Final Epidemic (29 page)

Hell, it might even be true,
he thought to himself.
But this sure ain’t no time to find out.

Now, still tired from the circuitous drive along backcountry roads that had avoided any police roadblocks, Orin wedged the car between two similarly battered-looking vehicles. The sun was a half hour away from rising, and he walked down a still-darkened street on Denver’s gritty southwest side.

It was a neighborhood of dirt driveways and rusted pickup trucks, with the occasional chrome-laden Harley secured by a chain to the porch. These were working-class houses, their windows darkened hours before by residents who were usually awake to greet the dawn from jobs on the early shift. Occasionally, a dog barked at the echoes of Orin’s footsteps on concrete chipped and cracked.

Midway down the block, he climbed the steps to an asphalt-shingled bungalow fronted with a weather-grayed porch. He knocked—softly at first, then with a louder impatience. Finally, a light deep inside the structure snapped on and Orin saw movement behind the door’s curtained glass.

“Orin? That you, boy?”

“Let me in, Cappie.”

The door opened, wide enough for him to slip into the house.

Inside, a heavyset man in a soiled green T-shirt and boxers broke into a wide grin. He shifted the pistol he held, a blue steel Colt Python, to his left hand and extended his right.

“Damn, boy—we’ve been wondering if you got out.” Cappie dropped his unshaken hand, awkward under Trippett’s unblinking eyes. “I guess you heard. They kilt Bobby. Gil, too.”

“I was there, Cappie.”

“Sure. Sure, I know you was. Hey, you want a beer? Some coffee?”

“What I want, Cappie—what I dearly want, more than
anything else in the
fuckin
’ world—is to find out how the goddamn feds knew to come lookin’ in the warehouse.”

“How’m I supposed to—”

“Bitch had a fuckin’ warrant, Cappie.” Orin’s voice was still low, but carried the intensity of a laser. “She and that spic waved it right in my face. Somebody’s talking. They knew where to look for the ’16s.”

“Bullshit,” Cappie said, and now his voice was angry too. “If somebody talked, why would the feds come looking now? Damn, boy—we moved them guns outta there three days ago!”

Orin was in no mood for his subordinate’s logic. “And then we lose the Jap nerve gas, too,” he said. “Fuck did you go off to? Gil and Bobby go down, so you just take the hell off?”

“I was shooting too,” Cappie protested. “I had my Russian AK. I burned up two full clips, all I had, out the side window. Damn, same time’s I was trying to drive the truck, boy! Then you was gone, and I seen Bobby and Gil take it. All the shooting, you knowed the cops had to be on the way. What’d you want me to do? Wait around and surrender to ’em?”

“Seems that’s what you wanted me to do.”

Cappie threw up his hands, the gun still gripped in his left. “Jesus Lord! Okay, I’m sorry you got left. I’m sorry I ain’t got X-ray eyes so I coulda seen the Spanish guy hadn’t shot you dead.”

There was a noise from the back of the house, and Trippett’s head swiveled so quickly the tendons popped loudly. His eyes, narrowed to mere slits, darted to Cappie’s face.

“Fuck you got back there?”

“Jesus, Orin—it’s just Lubella. Lubella Tompkins. Bobby Touchette’s cousin, okay?” He raised his voice. “Honey? C’mon out here and say hi to Orin.”

A woman of perhaps thirty, her features sharp and feral, stepped from the bedroom darkness into the long living room. She wore a man’s pocket T-shirt that fell just below the
junction of her thin legs; as she moved, the small cones of her breasts bounced against the fabric. She stared at Orin for a long moment, her expression cold; then she moved to the dining table and picked up a pack of cigarettes.

“What you say, Orin? You want Lubella to fix up something to eat? She don’t mind—right, baby doll?”

The match flared, and the pool of light it cast around her face caught her in an eyes-tight grimace as she brought her cigarette to the flame. Lubella drew the smoke in deeply, and exhaled it with a sibilance that was sharp and disapproving.

“Cook your own damn food,” she said. “Lincoln freed the slaves, or ain’t ya heard?”

Cappie colored. “Damn it, Lubella, I said to—”

“Up yours,” Lubella overrode him. “I’m going back to bed. You make a mess, I ain’t cleaning it up tomorrow.” She took several steps, then turned at the door. “Whatever you two got in them pea-brains of yours, leave me the hell out of it,” she said evenly.

“You don’t know nuthin’ ’bout it,” Cappie said.

“I know I ain’t gonna get killed like poor Bobby,” she said. “You take your machine guns and your poison shit somewheres else.”

Both men watched the door close behind her, and heard the sharp click of the lock.

Cappie stood for a moment as if poleaxed.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. He looked at Orin, a helpless expression on his face. “
Fuckin’
women. She don’t know shit ’bout it, Orin. Hell—I don’t know shit, either. ’Cept that I’m on
your
side, man. You know that.”

“Somebody tipped the feds,” Orin repeated. “You got any thoughts about that, Cappie?”

“Yeah, but you ain’t gonna like it. They went to the warehouse because they knew
you
was workin’ there. They was
fishin’,
man. Somebody pushed a button on some damn computer, and your rap sheet popped up. Uh-uh, Orin. If they’d
been tipped guns was there, they’d of sent a lot more than four people.”

After a moment, Orin’s own features relaxed.

“The spic guy was ATF,” Orin said finally. The hostility with which he had entered had evaporated, and in its place was an attitude of casual calm. “When I got free of that fed bitch, he was inside on his little-bitty walkie-talkie yelling for help. Shit, I almost run right into him in the dark. Knocked the flashlight right out of his damn hand.”

“I heard some shooting in there.”

Orin shook his head in contempt. “I got out the back ’fore he even drew his gun, man. Heard him stumblin’ round in the dark. That musta been when the fucker knocked over the crate with the nerve gas.”

Cappie forehead furrowed. “I heard he got shot by one of his own.”

“Maybe. But by then, he was a dead man walkin’.”

“Damn,” Cappie said. “Think I’d rather catch a bullet.”

Orin shrugged. “Probably never knew what hit him.”

“Too bad about the sarin, though. Coulda come in handy with the Denver thing.”

“Yeah, well. Can’t cry over spilt nerve gas, huh?” Orin chuckled at his own joke. “ ’Sides, gotta figure it took down one fed. And, hell—we still got that other shit the Jap brought. Gets down to brass tacks, a little bit of anthrax goes a long way.”

“You still good to go?” Cappie asked. “When you want to do it?”

Orin pulled up a chair and settled into it. “Well, boy—what you say we have some of that beer, first. Maybe get a little shut-eye too. You still workin’ at that movie theater?”

Cappie nodded. “Damn flu thing’s got it shut down, though. Don’t know how long.”

“Good. Nobody’ll be around.” Orin thought for a moment. “Okay. We’ll use the movie place as a . . . a rallying point. Need to, that’s where we’ll tell our people to meet. I’m
staying here till we do it, and I don’t want nobody to know where I am.” He nodded in the direction of the bedroom. “You keep her shut up about me, hear?”

Orin put his feet on the kitchen table, and one hand curled into the pocket of his jacket. It came out holding what to Cappie looked like a small red-and-white labeled can. Orin set it on the table carefully.

“Then—if you think Lubella’ll
let
you, that is—we’ll saddle up about noon, and go wipe out Denver.”

Tallahassee, Florida
July 23

At first, Katie had found it rather exhilarating, racing along graveled roads and two-lane blacktops in a stolen pickup truck. She had driven throughout the night, trusting both to luck and the surprisingly detailed road maps J. L. had found in Carol Mayer’s vehicle. It seemed almost heroic—the two of them on the run, armed with a learner’s permit and dodging whatever authority might still be hunting them. She envisioned herself and J. L. as a latter-day Thelma and Louise, though far younger and more attractive.

But the closer she got to her objective, the harder it had become to see the situation as anything but what it was. They were alone, possibly infected with some kind of germ that had already killed one of their friends and traveling through what had become a frightening, virtually lawless land. It got worse the closer they got to Tallahassee, when they traded the largely rural Florida landscape for the city’s outskirts. Soon they were motoring through what was an unmistakably urban area, its atmosphere one of tired neglect.

For Katie, it was unfamiliar territory—progressively tougher-looking neighborhoods populated by progressively harder-looking residents. While few other vehicles were
moving on the streets Katie drove, people were. The closer she got to the city center, the more crowds she encountered—first in knots along the sidewalks, gradually in larger numbers that spilled into the street. Some were profoundly drunk, others plainly predatory. One of the latter, a man with dirty blond hair and a Seminole tattoo on his bare shoulder, cupped his hands and shouted an obscene invitation as Katie motored past. Other men had similar notions, also appearing to find a pickup truck occupied by two teenage girls a focus of increasing interest. Katie found herself frequently cutting down side streets and alleys to avoid the growing throngs in the street.

After a while, Katie no longer knew in which direction she was driving.

The crowds were getting thicker where she now drove, and angrier. Debris littered the street, and once she had to steer around a brace of tires that had been set afire; sullen orange flames vomited an evil black plume. A bottle arched through the air to shatter on the pavement a few feet in front of her vehicle. A block or so farther down, the crowd had spilled from the sidewalks and completely blocked the street.

There were no police to be seen.

“Let’s get away from here,” Katie heard J. L. say in a tight voice.

She turned left onto a cracked and pitted roadway, and a smile spread on her face.

There, the distance foreshortened by the low perspective, was the skyline of downtown Tallahassee.

Katie slowed, her attention momentarily fixed on the target finally before her.

Distracted, she did not notice anything amiss—not until the chunk of concrete starred her windshield, a shattering supernova that peppered both of them with small rounded fragments and turned the safety glass opaque.

“J. L.!” she screamed, her heart in sudden tachycardia.

At the same time, the truck rocked to the side and
something, a short length of pipe, smashed through the driver’s window next to her head. More fragments exploded against her, these sharper ones that stung into her face and neck.

A muscular arm reached through the hole, fingers extended toward the key ring that hung from the ignition switch. Katie struck at it with a closed fist, seeing for the first time the other figures converging toward the slowly moving vehicle. A hailstorm of hard objects noisily dented the hood and sidewalls. She heard shouting from immediately outside her window, angry and demanding words that in her terror did not register as language.

“Go, go, go!” J. L. screamed from beside her, and Katie jammed her foot hard against the firewall.

The pickup lurched forward, tires squealing and raising a thick curlicue of smoke. She felt a muffled bang as something substantial hit hard against the passenger door and spun away; she barely heard the curses shrieked in her wake. Through J. L.’s window, Katie saw other figures sprinting toward their vehicle, and she wrenched the wheel back and forth to scatter them.

The disembodied hand was now clutching frantically at the steering wheel, and Katie fought it for possession. It would not release its desperate grip, not even when the vehicle swerved sharply, bouncing over the curb and speeding toward the lamppost.

There was a loud screeching noise—possibly the scream of metal scraping against metal, or possibly something more human—and the arm disappeared back out the window with a horrifying abruptness. Katie, too terrified now even to scream, cut hard back toward the street, leaning forward to peer around the spiderweb of the ruined windshield.

And suddenly she was clear.

Katie sped on for a few seconds before the realization rose sufficiently to smother the fear. She felt a rush of exhilaration, of triumph even.

Oh, that dirty bastard,
she told herself, her thoughts a
disjointed ramble,
he thought he could get to the key and he won’t try that anymore—

Oh, God. I think I killed somebody.

Without knowing why, she stood on the brake pedal, locking the wheels and again raising smoke from the tires. Then she ripped the door open and stood, breathing in rapid gasps and with one foot still in the truck.

Thirty yards behind her, the milling crowd she had driven through still roiled like an angry storm cloud. People, some burdened by double armloads of clothing or expensive-looking consumer electronics, stumbled along the sidewalks. A tendril of smoke wafted from a shattered display window, and a flickering light fitfully dappled the otherwise darkened interior of the store. In the distance, Katie could hear sirens and the vicious, flat cracks of what might have been gunfire.

Closer to them, a man lay facedown and spread-eagled on the sidewalk, a few yards past the crumpled half comma of the streetlight stanchion. Aside from a dark pool slowly spreading from under the figure, there was no other movement there.

Katie stared in horrid fascination, unable to tear her eyes from the scene.

J. L. was near hysterics.

“Katie, get back in!” She reached over and pulled hard at her friend’s wrist, tugging until Katie finally climbed back inside the cab.

“Keep going,” J. L. said. “We’ve got to get away from all this.” Her head swiveled back to her friend, and she saw the streaks of tears on Katie’s face.