Monster Nation(68)

'Shh! I hear him moving around in there, get your foodhole shut, alright?'

Clark cleared his throat discretely and opened the door of the warden's office. In the corridor beyond the two MPs stood at attention against a steel wall painted in flaking tan. Their salutes were perfect.

'At ease,' Clark ordered, and they relaxed fractionally. 'You two head down to the DCAF, if you're hungry. I'm safe for now, thank you.' He turned the opposite way, toward the prison's nerve center.

On the way he passed a window and was startled to see it was dark outside. Had he slept that long? Normally he woke like clockwork. In the prison yard soldiers with red lens flashlights were sweeping the open area between the fences. So far none of the infected'the dead'the victims of the Epidemic had wandered into the prison's valley but it would happen. They might be out there even now, stumbling toward the warmth and the food trapped inside. He couldn't see them in the dark, of course, so he hurried into the operations room.

Racks of server hardware had been crammed into the small office and the floor was a hazard of unsecured cables. All the equipment made it ten degrees warmer in the room, when added to the body heat of the half-dozen specialists plugging and unplugging the modular components.

At the far end Vikram stood before a massive flatscreen monitor. He was reading from a printout of an Excel worksheet while a specialist inputted coordinates on a wireless laptop. 'Woods Landing, Wyoming. That will be, now, let me look, call it forty degrees thirty seconds north, one hundred and six degrees mark west, we do not need to be so exact, yes? Given our resolution? The date for this location will be March the Seventeenth. Oh! The day of Saint Patrick.'

Clark's thin lips twitched in something reminiscent of a smile. His friend had a way of staying cheerful despite circumstances that had seen them both through many a losing battle.

'Still working tirelessly, I see, while the old man gets his beauty sleep,' Clark said. The specialist on the laptop turned away and looked busy, knowing he wasn't supposed to be part of this conversation.

'It is the epidemiology data, Bannerman.' Vikram handed him the worksheet and Clark scanned it.

'Sanchez mentioned it to me before she was killed,' he assented. 'It was what she wanted to talk to me about when she called me down to the Bag.'

'It was her crowning achievement.' Vikram tapped the flatscreen monitor to show Clark a map of the United States. Tiny dots covered most of the west in several different colors. Clark imagined he knew what they represented'every known appearance of the Epidemic. 'She had learned, as did we all, that this is no virus, and no bacterium. So she went on the hunt for some other villain. And this is what she found.'

There were too many dots. Bannerman stopped scanning the screen and looked down at the paper in his hand. Each incident was listed with a place name and a date, with even a time of day listed for many entries. He flipped to the bottom of the sheet, to the oldest data. 'This can't be right. These dates' they go all the way back into last year, some of them. I arrived here in the middle of March, what was it, the eighteenth? The nineteenth. The Epidemic was three days old then.'

'Lieutenant Sanchez thought not so much. She believed it started earlier but that we missed the signs. Her notes are maddeningly vague and of course we cannot ask her what she was thinking.'

'What about her crew?' Clark asked. 'Were any of them epidemiologists?'

Vikram nodded. 'Three of them, good doctors all, but military doctors. She gave them orders and they followed without any questions. She let them know nothing of what she was doing'and that is standard operating procedure only. That is not the mystery. She had them look up newspaper articles, mostly. You remember the outbreak of violence last year that had the media so excited?'

'Yes, of course. I mostly attributed it to anger over the election. That's what the the newspapers told me, anyway.'

Vikram nodded. 'I have seen the clippings. I have read myself a story about a dog that ate its owner before it was put down. About a mother who tore her babies to pieces. Missing children. Serial killers. Bad batches of the drugs like PCP. Lieutenant Sanchez looked at these and many more and saw evidence of a larger trend." Vikram touched the systems specialist on the upper arm'the approved zone. 'Please show him now.'

The screen filled in with what could have been a spiderweb or the root pattern of an ugly tree. Clark felt his breath leaking out of him. This changed everything. He reached for his cell phone. The Civilian had to know about this. Everyone had to know about this.