The dead can’t drive. At least Nilla couldn’t. She had tried stealing a car to get east only to abandon it before leaving the parking lot. Her hands when she tried to grip the steering wheel felt like they were covered by thick mittens. The wheel slid away from her and she tried to stamp on the brake, only to find that her leg was beyond such precise movements. If she had gotten up to any speed she would probably have broken her neck.
So she resorted to hitch-hiking, because she didn’t have any better ideas.
Nilla stood by the side of Route 46 and screened her eyes with one hand as she watched a plume of dust approaching her from the west. It would be her first ride all day if she actually made this one. She was ready to bolt at the first sign of green and nearly did—but it wasn’t Army green, this was the bottle green of a civilian car. A little Toyota, it looked like. She was pretty sure the police only drove American-made cars.
It rolled up to a stop next to her but the window didn’t come down at first. She could understand that. She’d been eating out of trash cans for a week, sleeping where she could. She had scrounged some clothes out of a dumpster, a pink baby tee a size too small for her and a pair of ratty chinos long out of fashion. Together they made her look like a prostitute. Her stringy hair and the unnatural pallor of her skin made her look like a junkie. People didn’t pick up hitch-hikers who looked like her. Not often.
She smiled through the window anyway, bending down to try to make eye contact. There were two people in the car—two kids. White suburban teenagers, going by looks. He had a little wispy facial hair and an Oakland Raiders baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. She had a gold cross around her neck. They both wore black t-shirts, band t-shirts.
The window came down, cranked by hand. This had to be the boy’s first car. He probably scrimped and saved to buy it used. He had probably installed the spoiler on the back himself—the paint didn’t quite match. Nilla knew she had to be careful with what she said, with what she asked for.
“I’m heading east, to, to Barstow,” she suggested. She remembered to smile and put a hand on the windowsill. They were less likely to take off if she was already in contact with the car. You learned these things after a week on the road.
The boy looked her up and down, studying her clothes. Her breasts and her hips.
“I don’t know, Charles,” the girl whispered, as if Nilla couldn’t hear her. “Look at her.” Nilla gave the boy her best high wattage smile.
“Damn, Shar!” the boy shot back. “Shut up! I guess we got room for one more,” he offered. He wasn’t sure, no more than his girlfriend, but he had teenage hormones to contend with.
Nilla opened the back door and climbed in.
Limit: Two Gallons of Water per Person, due to Emergency, Please! [Handwritten sign posted at a CVS Pharmacy, Carefree, CA 3/28/05]
Nilla nestled back in the upholstery of the Toyota’s back seat and chewed on a candy bar when she really wanted to swallow it whole. It was the closest thing the kids had to food.
“We were heading down to Hollywood, but the radio said you shouldn’t.” The girl, Shar, craned around in her seat to look back at the hitch-hiker. “You’re, well, you’re not supposed to pick people up, either. You’re not even supposed to drive unless you have to.”
It was a sort-of apology. The girl felt guilty for not wanting to pick her up. Nilla’s mouth was full, so she gave Shar a closed-mouth smile.
“Damn, woman, if I want to go somewheres I’ma gonna do it,” Charles swore, striking the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. “I got my mind on my drivin’, and my drivin’ on my mind, you know what I’m saying? Shit, that’s just what freedom is all about. For reals. Now see if you can find something on the FM.”
“I just get scared, is all,” the girl said, slumping down in her seat again. She didn’t touch the radio. “They say there’s sick people down there. They say they’re violent.”
Nilla gave a polite shrug. The girl was still looking at her in the rear-view mirror.
“They say they have glowing red eyes,” Shar finished, and then looked away. “I get scared, is all.”
“Unh-uh, no way, I told you already, woman. I’m psycho-killer crazy. I’m mad gangsta dangerous. I’m a hard man, baby, hard enough for both of us. I’ll keep you safe, Shar. I already told you that.”
He grabbed her around the shoulders with one arm and held her close, kissing the side of her forehead before he let her go again. He switched the radio on himself and they couldn’t talk any more, not and be heard over the blare of hip-hop that came out of the speakers by Nilla’s head. It made a strange soundtrack for what she saw out her windows—flat land covered in spotty green and yellow vegetation in the perfect rectangular fields of big truck farms. They passed the occasional abandoned oil derrick like a tired animal bending down for a drink of water and unable to get up. Nilla saw a couple of houses that had collapsed down the middle. It looked like the ground itself had fallen away from beneath them. Nobody had bothered to repair them. She was a long way already from the bustling little town by the sea where she died and came back.
“There’s a town up ahead,” Shar said, sitting up in her seat. “Are you still hungry?”
Nilla nodded hopefully. “I don’t have any money, though.”
Shar sat back down. “Can we stop, Charles? Just for a minute? I need to pee.”
They rolled in over the sudden shockingly-blue ribbon of an aqueduct and into a tiny town bleached by sun into a uniform brownish-grey. There was no sign welcoming them to town but judging by the names of half the stores they had arrived in Lost Hills, California. As they glided through the cracked streets Nilla got a bad chill down her back and she realized that everyone they passed was staring at them. They were normal people—she saw faces with bad acne scars, old women with hair like frozen cumulus clouds, mothers carrying babies and brushing dark hair out of their eyes to see better. She got another shock when she realized that it wasn’t the car garnering all that attention. The eyes didn’t track the counter-rotating hubcaps or the handmade spoiler on the back. They were looking in the windows. In the back windows.
At her.
They knew. The people of Lost Hills knew what she was. They could sense it. If she closed her eyes she could see them all, their golden auras, and she knew they were all looking back and seeing her darkness. Surely not as vividly, certainly not consciously but they could sense her energy just like she could sense theirs.
She wanted to get out, but she didn’t want to leave the safety of the car. She wanted Charles to just keep driving, to speed up, even as he began to maneuver into a parking space on the town’s dusty main street. She wanted to make herself invisible—but that would surely spook Charles and Shar and she couldn’t risk that, not when they were her only way out of town.
Charles switched off the ignition and the three of them got out. The stares intensified and on the corner a woman in a red cardigan called out something in Spanish. Nilla had no idea what she was saying. Well, at least she knew one more thing about herself than before: she couldn’t speak Spanish.
They headed into a little convenience store—the sign out front said “bodega” in amongst the signs advertising cheap cigarettes and powdered milk. A little, narrow room with a low ceiling of stained acoustic tile and metal racks full of off-brand merchandise. The candy was all Mexican, the newspapers up front were full of words and even punctuation Nilla didn’t recognize. The proprietress, a middle-aged woman in a blue print dress, could barely be seen behind an enormous lottery terminal and a display of artificial roses each sealed in its own plastic case.
Charles headed over to talk to her while Nilla and Shar roamed the aisles, looking for snacks. Nilla had a pretty good idea of what was going on and she kept her mouth shut. “So excuse me, ma’am? Do you sell condoms? No? Ma’am, I need some help here. What about the flavored kind, do you have any of those?” The woman behind the counter couldn’t conceal her horror at the question. For the first time sin
ce they’d entered the store she looked away from Nilla. “What about those ones? They have little bumps on them, you know, excuse me, Ma’am? They’re ribbed for her pleasure?”
“Boomps?” the woman asked, her eyes hard.
In the aisle just out of view Shar grabbed a link of plastic-wrapped salami and handed it to Nilla. “In your pants,” she whispered, “there’s plenty of room. Five-fingered discount.”
“Yeah, bumps. Ribs, I guess,” Charles suggested. He held up his hands about a foot and a half apart from one another. “In this size?”
“Boomps,” the woman said again. “Ribs?”
“I think they call them French ticklers.”
Shar sputtered with laughter even as she handed Nilla a block of cheddar cheese and a bag of potato chips. She just couldn’t help herself. It was all over as soon as the laugh came out of her, though. “Thieves! They are thieves!” the woman shrieked. She started to crawl up onto her counter, clearly intending to seize them in the act of shoplifting.
“What do we do?” Nilla asked, but Shar had already dropped half the things she was carrying and was at the door. Nilla followed as close behind as she could, unable to move as fast as she might like both because she was, well, dead but also because her pants were full of cold cuts. Charles came up behind her and pushed her bodily into the door of the bodega until it flew open and they spilled out into the sunlight. The proprietress was still coming for them, her knees already up on the counter. They headed for the car, intending to make a clean getaway.
“Que estas haciendo? Ai! Malvado fantasma, es peligroso!” a man on the corner shouted and Nilla pulled up short, guilt flushing through her body. Shar and Charles kept running. The man came closer—an old, weathered guy in overalls and a baseball cap. What could she do? She felt pretty lousy about shoplifting but she would feel worse, she knew, if she were caught. The people of Lost Hills wouldn’t give her a chance. They knew. She bolted for the car.
“Hice por ayudar,” the old man said behind her. She got maybe three strides down the road before she realized he’d been trying to warn her. Charles and Shar were behind the car, huddled in its shadow.
A crowd of men had gathered in the middle of the street. Some of them had farm implements—pitchforks, shovels, she saw a long-handled trowel—and others just had steel-toed boots. They had gathered around a girl who was maybe fifteen years old, lying curled up in the street, and they were kicking her to death.
No. Not death. When Nilla got closer she closed her eyes and saw the golden fires of the men in a ring around a huddled shape of fuming darkness. The girl was already dead. The blows the men rained down on her weren’t stopping her from reaching for their ankles, trying to grab them and tear them apart.
No wonder the people of the town were so sensitive to her energy. The sickness had already come upon them.
The Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response has asked that all physicians and medical technicians register with their nearest Emergency Services Provider. [FEMA ListServ Message, 3/30/05]
The hunger swelled inside Dick, turned inside him, threatened to consume him. It was bigger than he was and he lacked any kind of willpower or ego to fight against it. Sometimes it seemed to speak to him in a low, moaning language more primitive than words. It told him what to do. It told him where to go. Up. Up into the mountains, up the winding course of the highway toward the light. What he would find there he couldn’t know, but he couldn’t resist the pull, either.
He lost one of his boots along the way, snagged under a protruding tree root. He pulled and pulled until the laces creaked, until the leather stretched and tore, until his foot came out red and swollen. He moved on, bouncing up and down with each step, up on the boot, down when his naked foot hit the gravel, or the concrete, or the loose rocky soil. He didn’t let this hobbling gait slow him down.
The hunger drove him on.
At ten thousand feet above sea level he saw something white and low ahead—a car that had stalled out in the rarefied air. He moved in with a little caution, unsure if he was wasting his time. He wasn’t. There was someone inside, a woman, a middle-aged woman in pearls and pantsuit. Her hair was like gossamer, like the silken strands of a spider’s web. In Dick’s altered vision her hair glowed like a fine tracery of gold. He wanted her. The hunger had to have her.
She screamed but he could barely hear her through the safety glass. She tried to get the car moving but failed. He came closer and lunged for her. His face smashed against the glass of her window. Pain sang a single low note in his nose and his cheek but the hunger roared louder. He struck again. She bounced across the front seats of the car and pushed her way out of the passenger door, out into the air.
The smell of her hit Dick like a storm of longing. His jaw stretched wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. She tried to run but she’d already made her fatal mistake. She would have been faster than Dick if she’d been wearing tennis shoes instead of high heels. She could have outrun him at sea level where she could catch her breath. That high up in the mountains she could barely run a dozen yards before she got winded. The air was too thin to properly fill her lungs.
Dick didn’t need to breathe at all. He was dead. She would run a ways and have to stop to puff and gasp and wheeze. He just kept coming. It took most of an hour but in the end he closed the gap between them. He got his teeth in her flailing arm and just refused to let go. He couldn’t feel any mercy or compassion anymore. To Dick she was just meat, a meal, something to snack on. He couldn’t understand her pleas for release.
The hunger owned him. It didn’t leave room for pity.
When he was done with her and her blood had dried on his chin and his vest, when the hunger was sated for a while (just a while, it would come back soon enough) he lay sprawled across her cooling body, his esophagus heaving with peristalsis, and he watched the gold filigree of her hair tarnish and turn dark. When she woke up she joined him, what was left of her. Together they headed up the highway. The hunger pulled her along too, and when they crested the mountain together they saw where it was leading them.
Public transportation is running on a reduced/holiday schedule. It is expected that normal schedules will be resumed shortly. [RTD Denver, CO service announcement, 3/31/05]
A new structure had been erected on the grounds of the prison overnight. The biowarfare people from Fort Detrick called it “the Bag”. The biosecure research facility the 1157th Engineers Company had built on the site of Florence-ADX comprised a series of interlocked Conex shipping containers lined inside with several thicknesses of transparent mylar. These envelopes were kept at varying levels of negative air pressure so that if one was punctured pathogens would be blow inward, not out. The Bag qualified as a Class II Biological Safety Cabinet.
To get inside the Bag you had to pass through a series of flaps that had to be unzipped and then resealed behind you. Clark had already been decontaminated and had his clothing (including his underwear and socks) replaced with disposable paper modesty garments. His name and rank were stenciled on the chest and sleeves. He felt humiliated. What Vikram had to tell him didn’t please him either. “There’s no word on the girl because there’s no one there to answer the phone?”
“Everyone is gone, all of them. Everyone with a telephone,” Vikram shrugged in apology.
“What do you mean, gone?” he demanded as they ducked through yet another flap. “The entire town? Not just the sheriff’s office?”
“The town has been officially deserted. The people to a soul evacuated, the surrounding roads sealed and barricaded. It was done on FEMA’s order.”
“Nobody over there has authority to evacuate an entire town! That’s not supposed to be possible without my countersignature.” Clark knew what this meant. The incident had grown too large for one lowly Captain to be in charge anymore. Someone upstairs must have relieved him of duty and the papers were still in the mail. It was hardly surprising but he didn’t like it at all. “Did those trigger
-happy deputies ever find out her name? I mean before they ran away. At least tell me they didn’t kill her.”
“There’s still an all points bulletin out for her. They wish to take her to protective custody. That at least means she still lives, certainly.” Vikram grabbed his beard in a tight fist. “I am afraid though their description, is not so good. Age eighteen to forty-five. Blonde. Tattoo on the stomach.”
“That describes half the women in California,” Clark said, scowling. “They didn’t get a single photograph of her?” Of course they hadn’t. The debacle at the hospital parking lot had been completely FUMTU (Fucked Up More Than Usual). He came up to the final envelope of the Bag and peered in. Through the cloudy mylar he could make out a figure like an obese white grub with stubby arms and legs gliding along a series of instrument trays, touching each tool in turn. That would be First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez, the woman he’d come to talk to, dressed in a one-piece biological safety ventilated garment. A space suit, in biowarfare lingo. There was another occupant of the innermost reaches of the Bag and he wore nothing at all. Shriveled, grey, mutilated—one of the original victims from the prison. He was held to a gurney by four-point restraints but Clark could see him writhing and jerking even through the translucent wall. “Good afternoon, First Lieutenant,” Clark said into an intercom box dangling by a cable from the ceiling. “I trust you’ve completed your initial assessment.” He let go of the talk button and looked at Vikram. “They evacuated the entire town? That’s madness.” Vikram opened his mouth to respond but Sanchez’s voice grated out of the speaker first.
“Sir, no, sir.” Sanchez put down the aural thermometer she’d been holding and came closer to the wall so he could see her better. She snapped to attention and they exchanged salutes. “I have not completed my assessment because I was unable to sedate the patient. Sir, your orders clearly stated that no biopsies or invasive procedures were to be performed on a non-anesthetized individual.”
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