Monster Nation

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November 29, 2004

Chapter Fifteen

Author's Note: So it's official, one of my short stories is going to be published next year in Permuted Press' anthology of zombie fiction, "The Undead". Permuted Press interviewed me after my story was accepted--some of you may wish to click here to read what I had to say. Some others may wish to just go straight to the anthology's home page (and then click on "Author Interviews"). Others can just read today's chapter--it's a real corker. Part three starts on Friday!

--David Wellington

There are too many of them, Archie. No, I don’t mean… there are more of them than we thought, than our, our models showed. I’m talking about your computer model, the one you… it’s like they’re multiplying, reproducing but… Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. It’s time for Warlock Green to come out of the closet. [Telephone conversation between the Adjutant General of the Colorado National Guard and an undisclosed second party, 4/4/05]

A hazy cobweb of vapor trails filled the big sky over Cherry Creek, left behind by planes and helicopters full of refugees headed in every possible direction. The aircraft were all gone but they left their tracks behind.

There were more infected coming up Third Avenue from the country club. Maybe two dozen. Clark gestured for the nearest squad to handle them, then spun around when someone behind him shouted “Target spotted, in that window!”

“Somebody kill that motherfucker for me already!” Horrocks screamed, his eyes huge and white. A squad of soldiers carrying M4s broke off to assault the entrance to a copy shop with wide windows overlooking Fillmore Street. A young man in a blue apron was in there pressed up against the glass, his hands white blobs against the window, the muscles of his face completely slack. Like something stuck to the wall of an aquarium. One of his cheeks was dark with torn skin and dried blood.

Clark backed up against the side of the HEMTT and reloaded his sidearm. It had been a long, haunting night and it just kept getting worse. He thought about countermanding the order—the infected boy wasn’t a danger to anybody stuck inside that store. It would demoralize the troops though to leave even one of the cannibals standing.

Keeping morale alive was pretty much all Clark could hope to accomplish. For every one of the infected they cut down ten more seemed to appear out of thin air. They were making no progress at all toward their stated objectives.

“Come on, come on, let’s not lose the operational tempo here,” Horrocks insisted.

The soldiers were still crisp, still professional. Maybe it was only Clark who was wilting after a night of violence and cold food and no sleep. They kicked the boy away from the window and butchered him and were back to the HEMTT inside of sixty seconds. On the roof of the big truck a crew-served M249 kept them covered the whole time.

The HEMTT was full of scared survivors, people they’d picked up along the way. Every time one of the troops discharged a weapon a collective moan of shock billowed out of the back. The sound got on Clark’s nerves—he felt guilty enough already, he didn’t need the infernal howling of the survivors to remind him he was slaughtering innocent civilians.

“Comms,” Clark called out and a specialist with a satellite cell phone came duck-walking up to him. Keeping low, just like she’d been trained—it made it less easy for a sniper to hit her. Nobody was shooting at them in Denver but she’d had proper cover procedure drilled into her so hard it stuck. She knelt down by the side of the truck with Clark and threw him a salute. “What do we have?” he asked. “Did you get through to the Adjutant General?”

“Sir, no, sir, nothing since the last transmission.” That had been half an hour before. A column of light armor (Hum-Vees with mounted weaponry) was supposed to come down Speer Boulevard any minute and relieve the platoon. Clark wasn’t holding his breath. The AG wasn’t responding to his calls, which couldn’t mean anything good. “Alright, get back to the vehicle,” he told her. He called for Horrocks and the sergeant appeared instantly. “It’s time to break contact. We’re holding our ground here but that’s not exactly the same as making progress. I want squad three on rear security.”

The sergeant set about making it happen while Clark hauled himself up into the cab of the HEMTT. A laptop on the dashboard showed a GPS map of the neighborhood. It showed the country club and the Cherry Creek shopping center tinged in red. Clark had to zoom out to see any blue at all—a Stryker group sitting tight on a stretch of Federal Boulevard. “How old is this product?” he asked.

“Sir, about thirty minutes,” the comms specialist replied. She was blushing under her helmet. The best data she had must have come in with the last download from command.

“Alright,” he said, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What is CNN saying?”

She played with the laptop for a while, collating text reports from the news channel’s website with the map’s imaging software. When she showed it to him again the Strykers were missing and whole districts of the city had turned red. The Epidemic was spreading, far faster than any infectious disease had a right to. And where did those Strykers go? He couldn’t find them anywhere on the map at all. Had they retreated?

The HEMTT started up with a roar and got under way. The driver kept it to a crawl—the cargo unit in back was stuffed full with the survivors so the soldiers had to run alongside carrying all their equipment with them.

The infected seemed to sense that Clark was withdrawing. Congress Park was crawling with them and they stretched out bloody arms to try to grab the truck as it went past. They came out of every street the HEMTT passed, streamed out of half the buildings. The soldiers wanted to aggress on the enemy but Horrocks kept a tight rein on them—fighting would just slow them down. Clark wanted to get back to command and find out what the hell was going on before he committed to another combat effort.

On Colfax somebody had opened up a dumpster and spread trash across half the street. It looked like some of the bags had been torn open by animals. Clark buckled and unbuckled the holster of his sidearm for something to do with his hands.

The driver took them straight up the Esplanade, crushing the grass and bushes there in the interest of speed. “Try the AG again,” Clark told the comms specialist and she dutifully dialed the number but got no response. Maybe the Joint Tactical Radio System was down again—it had a bad reputation. As the driver brought them into the school’s parking lot Clark leapt down from the cabin before the vehicle had even stopped.

There was no one around.

Nobody guarded the rear entrance. Nobody staffed the motor pool. The big TROJAN SPIRIT II vans on the playing fields were standing vacated and alone. Clark told Horrocks to send two squads into the school and report back at once but he already knew what they would find, and he was pretty sure he knew where the Stryker group went, too.

More red dots on the screen. There was no way to save Denver, Clark realized. It just couldn’t be done. There were too many infected, and not enough bullets.

The Pentagon is dispatching troops to help us right now—units of the 82nd Airborne Division, ah, you may have heard of them and also the 10th Mountain Division, they’re trained in high altitude work. Whether they can get here in time we don’t know… wait, what? No, we’ll stay on the air until we’re ordered to leave. Well, I don’t care, Marty. I don’t care, you can go, that’s fine. Just leave the camera running. [Denver’s 7, Emergency Bulletin 4/4/05]

Nilla wanted to laugh, to whoop for joy at their escape. Except that in her hand the bundle of napkins was already soaking through, a spreading red stain growing in the center of the makeshift bandage.

“Shar,” she said. The girl kept staring straight ahead. The car jounced through a pothole and Nilla’s hand flew free. Blood sloshed out of Charles’ neck. “Shar,” she said again. “Look, we need to get Charles some help now or he’s going to die.”

Shar sped up, the mountains falling away on either side, dead and barren desert consuming the view through the windshield. The Toyota screamed with heat prostration and stripped gears. Through the broken window a gritty wind battered Nilla’s face and rattled the napkins in her hand. There was glass everywhere but she couldn’t spare a hand to brush it away—her free hand was needed just for holding on.

“If he dies—I know you don’t want to hear this—but if he dies on us he’s going to come back. He’s going to come back hungry.”

WELCOME TO DEATH VALLEY. The sign whipped past them, almost too fast to read. Through the rear window Nilla saw nothing but their own plume of dust.

“You have to accept this, Shar. There may be no way to save him. I know what I’m talking about. Would you just say something, please? Shar—if he dies, and comes back, he’ll be as dangerous as the armless guy back there. He won’t hesitate to, to attack you. Shar, can you even hear me?”

The girl stepped on the brake and the car shuddered as it decelerated, throwing Nilla against the seat back in front of her. When it came to a complete stop dust surrounded them like a brownish fog. It came in through the shattered window and filled Nilla’s already dry mouth, making her gag.

“I’m so sorry.”

Shar’s voice was tiny in the car, almost lost in the sound of the engine pinging and the chiming cascade of glass spilling off the backseat. “What was that? I don’t understand,” Nilla said.

“I’ll take care of him. Look, I am so, so sorry.” Shar was weeping. She reached up and smeared the back of one hand across her nose. “Please, Nilla. You were really nice to me. I want you to know I feel bad about this.”

Nilla stared at the back of the girl’s head as it shook with emotion. She made no attempt to start the car back up again. Nilla understood, of course. She pushed the napkins into Charles’ wound as best she could and fastened the seat belt across both of his arms, just in case. Then she pushed open the door and stepped out onto the fractured surface of the desert. The car pulled away from her as soon as she had closed the door, Charles and Shar heading east without her. In a minute they were lost to the heat shimmers coming off the burning sand.

END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER NATION

Posted by Wellington at 08:54 AM | Comments (21)

Chapter Fourteen

The I-25 Corridor is completely backed up, all the way to the Tech Center, it looks like there was a multi-car pileup somewhere down there—please, once again we have to urge everyone not to try to get out of the city by car, it will only increase the chaos. [Traffic Report from Denver’s 7, Special Emergency Bulletin 4/4/05]

A spill of them came up the bed of the Platte, maybe two or maybe three dozen, their feet splashing wildly in the muddy water. Among the dead Clark saw a couple of orange jumpsuits—those would be the original infected prisoners of Florence—but also one or two Battle Dress Uniforms. Military personnel. He raised his pistol but didn’t shoot.

Behind him the platoon sergeant howled at the troops. Chief Horrocks waved his arms like a demon as he urged his soldiers on. “Put your fucking back into that, Mendelsohn! Get some of that 550 cord down here, we need to secure this end.”

Clark lined up his weapon with the forehead of the leading assailant. A woman in a waitress uniform with a nametag that read KRISTI. Her face wide and open and blank. It would take a lot, a complete shift in perspective, to pull the trigger. It had to happen, and soon.

“Come on, come on, you all get lazy since we came home? You been sitting around watchin’ cable, eating Burger King every day? It’s MREs on the menu tonight unless we stop this thing here and now!”

Clark knew better than that. The infected had not stayed together as a unified force against which he could run flanking maneuvers and surgical strikes. They had spread out, thousands of them heading in thousands of directions and everywhere they infected the civilians they found. In a few hours there would be more infected than healthy in Denver. This was a holding action, a way to buy time until the relocation buses were out in convoy, headed for safer climes. Clark lowered his weapon.

“Now now now go go go, move it, move it,” Horrocks boomed and finally, yes—the two lengths of orange detainment netting lifted like the sails of a day-glo ship. They snagged a few of the infected, their clumsy hands snarled up in the plastic but the rest just surged forward, trying to get through the gauntlet the soldiers had erected. They were being funneled straight toward Clark and the ten best shots of the platoon.

Clark raised his weapon again, sighted. Kristi, the waitress... the infected person in the front lifted one hand toward him and she stumbled, going down to her knees in the muddy water.

“We’re a go, sir,” Horrocks bellowed, not ten feet away. “Firing on your order.” The sergeant knew better than to question Clark’s hesitation in shooting but Clark could feel it, a hot, hard stare boring into his back. If he didn’t shoot now he could never ask the men and women of the platoon to follow his orders. If he didn’t fire he would be in direct contradiction of the AG’s standing instruction to shoot on sight.

He lined up the end of his firearm with the woman’s forehead. She was no more than fifteen yards away. She was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister maybe. There were people who loved her and wanted her to recover from this.

“FIGMO,” Clark said. Language unbecoming of the officer’s corps, something he hadn’t said since his time in Vietnam.

Fuck it, got my orders.

“Fire at will,” he said. He squeezed the trigger and the flesh of the woman’s forehead erupted, fragments of bone exploding from her temple. To Clark’s left the marksmen opened up with a sustained volley, the noise rolling around the front range of the mountains, it sounded like to Clark, and echoing on forever.

The President has been moved to a safe location, where he will remain until this is all over. Thank you, that’s all. [White House Press Briefing, 4/4/05]

She heard gravel squealing under Charles’s sneakers, knew he was racing to help her. She started to turn around, to tell him to stop. She didn’t need his help—the dead man wouldn’t attack her, not one of his own kind.

She knew she wouldn’t get the warning out in time.

Charles spun in the gravel beside Nilla even as she reached to push him back. He had his arms twisted around for a nasty punch right to the dead man’s genitals. It connected with a sound like a side of beef being dropped from a height.

The armless dead man didn’t even flinch. Instead he put one bare foot up on the side of the truck and propelled himself into space. Nilla dodged to one side but he wasn’t aiming for her.

“Get him off, get this fucker off me!” Charles wailed as the dead man collided with him, knocking him flat to the road. Nilla grabbed at the dead man’s matted hair to yank his head back and keep him from getting his teeth into Charles’ neck. “Get him off!” Charles screamed again, but Nilla couldn’t hold the dead man, his hair was too greasy and even when she dug her fingers in it just came out with a noise like a zipper opening up. “Get him off!” Charles begged as the teeth sank deep into the fleshy part of his throat. Blood spilled out onto the roadway like a bucket of water being upturned.

Nilla kicked the dead man as hard as she could in the cheek, in the ear, in the eye. She fell down to her knees and pulled with both hands on his vest, on the nubs of bone at the ends of his shoulders. “You don’t want him,” she protested, trying to haul him off of Charles bodily. “You want me,” but she knew it wasn’t true.

“Get him off,” Charles sobbed. “Get… him… off, please.”

Nilla got her shoulder into the narrow gap between the dead man’s chest and Charles’ back and heaved, pushed and pushed, tried to brace her feet against the asphalt for leverage. The armless corpse shifted but not enough—his teeth were chewing at Charles’ skin, digging in deep. Nilla grunted and heaved one last time with all her strength and somehow dislodged the ghoul. She wasted no time yanking Charles up to his feet. With her shoulder in his armpit she hurried him back toward the Toyota. Behind them the corpse staggered up to its knees.

“Just a little further,” Nilla told Charles, her arms around his waist. He clamped both hands against his throat. His legs shook violently and she dragged him for a second until he could get under his own power again. “Just get to the car,” she told him. They were barely moving forward, inching along, Nilla’s slight frame no good at carrying Charles’ weight.

The dead man got one foot up and started rising, only to lose his balance and tumble backwards. Nilla’s mind surged with hope. Just a little further. Just a little…

Charles’ hand fell away from his neck and a pencil-thin jet of blood shot out ahead of him. He wheezed and choked and Nilla shoved one of her own hands against his wound. Her hand was soaked with blood instantly. It started to run down her forearm, into her shirt sleeve.

The corpse rolled back against the pickup truck and levered himself upward on its bumper. This time he ended up on his feet. He began staggering toward them. They had a head start but the dead man stumbled forward faster than Nilla’s dragging pace.

Nilla looked forward again—and nearly collided with the Toyota as it came screeching up to her. In the driver’s seat Shar looked stunned, paralyzed, her fingers white on the wheel, her face narrow and wrinkled with fear.

Behind them the corpse had nearly closed the gap. In a few seconds he would be on them. Nilla let Charles fall across the side of the car and wrenched open the back door. She pushed him inside and jumped in on top of him. She grabbed a bundle of fast food restaurant napkins off the floor of the car—they were filthy and probably covered in germs but it didn’t matter—and stuffed them into the crook of Charles’ neck. She yanked the door closed behind her.

The dead man stumbled up to the side of the car and lurched forward, his face slamming against the window only inches from Nilla’s nose. She fell backwards in terror as the corpse stumbled back for another strike.

“Shar!” Nilla screamed. “Shar! Drive!”

The teenaged girl threw the car into drive just as the armless guy slapped his face against the window a second time. Glass erupted into the car in a green cascade, tiny cubes of safety glass spilling down across Nilla and Charles, bouncing off the car’s upholstery. Nilla spun around as the car lurched forward and saw the corpse standing in the road, his face a blurred distortion of human features. As the car raced away from him he stumbled after it, unable to stop coming for them even though it was hopeless—he would never catch them now.

Posted by Wellington at 07:53 AM | Comments (7)

November 24, 2004

Chapter Thirteen

Author's Note: There will be no update for Friday, Nov. 26, due to the Thanksgiving Holiday. Unfortunately I'll be away from my computer for the rest of the week. Regularly scheduled posts will resume on Monday. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers!

--David Wellington

Downtown Denver is considered a safe zone until 9:00 PM tonight or until further notice. Medical care and food distribution centers on the 16th Street Mall will remain open until that time. [Emergency Broadcast, Denver, CO 4/4/05]

“Shar, turn the AC up. It’s getting’ all sweaty in heah.” Charles wiped at the back of his neck. Nilla studied the small thin hairs there, the way they lined up where his hand had plastered them down. She could see his pores opening up in the heat, the tiny droplets of sweat gathering together, turning into rivulets that ran down into his collar.

“It’s all the way up already,” Shar complained, but she played with the controls anyway.

In the back seat Nilla felt the heat but she stayed perfectly dry. Her sweat glands didn’t work anymore. She tried rolling her window down a crack but the air that came pushing in felt like the exhaust from a blast furnace. Too much. She was tired of riding in the car, tired of being hot and cooped up.

The two of them shared a coke—the last of the sodas they’d pilfered from the motel—but they didn’t think to offer her any. They had barely spoken to her since they’d started out that morning. When Charles had stopped to refuel at an abandoned gas station at a lonely intersection high in the mountains Shar had gotten out with him, as if she didn’t feel safe in the car with Nilla.

She could hardly blame the girl, she supposed. Not with the kind of thoughts she’d been thinking. Mael Mag Och had told her the kids weren’t her friends. She’d seen for herself the way the living looked at her—like she was something unclean. The enemy. Why should she think of them any other way? She didn’t belong among them anymore. That should have been clear to her from the start.

Mael had said she should abandon Charles and Shar. That she should make her own way east. He’d said some other things that she didn’t even want to think about but he’d been quite clear on that point. No more fraternization with the living. Something in her responded to that message and she longed to strike out on her own. No more dirty looks. It would be so much easier than the silent game the three of them were playing.

Still—he was who knew how far away. Hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away. She could hardly walk across the country. She needed the kids. If she wanted her name back she had to have a ride. Surely he would understand. He seemed to have a pretty poor grasp on the English language and he had kept lapsing into what sounded a little like Gaelic, she thought. Maybe he wasn’t from America originally. Maybe he didn’t know how far his body was from her. He would have to understand.

Just to get out of her head for a while Nilla nudged the back of Charles’ seat. He tried not to flinch. “So when are you going to tell me?” she asked, intentionally cryptic, a little ashamed of what she was demanding when the two of them had clearly intended to keep it amongst themselves.

“Charles,” Shar said, as if she expected her boyfriend to lurch into violence at any moment. Maybe that was what Nilla expected, to, or even hoped for. It would be a great justification. The boy didn’t say anything, though.

“Seriously, I want to know. Why did you run away? Were you getting beaten by your parents or something? That would make sense.”

“I know you didn’t just say somethin’ ‘bout my moms,” Charles muttered. There was no force in the words, no anger. He was scared of her now. It angered her more than anything. She had turned to him for a little human contact and now he was scared of her. What the hell was up with that?

“Please don’t,” Shar said. It sounded like she was saying it to herself.

“Was it school? Were you having a hard time at school? Come on. Just tell me. We’re all friends now, right?” The neediness in her voice annoyed her and in frustration she slid across the back seat, putting the soles of her bare feet up against the window. The sun felt like a blowtorch on her skin and she yanked them away. When he maintained his stony silence she sat up on the warm seat and stared out at the mountainous land that flew by, its folds and creases etched into the side of a barren, unfinished planet. “Were you just bored?”

“Shar,” he said, but she knew he was speaking to her, not his girlfriend.

“Huh?” she asked. “What does that mean?”

“Shut up! Oh my God don’t you say it!” Shar scrunched down in her seat and buried her face in her hands.

“Her name—” Charles began, keeping his eyes on the yellow line running down the middle of the road.

“My fucking name is Sharona, okay? Is that what you wanted to know?” The girl whirled around in her seat, her eyes huge and sharp. “You know. Like ‘M-m-m-my Sharona,’ like in that stupid song! That should tell you a little about my parents. You know the song.”

Nilla had no idea what the girl was talking about.

“They thought it was funny. I would come home from school and I would be crying, bawling my eyes out for fuck’s sake. And they would laugh at me. Then they would sing that stupid song, over and over again.”

“I don’t understand. You came along with Charles when he ran away because of a song?” Nilla fanned her face with one hand. Had it gotten hotter in the car?

“No! I’m the one who’s running away! They don’t care about me. I called my Mom from that hotel and you know what? She was so fucking stoned she didn’t even ask if I was okay. I tried, I tried so hard but when they closed the school because of this Epidemic I just could not face them anymore. I used to go to school to get some peace, can you believe that? I used to love school and the government took that away from me. So I went to Charles and I talked him into this. Into running away with me. He cares about me. He loves me.”

Nilla couldn’t process the girl’s outburst. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You ran away because of a song?”

“Holy shit,” Charles shouted. “Holy shit!” He pointed through the windshield as he stepped on the brakes, throwing Shar forward against her seat belt. The sign read DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, 2 MILES.

He pulled the car to a stop just at the top of a ridge and got out of the car, letting a wave of overheated air rush through the car. Nilla could taste how dry the air was as it buffeted her face and hands.

Nilla grabbed the map and rolled out of the car to join him. Together the two of them looked down the slope of craggy rocks at a depression in the landscape that seemed to go down forever. The view shimmered in a blast of heat that burst up at them, not so much like a hot wind as the shockwave of some terrible fiery cataclysm.

“I knew it was getting hotter,” Charles said.

“We have to keep going,” Nilla said. He laughed at her. She jabbed at the torn map with one clumsy finger. “No, seriously. We have to keep going east. Look, look here. It’s not as wide as it looks and on the other side we’ll be in Nevada. We’ll be safe there.”

“It’s called ‘Death Valley’,” Charles told her. “‘Death Valley,’” he repeated as if that alone would change her mind. “It’s the hottest place on earth, I think. We learned about it in Geography class. People who go there get lost and they die. You don’t go in there without water. We don’t have any water, in case you didn’t notice.”

They could not just stop. Not when Nevada was so close. They couldn’t go back, either. The entire US Army was probably looking for her back there. “It’s just a name! We can cross it in a couple of hours. We can stop for water in just a couple of hours.” He started heading back to the car. “Charles, wait—look. There’s somebody else here.”

He looked where she pointed. She was right, there was a pickup truck parked on the side of the road just a couple of hundred yards away. Dust and grime besmirched its sides so thoroughly that it had taken on the colors of the desert. It looked like there were two people lying down in the bed of the truck, moving against one another. Lovers parked in the middle of nowhere for a little afternoon fun, she guessed. It felt too hot for that but she supposed hormones could overcome heat exhaustion if they were strong enough.

“Oh, dude,” Charles said, his face falling. “It’s two guys.”

“Yeah, well,” Nilla said, getting desperate. They couldn’t turn back now—her name was waiting for her. “Maybe they have some water.”

Charles didn’t move. She smiled weakly at him but she knew very well he wasn’t going to go ask for water from the truck’s occupants. Fine, she thought, she would do it herself. She covered the distance between the two vehicles as quickly as she could, her feet slipping on the loose gravel of the shoulder. It was so hot. When she reached the pickup she cleared her throat a couple of times to try to warn the two men that she was approaching. They didn’t stop what they were doing so she stepped closer. “Hello? Excuse me?” She took another step and smelled blood in the air. She closed her eyes, knowing what she would find. There were two people in the back of the truck, yes. One of them rapidly bleeding to death. The other one had beat him there.

The ghoul must have felt her regard. He reared up, a mouthful of flesh tumbling from between his lips and got to his feet so that he towered over her, his stained face ten feet up in the air. He wore a torn-up padded vest even in the intense heat and his legs looked as thick as tree trunks. That wasn’t what she noticed first, though.

He didn’t have any arms.

Posted by Wellington at 08:52 AM | Comments (17)

November 22, 2004

Chapter Twelve

LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT! [Signage posted in Los Angeles, CA, 4/3/05]

Nilla was sitting in the backseat when Charles and Shar arrived at the car. They stood there very close to each other for a while and then Charles climbed in.

“Damn, woman, you clean up nice,” Charles said, looking at her over the back of his seat. His eyes searched her face, looking for something. He didn’t find it.

Shar stood perfectly motionless outside the passenger-side doors. Nilla couldn’t see her face from that angle, just the fists she kept clenching and releasing, clenching and releasing. Nilla wondered what the two of them had said to each other last night.

Eventually Shar opened the front door and got in. She buckled her seatbelt very carefully.

All citizens unable to reach the evacuation staging area at Loma are implored to stay in their homes and only open the door to law enforcement personnel with appropriate credentials. Please do not use your telephones: this will only tie up vitally-needed lines of communication. [Emergency Broadcast for Grand Junction, CO 4/3/05]

There was no time to go to Commerce City, even if it wasn’t denied territory. What would he find there anyway—some ruptured cyclone fencing? A latrine pit that had never been used?

“We’ve never seen organized behavior from them before,” Clark kept telling people. It felt like he was making excuses. He had to pass through any number of clerks and military police before he finally reached the Esplanade south of City Park. There was a high school there, a big brick pile with a clock tower. Alvin Braintree, the Adjutant General of the Colorado Army National Guard had turned it into a forward command post.

In a classroom set up for chemistry experiments—big black fiberglass tables, a row of sinks and exhaust hoods along one side, periodic table of the elements on the wall—Bannerman Clark stood at attention and waited while the AG received the same sitrep that Clark had heard twenty minutes earlier.

“The infected then formed what I can only describe, sir, as a human pyramid.” The chief warrant officer giving the report steepled his hands. “Some individuals went over the top, over the razor wire. Others simply pressed their bodies against the chain-link perimeter fence until it gave way. We attempted to contain the situation but we lacked sufficient force to subdue the detainees. They headed south-west, toward the downtown area. We gave pursuit but again, lacked the manpower to overcome them and eventually had to break contact. Had we been allowed to aggress on them I think we could have done something but we had strict orders not to endanger the infected.”

Clark felt the temperature in the room drop about twenty degrees. Those had been his orders, of course. The chief warrant officer was suggesting, in a not very politic way, that Bannerman Clark was personally responsible for what was happening to Denver.

Namely: it was being overrun. They had lost small towns before, all over the west. This was the first time a real city was endangered. It was the biggest setback of the Epidemic.

The AG put his feet up on the teacher’s desk and looked at the two soldiers before him. “That order is rescinded as of this fucking minute,” he said. His mouth, under the white stubble of a long day, was as straight as a ruler. “You will shoot the infected on sight and no more of this willy-wogging. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Clark shouted, his voice echoed by that of the CWO.

“You both need to hear me on this, because I’m putting you in charge of platoons today. It looks like I’m short on real officers.” It was a slight—a soldier of Clark’s rank should be in command of a full company, as many as two hundred warriors. Instead he was being given thirty. “Chief Warrant Officer, you’re dismissed. Go get your men and sort out what vehicles you can commandeer. Captain, you’re with me.” The AG stood up and headed for the door. Clark hurried to catch up, staying a step behind his commanding officer at all times. The AG was the highest-ranking member of the COARNG, answering only to the Governor. As far as Clark knew this was the first time in the man’s life he’d ever worn camo.

Now he wore the full battle rattle—body armor complete with shoulder-mounted flashlight, protective gas mask stowed at his belt, a tank commander’s CVC helmet with Nomex liner under his arm with a clip for his nods—and he clattered down the hallway lined with students’ lockers. “This is your mess, Clark. I don’t particularly care to know what you were thinking but I know you’re a real barnacle on the world’s backside, now, and at least that’s something. You were supposed to keep this thing contained in the prison. You were supposed to give us appropriate guidelines for how to proceed when that failed. You were supposed to find a cure. Have you done anything but watch this mess ignite right in front of your face?”

It wasn’t a question requiring an answer. Clark stayed at attention and fought the urge to explain himself. He and the AG stepped aside to let a file of enlisted get past, their sergeant keeping them in step with obscene jody calls. “Don’t feel too bad, Captain,” the AG said to Clark as the men stomped past, even their footfalls in unison. “You’re going over Niagra Falls for this, yes. I have my own career to consider. But maybe your friends at the Pentagon can find you a job when this is all over. I think you’d make a perfectly capable dog catcher.”

Clark clamped his teeth shut, ashamed more of the AG’s lack of professionalism than his own complicity in the breakout. He didn’t say a word as he was lead into an impromptu armory set up in the gymnasium. The AG selected a sidearm for him, an M9 Beretta, the standard weapon for the officer corps since the mid-eighties and a definite step up from the old traditional Colt .45. It felt heavier than Clark remembered—he hadn’t hefted one since his last visit to the pistol qualification range, nearly a year past. He fed his belt through the weapon’s holster and checked the safety before putting it away.

“You’ll at least have a chance to redeem yourself,” Braintree told him. Clark kept his eyes front so he didn’t have to look at the man. “That’s more than I can say for the three troops who were eaten alive during the breakout.”

Clark felt his knees turn to water and he consciously forced his spine to stiffen. He hadn’t heard about those casualties. He had dozens of questions to ask—what were their names, had their families been notified, were they weekend warriors or heroes from the fighting in Iraq—but he hadn’t been given permission to question his superior officer.

Vikram was waiting for him in the school’s lobby when he was dismissed. The Major belonged to the Regular Army and had no standing in the command post and in the interest of base security he shouldn’t have been allowed inside at all but Clark was truly glad to see his old friend.

“He chewed out my fourth point of contact,” Clark said, surprising himself a little. It was a euphemism he hadn’t heard or used since the earliest days of his career. “I’ll be lucky not to be court-martialled after this.”

Vikram shook his head to brush away the negativity. “We can do good in this world, or we can be miserable over the bad that is already done. What would you have me do?”

“Get up to Florence. Sit on the prison, clamp it down. We cannot let the work there be delayed, no matter what else happens. You may receive new orders while you’re there—I can hardly ask you to counter them, but make sure before that happens that Florence is airtight.”

Clark dismissed him and headed down to the parking lot of the school where a convoy of RTD buses was headed out, stuffed full of civilian evacuees. A motor pool staff sergeant assigned him the last military vehicle in the lot—an enormous lumbering eight-wheeled M977 HEMTT (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck) that was built for hauling cargo. Before Clark could even inspect the two man crew he had his platoon, too, a scared-looking group of warfighters who fell into ranks behind their platoon sergeant without a word.

“Sir, platoon reporting for duty, sir!” the platoon sergeant barked. He looked like a prospector with a bushy white non-regulation hair spilling out of his helmet and eyes like embers set at the bottom of dark pits. He had his men in line, though, there was no question of his ability. He gestured and a specialist ran up holding a soft boonie hat—a fisherman’s hat in desert camo—as if it were a crown. Clark understood the gesture and knew he should not outwardly acknowledge it. These were veterans and they were acknowledging that he was one of their own. He put on the boonie hat and handed his peaked uniform cover to the specialist in return. He had no doubt he would get it back dry cleaned and reblocked. The sergeant major nodded discretely and turned to face his platoon. “Attention to orders!”

“Drive on, chief,” Clark said. It was the traditional order to keep up the good work. The platoon leapt like synchronized swimmers into the HEMTT’s boxy cargo compartment. Clark rode up front with the crew in the much more comfortable shovel-nosed cabin. The driver got the prime mover roaring and shuddering out onto a deserted Colfax Avenue, threading the needle between big tent churches and peepshow parlors, fast food franchises and gas stations.

Everything had changed.

Posted by Wellington at 06:52 AM | Comments (4)

November 19, 2004

Chapter Eleven

STAY TOGETHER! Know your group number by heart! [Signage posted at Evacuation Centers in Los Angeles, CA, 4/2/05]

Nilla couldn’t help herself. She knocked on the door of the little apartment behind the motel’s registration desk. No one answered, of course. She stepped inside into a faint smell of mildew and a lot of dust that jumped up out of her way everywhere she moved.

She found a dresser in the cramped bedroom and touched the smooth wood of its drawers for a moment before opening them. It wasn’t so much that she felt bad about stealing another person’s clothes, though there was that. It was more the lack of familiarity. She couldn’t remember her own dresser, if she had one. She couldn’t remember her own bed, the smell of the sheets, whether they were starchy or silky or even what color they were. It felt less like she was intruding on someone else’s domain than as if she were inventing each gesture—the first time she ever opened a drawer, the first time she ever pulled on a pair of simple cotton boxer shorts. Things she must have done thousands, tens of thousands of times before in her living life.

Every single thing was new. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe her life had been tragic and horrible. Maybe even that didn’t matter. Maybe getting a second chance, one where you didn’t have to be aware of the old life you’d lost—maybe that was something valuable and good by itself.

The clothes in the dresser were men’s clothes. Maybe the man on the tree, the one who blew out his own brains with a shotgun—

The airy light coming in through the apartment’s windows wouldn’t let her dwell on thoughts like that. The little apartment was too cozy, the day too bright. She brushed the image right out of her head. It wasn’t hard. She felt good, amazingly good. Maybe not as exultant as she’d felt in the middle of the night with her hands steeped in the blood of the bear. But good.

She zipped up a pair of low-riding jeans around her hips and buttoned down a soft white cotton shirt, rolling up the sleeves because they were too long. She caught her reflection in a mirror hung behind the door and had to stop a while and just take it all in. Her skin was clear. Pale, still, but… her eyes were big and warm and bright. No dark circles, no bags, not even crow’s feet. Her hair looked like it had just been styled. She pulled up the shirt to check her abdomen, standing on tiptoe to see it in the mirror—a man’s mirror, it only showed her from the neck up—and saw there was no discoloration there anymore. Even the wound on her belly had settled down to a few thin lines of scar tissue that looked old and well-healed where they bisected her tattoo. The only real injury she retained was the one that started it all—the circle of tooth marks on her neck and shoulder where she’d been bitten to death.

“How about that,” she breathed, a smile folding her lips. Pinkish lips, not blue. She laughed out loud, just a single ha but it was natural, spontaneous.

She looked great. She sniffed her armpits—nothing.

She was still admiring herself in the mirror when she heard a door slam nearby and someone come clattering out onto the motel’s breezeway. Charles and Shar.

Now what was she going to do about them?

It is imperative, especially now, that facilities for worship and religious observance are made available for the use of relocated persons. In the interest of saving space a standard multi-faith chapel may be erected, as long as it follows military guidelines on diversity and tolerance. [FEMA Supplementary Notice No. 74: Relocation Camps: Facilities, issued 4/2/05]

From the Bakersfield checkpoint cars were standing three miles back, most of them with their motors switched off. The marines from Twenty-Nine Palms were Iraq veterans and they knew how to perform a vehicular search quickly and efficiently. They also knew the danger of letting anything at all slip by uninspected.

“Sir, with all due respect.” First Lieutenant Armitrading, United States Marine Corps bit off what he was about to say. He gestured at the soldiers arrayed around the checkpoint. They wore the new ACUs with digital camoflauge, something the Marines had invented and the other service branches were starting to adopt. The grey and black uniforms looked pixilated up close, as if the Marines were characters from some truly violent video game. “I get five thousand thumb-suckers a day through here, headed for the camps at California City. Most of them are blonde.”

Bannerman Clark watched, only mildly indignant on her behalf, as a fifty-nine year old woman was subjected to a DNA swab from the inside of her cheek by a nineteen year old girl in pigtails, freckles, and Interceptor body armor complete with CAPPE plates. The woman’s four children, the oldest the same age as the marine, stared through the windows of their stopped car as if they never expected to go anywhere again, as if they assumed they were going to set up housekeeping right there at the roadblock. The test was the creation of Desiree Sanchez, Clark’s main medical investigator in Florence. She claimed it was foolproof. A few epithelial cells taken from the cheek could be examined under a microscope. If they looked vital and healthy the person was not infected. Easy.

“You heard me about the tattoo, correct? This is important. I need you to start looking for her—she could be the answer to this thing.” This was the place, it had to be. She was heading east, toward Nevada. Clearly she wanted to get out of California. From Lost Hills Route 15 was the easiest way to do that. If she went too far north or south she would be trapped—every road around Los Angeles and San Francisco was locked down and she would be picked up in minutes. 15 was the only way out. There were smaller roads, more circuitous paths but they all lead right through hell on earth. She’d be a fool to go that way and infected or not she had some intelligence left.

Down the line someone honked his horn three times in rapid succession. A marine dashed across the heat-smeared blacktop and smacked the hood of the offending car with the butt of his SAW. The honking stopped but the driver and the soldier had more than a few words to exchange.

“Sir, I will reiterate my respect for your rank,” Armitrading sneered. “However this is not a joint operation, sir. You are far from your jurisdiction right now, sir. I promise I’ll keep my eyes open for her. Now, if you don’t mind?” The First Lieutenant turned and dashed off, his M4 held at low ready, barrel pointed at the ground, finger on the trigger guard.

Up the line a car door opened—the sun flashed off of it like a warning beacon. A man holding a baby got out and just walked away, leaving his car chiming plaintively behind him. Clark wondered where he thought he was going to go.

Others in the line must not have shared his insecurity. A family of four followed him out into the shoulder on foot. A trio of young men in sweatshirts came next. Soon a small crowd had gathered at the checkpoint, their cars forgotten, intent on crossing on foot.

The Marines were there before them, falling into perfect formation. A single line of men and women, weapons in plain sight but not pointing anywhere in particular. There was a lot of screaming and gesturing going on but none of it came from the Marines.

What were these people fleeing from, Clark wondered, that would make them face off with Marines armed with automatic weapons? He pondered going inward, to Los Angeles, to see what was becoming of California. He was stopped from actually planning such a move by Vikram who came running over from the helicopter waving his arms in distress.

“Bannerman!” he shouted. “Come quickly!”

Posted by Wellington at 08:51 AM | Comments (15)

November 17, 2004

Chapter Ten

KNOW THE SYMPTOMS OF CHOLERA! Diarrhea. Abdominal cramps. Nausea and Vomiting. Dehydration. [Hospital Bulletin published by the Centers for Disease Control, 4/1/05]

“I don’t see enough lights down there. It’s only what, 2200 hours? There should be lights on, people should be watching primetime television. Get us closer and hit that target with the main light,” Clark said over the headset built into his helmet. He couldn’t hear himself think over the noise of the helicopter’s engines.

“I am sorry, Bannerman, do you copy me?” Vikram asked from the next crewseat over. “Doctor First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez is requesting that she be allowed to euthanize some of the victims, so she can dissect them. I am as discomforted as you, but I think it is the only way to—”

“I copied you the first time, and I still won’t allow it.” Clark peered down at the unlit streets of Lost Hills, California. He couldn’t see a damned thing. The pilot wore NODs to see in the dark but the passengers had to make do with their naked eyes. The town looked deserted. The people were scared, sure, he didn’t blame them but he didn’t see any vehicular traffic at all. What was going on? There were supposed to be people down there for him to interview, people who might have seen the blonde girl as she came through. Clark had gotten a truly lucky break—traditional channels had actually turned up something useful. The Kern County Sheriff’s office had flipped the girl’s description on a trivial shoplifting case at a local convenience store. The owner had described one of the thieves as blonde, maybe forty years old with a black tribal tattoo of a sun with wavy rays on her stomach. The Sheriff had recognized the description of the tattoo from the APB. She had been here, maybe a day or two before at the very most. This was Clark’s best lead.

“Bannerman, Captain, I must implore you! Destroying a few of the specimens may be the only way! What if by doing this she finds a cure?”

“And what if she doesn’t? How do I explain to the families that their dad, their grandma, their twelve-year-old son had to have his head cut open while he was still alive because we thought it might help other people with the same illness, except it turned out not to help at all? Let her use the bodies those SWAT butchers at the hospital gave us.”

Vikram stared at him. In the dark cabin his eyes gleamed with frustration. “Their heads were all shot to pieces. Not much use when studying a brain ailment.”

Clark grimaced in distaste. He stared through the polycarbonate canopy of the Blackhawk at the square shadows of buildings below. “Okay, get the lamp on that structure,” he demanded. The pilot flipped a switch.

In the overwhelming white light of the Blackhawk’s main search light everything was the same flat gray, distinguishable only by ultra-black shadows blasted away by the lamp. The infected swarmed across the broken windows of a feed store like enormous maggots, their faces slack as their twisted hands reached upward to try to snag the helicopter.

One of them held a broken piece of bone. He threw it hard and it bounced off the metal skin of the helicopter with a resonating clang.

Breath puffed out of Bannerman’s lungs. Not in surprise, not anymore, no, this was just nervous exhaustion. Another town overrun. That made six in California, three each in Utah, Wyoming, and Texas, twelve in Colorado. More of them, certainly, that he didn’t even know about yet. The infected had taken over the streets of Lost Hills. “Did we receive any kind of distress call from this place before it went down?”

The pilot answered on the helmet circuit. “Negative, sir. These little farm places, they’re full of illegals. Probably more afraid of la Migra than they are of the infected. Do you want me to initiate a search pattern of maneuvers and look for survivors, sir?”

“Yes,” Bannerman Clark said, wondering why he was being asked such a silly question. “Yes, I do.”

“You’ve got dead—or infected, or whatever—people wandering into streams and reservoirs and rotting there. You’ve got healthy people being shuttled around like livestock to camps where they don’t even have basic health services. We’ve got sanitation breaking down all over the west and with that comes cholera, with that comes typhoid, and giardia on a scale you can’t imagine. In Arizona, in New Mexico dirty water is going to kill us faster than these cannibals.” [The Surgeon General in a briefing for NIH Field Agents, 4/2/05]

Dick did not know why he’d been brought to this zone of naked blood-red rock. The sun was intense. It dried him, leached the moisture out of his most hidden orifices. He chafed, and blistered, and the skin of his thighs wore away in red patches but he didn’t stop. The dead don’t stop for pain.

The voice in his head that was no voice knew what needed to be done. Dick did not question his instructions. He marched with his two-step gait—bare foot, then the boot, bare foot, then the boot—and devoured the miles beneath him.

Dick lacked any kind of sense of time. He could not have determined how many hours or how many days passed when he finally came to the edge of a cliff and looked down on white, foaming water. His dry body cried out for the smooth kiss of the water and the thing that steered him agreed. Dick toppled forward and fell, an ungainly diver, into the hissing silver of the river, heedless of rocks, uncaring of his clothes. He surrendered himself to the current and for a while he drifted along the bottom, his toes brushing the stony riverbed, his eyes closed. When he opened them again he had washed up on the far bank and water poured from his wet clothing, rolling back down into the stream.

He did not know how many times he had done this before, or how many bodies of water he was yet to visit. Someone else, some other force kept track of those things.

Time to move on to the next errand. Dick pushed his face into a crack in the rock and dug out some spiders with his tongue. Just enough to give him strength. Then he headed forward, once again into the excoriating sunlight.

Posted by Wellington at 08:49 AM | Comments (17)

November 15, 2004

Chapter Nine

Relocation camps are now open at Cathedral City, Winterwarm and Oceanside. A map to these facilities is on the back of this handout. When entering a camp you may bring with you: personal (PRESCRIPTION) medication, TWO changes of clothing and ONE small toilet kit. All weapons, illegal items and communication/recording devices (laptop computers, PDAs, CELL PHONES) will be confiscated. [Flyer handed out at bus and train stations in Los Angeles, emphasis as per original, 4/1/05]

The bear didn’t growl or roar or make any sound at all as she advanced. Her fur shivered in the breeze and her eyes glowed with fire as she pressed her snout wetly against Nilla’s leg. She had to be seven feet long and her legs were all muscle. Hot breath jetted up Nilla’s thigh and she cringed.

The bear looked up at Nilla and panted for a second. She stepped closer, her mass making the ground shake and Nilla cried out as she rolled away. Slowly, keeping her hands in plain view she got back to her feet. If she just walked away, backwards so the bear wouldn’t think she was running, well then surely the bear would leave her alone. Right? The bear didn’t want to eat her. She was undead—rotting flesh, full of toxins.

Nilla glanced at the corpse hanging from the tree. Oh. Bears must eat carrion, she decided.

It wasn’t food the bear was after, though, she could see it in the animal’s eyes. The bear knew what she was. It was the same look she’d seen in Lost Hills—and from Charles, less than an hour earlier. The bear was intelligent enough to recognize an abomination.

Nilla turned and ran, her bare feet slapping on the slickrock, her arms pistoning as she—

The bear tore past her at a gallop, not even exerting herself. She rolled one shoulder and slammed into Nilla, sending her sprawling down a slope of loose shale. The pain was intense as she bounced from one sharp rock to another, her skin bruising and tearing as she rolled. When she finally stopped she could only curl around herself, her body screaming.

The bear came lumbering down the hill, a black shape that obscured half the sky, headed right for her.

No, she thought, she didn’t want to… to die like this, not alone in the dead wilderness. No.

No.

The bear stopped not three feet away from her and sniffed the air. She lifted her head and opened her mouth, then moved in, her paws smacking the rock. She would have stepped on Nilla if Nilla had still been there.

Nilla was invisible. The cold bit her with renewed force but the pain melted away. She looked down at her hands with eyes closed and saw nothing—no dark energy, just nothing. She stared at the bear and knew the animal couldn’t sense her at all. It wasn’t over, though. Nilla had to end this or eventually she would run out of strength and become visible again—she had a span of time measured in seconds, maybe—and then the bear would be on her with rending claws and vicious teeth. Nilla had to defend herself if she wanted to walk away.

She reached over and grabbed a handful of loose flesh at the back of the bear’s neck and squeezed through the fur, squeezed as hard as her fingers allowed, digging her nails into the pliant skin beneath. The bear made a noise then, a titanic, warbling yell that almost sounded like human language.

Nilla’s teeth entered the bear’s neck. She could see the artery throbbing there. She could smell the blood. When she broke the skin it coursed out and over her, a red flood to carry her away. What happened next didn’t involve thinking at all. She bit and tore and gouged as the bear screamed. A chunk of meat came loose in her mouth and she swallowed it effortlessly. The skin tore open and she thrust her face deep into the bear’s body, into its hidden recesses. She bit and chewed and swallowed and bit, desperate to steal the bear’s energy before it ran out. The bear couldn’t resist her—shocked by the suddenness and the pain of her attack it could only scream and try to run but she had it, she had it down, down for the count.

Its life flowed into her, through her. Warm as blood, rich and sweet as the bear’s flesh it thrilled in every cell of her body. It felt like being on fire. It felt like being alive again—there she was, all dressed in white bopping down the street, shaking her hips in the sunshine because it felt so damned good to be alive and healthy and beautiful. It was almost too much.

She fell to the ground on her knees and swayed with it for a while with her eyes closed, watching the bear’s golden energy degrade. When she opened her eyes again she saw the bear looking back at her with that same expression of recognition she’d been so startled by before. Then she did a double take. Her benefactor was sitting on the bear’s back as if he planned to ride off into the sunset.

“You—” Nilla looked up at the naked man. His beard looked newly-trimmed and the blue tattoos that covered his skin glowed with their own light. “Who—”

“Mael Mag Och,” he said, thumping his chest. He looked down at his mount, at the expression on her face. “She knows you. She knows what it is to be gruaim air le acras.”

“What are you doing here?” Nilla demanded.

He ignored her. Slipping down the bear’s furred flank he stepped onto the slickrock and looked straight upward at the stars. “In salmon moon, she wakes from winter and eats, and does not stop. She swallows a river if she can, a cliath bhradan. In summer she takes moths—forty thousand every day.”

“How do you know that?” Nilla demanded. The bear’s life energy was flickering out. She felt a pang of guilt like a rippling in her stomach muscles but—hey. Stomach muscles. She look down and saw the four deep gashes there where the bear hit her first.

“I know many things. I know some English, now. Before, chan fhaigh mi lorg air na facail!” He grinned sheepishly. “Sometimes I slip back. I know you. I understand hunger, but do not know it. I talk to dead, you see. I learn.”

Nilla frowned. “What are you? I know you’re not really here. I thought before you were a hallucination. You aren’t though. You’re real.”

He ignored her. “I know what you are. You are shadow, like so many shadows. Different, though. Like fires in a longhouse, except… this one, it goes out. Covered fire. Then it comes back. Know it is you. Sometimes no fire is better signal than fire, yes? You are stronger, and you are smarter than the rest. I must use you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A job, for you. A cam-borraig. Work. Purpose. You want something more than that?”

“What kind of job?” She brushed hair out of her eyes.

He smiled. “Be yourself.”

She opened her mouth to speak then closed it again with a click. “Be myself.”

“Be the darkness. Be a shadow. You first come east, come to me. To my body. It is is, is in some place of high towers and broad flat canyons. We talk there. No live things, though. No more of the living. They are not allies. They are food for you.”

Nilla shook her head, confused. “What? I—what?” She thought of Charles and Shar—and everyone else who had stared at her, condemned her, hated her. She didn’t like where the thought headed (into her teeth) so she threw it away. “I need them. I can’t drive. I don’t remember how.”

“Then you walk to me.”

The bear died. She made no death rattle, nor did she go into convulsions. She simply flickered out, the last of her vital fire gone. Darkness began to fill her up instantly. There was no transitional zone, it seemed, between life and death, or at least between life and undeath. It was a change of state, not form.

Nilla pulled her hair back in a ponytail but had nothing to tie it with so she just held it. It felt less greasy than before, strangely enough. It had more body, too. That was weird but she had no time to consider it. “Screw this. I don’t need a job, guy. What I need is to stay alive. If that means consorting with living people, I don’t mind that at all. You want me to walk east, with no idea where I’m going.”

“Yes,” he nodded happily.

“To talk to some guy who doesn't understand English. Or clothing.”

“Yes.”

“And for this I get a sense of purpose.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and opened his arms as if to embrace her. “Let us begin.” He bowed and gestured toward the east with one arm. The first pale glow of dawn was surging there. “You begin, now.”

“No. Not tonight.” She turned on her heel and started walking away, up the slope and back towards the motel. Whatever the future held it started with a shower. She was covered in the bear’s lifeblood, thick gobbets of it coagulating on her skin. She could imagine a better time to conduct a job interview. “When we’re talking about full dental and three weeks paid vacation, then you get back to me.”

Behind her she felt the bear stir, her energy smoky and dark. She didn’t want to look back and see her own handiwork.

“Very well,” he said to her back, “I’ll give you what you want, though is fhasa deagh ainm a chall na a chosnadh.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You drive a hard bargain, but it may be worthy. Lass, you come east, to my body, and I’ll tell you the name you’ve lost.”

He was gone when she turned to look. Only the bear remained, inching her way up the slope toward her interrupted meal. The look of recognition on her face was gone. Nilla saw nothing there but hunger.

Posted by Wellington at 09:48 AM | Comments (12)

November 12, 2004

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.

Posted by Wellington at 08:47 AM | Comments (7)

November 10, 2004

Chapter Seven

Infectuated individuals are known to be of a highly dangerous nature. Under no circumstances should you, as civilians, attempt to subdue or take them out. The police are trained for this. Let’s let them do your job. [Televised speech delivered by the President of the United States, 3/31/05]

Kirsty Lang on the BBC World News channel, looking grave while a xylophone played a rising crescendo: “Growing fears in America tonight as the Epidemic spreads to the Pacific Northwest. Our Reginald Forless is in Spokane tonight where city officials and law enforce—”

A reporter with his head down in front of a line of cars, their headlights washing out his features as they passed in slow motion: “—scene of chaos behind me, this small town where nobody ever went anywhere has been mobilized tonight. Evacuees are heading south, toward San Diego, and—”

Two balding men faced each other in oversized chairs, their ties undone: “—can’t just disregard what the Army is saying, they have the people and the equipment to—”

“Bullshit! That thing we just saw was dead!”

Emeril LaGasse came running down a set of stairs, his fists pumping in the air, a towel over the shoulder of his chef whites. “Tonight we’re talking tenderloin, we’re talking beef bourguignon, and look at this cabbage, huh? Look at it! I’m makin’ a slaw!”

Charles sprawled across the bed, with his shirt off, one foot waving back and forth in an agitated rhythm. “Nothing fucking on,” he moaned, but he didn’t switch off the television. “How do you get the porn and shit? You know what I’m saying?”

In a corner Shar squatted against the wall and held one hand over her ear. The other held the handset of a princess phone. “Mom? I can’t get through to Uncle Phil. Well how many times have you tried? Me? I’m safe, I’m in some kind of motel—”

“Don’t you fucking tell her where we are!” Charles shouted. His skinny arms raised like sticks to bat at her but he didn’t sit up.

Nilla sniffed one of her armpits and winced at the stale smell there. Not body odor, necessarily. Something fouler. “I’m going next door,” she said. She stepped out into a night full of bugs that batted suicidally against the one light over the motel’s parking lot. Charles’ Toyota was the only car parked there—the owners must have deserted the place and turned on the no vacancy sign on their way out. If they hadn’t been so lost Nilla and the kids would have passed right by it.

Luckily the owners had forgotten to lock the doors when they left, too. In the peace and quiet of an empty room Nilla sat down on the bed with its over-starched coverlet and stared at the useless telephone, wishing she had someone to call. God, no point in dwelling on that, she decided, and pulled the baby tee off over her head. The sleeves stank and she wondered if she could rinse it out in the sink with shampoo. She looked down, checking her skin, and noticed a green discoloration on her abdomen, right above her tattoo. It must be dye from the cheap shirt, she thought, even though it was the wrong color. She got up and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She stepped out of her baggy pants and saw that the discoloration was on her crotch, too. With a handful of soap she tried to scrub it off but it wouldn’t budge. She moved into the shower and tried again with the motel’s washcloth. Nothing.

There was a fog-resistant shaving mirror mounted in the shower and she studied her face. The bruising under her eyes had spread until she looked like a raccoon. Or a goth chick wearing too much kohl. She had a bad pimple on her cheek but it wasn’t ready to pop. She wondered if she should shave her legs and realized that the hair there had stopped growing. That couldn’t be a good sign.

She was still checking herself out when she heard the door of her room open and Charles came trooping in. He had a can of soda in either hand. “Hey,” he said, “Shar thought you might want some—”

He stopped in mid-thought. His face opened up in a kind of half smile that made him look very, very stupid. He was staring at her but not in the malevolent way the people of Lost Hills had stared at her.

She looked down and saw that she had come out of the shower to greet him but she had forgotten to put her clothes back on. Water dripped from her elbows and her chin and splashed darkly on the ivory shag of the carpet.

What the hell? Had she forgotten all about modesty when she forgot her name? Or was her brain just breaking down, was she not making the necessary connections?

She suddenly felt very alone and very afraid.

“I guess I should…” he grinned, “I mean Shar wouldn’t…”

He was stalling. He wanted her and that meant everything. It meant she was still whole and healthy and desirable. It meant he didn’t see a monster when he looked at her but a woman, a human being full of vibrant life. She took a step closer and grabbed his hand. She couldn’t believe what she was doing but she needed it, so much.

She guided his hand to her breast and let him cup it. He immediately tweaked her nipple in a way she normally would have found more irritating than arousing but it just didn’t matter. He was human and male and if he reacted to her she could be normal again.

He swallowed hard and moved closer to her, as if unsure of what to do next. Was he a virgin? Nilla was pretty sure she wasn’t. She would use every whorish trick she could think of if she could just have this simple reassurance. She reached across the space between them and brushed the backs of her fingers across the front of his jeans.

Nothing. She felt nothing down there—no hardness at all. He looked down at her breast like someone who couldn’t understand what he was seeing. “So cold,” he said, his voice small and afraid.

She winced backward and it was the signal he’d been waiting for. He rushed out of the room, his sodas rolling across the floor where he’d dropped them. Nilla went to the door and shut it, locked it tight and fastened the chain.

She wanted to break down, to cry, but that was a human response and her body refused to let her have even that. She wanted to cut herself to pieces but there was nothing sharp at hand. She looked around the objects of the room—bed, tv, lamp, nightstand, Gideon’s bible—and none of them made sense, they’d been torn out of context and left hanging in a meaningless space. It was too much.

She undid all the locks on the door and ran out into the night, down the stairs and across the parking lot. The dark trees there accepted her without a murmur.

Posted by Wellington at 07:45 AM | Comments (19)

November 08, 2004

Chapter Six

Bottled water will be available free of charge. You are also entitled to pick up pre-cooked foods at the local grocery store. Menus and options will be chosen or approved by your local FEMA representative. Please let us know about any dietary restrictions. [FEMA Supplemental Broadcast for Relocated Individuals, 3/31/05]

“Great fucking plan, Nilla.” Charles grabbed the map out of her hands. “Look, now it’s torn. This is so whack!”

Nilla looked through the windshield. The road they’d been following—one lane, only partially paved—ended in a T intersection. There were no street signs or any kind of indication of where they were. The level cultivated land around Bakersfield had given way as they traveled north to trees and mountains and the roads had become sparser. They hadn’t seen a human being or a car for half an hour and now, officially, they were lost.

East, Nilla thought. They should head east. Except that she couldn’t see anything through all the trees. Sparse scrub pines and towering aspens crowded together on both sides of the road. East. Except they had turned around so many times and switched roads so often she had no idea which compass direction she was facing, much less which way was east. She felt something stir in her belly. Hunger, yes, of course it was hunger, it was always hunger. But the familiar pull was drawing her in a particular direction. It was telling her to go left.

Nilla had taken advice before from a naked man she had probably just hallucinated. “That way,” she said. One of the few compensations of having no memory whatsoever was that you couldn’t remember how many times your gut feelings had steered you wrong. “Seriously. That way.”

No one will be allowed into or out of the quarantine area without official written permission. Violators will face criminal charges and possible lethal force for non-compliance. [FEMA Travel Advisory for Las Vegas, NV and Salt Lake City, UT, 3/31/05]

Three hours and change in an Airbus from DIA to Ronald Reagan National on an empty flight, just Bannerman Clark and a pair of exhausted Air Marshals who took one look at him and started ordering drinks. When was a flight to DC ever empty? He realized that he hadn’t been watching much CNN since the incident began but he’d had no idea people were scared enough to stay off of planes.

At least the quiet flight gave Bannerman Clark some time for the paperwork that had been piling up since his interrupted dinner at the Brown Palace. He couldn’t concentrate, though, and barely made it through a single Incident Account Report before he had to give up and snap shut his laptop. In the vibratory space of the jet engines he couldn’t seem to shut off his brain and things kept occurring to him, things he’d forgotten, things he needed to think about later. The girl’s face kept jumping out at him, the look of terror in her eyes. The stuff that dripped from her nose. The fact that she could talk. She had to mean something. She was less affected by the pathogen than any other victim he’d seen or heard about. Did she possess some natural immunity? Or maybe she’d been infected with a different strain of the virus or bacterium or whatever it was.

He’d been putting together a requisition for some troops to go looking for her. He couldn’t just grab men and women out of their barracks willy-nilly, even a Rapid Assessment and Initial Deployment officer had to formally request personnel from their commanding officer. He had a line on some really promising folks, veterans from Iraq who’d been pulling weekend warrior duty every since they got back and should be rested and ready for a new adrenaline rush. Then Vikram had come in to break the news. He was wanted for a breakfast interview in Washington with a DoD Civilian.

It was all over. Initial Deployment was his Military Occupational Specialty, his MOS and the initial deployment was complete. His role in the crisis was finished. He didn’t resent it, really. There were other people, people far more qualified in dealing with widespread medical emergencies waiting to take his place. He just wasn’t sure what he was going to do next. The world was on fire and he was holding a bucket full of water and he didn’t know where to throw it.

When he touched down at DCA a limo was waiting to take him right into Georgetown. He was a little surprised he wasn’t going to be debriefed in the Pentagon itself but he had a lifetime not questioning orders to quell his unease. After passing through a metal detector and an inspection by a nosy dog barely kept on leash by a man in a uniform shirt that simply read CANINE SUPPORT he found himself in a fourth floor office of lacquered cherry wood and office chairs wrapped in plastic. A stack of multi-line telephone units with no handsets had been shoved under the conference table. At the head of said table stood a chilled bottle of water and a cellophane-wrapped box of marshmallow Peeps. Clark knew they weren’t for him. He decided not to sit down and instead stood by the window, peering through the Venetian blinds at businessmen in dark suits or dress casual jeans rolled toward their various offices like Pachinko balls falling into their appropriate holes.

“Bannerman.”

The man in the door had the sort of heavy body shape and steel-blue freshly-scraped jaw of a desk officer with the CIA but he wore the dark suit, red tie and American flag pin of someone who regularly appeared at press conferences. An under-secretary, surely, one of the Department of Defense’s leading lights but nobody Clark would be expected to recognize on sight. He didn’t offer his name. He sat down in one of the wrapped chairs, not bother to remove the plastic, and cracked open his bottle of water. “Look at you. Veteran of multiple wars. Well decorated and commended. Thirty-five years on service and you’re still just a Captain. I think we both know why.”

Clark moved his cover from one hand to another. He didn’t care for the civilian’s easy familiarity. “I’ve never questioned my lot in life. I simply serve at the pleasure of my Commander in Chief.”

“You never married, that’s why. The Army likes married men. It means they’re not gay. Sit down, will you? You’re annoying me with your conspicuous body language.” The civilian tore open his box of marshmallow treats and stuffed one into his mouth. “My big weakness,” he intimated when he’d swallowed the yellow goo. “It’s less than a week since Easter, right? Anyway, I don’t care if you were screwing Freddy Mercury in the seventies. I don’t care if you dig sheep. Sit down, I said.”

Clark did as he was told.

“They’re in Chicago now, did you know that? We’re keeping a lid on it but it’s bad there, very, very, very bad.” The Civilian inhaled a long, slow breath and then laid down the law. “Look, you’re off the case, you know that. FEMA is taking over in California. We need the flexibility and the ability to make snap decisions out there you only get with civilian agencies. The Army’s great for doing the same thing a hundred times over and nobody questions your loyalty but this. This is serious.”

“What about Colorado? That’s the state I’m sworn to protect.”

“Yeah, the Adjutant General of the COARNG gets to keep Colorado, whoop-dee-doo. He’s got full-bird Colonels to put on that and you’re not on the short list. But who cares about Colorado? I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not but these dead fuckers are taking over Los Angeles. I care about Los Angeles. The President cares about Los Angeles. Right?”

“No.” Clark placed his hat squarely on the table and turned it so the brim was facing the civilian.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No, you’re not entirely right. You’ve fallen for what I hope will very soon be classified as an urban legend. The infected are not dead. They’ve undergone some kind of basal metabolic change, something that depresses their vital signs but they’re not dead. I have a team from Fort Detrick looking into it right now. If I’m being reassigned I just wanted to get that fact on the record.” He began to stand up.

“Sit down. You’re off the case, yes.” The civilian stood up instead. He peeled one of his Peeps away from its fellows and held it in his hairy hand as if he were cradling an actual baby chicken. “But you’re not done. I like you, Bannerman. I like your first name, I think it’s funny, and I like people with funny names.” He walked over to stand behind Clark and slowly, deliberately, placed his yellow candy on top of Clark’s cover. “I also think you’re a wonk and the President loves wonks. You were the first responder, the early adapter on this mess. I want you to be my go-to guy.”

Clark inhaled slowly and folded his hands in his lap. “In what capacity?” he asked.

“As my wonk, I just said that. I don’t care what you’re called. The President doesn’t care what you’re called. You can make up your own MOS for this. You can have what you need—I’ll rubber stamp anything because I know you, I’ve read your dossier so many times I know you would die, physically die before you would requisition a Bic pen that wasn’t job-vital. What do you say, Bannerman? Are you my wonk or are you my wonk?”

It would mean reporting to this civilian. It meant operating as a free agent, without standing orders—something unthinkable to a career soldier like Clark. It also meant he would have carte blanche to find the girl and maybe bring resolution to the biggest public health crisis since the influenza of 1918.

Clark reached forward and picked up the yellow sugar bomb sitting on his cover. Without hesitation he put it on his tongue as if he were taking communion and bit down. The answer was yes.

Posted by Wellington at 08:37 AM | Comments (15)

November 05, 2004

Chapter Five

It is recommended that travelers arrive at the airport four hours in advance of departure time to complete the required medical examinations before boarding. [FlyDenver.com “Tips for Travelers” page, updated 3/31/05]

A star had fallen to earth and gotten lodged there, still burning bright.

Its silver radiance illuminated the ridge, sending out long streamers of brilliance that made shadows on the facing slopes, shadows like the clouds made during the day, impossibly big, always moving. Like ocean waves of light and darkness washing across the spine of rocks and trees at the top of the world.

He headed toward it, drawn—physically pulled in. Death had not been kind to his eyes but he could make out more details as he got closer. There were buildings on the ridge, low concrete blocks. There were other shapes there as well, like titanic lizards eroded by rain and wind until their shapes were soft and smooth. They occluded the light, their silhouettes thrown across him, over him.

Others—other dead people—had gathered in the scree below the ridge. They stood apart from one another on ground crawling with lichens and dwarf pine trees that throbbed with energy but they weren’t trying to devour that life. They stood motionless, their faces tilted upwards to catch the sleeting luminosity of the fallen star. As he came among them they made no sign of noticing him. They were too busy studying the endlessly changing glow. Feeding on it. One of its beams touched Dick and though he was mentally incapable of surprise anymore his body could still feel the shock. It felt like something had been torn from him, burnt out of him perhaps. The hunger. When that light reached him it drove the hunger away. It fed him a constant, steady stream of energy, the energy he needed to continue his existence. More than enough.

It was like the glow of the woman in the car, like the golden aura of human life. Except… no. Better to say that the human aura was like the light of the fallen star. The radiation that shot through him was altogether more pure and more real. It nurtured him, warmed him. He wanted to run up the slope and jump inside of that light. Surrender to it—become one with it.

As he got closer though the warmth he felt turned to heat. Real heat. He could feel it singing him, scorching every cell in his body. He took a step closer and tasted smoke at the back of his throat. He could see dark shapes ahead of him. Charred, burnt-out corpses, lumps of blackened meat in tattered remnants of clothing. He understood, in a wordless, primal way. The very thing that nourished him could consume him if he got too close. He was in a gray zone, a realm between comfort and instant annihilation and staying there meant pain.

No matter. He stepped backwards. It was enough to stand a respectable distance away and let the fallen star comfort him. It was enough to rest. To rest and watch the light show. It was all he ever wanted, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in life or in death.

He was so absorbed in the coruscating patterns of the light, transfixed like an acid freak staring into the depths of a lava lamp that he barely noticed when a yellow rectangle appeared up in the buildings above the star—a door opening, letting out human noise and movement. A man, a living man appeared there, a microphone in his hand. Dick bared his teeth by instinct but he felt no real need to attack the man. The light of the fallen star had given him that, a kind of serenity.

“Good evening,” he told them, his voice amplified by loudspeakers strung on poles in the circle of statuary reptiles. Some of the gathered dead, like Dick, looked up. Most did not. “I see some new… new faces tonight. Welcome. I wish there was more that I could do for you. I truly do. You’ll never know how sorry…”

The voice broke off in a choking noise. A sob. The man went back inside his house. Music played over the loudspeakers, light Classical music—Mozart, although Dick could not have made that distinction. The music meant nothing to him. He already had everything he wanted.

The man came back the next night. Every night. The music changed. The pleas for forgiveness didn’t. Dick grew irritated with the man for a while. Eventually he learned to ignore him, to not even look up when the lights went on up there.

It was a kind of perfect existence. He felt warm and sated. Dick could have stayed there forever.

In a dawn time without time, long after the music had finished, Dick stood rock still where he’d stopped the night before though dew ran down his face and his muscles were stiff and sore. None of it bothered him. The rising sun couldn’t overpower the rays of life and happiness that shot through him. Yet something had changed, something simple, easy to miss. He studied the fallen star to try to detect what it might be and felt the star looking back at him.

It was more than aware of him. It was actively looking at him. It had a consciousness and even a kind of voice, though its words were made of light. Dick had been unable to understand the living man’s address the night before but these words made perfect sense to him. In time it took shape, a certain fulgent form that conveyed the sense of a human body while being made entirely of rays of light. It reached out fingers that stretched across the slope and brushed the ruins of Dick’s shoulders.

Yes, it thought, and Dick heard it sigh. There were others, it told him. Others that were closer or perhaps better equipped to perform the task (what task? It was a question, and Dick was beyond questions). Yet Dick possessed a certain quality of appearance. A supreme ugliness, a horror of aspect. His ruined body could inspire fear better than that of a dead man more whole.

Dick could hardly be offended by the thought. He was more honored than anything else, honored to be picked by this perfect form at the heart of the fallen star. In the middle of the source.

The form said it could use him. Dick lacked the will to refuse the request and anyway the form wasn’t asking. He would do its will. Even the concept of choice was beyond him.

Some part of him, some deep part felt regret and longing but it didn’t stop him from turning his back on the source. Without a word, without complaint, he turned and left the ridge and headed down into the valleys below.

Posted by Wellington at 09:13 AM | Comments (14)

November 03, 2004

Chapter Four

THIS AREA UNDER QUARANTINE – Trespassers will be subject to detainment and decontamination [Signage posted in Brentwood, CA, 3/30/05]

In the irrigated fields outside of Lost Hills they saw people moving sluggishly through the crops. Never more than one or two at a time, all of them headed toward town.

Shar stirred restlessly in Nilla’s arms. The sight of the undead girl being beaten to death had really shaken her. “They’re going to come for me next,” she had kept sobbing, though Charles and Nilla had both pointed out there was no reason to think such a thing. Nilla had a very good reason to think it would be otherwise but she kept it to herself.

After a few minutes of sheer hysteria and Charles constantly telling her to shut up Shar had demanded that he stop the car right in the middle of the road. There was no traffic. She had come around to the back of the car and crawled in with Nilla, who could hardly refuse to put her arms around the frightened girl.

“I need to call my mom,” she said from time to time. Sitting up in the seat she stared out the window at a man wearing nothing but a baggy t-shirt. He was wandering through a stand of avocado trees, the branches smacking him in the face but he paid no attention. “Do you think—is he one of them?” Shar asked.

“Holmes is just loaded, Shar,” Charles chortled over the back seat. “He’s all crunked up, you know what I’m saying?”

“I need to go home now, Charles,” Shar said so quietly he couldn’t have heard her. The windows of the little Toyota rattled whenever he took the car over forty miles per hour and he refused to turn down the radio so any conversation between the three of them had to be shouted. Nilla opened her mouth but Shar shook her head in negation. “No. No, I’m just practicing. I could make him take me home if I really wanted. Charles wanted to go to Hollywood, but I talked him out of it,” Shar said, looking up into Nilla’s face.

The girl was scared shitless and a little traumatized. Nilla wondered how she would react if she ever saw one of the dead face to face. “Yeah?” Nilla asked, her voice a soft purr. Maybe she had been a nurturing person in her life or maybe it was just natural instinct but she knew what it took to comfort the girl. She brushed Shar’s hair away from her forehead. Hunger stabbed her in the stomach and told her it was time to eat but she sucked in her belly and refused to entertain the notion. “Why did he want to do that?”

“He thought we could find some movie star, or maybe a singer, and save them from the sick people and then they would be so grateful they would let us stay with them and we wouldn’t have to worry about money.”

Nilla nodded as if this made perfect sense. “But then you heard on the radio that you should stay away from Los Angeles.”

Shar nodded and rubbed anxiously at her nose. “I think maybe I should sit up now. Up front, I mean.” She stared deep into Nilla’s eyes and shot her a microsecond smile. “Thanks,” she said. “I got so scared.”

“It happens.” Charles pulled over on the side of the road so Shar could get back in the passenger’s seat. As she was climbing out of the car the girl brought her face close to Nilla’s ear. Nilla closed her eyes to better hear what Shar might say.

“Don’t hate me, okay? But you really need some deodorant.”

They didn’t stop for Bakersfield, though Shar and Charles argued about whether they should until long after they’d passed through the sprawling downtown. Charles got them onto Route 58 after only a few tries and before they knew it they were in the middle of farmland again. Relief overcame Nilla and she shuddered. She really didn’t want to stop anywhere populated again but even so Bakersfield looked untouched by the dead. Maybe it was just a local phenomenon. Maybe if she got far enough east she would be safe. Was that what her mysterious benefactor on the hill was trying to tell her?

About ten miles past the last houses of the city they started seeing cars coming from the other direction, headed west. A station wagon flashed its lights as it sped by them and Charles looked pensive. “Yeah, fuck you too, grandma,” he said, and chewed on the hair of his lower lip. When they started to see exit signs of Tehachapi it happened again, this time with a Mazda Miata. A third car honked its horn at them repeatedly.

Nilla stared through the windshield and saw the driver emphatically shaking her head and waving a hand to tell them to stop. “Charles, maybe we should slow down,” Nilla suggested.

“Yeah, and maybe you should just sit there and not talk to me right now,” he said, turning in his seat, the seat belt tugging at the skin of his neck. She had a momentary pang of desire—she really wanted to put her teeth in that throat of his—but she fought it down. “I’m kind of busy, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry, okay, ho?”

Nilla crossed her arms and looked away.

They started to see more traffic heading east and Charles had to slow down anyway to match the prevailing speed. The lanes heading west grew packed and drew to a standstill. Charles switched off the radio and squinted at the road. He didn’t like what was going on but he’d already told Nilla to shut up and he didn’t want to show any signs of weakness.

Many of the cars they passed honked their horns now and occasionally someone would lean out their window to shout at them. Nilla couldn’t understand them—they were moving too fast. She found a map in the pocket of the seat in front of her and pulled it out. Just east of Tehachapi… there. Brown blotches surrounded the road on either side. She studied the tiny print.

Edwards Air Force Base. China Lake Naval Weapons Center. Fort Irwin Military Reserve. Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base. It looked like the Armed Forces owned all the land between them and Nevada. She remembered the man in the Army uniform, the one who had almost presided over her execution.

“Charles, listen to me—we have to get off this road!” she shouted. The boy sneered and showed her one fist. He didn't want to hear her but she was far more worried about falling afoul of the Army. “Charles! There’s a roadblock, that’s what’s happening. Do you really want the Marines to ask you why you’re running away from home?” It was a bluff—she still didn’t understand what had made him flee his hometown—but it had to be at least partially right.

He started to grumble again but Shar sat up straight in her seat and looked right at him. It kept him from growling, anyway. The girl put a hand on his arm and stroked it gently. “They’ll split us up. They’ll find out I’m underage.”

He lowered his head and refused to look away from the road. Nilla didn’t have time to argue anymore. “There’s a road—route 14. We can turn off at a town called Mojave.” It wasn’t a great solution—it would take them along the edge of China Lake—but it would get them out of immediate danger.

Charles still refused to respond and she had to content herself with staring at the back of his head and imagining what would happen if the Army found her. They wouldn’t fall for her trick again, would they? Even if they did there was no way Charles and Shar would let her stay in their car once they knew her secret.

Come on, Charles, she thought. Come on.

The big green signs for the exits at Mojave came up on the side of the road and Nilla had never wanted anything so much in her life. At least as far as she could remember.

Posted by Wellington at 07:48 AM | Comments (8)

November 01, 2004

Chapter Three

The Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response has asked that all physicians and medical technicians register with their nearest Emergency Services Provider. [FEMA ListServ Message, 3/30/05]

The hunger swelled inside Dick, turned inside him, threatened to consume him. It was bigger than he was and he lacked any kind of willpower or ego to fight against it. Sometimes it seemed to speak to him in a low, moaning language more primitive than words. It told him what to do. It told him where to go. Up. Up into the mountains, up the winding course of the highway toward the light. What he would find there he couldn’t know, but he couldn’t resist the pull, either.

He lost one of his boots along the way, snagged under a protruding tree root. He pulled and pulled until the laces creaked, until the leather stretched and tore, until his foot came painfully free. He moved on, bouncing up and down with each step, up on the boot, down when his naked white foot hit the gravel, or the concrete, or the loose rocky soil. He didn’t let this hobbling gait slow him down.

The hunger wouldn’t let him.

At ten thousand feet above sea level he saw something white and low ahead—a car that had stalled out in the rarefied air. He moved in with a little caution, unsure if he was wasting his time. He wasn’t. There was someone inside, a woman, a middle-aged woman in pearls and pantsuit. Her hair was like gossamer, like the silken strands of a spider’s web. In Dick’s altered vision her hair glowed like a fine tracery of gold. He wanted her. The hunger had to have her.

She screamed but he could barely hear her through the safety glass. She tried to get the car moving but failed. He came closer and lunged for her. His face smashed against the glass of her window. Pain sang a single high note in his nose and his cheek but the hunger roared louder. He struck again. She bounced across the front seats of the car and pushed her way out of the passenger door, out into the air.

The smell of her hit Dick like a storm of longing. His jaw stretched wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. She tried to run but she’d already made her fatal mistake. She would have been faster than Dick if she’d been wearing tennis shoes instead of high heels. She could have outrun him at sea level where she could catch her breath. That high up in the mountains she could barely run a dozen yards before she got winded. The air was too thin to properly fill her lungs.

Dick didn’t need to breathe at all. He was dead. She would run a ways and have to stop to puff and gasp and wheeze. He just kept coming. It took most of an hour but in the end he closed the gap between them. He got his teeth in her flailing arm and just refused to let go. He couldn’t feel any mercy or compassion anymore. To Dick she was just meat, a meal, something to snack on. He couldn’t understand her pleas for release.

The hunger filled him up. It didn’t leave room for pity.

When he was done with her and her blood had dried on his chin and his vest, when the hunger was sated for a while (just a while, it would come back soon enough) he lay sprawled across her cooling body, his esophagus heaving with peristalsis, and he watched the gold filigree of her hair tarnish and turn dark. When she woke up she joined him, what was left of her. Together they headed up the highway. The hunger pulled her along too, and when they crested the mountain together they saw where it was leading them.

Public transportation is running on a reduced/holiday schedule. It is expected that normal schedules will be resumed shortly. [RTD Denver, CO service announcement, 3/31/05]

The biowarfare people from Fort Detrick called it “the Bag”. The biosecure research facility the 1157th Engineers Company had built on the site of Florence-ADX comprised a series of interlocked conex shipping containers lined inside with several thicknesses of transparent mylar. These envelopes were kept at varying levels of negative air pressure so that if one was punctured pathogens would be blow inward, not out. The Bag qualified as a Class II Biological Safety Cabinet.

To get inside the Bag you had to pass through a series of flaps that had to be unzipped and then resealed behind you. Clark had already been decontaminated and had his clothing (including his underwear and socks) replaced with disposable paper modesty garments. His name and rank were stenciled on the chest and sleeves. He felt humiliated. What Vikram had to tell him didn’t please him either. “What do you mean, gone?” he demanded as they ducked through yet another flap. “The entire town? Not just the sheriff’s office?”

“The town has been officially deserted. The people to a soul evacuated, the roads leading inward sealed and barricaded. It was done on FEMA’s order.”

“That’s not supposed to be possible without my countersignature.” Clark knew what this meant. The incident had grown too large for one lowly Captain to be in charge anymore. Someone upstairs must have relieved him of duty and the papers were still in the mail. It was hardly surprising but he didn’t like it at all. “Did those trigger-happy deputies ever find her? At least tell me they didn’t kill her.”

“There’s still an all points bulletin out for her. They wish to take her to protective custody.” Vikram grabbed his beard in a tight fist. “I am afraid though their description, is not so good. Age eighteen to forty-five. Blonde. Tattoo on the stomach.”

“That describes half the women in southern California,” Clark said, scowling. “They didn’t get a single photograph of her?” Of course they hadn’t. The debacle at the hospital parking lot had been completely FUMTU (Fucked Up More Than Usual). He came up to the final envelope of the Bag and peered in. Through the cloudy mylar he could make out a figure like an obese white grub with stubby arms and legs gliding along a series of instrument trays, touching each tool in turn. That would be First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez, the woman he’d come to talk to, dressed in a one-piece biological safety ventilated garment. A space suit, in biowarfare lingo. There was another occupant of the innermost reaches of the Bag and he wore nothing at all. Shriveled, grey, mutilated—one of the original victims from the prison. He was held to a gurney by four-point restraints but Clark could see him writhing and jerking even through the translucent wall. “Good afternoon, First Lieutenant,” Clark said into an intercom box dangling by a cable from the ceiling. “I trust you’ve completed your initial assessment.” He let go of the talk button and looked at Vikram. “They just abandoned the town? The entire town? That’s madness.” Vikram opened his mouth to respond but Sanchez’s voice grated out of the speaker first.

“Sir, no, sir.” Sanchez put down the aural thermometer she’d been holding and came closer to the wall so he could see her better. She snapped to attention and they exchanged salutes. “I have not completed my assessment because I was unable to sedate the patient. Sir, your orders clearly stated that no biopsies or invasive procedures were to be performed on a non-anesthetized individual.”

Clark nodded silently. He’d wanted his sufferers to be as comfortable as possible. In their confused state they could hardly agree to medical examination but at least he could manage their pain. “Perhaps you’d care to elaborate, Sanchez,” Clark suggested, gritting his teeth.

“Sir, I applied a narcotic sedative, namely morphine, in increasing doses at four hour intervals. I continued to up the dosage well past the safe human level. No matter how much I injected into him however his behavior and affect remained unchanged. A few minutes ago I applied what would be an instantly lethal dosage and as you can see the patient remains fully motile. I’ll reiterate: that should have killed him. It didn’t.”

Clark tried to thrust his free hand into his pocket so he could reorganize the small change there. Unfortunately he’d left his coins with his uniform back at the entrance to the Bag. “Do you have an explanation for that?”

“I do, sir. The patient is already dead.”

Clark said nothing and eventually she continued.

“The patient demonstrates no vital signs at all. No respiration, no pulse. I can’t measure his blood oxygen levels because from what I can tell his blood has coagulated and dried up in his veins. He’s dead, by pretty much any medical or legal definition I can think of. What we have here is not a human being any more, but a zom-”

Clark stabbed the talk button on the intercom. “That will be enough.”

“Sir, with all due respect, we are no longer dealing with an outbreak of a traditional virus. A virus can’t survive in dead tissue! We need to complete rethink our strategies and—”

Vikram leaned in close to the intercom. “You are under my direct command, Doctor, and I will not have this kind of insubordination! I am shocked and appalled that you would talk back to—”

“He’s dead! He’s not faking it! Sir, I’ve run everything short of an MRI on this man and—”

Clark cleared his throat. The others fell silent and waited while he composed his thoughts. The only sound in the Bag was the crinkling rustle of mylar stirring in a ventilated breeze. He ran a hand across his forehead and then spoke in a soft, low voice he reserved for quieting panicked underlings on the battlefield. He stared hard at Sanchez, trying to find her eyes through all the plastic. “Soldier. What is your official report going to say? Have you thought about that?”

“Sir,” Sanchez began, but Clark merely held up a hand for patience.

“Is it going to say you spent the last thirty-six hours trying to sedate a man who was already dead?”

Burning defiance erupted behind her eyes. It stayed there and didn’t reach her voice. She was, after all, a soldier. She knew when she was receiving an order. “I… no, sir. It won’t.”

Posted by Wellington at 09:00 AM | Comments (12)