Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  Desmond and Peyton found the keys to an old Citroen SUV in the airport’s office, and pulled out onto a paved two-lane road that wound through the green, rolling landscape. The GPS location was about forty miles from the airport, in an area of wooded hills. The fog hung heavy on the road; the headlights barely cut through it. The aurora loomed above, its green glow like a homing beacon. Peyton studied the aurora’s curving lines; they were like the plasma contrails of a spaceship in a sci-fi movie.

  As Desmond drove, he told Peyton what he had remembered. For a very long time, Peyton had wanted to know what had happened after he left her on the doorstep of their little bungalow in Palo Alto. She had thought about him for countless hours since that day. Hearing the full story was nearly surreal to her, a blank page of their life together now filled in.

  Desmond’s memories ended with Yuri Pachenko walking into his office in Menlo Park. The description of the man was vaguely familiar to Peyton. So was the name. But she couldn’t place either one.

  “Do you know where they’re keeping the cure?” she asked.

  “No.” He glanced over at her. “Did you ever get married?”

  Peyton shook her head.

  “Because of me.”

  “Because of life, Desmond. It’s not your fault. And it’s in the past, okay?”

  “Not for me.”

  They rode in silence a moment.

  Peyton spoke first. “Do you remember Avery?”

  “No.”

  “I still don’t trust her.”

  “Same here. But she’s given us no reason not to yet.”

  Peyton changed the subject. “How do you feel?”

  “Like my head’s going to split open.” He studied her. “What about you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Be honest. You’re getting worse, aren’t you?”

  “Getting sick’s an occupational hazard. I accepted the risks when I went to work at the CDC.”

  “Well, I don’t accept it.”

  Peyton stared out the windshield.

  “You’re not going to die like this, Peyton.”

  She massaged her aching neck; the turbulent landing had done more damage than she’d realized. “I’m usually the one telling sick people I’m going to fix them.”

  “Well, I think you deserve a week off.”

  They drove in silence after that. Peyton didn’t see a single building outside—no homes, no businesses. Except for the paved road that carved through the hills, this place was untouched by civilization.

  “We’re coming up on it,” she said as she studied the Labyrinth Reality app. “A hundred yards to destination.”

  Desmond slowed the car. “Direction?”

  “Roughly ten o’clock.”

  The road curved to the right. There was no driveway or path leading in the coordinates’ direction. Desmond pulled the car off the road and parked.

  “Stay here.”

  “No way.”

  “Peyton—”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “All right,” he said, resigned. It was the reaction of someone who had been married twenty years and knew when an argument was futile.

  Outside the car, they crept into the forest. The ground rose with every step; the road sat in a valley. Ancient evergreen trees surrounded them. Between their canopy and the fog, the light of the moon and the aurora faded away. Peyton could see less than twenty feet ahead of them.

  She touched Desmond’s shoulder, then pointed at the flashlight she held, silently asking him if she should switch it on.

  He shook his head no. His rifle was slung over his shoulder, a handgun in one hand. With his other hand, he reached back, took Peyton’s hand, and led her through the dark forest.

  It was utterly quiet. She heard no animals stirring, no birds calling. When she stepped on a branch and snapped it, the sound seemed deafening. Desmond froze.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  He waited for any reaction, any sound. But the forest remained still and quiet.

  “Distance?”

  Peyton activated the phone. “Thirty yards. Dead ahead.”

  Desmond crept forward, the gun held out now.

  Peyton held her breath as they walked the last ten yards. The fog seemed to close in on all sides.

  The phone beeped. A message popped up:

  Labyrinth Entrance Reached

  Desmond took the flashlight from her hand, turned it on, and panned around the area, cutting through the fog. Suddenly he stopped.

  Peyton saw it too. Her first thought was: it’s going to explode.

  Chapter 76

  Desmond crept toward the small metal box that lay on the ground. “Stay back,” he whispered. “Could be booby trapped.”

  She retreated behind a tree ten yards away and watched him draw his fixed-blade combat knife. With the serrated edge, he sawed a limb off a nearby tree, cut the branches off, and used it to flip the box open.

  To Peyton’s relief, nothing happened.

  Still cautious, Desmond stepped forward. He bent down, drew a small scrap of paper from the box, and exhaled.

  “It’s a new set of GPS coordinates,” he said.

  “Where?” Peyton asked.

  He took the phone out and typed on it. “Still in Shetland. Maybe twenty or thirty miles from here, I think. We can drive.”

  An alert popped up on the phone’s screen. It was a message from the Labyrinth Reality app:

  1 Entrance Located.

  She showed the message to Desmond.

  He paused. “It’s the same message as before, when I opened the app in Dadaab.”

  He took the phone and clicked the message. A map appeared. The location was in Australia, in the southern half, near the coast. It was rural, and as Desmond zoomed in, Peyton saw a dark spot in a green and brown landscape. He zoomed to the maximum, and Peyton’s mouth went dry. Desmond was silent. They had gone there together, fifteen years ago—to Desmond’s childhood home. The burned remains were more overgrown now, but the charred foundation of the old ranch house still rose above the weeds. There was no indication anything had changed, but Peyton didn’t know how old the satellite images were. Someone or something could be there now. Or could have been hidden there, just like at this location.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He glanced at the phone, then at the scrap of paper with the nearby GPS coordinates. “I say we check out the coordinates here, then we can decide on going to Australia.”

  “Should we call Avery?” Peyton asked.

  “No. Not until we know what’s going on.”

  A tree-mounted, motion-activated wireless camera came to life when Desmond entered the scene. The individual who had been monitoring the feed woke and watched anxiously. It wouldn’t be long now.

  Desmond and Peyton drove through the night. The fog was still heavy, but Peyton thought it was starting to lift. A constant breeze buffeted the car, as if they were driving through a giant wind tunnel. The road curved left and right as they went deeper into the mountains of Shetland.

  At five hundred yards from the destination, a dirt road split off from the paved road. Desmond leaned over and saw on the phone that it led to the coordinates. He reached into his backpack and pulled the night vision goggles out. He cut the car’s headlights as he pulled the goggles on and started down the dirt road.

  Three hundred yards later, he killed the engine.

  “We’ll hike in.”

  They walked along the tree line of the dirt road, which weaved through the forest seemingly arbitrarily. It ended in a clearing with a small cottage. There was no sign of life: no lights glowing through the windows, no smoke rising from the chimney. The rubble stone exterior was shades of gray and blue and purple; moss grew on the wooden roof. The place looked ancient, as if it had been built in the Middle Ages and abandoned.

  In the dim light, Desmond gave Peyton a look that said, Stay here.

  He didn’t wait for her to respond, mer
ely handed her the key to the car and ran toward the cottage, rifle held at the ready.

  Peyton held her breath as he went around the right side of the house. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty. Lights came on, the front door opened, and Desmond walked out onto the porch. He waved her toward the house.

  When she reached the steps, he said, “You’ve gotta see this.”

  She stepped inside—and stared.

  Cork covered the walls, and pictures, articles, and scribbled notes were tacked everywhere. Peyton recognized some of the names: Rapture Therapeutics, Phaethon Genetics, Rook Quantum Sciences, Rendition Games. There were pictures of Desmond and Conner. She scanned the scribbled notes:

  Invisible Sun — person, organization, or project?

  What requires that much energy?

  Third world used as a testing ground?

  Some of the newspaper clippings went back as far as the eighties.

  Whoever had lived here was obviously investigating the Citium. Had been for a long time. And they had only recently left. In the kitchen, dishes with food particles lay in the sink. On the kitchen island, a laptop sat closed.

  “The place has power,” Desmond said, turning on a small space heater. Peyton was glad for the warmth. “There’s a solar array behind the house and likely on the back side of the roof. It’s completely off-grid though.”

  Three filing cabinets lined one wall. Peyton was about to open the first when Desmond called out, “Over here.”

  He stood in the living room, tapping his foot on a floorboard. “You hear that?”

  Peyton shook her head. What’s he doing?

  He grabbed a fire poker that hung beside the stone hearth, jammed it into the floor, and pried the board loose. A safe lay underneath, with a dial lock. Desmond worked faster, ripping the adjacent boards free until it was completely uncovered. He gripped the dial and began spinning it.

  Peyton crouched beside him. “You know the combination?”

  “Maybe,” he mumbled.

  He tried the handle, but it didn’t budge.

  “What did you try?”

  “The combination to Orville’s safe.”

  Peyton instantly realized his theory: He thinks he created all this—that it’s his research.

  He glanced at her. “Ideas?”

  When they had found the box in the woods, Peyton had wondered why someone would have hidden GPS coordinates there—why they were given two locations instead of just being directed straight here to the cottage. “The first location. It has to serve a purpose.”

  Desmond nodded. “Yes. Maybe it was to ensure the right people found this place—and that they had the key to finding whatever’s hidden here.”

  He spun the dial again, using the GPS coordinates of the first location. The handle clicked this time, and he pulled the metal door open. A stack of pages lay inside.

  The top sheet had a single line of text, handwritten, in large block letters.

  How the Citium Lost Its Way

  Desmond flipped the page over, revealing a handwritten note below. He and Peyton read it together.

  If you’re reading this, the worst has occurred. The world will soon change. The enemy we face is more capable than any government or army the world has ever seen.

  I believe, however, that they can be stopped. To do so, you must understand their origins, their history, and their true intentions. The pages included here reveal those things. It is the greatest and perhaps only weapon I can offer you.

  First, you should know that the Order of Citium began with good intentions. They were a noble organization. A group of faith. They had rituals and beliefs, though they recognized no deities. They worshiped at the altar of science, and in science they believed they would find answers to our deepest questions—including one in particular that they called the great question: Why do we exist?

  They went to great lengths to pursue that answer. But they lost their way. In a desert in New Mexico, on a July morning in 1945, an event occurred that changed the Citium forever. I know of that transformation because my father witnessed it; I have enclosed his story, which I have rewritten based on what he told me. The remainder of the pages contain my own story. I hope it will lead you to the key to stopping the Citium. Hurry.

  - William

  “William,” Peyton said. “There’s no last name. Do you remember him?”

  “No.” Desmond studied the pages under the letter, scanning them. “But I take it he was one of my allies. Maybe an informant.”

  “Makes sense. What do you want to do? Should we call Avery?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, read this, then search the rest of the house.”

  Peyton agreed, and they sat down on the worn couch in the living room. It was in the low forties outside, and it felt even colder inside. The small heater wasn’t enough. She glanced at the fireplace, but decided the smoke it would generate would be too much of a risk. She opted instead to drape the thick quilt from the couch over her, and she slid closer to Desmond and spread it across him as well. The warmth of their body heat slowly filled the small space under the quilt.

  He studied her face. She knew what he was thinking: this was just like Palo Alto, that small house they had shared fifteen years ago. She felt it too, them slipping back into that place they had been in together. But there was too much going on for her to even think about that. She lifted the pages and began to read.

  Chapter 77

  My father’s name was Robert Moore. He was a scientist at perhaps the most important time and place for scientists—a moment when science ended a war. And changed the world.

  On that day, in July 1945, he slept only one hour, dressed in his best suit, and drove through the desert to the test site. At the gate, security made him step out of his car, which they searched extensively.

  The mood across the base was tense. Inside the control station, the project director was bordering on a breakdown. Several times, General Leslie Groves had to guide the man outside, where they walked in the darkness, through the rain, talking, the general assuring him all would go as planned.

  Shortly before five thirty a.m., the countdown began. The seconds were the longest of Robert’s life.

  The team had nicknamed the device the Gadget. It was the product of half a decade of work by some of the greatest scientific minds ever assembled. That morning, the Gadget sat atop a one-hundred-foot-tall steel tower. Desert stretched in every direction. The control station where the scientists waited was nearly six miles away. Even at that distance, Robert donned welder’s goggles and focused through the tinted glass. He saw only darkness in the seconds before the countdown reached zero.

  The flash of white light came first. It lasted for a few seconds, then a wave of heat passed through him, soaking his face and hands. When the wall of light faded, he could make out a column of fire rising from the site, expanding quickly.

  The cloud broke through a temperature inversion at seventeen thousand feet—which most scientists had thought impossible. For minutes after the explosion, the cloud rose into the sky, reaching the substratosphere at over thirty-five thousand feet.

  Forty seconds after the detonation, the shock wave reached the scientists in the control station. The sound of the blast followed shortly after. It had the quality of distant thunder, reverberating off the nearby hills for several seconds, giving the impression of a rolling thunderstorm. The sound was heard up to a hundred miles away; the light from the explosion was seen from almost twice as far.

  The blast instantly vaporized the steel tower that held the bomb, leaving a crater nearly half a mile wide in its place. An iron pipe set in concrete, four inches in diameter, sixteen feet tall, and fifteen hundred feet away from the detonation, was also vaporized. In the control station, there was silence. In place of the worry that had led up to the event, every person who had seen it now felt awe. And uncertainty.

  As if coming out of a trance, the team members looked around, unsure what
to do. Some shook hands, congratulating each other. A few people laughed. Several cried. All believed that in the New Mexico desert that morning, the world had changed forever.

  The first atomic bomb had been detonated. They hoped it would be the last.

  Back at Los Alamos, a team member raised a glass. “To the dawn of the Atomic Age.”

  Many had feared the test would be a dud. The feeling most of them now felt was relief; for a few it was fear.

  Robert spoke for the first time since the Trinity test. “Yes, a new age indeed. We have given the human race something it has never possessed before: the means with which to destroy itself.”

  When no one responded, he added, “How long will it be before a madman acquires our device and uses it? Five years? Ten? A hundred? I wonder which will be the last generation of humans? Our children, perhaps our grandchildren?”

  When the group broke, Robert’s supervisor followed him back to his office and closed the door behind him. Robert had come to respect and trust the older man, and so the words he said gave him great pause.

  “Did you mean what you said?”

  “Every word. We’ve opened Pandora’s box.”

  His supervisor studied him a moment. “Be careful what you say, Robert. Some people here aren’t what they seem.”

  Less than a month later, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki.

  Death toll estimates ranged from 129,000 to 246,000.

  The depression Robert had fought his entire life finally overwhelmed him. When he stopped coming to work, his supervisor visited him at his home.

  “Did you know?” Robert asked.

  “Not the specifics. Only that the bombs would be used to end the war.”

  “We killed those people.”

  “The war would have dragged on for years.”