The End Has Come

“It didn’t come down to justice, or anything like that. It came down to the fact that your job — overseeing the quarantine, setting up the hospital camps — is essentially complete. Director Philips still has plenty more to do. If he can isolate the prion and find a vaccine, well. That would be handy, wouldn’t it?”

Whitman knew enough about the disease to understand that would probably never happen. Still. He wasn’t here for debate. Just sentencing.

“You were right, we need a scapegoat. And you’re it. I’m sorry.”

Whitman nodded. He looked down at his hands in his lap. His left hand with its tattoo. Had that made a difference? Maybe.

“I understand,” he said, meekly. His bravado had deserted him. “So what’s next? A quick firing squad? Or do I go on an apology tour first?”

The senator grunted. “You think we’re going to kill you?”

“Isn’t that why I’m here?” Whitman asked.

“No. Oh, I’m sure some of my colleagues would like that. But no. Your name will go down in history as the man who bungled the Crisis. Part of the official record. But honestly, we don’t have enough people left to throw any of them away.”

Whitman looked up in surprise. “So — what’s going to happen to me?”

“A very serious demotion, to start with. Your salary is going to take quite a hit. But we’ve got a new job for you. There are still new positives being discovered all the time. We can’t very well keep them in the cities where they might spread the infection. They need to be taken to the hospital camps, God help them. Somebody has to be in charge of that. Transportation and the like.”

“I don’t understand,” Whitman said.

“We’re giving you another chance,” the senator told him. “A chance to make amends.”

* * *

The bikers didn’t come back for their dead. Maybe they were scared off permanently.

The van was totaled. Surprisingly, the semi rig ran just fine. It took some work extricating the snow plow blade from the van, but in the end they had a vehicle again. Even if it stank inside like home-made liquor and road pirate blood.

Between them, Whitman and Grace figured out how to drive the thing. Within a couple of hours, they were cruising down the highway at a steady twenty miles an hour, Bob curled up in a little bunk behind the cab.

Grace had fallen asleep too by the time Whitman pulled off the highway, just over the Florida line. He drove another couple of miles to a place he’d only ever seen on satellite maps.

It wasn’t a city. It wasn’t big enough to be a village. He thought it might’ve been a country club, before. It had a high fence and a parking lot full of patched-together cars. Snipers up on the gate waved them through.

Inside the lot, he saw people dressed in outlandish clothes working on the cars. Women in furs and floppy hats wrestled with carburetors. Men with blue hair or dressed in suits with torn shoulders changed oil filters.

The truck’s brakes squealed as he pulled to a stop. The noise woke Grace and she sat up slowly, looking around with bleary eyes. “This isn’t a hospital camp,” she pointed out.

“No,” Whitman told her. “It’s a place we can trade some of our water for gasoline, though.”

“Who are these people? Road pirates?”