“Nervous?” she asked.
“Nah, I’m excited,” he said with a grin. “I was a really good go-cart racer back in the day. I’m looking forward to showing off my skills. “
Patel, Josephine, Leo, and the two police officers rode in Patel’s van ahead of them.
Soon, the skyscrapers of Yanloo City appeared in the distance. It looked more serene this time, as if the city was sleeping. On a smaller level the men within the city must have been groaning, nervous and wrecked, unaware of the civil war going on inside their bodies. And on the molecular level things were morphing, changing, mutating.
The van approached the wall and Leo got out to open the round, metal door with his key card. He stood there as both vehicles drove through. Up on top of the wall a man was hunched over, nearly unconscious.
“Look out for that guy,” Leo said to Kizzy as they drove past.
“Something is trying to control me,” the man said.
“We’re working on that, Joey.”
Leo got back into the van and they drove in through the canal yards. At the end of a square where the well that led down to Josephine’s lab sat, they came upon the concrete, defensive barricades the police must have set up in case the mutants came back. The van drove in between he concrete slabs no problem.
“This might be tight,” Murray said as he pulled up and promptly wedged the truck between the blocks.
The van ahead stopped and they all got out to stare at the wedged vehicle.
“This is embarrassing,” Murray said with a red face.
“Can you go backwards?” Leo asked.
Murray shifted it into reverse, but the truck was stuck fast.
“We don’t have time to deal with this,” Patel said, he turned to the two cops. “Rico, Sallah, help Murray get out. We’ve got to go.”
“Kizzy, hop in with us,” Leo said.
“Are you crazy?” Josephine said. “We can’t bring her in there.”
“I’d feel better with us watching her than leaving her out here,” Leo said, opening the car door.
“I’m coming,” Kizzy said.
Patel drove and Leo sat in the front seat with him. Kizzy and Josephine sat in the back seat.
They went through the city streets. Some men were already passed out on the ground, their skin white and their eyes black. Others were walking around, pale faced and miserable. As the car passed them they would feel at their ears and instinctively begin to follow after it. Soon there was a mob behind them.
Patel drove straight to the church. They turned the corner only to find a huge crowd of men waiting outside. They all turned their heads unison as the van pull up.
“That doesn’t make things very easy,” Leo said.
“Just the opposite, actually,” Patel said.
“Why are they doing here?” Josephine asked.
“They probably want to go in to pray,” Patel said.
A man slapped his hand on Patel’s window. “Help me, Doc, you gotta help me.” His hair had fallen out, his face was powder-white and the inside of his mouth was black.
“I’m trying,” Patel said as he got out of the car. “These men are still okay. Kizzy, might be better to come inside.”
Kizzy got out and followed him to the boarded up entrance of the church.
“What’s that noise?” a man asked, snapping his finger by his ears.
“You go in after them,” Josephine said to Leo, nudging him on the shoulder.
“What about you?” he asked.
“They’re not interested in me, remember?”
Patel pried the boards off the church and led Kizzy inside. The men flowed in after them and gathered in the entryway before filing in and sitting down in the pews.
“God, this place is a mess,” Patel said as they walked across the open floor.
It was covered in stained glass and crow feathers and droppings. There were even some brass robot parts scattered over the stones. Iris. Kizzy shuddered. It almost seemed as if some of the largest parts of her had been removed. Morrigan’s crow suit sat there on the floor among the pews. Evidently he had taken it off after he had fallen. The suit almost seemed to glow like a shiny object in Kizzy’s sight.
Patel led the way to the study. Kizzy pulled herself away from the suit and went after him. Leo followed and kept watch at the door. A man wearing baggy jeans and a t-shirt approached him.
“Hey man,” the man said; he sounded exhausted.
“Hey bud, how’s it going?” Leo asked.
“How is she making that noise?” the man asked.
“We don’t know.”
“It was all muffled when she was in the car, but now it’s almost deafening.” The man wailed and grabbed his head.
“Is it that loud?” Leo asked.
“No, it feels like somebody is trying to reach into my brain.”
Patel brought Kizzy to a large crate that sat at the back of the room behind the desk. They stepped over a pile of spilled papers on the floor. He broke the lock with a crowbar and pried the crate open.
“I used to come here a lot,” Patel said as he rummaged through the things. “We would drink scotch together with his body guard, Dennis. Nice British bloke. He couldn’t speak, he had his throat blown out in an accident. Morrigan learned sign language so that Dennis could talk to him. Hmmm. This is strange.”
“What?” asked Kizzy.
“Some things are missing. Somebody must have stolen some of the items he had in here.”
“Who would have done that?” Kizzy asked.
He looked back at the door. “I wouldn’t rule out Leo to be honest with you. He may have wanted to hide evidence. Or perhaps Josephine when she first came up from her lab. She’s a wild card, to be honest with you. She’s obsessed with her image, always has been. We just have to make sure she doesn’t sabotage this operation.”
Kizzy didn’t like the way he talked about them, they were her adoptive parents after all. She stayed quiet.
Patel continued to rummage through the crate. “I guess I have to just ignore it.”
“Leo,” said the man at the door. His voice was becoming deep and black goo dripped from his mouth. “Remember that time we drank all those beers up on top of the wall?”
“Boy do I!” Leo said with over-the-top enthusiasm. He turned to Kizzy and Patel. “Hurry up please!”
“Ah, here it is,” Patel said as he held the small disc drive up to the light.
It was so insignificant. How could something so small be so important?
They went back and pushed Leo forward out the door.
“Excuse us Russel,” Leo said. “It was nice catching up with you, but we’ve got to go.”
The man was nearly completely turned now, he covered his ears and looked to Kizzy with crazy eyes. “Quiet!” he screamed with a deeper voice than he had before.
“She’s not making any noise Russel,” Leo said.
“It’s coming from her,” the man said.
The men sitting in the pews began to stir and covered their ears.
Leo pulled Kizzy along and they ran through the church amidst the crowd of men who were quickly beginning to transform. Clicking noises came from their bodies and their spines and arms contorted in unnatural directions. These men were transforming instantly without the unconscious stage of the process. Patel picked up Morrigan’s crow suit as they left the building. Kizzy wondered for a second what he was up to.
Josephine sat worried in the front seat of the car, her hands on the wheel.
“Drive please!” Leo shouted as they hopped in. The snarling men barreled out of the church and Josephine drove off.
They rounded the corner and suddenly they were in the midst of hundreds and hundreds of pale-white mutated men moaning and staggering in the street. One pressed his hand to the glass of Leo’s window. “Help me...”
Another wasn’t so passive. “That noise!” he yelled as he charged forward with a long metal bar and smashed it into the windshield. T
he glass exploded into a thousand pieces on the dashboard and Leo’s lap. The men began to press in on the car.
“Just keep moving, Jo,” Leo said as he reached into the backseat for a duffel bag.
Josephine was visibly shaken. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. “There’s not so much room to drive.”
“That’s what I’m working on,” Leo said.
He rummaged through the SWAT bag and emerged with a canister of tear gas and a cannon with which to shoot it. He looked back in the bag and pulled out three gas masks.
The violence that the one mutant had shown began to incite the anger of the mutants all around them, and they began to grumble and growl, covering their ears to the sound that Kizzy was somehow producing. One must have kicked the back end of the car, because they were suddenly jerked to the right. Josephine adjusted the wheel and kept driving. Leo stared at the gas mask shortage in his hands. Another mutant slammed its body into the side of the car. Kizzy’s window cracked. The grumbling around them grew louder.
“Well... crap,” Leo said. He tossed two gas masks back to Kizzy and Patel, and put the other over Josephine’s head.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Giving us some driving room.”
Leo leaned up through the opened windshield and jammed the tear gas canister into a crevice where the hood had been bent. He pulled the pin. Thick yellow gas sprayed out before them.
“Get to the canal yards,” Leo said as he put his face down into his jacket. Kizzy leaned up to make sure he was alright. The gas stung his eyes, they were shut and tearing. Kizzy held his arm. Even from inside her mask, Kizzy could feel the stinging scent of the gas. Leo must have been dying. He began to cough and choke, but so did the mutants. They spread out away from the car and Josephine was able to drive out from the crowd.
Soon the canister emptied and Leo came out from his coat and gasped in deep breaths and coughed them out like crazy.
“You alright?” Josephine asked.
“Feels like acid in my lungs.”
Soon they came upon the meeting place in the square where the truck was still stuck in between the barricades. Still blocking the only way out. Unfortunately, there was no sign of Murray or the police officers.
“I’ll try and move it,” Leo said.
Kizzy shook off her mask, got out, and followed Leo to the truck.
A smoking projectile shot into the truck and exploded. The flames shot fifteen feet into the air and the truck was flipped over onto the hood of Patel’s van. The gas was pouring out from the engine.
“It’s going to blow!” Leo yelled.
Josephine and Patel climbed out from the van as both vehicles caught fire.
“Where did the shot come from?” Josephine yelled.
Instinctively Leo looked to the warehouses that surrounded them. Atop a nearby building two figures wrestled with each other over a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
“I think they had something to do with it.”
Kizzy looked in horror. One was Paige Palmer, the other was Diego.
Suddenly the mutants were upon them. One jumped at Kizzy. Josephine grabbed her and pulled her out of the way behind a concrete barrier.
“We have to take shelter!” Leo shouted, he fired a round from his gun at the mutant. “Get Kizzy out of here.”
Josephine grabbed Kizzy by the hand and took her to the well. She entered a code into a box in the pavement and a secret trap door in the ground opened to a long staircase leading down to her lab. Kizzy followed Josephine down, pausing for a moment to watch her father buy her time from the incoming mutants before descending.
Leo tossed Patel a gun.
Patel tossed it right back. “I have no idea how to use that.”
They hid behind one of the barricades as Leo fired, trying to slow the crowd that was barreling towards them.
The stream of mutants were uninterested in them and unlike before they weren’t responding to the gun fire. It was as if they felt no pain at all. They were truly in a mindless state, controlled by something else now. They flooded past them and towards the well, towards Kizzy.
The mutants went to the trap door and began to stomp on it, trying desperately to get to the sound that was driving them crazy. The hatch gave in and they were able to lift it open and flow down into the lab.
“Oh no,” Leo muttered.
He sprang to his feet and ran towards the well, his lungs still burning from the tear gas.
“Leo wait!” Patel screamed after him. “Don’t!”
But there was no stopping him, he had given up to much to stop now. 18 years of waiting for Josephine. 18 years lost with a daughter he didn’t know existed. He had sacrificed too much already. His survival didn’t mean a thing.
Fortunately the mutants weren’t bothering with the well that led down to the factory below. Leo ran and jumped over its wall and was sucked down into the darkness. He fell through the air and hit hard against the metal walls of the chute. There were no Enoch beans down there to break his fall. He held tightly to his gun and sat there for half a second wondering if he had just done something colossally stupid and would now be stuck down there forever. But thankfully the chute opened and he fell down into the unloading room. Josephine’s voice came over the intercom.
“Leo, come quick.”
The door to the main factory floor opened. Leo ran out onto the catwalk. The laboratory that was suspended above the center of the facility was surrounded by the mutants that were flowing down through the trap door. The creatures were tearing the outer wall from the structure. Robotic arms from the ceiling were desperately grabbing and tossing them away. Leo approached on a catwalk, hoping there would be some sort of opening in the mayhem. Suddenly, a mutant came rumbling down the catwalk towards him, its eyes dead and black, using its arm to run like a gorilla. It was headed for the lab, Leo just happened to be in the way. It raised its arms over its head in fists and was about to smash Leo through the grate when a robotic arm came and slapped it from the catwalk, sending it toppling down to the factory floor. Leo watched it fall then looked to the robotic arm.
The arm grabbed Leo and pulled him with reckless speed towards the lab. The wind blew in Leo’s face and it didn’t seem like the arm was going to stop. Had the computer mistaken him for a mutant and was planning on smashing him against the wall? At the last second an opening appeared in the side of the facility and the arm threw Leo inside. He tumbled in over the carpeted floor and crashed into a lab table, knocking glass bottles and a microscope onto the floor.
Josephine sat at the control panel, her face red. Half her attention on the controls for the arms, the other half looking back to make sure Leo was alright. Kizzy was at her side, guiding her on which mutants to grab next.
“We screwed up Leo,” she said. “Again.” She looked back at him, her forehead was furrowed and her brow sweaty. “I knew this was a mistake coming here. And now we’re going to die.”
“We don’t know that,” Leo said from his position on the floor.
A dozen snarling mutants scrambled to the hole he had just flown through.
Josephine pressed a button and the opening swiftly closed. “You think we’re getting out of here? This is all my fault.”
“You did all you could,” Leo said.
“How’s that supposed to make me feel better?”
“This was something unforeseeable.”
“The world was counting on me to foresee it.”
“We’ll fix it.”
“Two minutes estimated until structure breach,” the computer said.
“How?” Josephine screamed at Leo. “The lab’s about to be torn apart.”
“We can fight them off.”
“We can’t.”
“If these machines were running could we drown out some of the sound?” Kizzy asked.
“You’re brilliant,” Josephine said and pressed an audio recorder to Kizzy’s stomach.
“What are you doing?�
� Kizzy asked.
“Making a louder sound.”
She commanded one of the arms to come and fetch the recorder. The arm came in through the roof, took the device, and it brought it out through the factory. Josephine turned the audio way, way up on her computer. Kizzy couldn’t hear a thing, none of the humans could, but all the mutants in the factory were driven crazy by this noise. They began to follow the sound through the factory, tripping over themselves trying to destroy it.
Josephine typed in the commands to start the factory machinery. The machines, conveyor belts, and robotic arms whirred to life and some of the mutants were sucked into the processes.
“What are they doing?” Kizzy asked.
“I don’t quite understand it, but your fertile reproductive system made a sound they were compelled to hunt down and destroy. Here’s our window to escape.”
They ran from the lab and out on the catwalk towards the trap door leading up to the surface. The mutants paid no attention to them this time. They were on the trail of something bigger, louder, more disturbing. But one of the mutants climbed up the wall, jumped up, and caught the robotic arm, and was able to destroy the recorder.
“And there goes our window,” Leo said.
They continued up the stairs towards the surface. They came upon to a small landing, right beneath the torn-up secret door.
Some of the mutants had turned and began chasing after them, climbing up the walls of the factory to get to them. A few others stayed on the factory floor and began tearing up the electrical system. With the pieces out they began to reassemble them in a large unsightly pile on the floor.
“They’re reconstructing the reactor,” Josephine said in astonishment.
“Why would they do that?” Leo asked.
“They’re rigging it to blow,” Josephine said. She picked up her two-way. “Patel, the mutants are being controlled somehow, you should come and see this.”
“We don’t have time,” Leo said, trying to pull her along.
“It will be minutes before they climb up here,” she said, taking her phone and photographing the mutants down on the factory floor.
A white hand burst up through the grated catwalk.
The Enoch Plague (The Enoch Pill Book 2) Page 23