Last Gasp (71 page)

“Jen can take over for a few hours. What about you? Jo’s a good driver. She can handle the jeep while you get some sleep in the back of the pickup.”

Dan appeared pushing the spare wheel. His frail arms looked incapable of supporting it. Chase went to his assistance and had to clench his teeth to keep his emotion in check.

While Chase and Nick worked at replacing the wheel, Jen distributed biscuits, chocolate, and fruit. She knelt down to offer some to Dan, who was sitting exhausted in the thin shade of the pickup, head thrown back, eyes closed. When he opened them there was such misery written there that she instinctively pulled him to her in a gesture of pity and forgiveness.

Chase went back to the jeep and rigged up the canvas sheet as a shelter. Not only was the heat oppressive but the sun’s rays caused a prickly, smarting sensation, as if the skin were being bathed in a weak acidic solution. The air itself tasted tart and coppery.

As he tucked the flaps of the canvas behind the rolled-up camping gear, leaving a tentlike opening to give them the benefit of what breeze there was, Chase found a reassuring smile from somewhere. “Jo’s going to drive for a while. We’ll stop at nightfall for something to eat and then I’ll take over. We’ll be all right. We’re going to make it.”

“I know,” Ruth said and gave him a smile too. “I trust you.”

For just a moment Cheryl’s eyes opened and looked straight at him. There was no expression in them and he wasn’t sure whether it was simply a reflex action, performed unconsciously, but nevertheless he felt a surge of fresh hope.

Chase walked back to the pickup and crawled underneath the sunshade Nick had fashioned from a blanket and stretched out on top of a sleeping bag. His bones seemed to creak with tiredness. Beside him, cushioned against the jolting and swaying in a cocoon of baggage and clothing, Nick was already fast asleep.

Chase closed his eyes and dreamed that Baz Brannigan was trailing them with an ax buried in his head. The landscape was a bleached sulfurous yellow. Baz pursued them to the edge of a cliff using a giant hypodermic syringe as a crutch. The jeep (they were all of them in the jeep, with Cheryl, miraculously fit and well, at the wheel) went over the edge of the cliff and sailed through the air. Chase tensed every muscle in his body for the expected crash. When they hit the ground he sat bolt upright, arms forming a cross to shield his face.

It was growing dark and the pickup had stopped.

There was no one in the cab. They had pulled over onto the hard shoulder of a main highway, presumably Interstate 80. Chase slid down, his mouth filled with the most foul taste, and spat out. What he wouldn’t give for a cup of sweet scalding coffee!

Jen and Dan were standing by the jeep. As Chase went up he saw Jo collapsed over the wheel with her head cradled in her arms. At first he thought there’d been an accident and then he knew there hadn’t. There was no need to ask and nothing he wanted to see.

Nick helped his daughter from the driver’s seat and held her in his arms. Chase did what he could to comfort Ruth. She clung to him and wept, but he could think of nothing to say.

Afterward, when Cheryl’s body had been wrapped in a blanket and placed in the back of the pickup, they turned onto 93 and drove without stopping until they reached Desert Range at two o’clock the following morning.

The war between the prims and the mutes was getting closer. There had been fierce and bloody clashes in the hills and forests to the west, but so far Desert Range had remained undetected and unmolested. Lying in the middle of an arid plain and well away from the main routes north, it was on the periphery of the tribal conflicts that raged across California, Nevada, and Utah.

Dan had never been able to understand what the fighting was about. Every time he led a reconnaissance party from the furthermost tip of the western network of tunnels (chosen because it was several miles distant from the Tomb itself), he was struck afresh by the sheer mindless lunacy of conducting a war for no conceivable gain. Not territory. Not natural resources. Not plunder in even the crudest sense of the term. And certainly not patriotism or pride or any of the other emotional intangibles that traditionally had sent men to war. It was fighting for the sake of it—merely obeying some atavistic impulse as natural as breathing and sleeping.

Below him, in the valley of what had once been the verdant Meadow Valley Wash, a Sherman tank was trundling up the dried-up riverbed, blue smoke rings sputtering from its exhaust. A stone-tipped arrow wavered drunkenly through the air and clunked against the turret. The tank halted and laboriously cranked its gun through ninety degrees in the direction of the aggressor, apparently oblivious to the fact that the barrel was a splintered stub, like a joke cigar that had exploded.

Another arrow clattered harmlessly against the armor plating and snapped in two. From its trajectory Dan was able to pinpoint its source—a screen of bushes concealing a small opening in the river-bank.

Kneeling beside him, watching through binoculars, Jo said, “You were right, it’s a raiding party of mutes. But who does the tank belong to?”

“Can you see any markings?”

“Some old army insignia, nothing recent.” She lowered the binoculars and edged behind a rock that had some form of bell-shaped fungus growing on it. There were strange species of flora appearing everywhere, so commonplace they hardly noticed them. Jo’s face was completely hidden behind tinted goggles and a gauze mask, underneath which she was plastered with barrier cream as protection against ultraviolet radiation. Prolonged exposure led to cataracts and eventually blindness. The thinness of the air they could do little about except to become acclimatized to what was the equivalent of twenty thousand feet up a mountain.

“Where are Fran and the others?” Dan said. “I hope they know we’ve got company.”

There were five of them in the reconnaissance party. They had been out two days and were due back by nightfall: Thirty-six hours was the maximum permitted by the medics. This particular skirmish was the nearest one so far to the western access of the Desert Range complex, barely ten miles away.

“Fran won’t move from the camp till she hears from us,” Jo said. Her straw-colored hair was pulled back under a forage cap, wisps trailing over her upturned collar. “Where do they find the diesel fuel to run a tank, for God’s sake? You’d think they’d find a better use for it, to generate power or even to keep a fire going. They must—”

Dan silenced her with a wave of his gloved hand and at the same time ducked down. Somebody shrieked below them, a cry that sounded hardly human at all. The crack and echoing reverberation of a gunshot rolled along the valley.

“What’s happening?” Jo said, craning to see.

“The mutes decided to rush them and somebody in the tank opened fire with a rifle. Keep down, we don’t want to be spotted.”

Carefully they peered over the rock and saw three men emerging from the turret. They were unshaven and wore patched-up army fatigues but were otherwise normal in appearance. The mutes—about a dozen of them—were crouched behind rocks and bushes, armed with crude spears, cudgels, and bows and arrows. One of them lay sprawled on the bank with half his face missing.

It looked to be such a one-sided contest that Dan was loath to watch. The three men were armed with rifles and pistols, the mutes with primitive homemade weapons: It was the twenty-first century versus the Stone Age. But what were they fighting
for?
Ownership of this barren tract of valley and riverbed that wouldn’t have supported a couple of goats?

As they moved forward, dodging the missiles casually, almost indifferently, the three men picked off the mutes like plaster ducks in a shooting gallery. Dan gripped his own rifle in a paroxysm of frustration and despair. This was cold-blooded slaughter.

Jo said needlessly, “There’s nothing we can do.” She reached out and he felt her fingers tighten on his arm. “Come on, Dan, let’s go back. We don’t have to watch this.”

She moved back, and as he squirmed around on his haunches to follow her, they both froze as a grunting, gibbering snarl seemed to tear the air apart. From out of the cavelike opening in the riverbank came a small bundle of fur and teeth that moved in a blur through the rocks and leaped at the throat of one of the men before he had time to sight his gun. In seconds the riverbed was swarming with the creatures. They moved so fast that Dan couldn’t make out what they were—a kind of rodent, he guessed, but with an insatiable ferocity he’d never seen before.

They systematically tore the three men apart, attacking the head first and working downward. Now able to see them properly for the first time, Dan realized what they were, and his blood chilled. Ground squirrels. In the past one of the most timid and docile of creatures, almost domesticated and fed from picnic tables by generations of American kids, these descendants had mutated into voracious wild animals with a taste for human meat.

And something else he realized, amazed and fearful.

“They’ve been trained,” he whispered numbly. “The mutes have trained the squirrels. It was a trap. They lured those guys out of the tank so that the squirrels could get at them.”

Jo stared at him through the tinted goggles. “But some of the mutes were killed.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter to them,” Dan said. “They don’t think like we do. Maybe they don’t think at all—it’s just instinct.”

There were three writhing mounds of gray fur where the bodies had been. The clicking and snapping of tiny teeth could be heard, strangely peaceful after the gunfire and the screams. Three of the mutes had climbed up onto the tank and were poking their spears into the open hatch. Dan hoped there was no one hiding inside.

Once over the ridge they straightened up and loped down the hill to the camp, about a mile away. The raw sunlight scoured the bleached landscape and the air tasted metallic. They were reaching the point at which further exposure would be dangerous, though this wasn’t the reason Dan was anxious to return to the Tomb. Six months ago there hadn’t been an incident within a hundred miles. As the skirmishes got closer, the threat of discovery became more likely, and it was vital that the Tomb was alerted and prepared. It was safe from attack by prims and mutes, but now somebody—and who the hell where they?—had tanks. And tanks meant explosives. Even perhaps a nuke warhead. He shrank from the thought.

The tent was still up. The lazy bastards were still asleep or lingering over a late breakfast.

Dan pushed aside the light brush they had piled up as camouflage and raised the tent flap. It was very quiet inside and he felt a twinge of unease until he saw an outstretched leg wearing a knee-high brown boot, which he recognized as Fran’s. The leg wasn’t attached to her body. Next to it lay a hand, fingers curled, like a discarded glove.

The interior of the tent was dark, the canvas walls obscured by something that seethed. They were coated with millions of tiny white grubs. The grubs covered every surface and they were feasting on the three bodies and devouring them piece by piece. In the middle of Fran’s chest was a hole that pulsed whitely as the grubs burrowed inside.

Small, bald, and rotund, Art Hegler was at the communications desk with headphones around his neck listening over the desk speaker and making an occasional jotting. The message was in Morse, very fast, outstripping Chase’s rudimentary knowledge, and the few words he did catch were jumbled and meaningless.

After a minute or two Hegler threw down the pen and arched back. His taut straining T-shirt read: “From the womb to the Tomb.”

“Same code?”

Hegler nodded, dropped the headphones onto the desk, and waddled across to the coffeepot. “Want some?”

Chase shook his head. Two cups a day were his limit. “Is it military traffic?”

Hegler shrugged. Their conversations were usually terse and cryptic. Perhaps Hegler resented the fact that he was still nominally in charge at Desert Range, when everyone knew that the scientific basis for its existence had long since ended. With its empty labs and silent equipment, the lower levels sealed off, the installation was a shadow of its former glory.