by Addison Gunn
Then again, even if these things weren’t lions and Miller was very definitely allowed to blow them away, he didn’t much like the idea of trying to take down something the size of a fucking rhino with rifle rounds.
“Do you think the people in there are hiding until nightfall?” du Trieux asked, matching his tone. “Perhaps the predators around here can’t see too well.”
Privately, Miller suspected it was the heat. The Bravo’s interior fans were roaring away, but Miller didn’t even want to guess what it must have been like to suffer outside for hours on end. The building’s shade might have been all that was keeping the inhabitants alive.
“Maybe,” he murmured, quickly changing the subject. “Doubt any decent local clubs open up until eight or nine, anyway.” He glanced across the Bravo at her. “We could come back then, find dates. I call dibs on blondes and redheads. Especially blondes.”
She hesitated, lifting an eyebrow. “Do I get first shot at blonde men, at least?”
“Hell, no. Not if they’re short, anyhow.”
Du Trieux snorted. “I hope it’s okay to ask, but... You prefer men? Or women?”
“Both. Maybe a little pickier when it comes to men—if he doesn’t take better care of his looks than I do, not too interested.” Miller tapped the driver’s wheel. “You? Men, women, both?”
“Just men.”
“Really? Didn’t someone say you were dating a Lebanese around the water cooler...?”
She near enough slapped him. “Don’t you Americans know any countries other than ones you invade—” And then she saw his mock-serious expression, and laughed.
He left her to chuckle, and glanced through the windshield nervously.
“Why do you do that?” du Trieux asked.
“Do what?”
“Distract us with bullshit when things get serious.”
Miller tapped his fingers on the wheel again, glancing around in hopes of spotting Doyle and Morland’s Bravo. “You know I was in the Army, right?”
“Right.”
“The closest I ever got to war was sitting around the base on rapid deployment alert. They’d line us up with all our gear, sometimes sit us in troop transport planes. It’d go on for weeks at a time whenever they held an election in Saudi Arabia, or if someone blew up an oil pipeline in Russia, or whatever.” Miller chewed his lip. “It was like sitting with a guillotine hanging over us, day after day, and we were begging it to drop. There wasn’t any other way to break the tension; bullshitting each other instead of thinking about—it’s an instinct by now.”
Du Trieux joined him in silently watching the building and streets for a while, lightly fingering her Gilboa.
“You remind me of Hasim,” she said, eventually.
“Hasim?”
“A jihadi I met while we were liberating Syria from the false caliphate, the Daesh.” She glanced at him uncertainly, but he didn’t explode in war-on-terror speak and bigotry, so she went on. “Mostly, at camp, he sang songs that the Daesh would have executed him for. Not just because they were mocking, but because the Daesh think music is evil. All he wanted to do was sing. He didn’t want to fight. Not really.”
Miller nodded slightly, tapping away at the wheel to distract himself. “Yeah, I’m kind of a coward like that.”
“Oh, Hasim wasn’t a coward,” du Trieux said. “He didn’t want to fight, but he knew he must. Not out of vengeance for our brothers and sisters, like most of us there, but because it was the correct thing—the right thing—to do.”
Miller’s fingers stilled on the steering wheel.
“There isn’t any shame in a fear of violence, Miller. This is what bravery is, isn’t it? Overcoming fear to do what is right?”
He blinked at her. “I heard the soldier needs something of the sociopath in him.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Men like that are good killers, but they are not good men, you understand?”
Miller looked away, thinking on what du Trieux had said, and what Gray had said. “Maybe,” he said quietly.
Du Trieux lapsed into silence after that, leaving Miller alone with his thoughts and she with hers.
As the minutes and heat wore on, the behemoth-sized thugs trotted away to find something weak or dead to eat. Eventually the streets were quiet and still, except for the movement of another Bravo rolling to a halt at a nearby intersection.
“In position,” Doyle reported a moment later.
They brought the Bravos together, and sat in their air conditioning with the doors open for a quick briefing.
“We’re looking for the Baxters. Their emergency plan directed them to evacuate here, their home’s been abandoned at least a week.” Miller passed the pad with Alphonse and Linda’s pictures on it over to Doyle and Morland, letting them get a look. “Two kids. From family photos, their skin’s a little lighter than their dad’s, frizzy hair like his. The building’s got somebody living in it, though we haven’t seen any movement in the half-hour we’ve been here,” he said. “Except for big-ass animals, but they cleared out.”
Morland obliged them with a nervous glance around, as if he expected to be eaten at any moment. “Apparently scavengers are following the dust storms around,” he said. “Looking for a free meal.”
“Great,” Miller muttered.
“Were any of our other pickups directed here?” Doyle asked.
“Don’t think so. So far as I know, Switchblade cleared the last of the employee shelters a couple of days ago.” Miller glanced at the building again, trying to find signs of life behind the building’s mirrored glass. “We’re only interested in the Baxters for now. If other employees are resident, we’ll pass it up the chain and the executives can make the call.”
A few sips of water later, and Cobalt-2 assembled on the lobby doors. Morland and Doyle in front with their shotguns—magazine-fed automatics laid out like oversized assault rifles—Miller and du Trieux behind.
This close, the tiny key reader, a plastic lozenge beside one of the door hinges, clearly displayed three blue lights. Unlocked. Doyle paused, S-Y master key software loaded on his phone, and glanced back at Miller.
It wasn’t right. The Baxters’ home was one thing, but an office block being used as a shelter? The lobby doors would be stronger than they looked—these buildings were designed to survive a car bomb detonated on the kerb; they could easily hold out the wildlife, if they were locked.
The doors swung open, and yielded to the shadowy darkness of the interior. The inner lobby doors, normally shut to hold in the building’s air-conditioned atmosphere, were hanging wide open.
The smell hit Miller first. He could barely see—his eyes struggling to adapt to the building’s cave-darkness after the sunlight outside—but he could smell body odour. Gym socks and stale urine, the subway in midsummer with hundreds of sweating people in close quarters. The unwashed smell of an Infected mob.
The lobby doors shut on their springs behind them with a whoomph, and everything seemed still. Dead.
The front desk was overturned, graffiti on the wall behind it, just to cement the horror movie atmosphere. No scrawled warnings, no creepy messages in blood, just neat orderly rows of childish stick figures holding hands. There was more crayon work further in, swirls and scribbles and crude animals along with a few more detailed pictures of cars and trees, as if adults had watched a couple of five-year-olds start drawing on the walls and had decided to join in.
Miller struggled with the impulse to cry out a greeting, beg the occupants to show their faces, but he held his tongue, directing his small team through the lobby and into the building’s wings, checking meeting rooms one by one. In about half, the projectors’ screens had been drawn over with more crayon work—definitely collaborations between adults and children, zoo animals and newer wildlife cavorting under oversized yellow suns.
The place seemed deserted, except for the fire escapes.
Piles of trash and furniture were stacked up behind the stairwell doors, com
pletely barricaded. Not even an inch of give when Morland put his huge shoulder to the door and pushed. It seemed like a fire hazard, but nobody, nobody, would be making it upstairs without using the elevators. Thankfully, they worked. Sort of. The call buttons lit up, and the elevator panels accepted the master key, at least.
Miller hammered on the call button again, but the elevators refused to arrive.
“Who are you?”
“What?” Miller looked round, trying to find the source of the voice. “We’re corporate-board-level security, who are you?”
“Over here,” Doyle said, pointing at a panel on the wall. An intercom with a tiny screen, just barely lit.
The man on the display was shirtless, sweaty, his hair at all angles. Eyes wild. “You’re not them? The Infected?” he demanded. “You’re employees like us?”
“Yes, we are.” Miller leaned in, pulling up his ID card from its clip on his chest to show the panel.
“Oh... Okay. I’ll go free the elevator and come down for you. Just, wait there. Okay? Wait there...” He vanished from the screen, but the panel continued to display a wall.
“At least they’re not infected,” Morland said.
“Don’t know about that,” Miller muttered, clutching his M27 tighter.
The floor-number display above one of the elevator doors began slowly counting down.
The elevator pinged after a tense wait, and the shirtless man from the intercom—and his stink—emerged from within. He looked around nervously, chewing at his fingernails. “There aren’t any Infected with you, are there?”
“No,” Miller said, kindly as he could. “We’re here to protect you from them. I’m Alex.”
The man didn’t answer at first, his eyes shuddering over each of their faces like a drug addict’s, unable to focus on any particular feature without his eyes leaping away. For a moment Miller was afraid the poor guy was having a seizure, but he retreated into the elevator, pressing himself against the wall. “I-I’m George. Are you sure you’re an employee like me?”
“Yes.”
George didn’t seem to believe him, shrinking into that corner of the elevator. “O-okay. You can come upstairs.”
The elevator wasn’t that tight a fit with five people, but it was uncomfortable. Dark. The buttons and display provided the only light, until Doyle flipped on his chest-rig flashlight. George flinched away from the light, looking a little ghoulish in the blue-tinged glow.
“Alright?” Doyle asked, thinly.
George huddled back, wretched and dishevelled. “It’s fine. Just bright. Light hurts sometimes.”
“Is that why the lights are out?”
George nodded, but didn’t offer any further information. When they reached the fifth floor, he scurried out into the half-lit corridor—a little sunlight snaking through the building’s corridors from the windows, catching dancing motes of dust and fairy-like gnats in the sunbeams—and pulled a piece of board through the elevator’s doors, blocking them. All the elevators had been treated similarly—in one lay an overturned filing cabinet, in another a pair of office chairs.
Pointing, Miller asked, “Why?”
“To keep us safe,” George said, breathlessly turning the board over so as best to catch the door. “None of the locks work. They’re all... all broken. When the Infected came, the doors opened for them. We blocked the elevators and barricaded the stairs, so they can’t come back.”
“The Infected were here?” Miller asked, wiping his eye. One of the gnats had flown into it, making his eye tear up.
“They bit us,” George said, lifting his arm, displaying a recent crescent-shaped scab, before stopping nervously in the middle of the hall. “It’s, it’s all right now. The others were going to send us out, because we’d been bitten, but it’s alright, we all like each other now...”
They were infected. They were all damn well infected.
Bit by bit they got the story out of George, how the building’s security systems had failed during the riots. The building did have shelter supplies, and everything had locked up the way it was supposed to, up until the mob arrived, shortly after Jimmy Swift’s broadcasts. Then the doors spilled open, and two security guards and a janitor had been killed—beaten to death. Others had been injured, many had been bitten. And the one thing missing from the supplies were anti-parasitic drugs.
The infection spread rapidly after that—the cramped conditions, the lack of hygiene, the necessity of letting infected people handle foraged food. The parasite spread with most kinds of body-fluid contact. Saliva, sweat. Sex. The Infected’s natural inclination to get along, to like one another, to think like each other, to be affectionate, had brought the mild cases in close contact with those so far gone they were starting to forget what language was for. Soon there weren’t any mild cases left, thanks to the repeated reinfections.
“It’s not so bad if they keep apart from each other,” one of the last uninfected, Opal, a woman with an anti-parasitic drug implant, said. “They’re still... people?” She said the word uncertainly. “When there’s more than a few together, they... they get mob-minded.”
Right now, in a dingy office, there was George and a teenaged girl, watching, swaying more or less in time with one another. “It’s confusing,” George said, gently.
“Can’t stop thinking about what other people are doing, too many things to think about,” the girl said. “It’s easier if you shut—” “—shut your eyes, less to—” “—less to think about,” they said, almost murmuring over each other’s voices.
“But you’re not like them?” Miller asked, hand resting against the stock of his slung M27. “You don’t want to go and join their communes?”
“We’re employees,” George said, almost desperately. “They kill employees.”
Early on, Opal explained, some of the newly infected—uncomfortable with their uninfected former co-workers—had tried to escape, to join the mobs. They’d all promised to return if it was safe, but none had. Foraging parties sometimes disappeared, never just one or two, but entire groups. The remaining infected employees had convinced themselves that the communes had killed them—there was a strong strain of paranoia running through the group after the earlier attack.
Privately Miller suspected, and he could see that Opal shared his suspicion, that the Infected had run along with the communes and forgotten all about their fellow employees the moment mob-mindedness took over.
“It wasn’t too bad, while more of us were still uninfected. Right now Alphonse and I aren’t very popular,” Opal said. “Apparently we don’t smell right, but they know us and we’re employees. That seems to matter more than what we smell like.”
“We’re the same, we’re employees, we’re the same, we work for the company...” George was rocking back and forth, the girl beside him similarly agitated.
“Alphonse? Alphonse Baxter?”
“That’s right. He has the chip too—you know him?”
Miller looked back at his squad, then nodded fractionally. “We’re here to take him and his family to safety.”
Opal tugged at her chin nervously. “The rest won’t like that.”
“PLEASE, BABY, PLEASE, let me take it out...” Linda Baxter, considerably worse-for-wear after a week of exile, started to rock nervously in front of her husband.
Alphonse looked tired, defeated. The broken arm had something to do with that, but so did the way his children sat rooted beside their mother, joining her pleading with half-burbled whines more suited to toddlers.
Du Trieux was trying to guard the door, but failing. Curious employees were drifting after them, the news of Cobalt-2’s arrival spreading rapidly up- and downstairs—the stairwells were only barricaded at the bottom floors, and were the only means of getting around with the elevators on lockdown.
Alphonse looked up first, surprised to see someone with a gun, and Linda’s half-conscious rocking grew worse as she spotted George, his nervousness joining hers in a confused muddle.
“Oh, thank God—”
“We are safe,” Linda snapped, drawing her husband’s sling-bound arm toward her again, despite his wincing. She didn’t seem to understand he was hurt, but she understood George’s bubbling nerves perfectly. The two children watched owlishly, their faces twisting to match their mother’s severe tone.
Gnats danced in the gloom along with the dust, fizzing along just above head level.
“Afe,” the daughter murmured, words seemingly having lost all meaning for the child, simply mimicking her mother’s sounds.
“Don’t listen to her,” Alphonse begged, wrapping his good arm around the bad, leaning away from her wife. “Please, take us, we need to get out of here, it’s been days—”
“Al, please, we need to take it out, we just need to cut it out and then you’ll be alright, don’t you see?” The woman lost all interest in the visitors, and reached for her husband’s bad arm again. His right arm—the arm drug chips were usually implanted in.
George stumbled forward, falling to his knees nearby... caressing the air as if it were Alphonse’s arm. The employees were in motion, and there wasn’t anything du Trieux could do to keep them from shoving past her at the door. First one got past, then a second, pushing at her like drunks dealing with an unwelcome party-guest, all fumbles and knuckles.
Cobalt’s mere presence was putting them on edge. George wasn’t just afraid of them because they had guns; they were strangers, and they were uninfected. Revulsion at their presence was the last straw on the camel’s back, and Miller realized it only as he spotted the situation spiralling out of control.
“We just need to tear it out...”
“Linda, no!” Alphonse struggled to stand, and she, and George, and the other employees, even the children, all pushed him back down. She leaned forward, gently pulling away the ragged remnants of his sleeve, and dipped as if to kiss his shoulder... He screamed, and she bit him again, tearing at his shoulder with her teeth.
