by Chris Fox
“Get me an estimated time of impact,” he bellowed, pivoting to face the sea of technicians. Most typed furiously on their keyboards, but a few shot him terrified glances. One woman was crying, a young blonde with close-cropped hair and swollen eyes. "Now, people.”
“Eighty seconds until it hits satellite six, sir,” an Asian woman with wireframe glasses spoke up, rising from her desk so he could meet her gaze. It was the same one who'd given him the tablet. Benson, the name tag read. “We have another forty before it reaches us here. It will blanket the entire planet in just under four minutes.”
“At least one of you is competent,” the Director growled, attempting to suppress the irritation at how powerless he felt. “Keep six broadcasting and record all data. If we’re going to lose it, let's at least get what we can. Shut down all monitoring as soon as it goes dark.”
He strode from the pit towards the wide glass desk on the far side of the room. It was slightly elevated over the others, giving him a commanding view of the technicians. It had been placed there to further reinforce his authority, though it did little to help his mood. He slid into the high-backed leather chair behind the desk and keyed in a sequence on the silvered keyboard. His monitor flared to life with the lime-green connecting icon.
“What is it, Mark?” a familiar voice answered almost immediately. The picture showed a stocky blond-haired man with piercing blue eyes, hands steepled on his desk as he stared at the camera. Leif Mohn himself, a man even Mark found terrifying.
“The second wave will be here in three minutes. We’re going to lose satellite six, but the other eleven are protected,” he explained, pausing while he awaited a response. Mohn’s face revealed nothing.
“That’s a shame. Six is responsible for north Africa, isn’t it?” Mohn asked, tone neutral.
“It is. We can bridge the gap if we alter five and seven to cover a wider radius, but that leaves thin coverage in all three areas,” Mark replied. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was the best they had.
“As soon as the wave is over, have the artifacts brought below. I want to see if the wave has any effect,” Mohn instructed, reaching for something off-screen. He turned back to the camera. “Do we have an update on the situation in Peru?”
"No, sir,” Mark admitted, though he hated doing so. It made him look incompetent for trusting subordinates. “Last we heard, Commander Jordan was in place and awaiting the package, but he hasn’t reported in since this morning. That’s unusual, but given the impending wave we couldn’t send a team to investigate.”
“Inform me if anything changes. Also, I want to be notified the second we’ve compiled footage from the aftermath of the wave,” Mohn said. He didn’t bother awaiting a response, simply terminating the feed.
If the Old Man had been upset about losing an eighty-billion-dollar satellite moments before they were knocked back into the Stone Age, he certainly didn’t show it. Mark compartmentalized the conversation. He had to focus on the situation. Time was critical.
“Sir, wave impact in fifteen seconds,” Benson called from her desk. She’d be one to watch in the coming days. She seemed to be keeping it together better than most of the techs.
Mark rose from his desk, watching the feed from six on the giant screen. The wave had blotted out everything, leaving the screen filled with the sun’s fiery wrath. Had the first civilization witnessed something similar thirteen thousand years ago? Or had they lacked the technology and simply been eradicated? He would give anything to know more about that civilization. Mohn had gleaned so little from the pyramid in Peru and even less from Göbekli Tepe. The only solid information they had came from the artifacts, and that was extremely limited.
The screen went dark. Satellite six was gone. The room fell utterly silent, save for the low hum of computers. No one spoke or even tapped away at a keyboard. They all knew that when the feed returned, when the wave was over, they’d find themselves in a strange new world. There was no way of knowing just how it would affect them.
They had projections, of course. The world’s power grid would be severely damaged, though there was no way to predict the exact magnitude of that damage. People would be left in a dark aftermath, fighting for food and possibly shelter as the civilized world tore itself apart. That would leave them unable to respond to the true threat, these werewolves that had begun appearing several weeks after they’d explored the pyramid.
Had that been their true plan all along? Start the plague just before the world faced its worst calamity in recorded history? If so, it was utterly devious. It would give the werewolves the time they needed to spread unopposed. Mohn Corp. would resist, of course, but how much resistance they could offer remained to be seen. They had less than three thousand personnel in Syracuse, and every other installation lacked the elaborate shielding they had here. The other facilities would suffer severe damage from the wave. They hadn’t the faintest idea as to the werewolves’ motives and were woefully unable to respond to the threat.
The lights flickered for a split second and then came back on at a slightly reduced intensity. It was the only sign that they’d switched from the local power grid to their own nuclear reactor. That switch was intended to be permanent, since they had no idea how long it would take for the local government to rebuild, assuming that it even survived the disaster.
“Sir,” Benson called. She waited for his attention before continuing. “Satellites are beginning to redeploy. We’ll have feeds in sixty seconds.”
“Excellent,” Mark replied, leaving the desk and heading back into the pit. He studied the black screen for nearly a full minute before it flickered back to life.
It now showed eleven feeds, with a conspicuously black spot where six should have been. He tapped a series of commands on the tablet and watched as each of the satellites altered their cameras from the sun back to the earth. The feeds revealed familiar images showing every continent. Those in daylight time zones looked exactly the same, but those on the far side of the earth were dark, save for a thin band of lights around the equator. Every city outside that belt had been extinguished. Power was gone in the blink of an eye leaving them, so far as they knew, the only organization in the world with both satellite access and electricity.
The latter would return in time, but no nation would be able to recover satellite access. Every last one, save for those belonging to Mohn Corp., had just been obliterated by the coronal mass ejection. The world was blind, naked before whatever apocalypse the ancient myths had tried to warn them about.
“Give me points of interest, people. What can you show me?” he asked, folding his hands behind his back. It galled him to know so little, but there was nothing for it but patience.
“Sir, feed five is making a pass over northern Africa. Cairo was listed as a potential point of interest. I think you’re going to want to see this,” a young man with a shock of black hair and a cleft chin said. Mark was close enough to read the name tag. Jacobs.
He called up feed five, which dominated the main screen. The camera was aimed at the Giza plateau and provided a spectacular view of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. The ground shook and trembled, sending temple columns and a few stones from the Pyramids tumbling to the earth. Odd, since Egypt wasn’t seismically active.
Then a jet-black point jutted from the earth between the first and second Pyramids. It grew larger and larger, boring up through the earth just as the one in Peru had. Only this one was far, far larger. The ground around it roiled and bucked as it continued its ascent. Eventually, the structure hit both the first and second Pyramids, knocking them out of its path like children’s blocks. Five thousand years of human history were obliterated in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing but rubble at the feet of what must now be the largest man-made structure in the world. Assuming it was man-made.
Only the Sphinx had survived the destruction, now perched at the very foot of the newly arrived pyramid, as if it had been made to sit there. Odd that. The pyramid’s obsidian surface
was different than its counterpart in Peru. It was decorated with elaborate golden hieroglyphs as large as a man. Thousands upon thousands of them. What did they mean? Who had created them? There were so many damned questions and precious few answers.
“Sir,” Benson barked as she shot to her feet. “There are more of those things. One in Australia. Another in Cambodia. There might be others but those are the ones that we’ve identified thus far.”
The Director walked back to his desk and called the Old Man.
3
Zombies
“Director Phillips?” a voice blared from somewhere outside the dream. Mark struggled awake, sitting up in bed. He glanced at the clock. 2:43 AM. He'd only been out for about forty minutes. It was more than he'd expected.
An insistent red light flashed at the base of the wall screen. He tapped it.
“I’m awake. Report,” he said, still groggy but already processing. If they’d woken him this quickly after he'd left Ops, something monumental must have happened.
“Sir, I’m piping you the footage from satellite five now,” a female voice said. It was the Asian tech. Benson. “I’ve concatenated the most important parts, complete with our initial analysis.”
He was impressed. She hadn’t apologized for waking him, which most other techs would have done. If it was important enough to wake him she was smart enough to realize no apology was needed, because she was simply performing the duty he’d assigned her.
Mark picked up the tablet from the nightstand and propped the pillow up against the wall. He leaned back, swiping to wake the device. It took a few moments to browse to the footage Benson had indicated. There were four videos, one from Cairo, another from London, the third from Berlin, and the final one from Paris. He started with London.
It was a top-down view of downtown, just outside a hospital. Police stood in the street, directing crowds of people. Abandoned vehicles clogged the street and thousands of people streamed between them. It was his first look at a large city after all power had been lost, but beyond the expected chaos he didn’t see anything remarkable.
A figure staggered out of the hospital. Then another. Then a third and a fourth. They lurched drunkenly towards the crowd, where they began to attack people. At first most of the crowd barely noticed, but then some of those attacked rose and began attacking others. The violence spread like wildfire, ripping into the crowd in several places.
People were finally aware. They began stampeding away from their attackers, more than one poor soul trampled as people flooded past. The camera zoomed in, focusing on the spot where the violence had begun. Several figures knelt over the fallen. Were they…feeding?
A window popped up on the far side of the screen, listing behavior observed over the next two hours. Extreme violence. Immunity to pain or injury. Inability to speak or reason. Extreme and lethal aggression. Benson had included a great deal of data but drew no conclusion, though it was obvious to any observer. He’d just witnessed a scene that could have come from a Romero movie. Those people were zombies.
Mark turned off the tablet, setting it on the pillow beside him as he considered the implications. He could assume the other three videos showed similar incidents. That suggested this might be global, though he couldn’t confirm that without more evidence.
The Old Man had hinted for years that some sort of apocalypse was coming, but Mark had assumed that it must be the CME. It was only recently that he’d modified that hypothesis to assume that the werewolf outbreak in South America was somehow part of a master plan set in motion eight millennia before their recorded history began. What if he wasn’t seeing the whole picture? What if this zombie outbreak was the real apocalypse? Who had set it in motion and what did they stand to gain from it? How did the werewolves figure into it all? Most importantly, how much did the Old Man know and why wasn’t he sharing that knowledge?
Mark turned the tablet back on and browsed to the Cairo video. The pyramid was significantly larger than the others and the fact that the world’s oldest known pyramids had been built virtually on top of it was suggestive. Were the ancient Egyptians the distant descendants of the people who’d built that pyramid?
The footage was from a higher vantage than London, showing pandemonium sweeping the streets of Cairo. Some people ran, some fought, and others huddled on top of buildings. Those in the streets were pulled down by growing hordes of shambling corpses, soon rising to join their attackers. It chilled him, but what came next was even worse.
As one, the corpses froze. Thousands of bodies all at once. Then they began a slow orderly walk towards the massive black pyramid. He sped up the footage, watching as they marched like ants towards the base of that structure. An army of the dead in neat, even rows. Waiting, but for what?
It was time to alert the Old Man. He swiped to his contacts and tapped the connect button next to the Old Man’s dour picture. The tablet beeped twice and then went to voice mail. Mark checked the time. 3 AM. Mohn would have picked up, unless he was on a call. Who could the Old Man be talking to?
Mark logged into the admin panel, delving down into the call logs. Odd. The Old Man had placed six calls to London in the last four hours. Who the hell was he talking to in the middle of the night? The London facility was small and held little tactical value right now. The woman in charge there wasn’t even a top-level executive. In fact, Margery probably knew less about what was happening in her own city than Mark did. So why would Mohn be calling there?
4
The Dead Rule
The dead ruled Cajamarca. Blair gazed down at the moonlit city from his perch atop the steeple. The church sat midway up a hill at the city’s edge, looking down on a sea of churches, skyscrapers, and homes. Not a single street light or friendly glow from a residential neighborhood could be found. Whether the people had lost power when the second wave hit or were merely trying to hide, no one seemed willing to advertise their presence with so much as a flashlight.
Yet they were down there. He could smell a dozen competing scents, all tinged with fear. There were survivors and they’d wisely chosen to hunker down and wait for help to arrive. Blair was that help.
“Look, down there by that grocery store,” Liz said, materializing next to him. Her copper hair was bound in a tight ponytail and she wore a pair of black yoga pants with a matching jacket. Simple night camouflage. “Something moved in that window.”
“You know, I hate it when you do that,” Blair said, eyeing her sidelong. She’d taken to using a new trick the Mother had shown her. Something she called shadow riding. That usually meant she was lurking in his shadow. Literally. “It could have been a zombie. Or a pet.”
“Maybe, but it’s worth a look,” Liz replied. She turned to face a neighboring apartment building, beckoning.
A figure blurred into view, crossing the distance between them in three quick hops. A tall man in a black t-shirt and dark canvas pants landed on the roof below them, his blond hair covered by a tactical helmet with a glass visor. He cradled an assault rifle in his arms, scanning the darkness for threats. Part of Blair still panicked at the sight of Commander Jordan, memories of fleeing Mohn’s chief executioner still fresh in his mind. No. That had all changed.
The Commander was on their side now. He’d risen just a few hours after the Mother had torn him apart, a blond werewolf a good six inches taller than Blair’s silver form. Not that Jordan wore his bestial form often. The soldier definitely preferred conventional weaponry to claws, but he seemed just as effective without them. They could use their increased strength and speed while in human form, and Jordan utilized both with terrifying lethality.
“Sit rep?” Jordan asked, all business. Blair still didn’t trust him. It was hard trusting a man who’d blown up houses to hunt you down.
“Movement down there in the grocery store. Blair and I will check it out. I want you and Bridget to wait here,” Liz ordered. Blair was amazed at how easily command came to her now. She’d already adopted the Mother’s doctri
ne of the Ka-Ken being the battlefield commanders. The role fit her.
“We can do that,” Bridget said, emerging from the shadows behind Jordan. She was comically short beside him, though those roles would reverse if she shifted. Bridget wore the same black yoga pants as Liz, with a black tank top that left her pale shoulders exposed. She caught his eye. “Be careful, Blair.”
“It’s probably nothing, but we have to check,” he said, shrugging. He turned towards the building, eyeing the route in between. “Four jumps. You going to hitch a ride, Liz?”
“Sure, faster that way,” she said, flowing into the darkness like inky mist. Damn, it was eerie. He couldn’t feel anything, not the slightest hint that she was in his shadow. Yet he was positive she was there.
He bounded down the slope, drawing on the moon’s strength to fuel his blur. The wind whipped at his clothing, blowing his hood back and plastering the jacket to his body. He landed just outside the grocery store in the middle of a near-empty parking lot. He raised his nose, examining the scents. Soap. Sweat. Urine.
“You were right. There’s someone alive in there,” he whispered, moving to the door in a low crouch. He peered through the glass, scanning the dark aisles. A normal person would be blind, but the thin moonlight lit the place like day for his eyes. He could clearly make out several figures. “Look, crouched there in the produce section. Four of them.”
“Shall we introduce ourselves?” Liz’s disembodied voice asked, still wrapped in shadow.
“Okay, I’ll go inside. Stick to the shadows unless I get into trouble. We don’t want them to feel threatened,” he replied, rising to his feet. He rapped lightly on the glass.
Two of the four figures drew together, whispering. He couldn’t quite catch their heartbeats, but the words were plain. A young man was speaking in Spanish. “We should let him in. He could die out there.”