On Colfax somebody had opened up a dumpster and spread trash across half the street. It looked like some of the bags had been torn open by animals. Clark buckled and unbuckled the holster of his sidearm for something to do with his hands.
The driver took them straight up the Esplanade, crushing the grass and bushes there in the interest of speed. “Try the AG again,” Clark told the comms specialist and she dutifully dialed the number but got no response. Maybe the Joint Tactical Radio System was down again—it had a bad reputation. As the driver brought them into the school’s parking lot Clark leapt down from the cabin before the vehicle had even stopped.
There was no one around.
Nobody guarded the rear entrance. Nobody staffed the motor pool. The big TROJAN SPIRIT II vans on the playing fields were standing vacated and alone. Clark told Horrocks to send two squads into the school and report back at once but he already knew what they would find, and he was pretty sure he knew where the Stryker group went, too.
More red dots on the screen. There was no way to save Denver, Clark realized. It just couldn’t be done. There were too many infected, and not enough bullets.
The Pentagon is dispatching troops to help us right now—units of the 82nd Airborne Division, ah, you may have heard of them and also the 10th Mountain Division, they’re trained in high altitude work. Whether they can get here in time we don’t know… wait, what? No, we’ll stay on the air until we’re ordered to leave. Well, I don’t care, Marty. I don’t care, you can go, that’s fine. Just leave the camera running. [Denver’s 7, Emergency Bulletin 4/4/05]
Nilla wanted to laugh, to whoop for joy at their escape. Except that in her hand the bundle of napkins was already soaking through, a spreading red stain growing in the center of the makeshift bandage.
“Shar,” she said. The girl kept staring straight ahead. The car jounced through a pothole and Nilla’s hand flew free. Blood sloshed out of Charles’ neck. “Shar,” she said again. “Look, we need to get Charles some help now or he’s going to die.”
Shar sped up, the mountains falling away on either side, dead and barren desert consuming the view through the windshield. The Toyota screamed with heat prostration and stripped gears. Through the broken window a gritty wind battered Nilla’s face and rattled the napkins in her hand. There was glass everywhere but she couldn’t spare a hand to brush it away—her free hand was needed just for holding on.
“If he dies—I know you don’t want to hear this—but if he dies on us he’s going to come back. He’s going to come back hungry.”
WELCOME TO DEATH VALLEY. The sign whipped past them, almost too fast to read. Through the rear window Nilla saw nothing but their own plume of dust.
“You have to accept this, Shar. There may be no way to save him. I know what I’m talking about. Would you just say something, please? Shar—if he dies, and comes back, he’ll be as dangerous as the armless guy back there. He won’t hesitate to, to attack you. Shar, can you even hear me?”
The girl stepped on the brake and the car shuddered as it decelerated, throwing Nilla against the seat back in front of her. When it came to a complete stop dust surrounded them like a brownish fog. It came in through the shattered window and filled Nilla’s already dry mouth, making her gag.
“I’m so sorry.”
Shar’s voice was tiny in the car, almost lost in the sound of the engine pinging and the chiming cascade of glass spilling off the backseat. “What was that? I don’t understand,” Nilla said.
“I’ll take care of him. Look, I am so, so sorry.” Shar was weeping. She reached up and smeared the back of one hand across her nose. “Please, Nilla. You were really nice to me. I want you to know I feel bad about this.”
Nilla stared at the back of the girl’s head as it shook with emotion. She made no attempt to start the car back up again. Nilla understood, of course. She pushed the napkins into Charles’ wound as best she could and fastened the seat belt across both of his arms, just in case. Then she pushed open the door and stepped out onto the fractured surface of the desert. The car pulled away from her as soon as she had closed the door, Charles and Shar heading east without her. In a minute they were lost to the heat shimmers coming off the burning sand.
END OF PART TWO OF MONSTER NATION
PART THREE
Chapter One
TonguesOfFire92: I read you can send care packages of clothes, and foodstuffs if they’re in cans, or dry foods like soda crackers, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, beef jerky, you know. I’ll try to find the link, those poor starving Californians really need our help. [Christian Love: Singles Chat Room Transcript, 4/8/05]
Ears flicking back and forth, nose up and into the night breezes, the kit fox trotted to the back of a creosote bush and pawed at the ground. Something didn’t smell right but she was hungry after a long day curled up in her den and she needed to hunt. She looked up, around, her black eyes drinking in the tattered dribs and drabs of starlight available. Far, far away from city lights this night, this moonless desert, was one of the darkest places on the surface of the earth.
The vixen dipped her head and sniffed at the ground, at a narrow pit in the sandy soil. Grains of mica and dust spilled down into the hole as she nosed it. In an instant, far too fast for human eyes to discern, her forepaws were inside the hole, her claws sunk into the tiny body of a shrew. She hauled the animal up to her mouth and set out for the safety of her own den where she could feast at her leisure.
Without bothering to make herself visible again Nilla reached down and scooped up the fox with her numb, chapped hands and shoved her face deep into the animal’s throat. She had bitten through the jugular vein and consumed the fox’s slight flicker of golden life before the animal could even begin to fight.
She made a point of destroying the fox’s skull before she threw away its remains. She felt guilty enough about the bear she had consigned to a life of wandering undeath. When she was done she sat down hard on the sand and let her brain relax, let herself become visible again. Every time in the past she had used her trick Mael Mag Och had appeared to tease her with riddles but not this time. She waited an hour but he never showed. That saddened her—she would have been glad for his company. Loneliness gnawed at Nilla, though she was hardly alone.
For one thing she had the desert all around her. Death Valley had failed to live up to its name. It might be a dangerous place for unprepared campers but it was hardly dead: in fact it crawled with life, with animals in startling abundance. They didn’t exactly announce themselves and with normal human eyes she rarely caught sight of them. With her eyes closed, though, the desert sparkled with their energy, like a vast field of stars but far more active and mobile. She would sit and watch for hours sometimes, especially at night as the life-lights of the desert played out their endless game, chasing each other, devouring each other. Predators were big bright blotches of light that flowed toward and absorbed the smaller, dimmer sparks of prey animals. The shrubs and cacti around her flickered dimly but under the ground their massive root systems, ten times as large as the parts they showed above the ground, made a tapestry of interwoven bright radial lines and curves, a fabric with a radiant warp and a luminous weft. It was the most beautiful thing Nilla had ever seen.
For another thing she couldn’t say she was alone because she was being followed. Followed and watched by the armless dead thing that had killed Charles. She had become aware of his continued presence during her first torturous afternoon in the valley, when she had walked so far and so hard she wore holes in the fabric of her too-tight jeans and her lips had split open with dehydration. The sun had started playing tricks on her early and had never let up—she saw heat shimmers in every direction that looked like pools of water rippling on the horizon, felt the shadow of every wisp of cloud on her back like a blast of icy breath. He stood at the top of a rise, his face distorted by glare, his ravaged body full of darkness in her life sense. She would have liked to write him off as yet another hallucination but she couldn’t
. She knew he was there. She was pretty sure he had instructions to follow her, though how anyone could make a dead man do their bidding was an open question.
He dogged her footsteps no matter how far or how fast she moved. On foot she was slightly more mobile, more agile and with better balance, but he had longer legs. He never approached more than five hundred feet from her but he never receded over the horizon either. As she headed east, walking night and day, stopping only to feed her body or to give her mind a momentary rest, he was never too far behind.
She stopped looking back, eventually. His presence became a fixed thing, a necessary piece of the environment. If he had stopped or turned away she would have felt it, she knew. She ignored him the best she could and kept trudging.
More of the same. Bushes no higher than her knee, some as low as her ankle. Soil cracked and broken by evaporation gave way to sharp-edged sand dunes gave way to rock scoured billiard ball smooth by trillions of individual grains of sand, each of them rolling, tumbling, microscopic jagged edges catching on the tiny defiles in the stone, tearing and breaking, wearing the rock face smooth a nanometer at a time over eons.
After three days she came to the place where the desert ended and the mountains began again. She bore no illusions about what lay ahead—she still had the map she had taken from Charles’ car and she knew there was another desert on the far side of this new mountain range. Not just another valley but a high plateau of desert that went on forever. Still she was glad to be climbing upward, even when her legs complained, even when her thighs burned with the unrelenting effort. Getting up into high country meant the nights were cooler, the daytime sun less punishing.
In the absence of anything else the mind grows to fill the landscape it observes and in turn it takes on the aspects thereof. After days of walking nearly non-stop she had learned to stop thinking about every individual thing she saw, the swaying branches of every Mormon tea bush, every tiny yellow flower of a brittlebrush. Instead she had come to understand everything as process. In constant motion she began to see the world in terms of movement and change, and any change for the cooler, the wetter, or the rockier was for the better.
She used her hands and feet to pull her way up the Amargosa mountains and into Nevada. There was nothing to mark the border—she had to guess, based on what sense she could make of the map in a place with no unique landmarks. She was well off the paved roads that cut Death Valley into quadrants and the gas station map had very little physical detail to guide her.
Did it matter? If you walked across the country, from one ocean to the other, did it matter at any point what state you happened to be in? She had been holding Nevada in her mind as a goal, an escape—a place where she would be safe from the military and the police and everyone else who wanted to destroy her. Had anything really changed, though? Surely the people of Nevada hated the walking dead as much as the Californians. The desert was providing for her, it was a safe place for her. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe she should ignore Mael Mag Och’s offer, forget about finding her name, just live underneath the cottonwoods, spend the rest of time getting more and more crusty and dry, eating kit foxes and tortoises and coyotes in the smell of sagebrush and baking rock. Maybe she should stay there forever.
She stopped to ponder that and just to sit down for a second. Her feet were killing her. Perched on a rock her body stopped complaining so loudly and her mind began to settle, to gather itself back up. Returning to concrete thought she slowly became aware that the armless corpse was gone. She felt his disappearance as a sudden shock of absence, the way she might have felt on having a tooth knocked out of her head.
Why had he gone? Where had he gone? She spun around, searching the high ridge then closed her eyes and tried the same search again but… nothing. He was gone. She turned and faced eastward—maybe he had gotten ahead of her somehow? No. No, but there was something. She stood at the top of a wandering canyon, the imprint of some ancient mazy river. At the head of the canyon stood a simple wood-frame house. Smoke dribbled out of the chimney to be torn apart by a gusting wind.
People. Living people. Who had somehow scared off the armless freak.
Chapter Two
CDC almost certain they can be pretty sure about one thing… maybe.
So the Centers for Disease Control says here that it’s not a virus. Which builds on what we already knew from this spectacularly useful press release from the National Institute of Health, which claims it isn’t a bacterium. So what the hell is it? In the meantime, here’s your conspiracy theory of the week from Romenesko’s: Man in Oklahoma claims rapture happened, only no one was fit to be saved.
[blog entry, DiseasePlanet.org, 4/8/05]
Clark ordered the HEMTT to a stop and leaned out his window to listen. In the distance, past a line of trees he heard a noise like paper being crumpled, over and over, interspersed with sharp bangs. He knew that sound. It was an automatic grenade launcher blowing the hell out of a city block. “That’s the Stryker group,” he told the driver and comms. After three days of hard fighting they both just looked numb.
It was a strange kind of conflict where the noise of automatic weapons fire meant safety, while unarmed civilians were your prime target. “Firefight ahead, chief,” he shouted back at Horrocks. The sergeant snapped to attention. “Get your people squared away.”
Horrocks snapped into action. “Alright, everybody find your battle buddy, we’ve got trigger time coming up. You, you, you, take point—you six spread out and keep your eyes open. Look out for negligent discharge!”
In the truck’s cabin the comms specialist spoke in a monotone into one of her cell phones. “Stryker group three, this is assault element six. Assault element six calling, Stryker group three. Do you copy, please?”
“Five by five, Assault. We are holding onto a golf course approximately one quarter kilometer north and east of your location, taking heavy fire… scratch that, not fire, you know what I mean. We’ve got air support coming in from Buckley ANG to remove friendlies, can you assist?”
“On our way, Stryker group,” comms said, but they were already in the middle of it. The HEMTT crept forward into a leafy residential street and grumbled to a stop. Ten or so infected stood in the intersection, stumbling on ravaged legs. One of them turned to look directly at Clark through the windshield. He heard Horrocks shouting at Squad Two and the infected man’s head erupted like a volcano. An infected woman in a bright red sweater came hurrying toward the truck, her long black hair floating behind her, still silky and full of body even though her face was grey and pitted with sores. The squad cut her down, too—and an old man in a pair of coveralls, and a teenaged boy wearing a sweatshirt. There were more of them and more coming down the street, perhaps drawn by the combat noise.
“Chief, we need to get through here,” Clark yelled out the window. The sergeant was on it, shouting for his platoon to deploy themselves in a semicircular formation before the truck. Clark addressed the HEMTT’s driver. “Specialist, take us in as slow as you can—let these men do their work without having to be afraid of getting run over.”
Inch by inch they pressed forward. The troops took their time, lined up their shots. There seemed to be no end of infected citizens for them to mow down but they had a sizeable advantage—they could think, for one thing, rather than just running blindly into a crossfire. They had the advantage of being able to strike from a distance. They had their training and discipline to fall back on.
“Stryker group, we are converging on your location but meeting heavy resistance,” comms said, holding her phone tight against her face. A bloody hand smacked against the window beside her face and she screamed. Clark drew his sidearm but the squads had already pulled the infected man off of the side of the truck and blown open his skull.
Out of the cab, beyond Clark’s line of sight someone let loose with a sustained burst of automatic weapons fire—a pointless waste of ammunition and a sign that somebody had lost his or her cool. Clark climbed over
the comms specialist and jumped down to the street to see what was happening. Infected crowded around on every side, more of them coming out of every side street, every alley, every garage and doorway. Clark loosed his weapon and shot down a bald man with no skin on the lower half of his face.
For a moment nothing was moving, no one was firing. Clark's mind immediately leapt to the pertinent question: why?
Why was he here, what did he hope to accomplish?
He was wasting his time, achieving nothing. The blonde girl with the tattoo could be anywhere by now, he thought, she could have slipped through his grasp already. Certainly he’d heard nothing from the Marine roadblock at Twenty-nine Palms.
Motion on the edge of his vision startled him back to focus. More of them—how? How had the pathogen spread so quickly? Clark was sick of asking himself that question but he was constantly confronted with new variations on the theme. How did this start? What enemy, what nation, what terrorist faction would let this happen? He fired again and a naked woman spun off her feet and landed in a heap. He lined up his next shot and pierced her cranium.
He was putting them out of misery, he told himself. Yes, they were sick people. Yes, they were citizens of the United States. But if the pathogen spread this quickly there just weren’t enough doctors to treat them all. Especially since half the doctors in the country were probably already infected themselves.
He had his orders, but never in his life had that been enough. He'd always wanted to know how things worked, and why.
“Chief, do you think we can just ram through this?” he asked, his voice low. He was allowed to ask his sergeant questions but it was better if the troops didn’t hear.
Monster Nation Page 14