Dispersal

by Addison Gunn

  Hsiung cleared her throat. “Do we have a battleship in the S-Y fleet I don’t know about?”

  “A what?”

  “I’m looking south across that parking structure and over the performing arts center, sir. There’s a battleship on the river, not three clicks from the Tevatnoa. It’s just blown the Fuller Warren Bridge to pieces and it’s headed straight at it.”

  Doyle gushed. “It’s fucking huge.”

  “Use the long-range radio, Hsiung; see if you can’t establish contact with the Tevatnoa. Make sure Lewis knows what’s coming.”

  “It’s hard to miss,” Hsiung said.

  “Just do it. We’re on our way.” Miller turned toward Morland. “Find anything else?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think anybody’s been in here since before the invasion.”

  Miller’s frown deepened. “Alright. Let’s go.”

  As Miller and Morland reloaded and braced themselves for the Infected back on the stairs, du Trieux’s voice crackled over the com. “I just hope there’s a ship left by the time we get there.”

  18

  DAIRY FARMING WAS an excuse, Samantha soon realized; a cover. The true purpose of the farm, the true ‘calling’—as Brother Ed, Brother Jim, and Brother Dan called it—was to spread the Archaean parasite to every living creature on the planet, willing or not.

  Samantha understood the logic. Humans were unsympathetic killing machines, born and bred to consume the planet’s resources and destroy everything—including each other—in the process. Looking for a way to rein in that behaviour was understandable.

  But unlike the rest of the Archaeans, Samantha didn’t believe the Infected were immune to those failings. They weren’t enlightened. They weren’t exempt from ambition, or ego, or arrogance, or any other destructive human trait. In fact, Samantha increasingly believed, the Archaeans were worse.

  If you had one ambitious, egocentric and arrogant human, you had a fighting chance against them, one on one. An Archaean with the same outlook, with their ability to project their emotions across the Infected, was a potential mob, a horde—hundreds of ambitious, egocentric, arrogant monsters, all acting in unison.

  These were not winning odds. Anyone acting against the majority was doomed.

  You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. One trip with the farm’s ‘outreach’ program and Sam understood perfectly well that she, and everyone who had come with her, were under the control of an angry cult. There was no point in resisting the majority rule; in fact, thanks to the parasite, it was impossible to do so.

  Days of toil turned into weeks. Samantha spent her time herding thug-behemoths back and forth to and from the fields, shovelling waste and occasional snow, laying fresh hay in the stalls. Evenings she sat on a hard wooden pew and watched as a raiding party was ‘chosen,’ watched as they returned—hours or days later—with humans to convert, or with blood on their hands.

  The fellowship had numbered maybe a hundred or more on Samantha’s arrival. Now, the farm house—the only true living space—was full to the brim, too full.

  Sheds formerly used for storage or prisoners had to be converted to living spaces. Stone chimneys were built against the walls to add heat during the harsh snowstorms; fungus-covered trees were felled, planked, and hammered into bunk beds. Mattresses of pine needles and goose feathers became precious commodities. All the while, the behemoths were milked, butter was churned, cheese was made, and the sun rose and set, day after day.

  Samantha felt neither joy, contentedness, nor comfort in her life. From what she could tell, no one else on the farm did either. The only ones who showed any positivity were the three ‘Brothers’ who preached each night, but the moment the message was finished, and the workers sent back to their duties, the good vibrations faded and ultimately disappeared, amidst the cold, the wet, and the daily grind.

  Was this her life now? Was Samantha to feel discontented and alone, living in a crowd of people just like her?

  These thoughts came and went from Sam’s mind, until one afternoon—as she smacked the broad rumps of the thug-behemoths, urging them back into the barn for the night—she barely registered the sound of a gunshot.

  A gunshot?

  Looking up, Samantha dropped her stick and turned toward the noise. A string of pops and snaps, like firecrackers, echoed through the air and spooked the livestock.

  The beasts moaned and shifted, shuffling toward the southern side of the pen, away from the barn door.

  Samantha felt irritated, if less than she should. She knew it wasn’t firecrackers, but somehow, she couldn’t convince herself the sound had any significance. Her mind was hazy and tired, sluggish and filled with fog. She worried briefly that the disturbance would affect the behemoths’ milk production, and then picked up her stick, almost forgetting what she’d just heard.

  Across the field, the farmhouse sat, beautiful and yellow, the black shutters tacked back for the day to let in the cool winter breeze. Beside it, a large transport truck had appeared, a camouflage canvas top raised over the bed.

  Samantha squinted at the vehicle, listened to the firecrackers pop—and thought to herself, What’s for supper?

  Just then, a band of people, armed with rifles, shotguns, and various handguns, burst through the ferns, jumped the property line and ran west, scooping up and capturing members of the fellowship along the way. They shot anyone who resisted and dragged survivors behind them like captured pigs.

  It took several seconds before Samantha’s mind understood what was happening. Dropping her stick, she ran, jumping over the split-rail fence and scratching the length of her calf as she skimmed the barbed wire.

  Inside the barn, Sister Ethel screamed, “What’s happening?”

  “Run, Ethel!” Sam barked.

  The six milkers working at the stations on the north side of the barn looked up from their pails, then scattered.

  Behind her, the barn doors swung wide, crashing against the wooden pews stacked against the wall. Samantha ran straight down the center of the barn, aiming for the stage. Sister Ethel’s screams reverberated off the rafters.

  “Somebody shut that one up,” a man said.

  “What’s happening? What’s—”

  A gun shot rang out and Ethel fell silent.

  At the end of the barn, Samantha hopped onto the platform and sprinted upstage toward the ladder, the shrieks of the milkers sounding behind her. Sam scrambled recklessly up the ladder.

  “Where’s that one goin’?” someone asked.

  “Hay loft, I reckon.”

  At the top of the ladder, Sam threw herself into the hayloft and picked her way through the bales stacked haphazardly to the only other door: the loft door. It offered no ladder or stairwell, but it was a way out, and hopefully one the raiders hadn’t accounted for yet.

  Sam yanked open the door and was relieved to find the rope and hooks still hanging from the pulley. Grabbing the hook, she kicked off the edge of the barn and held on. She dropped to the ground and took off running.

  Behind the barn stretched miles of dense forest; she ran headlong into the brush, weaving between trees, jumping fallen limbs and tree trunks. She heard movement behind her, the sound of pursuit, and increased her pace.

  She wasn’t sure how far she’d run. The late morning sun climbed the sky, extending fingers of light through the dense canopy. She felt her legs tiring, and knew there was no way she could outrun the pursuit. She scanned ahead, looking for a hiding place.

  She sprinted to the left and cut across a creek, stopping to fill her pockets with rocks and stones from the bed. Ahead was a particularly tall pine tree; Sam jumped onto its lowest branch and climbed. A few branches up, her foot slipped, spilling a tuft of needles to the forest floor.

  “Over there!” someone shouted.

  Once above head-height, she wedged her body between the trunk and a thick branch, pulled her sling from her waist band and a rock from her pocket, leaned out and fitted t
he first stone.

  She spotted three in pursuit, spread out. The closest, a blonde woman in camouflage gear with a rifle in her hands, was just arriving at the creek.

  Samantha adjusted her body, swung the sling over her head, and released.

  The woman took the stone straight between the eyes, spun mid-step and pitched face-first down the bank and into the water.

  Sam grabbed another rock from her pocket and reloaded the sling.

  The next pursuer, a man all in black with a pistol in hand and a rifle over his shoulder, approached on her left. Whoever these people were, they were well equipped.

  Sam leaned back from the tree, gripping the trunk with her thighs, and swung the sling once more.

  The movement caught the man’s eye, and he dropped to one knee and squeezed off a shot. Twisting, Sam swung down from the branch, hanging by her knees, and the bullet went wide. Sam had barely lost her momentum. She released.

  The rock sliced through the air like a blade, hitting the man on the side of the head beside his ear. Cushioned by his knitted cap, the stone didn’t knock him out, but he went down, clutching his head and howling. Sam was pulling herself up and reached into her pocket to grab another stone when a searing hot pain sliced through her.

  The bullet punched straight through her body and into the tree behind her, splintering bark, pine needles, and sending blood in all directions. Sam cried out, nearly slipping. Her sling dropped from her nerveless fingers; she watched it helplessly as it fell to the leaves below.

  She grabbed hold of the trunk and struggled to maintain consciousness, but the pain was blinding. Her arms spasmed and she fell, crashing into tree branches and smacking onto the ground straight on her right shoulder.

  She just managed to make out the angry face of a man in a bloody black cap when the butt of a handgun filled her world.

  All went black.

  SAMANTHA AWOKE WITH a splitting headache and a throbbing in her shoulder. Her clothes were stuck to her skin with blood and sweat. Her mouth tasted metallic and dry. It was pitch dark. She heard the muffled voices of people around her and felt the terror and fear of nearby Infected. It wasn’t until she blinked a few times that she realized she was blindfolded.

  The world shook, like a massive earthquake; she bounced into the air and slammed back down onto her shoulder, sending pain through every nerve in her body.

  No. She was in a vehicle. Probably the transport she’d spotted back on the farm. Something nudged her in the stomach. Gentle at first, then like a kick to the gut.

  “This one’s awake,” a man said.

  “Keep an eye on that one. It killed Lisa.”

  Her hands were bound behind her back, and the pain in her shoulder was so bad she was having a hard time staying conscious.

  After a long while, the transport stopped and Sam was yanked to her feet by two sets of hands, under each arm.

  She was dragged a few meters, and her blindfold was ripped off. Afternoon, by the looks of the sun. She stood at the mouth of the trailer, bloody-stocking-cap guy holding one arm, another man in full camouflage gripping the other. With a shove they pushed her off the edge of the bed, face-first into the dirt.

  Spitting earth from bloody lips, Samantha looked up at the entrance to a wooden fort. A log wall, at least six meters high, extended around the fort, topped with a walkway and manned by guards in camo. Within the walls stood several huge log cabins and a fenced enclosure, also guarded. There were at least three dozen humans in sight, armed with weapons of all types—and who knew how many more inside the cabins.

  In front of her, a line of Infected marched by, manacled and chained together.

  Samantha swallowed the lump in her throat and wrenched her shoulder off the ground, flipping herself onto her back. The two men yanked her roughly to her feet.

  “Where are we?” she asked, as they pulled her toward a fenced walkway.

  “Hell,” one of them said, laughing.

  19

  THE SOUTHERN SKY bled orange. A thick wall of red dust—originating about eight thousand kilometers away in the crusted deserts of the Sahara—moved high, wide, and fast across the waters of the Atlantic, over the St. John’s River and through the ruins of the Fuller Warren Bridge, rushing at them like a six-hundred-meter-high door closing on a tomb.

  Just west of the dust cloud, Miller and Cobalt raced their rubber dinghy through choppy waters, losing ground against the oncoming haze. The surviving members of their security squad zoomed ahead of them.

  Before them was the Acosta Bridge, blown apart not long after the Fuller Warren by the battleship still approaching from the southeast.

  The battleship, which flew no colours, looked like it could have been American or British at one point, but there was no way of telling who was in control now. The name of the ship had been covered over with thick black paint.

  “Everybody got a gas mask?” Hsiung asked, steering the motor at the stern of the dinghy, watching the approaching dust storm with wide eyes.

  “Got mine right here, Tea Blosshom,” Doyle said, swinging his gas mask in the air.

  “She’s not your fucking Tea Blossom,” du Trieux snapped at him, snatching his mask from his fingers. “How much morphine did you give him?”

  Hsiung frowned. “Half a syrette.”

  “You should shee my knee,” Doyle slurred, pointing to his left leg. “It looks like an overripe grapefruit.”

  Miller couldn’t tell which scared him more: the dust storm, the rough sea slapping the dinghy and drenching them to the bone, or the battleship poised to blast them out of the water.

  Doyle giggled and pawed for his mask like a kitten after a string.

  Grimacing, du Trieux let him have it. “You’re a lightweight,” she said, helping him put it on.

  “Eazhe up, Cactus Flower,” Doyle said, snapping his gas mask in place.

  Morland stifled a laugh, then coughed uncomfortably as Hsiung and du Trieux glowered at him.

  Miller pulled a compass from his combat vest and eyed it nervously. An island to the east—once a ridge on Jacksonville’s outskirts, now cut off by the rising seas—was fully engulfed in the red dust cloud. It had to be kilometers wide. At this rate, the storm would pass over the battleship first, then engulf the dinghies; the Tevatnoa—sitting just east of the Hart Bridge—would be struck last.

  Miller would have much preferred to be aboard the Tevatnoa when it hit. He wasn’t certain the rubber dinghy could withstand the wind if it topped forty knots. They’d just have to make a run for it and hope for the best. Given the sputtering noises from the dinghy’s motor, he wasn’t hopeful.

  Hsiung cursed at the fungus covering the engine controls, wiped the blooms off with a gloved thumb, then kicked the motor with the heel of her combat boot, causing it to gasp and revive again—but victory was fleeting. After a few seconds, the engine popped, spat out a puff of gray smoke, and died.

  Miller picked up a pair of paddles and tossed them to Morland and du Trieux. Hsiung snatched up the one at her feet, tucked under Miller’s grenade launcher.

  “Stroke!”

  It was futile. White caps and two-meter crests struck the raft from behind, lurching them up and tipping them down. They were drenched and paddling against the wind on a river with virtually no current, making no headway.

  Miller cussed under his breath. They could have stayed in Jacksonville when they’d spotted the battleship, left the Tevatnoa to its own fate. They could have hunkered down in an abandoned building and waited out the dust storm. Instead, they’d tried to outrun it in a rubber dinghy. They’d burned out their engine and would now either suffocate or drown. Hell, they deserved to die, for being so stupid. Bravery only got you killed.

  The wall of red dust struck like a hammer, swallowing them whole. The wind lifted the stern of the dinghy half a meter out of the water, jolting them forward in their seats and sending the grenade launcher, the long-range radio and the medical kit tumbling into the murky water.


  Miller looped his wrist around the safety rope and wedged the tip of one boot into the bottom seam. The dinghy bounced out of the water again, flying headlong across the waves.

  The engine, probably the only thing keeping the raft from taking flight altogether, caught a gust of wind, twisting the craft in the air and spinning it around. Doyle, du Trieux, and Hsiung were the first to go; Morland and Miller, closest to the water, were able to hold on for a few more seconds until they too tipped over, the raft landing upside down on top of them.

  Miller came up and out of the water under the dinghy, one hand still clasping the safety rope. Having no idea where anyone else had gotten to, he ripped the gas mask from his face and gasped for air, coughing at the effort. The air under the raft was thick with dust and sand, feeling like glass in his throat.

  The raft bucked on one side, threatening to flip again, and Miller reached across, stretching his body the width of the raft so he could grab the rope. Behind him, du Trieux surfaced and grabbed hold of the safety rope with her right hand. With her other hand she lifted Doyle, still wearing his gas mask.

  Miller reached over and pulled the mask off Doyle’s face, dropping it into the water. Doyle coughed and sputtered, but then heaved and vomited. Du Trieux popped the flotation collar on his vest and looped his arm through the safety rope. Then she drew a deep breath and went down into the water again.

  Beside him under the raft, Doyle mumbled something about a flower. Miller grimaced and hit the flotation device on his own vest. Soon thereafter, du Trieux and Hsiung emerged, followed by Morland.

  “I’ve got a plan,” du Trieux said, panting. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  Miller spat foul-tasting water from his mouth. “I’m all ears.”

  “We’re closest to the battleship,” she said.

  Morland shook his head. “Not a chance in hell.”

  Just then Doyle’s arm slipped from the safety line and he bobbed in place, held afloat only by his flotation collar.