Monster Nation(29)

'Hice por ayudar,'the old man said behind her. She got maybe three strides down the road before she realized he'd been trying to warn her. Charles and Shar were behind the car, huddled in its shadow.

A crowd of men had gathered in the middle of the street. Some of them had farm implements'pitchforks, shovels, she saw a long-handled trowel'and others just had steel-toed boots. They had gathered around a girl who was maybe fifteen years old, lying curled up in the street, and they were kicking her to death.

No. Not death. When Nilla got closer she closed her eyes and saw the golden fires of the men in a ring around a huddled shape of fuming darkness. The girl was already dead. The blows the men rained down on her weren't stopping her from reaching for their ankles, trying to grab them and tear them apart.

No wonder the people of the town were so sensitive to her energy. The sickness had already come upon them.





Monster Nation





Chapter Three


The Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response has asked that all physicians and medical technicians register with their nearest Emergency Services Provider. [FEMA ListServ Message, 3/30/05]

The hunger swelled inside Dick, turned inside him, threatened to consume him. It was bigger than he was and he lacked any kind of willpower or ego to fight against it. Sometimes it seemed to speak to him in a low, moaning language more primitive than words. It told him what to do. It told him where to go. Up. Up into the mountains, up the winding course of the highway toward the light. What he would find there he couldn't know, but he couldn't resist the pull, either.

He lost one of his boots along the way, snagged under a protruding tree root. He pulled and pulled until the laces creaked, until the leather stretched and tore, until his foot came painfully free. He moved on, bouncing up and down with each step, up on the boot, down when his naked white foot hit the gravel, or the concrete, or the loose rocky soil. He didn't let this hobbling gait slow him down.

The hunger wouldn't let him.

At ten thousand feet above sea level he saw something white and low ahead'a car that had stalled out in the rarefied air. He moved in with a little caution, unsure if he was wasting his time. He wasn't. There was someone inside, a woman, a middle-aged woman in pearls and pantsuit. Her hair was like gossamer, like the silken strands of a spider's web. In Dick's altered vision her hair glowed like a fine tracery of gold. He wanted her. The hunger had to have her.

She screamed but he could barely hear her through the safety glass. She tried to get the car moving but failed. He came closer and lunged for her. His face smashed against the glass of her window. Pain sang a single high note in his nose and his cheek but the hunger roared louder. He struck again. She bounced across the front seats of the car and pushed her way out of the passenger door, out into the air.

The smell of her hit Dick like a storm of longing. His jaw stretched wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. She tried to run but she'd already made her fatal mistake. She would have been faster than Dick if she'd been wearing tennis shoes instead of high heels. She could have outrun him at sea level where she could catch her breath. That high up in the mountains she could barely run a dozen yards before she got winded. The air was too thin to properly fill her lungs.

Dick didn't need to breathe at all. He was dead. She would run a ways and have to stop to puff and gasp and wheeze. He just kept coming. It took most of an hour but in the end he closed the gap between them. He got his teeth in her flailing arm and just refused to let go. He couldn't feel any mercy or compassion anymore. To Dick she was just meat, a meal, something to snack on. He couldn't understand her pleas for release.

The hunger filled him up. It didn't leave room for pity.

When he was done with her and her blood had dried on his chin and his vest, when the hunger was sated for a while (just a while, it would come back soon enough) he lay sprawled across her cooling body, his esophagus heaving with peristalsis, and he watched the gold filigree of her hair tarnish and turn dark. When she woke up she joined him, what was left of her. Together they headed up the highway. The hunger pulled her along too, and when they crested the mountain together they saw where it was leading them.

Public transportation is running on a reduced/holiday schedule. It is expected that normal schedules will be resumed shortly. [RTDDenver , CO service announcement, 3/31/05]

The biowarfare people fromFortDetrick called it 'the Bag'. The biosecure research facility the 1157th Engineers Company had built on the site of Florence-ADX comprised a series of interlocked conex shipping containers lined inside with several thicknesses of transparent mylar. These envelopes were kept at varying levels of negative air pressure so that if one was punctured pathogens would be blow inward, not out. The Bag qualified as a Class II Biological Safety Cabinet.