by Duncan, Ian
“Son of a bitch,” Sam growled, and passed the thermals to Wes. “If they have any kind of perimeter up they’re going to find us.”
Cuban nodded. “We need to move.”
Trubilinski sat in the driver’s seat observing the slow change that came over the operators. They were coming to life, bristling and agitated like a nest of bees ready to leave the hive and fight. It was what they were made for. He checked his tablet PC once more. currently offline, the status bar read. A wheel there had been spinning uselessly for hours. He dropped it into the center console and shut the lid definitively.
Trubilinski cleared his throat. “What kind of action do you propose, gentlemen?”
Sam and Cuban looked at the general, a fierce and eager gleam in their eyes.
Wes lowered the binoculars. “Wrap my leg up,” he said.
Cuban took the binoculars and surveyed the street and the low, unmarked building into which the captives were being led. “So, we’re looking at a human trafficking operation. Women and children, maybe a hundred. Fifteen tangoes at least.”
“Fish in a fucking barrel,” Sam said, winding a roll of gauze around Wes’s calf.
Wes shook his head. “Slave traders. Even with all this going on. My opinion of human depravity has never been stronger.”
“Early in the morning, too,” Cuban said. “That’s dedication.”
“Just bear in mind,” Trubilinski interjected, “if you do this, you’ll be taking on responsibility for everyone inside that building. Everyone you liberate.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Wes said. “This is our nation, our city. We’re already responsible for everyone in that building.”
“Spoken like a true sheepdog,” Sam said, offering his fist to Wes, who bumped it with his own.
“Right on, brother.”
“We’re gonna do this in the daylight?” Cuban asked.
“Shit,” Sam said. “I’m not waiting around all day, are you?”
“Hell no,” replied Cuban.
“Alright, let’s hear some ideas,” Sam said, covering Wes’s gauze with a layer of athletic tape.
“Take out the sentries, smoke out the rest,” Cuban suggested.
“Draw them out with a diversion,” Wes said. “Lure them into a gunfight. Freak ‘em out, wear ‘em out, go in tonight and mop up the rest.”
Sam opened his tactical backpack and removed a silencer for his .300 Blackout carbine. “How about this,” he said, screwing down the threads, “Cover the exits, take out the sentries, take out the guys who eventually come out to check on the sentries, then cut power to the place—if there is any—go in hot, and exterminate the fuckers?”
“I like the exterminating part,” Cuban said.
“They’re not posting sentries outside,” Trubilinski said. He had just glassed the building with the FLIR binoculars.
The operators fell silent.
“I have a suggestion.” Trubilinski said. “Why not draw the coughers here and let Cordyceps do the heavy lifting? I think we can safely assume the women and children will be locked in rooms or holding pens of some kind. Only the traffickers themselves will be roaming the interior freely. We use the chaos. We let the Cord in, then, once their ammunition is exhausted, we mop up the rest.”
Once again, the cab was quiet.
“That’s just plain crazy,” Sam said, grinning behind his respirator. “I like it.”
“What about the Cicada Project, General?” Wes said, seeming to extend an olive branch after the harshness of his earlier remark.
Trubilinski peered out at the brightening sky over the rooftops of the city. “The rest is for God to sort out. This”—he nodded to the trailer where the captives had been unloaded—“This may very well be the greater good we have left to do.”
Sam glanced at Cuban and Wes, who both nodded.
“We’ll need your help, sir.” Sam said.
Trubilinski turned in his seat to look directly at Sam, mirth dancing in the pale eyes that shone above his respirator. “I’m your huckleberry.”
Forty
CHLOE PINCHED her nose shut through the paper dust mask. “Oh god,” she moaned in a nasal voice, “I’m not touching that.”
Cole stood by the minivan’s open passenger door, doing his best to breathe through his mouth and finding himself holding his breath even then. “You got a better idea?”
Chloe started gagging and turned away, ripping off her paper mask in time to unleash a torrent of vomit on the pavement at her feet. Cole didn’t watch. He reached in to the minivan, nearly touching the pants legs that protruded stiffly into the driver’s side floorboard, disturbing a cloud of bluebottle flies that bounced off the windshield and caromed about the interior, buzzing and rattling against the windows. Cole could see the keys, a whole cluster of them hanging from the ignition. He groped the far side of the steering column for the one in the ignition, eyeing the body and holding his breath, nearly losing his nerve when he saw a wrinkle in the corpse’s shirt moving. The wrinkle buzzed and Cole realized it was a fly, likely hatched from a maggot inside the body and unable, now, to escape.
A host of lights on the dash lit up when Cole turned the key. He twisted it further. The engine cranked and fired without hesitation, the air-conditioner roaring and static blasting from the radio speakers. Cole found the knobs for both and turned them off. He stepped back from the van and took a deep breath, nearly choking when the stench reached him.
Chloe watched him from several paces away, the dust mask back in its place and her hands on her hips.
“I could use a hand,” Cole said.
“With what?” Chloe said dumbly.
“With the body, what do you think?”
“I told you, I’m not touching that.”
Cole walked around to the passenger side. “If you want a ride you will.”
He pulled open the sliding rear passenger door and saw, hanging there, the rotting face of the corpse, its eyes lost in folds of swollen flesh and its open mouth ghastly and decorated with writhing maggots.
Now it was Cole’s turn to spin on his heels and vomit, retching until he shuddered. When he looked up, Chloe was shaking her head.
“Are you doing all this for that pregnant chick?”
Cole coughed and spat on the parking lot. He noticed some of his vomit clinging to the side of the AR’s stock. He wiped it off and slung it disgustedly from his fingers. “If you don’t want to help, you can go to hell.”
Chloe let out a little huff behind her paper mask and looked around them. “I’d say we’re pretty much there, wouldn’t you?”
Cole glared at her. “This isn’t even a suburb of hell. Now give me a hand.”
Chloe stepped closer. “What exactly are you trying to do?”
“We’re going to pull the body out.”
“That thing’s as big as a fucking cow.”
“It’s just gas.”
“Gas bag,” Chloe said.
Cole set the rifle butt on the pavement and propped it behind the sliding door. The man’s arms stretched over his head, well into the bench seat, as though he had been diving across the console for the rear when the bullets caught him. His fingers were splayed wide as though his hands had been inflated, and a black synthetic watch band constricted the bloating of his arm just like the belt at his waist.
Cole reached for the corpse’s wrist, hesitating. “Here, you take that arm and I’ll take this one.”
“Oh my god,” Chloe said.
The arm was fleshy but cold, like a soft mannequin.
“One, two, three pull, okay?”
Chloe only nodded, not breathing. She took the wrist with both hands, visibly cringing.
“One, two, three, pull!”
The corpse dragged across the console like a giant slug, sliding over the backseat. W
hen its skull struck the floorboard at the door, the concussion knocked live maggots from its mouth and sent Chloe stumbling backwards with a shriek.
Cole had to breathe and when he did, the stench was so heavy it seemed to be a black bar across his vision and he felt hot bile rising in his throat. Still, he held on to the corpse’s wrist and kept pulling, the arm giving slack suddenly as the bone dislocated from the socket, but the muscles and tendons holding long enough to pull the body down to the pavement, where it flopped and shook like a thing the consistency of wet loaf bread. Cole let go and backed away, joining Chloe in one more involuntary pukefest before it was over.
Cole retrieved his rifle and staggered to the driver’s side, using the controls on the door panel to lower all the windows. “Get in!” he croaked, his throat burning. He slid the seat back far enough to accommodate his chest rig and backpack, then climbed in, tucking the AR barrel-down between his legs. “Let’s go!”
Chloe appeared at the passenger side, pulling the cleaver from her belt behind her back and laying it on the dash before she climbed in. She kept her hand clamped over the dust mask and leaned her head out the open window.
Cole shifted into drive and accelerated. He happened to look down at the instrument panel and noticed the fuel gauge barely registering a quarter tank of gas. Story.
Forty-One
COLE WHIPPED the minivan parallel to the wall, crunching one tire in the wreck of the drone. He slammed the gear shifter into park and killed the engine. Chloe had bailed before they even came to a complete stop, and Cole threw open his door and rolled from the seat with his AR, gasping for a breath of untainted air.
The cable was still dangling by the wall, and when Cole looked up he saw the silhouette of Emily’s head, her blonde hair lit by the morning sun, a wreath of white light.
“I’m coming up!” Cole shouted. He propped his AR against the wall and stripped off his load-bearing vest and backpack. He felt incredibly light for the first time in days. Chloe stood by watching.
“I’ve got to climb up there so I can lower them down,” he explained.
Chloe raised her eyebrows over the top of her sunglasses. “Can’t you just go back up the ladder inside?”
“Sure,” Cole said. “You want to go check it out for me, make sure there aren’t, you know, a couple dozen Cord zombies still chilling in there?”
“Been there done that,” Chloe said.
“That’s what I figured,” Cole said, then had a thought. “Here, you can use my AR to cover us. But listen, I’ve only got sixty rounds left, so if anything happens, make them count.”
Chloe’s head turned to stare at the black rifle.
Cole took hold of the cable but stopped. “You have shot one of those before, right?”
“Um. Not really.”
“Okay.” Cole let go of the cable and snatched up the AR. “See this lever here? That’s the fire selector. This is safe.” He flicked the selector with his finger. “That’s fire.”
Chloe nodded.
“Look through here, put the glowing red dot on your target, and pull the trigger. Other than that its just like a video game, except if you waste my ammo I’ll be the one to kill you.”
“Just like a video game,” Chloe scoffed, taking the rifle from his hands. “I got this.”
Cole watched her struggle with the weight of it for a moment, shouldering the stock and turning her head awkwardly to look through the holographic sight.
God help us. “Don’t forget the safety.”
“I said I got it,” Chloe said irritably.
Cole spat on his hands and rubbed them together. He leapt up and took hold of the cable and started climbing hand over hand, pedaling at the wall with his feet, doing everything he could to propel himself upward, the muscles in his arms and shoulders screaming before he had ascended even ten feet.
Emily was watching, and the knowledge of it seemed to give him strength.
A second head appeared beside Emily’s. Brandon’s voice: “You’re doing great, buddy.”
Cole wished he had taken the time to tie knots along the cable at intervals. He gave up kicking at the wall and tried to grab the cable below him between his boots—anything to relieve the strain on his upper body. Nothing seemed to help. It sucked. No way could he make this climb again. Not before he had rested a week. Make that a month.
Emily’s voice now: “You’re almost there!”
Cole climbed in a kind of fury, fury at his own weakness, fury at the audacity of Walsh and his men, fury at the mistakes he’d made already, and fury—perhaps the least of which—was directed toward Cordyceps itself, toward the fungus’ relentless and unkind evangelism, its determination to convert the whole of his race into zombies, maniacs, or sprouted statuary.
Cole reached the end of the cable where it lay hard over the edge of the masonry parapet wall, but realized he didn’t have enough strength left to let go with one hand to reach for the edge of the wall. He hadn’t visualized this transition, and he certainly hadn’t anticipated needing to make a maneuver like this at the very moment of his greatest weakness and exhaustion.
Cole looked down. This was it. He would fall the moment his strength gave out.
“We got you, buddy.”
Cole felt multiple hands grasping for him. Brandon and Emily were working together to haul him up and over the wall. Inexplicably, Cole felt the hard edge of the parapet wall under his hands, then his torso was over it and he could see the rooftop, that damned rooftop, as welcome now as some exalted Beulah.
The parapet wall raked Cole’s legs as he came over. He fell to the roof and rolled to his back, Emily and Brandon collapsing on either side of him and Brandon letting out a cry of pain that segued into breathless laughter.
“You fat sonofabitch,” he gasped.
Cole tried to laugh, but couldn’t.
“That was easy enough,” Emily managed.
“Nothing to it,” Cole said. He struggled to sit upright. “I found a car—and Chloe.”
Brandon shook his head. “That’s so weird. I saw them on her, man. A hundred, at least. No one could have survived that.”
“You should see her face,” Cole said. “She’s beat up pretty bad.”
Brandon shook his head. “She should be a lot more than beat up. She should be dead.”
“I should be dead, too,” Cole said. “Many times over.”
“Something’s not right about it,” Brandon insisted.
A faint voice carried from below. “Are you coming?”
Chloe.
Cole struggled to his feet and went to the parapet wall, looking down to see her sighting the rifle across the parking lot.
She angled her head up and shaded her eyes against the sun to see Cole. “Someone’s over there!” she shouted.
“Shit,” Cole said. Sooner or later they had to get off the roof. It could have been anyone Chloe saw. A looter, another survivor. One of Walsh’s men. Anyone.
“We gotta get down there quick,” Cole said. He turned to see the questioning and anxious faces of Emily and Brandon, and realized he hadn’t considered who should go first.
Brandon seemed to read his mind. “If I go first, I can help secure the area down below. But if I stay up here I can help you lower Emily.”
“Right,” Cole said, thinking. He also didn’t want Emily to be the first person he lowered using an unproven method.
“We’ll lower you first,” Cole told Brandon. “Chloe has my rifle and there’s a pistol and one more mag in my chest rig when you get down there.”
“Roger that.”
Brandon hopped on one leg to the parapet wall and started hauling up the cable, hand over hand. When at last the looped ends came up, Brandon sat on the edge of the wall and Cole helped him step into them, sliding the larger set up to his thighs, then hooking his arms through
the second set, and securing them over his shoulders and under his arm pits.
“How does that feel?”
“Good as it’s going to get, I guess.”
Cole gave him a couple feet of slack, then played out the cable across the rooftop and took it around the vent pipe in a half-wrap. “Okay,” he called over to Brandon, “I’m going to belay you off this pipe. I won’t be able to see you, so if it’s going too fast or too slow, shout out.”
Brandon nodded and attempted to lift his bad leg and swing it over the wall. Emily was there to help steady him. Cole held the cable with both hands and leaned back to keep the line taut.
“I guess there’s no graceful way to do this,” Brandon said, sitting on the parapet wall with both legs dangling over the edge.
“Getting over the side is the worst part,” Cole said, his optimism soon to be sorely tested.
“Okay, give me some slack.” Brandon twisted to grip the edge of the parapet wall and shifted all his weight to his right buttock. For the moment his bad leg dangled, useless. “A little more.”
Cole let another foot of the cable pass through his hands. As yet there wasn’t much resistance. He turned his head to watch Brandon. Sweat shone on his forehead and his jaw tightened until a vein bulged in his temple.
Brandon’s voice had become a strained growl. “A little more.”
Suddenly he dropped from sight. The cable went taut, jerking Cole before he threw one foot forward and caught himself.
“Brandon! You okay?” Cole’s voice was so high and strained the sound of it shocked him.
“I’m okay!” came Brandon’s voice from below. “You can start lowering!”
Emily stood at the edge looking over.
Cole swore in relief. He let the cable move forward, working his hands methodically. The friction around the vent pipe gave him good control, but the pipe was bending more than he’d anticipated under force of Brandon’s weight.
“It’s scraping!” Emily said.
“What?” Cole shouted. With his upper body straining, it was difficult to turn his neck to see her. “What’s scraping?”