Medora Wars (33 page)

“If it’s the way you think it needs to be.” Malik looked down at the back of Carter’s hair. He had a small tattoo of a woman’s name on his neck. It simply said ‘Stacy.’ He wondered about the transformation that the man had gone through: a love for some woman in a small town that had turned into an infatuation with an unknown figurehead dictating terror across the world. “Who was it on the phone, Atash?” Malik finally asked.

“Malik, let’s get in the helicopter.”

“Who was it?”

Atash kicked Elise in the side. “Get on the plane, Malik,” he responded calmly.

“Who is the Sirr?”

Atash once again lifted his rifle at Malik. “Ask that question one more time, brother.”

“How did you know I killed my son?”

“You bring this up now?” Atash yelled at him.

“Mayberry told you, didn’t he? It was him. That’s how you knew so much about me. I was just another folder full of information from that bastard.”

“Malik, I didn’t know who he was…” Atash’s face shrunk in anguish.

Malik was about to speak but instead looked down at Elise. Her face was covered with dry blood and her long hair matted down along her face. She reminded him of his first grade teacher when she gave him a slanted smile.
If this one person can be so patient with me, why can’t I be patient with myself?
He glanced back at Atash and heard a shot ring out from the garage.

Looking over, the scene sprawled out in delayed time. Dozens of soldiers streamed out from the building, cautiously taking cover on the ground, and behind crumbling cement walls. Malik was in between the two sudden forces of apathy and passion that fought within him. He was about to respond to Atash when he realized that the man had been shot.

Atash had fallen over, holding his hip, and panting heavy. “Malik, go… get in the helicopter, and fly up into the sky. Let the flames of redemption guide you to the glory of nothingness. Rid the world of its only hope of freeing itself from the scourge. Drop that weapon right back down on top of us.”

“Atash…” Malik said as he ducked and sprayed a shower of bullets at the impending soldiers. He saw the cracks again growing under Atash’s eyes, around his mouth, and underneath his chin; cracks of a vain hope returning its hollow reward. Malik wanted to sit down with Atash for hours and pour more of his heart open to him but simply stood frozen as Elise rose to her feet.

She didn’t turn to Malik; she didn’t worry about him from behind her, because she had learned who he was long ago. She had learned that she only needed to act and Malik would follow. She only needed to hold the box cutter in her clenched fist and thrust it out and down into Atash’s neck. Just a mere flick of her small wrist would tear through his jugular vein, releasing the life from his corrupted thoughts, and wayward mind.

As more bullets bounced around Malik, he watched the power drain from Atash’s face, as a stream of blood wept from his ruptured neck.

Utter shock sprang into Atash’s eyes as he gasped for air, looking up at Malik. “Get…” Atash’s voice gurgled from beneath foaming blood, “Get to your task…”

“Atash,” Malik said, bending over him. “You were right all along. Everything is an illusion. Even what we choose to believe.”

Atash’s eyes struggled to focus as he looked up at Malik. “I didn’t care,” were his final words as the blood ceased pouring from his neck.

Elise turned to Malik, with the box cutter in her fist, covered with Atash’s blood. “Malik,” she said, looking at him with radiant eyes that shone through over a month of torture, starvation, and impending death. “Forgive yourself.”

As the chopper blades thumped above him, he couldn’t understand the patience and love that filled the person in front of him. “I will, once I complete my task.”

“No… Malik.” She held her box cutter up to him. “You can’t…”

“Don’t worry, this is a new task,” he said gently as he lowered her arm. “Please trust me now. I know I can’t undo anything I’ve done, but I can try to make it better.”

Stepping over Atash, he fired his rifle in the direction of the soldiers for a few seconds, and opened the cockpit door to the helicopter.

“You won’t have to witness anything, any more,” he said, hoisting himself up into the cockpit. He looked down at her. “You were right about me. Your agent and the baby are alive.”

“Where are you going?”

“About a thousand miles south. Might need to refuel on my way down.”

He slammed the door and looked out the window once more at her. He then pushed up on the throttle, lifting the chopper into the air, and away from Elise for the last time.

Chapter Thirty: Las Cruces, New Mexico

Like jagged teeth sprouting from the desert, a series of mountain peaks stood erect in the distance like sentinels of a once sane country. Their splintering cliffs projected forth with slanted shadows that drew down the mountains from the midday sun. Above their rocky precipice the sky cut a clean blue line just below a cluster of benign clouds. To Dave, it was the northern boundary of his home that was still intact; still unscathed from the smoldering rot of the undead that now devoured the world.
Undead
, he scoffed, as if the word were now obsolete.
No, there is something new about them now
, he thought. He still felt their fingers, knees, and foreheads moving over him, probing him, testing him, and then accepting him.
They have a different agenda now.

The middle of his knees ached as he moved through the desert toward the mountains. He felt burning within them as each knee took his weight with his footsteps. He imagined the grinding joints wearing away as he moved farther over the creamy brown sand of the desert floor. He didn’t know for what he marched; what is even beyond those mountains? He imagined his small home in Dallas broken in from all windows as the entire city made a mad dash to flee the state. Even though it’s hundreds of miles away from Juárez, he knew of the quick panic that gets a hold of people in these days.
Hell, I would’ve fled all the way up to Canada if I weren’t here right now.

After shedding his pack and camouflage jacket long ago, he now dropped his utility belt from off his waist, with the handgun in its holster. He never wanted to fire a gun again for the rest of his life. He only now clutched to his canteen with enough water for one more gulp. Only the thin white cotton of his undershirt shielded his skin from the sun. He tried focusing on the scraggly bushes in front of him as he walked, but he kept shuddering from the breath at his back, and the wriggling fingers along his spine that he had to endure through an entire day. Stark said it might work, but he didn’t say how long it would take to wriggle through crowds of millions of them.

No other person, beside that doctor, will ever know what it was like
, he thought: blindly following the random single file lines of the infected as they streamed between alleyways and sunken neighborhoods.
At least they moved fast
, he thought.
If they still moved at their penguin waddle pace, I still would’ve been stuck in that city until I died of exhaustion.
He periodically blinked as he looked at his palms, marveling that they were still in front of his face, and his heart beating.
How am I alive when so many have died?
So many millions just shuffled off into a residue of raw organic material from which the new beast could emerge. A beast with millions of drones with tens of millions of legs to carry itself forth through the dusty deserts of Texas into the fleeing masses of a now useless technological generation. Which city would the beast’s tentacles hold on to next? Probably the city he could now see glittering on the horizon.

Sighing with resignation, he collapsed onto his knees, and looked over his shoulder to the south where he long ago had ceased to hear the desperate gunfire and bombings that swarmed the Mexican border. He thought of Michaels’ long black hair and the saddened smile that she gave him before he stepped away from that power plant. She was only a glimpse of a certain life that could’ve been. She was right all along: everything changed on us, and we didn’t realize it before it was too late.
Maybe if we had all thought the way Michaels had thought, we could’ve prevented all of this. You can’t hold on to what never worked in the first place.

Dave breathed warm air into his nostrils and sat cross-legged on the ground. The silence around him filled his mind with a pleasing comfort that he hadn’t had for several months. He realized that he hadn’t been in such pristine silence for a very long time. He only finally got used to the absence of Douglas’ voice screaming constantly into his ear. Wondering about the remaining members of their “elite” special operations team, he shuddered with a profound sadness. It was the same sadness that crept up on him every morning before he went to work when he lived in New York City; a sadness that had compelled him to escape his loneliness and join the special infectious ops. After traveling halfway around the world and squeezing his way through millions of the infected, the sadness had managed to keep quietly in stow to creep out now in the silent desert.

He suddenly missed the power plant back in Juárez, and for a brief moment, wished he were back there when he suddenly heard a cough in the distance. It was a single isolated cough that came from no apparent direction. Holding his breath, he waited to hear it again, wondering if it was just in his mind. He hoped there was someone he could talk to; someone he could sit in the desert with to discuss the fall of humanity. He wanted to talk about all the soon forgotten joys and follies of their ridiculous culture as the beast came from the south to overtake them. Waiting, he didn’t hear another hopeful cough in the distance.

He wanted to keep sitting cross-legged, staring at the southern horizon, as his mind cleared. Suddenly, the vivid memory of having to clutch to a large antenna atop a Manhattan skyscraper filled his mind. He remembered the vicious faces of the infected that had snaked their way up from the streets to overflow the top of the building. He recalled the clarity of thought that he had at that moment. Only his own self-preservation held his thoughts, finally clearing away the monotony of his empty life. He grasped at that state of mind, trying to bring it into his consciousness, but he heard another cough that brought him back to his painful feet.

“Hello?” he squeezed out from his dry throat. Only the wind answered. Waiting silently, he thought he heard the cough again just down the dry knoll where he stood. Walking blindly down the hill, he stepped quietly to listen, but only heard the crosswinds. Continuing in the same direction, he saw the bleached green color of the desert brush smearing over the sandy brown landscape. By chance his eye caught a dense green color pooled in a steep crease of the hill. He was about to keep walking when the green spot slightly moved. Staring for a minute longer, it looked like a long arm was reaching up to the sky, from the darkened floor.

“Hey!” Dave yelled. “I see you. I’m coming!” He attempted to run but fell forward, skidding the heels of his hands on the rock shards beneath him. Understanding that his body was now entering starvation, he decided to walk slowly to the lonely figure lying alone in the desert.

He imagined for a moment that he would miraculously find that the person was Dr. Stark. That somehow, after they had been separated inside a city full of twenty million of the infected dead, he would find him here now. He started playing the scene out in his mind but was quickly cut off when he realized that the person laying on the ground was actually him.

“Dr. Stark!” Dave cried out, falling down in front of the doctor, whose lips and face were blistered over. The back of his neck was cherry red with white scales beginning to flake.

“You...?” Stark turned his head up toward Dave. “You made it,” he stated.

“We both made it.”

“Do you have any water?” Stark said, squinting up at him while trying to rise.

Dave helped him to a sitting position. “I have a little.” He unscrewed the lid and handed it to him. “Here you go. Are you hurt?”

“No, no, just very dehydrated.” Stark grabbed the canteen and swiftly swallowed the warm water. “I’m glad to see you’re alive, Tripps.”

“Barely.”

“Did they attack you?”

“No, no, it was just a complete maze trying to get out of the city.”

“Oh, yes… could only follow the streams of them. Anytime I tried to wriggle my own way through them they would start to notice me and swarm me with their hands. They’re constantly… probing… gathering intel. They only care about big threats now. I saw them swarm a row of tanks in a matter of seconds. Once the horde identified a threat, it immediately dispatched itself to extinguish the danger.”

“I noticed.”

“It’s a whole new animal now. At least before we knew what they wanted—to just eat us. Now…” Stark stared at the ground.

“How did you know they wouldn’t kill us?” Dave sat down next to him, suddenly craving a cold beer.

“I didn’t. I just guessed. Believe it or not, I’ve never really known what I’m doing,” Stark said gravely. “I think I do now, though.”

“But you’re… Dr. Stark.”

“Did you know they built a statue of me in New Jersey?”

“Yeah, I saw that on the news a few months ago.”

“Just this huge, bronze statue that faces Manhattan,” Stark scoffed. “Tried to make me the token legend, even though I’ve been constantly guessing my way through this whole thing. It was Rambert just grasping at straws.”

“You deserve the statue, Dr. Stark.”

“Do I deserve it now?” He said, lifting his hand toward the southern sky. “My half-baked plan to wipe out the infected down there resulted in a… cybernetic form of human life. We have millions of people down there walking around with nanomachines running in their blood, making new body parts. I’ve got a severed arm in my bag that looks like a prop from a cheesy cyborg movie. None of this should be happening.”

“Well, it is happening. So what do we do about it now?”

Ignoring Dave, Stark continued, “And once any outbreak happens in any city that has an ATLAS-M, it’s going to create the exact same type of creature. At the rate they can infect, the Earth will be covered with them.”

“ATLAS-M?”

Stark snorted. “Don’t worry about it. Just something that seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Dave didn’t respond but looked up at the sky as the light twisted through the clouds, showing streams of a faint pink as the sun moved toward twilight. The stillness of the wilderness made everything happening in Juárez seem like a dream; no longer part of his reality. Douglas, Michaels, Jacobs and everyone else seemed like fictional characters from some book that he just finished reading.

“Tripps, do you have a family?” Stark asked, looking over at him.

“No, no, never. No kids.”

“Oh. Probably better that way now.”

“It’s still not too late,” Dave said, feeling oddly content. He wanted to talk more. He wanted to let the anxiety of his past life ooze out from him.

He felt the undying sense of self-preservation slip away from him as he and Stark suddenly stared out into the eternity of the bleeding sky.

There was no sound at first.

The curtain of the sunset was suddenly cast from the sky as a large plume of gas and smoked sprouted up from the southern horizon. As a pillar of white smoke thrust upward into the sky, a sudden flash of light shot out over the desert floor. The stack of smoke ascended farther, gathering bulk and fire underneath itself as a lofty crown of blackened fire frothed at the head.

“Oh my god,” Dave let slip from his mouth.

“Shh,” Stark said, resting his hand on Dave’s shoulder.

All at once, a clap of thunder rolled out toward them, slapping their eardrums into a deafening ring. They watched as the smoke shaft continued to rise toward the ceiling of the sky, with an unseen energy driving upward. The massive explosion screamed outward at the Earth and sky with the wrath and destruction of a falling country. Its fires scorched the undead with the fury of desperation and exhaustion.

“They finally did it,” Stark said quietly.

“I can’t believe it… they’re all... dead.”

“Someone finally pulled the trigger. It’ll help, but it won’t stop them.”

They watched in silence a while longer as the large mushroom finally stopped building upward and only lingered at the edge of the horizon. It stood triumphant and somehow permanent as a watchman over the dead. Dave remained cross-legged and silent, torn within himself about what he should say or do. Part of him wanted to run back south and wrap himself into the rays of radioactive decay, to never have to think about the smoldering planet ever again. He knew, however, that a new era had only just begun and that he wanted to be a part of it.

“I wonder how many of these are going off all over the planet right now,” Stark said, standing to his feet. “It’s all over.”

Dave stood and looked at Stark, who walked toward the mountains. “It’s not over,” Dave said at him.

“Come on. Let’s make it into town, Tripps. I think we’re only a few miles off from whatever city is by those mountains. I’ve got a lot of new work to do,” Stark said.

Dave thought about Michaels. “It’s not over,” he said. “We just stepped into a new universe.”