Medora Wars (28 page)

“Shh, shh, don’t fight it. Don’t be afraid. You’ll understand soon. For now, yes you are our hostage.”

She continued looking up at him, mystified as Malik took her radio from off the desk and turned it off.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked, a terrified ripple formed across her forehead.

“I will if you ask me again,” Atash said, stepping over her. “How many people are on the outside of this door?”

“Um, um,” she said, looking back at the small group of armed men. “It’s just a hallway, but it gets patrolled every five minutes by two soldiers.”

“I’m going to find out in about thirty seconds if you’re lying to me,” Atash said as he removed his fiber optic camera from his backpack and threaded the rubbery end under the door.

“I’m not lying!” she screamed.

“Gentle, now, gentle my dear,” Atash said, putting his eye next to the other end of the camera. He closed one eye and held his breath for a moment, and then looked back at the soldier. “What’s your name?”

Her face had drained of color as she looked around. “Just, fuck off.”

“Your anger does nothing to me. What’s your name?” he said, kindly.

“Private Patel.”

“Private Patel, thank you for telling the truth.” Atash stood back up and opened the door. “It is important, my brothers, that we do not start our gunfire without identifying where the warheads are kept. Do you all understand?” He received his typical quiet response from the men and motioned for them to move out the door. “We will take one hostage per every brother, after that, we will kill silently. Malik, I’d like you to escort our witness.”

Malik walked back to Elise and looked down at her as she hung her face toward the ground. The back of her hair was matted with dirt, and the clothes of her entire backside had crusted over with blackened blood. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing the side of her neck from behind. “Walk in front of me.”

The group moved out the door and into a darkened hallway, with Atash holding Private Patel in front. “If you say a single word at this point in time, I will have to swiftly end your life,” he whispered in her ear as they turned a corner and saw two soldiers at the far end of a new hallway, speaking softly to each other.

Atash motioned to two men from behind him, who swiftly ran with their backs low along the walls of the hallway. They shot taser guns at the soldiers, who dropped to the ground almost simultaneously. As they gathered the men and began to tie them up, Elise turned her face toward Malik.

“Malik,” she whispered. She waited for him to respond but heard nothing. “Malik, I will kill Atash if you want me to.”

“Shut up,” he quietly said into her ear.

“You don’t have to be the one to do it. If you give me the chance, I can do it.”

“I would’ve killed him long ago if I wanted him dead.”

“I know you’re very far down this rabbit hole.”

“I will shoot you right now if you don’t shut your mouth!” he said briskly, with spit flying from the side of his mouth.

“You can still come out of this hole, it doesn’t matter how deep you are. Do you see that?”

He simply squeezed her neck in response, slowly collapsing her airway. She managed to push out another breath before passing out. “Save us.”

Chapter Twenty Four: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Stark looked down at the new corpse that Dave had brought in. He had lost count of how many of the bodies he had explored since they had been marooned. It was a teenaged boy with long, black hair that lay beside a mound of discarded bodies that had collected in the corner of the loading bay. His chest and stomach were covered with black tattoos, with piercings along his left ear and into his face, clinging to both nostrils and lips. Both the front of his thighs had large open wounds running the length of the muscle but were closed off by the same shining metallic mesh that Stark had seen over and over again.

“They’re healing themselves now,” Stark said pointedly.

“See that stab wound on his chest?” Dave said.

Stark ran his gloved hand over a four inch, superficial wound above the boy’s nipple. “Yes…”

“That’s where I tried to stab it through with a blade, but it just stopped.” Dave drove his pointed fingers into his palm. “I couldn’t even run it through.” He wiped his sweaty mouth with the back of his hand. “I had to use a bullet to his head, at least those still work.” Dave walked off and up the spiral staircase that led to the catwalks above the vast floor of the power plant.

Stark’s radio blared with Douglas’ voice, “Dr. Stark, would you mind coming to the roof?” The crew had recently found a small passageway above the catwalks that opened up to a small hatch on the roof.

“Yeah, I’ll be up in just a minute.” Stark clicked off the radio and looked down again at the teenager’s leg. “What are you?” he said, and then turned around.

Stark climbed up through the catwalks, past Michaels, who was lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. He had finally come to the conclusion that there was no way their unit was going to get extraction, and that the only way to stop the horde was one last desperate attempt.
The entire situation had become such that the solution is simple, an annihilating explosion,
he thought.
He almost delighted in the simplicity of it given that there was so much now that he didn’t understand about the virus. His anger at Rambert’s reluctance to drop a nuclear bomb had long grown into indifference.

He thought of Beckfield’s words:
it’s the much less remembered act of cutting your losses and continuing in adversity that gets no praise. It’s men like me that change the world.
Stark thought of the march of the millions of the infected dead outside the walls and realized that Rambert’s way of thinking had become extinct.
There’s no more room for subtlety and patience anymore, broad strokes of change are they only thing that will make a difference now,
he thought. Stark then felt the need to flee from the city, not for his own survival but from excitement of starting a new kind of frontier.

He wriggled his way up a narrow staircase and out into the warm wind of midday. The sky was clear except for the continual screaming of fighter jets above. They crisscrossed the sky in pairs, dropping missiles into the sea of human bodies that spread out into all horizons around him.

Douglas stood at the edge of the building with one foot on the railing, looking out with binoculars. There was a sound of pattering footsteps below, unrelenting with echoing off the concrete walls.

“What’s going on, Captain?” Stark sidled up beside him and looked out.

“Look out there. Just watch them for a few minutes,” Douglas said without taking his gaze from the binoculars.

“Okay.” As far as he could see, it was the same city pulsating with movement from every building top, all streets and every low alleyway. He saw bombings at the edge of the city erupting with smoke and fire. He now guessed from the continual firestorm in the distance that the horde had broken past the El Paso border. He squinted his eyes through the binoculars and laughed. “We finally have a legitimate reason to keep people from crossing the border. Makes everything before the outbreak seem… trivial. The stupid shit we cared about…”

“Don’t look out there,” Douglas said, not seeming to hear him, “look right around us. Around the building.”

“What?” Stark put the binoculars down and peered over the edge of the building, which was surrounded in every direction. The horde was hugging the walls but moved parallel to the building in continuous movement. There were concentric circles of the infected flowing in an outward pattern from the building, moving in neatly confined single file rows. It was a separate horde that hugged the building, with a gap that formed distinctly from the infected that crawled around the rest of the city.

“They seem to be very interested in us,” Douglas said. “It’s like they’re guarding us or something. None of them try to break into the building—they’re just marooning us from the rest of the city. We couldn’t get out of this building if we had triple the artillery that we’re carrying right now.” He peered down at where they had last left the shock tanks, which were now completely saturated with the infected as they swarmed around them with even footsteps.

“They don’t stop for anything. They’re not even looking around to investigate their environment. They just keep moving and moving...” Stark said.

“They might know what they’re doing. You think they’re just coincidentally imprisoning the one team that was sent into the city to destroy them all?” Douglas asked, taking the binoculars back.

“But they’re not intelligent. They’re no smarter than a virus; they only know one thing—which is to infect others in order to reproduce. That’s it,” Stark said.

“Then why in the hell aren’t they attacking us? They’re doing a hell of a lot of damage in El Paso right this minute. I just talked to my superior out there who says that they don’t just blindly flood the streets like easy targets. They’re… patient. They’ll wait and hide in buildings until our soldiers go in between, and then they fall out on top of them like fucking guerilla warfare. These bastards know what’s going on. They’re not just out to eat our flesh, they’re at war with us, and they know it.”

“But, it doesn’t make sense, each one is still dumb as a rock—” Stark stopped mid-sentence. “Wait, I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner.”

“What?”

“Have you ever heard of emergence?” Stark asked.

“No.” Douglas looked back as he saw Dave and Michaels come up from the hatch below.

“I can’t believe this. We’re actually witnessing something pretty amazing,” Stark continued.

“What’s going on?” Dave said from behind.

“It’s like ah, ah, a snowflake,” Stark said.

“What is like a snowflake?” Dave asked.

“The infected down there. Just listen.”

“The hell are you talking about?” Michaels asked.

Stark continued, “A single snowflake is a complex pattern of crystallized water. But how and where was it made? Microscopic water droplets just float around in complete chaos up in the sky until the perfect conditions of temperature and pressure are met, then, those water droplets… coalesce into perfect symmetry.”

“Okay…” Michaels said in drawn out doubt.

“Organization from chaos. An organized entity
emerges
from a more primitive source of interactions of simpler entities. This is emergence. This thing is found all over nature.”

“You think this is happening with the twenty million infected people out there? Not only are they immune to electromagnetic waves but they’re
onto
us now?” Douglas walked away from the edge of the building and lay on the soft gravel of the roof. “Fuck me.”

“Don’t tell me there is some sort of queen bee that we need to kill.” Michaels snorted.

“No, no it’s not like that. Just think of a school of fish that goes round and around without losing a single fish to the shark, the school does this without an actual individual fish directing the movement. The pattern simply emerges from the smaller interactions of the individual fish, which makes an overall beneficial strategy to the school as a whole.” Stark swallowed and stopped for a moment, thinking about what he was saying. “The whole city of infected is like one
being
now. That’s why it will attack our troops in El Paso but hold us prisoner here. It is strategizing. The entire mass collects data from every footstep, from every small movement of each individual. By the small collisions and reactions of the individuals, the whole mass takes it into account, and adjusts in order to survive.”

“Why are they doing this now?” Dave asked.

“It was our pulse that we sent out. It must have stimulated the virus to adapt, making it much more agile and better equipped to collaborate with other host bodies. I mean, this is all speculation, but it’s my best guess at what’s happening.”

“Holy shit,” Michaels pronounced and walked away to retire to the catwalks beneath the roof. “Good luck everybody,” she said as she walked backward down the hatch and disappeared.

“The whole thing has to be wiped out in one swoop. It’s the only way,” Stark said with his eyes glued outward.

“Well, the Army and Marines are about to mobilize into the city,” Douglas said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re coming in. Head to head combat.”

“But we’re completely outnumbered.”

“Yeah, about twenty to one. The airstrikes aren’t doing shit and they’re all spilling into El Paso now.”

“When are they coming in?” Stark asked.

“Uh, now.”

“But, this doesn’t make any sense. They’re just going to get overrun.”

“Well, tell your fancy President that, because World War Three is happening out there right now.” Douglas continued looking up at the sky as if he were daydreaming.

“Isn’t he your President, too?” Dave said, long ago dropping the military formality with Douglas.

“As soon as he gets a country back, then I’ll start calling him the President. What is he now? President of an underground lair somewhere like fucking Lex Luthor?” Douglas said.

“I am going to call him. I’m going to tell him to get us the hell out of here, and to nuke this place back to hell.” Stark swiftly turned around and lowered himself to the building below, leaving Douglas and Dave in silence.

“Hey, wait!” Dave yelled out as Stark disappeared past the floor of the roof. “What are they doing with us? Why don’t they just overtake this place and kill us?”

After a small pause, Stark’s voice echoed up from the hatch, “I think we’re hostages.”

*****

The new host of Ciudad Juárez was clustered in between a main military front that lined the almost twenty mile span of the border between El Paso and the rolling, dusty hills on the west side of the city. The horde curled and rippled, constantly moving in incremental steps. An arm of the horde moved northward from the border, feeling out how far the U.S. military front extended. It pushed slightly up the small mountains in the west, understanding that the enemy was accumulating in the foothills and valleys there as well. It expanded and then circled back in on itself, cycling its outer membrane with the infected from the center of the city to restart the reconnaissance once again.

Men and women soldiers crouched behind walls of infantry fighting tanks, with their rifles pointed toward the dirt, waiting. Behind them laid the El Paso streets filled with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of even more soldiers who waited underneath deadened streetlights and a dry wind. They all breathed with a quickened panic, uncertain of the strength of their modern enemy. They had known how to fight terrorists in foreign hills and desperate factions in the deserts, but they had never before had to face an enemy whose soldiers had no sense of self-preservation. They felt like they were about to battle with an actual hurricane, whose winds and rain didn’t understand the horror of pain or fear of death.

The only sound was garbled radios and gunfire in the air. There was always a tank sputtering out a slug into the horde to the west. The senior officers, who watched from the downtown El Paso office buildings, learned quickly that they had to fire into the horde at random. When they tried to fire in one location to pound out a large mound of the infected, the horde would quickly recede from the impact, and move toward the source of the firing to overcome the squads whose tanks were making the assault. It took them several hours to realize that they weren’t fighting an army of individuals but a single entity that could react to an attack from a great distance by flooding a previously empty and unguarded area, in seconds.

The U.S. tried an attack from the south of Juárez. The neighborhood buildings had become exposed like old bones as the horde moved up and northward to face the main U.S. border assault. Slowly, twenty thousand troops moved through the crushed streets of blood that were left behind. Every single home, market, or office building was completely collapsed into mounds of bricks and thin sheetrock from the weight of the infected that had crammed into each building, looking for live human flesh. The trees that once stood erect had all been digested by the horde. The city had been stomped out by millions of feet that had churned all the city blocks into a humidified, organic crater.

The troops vomited as they crept along, choking down their horrors, and waiting until they could catch the back end of the horde and attack. As they filled the lower end of the city, they only saw the backs of the soldier in front of them, wondering. Once night came, the commanding officers told them to stay put in the streets and rubble until morning, when they would have better visibility. It wasn’t until the early morning that they felt small stirrings in the road beneath them. They felt their boots slightly vibrate as they heard crumpled street signs rattling against metal posts.