Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  “No, I—” Clark looked down at his briefcase. “With your pardon, though, there are some papers I need to show you. This is crucial material.”

  “I know that, Bannerman. I heard what you said on the phone. Now come on. I’m counting on you for my dead cat bounce. Did you know you were the only military type to come out of Denver without losing a single troop?” He held up a hand for patience though Clark had not interrupted him. “It’s definitely a shame about Sanchez. Read all about her, wish I could have met her. Come on. The person we’re meeting for lunch will want to hear about your papers.” The Civilian rose from the desk and headed out the door. It was all Clark could do to keep up.

  He protested a few times that they should really talk in private first but the Civilian just smiled. Clark played along—he needed the man. He needed the authorization to put together the last two pieces of the puzzle. He needed satellite time.

  And he needed to find the blonde girl. She would have information that he crucially needed. She would be the answer he sought. She had to be.

  They moved quickly through the maze of the dilapidated office building, weaving through rows of cubicles and passing through two steel fire doors. Finally they arrived at a corner office in the third floor of the building. A keycard reader had been installed hastily next to the door, the plaster underneath broken and crumbling. The Civilian swiped a card through the slot and they stepped inside.

  An aged woman in an immaculate business suit rose from behind a desk and hurried toward them. Her face was so slack and bloodless that Clark reached for the sidearm that he’d left in Florence.

  “I’m not dead yet, Captain,” the woman said, her mouth an unmoving slot in the middle of her face.

  “Botox,” the Civilian whispered behind his hand.

  “This is not a town that respects wrinkles, not anymore. Special Agent Purslane Dunnstreet,” she said, and took Clark’s hand. Her skin felt as dry as paper. “Welcome,” she said, waving one skeletally thin arm expansively, “to the War Room.”

  Clark looked around at the office, a cluttered room maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Paper in every conceivable form filled the room, stacks of it on the carpet, rolled sheets like scrolls stuck into actual pigeonholes, bound volumes squeezed into overloaded metal shelving units. One wall was lined with dozens of old grey enamel filing cabinets. A row of laser printers sat on the floor by the window, wired to a beige desktop computer. Page after page rattled through their mechanisms, filling the air with the smell of baking toner, more paper being created by the second.

  “Agent Dunnstreet, meet Bannerman Clark, my favorite metrosexual. Clark, Purslane here is an old spy, one of the original Cold Warriors. I’ve never met anyone who hates Communists more.”

  “Jesus has taught me,” Dunnstreet said, her frozen eyes piercing the Civilian, “to hate the sin, not the sinner. Communism is a perversion, a sick compulsion of thwarted self-hatred. Communists are persons, and as persons they can be re-educated, re-oriented, brought back into the flock. Most of them. The fact that this country is longitudinally trending Republican should demonstrate that much.”

  “Yeah… anyway… she’s been back here since the sixties. She was, what, NSA originally? She was funded all through the Reagan years and then got funded down under Clinton. Except nobody bothered to check if she was still here. She came in day after day, her very existence so heavily classified the Dems didn’t have a chance of rooting her out, and kept up her lonely vigil. After 9/11 she surfaced again, or at least she chose to remind certain well-placed individuals that she was still here. Her particular field of expertise appealed to the DHS and she was rolled up under Ridge and friends… now we’ve reached a kind of tipping point and she has become one of the most important people on the planet.”

  Clark frowned. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand. What exactly do you do?”

  Dunnstreet folded her arms across her narrow chest. “I deal in abstracts, Captain, intangibles that I keep in a ledger book and next to them I copy down numbers, as I may. I’m a hypotheticals modeler, a what-if specialist. For the last forty years I have been positing one terrible scenario after another, and plotting ways to deal with them should they ever arise. In specific I have been imagining a land war fought on the territory of the United States. This is Warlock Green, my masterwork.” She gestured at the printers humming under the window. “These are the operational parameters and legal instruments necessary to win such a war. It is a fail-protected strategy that I stand behind one hundred per cent.”

  The Civilian beamed. “Warlock Green is a protocol for the end of the world.”

  Chapter Eleven

  GONE TO BIRMINGHAM “SAFE ZONE”, JIM PETERS AND THREE BOYS. WON’T BE BACK—HELP YOURSELF IF YOU NEED IT, LEAVE IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE IF YOU DON’T [Handwritten note taped to an abandoned car in Jasper, AL, 4/10/05]

  “I touched his face with these fingers. His skin like beaten copper. His eyes were terrible to look upon. The water that had frozen me and kept me from the worm, for two thousands of years—th-there never was a thing so cold as those eyes.” Even as he relived the memory Nilla could see the religious awe that gripped Mael Mag Och and twisted his spine rigid. His face was the blank mask of the trance state, his eyes wild under their beetling brows. “He wore a mantle so fine, so soft to the touch that it lifted as the cold water stirred around me. Teuagh, he was, the Father of Clans. The judge of men. And he was angered. “Gheibh gach nì bàs!” he told me. Everything must die. Lass, do you believe me, that I saw him, that we spoke?”

  “Yes,” Nilla said. She stood on top of an arch of red rock overlooking a million square miles of desert canyons twisting like the surface of the world had been rumpled up, bedsheets kicked sideways by the stretching, yawning upheaval of the Rocky Mountains. Coursing out of tiny holes in the rock, smoke, greasy and thick with soot rolled down the canyons in a flash flood of dark energy, from east to west, following the sun. It picked and tore at the rock, kicked up great spuming sprays of darkness, pushed onward, ever onward, flooding the world. She blinked and it was gone, just rock again, stained the color of sunset.

  She’d seen lots of things since she gave in to Mael Mag Och. She’d seen her own reflection. She’d seen a world that hated her, and she’d seen why, and why she was allowed to hate it back. Why she was supposed to.

  She’d seen how things really worked. How anyone could just fuck with you, any time they wanted. There was no stopping them and they could make your life hellish. Make you do horrible things.

  “Teuagh is moving us, like the pieces in a game, and I doubt you like it much, I know I don’t care for it. Yet it’s a hard thing to move backwards on this board. It’s a painful thing to break the rules. You see, don’t you, how we’re made for this? How his hand molded the clay of us for this work? We can’t paint pictures, lass, not with these clumsy fingers. We can’t write poetry. But we can kill. Oh, we are made to kill.”

  “Yes,” Nilla said. They were moving, moving eastward. The armless dead man moved behind them, easily keeping up. Against the flow of the dark energy—Nilla could feel it growing stronger the farther they went. Stronger and more angry. It raged against the world it destroyed, it bit and scratched and rent everything it touched asunder. It was inside of her, that darkness, and Mael Mag Och had become its emblem.

  She was terrified of him. She needed him.

  “There,” he said. He pointed to a place ahead of them. A place where the twisting canyons had been dragged into a semblance of order, into straight lines: a grid. Streets marking out square plots of land, tiny houses in the desert all pointing the same way. The city glittered on the dull desert plain.

  It occurred to her that Mael was manipulating her. Maybe he was putting thoughts in her head. Maybe he was just using her the way people have used each other since the first dawn. But like a dream that feels so vivid when you hold it in your head, only to flee in every detail when you consciously try to recall it, she couldn’t make the co
nnections.

  “There she lies, the fortress citadel of Las Vegas. She’s stood longer than most, and I admire her for it. But all worlds must end some time. My world ended when I plunged into that dark water, a human sacrifice for the good of my folk. Yours ended with teeth in your neck. You know what you need to do, lass. For me and the Father of Clans.”

  “Yes,” Nilla said, and headed down into the city of Las Vegas alone.

  can u help?!? Got 3 ded outside, more on way. Plz, B4 2 l8!!1 [SMS spam message, Evergreen, OR, 4/11/05]

  An old chart laid out in grid squares flapped across the wooden table, stirring up dust motes in the wan light of the office. “Here, gentlemen, you see the Potomac river. It is so wonderfully fitting that my new Army of the Potomac will be turning the tide on this menace. I’ve thought often of that irony, especially in draft revisions five and six, which seem to fit best with the current situation. Revisions seven, eight and nine assume an insurgence of anarchists from the Mexican border. I don’t feel that applies to us now, no.”

  Purslane Dunnstreet’s botulin-paralyzed face couldn’t show the years of tiny strains, the pockmarks of decades spent crouched over situation papers and classified troop strength analyses and ordnance maps, all the years of being ignored in her fly-specked pigeonhole where the light coming through the window was the color of old tobacco stains and even the radio got bad reception. The frozen contours of her eyes couldn’t demonstrate the obsessive nature of her task, or the million slight frustrations the years must have brought her. The mental enervation of planning and planning and revising and re-envisioning and drafting and rewriting and compiling five hundred page reports guaranteed to be only glanced at before they were filed away in the Pentagon’s back hallways, in the White House sub-basements, but most of all, the sanity fatigue of just working at it, spending every waking moment obsessed with one singular idea that no one else ever took seriously—that strain could not manifest on her face.

  Instead it came out in her fingers.

  She touched her neck and sighed happily. “Honestly I was beginning to doubt the Dunnstreet Maximum Faith-Based Provisional Order of Battle would ever need to be invoked. I suppose the Boy Scouts had it right after all. ‘Be Prepared’, it really is the most essential thing.” She waggled her digits in the air and Clark’s stomach churned.

  Thin, white, worm-like appendages, extruded lengths of flesh that twisted around one another in complex patterns. It was not enough to say that she wrung her hands in excitement as she laid out her Big Idea on the table before them. She tied her pasty fingers in knots, cracked the knuckles with a sound like mice being trodden underfoot, drummed her fingertips on the table so fast her French manicure blurred while Clark watched it dance.

  “The New Citizen Army will sweep through here, and up through Georgetown, cutting off any advance. The city will be secured. And then it’s onward to New York.” A new map clattered across the table, blasting cool air into Clark’s face.

  He shook himself awake. He’d been so mesmerized by the fingers he’d lost almost all the details of the plan. He had the gist of it, though.

  Purslane Dunnstreet’s foolproof plan would have worked marvelously—against an invasion of Nazi stormtroopers. She wanted entire columns of armored vehicles stationed on the Beltway. She wanted to draw in every element of the military—regulars and reserves—that could make it in time to create a single overwhelming force to protect Washington while the rest of the country was left defenseless. She wanted constant overflights of D.C. with nightly bombing runs. She had provisions against insurgencies by Fifth Columnists and a contingency for providing disinformation to any spies who cropped up. She wanted commando raids on enemy strongholds and a network of resistance fighters to sprout up in the occupied territories.

  Not a single part of her plan made any sense when applied to a horde of mindless, unarmed civilians who outnumbered the military units a hundred to one.

  The infected didn’t send spies into your camp. They didn’t hold strongpoints or even beachheads. You could bomb them into paste and others would just flood in to take their place.

  Clark glanced over at the Civilian, who was paring his fingernails with a tiny nail clipper attached to a keychain.

  The Civilian must have understood the look on Clark’s face. He shrugged in reply.

  When Dunnstreet finally finished her presentation she went to the printers and handed each of them a hefty document, still warm and redolent of ink. Clark leafed through his, finding hundreds of pages of information on how to deal with looters in a time of martial law.

  “Your Operational Parameters Document, gentlemen. Please do not lose it. That would be a grave breach of national security. It outlines the powers you will assume and the tools and equipment you may requisition in the defense of freedom.”

  “It’s like the Shaper Image catalog,” the Civilian gleamed, “except with more nerve gas.”

  Clark flipped to the back of the document. A hefty chapter covered when he was and was not justified in using lethal force against healthy civilians. Basically whenever he wanted, he gathered. He just needed to know which code to use when he filled out his after-action reports later. Clark placed it neatly on the table, square with the edge.

  He cleared his throat. “Thank you very much for that presentation, Agent Dunnstreet,” he said, rising from his chair. “I have some information I’d like to show you myself.” He clicked open the latches of his briefcase and took out the papers Vikram had prepared for him.

  “I do so love raw data,” Dunnstreet announced, writhing her fingers together at her shoulder until they flew apart with a dry snap.

  Chapter Twelve

  To: DarkGothKiller14@hotmail.com

  From: xxXHomerclesXxx@battle-net.com

  Re: Mom’s Okay, just Scared

  So stop calling all the time, k? No word from dad/step-whore but will let you know. Don’t come here, coz Ohio is bad, according to the tv. Stay put and safe, bro.

  Peace out

  ted

  [Undeliverable email stored on server mail@battle-net.com, 4/12/05]

  Clark laid a sheet of 11x17 paper on the table. It showed a map of the United States with Vikram’s spiderweb superimposed on top in various colors. “Our epidemiology studies produced this. A woman lost her life for it.” He met Dunnstreet’s gaze, then the Civilian’s. They had to listen to this very, very closely. It could change everything. “Originally we were working on an infectious disease hypothesis. That is, that the Epidemic is a pathogen spread by close contact with infected bodily fluids. We believed it began in the prison at Florence, then spread to California by way of a vacationing staff member. The chain of evidence looked good and we believed we understood how this thing works.”

  Of course he had looked for a pathogen. It was what he was trained for: biological terrorism. He remembered how he had upbraided Assistant Warden Glynne for letting the prison riot go three days before calling it in. Glynne had assumed he was looking at a new and especially pernicious drug. Drugs were a major problem at the prison, so drugs were what he looked for.

  Shame pushed up out of Clark’s collar and spread across his cheeks. He should have been more flexible, more open to other possibilities. Countless people had died because he had assumed the Epidemic had to be a disease.

  “Then some very smart people thought to actually put the data into a spreadsheet and see what came out. What we see now is that this isn’t an infectious disease at all. Whatever it may be instead is spreading in a radial pattern, something no biological agent ever does. Instead it propagates like sound waves or radio waves, only far, far slower.” He pointed at some blotches on the map, places separated by hundreds of miles but which had been overrun by the infected on the same day, the same hour. “It’s emanating from somewhere here in the Rocky Mountains and spreading outward in every direction like a ripple on a pond. Nothing stops it, nothing can protect against it. Wherever the leading edge of this wave arrives, the dead come
back to life and attack the living.”

  “The dead?” the Civilian asked, glee lighting up his face.

  “The dead.” Time to face facts. Desiree Sanchez had finally proved her point to Clark, and all it cost her was everything she had. Enough! Guilt wasn’t going to get him what he needed. “I don’t know what’s here.” He stuck his finger on the spot in the mountains that had to be the epicenter of the apocalypse. “But I know it’s causing this… disaster to happen. And I believe that given the right opportunity,” he stiffened his spine and stared into the middle distance. “Well. If something can be turned on, perhaps it can be switched off.”

  “You think you can stop the Epidemic? You want to stop it?” Purslane Dunnstreet asked, sounding dismayed.

  “Stop it altogether? The dead just fall down and don’t get up again, nobody else rises from the grave, we get around to the long and painful process of rebuilding?” the Civilian asked, looking greedy.

  Clark folded his arms behind his back and nodded, just once. This was it. The last best chance for humanity and it could be done in his back yard with a handful of men.

  “So you’re saying,” Dunnstreet said, very, very slowly, “that you don’t want to participate in the Defense of the Potomac.” She went to her charts. “I had a company picked out for you, especially, Captain. A company all your own.”

  Clark’s face fell. After decades of keeping his feelings to himself, this was too much.

  “Purslane, I think perhaps we’ve covered enough for today,” the Civilian said, rising from his chair.

  “Captain,” Dunnstreet said, ignoring him. “I can understand if my battle orders frighten you. I can, truly, I know what it is like to quaver before a grand duty. I hope you will reconsider. Before you leave, though, will you do one thing for me? Will you pray with me for our nation?”