Immortality (58 page)

Keeping low, Artie moved along the ridge to find another attack point. A thunderous shudder bore down on him at high speed and then slowed to a hover just above and in front of his position. Trees were bending down; their branches whipped by whirlwinds. He knew some kind of big helicopter was in the air very close to him. Loud fast bursts of chain-driven sounds ripped at his ears, followed by explosions erupting from Pagan positions. Artie took a risk and moved forward to peer through the brush. Dirt was being kicked up all around him from rotor wash. He saw an Apache helicopter just above and to the right. The Apache, and what must have been several others which he couldn’t see, were firing chain-gun cannons into Pagan positions. At the focus point of the Apaches’ fire, all he could see was a growing cloud of dust and smoke with flashes erupting inside it. Hell had come to the Pagans. He loved it. He grinned even as specks of wind-driven dirt and grit were pelting his face.

The Apaches stopped firing in less than a minute. They had exterminated the vermin. Artie looked at the attack bird hovering near him. The war machine’s presence was intimidating. If the crew turned on him and opened fire, he wouldn’t stand a chance. These men had come to the aid of real victims this day; but at their heart, they were enforcers of the I64 line. The smile dimmed on his face and slowly became a scowl. He raised the M4 to his shoulder and aimed at the Apache’s glass enclosed canopy. He could make out the shape of two men. This would be a serious blow to an enemy more dangerous and more responsible for all the suffering than the Pagans. He was ready to squeeze down on the trigger. He didn’t know if the canopy was armored glass. The M4 might end up being as effective as spitting in the face of a murderous machine. He wished he had some grenades for the launcher and knew how to use it. He slowly tightened on the trigger. A few rounds spit from the M4 and then it stopped. He looked at the gun. The clip was empty. He looked back; the Apache was gone but he could still hear it flying nearby. Artie got to his feet and ran. Seconds later, he heard the forest erupting from cannon fire just behind him. He ran faster. He knew he would be blown apart at any moment.

Several minutes later, Artie reached the dirt road he’d crossed earlier. He was panting. His face was covered in sweat. The Apache had stopped firing some minutes ago. He couldn’t see or hear the bird he’d shot. He had spit into the face of the monster and learned he needed more than machine gun rounds. All the firing had stopped. The battle was over. He walked across the road and down the cement wall to rejoin the fighters he’d met less than twenty minutes earlier. He felt like it had been days ago that he’d pulled an M4 from that crate and stuffed ammo and clips into his pockets.

~

Dusk was closing in around them. The group of thirty men moved through the woods in near silence. Artie/Alexander was dressed in dark green camouflage fatigues and a flak vest which he’d been issued earlier that day before the team set out. His .357 magnum was in his shoulder holster which he wore outside the fatigues and vest. He was starting to think of himself as Alexander. This was the name these fighters knew him by. Some had seen him take his shot at the Apache. The rumors were that he was both extremely crazy and brave.

Alexander carried what was now his M4. The weapon was starting to feel like something his hands were familiar with. On his vest and belt, he had pouches of 40mm grenades which looked like huge fat bullets, one and half inches wide and four inches long. He’d learned how to use the launcher by firing a dozen non-explosive practice shells across a field at a deserted cabin. The launcher could fire a grenade a thousand feet out and deliver enough punch with a single hit to cripple a lightly armored vehicle. The next Apache would not be so lucky.

A military two-way radio was clipped to Alexander’s belt. In his earbud, he heard the chatter of other men in the hunting party. They were tracking down a group of Pagans who had fled on foot. The Apaches had killed most of the vermin. The best guess was they were hunting approximately ten to twenty Pagans.

They were tracking an enemy who had a commanding head start. The hunting party had been going for over six hours without stopping. Alexander could feel they were getting close. A man named Jones was leading the team. He was a hunter and trapper who knew these woods. This had been his home since he was a boy. He was lanky looking with a grizzled beard and a strong Virginia accent. Alexander thought Jones knew the woods but lacked the decisiveness of a leader.

“
Clearing up ahead
,” crackled in Alexander’s earbud.

Alexander stopped walking when he reached a line of trees where several men were congregating. More men were still coming up from behind. Below him, he saw a small town spread out in a valley. A river ran through the valley and between some of the structures. The town was not deserted. There were some people on sidewalks and cars moving on the streets. Alexander tensed as he saw an armed group of maybe two dozen move out from the edge of the woods below them. They walked down the center of the main street, and at its end, filed into a three story building which looked like a bank. Pagans!

“We got ’em,” said Jones.

Alexander crouched behind some boulders as more Pagans came out of the three story building. The gangsters walked across the street to a line of armored Humvees that had pulled out of a parking structure minutes ago. The town was a stronghold. This was not what the hunters had expected to find. They were out of radio range of the settlement. Jones had tried a cell phone but was unable to connect, which was no big surprise given the decaying conditions of all the infrastructure. Attacking with their force of thirty fighters was suicide according to Jones. Everyone on the team had M4s and grenade launchers, but that was not enough firepower. At least a hundred Pagans were down there with heavy machine guns and possibly rockets. Alexander and some of the other men were ready to take them on. They had surprise on their side. They had hundreds of grenades, which was enough for a small artillery barrage. Jones wanted to send a party back to the Red Cross shelter to bring reinforcements, which could take eight hours or more, even if they returned by car. The Pagans could be gone by then or – worse – reinforced. Jones was soft and everybody saw it. Alexander felt an insane compulsion to shoot the coward where he stood. Jones was ready to pull back. For Alexander there was no time left, it was either shoot the man or force him to change his mind.

“I’m going to attack,” said Alexander. “Anyone who wants to kill Pagans can join me.”

“The hell you are!” roared Jones.

In a flash of rage, Alexander jammed the barrel of his M4 into the man’s throat gagging him. Jones backed up. Alexander moved with him keeping the barrel pressed in place. He was moments from squeezing the trigger.

“Fuck you,” yelled Jones.

The man turned abruptly and started to walk away. Alexander found himself aiming his M4 at the back of a coward. There was grumbling. A few of the men started to walk off after Jones but the majority didn’t move. Alexander watched as the deserters vanished into the stands of trees. He felt his left eye twitching. He wanted to spray them with bullets and wasn’t sure how he was holding back. He turned to face the men who’d remained.

“I’m going to kill Pagans,” he said in a soft voice that was almost a snarl. “I’m going to ambush them and leave behind a town full of their rotting corpses.”

There was silence; then one fighter said, “Yeah!” and then another barked, “Let’s do it.”

Alexander locked eyes with one man and then another and another. Amazingly, these men were accepting him as their mutinous leader. This was not exactly what he had intended. He just wanted to kill Pagans.

The plan was the result of a group discussion between Alexander and four of the most experienced fighters. The strategy was simple and lethal. Half the fighters would remain behind in positions up on the hillside. The goal was to use the other half to draw out the Pagans by giving them what looked like an easy slaughter. Once the enemy was completely exposed, the men on the hillside would hit them with overwhelming violence: a fusillade of hundreds of grenades.

Alexander and his half of the fighters had crept down to the last bit of tree cover before the town. Fifty yards away, a chain link fence marked the beginning of a small park with benches and an old fashioned kid-powered merry-go-round. Alexander’s new second-in-command had remained up on the hillside to lead the grenade assault. He was the man Alexander had walked next to during the six hours they’d tracked Pagans through the woods. His nickname was Fox. He was a stocky Texan with a sarcastic streak and a bad temper. Alexander had looked Fox in the eyes and saw a man that lusted for blood, a brawler. This was a man who could be counted on to attack and not run.

Alexander crept forward alone. He was on point and would draw first blood. He walked out of cover through a break in the fence and into the park. He stood looking at the town. The sun was almost down. The sky was growing dark. There were armed Pagans standing less than a hundred feet away. He felt a sting on his wrist and turned it over. An insect was biting him on his gang tattoo. He squashed the bug against the red dragon on his wrist. He had gone full circle in his life and was back to who he was born to be. It was time to kill Pagans.

Alexander pressed the transmit button on his radio but didn’t speak a word. Instead, he released the button. He felt something odd. There was a little ball of fear simmering in his gut. Something was whispering danger. His eyes opened wide in the growing darkness. He thought of the hospital tent where Suzy had died; he thought of New York. A kill zone was coming. He was certain of it. Was it too late for his fighters to pull back? He pressed the transmit button.

“Fallback,” he whispered harshly. “A kill zone’s going to hit.”

“A what?... Say again…”

Alexander saw a Pagan fall in the street, then others. There were no insect sounds or wind. There was no moon. It was a quiet night while death visited the streets of this small town. Alexander walked out into the middle of all the dying and began shooting Pagans while they were collapsing. He was going to make sure none of them lived. Some of them might have his immunity to kill zones, but no one was immune to bullets.

~

Not a single of his fighters had been lost in the kill zone or the mop up which was on-going. These fighters had become Alexander’s to command. He sensed it. They would die for him. They were in awe of him. His prediction, and then reckless survival and exploit of a kill zone, were things bordering on superstition or even legend. Fox asked how he’d known the zone was coming. Alexander had told him it was a sense he’d picked up from surviving in the middle of them, which was mostly the truth. He said he’d learned the smell of this kind of death when it was coming.

Alexander attached a flashlight to the barrel of his M4. The streetlights were working but pools of darkness stretched out everywhere. All the people in the center of town were dead. Some Pagans on the edges were possibly still alive but not for long, thought Alexander as he led his men down the main street of the town. They’d captured a handful of citizens from the first few buildings on the street. To Alexander, they were all whores who had serviced a corrupt master’s needs.

“Put the collaborators in that building,” ordered Alexander. “You two stand guard. I’ll deal with them once we’re done.”

Alexander walked up to the three-story building he’d originally seen Pagans entering and exiting. The building was a bank. The heavy glass door was locked. Inside, he saw dead bodies. He backed up across the street and loaded a 40mm shell. His men started to go for cover. They saw what was coming. Alexander hunkered down next to Fox behind a Humvee and shot the grenade into the door. A powerful explosion shook the ground. When Alexander looked up, he saw debris sprayed across the street. All the glass in the building was gone. Bits of scorched paper were floating in the air. He led his men inside the building through the blown out doorframe. Inside were dead Pagans. He wished some were alive just so he could kill them. His men fanned out to search the bank.

“We got one,” radioed Fox. “In the vault!”

Alexander walked into the open vault. Fox had a Pagan lying on his stomach with an M4 pointed at the back of the prisoner’s head. The prisoner had a long braided ponytail like an American Indian. His clothing was torn and disheveled. Alexander shoved the man over with the tip of his boot. The Pagan’s eyes met his. There was dullness in the man’s stare as if he was not registering what he was seeing. The eyes didn’t blink or move. It was like looking into a pair of camera lenses attached to a machine. Without warning, Alexander’s perceptions expanded. Every muscle in his body seized up turning him into a living statue. Somehow he was seeing through this man’s eyes – and what he saw were his own eyes staring back. The closed loop was like the infinite reflections of a pair of mirrors facing each other. The connection dropped as abruptly as it had emerged; but in that instant, Alexander realized creatures lived among them who participated in this plague and this man was one of them. The creatures were immune and they were some kind of spies. He fired a burst of rounds into the creature’s torso. There had to be more of these things out there hiding like infected parasites among the normal. All of them had to be hunted down and exterminated; then maybe the plague would end.

The BVMC lab seemed less frenetic than it had been. For Mark, two days of Chanukah remained. For most of the country, tomorrow was Christmas Eve. Dinner was beginning to be served in the cafeteria. Most employees were heading in that direction, except for three. Mark, Kathy, and Carl were meeting secretly in Carl’s office. The door was locked. The television was turned up to prevent anyone from overhearing. A summary of world news played noisily in the background. The meeting was important, but Mark’s thoughts were wandering no matter how hard he tried to stay focused. Days had passed and he still had no idea of the methods or extent to which the alien technology in his brain was affecting him. That’s how he thought of it now,
alien technology
. He was fully convinced the seeds were something that had not been created by mankind or, at least, not created by what everyone called modern civilization. He didn’t know where the nanotech had come from, but it felt old to him; and the more he thought about it, the more ancient it felt. He knew it was stealthy and suspected it could have been around for a very long time. The only certainty was that at the high concentrations he carried, the technology enhanced his body’s natural healing abilities; instead of killing him, it cured him. His shoulder had a faint pink scar which was almost invisible, but the nanotech didn’t fix everything. He still had diabetes and his fingers were still sore in the morning. He suspected it only worked on traumas. He noticed Kathy had her cane with her. He didn’t recall seeing her with it earlier in the day. He wondered if her knee bothered her more from emotional stress than physical strain. Could the nanotech repair emotional traumas as well as physical ones? Mark’s focus returned to the conversation.