by Duncan, Ian
As they neared the white van, the horror of what must have happened became apparent—so apparent, in fact, that Cole forgot to downshift until the engine began to shudder. He coaxed the engine back into a lower gear and rolled over the first of the bodies that encircled the van like a throng of worshippers slain around some pagan deity.
“Oh my god,” Emily said, clutching the sides of her seat.
Cole brought the truck to a stop, nearly nose-to-nose with the van. Chloe still stood motionless, nearly at eye-level through the windshield, and holding, Cole noticed now, not her butcher knife, but his M4 carbine. So much blood covered her that she looked like a statue doused with crimson paint.
Cole toggled the gearshift into neutral and pulled the yellow air brake knob, the pneumatic hiss of the brake lines causing Chloe to start as though a hypnotist had just snapped his fingers in front of her face.
Cole flung open his door and climbed down, shutting it after him. He pulled the 1911 from his waistband, stepping over gunshot coughers, and trying to look every direction at once as he approached the van. Several of the coughers moved, turning like fitful sleepers and sighing loudly, causing Cole to bring up the pistol suddenly, nearly flicking off the combat safety before he moved on. Long brass shell casings from the M4 skittered across the pavement from his bootsteps.
“Chloe, come on,” Cole said, barely loud enough to be heard over the idling diesel engine, reluctant to break the silence, as though the coughers were really only sleeping after all.
Chloe only stared at the semi, thunderstruck as though an alien craft had landed in front of her.
Shock. Cole had seen it too many times. “Chloe, get your ass down from there!”
Only then did she turn her head to look at him. Vacant eyes.
Cole looked into the van. Most of the windows were shattered. No one inside. He saw his tactical vest lying in a pile of safety glass shards and reached in for it, shaking it clean. It felt light. None of the mags were in it and the Glock’s holster was empty.
“Chloe! Where’s Brandon?” Cole slipped the vest on and buckled the snaps.
She made eye contact with him at last, and started to shake her head, an almost imperceptible movement, her lips parting noiselessly.
“Come on,” Cole said impatiently, “let’s go.”
Chloe squatted on the roof and Cole took the AR from her and jammed the 1911 in the vest holster so he could help her down, noticing, for some reason, that she still wore her sunglasses, though they sat askew on her nose and both lenses were missing. The wet blood on her arms when he touched her instantly softened his demeanor.
“I got you. There you go. Come on, we can talk about it in the truck.”
Every step Chloe took seemed to restore some sense of her self-awareness and alertness, and by the time Cole opened the door of the truck she scrambled up the diamond plate steps as easily as though she’d been doing it all her life. She crawled over the console and tucked herself into the space behind the seats, wrapping her arms around her knees.
Cole shut the door behind him and lay the AR in the floorboard, glancing at the action long enough to see that the bolt was locked back, the mag empty. He looked at Emily, who looked at Chloe and back at him.
Cole shook his head slowly.
Emily didn’t seem satisfied. “Chloe, what happened to Brandon?” she said gently, her English accent serving somehow to sweeten the tone of the question.
Chloe lifted her head, “Brandon—” she started, then her eyes lost focus.
Cole looked out the window.
Emily noticed him turning in his seat to look further. “Can you see them?”
“Not yet, but we’d better keep moving.” He smacked the air brake release and worked the gearshift into one of the reverse gears.
The truck lurched ungracefully, seeming to shake Chloe from her reverie. “He didn’t make it,” she managed.
Cole glanced back at her. “You saw him die or you’re not sure?”
Chloe looked at him, disgust on her blood-streaked face as though the final indignity was Cole’s insistence that she spell it out. “He’s fucking dead, okay?”
Cole glanced at Emily and concentrated on driving the truck. Behind him, Chloe’s voice softened.
“They, they broke all the windows…they pulled him out. I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t stop them all.”
Emily reached back to touch Chloe’s bloody arm. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t even know,” Chloe said, seeming to notice her blood-soaked clothes for the first time. “I don’t think that’s my blood. I can’t feel anything. Wrong, I mean.”
Cole steered the truck out of the parking lot and brought it up to speed on the access road, forced to slow repeatedly at various roadblocks: cars jammed together in impromptu collisions at intersections where the pavement was sprinkled with exploded shards of plastic and glass, the panic induced by the outbreak having apparently wreaked havoc as people fled before the swarms of coughers, or perhaps lost control of their vehicles as something other than their own minds began to motivate them.
“See if the truck radio works,” Cole blurted after a long silence. Only after he spoke did he realize that Chloe and Emily had been talking to each other and that his thoughts had drifted elsewhere.
“Everything’s knocked out,” Chloe said.
Emily reached for the dashboard. “May as well give it a go,” she said. Her hand hesitated at the cockpit-like array of gauges and displays, finally finding an aftermarket radio and CD player installed behind the gearshift. She pressed a silver knob and Cole saw the LED screen blink on brightly, the radio frequency appearing in bold digital pixels and the droning of a human voice fading in, midsentence, coming from the speakers all around them in stereo.
“…understand that at this point we’re working with quite a bit of speculation in the process of gathering information, since a number of our networks are down, but what we are hearing from a reliable source is that the President and a number of his cabinet, if not all his cabinet, had taken refuge in an underground bunker and that the bunker was somehow compromised.”
Emily twisted the volume knob higher.
“What we can’t confirm, at this point, is whether or not the President or any of his cabinet are, in fact, casualties, but from what we’re hearing, with the entire District of Columbia in chaos, is that the government is barely functional, if functional at all, at the highest levels. Again, I’m sorry to keep repeating all that, but for some of you having trouble tuning in or just for the sake of clarity, let me repeat that we’ve been receiving reports that the President and his staff, perhaps all his cabinet, have been exposed and possibly even infected.”
“Try a different channel,” Cole said. “See what else you can get.”
Emily hit the scan button and for a moment the radio fell silent as the scanner ran through what was apparently a huge amount of dead air before it landed on another active frequency. The voice that came through the speakers now was familiar to them all—not for its particular owner, but for the deep-throated style of a movie preview narrator.
“Tonight,” the voice said ominously, “on an all-new episode of Cordyceps Nation, see the footage the government doesn’t want you to watch.”
Amid the backdrop of sound effects underlying the narrator’s voice, Cole heard the popping of gunfire and his own voice shouting. The skin on his arms tightened into gooseflesh.
“What did he—” Emily started, but Cole held up his hand.
The narrator wasn’t finished. “Go behind the lines of the latest outbreak with our exclusive survivor body-cams.”
“BRANDON!” a voice from the radio speakers yelled.
“GET THEM OFF ME!”
Cole heard coughing and a savage roaring and the distinctive popping of the AR-15 firing wildly, what he knew from both experience and
his nightmares was the sound of desperate, close-range fighting.
The narrator’s voice-over came again: “Cordyceps Nation, tonight at nine P.M. eastern. Viewer discretion is advised.”
The ad was over. Cole and Emily sat stunned. The truck slowed, Cole forgetting himself. Emily looked at him.
“Did he say ‘body-cams’?”
Cole stomped the brake and turned suddenly in his seat to glare at Chloe. The sunglasses frames. “You fucking bitch!”
Cole left the controls and dove for her just as she screamed and rose to meet him, bringing her hands up in claws like a wildcat, the two locking together over the console, Chloe’s fingernails raking the side of Cole’s face before he caught her wrist and then her head battered his nose in an explosion of pure pain that nearly darkened his vision. Chloe might have clawed him again had Emily not pulled her back with an arm around her neck while Cole fell back against the steering wheel.
At that moment the truck hopped the curb—albeit at a speed less than ten miles per hour—and collided with a huge stationary restaurant sign installed in a groomed flowerbed. They fell about the cab, Cole’s neck whiplashing back and bouncing off the vinyl-trimmed dashboard.
Cole righted himself and seized Chloe’s bloodied pants leg. The truck had stopped. He pushed open the cab door and dragged Chloe across the driver’s seat, out into midair before he let her drop, nearly falling with her before he caught hold of a chrome handle mounted to the cab.
Chloe fell to the ground in a heap, turning over on her back and gasping noiselessly while Cole watched.
Cole drew the 1911 from his waistband. He could feel blood pouring from his nose into his mouth. He spat it out, flicked off the 1911’s combat safety, and brought the barrel up until the sights aligned on Chloe’s face.
“Cole, wait!” Emily had crawled to the open door.
Cole didn’t take his eyes off Chloe, who had started to violently suck in air, her eyes wide with terror.
Cole cut his eyes briefly to Emily. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Emily said. “Just wait a minute.”
“She sold out,” Cole said, shaking the pistol accusingly. “She fucking sold us out.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily said.
“You didn’t see the video,” Cole said. “Trudy played it on her phone, on the roof. I saw Chloe giving an interview on Cordyceps Nation. It all makes sense now. She’s been a snitch all along.”
Emily hesitated. “I thought—I thought you said they could fake things, that they made people say things they never actually said.”
“This was different,” Cole said. “I knew something was different about it. Her interview was real.”
Emily held her hand up tentatively, as though she were negotiating a hostage situation. “Okay, okay, but we have to be sure.”
“Tell her, Chloe,” Cole demanded.
Chloe rose to her hands and knees. “They said they’d kill me if I didn’t.”
“Bullshit,” Cole spat. “You could’ve told us as soon as you got in the truck. That’s why you didn’t want us to turn on the radio.”
Emily’s face was white. “How long have you been filming us?”
Cole looked at Chloe’s face and realized she had lost her sunglasses in the scuffle. He looked over his shoulder and saw them lying in the floorboard of the truck. Without lowering the pistol, he motioned for Emily to hand them to him.
Chloe clenched her jaw and watched Cole examine the frames.
“Look at that,” Cole said, showing it to Emily. On the front of the black plastic frame, where the ear piece met the frame, the frame was slightly thicker than it should have been, and a tiny lens was visible, no bigger than a pepper flake, giving off a green, polarized tint when he turned it to the light.
“Fucking bitch,” Emily repeated, wonderment in her voice.
“Ever since I found you trying to boost a ride,” Chloe admitted proudly, the accomplishment of her betrayal now the only weapon she had to wield. “You people made me a millionaire.”
Cole and Emily stared at her, speechless.
“All you had to do was work with Walsh and he would have set you up,” Chloe said. “I don’t know what your fucking problem is.”
Cole clenched the pistol even harder, his knuckles white and the play already squeezed out of the trigger. “My problem,” he began, and then checked himself, trying hard to contain his anger. He had already imagined how the bullet would topple her in a backwards somersault. He wanted to see that. Instead, he blinked hard and said, “One last time, Chloe: What. Happened. To Brandon?”
A grotesque, self-satisfied smile crossed Chloe’s blood-streaked face. “He died making me rich, too.”
The pistol trembled in Cole’s hand.
“Kill her,” Emily said in a low, brutal tone.
Cole hardly recognized her voice, all the foreign lilt and charm gone from it.
Just then a more rational part of Cole’s brain seemed to take over, perhaps stunned into action by Emily’s demeanor. He clicked the 1911’s combat safety into place and lowered the pistol. “Give me that,” he said, taking the glasses back from Emily.
“Here,” Cole said, tossing them down to Chloe, “you can film them coming for all I care.”
Cole pointed to the furthest corner of the vast, paved flatlands of brick-and-mortar America, where, as if on cue, the horde was now visible, their legion footfalls nearly audible, or perhaps only synthesized in the overwrought horror of one’s imagination. No, he could hear them.
“Hope you get some good footage,” Cole said, pushing Emily back into the cab.
Chloe leapt at the truck and grabbed for Cole’s ankle as though she were only the first of the Cord zombies to reach them. But Cole would not give her the mercy of a bullet. He planted his boot in her face and shoved her off.
Fifty-One
THEY COULD HEAR CHLOE screaming obscenities outside the truck as they backed off the sign and pulled away. In the side view mirror Cole could see her standing, alone and forlorn—at least the angle of her head suggested as much until Cole realized she was holding the sunglasses, gazing into the camera, probably pleading for Walsh’s rescue. Might as well pray to a stone, Cole thought. He noticed Emily had leaned forward to watch in the mirror on her side as well.
Cole certainly felt no remorse in leaving Chloe to her death. What continued to nag him, though, was the thought that Walsh might actually rescue the bitch. After all, how many cooperative “actors” could he have left? The only thing making his sick little franchise successful was the heart-pounding tension of real survivors fighting for their lives. Once they were all dead, Cordyceps Nation would be nothing but a static documentary, an inevitable film of the relentless ebb and flow of coughers across the zone until they, too, collapsed and the death all around them was complete but for the spores—however long-lived they might be—that could start it all again.
Cole lurched and ground through the gears as well as he could, hoping to gain as much distance as possible before the horde struck, but another part of his mind sensed unfinished business behind him. And not just because a traitor was still alive. What, he wondered, made Chloe think—with an onslaught of coughers less than a quarter mile away—that Walsh was capable of rescuing her? Did she know, for instance, that his armored vehicle was close by?
Without a word, Emily leaned forward and steadied herself against the dashboard, looking down into the floorboard like she might vomit.
“Are you okay?”
She took a deep breath. “Contractions,” she managed.
“Whoa. Right now?”
She nodded, and a moment later she exhaled and leaned back in her seat. “The strongest I’ve felt yet.”
Cole could have done a double take. “Wait—strongest yet? You mean you’ve been having them already?”
Em
ily rubbed a hand across her belly. “I didn’t want you to worry. It could go on for a while, until they get closer together. And more intense.”
“More intense,” Cole repeated, finding his mouth dry. “How close are they now?”
“I said I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Well, I kind of need to take it into account, you know, how much time is left on the clock.”
“I really don’t know,” Emily said. “I’ve never had a baby, so there’s no way of knowing what to expect.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Cole said, mostly to reassure himself.
“I know you will,” she said.
They fell silent, but a moment later Cole slowed the truck and steered through a left-hand turn onto a smaller side street.
“What are we doing?” Emily asked.
Cole accelerated down an empty street lined on either side by looted retail outlets, their least desirable contents littering their parking lots, where thieves had long since picked though them and disappeared.
“Unfinished business,” Cole said, “for Brandon and for us.”
Emily said nothing, only looked out her window, and for the moment Cole thought she might be having another contraction. He made another left turn, then pressed in the clutch and let the truck coast. He leaned forward over the wheel to look at something above them.
“What is it?” Emily said.
Cole pointed. “Looks like Walsh might be having a little trouble of his own.”
The antennae above a three-story office building, appeared, at first glance, to be the site of a cell tower or repeating station, equipped with white drums that served to amplify radio signal or boost cell reception. On closer look, however, the white drums had a ragged appearance, and after staring for more than a few seconds, one began to notice, much like recognizing shapes in a cloud, the silhouette of arms and legs.
They were, in fact, climbers wearing biohazard suits. How they had attached themselves to the framework of the antennae’s mast was impossible to tell, but Cole imagined he could almost make out bands of gray duct tape. No stalks were visible, but Cole supposed the fruiting bodies could be trapped inside the anti-rip fabric of the suits, or perhaps yet to burst through the lenses of their facemasks.