After three days she came to the place where desert ended and mountains began. She bore no illusions about what lay ahead—she still had the map she had taken from Charles’ car and she knew there was another desert on the far side of this new mountain range. Not just another valley but a high plateau of desert that went on forever. Still she was glad to be climbing upward, even when her legs complained, even when her thighs burned with the unrelenting effort. Getting up into high country meant the nights were cooler and the daytime sun less punishing.
In the absence of anything else the mind grows to fill the landscape it observes and in turn it takes on the aspects thereof. After days of walking nearly non-stop she had learned to stop thinking about every individual thing she saw, the swaying branches of every Mormon tea bush, every tiny yellow flower of a brittlebrush. Instead she had come to understand everything as process. In constant motion she began to see the world in terms of movement and change, and any change for the cooler, the wetter, or the rockier was for the better.
She used her hands and feet to pull her way up the Amargosa mountains and into Nevada. There was nothing to mark the border—she had to guess, based on what sense she could make of the map in a place with no unique landmarks. She was well off the paved roads that cut Death Valley into quadrants and the gas station map had very little physical detail to guide her.
Did it matter? If you walked across the country, from one ocean to the other, did it matter at any point what state you happened to be in? She had been holding Nevada in her mind as a goal, an escape—a place where she would be safe from the military and the police and everyone else who wanted to destroy her. Had anything really changed, though? It would be truly naïve to think that the sickness, the plague of undeath, stopped at the border between the two states. Surely the people of Nevada hated the walking dead as much as the Californians. The desert was providing for her, it was a safe place for her. Maybe she should just stop. Maybe she should ignore Mael Mag Och’s offer, forget about finding her name. She could just… exist underneath the cottonwoods, spend the rest of time getting more and more crusty and dry, eating kit foxes and tortoises and coyotes in the smell of sagebrush and baking rock. Maybe that would last forever.
She stopped to ponder that and just to sit down for a second. Her feet were mostly numb but her legs were killing her. When she perched on a rock her body stopped complaining so loudly and her mind began to settle, to gather itself back up. Returning to concrete thought she slowly became aware that the armless corpse was gone. She felt his disappearance as a sudden shock of absence, the way she might have felt on having a tooth knocked out of her head.
Why had he gone? Where had he gone? She spun around, searching the high ridge then closed her eyes and tried the same search again but… nothing. He was just gone. She turned and faced eastward—maybe he had gotten ahead of her somehow? No. No, but there was something. She stood at the top of a wandering canyon, the imprint of some ancient mazy river. At the head of the canyon stood a simple wood-frame house. Smoke dribbled out of the chimney to be torn apart by a gusting wind.
Where there was smoke there had to be people, didn’t there? Living people. People who would make better company than the armless freak. She hurried down toward the house, her legs screaming but her hands reaching out.
CDC almost certain they can be pretty sure about one thing… maybe:
So the Centers for Disease Control says here that it’s not a virus. Which builds on what we already knew from this spectacularly useful press release from the National Institute of Health, which claims it isn’t a bacteria. So what the hell is it? In the meantime, here’s your conspiracy theory of the week from Romenesko’s: Man in Oklahoma claims rapture happened, only no one was fit to be saved. [blog entry, DiseasePlanet.org, 4/8/05]
Clark ordered the HEMTT to a stop and leaned out his window to listen. In the distance, past a line of trees he could hear something. A noise like paper being crumpled, over and over, interspersed with sharp bangs. He knew that sound. It was an automatic grenade launcher blowing the hell out of a city block. “That’s the Stryker group,” he told the driver and comms. After three days of hard fighting they both just looked numb.
It was a strange kind of conflict where the noise of automatic weapons fire meant safety, while unarmed civilians were your prime target. “Firefight ahead, chief,” he shouted back at Horrocks. The sergeant snapped to attention. “Get your people squared away.”
Horrocks snapped into action. “Alright, everybody find your battle buddy, we’ve got trigger time coming up. You, you, you, take point—you six spread out and keep your eyes open. Look out for negligent discharge!”
In the truck’s cabin the comms specialist spoke in a monotone into one of her cell phones. “Stryker group three, this is assault element six. Assault element six calling, Stryker group three. Do you copy, please?”
“Five by five, Assault. We are holding onto a golf course approximately one quarter kilometer north and east of your location, taking heavy fire… scratch that, not fire, you know what I mean. We’ve got air support coming in from Buckley ANG to remove friendlies, can you assist?”
“On our way, Stryker group,” comms said, but they were already in the middle of it. The HEMTT crept forward into a leafy residential street and grumbled to a stop. Ten or so infected stood in the intersection, stumbling around aimlessly on ravaged legs. One of them turned to look directly at Clark through the windshield. He heard Horrocks shouting at Squad Two and the infected man’s head erupted like a volcano. An infected woman in a bright red sweater came hurrying toward the truck, her long black hair floating behind her, still silky and full of body even though her face was grey and pitted with sores. The squad cut her down, too—and an old man in a pair of coveralls, and a teenaged boy wearing a sweatshirt. There were more of them and more coming down the street, perhaps drawn by the combat noise.
“Chief, we need to get through here,” Clark yelled out the window. The sergeant was on it, shouting for his platoon to deploy themselves in a semicircular formation before the truck. Clark addressed the HEMTT’s driver. “Specialist, take us in as slow as you can—let these men do their work without having to be afraid of getting run over.”
Inch by inch they pressed forward. The troops took their time, lined up their shots. There seemed to be no end of infected citizens for them to mow down but they had a sizeable advantage—they could think, for one thing, rather than just running blindly into a crossfire. They had the advantage of being able to strike from a distance. They had their training and discipline to fall back on.
“Stryker group, we are converging on your location,” comms said, holding her phone tight against her cheek. A bloody hand smacked against the window beside her face and she screamed. Clark drew his sidearm but the squads had already pulled the infected man off of the side of the truck and blown open his skull.
Out of the cab, beyond Clark’s line of sight someone let loose with a sustained burst of automatic weapons fire—a pointless waste of ammunition and a sign that somebody had lost his or her cool. Clark climbed over the comms specialist and jumped down to the street to see what was happening. Infected crowded around on every side, more of them coming out of every side street, every alley, every garage and doorway. The noise of the gunfire must be drawing them, he thought. There was nothing for it but to fight their way through. Clark loosed his weapon and shot down a bald man with no skin on the lower half of his face. Another victim reached for him from fifteen feet away and he gunned her down, too. His hand was turning numb from all the recoil.
Motion on the edge of his vision startled him. More of them—how? How had the pathogen spread so quickly? Clark was sick of asking himself questions but he was constantly confronted with new variations on the theme. How did this start? What enemy, what nation, what terrorist faction would let this happen? He fired again and a naked woman spun off her feet and landed in a heap. He lined up his next shot and pierced her cranium.
; He was putting them out of misery, he told himself. Yes, they were sick people. Yes, they were citizens of the United States. But if the pathogen spread this quickly there just weren’t enough doctors to treat them all. Especially since half the doctors in the country were probably already infected themselves.
“Chief, do you think we can just ram through this?” he asked, his voice low. The unwritten rules allowed him to ask his sergeant questions but it was better if the troops didn’t hear.
Horrocks spat noisily. “They’ll get stuck in the wheels. We’ll get bogged down and eventually we’ll run out of ammo, sir.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Open me up an escape corridor. We need to reinforce that Stryker group. Get the men on the truck.” He caught himself. “The men and the women.” He wasn’t fresh. That was all. Normally he would never have made such a mistake but he had been too long without sleep or real food. “Get the troops onboard, and clear me a path with the SAW, with the small arms, whatever we have.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Horrocks shouted and made it happen. The SAW crew on the roof of the HEMTT opened up with an unholy rattle and the infected fell before the truck like corn at the harvest. The troops clung to the sides and top of the vehicle and slaughtered anything that tried to get into the gap the SAW made. The driver got them moving, both arms clutched around the steering wheel as the HEMTT drove up and over the pile of bodies and they popped through the crowd like a cork out of a champagne bottle. In under sixty seconds they were spinning out on a perfectly manicured golf course, fighting to keep traction.
The infected came at them from behind but Squad Three kept them at a distance with harassing fire. On the grass the driver opened up his throttle and they raced over and through bunkers and greens. The soldiers on the outside of the truck hung on for dear life as it bounced and shook on its eight wheels. Clark could see the Strykers up ahead. He counted three vehicles. There should have been five. One of the light urban warfare tanks looked badly damaged as well. They had been parked in a triangular formation that allowed the group to cover enemy action from any angle. The golf course around the armored vehicles was pockmarked with dark, smoking craters. Clark saw civilians, perhaps seventy-five of them and many badly wounded, huddled inside the loose perimeter. Added to the shell-shocked survivors in the back of the HEMTT that made nearly a hundred.
One of the Strykers deployed a spread of grenades from a roof-mounted MK-19 and smoke and fire tore through a stand of trees, shattering the wood and sending clouds of leaves twirling down through the air. As they pulled up to the Stryker group Clark heard the vehicles’ .50 caliber machine guns roaring in tight, controlled bursts, chopping down clusters of the infected as they emerged from the surrounding streets and buildings.
The comms specialist’s phone chimed and she answered it, “Copy that Buckley, we are five by five. Captain, sir, there’s a helicopter coming in right now to upload these friendlies and they can take ours, too.”
“Yes, finally,” Clark said. Finally something was going right. He squinted against the sun and saw an MH-53 Pave Low coming in just above the tree tops. The Pave Low, a double-wide chopper studded with instrument and weapon pods, was the biggest rotor-wing aircraft the ANG possessed. It could easily carry the survivors to a safe place, wherever that might be.
The helicopter dropped its ungainly bulk onto a putting green and started loading civilians onboard. A copilot wearing a gold Second Lieutenant’s bar dropped out of the crew hatch by the nose and came running up to throw Clark a salute.
“I admire your timing, airman,” Clark said, returning the salute. “We just arrived here ourselves.”
“Sir, permission to inquire whether I am addressing Captain Bannerman Clark, sir?”
“Granted, and yes, you are. What’s going on? Speak candidly, son, I don’t have all day.”
“Sir, I have special orders for you, sir, straight from the DoD.” The Civilian, Clark thought. The man with the marshmallow peeps. What was he thinking, issuing orders to a military unit during combat operations? That broke pretty much every one of the unwritten rules. “We’re supposed to track you down and send you home. You should take your platoon and head somewhere fortified, they told us. Hunker down and wait for further instructions.”
Clark sputtered in surprise. “That’s preposterous. There’s still work to be done here and I’m not leaving until that work is done and it isn’t done until I say when it is done!”
The Second Louey looked down at his flight boots. “Sir, begging your pardon but I’m just the messenger and… sir, I’ve been flying over this town back and forth all day. I’m truly sorry but when you say there’s work to be done—there’s not. We haven’t seen any sign of real survival since this morning.”
Ice cubes trickled down Clark’s spine. “That’s,” he said softly. “That’s not the kind of attitude I like to hear,” he continued but he couldn’t finish the rebuke. He tried to remember when the last survivor had climbed aboard the HEMTT. The last time they’d seen anyone else opposing the infected. It had been during the previous night, the endless, sleepless night. He took a second to think about what that meant, but only a second.
“Sergeant Horrocks,” he called, “did you hear what this man had to say? It’s time for us to make a tactical withdrawal.” Which was Army speak for what had formerly known as a retreat. Which meant the National Guard—and the Federal Government—had written Denver off as irredeemable. A complete wash.
“Get your asses in gear, my little babies,” Horrocks screamed, walking away. “We’re popping smoke!” At the news some of the troops offered up a weary cheer.
Dear Sis:
The elms outside my window are dying, which hardly seems like a big deal now, does it? And yet I can’t help but look at them, at the sickly leaves and the branches that just aren’t budding. Someone came by today to paint them with medicine but stopped before he was half done, everyone is so distracted right now. Heard San Francisco was gone, now how could that be? How do you lose an entire city? The nurses turned off the television before I could find out. Please visit soon, if you can.
Love, Irene [Letter delivered to an abandoned house in Minneapolis, 4/8/05]
The tiny shack stood on short stilts above the floor of the box canyon. A narrow row of stairs lead up to a weathered wooden door that didn’t quite fit its frame. Behind the house stood a white cylindrical tank, probably the fuel supply for a generator or a gas stove. Nilla spent most of an hour checking the place out, climbing the rocks all around. No road, not even a path lead to the misshapen door. As far as she could see in every direction lay nothing but desert. Who would live in such a desolate spot?
She was asking herself that question when the door swung open, revealing a rectangle of cool darkness beyond. Unable to move fast enough to find cover Nilla did what was starting to come natural—she hid away her energy, made herself invisible.
A man stepped out of the house and onto the first of the steps. He wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a white beard that descended in bushy curls to the middle of his chest. His head was shaven or perhaps just bald. His skin had the sallow shade of untanned leather and he looked like he might be a hundred years old or perhaps only sixty. He scratched the back of one thigh and stared right at Nilla. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “You can make yourself invisible. Please, come inside. We need to talk.”
“I heard a guy on the tv today, I think he was an evangelist or something.”
“Yeah.”
“He was talking about the end of the world. Saying—”
“Yeah.”
“—right, saying maybe this, you know. Maybe this is it. Judgment day? And we’re being punished because of our sins. And that got me to thinking…”
“Yeah?”
“Well I mean if we’ve already been judged, right? If God has already decided who’s good and who’s bad and all that shit… then what we do from now on just doesn’t matter. Like this is kind of a grace period. L
ike we could, I don’t know, maybe you and I could. Well.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be right over.”
[Telephone call between two local customers in Boise, ID, 4/8/05]
The infected kept coming in slow motion. As if they were swimming through the air. “Fuck you!” With a baby screaming in the crook of his left arm the survivor lifted his shiny pistol and fired again. Bannerman Clark wondered if the man was even aiming. He certainly wasn’t hitting anything. “Fuck you,” he yelped with every shot. His voice had gone hoarse with it.
With a hand signal Clark sent Squad Three forward to back the man up. The soldiers dropped to one knee and fired on the enemy before they could reach the survivor. The infected citizens of Fountain, Colorado spun and dropped and beat their heels against the sidewalk, one after the other. After the fall of Denver the soldiers knew to take their time and line up perfect head shots. Anything else was a waste of ammunition.
The man with the nickel-plated revolver couldn’t seem to bring his arm down. It stood out from his shoulder like half of a crucifix. He wore a blue buttoned-down Oxford cloth shirt, a loose tie, and tan chinos smudged with what might have been engine grease. Clark was pretty sure it wasn’t. “Somebody…” the man rasped, “somebody take this baby… it’s not mine, oh, fuck.” He closed his eyes and Clark rushed up to grab the infant before the man dropped it. He knew that look, had seen it hundreds of times before. “Fuck,” the man screeched, and started to fold up, as if his knees had turned to gelatin.
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