by Rick Chesler
“I have to go,” he whispered.
“No…”
“I need to be with her. At the end. She’s completely alone. She needs me.”
Veronica pulled back, stared into his eyes. “If you go, you may not be able to get back in. For I don’t know how long.”
“I know. But maybe…”
“Maybe you’re better off there. Safe,” Veronica said, nodding as if the debate was over. “Go, and let all this settle. We’ll stop DeKirk and whatever he’s got planned, and in the meantime, you’ll be isolated there, away from any contagion, away from…”
“Dinosaurs and zombies who will be coming to devour the woman I love?”
She swallowed. “I love you too, but you’re not part of this fight anymore.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“Way above your pay grade, sport.”
“Really? I’m more experienced than any soldier you’ve got at taking out crylopholosaurs with a helicopter rotor.”
She pulled away, and then held his hands. “I’ll grant you that, but if they get that far again that you need to use such creative methods of dispatch, it’ll already be too late. We have to stop them before they make landfall.”
“We?” He searched her eyes. “I knew they’d want you, but can’t you step away, too? Come with me, be safe and we’ll wait it out, or consult with your bosses long distance. What does it matter if you’re there in person?”
“Alex. I need to be here. DeKirk was my mission. This…this is all mine, no one has the expertise or knowledge base that I do.”
“High on yourself much?”
“I’m not kidding. It’s too late in the game to debrief anyone else. I need to be here at the heart of it all if there’s any chance of tracking DeKirk and ending this before it gets any worse.”
Alex sighed, and Veronica could see the acceptance in his eyes. He knew she was right.
“Go,” she repeated. “Be with your mother, kiss her and give her my love, and… God, I don’t know what to say at this point.”
“You’ve said and done so much already,” Alex said. “She loves you too, like the daughter she wishes I had been.” He gave an emotional laugh. “I…”
Veronica leaned and stood on her toes, giving him a big kiss. “Get to the airport. I’ll send clearance and reserve a plane for you. I’m assuming you can mark and track your own flight plan.”
He nodded.
“Good, because we may need all the other pilots we can get.”
“That’s why I think I should stay,” Alex said. “Or at least, can I come back and help out after…?”
He let that trail off, and Veronica shrugged. “Maybe, and yes you’re right, we may need you. Stay close to a phone and be safe.”
“You too.” He pulled her to him and hugged her close, feeling as if it might be the last time.
6.
Underground Bunker—Location Secret
As he was prone to do of late, William DeKirk sat alone in the dark. The shadows and the lack of background illumination served to highlight the focus and reality of what he surveyed on the dozen or so screens on the wall in front of him, and the two more on his desk. A bank of servers and land-based phones occupied an alcove to his right while a great steel door stood guard at his back, behind a long conference table. Literal flesh and bone guards barred the entrance on the other side, but inside this room, he was truly by himself.
He knew he wouldn’t be alone for much longer, so he planned to enjoy his last day of secrecy, seclusion and virtual anonymity, savoring every minute before the final thrust of his plan began.
Checking the status of his secure communications arrays and internet pathways—a tangled and complex routing of multiple hubs and locations, all built out from this site and expanded across far-flung geographic zones without anyone being the wiser—he smiled to himself.
This had been decades in coming, and his plan had always had just one blind spot. Actually not so much as a blind spot as what he liked to call a confident future opportunity. One he had been sure would present itself when he needed it. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have a small army of bio-engineers, researchers and doctors all working on various pieces of a puzzle only he could see in its entirety. All he needed was for one of them to come up with the silver bullet—the ultimate weapon he would unleash to bring the world to its knees and allow him to step in and take control. There had been many other potential superbugs—viruses he could have tried, ways to an end—but he was ever the perfectionist, and decided to wait until just the right tool came along.
He was that confident in himself and his destiny, never doubting that he would find a way, and that when he needed it, a solution would present itself. All he had to do was nudge it along and make sure he was ready to act when he saw it.
Antarctica was the silver bullet, and what a bullet!
He still couldn’t believe how perfect it all turned out. Flexing his right arm, he felt the flesh tighten, the muscle ripple. Felt the blood in his veins, cool and yet seething with energized power, and he shuddered. Giddy with the energy coursing through his body, he fit his right wrist into a device like a blood pressure cuff on his desk. Except this one punctured his skin in three places and took readings, feeding the results of his internal scan directly into the system.
Three treatments was all it had taken. Treatments that he once thought could have gone either way and could have just as easily ended his dreams and taken his life, except for one little thing.
Destiny.
It wasn’t his fate to lose. It wasn’t even a risk.
Nothing could stop him now, just as nothing and no one had come close in all these years of efforts. He had to laugh, thinking about the CIA, Interpol and many others who had been after him for decades. They had stepped up their search in recent years, and despite all their money, technology and legions of agents, spooks, and mercenaries, they hadn’t even gotten a whiff of his true location or goals.
He cackled again, thinking about how he had always been six moves ahead of them, how he had eventually positioned himself to hide right under their noses. Only fitting that the hunters were about to become the hunted.
His vision lovingly caressed the visuals on the monitors, lingering a few moments on each screen. He watched the internal views of the tanker ships, where three crylopholosaurs and a Z.rex slumbered amidst a floor seething with human zombies, like dragons atop their treasure hoard. Another screen revealed a pair of chained creatures, enormous wings folded tight to their sinewy bodies, snapping at each other with long pelican-like beaks between incensed red eyes. The next monitor presented a deck-top viewpoint of churning waves and an immense titanium chain over the side, dragging along a beast with a serrated sail that thrashed and surfaced and dipped and snapped at the chain with monstrous teeth.
DeKirk savored each visual and felt his blood surge and his muscles harden, and more—he felt the hunger growing.
His stomach rumbled and his insides clenched and his mouth filled with saliva. This was beyond hunger, he knew. A rabid, instinctual need to feed. However, as bad as it was, DeKirk had his technicians modify the prion’s molecular structure, tinkering here and there with its protein strands and inherent makeup, not unlike splicing genes. Once the feeding impulse had been isolated, it could be tempered. But first they had to attack and re-sequence the element that would destroy the host’s consciousness and personality.
No point in becoming a god if you wouldn’t be left with enough sense to appreciate your new position.
That part hadn’t been easy, but thanks to Xander Dyson’s initial research, DeKirk had been able to have his other brainiacs complete the task. At first he was worried about Dyson’s rambling about a failsafe, and that perhaps he had been shrewder than he gave the man credit for, that maybe he had managed to get word to someone outside the island. The paranoid little freak would definitely do something like that, but DeKirk felt he could rest easy. Three months and no word of it? He would hav
e picked up something for sure in all this time, and besides, Dyson didn’t really have an abundance of free time last he saw the man. From the moment DeKirk had cut him off and left him to die, the biochemist would have been on the run on an island full of rampaging zombies and voracious dinosaurs.
No, there was no doubt; his failsafe died with him—if he even had one in the first place and wasn’t bluffing.
Now, three treatments later, and DeKirk—the sole beneficiary of the zombie protein modifications—was on his way to perfection. By all projections, he should be fully transformed within the next twelve hours. Unstoppable, immortal and in control of all that power. All the benefits of being a zombie with none of the drawbacks. A god to a new race that, he found, would answer to him through a combination of naturally-occurring electromagnetic field radiation that the prions used to communicate and control other hosts, as well as implanted microchip technology where necessary (as with the dinosaurs, which could be overly unruly and chaotic without properly directed discipline).
Grinning, DeKirk flexed and then interlaced his fingers as he stared at another screen depicting some kind of medical chamber, where a frail bald woman lay on a table, IVs in her arms. A bevy of technicians stood around monitoring her vitals.
DeKirk licked his lips, anticipating the delicious irony to come. He had scores to settle with more than a few people, but this selection of Patient Zero would be a more than fitting assault on someone who had come oh-so-close to derailing DeKirk’s ambitions—something not easily done nor readily forgiven.
One final screen captured his attention: a view from atop a mast looking down on a flat ship’s deck where the largest of the lizards he had ever imagined lay strapped down, still in frozen slumber.
My dreadnought, he mused. At forty tons and twenty-five meters long, it was a smaller individual than some of the fossils they had discovered in South America. It had been found in a cavern, frozen almost throughout, just a short distance from Vostok. It had certainly been part of that same lake, lured there from whatever it had called home while the rest of the Earth began its methane or asteroid-induced climate change. Whatever it was, DeKirk didn’t really care. Let the eggheads argue about what caused mass extinctions, because he was pretty sure he had the answer.
The prions did their work, and hunger did the rest. If an animal was hungry enough, it would eat anything—do anything—to sate itself and kill those relentlessly nagging impulses. A person would literally eat his neighbor’s child, DeKirk had always thought, if things got bad enough. And dinosaurs, well…a mere reptile possessed not the faintest shred of restraint or morality. They were no match for starvation.
Hunger was the ultimate constant. Every species feared it, every organism experienced it at one time or another. Hunger drove migrations, and hunger—more specifically, the fear of it—gave birth to civilization, agriculture, and everything that came with it. Stars burned energy just as every organism consumed prey. A living thing was merely a biological machine, and machines must be fueled or they stop running.
Only now, DeKirk could control the perceived sensation of hunger in a zombified organism—human or dinosaur. Direct it, shut it off once necessary, once his goals had been achieved.
But first, he thought, as he perused his monitors once more, his army would feed.
And feed well.
7.
Grenada
Alex made a less than perfect landing, but a landing nonetheless. His late friend Tony’s words came back to him from Antarctica, haunting him…Any landing you can walk away from…
He climbed out of the cockpit on the deserted airstrip, a little curious as to the lack of a reception. No maintenance people, no security, just the disembodied voice from the tower clearing him to land.
Curious, but not alarming. Yet.
He shrugged off the nagging concern and turned to the sound of an engine approaching him. The day was hot, humid and somehow overly dry at the same time. It was like his mouth was full of sandpaper filings and he had the unshakeable notion that trouble was coming, with his mother at the center of it.
Why was she here? Did it have to be treatment outside the continental U.S.? Was that all it was? During the flight here he had questioned everything. The tone of her voice, the timing of all this. Something wasn’t right.
But now here she was, coming toward him. He could see her in the back of the Jeep.
Guess we’re not going to the facility, he thought.
He took off his aviator’s sunglasses, hooked them behind his collar and made for the ground transport, expecting to help her out. Instead, even before it parked, his mother—head wrapped in a yellow scarf, wearing tan slacks and a white silk blouse, sprang from the open door and ran to him. Elsa threw her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercely.
“It worked!” she yelled over the winds and the Jeep’s engine. “It worked!”
#
"What do you mean?" Alex asked. "How are you better, what…?"
A thousand questions ran through his mind, along with a small nagging alarm bell which was subsequently droned out in a wave of excitement and joy. His mother was not only alive and well, but she was going to make it. A miracle had somehow occurred here on this little island.
But that warning bell chimed one more time. The coincidence of it all… She had suffered so long with this disease, but now that it had nearly run its course this mystery treatment works?
He pulled away slightly, and with a trace of terror, searched her eyes, then her skin.
"What is it?" she asked, her voice bubbling with uncontrolled happiness.
"Nothing, just…" He studied her features. Couldn't tell what was under the bandana-scarf, but she just seemed…healthy. A modest sunburn at worst, but her eyes were strong and vibrant, without a touch of (dare he say it) yellow or reptilian. Why would he think that? Why consider that any miracle in this day and age had to come with a curse? Couldn't it just be a modern triumph of medicine here on this island, far away from FDA rules and lengthy testing periods before new treatments and drugs could be approved?
"Did it really work? You feel better? I mean, you look great and all, and I am doing all I can to not drop to my knees and praise God right freaking now, but…"
She squeezed his shoulders and nodded fast. "It worked, Alex, and it's real, but…" She looked over her shoulder at the driver and the man in a black suit and sunglasses sitting beside him. “I wonder if something else is behind the treatment, behind my selection in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“I've heard things while they thought I was unconscious. I heard your name, and something about Vostok.”
Alex paled. It is too good to be true. “What else?”
She shook her head, leaned close and hugged him again. “Just trust me, we can't go back in there.” She cocked her head back toward the facility. “I know you had dealings with these people down there. Your father too. Bad people, and I know his death was no accident. So I'm scared. I don't trust them, don't trust any of this.”
She pulled away, locked eyes with her son, then glanced toward the airplane.
“Is it still fueled? Can we just go—how fast could we take off?”
“Mom, I don't know if we can. We…" Shit, he thought, looking at the driver, who now stood up and started to get out of the Jeep. There was a gun holstered at his right hip.
“Better not just yet.” He stepped in front of his mother and addressed the men. “Hey there. I’m Alex Ramirez. Thanks for the greeting party. What do we do next? Is there a release procedure, sign out form or something?”
The driver said nothing, but the other man, still in the Jeep, lowered his sunglasses. He stood, then spoke into a walkie-talkie, something lost in the wind and the rustling palm tree branches alongside the runway.
“Get ready,” Alex’s mother said to him, over his shoulder.
“For what? What’s going on here?”
“Told you,” she whispered, pointin
g back toward the airport, “nothing good.”
The man in the Jeep lowered the walkie-talkie and finally spoke, leaning over the Jeep’s railing. “Mrs. Ramirez, Alex, you’re to come back to the treatment facility for further observation.”
“No.” His mother was defiant, shouting the word as firmly as she could.
“Listen,” Alex said. “Who’s in charge here? I’d like to meet with him and review a few things. Including what authority you have here. Otherwise, I would like to take my mother home.” He took a breath, and added: “Now.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” The man nodded to the driver, who then reached to his side for his weapon.
—only the holster turned out to be empty. A look of shock crossed his face as he looked down at the vacant leather accessory, then back up sharply.
Alex’s mother stepped forward, raising the .45 and pointing it with both hands.
“Looking for this?”
“Mom!” Holy shit. “When did you—?”
“Not now. Alex, start the plane.”
The man in the black suit shook his head. “Think about what you’re doing, Mrs. Ramirez.”
“Think about what you’re doing. I’m getting out of here before you can do anything else to me.”
“Like finish your cure?”
She shrugged. “I feel great, and I’ll take that any day rather than risk whatever else you have planned.”
“Mom…”
“You need more treatments,” the man said. “Monitoring. We have to be sure…”
“I’ll take my chances. I’ll trust in how I feel, that whatever you gave me, it did the job. As to the rest of it, the rest of you…no way. I’m not going to let you hurt my son, or use me for whatever the hell you’re setting up.”
She aimed the gun, steadying her hands as the driver approached. “I mean it.”
“Drop the gun, ma’am.”
“Uh, Mom, maybe you should listen to them.”