by Scott Mackay
“We’ll be back in five or ten minutes,” said Glenda.
Glenda and Jake got out of the car. The rain soaked their clothes instantly.
As they got closer to the landslide, it reminded her of a sleeping monster. Dead and broken conifers stuck out of its muddy back like giant quills. Yet, by its own momentum, and by the constant erosion of the rain, debris had caved away from the leading edge of the landslide and left a narrow passage along the outside shoulder of the road—a ledge perhaps wide enough for her car?
She looked up the mountainside. God, there was really nothing holding it in place anymore. As they made their way into the narrow passageway along the right side of the road, she felt like the sleeping monster might suddenly open its maw and devour them. To the left, rain ran in rivulets over the broken-away part. She pointed her flashlight at the rivulets, holding her rifle in her other hand. The water was brown and muddy.
She shone her flashlight further afield. “I think it ends up here. We might make it.”
“Except it’s all caved in up here.”
“Just a bit. Maybe the car can get through.”
“Not without getting stuck in that mud.”
“Let’s have a look.”
She climbed the caved-in section, her feet sinking up to her ankles in mud.
As she got close to the other side of the caved-in section, she saw the headlights of a parked vehicle beyond the furthest extent of the landslide. She turned her flashlight off and got to her knees, because even though she couldn’t immediately confirm who it was, she knew it had to be Buzz—Buzz, maybe coming back down the mountain because he had reached a different impasse further up, and was now being thwarted again by this new obstacle. Jake got to his knees beside her.
For several seconds she couldn’t move, couldn’t even look. She was caught in the grip of her own survival instinct, keeping down in all the sopping mud where Buzz couldn’t see her. But then it dawned on her. She had an opportunity here. She had her rifle. And it wouldn’t be like killing that dog, because she could kill Buzz easily. All that hurt he had brought into their home. Always coming around with a twelve-pack or a fifth of Jack. Driving a wedge between Gerry and the rest of the family so that sometimes she would go to her bedroom while they were out on the front porch drinking and weep until she couldn’t weep any more. I shot the sheriff but I did not shoot the deputy. Well…now was the time. She steeled her nerve.
She got up on one knee and readied her rifle. And to think, he had made a pass at Hanna while at Marblehill.
In a moment she saw a figure appear in the glow of the headlights. Through the blur of the rain, the figure resolved into Buzz Fulton. She took aim, exhaled, squeezed the trigger, and fired—but fired just as some mud shifted from under her knee. It wasn’t much, but still enough to make her miss.
Buzz ducked and circled back to his truck in a crouched position. She pumped another round into the chamber and fired at his windshield. If she couldn’t get the man, she would get his truck, damage it as much as she could so he would have a hard time following them. But before she could fire through the front grille, Buzz started firing back. A bullet rocketed through the air toward them and thudded into the mud not five yards away, making a small, lugubrious splash.
“You sons of bitches!” he called.
Then he pumped round after round in their general direction.
As much as she would have liked to shoot Buzz’s truck to pieces, Glenda knew her only option was to retreat, especially because she had her child with her, and also because she was starting to fear that all the gunfire might trigger the mountain into another mudslide.
“Jake, back to the car.”
Jake ran—fast but clumsy in the thick mud, and looking as if he were ready to hit the dirt at a second’s notice.
Glenda fired one more round at the truck, then ran as well. She slipped and fell, scraping her knee badly on a small part of road that was clear of mud, but got up and continued, blinking through the torrential rain, wondering when more of the mountain would topple into the valley. Jake ran ahead of her, finally
leaving the mud behind and dashing along the ledge until he came to the car. She, too, came to the ledge.
Great clumps of mud fell from her shoes.
Jake dove into the backseat.
Glenda reached the car, pushed the rifle over Hanna’s knees, got into the driver’s seat, put the car in gear, swung round, and headed down the highway, not caring if they ended up walking part of the way to Marblehill.
Anything was better than being shot at by Buzz on this mountain.
28
Two days after the virus launch, Neil stared up at the sky from the Homestead parade ground as if it were his own personal masterpiece. Light. Once again. He could have cried for joy. Not the big gaping holes of the first attempt. No. Just these big brown blotches that were like onionskin. Like looking through a thousand blurry skylights—translucent apertures that let the beautiful glow of the afternoon sun in.
Louise stood next to him, clutching his hand. Ashley and Melissa stood next to Louise.
Morgan… Morgan played out in the huge puddles dotting the parade ground.
The silence, after so many days of gunfire, was unreal. It was like Christmas Day on the Eastern Front.
But where the hell was Greg?
He thought he should ask Morgan to get out of the puddle, but she looked happy playing in all that mud.
Louise squeezed his hand and glanced toward the other end of the base. “Maybe they’ll stop.”
“Maybe they will.” He motioned at the sky. “The Moon is going to launch in the next couple of days.”
“I knew you could do it.”
He took a few steps out into the yard, where he got a wide view of the runways beyond the parade ground. All the grass was dead. A lot of it had been washed away in the rain. In the brown light coming from the sky, the horizon reminded him of the brown sky he had seen on Mars when he had been a visiting professor there years ago. God, it looked… otherworldly out on that runway—like the surface of one of the moons or inner planets, with nothing living, nothing able to live, just a horrifying wasteland.
He heard a lone gunshot from the direction of Home-stead’s main gate. They all froze. Christmas Day on the Eastern Front was over.
“Kids, go inside,” he said.
“Dad, I want to stay out here,” called Morgan.
“Morgan, don’t argue with Daddy,” said Louise.
With a sharpness he didn’t mean, he said, “All right, Morgan. Out of the puddle. You’re ten years old.
You shouldn’t be playing in puddles.”
“But, Daddy, it’s fun.”
“Morgan, right now.”
She got out of the puddle and came toward the barracks.
He turned to Louise. “What are we going to do with that kid?”
He and Louise got the girls inside.
He heard a few more gunshots from the opposite side of the base, but it wasn’t amounting to much. He glanced around the barracks and felt cramped, at odds with his family.
Once they were settled inside, he lifted his cell and tried his sister-in-law, Glenda.
It took him a while, but he finally got through.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Just west of Charlotte.”
“You should have been at Marblehill by now. Lenny called me an hour ago. He was expecting you a couple days ago. What happened?”
“It’s tougher than you think.” Then a pause. “I see light. Are we going to be okay?”
“We launched forty-eight hours ago. The Moon is going to launch on Tuesday.”
“The Moon is?” She sounded suddenly breathless. “So you’ve been talking to Gerry?”
He glanced at Louise. “Not directly.”
“But they’re helping you?”
“Luke Langstrom’s in charge now. I don’t know how that came about. But he’s been…cooperative.”
“Y
ou mean Gerry’s not running things anymore?”
“I don’t think so.” He sighed. That was the thing with Gerry. He always thought he was going places, but he never was. “I don’t think he’s officially off the team. I think he’s still doing things for them. But more on a consulting basis.” The signal hissed for a few seconds, and that was fine because it gave him a chance to change the subject. “So you’re west of Charlotte? You sound a little shaken.”
“Where do you want me to begin?”
“Are you okay?
“We ran into a landslide west of Dunstan, and had to turn around. We had to detour along 74. Plus we have Buzz Fulton following us.”
She told him of her unnerving encounter with Buzz Fulton up on the mountain.
“Have you seen him since the landslide?”
“No. But he knows we’re on our way to Marblehill.” Glenda told Neil about Jake’s note. “Then we got taken prisoner in Charlotte. This…gang, or…I don’t know—they were all in National Guard uniforms.
They held us for a few days, and tried to find out where we were going, but I didn’t tell them. They weren’t all that bad, really. I gave them a story about Hanna’s asthma. I said I was trying to get to this clinic in Spartanburg. Then this morning, when they saw light in the sky, the good ones decided to let us go.”
“Did they give you a charge for your car? Because, with that detour…”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you? They took all our food. And our rifle. But we still have a handgun. We managed to hide it from them.”
“How many rounds left?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Without an extra charge, you may have to walk part of the way. You realize that, don’t you?”
“I’ve been thinking of nothing else.”
“I’ll phone Lenny and let him know you might be coming on foot. Do you have a flashlight?”
“Yes.”
“And is the battery good?”
“So far. But we’ve used it a lot.”
“Try to conserve it,” he advised. “When you get near the gate, flash it three times. These airmen…they’ve got the place stocked to the gills with military weapons, and they’ve got orders to keep intruders out.”
“So, three times,” she said. “Hang on, hang on…there’s something on the road ahead. Let me give you to Hanna for a sec.”
He heard the phone shift hands.
“Uncle Neil?”
“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing?”
“Can we go swimming at Marblehill?”
“You can do anything you like. Is Jake doing okay?”
“He’s sleeping. We got captured by these National Guard guys.”
“Your mom was saying.”
“But they let us go.”
“Were you scared?”
“For a while I was. But then I saw that they weren’t really so bad. One of them had a guitar.”
“Is that right?”
“But he wouldn’t let me try it. He said it belonged to his dad.”
“Oh.”
“Okay…okay…here’s my mom. She wants to talk to you again.”
He heard the phone shift hands a second time.
“Is everybody doing okay down there?” asked Glenda.
“Colonel Bard had to reduce our rations.”
“You sound a little on edge, Neil.”
“Glenda, the reason I called… and this is strictly hush-hush, and I don’t know whether you want to tell the kids or not. But the reason I called is to tell you that the United States and its allies are going to move against the TMS any day now. And early this morning I was informed by the assistant secretary of defense that if the TMS becomes unviable, the Tarsalans have vowed to take control of those planetside areas offered in the last U.N. counterproposal. That includes the Chattahoochee National Forest. So you have to be careful of your approach.”
She was silent for several seconds. “So… when you say take control…”
“It’s going to be hostile.”
Again, a pause. “Do you think they’ll get anywhere near Marblehill?”
“If they do, they’re going to get a lot more than they bargained for.”
The next day, perforations developed in the shroud’s brown freckling, and unimpeded sunlight reached the Earth’s surface. The mood at Homestead was buoyant. Neil couldn’t have been happier. All morning and into the afternoon he didn’t hear a single gunshot. The cease-fire lasted all night, and when morning came there was an actual dawn, diffuse and brown, with a light so fragile and amber that it reminded him of atmospheric varnish.
All that day, peace reigned. He spent much of the afternoon looking at his book. It was an art book, with full-color plates, and its title was The Impressionists. The Impressionists, he decided as he gazed at a particularly evocative painting by Mary Cassatt, were the great painters of light, from the great age of light, before this current age of darkness. This painting by Cassatt was called A Reader in the Garden,
and as a study in sunlight, it had a great emotional impact on Neil in his current strained circumstances.
He turned the book around and showed his wife. “You know what the caption says? It says, ‘In fresh bright light, in the middle of a flower garden, a woman sits reading.’ Look how she just takes it for granted. Not only the sunlight, but the flowers. Look at the light in this painting. Look at the shadow. And then look outside.
Melissa got up, came over, and put her arm around him. “By next summer we’ll be back home. I’ll help you put cocoa shells on the garden. We’ll have flowers just like hers.”
He patted her hand, and realized it wasn’t a girl’s hand anymore, but a woman’s.
For the rest of the afternoon and evening he looked at his book. In the title of every work, sunlight was implicit. Regatta at Argenteuil. Countryside with Haystacks. Village Along the Seine. He concentrated for a long time on Alfred Sisley’s Village Along the Seine. He read the caption. “One feels the pleasure of the painter in the sun-dappled trees in the foreground and the clear light on the houses on the other side of the river.” Painted in 1872. He wanted to be on the banks of the sunlit Seine in 1872, right there with Alfred Sisley as he painted his sun-dappled trees and clear-lighted houses.
“When this is all over, I’m going to retire.”
He woke up in the small hours of the morning drenched in a fearful sweat. A dream. A stupid dream.
The Cameron Chess Study. He and Kafis playing chess. Kafis’s pupils shrinking to their midpoint in that sneaky and aggressive way they had as he checkmated Neil. Checkmate. The word echoed in his mind.
But then he realized that at exactly this moment—and he confirmed it with a quick glance at his cordless alarm clock—the Moon was launching.
“Checkmate, Kafis,” he said into the dark that he had grown to hate.
He expected to see even more brown spots over the next couple of days—the Moon launches burning through the phytosphere the same way a lit cigarette burned through upholstery—but new spots didn’t appear. He sat in the parade ground for most of the afternoon and looked up at the sky with a pair of enhanced binoculars, military ones equipped for infrared, hoping to see some telltale activity. Not only did he fail to spot any new lesions, but the existing ones seemed to be stagnating in their growth.
He had his dwindling scientific staff keep an eye on the phytosphere for the rest of the day—many of his people had abandoned their posts, finding the growing instability at Homestead too nerve-wracking.
When the sun went down, a young Air Force technician said that there was no significant growth in the virus lesions, and that, in fact, some of them were scabbing over with what seemed on the spectrometer to be a form of carbon sheeting.
Neil had a look at the readouts, and after scrupulous analysis he realized, with a sickening sense of dread, that instead of the targeted Tarsalan DNA component responding in defense to the insult of his virus, it was actually the xenophyta carapace component that was r
esponding, capturing and encapsulating the virus during its lytic phase, trapping the reproducing viruses in little cages of superhard material, and at the same time neutralizing the omniphages. Was this his endgame, then?
He told Colonel Greg Bard about it an hour later.
“It’s like when a computer gets a virus. If the computer can’t delete it, it quarantines it. The carapace, or at least extraneous calcifications of carapace material, are surrounding and encapsulating the virus, effectively jailing it so it can’t spread.” He shook his head, nonplussed by his own blindness. “I didn’t see it coming, Greg. I was so focused on defeating and confusing the defense component, I didn’t consider the possibility that the carapace element might pick up the slack. And now I think we’re screwed.”
The new offensive came an hour after that. He didn’t know how the opposing side got a tank, but he heard it at the other end of the base: the hum of its fusion-cell-powered engine, the creak of its tracks, and the nearly inaudible rumble of its massive weight getting closer and closer. He packed up what he could, had the girls throw clothes into bags, and as gunfire erupted in the stale brown dusk of the slowly closing virus holes, he and his family ran the two hundred yards to the Officers’ Club.
Airmen sandbagged the Officers’ Club.
Neil and his family entered and turned left. Emergency lights lit the corridors. His girls did exactly what they were supposed to, just like in the drills. Some airmen clutching rifles, led by Colonel Greg Bard, emerged from a ready room and ran down the corridor toward them, dark blue helmets on their heads, light-gathering goggles over their eyes, tramping down the hall in sync, grim-faced and intent.
Bard stopped and gave them a smile. “Hi, girls.”
The girls gave him halfhearted and frightened hellos.
Then Greg turned to Neil and offered an apologetic shrug. “Looks like they’re…you know.”
“Is it bad?”
“We knew it was coming.”
Something in the way Greg said this made Neil’s stomach roll in fear. “But you’re sure you can stop them.”
Greg looked away. “I don’t know where they got that tank.” He seemed distracted for a few seconds but then his attention focused. “And actually…I was coming over. I want to give you these.” Greg took out two aerosol spray cans. Neil instantly recognized them as the spray they used to disable Tarsalan flying surveillance macrogens, a defense-department-contract product that had been in limited use in sensitive areas for the last several years, and had recently become commercially available. “Lenny’s telling me they need some up at Marblehill.”
