Only when they arrived the girl was gone, having apparently murdered all of her captors. They didn’t know how long it had been since she’d escaped. They didn’t know which way she went. They didn’t know where she was headed. But she knew they were coming for her and would therefore be on her guard.
“There’s two dead in here, sir,” the soldier said, leaning in through the open door of the helicopter. Clark closed his laptop with a click and nodded. He looked past the soldier and saw the entrance to a cave. An iron-barred gate swung open on its hinges. “One of them looks like a drug overdose,” the soldier continued. “The other body is partially consumed.”
Clark breathed out a long sigh of dissatisfaction. To get so close… “I take it there’s no sign of any females. That’s not a question that needs an answer.” The girl had literally been right there, right there no more than an hour prior, probably even less. Clark was almost ready to stage his offensive on the mountain location, the Epicenter. He had the troops, he had the supplies. Until he understood the girl’s place in the Epidemic, until he knew what she meant, he would never be psychologically ready, though. You didn't go to war without all the facts. The girl was one last question and he needed an answer. “You don’t have any good new for me, do you? She didn’t leave anything behind that might help us find her?”
“No, sir,” the soldier responded. No one had expected there would be. “Except… permission to add something, sir.”
“Granted, of course.”
The Guardsman bit his lower lip. “There’s no vehicles here, sir. I don’t know how these two bodies could have got here without a vehicle. Maybe somebody dropped them off, but I wouldn’t want to be stuck out here so far from town without a way out. Not with dead people wandering around loose out here, and all. Sir.”
Clark actually smiled at the young man. Not very professional but he couldn’t help it. He jumped down from the helicopter body, slapping the Guardsman on the shoulder, and jogged into the AO. Soldiers were busy sealing up the bodies in type II human remains pouches and sifting through the sand looking for forensic evidence. This had been a standard mopping-up exercise following a failed rendezvous. It was about to turn into something quite different.
He came up on a group of soldiers near the cave mouth and asked if any of them were hunters. One of them was, an eighteen-year-old female from Littleton who used to go hunting with her grandfather. “Do you see any tracks around here, the kind a vehicle might make?” he demanded. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing a deer hunter would know how to look for but he needed data right away.
“Maybe, something, I guess… there are some tire tracks, they’re pretty vague, right through here, sir,” she said, and waved back and forth with her hands. Indicating a path between the cave and the highway. At his nod she trotted downfield and then came right back, slightly out of breath. “It looks like somebody peeled out. There’s rubber on the road, headed east.”
“Sergeant Horrocks,” Clark shouted, and the Platoon Sergeant lifted his shaggy white head to look. “Get these soldiers ready to move out—we have a target to chase.” He didn’t stick around to observe as his staffer made order out of chaos. He needed to be back in the helicopter—back where he could be on top of things.
A car or a van or a truck—a ground vehicle. It would stick to the roads and there was only one road nearby of any consequence: the highway. The bodies they found in the cave had still been warm, even on a cold night.
They still had a chance.
Ten minutes later and a hundred feet up in the air The Civilian upended a tiny silver flask into his mouth and peered out through the helicopter’s windows at the darkness below. “I can’t see ass,” he said, irritably.
The copilot leaned back to face the two of them. “Sirs, we had visual confirmation of the target vehicle on the highway but it’s gone now. It must have gone off-road, sirs.”
“Get the ground teams in place. Sweep this area with infra-red and image enhancement.” It wouldn’t find her, of course. She was dead and wasn’t generating any body heat, so IR imaging would be useless. As for night vision goggles, well, they helped you see things in the dark but not things that could make themselves invisible.
Thank God he had an ace up his sleeve. This was going to be next to impossible as it was.
Adrenaline shot through the muscles of his back, making them ache a little. He hadn’t been this excited since the fall of Denver.
“So what exactly is she going to do for you once you find her?” the Civilian asked.
“I’m hoping she can tell me.” An imaging window opened on Clark’s laptop, piped through from the infra-red cameras. “Put us down at this location, specialist,” Clark said, pushing forward between the crew seats of the pilot and copilot. “It looks like the target vehicle has come to a complete stop.” The van lay on its side, dressed up in false colors where it was warm and cold. It looked wrong, broken.
When the helicopter’s passenger door slid open the cold night air of the Utah desert bit at Clark’s face and hands. He ignored it and stepped out into the darkness. He threw a hand signal at the pilot and listened to a flare being shot from a vehicle maybe half a kilometer away. One of his Hum-Vee’s. A few seconds later the desert lit up with sizzling white light that reflected dazzlingly from the abandoned van’s crumpled roof.
The vehicle was cooling rapidly in the night air. Its engine pinged from time to time. There were piles of broken glass around the windows, mounds of black charred foam rubber where the seat cushions had caught flame. Footprints in the sand. Heading northeast—the same direction the van had been traveling. Clark peered out into the harsh light of the flare and saw something out there. It looked like a body. He prayed the girl hadn’t been killed in the crash.
He took a crowd-control bullhorn from his belt and switched it on. “Nilla,” he said, and the name rocketed around the desert, bounced off hills a kilometer away. “Nilla, I know you’re here somewhere. You have to stop running.”
All around him in the shadows his vehicles were spreading out, taking up position. They would form a pretty tight perimeter when they were deployed properly. But did it matter? If she was invisible she could walk right past any barricade they made.
“Nilla, I know you’re afraid of me. I know the last time we met was traumatic. Believe me, it scarred me, too.” A Stryker rolled up behind him and came to a stop. Soldiers fanned out on his hand signal, scoured the desert ahead. A pair of soldiers with their M4 rifles at the ready reached the body he’d seen and threw back a thumb’s down. So at least it wasn’t the girl.
“Nilla. I only want to stop this thing. I want to stop the killing, the violence.”
One of the soldiers screamed. He jumped up and down, grasping his arm. Clark was too far away to see if there was any blood but he knew what it meant. The soldier’s battle buddy dropped to the ground and waved his rifle around but the girl was invisible. If she was an enemy, if she was too scared to listen to reason—it would be simplicity itself for her to kill one of his men.
He had to complete this before anyone got hurt. He turned to wave at the Stryker and his secret weapon stepped out of its rear hatch, escorted by two of his biggest troops. Beside them and their bulky body armor the teenaged girl looked even younger than she actually was.
The troops brought her to him and he placed an arm around her shoulders. This would be the tough part. “Nilla, I’m sure you remember Shar. I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I will if I have to.” He removed his sidearm from its holster and placed the barrel a few inches from Shar’s forehead. It took real effort on his part to point the weapon at an innocent but he managed. "You could have killed her before, but you didn't. I'm guessing you don't want to watch her die right now."
“Please, Nilla,” Shar screamed. She wriggled under his arm and he held her closer.
Nothing. Another of Clark’s soldiers cried out but not because he’d been attacked. Something had brushed against him. Was Nilla making
a run for it? He could have miscalculated how much of her humanity was left. He could easily have miscalculated that.
Clark cocked the pistol. The sound of the well-oiled mechanism drawing back echoed in the still desert night.
“Don’t,” someone said, no more than a dozen yards away. Someone female. “Please.”
“Show yourself,” Clark demanded.
She did, not so much fading into existence as suddenly standing out where before she’d blended into the shadows. She looked different from how Clark remembered her—healthier, strangely enough, as if she had prospered while the country suffered and died.
Soldiers fell on her like a well-drilled football team, securing her hands and face, knocking her feet out from under her. She tried to make herself invisible again but Clark had warned them in advance and they didn’t let go.
“Oh, Jesus,” Shar said, sagging against him, her arms around his waist.
“You did very well,” Clark told her. He carefully lowered the hammer of his pistol, mindful of accidental discharge even though the safety was on. “I promise, that’s the last thing we’ll ask of you.”
“Yeah. Okay,” Shar said. “Just—don’t make me ride in the same car with her, okay? I never want to get this close to her again.”
Chapter Eight
McDougall was a scientist, a real scientist. I can trust his notes, surely. The mice in the control group have reached the inevitable negative result while the experimental group… some minor side effects, dermatitis, hair loss but you expect that with radiation, not that this is any kind of radiation Roentgen or Curie would acknowledge. But they’re alive, damn it, they’re still alive. This could be something, or not. Trying to stay scientific about this: lather, rinse, repeat. [Lab Notes, 1/18/04]
They gave her some clean clothes and let her take a long, hot shower. They fed her a couple of hamburgers that came on a biodegradable brown tray. She ate the tray, too, when nobody was looking. A female soldier wearing riot gear offered to help her fix her hair and her makeup if she wanted. She declined. They were all very polite and kind and they never got closer than six feet to her.
At all times they kept her chained to a wall.
They kept her blind-folded, gagged and hog-tied for the entire ride to their base and nobody would tell her where she’d been taken but one look at the flaking paint on the walls, the endless series of locked doors, the narrow windows holding shatterproof glass suggested either a mental hospital or a prison. There were tie-downs and chain staples in every room, restraints built into every cot. Security cameras lurked in the corners and the doors all came in pairs so that she had to be buzzed through twice every time she moved from one room to another.
Eventually they locked her down in a staff lounge and left her there. Two long Formica cafeteria tables almost filled the room, leaving only a little space for a bar made of dented chrome. The carpet was burnt orange and speckled with tufts of hard plastic where someone had dropped a cigarette and it had fused the carpet fibers together. Horseshoe-shaped fluorescent lights buzzed down on her from a ceiling of crumbling white acoustic tile. Behind the bar someone had nailed up a line of wooden bubble letters:
YE OLDE ENGLISH PUB
There was a neon Coors sign near the door. In one corner of the ceiling a blank-faced motion detector clicked and displayed a green light every time she got up from her seat and wandered around the room. Eventually she got bored enough to try an experiment. Banking her energy down to nothing she stood in the middle of the room, quite invisible, and waved her arms.
Click. The green light flickered a little, but it burned strong and bright after a moment. Clearly her best and only trick wasn’t going to get her out of there.
A door opened on the far side of the room, near the bar. The head asshole, the one who had asked her what her name was so very, very long ago, the one who had claimed he would kill Shar if he had to, walked in. He looked like he had a stick up his ass. He looked like he daily removed said stick, polished it, and reinserted it.
He sat down at one of the cafeteria tables, at least six feet away from her, and put his hat on the seat next to him. He looked at her without saying anything. He had brought a briefcase with him—now he put it on the table and flicked open its latches. “Do you drink, Nilla? We have a wide selection of canned beers to choose from.”
Nilla stared back at him. If he was going to treat her like an animal in a zoo she was damned if she would talk to him. She wanted to channel the personality she’d had before, the dark Nilla who looked on humans as food and who found the end of the world ironically amusing, but that Nilla was gone. No, she’d pretty much blown that act when she demonstrated she still cared enough about Shar to save the girl’s life.
She wasn’t about to go soft, though. She made a hard line of her mouth and didn’t move. Tried to look as dead as possible. The world hated her, people like this man had gone out of their way to prove it. She refused to let them see whether or not she cared.
“I’m not a big drinker myself,” he told her. “I do like to come down here from time to time, though. It’s nice. Cheerful. It lets me forget for a few minutes what’s going on out there. All the people dying. all the parents losing their children, all the children who are so afraid. I am trying to stop the Epidemic, and I will do everything in my power to advance that aim. But even I need to relax sometimes. To get away and pretend it all doesn’t exist.”
Nilla could feel her eyeballs drying out but she refused to blink.
He stood up and took something out of his briefcase. He walked closer to her, only hesitating once he came into biting range. She reached under the table and grabbed the chain that anchored her to the wall. He dropped a piece of heavy paper on the table before her.
With a flick of the wrist she smashed her chain against the underside of the table, making a noise like a gunshot. She bared her teeth at him, bugged her eyes out. Hissed.
He didn’t flinch, which she had to admit impressed her. His nostrils did flare a little but he didn’t jump. He didn’t exactly waste his time about retreating to the far table, but he hadn’t jumped.
She had met so many weak people. He wasn’t one of them.
“Please look at the picture in front of you. I don’t have as much time as I would like, so if you could stop playing games with me, I’d appreciate it. Look at the picture and tell me what you see.”
She looked at him, not the picture. Eventually he sighed.
“That’s where it comes from. The Epidemic. In a couple of days I’m going to lead a raiding party up there and we’re going to storm it. Maybe blow it up. I’d like to think that will be enough to end this. I’d like to have some confirmation, and I’m hoping that you can provide it. Do you recognize the place in that photo?”
Alright, she thought. Give him an inch, see how much he takes. She looked down. She’d never seen the place in the picture before. It meant nothing to her. It looked like a cluster of one-story buildings—too big for houses, maybe hunting lodges or something—on top of a mountain. There were strange shapes, animal-like, maybe reptilian, scattered around the building. Sculptures. Sculptures of dinosaurs, in between snow-covered peaks.
Snow-covered mountains… the fire.
She looked again.
A perfectly semi-circular expanse of ground around the buildings stood out, because it was empty. Beyond a certain limit the picture was full of bodies. Thousands of them, dead bodies, standing, facing inward. It was as if the undead had gathered to storm the buildings only some magical force was keeping them at a distance.
A place up in the mountains. A guilty man. A fire that would burn the world.
Jason Singletary had seen this photograph. Or he’d seen what it depicted. He’d tried to force his vision on her.
“You say it started here? How?” she demanded.
“We don’t know. I’m gathering intelligence from every source I can find—including you. I saw a look of recognition on your face just now. Talk to me.”
There was definite steel in his voice but Nilla didn’t know what to tell him. “I’ve never been there. I don’t know what you’ll find. But…”
It was his turn to wait without speaking.
“I think I’m supposed to go there. Maybe you’re supposed to take me there. I’m the only one who can do it.” Singletary had been very clear on that last point.
“I see.”
“No, listen, I was chosen for this. Maybe I was created for this, I don’t know…” she considered telling him about Singletary, and about Mael Mag Och. She knew it would sound crazy, though. She grew agitated as she thought through her options. She picked up her chain and stood up abruptly. “You have to take me there, or, or you can just let me go, and I’ll go there myself.”
He nodded at her and then quickly, methodically, closed his briefcase with a double click.
She felt as if she’d been sleepwalking. No, she felt as if she’d been in a bad dream, a dream where she’d forgotten something horribly, terribly important, something she had to do and that she had forgotten and now it was coming due. When Singletary had been trying to tell her about this she’d been distracted, she’d wanted to find her name so badly. Now she realized she should have paid more attention.
“You have to let me go,” she said.
“Not a chance.” He stood up and headed for the door. “I saw what you did to those men at Jukebox Cave. You’ll never be free again, not if I can help it.”
He didn’t slam the door shut behind him but he might as well have. Nilla stared at it, at the door, for a very long time. Then she yanked at her chain, trying to get loose.
Not a chance.
They brought her another meal—pork chops—a little later. She ate them, of course, but they didn’t really taste of anything. She was still sucking little bits of the grayish-pinkish meat out from between her teeth when the lights went out.
Oh God, she thought. They didn’t know that she didn’t sleep. Or maybe they did know and they just wanted to torment her, to force her to abide by a normal human day/night schedule. But then the room’s emergency lights came on, a pair of wan halogen bulbs tucked away in a corner of the ceiling.
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