Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  “Dana Scully.” Her face was stoic; Desmond thought it was a pretty good imitation of the character. She was definitely game for the role-playing.

  “I know why you’re here.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’ve been sent to debunk my work.”

  “What can I say, Mulder? I’m a woman of science.”

  “So you don’t want to believe?”

  “With science, what I want is irrelevant. Proof of a hypothesis is all that matters.”

  She tucked a strand of red hair behind her ear. He could see her dark brown hair under the wig.

  “What’s your current case?” she asked.

  He sighed theatrically. “Tough one. There’ve been reports of an aberrant human in the Palo Alto area.”

  “Aberrant?”

  “An anomaly, Scully. A woman who doesn’t conform to any of the known norms of the human species. Paranormal intelligence and attractiveness. Extreme wittiness. We could be looking at genetic engineering. Possible extraterrestrial involvement.”

  She finally broke character, smiled and laughed quickly, then returned to a straight face. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  “I’ve recently confirmed the evidence.”

  One of her friends, who was dressed like Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction, grabbed her by the arm. “Hey, there you are. Let’s go.” The girl was very drunk.

  “Yeah, just a minute,” Scully said quickly.

  “No, come on! Paul and Ross have already left. Come on.” She was dragging her now.

  Scully turned. “Sorry. Duty calls.” A coy smile spread across her lips. “Good luck with your case.”

  She glanced back at him one last time before her friend dragged her out the front door.

  In the kitchen, Desmond waited for the blender to stop mixing up a fresh pitcher of margaritas, then asked the host, “Who was the girl dressed as Scully?”

  He concentrated on his pour. “Scully? That’s… Oh yeah. Peyton Shaw.”

  Desmond opened his eyes and stared at Peyton, who was still holding Hannah’s head in her lap.

  A smile spread across his face. “Hi, Scully.”

  Peyton’s eyes instantly locked on to his. To Desmond’s surprise, he saw shock, then what he thought was fear. A sad, remorseful smile crossed her lips.

  “What?”

  “How much do you remember?” she asked.

  “We met in Palo Alto. At a Halloween party.”

  She nodded slowly but said nothing.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  She shook her head.

  “Hey,” he said. “What happened between us?”

  Before she could answer, Avery shouted from the pilot’s seat. “Look alive back there. And put your headsets on.”

  Desmond’s eyes grew wide when he saw the scene beyond the helicopter’s windshield.

  Chapter 64

  Avery pulled back on the helicopter’s stick, flying above the smoke that spread out beyond Mombasa. A minute later Peyton got their first glimpse of the carnage.

  Mombasa was Kenya’s second largest city and the largest port in East Africa. At the center of the sprawling metropolis lay Mombasa Island, which was connected by causeways to three peninsulas from the Kenyan mainland. Right now those causeways were packed with cars and people trying to escape the island. From above, they looked like ants marching over a bridge, fleeing the chaos.

  The Changamwe Oil Refinery, which lay at the back of the island, just before one of the bridges to the mainland, was ablaze, belching smoke into the air. Its tanks and pipes would give the fire an almost endless source of fuel.

  The fires were not the only problem. A dozen large cargo ships lay scuttled at the mouth of the bay, their rectangular metal cargo containers spilled into the water, the mountain of steel forming an impassable barrier.

  “They’ve sealed the port,” Avery called over the headsets. “Could have been the Kenyans as an act of containment.”

  “Or another nation,” Desmond said. “To protect themselves.” He peered out the window, his eyes narrowing. “They bombed the airport’s runway too.”

  Peyton stared in awe at the city. From their vantage point, she could see one of the hospitals. A crowd was massed outside, hundreds of people trying to get in. Bodies lay in the streets, dying, trampled.

  Mombasa was her worst nightmare: an uncontrolled outbreak in a major city, millions of people at the mercy of a pathogen with no cure and no treatment, all of them left to suffer and die. Peyton had dedicated her life to ensuring this very scene never became a reality. She had flown to Kenya to stop this. Yet now it was happening. She had failed. They—Conner McClain—had beaten her.

  If this was happening in Mombasa, she wondered what Nairobi was like. What America was like.

  In that moment, she set aside her fears about her own safety—and Hannah’s.

  She needed a place to start, needed to know how long she’d been in captivity, how long the virus had been loose.

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  “Monday,” Avery replied.

  That came as a shock. Peyton had flown to Nairobi the previous Sunday, a full week ago.

  “What’s the status of the outbreak in Kenya?” she asked urgently.

  “I don’t know,” Avery said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Peyton didn’t even try to hide her skepticism.

  “Again, we were under a comms blackout. Any information about the outbreak was tightly guarded. People on that ship have families too. I’ve only heard rumors.”

  “Such as?” Peyton was almost certain she was lying—or at best, keeping information from them.

  “Such as, there are two hundred thousand dead in Kenya from the Mandera strain. Another half a million around the world have died from the precursor flu virus.”

  Precursor. So what McClain had told her was true: the flu strain that Elliott had been tracking was the precursor for the Mandera virus; it mutated into the deadly hemorrhagic fever that had killed the two Americans, including Lucas Turner. Some part of her had hoped McClain was bluffing, posturing, to scare her. She almost didn’t want to know the answer to her next question.

  “How many are infected?”

  Avery was hesitant. “Hard to say. I’ve heard three billion. Maybe more.”

  Peyton’s head swam. She swallowed. For a long moment she thought she might throw up, or even pass out. Three billion people infected. It was an unimaginable catastrophe. If what happened in Mandera occurred around the world, human civilization wouldn’t recover for decades, possibly centuries. In fact, she had no idea what the world would look like after that. At the rate the virus was spreading, she wondered: Would there be only a few million survivors? A few thousand?

  But Conner McClain had created a cure. Was he going to give it to his chosen few? Peyton had to find that cure, for her own sake, and the sake of so many others.

  “McClain has a cure. He told me on the ship.”

  “It’s true,” Avery said. “They informed everyone on board that it had been administered recently in our routine vaccinations. All employees at Citium companies received it.” She glanced back at Desmond. “Including you.”

  He only nodded and glanced out the window, staring at the horrific scene, a hint of guilt on his face.

  Avery moved the helicopter inland, away from the city. It was obvious that landing in Mombasa would likely be a death sentence. The helicopter would be mobbed, rushed by people hoping to get out or hoping for help to arrive. And once on the ground, they would find no way out of the city, and no help for Hannah within.

  Avery reached under the seat, unfolded a map, and studied it.

  “What’re you doing?” Peyton asked.

  Avery didn’t look up. “Trying to figure out where to go, Princess.”

  “Don’t call me Princess—”

  Desmond held a hand up to Peyton. “Ladies. We’re all on the same team here. Let’s talk.
What’re you thinking, Avery?”

  “I’m thinking we’re screwed.”

  “Okay, so nothing new there. What do we need? A satphone and a plane, correct?”

  “And a hospital,” Peyton said quickly. She glanced at Hannah, asleep, helpless, taking shallow breaths as she lay in the floor of the helicopter. I won’t let her die.

  Desmond spoke before Avery could.

  “Right. So, what, we fly along the coast, try to find a city still intact?”

  “Dani Beach is close by,” Peyton said. “They’ve got a great hospital and an airstrip. Lots of other coastal towns along the way. Once we cross the border with Tanzania there’s Tanga and Dar es Salaam farther south. Plus the Tanzanian islands off the coast.”

  “They’ll shoot us,” Avery said flatly.

  “Who?” Peyton asked.

  “The Tanzanians. Think about it—you’ve got a raging outbreak to the north. Step one is to close your airspace, shoot anything flying in from Kenya. And the Kenyan coastal towns are no good either. They’re probably in the same shape as Mombasa, and I’m sure Conner is enlisting search parties there too. The American government has no presence or assets in Dani Beach that I’m aware of. There’s a CIA station in Dar es Salaam, and an embassy for that matter, but we’ll never reach them.”

  “So we go inland,” Desmond said. “Nairobi?”

  “Suicide,” Avery said. “If Mombasa looks like this, imagine Nairobi. And Conner will assume that’s our only move. I think…”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re trapped.”

  “We’re not,” Peyton said. She had an idea. It was a gamble, but it just might pay off.

  Desmond studied her.

  “I know where we can go,” she said. “It’s inland, in Kenya. It has an airstrip, satphones, and a hospital. My guess is the outbreak is contained at this location. And McClain will never think to look for us there.”

  After Peyton told them her plan, Avery studied the map.

  “It’s at the helo’s max range. Fifty-fifty odds we have enough fuel to get there. If it’s a bust, we’re stranded for sure.”

  “Flight time?” Desmond asked.

  “It’s about three hundred and fifty miles away. Two hours, roughly.”

  Peyton looked down at Hannah. She didn’t know if the young woman had two hours, but she felt like her plan was their only hope.

  Chapter 65

  Desmond sat against the back wall of the helicopter, side by side with Peyton. They glanced at each other for a moment, then stared forward, riding in silence. Out the window, the last rays of sunlight were receding behind the mountains in the distance.

  The helicopter rotor’s rhythmic drone was almost hypnotic, and before long, Desmond felt Peyton’s head fall on his shoulder. The woman was worn out. He tried not to move; he wanted her to get some rest.

  For him, sleep was elusive. Questions ran through his mind. What he had learned on the Kentaro Maru had shocked him. If what Conner had said was true, he was partially responsible for starting the outbreak. He wondered if somewhere buried in his memories was the key to stopping it. Or if it was buried in the Labyrinth Reality app he had found in Berlin. Or both. He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to remember his past.

  The morning after the Halloween party, Desmond stopped by xTV’s accounting department. His investigative work had revealed that Peyton was a sophomore at Stanford, and that Andrea, an xTV intern who had graduated from Stanford in June, was a friend of hers.

  Desmond found Andrea in her cubicle, staring at her computer screen, twirling a strand of sandy brown hair around her index finger.

  “Hey, you know Peyton Shaw, right?”

  “Uh-huh.” She seemed to be tabulating figures on the screen. Finally, she turned. “What’s up?”

  He shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant. “Nothing. Just thinking it would be cool if you invited her to the company party on Thursday.”

  Andrea smiled. “Really? You do? You think it would be ‘cool’?”

  Desmond sighed. “Andie—”

  Her tone was taunting now. “Somebody’s got a crush.”

  “Oh, please. What grade are you in?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, lover boy.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “For a price.”

  Desmond stood there, dreading her next words.

  She handed him some papers. “These are the time sheets for hourly employees and contractors. I have to type these in every week and verify them. I want a web form where they enter their hours and it automatically downloads to our payroll system.”

  Desmond opened his mouth to respond, but Andrea had more.

  “And, I want error checking and validation. No non-numeric characters, verification on values outside expected ranges, the whole nine. And it better work in Netscape and IE.”

  “Is that all? Automate your entire internship?”

  “It’s a wicked world, Des. Even love has a price.” She eyed him dramatically. “And it don’t come cheap.”

  “You’re a lunatic.”

  “Email me the link for testing.”

  He finished the web form before lunch.

  The xTV party was a celebration of a new round of funding, a new release of their software, and half a dozen milestones they had hit. They were barreling closer to their vision of taking over television forever.

  Desmond found Peyton at a round table with Andrea. Two half-empty champagne glasses sat before them.

  “Ladies,” he said as he reached them. “Can I get you a refill?”

  Andrea looked at him with a sadistic smile only a torturer would wear. “You waiting tables now, Desmond?”

  “What can I say? Stock options don’t buy groceries.”

  Peyton laughed.

  Andrea rolled her eyes and grabbed her champagne glass. “I’m just gonna go smash this champagne glass and eat the sharpest pieces. You kids try not to kill anyone with those puppy love eyes.”

  Desmond sat down as she stalked off to the bar.

  “She’s very subtle,” he said.

  “Very.”

  “I think she may have a lot of pent-up aggression.”

  “Bad breakup last semester. And she sort of hates her internship.” Peyton smiled. “Heard you helped her with that.”

  “Ah, well, all in the line of duty.”

  “Part of your case?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Any new leads?”

  “Working on something now.”

  “Promising?”

  He studied her. “Too early to tell.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  She took another sip of the champagne.

  “You like working at xTV?” she said.

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I like solving problems. Going home every day knowing I made some progress on something. Waking up every morning with a new set of problems to solve.”

  “What’d you do before?”

  “Worked on an oil rig.”

  She smiled, about to laugh, then squinted at him. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting.”

  He figured he might as well be up-front with her; no sense going down this road if it was a dead end. Better to get the deal-breakers out on the table.

  “I didn’t go to college. Just moved out here from Oklahoma.”

  He knew she was a biology major and wanted to become a doctor. Her pedigree was a little more sophisticated than an orphaned oil well driller who had recently killed a man.

  “Why?”

  The question caught him by surprise. “Why what?”

  “What brought you out here?”

  Since he’d been in the Valley, no one had actually asked him that. “The work.” He thought a moment. “The people. I wanted to meet people like me.”

  “You want to meet some more of them?”

  “Yeah. I do.”<
br />
  The coy smile returned to her lips. “Hold out your hand.”

  He extended his hand. She opened her handbag and drew out a pen, then scribbled an address on his palm.

  “What’s this?”

  “Another clue for your case. There’s a house party in Menlo Park Saturday night. With lots of people like you. I think you’d like it.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then so will I.”

  The house party in Menlo Park was quite different from the raging Halloween party where Desmond had met Peyton.

  He was a little nervous walking up to the Mediterranean-style home, but that disappeared when Peyton opened the door and smiled at him. She wore a black dress, diamond earrings, and a light gray cardigan to ward off the chill in the November air.

  She had been right about the partygoers. Desmond found the conversations incredibly interesting. It wasn’t idle chat. No gossip. No talk of what was on TV. They discussed big issues—everything from technology to science to politics to world history. Most of the attendees were Stanford students like Peyton, or recent graduates. About half had the next big idea for a startup that would change the world. Their certainty grew with each beer can opened, every bowl smoked. On the whole, it was an inside look at how founders thought about their startup ideas and shaped their vision. Some of the people there were just dreamers, big talkers; but he thought, maybe, some would actually start a company—and succeed. He just had no idea which ones they were.

  Outside, on the porch, he found Peyton standing alone.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  She turned, a smile forming on her slender face. “Only so much hyperbole I can stand in one night.”

  He let out a laugh.

  “You’re loving it though, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I am.”

  “I knew you would.”

  He studied her a moment.

  “This is what you’re after, isn’t it?” she said. “Starting your own company or being part of a hit startup.”

  “It’s not the only thing I’m after.”

  They stared at each other.

  “What about you, Peyton? What do you want?”

  “Right now, all I want is to get out of here.”