The Dying of the Light: Interval (16 page)

“And now I will take my place with them. Goodbye, Mr. Shaw. If you ever see your wife again, please thank her again for saving me and my people.” There was the click of a pistol’s hammer, and Shaw whirled around, just in time to close his eyes as Arturo took his own one-way trip to the promised land.

Shaw leaned against the open door, collecting himself. In the span of a few hours, he’d seen men and women he’d worked with for years killed, discovered starving people eating the body of a walker, and now, he was all alone.

It was a lot to take.

He thought of Jenny, and how unlikely it was that he’d ever see her again.
God, I miss her so much already. How do I deal with this?
It was more than a few minutes before he was able to get himself under control, but he finally managed it, and walked down the terminal, occasionally stopping to lean against a support pillar or wall.

He made it back to the main terminal area, and only glanced at the carnage when he was forced to move a body out of his way as he trudged up to the second-floor area. He gathered what supplies he could find, such as they were, and fashioned a crude
travois
out of some chairs and an advertising banner so he could carry them. He dragged it down the second-floor walkway where once, thousands of passengers had rushed to catch their flights. He stopped and looked down into the main area once more, just before leaving, and saw Brother Liam’s body. The old man looked peaceful, with almost no marks on him, save for the small bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

Too easy
.
For the horror he created, he should’ve suffered more
. Shaw shook his head and moved on.
I’ll find an office, or a room I can fortify. But up here, on the second floor. In the sun
.

Out of the twenty people who had departed McMurdo earlier that day, he was the only one left. Marooned amongst a sea of death, with no way home. Even if he could get to the plane, there was no way to fly it by himself. But he’d be damned if he’d give up. He wasn’t bitten, he wasn’t infected, and he had the love of his life waiting for him. He’d find a way back, somehow.

The supplies still on the plane beckoned him, and he knew he’d eventually have to figure out a way to get to them without drawing the walkers at the same time.

He turned to face the setting sun, feeling it bathe him in his light, as though it were washing him clean. He ignored the walkers roaming aimlessly on the ground outside, ignored the stench from the dead all around him, and closed his eyes, offering a silent prayer to a God he’d never spoken to before.

Please let me make it back to Jennifer. Let her know I’m all right, and that I’m coming home. Watch over her, and keep her safe. Amen
.

He settled the heavy straps of his pack and improvised
travois
onto his shoulders and straightened his back. His first priority was going to be finding a defensible room, and time was wasting.

Chapter Seven

McMurdo Station
Two years later; Z-Day + 6 years

“Now, do you have anything for me on the mutation rate?” Rajesh asked from the computer monitor in the McMurdo genetics lab.

Jim looked down at his notes, looking for anything new. As he looked up to retort, his eye glanced over the date code on the monitor, and he caught himself. Rajesh was long dead. His hand moved to the keyboard almost of its own volition, pausing the video playback.

Has it really been five years since then?
he asked himself, looking at the now still and silent image of his friend.

Rajesh Mehra had been studying the prion from India, communicating with Jim over the last flagging useful parts of the Internet before it, too, finally died.

He hadn’t actually
seen
Rajesh die, but his friend had been worried for some time that, after Z-Day, the religious zealots who’d burned so much of his country to ash would find his lab and he, too, would die. But he’d kept sending Jim data regularly, until one day there was… nothing.

Atkins stood, the notes slipping from his hand as he backed away from the computer, all the pain and rage and anguish of those first days coming back to him. He looked around the room, at all the equipment, the notes, the charts, the samples, all of it useless, now. None of it mattered, any more. None of it would
ever
matter, now that everyone had given up on the Christchurch expedition ever returning.

They said they would send word by satellite if they could. They said they would come back for us. I would’ve heard if they had sent anything. Sabrina would’ve told me
.

Two years they had been gone, and nothing. No sign of them, no transmissions, no great engines splitting the sky with their screams. But there was nothing. No
food
.

I am so sick of vegetables and fruits and mystery meat once every three days. I need
food,
dammit.
Real
food, not this
.

Suddenly, it was all too much for him to take, and he threw everything on his desk to the floor. Monitor, more notes, coffee mug, all of it. The crash of breaking glass and shattered plastic sang in his soul, and he knew that he couldn’t stop there. It was a big lab, and his eyes gleamed with its destruction.

The photo was old, and worn, and had been handled many times. The edges were curling, and more than a few tears stained the surface, marring the colors, but the man in the photo could clearly be seen. Wearing one of the traditional military caps of the Russian tank divisions, he stood tall and proud next to his vehicle, a forty-seven-ton T-90 main battle tank. He had the square jaw, piercing gaze, and proud mien Tatiana liked in her men.

Oh, Vasily, my dear husband, where are you?
she thought, yet another tear falling on the photo.
I miss you so. Perhaps I will see you when I come home
.

Tatiana Zavrazhny was beautiful in her own right, a perfect match for Vasily. Tall and blond, she was the woman most men pictured when they thought of Russian women, and many at McMurdo had longed to ‘ease her pain,’ as they put it. More than one woman, too. And while she was not averse to a warm body of either sex next to hers, no one could ever take the place of her Vasily.

She replaced the photo in her trunk’s false lid, and looked at the much-folded transmission slip she’d received so many years ago that usually joined the photo. She had no need to remove it. The decoded words were burned into her mind.

By any means necessary, you are to return to Moscow. You are to destroy any state equipment remaining behind, and insure the destruction of all state secrets. Should you be captured or detained and unable to avoid interrogation, you are to use any means necessary to avoid the revelation of state secrets
.

—
Grigori Mostovoi, Director Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki

In truth, the orders had been unnecessary. She would have tried to go home regardless of her orders, because that was where Vasily was. She had waited, and she had failed once already when she was not chosen to go to Christchurch with the others on the Americans’ plane. Now, she might never leave, but she would always be waiting. And with the satellites between here and Russia still operational, she still hoped to get word to or from her homeland.

She had been working on one of the other satellite operators, Vincenzo DiLaurio, for months now, and had finally let him into her bed. His snores still haunted her, though he had been gone for hours. He was proving to be more difficult to manipulate than she had expected, but she was sure she could—

A sudden crash disrupted her train of thought, and she spun on her bunk toward the opposite wall. The only thing in that direction before the edge of the building was the genetics lab, and no one went in there, not even Atkins, though it was technically his lab.

Out of habit, she checked to make sure the knives she preferred were in their normal resting places, secured about her person. She listened for another moment, and heard more crashes, from the same direction. She stepped out into the corridor, listening to the increasingly rapid sounds of breaking glass and plastic as she moved down the hallway.

Taking a glance inside the room to make sure there were no glass instruments on a trajectory for the door, she stepped inside and took a moment to survey the scene. Jim Atkins was clearly having a fit of rage, which was somewhat disturbing given that he was one of the larger men on the base. Tall and broad-shouldered, he nevertheless showed the signs of malnutrition, as they all did now.
No one is fat, anymore
, she thought.

Since he started working at the Shack, he hasn’t been in his lab. Why the sudden interest? And, more importantly, what is it that he’s destroying?

She spoke softly. “Jim?”

The violence against the inanimate stopped abruptly, as though it was a recording put on pause. Jim stood there, a puppet with his strings cut, not turning to her. Simply breathing hard from his exertion. She took one step, then another, and when he didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge her existence, she spoke again. “Jim? It is Tatiana.”

She saw his head turn to one side, and one deep blue eye gazed at her over his shoulder.

“What do you want, Tatiana?” His voice was rough, hoarse, as though he had been yelling.

“I simply want to know, you are OK?” She gritted her teeth. She hated having to pretend that she didn’t speak English well, but it wouldn’t be good for these people to wonder why a Russian scientist who’d ostensibly never left the Motherland had such fluency.

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine, Jim. Look around.” She waved her hand slowly at the devastation he had caused.

As if a veil had been lifted, he peered around the lab, seeing firsthand what he had done. He dropped the broken shards of some now-unrecognizable instruments from his hand, and she noted some blood falling to the floor with them.

Suddenly, it occurred to her that Atkins might be a far easier target than DiLaurio, and he had the same level of access. She’d never considered it before, given DiLaurio’s known penchant for blondes, but perhaps, now that the situation had been controlled, he could be more useful.

She took a moment to glance at her reflection in the shiny surface of one of the banks of his equipment, unobtrusively adjusting her clothing to its best advantage as she moved into the room. A tug down on the zipper of her sweater, a hand through her hair before putting it up in a ponytail with an ever-present scrunchie, and she was ready to work her magic.

Of course, she needed a way in. And getting an injury treated by a pretty girl was as quick a way as any, with most men.

“Oh, Jim, you are hurt,” she said, taking the first aid kit from the wall. She took it over to a table near Atkins, who hadn’t moved, and brushed off the top with her arm. Making sure there was no glass on it, she hopped up on the table and grabbed his arm, turning it over as she inspected it. He made no move to stop her, and the motion turned him toward her. She knew exactly what she was doing when she bent forward just a bit, giving him a nice view down her sweater.
Have a nice look, Jim Atkins. Then maybe you’ll want more of a look later, and we can talk about what
I
need from
you
.

She fretted over his injury, telling him how silly men were, how they needed women to take care of them, all of the silly platitudes that she knew men liked to hear. Every so often during her medical ministrations, she would glance up at him from under lowered bangs and he would be staring at her, and she knew that she was having, at least in some small way, an effect on him.

She taped up the last bandage on his hands, and sat up straight, bringing her eyes to a level with his chin.
Bohze moi,
she thought.
He really is a tall one!
Even though she was married, Tatiana was a pragmatist, like most Russians, and knew that though she might feel nothing for this man, he could still be… fun.

“Thank you, Tatiana,” he said. “
Spasibo
.”

She smiled.
At least he’s trying
. “
Puzhalsta
. You are welcome, Jim.” She shook her head again, expertly bouncing her ponytail in a way she knew caught men’s eyes. “Why did you do this?”

He sighed. “It just sort of all caught up with me. Being marooned down here, nowhere to go, for the rest of our lives. Everyone we ever knew back in the world is dead, and we’re all that’s left. Once we’re gone, humanity itself dies.” He moved off among the lab equipment and tables, broken glass crunching unnoticed beneath his heavy boots. “Oh, sure, there may be pockets left, some tribes in Asia or the outback of Australia, but eventually, they’ll be gone, too. And
homo sapiens sapiens
, as we know it, will disappear. We will have vanished from the face of the earth. Except for the walkers. Oh, good.”

She had stopped listening, not caring, but when he crouched down, she joined him, and saw him looking at two computer workstations under one of the tables. Alone amongst the debris, they seemed to have survived intact.

“These are not damaged?” she asked, playing the part of the dumb blonde to perfection.

“No, no, these are fine, which is great, because these are the backups.”

“Backups?”

“Yeah, the backup storage units for all my data. All the research is stored on these as well as the main system, just in case something should happen.”

Tatiana looked over at the main system, which still threw the occasional spark as it shorted out. The case had been shattered, the metal bent after who knows how many blows from a raging fist, and the monitor was a total loss. Following her gaze, Atkins sighed.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now, since I can’t access these without the main system. Thanks, Tatiana.”

“
Puzhalsta
, Jim.”

She smiled at him and stood up, stretching to give him a great view, then bounced out of the room. Once back in the corridor, she moved quickly to her room, her mind racing. If DiLaurio didn’t work out, as was becoming clearer and clearer by the day, Atkins seemed a definite alternative for her plans.