Monster Nation(105)

It was the girl. She stood up and stepped onto the starlit helipad. A bullet hole in her neck oozed crusty powdered blood, dried up so long ago it wasn't even shiny. She prodded the wound with one undead finger.

It was so easy to forget that she wasn't one of the living. That she wasn't exactly what she appeared to be, a helpless, innocent survivor of this horror. Clark had to remind himself from time to time that she was part of the Epidemic, not a victim of it.

'What did you do with Sergeant Horrocks?' Clark demanded.

The girl frowned. 'Older guy, white hair, three stripes on his arm? He didn't make it. None of them did. I watched them go under, Captain. I would have tried to help but, well, your men were trying to shoot me at the time. If they could have focused on their enemy, well''

'That's exactly what they were doing.' Clark stood up straighter than before and stared at her with his best command face. 'So. Are you going to eat us now, or did you have something else in mind?'

The girl's face soured and she threw him a mock salute. 'I thought we would get in that helicopter and fly out to that mountain you were so excited about. You know, what we were supposed to do in the first place.'

'You don't honestly expect me to take you with us,' Clark sputtered.

'I think you need all the help you can get. Listen, Captain'I don't know anything about military tactics or politics or epidemiology or anything. I lost whatever expertise I may have had when I died. But I do know my destiny is up there. I'll walk if I have to, but I'd prefer to catch a lift with you two.'

Clark felt a sinus headache coming on. He had no answers. He had no information. His chain of command was broken and his direct superior had turned against humanity. According to every order of warfare that he knew that meant it was time to fall back and call for evac. Yet fate had put him in the position of being the one who had to decide the entire future of the human race.

'Oh, hell,' he said, sounding prissy even to himself. 'Mount up already. We've got no time to lose.'

It was all too true. Their destination, Bolton's Valley, was nearly a hundred miles away even as the crow flew. The pilots assured him they could reach the Epicenter with the fuel onboard but it would be a close thing. Once they had completed their mission they would have to find alternate transport out of the area of operations.

Assuming they survived. Clark kind of doubted they would. As long as they got close enough to the switch, as long as they managed to turn this thing off, that would be enough.

He imagined it'the Epicenter'as some kind of science fiction death ray contraption. A big telescoping raygun with fins and flanges and control panels sticking out of a hatch carved into the mountain. He imagined it had two buttons that controlled it, conveniently labeledON andOFF. He imagined pushing the latter and then going back to Denver, to the Brown Palace, and finally having that juicy, rare steak that fate had stolen away from him. He imagined taking a room upstairs, a room with tasteful wallpaper and gauzy curtains on the windows and a big, soft bed with a white coverlet. He imagined going to sleep for a very long time and then waking up to find that humanity had rebuilt after the dead stopped rising, that while he slept everything had been cleared away, tidied up, made whole again. He imagined that the population of the United States would have replenished itself and that there was no one left who even remembered the Epidemic, that there were no wounds anymore, no physical scars, no emotional traumas. No nightmares.

Except, he knew, that he would still remember. He would remember the face, and the name, of everyone who had died. He would remember them for the rest of his life.

Perhaps it was better if he didn't come back.

'It is still a lovely world, is it not?' Vikram asked, jolting Clark out of his reverie. He hadn't even noticed the helicopter lifting away from the prison. He hadn't realized that they'd already swung way out across the mountains, that they were running fast, about a hundred feet up, following a ridgeline that probably marked the Continental Divide. Maybe an hour had passed and he'd been lost in his own thoughts. So close to the end and he'd wasted all that time.

He looked down, though, and saw trees clothing the rugged sides of the mountains, aspens and firs and loblolly pines. He saw water snaking between the peaks, the stars wavering in the depths of creeks and rivers. Oh, Vikram was so very, very right.

Then he looked over at the girl. She sat very still in her crewseat, buckled in and motionless. Her chest didn't move with breath, her eyes didn't blink. You could tell she was dead, if you paid attention. If you actually looked. She had the waxy skin of a corpse. She had the eyes that didn't really focus anymore, not on anything in particular.