A flash-bang concussion grenade went off right inside the Emergency Room and Clark stopped in mid-sentence. He looked up to see SWAT teams pouring out of the hospital, their black Kevlar and their iridescent blue-blocker goggles making them look like demons pouring out of a crack in the side of Hell. Something major was happening.
“Naam,” Vikram breathed, taking his God’s name in vain but Clark thought maybe the time was right for that.
Clark opened the door of the patrol car and stepped out into the hospital’s loading zone. The sheriff’s deputy came marching toward him but he held up a hand for patience. He watched the SWAT teams fall into close ranks in two lines facing the emergency room doors at forty-five degree angles. They moved flawlessly, as a unit. As crazy as they might have become, as desperate, they had not forgotten their drills. They were forming a perfect firing formation. A kill zone. They expected something big and bad to come out of the hospital at any second.
The doors opened and a skinny blonde girl walked out.
She had her arms up, trying to surrender. She looked terrified. She also had a truly gruesome wound on her neck and what looked like bloodstains on her chin and chest. Her lips were shaking. They were blue.
“Please,” she said, her voice thick with fear. “Please, don’t kill me.”
The SWAT team leader threw a hand signal at his men and the troopers swarmed her, some holding back to keep her in their weapons’ sights, others streaking in with riot control batons to knock her legs out from under her. They got her hands behind her, fastened together with a thin plastic zip-cuff. Expert hands frisked her, pulling open her white lab coat to show she wore nothing underneath. When it was established that she was unarmed two troopers grabbed her by the arms and yanked her away from the glass doors and over to a clear patch of ground by some shrubbery. The sheriff’s deputy loped over to look at her while the SWAT teams shifted position again to keep the doors covered.
Clark couldn’t help himself. He stepped in between the deputy and the girl. “The infected persons I’ve seen couldn’t talk. They were physically incapable of it,” Clark insisted. “You have to take this woman into custody, sure, she needs to be monitored. You don’t need to hurt her. At the very least that’s going to end in a law suit. At worst it’ll mean criminal charges filed against you.”
“I’ve seen enough of them. I know what they look like and how they act. We can’t let even one of them get away.” The deputy nodded at his underlings.
The girl shivered and sobbed as a SWAT trooper leveled his weapon at her forehead.
“Who are you?” Clark asked her, trying to humanize her in the deputy’s eyes. He wouldn’t give up until she was actually dead—he owed her that much, after standing by and just watching the bloodshed all night. “What’s your name?”
“I… I don’t know,” the girl said. “I’ve lost my memory, I can’t remember!” She sobbed again. Mucus leaked from her nose and eyes. It was dark and thick with congealed blood. Oh, no, Clark thought, oh, no. He’d been wrong—she was one of them.
“Do it,” the deputy coughed. He turned away. The SWAT trooper clicked off the safety of his firearm and steadied it with his free hand.
The girl vanished. Right before Clark’s eyes. Or rather… he felt as if a particle of dust had fallen into his eyes and he tried to blink it away and when his vision cleared she was nowhere to be seen. She must have made a break for it. Yet when he looked around he saw only confused-looking men in riot gear. The SWAT trooper fired a few desultory rounds at the bushes where she’d been kneeling but clearly he didn’t know what to target. The deputy’s face was set like stone. Behind it his brain chugged along trying to figure out what had happened.
She had vanished into thin air.
IN THE BLOOD: A good-looking young woman named Marisol Gonsalvez wastes her time and ours by starring as an ass-kicking nun with, you guessed it, the stigmata. This mildly offensive gore romper is opening in “selected cities” which means it isn’t going straight to video, but it probably should have (**, rated R for excessive religious violence and graphic nudity, 81 min). [Roger Ebert, One Minute Film Reviews, suntimes.com, 3/22/05]
The gun had been used recently and it was hot and it stank with a sour reek that poured down over her face and made her gag with fear. The SWAT trooper stood as still as a stone with his finger on the trigger. She couldn’t see his eyes—they were hidden behind thick goggles. What was he thinking? Was he questioning this at all? He could wipe out her life—her undeath, she supposed—in a heart’s beat if he chose. If she died there with no memories of her past it would be like she hadn’t ever existed at all.
Maybe that would be for the best.
She was already dead. Did she really want to face a new un-life in a decaying body? A new lifespan of uncertain duration, without any knowledge of who she was or what she might have lost?
Then one of the others, the one in the military uniform—she could see his eyes and they were full of sadness—had to spoil it all. “Who are you?” he asked, “what’s your name?” In the tone of voice you used when speaking to a frightened dog.
She sputtered out something, an answer, a negation and suddenly it was all too real. The possibility that she might have a name, lost out there somewhere but still intact, reawakened in her the sense of what she had to lose. She had something still, some breadth of time, and the fear of losing it could cripple her. Her brain rolled over inside her head as the dread overwhelmed her, completely took her over. Her body shook and spasmed and heaved as if she was going to cough up her own skeleton, spit it out on the ground. She felt something clotted and nasty leak from her, from her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She tried to cough it up.
She heard the gun click, heard a bullet inching through its oiled metal mechanism, getting ready for the shot. Her eyes squeezed shut, terrified of what they might see. Oblivion evaded her, however.
With her eyes closed she could see the men like torches in a snowstorm. Their radiance, their golden tasty goodness glow that she wanted so badly to get close to, to consume, burned and roared inside their bodies. It was their life force, she realized. She could feel the energy, the heat of it turned on her, focused on her and she knew they could sense somehow her own dark energy—that horrible perversion of life—God, she thought, if only she could hide that away from them, if only she could make them see her as one of them or even just see her as nothing at all, as invisible, transparent—
Something grated in her head, the bones of her skull sliding across one another like continental plates. The agony of it was unbearable—being shot in the brain ccouldn’t hurt any more.
An icy shudder went through her. Her eyes shot open. She looked up and saw the men and every one of them had the same vacant look on his face.
“Where did she go?” the SWAT trooper asked. “I can’t see her!”
It was impossible but… she had gotten her wish.
It couldn’t last: her body felt drained, her mind hazy. The bare space of existence she’d bought for herself had cost all of her energy and in a moment she would lose it, that control. In a second they would see her. The man with the gun would see her again and nothing would stop him from shooting.
She had to escape.
Her hands were locked behind her with a loop of plastic, so she rolled over on her side and thrusted upward with her back, with her shoulder against the concrete until she was sliding upward onto her feet, a move she didn’t think human bones should allow but it worked for her. She must have been a yoga instructor in her past life—how else could she explain how limber she was, even with stiff, dead muscles? As fast as her feet could carry her (which wasn’t fast at all, damn it, she needed to move) she ran right toward the men, slaloming between them, careful not to touch them because that might just break the spell. Already they were starting to blink and look around, their eyes unfocused when they glided over her but that would change in a hurry. She had to get away. There, she saw a gap, a narrow space between two par
ked police cars, their red and blue light splashing across her white coat, run, run, run, okay, just a fast walk, anything, she squatted low, her body stiffening and complaining about it. She pushed her way into a stand of bushes. Behind her she heard shots fired, gunshots much louder than she expected and her torso winced painfully, her stomach clenching.
They were moving then, searching for her. She picked a direction and just moved, no conscious effort required, pure flight reflex taking over. But where to run to? Every direction seemed equally fraught with danger. Hide—she could hide. She found a hole to crawl into, a dry drainage pipe at the bottom of a ditch, wide enough for her to curl up inside. She tucked herself away, desperate to remain undiscovered. She scraped her zip tie against a rough lip of concrete until it snapped: the noise petrified her, made her think they would be on her in a moment.
They didn’t find her.
Dogs howled for her as she lay motionless and coiled. A helicopter buzzed overhead, its searchlight spearing the scrub grass right outside the mouth of her pipe, bleaching it of color. Men ran past with their guns jangling, excited for the kill, lusting for her blood. Hunger grew inside of her—it was the only way to measure the passage of time. She wanted to crawl out and away, to go look for some food but she couldn’t dare. Instead she chewed on her fingernails, just made her hungrier. She lost track of the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The night flew away from her on bat’s wings.
Dawn came, a hallucinatory vibrant blue on the grass that slowly turned to a pale lemon glow. There was silence around her. There had been for hours. She’d been waiting for something, some signal that it was safe to come out.
Nothing presented itself. Still. She couldn’t stay in the pipe forever. She had to get out. She had to get away. She harbored no illusion that the men had given up. They would still be looking for her. She was a monster. Something that had to be hunted down. She had to run as far and as fast as she could to avoid them. Definitely she had to get out of town. Where could she go, though? She might have family somewhere, people who would hide her, but she had no recollection of anyone. She didn’t know where she lived herself.
Stiff with cold and moisture she unraveled herself in the pipe and climbed out on all fours, every inch costing her jolts of pain up and down her spine. Once she was fully out of the pipe she stood up with infinite care and caution. The motion made her head buzz. Exhaustion and the ever-growing hunger made everything around her jittery and sharp. She rubbed at her eyes with her knuckles and something dark flared in her mind’s eye.
She gulped and choked on a shriek, keeping it inside of her but just barely. There—up on a hill above the hospital. Just a silhouette, a man-shaped darkness framed against the first orange smudge of the rising sun. She squinted hard and saw a naked man, his skin covered in blue curlicues and arabesques. Tattoos. He didn’t look like one of the dead. He looked perfectly healthy. He had a thick bushy beard and his hair was pulled back in a tight pony-tail. He wore nothing but a piece of rope around his neck and a band of fur around one bicep.
The man looked right into her head and she knew he was not just aware of her but psychically inside of her. He was probing her, studying her. She sensed some things about him, reciprocity for what he was taking from her. Not words, nothing so complex—just buzzing, distorted sensations, feelings, images. He was old, very old, and very much undead like herself, he let her know. He was a friend.
He turned away from her and pointed at the sun. She understood.
In a moment all of it was gone. He was gone. She was standing on wet grass, alone, defenseless. Hunted. She had something, though. There was somebody else—somebody like herself out there. She had no idea if she could trust him or not but what did it matter?
She had a direction. East. Go east, the naked man had been telling her. She had to go somewhere. Go east. Okay, she thought.
Okay.
Part 2
DIESEL FUEL RESERVED FOR AUTHORIZED USERS ONLY! Please forgive the inconvenience. [Sign posted at a Petaluma, CA, gas station 3/23/05]
Dick woke up different. Simplified.
Silvery moonlight lit up the world. It dripped from the branches of the trees and played on the surface of the snow. Dick was a shadow in the lee of that light. There were other shadows surrounding him. One huddled near him, her long white hair dyed with blood. She curled tight around a treasure that glowed dimly like a dying ember. It had a knob of bone protruding from one end. It had fingers on the other. It was a human arm, but Dick was beyond concerns of taste or decorum. He tried to grab it away from her only to find that he had no hands anymore. His shoulders ended in gore-caked nubs. The female shadow’s prize was part of Dick’s body. His arm.
The sheep had the other one. They were working hard at grinding it down to paste so they could swallow it. It would take them hours to finish it.
This was immaterial to Dick. There were lights and there were shadows and he was one of the latter. He was no longer capable of feeling loss or regret.
Only hunger.
The Homeland Security Advisory System today raised the level of threat awareness to Orange, or High for the following areas: Anaheim, Glendale, and Oakland. The level of threat awareness has been raised to red, or Severe, for the following areas of the Southland: Atwater, Brentwood, Century City, Granada Hills, Los Feliz… [DHS bulletin for the media, issued 3/26/05]
Back to Colorado. Four days had passed and so little had been accomplished. They had tightened the cordon where they could but the pathogen was already out.
A staff car took Bannerman Clark and Vikram Singh Nanda out to Commerce City, where the new detention facility had sprung up like a ring of fungus after the first rain of spring. Commerce City: not so much a town as a zoning error, a sprawling ex-prairie north of Denver full of chemical tanks and dusty weeds and long-haul truck agents and rusting railroad tracks. Ancient farmhouses that had been spruced up with particle board and unpainted dry wall and turned into light manufactories. The prettiest thing in Commerce City was a petroleum cracking plant, a stack of steel intestines that was lit up at night like a carnival.
“The CDC has quarantined blocks of Atlanta, New York and Detroit,” Clark said, scanning his email on a Blackberry as the car bounced. “It’s hard to tell if it’s the same thing or some unrelated problem. What little intel I have is confused at best. The victims are all over Chicago. What kind of force do we have on the ground in Illinois? We need to cut the CDC out of this, take over.” The Centers for Disease Control was a civilian group. Civilians lacked the discipline and devotion to protocol that marked military operations, and all they could offer in exchange for their chaos was intuition—guesswork. This was a time for action, not committees. Vikram nodded and made a note on his own handheld.
The car slid to a stop in a spray of gravel that made a noise like hailstones striking the gleaming car. The Captain and the Major got out and walked the rest of the way. “I have ten workgroups in California but nothing between here and Las Vegas. Maybe we can shuffle some people around. Let’s liaise with the WHO as soon as we can. We need to think of this as global, now. If we haven’t seen any cases in China or Europe yet we will, sooner rather than later. The rest of the world can’t be allowed to think of this as a purely American problem. We need overseas support teams trained and ready to go.”
The prison, with its ten thousand doors and its state-of-the-art prisoner control system, was a terrible place to store the infected. The Supermax at Florence had been overcrowded before the Epidemic began. It forced the ill and the healthy together, made them all breathe the same air. The detention facility in Commerce City, by way of contrast, had been set up to take the infected and keep them away from the general population. It mostly comprised a double layered chainlink fence and an open-pit latrine that so far sat clean and unused. The Guard brought in new cases of the mysterious disease every day. Clark had teams working round the clock, looking for ways to improve conditions for the detainees but the main thing was to war
ehouse them.
“We need to bring in regular Army squads to police up Los Angeles, there needs to be door-to-door catching. We need a declaration of emergency for at least four states.”
Clark stopped talking and put his blackberry in his pocket. He had reached the fence and he could feel their eyes on him. They looked pale and poorly fed. Most of them had visible wounds. They did not have the depressed and surrendering look of refugees, though. They looked more like junkies staring at their next fix.
None of them made a sound. They reached for him hungrily through the wire, their fingers twined through the links, their faces pressed close up against the fence as if they could push themselves through.
One of them slapped the chainlink with the flat of a broken hand and it rattled, watery, plinking echoes rolling up and down the length. The center was built for five hundred detainees. It was already at twice capacity and they were adding new pens daily.
“We need…” Clark stopped, unable to think for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need that girl, Vikram. The blonde. She could talk.”
The Sikh Major looked up from his handheld—he’d been avoiding the gazes leveled at him through the fence. He pursed his lips as if he was about to speak.
“We need her. She’s the answer.” He had it. Soldiers, Bannerman Clark ruminated, sometimes possessed intuition too.
As of twenty-three hundred hours tonight in the UTC-8 time zone, parts of three highways in California will be closed to civil traffic. The Governor has called for all citizens to cooperate with this necessary step in maintaining the public health. The affected highways are the State Route 1 (Pacific Coast Highway), State Highway 27, and State Highway 74. [CalTrans press release, 3/28/05]
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