Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  Horrocks spat noisily. “They’ll get stuck in the wheels. We’ll get bogged down and eventually we’ll run out of ammo, sir.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. Open me up an escape corridor. We need to reinforce that Stryker group. Get the men on the truck, the, the men and the women.” He wasn’t fresh. That was all. Normally he would never have made such a mistake but he had been too long without sleep or real food. “Get the troops onboard, and clear me a path with the SAW, with the small arms, whatever we have.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” Horrocks shouted and made it happen. The SAW crew on the roof of the HEMTT opened up with an unholy rattle and the infected fell before the truck like corn at the harvest. The troops clinging to the sides and top of the vehicle slaughtered anything that tried to get into the gap the SAW made. The driver got them moving, both arms clutched around the steering wheel as the HEMTT drove up and over the pile of bodies and they popped through the crowd like a cork out of a champagne bottle. In under sixty seconds they were spinning out on a perfectly manicured golf course, fighting to keep traction.

  The infected came at them from behind but Squad Three kept them at a distance with harassing fire. On the grass the driver opened up his throttle and they raced over and through bunkers and greens. Clark could see the Strykers up ahead. He counted three vehicles. There should have been five. One of the light urban warfare tanks looked badly damaged as well. They had been parked in a triangular formation that allowed the group to cover enemy action from any angle. The golf course around the armored vehicles was pockmarked with dark, smoking craters and Clark saw civilians, perhaps seventy-five of them and many badly wounded, huddled inside the loose perimeter. Added to the shell-shocked survivors in the back of the HEMTT that made nearly a hundred.

  There had been two and a half million people in Denver, once.

  One of the Strykers deployed a spread of grenades from a roof-mounted MK-19 and smoke and fire tore through a stand of trees, shattering the wood and sending clouds of leaves twirling down through the air. As they pulled up to the Stryker group Clark heard the vehicles’ .50 caliber machine guns roaring in tight, controlled bursts, chopping down clusters of the infected as they emerged from the surrounding streets and buildings.

  The comms specialist’s phone chimed and she answered it, “Copy that Buckley, we are five by five. Captain, sir, there’s a helicopter coming in right now to upload these friendlies and they can take ours, too.”

  “Alright, finally,” Clark said. Finally something would actually be finished. He squinted against the sun and saw an MH-53 Pave Low coming in just above the tree tops. At least something was going right. The Pave Low, a double-wide chopper studded with instrument and weapon pods, was the biggest rotor-wing aircraft the ANG possessed. It could carry the most survivors.

  The Pave Low dropped its ungainly bulk onto a putting green and started loading civilians onboard. A copilot wearing a gold Second Lieutenant’s bar dropped out of the crew hatch by the nose and came running up to throw Clark a salute.

  “I admire your timing, airman,” Clark said, returning the salute. “We just arrived here ourselves.”

  “Sir, permission to inquire whether I am addressing Captain Bannerman Clark, sir?”

  “Granted, and yes, you are. What’s going on? Speak candidly, son, I don’t have all day.”

  “Sir, I have special orders for you, sir, straight from the Pentagon.” The Civilian, Clark thought. The man with the marshmallow peeps. What was he thinking, issuing orders to a military unit during combat operations? “We’re supposed to track you down and send you home. You should take your platoon and head somewhere fortified, they told us. Hunker down and wait for further instructions.”

  Clark sputtered in surprise. “That’s preposterous. There’s still work to be done here and I’m not leaving until that work is done and it isn’t done until I say when it is done!” Guilt, he thought. He was feeling guilty for his earlier doubts.

  The Second Louey looked down at his flight boots. “Sir, begging your pardon but I’m just the messenger and… sir, I’ve been flying over this town back and forth all day. I’m truly sorry but when you say there’s work to be done—there’s not. We haven’t seen any sign of real survival since this morning.”

  Ice cubes trickled down Clark’s spine. “That’s,” he said softly. “That’s not the kind of attitude I like to hear,” he continued but he couldn’t finish the rebuke. He tried to remember when the last survivor had climbed aboard the HEMTT. The last time they’d seen anyone else opposing the infected.

  He took a second to think about what that meant, but only a second.

  “Sergeant Horrocks,” he called, “did you hear what this man had to say? It’s time for us to make a tactical withdrawal.”

  Formerly known as a retreat. The National Guard—and the Federal Government—had written Denver off.

  “Get your asses in gear, my little babies,” Horrocks screamed at his platoon, walking away. “We’re popping smoke!” At the news some of the troops offered up a weary cheer.

  Chapter Three

  Dear Sis:

  The elms outside my window are dying, which hardly seems like a big deal now, does it? And yet I can’t help but look at them, at the sickly leaves and the branches that just aren’t budding. Someone came by today to paint them with medicine but stopped before he was half done, everyone is so distracted right now. Heard San Francisco was gone, now how could that be? How do you lose an entire city? The nurses turned off the television before I could find out. Please visit soon, if you can.

  Love, Irene

  [Letter delivered to an abandoned apartment in Minneapolis, MN 4/8/05]

  The tiny house stood on short stilts above the floor of the box canyon. A narrow row of stairs lead up to a weathered wooden door that didn’t quite fit its frame. Behind the house stood a white cylindrical tank, probably the fuel supply for a generator or a gas stove. Nilla spent most of an hour checking the place out, climbing the rocks all around. No road, not even a path lead to the misshapen door. As far as she could see in every direction lay nothing but desert. Who would live in such a desolate spot?

  She was asking herself that question when the door swung open, revealing a rectangle of cool darkness beyond. Unable to move fast enough to find cover Nilla did what was starting to come natural—she hid away her energy, made herself invisible.

  A man stepped out of the house and onto the first of the steps. He wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a white beard that descended in bushy curls to the middle of his chest. His head was shaven, or perhaps just bald. His skin had the sallow shade of undyed leather and he looked like he might be a hundred years old or perhaps only sixty. He scratched the back of one thigh and stared right at Nilla. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “Please, come inside. We need to talk.”

  “I heard a guy on the tv today, I think he was an evangelist or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was talking about the end of the world. Saying—”

  “Yeah.”

  “—right, saying maybe this, you know. Maybe this is it. Judgment day? And we’re being punished because of our sins. And that got me to thinking…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well I mean if we’ve already been judged, right? If God has already decided who’s good and who’s bad and all that shit… then what we do from now on just doesn’t matter. Like we could, I don’t know, maybe you and I could. Well.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  [Telephone call between two local customers in Boise, ID, 4/8/05]

  “Fuck you!” With a baby screaming in the crook of his left arm he lifted his shiny pistol and fired again. Bannerman Clark wondered if the man was even aiming. He certainly wasn’t hitting anything. “Fuck you,” he yelped with every shot. His voice had gone hoarse with it.

  With a hand signal Clark sent Squad Three forwar
d to back the man up. The infected citizens of Fountain, Colorado spun and dropped and beat their heels against the sidewalk, one after the other. After the fall of Denver the soldiers knew to take their time and line up perfect head shots. Anything else was a waste of ammunition.

  The man with the nickel-plated revolver couldn’t seem to bring his arm down. He wore a blue buttoned-down Oxford cloth shirt and tan chinos smudged with what might have been engine grease. Clark was pretty sure it wasn’t. “Somebody…” the man rasped, “somebody take this baby… it’s not mine, oh, fuck.” He closed his eyes and Clark rushed up to grab the infant before the man dropped it. He knew that look, had seen it hundreds of times before. “Fuck,” he screeched, and started to fold up, his knees turned to gelatin.

  “Someone get this man a survival blanket. He’s in shock,” Clark shouted but before anyone could obey the order Clark heard the chittering spring-loaded sound of a cheap firearm being cocked. He looked down and saw the revolver pointed up at his face. He could feel the heat coming out of the barrel, smell the spent powder.

  Nobody moved. The members of Squad Three were too smart and too well-trained to point their weapons at an armed assailant. Sudden movements and implied threats could spur on a desperate man instead of convincing him to stand down.

  “I’m Rich Wylie. I lived over there.” The barrel of the revolver dipped to the left. “Nice place, you know? I kept the yard nice, fertilized it, watered it all the time. You have to in this climate. I… paid my taxes. Do you understand me? I paid my taxes every goddamned year, I paid your salary and you were supposed to come rescue me.”

  “We’re here now,” Clark suggested, his tone as soft and even as he could manage. Bannerman Clark had a full board of medals on the breast of his dress uniform. It didn’t mean he could look into the barrel of a loaded gun without quaking in his boots. Absurdly the main thought in his head was that he hoped he wouldn’t soil his BDUs. Someone would see it, which would mean everyone would know about it within twenty-four hours and the jawjacking would go on forever. Clark knew—he’d been one of those kids with nothing better to do than trade scuttlebutt about the CO. “If you’ll put that weapon down we can—”

  “If I put this down you won’t listen to me! As soon as I do it your guys are going to tackle me, I’m not a complete moron. You need to hear this. You’re coming from Denver, right? Yeah, I saw all about that on the news. You’re coming from Denver. You were up there trying to do fuck knows what, you, you shot some dead people, ooh, how exciting but down here we didn’t have any military to help us. Down here we had two cops, and one of them had diabetes! He didn’t do so good.”

  It wasn’t so much news to Clark as the variation on a theme. The Adjutant General had drawn every troop in Colorado into the defense of Denver, leaving the rest of the front range without a military line of defense. Reinforcements from the east were supposedly on their way but for three critical days Colorado had stood alone.

  It was hard for Clark to fault the AG’s reasoning, though. Four million people inhabited the state of Colorado. Three million of them lived in or around Denver. Or at least they had.

  “I want my life back, but you can’t… you weren’t here in… in time…” a plaintive, high sound came out of Wylie’s throat. He didn’t have a lot left. “You can’t… stop this. You can’t stop this,” he said. His face had gone white. The revolver drifted downward and then fell from his hand to clatter on the street. In an instant Squad Three pushed in, knocking Clark backward, away from the assailant. One of them took the baby from him—it wouldn’t stop screaming. Two men grabbed at Wylie’s shirt and arms and neck, pulled his arms behind his back, restrained him. It was over in seconds. Clark swallowed though there was nothing in his mouth.

  “Fucking spaz,” a troop said, and filled his mouth to spit on Wylie. Sergeant Horrocks stepped up into the soldier’s face and stared him down until he swallowed visibly.

  Clark adjusted his boonie hat and turned away. “Sergeant, please find a place for this civilian in one of the vehicles,” he ordered over the sound of the baby’s cries. “And find… find someone to take this. This infant.” He couldn’t hear himself think. Alone, he strode away from the vehicles to stand on the shoulder of the road. He stared up over the tops of the quaint Victorian mountain town buildings, at the snow-covered peaks, until his stomach muscles stopped flip-flopping beneath his uniform shirt. It had been a long time since someone pointed a gun at him. He had served in two major wars and nearly a half dozen small conflicts and he’d never gotten used to the feeling. He had believed that he would get through the current crisis without it ever happening.

  The convoy got moving again before Clark was ready to go. He watched the HEMTT go by, two of the Strykers. Then the line of minivans and panel trucks and school buses—anything they could find, anything civilian that could hold a few people. The last of the Strykers pulled rear security. Clark swung up onto its back compartment and sat down on the turret, feeling better with the wind in his face.

  The Civilian had ordered him to get to a hardened location and wait. Clark had chosen Florence—the best fortified site he knew—and he would get there eventually. But not before he’d rescued every civilian he found between Denver and the supermax prison.

  Chapter Four

  US slouches toward Martial Law, Conspiracy Nuts Everywhere Cream their Jeans

  The Att-Gen asking for extra powers, well, what else is new. But with the Army pretty much owning half of the Western US already and security inside the Beltway making every trip to Starbucks into a fun-filled lightning round of “name that gun” this is starting to look like the real deal. Brr.

  [blog entry, wonkette.com, 4/9/05]

  Nilla perched on the edge of a hand-made wicker chair, her hands on the table. The bald man twisted the can opener a final time and put a tin of potted meat down between them. It looked like cat food.

  “I’m, uh, I’m Jason Singletary.” He showed her an expanse of brown and ugly teeth. She supposed it was a smile or something.

  “Nilla,” she said.

  “I know.” He stepped back from the table and moved his hands in front of him, touching his fingers together as if he was counting. “I know a lot of things about you. I know what your purpose is, I think. There’s a lot to discuss.”

  Nilla frowned at him. This was nonsense. How could he know her name? She’d never seen him before in her death. If he’d known her during her life he still wouldn’t know the name she’d chosen for herself. He was lying.

  He could see her when she was invisible, of course, which meant that maybe he had sources of information that weren’t readily available to her.

  She ran a fingertip across the puce surface of the potted meat and touched it to her tongue. She couldn’t deny it was tasty. It had been flesh once, after all. She dug in with a much-dented spoon he provided and started eating. “Why do you live—” she began, intending to ask him why he lived in such a lonely place, but he reacted as if she were shouting right in his ear, wincing away from her words, clutching at his head with both hands. He dashed into the tiny house’s kitchenette and grabbed a roll of tin foil, which he wrapped around and around his head until it formed a tight, shiny skullcap.

  “Sorry, what was that?” he asked.

  “I… was going… to ask,” Nilla said, trying to keep her words soft and slow, “why you lived all the way out here. In the middle of the desert.”

  He nodded happily. “Nevada has the lowest population of any of the fifty states,” he told her, reciting something he’d read in a book in school by the sound of it. “There’s a lot less chatter. I call it chatter, like the background transmissions they pick up on their radios, radio operators, they call that chatter.”

  He stepped backward, colliding with the wooden wall of his shack.

  “I’m, well, psychic,” he told her.

  “No, really,” Nilla said, digging with her finger for the last shreds of meat in the bottom of the tin. She couldn’
t remember eating it, frankly, it had gone so quickly and—

  Yes, really, she thought, interrupting her own train of thought. Which should have been impossible, she pondered—after all, nobody could think of two things at once, and therefore, I really am psychic. This is me you’re hearing. It just sounds like your own inner voice.

  Nilla stared up at him, trying not to think of anything. That’s impossible, I’m afraid. You’re always thinking about something, no matter how abstract or banal. The mind can’t just stand still. It has to keep moving or it dies. Like a shark. Sharks suffocate if they stop swimming.

  “Don’t do that again,” she told him. “It’s very disconcerting.”

  “Imagine how I feel,” he said out loud. “I have that—all of that, that noise in my head, except, it’s all the time, it’s, it’s, it’s… it’s very difficult having you here. I’m sorry but it has to be said. I thought, well, with your memory condition maybe, maybe just maybe you’d be less, oh God, less noisy, but but but but you’re just full. Full of questions. I’ve been living here a very long time. I get everything I need through the mail. You’re the first visitor I’ve had in twenty years.” As he spoke he kept scratching the skin around his eyes and the top of his nose as if something in his head was trying to get out. Nilla stared at his hands and he dropped them to his sides.

  She looked around the one-room shack for the first time, really, actually studying how Singletary lived. She saw his bed in one corner, a utilitarian cot covered in old, tattered magazines and a box of tissues. She saw his stove, a rusted white box that sat well away from any of the walls, and the shelves above it filled with tin cans. She saw the orange bottles that pills come in everywhere, scattered underfoot, lined up neatly on the edge of the table, interspersed with the stored food. She picked one up and studied its label.

  TEGRETOL (Carbamazepine), 1600 mg. Take three times daily with food.