Storch sat up and hugged himself. He couldn't hold his head up, let it settle against his knees. He hadn't asked for this, for any of it. All he'd wanted since he came home from the war was to be left alone, to grow old in peace, a latter-day Cincinnatus. In the last eight years, he'd managed to strike some sort of deal with his past and with his illness, and he'd been able to become almost normal. The others, the few men from his squad that he'd kept in touch with for awhile after they got back, had all retreated into bitterness and paranoia, hating their own government as they'd once hated its enemies. But he'd gotten it together as well as he knew how and gone on with his life. He didn't want to kill anymore, didn't want to think in terms of "US" versus "THEM." He wanted to be free, and didn't harbor any illusions about what the word meant or about how hard it was to keep. Now, in the span of three days, he was a prisoner again—of somebody else's war, and not any kind of conventional, sane war, either. Both sides in this conflict seemed to be competing to drive him insane, to pry him away from everything that made sense in his life, to reduce him again to a soldier, a headful of hardwired fight or flight instincts. They wouldn't let him fly, they wouldn't explain it to him, wouldn't let him decide. He wanted to fight, now, yes indeed. But he wanted answers, to see for himself what was what, and what the fight was over, before he cast in his lot on either side. And perhaps they'd all regret that they'd ever decided to disturb Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch from his sleep of self-exile, because he'd fight them all.
The blackness of the cargo container was merely darkness again, the absence of light, not a void fraught with phantom inquisitors. He could get out of a box.
Kneeling, he tugged at the heel of his left boot. The false bottom of the heel came away in his hand and he pulled out a spool of monofilament wire. It looked like metallic angling line, or silvery dental floss, but Storch handled it gingerly, taking care not to touch it as he unspooled it and stretched it between his fists. As a garrote, the wire could cleanly saw the head off a victim, but its primary purpose was as a saw. He'd ordered the boots from Soldier Of Fortune magazine because of their sturdiness and comfort, and never in five years had he opened the heels to use the special tools inside. Now he blessed the earlier, edgier incarnation of himself that'd seen the necessity of carrying hidden weapons in his shoes.
Sidling up to the tiny crack of sunlight in the wall, he pressed himself against it and tried to peer out. Nothing more definite than a wall of unvaried grayness outside, but no movement, either. After feeling up and down the slot of the door, he looped the cutting wire around the first of the three bolts that held him prisoner. Each was as thick as his index and middle fingers together, but the wire worked through them like a stick of dry mesquite. The minutes flowed by unnoticed, Storch living in his hands and in his ears, hearing nothing but the muted whine of the wire worrying away at the steel, and the next, and the last. Suddenly, finally, the wire popped free, and the door settled on its hinges with a resounding groan, drifted open. Storch put away the monofilament wire and leaned cautiously out.
The cargo container was apparently parked in a field of trailers, because another exactly like it was next to it, parked so close that the door clanged against it when it swung open. The light was deep blue, the last gasp of night before the dawn of another brutal midsummer day. A sputtering breeze carried dust, diesel and the growl of idling semis. A truckstop, somewhere in the Central Valley.
Storch climbed down from the container, bracing himself against the edge of the flatbed trailer it rested on, lowering himself as steadily as he could to keep from crying out. His shoulder muscles complained, but he willed himself to ignore them. His feet found the tarmac and he pushed the cargo door to. Within minutes, he could be on another truck, bound for anywhere but here.
"Freeze!" a stage-whisper from just over his shoulder. Storch whipped around and saw a man in black fatigues racing down the narrow alleyway between the trailers, holding something out in front of him that looked like an electric shaver. Storch backed up a step. The sentry wasn't a regular trucker or a security guard, he knew. The three-quarter profile stance he adopted as he charged Storch was almost exactly the tactic he himself would have chosen, if their roles were reversed. Storch crouched at the last minute and stepped inside the outstretched hand, bent it over his shoulder and started to pivot, intending to break the arm as he threw the man against the cargo container.
But the man was turning in his grip, the arm twisting so it bent over him. A knee came up between his legs from behind and slammed into his groin even as the razor-thing—taser-thing, he corrected himself—jabbed him in the neck. Hot blue sparks flashed in his brain and he felt his legs buckle, his control over them becoming as tenuous as a long-distance telephone connection with a demilitarized zone. His hands spasmed, but Storch held onto the arm, threw his nerveless weight against the sentry, slamming him hard against the cargo container. The taser broke contact with his skin and his body, shaky though it was, was suddenly his again. He swept the sentry's feet out from under him and twisted the arm back around his neck, drove the crackling mouth of the taser into the sentry's face once, twice, then pressed it against him until his closed-mouth screams subsided and he smelled hair and skin burning. His own hands tingled as the current jumped from the man's sweat-slick skin into his. He heard a startled gasp and the wriggling body behind him went limp, draped across him like a wet bearskin rug.
Storch staggered under the dead weight, caught himself against one wall and shrugged the man off. He slumped to the ground beside the body, froze and listened. There was no change in the faint, utterly mundane noises from outside the trailer-maze. He looked at the man for a long while, considering killing him. A twist of the neck, and the man would never trouble anyone again. But Storch noticed the Walther PPK holstered at his side; it was mounted with a short silencer. He could've put a bullet into Storch without arousing any attention from the outside world, but he'd tried to subdue him, instead. The thought of killing a soldier in his sleep made him shivery, nauseous.
Methodically, he searched the sentry's pockets. No big surprise—the sentry carried no ID, not even a wallet. He took the gun and stuck it into the waistband of his pants, snugging the silencered barrel into the small of his back. He found a cell phone—dead, unresponsive when he thumbed the SEND button—shorted out from the taser jolt. A card with a list of numbers was glued to the back of the phone. Storch peeled it off and slipped it into his pocket, returned the phone, and rolled the body into his cargo-cell, arranged the door so it looked secure. The light was already turning from blue to grayish gold as the sun began to fight its way above the horizon. Storch had a long way to go, but where?
Answers. He had to find somebody who could tell him who was fighting who, and why. Somebody on the right side of the law, somebody who would listen to him.
He ran down the line of trailers, ears pricked for more sentries, but he heard nothing. He found his way out of the maze so suddenly that he was still running when he came out into the open. He stood at one end of a vast parking lot filled with semis, most idle, but some dozing noisily with their running lights on. A diesel fueling station stood fifty yards away; sleepy-looking men in flannel shirts and greasy jeans stood at the pumps, not noticing him. In the center of the lot sprawled a vast and brilliantly lit truckstop, the Mojave Outpost. He checked himself over—he looked like another trucker, dirtier and more freaked-out looking than most, but not so much as to attract undue attention. Head-checking both ways, he crossed the tarmac, looking for a way to get to San Jose.
17
Stella cleaned the instruments they brought back from the trailer, then sat aside to watch Mrachek process the blood sample. She never looked at Stella as she worked over the slides she laid out on the countertop. A lesser judge of character might've mistaken it for trust, but Stella had worked under enough doctors to see the contempt it represented. As a nurse, she was just another tool, a little more autonomous than the others, which represented more of a drawb
ack than an asset. Stella had come to admire a few of them, but never liked any. She was beginning to dislike Delores Mrachek a great deal. To have fallen down a rabbit hole into a twilight world, the hostage of a terrorist faction, and still be taken for granted, dismissed as an instrument just like at her day-job, galled her almost as much as the quarantine.
Since she'd gotten out of quarantine, she'd been treated pretty decently, for a hostage. She'd been assigned a slightly bigger cell opposite the sick bay, and she'd been allowed to come and go as she pleased. Not that there was any chance of escape, or manpower to spare to watch her. The corridor she called home branched off into a maze of sturdy, identical concrete halls, staircases and ladderways that had the deep chill and sepulchral staleness of underground. She doubted she could find the door that led to the surface, let alone pose enough of a threat to be allowed to leave. They seemed to be willing to grant her as many privileges as she earned by being an invisible guest, and Dr. Mrachek had begrudgingly told her she'd appreciate her help in the sick bay. There was quite a bit of trauma work to be done, she'd said, but Stella couldn't be sure if she meant regularly, or in the immediate future.
They seemed to be a group of less than thirty men and women. Most of them were obviously soldiers. They didn't leer or try to flirt with her. They merely noticed her. The rest of the cabal seemed to be scientists, though they wore the same fatigues as the others; they were always rushing around carrying files or walking blind with VR goggles and datagloves on. All were in their late forties to early sixties, and reminded her of Dominican monks: silent, somber, lost in contemplation of some grim truth they hoped to keep secret from the outer world. She avoided them and for them, she was invisible.
When she'd been asked to accompany Mrachek on a "field trip," she'd been giddy, and hard-pressed not to blow her cool as she accepted. To get outside into the fresh air again, to see the world outside this bunker. Even if escape was impossible, she knew she'd never get a better chance.
She should've known better. When she'd helped Mrachek and two soldiers load the gear for the trip, they'd filed into a huge underground vault with a steel plank ceiling that looked removable. Four green, windowless vans and two familiar pickup trucks were parked along the side, but the lion's share of space was taken up by two helicopters with their rotors removed: both heavy military choppers. They sat on a massive lift rack that could, presumably raise them up to the convertible roof for liftoff. A squad of soldiers worked in pits beneath both the helicopters, assembling outsized racks that would probably hold missiles. She'd climbed into the back of a van and squatted on the shag-carpeted floor in a circle with four mute soldiers in civilian clothes. They'd passed around chocolate glazed donuts and a thermos of coffee, but Stella hadn't taken much. The way they wolfed them down, as if they might not get to eat again anytime soon, made her loath to deprive them, whether it was out of real danger, or bad manners born of habit. The van started and lurched into a steep, twisting ascent, like they were going up a spiral ramp in a parking garage. Sunlight flared through the tinted front windshield, but she felt afraid to stand and try to look out, for fear of the silent men around her.
A few times they whispered in each other's ears, but for the most part, they seemed perfectly at ease with the silent treatment, as if they wouldn't have said much more if she'd been absent.
They'd ridden in the van for an hour, then stopped in the midst of a huge maze of semi trailers in what Stella guessed must be a truckstop, probably in the Mojave Desert from the arid heat and the stinging blue sky. The soldiers fanned out to stand watch while the driver opened one of the cargo containers and nosed the van into it. He opened the back doors and offered Stella a fresh thermos of coffee and a package of chocolate doughnettes. He nodded at her thanks and went to work.
She watched Mrachek climb out of the other van with some other scientists. They all followed an armed escort into one of the trailers, then, a few minutes later, Mrachek came out and approached Stella, helped herself to the last doughnette. Without a word, she led Stella to another trailer, where a soldier held the cutout door open for them and shone a flashlight in after them to light their way. Mrachek turned sideways and edged past stacked wooden crates with HECHO EN MEXICO stenciled on them to what looked like the blind front end of the trailer, then pulled on a steel panel to reveal a ten-key pad. Too fast for Stella to read the code, Mrachek tapped it in and the wall beside her slid back in upon itself, revealing a darkened doorway. Mrachek stepped through and hit some buttons that sent fluorescent lights spluttering to life. Stella crept into the hidden space, expecting to find a smuggler's hole filled with armaments, or something. What she found instead was a miniature laboratory, the size of a kitchenette, no wider than the breadth of the trailer, but Stella saw most of the equipment she'd noticed in the sickbay reproduced here. There was a rudimentary trauma station and surgery, and an incubator in an isolation booth. Like the sickbay, the lab was designed specifically for the bizarre war Mrachek claimed her weird militia was fighting. Who funded these people? Against her nature, she'd been impressed into silence.
She'd held her feelings in check for an hour, watching Mrachek, trying to learn what they were up to without giving herself away. Mrachek prepped five slides with blood samples, and, after depositing three in a glassine in the freezer, donned a clear plastic faceshield and heavy gloves. She turned and squeezed past Stella to get to a locked cabinet. With one of the keys on the ring around her neck, she unlocked it and selected an unmarked green glass bottle. Stella recognized the test. Over the course of their awkward quarantine together, Mrachek had performed the same test on their own blood samples every hour on the hour. Stella never saw or heard anything of the soldier who got scratched, and never asked.
Stella had never taken her eyes off Mrachek's broad, square back as she stood and took a silent step towards the outer door, but she never saw the doctor's hand go for the strange gun she held in her hand as she turned. Some sort of dart cartridge rested in a transparent sheath where a barrel should be. "This has enough pharmaceutical curare in it to kill you before you feel the prick."
"I was just stretching my legs."
"We're leaving in a little while. Going back."
"I…just wanted to see the sun again before we went back."
That can be arranged once we return to base. I'm going to need your help running this batch of slides through in a few minutes."
"Is he one of us?" Mrachek raised an eyebrow at this. "I mean, is he human?"
Mrachek thought for a moment. She was not a woman who needed someone to talk at. But Stella was clearly not going anywhere, and had helped process the tests, had earned some answers. She was smart enough not to let it come to a fight. "He seems to be uncontaminated, but that isn't the issue." She started to turn away, and Stella reached out to touch her. Mrachek recoiled as if there was still some doubt about Stella's own biological status.
"He's a sick, emotionally damaged Gulf War veteran who may or may not have committed mass murder in the last twenty-four hours. We were forced to entrust him with a very special task which we lacked the manpower to complete ourselves, and he bungled it. If not for poor Mr. Napier, we might've been up shit creek without a paddle."
"You mean you still have the remains?"
"Oh, he's still very much alive," Mrachek said, shaking her head. Stella had no words. "We couldn't kill him."
"After what it did in your own fucking base, and what it could do? Burn it with napalm, if you have to."
Mrachek smiled humorlessly at this. "No, I mean, we haven't been able to kill him. That's what we're going to try to do when we get back. We're going to kill him again and again until we get it right. You want to help?"
"Don't have anything else to do, do I?" She looked at the charts on the table again.
When Mrachek had left the trailer to get the blood, Stella'd messed with the closed circuit TV system. Flipping through the dozen-odd cameras they had, she'd seen that they were at a truck stop s
omewhere in the Mojave desert, maybe Death Valley. There were no other vehicles parked near them, only row upon row of semi trailers parked at the edge of the lot. Dawn was coming, the sunrise an impressive sight even on the grainy color monitor. It felt like the first she'd seen in years.
Then she'd switched to a channel that carried a handheld camera feed. The cameraman followed Mrachek and an armed guard into a cargo container resting on a flatbed freight trailer. The camera had a light on it, so she'd clearly seen the man lying bound on the floor, his limbs secured behind his back in a position that in itself looked like a form of torture. She'd watched as Mrachek had extracted blood from the large, rawboned body, as the guard had complained over and over that they ought to have a flamethrower with this guy, human or not. She'd seen his head, hairless and sunburnt, and when they rolled him over, his face, carved down to sinew and unlovely, proto-Neanderthal bones, and clenched tightly, even in drugged sleep. His mouth worked, bit off the first three swabs Mrachek tried to get between his thin, chapped lips. The guard, in thick, clumsy rubber gloves, had to pry the man's jaw open to get a swab in. Even in sleep. Something about his instinctual defiance appealed to her and would not go away, despite what she heard about him later. This man was someone she'd only ever see on a TV, so it was safe to think about him.
"Are you going to kill him, too?" Stella asked, touching the charts.
"That isn't for me to decide," Mrachek answered, unperturbed. "But then," she said, "I think killing him would be granting him his secret, fondest wish."
One of the monitors blinked on just as Stella was thinking about turning it on. She flinched. The big, dark black man was on the screen, the Major. He was looking at a point just off-screen, the monitor that was showing him the sickbay trailer. He nodded towards Stella, then looked towards Mrachek.
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