Desert Angels (6 page)

Fuck the impossible physics of the universe right now.

He’d get to the bottom of this sooner or later.

THREE – RECONNAISSANCE, THE NEIGHBORS AND LIGHT CLOUDS

He had the good sense to wait until morning before implementing his new mission objective of killing Stiffers (as he’d decided to call the mutants), and assure himself of top-notch focus and physical acuity. He did not drink the night before though highly tempted. Rather, he downed a few melatonin and dreamed of monster butchery.

He suspected that he would have to go beyond the immediate vicinity of the Dome and so packed a radiation suit, should rad or roentgen levels begin to change for the worst.

His plan was simple: Find at least one of the undead monsters and capture it alive. If he could examine one of these things while still animated, more answers might be gleaned as to how the radioactive fuckers lived and moved (an anachronism already since all his tests on the Stiffer corpse in his lab showed no respiration nor cardiac sinus rhythm, hence dead, yet walking).

He had a bit of a real human altercation with Walter in his quarters on the eve of his morning departure, which surprised and worried him; after the dispute, he wondered if he was slowly going insane.

“No, I do not want you to come with me,” he pointed at Walter, who was cooing madly on his desk.

He noticed there was no note from the Guardian Angel this morning, but his mind was focused on other things aside from that inexplicable piece of crazy magic. He wanted zombies, alive and under his dissection knife. The Guardian Angel was inexplicable, yet ubiquitous at this stage of the game. It came and went of its own volition and its means of entry and exit remained a mystery. For the moment, Jack could accept that. Moreover, the Guardian Angel had thus far given sound counsel and put forth accurate facts. So its presence in the back of Jack’s already challenged rationale was not altogether unwelcome.

He turned to leave the room, and Walter immediately flew over to his shoulder and pecked at his ear.

Jack was in no mood. “Get off,” he hissed.

Walter remained perched where she was.

“I’m not kidding,” Jack said. “This is going to be dangerous. And if we hit high levels of radiation out there, I have no way to protect your feathery ass.
Capiche
?”

He tried to gently flick the bird’s chest with his index finger, but the pigeon remained intractable.

“Fine, suit yourself, dummy,” Jack said.

He headed toward one of the labs, and pulled out a radiation suit, and packed it and himself into his most prized vehicle, an M1151 fully equipped and armed High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle or Humvee for short, already loaded with enough ammunition and gunnery implements to level a small town. But he figured he was not being extreme in terms of arming up; God knows what else was out there aside from the Stiffers.

He exited Eden’s front gate, checking radiation levels immediately, and finding that little had changed; surprisingly, the rad readings appeared to be diminishing. According to all rules of meteorological law and physics, fallout from winds heading west to east, should bump up the contamination factor across the landscape. Such was not the case.

Fine, he thought. For the moment, again, one less thing to worry about. But Jack knew that levels of fallout could jump within minutes, so he left his radiation detection device on automatic throughout his trek.

He did notice something that was downright weird, however, and with good reason. Only minutes out of Eden’s perimeter, Jack noticed what appeared to be a collection of sparkling lights coalescing at near ground level, and hovering about twenty yards from his Humvee at any given time.

Jack first assumed it was a weird optical illusion, or some kind of eerie ionization effect in the making – a combination of recombinant radiation mixed with high and low pressure elements from the charged atmosphere – but as his Humvee moved, the lights seemed to be
following
him.

There was no explanation for it.

At one point, he stopped his vehicle and stepped outside and tried to approach the light particles. Attendant with their presence was a low hum and it made Jack shiver. He found as he drew closer to the lights, they slowly began to diminish, until when he was within a few feet of them, they evaporated into a swirling ground mist.

He looked to Walter on his shoulder. “Weird, right?”

Walter clucked and Jack looked out at the horizon to his home, which was now a golf ball size image nearly five miles away.

Twenty minutes later, and Jack pulled his Humvee to a screeching halt.

Directly ahead, surrounding what appeared to be an abandoned motor home, was a swarm of half a dozen Stiffers, all clawing stupidly, like apes, at the vehicle, trying obviously to obtain entrance.

Jack doubted very much anyone was alive in the motor home, in fact, the inhabitants had already died within it, or had moved off rather unwisely, after the initial attacks which they had probably witnessed on any one of four horizons.

But that was neither here nor there. The Stiffers for Jack represented a veritable cornucopia of scientific opportunity.

“Jackpot, pal,” he said to Walter, who flapped to the Humvee’s roof, as Jack exited the driver’s seat.

He reached for a tranquilizer gun, armed with a potent dose of elephant anesthesia, mixed with a few other deadening components of Jack’s own creation, then armed up with more practical weapons, his AK-47, .9 millimeter Beretta and .23 Glock.

The Stiffers looked up and on seeing Jack predictably began to lumber his way, which Jack had anticipated.

He took aim at five of the Stiffers and dispatched those in rapid succession, rendering them more dead than they already were, he noted with some wry amusement.

The final Stiffer, the furthest from him, he shot with the tranquilizer rifle. It failed to slow the Stiffer down (which really did not surprise Jack either, given that these things continued to defy all laws of nature by even being ambulatory) and thus he was forced to fire to maim.

He took out the Stiffer’s two legs, which caused the Stiffer to howl in pain and rage. It began to crawl ineffectually toward Jack, as he returned to the van and removed some chained netting. He threw it over the afflicted Stiffer, which eyed him with supernaturally red eyes of hate and agony.

“Go fuck yourself,” Jack snipped at it, as he dragged the thing back to his Humvee and utilized the on-board crane to load the monster in the rear. Once shackled to the mainframe of the rear compartment, Jack re-entered the driver’s cabin, and began a slow semi-circle back toward his sanctuary.

The Light Storm, as he now referred to the bizarre light phenomena of earlier, reappeared, as he approached closer proximity to the Dome. He now noticed another bizarre phenomena appearing on the passenger side of the Humvee. Walter rested on the passenger seat, but flapped up to the dashboard, to also view the strange new chicanery of this ever-changing radioactive landscape.

A dark shadow began to parallel the Humvee, keeping a respectable distance of fifty feet. Jack at first thought it was the result of a cloud above, but the sky was completely cloud-covered so that explanation was immediately ruled out.

Like the little Light Storm that also paralleled the Humvee’s trajectory to Jack’s left, the black shadow moved on its own preternatural volition alongside it.

The Stiffer in the rear began to growl and grow restless, but Jack ignored it, more interested in the strange phenomena outside his vehicle.

He activated the gate to the Dome, and entered Eden proper. When he exited the Humvee, he noticed that both the Light Storm and the odd shadow had disappeared.

“That is the god damned weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jack said, glancing at Walter, who was perched on the open door of the Humvee.

Lights that moved on their own volition. Shadows that existed where shadows should not. The carnivorous dead walked freely about. The world had turned upside down, in Jack’s mind.

He wondered if his sanity would remain intact for longer than the next few days.

* * *

His second foray into Stiffer dissection and forensic examination revealed, or rather, confirmed his findings with regard to the first zombie he’d analyzed. The Stiffers had no heart beat, nor brain function … yet they moved, consumed, and were filled with rage.

That the Stiffers were once human, there was no doubt. All internal organs were in the right place, albeit hopelessly contaminated by concentrated gamma radiation, well off the charts. Jack was reminded of a book by Richard Matheson, called
I Am Legend
, where the hero of that story, a scientist like himself, was faced with a similar situation as his own – trying to rationalize the existence of creatures who lived, but should not be living at all, according to all –

– all the rules of nature…

Jack chided himself and arrested this thought, as he chopped the Stiffer’s head off and threw it along with the corpse into an incinerator. There were no more rules of nature, Jack mused to himself. Nature was being confounded and confused in this strange new world. Guardian Angels existed, zombies were alive and well (no pun intended) and that was that.

Jack realized that the only way he would make it, or continue living, without madness encroaching on his mind, would be to accept what his scientific knowledge already intuited for him: That nothing would ever be the same again in this post-apocalyptic nightmare that he now must refer to as the Late Great Planet Earth.

He decided to utilize his most recent resource, The Guardian Angel.

Rather than trying to find new ways to trap or capture his newfound visitor on tape, he decided that direct communication could only be beneficial to his current plight.

That night before falling asleep, with Walter perched on his shoulder, Jack typed up a letter to the Guardian Angel. It consisted of thanks for information thus far and understanding that the Angel could not explain to him fully what it was, but if it could provide any information on the Stiffers, or the Light Storms, and the predatory Shadow, he would be extremely grateful.

He printed out the letter, and left it on the table in full view for anyone to view it.

His last thoughts before falling asleep were of a monstrous face with green eyes and glowing fangs reaching out for him in both famishment and hatred.

* * *

That night, after her transformation from bird to human, Angela considered Jack’s letter carefully. With each passing day when she transformed, more psychic information was revealed to her, so she was well ahead of Jack’s limited curve of discovery and enlightenment as to the state of affairs in the world at large.

She began typing out her response to Jack’s query and hoped that Jack would heed her counsel.

Dear Jack:

Thank you for respecting my privacy in terms of who and what I am. Let us just say that I commenced to exist on or around the time of what you call Blast Day – or for our more direct purposes – the end of the world as we know it. The Stiffers, as you call them, are mutational products of extreme exposure to fallout. But that does not explain the impossible reality of their existence, when all physiological data points to their being non-human and non-alive. I can tell you what energizes them – what allows them mobility and consciousness – is a new energy in the matrix of our modern physics which both you and I know nothing about. I would say simply it is a power or force of evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. I suspect that the Shadow entity you saw today is also a product of some unseen – and as yet – undetected force that does not have your best interests at heart. You asked if it was safe to explore Las Vegas in the near future; I would answer that there is no need for you to go to Vegas at this time. It is still smoldering from a direct low-atmosphere blast and should be regarded as a Dead Zone for at least a year. Last, I do have some useful information for you: Starting tomorrow, some survivors will be coming your way. Some will be from Ashwood, some will be stragglers who managed to be outside of the radius of Ground Zero of the various nuclear attacks in your vicinity. Some will also come with mischief in their hearts. They will not come all at once, but over a period of weeks. You have the ability and resources to treat many of them for radiation sickness, but some will die, despite your best medical ministrations.

I hope this note is helpful to you. Please feel free to communicate this way at any time and I will endeavor to answer your questions to the best of my limited ability.

Yours, The Guardian Angel.

Angela printed out the letter and placed it next to Jack’s letter to her. She walked over and took one of the blankets Jack had tossed away on the floor and wrapped it around her nakedness. She then exited Jack’s room and headed for the Dome entrance.

The night air, even now at three in the morning, was still warm, humid and sticky. The lingering rotten smell of waste and death filled Angela’s nostrils. She looked to the sky for any stars that might be able to pierce the veil of radioactive cumulus formations, but no such celestial sentinels blinked back at her.

As she peered into the darkness beyond the front gate, which glowed in electrical lethality, she could make out a few pairs of radiant eyes from nearby Stiffers. They clearly knew that there was a food supply in the form of Jack, and thus their interest in the facility was high.

Angela felt tempted to go back inside, nab one of Jack’s high-powered rifles with a scope, and pick off the radioactive bastards at her leisure. But she realized this would be a waste of time. More Stiffers would replace those destroyed. She knew this in her heart and spirit. Her efforts would be an exercise in futility.

From out of the dark, a horrible sound emanated – an inhuman growl that was neither human nor animal. It could only be described as demonic, and it caused Angela to back up and head for the Dome entrance at a sprint. The growl repeated itself and Angela closed the Dome’s door, and reactivated the alarm system she had disconnected so she could roam freely outside and within.