Nightmare Factory, page 21
I studied the list again. “Limit results only to those I could possibly find locally.”
The list shortened to two entries.
“Hospitals and pharmacies should have stock on these, but they will be in extremely high demand by now.”
I had Ada map several likely places to try. One was twenty-eight miles to the north, and another a little farther to the southwest. She assigned a probability of finding the meds at less than sixty-two percent for either location.
“Well, shit,” I said.
“How long can they stay in this area without glowing in the dark?”
“Thirty hours before mitigation methods would be inadequate to reverse the damage,” Ada responded.
I thought on that as I watched Sumo searching the riverbank for… well, whatever it is dogs go sniffing for.
“Why Louisville?” I asked. The barest hint of an idea occurring to me.
“Unknown,” the AI said. “Limited strategic importance, economic impact will be minimal. Seems to be simply to decimate the large population centers. This was likely one of the more westward metroplexes that was targeted.”
“Bayou’s sister. What does she do for a living?” I asked, an old conversation slowly bubbling up from my scattered gray matter.
Ada must have sensed what I was getting at, because the replay of that conversation played in my visual overlay.
“So where is she now?” I had asked.
Bayou had been gazing up at a brilliant sky. I remembered we were somewhere on the African continent but could no longer remember where.
“She’s with Rivex. Manufacturing. She just got a promotion.”
“There, stop there,” I said to the AI. In the replay, Ada had posted up the corporate tree of Rivex Manufacturing. The locations, stock prices, and earnings. “They’re a division of Atmos Defense Systems. The ones that build the ballistic pods.”
“That is correct, Joe.”
I pulled the collar down on my base layer battleskin. Rivex makes these. I could feel the manufacturer’s logo stamped into the collar. I’d seen it nearly every day of every deployment. “They also make the battle suits. That would offer Carol and Damiana protection, right?”
“Not as much as the full body armor, but yes, it would be a significant advantage. There is also a distribution center outside the city, which probably is still intact.”
“Plot the course and help me come up with some way of shielding them for tonight.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY
The solution was an ugly one, but during an apocalypse, aesthetics are a secondary consideration. At least that’s what I told myself. I used the original battery tray from the truck as a roof over the sleeping mats. It had a thin lead lining that would offer some protection. Then, Carol and Damiana used combinations of my body armor plating and two of Sumo’s spare battle suits to shield their heads and chests. We ate a cold meal and drank only from supplies we’d brought with us. Sumo and I would be fine outside, but I did everything I could for my new companions.
The night wasn’t cold, but I wished for a campfire just the same. I had a gnawing uneasiness that I couldn’t tamp down. I wasn’t alone; Sumo also seemed agitated and restless. Of course, we had barely escaped from some of the worst shit either of us had ever seen. We were currently outside in close proximity to one of the first nuclear blast sites on the U.S. mainland. I rubbed a finger across the truck panel. In my flashlight I could see more of the fine lavender powder coating my fingertip. We had reason to be ‘out of sorts,’ as my mom used to say, but none of that was it. No… something else was wrong.
I emptied the can of prepackaged coffee and decided I should probably switch over to decaf. I was getting a bit jittery. My fingers kept tracing lines to my handgun, my knife, and reaching over my back for the Rattler MK4. None of those items were where they should have been. They were close, but being out of my armor meant I couldn’t easily keep them on me. It was an unaccustomed vulnerability for me. Sumo snapped at some unseen flying thing, then settled against my leg once more. I stroked his fur and lay back, trying to think.
I was a professional soldier, and no, I didn’t get nervous before a mission. We were well-trained, well-equipped, and we reduced the risks as much as possible. Take that into account and add to it the fact that I am augmented and enhanced. Hell, one of my arms is more metal and circuitry than flesh and blood. My point is, I don’t get nervous; I make the other dumb fuck nervous. So why was I sitting here, clearly not thinking straight… okay, yeah… nervous?
My eyes snapped open instantly. I knew I had only been sleeping a short while. Soldiers get a sense of their own internal clock, and mine was as reliable as they came. I felt the dog’s steady breathing, his chest rising and falling, my head resting where it had been. I didn’t want to alert the AI. I knew she was using passive and active sensors to monitor the surroundings. She would have awoken me had anything happened. Still, something had happened. I could feel it.
I rolled my head from side to side, scanning the truck, the riverbank, and the trees beyond. The night was relatively bright. A gibbous moon cast the surroundings in silvers and grays. My heart was beating as it sometimes did in the heat of battle. I consciously attempted to calm.
“Are you alright, Joseph?”
Ada had monitored my ocular nerve and knew this wasn’t just part of my typically restless sleep pattern. “Something is here,” I whispered internally. I felt a pulse move through my suit. I knew Ada was going fully active on all sensors. Sumo stopped breathing. To be more accurate, his chest stopped moving. He was awake now, too.
“Prowler, helmet,” Ada commanded.
This can’t be good, I thought. I silently donned my bucket, and the Rattler was in my hand before I even thought about it. Something else occurred to me as I was kneeling there, sweeping the gun across the area for targets. I was terrified.
“It’s here,” I whispered. It couldn’t be, but I clearly fucking felt it. My personal boogeyman had followed us for hundreds of miles. Sumo began uttering a growl so low I felt more than heard it. I had faced overwhelming enemies multiple times in my career. Narrowly escaped a biological and robot horde in the last twenty-four hours, but this thing had gotten into my skull.
“There is nothing here,” Ada said with the finality of a machine that has weighed all the facts and examined every piece of evidence.
“You don’t know shit,” I said, rising to my feet. I motioned Sumo left, and I went right, keeping the two sleeping women in the middle of us. My helmet jiggled on my head; without my chest armor to attach it, the fit was comically loose. I felt like a human bobblehead. Visible in my visual overlay, Ada scanned through every available wavelength, but nothing flashed the familiar red glow of a potential threat.
“I know what you are thinking, Prowler. Whatever that creature is, it couldn’t have followed us from Iron River,” Ada said.
“Maybe there are more of them. Perhaps it can fly? You consider that?”
“I consider all possibilities,” she said calmly. “To be more accurate, I should say the chances are infinitesimally small that it is here, or if it is, that it would be the same one.”
At least she was admitting that the damn thing existed now. Still, why was it giving me the fucking shakes?
Sumo and I met up on the opposite side of the campsite. He seemed to have no better idea where the thing was than I did. My scope was still clear. Nothing larger than a fucking frog was within a hundred yards.
I backed up to the truck and wished again I had my armor. Carol and Damiana were sleeping soundly. My helmet mic could easily detect both of the women’s soft snores.
“Active patrol,” I stated. “Sumo, you first. Wake me in two hours, Ada.” Sumo trotted off, beginning his rounds. We were too tired and too few to do an effective sentry duty, but I was beginning to distrust that Ada alone could keep us safe. All she could really sense was the weird paranoid signals my body was giving off. Still, that soldier’s sixth sense had saved my ass before.
The rest of the night was Sumo and I swapping out every few hours. Other than a lone rabbit with apparently bad intentions, Sumo tracked down nothing of note. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened. In the early morning hours, I sat on the tailgate between sentry rounds. I realized the feeling of the threat. The sense of being hunted was gone. As a soldier, I had learned to trust my instincts, especially when it came to potential danger, yet now its absence had me even more confused and on edge. “I don’t think I like this new world,” I said softly. The upside was, it didn’t look like I would be occupying it long.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-ONE
LUX
He missed his mom, Marcie, and even his dad and his new girlfriend, maybe a little, but Lux wasn’t miserable. In fact, he was happier than he remembered being in a long time. Bill and Laura had two kids. Aleta was already eleven and a boy they called Peegee was just a little older than Lux. Since that first night, the three of them had been playing constantly. The parents had talked little to him, but they’d let him stay. The house wasn’t as large as his mom’s or dad’s, so he’d been sleeping on a mat in the utility room. It was still way better than the woods. They also fed him, but sadly, no more of the wonderful bacon. Still, things could be worse.
“No one lives in those,” Peegee said as they threw a ball down the small street.
Lux had been looking at the other homes nearby, one he now realized was just a barn or something. It had machinery parked underneath. “Yeah, we have some empty houses around ours, too.”
“Dad said you could stay for a few days until they can get in touch with your parents,” the girl said, racing up fast on her bike and sliding it, the back tire braking hard.
Lux shrugged and tossed the ball back. “I’m glad. I didn’t much like the woods.”
“You can’t eat all our food, though,” she said before speeding off and circling the big round area at the end of the street.
“I wasn’t going to, Aleta,” Lux said when she came back by. His voice had a clear edge of anger now. He appreciated how kind the family had been, but it wasn’t his fault he was here. He forgot the ball and went and sat on the curb. Timber came over and dug his face into Lux’s side. “Thanks, boy. I’m glad you found me, too.”
Peegee didn’t talk a lot, but when he did, sometimes, his words sounded funny. “Don’t pay any attention to her,” he said to Lux. “Dad’s just worried we don’t have enough food and stuff.” He turned and watched his older sister’s bike as she went around a curve in the road. “She’s not just being mean.”
“What does that mean? Why don’t they just call and order what they need?”
The boy shrugged. “Probably same reason the power’s out, and the streaming holochannels aren’t playing.”
That made sense to Lux, but how would they get in touch with his mom then? “Someone will come and fix it, right?”
Peegee just twisted his face and spat into the grass. “Beats me. Let’s go play in the barn.”
After a week, Bill started spending a little more time with Lux each day. Mainly just walking around the small farm, pointing things out. Lux got the feeling something was different, but he wasn’t sure what had changed. They also weren’t eating like they had been the first few days. Dinner the day before had been the only meal, and it was just canned beans and some homemade bread that tasted gritty.
“The crops aren’t in yet, you see.” Bill pointed, and Lux could see a small round object hanging off a vine that was filled with yellow blossoms.
“That’s a tomato,” Lux said proudly.
“Very good, kiddo. You pick up fast. It will be another few weeks for those, longer for some of the other stuff.” Bill waved his hand around to take in the vast expanse. Lux only saw it as a couple of gardens.
The farm, as they had called it, wasn’t that large, not even as big as the playground area in his mom’s neighborhood, but Mister Bill seemed proud of it.
“Have you ever gone fishing?” Bill asked, changing the subject.
“Uh, uh,” Lux answered, shaking his head. “Mom, didn’t like me to get around water.”
“Aww, that’s silly. Tell you what, tomorrow all of us will go see if we can catch us some dinner. There’s a great little spot just a mile or so away.” Lux wasn’t good at reading adults, but he felt that the man was not really saying what he was thinking.
“Is everything going to be okay, Mister Bill?”
The man smiled, removed his Atlanta Braves hat, and rubbed the sweat from his face. “I think so, Lux. Me and Mrs. Laura are just a bit worried. That’s all.”
“About food?”
The man’s expression seemed to blank out, but then he recovered. “We’ll be fine. Look at everything growing out here, and tomorrow we’re going to reel in some giant fish.”
Fishing sounded fun, but Lux knew there was more than what the man was saying. He was more than a little worried.
By the end of that following week, things had gotten even worse. Mister Bill and his wife were fighting openly now.
“You were never a farmer, Bill. You just wanted to play in the dirt,” she yelled from the backyard.
“It’s not my fault. I have a barn full of equipment that will no longer do nothing.” The back door slammed as the man stormed inside.
Lux looked at the two kids. Both looked scared. Neither seemed to want to stay near the house because of the increasing confrontations. They also didn’t seem to want to be around him much, either.
“They weren’t like this before you showed up,” Aleta said accusingly, walking by and bumping him hard with her shoulder as she passed.
Lux wasn’t sure what was happening, but knew it wasn’t good. Maybe not for this family, but especially not for him. He didn’t belong here—he knew that.
There was no dinner that night. They all went to bed hungry. The next morning, Mister Bill took Lux out early. “We going fishing again?” Lux asked. He didn’t think so because all the man carried was a piece of iron. That, plus, the fishing hadn’t been very productive. Lux had caught a fish and Bill had gotten two, but they were hard to eat, lots of bones, and very little meat.
Bill stayed silent and kept walking toward one of the other houses. The man went up and peered into the door. Lux already knew no one lived there, so he failed to understand the purpose of the man’s actions. Some of what the man had shown him was cool, like the plants and mushrooms you could eat, even some bugs if you got really, really hungry. How to find water that was safe to drink and stuff like that.
“Follow me,” Bill said, walking around the empty house to the backyard.
Standing on the patio, Bill looked around, studying the place. It looked a lot like their house, Lux decided. A swing set, some furniture, and a grill for cooking. People had once lived here. Where had they gone?
Bill took the metal bar and gave it a little toss, catching it back in the same hand. It looked heavy to the boy. It was black with one pointed end and the other bent around to form a letter ‘U.’
“Kid, I need you to know something,”
the man began; it sounded like he was on the verge of tears or maybe just angry.
Lux worried he had done something wrong, but he couldn’t think of anything.
“I mean, don’t take this personal or nothing.”
Lux heard Peegee and Aleta in their yard across the road. Timber barked; Lux imagined they were throwing the ball to big dog. He liked Timber the best he decided. When he looked back at the man, Bill had the bar raised high, and he was openly crying now.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-TWO
KOVACH
I didn’t tell the women anything about the night’s events, or non-events, to be more accurate. We packed up as soon as the batteries were charged and hit the road again. I let them know about the battle suit manufacturer. Unlike the drive yesterday, today we would have to go through some residential areas, as well as a few small towns. I didn’t like it but saw few alternatives.
After being on the road over a week, I had yet to see another operational vehicle of any kind. No cars, no air cars, no work tractors even. A few bikes, a handful of people on horseback, but the old GMC pickup had the road pretty much to itself, other than the stalled vehicles we had to navigate around or occasionally pull out of the way.
I felt like I was traveling through a foreign country. Traffic wasn’t the only thing missing. I’d seen no other dogs or cats. Most cattle fields were barren. When we slowed down or stopped, I no longer heard birds. The world outside was very different from a week ago.
One of my earlier drop missions had been into Tunisia in northern Africa. It was unusual because I had vacationed there once with my family when I was twelve or thirteen. I remembered how great the beaches on the Mediterranean were and how friendly the locals had been. It was one of the most progressive areas on the African continent and heavily dependent on tourism.
Years later, it was a battle zone. A civil war in a neighboring country had spilled over the borders, and now Tunisia was where most of the heaviest fighting was happening. We had dropped in to secure a diplomat. One who, ironically, had already been dead for days before we arrived. We had to fight our way back to the coast and wait for extract. The beautiful buildings they used to remind everyone of Greece now were tumbled down ruins. The shops were gone, the restaurants all vacant shells, but what I remembered most was how much the people had changed. Their world had disappeared, and now they, too, were just hollow shells, full of anger and loss and guilt. They wanted our help, and they wanted us dead, sometimes in the same instant.
