The Gemini Effect

by Chuck Grossart

  After Kate died, Allison filled a role as a sounding board and a shoulder to cry on when the press corps was nowhere near. There were times, in the months following Kate’s death, when Allison knew that if she so wished, she could take their relationship to another level, but she chose not to.

  Allison had married young and thought she’d found the man who’d stand next to her forever. The demands of being married to a Coast Guard pilot, however, turned out to be more than he’d signed on for, and in time, the marriage simply faded away.

  She wasn’t lonely by any means—she didn’t have time to dwell on such things—but there were times she wished she could’ve done things differently.

  But to Allison, wishing was nothing more than an excuse for poor planning. The past is the past, and nothing can change it. The future is what one makes it. And the present—today—is the most important of all. Right now, he was the president, and she his vice. As long as they were both in office, she knew that’s how their relationship would stay. To allow it to progress to something more—even though she’d considered it—would be unprofessional, and she doubted Andrew would allow it, either.

  She knew him, though, probably better than any other member of his staff. She could tell his mood by the tone of his voice, by the look in his eyes. She could read him.

  And right now, she needed to speak to him in private. Something in his voice . . .

  “Admiral, I need the room, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Grierson said. He stood and exited the room without question.

  CHAPTER 17

  Ever since the hideous radiological attack unleashed in Cleveland had murdered thousands of innocents, the American public had practiced citywide evacuations. What was once considered an obsolete, feel-good civil defense program—good for nothing more than making the public feel like there actually was an orderly way to get out of the way of hundreds of Soviet nuclear weapons that would soon be dropping on their heads—had been transformed by the urgent necessity of national survival into an actual, functioning program. The Department of Homeland Security had provided every major city with an evacuation plan designed to cover a number of possibilities, portions of which were practiced once a month.

  Cleveland had been an example of mass public panic. People tried to run, to get as far away from the spreading cloud of invisible death as they could, and hundreds had died in the process. The entire nation had watched as it happened. Watched as the highways clogged and ground to a standstill. Watched as people had dropped dead, choking and spitting blood, clawing their eyes from their sockets. Watched mothers and children die leaning against their cars, hopelessly stranded in the sea of automobiles lining the highways for as far as the eye could see, while the dirty cloud spread. The sobering fact that more people had died trying to get away from the area than had died the instant the devices had exploded around the city had been a wake-up call. People had watched. And knew that next time, it could very well be them.

  Six months ago, the entire city of Chicago had been evacuated. There were problems, but not on the scale some had expected. The exercise had gone surprisingly well.

  But it had taken three days.

  It was just an exercise. People knew it wasn’t real.

  Hugo knew there were going to be problems. The major cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, most of the larger metro areas—were much more prepared than the smaller cities, as they were more lucrative targets. At least they were before this night. Right now, there were six other cities he wished had had more time to prepare. The entire country knew about Kansas City—and when the sirens sounded, people wouldn’t react like it was an exercise. They would panic.

  He prayed most could be saved.

  Minutes after Hugo had stepped from the situation room, the sirens began wailing in Topeka. Five minutes later, in Des Moines. Then, in Omaha. St. Louis. Wichita. Springfield was last.

  A mass exodus began.

  The things entered Topeka forty-five minutes later. There were no soldiers there to delay their approach. There hadn’t been enough time.

  The hideous sound of demons feeding filled the Kansas night.

  CHAPTER 18

  Carolyn pressed herself against the interior wall of the Chinook’s cargo area, hugging her knees tightly against her chest with two trembling arms. The rear hatch of the big chopper was still open, and the cold night air swirled around her, making every inch of exposed skin feel like ice. She was shivering uncontrollably, not only from the cold, but also from the absolute terror of what she’d just witnessed.

  She could tell they weren’t flying very high, as the lights from what little population there was in this part of Kansas farm country slid below them, the rapid thwap thwap thwap of the dual rotor blades propelling them forward. Toward where, she didn’t know. And didn’t much care.

  The three remaining members of her team—also cold and frightened—were huddled together on the other side of the chopper’s large interior. As far as she could tell in the dark, there were also about ten soldiers in the cargo area, the ones lucky enough to get away. They sat quietly, rifles between their knees, eyes looking straight ahead at nothing in particular. Carolyn knew their thoughts must be with their fellow soldiers—their brothers and sisters in arms—those who’d been left behind.

  To fight.

  To die.

  The thought of all those people being killed by those things made her stomach turn. The yellow eyes—hundreds, thousands of pairs of pinpoint evil, bounding across the tarmac in the darkness. What she’d seen couldn’t be real. It couldn’t have happened! But she knew it had happened. And more than that, she knew she was one of the lucky ones. If she’d fallen instead of Matt . . . She shivered as she remembered his head ripped from his body as easily as a grape plucked from a stem. She remembered the crew chief . . . His eyes, as he was pulled from the open ramp. Whatever those things were, they were very, very real.

  Noticing she was shaking, one of the soldiers handed Carolyn a heavy wool blanket. “This should help, ma’am,” he said. She thanked him, and he walked back to his seat.

  She covered herself, leaving only a small opening around her face to breathe.

  The big Chinook slowly turned to the right, banking ever so slightly. Carolyn instinctively looked out the rear hatch to give her inner ears the assurance that, yes, they were actually turning, and she saw it. A single clawed hand grasping the edge of the chopper’s back ramp.

  She blinked her eyes, praying she was just seeing things.

  She wasn’t.

  Two yellow orbs burned back at her from the blackness.

  It had somehow managed to gain a handhold on the underside of the chopper after throwing the crew chief out the back.

  And now, it was climbing inside.

  Carolyn screamed as the beast passed her, scrambling forward into the hold. It hadn’t seen her. Covering herself with the blanket had saved her life.

  Startled by her scream, the soldiers turned, oblivious to the beast moving toward them. The first two were thrown out the open rear of the chopper—spinning through the blackness to their deaths below—before they had time to react.

  The creature was moving fast, clawing and tearing as it went.

  The next soldier brought his weapon to bear, but he too was flung toward the rear, and he skidded across the metal floor until his body disappeared into the darkness. His rifle slid across the floor, thudding to a stop against Carolyn’s feet. She looked at it, for an instant wishing she’d learned how to handle a gun. She grabbed the rifle, which to her surprise was much heavier than she thought it would be.

  The cargo hold of the chopper was filled with shrill, terrified screams as the members of her team scooted toward the front, toward the cockpit. The soldier farthest away from the beast opened up with his M16, spraying a volley of three-round bursts into the creature, w
hich reeled back and let loose a horrible, thunderous roar, waving its long arms as if to knock the bullets away. Small, chunky clouds of gore blossomed behind it as the supersonic shells exited its back. But it didn’t go down.

  Carolyn, holding the rifle in her left hand, crawled on all fours toward the very rear of the chopper and huddled against a heavy bag of equipment strapped down to the floor near the ramp. She crouched low to stay out of the beast’s field of view, trying desperately not to scream. The cold wind from the rotor wash pummeled her face.

  The other soldiers started firing. The muzzle flashes from their M16s lit the interior of the cargo hold like strobe lights, capturing each movement as a still picture, a single moment of terror. The creature dropped to its knees as the shells slammed into its body. Sparks flew from the metal beside Carolyn’s head, and she realized she was in their line of fire. She crawled around the heavy equipment bag, trying to shield herself. The metallic ting of spent rounds bouncing around her was almost as loud as the bursts from the soldiers’ M16s. The sturdy bag thudded against her as some of the rounds hit it. She was only feet from the edge of the chopper’s rear ramp, and the empty blackness outside. She held tightly to the bag as the chopper began to jink wildly to the left and to the right, its rotors’ noise changing pitch—growling—with each abrupt movement.

  She peeked over the bag and saw the creature crawling into the cockpit. The soldiers were desperately trying to fire at the thing as they skidded across the floor, working to maintain their balance.

  She watched in horror as one long, clawed arm sliced through the air and crunched into the pilot’s helmet. The big chopper dropped sickeningly, Carolyn’s stomach rising into her throat as she floated above the metal floor for an instant.

  She looked out the rear ramp and saw the treetops whipping by, small bits of leaves and branches snapping off as the bottom of the Chinook slid across the upper branches. She could smell the trees. The scent of broken wood, green with sap.

  They were going to crash.

  Carolyn always heard that people who knew they were about to die would see their entire lives flash before their eyes.

  As the chopper started to spin out of control, all she saw was the horrid face of a beast standing in the cockpit of the doomed Chinook, one clawed hand grasping part of what used to be the pilot, two bright yellow eyes fixed directly on her.

  She heard thick branches snap. The screech of twisting metal.

  And then everything went black.

  CHAPTER 19

  The OH-58 Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter was the last aircraft to escape the carnage at KCI. Its occupants were also the last two survivors.

  Colonel Garrett Hoffman sat silently in the right seat, trying to comprehend what had just happened; his entire base of operations, hundreds of troops and civilians, had just been massacred by a wave of . . .

  Things.

  He’d heard the president’s speech, heard that some kind of mutated rats had killed thousands of people in Kansas City. Incomprehensible, it seemed, until he saw them with his own eyes. By the thousands.

  So many, thousands, hundreds of thousands . . .

  Moving faster than he thought possible.

  The eyes, the goddamned glowing eyes . . .

  His troops had stood their ground and pumped all the firepower they could throw at the beasts—and still they came. Climbing over their dead. In waves. Small yellow eyes glowing brightly in the night. Tearing into his troops. Killing them.

  He’d watched as the Air Force peppered the tarmac with cluster bombs, tearing hundreds of the things to shreds with each pass. But still, they came.

  He’d watched as the last choppers wallowed into the sky, carrying the lucky few who had managed to escape at the last instant. And then, as his own chopper had lifted off, he’d watched them completely cover the tarmac, their bizarre chattering and clicking filling the Missouri night, as they moved toward the terminal building. To kill whoever remained.

  His entire base camp—the whole goddamned airport—had been overrun in a matter of minutes. It had been so fast, too fast to make any decisions. Too fast to move. Too fast to save anyone.

  I left you all behind.

  He was stunned, in a state of shock, and swept by a sickening wave of guilt. The airport had been his, and he’d lost it. Worst of all, he was alive, and his troopers weren’t.

  Part of him felt he should’ve died with his soldiers, but another part knew he was getting a chance to avenge their deaths. To kill as many of those fucking things as he could. Especially the humanoid ones.

  He’d emptied his sidearm into the head of one of the two-legged devils, which had jumped at least twenty feet into the air to grab the right landing skid of the Kiowa, and watched as it fell dead to the cement below, rapidly torn apart and devoured by the rat-things swarming where his chopper had been just a few seconds before. They hadn’t been briefed to expect anything with two legs, but whatever it’d been, Garrett knew he’d seen intelligence in its eyes. Behind the fury of its fiery gaze, it was thinking. He almost hadn’t been able to pull his trigger fast enough to make the goddamned thing die.

  Garrett couldn’t wait to kill more of them, with his bare hands if he had to. The thought made him warm inside. Hate was an effective field dressing.

  “Sir!”

  The pilot was leaning toward him, yelling to be heard over the interior noise of the Kiowa’s cockpit.

  “We’ve got a Chinook down, Colonel, about three miles from here! We’re closest to the crash site!”

  Garrett didn’t have a helmet, so he wasn’t able to hear the pilot’s radio traffic. “Okay, Captain!” he yelled back. “What are you waiting for! Let’s move!”

  The pilot banked the chopper hard, lining up their course with the last known position of the CH-47. The Kiowa Warrior’s mast-mounted sight—looking like a large basketball with glass eyes suspended above the main rotor—could see through the darkness with a low-light television and thermal imaging system. This chopper was designed to scout and search for the enemy, using the mounted sight to peek over hills and trees without exposing the entire aircraft to enemy fire. It would find the enemy, and the Apaches—the gunship choppers—would attack and kill.

  The pilot skimmed the trees, using his night vision equipment to navigate obstacles and his global positioning system (GPS) readout to find the exact coordinates. The mounted sight swiveled left and right, searching for a heat signature—a fire—from the downed Chinook. To the south, the thermal imaging system picked up thousands of small heat signatures, moving fast to the north. The things, on the move. They were only a few miles from their position.

  “Sir! If we’re going to find them, we have to do it fast! The things are moving this way, about three miles from our position to the south!” The pilot pointed toward where the wave of things was approaching.

  Garrett squinted through the darkness, trying to pick out their glowing eyes in the blackness below. At the speed they’d moved from the city to the airport, he knew they could cover three miles in just a few minutes.

  “Got it, sir!” the pilot yelled as the thermal imaging site picked up the crash site. “About five degrees left, two hundred yards!” There was no fire, but the heat from the Chinook’s two engines still glowed bright green on the screen. If there was no fire, the possibility of survivors was much higher, Garrett knew. If there were any survivors. He couldn’t discern any movement on the screen.

  “Take us in closer!” Garrett yelled. “Try to find a place to put us down!”

  “Yes, sir! Looks like they went down in the middle of some trees! We may have to put down right here!”

  “Do it!”

  The Kiowa settled to the ground, its rotor wash kicking up grass and dust from the plowed field at the edge of the tree line. “Sir, you’re going to have to hurry—”

  “I know! If I’m not back
by the time the things get here, you get your ass out of here! That’s an order!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Garrett jumped from the Kiowa and sprinted toward the tree line. As he ran, he looked to his left, trying to spot yellow eyes in the darkness. He couldn’t see them.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER 20

  The president wearily looked up from a blurry sheet of paper as the secretary of Homeland Security entered the situation room.

  “Mr. President, it’s happening in Topeka.”

  Andrew could hear the utter helplessness in Hugo’s voice and see the matching desperation in the man’s eyes. Topeka. It’s happening again, and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it. Go ahead and say it, Hugo.

  “We started the evacuations about forty-five minutes before the things entered the city,” Hugo said and then paused, the weight of the world brutally pressing down on his shoulders. “It wasn’t enough time, Mr. President. We’re going to lose Topeka.”

  The president glanced down to the statistics in front of him, squinting to read the numbers through tired eyes.