by Milt Mays
Freaks. Yeah, she had experience with those. Right here.
She jumped out of the Beemer and ran to the building, rain pelting the olive-green, breathable raincoat she used for backpacking. The waterproof trail runners would be okay, but her tan fly fishing pants would get a bit wet. They dried fast. The main thing was getting inside and finding out why the alarm went off.
This vault was more than secret. More than top secret. Neither the President, nor any of his advisers or close staff had any inkling of who was kept in suspended animation in this vault. Such were the layers of secrecy in the clandestine branches of the U.S. government. In the early days, the fledgling Department of Homeland Security knew about the contents of this vault, but with changes of presidents and growth of the department came loss of staff, and as in all big bureaucracies, the files got buried.
And there were the accidents: fatal ones.
The modern world on the eastern seaboard of the mighty USA was host to numerous unavoidable accidents, usually from motor vehicles, sometimes from industrial mishaps, drunken hypothermia, drug overdoses, criminal underworld professional hits. The list was long. And then if you were hospitalized . . .
Prior to his hospitalization, one powerful and caustic senator, George Cardwell of the mighty state of Mississippi, knew all about the vault and the occupant. But when a powerful senator starts forgetting things, his dementia must be investigated immediately, by the best. His doctors in Bethesda Naval Hospital scanned and probed and came up empty, except for the widened choroid fissure, dilated temporal horns of the lateral ventricles, atrophy of the hippocampus, and white-matter degeneration of glial cells: all seen in Alzheimer’s disease.
Poor man.
After a year, he was placed in a secret nursing home, and a very select nurse planted by La Riva Labs made sure he never missed his oatmeal spiced with a certain genetically modified virus that caused degeneration of glial cells in the brain. Or at least it did in their primate lab. Now they had their first human test case. The Senator worsened. Couldn’t even remember his name now.
Rachel knew all this to be true because she was one of the top scientists who worked for La Riva Labs. She knew that primate lab with macaques very well. They had helped her discover the cure for Simian virus, and then HIV, and finally the nano-genetic splicer for her daughter’s DNA.
She also knew the man in the vault all too well. There was a time, even a year or two before 9/11, when she would have fought to release the man in the vault, Jabril El Fahd. He deserved a fair trial for his crimes. Ya-da-ya-da-ya-da. Yeah, that was her. A used-to-be liberal. Before Jabril nearly killed her husband, Alex, and destroyed the entire U.S. Since then Rachel had learned a few things: karate, judo, how to shoot better than most men and with a Glock in each hand. But most of all, her attitude had changed. She had become what some called one tough bitch. It was necessary to protect Alex, and her teenaged daughter, Alexis—the hope of the world.
Two police cars raced by and ignored her parking indiscretion, though they would swarm the place if they knew what had happened inside this building, this all-too-familiar beige brick building. A video camera perched above a beautiful, faux walnut door. Not wood, but one inch of iron. Appearances were important to those who built this place. There were no windows, either—a clue no one inside needed to look out.
There were four layers of redundancies in the power circuit to this vault for good reason. “The body and brain of Jabril El Fahd must never be warmed!” This had been the order from the commanding General of the Army’s special antiterrorism unit to the soldiers who were entrusted with guarding the tomb. General Joseph Patton Hanson had made that statement over sixteen years ago. He was a simple man, in Rachel’s estimation. Simple yet ruthless. Simple in that he always thought of Jabril as “frozen” when in reality he was hypothermic. Ruthless in his ultimate desires for Jabril. On the way out of the “burial” ceremony, General Hanson had whispered to Rachel, “I’d love to have Jabril warm up, and then hang that living, squirming son of a bitch, and applaud when he strangles to death due to a strategic error in the hangman’s noose. But first, I’d have a long one-on-one session administering waterboarding and electric shocks.” General Hanson had smiled, showing his too-white teeth, his face slanted from the scar that ran from one eyebrow to cheek, a memento from Jabril. The smile was as ugly as his words. Rachel had coughed and walked away, her polite way of ending the conversation. Yes, Jabril had done ugly things, would have done horrific things to millions, perhaps billions of people. Yet the General’s ideas went too far.
Jabril was a man, a human being, though the Army didn’t seem to care. After all, he had deep connections to Al Qaeda and his deepest wish was to end western civilization. He’d nearly succeeded once. If given a second chance, accounting for his unique mutated form, he would succeed. They didn’t want him to have that second chance, and felt sure his ability to think and plan and fight was ended forever after Rachel’s friend had sliced and diced and scrambled his brain like a Dairy Queen Blizzard back in 2001. But his DNA was too unique not to study, discern its secrets and build an army of almost indestructible mutants that would obey General Hanson’s every command.
So the CIA, La Riva, and the Army had partnered and kept Jabril in a suspended living state in order to sample his mutating DNA, every day for the last fifteen plus years—excepting weekends and holidays, of course. This was the government.
But she knew the General enjoyed knowing Jabril might feel every biopsy, and hoped he even suffered between biopsies. A rightful punishment on his way to hell. Jabril hung from wires embedded in the bones of his arms and legs, a hypothermic Islamic puppet on strings, naked but for a loincloth, fed through a gastric tube. No site was considered verboten to sample: heart, liver, eyes, brain, testes. It didn’t matter; all areas healed within minutes after the sample was taken. Since Jabril was not contagious, he was not isolated; no need to zoot-suit before coming in. Merely a mask and gloves. No one used any anesthesia. The man, beast, terrorist, was hypothermic, too cold to feel, they said. But if he felt it? If he felt the slice of scalpels, the boring of drills, the tearing of biopsy bites? As far as the General was concerned: served Jabril right. He healed himself in minutes, anyway. Just a scar left. Once, mice kept in crates next to him, mice they’d been injecting with his cells, had gotten out and crawled over Jabril, bite scars evident the next morning. The General heard that one and nearly split his spleen laughing.
Rachel punched in her code on the outside cipher keyboard next to the iron door. A buzz clicked the lock and she pulled open the heavy door, entered and pulled it shut. In one minute the alarm would sound if she didn’t enter the code into the alarm cabinet, twenty feet down the hallway. She rushed to the cabinet, her wet shoes squeaking.
The green light glared at her from the alarm keyboard. Not often you get worried seeing a green light. But this green light meant the alarm was already off. Someone was here. Maybe the Jeep had brought them?
She ran to the elevator and drew her Glock from her shoulder holster. Shit! Even though she had gone through a ton of martial arts and weaponry training since surviving Jabril in 2001, she was no field agent. And as much as she hated violence . . . But she was here. She was it. She started to run inside the opening elevator doors, but stopped. The shiny steel walls inside the elevator were splattered in a dark substance. One corner was completely painted next to the—
Head. Yep, that was a man’s head lying in the corner. And that was definitely not paint.
The doors bounced closed against her shoulders and started to open again. She couldn’t move. Rain dripped off her coat onto the floor. All she could do was stare and think of Alex and Alexis. Alexis was not only the light in Rachel’s heart, but the potential light of the world. Her unique genetic differences, inherited from her father, could save the human species from endless violence and bloodshed.
All the blood.
Damn. She had to think, but nausea filled her. Blood coated the w
alls. The head (thank God it faced the corner) had matted blood over the high-and-tight haircut. A jagged tear around the neck explained everything: Jabril. He always caused a lot of bleeding when he changed. Not his own, either. Maybe this head was one of the guys from the Jeep.
Should she return to her car and wait for help? Probably. The doors bounced on her shoulders again. She stepped inside, hit the “B” and “Close Door” buttons.
If Jabril was still here, she would have been dead already, so she decided to proceed. She must go to the basement and start the investigation while the evidence was fresh. Then she would call someone.
The elevator descended so quickly her stomach lurched. The head rolled her way and she gagged at the dead face. She turned away and forced other thoughts in her head. How the hell could the power go off to a top secret, temperature-controlled vault but still have the elevator and alarms in working order?
The elevator stopped, the head rolled back and a soft ding signaled her arrival. The doors parted and she peeked out.
Ten feet down the hallway two men glanced up. One was compact, stood as if wired for action, wore blue jeans, a black baseball hat, an unzipped forest-green rain jacket showing a black tee shirt with a peach surfboard emblazoned on the front. The other was a big guy, meaty, planted and relaxed, identical rain jacket, buzz cut, sky-blue tee with a large fish and a dark tear-drop stain dribbled on the front.
Both had grizzled, two-day beards and aimed rifles at her.
Rachel thought again about Alexis who was in Texas helping post-war people in need, and hoped she could take care of herself.
Chapter 5
Rachel glowered at the two men pointing rifles at her. “What the hell, boys? Didn’t feel the need to contact me? Don’t think I might add something to this little hoopla?”
They lowered their guns.
“Rachel . . . Uh, how are you?” Sam Houston, the smaller man, relaxed his nervous stance, scratched under his chin and raised his eyebrows, like his presence there was a mere accident. “You look great.” He had a tanned face, black hair, black eyes, and a constant grin. “We were about to call you.”
She stomped toward them, grateful for familiar faces, but angry that she was not there first. Her thick auburn hair trailed behind her like a mane, and she reveled in the fact that over fifteen years had passed since she’d seen Sam and she still had no gray. During times like these she really didn’t like her too-feminine face with full lips and pixie nose. It was nice to have the balance of a “concentration crease” in the middle of her eyebrows. And over the years it had deepened, allowing her to maximize angry looks. Like now. Yeah she had more wrinkles, but she also hadn’t put on an ounce of fat. She wanted to punch Sam in the mouth for lying to her. No way would they have called her. Always trying to protect the woman. What a bunch of crap.
Sam strained to stand tall, yet his head barely reached her chin. Even though she was five six, he was a runt. Yet, he was more dangerous than three Napoleons. His raven hair covered the top of his ears. He had no gray either. Damn. But he did have a bit of salt in his pepper-dark beard.
“Right. Who do you think you’re kidding?” She stopped and studied the gore around her. “What in God’s name happened here?” And in that instant she forgot her anger at them, knowing they only wanted to help.
The guards of the vault, or rather their pieces, lay scattered about like carnage from a grizzly bear attack in the Rockies.
“Jabril happened,” the big man said. “Next time I’m cutting his head off and burning it to ashes.” Salvatore Sebastiano Rocca, or Rock, was Rachel’s friend who had “killed” Jabril those sixteen-plus years ago. Or so he thought when he drove his knife up through Jabril’s chin into his brain and mixed it up like a milkshake. No pulse, no reaction. A done deal. Yet a few weeks later Rachel had told him Jabril came back to life and the Army had kept him alive. How stupid was that? Keeping the man alive who nearly destroyed the USA and slept with Al Qaeda. He’d even infected himself with a virus to wipe out the USA, only to become some mutant monster who was way stronger and faster than any human and could heal bullet wounds in minutes.
Rachel had explained it to Rock once: Epigenetics, viruses or stress or something had changed Jabril’s genes so he was like a chameleon, only he wasn’t able to change the color of his skin but the size and quickness of muscle fibers and the ability to regenerate tissues at enormous speeds. Those attributes made him close to the perfect soldier. One problem, though: Jabril was a loose cannon, more like a big—no—a huge and very bad-tempered version of Bugs Bunny’s Tasmanian Devil, swirling and killing and bouncing from place to place. Uncontrollable. Unpredictable. Apparently they kept him alive to duplicate his DNA and reproduce it inside soldiers, soldiers they could easily control. He should have been a brain-dead organ donor, right? Rock looked at the walls and the dead soldiers. Wrong. It seemed he could also reconstitute a churned brain, although judging from the state of things in the vault he might be a bit more insane than in 2001.
Rachel eyed him. “You think you’re up for a next time, Rock?” She knew he was always game, but the years had not treated him as kindly as Sam. Though his physique still spoke of square, muscular power, there were other changes. The grizzled beard was mostly salt, the gray hair was discernible even with his buzz cut, and the wrinkles were deep around the eyes. They were kind hazel eyes rimmed with brown, eyes she could trust and had trusted. And he was the only one who knew about Rachel’s other life.
He puffed air out his nose. “Damn straight.”
Sam squatted and inspected the vault door. “There’s no next time for you, Rock. You’re . . . Well let’s say you’re past your prime.”
“I can still bench three-hundred and run a mile under six.”
“What were you doing in ’01, when you took him out?” Sam jutted his head toward Jabril’s tomb.
“Four-fifty and under five.” Rock nodded, hung his head. “You’re right. I’d be no match. It appears that Jabril hasn’t aged a day in that frozen fountain of youth. And no telling what that virus has done to him now. It’s had a long time to change his DNA again.”
“How could the virus mutate while he was frozen?”
Rachel put a palm up. “His body temperature was low, hypothermic, not really frozen. Viruses still do their thing even in Antarctica. Some even work faster in the cold.”
Now that her initial revulsions had abated, Rachel knelt on one knee and inspected the remains of the guards. These were not all ragged tears. There were many cleanly severed appendages.
“Are we sure it wasn’t some of his Jihadist buddies come to rescue? Didn’t the Army uncover something about ISIS militants in Alexandria? There’s a lot of damage here. What about the video camera? Did you look at the recording?”
“Machine has been destroyed. The digital video recordings are toast.” Sam said. “ISIS is old news. Only one set of bloody footprints in here.” He pointed at the floor leading to the elevators. “Those naked prints leave the area bloody, come back clean and wet. They are not accompanied by other bloody prints. Then we have only one set of shoe prints. Looks like Nikes.” He paused. “The three guards have no keys on them. I’m thinking he left, thought better of running around without shoes, rifled through the guards’ vehicles, found some clothes and shoes and came back, dressed and left again in one of the guard’s cars.”
“There’re three vehicles,” she started, then remembered. “The Jeep is yours.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “Not sure what the third was.”
Rocca pointed to the shoe prints. “He went into the vault and sat at the computer station before he left. There’s also a wet and bloody tee shirt in the corner. Not sure about that.”
“We think it’s only Jabril,” Sam said. “You know he could do this all by his little lonesome.”
“Yeah.” She studied the shoe and footprints, then the guards and their cleanly severed heads. “He must have a knife, though. How long you think he’s been gon
e?”
“A very sharp knife.” Rocca said and pointed to the wall. “Probably gone about an hour; blood spatter’s not quite dry.”
Rachel stood, pulled out Silastic gloves from her pants pocket, donned them and faced Sam. “And how is it you two got here before me?”
“Friends in low places.” Sam smiled, the Cheshire cat incarnate.
“Oh how true. The lowest.” She stepped around Sam and touched a spot of blood on the wall, then squatted and did the same to a bloody Nike print, dabbing at its consistency. “You’re probably right about when he left. Though, with it being so cold down here it might be ninety minutes. And the different dots and blots around here indicate extremely powerful and quick blows. I’d say you’re right, Rock. El Fahd has regained all of his former glory, and a very sharp instrument.”
Rock held his head up. “So what do we do now?”
Sam stood still and eyed Rock and Rachel, waiting.
Rachel knew what Rock wanted: to get her husband, Alex, back into the mix. Alex had survived Jabril once and his unique capabilities were possibly their only chance to beat Jabril. But he’d been secretly living in the deep wilderness of the High Sierra for the last sixteen-plus years, for all intents and purposes dead in the eyes of the U.S. government. Alex’s muscle cells had mutated in 2001 like Jabril’s, despite their being geographically separated by half the globe. Might have had to do with his exposure to viral biowarfare agents he’d been making in Brazil. But Alex’s epigenetic mutation involved other cells. His neurons also mutated, allowing telepathic abilities and changes in body temperature. If the U.S. Army could meld Alex and Jabril together? General Hanson would do anything for that.
So Alex had remained hidden from the U.S. Army. And though Alex’s abilities could help them, and he could kill with his bare hands as easily as Jabril, he would never kill Jabril. Too much deep history between them that ran back almost a hundred years.