Inferno (The Glitch Book 2), page 5
They walked around a small damp patch on the road, then let the incline pull them forward. More homes appeared on the side of nearby hills. Mike scoured each one for any sign of movement, but only shadows sat behind the distant windows. The soundscape was off too, by the fact that there wasn’t one. The usual small town din had been replaced by silence. He felt like they were walking into a cemetery, but there was nothing peaceful about what his gut was telling him.
They approached a small boxlike building, which large lettering on its side announcing salvation was available within. His mind flicked back to his dream of the people walking into a more historic version of the same building, and he wondered if he should walk up the slope of its driveway to the front door.
“There’s a motel up ahead,” said Darlene. “Maybe there’s people there.”
Her words lacked emotion. That was fine. He needed her to be in control if they were going to get her to safety. She could mourn Gary later. “We can come back. Right now we are just moving forward until we meet the town’s authorities.”
They kept walking, passing a large store, an attorney’s office, then more retailers, all neatly arranged around a plaza with a parking lot, home to a few vehicles. They then arrived at a junction, with a gas station on the far left corner.
Alexis looked up at the stoplight. “It’s been red since I saw it, at least a minute…”
Mike briefly looked up too but didn’t want to dwell on things that were out of place, his investigative bones were screaming anyway by just how ‘off’ everything felt. “Map says the police station is just up ahead, next junction on the right.”
They continued on, but each step he took was getting harder. Not because of his backpack but because they should have seen someone alive. No town was this quiet, not even one in the New Mexican mountains.
The lights at the next junction were equally red, but nobody mentioned it. Instead they stood in the middle of the road and looked at the large flat complex of buildings to their right and the blue lettering on the side of a front wall announcing ‘Pine needles police department.’ The place looked as dead as every other building in the town.
“Let’s check it out,” said Mike and went to walk forward when he sensed that the other two weren’t moving with him. He followed their gaze along the stretch of road to the motion at the end of it, about a mile off.
“Is that a person running?” said Darlene, squinting.
Mike reached back and grabbed a small pair of binoculars from a side pocket in his pack. Holding them to his eyes just confirmed what the fear in his gut was telling him. He handed the eye pieces to Alexis.
“Shit,” she said. “Do we shoot it?”
Darlene almost crumpled, emotion breaking out across her face. “No… no… not again. They can’t be here as well…” As she talked she walked backwards, then suddenly looked towards the police station, her eyes becoming wide.
Mike looked in the same direction, being just as shocked as the young woman but for different reasons. “Daryl?”
“Er… Mike…” said Alexis, trying to draw his attention back to the street.
He slowly started to walk towards the police station and his friend who was waving him forward.
“Mike!” shouted Alexis.
He flicked his head back around to the road. The single point of movement had been replaced with a group of dark forms. He held his binoculars to his face once again. Twenty to thirty people, men, women, all ages were sprinting towards them. Not jogging, but full on pushing their arms and legs as hard as any human could. Except he knew they weren’t that anymore. He tried to see their eyes, but they were too far out.
“Mike!” This time the shout came from Daryl who had ventured into the parking lot out front of the building. He had a bandage across his neck, and an M4 rifle in his hand. “Quick! They’re coming!” Another person appeared in the doorway behind Daryl.
“Run here, Mike Richter!” shouted Constance Nguyen.
Mike, Alexis and Darlene started doing just that, running over gravel, then a parking lot, and with Daryl ran through the open main doors of the station.
Daryl briefly threw his arms around his friend. “How are you not dead?”
Mike went to reply when he saw another unexpected face. Colonel Holland limped forward, a crutch of some kind under his right shoulder, and a similar assault rifle in his left hand. “Why does it not surprise me to see you again,” said the Colonel.
“Umm… they are getting very near,” said Constance still in the doorway.
Despite his mind being in a state of confusion and partial joy, Mike spun around and looked out to the road. The crowd was a few hundred yards off and now double the size.
“Get inside, Constance,” said Daryl, then pulled the doors closed, locking them with two bolts, and then running a chain around the handles.
“Denise?” said Alexis. Mike turned around, Dawn, Denise Reed and Brad Reynolds emerged from a door next to a large glass screen with the words ‘Main Desk’ above it.
Dawn ran forward and briefly hugged him. “I knew you made it! The others they said no way, but I knew! I knew!”
A smile flashed across Mike’s face, but despite the joy he wanted to bathe in on knowing his friends still existed, he was more concerned about what was approaching outside. He looked back outside through the only gap in a boarded up window. The crowd appeared to have stopped approaching. “I take it that’s the town’s people out there?”
“Some of them,” said Holland. “So far they have not ventured too close to the station. When they do, we let them know we got the firepower to hold them off.”
“Are they all…” Alexis searched for the right term.
“Friggin zombies?” said Dawn.
“Yeah…”
“Seem so. We tried talking to them when they started showing up, but they were more interested in trying to hack our heads off with farming equipment.”
Mike kept looked at the crowd, now fifty strong. One of them, a man was standing closer to the station than the others. “You know what they are right?” he said without turning around.
“The AI, yes that’s our working hypothesis,” said Reed. She was another who was bandaged up, one over her lower arm and a smaller piece of gauze across her left eyebrow. “Although quite how that’s physically possible is beyond me.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it. We are now living in the beyond,” said Mike, still looking through the hole to the road. “I had a conversation with one a few hours back…” he could sense the others looking at him. He went to say more, to explain to those behind him how the young man in the cafe wanted to find others like him, to become ‘whole’ but instead he held his tongue.
A good way along the road a forty something man, who looked as if he had just stepped out of a board meeting, and who appeared to be studying the station as closely as Mike was studying him turned and joined the others. The rabble slowly turned with him and moved away.
“I think they’re leaving.” Mike sighed.
Danger passed for now.
He turned around to the group that was standing around him. A young woman and an older man he hadn’t met before were also in the lobby area.
Dawn put her hand on his shoulder. “Lets get you some food and water, then I’ll tell you how the hell we all ended up here.”
*****
Elias looked away from the young man who was leaning up against the door to the garden, his eyes settling on the wall just a few feet in front of him. “It finally happened,” he said to himself. “I’ve seen it happen to other guys, but I didn’t think it could come on me after all these years.” He looked back to Travis with a confused expression. “I ain’t never heard of anyone seeing kids like you though.” His eyes then grew wide and he clamped his hands around his temples. “Damn it, there’s no one there Elias.”
“You haven’t got PTSD,” said Travis. “I’m real… I’m just not… flesh and blood like you.”
“That’s what an invisible PTSD person would say!”
Travis frowned. “You can let go of the shovel, it wouldn’t do any good anyway and I think it’s scaring Brillo.”
Elias looked at his dog that was laid down under one of the other sun lounge chairs. “Come here boy.”
Brillo got up, waging his tail, then sat near Elias’s feet. Elias stroked him a few times. “It’s okay. Everything’s fine.” He then shook his head and stared out at the lawn and bushes at the bottom of his moderately sized plot. “If I’m not crazy, then you got to be one of those aliens.”
“Not an alien.”
He looked at Travis. “Yeah, you some alien, that’s invaded my brain. Well I ain’t going to let you do shit to me or my dog! And if I start to not feel like me? I’ll go in the other room and end it.”
“I’m not an alien!”
“Then what the hell are you? A ghost? Why you haunting me? You got nothing better to do?”
“If it helps you to think of me as a ghost. Then great, do that. But all you need to know is for now you’re stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. You got a computer?”
“What does a ghost want with a computer?”
“I can use it to hack into government systems. Find out what’s really going on across the country.”
“No, I ain’t got a computer!”
“Who doesn’t have a computer!”
“Someone who doesn’t need porn or ten dollar shoes!”
“You’re like eighty or something right?”
Elias’s eyes grew big. “Eighty? Do I really look eighty to you?”
“You’re old, that’s all I know.”
Elias looked away. “I’m not eighty, and I don’t have a computer.”
“Then you need to take me to one.”
“I’m not taking you… me… whatever. Anywhere. Most of the comms are down anyway, no internet, no talking to your girlfriend on the cell phone and no TV. There’s patchy radio reception and that’s all.” Elias got up, still holding the shovel. “I need to take a leak. You going to follow me in there as well?”
Travis folded his arms. “I’ll look the other way.”
Elias moved through the country style kitchen, Brillo trotting with him. Then into the hallway, where he took a sneak look back to make sure Travis hadn’t moved, which he hadn’t. He then quietly opened the closet door, pushed his winter coats to one side, and quickly spun the dials on the lock on his gun chest. He pulled it open and grabbed what he knew to be the closest firearm. A government 911, he then picked up the loaded magazine and slid it inside the gun, and cocked it. He looked in the opposite direction to the entrance. He could just leave. Grab his keys from the hook on the wall, jump in the truck and drive before the fugitive kid in his sun lounge knew he was gone . But then what if the kid trekked a further four miles up the lane to the Holler’s ranch? Or went the other way to the Braxton’s? He was going to have to deal with this kid himself.
He looked back at the sun lounge. Travis was still there but now he was turned around, looking out into the garden. That was a bit of luck and would allow Elias to move up behind him.
He suddenly had a flashback to the same maneuver he pulled on a fighter in a tiny village in the mountains of Afghanistan. The first time he had had that memory in years. Maybe it really was PTSD.
He got to his feet, raised his gun and walked slowly forward, entering the kitchen, then finally got to the open door to the sun lounge. “I got a—”
“Gun. Yeah I know,” said Travis. “Shoot. I think it’s the only way you’re going to believe what I’ve been telling you.”
“I don’t want to shoot you kid, but you done some bad shit from what they said on the radio. They don’t launch a nationwide manhunt unless a person needs to be stopped.”
“I’m sorry about your window…”
“Uh?”
Travis slowly turned around, his hand raising, while his fingers gripped around a gun. A boom rang out and the first glass panel of the sun lounge, the one near the external door shattered. Travis held out his empty hand. “See, no gun, and I have no gun wound.”
Elias stood with his mouth open, the gun still trained on the young man. “What’s happening… I don’t understand.”
Travis sighed. He felt bad for the old guy, he just hoped he would eventually understand. Perhaps some education was needed. “What do you know about artificial intelligence?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mike looked out over a large former office area, full of people. In one corner of the wood panelled walls a small group of children sat and to his surprise the old German scientist, Meyer was seemingly keeping them entertained. He looked across to Mike and nodded. Mike replying in kind. Other senior citizens were seated nearby, while others, younger, milled around, talking in huddles. He recognized none of them.
“Some of these are townsfolk who didn’t try to kill us,” said Dawn.
Holland walked along the wall, then stopped near a door and awkwardly turned, facing Mike. “Why don’t you and I have a conversation?”
The FBI agent looked at Dawn then Alexis and nodded to the colonel, and followed him inside. He briefly noticed a silver nameplate on the door mentioning a police chief. The office was modest in size, but modern and decorated with posters of missing people, a few framed certificates and photos of proud men and women.
Holland limped behind a desk and sat, the look of relief being obvious on his face. On the desk was a bottle of whiskey. He noticed Mike’s glance at it. “You want some?”
“I’m good.” It was a lie, but he already knew what the colonel thought of him regarding his alcohol consumption.
“Well I hope you won’t mind me doing so.”
Mike watched, mildly surprised, the older man pour some of the golden liquid into a glass he produced from a drawer, and take a sip. “Never took you for the drinking kind,” said Mike.
“The end of the world has a way of changing a man…”
Mike wasn’t sure if the colonel was joking or not.
“So… last I saw of you and your lady friend out there—”
“She’s a fellow agent.”
“Of course. Agent Adams. Was about five or so minutes before the nuke blew that AI piece of shit into a million pieces. I did wonder if you had made it to the mountains, I guess you did.”
“Yes, but not before I delivered my son’s—”
“Wilson?”
Mike nodded. “My son’s virus. The reason you and I are sitting here now, and not slaves to that thing, was because of the virus he developed. Which…” He swallowed. He was about to admit something to himself that he wasn’t fully ready for. Strange it would happen in a small town’s police chief’s office, in front of Holland. “He died for. That was why we stole the phone. If you had stopped us like you wanted too. We’d all be dead. And everyone else.” Anger bubbled inside him.
Holland ran a hand over the beginning of a white beard. “Yeah well, whatever your son did or did not do, right now the world is paying a price for the nuclear detonations. The AI it would seem has entered the planet’s ecosystem. We would have recovered from the nuclear fallout, but—” He took another sip. “Now we have an enemy within, so to speak.”
“Where’s the rest of the military?”
“I got no idea.”
“What happened at the base at Sulerosa? Why are you here?”
“That’s a bit of a story. The highlights are Sulerosa was largely destroyed by the explosion. Which was larger than projected. Luckily, everyone was already evacuated to a base further back, which I didn’t manage to get to…” Mike suppressed a smirk. “I didn’t know at the time but your friends out there had escaped with a number of the Sulerosa residents, and were making their way here when we into each other.”
Mike scrunched his face in confusion. The chances of he and them both going to the same small town in the hills were low at best. “What made everyone come here?”
The colonel sighed. “The autistic kid.” He took another sip of his drink.
“Constance?”
“No, the other one. He draws.”
“Kevin?”
“I don’t know. The one that draws! Anyway, he told the girl that we need to come here. I wasn’t going to listen to a crazy kid, but it just so happened that this place was not too far out of our way, so I thought why not. And here we are. Why did you come here?”
“It was the closest, and I thought… hoped it would have services… some way for us to contact our head office.”
Holland scoffed. “You been listening to the radio?”
“Some, the reception wasn’t that great in the valley. The AI has affected a lot of people…”
“That’s one way of describing the situation.” He took another sip and Mike realized he was already drunk when he first saw him in the lobby. “End of the world would be another.”
The colonels pessimism was starting to bother him, but the fumes drifting across the room from the older man’s breath were even worse, he went to reply, when a knock came at the door.
“Yup,” said the colonel.
The door opened and Reed appeared. “I have questions for agent Richter.”
Holland smiled. “I’m sure you do. But if you think he’s going to save us all, you’re shit out of luck. He knows less then we do.”
Reed came inside and closed the door behind her and leaned up against the wall to the side. “You delivered the virus?”
Mike took them both through the events of the past day and night. Even the colonel sat quietly listening, his interest only interrupted by filling his glass again.
“So it’s affecting animals as well…” said Reed.
“Yeah.”
“We ran across some others… people, before we got to this city,” she said. “They were wandering the freeway. At first we thought they were hurt in the explosion, but their eyes… When we tried to help them, they attacked us. We had to kill them. It was the only way. They wouldn’t stop…”
