Immortality (78 page)

“Goddamn it!” said Sarah.

“We’ve got to go,” said Mark. “Everyone, pack up! We can’t wait until we see a ground patrol heading our way.”

They had broken camp faster than Mark thought possible. The column of Humvees was racing along a two-lane state highway heading north toward San Antonio. Carl was driving. On any of these deserted Texas roads – large or small – the caravan stood out and was readily exposed to aerial surveillance. They needed to lose themselves in the clutter of an urban landscape. Mark had seen no signs of pursuit, but would he see anything before it was too late? He turned and looked out the rear window. Something terrible was about to happen. He could feel it. During this exodus, he’d guided them past hundreds of kill zone sites. They’d come too far and avoided so much; he was not going to lose them now.

“Noooo,” moaned Sarah.

Mark turned to look at her and experienced it a moment later. Kill zones were ripping through Atlanta. The mental impact crumpled him in his seat. The god-machine was blanketing the city with multiple small kill zones. Mark perceived the destruction through the senses of bystanders who could do nothing but stare like paralyzed robots under god-machine control. Their experiences erupted to the surface of his mind like data-floods packed with the output of human sensory organs instead of data. Unbearable minutes passed. Countless flashes of horror boiled in his mind until he wanted to die… and then it all grew still, the aftermath of an empty city. Atlanta was now a mass grave. Mark knew about these observers from Sarah’s descriptions. Among others, he’d just seen through the eyes of a good man, a soldier he knew well at the CDC lab, who’d stood inhumanly inert as the lab was hit again and again with machine-driven brutality. All of Atlanta had been sterilized one more time. Mark heard Sarah moaning softly as remnants of memory-images faded from his mind.

“Atlanta’s ruined,” said Mark.

“The lab?” asked Kathy.

“A graveyard... Almost everyone’s dead and Alexander’s free to murder who isn’t.”

Mark could see Kathy was resigned. Her eyes remained dry. They’d all accepted the inevitable a week ago. They’d all accepted they might become one of the few pockets of humanity to survive. Atlanta was one more horrific step toward that worst of possible endings. Mark sensed a memory capsule from Sarah. The sphere had appeared in his mind and was radiating its desire to express itself. He was confused. Why had she sent this? He focused on the capsule until it opened. He saw a collection of sixteen runic words and nothing more. Sarah turned and stared at him with vacant eyes. She was motionless except for the rocking of the Humvee; and a deep unnatural breathing which moved her shoulders up and down. There was something wrong with her.

“What is this?” he said.

Sarah’s eyes came back to life. She blinked a few times. He recognized her disorientation was from a data-flood that was just waning. She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to compose herself before speaking.

“I had the command catalog open before the kill zone started,” she said. “I was searching for programs to try. Those sixteen words were displayed on the task list just as the kill zones began.”

“Could you have run a command by accident?” asked Mark.

“I couldn’t. I was paralyzed from a data-flood and then the phrase was loaded into the task list. I was ripped from the data-flood and slammed into the center of a kill zone. I think the phrase spells out a command that was automatically run. I think it opened the interface which connected me to observers in Atlanta.”

“This is important,” said Mark. “Okay. We need to work this step by step. We’ve got a sentence in the ancients’ language and we think we know its meaning. We need to check each term by itself. If we can find a term in the catalog, we use the tablet to get a preview feeling for it. It’ll probably give us a meaningless sensation or something, but we’ve got to try. The interface is constantly adapting to us; we may get a surprise. Next, we use the thought-interface to access data-floods on each term by itself, one at a time. When we’re done we compare notes.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Kathy.

“Cracking the code,” said Mark. “Understanding the ancients’ language. The phrase we’ve got is related to kill zones and could even lead us to programs controlling kill zones. I don’t believe we’ll find a way of stopping the god-machine, but we might just find something that’ll save lives.”

Mark awoke abruptly from a deep sleep. He struggled a moment to remember where he was parked; then the name came to him, Odessa, Texas. He’d driven into the underground garage while it was still daylight. The electricity in Odessa was out. They’d laid glow-sticks out on floor of the garage so people assigned watch duty could see anyone sneaking around. In the dim green light, Mark could see Kathy sleeping next to him. In the rear, he saw Carl; but Sarah’s seat was empty. They’d bedded down in their Humvees so they could pull out in hurry. Mark looked at his watch – 3:20 a.m.

He knew a nightmare had jolted him from his sleep, but he couldn’t remember it. As he rubbed his eyes, some of the dream came back to him, and then more, and then suddenly, it was fully back with startling detail; but it was not a dream. He realized the nightmare was woven whole from Alexander’s real experiences. The memories had been sitting in his brain waiting to be noticed, waiting to be relived. He must have repressed them when awake; but in the vulnerability of dreams, they had flourished. Mark felt unclean experiencing the unfiltered violence of Alexander’s triumphs seeping into his mind. He had no idea what this man looked like. He’d perceived many things through this soldier’s senses, many things he wished he had never known, but not a glimpse of the face. Sarah had seen the face in a mirror and described his appearance. Mark knew he could pass him on a street and never know it, except that it would be hard to conceal the kind of savagery that inhabited that heart. In Mark’s vision, the soldier was surrounded by a kaleidoscope of death, picking his way through the aftermath of an assault. Alexander and his followers had murdered all who remained at the CDC laboratory. Any doubts Mark had about Alexander’s obsession to destroy him and Sarah had ended in this moment with this vision. The man was walking through the dead, turning over bodies to examine their faces. He obviously knew what Mark and Sarah looked like and was searching for them. Alexander reached the end of a hallway Mark recognized. A week ago, Mark had been there. His CDC office was just a few doors back. The man spun around and slammed his fist into a wall. He didn’t utter a sound. The pain was intense. Alexander knew the Traitors had escaped. A suppressed rage unlike anything Mark had ever felt was building to an eruption inside this man, and then Mark understood why. In a dream, Alexander had seen the Traitors fleeing in a caravan of Humvees. He’d ignored the dream, believing it was nothing more than a subconscious fear of failure; but the dream had been real – and he had failed!

Dread was creeping into Mark’s heart. He felt like his body was encased in ice, unable to move, unable to keep warm as the dread seeped deeper into his blood and flesh. Alexander was getting better at hunting them and he had dreams, god-machine spawned dreams, to guide him. If he’d listened to that inner voice, he might have bypassed Atlanta and been encircling them at this very moment. Mark looked out across the garage with its glow-stick illumination. He knew they had survived, not by decisive actions on their part, but because of Alexander’s failure; and a hunter like this man would not make that mistake again.

Mark tried to erase the taste of violence he’d experienced. It was a sickness that thickly coated his mind. He climbed out of the Humvee and pulled on a sweater. The garage was quiet. He leaned his weight into the Humvee’s door until it softly clicked shut. He knew where the guards had been stationed and suspected they were looking at him right now. He cracked a glow stick and shook it with a rattling sizzle. The chemical glow extended out into the deserted structure. He walked up a car ramp and into the night. He gazed upward. With the city lights blacked out, the night sky was crowded with stars. A mild sandy wind was blowing from the west. Mark sat down on a cement wall. He knew Alexander would be coming after them even harder, because of his defeat. There was little doubt that right now he was tracking his quarry using the god-machine as a subconscious guide. He probably believed it was intuition or maybe even that god was leading him. The man was growing unstable and, as a result, even more dangerous.

For days, Mark suspected he might have to split himself and Sarah off from the group. They might have to act as bait to draw Alexander into a trap; but before they could do that, he had to find a safe place for his people to wait and he had to devise a trap, both of which were far easier to think about than accomplish. He’d identified several good places where kill zones had never hit; but until the god-machine was finished with its genocide, there was no guarantee its plans would not change. A kill zone could hit everyone in a spot he’d just left them, falsely believing it was safe. The only solution was to keep moving and keep dodging kill zones – and Alexander – and the government –until the extinction ended. All the achievements of mankind, all our grandeur was dwindling into insignificance. We were being reduced to small tribes fleeing from hiding place to hiding place, just as our mammalian ancestors had done when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Mark shook his head. He could do nothing to stop the god-machine. He could do little to stop the government. But Alexander was just a man. He had to be able to find a way to end that threat. If Alexander caught up with them right now, they would all be killed. They were not soldiers and even if they were, Alexander’s militia drastically outgunned them. Mark’s greatest advantage was that Alexander was fifteen hundred miles away in Atlanta. If the warrior pushed his column of armored vehicles to their top speed, it could take days to reach Odessa, assuming he knew exactly where to find them, which he likely did not. Mark knew Alexander also had a much bigger problem than distance and speed and that his quarry was constantly moving from place to place; his biggest problem was that his small army of vehicles sucked down fuel at an amazing rate. An
assist
had previously calculated for Mark that a single gas station could be drained and still provide only a couple hundred miles of travel. Maybe a good trap would be to lure Alexander into a place where he’d be stranded once his army ran out of gas?

Someone sat down beside Mark on the wall. He looked over and saw Sarah. She’d probably sensed some of what was churning inside him. She looked up at the stars.

“I can’t think of anything to do except keep running,” said Sarah.

“Until Alexander catches us,” said Mark. “Then we’re going to have to stop him ourselves.”

“I know,” said Sarah. “I’m ready to act as bait, same as you.”

Mark wasn’t surprised that Sarah knew parts of what he’d been thinking. She’d been displaying hypersensitivity to people’s thoughts and emotions for some time. She was operating at an empathic level that had to be far beyond his abilities. He’d realized that in the last few days, he’d been sending bits of thoughts to her without intending to do so. Their minds were sharing information in ways he couldn’t fully understand or control. It was as if certain parts of their memories were being synchronized, so that they would both independently have the same ideas. Was this synchronization a normal part of the changes going on inside them or was it happening subconsciously out of some unknown imperative, because of the threat they were both under? Maybe ‘thinking the same’ would somehow save their lives if they were forced to lead Alexander into a trap? Mark was in turmoil. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of luring men into a deathtrap. He couldn’t imagine issuing an order or pushing a button that would kill hundreds of people, without giving them a chance to surrender; but what alternative was there? He was not ready to surrender his life, and Alexander could not be fooled into thinking they were dead. Unless a superior military force was coming to their aid, the only way they could fight back would be through deception and guerrilla warfare weapons, like explosives or fire. The thought sickened him. How could he take part in premeditated murder?
My life is worth more than yours.
It was exactly that kind of demented calculus and instinct for murder which had led mankind into the extinction they were now facing. There had to be some other way.

“I don’t feel that way at all,” said Sarah. “If anyone deserves killing, it’s that bastard and his mercenaries. If I could smother them all in their sleep, I’d do it and rest like a baby after it was done.”

Sarah was quiet for a long time. There were no sounds except the wind, no motion except bits of litter blowing down the street. Odessa had been untouched by the kill zones that had ravaged Midland, Texas less than twenty miles away. Odessa had been deserted by its people for a thousand reasons Mark would never know; but kill zones striking the town had not been one of them. Odessa was now a modern day ghost town like its larger neighbor. Mark looked at Sarah and saw troubled eyes and a mouth that was as straight as a line. He felt nothing coming from her, no thoughts, no feelings. She was like a black hole in space drawing everything in and letting nothing escape. She turned and looked directly into his eyes.

“What you and I want to believe is that the god-machine is creating a new rung in the evolutionary ladder and hijacking people like us as part of its plan,” said Sarah. “What if it’s worse than that? What if we are igniting the kill zones ourselves? Maybe that’s why I’ve survived so many of them? Maybe that’s how I know when they’re going to hit?”

“That’s what Alexander believes,” said Mark. “Do you think he’s right? Do you think killing us will stop the extinction?”

“That’s what some of the government types think,” said Sarah. “I have gaps of missing time. Who knows what I’ve done during the times I can’t remember. Maybe I’m some kind of monster that will do anything to breed a new race?”