Dispersal

by Addison Gunn

  Hsiung suddenly jerked to one side, knocking the sniper like a pinball around the inside of the overturned dinghy. “Something just brushed against my leg.”

  Morland adjusted his grip on the safety loop as the raft bucked in the wind. “Let’s hope it doesn’t have teeth.”

  Du Trieux moved Doyle to one side so she could look Miller in the eyes. “We need to get out of the water. The Tevatnoa is too far.”

  “They could be the Infected,” Miller said.

  “You saw what they did to those bridges,” du Trieux argued. “If they wanted the Tevatnoa sunk, they’d have done it already.”

  “Maybe they don’t want it shunk sho they can kill ush all and take our shtuff,” Doyle slurred.

  Morland nodded. “Most bloody likely.”

  “There could be communications going on between them right now,” du Trieux kept on. “Without the long-range radio there’s no way of our knowing.”

  “I’m not kidding, guys,” Hsiung said. “There’s something moving underneath us.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t have a scaled dorsal fin,” Miller muttered, instantly regretting it.

  Hsiung’s face turned ashen.

  The wind bucked, causing the raft to shudder. “We have to do something,” du Trieux said. “We can’t stay like this.”

  “We have to wait until the dust storm passes, our gas masks are sodden and we’ll suffocate,” Morland said.

  “Did anybody else feel that?” Hsiung asked.

  The fanged mouth and bulbous head of a tusk-fiend broke the surface in the center of the dinghy. The enormous tusks pierced straight through the underside of the rubber raft, lifting it into the air before everyone let go of the safety ropes and scattered.

  When the beast came down, its teeth still stuck in the rubber, the only one still near it was Doyle, floating less than a half meter away.

  Miller and du Trieux swam in from opposite directions, their knives at the ready.

  The tusk-fiend thrashed around in protest, entangled in the remains of the dinghy.

  Du Trieux reached Doyle first. Wrapping her arm under his chin, she swam backwards, kicking and grunting, knife still clutched in hand.

  Just as the tusk-fiend managed to shake off the raft, a shot rang out. The creature’s brain matter was scattered into the dusty wind.

  The battleship loomed to their right, the shadow of a sniper draped over the side.

  Miller looked wildly to his left. The Tevatnoa lay at least a full kilometer away, still engulfed in the dissipating storm. Miller swam, one arm over the other, toward du Trieux and Doyle. “To the battleship, then,” he said.

  “You’re the boss,” du Trieux answered.

  20

  THERE WERE FEW events in Samantha’s life that she truly regretted. It was her choices, even the bad ones, that had led her to the Archaeans, and her true calling; how could she wish any decision undone, when she was so happy with the result?

  Now, however, as she pulled yet another mushroom off the trunk of a felled pine tree, she deeply regretted that she had ever joined the commune at the dairy farm. If she’d listened to her gut, steered her group away, they’d never have been roped into the kidnappings. And they wouldn’t have been hunted and enslaved in turn, had they kept to themselves and continued their journey south.

  With any luck, they could have got all the way to Florida and been basking on some warm, soft beach, drinking coconut milk, rather than stuck in the middle of a Northeastern forest in the middle of winter, freezing their asses off and working their fingers numb.

  In fact, Samantha wasn’t sure how things could be any worse.

  The humans had the Infected under armed guard at all times. Working in packs of five, the Infected were spread across a heavily wooded area west of Old Forge; as far as Samantha could tell, they were deep into the Ha-De-Ron-Dah forest, in Adirondack Park. Even before the collapse, the area had been off the grid.

  From what she could tell, these humans—fifty, maybe more—had established some sort of isolated settlement. They had a marketplace, a mayor, a forge, all in log houses. But for their automatic weapons, and the modern clothes, it looked like something out of the Old West.

  The region had plentiful natural springs and an abundance of rain and snowfall, and the humans farmed their own food and lived without electricity. They probably hadn’t seen a drop of the bottled Archaean water since its discovery five years before—there simply wouldn’t have been a need, or desire, for it.

  And since the people of the Adirondack mountains were known for keeping to themselves—suspicious of authority as it was—it made perfect sense that they’d survived, even thrived, in the rough environment.

  In fact, they’d apparently done so well, they’d begun to build a second log settlement, only a quarter of a kilometer from the first. The need for fungus-free lumber, Sam guessed, was what had inspired them to start using Infected slaves.

  After being dragged from the truck on arrival, Sam and the other Infected were untied, shoved down a fenced path and dragged to a log barn.

  Far back in the line, Sam craned her neck, peering at the head of the queue. She spotted a forge, then smelled burning flesh. A few of the others—who had come to the same conclusions—tried to run, climbing over the fence and sprinting for their lives, but they didn’t get far. The fort swarmed with guards, and it didn’t take long before the Infected were tackled and dragged to the front of the line to be immediately branded.

  Horror rippled through the new Infected like a shockwave, freezing many of them in position. The man in front of Sam pissed his pants. Those who stopped in line only got smacked with the butts of hunting rifles for their troubles. Terror floated in the air like a fog.

  One by one, Sam heard the screams. When it was her turn, she felt weak at the knees, her head swimming as she hyperventilated.

  The human holding the brand was young, hardly eighteen. He was missing his two front teeth and wore wooden dentures, making his smirk even more disturbing.

  “Come on, now, don’t make this worse,” the boy said. He pulled the branding rod out of the forge with a heavily gloved hand. At the end gleamed a red hot circle with an ‘I’ in the center. “Ready when you are, guys.”

  Two large men grabbed Sam by the arms and pulled her toward a blackened but solid wooden block.

  “No!” she screamed, panic taking over. She dug in her heels and locked her knees, grabbing hold of the fence.

  The men cussed, then yanked her loose.

  The man on the right stopped and flinched, frowning at his hand. “It’s bleeding. Damnit, I just got Infected blood on my new gloves.”

  The man on the other side shook his head. “Damn shame. You’ll have to burn them, now.”

  The man with the brand squinted at them. “Why’s it bleeding?”

  The man on the right stuck his finger into Samantha’s bullet wound and wiggled it around. Despite her best efforts, she screamed.

  “It’s been shot.”

  The man with the brand waved them forward. “Well, today is its lucky day.”

  “Let go of me!”

  Dragging her toward the block, they bent her at the waist, forced her chest onto the wood and held her down. The man on the left grabbed the hem of her shirt and pulled it up, dragging it over her wounded shoulder.

  “Hold still,” one of them said.

  She couldn’t breathe. Hot air burned her throat and she tasted bile. Kicking and flailing did no good. Strong arms held her in place as the man with the brand approached.

  “Hurry up,” one of them said. “It’s stronger than it looks.”

  Twisting her head to one side, she flipped her ponytail out of her face just in time to see the brand descend onto her bullet wound. The boy pressed the ‘I’ into her flesh and held it for five seconds.

  Searing pain blazed through her arm and shoulder, down her elbow and into her fingers. She saw white stars and fought to stay conscious as blackness filled her vision and
weakened her resistance. She screamed at the top of her lungs, the pain tearing its way out of her.

  When the brand came away, scraps of skin peeled off, stuck to the red-hot metal. The boy shoved it back into the forge, and Sam sobbed, helpless.

  Just when she had begun to see clearly, the man pulled the brand out of the fire again and stuck it on her left arm. “And one more for good luck.”

  Sam shrieked holy hell but lay as still as a corpse, wishing for it to end. Death seemed a welcome idea.

  “I just cauterized your wound for you,” the human boy said. “You’re welcome.”

  Spit dripped from Sam’s mouth into the dirt. “Fuck you.”

  Strong hands lifted her off the block and dragged her. The toes of her worn boots ploughed the dirt.

  Behind a two-and-a-half-meter-tall wooden fence, more Infected stood in clumps, grouped together in a holding pen. The men dropped Sam to her knees and closed the gate behind her, locking it from the outside.

  She wanted to pass out. The pain in her shoulder and arm was insurmountable. She dropped onto all fours and choked out a few more sobs before gentle, sympathetic hands helped her to her feet and onto a pile of pine needles.

  “Don’t touch the burns,” someone said; a woman.

  Through her tears and the fog of pain Samantha managed to nod, then sat on the pile.

  “Drink this.” The woman handed her a tin cup.

  Sam drank it greedily. It was water, but tasted of pine and something else, something sweet that left an aftertaste.

  “It’s white pine tea. Wipe this on your burns,” the woman said, handing Sam a cloth with a sticky glob smeared on it. “It’s honey.”

  Sam touched the goo to her wounds, wincing through the agony. She heard screaming back at the branding station and shuddered.

  She handed the wash cloth and cup back to the woman, who looked to be about fifty years old. Her wiry hair, twisted into dreads, was grayed at the temples, and she had lichen and fungal growths up both arms and on her face. Her eyes sunk into her face like black rocks. “Give some to whoever comes in next,” she said. “And try to sleep. There will be a lot to do tomorrow.” The woman looked over her shoulder at the armed humans patrolling the terrace.

  “Who are these people? What is this place?” Sam asked.

  The woman looked back at her, sadly. “It’s a labor camp,” she said. “And they own us.”

  When Sam opened her mouth to ask another question, the gate to the holding pen opened and another Infected—a man, short and stocky—fell inside. He’d been one of Brother Paul’s right-hand men back at the dairy farm. Off the top of her head, Sam couldn’t think of his name.

  “You’ll see,” the woman said, as two able-bodied Infected helped the newly branded man to his own bed of pine needles beside Sam’s.

  Sam handed him the cup and wash cloth and explained what to do. The man nodded absently, looking bewildered.

  Feeling slightly better, Sam blinked through the throbbing pain and scanned the holding pen. The woman who had helped her had moved off toward a group of sickly-looking Infected. They were gathered around a circle of pine needle beds, whispering amongst themselves and scratching their lichen growths. The brand-scars on their arms had scabbed over, leaving raised pink welts on their skin. Old-timers, she guessed.

  She figured the transport carrying her had held twenty-five or so of her fellow prisoners; it couldn’t have been many more. She had no idea what happened to the others at the farm, and tried not to think about it. Her eyelids grew heavy and she lay down.

  At some point the sun set. The screams of the brandings eventually ceased, and Sam was able to capture a few hours’ sleep. For a few hours, she was at peace.

  The feeling didn’t last long. The next morning, in the dim pre-dawn, she was awakened with the others in her pen. Armed humans fastened crude manacles to the new arrivals’ ankles, secured them with bolts, then chained them together in groups of five. After handing one of each group a handmade basket woven from bark, they were marched, at gunpoint, through the forest.

  Just as the sun peeked bright on the horizon, Sam and her chain gang were shown to a pile of tree trunks, covered in fungal blooms and wild mushrooms.

  Two men on the end of Sam’s chain started picking off the blooms and caps, dropping them into the basket at their feet. Following suit, the two beside them—a women and another man—did the same, leaving only Samantha.

  She looked around, where other gangs worked on other log piles. Far off behind them, a group of ten humans made a clearing on the forest floor, chopping down trees and levelling the soil. Another team was starting on a wall: digging holes, dropping in previously-cleaned logs with pulleys and man-powered cranes, filling in the holes with excess dirt. It was a massive production.

  At first, Sam couldn’t understand why the humans had slaves at all. There were certainly enough of them that they could be doing this themselves. Then she realized: fungus, particularly the blooms which had sprouted after the birth of the Archaean biome, was harmless to those who were Infected, but deadly to humans. She doubted they had enough gas masks for all of them, either, much less thought to use them to clean lumber. Why bother, when you could round up some Infected to do it for you? And certainly the fungus and mushrooms wouldn’t stop growing on the logs, even after the cabins were built. That meant the humans required a slave force, year round, to keep their homes clear of the toxic growths.

  This didn’t go on to explain how feeding, guarding, and taking care of a group of slave Infecteds was worth the hassle for such a simple job, but then she understood that the humans just weren’t bothering.

  There were no bathroom breaks; you squatted where you stood. There were no water breaks, no food. Technically, aside from a pile of pine needles, there was no shelter, either.

  With snow storms coming and going at any given moment, Sam had to wonder: what good was a slave force if they continually died from the elements? Although it went some way to explaining why the humans raided Infected communes. But the turnover had to be immeasurable.

  Just then a rifle butt struck Sam’s wounded shoulder, making her flinch.

  “Get to work!” a human man said, motioning to the logs with the barrel of his rifle.

  Gingerly reaching forward, Samantha pinched a mushroom cap between two fingers and pulled it off the log. The cap came off, but the stalk remained lodged in the bark. After tossing the cap into the basket, Sam went back for the stalk, then pulled a fungal bloom off, accidentally dropping them both to the ground.

  The Infected beside her jabbed Sam with a bony elbow. “Hey, be more careful,” he said. “That’s dinner.”

  Her stomach twisted. “Sorry.” Reaching down, she picked up the mushroom stalk and tossed it into the basket. That answered that question.

  Later, when the light of day had faded and the humans deemed it time, the Infected were marched back to their enclosure. Using a homemade bow drill fashioned from hair and sticks, the old-timers lit fires, then took the baskets of mushroom caps and fungal blooms and boiled them in water in tin cups. These cups were then passed around, everyone getting three mouthfuls. Then they made pine needle tea, and took turns with that. The water they collected from a muddy hole in the pen, and from melted snow.

  When it was Sam’s turn, she passed the mushroom cup along without taking a single sip, and only drank the tea.

  She knew the Archaean parasite granted her an immunity to the majority of the fungal infections associated with it, but she’d seen how covered these Infected were, and assumed eating the fungus was contributing.

  It would only be a matter of time before she was in the same condition, but if she was to ever devise an escape, she needed full mobility, and no distractions. That included itchy growths.

  Her eyes scanned the crowd and rested on Binh, who she hadn’t realized until then was among the new arrivals. Their eyes met as he hungrily gulped from the cup in his hands and he nodded to her as he passed it along.
>
  She balled her fists and felt her eyes fill with tears, but not from sorrow.

  From rage.

  21

  DOYLE WAS HOISTED aboard the battleship via a stretcher lowered from the port side. Upon closer inspection, it had proven not to be a battleship, but a Bay-class dock landing ship, about one-hundred-eighty meters long and thirty meters abeam. With two large cranes between the superstructure and the flight deck, and an arsenal of cannons, miniguns, GPMGs and CIWSs, it looked a monster compared to the Tevatnoa, which, while larger, was not nearly as well-armed.

  The Tevatnoa offered no help to Cobalt, currently a kilometer away off the landing ship’s port bow, stationary and quiet on the St. John’s River.

  As the rest of the team climbed a cargo net obligingly dropped by the ship’s crew, Miller could only guess as to what communication, if any, had taken place between the two vessels. He imagined Gray and Lewis in the Tevatnoa’s bridge, cursing Miller’s name for boarding the unidentified vessel, but what choice did he have? Given Doyle’s condition, and the threats from the water below, he saw no alternative other than to follow du Trieux’s suggestion.

  Once on deck, Miller watched the medics tend to Doyle, accepting an offered heat blanket.

  “Get your handzz off me, you wankerzz,” Doyle spat from his stretcher. “Who the hell are you anyway?”

  “He’s had fifteen milligrams of morphine,” Miller told the medics as they whisked him away. “And his knee is shattered.”

  The crew wore wrinkled dark blue Royal Navy uniforms. Given their lack of fungal growths and alert expressions, Miller’s first guess was that they were uninfected. The sailors stood impassively over Miller and his team, keeping their Glock 17s trained on them until an officer approached, stomping down the deck with heavy steps.

  He was a commander, going by the rank insignia in the middle of his jacket. He wore a navy blue baseball cap so low on his head his ears stuck out like satellite dishes. Putting a hand on his holstered Glock, he eyed Miller up and down as if appraising a prize pony. “Name, rank, and serial number, please.”