Vikram shook his head to brush away the negativity. “We can do good in this world or we can be miserable over the bad that is already done. What would you have me do?”
Clark inhaled sharply. Vikram was a balm for the soul, alright. He tried to think clearly, to prioritize. That was something he was good at. “Get up to Florence. Sit on the prison, clamp it down. We cannot let the work there be delayed, no matter what else happens. You may receive new orders while you’re there. You may be reassigned to somebody else. I can hardly ask you to countermand direct orders, but make sure before you leave that Florence is airtight.”
Vikram saluted by way of response. Clark dismissed him and headed down to the parking lot of the school where a convoy of RTD buses was headed out. They were stuffed full of civilian evacuees. A motor pool staff sergeant assigned him the last military vehicle in the lot—an enormous lumbering eight-wheeled M977 HEMTT (Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck) that was built for hauling cargo. Before Clark could even inspect the two man crew he received his platoon, too, a scared-looking group of warfighters who fell into ranks behind their sergeant major without a word.
“Sir, platoon reporting for duty, sir!” the platoon sergeant barked. He looked like a prospector with bushy white non-regulation hair spilling out of his helmet and eyes like embers set at the bottom of dark pits. He had his men in line, though. Judging by the way they snapped to attention there was no question of his ability. He gestured and a specialist ran up holding a soft boonie hat—a fisherman’s hat in desert camo—as if it were a crown. Soldiers in the field—in Iraq—wore such hats to keep the sun out of their eyes. Clark understood the gesture and knew what he was being offered. These were veterans and they were acknowledging that he was one of their own regardless of his service record or any mistakes he might have made. The sergeant was telling him he was in command and that any orders he issued would be followed to the letter. Clark took off his own cover and put on the boonie hat. The specialist took his peaked cap and returned to the line. Clark had no doubt he would get his cover back dry cleaned and reblocked. Clark gave the sergeant the briefest of glances in way of thanks. The sergeant major nodded discretely and turned to face his platoon. “Attention to orders!”
“Drive on, chief,” Clark said. It was the traditional order to keep up good work. The platoon leapt up into the HEMTT’s boxy cargo compartment. Clark rode up front with the crew in the much more comfortable shovel-nosed cabin. The driver got the prime mover roaring and shuddered out onto a deserted Colfax Avenue, threading the needle between big tent churches and peepshow parlors, fast food franchises and gas stations.
That was how Bannerman Clark went to war.
Downtown Denver is considered a safe zone until 9:00 PM tonight or until further notice. Medical care and food distribution centers on the 16th Street Mall will remain open until that time. [Emergency Broadcast, Denver, CO 4/4/05]
“Shar, turn the AC up. It’s getting’ all sweaty up in heah.” Charles wiped at the back of his neck. Nilla studied the small thin hairs there, the way they lined up where his hand had plastered them down. She could see his pores opening up in the heat, the tiny droplets of sweat gathering together, turning into rivulets that ran down into his collar. Every cell in his body burned like molten gold.
“It’s all the way up already,” Shar complained, but she played with the controls anyway.
In the back seat Nilla felt the heat but she stayed perfectly dry. Her sweat glands didn’t work anymore. She tried rolling her window down a crack but the air that came pushing in felt like the exhaust from a blast furnace. Too much. She was tired of riding in the car, tired of being hot and cooped up.
Charles and Shar shared a coke—the last of the sodas they’d pilfered from the motel—but they didn’t think to offer her any. They had barely spoken to her since they’d started out that morning. When Charles had stopped to refuel at an abandoned gas station at a lonely intersection high in the mountains Shar had gotten out with him, as if she didn’t feel safe in the car without his company.
She could hardly blame the girl, Nilla supposed. Not with the kind of thoughts she’d been thinking. Mael Mag Och had told her the kids weren’t her friends. She’d seen for herself the way the living looked at her—like she was something unclean. The enemy. Why should she think of them any other way? She didn’t belong among them anymore. That should have been clear to her from the start.
Mael had said she should abandon Charles and Shar. That she should make her own way east. He’d said some other things that she didn’t even want to think about but he’d been quite clear on that point. No more fraternization with the living. Something in her responded to that message and she longed to strike out on her own. No more dirty looks. It would be so much easier than the silent game the three of them were playing.
Still—he was in New York, he’d said. Thousands of miles away. She could hardly walk across the country. She needed the kids. If she wanted her name back she had to have a ride. Surely he would understand. He seemed to have a pretty poor grasp on the English language and he had kept lapsing into another language, one she didn’t recognize. Maybe he wasn’t from New York originally. Maybe he didn’t know how far his body was from her. He would have to understand.
Just to get out of her head for a while Nilla nudged the back of Charles’ seat. He tried not to flinch. “So when are you going to tell me what you’re running away from?” she asked, intentionally cryptic, a little ashamed of what she was demanding when the two of them had clearly intended to keep it amongst themselves. She was just bored enough to prod in spite of herself.
“Charles,” Shar said, soothingly, as if she expected her boyfriend to lurch into violence at any moment. Maybe that was what Nilla expected, too, or even hoped for. It would be a great justification. The boy didn’t say anything, though.
“Seriously, I want to know. Why did you run away? Were you getting beaten by your parents or something? That would make sense.”
“I know you didn’t just say somethin’ ‘bout my moms,” Charles muttered. There was no force in the words, no anger. He was scared of her now. It angered her more than anything. She had turned to him for a little human contact and now he was scared of her. What the hell was up with that?
“Please don’t,” Shar said. It sounded like she was saying it to herself.
“Was it school? Were you having a hard time at school? Come on. Just tell me. We’re all friends now, right?” The neediness in her voice annoyed her and in frustration she slid across the back seat, putting the soles of her bare feet up against the window. The sun felt like a blowtorch on her skin and she yanked them away. When he maintained his stony silence she sat up on the warm seat and stared out at the mountainous land that flew by, its folds and creases etched into the side of a barren, unfinished planet. “Were you just bored?”
“Shar,” he said, but Nilla knew he was speaking to her, not his girlfriend.
“Huh?” she asked. “What does that mean? Why did you say ‘Shar’?”
Just saying her name had a strange effect on the girl in question. “Shut up! Oh my God don’t you say it!” Shar scrunched down in her seat and buried her face in her hands.
“Her name—” Charles began, keeping his eyes on the yellow line running down the middle of the road.
“My fucking name is Sharona, okay? Is that what you wanted to know?” The girl whirled around in her seat, her eyes huge and sharp. “You know. Like ‘M-m-m-my Sharona,’ like in that stupid song! That should tell you a little about my parents. You know the song.”
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 to a stop just at the top of a ridge and got out. Overheated air instantly pushed out the air conditioned comfort of the car. Nilla could taste how dry the air was as it buffeted her face and hands.
She 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 but she shook her head for patience. “No, seriously. We have to keep going east. Look, look here,” she said, pointing at the map. “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 or you die. We don’t have any water, in case you didn’t notice. So if we go in there—”
“You’re not going to die!” she protested. They could not just stop. Not when Nevada was so close. They couldn’t go back, either. California was one big trap for her. The entire US Army was probably looking for her back there. If they found her they would shoot her and she wouldn’t have a chance to turn invisible or run away. “‘Death Valley’ is 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. A wavering shadow caught her eye. “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. In the shimmering air it had been all too easy to miss but once you saw it its reality struck you forcibly. Something moved in the cargo bed. 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. “That’s two guys.”
“Yeah, well,” Nilla said, getting desperate. They couldn’t turn back now—her name was waiting for her and death was close behind. “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. Despite the heat a chill rolled down her spine. She closed her eyes, knowing what she would find. There were two people in the back of the truck, yes. One of them was 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.
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 middle-aged woman in a sweatsuit, her face wide and open and blank. Clark had never fired on a civilian target before. He hadn’t fired at a human being in decades. He would have to cover a lot of mental terrain and pull a complete shift in perspective before he could pull the trigger. It had to happen in the next few seconds.
“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. The plastic netting forme crowd control barriers lining the narrow channel of the river, keeping any of the enemy from climbing up the sides. The netting 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. The middle-aged woman 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 chief 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 mother, 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 squeez
ed 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 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.
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