13 Days to Die

by Matt Miksa

  The president rubbed the heels of his palms against the sides of his head, making circles above his ears. Then he simply nodded, and it was done.

  CHAPTER

  61

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  JO OPENED HER eyes to see that the world had tilted on its side. Her cheek pressed into cold concrete. Saliva dripped from her parted lips. A dull heaviness pinned her to the floor, every joint, every muscle smashed under the weight.

  The paralytic began to wear off. Although her body was a frozen cast, she wasn’t completely numb. Everything ached. Jo attempted to blink. Her eyelids slid across her corneas in slow motion. Then, a breakthrough; she wiggled her right hand. No, someone else had moved it. Jo tried to call out, but her brittle vocal cords managed only a whimper.

  “You’re awake. That means you’re almost out of it,” a voice said. It was a man’s voice. A voice she knew well. “It takes a few hours to metabolize the vecuronium bromide, depending on how much the bastards used.”

  Jo’s vision cleared a bit, and she slowly regained control of her eyes, but not her head. Still, it was enough to determine where she was.

  The Slammer.

  Officially, it was named the Patient Isolation Suite, but that made it sound like a comfortable place—some kind of spa with feather beds and Netflix. In reality, it was an airtight detention cell. Anyone who might have come into contact with a hot agent checked into quarantine until they either manifested symptoms—and most likely died—or waited out the incubation period physically unharmed. Psychological harm was another matter. Two weeks sealed inside a five-by-five-foot Plexiglas cube with nothing but a cot and a toilet would drive anyone mad. No one reemerged from the Slammer quite the same.

  Reflected in the glass wall, Jo saw a figure hunched over her lifeless form. Gaunt and unshaven, he looked like a prisoner of war—nothing like how she remembered.

  “My God, Weilin. I never thought it would come to this. You must believe me.”

  The man’s words quivered. Over the two years of their marriage, Jo couldn’t recall if she’d ever seen Ru cry.

  CHAPTER

  62

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  OLEN AWOKE WITH a jolt and coughed violently. He rolled onto his stomach to let a trail of mucus drain from his throat. He attempted to wipe his lips, but his half-frozen muscles refused. It wouldn’t have mattered; his wrists were bound behind his back.

  Disoriented and freezing, Olen scanned the dark space. There was just enough light for him to see clouds of fog puffing from his mouth—his breath crystallizing on contact with the frigid air. His mouth felt dry and sweet, like he’d taken a bite of cotton candy. They’d probably injected him with some sort of psychoactive sedative, and it was screwing with his senses. (At least that would explain the naked mountain troll he saw salivating in the shadows.) At that moment, Olen was sure of just one thing: he was moving.

  The steel floor shook. His ears filled with a familiar pressure. The droning hum of jet engines was unmistakable. Either he was still shuddering from a drug-induced, hallucinogenic mind fuck, or he was in the cargo hold of an aircraft.

  Olen struggled to remember what had happened before he lost consciousness.

  Marc. That son of a bitch was alive.

  The memory materialized like a thunderhead. The anger returned too. Shot by Marc Chen? His old roomie. Chen wasn’t a friend by any stretch, but Olen had never expected the man to be on the other side of a bullet. Though it hadn’t been a bullet. A bullet would have killed him, and Olen was too effing freezing to be in hell.

  A thin, bright line of amber light drew Olen’s eyes up. Its two-foot length disappeared and reappeared as the plane bounced. The light emanated from the main cabin. A section of the ceiling had come loose. An access panel.

  Blood rushed to Olen’s extremities, and the feeling in his arms and legs returned. He rolled over and stretched his neck toward the light—the way out.

  CHAPTER

  63

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  RU TRIED TO help Jo sit up, but his emaciated frame lacked the strength. The man had withered into a graying waif. His expression looked completely despondent, tortured. That was the worst part, Jo thought.

  “Ru.” Jo’s numb tongue began to form words that dribbled from her mouth, one by one. “You … look … like … shit.”

  “Why they’ve kept me alive, I have no idea,” he replied. “Maybe they worried it wouldn’t work.”

  “The bioweapon, you mean?”

  Jo’s ex-husband rested on one knee. His head hung behind a curtain of salt-and-pepper bangs. His breath smelled like liquor. Jo spotted two bottles of baijiu in the corner of the cell.

  “Only the great Dr. Sun Ru could invent such an impossibly perfect virus,” Jo said, speaking slowly through tingling lips. “A bioweapon that shows no compassion, mutates at will. Few creatures on this earth can morph into something else entirely when it suits their narcissistic ambition. Yet the ones who can seem to be drawn to one another.”

  “Viruses have no ego, Weilin. Only men. I suppose you know that better than I’d like to admit.” Ru leaned against the Plexiglas wall for balance. His breathing became shallow and labored.

  “Why did you do it?” Jo’s eyes welled, but her face was a mask, still immobilized by the vecuronium bromide. The disgust in her voice said enough.

  “I developed the virus here, at the Black Egg, with a small grant from the Ministry of Health’s Oncology Research Center.”

  “Oncology?”

  “Blood River virus, as you call it, was originally designed to kill cancer cells, not people,” Ru explained. “I programmed the virus to ignore healthy cells and target tumors. It was decontamination on a microscopic level. The virus infected a damaged cell and recoded its DNA. It inhibited the cancer cell’s ability to divide. In the past, a specific virus had to be developed for each type of cancer. That level of customization was nearly impossible to sustain.

  “So, I gave my virus mutative properties that allowed it to adapt to a whole range of cancers. Pancreatic, breast, lung, liver cancer—my little bug adapted intelligently to each patient’s unique circumstance.”

  “Ru, that’s incredible!”

  “You’re not the only one who had that reaction,” he said grimly. “The Ministry of Health took notice of my work. The money poured in. My research had the potential to rid the earth of mankind’s deadliest and least understood disease. Finally, a cure for cancer. I remember celebrating with a bottle of Henri Jayer Vosne-Romanee. Remember, like the one your aunt gave us?”

  “I had no idea what you were working on.”

  “No one did. Not at first, but eventually word spread. The next knock on my door wasn’t the Ministry of Health. It was the People’s Liberation Army.”

  “I’m guessing they weren’t interested in the public health benefits.”

  Ru looked away and nodded silently. “Evidently, the technology was too valuable to be used for something as trivial as saving lives. The PLA had other plans.”

  “The army made you alter the virus,” Jo said, mortified.

  “They didn’t coerce me, if that’s what you mean. A couple uniforms visited my lab once a month. They weren’t the uptight soldiers you’d expect. They were different guys every time, but the night always went the same way. We’d head to a bar, meet a few women. At some point, we’d all sit down for a lavish dinner and someone would pass me an envelope underneath the table. Occasionally it was one of the women.”

  “You took the army’s money and kept working. I would have too. No one can predict where scientific research will lead,” Jo said.

  “And that’s all it was. Research. I soon determined the virus could target nearly any type of cell, not just cancer cells. That’s what made it so novel. I could program it to target skin cells, muscle cells, even brain cells. When I discovered how to target blood cells, the PLA pulled the plug. The next visit
was from a junior officer named Lieutenant Wang. He didn’t take me to dinner.”

  “When was that?” Jo asked.

  “About six months ago. I’m not entirely sure. I’ve lost track.” Ru sighed, looking around the barren cell. “So, what have I missed?”

  CHAPTER

  64

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  IT TOOK OLEN a bit of time to cut through the plastic zip ties that bound his wrists, even once he got a grip on the switchblade hidden in his back pocket. He was surprised to find it still there. Wouldn’t the guards have searched him for weapons? Why hadn’t they confiscated the knife?

  Olen searched through a stack of aluminum storage boxes for anything useful. One container buried at the bottom looked promising. He couldn’t read the Chinese writing on its lid, but the cartoon image of a man suspended from a dome-shaped canopy offered a clue to the box’s contents. Parachutes. And not just parachutes either. The box contained flares and portable oxygen too. A midflight escapee’s survival kit. Hot damn.

  Olen lifted the access panel in the ceiling and peered into the cabin. He recognized the plane. Plush carpeting, ornate mahogany chair legs. It was a VIP jet—the same one that had transported him to the TAR. The plane where he’d first met Jo.

  A dull ache pounded behind Olen’s eye sockets. Flashes of those last moments in the Black Egg exploded across his synapses like firecrackers—the impassive look in Marc’s eyes, the way he’d stepped through the door with his arm outstretched. Olen’s brain struggled to reboot, to process the last images his eyes had collected.

  Marc had looked different. Bigger. Sharper, somehow. Scaly, like a dragon. Wings and snout. Wrong. The drugs had mixed up his memories. Olen shook his head, swishing the watery images around like tie-dye. It didn’t make sense. Marc was green. Olive. Olive green. He was wearing a PLA uniform. A disguise? No, they’d gotten to him. Turned him. Could it be possible?

  Marc was an arrogant dick, but the man was no traitor. He must have infiltrated the Black Egg for the same reason Olen had: to find the source of Blood River virus. Marc had posed as a Chinese military officer and talked his way past security—a smarter strategy than scaling a hundred-foot incinerator shaft but no less dangerous. If Marc had been caught, they’d have dragged him by his nose hairs to a PLA black site for “questioning.” Marc must’ve seen Olen and freaked. Two clandestine operatives working independently, without knowledge of one another, could get messy, even if they shared the same objective. So, Marc had shot him to save himself. What a champ. Now Olen would get to visit that black site instead. He’d remember to send Marc a postcard.

  Or … Olen could just jump out of this effing plane.

  The cartoon parachute man beckoned to him, then flipped up two chubby middle fingers. Cock tease. Olen knew his gizzards would blow out of his nostrils if he tried to bail at thirty-three thousand feet. He needed to get the plane to drop to a lower altitude. Maybe he could sweet-talk the pilots into helping him out. First, he’d need to slip past that drooling mountain troll, who’d fallen asleep (and fortunately turned out to be just a PLA guard with wicked jet lag).

  Through the access panel, now slightly ajar, Olen spotted a barrel-chested man with stars on his shoulders and flecks of white dusting his sideburns. He was sitting behind the desk near the rear bulkhead, peering down a bird-beak nose, reading a book. A pair of barbed horns sprouted from the man’s forehead. Then the demon looked up, and the plane trembled.

  CHAPTER

  65

  Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

  “HOW BAD IS it? Will Taipei recover?” Ru asked.

  “Taipei?” Jo pulled herself up on an elbow. “Taipei is unaffected, as far as I know.”

  “But the invasion—”

  “Hasn’t even begun yet,” Jo interjected. “The PLA used your virus to overthrow the Politburo, here, on the mainland. General Huang has his finger on the trigger, no doubt, but so far he hasn’t touched Taiwan. The Americans probably have something to do with that.”

  “B-but the virus,” Ru sputtered. “You said it had been weaponized.”

  At that moment, Jo realized that her ex-husband had no idea of the extent of his crime. The architect of this weapon of mass destruction was completely unaware of the devastation he’d caused.

  Jo watched Ru’s face melt in horror as she explained what had happened in Dzongsar Village. The smoldering pit of dead monks. The riots in Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou. The bombing of the Great Hall of the People. The coup and the curfew. The imposition of martial law and the imminent PLA invasion of Taiwan. She spared no detail, no matter how disgustingly gruesome, and she paused only when there was nothing left to say.

  Ru collapsed into a pile of bones. He buried his face and muttered through deep sobs, “Oh God! Oh God!”

  Jo slid closer, dragging herself as the paralytic faded. She resisted the human urge to place a hand on Ru’s back, to comfort the tortured scientist. He didn’t deserve comfort. “Why did you think the army had attacked Taipei?” she asked. “You sounded so sure.”

  “Aiguo,” Ru mumbled into the floor. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to disappear into his own body.

  “I know your brother is involved. He helped deploy the weapon.”

  “No,” Ru said. “He warned me not to trust the military. He begged me to refuse their money. Aiguo knew something like this would happen, but I didn’t want to hear it. I just wanted to keep going.”

  “Your brother was in Dzongsar Village,” Jo said coolly. She watched her ex-husband’s face carefully. “He went there to destroy the evidence of what you did. I spoke with him. I have proof.”

  “What proof do you have, Weilin? A man in a distant hot zone inexplicably impersonates his own brother. And for what reason? He was probably just investigating the outbreak, same as you.”

  Jo perked up. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled. “How did you know Aiguo had impersonated you?” she asked flatly. She hadn’t mentioned that detail. Ru wasn’t telling her everything.

  Ru glared like a cornered animal. His sobbing ceased.

  “It was you,” Jo hissed, her mouth curling in disgust. “You weaponized Blood River virus!” She wanted to hit him, strangle his thin neck, but her body still refused to respond.

  “Everything I’ve told you is true. I invented the virus to fight cancer,” Ru insisted.

  “Maybe that’s how it started, but you couldn’t stop, not when you’d discovered its true power.” Jo’s face flushed with fury. “You contacted the army yourself, didn’t you? You knew about Dzongsar. Hell, you probably pitched them the idea.”

  “It was supposed to be a controlled experiment. The village was remote and the terrain made it nearly inaccessible, not to mention the heavy restrictions isolating the entire region. Dzongsar was the perfect testing ground. Quarantine should’ve been a breeze. Lieutenant Wang assured me the PLA would take whatever measures necessary to lock down the village, keep the disease contained.”

  Jo spat in Ru’s face. The man just looked away, not bothering to wipe the saliva from his cheek.

  “You murdered all of those people,” she said. “That’s why Aiguo went to Dzongsar. To stop what you’d done. But he was too late.”

  “Don’t be so naïve, Weilin.” Ru’s voice sharpened. “They used me, the same way they used you. The PLA never intended to quarantine the village, and it never intended for you to conduct a legitimate epidemiological investigation. Don’t you see? That lieutenant wanted the virus to get out. By the time my brother and I figured it out, that we’d been deceived, it was probably too late, but we had to try anyway. The army got to me first, and I ended up in this plastic box, but Aiguo got away. I’m glad he made it to Tibet, but obviously he couldn’t stop it.”

  “Aiguo’s dead,” Jo blurted. She wanted the words to hurt, to stab at her ex-husband like poison-tipped daggers. Ru adored his brother. She remembered the two men at her wedding, the bear hugs and back slaps.


  Ru sat, statue-still, eyes wide. Maybe he already knew. Maybe he’d already come to terms with his role in Aiguo’s agonizing death. But then her ex-husband began jerking, thrashing, as if trying to physically expel the information the way a body rejected a transplanted organ. He crawled toward the corner of the cell, toward the bottles of baijiu. One was empty. Ru grabbed its long neck and slammed it into the cement floor, sending shards of green glass exploding in all directions. Jo shielded her face in the crook of her elbow. When she looked up, Ru was pouring the remains of the other bottle over his head. His eyes reddened with irritation from contact with the potent spirit. Suddenly, he had a lighter in his hand. Where had he even gotten one? From Huang’s men, she reasoned. They have no more use for him. They want him to …

  “Ru, don’t!” Jo shouted. The man probably deserved to be executed for what he’d done, but at that moment a remnant of the love she’d once felt wormed to the surface. “Please, Ru. Think. What are you going to do?”

  “You must see,” he said. “They’ve been waiting for me to do it. They’ve all been waiting.”

  “Then don’t give them the satisfaction,” Jo whispered hoarsely.

  Ru kneeled in a puddle, his hair and clothes sopping with alcohol. He held the lighter in one hand high above his head. A small orange flame danced in his white-knuckled fist. Jo had never seen that expression on Ru’s face: pure anguish, guilt, regret.

  “This isn’t for them,” he said.

  With a flick, Ru’s palm opened, releasing his grip on the lighter. Then came the heat, gnashing and snapping its jaws, mauling the man’s body like a beast, savage and bloodthirsty. Seconds later, water poured down from fire sprinklers overhead, but it was too late. The fire had consumed Ru’s frail form.