Monster Nation

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October 29, 2004

Chapter Two

Author's Note: Well, it's that time of the year again. Happy Halloween, everybody! The ancients believed that this was the new year, the time when the world of the living and the ghostly plane of the dead intersected and anything could happen. The time when consensus reality broke down and the things that went bump in the night grew long, sharp teeth. Nonsense, of course, science tells us that monsters don't really exist. But imagine yourself in the time of Mael Mag Och. There is no light in the world brighter than the campfire you huddle around. There is a forest just outside the ring of light, an old-growth beast that sprawls and clutches at your hair and sucks at the ground like a needy beast. That forest goes on forever--it is the whole world outside your meager fire ring. It's dark back there, truly dark; anything could hide in those shadows. Two days ago you watched the moon be eaten by the night, you watched it turn bloody red: it never did that before, you think. You move a little closer to the fire, just to stay warm. The night is pulsing with the sound of frogs and crickets but it's the things that make no sound at all, you think, who are truly dangerous. A branch snaps in the fire and you look up, feeling foolish but there: yes, over there, no, now it's moving--there! A pair of eyes like hot coals, burning just beyond the reach of your light. You reach for your knife. If it comes down to you and the thing in the dark, will you have the strength to defend yourself? Will you have the speed? You don't know what that thing is. But you know it's hungry. It watches you like it has all the time in the world. All night to wait, and watch. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't blink.

Happy Halloween!

--David Wellington

Limit: Two Gallons of Water per Person, due to Emergency, Please! [Handwritten sign posted at a CVS Pharmacy, Carefree, CA 3/28/05]

Nilla nestled back in the upholstery of the Toyota’s back seat and chewed on a candy bar when she really wanted to swallow it whole. It was the closest thing the kids had to food.

“We were heading down to Hollywood, but the radio said you shouldn’t.” The girl, Shar, craned around in her seat to look back at the hitch-hiker. “You’re… you’re not supposed to pick people up, either. You’re not even supposed to drive unless you have to.”

It was an apology. Nilla’s mouth was full, so she gave the girl a closed-mouth smile.

“Damn, woman, if I want to go somewheres I’ma gonna do it,” Charles swore, striking the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “I got my mind on my drivin’, and my drivin’ on my mind, you know what I’m saying? Shit, that’s just what freedom is all about. For reals. Now see if you can find something on the FM.”

“I just get scared, is all,” the girl said, slumping down in her seat again. She didn’t touch the radio. “They say there’s sick people down there. They say they’re violent.”

Nilla gave a polite shrug. The girl was still looking at her in the rear-view mirror.

“They say they have glowing red eyes,” Shar finished, and then looked away. “I get scared, is all.”

“Unh-uh, no way, I told you already, woman. I’m psycho-killer crazy. I’m mad gangsta dangerous. I’m a hard man, baby, hard enough for both of us. I’ll keep you safe, Shar. I already told you that.”

He grabbed her around the shoulders with one arm and held her close, kissing the side of her forehead before he let her go again. He switched the radio on himself and they couldn’t talk any more, not and be heard over the blare of hip-hop that came out of the speakers by Nilla’s head. It made a strange soundtrack for what she saw out her windows—flat land covered in spotty green and yellow vegetation in the perfect rectangular fields of big truck farms. They passed the occasional abandoned oil derrick like a tired animal bending down for a drink of water and unable to get back up. Nilla saw a couple of houses that had collapsed down the middle. It looked like the ground itself had fallen away from beneath them. Nobody had bothered to repair them. She was a long way already from the bustling little town by the sea where she died and came back.

“There’s a place to stop up ahead,” Shar said, sitting up in her seat. “Are you still hungry?”

Nilla nodded hopefully. “I don’t have any money, though.”

Shar sat back down. “Can we stop, Charles? Just for a minute? I need to pee?”

They rolled in over the sudden shockingly-blue ribbon of the aqueduct and into a tiny town bleached by sun into a uniform brownish-grey. There was no sign welcoming them to town but judging by the names of half the stores they had arrived in Lost Hills, California. As they glided through the cracked streets Nilla got a bad chill down her back and she realized that everyone they passed was staring at them. They were normal people—she saw faces with bad acne scars, old women with hair like frozen cumulus clouds, mothers carrying babies and brushing dark hair out of their eyes to stare. She got another shock when she realized that it wasn’t the car garnering all that attention. The eyes didn’t track the counter-rotating hubcaps or the handmade spoiler on the back. They were looking in the windows. In the back windows.

At her.

They knew. The people of Lost Hills knew what she was. They could sense it. If she closed her eyes she could see them all, their golden auras, and she knew they were all looking back and seeing her darkness. Surely not as vividly, certainly not consciously but they could sense her energy just like she could sense theirs.

She wanted to get out, but she didn’t want to leave the safety of the car. She wanted Charles to just keep driving, to speed up, even as he began to maneuver into a parking space on Tulare Street. She wanted to make herself invisible—but that would surely spook Charles and Shar and she couldn’t risk that, not when they were her only way out of town.

Charles switched off the ignition and the three of them got out. The stares intensified and on the corner a woman in a red cardigan called out something in Spanish. Nilla had no idea what she was saying. Well, at least she knew one more thing about herself than before: she couldn’t speak Spanish.

They headed into a little convenience store—the sign out front said “bodega” in amongst the signs advertising cheap cigarettes and powdered milk—a dim room with a low ceiling of stained acoustic tile and metal racks full of off-brand merchandise. The candy was all Mexican, the newspapers up front were full of words and even punctuation Nilla didn’t recognize. The proprietress, a middle-aged woman in a blue print dress, could barely be seen behind an enormous lottery terminal and a display of artificial roses each sealed in its own plastic case.

Charles headed over to talk to her while Nilla and Shar roamed the aisles, looking for snacks. Nilla had a pretty good idea of what was going on and she kept her mouth shut. “So excuse me, ma’am? Do you sell condoms? No? Ma’am, I need some help here. What about the flavored kind, do you have any of those?” The woman behind the counter couldn’t conceal her horror at the question. For the first time since they’d entered the store she looked away from Nilla. “What about those ones? They have little bumps on them, you know, excuse me, Ma’am? They’re ribbed for her pleasure?”

“Boomps?” the woman asked, her eyes hard.

In the aisle just out of view Shar grabbed a link of plastic-wrapped salami and handed it to Nilla. “In your pants,” she whispered, “there’s plenty of room. Five-fingered discount.”

“Yeah, bumps. Ribs, I guess,” Charles suggested. He held up his hands about a foot and a half apart from one another. “In this size?”

“Boomps,” the woman said again. “Ribs?”

“I think they call them French ticklers.”

Shar sputtered with laughter even as she handed Nilla a block of cheddar cheese and a bag of potato chips. She just couldn’t help herself. It was all over as soon as the laugh came out of her, though. “Thieves! They are thieves!” the woman shrieked. She started to crawl up onto her counter, clearly intending to seize them in the act of shoplifting.

“What do we do?” Nilla asked, but Shar had already dropped half the things she was carrying and was at the door. Nilla followed as close behind as she could, unable to move as fast as she might like both because she was, well, dead but also because her pants were full of cold cuts. Charles came up behind her and pushed her bodily into the door of the bodega until it flew open and they spilled out into the sunlight. The proprietress was still coming up and over her counter, her knees up on the smooth surface. They headed for the car, intending to make a clean getaway.

“Que estas haciendo? Ai! Malvado fantasma, es peligroso!” a man on the corner shouted and Nilla pulled up short, guilt flushing through her body. Shar and Charles kept running. The man came closer—an old, weathered guy in overalls and a baseball cap. What could she do? She felt pretty lousy about shoplifting but she would feel worse, she knew, if she were caught. The people of Lost Hills wouldn’t give her a chance. They knew. She bolted for the car.

“Hice por ayudar,” the old man said behind her. She got maybe three strides down the road before she realized he’d been trying to warn her. Charles and Shar were behind the car, huddled in its shadow.

A crowd of men had gathered in the middle of the street. Some of them had farm implements—pitchforks, shovels, she saw a long-handled trowel—and others just had steel-toed boots. They had gathered around a girl who was maybe fifteen years old, lying curled up in the street, and they were kicking her to death.

No. Not death. When Nilla got closer she closed her eyes and saw the golden fires of the men in a ring around a huddled shape of fuming darkness. The girl was already dead. The blows the men rained down on her weren’t stopping her from reaching for their ankles, trying to grab them and tear them apart.

No wonder the people of the town were so sensitive to her energy. The sickness had already come upon them.

Posted by Wellington at 08:32 AM | Comments (9)

October 27, 2004

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.

Posted by Wellington at 08:56 AM | Comments (10)

October 25, 2004

Chapter Fifteen

IN THE BLOOD: A good-looking young woman named Marisol Gonsalvez wastes her time and ours by starring as an ass-kicking nun with, you guessed it, the stigmata. This mildly offensive gore romper is opening in “selected cities” which means it isn’t going straight to video, but it probably should have (**, rated R for excessive religious violence and graphic nudity, 81 min). [Roger Ebert, One Minute Film Reviews, suntimes.com, 3/22/05]

The gun had been used recently and it was hot and it stank with a sour reek that poured down over her face and made her gag with fear. The SWAT trooper stood as still as a stone with his finger on the trigger. She couldn’t see his eyes, hidden behind thick goggles. What was he thinking? Was he questioning this at all? He could wipe out her life—her undeath, she supposed—in a heart’s beat if he chose. If she died there with no memories of her past it would be like she hadn’t ever existed at all.

Maybe that would be for the best.

She was already dead. Did she really want to face a new un-life in a decaying body? A new time without any knowledge of who she was or what she might have lost?

Then one of the others, the one in the military uniform—she could see his eyes and they were full of sadness—had to spoil it all. “Who are you?” he asked, “what’s your name?” In the tone of voice you used when speaking to a frightened dog.

She sputtered out something, an answer, a negation and suddenly it was all too real. The possibility that she might have a name, lost out there somewhere but still intact, reawakened in her the sense of what she had to lose. She had something still, some breadth of time, and the fear of losing it could cripple her. Her brain rolled over inside her head as the dread overwhelmed her, completely took her over. Her body shook and spasmed and heaved as if she was going to cough up her own skeleton, spit it out on the ground. She felt something clotted and nasty leak from her, from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She tried to cough it up.

She heard the gun click, heard a bullet inching through its oiled metal mechanism, getting ready for the shot.

With her eyes closed she could see the men like torches in a snowstorm. Their radiance, their golden tasty goodness glow that she wanted so badly to get close to, to consume. Their life force. She could feel the energy, the heat of it turned on her, focused on her and she knew they could sense somehow her own dark energy—that horrible perversion of life—God, she thought, if only she could hide that away from them, if only she could make them see her as one of them or even just see her as nothing at all, as invisible, transparent—

Something grated in her head, the bones of her skull sliding across one another like continental plates.

An icy shudder went through her. Her eyes shot open. She looked up and saw the men and every one of them had the same vacant look on his face.

“Where did she go?” the SWAT trooper asked. “I can’t see her!”

She had gotten her wish.

It couldn’t last: her body felt drained, her mind hazy, reeling, everything shifting its shape. In a moment she would lose all control and she would collapse and lose this magic she had somehow created, in a second they would see her. The man with the gun would see her again and nothing would stop him from shooting.

She had to escape.

Her hands were locked behind her with a loop of plastic, so she rolled over on her side and thrusted upward with her back, with her shoulder against the concrete until she was sliding upward onto her feet, a move she didn’t think human bones should allow but it worked for her. As fast as her feet could carry her (which wasn’t fast at all, damn it, she needed to move) she ran right toward the men, slaloming between them, careful not to touch them because that might just break the spell. Already they were starting to blink and look around, their eyes unfocused when they glided over her but that would change in a hurry. She had to get away… there, she saw a gap, a narrow space between two parked police cars, their red and blue light splashing across her white coat, run, run, run, okay, just a fast walk, anything, she squatted low, her body stiff and complaining, pushed her way into bushes. Behind her she heard shots fired, gunshots much louder than she expected and her torso winced painfully, her stomach clenching.

They were moving then, searching for her. She picked a direction and just moved, no conscious effort required, pure flight reflex taking over. But where to run to? Every direction seemed equally fraught with danger. Hide—she could hide. She found a hole to crawl into, a dry drainage pipe at the bottom of a ditch, wide enough for her to curl up inside. She tucked herself away, desperate to remain undiscovered. She scraped her zip tie against a piece of broken rebar until it snapped: the noise petrified her, made her think they would be on her in a moment.

They didn’t find her.

Dogs howled for her as she lay motionless and coiled. A helicopter buzzed overhead, its searchlight spearing the scrub grass right outside the mouth of her pipe, bleaching it of color. Men ran past with their guns jangling, excited for the kill, lusting for her blood. Hunger grew inside of her—it was the only way to measure the passage of time. She wanted to crawl out and away, to go look for some food but she didn’t dare. Instead she chewed on her fingernails, which just made her hungrier. She lost track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The night flew away from her on bat’s wings.

Dawn came, a hallucinatory vibrant blue on the grass that slowly turned to gray. There was silence around her. There had been for hours. She’d been waiting for something, some signal that it was safe to come out.

Nothing presented itself. Still. She couldn’t stay in the pipe forever. She had to get out. She had to get away. She harbored no illusion that the men had given up. They would still be looking for her. She was a monster. Something that had to be hunted down. She had to run as far and as fast as she could to avoid them. Definitely she had to get out of town. Where could she go, though? She might have family somewhere, people who would hide her, but she had no recollection of anyone. She didn’t know where she lived herself.

Stiff with cold and moisture she unraveled herself in the pipe and climbed out on all fours, every inch costing her jolts of pain up and down her spine. Once she was fully out of the pipe she stood up with infinite care and caution. The motion made her head buzz. Exhaustion and the ever-growing hunger made everything around her jittery and sharp. She rubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and something dark flared in her mind’s eye.

She gulped and choked on a shriek, keeping it inside of her but just barely. There—up on a hill above the hospital. Just a silhouette, a man-shaped darkness framed against the first orange smudge of the rising sun. She squinted hard and saw a naked man, his skin covered in blue curlicues and arabesques. Tattoos. He didn’t look like one of the dead. He looked perfectly healthy. He had a thick bushy beard and his hair was pulled back in a tight pony-tail. He wore nothing but a piece of rope around his neck and a band of fur around one bicep.

The man looked right into her head and she knew he was not just aware of her but psychically inside of her. He was probing her, studying her. She sensed some things about him, reciprocity for what he was taking from her. Not words, nothing so complex—just buzzing, distorted sensations, feelings, images. He was old, very old, and very much undead like herself, he let her know. He was a friend.

He turned away from her and pointed at the sun. She understood.

In a moment all of it was gone. He was gone. She was standing on wet grass, alone, defenseless. Hunted. She had something, though. There was somebody else—somebody like herself out there. She had no idea if she could trust him or not but what did it matter?

She had a direction. East. Go east, the naked man had been telling her. She had to go somewhere. Go east. Okay, she thought.

Okay.

END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER NATION

Posted by Wellington at 08:56 AM | Comments (13)

October 22, 2004

Chapter Fourteen

DOES AMERICA HAVE ENOUGH GUNS? Assault Weapons Bans and the Congressmen Who Hate Them [“The Economist” magazine, 1/05]

Stuttering flashes of light lit up the hospital’s windows as the SWAT teams moved through room after room looking for hostages and shooting anyone who looked suspicious. Bannerman watched from the back of a squad car, trying not to look every time he heard sub machine gun fire.

It was hard. “They’re in there shooting people, Vikram. Sick people. This isn’t law enforcement. It’s eugenics. And I can’t do a thing about it—I’m way out of my jurisdiction here and the local OIC isn’t taking my calls. FEMA doesn’t want to hear it until I’ve got a verified one hundred fatalities and the Governor’s office is doing its own investigation. They promise they’ll get back to me. So in the meantime I sit here and listen to people getting slaughtered. The alternative is to run in there and try to stop them with my bare hands, in which case they would decide I was a threat, too, and take me down.” The sheriff’s deputy had been quite clear on that last point. “I have never felt so helpless in my life.”

Vikram Singh Nanda held up one hand. The other clutched his ruggedized cell phone to an ear hidden beneath his turban. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” He finished his call. “I am sorry, Bannerman. What were you saying just then?”

Clark looked up at the hospital and saw tear gas streaming from a line of open windows. “Forget it.” This was what happened when you put law enforcement teams in charge of what should be a military situation. It didn’t matter how much training or discipline they had—they just weren’t ready to psychologically handle a true combat experience. Just ask the Branch Dravidians at Waco. Even federal units were ill-equipped for a real fight.

“So I have news,” Vikram told him, trying to move on. “News you will not like.”

“We’ve found our warden?” Clark asked. This could be crucial. He had set his friend with the task of tracking down the elusive man but he hadn’t expected results nearly so quickly.

“He left an immaculate paper trail. And why not? He had nothing to hide. He was a man going away on vacation. He took a flight from Denver International Airport that arrived at LAX at three twenty-two on a Thursday. He rented a car, a Jeep Cherokee, from the Hertz counter and was later recorded purchasing gas at a service station in Petaluma. Two hours later he was seen biting a young woman on the neck and was subsequently gunned down by an officer of the law. His body was brought here, to this hospital.”

“Jesus fucked a duck,” Bannerman said. The first time he’d sworn in a month, probably, but well-deserved. You couldn’t ask for a cleaner timeline, for one thing—Vikram had always been thorough—but their luck in getting such a clear picture of the warden’s movements was far and away eclipsed by the story’s sheer horror.

The warden had been infected in Florence. Of that Clark had no doubt. He had flown through two major international airports, spreading his contagion to everyone in both terminals—and by extension the passengers and crews of every flight that left the airports. The germ could be on its way to hundreds of destinations by now. No, Clark reconsidered, the warden had a head start on them. The germ would already be at hundreds of destinations. Not every passenger on every plane would be infected, of course—no pathogen was that insidious—but if just one person on every flight had it… well, it had only taken one infected individual to turn the hospital into a war zone. Bannerman Clark had been operating under a protocol of containment—intending to quarantine every known location where the new disease manifested itself. That was impossible now. What had happened here, at the hospital, would already be beginning in cities around the planet. Starting with Denver. And Los Angeles.

Jesus fucked a duck, indeed.

Clark grabbed the bridge of his nose and pinched. He was trained for this. As part of his being named the RAID officer for Colorado he had been required to complete an eight-week course in crisis response to biological warfare incidents. It was time to manage this thing. Time to prioritize. What did he need?

“I need flight schedules,” he said weakly, and Vikram pulled a note pad from his pocket. “We at least need to start looking at epidemiology. I need crew lists and passenger manifests, we’ll track down as many people as we can—God, I hope none of those flights were headed to non-aligned states, we’d never catch them. I need to talk to the administrator for FEMA region IX and the local Guard CO, not just the AG, I—”

A flash-bang concussion grenade went off right inside the Emergency Room and Clark stopped in mid-sentence. He looked up to see SWAT teams pouring out of the hospital, their black Kevlar and their iridescent blue-blocker goggles making them look like demons pouring out of a crack in the side of Hell. Something major was happening.

“Naam,” Vikram breathed, taking his God’s name in vain but Clark thought maybe the time was right for that.

He opened the door of the patrol car and stepped out into the hospital’s loading zone. The sheriff’s deputy came marching toward him but he held up a hand for patience. He watched the SWAT teams fall into close ranks in two lines facing the emergency room doors at forty-five degree angles. They moved flawlessly, as a unit. As crazy as they might have become, as desperate, they had not forgotten their drills. They were assembling a perfect firing formation. A kill zone. They expected something big and bad to come out of the hospital at any second.

The doors opened and a skinny blonde girl walked out.

She had her arms up, trying to surrender. She looked terrified. She also had a truly gruesome wound on her neck and what looked like bloodstains on her chin and chest. Her lips were shaking. They were blue.

“Please,” she said, her voice thick with fear. “Please, don’t kill me.”

The SWAT team leader threw a hand signal at his men and the troopers swarmed her, some holding back to keep her in their weapons’ sights, others streaking in with riot control batons to knock her legs out from under her. They got her hands behind her, fastened together with a thin plastic zip-cuff. Expert hands frisked her, pulling open her white lab coat to show she wore nothing underneath. When it was established that she was unarmed two troopers grabbed her by the arms and yanked her away from the glass doors and over to a clear patch of ground by some shrubbery. The sheriff’s deputy loped over to look at her while the SWAT teams shifted position again to keep the doors covered.

Clark couldn’t help himself. He stepped in between the deputy and the girl. “The infected persons I’ve seen couldn’t talk. They were physically incapable of it,” Clark insisted. “You have to take this woman into custody. Certainly she needs to be monitored. You don’t need to hurt her. At the very least that’s going to end in a law suit. At worst it’ll mean criminal charges filed against you.”

“I’ve seen enough of them. I know what they look like and how they act. We can’t let even one of them get away.” The deputy nodded at his underlings.

The girl shivered and sobbed as a SWAT trooper leveled his weapon at her forehead.

“Who are you?” Clark asked her, trying to humanize her in the deputy’s eyes. He wouldn’t give up until she was actually dead—he owed her that much, after standing by and just watching the bloodshed all night. “What’s your name?”

“I… I don’t know,” the girl said. “I’ve lost my memory, I can’t remember!” She sobbed again. Mucus leaked from her nose and eyes. It was dark and thick with congealed blood. Oh, no, Clark thought, oh, no. He’d been wrong—she was one of them.

“Do it,” the deputy coughed. He turned away. The SWAT trooper clicked off the safety of his firearm and steadied it with his free hand, inspected the weapon to make sure it wouldn't jam.

The girl vanished. Right before Clark’s eyes. Or rather… he felt as if a particle of dust had fallen into his eyes and he tried to blink it away and when his vision cleared she was nowhere to be seen. She must have made a break for it. Yet when he looked around he saw only confused-looking men in riot gear. The SWAT trooper fired a few desultory rounds at the bushes where she’d been kneeling but clearly he didn’t know what to target. The deputy’s face was set like stone. Clark felt a flutter of panic in his stomach.

The girl had vanished into thin air.

Posted by Wellington at 01:53 PM | Comments (16)

October 20, 2004

Chapter Thirteen

“This was a test of the Reverse 9-1-1 Emergency Notification System. You do not need to reply to this call. Please hang up now. This was a test…” [Phone Message received in Butte, MT, 3/21/05]

“That’s it, you idiot. You take the fucking meat!” Bleu jiggled the bit of string and the leg of mutton danced in front of the dead woman’s ruined eyes. She scrunched up her face and part of her cheek fell away, dangling by a flap of skin. Dick could see the pureed muscles beneath and a hint of bone.

The dead climber reached up and sank her fingernails into the leg. Her hunger vibrated through her, spasms of need pushing her on far more than Bleu’s taunt. She sank yellow teeth through the wool and blood dripped on the pine needles below. “This is the last one,” Dick said. He’d said it so many times it had to be true.

Bleu let go of the leg and the climber fell to the ground rather than let her prize go. She curled around the meat, protecting it from interlopers with her body.

Dick leaned over the edge of the roof and fired five shots into her head and neck. Powder burns darkened his pant leg but he didn’t care. He was too busy coughing and snorting, getting ready to be sick. When he was done he sat down hard on the roof and breathed heavily, washing out his mouth with stale coffee. “That’s it, then,” he said. “You got three of them. At the mine. Then the one we killed in the house. This poor sucker. And the girl I saw. On the road.” He nodded. “That’s six.”

“I said there might been seven when we found ‘em,” Bleu clucked.

“But you don’t know. You couldn’t count them so well in the mine. You said they were crawling all over each other. So you don’t know.”

“I sure don’t.” She stared out at the trees as if by peering hard enough into the murk she could see right through it. Come on, Dick thought. Come on, come on, come on. Any euphoria he had felt earlier was long gone. He just wanted to go home, to get somewhere safe. He studied Bleu’s face like a kid waiting for a teacher to dismiss class on the last day of school. Finally she nodded and helped him lower the ladder over the side.

They climbed down as quietly as they could, the pine needles muffling their footfalls. The moon laid down sharp-edged shadows as they made their way between the tree trunks, Dick putting out one hand to slide along the smooth or rugged or rough bark. After the noise and light of the gunshots the world seemed wrapped up in cotton and hidden away somewhere dark. His muscles were jumpy under his skin. He didn’t know if there had six or seven either. He just had to get out, all of his excitement turning to cold dread sweat on his back, making the shoulders of his shirt cling to him.

Where the valley turned to hillside and then to the thrust of the ridge Bleu crouched low and put her guns in her belt. The slope came up pretty suddenly and they had to climb their way up instead of walking. It had been easy to get down the track—gravity had helped there—but going up proved far more difficult. Halfway to the top Bleu leaned forward and grabbed at a tree root to steady herself on the broken rock. “I don’t know we should leave yet. What if the police want to—” She stopped and looked down.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I just stepped in something sticky.” Dick looked down to see a moldy hand reach up and grab at her ankle. She screamed as the last climber yanked her downward on top of him. She rocked back and forth trying to get free but he got one near-skeletal arm around her throat and pinned her down. “Walters!” she shrieked.

“Bleu!” He pulled out the ice axe and readied himself to strike but he couldn’t see any way to hit the dead man without impaling Bleu too. He danced back and forth looking for an opening—and suddenly his feet were sliding on loose shale. Thin sheets of rocks skittered down the slope, pebbles bouncing and flying as he tried to keep his balance.

“Walters!”

Dick threw out his arms to catch himself, letting go of the axe. He shouted out, half in surprise. “Bleu, just, just hold on—” His feet fell away from beneath him and the hill rolled over as he fell, colliding with the loose rock, sliding, skidding as Bleu and the dead man fell away from him. He got a good view of the dead climber finally and saw why there’d been so much confusion as to whether there were six or seven of them. The climber who had Bleu was nothing more than a torso, his legs and abdomen torn away leaving a ragged, stringy wound. Dick reached out, trying to grab Bleu’s foot, trying to grab tree roots or solid rocks or anything. He had to save her—he had to get back up and save her, but then his head smacked something hard and cold and his vision went all sparkly.

He opened his eyes without remembering ever having closed them. His body rang like a bell. His mouth tasted stale and white—white? Was that a taste? He was pretty sure he’d wet himself. Above him the stars burned hard and cold. He recognized the symptoms of a bad concussion but his thoughts were swimming through him like fishes, no, no, he had to, he had to stop.

Stop.

Yes. Just lay there for a while in the soft snow. It didn’t feel cold at all. Something noisy and terrifying had been happening and he was pretty sure he had the details written down somewhere if he wanted to look them up but just then, just then he only wanted to look up at the stars. Such a beautiful night in the mountains. Something furry brushed against his hand and he reached out to pat it, to pet it. A dog? No, too fleecy.

He managed to tilt his head so he could look and found himself staring into an eyeball with a horizontal pupil. A sheep’s eye. Even after years of working as a livestock inspection agent he had never gotten used to those eyes with their sideways elongated pupils like something out of Stephen King. Still. A sheep was nothing to worry about. He gave this one a professional once-over. He recognized the breed: Barbados blackbelly. She seemed slightly off, though. Yes… her rear legs were tucked in too tight and there were pink patches in her coat where she’d rubbed herself raw. Scrapie, alright. A damned shame—she looked like a strong animal and she would have to be put down so she didn’t infect the rest of the flock. The sheep put out her tongue and licked his hand. He laughed until she nipped him, hard.

“Hey there,” he said, “come on,” and he sat up so suddenly the blood rushed right out of his head. He groaned and tried to rub at his temples. It didn’t work. The sheep still had his fingers clenched in her incisors. She choked up on his hand and started crushing his fingers with her premolars. Her herbivore’s teeth couldn’t tear his skin very well but she clearly meant to grind him to paste.

Dick yelled and tried to get up but another sheep, this one missing part of her hindquarters, sprawled across his chest. She weighed two hundred pounds, easily, much more than he could lift—he was trapped. A ram with broken horns got his mouth around Dick’s shoulder and clamped down hard. He felt the bones there flex with the pressure. Soon enough they would snap. More sheep arrived. Maybe a dozen. A full flock, all of them showing signs of scrapie.

Bleu had slaughtered all of her sheep—she’d done it herself. She had… she had cut their throats. Bled them. She wouldn’t have decapitated them or destroyed their brains. Too messy.

Now they were back. Bloody wool obscured Dick’s view but as the ram crushed the skin and muscle of his left arm he saw Bleu herself standing before him. Massive chunks of meat were missing from her neck and throat so that her head seemed to float above her body like a baloon on a string of vertebrae. She didn’t say anything as she bent over him, pushing her way in amongst the sheep, and picked up his right arm in both of her hands.

Posted by Wellington at 02:09 PM | Comments (24)

October 18, 2004

Chapter Twelve

“He was just leaning against the … standing there, he looked kind of confused and every once in a while he would knock on the door. With his fists, you know, maybe he was trying to break it open but… he wasn’t my husband, not anymore… I didn’t know what to do!” [Caller on the “Buzz Linklee Show”, 1290 AM KKAR, Omaha, 3/19/05]

On the snowy roof of the Skye house Dick sipped at his coffee and tried the police again on his cell phone. When that didn’t work he tried his office, and finally his sister in Montana. No signal, not even a bar. It had been that way since the first time he’d tried but he couldn’t seem to just put the phone away.

“Remember,” Bleu said. “You have to go for the head. The brain, sure. Otherwise they don’t so much as feel it.”

They had some moonlight, which was good, and plenty of guns, also good, and they were up on the roof and had pulled the ladder up behind them which was the best idea ever as far as Dick was concerned. It was also freezing cold and they couldn’t go down until all of the climbers were dispatched. Bleu had a leg of mutton on a string that she dangled over the edge of the roof. Fishing for dead people.

The thought made Dick laugh and he wiped at his face as he chuckled, rubbing away the paste of dried saliva there. His mouth had dried out like a piece of jerky. “Gnugh,” he moaned as he scratched at his leathery tongue. She stared at him and he realized he was being inappropriate. “Sorry,” he mumbled.

He wasn’t doing so well with the fear.

“Don’t be sorry. Be ready.” It sounded like something she might have told her son. Her dead son. Her dead survivalist son—well, he hadn’t survived the walking dead, had he? Dick wanted to giggle again.

“When I say ‘be ready’, that means you should check your weapon there, sport.” Bleu clomped over to the other side of the roof. Her hobnail boots had cracked some of the shingles and Dick was afraid to follow her over there. Instead he worked the action of the Weatherby rifle and checked that there was a round in there. Of course there was. He’d put it in himself under her supervision. He was the shooter because his eyes were better but she knew all about guns and she didn’t really need him. He could just leave. His car was waiting for him just over the ridge. He just had to get past two or maybe three ghouls.

“There! Come on already, get your shot lined up!” Bleu was pointing out into the sighing pines, one boot stamping repeatedly on the shingles. Dick tried to bring the rifle up to his face and nearly dropped it in the process.

Okay, okay, he told himself, calm down. Just calm the fuck down.

“Do you see him? She’s leaning on that tree. It’s a perfect shot.”

Dick nodded—he did see something kind of human-shaped—and brought the scope to his eye. Let his night vision adjust until the image cleared. Yes. A human figure, dark against the snow. The climber in question had been a woman once, judging by the shape of her hips. Now she looked like a rotting pumpkin perched on top of a sportswear mannequin. The scientist in Dick rose to the top, trying to understand what he saw and it made sense, sure. Being frozen all winter hadn’t preserved the climbers as much as liquefied them: when ice crystals formed in their muscle cells the sharp apices of the crystals had shredded the cell membranes, turning the climbers flaccid and gooey. He remembered the one he’d fought with. Putrefaction hadn’t weakened them at all.

Immaterial. The only thing that mattered was the shot. He tried to remember his time in the Boy Scouts. He had passed the requirements for the marksmanship merit badge. Seat the rifle, line up the shot, adjust for windage—

“Take the shot al-fucking-ready!” Bleu howled.

Dick fired spasmodically.

The magnum round hit the tree a few inches above the climber’s head. The wood exploded, showering the dead woman with pulpy fragments and splinters of bark. Bleu didn’t credit the climbers with too much mental wattage but it looked like they understood what it meant when the tree you were leaning on exploded. Without looking back the climber slumped off into the darkness.

It had taken them three hours to pick one shot and he missed. Dick wiped at his mouth again. He didn’t feel so good.

New Flux Generating Step Identified in the Metabolic Pathways of Human Prion Protein (PrPsc) [New England Journal of Medicine, 11/6/04]

Nilla watched the three men get cut down by the SWAT team through the Venetian blinds in the cafeteria. Her blood wasn’t circulating in her veins anymore but it went cold anyway. They weren’t asking questions down there. They weren’t trying to help people. The police were just slaughtering anyone who came out.

Maybe not just anyone. Maybe live people got a pass. Nilla was undead and she knew she would be on the short list for the firing squad. She had to get out—she had to escape the hospital somehow.

She tried to run but her legs cramped up instantly when she started to sprint. In pain she hobbled past a room full of nurses and orderlies bent over a bed. She didn’t look too closely—she could hear what they were doing.

Out in the hallway she saw heart rate monitors and pulse oxygen readers mounted on IV poles, she saw bad art on the walls, pictures of kittens and houses in New England and, ugh, a streak of blood pointing towards the stairs. She leaned up against a wall, her leg muscles screaming at the workout she was giving them, and sank to the floor below a line of windows that let cold black night air belly in.

“This is the police! We’re coming in! Everyone needs to be on the floor, now, with your hands in plain view!” someone shouted outside, his angry voice electronically amplified. He made it sound as if they would shoot anyone they found inside the hospital. Fear made Nilla’s hands shake so much she shoved them in the pockets of her stolen coat.

She got up and followed the blood trail only to find a dead guy in a jumpsuit blocking the doorway, motionless, his head tilted back a little. As if he was expecting to receive transmissions from space.

“Move!” she said, trying to shove at him. He had a foot on her and maybe fifty pounds. He wouldn’t budge. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly his jaw began to drift down and his eyes started to focus on her.

Outside of the hospital she heard rapid gunfire. Short bursts of it that didn’t let up:

B-B-BRATTT-B-B-BRATTT-B-B-BRATTT.

She tried shoving the big guy again and finally he looked down at her, saw her. His mouth opened as if he might speak.

A glassy rope of drool spilled over his lower lip. He shot out one hand to push her away and knocked her to the floor. She slid over onto her side on the glossy linoleum. He leaned down over her and tried to grab her with hands so big they looked comical. She slipped out of his grasp with more grace than she’d thought she possessed but she knew he would get her eventually.

Something whistled as it came in through the open window and took off the top of his head. Dried-out brain matter showered down on her as fragments of his skull plinked off the wall. Before he could even fall down she ducked around him and into the stairwell. A sniper had shot him without warning—maybe they had seen him attacking her, maybe they were trying to defend her. Or maybe she was the next target.

She took the stairs downward as quickly as she could manage. She kept tripping and having to grab the handrail because she was constantly looking back over her shoulder. She was halfway down when the door at the bottom of the stairwell opened and yellow light streamed in, dazzling her. Something black about the size of a soda can bounced off the floor and she slid to a halt. The canister clattered to a stop and started spewing white smoke. It smelled weird, truly weird and then it made her nose itch. Tear gas? She didn’t know what tear gas smelled like. She couldn’t go out that way, though—they would be guarding the door. She turned around and started heading back up, back to where snipers lay in wait just outside the open windows.

Nilla only made it a step or two before the lights went out. The police had cut the power.

Posted by Wellington at 01:56 PM | Comments (13)

October 15, 2004

Chapter Eleven

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Getting about as far as possible away from the undead, I just wanted to mention that the good folks over at Penny Arcade are starting up this year's "Child's Play" charity drive now, at http://www.childsplaycharity.org/ They collect video games, console systems, and assorted stuff and deliver it in time for Christmas to kids in hospitals around the country. You can donate games, systems, or just cash if you want to. If you're going to buy ten dozen Christmas gifts this year anyway, why not add one more thing to your list? Okay, enough preaching. Let's get back to the dead people.

--David Wellington

What the Government Doesn’t Want You to Know: RATE OF CATTLE MUTILATIONS SPIKES! [“UFO Insider” magazine, February 2005]

Nilla was standing in the hospital’s cafeteria, devouring sliced beets out of a tin can she’d found sitting open on a counter when she heard a violent squawking noise coming from outside. She swallowed and went to the window. It was dark outside but blue and red light kept flashing across the slats of the Venetian blinds. With her clumsy hands she pushed open two of the slats and looked out.

Oh, God, no, she thought.

FEMA MOVES HEAVY EQUIPMENT THROUGH ILLINOIS AT 3 AM: What are they preparing for? [ctrl.org, 3/20/05]

“There are SWAT teams ready to storm the building. You still have a chance to come out of this in good shape if you’re willing to release some hostages.” The words blasted against the brick face of the hospital and rebounded off into space. No answer was forthcoming. The sheriff’s deputy switched off his bullhorn and turned to shake hands with Clark and Vikram. He was a big man, clearly a weightlifter in his off hours. He had a blonde crew cut and dark deep-set eyes. “You’re from the Army, huh? I didn’t know we rated that kind of attention.” The deputy looked dazed. He was out of his element here—his town had always been a quiet place, one of a thousand Californian hamlets between San Francisco and Los Angeles where nothing ever happened. Now he was overseeing an actual hostage crisis. A complete breakdown of the social pecking order.

“We’re just here as advisors,” Vikram soothed, giving his biggest smile. He asked about the boy’s tattoos. The deputy seemed grateful for the diversion but was too riled up to give more than one word answers.

Clark wasn’t particularly frosty himself. He very, very much wanted this to be a wasted trip. He wanted to go back to Colorado safe in the knowledge that the thing, the bug, the virus or whatever it might be was wholly contained in Florence.

He forced himself to relax by grabbing his keys in his pants pocket until the jagged edges bit into the ball of his thumb. The discomfort helped him focus. He studied the layout of the denied perimeter the sheriff’s office had created. The hospital was a three story building studded with windows. On the side that faced the street it had only a single entrance, a wide lobby of automatic doors leading into the emergency room. Blue and red light flashed across the glass: the deputies had formed a wedge with their patrol cars, a covered forward position for the negotiation phase.

Beyond the doors darkness filled the building like a fluid. Clark saw occasional flashes of motion in there but he could never make out any details. Just inside the emergency room, illuminated only by the police lights, he could see what looked like a leg—the wrinkled sole of a foot, the bumpy shape of an ankle—as if someone had collapsed in the shadows. “There,” Clark said, pointing it out. “Do you see that? It looks like a man down. Can you get someone in there to retrieve casualties?”

The deputy glared at Clark but then he looked away and lifted his radio handset to his mouth. He uttered a few quick strings of police code numbers and after a moment three SWAT troopers in full armor emerged from a truck behind them. Two of them took up station in short range of the entrance while the third conspicuously put his weapon down on the ground and advanced. He kept his hands in plain view as he ducked under a flapping cordon of caution tape and advanced on the doors. No weapons fire or any other indication of resistance came from the hospital so the trooper moved in closer and then slipped quickly and silently through the glass doors.

Clark couldn’t see him after that. “This is SWAT Two, 10-97,” he heard crackling over the deputy’s radio. “11-44.” Clark knew that code—it meant “possible fatality.” “Oh, man,” the trooper said, his breath heavy as it roared out of the radio. “Oh, man, it’s just a leg, it’s been torn off…”

“Is there anyone else in there?” the deputy asked. “Anybody alive?” He looked like he might be sick.

“10-6, 10-6,” the trooper insisted, asking them to stand by. “I see six, maybe more males—it’s very dark, they’re approaching my position.”

Clark stiffened. He squeezed his keys until the pain made him wince. “Get your man out of there now,” he demanded.

The deputy waved at him is dismissal. “SWAT Two, are they armed?”

“SWAT Two here, negative… 10-6, okay, okay, one of them tried to grab me…”

The radio crackled with silence. Vikram put a hand on Clark’s shoulder and he realized he’d been about to jump up and run inside. He let out a deep breath and then sucked in a new one when the door of the hospital slammed open.

“Fuck, fuck, fuuucckkk!” SWAT Two screamed as he came barreling out, the severed human leg clutched in one hand. The trooper dashed to cover as the doors slid open again and three badly wounded men came staggering out.

Blood covered one’s face. Another wore no shirt and Clark could see he’d been disemboweled. The third’s left arm dangled at his side, the skin flayed off down to the elbow. They made no sound at all as they limped toward the fleeing SWAT trooper. They didn’t even look up when the deputy demanded that they halt.

A firearm went off very close to Clark’s head and he instinctively ducked. When he looked again the three injured men were spinning in place, the dark craters of bullet wounds tearing open their flesh. “Hold your fire!” Clark shouted but the deputy bellowed over him, demanding that the SWAT team fire at will. “What are you doing?” Clark demanded. “Those men are unarmed! They need medical attention!”

The deputy set his mouth in a hard line. He studied Clark’s face for a moment, then turned away to spit on the ground. “I have had just about enough of this shit,” he said. “I don’t care if they’ve got rabies or ebola or what the fuck ever—six of my men are in that hospital right now and who knows how many civilians and I know just one thing. This. Ends. Here.” He pointed at the ground to emphasize his point.

Clark shook his head sadly. This was where it would truly begin.

In the red and blue light the three men jittered and danced as the SWAT team, their eyes vacant as they tried to walk forward through the hail of gunfire. Clark knew that look. It was the same one he’d seen at ADX-Florence.

Posted by Wellington at 01:51 PM | Comments (12)

October 13, 2004

Chapter Ten

SLEEPY YANK TOWN WAKES TO MURDER! Selkirk, KS “Scene of Carnage” as Motorcycle Enthusiast Retreat Attacked by Locals [thesun.co.uk, 3/22/05]

Three helicopters keeping station around the prison seemed to hover on pillars of radiance as their searchlights scanned the terrain around ADX-Florence. Their shivering noise had replaced the normal night sounds of cicadas and frogs. A fourth helicopter, bigger and darker, came in for a landing and Bannerman Clark was waiting.

“Welcome to Colorado,” he said, saluting the young men and women who emerged. These were researchers from USAMRIID, the Army’s primary biological weapons defense facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland. They looked as if they’d rather lick each others’ boot soles then come any closer. Clark had removed his cover and replaced it with a plastic shower cap. He had latex gloves on his hands and a surgical mask dangling around his neck. “We don’t know our parameters yet so we’re being careful,” he explained. “We have to assume everyone in this facility is compromised. Please follow the sergeant here.”

The researchers dutifully filed through a sallyport defined by two barbed-wire fences and into their new home. The 8th Civil Support Team hadn’t wasted any time setting up temporary lab facilities for the biowar people, taking over the prison grounds to set up ten double-wide trailers swathed in positive-pressure tents and installing decontamination stations at every access point. The USAMRIID contingent was used to this kind of confinement, all of them being certified for level four biosafety precautions, and they kept their heads down as they were taken through basic orientation.

One man remained inside the big helicopter and Clark looked to see who it might be. “Hello, Bannerman, is that you, my old buddy?” he asked, stepping into the illumination of the vehicle’s exit ramp. He wore an army uniform with a turban and a bushy black beard and his eyes twinkled in the half-light.

“Vikram, Vikram, how have you been?” Clark laughed, happy despite the grim setting to see an old friend. Major Vickram Singh Nanda and Bannerman Clark had come up through the ranks together, starting in the Engineers during Vietnam. They had gone from Green to Gold together, as the saying went, receiving their commissions in the same ceremony. They had fallen out of touch over the years but Clark had heard that Vikram had ended up at Fort Detrick and he’d been hoping they would have a chance to resume contact. He’d never expected his old partner to show up personally.

“I heard you had a very, very serious problem here in your Colorado, so I have come. How could I do less? I requested this duty.” Clark couldn’t believe his luck—to get Vikram Singh Nanda in charge of the biowar team was a definite card up his sleeve. His smile must not have lasted, though, because a moment later Vikram’s face fell. “It is bad, isn’t it?”

Clark shook his head. “I’ll tell you all about it en route. I’m running out to California tonight and you can come with me if you don’t mind the jet lag. It’s a virus, we think. The symptoms are ataxia, aphasia, and severe dementia. Aggressive behaviors including cannibalism.” Vikram gasped and Clark nodded in agreement. “It’s also got an incubation period of just a few minutes. Yes, it’s bad.”

“I have never heard of such a thing happening in nature. That kind of effect should take months to manifest. God simply does not create something so virulent unless… you think it has been weaponized.”

Bannerman Clark knew he could count on his friend’s razor intellect. He nodded discretely, because he didn’t want to say it out loud yet. He’d come to the same conclusion. A pathogen that could destroy a man’s mind and turn him against his friends and co-workers with homicidal intent in a span of minutes would be the ultimate terrorist weapon.

“We’ve got a lid on this place and it’s tight enough for now,” Clark said, pointing out the double-layer cyclone fence the 8th CST had erected around the entire prison compound, in addition to the prison’s own fences. “I’ve got digital topographic imaging and satellite support so vigilant I can see every acorn hidden by every squirrel in a twenty mile radius. I’ve got air and ground troops watching every corner of this site.”

“Then why, my friend, do you look so frightened?” Vikram asked quietly.

Clark kicked the dirt in frustration. Not a terribly efficient way to get out his anger but he was running on twenty-four hours without food and it was starting to get to him. “Because the warden of this prison may very well have been carrying the virus when he took off on vacation three days ago. All of this,” Clark said, gesturing around at the fences, the helicopters, the mobile labs, “might just be my way of locking the barn door when the horse has already run away.”

Where is your family’s Emergency Meet-Up Point? Where is your personal Go Bag, at work, at school, in the car? How many days worth of water do you have in the house right now? [Emergency Preparedness Update #7, published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 1/05]

The kerosene lamp whoofed into life and threw some yellow around the bare plank walls of Bleu’s root cellar. Dick could still see moonlight coming through the slats and he wondered how long it would take one of the homicidal climbers to break in. Bleu didn’t seem particularly scared. Just anxious to get the job over with. “What happened to them?” Dick asked. “What makes people act like that?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. It has to be some kind of government germ warfare thing gone wrong, doesn’t it?” Bleu lifted the lantern and clomped down a narrow flight of stairs cut into the earth. They came into a low space with bowed walls and Bleu hung the lantern on a four-by-four that held up the ceiling like a toothpick holding open the mouth of a predatory cat in a cartoon. Stacks of cardboard boxes and bags full of potatoes and radishes filled most of the space. At the far end from the stairs sat a door wrapped in black plastic of the kind contractors use. Bleu went to the door and stopped. “I reckoned if anybody would know about that it would be you. Hell, kid, that’s what I called you down here for.”

Dick’s eyes went wide. “Me? I’m just a low-level bureaucrat. A livestock inspector! I don’t know anything about biowarfare.” He thought about it a second. He was with the government, which must be all that mattered to Bleu. “Look, I’m on your side, you know,” he said, trying to remember what hippies stood for. Flower power, sure, and they didn’t like the Vietnam War. “Um, peace and love, right? Love is all you need.”

Bleu opened the waterproof door and light spilled over its contents. Five racked hunting rifles, most of them .22 caliber rimfire weapons but also a good old-fashioned thirty-ought-six. Even more insane: one was a heavy-duty big game rifle, a centerfire, bolt-action Weatherby Mark V Safari Custom, something Dick had only ever seen in gun magazines. An elephant gun, to be blunt about it, though most likely the Skye family had planned on using it against bears when they bought it.

Below the rack of rifles hung three shotguns in various gauges and below that pistols and revolvers, high-powered enough to cut a man and half. At the bottom of the closet sat box after box of ammunition, cleaning supplies for the weapons, and sheaves of paper targets, some of them used. On the back of the door someone had taped up one target showing a human silhouette with the bullseye where the man’s heart would be. Dick saw an almost perfect grouping, six narrow holes right in the center. In the white space of the target someone had written NICE SHOOTING STORMY and OCTOBER 17 2002, STORMY’S BIG DAY.

Dick couldn’t help but stare. He was looking at an arsenal, a survivalist’s wet dream, enough guns to hold off an invasion of ATF and FBI agents for a week. He had thought he had been sent back through a time warp to Woodstock. Instead he’d wandered into Ruby Ridge.

Posted by Wellington at 01:54 PM | Comments (37)

October 11, 2004

Chapter Nine

“He’s crawling toward me… no, on his arms, his legs don’t seem to work anymore, listen, I don’t have time—oh my God—his eyes—his eyes—please! Please tell them to hurry!” [911 Emergency Response System call, Gabbs, NV, 3/20/05]

In the shadows of the spruces and the firs Dick and Bleu Skye (her legal name, she assured him) crunched through the snow that would linger nine months of the year at that altitude.

“I suppose that some people would call us freaks,” Bleu said, the words distorted by her lip wound but he could at least understand her now. Not that he was really listening. Her voice was a rough melody in harmony with the scrunching down of snow and the squeak of pine needles he made with every step. “And I suppose I don’t mind so much, we were trying to build something, is all. A quiet life in a pretty noisy world. Me and Tony, that was my husband, and our boy Stormy.”

Dick’s feet were numb with the cold. His brain was numb with implications, meanings, ramifications. He’d just participated in the butchering of another human being. Oh, it had been self defense, sure, and oh, Dick was no peacenik. He owned guns, just like half of Colorado. A couple of target pistols and a hunting rifle and yes, he had used it to kill. To kill white-tailed deer. The idea of hurting a human being intentionally, of true violence, of murder… that he’d never even contemplated before.

“That was nigh on twenty years ago, back when Stormy was just a passenger, you know, when I was carrying him. We built all this with our hands and we loved it, just loved it, no matter if we were hungry. No matter if we didn’t know how to do something—we could learn. And all we had to do was walk outside and look up and we knew why we came up here and why we didn’t want to go back.”

A half-visible path, a little more clear of snow than the surrounding terrain, went snaking through the trees and they followed it. Dick was lost on that path as he followed Bleu and he couldn’t let go of the ice axe. It was like a talisman, some proof that he wasn’t an evil man, that he wasn’t a killer. Exhibit A in the trial going on in his head. Bleu’s voice was just the soundtrack to that groundbreaking bit of courtroom drama and when she started sobbing it was just another instrument in the orchestra. On some level he realized that he wasn’t thinking straight.

“I always worried that I couldn’t teach Stormy enough. I worried he wouldn’t know enough to make it in this life and now… oh God, now…”

She stopped, and so did Dick. They’d reached their destination, a wooden structure that had to be a century old. Just a shack really, with one wall open to the elements. Inside the trail lead downward, into the earth. An old abandoned mine entrance. The mountains were riddled with them, leftovers from the gold rush. The wind tore out of it, colder than the outside air, and it made a hollow sound. Dick stepped closer and Bleu took his arm, holding him back. There was something moving down there.

“He died quick. My son died quick. Tony took his time about it. And now… I guess maybe… maybe you should just look. Here.” She handed him a flashlight. He clicked it on and peered down into the darkness.

“How many do you see?” she asked, her voice flinty again. He couldn’t see anything.

Then he could. The beam caught on something wriggling, something dark but recognizable. A pair of human legs in snow pants and tan Timberland boots. The legs kicked fitfully. Dick scanned upward with the light, saw a heavy winter jacket. Arms and a head. The face tilted upward and he felt vomit rush up his throat. The skin of the face was red and black and white and yellow. The eyesockets were empty and half of the skin was missing from the jaw. The hands clutched at the slope of the tunnel, digging in until the knuckles stood out like walnuts. The person, because it was a person, yes, was trying to climb out of the tunnel but it was too steep or something.

“How many?” Bleu asked again.

“Two,” Dick said, sweeping the light back and forth. “No, three. And—are those bones? Skulls. Hu.” He cleared his throat. “Human.” He clicked off the light and shoved it in his pocket so he could wipe his palms on his jeans. “I saw two—two skulls.”

“My big strong men,” Bleu rasped. “They just wanted to help and they’re torn to pieces.”

It took her a while to collect herself before she could speak again. “We found them two days ago and didn’t know what we oughta do. We thought they were dead at first, well, why wouldn’t we? They probably got caught in a storm and went in there looking for shelter. Climbers get themselves lost up here all the time. Nobody ever finds them till summer. When they started moving we decided they were just hurt. They don’t never talk, not even when you yell questions at them.” She took a pistol out of her pocket and cocked it. “There were more yesterday. Maybe six, and maybe seven.” She pointed her weapon down into the tunnel. “They’re getting out.” She fired and the high-caliber shot blasted all around the valley, rolling along the mountains like an endless series of doors slamming shut.

“Wait!” Dick shouted, scampering backward, away from the gunshot. “Wait! They need medical assistance, you know, like a doctor, you can’t just—” She fired again and he winced. “I’ve got to—I’ve got to call the police,” he stammered. He had his cell phone in his hand.

“Good idea,” she said. She aimed carefully, lining up her shot with the forehead of the third—the third person—the third creature? Dick didn’t know what to call them. She pulled the trigger and then let her arm drop, the pistol still in her hand. “We can use the help. We should head back to the house before dark.”

He followed her back, not knowing what else to do.

BAD MOON RISING: Top Psychologists Explain the Recent Outbreak of Violence in America [“Home Front” magazine, March 05]

Nilla scrubbed at her hands and her throat, scraped at her skin with rough paper towels, trying to get the blood off of her body. She had discarded her white clothes. They were hopelessly stained. She had found a doctor’s white coat that smelled like disinfectant and some loose-fitting scrub pants. It would have to be enough.

She kept staring in the women’s room mirror though she told herself to stop.

Her teeth were coated. She ran a finger around them, wished she had some toothpaste and some dental floss. She stopped in mid-rub. Dental floss. Most people never bothered with it. Clearly she had. It wasn’t quite a recollection, more like muscle memory or the pain of a phantom limb: she had used dental floss in her former life. It hurt to think about it. The broken stubs of memories were attached to the idea. I used to floss, she would think, and she could feel her brain trying automatically to find examples, to remember amusing anecdotes about flossing. It came back with blank pages, dead links. She felt for some reason like her head was full of ice cubes that rattled together every time she moved.

She looked up again at herself in the mirror. The blue lines under her skin hadn’t gone away. Those were her veins. They had never been that visible before. Under her eyes she saw dark spots. Blotches, really—not just bags under her eyes, more like tattoos. Or bruises. She looked like she’d been battered.

She looked back down at the sink and the blood swirling in the drain, not wanting to look at her face anymore. She had no pulse. She wasn’t breathing.

Nilla knew what that meant. She had become the biological singularity. The thing that doesn’t happen made manifest. She was dead, but also obviously live. Dead. Alive. Alive. Dead.

Undead.

Posted by Wellington at 01:47 PM | Comments (18)

October 08, 2004

Chapter Eight

This station is conducting a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. [KCNC-TV, Denver, 3/19/05]

In her bed Nilla felt as if she’d left her body altogether. It had happened so fast—her mind reeled and she was unable to even sit up to get a better view—not that she wanted one—except that she needed to know what was going on—not that it made any difference—it was more horrible, though, to think that in a minute she would die and she wouldn’t see it coming. She screamed and her consciousness fluttered above her body, her mind detaching to spare itself from the shock. She writhed on the bed, her muscles convulsing wildly as she watched her arms and legs flex and release, kick and shove and shake trying to get free of her restraints.

From the foot of the bed she heard a sound like air being let out of a balloon and then a noise of bubbles forced out of a soft enclosure. Occasionally she heard teeth gnashing together.

They were going to kill her, they were going to eat her, too. Any second now.

Above herself, floating where she could see her tattoo and the bite mark in her shoulder and the greasy mess her hair had become Nilla felt very little fear or concern. She did notice inefficiency. For instance, her arms were in danger of overextending themselves and possibly tearing ligaments the way the kept straining and pulling at the restraints. If she just arched her back so, and brought her forearm up as high as she could, like this, it would be so much easier. She could simply use her teeth to pull at the Velcro closure of the strap. It would be easy.

No, no, no, her body told her. Limbs and backs don’t bend like that.

A jet of hot blood shot up and splattered the soles of Nilla’s feet. She could see Emerson’s back bobbing up and down—seizing, moving spasmodically as it might during the moment of orgasm. She understood what that meant. He was swallowing chunks of meat whole, the way a snake does.

Her mind grunted in exasperation and ordered her body to move. Twisting on the bed, forcing sinews that were far stiffer than they should be she managed to get her arm up, her back twisted around so she could just turn her head and touch the end of the restraint with her mouth. Just a little further, she demanded, but her body complained: any further and she’d tear a muscle in her back. Her mind pointed out what the alternative would be.

She jerked her head forward and got her teeth into the nylon strap. She felt the smoothness of it, the texture of the weave with her tongue. Her head jerked back, unable to maintain the awkward position, and the strap tore open with a noise as loud as a lawnmower starting up.

Pankiewicz looked up, his blood-soaked face peering over the edge of the bed, clearly alerted by the sound. A moment later he disappeared again, distracted by his feast. With one arm free Nilla grabbed at her other wrist and tore away the binding there, then hastily did her ankles, too. She was free, she was out, her mind flew right back into her body and she realized she had achieved very little. The cops were still eating the nurse alive right in front of her. She was still in danger.

Get out—her mind and body agreed—get out! She pulled her feet underneath her on the bed and swiveled up to a kneeling position. She expected a head rush but instead it was her entire body that swam, her muscles vibrating like plucked rubber bands. She was not in good shape and these gymnastics weren’t helping.

Just one more stunt to pull, though, she told herself, and leapt right over the heads of the cops. She hit the cold tile floor on the far side, rolled to a stop, and looked up, her arms sheltering her head, her legs tucked as best she could.

Emerson didn’t react at all. He kept feeding, his face buried in the mid-section of the now silent nurse like a vulture looking for entrails. Pankiewicz noticed her, however. He turned around, still on all fours on the stained hospital floor, and stared at her. Only his eyes were visible. The rest of his face was dripping gore.

He stumped toward her on his knees, his head drifting to one side. He moved slowly, so slowly but she couldn’t stop shaking with fear, couldn’t get up. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see her own death creeping ever closer.

She could still see him.

Maybe… maybe seeing was the wrong word, more like she could sense him, maybe the hairs on the back of her neck were shivering—maybe it was just like the phosphor afterimage you saw when you looked at a bright light and then closed your eyes but… she saw… right through him, saw the inside of him. A kind of x-ray vision. She saw a darkness in him, a roiling cloud of dulled energy that fumed away like fog coming off of dry ice. It filled his shape, made him a figure of shadowy smoke floating on a background of pure white.

What the hell? She glanced over at Emerson and the nurse. The other cop had undergone the same transformation, his body rendered into a boiling silhouette of hazy dimness that sizzled and spat. Nilla saw the nurse, too but not the same way. The nurse’s energy oozed from her and run away across the floor in wide rivulets. It wasn’t dark, either, but a beautiful radiant gold that shimmered and gleamed and dazzled Nilla’s eyes so she almost had to look away. She didn’t want to, though: in this perspective the nurse had been transformed into a thing of almost perfect beauty. Nilla wanted to get closer, to touch the dead woman. To bask in that warm effusion of light. To drink of it. To consume it.

She realized she was salivating. She quickly looked down at her own hands, needing to know. Somehow she wasn’t surprised to see darkness there, filling the shapes of her fingers, swirling madly in her palms. She looked up at Pankiewicz again and showed him her hands.

No words passed between them. She was pretty sure the policeman would not have understood if she spoke to him. Still, a kind of communion was possible. He could see her dark energy as well as she could see his, she knew that without questioning how she knew it. They shared an awareness. She sensed his mood, his hunger, his confusion. He moved closer to her, half a step, but then sat back on his haunches. He radiated indifference at her. Irrelevance. She was neither food nor threat. He turned around and headed back to the corpse of the nurse.

Nilla sat very still, holding her head with both hands, and watched as they feasted. She saw the moment when the nurse’s energy changed, the golden fullness dimming out like a dying candle, shifting through a last flaring shade of blue. Her flame went out and dark smoke billowed up inside her.

The horribly mutilated woman sat up with a wet tearing noise as she unstuck herself from the floor tiles. She looked around for a minute and then pushed the two policemen away. They had lost interest in her the moment her energy changed anyway. Rising on legs of slaughtered meat and gnawed bone the nurse slumped against a wall and started walking, leaning against the wall for support, dragging a blood stain along the plaster. The cops followed close behind. Where they were headed Nilla didn’t know. She didn't get up to follow them.

Instead--reluctantly, afraid of what she would discover, but needing to find out anyway, she circled one hand with the fingers of the other and pressed her index finger against the vein in her wrist, trying to find a pulse.

Posted by Wellington at 09:18 AM | Comments (21)

October 06, 2004

Chapter Seven

PRESIDENT CANCELS SKI WEEKEND: No Reason Given [USA Today, 3/19/05]

“Can we get some lights on? Surely there’s emergency lighting in there. Let’s get it on.” Bannerman Clark stood rigid before the polycarbonate window, not sure what he would see once the lights were on in the Special Housing Unit. The Special Horror Unit, more like. Whatever could possess a man and drive him to cannibalism—possess a rational man with a good job and a family, no less, as it had the prison guards—wasn’t going to look pretty.

The Assistant Warden shrugged when his underlings looked to him for confirmation of Clark’s order. “I’ve been relieved of command. Do what he says.”

It had taken six phone calls to have Bannerman Clark assigned as the Local Incident Commander for what had yet to officially become an Incident. After September Eleventh the system had been considerably streamlined. Clark’s Captain’s bars hardly warranted the kind of power and influence he was then authorized to wield but this was an OOTW (Operation Other Than War) and a civilian could have been drafted for the job if it was considered necessary.

Having somebody in charge was about to become very, very necessary.

“We thought it had to be drugs,” Glynne said. “That’s what we’re trained to look for. I sent in men who don’t even take aspirin when they have a headache. They didn’t make it back out.”

It did not surprise Clark at all that Glynne would look no further than the end of his nose. In 1997 an inmate had been murdered at ADX-Florence and the body wasn’t found for four days. The prison was so tightly circumscribed and controlled that any deviation from the standard timetable—even a dangerous one—just didn’t register. He flipped open his phone and thumbed a quick text message to a First Lieutenant at the Buckley Air Force Base with the 8th Civil Support Team, the Guard’s WMD task force. It was quite clear to Clark that the men in that holding area were not under the influence of drugs. Only some kind of virulent disease could cause this cannibalistic behavior. Perhaps a mutated strain of meningitis. Or rabies.

“We had men go in there in full riot gear with electric prods. We filled that room with CS gas. We turned high-pressure hoses on them and everything. Whenever I sent a man in there they just ripped off his armor and tore out his throat. I personally fired six rounds from a .357 into the chest of one of those assholes. He spun around like a top but then he just kept coming. He’s still down there, walking around. Eating my guards.”

An emergency lamp near the ceiling of the Black Hole turned orange in the darkness as it started to warm up. It was designed to do that—if the inhabitants of the SHU were exposed to bright light without warning they could be temporarily blinded. Clark took the image enhancement optics off of his head and laid them neatly on his desk as the lamp ramped up to full power.

In the new illumination Clark saw one of the afflicted stumbling across a mound of trash—unspooled rolls of toilet paper, torn newsprint, pieces of ripped riot armor. He moved like a frog in a terrarium, his legs extending slowly to find purchase, his upper body motionless. The rest of them wriggled in their pile, naked and unashamed as they fed. They looked up at the light but they didn’t blink. Clark grunted despite himself. The victims were in bad shape. One man had lost his ears and lips. Another had most of his midriff torn away, everything between his rib cage and his pelvis. How could anyone get up and move around after sustaining such an injury? How could anyone survive it? Clark shuddered and recovered himself. He had a job to do.

“I need your entire staff here. Wake them up if you have to and bring them in. The next twenty-four hours are going to be crucial in containing this. We need everyone who might have been exposed to stay locked down here in quarantine until we know we aren’t going to spread it.” He turned to the technician who had turned on the lights. The man at least knew how to do something useful. “Glynne here was described to me as an Assistant Warden. Where is the actual Warden while all this is going on?”

The technician glanced at Glynne.

“Vacation. He went to visit his family. In California,” the Assistant Warden announced.

Vegans Go Home: This is Meat Country! [Billboard outside of Grand Junction Colorado, leased by the Colorado Beef and Buffalo Cattlemen’s Association, 05]

The nurse in the panda bear jacket came back, finally, wheeling an EKG machine into Nilla’s cubicle. She looked tired, near exhaustion and sweat had soaked through the armpits of her coat. Without a word she dragged her cart to Nilla’s bedside and started tearing open plastic bags and unsealing tubes of gel. When she pulled Nilla’s shirt up, nearly exposing her breasts, something had to be said.

“What’s going on?” Nilla demanded. “I’ve been lying here for hours in these restraints. Surely if I was rabid I’d be foaming at the mouth now or something.”

The nurse stared at her with a pained look. “Rabid? Who said you had rabies? This is ridiculous. I’m in the middle of a double shift I got assigned with no warning and no lunch break. I’m hungry and tired and I want to go home and now I have to listen to patients who’ve seen one episode of ER and think they can diagnose themselves. Can I just do my job, huh? Do you think I can just do my job? I don’t have time for this.”

Nilla couldn’t help but be chastened. She understood what it was like to be hungry and tired, after all. She was pretty much nothing but. “I’m sorry,” she said.

The nurse just shook her head. She squeezed a tube over Nilla’s stomach and icy cold gel dripped on her skin, making her wince. Next came a series of electrodes that had to be patted down. Finally the nurse switched on her machine and turned a few knobs.

“Come on. Come on,” the nurse muttered as the EKG warmed up. “Come on already.”

The screen of the EKG finally lit up and simultaneously an alarm tone sounded. On the screen a flat line etched its way from left to right with no deviation whatsoever.

“Jesus,” the nurse swore, and thumped the machine hard. Nothing changed. She switched off the alarm. “Another malfunction!”

“What—what did that mean?” Nilla asked, suddenly terrified. “I don’t have a heartbeat? What’s going on?”

The nurse swore again and yanked the electrodes off of Nilla’s body. “It means my machine is fucked, and now I have to get another one, from the other side of the hospital, and that I don’t get my smoke break for another half hour! That’s what it fucking means. Jesus, would you calm down?” She grabbed for Nilla’s bound wrist and shoved her index finger into the pulse point. After a few seconds her mouth jerked in bewilderment and she shoved her palm underneath Nilla’s nose, trying to feel her breath.

“Oh, God. Doctor!” she screamed. “Code blue, code blue!” She turned to run out of the cubicle just as one curtained wall twitched back. The two police officers who brought Nilla in—Emerson and Pankiewicz, she remembered—stood there. They didn’t look so good. Their skin looked positively blue in the fluorescent light and their eyes were vacant, all but rolled up in their heads. Emerson’s shirt was badly torn and Pankiewicz was missing his hat.

“Please,” the nurse said, “please get out of my—”

Emerson grabbed her by the head and bit off her nose. Pankiewicz staggered forward and into her stomach, knocking her against the bed. The three of them fell to the floor in a heap, a writhing, spasmodic heap that screamed sometimes, but not for very long.

Posted by Wellington at 09:12 AM | Comments (17)

October 04, 2004

Chapter Six

“The chickens are coming home to roost, everybody. Coming home to roost. You see all this violence—what? No, the chickens is what I said. This violence in the western states, just out of control, which is what happens when your prison system is like, it’s like, it’s a country club, you know, it’s the cotillion ball for felons. They’ve got cable, they’ve got porn. Porn! I want to go to prison! Somebody arrest me! They have swimming—no, no, no! I said Chickens! The chickens are coming home to roost!” [Ted Thiokol, “Ted and Andy’s Morning Zoo” radio show, WNCI 97.9 (Columbus, OH), 3/18/05]

One whole wall of the mountain house had been converted into a mural painted in bright almost psychedelic colors. It showed a girl, perhaps thirteen years old with blonde hair exploding outward from her head. She had a pair of butterfly wings and she was hovering over a swirling galaxy of bursting stars. The colors had faded over a period of decades but someone had tried to touch it up periodically.

Mrs. Skye banged a half-full bucket of water down on an old, scarred table and started washing her face and her gnarled hands. The water came away dark with grit and dirt and dried flecks of blood. She shook as she rubbed at her eyes and her ears. “You’re too fucking late, Walters, but I won’t hold that against you. You help me slaughter them and we’ll call it even, yeah?”

Dick sat down in a hand-made chair and tried not to look at her. “Mrs. Skye, I’m sorry we took so long to get back to you after your call. You have to admit though that you’re kind of secluded here. It took me six hours to drive here from my office and then I had to climb over a hill to find you. How many sheep are we talking about?”

“Sheep,” the old woman said. She peeled off her jacket and threw it on the floor. She had a bad cut on her arm that looked infected. With a dishrag she started cleaning out the injury. “You’re here about the sheep. Ain’t that a shit sandwich.” She took a bottle from a dusty shelf and poured clear liquid down her arm. She winced visibly—it must have been rubbing alcohol or something. “The sheep are all dead. I just slaughtered them myself so that they wouldn't... so they wouldn't... Next you’re going to tell me you came up here unarmed.” The look on his face must have convinced her that this was, in fact, the case. “I called this morning, I called your office and then came right back here. You didn’t get my message? Fuck!”

“Maybe,” Dick said, holding his hands up for calm, “we should just start over. You reported a case of scrapie a couple of weeks ago—”

“Yes, I did. Goddamnit! I make two phone calls in three years and you don’t even bother to listen to the important one!” She stomped to a window and stared out at the trees. “Well that’s as it is,” she said, running her nails across her scalp. “I can’t do this alone, I’m tired—I haven’t slept in two days, I haven’t eaten today. We’re just going to have to…” She stiffened visibly. “What’s that? Come here and look at this, Walters.”

Dick rose from his chair and started over to the window. Before he got there he jumped back at the sound of broken glass and screaming. A human hand covered in blisters had come in through the shattered window and grabbed Mrs. Skye by the bottom lip, broken finger nails sinking deep into her skin, tearing her flesh.

Instead of panicking she got her teeth around the fingers and bit down hard enough to snap them off. She reeled backwards, knocking Dick to the floor in the process, and spat the fingertips into the corner of the room.

“Uh gud,” Mrs. Skye wheezed, her mouth covered in blood. “Thur utt!” Dick had no idea what she meant but she could only seem to repeat over and over, “thur utt! Thur utt!”

He heard a thud on the side of the cabin, the sound of bone hitting wood very hard. It came again a moment later and then he heard boards creak as someone stepped up onto the porch.

“Shut thuh dur!” Mrs. Skye screamed but it was too late. Dick laid her down gently on the floor (he’d been clutching her ever since they fell together) and stood up, wiping his sweaty palms on the backs of his pants. By the time he reached the door the assailant was already there.

He looked like a mountain climber—the purple ballistic nylon jacket, the rock boots, the ice axe hanging from his belt gave that away. He also looked like a sculpture of a human being made out of butter and left out in the rain. The flesh of his face had dripped away from the bone, revealing bare yellow skull in some places. One eye was completely obscured by collapsed skin. The other had the white cast of glaucoma. A few long black hairs dangled from the climber’s face but none were left on top of his head.

The climber moved slowly, so slowly Dick thought he must be running on adrenaline himself as he dodged the climber’s clumsy advances. He ducked under an outstretched arm and tried to knock the climber’s legs out from under him, amazed at how quickly he was reacting, at how instinct just took over.

The climber grabbed his belt and clambered up onto Dick’s back, forcing Dick down to the floor with his weight. Dick could hear his own explosive breathing but the climber made no sound at all. The weight on him shifted a little and he tried to get out from under but then he felt teeth digging into the roll of fat at his waist. The pain was bright and intense: a vibrant horror splashed across his desperate senses. Dick heaved and the climber rolled off of his back.

Blood seeped into his pants as he roared for breath, sucking down the rarefied mountain air to sustain his panic. Dick saw the ice axe hanging from the downed climber’s belt and he wanted it, wanted it like a sixteen year old wants a new car.

The climber got one knee under himself and thrust out one arm for support. He was taking his time about getting up. Dick grabbed the axe and yanked. It came free of its quick release buckle. The rubberized grip felt great in his hand. Dick swung.

The pick end of the axe went right through the climber’s jacket and into a hollow space that must have been his lung. Dick expected to get sprayed with arterial blood but only a little dry powder billowed from the wound. Dick yanked the axe back out but by the time he was ready to swing again the climber had regained his stance.

The next blow hit the climber in the shoulder, hard enough to make Dick’s own arm vibrate with the impact. The climber didn’t appear to even feel any pain. With his free arm he reached for Dick’s throat. He would have gotten it, too, if Mrs. Skye hadn’t chosen that moment to cave in the back of the climber’s head with a ball peen hammer. The skull collapsed like cracked pottery and the climber slid to the floor, limp, seemingly boneless. Dick brandished the ice axe, ready to strike again but the climber didn’t so much as twitch.

“Huh’s dead, Wultuhs,” Mrs. Sky said, clutching her lip. She took her hand away and spat blood at the corpse at her feet.

“Call me Dick.” He felt no guilt, no remorse, just a high singing lightness in his stomach and a tension in his shoulders. He couldn’t let go of the axe.

“Alrutt. Call muh Bleu. Layk thuh chis.”

Posted by Wellington at 09:06 AM | Comments (13)

October 01, 2004

Chapter Five

MORMON BISHOPS FORBID POLICE INVESTIGATION: Tabernacle Could be Hiding Terror Cell, State Bureau of Investigations Warns [Deseret Morning News, Salt Lake City, 3/18/05]

They left her there for hours, strapped to the bed, unable to move. She didn’t grow stiff or uncomfortable but she couldn’t even reach over to turn on the television set mounted in a steel bracket above her bed. She tried to sleep but she failed at that, too: her body refused to truly relax, not when she kept hearing screams outside her room. No more gunshots, at least. She tried to calm down and failed.

It left her with a lot of time to think. To try to remember. She pushed hard into the dark parts of her brain, like developments full of houses with no lights on at all and nobody home. In the abandoned suburbs of her mind she tried to piece together anything, anything at all: the faces of her parents, her lovers, her friends. Did she have kids? Did she have a home somewhere? She tried not to color her thoughts with half-hearted guesses, but failed: the clothes she had on, the piercings had to mean something, at least, that she wasn’t homeless, that she didn’t work in an office, at least. These superficial deductions got in the way, though. They summed up a caricature of a life with no detail, no texture at all. She tried to put them out of mind and remember something. She dug for any shard of memory at all. A birthday party. A trip to the mall. Where she had left her purse. She tried to remember her own name, even her initials.

She failed.

WEIRD: Horse bites dog in Wyoming. Apparently the horse was sick and the dog was a jerk. Cats and dogs still not living together. [Fark.com news portal, 3/16/05]

The Blackhawk set down well clear of the prison fence. There were pressure plates and laser sensors and dogs trained to attack without barking in there. Searchlights stabbed out from the guard towers and bathed the helicopter in a brilliant glow. As the rotor spun down Bannerman Clark jumped down to the sandy soil of the outer perimeter and looked for the man he was supposed to meet.

Assistant Warden Glynne of the Florence Administrative Maximum Corrections Facility greeted him with a snappy salute he did not return. Military personnel were not supposed to salute civilians and vice versa and Clark already knew enough about Glynne to know the man had never been a soldier.

“Welcome to the Big One,” the Corrections Officer said, unfazed. The man hadn’t shaved in days and his tie hung loose from an unbuttoned collar. “I’m glad you came so quickly. Things are degenerating and we could really use some help.”

“I understand you have a riot on your hands, Mr. Glynne and that it’s been going on for three days. I’d appreciate knowing why I’m here, though. Surely this is a problem for a SWAT team or the CBI. The National Guard shouldn’t be called in unless—”

Glynne spoke over him. “This isn’t a riot, Captain. This is a complete protocol failure. It’s been going on for seventy-nine hours. You’re here because this is something we’ve never seen before. Follow me, please.”

They passed through the main gate of the prison and into a well-lit series of rooms painted and repainted so many times the light switches and doorknobs had taken on a softened, rounded look. Glynne lead him through a series of tight passages with heavy iron doors that had to be unlocked manually and which snapped shut and locked with an electronic buzz once they were through. “There are ten thousand doors in this facility, Captain. In an emergency lockdown all of them close and lock automatically. Nobody ever gets in or out unless we know about it. We’ve got eyes everywhere, even in the CO areas. That’s the good news.”

“All I see here is bad news,” Clark said, glancing around in distaste at the dusty corridors.

“This is a supermax prison, Captain Clark, where the real dead-enders go. Violent inmates who can’t be allowed to mingle in a normal prison environment. We impose twenty-three hour per day solitary confinement. Prisoners have to wear leg and wrist shackles when they go to eat. They get one four-inch-wide window in their cells and the toilets had to be designed so you couldn’t fit a human head in them. They do that, you know. If you give them an opportunity to do something, no matter how sick or perverse, they’ll do it. Just to fuck with you.”

Clark made a grunt of understanding. Beyond one last door lay a control center, a red-lit claustrophobic space filled with computer monitors and desks and half-empty coffee cups. A dozen men and women in Corrections uniforms sat slumped in uncomfortable chairs, most of them gathered around one dimly flickering monitor. Two other men stood before what looked to Clark’s eyes like a black wall until his vision adjusted and he saw it was a slab of transparent polycarbonate (more bullet- and impact-resistant than glass). The men wore image enhancement optics—AN-PVS 7B night optic devices—and were rapt by what they saw on the other side of the window.

When Glynne spoke again it was in a whisper as if he were afraid something on the other side might hear him. “This is where the real bad guys go, one of our special housing units. The inmates call it the Black Hole. There are a hundred and forty-eight punishment cells down there which we keep darkened and sound-dampened at all times. Nobody can stay violent for long in an environment like that. It’s been psychologically proven.”

Clark picked up a set of optics from a desk and strapped it onto his head and chin. He switched on the unit and looked down into the SHU. It took his brain a moment to make sense of the false-color images the goggles created but quickly enough he saw what was happening. In the cells prisoners lay motionless on their beds or paced endlessly around their tiny rooms. Some stood at their doors patiently as if waiting for them to open while others smashed at their walls with arms and heads and shoulders. He looked straight down at the center of the unit and had to gasp in disgust. Two dozen inmates were milling about in a central open area, many of them naked and clearly injured. He saw arms and legs that hung limp, faces contorted by lacerations, fingers and eyes missing. Another ten or so inmates lay in a pile in one corner, their bodies wriggling like fat worms. “What are they doing?” Clark demanded.

“They’re eating each other,” Glynne said, his voice flat. “Some of them… some of them eat, and some get eaten.” The energy had gone right out of the CO.

“Good God! Where is your staff? Where are your guards? You need to get them in there and stop this at once!” Clark demanded.

“You don’t understand, Captain. The inmates are never allowed out of their cells in this unit. The men in that open area you’re looking at? Those are my guards.”

Posted by Wellington at 08:30 AM | Comments (17)