Chaos forged, p.5
Chaos Forged, page 5
“I would be wearing my own helmet if I was not. We scanned the area when we landed.”
Taking his word for it, Danielle ceased fighting Lindsey and helped her remove the helmet. She had to leap away almost the moment she pulled it loose to avoid being spattered with the contents of Lindsey’s stomach. She almost lost it herself when Lindsey puked, but managed to beat the urge back and swallow the burning bile.
“We will check to see if there are … others,” Sabin volunteered.
Danielle nodded, although she wasn’t certain if he’d spoken to her or the others. Regardless, she didn’t think she could handle another such discovery at the moment and Lindsey, as soon as she’d finished being sick, began to weep, claiming her full attention. By the time Lindsey had managed to collect herself, they discovered that most of their group had already gotten on the bus. She helped Lindsey up the stairs and into the first empty seat they came to.
Lindsey caught her hand as she started to move away. “I … don’t think … I’m not sure I can handle this.”
Danielle swallowed with an effort. “You can. You have to, Lindsey,” she said bracingly. “We all have to.”
Lindsey looked a little hurt at her brusqueness, but she seemed to collect herself. Guilt shrouded Danielle as she made her way to the back of the bus. She should’ve been more sympathetic to Lindsey’s plight, she knew, but she just couldn’t summon the strength for it. She was still shaky herself from their discovery of the body and the portents it boded.
Dropping on the bench at the very back of the bus, Danielle removed her own helmet and then shifted over to the window seat, staring at nothing in particular, her entire being focused inwardly.
The tank, Nick discovered, was only a quarter full. When he’d finally managed to get the bus started, he headed for a fuel pump near the hanger. Danielle got up and headed out of the bus in search of fresh air when he got off to pump the fuel. Even the fumes from the fuel, she discovered, were an improvement over the air both inside and outside of the bus, for either the odor of decay clung to her suit, or the light breeze was carrying it.
She was afraid it was on the wind.
“Sorry.”
Danielle glanced at Nick, lifting her brows questioningly, feeling too drained to make the effort to talk.
He shrugged. “I would’ve handled it myself if I’d thought I could.”
It took her a moment to realize he was talking about removing the body. “Don’t be. There’s no reason why you should’ve had to handle it alone. I’m perfectly capable of helping.” And she had a horrible feeling that the bus driver would only be the first of many—not that they’d properly disposed of the poor man. “Do you think that’s all we’ll be doing?”
“I think we should try not to get ahead of ourselves.”
She smiled at him wanly. “You mean just don’t think at all?”
He shrugged. “If you can manage that—yes.”
“Good idea,” Danielle said, feeling her chin wobble faintly. “I think I’m going to try to follow your advice.”
“We can get through this, Danny—if we stick together.”
Danielle stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment. Just as it dawned on her to wonder if he meant ‘we’ as in the humans that were left or ‘we’ as in the two of them, someone opened one of the windows of the bus. The moment stretched as the sound of other windows being opened intruded and Danielle felt a flicker of relief when it occurred to her that the interruption had prevented her from answering.
The suspicion that he might have meant the two of them made her extremely uncomfortable, but his behavior since their arrival made it difficult to completely dismiss the notion that that was what he’d meant.
It wasn’t as if she disliked Nick—unfortunately. Their brief interlude had convinced her, though, that Nick LaRoche’s main interest, beyond flying, seemed to be to see just how many women he could screw from the cradle to the grave, and her main interest had been to avoid emotional tangles likely to lead only to heartache. It had been a narrow miss—for her, anyway. She was perfectly willing to remain on friendly terms with him, willing to stand by him if he was right about the motives of their alien ‘friends.’ Professionally, he was a good man to have at one’s side in any difficult situation. Career-wise, he had one of the scariest backgrounds of any man she knew. But if he had pairing up on his mind, well, that wasn’t going to happen.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—I’m an idiot that deserves misery!
When she turned to put some distance between them, she nearly ran full force into Sabin.
She fell back a step, glancing up at the man she’d nearly run into as she rounded the end of the bus in surprise.
She realized the moment she looked up at him that she was wrong. It wasn’t Sabin. It was On. Sabin stood behind him.
As nearly identical as they were, there were slight differences that were noticeable when they stood side by side. Oddly enough, even though she couldn’t pinpoint them, she realized there was something about Sabin’s face that made him seem more mature—older—as in years, not the matter of minutes or possibly hours there would be between the birth of twins. Sabin certainly wouldn’t be flattered by that, she was sure, even though, at a guess, she couldn’t believe that he was much more than thirty. If they were twins, though, and she saw no reason to doubt it, that wasn’t possible. She decided it must be experiences that had written the maturity on Sabin’s face that made him appear at least a couple of years older.
It flickered through her mind to wonder what sort of life Sabin had led.
“You’re On,” she said. “You must be the younger twin.”
His eyes widened slightly. Instead of answering, he glanced behind him at Sabin.
Sabin studied her assessingly for a moment. “You are very observant. Pain leaves its mark. I was injured in the course of my duties.”
Danielle felt her face redden at her thoughtless remark. “I’m sorry.”
He tilted his head curiously. “Why?”
She blinked at him, jolted by the question. It made her excruciatingly uncomfortable when she realized she’d merely mouthed the correct platitude as one did a hundred times a day, automatically, because it was the polite thing to do, not because one gave it any thought or truly felt anything. She was sorry to hear that he’d had an injury bad enough for the pain to leave its mark, though, and equally regretful that she’d inadvertently insulted him. “If you were insulted …”
“I was not.”
Disconcerted, Danielle merely nodded and moved around them.
She didn’t want to get back on the bus. Instead, she stopped beside Joyce, who was leaning against the side of the bus, staring into space trance-like. “You alright?”
Joyce blinked. Slowly, she turned to look at Danielle. “No. I don’t think I’ll ever be alright again.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that. Danielle struggled with it for a few moments but her own emotions were too raw, her own outlook too stark, for her to be able to think of anything to say that might ease any of the pain for either of them. “Maybe we’ll discover it isn’t as bad as it seems right now,” she said after several minutes had passed.
Joyce cleared her throat. “We all want to believe that and we all know it’s a lie.” She swallowed convulsively. “I can smell the dead from here.”
Danielle had thought the same. She’d tried to convince herself that it was the body they’d pulled from the bus and that it was only her imagination that made it seem the air was ripe with the many smells of decay. And yet Joyce had only to voice her own fears to convince her. She doubted that was any more rational than her fears. Joyce had no way of knowing more than she did.
All the same, she found that her attempts at denial no longer comforted her at all.
Beyond forcing themselves to face a truth none of them wanted to accept, was there really any point in going? What could they accomplish by doing so? Surely there couldn’t be survivors living among so many dead? Wouldn’t they have fled the city when it reached a point where they could see that the possibility of getting medical help was almost nonexistent? Wouldn’t they have reached a point where they realized the threat of infection outweighed the possibility of medical help?
Pushing away from the bus, she looked around for Dr. Morton. When she discovered that he and Andre` and Bud had returned to the corpse to douse it with fuel and burn it, she hesitated. The whiff of burning hair and flesh decided her, however. If she could see, and smell the cremation from where she stood there was no point in keeping her distance only for the hope of comfort.
Very likely it was something she’d have to grow accustomed to. The dead would have to be disposed of or other diseases would create a new plague—might already have done so.
“We should decontaminate the suits.”
Clancy and the others glanced at her and exchanged a look.
“I’m not sure there’s any point in it,” Andre` muttered.
She studied their faces in dismay. “We’re alive. That’s the point—trying to stay alive.”
Clancy looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “And the point of that?”
Danielle bit her lip but anger surged through her. “Because some of us want to live! Because there’s bound to be survivors out there who’ll need help! Because I, for one, think our race is worth saving, damn it! We can’t just … give up!”
Bud nodded jerkily. “You’re right. Nobody’s thinking very clearly right now, Danny.”
“I know that, but we’ll have to grieve later … when we’re sure someone else isn’t suffering because we’re too wrapped up in our losses to help them. My sons are out there—my mother, all of my family. I’m not going to rest until I know whether they’re alive or not.”
Clancy straightened, pulling himself together with obvious effort. “Of course there’ll be survivors. No doubt scattered, though.”
A modicum of relief flowed through her. “That’s what I was thinking. We know they would’ve set up emergency medical treatment within the city during the height of the outbreak, but don’t you think, when they were overwhelmed, when they saw that the quarantine wasn’t working, that they would’ve begun to evacuate?”
Clancy frowned, but thoughtfully now. “It’s hard to say. There would’ve been widespread panic … people trying to flee. They would’ve brought the military in to try to keep order and contain the infected and those exposed and possibly infected.
“The horrible truth is that pretty much everything they would’ve done to begin with probably only succeeded in spreading the infection. If people had obeyed the order to stay inside … but then, I’m not certain that they ever discovered whether it was airborne or spread through contact.”
He stared down at the burning corpse for several moments and finally gestured for the group to return to the bus.
“We might be better off to find a plane or a helicopter to view the damage first and try to locate whatever centers are possibly still in operation,” Clancy said thoughtfully as they reached the rest of the group.
“That still means a bus ride,” Nick replied. “I take it we’re not going in to the city?”
“As Danielle pointed out, that probably isn’t the best idea we could’ve come up with—although I know everyone is anxious to search for their families.”
“The craft that we arrived in will accommodate everyone,” Sabin offered.
Nick eyed him assessingly. “Not a very good idea.”
Sabin lifted his black brows questioningly. “Why is that?”
“It’s not American. They’ll be patrolling our airspace.”
Sabin glanced at the grundt, Bork, but he was polite enough not to point out that they hadn’t been challenged before.
“We’ll take the bus to the closest airport,” Nick added after a moment. “Find a place to set up and then locate a chopper … unless anyone has objections?”
Danielle was relieved at the suggestion—more than she should have been. She knew it was only delaying the inevitable, but she felt like she needed to pace the shocks she knew were coming or she was going to cave in and become nothing more than a blubbering mass of jelly.
The trip to the airport Nick had mentioned was almost more than she could handle. The freeway was clogged with abandoned vehicles and those weren’t the worst. The vehicles that weren’t abandoned contained bodies and the roadsides were littered with people who’d tried to flee the plague, as well. Carrion feeders, both of the winged variety and the four-legged, were feeding upon the corpses. Andre` and Bud pulled their service revolvers and shot at the buzzards, wild dogs, and opossums, killing about a dozen between them and sending twice that many into at least temporary flight before they ran out of ammunition.
Danielle empathized with their feelings even while, on another level, it alarmed her to see them waste their ammunition. It bothered her just as much to see the scavengers tearing at the bodies, but it was an exercise in futility. It wasn’t even effective enough to make any of them feel any less helpless or hopelessly overwhelmed.
As they drew closer to the fringes of the city, they saw worse—burned-out buildings and cars, piles of rubble and pits in the pavement and roadsides that gave the area the appearance of a war zone.
Clearly, as Clancy had suggested, the authorities had set up roadblocks to try to contain the panicked populace. Just as clearly, it had been as ineffective as every other measure they’d taken to try to contain the spread of the deadly disease.
The hotel they stopped at seemed to be deserted—barren of either living or dead. It was difficult to determine that by the smell. The closer they’d come to the city the harder it was to breathe. Feeling more than a little nauseated, Danielle climbed from the bus with a mixture of relief and trepidation and entered the lobby of the hotel. It was nearing dusk by the time they arrived and the gloomy interior was hardly welcoming. It chilled her in an indescribable way to find herself standing in such a familiar place and seeing it in such a completely unfamiliar light. They discovered with some relief that the power still worked, however. When he’d turned on the lights, Nick strode to the desk and, after studying the machine used to make the security cards for several moments, gave up on it and searched until he found master keys.
Lindsey, who’d kept her distance after the incident on the field, sidled up to Danielle as the group made their way down the hall in search of rooms. “Can I …? Do you mind if we share?”
Danielle glanced at her tiredly and she blushed.
“I just … don’t want to be alone.”
“Sure,” Danielle responded, feeling a twinge of shame and guilt for being so short with her before. “It would make me feel better, too.”
Sabin, who’d produced some sort of scanning devices from their equipment carries when the group had gotten off the bus, glanced at Danielle when she spoke. The movement caught Danielle’s attention, but she didn’t acknowledge that she’d noticed his interest in the conversation.
It made her more uncomfortable. She couldn’t help but wonder what the aliens thought about them and if every word they spoke was being analyzed so that they could get a better grasp of the beings they’d come to help. She supposed that would almost be an instinctual reaction—know the enemy—and yet it reminded her of her conversation with Nick.
If they were searching for weaknesses, however, they’d had plenty of time by now to see that her and her crew were just about as vulnerable as it was possible to be and still be functioning. Despite every effort to carry on, they were all more like zombies than living, thinking creatures, because they were having trouble managing the simplest of tasks.
The entire group paused in the corridor as Nick opened the first door. Sabin stepped past him and scanned the room. When he returned, he met her gaze. “This room is … clean.”
Danielle glanced around but since no one seemed to object, she nudged Lindsey toward the room. “Will you be alright for a little bit? I think we could use something to eat. I thought I’d see if I could find the kitchen and look for something.”
The comment seemed to rouse everyone out of their near catatonic state. “Good idea,” Nick said. “I think we could all use something.”
“I will escort her,” Sabin said.
Nick’s lips tightened.
Uneasiness flickered through Danielle both at the instant aggressiveness evident in Nick’s demeanor and the prospect of being alone with Sabin—any of the aliens. “Thanks,” she said, trying to head off any more overt display of distrust. “Do you want to come with us, Lindsey? Or will you be alright here until we get back?”
Lindsey sent Sabin a wide-eyed look of pure horror. “I’ll wait in the room,” she said, scurrying inside and nearly slamming the door in their faces. The sound of the locks being shot home were loud in the near-deafening silence she left behind.
Feeling her face heat, Danielle turned away and headed back toward the lobby. She heard a tread behind her, surprisingly light for a man as muscular as Sabin, and glanced up at him as he came along beside her. After a few moments, she heard the rest of the group move down the corridor to the next room.
“This is … a very difficult situation for you.”
Danielle glanced at him again, uncertain of where the conversation might be leading or if it was a question or an observation. “For all of us, yes.”
He said nothing more until Danielle paused in the lobby and looked around.
“The indications are that we are too late to offer much in the way of aid to your people. I deeply regret that this seems to be case.”
Danielle’s throat closed, although she told herself angrily that he didn’t feel any damned thing at all. The wonder of it was that he wasn’t gloating about it. She turned to face him, feeling her anger waver at the discovery that he was standing closer than she’d thought and he was far taller than she’d realized—intimidatingly so. “Do you? Why?”
Something flickered in his eyes, an acknowledgement, she thought, of the comment he’d made to her when she’d offered sympathies for his injury. “Any being of conscience must be disturbed to see the destruction of an entire species.”
