From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  “What? How?”

  “I don’t know,” Kumar answered, picking up the laptop and tapping away on it again. “You’d have to ask him. I’m not a microbiologist. He says they don’t need much, so they probably just absorb stuff from all around them, or something like that. Where to next?”

  “I want to see ground zero,” Becky said.

  Kumar sighed. “What? You mean, like, 9-11?”

  “No,” she said, lightly punching his shoulder. “I mean the place where the outbreak started. Kris was telling me about it. Where was it again?”

  “Bangor?” Kumar said, with an expression like she’d just requested salmon-flavored ice cream. “With all the places in the world we can choose, you want to look in on Bangor?”

  Becky stiffened with annoyance. “I just want to see where it happened.”

  “I dunno,” Kumar said. “Sounds boring.”

  Her expression changed. Out came her bottom lip in a sulky frown, and she clasped her hands, which happened to have the side effect of pushing her breasts together.

  “Please?” she said, turning her liquid eyes on him.

  “Uh… yeah! Sorry, I…” The laptop almost slipped from his lap. “No. Yeah. No, that makes sense, babe. Gotta… gotta… um…”

  He caught the laptop just in time and began tapping furiously.

  “Aren’t they adorable when the relationship is fresh and new?” Krissy sighed, smiling at the pair. “It’s like you could get them to drink liquid nitrogen.”

  “Yeah,” Felicia said, putting the cookie platter down on the coffee table, “and then later, you can’t even get them to lift the seat.”

  Sensing the possibility of trouble brewing, Cameron jumped to his feet.

  “Let me give you a hand, baby,” he said, grabbing a few empties. “You know I worship the ground you walk on.”

  “I know it, baby,” Felicia replied, smiling as she took the bottles from him. “And don’t you worry. You lift my seat just fine.”

  “Nicely played,” Krissy said. “Juuust enough to keep him jumping.”

  Cameron looked at Brian. “You married this woman?”

  “Seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” Brian answered, watching the screen. “I mean, she came with her own set of handcuffs and everything.”

  “Bangor, Maine,” Kumar said. “Should be coming up right…. now.”

  “Oh thank you, Kumar,” Becky gushed, clearly enjoying her influence. “I’ll have to remember… to reward…”

  She dwindled off into silence.

  For a moment, nobody said a word. All anyone could do was gaze in astonishment at the images on the screen.

  Finally, Becky murmured, “We have to tell the General.”

  “Screw that,” Krissy said, standing up from the couch. “We have to tell Marshal. We have to tell everybody.”

  The General strolled into the conference room with a relaxed smile.

  “What’s with this emergency meeting, Marshal?” he asked. “I was in the middle of planning my greatest strategic campaign. You never told me there was a golf course just adjacent to the downtown area. Well, to misquote Robert Duvall, ‘Zombies don’t golf!’ So, the way I see it…”

  He stopped and looked at the grim faces all around, a veritable who’s who of New Toronto. Professor Scratchard, standing in front of a blank wide screen, looked up from a quiet conversation he’d been having at the General’s arrival. Lieutenant Marlowe was signaling to him to take the empty chair next to his. Everyone else seemed to be either lost in their own private contemplation or just as confused as he was. Marshal sat at the head of the long table looking both thoughtful and morose.

  The General sighed. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he said, moving over to take the chair next to Marlowe and Stevens.

  There was a brief quiet as everybody sat waiting.

  Finally, Marshal stirred.

  “Early this afternoon,” he said without, “some of our people were using the American satellites to hunt for the missing horde. It was last seen moving southeast, missing New Toronto by at least a hundred kilometers, then moving into Lake Ontario. Their search eventually caused them to take a look at Bangor, Maine, otherwise known as ground zero for the outbreak.”

  He nodded to Scratchard. “This is what they discovered.”

  The screen came to life.

  At first, it was difficult to understand what was being shown. From the sky, it looked like a tangled blot of twisting, interconnected muscle tissue, lumpen blobs, and paper-thin membranes. That they were looking at some new, mutated rearrangement of human flesh could not be doubted. Thanks to the angle, however, it was difficult to apply any sort of perspective.

  “About an hour later,” Marshal continued, “as we were calling this meeting, we got another look at a slightly better angle.”

  “Okay, okay,” the General said. “So we found the enemy. Bangor is still a long way away from us.” Then he squinted and pointed at the screen. “What’s that thing right there? That small lumpy thing poking out of the mess of human tissue.”

  “That, General,” Scratchard said, “is a twenty story building.

  The General leaned forward and reexamined the footage in alarm.

  “We’re here,” Marshal said, “to discuss options, if there are any. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what we can do, only that we must do something.”

  The video on the screen painted a picture of downtown Bangor, Maine, covered in great swaths of human tissue, like some macabre, hellish cityscape. Towers of flesh climbed up to the sky, dwarfing the largest buildings of the town, then linking together to form lattices, bridges, platforms, and support columns. Human body parts, arms, legs, and other familiar bits, could sometimes be seen poking out of the mass, like leftover afterthoughts not quite erased from the building material.

  “Jesus Christ,” Luca muttered. “How fucking big is it?”

  “Roughly?” Scratchard glanced at the image thoughtfully. “One can only guess. But assuming the density is uniform – though I rather doubt we can – and calculating a general estimate of the overall volume of space being taken up, I would say that we’re looking at a mass of… forty billion metric tonnes? About ninety trillion pounds for you Americans.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Elizabeth said, covering her mouth.

  “Ninety trillion?” Stevens gasped.

  “How…” James Snake looked pale as he licked his lips. “How much is that in people?”

  “Again, it’s hard to say,” Scratchard said. “There’s a fairly wide margin of error in calculations made from this kind of distance. Those twisting towers are at least three times as high as the CN Tower, if I’m to judge by perspective. But there could be hollows, stretched tissue… in fact, there probably is. But even if that’s true, the bottom line is still staggering. But if what we’re seeing is in keeping with the pound per cubic meter ratio…”

  He hesitated, watching the numbers flash by in his head.

  “There’s a minimum of four hundred million people mixed up to make that thing,” he said, “or maybe as many as six.”

  He looked down at his notes, allowing it to sink in. Marshal, who’d already heard the report in totality, simply stared down at the table with a faraway expression.

  “How could there be so many?” Ellen breathed. “That’s… that’s more than the population of Canada, the United States, and Mexico combined.”

  “And there’s still walkers out there, walking the streets,” Torstein pointed out.

  “Um. We’re pretty sure they’ve been migrating to Bangor from all over the planet,” Scratchard said. “How they decided who went and who continued to hunt for more humans…”

  He shrugged, indicating he didn’t care.

  “Our observations recently have lead us to believe that New Toronto’s population of undead has diminished by as much as seventy-five percent,” Marshal said. “We’ve seen examples of undead heading east and now we know why. This is a culling
that’s been occurring all over the world. Everywhere, a large percentage of the undead are packing up and migrating to Bangor. As close as we are, the percentages appear to be higher, but who knows? Maybe there’s another four hundred million headed that way as we speak.”

  “Do we know why?” Captain Vandermeer asked.

  Scratchard altered his posture slightly to indicate God, who was sitting at the table nearby.

  “They’re building an assimilator,” God said, pointing up at the screen. “That place there. That gap between those four towers. That’s where it will happen. That’s where they’ll come through the gate.”

  “Who’s going to come through?” Torstein asked.

  “And what gate?” Vandermeer pressed.

  “Most of you will remember,” Marshal explained, “when Professor Scratchard angered almost everyone in the community by injecting God with an engineered strain of the organism. His collusion with God, as unacceptably dangerous as it was, provided us with a unique insight into the thought processes of the organism, such as they are. For a brief period, he shared a consciousness with the collective and was able to understand their true purpose.”

  “The organism is a manufactured, artificial life-form,” God said. “They were designed specifically for the purpose of interstellar exploration, much the same way that humans might create and use robots for the same purpose. The designers – the organism thinks of them only as ‘the Masters’ – are also single-celled, only far, far more evolved and collectively intelligent. They have, it would appear, unlocked the secrets to teleportation, and engineered the organism to help them explore and colonize the galaxy.”

  “Teleportation is a rather mundane way of describing it,” Scratchard interjected with a sour expression. “Think instead of the ability to open up wormholes through time and space. Stable wormholes allow two-way passage, but require two fixed gate points. Unstable wormholes require only one fixed gate point, travel in only one direction, but are entirely random in where they egress. The slave-organism has within its genetic coding the blueprints to construct a second fixed gate point, which they refer to as an assimilator, thereby creating a stable wormhole back to the home planet.”

  With a gesture, he returned their attention to the images on the screen.

  “This is an assimilator,” he said, “and it is less than a week from completion.”

  For a long time, no one spoke. The crushing implications of his words reached out to each of them in turn, generating a wave of despair that strangled the room. It was as if in one, single sentence, Scratchard had condemned them to an abyss, and no one could think of what to say.

  “Now,” Scratchard continued, when the silence had stretched too long, “these… ‘Masters’… their technology is all biomorphic. Everything they do comes from a manipulation of living organic material on the cellular level. For example, if they want to generate a magnetic field, a cyclone of about a billion individual cells will form a complex matrix and quite literally grow an organic machine capable of producing that effect. Interestingly enough, this is the source of the zombie virus’s huge blind spot where our technology is concerned. As a mere creation of the Masters, it just doesn’t have the foundation, or the programmed imagination, to understand mechanical science the way we do.

  “The ‘Masters’ themselves, on the other hand, are more adaptable in their cognitive abilities. It is not only likely that they will be able to, upon reflection, understand and respond to our technology, they will almost certainly be able to things the like of which we can’t even imagine.”

  “So that’s it, then,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “It’s over.”

  Scratchard considered this, and then nodded. “A fair assessment, I think. Yes.”

  “Professor,” Marshal said, his voice filled with warning.

  “What, Marshal?” Scratchard demanded, turning on him. “What would you have me say? We have a half a billion super-monsters that are well beyond our reach constructing what amounts to a doomsday weapon we don’t even understand! I’ve spent a half a year studying this slave-organism – not even the master race, mind you, but their servants – and I’ve yet to find even the slightest weakness we can exploit. So, what are we supposed to use to beat them? The power of love?”

  “We discussed one possibility,” Marshal reminded him. “Maybe there are others. Would you rather we simply lie down?”

  “That possibility, as you call it, was proven to be impossible,” Scratchard snapped. “And if we lie down, then at least we’d be comfortable.”

  “What?” Luca demanded. “If you got an idea, then fucking spit it out.”

  Scratchard ignored him.

  “You’d better answer me, egghead,” Luca growled.

  “No, Luca,” Marshal sighed. “He’s right. The idea was untenable. My point wasn’t to suggest we try it, but that if we came up with one idea after only a few minutes of thinking, then maybe we could come up with something else.”

  “Fat chance,” Scratchard snapped.

  “Tell us this idea anyway,” Captain Vandermeer said. “It seems we have an impossible task. Maybe it will give us some kind of inspiration.”

  “Basically,” Marshal said, “the idea was to drop a fusion bomb on them.”

  “Nuke ‘em?” Brian laughed. “Take off and nuke the site from orbit?”

  “It’s the only way to be sure,” Kumar added with a grin.

  “Do you two think this is funny?” Elizabeth demanded. “We’re all going to die if we don’t come up with something, and you’re making a big joke out of it?”

  “Scolding them won’t help either, Liz,” Marshal said.

  “Hold it, hold it,” Krissy said. “I thought you said the organism was virtually immune to radiation and heat.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Scratchard said, provoked by the opportunity to belittle someone. “I am, as you put it, ‘virtually immune’ to water, but drop an ocean on my head and see what happens.”

  Krissy scowled, and Brian bristled at his tone, clenching his fists.

  “Mind your manners, Nicholas,” Valerie said, shaking her head at him. “In any event, I can see where the problem is. Not many nuclear bombs have popped up during our scavenger missions, have they?”

  “That’s actually not the problem,” Scratchard said, “Either I or Eva could build a big enough bomb from scratch. Pickering or Bruce nuclear plants would likely have the nuclear material we’d need. It’s actually not all that difficult, if you know what you’re doing. Even Samuels could probably do it.”

  He shrugged. “But not in less than a week. A month… maybe, if you don’t mind risking an accidental mushroom cloud by rushing the process.”

  “What if it didn’t take a month?” the General asked.

  “What if penguins could master ballistic weaponry?” Scratchard retorted. “Wouldn’t that give the leopard seals something to think about?”

  “I swear to god, egghead…” Luca began.

  “Don’t drag me into this,” God said with alarm.

  “That’s enough!” Marshal shouted. He turned towards the General. “Is there some point to your question, sir?”

  “It’s possible,” the General said, stroking his chin, “that I might know where an intercontinental ballistic cruise missile or two might be lurking.”

  “Close by?”

  “Base Borden,” the General answered. “About an hour and half round trip by helicopter.”

  Suddenly, Scratchard looked interested. “How would they have been stored?”

  “And what are nuclear missiles doing at Base Borden anyway?” Elizabeth demanded. “We don’t have any silos there! Nor would we have allowed them to build any.”

  “That we know of,” Kumar said with shifty look.

  “It’s not nearly so conspiratorial,” Williams said. “Because of all the recent saber-rattling with Russia, we’ve been upgrading and retrofitting NORAD. A good number of those installations are up near the Ar
ctic Circle, so when the refurbished missiles are shipped out, they first go to one of two distribution points: Alaska and Borden. Once they’re at Borden, they take direct military flights to their final destination. As for storage, when not deployed, they’re usually strapped onto a launch trailer. That’s where these missiles would be.”

  “How do you know they’re still there?” Marshal asked. “You said they were in transit to a northern installation. How do you know they didn’t move out?”

  “Because my friend, General Brenner, was overseeing the transition, and he was still in Washington when the outbreak took place. They wouldn’t have gone ahead with delivery without him. These are, after all, thermonuclear missiles we’re discussing, not pizzas.”

  “So we use the choppers,” Luca said, spreading his hands like he was stating the obvious, “fly up to Borden, create a distraction while we load them up, and Boom! New Toronto’s a nuclear power. What’s so hard about that?”

  “Are you a complete idiot?” Scratchard asked.

  In response, Luca scooped up an empty coffee mug from the table and threw it like a laser at Scratchard’s head. It struck the unprepared Professor square on the forehead, snapping his head backwards and dropping him to the floor.

  “Go Luca,” Brian muttered.

  “Luca!” Marshal snapped.

  “I’m sorry, Marshal,” Luca apologized, though he did not look sorry at all. “I shouldn’t’na done that. I guess I’m too much of a fucking complete idiot to know better.”

  Eva and Valerie got up from their chairs to help the groaning professor to his feet.

  “While I do not, in principle, approve of the use of violence,” said Peter Hanson, who had remained silent up until now, “I must admit, I rather enjoyed that.”

  “Are you all right, Professor?” Marshal asked, still glaring at Luca.

  “Y-yes,” Scratchard said a bit unsteadily, leaning heavily on Eva. A glaring red welt marked the center of his forehead. “I… I think so. What, uh… what were we talking about just now?”

  “Jesus Christ, Luca!” Marshal snarled.

  “All right, I’m sorry,” Luca said, exasperated. “I didn’t mean to cause him brain damage or nothing. Let him walk it off. He’ll be fine.”