Monster Nation(86)

'I appreciate the fact that there are no enlisted men here, Vikram,' Clark said, a little testier than he meant it to sound, 'but please stop making me look like such a fool.'

'You have my deepest apologies.'

Together they paged through the windows. At first each picture was a new and exciting toy, a present to be unwrapped but the story they told grew rapidly depressing and more depressing. The images looked to Clark after a while like microscope slides, layers of horror meticulously dissected and mounted on slips of glass. A sprawling, out of control forest fire on the Western Slope had the appearance of a vicious ameba attacking a stomach lining. Oil tanks exploding in colossal fireballs in Colorado Springs looked like alveoli bursting inside a collapsed lung.

As horrific as the metaphors might be they hid a worse truth. Colorado, the state Bannerman Clark called home and which he had sworn to protect, was breathing its last gasps. He'd seen plenty of chaos in his march south to Florence but chaos was what you expected on the battlefield. Soldiers rarely saw what came after, the all-crushing descent of entropy and decay. There were few people in the satellite images. Those few who did show up were already dead and still moving only out of sheer perversity.

'Time for a break,' he said, after about an hour. They had finished with the high-temperature images and had moved on to those targets that displayed movement above a certain threshold. He had looked at far too many pictures of packs of ghouls milling aimlessly through the village centers of tiny mountain towns, seen more than his share of cars racing away from undead communities. 'I need to hit the head.'

Vikram nodded, not bothering to look away from the screen. He collapsed a window and the next one underneath showed the linear, no-nonsense buildings of a military base. The Buckley ANG base, to be specific. The dead had swarmed through its main gates and were clustered on the parade ground, swarming over each other, clambering on top of each others' limbs and torsos and faces like a scrum in a rugby match. Clark wondered what must be at the bottom of that heap to make the ghouls so desperate and so active. Food, of course, that was their prime motivation. Whether said food was or had been human or not he decided he didn't want to know.

He headed down the corridor and pushed open the door of the men's room. Trash littered the floor, transparent cellophane and pieces of yellow cardboard. He could hear the Civilian inside one of the stalls talking on his cell phone.

'Yeah, well you will do nothing of the'um, umgh'nothing of the f*cking sort until I give you the word. No, nobody gets shot. I don't care what she did to you, it doesn't justify' look, even I answer to somebody. You have to do what you're told, yeah, but this time you get something in return. You can write your own ticket, is what'anything that's in my power. I dog you today, and it is worth so much to you. Umhumuh, ugh, gah. It's the beauty of capitalism, everybody gets a turn pissing down somebody else's neck. Fine, then, f*ck you very much too. I'll see you there in thirty-six hours.'

Clark relieved himself and washed his hands carefully in the sink. He saw the stall door open in the mirror and the Civilian emerged with yellow foam dripping from one corner of his mouth. He had a half-finished box of marshmallow peeps in one hand and his cell phone in the other.

'Looking good, Clark, looking good. I might have something for you in a while. Keep yourself ready,' the Civilian said. His eyes looked like they'd been frosted and there was sweat on his forehead and on the tip of his nose. He left the bathroom without further comment.

Back in the control room Vikram had narrowed his search down to three images he wanted Clark to see. The first showed the prison itself, which was thronged with motion'human, living human motion out in the shantytown beyond the walls. There were a few spots of extreme temperature Clark couldn't identify. They weren't located near any of the exhausts from the HVAC systems, nor were they anywhere near the generators. 'We'll need to check those,' Clark agreed. 'It would be ironic, I suppose, to find out the terrorists were actually working out of our own basement. It would also be easy to mop up so I doubt that's the case, given our luck.'

Vikram switched to a second image. A complex of buildings near Clear Creek Summit. An abandoned but functional ski resort, judging by the constantly moving chair lift. 'This looks like a hardened facility,' he told Clark. Look, here, these doors on the main building. They've been reinforced with welded steel. Over here, this looks to me to be a machine gun nest, what do you think?'

'I think you're right. They have power so we can assume there are people inside. Of course right now there's no reason to think they're bad guys. Anybody sane would reinforce their doors right now and a machine gun for perimeter security is one of the better home improvements I can think of. This definitely belongs on our short list, though. What's this?' he asked, pointing at a minimized window near the bottom of the screen. The third candidate for the site of the Epicenter.