Landon rolled toward the man’s feet as a spray of bullets sent chips of cement flying in every direction. The guard raised the still-firing rifle as he reached for the slash in his protective gear. The trajectory of the bullets rose with it, pounding Elaine Forster where she cowered near the bottom of the slide. Her torso exploded with crimson and she appeared to dance as she was lifted from her feet and tossed into the corner.
“Get up, Landon!” his father shouted.
The rifle fell from the man’s hands in his hurry to grab the torn fabric. His gloved hands fumbled to find the opposite edges and pinch them closed. His eyes grew wider still, and the expression of horror on his face only fueled Landon’s hatred for the man.
His father grabbed one of the man’s arms and wrenched it behind his back, while Ben did the same with the other. The guard continued to flail. His exertions knocked them all to the ground. He screamed and thrashed as the two did what they could to keep him down.
“Hurry up!” his father yelled.
Landon crawled over to the man and slipped his hand through the gash in the suit. He recalled his thought about how he would be able to kill the man with his bare hands as he smeared the blood over the man’s mouth and lips, over his nose, and in his eyes.
The man’s cries became shrill. He bucked the men off of him and scurried away. When he ran into the wall, he whirled to face them. Landon only caught a glimpse of the man’s blood- eclipsed eyes before dark fluid fired from the man’s mouth and covered the inside of the plastic shield. He toppled forward and lay prone on the floor, his legs kicking uselessly against the wall.
“We don’t have much time,” his father said.
Landon crawled over to where his father and Ben were already unlatching the man’s headgear.
“Clean off his mask, Landon! Hurry!”
Landon tugged off his sweat- and bloodstained scrub top and used it to clear the warm blood from the plastic shield while his father and Ben stripped the man out of the suit. Once he was down to the fatigues he wore underneath, they carried him to the nearest oven and dropped him on the track.
“Give me your hand!” His father dashed across the room to where he had dropped the sharpened hook of bone. “Hurry!”
Landon held out his right hand and looked away. Using a jagged sliver of bone, his father stabbed it into the muscle between his thumb and index finger and fished around until he was able to pry out what looked like a microchip of some kind. Landon pressed the wound to his stomach to try to slow the bleeding while he watched his father carve a hole in the dead soldier’s hand and implant the chip. The second he was done, he shoved the man into the furnace and threw the bone in after him. The man’s hair and fatigues caught fire immediately.
Landon rushed over to the man’s isolation suit and started putting it on. The white was marred with bloody handprints, but there was nothing any of them could do about that now. He could smell the sticky scent of all of the fresh blood as his father lowered the hood over his head. The cool oxygen blew into his face. His father took him by the shoulders and turned him so that their eyes met.
“You remember what I told you. Stay out of sight until you reach the nearest door, and then run for everything you’re worth.”
“What about you?” Landon cried.
“I will always love you, son.”
“I’m not going without—”
Hinges squealed as the door at the top of the stairs opened. Boots clomped on the wooden steps.
Ben grabbed the rifle from the floor and turned it toward the bottom of the staircase, where long shadows stretched down the risers and across the cement floor.
Landon’s father shoved him out of the way.
“All right,” a voice called down. “Who’s next?”
4:07 AM
The moment he saw the white suits, Ben opened fire. Wood splintered. Fragments exploded from the walls. Scarlet blossoms appeared on the lower legs of the men descending the stairs. They fell down the remaining steps and landed on the ground, their rifles already raised.
“Go!” his father shouted.
Landon sprinted past the fallen men toward the staircase as their rifles spat fire. He heard Ben cry out in pain behind him as bullets screamed past his head, striking the stairs and walls all around him. A man appeared in the open doorway above him, pointing his weapon straight at him. Landon threw himself to the ground as the man squeezed the trigger. He caught just a flash of the wounds opening up across the man’s thighs and lower abdomen before he fell down on top of him, still firing bullets into the walls and stairs as he tumbled down past him. Landon lunged forward and glanced back as he crossed the threshold into the hallway.
He saw his father standing there, looking back up at him. There were tears in his eyes.
“Don’t look back. Just run. You have to live.”
Landon heard the clamor of approaching footsteps and a confusion of voices. He committed the image to memory as he turned and ran into the hallway.
It was the last time he saw his dad.
5:37 AM
The following hour and a half passed in a haze. Pressing himself against doorways as white-clad men rushed down the hallways in the direction from which he’d come. A riot of gunfire and shouting, and then nothing but silence. Trying not to think about the implications of that silence as he stumbled through a maze of corridors, nearly blinded by tears. By the time he found the front doors and staggered out into the darkness, he was functioning on instinct alone. He only vaguely remembered dashing across the field toward his house, with every step expecting to feel the bullets tear into his back and hear the echo of the reports as he skidded face-first into the weeds. Barreling through the front door and climbing the stairs to his room. Stuffing clothes and his wallet and everything else he could fit into his backpack and barreling back down. Around the main level and down the stairs to the cellar. Through the door and the long underground tunnel. Running straight out of the gatehouse and splashing down into the river. Struggling to reach the other side and hauling himself up into the bushes on the opposite bank. Crossing the field to the tree line and vanishing into the dense forest.
From where he now stood, miles away and halfway up the adjacent mountain, he could see the blood-red stain of the rising sun over the foothills beyond the highway. The fringe of pines on top of them appeared to burn.
The isolation suit was now buried under as much dirt and detritus as he could hurriedly heap over it. He wore a T-shirt and jeans, yet still shivered violently from the river water and sweat that refused to dry. To the north, smoke filled the sky and crept up the slope of Mt. Frazier through the trees. The entire town was ablaze, from the cluster of buildings that made up downtown to those that spread out around it into the wilderness. He couldn’t see his house or the adjacent historical spa, but he was certain they burned as well. A line of olive-green vehicles filed out of town over the river toward the highway, where only a single interstate trucker cruised past. As he watched, they all turned right, but didn’t immediately accelerate. It was almost as though they all paused to take one final look at their handiwork.
A resounding explosion shook the earth and knocked him to his knees. Loud cracking sounds followed, slowly metamorphosing into a loud roar. He turned and looked uphill to the northwest. The entire crown of Mt. Frazier had broken free and now thundered down toward the town in an avalanche of boulders the size of cars. Mature trees collapsed before the onslaught. A cloud of dust joined the smoke as the wall of destruction swept over the town. He lost sight of the flames as bounding rocks filled the valley. He followed the leading edge toward the highway, where rocks hurtled down into the river and destroyed the off-ramps.
Slowly, the convoy on the highway picked up speed and continued traveling to the south until only the rising sun glinting from the windshields remained. And then there was nothing left of them at all.
Landon wiped the tears from his eyes and forced himself to look back toward Mineral Springs, the to
wn where both he and his father had been born, where he had lived every day of a life that was now over, where the incinerated corpse of the girl he had loved and sworn he would one day marry was buried under tons of rock.
He turned away and forced his legs to run again.
There was nothing left for him here.
As far as the world was concerned, Landon Crane was dead. The sooner he accepted that fact, the better. His father had given him the gift of life, and the only way to honor his sacrifice was to live it.
JULY 4, 2010
Mineral Springs, Colorado
Elevation: 8650
Population: 0
5:38 AM
Dr. James Stokes pulled his black Cherokee onto the shoulder and took several deep breaths before finally climbing out. The gravel crunched under his loafers as he walked around to the opposite side of the vehicle and leaned against the passenger door. His heart was beating so hard and fast that he had to concentrate on his breathing to keep from hyperventilating. He thought he had cried out all of his tears over the past nineteen years, but he was wrong. He thought he was prepared to come back here for the first time, as well. Apparently, no amount of time could heal the wounds that felt as fresh at this very moment as they had the day he ran away from the only home he had ever known so many years ago.
It had taken him nearly three days to reach Pine Springs. Three days of sneaking through the woods, often crawling through scrub oak and yuccas whenever he sighted the highway or heard an airplane or the thunder of chopper blades overhead. Three days of drinking from streams and subsisting on the rare pine nuts he was able to crack from the cones with his mostly useless hands. Three days of expecting men in white to come bursting through the foliage at any second, of reliving the fear and the horror and the pain and the loss. Three days of wishing more than anything that he had died with everyone he loved, but knowing that even such thoughts were a slap in the face of his father’s dying gift.
When he finally reached Pine Springs, he had cautiously made his way to the bus station, where he had purchased a copy of the Rocky Mountain News and a one-way ticket to Denver. He had read the articles about the natural disaster all the way there, careful not to let a single tear creep from his eye or do anything that might attract attention. The National Guard had been summoned, but by then it had been too late. All they were able to do was move around the boulders and extract the pulverized bodies from the ruins, most of them little more than powdered bone and liquefied flesh. No one was sure why the massive rock formation on top of Mt. Frazier had caved away and cascaded down the slope to bury the town, save for the speculation that the sound of the firework display the night before had threatened its stability. There was no mention of explosives of any kind. Nor was it reported that the corpses had been burned. Nothing had been written about the Historical Mineral Springs Spa or anything that might have been found inside of it. Not a single article even hinted at the military presence on the Fourth. The only fact that was stated with any sort of certainty was that there were no survivors.
He remembered tearing out the lead article, folding it, and shoving it in his pocket. That same yellowed piece of newsprint still resided in his wallet.
From Denver he had used the last of his money to purchase a transfer to Los Angeles, where he spent the next four years living essentially hand-to-mouth and working as day labor with crews of illegals, harvesting fields and performing all kinds of manual tasks, all the while fearing that should he ever show his driver’s license or social security card, the men in white would descend upon him and rectify their lone oversight. He was terrified to approach any of the newspapers or authorities. He could offer no proof of what had happened, and the moment they started making calls to verify the authenticity of his story, his death warrant would be signed. What little money he managed to save he invested in a pistol he could never summon the nerve to use on himself. It wasn’t until three weeks after his twenty-first birthday that he finally concocted a plan.
He had been living in a ramshackle hotel filled with vermin of all ilk that rented rooms by the week and didn’t ask any questions as long as he paid in cash. His neighbor had been a strung-out heroin addict who called himself “Tokes” and only left his foul-smelling room long enough to hit the Strip to score. They had spoken little in passing. All he knew about his rail-thin neighbor with the scarred arms was that he had taken to the streets at fifteen following the death of his parents and a string of abusive foster homes. On the night he had found the door of the room next to his standing ajar and entered to discover the pale body with the needle in its arm, he experienced another rebirth. The wallet on the nightstand had a California driver’s license, social security card, and a handful of credit cards that looked like they’d been used most recently to cut lines of powder.
The name on them was James Stokes.
After several years in a junior college, he had earned a scholarship to UC-Davis. From there he had devoted every waking moment to what he had come to think of as his mission. He had learned everything there was to know, from biology to virology, before finally earning his medical degree in immunology from the Stanford Medical School. Four more years as a resident, and he was finally ready to follow the path that had begun as a Fourth of July celebration in Acacia Park to its conclusion.
But there was one thing he needed to do first.
Stokes finally found the courage to raise his eyes and look across Mineral River. Cars zipped past on the highway behind him as he rubbed the object in the plastic bag in his pocket between his thumb and forefinger. He knew every one of its heart-shaped curves intimately. The rockslide was limned orangish-red by the rising sun. Pines and aspens grew from the gaps between the stones. Had he not known that the town had been there once upon a time, he might never have suspected. The city limits sign had come down, and the off-ramps had never been repaired. It was almost impossible to tell where they had been. All it looked like now was an abandoned old quarry. The cars whipping past on the highway didn’t even slow down. Not only had the town and everyone he loved ceased to exist…they had ceased to matter.
He glanced back over his shoulder to make sure there were no military-green vehicles converging upon him.
He was still scared. Terrified of the past and even more frightened of the future.
He pictured his father standing at the bottom of those basement stairs and the expression on his face as they said their silent goodbyes.
He imagined Penny smiling and blowing him a kiss, the love in her eyes as she stared up at him, the perspiration on her forehead glistening in the moonlight.
Dr. James Stokes turned away before the tears could form and climbed back into his car. He merged into traffic and followed the highway to I-70. From there, it was a straight shot to Washington, D.C.
TODAY
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Biodefense Office
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Headquarters
Nebraska Avenue Complex
Washington, D.C.
“Why do I want to work for the Department of Homeland Security?” Stokes repeats. “The answer is really quite simple.”
Dr. Hannon leans forward and steeples his fingers under his chin. Stokes can clearly see the curious, almost amused expression on the director’s face. And the crescent scar around his right eye.
Stokes’s heart skips a beat.
“Please elaborate, Dr. Stokes.”
That infernal expression never leaves Hannon’s face. Stokes remembers the same expression behind the plastic shield when the much younger man looked up at him from the body he was butchering.
Stokes stares down at the heart-shaped locket in his palm. He opens it and looks at the picture of two lovers holding each other as though their arms could protect them from the freight train of fate speeding toward them. The small picture is still dotted with Penny’s crusted blood, for this is the first time he’s opened it since he removed it from her neck. He holds it flat and raises it above the
level of the desk. He draws a deep breath, and blows across the picture. Particles of dried blood float into the air between them.
“I want to show you something,” Stokes says and slides the locket across the desk.
Hannon picks it up and tilts it to better see the picture.
“Her name was Penny Davis.”
“And I assume this is you with her.” He chuckles. “You had a lot more hair back then.”
“His name was Landon Crane.”
Stokes scrutinizes the man’s face for any reaction to the name and is rewarded with a subtle narrowing of the eyes.
Hannon looks up at him and smiles.
“Ah…the prodigal son returns. I never knew for sure, but I always suspected there was one that got away.” He cocks his head to the side like a vulture might. “You realize I can’t let that happen again. I push this button under my desk and you vanish again. Only this time, you don’t come back. So tell me, boy, what are you going to do now?”
“Nothing.” Stokes returns the man’s smile. “A better question would be…what have I already done?”
Hannon glances again at the open locket and then at the particles Stokes blew from it that swirl in the slanted light from the window like motes of dust.
He hurls the necklace across the room and nearly topples his chair in his hurry to back away.
“All of this time, I’ve been studying immunity,” Stokes says. He crosses one leg over the other and for the first time in as long as he can remember feels a sense of calmness wash over him. “It’s really a hard concept to pin down. What makes one person susceptible to a disease while another is totally unaffected? How can there be something inside someone that makes him immune to a contagion that wipes out ninety-seven percent of those around him?”
Immune Page 5