by Stark, Ken
“Oh, Daddy...” she cooed, wiping away a single tear.
Suddenly, everyone was at a loss for words. No one more so, than Mason.
“I'm sorry, my love,” Hansen spoke to his daughter as if they were the only two people in the room. “I knew it was only a matter of time, but there were so many lives at stake that I couldn't let myself think it. I mean, I couldn't just leave them all here to die, could I?”
“Of course not, Daddy. Not you.”
He reached across to brush a bit of hair from her face. “Even when we were down to seven, what was I going to do? Draw straws for the few I could stuff in my car?”
“Of course not, Daddy...” she said again.
It started with Richie. He broke away from the pack, stepped right up to Hansen, and offered the man his hand.
“I didn't know...” he tried to say, but then he stopped fishing for the correct words and told him, simply, “Thank you for saving my life, Gary.”
Hansen tried to wave off the words, but Richie stuck to his guns and kept his hand out. Finally, Hansen took it, saying nothing in return.
With that, each and every one of the college kids filed past and offered Hansen their hand, and to Hansen's credit, he shook every one of those hands even though he clearly didn't think he deserved it.
“And mine,” Donn said.
“And mine,” William echoed.
“And mine,” little Diego said, puffing out his chest.
“And mine,” Teddy said last.
Then Inez appeared, and saying not a word, she bent down and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
At last, Alejandra presented herself before the man and told him, “No lo sabía. Quizás no eres tan malo después de todo.” When he cocked an eyebrow at her, she added with a shrug, “You know... para un tamarindo.”
He may have forced the chuckle, but the smile was real when he replied, “No cuentes con eso, peleonera.”
She returned the smile, gave the man a nod, and Mason thought he might even have seen her throw him a wink as she peeled away.
Suddenly, those wide, overstuffed chairs looked like heaven to Mason. He made his way toward the big fireplace that gave the restaurant its name, and plunked himself down in the chair closest to the hearth. Before he'd even kicked off his boots, he found Mackenzie crawling into his lap, Clancy curling up at his feet, and Sarah taking the seat next to him. And with that, everyone else found a seat – some sharing, some opting for a spot on the floor – and two of the boys, Donn and little Diego, perched themselves on the hearth directly behind Mason, as if they were his own personal Praetorian Guard.
“So, what do we do now?” Teddy asked no one in particular.
Mason was perfectly content to let someone else answer the question. Hell, now that he understood Hansen just a little bit more, he'd even be willing to let the old man decide the next step. But as his eyes wandered about the room, he suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him as if waiting on his every word. Suddenly, he felt the full, ponderous weight of responsibility drop on his shoulders like a ton of bricks.
Just yesterday, it seemed, he was all set to single-handedly take on a world gone mad. He'd do his best to wring that bastard's neck, and if he got his own neck wrung in the process... well, so be it. He would have died on his own terms and with zero regrets. Now that he thought about it, maybe he did die that day, after all. The old Hank Mason died a quick, ignominious death, and in his place emerged a new Hank Mason. A better Hank Mason. A Hank Mason who was somehow worthy of the friendship and devotion of wonderful people like these. And none of it would have happened if the sweet little thing tucked under his chin hadn't dared to teach an unrepentant asshole a damnable thing called 'hope.'
He found a spot between Mackenzie's fiery-red curls to give her a kiss on the head, and he told her, silently, You people think I saved your lives? Trust me, you got it all bass-ackwards...
“I'll tell you what we’ll do, Teddy,” Hansen finally answered the girl's question. “What we’ll do is, we get the fuck out of here, and we never look back.”
“Fuckin' A,” Alejandra seconded the motion.
“Uh... and how do we do that...” Diego piped up, “...exactly?”
Mason had been harboring a dark thought all morning, and now he heard himself saying it out loud. “I could try to fight my way to Gloria,” he suggested, but it was met with immediate and impassioned opposition.
“No!” Sarah, Mack, and Becks all shouted at once, loudly enough to get the swarm back to howling.
“You can't, Mace,” Sarah said, reaching out her hand.
Instinctively, he took it, and as their fingers intertwined, he could see Becks out of the corner of his eye, trying very hard to look anywhere at all but at them.
“No, you can't,” she said into her lap. “You'd never make it, Mace.”
“Hey, if the man wants to go, let him go,” Hansen said, trademark sneer quickly making a comeback.
It might have been meant as sarcasm... or maybe not. But for a second or two, for just the briefest of moments as he met Hansen's eye, Mason actually considered going for it. But then Mack raised her pretty little head and looked up at him with the most plaintive eyes he had ever seen in his life, and all such thoughts evaporated away in a single, fluttering heartbeat.
“You wouldn't leave me and Sarah, Mace...” she cooed. “Would you?”
He kissed her lightly on the forehead and tucked her back under his chin. “No, of course not, Mack.”
The words had come almost automatically, but with the girl's tiny body relaxing back into his and Sarah's slender hand embracing his own, he knew how much he'd meant them. He'd meant those words with every fiber of his being. He would never leave them. Not while he still drew breath.
“Not now and not ever, Mack.” He kissed her again. “Not for anything. Ever.”
As Hansen turned up his nose as if he'd just caught a whiff of something foul, Donn jumped to his feet, declaring, “I'll go, Mace! I'll fight my way through those '50s!” But barely had the words left his mouth than Diego jumped up, shouting, “No, I'll go!” followed immediately by Richie standing and declaring, “No, I'll go!”
Jesus...
Mason had known big men in his life. He'd known strong men. He'd known men who'd chew the world up and spit it out and shit on whatever remained. But out of all those big, strong men he'd ever known, not a single one of them had half the balls of these college kids.
“No!” he said, shutting the whole thing down before anyone else could volunteer to throw their life away. Then, he directed another, “No!” squarely at Alejandra, knowing that she would lay a beat-down on anyone about to sacrifice their life for hers, just so she could go in their place. “No one's going anywhere!”
“But Mace, “ Diego tried one last time, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...”
“...Or the one,” Addison finished the quote, much to Diego's surprise. When Diego looked to him, he cocked an expert Vulcan eyebrow and said, “Hey kid, I was a Trekkie when 'Trekkie' was still an insult. But trust me, we're nowhere near the Kobayashi Maru yet, so just maintain standard orbit.”
“Mierda...” Alejandra narrowed her eyes at Addison. “How old are you, anyway?”
“So, what do we do?” William asked, for the first time looking not to Hansen for an answer, but to Mason. “We can't stay here forever, right?”
“No way,” Christopher said from a sprawl on a nearby couch, eating handfuls of Count Chocula straight from the box while Inez tsk-tsked behind him. “We've already overstayed our welcome at your fine place of higher learning. Time to move on.”
“You stay, you die,” Mackenzie cooed, sweetly and grimly enough to bring a deathly silence to the room.
“Uh, so we go, right?” Richie asked at last, he too directing the question at Mason instead of Hansen.
“We go,” Donn said, pounding the floor with the butt of his war-scythe.
“Yeah, I guess we go,”
Teddy agreed, though without the slightest hint of enthusiasm.
“We go,” Sarah told them both, point blank. “We go as fast as we can, and as far as we can.”
“Chido,” Alejandra harrumphed, one hand on her hip and the other on the hilt of her machete.
“And we go together,” Becks said, smiling sweetly at her father.
“But how?” Diego asked with just the slightest hitch in his voice.
Mason looked to Hansen, and soon enough, they all were. There was only one way out. He knew it, Sarah knew it, and Hansen was smart enough to know it, too. Still, it just seemed right that Hansen should point the way, so he waited patiently while the man pretended to make up his mind.
“Building five?” Hansen grumbled at last.
“You afraid, Gary?” Mason replied, throwing Hansen's own words back at him.
Hansen's trademark scowl suddenly returned in full. “You're an asshole, you know?” he huffed.
“Yes,” Mason agreed without hesitation.
“And that monster truck of yours is a long way away.”
“Her name is Gloria.”
The scowl deepened.
“Chances are, we won't make it halfway to that... to Gloria before we're all killed.”
“Chances are,” Mason agreed again.
Hansen stewed for some time, then he said what everyone knew he was going to say.
“Alright then,” he grunted. “But just for the record, do you have the slightest idea just how we're going to accomplish that impossible feat?”
To be honest, Mason hadn't thought that far ahead. But now that the question was raised, he deposited a half-dozing Mackenzie into Sarah's lap and went to the window to see if things were half as bad as he'd imagined.
Shit...
They were worse. Much worse.
Under normal circumstances, an alpha would settle into a vigil state once the sounds of human activity ceased. But these were far from normal circumstances. With so many creatures packed into the Quad, bumping together, jostling, lashing out at anything that might be perceived as prey, every single one of them was on high alert and charging at anything that moved. At any other time, the creatures tearing one another apart would only be a good thing, but with the swarm packed as tightly as sardines, every altercation just excited the bloodlust more.
The car barrier was still in place, but it might as well not have been. With the first wave crushed to a pulp, the rest of the swarm had a stepping stone, and they poured over the vehicles as if they weren't even there. And on the other side of the Quad, the wall of dead bodies that had been so carefully constructed was now torn asunder, and the hundred or so scattered corpses did nothing to stem the tide.
So... that was it. The swarm had free and unfettered access from three sides, and they were using them all. And the ruckus they were causing was sure to bring more. Now, there were hundreds. By tomorrow? Christ…! To borrow a quote from a certain bug-hunting Marine Private, That's it…! Game over, man! Game over…!
And just for one last kick in the gonads, there were echoes there, too. Dozens of them, bumbling their way through the swarm like drunkards through a crowd and only agitating the alphas more. One of them in particular caught Mason's eye, and he spared it a second glance to confirm what he was seeing. But there was no mistaking the gold Rolex and the Armani suit. This was the one he'd clubbed over the head, and Becks had finished off with a javelin through the eye. Armani had been down for the count, but here it was, back up at the bell.
Gotta work on that forearm, Becks, he mused in his head.
Mason could feel everyone's eyes on him, but he said nothing as he tore himself away and padded across to the windows on the other side of the room. From there, he could look down on what they'd be facing in their drive for building five, and what he saw chilled him to the bone.
The buildings were a good forty feet apart, but though the northern end of the passage looked to be blocked by some kind of railing, a fresh wave of alphas was raging in from the east, straight down the concourse. So, the swarm wasn't just pouring in from three sides, it was gushing in from all four. End result? Goddam bloody mayhem.
There was a single door on the side of building five, but it was offset. Nothing like a straight shot. Without anyone on the other side to surreptitiously wedge it open, they would have to break it in under the full scrutiny of the swarm. He paced off the diagonal distance in his head and counted it as more than sixty feet. Sixty feet through the densest swarm any of them had ever seen, and without so much as a Sherman tank to their name. So to paraphrase Teddy, what in the flying fucking Hell were they going to do now?
Just then, Donn came up beside him, his big frame filling the corner of Mason's eye. The twenty-something punk planted the butt of his war-scythe on the carpet and uttered a low whistle as he looked down on the swarm, one hand leaning on Hansen's back-up pistol on his hip.
“It looks impossible,” he said in a hush.
“So did crossing the Alps until Hannibal did it,” Mason hushed back.
“Sure. Losing half of his army in the process,” came the terse reply.
“Those were alternative facts, Donn. Fake news. Recent estimates put Hannibal's losses at something like eight percent.”
Donn did the math in his head.
“Okay.” he said at last. “So out of these fifteen people, which one are you willing to lose?”
“We just have to think outside the box,” Mason told him, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt.
Just then, little Diego appeared on Mason's other side, and he raised himself up on his tiptoes to get a good look at what was going on down below.
“Uh, Mister Mason…? Sir…?” he said as quietly as a mouse. “Instead of thinking outside the box, maybe in this instance we should go the other way.”
“Huh?” Mason and Donn said as one.
“Well,” Diego cocked one corner of his mouth in a semblance of a smirk, “instead of thinking outside the box, maybe it's time we started thinking inside that sumbitch...”
CHAPTER XV
It wasn't a horrible plan on the face of it.
After an hour of everyone offering their own input here and there, Hansen fully involved this time, it was actually raised to the level of almost shitty-ass. And an hour after that, after a whole lot of tweaking and massaging, wholesale destruction and rebuilding from the ground up, it attained the lofty heights of barely acceptable. But with no other choice and their backs against the wall, barely acceptable was the best they could hope for.
And yet, there was apparently one last sticking point.
“I am so sick of hearing about that damn book! Can you please tell me what's so important about a goddamn book?”
This was Hansen, back to his normal level of snark and still harping on that one point that'd wedged in his craw since the beginning.
“You have a problem with books?” Addison feigned concern. “If it makes you feel any better, Chief Wiggum, some are bound to have pictures.”
As Hansen boiled, Inez spoke up as the voice of reason. “Books are mankind's way of handing down knowledge, Gary. Everything we've learned in the past five thousand years has been written down, so we don't have to learn it again. Wouldn't it be a good thing to have some of those thousands of years of knowledge to dip into?”
Not surprisingly, Christopher backed his mothers’ play. “We can't be scavengers forever. Stuff'll run out, right? Even canned food goes bad eventually. There'll come a time when we'll have to know a lot just to keep going. I mean, does anyone here know how to farm? How to dig a well? How to refine gasoline? How to weave cloth?”
“How to hot-wire a car?” Richie threw Mason's way, with a little side-grin.
“How to make bullets?” Alejandra added, effectively wiping the grin away.
“They're right, Daddy,” Becks agreed, but her father dismissed it all with a snort.
“That's years away, sweetheart. When that day comes, we won't have to risk our
lives trying to grab a few books on the run. When we really need them, we'll be able to waltz into any library in any city and just take what we need.”
“Are you sure of that?” Mason asked him, pointedly.
“Of course! It's just common sense, isn't it? When a pack of wolves kills off all of their prey, they starve. It's as simple as that. Eventually, your so-called 'alphas' will run out of food, and that's it! No more food, no more alphas.”
“Just a whole lot more echoes,” Richie said, grimly.
Again, Hansen snorted the matter away. “They'll die off too. Eventually.”
“Didn't they do that already?” Beverly hushed from the sidelines.
Sarah leaned as far forward as the slumbering Mackenzie in her lap would allow, and looked Hansen square in the eye.
“The fact is, Gary, apart from the obvious, we know nothing about this virus or how it affects the human body. We don't have the slightest idea how it alters the brain chemistry of those in stage 2, and we can't even begin to guess what it does to reanimate a corpse in stage 3. So far, it defies all known science and every bit of logic. So you can't sit there and say that you know how this will all play out. You couldn't possibly know. No one knows. But maybe there is one book in all of existence that can give us a clue.”
As Hansen grumbled under his breath, Donn said, “I thought you already found the magazine you wanted. Isn't it the right one?”
“It is,” she sighed, sagging back into her chair. “It's the one Jim Lambert told me about, and I am more certain than ever that he was on to something. But that article just scratches the surface. I need to see the JAMA report to know for sure.”
“And once you get it, you can do something about it?” This from little Diego.
Sarah took her time answering, and when she did, it was with another heavy sigh. “Honestly, Diego, I have no idea.”
A dark shadow swept across her features, and Mason knew that she was holding something back. It didn't take a genius to figure out what. Even if she found her fabled JAMA report and it revealed every detail regarding the exact nature of the virus, there wasn't a damn thing she'd be able to do about it. A full team of scientists at the CDC with unlimited funds and equipment? Maybe. One woman stuck in the Dark Ages? Not a fucking chance. But what would be the point of sharing that particular bit of news? After all, sometimes ignorance really was bliss.