The apparitional figures rose again. One clean shot at the first tanker and it would all be over. Three thousand gallons per truck, thirty-six thousand gallons in all. The entire convoy would go up, detonating like sticks of dynamite in a line. Peter realized that one of the figures was the cloaked woman. He lifted his rifle again and squeezed the trigger, only to hear the click of an empty chamber.
The woman raised her arms and spread them wide.
At the tail end of the convoy, an altogether different sort of vehicle had appeared. It swooped upon them at high speed, engine roaring, banks of sodium vapor lights blazing from the roof of its cab. A six-wheeled semi-tractor: daisy-chained behind it were two large cargo boxes constructed of galvanized metal buffed to a highly reflective finish. In the weeks to come, this curious aspect—it resembled nothing so much as two mirrored boxes rolling down the highway—would emerge as a matter of significance, a clue in a sequence of clues; but at the moment of the truck’s air-braking descent upon the scene, no one paid that much attention. Some of the fleeing oilers, their panicked brains washed clean of logic, and failing to notice that the smaller vehicles that had taken out the rear guard had conveniently vanished into the undergrowth, even permitted themselves the hope of rescue. They were under attack. The attack, mercilessly discombobulating, had come from nowhere. The containers, in their fortified appearance and shining bulk, resembled portables.
Which they were. Though toting a cargo of an altogether different kind.
One to see this was OFC Juan Sweeting. Despite his off-putting manner and intimidating muscularity, Ceps was a man with the soul of a poet. Alone in his rack at the end of each day, he privately put pen to paper, rendering his deepest thoughts in lines of uncommon sensitivity and verbal music. Despite the trials of his life, he steadfastly believed the world to be a beautiful, God-touched place worthy of human hopefulness; he wrote a great deal about the sea, whose companionship he treasured. Though he had never shown anyone these poems, they formed the heart of his life, like a secret lover. Sometimes, scraping oily gunk from a cooker or hurling a bulk of iron above his head in the weight cages, Ceps was so inflamed by the desire to write a poem that it was all he could do not to abandon his task and race back to his rack to celebrate the magnificence of creation.
The arrival of the gleamingly reflective semitruck coincided with his blossoming suspicion, like Peter’s, that not all was as it appeared. Indeed, nothing about the attack made sense. Why would human beings prey upon one another in this manner? Did they not possess a common foe? Why destroy an energy source that maintained the very existence of their species? The idea taking shape in his mind was the correct one, that their attackers were not in league with their own kind, and as the first of the two shining compartments released its cargo, his suspicions became certainty. But by then it was too late; it had always been too late.
The virals swarmed over the convoy. There were hundreds. But in the moment that followed, Ceps realized that the virals were not, in fact, killing everyone. Some were set upon with merciless, blood-splashing swiftness, but others were snatched bodily, flailing and screaming as the virals seized them around their waists and leapt away.
A far worse fate, to be taken. To be taken up.
He made a quick decision.
The semi had come to a halt less than twenty yards from the last tanker in the line. Ceps had seen a tanker blow before. The destruction was instant and total, a great fiery wallop, but in the preceding tenth of a second something interesting occurred. Seeking the weakest point in the structure, the expanding fuel sent the tanker’s end plates shooting horizontally like corks from a bottle. In essence, an exploding tanker truck was a gun before it was a bomb. Ceps had reached the last tanker now. The silver truck was parked twenty yards straight behind him, well within range. With his massive arms, Ceps unscrewed the cap of the offload port and opened the valve. Gasoline spouted from the pipe in a glistening gush. He stood in this current, soaking his clothes. He filled his hands and splashed his hair. This ravishing world, he thought, his senses filling with the smell of fuel, like bottled fire. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world. Perhaps someone would find his sheaf of poems tucked beneath his mattress and read in its pages the hidden truths of his heart. The words of a poem he loved came back to him. Emily Dickinson: a boy of eight, he had found a book of her poems in the Kerrville Library, in a room nobody ever went to. Because it seemed no one had any use for it, and in a state of anthropomorphic sympathy for its loneliness on the shelf, Ceps had tucked it into his coat and stolen off to an alleyway, where, sitting on an ash can, he’d discovered a voice long gone from the earth, that seemed to strike straight to his most secret self. Now, standing in the path of the gushing port, he closed his eyes to let its words, etched in memory, pass through him one last time:
Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty, mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee—
He removed his lighter from his pocket and flicked it open to balance his thumb upon its flinted wheel.
A hundred yards away, in the cab of the third tanker, Peter was attempting to put the thing in gear. The knob, its markings long since worn off, told him nothing. Each attempt was met with a grinding sound.
“Move over.”
The door swung open and Lore scrambled in, Michael following. Peter slid across the bench to let him take the wheel.
“Our plan is?” Michael asked.
“We don’t have one.”
Michael glanced into the side-view. His eyes widened. “Now we do.”
He jammed the gearshift into first, swung the wheel all the way to the left, and hit the gas, clipping the second tanker. Instead of reversing, Michael pressed the accelerator again. A screech of metal and suddenly they were free, a fifteen-ton wheeled missile bounding into the undergrowth.
Behind them, the world exploded.
The truck shot forward like a rocket; Peter was thrust back in his seat. The rear of the truck lifted, swerved, then somehow found traction again. The cab was bouncing so fiercely it seemed certain they would shake apart. Michael worked through the gearbox, still accelerating. Brush swept over the windshield; they were flying blind as bats. He turned the wheel left again, guiding them in a long arc across the tangled field, and then with a second toss they were on the highway again, racing east.
Their flight had not escaped attention. In the side-view, Peter saw a bank of pale green light gathering behind them.
“We can’t outrun them in this thing,” Michael said. “The only chance is the hardbox.”
Peter jammed a magazine into his rifle. “What have you got?” he asked Lore, and she showed him a pistol.
“That’s not the only problem,” Michael said. “We’ve lost our brake coupler.”
“Meaning what?”
“I can’t slow down or she’ll jackknife. We’ll have to jump.”
The virals were closing. Peter guessed two hundred yards, maybe less.
“Can you get us up the exit ramp?”
“At this speed, there’s no way I’ll make the turn at the overpass. It’s ninety degrees.”
“How far’s the box from the top of the ramp?”
“A hundred yards straight south.”
There was no way they would make it if they jumped at the base of the ramp. A hundred yards would be cutting it close as it was, and that was assuming they escaped the fall uninjured.
The hardbox marker appeared in Michael’s headlights. Lore climbed over the bench and took a place by the door as Michael downshifted, cutting their speed to thirty, and veered to the right, guiding them up the ramp. They flung the doors wide, filling the cab with swirling wind.
“Here we go.”
As they hit the top of the ramp, Michael and Lore leapt from the cab, Peter just behind them. He hit the ground on his feet, knees flexed to absorb the impact, then rolled end over end on the pavement. The air poured from his chest. H
e came to a stop just in time to see the taillights of the tanker barreling through the guardrail. For the thinnest instant, the vehicle, all thirty thousand pounds of it, seemed on the verge of taking flight. But then it sank from sight, its disappearance followed by one more titanic explosion on a night of them, a roiling cloud with a white-hot center that blazed like an enormous flare.
From his left, the sound of Lore’s voice: “Peter, help me!”
Michael was unconscious. His hair was slick with blood, his arm twisted in a way that seemed broken. The first virals were at the foot of the ramp now. The light of the burning truck had bought them a moment, but that was all. Peter hoisted Michael over his shoulder. Christ, he thought, his knees buckling under the weight, this would have been easier a few years ago. The hardbox flag stood in dark silhouette against the stars.
They ran.
34
She appeared in the doorway as Lucius was concluding his evening devotions. From her hand dangled a chiming ring of keys. Her plain gray tunic and tranquil demeanor did nothing to communicate the impression of someone in the midst of a jailbreak, though Lucius noted a glaze of perspiration on her face, despite the evening chill.
“Major. It’s good to see you.”
His heart was full of a feeling of events set in motion, circles closing, a destiny unveiled. All his life, it seemed, he had been anticipating this moment.
“Something’s happening, isn’t it?”
Amy nodded evenly. “I believe it is.”
“I’ve prayed on it. I’ve prayed on you.”
Amy nodded. “We will have to move quickly.”
They stepped from the cell and continued down the dark hallway. Sanders was asleep at his desk in the outer room, his face turned sideways over neatly folded arms. The second guard, Coolidge, was snoring on the floor.
“They won’t awaken for a while,” Amy explained, “and when they do, they’ll have no memory of this. You will simply be gone.”
Lucius reached down to withdraw Sanders’s pistol from its holster, then glanced up to see Amy regarding him with a look of caution.
“Just remember,” she warned. “Carter’s one of us.”
Lucius chambered a round and set the safety and tucked the gun into his waistband. “Understood.”
Outside, they walked with measured briskness toward the pedestrian tunnel, keeping to the shadows. At the portal, three domestics were idly standing around a fire burning in an ash can, warming their hands.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Amy.
They melted to their knees, looks of mild surprise stamped on their faces. Lucius and Amy eased their bodies to the ground.
“That’s some trick,” said Lucius. “You’ll have to teach me sometime.”
On the far side of the tunnel, a pair of saddled horses waited. Lucius gave Amy a leg up, then climbed aboard the second horse, taking the reins loosely in his hand.
“One thing I need to ask,” he said. “Why me?”
Amy thought a moment. “Each of us has one, Lucius.”
“And Carter? Who does he have?”
An inscrutable look came into her eyes, as if her thoughts were carrying her far away. “He is different from the rest. He carries his familiar inside him.”
“The woman in the water.”
Amy smiled. “You’ve done your homework, Lucius.”
“Things have a way of coming.”
“Yes, they do. He loved her more than life but could not save her. She is the heart of him.”
“And the dopeys?”
“They are his Many, his viral line. They kill only because they must. It goes hard with them. As he thinks, they think. As he dreams, they dream. They dream of her.”
The horses were tamping the dust. It was just past midnight, a moonless sky the only witness to their departure.
“As I of you,” said Lucius Greer. “As I of you.”
They rode into the darkness.
35
Brothers, brothers.
And away, into the night. Julio Martínez, Tenth of Twelve, his legions discarded, cast to the wind. Julio Martínez, answering the call of Zero.
It is time. The moment of rebuilding has come. You will remake the world again; you will become the true masters of the earth, commanders not only of death but of life. You are the seasons. You are the turning earth. You are the circle within the circle within the circle. You are time itself, my brothers in blood.
In life Martínez had been an attorney, a man of law. He had stood before judges, defended the accused before juries of their peers. Death row cases were his specialty, his professional forté. He had acquired a particular brand of fame. The calls had come from everywhere: Would the great Julio Martínez, Esq., come to the aid of such-and-such? Could he be persuaded to swoop into action? The rock star who had bashed his girlfriend’s brains out with a lamp. The state senator with the dead whore’s blood on his hands. The suburban mother who had drowned her newborn triplets in the tub. Martínez took them all. They were insane or they were not; they pled or they didn’t; they went to the needle, or the tiny cell, or scot-free. The outcome was irrelevant to Julio Martínez, Esq.; it was the drama he loved. To know one was going to die and yet struggle against its inevitability—that was the fascination. Once, as a boy, in the field behind his house, he had come upon a rabbit in a trap, the kind with a spring and teeth. Its iron jaws had clamped onto the animal’s hind legs, flaying flesh to bone. The creature’s small, dark eyes, like beads of oil, were full of death’s wisdom. Life ebbed from it in a series of spasmodic scuffles. The boy Martínez could have watched for hours, and did just that; and when the rabbit failed to perish by nightfall, he carried it to the barn and returned to the house and ate his supper and went to bed in his room of toys and trophies, waiting for morning, when he could watch the rabbit die some more.
It had taken three days. Three glorious days.
Thus, his life and its dark investigations. Martínez had his reasons. He had his rationale. He had his particular method—the rag of spirits, the loyal cord and infinitely pliable duct tape, the dank, unseen compartments of dispatch. He chose low women, those lacking learning or culture, not because he despised them or secretly wanted them but because they were easy to ensnare. They were no match for his beautiful suits and movie-star hair and silken courtroom tongue. They were bodies without name or history or personality, and when the moment of transport approached, they offered no distraction. The timing was all, the orchestrated, simultaneous release. The old choir of sex and death singing.
A certain amount of practice had been required. There had been misfires. There had been, he was forced to admit, a certain amount of accidental comedy. The first one had died well but too soon, the second had kicked up such a ruckus that the whole thing had dissolved into farce, the third had wept so pitiably that he could hardly pay attention. But then: Louise. Louise, with her corny waitress uniform and sensible waitress shoes and unsexily supportive waitress hose. How beautifully she’d left her life! With what exquisite rapture in the taking! She was like a door opening into the great unknowable beyond, a portal into the infinite blackness of unbeing. He had been eradicated, pulverized; the winds of eternity had blown through him, beating him clean. It was everything he’d imagined and then some.
After that, frankly, he couldn’t get enough of it.
As for the highway patrolman, the universe was not without its ironies. It gave and took away. To wit: the Jag with a broken taillight, and Martínez with the woman’s bagged body in the trunk; the cop’s slow saunter toward the car, his hand resting manfully on the butt of his pistol, and the downward glide of the driver’s window; the patrolman’s face pressed close, sneering with bored righteousness, his lips saying the customary words—Sir, could I see …?—and never finishing. In the harried aftermath, Martínez had managed to dispose of the body in the trunk, his nighttime practices thus to remain forever unknown, unconnected to his fate. But a dead policeman by the side of the high
way, everything recorded by his dashboard video camera, well. In the end, the only thing to do, as the saying went, was for the great Julio Martínez, Esq., champion of the unchampionable, defender of the loathsomely defenseless, to pour himself a glass of thirty-year-old single-malt and toss it over his tongue while the windows of the house twirled with the lights of justice and come out with his hands dutifully up.
Which, given the way things had worked out, hadn’t turned out to be such an unlucky turn of events, actually.
Martínez couldn’t say he cared much for his fellows. With the exception of Carter, who struck him as purely pitiable—the man didn’t even seem to know what he was or what he’d done; Martínez hadn’t heard so much as a squeak from the man in years—they were nothing more than common criminals, their deeds random and banal. Vehicular homicide. Armed robbery gone bad. Barroom shenanigans with a body on the floor. A century marinating in their own psychological waste had done nothing to improve them. Martínez’s existence was not without its irritating aspects. The never quite being alone. The endless hunger always needing to be filled. The ceaseless talk-talk-talk inside his head, not just his brothers but Zero, too. And Ignacio: there was a piece of work. The man was a litany of self-pitying excuses. I didn’t mean to do half those things. It’s just the way I was built. After a hundred years listening to the man’s whining, Martínez wouldn’t miss him one bit.
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