Running Red (18 page)

“Did you guys see that?” one of the guards says. I see his name tag and it says Wayne. They start laughing and talking over top of one another. They’re all excited, like the boys in my high school got after a fight in the cafeteria. What I get from the conversation is that Corporal Yano will never live down the ass beating I just gave him. One of the guards comes out and nudges Yano with his toe. When Yano doesn’t move, the guard makes a funny face by sliding his jaw to the side. He tries to talk and the others laugh. Even I start to chuckle.

“Having fun, gentlemen?” LC Allison asks. Even in this persona, Auntie Alice’s voice commands attention. The three jokers snap to attention. LC Allison steps into the light. She looks down at Yano and then looks at me.

“Is this because he was obeying my orders?” she asks.

“No, ma’am,” I say.

“Would you care to tell me why you just beat the shit out of one of my best soldiers?”

“I wasn’t in the mood to party,” I say.

At least not with some guard whose hormones are jumping like locusts in a plague. I really wish I was celebrating with Matt and Aubrey. There’s more laughter and cheering from down the road.

“Sounds like our new guests are getting acclimated,” LC Allison says. “Your friends are enjoying themselves.”

“Yes,” I say. Why do I feel like she’s my mom and I’m begging her to go out with Lane?

“I will arrange for you to visit them in the morning,” she says.

I bite my tongue from saying anything sarcastic. Instead, I give her an appreciative smile, albeit closed lip. I cap it off with a nod. LC Allison holds her arms out. She’s going to hug me, I think, and then she does. I don’t know what else to do except put my arms around her. At that point, I think, “This is as weird as the night can get.”

“The Superiors would like to see you now,” she says.

“Now?”

“Yes. There are some time zone differences.”

“I didn’t think time existed anymore.”

“Just because the clocks aren’t ticking doesn’t mean time has stopped.”

I follow her into the HQ. It’s late where Camp G is located. Still, there are armed guards on duty inside the building. Each snaps off a salute as LC Allison walks pass. She dutifully returns the snap.

She leads me to a door. “Conference Room” is stamped into a small plastic rectangle slid into a metal sleeve. Two guards stand at attention outside this door. They each take a step to the side in opposite directions of each other. LC Allison slides a plastic ID badge through a reader. There is a beep followed by a click. A green light pops on. The door opens. She holds it open for me and we go inside.

We are the only two people in the room. The actual room. LC Allison pulls out a leather chair on wheels and sits down. She holds a hand out to the one next to her. I sit down. LC Allison opens a thin laptop computer and turns it on. There are some familiar start-up sounds that I haven’t heard for a long time. It makes me melancholy for the last time I saw Lane.

A few moments later, five flat screen monitors hanging on the wall snap on; they emit a bluish glow that fills the room. The blue disappears once the images fill the screens. I am looking at the faces of several people. There are three men and two women. They wear matching uniforms. The jackets I see are black with red piping on a chest flap that buttons along the right. Each member of this group has a screen of his or her own. None of them speak.

“Peace through power,” LC Allison says. The others return the greeting. I am instantly unsettled.

“Is this the girl?” one of the women asks. She moves about in her seat as if she’s trying to get a better look at me. I’m not sure, but I think she squints at the screen. There are four stripes on her sleeve.

“Yes,” LC Allison says. “Robin Willette.”

One of the men smiles. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, so to say, Miss Willette.” He has a distinct British accent. He continues to smile. I have no idea of what to say.

The squinting woman speaks again. “Have you explained the situation to her?”

“No, Superior Four,” LC Allison says. “I thought we might be better served by having all of you present.”

At this point, LC Allison turns to me. In the glow of the monitors hanging in front of us, her face looks elongated, like a ferret. The world, I think, has gone bat house crazy.

Or I have. “Wake up,” I tell myself.

The day has been long and exhausting. It’s difficult for me to process what the talking heads before me are saying. It begins with the British guy, who is introduced as Superior Two; his title corresponds with the number of stripes on his arm. He’s going on and on about the benefits of being part of the Elite Forces, how we must continue to be united to defeat those elements that seek to overthrow us. I don’t know why, but it all feels very Orwellian—a concept that was rammed into my head back when I was a senior in high school. There’s no conclusion to what he’s been saying. He just stops and smiles. The tips of his moustache curl around the edges of his nose. They bounce on his shiny, plump cheeks when he speaks.

No sooner does Superior Two stop his discussion then one of the women, Superior Five, begins talking. She’s Asian in appearance, but I don’t detect any accent. Her eyes are tired, but her voice rambles on as she explains that the Guard, the ever present, ever evil Guard, is our enemy. The other monitors show images of camo dressed soldiers storming a city somewhere. I’m not sure where it is. There’s a large body of water near it. The Guard is shown killing hundreds of bedraggled civilians. The Guard is bad, Superior Five tells me.

Superior Three, a grumpy looking old man with a thick head of snow-white hair and enough lines on his face to make a map, explains that the Guard and the Elite Forces had a falling out. When the runners were, well, running rampant, the two groups had joined forces, working cohesively on the rescue missions. But then they encountered an enemy that became more dangerous than the fungazoids. This enemy, according to Superior Three, was the survivors who didn’t want to be rescued. He had a simple name for them: the Undergrounders. Society, he says, is breaking down. It makes me want to roll my eyes and shout, “Duh!” His explanation is convoluted. I don’t hear any reasonable explanation as to why humans are fighting humans, especially when the runners are adapting and mutating. What it breaks down to is that he believes the Guard is using the residents of the Safety Zone camps as human shields to prevent the Elite Forces from invading.

“An attack is imminent, I tell you. We must prepare all of our outposts.”

“Hold on,” I say. The faces on the monitors pucker. I’ve interrupted their flow of propaganda, but I don’t care. “Are all of you telling me this country is at war?”

The last of the Superiors, a man who looks like he could have been my history teacher, smiles. His teeth are brilliantly white, his hair is perfectly coiffed. It’s as if he was born to be on TV. He is Superior Six.

If he’s Six, I think, and the British guy is Two, and the grumpy old guy is Three, the squinting woman is Four, and the Asian woman is Five, who is Superior One? I sneak a glance at LC Allison. She’s not wearing a uniform.

“These catastrophic events have only begun to materialize in the last few months,” Superior Six says. “You’ve been on the road, removed from these challenges we’ve been facing.”

“So we are at war,” I say.

“The balance of humanity is in our hands,” Superior Six says. He flashes his anchorman smile. It is becoming clear that the real enemy here is ego. This is a war for power, to control what is left of mankind.

“Shouldn’t we be out there eradicating the runners instead of fighting with ourselves?”

LC Allison puts a hand on my arm. “We have people working on that,” she says. “They tell us we are close to developing a vaccination for the survivors.”

“What about those already infected?” I ask.

Silence is my only answer.

“The infected are already dead,” Superior Two says. “Just as the fungus attacked and killed the carrier ant, likewise does it do the same to humans.”

“They’re changing,” I say. Again, there is skepticism on their faces.

“Ms. Willette has noticed several physical and behavioral changes in the infected,” LC Allison says. “It’s one of the reasons I requested this video link.”

Superior Four puts on a pair of glasses. She leans back in her chair. “Can she elaborate?” she asks. Her fingers move over a flat tablet in front of her. Two screens down, Superior Six glances down at something on the table in front of him. He taps whatever it is several times while trying to watch me and read whatever is in front of him. I’m pretty sure they are texting one another on their portable screens.

“I first noticed it several days ago,” I say. “There was a runner who tried to latch onto me. Before this attack, other runners I encountered did that run-at-you charge where they tried to tackle their prey.”

“What was different this time?” Superior Three asks.

“I felt like he was studying me.”

“Preposterous,” Superior Two says. His British inflections are flaring. “The fungus attacks the nervous system. It controls the runner’s muscles and directs it to a target.”

“How does the fungus know what to attack?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” Superior Five asks.

“If the runner is dead, and the eyes have no function, how does the runner know where to attack? Does it smell us? Does it sense us?”

Superior Six clears his throat and leans forward. “The fungus slowly takes control of the nervous system. It somehow directs the carrier by controlling a part of the brain, giving it specific impulses to do specific things.”

“Like the fungus originally did with ants. It drove them to a specific leaf at a specific time of the day, and the ant latched onto the leaf and the spore stalk grew out of its head and released its seeds. I know all of this from the public service announcements. What I want to know is, how did the ant know it was the right leaf. Did it see it? Smell it? Hear it? What senses did the ant still have to know where to go? What kept it from wandering around in circles or smacking into a rock?”

“I told you,” Six says. “The fungus controlled the ant.”

“So the fungus had to somehow tap into the optic nerves or use the antennae or something to know where the tree was.”

The Superiors scoff at me.

“What you’re suggesting,” Superior Three says. He points a fat, twitching finger at me. “What you are suggesting is that the runners are thinking.”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. The fungus is learning how to use our brains. It’s why humans don’t have the spore stalk growing out of their heads. It’s why, after the latching, the carrier collapses into that mound of mossy mold that releases the spores. The fungus is burrowing into the brain. It’s learning how to use the carrier.”

They click their teeth, shake their heads, wave their hands at me. I am giving them something else to consider when all they want to do is battle the Guard. LC Allison gives me a soft, gentle kick under the table.

I speak directly to the screens. “The day after I was attacked on the road I saw a runner trapped in a house trying to remember how to open a door.”

Again there is more scoffing.

“Later that night, it got out and tried to latch onto me.”

“Someone let it out,” Superior Three says.

“No, sir,” I say. “It was trapped in a house, and that night it was out.”

“Impossible!” Five says.

“I have witnesses,” I say. “They are here at Camp G.”

The Superiors grow quiet.

“They are here,” LC Allison says. “I can arrange for you to speak to them.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Three says. He is sitting back in his chair, slowly swiveling it side to side.

“There’s more,” I say. I look at LC Allison. She nods for me to continue. “The runners are mutating.”

“How so?” Superior Six asks.

“They are growing mandibles.”

“Can she say that again?” Four asks. “It sounded like she said ‘mandibles.’”

“She did,” Five says. “I am sending you images of some of the latest intel on the runners, Four.” Four’s monitor switches over to a shaky video of a runner with opening and closing jaws. They click or snap in and out of place.

“We have only recently received this intelligence,” Five says.

“So you can see the runners are changing physically,” I say. “Why won’t you believe me when I say their behavior is changing?”

None of them speak. None of them look at me. All of them are tapping on the screens they have lying in front of them. One by one the screens go back to blue. Superior Six smiles at us.

“We will reconvene tomorrow,” he says. His screen goes black.

“They don’t want to know,” I say. “They’re more concerned about their war with the Guard.”

“Let’s talk outside,” LC Allison says. We leave the conference room.

There are new guards in the halls. Like the ones on duty before them, they snap to attention and salute.

LC Allison and I walk across the grounds towards my apartment.

“All they want to do is fight their war,” I say.

“It’s why I brought you here,” LC Allison says. “They need to know.”