Steps (8 page)

“
CMFO
stands for Commanding Mother Fucking Officer. You address me as Sir, and you begin and end what you say to me with Sir. You copy, Maggot?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“And as your
CMFO
, I’m who you come to when you need it. Your daddy and momma have their hands full. You come to me, or you come to this half-tarded white boy Genny here. Copy?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

Someone knocked on the bay window behind them. It was Arroyo, who motioned for Gentry and the others to come inside. Gentry ushered the boy ahead of him while Billings brought up the rear and closed the patio door behind him. They were all in the living room, even Fletcher and Goetsch, who were supposed to be making rounds outside.

Sarge stood in the foyer by the front door. He sucked at a canteen, wiped his mouth and forehead and took a few deep breaths. He scanned the room, and then said, “Three man posts here on out. Arroyo, Goetsch, Fletch are Alpha watch. Riggs, Genny, Billings, you take Bravo watch. Alpha is on-duty, four hour shifts. Edwin, you and I are Slackers. That means we take up slack on whichever team needs it. Everyone copy?”

“You make it down to Mayberry, Sarge?” Riggs asked. “You see any roadblocks?”

“Hell, no, I didn’t see any roadblocks, Riggs. The whole camp got smoked. That hullabaloo didn’t stop once we scooted out. I think we had buggers already hiding under their hoods. Mayberry fell, boys, and anyone who made it out is heading up the goddamned hill.”

Chapter 16

Out of Mayberry   
(Moore)

C
aptain Darcy Moore, second year P.A. student, not quite a doctor, but she was the best they could round up for Camp Mayberry, crouched alone in the darkness. When she moved, she moved slowly, with her ears perked and her eyes squinted into the shadows. She had abandoned her gas suit as soon as the camp fell. It lay in the field surrounding Camp Mayberry along with hundreds of other suits, many of them with their owners still inside, the lucky ones, perhaps.

On her shoulder she carried a canvas
MOLLE
bag. Inside the bag was her gas injector and a handful of vials, dressings, tourniquets, gauze, a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff, gloves, masks, and various medications including a vial of Amoxicillin. For more intrusive work there were two
IV
kits, tubing, three scalpels, a thermometer, scissors, and no food or water at all. Nor was there ammunition or a weapon because she had left her pistol beside her cot along with her M4. She grabbed only the aid bag and ran outside searching for casualties before she realized there was nothing to do but run. They swarmed around her spewing automatic bursts, and more of them ran with her toward the trees. She ran on when the others stopped, unable to halt her flight response because even those who ran with her were firing sideways, clustered into their Dirty Dozens or alone, utter panic, utter chaos, a shaking and tossing of the hive from a thousand foot tree, dropping, tumbling, insanity. She ran until the firing died behind her, and her breath became so ragged and hot she thought she might spit up blood. After that she walked, heard others around her but hid from them, and now it was her and the
MOLLE
bag with no ammunition and no weapon to fire it.

Captain Moore crouched. She listened. When she heard nothing, she made her way down the game trail as quietly as she could. Her steps were measured and slow, and she clung to the
MOLLE
bag as if it had dropped from her womb.

She nearly stepped on him. That was how quiet he lay and how obscure in the darkness. He lay next to the trail naked but alive, because his chest rose and fell as she watched. He might not be asleep, but he was not fully conscious, either. His lips moved as she stood frozen, and his legs twitched either from a dream or a delusion.

As she crept by him, his legs stopped twitching and stiffened. His arms straightened, his head kicked back, his spine arched, and his eyes shot open, all of this in silence but for a quiet gagging sound grinding out of his throat. The seizure locked him in its grip for an agonizing minute, and then released him limp and spent back to his place on the trail. It was like watching an invisible fist squeeze the life out of him.

His eyes flew open, and they locked onto Moore. One little voice screamed at her to run, that she should have run while he had been trapped in the seizure.
Why did you watch instead of run, you idiot?
The other voice said,
Running now will trigger his flight-fight response, hunker down and hope he remains catatonic, don’t draw his attention with movement.
Moore hugged the bag to her breast and listened to the second voice, because in the end, they both said the same thing in unison:
You fucked up, sister, kiss your babies and toss them over the cliff.

The soldier pushed himself up on one elbow. In the dark, the bloodied whites of his eyes became an oily black. That would be the conjunctivitis and vitreous hemorrhaging, signs of progressive infection, along with nasopharyngeal bleeding, the latter of which left black-bloody trails out of his eyes and nostrils and along his lips and chin in a sickly drawn beard. Showing preference to the nerve cells, the virus would rapidly progress to meningitis, causing loss of motor and cognitive functions, resulting in unpredictable, invariably violent behavior, along with periodic seizures as the brain struggled to combat the ongoing attack.

His head and body were shaved clean, lean and muscular from long hours of labor in Mayberry. Those muscles flexed like living creatures as he rose and stood silent with his head tilted as if to hear something Moore could not. Despite his bodily strength, the virus attacked him with astonishing rapidity. For some, the infection hid latent for days, and by rare accounts, weeks. Many showed signs within twenty-four hours of exposure, progressing within forty-eight hours from flu-like symptoms to this waking, catatonic state.

His black eyes were impossible to judge, but he seemed to be staring above her, and his head shifted left and right in a robotic, disjointed manner that spoke of the neural damage invoked by the virus. His right arm twitched. He gasped. His eyes widened as a mild seizure took hold, and Moore did not hesitate this time.

With the bag against her chest, she sprinted along the game trail without glancing behind her, because she knew what she would see. The soldier would be crashing along at his haphazard gait, falling and scampering to his feet in a trip-run that resembled a sick imitation of an ape on all-fours. Unable to properly decode the signals sent to his cerebral cortex, he would lose his higher cognitive functions, along with the lower functions such as balance, pain, and self-preservation. He would ignore phalangeal fractures in his hands and feet and any other injuries he might suffer. He would press on until the autonomic nervous systems failed, or an injury caused immobility, or starvation or thirst sent him into arrest. Maybe the diaphragm would collapse and he would suffocate. Maybe he would break a femur or tibia, or a flutter of the heart would cause tachycardia, fibrillation, failure. Until then, he would be plagued by horrifying, violent delusions as his brain cooked within the confines of his skull, and his ever more inexplicable behavior would continue to generate senseless acts of aggressive behavior.

A hand raked down her back, found her belt, and the full weight of the soldier bore down on her. He landed on top of her, and when she wrangled onto her back, he pinned her with his knees and hissed through the blood and spittle spraying from his mouth.

The words
airborne contagion
formed in her mind, and whatever hope she had harbored against her own infection were swept away as the soldier clawed her face and yanked her hair.

His arms shook, and his body stiffened with seizure. Moore rolled out from beneath him, wrapped an arm around his neck, fell backward to the ground with him on top and scissor-locked her forearm and bicep against the carotid arteries flanking his esophagus. It was a five-second knockout as she cut the blood from his brain, and while the seizure kept his muscles spasming, she sensed he was no longer conscious.

She wrenched her grip tighter when the spasming ceased, and she lay there and counted aloud to one-hundred, and when that did not feel like long enough, she counted to two-hundred.

When her arms grew numb, she let loose, rolled the soldier off, and knelt over him.

“God, help me,” she said, and she meant it. She inspected the inside of her left arm, red from the soldier’s blood. Moore touched her face and came away with blood not hers, but the soldier’s. She was covered in it, baptized, infected like the rest of them, and it was only a matter of time before her eyes bled red and her brain began its slow-roast descent into madness.

She tore open the
MOLLE
bag and preempted thought with blind action. She jabbed one of the vials into the gas injector. She twisted the
CO₂
cartridge into place. As a sort of sick humor, because it no longer mattered, she sprayed her shoulder with iodine before she pressed the gun to it and pulled the trigger.

There was the hiss-whump of the injector, followed by silence. She fought back the urge to cry, and after she caught her breath, she held the vial close so she could read it. She had no way of knowing the results of the vaccination trials, because the camp fell before they could take further readings. Some of them, obviously, did not work. Some of them had been at least partially effective, because not everyone in Mayberry had been compromised.

She stuffed the vial and injector into the canvas bag, and for a while sat there listening for others. Then she stood and marched down the trail. As she trudged along, she checked the moon’s path, orienting herself in a general easterly direction, and when the sky lightened with dawn, the moon burned orange above her. There had been a river-cut in the trees visible from camp in the easterly direction, and surely the game trail would lead her to water.

Around noon she heard the flow of a stream, and she wound her way through the underbrush toward it. She emerged at the crest of a steep bank cut away during the recent floods, and it took her the better part of an hour to make her way upstream to a point where she could safely descend and bury her face in the water.

Moore drank heavily and brushed the water across her face, cheeks, hands, and anywhere she found the soldier’s blood. Somewhere just south of sixty-five Fahrenheit, the frigid mountain spring water both quenched and chilled her, and she shivered as she worked.

She moved upstream a few paces, buried her head beneath the water, and ran her fingers through her hair to untangle the knots and dirt. When she raised her head, she saw a woman on the far bank staring at her. The expression on her face was that of a wild animal, one of mixed shock, caution, and curiosity.

For a while neither of them moved, as if preserving the spell of the moment. Then the woman dove into the trees behind her, started up the trail the way she had come, stopped and once again faced Moore. She resembled a deer making that last glance over its shoulder before it loped into the woods.

After a few seconds, the woman relaxed, retraced her steps and stood on the bank, erect, palms open at her side with an expression of calm on her face. She wore hides such as a Native American might have worn, well-tailored and fitted but free of markings and colors. A long black braid snaked over her left shoulder and between her breasts. The woman stroked the braid for a moment, and then lowered her head and stepped out of her dress, exposing skin the color of milk, so smooth that when she entered the stream, Moore expected the woman would melt and drift away with the current.

The woman waded to the midpoint of the stream and stopped. It was not very deep, to the woman’s thighs, and she put a hand to her heart and stared at Moore and waited, so patient and still that she thought the woman might be capable of standing there for centuries.

Moore risked breaking the spell by sweeping a handful of water across her cheeks and pressing it into her eyes. She felt her pulse, timed it to see if it were steady, because an erratic heartbeat signaled pericarditis, one of the infection modes of the
NEBOV
. The pulse was normal, and as best she could tell, her hands were fatigued but steady. She drank, felt it slide down her throat without the pins-and-needles she might expect from a throat infection. “You’re okay,” she said to herself. “You’re okay.” She searched the trees behind her, verified she was alone, and returned her attention to the woman in the stream.

“God help me,” she said again, and as if in answer, the woman began singing. Moore did not recognize the language, but she understood the words by their rhythm. She sang of love and comfort, and the stream grew tepid, warming until it felt as comfortable as a fresh-drawn bath. Moore swished her fingers through the water, and tried to resist an overwhelming urge to unclothe herself and step off the bank. Gone was the panic and terror of being exposed to the virus. Gone were her hunger, thirst, fear, and all her inhibitions. The closest she could describe the feeling was being held by her mother, and an impossible image formed of her mother large and looming, holding her as Moore pressed her head against her shoulder. Whatever it was, the feeling burst inside of her and spread throughout her limbs in the span of three heartbeats. Goosebumps rose on her arms and neck. Her mind cleared, and she saw only the beauty of the woman in the stream, which filled her with an overwhelming desire to be near her.

Moore slipped off her boots, her shirt, and pants. She unsnapped her bra and slid her panties down her legs, laid them on top of her pants, and stepped into the water naked.

At five-seven, Moore was reasonably tall, but she had not appreciated the woman’s height until the water covered her thighs, and then her belly, and touched the lower regions of her breasts. The woman’s eyes tracked Moore as she neared, cast ever more downward, until Moore’s neck craned up at her, and they stood almost touching in the middle of the stream.

Clear, deep-blue eyes stared down at Moore, impossibly round like an owl’s, pressed into a face that both defied and defined everlasting beauty. She seemed to be a young twenty-something, but the eyes spoke of millennia, and Moore understood the song, even though the words felt as ancient as the moon.

After a few refrains, the words coalesced not into English, but into a language Moore had forgotten long ago, innate words that were as instinctual and unvarying as a newborn coo. The woman sang the human song, the notes of the human race. It was love. It was peace, and when the woman put a hand to the back of Moore’s head and pulled her to her breast, Moore drank of the woman’s milk, and she knew the Light.