“Someone get this man a survival blanket. He’s in shock,” Clark shouted but before anyone could obey the order Clark heard the chittering spring-loaded sound of a cheap firearm being cocked. He looked down and saw the revolver pointed up at his face. He could feel the heat coming out of the barrel, smell the spent powder.
Nobody moved. The members of Squad Three were too smart and too well-trained to point their weapons at an armed assailant. Sudden movements and implied threats could spur on a desperate man instead of convincing him to stand down.
“I’m Rich Wylie. I lived over there.” The barrel of the revolver dipped to the left. “Nice place, you know? I kept the yard nice, fertilized it, watered it all the time. You have to in this climate. I paid my taxes. Do you understand me? I paid my taxes every goddamned year. I paid your salary and you were supposed to come rescue me.”
“We’re here now,” Clark suggested, his tone as soft and even as he could manage.
Bannerman Clark had a full board of medals on the breast of his dress uniform. It didn’t mean he could look into the barrel of a loaded gun without quaking in his boots. He was about five pounds of pressure away from being dead and he knew it.
“Not acceptable,” the survivor told him.
Clark stayed perfectly still. He didn’t raise his hand to calm the man down. It might look like he was reaching for the pistol. Absurdly the main thought in his head was not that he might die but that he hoped he wouldn’t soil his BDUs in his fear. If he shit himself someone would see it, which would mean everyone would know about it within twenty-four hours and the jawjacking would go on forever. Clark knew—he’d once been one of those kids with nothing better to do than trade scuttlebutt about the CO. Even if he survived he would never command the respect of his soldiers again. For that reason alone he needed to keep it together. “If you’ll put that weapon down we can—”
“If I put this down you won’t listen to me!” Wylie looked tired. Exhausted, even, but that could just make him unpredictable. “As soon as I do it your guys are going to tackle me and we both know it. I’m not a complete moron. You need to hear this. You’re coming from Denver, right? Yeah, I saw all about that on the news. You’re coming from Denver. You were up there trying to do fuck knows what. You shot some dead people, ooh, how exciting but down here we didn’t have any military to help us. Down here we had two cops and one of them had diabetes! He didn’t do so good.”
It wasn’t so much news to Clark as the variation on a theme. The Adjutant General had drawn every troop we could get into the defense of Denver, leaving the rest of the front range without a military line of defense. Reinforcements from the east were supposedly on their way but for three critical days the rural population of Colorado had stood alone.
It was hard for Clark to fault the AG’s reasoning, though. Four million people inhabited the state of Colorado. Three million of them lived in or around Denver. Or at least they had. The choice must have seemed clear at the time.
“I want my life back, but you can’t… you weren’t here in… in time…” a plaintive, high sound came out of Wylie’s throat. He didn’t have a lot left. “You can’t… stop this. You can’t stop this,” he said. His face had gone white. The revolver drifted downward and then fell from his hand to clatter on the street. In an instant Squad Three pushed in, knocking Clark backward, away from the assailant. One of them took the baby from him—it wouldn’t stop screaming. Two men grabbed at Wylie’s shirt and arms and neck, pulled his arms behind his back, restrained him. It was over in seconds. Clark swallowed though there was nothing in his mouth.
“Fucking spaz,” a troop said, and filled his mouth to spit on Wylie. Sergeant Horrocks stepped up into the soldier’s face and stared him down until he swallowed visibly.
Clark adjusted his boonie hat and turned away. “Sergeant, please find a place for this civilian in one of the vehicles,” he ordered over the sound of the baby’s cries. “And find… find someone to take this. This infant.” He couldn’t hear himself think. Alone, he strode away from the vehicles to stand on the shoulder of the road. He stared up over the tops of the quaint Victorian mountain town buildings, at the snow-covered peaks, until his stomach muscles stopped flip-flopping beneath his uniform shirt. It had been a long time since someone pointed a gun at him. He had served in two major wars and nearly a half dozen small conflicts and he’d never gotten used to the feeling. He had believed that he would get through the current crisis without it ever happening. The infected had sharp teeth and grabbing hands and he had seen how they killed but somehow it took a fifty dollar revolver to teach him true fear.
The convoy got moving again before Clark was ready to go. He watched the HEMTT go by and two of the Strykers. Then the line of minivans and panel trucks and school buses—anything they could find, anything civilian that could hold a few people. The last of the Strykers pulled rear security. Clark swung up onto its back compartment and sat down on the turret, feeling better with the wind in his face.
The Civilian had ordered him to get to a hardened location and wait. Clark had chosen Florence—the best fortified site he knew—and he would get there eventually. But not before he’d rescued every survivor he found between Denver and the supermax prison.
US slouches toward Martial Law, Conspiracy Nuts Everywhere Cream their Jeans:
The Att-Gen asking for extra powers, well, what else is new. But with the Army pretty much owning half of the Western US already and security inside the Beltway making every trip to Starbucks into a fun-filled lightning round of “name that gun” this is starting to look like the real deal. Brr. [blog entry, wonkette.com, 4/9/05]
Nilla perched on the edge of a hand-made wicker chair, her hands on the table. The bald man twisted the can opener a final time and put a tin of potted meat down between them. It looked like cat food.
“I’m, uh, I’m Jason Singletary.” He showed her an expanse of brown and ugly teeth. She supposed it was a smile or something.
“Nilla,” she said.
“I know.” He stepped back from the table and moved his hands in front of him, touching his fingers together as if he was counting. “I know a lot of things about you. I know what your purpose is, I think. There’s a lot to discuss.”
Nilla frowned at him. This was nonsense. How could he know her name? She’d never seen him before. At least not since she’d died and lost her memory. If he’d known her during her life he still wouldn’t know the name she’d chosen for herself. He was lying.
Then again he could see her when she was invisible which meant that maybe he had sources of information that weren’t readily available to her.
She ran a fingertip across the puce surface of the potted meat and touched it to her tongue. She couldn’t deny it was tasty. It had been flesh once, after all. She dug in with a much-dented spoon he provided and started eating. “Why do you live—” she began, intending to ask him why he lived in such a lonely place, but he reacted as if she were shouting right in his ear, wincing away from her words, clutching at his head with both hands. He dashed into the tiny house’s kitchenette and grabbed a roll of tin foil, which he wrapped around and around his head until it formed a tight, shiny skullcap.
“Sorry, what was that?” he asked.
“I… was going… to ask,” Nilla said, trying to keep her words soft and slow, “why you lived all the way out here. In the middle of the desert.”
He smiled again. “Nevada has the lowest population of any of the fifty states,” he told her, reciting something he’d read in a book in school by the sound of it. “There’s a lot less chatter. I call it chatter, like the background transmissions they pick up on their radios, radio operators, they call that chatter.”
He stepped backward, colliding with the wooden wall of his shack.
“I’m, well, psychic,” he told her.
“No, really,” Nilla said, digging with her finger for the last shreds of meat in the bottom of the tin. She couldn’t remember eating it, frankly, it
had gone so quickly and—
Yes, really, she thought, interrupting her own train of thought. Which should have been impossible, she pondered—after all, nobody could think of two things at once, and therefore, I really am psychic. This is me you’re hearing. It just sounds like your own inner voice. The thought was papery and soft, barely audible in her head. As he had suggested it sounded exactly like her own interior monologue. As if she were talking to herself.
Nilla stared up at him, trying not to think of anything. That’s impossible, I’m afraid. You’re always thinking about something, no matter how abstract or banal. The mind can’t just stand still. It has to keep moving or it dies. Like a shark. Sharks suffocate if they stop swimming.
“Don’t do that again,” she told him. “It’s very disconcerting.”
“Imagine how I feel,” he said out loud. He held up his hands to show her how badly they were shaking. Then he bent and half turned away from her as if he couldn’t stand to look at her. “I have that—all of that, that noise in my head, except, it’s all the time, it’s, it’s, it’s… it’s very difficult having you here. I’m sorry but it has to be said. I thought, well, with your memory condition maybe, maybe just maybe you’d be less, oh God, less noisy, but but but but you’re just full. Full of questions. I’ve been living here a very long time. I get everything I need through the mail. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in twenty years.” As he spoke he kept scratching the skin around his eyes and the top of his nose as if something in his head was trying to get out. Nilla stared at his hands and he dropped them to his sides.
She looked around the one-room shack for the first time, really, actually studying how Singletary lived. She saw his bed in one corner, a utilitarian cot covered in old, tattered magazines and a box of tissues. She saw his stove, a rusted white box that sat well away from any of the walls. She saw the shelves above it filled with tin cans. She saw the orange bottles that pills come in everywhere, scattered underfoot, lined up neatly on the edge of the table, interspersed with the stored food. She picked one up and studied its label.
TEGRETOL (Carbamazepine), 1600 mg. Take three times daily with food.
“That’s for the, the, the seizures,” he sputtered, taking it away from her. “I have some canned tuna fish, would you like that?”
“Yes,” Nilla said. She studied him as he moved around the side of his house that might be considered his kitchen. “I guess that explains how you were able to see me, even with my aura hidden. Were you born like this?” she asked.
His shoulders tightened as he worked a manual can opener. “Yes, I think so. I saw… saw ghosts, ghosts sometimes, when I was, little. Still do. It got so much worse during puberty. I couldn’t take it, just couldn’t… they sent me around to the hospitals but the drugs, they just… there’s something very wrong with my brain, I know that. I know that! It leaks. It leaks and it, it doesn’t always. It doesn’t always work, the tin foil doesn’t always… I’m so terribly sorry. I’m stuttering, aren’t I?”
“You saw ghosts,” Nilla said.
“Yes.” He set down the can of tuna in front of her and she knocked it back into her mouth as if she were drinking a shot of whiskey. It curbed her hunger for a few seconds but then it returned as strong as ever.
He went on, his hands clutching the edge of the table. “Dead people, the, the memories, the memories of dead people that get stuck here. In this world. Nothing ever gets forgotten, see, it, it’s like a vibration, a vibration in a kind of, well, a string, and it keeps vibrating forever, it gets fainter over time. You know. Like a violin string, if you pluck it. It’ll keep vibrating and even though you can’t hear it after a while it’s still… it’s still…”
She knew her eyes had gone very wide. She couldn’t help it.
He was saying that memories were never really lost. For instance, her memories.
He wouldn’t look at her. He took down a can of spam from his shelf and peeled back the lid. He set it down on the table in front of her. When she didn’t touch it he shifted it toward her an inch or so. She lifted her spoon.
“No,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t asked.
“Why not, damnit? Why. The fuck. Not?”
“I can’t return your memory to you because I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen your ghost, Nilla.” He had calmed down considerably. Maybe he was afraid of her and his fear was keeping him quiet. “I don’t… pick and choose. They just come to me. If you were still alive, maybe I could look for your ghost or… or your memory. But then you wouldn’t need your memory back. And you wouldn’t be here.”
The can before her was empty. She couldn’t even remember the taste of the spam.
He sat down on the edge of the table. “There are things you need to know. You didn’t come here by accident. I lead you here myself.”
Nilla placed her hands in her lap. “Maybe if you just tried really hard. Or you just kept yourself open to the possibility. If I stay here, for a while, maybe my ghost will come here. Maybe it will come looking for me.”
“It doesn’t work that way, and we have more important things to talk about,” he told her, dismissing the notion in a way that made rage bubble inside of her. What could be more important than recovering her memories? “Please, we don’t have much time! I guided you here—the occasional thought I put in your head, telling you to head down this valley or to skirt that road. There’s something you need to know, Nilla. There’s a man up in the, the, the mountains east of here, I’ve touched his mind many times. He’s done something horrible. Something truly terrible, like, I see a fire, this fire that will burn up the world. He knows what he’s done. He’s consumed with guilt and—and—and—”
“Just answer me, alright?” she said. She stood up very fast—fast enough to have given herself a head rush if her blood could actually move anymore. “You know so much about me—my new name, the fact that I’m undead, what I like to eat. Why can’t you just look inside my head and find out who I really am?”
“I told you, it doesn’t… Nilla—Nilla, you need to, to…. This guilty man, he.” He shivered violently and she wondered if he was about to have a convulsion. A low, mooing sound rattled up and out of him. She could smell the fear on him—the adrenaline breaking down in his sweat, sour, acrid. “You, you you—”
“Just calm down!” She moved around the table and grabbed him by the shoulders. The hunger rolled through her innards and she really, really wanted to take a bite out of his neck, out of his golden energy. “Just—I know I’m scary right now, I know I must be monstrous to you but you have to calm down!”
She let go of him in disgust when his eyes rolled up into his head. He slumped down to the floor. She felt a desire to help him, to move him over to his bed but it would probably just rile him up more. There were a lot of questions she needed answers to but she was just going to have to wait for his seizure to pass.
On the shelf above his stove she found a tin of sardines she thought she could open even with her numb fingers. She went back to the table and sat down, more than willing to give him the time he needed. On the floor near her feet, Jason Singletary moaned plaintively and wrapped his arms around himself as if he were very, very cold.
JESUS IS COMING to eat your leg [Graffiti in an Arby’s men’s room, Grand Rapids, MI 4/8/05]
Florence-ADX sat in the middle of a bowl filled with scrub grass. No trees grew in the fields around the prison, just rocks and weeds. Nothing had been allowed to get tall enough to hide a fugitive. The prison itself sat low on that empty hollow, most of its bulk hidden under the ground like an animal digging itself into the soil against the threat of all that empty blue sky. The clouds overhead shot past on winds that tore them to pieces as they came howling down out of the mountains.
Clark rolled into the Supermax prison at the head of a convoy sixty vehicles strong. The place looked more spooky than he would have liked—the refugees in his minivans and big rigs had been through a lot already and he hated to deliver t
hem to such a frightening place but there were no alternatives. As far as he knew the prison could be the last safe place in a three hundred mile radius.
While he had been gone much work had been done on the place to harden it against the ongoing disaster. Clark nodded in approval when he saw what had been done in his absence—the inmates had been evacuated and the prison had been cleaned up, the dogs put back to work controlling the perimeter, the sallyports reinforced and well-guarded. The trailers that constituted Desiree Sanchez’s domain, the Bag, had been moved inside the second tier of fencing where they would be safe.
Vikram Singh Nanda waited for him at the main gate of the prison. Clark detached Sergeant Horrocks to square away the soldiers and get them started on their AERs. He greeted his old friend with a brief hug. Something clattered against the epaulets of his uniform and he lifted Vikram’s wrist to get a good look. The Sikh Major wore a hammered steel bracelet on his left wrist. Not regulation, not by any means.
“It is my karra, a sign of my bondage to the teachings of the ten gurus,” Vikram explained, looking almost sheepish. “I do not normally wear it, though I should.”
“Trying to get right with your God, I see,” Clark muttered, and clapped his friend on the shoulder as he headed inside to the warden’s office. It would be Clark’s office for the time being. As requested someone had installed a cot and a dedicated communications terminal, a laptop that connected with Washington via satellite network. He intended to spend a lot of time in the small room.
Vikram closed the door behind himself. Clark was suddenly and unexpectedly alone. It had been a long time since he’d been left to his own thoughts.
He sat down in the leather chair behind the desk and placed his sidearm in a top desk drawer. He steepled his fingers in front of him and stared forward across empty space. Something was coming, some horrible realization. He could feel it building in the back of his brain, in the oldest part where fears lurked like lizards in a swamp. The realization was being patient. Waiting for him to acknowledge it. He sighed a little, a brief release of the pressure in his chest. And then it hit him all at once.
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