The last of the group, Dr. Kaes, was much harder to read. His face was lined and creased, but there was a bright twinkle in his eyes and a slight smile on his lips. He was thin, almost emaciated, but this only emphasized a sense of sharpness and acuity, like a knife honed to perfection. A stark streak of white had sprouted in his dark hair, but it only made him seem more dashing and dangerous. Did he look better or worse than when the Hunter had first seen him, way back in St Louis? It was hard to say. One thing was sure though, the man was changed. This was certainly not the bumbling, flabby egghead he’d first encountered.
On the other side of the aisle (literally, as they were roughly so divided in seating) were the New Americans. Santiago he knew, of course, and the big guy looked familiar. He’d been introduced to the others, as well, including the woman sitting next to him with the knives, but none of them had made much of an impression. All in all, they seemed like a pretty average cross-section of Old American society.
There were also a few wild cards, so to speak, in the other folks they’d rescued from the mutants. There was CJ, of course, and his new pal Seymour, plus five more former Army members who’d been rotting in the mines. These people, physical attributes aside, all seemed alike; beat-up, skinny, hard-eyed, and grimly focused. They had seen too much and the world the rest of us called reality had become something like a cruel joke. He’d seen the same look in the eyes of an old friend of his who’d done three tours in the Indonesian War. In other words, they were soldiers.
Then, once things had settled down, they all started to talk. And talk and talk and talk. For his part, the Hunter simply sat and listened. The first one up was the amateur doctor, the leader-type guy, Santiago, who walked to the podium and called for attention.
“OK, so,” he said self-consciously, clearing his throat, “for those of you who don’t know, my name is Santiago. And these folks,” he gestured to a group down to his left, “are the Reformist Council of New America. I guess I should say welcome, or something, but then not all of you are technically here by choice, so let’s just say that I hope you’re all comfortable and on the mend and everything. Now, I believe that we have a lot to discuss. In fact, from the little I’ve learned from Dr. Kaes here, I think there may be a whole hell of a lot. So…”
And so the CDC group went through the whole thing, from start to finish. Mostly Dr. Kaes did the narration, but the Old Man injected himself often enough, as ever, and the nurse and the com specialist also threw in from time to time. The Hunter knew most of the tale, but he still listened with amazement as they described the trek from New Atlanta, all the way north to Minneapolis, then south again, through fire and flood, cannibals, nuclear accidents and homicidal gangs, surrounded and beset by death and madness. It made for quite a story, he had to admit.
And to be honest, it made him feel somewhat ashamed. To have derailed these poor saps, just when they’d been so close? And for what? But this wasn’t really the time to think about it, he decided, and kept his features flat as he listened.
Finally, Kaes sort of sputtered out, relating their recent misfortunes with the deformos, and then asked if anyone had any questions. Undoubtedly stunned and a bit overloaded by the doctor’s story, everyone sat silent for a little while before one of the Council members, an older man in a tweed suit, finally spoke up.
“Um, if I may?” he said, standing up. Kaes turned to him. “Er, hello. I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Hollis Landrip, but everyone here calls me the Professor. I, uh, used to be a biology teacher Before. Anyway, I was wondering about the mutative nature of the virus, this idea of its genetic adaptability…”
What followed then was a long boring technical discussion, most of which the Hunter couldn’t begin to understand, but the gist of which was fairly clear: If they didn’t get the living, breathing Old Man to California, where they still had the wherewithal to make a cure, the human race itself would be dead and gone in somewhere between 20 and 100 years. And the Old Man was getting closer to death with every second. All in all, a pretty dire and depressing gist, even to someone like the Hunter.
When they’d hashed out all of the little details about how the Sick worked and how it could be cured, they again sort of wound down and sat in silence for a moment. Then the Council leader, Santiago, cleared his throat, thanked Doctor Kaes, who returned to his seat, and went back up to the podium.
“Well…” he said, obviously at a loss for words. “That was all very enlightening. And, for a lot of us, it’s what they call news. Real bad news! I mean, we all thought that the Sick had run its course. Shot its wad, so to speak, and now we’d just, you know, pick up and move on. Start all over again. But now, you tell us how it’ll come back?! Hell, I won’t lie to you, it scares the living shit outta me! You know?”
There was a general murmur of miserable agreement.
“Yeah,” said Santiago, with a sigh. “But it looks like we—and by we I mean all of us, the whole damn species—still have an ace up our sleeves, Mr. Lampert here. The trouble is, he’s here and the facilities are in Frisco. So the big question is how do we get him there, right? Right. And it ain’t gonna be easy.”
“But before we start discussing that, I think we ought to take a minute to fill you CDC folks in on what we’ve had going on here in good old New America. Because, if you ask me, the only way we’re going to get Lampert to Frisco is to use certain resources that only the Governor can provide. And he’s not gonna provide ‘em willingly, if you know what I mean.”
And so next the Hunter sat through a history of New America, from its inception and founding by Jackson Armstrong to its growth and organization, right up to the present state of repression and constant war with the mutants. Again, the Hunter knew almost all of this and paid only partial attention to the whole thing, although it did clear up where he’d seen the big dude before. And imagine, the former Deputy Chief of Police! Things must have gotten pretty bad in NA for him to have gone over! It made the Hunter all the more chagrined that he’d been thinking of handing the Old Man to someone that could inspire that kind of disloyalty and polarization. But then, how could he have known? He’d been out on the road, chasing Kaes and the Old Man all over God’s creation, how could he have known the Governor and the PF had gone all Nazi?
Of course, Kaes and his companions had a lot of questions, once Santiago (and a couple of the other Council members) finished their end of the story, and the Hunter again waited as they were told all about the War, the Reformist movement, and all of the vagaries of life in New America. They ended up with their latest victories, first over the PF, in that they had recently assassinated Chief Hanson Knox, and then over the deformos, against whom they had deployed their newest, best weapon, a very high-powered, hand-held, ultraviolet sort of flashlight gizmo that apparently worked on the muties’ atrophied eyeballs like a blowtorch on butter.
Through all of this, of course, thanks to his involvement one way or another in some of these events, many a hard look was directed at the Hunter. And when they’d finished talking about how they’d all gotten there and all about the Sick and everything, they turned to him. Santiago did the talking.
“Which still leaves this gentleman,” he said, waving at the Hunter like he was a lamp or a dog or something.