Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  Clark moved his cover from one hand to another. He didn’t care for the civilian’s easy familiarity. “I’ve never questioned my lot in life. I simply serve at the pleasure of my Commander in Chief.”

  “You never married, that’s why. The Army likes married men. It means they’re not gay. Sit down, will you? You’re annoying me with your conspicuous body language.” The civilian tore open his box of marshmallow treats and stuffed one into his mouth. “My big weakness,” he intimated when he’d swallowed the yellow goo. “It’s less than a week since Easter, right? Anyway, I don’t care if you were screwing Freddy Mercury in the seventies. I don’t care if you dig sheep. Sit down, I said.”

  Clark did as he was told.

  “They’re in Chicago now, did you know that? We’re keeping a lid on it but it’s bad there, very, very, very bad.” The Civilian inhaled a long, slow breath and then laid down the law. “Look, you’re off the case, you know that. FEMA is taking over in California. We need the flexibility and the ability to make snap decisions out there you only get with civilian agencies. The Army’s great for doing the same thing a hundred times over and nobody questions your loyalty but this. This is serious.”

  “What about Colorado? That’s the state I’m sworn to protect.”

  “Yeah, the Adjutant General of the COARNG gets to keep Colorado, whoop-dee-doo. He’s got full-bird Colonels to put on that and you’re not on the short list. But who cares about Colorado? I don’t know if you’ve heard this or not but these dead fuckers are taking over Los Angeles. I care about Los Angeles. The President cares about Los Angeles. Right?”

  “No.” Clark placed his hat squarely on the table and turned it so the brim was facing the civilian.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No, you’re not entirely right. You’ve fallen for what I hope will very soon be classified as an urban legend. The infected are not dead. They’ve undergone some kind of basal metabolic change, something that depresses their vital signs but they’re not dead. I have a team from Fort Detrick looking into it right now. If I’m being reassigned I just wanted to get that fact on the record.” He began to stand up.

  “Sit down. You’re off the case, yes.” The civilian stood up instead. He peeled one of his Peeps away from its fellows and held it in his hairy hand as if he were cradling an actual baby chicken. “But you’re not done. I like you, Bannerman. I like your first name, I think it’s funny, and I like people with funny names.” He walked over to stand behind Clark and slowly, deliberately, placed his yellow candy on top of Clark’s cover. “I also think you’re a wonk and the President loves wonks. You were the first responder, the early adapter on this mess. I want you to be my go-to guy.”

  Clark inhaled slowly and folded his hands in his lap. “In what capacity?” he asked.

  “As my wonk, I just said that. I don’t care what you’re called. The President doesn’t care what you’re called. You can make up your own MOS for this. You can have what you need—I’ll rubber stamp anything because I know you, I’ve read your dossier so many times I know you would die, physically die before you would requisition a Bic pen that wasn’t job-vital. What do you say, Bannerman? Are you my wonk or are you my wonk?”

  It would mean reporting to this civilian. It meant operating as a free agent, without standing orders—something unthinkable to a career soldier like Clark. It also meant he would have carte blanche to find the girl and maybe bring resolution to the biggest public health crisis since the influenza of 1918.

  Clark reached forward and picked up the yellow sugar bomb sitting on his cover. Without hesitation he put it on his tongue as if he were taking communion and bit down. The answer was yes.

  Chapter Seven

  Infectuated individuals are known to be of a highly dangerous nature. Under no circumstances should you, as civilians, attempt to subdue or take them out. The police are trained for this. Let’s let them do your job. [Televised speech delivered by the President of the United States, 3/31/05]

  Kirsty Lang on the BBC World News channel, looking grave while a xylophone played a rising crescendo: “Growing fears in America tonight as the Epidemic spreads to the Pacific Northwest. Our Reginald Forless is in Spokane tonight where city officials and law enforce—”

  A reporter with his head down in front of a line of cars, their headlights washing out his features as they passed in slow motion: “—scene of chaos behind me, this small town where nobody ever went anywhere has been mobilized tonight. Evacuees are heading south, toward San Diego, and—”

  Two balding men faced each other in oversized chairs, their ties undone: “—can’t just disregard what the Army is saying, they have the people and the equipment to—”

  “Bullshit! That thing we just saw was dead!”

  Emeril LaGasse came running down a set of stairs, his fists pumping in the air, a towel over the shoulder of his chef whites. “Tonight we’re talking tenderloin, we’re talking beef bourguignon, and look at this cabbage, huh? Look at it! I’m makin’ a slaw!”

  Charles sprawled across the bed, with his shirt off, one foot waving back and forth in an agitated rhythm. “Nothing fucking on,” he moaned, but he didn’t switch off the television. “How do you get the porn and shit? You know what I’m saying?”

  In a corner Shar squatted against the wall and held one hand over her ear. The other held the handset of a princess phone. “Mom? I can’t get through to Uncle Phil. Well how many times have you tried? Me? I’m safe, I’m in some kind of motel—”

  “Don’t you fucking tell her where we are!” Charles shouted. His skinny arms raised like sticks to bat at her but he didn’t sit up.

  Nilla sniffed one of her armpits and winced at the stale smell there. Not body odor, necessarily. Something fouler. “I’m going next door,” she said. She stepped out into a night full of bugs that batted suicidally against the one light over the motel’s parking lot. Charles’ Toyota was the only car parked there—the owners must have deserted the place and turned on the no vacancy sign on their way out. If they hadn’t been so lost Nilla and the kids would have passed right by it.

  Luckily the owners had forgotten to lock the doors when they left, too. In the peace and quiet of an empty room Nilla sat down on the bed with its over-starched coverlet and stared at the useless telephone, wishing she had someone to call. God, no point in dwelling on that, she decided, and pulled the baby tee off over her head. The sleeves stank and she wondered if she could rinse it out in the sink with shampoo. She looked down, checking her skin, and noticed a green discoloration on her abdomen, right above her tattoo. It must be dye from the cheap shirt, she thought, even though it was the wrong color. She got up and went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She stepped out of her baggy pants and saw that the discoloration was on her crotch, too. With a handful of soap she tried to scrub it off but it wouldn’t budge. She moved into the shower and tried again with the motel’s washcloth. Nothing.

  There was a fog-resistant shaving mirror mounted in the shower and she studied her face. The bruising under her eyes had spread until she looked like a raccoon. Or a goth chick wearing too much kohl. She had a bad pimple on her cheek but it wasn’t ready to pop. She wondered if she should shave her legs and realized that the hair there had stopped growing. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  She was still checking herself out when she heard the door of her room open and Charles came trooping in. He had a can of soda in either hand. “Hey,” he said, “Shar thought you might want some—”

  He stopped in mid-thought. His face opened up in a kind of half smile that made him look very, very stupid. He was staring at her but not in the malevolent way the people of Lost Hills had stared at her.

  She looked down and saw that she had come out of the shower to greet him but she had forgotten to put her clothes back on. Water dripped from her elbows and her chin and splashed darkly on the ivory shag of the carpet.

  What the hell? Had she forgotten all about modesty when she forgot her
name? Or was her brain just breaking down, was she not making the necessary connections?

  She suddenly felt very alone and very afraid.

  “I guess I should…” he grinned, “I mean Shar wouldn’t…”

  He was stalling. He wanted her and that meant everything. It meant she was still whole and healthy and desirable. It meant he didn’t see a monster when he looked at her but a woman, a human being full of vibrant life. She took a step closer and grabbed his hand. She couldn’t believe what she was doing but she needed it, so much.

  She guided his hand to her breast and let him cup it. He immediately tweaked her nipple in a way she normally would have found more irritating than arousing but it just didn’t matter. He was human and male and if he reacted to her she could be normal again.

  He swallowed hard and moved closer to her, as if unsure of what to do next. Was he a virgin? Nilla was pretty sure she wasn’t. She would use every whorish trick she could think of if she could just have this simple reassurance. She reached across the space between them and brushed the backs of her fingers across the front of his jeans.

  Nothing. She felt nothing down there—no hardness at all. He looked down at her breast like someone who couldn’t understand what he was seeing. “So cold,” he said, his voice small and afraid.

  She winced backward and it was the signal he’d been waiting for. He rushed out of the room, his sodas rolling across the floor where he’d dropped them. Nilla went to the door and shut it, locked it tight and fastened the chain.

  She wanted to break down, to cry, but that was a human response and her body refused to let her have even that. She wanted to cut herself to pieces but there was nothing sharp at hand. She looked around the objects of the room—bed, tv, lamp, nightstand, Gideon’s bible—and none of them made sense, they’d been torn out of context and left hanging in a meaningless space. It was too much.

  She undid all the locks on the door and ran out into the night, down the stairs and across the parking lot. The dark trees there accepted her without a murmur.

  Chapter Eight

  PLEASE BE ADVISED: Foreign nationals will not be allowed into the United States unless they carry up-to-date and authorized medical papers. Otherwise you are subject to incarceration! [Signage posted at Customs, John F. Kennedy International Airport, 4/1/05]

  “He knows talent when he sees it, yes, that is that,” Vikram said, clutching a nylon handloop as the Blackhawk lifted up and banked away from the prison.

  “He’s hedging a bet.” Back to California. Bannerman Clark hated flying. Washington to Denver on another empty airbus. Blackhawk to Florence to pick up Vikram—now officially attached to Clark’s nascent Action Team—and take the two of them back to DIA. Then a military transport, probably an old DC-10 judging by Clark’s recent luck, then another helicopter to spirit them off to a place called Kern County where someone might possibly have seen the blonde girl, according to a tip phoned in on the APB.

  It didn’t matter. None of the wasted time or the jet lag or the bad food or the recirculated air mattered. “I looked him up in Nexis when I got airborne out of DCA. He’s an up-and-comer, playing at being a young Turk at the tender age of fifty-two. He’s angling for a Cabinet post. He wouldn’t meet with me in the Pentagon—I didn’t ask why but I can guess. He wants to keep me on the books but off the charts.”

  “He has you for his wild card. This man, he is playing games while the house is on fire?”

  Clark laid one finger alongside his nose. “Don’t forget we’re talking about DoD civilians here. Armchair generals.” He need say no more. For the last thirty years Vikram and Clark had been touring the world at the whim of men with Big Ideas and Foolproof Plans. Soldiers and even entire countries were just tokens on a game board when you looked down on them from those lofty heights.

  “I’m his wonk, he calls me. His idea man. Somebody with experience in a brand new way of war. After September Eleventh people like him wrote their own ticket because they were ready for the new paradigm. He hopes to do the same here.”

  “He is making political capital out of this horror.”

  Clark sighed and lifted both hands. ‘Twas ever thus. “I can’t help but thinking there’s more to this than I get, but then I never understood politics. This guy most certainly does. If we can find this girl and if she is what I think she is this man will be appointing Cabinet posts, not filling one.”

  “Unless we are eaten, all of us, before then.”

  “Yes, that would spoil his gambit.” Clark tried to laugh and found he couldn’t.

  CALIFORNIA, INFECTIOUS DISEASE OUTBREAK: This is a notification of the Presidential declaration of a major disaster for the State of California (FEMA-1899-DR), dated April First, 2005, and related determinations. [FEMA/DHS Federal Register Notice, 4/1/05]

  Under a rising sun that looked like a ruddy impostor now a freight train full of emergency medical supplies shouldered its way westward through raw cuts in the mountain side, its rusted cars rattling and swaying on the tracks as it cut through switchbacks, its horn a plaintive subsonic tone that seemed to rise up out of the ground like vapor in the heat of day.

  It had to slow down to a bare crawl as it crested a ridge. Dick was waiting on a spur of rock just above. Behind him the source called to him with its infinite love but he didn’t look back. At just the right moment the voice in his head called Now and he leapt, spinning off his feet into space to come crashing down with a clatter on the roof of a boxcar. He dug in with his feet the best he could, unable to literally hold on. The vibration of the rumbling train made his teeth hurt but he was incapable of complaining.

  He was a soldier now. He had his orders.

  “No, I don’t think people should panic. What kind of question is that? Look, just be ready to move. We’ve already had some evacuations. I think it’s fair to say that you should expect more.” [San Francisco Chief of Police Heather J. Fong at press conference, 4/1/05]

  Nilla wandered through a landscape the colors of bleached bone. The rock beneath her feet looked white, whiter than her pale skin. The aspens and sequoias of the forest behind her had given up on the stony ground. From horizon to horizon all she could see were bristlecone pines, leafless, twisted things that looked undead by starlight. Their branches wrapped around their trunks like hurt people hugging themselves for comfort or speared upwards in accusation at the frozen sky. Some were dead outright, cracked and splintered. They didn’t rot, it seemed, so much as erode.

  She was cold. She’d been cold before and never really cared but now, naked, wet, exposed in the chilly mountain night, she felt it in her skeleton. She could feel the frost getting into her individual ribs, into the creaky joints of her kneecaps and elbows.

  She wanted to go back but she didn’t know what that meant. Charles would be huddling with Shar in their room, wouldn’t they? Terrified of her.

  Charles had to know. He must have suspected before and now he knew.

  The smell on her was the stink of death. The discoloration on her abdomen was the first sign of putrefaction. Her body and her mind were breaking down and there was nothing she could do about it, nothing anybody could do about it and why would they, anyway? She was dead, a corpse! She should be rotting away. Her flesh would sag and fall off in gobbets, her skin would slough off in greasy strips. Her face would melt away until her bare skull grinned out at the world—would she feel better then?

  A prickling of the skin behind her ears made her look up. Something—something living nearby. She would turn her face from it, flee it, whatever it might be. It was big. She closed her eyes and saw it, not a hundred yards away. Two, maybe three times the size of her, its energy brighter than any living energy she’d seen.

  She had to get closer. Damnit—the hunger in her had become a solid mass, a tumor in her stomach that had control of her feet. She wanted to run away, to hide herself but the hunger had other plans. She got closer.

  Her nose picked up the smell of death right away. It was her ow
n smell, but sharper. Her foot blared with pain as she tripped on something. Bending down she felt metal and wood. A gun, a shotgun. She looked up and saw a human body with no head, dangling from the colorless branches of a bristlecone. Its lower extremities were missing and it had no energy at all, neither bright nor dark. The owner of the motel, maybe, who had come out all this way to kill himself. No one would ever know, she decided.

  Something massive shifted behind her and she turned as fast as she could. The energy she’d seen, the bright source was right there. A black bear, maybe three hundred pounds. A female, old and grizzled, her pitch black fur ending in white tips that glistened with the reflected light of stars. The bear made no sound—she didn’t growl.

  She was beautiful. She stood on her hind legs, her eyes looking directly into Nilla’s. There was something there. Understanding? Recognition? Impossible. Nilla was undead, unnatural while this gorgeous animal seemed carved out of the very earth she stood on. Was this some kind of spiritual awakening, Nilla wondered, was she meeting her spirit animal? Maybe this was the moment when everything would make sense.

  The bear swiped one paw across Nilla’s stomach, the claws digging great bloodless gouges through her midriff, slicing up her tattoo. The blow had enough force behind it to kill outright a full-grown deer. It knocked Nilla off her feet and sent her falling into the body in the tree. Looking up at the corpse Nilla finally understood. The bear had been having a midnight snack—breakfast after a long winter’s hibernation. Nilla had just gotten in between a full-grown black bear and her meal.

  Chapter Nine

  Relocation camps are now open at Cathedral City, Winterwarm and Oceanside. A map to these facilities is on the back of this handout. When entering a camp you may bring with you: personal (PRESCRIPTION) medication, TWO changes of clothing and ONE small toilet kit. All weapons, illegal items and communication/recording devices (laptop computers, PDAs, CELL PHONES) will be confiscated. [Flyer handed out at bus and train stations in Los Angeles, emphasis as per original, 4/1/05]