Where are you? she thought. Show yourself, you bastard. I’ve got a message from Louise.
Martínez was close, very close. She was practically on top of him. For the first time in many years Alicia knew the taste of fear, but more than that: she knew hatred. A pure force, binding and suffusing every part of her. All her life seemed called to this moment. Martínez was the great misery of the world. It was not glory she sought or even justice. It was vengeance; not killing but the act of killing. To say, This is from Louise. To feel his life leaving him under her hand.
Come to me. Come to me.
From out of the gloom a shape appeared, a flash of white skin in the beam of her rifle. Alicia froze. What the hell …? She took a step forward, then another.
It was a man.
Ruined and sagging, old beyond old, his figure emaciated, a sketch of bones; his skin was bleached of all color, almost translucent. He was huddled in nakedness on the floor of the cave. As the light of her rifle passed over his face, he did not flinch; his eyes were like stones, inert with blindness. A bat was writhing in his hands. Its long, kitelike wings, the sheerest membranes stretched over the attenuated fans of fingered bone, fluttered helplessly. The man brought the bat to his face and, with a shocking energy, enveloped its dainty head in his mouth. A final, muffled squeal and a tremor of the creature’s wings and then a snapping sound; the man twisted the body away and spat its head to the floor. He pressed the body to his lips and began vigorously to suck, his body rocking with the rhythm of his inhalations, a faint coo, almost childlike, pulsing from his throat.
Alicia’s voice sounded clumsily huge in the cavernous space. “Who the hell are you?”
The man pointed his blind, rigid face toward the source of the sound. Blood slicked his lips and chin. Alicia noticed for the first time a bluish image crawling up the side of his neck: the figure of a snake.
“Answer me.”
A faint puff, more air than speech: “Ig… Ig…”
“Ig? Is that your name? Ig?”
“…nacio.” His brow crumpled. “Ignacio?”
From behind her came a sound of footsteps; as Alicia spun around, the beam of Peter’s rifle swept her face.
“I told you to wait.”
Peter’s face was a blank, transfixed by the image of the man huddled on the floor.
Alicia pointed her rifle to the man’s forehead. “Where is he? Where’s Martínez?”
Tears swelled from his sightless eyes. “He left us.” His voice was like a moan of pain. “Why did he leave us?”
“What do you mean, he left you?”
With a searching gesture, the man raised one hand to the barrel of Alicia’s rifle, wrapped it in his fist, and pulled the muzzle hard against his forehead.
“Please,” he said. “Kill me.”
They were bats. Bats by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. They exploded from the roof of the tunnel, a solid airborne mass, swarming Dodd’s senses with the heat and weight and sound and smell of them. They blasted into him like a wave, sealing him inside a vortex of pure animal frenzy. He waved his arms madly, trying to deflect them from his face and eyes; he felt but did not yet wholly experience the sting of their teeth, drilling into his flesh, like a series of distant pinpricks. They are going to tear you to pieces, his mind was telling him; that’s how this is going to end; your awful fate is that you’re going to die in this cave, torn to shreds by bats. Dodd screamed, and as he screamed his awareness of the pain became the thing itself, attaining its full dimensions, his mind and body instantly achieving a unity of pure annihilating agony, and as he pitched forward toward the detonator, with its glowing lights and switches, his physical person assuming in that elongated instant the properties of a hammer, falling, his one thought—oh, shit—was also his last.
The blast wave from the prematurely detonated first package, rocketing from the tunnel into the cave’s complex of halls and cavities with the energy of a runaway locomotive, reached the King’s Palace as a terrific bang, overlapped by a pop of pressure and a deep subterranean trembling. This was followed by a second lurch underfoot, like the deck of a boat tossed by a giant wave. It was an event in equal measures atmospheric, auditory, caloric, and seismic; it had the power to rouse the very core of the earth.
They were known as hangers: sleeping virals who, their metabolic processes suppressed, existed in a state of extended hibernation. In this condition they could endure for years or even decades, and preferred, for reasons unknown—perhaps an expression of their biological kinship to bats, a buried memory of their race—to dangle upside down, arms folded over their chests with a curious tidiness, like mummies in their sarcophagi. In the various chambers of Carlsbad Caverns (though not the King’s Palace; this was Ignacio’s alone) they awaited, a dozing storehouse of biological stalactites, a somnolent army of glowing icicles excited to consciousness by the bomb’s detonation. Like any species, they perceived this adjustment to their surroundings as a mortal threat; like virals, they instantly snapped to the scent of human blood in their midst.
Peter and Alicia began to run.
Alicia, had she been alone, might have stood her ground. Though she would have been swallowed by the horde, it was so embedded in her nature to turn and fight that this impossible task would have felt oddly satisfying: a thing of fate, and an honorable exit from the world. But Peter was with her; it was his blood, not hers, that the virals wanted. The creatures were funneling toward them, filling the underground channels of the cavern like the undammed waters of a flood. The distance to the elevator, roughly a hundred yards, possessed a feeling of miles. The virals roared behind them. Peter and Alicia hit the elevator at a sprint. There was no time to set the charge; their initial strategy was now moot. Alicia scooped the package from the floor of the elevator, seized Peter by the wrist, kneed him through the hatch, and launched herself behind him, touching down with a clang.
“Grab a cable!” she yelled.
A moment of incomprehension.
“Do it and hold on!”
Did he understand what she had in mind? It didn’t matter; Peter obeyed. Alicia dropped the package to the roof of the elevator, pointed her rifle downward at the cable plate, and pulled the trigger.
Freed from the mass of the elevator car, the counterbalancing weights plunged downward. A hard yank and then a massively accelerating force rocketed them skyward: Peter experienced their ascent in a blur, a sense of pure motion that focused on his hands, his only link to life. He would have lost his grip entirely if not for Alicia, who, below him, her grasp unassailable, acted as backstop, preventing him from slithering down the cable and plunging into the maw. In a confusion of arms and legs, they spun wildly, overwhelmed by a bombardment of physical data beyond Peter’s ability to compute; he did not see the virals leaping up the shaft behind them, ricocheting from wall to wall, each jolt of movement propelling them upward, narrowing the gap.
But Alicia did. Unlike Peter, whose senses were merely human, she possessed the same internal gyroscopes as their pursuers; her awareness of time and space and motion was capable of constant recalculation, enabling her not only to maintain her grip but also to point her rifle downward. It was the grenade launcher she intended; her target was the package on the elevator’s roof.
She fired.
26
FEDERAL STOCKADE, KERRVILLE, TEXAS
Major Lucius Greer, late of the Second Expeditionary, now known only as prisoner no. 62 of the Federal Stockade of the Texas Republic—Lucius the Faithful, the One Who Believed—was waiting for someone to come.
The cell where he lived was twelve feet square, just a cot and a toilet and sink and a small table with a chair. The room’s only illumination came from a small window of reinforced glass set high on the wall. This was the room where Lucius Greer had spent the last four years, nine months, and eleven days of his life. The charge was desertion—not completely fair, in Lucius’s estimation. It could be said that by abandoning his command to follow
Amy up the mountain to face Babcock, he had simply followed orders of a deeper, different kind. But Lucius was a soldier, with a soldier’s sense of duty; he had accepted his sentence without question.
He passed his days in contemplation—a necessity, though Lucius knew there were men who never managed it, the ones whose howls of loneliness he could hear at night. The prison had a small courtyard; once a week the inmates were allowed outside, but only one at a time, and only for an hour. Lucius himself had spent the first six months of his incarceration convinced he would go mad. There were only so many push-ups a man could do, only so much sleep to be had, and barely a month of his imprisonment had passed before Lucius had begun to talk to himself: rambling monologues about everything and nothing, the weather and the meals, his thoughts and memories, the world beyond the walls of the stockade and what was happening out there now. Was it summer? Had it rained? Would there be biscuits with dinner tonight? As the months had passed, these conversations had focused increasingly on his jailers: he was convinced that they were spying on him, and then, as his paranoia deepened, that they intended to kill him. He stopped sleeping, then eating; he refused to exercise, even to leave his cell at all. All night long he crouched on the edge of his cot, staring at the door, the portal of his murderers.
After some period of time in this tortured condition, Lucius decided he could endure it no longer. Only the thinnest vestige of his rational self remained; soon it would be lost to him completely. To die without a mind, its patterns of experience, memory, personality—the prospect was unendurable. Killing yourself in the cell wasn’t easy, but it could be accomplished. Standing on the table, a determined suicide could tuck his head to his chest, tip forward, and break his neck in the fall.
Three times in a row Lucius attempted this; three times he failed. He began to pray—a simple, one-sentence prayer seeking God’s cooperation. Help me die. His head was chiming from its multiple impacts on the cement floor; he had cracked a tooth. Once more he stood on the table, calibrated the angle of his fall, and cast himself into the arms of gravity.
He returned to consciousness after some unknown interval. He was lying on his back on the cold cement. Again the universe had refused him. Death was a door he could not open. Despair gripped him utterly, tears rising to his eyes.
Lucius, why have you forsaken me?
They were not words he heard. Nothing so simple, so commonplace, as that. It was the feeling of a voice—a gentle, guiding presence that lived beneath the surface of the world.
Don’t you know that only I can take this from you? That death is mine alone to make?
It was as if his mind had opened like the covers of a book, revealing a hidden reality. He was lying on the floor, his body occupying a fixed point in space and time, and yet he felt his consciousness expanding, joining with a vastness he could not express. It was everywhere and nowhere; it existed on an invisible plane the mind could see but the eyes could not, distracted as they were by ordinary things—this cot, that toilet, these walls. He plunged into a peacefulness that flowed through his being on waves of light.
The work of your life is not done, Lucius.
And, just like that, his incarceration was over. The walls of his cell were the thinnest tissue, a ruse of matter. Day by day his contemplations deepened, his mind fusing with the force of peace and forgiveness and wisdom he had discovered. This was God, of course, or could be called God. But even that term seemed too small, a word made by men for that which had no name. The world was not the world; it was an expression of a deeper reality, as the paint on the canvas was an expression of the artist’s thoughts. And with this awareness came the knowledge that the journey of his life was not complete, that his true purpose had yet to be unveiled.
Another thing: God seemed to be a woman.
He had been raised in the orphanage, among the sisters; he had no memories of his parents, of any other life. At sixteen he had enlisted in the DS, as nearly all the boys in the orphanage did in those days; when the call had gone out for volunteers to join the Second Expeditionary, Lucius had been among the first. This was right after the event known as the Massacre of the Field—eleven families ambushed on a picnic, twenty-eight people killed or taken—and many of the men who had survived that day had joined up as well. But Lucius’s motives were less decisive. Even as a boy he had never been swayed by the stories of the great Niles Coffee, whose heroics seemed transparently impossible. Who in his right mind would actually hunt the dracs? But Lucius was young, restless as are all young men, and he had wearied of his duties: standing watch on the city walls, sweeping the fields, chasing down kids who broke curfew. Of course there were always dopeys around (picking them off from the observation platforms, though frowned upon as a waste of ammunition, was generally allowed if you didn’t overdo it) and the diversion of the occasional bar brawl in H-town to break up. But these things, distracting though they were, could not compensate for the weight of boredom. If signing on with a bunch of death-loving lunatics was the only other option for Lucius Greer, then so be it.
Yet it was in the Expeditionary that Lucius found the very thing he needed, that had been absent from his life: a family. On his first detail he’d been assigned to the Roswell Road, escorting convoys of men and supplies to the garrison—at the time, just a threadbare outpost. In his unit were two new recruits, Nathan Crukshank and Curtis Vorhees. Like Lucius, Cruk had enlisted straight out of the DS, but Vorhees was, or had been, a farmer; as far as Lucius knew, the man had never even fired a gun. But he’d lost a wife and two young girls in the field, and under the circumstances, nobody was going to say no. The trucks always drove straight through the night, and on the return trip to Kerrville, their convoy was ambushed. The attack came just an hour before dawn. Lucius was riding with Cruk and Vor in a Humvee behind the first tanker. When the virals rushed them, Lucius thought: That’s it, we’re done. There’s no way I’m getting out of this alive. But Crukshank, at the wheel, either didn’t agree or didn’t care. He gunned the engine, while Vorhees, on the fifty-cal, began to pick them off. They didn’t know that the driver of the tanker, taken through the windshield, was already dead. As they ran alongside, the tanker swerved to the left, clipping the front of the Humvee. Lucius must have been knocked cold, because the next thing he knew, Cruk was dragging him from the wreckage. The tanker was in flames. The rest of the convoy was gone, vanished down the Roswell Road.
They’d been left behind.
The hour that followed was both the shortest and the longest of Lucius’s life. Time and time again, the virals came. Time and time again, the three men managed to repel them, saving their bullets until the last instant, often when the creatures were just steps away. They might have tried to make a run for it, but the overturned Humvee was the best protection they had, and Lucius, whose ankle was broken, couldn’t move.
By the time the patrol found them, sitting in the roadway, they were laughing till the tears streamed down their faces. He knew that he’d never feel closer to anyone than the two men who’d walked with him down the dark hallway of that night.
Roswell, Laredo, Texarkana; Lubbock, Shreveport, Kearney, Colorado. Whole years passed without Lucius’s coming in sight of Kerrville, its haven of walls and lights. His home was elsewhere now. His home was the Expeditionary.
Until he met Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, and everything changed.
He was to receive three visitors.
The first came early on a morning in September. Greer had already finished his breakfast of watery porridge and completed his morning calisthenics: five hundred push-ups and sit-ups, followed by an equivalent number of squats and thrusts. Suspended from the pipe that ran along the ceiling of his cell, he did a hundred chin-ups in sets of twenty, front and back, as God ordained. When this was done, he sat on the edge of his cot, stilling his mind to commence his invisible journey.
He always began with a rote prayer, learned from the sisters. It was not the words that mattered, rather their rhythm; they w
ere the equivalent of stretching before exercise, preparing the mind for the leap to come.
He had just begun when his thoughts were halted by a thunk of tumblers; the door to his cell swung open.
“Somebody to see you, Sixty-two.”
Lucius rose as a woman stepped through—slight of build, with black hair threaded with gray and small dark eyes that radiated an undeniable authority. A woman you could not help but reveal yourself to, to whom all your secrets were an open book. She was carrying a small portfolio under her arm.
“Major Greer.”
“Madam President.”
She turned to the guard, a heavyset man in his fifties. “Thank you, Sergeant. You may leave us.”
The guard was named Coolidge. One got to know one’s jailors, and he and Lucius were well acquainted, even as Coolidge seemed to possess no idea of what to make of Lucius’s devotions. A practical, ordinary man, his mind earnest but slow, with two grown sons, both DS, as he was.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, thank you. That will be all.”
The man departed, sealing the door behind him. Stepping farther inside, the president glanced around the boxy room.
“Extraordinary.” She directed her eyes at Lucius. “They say you never leave.”
“I don’t see a reason to.”
“But what can you possibly do all day?”
Lucius offered a smile. “What I was doing when you arrived. Thinking.”
“Thinking,” the president repeated. “About what?”
“Just thinking. Having my thoughts.”
The president lowered herself into the chair. Lucius followed her lead, sitting on the edge of the cot, so that the two were face-to-face.
“The first thing to say is that I’m not here. That’s official. Unofficially, I will tell you that I am here to seek your help on a matter of crucial importance. You have been the subject of much discussion, and I am relying on your discretion. No one is to know about our conversation. Is that clear?”
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