Heroes of the Undead | Book 1 | The Culling

by Meredith, Peter

  An ambulance was called for Jun Bae, but with the traffic blocking everything, it took an hour for it to arrive and another hour for it to roll up to the closest hospital, which just happened to be the one where Natalie worked and by then it was on fire. Ten others who had been infected right around the same time as Natalie had been, were rampaging through the building, attacking anything that moved.

  It was a running fight that was going in every direction. Those ten infected nearly seventy others before the police gunned the last of them down. Although none of the ten survived, their tainted blood coated the building.

  Michael-13 had started a fire in Los Angeles and by midnight it was spreading out of control. Los Angeles was doomed, but it was not the only city that was dying. London, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Calcutta…every major city had been marked for destruction. And that even included the Order’s home city of New York.

  New York City was a powder keg to begin with and when it went off, it would take half the country with it.

  Chapter 1

  Three days earlier—November 21, 2021

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  Security cameras picked up the two men in dark suits even before they entered the Whitehead Institute. This was a hundred-times-a-day occurrence and the bored man on surveillance didn’t blink an eye. It was only after the front desk security guard rang up Lab 338 that things started moving.

  On average, the front desk called that lab exactly zero times a year. It had never happened, and yet the call triggered an alarm in a small room two floors up. The room was set aside exclusively for visiting researchers. Almost exclusively. A pair of FBI agents had been roosting in it for the last two weeks.

  The room smelled of Fritos and old French fries. In front were a few desks and a cubicle wall. Thrown on the floor in back were a couple of mattresses and a like number of suitcases, each gaping and spewing clothing.

  Lying on one of the mattresses and snoring softly was the large ungainly form of FBI agent Stanley Plinkett, while in front, sitting at a desk and trying to stay awake was Agent Griffin Meyers. At twenty-eight, Griff was the junior agent by more than a decade. Still, his blue eyes were puffy from staring endlessly at the three live feeds he had going on one screen. On a second monitor, he was playing a game of solitaire. He was in the middle of losing, again, when the sound of a phone ringing over the speakers made him jump.

  A canned voice answered, “Hmm, yes?”

  “Hi, this is Ron from down in the lobby. Dr. Carter has a couple of guests.”

  “Guests? For Carter? Okay. I’ll send him down.”

  As Griff jotted the time down on a pad of paper, he barked, “Plink! Get up. It’s Bryce.”

  “Just Bryce?”

  “So far.”

  Plinkett groaned as he struggled to sit up. The two had a running bet on which of the three-hundred scientists at the institute would be contacted. Bryce Carter had been Griff’s third pick in their NFL-style draft.

  “There’s still time,” Plinkett said as he came around the cubicle wall and leaned over Griff. Age and too many stakeouts had given Plinkett a bit of a paunch. With his thinning blonde hair and owlish expression, he looked more like an insurance salesman than an FBI agent. He squinted at the camera feed that covered the lobby. He pointed at the two men in suits. “Does that look like Seven and Eight?” The reference was to the nine pairs of recruiters that Magnus Enterprises were using to suck in some of the nation’s best scientists, doctors, engineers and artists.

  “I’ll be able to get a good capture when they’re leaving. Oh. There’s Bryce. Look a him. He looks like he thinks he’s in trouble.” Bryce was Griff’s age, but dressed as he was in khakis and a plaid shirt he looked like a middle-aged nerd. It didn’t help that he was short and thin, with a perfect part on the right side of his head. “Here’s the handshake, and the name drop. Look how his mouth fell open. And now for the card.”

  On the screen, Bryce stared at the business card for six seconds then looked at the back of it. Recruiter number Eight then held up a black envelope but didn’t hand it over. He gestured to the lobby doors and the three headed outside where they were picked up by another camera.

  “That’s them,” Plinkett muttered. “Eight has that ring of hair around his head.”

  Subconsciously, Griff ran a hand through his own thick dark hair. “Why the hell doesn’t he just shave it off completely? Better to be bald if you ask me.”

  Plinkett shrugged. “Because he’s an idiot. You better get going. Be cool. Don’t spook him.”

  Griff unfolded his six-foot frame from the chair he’d been sitting in for the last three hours and stretched. “Bryce is a mouse. He’s gonna spook no matter what. I just won’t say anything until we’re in the elevator.”

  Three minutes later Griff was in the lobby, watching the door. Trying to fit in among the undergraduates, he had dressed in old jeans and a t-shirt; he had a satchel slung across his shoulders. His disguise was a failure. The t-shirt did nothing to hide his muscles and the satchel only highlighted the breadth of his shoulders. He was also more aware than any of the students schlepping through the lobby. In short, he looked like a cop.

  Still, Bryce didn’t even notice him until the two were alone in the elevator together. Bryce wore a happy/stunned look and couldn’t stop staring at the black envelope. He even sniffed it.

  Griff pressed the five and then put out a hand to stop Bryce from hitting the three.

  “You’ll be getting out with me,” Griff said. “I’m FBI and we need to talk about your upcoming trip.”

  Bryce backed to the wall of the elevator, holding a protective hand up to the throat of his plaid shirt. “M-my trip?” When he was frightened, his voice turned high and reedy. “How did you know about that? They just told me. They just told me two minutes ago. I-I-I think I need to see some ID or a warrant or something.”

  “When we get upstairs.”

  For a moment, Bryce looked like he wanted to say something more, but Griff was a head taller than him and an unspoken but innate promise of violence hung in the air around him. The two rode in a long silence that gripped Bryce and seemed to infect him with a malaise. Minutes before, his life was hitting a pinnacle. He was being wooed by none other than Daniel Magnus, the eighth richest man in the world. And now he had the FBI after him.

  He was numb by the time he made it into the FBI’s borrowed room.

  Once inside, first Griff then Plinkett produced their IDs. “When’s the limo coming for you?” Griff asked.

  Should I demand a lawyer? Bryce wondered. He had the feeling they wouldn’t let him call one. They were standing very close. “The day after tomorrow. At ten. What’s this all about?”

  “Daniel Magnus,” Griff answered. “Something is happening with him and we need to know what. He's been collecting people. Scientists, artists, doctors. All young. All highly intelligent.”

  Bryce shrugged. “So? Didn’t Edison do the same thing? And what about the Manhattan Project? That was our own government.”

  Plinkett slapped a heavy hand down on Bryce’s shoulder and glared down at him. “This is different. You know that group of buildings he bought in New York City?”

  “The Magnus Plaza? That’s where I’m going. On his private jet. And it’s perfectly legal.” Bryce hoped so, at least. His head was spinning and his normally precise thoughts were nebulous and hard to grasp.

  “Are you sure?” Griff asked. “Something’s happening there. Something that doesn’t make sense. We estimate Magnus has seven thousand people living in those buildings. They go in, but they don't come out.”

  This brought Bryce up short. “Ever? That’s impossible.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Plinkett said. “He has deliveries brought in. Truckload after truckload, every day. It’s true, a few people do go out. Like those recruiters. When they do get out, the first thing they do is contact their families; to warn them.”

  Bryce’s stomach dropped. “About w
hat?”

  Griff stared hard at the young scientist before answering. “We’ve had eleven family members contacted so far. The threat is never spoken of directly, but they were all told to leave their homes. Half were told to go north; as far north as they could go. Some were told to get up into the Rockies. Another was told to take a vacation to Tahiti.”

  Breathless, Bryce said, “Eleven is not really a lot.”

  Plinkett spun Bryce so the scientist faced him. “That’s only the ones that contacted us. How many others simply heard the warning and took off? And more likely, how many of these people had no family at all? More than you’d think and it should worry you. In the last four months we’ve had a spike in missing persons with a few characteristics in common; young, intelligent, scientifically educated, few to no family members, and all had been in contact with Magnus. Like we said, they go in, but they don’t come out.”

  No family members? This struck particularly close to Bryce, who had been an only child and had lost his mother the year before.

  “So…so, what do you think he’s doing? You think he's starting a cult? Or planning to go David Koresh? No way. This is Daniel Magnus! The Daniel Magnus.”

  Plinkett sat back on the desk, knocking one of the monitors with his elbow. “We have no idea what he’s really doing in there. It’s why we’re talking to you and others like you. We’re going to need you to go in, find out what he’s up to and get out again. You’ll be perfectly safe. We’ll have eyes on you every step of the way. Except for when you’re inside, obviously. Once inside, you’ll have three hours to get the information and get out. If you don’t come out by then, we’ll spring a search warrant on them.”

  A search warrant? For Daniel Magnus? People did not serve Daniel Magnus with a search warrant. “This is crazy. What you’re asking is…Wait. Why don’t you just go in now? You just said that there were missing persons.”

  Plinkett sighed. “We tried that once and they produced the person in a snap, almost as if the judge had warned them ahead of time. And it didn’t matter either way. The guy wouldn’t say a word. He sat like a stone even when we threatened to charge him with sedition. He didn’t fucking blink at the idea of the death penalty.”

  Before Bryce could say anything, Griff spun him around. “That man had been inside for six weeks. Let that sink in. It took only six weeks for him to give up his life. Look, Bryce, your country needs you.”

  “Potentially,” Bryce corrected. “What happens if he’s working on something important and needs my help. You don’t know this but I’ve just made a breakthrough in my…”

  Griff spoke over him, “In your research into chromosomal protein pairings. We know all about it, which means Magnus knows. It’s why he wants you, or rather, why he wants your work.”

  Bryce’s eyes narrowed. “You think he’s going to try to steal it?” When it came to his research, Bryce was extremely guarded, almost to the point of paranoia. Just the idea that Magnus was after his work made him rethink everything. He tapped his lip absently before asking, “I’ll be safe?”

  “Perfectly,” Plinkett said.

  Griff nodded in complete agreement and then held up a hand. “Except, like I said, we need to know what’s happening in there and we won’t find out unless you take a few chances. Walk around. Talk to people. Insist on it. If Magnus is really trying to recruit you, wouldn’t you want to find out everything you could before you gave him your answer?”

  “I suppose, but what if my answer is yes? What if he really is legit? It’s Daniel Fucking Magnus.”

  Griff stepped right up to Bryce and looked down his nose at him. “At least eleven people told their parents to run far away from what’s coming. No. Let me rephrase that. Eleven scientists told their parents to run far away. It scared them enough to call us. What would cause you to do that? Something legitimate or something terrible?”

  Plinkett stood as well. “And if things do go sideways and you’re on the wrong side, we’ll make sure to find the right judge to pin as much of it on you as humanly possible. I wouldn’t rule out the death penalty.”

  “Christ! It was a hypothetical question,” Bryce replied.

  “Hypothetical or not,” Plinkett said, “we chose you for a reason. According to your file you paid for some of your schooling by playing poker. That right?”

  Normally, Bryce would’ve gone into exquisite detail concerning his poker skills, but just then he was miserable and could only nod. Griff put a hand on his thin shoulder. “We’re going to need you to carry a bluff from the moment you get picked up by the limo, to the second you walk out the front doors. Can you do that?”

  “You want me to try to bluff one of the smartest men in the world?”

  “Exactly,” Griff said. “Just remember, he’s like everyone else. He sees only two things: what he wants to see and what he expects to see.”

  Chapter 2

  November 24th, 2021

  The Day the World Ends

  JFK Airport

  “That was fucking awesome,” Bryce Carter whispered beneath the sound of the plane’s engines throttling down. He figured it was a guarantee that the plane was bugged, and even if it wasn’t, he had to stay in character. The Gulfstream had a price tag of a hundred-million dollars and was worth every penny. The interior was spacious, and with its gold inlays and shining teak, it reminded him of a luxury yacht instead of a plane.

  The real Bryce Carter, PhD would have reveled in the chance to fly on a private jet. He would’ve been giddy, and he would be a bit sad at the idea of having to leave it. This fake Bryce sighed and thumped the armrest with the meaty part of his small fist before he stood and forced a grin at the pretty stewardess. She was a fake, too. No woman had ever smiled so much at Bryce in his life.

  At the door of the jet, he paused to adjust his cuff—normally, this would be for the visual effect alone. His cuff was fine, but this was what powerful men did…at least according to the magazines. Bryce only did it so the FBI could get a good look at him. His eyes flicked around, hoping to spot a man up on the roof of a hanger with a pair of over-sized binoculars, or a baggage handler in dark sunglasses, talking to his wrist.

  Ahead of him, a servant in a nicer suit than his own, carried his bag to a helicopter that was waiting to whisk him off to his meeting with Daniel Magnus. THE Daniel Magnus. Bryce couldn’t stop thinking of him that way, with the “THE” in capitals and in italics.

  Magnus was the Henry Ford of his time and the next Bill Gates. He was the future of technology as much as he was its present. He was the epitome of cutting edge in a dozen fields, including work in molecular biology and the Human Genome project. And somehow, he had come across Bryce’s name.

  The “real” Bryce would’ve felt like the king of the world as he sauntered off the private jet, the wind plucking at the lapel of his suit. He would’ve had to hide the grin that kept wanting to bloom across his face. He would have a manic feeling of success, of having “made it” before he was even thirty. It would bubble up inside him and demand to burst out.

  Bryce had to fake all this. He had to keep from muttering: “Fucking FBI.” They had ruined this moment, potentially the greatest moment of his life.

  The helicopter blades were already spinning, causing his brown hair to ripple and wave like fire. Normally, he wouldn’t care, however, there was a woman sitting in the back. He assumed that she was nothing more than an expensive bit of blonde eye-candy, like the stewardess had been.

  It was only when he climbed in next to her that he recognized the woman as Maddy Whitmore. For the most part, she hadn’t changed in four years; her cheeks were a little chubbier, and her round chin a little rounder. Her sharp grey eyes were deeply set in fleshy folds, making them appear smaller than they were. Her hair was cut into a brown bob which was a vast improvement over the dreadlocks she had once sported.

  “Mad Maddy! My God, it’s you. Wait, is it Maddy, or are you still going by that tribal name you adopted at Harvard? Mgbaila-something w
asn’t it?”

  Maddy’s round face turned wooden and her lips practically disappeared. “Bryce. I see you’re still waiting on that growth spurt. If you’re the kind of person Magnus is looking to hire, this is even a greater waste of time than I envisioned.”

  “Yeah, why are you here? You know Magnus has a bad habit of actually making a profit while delivering goods and services to customers at a fair market value. Last I heard, you were going to go work for Cuba in their socialist paradise.”

  Before she could answer, the pilot leaned back so that her blonde hair spilled down one shoulder—Magnus sure liked his blondes. In her blue uniform, she was stern, but pretty. She pointed at the headsets. “You’ll need to put the headgear on. If you’d like to speak to each other, there’s a microphone built in.”

  Maddy picked one up. “Mine comes with an off switch. Must be my lucky day.” As the engine began to spool up, she placed the headset over her ears, and with a final insincere smile, she turned to look out the window.

  Bryce muttered, “Oh, how will I ever cope with the rejection?” He was actually disappointed. Seeing Maddy and slipping into their old antagonistic bantering had been the only natural thing he had done that day. Everything else had been a calculated act, and the stress of keeping it up was already wearing on him.

  Even in the helicopter, he kept asking himself: what would Bryce do?

  He would grin and enjoy the moment as the helicopter gently lifted into the air. From a thousand feet, New York City was far more alluring than at ground level. The trash and the graffiti disappeared, leaving only the canyons of concrete and steel, the rivers of cars, and the endless flow of humanity. It all washed over Bryce without leaving an impression. He was anxious…no, he was scared.

  Up to this point, his act had been only a warm up. The limo driver, the stewardess, the pilot; none of them had the genius-level intellect of Daniel Magnus. They hadn’t sat before Congress or been grilled on 60 Minutes. They were just people…and they saw what they wanted to see.