COMPLETE! The Wasteland. A woman screams in the night. Spotlights flash on a pile of dust in the desolate patch of land that lay just beyond the tall crosses that picket the boundary of Encampment R-34. A group of curious students leave their bunkho...
In the silence, Bryne continued. "The letters Mell and I have read prove that this infection is not at all what we thought. It doesn't pass as easily as the flu. We were told that our population was wiped out by something...transferrable, something with a life cycle. I know this will be hard to hear, but there is no life cycle. It lives on, forever. In us. The letters in the Chronoscope are nearly a thousand years old. The same can be said of some people living beyond the razor wire fence."
Roz scoffed with the others. "I could listen to you talk all day, pretty boy, but what you're saying doesn't make sense. They've been alive all this time?"
"It's impossible," Crevan corrected. "Sooner or later, we all find our way to the dirt of the Sorrow Plots."
"That's true. The Sorrow Plots wait to call us home. And we always thought this encampment was here so that way we could outlive the infected, until the very last of the virus had died out in the dust. But that's just not the reality. We will never outlive them because they are never going to die naturally. They must be killed, one by one, by the uninfected. Tell them, Luther." Bryne hardly blinked. "Mell, you tell them. Who survived?"
I took a deep breath and said his name for the first time since reading it on the tablet. "Kumpan. He's in the Chronoscope. From letters dating back eight hundred years."
"The gypsy who brings trinkets to the Priests?" Lane gasped as she looked down at the necklace she took from Inventory Post. The emerald at the center looked similar to the ring worn by Job Priest.
Felicity hissed at me and turned to Luther. "Lenny, how can you let her blaspheme? Priests would never converse with a known virus carrier."
"Ask the other Guardians, Felicity," I said in defense. "They must have heard the oldest of our encampment talk about how Kumpan has never aged. The Priests know this and are somehow benefiting from trading with the infected."
"Stop her, Lenny," Felicity begged.
Luther Priest raised a hand, the fabric of his robe sliding down his forearm. "My allegiance is to the Warden of the Neverdowns. Not the Priests. Not to Encampment R-34. Let's hear them out."
"If Kumpan is infected, how have the Priests not gotten the disease?" Oscar asked, scratching his cheek. "Us Watchmen are told to stop them before they pass the desolate patch."
"It's because the virus isn't exchanged as easily as the flu," Rufus answered in a murmur, repeating Bryne's words. "They have to...do something to you."
"Like what?" Roz asked, her eyes widening. The people in the room who knew the answer stayed silent.
"However the virus is passed, it happened to Kumpan. But, I don't really know how. And Bryne says it's not a virus, anyway," I clarified. "I think I'm almost to the point in the letters where I can find out why."
"She is," Bryne confirmed. "Kumpan was there at the beginning. So was a man named Ezzelin von Klatka. He wrote the first letters in the compilation built by the Chronoscope called The Dracula Index."
Crevan was still doubtful. "Why Dracula? Is that the place where the sickness happened?"
"No, it's the name of a person," Bryne continued. "He has many names, in fact. The Chronoscope is telling us that he is extremely important."
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