by Weston Ochse
By the time we were done and had the vehicle prepped and ready, it was going on ten PM. Dupree had woken once. He’d spent an hour jotting down notes, then we’d given him some food and sent him back to dreamland.
I soon found myself drifting through an ethereal landscape of Tony Scott movies. One minute I was Denzel Washington playing the redemptive Creasy in Man on Fire, and the next I was Maverick, the hotshot pilot in Top Gun who was brought to earth by the death of his best friend. Then, for what seemed like an eternity, I was stuck in Michael Rapaport’s living room in True Romance, smoking joints with Brad Pitt and all he could talk about was about having sex with Angelina Jolie. It was the sort of thing where I knew it was a dream, but was unable to change it. I let it take me for a ride as Pitt droned on and on, getting increasingly more detailed and imaginative, until I was suddenly on a submarine, staring into the mad eyes of Gene Hackman. I knew that somewhere aboard ship Denzel was arguing with a crewman about the relevance of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer over Stan Lee’s version while he planned a mutiny to take the Crimson Tide away from Gene Hackman.
My fucking dreams were always like this. Was this what it meant to be a child of the ’nineties?
“Belay that order,” Hackman said.
I turned to see who he was talking to. There was no one behind me, so it was apparently me. I turned back only to have his face now an inch from my own, so close I could see the pores on his nose.
“I said to belay that order.”
“Yes, sir,” I began, then corrected myself. “Aye aye, Captain.”
“You do know what to belay, right?”
The timbre of his voice changed from the deep baritone that loved arguing about the color of Lipizzaner stallions to something tenor and almost familiar.
“Belay! Belay! Belay!”
He screamed so loudly into my face that I jerked away and fell backwards, onto the deck. My head hit metal and I saw stars. Then came a sound like someone banging on the outside of the sub. At first I thought it was the sounds the metal made as the water pressure changed, but they were too regular; they sounded almost like drums.
I opened my eyes as I suddenly recognized the voice.
For a brief instant Gene Hackman’s face was replaced by the boyish, button-nosed face of Tim Thompson.
Then I was underwater, arms flailing, breath exploding, chest bursting...
Drowning.
It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.
General Norman Schwarzkopf
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WE LEFT ON foot the next morning, dressed in full hazmat suits with a four-hour supply of oxygen. I’d tried several times to radio in our position, but we were too far away from any of the re-trans stations. So instead of carrying a heavy doorstop, I left the radio at the safe house. I carried my HK416 in a sling, my Sig in a shoulder holster and a knife belted to my thigh. I could move well, although it felt awkward. The gloves limited my tactile sensitivity. The plastic viewport in the helmet both constrained my vision and caused it to warp as each step made the flexible helmet shift, sag or tighten, depending on how I moved my head, sometimes making the world seem like a moving acid trip. I couldn’t help being reminded of the EXO I’d worn months ago, and wished I had it now. But it was going through some upgrades, specifically extending the battery power. As it stood, the EXO didn’t have enough power for this mission. But still, where the EXO had heightened my abilities, this hobbled them. I needed to remember that. I couldn’t count on my reactions to save us. I had to plan. I had to be careful.
Sandi wore her weapons the same way I did, although she carried a MAC-10 and a Beretta 9mm.
Dupree carried an HK416. If he had to use it, we were definitely in trouble. He walked with a limp, which made travel slower.
Phil was the happiest of us all. He carried a flame thrower and still wore the shit-eating-Merry-Christmas grin he’d had when Sandi first belted it onto him.
Dupree was in a decidedly good mood, especially considering I’d shot him the day before. Not that he knew that. He assumed he’d been shot by one of the GNA bikers. I certainly wasn’t going to correct him.
Situated in a residential neighborhood, the safehouse stood between two east-west streets—Fifth and Sixth Avenues. These were broad affairs which still had occasional traffic. We wanted to avoid any interaction for as long as possible, so we left the safehouse by the back door and moved carefully between neighborhood homes. Phil was on point, the tip of the igniter nozzle already glowing with a small flame. Sandi brought up the rear. Dupree and I were in the middle.
I’d screwed a suppressor into the S4 barrel of my pistol. If we were going to need to fire, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t heard right up until the point when it happened. I carried it at high ready, with the barrel pointed upwards and both hands on the grip.
We’d managed a block and a half before we startled a man sliding out of a window. He had the look of an animal. His face was dirty, his broken-nail-tipped hands were filthy, and grime coated every inch of visible skin. He regarded us for a moment, then bolted. We let him go. He was just hungry.
We reached North Vernon Avenue and paused at the corner of a home. We’d heard engines for several minutes now and seemed to have discovered their locus. A GNA bus was parked down the block. Two armored men sat on motorcycles nearby. One of them could have been from yesterday, they looked so similar. Or it could just be their uniform. We could see through the metal-mesh windows that the bus was already half-full. As we watched, several men in full battle rattle and body armor were pushing people into the bus. I could see the rabbit that’d bolted from us earlier sitting uncomfortably in a seat. I watched as the last man was forcibly sat, and guessed as the guard did something out of sight that he must be handcuffing the man to something inside the bus.
True believers, my ass.
A vision of Charlton Heston yelling “soylent green is people!” played through my mind.
I felt my lips curl. I didn’t like what was happening. These men were bullies and needed to be stopped. I fought the urge to do violent things but still couldn’t stop myself from stepping forward.
Sandi pulled me back. “What are you doing?”
I gritted my teeth. “Nothing.”
She saw the pained look in my eyes and nodded. “I don’t like this anymore than you do, but we have to consider the mission.”
She was right, of course.
Then she added, “Look at it this way. Maybe they’re just getting them out of harm’s way in the advance of the alien vine.”
I nodded. It made sense.
We waited another ten minutes as they closed up shop and headed south, back towards GNA territory. We listened until we could no longer hear the sound of the motorcycles before crossing the street.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I spun, but it was only three large black birds sitting on a wire. One must have moved its wing. I was about to turn away when all three took flight.
Directly towards us.
“Phil! Right!”
He turned and let out a roiling cloud of enflamed fuel, catching the birds ten feet out.
We stepped aside as they crashed to the street. Two were already dead and smoldering. The third flapped miserably in a circle, its wings half burned away.
I walked up to it, placed the heel of my boot on its neck, and put it out of its misery.
When it stilled, I turned towards Dupree. “This fungus is going to be the death of us.”
He frowned. “Let’s hope not, because that’s their exact plan.”
We reformed and crossed the street, now even more aware that threats could come from the sky. When I was about ten, I’d been in a field in Nebraska with my class. Our science teacher had been droning on and on about the life cycle of corn and how it was part of every stage of our lives when a flock of starlings suddenly appeared. They began to form complex, undulating shapes in the air. Mr. Kurtz�
��that was his name—called it a murmuration and said that it was a protective response. He pointed out a hawk on the outer edge of the swirling cloud of starlings. Like most of my classmates, I was mesmerized by the ever-twisting, constantly-changing avian ballet and couldn’t tear my gaze away.
I remembered how in awe I’d been at that moment, as nature revealed one of its hidden beauties to me. But now I was in fear of such a thing, re-imagining that moment, but with infected starlings murmurating in anticipation of an attack. Ten thousand beaks, rending, tearing, and ripping through hazmat suits, flesh, scraping bone, spores from their ascocarp spikes infecting us even as we lay dying.
Beautiful and deadly.
I hoped I’d never see such a horrendous thing.
“Look at that.” Dupree rushed over to an animal corpse lying against the curb.
“Dupree!” I called, but there was no stopping him. I ran behind him, checking the ground and the sky for any threats.
He could barely contain his excitement. “Just like Cordyceps ignota. Remember the tarantula ascocarps I told you about? Look.”
The dog had probably been an average mutt, one you would see playing with kids, or sitting on a porch, or rooting around in a neighbor’s garden for moles. It had been brown and white with a smattering of black spots. Now the spots were pierced by long, cylindrical growths that branched out to look a little like antlers. These were even longer than the ones we’d seen on the dogs that had chased us earlier.
“They probably grew until the dog couldn’t carry them anymore, their roots wrapping themselves around internal organs and squeezing.” Dupree leaned in close to examine a particularly long, white-colored ascocarp. He glanced up at me with the look a million little boys had given their fathers. “Can we keep it?”
And just like a million dads, I shook my head. “We’ll get one somewhere else.”
He appeared to consider my response, then nodded. “Yeah. You’re probably right.” He stood. “Note the difference between the fungal growths on animals versus those on Homo sapiens. It’s interesting that there’s different infection vectors. I’d think it would be more efficient to have a single mode of infection.”
“Maybe they don’t work on everything.”
He grinned. “That’s exactly right. The difference in the mycelia could be because of the need to produce alternate actinobacteria. We’ll make a scientist out of you yet, Lieutenant Mason. Good catch.”
The idea of sitting behind a desk and staring into a microscope was right up there with scrubbing toilets or folding underwear. I shuddered internally, but knew I was safe from that fate, especially since I didn’t understand half of what he’d said. “If you’re done playing with dead things, we should be getting along.”
We hit Bayless Street, a small east-west street, and decided to follow it to its end at Zachary Padilla Avenue. This was our cue to turn south. We had to cross the 210. But that was regularly patrolled. Zachary Padilla Avenue ran over the 210 with high side-walls originally designed to deter people from throwing things out of car windows onto the cars below, but which would now help screen them from sight. That is, unless the bridge was a chokepoint and there were people waiting for folks just like us to come haplessly across.
Phil stayed behind with Dupree while we checked the overpass.
Sandi took left.
I took right.
We both hugged the sidewalls as we combat crouched quickly forward. Our pistols were out and in front of us at the ready.
The overpass rose to a crest, then descended back down on the other side of the 210. We couldn’t see over the crest until we were halfway up the incline. Sure enough, two cars were pulled nose to nose to block our path. But I didn’t see anyone as I swept my pistol barrel back and forth, seeking a target. I decided to double my speed. Running on my toes to reduce the noise, I made it to the car just in time to see two men glance in my direction.
They were making ramen on a portable propane stove. Both were Hispanic. One held a pair of chopsticks in his hand; the other held a .357. I noticed the body of a woman lying on a pile of purses, her pants removed, cigarette burns on her legs. I shot the one with the .357 in the head, then turned my gun on the second man. He dropped his chopsticks, sneered, and reached for his weapon as I double-tapped him in the face.
Both of them down, I slid over the hood of the car and onto the other side. I searched for a third man, but didn’t see anyone.
Sandi vaulted over the hood of the other car. She swept the area with her pistol, then said, “Clear.”
“Clear,” I said.
Then we conducted a quick site exploitation. Besides various weapons and a food stash, we found a bag of rings, watches, and various jewelry. Like that shit meant anything anymore.
Dupree and Phil joined us. The scientist looked a little wide-eyed at the bodies, but didn’t say anything. We were about to continue when I heard something. Muffled at first, it was someone pounding on the inside of the trunk of the car on the right. I told Dupree to pull the handle under the front dash.
When he did, we saw a middle-aged Asian woman, naked, bruised, and filthy. She regarded us with wide eyes. Yellow and blue bruises colored her face, telling of multiple beatings. The insides of her thighs and her breasts had the same mottling of old and new bruises.
I held out a hand, but she flinched away from it.
Sandi pushed me aside. “Come on. It’ll be okay now.” The woman hesitated for almost a full minute, before tentatively reaching out her hand, which I couldn’t help but notice had broken and bleeding nails, probably from where she’d been trying to claw her way free of the trunk. Sandi helped her out of the car and leaned her a little unsteadily against a bumper.
Phil found a jacket in the backseat of the other car and gave it to Sandi, who then draped it over the shoulders of the woman.
Dupree stared at her, his mouth open, tears in his eyes.
I had no doubt he was reliving a part of his own past he never wanted to see again.
“What are we going to do with her?” I asked.
Sandi regarded me for a moment, then shook her head. “Nothing. She’ll have to take care of herself.”
“How—how can she?” Dupree’s voice broke. “She needs... she needs...”
Sandi put a hand on his arm. “Those things don’t exist anymore.” Then she reached down, picked up the dead man’s .357 and handed it to the woman.
She accepted the gun without looking, the weight of the pistol tugging her arm straight. I watched her eyes as they shifted from fear to determination.
“Come on,” Sandi said. “Let’s get out of here.”
I took one last look at the woman, wondering briefly where she came from, where her family was, and if there was anyone she could go to. Then we left, Phil in front again as we descended the overpass. We’d gotten perhaps a block further when we heard a single gunshot.
No one turned around, not even Dupree.
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, ‘it is the quality which guarantees all others.’
Sir Winston Churchill
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WE PASSED THE Northrop Grumman parking lot and reached a construction gravel pit at the end of the road. We looked across the pit and saw the black alien vine in person for the first time, a vegetative thickness on the horizon. Not so far off in the distance rose one of the Twin Hives. A few sentry Cray soared above it. There’d be more at night. Every step closer to the hives put the party in even greater danger. Fighting a Cray with an armored EXO was hard enough; they’d tear through the hazmat suits like they were made of paper. I checked my watch. We had six hours to get there and back. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the alien vine in the dark.
The pit was clearly over a thousand feet wide. Skirting it would take too long, so we decided to go through it. Down below, in the center of the pit, rested two trailers, several pick-ups, and a large front loader. There was no sign of occupa
tion, but we were wary.
I holstered my pistol and unslung my HK416. Distance was now more important than silence.
The uneven ground was tricky to traverse. I let Phil get well ahead of us; the last thing Dupree or I needed was for him to slip and fall and blow us all up. Even so, the grade was steep enough that we all fell at least once, Phil and me on our butts, Dupree on his side. Each time we checked the suits for rips or tears, but they remained sealed.
We made the bottom of the pit breathing heavily. My legs felt the stress of the descent. I couldn’t imagine how Dupree felt. My face was hot and wet beneath the helmet. An itch had found a home at the base of my nose. I would’ve loved to scratch it away, but the suit wouldn’t allow it. For a brief moment, I considered taking it off, but I’d seen enough of the fungees and the spikers to know that that’s not how I wanted to end up. If it came to that, I’d do what that poor Asian women had done and end it myself.
Sandi and Phil decided they were going to clear the trailers, but I insisted on replacing Phil. Close Quarters Combat, or CQB, was a skill that required a lot of practice and trust between its practitioners. I knew that Sandi had that training from her association with OMBRA. Since we’d had much the same training, our level of trust in each other’s ability would be greater.
The trailers were the same white single-wides I’d seen at construction sites the world over. Several of the mesh-covered windows had been broken. Doors hung ajar. They were arrayed in an L-shape, each with a set of faded wooden steps.
We were about thirty feet away when I held up my fist and we halted. There was no reason to rush. We needed to get a feel for the place. Observe it. Watch for motion.
I spoke low to pass the time. “So what’s Phil’s story?” I asked Sandi.
“He’s Mother’s nephew.”
“So that’s why he walks around like he has a stick up his butt.”
“That and he’s a piece of shit.”