Hissers (21 page)

He looked at the frost on the ground, saw only his own footprints leading back toward the river, a sign of real physical properties, height and weight. A human trace. The man had left no footprints. Nothing.

He would have checked every tree for this potential assassin had he not been shaken to his very core by those jet black eyes. No whites, no pupils, as if something far more sinister was moving about the woods wearing the skin of a slain farmer. Winston Davis did not believe in ghosts or demons, but he knew that a real man would have shot him, would have circled back around and killed his troop. What he had seen was not a man. He sat on the cold forest floor and shook.

Winston never spoke of this, and sometimes still saw those black orbs staring at him in those dead woods while he slept. He’d written down the events of that night merely to get it out of his head, and never read the journal entry again. Better to chalk it all up to fatigue.

As Lieutenant General Winston Davis lay on the grass in some field in some puny Midwest town, his lower extremities jagged from a myriad bone fractures, his lungs exposed to the open night air, he realized he’d now seen something worse than that entity in the woods surrounding the Drina River. In the last few hours he had seen beings that should not exist, a virus of killing machines spreading faster than any biology should allow. He had come to see the end of the world.

And what really bit his ass was that he knew he was part of the problem. He’d said his Hail Marys already for what good it would do him in the afterlife. Part of him was fine with this turn of events, don’t get him wrong. Something like this was bound to happen sometime, and if it was written on the wind then who was he to interfere. He was just a pawn in the end.

But the other half, well, the other half was just tired and finally realizing he couldn’t win them all. Now it was a matter of
how
he would go out, not when.

When he’d seen the SUV coming at him he knew this was his chance to have his last wish granted. Of course, he hadn’t expected punk kids with kitchen utensils to come out like some new age Lord of the Flies.

They couldn’t be more than, what, fifteen? Hell, they didn’t even look old enough to drive let alone fight anything other than their own teddy bears. He’d served with young men in battle but they were at least trained with weapons, at least muscular, at least primed to kill, and they definitely knew when to obey orders they might not find morally sound. These idiots looked like they still pissed in their pants every night in bed.
Thanks, God. Way to go.

“…c’mere. Hurry.”

Sunday, 12:26

Connor took a knee near the wounded man. It was true what he said, his legs were shattered and Connor could see the man’s ribs poking through the hole in his chest. He had no idea how the man was still alive.

“Sorry, we didn’t see you on the ground. I didn’t hit you did I?”

“You came close, but no.”

“We can put you in the car but I don’t know if the hospital is still there or not.”

“Forget the hospital,” the man said. “Hospital isn’t going to cure anything you see here. Besides, I think if I move anymore that’ll be it. Lights out for good. I need to talk to you.”

“Did those things get you? Why haven’t you changed?”

“Kid, if I was attacked by those things, I’d be ripping your throat out right now. I’ve been laying here for a while watching the far streets, watching those fucked-up people attack anyone in their path, timing how long it takes the victims to turn bad. Figure it’s an average of about seven seconds.”

“I know. My mother was bit in front of me.”

“Aw hell, my apologies, kid. Your first time in combat, I assume? Yeah, that can be rough. Tell you what I always told my troops: you think about it after you’re sitting on your enemy’s corpse.”

“If you weren’t bit, what happened?”

“I was on the fucking plane. Strapped in, gripping my knees—”

“You were on the plane!”

“You don’t interrupt a superior, son. Now let me talk. I was gripping my knees. At some point I was flying through the air with a hunk of metal in my torso. Figured the impact would have killed me. I mean, it sure should have. Must have been launched out of the fuselage somehow. Some damn lucky way that you always read about in the papers where people swear they have guardian angels. Landed here, crawled a few feet, decided that was far enough. Mostly realized that it hurts way too much to move. Good view of the stars in this town, where ever the hell I am.”

“Castor.”

“Boring name. You got strip clubs?”

Connor wasn’t sure. If they did he had never seen them. “I don’t think so. I’m only fourteen.”

“Well shit, that’s a shame. Every good town needs a strip club. It’s American like Coca Cola and Jay Leno and Marlboro cigarettes. Wife made me quit smoking ages ago, but now that I lay here… Wait, this ain’t some Mormon area or anything, is it?”

“No. Pretty much your average town, I guess.”

“Without a strip club? We call that below average. Look—” the man coughed and blood bubbled out over his chin “—what’s your name, private?”

“Connor.”

“Okay, Connor, I’m Lieutenant General Winston W. Davis of the Special Projects Division, USMC. I’ve got a request for you. It isn’t hard and considering the predicament we’re all in you’d best take it to heart anyway because it’s a good skill to have.”

“OK. What?”

“I want you to kill me.”

“
What?!”

Nicole took a step closer to the man. “Sir, we can’t kill you. Isn’t there anything else we can do? We can try to find help, take you with us maybe—”

“Now listen here, you jackasses, I will not be turned into one of those things and I’ve been waiting patiently for death but God seems to have other plans for me. So fucking kill me already and spare me this other fate. I’d do it for you!”

As much as Connor understood the man’s willingness to die rather than become one of those monsters, and as much as he realized he and his friends had been exposed outside the SUV for a good minute now, there was something else bugging him. “If you were on the plane, then you know what this is all about.”

“Hey yeah, that’s true,” Amanita said. “What the fuck was on that plane?”

General Davis coughed up more blood. “Stupid kids. What, you think you can understand what was on that plane? Hell,
I
don’t even know what it was. But fuck if it wasn’t the perfect new weapon, right. I mean, just look around. Took out this town in a couple of hours.”

“You made the people like this?” Seth asked. All four teens were squatting near the Lieutenant General now. “Why?”

“Shit, son, I didn’t make anything. And if you think the United States Marine Corps is dumb enough to engineer something this uncontrollable you’re as stupid as you look.”

Connor had had enough of this man’s attitude. Authority or not he wanted to know what was going on. Besides, right now authority was granted to whomever could outrun the hissers. “Didn’t you hear me say my parents were killed, you sonofabitch? What was on the plane?”

“Slinging insults, now, kid? Good for you. Make you a deal. I tell you, you kill me. Sound good?”

“I might kill you anyway. My mind is starting to drift that way. What was on the plane?”

“That’s it. Get tough.” The wounded man chuckled, looked up at the stars. There was a pause. Then: “You know, when we first went to Iraq they told us we’d be welcomed as saviors. Like we’d get big bear hugs everywhere we went. Yeah, some places that happened. In others, they wanted us dead. In even other places, they just didn’t know. And neither did we. There’s the rub. You’re in some foreign town, little kids are smiling at you, old men are glaring at you, and in your gut you know something is wrong, you know you could walk around the next corner and take a round to the face. See, with that enemy, it’s rarely a guy with a gun. Nah, it’s a landmine, or bombs, or some fucked up trap that goes boom and the next thing you know you’re picking up your own arm or leg in a daze and trying too damn hard to reattach it but it won’t go back. The looks on those poor soldiers’ faces when they realize they won’t play ball with their kids, won’t ride a bike again, won’t even walk…

“So we got tired of it, said lets come up with a way to combat those effects. The powers that be say we can’t play God but you tell that to the good boys doing their best to kick Al-Qaeda’s butt, who just happen to have the bad luck to walk by a suicide bomber and see their own body parts flying through the air. They get a free ride home, sure, but they still have to look in the mirror everyday and feel that phantom limb where there’s nothing but empty space now.”

“I’m getting bored,” Amanita said.

“Getting to my point, private. We contracted out to the best geneticists we could find, told them to do whatever they had to do to make it possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Reattach arms, reattach legs. Attach somebody else’s legs and arms to someone in need. They gave us some gene drug, which was explained to me in chemical terms only moon men would understand but shit if it wasn’t getting damn close to working the way we wanted. Or maybe it worked too good. There’s a test subject in the lab in California whose body accepted foreign tissue with only minimal infection. A third arm. You believe that? They used snake toxins to combat the rejection process, least that’s what I heard on the plane ride. Fucking kid can move that arm too. Amazing stuff.”

Connor thought about the hissers he’d seen with extra limbs. It was starting to make sense now if you believed in science fiction and the Devil—whose face he was pretty sure he was looking at. “So what was on the plane?”

“That’s just it, Connor. I don’t know. Cute blonde lady, Dr. Haley, was being flown to DC and she had lots of different samples all packed up in little freezers and bio-transport suitcases. Said she had some new strains of her wonder drug but I’d talked to her this morning so I figured I’d
seen
the newest strains. Said something about finding an error in the chemistry while we were flying, too, but fuck if I know what she meant. She could have told me she had Adam and Eve’s bones in those cases for all I knew about how to verify her work. Wasn’t my job to know, just to make sure she got it done and that it worked the way we wanted.”

“What made the plane crash?” Nicole asked. Connor didn’t look at her face but could tell she was getting angry.

“What made the plane crash? Let me explain it this way, private. That plane doesn’t crash. It’s tended to by the highest paid engineers in the country. It flies the top brass back and forth across the country on a daily basis and can do a full barrel roll at thirty-thousand feet while spitting out chaff and flares. Question is what
could
make the plane crash?”

“I don’t get it,” Connor said.

“Hell, Connor, I don’t know. That’s what’s to get. An Act of God? A black-market anti-aircraft gun. One minute I’m having a highball and the next the pilot starts instructing us on an emergency landing. After that, the lights go out, the plane drops. I had my seatbelt on. Dr. Haley was across from me. She didn’t have hers on. She flew up and hit her head so hard on the ceiling I saw her skull cave in. Only thing I remember after that was my stomach in my throat and then the sound of God screaming. I woke up here, like this, and my gun is over there. See that black thing in the grass? Pretty sure that’s it but I can’t move to it. So I watch the plane and see the stewards running around biting people like they haven’t been fed in years. And I know that they’re really dead because nobody can survive that kind of crash.”

“You did.”

“Like I said, this isn’t survival, this is my punishment. To sit and wait for my turn to become one of those things. To know it’s coming, it’s always the waiting that’s the worst torture. But I know a bullet to the brain will stop it because I watched a cop take down two of those things with two headshots before he got tackled and shredded alive.
Bam bam!
And they both fell. Dead again. Headshots will do it. At least it’s a gamble I’m willing to take. Anyway, I can’t tell you what happened. Fate didn’t want that plane to reach D.C. Now, that’s what I know. You gonna keep your end of the bargain?”

The first drops of warm summer rain hit the ground.

Connor rose and looked at his friends, saw the disbelief and anger in their faces. Despite the inconclusiveness of everyone else’s parents’ fates, it was reasonable enough to assume the four of them were all now orphans, and the man on the ground was part of the reason for it. Maybe a day ago he would have ignored this man’s request and taken him to the hospital. A day ago he wasn’t driving underage. A day ago he hadn’t kicked, punched, stabbed, and run over other humans. A day ago he had dinner with his parents and played video games with Seth. A day ago Mom gave him ten dollars to go buy some pens and notebooks at the local Rite Aid. A day ago was another life.

He was about to propose a vote on what to do, but it never even got that far. It was decided with a simple nod from Nicole, whose once soft face was now caked in dirt and blood, whose hair had been done up hours ago in anticipation of a real high school party but was now matted with other people’s flesh.