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January 31, 2005
Chapter Eight
McDougall was a scientist, a real scientist. I can trust his notes, surely. The mice in the control group have reached the inevitable negative result while the experimental group… some minor side effects, dermatitis, hair loss but you expect that with radiation, not that this is any kind of radiation Roentgen or Curie would acknowledge. But they’re alive, damn it, they’re still alive. This could be something, or not. Trying to stay scientific about this: lather, rinse, repeat. [Lab Notes, 1/18/04]
They gave her some clean clothes and let her take a long, hot shower. They fed her a couple of hamburgers that came on a biodegradable brown tray. She ate the tray, too, when nobody was looking. A female soldier wearing riot gear offered to help her fix her hair and her makeup if she wanted. She declined. They were all very polite and kind and they never got closer than six feet to her.
At all times they kept her chained to a wall.
They kept her blind-folded, gagged and hog-tied for the entire ride to their base and nobody would tell her where she’d been taken but one look at the flaking paint on the walls, the endless series of locked doors, the narrow windows holding shatterproof glass suggested either a mental hospital or a prison. There were tie-downs and chain staples in every room, restraints built into every cot. Security cameras lurked in the corners and the doors all came in pairs so that she had to be buzzed through twice every time she moved from one room to another.
Eventually they locked her down in a staff lounge and left her there. Two long Formica cafeteria tables almost filled the room, leaving only a little space for a bar made of dented chrome. The carpet was burnt orange and speckled with tufts of hard plastic where someone had dropped a cigarette and it had fused the carpet fibers together. Horseshoe-shaped fluorescent lights buzzed down on her from a ceiling of crumbling white acoustic tile. Behind the bar someone had nailed up a line of wooden bubble letters:
YE OLDE ENGLISH PUB
There was a neon Coors sign near the door. In one corner of the ceiling a blank-faced motion detector clicked and displayed a green light every time she got up from her seat and wandered around the room. Eventually she got bored enough to try an experiment. Banking her energy down to nothing she stood in the middle of the room, quite invisible, and waved her arms.
Click. The green light flickered a little, but it burned strong and bright after a moment. Clearly her best and only trick wasn’t going to get her out of there.
A door opened on the far side of the room, near the bar. The head asshole, the one who had asked her what her name was so very, very long ago, the one who had claimed he would kill Shar if he had to, walked in. He looked like he had a stick up his ass. He looked like he daily removed said stick, polished it, and reinserted it.
He sat down at one of the cafeteria tables, at least six feet away from her, and put his hat on the seat next to him. He looked at her without saying anything. He had brought a briefcase with him—now he put it on the table and flicked open its latches. “Do you drink, Nilla? We have a wide selection of canned beers to choose from.”
Nilla stared back at him. If he was going to treat her like an animal in a zoo she was damned if she would talk to him. She wanted to channel the personality she’d had before, the dark Nilla who looked on humans as food and who found the end of the world ironically amusing, but that Nilla was gone. No, she’d pretty much blown that act when she demonstrated she still cared enough about Shar to save the girl’s life.
She wasn’t about to go soft, though. She made a hard line of her mouth and didn’t move. Tried to look as dead as possible. The world hated her, people like this man had gone out of their way to prove it. She refused to let them see whether or not she cared.
“I’m not a big drinker myself,” he told her. “I do like to come down here from time to time, though. It’s nice. Cheerful. It lets me forget for a few minutes what’s going on out there. All the people dying. all the parents losing their children, all the children who are so afraid. I am trying to stop the Epidemic, and I will do everything in my power to advance that aim. But even I need to relax sometimes. To get away and pretend it all doesn’t exist.”
Nilla could feel her eyeballs drying out but she refused to blink.
He stood up and took something out of his briefcase. He walked closer to her, only hesitating once he came into biting range. She reached under the table and grabbed the chain that anchored her to the wall. He dropped a piece of heavy paper on the table before her.
With a flick of the wrist she smashed her chain against the underside of the table, making a noise like a gunshot. She bared her teeth at him, bugged her eyes out. Hissed.
He didn’t flinch, which she had to admit impressed her. His nostrils did flare a little but he didn’t jump. He didn’t exactly waste his time about retreating to the far table, but he hadn’t jumped.
She had met so many weak people. He wasn’t one of them.
“Please look at the picture in front of you. I don’t have as much time as I would like, so if you could stop playing games with me, I’d appreciate it. Look at the picture and tell me what you see.”
She looked at him, not the picture. Eventually he sighed.
“That’s where it comes from. The Epidemic. In a couple of days I’m going to lead a raiding party up there and we’re going to storm it. Maybe blow it up. I’d like to think that will be enough to end this. I’d like to have some confirmation, and I’m hoping that you can provide it. Do you recognize the place in that photo?”
Alright, she thought. Give him an inch, see how much he takes. She looked down. She’d never seen the place in the picture before. It meant nothing to her. It looked like a cluster of one-story buildings—too big for houses, maybe hunting lodges or something—on top of a mountain. There were strange shapes, animal-like, maybe reptilian, scattered around the building. Sculptures. Sculptures of dinosaurs, in between snow-covered peaks.
Snow-covered mountains… the fire.
She looked again.
A perfectly semi-circular expanse of ground around the buildings stood out, because it was empty. Beyond a certain limit the picture was full of bodies. Thousands of them, dead bodies, standing, facing inward. It was as if the undead had gathered to storm the buildings only some magical force was keeping them at a distance.
A place up in the mountains. A guilty man. A fire that would burn the world.
Jason Singletary had seen this photograph. Or he’d seen what it depicted. He’d tried to force his vision on her.
“You say it started here? How?” she demanded.
“We don’t know. I’m gathering intelligence from every source I can find—including you. I saw a look of recognition on your face just now. Talk to me.”
There was definite steel in his voice but Nilla didn’t know what to tell him. “I’ve never been there. I don’t know what you’ll find. But…”
It was his turn to wait without speaking.
“I think I’m supposed to go there. Maybe you’re supposed to take me there. I’m the only one who can do it.” Singletary had been very clear on that last point.
“I see.”
“No, listen, I was chosen for this. Maybe I was created for this, I don’t know…” she considered telling him about Singletary, and about Mael Mag Och. She knew it would sound crazy, though. She grew agitated as she thought through her options. She picked up her chain and stood up abruptly. “You have to take me there, or, or you can just let me go, and I’ll go there myself.”
He nodded at her and then quickly, methodically, closed his briefcase with a double click.
She felt as if she’d been sleepwalking. No, she felt as if she’d been in a bad dream, a dream where she’d forgotten something horribly, terribly important, something she had to do and that she had forgotten and now it was coming due. When Singletary had been trying to tell her about this she’d been distracted, she’d wanted to find her name so badly. Now she realized she should have paid more attention.
“You have to let me go,” she said.
“Not a chance.” He stood up and headed for the door. “I saw what you did to those men at Jukebox Cave. You’ll never be free again, not if I can help it.”
He didn’t slam the door shut behind him but he might as well have. Nilla stared at it, at the door, for a very long time. Then she yanked at her chain, trying to get loose.
Not a chance.
They brought her another meal—pork chops—a little later. She ate them, of course, but they didn’t really taste of anything. She was still sucking little bits of the grayish-pinkish meat out from between her teeth when the lights went out.
Oh God, she thought. They didn’t know that she didn’t sleep. Or maybe they did know and they just wanted to torment her, to force her to abide by a normal human day/night schedule. But then the room’s emergency lights came on, a pair of wan halogen bulbs tucked away in a corner of the ceiling.
Nilla stood up and tried to reach the door, intending to signal to her captors that something was wrong. The chain wouldn’t let her reach, though.
Hello, lass, Mael said, startling her. She looked to her left. He was reclining on top of one of the cafeteria tables. Naked, hairy, tattooed. He looked out of place in the Olde English Pub, to put it mildly.
“You—what did you,” Nilla sputtered. She looked up at the emergency lights and then back at her benefactor.
He winked in reply.
Posted by Wellington at 08:55 AM | Comments (10)
January 28, 2005
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.”
Posted by Wellington at 08:35 AM | Comments (16)
January 26, 2005
Chapter Six
Subtle energies, discrete communication. So many months gone to this foolishness. Am I just looking for a way to keep my mind occupied? The neoplasm is an ostrich egg, we can see it right through the skin and here I am growing bluegrass in Dixie cups. The world’s most expensive high school science project, I… I need some rest. [Lab Notes, 1/1/04]
She came trudging out of the cave to find the Space Van pinging softly in the starlight. Folding patio chairs had been set up around the open back, and a tiny hibachi gave off a cheery glow from the tailgate. Morphine Mike was drinking a beer, his back up against the dusty metal of the van.
Mellowman’s energy popped and crackled inside of her. She felt like an overdone potato in a microwave. She hadn’t felt so strong since she’d eaten the bear.
The tight muscles across Nilla’s stomach rumbled for a moment and something tiny and metallic squeezed its way out of her skin. The puckered exit wound it left behind closed up and healed over as she watched. She bent down and picked up the piece of buck shot. She was full of them, still, and her body was rejecting them one by one. She would probably be shedding them for a week.
It didn’t matter. Mellowman was dead and she… wasn’t.
Mike was agitated. He wanted to get in the van and rocket away, just get out of there and head back to Las Vegas. She could tell by the way he kept looking at the road. He would have heard the screams, of course. He would know what was happening.
She stepped closer to him. Into the red light of the hibachi. She let her dark energy flow back into her, the cool flame spreading through her limbs like tingling shadow. It felt like pins and needles all over. He yelped a little when she appeared in front of him with no warning.
“You’re… you’re dead,” he said. It might have sounded like wishful thinking but that wasn’t it. It was merely him completing a line of reasoning. One that Mellowman had worked through in the space of a heartbeat. Morphine Mike, with his degree in environmental chemistry, was just now figuring it out. Not all dead people are alike.
“Yes,” she said. The darkness inside of her coiled and bent. It was laughing, laughing at him. Laughing at the living.
She had so many people inside of her now… literally, and figuratively. Jason Singletary was in there. So was Mael Mag Och. It was as if by losing herself, her memory, she had made herself a vessel to be filled up by others. Like being possessed, perhaps, or suffering from multiple personal disorder. There were many of her now. This Nilla, the one who stepped closer to Mike and leaned in, pushing up hard against the envelope of his personal space, was the darkest of the lot.
Bad Nilla. Evil Nilla. She could just eat him up.
He swallowed a gulp of beer. Dropped the can onto the sandy soil where it fizzed noisily for a moment like a flame going out. “Mellowman? The Termite?”
She smiled, showing him her teeth. Were there flecks of skin and meat stuck between her incisors? She didn’t care. She contemplated telling him to go see for himself. Tricking him, locking him up in the cave with the Termite. Let them starve to death and see which one ate the other first.
The dead don’t drive, though.
“They’re not going to be problems for us anymore. Can we go, or do you need to sober up, first?” she asked. She put a finger under his chin. It was necessary, she knew, to establish the hierarchy here. He had to know who was in charge. She found the pulse point of his neck and tapped it rapidly. In time with his heartbeat.
She felt so good. So strong. When he asked which way to drive she fastened her seat belt and told him to go east.
They were fifteen miles down the road, well on their way to Salt Lake City, when a helicopter flew by so low over them that the Space Van rocked on its wheels. “Shit!” Mike squeaked, the curse spurting out of him as he struggled with the steering wheel. He slammed on the brakes and pulled them over onto the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Nilla demanded. “Get back on the road.”
“They saw us!” Mike bit his lower lip. “Maybe we can abandon the van. Maybe we can go into the desert on foot—it’s cold at night, though, so we’ll show up on IR. Shit!”
“What are you talking about? That was just a helicopter. They probably have bigger things to worry about than us.”
Mike shook his head. “Look, you have got to understand what’s happening. This was Mellowman’s plan. The military is offering to pay for your capture. They offered a ludicrous amount of money. Enough to make it worth it to him not to kill you. He was supposed to meet them halfway, back at the cave, and collect the bounty. I don’t know if they just showed up early for the meet and found his corpse or maybe they had the place under surveillance already. Either way they are not going to just let us go.”
The military. Nilla remembered the man in the Army uniform, the one who had nearly supervised at her execution. “Get back on the road,” she said. “Turn off the headlights. There won’t be any traffic.”
“No fucking way! We’re already caught. All we can do is surrender and hope they don’t shoot us on principle.”
She grabbed his forearm and put his wrist in her mouth. She crunched down, hard, but not hard enough to break the skin.
Mike got the message.
They burned out onto the highway accelerating as hard as the Space Van could, rolling from side to side like a boat. Without the headlights the van might as well have been plummeting forward into interstellar space. Nilla grabbed a map out of the glove compartment and studied it by the illumination of a Zippo lighter she found underneath it. “Okay,” she said, “okay, we can do this—I’ve outmaneuvered them before. North of here is the Bonneville Speedway. Sure—the Salt Flats, right?” She could remember the rocket cars setting land speed records, but she couldn’t remember her name? She would dwell on the disparity later, she decided. “There have to be some buildings there. Something with cover. Take a left up ahead.”
“Where? I can’t see anything!”
“A left!” she shouted when he started to veer into the right lane.
He turned hard, perhaps thinking she’d seen a turn he'd missed. The Zippo touched the map and the map went up in flames. The van took a guard rail hard and listed over to one side. They were going at least sixty, probably more.
The Space Van rolled at least once as he panicked and she screamed but she couldn’t have said later how long it took for the vehicle to skid and slide and rock to a stop. She felt her soul leave her body, much as it had when she was restrained in the hospital bed, back when she thought she was still alive. She felt her soul careen back and forth inside the van, a bean inside of a maraca, a die inside a gambler’s hand. She saw bits of flaming map dance in the spinning cabin, saw Mike’s face turn to look at her, his mouth moving, forming words but she didn’t hear them.
Go limp, she told herself. Her limbs turned to loose rubber and bounced around inside the van, her body shook like a doll. Go limp.
Then the van smacked the desert on its side and slid about a hundred feet, showers of sparks flying up every time it grazed a rock. It finally came to a stop. Nilla bounced a little inside the protective webbing of her seat belt, but she was okay.
She stared out at the starlit desert beyond the shattered windshield. Everything had stopped. She looked down, down at where Mike sat in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t there. She searched her memory, trying to figure out how that could happen. She remembered he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt.
Carefully, trying to avoid the piles of broken safety glass that seemed to be everywhere, Nilla unfastened herself and climbed out of the wreck. A helicopter shot by overhead, very fast, while she stood there, craning her head back and forth, looking for Mike. She walked out onto the Salt Flats and the ground crunched beneath her feet.
Eventually she found him.
He had been thrown through the windshield in the crash and his body had gone skidding over the crunchy, perfectly smooth salt rime for over a hundred yards. Judging by the broken depressions in the soil he must have skipped like a stone on the top of a pond.
He wouldn’t be coming back. Shards of glass stuck out of his head like a bloody crown. Nilla felt her shoulders fall, a certain tension dripping away from her.
From behind she heard the sound of heavy trucks roaring toward her. Overhead two more helicopters came in slow and circled around her, their lights stabbing the desert, missing her entirely.
Nilla was still flush with energy. She went invisible.
Posted by Wellington at 08:53 AM | Comments (10)
January 23, 2005
Chapter Five
This smacks of Vitalism but… I can’t deny those results. Repeatable, if you follow the extended lab instructions… teaching the cells to grow? The force that makes the grass run green? Come on. I’m looking at magic here, plain and simple. Somebody bring me my pointy hat and my wand. [Lab Notes, 7/21/03]
“We’re about five miles from the old Air Force base at Wendover. Just across the border into Utah.” Mellowman stood silhouetted against the bare purple light at the mouth of the cave. Inside wasn’t total darkness—a Coleman portable lantern painted a rough circle of yellow on the floor perhaps a dozen yards away. Nilla’s eyes weren’t in great shape, however, and she couldn’t make much out.
“Back during the war,” he went on, “World War II, I think, the airmen used to come up to these caves with girls they picked up in town. The girls didn’t want their daddies seeing what they were doing. It got to be such a popular passtime that they brought in a cement mixer and put down the floor your are currently drooling on. It’s tough to enjoy yourself with stalagmites poking you in the back. Somebody else figured they’d give the place an air of legitimacy by rigging up a jukebox in here, and that’s where the name came from. Jukebox Cave. They had some great parties, my grampa used to tell me. He was one of those guys. I’ve always loved this place. Can’t you feel it, the vibe in here? The feeling, that low-down, that dirty feeling. This is ground zero for getting it on. This is fuck heaven. I brought some girls here myself when I was a young Mormon, back when I used to have ninety-nine sex. You ever had a ninety-nine? You know what that is?”
She didn’t dare answer.
“That’s when you do every last bit of dirtiness you can to the girl, short of squirting up her skirt. No, if you spill it on the ground well that’s not adultery, no ma’am, that’s just the sin of Onan and that has got to be at least one per cent less sinful, now don’t it? And sometimes one per cent is all it takes to get you into Heaven.” Mellowman laughed maniacally. “Shit, there was a time when crap like that actually mattered to me.”
“Are you… going to… rape me?” she asked. It was just a question. Her injuries wouldn’t let her summon up the rage she needed to turn it into an accusation.
Mellowman’s face fell all the same. “Aw, shit,” he said, and scuffed one boot on the floor. “Aw, c’mon, Muffin, you really think I’m like that? Me and Mike, we’re the laid-back type, real gentlemen, the two of us. We don’t pay for pussy, and we don’t beat up women just to get laid, at least not most of the time. Consensual sex is the best kind, we know that.”
He laughed for a moment, the sound banging off the roof of the cave.
“On the other hand, the Termite is probably too far gone to care. And he’s taking the first watch. You have yourself some pleasant dreams, now.”
He strode away, leaving her there in the dark.
She had most of the night to work out what she was going to do next.
She managed to roll over on her side and crawl a bit, just enough to get closer to the lamp. Not actually get into its light. It took her far, far longer than she expected to halve the distance. It took more effort than she thought she had left.
She was screwed, she understood that much implicitly. Whatever Mellowman had in store for her in the morning it wouldn’t be good. Maybe not as bad as having her brains blown out, perhaps not as bad as being buried unable to die. She wouldn’t like it, though, that much she knew.
Mael, she called out with her mind. Mael, help me, she screamed silently, but either the walls of the cave were blocking her telepathy or he just couldn’t hear her at all. There was no response.
She started crawling again. Managed to get far enough that the light played on her face.
She was on her own. Only one thing left to try.
“Hey,” she shouted. At least she tried to shout. What came out sounded more like a wet wheeze. Maybe she’d broken something while crawling. Maybe her body was just done. “Hey, somebody! Termite!”
That was all she could muster. She waited, waited to regain enough strength to wheeze again.
Something moved in the darkness. A flittering, skittish motion. Like the feelers of a cockroach feathering over a dried-up piece of potato chip.
It came again, this time followed by a noise like feet being dragged across rough concrete. Nilla thought she could see a blur of paleness in the distance. Soon enough it resolved into a shape, a humanoid form. It was the Termite.
“Y-y-you sh-sh-sh-ut up,” he said. He rubbed at his nose and his left eye. “J-j-just shut up.” He rubbed his eye again. Then his nose. She could see where he’d got his nickname. In the dark he positively glowed, his skin translucent and shiny under the grime. The splayed and broken brown palisade of his teeth looked like the mouthparts of an insect. With his wrist he smoothed back his hair, which was greasy enough to stay put. “I’ve got my orders.”
“What is he going to do with me?” Nilla asked.
“Sh-shut up, stupid.”
Nilla sucked on her lower lip. Fear was filling her up. Not fear of what was going to happen. Fear that what she tried next wasn’t going to work. If it didn’t—then she was truly out of ideas.
Then his eyes flicked downward. Into the shadows of her cleavage. She knew she still had a chance.
“Just sit and talk with me, please,” she said to him. She needed to bait the hook. “Are you going to hurt me?” she asked. She put what emotion she had left into the words, twisted them. Made them dirty. Like she wanted to be hurt but only in a very special way. Nilla licked her lips. There was no room in her soul for being disgusted with herself. This was just like when she’d eaten the boy on the golf course. Exactly like that. Sheer survival.
“Aw, no, n-no, I c-c-c, I can’t do this,” he whined, his body curling around the negation. He ran both hands over his scalp, tearing at his hair, clawing at his cheeks. He rubbed his nose and his eye again and turned away from her, only to turn around again quickly.
“But I want it so much,” Nilla said. And she did. She made herself want it. Want him to come closer. To touch her.
The Termite blinked his eyes rapidly. He rubbed at his nose, at his left eye. He reached over and grabbed her breast, hard, hard enough to make her gasp in pain.
It was the best she was going to get. She reared up like a snake and sank her teeth deep into the flesh of his arm. She aimed for the vein there and found it without trouble. He screamed, screamed like a stuck pig, screamed for help, for his mother, the pain in him lighting up the cave like neon. He screamed and screamed and reached for something on his belt. Something dangerous. A gun. He screamed and brought up the gun and started firing wildly, more noise, light in huge orange flashes, and still he screamed, and fired, and fired, and fired until his gun went dry.
It didn’t matter. Before he got off his first shot Nilla had already stolen enough from him. Enough life. She banked her energy. Made herself invisible. It felt like it wasn’t going to work but combined with the darkness in the cave, well. None of the shots hit her.
She was already up, up on shaky feet, moving toward the entrance of the cave. Behind her the Termite kept screaming.
At the entrance she found Mellowman. She had hoped she would. He was going to ruin all of her plans, though, by doing one smart thing. He had heard the screams and the gunshots—how could he not—and he looked deeply concerned. But not panicked. Instead of rushing into the cave, guns blazing, he was pushing the gate closed. He already had the key to the padlock out and ready. He was going to do the smart thing, and seal her inside the cave with the Termite.
Had she wasted a moment more on the Termite, had she stopped to take more of his life force, she wouldn’t have made it. She pushed and stumbled and snagged herself badly as she squeezed into the narrow opening left in the gate. Mellowman grunted and she knew by the way he tensed up that he could feel the resistance her body made. He could feel that something was holding the gate open, even if he couldn’t see it.
“Muffin?” he asked. He started to grin. He had grasped immediately the strange particulars of the situation. Crazy girl, probably undead, can make herself invisible. He stepped into the gate, blocking her escape, knowing that if he didn’t stop her at that moment she would probably get away.
Still the Termite screamed.
Nilla thudded against Mellowman’s chest, the coarse weave of his baja shirt rough against her cheek. He smelled like stale smoke. His arms went around her, tentative at first, then closing with sudden conviction, trapping her.
“I’ve got you, Muffin. And I’m never going to let you go,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her but it didn’t matter.
She would have preferred it if he was looking at her. She wanted him to see her. But it didn’t matter.
He was almost a head taller than her. Nilla’s face fit easily into the crook of his neck. Her lips could feel the pulse of his jugular vein—it was right there.
She tore his throat out and drank the blood that poured down over her mouth.
Posted by Wellington at 09:52 PM | Comments (11)
January 12, 2005
Chapter Four
Sheldrake is a crackpot, of course. Canalized pathways? Morphic resonance? It’s all chemical! I don’t know why I waste my time with this nonsense. Cell differentiation stimulated by a biological field that can’t be directly detected? Come on! [Lab Notes, 4/9/03]
Up through Nevada, deep into denied territory. Nilla traveled farther in one night in the Space Van than she had since her re-awakening. Hundreds of miles. There was no traffic.
“Things were good in Vegas, we had an operation,” Mike told Mellowman once. Nilla had nothing to do but listen to the two of them bicker, that and stare out the back of the van at stars and night. “We had some protection. This road leads to… I don’t know, hell. Hell on earth.”
“Here be dragons,” Mellowman agreed. “And some people like dragons. Some people will pay anything for just one quick gander at a dragon’s left butt cheek.” He shifted in the back of the van, duck-walking across Nilla’s field of vision. His eyes were bright red, almost glowing, which wasn’t surprising considering the ratio of pot smoke to oxygen in the van.
“Where are you taking me?” Nilla creaked.
Mellowman seemed to have found a new method for coping with her refusal to die, it seemed, and that was simply to ignore her. “Besides,” he said, but not to her. “Vegas is on the way out.”
“What are you talking about? The Chamber is keeping people safe!”
“The Chamber,” he told Mike, his tone growing imperial, “is made up of assholes like me and I know I’m running out of ideas. More people getting sick every day—more of these things getting loose. No. Vegas is on its last legs. If we want to make something happen, something real, the east coast is where we need to be. Maybe we even need to go further. I bet they’ll just love our act in London. You ever been to Paris? It’s the City of Lights. I can take you there if you’ll just shut up and do what I tell you.”
“You think it’ll stop here? You don’t think we’ll take it to Europe with us?”
“I’m doing what feels right. I’m going on instinct. That’s what I’ve got, which is what has taken me this far and let me survive, and even build something, in a world that wants to kill me every time I turn around. And you know what, Mike? Lately my instinct is talking to me about heading east, and how I can do that. Lately it’s been telling me I got to travel light. That I gotta trim the dead wood. How do you like that? I will include you in my plans because you know how to brew up the shit. Assuming you stop arguing with me.”
There was a long pause before Mike answered. “You want to be alone with him, with the Termite?” he finally said, sounding like he had surrendered something. “He’s a hell of a driver and he digs graves faster than anyone I know but he’s not much for conversation. Not to mention what’s going to happen when you run out of scooby snacks. You think he’s tweaking now…”
Mellowman laid down on a piece of foam rubber that was almost large enough to serve him as a mattress. “You got a point there, I suppose. Now shut up. I want sleep. Mellowman wants sleep!”
“Sure. Sure thing,” Mike said. Nilla couldn’t see his face from where she sat.
Silence after that, for a long time. The sound of wheels on concrete, which after a while stops being a sound at all and becomes something different, more fundamental, less liminal. Nilla started listening for the jingle of the keys in the ignition, or the sound of Mellowman’s heavy breathing. He never snored, though occasionally he muttered something dark and foul in his slumber.
She wasn’t allowed to sleep. She wasn’t allowed to just zone out. It seemed that whatever fate had let her live through so much wasn’t in the business of being kind.
She heard Mike come across the floor toward her just fine when the time came. When he was sure that Mellowman was fast asleep, most likely. He spoke to her in a dry whisper. “I know you’re dead. Undead. I know you’re not like the others, though. What the hell are you?” He didn’t seem to expect a straight answer from her. Perhaps he thought she was some kind of spy, that she would refuse to give him that kind of information. If she’d known, though, she would have told him everything.
“You have some friends in high places, I’ll give you that. Getting you out of that shallow grave like that… it had to take some serious incentive. Or some serious threats. Somebody wants you really bad if they can talk Rick out of a thrill like that. Care to tell me about it?”
She shook her head, gently so as not to dislodge it from her neck. The vibration of the moving van made her feel as if she would fly to pieces at any moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s this guy, he’s dead, but like me. His name is Mael Mag Och. He said he would try to help me. That’s all I know. He talks to me… he sends his thoughts into my head, like, like telepathy, and he told me he would try to help.”
Mike sat up and looked down into her face. “Mael Mag Och? What kind of name is that?” He leaned closer. “Do you think—I mean, what kind of a deal is he making with us?”
Nilla squinted. “Oh, he would never make a deal with you. You’re the one who makes the vaccine. You’re trying to stop us.”
Mike’s face folded in half down the middle. “No, that’s not… I guess you don’t know.” He looked over at the jar of iridescent red pills. “That stuff’s just a placebo. A sugar pill.” He stared into her eyes looking for comprehension. “It’s worthless, it doesn’t do anything. This is all a scam that Rick came up with. I have a degree in environmental chemistry, I knew how to make them. Them, and the stuff that keeps the Termite marginally sane. It was Rick’s idea to call it a vaccine. He called it a psychology experiment at first, he wanted to see if coming back from the dead was all in people’s minds. Either that or he was bullshitting me from the start. Listen. I need to get away from him. You need to just get away. Maybe you and I can make our own deal. Maybe we can help each other out.”
She lacked the strength to turn herself invisible. She lacked the strength to sit up for very long. She couldn’t imagine any way in which she could help him but she knew this was her big chance, her one long shot at getting away from Mellowman and the Space Van. Mael Mag Och would never broker a deal with a living human, of course, but maybe if she just lied, made something up…
In the end she lacked the energy to think up a convincing lie.
“I… I’ll try,” she said, finally, her voice very small.
Mike’s face froze, expressionless and cold. “I hope you try hard. Rick’s not like other people. He’s violently insane.”
He slid back across the floor of the van and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the night.
In the morning, with white light coming through the van’s window, pummeling her with its heat, the van slowed down and went off road. Nilla felt it jounce and shudder and throw her around like a rag doll before it finally came to a stop. When the door opened and she could see outside again she was looking at the entrance to a cave. Warning signs covered the entrance: JUKEBOX CAVE. OFF LIMITS! A barred iron gate covered the entrance sealed with chains and a heavy padlock.
Mellowman stretched and groaned as he got up from his narrow bed. He stepped out of the van and reached deep into the front of his pants as if he was playing with himself. Eventually he pulled out his hand and revealed a steel key, which fit the padlock perfectly. He wheeled the gate open and the van backed into the burnt orange darkness of the cave. This, Nilla realized, must be his special spot.
Darkness collapsed on top of her as the van pulled further inside.
Posted by Wellington at 09:52 PM | Comments (13)
Chapter Three
Bad result from the nephrectomy but codeine was made for nights like these and the swish of the dialysis machine is perfect white noise. She’s sleeping peacefully, now. Wish I could say the same. [Lab Notes, 11/1/02]
Vikram tapped in a password on his keyboard and a window opened up on the main monitor. Satellite imagery of the Rockies, received in real time from the OSR’s newest and most sophisticated birds. The current view showed a composite image with the false color data from an infra-red Landsat run through a codec that matched it up with the standard footprint imaging of a Keyhole-class spybird.
“Amazing—you’re telling me these pictures are how old?”
“Only a second or two, and that delay comes from the time it takes the computers to process and render the images. We have a Lacrosse-class satellite coming over the horizon in a few minutes and then we’ll be able to start constructing stereoscopic images, they promise to me. Three dimensional views.”
Bannerman Clark shook his head. He could hardly believe this. The last time he’d relied on satellite data to plan an offensive had been in Desert Storm. Back then images from the birds had to be developed—they came on actual photographic film. Sometimes it took hours to get an image, or even days if the footprints weren’t right. “How did we come so far so fast?” he asked.
“Advances in computer technology,” Vikram suggested, with a shrug. “For the most part. Also there are very many more satellites now that before. They say five of them are passing over your head on any given day.”
Clark shook his head. “We’re still looking for a needle in a haystack, though.” A map of Colorado had been tacked to one wall near the monitors. Desiree Sanchez’s epidemiology data had been plotted on the map as a series of vectors pointing back towards the epicenter. Theoretically it should have been all they needed to triangulate the position—to find the locus where the Epidemic had truly begun. Unfortunately Sanchez’s data were thin on the ground and some of them contradicted others. They had narrowed their search parameters to a narrow corridor high up in the mountains, a zone varying between three and seventeen miles across and about a hundred miles long, from Steamboat Springs down to Florence. That left them with fifteen hundred square miles of rugged terrain to look at. An area, then, a little larger than Rhode Island.
Clark had to keep in mind as well the fact that they had no idea what they were looking for.
“Alright, let’s start at the bottom of this map and work our way north. We’ll take shifts manning the controls—Vikram, you’ll need to give me a quick rundown on how they work. The next time your shift finishes go talk to the Chief and find out if any of the soldiers have training in signal intelligence. Let’s start panning across this ridge here, alright? I hope you’ve had your coffee.” Clark sat down next to Vikram and the master processor box. The ruggedized computer had so many cables and patch cords emerging from its back end that it looked like the head of a squid. The monitors, the keyboard and the mouse were all wireless, which still looked wrong to Clark, as if they were missing vital components, as if someone had installed them incorrectly. “How do you aim the camera?”
Vikram smiled cheerfully and launched another program from his start menu. “Bannerman, we can do this that you ask. We can study every square inch of the display. Or we can run this algorithm that looks for salient features. It ignores the hundreds of square miles of tree cover, you see, and looks for things that are out of place.” Vikram keyed in a search request for point-sources of heat above one fifty degrees Celsius. The laptop chunked and grumbled for a moment and then windows started popping up all over the monitor. Vikram maximized one and together they looked at a rendered view of a car fire, the chassis blazing away in super-high-contrast black and white. The camera wheezed in and out of focus as it tried to stay locked on to the wavering flames.
“I appreciate the fact that there are no enlisted men here, Vikram,” Clark said, a little testier than he meant it to sound, “but please stop making me look like such a fool.”
“You have my deepest apologies.”
Together they paged through the windows. At first each picture was a new and exciting toy, a present to be unwrapped but the story they told grew rapidly depressing and more depressing. The images looked to Clark after a while like microscope slides, layers of horror meticulously dissected and mounted on slips of glass. A sprawling, out of control forest fire on the Western Slope had the appearance of a vicious ameba attacking a stomach lining. Oil tanks exploding in colossal fireballs in Colorado Springs looked like alveoli bursting inside a collapsed lung.
As horrific as the metaphors might be they hid a worse truth. Colorado, the state Bannerman Clark called home and which he had sworn to protect, was breathing its last gasps. He’d seen plenty of chaos in his march south to Florence but chaos was what you expected on the battlefield. Soldiers rarely saw what came after, the all-crushing descent of entropy and decay. There were few people in the satellite images. Those few who did show up were already dead and still moving only out of sheer perversity.
“Time for a break,” he said, after about an hour. They had finished with the high-temperature images and had moved on to those targets that displayed movement above a certain threshold. He had looked at far too many pictures of packs of ghouls milling aimlessly through the village centers of tiny mountain towns, seen more than his share of cars racing away from undead communities. “I need to hit the head.”
Vikram nodded, not bothering to look away from the screen. He collapsed a window and the next one underneath showed the linear, no-nonsense buildings of a military base. The Buckley ANG base, to be specific. The dead had swarmed through its main gates and were clustered on the parade ground, swarming over each other, clambering on top of each others’ limbs and torsos and faces like a scrum in a rugby match. Clark wondered what must be at the bottom of that heap to make the ghouls so desperate and so active. Food, of course, that was their prime motivation. Whether said food was or had been human or not he decided he didn’t want to know.
He headed down the corridor and pushed open the door of the men’s room. Trash littered the floor, transparent cellophane and pieces of yellow cardboard. He could hear the Civilian inside one of the stalls talking on his cell phone.
“Yeah, well you will do nothing of the—um, umgh—nothing of the fucking sort until I give you the word. No, nobody gets shot. I don’t care what she did to you, it doesn’t justify… look, even I answer to somebody. You have to do what you’re told, yeah, but this time you get something in return. You can write your own ticket, is what—anything that’s in my power. I dog you today, and it is worth so much to you. Umhumuh, ugh, gah. It’s the beauty of capitalism, everybody gets a turn pissing down somebody else’s neck. Fine, then, fuck you very much too. I’ll see you there in thirty-six hours.”
Clark relieved himself and washed his hands carefully in the sink. He saw the stall door open in the mirror and the Civilian emerged with yellow foam dripping from one corner of his mouth. He had a half-finished box of marshmallow peeps in one hand and his cell phone in the other.
“Looking good, Clark, looking good. I might have something for you in a while. Keep yourself ready,” the Civilian said. His eyes looked like they’d been frosted and there was sweat on his forehead and on the tip of his nose. He left the bathroom without further comment.
Back in the control room Vikram had narrowed his search down to three images he wanted Clark to see. The first showed the prison itself, which was thronged with motion—human, living human motion out in the shantytown beyond the walls. There were a few spots of extreme temperature Clark couldn’t identify. They weren’t located near any of the exhausts from the HVAC systems, nor were they anywhere near the generators. “We’ll need to check those,” Clark agreed. “It would be ironic, I suppose, to find out the terrorists were actually working out of our own basement. It would also be easy to mop up so I doubt that’s the case, given our luck.”
Vikram switched to a second image. A complex of buildings near Clear Creek Summit. An abandoned but functional ski resort, judging by the constantly moving chair lift. “This looks like a hardened facility,” he told Clark. Look, here, these doors on the main building. They’ve been reinforced with welded steel. Over here, this looks to me to be a machine gun nest, what do you think?”
“I think you’re right. They have power so we can assume there are people inside. Of course right now there’s no reason to think they’re bad guys. Anybody sane would reinforce their doors right now and a machine gun for perimeter security is one of the better home improvements I can think of. This definitely belongs on our short list, though. What’s this?” he asked, pointing at a minimized window near the bottom of the screen. The third candidate for the site of the Epicenter.
Vikram opened it without comment. When he saw the image Clark sat down carefully and folded his hands in his lap.
“This one gets my vote,” Vikram said, and Clark had to agree.
“The dead are just standing there. They look like they are waiting for something," Vikram said, blowing up one corner of the image until the screen showed nothing but corpses, standing in a perfect semicircle, looking, well, contented. He zoomed back to check another feature of the image, rotating it through three dimensions. "What are those? Dinosaurs?”
Posted by Wellington at 09:51 PM | Comments (20)
Chapter Two
Chemo isn’t helping. Laetrile, interferon, gene therapy, mega-antioxidants: nothing. Soon I’ll be down to dried tiger pizzles and psychic surgery. [Lab Notes, 10/30/02]
She never actually lost consciousness. She couldn’t even faint.
The pain squeezed her down to a narrow field of view, like peering through the slats of a set of Venetian blinds. Solid black filled the rest of her vision. When she closed her eyes energy buzzed and crackled and spat all around her.
Mael, she thought. Mael, I didn’t betray you. I tried to do what you asked.
nilla, he replied, but she could barely hear him. nilla, what’s happened to you?
Her body felt like a torn-up rag. Ridges and threads of pain dug through her midsection, flesh and bone torn away from each other, organs punctured and deflated. Her stomach muscles hung slack and useless. She could not have stood up even with assistance.
Under her head the constant burr and rattle of the Space Van’s wheels on pavement hurt her teeth, turned her eyes to bruised jelly. Even her brain hurt. She couldn’t breathe—not that she needed to, but it would have felt infinitesimally better to be able to exhale a long and lugubrious moan.
“You cut her to pieces. There’s no pulse, Rick. No breathing. She’s dead!”
“If she was one of them she would be up and at our throats. Just keep her alive long enough that we can get her out of Nevada. I’m not taking the heat if it turns out she really was from the Chamber.” Mellowman stepped into her field of view. Looking down at her his face turned bunched-up and porcine. “Listen, my little Muffin. If you die in my van I will shoot your corpse,” he said.
“Get back, alright? It’s hard enough doing this while we’re moving. Jesus—could we slow down a little?” Something sharp slid into the flesh of Nilla’s bicep. A hypodermic needle. Of all the pointless things… She tried smiling a little and found to her surprise that she still had a little control over her facial muscles.
“Dead my ass, look at that.” Mellowman stared deep into her eyes. “She likes it, she likes whatever you just put in her arm.”
“Just a reflex, Rick. Don’t get excited.”
Mellowman shook his head. “Who are you working for, lady? Who sent you? Playing dead isn’t going to save you from a beating. Talk to me, fucker!” He leaned very close until she could smell the stink of garlic and sausages on his breath. “I know you can hear me, you stupid cow!” When she failed to respond he pursed his lips and let a dollop of drool dangle out of his mouth. It wobbled back and forth, yellowish and full of bubbles. It filled up her vision and instinctively she tossed her head to the side to avoid it.
He sucked it hurriedly back into his mouth. “I got you!” he screamed, and then he started kicking her.
She went limp, as best her savaged muscles would let her.
Eventually he stopped.
Nilla—it’s hard for me to find you, where are you, lass?
She could hear Mael calling her but through the pain his voice was a little light floating far out on an ocean of darkness. She lacked the resources to answer.
Nilla! I can barely sense you out there, talk to me!
Later, but still long before the dawn. Darkness outside of the window in the van’s rear door. Occasional arpeggios of light as they passed under streetlamps, pizzicato flashes of red as they passed a car going the other way, few and far between. Mike, the one with the needles, had his arms around her, moving her back and forth. Maybe trying to wake her up. He pulled a blanket around her as the van slowed, pulled away from the lights. The back door fell open and she was pushed and dragged out, onto loose dirt. She could feel the van’s exhaust farting against her leg, hot and dry.
The desert at night: close and comforting, the very opposite of the expansive emptiness of day time. The darkness, near total, pushed in close looking to share your warmth. The few sounds were mournful and polite.
“Welcome to Arizona, Muffin. Home of fuck-all and plenty of it,” Mellowman bellowed at her, his face very close to her ear. She couldn’t stand on her own. If Mike let go of her she knew she would fall. “I’m going to shoot you again. In the head this time. If that still doesn’t kill you we’re going to bury you in a shallow grave. If you dig yourself out of the grave then I will come back and shoot you again, until it works.”
Just… just go invisible, Nilla thought. But that was beyond her, way beyond her. She lacked the energy for it.
Mike set her down, leaning up against the side of the van. The third guy, the fidgety one—had be been driving the van? He must have been driving the van—leaped out of the back holding a shovel. “Alright, Termite, you get to it,” Mellowman told him. He moved rapidly out of Nilla’s field of vision but she could hear him digging, quite close by.
Mellowman knelt down near her and took one of the film canisters from his bandolier. He popped it open with one thumb and a complex, earthy, skunky smell came out. A vegetable smell. He dug out a finger’s length of leafy green material and rolled it into a cigarette. He lit it and blew smoke in her face. “Not much longer now. You feel like talking?”
She let her eyes go lax in their sockets. No point in looking at anything. There was nothing in this little tableau that could save her.
“I don’t expect you do. Some people like to talk when they get to this point, is all, they like to confess to things, like I was a priest or somewhat. I’ve been out this way before, you see. I’ve had problems like you before. Not so much it’s become a habit. You want a puff on this? Or maybe some water? Maybe, Muffin, you want to know what it’s like to be with a man. You know, one last time.”
She focused her vision on him again and was surprised by what she found in his face. He looked genuinely interested. This was real to him, all of it, much more real than the people in Las Vegas lined up at the van or the danger she might have posed to his operation. No, this was a man whose life was measured in the number of times he was able to go out into the desert and do someone harm.
She could plead for her life but that was beyond pointless—he wanted her to suffer, to beg, and the more she cried the more he would want. She could ask for what she really wanted and just maybe she would get it. “Huh, huh,” she snuffled. “Hungry.” It came out on a long exhalation.
Mellowman shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Then I guess a blow job is out of the question.” It was a joke, whether or not she found it funny. Apparently he had been serious about granting her last request, though, or perhaps he just didn’t care. Mike went into the van—she felt it rocking against her back as she moved around inside there—and emerged with half of a sandwich. Roast beef and mustard, by the smell. He held it near her mouth but she couldn’t use her hands, couldn’t even lift her arms. He had to feed it to her, disassembling the components. His motions around her were respectful, almost gentle. When she was done eating though Mellowman ordered Mike to pick her up and carry her and his hands grabbed her forcefully under her armpits.
Nilla.
Mael’s voice in her head sounded distorted, fuzzy on the low end. It irritated her, itched in one corner of her brain, the left side high up. She felt the buzz in her teeth.
Nilla, Dick’s on the road to you but I doubt he’ll arrive in time. There’s something else I can try, but no guarantees, lass. Do you understand? It may be as I can’t get you out of this one.
She understood. She was grateful he was with her there at the end.
Mike and the other one, the twitchy guy, lowered her into the grave, a hole maybe three feet deep in the sand. The half of a sandwich she’d eaten had given her a little strength back, enough to sit up anyway.
Mellowman broke open his shotgun and loaded in a pair of shells. When he sighted down the barrels at her his free eye was wide with excitement. He was going to enjoy this, she saw, and she was certain by the way he looked at her, that and no other evidence, that of all the people he had killed and buried in shallow graves before none of them had been women. And that this simple fact made all the world of difference to him.
This was a man who had always counted on himself first. Who had never believed that other people were worth the time it took to learn their names, not when you could make up new ones for them and they just took it and smiled like they liked it. This was the kind of man for whom the end of the world meant the beginning of all possibilities. Breaking the law was a game. Selling drugs was a great way to make money because people wanted drugs and what was good or bad for them meant nothing whatsoever. The kind of man who could kill just to see what it felt like.
It was funny how being so close to death concentrated her perceptions. She felt like she could look right into the souls of the men around her. How much of it was her reading their energy, their auras, and how much was just pure imagination she didn’t know. Mellowman placed the end of the shotgun against her forehead and braced himself against the recoil. Nilla had been in that position before. Men seemed to like her in that position. Go invisible, she told herself, but she couldn’t. The sandwich hadn’t been enough, it hadn’t bolstered her energy enough to let her do that.
Mellowman put his finger through the trigger guard of the shot gun. He started to squeeze.
Then he stopped.
Muffled, deepened as it came wending its way through the fabric of his jeans jacket, music floated up out of Mellowman’s chest. Skynyrd. Freebird.
“Aw, fuck no, aw, not now,” he whined. “Nah, not that ring…”
He lowered the shotgun and took a red-white-and-blue cell phone out of his inner jacket pocket. He stared at it as if he were holding a coprolite in his hand. Something exotic and bizarre and loathsome all at the same time.
He flipped it open and started to talk.
Posted by Wellington at 09:50 PM | Comments (17)
Chapter One
The new study in angiogenesis holds some promise… stem cell therapy could be the key. I palpated the neoplasm today and it was the size of a robin’s egg. Mood: Cheerful, though she refused to eat. [Lab Notes, 9/12/02]
“Jesus! What's that smell?”
“Hell, I don’t know, but we have to get out of here.”
“It’s like month-old pizza or something. Cat piss sealed in Tupperware and left to mellow.”
“They’re going to get in here. I don’t think you understand. They’re at the gates right now and we didn’t have time to lock them. They are going to come out onto this runway and then we won’t be able to take off.”
“Huh. Alright, alright. French cheese left sitting on a radiator? Help me get this door closed.”
Darkness slid across Dick’s hidden form. He wriggled deeper into the packing material inside his crate. He hungered, oh, how he hungered, and there was food just inches away but the Voice had made it clear. There was still work to do.
His whole body vibrated as the military cargo plane jumped into the sky.
I won’t accept this! No hope, they say. Keep her comfortable, they tell me. Enjoy the time you have left. No! I am a scientist and I believe all problems can be solved given adequate study and application. I am a scientist and I refuse to accept the inevitable. [Lab Notes, 9/20/02]
Outside, beyond the fence, construction crews were working non-stop installing plumbing and streetlights in the shanty-town. Bannerman Clark watched a backhoe sinking its teeth into the yielding earth for a while and then turned back to the one-way mirror behind him.
“We had barricades across the roads but they just came up through the sewer. They came up out of the storm drain—covered in shit, um, pardon my French. Covered in sewage and they didn’t care. You could see their eyes but it was like… God, do you know what I mean? Those aren’t eyes anymore. They aren’t people.”
If he couldn’t allow the survivors inside the prison walls Clark intended to do what he could for them. He could give them a healthy environment—Vikram had loved the idea of building infrastructure out there, it gave the soldiers something to do other than contemplating their own mortality. An Engineer to the end, the Sikh Major had thrown himself into the hard, back-breaking work as if he were going off to a round of golf.
“My sister-in-law told us to keep the car running, that she would be out as soon as she found her passport. We waited and waited and waited… we burned through a quarter tank of gas before Chuck decided we had to get moving. I cried, I cried but I didn’t try to stop him.”
Inside the prison Clark oversaw another program. Each survivor was brought in to be registered—name and vital statistics entered in a proper database, lot number in the shantytown recorded, a cursory physical exam performed. Those who wished it could stay and tell their stories. Almost all of them wished it.
“Six days in my office, and then the water stopped flowing. I was so hungry and I knew I couldn’t make it without water. They were all over the parking lot, touching the cars, just, just touching them like they were trying to remember what they were for. I knew I had to make a break for it.”
A row of narrow interrogation rooms lined the space beyond the one-way mirror. In each room a survivor sat with a uniformed interviewer and spoke into a microphone. The chairs were uncomfortable, the rooms cramped and dreary. None of them seemed to mind. The experiences they’d been through were so traumatic and so huge compared to the banal routine of their previous lives that they needed to get them out, needed to purge themselves of what they’d seen and not a single one of them complained or ended an interview early.
“I was out at a fishing cabin on Lake Mohave, me and three other guys and they… they wanted to leave, to get home to their families. I couldn’t say no, even if I knew we were safer there. We loaded up the truck, we had about sixty pounds of Stripers on ice in the back, figured we could eat those if we didn’t find anything else. It just didn’t matter. I was in the desert two days before this Immigration Services truck picked me up.”
Clark was thrilled. The more information he could get about what was happening in the world outside the prison, the better. At first that was all it meant—information gathering, intelligence in its most human form. As he listened in on the interviews, though, from his hidden roost in the administration wing, he found he couldn’t turn away. He needed to hear the stories, as much as they needed to tell them.
He needed to know it was possible to survive. He needed to know that people who weren’t soldiers still had a chance.
“So we got to this one town, and Charles was in pretty bad shape, and I stopped and there were no people but there were dogs everywhere. I mean whole bunches, um, packs of them, you know? I guess when the people left they couldn’t take their dogs with them. They were everywhere just smiling and wagging their tails, I was worried at first but. Anyway. They were hungry, you could tell. I tried feeding them but there were so many. I found some dog food in this grocery store. It was pitch black in there but I figured it was safe. If the dogs were just running around and okay then there couldn’t be any dead people. I found the dog food and I was looking for a can opener when I heard this noise. It wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t dogs barking. Okay, I mean, all the dogs were barking, they were always barking. That was kind of a nice sound, they sounded happy. This was different though. The dogs were going crazy. Somebody was really in trouble.”
Clark pulled up a wooden chair and leaned his elbows on the railing before the mirror. The girl in the interview room had long dark hair stained with blood—how on Earth had that happened, and why hadn’t someone let her into the shower room? Perhaps she had refused the offer. He’d seen stranger behavior from the survivors. Many of them slept sitting in chairs, or in their cars, too accustomed to constantly moving to ever lie down again. Some of them wouldn’t use the facilities without someone else standing guard outside. Hell had come to them and they had learned to live in hell.
“I came around the corner and the dogs were everywhere, and they were jumping up and down, biting at the air. Really upset. I tried shushing them but there were so many. Then I looked and I saw they were all over the car. The back door was open and Charles… I don’t know what he was thinking. I guess they don’t, you know. Think much. They just get hungry and wander off. Charles had tried to get out of the car but he got snagged in his seat belt. The dogs. The dogs.”
“Go on,” the interviewer told the girl. A female soldier, maybe five years older than the girl across the table. She poured a glass of water and handed it to her subject.
The girl had her arms curled tightly around her stomach as if she were feeling nauseous. She didn’t even look at the water. “The dogs tore Charles apart, I guess. To, to pieces. I tried fighting them but they didn’t care about me, they just ignored me. They could tell, somehow. They could tell Charles was dead and they hated him. I used to like dogs, you know?”
The girl wasn’t crying but she wiped at her face anyway. Maybe it was hot in the interrogation room and she was sweating. “I wish I didn’t make Nilla get out of the car,” the girl said. “She could of helped me, maybe.”
“Nilla?” The interviewer asked. “Who’s Nilla?”
The girl’s face hardened into concrete and she stared at the interviewer with blazing eyes.
For some reason—a hunch, perhaps, a stab of intuition—Clark leaned closer to the glass.
Posted by Wellington at 09:50 PM | Comments (11)