by James Knapp
Like the map they used to chart it, I didn’t understand the future as well as some of us did. I knew what Ai believed, and that the visions weren’t so much looks into our actual future as they were bleed over from what she called alternate possibilities. I knew there were an infinite number of those possibilities, and that meant an infinite number were almost identical to ours. She thought we could see into them, and that their present was our future. They were all almost the same, and some pitched off the cliff into nothing, while others somehow avoided it.
At least that was what she thought. I don’t think she really knew. Not for sure. All I understood was that we wanted to be one of the ones that avoided it, whatever “it” was. The dark void that no one could see into meant we were on the wrong path. We were making mistakes, the same mistakes as the rest. Was the virus a dead end? Was that the mistake?
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Even if this plays out a million times and everyone is wiped out every time, we could still make it, right? We could be on the right path.”
“No one sees past the end of their own life. You know that.”
“But we don’t know that for sure. If what we see comes from somewhere else, couldn’t it just be that they all die, but we live?”
Penny opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She smiled, and for a second the worry left her eyes.
“You know, I think that might actually be deep,” she said.
“Hey, it could be true,” I said. “Admit it: you don’t really know.”
“Ai—”
“Ai is amazing, but come on, at the end of the day she’s just a person like you or me.”
“She’s not like you or me.”
“Penny, she isn’t a god or anything.”
“What is this insolence?” she asked. She was kind of kidding but kind of not.
“I’m just saying, she’s a person, she makes mistakes just like everybody else, and she doesn’t know everything.”
“Then you think she’s wrong about all this?”
“No, but—”
“Because if she’s wrong about this, then what the hell is it we’re trying to do here?”
“Fix it,” I said, getting annoyed. “Fix everything. That’s why we sneak around messing with everybody’s head, so we can fix everything, because we know everything, and everyone else is a bunch of stupid sheep—”
“Hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
“Yeah, well, just because you break a bunch of eggs doesn’t mean you get an omelet either.”
Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel as she took another swig from the bottle. She was drinking more than usual, a lot more. If I hadn’t been so drunk myself, I’d have probably thought more about the fact that although she wasn’t any bigger than me, I’d seen Penny break men’s fingers. I’d seen her stab people and shoot people.
“I think you’re talking some dangerous talk,” she said.
“I think you’re drunk.”
“I think you’re drunk. I think you’re always drunk.”
“Screw you, Penny.” I growled. That was crossing a line. She wasn’t allowed to bring that up. “My drinking is not a problem.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” she snapped back. “Do you know how many times I’ve held your hair while you puked your guts out?”
There were actually tears in the corners of her eyes. That was something I’d never seen before, but I kept going.
“If you didn’t, they’d probably throw you out on the street,” I said. My face was hot and my hand had made a fist around the neck of the flask. “Just like they did with what’s-her-face—”
“She had a name!” Penny shouted. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her do that either. It actually stopped me cold for a second.
Before me and before Penny, Ai had pinned her hopes on some girl named Noelle Hyde as the one that was going to save the world. She didn’t work out so good, though, and so from what I could get, they had to kill her. Penny never talked about her. I never really thought much about if they knew each other or how much or for how long. I could tell by her face that this time it was me who crossed the line, and opened my mouth to maybe take it back or something, but it was too late.
“She had a name,” she said in a low voice. Every muscle in her body looked tense, like she wanted to break my neck or something.
She wouldn’t, though. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to. I was no match for her physically, but if I had to, I could make her stop. If I wanted to, I could kill her.
“I know,” I said. I was breathing hard.
“Sometimes you keep talking when you really should just shut up,” she said.
Heat rushed up my neck, and I was just about to lay into her when the screen on the dash lit up again with an incoming call. This time it was from Ai.
Penny frowned, and we glared at each other, but when Ai called, you didn’t keep her waiting. Penny took a deep breath and answered.
Ai’s face appeared on the screen. Her eyelids were half-closed, like when she was concentrating, and her pupils were dilated. The prominent vein on the right side of her neck bulged, and every few seconds she twitched, just barely. She’d drugged herself like she sometimes did to enhance her abilities, and she looked like she was tripping hard this time.
“Where are you two? What is your exact location?” she asked. I closed my eyes for a second and when I concentrated, I could sense her. She was reaching out from the top of Alto Do Mundo to find us. Something was wrong.
“We left the Stillwell base,” Penny said. “We’re headed back now.”
“You left the Stillwell base nearly two hours ago,” Ai said, still staring into space. “Listen to me carefully: forget whatever you’re fighting about and—”
“She started it—” I said, and before the last word even got out of my mouth, I felt her reach into my head. She reached right through the anger and the drunkenness, and it was like a cold hand grabbed some primal part of me and made my body jump. Penny jumped in the seat next to me, her mouth stuck open.
“Don’t ever interrupt me,” Ai said. “Listen, and do what I say. You’re both in danger—”
Penny could still drive, but that didn’t change the fact that she was drunk and about as distracted as you could get. Her reflexes were good, but even she wasn’t fast enough to react when a man appeared in the headlights in front of us.
For a second, everything seemed to slow down so much that it almost stopped. I could see Ai’s big lips move as she kept talking, but all I could hear was a sort of dull, white noise as Penny cut the wheel and the car tilted on its suspension. Through the windshield, big flakes of snow drifted toward us, past the man in the street. He was dirty and bundled in filthy clothes that hung from his scrawny frame. His cheeks were hollow, and through his parted lips I could see teeth that were yellow and brown.
He looked up from the headlights that bore down on him. He looked right through the glass, right at me, and I could see black spots that branched through the whites of his wide eyes. They followed me as the car began to veer, and he just stood there like he was completely unaware of what was happening.
You’re in terrible danger, I felt Ai’s presence say from where it sat in the back of my mind. She was calling us, calling us to come back home. She wanted us to come quickly, and I could feel the urgency building up inside me.
I didn’t think; I just reached out to the man in the street the same way Ai was reaching out to me. Certain minds were easier to control than others. If a mind was receptive enough, I could reach across the city and touch it, but from a few feet away I could push almost anyone. If I could snap him out of his trance and make him move, then he might have enough time.
The inside of the car got bright as my pupils opened all the way and the light from the dash and the headlights swallowed up almost everything except the man’s face and those strange, blotchy eyes. I concentrated on him, looking for the s
wirling colors of his consciousness and the bright electric bands underneath that controlled everything. I focused on him as hard as I could as we bore down on him, but instead of the aura that should have been there, I pushed through into nothing but a black void. It was like stepping off the side of a cliff into a huge, bottomless pit.
He’s dead, I thought. Where his thoughts should have been, there was just emptiness. He was dead. It was a revivor.
The car struck him above the knees, and the expression on his face never changed as muscle rippled under the impact and the bones inside snapped. His body pitched forward over the hood as his feet left the ground and one old boot flew off, the rubber heel flapping. His face struck the windshield, and half-rotted teeth shattered against the bulletproof glass.
The car was sliding, and Penny cut the wheel again to compensate as the man’s body tumbled past, tearing the side mirror free as he spun like a rag doll in the air. Only a few feet away, two more men stood in the path of our car, and as I heard the shriek of tires cut through the white noise, I screamed.
Past the two men, I saw three more, and then the road curved past a building face to join the main drag, where every car was stopped. Penny cut the wheel again, but it was too late. The car went into a skid, and I felt the two bodies slam against the door. A head struck the window and sprayed blood, but as everything streaked by, I saw nothing but darkness around them. They had no lives to lose. They were all already dead.
They’re all revivors, I said to Ai’s presence.
We hit the guardrail head-on. The street, the people, and all the cars whipped past the windshield as the rear wheels came up off the ground behind us, and then we were spinning, end over end through the air.
Nico Wachalowski—VA Hospital
It was dark, and they were all around me. Their bellies were swollen, and the meat inside them had begun to rot. They’d dragged me underground into what used to be an old ammo dump, with decaying wooden walls and a ceiling that buckled under the soft earth above it. It was filled with bones and scraps of clothing. They’d used this place before.
Move. You have to move.
I’d relived that day more times than I could count. Every time I told myself to fight, and every time I didn’t until the first set of teeth bit down. No matter how many years passed, I couldn’t shake it; from the crooked teeth that punched through first, to the cold tongue that touched the mouthful of skin.
Pain bored into my shoulder as the thing’s wet, grimy hair tickled my neck and face. I heard the crunch and screamed. It raised its head with a chunk of my flesh clenched in its teeth, while another one crowded in and bit down where the blood was pumping out. They were eating me. They were eating me alive.
You have to move.
I pushed against them, but the space was too tight. They were too heavy. A knee bashed into my ear. I tried to twist my head, but they had me pinned. A thumb slipped into my eye socket and warmth gushed down my cheek, into my ear. With the eye I had left, I saw one of them pulling a big strip of skin away. In the dim light, I could make out the chest hairs sprouting from it.
I’m going to die, I thought.
I vomited. One of them shoved the eye it had popped free into its mouth. Cold fingers groped at me, holding me. All I saw were sets of teeth stained red. I slipped into shock, and my mind disconnected. The cold feeling turned warm, and something deep inside began to soothe me. It whispered for me to let go.
You’ve done enough, it said. It’s okay. Don’t struggle. Just rest now …
I’d relived this memory again and again, but a part of that day was gone. They told me it might never come back. The next thing I could ever remember was Sean’s voice calling my name.
Then there, in a gap between the bodies that crowded around me, I saw a face I couldn’t remember ever seeing before.
It was the face of a young boy with black skin and tangled black hair. He was a native; scrawny, dirty, and out of uniform. He couldn’t have been older than twelve. His pulse throbbed at his neck and his eyes were wide.
I wasn’t alone down there.
Someone else had been down in that tunnel with me. In the light of the single, swaying overhead bulb, I saw the flash of metal as the boy positioned the tip of the blade behind the closest revivor’s neck. How could I have forgotten that?
He pushed the knife into the flesh and twisted it. From the way the revivor dropped, I knew he’d severed the primary nodes at the brain stem. He moved to the next one, the blade shaking and dripping black.
“Wachalowski! Wachalowski, where are you?” A voice was shouting my name, muted, from somewhere up above. Sean’s voice. My squad had found me somehow.
I fought them then. My brain seized on the hope that I might still survive, and I fought.
They saw the boy. One of them swung, but he got out of the way as the bayonet tugged at his filthy shirt. With most of my strength gone, the others turned their backs to me and closed on their fresh victim.
He tried for the side tunnel he’d come through, but another one had come in behind him. He was cut off. He scrambled back until he hit one of the makeshift walls. One of the planks was broken, and behind it was a small space that someone had dug out to hide food or munitions.
The boy squeezed through just as they reached him. He retreated back into the cubby as grimy fingers clawed an inch from his face. I pushed myself up and got on my hands and knees next to the revivor that lay facedown in the dirt. I looked for something, anything to stop them with.
“Wachalowski!”
Hands grabbed me from behind and pulled. I tried to scream, but my throat burned with something salty and warm. I choked, and coughed up blood.
Sean, wait …
He pulled me away, away from the backs of the revivors crowded around the broken plank. He thought I was alone. I could just make out the boy’s face, terrified, as I was dragged from the room and back up the tunnel.
“Shit! Set up a perimeter!” Sean yelled. I heard gunfire. The trees spun above me as Sean leaned over and shined a light in my one eye.
“Nico, stay with me,” he said. I tried to speak, but I was choking. Blood ran from my mouth.
Someone craned back my head, and I felt a tube slide down my throat. I could breathe again. I groped for Sean’s sleeve and pointed back down the tunnel.
Sean, wait, I said over the JZI, but I never finished. He leaned in close and stared into my eye. I felt dizzy as his pupils got wider, and as he stared, I felt the pain and the fear ease back. My heart rate went down.
“Sleep, Nico,” he said. I felt myself relax. “It’s over now. Don’t try to talk. Just sleep.”
I wanted to tell him about the boy, but when I tried, I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t form. He didn’t know. None of them knew. He was six feet underneath them, and none of them knew. Why couldn’t I respond? What had Sean done to me?
He leaned in until his lips were at my ear.
“You will forget this,” he said. “I can’t do anything about the physical scars, but I can do this. I don’t know if I can take it away completely, but I’ll try. Just forget …”
Forget …
“ …forget what happened down there.”
The medevac came. They airlifted me out. One of the revivors, its teeth stained red, came back up and watched the chopper. The gunner turned on it and cut it down as we left the boy who’d saved me to his fate, forgotten.
I opened my eyes. I was in a hospital, lying in bed while a doctor stood off to one side, turned away from me to examine an X-ray. I could still picture the boy’s face in my mind.
Was it real? Had it been a dream, or had that old memory finally worked its way back to the surface?
Outstanding message: Flax, Calliope.
There were many other beds in the room, all occupied. Off to my left I saw a man with bandages wrapped around his face, and in the bed across from his, another man whose hand was wrapped. At least two of his fingers were missing. A woman on a gurney had been w
heeled in and pushed along one wall to wait her turn. Her face was lacerated, and there was a tube down her throat.
Outstanding message: Flax, Calliope.
The words flashed near the corner of my eye. I opened it.
Where the fuck are you?
I smiled, and felt a knot on the right side of my face. The time stamp on the message said it was two hours old. She was alive, or at least she had been two hours ago. I shook off the dream and accessed the Bureau’s system to find out what was happening out there.
FBI alerts had piled up, and they were still coming in. All across the city, thousands of people had dropped dead, only to get back up minutes later.
“MacReady was right…. We should have listened….” I remembered. The basement caller, maybe Deatherage, had said that. Did he mean Bob MacReady, the same man I knew from Heinlein Industries?
I put in a call to him over the JZI, but he didn’t pick up. His communications node was still active, though. Wherever he was, he was alive. I left the channel open and set it aside in case he responded.
Out in the hallway, another patient was trucked by while a man shouted instructions. The hospital was overrun. According to the reports, the revivors had initially shown violent aggression, and riots broke out. Vehicles were abandoned in streets that became gridlocked. Stillwell soldiers had scrambled to assist local police, but before they could get a handle on the situation, the damage had been done.
I closed my eyes and cycled through incident reports. A citizen tip site had been set up, and flooded almost as soon as it came online. The FBI was scrambling to process the incoming information, but phones, data, and even JZI links were getting jammed. The media storm had networks nearly at a standstill.
It was a disaster. The carriers were slipping past perimeters set up after the initial assault, and disappearing. No one could say for sure where they were going or if there was any organization to their movements. The entire city was in a panic.
