A shrill scream penetrated the fog. From within the thick cloud, a crazed man, no more than twenty-years old and wielding a large fireman’s axe, sprinted toward the General and the pilot.
With his spare hand, Wiezorek pulled a P229 from the holster at the back of his combat pants. “Stop there, sir. If you come any closer, I will open fire!”
The man ignored him and screamed again, accelerating forward.
“I said stop, or I will open fire!” yelled the pilot.
The man didn’t need to be asked again. Two bullets quickly and powerfully punctured his chest and sent him veering off his trajectory, crashing into the side of a burning parked car. Wiezorek looked down at the smoking gun firmly gripped in the General’s hand.
“We don’t have time to fuck around.”
“No, sir. Of course.” The young pilot’s heart was thumping in his chest.
“Where is the transport?”
“It’s not here, sir. We will have to find another way.” Wiezorek scanned the area. This was ridiculous. How the hell were they going to get through the city? It was chaos. He sighed and raised his head to the sky. It hit him. “A chopper.”
“What?”
“A chopper!” he repeated. “There is a helipad on the roof of this hospital. If we can get to it, I can get us above all this shit and outta here, sir!”
“Do it, soldier.”
“Yes sir, but we will have to go back into the building. I won’t be able to lift you up the emergency ladder. We’ll have to take the central stairwell—can’t even chance using the elevator.”
“Agreed. Let’s move.”
“Yes, sir, but ...” He hesitated. “I’ll carry you. It’ll be faster.”
Benjamin nodded.
Wiezorek holstered his P229 and repositioned the General’s arm around his neck. Grunting, he lifted the man’s weight once again. The pilot shuffled through the swirling cloud of soot, ash, and smoke until he reached the double sliding doors of the emergency room. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Do it,” commanded the General.
As ordered, Wiezorek slipped the General from around his neck and, in one motion, placed his shoulder firmly in the man’s midriff and lifted. The General slid across the pilot’s shoulders, his right leg and right arm on either side of the pilot’s neck. Benjamin grabbed his own right leg to lock himself in place, brandishing the Glock in his left hand.
“Go!” the General ordered.
The pilot stomped into the open emergency room. He studied the color-coded map just inside the doorway, trying to memorize the route to the helipad. Up—he just had to go up. Scanning the room, then the map, then the room again, he identified the stairwell he needed. He shifted the General on his shoulders and marched as best he could toward the door. He pushed it open with his foot and peered upward through the stairwell. An intense heat rose through the concrete column. That couldn’t be good. They had to move quickly. He took a deep breath and began to climb. Each step was a greater effort than the last. His thigh muscles burned with lactic acid. At ten stories, he had to stop.
“C’mon soldier. You can do it. Move it, move it, move it!” It wasn’t much of an inspirational speech, but it was all he could think of.
The pilot gathered what energy he could and grabbed at the banister, hoisting himself up the stairs, one by one.
Somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, there was a scream from above him. Wiezorek searched through the intensifying smoke for the source. He couldn’t see anything, but it sounded close. He hacked a cough as ash particles worked their way into his lungs.
“What is it, soldier?”
“I’m not sure, sir.”
“Where the hell is everybody?”
“The hospital was ransacked, sir—desperate people searching for medication for whatever it is that has infected the area. I don’t think they found it. I think many made their way to a makeshift quarantine site set up in the downtown area. Perhaps—”
The pilot was cut short as something clanged and crashed down through the stairwell. A piece of the metal handrail hurtled past the men, followed by large chunks of brickwork that pummeled the stairway and exploded into a thousand fragments as they hit the ground below.
Wiezorek peered over the edge to examine the debris. As he pulled away from the edge, the limp form of a woman’s body smacked on the railings in front of him, spattering blood over his combat pants before she slid and fell down the central hollow. The pilot froze in shock and could only listen to the faint sound of her limbs slapping against the stairs and metal until a final thud signaled she had hit the bottom.
“You have to move, soldier. We don’t have any time.” Wiezorek nodded weakly and, again, repositioned the General on his aching shoulders. He had to keep moving.
At the twentieth floor, he found the broken stairs and railing that had come apart and crashed past them moments earlier. The woman must have leaned on it before the structure gave way. Perhaps she had been trying to make it to the chopper as well.
Carefully stepping past the gap in the concrete, the young pilot pushed through the doorway and immediately fell to his knees. The General slumped to the floor and rolled onto his back. Wiezorek, still trying to catch his breath, lifted his head from the tarmac. There it was—the Bell 412 Mercy Air helicopter—a seven-thousand pound, fifty-foot-long, blue and white angel. But someone was in it.
The young pilot mustered enough strength to sprint forward. He slammed at full pace into the door of the helicopter, seized the handle, and flung it open. A rotund man stared at him and then yelled in a language the pilot didn’t understand. For a brief moment, the General’s words rang in his head: no time to fuck around. Wiezorek pulled the trigger of his P229, pumping two rounds into the occupant’s right leg. The cockpit was sprayed with blood as the man’s thigh exploded, forcing his whole body through the open passenger door. No time to fuck around, but he couldn’t kill a defenseless man.
The pilot scanned the cockpit and the hold. It was now empty. He ran back to the General and lifted him onto his shoulder. He carried Benjamin the thirty feet to the helicopter and stuffed him unceremoniously into the passenger side, then slammed the door. He closed the hold and climbed into the cockpit where he froze for several seconds.
“Good job, soldier. Now let’s get the hell outta here.”
The young pilot nodded. “Yes, sir.”
They slipped on their headgear and watched the tarmac disappear as they lifted off the helipad. Buildings became smaller as the horizon grew larger. From east to west, Las Vegas was aflame. Destroyed buildings leaked streams of vigilantes and gangs into the alleys. From high up, they looked like angry ants—tiny and insignificant.
“Where now, Wiezorek?”
“Out to sea, sir. My last communication from your team was to take you to the docks in San Diego Military Port to rendezvous with a submarine, but I think we have to go straight out to sea. Chatter was you’re on the most wanted list now, sir.”
“Good job, soldier.”
“Ethan, sir. And no problem. Gotta stick together in these circumstances. Can only trust people in the field, sir. Those who are in the thick of it, as it were, sir.”
The General nodded. “How do you intend to get us into a submarine from this chopper?”
The pilot thought for a moment and then grinned. “Splash down, sir. Splash down.”
Benjamin shook his head.
Location: A remote village, Peru, South America
Kelly sat cross-legged and waist-deep in a mud puddle. Dirty, opaque water swirled around his bare knees. Under a bright but cloud-covered, gray sky, a warm drizzle speckled his naked torso and slicked his hair to his face. He heaved a sigh. How the hell had he gotten into this situation?
In the last couple of weeks, he’d been dragged to the South China Sea by a covert government outfit, lost his best friend, Chris, been shot, evaded a deadly virus that was still loose in California, and was now sitting
in a dirt puddle in Peru next to a giant salamander whose species, according to one crazy professor, brought humans into enlightenment thousands of years ago. Oh, and to boot, the salamander thing, K’in, had formed some kind of bond with Kelly he couldn’t shake—not that he was sure he wanted to.
Recently, Kelly had talked to the creature. He was a silent partner and a great listener. He would sit by the camp fire and talk for hours when everyone else had gone to bed. K’in would lie next to him in the moist ditch and appear to be attentive, staring back with empathetic eyes. One evening, Kelly had talked from dusk till dawn about his family. He’d even talked about his friend Victoria. So many people had died. It was too much to bear. But it had been cathartic to let out his emotions to someone, something, that couldn’t answer back. In fact, even the nightmares and horrific images of his dead wife and child that had plagued him for many years had inexplicably stopped.
A crack of thunder rolled through the sky, rumbling in Kelly’s chest. It broke his train of thought, jolting him back to the real world. He stood, allowing the brown liquid to drain from his knee-length cargo shorts. Kelly grabbed the bottom of one short leg and wrung out the water. Then the other. He wiped his torso down with both hands, swept his hair back over his head and away from his eyes, then trudged over to his little hut, patting K’in on the head as he passed.
The door was already open. Kelly stepped inside and allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkened room. Freya was on her hands and knees in the corner, the butt of a small flashlight in her mouth. She was examining a crumpled map that was sprawled out on the floor. Her hair was tied back in an efficient ponytail, and she was still wearing her black jungle gear—a far cry from the body-hugging outfits she had been wearing when they first met. Her porcelain face was even a little dirty. Kelly preferred Freya this way.
Suddenly aware she was not alone, Freya stopped her work and rocked back into a kneeling position. She looked up at Kelly. The bright light outside meant he appeared only as a large silhouette in the doorway—featureless. Still, she could feel warmth from his gaze. He had been very supportive this last week—talking with the village elder, figuring out what they had to do next, and helping her to map out their route to Egypt. She wasn’t accustomed to accepting help from anyone other than Benjamin. But when Kelly did it, it didn’t feel intrusive or chauvinistic.
“Hey. Raining?” Freya asked.
“About to start but not too heavy yet. We need to get moving soon. Gotta trek through the forest to get to the truck that can take us to Callao, and I really don’t want to do that in dark.”
“No, you’re right. I was just working on the map here as we don’t want to get lost.”
“Any news from the General?”
“Not since yesterday before he boarded the sub. It’s a good idea to keep communication to a minimum. I still can’t believe he was almost killed in the hospital.”
“Yeah, I was sorry to hear about the professor, though.” Kelly didn’t sound particularly sincere.
“I wasn’t that close with him, but it doesn’t help our situation very much. He held most of the knowledge in his head. I’m not sure what we’ll do if we find an orb.”
“When.”
“What?”
“When we find an orb. You said if. If isn’t an option.”
Kelly was right. Was she getting soft? She was distracted with concern for Benjamin. That was for sure. “Yes, when we find one.”
“Anyway,” he continued. “I’ve been thinking. I may know someone in Egypt who could help.”
Freya studied him. His tone was uneasy, and he lacked conviction. “Oh? Who?”
“Just a guy I’ve known for a long time. He’s a bit of a brainiac—knows a lot of stuff. I think he’s a professor of something or other.” Kelly shuffled on the spot.
“You think? Do you know this man or not?”
“Just believe me. He’ll know how to help.”
“And you trust him?”
“Trust is a strong word.”
“Who the hell is this person? Stop being evasive.”
“Just a guy. I know him, and he knows me. Leave the details to me, yeah?” Kelly turned to leave the hut but stalled at the opening, lost in his thoughts. Kelly wasn’t even sure if his friend would help. Not after everything that had happened. They hadn’t spoken in years. But what choice did he have? Given the situation, there was no other way. Kelly heaved a sigh.
“You okay?” Freya took a step toward him, an arm outstretched.
“Yeah, I was just thinking about ... about K’in,” he lied. “I don’t like your little plan with the General. I mean, handing over K’in to him and that walking fridge, Tremaine, to keep safe in the sub. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“You don’t need to worry.” Freya’s tone hardened. She pulled back her hand. “I trust Benjamin.”
Kelly eyed her. “You know, you’re the only person who calls him that instead of General. What is it between you two?”
“Nothing. I just trust him.” She jumped up and pretended to busy herself folding the map. She sensed Kelly staring at her. “What?” Freya asked.
“Nothing. Jeez, don’t get your panties in a bunch. Your nocturnal activities are none of my concern.” He turned and walked out of the hut towards his own dwelling.
Freya fumed. He could be such an asshole sometimes. If she told him, he’d feel stupid. But there was no point. She turned back to her map and stuffed it into a rucksack. Then, she slung the pack over her shoulder and marched out of the hut.
* * *
The sky was dull and gray, yet compared with the darkness of the little hut, it seemed eye-wateringly bright. It took a few moments for Freya to focus on her surroundings. She scanned the village center. K’in was sitting in his ditch, a group of children scooping up water with their hands and then dropping what hadn’t run through their fingers onto the creature’s back. A few adults were busying themselves with chores.
Then there was Kelly. He was talking with the village elder again. He’d been chatting away to the old man all week. She had tried to listen once or twice, but it had been no use. She could not understand a single word they said. She wasn’t even sure Kelly knew what he was saying when he spoke. He was so full of shit sometimes. But his confidence—or maybe overconfidence—was part of his charm. Her admiration for him hadn’t dwindled in the past few days, but she did feel she understood him better. He bulldozed his way through life, because he knew no other way. One evening, she had asked him if he had always been like that, even as a child. He had replied he didn’t remember being a child. But that was all he had said and quickly changed the subject.
Freya strolled over to the men, sauntered past K’in, whose gaze followed her path. She may have been wearing jungle boots and military gear, yet she couldn’t help swaying her hips. It just helped her feel a little more, well, her. She arrived at the tail end of their conversation, which was in pidgin Quechua. Kelly was frantically nodding and gesturing while speaking the odd string of words. The old man, patient as ever, was replying, speaking as slowly as he could. Sensing her approach, Kelly stopped talking.
“Don’t stop on my account.”
“We’re finished here anyway. He was just wishing us luck.” Kelly started walking away, his voice fading with his increasing distance. He turned his head back and whistled loudly. K’in sprang from his ditch and padded on all fours quickly past Freya to Kelly’s side.
Freya glanced backward to catch a final glimpse of the village. In a strange way, she was going to miss it. She turned her attention back to Kelly and K’in, shifting the backpack on her back to make it more comfortable. She jogged up beside them. “What was that word he kept using when talking to you? I heard it several times.”
“What word?” Kelly shrugged.
“Wa-kay-ro.”
“Oh, Huaquero. Yeah, my Quechua isn’t so good. But, if I remember rightly, it means ‘treasure hunter.’ In modern Spanish, it translates to ‘tomb robber.�
�� I guess you can take your pick.”
“Fitting. Interesting language, this Quechua.”
“Yeah, Izel thought so, too,” Kelly replied without looking at her. He then pulled on his backpack toggles to ensure a tight fit to his back and picked up pace, forcing Freya to quicken her step in order to keep up.
Location: CDC quarantine, San Francisco, California, USA
Jerry Caulfield. That is what was written on the chart. The doctor examined the corpse through the plastic shield that comprised the majority of the hood covering his head, part of an all-encompassing, entirely white, protective suit. The body was twisted and contorted in every direction, a frozen effigy of torture. The sockets were blackened and the skin was gray. The chest cavity was open where the autopsy had been performed, but no organs had been found, only a mixture of liquid tissue and tar-like congealed blood—the telltale sign of hemorrhagic viruses. This was the worst way to die—long and drawn out, the body not succumbing to the inevitable for hours. It turned the doctor’s stomach to see it.
The team had managed to transport the victim to the secure CDC facility, but it was no use. They had taken blood samples for analysis as fast as they could. There was no saving the man, but he could still provide them with answers. They at least knew he was patient zero.
The doctor turned away and walked across the hermetically sealed room to a large steel door. He pulled it open and stepped through into a smaller room, allowing the portal to close behind him. Immediately, he was bombarded with a fine mist, jet-powered through several hoses in the wall. He stood with his arms pointed directly upward and turned in a circle several times. The sanitation process was long and laborious but necessary.
Thirty minutes later, he was back in normal clothing: a pair of gray slacks, black shoes, and a badly pressed powder-blue shirt. He marched up the corridor, fighting with a sunflower-yellow tie that felt more like a noose around his neck. He pushed a set of heavy double doors open and entered the video conference room. The Colonel and the Secretary of State each filled a screen that projected their faces to be more than twice their actual size, giving them an even greater presence than normal. They were already mid-conversation.
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