Fear the Survivors (18 page)

Chapter 18
: City Counciling

O
n a dark night in the small city of Johnstown, a group gathered in anger. Shouts ran rampant through city hall as the mayor tried to wrestle words with the crowd. But they would not be calmed. Federal, state, and even local taxes were going up again, and they weren’t going to stand for it.

“Mayor Karmen, this is too much, surely you can see that?” said a woman’s voice from the crowd.

On some level, Paul Karmen recognized the woman’s voice, but he was too harried to place it. They were angry, and it seemed like he did not have a friend amongst them. These were his people, heck, many of them were related to him. But this was out of control.

“Now, of course I see that this is a lot to ask. The last few months have been tough on us all, and I know it seems like the world’s going to hell in a handbasket, but people, I don’t know what you want me to do about it. There’s wars going on, and we have a responsibility as Americans to do our part.”

The room did not like that, but the voices quelled to a dull rumble until another familiar voice spoke up. This one Paul did recognize, and Al Schneyer raised his powerful voice as he spoke. The man was in his fifties, the veteran of many a town hall meeting, his large frame delivering an appropriately powerful opinion that always seemed to be at odds with Paul’s, but which was always couched in the nicest of terms. Al was a farmer turned businessman, who had seen a great deal of expansion over the last ten years as he had turned his family farm into a corn-growing concern. But as the Schneyers had enveloped their neighbors’ farmland, they had also taken on airs. Tonight Schneyer wore his somewhat trademark suit that was a little small for him, but apparently expensive, and he was clearly freshly shaven, one of the few there who was, including the mayor.

“Now, now, folks, the mayor’s right. We’re Americans and we have a duty to pay our fair share,” said Al in a deep bass.

And here we go, thought Paul, “Of course we should support our troops during a war, and where the government is involved in supporting the folks in Palestine and finding these damn terrorists that’ve been tearing up things back home, we have a duty to back them up.” The room nodded and commented their assent to this, but he wasn’t done. Oh crap, thought Paul. “Of course, if they were actually out looking for these damn terrorists that’d be another story. But have they found them? No, they haven’t. Three months of attacks and murders—sickening murders, devil’s work—and not one culprit caught, not one arrest in all this time.”

The room rallied behind him. Paul went to speak, but as he opened his mouth, Al boomed out again, smiting Paul’s response before it had started, “And what about that war spending? Where are our dollars going? To the Middle East, to help the folks dyin’ a thousand deaths from the plague ripping apart those poor countries? No, their goin’ to shit is where they’re goin’!”

The room broke into angry talk at this last point, and Paul called out for order. “Please, ladies and gentlemen. Please.” But his voice was lost in the confused shouts and rants filling the room. His eyes met Al’s, who looked back at him with the immovability of the self-righteous, and Paul wanted to punch him right in his smug little face. Lowering his head awhile, Paul wondered why he had taken this job at all.

“Everyone, please!” shouted Paul in a rare moment of exasperation, his outburst knocking the wind out of the room. “No one is more frustrated than I by the horrific attacks across our country.” Paul felt the pang of his own loss in the last few months, and his voice wavered a moment.

The room was momentarily silent. “I just fail to see what all this shouting is going to do about it. We sent a letter to Congressman Hartley, we know other towns, cities, and concerned citizens have done it too. God knows we already didn’t vote for the man sitting in the Oval Office, and I’m pretty sure none of us will next time either.” A murmur broke through at that comment, and Paul worried he was going down the wrong track. Finishing with marked conviction, he said, “But while he’s in office, he is still our president, and what he says goes … that’s it, folks. We can send another letter to Congress, but bar that, this town isn’t about to start acting like a bunch of liberal whiners.”

The room fell silent again, and it seemed for a moment that Paul had assuaged further dissent. He dared not look at Al Schneyer. He didn’t want to encourage him further. But he heard the man clear his throat, saw with the corner of his eye that the burly man was glancing around for support, and Paul’s shoulders sagged.

But as Al went to speak further, to hit home his point about refusing to pay this last property tax increase as so many had proposed earlier that day, the room started to twitch. A part of their brains was telling them something was wrong. A smell. Smoke.

They saw the smoke before they saw the flames. The vents in the ceiling started belching it even as the first licks of orange started to appear outside the windows of the big hall. A single shout catalyzed the room’s impending panic, and the mob reacted. Moving as a mass to the double doors at the back of the room, they already felt the heat starting to emanate from the walls. But something was blocking the main doors. They rattled and banged on them, anger and fear rising in intensity, but the doors would not budge. Turning at first in drabs, and then as a whole, the mob started to move to the smaller side exit at the front of the hall, to the left of the now-deserted dais.

Having come down from the stage, the mayor was one of the first to get to the other exit. It too, seemed to be blocked, but it could be opened enough to allow one person at a time to break free. Stepping to one side, Paul tried to urge the women out first, herding people and trying to stop the mad crush to the door. It was hard. People at the back were desperately pushing forward, and the volume of shouting and screaming was drowning all reasonable calls for calm.

The shouting was cut through by the crack of a gun. Then another. Crack, Crack. Through the windows they could see that the flames were not as bad on this side of the building as the other. But they could also see the first of the people that were running free of the fire.

Crack, another fell, her head blown open as she sprinted from the burning building. She joined the several bodies that had already fallen. But the people close to the door could not see through the window to what was happening to their friends and loved ones outside, and they kept pouring out through it.

Crack, crack, crack. They fell with brutal efficiency, one after another. No one was getting more than a few meters from the door. As the group near the window started to back away in horror, the pressure at the front relieved until a woman trying to escape had barely gotten a step before she saw the bodies in front of her. She stepped back instinctively toward the doorway and as the shot hit her, she was blown back into the man behind her, her blood splashing over him as he caught her and stumbled back into the hall.

The sight sent the remaining thirty people in the hall into a mad frenzy. Paul stared in horror at the man clutching the woman … her face gone … her head punctured and run through. Another man made a mad dash for the door and Paul reached out for him but he was too late. The shooter allowed the man to get a few steps then dropped the sprinting man as he leaped over another body. Spinning him in midair as his head was stopped dead by the bullet. The man fell like a rag doll to the paving stones outside the hall and lay there limp, unmoving.

Paul stared at the man’s body from the doorway in astonishment. Behind him the room had gone mad. People were shattering windows on the far side of the hall, but the fire was fully fledged there, clearly deliberately set to herd people out onto the killing field that was this lone exit. The broken windows only let the flames leap inward, and Paul felt the heat behind him increase.

Suddenly a chair came flying through the window to Paul’s right, soaring through the air in a cloud of shattered glass to land on the pavement amongst the bodies. A man followed behind it and the crack of the gun came clear again. Paul saw the muzzle flash down the street. Staring at it, a part of him said run. But where to? The rest of the people in the hall began to climb out the shattered window, driven to primal insanity by the flames on the other side of the building. Paul watched as the muzzle flashed once, twice, crack, crack, dropping them as they climbed out, a gruesome pile of bodies draped over the window’s sill and over each other. As he stared at the flashes in the darkness, Paul saw its source start to move. Slowly. Deliberately, it started to come closer.

Inexorably the flashes stepped toward the hall, their vicious crack sounding amongst the din of the fire and screams. Regular. The thump of a heartbeat that was silencing the hearts and shouts of the crazed people climbing out of the only window not ablaze. And as it approached, Paul saw a figure resolve behind the flash. Black as the darkness it was stepping out of. Blacker even than the night sky above them.

Without thought, Paul stepped forward, out of the doorway, peering into the night to see what thing could be doing this. What shadow was wielding that gun. But as he stepped forward, none of the shots were for him. They flew past him into the last of the terrified people weeping as they tried to clamber over their dead husbands and wives.

As he stepped slowly from the building, Paul saw the black figure step into the dim light of a streetlamp. Her lithe figure walked with grace, an assault rifle braced at her shoulder, firing with calm ease. With a start, Paul realized that the figure was not even looking at the building as she slayed the last of the town’s people.

She was staring at him. He froze in the focus of her black stare, suddenly aware that he was shaking. She lowered her rifle at last. No more screams came from the hall. Only the sound of the fire devouring it. Without warning, his fear boiled up in him, and suddenly he was running, sprinting away from her. He didn’t see where he was going, his legs grabbed at the asphalt with abandon as he felt the full weight of his impending death clawing at him for the first time. The fist that suddenly grabbed his calf was like iron. Cold and hard, it clamped on to him and stopped him dead, his leg dislocating as he was hauled bodily backward and up, his face barely missing the tarmac was wrenched upside down.

He cried in pain as his weight swung from his dislocated leg. It took him a moment to realize he was upside down. Hanging from his ankle. He drew his attention from the pain in his hip, like drawing iron from a magnet, and focused his eyes. He saw her feet first. Planted firmly in front of his face as she stood holding him by his ankle like nothing more than a sack of potatoes. He felt her stoop, and with her free hand, grab him by the neck. She pulled his face to hers and held him there, grasped by one bruised ankle and his neck. He felt like a doll. Like paper in her hands. He realized that his hundred-eighty-pound frame was nothing to her, that he was but a joke, and he saw mockery in her black eyes.

When she eventually spoke, it was with incongruous gentility, her soft, almost sultry voice at horrific odds with the way she had handily slaughtered half the town. “Paul Karmen. Hello. My name is Princess Lamati. I want you to remember my name. It is very important that you remember it, and tell it to the people who are going to come and ‘rescue’ you. I am Princess Lamati of the Hamprect Empire, and I am here to eradicate you.
All
of you. But that can wait. First I have a message for an old friend of yours. In fact, I believe you somehow managed to get her to go to the prom with you, a long, long time ago.”

Paul tried to comprehend her words, to wrap his head around them, and found himself morbidly curious as to where this was going. A whimper escaped his lips, an echo of the question that her statement begged for. But he could manage no more than that through his shock.

She went on, “When she comes to see you, when Madeline Cavanagh comes to visit her old boyfriend in the hospital, tell her that she can end all of this, end all the slaughter and pain, by simply stepping out into the night. Tell her that all the people who have died at my hands have suffered because of her. Tell her I won’t stop. I’ll never stop. Tell her that by staying in hiding like a coward she has only caused more death. I will find her eventually. And when I do, all this extra suffering will have been in vain. A sad prelude to the one thing that could have stopped it all: her death. I tell you this now, because in a moment you may black out, and I want you to remember my little message.

“Do you understand me, Paul?”

He managed a nod through the grip around his neck, and Lana smiled, “Good.”

Through his discomfort, a new feeling came like an unexpected whisper in a darkened room. A tiny tingling in the back of his neck where Lana’s fingers touched his spine. An itch in his very bones. He tried to writhe against it, but she held him firm, and his struggles washed pointlessly against the wall of her strength. Suddenly he felt the itch break through to his soul … and then fire. Fire in every bone, in every inch of his skin, in his mouth and ears and eyes, in his bowels, and under his nails. Fire like a thousand red hot needles coursing voltage into his veins. He screamed in his brain, the final image he would remember that night seared into his mind, along with her words.

“Tell her I won’t stop. I’ll never stop.”

His mind tried to close itself off. He prayed for death.

- - -

As the phalanx of helicopters came in over the treetops, Ayala went through her preparation ritual. Her team was split into two groups, each with three leads, each lead with two men running with him. The groups were travelling in heavily laden Black Hawk gunships, with high-caliber machine gunners mounted on either side for suppression support.