Surya wagged his head from side to side. “I’ll call him, but what do I tell him?”
Vijay did not answer. His eyes glazed over just before his eyes closed.
Jack darted a glance at his vital signs, fearing that the stress might have killed him. But his heart continued to beat, its pace slowing now as Vijay faded into unconsciousness.
“Christ.” Turning to Surya, Jack said, “Come on. We’ve got to get out to this Koratikal place.” As they left the room, he added, “Why did Vijay want you to call your brother? Who is he?”
“He’s a captain in the National Security Guard, the Black Cats.”
“Black Cats?” Jack asked, never having heard of them before.
“They’re our equivalent of your Delta Force, I think. His unit specializes in counter-terrorist operations.”
Jack whistled. “That’s a bit of good luck.” He glanced over at Surya, who had a troubled expression on his face. “Why so glum?”
“My brother hates me.”
* * *
“Naveen. Naveen!” Preethi Reddy hissed like a cobra as she stomped into the hut, the only home her miserable good for nothing husband could provide. Unlike many, who were content to accept their karma, Preethi cursed it every day as she asked the gods why she had been saddled with such a lazy fool.
While it was clear that he had caught some sort of fever, she was sure he was only using it as an excuse to get out of a day’s work, casting them another handful of rupees further into the depths of poverty. She deserved better.
There he was, still asleep. But if he thought he was going to have an undisturbed rest, he was badly mistaken.
“Naveen, stop faking and get to work. Did you hear me? I will not have you set such a poor example for the boys when they come home from that silly school.”
Her mouth snapped shut as she saw his hands. His fingers were deformed, as if they had melted together.
And his chest wasn’t moving. He had stopped breathing.
“Naveen?” She knelt next to him, suddenly terrified. As much of a lazy charlatan as he might be, she did not relish the thought of becoming a widow, living as an outcast to her family and village. “Husband?”
She reached out to touch a large spot on his chest that resembled a vicious bruise. The tips of her fingers slipped into his flesh. Except that it was no longer flesh, but something else.
With a scream of horror, she pulled her hand back. Her scream grew louder as she saw that Naveen’s flesh was still connected to her fingers, stretching out like soft putty between them before it parted.
Then she felt the pain, a fierce burning sensation that began in her fingertips where globs of Naveen still clung to her. Even as she watched, her mouth still open in a shriek of terror, the mottled, bruised tissue of her husband began to quickly cover her fingers, then her hand.
She ran outside, shaking her hand in desperation, trying in vain to cast away the final evil that her husband had visited upon her.
Hearing the screams, the others who lived in the village emerged to see what was the matter. Preethi grabbed a man who came forward to help her, and some of her husband’s flesh stuck to his skin. In a matter of seconds, he, too, began to scream as the fiery pain took hold.
As the village erupted in panic outside the hut, what had once been Naveen Reddy began to move.
* * *
Despite his misgivings, Surya had called his brother as soon as he and Jack had left the ICU. While Jack had stepped away to give him some privacy, he couldn’t help but notice that the conversation had been a heated one. Surya had quietly but passionately argued with his brother for more than five minutes.
With a deep sigh, he hung up and pocketed his phone. “He’s on his way,” Surya told him, as if he had just received a death sentence, “but he won’t be able to get here until this afternoon. He has to take a plane here from Delhi.”
“Are we going to pick him up?”
Surya laughed. It was a bitter sound. “No. The only way my brother would ride in my car would be if he were dead. He’ll be picking us up here.”
“Damn.” Jack followed Surya into one of the waiting rooms and took a seat beside him. He hated the idea of waiting, but there was no sense in just he and Surya going to the village. They had neither weapons, nor authority. Surya’s brother, however, would at least be able to report back to his superiors if the village had been compromised. Assuming the three of them survived the encounter.
But if they were going to do this, they had to do it as a team, and it didn’t sound like Surya and his brother were exactly on the same side.
“So what happened between you two?”
Surya was silent for a moment, staring at the floor. He said, “It’s because of our younger sister, Pravalika. Both Kiran and I loved her very much, but he was closer to her than I was. They were born only a year apart, five years after me. They treated me more like an uncle than a brother.” His lips curled into a wistful smile that rapidly faded. “Eight years ago, I was driving her to visit a friend and I made a mistake. A terrible mistake. There was an accident, and Pravalika was killed.” He looked at Jack, his eyes filled with pain. “My parents eventually found it in their hearts to forgive me, but Kiran never could. Not that I deserve it. And since that day he has hated me with every fiber of his being.”
“God, I’m sorry.” Jack was no stranger to death in its many terrible forms, but that would have been a terrible burden of guilt to bear. “But Surya, if he hates you so much, why did he agree to come?”
“Because I told him that Vijay said he had to.” He looked at Jack with wounded eyes. “He would have never come if I had asked him. But Vijay, even though we are his cousins, he has been more like a favorite uncle to us. To both of us. He helped me get into university and find the job I now hold, and helped convince our father to give his blessing for Kiran to join the Army.” He managed a wan smile. “Vijay was the only one in our family who believed that Kiran could do it, and stood up for him against my parents. That, let me tell you, is no easy thing to do. And he was right. Kiran was born to be a soldier.”
“It’ll be good to have someone like that, but I wish he would’ve brought a company of his Black Cats with him.”
Surya looked him in the eye. “Jack, you still have not explained why you and Vijay want him here. Why have we called in a counter-terrorist expert, rather than someone from the Ministry of Health?”
“If the people in that village have been infected as I suspect, your health ministry won’t be able to help them.”
* * *
“They’ve been infected by genetically engineered maize? That’s preposterous.” Despite the warm afternoon, the emotional temperature in the Indian Army Mahindra Jeep driven by Surya’s brother, Captain Kiran Chidambaram, had fallen well below freezing as they headed east out of Hyderabad toward Koratikal. “And even if it’s true, why would Vijay have wanted me to come? He must have been out of his mind.”
Like his brother, Surya, Kiran was a handsome young man, in excellent physical condition. He also had the look in his eye of a warrior who had braved the crucible of combat. Jack knew the type. He was one himself.
“He wasn’t crazy,” Jack said from where he sat in the passenger seat. Surya sat in the back, not having spoken a word since Kiran picked them up at the hospital. “Trust me.”
“Trust you?” Kiran stared at Jack, his dark eyes blazing. “Why should I?”
“Because I worked with Vijay before he came home to India, and I’ve seen the effects of the infection he’s talking about with my own eyes. You don’t want to let this particular genie out of the bottle. It doesn’t just make people ill. It can make them…” Jack struggled to find an appropriate word. “It makes them very violent. Let’s leave it at that.”
Behind them, the sun was beginning to set, and the land around him was cast in a golden glow that would soon turn to darkness. Jack began to question the wisdom of coming out here this late. Facing harvesters under any cond
itions was dangerous. Doing it at night and unarmed, and possibly facing more than one, was suicidal. But he hadn’t felt there was any other choice. He had to know, and if there truly was a harvester infestation here, the authorities had to be alerted in time to contain it. If that was even possible.
Kiran returned his attention to the road. “Fools. And I am a bigger fool.”
They drove on in silence, following the route Vijay had given them to the field where he and Naresh had gone. Surya guided Kiran, who didn’t bother responding, but simply drove like an angry automaton.
“Here,” Surya suddenly said. “I think this is it.”
Jamming on the brakes, Kiran brought the jeep to a skidding halt, the tires sending up a flare of dry dust around them. He switched off the ignition and sat there, staring straight ahead.
Ignoring him, Jack got out, with Surya right behind him. The sun had faded below the horizon in the west, leaving the world in twilight.
Looking down near his feet, Jack saw a small placard that had been kicked over. Leaning down, he turned it over to see the AnGrow logo on the other side. “It looks like this is the place.”
There was a slight breeze, just enough to rustle the stalks of maize in the unharvested fields nearby.
Then he heard something else that made his blood freeze. It was the faint but unmistakable sound of someone screaming.
He turned to Surya. “Do you hear that?”
“Yes.” He pointed. “I think it’s coming from over that way. There’s a small village there.”
“Damn.”
Kiran got out and came to stand next to him. “I hear it, too. What the devil is going on?”
“Let’s go find out.” Jack gestured for Surya to get back in the jeep, and he piled in behind him while Kiran hopped back into the driver’s seat. Starting the engine, he put the vehicle in gear and headed down the road toward where the screaming was coming from. His face bore a grim, worried expression.
“What are we getting into?” The anger had leeched out of Kiran’s voice. He spoke those words with the tense calm of an experienced soldier.
Shaking his head, Jack told him the truth. “I’m not sure, Kiran. And believe me, I hope to God that I’m wrong about all this. But…”
The rest of his words were stolen by the sight of a child, a girl maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who suddenly appeared in the beam of the headlights, stumbling toward them. Her eyes were wide, glazed over, as if she were in a trance.
Kiran stomped on the brakes, bringing the jeep to a skidding halt. He leaped out and ran toward the girl.
“Stop!”
Jack’s bellowed warning gave Kiran pause.
“She could be infected. Let me take a look first. Stand back.”
The girl had stopped, but she didn’t look up at them. She stared at the constellation of dust motes reflected in the jeep’s headlights, and Jack could hear her moaning softly. Somewhere behind her, farther down the dark road, he could hear more screams.
Reaching into his pocket, Jack withdrew a disposable plastic cigarette lighter. Trying to ignore the terrified screams, he approached the girl with slow, measured steps as the other two men watched in shocked silence.
Holding up the lighter toward the girl, he flicked the igniter. An inch-tall tongue of flame appeared, flickering slightly as Jack continued to move toward the girl.
Her eyes, moving in a jerky, spasmodic fashion, turned toward the flame.
Only a pace away now, Jack leaned forward, extending the lighter toward the girl’s shoulder closest to him.
“Jack, what are you doing?” Kiran stepped forward.
“Don’t move!”
Kiran stopped, and Jack could sense the outrage in him as the flame of the lighter brushed the girl’s skin.
She flinched, and her eyes blinked. Other than that, she made no reaction.
With an enormous sense of relief, Jack let the lighter’s flame die. Naomi had told him that the harvesters had an instinctive reaction to open flame. Even the intact malleable tissue, the parts of their bodies that allowed them to take the shape of other creatures, of harvester corpses reacted. Without a cat or thermal imager, it was the only other way to test someone to make sure they were really human without taking a tissue sample or trying to draw blood that they didn’t have.
“Surya, get her in the jeep. See if you can get her to tell you what happened.” Jack doubted the girl would talk, as she was clearly in deep shock. But they had to try.
Without a word, Surya gently guided the girl to the jeep, helping her into the back seat.
To their left, they heard someone or something moving quickly through the maize toward them. Jack was about to shout for Kiran to get back into the jeep when an ear-piercing shriek of agony, unmistakably human, came from whomever it was.
The agonized scream suddenly stopped. Or was cut off.
Kiran was standing right beside him now, staring into the darkness beyond the reach of the jeep’s headlights. “What the devil is happening? Bloody hell, I wish I had my sidearm.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good.” Jack was momentarily stymied by indecision. The smart thing would have been to turn and run. Right now. He knew what must be happening here. But Kiran and Surya had to witness the terror for themselves, or they would never believe it. Right now, they could write off what they’d heard as being a lunatic or terrorists, and no one would ever believe what the girl might say, assuming she ever recovered. “Can you call in your unit?”
“As much as I would like to, what would I tell my commander? All I know for certain is that people are screaming, but I don’t know why. I haven’t even heard any gunshots.” He shook his head. “He would tell me this is a matter for the local police, not the NSG, and he would be right. But you don’t want to call the police, do you?”
Jack shook his head. “No. They wouldn’t be any better off than the civilians. We need military grade hardware and men who know how to use it.”
“And you still refuse to tell me exactly what we’re facing?”
“Kiran, this isn’t something I can tell you in words beyond what I’ve already said, because you won’t believe it. You can’t. You’d think it was a cruel joke or that I was simply insane. Please trust me on this. I learned that lesson the hard way. You can only believe if you see it. And even then…even then you’ll want to deny what you’ve seen.”
Another piercing cry erupted from the maize, closer now. Both men flinched, their eyes reflexively darting in the direction of the sound.
“Shit,” Jack cursed. “Come on. We’ve got to get closer to the village.”
He turned and trotted back to the jeep.
With a last look into the scream-filled darkness that lay before them, Kiran, his mouth set in a grim line, followed.
Starting up the jeep again, he drove them forward into the unknown.
CHAPTER TEN
Naomi sat on a chair, staring at a high resolution display, oblivious to the quiet but intense work that went on around her. She was in one of the seven labs of Morgan Pharmaceuticals devoted to gene research. Unlike the other six, this was the only one located in the corporate headquarters building. It was in the basement behind a set of vault doors that were guarded around the clock. Morgan had told her that this was the sanctum sanctorum of his entire enterprise, what he hoped would be the birthplace of his personal legacy for humankind.
Most of the lab was a study in organized chaos, with long lab tables supporting deep double-tiered shelves packed with color-coded vials, jars, and bottles, creating a rainbow of bottle tops and labels. The table surfaces were covered with equipment, sample containers, boxes, and other paraphernalia. To the casual observer, the only part of the lab that wasn’t a disaster area was the spotless white floor.
One wall sported a set of large freezers that had initially given Naomi an involuntary shudder, for they were the same make and model that she had used in her work at New Horizons under the tutelage of Dr. Kempf. Or, at least,
what had been masquerading as the good doctor.
The recollection faded under the onslaught of welcomes from the staff as Morgan had introduced her. Everyone had greeted her with smiles and unreserved warmth.
Everyone but Dr. Adrian Kelso, Morgan’s chief scientist, whose demeanor had been one of cool detachment. She had met his type before: an accomplished middle-aged male researcher who couldn’t get past a sense of professional jealousy. Instead of viewing her as a partner in this endeavor, he was already seeing her as a competitor. She had dealt with plenty of men like that at New Horizons. Just as they did, Kelso would have to get used to the idea of her not only being around, but of calling the shots, at least on this project.
For Morgan’s benefit, Kelso had put on a show of giving her a brief tour of the lab. All the equipment was intimately familiar to her, and she already saw herself in her mind’s eye, hard at work, just as she had been at the New Horizons lab in Lincoln. Only this time, it would be for mankind’s benefit, not his destruction.
When the tour was over, Kelso had seated Naomi before one of the computers and called up the data telling of their progress in recreating the core elements of the New Horizons corn seed that had been twisted to the evil purposes of the harvesters.
That was where she had been sitting, immobile except for periodic clicks of the mouse to turn a page or call up a new data file, for the last four hours. Kelso, of course, had long since departed, and the others here in Lab One had resumed their labors. All other thoughts, even her worry for Jack and Vijay in India, had been banished by the flood of information she had greedily devoured.
Now, as she mentally came up for air, she could tell that the others in the lab, while hard at work, were throwing periodic glances her way, no doubt wondering what she was thinking.
“Brilliant.” She spoke the word softly, but loud enough that it would carry to at least the nearest of her new coworkers. Unlike her first day at New Horizons, where she had expected everyone to bow before her genius, she wanted to get off on the right foot with these people. But she hadn’t chosen that word with any intention of ingratiating herself. No, it precisely described her feelings toward what she’d just finished reading about what they had accomplished here. Spinning around in her chair, she faced the others, who were now all raptly staring at her. “Absolutely brilliant. And you’ve gotten this far in only the last year?”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 10