Mount Dragon

by Douglas Preston

  “But I have a headache now.”

  “Perhaps a half dose,” said the doctor, fumbling in his suitcase with gloved hands and administering the injection.

  “Just tell me, please, please, if I have it,” she pleaded.

  “Twenty-four more hours,” the doctor said. “Just one more day. You’re doing fine, Rosalind, you’re doing beautifully. As I told you, I’m not being given any more information than you are.”

  “You’re a liar,” Brandon-Smith snapped. “I want to talk to Brent.”

  “Relax. Nobody’s a liar. That’s just the stress speaking.”

  The doctor came over to Czerny, who presented the side of his suit in resigned anticipation of having his blood drawn.

  “Anything I can do for you, Roger?” the doctor asked.

  “No,” said Czerny. Even if he pushed past the doctor, he knew there were two of his fellow guards stationed directly outside the quarantine area.

  The doctor drew the blood and left. The blue light stopped blinking as the hatchway was sealed. Czerny went back to the Three Stooges, while Brandon-Smith lay down, falling at last into a fitful sleep. At eleven, Czerny turned off the lights.

  He awoke suddenly at two. Even though it was pitch black, he felt, with a shiver of horror, a presence hovering above his bed.

  “Who is it?” he cried, sitting up. He fumbled for the light, then dropped his arm again when he realized the form at the end of his bed was Brandon-Smith.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  She did not answer. Her large frame was trembling slightly.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “My right arm,” said Brandon-Smith.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s gone,” she said. “I woke up and it was gone.”

  In the dark, Czerny pawed at his sleeve, found the global emergency button and punched it savagely.

  Brandon-Smith took a small step forward, bumping his bedframe.

  “Get away from me!” Czerny shouted. He felt the bed vibrate.

  “Now my left arm’s going,” she whispered, her voice strangely slurred. Her whole body began to shake. “This is strange. There’s something crawling inside my head, like tapeworms.” She fell silent. The trembling continued.

  Czerny backed up against the wall. “Help me!” he cried into his intercom. “Somebody get the hell in here!”

  Two recessed bulbs in the ceiling snapped on, soaking the chamber in a dim crimson light.

  Suddenly Brandon-Smith screamed. “Where are you? I can’t see you! Please don’t leave me!”

  Over his intercom, Czerny heard a peculiar wet sound that was almost instantly smothered by the dying buzz of a short circuit. Looking up in sudden horror, he saw wrinkled gray brain matter thrusting against the inside glass of Brandon-Smith’s faceplate. And yet she remained standing for the longest time, still twitching, before she slowly began to topple forward onto his bed.

  PART TWO

  The horse barn stood at the edge of the perimeter fence, a modest metal building with six stalls. Four of the stalls held horses. It was an hour before dawn, and Venus, the morning star, shone brightly on the eastern horizon.

  Inside the barn, Carson watched the horses drowsing in their stalls, heads drooping. He whistled softly and the heads jerked upward, ears perked.

  “Which one of you ugly old cayuses wants to go for a ride?” he whispered. One horse nickered in return.

  He looked them over. They were a motley lot, obviously locally purchased, ranch rejects. A goose-rumped Appaloosa, two old quarterhorses, and one grade horse of indeterminate breeding. Muerto, Nye’s magnificent Medicine Hat paint gelding, was gone, apparently taken out by the Englishman on one of his mysterious rides even earlier that morning. Guess he’s had enough of the place, too, Carson thought. Though it seemed a strange time for the security director to be leaving the grounds. Carson, at least, had an excuse: the Level-5 facility was still closed, and would remain so until an OSHA inspector arrived the following day. Carson couldn’t work if he wanted to.

  But even if the Fever Tank had been open for business, there was no way Carson was working this day. He grimaced in the dark, overripe air of the stable. Just when he’d decided it was irrational to blame himself for Brandon-Smith’s accident, she’d died of exposure to X-FLU. Then Czerny had been removed in an ambulance, virus-free but incoherent. The entire Fever Tank had been decontaminated, then sealed. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and Carson had grown tired of waiting in the hushed, funereal atmosphere of the residency compound. He needed time to think about the X-FLU problem, to figure out what went wrong, and—perhaps most important—to recover his equilibrium. He knew no better tonic than a long ride on horseback.

  The grade horse caught Carson’s eye. He was a liver-colored bay with a head the size of a coffin. But he was young and tough-looking. He eyed Carson through a straggly lock of mane.

  Carson stepped inside the stall and ran his hand along the horse’s flank. The fur was tight and coarse, the skin tough as tripe. The horse didn’t jerk or tremble; he merely turned his head and smelled Carson’s shoulder. He had a calm, alert gleam in his eye that Carson liked.

  He picked up the front leg. The hooves were good although the shoeing job was abysmal. The horse stood calmly while Carson cleaned the hoof with a penknife. He dropped the leg and patted the horse on the neck.

  “You’re a damn fine horse,” Carson said, “but you sure are one ugly son of a bitch.”

  The horse nickered his appreciation.

  Carson eased a halter over the animal’s head and led him to a hitching post outside. It had been two years since he’d ridden, but already the old instincts were coming back. He went into the tack room and looked over Mount Dragon’s saddle collection. It was obvious that most of the other residents were uninterested in riding. One of the saddles had a broken tree; another was just a screwed-together affair that would probably disintegrate the moment the horse broke into a trot. There was one old Abiquiu saddle with a high cantle that might do. Carson picked it up, grabbed a blanket and pad, and carried everything out to the hitching post. He buckled on his old spurs, noting that during the years of disuse one of the rowels had broken.

  “What’s your name?” he murmured softly while brushing out the horse’s coat.

  The horse stood there in the gathering light, saying nothing.

  “Well then, I’m going to call you Roscoe.” He folded the blanket, placed it on the horse’s back, then added the pad and saddle. He looped the latigo through the rigging and tightened it, feeling the horse swell his belly with air in an attempt to trick Carson into leaving the cinch too loose.

  “You’re a rascal,” said Carson. He hitched the breast collar and loosely buckled the flank cinch. When the horse wasn’t paying attention he jabbed his knee in its belly and jerked the latigo tight. The horse flattened his ears.

  “Gotcha,” said Carson.

  The light was now brighter in the east, and Venus had grown pale, almost invisible. Carson tied on the saddlebags containing his lunch, looped a gallon canteen over the horn, and swung up into the saddle.

  No guard was on duty at the rear gate in the perimeter fence. Approaching the keypad, Carson leaned over and punched in the code, and the gate swung open.

  He trotted out into the desert and took a deep breath. After almost three weeks of incarceration inside the lab, he was finally free. Free of the claustrophobic Fever Tank, free of the horror of the last few days. Tomorrow, the OSHA inspector would arrive and the grind would begin again. Carson was determined to make this day count.

  Roscoe had a rough, fast trot. Carson turned the horse southward and rode toward the old Indian ruin that poked above the horizon, a few wrecked walls amid piles of rubble. He’d been a little curious since he’d first seen it from Singer’s window.

  He rode past at a distance. Most of the ruin was covered with windblown sand, but here and there he could make out the low outlines of collapsed walls and
small room blocks. It looked like many of the old ruins that had dotted the landscape of his youth. Soon, it was nothing but a diminishing point behind him.

  When he was several miles from the lab, Carson dropped the horse into a walk and looked around. Mount Dragon had shrunk to a white cluster to the north. The vegetation of the Jornada desert had changed subtly, and he found himself surrounded by creosotebush that marched toward the horizon with almost mathematical precision.

  He continued south again, enjoying the familiar rocking of the horse. A pronghorn antelope paused on a rise and looked in his direction. It was joined by another. Suddenly, as if on cue, they wheeled about and fled; they had caught his scent. He rode through a curious stand of soapweed yucca, looking uncannily like a crowd of bowing people, and he remembered a story passed down in his family about how Kit Carson and a wagon train had circled and fired at a group of hostiles for fifteen minutes before realizing they were shooting at just such a yucca grove.

  By noon, Carson reckoned he was about fifteen miles from Mount Dragon. He could just make out the cinder cone itself, a dark triangle on the northern horizon, but the laboratory had long sunk out of view. A low range of hills had appeared in the west, and he turned his horse toward them, eager to explore.

  He came to the edge of a vast lava flow, black jagged rubble piled on the desert floor, covered with blooming ocotillo. This, Carson knew, was part of the vast lava formation known as El Malpaís, the Bad Country, which covered hundreds of square miles of the Jornada desert. The western hills were closer now, and Carson could see that, much like Mount Dragon, they were a chain of dead cinder cones.

  Carson rode along the edge of the lava, winding in and out, following the irregular pattern of the flow. The lava had spread amoebalike across the desert, leaving a complicated maze of coves, islands, and lava caves.

  As Carson rode, he watched a summer thunderstorm rapidly build over the hills. A great thunderhead began to rear against the tropopause, its bottom as flat and dark as an anvil. He smelled a change in the air, a freshening of the breeze, bringing with it the smell of ozone. The spreading cloud covered the sun, and a cathedral-like hush fell on the landscape. In a few minutes the cloud was dropping a column of rain the color of blued steel. Carson urged Roscoe into a trot, scanning the edge of the lava, figuring he could weather the coming storm in one of the caves that were usually found at the edges of the flows.

  The column of rain thickened, and the wind began to push skeins of dust along the ground. Lightning flickered inside the cloud, the rumbling of thunder rolling across the desert like the sound of a distant battle. As the storm approached, a low moaning filled the air and the smell of wet sand and electricity became stronger.

  Carson rounded a point of lava and saw a promising-looking cave among the mounds of twisted basalt. He dismounted, removed his saddlebags, and tied Roscoe to a rock by his lead rope. He climbed over the lava to the cave entrance.

  The mouth was dark and cool, with a soft floor of windblown sand. He stepped inside just as the first heavy drops of rain slapped the ground. He could see Roscoe, on the long lead rope, turn his butt to the wind and hunker down. The saddle would get soaked. He should have brought it into the cave with him, but such a saddle didn’t deserve special treatment. He would oil it when he got back.

  The desert was suddenly engulfed in sheets of rain. The hills disappeared and the line of black lava faded into the gray torrent. Carson lay on his back in the dimness of the cave. His thoughts turned inevitably to Mount Dragon. Even here, he could not escape it. It still seemed unreal to him, this laboratory lost in the desert. And yet the death of Brandon-Smith was real enough. Once again, he tortured himself with the thought that if his genetic splicing had succeeded, she would be alive. In one sense, his overconfidence had killed her. Part of him realized this train of thought was irrational, and yet it kept returning to haunt him, again and again. He had done his best, he knew; Fillson’s and Brandon-Smith’s own inattention were responsible. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of guilt.

  He closed his eyes and forced himself to listen to the rain and wind. Finally, he sat up and stared out the cave opening. Roscoe stood silently, unafraid. He had seen it all before. Although Carson felt sorry for him, he knew it had been the lot of horses since time immemorial to stand in the rain while their masters took refuge in caves.

  He eased back and absentmindedly ran his hands through the sand on the cave floor, waiting for the storm to pass. His fingers closed over something cool and hard, and he pulled it from the sand. It was a spearpoint, made from gray chert, as light and balanced as a leaf. He remembered finding a similar arrowhead once, out riding the range. When he brought it home his great-uncle Charley had become very excited by the find, saying that it was a powerful sign of protection and that he should carry it always. His great-uncle had made him a buckskin medicine bag for the spearpoint; then he had chanted and sprinkled pollen over it. His father had been disgusted by the whole proceeding. Later, Carson had thrown away the bag and told his great-uncle he had lost it.

  He slid the spearpoint into his pocket, stood up, and walked to the cave entrance. Somehow, the find made him feel better. He would get through this; he would succeed in neutralizing X-FLU, if only to ensure that Brandon-Smith’s death had not been in vain.

  The storm eased, and Carson stepped out of the lava tube. Looking around, he saw a great double rainbow arching over the hills to the south. The sun began to break through the clouds. He collected Roscoe’s lead rope, patted him and apologized, then wiped the seat dry and remounted.

  Roscoe’s hooves sank into the wet sand as Carson nosed the horse once again in the direction of the hills. In minutes the heat returned, the desert began steaming, and he felt thirsty. Not wanting to exhaust his water supply, he dug into his pocket for a stick of gum.

  Topping a rise, he froze, the gum halfway to his mouth. Tracks crossed the sand directly before him: a mounted horse, showing evidence of the same poor shoeing job as Roscoe. The tracks were fresh, made after the rain.

  Popping the gum into his mouth, Carson followed. At the top of a second rise he saw, in the distance, the horse and rider posting between two cinder cones. He immediately recognized the absurd safari hat and dark suit. There was nothing absurd, however, about the way the man handled his horse. Pulling Roscoe below the rise, Carson dismounted and peered over the top.

  Nye was trotting at right angles to Carson, riding English. Suddenly he reined his horse to a stop and fished a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. He flattened it on the pommel and took out a sighting compass, orienting it on the paper and taking a bearing directly at the sun. He turned his horse ninety degrees, nudged him back into a trot, and soon disappeared behind the hills.

  Carson remounted, curious. Confident in his own tracking skills, he let Nye gain some distance before easing his horse forward.

  Nye was leaving a very peculiar trail. He rode in a straight line for a half mile, made another abrupt ninety-degree turn, rode another half mile, then continued the process, zigzagging across the desert in a checkerboard pattern. At each turn Carson could see, from the hoofprints in the sand, that Nye halted for a moment before continuing.

  Carson continued tracking, fascinated by the puzzle. What the hell was Nye doing? This was no pleasure ride. It was getting late; clearly, the man was planning to spend the night out here, in these godforsaken volcanic hills twenty miles from Mount Dragon.

  He dismounted again to examine the track. Nye was moving faster now, riding at a slow lope. He was riding a good horse, in better physical condition than Roscoe, and Carson realized he would not be able to follow indefinitely without exhausting his own horse. With a little exercise, Roscoe might be the equal of Nye’s mount, but he was “barn sour” and they were still many miles from the lab. Even if Carson turned back, he would not get back before midnight. It was time to give up the chase.

  He was preparing to mount when he heard a sharp voice behind him. Turning, he
saw Nye approaching.

  “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” the Englishman said.

  “Out for a ride, same as you,” Carson replied, hoping his voice didn’t betray his surprise. Nye had obviously noticed he was being followed and doubled back in a classic move, tracking the tracker.

  “You lying git, you were stalking me.”

  “I was curious—” Carson began.

  Nye moved his horse closer and with invisible knee pressure turned him expertly on the forehand, at the same time laying his right hand on the butt of a rifle sheathed beside the saddle.

  “A lie,” he hissed. “I know what you’re up to, Carson, don’t play stupid with me. If I ever catch you following me again I’ll kill you, you hear me? I’ll bury you out here, and no one will ever know what happened to your stinking pishogue of a carcass.”

  Carson quickly swung up on his horse. “Nobody talks to me that way,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to you any bloody way I like.” Nye began to slide the rifle out of its scabbard.

  Carson jabbed his horse in the flank and surged forward. Nye, taken off guard, jerked the rifle free and tried to swing it around. Roscoe slammed into Muerto and threw the security director sideways in the saddle; at the same instant, Carson dropped his reins and grabbed the barrel of the rifle with both hands, yanking it out of Nye’s grasp with a sharp downward tug.

  Keeping an eye on Nye, Carson opened the breech and removed the magazine, tossing it into the sand. Then he extracted the wad of gum from his mouth and jammed it deep into the chamber. He snapped the breech shut and winged the gun far down the hill.

  “Don’t ever unship a rifle in front of me again,” he said quietly.

  Nye sat on his horse, breathing hard, his face red. He moved toward the rifle but Carson spun his horse, blocking him.

  “For an Englishman, you’re a rude son of a bitch,” Carson said.

  “That’s a three-thousand-dollar rifle,” Nye replied.