“Headed for the square, northwest corner.”
Caleb pressed the binoculars to his brow again. With vexing slowness, the square came into focus. “I’m not seeing anything.”
“It was there a second ago.”
Still scanning, Caleb lifted the radio to his mouth to call the command platform.
“Station one, this is station nine …”
He stopped in mid-sentence; his vision had grazed something. He swept the lenses back the way they’d come.
The table in the square had been overturned; behind it, the nose of one of the trucks was pointed upward at a forty-five degree angle, its rear wheels sunk deep into the earth.
A sinkhole. A big one, opening up.
Peter turned away from the battlefield. The buildings of the city were shapes against the dark, lit by angled moonlight.
Chase was beside him. “What is it?”
The feeling prickled his skin like static electricity: all eyes. “There’s something we’re not seeing.” He held up a hand. “Hang on. Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” Apgar’s eyes narrowed as he cocked his head “Wait. Yeah.”
“Like … rats inside walls.”
“I hear it, too,” Chase said.
Peter grabbed the mike. “Station six, anything out there?”
Nothing.
“Station six, report.”
Sister Peg stepped into the kitchen pantry. The rifle was stashed on the top shelf, wrapped in oilcloth. It had belonged to her brother, rest his soul; he had served with the Expeditionary, years ago. She remembered the day the soldier had arrived at the orphanage with the news of his death. He had brought her brother’s locker of effects. Nobody had checked the contents, or else the rifle would have been taken back into inventory. Or so Sister Peg had supposed at the time. Most of the belongings in her brother’s locker contained no trace of him and did not seem worth keeping. But not his gun. Her brother had held it, used it, fought with it; it stood for what he was. It was more than a remembrance; it was a gift, as if he’d left it behind so that someday she would have it when she needed it.
She moved the ladder into place and, with gingerly steps, brought the gun down and placed it on the table where the sisters kneaded bread. Sister Peg had cared for the weapon meticulously; the action was tight and well lubed. She liked the way it fired, with a decisive trigger and a good, clean snap. Once a year, in May—the month of her brother’s death—Sister Peg would remove her frock, don the clothes of an ordinary worker, and take the transport out to the Orange Zone. The rifle rode beside her, concealed in a duffel bag. Beyond the windbreak she would set up a target of cans, sometimes apples or a melon, or sheets of marked paper nailed to a tree.
She carried the rifle, now loaded, to the dining hall. Over the years the gun had grown heavier in her arms, but she could still manage it, including the recoil, which was dampened by a buffer tube with a spring connected to the pad. This was very important for follow-up shots. She chose a position by the hatch with a clear view of the hallway and the windows on either side of the room.
She thought she should take a moment to pray. But, as she was holding a loaded rifle, conventional prayer did not seem entirely suitable. Sister Peg hoped that God would help her, but it was her belief that He much preferred for people to attend to themselves. Life was a test; it was up to you to pass it or not. She raised the gun to her clavicle and angled one eye down the length of the barrel.
“Not my children,” she said and pulled the charging handle, snapping the first round into the chamber. “Not tonight.”
“Rider inbound!”
A tense new energy shivered along the rampart. Something was shifting. The viral barrier parted, forming a corridor like the one the previous night. Down this hallway a single rider galloped toward them. All along the catwalk, eyes took purchase upon the posts and slots of gunsights; gathering pressure flowed from shoulders to forearms to the padded tips of index fingers. The order to hold fire was clear, yet the urge to do otherwise was strong. Still the rider kept on coming. Raised in the saddle, this person—the gender was as yet unknowable—was yelling incomprehensible words. While one hand clutched the reins, the other swayed in the air over the rider’s head, a gesture of ambiguous meaning. Was it a threat? A plea for forbearance?
On the command platform, Peter understood what was about to happen. The inductees had no experience; they lacked the mental muscle memory of military training; they existed in only the most general way within a chain of command. The second Alicia reached the lighted perimeter, he would lose control of the situation. “Hold your fire!” he was yelling. “Don’t shoot!” But words went only so far.
Alicia hit the lighted perimeter at a full gallop. “It’s a trap!”
Her words made no sense to him
She pulled up, skidding to a halt. “It’s a trap! They’re inside!”
A shout came from Peter’s left: “It’s that woman from last night!”
“She’s a viral!”
“Shoot her!”
The first bullet speared Alicia’s right thigh, shattering her femur; the second caught her in the left lung. The horse’s front legs folded, sending her pitching forward over its neck. The first pops became a full-throated barrage. Dust kicked up around her as she crawled behind the fallen animal, which now lay riddled and dead. Shots were connecting. Bullets were finding their mark. Alicia experienced them like a fusillade of punches. Her left palm, speared like an apple. The ilium of her right pelvis, shrapnellized like an exploding grenade. Two more to the chest, the second of which ricocheted off her fourth rib, plunged diagonally through her thoracic cavity, and cracked her second lumbar vertebrae. She did her best to shove herself beneath the fallen horse. Blood splashed from its flesh as the bullets pounded.
Lost,
she thought, as a curtain of darkness fell.
Everything is lost.
The majority of virals emerged inside the city at four points: the central square, the southeast corner of the impoundment, a large sinkhole in H-town, and the staging area inside the main gate. Others had piloted their way through the pocketed earth to emerge in smaller pods throughout the city. The floors of houses; abandoned lots, weedy and untended, where children had once played; the streets of densely packed neighborhoods. They dug and crawled. They traced the sewage and water lines. They were clever; they sought the weakest points. For months they had moved through the geological and man-made fissures beneath the city like an infestation of ants.
Go now,
their master ordered.
Fulfill your purpose. Do that which I’ve commanded.
On the catwalk, Peter did not have long to consider Alicia’s words of warning. Amid the roar of guns—many of the soldiers, gripped by the frenzy of a mob, were firing upon the dopeys as well—the structure lurched under him. It was if the metal grate beneath his feet were a carpet that had been lifted and shaken at one end. The sensation shot to his stomach, a swirl of nausea, like seasickness. He looked side to side, searching for the source of this motion, simultaneously becoming aware that he was hearing screams. A second lurch and the structure jolted downward. His balance failed; knocked backward, he fell to the floor of the catwalk. Guns were blasting, voices yelling. Bullets whizzed over his face.
The gate,
someone cried,
they’re opening the gate! Shoot them! Shoot those fuckers!
A groan of bending metal, and the catwalk began to tip away from the wall.
He was rolling toward the edge.
He had no way to stop himself; his hands found nothing to grab. Bodies tumbled past, launching into the dark. As he rolled over the lip, one hand seized slick metal: a support strut. His body swung around it like a pendulum. He would not be able to hold on; he had merely paused. Beneath him, the city spun, lit with screams and gunfire.
“Take my hand!”
It was Jock. He had lodged himself under the rail, one arm dangling over the edge. The catwalk had paused at a forty-five degree angle to the ground.
“Grab on!”
A series of pops: the last bolts were yanking free of the wall. Jock’s fingertips, inches from Peter’s, could have been a mile away. Time was moving in two streams. There was one, of noise and haste and violent action, and a second, coincidental with the first, in which Peter and everything around him seemed caught in a lazy current. His grip was failing. His other hand flailed uselessly, trying to grasp Jock’s.
“Pull yourself up!”
Peter tore away.
“I’ve got you!”
Jock was gripping him by the wrist. A second face appeared under the rail: Apgar. As the man reached down, Jock heaved Peter upward; Apgar caught him by the belt. Together they hauled him the rest of the way.
The catwalk began to fall.
The slaughter had commenced.
Freed from hiding, the virals poured over the city. They swarmed the ramparts, flinging men into space. They launched from the ground and rooftops like a glowing fireworks display. They burst through the floors of hardboxes to butcher the occupants and exploded through the floors of buildings to haul the hiding inhabitants from closets and out from under their beds. They stormed the gate, which, although formidable, was not designed to repel an attack from within; all that was required to open the city to invasion was to tear the crossbars from their braces, free the brake, and push.
The pod that emerged near the impoundment was likewise charged with a specific mission. Throughout the day, their delicate sensorium had detected the footfalls of a great number of people, all headed in the same direction. They had heard the roar of vehicles and the barks of bullhorns. They had heard the word “dam.” They had heard the word “shelter.” They had heard the word “tubes.” Those that sought a direct entry to the dam were confounded. As Chase had predicted, there was no way in. Others, like an elite assault force, homed in on a compact building nearby. This was guarded by a small contingent of soldiers, who died swiftly and badly. Jaws snapping, fingers trilling, eyes restlessly roaming, the virals took measure of the interior. The room was full of pipes. Pipes meant water; water meant the dam. A flight of stairs descended.
They arrived in a hallway with walls of sweating stone. A ladder took them deeper underground, a second deeper still. A dense humanity lay near. They were coming closer. They were homing in.
They reached a metal door with a heavy ring. The first viral, the alpha, opened the door and slid inside, the others following.
The room was ripe with the odor of men. A row of lockers, a bench, a table bearing the remains of a hastily abandoned meal. Connected to a complex assembly of pipes and gears was a panel with six steel wheels the size of manhole covers.
Yes,
said Zero
. Those.
The alpha gripped the first wheel.
INLET
NO.
1
it was marked.
Turn it.
Six wheels. Six tubes.
Eight hundred dying cries.
Pistol extended, Sara approached the storage room and gently dislodged the door with her foot.
“Maybe it was just mice,” Jenny whispered.
The scratching sounded again. It was coming from behind a stack of crates. Sara placed the lantern on the floor and pushed the pistol out with both hands. The crates were piled four high. One on the bottom began to move, jostling those above it.
“Sara—”
The crates went tumbling. Sara fell back as the viral burst through the floor, twisting in midair to attach itself to the ceiling like a roach. She fired the pistol blindly. The viral seemed not to care at all about the gun or else knew that Sara was too startled to aim. The pistol’s slide locked back; the magazine was spent. Sara turned, shoved Jenny out the door, and began to run.
At the base of the wall, Alicia, immobilized, broken, lay alone. Her breathing was labored and damp, punctuated by small, exquisitely painful hitches. Blood was in her mouth. Her vision seemed skewed; images refused to resolve. She had no sense of time at all. She might have been shot thirty seconds ago. It might have been an hour.
A dark shape materialized above her: Soldier, bowing his head to hers.
Oh, see what you’ve done to yourself,
he said.
I leave you for a minute and look what happens.
His warm breath kissed her face; he dipped closer, nuzzling her, exhaling softly through his nostrils.
My good boy
. She raised one bloody hand to his cheek.
My great, my magnificent Soldier, I am sorry.
“Sister, what have they done to you?”
Amy was kneeling beside her. The woman’s shoulders shook with a sob; she buried her face in her hands. “Oh no,” she moaned. “Oh no.”
The spotlights had gone out. Alicia heard gunshots and cries, but these were distant, dimming. A merciful darkness enveloped her. Amy was holding her hand. It seemed that all that had gone before was a journey, that the road had brought her here and ended. The night slid into silence. She felt suddenly cold. She drifted away.
Wait.
Her eyes flew open. A breeze was pushing over her—dense, gritty—and with it a rumble, like thunder, though the sound did not stop. It rolled and rolled, its volume accumulating, the air swirling with windblown matter. The ground beneath them began to shake; with a whinny, Soldier reared up, his hooves slashing the air.
Her army is nothing. I can whisk it away.
Alicia raised her head just in time to see them coming.
Peter, Apgar and Jock were racing down the falling catwalk. Its failure proceeded in sections, like dominoes falling in a line. Peter’s orders to fall back to the orphanage, the city’s last line of defense, went unheeded; a state of panic reigned. The problem was not merely the serial collapse of the catwalk, from which soldiers were falling a hundred feet to their deaths. The virals had also stormed its length. Some men were hurled, others devoured, twitching and screaming as the virals’ jaws sank home. Yet a third group were bitten and subsequently left to their own devices. As had been witnessed in the townships, Fanning’s virus did its work with unprecedented swiftness; in short order, a growing percentage of Kerrville’s defenders were turning on their former comrades.