“Captain, I’m Jim Jesuroga. I’ve got to thank you—my family couldn’t make it on our own.”
“Let me kiss him!” a woman shrieked, a middle-aged matron with died maroon hair. She wrapped her arms around Clark’s neck and pecked at his cheek. She stank of body odor and artificial lavender. Her children came up behind her, their eyes bright with hope, while others moved in, all of them wanting to get close, to touch him, to speak with him if only for a moment.
Clark spent nearly an hour among them, listening to their stories. What he learned shocked him. So few people had survived, so very many had died and reanimated. It was bad, bad all over and the only way to survive seemed to be to get out, to get east. Since that was turning out not to be such a great idea (the dead were already in New York and Atlanta was overrun, he learned), the last resort seemed to be Florence-ADX.
When he was done meeting with survivors, when he was too exhausted for any more, he retired to the prison. The gates closed again and the Civilian came up beside him. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it? Being the hero and all.”
“I… suppose it does,” Clark admitted.
“Yeah, so you better not fuck up and get all of these good people killed.”
Clark blinked in shock. Something to keep in mind, he told himself.
Part 4
The new study in angiogenesis holds some promise… stem cell therapy could be the key. I palpated the neoplasm today and it was the size of a robin’s egg. Mood: Cheerful, though she refused to eat. [Lab Notes, 9/12/02]
Dick could hear voices and he knew food was nearby. But now was not the time to eat. He hid himself, as best he could, and waited.
“Jesus! What is that smell?”
“Hell, I don’t know, but we have to get out of here!”
“It’s like month-old tuna or something. Cat piss sealed in Tupperware to let it mellow.”
“They’re going to get in here. I don’t think you understand. They’re at the gates right now and we didn’t have time to lock them. They are going to come out onto this runway and then we won’t be able to take off.”
“Huh. Alright, alright. French cheese left sitting on a radiator? Help me get this door closed.”
Darkness slid across Dick’s hidden form. He wriggled deeper into the packing material inside his crate. He hungered, oh, how he hungered, and there was food just inches away but the Voice had made it clear. There was still work to do.
His whole body vibrated as the military cargo plane jumped into the sky.
I won’t accept this! No hope, they say. Keep her comfortable, they tell me. Enjoy the time you have left. No! I am a scientist and I believe all problems can be solved given adequate study and application. I am a scientist and I refuse to accept the inevitable. [Lab Notes, 9/20/02]
Outside, beyond the fence, construction crews were working non-stop installing plumbing and streetlights in the shanty-town. Bannerman Clark watched a backhoe sinking its teeth into the yielding earth for a while and then turned back to the one-way mirror behind him to listen to another story.
“We had barricades across the roads but they just came up through the sewer. They came up out of the storm drain—covered in shit, um, pardon my French. Covered in sewage and they didn’t care. You could see their eyes but it was like… God, do you know what I mean? Those aren’t eyes anymore. They aren’t people.”
If he couldn’t allow the survivors inside the prison walls Clark intended to do what he could for them. He could give them a healthy environment—Vikram had loved the idea of building infrastructure out there, it gave the soldiers something to do other than contemplating their own mortality. An Engineer to the end, the Sikh Major had thrown himself into the hard, back-breaking work as if he were going off to a round of golf.
“My sister-in-law told us to keep the car running, that she would be out as soon as she found her passport. We waited and waited and waited… we burned through a quarter tank of gas before Chuck decided we had to get moving. I cried, I cried but I didn’t try to stop him.”
Inside the prison Clark oversaw another program. Each survivor was brought in to be registered—name and vital statistics entered in a proper database, lot number in the shantytown recorded, a cursory medical exam performed. Those who wished it could stay and tell their stories and have them recorded onto audio tape. All of them, it seemed, wished it.
“Six days in my office, and then the water stopped flowing. I was so hungry and I knew I couldn’t make it without water. They were all over the parking lot, touching the cars, just, just touching them like they were trying to remember what they were for. I knew I had to make a break for it.”
A row of narrow interrogation rooms lined the space beyond the one-way mirror. In each room a survivor sat with a uniformed interviewer and spoke into a microphone. The chairs were uncomfortable, the rooms cramped and dreary, designed for use by hardened inmates. None of the survivors seemed to mind. The experiences they’d been through were so traumatic and so huge compared to the banal routine of their previous lives that they needed to get them out, needed to purge themselves of what they’d seen and not a single one of them complained or ended an interview early.
“I was out at a fishing cabin on Lake Mohave, me and three other guys and they… they wanted to leave, to get home to their families. I couldn’t say no, even if I knew we were safer there. We loaded up the truck, we had about sixty pounds of Stripers in the back packed in ice, figured we could eat those if we didn’t find anything else. It just didn’t matter. I was in the desert two days before this Immigration Services truck picked me up.”
They wanted someone to listen. Clark was happy to oblige them. The more information he could get about the outside world the better, of course. And at first that was all it meant—information gathering, intelligence in its most primitive form. As he listened in on the interviews, though, from his hidden roost in the administration building, he found he couldn’t turn away. He needed to hear the stories, as much as they needed to tell them.
He needed to know it was possible to survive. He needed to know that people who weren’t soldiers still had a chance to live.
“So we got to this one town, and Charles was in pretty bad shape, and I stopped and there were dogs everywhere. I mean whole bunches, um, packs of them, you know? I guess when the people left they couldn’t take their dogs with them. They were everywhere just smiling and wagging their tails, I was worried at first but they were so cute. They were hungry, though, you could tell. I tried feeding them but there were so many. I found some dog food in this grocery store. It was pitch black in there but I figured it was safe. If the dogs were just running around and okay then there couldn’t be any dead people. I found the dog food and I was looking for a can opener when I heard this noise. It wasn’t a scream, and it wasn’t dogs barking. Okay, I mean, all the dogs were barking, they were always barking. That was kind of a nice sound, they sounded happy. This was different though. The dogs were going crazy. Somebody was really in trouble.”
Clark pulled up a wooden chair and leaned his elbows on the railing before the mirror. The girl in the interview room had long dark hair stained with blood—how on Earth had that happened, and why hadn’t someone let her into the shower room? Perhaps she had refused the offer. He’d seen stranger behavior from the survivors. Many of them slept sitting in chairs, or in their cars, too accustomed to constantly moving to ever lie down again. Some of them wouldn’t use the facilities without someone else standing guard outside. Hell had come to them and they had learned to live in hell.
“I came around the corner and the dogs were everywhere, and they were jumping up and down, biting at the air. Really upset. I tried shushing them but there were so many. Then I looked and I saw they were all over our car. The back door was open and Charles… I don’t know what he was thinking. I guess they don’t, you know. Think much. They just get hungry and wander off. Charles had tried to get out of the car but he got snagged in his seat belt. The dogs.” The g
irl fell silent for a while. “The dogs.”
“Go on,” the interviewer told the girl. A female soldier, maybe five years older than the girl across the table. She poured a glass of water and handed it to her subject.
The girl had her arms curled tightly around her stomach as if she were feeling nauseous. She didn’t even look at the water. “The dogs tore Charles apart, I guess. They tore him, well, to pieces. I tried fighting them but they didn’t care about me, they just ignored me. They could tell, somehow. They could tell Charles was dead and they hated him. I used to like dogs, you know? I did.”
The girl wasn’t crying but she wiped at her face anyway. Maybe it was hot in the interrogation room and she was sweating. “I wish I didn’t make Nilla get out of the car,” the girl said. “She could of helped me, maybe.”
“Nilla?” The interviewer asked. “Who’s Nilla?”
The girl’s face hardened into concrete and she stared at the interviewer with blazing eyes.
For some reason—a hunch, perhaps, a stab of intuition—Clark leaned closer to the glass.
Chemo isn’t helping. Laetrile, interferon, gene therapy, mega-antioxidants: nothing. Soon I’ll be down to dried tiger pizzles and psychic surgery. [Lab Notes, 10/30/02]
She never actually lost consciousness. She couldn’t even faint.
The pain squeezed her down to a narrow field of view, like peering through the slats of a set of Venetian blinds. Solid black filled the rest of her vision. When she closed her eyes energy buzzed and crackled and spat all around her.
Mael, she thought. Mael, I didn’t betray you. I tried to do what you asked.
nilla, he replied, but she could barely hear him. nilla, what’s happened to you?
Her body felt like a torn-up rag. Ridges and threads of pain dug through her midsection, flesh and bone torn away from each other, organs punctured and deflated. Her stomach muscles hung slack and useless. She could not have stood up even with assistance.
Under her head the constant burr and rattle of the Space Van’s wheels on pavement hurt her teeth, turned her eyes to bruised jelly. Even her brain hurt. She couldn’t breathe—not that she needed to, but it would have felt infinitesimally better to be able to exhale a long and lugubrious moan.
“You cut her to pieces. There’s no pulse, Rick. No breathing. She’s dead!”
“If she was one of them she would be up and at our throats. Just keep her alive long enough that we can dump her outside of city limits. I’m not taking the heat if it turns out she really was from the Chamber.” Mellowman stepped into her field of view. Looking down at her his face turned bunched-up and porcine. “Listen, my little Muffin. If you die in my van I will shoot your corpse,” he said.
“Get back, alright? It’s hard enough doing this while we’re moving. Jesus—could we slow down a little?” Something sharp slid into the flesh of Nilla’s bicep. A hypodermic needle. Of all the pointless things. She tried smiling a little and found to her surprise that she still had a little control over her facial muscles.
“Dead my ass, look at that.” Mellowman stared deep into her eyes. “She likes it, she likes whatever you just put in her arm.”
“Just a reflex, Rick. Don’t get excited.”
Mellowman shook his head. “Who are you working for, lady? Who sent you? Playing dead isn’t going to save you from a beating. Talk to me, fucker!” He leaned very close until she could smell the stink of garlic sausages on his breath. “I know you can hear me, you stupid cow!” When she failed to respond he pursed his lips and let a dollop of drool dangle out of his mouth, right over her face. It wobbled back and forth, yellowish and full of bubbles. It filled up her vision and instinctively she tossed her head to the side to avoid it.
He sucked it hurriedly back into his mouth. “I got you!” he screamed, and then he started punching her.
She went limp, as best her savaged muscles would let her. The pain kept booming away in her side, as rhythmic and powerful as the surf coming in. Her body jerked like a dog on a leash every time he hit her.
Eventually he stopped.
Nilla—it’s hard for me to find you, where are you, lass?
She could hear Mael calling her but through the pain his voice was a little light floating far out on a foggy ocean. She lacked the resources to answer.
Nilla! I can barely sense you out there, talk to me!
Later, but still long before the dawn. She could see darkness outside of the window in the van’s rear door. Occasional arpeggios of light as they passed under streetlamps, pizzicato flashes of red as they passed a car going the other way, few and far between. Mike, the one with the needles, had his arms around her, moving her back and forth. Maybe trying to wake her up. He pulled a blanket around her as the van slowed and pulled away from the lights. The back door fell open and she was pushed and dragged out, onto loose dirt. She could feel the van’s exhaust farting against her leg, hot and dry.
The desert at night: intimate or claustrophobic, you take your pick. The very opposite of the expansive emptiness of day time. The darkness, near total, pushed in close looking to share your warmth. The few sounds were mournful and polite.
“Welcome to Arizona, Muffin. Home of fuck-all and plenty of it,” Mellowman bellowed at her, his face very close to her ear. She couldn’t stand on her own. If Mike let go of her she knew she would fall. “I’m going to shoot you again. In the head this time. If that still doesn’t kill you we’re going to bury you in a shallow grave. If you dig yourself out of the grave then I will come back and shoot you again, until it works.”
Just… just go invisible, Nilla thought. But that was beyond her, way beyond her. She lacked the energy for it. She lacked the energy to scream.
Mike set her down, leaning up against the side of the van. The third guy, the fidgety one—had be been driving the van? He must have been driving the van—leaped out of the back holding a shovel. “Alright, Termite, you get to it,” Mellowman told him. He moved rapidly out of Nilla’s field of vision but she could hear him digging, quite close by. “You know why I call him Termite? Nah, you couldn’t know. See he likes to go fast, our friend Termite, and when he’s going fast enough his teeth kind of grind together. You heard of meth mouth?” When she didn’t reply he kept going. Clearly there was some time to kill before she was shot. That just made the fear worse. “So Morphine Mike, our famous physician friend, he figures the best thing to do is to put a piece of wood in the Termite’s mouth when he’s speeding. Otherways his teeth will just grind away to dust. We three look out for each other, you understand? So this idea of Mike’s works great except for one thing. The first piece of wood we put in there, he just bites through it. So we get a chunk as big as your thumb. It was gone in a day. Most of it was just missing, ground away to sawdust. Mike said maybe we should stop but I figure, well, fuck. The son of a bitch needs the fiber!”
Mellowman burst out in an explosive laugh at his own joke. He knelt down near her and took one of the film canisters from his bandolier. He popped it open with one thumb and a complex, earthy, skunky smell came out. A vegetable smell. He dug out a finger’s length of leafy green material and rolled it into a cigarette. He lit it and blew smoke in her face. “Not much longer now. You feel like talking?”
She let her eyes go lax in their sockets. No point in looking at anything. There was nothing in this little tableau that could save her.
“I don’t expect you do. Some people like to talk when they get to this point, is all, they like to confess to things like I was a priest or somethin’. I’ve been out this way before, you see. I’ve had problems like you before. Not so much it’s become a habit. You want a puff on this? Or maybe some water? Maybe, um, well, maybe, Muffin, you, you want to know what it’s like to be with a man. You know, one last time.”
She focused her vision on him again and was surprised by what she found in his face. He looked genuinely interested.
How was that even possible? She was dead, for one thing, and beyond that half of her
body had been destroyed by his shotgun blast. And he still wanted her sexually. She recalled the time she had silently begged Charles to touch her, to want her. This should feel good, or at least comforting. But of course it didn’t. She was afraid, afraid that nobody was left to save her. That the end of her world had finally arrived.
She could plead for her life but that was beyond pointless—someone like Mellowman wanted her to suffer, to beg, and the more she did it the more he would want. She could ask for what she really wanted and maybe, just maybe she would get it. “Huh, huh,” she snuffled. “Hungry.” It came out on a long exhalation.
Mellowman shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Then I guess a blow job is out of the question.” It was a joke, whether or not she found it funny. Apparently he had been serious about granting her last request, though, or perhaps he just didn’t care. Mike went into the van—she felt it rocking against her back as he moved around inside there—and emerged with half of a sandwich. Corned beef, judging by the smell. He held it near her mouth but she couldn’t use her hands, couldn’t even lift her arms. He had to feed it to her, disassembling the components, tearing the meat between his fingers. His motions around her were respectful, almost gentle. Maybe it would have been different if he knew the shreds of lunch meat were far less appetizing to her than his fingers were. She managed not to bite the hand that fed her. When she was done eating Mellowman ordered Mike to pick her up and carry her and his hands grabbed her forcefully under her armpits.
Nilla.
Mael’s voice in her head sounded distorted, fuzzy on the low end. It irritated her, itched in one corner of her brain, the left side high up. She felt the buzz in her teeth.
Nilla, Dick’s on the road to you but I doubt he’ll arrive in time. There’s something else I can try, but no guarantees, lass. Do you understand? It may be as I can’t get you out of this one.
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