Last Gasp (74 page)

“Think we’d notice the difference?” Nick murmured.

Jen hugged herself and shuddered. “I don’t like the idea of sending somebody into the tunnels after them—I know I wouldn’t go.”

They turned a corner and pushed through double doors into the mess hall. Chase said, “That’s true, we can’t order anyone to go, but we have to get them out of there before they build up in strength.” Relief brightened the tired faces as he told everyone that the situation wasn’t immediately critical. The Tomb was secure and everyone could go back to bed. There was a slight stir of unease when he mentioned the possibility that intruders had broken into the complex, and Chase had to raise his hands for silence. “You can all rest easy; there’s no way they can get in. But if any of you want to volunteer, we’re sending a squad of armed people into the complex to flush them out and seal off the outer access points so they can’t get in again. It’s not going to be pleasant, but it has to be done. If you feel like volunteering report to the operations room at noon tomorrow.”

“You mean today?” somebody called out. “It’s five o’clock.”

“Right. Noon today.”

There was a general movement toward the door. Nick turned to Chase, smothering a yawn. “You’ve got your first volunteer. But if they happen to break in before eleven, don’t bother to wake me.” He put his arm around Jen and they joined the rest of the dispersing crowd.

Chase arched his head back, massaging his neck muscles. “Get to bed,” he said to Ruth. “I’m going up to the operations room to make sure everything’s secure. I won’t be long.”

Ruth eyed him critically. “Don’t be. You need to rest too.” She said with mock severity, “Doctor’s orders.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Chase squeezed her hand and went off. As he came into the corridor, worming his way through a knot of people, a distraught woman snatched at his sleeve. Her eyes were red and puffy and it took him a second or two to recognize her. It was Sonia Maxwell, Ron’s wife.

“Have you seen him? Is he here?” She looked up at him and then jerkily from left to right and back again, scanning the faces.

“You mean your husband? No, not since we came down from the ops room.”

“He told me.” Her lower lip quivered as she fought to keep control. “About Fran. That was nearly two hours ago and I haven’t seen him since.”

“I’m sorry about your daughter.” It sounded so feeble, this polite phrase of condolence, so meaningless. He tried instead to reassure her by saying that perhaps Ron wanted to be alone for a while—maybe he’d gone to the lab? Sonia Maxwell nodded and wandered off in a trance.

Chase escaped gratefully. Was it right that he should feel guilty? Because there was no doubt he did. His son was alive, her daughter was dead. By some obscure association he felt shamed by his own relief that Dan had returned safely. The emotion scraped at his nerves and distracted him as he mounted the stairway to the operations room and walked into a taut silence that at first he didn’t notice. All eyes were fixed on a winking red light on the wall plan of the Tomb, down on Level 4.

The duty officer held the handset in midair, arrested by Chase’s appearance. He replaced it in its cradle and jumped up. “I was just about to call you.” He jerked his head toward the light. “Somebody’s opened a sealed door on Level Four. I’ve already sent a couple of men to investigate.”

“From inside?”

“Must have been. The alarm sensor wasn’t triggered.”

“Who’d be crazy enough to do that?”

The answer came to him even before the question was out of his mouth.

Somebody whose grief and desire for revenge would obscure every other impulse. Somebody who had no other reason for living except for his only child—a reason now annulled and made worthless. In a dying world the death of a loved one might prove to be the final blasphemy.

Somebody like Ron Maxwell.

“How long has it been open?”

“Only a few minutes. I got onto it right away. We should have it sealed tight again pretty soon.” The armpits of the duty officer’s tan shirt were ringed with sweat. He wiped his mouth with a hand that was visibly trembling. “Want me to raise a general alarm?”

“Not yet. Everyone’s on his way back to bed. Let’s wait for your men to report. We’ll give them five minutes.”

For Chase and the others in the operations room it was the longest five minutes of their life. After two had ticked away the duty officer had to sit down. After four the tension was like a high-voltage charge, at such an unbearable pitch that one of the technical operators began to whimper through hands pressed to his face.

As the sweeping red hand ascended to the vertical, marking off five, a dozen thoughts were hammering in Chase’s brain. The men had been given sufficient time to report and yet failed to do so. How many intruders could have entered the Tomb during those five minutes? Could they have infiltrated up to Level 3? Immediately above Level 3 were the living quarters, the dormitories, and the sick bay. Dan and Ruth and most of the community were down there sleeping.

The duty officer was staring at him, his white face beaded with sweat.

“Hit it!” Chase cried hoarsely and was on his way through the door even as the siren started to wail.

Dan had been wrong. They were not, as he had described them, babies, but homunculi. Tiny stunted dwarflike beings with pulpy alabaster flesh and black pinprick eyes like raisins stuck in dough.

Obeying an instinct similar to the ant’s they blindly followed a trail laid by the one in front, and the one in front of that, and the one in front of that, and the one in front of that. First a few, perhaps five or six, had picked up the scent of Dan and Jo as they struggled back across the hot barren landscape. More of the creatures had joined the march, which soon became a straggling procession, dozens, scores, then hundreds plodding onward across the desert scrub and disappearing into the tunnels like a long jointed white slug burrowing underground.

Guns could kill them, though it didn’t seem to matter. Instinct and hunger drove them on; death was immaterial. They were seeking food, of any kind, animal or vegetable. They ate voraciously, like a plague of caterpillars stripping a forest bare. Kill one and another climbed over the body to take its place. Kill twenty and fifty more came on with pudgy blank faces and small red gaping mouths. They were mouths on stunted legs, quite mindless, living only to eat and reproduce.

The raw sunlight with its fierce dose of ultraviolet radiation was beneficial to the species, indeed essential. It had warped their genetic structure until each successive generation adapted more comfortably to the new conditions. Even the thinning atmosphere with its low oxygen content had been assimilated and was vital to the development of their metabolic structure.

There was no way they could be stopped—as Chase soon discovered.

They packed Level 4 with their soft squirming bodies and were stumping up the stairway to Level 3, jammed shoulder to naked shoulder, as Chase hopelessly pumped shot after shot into their midst. It was like shooting at the tide. The upper levels above him were in turmoil. People grabbed the few personal effects they could carry and scurried upward, some hastily dressed, others still in night attire. The siren blare filled the corridors as Chase and the guards tried to halt or at least delay the inexorable progress of the eighteen-inch-high white tide.

Retreating before it, Chase followed the others up to Level 1. In the operations room he came upon the duty officer, holding his post when the rest had fled.

“Where are they?”

“Level Two.”

“What in God’s name are they after?”

“Food.”

“Us?”

“Yes.”

“Then we abandon?”

“Unless you can come up with the brain wave of the century in the next two minutes. Are the charges primed?”

“They prime automatically during an alert.”

“Is everybody out?”

The duty officer looked at him, gray in the face. “Do you expect me to check?”

“All right. Set the timer and let’s go.”

The duty officer lifted the circular stainless-steel plate to reveal a red stirrup handle. Quickly he unscrewed two chromium-plated bolts, turned the stirrup through 180 degrees, and pressed it fully down until it locked. A timing device whirred and began to tick away the seconds. There were ninety of them before the Tomb erupted.

After ten the operations room was empty.

Sixty feet above the jungle the black gunship banked left and aligned on the Strip, taking its bearings from the crumbling overgrown tower with the ornate lettering just visible through dense foliage and twining mossy creepers: The Dunes.

Powered by chemical fuel and liquid oxygen, the gunship clattered over the swampy hollow formed by the convergence of roads and side streets between Flamingo Road and Sahara Avenue. Circus-Circus went by on the left, smothered in greenery; directly ahead was Las Vegas Boulevard South in the downtown casino section. The only gambling that took place now had to do with survival. Odds were laid on adaptation versus extinction: the chance of eating something smaller against the risk of being eaten by something bigger.

Encroaching steadily northward, the tropical belt, fed by heat and the abundance of carbon dioxide, had taken possession of a wide swathe of desert. Farther south the swampland was too hot and stagnant even for amphibians. Deep down in the sludge new formations of molecules simmered and thrived, stirred into activity by the bombardment of radiation, creating forms of life that had yet to evolve and emerge into the light. Further south still lay the bubbling toxic ocean, a seething caldron of chemical soup.

Safe behind tinted thermo plastic, breathing cool oxygen, the pilot eased back on the control column and ascended to two hundred feet. The steel-and-concrete blocks, the broken windows, and tilting neon signs merged and were lost in the close-packed growth, as effectively hidden as the remains of a long-lost civilization. Only the reflected gleam of the sun, picking out the shallow muddy strip like the trail of a slug with an unerring sense of direction, gave any hint of man’s erstwhile intrusion.

Dan shaded his eyes and watched the speck of the gunship disappear into the hazy distance. His face and neck were caked with yellow cream. He slipped the dark goggles into place and moved slowly, measuring each breath, along the squelchy bank to where the others were stretched out under the giant ferns.

He couldn’t help remembering Miami Beach 2008. In thirteen years he hadn’t progressed very far—as far as Las Vegas with the dismal prospect of not seeing his thirtieth birthday. At least here the air was just about breathable—2 or 3 percent lower and they would have been floundering about like beached fish.

He stepped over something squirming in the mud and gained the higher, firmer ground. Once out of the direct sunlight he stripped off his goggles and dropped down, chest heaving, by his father’s side. Chase tried to smile through his yellow mask. He was nearing sixty and Dan was afraid that his respiratory system would no longer be able to cope with the thin atmosphere. During the last six days people younger than he had collapsed, frothing, blue-lipped. He tore his mind away from the stark possibility.

“Couldn’t you make out any markings?” Ruth asked.

“There weren’t any. But it was armed. Rockets. Guns.”

“Against whom?” Chase said angrily. His eyeballs were crazed with broken blood vessels. “Why kill when we’re dying anyway?” He shook his head, dumbfounded.

“The mutes aren’t dying, they’re flourishing,” Jo said. Her fine-spun hair spilled out from underneath her forage cap. “And those things back in the Tomb”—her throat muscles worked—“those white grubs or whatever they were. The conditions seem to suit them.”

“No, they suit the conditions,” Chase said. “Nature always fills a niche.”

Large brown opaque bubbles formed in the swampy hollow, burst with an explosive farting sound, and belched yellowy-brown steam that drifted slowly through the hot turgid air. It smelled of sulfur and methane laced with various oxides and nitrites. Back to the Precambrian, Chase thought with a sense of almost macabre relish. Theo had seen it coming thirty years ago. Perhaps even then it had been too late to change anything: The balance was already upset. Factors beyond anyone’s control had conspired to bring the earth to its knees and now the count had reached nine, the referee’s hand was raised, and there wasn’t going to be a bell to save it.

Or them. There was nowhere to go from here.

After evacuating the Tomb they had made for Interstate 15, intending to travel north, but the highway was impassable. From the experience of the reconnaissance parties they knew it was too dangerous to cross the border into Nevada, and all the evidence indicated that the tribal fighting among the prims, mutes, and other groups had spread across northern Utah, which meant the route was closed to them. So the raggle-taggle column had turned south, splintering into smaller groups and losing people on the way as they encountered the damp fingers of swampland reaching out from Lake Mead.

Other travelers on the road had told them of conditions elsewhere.

Arizona was a jungle as dense and impenetrable as any in darkest Africa. In California huge concentration camps covered half the state. Most of the travelers were hoping to find a way north, prepared to risk the tribal wars in getting to Idaho and Oregon. The jungle, so it was said, was advancing at the rate of four miles every month, but surely, surely, it had to stop somewhere; it had to, hadn’t it?