'I am sorry, Bannerman, do you copy me?' Vikram asked from the next crewseat over. 'Doctor First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez is requesting that she be allowed to euthanize some of the victims, so she can dissect them. I am as discomforted as you, but I think it is the only way to''
'I copied you the first time, and I still won't allow it.' Clark peered down at the unlit streets of Lost Hills, California. He couldn't see a damned thing. The pilot wore NODs to see in the dark but the passengers had to make do with their naked eyes. The town looked deserted. The people were scared, sure, he didn't blame them but he didn't see any vehicular traffic at all. What was going on? There were supposed to be people down there for him to interview, people who might have seen the blonde girl as she came through. Clark had gotten a truly lucky break'traditional channels had actually turned up something useful. The Kern County Sheriff's office had flipped the girl's description on a trivial shoplifting case at a local convenience store. The owner had described one of the thieves as blonde, maybe forty years old with a black tribal tattoo of a sun with wavy rays on her stomach. The Sheriff had recognized the description of the tattoo from the APB. She had been here, maybe a day or two before at the very most. This was Clark's best lead.
'Bannerman, Captain, I must implore you! Destroying a few of the specimens may be the only way! What if by doing this she finds a cure?'
'And what if she doesn't? How do I explain to the families that their dad, their grandma, their twelve-year-old son had to have his head cut open while he was still alive because we thought it might help other people with the same illness, except it turned out not to help at all? Let her use the bodies those SWAT butchers at the hospital gave us.'
Vikram stared at him. In the dark cabin his eyes gleamed with frustration. 'Their heads were all shot to pieces. Not much use when studying a brain ailment.'
Clark grimaced in distaste. He stared through the polycarbonate canopy of the Blackhawk at the square shadows of buildings below. 'Okay, get the lamp on that structure,' he demanded. The pilot flipped a switch.
In the overwhelming white light of the Blackhawk's main search light everything was the same flat gray, distinguishable only by ultra-black shadows blasted away by the lamp. The infected swarmed across the broken windows of a feed store like enormous maggots, their faces slack as their twisted hands reached upward to try to snag the helicopter.
One of them held a broken piece of bone. He threw it hard and it bounced off the metal skin of the helicopter with a resonating clang.
Breath puffed out of Bannerman's lungs. Not in surprise, not anymore, no, this was just nervous exhaustion. Another town overrun. That made six in California, three each in Utah, Wyoming, and Texas, twelve in Colorado. More of them, certainly, that he didn't even know about yet. The infected had taken over the streets of Lost Hills. 'Did we receive any kind of distress call from this place before it went down?'
The pilot answered on the helmet circuit. 'Negative, sir. These little farm places, they're full of illegals. Probably more afraid of la Migra than they are of the infected. Do you want me to initiate a search pattern of maneuvers and look for survivors, sir?'
'Yes,' Bannerman Clark said, wondering why he was being asked such a silly question. 'Yes, I do.'
'You've got dead'or infected, or whatever'people wandering into streams and reservoirs and rotting there. You've got healthy people being shuttled around like livestock to camps where they don't even have basic health services. We've got sanitation breaking down all over the west and with that comes cholera, with that comes typhoid, and giardia on a scale you can't imagine. In Arizona, in New Mexico dirty water is going to kill us faster than these cannibals.' [The Surgeon General in a briefing for NIH Field Agents, 4/2/05]