Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  “The victim’s flesh is pale and languid, uniform in color along his face, neck, and parts of his arms,” she narrated. “It appears dried out, chapped and ready to crack. His hair is dry and listless, and several clumps of strands have been shed to the pillow or floor.”

  Vicky noticed that even though the patient was breathing on his own and in no distress, the sheet covering him up to his neck didn’t flutter or billow at all, his breaths clearly too shallow and short to ruffle his chest enough to rustle it.

  The victim was a veritable corpse to the naked eye, a fact that seemed to be confirmed by touch as well.

  Vicky found examining a corpse or living subject through hazmat gloves to be a distinctly frustrating experience. In her mind an examination needed to make the fullest use of sensory input to reach a successful and satisfactory conclusion. This was especially true given, first, that she was often encountering an infection never seen before in its current form and, second, that her fieldwork potentially involved a threat to millions of lives as opposed to that of a single patient. Science and training might’ve formed the body of her work, but making preliminary assessments based simply on what her eyes detected came from a part of her mind she neither understood fully nor tried to.

  Before continuing her examination, Vicky consulted a small, old-fashioned chalkboard hanging from the same pole supporting a section of the plastic sheeting.

  “Strangely,” she resumed, repositioning her phone to make sure the recording missed nothing, “the patient’s vitals are reasonably normal. Heart rate, blood pressure, pulse all indicate anything but what his appearance otherwise suggests should be drastically anomalous vital signs. Doctor,” she called to Robelais, “what else can you tell us about this patient?”

  “Nothing,” he responded. “I saw him for the first time when his family carried him inside; weak, short of breath, and bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ears. They haven’t been back since.”

  Vicky felt something tug at her spine. “Has anyone checked on them?”

  “That was two days ago. It’s been just me here alone practically ever since. That’s why I stopped issuing reports. No time, especially with fourteen patients total now, but this man was the first.”

  Vicky inspected the patient’s hands, wishing she could better feel them through her gloves. There was so much to be gleaned from an examination through touch, to the point where she resisted the temptation to break protocol and risk flesh-to-flesh contact. She could tell the man’s hands were rough and callused. There might have been some bruising, but it was hard to determine given the rigidity in the patient’s dermal layers. The calluses seemed ridged in a pattern that indicated work with manual tools, shovels and rakes perhaps. And although the skin’s rigid condition made it harder for her to discern tone, Vicky thought she could detect the kind of variances that suggested a man exposed frequently to the sun in patterns she took to mean the man’s work kept him in a single direction for a prolonged period.

  A farmer, then, most likely.

  “A neighbor of this patient was brought in this morning,” Robelais reported, after consulting a chipped wooden clipboard he’d been holding. “I’m sorry I neglected to mention that.”

  “Understandable under the circumstances, Doctor. What was the time lag between admissions?”

  Robelais checked his clipboard again. “Thirty-six hours, according to this, but that may not be precise. The other dozen patients arrived in between.”

  “So this contagion, whatever it is, we can safely assume, is now thirty-six hours old,” Vicky noted, judging that to be the contagion’s approximate incubation period. And the fact that Robelais showed no signs of the initial symptoms led her to conclude, on a preliminary basis, that the pathogen wasn’t spread through the air.

  She began a general, physical examination of the man. She started in the throat area, checking the glands there, along the jawline, and then at the armpit area. There was swelling, but nothing grossly apparent. What was apparent was a general rigidity of the skin and overall musculature, as if the patient were holding his muscles tight, flexing them. His stomach and torso area were similarly rigid and her initial examination of his liver, kidneys, bladder, and intestinal fabric felt hardened.

  Rigor mortis indeed, Vicky thought. If this were some kind of test, and they’d brought her in here to examine the man blindfolded, she would’ve guessed he was already dead and suffering from the first stages of that.

  On the contrary, though, he was still alive.

  And that made whatever had struck this village something she’d never encountered before, either directly or via case study. The patient showed no response to stimulus, had no reflex capacity. An examination of his eyes revealed them to be utterly lifeless, the pupils fixed and dilated, and the whites stained by what looked like ink blotches of red where blood must’ve leaked. She noted his eye color as blue, but closer examination revealed an ash-gray hue seemed to be overtaking it, strongest at the perimeter and spreading toward the center—something else Vicky had never encountered before, either in study or the field.

  The beam of her penlight shined through them revealed no swelling of the brain, though she suspected it too would have exhibited an increased rigidity had she been able to examine it. The patient’s heartbeat should’ve been more pronounced than it sounded through the stethoscope, a fact Vicky first passed off to the cumbersome nature of the biohazard suit and then wondered if perhaps it was more due to general rigidity plaguing his chest cavity as well.

  Starting from the inside and moving outward, she thought, making another mental note.

  As Vicky pried open the patient’s mouth, a frothy stream of blood drained out from swollen gums. Swabbing away the blood revealed that most of his teeth had fallen out, some still in his mouth under his tongue, while the rest were loose and on the verge of following. She traced a finger along the gum line, feeling a pinch and pulling the finger away before her glove could tear. She first thought it was the broken base of a tooth still lodged beneath the gum. Closer inspection, though, revealed it to be something else entirely: a new tooth, the tip pointy and sharp.

  Vicky inspected his gums again, using a probe this time, and not believing what she uncovered.

  The patient was growing a fresh set of teeth to replace the ones that had fallen out, perhaps even forcing them from the gums the way his second set of teeth had pushed out the first.

  “Can you step outside with me for a moment, Doctor?” Van Royce asked her, looking up from a text message or e-mail he’d received on his phone.

  “Wait, I want to try one more thing.” She looked toward Robelais through her helmet’s plastic antifog plate. “Have you been drawing blood?”

  “Yes, several times,” he told her. “The last time I tried was one hour ago.”

  “What do you mean tried?”

  “I encountered … difficulties.”

  “Difficulties?”

  “A new symptom,” Robelais said, as if embarrassed by his lack of understanding. “Or, perhaps, a gradation of what was already present. Here,” he said, handing her a syringe from a tray poised atop a nearby cart.

  Vicky took the syringe and peeled back the sterile wrapping. She found a vein just beneath the crook in the patient’s elbow. She tried to pinch the skin to make the vein protrude a bit more, but couldn’t even budge it. Then she patted the skin in the general area around the vein to flush some blood to the area, also with no effect at all.

  Ultimately, she held the arm steady and slipped the needle into place over the blue of the vein, easing the plunger down.

  It didn’t move.

  She pressed harder.

  The needle still didn’t budge, not even piercing the skin, the vein remaining untouched beneath it.

  “What the…” she heard Van Royce start, before his voice trailed off.

  Vicky pressed her thumb with as much force as she could muster, until her knuckle started to throb.

  Crack!

/>   Ping!

  The two sounds made her lurch back reflexively, rocking the gurney on which the patient lay. She looked down at the plunger still clutched in her grasp. The needle had broken off at the stem and dropped to the building’s tile floor.

  “Doctor,” Van Royce was saying, his voice sterner. “A moment outside, please.”

  Vicky followed him back into the hallway, glad to be able to strip off her hazmat mask and breathe freely again. Even more glad when they slid through a curtain formed of the same plastic sheeting into an empty cubicle.

  “Before you ask,” she started, catching up to her own breathing, “the answer’s no, I’ve never seen or studied anything like this before.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say,” Van Royce told her, his tone as grim and somber as his expression. “While you were examining the patient, I received word of another possible outbreak, considerably more advanced.”

  “Where?”

  “Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula. Another team from the WHO is already en route.”

  “But they won’t get there before we can, Neal,” Vicky told him.

  SIXTEEN

  Alberta, Canada

  Dale Denton watched Orson Beekman approaching him across the frozen patch of wasteland. Nothing but scrub and light snow cover with a smattering of rolling hills and mountains in the distance that looked as if they’d been painted onto the scene beneath the blazing sunlight that belied the actual temperature.

  “Doesn’t look like much, does it, Professor?” Denton greeted, with a wide grin showcasing the deep furrows and lines the sun had carved into his face through all his years working the fields. “But the oil sands situated beneath this land have helped make Alberta responsible for around ninety-five percent of oil reserves in this country. Know how much of those our company owns the mineral rights to?”

  “No,” Beekman said, exhausted from coming straight here from Houston. He’d stopped there only long enough to secure the rock, or whatever it was, in the safest environment possible after returning from the Yucatán. “I don’t.”

  “Neither do I, to tell you the truth, not exactly. But I know there weren’t a lot of other bidders when I got involved a whole bunch of years ago. Plenty of others knew the oil sands were here, but only a very few saw the profit in that someday. Everybody knows you’ve got to risk a fortune to make a fortune, and I’m hardly a stranger to risk. Show me a man who’s afraid of taking risks, and I’ll show you a failure. I’ve been walking a tightrope with a blindfold on my whole goddamn life. Familiar territory now, my own backyard.” Denton paused and looked Beekman over, as if seeing him for the first time. “Congratulations on a successful trip, by the way.”

  Beekman shivered and wrapped his arms tighter around himself. Denton had had cold-weather gear waiting for him to change into at the airfield, but so far it wasn’t doing much good. He’d felt cold ever since leaving Mexico, unable to chase the experience at the site of the find in the Yucatán from his mind.

  “Successful?” he managed to repeat, incredulous at Denton’s use of the word.

  “In spite of the collateral damage, of course,” Denton said matter-of-factly, as if the deaths of Racine and his team meant nothing to him. “Those people knew the risks and were paid handsomely for it.”

  Beekman shuddered. “You weren’t there. The damage was a lot more than collateral.”

  Denton seemed unmoved. “You gave explicit orders Racine’s team violated. I hope you don’t feel either of us bears any responsibility for this.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do.”

  “I’m not talking about the deaths; I’m talking about what caused them and how. I’m talking about the object. And no amount of sanitization or cover-up can change the fact that it was directly to blame for what happened.”

  “A rock?”

  “I don’t need to tell you that this is no ordinary rock.”

  Denton scowled, his breath misting before him. In point of fact, he had gone into damage control mode as soon as Beekman provided his initial, stumbling report over the satellite phone. Bribes were prepared for the proper Mexican officials, and by the time Beekman reached the airport after cursory questioning, blame for the massacre had been laid with the Sinaloa drug cartel. He didn’t have to clear Customs and no one questioned the contents of the vacuum-sealed container that hadn’t left his sight, and didn’t until he secured it at Western Energy Technologies headquarters in Houston.

  “Please don’t insult me with your mumbo jumbo, Professor,” Denton scoffed. “I’m a businessman and, last time I checked, you were a geophysicist. Let’s stay on subject and on point here.”

  “I imagine that’s what Pandora was doing just before she opened the infamous box.”

  “There’s no room for myths or spook stories in our line of work. We knew the rock, stone, object, or whatever you want to call it was potentially dangerous and you warned Racine to that effect. Please don’t expect me to base my decisions on the actions of a single unstable and unbalanced individual. That’s right, Professor, I’ve reviewed the personnel files. This woman responsible for this mess suffered from bipolar disorder, and I’m betting the autopsy on her shows she’d stopped taking her meds.”

  “Have you even read my report?”

  “You look around here and see oil fields,” Denton said, instead of responding. “Know what I see, Professor? I see the past, soon to be the distant past. I see a finite resource that’s bleeding away as we stand here. Imagine a world that no longer has oil to fuel it. Now, imagine a world that no longer needs oil to fuel it. And whoever comes up with a new energy source to replace fossil fuels will be the next Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Intel. All indications point to the fact our long-lost rock possesses that kind of potential. But we can’t determine that unless we put aside likening it to Pandora’s box, the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, or the goddamn pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Because you just might have brought back a real pot of gold from the Yucatán. So let’s focus on the bigger picture, the fact that something we’ve been searching for ever since Ben Younger happened upon it in that underground cave twenty-seven years ago is now in our possession.”

  “It was burning through the young woman’s hand,” Beekman told him, something he had left out of his report.

  “Burning?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, except upon inspection the surrounding skin showed no signs of heat scoring, bubbling, puckering, or burn marks.”

  “All the better it’s tucked away safely in our lab, then.”

  “I’m not sure how safely anymore.”

  Denton’s eyes bore into Beekman the same way the drill was slicing through the rock, shale, and limestone of Alberta. “What about its origins and actual composition?”

  “Once I’m sure it’s safe, we’ll run X-ray, spectrographic, and magnetic resonance core testing toward that end.”

  “I trust my gut over all of them, Professor. We were standing side-by-side in Mexico when Ben Younger appeared out of nowhere. The answers to everything that happened to him afterward, including his death, lies with this rock.”

  “All I’m saying is that we need to go slow here, exercise all measure of caution. If we’re right about the potential the rock’s energy has to change the world, we must also accept the fact that it has the power to—”

  “Spare me the lecture, Professor,” Denton interrupted. “We’ve been over this before. A million times. And if I let myself get spooked as easily as you do, there wouldn’t have been a Mexico or the hundred-million-dollar lab where potentially the greatest scientific discovery ever known to man is waiting for us.” Denton swept his gaze about the wasteland so rich with oil sands that it might as well have been a paradise. “Look around you,” he prompted to Beekman, wearing no jacket and only a sweater rolled up at the sleeves. “When others were shutting down or reducing their operations, I was expanding those of Western Energy Technologies. And I’ve pu
rchased tens of thousands of additional acres since prices sank. Time and time again, I should’ve lost, but I never did, because I always win. It’s all about the future, and we’re going to own that future, Professor, lock, stock, and fucking barrel.”

  Thanks to an object no bigger than a baseball, Denton thought, WET was poised to make another fortune from pioneering a new source of energy, but only if his gut feeling was correct. Ben Younger, likely the first person to ever encounter the rock’s power, was dead and buried, what was left of him anyway, after plunging from a sixtieth-floor office window in a Manhattan skyscraper. He might well have been the first man to ever lay eyes upon it, carrying its mark with him from that day forward without realizing its true power and origins.

  Energy Is Power.

  Another of Denton’s catchphrases that had become the motto of Western Energy Technologies. As a boy he’d watched his parents die in a cotton field, barely avoiding the tornado that gobbled them up after the work foreman had refused to heed the advance warnings. He ended up being raised in an old-fashioned Jesuit orphanage where the rest of his rearing was done in misery by no one in particular. That’s how Dale Denton had learned to rely only on himself.

  He’d never gotten the sight of that funnel cloud sucking his parents up into its vortex out of his mind. He’d watched breathless, horrified, but also fascinated. And, if the theories Professor Beekman had developed about the object now held in WET’s Houston labs were correct, Denton was about to harness a completely new energy source, a game changer in the world of energy that would hopefully justify the fortune he’d spent over the years to recover it.

  “I’m going to say this one more time,” Beekman told him, shivering anew. “We should delay the experimentation phase a bit longer, at least until we have a clearer notion of what we’re dealing with.”

  “And I believe we shouldn’t. Enough said,” Denton finished, leaving it there. “You have your instructions, Professor. Utilize any precautions you wish to make sure we don’t destroy the world before we get the chance to own it, but I want you to be ready to go ahead by the time I return to Houston.”