Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  Dick could more easily have stopped a moving bulldozer with his face than he could disobey that command.

  Rule Two: Dick obeys the Voice. The Voice is the Voice of the Source. No further explanation is required.

  The door opened again and an other came in. A shadow like himself, different in some way that didn’t matter. They were one and the same and that meant she was competition for the food. They both played the game. Dick had seen her before but he was incapable of creating new memories and uninterested in connecting any dots. He stayed where he was.

  The competitor moved around the tiny room in a flurry of action, faster than Dick could move, much more agile. She picked up something heavy and metallic from a shelf and came at Dick, her hand held high, her weapon ready to smash in his head.

  You want to destroy him now? A perfect innocent? The words were not meant for Dick. He ignored them.

  The competitor snarled and held her hand in place, ready to bring the weight down on Dick’s skull. Dick felt no fear, though he understood what was happening in his own dim way.

  Rule Three: Dick and death are old friends.

  “He’s a killer! A monster with no mind left!”

  You have more in common with him than you do with that sick, living thing on the floor. The only difference between you is that our friend here can’t be held responsible for his actions.

  The opponent said nothing but she lowered her arm.

  This is a test, lass. A test for you. No one will leave this dwelling until Jason Singletary is dead. You have some choices now, and I’m so sorry to force your hand but I have a duty to perform. You can let our armless friend tear out the psychic’s throat. Or you can do it yourself.

  “No,” the competitor sobbed, a blurred sound like a shake of the head, like the sound of an avalanche starting to let go. “No.”

  Nilla, someone said. It sounded like the Voice but even Dick knew it wasn’t. Did it come from the food? That made no sense. Luckily for Dick’s sake it didn’t matter. Only the rules mattered. That place, the fire in the mountains. Don’t get distracted now!

  “No—I won’t,” the other demanded.

  You have to go there—you are the only one who can!

  Ignore him, the Voice said. You have to understand me, lass. I would turn away if I could. I cannot. Dick here and I have done such things… terrible things. Together we poisoned the waters, lass. We have sown a savage crop. But it’s not over yet, and we can’t rest. You are one of us. We need you for what comes next.

  “The end of the world,” the other breathed.

  We are the ones who end it. You, myself, and all the others like us. It has been decided by powers I am compelled to serve. You must serve them as well. Can’t you see it now? We’ve been given this curse by forces larger than ourselves.

  “No, not me…” The other sounded pained. What could be bothering her so? There was food. She would be hungry, as Dick knew all too well. Why would she not eat? Even the Voice agreed. She should eat!

  Rule Four: Questions run away from Dick like the ripples on a pond.

  They were gone before anyone had a chance to speak again.

  Nilla! The snow-peaked mountains! The fire!

  Everything happens for a reason. You were made for a reason. You were allowed to keep some portion of your wits in your head. That makes you special. It does not make you immune. The Father of Clans has judged mankind and mankind has been found wanting. Someone must carry out that decree. Someone must wipe the slate. When it is done, Nilla, the world will be healthy again. It will be clean, and as beautiful as it once was. Do we deserve to remain in a world they have polluted? Do the powerful have a right to despoil, simply because they are powerful? There must be limits, lass. There must be a vengeance. Without the threat of a penalty why would a man not commit a crime? This curse is ours. We died so that others may be purified.

  “This isn’t my curse. It’s not… it’s not mine.”

  Lass. It is. But my masters are gentle, even as they are horrible. They’ve given us a gift, too. You and I, we aren’t like the others. We retain the ability to choose. And we are allowed, within some small latitude, to choose mercy. My friend here will kill this man in the most horrible, painful way imaginable. Or you can do it yourself, instead.

  “…no, I… no.” Her voice was tiny.

  She made herself small, falling to her knees, bending low over the food. Her face came very close to Dick’s and their eyes met. Dick had no idea what she might have found in his gaze. He saw only her dark energy.

  The ever-burning fire!

  We can wait for as long as you like. But that will just prolong Singletary’s fear, won’t it?

  Her head moved, lowering her mouth to nearly touch the food. So slow. Dick understood being slow. It didn’t matter—you got there in the end.

  Nilla!

  Rule Five: Everyone follows the rules, eventually.

  Chapter Nine

  Q: I’ve heard there’s a vaccine available but the government refuses to release it until it’s been thoroughly tested. But we need it now!

  A: In any time crisis there will be rumors that defy easy debunking but you have to assume that if something sounds too good to be true it probably is. There is no vaccine. If someone tries to sell you vaccine, report them to the authorities immediately.

  Q: My mother/brother/sister/lawyer was in California, in one of the relocation camps, on 4/8, the day they announced CA was overrun. How long will it be before we get some news out of the camps?

  A: At the present time, we just don’t know. Every effort is being made to resecure California but for now all we can do is wait and pray.

  [FEMA “Straight Facts about the Epidemic” website FAQ, posted 4/8/05]

  “They were civilians. You can’t just pop American civilians in the head… it’s effed up. He was saying before it was just a disease. That there might be a cure.”

  “Yeah, officers say a lot of things. You get used to it.”

  Bannerman Clark opened his eyes and saw his uniform socks. He saw the place where he had darned a hole in the left one, saw the angular shape of his large toe beneath the thin fabric, like something carved out of soft wood. Someone had removed his shoes.

  He sat up and saw them placed neatly by the side of his cot, lined up so that he could just step into them. They’d been polished and relaced.

  “Some of them were kids! A lot… a lot of them were kids. They’re asking too much of us. First the draw-down, then stop-loss and mid-tour extensions and no freedom leave, and, and… what happens now? Do we stay here and pull CQ duty forever? Do we live here, in a prison, when everybody else is dead?”

  “You have someplace else to go?”

  Soldiers outside his door, trading gossip. As they had for the last hundred thousand years, since war was invented. Clark didn’t worry too much about their bitching. He’d had a staff sergeant in Vietnam, back when he looked to staff sergeants for his orders, who had smiled and showed a full set of very white teeth every time he heard a troop complain about conditions on the firebase or about the jungle patrols or how hard it had rained the night before. “A soldier with time to bitch,” he had told Clark, “is a happy soldier. It’s when they don’t talk at all you have to keep one eye on the back of your shirt.”

  Sergeant Willoughby, that had been the man’s name. If he had a first name he’d never shared it with the likes of Clark.

  He pushed his narrow feet into the shoes and tied them tight, his breath constricted in his chest as he doubled over. That was just age. Standing up carefully to avoid a head rush he looked around for his cover. The boonie hat was gone—his peaked uniform cover was back. A message from Sergeant Horrocks. Trigger time was over—the new duty was garrison duty, which meant proper uniforms and a more rigid chain of command. The elegance of the message appealed to Clark. A good platoon sergeant must be half Mussolini and half Martha Stewart and Horrocks was a very good platoon sergeant.

  “They say troo
ps are AWOL all over the Midwest. Going back for their families. Can you believe that? I thought about it in Iraq, I think everybody did—we used to talk about it after lights-out, made plans for it even. Nobody ever did it. You would have got shot.”

  “You still will, don’t kid yourself. Keep your nose clean, keep your ass dry, keep your head down. You saw the bodies they pulled out of that trailer. Man, don’t talk to me about that shit. Don’t even look at me while you’re thinking it.”

  Desertion? Had it come to that? Vikram would have more information. He buttoned up his uniform top and donned his cover. Time to get back to work. He felt strangely good, at least healthy—maybe all he’d really needed was a nap. He should feel shell-shocked, he thought. He should be wracked with guilt. He had just shot one of his own soldiers, and even if she was dead she had been—

  Dead.

  She had died, while he watched, and then she had gotten up and stumbled toward him. Of course, his rational side insisted, she had been infected, not dead. She had been covered in fluids and tissues from the infected man, the man whose brain Clark had, had shredded, so obviously she had been infected, even if—even if he had personally seen her bleed out. Even if he had watched her die.

  He needed to think about that. He needed to consider all the implications. He also needed to put it out of mind altogether if he was going to continue to function.

  “Shh! I hear him moving around in there, get your foodhole shut, alright?”

  Clark cleared his throat discretely and opened the door of the warden’s office. In the corridor beyond the two MPs stood at attention against a steel wall painted in flaking tan. Their salutes were perfect.

  “At ease,” Clark ordered, and they relaxed fractionally. “You two head down to the DCAF, if you’re hungry. I’m safe for now, thank you.” He turned the opposite way, toward the prison’s nerve center.

  On the way he passed a window and was startled to see it was dark outside. Had he slept that long? Normally he woke like clockwork. In the prison yard soldiers with red lens flashlights were sweeping the open area between the fences. So far none of the infected—the dead—the victims of the Epidemic had wandered into the prison’s valley but it would happen. They might be out there even now, stumbling toward the warmth and the food trapped inside. He couldn’t see them in the dark, of course, so he hurried into the operations room.

  Racks of server hardware had been crammed into the small office and the floor was a hazard of unsecured cables. All the equipment made it ten degrees warmer in the room, when added to the body heat of the half-dozen specialists plugging and unplugging the modular components.

  At the far end Vikram stood before a massive flatscreen monitor. He was reading from a printout of an Excel worksheet while a specialist inputted coordinates on a wireless laptop. “Woods Landing, Wyoming. That will be, now, let me look, call it forty degrees thirty seconds north, one hundred and six degrees mark west, we do not need to be so exact, yes? Given our resolution? The date for this location will be March the Seventeenth. Oh! The day of Saint Patrick.”

  Clark’s thin lips twitched in something reminiscent of a smile. His friend had a way of staying cheerful despite circumstances that had seen them both through many a losing battle.

  “Still working tirelessly, I see, while the old man gets his beauty sleep,” Clark said. The specialist on the laptop turned away and looked busy, knowing he wasn’t supposed to be part of this conversation.

  “It is the epidemiology data, Bannerman.” Vikram handed him the worksheet and Clark scanned it.

  “Sanchez mentioned it to me before she was killed,” he assented. “It was what she wanted to talk to me about when she called me down to the Bag.”

  “It was her crowning achievement.” Vikram tapped the flatscreen monitor to show Clark a map of the United States. Tiny dots covered most of the west in several different colors. Clark imagined he knew what they represented—every known appearance of the Epidemic. “She had learned, as did we all, that this is no virus, and no bacterium. So she went on the hunt for some other villain. And this is what she found.”

  There were too many dots. Bannerman stopped scanning the screen and looked down at the paper in his hand. Each incident was listed with a place name and a date, with even a time of day listed for many entries. He flipped to the bottom of the sheet, to the oldest data. “This can’t be right. These dates… they go all the way back into last year, some of them. I arrived here in the middle of March, what was it, the eighteenth? The nineteenth. The Epidemic was three days old then.”

  “Lieutenant Sanchez thought not so much. She believed it started earlier but that we missed the signs. Her notes are maddeningly vague and of course we cannot ask her what she was thinking.”

  “What about her crew?” Clark asked. “Were any of them epidemiologists?”

  Vikram nodded. “Three of them, good doctors all, but military doctors. She gave them orders and they followed without any questions. She let them know nothing of what she was doing—and that is standard operating procedure only. That is not the mystery. She had them look up newspaper articles, mostly. You remember the outbreak of violence last year that had the media so excited?”

  “Yes, of course. I mostly attributed it to anger over the election. That’s what the the newspapers told me, anyway.”

  Vikram nodded. “I have seen the clippings. I have read myself a story about a dog that ate its owner before it was put down. About a mother who tore her babies to pieces. Missing children. Serial killers. Bad batches of the drugs like PCP. Lieutenant Sanchez looked at these and many more and saw evidence of a larger trend." Vikram touched the systems specialist on the upper arm—the approved zone. “Please show him now.”

  The screen filled in with what could have been a spiderweb or the root pattern of an ugly tree. Clark felt his breath leaking out of him. This changed everything. He reached for his cell phone. The Civilian had to know about this. Everyone had to know about this.

  “It’s not a disease at all, I do not think,” Vikram said, rubbing his beard. “It is more like a radiation. Or perhaps it is magic.”

  Clark shot him a warning glance and pressed SEND.

  Chapter Ten

  NO VACCINE, NO PEACE!!!! Sheriff’s Office in Clark County has some according to insider eyewitness but no plan to distribute to the people! WTF!!!1 If I was WHITE like YOU, could I have my innoculation then, OFFICER??? [“unDead Amerikkka” electronic newsletter, distributed via email 4/9/05]

  Men with machine pistols and brown baseball caps patrolled Terminal Two of McCarran international airport in Las Vegas. They moved in teams of two or three. One of them lead a pair of Doberman pinschers directly past where Bannerman Clark sat, waiting for the next flight to Washington.

  “They don’t have any badges,” Clark observed to the man sitting next to him in the cocktail bar. He sipped at his ginger ale—a little sugar always helped with his jet lag—and watched one of the dogs shove his snout into a trash can. “No insignia. Is this new?” He had never been to Las Vegas before, and was only there now because it was the last airport in the West that hadn’t been overrun. A military helicopter had brought him that far but lacked the range necessary to get him to the Capital.

  The businessman sitting next to him hunched his shoulders, wrinkling his tweed jacket and looked at Bannerman with some surprise. “This is the only city in a hundred miles that isn’t crammed full of dead maniacs and you’re worried about identification? They’re private consultants. We don’t ask a lot of questions about them, and you shouldn’t either. Excuse me, I have a flight to catch.” He dropped a five on the bar and hurried off.

  Who had hired the private consultants? The mayor of the city? Organized crime? It wasn’t Clark’s jurisdiction. Yet when he finally arrived in Washington twelve hours later (after an unannounced layover in St. Louis where he was not allowed to deplane) he found more private consultants at Ronald Reagan, though at least these wore some insignia on the back of thei
r flak jackets: KBR. A man in a KBR vest with a long, fluttering mustache checked his ID before he was herded into the baggage claim, even though he had no bags to pick up.

  At least the driver of the car that picked him up at the terminal was military—a regular army corporal with a stubbled dimple on the back of his head. In Georgetown the corporal gave him a snappy salute and indicated the door of a building Clark had never seen before. It was not the same building where he’d met with the Civilian the first time, nor was it anywhere near the Pentagon. There was no sign on the door except for the street number.

  Inside he found what must have been a cheap hotel at one point in its life-cycle. It had been converted into office space, the rooms on the first floor broken down into cubicles, but it took Clark a while to find anyone inside. Finally a man in a buttoned-down white shirt lead him to a conference room and knocked on the door. Inside the Civilian sat silhouetted before dust- and fly-specked Venetian blinds, a fresh box of Marshmallow Peeps on the table in front of him. “Mission creep,” he said, and stuffed one of the treats in his mouth.

  Clark removed his cover and stepped forward. “I have something I’d like to show you,” he began, but the Civilian’s eyes didn’t move at all. He looked deep in thought.

  “Mission creep,” he said again. “Powell Doctrine. A million Mogadishus.”

  Clark stepped a half-step closer. “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Bannerman,” the Civilian drawled. “I’m coming down from my afternoon dose of hillbilly heroin. I have a bad back, you see. A really. Really. Bad back.”

  He did not ask Clark to sit down, nor were there any extra chairs in the office.

  “It’s a shame about Los Angeles. And, uh, Colorado, right? Colorado. They had some nice scenery there. I really need to re-velocitize. Hold on. Marcy!” he shouted. “Not even an intercom in this office. Marcy! I need my pick-me-up!”

  A young woman brought in a tray and set it on the desk. It held a glass full of ice and a can of Red Bull. The Civilian ignored the glass and drank straight from the can. “Good of you to come out, Bannerman. I appreciate the face time. Listen, there’s someone I need you to meet. You ready? Need to freshen up?”