The Omega Point

13. THE TRACK OF THE CAT

Mack had moved swiftly through the countryside, but thought better of entering Raleigh during the day. He needed to work fast, but he also had to stay alive, and that was going to take some care. For all of his skills, anyone with a good rifle and a good eye would be a danger to him. He wished that he could have brought the young guard’s rifle with him, but if it had been gone when he woke up, even though he would have had no memory of what had happened, he’d have known that something was wrong and raised the alarm.

Hiding in a barn, Mack hadn’t rested, he hadn’t been able to. When so many people were waiting on you and things were deteriorating this fast, the tension was appalling.

After the sun had at last set, he climbed down from the hayloft and surveyed the farm. It was as quiet as it had been when he’d come here. He needed food and, above all, water, so he decided to take a chance on the house.

He’d had a great deal of field training, so he knew how unsafe it was to expose yourself to dark windows, but it couldn’t be helped.

It was pointless to conceal himself, so he just strode forward.

When he returned to the Acton Clinic, all exhausted and apologetic, he would use the same technique. He would let them lock him in again. The window was hopeless, but there was an escape route through the air-conditioning ducts in his room, and one of his jobs in Raleigh was to go to the county building department and look at the plans of the patient wing. He had not killed yet, but when he got back there, he was going to do a good deal of that, and a good deal of information extraction.

By the time he reached the house, he knew that it was empty.

The fridge was warm, but there was a half-finished bottle of Coke inside, flat and hot. He drank it all. The water taps didn’t even drip when he turned on the faucets, so he got a pitcher out of the cabinet and banged through the house to the nearest bathroom. There was water in the toilet tank, which he pitchered out and drank. Down the hall, he saw a woman’s legs in the doorway of a bedroom. The rest of her was sprawled out of sight.

He left the house and found a pickup in the garage but its electronics were fried so he headed off down the road on foot. With the setting of the sun, the sky had turned an odd pinkish-purple color, something that was new. Pinkish purple, with long, shimmering sheets of green auroras cutting through it. Beautiful, indeed, and so could death be beautiful.

By the time he reached the outskirts of town it was full night, and now it could be seen that the odd color of the sky was centered on a faint thickening brightness low on the northeastern horizon. What was it? He knew little about astronomy, but it had the look of something that the world would come to wish had not appeared.

Most of the houses he passed were dark, but some contained faint, flickering glows of candlelight, and one or two the brighter light of oil lamps. He had no real plan, except to see what he could do to stir these people up against the clinic. They hated it, of course, but they needed leadership to go up there and cause mayhem.

As he drew closer to the town center, he was stopped by something he had not seen in many years, not since his days in Mexico, when drug cartels sometimes did it to terrify locals into serving them.

On a street lamp about halfway into the town, a man had been hung… and, he noted, hung badly. The body was covered with blood from the neck, because they’d hauled him up without tying his hands, leaving him to struggle with the knot while he choked. Ugly way to do it, probably because they were clueless about the process. Under the body, dogs snarled at one another as they licked the blood in the street.

A number of storefronts were burned out, and he could smell death in the air. More dogs could be heard in the darkness, and as he passed the ones beneath the hanged man, some of them gave him a predatory appraisal. Once a dog has tasted blood, it is dangerous, always. Not wanting to have to fight off the whole pack, he gave them a wide berth, and did not meet their eyes.

You could give a dog a heart attack by shattering its muzzle with the right kind of blow, but six or seven dogs would keep you damn busy, and you would absorb damage.

Ahead, there was a restaurant showing a flicker of candles in the front window. Inside, he could see the shadows of many people. Good, this was what he’d been looking for. Desperate people band together, at least when they still believe that they might have some way to save themselves. Only later, when they understand the hopelessness of their situation, do they turn on one another. In another couple of days that would happen here. In fact, he was probably lucky that it hadn’t already happened.

He went to the door and paused, evaluating the crowd. There were men, women, and children present, so this was probably some kind of survivorship gathering. Safe enough.

He stepped in. Voices rumbled around him, angry and desperate ones, and the children were crying, many of them. A few were playing.

“We’re real hungry, John,” a male voice said. “You gotta find a way.”

“We need to do some urban foraging,” the man in front, probably the mayor, said.

“We’ve scoured the town, goddamn it,” somebody shouted. Rage. Terror. They were just about to turn on one another.

Mack took a breath and raised his voice. “Excuse me.”

They froze like frightened mice, then turned all at once. Suspicion in the faces. Women swept their children behind them. He was acutely aware of the fact that the room was full of guns.

He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m unarmed.” He looked from face to face, smiling just enough but not too much. His next words were crucial, and he had thought about them carefully.

“I just escaped from the Acton Clinic.”

An immediate murmur, more suspicion in the faces. All expected. He was playing them.

“I’m not a crazy, okay!”

They quieted down a little.

“Let him talk,” the man at the front of the room said. He was pudgy, but his eyes were hollow. That was one famished fat man up there. He must be almost crazy with hunger, probably dropping ten pounds a day.

“I’m an assistant chef.”

A guy with a deer rifle said, “What do you mean, you escaped? Why does an assistant chef need to escape?”

“That goddamn place is a palace! There’s tons of food, tons of it. They’ve got enough to feed their damn psychos for a year. It’s enough to get this whole town through this thing—I mean, if there’s another side to it, God willing.” Then he stopped. Time to let it sink in. Time to let them chew.

“How much food exactly?” a woman asked.

“Try a hundred dressed hogs, forty beeves, maybe a quarter ton of prepared meats, not to mention a whole huge basement storage area full of canned goods for long-term use. That’s a damn Versailles palace up there on that hill, and they have no right to keep all that food just for a bunch of loonies. No right, not when good, normal people who are the backbone of the country need it! That’s why I escaped. I want to help people who need help… folks who’re healthy and normal.” He laughed, made it bitter. “That palace up there is full of people who this world doesn’t even need. But it needs you.” He pointed to a little girl peeking out from behind her mother’s dress. “It needs her.”

“They got more guns than we have, man.”

General assent.

“Yeah, I know. You’ve gone up there and taken a few shots, I know that, too.”

“I did that,” the same voice said. He stepped out of the crowd. He was a young guy, about thirty. He had a preteen boy in tow who looked as tough as he did. “I’m two tours in ’Stan. I was on rotation stateside when this thing started. And if we try on the Acton Clinic, I can tell you as a soldier that a lot of us are gonna get wasted.”

Mack let silence follow that statement. They needed to taste their fear, then be pulled out of it. “How long has it been since you folks got anything to eat?”

People looked around at each other. “Three days,” the man in the front said.

“Okay, I had three squares before I came out. I think it was the steak that made me make my move, eating it, knowing that at least some decent, normal folk down here could be eating what the crazies were gobbling. And the patients get a lot better than we do. It’s like a damn cruise ship up there.”

Another voice rose, this a kid of about fifteen. “Mister, they signal. They use SSB code bursts. I pick them up on my scanner. So they could signal for help.”

That brought an uneasy murmur. Of course, the kid was worrying about Mack’s own code bursts, but no way could he say that.

“Those are probably just signals to their rich families, arranging for more supplies. Now listen to me, I know the place from the inside out and I’ve got the kind of training you need for an op like this. Special Forces. Afghanistan. Pakistan.”

“Unit?” the guy with the rifle asked.

He’d done this sort of thing many times before, and it actually felt good to do it again. “Night Stalkers,” he replied easily. “160^th SOAR.” One of the many answers he had to the many questions a CIA field officer gets about his identity. You always lie, even to your friends.

The guy started to be impressed, but then he asked another question. “How’d you end up in the kitchen?”

“Oh, I was on security, all right. But we got shoot-to-kill orders last week and I told Glen MacNamara that I could not do that.” He looked around the room. “You all know who Glen is?”

They knew. Like any town living beneath the walls of a castle, they were obsessed with what went on inside it. Except they did not know about this food, of course. Naturally not, because it didn’t exist. But their imaginations and their eagerness to hate the palace made them believe it in without question. In truth, the clinic was just about stripped of food like everyplace else—except, of course, for the redoubts. If he had wanted to be straight with them, he should tell them how to get to the Blue Ridge underground facility, but he had no intention of doing that. There, they would find food enough to carry this town for five years. Yeah, and give the food of the pure of blood to this gaggle of human trash? Not gonna happen. The pure of blood were the future of the world, or it had no future.

“What I need to do is for you folks to get me the building and ground plans for the clinic from the buildings department, then I can lay out a professional plan of attack for you.”

“Mister, they’ve got SOPMODs in there, I’ve seen them. And bigger stuff. Lots of it. Plus those cannons that make you feel like you’re on fire. The best we can do are a couple of assault rifles and this kinda stuff.” He ported his deer rifle.

“Except you’re gonna have me in there, and you’re gonna have a Ranger plan.” He addressed them all. “I can’t tell you that nobody’s gonna go down, because that’s not gonna happen. There will be casualties. But you will win. That I can tell you, because that’s what’s gonna happen.”

And when they couldn’t find the food, they would first slaughter the bosses, and when they still couldn’t find it, they would fall victim to their own rage, and they would lay waste to the place.

They got the blueprints he needed, and together they laid out a good plan of attack, one that would actually work. “This gate,” he said at last, pointing to the disused back gate on the grounds plan, “will be unlocked. After your feint draws them to the front of the grounds—and they’ll all come running, they’re not that well trained—then you just send your main force right through that gate. You get inside the grounds, they are toast, people.”

They worked out a schedule, and at midnight, he began his journey back. Crazy ole Mack was just about done in, starving and filthy. Mack was sorry. Mack was coming home.