by Jon Land
The man nodded, his voice gravelly and hoarse when he responded. “We have two F-16s already in the air, circling overhead.”
Just like the Egyptians must have two days before, Vicky thought, certain now that government knew far more than they were saying about Medusa. She had no concept of what they were about to encounter once inside, but couldn’t stop picturing an army of the infected, unleashed on the world in the event the pathogen couldn’t be contained.
“I want a gun,” Vicky said to Musa.
Musa took a pistol from one of his men and handed it to her. “Just don’t shoot me. And remember to aim for the head,” he added, recalling her own words back at the clinic.
* * *
The facility’s fate became quickly and abundantly clear from the moment she, Musa, and the Lebanese soldiers stepped through the black hole of the entrance.
The facility had been ravaged, looked to have been the target of a savage and concentrated attack, the level of damage and destruction growing worse the deeper they waded. Blood was splattered everywhere, dried and chalky. Equipment was toppled, doors blown or torn from their hinges. The shattered refuse of computers and other diagnostic equipment was strewn everywhere, little of it recognizable. Emergency lights were sputtering or flashing in strobe-like fashion, making it difficult to focus. And a dull whine, evidence of an emergency alarm that had burned itself out, toyed with the edge of Vicky’s consciousness, unsettling her even further.
But what stood out most were footprints, footprints frozen in the blood. Crisscrossing each other, all seeming to head in the same direction:
The facility’s main doors, through which Vicky had just entered.
The intensity and level of destruction worsened the deeper they drew into the facility and approached a stairwell that descended to the first sub-level.
Vicky could see Musa swallow hard through the orange fabric covering his throat. “None of this makes any sense.”
“Not yet, anyway,” she told him.
Continuing on, they encountered a series of hastily erected barricades, now breeched, formed of office furniture placed at strategic points to block access to the stairwells leading to the first sub-level. The elevators had been disabled, wiring exposed from within their operating panels.
Some portion of the facility’s staff had seemingly made a concerted effort to contain the crisis here and not let any of the infected escape El al-Lacosh, as Vicky had come to think of it. But Gunther Brune’s presence in Abu Siddar clearly indicated that effort had failed, along with the fact none of those who’d made their stand here were anywhere to be seen.
One of Musa’s men continued to lead the way deeper into the facility. Vicky walked immediately behind him, Musa on her right with another soldier, the remaining two having gone off to sweep additional areas of the facility in search of survivors. She wished they’d brought more biohazard suits to accommodate more soldiers, but squandering the time it would take to get them to the site was unthinkable under the circumstances.
“Security tapes,” Vicky told Musa, gesturing toward a wall-mounted camera.
“I’m familiar with the system,” he said, after inspecting it closer. “Digitally based, content stored on a hard drive.”
“We need to bring the computers that are still whole with us. They’ll be able to tell us whatever was created here. And what got loose,” Vicky added after an uneasy pause.
They forced their way through the next, bulkhead-type door to find it had been blocked by a desk and assortment of chairs. The inside of what looked like a more administrative area was lined with spilled-over desks, save for one where a single figure lay facedown atop a blotter soaked in blood and gore.
Vicky eased him upright and saw what was clearly a gore-splattered entry wound on the side of his head.
“He shot himself,” Musa said, noting the presence of a fallen pistol at the man’s feet.
Vicky barely heard him, too busy examining a series of bite marks on the man’s side and upper legs. “He was infected, knew what he would soon become.”
“What, like Gunther Brune? You’re saying there are more of them here?”
The other two soldiers returned from their sweeps with a collection of assault rifles they handed over to Musa.
“They’ve all been fired,” he reported, after inspecting the first few. “All of them empty.”
Damage from more gunfire was evident in the walls and toppled equipment as well, but that didn’t tell Vicky who, or what, they’d been shooting at.
“Where are the bodies? Where’s the blood, the carnage? If they went up against a horde of what we saw back in that clinic, it should be everywhere.”
Musa could only shrug.
“And what happened to them once the barricades were breached? If they’d survived, they would’ve reached civilization by now. If they didn’t, as all indications would suggest, whatever’s left of them should be in front of us now.”
Musa didn’t bother to shrug this time. “This is where it started, isn’t it? This is Ground Zero.”
And that’s when they heard the crash.
FORTY-FOUR
Southern Lebanon
The Lebanese soldiers who’d accompanied Vicky and Major Musa inside the facility tensed, the faceplates of their helmets gone misty with condensation. They aimed their assault rifles back across the floor riddled with toppled equipment, toward the door beyond which lay the barricades erected by workers who seemed to have vanished along with everyone else.
“We should get out,” Vicky said, readying her own pistol in her gloved hand.
“My thoughts exactly,” Musa agreed, already backpedaling.
They were almost to the heavy, swinging doors, when both crashed open and a surge of motion engulfed them in the same moment the single door leading to where the survivors had made their last stand burst ajar behind an identical wave. Vicky processed the scene in slow motion, catching glimpses of the pathogen’s victims in the next phase of the disease, what Gunther Brune was becoming before he was gunned down.
Her first thought was that their skin had turned inside out, an illusion cast by the fact that the hardened, pulsing ridges layered atop the surface looked like veins and arteries running externally instead of internally. Their eyes were like black marbles wedged into their hairless skulls. The faces of the creatures were dominated by the same crisscrossing, overgrown rows of teeth as Gunther Brune had displayed, looking more like snouts as a result. Their arms and legs appeared vaguely simian, but hairless to reveal those sinewy growths Vicky had already taken for veins and arteries layered outside the skin instead of within it. Encased likely in some form of hardened shell comparable to what she’d witnessed in the patients she’d examined.
No longer human at all, their recombinant DNA reengineered by the infection, turning them into …
Into what exactly?
Musa’s soldiers turned their fire on the creatures, two in each direction to protectively enclose Vicky and the major. But the creatures were on them before the bullets could even slow them down, engulfing the soldiers in twin waves, a blur of time and motion. Amid the horrible screams and red mist wafting into the air, Musa and Vicky bolted for the now cleared path to the door and potential escape. This as the screams of the soldiers being ravaged turned wet and wheezy, and Vicky felt their blood splashing against her.
“What are they?” Musa managed, as they dashed up the stairs, back toward the facility’s aboveground floor.
They shoved their way through a heavy bulkhead-type door. Musa sealed it closed after them, but found no locking mechanism to slide into place. They’d started to rush toward the same doors they’d entered through, when the bulkhead door crashed open, the flood of creatures from the sub-level surging toward them.
Musa swung and drained the magazine of his assault rifle, aiming for the head and downing a dozen of the creatures that were immediately trampled by the remainder of the advancing horde. Vicky heard it clack empty, Mus
a exchanging it for a pistol in the same moment she readied her own. The two of them firing shot after shot, more hits than misses, the hits obliterating the features of the creatures, spraying blood and bone matter into the air and walls.
Vicky felt the 9mm pistol kick upward in her hand, sending her bullets wildly off target, when she picked up her pace backward. She realized Musa was tugging her on by the wrist, but she kept firing until her pistol’s slide locked open and the main doors were upon them.
They surged into the night toward a pair of Humvees that had positioned themselves so their heavy machine guns were facing the door. The twin guns opened fire as soon as she and Musa were clear, dual streams of bullets pouring into the creatures, as they seemed to congeal in the doorway.
“The heads!” Musa cried out. “Shoot for the heads!”
Vicky was already at their vehicle by then, Musa leaping inside and slamming the door just behind her. Her thinking halted abruptly when she realized her Humvee was reversing, twisting and turning, the constant din of the .50-caliber machine gun’s fire deafening her to the screech of tires, crack of the big bullets’ multiple impacts, and the blare of the constant stream of fire itself. She had the same sense she recalled as a little girl when the merry-go-round started spinning so fast, she could barely spot the sea of faces waiting beyond.
The things that had managed to escape the initial barrage were surging toward them.
Thud!
Vicky felt rather than heard the thump of her Humvee striking one of the men-turned-monsters by the deadly pathogen that had been conceived within the walls of the facility they’d just fled. She knew Musa was barking out orders, screaming into the vehicle’s radio to report what was happening or summon reinforcements or airstrike, anything, in words she still couldn’t hear. Or, if she heard them, they didn’t register, lost in the haze bred by panic that had consumed the night.
There was a large blast she did register, followed by a flame burst that split the black air. One of the Humvees had crashed into a concrete pillar supporting the fence. Vicky thought she detected screams at the edge of her consciousness, caught strobe glimpses of motion descending upon the wreckage. This while her Humvee was tearing on, whipsawing and fishtailing, the fire from its turret-mounted heavy machine gun deafening.
Musa swung toward the Israeli soldier Raviv to find him already on his satellite phone, calling in the air strike on the facility from the F-16s that were circling overhead now. They’d use bunker busters to make sure nothing was left, whatever creatures might still be gestating inside the hardened shells obliterated before they could complete their transformation into whatever these things were.
Their Humvee and a second one that had managed to survive surged out into the surrounding desert mere moments ahead of the initial blast that impacted with a fury that coughed a huge dust cloud into the air ahead of the fireball. A second blast rattled the Humvee again, before a third actually lifted it off the road, the driver barely able to retain control when it smacked down again.
“We just came from hell, didn’t we?” Musa managed, settling back in his seat, with the glow of the fires wrought by the blast dissipating the farther away they drew.
“Close enough,” Vicky told him.
FORTY-FIVE
British Columbia, Canada
Max flew into Boundary Bay Airport just over the United States border, ten miles from Vancouver. The address associated with the post office box that formed the return address for the animal figurines Laurie Whitlow continued to receive after the reported death of her father was located in the town of Maple Ridge. Max had already reserved a rental car preloaded with directions to cover the roughly one-hour drive.
When he landed, there was a message waiting for him on his phone from Admiral Darby, summoning him back to station. Not just him, either, Max recalled now: All personnel were being recalled to duty or redeployed to the region, something big and bad obviously going down.
But Max had to pay a visit to Dr. Franklin Kirsch first. Four, five hours maybe, was all he needed. Then he could hop whatever series of flights to return to the Middle East, from Vancouver International Airport, instead of Boundary Bay.
It was misty and damp, with rain in the forecast, a fact that hardly diminished the beauty of the countryside Max passed on the drive. He kept his cell phone handy in one of the console cup holders, in case Bochner uncovered anything else awry in the circumstances surrounding Dr. Franklin Kirsch’s passing. Because his instincts had convinced Max that Kirsch had somehow survived the explosion at CyberGen and had been hiding out here ever since. Land records indicated no deeds or transfers in his name, but that was hardly surprising, given that Kirsch would’ve taken all necessary measures to disappear forever. Add that to the timing of the explosion coming so close to Ben Younger’s visit to Kirsch, and a connection seemed at the very least plausible.
Max reached the fence line of the farm in question, just as the sun broke through the dusk sky. He figured it to be around four hundred acres, average for this area. There was no gate at the entrance, located alongside a mailbox, and he drove onto the property toward a farmhouse, passing acres of apple orchards on the way.
Max slowed near a large fenced pen where a quartet of horses were grazing not far from him. They looked like draft horses, working animals. Suddenly, the four horses reared their heads back, sniffing at the air. Their eyes seem to lock on him, freezing for a long moment before they began baying and snorting. Kicking their front legs into the air before galloping toward the other side of the pen, as far from him as possible.
Was it something I said? Max quipped to himself, sliding up the window again. Guess I’m not your type.
Drawing deeper onto the property, Max saw that the postcard perfection of the initial acres he passed were shadowed by empty, barren lands beyond riddled with overgrowth. Closer to the farmhouse, he spotted a horse barn before which lay a hog pen, the animals turning his way as he eased his car to a halt.
Max climbed out, eyes on the front door, when he heard the unmistakable clack of a shell being ratcheted into the chamber of a shotgun.
“That’s as far as you go, mister,” a voice warned ahead of a young man in denim overalls emerging from the darkness of the barn. “Keep your hands were I can see them.”
Max raised them into the air. “I’m not armed.”
“You better not be,” the young man said, his thick hair looking like a tangled bird’s nest atop his head, acne riddling his face. “You lost or something?”
“I’m here to see Franklin Kirsch.”
“Then I guess you are lost, since I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“But he’ll know mine. It’s Younger, Max Younger. My father Ben was a patient of his.”
“I don’t know anything about that and I don’t know nobody named Kirsch,” he said, extending the shotgun further forward. “That means you’re trespassing and I’ll shoot you, if you don’t get yourself gone.”
Max had started to backpedal, to mollify the young man, when he felt a presence to his right, like a ripple in the air, the same way he sensed an enemy in combat.
“It’s all right, Teek,” a voice called out from the area of the house. “You can lower the gun.”
Max turned slowly to find an old man approaching. Slightly stooped over, wearing corduroys, his white hair now a gangly mess atop his head, but still recognizable from the pictures Laurie Whitlow kept displayed in the den of the brownstone she’d inherited from him.
“Dr. Kirsch,” Max greeted.
Kirsch stopped a dozen feet away. The light was bleeding fast from the sky, the clearing set between the farmhouse and the barn holding the last measure of it.
“Is it true what you just said, that you’re Ben Younger’s son?”
“I see you remember my father.”
“And I remember he had a son named Max. I remember that all too well,” Kirsch added, his voice cracking. “What I need you to do,” he resumed, after clearing
his throat, “is climb back in your car and drive off. Whatever you came here for, you won’t find it.”
“I’m Max Younger and I came here for information about my father, Dr. Kirsch.”
Teek started to raise the shotgun’s barrel again, and Kirsch made no move to stop him.
“I have nothing to say to you, young man.”
Kirsch turned and started to walk off, into a patch of ground already darkened by shadows.
“Someone tried to kill me,” Max called after him.
Kirsch stopped.
“And I think it’s connected somehow to the destruction of CyberGen,” Max continued.
Kirsch turned back around.
“How did you manage to survive, Doctor? Why did you fake your own death?”
“Because if I didn’t, I knew they’d finish the job. Because I had stepped out of the office for a meeting and when I came back the block had been cordoned off and the building was reduced to rubble. Do you know what blood smells like?”
Max nodded, not bothering to elaborate.
“Because I think I smelled it on the air.” Kirsch took a few steps forward, back into what little remained of the light. “You believe the oddities of your father’s … condition was somehow to blame for what happened? Well, so do I.”
* * *
Kirsch led Max inside the farmhouse and locked the door behind them, after dismissing Teek.
“Were you followed?”
“No,” Max said, calmly.
“Are you sure?”
“I’d know if I was. Believe me.”
Kirsch moved further away from him. “How, how did you find me? It couldn’t have been my daughter. She’s never told anyone, never, and she sure as hell wouldn’t have told you. Unless…”