Toxic (47 page)

“
¡Mierda!
” the trafficker yelled, fixing things by knocking the creature down.

They managed to keep them at a distance but not for long. The colonel saw a movement in his peripheral vision. Bruce grabbed his arm, hobbling along.

“They’re surrounding us. To the stores!”

Further along, the infected were behaving strangely. They were going away. Masters understood why. He saw the Asian, his arms raised, in the middle of the parking lot yelling, “
Zài zhèli
!”

Those were the first words pronounced by Dewei. The marine was almost in shock.

“He’s completely crazy,” Bruce yelled. “He’s going to get eaten!”

Masters knocked down a dangerously close L-D. “Nothing will happen to him. He’s saving our life,” he declared, shooting once again.

The biologist gave him a stunned look, his mouth deformed by surprise.

“What do you think you’re... You son of a... We have to help him!”

Elaine woke up with a stabbing pain in her neck. Already on the verge of vertigo, a rancid smell attacked her nostrils and made her stomach curl. Her heart raised and she wanted to vomit. She clenched her teeth and put her tongue against her palate. Somehow she tried to get up. The rooms were twisting in a strange perspective. Her vision swirled. She collapsed on the metallic floor.

“Look here, the girl is coming back to us,” she heard, despite the noise of a motor.

The sea spray and the uncomfortable feeling of a cold floor moving up and down: she understood where she was.

“You could say that things aren’t going very good,” said the same voice as before.

The man passed her with a rotten-smelling dish towel. This time, she barfed violently.

“Fuck! Are you and idiot or what, Hans?” another person got mad.

“What do you mean? We can’t get sick now?”

The first person burst out in laughter, watching her fold in half on the barge’s deck. Once her stomach was emptied of the acid bile that was burning her esophagus, Elaine sat up, her back against the railing. The nighttime panorama struck her in its resemblance to the night of the shipwreck. The ocean shone with millions of reflections of the round and almost full Moon. Lost once again, she told herself.

“I’m Clayton. Don’t pay attention to Hans; he’s a moron,” declared the blond man with a dirty surfer face.

The rusty boat was similar to transport barges used by fish farmers. This one here held a standard container, the same type as those carried by semis on dry land. On the deck, she spotted the two black sports bags that contained the medicine and surgical materials.

“I know that it’s painful. You have to understand that we didn’t have a choice.”

Elaine protested, shaking her head.

“Why?”

Clayton looked at her with his big eyes. His mud-encrusted hair fell in front of his round and almost juvenile face. He was wearing blue overalls similar to those of a mechanic.

She begged him. “My friends...”

“Don’t worry about them. Everything will be OK if you keep calm.”

“I want to go back to my friends. Take me to them. I beg you.”

Clayton scratched his nose. He exchanged looks with his accomplice, who gave her a contemptuous look.

“Things are getting complicated,” Hans said mockingly.

“You can do a U-turn and just leave me and...”

The surfer put a dirty finger to Elaine’s mouth.

“For the moment, that’s not a practical option.”

“Wow, Clay, you know how to talk to women!”

Great, she thought, wondering what type of half-wit she had to deal with. Even though it was hard to tell, she estimated that she had been unconscious for an hour. The others were looking for her, she was certain. Maybe they were following them with Hector’s sailboat. She had to understand how she had gotten here. She was missing information.

“There’s just the two of you?” she chanced.

“Ah! Didn’t I tell you that she never shuts her trap? I know this type of chick.”

“Shut it, Hans, and concentrate on navigating. Let’s not end up on a sand bar.”

“You know what, Clay? You’re a pain in the ass. I’m going to light up one of the chick’s smokes. It’s been so long since I had one.”

In addition, they had stolen the bag of cigarettes.

“We’re going towards the everglades, right?” she asked.

Clay leaned towards her. “I don’t have the right to tell you.”

“And my friends?”

“They’re still on the island.”

“What were you doing there, if I may ask?” Elaine added in a low voice.

“We use it to store L-Ds. They can’t escape, so it’s useful to find them when we need to. We didn’t think we’d find you there.”

“Yeah, we normally have fun with a different type of broad,” Hans started again, “but were coming around to the change. You’re less eager than the last,” he laughed loudly.

“When you need to? Why...”

Her jailer’s gaze suddenly went hard. “Now shut up.”

The motor changed speed and the barge’s movements became less intense. Elaine spotted a sort of pier under the mangroves.

“We’re almost there,” Clayton told her, grabbing her by the armpits to help her get up.

He seemed as solid as a rock to her. Large shoulders and knotted arms, she noted. Two pickups were waiting at the end of the quay. Models from the past century, the only ones with motors that could work. Clayton pushed at her back.

“We’re going take a short trip to the farm. It won’t take long.”

“A farm?”

Before the invasion, the majority of the farms in the south of Florida lived mainly off of tourism. Visitors lacking a sense of meaning came to give themselves a bit of excitement by throwing pieces of chicken to the alligators. Elaine took her place on the frayed seat of the vehicle.

Her chaperon didn’t take his eyes off of her. The driver’s side door opened up to a man who resembled a lumberjack, with arms as thick as her thighs. He had a military haircut, boorish features and an unfriendly voice: this didn’t mean anything good.

“Hans told me that you grabbed her at Tavernier Key. Was she alone?”

“There was a group,” Clayton specified. “And there were only two of us. We dropped off the merchandise and set off again quickly. We ran into her in the hospital. We couldn’t leave her.”

“I see. How many?”

“No idea, maybe a dozen.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

Elaine swallowed. The man leaned towards her, exhaling his fetid breath. A mix of alcohol and tobacco.

“Here’s the deal: you cooperate and you live.”

“Or what? You’ll throw me to the alligators?”

“Nah. We’ve got something better than that in store. How many?”

The violent elbow came suddenly and unexpectedly. Her lip spilt, blood ran into her mouth.

“How many?”

“You would do well do answer him. Dan isn’t the type to...”

“The farm, Clay. I’m listening to you.”

“Seven,” she blurted out.

The two individuals didn’t say anything to each other until arriving. Clayton invited her to come out of the cab. With the surroundings barely lit by burning barrels used as light sources, she had trouble orienting herself, still shaken up by the trip. The camp, which was made up of a sprawl of cabins and wobbly shacks in the middle of the swamps, seemed alive to her. And dirty. Debris covered the ground. Elaine was directed along a trail with an escort. People were getting up at this night hour. The trio crossed a wooden gate with a welcome sign. Someone had added
to paradise
 in white paint.

Their arrival attracted attention. The inhabitants of this sort of lost slum watched her as if she were an animal captured by hunters coming home with a meal. All of a sudden, she stopped, shocked by what she saw. In front of a warehouse missing sheets of metal, she saw a truck. A metal grating covered the sides of the trailer. Men, wearing helmets and protected by football equipment, threw infected creatures out of the cattle truck. The strange modern cowboys moved them around with the help of sticks with ropes wrapped around them. They separated the creatures incapable of standing on two legs from the group and then dragged them along the ground. Further along and in sight of everyone, people decapitated them, with a machete or an ax. The L-Ds thrown on a scrapheap ended in a common grave. The spectacle was a sight to behold, if she based her judgment on the dozen people clinging to the walls. The repetitive slashes of blades on flesh and bone made a butcher’s melody.

“What are you doing here?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Clayton cut her off.

She felt a steel point between her shoulder blades.

“Shut it,” Dan barked.

The behemoth of a man surpassed his underling by two full heads. He demanded respect. She was overcome by the sensation of stepping foot on another planet. She spotted beaming faces. Dirty, but laughing. That was... hard to believe. A young girl, around Alison’s age, came up to her. She looked her up and down, strange as she was flanked by the two men, and gave her a hand signal. The nurse responded to her with a funny face, which got her a punch in the kidneys as a warning. Dressed in a grey cape, the young girl touched a pendant with a wooden cross around her neck. She spotted other young women with the same religious accessory and noted that the boys didn’t wear it.

They came to what was once a fisherman’s cabin. The wooden shack, in a better state than the ones around it, was made up of a patio with an entrance decorated with a cross upon which a Latin inscription was written. Clayton freed her from her bonds and, taking advantage of the fact that Dan had moved away to go up the two steps towards the door, he whispered to her. “You’ll only be asked one question. Whatever your beliefs are, say yes if you want to live.”

Elaine looked surprised.

“What...”

“Say yes,” he insisted.

A crowd gathered around them. The group only contained hard, male faces.

The door opened. Elaine couldn’t make out the interior plunged in darkness. A man in a chasuble with a Middle Ages style hood came out onto the patio, his hands in his sleeves. Clayton pushed her towards him. With her standing in front of him, the man looked at her for a moment before asking her one fundamental question:

“Do you believe in God, my child?”

As a healthcare professional, she had witnessed miracles happen to patients who had been condemned by doctors. Since then, her intimate belief was established in a certain way. However, she had always avoided expressing it in public. While they were far from being irreconcilable, religion didn’t mix well with science.

She spotted Clayton, who remained stony-faced. In front of her, the man didn’t rush her. He was waiting for her to respond in an almost mystical silence. Elaine didn’t even hear the slicing of the blades beheading the infected.

“Yes, I believe in God.”

“Do you acknowledge Jesus as the savior of the Church, of Humanity and his imminent return amongst us?”

“I... Yes, I acknowledge it.”

The man took his hands out of his sleeves to lift up his hood, unveiling an almost-white mane on top of a weathered face.

“I am the Reverend. Welcome to Paradise.”

This paradise looked like an open-air butcher’s stall, but Elaine kept her feelings to herself.

T
he altitude presented a comfort worth appreciating: a lower oxygen level. Jave advanced along the ramp, his visor raised. The icy wind of the highlands whipped his smooth face. The sun sparkled at the summit. Mercenaries and humans had fought under an electric sky that stretched from one horizon bordered by peaks to the other. The attack had made a battlefield out of the heart of a lost small town beside a lake whose blue-green tongue slithered between the steep mountains.

The Lynian had chosen to keep some distance and to examine the surroundings before going to the real location of the conflict. In the far west, a large structure held the still water. According to the tera-servers, the principle of a dam consisted in making use of the hydraulic force inside a sloped tunnel to produce cheap and reliable energy. The structure dominated the narrow valley. The Lynian asked himself why the humans had built houses below it. The houses were concentrated alongside a line of greenery in the middle of the rocky ground. That didn’t make sense. And what if the dam collapsed?

Pre-tech civilizations sometimes gave preference to disconcerting ideas, but that wasn’t the purpose of his visit. Jave activated his repulsors and flew over the slanted concrete wall in the direction of the water flow that led to the village.

The site of the conflict was just around the bend. He gained altitude. Among the stunted trees, he made out dilapidated buildings. The scars of the battle in the form of impact marks and craters delimited a restricted perimeter. Further along, he found what remained of the wall that had been used as a rampart by the humans. The soldiers had used a lot of ammo, to judge by the quantity of cartridge cases ejected from their firearms.

He landed beside a pile of bricks. Right away, he plunged back into the frenzy of the action. The virtual shapes were superimposed onto his field of vision. A phantom soldier slid by on his right, two steps away from him, and then pointed his gun, which spat out long flames. In addition to the noise, this equipment, of doubtful quality, exposed the position of the fire. He let the battle progress until the key moment.