Healers

by Munson, Brad

  He could hear her screaming into her microphone, calling Boyd’s name, pleading for help. He could hear there was no reply.

  Bodies were piling up in front of them. He saw Levinson go down out of the corner of his eye, and the other men closed ranks with him and they fought on, almost mindless now, holding back the horde.

  And still: No answer from Boyd. Dead silence.

  Then a man – a human man, not a sprinter or a shambler – emerged from the chaos. He was dressed from head to toe in black, but not the same dull gray armor as the sprinters. Something unique and, to Krueger’s mind, rather wonderful.

  His head was covered in a black hood. His eyes were hidden by goggles. Still, Krueger recognized the voice when the man spoke through the slit over his mouth.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let me get this.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The man in black had a machete that gleamed in the late afternoon sun. He whipped it free and killed two sprinters in a single stroke – forward and back – then spun between two of Krueger’s men and walked, at an almost leisurely pace, to stand beside Castillo.

  He peeled off his headgear as he came. The handsome face with the high cheekbones and the jet black hair was new to her, but Krueger knew him in an instant.

  “Just as I suspected. Ewan Brewster, you son of a bitch.”

  Brewster allowed himself to grin – probably the first genuine smile he’d enjoyed in months. “Got it in one, you old fart,” he said. “Now let’s get this done.”

  Brewster turned to the panel and keyed in an entirely new set of numbers, ones that didn’t even resemble the chain that Boyd had forced Castillo to memorize. “I was planning on using these myself,” he said. “Thought I’d go in and kill a few traitors, but hey, you guys beat me to it. And you seem to have some sort of plan, so … what the hell.”

  The red light next to the keypad cycled from red to green. A locking mechanism buried deep in the stone door turned and clunked, and the door drifted open three inches, just as it had the day before.

  “We’re in,” he said unnecessarily. “Let me get that for you.” He dug his hands into the recessed handle and pulled. The door yawned open with surprising smoothness and for one moment everyone – Castillo, Krueger, his men – just gaped at him.

  “Well, come on,” he said, sounding exasperated. “We don’t have all day!”

  Castillo darted through the opening. Krueger shot one last sprinter square in the lolling tongue, giving his two remaining team members a chance to join Castillo in the darkness inside. Krueger himself was the last to pass Brewster, who reversed his grip, slipped into the shadows, and pulled the door shut with one supremely graceful movement.

  They were safe inside. The war, or what was left of it, would have to go on without them.

  Brewster turned to see the strongly featured Latina staring hard at him. It made him a little nervous. “You’re Ewan Brewster,” she said.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I’ve heard about you. The hero of Omaha. The one who walked away.”

  “All the bad stuff was lies. All the good stuff was somebody else.”

  Castillo stared a moment longer … then shook it off. “Whatever,” she said.

  Brewster looked wounded. “‘Whatever’? I’m hurt.”

  “We have to get this done. We have to complete the mission.”

  She looked around the space they had entered. Just as they had expected, both here and at the main entrance: It was an alcove, an entry space. There was another control panel here, mounted next to another set of doors, but that was all. A holding area that had to be penetrated, just like the door outside.

  She did exactly as she had been told. First security panel you see, Boyd had told them, pull off the casing, find the USB port, probably on the left, and plug in the flash drive. I’ll do the rest.”

  It wasn’t really a flash drive, Castillo knew. It was some kind of wireless modem. Boyd had told them he had to get hooked up to the Mount Weather system to penetrate it. That was their whole job. Let him get in and do his hacking. Just wait for the world to change.

  Except Boyd had given them the wrong entry code. And Boyd hadn’t said a word since before the attack began. So … what next?

  Never mind, she told herself. She just did her job. The case came off very easily. The USB port was exactly where the fat little techno-creep had said it would be. The wireless modem fit in perfectly; the instant it was connected the LED on its side flickered red-green-red-green.

  But … no Boyd.

  The others, including Brewster, didn’t say a word. Nobody dared. Castillo tapped the comm unit in her helmet, confirmed it was working, and tried one last time.

  “Boyd,” she said. “We’re in. I’m here. For Christ’s sake, come in. Say something.”

  There was nothing. Not so much as a hum. Castillo felt as if someone had shoved a knife in her belly.

  “Please, Boyd,” she said. “Please. What do we do? What–”

  The radio suddenly crackled to life. She heard the ghost of a carrier wave, heard someone breathing on the other end.

  A voice spoke. But it wasn’t Boyd.

  “No worries,” Mark Stiles said in her ear. “We’re here.”

  *****

  A spitting, yowling, enraged sprinter, freshly infected just hours earlier, snapped and snarled inches from Duncan Boyd’s face. Boyd yelped like a little boy at the sight of it and tried to shrink even farther into his chair.

  His wireless headset was still in place, though slightly askew from all the sweat and panic. The sprinter was held back by an improvised collar-and-pike arrangement that Mark Stiles had created on the fly … right after he’d killed the other half-dozen sprinters who had attacked him when he’d entered half an hour earlier.

  Maybe it was a good thing that nobody knew about his immunity to Morningstar. It did kind of make him a superhero, with a secret identity and everything. And really, once you got over the panic of being bitten to death and infected, it really wasn’t that hard to kill sprinters. They were actually pretty bad at being crazy.

  Stiles pushed all that aside. Instead he pushed the sprinter an inch closer to Boyd, so he could be sure to smell its hot and stinking breath on his ashen face. Stiles had a comm set on his head, too. He could hear everything that was being said in Omaha and far away, at Mount Weather.

  “Fix this,” he said to Boyd, “or I let him bite you.”

  Boyd’s eyelids fluttered – actually fluttered, like a damsel in distress. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know how. It was all a fake.”

  “I don’t believe you. You had to fool too many people. You had to come this close to telling the truth, or you would have been found out long ago.”

  Boyd started to shake his head, to deny it again.

  “Besides,” Stiles said. “You’ve got too big an ego to just fake it ‘til you make it. You wanted this fucker to work. You wanted control. That’s the kind of asshole you are.”

  Splotches of color appeared on the porcelain-smooth cheeks of the fat little techno-geek. Not for the first time, Stiles was reminded of the actor from Seinfeld, that Newman guy, who’d been in the first Jurassic Park.

  Same guy. But for real.

  “Look,” Stiles said, losing the last of his patience. “You’re a liar. You always lie. You’re lying right now. So just this once, Boyd, this one time tell the truth and do what you said you’d do, and I won’t let you die. You get that? Help our guys down in the mountain … and I won’t let you die.” The sprinter screeched as if on cue. Stiles shook the pole and made the sprinter tremble with eagerness, just for emphasis.

  The fat man gave in. He blinked tears out of his eyes and said, “Okay. Okay. Just a minute.”

  One hand reached behind him and pawed at a keyboard. He barely had to glance at the thing to k
ey in the right sequence of commands. Then he stamped a thumb on the RETURN key, and one of the screens in front of him flashed and showed two words, huge on the screen: UPLOAD COMPLETED.

  “Castillo?” Stiles asked. “Did that do it?”

  There was a long pause on the comm unit – too long, as far as Stiles was concerned. Then:

  “Yeah. Got the confirmation. The virus is in.”

  Stiles grinned like a little kid on Christmas.

  “Good deal,” he said to Castillo. “Now get the hell out of there.”

  He turned his attention back to Boyd, who was still trembling and panting with his face six inches from the sprinter.

  “I did what you asked,” Boyd said. “I gave them the code they needed. It’s done. It’ll happen, just like you wanted.”

  “Good,” Stiles said. “I appreciate that.”

  He opened his hands and let the sprinter go. The creature screamed with joyful hate and threw itself straight forward, directly into the fat man’s throat. It bit as hard as it could.

  A moment later, Stiles thought better of his plan. He got his hands back on the pipe and hauled the creature away. Then, one-handed, he pulled up his Winchester and blew the sprinter’s head into a bloody knot of flesh.

  Of course, it was too late for Duncan Boyd. He had been well and truly bitten. He was fully infected now, and Stiles thought it wouldn’t take all that long for the Morningstar Strain to work its way into his brain.

  He was hoping, however, it would take long enough for Boyd to feel every bit of it. Nice and slow.

  The geek was clutching his bleeding throat, as if he could somehow hold back the virus by sheer force of will and pressure on the wound. “Why did you do that?” he said, choking on his own blood.

  Stiles gave him a charming smile. “Guess what?” he said. “I lie, too.”

  *****

  Adan Forrest’s troops never set foot in Mount Weather. But then that was never the plan. The moment he received the properly coded command from General Sherman, he ordered a retreat. “Everyone,” he said, “Get back. Get to the MRAPs and transports. Be careful of sprinters and shamblers in the woods. Get out safely, but get out now.”

  He gave the orders from the pilot seat of the last remaining Apache in the air over Mount Weather. As he listened to a string of confirmations from every squad, every division, he gave one last set of commands to his ground commander and landed the chopper on the broad patch of green just outside the service entrance where Castillo and her people were waiting. It was rather refreshing, in a way: He didn’t need to worry about hitting a few bodies on the way down. All that was left in the area were sprinters, shamblers, or RSA soldiers, and they all deserved to die under the blades and wheel assembly of the Apache. He was glad to oblige.

  He had stashed a fully loaded M249 SAW in the front seat for just this moment. Now, as the Apache idled, he kicked open the hatch, pulled out the gun, and laid waste to a dozen sprinters and shamblers who were still fighting their way across the field towards the entrance.

  That was the last of them, at least for the moment. He activated his comm, called out to Castillo and Krueger, and a moment later the door to Mount Weather swung open for the last time, and they emerged, weapons up and ready.

  “I’d take you all in the chopper,” he said, “but there’s not enough room. Got an MRAP on the way to pick you all up, though. Even you, Brewster.”

  Brewster raised an eyebrow, and Forrest smiled coolly. “Yeah, I know you. You’re a goddamn legend, you are. Thanks for the help.”

  “Anything for Francis Sherman,” Brewster said.

  “I’ll remember that.” He put four more shots into the head of a sprinter who was still moving, enjoying every moment of it. He had been away from this kind of work for far too long, he decided. He’d have to make a point of getting his hands dirty a little more often.

  He cocked an eye at Castillo, who still look awestruck and grim at the same time. “Is it done?” he asked.

  She nodded her head very slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s done. They just don’t know it yet.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Three hours and seventeen minutes later, the air stopped circulating in Mount Weather.

  Tristan Finnegan was one of the first to notice it. “The fan,” he said. “The air. What’s going on?”

  It took a few minutes for one of his technical men on Level Four to give him an answer. “System error,” he said. “Circulators are off-line. We’ll get it fixed.”

  “Yes, you will,” Finnegan said. He knew there was no reason to threaten him further. The little man scurried off.

  Eleven minutes later the cooling units went offline as well. It began to get very warm, very quickly at every level of Mount Weather.

  “Enough of this shit,” Finnegan said to his bodyguards. “Let’s get out of here for a while. Walk the grounds and survey the damage until this is fixed.”

  “Sir—” one of them began, and he waved him away.

  “Oh, come on, they’re gone now. We saw them leave. Little assholes couldn’t blast their way in, so they left with their tails between their legs. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “That’s not it, sir,” said the other one. “We just got word—” he pointed almost shyly to the earpiece he and the other guard wore, a device Finnegan refused to bother with “–we just got word that the exit is locked.”

  “So unlock it,” Finnegan said. He was becoming very annoyed.

  “We can’t. They can’t. It … it seems to be jammed. Inoperable. We’re … we’re locked in. At the moment.”

  The temperature was still rising. The air was stagnant and hot already. It was starting to smell.

  “This is ridiculous,” Finnegan said. “Get the air conditioning on, get the air circulating, and get the goddamn doors open or everybody dies!” He was actually a little embarrassed. The old Finnegan, the one who worked for The Chairman, would never have raised his voice. But now …

  “That’s exactly right,” his guard said. “If we don’t get that working, everybody dies.”

  The technicians continued to work. The temperature continued to rise, at least for another two hours and seventeen minutes.

  Then the lights went out, at every level, in every room. In all of Mount Weather.

  It didn’t matter how much food was stored there. How many blankets, how much equipment. Without air, without power, without light … it didn’t matter.

  It took almost three days for the last men and women in Mount Weather to die. There were no gallant speeches, no calls to action, no promises of revenge from beyond the grave.

  There was just death. And Huck Finnegan was one of the last to go.

  EPILOGUE 1

  “Ladies and gentleman,” the cool, deep voice of the Chief Justice said from off-camera, “the President of the United States.”

  Francis Sherman stepped forward. He stood behind the podium with the familiar, famous seal and stared directly into the camera lens. He knew this was being broadcast across the country and around the ruined world. He wanted desperately not to look like an idiot.

  “My fellow Americans,” he said. “My name is Francis Xavier Sherman. I have served the United States all my life, first in the Armed Forces, then as part of recovering Omaha, and now, I have been asked to serve – for a very short while – as your President.”

  He looked down at the notes that he didn’t need, just to order his thoughts. Then he looked up again.

  He told the American people what had happened to the two men they had chosen as their leaders in an election that seemed to have occurred a thousand years ago. He explained how he was chosen to be Vice President; how the President had died in a craven act of betrayal by men who had now paid for their crime, and for so many others they had committed since Morningstar had come to America.

&nb
sp; “It is behind us now. We will never forget the service of these good men, these great men. But it is time to look to the future.”

  He took a deep breath and continued.

  “Beginning this day, March 18, 2007, I accept my appointment to the office of President of the United States. The Union is intact. The legal succession as dictated by our Constitution remains intact. One year from today, there will be a nationwide, validated election for a new President, Vice President, and U.S. Congress. I have no idea how,” he admitted, “but I promise you all: One year.”

  Sherman then went on, in a few carefully chosen words that Anna Demilio had helped him put together, to explain how the first batches of the Morningstar vaccine would begin shipping to population centers in two weeks’ time. No more: Two weeks. The goal announced by the late President just months before would now be realized: Every man, woman, and child in the forty-eight contiguous states would be given a one-time-only vaccine that would keep them from contracting the Morningstar Strain. They need never fear of rising from the dead.

  “Our work has just begun,” Francis Sherman said. “There is much to do, in so many ways. Land to reclaim. Families to rescue. Petty tyrants to overturn. And I am asking for your help to do just that: to restore the United States to its former glory. Not in a century, not in decades, but now. Beginning today.”

  Sherman looked directly into the camera, and for the first time he wasn’t nervous at all. He knew he was speaking the truth. He knew he was right.

  “We Americans are a remarkable people. We always have been. And now, after the worst disaster in our long history on this planet … we can begin to build again.