Chapter Thirteen
You can’t see it but you know it’s there, you feel its presence. Through the wall I can feel it… life, in the glorious abstract. In the middle of this morning’s test run she started vomiting blood and by the time I had her cleaned up and sedated the extrusion should have collapsed but… it didn’t. Right through the wall and I knew it somehow, I whispered it to her. It’s self-reinforcing now, I think. I smashed all the fetishes and the instruments but… it’s still there, the sensors show nothing of course but… I can feel it. [Lab Notes, 11/6/04]
“He’s going to come out of there any second now,” Clark promised, but he knew he was wrong. Together with Vikram he stared at the stairwell hatch leading down into the prison. Sergeant Horrocks was supposed to be emerging from that door at any moment, leading what was left of the troops.
It had been seven long minutes since his last call. There had been a lot of noise back then, a lot of shooting and screaming coming up from below. All of that had since stopped.
“Any second,” Clark repeated, and Vikram muttered in acquiescence. Behind them the Pave Low helicopter spun its rotor uselessly. There was only so long that they could wait—fuel for the aircraft was at a premium.
“Ah, Bannerman—here he is,” Vikram announced, as a human shape appeared in the stairwell door. “Nothing to worry about, I—” Vikram fell silent for a moment, then let out a terrified shriek. He raised his sidearm and fired three rapid shots into the doorway. The bullets collided with dead flesh and sent the figure there spinning.
“That was so totally unnecessary,” the shadowy figure said.
It was the girl. She stood up and stepped onto the starlit helipad. A bullet hole in her neck oozed crusty powdered blood, dried up so long ago it wasn’t even shiny. She prodded the wound with one undead finger.
It was so easy to forget that she wasn’t one of the living. That she wasn’t exactly what she appeared to be, a helpless, innocent survivor of this horror. Clark had to remind himself from time to time that she was part of the Epidemic, not a victim of it.
“What did you do with Sergeant Horrocks?” Clark demanded.
The girl frowned. “Older guy, white hair, three stripes on his arm? He didn’t make it. None of them did. I watched them go under, Captain. I would have tried to help but, well, your men were trying to shoot me at the time. If they could have focused on their enemy, well—”
“That’s exactly what they were doing.” Clark stood up straighter than before and stared at her with his best command face. “So. Are you going to eat us now, or did you have something else in mind?”
The girl’s face soured and she threw him a mock salute. “I thought we would get in that helicopter and fly out to that mountain you were so excited about. You know, what we were supposed to do in the first place.”
“You don’t honestly expect me to take you with us,” Clark sputtered.
“I think you need all the help you can get. Listen, Captain—I don’t know anything about military tactics or politics or epidemiology or anything. I lost whatever expertise I may have had when I died. But I do know my destiny is up there. I’ll walk if I have to, but I’d prefer to catch a lift with you two.”
Clark felt a sinus headache coming on. He had no answers. He had no information. His chain of command was broken and his direct superior had turned against humanity. According to every order of warfare that he knew that meant it was time to fall back and call for evac. Yet fate had put him in the position of being the one who had to decide the entire future of the human race.
“Oh, hell,” he said, sounding prissy even to himself. “Mount up already. We’ve got no time to lose.”
It was all too true. Their destination, Bolton’s Valley, was nearly a hundred miles away even as the crow flew. The pilots assured him they could reach the Epicenter with the fuel onboard but it would be a close thing. Once they had completed their mission they would have to find alternate transport out of the area of operations.
Assuming they survived. Clark kind of doubted they would. As long as they got close enough to the switch, as long as they managed to turn this thing off, that would be enough.
He imagined it—the Epicenter—as some kind of science fiction death ray contraption. A big telescoping raygun with fins and flanges and control panels sticking out of a hatch carved into the mountain. He imagined it had two buttons that controlled it, conveniently labeled ON and OFF. He imagined pushing the latter and then going back to Denver, to the Brown Palace, and finally having that juicy, rare steak that fate had stolen away from him. He imagined taking a room upstairs, a room with tasteful wallpaper and gauzy curtains on the windows and a big, soft bed with a white coverlet. He imagined going to sleep for a very long time and then waking up to find that humanity had rebuilt after the dead stopped rising, that while he slept everything had been cleared away, tidied up, made whole again. He imagined that the population of the United States would have replenished itself and that there was no one left who even remembered the Epidemic, that there were no wounds anymore, no physical scars, no emotional traumas. No nightmares.
Except, he knew, that he would still remember. He would remember the face, and the name, of everyone who had died. He would remember them for the rest of his life.
Perhaps it was better if he didn’t come back.
“It is still a lovely world, is it not?” Vikram asked, jolting Clark out of his reverie. He hadn’t even noticed the helicopter lifting away from the prison. He hadn’t realized that they’d already swung way out across the mountains, that they were running fast, about a hundred feet up, following a ridgeline that probably marked the Continental Divide. Maybe an hour had passed and he’d been lost in his own thoughts. So close to the end and he’d wasted all that time.
He looked down, though, and saw trees clothing the rugged sides of the mountains, aspens and firs and loblolly pines. He saw water snaking between the peaks, the stars wavering in the depths of creeks and rivers. Oh, Vikram was so very, very right.
Then he looked over at the girl. She sat very still in her crewseat, buckled in and motionless. Her chest didn’t move with breath, her eyes didn’t blink. You could tell she was dead, if you paid attention. If you actually looked. She had the waxy skin of a corpse. She had the eyes that didn’t really focus anymore, not on anything in particular.
She turned her eyes to look back at him. “You think you’re going to find a way to end the Epidemic. You know that’s probably bullshit though, right?”
Clark nodded. He couldn’t stop looking at the girl. “Yes. I also know that it’s my job to find out. Because maybe, just maybe I can stop it. At the very least I can perform the final duty of any soldier who watches his country die.”
“What’s that?”
“I can take our communal revenge on whoever did it.” Enough. Clark wanted to change the subject. “So who told you about the mountain?” Clark demanded of her. “Who said you were the only one who could go there?”
She shrugged and looked out the window. “A man named Jason Singletary. He had a gift, a… kind of a power. He was psychic, if you have to hear me say it.”
“Psychic,” Clark said. The word came out of his mouth and hovered in the air like a grim little cloud. It sounded a lot like other words he knew now. Like “undead”, or “magic.” It sounded like one of the things that had gone wrong with the world.
The pilot broke the silence that followed. “We’re approaching the site,” he said. “Should be visible in a few minutes.”
Before he’d even finished his sentence fragment the hatch to the cargo compartment started rattling.
"What was that?" Vikram asked, sounding only a little panicked.
The pilot and the copilot exchanged long, meaningful looks. "Maybe you should check it out," the pilot said. The door kept rattling.
The copilot unstrapped himself and came aft, walking with the motion of the helicopter, one hand on the ceiling to brace himself. “What have we got back here, just rations and some light munitions, right?” he called back to the pilot. “Anything that might come loose?”
It was like a dream, a particularly horrible dream, where you know what is about to happen but you are so plagued by self-doubt and general anxiety that you don’t dare open your mouth to say it, because that would make it real.
The co-pilot reached for the handle on the side of the hatch and even before he had turned it all the way the hatch exploded inward, spilling two hundred pounds of meat into the crew compartment. There was blood, and torn flesh, and screaming, but in that first awful second Clark couldn’t connect the dots, couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Only when he heard Vikram calling his name did he really know.
A man. A dead man. A dead man with no arms.
A dead man with no arms, his torso riddled with bullet holes, his face distorted by damage and hunger, his body as dry and tough as beef jerky, had stowed away aboard the helicopter when it left the prison. The dead man had killed the copilot in one incredibly swift, incredibly brutal motion and now he had his teeth deep in Vikram’s calf. Some of the blood slicking down the floor belonged to his best friend.
The dead girl was up, standing on her chair. She looked horrified and Clark felt a quick irrational burst of desire—he wanted to tell her everything was alright,
A better plan came to mind a moment later. He was standing next to an exterior hatch with an emergency release. He pulled up on the red handle and the door fell away into blackness, cold air bellying in so fast and hard it knocked everyone down. The dead man slipped away from Vikram. The girl fell off her crewseat. Clark grabbed her arm and hauled her up to stand next to him.
The dead man didn’t bother getting up. He just got his teeth into Vikram again and kept chewing. Vikram drew his weapon and started firing at the dead man’s head but the helicopter was rolling, pitching, yawing—nobody could fire accurately under those conditions, and Vikram was no marksman.
The pilot kept looking over his shoulder, shouting something back at them. Questions. He wasn’t paying enough attention to flying the aircraft. “Soldier!” Clark yelled at him, “see to your duties!” Then he turned to the girl.
“This psychic,” he said to her. “He told you—you were the only one. The only one who could go to the Epicenter. He told you that, he was sure of that?”
The girl’s eyes were very wide. He shook her and she nodded. It was what he needed to hear.
Grabbing her by the arms he yanked her forward and shoved her out of the helicopter, out through the external hatch, out into the roaring sky.
