Nilla had no idea what the girl was talking about.
“They thought it was funny. I would come home from school and I would be crying, bawling my eyes out for fuck’s sake. And they would laugh at me. Then they would sing that stupid song, over and over again.”
“I don’t understand. You came along with Charles when he ran away because of a song?” Nilla fanned her face with one hand. Had it gotten hotter in the car?
“No! I’m the one who’s running away! They don’t care about me. I called my Mom from that hotel and you know what? She was so fucking stoned she didn’t even ask if I was okay. I tried, I tried so hard but when they closed the school because of this Epidemic I just could not face them anymore. I used to go to school to get some peace, can you believe that? I used to love school and the government took that away from me. So I went to Charles and I talked him into this. Into running away with me. He cares about me. He loves me.”
Nilla couldn’t process the girl’s outburst. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You ran away because of a song?”
“Holy shit,” Charles shouted. “Holy shit!” He pointed through the windshield as he stepped on the brakes, throwing Shar forward against her seat belt. The sign read DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, 2 MILES.
He pulled the car to a stop just at the top of a ridge and got out of the car, letting a wave of overheated air rush through the car. Nilla could taste how dry the air was as it buffeted her face and hands.
Nilla grabbed the map and rolled out of the car to join him. Together the two of them looked down the slope of craggy rocks at a depression in the landscape that seemed to go down forever. The view shimmered in a blast of heat that burst up at them, not so much like a hot wind as the shockwave of some terrible fiery cataclysm.
“I knew it was getting hotter,” Charles said.
“We have to keep going,” Nilla said. He laughed at her. She jabbed at the torn map with one clumsy finger. “No, seriously. We have to keep going east. Look, look here. It’s not as wide as it looks and on the other side we’ll be in Nevada. We’ll be safe there.”
“It’s called ‘Death Valley’,” Charles told her. “‘Death Valley,’” he repeated as if that alone would change her mind. “It’s the hottest place on earth, I think. We learned about it in Geography class. People who go there get lost and they die. You don’t go in there without water. We don’t have any water, in case you didn’t notice.”
They could not just stop. Not when Nevada was so close. They couldn’t go back, either. The entire US Army was probably looking for her back there. “It’s just a name! We can cross it in a couple of hours. We can stop for water in just a couple of hours.” He started heading back to the car. “Charles, wait—look. There’s somebody else here.”
He looked where she pointed. She was right, there was a pickup truck parked on the side of the road just a couple of hundred yards away. Dust and grime besmirched its sides so thoroughly that it had taken on the colors of the desert. It looked like there were two people lying down in the bed of the truck, moving against one another. Lovers parked in the middle of nowhere for a little afternoon fun, she guessed. It felt too hot for that but she supposed hormones could overcome heat exhaustion if they were strong enough.
“Oh, dude,” Charles said, his face falling. “It’s two guys.”
“Yeah, well,” Nilla said, getting desperate. They couldn’t turn back now—her name was waiting for her. “Maybe they have some water.”
Charles didn’t move. She smiled weakly at him but she knew very well he wasn’t going to go ask for water from the truck’s occupants. Fine, she thought, she would do it herself. She covered the distance between the two vehicles as quickly as she could, her feet slipping on the loose gravel of the shoulder. It was so hot. When she reached the pickup she cleared her throat a couple of times to try to warn the two men that she was approaching. They didn’t stop what they were doing so she stepped closer. “Hello? Excuse me?” She took another step and smelled blood in the air. She closed her eyes, knowing what she would find. There were two people in the back of the truck, yes. One of them rapidly bleeding to death. The other one had beat him there.
The ghoul must have felt her regard. He reared up, a mouthful of flesh tumbling from between his lips and got to his feet so that he towered over her, his stained face ten feet up in the air. He wore a torn-up padded vest even in the intense heat and his legs looked as thick as tree trunks. That wasn’t what she noticed first, though.
He didn’t have any arms.
Chapter Fourteen
The I-25 Corridor is completely backed up, all the way to the Tech Center, it looks like there was a multi-car pileup somewhere down there—please, once again we have to urge everyone not to try to get out of the city by car, it will only increase the chaos. [Traffic Report from Denver’s 7, Special Emergency Bulletin 4/4/05]
A spill of them came up the bed of the Platte, maybe two or maybe three dozen, their feet splashing wildly in the muddy water. Among the dead Clark saw a couple of orange jumpsuits—those would be the original infected prisoners of Florence—but also one or two Battle Dress Uniforms. Military personnel. He raised his pistol but didn’t shoot.
Behind him the platoon sergeant howled at the troops. Chief Horrocks waved his arms like a demon as he urged his soldiers on. “Put your fucking back into that, Mendelsohn! Get some of that 550 cord down here, we need to secure this end.”
Clark lined up his weapon with the forehead of the leading assailant. A woman in a waitress uniform with a nametag that read KRISTI. Her face wide and open and blank. It would take a lot, a complete shift in perspective, to pull the trigger. It had to happen, and soon.
“Come on, come on, you all get lazy since we came home? You been sitting around watchin’ cable, eating Burger King every day? It’s MREs on the menu tonight unless we stop this thing here and now!”
Clark knew better than that. The infected had not stayed together as a unified force against which he could run flanking maneuvers and surgical strikes. They had spread out, thousands of them heading in thousands of directions and everywhere they infected the civilians they found. In a few hours there would be more infected than healthy in Denver. This was a holding action, a way to buy time until the relocation buses were out in convoy, headed for safer climes. Clark lowered his weapon.
“Now now now go go go, move it, move it,” Horrocks boomed and finally, yes—the two lengths of orange detainment netting lifted like the sails of a day-glo ship. They snagged a few of the infected, their clumsy hands snarled up in the plastic but the rest just surged forward, trying to get through the gauntlet the soldiers had erected. They were being funneled straight toward Clark and the ten best shots of the platoon.
Clark raised his weapon again, sighted. Kristi, the waitress... the infected person in the front lifted one hand toward him and she stumbled, going down to her knees in the muddy water.
“We’re a go, sir,” Horrocks bellowed, not ten feet away. “Firing on your order.” The sergeant knew better than to question Clark’s hesitation in shooting but Clark could feel it, a hot, hard stare boring into his back. If he didn’t shoot now he could never ask the men and women of the platoon to follow his orders. If he didn’t fire he would be in direct contradiction of the AG’s standing instruction to shoot on sight.
He lined up the end of his firearm with the woman’s forehead. She was no more than fifteen yards away. She was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister maybe. There were people who loved her and wanted her to recover from this.
“FIGMO,” Clark said. Language unbecoming of the officer’s corps, something he hadn’t said since his time in Vietnam.
Fuck it, got my orders.
“Fire at will,” he said. He squeezed the trigger and the flesh of the woman’s forehead erupted, fragments of bone exploding from her temple. To Clark’s left the marksmen opened up with a sustained volley, the noise rolling around the front range of the mountains, it sounded like to Clar
k, and echoing on forever.
The President has been moved to a safe location, where he will remain until this is all over. Thank you, that’s all. [White House Press Briefing, 4/4/05]
She heard gravel squealing under Charles’s sneakers, knew he was racing to help her. She started to turn around, to tell him to stop. She didn’t need his help—the dead man wouldn’t attack her, not one of his own kind.
She knew she wouldn’t get the warning out in time.
Charles spun in the gravel beside Nilla even as she reached to push him back. He had his arms twisted around for a nasty punch right to the dead man’s genitals. It connected with a sound like a side of beef being dropped from a height.
The armless dead man didn’t even flinch. Instead he put one bare foot up on the side of the truck and propelled himself into space. Nilla dodged to one side but he wasn’t aiming for her.
“Get him off, get this fucker off me!” Charles wailed as the dead man collided with him, knocking him flat to the road. Nilla grabbed at the dead man’s matted hair to yank his head back and keep him from getting his teeth into Charles’ neck. “Get him off!” Charles screamed again, but Nilla couldn’t hold the dead man, his hair was too greasy and even when she dug her fingers in it just came out with a noise like a zipper opening up. “Get him off!” Charles begged as the teeth sank deep into the fleshy part of his throat. Blood spilled out onto the roadway like a bucket of water being upturned.
Nilla kicked the dead man as hard as she could in the cheek, in the ear, in the eye. She fell down to her knees and pulled with both hands on his vest, on the nubs of bone at the ends of his shoulders. “You don’t want him,” she protested, trying to haul him off of Charles bodily. “You want me,” but she knew it wasn’t true.
“Get him off,” Charles sobbed. “Get… him… off, please.”
Nilla got her shoulder into the narrow gap between the dead man’s chest and Charles’ back and heaved, pushed and pushed, tried to brace her feet against the asphalt for leverage. The armless corpse shifted but not enough—his teeth were chewing at Charles’ skin, digging in deep. Nilla grunted and heaved one last time with all her strength and somehow dislodged the ghoul. She wasted no time yanking Charles up to his feet. With her shoulder in his armpit she hurried him back toward the Toyota. Behind them the corpse staggered up to its knees.
“Just a little further,” Nilla told Charles, her arms around his waist. He clamped both hands against his throat. His legs shook violently and she dragged him for a second until he could get under his own power again. “Just get to the car,” she told him. They were barely moving forward, inching along, Nilla’s slight frame no good at carrying Charles’ weight.
The dead man got one foot up and started rising, only to lose his balance and tumble backwards. Nilla’s mind surged with hope. Just a little further. Just a little…
Charles’ hand fell away from his neck and a pencil-thin jet of blood shot out ahead of him. He wheezed and choked and Nilla shoved one of her own hands against his wound. Her hand was soaked with blood instantly. It started to run down her forearm, into her shirt sleeve.
The corpse rolled back against the pickup truck and levered himself upward on its bumper. This time he ended up on his feet. He began staggering toward them. They had a head start but the dead man stumbled forward faster than Nilla’s dragging pace.
Nilla looked forward again—and nearly collided with the Toyota as it came screeching up to her. In the driver’s seat Shar looked stunned, paralyzed, her fingers white on the wheel, her face narrow and wrinkled with fear.
Behind them the corpse had nearly closed the gap. In a few seconds he would be on them. Nilla let Charles fall across the side of the car and wrenched open the back door. She pushed him inside and jumped in on top of him. She grabbed a bundle of fast food restaurant napkins off the floor of the car—they were filthy and probably covered in germs but it didn’t matter—and stuffed them into the crook of Charles’ neck. She yanked the door closed behind her.
The dead man stumbled up to the side of the car and lurched forward, his face slamming against the window only inches from Nilla’s nose. She fell backwards in terror as the corpse stumbled back for another strike.
“Shar!” Nilla screamed. “Shar! Drive!”
The teenaged girl threw the car into drive just as the armless guy slapped his face against the window a second time. Glass erupted into the car in a green cascade, tiny cubes of safety glass spilling down across Nilla and Charles, bouncing off the car’s upholstery. Nilla spun around as the car lurched forward and saw the corpse standing in the road, his face a blurred distortion of human features. As the car raced away from him he stumbled after it, unable to stop coming for them even though it was hopeless—he would never catch them now.
Chapter Fifteen
There are too many of them, Archie. No, I don’t mean… there are more of them than we thought, than our, our models showed. I’m talking about your computer model, the one you… it’s like they’re multiplying, reproducing but… Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean. It’s time for Warlock Green to come out of the closet. [Telephone conversation between the Adjutant General of the Colorado National Guard and an undisclosed second party, 4/4/05]
A hazy cobweb of vapor trails filled the big sky over Cherry Creek, left behind by planes and helicopters full of refugees headed in every possible direction. The aircraft were all gone but they left their tracks behind.
There were more infected coming up Third Avenue from the country club. Maybe two dozen. Clark gestured for the nearest squad to handle them, then spun around when someone behind him shouted “Target spotted, in that window!”
“Somebody kill that motherfucker for me already!” Horrocks screamed, his eyes huge and white. A squad of soldiers carrying M4s broke off to assault the entrance to a copy shop with wide windows overlooking Fillmore Street. A young man in a blue apron was in there pressed up against the glass, his hands white blobs against the window, the muscles of his face completely slack. Like something stuck to the wall of an aquarium. One of his cheeks was dark with torn skin and dried blood.
Clark backed up against the side of the HEMTT and reloaded his sidearm. It had been a long, haunting night and it just kept getting worse. He thought about countermanding the order—the infected boy wasn’t a danger to anybody stuck inside that store. It would demoralize the troops though to leave even one of the cannibals standing.
Keeping morale alive was pretty much all Clark could hope to accomplish. For every one of the infected they cut down ten more seemed to appear out of thin air. They were making no progress at all toward their stated objectives.
“Come on, come on, let’s not lose the operational tempo here,” Horrocks insisted.
The soldiers were still crisp, still professional. Maybe it was only Clark who was wilting after a night of violence and cold food and no sleep. They kicked the boy away from the window and butchered him and were back to the HEMTT inside of sixty seconds. On the roof of the big truck a crew-served M249 kept them covered the whole time.
The HEMTT was full of scared survivors, people they’d picked up along the way. Every time one of the troops discharged a weapon a collective moan of shock billowed out of the back. The sound got on Clark’s nerves—he felt guilty enough already, he didn’t need the infernal howling of the survivors to remind him he was slaughtering innocent civilians.
“Comms,” Clark called out and a specialist with a satellite cell phone came duck-walking up to him. Keeping low, just like she’d been trained—it made it less easy for a sniper to hit her. Nobody was shooting at them in Denver but she’d had proper cover procedure drilled into her so hard it stuck. She knelt down by the side of the truck with Clark and threw him a salute. “What do we have?” he asked. “Did you get through to the Adjutant General?”
“Sir, no, sir, nothing since the last transmission.” That had been half an hour before. A column of light armor (Hum-Vees with mounted weaponry) was supposed to co
me down Speer Boulevard any minute and relieve the platoon. Clark wasn’t holding his breath. The AG wasn’t responding to his calls, which couldn’t mean anything good. “Alright, get back to the vehicle,” he told her. He called for Horrocks and the sergeant appeared instantly. “It’s time to break contact. We’re holding our ground here but that’s not exactly the same as making progress. I want squad three on rear security.”
The sergeant set about making it happen while Clark hauled himself up into the cab of the HEMTT. A laptop on the dashboard showed a GPS map of the neighborhood. It showed the country club and the Cherry Creek shopping center tinged in red. Clark had to zoom out to see any blue at all—a Stryker group sitting tight on a stretch of Federal Boulevard. “How old is this product?” he asked.
“Sir, about thirty minutes,” the comms specialist replied. She was blushing under her helmet. The best data she had must have come in with the last download from command.
“Alright,” he said, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What is CNN saying?”
She played with the laptop for a while, collating text reports from the news channel’s website with the map’s imaging software. When she showed it to him again the Strykers were missing and whole districts of the city had turned red. The Epidemic was spreading, far faster than any infectious disease had a right to. And where did those Strykers go? He couldn’t find them anywhere on the map at all. Had they retreated?
The HEMTT started up with a roar and got under way. The driver kept it to a crawl—the cargo unit in back was stuffed full with the survivors so the soldiers had to run alongside carrying all their equipment with them.
The infected seemed to sense that Clark was withdrawing. Congress Park was crawling with them and they stretched out bloody arms to try to grab the truck as it went past. They came out of every street the HEMTT passed, streamed out of half the buildings. The soldiers wanted to aggress on the enemy but Horrocks kept a tight rein on them—fighting would just slow them down. Clark wanted to get back to command and find out what the hell was going on before he committed to another combat effort.
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