The Parasite War (22 page)

"How did it go?" Jo asked as he approached her.

"I don't know. They're confused, and who can blame them? They've only known us for a few hours, and we tell them something that runs contrary to everything they've heard. How could we expect any other reaction?"

"Yeah, we should have thought of that."

Alex sighed and turned to the others. "The kids have had a few minutes' head start. Let's saddle up and get out of here."

The guerrillas piled into their vehicles and started up the engines. Grudgingly, Pat Crowley and his little group got into their cars, too. The convoy started across the marshes.

The soft mud showed the motorcycle's track clearly on the humped ribbon of road running through the meadowland. At every curve Alex feared that they would emerge into a vast mob of the infected, the wreckage of the Harley strewn into the rushes, the bloody bodies of Ronnie and Jack crawling with colloids.

But the track went on and on, and the narrow, muddy road made for slow going. Alex was grateful for the din of the engines, certain that the silence of the marshes would be extremely enervating.

From time to time a racoon or rabbit would dart out of their way, and birds frequently fluttered out of the yellow rushes. These creatures had not heard the roar of a motor for years, and they would not hear such a sound again once the convoy had passed—not for a very long time. Alex dared hope that it would not be forever.

The terrain became more hilly, and Pat pointed to the east. As they topped a rise, the skyline of New York came into view. Or what was left of the skyline, at least.

The crumbling remnants of Manhattan ranged to the north; the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were both gone, the shattered plinths of their lower floors all that was left.

Pat Crowley, rifle slung over his shoulder, walked up to Alex and Jo.

"Where the hell are those kids?" Alex said.

Pat shook his head. "Jack can be impetuous," he said.

"Where does this road end?" Alex asked.

"It goes past the city, all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge."

"Well, they should have turned back by now."

"Tell me about it," Pat said. He looked glumly at the dry road here on this higher ground. There was no sign of the Harley-Davidson's tracks.

"Kids tend to get cocky," Jo said. "Maybe they wanted to see if they could get across the river."

"Jesus." Alex was growing more apprehensive by the moment.

"Maybe they had trouble with the bike," said Pat. "Or maybe they just decided to stop for awhile and take in the sights."

"Not Ronnie," Jo said. "She knows how serious this is."

"Oh, yeah?" Crowley said. "Then where is she? Maybe she's got one of these new infections you've been talking about."

"I doubt it," Jo said, annoyed.

"I'm sure they're all right," Alex said. But he knew that there was no sense in trying to put a good face on it. Something was definitely wrong. Crowley seemed to be blaming them for it.

"Well," Crowley said, "the way I see it is, we either wait here and sweat or go look for them."

"You're right," Alex said, "I think we should go after them, too, since we sent them out in the first place."

"The sooner we get over to New York, the better," Jo agreed. "But don't you think we better talk it over with the others before we do anything rash?"

"Of course."

Alex called the guerrillas, and Pat gathered his people, too. Alex put the question to them, and they were unanimous in their response. Riquelme summed it up: "We didn't come up here to admire the scenery. Let's go after them."

Samuel turned and raised his pipe-staff. "May the Lord bless you all," he intoned, "as ye journey to the valley of the shadow of death."

They were on the road again in seconds, bouncing on the dirt track toward the New Jersey turnpike. Their best guess was that Ronnie and Jack had gone into Manhattan. The bridges were all down, but the Lincoln Tunnel might have been open. It was possible that the kids were still on this side of the river, of course. But as the guerrillas approached the ramp leading onto the turnpike, the latter possibility seemed less plausible with every passing moment. Unless Ronnie and Jack were dead, they were now in New York City.

The asphalt, untended for these past thirty-six months, provided a bumpy ride, but they drove at the highest speeds they could, in spite of the discomfort. The lives of those two kids might very well depend on it.

There were no legible signs to guide them to the Lincoln Tunnel, but Alex remembered the way pretty clearly. He had driven to New York many times in the old days.

They followed a long, curving ramp around to the tunnel mouths. There were several dead cars blocking the way on the right side, so they took the other passage, intended for vehicles coming into New Jersey from Manhattan. There was little danger of facing oncoming traffic.

Turning on the headlights, they went on into the darkness. They had only gone a few hundred yards before they came on the hulk of an old Cadillac blocking the way. Alex could see other cars behind it. They cut the engines, and he stood to shout back to the others, "We're going to have to walk from here."

They took all the ammunition they could carry, but the mortar and rockets, napalm canisters, and some of the other weapons were too heavy and cumbersome to manage. Fortunately, they still had the timber they had cut in New Jersey. They tied the bulkier ordnance to the birch logs and ten people hefted it, while Riquelme strapped the flamethrower tank to his back and carried the nozzle in his hands. Three jeep batteries were brought along, too, in case they found functioning vehicles on the other side of the river. Gasoline was siphoned from the tanks, too.

They had had the foresight to bring lanterns with them, so there was some visibliity as they began to hike down the slope past the unmoving automobiles. Wet streaks stained the sides of the tunnel, and the floor gleamed with moisture in the lamplight.

The silence was broken only by the echoes of their boots scraping the asphalt as they went ever deeper under the river.

"I hope there's not too much water for us to get through," Alex said.

"Looks okay," said Jo.

"But as we get down toward the lowest point under the river, it might fill up."

Nobody said anything more about it. They would just have to keep moving and find out.

Once, Alex thought he saw something move. But it must have just been a rat. They were ankle deep in water now, still moving down a gradual incline. The sloshing of their feet was the only sound.

Again, something moved. But it wasn't in the shallow water. It was high up on the wall to the right. Alex shone his lamp up and caught the thing in the feeble rays.

It was a colloid.

"Holy shit!" someone's voice echoed.

The lamplight revealed other colloids, slithering along the walls. They seemed to be keeping their distance from the water, which made it fairly safe for the guerrillas. As Alex shone the light around, he saw a lot more of them crawling overhead, some of them even clinging to the tunnel ceiling.

Panicky voices came from behind Alex. He didn't want to start shooting in here if he could help it. After three years, there was no telling how much stress had been put on the tunnel by the enormous pressure of the Hudson's millions of tons of water. If this thing came crashing down on them, it would not only be the end of them, but quite possibly the end of the human race, too.

"Keep moving," he said. "They won't come down here. Not with all this water."

But Alex knew that the colloids could send the infected into the tunnel to bedevil them. If that happened, they were in a world of shit.

The water was almost up to their knees when Elvin spotted the Harley. It stood in the water on its kickstand, half of each wheel submerged in the black water.

"Ronnie," Alex called out, his voice reverberating through the cavernous tunnel. "Jack."

A girl answered from ahead. Alex couldn't tell what she was saying, but he was sure he recognized her voice.

"It's Ronnie," Jo said.

"Come on." Alex started splashing ahead rapidly, stepping as high as he could so that the water wouldn't slow him down. Jo was right beside him. Alex glanced over his shoulder and saw that Pat and a few of the Jersey people were behind them. Back further were Riquelme and a handful of the other guerrillas. The others lagged far behind, straining under the weight of the heavy weapons on their makeshift litter.

"Ronnie!" Alex cried. "Jack! We're coming."

"Alex!" Ronnie's voice was closer. "No!"

"Hold on!"

"Go back," Ronnie cried. "They've got us."

But it was too late. Alex held the lantern up high, and saw a phalanx of the infected blocking the way. Two of them gripped Ronnie's arms, and two others held onto Jack. The kids looked terrified.

Now the walls were thick with colloids, almost solid with them. They flowed like oil, parallel to the water's surface. But they would come no closer for fear of dissolution.

"Dad!" Jack cried. "Do something!"

Pat Crowley stepped forward and stared at the massed ranks of the infected. There must have been hundreds of them back there in the darkness. Strangely, Crowley did not seem to be afraid of them. He walked right up to them and said, "I'm sorry, son."

"Dad . . . ?"

None of the infected made a move toward Crowley. He turned and raised his rifle to his own head. Before anyone could even speak, he fired.

Half of Crowley's skull was blown away. His body sagged and slipped into the water with barely a ripple. He was still holding the rifle.

"
Dad!
"
Jack screamed, as the rifle report echoed through the tunnel.

Perhaps only Alex and Jo realized what had happened, why Pat Crowley had just killed himself. But there was no time to explain to the others. The Ingram's safety was off in a fraction of a second. Alex blasted away at the infected. One of Ronnie's captors was hit in the head. Ronnie wrested herself free of the other one and splashed toward the guerrillas. The infected had loosened their grip on Jack, too. But now they were pulling him back even as he struggled to free himself.

Jo shot one of them in the chest, and Jack lunged forward past the floating body of his father.

"Riquelme!" Alex shouted, now that the kids were clear of the infected. "Burn 'em!"

Riquelme stepped up, holding the flamethrower's nozzle out in front of his fireplug body. As the infected began to stagger toward him, he unleashed a horizontal pillar of flame that seared the flesh off their shrieking faces.

A dozen of the guerrillas stood together now, shoulder to shoulder, firing methodically into the ranks of the infected. The bodies fell, blood darkening the water as Riquelme aimed the flamethrower at another clutch of the undead.

Calmly, Elvin handed a .38 revolver to Jack. Tears streaming down his face, the boy cocked the pistol and fired into the chaotic mob facing the guerrillas. He squeezed the trigger six times, and continued to squeeze it long after he was out of bullets.

Riquelme swept the flame across the infected's ranks. Black, oily smoke billowed off the flaming clothes and burning flesh of the enemy. None of them had enough presence of mind to sink into the water. They staggered about, shrieking horribly and flailing, while the glistening colloids gouted and squirmed on either side and above.

Slowly, the guerrillas advanced. Elvin, Polly, Riquelme, Jill, Irv, Dan, Claire, and Samuel, along with Alex, Jo, and the two kids, formed a solid front that moved steadily toward the enemy, blazing away with rifles, semi-automatics and pistols. The others backed them up, the New Jersey people locking and loading along with the guerrillas.

Dozens of bodies floated in the dark water. Dozens more howled in pain. Clouds of stinking smoke filled the cavernous space as the infected fell back against the onslaught.

They were at the tunnel's lowest point now. The carnage continued unabated, since the mindless infected did not know enough to run away. They tried to attack again and again, but each time their bodies fell in scores. There weren't very many of them left by the time the guerrillas slowly began to climb up the incline, the water up to their waists.

"Riquelme!" Alex shouted. "Take it easy with that flamethrower!"

Riquelme shut the flamethrower down. Carried away in the heat of battle, he had forgotten that they would need the fuel later.

The few remaining infected were shot unceremoniously. The echoing thunder of gunfire ceased at last, and an eerie silence reigned in the tunnel, though Alex's ears rang for several minutes. He held the lantern high, pleased to see that the tunnel walls were no longer festooned with colloids. The fire had frightened them away, and they had left the infected to die for them.

"We whupped 'em pretty good," Elvin said in his flat voice, sounding as if he couldn't quite bring himself to believe it. "I thought we were finished, but we whupped 'em."

But along with the exhilaration was the knowledge that this was only the beginning. They had to find the neonate, and when they found it they had to destroy it. They were having enough trouble just getting across the river.

Jack Crowley leaned against the four-foot-high ledge on the right side of the tunnel, weeping. Alex put his hand on the kid's shoulder.

"Why did he do it?" Jack turned to him emotionally, his face wet with tears. He wanted to blame someone; it was in his voice. "Why did he kill himself?"

"He did it because he knew that he was infected," Alex said.

"No! He wasn't infected!" Jack screamed.

"Yeah, I'm afraid he was. It's a new kind of infection. They control your mind, and you don't even know it. He realized that he had sent you and Ronnie out to be captured. He killed himself so that the thing inside him couldn't do any more harm. He did it because he was trying to protect you and the rest of us."

This explanation of Pat's suicide calmed Jack. Alex couldn't be sure that it was true, but he believed that it might be. The only other explanation was that Pat had simply gone off his nut when he saw his son in the clutches of the infected. But he hadn't seemed the sort who would lose his cool like that.