Eden Plague - Latest Edition

by David VanDyke

  He came around in a different environment completely, an IV in his arm and a feeling of well-being coursing through his body. He lifted his left hand. It looked thin, but not skeletal anymore. They must have fed me through the IV, or maybe stuck a feeding tube down my throat while I was sedated.

  This place looked more like a hospital room, though he noticed locked restraints on his legs. He also felt heavy, tired and a bit euphoric. Probably valium or some other kind of drug to keep me under control. It didn’t matter. It was out of his hands now. He had to just hope and pray that others could execute his plan. It was hard to be optimistic right now. He wondered how Elise and the rest were doing.

  ***

  Thirty-five minutes later, the major in charge of the Delta squadron reported the bunker was clear. “No one at all secured, though, sir,” he said to Jenkins, who slammed his console in frustration.

  “Drive us in there, now. I want to see this place. And tell the intel people to get in there immediately and start figuring out where they went!”

  The command truck lurched into motion, joining the convoy of military and government vehicles rolling into the complex. The cavern soon filled up with two dozen Humvees, trucks, vans, and Suburbans, parked haphazardly among the old five-ton trucks and ancient jeeps. Men in combat fatigues mingled with groups in biohazard suits. There were reports of a laboratory, and a body on ice, and they were taking no chances.

  As the last of the vehicles passed through the inner tunnel archway, they felt a shock go through the mountainside. A rolling wave of dust flowed out of the big tube, chasing the trucks, and the people inside moved en masse toward the personnel doors away from the cloud.

  “Don’t worry, the virus won’t let them kill us,” Jenkins said with a confidence he didn’t really feel.

  “Not on purpose,” muttered one of the techs.

  The executive stepped onto the back bumper of the command vehicle, looking around at the confusion. It quickly sorted itself out without his intervention. These people were professionals, and as soon as it was clear that the roof wasn’t coming down, they kept on with their business.

  Two minutes later, smoking a cigarette inside the nearest bunker office, Jenkins heard a series of smaller blasts. Immediately, the overhead sprinkler system burst forth with a fine rain of water.

  “Oh, come on.” He looked at his soaked cigarette, then threw it down. “Somebody get that turned off! We can’t work in this!” He ran back to the command vehicle, taking off his suit coat and grabbing some paper towels, drying off. “At least it will settle the dust.”

  He ran the sopping towels over his face, and then froze. Stared at the soggy mess in his hand like it was a snake getting ready to bite. “No…” he whispered, as he smelled the slightly sweet cloying odor that he knew from before, from the laboratory of INS, Inc. The odor of the virus breeder gel, generated by the decomposing unicellular organisms that had been burned out, used up by the turbocharged metabolism imposed by the Eden Plague.

  He slumped in the contoured seat. It was too late. There was no way he could get out – no way he could avoid the infection. There was only one thing he could do, and he had to do it right now, while his mind was still his own.

  Before his resolve failed.

  “Major, I need to see you in the command vehicle.”

  The Delta commander trotted up, wiping liquid off his face. “Sorry, sir. I was looking at this.” He held up a box full of papers.

  “Come in, Major. Shut the door. You guys, take a break. Go to the john or something.” The other three men left, giving them privacy.

  “What is that?”

  The major reached into the box, showing him a thick stack of waxy pieces of paper, the name of the world’s foremost private package company on the backs. “I think these are those things that are left after you put address and customs stickers on packages.”

  Jenkins stared at the scores of sheets in the man’s hand, the hundreds in the box, and he knew in that moment that they had already lost. They had failed, and he didn’t want to live in a world where he’d wrecked the train so badly; nor one where in a few hours his infected brain would be begging to please admit what a mistake he made, and ask forgiveness of someone; nor one where he would cheerfully give up all his enormous wealth and privilege so he could slave for the good of mankind.

  A world where he didn’t get to torture Daniel Markis, or even hate him for winning the game.

  “Major, I have some terrible news.” He stared at the man for a moment, until he had his full, weighty attention. “I have made a horrible mistake. This liquid dispensed out of the sprinklers is filled with the biological weapon. Everyone inside is now in the first stages of infection. If any one of us gets out of here, he could spread the disease, and millions will die. Our families will die. The United States might not survive it. We have only one choice.” He spoke the lie with complete conviction.

  The major licked his lips, wiping his mouth convulsively, eyes bulging. He took a deep breath, straightened up, and finally said, “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  “Not everyone will have the fortitude you do. Even if your men maintain discipline, some of the others won’t. So before we become incapacitated, your men must seal off all exits, permanently. Use explosives, collapse the tunnels.”

  “That will be easy. The terrorists already did most of it for us. That was the explosions you heard.”

  Jenkins sat back in relief. “Good. They did us a favor. They wanted us to think ourselves trapped and try to escape, not realizing that the sense of duty of good men like ourselves would keep us here anyway. We will maintain discipline and work as long as we can, and we will see if some miracle cure will come to us, but for now, just make sure no one leaves.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jenkins dismissed the major and then got out of the vehicle. The sprinkler system had run out of liquid. The air smelled like dirt and sweet cloying humidity, and the ground was covered with a thin layer of mud. His shoes made squelching sounds as he walked across to the armored sedan.

  A back door opened, and he slid inside next to the National Security Advisor. The man had an old-fashioned car-telephone handset pressed to his ear.

  “Yes, Mister President. One moment please sir. What is it?”

  “You have him on the line?”

  “Yes, the ultra-wideband repeaters we planted were able to find their way through the rock fall.”

  “Good,” Jenkins said. “Put us on speaker, please? Mister President, we have a situation.”

  Nineteen minutes later the first B2 Spirit stealth heavy bomber orbiting above them released its special payload. One minute later, a second one did so elsewhere.

  A new sun briefly blossomed in the West Virginia mountains. Then another, larger one in Los Angeles. The President came on nationwide television almost immediately, preempting all broadcast channels. He pronounced the falsehood easily in his smooth orator’s voice.

  “My fellow Americans: A few minutes ago, terrorists detonated an improvised nuclear device in Los Angeles, California, and another in rural West Virginia. They have attacked a cruise ship in the Atlantic ocean, and all aboard were lost. Hundreds of thousands of our countrymen are dead. There may be more attacks to come. Ladies and gentlemen, we must act now.”

  “Therefore, in consultation with, and with the full support and ratification of both houses of Congress, the United States is declared, as of this moment, under martial law.”

  ***

  Vinny Nguyen drove the old jeep through the West Virginia nighttime, northwestward toward Pittsburg, Cleveland, and eventually Canada, he hoped. He should meet up there with the rest of the community, who had filtered out of the bunker over the last week.

  He had dug his way through the last few feet of soft dirt after he had triggered the explosions that sealed Jenkins and his people in, and then wirelessly activated the modern electronic valves that flooded the complex with contaminated fluid. He smiled as he thought about
the trap he had lain, and the flawless way his systems functioned.

  At least he died happy as blackest night turned to atomic day.

  -27-

  The video went viral less than an hour after the nuclear explosions. Despite the best efforts of the National Security Agency, US Cyber Command and every other arm of the government, it was posted and reposted to servers all over the world, to social networking pages, to websites and just simply e-mailed to people everywhere.

  Daniel Markis’ face looked at the camera, calm and composed. He smiled briefly, looked down at his script, and then spoke in a strong, confident voice.

  Hello, my fellow homo sapiens. I’m Daniel J. Markis, and I’m here to tell you about a better world.

  But before that world arrives, there will be some problems. Your own governments and leaders will try to suppress this video and the knowledge in it. But it won’t work. Information wants to be free.

  Then they will try to suppress the miracles. But that won’t work either. The miracles have already been sent to too many places.

  You will have heard scattered reports by now of miraculous cures of terminal illnesses, in Central America and Mexico, in Los Angeles, in the US State of Georgia, in Bermuda and many other places. But the miracles are right next door to you now.

  Over one thousand packages have been sent by private service to hospitals in a thousand cities around the world. The greatest number were sent to places where poverty and disease is rampant – to places like Calcutta and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro and Cairo and Cape Town, as well as the great centers of civilization like New York and London and Paris and Moscow and Beijing.

  Each package contains a simple bottle of a miracle solution. Less than one milliliter of this liquid will cure anyone injected with it of almost any known disease. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just give that tiny amount to any patient, any person, with a terminal illness, anyone who volunteers. As far as I have been able to tell, it has almost a one hundred percent success rate.

  If you run out of the cure, then there is an easy solution. Anyone who has been cured already can pass the cure on through blood or saliva or any other bodily fluid. Once you are confident of its power, all you have to do is pass it on.

  If anyone tries to hoard the cure, don’t worry. Don’t do violence. Just seek someone out that has been cured, they can pass it on to you. Share a drink, or a mint. Kiss them if you know feel like it. If you are a medical professional, use a syringe or a swab or an inoculation gun. It doesn’t matter. And if it doesn’t work, try it again. Because miracles really do happen.

  Good night, good luck, and welcome to a better world.

  -28-

  Daniel woke up from the nightmare again, the nightmare where he could see the food behind the glass but couldn’t reach it. He stumbled over to the bathroom faucet, drinking cup after cup of water. His dinner was long gone and he couldn’t convince them that he needed more calories. Or maybe they wanted to study him in this state of starvation. He looked in the mirror, seeing a concentration camp victim already.

  They came in from time to time in their hazmat suits and took blood or saliva swabs. They did biopsies of his liver and other organs with painful needles; they cut him and watched him heal. Each time he spoke to them, calling them by name if he could, trying to make them see him as human. Eventually they put a leather gag on his mouth.

  The promised tortures hadn’t yet materialized; he suspected Jenkins had bigger fish to fry for a while. Daniel just had to make it through day to day.

  They had been kind enough, if that was the word, to re-break his bones and straighten him out. They used no anesthetic and they recorded the whole procedure, hooked him up to all sorts of electrodes and machines. At least they fed him then.

  He lay back down, but had a hard time sleeping. Because he was awake, through the thick walls he heard the rattles of bullets ricocheting like marbles in a bathtub, the muffled thuds, the thump of something hitting his locked door, the yelling and screaming faint through the soundproofing. He sat up in bed, waiting for whatever came.

  The door swung open abruptly, revealing a tall, thin figure, backlit so Daniel couldn’t see his face; but he knew the posture and the way of moving.

  “Have you come to kill me, Skull?”

  The cadaverous avenger stepped into the room but left the light off. An MP5 submachine-gun with a long suppressor rested in his hand.

  “I ought to. It’s your fault Zeke is dead.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If you’d just have gone with them, if you’d never run and asked for Zeke’s help, none of this would have happened.”

  “It’s because of me he was alive at all, if you want to trace a chain of causality. I put him back together on a Kandahar mountainside, and I killed fourteen Taliban at close range doing it. Maybe ten other guys in the world could have done that, and I paid for it later. I didn’t kill him, Skull. But if it eases your pain, then shoot me now. I’m ready.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you. I’d have done that back in the cave if I was going to. Do you have a death wish? Why are you even here? You could have just sent the stuff around the world and escaped. Why did you get yourself captured?”

  “Because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  He snorted in disbelief.

  “Okay, how’s this. Maybe I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Maybe I wanted to distract them from the real plan, let them think they’d won. Maybe I wanted to provoke them to rash action, which I did, God forgive me. Maybe I deserve to be punished; I did murder Jenkins, and I brought on the death of a couple hundred thousand Angelinos. Maybe the people that have been experimenting on me need to see the truth, despite the lies. Or maybe the world needs a martyr, a symbol to rally around.”

  “You really are full of yourself, aren’t you? God damn you and your martyrdom and your symbol and your sainthood,” he snarled. “What’s with people like you? You don’t live in the real world.”

  “I live in the world of ideas now, because that’s what changes worlds.”

  “Oh, you make me sick. Get up and come with me. I’m not going to let them win even if you want them to.”

  “The old me would tell you to go to hell, take that weapon from you and do what I promised the last time you had me at gunpoint. The new me…just says no. I'm not coming with you. The new me isn’t afraid anymore. It doesn’t mean I’m a saint. It just means I consider myself already dead, so you can’t scare me. Nobody can. And that scares you.”

  Skull cursed him then, words to wound and hurt, but Daniel was beyond the sticks and stones. He wished he could help Skull. He wished Skull would accept the gift, and surrender all that pain and hate and anger. But for some people, that pain and hate and anger is who they are, is all they are, and they can’t give that up.

  Skull turned and went away muttering and cursing, defeated by Daniel’s refusal to be intimidated. He didn’t kill him, so on some level he knew Daniel was right.

  He understood. He forgave. He was glad, because it meant Skull had a conscience after all.

  He was also glad Skull left the door open. Perhaps if he’d been stronger he could have stayed, but Daniel found that given the way out, and the cost of staying, he wasn’t strong enough to remain to be tortured and dissected. Maybe that’s what was supposed to happen. Maybe staying would be the coward’s way out after all. Maybe he had more work to do.

  He followed Skull out at a distance, past a sad trail of bodies. It grieved him to see Skull’s killing rage, but as someone had once told him, no man can live in another man’s heart.

  -29-

  Elise looked at her watch, dimly visible in the glow of the hangar’s Exit sign. She glanced for the dozenth time at David Markis. His rejuvenated body had settled in at its optimum physical age, and now he looked for all the world as if he was Daniel’s younger brother instead of his father. He shook his head at her, shrugged as if he knew what she was thinking.r />
  She paced up and down, exchanging quiet greetings with Larry and the dozen others that were still with them. She knew many of the Bunker group had simply flown to Buenos Aires on their own passports. Before he died, Vinny had confirmed that those were not on any watch lists, had not been connected with the fugitives. The rest, who might be taken into custody, were here waiting in a small airfield near Tucson, ready for David to fly them south to safety and freedom.

  A half hour later the elder Markis finally spoke up. “We can’t stay much longer. It’s almost dawn, and someone is going to notice us stealing this plane and call the authorities. And we don’t want to have to sneak across the border in daylight. I doubt the Air Force is going to respect Mexican sovereignty if they decide to shoot us down. We have to go.”

  Everyone was looking at her. As if I can decide this, she thought. But I am his wife. They want my blessing. They want me to let him go, to absolve them of responsibility. Well, all right. They may still make it. Two highly-trained men by themselves might be able to slip across the borders. These people here – civilians, women and children – I can’t risk their freedom for one man.

  Even if he is my husband, my heart, my life.

  She nodded to David. “You’re right. Come on, let’s go.”

  Immediately he clapped his hands. “All right, you heard the lady, load up.” The stairs were already down on the twin-engine turboprop and the people took their places quietly. Elise sat down in the frontmost passenger cabin seat. She ran her hand over the fabric of the cushion next to her, wishing things were different. Please, God, if you exist, please, bring him back to me.

  Larry hit the button that opened the hangar, then ran to shut the fuselage door and take the copilot position. Engines whined to life and David taxied out onto the ramp, turning eastward toward the downwind end of the runway.