Chapter One
DIESEL FUEL RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY! Please forgive the inconvenience. [Sign posted at a Petaluma, CA, gas station 3/23/05]
Dick woke up different. Simplified.
Silvery moonlight lit up the world. It dripped from the branches of the trees and played on the surface of the snow. Dick was a shadow in the lee of that light. There were other shadows surrounding him. One huddled near him, her long white hair dyed with blood. She curled tight around a treasure that glowed dimly like a dying ember. It had a knob of bone protruding from one end. It had fingers on the other. It was a human arm, but Dick was beyond concerns of taste or decorum. He tried to grab it away from her only to find that he had no hands anymore. His shoulders ended in gore-caked nubs. The female shadow’s prize was part of Dick’s body. His arm.
The sheep had the other one. They were working hard at grinding it down to paste so they could swallow it. It would take them hours to finish it.
This was immaterial to Dick. There was light and there were shadows and he was one of the latter. He was no longer capable of feeling loss or regret.
Only hunger.
The Homeland Security Advisory System today raised the level of threat awareness to Orange, or High for the following areas: Anaheim, Glendale, and Oakland. The level of threat awareness has been raised to red, or Severe, for the following areas of the Southland: Atwater, Brentwood, Century City, Granada Hills, Los Feliz… [DHS bulletin for the media, issued 3/26/05]
Back to Colorado. Four days had passed and so little had been accomplished. They had tightened the cordon where they could but the pathogen was already out.
A staff car took Bannerman Clark and Vikram Singh Nanda out to Commerce City, where the new detention facility had sprung up like a ring of fungus after the first rain of spring. Commerce City: not so much a town as a zone, a sprawling ex-prairie north of Denver full of chemical tanks and dusty weeds and long-haul truck agents and rusting railroad tracks. Ancient farmhouses that had been spruced up with particle board and unpainted dry wall and turned into light manufactories. The prettiest thing in Commerce City was a petroleum cracking plant, a stack of steel intestines that was lit up at night like a carnival.
“The CDC has quarantined blocks of Atlanta, New York and Detroit,” Clark said, scanning his email on a Blackberry as the car bounced. “They’re all over Chicago. We have no intel about Chicago, do we? We need to cut the CDC out of this, take over.” The Centers for Disease Control was a civilian group. Civilians lacked the discipline and devotion to protocol that marked military operations, and all they could offer in exchange for their chaos was intuition—guesswork. This was a time for action, not committees. Vikram nodded and made a note on his own handheld.
The car slid to a stop in a spray of gravel that made a noise like hailstones striking the gleaming car. The Captain and the Major got out and walked the rest of the way. “Oregon is refusing to publish data and Washington is denying any cases at all. But Canada has called in three definite outbreaks. Maybe we can shuffle some people around. We need to think of this as global, now. We need foreign support teams trained and ready to go.”
The prison, with its ten thousand doors and its state-of-the-art prisoner control system was a terrible place to store the infected. The Supermax at Florence had been overcrowded before the Epidemic began. It forced the ill and the healthy together, made them all breathe the same air. The detention facility had been set up to take the infected and keep them away from the general population. It comprised a double layered chainlink fence and an open-pit latrine that so far sat clean and unused. The Guard brought in new cases of the mysterious disease every day. Clark had teams working round the clock, looking for ways to improve conditions for the detainees but the main thing was to warehouse them.
“We need to bring in regular Army squads to police up Los Angeles, there needs to be door-to-door catching. We need a declaration of emergency for at least four states.”
Clark stopped talking and put his blackberry in his pocket. He had reached the fence and he could feel their eyes on him. They looked pale and poorly fed. Most of them had visible wounds. They did not have the depressed and surrendering look of refugees, though. They looked more like junkies staring at their next fix.
None of them made a sound. They stared at him hungrily through the wire, their fingers twined through the links, their faces pressed close up against the fence as if they could push themselves through.
One of them slapped the chainlink with the flat of a broken hand and it rattled, watery, plinking echoes rolling up and down the length. The center was built for seventeen hundred and fifty detainees. It was already full and they were building more.
“We need…” Clark stopped, unable to think for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need that girl, Vikram. The blonde. She could talk.”
The Sikh Major looked up from his handheld—he’d been avoiding the gazes leveled at him through the fence. He pursed his lips as if he was about to speak.
“We need her. She’s the answer.” He had it. Soldiers, Bannerman Clark ruminated, sometimes possessed intuition too.
As of twenty-three hundred hours tonight in the UTC-8 time zone, parts of three highways in California will be closed to civil traffic. The Governor has called for all citizens to cooperate with this necessary step in maintaining the public health. The affected highways are the State Route 1 (Pacific Coast Highway), State Highway 27, and State Highway 74. [CalTrans press release, 3/28/05]
The dead can’t drive. At least Nilla couldn’t. She had tried stealing a car to get east only to abandon it before leaving the parking lot. Her hands when she tried to grip the steering wheel felt like they were covered by thick mittens. The wheel slid away from her and she tried to stamp on the brake, only to find that her leg was beyond such precise movements. If she had gotten up to any speed she would probably have broken her neck.
So she resorted to hitch-hiking, because she didn’t have any better ideas.
Nilla stood by the side of Route 46 and screened her eyes with one hand as she watched a plume of dust approaching her from the west. It would be her first ride all day if she actually made this one. She was ready to bolt at the first sign of green and nearly did—but it wasn’t Army green, this was the bottle green of a civilian car. A little Toyota, it looked like. She was pretty sure the police only drove American-made cars.
It rolled up to a stop next to her but the window didn’t come down at first. She could understand that. She’d been eating out of trash cans for a week, hiding where she could. She had scrounged some clothes out of a dumpster, a pink baby tee a size too small for her and a pair of ratty chinos long out of fashion. Together they made her look like a prostitute. Her stringy hair and the unnatural pallor of her skin made her look like a junkie. People didn’t pick up hitch-hikers who looked like her. Not often.
She smiled through the window anyway, bending down to try to make eye contact. There were two people in the car—two kids. White suburban teenagers, going by looks. He had a little wispy facial hair and an Oakland Raiders baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. She had a gold cross around her neck. They both wore black t-shirts, band t-shirts.
The window came down, cranked by hand. This had to be the boy’s first car. He probably scrimped and saved to buy it used. He had probably installed the spoiler on the back himself—the paint didn’t quite match. Nilla knew she had to be careful with what she said, with what she asked for.
“I’m heading east, to, to Barstow,” she suggested. She remembered to smile and put a hand on the windowsill. They were less likely to take off if she was already in contact with the car. You learned these things after a week on the road.
The boy looked her up and down, studying her clothes. Her breasts and her hips.
“I don’t know, Charles,” the girl whispered, as if Nilla couldn’t hear her. “Look at her.” Nilla gave the boy her best high wattage smile.
“Damn, Shar!” the boy shot back. “Shut up! I guess we got room for one more,” he offered. He wasn’t sure, no more than his girlfriend, but he had teenage hormones to contend with.
Nilla opened the back door and climbed in.
