Authors: Brian Hodge
2
It had taken a while, but finally Jason conceded that Kelly, on his deathbed, had been right. He’d known exactly what he was talking about.
John Kelly, his last bastion of security, had been dead just over three weeks. Since then, Jason had opened his eyes to what was going on. Tried to make himself see as Kelly had always been able to.
He rose early in the mornings and, while he no longer worried about going to work himself, cruised along in his car to monitor those who still did. He drove between seven forty-five and nine. Mt. Vernon was a small town just like ten thousand others, easy to maneuver around in if you knew the ins and outs, but that’s not to say it was free from traffic congestion in the mornings and evenings. Even so, over the past three weeks he was finding it easier and easier to zip around unhindered.
Jason walked up and down the mall, walked the streets around the town square, peering into storefronts as if they were museum exhibits. One by one they were closing up. Signs on the doors that had read
open
the day before now read
closed
. And didn’t change.
He haunted the aisles of the grocery stores, aware of the gradual depletion of cans and boxes. Restocking of the shelves seemed sporadic at best, as if shipping schedules had been thrown out of whack. And in one store, he overheard a manager complaining over the phone that revenue was down forty-four percent and still dropping.
Jason watched every televised network news broadcast that he could. Something seemed odd from the outset, though it took him nearly a week to peg it: they weren’t doing many remote broadcasts. No man-on-the-street shots. Almost as if, by avoiding it, they kept you from seeing something that was there. Or
wasn’t
there.
People are sick, people are dying,
he told himself.
Those are givens. But how widespread
is
this?
The news wasn’t much help. He listened and watched, and perused the weeklies, and finally they did break down and acknowledge the existence of a disease some medical jokester had termed “the bionic plague.” Isolated outbreaks, they said. Not to worry, they said. An experimental vaccine was being perfected and widespread distribution was imminent, they said.
“Right,” Jason told the anchor team one evening. “Now where’s that bridge you want me to buy?”
And then there were the trucks. Army trucks. Huge and green, with double sets of wheels in the backs, their cargo areas covered with heavy canvas tarps that looked as big as circus tents. They roared through town every day, it seemed, although he never saw them stopping, never saw troops emerge from the rear. Maybe they were just waiting for something. And then?
Martial law seemed about right.
* *
He felt it before he actually heard it, a deep rumbling from outside. He awoke with the sheets twisted about him, and in a mental haze thought it was awfully dark out for the garbage men to be making their rounds.
The slam of the building’s door woke him fully. He lay stock-still in the darkness as his heart thundered into double time; felt its reluctance to ease back to normal.
Just the building door,
he told himself,
nothing to get worked up over.
People could come and go at all hours.
Only there didn’t seem to be nearly as many coming and going even during normal hours lately, and…
And when they did, they didn’t make
this
much noise.
Sounds like an army down there.
Sweat crept from his armpits, and his hand twisted into a fist within the sheets. He held his breath, fearing even to exhale. He heard them speaking softly, urgently, male voices, though something was wrong with them. They sounded far away, hollow.
He heard several pairs of feet ascending the stairs, and now he could make out words.
“…got readings from one, next to last on this end.”
Jason slipped from bed onto the floor and crabbed his way through the hallway and into the kitchen. His eyes were growing accustomed to the moonlight, and they fell upon the cutlery rack hanging on the wall across from him. He crept over on cat feet to ease the biggest knife out by the handle.
The squeaking of floorboards, right outside his door…
“This is the one,” said a hollow, distant voice.
Jason gripped the knife and tensed, and waited.
And nothing.
He counted off one minute, two, and his door hadn’t so much as rattled. Instead, he thought he heard others within the building opening and closing, sometimes heavy thumping sounding between.
Jason eased over to his door, put his eye up to the peephole and caught a fisheye-lens view of the door across the hall. For a moment he glimpsed someone walking past, whose proportions swelled and shrank with the lens’s distortions, but Jason could see that he was dressed entirely in white, even his head.
Jason held on to the knife, a stainless steel security blanket. He waited, closing his eyes and sitting against the wall, feeling the nap of the carpet beneath his bare leg. Feeling every minute vibration of the building.
The closing of two doors came in rapid succession, then the building door. Finally, the firing up of a large truck engine…and another.
Jason sprang to his feet, threw open his door, and paused a split second. The hallway was deserted. He ran for the stairs in a half-crouch, outside into late-night air that clung warm and clammy to his skin. He ran barefoot and nearly naked past darkened windows, fallen evergreen needles prickling underfoot. He stopped at the corner of the building, peered around and down the street out front. He’d made it just in time to see the back end of the second truck swing around onto a cross street and head east.
Several moments later the engine died again.
“So what next, Sherlock?” he asked himself. He looked down at himself, naked except for his shorts, and sighed.
What the hell.
Jason sprinted across the street and cut into the shadows between two houses, both large two-story jobs. The moon shone brightly down, but there were enough shadows for cover. He threaded between the houses, from tree to tree in the back yards, moved across the alley into the next set of back yards to come out between two new houses. He hit the ground and slicked himself with chilly dew, felt stray blades of grass worm into his shorts. He stopped beside a honeysuckle bush, breathing in the sweet fragrance that brought back sudden memories of earlier summers, simpler days.
The trucks were parked half a block away, and milling about them were clones of the man he’d seen outside his door. Clad in white from top to bottom, they moved methodically from house to house, skipping one on rare occasion. As often as not, they came out of the houses bearing limp bundles that they tossed into the darkened backs of the trucks.
Suddenly he knew.
These guys were a cleanup crew, emptying houses of…their dead.
He watched with renewed attention. The white germ suits, their purpose was easy enough to ascertain. But how did they know which houses to enter? And how did they come to skip his own apartment? He remembered one of them saying something about “readings.”
Down the street, one of them moved into view with some type of camera-like thing mounted on a tripod. Slowly he scanned nearby houses.
That’s it,
Jason thought.
I’ll bet they’re using infrared.
It would seek out body heat, letting the viewer know if a warm living body lay behind those walls.
One question remained, though. What was being done with the bodies that weren’t so warm anymore?
* *
Three A.M.
Jason held the car steady, and if there had ever been a time he’d wished for cat’s eyes, this was it. He was driving without lights, half from memory of the road and half by faith. He judged that the army trucks were about a half-mile ahead.
A couple hours earlier, he’d returned to his apartment. He dried off, picked the grass from his pubic hair, and slipped into dry shorts and dark, lightweight clothing. By the time he’d gotten out in his Mustang, the trucks he’d been watching had moved on, but then, he figured it would be too risky to follow them around anyway. He drove to the hospital and staked it out. If there was anyplace the trucks could be counted on to make regular pickups, the hospital was it.
Patience proved him correct. After that, it was simply a matter of hanging back far enough and tailing the trucks out of town as they headed west on Route 15.
They must’ve been nearing fifteen miles out when he saw the trucks turn south. Jason slowed, fixing the spot with his eyes, not daring to blink until he passed by and mentally marked the spot. This southern road led straight back into moon-tinted trees and cultivated fields. He drove a mile past, then doubled back, lights now burning, and headed south himself.
About a quarter-mile along, the road had been barricaded with a stout-looking gate built from iron pipes and four-by-fours. Trees to the left, fields to the right, along with a jeep. Jason’s headlights caught its red reflectors. And, of course, a trio of men in white.
He braked, the engine idling as he sat thirty yards from the gate. He dared go no farther. These guys carried M16s, and had them up and at the ready, threatening in a leisurely sort of way.
One of them swung up a bullhorn. “This road is closed,” he announced, that characteristically hollow voice made even worse by the squalling of the bullhorn. “Turn your car around
now.
”
Ahead, on the horizon…Jason thought he saw it, couldn’t be sure.
If I could turn my lights off a second, get used to the dark.
He punched in the light stem. The whitesuits ahead diminished to ghosts, floating above the road.
Jason sucked in a deep breath. “Come on, don’t wuss out now,” he muttered to himself. Leaving the engine running, he opened the car door and stepped out. He could imagine the three M16s aiming together, as if in formation.
I’m gonna die…
“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time,” the fellow with the bullhorn said. “Turn back
now.”
“I just need to get to my grandmother’s,” he said loudly. “She lives over in the next county, and I just got a call from her. I always use this road as a shortcut.”
Over the river and through the woods, right, Jason.
“Find another route,” came the reply. “You will
not
be warned again.”
He lingered a second, two, three, until the face of the moon was obscured by a cloud passing over like a ghostly galleon. The darkness was nearly eclipse-perfect. And he had his answer.
Jason eased back into his car, popped the lights back on, slowly turned around and headed back to Route 15. And then headed for home.
He could’ve hidden the car somewhere nearby, crept through the fields like a night fighter behind enemy lines. But there was no need. Now he knew. Jason was all but certain there existed a new landfill project down that southern road. It was around here somewhere…now appropriated for other purposes. The red glow on the horizon had given it away.
A great burning was now taking place down that road, amid farms and woodland, ashes to ashes. Like the biggest charcoal pit in the world had been fired up.
He wiped his eyes and had to wonder if he’d just been driven back from Kelly’s final resting place.
* *
Jason slept fitfully once in his own bed again, waking late in the morning. He felt as if he might’ve fared better to have stayed up the rest of the night.
Yawning and pouring a cup of strong coffee down his throat, he put in a call to a fellow he’d known since high school. Larry Cameron had been no close friend, and they’d seen almost nothing of each other since they’d gone in opposite directions for college, Jason heading north to the U of I while Larry went to Southern Illinois University down in Carbondale. But their paths had crossed amiably enough over the years, and they’d been drunk together a time or two. And for now, well, any port in a storm.
Answer the phone, damn it,
Jason thought while listening to it burr merrily away sixty miles southwest of him.
At last he answered, Larry in the flesh, alive and kicking and speaking in the monotone Jason remembered from years back. Jason introduced himself.
“Hey, what gives?” Larry said.
“I was wondering if you might do a favor for me…”
* *
Although Larry was heading into his senior year (that is, if school started on time…campus life looked pretty sparse these days, unless you spent your time hanging out at the infirmary), his apartment was still decorated in Early College. He still adorned his walls with posters of every newly arrived Hollywood starlet who posed with more cleavage in view than out of sight; a small TV reposed atop an empty beer keg in one corner; his bookshelves were constructed of unfinished planks and concrete blocks.
None of which mattered to Jason, because the one thing he cared about now was Larry Cameron’s knowledge of and skill with computers. Such had been Larry’s passion ever since he’d met the guy. He’d loved computers, and science fiction, and had sucked at anything remotely athletic…yet Larry had still managed to avoid getting tagged a nerd. Maybe because he wore contacts instead of glasses, and overlong Levi’s. And had a hot-looking girlfriend.
“You want me to do
what
?”
Larry asked, peeling the wrapper away from a Hostess Ding-Dong. He’d offered one to Jason, who had refused.
“Put out some kind of computerized question to all the fellow geeks you can reach. See what they say about this bionic plague stuff.”
“Just like that, huh?” He chewed slowly, a crumb of chocolate clinging in stubble that looked two or three days old.
“Is it possible?”
Larry shrugged. “With computers, anything’s possible. You just gotta know which buttons to push.” He sighed. “Okay, okay, lemme think a minute.”
“Got any beer?” Jason asked.
Larry hitched his thumb toward the kitchen, about the size of a phone booth. Jason pulled a Rhinelander from the fridge and returned to a couch that looked as though someone had taken a knife to it. Rhinelander, fresh as Wisconsin’s north woods. Yeah, just like Pine-Sol. He drank it anyway.