Life — no matter which life it was — was just too damned short.
Chapter Four
A half hour out of White Mesa the next morning and Kate, the doctor’s apprentice, caught up to us. She had a pack on her back almost as big as she was.
“I’m coming with you,” she said.
Vargas shook his head. “Go home, little darlin’. It’s likely to be pretty deadly where we’re goin’, and none of us is gonna want your death on our conscience.”
The girl was small and young and wore her hair in sun–streaked pigtails, but her eyes were as hard and sharp as a basalt knife. She crossed her arms. “I’m not your little darling, I’m your medic, and if I don’t come, your deaths are going to be on my conscience. Besides, if you don’t stop these death machines, sooner or later it will be pretty deadly back in White Mesa too. Either those robots will kill us, or the raiders they’re chasing out of the north will.”
“So move your people to Vegas,” said Angie. “Get ‘em to safety. That’s your better bet.”
“I hear Vegas is under attack too.” Kate raised her chin. “These things have to be stopped at the source, and you’ll all have a much better chance of stopping them if I’m there helping you keep your blood on the inside where it belongs.”
Vargas glanced around at the rest of us, looking for support.
I just shrugged. It made sense to me to bring her. We could definitely use a medic, but thinking back to how casually I’d put Athalia at risk the night before, I wasn’t sure I could trust my judgment anymore.
“Sorry,” said Ace. “You ain’t seen enough of life yet. You need to live a little before you die. Go on home and find somebody to dance and kiss and climb trees with. Death’ll still be waitin’ after you’ve had your fun.”
Athalia nodded in agreement. “We might need you, but you shouldn’t—”
“You all don’t seem to understand,” said Kate. “I’m not asking your permission. I’m coming no matter what you say.”
We all looked at each other. Finally Angie turned away from the girl. “Well, since it seems like the only way to stop her would be to kneecap her, I guess she’s coming.”
“Fine,” said Vargas. “But she gets the next piece of body armor we find.”
“Agreed,” said everybody in unison, and then we started south again with Kate panting after us, that huge pack on her back looking like it was going to topple her over and squash her like a bug.
After a while Vargas looked back at her, then grinned at Angie. “Reminds me of that little gal who showed up at Ranger Center ‘bout a year back, all full of piss and vinegar. Didn’t let nobody tell her she couldn’t be a ranger. What was her name? Gave herself a real mean one, something to scare raiders with — Angel something.”
“Fuck you, Vargas,” said Angie. “Least I didn’t go calling myself Snake.”
“Hey, I didn’t pick that name. Folks started callin’ me that after I got bit that third time.”
Athalia blinked. “You’ve been bit by snakes three times?”
Vargas looked embarrassed. “Uh, five now, counting the time just now that got me caught by those raiders back there.”
“Five?” I stared. “How the hell does that happen?”
Vargas shrugged. “Snakes just like me, I guess. I don’t know.”
“Well I guess we do need a medic after all,” I said. “Just to take care of you.”
Everybody laughed, even Ace, even though it wasn’t that funny. I think we were all just trying to forget that letting that little girl come with us was pretty much signing her death warrant. I mean, we were signing our own too, but walking into the grinder was our job. We were resigned to it. Letting civilians die was precisely what a ranger wasn’t supposed to do.
***
We headed south through the mountains, moving higher in altitude. That cooled things off a bit, brought a little green to the red and rust of the wastes. It should have been comforting, but it just meant that the things that wanted to kill us had better hiding places.
It took us a day and a half to get to the pass that opened on the valley that the map I’d found in my old self’s pocket said should contain Darwin Village. It was a strange trip, at least for me. Each new turn in the trail brought back a vivid but useless flash of déjà–vu. I’d definitely been this way before, at least my former self — sorry, one of my former selves — had been, and maybe more than once. Some of the flashes were calm, just walking along, looking at the scenery. Some were nightmarish and filled with pain, like I had been running from something on a broken leg. I did my best to keep these flashes at bay and concentrate on finding any sign of where my predecessor had been attacked. Either I missed them, they weren’t there, or someone had done a hell of a job covering them up.
Another day on and we found Darwin. It wasn’t quite what we’d expected.
***
Based on the note about the missing sec pass, I’d thought Project Darwin was going to be another military facility, but what we found was a village. I also confirmed that I’d been there before, or at least an earlier me had. The déjà–vu that had been jerking my head around the whole long march continued as we wandered through the outskirts toward the town center. Again, it was like I was seeing the place through two dreams, one calm and bright — a daydream — the other dark and terrifying — a nightmare.
The daydream was just a repetition of what I was seeing now, a sense of having passed this shack before, of having seen that dog in that yard before. The nightmare was the same scenes against a red sky, with the dog barking and people slamming the door of the shack as I stumbled by, bleeding and broken. Were both visions true? Only one? Which one?
There was also the sensation of walking backwards through time as we got closer to the center of the village. At the edges the scene was typical wasteland — ramshackle farms with fields of stunted crops and cattle, cobbled–together shacks made of bits of old billboards, tin sheeting, car parts and tarps, but as we moved on, the buildings started to get older, but at the same time better–constructed and better–maintained, until finally we found ourselves in an area where all the houses were set on a grid of paved streets with trim lawns and white picket fences.
It creeped me out.
These weren’t the first buildings I’d seen that had been built before the bombs flew. Ranger Center had once been a prison complex which the first rangers had put to a new purpose. But even Ranger Center showed wear and tear. Sharp edges had weathered, paint peeled, the odd discolored shingle hinted at repairs. Here there was none of that. Everything looked as clean and new as the day it had been built. It seemed as if time and the nuclear holocaust hadn’t touched the town of Darwin.
But something had. We could tell that right away.
I’d have put the population of the town at around three hundred, which was enough to support a bar, a cat house, a clinic, a general store, and a building that advertised itself as the Darwin Village Free Library, but a good percentage of that population seemed to be sick. We could hear moans and retching from some of the houses, and saw other people stumbling around the streets like zombies, shivering and red–eyed.
The library and the general store were deserted when we poked our heads in, so we headed for the bar, which went by the name of the Black Gila.
The sounds of fighting coming from the place could be heard from a block away — a symphony of shattering glassware, splintering furniture, and the roaring of angry voices.
“Come on, you tongue–tied dummy! Do that again! I dare you!”
Angie raised her head. “That’s Hell Razor’s voice!”
An inarticulate bellow nearly drowned her out.
“And that’s Thrasher,” said Vargas. “I’d recognize that howl anywhere. Come on!”
We ran for the swinging doors, Vargas limping, Kate supporting him, and pushed through into a rustic–looking saloon with weary men and women slumped at trestle tables and the bar, all staring dully at two khaki–clad
hellions who were rolling on the floor next to the pool table and beating the living shit out of each other.
“Razor!” shouted Angie.
“Thrasher!” barked Vargas.
The two men halted their combat and looked up. Both were sporting black eyes and bloody lips and noses. One was lean and wiry, with limp black hair and a face like the joker in a pack of cards. He had a buck knife the size of a machete strapped to his leg and a pistol holstered under his arm. The other was enormous — tall, wide and padded out like a sofa with too much stuffing — with a stubbly shaved head and an utterly blank expression on his broad brown face.
He gave a small nod of greeting, while the joker–faced guy grinned a grin that made him look even more like a cartoon devil.
“Hey, all,” he said. “Where the hell have you been?”
***
Angie stepped toward the two men like an angry mom. “Never mind where we’ve been, Razor! Why are you two fighting?”
They untangled themselves and stood, looking sheepish. Razor, the smaller, harder one, shrugged. “Well, we got bored waitin’, and everybody else around here is too weak to put up a good fight, so….”
“So you fought each other?” Vargas rolled his eyes. “You numbskulls deserve each other.”
A man in an apron stood up from behind the bar, his face red with fury. “You know these two clowns? They owe me for the furnishings.”
“Don’t worry,” said Angie. “We’ll drink enough to make it right. In fact, set us up right now. A drink for everybody, yourself included.” She shot a glance at Kate. “Uh, but a sarsaparilla for the young ‘un.”
Kate’s head came up. “I drink beer!”
Vargas chuckled. “How you going to take care of us drunk, huh?”
The girl made a face, then snorted. “Fine. But I don’t want sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla tastes terrible. I like ginger ale.”
“Ginger ale it is, then.”
“And one plain water,” said Athalia.
Angie tossed some scrap on the bar and took the corner seat. The rest of us filled in around her while the bartender got busy filling jars and mugs with home brew, his earlier anger gone like someone had flicked a switch.
“Mighty kind of you,” he said. “Mighty kind.”
There was a moment of silence as everybody took a long slow pull, then a chorus of “Ahhhhs” as we set our mugs down. As this was the first beer this body had had in its life, I wasn’t exactly qualified to judge, but I had to say, it seemed like a pretty damned good beer to me.
“So,” said Angie after we’d all had another sip or two. “You two learn anything since you been here? Or have you just been fighting the whole time.”
The big bruiser — Thrasher, I assumed — just grunted and stared down into his beer.
Hell Razor shrugged. “We learned that the people around here are a bunch of weak–ass limp–dicks who can’t find the energy to get up out of their seats, let alone swing a fist.”
Vargas sighed. “Did you learn why?”
Hell Razor sneered in the bartender’s direction. “Our host here said it was because they were all sick. I say it’s because they’re all pussies!”
He raised his voice for that last bit and looked around hopefully, but the other patrons were still slumped in the same positions they had been when we came in. Only now they were studiously avoiding looking in our direction.
Hell Razor snorted, disgusted, and went back to his beer.
Athalia turned toward the bartender and asked the obvious question. “So why is everybody sick? What’s going on?”
“Somethin’ up at the lab,” he said. “A flu maybe? Everybody who worked up there comes down with it eventually. Been goin’ on for over a month. ‘Bout two weeks ago it got so bad, the boss collected all our security passes and told us not to come back until he could figure out a cure. We’re still waitin’, and folks are still gettin’ sicker. Dyin’ too, every now and then.”
“What lab is this?” asked Ace.
“Dr. Finster’s lab,” said the Bartender. “He’s been doin’ his experiments up there since as long as anyone can remember. Breedin’ strange animals. Makin’ cures for diseases. That kind of thing.”
Kate frowned. “But no cure for this disease?”
The bartender shook his head. “Like I said, Finster says he’s workin’ on it, but so far, nothin’. And what with his best researchers dead, I’m wonderin’ if he’ll ever find it.”
“All the researchers are dead?” I asked. That seemed strange.
“Well, we sure ain’t seen ‘em since everything started. Don’t know what else to think. And they was all the folks that worked closest with him too — all the ones he trained up since they was babies. Really seems to have taken it out of the old man, them dyin’. He ain’t left the lab since he closed it. Doesn’t talk to no–one except through the PA system, and then all he says is stay away.”
Everybody looked at each other. Even Hell Razor and Thrasher seemed interested. They paused in their drinking for nearly twenty seconds.
Kate cleared her throat. “So, what are the symptoms of this flu?”
The bartender shook his head. “It’s really odd. Starts off with the victims getting all red–faced and delirious.” He motioned around at the other patrons. “Then it’s pretty much what you see. They’re tired all the time, vomiting and shivering, maybe the screaming shits. Folks that’ve had it the longest tend to lose their appetite and sometimes their hair, then sometimes they die. It’s made a ghost town out of Darwin, even though most everybody’s still alive.”
“So,” asked Vargas. “What kinda work did the people do up there? The, uh, non–researchers, I mean.”
A voice came from the back of the room. “You all are some nosy motherfuckers.”
Another voice joined the first. “Yeah. What the hell do you want to know all this stuff for?”
The bartender got a frightened look on his face. “Come on, Metal, don’t start nothin’. And keep a leash on Mad Dog. These folks are already crazy enough to fight themselves if there’s no–one else handy. Don’t go gettin’ ‘em riled up.”
Me and the others turned. Two men, one big and paunchy, the other smaller and wild–eyed, were leaning in a doorway that led to a back room. The big one had long greasy hair and wore a ragged black t–shirt with the words Quiet Riot printed on it in spiky letters, so maybe he was Metal. The smaller one wore a dirty dress shirt and black leather gloves and twitched when he talked, so maybe he was Mad Dog. They certainly both looked as sick as dogs.
Hell Razor jumped up from his stool. “We wanna know ‘cause we wanna know. You got a problem with that?”
The two men looked him up and down, sneering, but then Metal shook his head. “On one of my good days I shit bigger than you, sonny. But I ain’t been havin’ so many good days lately.”
Mad Dog nodded in agreement. “Ain’t felt like gettin’ in a fight for months. My gut ain’t right.”
Angie elbowed Hell Razor back to his stool and stepped forward. “And maybe we’re askin’ ‘cause we’re lookin’ to find a cure for what’s ailin’ you.”
The two men laughed, but their laughter quickly turned into coughing fits, and they were both doubled up in the door, red–faced and weaving.
Metal recovered first. “How’s a bunch of gunslingers like you gonna find a cure when old Doc Finster can’t find one?”
“Yeah,” said Mad Dog. There was blood on his lips. “He’s the smartest man in the world. You ain’t but raiders with badges. What do you know?”
“I know I’d rather try something than just sit around waiting to die,” said Athalia.
I stood. “Answer the man’s question. What did everybody do up there?”
The two men looked like they wanted to sass me, but then they looked too tired.
“Mostly farm–type work,” said Metal. “Tendin’ Finster’s weird animals — feedin’ ‘em, breedin’ em’, makin’ sure the litters didn’t die.”
/>
“We grew his weird plants too,” said Mad Dog. “Fruits and veggies that only the weird animals can eat. Stuff that would make normal animals sick to eat it.”
Kate perked up at that. “And do you ever eat those plants?”
“Hell no,” said Mad Dog. “We gotta wear special suits just to be around ‘em.”
“And the animals,” agreed Metal.
I looked at the others. “Any ideas?”
Everyone shook their heads, except Kate. She turned to the bartender. “You still have books in your library?”
“Yes indeed,” he said. “Finster never let us throw ‘em out. Said he needed ‘em to make future researchers.”
“Fine.” She hopped off her stool. “I’m going to the library, if anybody else wants to come.”
Hell Razor wrinkled his nose like she’d farted as she walked out the door.
“Libraries. Right.” He swiveled around on his stool and pointed at the guys in the back room door. “We need any security passes to get into that lab?”
The big man shrugged. “You can get in, but you won’t get far. Most places are employee only.”
“We’ll see about that.” Razor downed his beer in one gulp. “Come on, Thrasher. Come on Snake. Let’s go kick in some doors.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Athalia. “I want to see inside that place.”
They shrugged as she joined them, but Angie held up a hand. “One second. Might save you some searchin’ around.” She gave Metal and Mad Dog a smile. “Don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a security pass for another facility lyin’ around in there anywhere. Place called Sleeper One?”
The men looked at each other, then shook their heads.
“Never seen nothin’ like that,” said Mad Dog. “But then, we just shovel shit. We never been into the high security areas. Could be anything in there.”
The Earth Transformed - Ghost Book I Page 4
