“I am … Drrrrrac-ulaaah.”
Another tent-shaking detonation of whoops, whistles, cheers. One of the soldiers in the front row shot to his feet.
“Hey, Count, eat this!”
A flash of spinning steel through the stream of light from the projector: the tip of the blade met the wood of the screen with a meaty thunk, burying itself squarely in the chest of the caped man, who seemed, surprisingly, to take no notice of this.
“Muncey, what the fuck!” the projector operator yelled.
“Get your blade,” someone else shouted, “it’s in the way!”
But the voices weren’t angry; everybody thought it was hilarious. Under a storm of catcalls, Muncey bounded to the screen, the images washing over him, to yank his blade free of the wood. He turned, grinning, and gave a little bow.
Despite it all—the chaotic interruptions, the laughter and mocking recitations of the soldiers, who anticipated every line—Peter soon found himself sliding into the story. He sensed that some pieces of the film were missing; the narrative leapt ahead in confusing jerks, leaving the castle behind for a ship at sea, then for a place called London. A city, he realized. A city from the Time Before. The Count—some kind of viral, though he didn’t look like one—was killing women. First a girl handing out flowers in the street, then a young woman asleep in her bed, with great sleepy curls of hair and a face so composed she looked like a doll. The Count’s movements were comically slow, as were his victim’s; everyone in the movie seemed trapped in a dream in which they couldn’t make themselves move fast enough, or even at all. Dracula himself possessed a pale, almost womanly face, his lips painted to look bowed, like the wings of a bat; whenever he was about to bite someone, the screen would hold for a long, lingering moment on his eyes, which were lit from below to glow like twin candle flames.
Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously, and yet as the story continued, he found himself worried for the girl, Mina, the daughter of the doctor—Dr. Seward, owner of the sanatorium, whatever that was—and whose husband, the ineffectual Harker, seemed to have no idea how to help her, always standing around with his hands in his pockets, looking helpless and lost. None of them knew what to do, except for Van Helsing, the vampire hunter. He wasn’t like any hunter Peter had ever seen—an old man with thick, distorting eyeglasses, given to vast, windy pronouncements that were the object of the soldiers’ most outspoken mockery. “Gentlemen, we are dealing with the unthinkable!” and “The superstitions of tomorrow can become the scientific reality of today!” The catcalls flew each time, and yet a great deal of what Van Helsing said seemed true to Peter, especially the part about a vampire being “a creature whose life has been unnaturally prolonged.” If that didn’t describe a smoke, he didn’t know what did. He found himself wondering if Van Helsing’s trick with the jewelry-box mirror wasn’t some version of what had happened with the pans in Las Vegas, and if, as Van Helsing claimed, a vampire “must sleep each night in his native soil.” Was that why they always came home, the ones who’d been taken up? At times the movie seemed almost to be a kind of instruction manual. Peter wondered if it wasn’t a made-up tale at all but an account of something that had actually happened.
The girl, Mina, was taken up; Harker and Van Helsing pursued the vampire to his lair, a dank basement. Peter realized where the story was headed: they were going to perform the Mercy. They were going to hunt down Mina and kill her, and it was Harker, Mina’s husband, who would have to perform this terrible duty. Peter braced himself. The soldiers had finally grown quiet, their antics put aside as they were caught up, despite themselves, in the story’s final, grim unfolding.
He never got to see the end. A single soldier dashed into the tent.
“Lights up! Extraction at the gate!”
The movie was instantly forgotten; all the soldiers bolted from their chairs. Weapons were coming out, pistols, rifles, blades. In the rush to get to the door, someone tripped over the projector’s power cable, sinking the room into darkness. Everyone was pushing, shouting, calling out orders; Peter heard the pop of rifle fire from outside. As he followed the crowd from the tent, he saw a pair of flares rocketing over the walls toward the muddy field beyond the gate. Michael was running past him with Sancho; Peter seized him by the arm.
“What is it? What’s happening?”
Michael barely broke his stride. “It’s Blue Squad!” he said. “Come on!”
From the chaos of the mess hall had emerged a sudden orderliness; everyone knew what to do. The soldiers had broken into distinct groups, some quickly ascending the ladders to the catwalk at the tops of the pickets, others taking positions behind a barricade of sandbags just inside the gate. More men were swiveling the spotlights to aim them across the muddy field beyond the opening.
“Here they come!”
“Open it now!” Greer shouted from the base of the wall. “Open the goddamn gate!”
A deafening barrage of cover fire from the catwalk as half a dozen soldiers leapt into the space over the yard, holding the ropes that connected through a system of pulleys and blocks to the gate’s hinges. Peter was momentarily arrested by the coordinated grace of it all, the practiced beauty of their synchronized movements. As the soldiers descended, the gates began to part, revealing the light-bathed ground beyond the walls and a group of figures racing toward them. Alicia was leading the way. They hit the gate at a dead sprint, six of them, dropping and rolling in the dust as the men behind the sandbags opened fire, releasing a stream of rounds over their heads. If there were virals back there, Peter didn’t see any. It was all too fast, too loud, and then, just like that, it was over: the gates were sealed behind them.
Peter ran to where Alicia lay with the others. She was on all fours in the dirt, breathing hard; the paint was dripping down her face, her bald head shining like polished metal under the harsh glare of the spotlights.
As she rocked back onto her knees, their eyes met quickly. “Peter, get the hell out of here.”
From above, a few last halfhearted shots. The virals had scattered, retreating from the lights.
“I mean it,” she said fiercely. Every part of her seemed clenched. “Go.”
Others were crowding around. “Where’s Raimey?” Vorhees bellowed, moving through the men. “Where the hell’s Raimey?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
Vorhees turned to where Alicia was kneeling in the mud. When he saw Peter, his eyes flashed with anger. “Jaxon, you don’t belong here.”
“We found it, sir,” Alicia said. “Stumbled right into it. A regular hornet’s nest. There must be hundreds of them.”
Vorhees waved to Hollis and the others. “All of you, back to your quarters, now.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to Alicia. “Private Donadio, report.”
“The mine, General,” she said. “We found the mine.”
• • •
All that summer Vorhees’s men had been looking for it: the entrance shaft to an old copper mine, hidden somewhere in the hills. It was thought that this was one of the hot spots Vorhees had spoken of, a nest where the virals slept. Using old geological survey maps and tracking the creatures’ movements with the nets, they had narrowed their search to the southeast quadrant, an area of roughly twenty square kilometers above the river. Blue Squad’s mission had been one last attempt to locate it before the evac. It was sheer chance that they had; as Peter heard the story from Michael, Blue Squad had simply wandered into it, just before sundown—a soft depression in the earth, into which the point man had vanished with a scream. The first viral who emerged took two more men before anyone could get off a shot. The rest of the squad was able to form some kind of firing line, but more virals swarmed out, braving the last of daylight in their blood fury; once the sun went down, the unit would be quickly overwhelmed, the location of the mine shaft lost with them. The flares they carried would buy them a few minutes, but that was all. They broke into two groups; the first would make a run for
it while the second, led by Lieutenant Raimey, would cover their escape, holding the creatures off as long as they could, until the sun went down and all the flares were gone, and that would be the end of it.
All night long, the camp buzzed with activity. Peter could feel the change: the days of waiting, of hunt-and-peck missions in the forest, were over; Vorhees’s men were preparing themselves for battle. Michael was gone, helping to ready the vehicles that would carry the explosives, drums of diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate with a grenade-cluster igniter, known as a “flusher.” These would be lowered by winch straight into the exposed shaft. The explosion would no doubt kill many of the virals inside; the question was, where would the survivors emerge? In a hundred years the topography might have changed, and for all Vorhees and the others knew, a landslide or earthquake had opened an entirely new access point. While one squad put the explosives in place, the rest of the men would do their best to sniff out any other openings. With luck, everyone would be in position when the bomb went off.
The lights came down to a gray dawn. The temperature had dropped in the night, and all the puddles in the yard were encrusted with ice. The vehicles were being loaded; Vorhees’s soldiers were assembled at the gate, all but a single squad, which would stay behind to man the garrison. Alicia had spent many of the intervening hours in Vorhees’s tent. It was she who had led the survivors back to the garrison, using the route they had first traveled along the river. Now Peter saw her up front with the general, the two of them with a map spread over the hood of one of the Humvees. Greer, on horseback, was supervising the final loading of supplies. Watching from the sidelines, Peter felt a growing unease, but something else, too—a strong attractive force, instinctual as breathing. For days he had drifted between the poles of his uncertainty, knowing he should press on but unable to leave Alicia behind. Now, as he watched the soldiers completing their preparations at the gate, Alicia among them, a single desire pushed itself forward. Vorhees’s men were going to war; he wanted to be part of it.
As Greer moved down the line, Peter stepped forward. “Major, I’d like to speak with you.”
Greer’s face and voice were distracted, hasty. He looked over Peter’s head as he spoke: “What is it, Jaxon?”
“I’d like to go, sir.”
Greer regarded him a moment. “We can’t take civilians.”
“Just put me at the rear. There must be something I can do. I can, I don’t know, be a runner or something.”
Greer’s focus shifted to the back of one of the trucks, where a group of four men, including Michael, were winching the drums of fuel into place over the tailgate.
“Sergeant,” Greer barked to the squad sergeant, a man named Withers, “can you take over for me here? And Sancho, watch that chain—it’s all wrapped up.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“These are bombs, son. For Christsakes, be careful.” Then, to Peter: “Come with me.”
The major dismounted and took Peter aside, out of earshot. “I know you’re worried about her,” he said. “Okay? I get it. If it were up to me, I’d probably let you come.”
“Maybe if we talked to the general—”
“That’s not going to happen. I’m sorry.” A curious expression came into Greer’s face, a flickering indecision. “Look. What you told me about the girl, Amy. You should know something.” He shook his head, glancing away. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. Maybe I really have been out in these woods too long. What’s that thing called? When you think something’s happened before, like you dreamed it. There’s a name for it.”
“Sir?”
Greer still wasn’t looking at him. “Déjà vu. That’s it. I’ve been feeling that way since I first found you guys. A big bad case of déjà vu. I know it doesn’t look like it now, but when I was a kid, I was a scrawny little thing, sick all the time. My parents died when I was small, I never even really met them, so probably it was just the orphanage where I was raised, fifty kids all crammed together, all that snot and dirty hands. You name it, I caught it. About a dozen times the sisters were ready to write me off. Fever dreams like you wouldn’t believe, too. Nothing I could really describe, or even remember. Just the feeling of it, like being lost in the dark for a thousand years. But the thing was, I wasn’t alone. That was part of the dream, too. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, not until you all showed up. That girl. Those eyes of hers. You think I didn’t notice that? Jesus, it’s like I’m right back there, six years old and sweating my brains out with fever. I’m telling you, she was the one. I know it sounds crazy. She was in the dream with me.”
An expectant silence hung around his final words. Peter felt a shiver of recognition.
“Did you tell Vorhees this?”
“Are you kidding? What would I say? Hell, son, I’m not even telling you.”
To show Peter that the conversation was over, Greer took his mount by the reins and swung back up into the saddle. “That’s all. But you ask me why you can’t go, there’s my answer. We don’t come back, Red Squad has orders to evacuate you down to Roswell. That’s official. Unofficially, I will tell you they won’t stop you if you decide to press on.”
He heeled his mount to take his place at the head of the line. A roar of engines; the gates swung open. Peter watched as the men, five squads plus the horses and vehicles, moved slowly through. Alicia was somewhere in there, Peter thought, probably up front with Vorhees. But he couldn’t find her anywhere.
The line had long since passed when Michael came up beside him.
“He didn’t let you go, huh?”
Peter could only shake his head.
“Me neither,” said Michael.
SIXTY-ONE
They waited, through that day and into the next. With just a single squad remaining to man the walls, the camp felt strange, empty and alone. Amy and Sara were now free to move through the garrison as they wished, but there was nowhere to go, nothing to do but wait. Amy had lapsed into a silence so profound that Peter had begun to wonder if he had dreamed her voice in the first place; all day long she sat on her bunk in her tent, her eyes drawn into an intense look of concentration. When Peter could stand it no longer, he asked her if she knew what was happening out there.
Her voice when she answered was vague; she seemed to be looking at him and also not. “They’re lost. Lost in the woods.”
“Who is, Amy? Who’s lost?”
She seemed to discover him only then, to enter into the present moment and its circumstances. “Will we be leaving soon, Peter?” she asked again. “Because I would like to leave soon.” An airy smile. “To make the snow angels.”
It was more than puzzling; it was maddening. For the first time, Peter actually felt anger at her. Never had he felt so helpless, pinned in place by his own hesitancy and the delay it had created. They should have departed days ago; now they were trapped. To leave without knowing if Alicia was safe was simply impossible for him. He stormed from the women’s tent and resumed his haunted walks around the compound, filling the useless hours. He made no effort even to speak with the others, keeping his distance. The sky was clear, but to the east, the peaks of the mountains glinted with ice. It had begun to seem possible they would never leave the garrison at all.
Then, on the morning of the third day, they heard it: the sound of engines. Peter raced to the ladder and ascended to the catwalk, where the squad commander, whose name was Eustace, was looking south through a pair of binoculars. Eustace alone had deigned to talk to any of them, though he kept such exchanges brief and to the point.
“It’s them,” Eustace said. “Some of them, anyway.”
“How many?” Peter asked.
“Looks like two squads.”
The men who moved through the gate were filthy, exhausted; everything about them spoke of defeat. Alicia was nowhere among them. At the rear of the line, still on horseback, was Major Greer. Hollis and Michael had come running from their tent. Greer dismounted, looking dazed
, and took a long drink of water before speaking.
“Are we the first?” he asked Peter. He seemed to not quite know where he was.
“Where’s Alicia?” Peter demanded.
“Christ, what a mess. The whole fucking hillside caved in. They came at us from everywhere. We were totally flanked.”
Peter could contain himself no longer. He grabbed Greer roughly by the shoulders, forcing the major to look him in the eye·· “Goddamnit, tell me where she is!”
Greer made no resistance. “I don’t know, Peter. I’m sorry. Everybody got split up in the dark. She was with Vorhees. We waited a day at the fallback point, but they never showed.”
More waiting; it was unbearable, infuriating. Peter had never felt so powerless. A short time later, a cry went up from the wall.
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