His shoulders tightened as he worked a manual can opener. “Yes, I think so. I saw… saw ghosts, ghosts sometimes, when I was, little. Still do. It got so much worse during puberty. I couldn’t take it, just couldn’t… they sent me around to the hospitals but the drugs, they just… there’s something very wrong with my brain, I know that. I know that! It leaks. It leaks and it, it doesn’t always. It doesn’t always work, the tin foil doesn’t always… I’m so terribly sorry. I’m stuttering, aren’t I?”
“You saw ghosts,” Nilla said.
“Yes.” He set down the can of tuna in front of her and she knocked it back into her mouth as if she were drinking a shot of whiskey. It curbed her hunger for a few seconds but then it returned as strong as ever. “Dead people, the, the memories, the memories of dead people that get stuck here. In this world. Nothing ever gets forgotten, see, it, it’s like a vibration, a vibration in a kind of, well, a string, and it keeps vibrating forever, it gets fainter over time. You know. Like a violin string, if you pluck it. It’ll keep vibrating and even though you can’t hear it after a while it’s still… it’s still…”
She knew her eyes had gone very wide. She couldn’t help it.
He was saying that memories were never really lost. Her memories.
He wouldn’t look at her. He took down a can of spam from his shelf and peeled back the lid. He set it down on the table in front of her. When she didn’t touch it he shifted it toward her an inch or so. She lifted her spoon.
“No,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked.
“Why not, damnit? Why. The fuck. Not?”
“I can’t return your memory to you because I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen your ghost, Nilla.” He had calmed down considerably. Maybe he was afraid of her and his fear was keeping him quiet. “I don’t… pick and choose. They just come to me. If you were still alive, maybe. But then you wouldn’t need your memory back. And you wouldn’t be here.”
The can before her was empty. She couldn’t even remember the taste of the spam.
He sat down on the edge of the table. “There are things you need to know. You didn’t come here by accident. I lead you here myself.”
Nilla placed her hands in her lap. “Maybe if you just. I mean you. If I stay here, for a while, maybe my ghost will come here. Maybe it will come looking for me.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” he told her, dismissing the notion in a way that made rage bubble inside of her. What could be more important than recovering her memories? “Please, we don’t have much time! I guided you here—the occasional thought I put in your head, telling you to head down this valley or to skirt that road. There’s something you need to know, Nilla. There’s a man up in the, the, the mountains east of here, I’ve touched his mind many times. He’s done something horrible. Something truly terrible, like, I see a fire, this fire that will burn up the world. He knows what he’s done. He’s consumed with guilt and—and—and—”
“Just answer me, alright?” she said. She stood up very fast—fast enough to have given herself a head rush if her blood could actually move anymore. “You know so much about me—my new name, the fact that I’m undead, what I like to eat. Why can’t you just look inside my head and find out who I really am?”
“I told you, it doesn’t… Nilla—Nilla, you need to, to…. This guilty man, he.” He shivered violently and she wondered if he was about to have a convulsion. A low, mooing sound rattled up and out of him. She could smell the fear on him—the adrenaline breaking down in his sweat, sour, acrid. “You, you you—”
“Just calm down!” She moved around the table and grabbed him by the shoulders. The hunger rolled through her innards and she really, really wanted to take a bite out of his neck, out of his golden energy. “Just—I know I’m scary right now, I know I must be monstrous to you but you have to calm down!”
She let go of him in disgust when he soiled himself. He slumped down to the floor. She felt a desire to help him, to move him over to his bed but it would probably just rile him up more. There were a lot of questions she needed answers to but she was just going to have to wait.
On the shelf above his stove she found a tin of sardines she thought she could open even with her numb fingers. She went back to the table and sat down, more than willing to give him the time he needed. On the floor near her feet, Jason Singletary moaned plaintively and wrapped his arms around himself as if he were very, very cold.
Chapter Five
JESUS IS COMING
to eat your leg
[Graffiti in an Arby’s men’s room, Grand Rapids, MI 4/8/05]
Florence-ADX sat in the middle of a bowl filled with scrub grass. No trees grew in the fields around the prison, just rocks and weeds, nothing tall enough to hide a fugitive. The prison itself sat low on that empty ground, most of its bulk hidden under the earth, an animal digging itself into the soil against the threat of all that empty blue sky. The clouds overhead shot past on winds that tore them to pieces as they came howling down out of the mountains.
Clark rolled into the Supermax prison at the head of a convoy sixty vehicles strong. Deserted and besieged in a dying land the place looked more spooky than he would have liked—the refugees in his minivans and big rigs had been through a lot already and he hated to deliver them to such a frightening place, but there were no alternatives. He didn’t have time to find another safe location to build a relocation camp. Clark nodded in approval when he saw what had been done in his absence—at least the place had been cleaned up, the dogs put back to work controlling the perimeter. The trailers that constituted Desiree Sanchez’s domain, the Bag, had been moved inside the second tier of fencing, where they would be safe.
The man who had implemented those changes, Vikram Singh Nanda, waited for him at the main gate of the prison. Clark detached Horrocks to square away the men and get them started on their AERs. He greeted his old friend with a brief hug. Something clattered against the epaulets of his uniform and he lifted Vikram’s wrist to get a good look. The Sikh Major wore a hammered steel bracelet on his left wrist. Not regulation, not by any means.
“It is my karra, a sign of my bondage to the teachings of the ten gurus,” Vikram explained, looking almost sheepish. “I do not… normally wear it, though I should.”
“Trying to get right with your God,” Clark muttered, and clapped his friend on the shoulder as he headed inside to the warden’s office. As requested someone had installed a cot and a dedicated communications terminal, a laptop that connected with Washington via a secure satellite network. He intended to spend a lot of time in the small room.
He sat down in the leather chair behind the desk and placed his sidearm in a top desk drawer. He steepled his fingers in front of him and then it all hit at once.
Bannerman Clark had gone for a week with little more than catnaps and cold noodles for sustenance. In that time he had fought a war.
He had butchered civilians.
Innocent, sick civilians who desperately needed medical care and basic services.
He had fought and strived against the unarmed citizens of the United States.
And he had lost anyway.
A cold emptiness like the void of space between galaxies opened up in his stomach and it went all the way down. He was empty, physically empty so that a slight wind could have come along and blown him away. The weariness in his arms and legs turned to paralysis and the buzzing in his head, the grinding, whining buzzsaw headache he always felt during combat operations unfolded into an entire machine shop of torment. Every moment of the battle for Denver waited there, separated and dissected, awaiting his careful analysis. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, going over these factoids, these isolated decisions from the fray. Just as he continued to think through and re-think every battle he’d ever participated in. Most of them he had won, with relatively little loss of life. Those were easy, just logistics reports, lists of numbers and names, so many bullets fired here, so much materiel consumed there
. The ones he had lost were the same except the lists of names had ghosts paper-clipped to them.
Something other than a ghost came with this action. The girl. The blonde girl who had to be the key to the Epidemic. She had escaped while he was busy with the WOFTAM of trying to defend a doomed city.
Clark had never believed in something so strongly before, but he believed that the girl was the answer he sought. The answer to why this was happening, and the answer to how to stop it. She was the one piece of the puzzle that didn't seem to fit, the one person who was neither on this side nor that, which meant she had to be more significant that she appeared. She had never been farther away from him.
Vikram stood before the desk, looking anxious but smiling. Always smiling. Clark had not heard his friend come in, did not know how long he had been standing there. Vikram was a veteran, though. He would understand the intensely personal malaise one fell into following a bad action.
Clark stared at the bracelet on his friend’s wrist. The current calamity had driven Vikram closer to his deity. “You’ve never doubted the existence of God for a moment, have you?” he asked, the words swimming out of him as if he were at the bottom of a cold, dark lake.
Vikram straightened up to a considerable height—he’d already been at attention but he found some more backbone somewhere. “The teachings of my faith require me to never have dealings with one who has no faith in some manner of god,” Vikram said in a proper, clipped tone. “This could prove difficult in our line of work. What should I do if my commanding officer was an atheist? I have asked myself this question many times. In the end I have chosen to follow a strict policy where it comes to religion. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Clark grinned and it felt very, very good. He didn’t examine why he wanted to laugh so much, he just gladly accepted it. He'd been doing this for decades and he knew when you were down in that hole and a rope appeared, you grabbed it. “I’m way outside of my jurisdiction, here. This has become a joint duty assignment. Because of my special position as a, a policy expert,” he couldn’t bring himself to use the Civilian’s term: wonk, “I’ve been prevailing on your good counsel despite the fact that you outrank me. If you want to jump ship now you’d be well within your rights.”
“Not until the hurly-burly’s done, my friend,” Vikram said. “Let me rephrase: not until it is done, sir.” And that was that. “I have a situation report all in preparedness, should you care to hear it.”
Clark did not care to hear it. He had feasted on enough bad news to choke him. No, he thought, not now. “Alright,” he said. “No time like the present.” Sometimes you had to keep going in life no matter how awful you felt. Sometimes sheer obstinacy was the only thing for it.
“Colorado is under martial law. The cadets of the Air Force Academy were armed and mobilized until they were relieved. Reinforcements of regular Army troops, namely the 82nd Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division, are doing what they can to secure the state. This amounts in the most to blocking all the highways leading out. The interior of the state, by all accounts, is without governance.”
Clark had pretty much seen that for himself. He nodded.
“Nevada and Utah have both declared state-wide disasters but the relevant authorities remain in control. I spoke with a very nice radio operator in Salt Lake City and he told me that large parts of the city are quarantined but they believe they can hold the infected back from the central region. California is gone.”
Clark opened a box of pens he had found in one of his desk drawers. He had been arranging them in a pen holder while he listened. He stopped and set down the pen holder carefully on the edge of the desk blotter. “What does that mean? Los Angeles or San Francisco?”
“I mean that the entire state has stopped communicating with the outside world.” Vikram didn’t shift on his feet, didn’t so much as blink. “It was a gradual process, of course, and did not happen all and at once. Until this morning there still were units of the Marine Corps in Sacramento who I could speak with, though they were very busy. The last I heard was that they were expecting reinforcements from the sea—a carrier group, called in to help maintain order. Then silence only.”
Insanity. Bringing in sailors to do the job of soldiers. The Navy trained excellent warriors but it gave them little experience in dealing with threats while onshore. The desperation in the plan was obvious. Clark wondered if he could have come up with anything else.
“The infection has spread as far east as Ohio. We expect to hear about Pennsylvania in a few hours—there have been isolated reports of infection in New York City, whole neighborhoods under quarantine. The overseas picture is murky at best but we know that both Mexico and Canada have mobilized troops and that they are asking for help we cannot currently provide.”
Clark nodded. He picked up the pens again and started sorting them by color. “Bad, bad, bad, worse. So. We need to find out what to do next. Are you in contact with the Governor right now?” He dropped the pens in their cup one after the other. “Normally I would take this time to liaise with the Adjutant General of Colorado but he, I happen to know, is dead.”
“The Governor is not available, I’m afraid. His current whereabouts are unknown.”
“Alright, so find me a General somewhere. Or a Colonel. Somebody who can give me an order.” Vikram shook his head. “A Lieutenant Colonel? I’ll take a Major.”
“I am saying that in the whole of the COARNG, I cannot find an officer that outranks your good self. I think you are it.”
Not possible and yet… many of the best officers in the Guard, and therefore the highest ranking, were deployed still in Iraq. Many more had died in Denver. Was it possible that not even a single Major had survived? Well, there hadn’t been that many to start with.
The implications, however, were devastating. If a mere Captain was in charge of the Colorado Guard… well, at least he had his masters in the Pentagon. “Alright,” he said. He placed the pen holder at the top of his desk, on the left side, then moved it to the right. It looked better there. “Alright, we’re tucked in here. If I have to be in charge I’m going to at least get a night’s sleep before I start barking at people. Unless there’s something more you need to tell me,” he added, seeing the look on Vikram’s face.
“Bannerman, there is more to tell but I think it is better if you should see it for yourself.”
Clark raised an eyebrow.
“First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez could use a moment of your time. Down in the Bag,” Vikram explained.
Chapter Six
Mood: Pissed Off!
Listening to: Slipknot, Wait and Bleed
yo ‘sup, we’re still here cause the road south is closed and brian thinks its no good in Canada, either, he’s so fucking smart, he thinks excep then wheres his girlfriend?…I would have protected my woman, true dat, I would lay down all I had for her I dunno. We got three big water jugs, and I filled up the tub last night, its not clean I guess, maybe well leve before it comes to that, if brian gets off his stupid ass.
[Livejournal update for user PiramidHed, 4/9/05]
The infected man on the gurney had been cut down to an obscene minimum of humanity. His face had been carved off, as well as the front of his skull. His brain sat like a shriveled piece of fruit in a bone bowl. Much of his chest had been removed—skin, sternum, musculature—to reveal his heart and lungs. Neither of them moved. Yet his fingers twitched and clenched, his toes writhed as the First Lieutenant prodded a long white curve of nerve tissue with a pair of forceps.
“They aren’t using most of their organs. Their blood is dried up in their veins. They digest their food… somehow, and they excrete wastes. Noxious waste. What you’re looking at, though—it isn’t human. It’s a nervous system that has failed to die.”
Desiree Sanchez had doffed her level four biosafety suit. Inside the Bag she wore an apron and a pair of heavy work gloves over her uniform. She had a pair of plastic goggles for eye protection but they were pushed up o
n her forehead. Splatters of human tissue and clotted blood covered her from head to toe but she wasn’t even wearing a filter mask.
“Lieutenant, I believe we spoke before about the patient’s hypothetical morbidity.” Clark held onto the intercom box, ready to interrupt her if necessary.
“Sir, yes, sir,” Sanchez said, and blew a stray hair out of her eyes. “I just don’t know how this man could live through what I’ve done to him. I mean, this isn’t an alternative lifestyle. This is a complete physiological change.” She dropped the forceps into a bloody instrument tray. Clark heard the clatter even through the multiple layers of thick plastic curtain between them. She leaned on the gurney and closed her eyes for a moment before going on. “I’m at the end here, there’s nothing I can do short of torturing this man pointlessly in the name of science. There’s another avenue of research I've been pursuing, though—the epidemiology of this thing. I think… that… that…”
Sanchez’ face went blank and a pained croak belched out of her mouth. Alarmed, Clark reached for his firearm even before he knew what was happening to the woman. It wasn’t there—he’d put the Baretta in his desk drawer and forgotten about it.
“Get—get off,” Sanchez mewled. Clark looked down and saw that the infected man had wrapped grey fingers around her wrist. “Get off me,” she shouted, and grabbed with her free hand for the instrument tray. It was just out of her reach. Her eyes sought his through the plastic.
Clark lacked so much as a pocket knife. He couldn’t get through the safety plastic with his fingers—he would have to go around. “Hold on, Lieutenant,” he said through the intercom box, then dashed out of the room. He whipped out his cell phone and called for help—for anyone.
Outside the Conex trailer the sun was very, very bright. Clark hurried around the side of the shipping container and pushed in the other end through a zippered wall, then through a decontamination station. An automatic shower pelted him with scalding hot water and he threw his arms up around his face, his eyes burning with antiseptic. Behind him he heard boots crunching gravel—too far away, he was the only one close enough to respond. He pushed through the inner air lock, heedless of the whooping alarms that told him he’d failed to close the outer door.
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