by Bill Ransom
Chapter 36
The Colonel flexed his fingers and toes carefully, testing his musculature. He had regained sensation throughout his body, but the slightest movement brought on tremors that punctuated his general weakness. Neither guard seemed worried about him, and neither suspected yet that he was from the outside. Rico’s eyes were still taped shut, but he positioned the nearby guards from their conversation.
I’ll get the sergeant first, Rico thought. The other one shouldn’t be a problem.
“They get out once in a while,” the sergeant was saying. “Rain washes holes under the fence. This one was probably sent out there to fix it and got himself mixed up. Flip a note to Blue, tell them there’s still a hole someplace and this time they should send a brain along. It can wait till daylight.”
Rico heard the rapid clicking of fingers in control gloves, then the beep that went with transmission. A chair swiveled.
“Seems like it’s pretty hard to do,” the younger man said. “I don’t think I could figure a way out of here.”
“Well, you could see how bad he wanted back in,” the sergeant said. “They don’t think like we do. They get afraid of everything. You know that one who brings the bread? Well, he’s afraid of paper. Crumpling paper. Puts his hands over his ears and howls like a coyote.”
“What’ll we do with this one?”
“Give him an hour or so. After bread, we’ll take him over to Blue, they’ll know what to do with him. We’ll have to tie him up in a little bit. That toxin makes ‘em pretty twitchy when they come around. Hey, here’s Gordon with the grub. Watch this.”
Feet shuffled through the double doorway, accompanied by the squeaksqueaksqueak of a cart, the clink of ice water and rattle of utensils.
Rico risked a left hand to his left eye. Two straps circled his body at the chest and legs. All of Rico’s strength and concentration went to prying the tape loose from his eyelid. He let it hang free so his guards wouldn’t notice. After a few deep breaths, he had the strength to loosen the right one. As soon as he did so, his body broke out in a profuse sweat, and tremors rippled through the muscles of his arms and legs. Cramps seized his belly and he was afraid he was going to foul himself.
Relax, he told himself, just relax. Slow, deep breaths.
The tremors drummed his heels slightly against the steel surface beneath him, but the sergeant chose that moment to crumple a wad of paper and send the retarded servant into a panic.
The poor man fled without his cart, waddling backwards, hands over his ears and eyes closed, crying like he’d been whipped.
Jesus! Rico thought. Some fun!
Rico risked a glance at his guards. The corporal poured out their ritual ice water while the sergeant broke the bread. Both men swept off their caps while the sergeant offered a mumbled grace.
“Too bad we’ll miss the Master’s sermon this evening,” the corporal said. “I’ve never seen him in person, only on-screen.”
“You’ll see plenty before your tour’s through,” the sergeant said, talking through a mouthful of dry bread.
He gulped down a glass of water and poured himself another.
“This is my third tour,” he went on. “I like it here. I rode escort for him last time from the airport.”
“You get all the luck,” the corporal said. “I got to ride with yesterday’s shipment and back. What’s he like?”
“Like the father you wish you’d had,” the sergeant said. “Funny, too, but not like one of the guys. He’s different. He sure made me feel good, just riding with him.”
Rico craned his neck a little to see if he could spot his tool kit. He didn’t see it, but the effort sent his body into spasm once again. This time, it was like a full epileptic seizure except he was completely conscious.
“Shit!” the sergeant said. “We should’ve cinched that dummy down better. Give me a hand here.”
The two of them cinched Rico tight to the gurney, then the sergeant leaned close and removed the loose tape.
“Something’s funny here,” he said. “This guy doesn’t look right.”
Oh, shit! Rico thought.
“What do you mean?”
“Look at his eyes,” the sergeant said, “the shape of his head.”
He held Rico’s forehead with one hand, ripped the tape off his mouth and spread his jaws wide.
“Look at his tongue. And where did he get gold in his dental work? Look at those fingers. Shit, I should have paid attention.”
The sergeant put the tip of his nose against Rico’s nose, and Rico was tempted to bite it off.
“Who are you?” he asked. “Who sent you?”
Rico grunted and shook his head, hoping to rescue the masquerade.
“Hit the intruder alarm,” the sergeant ordered. “There might be more than one of them. Then get the chief on the horn, tell him we’ve got one here dressed like a Triple from Blue. And toss me that tool kit.”
The corporal activated the intruder sequence on his Sidekick and tossed Rico’s tool kit to his partner. Before he could reach the radio, a series of alarms sounded from the direction of the main office complex, summoning fire, aid and security personnel.
“Disaster drill,” the corporal shouted.
“It’s no drill,” the sergeant shouted back. “And I’ll bet our company here knows all about it.”
The sergeant slapped Rico across the face.
“Don’t you?” he asked.
He slapped again.
“Don’t you?”
The man pulled his fist back for a punch when a puzzled expression crossed his face. He gasped a couple of times and the exhalations threw a hot wave over Rico’s face. The sergeant staggered back a couple of steps, mouth agape, and dropped to his knees.
“Sergeant?”
The corporal came to help but he, too, staggered and fell. He dropped face down on the concrete, his face making a heavy, wet thuck as he hit. The sergeant toppled onto his back without a word, the only sound a wet popping and crackling. Rico’s tool kit was underneath him.
Rico was conscious of a sickly smell that reminded him of rancid bacon in hot grease. He exhaled as deeply as he could and squirmed his left arm free. He unclasped the catch on one strap, then had to lie still for a few moments, fighting the tremors that racked his body.
“Better,” he told himself. “Getting better.”
Rico didn’t know what felled his two guards or what set off the disaster alarm, and that scared him a lot more than the guards themselves.
In this place, it could be anything, he thought.
If it was another bug, he didn’t want to get it. He didn’t want Harry and Sonja to get it, either.
A thick, liquid sound, something like boiling oatmeal, emanated from the floor beside him. Rico managed to turn his head enough to see what was happening to the sergeant at the foot of his gurney. Rico knew immediately that he was witnessing the manner of his friend Red Bartlett’s death. This time it was faster, but every bit as ugly.
Rico felt a heat coming off the sergeant’s body, intensifying the odor of hot, rancid meat. His own muscles refused to work, and he was forced to watch the sergeant’s body suppurate in its rapid decay. The flesh melted from the bone slowly at first, like cold ketchup from a bottle. Then it became more runny, hotter, and as the tissues pulled away from the bones he saw the first little tongues of blue flame.
Rico looked out the doors and saw other flickers of blue flame there in the darkness. He used the rest of his strength to turn his face away, then a dizziness overcame him, the alarms faded out and darkness swallowed him whole.
Chapter 37
Dajaj Mishwe monitored the facility-wide panic from the comfort of Casey’s inner office. The outer office had been rendered unbearable by the searing stench of the two bodies in full reduction and oxidation. The AVA that Mishwe had sent out on today’s shipment carried a further, and very deadly, refinement—steam from the sudden oxidation-reduction spread the active agent further, faster.
The vaccine was meant for children, and who could bear to abandon a sick child?
Mishwe had reserved Casey’s private elevator behind the office for himself, ensuring his liberation from Casey and all his doomed minions. The scene facility-wide was a triumph of horror and despair, a joy for the Angel of Eden to behold. The fires from the two Caseys sparked a general conflagration in the office complex, unimpeded by the fire-control system which Mishwe himself had disarmed just moments before he was summoned by security. Every monitor displayed the same scene: security, missionaries and Innocents alike bathed in the hot, blue blossoms of their sacrifice.
The “intruder” light lit from the ag security desk, and Mishwe’s joy was complete. There could be only one intruder. Only one man would risk all to enter this compound, and he had done so just in time for a warm welcome.
“Colonel Toledo,” Mishwe said aloud.
He liked the sound of it, the good fortune, the fateful opportunity to tie up this last end so neatly. Dajaj was a fastidious man, as befit an Angel of the Lord.
“Welcome, Colonel,” he said. “And thank you, Lord, for your perfection.”
He checked the monitor at the ag station and saw nothing but two empty terminals and a desk. The men had not yet turned on their lights, so the scene was drowned in shadow. Mishwe rotated the viewer and glimpsed a gurney near the exchanger fans, and someone was strapped to that gurney. The identity was impossible to make out. Smoke and steam from the two charred lumps in the foreground obscured all of the detail in the room. The figure did not appear to be moving.
Should I get him myself, he wondered, or should I leave him to the flood?
Mishwe decided it was time to burrow in and activate the final seals. A few million tons of water would finish Marte Chang and Colonel Rico Toledo quite nicely.
Chapter 38
Sonja knew she should have followed Harry up the ladder. Now she was ahead of him and the sound of his struggle beneath her scared her as much as the scent of smoke that she’d caught on the air-conditioned breeze.
Brought up in diplomatic circles, Sonja and Harry had dozed through many social briefings and shared many a joke over the elaborate ritual of manners that went with their lives. Yet, when they began their climb he had stepped aside for her, out of reflex, and out of reflex she had mounted the ladder ahead of him. Harry was still burned-out by muscle weakness and spasms, and he couldn’t fake it on the ladder, not even in the dark.
“It won’t kill you to learn a few manners,” her father had told her once.
Sonja believed everything that her father told her—until now. Now she believed that something as ridiculous as manners could kill them both.
“Harry,” she whispered, “I’m climbing over you, hold still.”
A hissing rumble started above them, and Sonja positioned herself behind Harry on the ladder. She pressed herself against his back, one leg hooked through a rung, both hands gripping hard in spite of the blisters. If he slipped, she could manage him.
What is that noise?
Her spine prickled with static and fear. The fine hair on the backs of her arms rose, and she felt Harry’s hair rise from the back of his head. Sonja clung to the ladder and to Harry, the vibration burning her palms and ankles where they gripped the metal.
Something huge passed them with a flash and a whoosh just a meter from their faces. Sonja opened her eyes as the downdraft hit, and watched an express elevator recede into the darkness below. The light inside the car was very bright, clearly illuminating the remains of five decomposing passengers through its Plexi ceiling.
My God! she thought. What happened to them?
The bodies on the floor of that elevator had slumped away from their bones, as though they’d been outside in the sun for weeks.
A tornado followed the car down the smaller shaft in front of them, and it was all Sonja could do to keep the hair on her head. Her hand would not come free to begin the climb again.
Sonja had discovered a dead horse one time, in the flats behind Casa Canada. Bloated and wearing its fly-and-vulture coat, the horse had smelled just like those people in the elevator. She leaned her face into Harry’s sweaty tunic and gulped a couple of deep breaths.
“Up there,” Harry said.
The downblast of air and dust gritted her eyes, but she saw another landing in the fading light, about ten meters above them. The light seeped through the familiar framework of the immense decon doors, doors that the two of them couldn’t budge on the last two floors.
“Did you see. . . ?” she asked.
“Inside the elevator?” He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I saw.”
“What if the dzee was right? What if he’s saving us from some huge mess they’ve made up there?”
“Why not just fill us in so we can be thankful and useful and suitably respectful little hostages? He’s not saving us from something. He’s saving us for something. I don’t want to find out what it is.”
Harry shrugged off her grip and resumed his struggle to the next landing.
Far off in the dark, another express car plummeted to Level Five, then another.
“I have a feeling we’re lucky that we didn’t take one of those,” she whispered.
Harry grunted, and swung himself around to the catwalk at Level Two. The shaft was sealed off above them, a precaution.
“There’s another shaft close by,” Harry reassured her. “Like the embassy—no one elevator goes all the way to the top in one run. The individual shafts all share this serviceway . . . at least, I hope this is it. . . .”
Sonja joined him and they stood breathing hard for a moment, uncramping their fingers, listening. The thousand cacophonous voices of the machinery of ViraVax rose upshaft around them, battling the downshaft breeze. The smell of smoke and spoiled meat was stronger, much stronger. Most of the noise was swallowed, as if by magic, in the mass of the bunker cap above them.
A blue service light at the end of the catwalk marked an active entranceway. When Sonja pressed the blue indicator beneath it, a panel whisked aside to reveal a lobby bathed in very bright light, and two missionaries struggling into a pair of emergency hazard suits. The oozing bodies of several deficientes lay around them on the floor.
“Get back in there!” one of them yelled.
Harry and Sonja stood in the doorway, so the panel couldn’t slide shut.
“Stay put,” Harry whispered. “Give me room.”
Sonja shifted away from Harry, but stayed in the doorway. All she could focus on was the little Galil in the missionary’s trembling hand. The pistol was identical to the one her father bought for her mother years ago. The barrel looked like it could swallow her whole.
“Get back!” the missionary repeated. “You get back to Hell, where you belong.”
He waved the pistol and stepped closer. His partner, now fully suited, backed him up. Sonja saw only the one weapon.
Harry has a plan, she thought. What is it?
“No entiendo,” Harry said in his perfect accent. He shrugged his shoulders in the all-purpose Costa Bravan gesture. “No hablo ningún inglés.”
“You understand this, don’t you?”
The missionary took another step and shook the gun in Harry’s face. Harry stood his ground, and Sonja heard him breathe slow and deep.
The missionary took one more step and poked Harry’s chest with the muzzle. That’s what Harry was waiting for. What happened next was nearly too fast for Sonja to see. Harry grabbed the muzzle with his left hand and snapped it down. The man couldn’t fire and instinctively jerked backwards. Harry kicked him in the crotch and, as the guard doubled over, kicked him again in the face. The second man made a lunge for Harry, but the suit was too clumsy and Harry stepped aside. Harry put a spinning back-kick into the man’s kidney as he lurched past, and it forced him over the rail and down the shaft. He did not scream.
The first missionary lay very still on the floor, a lot of blood bubbling from his smashed nose.
“Stay
here,” Harry said.
He dragged the missionary onto the landing behind them, then leaned on the railing and vomited down the shaft. His hands were trembling so violently that he dropped the pistol down there, too. He took a few seconds to catch his breath, then put a hand on Sonja’s shoulder. Harry and Sonja stepped through the doorway cautiously, and saw no one else alive.
The panel hissed shut behind them and Sonja heard security seals inflate. After much whirring, another door opened across the hallway. This time the two of them stepped into a grisly tableau of bodies, some charred, some in an accelerated state of corruption. The rising steam and stink spasmed Sonja’s throat shut, and she nearly blacked out before she could force a breath.
This was a wait station for transport cars, one of which kept trying to shut its doors around a very large, very dead pair of Innocents. Harry shuffled to the nearest doors and tried to pull them apart. No luck. He tried the next pair, still no luck.
“Okay,” Harry said, his breath coming harder, “I guess we take their car.”
The two dead men came apart in their clothing as Sonja and Harry pulled them out of the transport. A flicker of blue flame licked the stump of one leg, and the muscle began to melt from the bone. Sonja gagged, but caught the door in its final surge and they tumbled inside. Their car rose immediately without awaiting orders, and by the time Harry found the automatic shutoff, they were topside.
The door opened onto a plaza of hallways, each one littered with bodies of people who clearly had dropped instantly, in midstride, without a struggle. A haze of black smoke hung over the scene and stained the whitewashed walls.
“I sure hope it’s not catching,” Sonja said.
“Maybe this was the ‘guard virus’ the dzee was talking about,” Harry said. “Maybe it turned on them.”
Up ahead, reflected in the Plexi, Sonja saw the real thing.
Outside!