by Duncan, Ian
“Keep the keys,” he said, adding sardonically, “It was a lease anyway.”
“How’s your leg?” Emily asked, kneeling on the rooftop beside him. Her voice echoed inside the respirator she wore again at Cole’s insistence. Trudy wore the only other mask that had survived the fighting, a simple paper dust mask creased from being folded in her pocket.
Brandon grimaced and gripped his left knee, seemingly afraid to reach any further. The right side of his face bled from long lines gouged by coughers’ fingernails, the blood appearing black in the dim light. “Feels like my knee’s blown out. I only made it up that ladder because my life depended on it.”
Cole had revived somewhat eating jerky and nuts from his backpack, surprised by his appetite given the conditions. For a few moments he’d felt nearly as detached as some outside observer, popping peanuts in his mouth and chewing while he watched the other survivors figure out the problem of locking the hatch.
“Does anyone want to watch this with me?” Trudy held up her phone, the screen glowing in the darkness. “I don’t have a whole lot of battery left, so, if anyone is curious…”
“I’ll watch it,” Cole said.
Trudy sat cross-legged between Cole and Brandon, holding her phone like a tiny widescreen at arm’s length.
Cole saw the words cordyceps nation on the screen in bold lettering and felt his stomach tightening. Why he didn’t know. Perhaps it was precisely because he didn’t know, because in a way that ought to be inviolable, some of the most terrifying moments of his life were being produced and sold as an entertainment commodity—without his consent. That was enough of an outrage, to be sure, but as Cole was about to find out, the offense was actually far worse than he could have imagined.
Trudy tapped the play button.
The show opened suddenly with an action sequence: Cole with his head and arms out the window of the Prius, popping off rounds with the AR pistol at the looters chasing them. The camera angle was cinematic, as though they’d had a film crew in a helicopter flying beside the car. It shocked Cole how good it was. It wasn’t at all like any memory he had of the actual event—it was a scene from an action movie.
Cole was unaware, now, of anything happening around him on the rooftop. He had the sensation of a roller coaster rider that has topped the first big hill and feels the car falling away beneath him, a weightless moment of near-total uncertainty.
The perspective changed suddenly, the camera angle now behind the looters, watching one of them, struck by Cole’s bullet, tumbling to the pavement in slow motion. An electric guitar riff added an amplified scream as the man went down. Back to Cole, closer in, the AR pistol bucked, fireballs blooming from the barrel, even glints of sunlight off the brass, flipping away in slow-motion capture. The sound was studio quality.
Cole’s mouth hung open in stunned awe. They had been filming them with multiple drones the whole time.
Another looter went down in a dramatic, slow-motion collapse, the pistol in his hand clattering across the pavement.
“Got him!” a voice shouted from the tinny little speakers of the phone.
It was his voice, Cole recognized instantly, though he was sure he had said no such thing in the actual moment. He was about to say as much to Brandon and Trudy when the scene changed to Cole sitting in a leather armchair, speaking to the camera in the classic interview style of reality TV.
Cole stared. It was him, and it was not him.
“I’m not going to lie to you and say that didn’t feel good,” the Cole on the show said.
“What the hell?” Cole managed.
The camera panned even closer to Cole’s face. “People say a lot of things after they’ve been in a combat-type situation. Killing’s easy. Or it’s not. The truth is, in my experience, I just find myself doing what needs to be done. Maybe later, you know, I’ll have the luxury of reflecting on it, wondering whether it was the right thing.”
“That’s not me,” Cole said, his voice nearly failing him. He had entered a nightmare: not just the packaging of reality for resale, but the wholesale creation of it. His face on the screen struck him as strangely distorted, and the cadence of his speech slightly off, although it was life-like enough that anyone that didn’t know Cole personally would have been easily fooled.
The onscreen Cole smiled smugly. “I didn’t lose any sleep over it, though. Looters are even worse than the coughers, if you ask me. They had it coming.”
“I never said that!” Cole protested.
Brandon and Trudy looked at him. “That’s not you?” Trudy said.
“No, I never…”
The scene changed again, an aerial view of Cole and Emily walking across the parking lot toward the grocery store, the abandoned Prius behind them.
“Come on,” Cole’s onscreen voice said. “We’ve got to move faster!”
“I’m going as fast as I can!” a British woman’s voice said—definitely not Emily’s voice.
The camera angle flashed back to the fake Cole in the armchair. “She did slow me down. I wanted to help her. I mean, who doesn’t want to help a woman almost nine-months pregnant in a situation like this? But at the same time—and this was a constant tension I faced until the end—what if it comes down to my own survival? Just think, until the day before I’d never seen this woman. A total stranger. And now, am I really going to let her get me killed? After everything I’ve already survived? Just because we crossed paths randomly? That’s the thing about being out there, in the zone. You’re put in these situations, morally, that there just aren’t easy answers to.”
Cole could feel his blood pressure mounting. He shook his head. “That son of a bitch.” He had the fleeting and infuriating thought that they were watching him even now—watching him watch this—and the beginning of a thought occurred to him, how impossible it would be to survive while constantly imagining, in real time, all the ways the next episode might twist and pervert the things that were actually happening.
Walsh had seen and possibly heard everything. It became apparent, in the scenes that followed, that the little bird-sized drone Trudy shot down had only been one of many. They never seemed to lack a camera angle to capture the action—even during the onslaught of coughers inside the grocery store.
Cole found himself reluctantly engrossed—even he, perhaps the most resistant viewer possible. Even played back on a five-inch smart phone screen, it was compelling, vivid, gripping. They had to be making a fortune off this.
The three of them watched, the light from the tiny screen glowing on their faces in the darkness. They watched the man with the axe swinging valiantly, his teeth flashing white in gritted fury, and then the footage slowed, agonizing slow, so they could witness the exact moment the coughers overwhelmed him, knocking the axe from his hand and closing over him, seemingly a hundred fists pummeling and clawing him at once.
The screen shook as Trudy began to quietly sob. “Oh god.”
Cole was about to reach for the phone and shut it off when the screen changed to an interview—not with Cole this time, but Chloe. She wore a black tank top, her tattooed sleeves and shoulders on full display. “When the coughers came swarming up the aisles I knew we were screwed,” she said. “All I had was a butcher’s knife and a little nine-millimeter Cole had given me. It might have had seven shots in it.”
Cole frowned. He sensed something characteristically different about Chloe’s appearance. Even from the limited interaction Cole had with her, he sensed her cadence and facial expressions were truer and less plastic than his own. This was real. But how was that possible?
“I’m so confused right now,” Trudy said. “How did they…?”
Cole could only shake his head.
Just then the screen went gray and a little wheel spun in the center of it before it went dark altogether.
“Shit,” Trudy said. “My battery’s dead.”
The three sat in stunned silence for a few moments.
“I never sat for those interviews,” Cole said, in his own defense.
“That wasn’t you?” Trudy said.
Brandon didn’t seem entirely surprised. “Have you ever been on TV?” he asked. “Or posted videos of yourself talking online?”
“I was interviewed on national television once,” Cole admitted.
“That’s all they need,” Brandon said.
“What do you mean?” Cole asked.
“I used to work for the government,” Brandon said. “None of us knew whether Hollywood had dreamed it up and the CIA developed it, or if Hollywood developed it and the CIA stole it, but facial mapping software is out there. If they have, say, a thirty second clip of you talking, they can digitally map you and build an entire inventory of vocalizations and facial expressions.”
Trudy’s voice was still choked with emotion. “Oh my god, they can do that?”
“They can make you say anything they want,” Brandon said. “In living color.”
“I’m not sure I want to know how you know that,” Cole said.
Brandon grunted. “Yeah, I’d hate to have to kill you. Especially if it meant having to get up on this leg.”
Cole grinned in the darkness, but it soon faded.
Trudy stood up and walked away without another word.
Cole looked at Brandon, though he could barely see his face in the darkness. “They’ve already decided who’s going to live and who’s going to die.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Brandon said.
“It’s my fault I didn’t end this when I had the chance.” Cole swore and clenched his fist. “He was right across the table from me.”
“Hopefully it’s a mistake you won’t make again,” Brandon said. “You think they’ll leave us alone—tonight at least?”
Cole looked at Brandon. His bloodied face was only an outline, the dim glow of a fire in the city illuminating the horizon beyond him like a mock sunrise.
“I couldn’t promise you anything,” Cole said. “All I know is they’re still watching.”
Brandon blew out painfully, easing back to lay flat on the rubber membrane roof. “Well, if they want any of us to survive until the next damn episode they’d better give us a break.”
Any other man might have hoped Brandon was right, but Cole knew better than to hope. The Cord was out there, blowing in the wind. Even if their human adversaries decided to have mercy on them for a night, he knew Cordyceps never would.
Thirty
TWO MORE OPERATORS who had served with Sam on the teams arrived on foot in total darkness, homing in on an infrared beacon Sam had placed on the front porch of the cabin. They both wore dark clothing and carried sizable backpacks. They stepped into the house and removed their packs and night vision headgear, men with broad shoulders and narrow waists. They shook hands with Sam, clapping each other on the shoulder and speaking in muted tones, already of a mindset that they were on a mission. The names they used, in circumstances like these, were Wes and Cuban, the latter given for his Latin complexion and the former because he had once been ordained by a Wesleyan church. Neither were old by society’s measure, but by military standards they were well-seasoned, men in their late thirties who had already put in their twenty years and retired. Neither had been on active duty in the teams that long, where the dangers and rigors of special operations limit even the best careers to an average of several years. Wes had torn his ACL and MCL on a HALO jump, and Cuban had been shot twice in Fallujah. Wes had gone on to do a stint with the CIA and Cuban had served—in an unofficial capacity, of course—as an instructor with Delta Force. They would always be SEALs first, though.
They gathered around an enamel table in a sparsely decorated kitchen that had seen little improvement since the 195o’s. The operators sat at the table while Trubilinski stood with his back to a large porcelain sink. Blackout curtains were drawn over the windows and only a single naked light bulb hung over the table, the chandelier having been stolen in a break-in more than fifteen years earlier.
“Welcome to Checkpoint Charlie,” Trubilinski said dryly. He laid a thick bundle of hundred-dollar bills in front of each man. “You’re here, of course, in an unofficial capacity, which means you’re free to leave at any time. You’re here, I realize, because you’re sympathetic to our cause, and Sam has vetted you. That being said, the things I’ll ask you to do will certainly be illegal, traitorous, dangerous, fatal, et cetera.”
Trubilinski eyed the group of operators for a moment before he continued. None of them made a move to take the money.
“None of that comes as a surprise,” the general said. “Let me begin by posing a bit of trivia. Who closed the door to the ark?”
Sam blinked, and, being the more familiar of the three with Trubilinski, a smile played about his lips. “Noah?”
“God, sir,” Wes volunteered. The others looked at him and for a moment must have glimpsed the former seminarian in his face, gaunt and earnest as an Anglo Saxon Jesus.
“That is correct,” Trubilinski said, garnering Wes raised eyebrows and impressed looks from Sam and Cuban.
Trubilinski continued. “We have a situation in Washington in which a group of politicians would presume to enter an ark of their own making and shut the door themselves, leaving their constituents to die. I think it only fitting that we remind them that only God seals the door to the ark.”
Trubilinski clasped his wrist behind his back, his voice and posture taking on the bearing of an operational briefing. “The Cicada Project, as they dubbed it, was conceived after the first and second Cordyceps outbreaks resulted in over ten million civilian casualties. Confidence in eradication strategies waned and a new philosophy of accommodation—even surrender, you might say—to the processes of natural selection gained precedence in the administration. They decided to ensure that the best and brightest of their class would have a place to weather the storm, so public monies were secretly funneled into the retrofitting of a Cold-War era bunker.
“Unfortunately, this is where our intelligence regarding the Cicada project largely ends. Except for one other detail and this.” Trubilinski reached into his pocket and unfolded a single sheet of paper with a single column of printed names. “Fifty names. A partial list of residents who have purchased or otherwise secured places in the project. The list was provided by an asset within the project that I developed over a period of several years but lost contact with before anything else could be learned.”
Trubilinski laid the paper on the table before them. “Our objective is to destroy the Cicada Project or to otherwise render it implausible. Your ideas, gentlemen?”
The three operators exchanged glances.
“The location of the bunker?” Cuban asked.
“Unknown,” Trubilinski said.
“What’s our window?” Wes said.
“Tonight,” Trubilinski answered. “This is only speculation, but with the events that are unfolding in Washington as we speak, I would assume that anyone who paid two million dollars to secure a place in the project would have checked in by now or would be traveling there tonight at the latest.”
“So we stage a smash and grab,” Sam suggested, tapping the list. “One of these players, we take them by force to the bunker, use them to get in, set charges, boom.”
“Impossible,” Trubilinski replied. “Security will be at the highest level imaginable. The Secret Service will be there, for instance, and you can be certain that identity verification for entry will be confirmed by biometric technology. This isn’t just putting a gun to someone’s head and getting them to open a vault.”
“Why don’t we just drop a couple of daisy cutters on the place, then?” Sam said.
“Again,” Trubilinski said patiently, “I don’t know the location of the bunker, and even if I did, assa
ssinating the President and his entire staff via a fifteen-thousand-pound bomb is probably a bit more of a favor than my remaining friends in the Air Force will grant me.”
Cuban raised his dark eyebrows. “What are the extent of the assets in play, here, General? Could you make a phone call and get us a blinking dot on a map for every single one of these names, so we can see who might be en route and who, for instance, has already disappeared?”
Trubilinski seemed to consider it. “That is a possibility, particularly for the ones that live within driving distance of D.C. I’ve already marked those names with an asterisk.”
“An interception, then,” Wes suggested.
“Yes,” Trubilinski said, willing to game it out. “Only, they couldn’t know they’d been compromised. I’m thinking along the lines of infecting them with Cordyceps spores under the guise of a robbery, then sending them on their way.”
“A vehicular assault,” Sam said.
Wes nodded. “It could work. We couldn’t set up ambushes without knowing likely routes, but with two cars, one to chase and one to block, we could easily overtake them.”
“What are the Rules of Engagement, sir?” Cuban said.
“None,” said Trubilinski. “The only thing that matters is that the principals arrive at the project alive, unaware that they’ve been exposed to the fungus.”
Trubilinski gave them a moment to think it over. “Concerns?”
“Some of the principals will have private security,” Wes anticipated.
“Very likely,” Trubilinski said.
“Some will be armed,” Cuban said, playing out the scenario.
“Of course,” Trubilinski said.
“We’ll wind up killing somebody,” Sam said, rolling his eyes.