Chapter Seven
The books I ordered from Amazon last week (on a whim, just a silly whim!) have arrived. I should just send them back, this is just dumb. “The Lesser Key of Solomon?” The Greater Key was on back order. “The Alchymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz?” Huh? “Magick Without Tears?” Well, we could use a few less tears around here, though I could do without that superfluous “K”. [Lab Notes, 1/9/04]
“I’ve been looking for this girl since the Epidemic began,” Clark said. “Now you find her and you forget to tell me for most of a day?”
The Civilian stared straight ahead. He was strapped so tightly into his crewseat that maybe he couldn’t turn his head. “I can be a wrathful god sometimes, Bannerman. But sometimes I throw my favorite pet a bone. You don’t ask questions, not of me.”
Clark knew to back off. This fury was new—he was used to the Civilian’s cynicism but his anger was new and growing. Unfortunately that left him with his own thoughts for company.
So close—and something had to go wrong. Well, something always went wrong, that was the general rule of warfare. Clark had even made room for something going wrong in his plans, bringing along far more men and materiel than he should have needed to pick up one prisoner. Still.
This was a monumental cock-up.
The Civilian had presented Clark with the opportunity of a lifetime. An individual associated loosely with the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce had captured the girl. He was willing to turn her over to Clark in exchange for free passage east—with a military escort—and fifty thousand dollars. The Civilian had set everything up. Those were all the details Clark had—and all, it seemed, the Civilian was willing to give him. It should be enough, the Civilian insisted.
Only when they arrived the girl was gone, having apparently murdered all of her captors. They didn’t know how long it had been since she’d escaped. They didn’t know which way she went. They didn’t know where she was headed. But she knew they were coming for her and would therefore be on her guard.
“There’s two dead in here, sir,” the soldier said, leaning in through the open door of the helicopter. Clark closed his laptop with a click and nodded. He looked past the soldier and saw the entrance to a cave. An iron-barred gate swung open on its hinges. “One of them looks like a drug overdose,” the soldier continued. “The other body is partially consumed.”
Clark breathed out a long sigh of dissatisfaction. To get so close… “I take it there’s no sign of any females. That’s not a question that needs an answer.” The girl had literally been right there, right there no more than an hour prior, probably even less. Clark was almost ready to stage his offensive on the mountain location, the Epicenter. He had the troops, he had the supplies. Until he understood the girl’s place in the Epidemic, until he knew what she meant, he would never be psychologically ready, though. You didn't go to war without all the facts. The girl was one last question and he needed an answer. “You don’t have any good new for me, do you? She didn’t leave anything behind that might help us find her?”
“No, sir,” the soldier responded. No one had expected there would be. “Except… permission to add something, sir.”
“Granted, of course.”
The Guardsman bit his lower lip. “There’s no vehicles here, sir. I don’t know how these two bodies could have got here without a vehicle. Maybe somebody dropped them off, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck out here so far from town without a way out. Not with dead people wandering around loose out here, and all. Sir.”
Clark actually smiled at the young man. Not very professional but he couldn’t help it. He jumped down from the helicopter body, slapping the Guardsman on the shoulder, and jogged into the AO. Soldiers were busy sealing up the bodies in type II human remains pouches and sifting through the sand looking for forensic evidence. This had been a standard mopping-up exercise following a failed rendezvous. It was about to turn into something quite different.
He came up on a group of soldiers near the cave mouth and asked if any of them were hunters. One of them was, an eighteen-year-old female from Littleton who used to go hunting with her grandfather. “Do you see any tracks around here, the kind a vehicle might make?” he demanded. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing a deer hunter would know how to look for but he needed data right away.
“Maybe, something, I guess… there are some tire tracks, they’re pretty vague, right through here, sir,” she said, and waved back and forth with her hands. Indicating a path between the cave and the highway. At his nod she trotted downfield and then came right back, slightly out of breath. “It looks like somebody peeled out. There’s rubber on the road, headed east.”
“Sergeant Horrocks,” Clark shouted, and the Platoon Sergeant lifted his shaggy white head to look. “Get these soldiers ready to move out—we have a target to chase.” He didn’t stick around to observe as his staffer made order out of chaos. He needed to be back in the helicopter—back where he could be on top of things.
A car or a van or a truck—a ground vehicle. It would stick to the roads and there was only one road nearby of any consequence: the highway. The bodies they found in the cave had still been warm, even on a cold night.
They still had a chance.
Ten minutes later and a hundred feet up in the air The Civilian upended a tiny silver flask into his mouth and peered out through the helicopter’s windows at the darkness below. “I can’t see ass,” he said, irritably.
The copilot leaned back to face the two of them. “Sirs, we had visual confirmation of the target vehicle on the highway but it’s gone now. It must have gone off-road, sirs.”
“Get the ground teams in place. Sweep this area with infra-red and image enhancement.” It wouldn’t find her, of course. She was dead and wasn’t generating any body heat, so IR imaging would be useless. As for night vision goggles, well, they helped you see things in the dark but not things that could make themselves invisible.
Thank God he had an ace up his sleeve. This was going to be next to impossible as it was.
Adrenaline shot through the muscles of his back, making them ache a little. He hadn’t been this excited since the fall of Denver.
“So what exactly is she going to do for you once you find her?” the Civilian asked.
“I’m hoping she can tell me.” An imaging window opened on Clark’s laptop, piped through from the infra-red cameras. “Put us down at this location, specialist,” Clark said, pushing forward between the crew seats of the pilot and copilot. “It looks like the target vehicle has come to a complete stop.” The van lay on its side, dressed up in false colors where it was warm and cold. It looked wrong, broken.
When the helicopter’s passenger door slid open the cold night air of the Utah desert bit at Clark’s face and hands. He ignored it and stepped out into the darkness. He threw a hand signal at the pilot and listened to a flare being shot from a vehicle maybe half a kilometer away. One of his Hum-Vee’s. A few seconds later the desert lit up with sizzling white light that reflected dazzlingly from the abandoned van’s crumpled roof.
The vehicle was cooling rapidly in the night air. Its engine pinged from time to time. There were piles of broken glass around the windows, mounds of black charred foam rubber where the seat cushions had caught flame. Footprints in the sand. Heading northeast—the same direction the van had been traveling. Clark peered out into the harsh light of the flare and saw something out there. It looked like a body. He prayed the girl hadn’t been killed in the crash.
He took a crowd-control bullhorn from his belt and switched it on. “Nilla,” he said, and the name rocketed around the desert, bounced off hills a kilometer away. “Nilla, I know you’re here somewhere. You have to stop running.”
All around him in the shadows his vehicles were spreading out, taking up position. They would form a pretty tight perimeter when they were deployed properly. But did it matter? If she was invisible she could walk right past any barricade they made.
“Nilla, I know you’re afraid of me. I know the last time we met was traumatic. Believe me, it scarred me, too.” A Stryker rolled up behind him and came to a stop. Soldiers fanned out on his hand signal, scoured the desert ahead. A pair of soldiers with their M4 rifles at the ready reached the body he’d seen and threw back a thumb’s down. So at least it wasn’t the girl.
“Nilla. I only want to stop this thing. I want to stop the killing, the violence.”
One of the soldiers screamed. He jumped up and down, grasping his arm. Clark was too far away to see if there was any blood but he knew what it meant. The soldier’s battle buddy dropped to the ground and waved his rifle around but the girl was invisible. If she was an enemy, if she was too scared to listen to reason—it would be simplicity itself for her to kill one of his men.
He had to complete this before anyone got hurt. He turned to wave at the Stryker and his secret weapon stepped out of its rear hatch, escorted by two of his biggest troops. Beside them and their bulky body armor the teenaged girl looked even younger than she actually was.
The troops brought her to him and he placed an arm around her shoulders. This would be the tough part. “Nilla, I’m sure you remember Shar. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will if I have to.” He removed his sidearm from its holster and placed the barrel a few inches from Shar’s forehead. It took real effort on his part to point the weapon at an innocent but he managed. "You could have killed her before, but you didn't. I'm guessing you don't want to watch her die right now."
“Please, Nilla,” Shar screamed. She wriggled under his arm and he held her closer.
Nothing. Another of Clark’s soldiers cried out but not because he’d been attacked. Something had brushed against him. Was Nilla making a run for it? He could have miscalculated how much of her humanity was left. He could easily have miscalculated that.
Clark cocked the pistol. The sound of the well-oiled mechanism drawing back echoed in the still desert night.
“Don’t,” someone said, no more than a dozen yards away. Someone female. “Please.”
“Show yourself,” Clark demanded.
She did, not so much fading into existence as suddenly standing out where before she’d blended into the shadows. She looked different from how Clark remembered her—healthier, strangely enough, as if she had prospered while the country suffered and died.
Soldiers fell on her like a well-drilled football team, securing her hands and face, knocking her feet out from under her. She tried to make herself invisible again but Clark had warned them in advance and they didn’t let go.
“Oh, Jesus,” Shar said, sagging against him, her arms around his waist.
“You did very well,” Clark told her. He carefully lowered the hammer of his pistol, mindful of accidental discharge even though the safety was on. “I promise, that’s the last thing we’ll ask of you.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Shar said. “Just—don’t make me ride in the same car with her, okay? I never want to get this close to her again.”
