Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  Peyton leaned close to him. Her lips brushed his ear as she spoke, just loud enough for him to hear over the rotors.

  “Help me find a med kit. Hurry. She’s bleeding out.”

  Chapter 62

  From a tender floating in the Indian Ocean, Conner watched the Kentaro Maru sink. With each second, the sea swallowed more of the smoking heap. Unlike the Beagle, it would never be found. He was sure of that.

  “Hughes had help,” the captain said.

  “Brilliant deduction,” Conner muttered.

  “Should we—”

  “I’ll handle it. I have this well in hand.”

  Desmond had helped as best he could while Peyton sewed Hannah’s shoulder wound closed. She had operated with focus and poise, not a single second wasted.

  Desmond had no doubt that she had just saved the young woman’s life. Hannah was extremely pale now, her face gaunt. Blood covered the floor of the helicopter. Gauze and boxes of medical supplies lay strewn about like volcanic islands rising from a blood-red sea.

  Peyton sank back to her haunches. She exhaled deeply, and every bit of energy seemed to flow out of her. Desmond half-expected her to pass out herself. It must have been incredibly stressful, holding a friend and colleague’s life in her hands, knowing every move she made could end the woman’s life.

  She looked at Desmond with what he thought was skeptism. Then she leaned close to him, her lips inches from his ear, her words impossible for Avery to hear in the pilot’s seat. “What’s going on here, Des?”

  The tone was different from her words on the ship. It was somehow more… tender, familiar.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you acting like you don’t know me?”

  His eyes went wide. It was true. They did know each other. Quickly, he told her about waking up in Berlin with no memory of how he’d gotten there.

  “We need to talk,” she said. “There’s something you need to know. But first…” She glanced around, found the headset hanging from the ceiling, and pulled it on.

  Desmond grabbed another headset.

  “Avery.” Peyton’s voice was once again firm, commanding almost. “Hannah needs a hospital. She’s lost too much blood.”

  Avery glanced back at her.

  Desmond sensed another Peyton-Avery argument coming on. Hoping to avoid it, he asked Avery where they were.

  “Off the coast of Kenya, near the border with Tanzania.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Call for help,” she said simply. Desmond sensed that she didn’t want to elaborate—perhaps because her most recent plans had been so thoroughly questioned and amended by her passengers.

  “Where’re we headed?” Peyton asked.

  “Mombasa.”

  Peyton squinted. “There’s no American embassy in Mombasa. Or even a consulate. It was in my CDC briefing. In fact, no Western nations have embassies or consulates in the city. It’s too dangerous; they all pulled out years ago.”

  A pause, then Avery said, “At the bus depot, there’s a locker with a field kit in it.”

  “How does that help us?” Desmond asked.

  “There’s a satphone inside. I’ll call my handler. He’ll arrange exfil.”

  Her handler? Desmond thought.

  On Peyton’s face, he saw scrutiny. She didn’t trust the other woman.

  “You didn’t bring a satphone with you?” Peyton asked.

  “I couldn’t get my hands on one,” Avery said. “We were under a comm blackout on the ship.” She motioned to Desmond. “You saw the high security around even using a cell phone—they were under lock and key. Plus, they could have tracked any satphone I took off the ship.”

  “So assuming we get to the locker and make contact, how do we get out of Mombasa?” Desmond asked.

  “There’s a Kenyan naval base and a large airport.”

  “There are also several good hospitals,” Peyton said. “The Aga Khan Hospital would be my first choice.”

  Avery shook her head. “Look, I disabled the Kentaro Maru’s other helo, but Conner McClain is very smart, and he knows we have an injured person on board. By now, he’ll have hired every crooked cop, mercenary, and bounty hunter in Mombasa, and every other coastal town, to try to find us. And the first places they’ll stake out will be the hospitals and airports.”

  Peyton was about to launch her rebuttal when smoke on the horizon caught their attention.

  Mombasa was burning.

  Chapter 63

  The smoke cloud over Mombasa was so thick, they couldn’t see the city. But after a few minutes of debate, Desmond, Peyton, and Avery agreed that it was still their best hope of reaching help and getting out of Kenya.

  Desmond sat back against the helicopter’s rear wall and closed his eyes. The sight of the city on the coast reminded him of another place, what seemed like another life to him. And somehow, it also reminded him of Peyton, though the memory of her was just a feeling. He sensed that seeing her—touching her on the helicopter and during the escape—had been a sort of key to unlocking another memory.

  The night Desmond disposed of Dale Epply’s body outside Slaughterville, Oklahoma, he thought hard about where he would go. He considered three places: Seattle, New York, and Silicon Valley. Thanks to countless IRC chat sessions, he had met people like himself from around the country and the world, but they were mostly concentrated in Silicon Valley, in cities like Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. He couldn’t wait to get there and start over.

  He drove all day and camped every night. He obeyed the speed limit and avoided hotels—he didn’t want to leave a paper trail in case anyone from Oklahoma came looking for him. Thanks to the bounty he’d found in Orville’s safe, money wasn’t a problem.

  It was morning when he drove past Fremont and Newark, onto the Dumbarton Bridge and over the San Francisco Bay, arriving in East Palo Alto.

  He found a small RV park off Bayshore Freeway, where he asked around to see if there was anything for sale. A few hours later, he was haggling over a well-used Airstream trailer with a bearded old man who was chewing tobacco and listening to talk radio. The man claimed he was in poor health and was headed, in his words, to the glue factory pretty soon.

  “You’d rob a man on his deathbed?”

  When Desmond finally got the price down to the high side of fair, he placed the hundred-dollar bills into the man’s hand—slowly, one at a time, at the man’s request, so he could count them out loud. The old man wished him luck and told him to take good care of the trailer. Then he walked across the street and moved in with another resident—a woman who Desmond later learned the old man was romantically involved with.

  Desmond hitched the Airstream trailer to his truck and towed it to the tiny site he had rented. Then he shaved, cleaned himself up, and stocked up at a local grocery store.

  As soon as his computer was set up on the trailer’s dining table, he connected to the internet and began chatting. Luckily the RV park offered telephone service as part of its base services, and there were a number of local AOL dial-in numbers available. Within the hour, he had three job interviews at promising web startups.

  The next morning, he worried a bit about his appearance. He was about to turn nineteen and had worked outdoors most of his life. The wind and sun on his face had aged him some, but not enough: he still looked like a teenager. He was also built like an NFL linebacker, not a computer hacker. He expected to look totally out of place, and to possibly get rejected on sight.

  To compensate, he bought a dark suit, a white button-up dress shirt, and a tie. The clerk at Macy’s tied it for him. He even bought a pair of dress shoes, which felt weird to him after a life spent in steel-toed boots. Shaved, showered, shampooed, and dressed in the crisp suit, he thought he looked like a roughneck dressed up for prom. He was still nervous.

  He was also worried about his programming skills. He had been playing with all sorts of scripting languages on his free GeoCities page and
a few other web hosts, but he wasn’t completely sure what languages the startups would use.

  His concerns about his appearance vanished at the first interview. They barely looked at him. Everyone was wearing T-shirts and Teva sandals.

  In a cramped conference room, the company’s CTO, Neil Ellison, slapped down a few sheets of paper with a programming problem on it. It was in PERL, a language he knew.

  “If you don’t know PERL, you can leave now.”

  Desmond picked up the pencil and began scribbling.

  “Find me when you’re done.”

  Desmond didn’t look up. Fifteen minutes later, he approached Ellison.

  “Problem?”

  “I’m finished.”

  The man glanced at the page, started to discard it, then saw something that made him study it closer.

  Another programmer peeked over his shoulder. “It’s wrong,” he said dismissively.

  “No,” Ellison said. “It’s a better solution than ours.”

  Ellison looked up.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  The next two interviews proceeded in a similar manner. Only the programming languages changed. Desmond solved problems in PHP, Javascript, and Python. At the end of the day, he had three job offers in writing. His first choice was an offer from a promising startup called xTV, but he needed help: he didn’t understand half of what was in the contract.

  He asked around about a good lawyer, and later that day, he was sitting in the office of Wallace Sinclair, Attorney at Law. The office was nice, which made Desmond worry about the man’s rates.

  The biggest disappointment with all the job offers was that he wouldn’t automatically get stock in the company when he signed on. Instead, the companies had something called a vesting schedule: he would get the stock over time, as he stayed with the startup. And it wasn’t even stock outright; he was granted options, which were contracts to purchase the stock at a set price.

  “How does that do me any good?” Desmond asked.

  “If the stock goes up, it does you a great deal of good,” Wallace said. “Think about it. If you have an option to purchase the stock at one dollar and the stock is trading for fifteen dollars, your option is worth fourteen dollars per share.”

  Desmond understood that.

  “Best of all, you don’t have to pay tax on options when they’re granted, assuming the strike price is near the stock value. They’re worthless until the stock goes up and you exercise them.”

  There was more to the contract: a non-disclosure and a non-compete. Wallace walked him through it all.

  “Sometimes we see clawback provisions or a buy-sell agreement,” he said. “You don’t have that here. This contract looks pretty good. I’d sign it.”

  Desmond thanked the man, and asked him to send him a bill. He wrote out his address at the RV park.

  Wallace studied the address and said, “Forget it, Desmond. Just keep me in mind if you start a company or have more substantial legal work.”

  Desmond liked that. It meant the lawyer recognized his potential, was willing to bet that Desmond would one day be a bigger fish.

  He called xTV back that night and said he could start the next day if they provided more stock and a lower salary. He wanted just enough to live on. They agreed.

  Desmond found startup life to his liking. It was strangely similar to working on the rigs: long hours, deadlines, stressed-out people keyed up on coffee and energy drinks, and wild parties at regular intervals. But where his and Orville’s release had taken place in honky-tonk bars, strip clubs, and casinos, the startup parties were thrown at swanky restaurants and hotel ballrooms. Desmond couldn’t imagine the cost. It was perhaps the only thing that worried him about the company.

  He wasn’t the only one concerned. The guys in finance were constantly obsessing about their burn rate—the amount of money the company spent every month. The CEO, however, seemed completely unconcerned.

  At a hotel ballroom on a Friday night, their visionary founder stood before his employees and guests and announced that xTV had just registered its one millionth user.

  Cheers went up.

  He paced the stage, microphone in hand.

  “We’re democratizing TV. With the video cameras we provide, our users can capture what viewers really want to see: real life. And they can upload that footage directly to the xTV website, where they earn money from it.”

  The screen behind him began playing a montage of clips, all muted.

  “We’ve got a farmer in South Dakota giving people a look at what that harsh life is like. A teen mom in Atlanta struggling to make ends meet. An artist in Brooklyn selling his paintings in the subway and coffee shops. A singer in Seattle. A fishing competition in Alabama. A drag strip in North Carolina. A firefighter in Chicago.

  “This is real life. These are the stories we crave.

  “As faster internet speeds become available, more viewers will flock to xTV and our groundbreaking content. Mark my words: one day, cable will be gone. So will satellite. You’ll walk into Circuit City and you’ll buy a TV that’s internet-ready. And you’ll be browsing xTV every night to see what’s on.

  “In a few years, we’ll be bigger than Viacom and TimeWarner combined. We are the future of TV. We enable real people to tell their stories. That is our mission.”

  Desmond believed every word he said. They all did. Cheers went up again. The champagne flowed, and everyone seemed to be drunk except Desmond.

  A few months later, Desmond was invited to a Halloween party one of the programmers was throwing. He was tempted not to go, but the truth was he wanted to do something besides work and sleep for a change. He’d been told that there would be some people from work there, but that it would mostly be college students and recent graduates, like the host.

  He considered two options. One, not dressing up; and two, going all out. Both had risks. He took the middle road. He donned the black suit he’d purchased for the job interview and only worn once, and bought a five-dollar dark-haired wig. At OfficeMax, he purchased a plastic ID badge holder with a metal clip. On a sheet of printer paper, he wrote “FBI,” and below it, “FOX MULDER, SPECIAL AGENT.” It looked pretty homemade, but it would get the job done.

  The party was at a three-bedroom ’70s ranch home in Palo Alto that four programmers rented. The owners hadn’t done a ton of updates, and the place still had a Brady Bunch vibe: thick, worn carpet—which was orange—modern architecture, an open plan layout with a vaulted ceiling, and large windows and sliding doors that led out to a pool that hadn’t been cleaned since Marcia’s graduation party.

  Desmond was glad he had dressed up. Everyone was decked out. The partygoers hadn’t spent a fortune on their ensembles, but it was clear that they had put a lot of time and effort into them. Star Wars and Star Trek characters were well represented. Three sets of Princess Leia buns bobbed around the room. Two Darth Vaders stalked around, looming over small groups silently, their shiny outfits made mostly of black plastic trash bags. There were half a dozen Luke Skywalkers. Data and Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation scored three outfits each. A lone Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge was drinking a Michelob Light. His visor was a modified hairband, and he was telling a girl that she might as well take her top off, he could see through her clothes with his visor anyway. When he brought the bottle to his lips, she tipped it up and walked away, mumbling, “Bet you didn’t see that coming.”

  At the island in the kitchen, a pale white kid wearing a bald cap and a red Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform stood by the blender, overseeing the contents being poured in. When the top went on the device, he pointed and said, “Engage.” He tugged at the bottom of his tunic, turned, and nearly shouted, “You have the bridge, Number One.”

  It wasn’t clear whom he was talking to.

  One of the Darth Vaders called for a girl dressed as Marge Simpson to grab him a beer.

  “I thought you were driving?” she said.

 
He grew still and made his voice deeper. “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

  Several drinking games were going on. Loud music played (Green Day at the moment). Lines for both the home’s bathrooms spilled down one hall.

  Desmond was rather relieved to see no other Agent Fox Mulders, though there was one Scully. Her outfit was pretty good: a black pantsuit and a white button-up shirt with the collar laid over the lapels of the jacket. She’d printed her ID on a computer; it even had her own picture on it next to the large blue FBI letters. The red wig was the right color. She was about five foot six, slender, with dark brown eyebrows and fair skin. Her eyes were a little large for her face; Desmond found that attractive.

  She was standing with a group of five people, holding a red Solo cup she wasn’t paying much attention to, when one of the Luke Skywalkers approached her. A Darth Vader was his wingman.

  The guy’s voice was nasal, rehearsed.

  “Excuse me, am I to understand that you’re a female body inspector?”

  Scully smiled but didn’t laugh.

  “Nice try. Come back when you’ve got better material, Padawan.”

  Skywalker glanced at Vader. “The Force is strong with this one.”

  That did make Desmond laugh. Poor guy.

  The two faded back into the crowd, leaving Scully staring directly at Desmond.

  He had spent countless hours in bars, witnessed maybe ten thousand guys hit on girls. In that time, he had learned two things. One, if you see a girl you’re interested in, don’t hesitate. The moment you make eye contact, just go over there. Waiting hurts the cause. And two, pickup lines are useless. A woman is either interested or not; they pretty much know instantly. They don’t pick a guy based on the pickup line. Confidence is the universal attractor, and nothing says confidence like not having a pickup line.

  He never broke eye contact as he walked over.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Fox Mulder.”

  She extended her hand. It felt absolutely tiny in his.