Carl and Bro worked their way right up to the wall, where the sentry couldn’t see them. Carl took a look through a window, intending to find out how many of the troopers there were and what sort of condition they were in.
He saw all that, and more—and suddenly his heart started hammering, because it looked as if their mission might already have been blown.
There were only seven ’troopers, though they had five chicks along who were wearing gang colours—the main feature of the evening’s entertainment, had things gone entirely to plan. All twelve were orbit-high, and though there was no way to tell exactly what they had cocktailed into their rocket-fuel, Carl could see that the ingredients must have had a lot of lifting power. Maybe they were extra happy because things hadn’t gone exactly to plan, and they had found a new item to add to the entertainment bill. They had found the girl.
It was Carl’s turn to curse, and that made Bro chuckle.
“I knew that freakin’ skeeter’d getcha in the end,” he gloated.
“They’ve got the girl,” said Carl, in a low, hard whisper. “She’s all huddled up at the back just now, but it’s not going to be easy to take them if they fetch her out again.”
“She enjoyin’ herself?” asked Bro, with a snigger.
Carl didn’t bother to answer. The Doc had told him to be careful not to touch the girl—and he’d meant it literally, not euphemistically. He wasn’t going to be pleased when they took her back after partying with a bunch of Satan’s Stormtroopers.
“Hey,” said Bro, who had taken a peep himself. “They’re really high in there—and they ain’t had enough yet, though they’re looking really doped out. Must be using that new Spanish fly stuff from the lab over in B wing. Wonder where they ripped it off from—I been trying to think of a way to smuggle some out myself.”
In spite of all the sense which Carl had tried to talk into him, Bro still thought of employment primarily as an opportunity to rip off the employer’s goods. He really didn’t have enough brains to see that working for GenTech was different, and that working for BioDiv was very different. How was Carl ever going to explain to him that working for Doc Zarathustra was a big step up in the world, and that he had to change his way of thinking to make the most of it?
“We have to take them,” said Carl, “and we have to do it now. I’ll get the guy on the roof with a dart. The rest shouldn’t give you much trouble, given that their heads are on some other planet, but whatever you do don’t hit the girl!”
“Sure,” said Bro. “You’re the smartass, all right. Gee, Bro, I’ll take care of the big one—you pop the other twelve. What brothers are for, hey? Blood’s thicker than water, ain’t that what they say?”
“You want to give the MG to me? You think you could hit that sucker up top with the dart-gun—remembering, of course, that he’s the only one who hasn’t pickled his brain?”
“Just jokin’, Carly. Hell, you know how I love to play a tune.”
“Don’t hit the girl!” said Carl, again. It paid to repeat things when you gave orders to Bro. He wasn’t a good listener.
“Sure, sure,” said Bro.
“I have to get back to get a clear shot. Work your way round to the door, but don’t go until you hear me fire. You know what the dart-gun sounds like?”
Bro made another disgusted noise.
Carl pulled back from the window, and worked his way out back again, moving carefully through the bushes. It wasn’t easy to be quiet, with his feet in the water half the time and the branches rustling whenever he touched them, but the music from inside was loud enough to drown out the little sounds and the bullfrogs were making more noise than he was.
When he had the shot lined up to his satisfaction he fired. He needn’t have worried about Bro hearing the soft thunk of the dart rifle, because the anaesthetic didn’t take effect immediately, and the fact that the guy on the roof didn’t know what had hit him or where it had come from didn’t stop him playing a tune on his own MG and sending a hail of bullets out into the swamp. Mercifully, he was a lousy guesser, because he didn’t get one within a dozen yards of where Carl was crouching.
The burst of fire from the roof overlapped the longer one which Bro unleashed from the doorway of the roadhouse, and Carl knew full well that Bro would keep his finger tight on the trigger until he’d gone through the entire magazine. The moment the guy on top began to fall and it was safe to move, Carl ran—not to the door but to a side-window, so that anyone who was able to take cover from Bro would still be in his own line of sight. All the while he was thinking: Don’t hit the girl! Don’t hit the girl!
He didn’t have the least idea why Doc Zarathustra had kept the girl in an isolation room, or why she’d made a break, or why she shouldn’t be touched, but he knew that if he screwed up, he would have screwed up something big—and he didn’t want to screw up for the Doc, because he didn’t want to be bounced back down to the goon squad for the rest of his life.
When he got to the window and poked the dart-gun through he saw that there was no need. Bro was no marksman, but his targets had been coked up to the eyeballs and there hadn’t been anywhere for them to hide. Eleven of the twelve had gone down and the odd one out was a girl who’d been squatting in the corner, well wide of the door. She still had her jeans round her ankles, and there was no way she could even pull a knife until she’d finished what she’d started. When Bro ran out of bullets without having gotten around to her he just took three strides in her direction, and hit her on the head with the hot barrel of the MG. It knocked her out cold.
The silence seemed very deep after the booming music—which had been stopped dead by one of Bro’s bullets.
Carl went round to the front, not hurrying—and that was perhaps as well, because when he came around the corner, the guy who was just climbing out of the jalopy was already on his way to the door, ready to take Bro from behind. Carl fired from the hip, and was profoundly grateful to see the ’trooper go down, dropping his pistol as he fell.
“Musta had a weak constitution,” said Bro, coming back to look down at the guy who’d very nearly done for him. “Couldn’t take the partyin’ an’ went to sleep it off!”
Carl pushed past him, anxious to make certain that Bro hadn’t put a slug in the girl by mistake. For once, the gods were on his side; she was okay, and when he came close to her she looked up at him with wide open terror-stricken eyes. She wasn’t very old—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three—but her long hair was as white as snow. That was odd, because she certainly wasn’t albino. Her skin had plenty of colour in it, though it might have been knowledge of the state she was in that was making her blush so bright.
Carl knelt down beside her and only just stopped himself reaching out a hand to touch her face. He stood back, made helpless by his orders, and said: “Don’t worry now—you’re okay. You’re okay.”
He looked at Bro, who was collecting up all the hardware in the room. Three of the ’troopers were still alive and groaning, though they weren’t in any condition to carry on the fight. Bro bashed them one by one, aiming to shut them up rather than finish them off. If any of the others were still in a condition to moan, they had the sense to play possum.
“Go get the car,” said Carl, when Bro had finished.
Bro came to stand beside him, looking down at the girl.
“Hell,” he said, “she’s okay. I missed her, didn’t I?”
“Go get the car, Bro,” Carl repeated, his voice as icy as he could make it.
Bro favoured him with a twisted grin as he moved towards the door. Then, to the girl, he said: “You’ll be okay with my big brother, little girl. Even if he didn’t have orders not to touch you, he’s a real saint.” Carl could hear the sound of his laughter as he went off jauntily down the road.
The terror in the girl’s eyes hadn’t gone away. It wouldn’t, now that Bro had told her that her rescuers were under orders. She knew well enough whose orders they must be, and whatever had made her run away had scared
her pretty badly.
“It’s okay,” said Carl again, feeling helpless now. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not any more.”
But he couldn’t stand the way she was looking at him, and he couldn’t figure out any other way to handle the situation, so he shot her with the dart-gun to put her to sleep.
Carl knew that it would take at least forty minutes for Bro to get back to the car, even though his reluctance to remain exposed to the attentions of the mosquitoes would make sure he hurried. It wasn’t going to be a comfortable wait, with the stink of blood on the air and flies already coming in their thousands to settle on the corpses.
The local insects hadn’t had a feast like this in years.
After a while, he began to wish that he hadn’t put a dart in the girl after all. He would have felt a lot better about sitting there with her if he’d been able to talk to her. She might have tried to touch him, but he wasn’t really sure how strongly the Doc had meant that instruction. It looked very much as if the seven ’troopers had touched her, but nothing seemed to have happened to them—at least, not yet.
When that thought came into his head he went round to look at the bodies. He didn’t dare start feeling around to see which ones were breathing and which ones weren’t—if they had touched the girl it might not be wise to touch them. The only one who was undoubtedly alive, except for the two outside that he’d darted, was the chick in the corner Bro had knocked out—but it was unlikely that she had touched the white-haired girl.
He tried to shoo the flies away from the bodies, but it was a hopeless task. There was a plastic isolation bag with an airtank in the car, which they were supposed to use to bring the girl back, but he didn’t have anything to hand that he could wrap her up in to take her outside. She was attracting her own share of insects, and he really wanted to pull her out of there, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do except curse Bro and wish he’d hurry up.
He stepped outside to look over the jalopy and the bikes, but he didn’t hunt about for loot. He thought that he ought to be above that sort of thing, now he was working for BioDiv. He stayed out as long as he could bear it, but in the end he had to go back in and look around again—it was hell, but he couldn’t keep out of it.
Now that he had nothing to do but think, he couldn’t help asking himself why the girl was so important, and why he had been told not to touch her. It was difficult to stop ideas floating up into his head, and equally difficult to reassure himself that the Doc would have given him a fuller explanation if there was anything really dangerous to worry about.
He had been thinking like that for some minutes when he saw that something was happening to the bodies of the ’troopers.
If any had been still alive when he went out, they certainly weren’t alive now, and death hadn’t saved the others from whatever corruption was working inside them. The corpses had begun to go grey, and seemed as if they were on their way to being pitch-black. Carl had never seen gangrene, but he thought that this was what it might look like.
He had thought that the stink couldn’t get any worse, but now he knew that he was wrong.
It wasn’t just the colour, either—the flesh seemed to be shrivelling on the bones of the seven dead ’troopers, as though collapsing in on itself. Two of their old ladies were no better off, but the other three looked relatively clean, including the girl in the corner. Carl picked that one up, and took her out to the car. Maybe he was too late, and she’d go the same way anyhow, but he wanted to give her a chance—and he couldn’t bear the thought of condemning anyone to waking up in that roadhouse.
His palms were sweating, and it wasn’t just the heat.
So far as he could tell, the other two chicks who hadn’t begun to change were dead, but he shifted them anyhow, and put them outside. He was feeling sick, and though he knew it might only be the stink and the presence of so many dead men, he couldn’t help wondering if it was the beginning of something worse. He hadn’t touched the girl, or any of the unnaturally-corrupted corpses, but he couldn’t be entirely sure that he was safe.
He didn’t know what kind of projects Doc Zarathustra worked on. He was still basically hired muscle, despite his elevation to special duties. But everyone knew what kinds of things BioDiv was into, and everyone knew that one of them had to be germ warfare work for the military.
The genetic engineers were the guys who might one day produce the perfect weapon—the one which would kill every single one of the enemy while leaving every little piece of his property untouched. Your own troops, of course, would have to be immunized—but Carl couldn’t help wondering what might happen in the interval of development which separated the cooking up of the disease from the cooking up of the cure. He couldn’t help wondering whether he and Bro and Satan’s Stormtroopers had all got caught up in that interval.
Maybe the Doc would be able to give them shots—if they could only get back to the desert base in time.
While Carl waited, and watched the flies clustering about the bodies, not caring at all about the way those bodies were turning into things out of some sick horrorvid, he muttered some of Bro’s choicest curses under his breath, and wished that he had his little brother’s imagination, so that he could work up a few more.
Then he heard the sound of the sneaker roaring along the highway, and began to breathe a little more easily. He waited inside, to see what Bro’s reaction would be when he came through the door.
For once, Bro didn’t run true to form. When he swaggered back in, the crudity which was hovering on his lips died unspoken as soon as he glanced around.
Carl watched the colour drain from his brother’s face. Bro was no intellectual, but he knew what germ warfare was, and the same suspicions must have come to his mind that had come to Carl’s when the Doc had told them not to touch the girl. The fact that he had left them unspoken didn’t mean that Bro wasn’t just as scared as he was.
“What happened to them, Carly?” he asked, quietly. And then, without waiting for an answer, he said: “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Carl. “We have to get her into that sack—and then you can drive as fast as you like, all the way home.”
Bro shook his head. He was staring at one of the ’troopers, whose face was like a vast shrunken bruise—a skull in a purple ski-mask. Even the whites of his staring eyes were dull grey now.
“No, Carly,” he said. “Let the bitch rot with the rest of ’em. I don’t want nothin’ to do with this!”
“It’s too late for that,” said Carl, roughly. “If you can catch what they’ve got by just looking, then we’re already gone. But she ain’t turned black-and-blue, and if the Doc had thought that she was going to kick off a plague that would wipe out everyone in America, he wouldn’t have sent two guys with a dart-gun to fetch her back—he’d have sent out a bird to napalm the whole county.”
As he said it, he realized that it ought to be the truth, and it made him feel better—but not a whole lot better, because he was too scared for that.
“Get the sack, Bro,” he said.
“Get it yourself, smartass,” Bro replied, with feeling.
Carl got it himself. Then, very carefully, he got the girl into it, without once laying a finger on her.
Bro had finally found his tongue, and had begun to curse. He wasn’t quite as inventive as usual, but he made up for it with feeling, and by sheer long-windedness. He didn’t make any move to loot the bodies—not even the ones which didn’t show a trace of the strange corruption—and when he was safe and snug in the driving seat of the sneaker he had to grip the wheel very hard to keep his hands from shaking.
He drove like a maniac all the way home, but Carl didn’t raise a whisper of objection. The sun came up long before they hit the desert’s edge, but by that time Carl had called up Joe Stenner to ask for a copter escort, and no one had the guts to get in their way while they had a squad of mercy boys hovering over them like the angel of death.
C
arl didn’t dare tell Doc Zarathustra what had happened over an unscrambled radio link, but he mentioned that they’d had a little trouble collecting the package, and the goods were slightly soiled. He was glad that the comment didn’t start any alarm bells ringing.
“We have got to get out of this job, Carly,” said Bro, once they hit the desert east of Dallas. “I’d rather ride shotgun on the wrappers than this. I know you want it bad, but it’s not my bag. Tell the Doc we’re out of it, please!”
There had been a while back in the swampland ghost town when Carl might just have agreed with him, but now he took the time to look at the backs of his hands, which showed no trace of any unnatural colour, and then he looked at the girl in the bag on the back seat, still pink with health and moistening the plastic with her breath, and said: “Can it, Bro. We’re home and dry. The Doc knows what he’s doing, and special duties is the only way up for guys like us. We have to have ambition, Bro, or we’ll be nothing but cannon fodder all our lives. The whole damn world is on a slow slide to hell, and we have to do what we can to get out of the swamp.”
Nevertheless, as soon as they were back in the bunker and the girl was safely stowed away in her isolation-room, Carl sent word to Dr Zarathustra to say that he wanted a word in private, and that he’d be very grateful if he could have an early appointment.
“I’m sorry that the job turned out to be so unpleasant, Carl,” said Dr Zarathustra, in his carefully sincere fashion. “I had hoped that Mary could be returned here without any fuss at all. Did your brother also see what happened to the bodies of the men he shot?”
“He saw them,” said Carl, grimly. He was trying hard to be polite, but it wasn’t easy. The Doc sat there in his bright white coat, in his neat and clinical office, as though all the world were as clean and tidy and reasonable. The swamplands of Louisiana were less than two hundred miles away, as the proverbial crow flew, but that roadhouse which had become a slaughterhouse and the air-conditioned offices of the BioDiv bunkers were in different universes.
Route 666 Anthology Page 13