They reach Cherokee Avenue, turn north, and run directly into another megaswarm.
Lilly grabs the old man by the nape and tries to pull him away from the oncoming army of the dead, a thousand strong, moving shoulder to shoulder down Cherokee, a sea of pasty dead faces and shoe-button eyes, moving directly toward them. Lilly realizes that retreating in the direction they just came is out of the question. The other herd has boxed them in. She realizes this at the same moment the old man suddenly drops to his knees.
“The fuck are you doing?!” She tries to lift him back up. “Get up!”
“It’s over, Lilly.” He gazes out at the oncoming multitudes with eerie calm. “It’s time to bow to the hands of fate.”
“Shut the fuck up.” She lifts him with both hands so violently he gasps. “C’mon. There’s a place we just passed, might be able to get in—c’mon, goddamn it, get off your ass. Let’s go!”
* * *
They reach the freestanding brick building one second before the walkers. Lilly yanks the old man down the narrow space along one side of the building—a passageway that could barely be called an alley—a loading dock at one end, a series of low windows hastily boarded with worm-eaten planking along one side. The last window has a board hanging by a thread, a gaping hole in the original pane. Lilly hurries toward it, still dragging the old man along, his Florsheims scraping behind her. She can hear the tidal wave of shuffling footsteps closing in behind them. She can smell the rot-stench rolling in with the strength of a storm front. She pauses under the window. She glances back over her shoulder. Shadows are unfurling toward them, the air prickling with decay and sulfur and latent violence. She reaches up and shoves in the broken pane, hears the muffled sound of glass hitting a floor. Then she helps the old man up and inside the darkness. She climbs in after him.
* * *
At first, they don’t spend much time investigating the shadowy interior of the building or even identifying its original purpose. Lilly is too busy fortifying the windows and doors, making certain they’re alone, and looking for any useful leftovers or provisions. Nalls is occupied by his fatigue and fractured arm. He sits on a steamer trunk and catches his breath while Lilly moves furniture around, shoving a heavy shelving unit against the broken window. The fading twilight seeps through the cracks of the barricades and into the cavernous room, illuminating unfinished walls and a high ceiling. The place is the home of dusty cobwebs, moldering wooden panels, and all shapes and sizes of cabinets and storage bins.
“Get over here, c’mon, help me with this,” she orders the old man in a loud whisper, hyperaware of the gathering noise outside in the alley.
Nalls musters up a feeble surge of energy and joins her, pushing one side of a second massive metal cabinet across the dusty tile floor. The squeak of the legs on the parquet is excruciating and dangerous. Lilly senses the noise drawing more of the dead to the building. She can hear them outside, congregating in the passageway, brushing up against the boarded windows. The smell permeates: a thousand carcasses of rotting animals marinating in pond scum and swamp gas. It makes Lilly cough, and she holds her hand over her mouth as she searches the dimly lit room for a source of light.
She sees a workbench on the far wall, a few drawers, a pile of rags and oil-spotted documents. She wonders if this place was once an auto dealership or perhaps the back office of a garage of some sort. It’s getting dark quickly. She notices two massive, garage-style doors on either side of the work area, now hastily boarded and reinforced, one of them draped with a tattered curtain. She notices cables and pulleys and catwalks up in the rafters of the ancient ceiling. Where the hell are they?
In one of the drawers, she finds a flashlight, and miraculously it still works—albeit dimly. “Look for water, we’re going to need water, that I can guarantee you.” She shines the yellow beam of light along the struts and exposed particleboard of the unfinished walls. “And we’re going to need it soon.”
The old man looks around. “What in God’s name?” he murmurs, scanning the room, leaning against a trunk. He still breathes heavily from the journey across town, and his face is pale with exhaustion and pain.
Lilly tries a light switch. As expected, nothing happens. The place is as dead as that mob out in the alley. Lilly covers her mouth, the stench seeping in. More of the creatures have gathered outside, drawn to the commotion. There must be hundreds of them—thousands perhaps—brushing against the boarded windows. The foundation creaks and shifts with the sheer number of them. Lilly takes deep breaths as she goes through more of the drawers.
Behind her, the old man lets out a groan and lies down on top of the trunk.
In a drawer, Lilly finds inexplicable documents from the midnineties on, a thousand yards of velveteen fabric delivered on September 22, 2003, invoices for light filters, furniture, heavy-duty cable, replacement circuit breakers, xenon bulbs, sheets of plywood, rope, machine oil, and gunpowder. Gunpowder? Lilly looks more closely at one of the garage-style accordion doors. The frame is nailed in place, a few sheets of plywood haphazardly crisscrossing the egress—evidence of hasty attempts to batten down the hatches.
A noise creaks on the other side of the garage door, the telltale watery growl of a walker. Maybe more than one. Shuffling feet, guttural noises. Evidently the building is infested as well as puzzling in its purpose. Lilly doesn’t notice the old man has begun to snore behind her. She rushes over to the fortified door and peers through a thin crack between the side rail and the plywood.
In the last rays of twilight, a larger room on the other side of the door is barely visible. About a half dozen shadowy figures are milling about a raised platform adjacent to the vertical door, and along the far edges of the space, scores of chairs are arranged schoolroom style. Lilly finally recognizes the place for what it is.
“We’re backstage,” she utters. Her voice is hushed, a mixture of awe and nostalgia for the days when people actually lived lives genteel enough to attend the theater. She gapes at the dead players lumbering aimlessly back and forth across a derelict stage, stiff-legged pawns on a chessboard grid that has lost all meaning. Were they actors? Were they theater people who got pinned down and turned? An unexpected fist of sorrow clenches Lilly’s innards as she notices a dark, dusty sign made of tiny lightbulbs above an exit on the far wall of the theater: THE PENDRAGON SHAKESPEARE THEATER. Her eyes well up. “Backstage in a goddamn Shakespearian theater.” She turns toward the old man. “How apropos.…”
She stops. She goes still. She sees that Nalls has fallen into a fitful slumber on a large steamer trunk near the window. Curled into a fetal position, he snores softly, eyeballs jittering beneath his lids.
Lilly exhales a sigh of relief. For a moment, she thought she had lost him. She realizes now that she needs the old codger for more than his vaccine. She needs a companion. She needs human company right now. “‘To sleep, perchance to dream,’” she murmurs, thinking of Hamlet, thinking of King Lear as she gazes upon the slumbering old man.
Something catches her eye off to the right, a dark object sitting on the workbench next to Lilly’s satchel: the portfolio. She goes over to it. Buzzing with curiosity, she picks it up, thumbs the clasp open, and takes a look at the contents. She stares. She frowns. The magnitude of what she’s seeing doesn’t immediately register.
She starts thumbing through the contents of the case, shaking her head, brow furrowed with confusion. What she expected to find were chemical equations, scientific notes, not this. She inspects the diagrams and hand-drawn illustrations, the odd little doodles, the footnotes to footnotes to footnotes, and the byzantine streams of thought. “What the fuck?” A few of the papers fall out, fluttering to the floor. She stares. “What. The. Fuck.”
She kneels and takes a closer look. Some of the items are well-worn pages torn from spiral-bound notebooks, every square centimeter crammed with tiny, obsessive, feverish sketches that at first look normal if not a little chaotic—lots of arrows, labels, and concentric circles—
all of them revolving around endless variations of the same motif: an angelic female figure with reddish-brown hair, ponytail, ripped jeans, and a halo. Mostly depicted in primitive, childish renderings, this eerily familiar-looking cartoon-woman is labeled on some of the pages as “donor zero,” while at other points she’s called “the panacea girl” or “the plague goddess.”
A cold trickle of terror worms its way through Lilly’s midsection as she notices that many of the pictures of the ponytailed goddess are labeled “L.C.” or “Lilly C.” In some of the more elaborate sketches, a second figure with a dirty face and yellow eyes (a walker, presumably) is drawn next to the woman in the ponytail. The two figures are connected by an umbilical of arrows, the arrows labeled with foreboding phrases such as “the final grafting process” or “the penultimate hybridization.” Lilly stiffens. Her throat goes dry. She slowly rises, staring down at the madness and murmuring, “Oh no … no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—”
“Oh yes, I’m afraid so.”
The voice behind her is almost ghostly in her ringing ears. She whirls around just in time to see the scraps of plywood swinging toward her.
The board strikes her square on the forehead, sending a skyrocket of white light across her eyes and a sharp pain stabbing down through her skull as she staggers backward, tripping over her own feet.
She lands on the small of her back, the pain shooting up through the sprains and bruises of her battered joints. The old man stands over her, the board still gripped in his palsied hands and splint-laden arm like a Louisville Slugger. He has the strangest expression on his face, a mixture of defiance, amusement, and more than a little madness. “They say a catnap, even for a few minutes, can be rejuvenating for a person of advanced age.”
Dazed and breathless, Lilly instinctively raises her hands to block the next blow, but the old man puts a surprising amount of force into the swing, especially for a person of his years. Maybe years ago, on the golf course, he was capable of magnificent, three-hundred-yard drives. Or perhaps he simply has been playing possum all along, concealing his reserves of strength. But whatever the source, that next blow tags the side of Lilly’s face with the force of a battering ram and turns the lights off behind her eyes.
The last thing she sees before sinking back into the swamp of unconsciousness is the old man’s yellow, tobacco-stained smile, the sound of his voice fading in her ears: “Good night, sweet princess.”
TWENTY
Nalls stands there for a moment, assessing, pondering, taking shallow, asthmatic, hyperventilated breaths. His arm twinges but he ignores it. He drops the board and gazes down at the young woman in the ponytail lying amidst the shreds and litter of his portfolio, the contents of his genius. He feels a faint frisson of shame for lying to her about the advanced stages of the trials, but he had no choice in the matter. Otherwise she would not have taken him along with her, protected him, and kept him safe from the swarm. It is imperative that he be allowed to conduct this one final experiment—his combination magnum opus and swan song—before the course of events makes such critical research impossible.
He has very little time. He quickly turns and scuttles across the room to the workbench area. He starts going through the drawers, looking for a suitable apparatus with which to bind the woman. It must be stronger than mere rope, completely foolproof, or she will most certainly be able to finesse her way out of it. He also knows that his vigor is fleeting and temporary, a product more of adrenaline and epochal events than of health. The sickness will take him down soon. How soon, he doesn’t know for sure. This is one of the frustrating conundrums of the microbial environment at play here. Incubation periods vary wildly. He rifles through the side drawers and finds nothing but old legal tablets, scripts, office supplies, and manila files brimming with meaningless ephemera. His head throbs with the fever, his vision swimming out of focus for a moment.
He pauses, knees turning rubbery, dizziness coursing through him as he holds on to the workbench with his left hand to keep from falling. His stomach lurches. Chills roll through him. He shivers. He’s burning up but as long as he can still move and think, he can tend to the final parameters of the experiment.
Right then, a metallic object catches his eye on the other side of the room, shimmering dully in the gloomy beam of yellow light cutting through the dust. That single flashlight lying on the workbench is now the only source of illumination in the room, and those batteries are going down fast. He trundles quickly across the room.
The adjacent stage has a complex system of draping, as well as massive auxiliary curtains, all of which are controlled by a convoluted system of pulleys and counterweights high up in the rafters. Nalls takes a closer look at one of the cables dangling down in front of the lighting console. Judging from the positioning of the ancient metal stool in front of the console, a stagehand must have once perched here during performances and peered through the wings for his cue to move scenery, lift and lower curtains, and make timely lighting changes.
Nalls removes part of the block and tackle—a metal clamp used to grip cables and ropes for better leverage—and sticks it in his pocket. He remembers seeing a mountain climber on TV use such a device to ascend a slope. The chemist has the perfect use for it now. He gazes up. The next challenge will be the extraction of the largest steel cable. He looks over and sees a pair of pliers on the lighting console, and he grabs them. He now uses the sharp inner teeth—meant for stripping the jackets off electrical wire—to chew through one of the cables. In a matter of minutes, the cable snaps and Nalls pulls the rest of it free of its pulley system.
He returns to the spot where the woman still lies unconscious, arms and legs akimbo, her face already swollen and bearing the imprint of the board across her left temple. Nalls digs the tiny pencil-sized leather case from the back pocket of his trousers. Thankfully, he sees that the case hasn’t been crushed. He believes that Lilly was—and remains—completely oblivious to the fact that he took the experimental drugs from the hospital.
Now he carefully opens the case and lays the vials labeled X-1, X-2, and X-3 on the floor in front of the woman. Nalls flinches at the onset of a coughing fit, and he coughs and wheezes for a moment, his skull pounding. He feels his forehead. His fever has become a furnace. He is certain that his temperature is going through the roof and guesses it has already reached the critical hundred and six degrees. Any higher, and the seizures and organ failure will begin, but he has much to do before that happens.
He screws the hypodermic needle onto its plunger and sticks the point through the tender skin under the elbow of his good arm, then slams the compound into his artery. He sucks in a breath as the cold spreads through him, a searing cold, the deep frozen maelstrom of liquid nitrogen or perhaps the lowest circle of hell.
His head tosses back in faux orgasmic response to the spread of the compound—an unprecedented event in medical history (if he may be so bold as to say so himself). The chemical invasion courses through every vein, every cell. He lets out a long sigh of victory—the exhalation of Alexander Graham Bell calling Watson, of the Wright Brothers leaving the ground, of Jonas Salk killing his first polio virus. It is the sigh of genius.
He trembles in the last stages of the disease, his sensory organs already starting to fail.
Time is of the essence. Timing is everything. He quickly gets to work on the woman.
Alas, it takes quite a bit of time to prepare her body for the experiment.
* * *
The slap wakes her. Perhaps wake is the wrong word. Something pops in her face. A bubble? A mousetrap snapping? She blinks and doesn’t know where she is at first. She can barely make out blurry images moving directly in front of her. She tries to focus and figure out what happened to her. Did she pass out? Was she jumped?
She tries to move and realizes her hands are bound and tied behind her back. She blinks and blinks, and she realizes she’s sitting up on scabrous floorboards against a wall in a dimly lit room, the old man sitting mer
e inches away from her, close enough for her to smell his sour, malodorous breath.
“Let me start by offering my sincerest apology for striking you like that.”
With the creaky voice on which to train her gaze, Lilly Caul finally sees that Raymond Nalls is sitting cross-legged, Indian-style, on the floor directly in front of her. The old man is shiny with sweat, his flyaway white hair like a penumbra of smoke around his skull. His eyes burn with emotion, the bloodshot whites parboiled with fever. His rusty voice is surprisingly steady. “As I think I’ve made clear, I detest violence of any sort, even in the unfortunate environment in which we find ourselves.”
Lilly tries to move but her head is pounding unmercifully, probably harboring a concussion from the impacts of the board, and rope digs into her wrists. She feels a pressure on her lower back, and hears a metallic jangle each time she strains against her bonds. Something cuts into her ribs. She looks down and sees that she is bound to the exposed wall with steel curtain cable. “What the f-fuck…?”
“Take a minute, let it sink in,” the old man urges helpfully.
Chills pour through Lilly as she gazes down and slowly follows the knotted cable around her midsection and realizes it crisscrosses her back and shoulders like a harness, the strands gathered through a metal clamp-like device, tightened down to piano-string tautness.
Outside the windows, a volley of distant thunder rattles the night.
The flicker of lightning spangles the room for a moment with silvery daylight, illuminating the backstage area of the Pendragon Theater: the sealed stage doors, the cobwebby rafters, the cables and pulleys hanging down, the huge flats of scenery—clouds, trees, castles, turrets, and giant clownish faces leering in two dimensions—leaning in heaps against the exposed wall boards.
Lilly sees the litter of insane notes and drawings strewn across the floor, and remembers getting walloped one second after seeing the abomination of madness inside that portfolio. She notices the old man has a similar armature of cable wound around his belly, across his shoulders, tightened and locked with a second clamp-like apparatus. Her mouth goes dry with panic. She starts straining with all her might, feeling the cold sweat break out on her skin. She strains and wriggles and angrily tosses her head. “M-mother-f-fuck!—What are you doing?—WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”
Search and Destroy Page 23
