Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  The gun had been used recently and it was hot and it stank with a sour reek that poured down over her face and made her gag with fear. The SWAT trooper stood as still as a stone with his finger on the trigger. She couldn’t see his eyes, hidden behind thick goggles. What was he thinking? Was he questioning this at all? He could wipe out her life—her undeath, she supposed—in a heart’s beat if he chose. If she died there with no memories of her past it would be like she hadn’t ever existed at all.

  Maybe that would be for the best.

  She was already dead. Did she really want to face a new un-life in a decaying body? A new time without any knowledge of who she was or what she might have lost?

  Then one of the others, the one in the military uniform—she could see his eyes and they were full of sadness—had to spoil it all. “Who are you?” he asked, “what’s your name?” In the tone of voice you used when speaking to a frightened dog.

  She sputtered out something, an answer, a negation and suddenly it was all too real. The possibility that she might have a name, lost out there somewhere but still intact, reawakened in her the sense of what she had to lose. She had something still, some breadth of time, and the fear of losing it could cripple her. Her brain rolled over inside her head as the dread overwhelmed her, completely took her over. Her body shook and spasmed and heaved as if she was going to cough up her own skeleton, spit it out on the ground. She felt something clotted and nasty leak from her, from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She tried to cough it up.

  She heard the gun click, heard a bullet inching through its oiled metal mechanism, getting ready for the shot.

  With her eyes closed she could see the men like torches in a snowstorm. Their radiance, their golden tasty goodness glow that she wanted so badly to get close to, to consume. Their life force. She could feel the energy, the heat of it turned on her, focused on her and she knew they could sense somehow her own dark energy—that horrible perversion of life—God, she thought, if only she could hide that away from them, if only she could make them see her as one of them or even just see her as nothing at all, as invisible, transparent—

  Something grated in her head, the bones of her skull sliding across one another like continental plates.

  An icy shudder went through her. Her eyes shot open. She looked up and saw the men and every one of them had the same vacant look on his face.

  “Where did she go?” the SWAT trooper asked. “I can’t see her!”

  She had gotten her wish.

  It couldn’t last: her body felt drained, her mind hazy, reeling, everything shifting its shape. In a moment she would lose all control and she would collapse and lose this magic she had somehow created, in a second they would see her. The man with the gun would see her again and nothing would stop him from shooting.

  She had to escape.

  Her hands were locked behind her with a loop of plastic, so she rolled over on her side and thrusted upward with her back, with her shoulder against the concrete until she was sliding upward onto her feet, a move she didn’t think human bones should allow but it worked for her. As fast as her feet could carry her (which wasn’t fast at all, damn it, she needed to move) she ran right toward the men, slaloming between them, careful not to touch them because that might just break the spell. Already they were starting to blink and look around, their eyes unfocused when they glided over her but that would change in a hurry. She had to get away… there, she saw a gap, a narrow space between two parked police cars, their red and blue light splashing across her white coat, run, run, run, okay, just a fast walk, anything, she squatted low, her body stiff and complaining, pushed her way into bushes. Behind her she heard shots fired, gunshots much louder than she expected and her torso winced painfully, her stomach clenching.

  They were moving then, searching for her. She picked a direction and just moved, no conscious effort required, pure flight reflex taking over. But where to run to? Every direction seemed equally fraught with danger. Hide—she could hide. She found a hole to crawl into, a dry drainage pipe at the bottom of a ditch, wide enough for her to curl up inside. She tucked herself away, desperate to remain undiscovered. She scraped her zip tie against a piece of broken rebar until it snapped: the noise petrified her, made her think they would be on her in a moment.

  They didn’t find her.

  Dogs howled for her as she lay motionless and coiled. A helicopter buzzed overhead, its searchlight spearing the scrub grass right outside the mouth of her pipe, bleaching it of color. Men ran past with their guns jangling, excited for the kill, lusting for her blood. Hunger grew inside of her—it was the only way to measure the passage of time. She wanted to crawl out and away, to go look for some food but she didn’t dare. Instead she chewed on her fingernails, which just made her hungrier. She lost track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The night flew away from her on bat’s wings.

  Dawn came, a hallucinatory vibrant blue on the grass that slowly turned to gray. There was silence around her. There had been for hours. She’d been waiting for something, some signal that it was safe to come out.

  Nothing presented itself. Still. She couldn’t stay in the pipe forever. She had to get out. She had to get away. She harbored no illusion that the men had given up. They would still be looking for her. She was a monster. Something that had to be hunted down. She had to run as far and as fast as she could to avoid them. Definitely she had to get out of town. Where could she go, though? She might have family somewhere, people who would hide her, but she had no recollection of anyone. She didn’t know where she lived herself.

  Stiff with cold and moisture she unraveled herself in the pipe and climbed out on all fours, every inch costing her jolts of pain up and down her spine. Once she was fully out of the pipe she stood up with infinite care and caution. The motion made her head buzz. Exhaustion and the ever-growing hunger made everything around her jittery and sharp. She rubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and something dark flared in her mind’s eye.

  She gulped and choked on a shriek, keeping it inside of her but just barely. There—up on a hill above the hospital. Just a silhouette, a man-shaped darkness framed against the first orange smudge of the rising sun. She squinted hard and saw a naked man, his skin covered in blue curlicues and arabesques. Tattoos. He didn’t look like one of the dead. He looked perfectly healthy. He had a thick bushy beard and his hair was pulled back in a tight pony-tail. He wore nothing but a piece of rope around his neck and a band of fur around one bicep.

  The man looked right into her head and she knew he was not just aware of her but psychically inside of her. He was probing her, studying her. She sensed some things about him, reciprocity for what he was taking from her. Not words, nothing so complex—just buzzing, distorted sensations, feelings, images. He was old, very old, and very much undead like herself, he let her know. He was a friend.

  He turned away from her and pointed at the sun. She understood.

  In a moment all of it was gone. He was gone. She was standing on wet grass, alone, defenseless. Hunted. She had something, though. There was somebody else—somebody like herself out there. She had no idea if she could trust him or not but what did it matter?

  She had a direction. East. Go east, the naked man had been telling her. She had to go somewhere. Go east. Okay, she thought.

  Okay.

  END OF PART ONE OF MONSTER NATION

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  DIESEL FUEL RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY! Please forgive the inconvenience. [Sign posted at a Petaluma, CA, gas station 3/23/05]

  Dick woke up different. Simplified.

  Silvery moonlight lit up the world. It dripped from the branches of the trees and played on the surface of the snow. Dick was a shadow in the lee of that light. There were other shadows surrounding him. One huddled near him, her long white hair dyed with blood. She curled tight around a treasure that glowed dimly like a dying ember. It had a knob of bone protruding from one end. It had fingers on the other. It was
a human arm, but Dick was beyond concerns of taste or decorum. He tried to grab it away from her only to find that he had no hands anymore. His shoulders ended in gore-caked nubs. The female shadow’s prize was part of Dick’s body. His arm.

  The sheep had the other one. They were working hard at grinding it down to paste so they could swallow it. It would take them hours to finish it.

  This was immaterial to Dick. There was light and there were shadows and he was one of the latter. He was no longer capable of feeling loss or regret.

  Only hunger.

  The Homeland Security Advisory System today raised the level of threat awareness to Orange, or High for the following areas: Anaheim, Glendale, and Oakland. The level of threat awareness has been raised to red, or Severe, for the following areas of the Southland: Atwater, Brentwood, Century City, Granada Hills, Los Feliz… [DHS bulletin for the media, issued 3/26/05]

  Back to Colorado. Four days had passed and so little had been accomplished. They had tightened the cordon where they could but the pathogen was already out.

  A staff car took Bannerman Clark and Vikram Singh Nanda out to Commerce City, where the new detention facility had sprung up like a ring of fungus after the first rain of spring. Commerce City: not so much a town as a zone, a sprawling ex-prairie north of Denver full of chemical tanks and dusty weeds and long-haul truck agents and rusting railroad tracks. Ancient farmhouses that had been spruced up with particle board and unpainted dry wall and turned into light manufactories. The prettiest thing in Commerce City was a petroleum cracking plant, a stack of steel intestines that was lit up at night like a carnival.

  “The CDC has quarantined blocks of Atlanta, New York and Detroit,” Clark said, scanning his email on a Blackberry as the car bounced. “They’re all over Chicago. We have no intel about Chicago, do we? We need to cut the CDC out of this, take over.” The Centers for Disease Control was a civilian group. Civilians lacked the discipline and devotion to protocol that marked military operations, and all they could offer in exchange for their chaos was intuition—guesswork. This was a time for action, not committees. Vikram nodded and made a note on his own handheld.

  The car slid to a stop in a spray of gravel that made a noise like hailstones striking the gleaming car. The Captain and the Major got out and walked the rest of the way. “Oregon is refusing to publish data and Washington is denying any cases at all. But Canada has called in three definite outbreaks. Maybe we can shuffle some people around. We need to think of this as global, now. We need foreign support teams trained and ready to go.”

  The prison, with its ten thousand doors and its state-of-the-art prisoner control system was a terrible place to store the infected. The Supermax at Florence had been overcrowded before the Epidemic began. It forced the ill and the healthy together, made them all breathe the same air. The detention facility had been set up to take the infected and keep them away from the general population. It comprised a double layered chainlink fence and an open-pit latrine that so far sat clean and unused. The Guard brought in new cases of the mysterious disease every day. Clark had teams working round the clock, looking for ways to improve conditions for the detainees but the main thing was to warehouse them.

  “We need to bring in regular Army squads to police up Los Angeles, there needs to be door-to-door catching. We need a declaration of emergency for at least four states.”

  Clark stopped talking and put his blackberry in his pocket. He had reached the fence and he could feel their eyes on him. They looked pale and poorly fed. Most of them had visible wounds. They did not have the depressed and surrendering look of refugees, though. They looked more like junkies staring at their next fix.

  None of them made a sound. They stared at him hungrily through the wire, their fingers twined through the links, their faces pressed close up against the fence as if they could push themselves through.

  One of them slapped the chainlink with the flat of a broken hand and it rattled, watery, plinking echoes rolling up and down the length. The center was built for seventeen hundred and fifty detainees. It was already full and they were building more.

  “We need…” Clark stopped, unable to think for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need that girl, Vikram. The blonde. She could talk.”

  The Sikh Major looked up from his handheld—he’d been avoiding the gazes leveled at him through the fence. He pursed his lips as if he was about to speak.

  “We need her. She’s the answer.” He had it. Soldiers, Bannerman Clark ruminated, sometimes possessed intuition too.

  As of twenty-three hundred hours tonight in the UTC-8 time zone, parts of three highways in California will be closed to civil traffic. The Governor has called for all citizens to cooperate with this necessary step in maintaining the public health. The affected highways are the State Route 1 (Pacific Coast Highway), State Highway 27, and State Highway 74. [CalTrans press release, 3/28/05]

  The dead can’t drive. At least Nilla couldn’t. She had tried stealing a car to get east only to abandon it before leaving the parking lot. Her hands when she tried to grip the steering wheel felt like they were covered by thick mittens. The wheel slid away from her and she tried to stamp on the brake, only to find that her leg was beyond such precise movements. If she had gotten up to any speed she would probably have broken her neck.

  So she resorted to hitch-hiking, because she didn’t have any better ideas.

  Nilla stood by the side of Route 46 and screened her eyes with one hand as she watched a plume of dust approaching her from the west. It would be her first ride all day if she actually made this one. She was ready to bolt at the first sign of green and nearly did—but it wasn’t Army green, this was the bottle green of a civilian car. A little Toyota, it looked like. She was pretty sure the police only drove American-made cars.

  It rolled up to a stop next to her but the window didn’t come down at first. She could understand that. She’d been eating out of trash cans for a week, hiding where she could. She had scrounged some clothes out of a dumpster, a pink baby tee a size too small for her and a pair of ratty chinos long out of fashion. Together they made her look like a prostitute. Her stringy hair and the unnatural pallor of her skin made her look like a junkie. People didn’t pick up hitch-hikers who looked like her. Not often.

  She smiled through the window anyway, bending down to try to make eye contact. There were two people in the car—two kids. White suburban teenagers, going by looks. He had a little wispy facial hair and an Oakland Raiders baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. She had a gold cross around her neck. They both wore black t-shirts, band t-shirts.

  The window came down, cranked by hand. This had to be the boy’s first car. He probably scrimped and saved to buy it used. He had probably installed the spoiler on the back himself—the paint didn’t quite match. Nilla knew she had to be careful with what she said, with what she asked for.

  “I’m heading east, to, to Barstow,” she suggested. She remembered to smile and put a hand on the windowsill. They were less likely to take off if she was already in contact with the car. You learned these things after a week on the road.

  The boy looked her up and down, studying her clothes. Her breasts and her hips.

  “I don’t know, Charles,” the girl whispered, as if Nilla couldn’t hear her. “Look at her.” Nilla gave the boy her best high wattage smile.

  “Damn, Shar!” the boy shot back. “Shut up! I guess we got room for one more,” he offered. He wasn’t sure, no more than his girlfriend, but he had teenage hormones to contend with.

  Nilla opened the back door and climbed in.

  Chapter Two

  Author's Note: Well, it's that time of the year again. Happy Halloween, everybody! The ancients believed that this was the new year, the time when the world of the living and the ghostly plane of the dead intersected and anything could happen. The time when consensus reality broke down and the things that went bump in the night grew long, sharp teeth. Nonsense, of course, science tells us t
hat monsters don't really exist. But imagine yourself in the time of Mael Mag Och. There is no light in the world brighter than the campfire you huddle around. There is a forest just outside the ring of light, an old-growth beast that sprawls and clutches at your hair and sucks at the ground like a needy beast. That forest goes on forever--it is the whole world outside your meager fire ring. It's dark back there, truly dark; anything could hide in those shadows. Two days ago you watched the moon be eaten by the night, you watched it turn bloody red: it never did that before, you think. You move a little closer to the fire, just to stay warm. The night is pulsing with the sound of frogs and crickets but it's the things that make no sound at all, you think, who are truly dangerous. A branch snaps in the fire and you look up, feeling foolish but there: yes, over there, no, now it's moving--there! A pair of eyes like hot coals, burning just beyond the reach of your light. You reach for your knife. If it comes down to you and the thing in the dark, will you have the strength to defend yourself? Will you have the speed? You don't know what that thing is. But you know it's hungry. It watches you like it has all the time in the world. All night to wait, and watch. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't blink.

  Happy Halloween!

  --David Wellington

  Limit: Two Gallons of Water per Person, due to Emergency, Please! [Handwritten sign posted at a CVS Pharmacy, Carefree, CA 3/28/05]

  Nilla nestled back in the upholstery of the Toyota’s back seat and chewed on a candy bar when she really wanted to swallow it whole. It was the closest thing the kids had to food.

  “We were heading down to Hollywood, but the radio said you shouldn’t.” The girl, Shar, craned around in her seat to look back at the hitch-hiker. “You’re… you’re not supposed to pick people up, either. You’re not even supposed to drive unless you have to.”