by Brian Hodge
Travis reached for his ex-manager’s name. Pit Bull had mentioned it in the cell one day when they were talking about his wrestling days. Al, was it? Go for it. “Al took care of you before, right? Kept you out of trouble, made sure you had everything you needed?”
Pit Bull nodded. “He was a good guy. Me, I was never very…I don’t know…organized.”
“Hell, we’ll look out for you.” Travis watched Pit Bull’s eyes brighten. He’s eating this up. He grinned. “What are friends for?”
Travis glanced across the street, where Diamond was still inside. Then he looked back at the storefronts they’d just passed. One was a pet shop. He remembered the wrestling stories…the pet store should have just what the doctor ordered.
“Stay put,” Travis said. “I got a surprise for you.”
He jogged back several yards. Like everything else, the pet store featured a permanent closed sign in the window. Travis lifted his shotgun and blew out the glass door.
The smell rolled out like a wrecking ball. He hadn’t even thought about that…the decaying carcasses of caged animals. Puppies, cats, birds, Guinea pigs, snakes, hamsters…a menagerie of the dead. Even the fish were belly-up, those that hadn’t been eaten by their tankmates.
Travis held back and took a deep breath, moved quickly inside the reeking store. His feet crunched shattered glass. And as he moved through, he couldn’t help but look at the cages and glass tanks that housed the smaller animals. They were nightmares. No doubt they’d dehydrated long before they could’ve starved. Dead animals had never bothered him much before, on the road or wherever. Until now. He’d never seen this many. And there was something disquieting in realizing that his fate could easily have been identical.
As luck would have it, what he wanted was in the very rear of the store, next to the dog leashes. But it was a beauty, well worth the trip. He snatched it off a wall peg and ran back to the sidewalk.
And when he presented Pit Bull with the heavy, spiked collar, he thought the huge wrestler was going to cry.
“Thought it might bring back some memories,” Travis said.
Pit Bull nodded enthusiastically, grinning from ear to ear. He tugged down the collar of his blue workshirt and slipped on the thick leather, buckling it in back. He turned around and stared at his reflection in the window behind him. It looked in on a travel agency, and while posters espoused the pleasures of Europe and a girl in a bikini smiled from a Jamaican beach on a placard, Pit Bull had eyes only for himself. He preened, turning this way and that. He snarled at his reflection, then grinned happily and laughed like a child.
“Thanks a bunch, Travis,” he said quietly, moving from the window. “Thank you.”
Travis nodded.
And then they all saw Diamond again. He emerged from the punched-out window, his rifle slung over one shoulder. Once out on the sidewalk, under the bank’s three-dimensional sign, he raised his arms. Canvas bags dangled from his hands, and a grin split his face in half.
They laughed again as he walked up to them, and Diamond reached into one of the bags and pulled out bundles of hundred-dollar bills for each of them. He sighed, gazing fondly back at the bank’s demolished window.
“Always did wanna do that,” he said.
* *
The explosions seemed to come every few minutes. Soft thumps, never more than one at a time. Plumes of smoke rose into the sky somewhere south of them, dark smudges against summer blue.
“What do you think that is?” Lucas wondered aloud.
All were silent for a moment, watching, waiting. The smoke climbed higher as the silent city held its breath.
Travis reached for his shotgun. “Let’s go check it out. Doesn’t look too far off.”
Diamond brushed his dirty jeans. “Yeah, not too far. Maybe down on Manchester.”
They set off south, numbering eight by now. The additional three had been picked up over the weekend. There had been nine, but one man had made the fatal mistake of challenging Travis’s decision that they head westward, along Forest Park and beyond, toward the suburbs. Travis had broken the man’s neck after a brief struggle. Pit Bull had moved in to do the job, but this one Travis had wanted for his own.
Boots, shoes, and sneakers scuffed across the pavement as they cut south. Rifles and shotguns rested across shoulders, or were cradled in arms; handguns were within quick grasp. They squinted against the glare of the morning sun, alert for threats.
“I miss Sharon,” Hagar said out of the blue, and this brought an appreciative chuckle from most of them. “Think we’ll ever run across her again?”
“Not if she’s smart.” Travis grinned back, then winked.
Sharon had been his second piece of ass since Sheila had walked out. They’d found her inside a little dump of a restaurant while scrounging for food the night before. She’d beaten them to it, and as she’d watched them come in, all eight of them, cutting off every escape, her eyes had looked more and more like those of a deer surrounded by a wolf pack.
Travis watched the helplessness well up in her eyes, and felt himself growing. Her body tensed like a cat’s, with nowhere to spring. She couldn’t have been much more than sixteen.
Travis took her first, as was his right. The natural order of things. The others took subsequent turns…on the floor, on the counter, on a table. All except for Pit Bull.
They’d never known her name. She hadn’t spoken a word other than “please” and “no.” But Henry, one of the new arrivals, had hung the name Sharon on her, short for Share ’n’ share alike.
“Nice tight rack on her,” Henry said, remembering, and another dull explosion thumped through the air.
“How come you didn’t get your fair share o’ stuff?” It was Diamond. So far, he was the only one other than Travis who would say much to Pit Bull.
As they walked, the wrestler twisted under the others’ scrutiny.
“You don’t like girls?” Henry said, chortling low, mean laughter. Physically, he was the one nearest Pit Bull’s size, though even he fell short. He was a couple inches shorter, and sported an imposing belly, though he carried it easily enough.
“Girls never liked me,” he said, staring down at his feet. He reached up to run a finger across the studded leather of his collar.
“Priority one,” Travis said. “Get Pit Bull laid.”
A low round of laughter passed among them, and they fell silent as they kept south. Several minutes passed until they hit Manchester, a broad thoroughfare where every other business seemed to be a car dealership. They began to move west toward the smoke.
They found their answer in the expansive lot of a Ford dealer. More than half a dozen autos had been reduced to charred hulks, resting on melted tires and still churning oily black smoke into the air. Flames still ate away at some of them.
They saw the man next, sitting cross-legged atop the showroom roof, close to the Ford sign. He was watching them draw nearer, that was obvious from his posture. He then lifted a rifle, sighted in on another car, and squeezed off a single shot.
The effect was immediate and devastating. The car’s gas tank erupted with force enough to heave the back end off the ground. It fell back with a grinding crash and bloomed fresh fire. A column of dense smoke wormed upward.
They stepped from Manchester and onto the edge of the lot. The building was still fifty, maybe sixty, yards ahead.
Travis squinted up at the man, trying to take in a little more detail. Silvery-blond hair, he could tell that much. Lean build. And though he was much too far off to see the man’s eyes, he felt them drilling in just the same. Pulling him on? Weird, yeah, but that’s how it felt.
“Now we know,” said one of the newer men. “Let’s go back, okay?”
“Chickenshit,” said Lucas.
Travis, not looking back, waved the comments down with a quick flip of his hand. He had to g
et closer, to see this man who got his jollies by torching cars long-distance. He had no choice in the matter now. And if the others turned tail and ran, fuck them.
Because he’d find others.
Yes. He would. This man ahead would show him how. And where.
“Travis, my man, this dude looks more than a little dangerous,” Diamond said softly. He patted the stock of his Marlin. “I can take him out with this if you want.”
Travis pulled his gaze from the rooftop and leveled Diamond with it. “Don’t you even think it. Not before I talk to him.”
Diamond sighed. “Okay, I’m with you, but…” He shook his head.
Travis led them closer, until they stood close enough to see, to talk. The sharpshooter looked down at them, expressionless, the rifle across his knees.
“You’re managing a hell of a lot of damage with one little rifle,” Travis called up.
The man nodded. “Everybody needs a hobby.” He smiled faintly and annihilated an old Pinto far across the used lot.
“You using incendiary bullets in that thing?” asked one of the newer men. “You gotta be.”
The sniper picked up an unmarked box of cartridges. Prototypes, they were, but only the sniper knew this. Only he knew they’d been manufactured in Wyoming by a high-tech craftsman who’d filled each slug with an extremely potent explosive designed to go off when the soft nose of the bullet imploded. The sniper frowned, inspected the box. Shook his head and hunched his shoulders. “Incendiaries? No.”
“Well, I don’t care what they show in the movies, you can’t blow a tank with normal bullets.” This time it was Henry. He shoved his way through the others, past Pit Bull, past even Travis, until he stood well in front of the group.
Travis ground his teeth, his skin crawling where Henry had touched him. He tasted bile, and as he stood looking at Henry’s back, his broad ass, the growing circle of scalp where Henry was losing his hair, he wanted nothing more than to apply the butt of his shotgun to that little skullcap. But he’d hold it, for now.
“We used incendiaries in ’Nam,” Henry said, his voice radiant with all there was to know in the world. “You can’t blow a tank without ’em.”
The man smiled again. “I can.”
“Horseshit,” said Henry.
The man pursed his lips and frowned. “I don’t like you,” he finally said, as if musing this thought over. “You seem like a pain in the ass. Like you’ll always be a pain in the ass.”
Nobody moved for a moment. All the air seemed to drain away, as if into a vacuum. Then the sniper was the first to move. With one hand, he swung the rifle down, pointed without aiming at Henry. Popped off a quick shot.
And Henry blew up.
HOLY SHIT! Travis saw him standing there one moment, and the next there came a dull coughing roar, and the air was filled with a thick red spray. Flesh and bone turned into shrapnel, and Travis heard rather than saw the various pieces slapping down onto the asphalt, felt the mist wash over him. At last the bulk of Henry’s body keeled over, gone from the breastbone up. Jagged lengths of denuded, shattered ribs poked through the tatters of his shirt and skin.
Someone in back became ill. No one else seemed to even breathe.
“Uh-oh, look at what I’ve done!” exclaimed the man on the roof. “I’m really sorry about that. Sometimes I just lose my head, shoot first and ask questions later.”
Travis cleared his throat of a giant, industrial-strength lump that had lodged there. “Ummmm…no great loss.”
Behind him, the rest murmured assent.
The sniper grinned cheerfully. “As long as we’re in agreement on that, no harm done, I guess.”
Again, they all stood stock-still, as if awaiting orders.
“You,” said the man on the roof, finally ending a tiresome silence. He pointed to Travis with his finger. Not the rifle, oh thankyouthankyouthankyou. “I knew someone like you would show up sooner or later.”
“You know me?” Travis asked.
“You personally? Nah. But you’re a very pissed-off person. And that’s okay in my book. I need a person like that.” He set his rifle down, dangled a leg over the roof, and propped an elbow on the other knee. A friendly pose, a let’s-get-to-know-each-other pose. “Why, exactly, well, you’ll understand that in time. Do you follow me so far?”
Slowly, as if one wrong move would get him vaporized too, Travis nodded. And for the first time in his adult life, prayed.
“So far, so good, then,” the man said.
“One thing I gotta know,” Travis said slowly. “How’d you do that with the bullets?”
The blond man cocked one eyebrow. “Magic is a fickle thing,” he said, a finger pointing upward as if he were a schoolteacher clarifying an especially tricky issue. “But the secrets of technology will serve any wise master.”
The man spoke softly, gently, only to him, it seemed. There was nothing else beyond the two of them.
“Look at me,” he said.
Travis did, and once their eyes met, truly met, he knew he couldn’t pull away. Not until he was released. Travis sank deeper into memory until he saw reflected back everything that was within himself. A childhood playing second fiddle to his brother Galen. Endless fights with Sheila. Fights in bars, rage that so often had no direction. And then he saw the future. All the kingdoms of the world were in those eyes, within grasp. His entire life had been directed to this moment, this crossroads. Here, clearly, was power, raw and genuine.
And then he felt himself released.
“I’ve had many, many names,” the man on the roof said, “but for now I’m fond of the name Peter Solomon. And I have a present for you. If you want it.”
Whatever it is I want it, I want it all. “Name it.”
Peter Solomon stretched his arm out, swept it over everything and nothing in particular. “The city. Consider it yours. You can take it, I guarantee you, you can.” He smiled, cocking his head to one side. “Men like you…all of you…you’ve been shit on all your life. A crass image, but it fits. But now, now you’ve got the opportunity to climb to the top of the heap.”
“No offense,” Travis said, treading lightly, oh so lightly, “but that thought had already crossed my mind.”
“I’d be surprised if it hadn’t,” the man said. “And alone, maybe you’d even have a good chance at it. But taking is easy. Keeping…now that’s something else. Hanging onto what you’ve taken, that’s where ambitious men start losing sight of the big picture. Either way, with me…” Hot, dry air, burning with smoke—had this man blinked even once? “Well, I can make a difference.”
This is crazy, I don’t even know this bastard, but I’d bet my balls he’s telling the truth.
“You know that now,” he said. “Don’t you?”
Travis felt himself nodding.
Peter Solomon smiled with feigned relief. “I’m glad. I think you made the smart move. And there are a few things I expect from you in return. From all of you.”
Then, in explicit detail, he told them what those things were.
5
He’d never known that silence could be so complete.
His name was Whitley Kramer…Doctor Whitley Kramer, if you please. As of late he’d worked as a field chief for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. For all he knew now, though, that shining example of the way a government branch can run efficiently no longer existed. His last contact with them had been a week ago, give or take.
No longer existed. Just like this hollowed-out St. Louis hospital he still haunted. He could walk its halls and hear his own heartbeat, although the stench of unburied dead spilled out and made him ill.
Over and over he wondered why he hadn’t turned around and fled back home to Atlanta. Home? Such as it was. His ex-wife had begun to hate him in absentia. To his children he was a stranger. These were too often the fates of a CD
C employee. Home? He had nothing to go home to.
In that case, he would die in the line of duty, like a captain going down at the helm of his ship.
“And we thought AIDS was a nightmare,” he said to the nurse across the table from him. They were seated at the table in a break room adjacent to one of the labs. Recent issues of both medical journals and People lay scattered across its dusty top, as well as plates encrusted with petrified food. “We didn’t know the meaning of the word nightmare.”
“What went wrong on us?” he thought the nurse said. Had her mouth moved? “Why couldn’t we stop it?”
He chuckled wearily, removed his glasses. A red saddle was left impressed into the bridge of his nose. “It’s like Nature kept one step ahead of us the whole way. We’d run off looking one direction, and she was running along another. And by the time we got wise, well…too late. Much too late.”
The nurse stared over his slumped shoulder, past him, toward the blank wall behind him.
“Dogs,” he said quietly, cradling his head in his hands. “Who’d have thought it would be dogs?”
In the beginning, they’d been so preoccupied with finding an endemic rodent population, it was as if they’d been trotting along a raceway wearing blinders. The plague bacillus was Pasteurella pestis…a radically mutant strain, but still the same. It had always been rodents before.
But Nature always loves to catch you with your pants down.
And in the end, it looked as if Man’s best friend had also been his savior.
There were two kinds of immunity, they’d found. First, those rare cases of natural immunity, the elite in that .4 percent whose systems simply burned the bacillus out. The others had indeed been infected, but had grown immune. And Kramer and his staff had finally located a common link among them…contact with a dog that was already carrying it. Whether they were bitten by the dog or a flea or had somehow absorbed the dog’s saliva into an open wound or sore, the results were the same: a direct injection of the bacillus into the bloodstream. Something the CDC had experimented with endlessly, to no avail. But the experimental injections were pure plague, while the dogs had provided an extra little something that made all the difference: a common enzyme that kept the bacilli in a dormant state, allowing a natural immunity to develop.
