He didn’t need to hear from Dr. Fitch or Lieutenant Colonel Fraser to know the team left behind at Lewis–McChord had failed.
For the most part, the horde had followed the Columbia River west. And had they remained on that course, their impact, while still devastating, would have been far less. They hadn’t remained on that course but instead veered slightly south just before a small town called Corbett where the mass picked up another two thousand people. From there, they went on to Springdale, a town of nearly four thousand. Mount Hood Community College came after that, with a student body of nearly thirty thousand more. His advisors hadn’t mentioned these places as possibilities until after the horde made the southern adjustment on their way toward Gresham. At that point, it had been too late to do anything. Not that they had a solution. Their solution had been Fitch, and he failed.
When his crack team of advisors had briefed him only hours earlier, he had been told the size of the horde would be around a hundred thousand when it reached Gresham, but they had anticipated a more or less straight line, following the river. They hadn’t considered the horde might adjust and target additional population centers along the way. They should have, but they didn’t, and that little oversight proved to be damning. Turns out there was a fair number of small pockets of people along the way.
Based upon the sheer footprint of the horde as seen from satellites—which was their only means of calculating numbers—General Westin had just informed him they had amassed somewhere in the range of a quarter-million people. He hadn’t mentioned the total number dead in their wake—he didn’t need to. The president had seen enough predictions, stats, and assumptions to know that number was roughly 10 percent. One died for every nine others who joined. The occasional person escaped, but that number was so small it hadn’t made any of the reports. The survivors had become an afterthought.
On the monitor attached to the far wall, the president watched as the horde breached the outer edge of Gresham where it would no doubt add another hundred thousand. Simple math—total population of 111,053—99,947 new runners, 11,000 dead, a handful of survivors who would most likely prefer to be part of one of the other two groups when they raised their heads and looked out upon what was left.
“That’s North East Division Street,” Westin pointed out as the runners bolted out across lawns and from the trees onto the pavement. First just a few, then many. Then even more. No different than the smaller towns along the way. “This here is Interstate 26. If we take out a swath of the road, we can slow them down, maybe divert them.”
Bombs.
He meant bombs.
The president licked his lips. They were so damn dry. His head was pounding with a headache that refused to go away. “We’ve seen them run through forests, water, across some horribly rugged terrain. What makes you think they won’t go around whatever hole you put in front of them? Or worse, let it fill up with the bodies from their numbers until the pile is high enough to get across?”
They’d given up on the use of troops. They tried to make a stand about half a mile outside the community college with rubber bullets and gas. Crowd control bullshit. The horde made quick work of that, too—the soldiers dropped their weapons and joined the runners. The equipment vanished under their feet. They didn’t even slow down.
Westin said, “There’s only one real solution to this problem. You’re not willing to consider it.”
The president said nothing, his eyes still fixed on the screen, grateful they had no sound.
“There’s another half-million people between Gresham and Portland. That puts their numbers at three-quarters of a million before absorbing the six hundred thousand in Portland. They’re a million and a half strong by the time they leave Portland. From there, they’re either heading south down the seaboard or north toward Seattle—Olympia, Tacoma—they’ll pick up another million and probably target Vancouver next if they continue to focus on large populations. That happens, do you really think the Canadian government will sit by and watch? They won’t let this group cross the border. If we don’t stop them, they will.”
“Canada will not lob a bomb across the border into US territory.”
“How certain of that are you? What would you do if this thing were heading south from Canada toward us? Would you let them run right across the border onto US soil? Attack Americans?”
The president didn’t reply. On the monitor, the dark mass of the horde flooded into the streets and yards of Gresham. Because the view was from above, he could only see the rooftops of homes and businesses. He wondered if those who had gone to sleep had time to switch on a light before the sound found them, before thoughts of such mundane things were pushed aside.
Westin was still rambling. “On the off chance they turn south, we’ve got Salem, Eugene, Medford, Redding—they pick up another half-million just in those four cities, who knows how many more in between. Sir, they could easily have numbers in excess of two million by the time they reach California, and if you think we had a problem before, what do you think will happen next? They’re currently in a relatively unpopulated area of the country. That changes if they’re allowed to get to California.” He pulled out his map again, that damn map, and started pointing. “Sacramento, 501,901 people. San Francisco, 884,363. San Jose, 1.3 million. Los Angeles, four million. There are forty million people just in the state of California. At their current size, we still have the means to stop them. That will change, sir.”
“You don’t think I fucking know that?” the president shouted, slamming his hands down on the table.
Startled, Samantha Troy jumped.
Westin went quiet.
Two secret service agents were in the room, weapons at the ready, before his voice got swallowed up by the engine drone. The president waved them off, took a deep breath, and rubbed his temples. “Somebody get Dr. Fitch on the line. I want to speak to him alone.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Fraser
“Dr. Fitch is dead, sir.”
Lieutenant Colonel Alex Fraser sat at a conference table in the Lewis–McChord dead room—an acoustically clean room with no true right angles or reflective surfaces. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in sound-absorbing foam. The outer walls themselves were more than a foot thick: two layers of concrete surrounding a Faraday cage, a metal structure designed to block all electronic signals. Nothing got in or out of this room unless routed through secure McChord communication channels. The dampening effect of the various soft and curved surfaces was disorienting. The still air seemed to eat sound.
A video monitor sat on the conference table, the president’s drawn face filling most of the screen. “What happened?”
Fraser told him.
With the briefest, most concise statements he could muster, he detailed everything that had taken place in the past hours, from the loss of his men as they attempted to capture several of the runners to their failed attempt to speak to the horde through the little girl.
Through all this, the president listened. He was in his office aboard Air Force One and had made it a point to tell Fraser he was alone and could speak freely. That statement had made Fraser think of Holt’s recovered hard drive, still in his pocket. Several times he considered mentioning it, then decided not to. Not until he fully understood which side of this the president fell on.
The president asked him the one question he’d been dreading, because the answer meant several different things well beyond the handful of words making up that question. He knew his response could trigger something he didn’t want on his shoulders—a decision that wasn’t his to make.
“Are these people conscious of what they’re doing?”
“With all due respect, sir, that’s a loaded question.”
“You understand the position I’m in. Dr. Fitch was tasked with deriving a medical solution. In the absence of that, his sole purpose was to get me an answer to that single question.”
“Dr. Fitch is dead, sir.”
&nb
sp; “Which is why I’m asking you.”
“So you can formulate a response.”
“Yes.”
“May I speak freely?”
“I already told you that you could.”
Fraser measured his words. “Whether they are aware of their actions or aren’t, does that really change the plan on the table?”
“I think your reluctance to answer gives me my answer.”
“They’re operating with some kind of hive mind. We’ve learned that much. All of them linked together somehow, somehow following instructions from—”
“Anna Shim,” the president interrupted with the wave of his hand. “A demon.”
Fraser shook his head. “Dr. Chan believes the little girl’s mind just came to that conclusion to rationalize what’s happening in terms she could understand. She took some story she heard at some point, some campfire tale, and put a name to it, a face. There’s no demon, no entity, no alien race…none of that. She could have just as easily named Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy as the voice in her head.”
“Then what?”
Fraser again thought of the hard drive in his pocket. He thought of the noise. He’d be damned if he couldn’t hear it right now—an impossibility within this room, but there it was anyway. Barely a hum, but there. “Dr. Chan and Dr. Harbin both believe we need to break the link. They think the individual conscious mind is still intact and if separated from the collective, they’ll be capable of independent thought again.”
“Isn’t that what you just tried?”
Fraser nodded. “Dr. Harbin attempted to sever the link by blocking the noise itself. That obviously didn’t work, but the theory was sound so Dr. Chan is attempting to find a medical means of doing the same. She’s trying to isolate the portions of the brain impacted by the noise, then block it chemically. There may be a way to build up a tolerance, too. She’s studying that as well.”
“With the older girl.”
“And me. Some of my men. Anyone who has survived multiple exposures.”
There was a knock on the door. The president’s gaze remained fixed on Fraser. “Yes?”
Fraser heard a door open, then a hand reached across the president’s desk and gave him a folded note.
The door closed. The president opened the single page and read the contents. It was obvious by the look on his face it wasn’t good news. He looked back at Fraser. “I’ve got statisticians running probabilities, attempting to determine where the horde will go next. Everyone agrees on Portland. They seem to be drawn by large population pockets. From there, things get sketchy.”
“North or south…”
“Exactly. The next large city to the north is Seattle, but there is a lot of rough terrain in between, even more if they continue up into Canada.” The president set the paper down on his desk. “Everyone seems to be in agreement now. After watching satellite imagery of the horde near the river when you attempted your capture, it’s believed as a group they’re operating with some intelligence. They’re not running for population centers blindly; they’re purposely attempting to increase their numbers. At Portland, the Columbia River is a half mile wide with a depth of fifty feet. Until now, they’ve crossed bodies of water on the backs of their dead—they keep running in until enough bodies accumulate to create a bridge. That won’t work with the Columbia near Portland. They’d all die trying. Every last one of them.” He tapped the paper. “Their path to the north is effectively cut off by that body of water. My people are now telling me with near hundred percent certainty the horde won’t even attempt to cross on the northern face. They’ll head south toward California after Portland.” The president looked up again, his eyes filled with defeat. “We’ve got to make some kind of stand at Portland. This needs to end there. That’s our last shot at containment.”
“Have you considered evacuation?”
“There’s no time. They’re two hours out. The situation is no different from Gresham and the others. A warning would just create a panic, traffic bottlenecks…It wouldn’t matter, anyway. I’ve been told the horde would just redirect to the evacuation zones, they’d follow the people. Nothing would change. It’s a zero-gain solution.”
Zero-gain solution.
That was a military term. If the president was using terms like that, it meant General Westin had his ear. Fraser knew Westin well enough to understand the solutions he’d recommend.
Fraser said, “How long has General Westin given you to decide on a military solution?”
The president looked as if he might deny it, then must have realized there was no point. “He wanted a green light on that hours ago. We’re too late for any meaningful troop mobilization. You’ve seen what happens with that, anyway. We’d just lose the personnel to the horde. He’s preparing an air strike and autonomous vehicles. That’s all we have left.”
There was another knock at the door, and the president muted his microphone and looked up. He nodded several times, then returned to Fraser. “I want reports from you and your doctors every thirty minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was no good-bye. The screen went blank and switched to the presidential seal. Fraser was up and out the door in an instant. He hoped to God Chan and Harbin had something.
Chapter Eighty
Martha
Martha and Harbin both stared at the body on the examining table, neither sure how what they were seeing was possible.
“One sixty-three,” Harbin said. “Still climbing. Climbing fast.”
Harbin had a nasty bruise under his left eye from his struggle with Fitch. Martha had suggested he ice it, but he insisted they didn’t have time for that sort of thing, and he was probably right. Fitch was dead, several soldiers, two of their test subjects. Fraser would be back any moment looking for answers, and they had none, only more questions.
“One sixty-eight.”
He was pointing one of the infrared thermometers at the dead woman on the table, the one who had bashed her head in on the helicopter with Fraser’s team. What was left of her remaining eye looked out at the two of them, milky with cataracts and beginning to liquefy from the increasing heat. Brownish-yellow pus dripped from the corner, down the side of her face, to the aluminum table. There was a little pool of it.
The smell was horrendous.
“One seventy.”
They’d seen something similar with the bodies back at Zigzag. They had increased in temperature postmortem, too, but not like this. Not this fast. She’d only been dead for about two hours.
After what happened, Fraser insisted they lock Sophie in one of the cages. The two dead captured runners had been removed and brought to this room—an exam space off to the side of the hangar. Martha wasn’t sure where they put Dr. Fitch and the soldiers who lost their lives, but she imagined they were close.
She’d ordered all her medical equipment to be brought here in order to stay near the test subjects. From the hangar, both Rosalin Agar and Sophie were whining in unison, their voices rising and falling together in this horrible chorus that seemed to combine with the low buzz of the noise coming from their bodies. Tennant refused to leave her sister’s side. She tried to go in the cage with her but finally agreed to remain on the other side when Martha told her they’d take off Sophie’s restraints.
“One ninety-two.”
Steam began to rise off the woman’s body, this humid mist that crept around the edges of Martha’s surgical mask. She’d rubbed petroleum jelly under her nose, but it did little to block the scent. Rot, sulfur, and turned earth, that’s what it smelled like.
“Should we cool her? Maybe with ice or water?”
Harbin shook his head. “If she’s representative of the dead members of the horde, we need to let this play out. They’re losing people as they go, and those bodies are out there. My God, 207 and still climbing.”
“I’m taking another sample.” Martha uncapped a syringe and plunged it into the woman’s arm, drawing blood. Even through her latex glo
ves, when her fingers brushed her skin, the heat singed her. She jerked away, embarrassed, as if she’d gotten an electrical shock. She shook it off. “Hand me that scalpel. I want epidermis and dermis, too.”
Harbin found one, placed the scalpel in Martha’s outstretched hand.
As she cut open the woman’s thigh, they both heard it.
Sizzling.
The hum was there, too, faint but growing louder.
“Two thirty-six,” Harbin said. “We need to hurry. It’s accelerating.”
A soldier appeared in the doorway. “Ma’am? We have the fMRI machine.”
“Two forty-nine,” Harbin said.
Martha pointed back to the hangar. “Set it up near the cages. I need you to restrain the remaining test subject and get her inside. I’ll be there shortly.”
She saw the hesitation in his eyes, but he nodded anyway and disappeared around the corner. With a pair of forceps, she took the sample of the woman’s flesh and carefully set it on a glass slide and positioned it under a Micron compound microscope. When she peered down into the eyepiece, she felt her breath leave her. “This is incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve got active bombardment at the cellular level. I don’t know what could possibly be fueling it—there’s no blood flow, no continuation of oxygen saturation, but yet…” Speaking aloud, it came to her. She looked up at Harbin. “Skin is an organ. I remember reading the dermis layer of the average adult is capable of absorbing as much as a liter of water during a one-hour bath. It sucks in oxygen as well. I’ve got no explanation for why this is continuing postmortem, but that’s clearly what’s going on. The active bombardment is causing vibration and friction. That friction is creating the hum we’re hearing. But the dermis alone can’t possibly…”
“It’s her entire body,” Harbin finished the thought for her. “Every organ, every bone, every ounce of her being. I believe it’s perpetual—the energy created by the friction exceeds the energy necessary to create the friction. Running must burn this excess away, but now that her body is stationary, the excess has no escape, which is resulting in residual heat. A rising buildup. This reaction is similar to a nuclear meltdown, just on a much smaller scale. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.” His eyes were fixed on the thermometer display. “Three eighty-four. That’s more than a hundred-degree increase in the past minute. This isn’t slowing down—just the opposite, we’re heading toward possible combustion. We need to get her outside.”
The Noise Page 26
