by Weston Ochse
He pointed to the metal jutting from the sides of the truck at forty-five degree angles. “These are to stop fungees and spikers from getting close enough to the truck to grab hold.”
He pointed to the mesh. “This is to keep birds and insects from getting in.” He tapped his forehead with his forefinger. “Don’t you get it, soldier? Everything out there is infected. The pigeons are as dangerous as a fucking tiger and attack anything they can.”
Sandi came up and stood in front of him, her back to me. She placed both hands on his shoulders and said something I couldn’t hear.
I’d encountered Phil’s type of anger before. No one likes for someone to come in and take over their missions. It’s happened to me, and I’ve done it to others. I’m sure Phil and Steve were as good as or better than anyone I’d ever served with. That they were still alive more than a year after the invasion was testament to their abilities. Still, if we were to succeed at the mission, it had to be as a team, rather than as a few pissed-off individuals.
Phil shook his head at something Sandi said, then stalked to the other side of the truck, where he began to slide into his kit.
Sandi turned to me and spread her hands. “So I see he gave you the guided tour.”
Nicely played. “Is it really an issue with the birds?” The thought of being attacked by a flock of contagious birds seemed suddenly terrifying.
“Not so much anymore. Early on, as the black alien vine spread, birds were getting infected in droves. But they also attacked in flocks. Most of them have long since died. Now we get the occasional migratory bird that stumbles into the black alien vine footprint.” She shook her head. “It’s nothing as bad as it was.”
“And the insects?” Dupree asked.
I remembered his description of the Amazonian ant. Of course insects could be carriers. Was I to be worried about ants and gnats and flies, as well? How could we hope to keep from being infected?
“As far as we can tell, the insects are infected, too. They’re moving like a bow wave in front of the alien vine as it encroaches.”
Dupree nodded. “There’d be a gray zone between the infected insects and the non-infected. Whether it’s the deimatic behaviors exhibited by the infected or pheromones, non-infected insects would flee to the best of their ability. Of course different modes of locomotion would result in complete infection of some species before others as they are overrun.”
I frowned. “You mean the faster bugs would win.”
“Not just fast; flying bugs as well.”
I stared at the mesh and shook my head. “So the butterfly is as deadly as a pterodactyl.”
Steve came around the back of the truck in a hazmat suit without the mask and helmet. He looked like a black Michelin Man. “Thank God pterodactyls are extinct.”
Sandi showed us to our suits and we wedged ourselves into them. The Viking HDS Dry Suits were made of vulcanized rubber. They were form-fitting and bulky. It was probably different in the water, but on land it was like I was wearing five layers of clothes. Still, it was better to wear this than to be exposed to infection.
We had our packs in the back of the vehicle just in case we needed them. I managed to rig a holster for my pistol on the right side of the suit. A bag clipped to the left held the flexible helmet. A rack of oxygen tanks which we’d use once we got closer to the action lay in the rear of the truck.
Phil got behind the wheel, and Steve sat beside him. Sandi rode in the back with us. She held a MAC-10 across her knees and wore black wraparound glasses.
“Let’s hit it,” she said through the back window opening.
The truck lurched forward and we headed down the mountain. Instead of following the 210, we turned north until we found Sierra Madre Avenue and took it west.
Several people stopped scavenging long enough to watch us pass. We didn’t encounter much vehicular traffic.
During the first ten miles, we saw a lone motorcycle weaving through a line of wrecked cars. The rider wore a gas mask beneath a spiked black helmet, and had a sawed-off shotgun in a holster on his back and another holster affixed to the gas tank that held what looked like a semi-automatic pistol. He looked our way once, but made no move towards us.
We passed a side street where a pickup was idling at the curb. While a woman stood at the back of the truck with an AR-15, a man carried food from a home in a plastic laundry hamper. They just stared at us as we passed.
I guess we were the new normal.
Then things changed.
I felt the vehicle slow and I glanced out the windshield. A traffic circle lay ahead of us; across it was a school bus.
“Where’d that come from?” Sandi said. “Wasn’t there yesterday.”
Phil slowed to a stop about a hundred yards away.
“See what it says on the side?” Steve said.
We all saw it. On a white background beneath the windows, in sprayed red letters, were the words, GOD’S NEW ARMY. Beneath that in smaller letters it read, NEW BELIEVERS WELCOME.
Steve pointed to the left. “We could cross-country and then head south on North Dalton.”
Dupree glanced in my direction. “What do they want?”
Sandi frowned. “Women, probably. Which makes you guys free to leave.”
A man dressed in white, with a shock of shoulder-length blond hair, walked around the back of the barn. I aimed my 416 in his direction and zoomed in with my scope. White shoes, a white suit and a white tie, he looked every bit the southern preacher. I recognized his face. How could I not? He’d been a media darling for at least a decade. “Paul Sebring.”
“Oh, hell.” Sandi charged her submachine gun. “I was hoping to miss his reach. Phil, let’s go four-wheeling.”
“What do they want?” I asked.
“My guess? You.”
“But can he know about our mission?”
“Must be someone up at Mother’s.”
I keyed in on movement from inside the bus. I zoomed in. Waited for the focus. Then—
“Sniper! Everybody down!”
I didn’t wait for the other to shoot. I put two rounds into the sniper.
Sebring ducked as the glass exploded behind him. When he straightened, he was no longer smiling.
Phil threw the truck in gear and shot over the curb, going south between a blue one-story cookie cutter home and a yellow two-story version of the same. The space along the side shrank to almost nothing as the metal on the truck’s sides raked the wooden siding like the claws of some great animal against a gargantuan chalkboard. I held on and watched Dupree grit his teeth and close his eyes. Then, like a BB shot out the end of a straw, we were into the back yards.
Phil angled right to miss a shed, but it meant we hit a swing set square on, sending it up and over the truck in a clamoring of twisted metal.
We hit Desert Willow and swung left to the first intersection, and right onto Gardenia.
Sandi yelled to be heard. “You know we’re heading square into GNA territory, right?”
Somehow Phil had managed to light another cigarette. As he took the next turn on two wheels, he said, “Not much choice.” He jerked his head back the way we’d come. “With Big Ego behind us, I figured anything not in his direction was the right choice. I remember when they used to crucify members who tried to leave.”
Steve pointed to a break in the trees to the right. “Through there.”
Phil swerved into it. The truck bucked as it jumped the curb. Glancing towards Dupree, I think he’d decided it was best to keep his eyes closed through the entire chase. Probably a good idea on his part.
Sandi pointed to a pack of wild dogs, all with ascocarps protruding from their shoulders and heads. “Spikers!”
A mix of breeds from mutt to German shepherd to Chihuahua, they were already running to intersect us. The smaller dogs fell behind, but the larger ones, including the shepherd and a pair of Brittany Spaniels, were able to reach us before we passed, leaping towards us like kamikaze canines. All but one
were stopped by the metal. A brindle greyhound hit the side of the mesh near where Dupree sat, clawed at it for a moment, then fell away.
“What was that?” Dupree said, his head whipping back and forth.
“Spiker dogs trying to eat you through the cage,” I said.
He turned and stared, eyes wide. Then he scrambled to grab his helmet from the bag at his hip. With shaking hands, he put it on.
“What are you doing?”
He pointed to the spot the dog had hit. “Spores.”
Sandi shook her head. “We’re going too fast for that. You only have to worry about them once we stop, or if we get into the alien vine.”
Phil shouted, “Hold on!”
I grabbed for the sides of the cage and watched with horror as we slammed into a corner of a Spanish-style stucco house. The impact shook me all the way to my teeth. The wheels were still spinning as they tried to find traction, grinding us against the side of the house.
Several of the spikers were still on our tail.
To the left came a shirtless woman whose head looked as if it had been burned: hair almost completely gone; black skin over bright red wounds. Fungal growths dotted her shoulders and neck, looking like distended nipples. She wore a pair of soiled panties and nothing else.
I raised my rifle, which put my aim just to the left of Dupree’s head. He regarded me and I gestured him aside. As soon as he moved, I put a round through the rifle. It struck the metal around the mesh and ricocheted, causing me to jump. I aimed again, this time getting the round through the mesh. It struck her center mass in the chest, sending her rolling onto the ground.
I heard a buzzing sound about the same time Phil managed to get the truck free. It shot forward, throwing me off balance. I reached out and caught Sandi’s breast, which earned me a punch in the sternum. I gave her an apologetic smile as I let go and transferred my grip to the truck.
Behind us came two motorcycles. Submachine guns were affixed to their fuel tanks. The riders wore full suits of racing armor with shin guards, knee guards, quad guards, articulated arm guards, and a full torso guard. They had red and white helmets that matched their armor. The prominent GNA on the front of their torsos said it all.
They opened fire as Phil jerked the wheel and punched the accelerator. We hit North Pasadena Avenue and slung south. The road was clogged with abandoned cars, so Phil was forced to careen onto several front lawns just to keep from crashing.
Sandi slid to the rear of the truck and fired her MAC-10 through the mesh, causing the riders to swerve to avoid getting hit.
Meanwhile the interior of Dupree’s helmet was misted, the same sort of moisture you’d get on the inside of a car’s windows if there wasn’t any ventilation. Oh Hell! I clawed my way to him and fought to remove the helmet. He wasn’t moving. The damned fool had put the helmet on and not the oxygen. What had he been thinking?
I found the connector and peeled the helmet from his head. As the truck bounced and jostled, I tried feeling for a breath. Nothing. I grabbed the back of his head and brought it to me just enough so I could make sure that he was breathing. I laid him down on the bed of the truck. That’s when I noticed the blood coming from his left thigh. He’d been shot. I checked the wound and noted with relief that the femoral artery was undamaged. Had it been hit, poor Dupree would have already been dead. As it stood, the wound was barely bleeding.
Sandi fired off another burst of shots.
One of the bikers went down, ass over tea kettle.
The second biker fired twice more, then tore away, heading back the way he’d come. I guess without support from his partner, he wasn’t willing to continue.
Hooray for our side.
Sandi pulled herself to the front of the back. “Let’s get to Safehouse 3.”
For the next twenty minutes, Phil drove the truck like an Indianapolis 500 professional race car driver. Twice fungees tried to block the way. Both times he swerved and clipped them, sending them tumbling like ragdolls into adjacent buildings. The number of spikers increased dramatically as we headed west.
We finally stopped at a small church wedged between Foothills Boulevard and the 210. The sign read Indonesian Evangelical Church. A gnarled Asian man held open a garage door. We roared inside, then he slammed it down and put several metal rods through the floor to secure it.
Dupree had come to a few minutes earlier, but he was deathly pale. I put a bandage over his leg wound. When they opened the rear of our cage, I helped him out. We soon found ourselves in the congregation hall, which had been set up with a meeting area near where the pulpit had once been, and cots where the congregation would have normally gathered.
While Sandi and the others secured the vehicle, I found a spare cot and got Dupree settled onto it. “What the hell were you thinking, putting the helmet on without checking for oxygen flow?”
He grinned weakly. “I forgot about the oxygen.” He closed his eyes and winced. “Getting shot hurts, you know?”
“I know. It’s why you try and avoid it at all costs.”
“Where are we?”
“In some church. They called it a safehouse.” I glanced around at the metal reinforced door and the barred windows and the men with rifles sitting round. “Looks pretty safe to me.”
I turned back to Dupree, but his eyes were closed. His chest was rising and falling steadily, so that was a good sign. He might as well sleep while he could.
We’ve been cataloguing as many survival groups as we can. We have more than seven thousand in our database alone. Some are good but most are bad. If you can make it on your own, try to do that. Even the good groups have a bloody past which they could just as quickly return to if times got tough all of a sudden. Keep the information flowing, people. And remember, be careful out there.
Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,
Night Stalker Monologue #1344
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT WAS MY bullet they found in his leg. Must have come from the ricochet. They were able to give him a unit of blood and had him on a drip just to bring back his fluids. As it turned out, the safehouse was run by Mother as one of her outstations. They were getting ready to abandon it to the creeping alien vine, much to the lamentations of Pastor Mercurio, the Indonesian leader of the long-gone congregation. Even now preparations were being made to move this part-forward operating base, part-MASH unit to somewhere in the foothills. Their only problem was trying to keep free of GNA.
“It’s more than a cult to them,” Sandi told me. “It’s more than a religion. They’re fanatics.”
I kept my thoughts to myself. Mother and Sebring both had cults of personality and they both wanted for them and their members to survive. They seemed different sides of the same coin to me, although Mother occupied the definitely nicer side—or so it seemed, for now.
Now we sat around a table. Phil and Steve cleaned weapons. Mercurio wouldn’t let them smoke in the church, so they were constantly going outside. I sat beside Sandi, and next to her was an ex-male stripper named Adam who had a face that looked somewhere between Richard Gere’s in American Gigolo and a meth addict. He’d been showing Sandi a map of the infected areas that he was updating daily.
“It’s crossed the 605,” he said in a small voice. He pointed to several spots. “Right here it’s all the way to Irwindale Road. We have no idea how it grew fast enough to reach there while the rest of it is still a mile back.” He shrugged. “It’s not like we even know how to stop it.”
“See the Sante Fe Dam Nature Preserve?” Sandi said, pointing at the map. “The damned vines probably relished the soil. So much easier to grow in than concrete.”
“I suppose so. That guy over there going to be able to tell us how to kill it?” he asked, his eyes darting towards where Dupree lay, softly snoring.
“We hope so. He’s OMBRA’s best and brightest.” She flashed me a smile. “And this guy, the guy who shot him, is his bodyguard.”
Adam sawed his jaws back and forth as he examined me.
“Not much of a bodyguard, is he?”
I stared at him flatly. “No. Not much.”
He jerked away as if I’d hit him. Good.
Sandi placed a hand over his. “How many more days?”
“Three, I think, maybe four.” He licked his lips. “It’s not just the alien vine, it’s what comes out of it. There’s some sort of bird that lives inside. We have yet to see one close up, but we think it’s alien, as well.”
“Maybe it’s the pollinator,” I murmured. Then when I saw them staring at me, I shared what Dupree had told me earlier.
“It’s good that you came along when you did,” Sandi said to me.
I shrugged. “Like Adam said, I’m just a bodyguard and not very good at that.” I suddenly flashed to Michelle begging me to kill her. I shook my head and changed the subject. “You said Sebring was there for us.”
She patted Adam on the shoulder and he simpered away to one of the cots. “He had to be. There’s no reason for him to be so far away from his center of control. You must have something he wants.”
“Not me. Must be Dupree. But even that’s strange. Why would he need a scientist?”
“He’s as desperate as any of us to stop the spread of the alien vine. It’s going to kill us all eventually if we don’t figure a way to stop it.”
“So he tries to steal a scientist?”
“It makes a sort of sense.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t buying it. “We’re missing something.”
We were getting nowhere fast. Our plan was to leave at first light. I checked on Dupree, then worked with Steve to fix the hole the bullet had made in his hazmat suit. We spent a fruitless hour trying everything from melting rubber to applying a patch, but the suit’s material withstood the best we could throw at it. Finally it was decided that Steve would stay back and give Dupree his suit. He wasn’t happy about it, nor was Sandi happy about taking a weapon out of the expedition, but without Dupree, there would be no expedition to begin with.
