VII. THE OUTLAW 5 страница

“I didn’t. It’s Caleb.”

“Are you a father to Caleb, is what I’m asking. Despite your gallivanting around the territories, trying to rid the world of the great viral menace, would you say that’s true?”

Suddenly Peter had the sense of having been perfectly maneuvered. It reminded him of playing chess with the boy: one minute he was drifting in the current of the game; the next he was boxed in, the end had come.

“It’s a simple question, Lieutenant.”

“I don’t know.”

Tifty regarded him another moment, then said, with a note of finality, “Thank you for your honesty. My advice to you would be to forget about all of this and go home and raise your boy. For his sake, as much as your own, I’m willing to give you a pass and let you and your friends go free, with the warning that speaking of our whereabouts will not, how shall I put this, bring happy things your way.”

Checkmate. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

“Consider it the greatest favor anybody’s ever done you. Go home, Mr. Jaxon. Live your life. You can thank me later.”

Peter’s mind scrambled for something to say that might convince the man otherwise. He gestured toward the drawing on the desk. “Those girls. You said you loved them.”

“I did. I do. That’s why I’m not going to help you. Call me sentimental, but I won’t have your death on my conscience.”

“Your conscience?”

“I do have one, yes.”

“You surprise me, you know that?” Peter said.

“Really? How do I surprise you?”

“I never thought Tifty Lamont would be a coward.”

If Peter had expected to get a rise, he saw none. Tifty rocked back in his chair, placed the tips of his fingers together, and looked at him coolly over the tops of his spectacles. “And you were thinking maybe that if you pissed me off, I’d tell you what you want to know?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Then you mistake me for somebody who cares what others think. Nice try, Lieutenant.”

“You said one of them was never found. I don’t see how you can sit here if she could still be alive.”

Tifty sighed indulgently. “Perhaps you didn’t get the news, but this isn’t a what-if world, Mr. Jaxon. Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around. Don’t get me wrong, I admire your optimism. Well, maybe not admire—that might be too strong a word. But I do understand it. There was a time when I wasn’t so very different. But those days are passed. What I have is this picture. I look at it every day. For now, that’s what I have to content myself with.”

Peter picked up the drawing again. The woman’s shining smile, the lift of her hair on an unseen breeze, the little girls, wide-eyed, hopeful like all children, waiting for their lives to unfold. He had no doubt that this picture was the center of Tifty’s life. Looking at it, Peter sensed the presence of a complex debt, allegiances, promises made. This picture: it wasn’t just a memorial; it was the man’s way of punishing himself. Tifty wished he’d died with them, in the field. How strange, to find himself feeling sorry for Tifty Lamont.

Peter returned the picture to its place on Tifty’s desk. “You said the trade was only part of what you do. You never told me what else.”

“I didn’t, did I?” Tifty removed his glasses and rose. “Fair enough. Come with me.”

Tifty manipulated another keypad and the heavy door swung open, revealing a spacious room with large metal cages stacked against the walls. The air was rank with a distinctly animal scent, of blood and raw meat, and the high-noted aroma of alcohol. The light glowed a cool, violety blue—“viral blue,” Tifty explained, with a wavelength of four hundred nanometers, at the very edge of the visible spectrum. Just enough, he told Peter, to keep them calm. The builders of the facility had understood their subjects well.

Michael and Lore had joined them. They passed through the room of cages and ascended a short flight of stairs. What awaited them was obvious; it was just a question of how it would be revealed.

“And this,” said Tifty, opening a panel to reveal two buttons, one green, one red, “is the observation deck.”

They were standing on a long balcony with a series of catwalks jutting over a metal shelf. Tifty pushed the green button. With a clatter of gears and chain, the shelf began to withdraw into the far wall, revealing a surface of hardened glass.

“Go on,” Tifty urged. “Look for yourselves.”

Peter and the others stepped onto the catwalk. Instantly one of the virals hurled itself upward against the glass, crashing into it with a thump before bouncing off and rolling back to the corner of its cell.

“Fuck… me,” Lore gasped.

Tifty joined them on the catwalk. “This facility was built with one purpose in mind: studying the virals. More accurately, how to kill them.”

The three of them were staring at the containers below. Peter counted nineteen of the creatures in all; the twentieth container was empty. Most appeared to be dopeys, barely reacting to their presence, but the one who had leapt at them was different—a full-blown female drac. She eyed them hungrily as they moved along the catwalks, her body tense and her clawed hands flexing.

“How do you get them?” Michael asked.

“We trap them.”

“With what, spinners?”

“Spinners are for amateurs. The gyrations immobilize them, but such devices are no good, really, unless you want to crisp them on-site. To take them alive, we use the same baited traps the builders of this facility used. A tungsten alloy, incredibly strong.”

Peter tore his gaze away from the drac. “So what have you learned?”

“Not as much as I’d like. The chest, the roof of the mouth. There’s a third soft spot at the base of the skull, though it’s very small. They bleed to death if you dismember them, but it’s not easy cutting through the skin. Heat and cold don’t seem to have much effect. We’ve tried a variety of poisons, but they’re too smart for that. Their sense of smell is incredibly acute, and they won’t eat anything we’ve laced no matter how hungry they get. One thing we do know is that they’ll drown. Their bodies are too dense to keep them afloat, and they can’t hold their breath very long. The longest any of them lasted was seventy-six seconds.”

“What if you starve them?” Michael asked.

“We tried that. It slows them down, and they enter a kind of sleep state.”

“And?”

“As far as we can tell, they can stay that way indefinitely. Eventually we stopped trying.”

Suddenly Peter understood what he was seeing. The work of the trade was really just a cover. The man’s true purpose was right here, in this room.

“Tifty, you are full of shit.”

Everybody turned. Tifty crossed his arms over his chest and gave Peter a hard look.

“You have something on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“You always meant to go back to Iowa. You just couldn’t figure out how.”

Tifty’s expression didn’t change. His face looked suddenly older, worn down by life. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“Is it?”

For five seconds the two men stared at each other. No one else said anything. Just when the silence had gone on too long, Michael broke the tension.

“I think she likes you, Peter.”

Fifteen feet below, the big drac was looking up at him, her head rolling lazily on her gimballed neck. She uncocked her jaw like someone yawning and drew back her lips to display her glinting teeth. These are for you.

Tifty stepped forward. “Our latest addition,” he said. “We’re all very proud of this one—we’ve been tracking her for weeks. It’s not often we get a full-blown drac anymore. We call her Sheila.”

“What are you going to do to her?” Michael asked.

“We haven’t decided. More or less the usual, I suppose. A little of this, a little of that. She’s too mean for the cage, though.”

Peter recalled Hollis’s punishment. “What’s the cage?”

Tifty’s face lit with a smile. “Ah,” he said.

Midnight. During the intervening hours, the three of them had been confined to a small, unused room, with one of Tifty’s men outside. Peter had finally managed to fall asleep when a buzzer sounded and the door opened.

“Come with me,” said Tifty.

“Where are we going?” Lore asked.

“Outside, of course.”

Why “of course”? thought Peter. But this seemed to be Tifty’s way. The man had a taste for drama. “Where’s Hollis?” Peter asked.

“Not to worry, he’ll be joining us.”

A cloudy, starless night. A truck was waiting for them, parked at the steps. They climbed into the bed while Tifty got into the cab with the driver. They weren’t guarded, but unarmed, in the dark, where would they go?

A few minutes passed before the truck drew up to an immense rectangular building, like an airplane hangar. Several other vehicles were present, including a large flatbed. Men milled about in torchlight, conspicuously armed with pistols and rifles, some smoking corn silk. From inside the building came a buzz of voices.

“Now you’ll see what we’re really all about,” said Tifty.

The building’s interior was a single cavernous space, lit by torches. A huge American flag, tattered with age, hung from the rafters. At the center was the cage, a domed structure approximately fifty feet in diameter with a hooked chain descending to the floor from its apex. Surrounding it were bleachers packed with men, all talking loudly, urgently waving Austins at a figure moving up and down the rows. At Tifty’s entrance a cheer shot up from the crowd, accompanied by a thunder of pounding feet. He did nothing to acknowledge this, escorting the three of them to an empty region on the lower tier of the bleachers, just a few feet from the crisscrossing bars of the cage.

“Five minutes till the betting closes!” a voice rang out. “Five minutes!”

Hollis took a place beside them. “Is this what I think it is?” Peter said.

He nodded tersely. “Pretty much.”

“They’re actually betting on the outcome?”

“Some are. With dopeys, mostly it’s just how many minutes it will take.”

“And you’ve actually done this.”

Hollis looked at him strangely. “Why wouldn’t I?”

The conversation was cut short as a second, louder cheer erupted. Peter looked up to see a metal crate being toted into the room on a forklift. A figure entered from the other side, walking with a manful swagger: Dunk. He was wearing heavy pads and carrying a pike; a sweeper’s mask rode on top of his head, leaving his tattooed face exposed. He raised his right fist and pumped it in the air, summoning a frenzied stamping from the bleachers. The forklift operator dropped the box in the middle of the cage and backed away while a second man hooked the latch to the chain. As he moved clear, Dunk stepped inside. The door was locked behind him.

A hush fell. Tifty, seated beside Peter, got to his feet, holding a megaphone. He cleared his throat and directed his voice over the crowd. “All please rise for the national anthem.”

Everyone clambered to their feet, placed their right hands over their hearts, and began to sing:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed, at the twilight’s last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

Peter, standing too, struggled to recall the words. It was a song from long ago—from the Time Before. Teacher had taught them in the Sanctuary. But the melody had been tricky and the words had made no sense his boyhood self could discern, and he’d never gotten the hang of it. He glanced at Michael, whose eyebrows lifted in shared surprise.

The last screeching note extinguished itself in another detonation of cheers. From the aural chaos emerged a repeated refrain, the beat established by thundering feet: Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk … Tifty let it run its course, then raised a hand for silence. He faced the cage again.

“Dunk Withers, do you stand ready?”

“Ready!”

“Then… start the clock!”

Pandemonium. Dunk drew his mask down, a horn sounded, the chain was pulled. For a moment nothing happened; then the dopey popped free of the crate and skittered up the cage with a quick, insectile movement, like a roach scurrying up a wall. It could have been looking for a way out or a vantage point for attack; Peter couldn’t tell. The crowd had its opinion. Instantly the cheers turned to boos and catcalls. At the top of the cage, the dopey grasped one of the bars with its feet and unfurled its body so that the top of its head was pointed toward the floor, arms held away from its sides. Dunk stood below it, shouting unhearable taunts and waving the pike, daring it to drop. Meat! the crowd chanted, clapping in syncopation. Meat! Meat! Meat!

The dopey seemed disoriented, almost dazed. Its bland gaze darted about the room randomly, as if the racket and commotion had short-circuited its instincts. Its features had a blurry appearance, as if its human characteristics had been dissolved by strong acid. For five more seconds it hung there, then ten.

Meat! Meat! Meat! Meat!

“Enough already.” Tifty rose to his feet, taking up the megaphone. “Throw in the meat!”

From without the bars huge, blood-saturated chunks were lobbed into the cage, landing with smeary splats. This was all it took. The creature released the steel bar and dove for the nearest hunk. The upper section of a cow’s leg: the dopey scooped it off the floor and shoved its jaws into the fatty folds, not so much drinking the fluids it contained as inhaling them. Two seconds and it was drained; the creature flung the desiccated remains away.

It swiveled toward Dunk. Now the man meant something. The dopey lowered itself to a crouch, balanced on its prehensile toes and massive splayed hands. The telltale cock of the head, the moment of regard.

It charged.

As the viral leapt toward him, arms extended, claws aiming for his throat, Dunk dropped to the floor and came up swinging the pike. The crowd went wild. Peter felt it too, the raw excitement of the contest surging in his veins. Dodging the pike, the dopey scampered back up the wall of the cage. No dazed retreat this time: its intentions were clear. When they came, they came from above. Twenty feet up, the dopey pushed itself backward off the bars, tucking its body into a headfirst aerial roll, twisting like a corkscrew as it descended in a rush of movement, and alighted on its feet ten feet from Dunk. The same engagement reversed: Dunk lunged; the dopey dropped. The pike speared the empty air above its head. As Dunk fell forward, carried by his own momentum, the dopey shot from its crouch and rammed headlong into his padded midsection, blasting him across the cage.

Dunk wound up propped upright against the bars, obviously shaken. The pike lay on the floor to his left; the mask had been torn away. Peter saw him reaching for the weapon, but the gesture was weak, his hand scrabbling with fogged inaccuracy. His chest was heaving like a bellows, a trickle of blood running from his nose to his upper lip. Why hadn’t the dopey taken him yet?

Because it was a trap. The dopey seemed to suspect as much; as it contemplated the fallen warrior, Peter could sense the creature’s interior conflict. The drive to kill versus an inchoate tactical suspicion that not all was as it appeared—a vestige, perhaps, of the human capacity for reason. Which would win out? The crowd was chanting Dunk’s name, trying to rouse him from his stupor. That or goad the dopey into action. Any death would do. Just by going into the cage, Dunk had already secured the most important victory: to be human. To deny the virals’ dominion over himself, over his fellows, over the world. The rest would fall as it fell.

Blood won.

The dopey went airborne. Simultaneously, the wandering hand found and secured the pike. As the creature fell, Dunk lifted the pike to a forty-five-degree angle, aligning it with the center of the dopey’s descending chest, bracing the butt against the floor between his knees.

Did the dopey know what was about to happen? Did it experience, in that sliver of time in which the outcome was ordained, an awareness of its race toward death? Was it happy? Was it sad? And then the tip of the pike found its mark, spearing the creature so thoroughly that life breathed out of it in a single, grand, instantaneous exhalation of death.

Dunk shoved the body to the side. Peter had joined the crowd on its feet. His energy was a part of theirs; it flowed in the collective current. His voice rang with the multitude:

Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk!

Dunk, Dunk, Dunk, Dunk!

Why was this different? Peter wondered, while another part of his brain refused to care, adrift in his unanticipated elation. He had faced the virals on the rampart, in cities and deserts, forests and fields. He had dropped seven hundred feet into a crawling cave. He had given himself to death’s likelihood hundreds of times, and yet Dunk’s courage was something more, something purer, something redeeming. Peter glanced at his friends. Michael, Hollis, Lore: there was no mistaking it. They felt just as he did.

Only Tifty looked different. He’d gotten on his feet like the rest of them, but his face was emotionless. What was he seeing in his mind’s eye? Where had he gone? He had gone to the field. Not even the cage could lighten this burden. Here was Peter’s opening. He waited for the cheering to die. In the stands, bets were being counted and paid.

“Let me go in there.”

Tifty studied him with one raised eyebrow. “Lieutenant, what are you asking?”

“A wager. My life against your promise to take me to Iowa. Not just tell me where this city is. You have to go with me.”

“Peter, this is not a good idea,” Hollis warned. “I know what you’re feeling. We call it cage fever.”

“That’s not what this is.”

Tifty folded his arms over his chest. “Mr. Jaxon, how dumb do I look? Your reputation precedes you. I don’t doubt a dopey is well within your abilities.”

“Not a dopey,” he said. “Sheila.”

Tifty weighed him with his eyes. Behind him, Michael and Lore said nothing. Maybe they understood what he was doing, and maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were too dumbstruck by his apparent loss of his faculties to formulate a response. It didn’t matter either way.

“All right, Lieutenant, it’s your funeral. Not that there’ll be anything to bury.”

Peter was escorted to a small room at the rear of the arena by Tifty and two of his men. Michael and Hollis were with him; Lore waited in the stands. The room was bare except for a long table displaying armored pads and an array of weapons. Peter suited up. He had initially been concerned that the pads would slow him down too much, but they were surprisingly light and pliable. The mask was a different matter; Peter couldn’t see how it would be any help, and it cut down his peripheral vision. He put it aside.

Now for armaments. He was permitted two. No firearms were allowed, only piercing weapons. Blades, crossbows, pikes and swords and axes of various lengths and weights. The cross was tempting, but in such close quarters it would take too long to reload. Peter chose a five-foot pike with a barbed steel tip.

As for the second: he cast his eyes around for something that would serve his purpose. In the corner of the room was a galvanized trash can. He removed the lid and examined it.

“Somebody give me a rag.”

A rag was produced. Peter wet it with spit and rubbed the inside of the lid. His reflection began to emerge—not with any distinctiveness, barely more than a blurry shape; but it would have to suffice.

“This is what I want.”

Tifty’s men burst into laughter. A trash can lid! Some pathetic little shield against a full-blown drac! Did he intend to commit suicide?

“Your foolishness is one thing, Lieutenant,” said Tifty. “But this. I can’t allow it.”

Michael looked at him with a quizzical frown. “Like… Las Vegas?”

Peter gave him the barest nod, turned to Tifty again. “You said anything in the room.”

“That I did.”

“Then I’m ready.”

He was led into the arena. The crowd erupted in roars and stamping, but the sound was different than it had been with Dunk. Their allegiances had reversed. Peter wasn’t one of them; they were excited to watch him die, this arrogant soldier of the Expeditionary who dared to think he could take on a drac. The box was already in position at the center of the ring. As Peter approached, he thought he could see it shaking. He heard, from the bleachers, “All bets now closing!”

“Not too late to back out,” Hollis said. “We could make a run for it.”

“What kind of odds are they giving me?”

“Ten to one you survive thirty seconds. A hundred to one you make it a minute.”

“You get one down?”

“Took you to win in forty-five. I’ll be set for life.”

“The usual arrangement, okay?” Peter didn’t need to elaborate: If I’m bitten but survive, don’t let me. Make it fast.

“You don’t have to worry.”

“Michael? Hold him to that.”

The man’s face was bereft. “Jesus, Peter. You did it once. Maybe it was something else that slowed them down. Did you think about that?”

Peter looked at the box in the middle of the ring. It was shuddering like an engine. “Thanks—I’m thinking about it now.”

They shook hands. A grave moment, but they had been through similar ones before. Peter stepped inside the cage; one of Tifty’s men sealed the door behind him. Hollis and Michael took their places on the bleachers with Lore. Tifty rose with his megaphone.

“Lieutenant Jaxon of the Expeditionary, do you stand ready?”

A chorus of boos. Peter did his best to tune them out. He had been running on pure conviction, but now that the moment was here, his body had begun to doubt his mind. His heart was racing, his palms damp. The pike felt absurdly heavy in his hand. He filled his chest with air. “Ready!”

“Then… start the clock!”

In the aftermath, Peter was to learn that the contest had lasted a grand total of twenty-eight seconds. This seemed both long and short; it had happened slowly and all at once, a blur of events that didn’t correspond to the ordinary course of time.

What he would remember was this:

The drac’s explosion from the box, like water shot from a hose; her majestic airborne leap, a force of undiluted nature, straight to the top of the cage, and then three quick ricochets as she bounded side to side, too fast for Peter’s eyes to follow; the picture in his mind’s eye of her anticipated release and the arc her body would employ as she fell upon him, and then the moment of its occurrence, exactly as he’d foreseen; the blast of force as their bodies collided, one stationary, one in headlong flight; the drac sending him careening across the cage, and his body—breathless, broken, his own for a moment or two more but no longer—rolling and rolling and rolling.

He was on his stomach. The trash can lid and pike were gone. He rolled onto his back and scrabbled backward on his hands and feet, and then he found what was left of the pike. The pole had snapped two feet from its pointed steel end. He wrapped it with his fist and rose. He would go down swinging; he would die on his feet at least. On a distant planet, crowds were cheering. The viral was moving toward him in a manner he would have described as leisurely, almost sauntering. She cocked her head and opened her jaws to give him a good, long look at her teeth.

Their eyes met.

Really met. A bona fide, soul-searching gaze. The moment locked, and in that moment Peter felt his mind plunging into hers: its sensations and memories, thoughts and desires, the person she’d been and the pain of the terrible thing she’d become. Her expression had softened, her posture relaxed a discernible notch. The ferocity of her expression contained something else now: a profound melancholy. A human being was still inside her, like a tiny flame in the dark. Don’t look away, Peter told himself. Whatever you do, don’t break her gaze. The pike was in his hand.

He took one step, then another. Still she did not move. He felt a kind of quiet shuddering within himself, not of fear but of longing; this was what she wanted. The crowd had silenced. It was as if the two of them were alone in some immense, still space. An empty church. An abandoned theater. A cave. He drew back the pike, placing his free hand on her shoulder for balance. Please, her eyes said.

Then it was over.

The crowd was absolutely still. Peter realized he was shaking. Something irrevocable had happened, beyond knowing. He looked down at the body. He had felt her soul leaving her. It had brushed him like a breeze, only the breeze was inside him, made of words. Thank you, thank you. I am free.

Tifty was waiting for him when he exited the cage.

“Her name wasn’t Sheila,” Peter said. “It was Emily.”

Tifty said nothing, wearing an expression of pure bewilderment.

“She was seventeen when she was taken up. Her last memory was of kissing a boy.”

“I don’t understand.”

Hollis, Michael, and Lore were coming down the bleachers. Peter moved toward them, stopped, then turned back to Tifty.

“You want to know how to kill them?”

The man nodded, slack-jawed.

“Look them in the eye.”

Amy’s mind was full of him. Full of Carter and the woman, whose name was Rachel. Rachel Wood.

Amy felt it, felt it all. She felt and saw and knew. The woman’s arms around him, pulling him down and down. The taste of pool water, like demon’s breath. The soft thunk as they reached the bottom, their bodies entwined like lovers’.

How Carter had loved her. That was what Amy felt most keenly: his love. The man’s life had stopped right there, at the bottom of the pool, his mind forever trapped in a loop of sorrow. Oh please, let me, thought Anthony Carter. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead. And then the bubbles rising as the woman took the first breath, her lungs filling with the awful water, the deep spasm of death moving through her; and then the letting go.

His was the sadness at the center of the world. The Chevron Mariner: that’s what this place was. It was the very beating heart of grief.

Blood was dripping from her as she made her way aft across the tilted deck. Amy could feel the change coming, a rumbling in the hills above. It would sweep down upon her like an avalanche. It would obliterate her, fashion her anew. She descended into the bowels of the ship, its maze of halls, its listing passages of pipe. Her feet sloshed through standing water the color of rust. Rainbow shimmers danced upon its surface. She moved by instinct. She homed in. She was the receiver to Carter’s beacon, which inexorably drew her down and down and down.

The pump room.

They were hanging everywhere, filling the space with their glow. They clung to every surface. They lay curled upon the floor like children. Here was the reservoir, the lair. The nest of Anthony Carter, his doleful legions suspended in abeyance. Where are you? she thought, and as she did her body shook, and in the wake of this convulsive jolt came a massive tightening in her abdomen, as if she’d been clenched by a giant fist. She staggered, fighting to remain upright. Blots of blackness swelled across her vision. It was happening. It was happening now.

I am here.

—Where? Where are you? Please, I think that I am… dying.

Come to me, Amy. Come to me come to me come to me …

A door stood before her. Had she opened it? She stumbled forward, down the narrow passageway beyond. The floor was slick with oil, the blood of the earth, time’s distillate, compressed by a planet. She came to a second portal. T1, it was marked: Tank No. 1. She knew what lay beyond. It had ever been thus. With all her strength she gripped the rusted ring and turned. Space flew open wide around her, as if she’d entered an immense cathedral.

And there he was. Anthony Carter, Twelfth of Twelve. Wizened and small, a wisp of a thing, no larger than the man he’d been and, in his heart, still was. A being of refusal made flesh. He lay on the floor, in the waste of the world; slowly he unfurled himself, rising to meet her. Carter the Sorrowful, the One Who Could Not, locked in the prison that he himself had made.

“Help me,” said Amy, a last great shudder moving through her, taking her over, and she fell into his arms.

* * *

And then she was somewhere else.

She was under a highway overpass. Amy knew this place, or so it felt. Its sights and sounds and smells were laden with a weight of memory. The echoing roar of cars passing overhead; the click-click-click of the roadway’s joints; the drifting trash and grime and heavy, smoke-choked air. Amy was standing at the edge of the road, holding a cardboard sign: HUNGRY, ANYTHING WILL HELP, GOD BLESS you. Traffic streamed by, cars, trucks, no one even looking her way. She was dressed in rags; her hands were black with grime. Her stomach was a stone of cold emptiness. The heedless vehicles flew past. Why would no one stop?

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14