by A. T. Avon
‘So are we.’
‘And like us, they’ll be given a choice – help or die.’
The elevator began to slow as they approached the small guard station at the top of the tower. The sudden darkness felt almost total as the elevator slid into this station, leaving the desert behind.
The doors opened. Houellebecq signaled for her to exit first. ‘What do you want to show me up here?’ she asked.
‘You’ll see.’
She looked around the guard station. Only one side looked out into desert. The other three walls – the front three – were all large display screens. The light was kept low in here, with a blind pulled down on the window looking out into the desert. There were three rows of tables, each with four analysts. Each analyst oversaw three computer screens, and these were set up with one edge touching the next, so that they seemed to zigzag strangely across each row.
There were four Chinese soldiers standing guard, two at either end of the room, all armed.
On one of the wall-mounted screens, Missy could see footage of a drone glinting in the desert sun somewhere. It wasn’t clear to her which of the analysts was operating it, but presumably one of them. Certainly, they were all staring intently at the screens in front of them, as if a lot was at stake.
As ever, something seemed to be missing, but Missy couldn’t identify exactly what it was. She scanned the room again. The guards, the analysts or techs or whatever they were, the screens, the generic puke green carpet.
‘Puke green,’ she said, before glancing at the guards.
Houellebecq looked down at the carpet. ‘What?’
‘This whole facility,’ she said.
‘Is puke green? No, it isn’t.’
Something had felt wrong about the ARC from the beginning, and Missy understood what it was now. She fixed her eyes on Houellebecq, keen to gauge his reaction to what she said next. ‘The soldiers don’t have Chinese flags on their uniforms.’
‘So?’
‘Or Chinese anything. Tang doesn’t represent the Chinese, does he? He never has?’
Houellebecq glanced at the soldiers standing guard as if trying to decide whether or not to speak candidly in front of them. In the end, he guided Missy to the back corner of the room and lowered his voice.
‘No red,’ said Missy, certain she was right now. ‘From the day we arrived here, I don’t think I’ve seen a single Chinese flag. No Mao smiling down at me, no little red books, nothing.’
‘Yeah well, not all of China is like that now.’
‘Give me a break, Houellebecq. This is a top-secret facility to ensure one nation’s dominance over all others – if Mao’s portrait’s going to be anywhere, it’s here. At the very least, something in this place would be red.’ She pointed down at the facility, stretching out in four directions hundreds of meters below. ‘Who is it?’ she asked. ‘Who’s behind this place really?’
Houellebecq glanced around the room, lowered his voice even further, and started chewing a little faster. He relented. ‘The Chinese are aware of it, of course. You can’t come out here and build a giant plus sign-shaped facility in the middle of the desert without them noticing. But yeah – you’re right, it’s not Chinese per se.’
‘Then who?’
‘In fact, this desert isn’t even in China.’ He pointed south. ‘China,’ he said. ‘About 200 miles that way, give or take.’
Missy called up a mental map in her head. ‘Which means we’re in Mongolia – in what, the Gobi desert?’
‘Impressive,’ said Houellebecq. ‘I give you a birds-eye view and you certainly don’t waste it.’
They were still speaking in hushed tones, but the guards weren’t showing much interest in them.
‘You still haven’t told me who owns this facility. Is it American?’
Houellebecq laughed. ‘It’s a lot more Chinese than it is American, believe me. But there are Americans invested in it, yes.’
Missy ran through a list of countries in her head, but none of them fit. She couldn’t figure out which country would choose the Gobi desert, if not China. ‘Mongolia?’ she asked, knowing it was wrong even as she asked.
‘There are one or two Mongolians involved,’ said Houellebecq, ‘but out of the 852 individuals who invested in this place – benefactors, we call them – Mongolia’s not heavily represented, no.’
Houellebecq showed a sudden interest in the computer screens. He crossed to a tech and said: ‘Call up drones N7, N9 and N12. And call up anything else in that area, too.’ One of the wall-mounted screens split into four live video images, showing hordes crossing the desert. Houellebecq tilted his head, then glanced out through the one window into the endless sand. He rubbed at his face nervously before returning his attention to the screens: ‘Map those images for me. In fact, map all of them.’
‘That’ll take a few minutes,’ said the Chinese-looking tech in perfect, British English.
‘Do it,’ said Houellebecq, before returning to Missy.
‘What’s going on?’
‘The hordes aren’t closing in on this facility evenly.’
‘Which means?’
‘Something’s gone wrong.’
‘So what are they closing in on, if not the facility?’
‘Some are going for the air base,’ he said.
‘The air base?’
‘It’s another facility, though smaller than this one – a hell of a lot smaller, actually.’
‘For what?’
‘Evacuation. There’s a tunnel from this facility to the air base, in case the air base here is ever overrun. There are five or six helicopters waiting there – for VIPs.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ said Missy, lowering her voice again, ‘if things go wrong and this place gets overrun, you have to walk how many miles in a tunnel to get to safety?’
‘Like I think I made clear before, this project hasn’t suffered from a lack of funding at any point, Missy. There are plenty of rich people around the world who are paranoid. That’s the thing about being rich. At a certain point you stop focusing on what you can get and start focusing on what you can lose. You spend to keep.’
‘And your point is?’
‘The tunnel has a high-speed train.’
Missy felt slightly foolish for not figuring this out on her own.
‘Rich people,’ she mumbled under her breath.
‘Exactly. And not just rich people, but paranoid rich people with an eye to taking over the world.’
Missy thought about this for a moment. ‘So they’re not actually here?’ she asked. ‘A few are. Some were airlifted here the minute we saw signs of the virus spreading. We were meant to get more. We were meant to get a lot more. But sometimes the best-laid plans don’t go, well…’ He shrugged. ‘To plan. We underestimated how rapidly it would spread. We underestimated how quickly basic infrastructure would shut down. With every hour that went past, it became harder and harder to get to our benefactors.’
‘Sounds like you have enough of them here to keep the lights on, though.’
‘That was never in question. Funds were moved here and stored in the vault, gold and other tangible assets.’
‘The same vault you just used to launch a mega-dome? You don’t think that’s a bit stupid, inviting every zombie within 3000 miles to attack your gold?’ Even as she asked this, Missy was thinking about Houellebecq’s wording. With an eye to taking over the world… On the one hand, he was trying to convince her he was Tang’s slave. But he knew too much to be a slave, and the words “we” and “our” were far too quick to roll off his tongue. ‘So this was never about survival,’ she said. ‘This was a consortium of individuals buying into… what exactly?’
‘Biotech. Alien biotech.’
‘And personal safety.’
‘Primarily the biotech.’
She fought down the bitter disappointment she felt at her brother’s betrayal. Did it extend to her father as well? Houellebecq perhaps sensed this, because he nodd
ed to the elevator door. ‘We should get going. We’ve got more than 100,000 zombies closing in on the air base and no other way to evacuate the benefactors.’
‘They’re not taking the straight, mindless route you anticipated.’
‘The benefactors?’
‘The zombies.’
‘No. More than a few seem bent on visiting our air base, making sure it’s out of action before they come here.’
‘They’re intelligent,’ said Missy. ‘That makes sense. If you’re running theory on the hallucinations is correct, they’re being guided by an extra-terrestrial life force which has a much better understanding of biotech than we’ll ever have. And if that’s true, it stands to reason this extra-terrestrial force also knows a thing or two about battle strategy.’
‘Maybe,’ said Houellebecq grimly, ‘maybe.’
They made their way back down the elevator. Missy stayed silent. Houellebecq did, too. Finally, as they plunged back into darkness, like two divers into a deep, dark rock-pool, he said: ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘It’s not.’
‘Shoot,’ said Missy warily, wondering how much worse the lies could get.
‘The soldier Tang used – the soldier that sparked the dome – he’s not a soldier. He’s not even a he.’
She frowned, not quite sure what Houellebecq was trying to tell her, or why he looked so guilty.
‘He used a woman?’ Missy asked, confused.
Houellebecq nodded. ‘Kilgariff. He used Kilgariff.’
Chapter 22
Somewhere in the Gobi
Houellebecq took Missy back to the control room, where she found Tang talking with her father and West. Tang had a detailed schematic up on one of the main screens and a tech was providing him with a view of what looked to be a steam engine. Only when the tech zoomed out a little did Missy realize her error. It wasn’t a steam engine. She had the scale wrong. It was some kind of factory or plant, some kind of filtration system.
A moment later, the schematic was replaced by an aerial view of what looked to be a small dam. ‘This is what they’re headed towards,’ Tang was saying to West. ‘This is why we’re having trouble with the hordes coming down from the north. They can obviously sense it.’
‘Sense what?’ asked Houellebecq.
West turned to look at him, then noticed Missy. He ordered one of the two guards to get her water. ‘An IV is preferable,’ he said. ‘But if you insist on moving around, you should at least be sipping water.’
Missy took the water bottle and did as Tang instructed. She started sipping. Aside from anything else, she was thirsty. She realized she was also hungry, but she didn’t like her chances of getting food right now.
She could tell from the tension in the room that something had gone very wrong. ‘What’s going on?’ Houellebecq asked. ‘Does this have to do with the zombies closing in on the air base?’
‘Not on the air base,’ said West.
‘Then what?’ asked Houellebecq.
Missy was staring at the image on the screen. The answer hit her in a flash. ‘Ha, the dam,’ she said, smiling to herself and holding up her water. ‘Am I right? They can sense it? A store of Protein Z?’
‘It’s not a small problem,’ said Tang, nodding. ‘If zombies from the north get access to water prior to arriving, they’ll arrive too fast, with too much strength. The whole point of putting the facility in the middle of the desert was to counteract that, to wear them down over the course of their journey. We need to take in the first wave. We need time to gas the first wave, before being overrun by subsequent waves. It only works if the timing is perfect.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Missy. ‘Why do you have a dam out there?’
‘It’s the filtration plant for this entire facility,’ said Tang.
‘Why does it have Protein Z in it? It’s under the dome?’
Tang shook his head. ‘It takes time for a dome to work. It rises to cloud level but…’ His voice trailed out as he checked something on a monitor off to his right.
‘The dome?’ Missy prompted. ‘You were saying?’
‘It lets evaporated water up through, filtering PZ from subsequent rain. Water that’s already on the ground when the dome forms, like this dam, for instance, that water isn’t filtered. It’ll contain Protein Z.’
‘It is only one hanger,’ said Missy’s father. ‘The northern hangar. The other three look to be on track for a successful intake and gassing.’
Tang grimaced. ‘We lose one hanger, we all die. You know this.’
Tang leaned awkwardly over the shoulder of a tech and made a few irate adjustments with a keyboard.
‘What are you going to do?’ Missy’s father asked.
Tang scanned the screens one last time, then slumped down into a chair. A pistol holstered on his hip seemed to give him discomfort. He unclipped the holster and took the pistol out, turning it in his hands while he spoke. ‘I’ve already given instructions to evacuate the benefactors. We lost too many valuable benefactors in the initial outbreak. I’m not willing to lose any more.’ He glanced up at West. ‘You’ll be overseeing that, West. Take them by train to the air base. We don’t have helicopters for them here. Evacuate them from there. The pilots at the air base will have information made available to them, coordinates for a safe landing site.’
‘And us?’ Missy asked.
Tang stood, still tapping the pistol on the palm of one hand. ‘I need something else, West. While you’re there, I need you to blow that dam.’ He turned to Missy’s father. ‘You knew about this. You wanted this. You designed it this way because you knew it would fail.’
‘You underestimated the intelligence of the horde,’ said Missy’s father. ‘Don’t blame me, Tang. You had the information on the submarine at your fingertips, too, just like me.’
‘What submarine?’ Missy asked. ‘The one from the 1990s?’
‘The Carrick,’ said her father, nodding. ‘British navy.’
‘And how does it relate to blowing up a dam?’
‘It’s not reflected in the official inquiry,’ said Missy’s father, ‘but there seems little doubt there was an outbreak of a virus on the submarine. It seems possible it was struck by the substance. Shortly after the outbreak, there was a mutiny. That’s all been covered up, of course. Officially, the explosions which followed were down to a lack of training, to faulty equipment.’
‘How did it show zombies gravitate towards PZ?’ Houellebecq asked.
‘A man named Conrad came forward three years after the accident,’ said Tang. ‘He was living in Russia – in hiding, terrified.’
Missy’s father nodded. ‘The submarine accident rippled through intelligence communities. It was the spark which enabled me to jump from academia into government work. It opened a lot of doors. There was a lot of money secretly thrown at finding the real cause of that tragedy. The man calling himself Conrad, he claimed to be a survivor. Furthermore, he claimed to be one of the first on the ship to get sick. He recanted it all a few months later, but his account perfectly describes a nest.’
‘This is a man who, if his story is to be believed,’ said Tang, ‘survived for two days in a submarine compartment without oxygen. Not just that, in a room which had suffered a flash fire. And the only way he could have escaped was up through one-hundred meters of water. He was a fraud.’
‘He claimed to have been at sea for a week before he was found,’ continued Missy’s father, ‘and though most people paid no attention to it, there was one detail in his story which I found interesting. He claimed to have an affinity for water, an ability to sense currents, changes in the atmosphere. He claimed to have survived by deliberately riding currents through squalls.’ Missy’s father shrugged, then pointed to the drone footage of the dam. ‘And he claimed to suffer hallucinations. I decided to take a chance on him. I decided to believe him.’
‘You sabotaged the design,’ said Ta
ng.
‘Yes. I suspected zombies could sense PZ via their hallucinations, so I put a dam out in the open, right under your nose, Tang.’ Missy’s father took a deep breath. He seemed relieved to get this off his chest.
‘And now we all die,’ said Tang with barely restrained fury.
Missy’s father didn’t seem to hear this. He was talking almost to himself now. ‘As it should be, as it should be... I’ve suspected this for a long time. It’s moving through different species, different populations. Absorbing, altering DNA… For all we know, it’s evolving even in space as it travels here. This thing has history.’ He smiled to himself. ‘After it enters you, well, it’s a lottery, isn’t it? You don’t know what you’ll get, what you’ll inherit. You don’t know what DNA it will bestow. Perhaps a man, mutated, could’ve survived the Carrick. I felt it was a question worth asking.’
The room was silent for a moment, digesting this. Finally, Missy’s father refocused. His voice took on a clipped, businesslike edge. ‘He was listed as serving on the submarine and his body was never found.’
‘In the sludge,’ said Tang dismissively.
‘Admit it, Tang, you messed up. It happens. It happens to the very best of us, which you are most certainly not. Why else would you be evacuating your benefactors? Why else would you have West blowing up dam walls? You’re scrabbling. You’re on the ropes and you know it.’ Missy’s father leaned in. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing, Tang, I hope this place burns.’
The gunshot caused Missy to flinch, and it was a moment before she understood what had happened. Tang had wheeled around, raising his pistol, and he had fired. Just like that. The bullet had gone straight through her father’s head.
He landed hard, blood spreading across the floor.
Missy was still registering all this, still trying to understand. She was only beginning to scream when she sensed the pistol swing her way. Tang still had it up, and he now took aim at her head.
Chapter 23