Extinction Series (The Complete Collection)

by James D. Prescott

  “You think that’s them?” Captain Mullins asked, hesitating.

  Jack checked the pistol on his hip and swung around the M4 strapped to his back. “We’re about to find out.”

  “When someone yells fire in a theatre,” Dag said with a nervous smile, “Jack’s the only guy I know who rushes back inside.”

  “If that was me lying there,” he snapped, “I’d hope you’d do the same.”

  Gabby stayed behind with Anna while the rest of the team pushed ahead to the intersection.

  Jack wanted to believe it was the falling ice that had injured the figures in the street. Even if it was wiser to head in expecting the worst.

  They followed the drone’s blinking red light. Jack and Mullins were in the lead, pushing hard over the icy ground, at times struggling to keep their balance. Up until that point, they’d had the luxury of maintaining a regular pace. Now, facing the possibility their friends were up there, seriously wounded, all notion of moving at a safe speed had gone out the window.

  A second before they arrived, Tamura appeared next to Jack, matching their brisk pace in spite of a recent wound to the shoulder. They were less than five yards away when Jack got a visual.

  “I got three on the ground ahead of our position,” he called out, chopping the air in front of him.

  They arrived to a confusing scene. The three figures were indeed the air crew. Littering the ground around them were ice boulders ranging in size from basketballs to sofas. One particularly large piece was pinning Steve’s legs beneath it. It was clear he was dead. The infrared had shown some remaining body heat in Natalie and Chris. Jack moved to the loadmaster, Grant dropping down by his side.

  “What the bloody hell?” Grant exclaimed upon seeing the man’s helmet.

  It had been punctured by two tiny holes, the glass spider-webbing out from the points of impact.

  Chris’ biosuit was saturated with a large, frozen bloodstain over his chest.

  “They weren’t killed by falling ice,” Jack shouted.

  He barely had time to get the words out when a violent crack rang out, followed by another, knocking Aphrodite out of the sky. It tumbled to the ground, where it hit the stone wall next to them and shattered.

  Jack tugged on Chris’ right arm, intending to throw him over one shoulder, but already his body was becoming rigid. He yanked again and rose up on a pair of wobbly legs. A shot buzzed in, striking the wounded man’s helmet. Both he and Jack fell to the ground.

  Behind him, Tamura, still exposed in the street, jumped behind a collection of boulders. Carrying the air crew away was a guaranteed way to get themselves killed. Clearly, the people shooting at them would like nothing more.

  Jack rolled the now-dead body off of his back and crawled over to a section of wall. Rounds zinged past his helmet, kicking up bursts of snow and puffs of stone dust. The same thing was happening to the others, spread all over the road.

  “Can you see where they’re shooting from?” Jack shouted, peering over the edge. His eyes found Captain Mullins, his back against a large chunk of ice. Ahead of them, he saw how the road bent into a gentle curve, the perfect place for an ambush.

  “One of the snipers is in the building at your twelve o’clock,” Mullins cried out, rounds keeping his head down. “Second-story. Left-hand window. If you can make your way around by hopping the compound wall, you may be able to sneak in from behind them. Grant and I will give you cover.”

  “Dag, Tamura,” Jack said, fighting the rapidly diminishing moisture in his mouth. “Wait for the covering fire and stay on my six.”

  Both of them nodded.

  Mullins and Grant rose up, firing at the second-story window.

  “Now!” Jack cried. He sprang to his feet and stormed across the compound’s open terrain. Tamura and Dag jumped over the section of wall nearest them and followed closely behind. Suddenly, the volume of fire increased as the ground at their feet exploded from incoming rounds. Jack hopped the northeast wall and dropped on his haunches waiting for the other two. From here, he could see onto another street which swung around and linked up just past where the air crew had been ambushed.

  Up ahead, a darkened figure came into view. Jack rose. Seeing him, the figure skidded to a stop and leveled his weapon. Even from here, Jack could see he wasn’t in a biosuit. He wore a light-colored parka, his head covered by a grey combat helmet. Over his eyes were a pair of ski goggles. Jack braced the stock into his shoulder and squeezed the trigger several times, riddling the man before him. His target dropped and didn’t move.

  A second later, Dag and Tamura showed up, the latter’s eyes wide at the sight of the man Jack had just killed.

  “The hell took you guys so long?” he said.

  They moved west into a grouping of oddly shaped stone buildings. Jack motioned to an entrance before disappearing inside, the others close behind. He could hear short bursts of automatic fire coming from upstairs. He sprang up the stairs two and three at a time.

  The sniper in the window had just finished reloading when Jack stepped into the tiny room. Jack aimed and pulled the trigger. Like before, he expected the weapon to vibrate in his hands, pushing back against his shoulder. Except this time all he heard was a click.

  His eyes met the sniper’s, whose own gaze flickered from surprise to amusement. The enemy’s rifle rose up at about the same time that Tamura let out a primal scream, pushing Jack aside and firing two shots into the sniper’s chest. He slumped forward, his eyes staring blankly ahead.

  “Three of them just ran off,” Captain Mullins called out from the street below. Dag leaned out the window aiming his M4, but there was no shot to be had. “You two all right?” Mullins followed up when he didn’t hear back from Jack or Tamura.

  Jack got to his feet slowly, rubbing his bruised behind. “I nearly bit the big one until Tamura here knocked some sense into me.”

  She smiled, and to Jack her angular features looked even more beautiful in the soft light. His mind flashed back to the man he’d killed and how quickly his own life had nearly been snuffed out. “Thank you,” he said, taking Tamura’s hand and squeezing it. “I owe you one.”

  Chapter 33

  Rome

  Mia glanced up from the research paper she was reading to find Ollie limping across the hospital cafeteria toward her.

  “My gosh, did they neuter you?”

  He flashed her a halfhearted grin. “I’m happy to report my manhood is intact. Apparently, Sentinel had inserted the tracking chip into my left arse cheek.” He rubbed his backside gently. “They also gave me this.” He produced a ten-inch burgundy-colored inner tube. Ollie laid it on the bench next to her and carefully settled onto it.

  “They destroyed it, right?”

  Ollie shook his head. “It was mine to smash and I took great pleasure in the act, thank you very much.” He happened to glance down at the paper she was reading. “Biophotons & Biocommunication: Understanding the Language of Cells. Wow, sounds riveting.”

  “It is,” Mia said, excited. “Don’t laugh. I think we might be onto something here.”

  Ollie read the name on the paper. “Roberto Rizzo. Never heard of him.”

  She stopped and glanced around. “Neither had I. Would you believe I had to push for nearly twenty minutes before Dr. Putelli handed over Rizzo’s work? He kept trying to convince me to read his own papers on cell communication instead. I humored him, but Putelli’s stuff was more or less the same safe research that gets published all the time. Rizzo, on the other hand… I think the guy was a genius. I did a little searching online and found out Rizzo used to be Putelli’s research assistant. But when Rizzo’s work began taking him too far outside the mainstream, Putelli got uncomfortable and tried to undermine the guy.”

  “Either Rizzo’s a whackjob or Putelli doesn’t like to share the spotlight,” Ollie observed, wincing as he shifted in his seat. He plucked the half-eaten donut from Mia’s plate and tossed it in his mouth.

  “Our general unders
tanding is that cells communicate via chemical signals. Instructions are sent out via hormones and neurotransmitters and picked up by cells using receptor proteins. Let’s take that donut you just stole to illustrate my point.”

  Ollie swallowed, a guilty look spreading across his face.

  “As soon as your pancreas detects you’ve eaten that donut, it releases a hormone called insulin into your system, instructing certain cells to start taking in the rush of glucose from your blood.” She smiled. “I hope you liked it.”

  “It was delicious. My pancreas and I thank you.” He picked up Rizzo’s paper and flipped through it. “So how’s this guy and his biophoton theory any different?”

  “Rizzo was actually continuing a line of research begun by a Soviet scientist in the forties, who found that the cells in our body produced a low-level radiance in the visible and ultraviolet frequencies. Think of the bioluminescence you see in fish and then imagine something infinitely weaker. Rizzo’s breakthrough was in hypothesizing that the light was one of the ways cells communicate with one another.”

  “And you think those flashes of light are sending instructions to our cells via this biophotonics mumbo-jumbo?” Ollie asked, surprised he was grasping any of this.

  “Precisely. You see, I thought the light was somehow co-opting the immune system in order to plant the artificial chromosomes into each cell. It wasn’t the most elegant way to go about it, but under certain conditions, it could work. What I see now is that the encoded light from the cosmic ray can do the same thing and so much faster. It does so by sending instructions to the cells all at once and allowing them to do the work. Think of a huge company like Amazon or General Motors. Both of them employ hundreds of thousands of workers, right? Now imagine the nightmare of having to hand each and every person a piece of paper every time you make a policy change. Then consider how much easier it is to send a single email to everyone in the company at once. In our example, the cosmic ray flashes are the email with the policy change and the cells in our bodies are the employees.”

  “Then what about blokes like us who don’t have Salzburg?” Ollie asked.

  “We aren’t affected,” she replied.

  “Okay, fair enough. Now that we know that, how do we stop it?”

  Mia’s lips curled into a thoughtful frown. She flipped through a pad of paper and stopped on one of the sketches she’d drawn.

  “The heck’s this? Looks like a bunch of wavy lines.”

  “It’s a magnetic field,” Mia replied, annoyed. “Cosmic rays hit our planet all the time, but we’re largely protected by a combination of earth’s magnetic field and the atmosphere. If we can produce a much smaller version of the former, say something that could fit in a bag or hang from a belt, it might be able to shield people from the mutating effects of the light.”

  “You’re a genius,” Ollie said, pulling her in until their lips met.

  Mia was stunned.

  “I-I’m sorry,” he stammered, wincing as he shifted away. “I didn’t mean it in a lecherous way.”

  She tsked and winked at him. “That’s too bad.”

  Chapter 34

  Washington

  Kay turned onto Kendal Street in Ivy City, a small industrial neighborhood northeast of Washington, and pulled to the side of the road. Soft early-morning light blanketed an otherwise bleak view. Low-income blockhouse apartments made up the bulk of the residential property here. The rest were run-down commercial buildings. To her right a storage locker business was surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence. On her left stood a red-brick two-story warehouse.

  Lucas had been right when he told her the location was nowhere she would have guessed. “What on earth would the VP and Cabinet be doing meeting in a place like this?” she asked herself out loud. A quick double-check of the GPS coordinates confirmed she was at the right location. A school bus loaded with somber-looking kids roared past, blowing right through the stop sign at the next corner.

  She pulled out her phone and took a picture of the warehouse. A sign above a metal shutter door read:

  Commercial Space Available

  Industrial Realty

  Call Aida El Hadri

  202-794-2222

  She zoomed in and took a picture of that too. Afterward, she got out of the car and crossed a ratty-looking street, a patchwork of oil stains and half-assed patch jobs. The warehouse shutter door was closed and so Kay circled around back. If she wanted to find out what was going on inside, stepping in through the front entrance was probably the worst thing she could do. Secretaries were paid to act as buffers between their employer and anyone intending to bust the employer’s balls.

  The moment Kay turned the corner she spotted an African-American woman about her height and weight cut through an empty parking lot and head for the warehouse’s back entrance.

  “Excuse me,” Kay called out. “Excuse me, ma’am, do you work here?”

  The woman had already opened the metal door by the time she turned to see Kay. She jerked with fear, as though Kay were about to pull a gun on her.

  “Relax, lady, I’m not trying to hurt you. I just had a couple of questions I need to ask you.”

  The woman tucked the bag she was carrying under her arms, lowered her head and disappeared inside.

  Miffed, Kay broke into a run after her. The door opened easily enough, groaning slightly on a set of rusty hinges. Upon entering, she was greeted by a long corridor punctuated with doors on either side. She moved down it, peeking into each room as she passed. The first she came to was a dirty lunch room, outfitted with a table, chairs, kitchenette and an old-school coffee maker. Another was packed with fine-quality chairs and tables. A third room had racks of clothing.

  Lots of strange stuff, but no mysterious woman. A single door faced her at the end of the long corridor. Kay opened it and found herself in a large open space. Cautiously, she went in, calling out to anyone who would listen that she was from the Washington Post and had a few questions. The floor sparkled, as though they had recently been mopped. By studying the footprints left in the drying water, she could see there had been a lot of activity here recently. Then in the center of the open area, Kay spotted bits of tape on the floor, as though someone had been measuring off a pre-designated area.

  Above her, Kay noticed a separate office accessed by a set of stairs. Perhaps whoever was running the warehouse was up there. Running low on options, Kay headed up and paused at the top to survey the warehouse floor. From this new vantage point, she was able to see the form laid out by the tape. It appeared to measure about ten by twenty feet and to be in the shape of a large rectangle.

  The office door was ajar and Kay pushed it open. At first glance, it appeared this new area would prove the least interesting of all. Multi-framed glass panels looked out over the warehouse. A pair of empty desks and roll chairs sat nearby.

  Could this have been where the cabinet members met? Kay didn’t think so. Something wasn’t adding up. She spotted something on the floor, beneath one of the desks. Reaching down, she came up with a business card for Stanley Hollerman, Head of Research and Development at Gen Tech.

  A quick search on her phone revealed that Gen Tech was in the video surveillance industry. But there was no telling how long that card had been there. New as it seemed, appearances could very well be deceiving. That was when Kay decided to do what every good reporter must when a lead grows cold. Make a phone call. In this case, to Stanley.

  She keyed the number on the card and got a pleasant-sounding female voice.

  “Stan, please,” she said. She’d learned long ago to never use someone’s full name. Asking for Stanley usually earned you a one-way trip to voicemail. Ask for Stan and make it sound like he’d been waiting ages for the call.

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  Kay bit her lip.

  “Hello?” the receptionist said.

  “Tell him it’s Aida,” she said, recalling the commercial rental sign she’d seen outside.

  “
Aida?”

  “Yeah, Aida El Hadri.”

  A pregnant pause, which was quickly followed by, “Stan isn’t in at the moment. Can I put you through to his voicemail?”

  “When are you expecting him?”

  “I’m not sure,” the secretary replied, her starched, pleasant voice beginning to betray her annoyance.

  “Thanks, I’ll try back later.”

  Kay stood for a moment, staring at the card. She was about to leave when she got another bright idea. This time she dialed Aida, the commercial real-estate broker.

  Two rings later—“This is Aida.”

  “Hello, this is Glenda. I’m calling you from Gen Tech’s accounts receivables department. I wanted to make sure you haven’t cashed the check we gave you for the rental space on Kendal Street in Ivy City.”

  “I don’t follow,” Aida replied in a thick Middle Eastern accent. “We cashed the check last week.”

  “Oh, darn it. Yeah, Stan was supposed to have you wait on that.”

  “Well, he never said nothing about waiting. He should have a copy of the short-term lease. The agreement makes it clear we cash the check right away. And for your information, I told Mr. Hollerman we don’t normally agree to anything less than six months. In your case, we made an exception.”

  “An exception?”

  “Yes, for two weeks.”

  “Ah, yes, that was very kind of you,” Kay said, continuing the ruse. “So we still have another week on the lease then?”

  “Eight days,” Aida corrected her. “After that, all your equipment must be removed from the premises.”

  “Equipment?”

  “I’m getting another call,” Aida snapped and hung up.

  Why was a video surveillance firm renting the warehouse in order to hatch a major conspiracy? Were they trying to keep things low-key or had they been lured there?