Chapter Fourteen
SOS DAUGHTER SICK HELP ANYBODY[Message mowed into a field of corn in Iowa, 4/12/05]
It had happened so quickly, Nilla hadn’t really thought it through. Blood was everywhere. It had pooled beneath the boy, ruining his clothes. He stirred with a spasmodic movement beneath her and she felt his dark energy like an ice pack pressed against her flesh. Nilla recalled waking up in a puddle of her own blood. Not so long ago.
Behind her the dog barked up a cacophony of irritation. She wanted to enjoy the feeling the boy’s energy gave her, the feeling like she was alive again. The dog wouldn’t let her do that. She reached for its collar, intending to shut it up, and stopped herself.
Mael might own most of her soul, she decided, but not all of it. The dog had done nothing to hurt her. She wouldn’t kill it just for being annoying.
Still. The damned dog wouldn’t stop barking. Someone would come looking to find out what was going on.
She got up and she moved, taking the boy’s brown baseball cap with her. She thought it would shade her eyes and help hide her face. She moved quickly, almost running—faster than she’d been, more nimble than since the day she died. The boy’s life energy thrummed through her, his gold coursing down the wires of her nerves. She stuck to the shadows, trying to look inconspicuous whenever she passed through a patch of streetlight.
Behind her in the darkness the dog stopped barking. She heard gunshots—the boy. They had found the boy she’d eaten, what was left of him, and put him down like a rabid animal. She only hoped no one had recognized him before they started shooting.
She felt an irrational urge to go back and check. Stupid, she knew. She kept moving, though she spared a glance over her shoulder to see if anyone was pursuing her. Nothing there but dim shadows and the watery reflections of streetlights in dull windows, the orange pulse of a DON’T WALK signal that suddenly turned white. She turned around to get moving again and—
“Hey! Hey, you, come over here!”
Nilla froze in place.
Three men wearing brown caps stood at the back of a panel truck. The letters LVCC had been stenciled on the driver’s side door. Two of them men wore surgical masks and latex gloves. The other one was staring at her with hot eyes.
“I fucking told you, get over here! I’m not waiting around all night while you figure that one out, asshole. Come on.”
Nilla moved toward him. He had scars from a childhood illness all over his face and very long eyelashes. He had a gun holstered at his hip. If she didn’t act fast enough, if she didn’t strike hard enough he was going to kill her and even then, even if she took him down she had to worry about his two friends. This was it—the chainlink fence at the end of the dark alley. Endgame.
“Here,” he said, and shoved something at her. A mask and a pair of latex gloves. “You’re on Plague Patrol tonight. I don’t care what you were doing before, I’m three men short and I’ve got a schedule to meet.”
Nilla had no idea what was going on but she pulled the mask over her mouth and nose. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to see what she was through the thick paper. She fumbled with the gloves but managed to get them on somehow.
“Okay, up there, the balcony there. You take units B through G. It looks like it’s going to be a bad one, tonight.” A feathery thin layer of sympathy in his voice startled her. “St. Rose Dominican is already full up. We’ll need to take this bunch all the way out to UMC.” Nilla looked up and saw a split-level apartment complex with a red tile roof. The doors looked close together, each separated from the next by a single rectangular window. Blue flickering light came from most of the windows—probably the wavering campfire glow of television sets.
“I—I’ve never…” Nilla stammered.
“Christ, you’ve never been on Plague Patrol before? Well, it’s pretty simple. You go in there and you see somebody who’s sick, you drag them back down here and they go in the truck. They give you any trouble and I’ll shoot them for you. Think you can handle that?”
Nilla nodded, knowing she couldn’t handle it at all but also knowing she wasn’t being given an actual option. She turned away without further comment and started up the stairs to the complex’s second level.
“Jesus Fuck. The Chamber will take anybody these days, won’t they?”
He wasn’t talking to her. Nilla approached a door marked B and knocked. There was no answer but she could hear the television set inside blaring away so she knocked again, much louder. Finally she tried the knob and found the door unlocked. She stepped inside onto seafoam green shag carpeting littered with twists of paper tissue. Blood flecked some of them a dark rose red.
The tv played an old cowboy movie. John Wayne or somebody shooting two-handed from the back of a horse. Its ghostly blue light was the only illumination in the room.
Nilla moved through a filthy kitchenette—dishes in the sink full of dried-up rice grains, refrigerator chugging unhappily—and down a short hallway toward a bedroom. “Hello?” she called out. No answer, of course. The bedside table was covered in plastic bottles of over-the-counter medication.
Mael had mentioned “poisoning the waters” with Dick. Was it really this bad, that armed thugs had to cart off the sick to avoid massive outbreaks of disease? Nilla could think of few things worse than the dead coming back to life to devour the living. A widespread pandemic of disease might fit the bill.
She turned back the sheets of the bed, half-expecting to find a dead man hidden there. Nothing. She turned around to head out of the apartment. Maybe the next one.
Someone sneezed right next to her left shoulder. Nilla wheeled around and threw open the door of a linen closet to find an enormously obese man wedged inside. He wore a white t-shirt and a pair of striped boxer shorts and a look of abject fear. He also had a ten-inch kitchen knife in his hand, raised over his head as if he was about to bring it down and slice her forehead open.
Nilla froze—no time to subtract herself from the equation, no time to hide, no time to think. Her hands were up, open, empty and he seemed to notice that fact.
“You,” she said, the words bubbling out of her like swamp gas, “have got the drop on me, mister. Tell you what. I’ll run away now. I can’t go out the front, though. Is there another way?”
“Maybe.” He looked down at her. His knife hand didn’t move. “If you’re skinny.”
A narrow little window in his bathroom opened over a back courtyard. It was a good ten foot drop but there were piles of trash bags down there. The obese man helped by pushing her through the narrow opening, his hands pushing hard on her back and her buttocks until she went flying out into the darkness. Nilla landed with a meaty thud and rolled away. In a second she was up, collecting the brown hat that had fallen off her head in mid-flight. It was more than just a way to hide her face, she realized. The obese man had been afraid of it. It had to be a symbol, as respectable as a policeman's badge. A badge that allowed her to be out past curfew—and something that would scare the hell out of everyone she met. She adjusted it carefully, low over her forehead, and headed back out into the night.
I have about THREE days worth of food. We WERE starving before but with only my MOUTH left to FEED… if you find this I guess that means I’m probably DEAD… if you don’t find this I guess that means we’re ALL dead, and this is really IT for the HUMAN RACE [Diary inscribed on the circulation desk of the Harold Washington Library, Chicago, IL, 4/14/05, emphasis as per original]
The Civilian took a handful of valerian root capsules as soon as they boarded the military flight back to Las Vegas. He fell asleep with his mouth open minutes after takeoff and snored obnoxiously the rest of the way. When the captain called back over the intercom to say they were being kept in a holding pattern above Las Vegas Clark woke up his patron to give him the news.
Still half-asleep the Civilian nodded and looked out the window. “What’s the hold up?” he asked. Before Clark could answer that he didn’t know the Civilian offered to get on the radio and bully the air traffic controllers into submission.
“I don’t imagine that’s necessary,” Clark told him, and tried to get back to the paperwork he had called up on his ruggedized laptop.
Eventually they put down and were met at the gate by a team of men in brown caps with carbines slung on their backs. Both of them were forced to submit to having the inside of their cheeks swabbed and tested on the spot.
When the results came back one of the men looked down at his shoes and offered Clark his hand. Clark took it, out of simple courtesy. “I am truly sorry for the inconvenience, Captain, but we can’t take any chances right now. One of ours turned up dead—dead and walking, I mean—earlier today. Half his face was chewed off. It’s not the first time but this one’s a little weirder than usual and it’s got us all spooked.”
“Weird? How?” Clark asked.
“Well, there’s no sign of a forced entry, anywhere on the perimeter fence. And when you get dead people chowing on security personnel you expect to find a bunch of them but from all signs this was just one guy or whatever and our guy was armed to the teeth. Then there’s the fact we never found the kid’s hat. It feels like they’re trying to infiltrate our ranks or something. Impossible, yeah, I know, they don’t have the brains for that.”
All seven bones in Bannerman Clark’s spine went rigid at once. The girl: the notion tore through his brain like a howling wind. “At least one of them does. They’ve shown organized behavior before, too—that’s what happened to Denver. Listen, I’m way out of my jurisdiction here, but I think maybe I need to talk to your superiors about—”
“Yo, Bannerman, hold up there.” The Civilian moved in with practiced ease. He switched his overcoat to his left arm and got his right hand on the brown cap’s shoulder. “I’m sure these fine fellows have this thing under control. You guys work for, what, sheriff’s office, state bureau of investigations, what?”
“The, uh,” the brown cap stammered, “the Chamber of Commerce.”
“Small business is the backbone of this nation,” the Civilian intoned, putting every spare watt of power he had into the look of gravitas on his face. “Carry on, good man, carry on.” He reached for Clark’s arm and pulled him away. When they were out of earshot of the brown cap he hissed at his wonk. “We are so out of here. I’m not a very bright guy but I know one thing: when the local troopers start talking about weird and unexplained deaths, it’s a short walk to doomsville. Las Vegas is going right down the shitter and I am not sticking around to watch. Is that clear?”
“The girl may be here,” Clark protested.
“Yeah, and Wayne Newton might be doing three shows a night but you will not put me in danger for your personal obsession. Don’t cross me on this, Bannerman.”
Clark frowned. “Alright. Our chopper is waiting in the other terminal. I suppose we should get back to Florence.”
He had his orders.
He didn’t have to like them.
