by Rick Chesler
The president blinked at him. The room muttered to themselves. A few smirks.
Veronica came up behind Alex and whispered, “Should have just said Mad Cow.”
“It’s sort of like Mad Cow Disease,” Alex stammered. “But way freakin’ worse. It turns people ravenous, and mindless. I saw it. The Russians were first, and then anyone they attacked…bit, or even scratched…would turn as well. Fast.”
The president blinked at him. “You’re not kidding me?”
“No sir. My father.. .was infected.”
“And?”
“He shot himself in the head rather than let it take him over. He was one of the lucky ones.”
The president swallowed hard. Turned back to the screen. “And those things…those prions? They were in the lake?”
“In the lake, and in…some other things too.”
The president looked back, about to ask for clarification, but Veronica cut him off, pointing at the tracking display.
“The tanker—something’s happening!”
#
Most eyes were glued on the main screen, but the other displays revealed different angles: one from the deck of the Montana, showing a hazy twilight-sort of sky, with windswept clouds over the approaching armada, a ragtag assemblage of flatbed tankers, ice-chipping clippers and larger cruisers all bearing toward the destroyer.
“Engagement protocols active, sir,” said the chair of the Joint Chiefs. “Given the unresponsiveness of the entire fleet, their unmitigated attack posture toward an American defense vessel that has properly identified itself and issued warnings, we are in compliance with international law to eliminate them.”
The president lowered his head, nodding. “To say nothing of the fact that there is… I grudgingly have to admit…the serious likelihood of a biological weapon of mass destruction aboard those ships. Given that, we cannot in good conscience let them pass.”
The Commander-In-Chief sighed, glanced back to Alex and Veronica, then straightened up and gazed at the central screen: the destroyer squaring off against the closing armada. “Give the Montana clearance to open fire. Sink the lead ship and let’s see how the others react.”
The chair of the Joint Chiefs picked up a red telephone and gave the order.
Alex held his breath. Veronica moved closer and let her hand drift toward his, sure now that with everyone’s attention locked on the screens, no one would notice this one tender display. Their fingers touched, then interlaced briefly. Alex was about to look at her, to make eye contact and see if they could draw strength from each other.
This was it.
Sink the bastards, Alex thought. Drown them all at the bottom of the ocean where no salvage mission will ever reach. Blow them to pieces and—
“What the hell?”
The president flinched, as did half the room. The other half had their jaws open in disbelief.
“Situation report!” he shouted. “What is that, what are we seeing?”
Nesmith struggled to find his voice. “Sir, I…”
Alex’s blood went cold. Veronica was gripping his hand so tightly it hurt. “It’s…”
On the peripheral screens, with feeds from the Montana, a wicked silvery blur slid into view, something like an enormous tusk that reared out of the water then slammed down onto the deck amidst planes and men and turrets.
Three of the screens turned to static.
On the main monitor, the satellite transmission captured the impossible. The water erupted between the destroyer and the first tanker, and something rocketed upward with the force of a launching missile.
“Is that a whale?” someone asked, without any degree of certainty.
Alex squeezed Veronica’s fingers hard, then let go.
“I said, report!” the president yelled. “What’s happening? Why aren’t we firing on them?”
The commander barked into the phone, but just then his head turned and stared at the screen—at the whirling figure thrashing on the deck, snapping and whipping its tail and massive jaws. In the blur from the satellite feed, it was almost impossible to see with any degree of precision, but Alex thought he saw enough: the telltale massive sail on its back.
“That’s no whale. It’s a Spinosaurus.”
“What?”
“I saw that thing enough growing up with my dad, who kept correcting me when I insisted that a T.rex was the largest meat-eating dinosaur ever.” He swallowed hard and pointed with his free hand. “No, it was that thing.”
The room remained in mute, horrified shock, while the president stared at the images. The rest of the cameras went to snow after a chaotic sequence of rapid blurs, crashing water, shattered metal and a crewman’s mangled body tossed into the air—almost ripped in half. On the main screen, something like a giant lizard stood on the sinking, smoking ship and seemed to be digging into its metallic guts with its snout, all the while shaking its prehistoric head.
Then everything—the Montana’s remnants and its attacker alike—sunk beneath the waves.
“Holy shit.” The president looked back to Alex. “Perhaps you two better give us more detail on what really happened down there. And no more bullshit about proteins and microscopic bugs.”
Veronica swallowed hard but stepped forward, keeping her eyes on the screen, where the maritime convoy continued on, transporting a cargo more deadly than anyone had dreamed. “Sir…we thought…we thought wrong. We thought there were only a few of the creatures, but now…”
Alex completed the thought. “We’re all screwed if any of those ships reach land.”
4.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Headquarters, Atlanta—5:45 PM
Dr. Arcadia Grey fought off the urge to throw the package out, or to call the bomb squad or the hazmat team. Her slender hands trembled and she felt as if someone had just thrown her a ticking time bomb. Director of Pathogen Research for the CDC, she was the main line of defense for the agency charged with defending America against all manner of disease outbreaks, pandemics, epidemics, infections, plagues, scourges, contagions and weaponized biological threats. Right now, she wished she could be anywhere else, or anyone else. Someone who wouldn’t have to face this responsibility.
The parcel was addressed to her and wrapped tightly in a bubble wrap folder, but it was the return address that had made her wish she had never come in today.
A single letter—the letter D.
Dyson.
It had to be. That was the way Xander Dyson had always signed his correspondence to her, whether they were love letters, business propositions, or late night emails waxing about the nature of single-celled life and whether it sprouted consciousness or housed elements of a soul, Xander was always one for brevity in signing his name.
Or was it arrogance?
Arcadia didn’t know, but that was long ago. A relationship she had ended in what seemed like a prior lifetime, after she and Dyson had embarked on radically different paths. Both geniuses and leaders in their field, they were competitors who had become much more, and at one point Arcadia even had dreams of a family and a settled future.
But that was all shattered when Dyson took his genius and his theories and meshed them up into radical notions about genetic superiority and making the world a better place through targeted racial manipulation. Bio-engineered diseases that would only affect certain ethnic groups, things like that. He began associating with dangerous new friends and attracting the attention of people who could—and would— cause exactly the types of mass plagues and extinctions Arcadia was sworn to prevent.
She had risen to a senior rank at the CDC, her skill and promise noted by the current administration, and she had been rewarded with greater and greater responsibility.
Now this.
What to do with a package from a bio-terrorist who just happened to be her former lover—and who, by all accounts, died three months ago?
The only thing stopping her from calling the authorities and having the package checked
for suspicious materials—or burning it in the incinerator right now—was the recollection of something Xander had told her one night as they lay in his big bed, cocooned in silk sheets. He had said that she alone was the only person he trusted. The only one he would ever share vital secrets with, and if anything ever threatened her, he would ensure she had a way out. A failsafe, he kept calling it, but she knew what he meant: an antidote, or an immunization.
She knew he had been working on such things for all the wrong people. What if he had succeeded, and what if he then made good on his promise and sent her something before he died? Something that finally made its way here after…that island and whatever happened there?
She hefted the package, warning bells chiming in her brain even as she ignored them all.
She tore open the wrapping.
#
The gift—a thumb drive ensnared in gobs of bubble wrap—was in her computer, and the lone file in the only folder sat patiently as she hovered the mouse pointer over it.
What the hell is zrex_kilr.exe?
Having come this far and throwing caution to the wind, she clicked open the file.
What are you giving me, Xander?
Even as the outpouring of data, 3D models and cellular micrographs whipped across the screen, and more and more files were accessed, Arcadia knew her life was about to change forever.
She saw bits of protein strings whipping past her eyes, then flashes of still photos and video files depicting impossible things—things that could have been visuals out of a Hollywood make-up effects lab.
Unblinking, she took it all in, bombarded, mesmerized and overwhelmed, but her confusion and disbelief began to clear away as the scientific data began to roll out, reinforcing her deepest fears while presenting a compelling yet sobering scenario that quite possibly signaled a pandemic unlike anything humankind had experienced—far beyond Influenza outbreaks, Smallpox epidemics and the Black Plague.
She stared more intently at the data, and at the file directories, looking for the one that might represent the culmination of all this work. The antidote.
The ‘Z-rex Killer’.
As started to search, her screen flashed and a popup from the CDC alert center startled her.
Her adrenaline spiked and her skin broke out in goosebumps.
High Priority. Washington had just sent in the alert. The equivalent of DefCon-5 or Terror Threat Level Red.
Arcadia looked out her window at the sudden flood of activity—all her friends and coworkers had received the same alert and now scrambled to make calls and warn their constituents.
The CDC was now on high alert for an imminent biological terrorist event.
Meanwhile, she had quite possibly just been given a gift from a dead lover that held the key to a solution.
First, she needed to make a call. She had to let Washington know.
5.
Langley, Virginia
Alex paced the floor inside what felt more like an interrogation chamber than a waiting room. He imagined there were cameras behind the walls watching his every move, and half expected that when the doors opened, the water-boarding would begin. Or the men with the white coats would rush in to take him away after he continued ranting about dinosaurs and zombies and evil plans to annihilate civilization.
He was still somewhat in shock that a room full of some of the most powerful people on the planet actually seemed to believe what he and Veronica had described, but he supposed seeing was truly believing. Especially when seeing a prehistoric sea monster cut through a naval destroyer and a contingent of highly-trained soldiers in a matter of seconds.
Before Alex had been ushered out of the strategy room, he overheard Veronica and the advisors talking hurriedly about defense initiatives, about aircraft carrier repositioning, about sealing off borders and putting the nation on high alert.
Alex had tried to butt in and tell them to make sure they alerted nearby countries. The coastline of South America for one—Brazil, Peru—any number of highly-populated regions could be hit first, and Alex could only imagine how fast the zombie virus—or whatever they should technically be calling this scourge—would spread. He could envision them losing the entire southern continent and then trying to contain the damage by sealing off borders, but could that even work?
Even as he ran through the scenarios in his mind, feeling helpless like a toddler standing before a towering unstoppable tsunami, he thought for the first time in days about his mother.
He hadn’t heard from Elsa Ramirez in more than a week. After his return from Adranos Island and after the loss of his father just as they had been repairing old wounds, he had sought out his mom. Maybe it was the guilt finally settling in, or maybe it was just finally his maturity—or maybe it could have had something to do with surviving a string of brutal attacks from zombies and dinosaurs—that had given him new perspective. He had to reconcile with his mother too, while there was still time.
Veronica encouraged him, even insisted. Regret would be a lifelong scar on his soul if his mother passed before he could patch things up with her, before he could thank her for so many things, before he could share all that had happened with his father. Maybe, just maybe, his presence could even give her strength, help her beat the cancer.
So he had gone. It hadn’t been easy, seeing her like that after so many chemo treatments and multiple surgeries. Not after he had been gone so long, and after being such a distant, ungrateful son. Not after putting the concerns of exotic species and microscopic life forms over the lives of his family, but of course, his mother hadn’t seen it that way.
Surprisingly, and in a rush of emotion Alex hadn’t expected, she had been proud of him. Instead of his father’s initial shame and disappointment, Alex’s mother greeted him with open arms and brought him into her little two-room apartment where to his shock, he found himself surrounded by a veritable resume of his life: framed newspaper articles, his diploma, even media clippings about his eco-warrior convictions were on the walls in places of distinction, as if his mother had been proud of his every misstep and had celebrated his flaunting of authority.
“You acted and remained true to your values,” she had said as they sat and shared a cup of tea. “I didn’t like you taking chances with people’s safety, including your own, but you always did what you thought was right. That’s how I raised you, and you never, ever let me down.”
So floored by this, Alex could say nothing, but just wept and held his mother—bald and frail—and he wept even more, feeling her ribs and her brittle bones and knowing that he was going to be too late.
Far too late to this reunion, far too late to save her. Too late for anything but spending time with her, whatever time she had left. That at least was another value he honored, for her, breaking away only on rare occasions like today when his mission took him to the U.N. itself. Up until a few days ago, he had worked as much as he could behind the scenes, on calls and Skype and limiting face-to-face meetings to times when his mother had care or was in the hospital for overnight treatments.
Things had gotten progressively worse over the past few weeks, but surprisingly their relationship was the best it had ever been, at least as far back as he could remember, since when he was just a kid opening presents from Santa with his mom and dad, and everything was right in the snowy world.
Even Veronica had met her and spent some time—the three of them together, and sometimes Alex thought that without that experience, without Veronica living through it and seeing Alex’s growth and dedication and compassion, maybe they wouldn’t be together right now. Of course, he and Veronica hadn’t had a lot of time together either, but that would come soon enough, once more urgent matters were settled. Once the threat was passed.
Alex’s mother had been a priority, at least until today, until what just happened, but then—his phone rang and the caller ID showed him her name, and Alex’s heart leapt. She had gone for another treatment, something new her doctor had suggested. Alex didn’t
know the specifics, and was taken aback that she had only just sprung this information on him while he was on his way out the door to fly to Washington last night.
He hadn’t known where she was going, how she was getting there, or what was involved— whether it was a new procedure or drug or whatever.
So, dying to hear the details, he eagerly answered the phone.
He listened, his relief at hearing her voice turning to concern and then, crushing sadness and heartbreak as she told him the news.
#
Veronica found Alex in the waiting room, talking on his phone. His eyes brimmed with tears as he ended the call with a choked goodbye.
She said nothing, just searched his red-rimmed eyes as a lump lodged in her throat.
“How…how did it go?” he asked, wiping away a tear.
She shook her head. “You probably heard it all before you left. All the main stuff. We’re locking down the borders, putting the navy on alert, redirecting the satellites and trying to get other countries on board with shared surveillance and cooperation.”
“There’s a lot of ocean between here and there,” Alex said. “A lot of ports.”
“Yeah, but we have a head start.”
“You saw all those ships, Veronica. Only one needs to get through to a major city. Or even a minor one. Out of the thousands of ships docking every day, maybe tens of thousands. How can they stop them all?”
Veronica had to ask, and wanted to change the subject. “Was that your mom?”
His eyes fell.
“She…left the country three days ago.”
“What?”
“An experimental treatment in Grenada. She just called from there, where they tried some last ditch cryo-surgical procedure.”
“It didn’t work?”
Alex shook his head. “She…isn’t coming back.”
“Oh, Alex.” She went to him, slipped her arms around his neck and hugged him, just held him tight, feeling his chest tighten and his breath escape. “I’m sorry.”