“Are you sure?” She felt guilty taking up even this much of his time. She was worrying like a child. She should be better than that.
“Kara, I’ve always got time for you.”
Kara twisted her hair around her finger. “Are we dropping off all the civilians when we get to the United States?”
Dom smiled slightly, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You know what they say about loose lips...”
“What about us? Me and Sadie?”
There was a second of hesitation in her father’s reply. It might as well have been an hour of silence for the volumes it spoke.
“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?” Kara asked. She felt a storm of frustration and sadness at the possibility of being sent away, at being separated from her father.
“It’s a complicated situation,” Dom said. Kara could see in his steely expression that he wasn’t lying. “I’m worried about you and Sadie.”
“I don’t want to have to leave again.” She felt the heat rise to her face. But she understood where her father was coming from. If she had learned anything during her time on the Huntress, it was that her father’s burden was greater than she had ever realized. “But if you think that’s best, then I will.”
“Right now, we don’t know what’s best,” Dom said. “We’re sailing toward an unknown enemy. At least back in the States, you’d have the midshipmen and Shepherd. You’d have Kent Island.”
Kara said nothing. She was afraid if she opened her mouth, the words would come out in a blubbering mess. She simply nodded.
“I know you can take care of yourself, but Sadie would be safer there,” Dom said.
“You want me to keep an eye on her.”
“I do.” He reached out and put his hand over hers. “I don’t like the idea of letting you and your sister out of my sight. But I hope you understand what’s at stake. I would do anything to keep you girls safe. And I’m afraid that might mean you and Sadie need to be somewhere else.”
She did understand. She didn’t like it. But she understood.
“I’m sorry,” Dom said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet, but we’ve got to find someplace safe for you and your sister.”
Kara sensed an opening. “So maybe that doesn’t mean sending us back with Shepherd. Maybe Lajes is safe enough.” At least then there wouldn’t be half the world between her and her father.
When she had watched her mother turn into a Skull, the only thing that had helped her through it was knowing that her father was still out there. Her worst fear wasn’t leaving the Huntress. It was losing him. She wasn’t sure if she or Sadie could handle a world like this knowing their father was gone, too.
She started to work up the courage to say more. Before she could, Chao turned around from his station.
“Captain, we’ve got an emergency at the dive site.”
-10-
Andris liked eating fish. He did not, however, like for them to eat him.
Seafood was plentiful around Riga, the Latvian capital. He had grown up eating pike, salmon, and carp. Even now, he could recall the market’s fishy, oily odor when his mother would take him to gaze at the rows of red and silver creatures entombed in ice.
Yes, those were the good times. The times they could afford what his mother had affectionately called “good meat.”
He did not take those times for granted. But now he wondered if this wasn’t some kind of retribution for all those creatures he had devoured so greedily as a child.
He did everything he could not to panic. To panic was to commit suicide at these depths. All the same, he could not help the surge of adrenaline pummeling his heart.
The chopper shuddered as the fish threw itself at the cockpit again. It heaved its open mouth at the helicopter, its tail thrashing.
“Miguel,” Andris said as calmly as he could. “We have run into an obstacle. A fish is trying to eat us.”
“I’m not sure I understood that,” Miguel said. “Could you repeat?”
“A fish is trying to eat us,” Andris said.
“Okay, guess I did understand. What do you want me to do?”
“I am not sure yet,” Andris said, kicking away from the open cockpit and deeper into the fuselage. “But if we do not come to the surface, at least you know what has happened to us.”
“I’m not getting eaten by a goddamned fish,” Meredith said.
The giant fish thrashed against the cockpit. Glass splintered and fractured, smacked away by the giant fins. The fish was a good six or seven feet from tail to nose.
“This is no shark,” Andris said. “What is it?”
“A grouper,” Meredith said. “But they aren’t aggressive. It doesn’t make any sense.”
He saw Meredith check her gauges and looked at his own. It was almost time to switch to the next tank. The chopper rocked backward as the grouper attacked again.
Andris searched the cockpit for a weapon. There was a machine gun lying bent and broken next to a corpse. It would do no good down here as a firearm. Maybe as a spear, though. He kicked to move toward it and picked the weapon up.
Meredith’s flashlight beam played over the creature’s face. Andris’s blood ran colder than the water around him. He was no marine biologist, but the creature’s eyes didn’t look right. They glinted red. Bones in the grouper’s dorsal fins spiked out, and its pectoral fins looked almost like claws.
“This cannot be,” Andris said.
He thought of the Oni Agent expelled by the canister they’d already sent back up to the surface.
“Good god,” Meredith said, realizing the truth at the same moment as Andris.
Andris secured a lift bag to the last batch of electronics but did not release it. The creature would destroy all their work if he sent it up now. Worse yet, Andris figured the creature might just fit through the open side door in the cabin. The last thing he wanted was to fight a massive Oni Agent-infected fish.
“We have to leave,” Meredith said, motioning to her dive gauge. She was already on her second tank.
Andris sucked a shallow breath through his regulator. He didn’t need to look at his gauges to know it was time for him to switch, too. The giant grouper continued to bite and snap at them. As much as he wanted to leave now, they couldn’t allow it to infect other marine life.
You assume that more fish aren’t already infected, he thought.
“We must kill this fish first,” Andris said. He picked up the machine gun and swam toward the grouper’s open mouth. The beast threw itself against the chopper again and again. Andris thrust the machine gun into the maw. The fish bit down and shook its head. Blood flowed from its mouth and turned the surrounding water red.
Still the beast continued its assault, only now with a gun stabbed through the roof of its mouth.
“Other ideas?” Andris asked. He and Meredith searched the cockpit. The chopper shuddered again, and debris flaked from the ceiling. But there didn’t appear to be anything else they could use to joust with the monster. “Then we will send up the last bag. I will distract the fishy.”
Meredith looked at him as if to question his sanity.
“Hurry!” He grabbed the end of the machine gun and twisted it. The fish struggled as if it were caught on a hook. Andris wasn’t sure any human would have the strength to reel in a fish like this. He was not so macho as to think he could do it. The stock of the gun started to slip from his grip.
He tightened his fingers, muscles straining, and braced himself against the cockpit chairs. His oxygen was running out. If he didn’t conquer his foe soon, lack of air would conquer him.
The fish reared back and freed itself from the gun. More blood clouded the water around the creature. Andris braced for another assault from the possessed fish.
It never came.
After a moment, he shone his light into the darkness where the fish had been. There was nothing but silt and a cloud of rapidly dispersing blood.
“Meredith,” Andris called. “The fish is
gone.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He turned to see her let go of the lift bag. It drifted up from the side door and floated toward the surface. His muscles tensed. He half expected the grouper to come surging out of the darkness and tear into the lift bag, scattering all the wreckage they had scavenged.
It didn’t. Instead, the beast’s face appeared in the open side door. Its huge mouth clamped onto Meredith’s leg. Her fingers splayed as she struggled to find something, anything to hold onto inside the chopper. But she found no purchase.
Andris launched forward and grabbed her arm. He spread his legs, shoving his finned feet against the bulkhead and pulling back on Meredith’s wrist.
The creature was so strong. He could feel his gloved fingers slowly sliding up her wetsuit.
If Dom saw me embracing his woman like this, Andris thought, I would have some explaining to do.
Meredith’s free hand shot toward her thigh. She pulled her dive knife from its sheath and stabbed toward the grouper. But with Andris holding her, she couldn’t reach it.
“Let go,” she said.
“No!” Andris cried. The last time he had gone along with someone else’s plan, Terrence had had his legs blown off. He wouldn’t let Meredith lose her limbs or her life trying to prove her bravado to him.
“Damn it,” Meredith said. “Let go now.”
“If I let go, you will be pulled into the darkness,” he said.
“Andris, trust me.”
He had let one of his comrades go once already today. He wouldn’t let another slip away. There had to be another way.
Meredith was strong. Capable. He had seen her pull through worse situations. But if he remembered anything from dive training with the French Foreign Legion, it was the absolute adherence to the so-called buddy system. To lose your buddy underwater was akin to cutting off your own limb. You did not dive solo, and you did not let your buddy go.
That fish did not make a good dive buddy. He would not let it take Meredith away.
Meredith slashed, cutting at its snout. Each slash and stab seemed to do nothing more than enrage the monster. One little knife was not enough against the massive grouper.
Then he spied the extra tank they’d used to fill the lift bags. It still had some air in it.
Andris pulled Meredith toward him. She tightened one hand on the bulkhead.
“Both hands,” Andris said. “Trust me, Meredith.”
She let go of the knife and grabbed the lip of the side door.
He grabbed the air tank and slammed it into the grouper’s face. The monster’s jaw loosened, and he shoved the tank between its teeth. Then he opened the valve. The jetting air thrust the tank farther into the fish’s throat, and Meredith was able to withdraw her leg from its mouth. Holes in her wetsuit revealed lacerated flesh, but at least she could still swim.
The fish twisted and thrashed, struggling to expel the tank. Meredith lashed out with the knife over and over, cutting into the confused monster’s face. Andris took out his own dive knife and joined her. Under their assault, its thrashing slowed. Its eyes were a mess of bloodied tissue, and soon it tilted on its side. The last bubbles of the air tank filtered out.
The fish was dead. Andris checked his gauges. His second tank was almost dead, too.
It was time to head to the surface. They had no other choice. Together, they slowly ascended, careful not to push the limits of decompression.
All the while, Andris’s eyes swept the waters below and above them. There was no telling how many other animals had been infected. It was bad enough to face Skulls on land. But worrying about monsters on land, sea, and air was not something Andris had looked forward to.
***
Lauren held the small device in the palm of her hand. All that work, all that tension, just to remove this tiny thing. As Dom had predicted, it was about the size of a house key. Except instead of just an antenna, battery, and GPS transmitter, there seemed to be something else. Lauren was no tech, but she could tell this device was more than a GPS tracker. Two probes hung from the device. It reminded her of a responsive neurostimulation device—the kind of implant used to help regulate epileptic seizures.
Matsumoto had survived the device extraction. A strange thing seemed to have happened after the surgery. His breathing and pulse recovered, more in line with a healthy individual. He no longer seemed to be teetering on the brink of death.
Lauren suspected the implant had something to do with it. She had heard the stories Dom and the Hunters had brought back from the Congo about the Titans. The militia had found neurological implants in the Titans, though at the time they didn’t know the purpose of the devices. Samantha and Chao’s research had shown that the FGL was trying to develop a method to control the Titans and, through them, the Skulls. Perhaps this device was similar.
She wouldn’t know for sure until Samantha and Chao inspected it. There was a high chance that even with their technological prowess, they wouldn’t be able to tell what the device’s purpose was. It was sophisticated hardware, unlike anything she’d ever seen. Still, any intel they gathered from it at that point would be an unexpected and welcome benefit.
Lauren cleaned the implant thoroughly and deposited it on one of their workbenches. “We need to get the GPS tracking component out of here immediately.”
“On it,” Samantha said, striding over. She reached to pick up the device then stopped. “You did disinfect this after pulling it out of the old guy, didn’t you?”
Lauren raised a brow.
“Just checking!”
“You’re the last person I would expect to be worried about that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Samantha asked.
“You’re going to let a little blood turn you off from what could be a tremendous feat of electric engineering?”
“I don’t know what’s in that bastard’s blood.”
“Don’t worry,” Lauren said, prodding the device. “It’s clean now.”
Lauren left Samantha to work on the device.
With Terrence and Matsumoto both recovering from surgery, it was time to get back to research. Meredith and Andris had returned from their adventure at the helicopter crash site. From what she had heard, it hadn’t gone quite as expected. The thought of more creatures out there with the Oni Agent, especially in Earth’s oceans and rivers and lakes, made her shiver. Cleaning up after this pandemic was going to be far more difficult than any of them had realized.
Divya and Sean were already in full CBRN suits inside the BSL-4 section of the laboratory. They deposited samples of the residue they’d recovered from inside the keg-like tank into plastic vials for chromatographic analysis. Another set of samples was also running through a genome-sequencing machine.
Peter watched them from outside the lab. “What’s your prediction, Dr. Winters?”
“This must be some variant strain of the Oni Agent,” Lauren said. “It’s got to be.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it is something even worse than the Oni Agent.”
“Always the pessimist.”
“I prefer to be called a realist.”
Lauren hoped Peter was wrong. If the Forces of Global Liberation had developed an entirely new bioweapon, then they were going to have to start from square one.
“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this,” Lauren said, “but I hope it is just a strain of the Oni Agent and not something else.”
“If we unintentionally created an airborne strain, I have no doubt the FGL could’ve created something even nastier on purpose.”
“This nanobacteria evolves and adapts so quickly. I don’t know how long we can keep up. What do we do when the Oni Agent has evolved to the point where the Phoenix Compound is no longer effective?”
“Now who is the pessimist?”
“Caught me,” Lauren said. “But given what Meredith and Andris saw, the Oni Agent is out of control. Affecting fish? I mean, damn, that is insane, even for
a typical zoonotic disease. Primates back in the Congo, I could see. But fish?”
Peter scratched at the stubble along his chin. “Maybe that’s just a facet of the nanobacteria. It can survive in anything with bones or cartilage. It thrives in a calcified environment.”
“So the Oni Agent has effectively turned the world against us,” Lauren said.
“You don’t think that fish was affected by the airborne agent the chopper tried to drop on us, do you?”
“No, everything Andris and Meredith described pointed to an animal that had been affected by the Agent for a while. For all we know, it scavenged on a dead Skull weeks ago.”
Peter frowned. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen more animals affected by the Agent.”
Lauren considered that for a moment. The idea that something humans had created would pervert not just their own biology, but that of all living creatures was against everything she believed as a scientist and healer. Even if they did save humanity, what would be left of the world? How deep did this destruction go?
“I’m not sure,” Lauren said. “Animals have evolved all kinds of mechanisms for survival. Nature is a constant war. A few Oni Agent-infected predators would be nothing more than hyper-aggressive representatives of their species. Other animals are used to being chased. They’re used to hiding and fighting. So in a way, the Oni Agent is nothing nature hasn’t thrown at them before.
“But we’re used to being apex predators, top of the food chain. Except we’re not at the top anymore. This game’s new for us, but not for the creatures already engaged in a daily struggle for survival.”
Peter stepped back, his eyes tracing Divya and Sean. His face was pale and drawn, and his expression looked haunted. Working in the lab, he and all the others were well aware the scientific challenges the Oni Agent posed. They treated patients on a case-by-case basis, and they performed computer simulations. But they barely spent any time off the ship. What they knew of this new world came from Dom and the Hunters’ stories, video and audio feeds, and data reports. They weren’t running for their lives from acid-spitting Droolers or avoiding the raking claws of an enormous Goliath.
The Tide: Dead Ashore (Tide Series Book 6) Page 10