The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  As yet they had seen no rats out here.

  He and 190 had been scanning news reports.

  “Here’s another one,” 190 said. “Translator says it’s from Dubai. Same story. Rats making people strangely violent. It’s just like the reports from Mexico City and Tokyo.”

  Chaos and violence had erupted in every single Zone around the world. Fortunately, those areas had already been sealed off from corporate commercial and residential areas. The program Sett had found featured a pretty but exhausted-looking woman broadcasting live from Toronto. Her wide and reddened eyes constantly scanned the studio, and her voice shook as she spoke.

  Pattern analysis of mined data indicates that the rats have been able to do this for some time. In what authorities are now saying were coordinated strikes, people described as hypnotized or robotic were seen commandeering shipments of food and other resources. It is now believed they carried them off to various hidden lairs around the world where numerous generations of rats may have been produced in short order.

  Though most wild animal species are long extinct, rats have managed to survive because of their ability to live in places humans do not, like sewers and other small, hidden spaces, subsisting on resources humans have not yet been able to claim…

  Sett stopped listening, focusing in on the horizon with the magnification feature in his glasses. What he had thought was a large hill there had just moved.

  Central Business District

  Standing inside the CBD were thousands of office workers, gathered into tightly packed groups. Each large cluster of humans was surrounded by a collection of rats.

  Daiss’ body was made to march forward. He passed among the groups until he was halted at the perimeter of one cluster, facing inward. Other Agents stood on both sides of him, facing the same way, sidearms in hand. Agents continued to file into the CBD until they numbered perhaps a few thousand, encircling the immobilized congregations of office workers in Corporate Green.

  As Daiss stood frozen in place, his gaze fell upon the faces of the men and women positioned immediately in front of him. Their pleading eyes overflowed with tears, but pleading with Daiss was like pleading with his Gloria 9. He was a mechanical component, and nothing more.

  There was no fanfare, no echoing order. Daiss felt his arm rise in front of him and his Gloria 9 kick as it disintegrated the mass of personnel standing before him. Every Agent’s Gloria 9 had fired simultaneously.

  Within seconds, everyone in a Corporate Green uniform was reduced to a lumpy heap. Hundreds of Agents had also fallen. The remaining Agents turned to face each other. Daiss pulled his trigger, and so did all the others.

  The circle intersection

  Wanda’s rage began to subside. As she looked around there were fewer rats, then still fewer, and then there were none. She was in a small alley, more than a block from the center of destruction at the main intersection. Even so, almost nobody here had been left alive.

  More shots rang out, some machine guns clanking out rhythmic short bursts, answered by the shrieks of Federal weapons. Evidently the Fiends and Saved had started their own war back up again.

  Based on the sheer number of fallen Saved surrounding her, Wanda concluded that they had inadvertently shielded her from slaughter.

  “Wanda!” a voice called.

  Leesa.

  “Have you seen Ernesto?”

  Oh, no.

  Ernesto had been here?

  “Ernesto?” Wanda called.

  Near the circle intersection

  Rus had seen a lot of weird shit in his life as a hoodlum, a New Union soldier, and now a Divinator, but nothing had been as fucked up as those rats. Masses of people had rushed in here, all trying to slaughter them, slaughtering each other in the process, but it was the rats that had brought it all on. There was something creepy and wrong about them, that had driven all the humans crazy. Then the rats just vanished.

  With all the guns around this place, his injury was like some big joke, except that he was going to die from it. A fucking spear? Right in the chest, some asshole had run Rus through with a spear. The Pure Water staff had fallen nearby, but he couldn’t feel anything below his chest and his arms were too weak even to reach for it.

  But he could reach the Juice.

  It had been his first combat without Juice since he’d been a snot-nosed punk, sniveling through life as one of the Bridges, but the rage he’d felt at the rats had blocked everything from his mind but the need to destroy them. Rus grasped for the full vial that still hung around his neck. There was no reason not to down it now. He’d be dead soon.

  Then out of nowhere came this little kid, scrawny like one of the Subjects, only a little Mexican kid, with one arm. It was the one he’d let go, when that doctor bitch had pleaded for him! The kid held a pair of pliers in his hand. He crouched down, plucked the vial out of Rus’ hand with the pliers and squeezed until it shattered. Bits of glass fell to the gravel, along with every drop of the precious liquid. Then the little fucker smiled at him, and in a creepy flat voice with a Spanish accent, he said, “False idol!”

  In the street where the fighting had been

  When the guns had started firing, Ernesto had hidden in a doorway and curled into a ball, but there was no way to shut out the noise. Now it was better. He could still hear guns, but they weren’t so loud.

  The Fiend had said something in English when the vial broke and spilled its smelly, oily stuff all over. He’d used a lot of the bad English words Arrulfo had told Ernesto he shouldn’t say.

  Ernesto had taught this Fiend, and shown him that the little vial would never save him. Now he could accept the One and not be an enemy and go to a good place for dead people.

  The Fiend wore a black robe. A stick appeared to have fallen from his hand; Ernesto could envision the trajectory of its fall. Now Ernesto saw at its end another vial, this one bigger and made of clear plastic. The Fiend had to learn that only the One could save him. Ernesto had to show him that the bigger vial on the stick was as weak as the little one. He took the stick and determined the correct angle to smash it against a corner of broken concrete, swinging hard. Water splashed against the rock. Ernesto took other vials from other Fiends but they were all dead and in their terrible places with Arrulfo forever. He could still save the one in the robe, though. One by one he broke the vials before the man’s face. “False idol, false idol, false idol, false idol.”

  The Fiend was saying bad words again.

  Ernesto picked up another stick with another vial at its end, this one rectangular.

  Near the circle intersection

  Over and over, the kid had cracked full vials with those pliers of his. Rus ground his teeth as he watched the Juice seep into the ground. The vicious little fuck had already broken the Pure Water staff. Now he’d moved on to the one the Subjects called the General’s Ashes.

  It took the kid about ten one-armed swings before one end of the brick broke off, exposing the bottom end of the tube. That bioplexi was pretty tough.

  He seemed to have some urgency behind his agenda of torturing Rus, and he came running up with the General’s Ashes and those pliers.

  “False idol!” he said again. The pliers crunched and the glass shattered. A fine black powder puffed out all over.

  Around the corner from the alley

  As Wanda rounded the corner, she saw Ernesto, standing less than twenty meters away. He was okay! He was holding up some kind of tube with a pair of pliers.

  “Ernesto!” Wanda called.

  A wisp of black smoke billowed over Ernesto’s head and disappeared.

  “Ernesto!” Wanda called again. It often took several tries to get the boy to answer or acknowledge when someone spoke to him, so it was a surprise when he raised his head and smiled at her.

  He collapsed. She ran toward him.

  The way he had fallen wasn’t right. He’d crumpled as if there had suddenly been less of him than before. Had he been shot with a Federal gun? She hadn’t
heard the shriek.

  She reached him. There was nothing there but the rags he’d worn, drenched in a strange whitish pink foam. The Fiend next to where Ernesto had been standing was dissolving the same way.

  Wanda felt it first in her lungs, a terrible burning followed by a strange emptiness. She lost the ability to breathe and then the impulse to breathe. Her body collapsed. A last, fleeting thought of Nami faded into nothingness.

  News channel still producing content, via Sett’s EI

  All we can do now is keep repeating this message for our viewers in the Des Moines area: Get indoors and seal your air intake. Wherever you are, go inside now!

  This is footage from another Federal security camera inside the sealed Zone. The bodies simply disintegrate, one by one. When the video is slowed down, you can see it, small pink spots forming in various places and expanding, erupting over the entire body. A few seconds later, only foam and clothing remain.

  If you are receiving this broadcast, get inside now and seal your air supply! This is a life-threatening emergency. Go inside now!

  The Great Midwestern Desert

  “It’s definitely moving,” 190 said. “It has to be one of the new office buildings. Even military stuff wouldn’t be that big.” Sett began waving and using various hailing programs through his glasses.

  The newscaster disintegrated mid-sentence. Sett gasped.

  “What’s going on?” Dok asked. He was kneeling next to Coiner, who had collapsed.

  “Newscaster just turned to foam, Dok,” Sett said.

  Dok’s eyebrows were down and his face was stern and certain, but his eyes welled with tears.

  “It’s the Slatewiper fungus, Lawrence,” Dok said. “I knew it. It’s exactly what I told you would happen.” He climbed awkwardly to his feet. “I told the Subjects, I tried to make them understand, and they nearly killed me for it. Now their ridiculous dogma has doomed us all, just like I said it would!”

  “It’s working!” 190 said. “Look!”

  Sett focused on the structure and his glasses confirmed that it was heading straight for them.

  But how could this be working? Why would a company come to rescue two Unnamed from a different organization, under any circumstances, let alone now, with two other strangers and such a high risk of contamination?

  Still, he waved and hailed for all he was worth.

  White central control room aboard the Agnes

  “Now what, sir?” 547 asked.

  “All communication was still being routed through the old building in the CBD while we finalized construction. We’ve been unable to identify any technical problems, but we are currently unable to make contact with anyone there,” his supervisor, NJt994, said. “The default directive is to hold our position whenever communication is lost.”

  NJt994 was more than his supervisor. As ranking White aboard the Agnes, he was charged with driving and making security decisions for the structure in times of emergency. All the other Whites aboard when they’d sealed were from 547’s cohort and held his rank, but 547 had a higher security clearance than any of them and therefore was de facto second in command. NJt994 embraced the mentor role and always went into detail in his answers, instructing 547 how to command. 547 was lucky that his immediate superior was, in fact, so literally superior. As far as 547 had seen, NJt994 was the perfect Unnamed: a physical incarnation of the Organization’s will. Together they stared down at the strange little group standing out there in the dust.

  547’s glasses told him it was a Williams Unnamed. He had set them to automatically scan in IR and UV whenever they encountered other UE glasses, thereby producing a construct that became an actual, identifiable face, without the glasses. When he zoomed in on the construct, the face was unmistakable.

  It was his former friend Sett! A flick of his eyes confirmed the other was Jack. One of the other two had dark skin, and the other was a wounded Fiend.

  “Now we watch them down there,” NJt994 said. “And we’ll know whether the air’s gone bad.”

  Below the moving beetle building

  Dok had gotten a good look as the gigantic structure had lumbered toward them. It was vaguely beetle shaped, like the stationary buildings in the CBD had been. Now, up close, it appeared only as a gigantic wall, slightly curving away in every direction.

  Though building-sized, the thing looked more like a machine than any ordinary structure, with bright red Grown-polymer legs and what was evidently a support framework, under a gray body. It was truly an incredible feat of bioengineering.

  But why is it here?

  There were a few windows up there on its surface. Dok thought he could see people crowded together inside, peering out.

  Time passed. Coiner coughed.

  “Did you see that?” 190 asked Lawrence.

  “Ames?”

  “Yes.”

  “190 and I shared news show links, Dok,” Lawrence said. “The newscaster we had open from Ames just disintegrated.”

  Dok sighed. “That’s what I’d expect. The spores were probably released in the Zone. The direction the desert wind is blowing would carry them straight toward Ames—for now. As close as we are to ground zero, even a slight shift in the wind could kill us instantly.”

  The building remained motionless and no communication came from within. Dok strode toward it, waving his arms. “Help!” he shouted. “Please help us!”

  There was no way to know whether anyone heard him.

  “They’re not going to open it,” Lawrence said.

  “No,” Dok agreed. “There was never much hope of that. What will they do now, shoot us?”

  “They could,” Lawrence said. “I’m sure they have a laser grid and auto guns for anything that gets too close. CBD buildings have stuff like that, and so do company housing structures. But why wait, if that’s what they plan to do?”

  Coiner grabbed Dok’s shirt and pulled, trying to hoist himself to stand. Dok grasped his hand and pulled him upward, but he was still so weak he nearly toppled under Coiner’s additional weight. Coiner’s clothes were soaked in blood and the arm he leaned on Dok’s shoulder was wet with it.

  With his other hand, Coiner removed the cord from around his neck, dangling the vial of Juice in front of him. Nobody moved for a long while.

  Finally, an opening appeared partway up one of the curving sides and something coiled downward, impacting the desert clay hard enough for Dok to feel the thud through his shoes. It was a cable ladder, with little loops that could hold one foot at a time, rolled out from what was apparently a service door, maybe ten stories above their heads.

  190 raced over and started up the ladder. Lawrence followed him, though not at a run. Reaching the cable ladder, he started up after 190, cupping the little dog against his chest with one arm and lunging up for each handhold with the other.

  “Better chance with three other outsiders up there instead of just me,” Coiner said, shoving Dok at the ladder.

  Lawrence was so big that every step shook and spun the ladder below him, but Dok managed to hold on. Coiner did, too, though Dok couldn’t imagine how he did it, in his condition.

  The cable was thin, digging into his palms and bending his feet around whatever part of his shoes happened to contact it. He was in better shape than he had been when Coiner had found him, but climbing this high, straight up, was too much. About a third of the way up Dok felt dizzy and shoved his arm up to the shoulder through the loop he’d been holding, in hopes it would hold him without him gripping. His vision went black for a second but he managed to shake it off.

  “Hey!” Coiner coughed below him. “Move it! They could seal up that opening any second.”

  Dok continued up the ladder with Coiner at his heels. At the top of the ladder, the smooth gray surface of the wall had rippled open, almost as if it had been melted by intense heat.

  Dok pulled himself off the ladder and up into a tiny and dimly lit mechanical area. The space between various giant pieces of biomachinery was ba
rely big enough for himself, Lawrence, and 190.

  190 was now just a heap on the floor. A woman stood over him, holding his gun and the jagged piece of glass she’d used to cut his throat.

  Coiner’s fist appeared in the opening, still clutching the cord with the little vial, and the woman lunged for it. Coiner, in the process of hoisting himself up, kept his grip on the cord and managed to punch her in the jaw, but he teetered on the edge of the hole for a moment before pulling himself inside. Relieved of its last climber, the ladder retracted into a space beneath the floor. The hole began to close, the surface healing itself as if it had never been opened.

  “You want this?” Coiner asked the woman. “You need this? Tell me where we can hide in here.”

  “Give it to me! Give it over now or I’ll tear you apart!” She shoved 190’s gun at Coiner’s face.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Coiner said. “You want to tear me apart after you drink it. Isn’t that right?”

  The woman stared at the vial, breathing raggedly. A three-shot burst echoed around the tiny space and Coiner’s head fell apart in chunks. The woman pointed the gun at Lawrence and yanked the vial free from Coiner’s dead hand.

  Lawrence had drawn his own weapon and had a bead on her, too. She growled through her clenched jaw and backed through a narrow gap between two giant pieces of equipment. Presumably she ran off to down the vial’s contents, but there was too much ambient noise in this machine room for Dok to hear footsteps.

  Lawrence set the dog down and slipped the straps off Coiner’s shoulders, taking the rail gun and sword, managing the task without re-holstering his sidearm. His Unnamed chest was too wide for the straps to cross as Coiner had worn them, so he slung one weapon over each arm and let them hang down by his waist. Dok picked up the dog and together he and Lawrence squeezed out, their direction dictated by the one gap between the pieces of machinery that was big enough for Lawrence to pass through.