Chapter Eleven
GONE TO BIRMINGHAM “SAFE ZONE”, JIM PETERS AND THREE BOYS. WON’T BE BACK—HELP YOURSELF IF YOU NEED IT, LEAVE IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE IF YOU DON’T [Handwritten note taped to an abandoned car in Jasper, AL, 4/10/05]
“I touched his face with these fingers. His skin like beaten copper. His eyes were terrible to look upon. The water that had frozen me and kept me from the worm, for two thousands of years—th-there never was a thing so cold as those eyes.” Even as he relived the memory Nilla could see the religious awe that gripped Mael Mag Och and twisted his spine rigid. His face was the blank mask of the trance state, his eyes wild under their beetling brows. “He wore a mantle so fine, so soft to the touch that it lifted as the cold water stirred around me. Teuagh, he was, the Father of Clans. The judge of men. And he was angered. “Gheibh gach nì bàs!” he told me. Everything must die. Lass, do you believe me, that I saw him, that we spoke?”
“Yes,” Nilla said. She stood on top of an arch of red rock overlooking a million square miles of desert canyons twisting like the surface of the world had been rumpled up, bedsheets kicked sideways by the stretching, yawning upheaval of the Rocky Mountains. Coursing out of tiny holes in the rock, smoke, greasy and thick with soot rolled down the canyons in a flash flood of dark energy, from east to west, following the sun. It picked and tore at the rock, kicked up great spuming sprays of darkness, pushed onward, ever onward, flooding the world. She blinked and it was gone, just rock again, stained the color of sunset.
She’d seen lots of things since she gave in to Mael Mag Och. She’d seen her own reflection. She’d seen a world that hated her, and she’d seen why, and why she was allowed to hate it back. Why she was supposed to.
She’d seen how things really worked. How anyone could just fuck with you, any time they wanted. There was no stopping them and they could make your life hellish. Make you do horrible things.
“Teuagh is moving us, like the pieces in a game, and I doubt you like it much, I know I don’t care for it. Yet it’s a hard thing to move backwards on this board. It’s a painful thing to break the rules. You see, don’t you, how we’re made for this? How his hand molded the clay of us for this work? We can’t paint pictures, lass, not with these clumsy fingers. We can’t write poetry. But we can kill. Oh, we are made to kill.”
“Yes,” Nilla said. They were moving, moving eastward. The armless dead man moved behind them, easily keeping up. Against the flow of the dark energy—Nilla could feel it growing stronger the farther they went. Stronger and more angry. It raged against the world it destroyed, it bit and scratched and rent everything it touched asunder. It was inside of her, that darkness, and Mael Mag Och had become its emblem.
She was terrified of him. She needed him.
“There,” he said. He pointed to a place ahead of them. A place where the twisting canyons had been dragged into a semblance of order, into straight lines: a grid. Streets marking out square plots of land, tiny houses in the desert all pointing the same way. The city glittered on the dull desert plain.
It occurred to her that Mael was manipulating her. Maybe he was putting thoughts in her head. Maybe he was just using her the way people have used each other since the first dawn. But like a dream that feels so vivid when you hold it in your head, only to flee in every detail when you consciously try to recall it, she couldn’t make the connections.
“There she lies, the fortress citadel of Las Vegas. She’s stood longer than most, and I admire her for it. But all worlds must end some time. My world ended when I plunged into that dark water, a human sacrifice for the good of my folk. Yours ended with teeth in your neck. You know what you need to do, lass. For me and the Father of Clans.”
“Yes,” Nilla said, and headed down into the city of Las Vegas alone.
can u help?!? Got 3 ded outside, more on way. Plz, B4 2 l8!!1 [SMS spam message, Evergreen, OR, 4/11/05]
An old chart laid out in grid squares flapped across the wooden table, stirring up dust motes in the wan light of the office. “Here, gentlemen, you see the Potomac river. It is so wonderfully fitting that my new Army of the Potomac will be turning the tide on this menace. I’ve thought often of that irony, especially in draft revisions five and six, which seem to fit best with the current situation. Revisions seven, eight and nine assume an insurgence of anarchists from the Mexican border. I don’t feel that applies to us now, no.”
Purslane Dunnstreet’s botulin-paralyzed face couldn’t show the years of tiny strains, the pockmarks of decades spent crouched over situation papers and classified troop strength analyses and ordnance maps, all the years of being ignored in her fly-specked pigeonhole where the light coming through the window was the color of old tobacco stains and even the radio got bad reception. The frozen contours of her eyes couldn’t demonstrate the obsessive nature of her task, or the million slight frustrations the years must have brought her. The mental enervation of planning and planning and revising and re-envisioning and drafting and rewriting and compiling five hundred page reports guaranteed to be only glanced at before they were filed away in the Pentagon’s back hallways, in the White House sub-basements, but most of all, the sanity fatigue of just working at it, spending every waking moment obsessed with one singular idea that no one else ever took seriously—that strain could not manifest on her face.
Instead it came out in her fingers.
She touched her neck and sighed happily. “Honestly I was beginning to doubt the Dunnstreet Maximum Faith-Based Provisional Order of Battle would ever need to be invoked. I suppose the Boy Scouts had it right after all. ‘Be Prepared’, it really is the most essential thing.” She waggled her digits in the air and Clark’s stomach churned.
Thin, white, worm-like appendages, extruded lengths of flesh that twisted around one another in complex patterns. It was not enough to say that she wrung her hands in excitement as she laid out her Big Idea on the table before them. She tied her pasty fingers in knots, cracked the knuckles with a sound like mice being trodden underfoot, drummed her fingertips on the table so fast her French manicure blurred while Clark watched it dance.
“The New Citizen Army will sweep through here, and up through Georgetown, cutting off any advance. The city will be secured. And then it’s onward to New York.” A new map clattered across the table, blasting cool air into Clark’s face.
He shook himself awake. He’d been so mesmerized by the fingers he’d lost almost all the details of the plan. He had the gist of it, though.
Purslane Dunnstreet’s foolproof plan would have worked marvelously—against an invasion of Nazi stormtroopers. She wanted entire columns of armored vehicles stationed on the Beltway. She wanted to draw in every element of the military—regulars and reserves—that could make it in time to create a single overwhelming force to protect Washington while the rest of the country was left defenseless. She wanted constant overflights of D.C. with nightly bombing runs. She had provisions against insurgencies by Fifth Columnists and a contingency for providing disinformation to any spies who cropped up. She wanted commando raids on enemy strongholds and a network of resistance fighters to sprout up in the occupied territories.
Not a single part of her plan made any sense when applied to a horde of mindless, unarmed civilians who outnumbered the military units a hundred to one.
The infected didn’t send spies into your camp. They didn’t hold strongpoints or even beachheads. You could bomb them into paste and others would just flood in to take their place.
Clark glanced over at the Civilian, who was paring his fingernails with a tiny nail clipper attached to a keychain.
The Civilian must have understood the look on Clark’s face. He shrugged in reply.
When Dunnstreet finally finished her presentation she went to the printers and handed each of them a hefty document, still warm and redolent of ink. Clark leafed through his, finding hundreds of pages of information on how to deal with looters in a time of martial law.
“Your Operational Parameters Document, gentlemen. Please do not lose it. That would be a grave breach of national security. It outlines the powers you will assume and the tools and equipment you may requisition in the defense of freedom.”
“It’s like the Shaper Image catalog,” the Civilian gleamed, “except with more nerve gas.”
Clark flipped to the back of the document. A hefty chapter covered when he was and was not justified in using lethal force against healthy civilians. Basically whenever he wanted, he gathered. He just needed to know which code to use when he filled out his after-action reports later. Clark placed it neatly on the table, square with the edge.
He cleared his throat. “Thank you very much for that presentation, Agent Dunnstreet,” he said, rising from his chair. “I have some information I’d like to show you myself.” He clicked open the latches of his briefcase and took out the papers Vikram had prepared for him.
“I do so love raw data,” Dunnstreet announced, writhing her fingers together at her shoulder until they flew apart with a dry snap.
