The Secret Apocalypse (Book 8): Rage Against the Dying Page 13

  “How’d you get away?” Kim asks, her voice cold.

  “Xavier showed up. He was wearing what looked like armor. He was leading a small gang of people through the streets.”

  “He was wearing armor?” Maria says.

  “It was a mix of different things. Motorbike leathers. The jacket and the pants are laced with Kevlar. Plus, he had arm guards and elbow pads. A motorbike helmet. A machete. A sword. A shotgun. They all had guns. But he kept telling his men not to shoot. Shooting would just draw more of them. He’d already figured out what was going on. And instead of waiting around to get rescued, to get killed, eaten, executed, he had taken action. He’d formed a group and they’d armed themselves and protected themselves. He knew that in order to survive this, you’d need strength in numbers. He knew exactly what to do and when to do it. He is a natural born leader.”

  “Wait, this all sounds like he’s a good guy,” Jack says. “A natural born leader? We need more people like that. What the hell happened?”

  “No. Not a good thing. The guy fell in love with the way things are. He fell in love with all the killing, with the wildness and unpredictability of it all. He fell in love with the chaos and the adrenalin rush. He became addicted to it. He fell in love with himself. All the power he had accumulated by helping people and by killing dead things, it all went to his head. And trust me, this kind of power, the kind you obtain from killing things that are already dead, it corrupts the soul. It didn’t take long. A month. Maybe less. Like everything around here, once things started going bad, they started going bad real quick.”

  “So how many people did he save?” Kim asks, desperately wanting to know the size of the group we’re dealing with here, of exactly how many people we are trying to evade. “How many people are we up against?”

  “I’m not sure of the exact amount.”

  “What do you mean?” Kenji asks with more than just a hint of skepticism in his voice. “You don’t know how many people are in your group?”

  “In the main group, there’s about a hundred people. Maybe a bit less.”

  Definitely a bit less since we’ve killed a few of them.

  I don’t say this out loud.

  “Main group?” Jack says. “How many groups are there?”

  “Like I said,” Clark continues. “He chooses the best people, the most ruthless bastards to watch the roads and to scout the surrounding towns and the outskirts of the city. There’s maybe three of these groups. Although I guess there could be more. And they’ve all been told, they’ve all been ordered to be violent and cutthroat. Their main objective is to recruit new people. But if there’s any resistance…”

  He trails off because he doesn’t need to say it out loud. Doesn’t need to say that if there’s any resistance from the people they encounter, from desperate people who have survived the first panicked months of an extinction level event, they kill them, torture them, use their loved ones as leverage to get them to do whatever it is they want them to do.

  “That’s too many people,” Maria says. “We’ll never outrun them all. And we won’t be able to hide from them if we stay here.”

  “Wait,” Jack says. “How did you all survive the nano-swarms?”

  Clark looks up, blood and confusion all over his face. “Nano-whats?”

  “The black clouds of death,” Jack explains. “They have a real bad tendency to come out of nowhere and kill instantly.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You didn’t see any nano-swarms?” I ask. “Black clouds of death. Microscopic robots. Designed to eat flesh and metal and everything. Designed to eat the dead, to eradicate the Oz virus.”

  “Look, I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” I say.

  “So where exactly is Xavier’s main hiding place?” Kenji asks, getting us back on track. “Where have you been living?”

  “His base of operations is a nuclear power plant. The damn thing is still running. It’s still got power. Lights. Hot showers. The works. I think that’s why Xavier has been so successful in recruiting people, in building his army. He’s got access to this facility. He draws them in. Gives them the grand tour. People fall in love with the place before they realize what kind of person Xavier really is, before they realize what it is they’re signing up for. But once they fall in love with the place, they’ll do anything to stay. Hot showers? Hot food? Cold drinking water? Forget it. It’s over. He’s got them. They’re his. And they will do whatever he wants.”

  “Nuclear power plant?” Jack says, shaking his head. “There are no nuclear power plants in Australia. Every time they wanted to build one, it was always denied. There were always massive protests on television. The whole works.”

  “It’s a military site,” Clark explains. “It’s located on a black site. It’s top secret. There’s no way anyone but a few people ever knew about it. I’m guessing that’s the only reason it’s still operational.”

  Another top secret facility. A black site. Again, I shouldn’t be surprised. But how has this place survived when the rest fell? Maybe it was a mix of blind luck and the fact that we are in the middle of nowhere.

  “How many vehicles do they have here?” Kenji asks, still thinking strategically.

  “Enough for the van guards.”

  “Van guards?”

  “The patrols, the psychos he sends out on scouting missions. The people he sends out on the road.”

  “What kind of vehicles?”

  “Trucks. Utes. Cars. Dune buggies. Quad bikes. Motorbikes. Everything.”

  “That’s like, a fleet of vehicles,” Maria says. “We are so screwed.”

  “He’s also got a fuel tanker that he stole from one of the bigger depots a few towns over. Wait, is stole the right word? I don’t know anymore. Anyway, we bring it with us when we go out on the longer scavenger missions.”

  “A fuel tanker?” Jack asks. “What the hell do you need one of those for?”

  “We use it as a mobile fuel station.”

  “A fuel tanker?” Kenji says, thinking out loud. “If we take that out, it might slow them down a bit.”

  “It would definitely slow them down,” Clark agrees.

  “What are you suggesting?” Kim asks. “We blow up their fuel tanker so we can make an attempt at an escape?”

  Kenji nods his head, half smiling. “Something like that.”

  But Kim is not convinced and she is not smiling. “How long will it take to plan something like this? A day? Two days? We don’t have that long. The Desert King is going to come for us, remember? They gave us a pretty clear ultimatum. Do you want your head on a spike?”

  “We’ll have to move quickly,” Kenji says, undeterred. “Our speed is perhaps our greatest advantage right now.”

  “Yeah, there’s no way Xavier will risk being here during the day,” Clark adds. “He’ll move away. He might even go all the way back to base. He’ll come back at night. Always at night. The sooner you do this, the quicker you move, the better chance you’ll have. Plus, there is absolutely no way he’ll be expecting this.”

  There is excitement in Clark’s voice. Hope.

  “So we need to hit them now,” I say. “And we need to hit them before they leave town.”

  “Or...” Kim says. “Here’s an idea. We let them leave.”

  “Yes. We can hide,” Maria adds enthusiastically. “I like that idea. Even though the Desert King ordered us to get out of town. And they did tell us in no uncertain terms that if we refused to do what they said, they would kill us and put our heads on display to warn other lost people. Yes, I remember that threat quite clearly. However, if we stay real quiet and we wait for the marauders to leave, we should be able to sneak out of town at some point without even getting into a fight.”

  Jack shakes his head, thinking it over. “That won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Like you said, t
hey’ve got a fleet of vehicles. A fleet that they will use to hunt us down with.”

  “But… taking them on like this. So soon after we barely escaped with our lives. They had us surrounded for crying out loud. They have so many people.”

  “They won’t expect this,” Jack says. “And they can only use their entire fleet of vehicles if they’ve got the fuel. A lot of fuel. If we take out the tanker, it will cripple them. It will make them think long and hard about chasing after us.”

  “He’s right,” Kenji says, sounding as though he’s already made up his mind about what he wants to do, and what he wants us to do. “And if we go right now, we’ll have the upper hand.”

  “And we can’t just hide here in this town,” I add. “Eventually, the Desert King, the people behind the walls, they’ll find us. They probably know this town better than anyone. They’ll know where to look for us.”

  Kenji turns his attention back to Clark. “Speaking of which, what do you know about the walls, about the Desert King?”

  “Like I said earlier, not a lot. Just rumors. Whispers. We saved a few people. People who had been exiled. Apparently, Xavier was one of them. One of the first…”

  “Xavier had been exiled?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Early. Before the shit really hit the fan.”

  “Why was he exiled?”

  “Not sure. You’d have to ask him. I think maybe he clashed with whoever was in charge at the time. Or maybe he had broken a law or something. Or maybe he just wanted out. Wouldn’t surprise me. The guy is crazy.”

  “So Xavier was safe,” Jack says. “Or as safe as you can be nowadays, and he was thrown out?”

  “Correct.”

  “Does he know who the Desert King is?” I ask.

  “No. No one does. Not for certain. But Xavier has an idea. He thinks he knows who it would be…”

  “Who?”

  “His brother.”

  “His brother?” Jack says. “You’re joking.”

  “Look, I’m just telling you what Xavier told me. He could’ve made the whole thing up. He could be telling lies to scare us. He has done that kind of thing before. But if Xavier is right, and if everything he says about his brother is right, he’s just as bad and maybe even worse than Xavier. He is another madman who’s been corrupted by absolute power.”

  “That’s if he actually is the Desert King,” I say.

  “Yeah. If Xavier is telling the truth…” he says, trailing off. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. But I do know this, the Desert King, he rules over a handful of people in a small domain, in the world’s smallest kingdom, and yet within those walls, within that domain, he is God. He has all the power. I don’t know how he obtained this power… but he’s got it. I don’t trust Xavier. I sleep with one eye open because he’s the kind of guy who would slit your throat in your sleep if you pissed him off. But I believe him when he tells us his brother, the Desert King, is crazy and dangerous. I believe him when he says his brother has access to nuclear warheads and chemical weapons and biological weapons. And I believe Xavier when he says that as soon as his brother figures out how to detonate them, we’re all dead.”

  More weapons of mass destruction. Lots more. It’s like humans as a species are drawn to things that can wipe out their entire existence.

  “How?” Kenji asks. “How did this all happen? How did he even take over?”

  “The military, actually, Xavier said it wasn’t military. Said it was a private company. A bunch of contractors. Said they conducted themselves like the military. Anyway, Xavier said they had left a skeleton crew behind to run things. Rookies and bean counters. There were no hardened soldiers. No one with any leadership experience. No one with any combat experience. It didn’t take long for the people, for the lucky few to lose all faith in them. Everything snowballed out of control from there.”

  And maybe I’d been a bit skeptical of his story at first, but as soon as he says the place was run by a private company, as soon as he says they only left a skeleton crew behind, I start to believe the story. Because there’s no way he could know all of this information without being told, no way he could make it up. Which means that right now, in this very town, there’s a madman, a self-declared King, sitting on a throne of nuclear and chemical weapons, tinkering with them, poking them, trying to set them off, trying to finish us off and finish what the man in the gas mask and the Oz virus started.

  Chapter 24

  So it’s official. We are surrounded by madmen because this is a mad world. A mad, crazy, messed up world. It is a world where the dead have come back to life, a world where the dead, the mad, the psychotic are the new rulers, the new leaders. These people are the new Kings and the new Emperors and they are rewarded handsomely for all their madness and savagery and brutality.

  And if good is ever going to triumph over evil, if sanity is going to triumph over insanity, if we ever want peace, then the good, however many of us are left, we will need to get dirty, we will need to do mad and savage and violent things.

  Kim stands up, moving over to our prisoner. She kneels down next to him. Looks him right in the eye. He meets her gaze. Unafraid. Completely unintimidated. I think he is unafraid because he knows that whatever Kim does to him, or threatens to do to him, will pale in comparison to whatever Xavier will do to him.

  “Does anyone actually believe a word he says?” Kim asks.

  “Get Sarah,” Kenji says. “We’ll need her to verify it.”

  “Verify?” Clark says. “What do you mean?”

  “Sarah lived behind the walls for a brief period. Her sister still lives there. She’s going to tell us whether you’re lying about this.”

  “The girl?” Clark asks. “The one with the severed arm, she’s been behind the walls? She was exiled?”

  “Yes…” Sarah says from the doorway. “I was there. And no, I wasn’t exiled. I left all on my own. Snuck out without anyone knowing about it. My sister is there right now.”

  “You left?” he asks. “Why?”

  “Because I was stupid,” she answers, walking slowly into the room, using the furniture for support. “I was so stupid. Because despite all the warning signs, despite the fact that the people in charge might have gone insane, living behind those walls is a hell of a lot safer than living out here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Maria asks. “You knew the place was run by a psycho but you told us it was safe. You lied to us. This place is not a sanctuary. It’s not a safe haven. I don’t care how high those walls are, it’s another dead end. It’s another circle of hell.”

  “First of all, I didn’t know for sure that the people in charge had completely lost their minds,” Sarah says, once again defending her actions and her lies. “No one was calling themselves the Desert King at this stage. At least, not in public. Sure, they were under a lot of stress. But everyone was under stress. Their actions, everything they did was justifiable. It all made sense.”

  I have heard this line before. And I can’t help but think that when madness and chaos becomes the norm, when violence and killing becomes the norm, how would anyone ever know if they’ve lost control? How would anyone ever know if they’ve fallen?

  “You have to understand that those people, they saved my life,” Sarah continues. “They saved my sister. We would’ve died if they hadn’t helped us. And behind those walls… it was a paradise compared to where we had come from.”

  “And you saw nothing that would’ve tipped you off to the fact that they had lost their minds?” Kim asks. “That they were dangerous?”

  “They were no worse than the people in charge of the place I had escaped from. In fact, when I was there, I’m pretty sure everyone still had their shit together. The one thing they constantly talked about was that they thought we were under attack. And we were under attack. From all manner of things. Everyone thought it was a good idea to stockpile the weapons of mass destruction. We had to do something in case the walls failed. We had to have some way of defendi
ng ourselves. And I had to lie to you. I had to make you guys believe it was a safe place, the best place. I had to make you believe it was the only sanctuary left in this godforsaken world. I needed you. You were my only shot. I did what I had to do.”

  “You led us into a trap,” Kim says. “You’ve led us right into a goddamn warzone.”

  “The whole country is a warzone,” Kenji reminds Kim and Maria, reminds all of us. “The whole world is a warzone. We’re no better or worse off anywhere else.”

  “So what do you propose we do now?” Kim asks. “In case you haven’t noticed, we are beset on all sides by murdering savages and psychopaths.”

  “I propose we do the best we can, with what we have. I propose we plan our next move carefully.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I’ve got a hide site,” Clark says.

  We all turn back to Clark. He has our undivided attention.

  “A hide site?” I ask. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m scared,” he says. “Been scared for a long time. Scared of Xavier. Scared of the people he keeps closest to him. His lieutenants. His enforcers. These are people who like this new world. They love this new world. Xavier answers to no one. And his men, the ones he puts in charge, they only answer to Xavier.”

  “You were one of those people,” I say.

  “And that’s the only reason I was able to find a hide site and secure it. Load it up with supplies. I had full access to all kinds of vehicles and as much fuel as I needed. All he asked for in return were new recruits. New soldiers for his army. So I delivered the recruits, showed him I was working hard. And while I was doing his work, I made sure I had an out.”