Clark nodded silently. He wanted the infected patients to be as comfortable as possible. In their confused state they could hardly agree to medical examination but at least he could manage their pain. “Perhaps you’d care to elaborate, Sanchez,” Clark suggested, gritting his teeth.
“Sir, I applied a narcotic sedative, namely morphine, in increasing doses at four hour intervals. I continued to up the dosage well past the safe human level. No matter how much I injected into him however his behavior and affect remained unchanged. A few minutes ago I applied what should be an instantly lethal dosage and as you can see the patient remains fully motile. I’ll reiterate: that should have killed him. It didn’t.”
Clark tried to thrust his free hand into his pocket so he could reorganize the small change there. That usually helped him keep his cool. Unfortunately he’d left his coins with his uniform back at the entrance to the Bag. “Do you have an explanation for that?”
“I do, sir. The patient is already dead.”
Clark said nothing and eventually she continued.
“The patient demonstrates no vital signs at all. No respiration, no pulse. I can’t measure his blood oxygen levels because from what I can tell his blood has coagulated and dried up in his veins. He’s dead, by pretty much any medical or legal definition I can think of. What we have here is not a human being any more, but a zom-”
Clark stabbed the talk button on the intercom. “That will be enough.”
“Sir, with all due respect, we are no longer dealing with an outbreak of a traditional virus. A virus can’t survive in dead tissue! We need to completely rethink our strategies and—”
Vikram leaned in close to the intercom. “You are under my direct command, Doctor, and I will not have this kind of insubordination! I am shocked and appalled that you would talk back to—”
“He’s dead! He’s not faking it! Sir, I’ve run everything short of an MRI on this man and—”
Clark cleared his throat. The others fell silent and waited while he composed his thoughts. The only sound in the Bag was the crinkling rustle of mylar stirring in a ventilated breeze. He ran a hand across his forehead and then spoke in a soft, low voice he reserved for quieting panicked underlings on the battlefield. He stared hard at Sanchez, trying to find her eyes through all the plastic. “Soldier. What is your official report going to say? Have you thought about that?”
“Sir,” Sanchez began, but Clark merely held up a hand for patience.
“Is it going to say you spent the last thirty-six hours trying to sedate a man who was already dead?”
Burning defiance erupted behind her eyes. It stayed there and didn’t reach her voice. She was, after all, a soldier. She knew when she was receiving an order. “Sir, no, sir. It will not.”
THIS AREA UNDER QUARANTINE — Trespassers will be subject to detainment and decontamination [Signage posted in Brentwood, CA, 3/30/05]
In the irrigated fields outside of Lost Hills they saw people moving sluggishly through the crops. Never more than one or two at a time, all of them headed toward town. None of them looked up at the passing car.
Shar stirred restlessly in Nilla’s arms. The sight of the undead girl being beaten to death had really shaken her. “They’re going to come for me next,” she had kept sobbing, though Charles and Nilla had both pointed out there was no reason to think such a thing. Nilla had a very good reason to be frightened for her own well-being but she kept it to herself.
After a few minutes of sheer hysteria and Charles constantly telling her to shut up Shar had demanded that he stop the car right in the middle of the road. There was no traffic. She had come around to the back of the car and crawled in with Nilla, who could hardly refuse to put her arms around the frightened girl.
“I need to call my mom,” she said at one point. Sitting up in the seat she stared out the window at a man wearing nothing but a baggy t-shirt. He was wandering through a stand of avocado trees, the branches smacking him in the face but he paid no attention. “Do you think—is he one of them?” Shar asked.
“Holmes is just loaded, Shar,” Charles chortled over the back seat. “He’s all crunked up, you know what I’m saying?”
“I need to go home now, Charles,” Shar said so quietly he couldn’t have heard her. The windows of the little Toyota rattled whenever he took the car over forty miles per hour and he refused to turn down the radio so any conversation between the three of them had to be shouted. Nilla opened her mouth but Shar shook her head in negation. “No. No, I’m just practicing. I could make him take me home if I really wanted. Charles wanted to go to Hollywood, but I talked him out of it,” Shar said, looking up into Nilla’s face.
The girl was scared shitless and a little traumatized. Nilla wondered how she would react if she learned that she was seeking comfort in the embrace of a dead woman. Best not to find out. “Yeah?” Nilla asked, her voice a soft purr. Maybe she had been a nurturing person in her life or maybe it was just natural instinct but she knew what it took to comfort the girl. She brushed Shar’s hair away from her forehead. Hunger stabbed her in the stomach and told her it was time to eat but she sucked in her belly and refused to entertain the notion. “Why did he want to go there?”
“He thought we could find some movie star, or maybe a singer, and save them from the sick people and then they would be so grateful they would let us stay with them and we wouldn’t have to worry about money.”
Nilla nodded as if this made perfect sense. “But then you heard on the radio that you should stay away from Los Angeles.”
Shar nodded and rubbed anxiously at her nose. “I think maybe I should sit up now. Up front, I mean.” She stared deep into Nilla’s eyes and shot her a microsecond smile. “Thanks,” she said. “I got so scared.”
“It happens.”
Charles pulled over on the side of the road so Shar could get back in the passenger’s seat. As she was climbing out of the car the girl brought her face close to Nilla’s ear. Nilla closed her eyes to better hear what Shar might say.
“Don’t hate me, okay? But you really need some deodorant.”
They didn’t stop for Bakersfield, though Shar and Charles argued about whether they should until long after they’d passed through the sprawling downtown. Charles got them onto Route 58 after only a few tries and before they knew it they were in the middle of farmland again. Nilla breathed a sigh of relief. She really didn’t want to stop anywhere populated again but even so Bakersfield looked untouched by the dead. Maybe it was just a local phenomenon. Maybe if she got far enough east she would be safe. Was that what her mysterious benefactor on the hill was trying to tell her?
About ten miles past the last houses of the city they started seeing cars coming from the other direction, headed west. A station wagon flashed its lights as it sped by them and Charles looked pensive. “Yeah, fuck you too, grandma,” he said, and chewed on the hair of his lower lip. When they started to see exit signs for Tehachapi it happened again, this time with a Mazda Miata. A third car honked its horn at them repeatedly.
Nilla stared through the windshield and saw the driver emphatically shaking her head and waving a hand to tell them to stop. “Charles, maybe we should slow down,” Nilla suggested.
“Yeah, and maybe you should just sit there and not talk to me right now,” he said, turning in his seat, the seat belt tugging at the skin of his neck. She had a momentary pang of desire—she really wanted to put her teeth in that throat of his—but she fought it down. “I’m kind of busy, and you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry, okay, ho?”
Nilla crossed her arms and looked away.
They started to see more traffic heading east and Charles had to slow down anyway to match the prevailing speed. The lanes heading west grew packed and drew to a standstill. Charles switched off the radio and squinted at the road.
Many of the cars they passed honked their horns now and occasionally someone would lean out their window to shout at them. Nilla couldn’t understand what they were saying�
��they were moving too fast. She found a map in the pocket of the seat in front of her and pulled it out. She tried to make sense of its colors and symbols. Just east of Tehachapi brown blotches surrounded the road on either side. She studied the tiny print.
Edwards Air Force Base. China Lake Naval Weapons Center. Fort Irwin Military Reserve. Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Base. It looked like the Armed Forces owned all the land between them and Nevada. She remembered the man in the Army uniform, the one who had almost presided over her execution.
“Charles, listen to me—we have to get off this road!” she shouted. The boy sneered and put up a fist as if he would punch her from the front seat. Clearly he was threatening her but she was far more worried about falling afoul of the Army. “Charles! There’s a roadblock, that’s what’s happening. Do you really want the Marines to ask you why you’re running away from home?”
He started to grumble again but Shar sat up straight in her seat and looked right at him. It stopped his growling, anyway. The girl put a hand on his arm and stroked it gently. “They’ll split us up. They’ll find out I’m underage.”
He lowered his head and refused to look away from the road. Nilla didn’t have time to argue anymore. “There’s a road—route 14. We can turn off at a town called Mojave.” It wasn’t a great solution—it would take them along the edge of China Lake—but it would get them out of immediate danger.
Charles still refused to respond and she had to content herself with staring at the back of his head and imagining what would happen if the Army found her. They wouldn’t fall for her trick again, would they? Even if they did there was no way Charles and Shar would let her stay in their car once they knew her secret.
Come on, Charles, she thought. Come on.
The big green signs for the exits at Mojave came up on the side of the road and Nilla had never wanted anything so much in her life. At least as far as she could remember.
It is recommended that travelers arrive at the airport four hours in advance of departure time to complete the required medical examinations before boarding. [FlyDenver.com “Tips for Travelers” page, updated 3/31/05]
A star had fallen to earth and gotten lodged there, still burning bright.
Its silver radiance illuminated the ridge, sending out long streamers of brilliance that made shadows on the facing slopes, shadows like the clouds made during the day, impossibly big, always moving. Like ocean waves of light and darkness washing across the spine of rocks and trees at the top of the world.
He headed toward it, drawn by it—physically pulled in. Death had not been kind to his eyes but he could make out more details as he got closer. There were buildings on the ridge, low concrete blocks. There were other shapes there as well, like titanic lizards eroded by rain and wind until their shapes were soft and smooth. They occluded the light, their silhouettes thrown across him, over him.
Others—other dead people—had gathered in the scree below the ridge. They stood apart from one another on ground crawling with lichens and dwarf pine trees that throbbed with energy but they weren’t trying to devour that life. They stood motionless, their faces tilted upwards to catch the sleeting luminosity of the fallen star. As he came among them they made no sign of noticing him. They were too busy studying the endlessly changing glow. Feeding on it. One of its beams touched Dick and though he was mentally incapable of surprise anymore his body could still feel the shock. It felt like something had been torn from him, burnt out of him perhaps. The hunger was gone. When that light reached him it drove the hunger away. It fed him a constant, steady stream of energy, the energy he needed to continue his existence. More than enough.
It was like the glow of the woman in the car, like the golden aura of human life. Except… no. Better to say that the human aura was like the light of the fallen star. The radiation that shot through him was altogether more pure and more real. It nurtured him, warmed him. He wanted to run up the slope and jump inside of that light. Surrender to it—become one with it.
As he got closer though the warmth he felt turned to heat. Real heat. He could feel it singing him, scorching every cell in his body. He took a step closer and tasted smoke at the back of his throat. He could see dark shapes ahead of him. Charred, burnt-out corpses, lumps of blackened meat in tattered remnants of clothing. He understood, in a wordless, primal way. The very thing that nourished him could consume him if he got too close. He was in a gray zone, a realm between comfort and instant annihilation and staying there meant pain.
No matter. He stepped backwards. It was enough to stand a respectable distance away and let the fallen star comfort him. It was enough to rest. To rest and watch the light show. It was all he ever wanted, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in life or in death.
He was so absorbed in the coruscating patterns of the light, transfixed like an acid freak staring into the depths of a lava lamp that he barely noticed when a yellow rectangle appeared up in the buildings above the star. It was a door opening, letting out human noise and movement. A man, a living man, appeared there with a microphone in his hand. Dick bared his teeth by instinct but he felt no real need to attack the man. The light of the fallen star had given him that, a kind of serenity.
“Good evening,” he told them, his voice amplified by loudspeakers strung on poles in the circle of statuary reptiles. Some of the gathered dead, like Dick, looked up. Most did not. “I see some new… new faces tonight. Welcome. I wish there was more that I could do for you. I truly do. You’ll never know how sorry…”
The voice broke off in a choking noise. A sob. The man went back inside his house. Music played over the loudspeakers, light Classical music—Mozart, although Dick could not have made that distinction. The music meant nothing to him. He already had everything he wanted.
The man came back the next night. Every night. The music changed. The pleas for forgiveness didn’t. Dick grew irritated with the man for a while. Eventually he learned to ignore him, to not even look up when the lights went on up there.
It was a kind of perfect existence. He felt warm and sated. Dick could have stayed there forever.
In a dawn time without time, long after the music had finished, Dick stood rock still where he’d stopped the night before though dew ran down his face and his muscles were stiff and sore. None of it bothered him. The rising sun couldn’t overpower the rays of life and happiness that shot through him. Yet something had changed, something simple, easy to miss. He studied the fallen star to try to detect what it might be and felt the star looking back at him.
It was more than aware of him. It was actively looking at him. It had a consciousness and even a kind of voice, though its words were made of light. Dick had been unable to understand the living man’s address the night before but these words made perfect sense to him. In time the consciousness of the star took shape, a certain fulgent form that conveyed the sense of a human body while being made entirely of rays of light. It reached out fingers that stretched across the slope and brushed the ruins of Dick’s shoulders.
Yes, it thought, and Dick heard it sigh. There were others, it told him. Others that were closer or perhaps better equipped to perform the task (what task? It was a question, and Dick was beyond questions). Yet Dick possessed a certain quality of appearance. A supreme ugliness, a horror of aspect. His ruined body could inspire fear, much more fear than any whole corpse.
Dick could hardly be offended by the thought. He was more honored than anything else, honored to be picked by this perfect form at the heart of the fallen star. In the middle of the Source.
The form said it could use him. It told him to leave the valley of the star. Dick lacked the will to refuse the request and anyway the form wasn’t asking. He would do its will. Even the concept of choice was beyond him.
Some part of him, some deep part felt regret and longing but it didn’t stop him from turning his back on the beautiful healing radiance. Without a word, without complaint, he turned and left the ridge and headed down into the valley
s below.
Bottled water will be available free of charge. You are also entitled to pick up pre-cooked foods at your local grocery store. Menus and options will be chosen or approved by your local FEMA representative. Please let us know about any dietary restrictions. [FEMA Supplemental Broadcast for Relocated Individuals, 3/31/05]
“Great fucking plan, Nilla.” Charles grabbed the map out of her hands. One corner ripped off in her grasp. “Look, now it’s torn. This is so whack!”
Nilla looked forward through the windshield. The road they’d been following—one lane, only partially paved—ended in a T intersection. There were no street signs or any kind of indication of where they were. The level cultivated land around Bakersfield had given way as they traveled north to trees and mountains and the roads had become sparser. They hadn’t seen a human being or a car for half an hour and now, officially, they were lost.
East, Nilla thought. They should head east. Except that she couldn’t see anything through all the trees. Sparse scrub pines and towering aspens crowded together on both sides of the road. East. Except they had turned around so many times and switched roads so often she had no idea which compass direction she was facing, much less which way was east. She felt something stir in her belly. Hunger, yes, of course it was hunger, it was always hunger. But the familiar pull was drawing her in a particular direction. It was telling her to go left.
Nilla had taken advice before from a naked man she had probably just hallucinated. A message from her stomach was just as good. “That way,” she said. One of the few compensations of having no memory whatsoever was that you couldn’t remember how many times your gut feelings had steered you wrong. “Seriously. That way.”
No one will be allowed into or out of the quarantine area without official written permission. Violators will face criminal charges and possible lethal force for non-compliance. [FEMA Travel Advisory for Las Vegas, NV and Salt Lake City, UT, 3/31/05]
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