by David Beers
Andrew stepped over Lane's body and checked the bathroom for a brief second, immediately seeing the murder weapon, a bent and bloody shower curtain rod.
He walked outside, flipping the lock on the door so that he could get back in easily if he needed. He pulled his phone from his pocket, not wanting to make this call, but knowing there wasn't any choice.
"Yeah?" Will answered.
"They're gone."
"Who?"
"The two kids."
* * *
Will hung up the phone.
He should have killed them. He thought about it when they first grabbed the two, but decided against it. Decided that he could kill them whenever he wanted, and that it wasn't necessary to do it just then. And now the two kids had killed one of his men and were on the lam.
He put the phone on his left leg, staring at the field he had first come here to look at.
Rigley sat next to him and he could see her staring from his peripheral vision. He wasn't going to look at her yet, though. Because this was a fuck up. A large, large fuck up that Will hadn't thought possible.
You're trained to think of all possibilities. Twenty years ago, would you have made the same choice? Fuck that, even three years ago?
Three years ago those two kids would have been dead and in a hole the moment they told him what he wanted to know.
Fuck Rigley and whatever she was going to say. She hadn't told him to pull the trigger, and Will knew that she couldn't have done it herself. Fuck her boss too, if somehow this bubbled up to that level (somehow, Will? This is long past the point of not reaching the highest levels of the US Government). The real thing bothering Will was why he made the choice. Why he had been so foolish.
"Well?" Rigley said.
"The two kids we picked up, they're gone. They killed one of our guys."
Will didn't look over at her, but just stared straight ahead at the trees.
Rigley lifted her hand into the air and slammed it down on the dashboard. She left it there for a second and then hit it again, harder, and again, and again.
"WHAT THE FUCK, WILL? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN THEY'RE GONE AND KILLED ONE OF US?"
Will put both hands on the steering wheel though the car was parked. "Just what I said."
Rigley turned so that her back was against the door and she looked fully at him.
"I heard what the fuck you said."
"We'll find them."
"The fuck we will. How are we going to do that, Will? We have half our men showing up in these goddamn woods and the other half still looking for the alien you can't seem to find. Need me to bring more men in, Will? Maybe I should bring in the entire National Guard. Do you think you could find them then?"
A few seconds passed in silence.
"What were you thinking?" she asked.
"You knew they were up there. You didn't say to get rid of them."
Will heard Rigley swallow and then only her silence.
When Rigley told him about this job, he hadn't thought this was the end of his career. He thought it might be a big point in said career, something else to add to the old resume, but definitely not the end. Fifty might be ancient for most people in this business, but not for Will. He had at least ten years left in him. Now though, sitting in this car and having Rigley Plasken stare at him from across the vehicle, he knew that it was over. Was it his choices that did it, or was it the situation? Was it not killing those two high schoolers or was it that he had completely failed to capture what he came here for?
He let the kids live because they were young. There wasn't any other reason for it. Because they hadn't lived life yet and for some reason he decided that they should. Will had known he would need to kill the other two kids, those infected, and had he somehow thought that by letting the two in the motel room live a little longer, he could atone for that future act? Atone? As if he answered to some god? It was laughable to even think that, but somehow he must have thought it. That letting those two live for a few more hours would make up for the murder coming to his hands.
He hadn't made such a choice before, and he knew that he could never make a decision like it again. A momentary lapse of judgement, maybe, but a disastrous result. It didn't matter that Rigley was glaring at him; it didn't matter what she thought—not really. He had fucked up, somehow at fifty let a budding conscience influence his thinking.
"They're irrelevant," he said. "The town is surrounded; they won't escape and they're not infected. What matters is the thing in those woods. We get that and everything else works out fine. Once we kill it, we'll go get the kids and wrap this thing up."
"How many times are you going to spew bullshit and act like its pearls?"
"No more bullshit. We'll end this today, either one way or the other."
55
Bolivia
The one-way mirror showed Rigley a hundred men, some walking around, some sitting. Talking, reading, or watching television. The mirror stretched around the circumference of the room, so that whoever was monitoring could look in at any portion they wanted. Rigley didn't need to do that. She understood what she was looking at.
"Nothing's happened like in the other bunker? No exploding heads?"
"No," Will answered.
"Then how do you know they're infected?"
"We don't for sure. But we didn't know the other bunker was infected either."
He wasn't getting it yet, but that was fine. He would soon. Rigley was in charge here, despite what this man wanted. This wasn't a corporation where everyone needed to play nicely.
"You didn't really answer my question. If we don't know that they're infected, then why are we taking them off the street? The reports show Sherman growing outward again."
Neither looked at each other, but watched the seemingly normal men do their seemingly normal tasks.
"The truth?"
"Yes, the truth," Rigley said.
"I think it knows it's being watched. I think that it's adapting to its situation. In the other bunker, it tried to spread, and did an okay job, but in the end we put it down because it tried to spread too openly. I think all of the people in that room are infected, and I think Sherman is living inside them—in their brains, but not trying to spread yet. Because it knows we're here and will kill it the moment we see it."
"How many people are we bringing in here each day?"
"About ten. Anyone that has had contact with Sherman. Ten new people into the field each day, ten out each day, into this place."
"Lord. No wonder it's growing, Will. Why don't you just leave them out there if they're going to die anyway?"
Will looked at her, his brows furrowing. "We don't know that they're going to die. We don't truly know if they're infected. Our scans aren't picking up anything; these are precautions."
Rigley started walking the length of the mirror, slowly, watching the people inside. "How long do you plan on keeping them here, then?" She said, her voice rising as she moved further away from Will.
"We haven't figured that out yet. We just know we don't want them possibly infecting anyone else."
"Yet we don't know they're infected, right?"
Will didn't say anything and Rigley didn't look back at him.
"Send them back out," Rigley said. "All of them. If they're infected then let them die out there amongst the growth, fighting it. Not in here where they can spread it to us."
"All of them?"
"Yes. We have to kill this stuff, Will, not keep ourselves safe."
"It's not us I'm worrying about, it's them."
"Our job isn't to keep them safe either," she said. "Put them back out in the field and let's see what happens."
Will watched her continue walking around the outer perimeter of the room. She didn't look back at him, and at one point put a finger on the glass, allowing it to trail next to her as she moved.
Put them back out in the field.
Let them die out there.
He didn't know what had happened to
this woman, but something serious must lie in her past. Something that must have broken her, and when whatever broke had grown back together, it grew back harder, and this was the end result. This woman walking around a bunch of men on death row, trailing a finger across the glass as if she was a child.
56
Rigley’s Mind
Rigley stood in front of the door, the red light casting down on her skin, giving it an evil hue. She stared at the word above: Her.
She didn't need to ask who her was, because there had only been one her, one daughter not named, but they had been close to it, hadn't they? There were a few names she and her husband could have chosen (don't want to say his name, Rigley?): Samantha, Cassandra, or Elle. They never got the chance though, because 'her' ended up as a stream of blood inside a toilet.
Why had Rigley come here, to this door? With so much going on outside, in reality, why was she at this door on the inside?
Because when you understand what's up here on these floors, you'll be able to fix it all.
Fix it all.
Is that what this was about, fixing everything? Somehow finding the answer to all the problems outside of this place, all the problems she encountered in Grayson? She doubted it, somehow. She didn't think this place had been built to solve problems, but to hide them, to make sure that she didn't have to face them out in the open—because Rigley didn't think she could handle them.
Yet here she was, standing outside of the door that probably was the impetus behind this whole setup.
She watched her hand move up to the door and twist the knob, a hand that she owned, but one she didn't feel she had control over. Rigley didn't even try to fight it, because something in her said it would be a waste of time. Something said that the time for fighting was over, that whatever fight she was supposed to try to win had long ago been lost. These were the spoils, and the spoils of this fight went to the loser.
The doorknob felt cold on her palm, colder than the air already causing goosebumps across her arms. Luckily, her hand didn't hold it for long, but pushed open the door with one shove, revealing a large, dark room. Large, though, might have been the wrong word, because the thing could have been tiny or infinitely large, such was the blackness. It could have stretched forever, or Rigley could be looking at a wall five feet in front of her.
All she knew for sure was that she didn't want go in, that she would rather have been placed inside that quarantine room back in Bolivia, placed inside that wrap around one way mirror and next to every one of those infected soldiers. Rigley didn't want to go a step further, not into this room, anywhere but that. She hadn't felt this dread the entire walk down the hall, but now it held her like some kind of massive giant, with a grip that would never, ever break.
Her feet stepped inside, and she understood the hallway she just walked down as she moved through the door. The cold, it didn't emanate from the hallway, but from these rooms. The doorknob was near ice because this room could have been a night in the arctic. Her breath streamed from her mouth in long, white wisps of air.
The door slammed shut behind her, echoing in the stillness.
From her left came the only light in the room.
A painting that looked like it belonged in a museum. The same red glow that shone down outside of the room, shone down from lights above the picture. A red rope, the fancy kind that blocked off onlookers all around the world, wrapped around the painting. Rigley watched the picture grow as her feet took her to it, the fear growing inside her with each unstoppable step.
She saw it clearly maybe ten feet from it, and tears burst from her eyes immediately. It wasn't anything disgusting, wasn't a toilet full of red water, but a beautiful woman. Young, maybe in her early twenties, with brown hair that curved perfectly around her slender face, and pale, porcelain like skin without a blemish. The woman smiled at something, a genuine smile, not one put on for the painter. She was looking away, at something out of the picture, and her brown eyes danced with happiness.
Rigley understood what she was looking at; the words above the painting, highlighted in red, said The Land That Could Have Been.
Rigley was looking at her daughter, or who her daughter would have grown into. A beautiful, happy young woman. This is what would never be, because it could have been but wasn't.
The tears fell down Rigley's face, but still her feet didn't move.
"This is why," the painting said.
Rigley's eyes widened at the sound. It wasn't a speaker implanted into or around the painting, the voice came from it.
"This is why everything you want will be lost."
Another red light came from the black heavens to her right, illuminating another painting, and there she saw her husband (Josh, Rigley. Say his goddamn name: Josh). His arm was interlocked with someone, and he was dressed in a tuxedo, wearing a smile that said it might be the happiest day of his life. Rigley didn't need to see the person connected to the arm that Josh held; she knew who it was. The painting was the picture of a wedding that would never happen, a picture of her daughter walking down the aisle.
"You've already lost everything," the first painting said. "And now you'll lose more. Are you ready?"
Her feet turned her then, completely around, so that she looked across the black cavern.
A sign turned on, looking just like those outside this ice chamber. On it, in red letters brought from hell, the word 'Bolivia'.
Rigley's feet started their walk.
57
Present Day
Bryan watched the woods around him, amazed at what was happening. Had he been in control of his body, his jaw probably would have hung loose. He didn't even have the awareness to look for Thera, to see what she thought.
He was watching something out of a movie, something like Predator, when the muscular men with paint on their face showed up to kill the alien. None looked like bodybuilders, most of these people were thin—some wiry, some filling up their shirts, but all of them had paint covering their face. Brown and green, blending with the thick forest that Bryan had grown up playing in, acting like he was one of these men as they ran around shooting fake guns. He had been chasing Michael back then, but these men were chasing an alien.
These men were chasing him and Thera.
"You seeing this?" Thera asked.
"Christ yes."
Morena had spent the fifteen minutes in between the first two people they saw and the arrival of these new men finding a place to hide. She wasn't leaving this area, but she didn't trust herself to go directly out into the middle yet. Bryan could sense some of this, could sense her disappointment in herself, perhaps for walking out here in the first place, so brazenly. The confidence she felt with herself didn't extend to Bryan's body, or Thera's. She knew she would die if something attacked her.
Bryan knew of places in these woods that none of these men would ever find, places that it took he and Michael years to search for or build. It was easy for Morena to find them even though the first two spots she went to had been overgrown from when Bryan used to romp around in these woods. The third, though, looked nearly the same as it had when the boys were twelve.
It had been fucking tough to build. Months of work, but everyday after school, the two of them showed up with shovels and garden tools. It was an accident that they found the damn place, Bryan tripping over it when he was chasing Michael (who seemed to never trip in his life, but just glided over the ground like Marty McFly on a hover-board). It was a rock, and when they examined it closely, it stretched ten feet in either direction, but yet the vast majority of it was only a few inches thick, with dirt underneath it. The 'base' of the rock stretched further down into the Earth, and when the two of them started digging, they realized they were basically creating a foxhole. So they dug enough room for them to slip inside, and then dug out nearly an entire room. They brought benches, disassembling them to slip through the entrance they created (necessary for it to be small, so that others playing guns with them would never see it) a
nd then reassembling once inside. The rock overhang kept the elements out, and while they found a squirrel inside from time to time, that was pretty much it.
Somehow, the damn thing had held up over the course of six years.
Morena went to it, and then both Thera and Bryan's bodies slipped through the twelve-inch gap.
The benches were still there, and the place smelled of fresh dirt. Pieces of the walls had fallen in, and Bryan immediately saw the bones of small animals, but that was it. This was their fort of old, the greatest one they ever created.
And now Bryan had brought this thing here, this royalty from another planet, this murderer.
Both Thera and he, or rather their bodies, stood, peering out into the woods as they watched the swarm of men settling in. They carried sniper rifles, knives, pistols, and a number of weapons that Bryan couldn't name.
"Who are they?" Morena asked, speaking for the first time in an hour.
"That's what we call the cavalry, Morena," Bryan said.
"Don't play games with me."
"He means they're the people here to stop you. It's a phrase," Thera said, clearly trying to keep Morena from inflicting some kind of harm on Bryan. Thera was always going to be the smartest of the group, but Bryan didn't care right then. Seeing these guys, all of them looking like they meant to do serious damage, brought him hope. They were like a big Fuck You to Morena and everything she thought or wanted.
"How will they stop me?"
Bryan's cheer died. He hadn't considered that, because despite his proximity to Morena, he still considered himself a completely separate being. Something that would go on living even if she died. But that wasn't true—not right now at least. If she died, it meant he died, because she was inside him. These people weren't the cavalry, they were goddamn executioners.
