A glowing point appeared in the distance, straight north. Adrenaline hit his heart; he hardened the stock against his shoulder. The light began to bob, then to separate like a dividing cell. Not virals: headlights.
“Contact!” a voice yelled. “Thirty degrees right! Two hundred yards!”
“Contact! Twenty left!”
For the first time in over two decades, the horn began to wail.
Greer shoved the accelerator to the floor. The speedometer leapt, the fields flying past in a blur, the engine roaring, the frame of the truck shuddering.
“They’re dead behind us!” Michael yelled.
Peter swiveled in his seat. Points of light were rising from the fields.
“Look out!” Greer yelled.
Peter turned around in time to see three virals leap into the headlights. Greer took aim and sliced through the pod. As bodies barreled over the hood, Peter slammed forward and bounced back into his seat. When he looked again, a single viral was clinging to the hood of the truck.
Michael pointed the shotgun over the dash and fired.
The glass exploded. Greer swerved to the left; Peter was thrown against the door, Amy on top of him. They were barreling through a bean field, moving laterally to the gate. Greer swerved the opposite way; the chassis tipped to the left, threatened to roll; then the wheels slammed down. Greer crested a rise and the truck went briefly airborne before spinning back onto the road. An ominous
clunk
from below; they began to decelerate.
Peter yelled to Greer, “What’s wrong?”
Smoke was pouring from the grille; the engine roared pointlessly. “We must have hit something—the transmission’s blown. On your right!”
Peter turned, took the viral in his sights, and squeezed the trigger, missing cleanly. Again and again he fired. He had no idea if he was hitting anything. The slide locked back; the magazine was empty. The lighted perimeter was still a hundred yards away.
“I’m out!” Michael yelled.
As the truck floated to a halt, flares arced from the catwalk, dragging contrails of light and smoke above their heads. Peter turned to Amy. She was slumped against the door, the pistol, unfired, dangling in her hand.
“Greer,” Peter said, “help me.”
He pulled her from the cab. Her motions were as heavy and loose as a sleepwalker’s. The flares began their lazy, flickering descents. As Amy’s legs unfolded from the truck, Greer stepped around the front of the vehicle, shoving fresh shells into the shotgun’s magazine. He slapped the gun into Peter’s hand and slid his right shoulder under Amy’s arm to take her weight.
“Cover us,” he said.
Caleb helplessly watched the truck’s approach. The virals were still well out of reach for even the luckiest shot. Up and down the wall, voices were yelling to hold fire, to wait until they were in range.
He saw the truck stop. Four figures emerged. At the rear of the group, one man turned and fired a shotgun into the heart of an approaching pod. One shot, two shots, three, flames blooming from the gun’s muzzle in the darkness.
Caleb knew that man to be his father.
He had stepped into the harness and clipped in before he was even aware he was doing it. The action was automatic; he had no plan, only instinct.
“Caleb, what the hell are you doing?”
Hollis was staring at him. Caleb hopped to the top of the rampart and turned his back toward the fields.
“Tell Apgar we’ll need a squad at the pedestrian portal. Go.”
Before Hollis could say anything else, Caleb pushed off. A long arc away from the wall and his boots touched concrete; he shoved himself away again. Two more pushes and he landed in the dirt. He unclipped and swung his rifle around.
His father was running with the others up the hill, just inside the lighted perimeter. Virals were massing at the edges. Some were covering their eyes; others had crouched into low, ball-like shapes. A moment’s hesitation, their instincts warring inside them. Would the lights be enough to hold them back?
The virals charged.
The machine guns opened up; Caleb ducked reflexively as bullets whizzed over his head, slicing into the creatures with a wet, slapping pound. Blood splashed; flesh was cleaved from bone; whole pieces of the virals’ bodies winged away. They seemed not merely to die but to disintegrate. The machine guns pounded, round after round. A slaughter, yet always there were more, surging into the lights.
“The portal!” Caleb called. He was running forward at a forty-five-degree angle to the wall, waving above his head. “Head for the portal!”
Caleb dropped to one knee and began to fire. Did his father see him? Did he know who he was? The bolt locked back; thirty rounds, gone in a heartbeat. He dropped the magazine, reached into his chest pack for a fresh one, and shoved it into the receiver.
Something crashed into him from behind. Breath, sight, thought: all left him. He felt himself sailing, almost hovering. This seemed extraordinary. In the midst of his flight, he had just enough time to marvel at the lightness of his body compared to other things. Then his body grew heavy again and he slammed into the ground. He was rolling down the incline, his rifle whipping around on its sling. He tried to control his body, its wild tumble down the hill. His hand found the lower unit of the rifle, but his index finger got tangled in the trigger guard. He rolled again, onto his chest, the rifle wedged between his body and the ground, and there was no stopping it; the gun went off.
Pain! He came to rest on his back, the rifle lying over his chest. Had he shot himself? The ground was spinning under him; it refused to be still. He blinked into the spotlights. He didn’t feel the way he imagined a shot person would. The pain was in two places: his chest, which had received the explosive force of the rifle’s firing, and a spot on his forehead, near the outer edge of his right eyebrow. He reached up, expecting blood; his fingers came away dry. He understood what had happened. The ejecting cartridge, ricocheting off the ground, had pinged upward into his face, narrowly missing his eye.
You are fucking lucky, Caleb Jaxon,
he thought
. I really hope nobody saw that.
A shadow fell across him.
Caleb raised the rifle, but as his left hand reached forward to balance the barrel he realized the mag well was empty; the magazine had been stripped away. He had, at various times of his life, imagined the moment of his own death. These imaginings had not included lying on his back with an empty rifle while a viral tore him to pieces. Perhaps, he considered, that’s the way it was for everybody:
Bet you didn’t think of this.
Caleb dropped the rifle. His only hope was his sidearm. Had he racked it? Had he remembered to free the safety? Would the gun even be there, or had it, like the rifle’s magazine, been stripped from his person? The shadow had taken the form of a human silhouette, but it wasn’t human, not at all. The head cocked. The claws extended. The lips retreated, revealing a dark cave dripping with teeth. The pistol was in Caleb’s hand and rising.
A burst of blood; the creature curled around the hole at the center of its chest. With an almost tender gesture, it reached up with one clawed hand and touched the wound. It raised its face with a bland expression.
Am I dead? Did you do that?
But Caleb hadn’t; he hadn’t even pulled the trigger. The shot had come from over Caleb’s shoulder. For a second they studied one another, Caleb and this dying thing; then a second figure stepped from Caleb’s right, shoved the muzzle of a shotgun into the viral’s face, and fired.
It was his father. With him was a woman, barefoot, in a plain frock, the kind the sisters wore. Her hair was the barest patina of darkness on her skull. In her outstretched hand, she held the pistol she had used to fire the first, fatal shot.
Amy.
“Peter …” she said. And melted to her knees.
Then they were running.
No words were passed that Caleb would later recall. His father was carrying Amy over his shoulder; two other men were with them; one of them had the shotgun his father had cast aside. The portal was open; a squad of six soldiers had formed a firing line in front of it.
“Get down!”
The voice was Hollis’s. All of them hit the dirt. Shots screamed past them, then ceased abruptly. Caleb lifted his face. Over the barrel of his rifle, Hollis was waving them on.
“Run your asses off!”
His father and Amy entered first, Caleb following. A barrage of gunfire erupted behind them. The soldiers were shouting to one another—
On your left! On your right! Go, go!—
firing their rifles as, one by one, they backed through the narrow doorway. Hollis was the last to enter. He dropped his rifle, swung the door around, and began to close it, clutching the wheel that, once turned, would set the bolts. Just as the lip of the door was about to make contact with the frame, it stopped.
“Need some help here!”
Hollis was bracing the door with his shoulder. Caleb sprang forward and pushed; others did the same. Still, the gap began to widen. An inch, then two more. Half a dozen men were piled against the door. Caleb swiveled his body so his back was braced against it and dug the heels of his boots into the earth. But the end was ordained; even if they could hold the door a few minutes longer, the virals’ strength would outlast them.
He saw a way.
Caleb dropped his hand to his belt. He hated grenades; he could not put aside the irrational fear that they would detonate of their own accord. Thus it was with some psychological effort that he freed one from his belt and pulled the pin. Holding the striker lever in place, he angled his face to the edge of the door. He needed more space; the gap between the door and its frame was too narrow. Nobody was going to like what he was about to do, but he had no time to explain. He stepped back; the door lurched inward six inches. A hand appeared at the edge, clawed fingers curling with a searching gesture around the lip. A chorus of yells erupted.
What are you doing? Push the goddamn door!
Caleb relaxed his grip on the grenade, freeing the striker lever.
“Catch,” he said, and shoved it through the opening.
He thrust his shoulder against the door. Eyes closed, he counted off the seconds, like a prayer.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi …
A boom.
The ping of shrapnel.
Dust falling.
58
“We need a corpsman over here right now!”
Peter lowered Amy to the ground. Her lips moved haltingly; then she asked, very softly, “Are we inside?”
“Everyone’s safe.”
Her skin was pale, her eyes heavy-lidded. “I’m sorry, I thought I could make it on my own.”
Peter looked up. “Where’s my son? Caleb!”
“Right here, Dad.”
His boy was standing behind him. Peter rose and drew him into a fierce hug. “What the hell were you doing out there?”
“Coming to get you.” There were scratches on his arms and face; one of his elbows was bleeding.
“What about Pim and Theo?” Peter couldn’t help it; he was talking in bursts.
“They’re safe. We got here a few hours ago.”
Peter was suddenly overcome. Thoughts crowded his mind from all directions. He was exhausted, he needed water, the city was under attack, his son and his family were safe. Two medics appeared with a stretcher; Greer and Michael lifted Amy onto it.
“I’ll go with her to the aid station,” Greer said.
“No, I’ll do it.”
Greer took his arm above the elbow and looked at him squarely. “She’ll be fine, Peter—we did it. Just go do your job.”
They bore her away. Peter looked up to see Apgar and Chase striding toward him. Above them, the gunfire had fallen to random spattering.
“Mr. President,” said Apgar, “I would appreciate it if in the future you did not cut it quite so close.”
“What’s our status?”
“The attack appears to have come only from the north. We’ve got no sightings elsewhere on the wall.”
“What do we hear from the townships?”
Apgar hesitated. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean
nothing
?”
“Everybody’s off the air. We ran patrols this morning as far west as Hunt, south to Bandera and as far north as Fredericksburg. No survivors, and almost no bodies. At this point, we have to assume they’ve all been overrun.”
Peter had no words. Over two hundred thousand people, gone.
“Mr. President?”
Apgar was looking at him. Peter swallowed and said, “How many people do we have inside the wall?”
“Including military, four, maybe five thousand, tops. Not a lot to fight with.”
“What about the isthmus?” Michael asked the general.
“As a matter of fact, we got a call on the radio from them a couple of hours ago. Someone named Lore, wondering where you were. They didn’t know anything about last night’s attack, so I guess the dracs missed them. That or they were too smart to try to cross that causeway.”
Above them, the guns fell silent.
“Maybe that’s it for tonight,” Chase said. He scanned their faces hopefully. “Maybe we scared them off.”
Peter didn’t think so; he could tell that Apgar didn’t think so, either.
“We need to make some decisions, Peter,” Michael cut in. “The window’s closing fast. We should be talking about getting people out of here.”
The idea suddenly seemed absurd. “I’m not leaving these people undefended, Michael. This thing has started. Right now, I need everybody who can hold a pitchfork on that wall.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
From the catwalk: “Contact! Two thousand yards!”
The first thing they saw was a line of light in the distance.
“Soldier, give me your binoculars.”
The spotter handed them over; Peter brought the lenses to his eyes. Standing beside him on the platform, Apgar and Michael were also scanning north.
“Can you tell how many there are?” Peter asked the general.
“They’re too far out to tell.” Apgar unclipped the walkie on his belt and brought it to his mouth. “All stations, what are you seeing?”
A crackle of static, then: “Station one, negative.”