Chapter Eight
PLEASE BE ADVISED: Foreign nationals will not be allowed into the United States unless they carry up-to-date and authorized medical papers. Otherwise you are subject to incarceration! [Signage posted at Customs, John F. Kennedy International Airport, 4/1/05]
“He knows talent when he sees it, yes, that is that,” Vikram said, clutching a nylon handloop as the Blackhawk lifted up and banked away from the prison.
“He’s hedging a bet.” Back to California. Bannerman Clark hated flying. Washington to Denver on another empty airbus. Blackhawk to Florence to pick up Vikram—now officially attached to Clark’s nascent Action Team—and take the two of them back to DIA. Then a military transport, probably an old DC-10 judging by Clark’s recent luck, then another helicopter to spirit them off to a place called Kern County where someone might possibly have seen the blonde girl, according to a tip phoned in on the APB.
It didn’t matter. None of the wasted time or the jet lag or the bad food or the recirculated air mattered. “I looked him up in Nexis when I got airborne out of DCA. He’s an up-and-comer, playing at being a young Turk at the tender age of fifty-two. He’s angling for a Cabinet post. He wouldn’t meet with me in the Pentagon—I didn’t ask why but I can guess. He wants to keep me on the books but off the charts.”
“He has you for his wild card. This man, he is playing games while the house is on fire?”
Clark laid one finger alongside his nose. “Don’t forget we’re talking about DoD civilians here. Armchair generals.” He need say no more. For the last thirty years Vikram and Clark had been touring the world at the whim of men with Big Ideas and Foolproof Plans. Soldiers and even entire countries were just tokens on a game board when you looked down on them from those lofty heights.
“I’m his wonk, he calls me. His idea man. Somebody with experience in a brand new way of war. After September Eleventh people like him wrote their own ticket because they were ready for the new paradigm. He hopes to do the same here.”
“He is making political capital out of this horror.”
Clark sighed and lifted both hands. ‘Twas ever thus. “I can’t help but thinking there’s more to this than I get, but then I never understood politics. This guy most certainly does. If we can find this girl and if she is what I think she is this man will be appointing Cabinet posts, not filling one.”
“Unless we are eaten, all of us, before then.”
“Yes, that would spoil his gambit.” Clark tried to laugh and found he couldn’t.
CALIFORNIA, INFECTIOUS DISEASE OUTBREAK: This is a notification of the Presidential declaration of a major disaster for the State of California (FEMA-1899-DR), dated April First, 2005, and related determinations. [FEMA/DHS Federal Register Notice, 4/1/05]
Under a rising sun that looked like a ruddy impostor now a freight train full of emergency medical supplies shouldered its way westward through raw cuts in the mountain side, its rusted cars rattling and swaying on the tracks as it cut through switchbacks, its horn a plaintive subsonic tone that seemed to rise up out of the ground like vapor in the heat of day.
It had to slow down to a bare crawl as it crested a ridge. Dick was waiting on a spur of rock just above. Behind him the source called to him with its infinite love but he didn’t look back. At just the right moment the voice in his head called Now and he leapt, spinning off his feet into space to come crashing down with a clatter on the roof of a boxcar. He dug in with his feet the best he could, unable to literally hold on. The vibration of the rumbling train made his teeth hurt but he was incapable of complaining.
He was a soldier now. He had his orders.
“No, I don’t think people should panic. What kind of question is that? Look, just be ready to move. We’ve already had some evacuations. I think it’s fair to say that you should expect more.” [San Francisco Chief of Police Heather J. Fong at press conference, 4/1/05]
Nilla wandered through a landscape the colors of bleached bone. The rock beneath her feet looked white, whiter than her pale skin. The aspens and sequoias of the forest behind her had given up on the stony ground. From horizon to horizon all she could see were bristlecone pines, leafless, twisted things that looked undead by starlight. Their branches wrapped around their trunks like hurt people hugging themselves for comfort or speared upwards in accusation at the frozen sky. Some were dead outright, cracked and splintered. They didn’t rot, it seemed, so much as erode.
She was cold. She’d been cold before and never really cared but now, naked, wet, exposed in the chilly mountain night, she felt it in her skeleton. She could feel the frost getting into her individual ribs, into the creaky joints of her kneecaps and elbows.
She wanted to go back but she didn’t know what that meant. Charles would be huddling with Shar in their room, wouldn’t they? Terrified of her.
Charles had to know. He must have suspected before and now he knew.
The smell on her was the stink of death. The discoloration on her abdomen was the first sign of putrefaction. Her body and her mind were breaking down and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing anybody could do about it and why would they, anyway? She was dead, a corpse! She should be rotting away. Her flesh would sag and fall off in gobbets, her skin would slough off in greasy strips. Her face would melt away until her bare skull grinned out at the world—would she feel better then?
A prickling of the skin behind her ears made her look up. Something—something living nearby. She would turn her face from it, flee it, whatever it might be. It was big. She closed her eyes and saw it, not a hundred yards away. Two, maybe three times the size of her, its energy brighter than any living energy she’d seen.
She had to get closer. Damnit—the hunger in her had become a solid mass, a tumor in her stomach that had control of her feet. She wanted to run away, to hide herself but the hunger had other plans. She got closer.
Her nose picked up the smell of death right away. It was her own smell, but sharper. Her foot blared with pain as she tripped on something. Bending down she felt metal and wood. A gun, a shotgun. She looked up and saw a human body with no head, dangling from the colorless branches of a bristlecone. Its lower extremities were missing and it had no energy at all, neither bright nor dark. The owner of the motel, maybe, who had come out all this way to kill himself. No one would ever know, she decided.
Something massive shifted behind her and she turned as fast as she could. The energy she’d seen, the bright source was right there. A black bear, maybe three hundred pounds. A female, old and grizzled, her pitch black fur ending in white tips that glistened with the reflected light of stars. The bear made no sound—she didn’t growl.
She was beautiful. She stood on her hind legs, her eyes looking directly into Nilla’s. There was something there. Understanding? Recognition? Impossible. Nilla was undead, unnatural while this gorgeous animal seemed carved out of the very earth she stood on. Was this some kind of spiritual awakening, Nilla wondered, was she meeting her spirit animal? Maybe this was the moment when everything would make sense.
The bear swiped one paw across Nilla’s stomach, the claws digging great bloodless gouges through her midriff, slicing up her tattoo. The blow had enough force behind it to kill outright a full-grown deer. It knocked Nilla off her feet and sent her falling into the body in the tree. Looking up at the corpse Nilla finally understood. The bear had been having a midnight snack—breakfast after a long winter’s hibernation. Nilla had just gotten in between a full-grown black bear and her meal.
