Cordyceps Resurgentis by Ian Duncan

Author:Ian Duncan [Duncan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: zombies, last of us, world war z, Thriller, bio thiller
Publisher: Hammerdown
Published: 2013-01-31T07:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Eight

TRUBILINSKI RODE the Blue Line in silence, fingertips steepled low in his lap and light from the tunnel strobing over his face like the flickering pages of a kineograph, but no animation there—every page, as it were, illustrated with his unblinking stone face and square jaw, fixed and immutable.

At the station beneath Arlington Cemetery, a stubble-faced man wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and gatsby cap stepped through the sliding door and leaned against a polished steel pole fifteen feet from Trubilinski, only grasping the pole with one hand as they accelerated, his casual attitude belied by his stability against the lurching and swaying of the car. He stared, eyes unfocused, at the map of the Metro on the wall across from him, the spider-legged diagram of the intersecting lines and transfer stations beneath the capital, and for two stops they maintained that charade under the fluorescent lights, only two strangers on the Metro, disregarding each other by the common practice of urban life, the unwritten code of shared spaces: the lifeless gaze into the corner of an elevator, the catatonic stance at the urinal, the welcome zombification of smart phone screens in close proximity.

The cars slowed again and stopped at McPherson Square. The doors opened onto an empty platform. No one boarded. Thirty seconds later, the doors closed and the train accelerated until the tunnel roared with displaced air. Only then did the man in the gatsby cap turn his head and look at the general, whose eyes had not left him since he boarded.

Trubilinski indicated the seat across the aisle with a slow, open-handed wave, a gesture gentlemen in passing might use to defer to one another in a narrow hallway. The man came down the walkway, passing his hand from one pole to the next, eyes on Trubilinski, until he lowered himself into the seat across the aisle, facing the same direction. A careful observer might have noticed, bunching under the man’s sleeves, muscles of the kind not often developed by urban hipsters, and a suspicious onlooker might have even concluded that he wore his clothes a size larger expressly for the purpose of concealing them.

“How are the kids?” Trubilinski asked.

The man looked at his knuckles and rubbed a scar there. “I don’t have any kids, General. You know that.”

“Then you still haven’t taken my advice,” Trubilinski said.

“I intend to once this is over.”

“You’ll do well to leave the city once you’re done.”

The man in the gatsby cap nodded. “If this doesn’t work I’ll be leaving a lot more than the city.”

Trubilinski fell silent, looking out over the seats before them, the tension around his eyes suggesting he saw something more significant unfolding there than the rattling and swaying of an empty Metro car.

“Sir, we’re only three minutes from the station.”

Trubilinski turned his head as though he had forgotten the man was there. “Of course.” Only then did he reach inside his jacket to withdraw a small plastic bag. The bag was sealed with a strip of duct tape. Inside the bag was another bag, also sealed.

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