Chapter Fifteen
mike oppenbach, fought gators and bears in his life but this was too much. he was a good man to have with us when it hit the fan. real handy with a gun and a machete and he never complained. guess that’s all i got to say [Eulogy carved into a makeshift grave marker, Emeralda Marsh, FL 4/16/05]
“Step right up, folks, this is no time for the bashful. All the money you give tonight funds further research; we also take medicines and pharmaceuticals of the illicit kind. One to a customer, it’s all you need. Guaranteed to keep you dead.”
Nilla sat on a bench outside of a CVS pharmacy and watched what was happening in the parking lot with a critical eye. She was in the right place—this was the main distribution point for the vaccine in Las Vegas. Her informants—a couple of teenage kids out after curfew and scared shitless of her brown cap—had not steered her wrong. Yet she couldn’t believe that so crucial a program could be run like this.
“He that believeth in me shall not live forever. Step right up. This little pill, this red and perfect ellipsoid, is the cure to what ails modern man. Thank you sir, please, tell your friends. One quick jolt and you’re safe forever. Step right up.” The barker stood six and a half feet tall and he was as wide through the shoulders as a professional wrestler. The waxed ends of an enormous mustache drooped from his face: up top he was going bald. He wore a stained baja shirt with bandoliers crossing his chest, sealed film canisters stuck in where rifle cartridges should be.
His associates weren’t as outlandish in appearance, but they had their eccentricities. They worked out of the back of a passenger van airbrushed with stars and moons and galaxies. Two men, one thin as a rake and twitchy, his head moving from side to side constantly as if he expected to be attacked at any time. The other pudgy and withdrawn. The former took the money from the block-long line of people waiting in the parking lot, while the other handed out thick capsules full of something sparkling and red.
“One to a customer, no greedy folk need apply. This is the love, the love you’ve been looking for. Who knew it came in pill form. Maximum love, step right up!”
Nilla rose from her bench and stepped into the sodium vapor glow of the parking lot’s lights. In the line of waiting people her appearance made soft explosions of whispering panic but nobody fled. It was the brown cap. It masked her dark energy wonderfully. People saw it and they knew why her very presence seemed wrong and frightening. She was one of the jackbooted thugs who ruled Las Vegas with an iron fist.
“Do not be alarmed, folks, everything is under my personal control.” The barker placed an enormous hand across his chest. In the orange light his flesh looked like cured ham. Nilla’s presence was a signal and he was receiving it calmly but with all due attention. She could see his shoulders come in slightly, his stance changed to one of wary readiness. It felt like she was walking to the gunfight at the OK Corral. “I will not rest,” the barker continued, “until each and every one of you is satisfied.”
The people in the line stared at her with open faces. Various fears chased each other through the furrows of their foreheads, the way they kept their hands shoved resolutely in their pockets. They looked like they were hunkering down against a dank and chill wind though the night air of Las Vegas was dry as a bone and late-Spring warm.
“I’m from the Chamber,” Nilla announced, to back up her one weapon in this showdown—the brown cap. “Who the hell are you?”
The big man placed a hand across his belt buckle and bent slowly toward her in a graceful bow. “I am he whose name was writ in water. I am the very model of a modern Major General. Some call me the space cowboy, while others refer to me as the gangster of love.”
Nilla squinted her eyes. “Fuck this. I can shut you down with one phone call, jerk. In fact I might just do it on principle.”
“Then call me Mellowman, the stoned superhero. I’m here to bring a little peace of mind to these benighted people. May I ask who you are, young filly?”
Nilla shook her head. “I’m from the Chamber. That’s all you need to know. You people, get out of here now. Don’t you know there’s a curfew?” She leered at the scared people in the line and they scattered like pigeons. “Now. I want to see your operation here. I want to know just what the hell you think you’re doing.” The bravado act she was putting on made Nilla’s nerves sing. She was no longer capable of getting an adrenaline rush but something ice cold and lethal blossomed inside of her and she liked it. Sure. For the first time in her death she actually had some power.
“Right this way, miss.” Mellowman or whatever the hell his name was gestured for her to follow him. “Welcome to the Space Van, my home that gets up and goes when the home I got is done and gone.”
“You’re selling vaccine, right? Does it actually work?” Nilla stepped around to the open back of the van to look inside. Bright red plush interior, crammed full of boxes and jars and rolled-up blankets.
“How about a free sample? Find out for yourself?” Mellowman picked up a box and slung it under his arm. Revealed below sat a jar full of the sparkling red capsules she’d seen handed out.
“Hey, dude, come on, let’s not do this,” one of his associates said, the thin and twitchy one. Nilla speared him with a glance. When she turned back Mellowman had one of the capsules in the expansive palm of his left hand.
Nilla wondered what would happen if she took it. Would it kill the virus or microbe or whatever it was that had reanimated her? Would she collapse in a lifeless heap? Probably it would do nothing. She picked up the jar and shook it. The capsules inside rattled with a satisfying noise. “Is this all you have?”
“Until we make some more. My aide de medecin over here, we call him Morphine Mike, he’s the man with the magic recipe.”
Wow, Nilla thought. This was going to be so easy. Trash the pills, kill the guy who made them. Mael would be satisfied. Maybe he would even let her go. She put the jar back inside the van and turned to announce that she was going to arrest them all.
She found herself looking into the twin barrels of a sawn-off shotgun. It must have been in the box Mellowman had grabbed. The black OO looked like the symbol for infinity.
“You stupid bitch. I’m on the steering committee of the goddamned Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know who you are, thinking you can come in here and rip us off, but you have made one truly dumb mistake.”
She had time enough to turn herself invisible but she panicked. His finger jerked on the weapon’s two triggers and she heard a noise like hell cracking open.
{fursuit19} is somebody there{fursuit19} hello
{fursuit19} hello
* fursuit19 HAS LOGGED OUT *
[AOL Instant Message transcript, 4/18/05]
The Blackhawk came in low and slow over the juniper-studded arroyos that surrounded the prison. Clark touched the Civilian’s arm and pointed out Pike’s Peak. As they drew closer he said, “Let me officially welcome you to the Big One.” He felt strangely proud of Florence-ADX—though he certainly had not built the prison, nor did he particularly like it. It had become his headquarters, however, and in a sense his home.
The Civilian looked excited. “Is it true you’ve got Pineapple Face there? You know, Noriega? And the Unabomber?”
“All the prisoners were removed in the first days of the Epidemic.” The Civilian looked disappointed, yet as they circled around for final approach it was Clark whose expectations were truly shattered. When he’d left the prison had been a safe, discrete structure, hidden carefully behind its multiple layers of unimpregnable fencing.
In his absence it had turned into a shanty-town. Tents and primitive shacks of corrugated tin had been erected in a wide semi-circle around the side of the prison facing the road. Narrow alleys ran between the ramshackle housing units and these were full of people in civilian dress. More than a few waved at the Blackhawk as it roared overhead. They looked healthy enough. There were children, too, and some animals: dogs, sheep, even a few horses. A stretch of rolling hillside had been cleared of vegetation and turned into a parking lot for dozens of vehicles. Not just the buses and vans of the convoy Clark had personally lead from Denver but smaller passenger cars, too, motorcycles and bicycles and a smattering of single-engine airplanes.
The Blackhawk set down on a pad on the roof of the prison where Vikram and Sergeant Horrocks were waiting to meet it. Vikram had his iron bracelet on and had added a new accessory, a strangely curved knife long enough to qualify as a short sword. Horrocks had dressed up in full uniform as if he expected Clark to demand an immediate inspection of the troops. Clark introduced the Civilian around and then gestured at the small town that had sprung up outside the gates. “Word gets around, I suppose. When did this start?”
“It is only a very recent phenomenon,” Vikram assured him. “But more come in every day. We do not let them inside of the fence but they don’t seem to mind. They know your name, Bannerman, and they expect you to protect them. We could hardly turn them away, you know.”
Clark shook his head. “This means new security issues, a whole new perimeter to keep secure, not to mention the health problems they’ll face without proper sanitation. And we can’t offer them any kind of medical care.”
The Civilian grabbed his arm. “Jesus! Who's a gloomy gus? Come on, Bannerman. You’ve earned this.”
He lead Clark to the main gates. Horrocks ordered for them to be opened and they swung out to reveal a gathered throng of people who pressed up close to the entrance as soon as it became clear. A man in a tattered business suit rushed up and grabbed Clark’s hand.
“Captain, I’m Jim Jesuroga. I’ve got to thank you—my family couldn’t make it on our own.”
“Let me kiss him!” a woman shrieked, a middle-aged matron with dyed maroon hair. She wrapped her arms around Clark’s neck and pecked at his cheek. Her children came up behind her, their eyes bright with hope, while others moved in, all of them wanting to get close, to touch him, to speak with him if only for a moment.
Clark spent nearly an hour among them, listening to their stories. It was bad, bad all over and the only way to survive seemed to be to get out, to get east. Since that was turning out not to be such a great idea (the dead were already in New York and Atlanta was overrun, he learned), the last resort seemed to be Florence-ADX.
When he was done he retired to the prison. The gates closed again and the Civilian came up beside him. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it? Being the hero of Denver and all.”
“I… suppose it does,” Clark admitted.
“Yeah, so you better not fuck up and get all of these good people killed.”
Clark blinked in shock. Something to keep in mind, he told himself.
END OF PART THREE OF MONSTER NATION
