Monster Nation(26)

Back toColorado . Four days had passed and so little had been accomplished. They had tightened the cordon where they could but the pathogen was already out.

A staff car took Bannerman Clark and Vikram Singh Nanda out toCommerce City , where the new detention facility had sprung up like a ring of fungus after the first rain of spring.Commerce City : not so much a town as a zone, a sprawling ex-prairie north ofDenver full of chemical tanks and dusty weeds and long-haul truck agents and rusting railroad tracks. Ancient farmhouses that had been spruced up with particle board and unpainted dry wall and turned into light manufactories. The prettiest thing inCommerce City was a petroleum cracking plant, a stack of steel intestines that was lit up at night like a carnival.

'The CDC has quarantined blocks ofAtlanta ,New York andDetroit ,'Clark said, scanning his email on a Blackberry as the car bounced. 'They're all overChicago . We have no intel aboutChicago , do we? We need to cut the CDC out of this, take over.' The Centers for Disease Control was a civilian group. Civilians lacked the discipline and devotion to protocol that marked military operations, and all they could offer in exchange for their chaos was intuition'guesswork. This was a time for action, not committees. Vikram nodded and made a note on his own handheld.

The car slid to a stop in a spray of gravel that made a noise like hailstones striking the gleaming car. The Captain and the Major got out and walked the rest of the way. 'Oregonis refusing to publish data andWashington is denying any cases at all. ButCanada has called in three definite outbreaks. Maybe we can shuffle some people around. We need to think of this as global, now. We need foreign support teams trained and ready to go.'

The prison, with its ten thousand doors and its state-of-the-art prisoner control system was a terrible place to store the infected. The Supermax atFlorence had been overcrowded before the Epidemic began. It forced the ill and the healthy together, made them all breathe the same air. The detention facility had been set up to take the infected and keep them away from the general population. It comprised a double layered chainlink fence and an open-pit latrine that so far sat clean and unused. The Guard brought in new cases of the mysterious disease every day.Clark had teams working round the clock, looking for ways to improve conditions for the detainees but the main thing was to warehouse them.

'We need to bring in regular Army squads to police upLos Angeles , there needs to be door-to-door catching. We need a declaration of emergency for at least four states.'

Clarkstopped talking and put his blackberry in his pocket. He had reached the fence and he could feel their eyes on him. They looked pale and poorly fed. Most of them had visible wounds. They did not have the depressed and surrendering look of refugees, though. They looked more like junkies staring at their next fix.

None of them made a sound. They stared at him hungrily through the wire, their fingers twined through the links, their faces pressed close up against the fence as if they could push themselves through.

One of them slapped the chainlink with the flat of a broken hand and it rattled, watery, plinking echoes rolling up and down the length. The center was built for seventeen hundred and fifty detainees. It was already full and they were building more.

'We need''Clark stopped, unable to think for a moment. He pinched the bridge of his nose. 'We need that girl, Vikram. The blonde. She could talk.'

The Sikh Major looked up from his handheld'he'd been avoiding the gazes leveled at him through the fence. He pursed his lips as if he was about to speak.

'We need her. She's the answer.' He had it. Soldiers, Bannerman Clark ruminated, sometimes possessed intuition too.

As of twenty-three hundred hours tonight in the UTC-8 time zone, parts of three highways inCalifornia will be closed to civil traffic. The Governor has called for all citizens to cooperate with this necessary step in maintaining the public health. The affected highways are theState Route 1 (Pacific Coast Highway),State Highway 27, andState Highway 74. [CalTrans press release, 3/28/05]

The dead can't drive. At least Nilla couldn't. She had tried stealing a car to get east only to abandon it before leaving the parking lot. Her hands when she tried to grip the steering wheel felt like they were covered by thick mittens. The wheel slid away from her and she tried to stamp on the brake, only to find that her leg was beyond such precise movements. If she had gotten up to any speed she would probably have broken her neck.

So she resorted to hitch-hiking, because she didn't have any better ideas.

Nilla stood by the side of Route 46 and screened her eyes with one hand as she watched a plume of dust approaching her from the west. It would be her first ride all day if she actually made this one. She was ready to bolt at the first sign of green and nearly did'but it wasn't Army green, this was the bottle green of a civilian car. A littleToyota , it looked like. She was pretty sure the police only drove American-made cars.