Last Man Standing (Book 2): Cordyceps (8 page)

"Don't try to talk," he says, his voice low and calm. "It's time to listen, Terrence." He looks down into Lassiter's wide, terrified, bloodshot eyes, staring at his own useless feet as blood seeps from the wounds. "Don't worry, you won't bleed to death. I know what I'm doing."

Whelan lowers himself into a pew and crosses one leg over the other. "Now, do you know what's going to happen next? No? Well, Terrence, you're going to die." He rests his hand on his thigh, palm facing up, takes the bloodied knife and runs a long line across his hand, wincing with the pain. Lassiter stares at the cut with tears in his eyes, his mouth opening and closing silently.

"You know you'll be the first man I ever killed, Terrence. Directly, at least. You know, face to face. All those years as an agent and I never had to take a life. Never had to slip poison into a drink. Never had to take out a double agent. I know, right? I wasn't exactly James Bond." He opens his fist and shows Lassiter the glass vial. "Tonight you made me kill millions, and none of them will be clean deaths."

He tosses the vial into his cut hand and crushes it in his fist. A little blood runs down his wrist and stains his white shirt sleeve red. "Millions of terrified people, Terrence. Chased. Beaten to death. Torn to shreds by their own loved ones. So," he says, relaxing in the pew," I think it's only fair that their commander in chief joins them."

Whelan blinks a couple of times and shakes his head. He can already feel the effects of the
Cordyceps
coursing through his veins. He feels lightheaded and a little sleepy, just as he does whenever he sits in a meeting after a scotch at lunch. "It's kicking in, Terrence. Not long to wait now. It'll all be over soon."

Lassiter reaches up to the pulpit and grabs at the corner of a copy of the Bible until it falls down to his chest. He hugs it close, as if it might offer some kind of protection. Whelan chuckles. "You really thought you were serving God, Terrence? You really thought God wanted you to kill millions of His people? No, Terrence, you weren't serving God. You were only serving yourself. God would be disgusted with you. He'd be ashamed to have let a self-righteous maggot like you soil his creation." He feels a tingling in his limbs, and a touch of vertigo kicks in. "He's going to let you die down here in the darkness, Terrence. You'll never feel the sun on your face again. That's your reward, Terrence. That's your punishment... Oh... I feel it. It's time, Terrence. I hope you're ready to face whatever comes next."

Beside the door of the situation room the young guard stands to attention, struggling to stay awake in the half light. For the last half hour he's been counting the floor tiles, trying to stay alert by working out the volume of water it would take to flood the hallway up to the ceiling, assuming the floor tiles are six inches to a side. So far he's—

He has his gun out of its holster moments after hearing the scream. It sounds like a wounded animal, more a roar than a scream. He rushes in the direction of the chapel, bursting through the door just in time to see Samuel Whelan lower his head to the body in front of the pulpit. He freezes in terror as Whelan takes a bite, and comes back up with a length of stringy, bloody flesh stretching from his teeth down to the body.

The guard puts him down in two shots, the first through his back and the second a clean shot through the back of the head. Whelan slumps to the ground like a rag doll, and the guard rushes forward and turns white as a sheet as he sees the President beneath him.

He mumbles a few words into his radio, and moments later a siren begins to wail through the facility, echoing through the halls, locking down each section of the site and allowing only guards free movement. He'll just wait at the door and keep the room secure until backup arrives. He'll—

Beneath Whelan's body the President begins to stir. It's just a twitch at first, but then he struggles to pull himself up. The guard rushes back towards the pulpit, desperately struggling to remember the first aid training he was given during basic. How do you treat a neck wound? Apply pressure, right? Raise the head above the body?

He's only a few feet from the President when he realizes first aid won't do any good.

President Terrence Lassiter opens and closes his mouth, letting out a strained snarl from his collapsed throat. He locks his bloodshot eyes on the guard and reaches his hands out towards him, desperately trying to attack but held back by the weight of Whelan's body covering his legs.

The guard raises his gun without a second thought and calmly puts a bullet through the President's left eye. The man slumps to the ground, and as he falls the Bible slips from his chest and lands with a splash in the spreading pool of blood surrounding his head like a halo.

Warren hunts through the AM band with a somber expression, visibly tensing whenever he finds something other than static. He's wearing earphones to pick up the weaker, more distant signals, and reporting to us whenever he finds something. In the last hour he's tuned into more than a dozen broadcasters from all across the country - KAAY out of Little Rock; KVOX, Fargo; WMVP, Chicago, to name a few - and they're each reporting the same thing. There's been a widespread outbreak in every state we've heard from, and while we can scarcely believe it it seems to have been intentional. Five of the stations reported sightings of aircraft above towns and cities before everything went to shit.

Bishop has been weeping in the corner for the last twenty minutes, and I don't blame him at all. A little while ago Warren picked up a faint signal from WJOX, a 50kW sports radio station out of Birmingham, Alabama, his home town. The DJ reported in a thick, slow southern drawl that a DC10 had dropped what looked like water across a huge swathe of the city, including the broadcast studio itself. We held the signal for ten minutes, and by the time it finally cut out the DJ was begging for help as the infected swarmed in from the street through the broken window.

Bishop's family is long gone, thank God, but I still understand how he feels. I felt the exact same way when I stood on the Verrazano Narrows bridge and looked back at the ruins of Brooklyn. It's not so much the destruction. That's just the most obvious aspect of the tragedy.

No, the biggest tragedy is learning that everything you ever knew is forever gone. It's the thought that no matter how long you live you really can't ever go home again. The city might still remain. Bishop's old high school might still stand, and his childhood home might look just the same as it always did. The same rusty gate out front. The same creaking floorboard on the third step up the staircase. The same old tire swing in the back yard. But none of it matters without the people. Without the people they're just buildings.

So now, like me, he's set adrift. Even if we can somehow survive this, whatever it is. Even if we can get through it unharmed until the very last of the infected die away, where is there to go? To where would we return after our victory? Soldiers at least get to go home after surviving a brutal war, but for us there's nowhere to return to. We've not only lost our future, but our connection to the past.

"Tom?" Warren tugs at my sleeve. "Help me out here, man, this signal's real weak. Here, take an ear." He hands over one of his earbuds, and carefully plays with the dial to try to hunt down the signal. I can hear a voice, just barely. "You hearing that?"

I nod, and press the earbud deeper into my ear in an effort to pick it up more clearly.

"— the order from up top a couple hours ago, but something didn't seem right so we held off."

"That's it, Warren. I got it, don't touch the dial."

Another voice comes through. Sounds like she's from somewhere out west. "Captain, when you say you got orders, where exactly did they come from? Is there still a command structure in place?"

"Well not really, ma'am, at least not as far as I know. The way I understand it the orders come direct from the President. Or, you know, someone at the base near Camp David, anyhow. All I know is that we've been speaking to a man by the name of Whelan these past two weeks. I'm told he's the boss at the CIA, and he had all the right authorization codes to order an airdrop, so we went along with it."

The woman returns. "And can you tell us exactly what happened tonight, in your own words?"

"Yes, ma'am. I came on shift 'bout two hours ago to find we'd received a shipment of vaccine from... well, I don't know, to tell the truth, but it was delivered in a kinda gas truck by folks who identified themselves as army, and they had all the right ID, so we let 'em fill three of our Bambi buckets. They handed me orders to make the drop at midnight local time, and—"

"I'm sorry, Captain, Bambi buckets?"

"That's right, ma'am. That's what we call the, ah, the water containers we use to make drops over wildfires. They're just collapsible open topped buckets. We usually dip them down into Kirby Lake to fill 'em up, dump them on a fire then head back to fill 'em up again." He coughs. "So anyway, they gave me orders to make all three drops at the same time over Abilene, which is... well, I don't know, something about it didn't scan quite right, then I noticed the guys pumping the vaccine were wearing respirators. Just didn't seem above board, you know?"

"And Captain," the woman asks, "did you question the orders at the time?"

"No, ma'am, I didn't. There was just something off about them, you know, and the way things have been recently I didn't want to find myself in a fight with a bunch of tooled up creeps, you know? So yeah, I just took the orders and sent them on their way, then I tried to put in a call in to Whelan over there at Site R, but I couldn't get through to the switchboard until gone half past midnight, when they told me that all orders were rescinded until further notice. They wouldn't tell me what the hell was goin' on, but they just warned me to stay the hell away from those Bambi buckets. Of course, then we started to hear about what was going on elsewhere. All I can say is thank Christ we held off. I just don't think I could have lived with myself if I'd dropped that stuff on my family. Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?"

"It doesn't, Captain. I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with us tonight, and I'm sure everyone in Abilene thanks you for your caution. God bless, Captain."

"Well, thank you, ma'am, I appreciate it."

"That was Captain Roy Walken of the Abilene Fire Department, whose brave actions tonight surely saved the lives of more than a hundred thousand residents of Abilene, Texas." She pauses for a moment, as if to collect her thoughts, and lets out a heavy sigh. "Folks, it's been a rough night here in the Lone Star State, and all across the country. We don't know much, and details are still emerging by the minute, but we know that the nation has been dealt an almost killing blow with widespread attacks on dozens of cities and hundreds of towns from coast to coast. We're also hearing rumors - and I'd like to make it clear that they are, at present, unconfirmed - that an attempted coup at the government facility Site R has resulted in the death of Acting President Lassiter. We're doing everything we can to firm up that information for you right now, but right now we can't seem to raise contact with the facility. As it stands we're..." The voice suddenly fades out.

"What did you do? Get it back!" I demand.

Warren shrugs. "I didn't do anything, the battery died." He sighs. "I got some more in the car, but unless somebody wants to ring the dinner bell for the dozen or so hungry fuckers down on the street it'll have to wait until morning."

Over in the corner Vee's trying to coax Bishop out of his depression with a candy bar, and strangely enough it seems to be doing the trick. He's stopped crying, at least. "Hey, guys?" I call out quietly. Vee looks up while Bishop struggles with the wrapper of a Three Musketeers bar. "Word is the President's dead."

I don't know what I expected. Joy? Relief? I've no idea, but I didn't expect anger. Vee looks furious, as if she's personally offended that she won't get the chance to kill him herself. She makes a fist and punches the wall beside Bishop, making the big guy flinch away from her and drop his candy bar. "Fucking piece of shit coward prick, dying in his bunker like a God damned cut price Hitler. I wanted to string him up above a pit full of infected, hand a knife to the families of everyone who died in that camp and watch him beg for fucking mercy.
Jesus
," she sighs and slumps against the wall beside Bishop.

Warren and I exchange a look. "Warren, let's never get on her bad side, OK?"

He chuckles. "Hey, you don't have to tell me, brother. Couple weeks ago she pushed a guy off the roof of a 7-Eleven for bleeding on her boots."

"Infected, right?"

He shrugs and gives me a sly smile. "Well, she said he was, but..."

"He was infected," Vee testily insists. "I just really loved those boots, OK? Had to throw the damned things out once they got covered in infected blood." She looks down at her heavy standard issue boots and breaks the slightest hint of a smile. "This apocalypse has been murder on my wardrobe."

Warren smiles and tucks the dead radio back in his duffel. "Well kids, I'd love to stay up all night and regale you with gory stories about the trail of dead Lieutenant Reyes has left in her wake, but I think it's a good idea for us all to get a little shut eye. Come morning we have to make some big decisions, and I don't want you guys all cranky and uptight while we're planning how to stay alive." He lifts himself from the floor and hikes his rifle up over his shoulder. "I'll take first watch."

I glance at my wrist, as if the time of night really matters any more. "I think I'll join you for a while if you don't mind. Don't think I'll be able to get much sleep, knowing what's outside."

Warren nods. "Yeah, it takes a little getting used to, I'll grant you that. Come on, I think I've got a little scotch in my pack. That should help knock you out."

"You good, Vee?" I look over to Reyes to find her smiling, leaning against Bishop's large, pillow-like shoulders. "Yeah, go ahead. This might be the best night's sleep I'll get in weeks. Bishop here's like a big teddy bear."

Bishop flashes a cheerful grin, his mouth surrounded with a ring of melted chocolate, and shuffles his ass forward until he's resting comfortably against the wall. "Huh huh," he chuckles, closing his eyes. "Teddy bear."

"Good night, guys." I grab my jacket, turn the knob on the lamp until the light fades, and follow Warren down the corridor back to the front of the building, glad for the opportunity to take a little fresh air.

"After a month locked in that box this is something I'll never take for granted again," I say, heading straight for the window.

"What's that?"

"Air. Just... fresh damned air, whenever I feel like taking a breath. You don't miss the breeze on your face until it's gone, you know? All I want to do now is go live in the middle of a big, open field and just live under the stars, feeling the breeze."

Warren smiles. "Me, I just wanna get a nice little yacht and find some island somewhere. I don't care where, as long as it doesn't stink of dead people." He tugs a bottle from the depths of his duffel and tosses it over. Lagavulin, 16 years old. "Thanks." I nod appreciatively. "Hey, this is good stuff."

"Yeah? I boosted it from a liquor store out in Valley Lake. I'm not a big liquor drinker, to be honest. I just grabbed the bottle with the biggest price tag."

"Good call." I unscrew the cap and take a long swig, enjoying the warmth as it coats the sides of my throat like honey. "This is my drink, when I can afford to switch from beer." I hand it back, and try to resist the urge to laugh at Warren's expression as he takes a gulp of the burning liquor.

"Jesus," he groans, wiping his mouth. "People drink this shit for fun? Gimme a cold beer any day of the week."

I take the bottle back from him. "It's an acquired taste, but if you ever want to get drunk again I'd advise you to acquire it. I get the feeling the future isn't so bright for cold beer." I take another swig and lower myself down against the wall by the window. I'm already feeling the whiskey kick in after a month without touching a drop. "So what's your story, Warren? How'd you end up on the wrong end of the apocalypse?"

He grabs an office chair in the darkness, rolling it over by the window so he can see out to the street. "My story? Well, it doesn't take much telling. Typical army brat. I spent a lot of time following my dad around the world as a kid. Little time in Germany. Couple of years at Okinawa.
Far
too much time in Guam. Soldiering is the family business, so when the time came I joined up. Trained as a sniper at Fort Benning, then it was straight off to Afghanistan, then Syria. Three tours, 107 confirmed kills." He reaches over and takes back the bottle. "I never really cared for it, to be honest. I always wanted to be a firefighter, but what are you gonna do? Turns out I'm just really good at killing people from far away." He winces again at the burn, then sighs. "Anyway, I took an IED hit near Damascus just back in March. They shipped me off back home, and I'd just about had the last piece of shrapnel pulled out of my ass in Maryland when everything started to go south. I checked myself out, found a ride north, hooked up with Vee's unit from Fort Dix and the rest is history. We spent the last month on cleanup duty, trying and failing to get some kind of handle on this mess."