Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  He flipped it open and started to talk.

  Chapter Three

  Bad result from the nephrectomy but codeine was made for nights like these and the swish of the dialysis machine is perfect white noise. She’s sleeping peacefully, now. Wish I could say the same. [Lab Notes, 11/1/02]

  Vikram tapped in a password on his keyboard and a window opened up on the main monitor. Satellite imagery of the Rockies, received in real time from the OSR’s newest and most sophisticated birds. The current view showed a composite image with the false color data from an infra-red Landsat run through a codec that matched it up with the standard footprint imaging of a Keyhole-class spybird.

  “Amazing—you’re telling me these pictures are how old?”

  “Only a second or two, and that delay comes from the time it takes the computers to process and render the images. We have a Lacrosse-class satellite coming over the horizon in a few minutes and then we’ll be able to start constructing stereoscopic images, they promise to me. Three dimensional views.”

  Bannerman Clark shook his head. He could hardly believe this. The last time he’d relied on satellite data to plan an offensive had been in Desert Storm. Back then images from the birds had to be developed—they came on actual photographic film. Sometimes it took hours to get an image, or even days if the footprints weren’t right. “How did we come so far so fast?” he asked.

  “Advances in computer technology,” Vikram suggested, with a shrug. “For the most part. Also there are very many more satellites now that before. They say five of them are passing over your head on any given day.”

  Clark shook his head. “We’re still looking for a needle in a haystack, though.” A map of Colorado had been tacked to one wall near the monitors. Desiree Sanchez’s epidemiology data had been plotted on the map as a series of vectors pointing back towards the epicenter. Theoretically it should have been all they needed to triangulate the position—to find the locus where the Epidemic had truly begun. Unfortunately Sanchez’s data were thin on the ground and some of them contradicted others. They had narrowed their search parameters to a narrow corridor high up in the mountains, a zone varying between three and seventeen miles across and about a hundred miles long, from Steamboat Springs down to Florence. That left them with fifteen hundred square miles of rugged terrain to look at. An area, then, a little larger than Rhode Island.

  Clark had to keep in mind as well the fact that they had no idea what they were looking for.

  “Alright, let’s start at the bottom of this map and work our way north. We’ll take shifts manning the controls—Vikram, you’ll need to give me a quick rundown on how they work. The next time your shift finishes go talk to the Chief and find out if any of the soldiers have training in signal intelligence. Let’s start panning across this ridge here, alright? I hope you’ve had your coffee.” Clark sat down next to Vikram and the master processor box. The ruggedized computer had so many cables and patch cords emerging from its back end that it looked like the head of a squid. The monitors, the keyboard and the mouse were all wireless, which still looked wrong to Clark, as if they were missing vital components, as if someone had installed them incorrectly. “How do you aim the camera?”

  Vikram smiled cheerfully and launched another program from his start menu. “Bannerman, we can do this that you ask. We can study every square inch of the display. Or we can run this algorithm that looks for salient features. It ignores the hundreds of square miles of tree cover, you see, and looks for things that are out of place.” Vikram keyed in a search request for point-sources of heat above one fifty degrees Celsius. The laptop chunked and grumbled for a moment and then windows started popping up all over the monitor. Vikram maximized one and together they looked at a rendered view of a car fire, the chassis blazing away in super-high-contrast black and white. The camera wheezed in and out of focus as it tried to stay locked on to the wavering flames.

  “I appreciate the fact that there are no enlisted men here, Vikram,” Clark said, a little testier than he meant it to sound, “but please stop making me look like such a fool.”

  “You have my deepest apologies.”

  Together they paged through the windows. At first each picture was a new and exciting toy, a present to be unwrapped but the story they told grew rapidly depressing and more depressing. The images looked to Clark after a while like microscope slides, layers of horror meticulously dissected and mounted on slips of glass. A sprawling, out of control forest fire on the Western Slope had the appearance of a vicious ameba attacking a stomach lining. Oil tanks exploding in colossal fireballs in Colorado Springs looked like alveoli bursting inside a collapsed lung.

  As horrific as the metaphors might be they hid a worse truth. Colorado, the state Bannerman Clark called home and which he had sworn to protect, was breathing its last gasps. He’d seen plenty of chaos in his march south to Florence but chaos was what you expected on the battlefield. Soldiers rarely saw what came after, the all-crushing descent of entropy and decay. There were few people in the satellite images. Those few who did show up were already dead and still moving only out of sheer perversity.

  “Time for a break,” he said, after about an hour. They had finished with the high-temperature images and had moved on to those targets that displayed movement above a certain threshold. He had looked at far too many pictures of packs of ghouls milling aimlessly through the village centers of tiny mountain towns, seen more than his share of cars racing away from undead communities. “I need to hit the head.”

  Vikram nodded, not bothering to look away from the screen. He collapsed a window and the next one underneath showed the linear, no-nonsense buildings of a military base. The Buckley ANG base, to be specific. The dead had swarmed through its main gates and were clustered on the parade ground, swarming over each other, clambering on top of each others’ limbs and torsos and faces like a scrum in a rugby match. Clark wondered what must be at the bottom of that heap to make the ghouls so desperate and so active. Food, of course, that was their prime motivation. Whether said food was or had been human or not he decided he didn’t want to know.

  He headed down the corridor and pushed open the door of the men’s room. Trash littered the floor, transparent cellophane and pieces of yellow cardboard. He could hear the Civilian inside one of the stalls talking on his cell phone.

  “Yeah, well you will do nothing of the—um, umgh—nothing of the fucking sort until I give you the word. No, nobody gets shot. I don’t care what she did to you, it doesn’t justify… look, even I answer to somebody. You have to do what you’re told, yeah, but this time you get something in return. You can write your own ticket, is what—anything that’s in my power. I dog you today, and it is worth so much to you. Umhumuh, ugh, gah. It’s the beauty of capitalism, everybody gets a turn pissing down somebody else’s neck. Fine, then, fuck you very much too. I’ll see you there in thirty-six hours.”

  Clark relieved himself and washed his hands carefully in the sink. He saw the stall door open in the mirror and the Civilian emerged with yellow foam dripping from one corner of his mouth. He had a half-finished box of marshmallow peeps in one hand and his cell phone in the other.

  “Looking good, Clark, looking good. I might have something for you in a while. Keep yourself ready,” the Civilian said. His eyes looked like they’d been frosted and there was sweat on his forehead and on the tip of his nose. He left the bathroom without further comment.

  Back in the control room Vikram had narrowed his search down to three images he wanted Clark to see. The first showed the prison itself, which was thronged with motion—human, living human motion out in the shantytown beyond the walls. There were a few spots of extreme temperature Clark couldn’t identify. They weren’t located near any of the exhausts from the HVAC systems, nor were they anywhere near the generators. “We’ll need to check those,” Clark agreed. “It would be ironic, I suppose, to find out the terrorists were actually working out of our own basement. It would also be easy to mop up so
I doubt that’s the case, given our luck.”

  Vikram switched to a second image. A complex of buildings near Clear Creek Summit. An abandoned but functional ski resort, judging by the constantly moving chair lift. “This looks like a hardened facility,” he told Clark. Look, here, these doors on the main building. They’ve been reinforced with welded steel. Over here, this looks to me to be a machine gun nest, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re right. They have power so we can assume there are people inside. Of course right now there’s no reason to think they’re bad guys. Anybody sane would reinforce their doors right now and a machine gun for perimeter security is one of the better home improvements I can think of. This definitely belongs on our short list, though. What’s this?” he asked, pointing at a minimized window near the bottom of the screen. The third candidate for the site of the Epicenter.

  Vikram opened it without comment. When he saw the image Clark sat down carefully and folded his hands in his lap.

  “This one gets my vote,” Vikram said, and Clark had to agree.

  “The dead are just standing there. They look like they are waiting for something," Vikram said, blowing up one corner of the image until the screen showed nothing but corpses, standing in a perfect semicircle, looking, well, contented. He zoomed back to check another feature of the image, rotating it through three dimensions. "What are those? Dinosaurs?”

  Chapter Four

  Sheldrake is a crackpot, of course. Canalized pathways? Morphic resonance? It’s all chemical! I don’t know why I waste my time with this nonsense. Cell differentiation stimulated by a biological field that can’t be directly detected? Come on! [Lab Notes, 4/9/03]

  Up through Nevada, deep into denied territory. Nilla traveled farther in one night in the Space Van than she had since her re-awakening. Hundreds of miles. There was no traffic.

  “Things were good in Vegas, we had an operation,” Mike told Mellowman once. Nilla had nothing to do but listen to the two of them bicker, that and stare out the back of the van at stars and night. “We had some protection. This road leads to… I don’t know, hell. Hell on earth.”

  “Here be dragons,” Mellowman agreed. “And some people like dragons. Some people will pay anything for just one quick gander at a dragon’s left butt cheek.” He shifted in the back of the van, duck-walking across Nilla’s field of vision. His eyes were bright red, almost glowing, which wasn’t surprising considering the ratio of pot smoke to oxygen in the van.

  “Where are you taking me?” Nilla creaked.

  Mellowman seemed to have found a new method for coping with her refusal to die, it seemed, and that was simply to ignore her. “Besides,” he said, but not to her. “Vegas is on the way out.”

  “What are you talking about? The Chamber is keeping people safe!”

  “The Chamber,” he told Mike, his tone growing imperial, “is made up of assholes like me and I know I’m running out of ideas. More people getting sick every day—more of these things getting loose. No. Vegas is on its last legs. If we want to make something happen, something real, the east coast is where we need to be. Maybe we even need to go further. I bet they’ll just love our act in London. You ever been to Paris? It’s the City of Lights. I can take you there if you’ll just shut up and do what I tell you.”

  “You think it’ll stop here? You don’t think we’ll take it to Europe with us?”

  “I’m doing what feels right. I’m going on instinct. That’s what I’ve got, which is what has taken me this far and let me survive, and even build something, in a world that wants to kill me every time I turn around. And you know what, Mike? Lately my instinct is talking to me about heading east, and how I can do that. Lately it’s been telling me I got to travel light. That I gotta trim the dead wood. How do you like that? I will include you in my plans because you know how to brew up the shit. Assuming you stop arguing with me.”

  There was a long pause before Mike answered. “You want to be alone with him, with the Termite?” he finally said, sounding like he had surrendered something. “He’s a hell of a driver and he digs graves faster than anyone I know but he’s not much for conversation. Not to mention what’s going to happen when you run out of scooby snacks. You think he’s tweaking now…”

  Mellowman laid down on a piece of foam rubber that was almost large enough to serve him as a mattress. “You got a point there, I suppose. Now shut up. I want sleep. Mellowman wants sleep!”

  “Sure. Sure thing,” Mike said. Nilla couldn’t see his face from where she sat.

  Silence after that, for a long time. The sound of wheels on concrete, which after a while stops being a sound at all and becomes something different, more fundamental, less liminal. Nilla started listening for the jingle of the keys in the ignition, or the sound of Mellowman’s heavy breathing. He never snored, though occasionally he muttered something dark and foul in his slumber.

  She wasn’t allowed to sleep. She wasn’t allowed to just zone out. It seemed that whatever fate had let her live through so much wasn’t in the business of being kind.

  She heard Mike come across the floor toward her just fine when the time came. When he was sure that Mellowman was fast asleep, most likely. He spoke to her in a dry whisper. “I know you’re dead. Undead. I know you’re not like the others, though. What the hell are you?” He didn’t seem to expect a straight answer from her. Perhaps he thought she was some kind of spy, that she would refuse to give him that kind of information. If she’d known, though, she would have told him everything.

  “You have some friends in high places, I’ll give you that. Getting you out of that shallow grave like that… it had to take some serious incentive. Or some serious threats. Somebody wants you really bad if they can talk Rick out of a thrill like that. Care to tell me about it?”

  She shook her head, gently so as not to dislodge it from her neck. The vibration of the moving van made her feel as if she would fly to pieces at any moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “There’s this guy, he’s dead, but like me. His name is Mael Mag Och. He said he would try to help me. That’s all I know. He talks to me… he sends his thoughts into my head, like, like telepathy, and he told me he would try to help.”

  Mike sat up and looked down into her face. “Mael Mag Och? What kind of name is that?” He leaned closer. “Do you think—I mean, what kind of a deal is he making with us?”

  Nilla squinted. “Oh, he would never make a deal with you. You’re the one who makes the vaccine. You’re trying to stop us.”

  Mike’s face folded in half down the middle. “No, that’s not… I guess you don’t know.” He looked over at the jar of iridescent red pills. “That stuff’s just a placebo. A sugar pill.” He stared into her eyes looking for comprehension. “It’s worthless, it doesn’t do anything. This is all a scam that Rick came up with. I have a degree in environmental chemistry, I knew how to make them. Them, and the stuff that keeps the Termite marginally sane. It was Rick’s idea to call it a vaccine. He called it a psychology experiment at first, he wanted to see if coming back from the dead was all in people’s minds. Either that or he was bullshitting me from the start. Listen. I need to get away from him. You need to just get away. Maybe you and I can make our own deal. Maybe we can help each other out.”

  She lacked the strength to turn herself invisible. She lacked the strength to sit up for very long. She couldn’t imagine any way in which she could help him but she knew this was her big chance, her one long shot at getting away from Mellowman and the Space Van. Mael Mag Och would never broker a deal with a living human, of course, but maybe if she just lied, made something up…

  In the end she lacked the energy to think up a convincing lie.

  “I… I’ll try,” she said, finally, her voice very small.

  Mike’s face froze, expressionless and cold. “I hope you try hard. Rick’s not like other people. He’s violently insane.”

  He slid back across the floor of the van and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the night
.

  In the morning, with white light coming through the van’s window, pummeling her with its heat, the van slowed down and went off road. Nilla felt it jounce and shudder and throw her around like a rag doll before it finally came to a stop. When the door opened and she could see outside again she was looking at the entrance to a cave. Warning signs covered the entrance: JUKEBOX CAVE. OFF LIMITS! A barred iron gate covered the entrance sealed with chains and a heavy padlock.

  Mellowman stretched and groaned as he got up from his narrow bed. He stepped out of the van and reached deep into the front of his pants as if he was playing with himself. Eventually he pulled out his hand and revealed a steel key, which fit the padlock perfectly. He wheeled the gate open and the van backed into the burnt orange darkness of the cave. This, Nilla realized, must be his special spot.

  Darkness collapsed on top of her as the van pulled further inside.

  Chapter Five

  This smacks of Vitalism but… I can’t deny those results. Repeatable, if you follow the extended lab instructions… teaching the cells to grow? The force that makes the grass run green? Come on. I’m looking at magic here, plain and simple. Somebody bring me my pointy hat and my wand. [Lab Notes, 7/21/03]

  “We’re about five miles from the old Air Force base at Wendover. Just across the border into Utah.” Mellowman stood silhouetted against the bare purple light at the mouth of the cave. Inside wasn’t total darkness—a Coleman portable lantern painted a rough circle of yellow on the floor perhaps a dozen yards away. Nilla’s eyes weren’t in great shape, however, and she couldn’t make much out.

  “Back during the war,” he went on, “World War II, I think, the airmen used to come up to these caves with girls they picked up in town. The girls didn’t want their daddies seeing what they were doing. It got to be such a popular passtime that they brought in a cement mixer and put down the floor your are currently drooling on. It’s tough to enjoy yourself with stalagmites poking you in the back. Somebody else figured they’d give the place an air of legitimacy by rigging up a jukebox in here, and that’s where the name came from. Jukebox Cave. They had some great parties, my grampa used to tell me. He was one of those guys. I’ve always loved this place. Can’t you feel it, the vibe in here? The feeling, that low-down, that dirty feeling. This is ground zero for getting it on. This is fuck heaven. I brought some girls here myself when I was a young Mormon, back when I used to have ninety-nine sex. You ever had a ninety-nine? You know what that is?”