Monster Nation(22)

Dick yelled and tried to get up but another sheep, this one missing part of her hindquarters, sprawled across his chest. She weighed two hundred pounds, easily, much more than he could lift'he was trapped. A ram with broken horns got his mouth around Dick's shoulder and clamped down hard. He felt the bones there flex with the pressure. Soon enough they would snap. More sheep arrived. Maybe a dozen. A full flock, all of them showing signs of scrapie.

Bleu had slaughtered all of her sheep'she'd done it herself. She had' she had cut their throats. Bled them. She wouldn't have decapitated them or destroyed their brains. Too messy.

Now they were back. Bloody wool obscured Dick's view but as the ram crushed the skin and muscle of his left arm he saw Bleu herself standing before him. Massive chunks of meat were missing from her neck and throat so that her head seemed to float above her body like a baloon on a string of vertebrae. She didn't say anything as she bent over him, pushing her way in amongst the sheep, and picked up his right arm in both of her hands.





Monster Nation





Chapter Fourteen


DOESAMERICA HAVE ENOUGH GUNS? Assault Weapons Bans and the Congressmen Who Hate Them ['The Economist' magazine, 1/05]

Stuttering flashes of light lit up the hospital's windows as the SWAT teams moved through room after room looking for hostages and shooting anyone who looked suspicious. Bannerman watched from the back of a squad car, trying not to look every time he heard sub machine gun fire.

It was hard. 'They're in there shooting people, Vikram. Sick people. This isn't law enforcement. It's eugenics. And I can't do a thing about it'I'm way out of my jurisdiction here and the local OIC isn't taking my calls. FEMA doesn't want to hear it until I've got a verified one hundred fatalities and the Governor's office is doing its own investigation. They promise they'll get back to me. So in the meantime I sit here and listen to people getting slaughtered. The alternative is to run in there and try to stop them with my bare hands, in which case they would decide I was a threat, too, and take me down.' The sheriff's deputy had been quite clear on that last point. 'I have never felt so helpless in my life.'

Vikram Singh Nanda held up one hand. The other clutched his ruggedized cell phone to an ear hidden beneath his turban. 'Okay, okay, okay,' he said. 'Okay.' He finished his call. 'I am sorry, Bannerman. What were you saying just then?'

Clarklooked up at the hospital and saw tear gas streaming from a line of open windows. 'Forget it.' This was what happened when you put law enforcement teams in charge of what should be a military situation. It didn't matter how much training or discipline they had'they just weren't ready to psychologically handle a true combat experience. Just ask the Branch Dravidians atWaco . Even federal units were ill-equipped for a real fight.

'So I have news,' Vikram told him, trying to move on. 'News you will not like.'

'We've found our warden?'Clark asked. This could be crucial. He had set his friend with the task of tracking down the elusive man but he hadn't expected results nearly so quickly.

'He left an immaculate paper trail. And why not? He had nothing to hide. He was a man going away on vacation. He took a flight fromDenverInternationalAirport that arrived at LAX at three twenty-two on a Thursday. He rented a car, a Jeep Cherokee, from the Hertz counter and was later recorded purchasing gas at a service station inPetaluma . Two hours later he was seen biting a young woman on the neck and was subsequently gunned down by an officer of the law. His body was brought here, to this hospital.'

'Jesus f*cked a duck,' Bannerman said. The first time he'd sworn in a month, probably, but well-deserved. You couldn't ask for a cleaner timeline, for one thing'Vikram had always been thorough'but their luck in getting such a clear picture of the warden's movements was far and away eclipsed by the story's sheer horror.

The warden had been infected inFlorence . Of thatClark had no doubt. He had flown through two major international airports, spreading his contagion to everyone in both terminals'and by extension the passengers and crews of every flight that left the airports. The germ could be on its way to hundreds of destinations by now. No,Clark reconsidered, the warden had a head start on them. The germ would already be at hundreds of destinations. Not every passenger on every plane would be infected, of course'no pathogen was that insidious'but if just one person on every flight had it' well, it had only taken one infected individual to turn the hospital into a war zone. Bannerman Clark had been operating under a protocol of containment'intending to quarantine every known location where the new disease manifested itself. That was impossible now. What had happened here, at the hospital, would already be beginning in cities around the planet. Starting withDenver .And Los Angeles.