Age of Monsters

by John Lee Schneider

  Tom had gotten some good clear views of infected Carcharodonts – code named: 'Shark Tooth' – marching in tandem, moving up from San Francisco.

  The satellite image provided no sound, but Tom could only imagine the thunder of footsteps.

  Besides the giant Carcharodonts, there were other flesh-eaters – other carnosaurs and megalosaurs – and even a number of herbivores – in fact, a rather large number of ceratopsians and several large sauropods.

  And while the majority of the exodus were giants, the other end of the spectrum was represented too, with swarms of sickle-claws – from infected giants, to 'normals', that darted between their ankles like biting dogs – all the way down to those odd sickle-clawed scavengers he could see riding the giants' backs like birds on a hippo.

  Tom had hunted up files on these little guys as well.

  Sickle-claws in general were a bit of a departure from the theme of gigantism – apparently there had been some effort to breed for intelligence.

  As it turned out, however, sickle-claws really weren't that smart.

  In particular, this little guy – code-named: 'Otto' – displayed none of the predicted higher-functions – with the literature suggesting that some cognitive functions were simply not available on what was basically still a primitive, proto-avian/reptilian model.

  Otto's base genome was a creature called a 'Toodon' – which Tom remembered had once invoked speculation that its relatively large brain-case might have eventually developed real intelligence – scientists had even fashioned a speculative 'dino-man' model that had received wide-circulation at the time.

  Otto, himself, however, was described in the literature as a bit of a dud – although he did demonstrate remarkable vocalizations as well as a parrot-like talent for mimicry.

  And while Otto might have torpedoed the idea that sickle-claws were smart, from what Tom could gather, he had become kind of a project mascot – there were pictures of members of the science team with the little lizard perched on their shoulders – often more than one.

  But near as Tom could tell, 'Otto's' function in the new ecology was as a ghoul.

  And uniquely, this also meant they were never affected by the Food of the Gods, because they didn't touch the giant carrion – they ate the dead people.

  Almost as if it was their preference.

  Tom wondered if that had been bred into them too.

  Even from space, Tom felt a twinge of revulsion. Disgusting creatures.

  The way they skittered across the giants' scales; Tom wondered if they itched like fleas.

  On the other hand, some of the big sauropods would have approached two-hundred feet in length before the Food of the Gods – he'd seen direct evidence they wouldn't even notice a gunshot. Once they were infected, munitions-fire barely bothered them.

  And the blooms were starting up again.

  The infected areas were also no longer sequestered around the cities – it simply erupted wherever infected beasts died.

  It was an unavoidable, inexorable pattern – soon every beast in the area would be infected – repeating the cycle of destruction – a traveling doomsday that just kept on going.

  Tom found himself imagining ever-more disastrous scenarios – he wondered if the infection could be spread by mosquitoes.

  Of course, he reminded himself, non-engineered organisms couldn't contain the chemical – a mosquito that fed on an infected giant would likely just pop.

  Unless, it was an engineered mosquito.

  He shut his eyes – now, why did he even have to even go and think that?

  Because, he sighed, that was one of the things that was really bothering him.

  This and other things that fit into the category of 'non-random'.

  Cell-towers, for example, had been taken out in nearly every major city. Even given the totality of the destruction – and especially considering the pointedly out-of-the-way locations a tower was likely to be built – sheer odds should have left at least a few standing – but that few was very few.

  Had this been an invading army of aliens, it would have seemed like a strategic hit.

  In the immediacy of it, the impossibility of ALL of it, made it easy to overlook the impossibility of the randomness of it.

  The beasts were just suddenly there.

  Even granting the accidental release of the Food of the Gods, that meant they had to have been there – and been there for a while. How could they possibly have not revealed themselves?

  But as he thought about it, the only possible answer presented itself.

  They WERE there.

  Rumors, after all, had persisted for years.

  And to dismiss the possibility of random-event, by definition, that meant on-purpose.

  Tom thought of all the marijuana grow-operations busted over the years – industrial sized fields, safely set-up in the protected areas of federal lands – they could operate indefinitely, undisturbed. They were also guarded zealously, which made them damn dangerous to stumble into on a hike.

  On impulse, Tom brought up a search of 'protected government lands'.

  Statistic: over eighty percent of United States landmass was uninhabited.

  And many of the largest protected areas were not just bordering, but actually surrounding almost every populated area in the country.

  Well, Tom thought, there's your breeding ground. Private – off-limits.

  And Tom was willing to bet they were damn dangerous to stumble into on a hike.

  He was further willing to bet anyone that wandered onto that grow-operation would be a story that would never get told. It wasn't like such wanderers would ever be found.

  Having a pretty good idea what he was going to find, Tom correlated the protected land graphics with the first wave of the Food of the Gods, city by city.

  It was the same graph.

  There it was. They'd been out there all along. For years, at least – perhaps decades.

  Waiting all this time, for some secret, silent alarm, to trigger them off.

  Tom looked over at the blank screen he kept tuned to Kristi's frequency.

  She hadn't posted since last night when she had turned the camera on, tracking a skulking shadow, before firing a single shot into the darkness.

  Tom noticed she was becoming more sparing with her ammunition.

  He had pin-pointed her general location, and had actually spent time trying to find her with a satellite-scope – so far unsuccessfully.

  He also played back some of her earlier images. She had grown progressively more gaunt – the circles growing under her eyes.

  Soon it would again be dark in her part of the world. And perhaps another one of her broadcasts would flicker to life – but eventually one of them would be the last.

  'Nothing', he had told the pretty young reporterette, when she'd asked him what he missed about the Earth.

  That seemed so arrogant now – even shameful.

  It was almost as if he deserved this specific, unique punishment.

  Tom shut his eyes.

  He nearly shouted out-loud when the first shrill whine of static nearly blasted out his eardrum, sending him spinning in the constant floating free-fall.

  Recovering quickly, he pulled himself back to his station.

  On his console, a light was blinking – top-level communication from down below.

  The BIG phone.

  Tom hit the switch and suddenly a voice spoke over the speakers, loud and commanding.

  “Goddamnit! Are we up and running? This is General Nathan Rhodes, acting Commander of the United States Armed Forces. Anyone reading this signal, report back immediately.”

  Tom blinked, hardly daring to believe.

  “Sir,” he said, speaking aloud for the first time in days, his voice cracking, “This is Major Tom Corbett. You've got the Eye in the Sky, sir.”

  Chapter 20

  The Fort Hunter Base lay just ahead.

  It had taken them four days and two vehicles, and they
had left the last one almost ten miles back.

  Four days, Rosa thought – not so long ago, that was a two-hour drive.

  But Lucas had got them there. Never once had he broken stride, and never once had he allowed any one of them to break stride either.

  She knew that single-minded focus well – long-hours, surgery, even disaster-aid sites – where there were no 'hours' – you just went on auto-pilot, acting out your function.

  Lucas operated under two simple goals – keep the morale up, and keep them moving. Rosa's analytical mind couldn't help but see it, even as it worked on her all the same. He made sure you were empowered – then he propped you up to act like it.

  During times they traveled on foot, he scavenged the demolished urban landscape like a woodsman living off the land. By the end of the first day, he'd had everyone armed – shotguns, pistols, rifles – it was amazing what people kept right in their cars.

  For the moment, however, the fates seemed to smile on them – the exodus of beasts served to work in their favor. They had few encounters once they escaped the city.

  Lucas, of course, played it discreet. The one band of roving sickle-claws they'd spotted, he'd steered them well-clear of. It had only been four of them, but Rosa noted the Lieutenant held back – even though she had now grown confident he could have dropped the group of them in short order.

  But there was no sense drawing the attention of others.

  That had, however, been the last contact outside the city. They had seen none of the larger carnosaurs.

  And while Rosa was happy enough for the respite, she was also learning not to trust such inexplicable good fortune.

  And even if their contact with the beasts was minimal, that still left a hundred miles of hard travel. On the first day's long march, Jamie had started lagging, her fair skin beginning to burn in the California sun. Lucas had not waited for her to complain, but instead stopped the group, confronting her face-to-face, his head tilted analytically.

  “Here,” he said, “that's probably heavy,” and switched out her hand-held pistol for Jeremy's shoulder-strapped rifle. Then he nodded to Allison, who still carried her purse – rifling through, he pulled out a small cosmetics kit and slopped a glob of dark-make-up under both of the startled coffee-girl's eyes. Then he pulled a bandanna out of his own pocket and wrapped it around her head.

  It was a remarkable transformation, Rosa thought. In less than two minutes, he had turned a timid parking-lot brewista into a wild-looking Rambo-groupie.

  But it worked. The balance of the rifle mimicked her own lost purse, a weight she was accustomed to – the cloth and war-paint across her face kept her temperature down.

  And again, most importantly, her posture had changed – Rambette was now acting out the part.

  From her own assigned position at Lucas' flank, having also now been provided with a pistol of her own, Rosa found herself constantly amazed at his ability to pull it off.

  In point of fact, she realized that somewhere in the middle, she had started to depend on him. Worse, to believe in him.

  Her own third-person perspective always understood intellectually the concepts of military training, but she'd never experienced the psychology at work.

  Part of her had always been rather contemptuous of the 'props' – the bluster and bravado. From a civilian perspective, she had always been cynically amused the way military jargon sounded like a coach revving up a football team to charge across a painted line. It seemed so trivial. Worse, it was like mind-control, because the emotions they evoked were all-too real. She'd doctored many a high-school player who had broken an arm or leg 'for the team.”

  Marching along in Lucas' path, however, in a rather thunderstruck 'duh' moment, she realized that was backwards – historically, sports were training for war – that was where the jargon came from.

  Rosa, of course, was always adamantly opposed to war, anywhere – she had stood in numerous protest lines, and she never believed in the 'good guys and the bad guys'. Her educated perspective necessitated a view of moral-relativity, and simple-minded military-code did not translate to her intellectual level.

  She realized now, however, it was her own perspective that was limiting. These simple-minded 'coach's tricks' were actually complex behavior training that had endured for thousands of years.

  And as currently being executed by a professional, these techniques were also what had kept them all alive.

  Like Patton – lead 'em through hell and make 'em love ya.

  And on an even deeper level, Rosa realized that it was just like Lucas himself had said – human-nature was human-nature.

  She would be utterly lying to herself if she didn't admit – privately to herself, under threat of torture – that she felt comforted and safe under his wing – following the head caveman, just like his primary 'she'. It didn't even bother her that Julie was there – the symbolic position of handmaiden in waiting.

  But even that was an illusion created by training and circumstance.

  They weren't the lead caveman's females – they were his 'assignment'.

  Lucas' cavewoman was somewhere else.

  Now, as their journey was growing short, that assignment was nearly over, and he would be off to find her.

  And in the same manner, with the efficiency of necessity, he would professionally hand-off his albatross to the system – dismissed with the same trained emotion that she would cut away loose tissue from a wound – to be numbed and stitched and never thought of again.

  After their last rig had run out of gas, ten miles and almost four-hours ago, Lucas had stepped out, stomping his lame foot, as if for no other reason than to make the pain come.

  “I feel like a hike,” he said. “Almost there, folks.”

  And again, just like that, he had his people ready to charge that final hill – their goal at last in sight.

  In fact, Rosa was only now realizing how much he had turned her own psychology around that simple goal – just getting there – and now she realized she hadn't given much thought to what happened next.

  That finally brought it home – penetrating through weeks of survivalist-shock. If the world really had ended, she wondered what waited just over the rise. Some refugee camp? It wasn't like there was any chopper ride back home.

  As they crested that final slope, she was overcome with an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

  Lucas caught her expression almost right away.

  “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

  Rosa felt the momentary sting of tears – absolutely forbidden in her world – and she bit them back with the same professional face she wore when she told a patient or family member there was no hope.

  “I'm fine,” she said.

  Lucas raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I've had more than one woman in my life tell me she was fine.” He shook his head. “Never once was it true.”

  Rosa stayed stubbornly silent.

  Lucas sighed. “Just like my wife,” he said.

  Ahead, the curve of the coastal highway gave them the first view of Fort Hunter.

  The first thing they could see was the ocean beyond – filled like a parking lot with the entire pacific fleet – aircraft carriers seemed to have formed a new chain of islands.

  And on the coast, surrounding the inland bay, Fort Hunter itself bustled – its sparse lodgings now joined by a make-shift shanty-town of temporary shelters – Rosa was reminded of a camp-out before a Dead-show.

  Lucas turned to the others. “You're not officially survivors until you get there alive,” he said.

  He pulled a flare-gun from his pack and fired four blasts in succession over the top of the base. Lucas smiled. “I don't really feel like walking anymore.”

  Within minutes, there was the sound of vehicles approaching.

  Chapter 21

  Lucas waved down the first jeep as the small envoy trundled up along Highway 101 to meet them.

  It was a well-fortified entourage, Rosa thought – three
vehicles, all with armed men riding on back – overkill for simply answering an SOS flare, and perhaps suggestive of what the troops had been conditioned to expect.

  Apparently sensing the same thing, as the procession rolled to a stop, Lucas nodded back to Rosa and the rest. “Be careful where you point your guns,” he said. “The boys might be a little bit jumpy.”

  Lucas stepped up to the first jeep, introducing himself with a salute.

  “Lieutenant Lucas Walker,” he said. “Reporting in with hostages.” He glanced over his shoulder, at Rosa. “Sorry – 'refugees'. Keep getting that one mixed up.”

  Rosa glared.

  The leader actually looked rather surprised to see them. He introduced himself as Sergeant Farrell, and raised his brows when Lucas told him they'd just come down from San Francisco.

  “San Fran was bad,” Farrell said. “The General's going to want to talk to you, sir.”

  “Disarm them, sir?” one of the troops asked.

  Farrell glanced at the rag tag lot and after a meaningful nod from Lucas, shook his head.

  “Let's just get everybody back to base,” he said. He nodded to Lucas. “Lieutenant, you ride with me.”

  Rosa looked at her fellow survivors – officially 'survivors', now that they'd got where they were going – and remembered that less than a few short weeks ago, they had been normal people – simply going about their anonymous lives in a bustling city.

  Now they looked at the beckoning soldiers with furtive, feral hesitation – only moving when Lucas finally clapped his hands. “Let's go people.”

  Allison and Bud joined Daryl and Bob in the first jeep; Julie, Jamie and Jeremy in the second.

  Rosa made sure to accompany Lucas in the third with Sergeant Farrell.

  Farrell radioed ahead. “Sergeant Farrell. Bringing in eight civilian refugees, and one American Naval officer. Please advise General Rhodes, they came down out of San Francisco.”

  Their little envoy led them all the way up to the docks, providing them a little tour.

  Rosa was reminded of downtown, whenever the fleets came in – except the scale of it was off the charts.

  She realized, however, that was likely because this represented the sum total of armed forces on this side of the continent.