by Mark Alpert
Gently but firmly, she pushed him down. Her hand was warm. She kept it on his shoulder even after he was lying down flat. John wanted her to keep it there. He smiled at her. “I don’t think Cordelia was exaggerating. You did help us win the war. I mean, who knows what would’ve happened if you hadn’t knocked some sense into Washington? We could all be English colonists still.”
But she didn’t smile back at him. Her face turned serious. “It had to be done. Cordelia was insistent. And history proved her right only a century and a half later. If it wasn’t for the United States, the Nazis would’ve defeated England and Russia, and the Japanese Empire would’ve conquered all of Asia. The whole world would’ve descended into nightmare.” She lifted her hand from John’s shoulder. “But there was a price to be paid. A very high price.”
“What do you mean?”
“We knew that the new country would devastate the Native Americans. They’d already been ravaged by plagues and war before the Revolution, but they still had a chance to recover. And the English were trying to help them by discouraging the colonists from settling west of the Appalachians. Over time, the Native American tribes could’ve unified and established their own nation in the western half of the continent. But once the United States became independent, the tribes were doomed. They were crushed by your westward expansion.”
John looked askance. “So what are you saying? You prevented one catastrophe but couldn’t stop the other?”
She nodded. “The trouble is, we can’t steer history like a car. All we can do is nudge it a little, and sometimes there are no good options.” She raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “And do you know what made it worse? Even back then, I knew the value of what we were going to lose. Before the Revolution, I’d spent more than a hundred years learning about the Native American tribes. I made many friends among the Ojibway when I was growing up in Haven in the 1600s.”
“Gower said your family didn’t have much contact with the Ojibway. He said they left you alone, and you did the same.”
“Well, it’s true, that was our official policy. But I was a very impetuous youngster, and Mother couldn’t stop me from leaving Haven. This was when we lived aboveground and used the cavern only for storing our Treasures. There were just a few dozen Furies then.”
“And you were the only white people in the area?”
“No, there were some French traders and missionaries in St. Ignace and Sault Sainte Marie. We stayed away from both outposts, but the French had brought smallpox to North America, and soon the Ojibway were dying by the hundreds. Our family had already learned how to inoculate ourselves against the disease, and I thought it was our duty to offer this protection to the Ojibway tribes. Mother, though, was dead-set against the idea.”
“Why?”
Ariel frowned. “She had the same fears then as she has now. She thought any contact with the outside world would threaten Haven’s safety. But several of my cousins sided with me, and we worked out a compromise with Mother. She agreed to let us inoculate the Ojibway as long as we stayed at least two hundred miles away from Haven. We also had to pretend we were French missionaries and nuns, so the Ojibway wouldn’t figure out who we were or where we came from.” Her frown disappeared. She turned cheerful again. “And that’s how the Ranger Corps got started. Our first expedition consisted of four men and five women.”
John couldn’t help but marvel at all this. He was beginning to see some of the benefits of eternal youth. Ariel hadn’t been confined to the boundaries of a single lifetime, the limited set of interests and passions that could be explored in sixty or seventy years. She’d lived several fascinating lives, one after another. “It sounds like that’s how you got interested in medicine, too.”
“Oh, yes. And we learned just as much from the Ojibway as they did from us. First we went to the Keweenaw Peninsula, on the southern shore of Lake Superior. The tribes there had extensive knowledge of medicinal plants. Then we moved farther west, to Chequamegon Bay. The Ojibway taught us how to hunt and fish and build birch-bark canoes, so we could live off the land. We could keep exploring the region and inoculating the tribes for as long as we wanted to.”
“Didn’t that worry your mother?”
“Every six months I’d assign a pair of messengers to go back to Haven. They’d deliver our reports to the council and pick up new supplies and volunteers.” Ariel paused, biting her lip. An uncertain look had appeared on her face, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should continue. She shifted in her chair. “And every year or so, one of our women would get pregnant, so we’d send her back to Haven with the messengers.”
Her cheeks colored. This surprised John. Ariel wasn’t the kind of woman who blushed easily. “They found Ojibway paramours?”
“That was our preferred method during Haven’s first century. There were few Europeans in the area, and most of them were unsavory characters, either cunning traders or fanatical churchmen. But there were many Ojibway men.”
She said this in a casual way, her voice jaunty and light, but within a few seconds her face turned a deeper shade of pink. John didn’t understand what was going on. Ariel was clearly uncomfortable, and yet she’d deliberately broached this subject. He could think of only one explanation: she wanted to tell him something personal, but it was so difficult to say that she had to force herself to do it.
At the same time that he realized this, he had a moment of dizziness. For an instant the gurney seemed to lurch underneath him. The feeling lasted for only a fraction of a second, and then he felt fine. It was so brief he wasn’t sure if it was an effect of the Fountain protein or simply a natural jolt of adrenaline. His nerves were in an uproar. Ariel was waiting for him to ask the obvious question.
He moved a bit closer to her, propping himself up on his elbows. “Did you get pregnant, too?”
The muscles in her neck tensed under her skin, but otherwise she didn’t move. Her green eyes glistened above her inflamed cheeks. Finally, after ten long seconds, she nodded. “Do you remember what Mother said on the day you came here? Near the end of the meeting in the council chambers?”
John shook his head. Elizabeth Fury had said a lot of things, and he didn’t know which one Ariel was referring to.
“She reminded me of the last time I brought a paramour to Haven.” Ariel’s voice was low but steady. “It was in 1674. His name was Running Cloud. And it didn’t end well.”
Before John could respond he had another dizzy spell. This one was longer and more intense than the first. The whole laboratory seemed to tilt, and for a second he was amazed that the hundreds of lab flasks didn’t slide off the shelves. He felt nauseous as well, and his skin went cold. Ariel looked at him, puzzled, as his head swayed and his mouth fell open. Then she jumped out of her chair.
“John! Are you okay?”
He couldn’t answer. The dizziness wasn’t subsiding. Ariel grabbed his shoulders and forced him to lie down flat. Her head seemed to wheel above him, lunging across his field of view.
“Listen to me, John! The protein is slowing your circulation. Take rapid, strong breaths, okay? You need to boost your heart rate.”
Then he felt the gurney rumble under his back. At first he thought this was another symptom caused by the Fountain protein, but Ariel looked up in surprise at the same time and turned her head to the left and right, scanning the room. She’d felt the rumbling, too. “Mercy!” she cried. “What was that?”
A moment later the lights went out. Then they heard the siren, high-pitched and deafening.
TWENTY
Sullivan stood at the edge of the woods south of Haven, gazing at the farm through a pair of binoculars. It was a gorgeous morning, much warmer than the past few days, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. Marlowe and Percy accompanied him, each man hidden behind a pine tree. Marlowe rubbed his bandaged shoulder and stared at the farm with livid eyes, while Percy pointed his camera at everything in sight, cackling every time he pressed the shutter.
The FBI’s surveillance van was about a mile away, parked on the shoulder of the road that ran parallel to Haven’s eastern fence. Sullivan adjusted the focus on his binoculars until he could read the logo plastered on the van’s side: CHARTER CABLE. The federal agents were posing as cable-TV repairmen. One of them pretended to fix the wiring inside a junction box on a nearby telephone pole. The other agents were inside the van, pointing cameras with powerful zoom lenses at the fenced-off farm. Unfortunately for them, there wasn’t much to see. The Elders had laid out the farm in a way that maximized their privacy. The cornfields and hedges and outbuildings at the edge of the property blocked the view of everything at the center. Although the agents could monitor who entered and left the place, they could barely see the farmhouses and barn.
The view from Sullivan’s position was equally bad. When he pointed his binoculars at the farmhouses he could see only their redbrick chimneys and wood-shingle roofs. Just beyond them was the barn, and behind that was the barnyard for Haven’s sheep and cattle. The barnyard was large, almost four hundred feet wide, and surrounded by twelve-foot-high slat fencing. Like the chain-link fence surrounding the whole property, the barnyard’s fence was a little too industrial-looking for an Amish farm, but the Elders had good reason for putting it there. The yard also served as a recreation area for the Furies, and the slat fencing shielded them from view, allowing them to exercise outdoors without pretending to be Amish. You couldn’t see them from outside, no matter how powerful your binoculars or camera.
Unless, that is, you were observing the farm from above.
Sullivan tilted his head back and aimed the binoculars at the sky. He wouldn’t have been able to spot the drone if he hadn’t known which direction it was coming from. The Reaper was only ten yards long, and it was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet. At that distance, the unmanned aircraft looked like a tiny black cross, several times smaller than a commercial jetliner. It crept across the cloudless sky, cruising overhead at the relatively sluggish speed of two hundred miles per hour. The drone had arrived just in time. When Sullivan checked his watch, he saw it was exactly noon.
He didn’t hear the explosion or feel the ground shake. He hadn’t expected to. The geothermal plant was almost a mile to the north and five hundred feet underground. Even if the blast had been twice as powerful, he wouldn’t have felt it. But he would know very soon whether his device had detonated. He trained his binoculars on a ventilation pipe protruding from the roof of one of the farm’s outbuildings. Then he waited.
After half a minute a pale wisp of steam rose from the pipe. The flow rapidly strengthened, gathering force and volume. Within seconds the vapor gushed out of the pipe in a thick, roiling plume. Steam surged out of the other ventilation pipes as well, rising and spreading above every outbuilding and farmhouse. The big white plumes leaned toward the east, pushed by the prevailing winds.
Sullivan smiled. He felt the surge in his own body, a sweet upwelling of triumph. But for the people down below, inside the cavern, the gushing steam was anything but sweet. Because the vapor came from deep within the earth, it was laced with hydrogen sulfide, a gas that forms in underground reservoirs when water dissolves certain minerals. The gas was colorless, foul-smelling, and corrosive.
And highly poisonous.
TWENTY-ONE
John lay helpless on the gurney. He could see Ariel in the feeble glow of the lab’s emergency lights, but he couldn’t move a muscle. The Fountain protein had immobilized him. He was dizzy and trembling and sick to his stomach, and every inch of his body hurt like crazy.
He felt a flash of pain across his chest as Ariel ripped off the EKG’s suction cups. Then she grabbed his gurney at the end where his feet were and wheeled him out of her lab, knocking the door aside. She shoved the gurney down the hallway, running like mad, her face red and contorted. John glimpsed the doors of the other labs speeding past on both sides, and his nausea redoubled. He wanted to die.
At the end of the corridor she pressed the button for the elevator but its power had been cut. Ariel shouted, “Bloody hell!” and turned to a nearby door with an EMERGENCY EXIT sign. She rammed the gurney through the doorway and stopped at the foot of a flight of stairs. Then she grabbed John’s legs and draped them over the side of the gurney.
“You have to walk!” she shouted. “We have to go up the stairway!”
John’s legs quivered and wobbled beneath him. He could barely stand up, much less walk or climb stairs. He leaned on Ariel as he moved away from the gurney, but she couldn’t support his weight. Before they could reach the first step, he fell on top of her and they collapsed in a heap. John’s face slapped against the floor, which seemed to tilt like a seesaw. His ears rang, high-pitched and loud. The noise inside his head was even louder than the siren.
Ariel scrambled to her feet and grabbed his right hand. Clasping it tightly, she pulled with all her might. “Get up, John! We have to go!”
He couldn’t get up. He was dead weight.
“Damn it!” She bent over and screamed in his face. “That’s the evacuation alarm! We have to get to the surface!”
It was getting difficult to think. The Fountain protein was messing with his mind. He imagined that the alarm was sounding inside his body. His cells were burning. They were exploding, one by one. “I can’t,” he muttered. “I—”
“Yes, you can!”
Her voice knifed through him. It pierced his skin and slipped into his Fountain-clogged bloodstream. With an enormous effort of will, he raised his right hand and placed it on the first step, palm down. Then he dragged his body forward and started crawling up the stairs.
The first flight of steps was agony. His calves and thigh muscles were on fire. Ariel helped him along, bending over him and hooking her right arm under his left. But the second flight was easier. His nausea and dizziness began to subside. At the foot of the third flight he was able to reach for the railing and stand up. As the pain in his muscles eased he started taking the steps two at a time. Ariel shouted, “Good! Keep going!” and his heart pumped faster. A burst of new energy spread to his arms and legs.
John felt almost normal by the time they reached the top of the stairway. He saw another door with an EMERGENCY EXIT sign, but he knew they couldn’t be at the surface yet. The laboratories were located below the Pyramid. Dashing ahead of Ariel, he opened the door and found himself on the cavern’s floor near the base of the Pyramid, which loomed high above them. Battery-operated emergency lights glowed here and there, but most of the cavern was shrouded in darkness.
The sirens were even louder here. Dozens of people ran along the pathways, heading for the exits that led to the farmhouses and barns aboveground. Many of the people carried flashlights and wore gas masks. A few were dressed in bright yellow hazmat suits. The air in the cavern was humid and smelled like rotten eggs.
John grimaced. “Jesus, what happened?”
Ariel rushed past him and turned left, toward the far end of the cavern, where pale clouds of steam billowed between the rocky walls. “Damnation! It’s the geothermal plant!” She looked over her shoulder and gave him a fierce look. “Follow the others to the surface! I’ll meet you there.” Then she sprinted toward the billowing clouds.
John didn’t hesitate. He raced after Ariel.
She ran fast, but he kept up with her. He wasn’t dizzy anymore. He was fully recovered and then some. After running for about a hundred yards Ariel stopped at a small storage shed next to the pathway. She opened the shed’s door, reached inside and pulled out a gas mask. She was about to put it on when she saw John come up behind her. She seemed more resigned than angry. “I had a feeling you’d want to come along. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Don’t worry about me. Why is there so much steam?”
“There must’ve been a break in the intake pipe. The steam is under high pressure, so it’s hard to shut down the flow. And there are toxic chemicals mixed with the water vapor. The worst is hydrogen sulfide.” Reac
hing into the shed again, she pulled out another gas mask and handed it to him. “You’re going to need one of these.”
“How toxic?”
“At low levels it irritates the eyes and throat. At high levels it causes respiratory paralysis. Okay, look at me carefully.” She demonstrated how to put on the mask and tighten the straps. John did the same while Ariel watched. Then she removed two more masks from the shed and gave one to him. “Take an extra, in case you find someone who needs it. Follow my lead, all right?”
Then, with one mask over her face and another in her hand, Ariel ran toward the geothermal plant. John followed right behind, sweating like crazy. It was like jogging in a steam room, only hotter and more uncomfortable. Within seconds his clothes were soaked. He had to wipe the condensation off the plastic eyeholes in his mask to see where he was going.
The vapor was so thick they didn’t see the plant until they were twenty feet away. As they rushed toward the entrance they nearly collided with someone coming out of the building. It was a tall man wearing a gas mask and carrying a woman in his arms. The woman also wore a mask but appeared to be unconscious. John looked carefully at the man, trying to glimpse the face behind the mask, and realized it was Gower. His eyes were wide and frightened behind the plastic eyeholes.
Ariel pointed at the unconscious woman. “Is that Claudia?” she asked. Her voice, muffled by the gas mask, was barely audible under the wailing sirens.
Gower nodded. “She closed the shutdown valve and then stayed behind to make sure everyone left the plant. But the heat was too much for her. She needs a doctor!”
“So the plant is clear? You’re absolutely certain?”
“Aye, she said she checked every room. Now please, I must go!”
“What of the asylum?” Ariel turned and pointed in the direction of the old caves, although they were invisible in the fog. “Has it been cleared too?”