Monster Nation

« November 2004 | Main | January 2005 »

December 06, 2004

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 The other pudgy and withdrawn.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

Posted by Wellington at 04:15 PM | Comments (10)

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.

Posted by Wellington at 04:14 PM | Comments (11)

Chapter Thirteen

From: BIGSkyPILOT (Moderator)

Re: Tips for Keeping Water Clean and Potable

There’s so much government spam now, isn’t anybody real still posting? I’ve only got power two hours a day now but I’ll keep the server running on generator as long as I can.

[Forum post from www.bigskypilot.net, 4/11/05]

“That woman is a lunatic,” Clark announced, between panting breaths.

The Civilian had recovered from the lethargy that had possessed him earlier and was leading his wonk through the crowded streets of Washington. His stated intention was to buy Clark dinner at “a really amazing titty bar I know just around the corner” where apparently the Russian waitresses barely spoke English and didn’t yet know you weren’t allowed to touch them. Clark was looking for a way to gracefully bow out but in the meantime he had to hurry to keep up with the Civilian’s long strides. Compared to the (erstwhile) laid-back streets of Denver, everyone seemed in a hurry in Washington.

“Oh, she’s nuttier than the combined scrotums of the Boston Red Sox. She’s also a close personal friend of the Second Lady. The Veep loves Purslane Dunnstreet and when the Veep loves somebody the SecDef loves them too, and as for me, well, I love everybody. It’s less of a timesuck than hating them. Come on, last one there buys the lap dances.”

Clark redoubled his pace and followed the Civilian into a dark, smoke-free den of booming techno music and strobing lights. A skeletal woman in a tight dress printed with hammers and sickles handed Clark a plastic martini glass. “O, Kapitan, my Kapitan,” she sighed, and dug her fingers inside Clark’s uniform shirt to touch his solar plexus.

While he stood there stunned the Civilian crammed in between the two of them. “You’re wasting your time, sweetheart. He’d rather be cleaning his own weapon, if you know what I mean.” He lead Clark to a bar at the back of the room where a number of suited men sat deep in conversation. A woman wearing nothing but panties and a Russian fur hat swayed back and forth listlessly over their heads.

“I assure you, the plan we just heard will fail,” Clark shouted over the music. The Civilian waved a finger at the bartender. “I’ve seen how these things fight. I’ve shot them myself. This woman’s ideas are useless to us.”

“Harsh words, Clark, from the great hero of Denver. You proved it’s possible to prevail against the dead, didn’t you? Not one man lost. You should be more proud of your accomplishments.”

The lights in the strip club dazzled Clark. He looked at the martini glass in his hand—it was dry.

“You’re supposed to fill it up at the bar and bring it back to her. That means you want to take her upstairs to the Martini Room.”

Clark set it carefully on the bar, out of the way of the dancer. He suddenly and pangfully missed the Brown Palace’s restaurant, with its nineteenth century decorum and its perfect slabs of beef. Gone now, most likely forever. With the rest of Denver.

“If anything,” he said, quite careful with his word choice, “I proved that it is possible for the most heavily-armed, best-trained veteran warfighters in the world to survive in the midst of these things, and that’s assuming they can bug out when things get too hot.”

The Civilian scowled at him, a cold, reptilian look that made Clark’s skin feel filthy. Clark had the sudden and repugnant thought that he was finally seeing the Civilian’s true face, the one behind the epoxied-on smile. It was horrible to behold. “You’re talking as if there were an alternative.”

“There must be! Anything would be better than that Dunnstreet’s suicidal plan!”

The Civilian gestured for a woman wearing a Soviet tank commander’s soft helmet to come and sit next to him. She pulled her dress up over her head and he leaned into her breasts, inhaling long and hard. “Nobody else has ever thought it through. I’m serious. No policy group, no strategic envisioning team, nobody at the Pentagon or West Point or OpFor or anywhere else has ever bothered to sit down and figure out realistically how to fight a war on American soil. It has always been unthinkable.”

“Nobody?”

The Civilian gulped at neat vodka while he answered. He seemed almost desperate to get as much alcohol into his system as humanly possible. “There have been wargame scenarios published, where Canada invades New York State, say, or France attacks with nuclear weapons. It’s all Dungeons and Dragons shit and meanwhile Purslane Dunnstreet was toiling in solitude, waiting for the big day, making the right friends, playing the game. Bannerman, sometimes you have to drink the Kool-Aid. You’ve just heard what we have planned, and you're one of us. Listen, I gotta go piss away all the Red Bulls I drank this morning. Keep the girls warm for me, will you?”

The Civilian got up and pushed his way through the crowd. Clark ordered a scotch and soda from the bar and sipped it in morose quietude. He studied the crowd disinterestedly with his eyes—he’d never been in a strip club before and he was only mildly curious as to what sort of person patronized them. Studying the customers was less embarrassing than looking at the staff, though. The sight of so much naked flesh made Clark blush.

He was not the only uniformed officer in the club, nor was he the highest ranking, but the vast majority of the men wore the black suits of career civil servants. He recognized several, or thought he did—he couldn’t see clearly more than a few dozen feet.

Clark managed somehow to be surprised when a young woman dressed like a Colonial era town cryer walked into the club ringing an enormous handbell. She had a clipboard under one arm and she read from it without much enthusiasm as she rang her bell. “Hear ye, hear ye, good people, it’s time to get your bets in. All bets must be placed by midnight tonight. Today’s deadpool is for Cleveland, Ohio. Double your money if Cleveland is overrun before midnight tonight! Hear ye, hear ye!”

Clark had blushed before. Now he blanched. He put his drink down on the bar and shoved through the patrons, needing to get out into the clean air. A completely naked woman with a red star tattooed on either of her nipples grabbed him around the waist but he wriggled free.

As he bumped past the reveling wonks of Washington he finally looked a few of them in the eyes and he realized what was going on. These people weren’t just jaded cynics willing to sacrifice the country for their own self-interest. They were suffering from threat fatigue, just as they had after September Eleventh. Too much horror that required your full attention, all of the time. Too much demand on one’s sense of gravitas and it broke, snapped, fell to pieces.

That wasn’t a good enough excuse, he decided. They needed to regain their composure and get back to work. But he wasn’t the one to tell them as much.

Out in the evening air he breathed deeply and stared up at where the stars would be if they weren’t obscured by the light haze of the Capital.

The Civilian spilled out of the door behind him, a dewy can of beer in his hand.

“There’s so little time left—did you hear? Cleveland is about to fall,” Clark told him, his hands tight fists in his pockets. “I have no doubt the Epidemic has already spread to Asia, across the Pacific. It will be in Europe soon enough and then it will have covered the entire globe.”

“A very wise man said something to me once. ‘Laddy,’ he said, ‘time’s only valuable to them that are counting it.’ I guess that means the dead don’t need watches. This is it, Bannerman, the big D, the big A maybe.”

Clark shook off the idea. “There’s a girl out there somewhere. In California, maybe, though I imagine she probably got out in time. She’s dead, but she can talk.”

The Civilian popped open his can with a noise halfway between a fart and a gunshot.

Clark went on. “Denver was lost because the dead somehow managed to organize their behavior enough to get over a ten-foot fence. Disease spread through the relocation camps far more quickly than any of our models can account for. There’s a deeper game at work here than we think.”

“And you can win it? I’m truly sorry,” the Civilian said, pausing to hiccup, “if you feel like you’re being shorted here. But tell me, how much should I trust a by-the-numbers Captain of the Guard who comes busting in here telling me that he and he alone can save the world? Come on, walk a mile in my shoes. Hmm.” He looked down. “I could use a shine, actually. Get ‘em shined while you’re walking in them, willya?” He giggled and nearly choked on another hiccup. “Seriously. I can't just authorize you to go bomb the hell out of the Rocky Mountains without some kind of justification. How am I supposed to sell this thing?”

“Well,” Clark said, feeling his heart pound in his chest, “I am the Hero of Denver.”

“George Fucking Washington’s ghost! I thought you’d never get the hang of this.” The Civilian held his beer out toward Clark in salute. “Oh, and I’m coming with you.” He smirked when he saw the look that brought to Clark’s face. “You think—hic—I want to stick around here and wait for Purslane to lose us this city, too?”

Posted by Wellington at 04:14 PM | Comments (16)

Chapter Twelve

To: DarkGothKiller14@hotmail.com

From: 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 REFUGEES

No 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.

Posted by Wellington at 04:13 PM | Comments (10)

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.

Posted by Wellington at 04:13 PM | Comments (5)

Chapter Ten

NO VACCINE, NO PEACE!!!! Sheriff’s Office in Clark County has some according to insider eyewitness but no plan to distribute to the people! WTF!!!1 If I was WHITE like YOU, could I have my innoculation then, OFFICER??? [“unDead Amerikkka” electronic newsletter, distributed via email 4/9/05]

Men with machine pistols and brown baseball caps patrolled Terminal Two of McCarran international airport in Las Vegas. They moved in teams of two or three. One of them lead a pair of Doberman pinschers directly past where Bannerman Clark sat, waiting for the next flight to Washington.

“They don’t have any badges,” Clark observed to the man sitting next to him in the cocktail bar. He sipped at his ginger ale—a little sugar always helped with his jet lag—and watched one of the dogs shove his snout into a trash can. “No insignia. Is this new?” He had never been to Las Vegas before, and was only there now because it was the last airport in the West that hadn’t been overrun. A military helicopter had brought him that far but lacked the range necessary to get him to the Capital.

The businessman sitting next to him hunched his shoulders, wrinkling his tweed jacket and looked at Bannerman with some surprise. “This is the only city in a hundred miles that isn’t crammed full of dead maniacs and you’re worried about identification? They’re private consultants. We don’t ask a lot of questions about them, and you shouldn’t either. Excuse me, I have a flight to catch.” He dropped a five on the bar and hurried off.

Who had hired the private consultants? The mayor of the city? Organized crime? It wasn’t Clark’s jurisdiction. Yet when he finally arrived in Washington twelve hours later (after an unannounced layover in St. Louis where he was not allowed to deplane) he found more private consultants at Ronald Reagan, though at least these wore some insignia on the back of their flak jackets: KBR. A man in a KBR vest with a long, fluttering mustache checked his ID before he was herded into the baggage claim, even though he had no bags to pick up.

At least the driver of the car that picked him up at the terminal was military—a regular army corporal with a stubbled dimple on the back of his head. In Georgetown the corporal gave him a snappy salute and indicated the door of a building Clark had never seen before. It was not the same building where he’d met with the Civilian the first time, nor was it anywhere near the Pentagon. There was no sign on the door except for the street number.

Inside he found what must have been a cheap hotel at one point in its life-cycle. It had been converted into office space, the rooms on the first floor broken down into cubicles, but it took Clark a while to find anyone inside. Finally a man in a buttoned-down white shirt lead him to a conference room and knocked on the door. Inside the Civilian sat silhouetted before dust- and fly-specked Venetian blinds, a fresh box of Marshmallow Peeps on the table in front of him. “Mission creep,” he said, and stuffed one of the treats in his mouth.

Clark removed his cover and stepped forward. “I have something I’d like to show you,” he began, but the Civilian’s eyes didn’t move at all. He looked deep in thought.

“Mission creep,” he said again. “Powell Doctrine. A million Mogadishus.”

Clark stepped a half-step closer. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“You’ll have to forgive me, Bannerman,” the Civilian drawled. “I’m coming down from my afternoon dose of hillbilly heroin. I have a bad back, you see. A really. Really. Bad back.”

He did not ask Clark to sit down, nor were there any extra chairs in the office.

“It’s a shame about Los Angeles. And, uh, Colorado, right? Colorado. They had some nice scenery there. I really need to re-velocitize. Hold on. Marcy!” he shouted. “Not even an intercom in this office. Marcy! I need my pick-me-up!”

A young woman brought in a tray and set it on the desk. It held a glass full of ice and a can of Red Bull. The Civilian ignored the glass and drank straight from the can. “Good of you to come out, Bannerman. I appreciate the face time. Listen, there’s someone I need you to meet. You ready? Need to freshen up?”

“No, I—” Clark looked down at his briefcase. “With your pardon, though, there are some papers I need to show you. This is crucial material.”

“I know that, Bannerman. I heard what you said on the phone. Now come on. I’m counting on you for my dead cat bounce. Did you know you were the only military type to come out of Denver without losing a single troop?” He held up a hand for patience though Clark had not interrupted him. “It’s definitely a shame about Sanchez. Read all about her, wish I could have met her. Come on. The person we’re meeting for lunch will want to hear about your papers.” The Civilian rose from the desk and headed out the door. It was all Clark could do to keep up.

He protested a few times that they should really talk in private first but the Civilian just smiled. Clark played along—he needed the man. He needed the authorization to put together the last two pieces of the puzzle. He needed satellite time.

And he needed to find the blonde girl. She would have information that he crucially needed. She would be the answer he sought. She had to be.

They moved quickly through the maze of the dilapidated office building, weaving through rows of cubicles and passing through two steel fire doors. Finally they arrived at a corner office in the third floor of the building. A keycard reader had been installed hastily next to the door, the plaster underneath broken and crumbling. The Civilian swiped a card through the slot and they stepped inside.

An aged woman in an immaculate business suit rose from behind a desk and hurried toward them. Her face was so slack and bloodless that Clark reached for the sidearm that he’d left in Florence.

“I’m not dead yet, Captain,” the woman said, her mouth an unmoving slot in the middle of her face.

“Botox,” the Civilian whispered behind his hand.

“This is not a town that respects wrinkles, not anymore. Special Agent Purslane Dunnstreet,” she said, and took Clark’s hand. Her skin felt as dry as paper. “Welcome,” she said, waving one skeletally thin arm expansively, “to the War Room.”

Clark looked around at the office, a cluttered room maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Paper in every conceivable form filled the room, stacks of it on the carpet, rolled sheets like scrolls stuck into actual pigeonholes, bound volumes squeezed into overloaded metal shelving units. One wall was lined with dozens of old grey enamel filing cabinets. A row of laser printers sat on the floor by the window, wired to a beige desktop computer. Page after page rattled through their mechanisms, filling the air with the smell of baking toner, more paper being created by the second.

“Agent Dunnstreet, meet Bannerman Clark, my favorite metrosexual. Clark, Purslane here is an old spy, one of the original Cold Warriors. I’ve never met anyone who hates Communists more.”

“Jesus has taught me,” Dunnstreet said, her frozen eyes piercing the Civilian, “to hate the sin, not the sinner. Communism is a perversion, a sick compulsion of thwarted self-hatred. Communists are persons, and as persons they can be re-educated, re-oriented, brought back into the flock. Most of them. The fact that this country is longitudinally trending Republican should demonstrate that much.”

“Yeah… anyway… she’s been back here since the sixties. She was, what, NSA originally? She was funded all through the Reagan years and then got funded down under Clinton. Except nobody bothered to check if she was still here. She came in day after day, her very existence so heavily classified the Dems didn’t have a chance of rooting her out, and kept up her lonely vigil. After 9/11 she surfaced again, or at least she chose to remind certain well-placed individuals that she was still here. Her particular field of expertise appealed to the DHS and she was rolled up under Ridge and friends… now we’ve reached a kind of tipping point and she has become one of the most important people on the planet.”

Clark frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What exactly do you do?”

Dunnstreet folded her arms across her narrow chest. “I deal in abstracts, Captain, intangibles that I keep in a ledger book and next to them I copy down numbers, as I may. I’m a hypotheticals modeler, a what-if specialist. For the last forty years I have been positing one terrible scenario after another, and plotting ways to deal with them should they ever arise. In specific I have been imagining a land war fought on the territory of the United States. This is Warlock Green, my masterwork.” She gestured at the printers humming under the window. “These are the operational parameters and legal instruments necessary to win such a war. It is a fail-protected strategy that I stand behind one hundred per cent.”

The Civilian beamed. “Warlock Green is a protocol for the end of the world.”

Posted by Wellington at 04:12 PM | Comments (4)

Chapter Nine

Q: I’ve heard there’s a vaccine available but the government refuses to release it until it’s been thoroughly tested. But we need it now!

A: In any time crisis there will be rumors that defy easy debunking but you have to assume that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. There is no vaccine. If someone tries to sell you vaccine, report them to the authorities immediately.

Q: My mother/brother/sister/lawyer was in California, in one of the relocation camps, on 4/8, the day they announced CA was overrun. How long will it be before we get some news out of the camps?

A: At the present time, we just don’t know. Every effort is being made to resecure California but for now all we can do is wait and pray.

[FEMA “Straight Facts about the Epidemic” website FAQ, posted 4/8/05]

“They were civilians. You can’t just pop American civilians in the head… it’s effed up. He was saying before it was just a disease. That there might be a cure.”

“Yeah, officers say a lot of things. You get used to it.”

Bannerman Clark opened his eyes and saw his uniform socks. He saw the place where he had darned a hole in the left one, saw the angular shape of his large toe beneath the thin fabric, like something carved out of soft wood. Someone had removed his shoes.

He sat up and saw them placed neatly by the side of his cot, lined up so that he could just step into them. They’d been polished and relaced.

“Some of them were kids! A lot… a lot of them were kids. They’re asking too much of us. First the draw-down, then stop-loss and mid-tour extensions and no freedom leave, and, and… what happens now? Do we stay here and pull CQ duty forever? Do we live here, in a prison, when everybody else is dead?”

“You have someplace else to go?”

Soldiers outside his door, trading gossip. As they had for the last hundred thousand years, since war was invented. Clark didn’t worry too much about their bitching. He’d had a staff sergeant in Vietnam, back when he looked to staff sergeants for his orders, who had smiled and showed a full set of very white teeth every time he heard a troop complain about conditions on the firebase or about the jungle patrols or how hard it had rained the night before. “A soldier with time to bitch,” he had told Clark, “is a happy soldier. It’s when they don’t talk at all you have to keep one eye on the back of your shirt.”

Sergeant Willoughby, that had been the man’s name. If he had a first name he’d never shared it with the likes of Clark.

He pushed his narrow feet into the shoes and tied them tight, his breath constricted in his chest as he doubled over. That was just age. Standing up carefully to avoid a head rush he looked around for his cover. The boonie hat was gone—his peaked uniform cover was back. A message from Sergeant Horrocks. Trigger time was over—the new duty was garrison duty, which meant proper uniforms and a more rigid chain of command. The elegance of the message appealed to Clark. A good platoon sergeant must be half Mussolini and half Martha Stewart and Horrocks was a very good platoon sergeant.

“They say troops are AWOL all over the Midwest. Going back for their families. Can you believe that? I thought about it in Iraq, I think everybody did—we used to talk about it after lights-out, made plans for it even. Nobody ever did it. You would have got shot.”

“You still will, don’t kid yourself. Keep your nose clean, keep your ass dry, keep your head down. You saw the bodies they pulled out of that trailer. Man, don’t talk to me about that shit. Don’t even look at me while you’re thinking it.”

Desertion? Had it come to that? Vikram would have more information. He buttoned up his uniform top and donned his cover. Time to get back to work. He felt strangely good, at least healthy—maybe all he’d really needed was a nap. He should feel shell-shocked, he thought. He should be wracked with guilt. He had just shot one of his own soldiers, and even if she was dead she had been—

Dead.

She had died, while he watched, and then she had gotten up and stumbled toward him. Of course, his rational side insisted, she had been infected, not dead. She had been covered in fluids and tissues from the infected man, the man whose brain Clark had, had shredded, so obviously she had been infected, even if—even if he had personally seen her bleed out. Even if he had watched her die.

He needed to think about that. He needed to consider all the implications. He also needed to put it out of mind altogether if he was going to continue to function.

“Shh! I hear him moving around in there, get your foodhole shut, alright?”

Clark cleared his throat discretely and opened the door of the warden’s office. In the corridor beyond the two MPs stood at attention against a steel wall painted in flaking tan. Their salutes were perfect.

“At ease,” Clark ordered, and they relaxed fractionally. “You two head down to the DCAF, if you’re hungry. I’m safe for now, thank you.” He turned the opposite way, toward the prison’s nerve center.

On the way he passed a window and was startled to see it was dark outside. Had he slept that long? Normally he woke like clockwork. In the prison yard soldiers with red lens flashlights were sweeping the open area between the fences. So far none of the infected—the dead—the victims of the Epidemic had wandered into the prison’s valley but it would happen. They might be out there even now, stumbling toward the warmth and the food trapped inside. He couldn’t see them in the dark, of course, so he hurried into the operations room.

Racks of server hardware had been crammed into the small office and the floor was a hazard of unsecured cables. All the equipment made it ten degrees warmer in the room, when added to the body heat of the half-dozen specialists plugging and unplugging the modular components.

At the far end Vikram stood before a massive flatscreen monitor. He was reading from a printout of an Excel worksheet while a specialist inputted coordinates on a wireless laptop. “Woods Landing, Wyoming. That will be, now, let me look, call it forty degrees thirty seconds north, one hundred and six degrees mark west, we do not need to be so exact, yes? Given our resolution? The date for this location will be March the Seventeenth. Oh! The day of Saint Patrick.”

Clark’s thin lips twitched in something reminiscent of a smile. His friend had a way of staying cheerful despite circumstances that had seen them both through many a losing battle.

“Still working tirelessly, I see, while the old man gets his beauty sleep,” Clark said. The specialist on the laptop turned away and looked busy, knowing he wasn’t supposed to be part of this conversation.

“It is the epidemiology data, Bannerman.” Vikram handed him the worksheet and Clark scanned it.

“Sanchez mentioned it to me before she was killed,” he assented. “It was what she wanted to talk to me about when she called me down to the Bag.”

“It was her crowning achievement.” Vikram tapped the flatscreen monitor to show Clark a map of the United States. Tiny dots covered most of the west in several different colors. Clark imagined he knew what they represented—every known appearance of the Epidemic. “She had learned, as did we all, that this is no virus, and no bacterium. So she went on the hunt for some other villain. And this is what she found.”

There were too many dots. Bannerman stopped scanning the screen and looked down at the paper in his hand. Each incident was listed with a place name and a date, with even a time of day listed for many entries. He flipped to the bottom of the sheet, to the oldest data. “This can’t be right. These dates… they go all the way back into last year, some of them. I arrived here in the middle of March, what was it, the eighteenth? The nineteenth. The Epidemic was three days old then.”

“Lieutenant Sanchez thought not so much. She believed it started earlier but that we missed the signs. Her notes are maddeningly vague and of course we cannot ask her what she was thinking.”

“What about her crew?” Clark asked. “Were any of them epidemiologists?”

Vikram nodded. “Three of them, good doctors all, but military doctors. She gave them orders and they followed without any questions. She let them know nothing of what she was doing—and that is standard operating procedure only. That is not the mystery. She had them look up newspaper articles, mostly. You remember the outbreak of violence last year that had the media so excited?”

“Yes, of course. I mostly attributed it to anger over the election. That’s what the the newspapers told me, anyway.”

Vikram nodded. “I have seen the clippings. I have read myself a story about a dog that ate its owner before it was put down. About a mother who tore her babies to pieces. Missing children. Serial killers. Bad batches of the drugs like PCP. Lieutenant Sanchez looked at these and many more and saw evidence of a larger trend." Vikram touched the systems specialist on the upper arm—the approved zone. “Please show him now.”

The screen filled in with what could have been a spiderweb or the root pattern of an ugly tree. Clark felt his breath leaking out of him. This changed everything. He reached for his cell phone. The Civilian had to know about this. Everyone had to know about this.

“It’s not a disease at all, I do not think,” Vikram said, rubbing his beard. “It is more like a radiation. Or perhaps it is magic.”

Clark shot him a warning glance and pressed SEND.

Posted by Wellington at 04:12 PM | Comments (8)

Chapter Eight

Virgin desperately seeking help before world ends, T/Th 5:00, tap foot [Graffiti in a bathroom stall, O’Hare International Airport, 4/18/05]

Dick stumbled through the door into cool air and just swayed there for a moment, glad to be out of the punishing sun, glad to have a soft wooden floor under his bare foot. For a moment, just a moment he felt the comfort of being in a place with square corners again. There were no memories in his head to be awakened, no thoughts of any kind but this perfectly simple, perfectly harmless pleasure. He was allowed to revel in it for just a handful of moments.

There were rules that had to be followed. This was a game. Dick’s universe had become a sort of game. It had rules.

“No—no, not now,” someone said from below him and it was over. The hunger raced up his spine and into his brain and he swung his head around, sniffing out whatever had made that noise. He stumbled against a table and metal crashed to the floor, bright sounds banging and crashing in staccato rhythm, turned and spun, the silvery grain of the wooden walls captivated him but no, he stepped forward and nearly trod on the very thing he sought.

Rule One: Dick will eat what Dick finds.

In a heap on the floor a nearly-naked man lay curled around one leg of the table, his head in his hands. “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, a sad, gentle smile in his voice.

Dick didn’t understand the words—words as a whole were lost to him. That was less of a rule than a condition of play. It was a relief more than anything. When people spoke to him he knew that they were trying to get his attention, that they were trying to communicate. He felt no frustration when he failed to get the point. There were rules in this world, but no decisions.

Dick sank to his knees. The food in front of him whimpered quietly but didn’t try to get away. Dick felt no pangs of conscience. Sometimes food ran and you had to chase it all day, the hunger dogging every footstep, every moment that passed an agony of want. When the food just laid there perfectly still, that was best.

He bent lower, bringing his mouth down toward the glowing energy of the food. It looked a little thready, a little dulled as if this food was already wounded but that made no difference. Dick bared his teeth and aimed for the food’s throat.

Stop now. Wait for my command.

The voice did not startle Dick, even though he understood it perfectly. The message was not made of words at all but of pure neural voltage. It slotted into his nervous system like a computer program loading from a disk.

Dick could more easily have stopped a moving bulldozer with his face than he could disobey that command.

Rule Two: Dick obeys the Voice. The Voice is the Voice of the Source. No further explanation is required.

The door opened again and an other came in. A shadow like himself, different in some way that didn’t matter. They were one and the same and that meant she was competition for the food. They both played the game. Dick had seen her before but he was incapable of creating new memories and uninterested in connecting any dots. He stayed where he was.

The competitor moved around the tiny room in a flurry of action, faster than Dick could move, much more agile. She picked up something heavy and metallic from a shelf and came at Dick, her hand held high, her weapon ready to smash in his head.

You want to destroy him now? A perfect innocent? The words were not meant for Dick. He ignored them.

The competitor snarled and held her hand in place, ready to bring the weight down on Dick’s skull. Dick felt no fear, though he understood what was happening in his own dim way.

Rule Three: Dick and death are old friends.

“He’s a killer! A monster with no mind left!”

You have more in common with him than you do with that sick, living thing on the floor. The only difference between you is that our friend here can’t be held responsible for his actions.

The opponent said nothing but she lowered her arm.

This is a test, lass. A test for you. No one will leave this dwelling until Jason Singletary is dead. You have some choices now, and I’m so sorry to force your hand but I have a duty to perform. You can let our armless friend tear out the psychic’s throat. Or you can do it yourself.

“No,” the competitor sobbed, a blurred sound like a shake of the head, like the sound of an avalanche starting to let go. “No.”

Nilla, someone said. It sounded like the Voice but even Dick knew it wasn’t. Did it come from the food? That made no sense. Luckily for Dick’s sake it didn’t matter. Only the rules mattered. That place, the fire in the mountains. Don’t get distracted now!

“No—I won’t,” the other demanded.

You have to go there—you are the only one who can!

Ignore him, the Voice said. You have to understand me, lass. I would turn away if I could. I cannot. Dick here and I have done such things… terrible things. Together we poisoned the waters, lass. We have sown a savage crop. But it’s not over yet, and we can’t rest. You are one of us. We need you for what comes next.

“The end of the world,” the other breathed.

We are the ones who end it. You, myself, and all the others like us. It has been decided by powers I am compelled to serve. You must serve them as well. Can’t you see it now? We’ve been given this curse by forces larger than ourselves.

“No, not me…” The other sounded pained. What could be bothering her so? There was food. She would be hungry, as Dick knew all too well. Why would she not eat? Even the Voice agreed. She should eat!

Rule Four: Questions run away from Dick like the ripples on a pond.

They were gone before anyone had a chance to speak again.

Nilla! The snow-peaked mountains! The fire!

Everything happens for a reason. You were made for a reason. You were allowed to keep some portion of your wits in your head. That makes you special. It does not make you immune. The Father of Clans has judged mankind and mankind has been found wanting. Someone must carry out that decree. Someone must wipe the slate. When it is done, Nilla, the world will be healthy again. It will be clean, and as beautiful as it once was. Do we deserve to remain in a world they have polluted? Do the powerful have a right to despoil, simply because they are powerful? There must be limits, lass. There must be a vengeance. Without the threat of a penalty why would a man not commit a crime? This curse is ours. We died so that others may be purified.

“This isn’t my curse. It’s not… it’s not mine.”

Lass. It is. But my masters are gentle, even as they are horrible. They’ve given us a gift, too. You and I, we aren’t like the others. We retain the ability to choose. And we are allowed, within some small latitude, to choose mercy. My friend here will kill this man in the most horrible, painful way imaginable. Or you can do it yourself, instead.

“…no, I… no.” Her voice was tiny.

She made herself small, falling to her knees, bending low over the food. Her face came very close to Dick’s and their eyes met. Dick had no idea what she might have found in his gaze. He saw only her dark energy.

The ever-burning fire!

We can wait for as long as you like. But that will just prolong Singletary’s fear, won’t it?

Her head moved, lowering her mouth to nearly touch the food. So slow. Dick understood being slow. It didn’t matter—you got there in the end.

Nilla!

Rule Five: Everyone follows the rules, eventually.

Posted by Wellington at 04:11 PM | Comments (10)

Chapter Seven

I’m sorry but the number you requested is not answering. If you’d like, I can keep trying, and your phone will ring when I get through. This service will incur a seventy-five cent surcharge. Press one now. [Automated telephone message, 4/10/05]

Nilla picked at a curl of paint on the side of the shack. It came loose in her hand and she rattled it around in her fist, then threw it away from her, out into the scrub brush by the propane tank. She couldn’t stand just waiting around but what else did she have to do? Eventually Singletary would give in. Eventually he would tell her what she wanted to know.

She heard him whimpering in her head, even through the wall of the shack. Begging her to go, to stay, to listen to him. He kept prattling on about his guilty man and some place up in the mountains—probably a hallucination he’d had from being out in the desert too long. She didn’t give it much credence, since he was obviously crazy. Her presence was terrorizing him but she knew she couldn’t just leave. Not without getting something first.

Nilla, the guilty man… you are the one he’s looking for… please, it’s all up to you… he moaned. The fire… it will burn up the world.

Rage spiked up inside of her and she felt him curl like a moth in the middle of a bonfire. Her emotions pained him, excruciated him, she had discovered. Normally she tried to get control of herself, to consciously calm down when he screamed like that. This time was different—she had run out of patience. She fed her rage, stoked it until it blazed.

“I’m not working for anybody!” she shouted out loud. Her words rolled around the canyon, echoing like rippling explosions but they were far louder in her head. “Nobody but myself. I am my own…” she struggled for the right word. Boss? Master? “My own… woman!”

The word you’re looking for is ‘weapon,’ she thought. No, somebody else thought that. It didn’t sound like something Singletary would have said.

It wasn’t me! he howled. Nilla! Don’t—don’t go up there! You have to listen to me first!

Images unfolded in her head. A landscape of rugged mountains topped with snow. A herd of huge animals—enormous beasts, reptiles lumbering across lichen-ringed rock. A ring of fire that spread outwards, rippling, engulfing the entire world.

It made no sense.

Singletary had been sending her those pictures for days but he didn’t have an explanation for them. He had received them from the last ghost that happened to pass by and somehow, she wouldn't understand but really, he knew he was supposed to pass them on to her. Because she had some duty, some sacred mission to perform relating to those mountains, those animals, that fire. Nilla had no idea what they meant, not even a frame of reference to begin to piece together their significance, if they had any.

“Stop that! You tell me what I want to know and then we can play any game you want. Stop mucking about in my head and concentrate on finding my name!”

His suffering leached into her and she felt her body shiver in the eighty degree heat. She could see him through the wall, or rather, she was so connected to him she could imagine him there perfectly. He was twisted on his plank floor, one arm constricted under his body, the circulation cut off. His back arched, drool spilled from between his lips. The pain was awful.

Then stop it, lass. Stop it forever if you find it so distasteful.

“Singletary, shut the fuck up already!” she screamed. The psychic was beyond understanding her, though. In his pain he didn’t even hear her.

I hear you just fine, love. Look up here.

She turned, slowly, beginning to understand, and shaded her eyes. On top of a ridge, not two hundred yards away, Mael Mag Och sat with his long hair blowing in a breeze she couldn’t feel. He raised one hand and waggled his fingers at her.

Nilla crossed the bottom of the canyon and clambered up the rock face beyond. She kicked off her shoes and used her bare toes to dig for footholds, clawed at the weathered sandstone. She didn’t sweat, nor did she pant for breath as she climbed upwards, always upwards, but she felt the strain in her dead muscles, the pull in her back as she hoisted herself bodily to where the naked man sat waiting for her, not moving an inch to close the distance between them.

“So brutal you can be.” He tsked her, looking like he had just dropped by for a social chat. She clambered up to him on her stomach, crawling like an insect, and just collapsed. “So angry. I suppose it’s understandable. The living have been so cruel to you, haven’t they? And now you’re willing to torture them just to find out a name that doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

She stared at him for a moment, unsure what to think. She was pretty sure that Mael was not at all what he appeared to be. “You have a better plan?”

“I do, lass. Would you like to hear it?”

She rolled over onto her back and lay staring up at the intensely blue sky, so rich in color it nearly turned to black at the zenith. “Your English has improved,” she told him.

He took it as a yes. “End all the anguish, finish all the sadness. Wipe out the violence and the depravity and the suffering in one fell swoop. It is a tall order, I’ll admit. Perhaps we can go one better: get them to do it for themselves.”

She hadn’t cared for Singletary’s nebulous refusals. She liked even less when Mael talked in riddles. “What are you?” she asked, sitting up, facing away from him. He wasn’t really there, of course. He was pushing himself into her head just like the psychic. It didn’t matter if she looked at him or not.

“A musician, once upon a time. And a politician. I was a sorcerer and a hunter, too. I wrestled with monsters in my day. I conversed with what you would call gods.”

She smiled weakly. Great. A Jesus freak. Or no, he had said gods, plural. A Hare Krishna. “Oh, I see. And what did they tell you?”

His voice softened. “Shall I be plain? They whispered to me in the dark and stillness of the forest that humanity is wicked. That men are born with evil in their hearts, and must expiate their corruption by deeds."

"Oh yeah? What kind of deeds makes up for somebody with evil in their heart?" Nilla asked. She wished he would get on with it.

"Sacrifice. Blood sacrifice, if necessary. The longer we go unredeemed, the steeper the payment. They told me that should the necessary rituals go unfulfilled and the good works left undone it might eventually be necessary to wipe out the human race altogether. For the good of the world.”

“That’s…” Nilla started, but she knew better than to finish.

“Crazy? I know you think it so. Your generation knows better. Your land doesn’t believe in gods. You believe everything just sort of happens for no reason, isn’t that right? You call that belief science. In my day we knew better. When the gods, especially when the Fathers of Clans spoke, we listened.”

Nilla stood up on the top of the rock and stared down at him. “Did you start the Epidemic?” she demanded. “That’s what I’m feeling here. You brought the dead back to life so they could kill all the living for you. I swear—”

“Lass, you’re confusing the author with the agent. I didn’t make this apocalypse. I serve it. As will you.”

She shook her head violently and started away from him, moving as fast as she could, walking flat-footed on the uneven rock. The sun’s heat, stored up all day in the rock, burned her feet but she kept moving. She wanted to get away from him, away from—

“You were created to be the sword in my hand. My weapon.” He stood before her. She hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t even seen him blink into existence there, he just… was there. She stopped short before she collided with him. “Why do you think your name was taken away from you?”

“Brain damage. There was no oxygen going to my brain so part of it died.”

He grinned at her. “That sounds crazy to me. Why would the Father of Clans bring you back damaged? He had his reasons, I can assure you. He wants to make this task easy for you. You have no attachments to the humans. They hate you—you may safely hate them back because you don’t remember what it is like to be one of them. You can do violence without guilt. You don’t ever need to question your own motives. What a gift you have been given!”

“Christ! I’m not some kind of evil undead warrior! I don’t want to hurt anyone!”

“Except Jason Singletary.” Mael place a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. The touch felt good—it had been a long time since anyone had touched her—but she shrugged it away. “I’ve seen through you, Nilla. You would have shaken him till his teeth rattled in his mouth if it would have gotten you a name. And what about those children? You lead them right to their deaths, even after I warned you to stay apart from them.”

She took a swing at Mael, her hard fist tight as a muscle cramp, but the blow met no resistance. She felt a clamminess in the air but there was no connection. She reached out and grabbed for his throat but her fingers just disappeared into his flesh as if she had stuck her hand into a column of smoke.

Nilla threw her hands up in disgust and turned around, heading back the way she’d come.

“His life has been one of torture. He’s been in pain since he was a child. Your heart didn’t go out to him, though. You were willing to use his pain. You wanted to make him hurt more.”

“And that’s a good thing?” she demanded. She was not surprised when she found him standing in front of her again. She tried walking right through him but he grabbed her shoulders and stopped her dead in her tracks. “You want me to do that, to hurt him?”

“Lass, you haven’t been listening. I want to stop his pain.” Mael glanced down into the canyon, toward the weathered shack. “I want to take it all away.”

Nilla looked too and her eyes nearly bugged out of her head. A dead man stood on the doorstep of Singletary’s little home. The dead man with no arms. With his head the corpse butted open the door and stepped inside.

She nearly broke her neck racing down the side of the rock.

Posted by Wellington at 04:10 PM | Comments (14)

Chapter Six

Mood: Pissed Off!

Listening to: Slipknot, Wait and Bleed

yo ‘sup, we’re still here cause the road south is closed and brian thinks its no good in Canada, either, he’s so fucking smart, he thinks excep then wheres his girlfriend?…I would have protected my woman, true dat, I would lay down all I had for her I dunno. We got three big water jugs, and I filled up the tub last night, its not clean I guess, maybe well leve before it comes to that, if brian gets off his stupid ass.

[Livejournal update for user PiramidHed, 4/9/05]

The infected man on the gurney had been cut down to an obscene minimum of humanity. His face had been carved off, as well as the front of his skull. His brain sat like a shriveled piece of fruit in a bone bowl. Much of his chest had been removed—skin, sternum, musculature—to reveal his heart and lungs. Neither of them moved. Yet his fingers twitched and clenched, his toes writhed as the First Lieutenant prodded a long white curve of nerve tissue with a pair of forceps.

“They aren’t using most of their organs. Their blood is dried up in their veins. They digest their food… somehow, and they excrete wastes. Noxious waste. What you’re looking at, though—it isn’t human. It’s a nervous system that has failed to die.”

Desiree Sanchez had doffed her level four biosafety suit. Inside the Bag she wore an apron and a pair of heavy work gloves over her uniform. She had a pair of plastic goggles for eye protection but they were pushed up on her forehead. Splatters of human tissue and clotted blood covered her from head to toe but she wasn’t even wearing a filter mask.

“Lieutenant, I believe we spoke before about the patient’s hypothetical morbidity.” Clark held onto the intercom box, ready to interrupt her if necessary.

“Sir, yes, sir,” Sanchez said, and blew a stray hair out of her eyes. “I just don’t know how this man could live through what I’ve done to him. I mean, this isn’t an alternative lifestyle. This is a complete physiological change.” She dropped the forceps into a bloody instrument tray. Clark heard the clatter even through the multiple layers of thick plastic curtain between them. She leaned on the gurney and closed her eyes for a moment before going on. “I’m at the end here, there’s nothing I can do short of torturing this man pointlessly in the name of science. There’s another avenue of research I've been pursuing, though—the epidemiology of this thing. I think… that… that…”

Sanchez’ face went blank and a pained croak belched out of her mouth. Alarmed, Clark reached for his firearm even before he knew what was happening to the woman. It wasn’t there—he’d put the Baretta in his desk drawer and forgotten about it.

“Get—get off,” Sanchez mewled. Clark looked down and saw that the infected man had wrapped grey fingers around her wrist. “Get off me,” she shouted, and grabbed with her free hand for the instrument tray. It was just out of her reach. Her eyes sought his through the plastic.

Clark lacked so much as a pocket knife. He couldn’t get through the safety plastic with his fingers—he would have to go around. “Hold on, Lieutenant,” he said through the intercom box, then dashed out of the room. He whipped out his cell phone and called for help—for anyone.

Outside the Conex trailer the sun was very, very bright. Clark hurried around the side of the shipping container and pushed in the other end through a zippered wall, then through a decontamination station. An automatic shower pelted him with scalding hot water and he threw his arms up around his face, his eyes burning with antiseptic. Behind him he heard boots crunching gravel—too far away, he was the only one close enough to respond. He pushed through the inner air lock, heedless of the whooping alarms that told him he’d failed to close the outer door.

Inside in air that smelled of decay and horror he wiped soapy water out of his eyes and tried to get his bearings. He found himself standing next to the gurney, on the far side from Sanchez. The infected man had torn loose the restraints on his wrists—he sat upright on the table, both of his hands clutching at the squirming biowarfare expert. The exposed brain slouched forward across the decimated face, dangling on its spinal cord. My God, Clark thought, how is that possible? He grabbed for the instrument tray, looking for anything that might be a weapon. He came up with a gore-caked scalpel and tried to stab at the infected man’s wrists but Sanchez kept writhing around, trying to break the iron grip. There was no way to guarantee that he wouldn’t stab her instead.

“It’s—it’s alright,” she said to him, “I’m sorry I scared you. He can’t hurt me—he doesn’t have a mouth, so how can he bite me? Really, Captain, I—”

The infected man released her wrist and plunged his fingers into her throat, the thick, jagged nails sinking deep into her flesh. Clark jabbed at the specimen’s wrist, trying to cut the tendons there but even as he connected hot, red blood sluiced down his forearm. Sanchez's blood. The infected man had found her jugular vein.

Clark dropped the scalpel and rushed around the side of the gurney, intent on getting his own hands around Sanchez’ neck to stop the bleeding, knowing it was too late. He caught his hip on the metal edge of the table and felt pain blossom through his thigh. The infected man let go of Sanchez and she staggered backwards, blood pouring from her throat like wine from a bottle.

She didn’t look so much frightened or pained as curious. Clark wondered—was she a good scientist right up until the end? Was she approaching her own death with a burning desire to know what it felt like, to see what happened next? She didn’t so much fall to the metal floor of the Conex as collide with it.

Something in Clark’s body contracted as if he were having a heart attack or a stroke. No—it wasn’t him at all. The infected man had grabbed him in both hands and was trying to pull him close. He whirled to face Sanchez’ killer and saw two MPs come rushing into the room. They raised their pistols to shoot at the specimen. “No, no!” Clark ordered. “There’s bottled oxygen in this room!” The firearms dropped at once.

The infected man tightened his grasp, his fingers cold against Clark’s arm and stomach. The determination in his arms was nothing short of extraordinary. Clark stared into the gray folds of his brain and wondered where he got that resolve. He reached out with his own hands and took hold of the man’s frontal cortex. It was softer, much softer than he’d expected it to be and far less slimy. He shredded it like a head of lettuce.

The fingers weakened where they touched him and then they stopped moving altogether. The cut-down man fell backwards, what was left of his skull colliding noisily with the metal edge of the gurney.

The MPs came closer and Clark waved them away. They huddled over Sanchez, probably trying to determine if she was actually dead. Clark staggered toward the airlock, intent on getting some fresh air. He could barely believe what had just happened. Florence ADX was supposed to be a fortress, an impregnable stronghold in this new and horrible war. If death could come for them even inside of its barbed-wire fences and dog-patrolled perimeter, then where was safe? Did such a thing as safety exist any more?

Before he could switch off the automatic shower in the airlock—he was already drenched with soap, suds filling his mouth and nose—he heard one of the MPs grunt from just behind him and the other one took his arm. What was happening?

“Beg pardon, sir,” one said. His eyes were very, very blue. Clark blinked. Why were they holding him up? “You looked like you were about to fall.”

Legs—Clark’s legs—stretched out before him, connected to him only in the most metaphysical sense. His body reeled, his head was wrapped in felt. He had hit the wall. There was only so much fear and exhaustion a man in his sixties could handle. Fighting himself he regained control. He was more afraid of further humiliation than he was of exhaustive collapse.

“Yes, soldier, I see that… I’m fine now, though, so—”

Metal clashed to the floor behind them, a bright, jangling, piercing sound. Clark turned his head and saw Desiree Sanchez standing up. Her neck had ragged holes in it. She had knocked over the instrument tray: one scalpel had fallen into her foot and stood there quivering, sticking out of her uniform shoe. The goggles had gotten themselves wrapped around her ears in such a way that they occluded one of her eyes. The other one was blank. Her mouth opened, showing teeth stained with blood.

Clark reached down and grabbed at the belt of the blue-eyed MP. Ignoring his own order he came up with the soldier’s weapon and fired one shot right through the middle of Sanchez’ head. For the second time in as many minutes she fell to the ground, lifeless.

“I’m going to retire to my room now,” he told the younger men standing with him. “I think I need to get some sleep.”

Posted by Wellington at 04:10 PM | Comments (12)

Chapter Five

JESUS IS COMING

to eat your leg

[Graffiti in an Arby’s men’s room, Grand Rapids, MI 4/8/05]

Florence-ADX sat in the middle of a bowl filled with scrub grass. No trees grew in the fields around the prison, just rocks and weeds, nothing tall enough to hide a fugitive. The prison itself sat low on that empty ground, most of its bulk hidden under the earth, an animal digging itself into the soil against the threat of all that empty blue sky. The clouds overhead shot past on winds that tore them to pieces as they came howling down out of the mountains.

Clark rolled into the Supermax prison at the head of a convoy sixty vehicles strong. Deserted and besieged in a dying land the place looked more spooky than he would have liked—the refugees in his minivans and big rigs had been through a lot already and he hated to deliver them to such a frightening place, but there were no alternatives. He didn’t have time to find another safe location to build a relocation camp. Clark nodded in approval when he saw what had been done in his absence—at least the place had been cleaned up, the dogs put back to work controlling the perimeter. The trailers that constituted Desiree Sanchez’s domain, the Bag, had been moved inside the second tier of fencing, where they would be safe.

The man who had implemented those changes, Vikram Singh Nanda, waited for him at the main gate of the prison. Clark detached Horrocks to square away the men and get them started on their AERs. He greeted his old friend with a brief hug. Something clattered against the epaulets of his uniform and he lifted Vikram’s wrist to get a good look. The Sikh Major wore a hammered steel bracelet on his left wrist. Not regulation, not by any means.

“It is my karra, a sign of my bondage to the teachings of the ten gurus,” Vikram explained, looking almost sheepish. “I do not… normally wear it, though I should.”

“Trying to get right with your God,” Clark muttered, and clapped his friend on the shoulder as he headed inside to the warden’s office. As requested someone had installed a cot and a dedicated communications terminal, a laptop that connected with Washington via a secure satellite network. He intended to spend a lot of time in the small room.

He sat down in the leather chair behind the desk and placed his sidearm in a top desk drawer. He steepled his fingers in front of him and then it all hit at once.

Bannerman Clark had gone for a week with little more than catnaps and cold noodles for sustenance. In that time he had fought a war.

He had butchered civilians.

Innocent, sick civilians who desperately needed medical care and basic services.

He had fought and strived against the unarmed citizens of the United States.

And he had lost anyway.

A cold emptiness like the void of space between galaxies opened up in his stomach and it went all the way down. He was empty, physically empty so that a slight wind could have come along and blown him away. The weariness in his arms and legs turned to paralysis and the buzzing in his head, the grinding, whining buzzsaw headache he always felt during combat operations unfolded into an entire machine shop of torment. Every moment of the battle for Denver waited there, separated and dissected, awaiting his careful analysis. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, going over these factoids, these isolated decisions from the fray. Just as he continued to think through and re-think every battle he’d ever participated in. Most of them he had won, with relatively little loss of life. Those were easy, just logistics reports, lists of numbers and names, so many bullets fired here, so much materiel consumed there. The ones he had lost were the same except the lists of names had ghosts paper-clipped to them.

Something other than a ghost came with this action. The girl. The blonde girl who had to be the key to the Epidemic. She had escaped while he was busy with the WOFTAM of trying to defend a doomed city.

Clark had never believed in something so strongly before, but he believed that the girl was the answer he sought. The answer to why this was happening, and the answer to how to stop it. She was the one piece of the puzzle that didn't seem to fit, the one person who was neither on this side nor that, which meant she had to be more significant that she appeared. She had never been farther away from him.

Vikram stood before the desk, looking anxious but smiling. Always smiling. Clark had not heard his friend come in, did not know how long he had been standing there. Vikram was a veteran, though. He would understand the intensely personal malaise one fell into following a bad action.

Clark stared at the bracelet on his friend’s wrist. The current calamity had driven Vikram closer to his deity. “You’ve never doubted the existence of God for a moment, have you?” he asked, the words swimming out of him as if he were at the bottom of a cold, dark lake.

Vikram straightened up to a considerable height—he’d already been at attention but he found some more backbone somewhere. “The teachings of my faith require me to never have dealings with one who has no faith in some manner of god,” Vikram said in a proper, clipped tone. “This could prove difficult in our line of work. What should I do if my commanding officer was an atheist? I have asked myself this question many times. In the end I have chosen to follow a strict policy where it comes to religion. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Clark grinned and it felt very, very good. He didn’t examine why he wanted to laugh so much, he just gladly accepted it. He'd been doing this for decades and he knew when you were down in that hole and a rope appeared, you grabbed it. “I’m way outside of my jurisdiction, here. This has become a joint duty assignment. Because of my special position as a, a policy expert,” he couldn’t bring himself to use the Civilian’s term: wonk, “I’ve been prevailing on your good counsel despite the fact that you outrank me. If you want to jump ship now you’d be well within your rights.”

“Not until the hurly-burly’s done, my friend,” Vikram said. “Let me rephrase: not until it is done, sir.” And that was that. “I have a situation report all in preparedness, should you care to hear it.”

Clark did not care to hear it. He had feasted on enough bad news to choke him. No, he thought, not now. “Alright,” he said. “No time like the present.” Sometimes you had to keep going in life no matter how awful you felt. Sometimes sheer obstinacy was the only thing for it.

“Colorado is under martial law. The cadets of the Air Force Academy were armed and mobilized until they were relieved. Reinforcements of regular Army troops, namely the 82nd Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division, are doing what they can to secure the state. This amounts in the most to blocking all the highways leading out. The interior of the state, by all accounts, is without governance.”

Clark had pretty much seen that for himself. He nodded.

“Nevada and Utah have both declared state-wide disasters but the relevant authorities remain in control. I spoke with a very nice radio operator in Salt Lake City and he told me that large parts of the city are quarantined but they believe they can hold the infected back from the central region. California is gone.”

Clark opened a box of pens he had found in one of his desk drawers. He had been arranging them in a pen holder while he listened. He stopped and set down the pen holder carefully on the edge of the desk blotter. “What does that mean? Los Angeles or San Francisco?”

“I mean that the entire state has stopped communicating with the outside world.” Vikram didn’t shift on his feet, didn’t so much as blink. “It was a gradual process, of course, and did not happen all and at once. Until this morning there still were units of the Marine Corps in Sacramento who I could speak with, though they were very busy. The last I heard was that they were expecting reinforcements from the sea—a carrier group, called in to help maintain order. Then silence only.”

Insanity. Bringing in sailors to do the job of soldiers. The Navy trained excellent warriors but it gave them little experience in dealing with threats while onshore. The desperation in the plan was obvious. Clark wondered if he could have come up with anything else.

“The infection has spread as far east as Ohio. We expect to hear about Pennsylvania in a few hours—there have been isolated reports of infection in New York City, whole neighborhoods under quarantine. The overseas picture is murky at best but we know that both Mexico and Canada have mobilized troops and that they are asking for help we cannot currently provide.”

Clark nodded. He picked up the pens again and started sorting them by color. “Bad, bad, bad, worse. So. We need to find out what to do next. Are you in contact with the Governor right now?” He dropped the pens in their cup one after the other. “Normally I would take this time to liaise with the Adjutant General of Colorado but he, I happen to know, is dead.”

“The Governor is not available, I’m afraid. His current whereabouts are unknown.”

“Alright, so find me a General somewhere. Or a Colonel. Somebody who can give me an order.” Vikram shook his head. “A Lieutenant Colonel? I’ll take a Major.”

“I am saying that in the whole of the COARNG, I cannot find an officer that outranks your good self. I think you are it.”

Not possible and yet… many of the best officers in the Guard, and therefore the highest ranking, were deployed still in Iraq. Many more had died in Denver. Was it possible that not even a single Major had survived? Well, there hadn’t been that many to start with.

The implications, however, were devastating. If a mere Captain was in charge of the Colorado Guard… well, at least he had his masters in the Pentagon. “Alright,” he said. He placed the pen holder at the top of his desk, on the left side, then moved it to the right. It looked better there. “Alright, we’re tucked in here. If I have to be in charge I’m going to at least get a night’s sleep before I start barking at people. Unless there’s something more you need to tell me,” he added, seeing the look on Vikram’s face.

“Bannerman, there is more to tell but I think it is better if you should see it for yourself.”

Clark raised an eyebrow.

“First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez could use a moment of your time. Down in the Bag,” Vikram explained.

Posted by Wellington at 04:09 PM | Comments (11)

Chapter Four

US slouches toward Martial Law, Conspiracy Nuts Everywhere Cream their Jeans

The Att-Gen asking for extra powers, well, what else is new. But with the Army pretty much owning half of the Western US already and security inside the Beltway making every trip to Starbucks into a fun-filled lightning round of “name that gun” this is starting to look like the real deal. Brr.

[blog entry, wonkette.com, 4/9/05]

Nilla perched on the edge of a hand-made wicker chair, her hands on the table. The bald man twisted the can opener a final time and put a tin of potted meat down between them. It looked like cat food.

“I’m, uh, I’m Jason Singletary.” He showed her an expanse of brown and ugly teeth. She supposed it was a smile or something.

“Nilla,” she said.

“I know.” He stepped back from the table and moved his hands in front of him, touching his fingers together as if he was counting. “I know a lot of things about you. I know what your purpose is, I think. There’s a lot to discuss.”

Nilla frowned at him. This was nonsense. How could he know her name? She’d never seen him before in her death. If he’d known her during her life he still wouldn’t know the name she’d chosen for herself. He was lying.

He could see her when she was invisible, of course, which meant that maybe he had sources of information that weren’t readily available to her.

She ran a fingertip across the puce surface of the potted meat and touched it to her tongue. She couldn’t deny it was tasty. It had been flesh once, after all. She dug in with a much-dented spoon he provided and started eating. “Why do you live—” she began, intending to ask him why he lived in such a lonely place, but he reacted as if she were shouting right in his ear, wincing away from her words, clutching at his head with both hands. He dashed into the tiny house’s kitchenette and grabbed a roll of tin foil, which he wrapped around and around his head until it formed a tight, shiny skullcap.

“Sorry, what was that?” he asked.

“I… was going… to ask,” Nilla said, trying to keep her words soft and slow, “why you lived all the way out here. In the middle of the desert.”

He nodded happily. “Nevada has the lowest population of any of the fifty states,” he told her, reciting something he’d read in a book in school by the sound of it. “There’s a lot less chatter. I call it chatter, like the background transmissions they pick up on their radios, radio operators, they call that chatter.”

He stepped backward, colliding with the wooden wall of his shack.

“I’m, well, psychic,” he told her.

“No, really,” Nilla said, digging with her finger for the last shreds of meat in the bottom of the tin. She couldn’t remember eating it, frankly, it had gone so quickly and—

Yes, really, she thought, interrupting her own train of thought. Which should have been impossible, she pondered—after all, nobody could think of two things at once, and therefore, I really am psychic. This is me you’re hearing. It just sounds like your own inner voice.

Nilla stared up at him, trying not to think of anything. That’s impossible, I’m afraid. You’re always thinking about something, no matter how abstract or banal. The mind can’t just stand still. It has to keep moving or it dies. Like a shark. Sharks suffocate if they stop swimming.

“Don’t do that again,” she told him. “It’s very disconcerting.”

“Imagine how I feel,” he said out loud. “I have that—all of that, that noise in my head, except, it’s all the time, it’s, it’s, it’s… it’s very difficult having you here. I’m sorry but it has to be said. I thought, well, with your memory condition maybe, maybe just maybe you’d be less, oh God, less noisy, but but but but you’re just full. Full of questions. I’ve been living here a very long time. I get everything I need through the mail. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in twenty years.” As he spoke he kept scratching the skin around his eyes and the top of his nose as if something in his head was trying to get out. Nilla stared at his hands and he dropped them to his sides.

She looked around the one-room shack for the first time, really, actually studying how Singletary lived. She saw his bed in one corner, a utilitarian cot covered in old, tattered magazines and a box of tissues. She saw his stove, a rusted white box that sat well away from any of the walls, and the shelves above it filled with tin cans. She saw the orange bottles that pills come in everywhere, scattered underfoot, lined up neatly on the edge of the table, interspersed with the stored food. She picked one up and studied its label.

TEGRETOL (Carbamazepine), 1600 mg. Take three times daily with food.

“That’s for the, the, the seizures,” he sputtered, taking it away from her. “I have some canned tuna fish, would you like that?”

“Yes,” Nilla said. She studied him as he moved around the side of his house that might be considered his kitchen. “I guess that explains how you were able to see me, even without my aura. Were you born like this?” she asked.

His shoulders tightened as he worked a manual can opener. “Yes, I think so. I saw… saw ghosts, ghosts sometimes, when I was, little. Still do. It got so much worse during puberty. I couldn’t take it, just couldn’t… they sent me around to the hospitals but the drugs, they just… there’s something very wrong with my brain, I know that. I know that! It leaks. It leaks and it, it doesn’t always. It doesn’t always work, the tin foil doesn’t always… I’m so terribly sorry. I’m stuttering, aren’t I?”

“You saw ghosts,” Nilla said.

“Yes.” He set down the can of tuna in front of her and she knocked it back into her mouth as if she were drinking a shot of whiskey. It curbed her hunger for a few seconds but then it returned as strong as ever. “Dead people, the, the memories, the memories of dead people that get stuck here. In this world. Nothing ever gets forgotten, see, it, it’s like a vibration, a vibration in a kind of, well, a string, and it keeps vibrating forever, it gets fainter over time. You know. Like a violin string, if you pluck it. It’ll keep vibrating and even though you can’t hear it after a while it’s still… it’s still…”

She knew her eyes had gone very wide. She couldn’t help it.

He was saying that memories were never really lost. Her memories.

He wouldn’t look at her. He took down a can of spam from his shelf and peeled back the lid. He set it down on the table in front of her. When she didn’t touch it he shifted it toward her an inch or so. She lifted her spoon.

“No,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked.

“Why not, damnit? Why. The fuck. Not?”

“I can’t return your memory to you because I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen your ghost, Nilla.” He had calmed down considerably. Maybe he was afraid of her and his fear was keeping him quiet. “I don’t… pick and choose. They just come to me. If you were still alive, maybe. But then you wouldn’t need your memory back. And you wouldn’t be here.”

The can before her was empty. She couldn’t even remember the taste of the spam.

He sat down on the edge of the table. “There are things you need to know. You didn’t come here by accident. I lead you here myself.”

Nilla placed her hands in her lap. “Maybe if you just. I mean you. If I stay here, for a while, maybe my ghost will come here. Maybe it will come looking for me.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he told her, dismissing the notion in a way that made rage bubble inside of her. What could be more important than recovering her memories? “Please, we don’t have much time! I guided you here—the occasional thought I put in your head, telling you to head down this valley or to skirt that road. There’s something you need to know, Nilla. There’s a man up in the, the, the mountains east of here, I’ve touched his mind many times. He’s done something horrible. Something truly terrible, like, I see a fire, this fire that will burn up the world. He knows what he’s done. He’s consumed with guilt and—and—and—”

“Just answer me, alright?” she said. She stood up very fast—fast enough to have given herself a head rush if her blood could actually move anymore. “You know so much about me—my new name, the fact that I’m undead, what I like to eat. Why can’t you just look inside my head and find out who I really am?”

“I told you, it doesn’t… Nilla—Nilla, you need to, to…. This guilty man, he.” He shivered violently and she wondered if he was about to have a convulsion. A low, mooing sound rattled up and out of him. She could smell the fear on him—the adrenaline breaking down in his sweat, sour, acrid. “You, you you—”

“Just calm down!” She moved around the table and grabbed him by the shoulders. The hunger rolled through her innards and she really, really wanted to take a bite out of his neck, out of his golden energy. “Just—I know I’m scary right now, I know I must be monstrous to you but you have to calm down!”

She let go of him in disgust when he soiled himself. He slumped down to the floor. She felt a desire to help him, to move him over to his bed but it would probably just rile him up more. There were a lot of questions she needed answers to but she was just going to have to wait.

On the shelf above his stove she found a tin of sardines she thought she could open even with her numb fingers. She went back to the table and sat down, more than willing to give him the time he needed. On the floor near her feet, Jason Singletary moaned plaintively and wrapped his arms around himself as if he were very, very cold.

Posted by Wellington at 04:09 PM | Comments (19)

Chapter Three

Dear Sis:

The elms outside my window are dying, which hardly seems like a big deal now, does it? And yet I can’t help but look at them, at the sickly leaves and the branches that just aren’t budding. Someone came by today to paint them with medicine but stopped before he was half done, everyone is so distracted right now. Heard San Francisco was gone, now how could that be? How do you lose an entire city? The nurses turned off the television before I could find out. Please visit soon, if you can.

Love, Irene

[Letter delivered to an abandoned apartment in Minneapolis, MN 4/8/05]

The tiny house stood on short stilts above the floor of the box canyon. A narrow row of stairs lead up to a weathered wooden door that didn’t quite fit its frame. Behind the house stood a white cylindrical tank, probably the fuel supply for a generator or a gas stove. Nilla spent most of an hour checking the place out, climbing the rocks all around. No road, not even a path lead to the misshapen door. As far as she could see in every direction lay nothing but desert. Who would live in such a desolate spot?

She was asking herself that question when the door swung open, revealing a rectangle of cool darkness beyond. Unable to move fast enough to find cover Nilla did what was starting to come natural—she hid away her energy, made herself invisible.

A man stepped out of the house and onto the first of the steps. He wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a white beard that descended in bushy curls to the middle of his chest. His head was shaven, or perhaps just bald. His skin had the sallow shade of undyed leather and he looked like he might be a hundred years old or perhaps only sixty. He scratched the back of one thigh and stared right at Nilla. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “Please, come inside. We need to talk.”

“I heard a guy on the tv today, I think he was an evangelist or something.”

“Yeah.”

“He was talking about the end of the world. Saying—”

“Yeah.”

“—right, saying maybe this, you know. Maybe this is it. Judgment day? And we’re being punished because of our sins. And that got me to thinking…”

“Yeah?”

“Well I mean if we’ve already been judged, right? If God has already decided who’s good and who’s bad and all that shit… then what we do from now on just doesn’t matter. Like we could, I don’t know, maybe you and I could. Well.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be right over.”

[Telephone call between two local customers in Boise, ID, 4/8/05]

“Fuck you!” With a baby screaming in the crook of his left arm he lifted his shiny pistol and fired again. Bannerman Clark wondered if the man was even aiming. He certainly wasn’t hitting anything. “Fuck you,” he yelped with every shot. His voice had gone hoarse with it.

With a hand signal Clark sent Squad Three forward to back the man up. The infected citizens of Fountain, Colorado spun and dropped and beat their heels against the sidewalk, one after the other. After the fall of Denver the soldiers knew to take their time and line up perfect head shots. Anything else was a waste of ammunition.

The man with the nickel-plated revolver couldn’t seem to bring his arm down. He wore a blue buttoned-down Oxford cloth shirt and tan chinos smudged with what might have been engine grease. Clark was pretty sure it wasn’t. “Somebody…” the man rasped, “somebody take this baby… it’s not mine, oh, fuck.” He closed his eyes and Clark rushed up to grab the infant before the man dropped it. He knew that look, had seen it hundreds of times before. “Fuck,” he screeched, and started to fold up, his knees turned to gelatin.

“Someone get this man a survival blanket. He’s in shock,” Clark shouted but before anyone could obey the order Clark heard the chittering spring-loaded sound of a cheap firearm being cocked. He looked down and saw the revolver pointed up at his face. He could feel the heat coming out of the barrel, smell the spent powder.

Nobody moved. The members of Squad Three were too smart and too well-trained to point their weapons at an armed assailant. Sudden movements and implied threats could spur on a desperate man instead of convincing him to stand down.

“I’m Rich Wylie. I lived over there.” The barrel of the revolver dipped to the left. “Nice place, you know? I kept the yard nice, fertilized it, watered it all the time. You have to in this climate. I… paid my taxes. Do you understand me? I paid my taxes every goddamned year, I paid your salary and you were supposed to come rescue me.”

“We’re here now,” Clark suggested, his tone as soft and even as he could manage. Bannerman Clark had a full board of medals on the breast of his dress uniform. It didn’t mean he could look into the barrel of a loaded gun without quaking in his boots. Absurdly the main thought in his head was that he hoped he wouldn’t soil his BDUs. Someone would see it, which would mean everyone would know about it within twenty-four hours and the jawjacking would go on forever. Clark knew—he’d been one of those kids with nothing better to do than trade scuttlebutt about the CO. “If you’ll put that weapon down we can—”

“If I put this down you won’t listen to me! As soon as I do it your guys are going to tackle me, I’m not a complete moron. You need to hear this. You’re coming from Denver, right? Yeah, I saw all about that on the news. You’re coming from Denver. You were up there trying to do fuck knows what, you, you shot some dead people, ooh, how exciting but down here we didn’t have any military to help us. Down here we had two cops, and one of them had diabetes! He didn’t do so good.”

It wasn’t so much news to Clark as the variation on a theme. The Adjutant General had drawn every troop in Colorado into the defense of Denver, leaving the rest of the front range without a military line of defense. Reinforcements from the east were supposedly on their way but for three critical days Colorado had stood alone.

It was hard for Clark to fault the AG’s reasoning, though. Four million people inhabited the state of Colorado. Three million of them lived in or around Denver. Or at least they had.

“I want my life back, but you can’t… you weren’t here in… in time…” a plaintive, high sound came out of Wylie’s throat. He didn’t have a lot left. “You can’t… stop this. You can’t stop this,” he said. His face had gone white. The revolver drifted downward and then fell from his hand to clatter on the street. In an instant Squad Three pushed in, knocking Clark backward, away from the assailant. One of them took the baby from him—it wouldn’t stop screaming. Two men grabbed at Wylie’s shirt and arms and neck, pulled his arms behind his back, restrained him. It was over in seconds. Clark swallowed though there was nothing in his mouth.

“Fucking spaz,” a troop said, and filled his mouth to spit on Wylie. Sergeant Horrocks stepped up into the soldier’s face and stared him down until he swallowed visibly.

Clark adjusted his boonie hat and turned away. “Sergeant, please find a place for this civilian in one of the vehicles,” he ordered over the sound of the baby’s cries. “And find… find someone to take this. This infant.” He couldn’t hear himself think. Alone, he strode away from the vehicles to stand on the shoulder of the road. He stared up over the tops of the quaint Victorian mountain town buildings, at the snow-covered peaks, until his stomach muscles stopped flip-flopping beneath his uniform shirt. It had been a long time since someone pointed a gun at him. He had served in two major wars and nearly a half dozen small conflicts and he’d never gotten used to the feeling. He had believed that he would get through the current crisis without it ever happening.

The convoy got moving again before Clark was ready to go. He watched the HEMTT go by, two of the Strykers. Then the line of minivans and panel trucks and school buses—anything they could find, anything civilian that could hold a few people. The last of the Strykers pulled rear security. Clark swung up onto its back compartment and sat down on the turret, feeling better with the wind in his face.

The Civilian had ordered him to get to a hardened location and wait. Clark had chosen Florence—the best fortified site he knew—and he would get there eventually. But not before he’d rescued every civilian he found between Denver and the supermax prison.

Posted by Wellington at 04:07 PM | Comments (17)

Chapter Two

CDC almost certain they can be pretty sure about one thing… maybe.

So the Centers for Disease Control says here that it’s not a virus. Which builds on what we already knew from this spectacularly useful press release from the National Institute of Health, which claims it isn’t a bacterium. So what the hell is it? In the meantime, here’s your conspiracy theory of the week from Romenesko’s: Man in Oklahoma claims rapture happened, only no one was fit to be saved.

[blog entry, DiseasePlanet.org, 4/8/05]

Clark ordered the HEMTT to a stop and leaned out his window to listen. In the distance, past a line of trees he heard a noise like paper being crumpled, over and over, interspersed with sharp bangs. He knew that sound. It was an automatic grenade launcher blowing the hell out of a city block. “That’s the Stryker group,” he told the driver and comms. After three days of hard fighting they both just looked numb.

It was a strange kind of conflict where the noise of automatic weapons fire meant safety, while unarmed civilians were your prime target. “Firefight ahead, chief,” he shouted back at Horrocks. The sergeant snapped to attention. “Get your people squared away.”

Horrocks snapped into action. “Alright, everybody find your battle buddy, we’ve got trigger time coming up. You, you, you, take point—you six spread out and keep your eyes open. Look out for negligent discharge!”

In the truck’s cabin the comms specialist spoke in a monotone into one of her cell phones. “Stryker group three, this is assault element six. Assault element six calling, Stryker group three. Do you copy, please?”

“Five by five, Assault. We are holding onto a golf course approximately one quarter kilometer north and east of your location, taking heavy fire… scratch that, not fire, you know what I mean. We’ve got air support coming in from Buckley ANG to remove friendlies, can you assist?”

“On our way, Stryker group,” comms said, but they were already in the middle of it. The HEMTT crept forward into a leafy residential street and grumbled to a stop. Ten or so infected stood in the intersection, stumbling on ravaged legs. One of them turned to look directly at Clark through the windshield. He heard Horrocks shouting at Squad Two and the infected man’s head erupted like a volcano. An infected woman in a bright red sweater came hurrying toward the truck, her long black hair floating behind her, still silky and full of body even though her face was grey and pitted with sores. The squad cut her down, too—and an old man in a pair of coveralls, and a teenaged boy wearing a sweatshirt. There were more of them and more coming down the street, perhaps drawn by the combat noise.

“Chief, we need to get through here,” Clark yelled out the window. The sergeant was on it, shouting for his platoon to deploy themselves in a semicircular formation before the truck. Clark addressed the HEMTT’s driver. “Specialist, take us in as slow as you can—let these men do their work without having to be afraid of getting run over.”

Inch by inch they pressed forward. The troops took their time, lined up their shots. There seemed to be no end of infected citizens for them to mow down but they had a sizeable advantage—they could think, for one thing, rather than just running blindly into a crossfire. They had the advantage of being able to strike from a distance. They had their training and discipline to fall back on.

“Stryker group, we are converging on your location but meeting heavy resistance,” comms said, holding her phone tight against her face. A bloody hand smacked against the window beside her face and she screamed. Clark drew his sidearm but the squads had already pulled the infected man off of the side of the truck and blown open his skull.

Out of the cab, beyond Clark’s line of sight someone let loose with a sustained burst of automatic weapons fire—a pointless waste of ammunition and a sign that somebody had lost his or her cool. Clark climbed over the comms specialist and jumped down to the street to see what was happening. Infected crowded around on every side, more of them coming out of every side street, every alley, every garage and doorway. Clark loosed his weapon and shot down a bald man with no skin on the lower half of his face.

For a moment nothing was moving, no one was firing. Clark's mind immediately leapt to the pertinent question: why?

Why was he here, what did he hope to accomplish?

He was wasting his time, achieving nothing. The blonde girl with the tattoo could be anywhere by now, he thought, she could have slipped through his grasp already. Certainly he’d heard nothing from the Marine roadblock at Twenty-nine Palms.

Motion on the edge of his vision startled him back to focus. More of them—how? How had the pathogen spread so quickly? Clark was sick of asking himself that question but he was constantly confronted with new variations on the theme. How did this start? What enemy, what nation, what terrorist faction would let this happen? He fired again and a naked woman spun off her feet and landed in a heap. He lined up his next shot and pierced her cranium.

He was putting them out of misery, he told himself. Yes, they were sick people. Yes, they were citizens of the United States. But if the pathogen spread this quickly there just weren’t enough doctors to treat them all. Especially since half the doctors in the country were probably already infected themselves.

He had his orders, but never in his life had that been enough. He'd always wanted to know how things worked, and why.

“Chief, do you think we can just ram through this?” he asked, his voice low. He was allowed to ask his sergeant questions but it was better if the troops didn’t hear.

Horrocks spat noisily. “They’ll get stuck in the wheels. We’ll get bogged down and eventually we’ll run out of ammo, sir.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Open me up an escape corridor. We need to reinforce that Stryker group. Get the men on the truck, the, the men and the women.” He wasn’t fresh. That was all. Normally he would never have made such a mistake but he had been too long without sleep or real food. “Get the troops onboard, and clear me a path with the SAW, with the small arms, whatever we have.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Horrocks shouted and made it happen. The SAW crew on the roof of the HEMTT opened up with an unholy rattle and the infected fell before the truck like corn at the harvest. The troops clinging to the sides and top of the vehicle slaughtered anything that tried to get into the gap the SAW made. The driver got them moving, both arms clutched around the steering wheel as the HEMTT drove up and over the pile of bodies and they popped through the crowd like a cork out of a champagne bottle. In under sixty seconds they were spinning out on a perfectly manicured golf course, fighting to keep traction.

The infected came at them from behind but Squad Three kept them at a distance with harassing fire. On the grass the driver opened up his throttle and they raced over and through bunkers and greens. Clark could see the Strykers up ahead. He counted three vehicles. There should have been five. One of the light urban warfare tanks looked badly damaged as well. They had been parked in a triangular formation that allowed the group to cover enemy action from any angle. The golf course around the armored vehicles was pockmarked with dark, smoking craters and Clark saw civilians, perhaps seventy-five of them and many badly wounded, huddled inside the loose perimeter. Added to the shell-shocked survivors in the back of the HEMTT that made nearly a hundred.

There had been two and a half million people in Denver, once.

One of the Strykers deployed a spread of grenades from a roof-mounted MK-19 and smoke and fire tore through a stand of trees, shattering the wood and sending clouds of leaves twirling down through the air. As they pulled up to the Stryker group Clark heard the vehicles’ .50 caliber machine guns roaring in tight, controlled bursts, chopping down clusters of the infected as they emerged from the surrounding streets and buildings.

The comms specialist’s phone chimed and she answered it, “Copy that Buckley, we are five by five. Captain, sir, there’s a helicopter coming in right now to upload these friendlies and they can take ours, too.”

“Alright, finally,” Clark said. Finally something would actually be finished. He squinted against the sun and saw an MH-53 Pave Low coming in just above the tree tops. At least something was going right. The Pave Low, a double-wide chopper studded with instrument and weapon pods, was the biggest rotor-wing aircraft the ANG possessed. It could carry the most survivors.

The Pave Low dropped its ungainly bulk onto a putting green and started loading civilians onboard. A copilot wearing a gold Second Lieutenant’s bar dropped out of the crew hatch by the nose and came running up to throw Clark a salute.

“I admire your timing, airman,” Clark said, returning the salute. “We just arrived here ourselves.”

“Sir, permission to inquire whether I am addressing Captain Bannerman Clark, sir?”

“Granted, and yes, you are. What’s going on? Speak candidly, son, I don’t have all day.”

“Sir, I have special orders for you, sir, straight from the Pentagon.” The Civilian, Clark thought. The man with the marshmallow peeps. What was he thinking, issuing orders to a military unit during combat operations? “We’re supposed to track you down and send you home. You should take your platoon and head somewhere fortified, they told us. Hunker down and wait for further instructions.”

Clark sputtered in surprise. “That’s preposterous. There’s still work to be done here and I’m not leaving until that work is done and it isn’t done until I say when it is done!” Guilt, he thought. He was feeling guilty for his earlier doubts.

The Second Louey looked down at his flight boots. “Sir, begging your pardon but I’m just the messenger and… sir, I’ve been flying over this town back and forth all day. I’m truly sorry but when you say there’s work to be done—there’s not. We haven’t seen any sign of real survival since this morning.”

Ice cubes trickled down Clark’s spine. “That’s,” he said softly. “That’s not the kind of attitude I like to hear,” he continued but he couldn’t finish the rebuke. He tried to remember when the last survivor had climbed aboard the HEMTT. The last time they’d seen anyone else opposing the infected.

He took a second to think about what that meant, but only a second.

“Sergeant Horrocks,” he called, “did you hear what this man had to say? It’s time for us to make a tactical withdrawal.”

Formerly known as a retreat. The National Guard—and the Federal Government—had written Denver off.

“Get your asses in gear, my little babies,” Horrocks screamed at his platoon, walking away. “We’re popping smoke!” At the news some of the troops offered up a weary cheer.

Posted by Wellington at 02:05 PM | Comments (10)

December 03, 2004

Chapter One

TonguesOfFire92: I read you can send care packages of clothes, and foodstuffs if they’re in cans, or dry foods like soda crackers, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, beef jerky, you know. I’ll try to find the link, those poor starving Californians really need our help. [Christian Love: Singles Chat Room Transcript, 4/8/05]

Ears flicking back and forth, nose up and into the night breezes, the kit fox trotted to the back of a creosote bush and pawed at the ground. Something didn’t smell right but she was hungry after a long day curled up in her den and she needed to hunt. She looked up, around, her black eyes drinking in the tattered dribs and drabs of starlight available. Far, far away from city lights this night, this moonless desert, was one of the darkest places on the surface of the earth.

The vixen dipped her head and sniffed at the ground, at a narrow pit in the sandy soil. Grains of mica and dust spilled down into the hole as she nosed it. In an instant, far too fast for human eyes to discern, her forepaws were inside the hole, her claws sunk into the tiny body of a shrew. She hauled the animal up to her mouth and set out for the safety of her own den where she could feast at her leisure.

Without bothering to make herself visible again Nilla reached down and scooped up the fox with her numb, chapped hands and shoved her face deep into the animal’s throat. She had bitten through the jugular vein and consumed the fox’s slight flicker of golden life before the animal could even begin to fight.

She made a point of destroying the fox’s skull before she threw away its remains. She felt guilty enough about the bear she had consigned to a life of wandering undeath. When she was done she sat down hard on the sand and let her brain relax, let herself become visible again. Every time in the past she had used her trick Mael Mag Och had appeared to tease her with riddles but not this time. She waited an hour but he never showed. That saddened her—she would have been glad for his company. Loneliness gnawed at Nilla, though she was hardly alone.

For one thing she had the desert all around her. Death Valley had failed to live up to its name. It might be a dangerous place for unprepared campers but it was hardly dead: in fact it crawled with life, with animals in startling abundance. They didn’t exactly announce themselves and with normal human eyes she rarely caught sight of them. With her eyes closed, though, the desert sparkled with their energy, like a vast field of stars but far more active and mobile. She would sit and watch for hours sometimes, especially at night as the life-lights of the desert played out their endless game, chasing each other, devouring each other. Predators were big bright blotches of light that flowed toward and absorbed the smaller, dimmer sparks of prey animals. The shrubs and cacti around her flickered dimly but under the ground their massive root systems, ten times as large as the parts they showed above the ground, made a tapestry of interwoven bright radial lines and curves, a fabric with a radiant warp and a luminous weft. It was the most beautiful thing Nilla had ever seen.

For another thing she couldn’t say she was alone because she was being followed. Followed and watched by the armless dead thing that had killed Charles. She had become aware of his continued presence during her first torturous afternoon in the valley, when she had walked so far and so hard she wore holes in the fabric of her too-tight jeans and her lips had split open with dehydration. The sun had started playing tricks on her early and had never let up—she saw heat shimmers in every direction that looked like pools of water rippling on the horizon, felt the shadow of every wisp of cloud on her back like a blast of icy breath. He stood at the top of a rise, his face distorted by glare, his ravaged body full of darkness in her life sense. She would have liked to write him off as yet another hallucination but she couldn’t. She knew he was there. She was pretty sure he had instructions to follow her, though how anyone could make a dead man do their bidding was an open question.

He dogged her footsteps no matter how far or how fast she moved. On foot she was slightly more mobile, more agile and with better balance, but he had longer legs. He never approached more than five hundred feet from her but he never receded over the horizon either. As she headed east, walking night and day, stopping only to feed her body or to give her mind a momentary rest, he was never too far behind.

She stopped looking back, eventually. His presence became a fixed thing, a necessary piece of the environment. If he had stopped or turned away she would have felt it, she knew. She ignored him the best she could and kept trudging.

More of the same. Bushes no higher than her knee, some as low as her ankle. Soil cracked and broken by evaporation gave way to sharp-edged sand dunes gave way to rock scoured billiard ball smooth by trillions of individual grains of sand, each of them rolling, tumbling, microscopic jagged edges catching on the tiny defiles in the stone, tearing and breaking, wearing the rock face smooth a nanometer at a time over eons.

After three days she came to the place where the desert ended and the mountains began again. She bore no illusions about what lay ahead—she still had the map she had taken from Charles’ car and she knew there was another desert on the far side of this new mountain range. Not just another valley but a high plateau of desert that went on forever. Still she was glad to be climbing upward, even when her legs complained, even when her thighs burned with the unrelenting effort. Getting up into high country meant the nights were cooler, the daytime sun less punishing.

In the absence of anything else the mind grows to fill the landscape it observes and in turn it takes on the aspects thereof. After days of walking nearly non-stop she had learned to stop thinking about every individual thing she saw, the swaying branches of every Mormon tea bush, every tiny yellow flower of a brittlebrush. Instead she had come to understand everything as process. In constant motion she began to see the world in terms of movement and change, and any change for the cooler, the wetter, or the rockier was for the better.

She used her hands and feet to pull her way up the Amargosa mountains and into Nevada. There was nothing to mark the border—she had to guess, based on what sense she could make of the map in a place with no unique landmarks. She was well off the paved roads that cut Death Valley into quadrants and the gas station map had very little physical detail to guide her.

Did it matter? If you walked across the country, from one ocean to the other, did it matter at any point what state you happened to be in? She had been holding Nevada in her mind as a goal, an escape—a place where she would be safe from the military and the police and everyone else who wanted to destroy her. Had anything really changed, though? Surely the people of Nevada hated the walking dead as much as the Californians. The desert was providing for her, it was a safe place for her. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe she should ignore Mael Mag Och’s offer, forget about finding her name, just live underneath the cottonwoods, spend the rest of time getting more and more crusty and dry, eating kit foxes and tortoises and coyotes in the smell of sagebrush and baking rock. Maybe she should stay there forever.

She stopped to ponder that and just to sit down for a second. Her feet were killing her. Perched on a rock her body stopped complaining so loudly and her mind began to settle, to gather itself back up. Returning to concrete thought she slowly became aware that the armless corpse was gone. She felt his disappearance as a sudden shock of absence, the way she might have felt on having a tooth knocked out of her head.

Why had he gone? Where had he gone? She spun around, searching the high ridge then closed her eyes and tried the same search again but… nothing. He was gone. She turned and faced eastward—maybe he had gotten ahead of her somehow? No. No, but there was something. She stood at the top of a wandering canyon, the imprint of some ancient mazy river. At the head of the canyon stood a simple wood-frame house. Smoke dribbled out of the chimney to be torn apart by a gusting wind.

People. Living people. Who had somehow scared off the armless freak.

Posted by Wellington at 01:59 PM | Comments (9)