Chapter Twelve
To: DarkGothKiller14@hotmail.comFrom: xxXHomerclesXxx@battle-net.com
Re: Mom’s Okay, just Scared
So stop calling all the time, k? No word from dad/step-whore but will let you know. Don’t come here, coz Ohio is bad, according to the tv. Stay put and safe, bro.
Peace out
ted
[Undeliverable email stored on server mail@battle-net.com, 4/12/05]
Clark laid a sheet of 11x17 paper on the table. It showed a map of the United States with Vikram’s spiderweb superimposed on top in various colors. “Our epidemiology studies produced this. A woman lost her life for it.” He met Dunnstreet’s gaze, then the Civilian’s. They had to listen to this very, very closely. It could change everything. “Originally we were working on an infectious disease hypothesis. That is, that the Epidemic is a pathogen spread by close contact with infected bodily fluids. We believed it began in the prison at Florence, then spread to California by way of a vacationing staff member. The chain of evidence looked good and we believed we understood how this thing works.”
Of course he had looked for a pathogen. It was what he was trained for: biological terrorism. He remembered how he had upbraided Assistant Warden Glynne for letting the prison riot go three days before calling it in. Glynne had assumed he was looking at a new and especially pernicious drug. Drugs were a major problem at the prison, so drugs were what he looked for.
Shame pushed up out of Clark’s collar and spread across his cheeks. He should have been more flexible, more open to other possibilities. Countless people had died because he had assumed the Epidemic had to be a disease.
“Then some very smart people thought to actually put the data into a spreadsheet and see what came out. What we see now is that this isn’t an infectious disease at all. Whatever it may be instead is spreading in a radial pattern, something no biological agent ever does. Instead it propagates like sound waves or radio waves, only far, far slower.” He pointed at some blotches on the map, places separated by hundreds of miles but which had been overrun by the infected on the same day, the same hour. “It’s emanating from somewhere here in the Rocky Mountains and spreading outward in every direction like a ripple on a pond. Nothing stops it, nothing can protect against it. Wherever the leading edge of this wave arrives, the dead come back to life and attack the living.”
“The dead?” the Civilian asked, glee lighting up his face.
“The dead.” Time to face facts. Desiree Sanchez had finally proved her point to Clark, and all it cost her was everything she had. Enough! Guilt wasn’t going to get him what he needed. “I don’t know what’s here.” He stuck his finger on the spot in the mountains that had to be the epicenter of the apocalypse. “But I know it’s causing this… disaster to happen. And I believe that given the right opportunity,” he stiffened his spine and stared into the middle distance. “Well. If something can be turned on, perhaps it can be switched off.”
“You think you can stop the Epidemic? You want to stop it?” Purslane Dunnstreet asked, sounding dismayed.
“Stop it altogether? The dead just fall down and don’t get up again, nobody else rises from the grave, we get around to the long and painful process of rebuilding?” the Civilian asked, looking greedy.
Clark folded his arms behind his back and nodded, just once. This was it. The last best chance for humanity and it could be done in his back yard with a handful of men.
“So you’re saying,” Dunnstreet said, very, very slowly, “that you don’t want to participate in the Defense of the Potomac.” She went to her charts. “I had a company picked out for you, especially, Captain. A company all your own.”
Clark’s face fell. After decades of keeping his feelings to himself, this was too much.
“Purslane, I think perhaps we’ve covered enough for today,” the Civilian said, rising from his chair.
“Captain,” Dunnstreet said, ignoring him. “I can understand if my battle orders frighten you. I can, truly, I know what it is like to quaver before a grand duty. I hope you will reconsider. Before you leave, though, will you do one thing for me? Will you pray with me for our nation?”
Without taking her eyes off of him she sank to her knees on the floor. She wove her fingers together into a tight, bony ball and looked deep into him with dewy, innocent eyes that sat in that porcelain face like raw oysters on a dish.
“Well, you two?” she asked. The Civilian grumbled and got down on his knees.
FULL UP—NO REFUGEESNo food, no water, no drugs, no money,
NO TRESPASSING NO SOLICITATION
Sorry, we’re closed!
[Painted on the front entrance of a DiscountDen superstore in Springfield, MO, 4/11/05]
As she wriggled through the gap below a chainlink fence on the edge of a golf course a sharp point of steel stuck into Nilla’s back. She felt her shirt tear, then her flesh. She grimaced—there was little pain, but she knew the wound would look terrible and she needed to pass for human. At the very least she would need a new shirt.
Nothing for it. She squirmed in the dirt and crawled through, onto immaculate bluegrass. She kept low and moved quickly across the green, knowing that if she was caught she would be slaughtered on sight. She was halfway to the clubhouse when a barking dog made her jump in her skin.
“Shut up!” someone yelled. “Shut up already! What the fuck’s the matter with you?” The voice came from just over a low rise in the course. Nilla dropped to the grass on her stomach and stopped breathing. The dog appeared on top of the rise, ears flicked back, nose sniffing at the air. A German shepherd, straining on its leash. She quieted herself as Mael had taught her and banked the fuming darkness of her energy. It was getting so much easier, and she could hold the darkness down for longer and longer periods of time. There. She was invisible. The dog pawed at the ground and whimpered for a moment, then kept right on barking.
Damn. It could smell her. She imagined sinking her teeth into the dog’s neck. How good it would feel. The animal’s golden life glared in the darkness and she wondered if it was thinking exactly the same thing.
“There’s nothing there, facewhore,” the dog’s handler said. A teenaged boy in a brown baseball cap and a tan windbreaker. He had his collar up to keep out the night’s chill and a lit cigarette dangled from his fingers. “See? Nothing. Now shut the fuck up!”
The boy yanked at the dog’s chain, viciously. The dog howled in pain but at least it stopped barking. Boy and dog both disappeared behind the rise again and Nilla let go of the death grip on her energy, sinking back into visibility.
In another minute she was at the front entrance of the golf course and she crossed the road with an unbearable feeling that she was being watched, that at any moment the boy would look over and see her running across the deserted blacktop. Her luck held out and she made it to the shadowy side of a house.
She was in. Excitement thrilled through her—or it could have been fear. She crept to edge of the shadow and looked out and down the length of a razor-straight road that intersected the famous Las Vegas Strip. The neon lights were still on. They filled the air around them with an incandescent haze, turning the night into well, not day, but something more like day than it was like night.
Rrright.
Fear. It was fear—it did nothing for her imagination.
Mael had a task for Nilla and she knew the penalty for refusing him now. There were rumors going around that Las Vegas possessed a vaccine against the Epidemic. Certainly the city had fared better than Denver or Sacramento or Salt Lake City. It was still full of the living, for one thing. Someone had to go into the city and find out what was happening. The armless dead man that Mael called Dick couldn’t perform this task. He lacked the necessary humanlike appearance. Mael couldn’t do it himself because he was merely a psychic projection and had no physical form in Nevada. Nilla had both of those things.
She didn’t dare disappoint him again. For hanging out with the kids in the Toyota, she’d been made to pay. Jason Singletary had died because she had disobeyed Mael Mag Och. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.
She looked down the street again, this time looking at the shadows. All the places she could hide in the midnight hour. She saw a doorway that had her name written all over it and she stepped into the moonlight, ready to hurry across the street as quickly as she was able. She got about three steps before she heard the dog whimper in pain again. She caught a flash of golden energy out of the corner of her mind’s eye and whirled to face whatever had stalked her.
“Excuse me. Excuse me, Miss!”
The teenaged boy stood not ten yards away, one hand barely holding the dog down from jumping on Nilla and tearing her face off.
Nilla froze. Jagged spikes of violence and the possibility of violence tore through her brain.
“It’s after curfew, Miss. Do you have ID? A driver’s license or something?”
Nilla turned slowly, a big, warm smile on her face. “I guess I left them in my other pants,” she said, shrugging helplessly. Act stupid, she thought. Not very difficult—she’d just completely blown her cover. She could fairly complain that she had no training in covert operations. “I’m just on my way home now, I promise.”
The boy moved to stand a few feet away and frowned sympathetically. “Look, Miss, you’re obviously not dead, I mean they don’t talk and all. I still have to see some ID, though. It’s that or I lose this job.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want that,” Nilla said. She stepped closer to him.
Ice filled up her body, ice cubes sloshing around inside of her like a cooler at the end of a long beach party. She felt her skin might just fall off, she was shivering so much. She stared deep into his eyes and saw that playing sexy wouldn’t get her out of this one. He had a gun, and the dog, and he was going to kill her in a second when he realized his mistake. He was going to see her dead energy and make the connection.
He was only a foot and a half away. She could make out every pimple on his face, she could see the pulse beating in his jugular vein. He was exactly the same height as her, she realized. She reached up and knocked his hat off, into the street.
“What the fuck did you do that for, you stupid bitch?” he demanded as he bent to retrieve it.
“I didn’t want to get blood on it,” she said, and grabbed him around the neck.
