At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  A few latecomers didn’t show themselves until all the others had died. Four or five had been hanging back in the last morning shadows. When they emerged, they did so in a careful crouch, but they didn’t head for the Wizard’s Tower. In fact, they were clearly trying to stay as far away from Cat Hill as they could while creeping toward the most distant corpses.

  Chloe let each of them come all the way out, thinking they’d be easier to hit once they were trying to drag a body away. But these stalkers weren’t any smarter than the others. I guess because they didn’t see us or hear new gunshots, they thought the danger was past and started gnawing on the dead right in the middle of the street. Three made that same mistake before noon, one right after the other. Like I said, no smarter than the other stalkers.

  However, one or two remained in the shadows, watching. After Chloe took down the third, they went to ground. At any rate, we didn’t see any movement. So maybe some stalkers can learn some simple lessons, after all.

  We were thinking that this had all been too easy and were about to start pestering Chloe to give us a try at the .308 like tweens at a shooting gallery, when Jeeza sat very straight on her observer’s stool, binoculars aimed southwest. “Movement,” she announced.

  We hustled back to our positions.

  Chloe gave one last try at working the kink out of her neck. “Where?”

  “Coming across Donkey Plain. Straight at us. Not a mass. They’re all strung out. Looks like they started from Green Mountain.”

  It made sense. Some would have heard the noise earlier than others. They’d be the first to arrive. The ones on the back of the mountain would bring up the rear. But— “Jeeza,” I called up, “Are these stalkers going slowly, or—?”

  “They are nonstop charging, Alvaro.” She sounded surprised, worried.

  I nodded. “Just like at the intersection. The ones to the east were fully active because they were getting game on the mountain. And the first who came charging up the south road must have been the most successful hunters here, around the base and the airfield.”

  “Pretty much what we expected,” Jeeza agreed. “The ones that are still eating don’t go dormant.”

  “Well,” muttered Chloe, “no reason to be coy about where they should look for us. Time to turn on that corny music again.”

  These stalkers had a lot more energy than the ones from the base, even after loping through the rugged terrain between them and Cat Hill. But it also strung them out even more. The weaker ones couldn’t maintain the pace set by the stronger ones.

  When the leaders started arriving about twenty minutes later, it was creepy watching their manic movement while the Monty Python theme was playing in the background. There was something extra grotesque about the way they rushed and jerked toward us, as if intentionally trying to stay out of sync with the marching beat.

  The first to arrive hit the fence in ones and twos. But eventually, statistical inevitability—the middle of the performance bell curve—produced an impressive pack of stalkers, who charged wildly through the gates into the base. But the buildings broke them up. They never hit in clumps greater than four and five, although, at the peak, several such clusters did run headlong against the chain link fence within the same minute.

  But we’d been refining our aim all morning long, and Chloe shifted to the Captain’s FAL for a few minutes to break that small wave. All those 7.62x51mm NATO rounds pretty much washed them away, their bodies piling on top of those few from the base who’d reached the fence.

  Which was a bit of a problem. There were now some places where the corpses were two or even three deep and some of the stragglers from Green Mountain tried to use the highest one as a launch ramp. Two survived long enough to try that leap but wound up snarled in the razor wire that ran along the top of the fence. Which must have hurt like the torture that Father Hernando claimed was awaiting sodomizers, potheads, dropouts, and Giants fans in Satan’s hottest regions of hell.

  But the creepiest way that the virus rewires the infected is that just as it eliminates fear, it allows them to ignore pain. Instead, pain works like a shot of adrenaline: it supercharges their rage, makes them try just that much harder to get at you.

  But none of them did. It was about 1600—that’s 4 PM—when Chloe shot the last one who showed up. She was limping along with a compound fracture, just above the ankle. I would have sworn it was physically impossible for a human body to propel itself with that kind of injury (probably the result of a bad fall among the volcanic pits). But there she was, shrieking and clawing at the air as she stumbled along like some mad, gory reinvention of a peg-legged pirate.

  Chloe’s second bullet put her down. The Monty Python theme went on, brassy and bass-drummed, marching onward with such excessive Victorian zeal that it seemed like a deranged musical indictment of our dying world. It had been a black humor soundtrack up until that moment. Suddenly, it was grim mockery.

  Jeeza reached over and turned it off.

  The silence was better, but not much. As the shadows lengthened, we stared down from the top of the Wizard’s Tower: ninety-four bodies that had been ravaged by disease before being drilled and bloodied by our bullets. That’s probably what victory has always felt and looked like: sobering. I suppose the difference now is that you don’t feel guilt.

  Not after you’ve looked into those infection-mad eyes.

  October 21

  The next day, we made our report to the council, Prospero silent and smirking behind us. On the one hand, what we told them was their dream come true: one hundred and forty-seven stalkers killed in two days. But on the other hand, it meant that all their math—and all their assurances to the rest of Georgetown—was pure shite, as Prospero pronounced it. And that meant their credibility was in the same crapper as their numbers.

  We let Jeeza do the talking. She’s good at it, and she has far more patience with idiots than the rest of us. For instance, I wanted to point out that since stalkers can obviously go dormant for long periods of time, all we really knew about the body count on Ascension island was that 270 people were survivors, who had disposed of 400 corpses, and in the past forty-eight hours, we’d killed 147 stalkers. Which meant that we could only account for 817 out of the roughly 1000 people that had been on the island when the plague hit. And there was no guessing about the last 183 because the whole “they are eating each other” assumption was a total crock.

  Maybe I wouldn’t have put it that bluntly if I had been talking to the councilors, but I’d have been tempted to. Big time. Not Jeeza. Her attitude and approach were like the lyrics of that old, old song come to life: “You’ve got to accentuate the positive,/Eliminate the negative.” She talked about how much safer the island was now, and how much had been achieved in just two days, and how much we appreciated the trust they’d shown us. Without which, this happy outcome would not have been possible.

  Then she put a little edge of melancholy in her tone. “But,” she started sadly, “this makes it necessary to reevaluate the assumptions under which we started.” (Amazing that she managed to completely avoid any suggestion that they were to blame for that.) After all, now there were 187 persons who could not be accounted for. Certainly, she assured them, the great majority of those had been eaten (she actually used the word “removed,” like they were a stain on the carpet or something). But we couldn’t be sure how many, because the last two days had shown us that the behaviors and natural resilience of the stalkers were not, and could never have been, fully understood.

  Which produced exactly the effect she—we—had been hoping for: the councilors asked us what we were going to do next.

  Jeeza for the win.

  It was clear that they were also coming to realize that, if we shared everything we’d learned, they were one impromptu town meeting away from being lynched for incompetence and endangering everyone with their bullshit theories. So while they were grateful, they were also uncomfortable; we could spill the beans anytime we chose.

&nb
sp; On the other hand, I also got the feeling that one or two of the esteemed councilors were beginning to get greedy. With the stalkers so reduced, they no doubt regretted agreeing to give us first pick of the salvage from the base and the airfield. We now had both a deal and sensitive knowledge that they wished we didn’t have: a potentially risky situation for us.

  But Jeeza managed to make us seem totally trustworthy and nonpolitical while also implying how important it was that we complete what we started. After all, she finished, it’s essential that we eliminate the last known cluster of the stalkers, those hiding out in the airfield’s terminal, hangars, and warehouses. Because after that, she admitted, Ascension’s locals would have to finish off any remaining infected on their own.

  That rocked them back in their chairs. “U-us?” one of them gabbled.

  She nodded sadly. “Everything suggests that the weaker stalkers do not remain close to the others when they go dormant. Probably to avoid becoming prey for the most aggressive of their kind. Unfortunately, there is no way to know how many lone stalkers might be in the volcanic rifts or vents all over this island.” As new horror started draining the color out of their faces, Jeeza spun them around again. “But thankfully, you have the answer to that problem.”

  “We do?” gabbled another.

  “Certainly,” she said with a smile that was one-half angel and one-half homecoming queen. “The dogs. Once we remove the remaining, er, problem at the airbase, it’s unlikely that any sizeable groups will remain. Given what we saw of the stragglers and margin-feeders, there will be lone, or maybe pairs, of hidden dormants. With the search grid that we’ve already plotted, and with firearms and ammunition from the airbase, and your own dogs, you can sweep the rest of the island.”

  “But would that be safe?” one elderly man quavered.

  She shrugged. “The ones just coming out of dormancy will be no match for all your guns.”

  And so we walked out of the meeting to the sound of “thank yous” and “bless yous” and “tell us how it goes tomorrow.” On the way to our loaner house, we got a few cheery waves and even more smiles.

  Once in the house, though, it was back down to business. Planning the hit on the base was easy enough. It was mostly a modification of what we’d already done. And as long as we cleared our approach step by step and always had two avenues of retreat for the Range Rovers, it was hard to imagine getting swarmed anymore. Toward the end of Operation Wizard’s Tower, the only stalkers we saw were thin as rails and stumbling as much as running. Besides, it wasn’t really possible that all 187 unaccounted-for humans could be stalkers. There were dozens of eyewitness reports of them feeding on each other. And the weakest were probably so deep in torpor that the fight at Cat Hill hadn’t roused them. But just to be sure, we had seeded the bodies there with old motor oil and other toxins—enough to make even a stalker sick, we figured. Bottom line: even my paranoia couldn’t reasonably conjure up a scenario in which we would face more than twenty fully capable stalkers at a time on the huge airstrip. And we could always shoot a bunch of them, drive away, make the rest chase us, shoot some more, and etc. etc. lather, rinse, repeat. It was hard to envision a full-on disaster. Not during the first part of the clearing operation, anyhow.

  Nobody else saw any strong possibility of our plan going sideways. In fact, they started talking almost like it was already a done deal.

  “You know,” Jeeza said wistfully, leaning against Rod, “once the base is cleared, and they’ve finished hunting down the last stalkers, the locals can plant new crops up on Green Mountain. There’s probably lots still growing up there from the start of the season.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Rod, arm around her shoulders, “that will change everything here.”

  Steve nodded. “And on St. Helena, too.”

  “Huh?”

  I saw what Steve was getting at. “Sure. Once Ascension is stalker-free and a little time goes by, the Saints can lift the quarantine. Anyone who doesn’t want to scratch out a living here can go back there.”

  Chloe shook her head, her smile ironic. “So, clearing this island of stalkers doesn’t really mean that the locals will stay; it means they can leave. Damn, the post-apocalypse world is just as full of contradictory bullshit as the old one.”

  I glanced over at Prospero, who had been uncharacteristically quiet. “And what about you? Will you still want to get away from here, if everything works out? Hell, if you stop baiting the councilors—even though they are pricks—I think your reputation might be rehabilitated. Maybe into ‘local hero.’”

  Prospero shook his head. “Even if that were to happen, no; I can’t stay here.”

  Chloe frowned. “Why?”

  His explanation came out through a long, weary sigh. “Because if I did stay, then any month now, maybe any week, you’ll need to learn how to make your way across the oceans—or deserts or plains or forests—using maps, a compass, and a sextant. Are you ready for that?”

  Chloe heard it as a personal challenge. “Actually, I am. So’s Alvaro. And the others are getting pretty damned good at it.”

  Prospero’s response was a sad smile and a slow shake of his head.

  I raised my chin. “What are you really getting at?”

  He looked me in the eyes. “GPS will be dead soon. Frankly, I don’t know how it has stayed active this long.”

  Prospero talks a lot of shit, a lot of which seems to come out of the weird, jolly irony that seems part of Brit culture. But this time, he was deadly serious. Both in his voice and his eyes. That was the moment I realized that the end of the world hadn’t finished happening yet. There were still major pieces left to crumble, sources of light yet to be extinguished. And I had taken this one for granted. Like an idiot. I sat. “Explain,” I said. “Why is GPS going to die?”

  He nodded. “GPS satellites are not in regular orbits. Keeping them aligned involves constant coordination and—this is key—recalibration. Their orientation to the ground, and alignment with each other, undergo small changes with every passing day. In time, those changes result in unreliable data. When the data becomes too unreliable, GPS will shut down entirely.”

  Rod, whose mouth had been hanging open, gulped. “You mean, when they get far enough out of sync so that there’s no data being exchanged, it would send you a message like…like ‘no service.’ Like when your cable box goes off-line.”

  “Exactly,” Prospero sighed.

  “So what does that have to do with your needing to leave here?”

  “Because I just might have the means to preserve the system. At least for several years. Maybe a few decades.” He glanced away. “It’s hard to tell.”

  I nodded. “And how do you plan on doing that?”

  He seemed surprised that I wasn’t laughing in his face. I was kind of surprised at that, too. “By going to the ESA facility at Kourou,” he answered slowly. “With its facilities, and with software specifically designed to compensate for the loss of alignment, GPS might have a longer lifespan.”

  “How?”

  He grimaced. “The full explanation is long, complicated, and very technical. The short version is this: there are about fifteen primary GPS ground stations. The master control, as well as most of the others, were compromised early on. Three—those at Diego Garcia, Kwajalein, and here—remained operational longer. Probably because of their comparative isolation.

  “Of these three, Diego Garcia was lost first and sustained considerable damage, from the sound of it. So far as I know, Kwajalein continues to operate, but its staff went dark shortly after Diego Garcia went down.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t say. It could have been an order from what was left of your Joint Chiefs or NSC, part of an attempt to firewall the facility. I only know—well, suspect—that Kwajalein is still functioning because without it, there’s no way GPS could have functioned this long.” He frowned. “But in the last few weeks, it has shown subtle signs of degradation.”

  �
��And you fear that Kwajalein has finally been hit by the virus?”

  “Or they were hit the same time as everybody else, but locked down the base, sealed the necessary parts of the facility, and held out as long as they had supplies. Or something else has occurred. I have no way of knowing.”

  “And here?”

  Prospero sighed. “The damage done when the leftenant turned is not trivial, and I’m not familiar enough with the system to determine if it can be made fully functional. Even if it can, I don’t have the codes or knowledge to operate it.”

  “Your friend—the one we saw in the NSA facility—did he know how?”

  Prospero nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was part of the software development group for saving GPS.”

  Steve looked over. “Where does Kourou fit in all this? Is it one of these ground stations?”

  Prospero shook his head. “No, but the staff there came up with the software concept. They shared their ideas with a group of colleagues—all around the globe—who decided to put aside secrecy oaths and classified restrictions in order to create a program which, if we can send it up to the correct satellites, will propagate across both GPS and other orbital platforms.”

  “What’s it do?” Rod asked, eyes intent, head thrust forward.

  Prospero held up a palm. “As I said, a real explanation would require a great deal of time. But in simplest terms, the program uses the orbital platforms to keep a watch on each other. It employs an observation-based algorithm that anticipates, checks, and adjusts for alignment loss in the GPS platforms.”