by Stark, Ken
“Far end!” Addison shouted between pants. “Left! Ladder!”
It was enough. The layout wasn’t dissimilar to the Alamo, so Mason led them unerringly to a small storage room at the back of the building, and to a ladder running up one wall. There was no door to buy them time, though. So, without preamble or apologies, he threw Alejandra onto the ladder and gave her a prodigious shove with a hand on her backside, and she started up, though not without the muttered curse, “Hijo de puta...”
Next was Addison, and he needed no encouragement. He scrambled up after Alejandra like an overgrown monkey, and caught up to her before she'd even reached the hatch. Now that it was only him and Hansen left, Mason sized up the situation in an instant. Hansen was sucking wind. He was exhausted. The only thing keeping him upright was the mile-long stick he carried up his ass. At twenty-plus years his senior, the old man should be the next to go. But above all else, the man was a cop. True blue, right down to the core. They could argue and threaten and bully one another 'til the cows came home, and the end result would be the same.
Mason launched himself up the ladder.
And none too soon.
Barely had he reached the halfway point when the swarm came bursting into the storage room with a roar and proceeded to tear the place apart. In a fit of panic, Mason stopped and had a look down, afraid that the old man had been one step too slow, and that he would have the ignominious honor of watching Becks' father being ripped to shreds. He was pleasantly relieved to see Hansen's big, ugly mug hovering just behind his knees.
“Take a fucking picture,” Hansen snarled up at him. “It'll last longer.”
He double-timed his ascent and rolled out onto the flat roof beside Addison and Alejandra, all of them wheezing and panting as if they'd run a marathon. Alejandra took one look at Mason and suddenly jumped to her feet, rushing back to the open hatch.
As Hansen's head appeared, she sighed, “Qué cabrón... Glad you could make it, tamarindo,” and helped him the rest of the way out.
Then, she was flat on her back again and Hansen was laid out beside her, both of them panting as if there wasn't enough air left in the entire world.
“I thought you were dead meat, tamarindo...” she managed between breaths.
“Not yet, peleonera...” Hansen panted back. “Moriré cuando esté listo. I'll die when I'm good and fucking ready...”
CHAPTER XXIV
Even above the roar of the swarm and the building being torn apart just a few feet below, the sound of Gloria's big Cummins diesel engine cranking to life was unmistakable.
Mason picked himself up and half-ran, half-staggered to the edge of the roof overlooking the east side of the building. Sarah had waited there, behind the wheel, long enough to know for certain that no one else would be coming through the window. Now, she was driving away.
But she didn’t go far. A dozen or more alphas had blundered through, falling onto the truck. She carved a path through the swarm with a few quick loops around the Quad to shake the hitchhikers loose. Then, she pulled to a stop far enough away that she could look up through the windshield to the roof of building six.
The setting sun glinted off the glass, making it hard for Mason to see. But he thought he could make out seven distinct heads pressed up against the windshield. Seven heads. All present and accounted for. Well, mostly...
It could have been worse.
That's what he told himself as he collapsed back to his knees and held up a hand to tell those below that they were okay, that all four of them had made it to the roof. Sarah waved back, and he could just make out a long mane of ebony hair cascading suddenly downward beside her. It was Becks. She was crying. She had her face in her hands, and she was crying. Then, that beautiful head was pulled closer to Sarah, and an arm went around her shoulder.
As the sun continued down behind his back, and the glare on the glass gave way to shadow, there was one single moment when he could see everyone clearly. Sarah. Mack. Becks. Richie. Teddy. Diego. And there in the center, being comforted from both sides, was Christopher.
Seven heads. Seven people. Seven friends he thought he'd never see again.
Then, the sun dipped below the crest of the building, and they were gone, just like that.
But the truck remained. The engine was keyed off, but there it sat... so near and yet so incredibly out of reach.
Addison appeared beside him, breathing hard and thumbing his glasses to the bridge of his nose. “Did they all make it? I mean... well, you know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Mason told him plainly.
“Thank God.” Addison breathed a sigh of relief. “But Jesus! Poor Inez... and that William kid. I didn't really like the guy, but Jesus!”
And with that, Mason came up against a familiar old foe. Before this whole shit-storm started, he rarely gave a damn about anyone or anything. To paraphrase Caligula, if all of humanity had but one neck, he'd have gladly hacked it through. But then came Mack. And then came Sarah. And even while humanity's neck was being hacked through by the cruel sword of fate, he'd learned a new way to look at those few who were left.
Poor Inez? No. Inez was dead. Her troubles were over. She'd been a kind and gentle woman, but she got stupid, and she was dead. Poor Christopher was more apropos, but even that rang somehow untrue. Christopher would mourn his dead mother, so pity be to him. But Christopher was still alive, which was more than could be said for most. So, upon whom should one heap one's pity in this fucked-up bizarro-world hellscape? The living? The dead? Those creatures caught so horribly between the two? Christ, maybe the whole idea of pity should be laid on the ash-pit of history along with the rest of mankind's extinct, self-indulgent bullshit.
He struggled for something to say that wouldn't make him out to be a monster. Finding nothing, he merely shrugged.
“Is Rebecca alright?”
It was Hansen, coming up from behind. Even if he hadn't spoken, his big, flat feet were unmistakable. But this wasn't his usual stride. It was slower. One heel scraping up gravel from the roof. And other footsteps, too. Alejandra's, almost in lock-step, but slightly off. So, apparently Hansen wasn't Superman after all.
When they reached the edge of the roof, Ally lowered Hansen to his knees and asked him gently, “Esta bien, tamarindo?”
“Estoy bien,” Hansen replied without a hint of his usual snark. “Gracias, peleonera.”
“De nada,” the girl said, almost sweetly.
Mason eyed the man from top to bottom. “Are you hurt?”
“Don't you worry about me,” Hansen gruffed back. “If I slow any of you down, you have my permission to leave me behind.”
“Do we have to wait until you actually slow us down?” Addison joked, earning him a huff from Alejandra.
And there they sat, four castaways looking down upon a ship they could never reach, bobbing in a storm-tossed sea.
“Now, that's what I call a rough day,” Addison sighed.
“We've had better, but it could've been worse.”
“A lot worse,” Alejandra agreed. “I have to say, there were times there where I thought we were all goners.”
“You're not alone,” Mason admitted back, however reluctantly.
“Honestly, the only time I thought we were done for was that business at the loading dock,” Addison chimed in. “After that, I knew we were invincible.”
“Most of us,” Hansen reminded him, grimly.
“Yeah.” Addison hung his head. “Most of us.”
“That was some bad shit, alright,” Alejandra sighed.
No one said a word about Beverly, or about the sweet little girl who'd put a bullet through her brain, and the subject was quickly dropped.
“Did Sarah find her book at least?” This from Addison.
“She did,” Mason said, and with Hansen snorting and grumbling in the background and tossing in the odd, “Mad scientists,” and, “Playing God,” to punctuate his general disgust, he did his best to give them an accurate though excee
dingly abbreviated account of the parts of Sarah's tutorial he'd understood. They listened with equal parts rapt attention and disbelief, then they each summed up their feelings in their own way.
“That's fucked up,” Alejandra sneered.
“But it's pretty cool, right? They sound like Borg nanoprobes!” Addison said a little too excitedly.
Ally turned her sneer on him and he beat a hasty retreat. “But yeah, totally fucked up.”
By now, the sun was almost gone and the truck was lost in shadows... and still they sat.
As twilight turned to dusk and then to utter darkness, they sat there still, each of them picturing in their minds both their deepest hopes and their darkest fears.
“How do we get down?” Alejandra asked at last. “I thought every building was supposed to have a fire escape. Isn't it like a law or something?”
As the resident keeper of all manner of useless trivia, Addison answered. “Actually, external fire escapes have become almost obsolete now. Thanks to improved building codes.”
“Well, good for the fucking building codes. Puta madre, what are we gonna do? Parachute down?”
“Don't worry, peleonera,” Hansen assured her. “You'll be back in your muscle car soon enough.”
“Oh yeah? You got thirty feet of rope I don't know about?”
“Trust me,” Hansen said in as gentle a voice as he might ever have used. “No te mentiría.”
Silence for several long moments, then Alejandra hushed back a single word. “Okay.”
Mason inched back from the edge and lay down on his back, making himself as comfortable as possible on a bed of tar and gravel.
“We won't be going anywhere tonight. Better get some shut-eye while we can.”
“Deal!” Addison said, and proceeded to beat them all to it. He curled up in the comfort of his sweater-vest and was asleep in seconds.
“Alright,” Hansen gruffed, and there was considerable shuffling about as he and Alejandra did what they could to settle in on Mason's other side.
“Tienes el sueño ligero?” he heard the old man hush.
“Supongo. Por qué?”
“Tengo apnea. Si sueno extraño, despiértame, okay?”
“Okay,” Alejandra hushed, and almost immediately, everything grew quiet atop that deserted island.
Mason could almost tune out the roar of the raging sea, as he let the darkness envelope him. But as his eyes adjusted to the absolute pitch-blackness, he realized that it wasn't so absolute after all.
Stars.
Jesus Christ, the stars!
The sky was as it must have been a million years ago. Before smog. Before electric lights. Before jumbo jets. Long before man and his infernal 'civilization.' Mason was no stranger to the night sky, and he'd had occasion to gaze up at it from some of the remotest places on Earth. But it had never been like this.
Never.
No wonder those early humans had bestowed such wonder and magic upon the heavens. The sky was alive! A million stars were out, and with the moon yet to rise, each one of those million stars was as clear and as bright as a diamond. And there, a brighter star glowing red. Was that Mars? It had to be. And he could even make out little smudges of light lost among the stars. Nebulae, maybe? Distant galaxies? Christ, was it possible that he might actually be looking upon things as far away as other galaxies?
All of a sudden, the Earth felt very, very small. A tiny fleck of sand, adrift in a cosmic ocean. And with that, Mason's mind expanded to fill the cosmos.
Was there life out there? Was that star-speckled ocean perhaps teeming with life? Other worlds? Other beings? Other so-called civilizations? If so, would any of those civilizations ever know about this tiny fleck of sand? Would any of those beings on any one of those countless worlds out there ever look down upon the Earth and say, 'There was man here, once'?
And what of the Earth itself? Would a single trace of this once great civilization remain in a hundred years? A thousand? A million? When some other intelligence rose up to take man's place, would there be a single one among them who would know what had come before? And if so, would they care?
His eyes drifted back to the glowing red dot, and he pictured that world in his mind's eye.
Mars. There had been water there once. Warmth. Air. Life, probably. Now, it was dust. Rocks. Ice. But among all of that dust and all of those rocks and all of that ice, there was something else, wasn't there? Maybe not life, but certainly proof of life. Proof in the form of metals and wires and glass lenses that some intelligent creatures had dropped in on the red planet from time to time. In a million years, all of those things crafted by man will have dissolved into the Martian soil, but wasn't there still proof of this life elsewhere?
A crescent moon began to rise over the eastern horizon. The moon. Earth's companion in her voyage across the vast cosmic ocean. That beautiful, desolate world had given early man comfort and had lighted his way through the dark. Now, it would be mankind's legacy. In a million years, proof of man would still exist in her endless vacuum. The ridiculous flags of a divided people would have bleached away, but proof of their existence would remain.
It was a comforting thought, for what it was worth. But even as his body grew numb and his eyelids began to droop, he couldn't help but wonder if this failed experiment in natural selection deserved to be remembered at all. Perhaps it would be best, after all, if mankind and all traces of its so-called 'civilization' were expunged completely from history. They had their chance, they fucked it up, and they self-destructed. The entire species wasn't even worth a footnote.
Suddenly, he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He felt himself drifting away into the endless cosmos, but it took only a single word from Hansen to snap him fully awake again.
“Mace?”
“Huh?” He sat up with a start, one hand on his empty holster.
“Easy there, big man. We're okay. Stand down.”
Despite the reassurance, Mason ran his eyes across every inch of the roof, paying special attention to the closed hatch hidden in the darkness. As satisfied as he could be under the circumstances, he lay back down, though not without a grumble.
“I'm trying to sleep, Gary. Do you mind?”
Hansen ignored him. “I have to ask you something, tough guy. How come when I'm stuck in some impossible situation with no way out and death all around, I always have to suffer through it with your ugly fucking mug as company?”
Mason didn't give it too much thought.
“Fate? Karma? Hell, Gary, maybe the universe just loves fucking with you. If you want out so bad,” he threw his thumb over his shoulder toward the edge of the roof, “have at it.”
Hansen snorted what might generously be considered a laugh. Then, he fell silent again. But just when Mason thought he was done...
“I tell ya, tough guy. I've been on ships in the middle of the ocean on a calm, moonless night, and I've never seen a sky like this.”
Grudgingly, Mason replied, but just barely. “Yeah? No shit.”
Silence for nearly a minute, then Hansen broke it again. “You know, some people just rub each other the wrong way. No big deal, it happens. Hell, a whole lot of people rub me the wrong way. But sometimes, people just get off on the wrong foot. It was like that with my old partner, Frankie. Frank Chow. We hated each other from the get-go. You know how it is. Nothing in common, two completely different people. But Frankie turned out to be a hell of a cop and one of the best friend's I've ever had. We were partners for eight years. I was pallbearer at his funeral.”
Mason stowed the wisecracks and told him, sincerely, “I'm sorry. Was he killed on the job?”
“Cancer,” Hansen huffed the word as a curse. “Thirty years old, never smoked a cigarette in his life and ran three miles a day. Then one day, poof!”
“I'm sorry,” Mason said again, even more sincerely.
Another silence, long enough that Mason began to think the old man had finally fallen asleep. The moon was bright enough now
that he could make out a little more than just the old man's silhouette. Alejandra was out like a light beside him, her pretty face tucked into his chest and his arm around her shoulder. Hansen must have been just as exhausted as she, but no, he wasn't asleep yet.
“The guy worked out constantly. Never ate meat. Took care of himself like no man I’ve ever known. I used to kid him that he was going to be pretty damned embarrassed lying in a hospital bed one day, dying from nothing. And then, he did just that. He died. Cut down in the prime of his life. Left a wife and two kids. Damn, he was a good man!”
This time, Mason said nothing, knowing enough to let Hansen work through his pain. But soon enough, that pain began to double back around.
“You know, I hated you the second I laid eyes on you,” the man said, just that plainly.
“I know,” Mason replied, just as plainly.
“I hated you because I knew the kind of man you were. And when I saw how you treated Rebecca, I hated you even more.”
“I know,” Mason said through a heavy sigh. “So did I.”
Another silence. Prolonged this time. Alejandra uttered a somniferous little grumble, but Hansen stroked her hair as gently as he might a kitten, and the grumbling stopped.
“And you know what, Mace?” Hansen said, quieter now. “Now that I've come to know you, I still hate you.”
“I know,” Mason sighed again.
Despite the words, Hansen reached over and gave him a pat on the shoulder, though it felt more like a punch.
“Oh, you're not such a bad man, I guess. It took the whole world going to Hell in a hand-basket, but I can see that now. Believe me, I've met some of the worst human beings on the planet, and you wouldn't even rank in the top fifty.”
“Uhh... Thanks... I guess.”
“Bah! I tell you, tough guy, I've met some of the worst scum this society has ever churned out. Murderers. Rapists. Men who'd do things to kids... Fuck! Well, I tell you what. That shit changes a man. Seeing that shit day after day, it truly does change a man. When you spend your life looking at the worst this world has to offer, you eventually start seeing the worst in everyone.”
