Immune Read online

  His initial processing had been an exercise in pain and humiliation. One by one, he and the others had been stripped and forced into a concrete room with drains set into the floor, then sprayed with cold water by a high-pressure hose that felt as though it stripped away the top layer of skin, leaving him red and shivering. He’d dressed in powder blue scrubs with matching slippers at gunpoint before being ushered down a long hallway to a small room where he’d been strapped into a chair and another white-suited man had drawn vial after vial of his blood, swabbed his mouth and nose, and suctioned out a sample of his sputum. A hole in the back of the chair had allowed them to insert a needle that felt like it was a foot long between the vertebrae in his lower spine to gather cerebrospinal fluid. As a final injustice, the man had taken a small metal gun that looked like the kind used to pierce ears, and slid it over the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. With a snap, it had pierced the muscle and implanted a small square that Landon could feel move from side to side when he pressed on it.

  “There will be more testing,” the man had said from behind him while he was shoved out into another hallway and a woman was led in behind him, screaming and begging God for salvation.

  After prodding him up the stairs, down a dark corridor, and into the room where he now cowered, they had slammed the door with a thud of finality that could have been the sound of his closing coffin. He had crumpled to the floor, sobbing and shivering, for a long time before summoning the courage to move. His room had echoed with the muted screams from the other rooms of the former vacation spa. He’d heard the repeated thumps of people hurling themselves against the walls and doors in futility. Shouts. Cries. Pleas. Bargaining. Bribing. All to no avail. Now all he could hear were their distant whimpers of resignation.

  The light stretching through the window brightened. Was it sunrise already? Time had lost all meaning. He struggled to his feet and walked to the window. Over the groves of trees and rows of turn-of-the-century bungalows, he could see a large swatch of Acacia Park and the eastern rim of the lake. A field of flames consumed the dead. From this distance, he could barely discern the white figures spraying streams of fire over the corpses.

  He had to turn away. He couldn’t bear to imagine Penny’s clothing igniting as her skin blackened and cracked, as the lips he had kissed so many times burned away from her bared teeth and the hair he had run his fingers through singed back to the blistered scalp. That image was a physical pain he felt in the core of his being, from which a sensation of warmth and numbness slowly blossomed. His body began to shut down. To the east, he could see the distant highway beyond the river. Not a single pair of headlights traversed the black road. The northern of the two off-ramps was barricaded by roadblocks, behind which a Jeep had been posted. He could only assume the southern entrance to town had been similarly blocked.

  There would be no rescue for them.

  They were all dead and no one would ever know.

  Hope abandoned him at the same time as the strength in his legs, depositing him on the floor in a trembling heap.

  2:26 AM

  The screams roused him from a dreamless sleep, wrenching him from one darkness into another. They were beyond anything he had ever heard. The pain. The terror. He had never imagined that such suffering could be possible.

  He sat up and scooted his back against the wall. The screams weren’t coming from around him, but from below him, rising through the floor as though it were no more substantial than tissue paper.

  Again, he started to cry.

  A combination of helplessness and fury took him. He leapt from the ground and ran toward the door. He beat against the steel door until his flesh split before turning to the walls and punching useless holes in the plaster that stripped the skin from his knuckles and left his throbbing hands unable to clench into fists.

  He reared back and screamed up into the heavens.

  The overhead light snapped on a heartbeat before a face appeared in the window inset into the door.

  Landon stood there, blood dripping from his fingertips, unable to move.

  With a resounding thunk, the bolt slid back into the wall. The door opened outward. As soon as the gap was wide enough, an isolation suit-clad man stepped in, the barrel of his rifle pointed right between Landon’s eyes.

  “Your turn to stoke the fire,” he said.

  Before he knew he was going to do it, Landon lunged at the man, who smoothly turned his rifle around and slammed the butt into Landon’s forehead. He heard and felt a crack inside his head and dropped to the floor. Barely able to push himself back up from the ground, he watched strings of blood drain past his lips. Warmth drained down his forehead and overwhelmed his lashes. It felt like his head had been opened by an axe.

  “Don’t try that again,” the man said.

  He walked around behind Landon, raised a boot, and shoved him in the rear. Landon collapsed onto his chest, only to be immediately hauled back to his unsteady feet. He swayed as he was guided down the hallway toward the staircase. The steps canted beneath him and the stairwell seemed to turn around him. He vomited and received an elbow to the ear.

  At the bottom of the staircase, they turned left into another long corridor. The screams were deafening down here. They seemed to come from all around him at once, penetrating him, reverberating in his bones. He wished that the horrible sounds would stop, that whoever was making them would just shut up and die already. With that thought, he felt his humanity slip away.

  He was led past a bank of windows to his left. Bright domed lights on retractable armatures spotlighted a stainless steel autopsy table, on top of which a man had been stripped and bound. The skin on his chest had been reflected in order to open his ribcage like a clamshell. Landon could see the grayish-pink lungs expand and shrink, the heart beating between them. The man’s intestines had been moved aside onto a freestanding tray to make room for the man who carved sections from the liver and passed them to another man with a collection tray. The gutters overflowed with blood.

  The man on the table continued to scream.

  “Make it stop,” Landon whispered.

  The man who vivisected the liver looked up as they passed. He wore a thick apron over his white suit, both of which were spattered with copious amounts of blood. Landon caught a glimpse of the scar around the man’s eye and had to avert his stare. He could have sworn the man had smiled at him.

  His guards shoved him onward, past another nearly identical surgical suite into which Landon couldn’t bear to look for fear that the wailing body bound to the table might be his father’s. Before they reached the end of the hallways, where it terminated at a single steel door, the screaming stopped abruptly. The resultant silence was somehow worse.

  One of the men opened the door and pushed him down another flight of stairs. These were wooden and unfinished, and looked to be from another era entirely. The dirty walls were stained by scarlet light. He felt a rush of heat on his face and smelled cooking meat. Beneath it, the damp smells of mildew and rotting timber rode the undercurrents. When they reached the cracked cement floor, Landon found himself in a massive basement, at the back of which he saw four enormous stainless steel cubes the size of campers. Each had a control panel with multicolored lights and buttons on the right. In the center of each was a large rectangular orifice, the source of the reddish glow. An elevated track with rollers led into the mouth of each.

  He was shoved so hard from behind that he left his feet and hit the floor on all fours. His palms left bloody smears on the warm cement.

  “Who’s next?” one of the men asked. “No!” a terrified voice screamed.

  “No! Not me! Not yet!”

  Landon looked up and saw the men who had dragged him down there seize Roman Graves, his shop teacher, by the arms and drag him kicking and flailing back up the stairs.

  He heard sobbing from the corner of the room and saw Graves’s grown daughter, who managed the Dairy Bear ice cream kiosk, collapse to her knees. Her girth jig
gled under the too-tight scrubs.

  “Back to work!” a voice shouted from above before slamming the door.

  “Landon?” a voice he had prayed to hear called from the rear corner of the room.

  “Dad!”

  Landon lunged to his feet and ran across the room to where his father stood beside a mound of ruined corpses at the bottom of a metal slide. He hugged him as tightly as he could. There was a thumping sound as another body plummeted down the slide and landed on the others with a slapping sound. The smell of the remains summoned dry heaves, but was apparently irresistible to the black flies that swarmed all over the foul mess of tangled appendages.

  “They won’t do this themselves,” his father whispered. “The exposed bones are sharp enough to cut through their suits.”

  “Won’t do what?”

  “Get back to work!” a man shouted from the far side of the room. Even in his isolation gear, Landon hadn’t seen him in the shadows beside the farthest incinerator to the right. He raised his rifle, lined it up with Sandy Graves’s shoulder, and fired. The bullet took a bite out of her shoulder before embedding itself in the concrete. She wailed, but managed to struggle back to her feet with the scrub top darkening around the wound.

  “Do what he says or they’ll take you next,” his father said, and then more softly: “I’m not quite ready yet.”

  His father stepped back and rolled one of the bodies onto a long steel tray, then nodded for Landon to help him lift it. Together they carried the tray over to one of the tracks and rolled it into the industrial furnace. They had to shove hard to force it through the mounds of ash and bone. A face he vaguely recognized as that of Percy Hargrove, with whom he was only peripherally acquainted, started to melt almost instantaneously.

  “Not ready for what?” Landon whispered.

  With his back to the guard, his father lifted the front of his top to reveal a bloodstained, broken rib tucked under the waistband of his pants.

  2:51 AM

  Landon stared down at the body that had just plummeted down the chute. The expression on Sandy Graves’s blood-spattered face was the same as it had been right after the guard shot her in the shoulder, not at all like that of the smiling woman in the paper cap who had served him double-scoops of mint chocolate chip and blue bubble gum on the summer evenings after his baseball games while the cicadas chirruped in the trees and barbecue smoke drifted across the park. It was hard to imagine that this was the same woman who only minutes earlier had shared this sweltering room with him. Yellow clumps of adipose tissue bulged from beneath the peeled skin around her opened chest and abdomen. Her pendulous breasts were pinched in her armpits. Only sections of her organs remained in the mess of bowels that had been haphazardly shoved back into the sickening maw. Robbed of her dignity, even in death, and cast aside like road kill.

  There was a banging sound at the top of the slide. Landon barely had time to step backward before heap after heap of filthy and blood-crusted clothing tumbled down onto her body. It took him a moment to figure out that these were their personal effects. The clothes they had been wearing before they were stripped of them for processing. The last links to their lives, to the world they would never again see. And now they were expected to burn them, too, to erase the final traces of their existence.

  How did these people expect to get away with this? Someone would miss an entire town. A thousand people didn’t simply go missing without someone wondering why. There would be families demanding answers. And the press would grab hold of the story like a dog with a bone. There was simply no way this tragedy could be hidden.

  But he realized that none of that was his concern. His ashes will have long since joined those they scooped from the furnaces before anyone even noticed he was missing. With the amount of planning that had gone into this massacre and the precision of its execution, he could only assume that the aftermath had been plotted to the finest detail.

  And besides, these men obviously had the backing and full support of the United States Army, which had already proven it could manipulate the media to its ends while fighting covert wars for reasons the general population would never know or understand if it did.

  He saw a pair of jeans in the jumble with familiar oily handprints smeared on the thighs from handling the greasy new nails and screws. Inside of the front pocket was the one thing he could never allow to be destroyed, not while he still lived. He reached inside, extricated the locket he had tried to hide from them before he had been subjected to the hose, and clenched it in his fist.

  “Pile the clothes on the body when you load it,” the man called from the corner. “Two birds with one stone.”

  The man chuckled. Landon realized that if given the chance, he could kill this man with his bare hands and the world would be a better place for it. How had any loving God allowed such a man to be born?

  It took all of his strength to drag Sandy out from beneath the clothes and onto the smoldering steel tray. He whispered an apology as he hid her visage beneath the filthy, smoke-smelling clothes.

  He called for his father to help him lift the tray, and then used him as a screen to slip the locket around his neck. The cold heart rested against his own. When the time came to die, he now knew that Penny would be there with him, as he had been with her.

  He drew comfort from the thought that soon enough he would be with her again.

  3:47 AM

  Sweat poured from his brow. His clothes were already soaked and clung to his skin. The blood of the dead had dried into cracking gloves over his hands and forearms. He continued to ask himself over and over why they were doing this. What was wrong with them that they were helping those who were surely going to kill them dispose of the bodies of their friends and neighbors? And each time, the answer was the same. Because life was so precious that each of them was willing to do absolutely anything to extend it, if only by minutes. And because this was the least they could do for those who had suffered so terribly, a final act of compassion for the souls that deserved better than to lie in a rotting heap at the bottom of the disposal slide. The only question he couldn’t answer was who would take care of the last few of them to reach the dissection table?

  Already, two of the four of them had been replaced as they were dragged up the stairs to their fates and fresh fodder was cast down to feed the furnaces. He knew his father’s turn would come next. All he wanted to do right now was curl up in his father’s lap as he had done as a child and go back to the way things had once been.

  “I’m sorry,” Landon said when his dad was within earshot. “For everything.”

  His father merely smiled through the mask of blood he’d smeared onto his face while in the process of wiping the sweat from his eyes.

  “So am I,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have missed a second of it.”

  “I wouldn’t have either.”

  He reached for his father’s hand, but a shout of warning from the guard stopped him short.

  “Before she died, I promised your mother I would never let anything happen to you,” his father whispered. “And that’s a promise I will never break.”

  “Dad…”

  “Listen to me,” he whispered, urgently, “and do exactly what I say.”

  3:58 AM

  All of their clothes were now burned, eradicating every bit of evidence that the men and women who were now piles of ash had ever been in this building. There was only a single body lying at the bottom of the slide. The men would be coming to take one of them soon. Their guard was growing more and more anxious by the minute. He barked and shouted at them to work faster, even though they already had the ovens stuffed to capacity. It was as though they were coming up against a deadline of which only he was aware. Landon continued to pick at the wounds on his palms and knuckles, prying the edges apart with his fingers until the blood flowed freely and painfully. He glanced at his father across the room, where he was helping Ben Hausman remove a catch-pan filled with bone chunks from one of the furnaces. Th
eir eyes locked for a long moment before his father finally gave the nod.

  Landon’s heartbeat accelerated and his pulse thumped so hard in his temples that his vision throbbed. His hands trembled as he brought them to his face and smeared the blood over his mouth and nose, and then across his hairline. He fell to his knees and started to retch.

  “Get up!” the guard shouted.

  Landon collapsed to his chest as he’d been instructed and forced his index and middle finger down his throat to make the heaves more realistic.

  “Landon!” his father yelled, and sprinted to his side.

  “Back away from him!” the guard bellowed. He grabbed Landon’s father by the shoulder and shoved him back.

  The guard kicked him in the hip several times before Landon eventually rolled onto his side and attempted to block the blows. The guard’s eyes widened behind the plastic shield when he saw the blood and pink saliva all over Landon’s face.

  “Jesus!” the man gasped. “He’s infected!”

  The guard’s reaction was instantaneous. He raised his rifle and pointed the barrel right at Landon’s forehead. The man’s eyes were so wide they were all Landon could see.

  Landon cried out and held up his hands as though they could ward off the fusillade of bullets that would destroy his skull and spatter his brains across the concrete.

  He saw a blur of movement behind the soldier. His father’s face. A hooked implement in his right hand. The broken rib was at the man’s neck one heartbeat, and then high in the air the next. A ragged hole appeared under the collar where the headgear connected to the bulk of the white suit. The oxygen hissed and made the tattered fabric edges flutter as it seeped out.