VII. THE OUTLAW 4 страница

“Bring it here.”

Her hands, somehow, managed this.

“Get rid of them,” Guilder said to Lila.

“Eva, sweetie, why doesn’t Dani take you outside?” She looked quickly at Sara, her eyes beseeching. “It’s such a beautiful day. A little fresh air, what do you say?”

“I want you to take me,” the girl protested. “You never go outside.”

Lila’s voice was like a song she was being made to sing. “I know, sweetheart, but you know how sensitive Mummy is to the sun. And Mummy has to take her medicine now. You know how Mummy gets when she takes her medicine.”

Reluctantly, the child complied. Breaking away from Lila, she moved to where Sara was standing beside the door.

With excruciating miraculousness, she took Sara by the hand.

Flesh meeting flesh. The unbearable corporeal smallness of it, its discrete power, its infusion of memory. All of Sara’s senses molded around the exquisite sensation of her child’s tiny hand in her own. It was the first time their bodies had touched since one was inside the other, though now it was the opposite: Sara was the one inside.

“Run along, you two,” Lila croaked. She gave a wave of absolute misery toward the door. “Have fun.”

Without a word, Kate—Eva—led Sara from the room. Sara was floating; she weighed a million pounds. Eva, she thought. I have to remember to call her Eva. A short hallway and then a flight of stairs: a pair of doors at the bottom pushed into a small, fenced yard with a teeter-totter and a rusted swing set. The sky looked down with a solemn, snow-filled light.

“Come on,” the child said. And broke away.

She climbed aboard a swing. Sara took her place behind her.

“Push me.”

Sara drew back the chains, suddenly nervous. How much was safe? This precious and beloved being. This holy, miraculous, human person. Surely three feet was more than enough. She released the chains, and the girl arced away, vigorously pumping her legs.

“Higher,” she commanded.

“Are you sure?”

“Higher, higher!”

Each sensation a piercing. Each a painless engraving in the heart. Sara caught her daughter at the small of her back and thrust her away. Up and out she rose, into the December air. With each arc her hair volleyed backward, suffusing the air behind her with the sweet scent of her person. The girl swung silently; her happiness was bound into a pure occupation of the act itself. A little girl, swinging in winter.

My darling Kate, thought Sara. My baby, my one. She pushed, and pushed again; the girl flew away, always returning to her hands. I knew, I knew, I always knew. You are the ember of life I blew on, a thousand lonely nights. Never could I let you die.

Houston.

The liquefied city, drowned by the sea. The great urban quagmire, none but its skyscrapered heart left standing. Hurricanes, drenching tropical rains, the unchecked slide of a continent’s waters seeking final escape to the Gulf: for a hundred years the tides had come and gone, filling the lowlands, carving out grimy bayous and contaminated deltas, erasing all.

They were ten miles from the city’s central core. The last days of travel had been a game of hopscotch, seeking out the dry places and segments of passable roadway, hacking their way through thickets of spiny, insect-infested vegetation. In these quarters, nature unveiled its true malevolent purpose: everything here wanted to sting you, swarm you, bite you. The air creaked with its saturated weight and miasma of rot. The trees, gnarled like grasping hands, seemed like something from another age entirely. They seemed positively made up. Who would invent such trees?

Darkness came on with a chemically yellowish dimming. The trip had compacted to a crawl. Even Amy had begun to show her irritation. Her signs of illness had not abated; rather, the opposite. When she thought Greer wasn’t looking, he caught her pressing her palms to her stomach, exhaling with slow pain. They quartered that night on the top floor of a house that seemed outrageous in its ruined opulence: dripping chandeliers, rooms the size of auditoriums, all of it spattered with a black, off-gassing mold. A brown line three feet above the marble floor circumscribed the walls where floodwaters had once risen. In the massive bedroom where they took shelter, Greer opened the windows to clear the air of the ammonic stench: below him, in the vine-clotted yard, lay a swimming pool full of goo.

All night long, Greer could hear the dopeys moving in the trees outside. They vaulted from limb to limb, like great apes. He listened to them rustling through the foliage, followed by the sharp animal cries of rats and squirrels and other small creatures meeting their demise. Amy’s injunction notwithstanding, he dozed fitfully, pistol in hand. Just remember. Carter’s one of us. He prayed it was true.

Amy was no better in the morning.

“We should wait,” he said.

Even standing seemed to take all the strength she could muster. She made no effort to hide her discomfort, gripping the flat of her belly, her head bowed in pain. He could see the spasms shuddering her abdomen as the cramps moved through her.

“We go,” she said, speaking through gritted teeth.

They continued east. The skyscrapers of downtown emerged in their particularity. Some had collapsed, the clay soil having expanded and contracted over the years to pulverize their foundations; others reclined against each other like drunks stumbling home from a bar. Amy and Greer traced a narrow spit of sand between weed-choked bayous. The sun was high and bright. Seaborne wreckage had begun to appear: boats, and parts of boats, splayed on their sides in the shallows as if in a swoon of exhaustion. When they reached the place where the land ended, Greer dismounted, retrieved the binoculars from his saddlebag, and pointed them across the stained waters. Dead ahead, wedged against a skyscraper, lay a vast ship, hard aground. Her stern rose impossibly high in the air, massive propellers visible above the waterline. On it was written the vessel’s name, dripping with rust: CHEVRON MARINER.

“That’s where we’ll find him,” said Amy.

There was no dry path across; they would have to find a boat. Luck favored them. After backtracking a quarter mile, they discovered an aluminum rowboat overturned in the weeds. The bottom appeared sound, the rivets tight. Greer dragged it to the lagoon’s edge and set it afloat. When it failed to sink, he helped Amy down from her mount.

“What about the horses?” he asked her.

Her face was a mask of barely bottled pain. “We should be back before dark, I think.”

He stabilized the craft as Amy boarded, then lowered himself onto the middle bench. A flat board served as a paddle. Seated in the stern, Amy had been reduced to cargo. Her eyes were closed, her hands wrapped her waist, sweat dripping from her brow. She made no sound, though Greer suspected her silence was for his benefit. As the distance narrowed, the ship expanded to mind-boggling dimensions. Its rusted sides loomed hundreds of feet over the lagoon. It was listing to one side; the surrounding water was black with oil. Greer paddled their craft into the lobby of the adjacent building and brought them to rest beside a bank of motionless escalators.

“Lucius, I think I’m going to need your help.”

He assisted her from the boat and up the nearest escalator, supporting her by the waist. They found themselves in an atrium with several elevators and walls of smoked glass. ONE ALLEN CENTER a sign read, with a directory of offices beneath. The ascent that lay ahead would be serious; they’d need to climb ten stories at least.

“Can you make it?” Greer asked.

Amy bit her lip and nodded.

They followed the sign for the stairs. Greer lit a torch, gripped her at the waist again, and began to climb. The trapped air of the stairwell was poisonous with mold; every few floors they were forced to step out just to clear their lungs. At the twelfth floor, they stopped.

“I think we’re high enough,” said Greer.

From the sealed windows of a book-lined office they looked down on the tanker’s decking, wedged hard against the building ten feet below. An easy drop. Greer took the desk chair, hoisted it over his head, and flung it through the window.

He turned to look at Amy.

She was studying her hand, holding it before her like a cup. A bright red fluid filled her palm. It was then that Greer noticed the stain on her tunic. More blood was trickling down her legs.

“Amy—”

She met his eye. “You’re tired.”

It was like being wrapped in an infinite softness. A blanketing, whole-body sleep.

“Oh, damn,” he said, already gone, and folded to the floor.

Peter and the others entered San Antonio on Highway 90. It was early morning; they had passed the first night in a hardbox in the city’s outer ring of suburbs, a sprawl of collapsed and scoured houses. The room lay beneath a police station, with a fortified ramp at the rear. Not a DS hardbox, Hollis explained; one of Tifty’s. It was larger than the hardboxes Peter had seen, though no less crude—just a stuffy room with bunks and a garage bay where a fat-tired pickup awaited, cans of fuel in the bed. Crates and metal military lockers were stacked along the walls. What’s in these? Michael asked, to which Hollis said, one eyebrow raised, I don’t know, Michael. What do you think?

They drove out at first light beneath a heavy sky, Hollis at the wheel beside Peter, Michael and Lore riding in the truck’s bed. Much of the city had burned in the days of the epidemic; little remained of the central core save for a handful of the taller buildings, which stood with forlorn austerity against the backdrop of bleached hills, their scorched facades telegraphing the blackened and collapsed interiors where an army of dopeys now dozed the day away. “Just dopeys,” people always said, though the truth was the truth: a viral was a viral.

Peter was waiting for Hollis to turn off, to take them north or south, but instead he drove them into the heart of town, leaving the highway for narrow surface streets. The way had been cleared, cars and trucks hauled to the sides of the roadway. As the shadows of the buildings engulfed the truck, Hollis slid the cab’s rear window open. “You better weapon up,” he cautioned Michael and Lore. “You’ll want to watch yourself through here.”

“All eyes, hombre,” came the man’s reply.

Peter gazed at the destruction. It was the cities that always turned his thoughts to what the world had once been. The buildings and houses, the cars and streets: all had once teemed with people who had gone about their lives knowing nothing of the future, that one day history would stop.

They moved through without incident. Vegetation began to crowd the roadway as the gaps between the buildings widened.

“How much longer?” he asked Hollis.

“Don’t worry. It’s not far.”

Ten minutes later they were skirting a fence line. Hollis pulled the vehicle to the gate, removed a key from the glove box of the pickup, and stepped out. Peter was struck by a sense of the past: Hollis might have been Peter’s brother, Theo, opening the gate to the power station, all those years ago.

“Where are we?” he asked when Hollis returned to the truck.

“Fort Sam Houston.”

“A military base?”

“More like an Army hospital,” Hollis explained. “At least it used to be. Not a lot of doctoring goes on here anymore.”

They drove on. Peter had the sense of driving through a small village. A tall clock tower stood to one side of a quadrangle that might have once been the center of town. Apart from a few ceremonial cannons, he saw nothing that seemed military—no trucks or tanks, no weapon emplacements, no fortifications of any kind. Hollis brought the pickup to a halt before a long, low building with a flat roof. A sign above the door read, AQUATICS CENTER.

“Aquatics,” Lore said, after they’d all disembarked. She squinted doubtfully at the sign, a rifle balanced across her chest in a posture of readiness. “Like… swimming?”

Hollis gestured at the rifle. “You should leave that here. Wouldn’t want to make a bad impression.” He shifted his attention to Peter. “Last chance. There’s no way to undo this.”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

They entered the foyer. All things considered, the building’s interior was in good shape: ceilings tight, windows solid, none of the usual trash.

“Feel that?” Michael said.

A basal throbbing, like a gigantic plucked string, was radiating from the floor. Somewhere in the building a generator was operating.

“I kind of expected there to be guards,” Peter said to Hollis.

“Sometimes there are, when Tifty wants to put on a show. But basically we don’t need them.”

Hollis led them to a pair of doors, which he pushed open to reveal a great, tiled space, the ceiling high above and, at the center of the room, a vast, empty swimming pool. He guided them to a second pair of swinging doors and a flight of descending stairs, illuminated by buzzing fluorescents. Peter thought to ask Hollis where Tifty got the gas for his generator, but then answered the question for himself. Tifty got it where he got everything; he stole it. The stairs led to a room crowded with pipes and metal tanks. They were under the pool now. They made their way through the cramped space to yet another door, though different from the others, fashioned of heavy steel. It bore no markings of any kind, nor was there an obvious way to open it; its smooth surface possessed no visible mechanisms. On the wall beside it was a keypad. Hollis quickly punched in a series of digits, and with a deep click the door unlatched, revealing a dark corridor.

“It’s okay,” Hollis said, angling his head toward the opening, “the lights go on automatically.”

As the big man stepped through, a bank of fluorescents flickered to life, their vibrancy intensified by the hospital-white walls of the corridor. Peter’s sense of Tifty was radically evolving. What had he imagined? A filthy encampment, populated by huge, apelike men armed to the teeth? Nothing he had seen even remotely conformed to these expectations. To the contrary: the display so far indicated a level of technical sophistication that seemed well beyond Kerrville’s. Nor was he alone in this shifting of opinion; Michael, too, was frankly gawking. Some place, his face seemed to say.

The corridor ended at an elevator. A camera was poised above it. Whoever was on the other side knew they were coming; they’d been observed since they’d entered the hall.

Hollis tilted his face upward to the lens, then pressed a button on the wall adjacent to a tiny speaker. “It’s all right,” he said. “They’re with me.”

A crackle of static, then: “Hollis, what the fuck.”

“Everyone’s unarmed. They’re friends of mine. I’ll vouch for them.”

“What do they want?”

“We need to see Tifty.”

A pause, as if the voice on the other end of the intercom was conferring with somebody else; then: “You can’t just bring them here like this. Are you out of your mind?”

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Just open the door, Dunk.”

An empty moment followed. Then the doors slid open.

“It’s your ass,” the voice said.

They entered; the elevator commenced its downward creep. “Okay, I’ll bite,” Michael ventured. “What is this place?”

“You’re in an old USAMRIID station. It’s an annex to the main facility in Maryland, activated during the epidemic.”

“What’s USAMRIID?” asked Lore.

It was Michael who answered. “It stands for ‘United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.’ ” He frowned at Hollis. “I don’t get it. What’s Tifty doing here?”

And then the doors of the elevator opened to the sound of weapons being cocked, and each of them was staring down the barrel of a gun.

* * *

“All of you, on your knees.”

There were six. The youngest appeared to be no more than twenty, the oldest in his forties. Scruffy beards and greasy hair and teeth clotted with grime: this was more like it. One of them, a giant of a man with a great bald head and ridges of soft fat folded at the base of his neck, had bluish tattoos all over his face and the exposed flesh of his arms. This, apparently, was Dunk.

“I told you,” Hollis said, kneeling on the floor like the rest of them, hands on top of his head, “they’re friends of mine.”

“Quiet.” His clothing was a hodgepodge of different uniforms, both military and DS. He holstered his revolver and crouched in front of Peter, sizing him up with his intense gray eyes. Viewed up close, the images on his face and arms became clear. Virals. Viral hands, viral faces, viral teeth. Peter had no doubt that beneath his clothes, the man’s body was covered with them.

“Expeditionary,” Dunk drawled, nodding gravely. “Tifty’s going to like this. What’s your name, Lieutenant?”

“Jaxon.”

“Peter Jaxon?”

“That’s right.”

Maintaining his crouch, Dunk swiveled on the heels of his boots toward the others. “How about that, gentlemen. It’s not every day we get such distinguished visitors.” He focused on Peter again. “We don’t get visitors at all, actually. Which is a bit of a problem. This isn’t what you’d call a tourist destination.”

“I need to see Tifty.”

“So I hear. Tifty, I’m afraid, is indisposed at the moment. A very private fellow, our Tifty.”

“Cut the bullshit,” Hollis said. “I told you, I’ll vouch for them. Tifty needs to hear what they have to say.”

“This is your mess, my friend. I don’t think you’re exactly in a position to be making demands. And what about you two?” he asked, addressing Lore and Michael. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

“We’re oilers,” Michael replied.

“Interesting. Did you bring us any oil?” His gaze narrowed on Lore; a smile, bright with menace, flickered over his face. “Now, you I think I know. Poker, wasn’t it? Or dice. Probably you don’t remember.”

“With a mug like yours, how could I forget?”

Grinning, Dunk rose and rubbed his meaty hands together. “Well, it’s been very nice meeting all of you. A real pleasure. Before we kill you, does anyone have anything else to say? Goodbye, maybe?”

“Tell Tifty it’s about the field,” said Hollis.

Something changed; Peter could sense it at once. The words fell over Dunk’s face like a shadow.

“Tell him,” Hollis said.

The man appeared stunned into inaction. Then he drew his pistol.

“Let’s go.”

Dunk and his men escorted them down a long corridor. Peter took stock of their surroundings, though there wasn’t much to see, just more halls and closed doors. Many of the doors had keypads on the walls beside them like the one beneath the pool. Dunk brought them to a halt before one such door and gave it three hard raps.

“Enter.”

The great gangster Tifty Lamont. Once again Peter found his expectations overturned. He was a physically compact man, with glasses perched on the tip of his long, hooked nose. His pale hair flowed over his neck, thin at the top with a crown of pink scalp beneath. Seated behind a large metal desk, he was performing the improbable act of constructing a tower out of wooden sticks.

“Yes, Dunk?” he said, not looking up. “What is it?”

“We’ve captured three intruders, sir. Hollis brought them in.”

“I see.” He continued with his patient stacking. “And you did not kill them because …?”

Dunk cleared his throat. “It’s about the field, sir. They say they know something.”

Tifty’s hands halted over the model. After several seconds, he lifted his face, peering at them over his glasses.

“Who says?”

Peter stepped forward. “I do.”

Tifty studied him a moment. “And the others? What do they know?”

“They were with me when I saw her.”

“Saw who, exactly?”

“The woman.”

Tifty said nothing. His face was as rigid as a blind man’s. Then: “Everyone out. Except for you …” He wagged a finger toward Peter. “What’s your name?”

“Peter Jaxon.”

“Except for Mr. Jaxon.”

“What do you want me to do with the others?” Dunk asked.

“Use your imagination. They look hungry—why don’t you give them something to eat?”

“What about Hollis?”

“I’m sorry, did I mishear you? Didn’t you say he brought them in?”

“That’s the thing. He showed them where we are.”

Tifty sighed heavily. “Well, that is a wrinkle. Hollis, what am I going to do with you? There are rules. There’s a code. Honor among thieves. How many times do I have to say it?”

“I’m sorry, Tifty. I thought you needed to hear what he had to say.”

“Well, sorry doesn’t cut it. This is a very awkward position you’ve put me in.” He cast his eyes wearily around the room, as if his next sentence could be found somewhere among its shelves and files. “Very well. Where are you on the roster?”

“Number four.”

“Not anymore. You’re suspended from the cage until I say otherwise. I know how much you like it. I’m being generous here.”

Hollis’s face showed nothing. What was the cage? Peter thought.

“Thank you, Tifty,” Hollis said. “Now all of you get the hell out.”

The door sealed behind them. Peter waited for Tifty to speak first. The man rose from behind his desk and stepped to a small table with a pitcher of water. He poured himself a glass and drank it down. Just when the silence had begun to strain, he addressed Peter with his back turned.

“What was she wearing?”

“A dark cloak and glasses.”

“What else did you see? Was there a truck?”

Peter recounted the events on the Oil Road. Tifty let him talk. When Peter had concluded, the man moved back to his desk.

“Let me show you something.”

He opened the top drawer, removed a sheet of paper, and slid it across the desktop. A charcoal drawing, the paper stiffened and slightly discolored, of a woman and two little girls.

“You’ve seen one of these before, haven’t you? I can tell.”

Peter nodded. The picture wasn’t anything he could easily pull his eyes from. It possessed an overwhelming hauntedness, as if the woman and her children were gazing out of the page from someplace beyond the ordinary parameters of time and space. Like looking at a ghost, three ghosts.

“Yes, in Colorado. Greer showed it to me, after Vorhees was killed. A big stack of them.” He lifted his eyes to find Tifty watching him keenly, like a teacher giving a test. “Why do you have a copy?”

“Because I loved them,” Tifty replied. “Vor and I had our difficulties, but he always knew how I felt. They were my family, too. That’s why he gave this to me.”

“They died in the field.”

“Dee, yes, and the little one, Siri. Both were killed outright. It was fast, though you know the saying: Make it quick, but not today. The older girl, Nitia, was never found.” He frowned. “You’re surprised by all this? Not quite what you expected?”

Peter couldn’t even begin to answer.

“I’m telling you these things so you understand who and what we are. All these men have lost someone. I give them a home, a place to put their anger. Take Dunk, for instance. He may be imposing now, but when I look at him, do you know what I see? An eleven-year-old kid. He was in the field, too. Father, mother, sister, all gone.”

“I don’t see what running the trade has to do with that.”

“That’s because it’s only part of what we do. A way of paying the bills, if you like. The Civilian Authority tolerates us because it has to. In a way, it needs us as much as we need it. We’re not so very different from your Expeditionary, just the other side of the same coin.”

Tifty’s logic felt too convenient, a way to justify his crimes; on the other hand, Peter could not deny the meaning of the picture.

“Colonel Apgar said you were an officer. A scout sniper.”

Tifty’s face lit with a quick smile; there was a story there. “I should have known Gunnar would have something to do with this. What did he tell you?”

“That you made captain before you busted out. He called you the best S2 there ever was.”

“Did he? Well, he’s being kind, but only a little.”

“Why did you resign?”

Tifty shrugged carelessly. “Many reasons. You could say that military life didn’t suit me on the whole. Your presence here makes me think it may not suit you particularly well, either. My guess would be you’ve gone off the reservation, Lieutenant. How many days are you AWOL?”

Peter felt caught. “Just a couple.”

“AWOL is AWOL. Believe me, I know all about that. But in answer to your question, I left the Expeditionary because of the woman in the field. More specifically, because I told Command where she came from, and they refused to do anything about it.”

Peter was dumbstruck. “You know where she comes from?”

“Of course I know. So does Command. Why do you think Gunnar sent you here? Fifteen years ago, I was part of a squad of three sent north to locate the source of a radio signal somewhere in Iowa. Very faint, just little scratches of noise, but enough to catch it with an RDF. We didn’t know why, the Exped wasn’t in the business of chasing down every random squeak, but it was all very hush-hush, very top-down. Our orders were to scout it out and report back, nothing more. What we found was a city at least two, maybe three times the size of Kerrville. But it had no walls, no lights. By any reckoning, it shouldn’t have existed at all. And you know what we saw? Trucks like the one I saw in the field just before the attack. Like the one you saw three days ago.”

“So what did Command say?”

“They ordered us never to tell anyone.”

“Why would they do that?” Though, of course, they had told Peter exactly the same thing.

“Who knows? But my guess would be the order came from the Civilian Authority, not the military. They were scared. Whoever those people were, they had a weapon we couldn’t match.”

“The virals.”

The man nodded evenly. “Stick your fingers in your ears and hope they never came back. Maybe not wrong, but it wasn’t anything I could sit with. That was the day I resigned my commission.”

“Did you ever go back?”

“To Iowa? Why would I do that?”

Peter felt a mounting urgency. “Vorhees’s daughter could be there. Sara, too. You saw those trucks.”

“I’m sorry. Sara. Do I know this person?”

“She’s Hollis’s wife. Or would have been. She was lost at Roswell.”

A look of regret eased across the man’s face. “Of course. My mistake. I believe I knew that, though I don’t think he ever mentioned her name. Nevertheless, this changes nothing, Lieutenant.”

“But they could still be alive.”

“I don’t think it’s likely. A lot of time has passed. Either way, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Not then and not now. You’d need an army. Which the CA more or less guaranteed we didn’t have. And in the leadership’s defense, these people, whoever they are, never returned. At least until now, if what you’re saying is true.”

Something was missing, Peter thought, a detail lurking at the edge of his awareness. “Who else was with you?”

“On the scouting party? The officer in charge was Nate Crukshank. The third man was a young lieutenant named Lucius Greer.”

The information passed through Peter like a current.

“Take me there. Show me where it is.”

“And what would we do when we got there?”

“Find our people. Get them out somehow.”

“Are you listening, Lieutenant? These aren’t just survivors. They’re in league with the virals. More than that—the woman can control them. Both of us have seen it happen.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should. All you’ll accomplish is getting yourself killed. Or taken. My guess is, that would be a good deal worse.”

“Then just tell me how to find it. I’ll go on my own.”

Tifty rose from behind his desk, returned to the table in the corner, and poured himself another glass of water. He drank it slowly, sip by sip. As the silence lengthened, Peter got the distinct impression that the man’s mind had taken him elsewhere. He wondered if the meeting was over.

“Tell me something, Mr. Jaxon. Do you have children?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Indulge me.”

Peter shook his head. “No.”

“No family at all?”

“I have a nephew.”

“And where is he now?”

The questions were uncomfortably probing. And yet Tifty’s tone was so disarming, the answers seemed to spring forth of their own accord. “He’s with the sisters. His parents were killed at Roswell.”

“Are you close? Do you matter to him?”

“Where are you going with this?”

Tifty ignored the question. He placed his empty glass on the table and returned to his desk.

“I suspect he admires you a great deal. The great Peter Jaxon. Don’t be so modest—I know just who you are, and more than the official account. This girl of yours, Amy, and this business with the Twelve. And don’t blame Hollis. He’s not my source.”

“Who then?”

Tifty grinned. “Perhaps another time. Our subject at hand is your nephew. What did you say his name was?”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14