Okay, okay, he told himself, calm down. Just calm the fuck down.
“Do you see him? He’s leaning on that tree. It’s a perfect shot.”
Dick nodded—he did see something kind of human-shaped—and brought the scope to his eye. Let his night vision adjust until the image cleared. Yes. A human figure, dark against the snow. The climber in question had been a woman once, judging by the shape of her hips. Now she looked like a rotting pumpkin perched on top of a sportswear mannequin. The scientist in Dick rose to the top, trying to understand what he saw and it made sense, in its way. Being frozen all winter hadn’t preserved the climbers as much as liquefied them: when ice crystals formed in their muscle cells the sharp apices of the crystals had shredded the cell membranes, turning the flesh flaccid and gooey. He remembered the one he’d fought with. It had been slippery with putrefaction.
They were dead. The climbers were dead, no matter how active they seemed. They had to be dead.
He grimaced to clear his head. The scientific observation was immaterial. The only thing that mattered was the shot. He tried to remember his time in the Boy Scouts. He had aced the requirements for the marksmanship merit badge. Seat the rifle, line up the shot, adjust for windage—
“Take the shot al-fucking-ready!” Bleu howled.
Dick fired spasmodically.
The magnum round hit the tree a few inches above the climber’s head. The wood exploded, showering the dead woman with pulpy fragments and splinters of bark. Bleu didn’t credit the climbers with too much mental wattage but it looked like they understood what it meant when the tree you were leaning on exploded. Without looking back the climber slumped off into the darkness.
It had taken them three hours to pick one shot and he missed. Dick wiped at his mouth again. He didn’t feel so good.
New Flux Generating Step Identified in the Metabolic Pathways of Human Prion Protein (PrPsc) [New England Journal of Medicine, 11/6/04]
Nilla watched the three men get cut down by the SWAT team through the Venetian blinds in the cafeteria. Her blood wasn’t circulating in her veins anymore but it went cold anyway. They weren’t asking questions down there. They weren’t trying to help people. The police were just slaughtering anyone who came out.
Maybe not just anyone. Maybe live people got a pass. Nilla was undead and she knew she would be on the short list for the firing squad. She had to get out—she had to escape the hospital somehow.
She tried to run but her legs cramped up instantly when she started to sprint. In pain she hobbled past a room full of nurses and orderlies bent over a bed. She didn’t look too closely—she could hear what they were doing.
Out in the hallway she saw heart rate monitors and pulse oxygen readers mounted on IV poles, she saw bad art on the walls, pictures of kittens and houses in New England and, ugh, a streak of blood pointing towards the stairs. She leaned up against a wall, her leg muscles screaming at the workout she was giving them, and sank to the floor below a line of windows that let cold black night air burst in.
“This is the police! We’re coming in! Everyone needs to be on the floor, now, with your hands in plain view!” someone shouted outside, his angry voice electronically amplified. He made it sound as if they would shoot anyone they found inside the hospital. Fear made Nilla’s hands shake so much she shoved them in the pockets of her stolen coat.
She got up. She found the courage to stand up. She followed the blood trail only to find a dead guy in a jumpsuit blocking the doorway, motionless, his head tilted back a little. As if he was expecting to receive transmissions from space.
“Move!” she said, trying to shove at him. He had a foot on her and maybe fifty pounds. He wouldn’t budge. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly his jaw began to drift down and his eyes started to focus on her.
Outside of the hospital she heard rapid gunfire. Short bursts of it that didn’t let up: B-B-BRATTT-B-B-BRATTT-B-B-BRATTT. She tried shoving the big guy again and finally he looked down at her, saw her. His mouth opened as if he might speak.
A glassy rope of drool spilled over his lower lip. He shot out one hand to push her away and knocked her to the floor. She slid over onto her side on the glossy linoleum. He leaned down over her and tried to grab her with enormous hands. She slipped out of his grasp with more grace than she’d thought she possessed but she knew he would get her eventually.
Something whistled as it came in through the open window and took off the top of his head. Dried-out brain matter showered down on her as fragments of his skull plinked off the wall. Before he could even fall down she ducked around him and into the stairwell. A sniper had shot him without warning—maybe they had seen him attacking her, maybe they were trying to defend her. Or maybe she was the next target.
She took the stairs downward as quickly as she could manage. She kept tripping and having to grab the handrail because she was constantly looking back over her shoulder. She was halfway down when the door at the bottom of the stairwell opened and yellow light streamed in, dazzling her. Something black about the size of a soda can bounced off the floor and she slid to a halt. The canister clattered to a stop and started spewing white smoke. It smelled weird, truly weird and then it made her nose itch. Tear gas? She didn’t know what tear gas smelled like. She couldn’t go out that way, though—they would be guarding the door. She turned around and started heading back up, back to where snipers lay in wait just outside the open windows.
Nilla only made it a step or two before the lights went out. The police had cut the power.
“This was a test of the Reverse 9-1-1 Emergency Notification System. You do not need to reply to this call. Please hang up now. This was a test…” [Phone Message received in Butte, MT, 3/21/05]
“That’s it, you idiot. You take the fucking meat!” Bleu jiggled the bit of string and the leg of mutton danced in front of the dead woman’s ruined eyes. The ghoul scrunched up her face and part of her cheek fell away, dangling by a flap of skin. Dick could see the pureed muscles beneath and a hint of bone.
The dead climber reached up and sank her fingernails into the leg. Her hunger vibrated through her, spasms of need pushing her on far more than Bleu’s taunt. She sank yellow teeth through the wool and blood dripped on the pine needles below. “This is the last one,” Dick said. He’d said it so many times it had to be true.
Bleu let go of the leg and the climber fell to the ground rather than let her prize go. She curled around the meat, protecting it from interlopers with her body.
Dick leaned over the edge of the roof. The rifle hadn’t worked out so well so he’d switched to a pistol, a .38. He fired five shots into her head and neck. Powder burns darkened his pant leg but he didn’t care. He was too busy coughing and snorting, getting ready to be sick. When he was done he sat down hard on the roof and breathed heavily, washing out his mouth with stale coffee. “That’s it, then,” he said. “You got three of them. At the mine. Then the one we killed in the house. This poor sucker. And the girl I saw. On the road.” He nodded. “That’s six.”
“I said there might been seven when we found ‘em,” Bleu clucked.
He shook his head. “But you don’t know. You couldn’t count them so well in the mine. You said they were crawling all over each other. There might have been seven, but there might have been only six. You don’t know.”
“I sure don’t.” She stared out at the trees as if by peering hard enough into the murk she could see right through it. Come on, Dick thought. Come on, come on, come on. Any euphoria or giddiness or adrenaline he had felt earlier was long gone. He just wanted to go home, to get somewhere safe. He studied Bleu’s face like a kid waiting for a teacher to dismiss class on the last day of school. Finally she nodded and helped him lower the ladder over the side.
They climbed down as quietly as they could, the pine needles muffling their footfalls. The moon laid down sharp-edged shadows as they made their way between the tree trunks, Dick putting out one hand to slide along the smooth or rugged or rough bark. Afte
r the noise and light of the gunshots the world seemed wrapped up in cotton and hidden away somewhere dark. His muscles were jumpy under his skin. He didn’t know if there had six or seven either. He just had to get out, all of his excitement turning to cold dread sweat on his back, making the shoulders of his shirt cling to him.
Where the valley turned to hillside and then to the thrust of the ridge Bleu crouched low and put her guns in her belt. The slope came up pretty suddenly and they had to climb their way up instead of walking. It had been easy to get down the track—gravity had helped there—but going up proved far more difficult. Halfway to the top Bleu leaned forward and grabbed at a tree root to steady herself on the broken rock. “I don’t know we should leave just yet. What if the police want to—” She stopped and looked down.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I just stepped in something sticky.” Dick looked down to see a moldy hand reach up and grab at her ankle. She screamed as the last climber yanked her downward on top of him. She rocked back and forth trying to get free but he got one near-skeletal arm around her throat and pinned her down. “Walters!” she shrieked.
“Bleu!” He pulled out the ice axe and readied himself to strike but he couldn’t see any way to hit the dead man without impaling Bleu too. He danced back and forth looking for an opening—and suddenly his feet were sliding on loose shale. Thin sheets of broken rock skittered down the slope, pebbles bouncing and flying as he tried to keep his balance.
“Walters!”
Dick threw out his arms to catch himself, letting go of the axe. He shouted out, half in surprise. “Bleu, just, just hold on—” His feet fell away from beneath him and the hill rolled over as he fell, colliding with the loose rock, sliding, skidding as Bleu and the dead man flew upward, away from him. He was sliding downhill and he couldn’t stop himself. He got a good view of the dead climber finally and saw why there’d been so much confusion as to whether there were six or seven of them. The climber who had Bleu was nothing more than a torso, his legs and abdomen torn away leaving a ragged, stringy wound. Dick reached out, trying to grab Bleu’s foot, trying to grab tree roots or solid rocks or anything. He had to save her—he had to get back up and save her, but then his head smacked something hard and cold and his vision went all sparkly.
He opened his eyes without remembering ever having closed them. His body rang like a bell. His mouth tasted stale and white—white? Was that a taste? He was pretty sure he’d wet himself. Above him the stars burned hard and cold. He recognized the symptoms of a bad concussion but his thoughts were swimming through him like fishes. Like… fish? No, that was… that was wrong. He had to stop—
Stop. Stop and rest.
Yes. Just lay there for a while in the soft snow. It didn’t feel cold at all. Something noisy and terrifying had been happening and he was pretty sure he had the details written down somewhere if he wanted to look them up but just then he only wanted to look up at the stars. Such a beautiful night in the mountains. Something furry brushed against his hand and he reached out to pat it, to pet it. A dog? No, too fleecy.
He managed to tilt his head so he could look and found himself staring into an eyeball with a horizontal pupil. A sheep’s eye. Even after years of working as a livestock inspection agent he had never gotten used to those eyes with their sideways elongated pupils like something out of H.P. Lovecraft. Still. A sheep was nothing to worry about. He gave this one a professional once-over. He recognized the breed: Barbados blackbelly, although she seemed slightly off. Yes… her rear legs were tucked in too tight and there were pink patches in her coat where she’d rubbed herself raw. The principle symptoms of scrapie. She had it, alright, just as Mrs. Skye had suggested. That was a damned shame—she looked like a strong animal and she would have to be put down so she didn’t infect the rest of the flock. The sheep put out her tongue and licked his hand. He laughed until she nipped him, hard.
“Hey there,” he said, “come on,” and he sat up so suddenly the blood rushed right out of his head. He groaned and tried to rub at his temples. It didn’t work. The sheep still had his fingers clenched in her incisors. She choked up on his hand and started crushing his fingers with her premolars. Her herbivore’s teeth couldn’t tear his skin very well but she clearly meant to grind his hand to paste.
Dick yelled and tried to get up but another sheep, this one missing part of her hindquarters, sprawled across his chest. She weighed two hundred pounds, easily, much more than he could lift—he was trapped. A ram with broken horns got his mouth around Dick’s shoulder and clamped down hard. He felt the bones there flex with the pressure. Soon enough they would snap. More sheep arrived. Maybe a dozen. A full flock, all of them showing signs of scrapie. And something else, too. Something worse.
Bleu had slaughtered all of her sheep—she’d done it herself. She had… she had cut their throats. Bled them. She wouldn’t have decapitated them or destroyed their brains, though. Too messy.
Now they were back. Bloody wool obscured Dick’s view but as the ram crushed the skin and muscle of his left arm he saw Bleu herself standing before him. Massive chunks of meat were missing from her neck and throat so that her head seemed to float above her body like a baloon on a string of vertebrae. She didn’t say anything as she bent over him, pushing her way in amongst the sheep. She didn’t say anthing at all.
DOES AMERICA HAVE ENOUGH GUNS? Assault Weapons Bans and the Congressmen Who Hate Them [“The Economist” magazine, 1/05]
Stuttering flashes of light lit up the hospital’s windows as the SWAT teams moved through room after room searching for hostages and shooting anyone who looked suspicious. Bannerman watched from the back of a squad car, trying not to look up every time he heard sub machine gun fire.
It was hard. “They’re in there shooting people, Vikram. Sick people. This isn’t law enforcement. It’s eugenics. And I can’t do a thing about it—I’m way out of my jurisdiction here and the local RAID-OIC isn’t taking my calls. FEMA doesn’t want to hear it until I’ve got a verified one hundred fatalities and the Governor’s office is doing its own investigation. They promise they’ll get back to me. So in the meantime I sit here and listen to people getting slaughtered. The alternative is to run in there and try to stop them with my bare hands, in which case they would decide I was a threat, too, and take me down.” The sheriff’s deputy had been quite clear on that last point. “I have never felt so helpless in my life.”
Vikram Singh Nanda held up one hand. The other clutched his ruggedized cell phone to an ear hidden beneath his turban. “Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” He finished his call. “I am sorry, Bannerman. What were you saying just then?”
Clark looked up at the hospital and saw tear gas streaming from a line of open windows. “Forget it.” This was what happened when you put law enforcement teams in charge of what should be a military situation, he thought. It didn’t matter how much training or discipline they had—they just weren’t ready to psychologically handle a true combat experience. Just ask the Branch Dravidians at Waco. Even federal units were ill-equipped for a real fight.
“So I have news,” Vikram told him, trying to move on. “News you will not like.”
“We’ve found our warden?” Clark asked. This could be crucial. He had set his friend with the task of tracking down the elusive man but he hadn’t expected results nearly so quickly.
“He left an immaculate paper trail. And why not? He had nothing to hide. He was a man going away on vacation. He took a flight from Denver International Airport that arrived at LAX at three twenty-two on a Thursday. He rented a car, a Jeep Cherokee, from the Hertz counter and was later recorded purchasing gas at a service station in Petaluma. Two hours later he was seen biting a young woman on the neck and was subsequently gunned down by an officer of the law. His body was brought here, to this hospital.”
“Jesus fucked a duck,” Bannerman said. The first time he’d sworn in a month, probably, but well-deserved. You couldn’t ask for a cleaner timeline, fo
r one thing—Vikram had always been thorough—but their luck in getting such a clear picture of the warden’s movements was far and away eclipsed by the story’s sheer horror.
The warden had been infected in Florence. Of that Clark had no doubt. He had flown through two major international airports, spreading his contagion to everyone in both terminals—and by extension the passengers and crews of every flight that left those airports. The germ could be on its way to hundreds of destinations by now. No, Clark reconsidered, the warden had a head start on them. The germ would already be at hundreds of destinations. Not every passenger on every plane would be infected, of course—no pathogen was that insidious—but if just one person on every flight had it… well, it had only taken one infected individual to turn a prison—and then a hospital—into a war zone. Bannerman Clark had been operating under a protocol of containment, intending to quarantine every known location where the new disease manifested itself. That was impossible now. What had happened here, at the hospital, would already be beginning in cities around the planet. Starting with Denver. And Los Angeles.
Jesus fucked a duck, indeed.
Clark grabbed the bridge of his nose and pinched. He was trained for this. As part of his being named the RAID officer for Colorado he had been required to complete an eight-week course in crisis response to biological warfare incidents. It was time to manage this thing. Time to prioritize. Time to stop feeling helpless and start doing things. He ran down a checklist in his head. What did he need?
“I need flight schedules,” he said weakly, and Vikram pulled a PDA from his pocket. “We at least need to start looking at epidemiology. I need crew lists and passenger manifests, we’ll track down as many people as we can—God, I hope none of those flights were headed to non-aligned states, we’d never catch them. I need to talk to the administrator for FEMA region IX and the local Guard CO, not just the AG, I—”
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