SYCAMORE BLUFF (Prequel to THE JACK REACHER FILES: ANNEX 1) (A Nicholas Colt Thriller Book 8)

by Jude Hardin

  Diana was still in the doorway to the communications room.

  “All clear,” Colt said.

  He could barely hear himself. The gunshots had deafened him.

  Diana stepped into the hallway and looked around.

  “Where’s the bad guy?” she said.

  “It wasn’t a guy,” Colt said. “It was a girl. She jumped over the railing.”

  “She jumped?”

  “It was more like she flew. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Diana walked to the banister and looked down. Colt joined her. The woman had landed on her back. There was a puddle of blood under her head, and her left leg was bent sideways at an impossible angle.

  “Well, she won’t be giving us any more trouble,” Diana said.

  “I don’t care about her,” Colt said. “The radio. The radio, Di. It’s ruined.”

  “Are you mocking me?”

  “Maybe just a little bit. But really, what are we going to do about the getting in touch with The Director?”

  “I don’t know. You think you can fix the transceiver?”

  “No. Did you take a good look at that thing? It’s way beyond fixing, unless you’re McGyver or The Professor on Gilligan’s Island or something.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Isn’t there some kind of backup? Would NASA really send six hundred and twelve people to Mars with only one way to phone home?”

  “There’s no backup that I know of,” Diana said. “The radio was only for emergencies. The scientists wanted Sycamore Bluff to be as close to the real thing as possible. They wanted the residents to really feel as though they were thirty-five million miles from Earth.”

  “Might as well be,” Colt said. “So what are we going to do?”

  “We don’t have much of a choice. We’ll just have to wait it out until the next supply helicopter comes.”

  “And when will that be?”

  Diana looked at her watch. “Tuesday morning at nine o’clock. About thirty-one hours from now.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but three different people tried to kill us tonight. Don’t we have to assume there will be more?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Diana said. “And I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think they’re targeting us specifically. Something has happened to some of the residents here. At first I thought the deal with Kyle Lofton was an isolated incident. After tonight, I know it wasn’t. Something is causing the residents of Sycamore Bluff to turn into homicidal maniacs.”

  “I’ve heard of island fever,” Colt said. “But this is ridiculous. And these last two, it was almost as if their hard drives had been wiped clean. Their personalities. I never saw the guy who hit me with the lamp and took my gun, the one you smashed with the garage door. But the guy with the machete, Bill Lott, and the woman in the hall just now, they had these creepy blank expressions on their faces, almost as if they were dead already. I hate to say it, but they really were almost like zombies.”

  “Starting to feel like you’re on an episode of The Walking Dead?”

  “I’ve never watched the show, and I never will,” Colt said. “Did I ever tell you about the movie I saw when I was twelve?”

  “No. On the show, they call the affected people walkers. I think we should come up with a name for the ones here.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, they seem to be pretty slow and stupid, so how about sloths?”

  “Sloffs,” Colt said.

  “Sloffs?”

  “I had a girlfriend in Paris one time who had trouble with the t-h sound. It’s how she would have said it. What do you think?”

  Diana didn’t answer. In one fast and fluid motion, she turned toward the staircase and squared off in a shooting stance.

  Another resident had entered the Town Hall building and had climbed to the second floor.

  Another one of them. Another one of those primal killing machines with blank expressions and—based on Kyle Lofton and the blonde with pink lipstick—propensities toward cannibalism.

  Sloff. An appropriate label, Colt thought. It sounded like slough, and that’s what these people had done. They’d sloughed off part of their souls.

  This newest one was holding a clear glass jar in one hand and a disposable butane cigarette lighter in the other. There was a hole in the jar’s lid, and a rag had been stuffed halfway into the hole.

  And the jar itself had been filled with a golden liquid that looked an awful lot like gasoline.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Diana stood there with her gun trained on the sickly figure at the end of the corridor. He was not especially tall, maybe five-ten, but she could tell, even with his current pallor and lack of expression, that he was extremely good looking. Not just your average, run of the mill, cute-guy-at-the-checkout-counter good looking. This guy could have been a movie star. He was in a league with the cream of the crop, top box office draws like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and George Clooney. In fact, the man looked strikingly familiar. He was fortyish with salt-and-pepper hair, and he wore a gray suit with a black turtleneck.

  Henry Parker used to wear an outfit like that sometimes.

  Diana knew it wasn’t really Henry Parker standing there at the end of the hallway with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. Henry was dead. Diana had killed him herself. She’d put a bullet in his brain.

  Still, the resemblance was uncanny.

  And, who was to say that the whole scene at the CIAO compound hadn’t been staged? The Circle certainly wasn’t beyond that sort of thing. Diana had even been involved with such antics herself from time to time. The pistol she’d been given for the recon mission could have been loaded with blanks. Maybe that was Henry’s complicated method of escaping from The Circle. Maybe he’d arranged an elaborate hoax, and had fooled them all. Maybe he’d been successful in faking his own death.

  But then what was he doing here in Sycamore Bluff? Why wasn’t he in France, out in the countryside somewhere? That had been his plan.

  All sorts of possibilities raced through Diana’s mind as the man stepped closer and closer. She squinted, focusing on his face. The more she examined his features, deathbed gray as they were, the more she was convinced that this was indeed the man she’d fallen in love with. Maybe, somehow, he had found out about her assignment here. Maybe he’d traveled to Sycamore Bluff with one objective in mind: to whisk Diana away with him, and to make their dreams of a life together come true.

  It was fairy tale stuff, and Diana knew it. Still, she couldn’t quite shake it off.

  “Henry? Is that really you?” she said.

  The man didn’t say anything. He moaned, as if he might be experiencing some sort of intense pain, and he gurgled and drooled, as if he might have swallowed some of the liquid in the jar. If this was Henry Parker—and Diana was almost sure now that it was—then he had been afflicted with the same horrid condition as the other murderous residents. Kyle Lofton. Bill Lott. And, most recently, the woman who’d slaughtered the guy in the radio room, the blonde with the baseball bat who’d fallen to the first floor.

  Henry stopped about fifteen feet from where Diana was standing and thumbed the flint wheel on the butane lighter. There was a spark, but no flame.

  Diana was vaguely aware of Nicholas Colt’s booming voice behind her. He shouted something, but whatever it was did not register in Diana’s consciousness. She was on another plane. Every cell in her body was zoned in on Henry Parker now. Whatever was wrong with him, surely there was a cure. An antidote. Something. Somehow, she would find a way to bring him out of this walking coma.

  She knew that his mind wasn’t completely gone, because it had taken some thought to put the little makeshift firebomb together. He was still capable of complex cognition, albeit very violent complex cognition, and to Diana that meant there was still hope.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  The man looked at her. “Uhhhhh,” he said.

  “Henry, it’s me.
Diana Dawkins. I know you remember me. I’m going to help you. But first, I want you to get down on your knees and set those things on the floor. Gently. Do it now, please.”

  Henry tried the lighter again, and again it failed to produce a flame.

  “Uhhhhh!” he said, frustrated that the ignition source for his crude little weapon wasn’t working as advertised.

  He took a couple of steps forward.

  “Stop,” Diana said. “Just stop right there, Henry. Think about what we had together. I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Don’t you understand that? I’ll get help for you. I promise. I’ll do whatever it takes, but right now you’re going to have to do what I say. Get down on your knees and set the jar and the lighter on the floor in front of you. Do it now.”

  Once again, Henry ignored Diana’s instructions. He flicked the Bic, and this time the spark was followed by a bright orange ribbon of fire about an inch high. He held the jar in front of him, opened his mouth and bared his teeth and stared into it. Diana could see his distorted face through the liquid, the sunken cheeks and the dark eye sockets and the malignant gaping grin, and it reminded her of a play she and Henry had seen together on one of their rare nights out. It was as if Henry’s tortured soul was trapped there in the jar, begging the volatile fuel to open the gates of hell and set it free.

  With an uncharacteristically shaky hand, Henry inched the lighter’s flame toward the homemade fuse. Diana knew what was going to happen next. The fumes from the jar would cause the rag to ignite. Then, Henry would launch the jar and the glass would break and the gasoline would explode and kill them all. The Town Hall building would burn to the ground, and with the other buildings along Main Street so close together, the entire town might go up in smoke. Diana could see the future sequence of events in her mind as clearly as she’d ever seen anything. She could see the fiery blast. She could feel the intense heat, the searing sizzling pain as her skin and flesh bubbled and charred and melted away from her bones.

  She wanted to pull the trigger, but something had a grip on her. Something had rendered her powerless to save herself. She stood there frozen, knowing Colt was out of ammunition, knowing this was the end, knowing it and accepting it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  For convenience, Lenny had created the acronym Tumac for The Unnamed Man with Connections. Lenny wasn’t very happy about the fact that he was going to have to accompany Tumac to Sycamore Bluff. This was not part of the plan.

  “My connection down in Central America insists,” Tumac said over the phone. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. If you want our help, you’re going to have to come along. I need four men. Three will not be enough.”

  “Then hire someone else,” Lenny said. “I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

  “This is a delicate situation, Señor Daehl, and one that requires a high level of trust and loyalty. It would be very difficult to find someone on such short notice. I could do it, but it would be about as wise as choosing a heart surgeon from a list of doctors in the phone book. All of the men provided by my connection are tried and true. I wouldn’t want to jeopardize the security of the mission by hiring someone off the streets, and I know you wouldn’t want that either. Anyway, my connection thinks that you should be the one to help, since it is an American factory that we are going to destroy.”

  “Who is this connection of yours?” Lenny said. “What’s his name? I want to talk to him.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. He wishes to remain anonymous, and he wishes to talk only to me. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I don’t understand anything,” Lenny said. “I’m no demolition expert, and I’m not a killer. What could I possibly do to help you in Sycamore Bluff?”

  “I just need a lookout. That’s all. And I might need you to drive a car. You can drive, no?”

  Lenny sighed. “I can drive.” He couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this insanity, but he didn’t seem to have much of a choice. “All right,” he said. “You win. I’ll do the best I can.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I’ll do it, but I’m not ashamed to say that I’m more than a little nervous about it.”

  “I will take good care of you,” Tumac said. “You will never be in any danger. I promise.”

  “Whatever. If I don’t get this problem taken care of today, then I might as well be dead anyway.”

  “We’re going to get it taken care of, señor. Don’t worry.”

  But Lenny was worried. Two years ago, there was a spate of killings blamed on a class of synthetic drugs being sold on the streets. These hallucinogenic substances were suspected as catalysts in several extremely violent murders where the killers actually ate parts of their victims. Whenever one version of the drug was eradicated, another would spring up that was apparently just as dangerous.

  All across the country, there was talk around the water cooler about the zombie apocalypse and other such nonsense. But, after a few weeks, the killings stopped as soon as they had started, and soon everyone pretty much forgot about them.

  The drugs were still around, but they weren’t turning people into homicidal, cannibalistic maniacs anymore.

  Because they never did in the first place.

  Word was never leaked to the media, but every one of the killers during that period was involved in an FDA clinical trial for a prescription medication developed by one man in a laboratory.

  This one man was a verifiable genius.

  This one man was to chemical engineering what Einstein was to physics.

  This one man was none other than Leonard W. Daehl.

  Developed as a treatment for a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions, U-3 was soon being touted as the next miracle drug. It was going to be the statin of the new millennium, people were saying. And, in addition to its curative qualities, it produced a sense of euphoria and increased alertness in healthy people, with no risk of dependence and no appreciable side effects.

  The results from the animal trials had been stunning, and if the human trials went as well, this revolutionary new medication was going to cure a lot of ills and make a lot of people a lot of money.

  The Nobel Committee had already started sending forms for Lenny to fill out. If the human trials went well, he was going to be rich and famous. He was going to be the next Jonas Salk.

  But of course the human trials didn’t go well. They didn’t go well at all.

  It took about three months for the adverse effects to start showing up, and they only occurred in one percent of the volunteers. One out of a hundred. But the effects were of the rarest and most severe variety, and the FDA pulled the plug on the trials immediately. Miracle or no miracle, they couldn’t approve a drug that turned one percent of the patients receiving it into flesh eating zombies. Just couldn’t do it.

  Lenny understood, and he begged them for another chance. He was ninety-nine percent certain that he could isolate the molecule responsible for the horrible side effects. He would tweak the formula, he told them. He would start the trials over, from scratch, with rats and rabbits and monkeys. He didn’t care how long it took. He’d already spent five years of his life developing this treatment, and he was perfectly willing to spend five more.

  The FDA refused. Grant money was tight, they said, and there wasn’t a drug company on the planet willing to sponsor a second set of trials. Not after what had happened with the first.

  Lenny went into a deep state of depression after that. The way he saw it, his life was over. He was sitting on the formula for a medication that could benefit millions of people, a drug made from simple herbal extracts that shouldn’t hurt a fly, and the FDA wasn’t going to allow him to perfect it for human consumption.

  He started drinking a lot, and he would go days without bathing or changing clothes. He would sit at the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka and a notebook and scribble out dozens of versions of the U-3 formula, racking his brain trying to figure out what h
ad gone wrong.

  Then one night in a drunken inspiration he found the problem. It had been right there staring at him the whole time, and it was so simple to fix.

  Simple as pi.

  This was it. He just knew it. Lenny was so certain he’d located the problem with the formula, he decided to repeat the animal trials with his own money. He would have to do every bit of the work himself. He would have to dig deeply into his inheritance to fund the research, and he would have to work out of his garage, but that was okay. If he did all that, and if the trials were successful—which they would be—then surely the FDA would give him a second chance with humans.

  U-3 was just too important to give up on. It truly was a breakthrough in medicine, one that would benefit humanity for all time, and Lenny was determined to see that it got back on track for commercial production and distribution.

  Lenny was so excited about finding the problem with the U-3 formula, he decided to go out and celebrate. He shaved and showered and put on a suit and took a cab to the Irish Lion Restaurant and Pub in Bloomington. There, he ran into a couple of pals from his undergraduate days at IU.

  A couple of fraternity brothers, actually. Dave Davidson, who was a colonel in the Air Force now, and Vic DeLorenza, who was the vice president of research and development for a company called Pelican Nutritional Products. It had been years since Lenny had seen either of them. Vic still lived in Bloomington, and Dave had driven down from Grissom Air Force base for a seminar on campus.

  Lenny bought the guys pints of Guinness. They talked about old times for a while, and eventually the conversation turned to what each of them was doing now.

  Lenny told them about U-3, and the problems he’d had with the research.

  “You should think about marketing it as a nutritional supplement,” Vic said. “That way, you can circumvent all that FDA crap.”

  “I would still want to do human trials,” Lenny said. “For my own peace of mind.”