The group gathered in the storeroom. Dusty, waning light filtered down through windows that were a good fifteen feet off the ground. They were also covered with metal grids.
Abigail, the Reverend, and Jessica got out the wind-up electric lanterns. Part of their responsibility was to keep them running by winding them up. They spent hours that day with them on their laps winding them. They were set out in a triangle on the concrete floor.
Troy stood guard while the two King brothers made a quick sweep of the kitchen area just beyond to check for Eaters and Poppers or anyone else deciding to hide or live in the building.
Alex watched the group. Everyone was obviously nervous. Even the child Dante was silent for once, just sniffing.
After ten agonizing minutes, the two brothers returned. Lindell stood inside the doorframe. He wore heavy black work boots with jeans and a thick black leather jacket. He rested his shotgun against the wall while he pulled off his woolen hat and scarf, and unzipped his jacket and removed it to reveal a black jumper. He shook the rain from his coat. It was cold riding on top of the container.
“The storeroom and kitchen are clear. There’s four doors leading off from the kitchen. They are all secure from our side. There are toilets on the right of the kitchen. I checked; they still flush. There must be a water tank on the roof that’s still holding water. But only flush if you take a shit, don’t waste water for a piss, just in case.”
Behind them, Cody flicked a switch. After a flicker, the strip lighting flashed on. The power was working for now. It could go off at any moment and return in minutes or not for days, if ever.
“We will set up an area around here, in the storeroom for sleeping. There will be shifts to keep watch. Terrance will tell you when you have a shift.” Troy stretched his neck to work the kinks out of it. He might have been sat down all day, but driving was no easy task.
“Once we are all settled,” Terrance said, “we will put together small groups to search the hotel from top to bottom, to look for any food, or anything useful, and arrange for someone to start preparing something to eat.”
“I will do that,” Abigail said with her arm raised as if she was at school again.
“Good.” Terrance looked around. “Naomi, you help her.”
Naomi gave a non-committal shrug of her large shoulders. She twiddled a metal stud in her nose.
Terrance noticed her fingernails were painted black, even though most of it was chipped off.
People started chatting and moving off to set up areas to place their belongings and lay out their sleeping bags.
Alex wandered over to a pallet that held large blue canvas bags. He looked inside one. It was full of clean bed linen.
“This is full of sheets if anyone wants to lay them under their sleeping bag, to make it more comfortable?” he announced. He then grabbed an armful and wandered to the nearest wall, while others started to help themselves. He dumped the pile of white sheets on the ground. Then he crumpled the blankets up, making a pile and laid his sleeping bag on top.
Everyone was exhausted, even though they had been confined to the container all day. However, most wouldn’t get the chance to sleep, not just yet. Things needed doing.
Terrance wandered over to Alex.
“Alex, you’re with me and Cody; we’re starting at the top of the hotel and working down to meet Lindell, Jessica, and Troy.” He nodded to say that’s it. “You need to be ready to go in five minutes.”
Alex leaned forward and slid his baseball bat from his backpack.
8
Doctor Bachman, Director Grant, and General Gordon
Government Biosciences facility
Groom Lake, Nevada
The doctor led them back out into the long concrete corridor and headed along its length. They passed other doors, but they were solid and gave no hint as to what was on the other side.
“What do you mean by pod?” the Director asked.
“It’s why the base was built here,” Bachman simply stated as they reached the end of the corridor. There was another elevator. Scanning his hand again, the doors slid open. The three started another descent.
“How deep are we?” the General asked.
“The main base is two hundred feet. The level we just left was three hundred. We are now descending to five hundred feet below the surface.
The Director removed his hankie and ran it over his forehead and top lip.
The lift settled into place. As the doors opened, it revealed a cavernous natural cave. Cool air rushed in, it tasted slightly of minerals. The ceiling was sixty feet high, with stalagmites hanging down up to fifteen feet long. The chamber was a hundred foot circular. The walls were chiseled to represent columns, seating, and a flat area. They were also completely covered in swirling patterns. What wasn’t covered in glyphs was carved in images depicting animals and humans, similar to the recent discovery in Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site at the top of a mountain ridge in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey. There was a waterfall in one corner, cascading down over the rocks and disappearing down a dark crevice, which filled the cave with a low humming sound, and a cloud of hanging mist.
Impressive as this ancient site was, it wasn’t what drew the two visitors attention. Smack in the middle of the cavern was a pulsating black pod that stood two meters tall and shaped like an egg. At its base are thick black roots that reached out across the floor like a crisscrossing spider’s web.
“What is that?” the Director said while pointing a finger at the black pod that rested behind a thick glass chamber. To the sides were workstations inside similar glass capsules. Scientists were busy on computers and stood next to machines on tables. They ignored the three people stood staring.
“That is one of seven pods that are distributed throughout our planet. One of them, the seventh, is what caused the outbreak.”
“My God!” the General whispered.
The Director stood with his hand held behind his back. He stared at the pulsating pod that was jet black with thick, slightly lighter veins stretched all over its surface.
“Explain,” the Director simply said.
“They are the worlds best kept secret,” he stated. He started reciting facts, as if there had been a sheet handed out, and he had memorized its contents.
“The first recent discovery of a pod was in 1898 in the fabled Shangri-La, high in the Tibetan Mountains. An English explorer working for the British Museum, called Clarkson, stumbled upon it.
“Clarkson didn’t know what it was, and luckily an avalanche hundreds of years prior had closed the valley off from the outside world. So when one of the sherpas touched the black, pulsating pod, and released the spores, it didn’t spread any further than the enclosed valley due to the strong wind currents, else history would have been written very differently. Actually, no it wouldn’t, we simply wouldn’t be here.
“An expedition was sent to discover what happened to Clarkson and his team the following season when they failed to return as planned.
“The British Museum had invested a lot of money in Clarkson, and they expected a return on that investment. They had just completed their White Wing a few year’s previous and needed exhibits to display.
“No one from the second group returned. Luckily, their location was left with a village elder down at the base of the valley in case of trouble. Not that he understood a word the explorers was saying, but they left a letter which was to be passed on to the next white person the elder met. When the second group vanished without a trace, at least their general location was known.
“A third team was sent, this time they were accompanied by a group of soldiers, in case the last two groups had been attacked by bandits. At the time, outsiders rarely visited what was then called Tibet.
“When the third group entered through the winding tunnels, out into the hidden valley only one soldier survived. As luck would have it, he was wearing a gasmask, due to suffering chest pains because of the high elevation. He
thought breathing through the mask would help his lungs. It saved his life, and he was able to return to sound the alarm.
“In the 1890s archeology was just gaining ground and becoming popular. That’s when references to other pods, from ancient texts and wall carvings started to make sense. The Egyptians painted images of a pod inside their temples and pyramids. The Mayans carved likenesses of it at Chichen Itza. It was also found referenced at Teotihuacán, in Mexico. At Angkor Wat in Cambodia. On one of the fifty tonne sarsen stones at Stonehenge. At the Puma Punku temple in Bolivia. In the Temple of Jupiter, in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. There is even a glyph of a pod in the Nazca Lines, in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. Even Babylonian stone tablets referenced it. And more recently at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. All the ancient civilizations seemed to know about the pods and inscribed or carved warnings for future generations. A warning for all mankind to heed.
“With this new information, it was later discovered, while excavations were carried out, that some of the ancient monolithic temples and pyramids were built over the pods to protect mankind and stop the spores from spreading. One is beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. The second is inside the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán in Mexico. The third is inside the temple at Angkor Wat in Cambodia. The fourth was discovered in a vast sealed temple cave in the Northwest Territories, near Great Bear Lake in Canada. We are standing in front of the fifth. It was discovered by a farmer digging for a freshwater well on July 2nd 1947. He stumbled on a collection of natural caves and found this chamber and pod. We have been studying it ever since.” He waited for the information to sink in.
“The ancient civilizations found four of the pods. Clarkson found the fifth. A farmer found the sixth. However, the ancient scripts and carvings described Seven Seeds of the Gods.
“The first registered reference to a pod was found in Sumer, an ancient Sumerian city. The Sumerian legend, The Epic of Gilgamesh, referenced one on a clay tablet.”
Bachman was surprised the Director hadn’t interrupted.
“Nebuchadnezzar wrote about the pods, calling them the Temples of the Seven Lights of the Earth.
“There were even references found in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 at Khirbet Qumran in the West Bank. The Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the seven original parchments, called them ‘Seeds of the Lord’. Other fragments, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean, written on parchments and papyrus and even engraved in bronze, also referenced the ‘Seeds’.
“Books that were not canonized into the Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Tobit, Wisdom of Sirach, Psalms 152, Jubilees and the Book of Enoch all referenced the ‘Seeds’ God had placed upon the earth.
“The Book of Enoch, sections obviously never released, even stated the ‘Great Flood of Gods Seeds’. This, some of our scholars believe is reference to the Great Flood, which wasn’t water, but a pandemic that wiped all living things off the face of the earth, apart from those inside the sealed Ark.
“The governments that knew the secret have had teams of specialist searching for the last pod for sixty-seven years. A group of nine loggers in a deep valley in Madagascar found it first.
“The rest, as they say, is history.”
“So we have known this was coming for over a hundred years?” the Director asked with his eyes locked on the pulsating pod.
“Yes. That’s why massive underground bunkers started appearing. The government used the Cold War as an excuse to create them.” Bachman was a little surprised Director Grant didn’t know all this; he was in charge of the CIA after all.
Then again, he reasoned; he was only given the position four days ago when the last director became infected. Maybe he has a lot of reading to catch up on.
But something in the Generals eyes hinted that he had known for a very long time. Politicians and Directors come and go, but military personnel stay the duration, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office. They are the real power behind the public figures.
“So if you have had this pod all that time, why hasn’t there been a blocker created already?” the Director asked.
“That would be impossible. After studying the six pods we know of, we found each is slightly different in genetic makeup. We concluded that the seventh would be likewise. If we had discovered the seventh pod before it was activated, then this would be a moot point. Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”
“So what choices do we have?” the Director said.
“That’s not for me to say. I’m just a biomedical scientist, that’s a little above my pay grade.”
“Has it always pulsated like that,” the General asked.
“No it hasn’t. It only started doing that after the seventh pod was activated. And yesterday it suddenly started sending out very low frequency pulses through the ground, similar to what our navy uses to communicate with submerged nuclear submarines.”
“So you’re telling me that thing is sentient?” the General stated.
“That we can’t say, but it seems to be sending out some kind of signal. Also, the other pods are doing the same.”
9
Alex, Terrance, and Cody
Top floor of the Marriott Hotel
New York City – Saddle Brook
Alex crouched behind the upturned table. They slowly moved up the stairs right to the top floor. The second group would start with the large conference rooms and restaurant on the ground floor.
Terrance led the way with the shotgun. Alex followed closely behind with his baseball bat. Cody gripped a long-handled axe.
As they entered the corridor on the top floor, they ducked down behind some upturned tables that had been tossed into the hallway. They crouched and listened for any movement.
The sound of the rain on the flat roof above echoed down the long corridor.
It was cold inside the hotel. Alex could see his breath billowing out in front of him.
Once they tried the fuse box in the kitchen the hotel lit up. Many light bulbs had blown when the power first went out.
Alex ran a hand over the smooth wood of the bat. Memories kicked in. The time he scored the winning run for his minor-league team, and how he looked up and his dad wasn’t even watching; he was chatting up a woman sat next to him on the bleachers.
He flicked to another memory holding a bat when he was nine. A baked desert stretched out before him, and his father was making out with his new girlfriend in the car, so Alex had to ‘disappear’ for a while. He wandered the scorching wasteland, wearing no hat or sun cream and no shoes on his feet. He remembered finding an old-looking gasmask. It looked alien, with its dirty cream material, and cracked lenses in its large round eyes, with the black cylinder at the bottom. He sat on his haunches and stared at it for five minutes. He then stood slowly, walked over, and beat it with his bat until the rest of the glass fell out, and the metal cylinder was all dented.
Alex was too young to remember his mother. She left and ran off with his uncle when he was only four. He had no real memory of her. A few images of her standing with the sun at her back, but he’s not sure if they’re real or his mind made them up to give him something to hold onto. He never heard from her again.
He was an only child, being raised by a sour man whose brother ran off with his wife. If his father wasn’t working in the fish market, he was in some dingy back room somewhere losing all his money at poker. He always said the next hand would be the one to change their lives, get them a nest egg. However, that hand never arrived; he just managed to dig a deeper hole each time.
Alex more or less raised himself. When he was ten, days would pass where he wouldn’t even see his father at all. He would still make his own lunch and go to school. Neighbors started to suspect he was left alone. Alex would start shouting, making out he was arguing with his father, just to make them think someone was with him.
By the time Alex was sixteen his father was a full-blown alcoholic and was living off welfare. Alex learned t
o keep away from him when he stumbled home. He was a nasty drunk.
In the evenings, Alex delivered pizzas to make some money for food. Repo men were always knocking on their door. They had called so many times; there was nothing of value left to take. It got to the point where his father would spend months at a time in prison to pay off his debts and Alex would go and stay with his aunt, who was just as unreliable and mean as her brother. His aunt Jolene and her four children by three different marriages would receive checks for looking after him. She spent the money on alcohol. At least her apartment had a TV, and his cousins were younger and smaller, so they didn’t pick on him.
Years went by with Alex struggling to feed himself, and get himself to school to get an education. Alex was saving up to move out, to find his own apartment.
On his eighteenth birthday, which his father had forgotten, he was no longer bound by his father’s authority. That evening he was going to inform his father about his plans. In the end, he didn’t need to. When he got home from a late shift, he found his father dead in his dirty chair. He fell unconscious from too many drinks and drowned on his own vomit.
On the table next to his body was a small, stale cupcake with a normal candle pushed into it. In the end, he remembered his only child’s birthday.
Alex couldn’t lie to himself and pretend to be sad. Now he didn’t have to move out, and all the debts died with his father. In one day, his whole life turned around.
“Alex?” Terrance said for the third time.
“Sorry?”
“Welcome back. Is everything okay?”
“Sorry, a little tired, that’s all.”
“Tell me about it. The sooner we get this done the quicker we can get some shuteye.
“Cody is going to stay here and watch our backs, while we make our way along the corridor, checking the rooms one at a time. I will go first with the shotgun; you watch my six.” Terrance readjusted the harness full of 12 bore shotgun cartridges that hung over his muscular shoulder.
The Sixth Extinction America Omnibus [Books 1-12] Page 5