“You mean the things would divide?”
“Basically. One mutated human being would split into another mutated human being. An exact replica.” Another patch of burned fabric ripped free. “The things would grow a twin. Pretty efficient way to make an army, don’t you think?” Carolyn reached inside the exposed chest cavity with her heavy gloves, poking through a shattered portion of the formidable rib cage.
“How far did the Soviets get with it?” Garrett asked.
“Far enough that one of their researchers felt compelled to risk his life to warn us about it.” She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating on what she was feeling for in the thing’s chest cavity. “They were able to reproduce a small number of human mutations—even got the reproduction sequence to work—but they couldn’t control it. The things mutated far beyond what they were trying to produce. The process couldn’t be controlled.” She continued searching with her hands, digging through the torn flesh. “They discovered the things would mutate incredibly fast in response to any harmful agents they were exposed to. They were resilient, like bacteria adapting to an overused antibiotic.” Her arms were into the thing almost up to her elbows. “They were afraid they wouldn’t be able to kill the things if they allowed the mutations to continue. So they disposed of them.” She opened her eyes. “There it is . . .” She started pulling.
“What in God’s name are you digging for?”
“Damn! I can’t get it out.” She yanked hard, causing the thing’s body to rock over on its side, a charred arm bouncing in the air as if it was still alive. “Put on the gloves.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I need help.”
“If you think I’m going to—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re a soldier. Open the covers, put on the damn gloves, and help me pull this thing out.” She grinned at him. “Don’t worry, soldier. You won’t break a nail.”
Without another moment of hesitation, Garrett unlatched the covers, shoved his hands into the heavy gloves, and reached inside the thing’s chest cavity. He was glad he couldn’t actually feel anything through the heavy rubber.
Carolyn guided his hands with hers, folding his fingers around a large, soft object.
“There. Now get a grip on that thing and pull.”
After three or four strong tugs, the object ripped free. The inside of the Plexiglas box was spattered with a thick, dark brown liquid that ran down the side of the smooth surface as the thing’s heart tore free in a gush of foul, dead blood.
Garrett stared at the object in his hands. “What is that?”
“It’s a heart.”
“It’s huge.”
“Not huge. It’s two hearts.” Carolyn spread the mutated mass apart, revealing two separate heart-shaped lumps of muscle. Two sets of torn, hose-like arteries hung from the tops of the brown muscles.
“These things have two hearts?”
“No, this friendly fellow had already started to divide when it was killed. It starts with the internal organs.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, more like Josef Stalin. Or Nikita Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev, too. They were all involved in it. The program spanned a number of years.” Carolyn pulled her hands from the gloves, leaving Garrett holding the mutated hearts by himself. “Spent a lot of Mother Russia’s rubles, too.”
“Can I put this down now?”
Carolyn couldn’t help but giggle, amused by the look of disgust on Garrett’s face. “Sorry. Yes, you can drop it. If we kept looking through its insides, we’d find more doubled organs.”
“You also said something about cocoons?”
“The initial divisions are fast, hard to control. The Russians never figured out how to slow the initial divisions, and neither did we. As the generations build, the divisions take on a more predictable pattern, occurring at a set interval. In time, when the things started to divide, they’d encase themselves in a chrysalis. Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It provides protection while they’re vulnerable.”
“The things underground, the casings—they’re cocoons?”
“I’m almost certain. The things went to ground, spun themselves some cocoons, and began the rapid process of cellular division.” She pointed toward the humanoid corpse. “Like our friend over there was doing.”
“If you’re right—and I hope you’re not—we’re going to be in a load of trouble when the things emerge.”
“I’m right, Garrett. It all adds up.” She glanced at the Plexiglas container holding one of the mutated rat bodies. “I can’t explain everything about this, but the basic evidence is just too strong to ignore. It has to be a form of the Gemini agent. It has to be.”
General Rammes cleared his throat. His face was ashen. When he spoke, his voice cracked. “Carolyn, you were right. They’re emerging from the casings.” He paused. “Hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions.”
“Dear God.” Garrett felt like all the air in the room had been suddenly sucked out, collapsing his lungs like a well-placed sucker punch.
“Carolyn, you need to look at this.” Lieutenant Ewing handed her a sheet of paper. “It’s blood-borne. The mutation is passed through the blood.”
Garrett looked back at the brown-splattered Plexiglas container and was again very happy he was clad in a protective suit and had used heavy gloves.
The color in Carolyn’s face quickly faded as she read the entire computer analysis. Her mouth hung open in disbelief.
“What is it, Carolyn?” Garrett was almost afraid to ask.
“It’s Gemini, all right, but there’s more to it. Highly aggressive . . . accelerated mutation . . .” She continued to read. “Twenty-four-hour replication timeline.” She looked at Josh.
“I ran it three times, Carolyn. The results were the same each time.”
“Does this mean these things are going to double in number every twenty-four hours?” Garrett asked.
“Yes.” She paused. “By tomorrow night—”
General Rammes finished her statement. “By tomorrow night, there’ll be twice as many.”
“Yes, sir. Every twenty-four hours, if we can’t stop them, we’ll have to deal with twice as many as the night before.”
“How do we stop them, Carolyn?” Rammes asked.
“I don’t know yet. But now that we know what the basic cause is, we have an idea of where to start.”
“How long?” Rammes knew how many cities were threatened. He also knew that conventional weapons more than likely wouldn’t be able to stop them. The alternatives weren’t something he wanted to consider.
“We’re just starting, sir. It’s going to take some time—”
“Time, Ms. Ridenour, is the one luxury we don’t have. The lives of millions of people depend on us. On you. And—”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Carolyn’s face flushed with anger. “I’ve seen what these goddamned things can do, General. I watched them slaughter hundreds of people at the airport! I watched one of them, one of them, kill a whole helicopter full of soldiers—and my team—even though they were pumping it full of goddamned bullets!”
The general’s eyes grew wide at first, then squinted as his own anger grew. It wasn’t every day that he took this sort of verbal abuse. More like never. Especially from a civilian.
Garrett put his hand on her shoulder. “Carolyn . . .”
She shoved it away. “No! I’m not finished!”
“Ms. Ridenour, I strongly advise you to—”
“Advise me to do what, General? Wave a magic wand and instantly kill all these things? Well, that’s not going to happen, sir. We’ve played God for too long, and now it’s coming back to bite us in the ass. Hard.” She pointed a trembling finger at the humanoid thing in the Plexiglas case. “That’s what happens when people like you decide to act lik
e the Creator and fuck with things that shouldn’t be fucked with, General.”
“We didn’t make these things, Ms. Ridenour. The Soviets—”
“Of course! The Soviets! It’s all their fault! The godless communists trying to destroy the free world for no other reason than they were fucking nuts! Maybe you don’t remember, General, but there were two major players in the Cold War. We had a part in it as well. It was tit-for-tat, wasn’t it, General? They make a new bomb, we make one that’s better. We make a new poison gas, they make one that’s better. They make a better fucking killer bug and we—”
“Stop it, Carolyn. Stop it now.” Garrett gripped her shoulders and spun her around to face him. “The general needs to know how we can stop these things and how long it will take us to find out how. He needs to tell the president.” He stared into her eyes. “More people are dying right now. Innocent people.” He saw her eyes soften. “Get a hold of yourself and give him an answer.”
Garrett loosened his grip as he felt her body relax.
Carolyn turned toward General Rammes. “I’m . . . I’m sorry, General.”
“She’s been through a lot, sir.”
“Shut the fuck up, Lieutenant Ewing.”
“Yes, sir. Shutting up.”
The room was so quiet that Garrett could swear he could hear his Timex ticking away on his left wrist.
“That was a pretty thorough ass chewing, Carolyn. I haven’t been braced like that since I was a cadet at West Point.”
She stammered, “S-sir, I—”
“It’s okay, Carolyn. You have been through a lot. We’re all tired, and there’s bound to be some short tempers around here.”
Carolyn looked down at the floor, ashamed at her outburst. “There’s no excuse for what I said. You had nothing to do with this, sir. I was out of line.”
“Yes, you were out of line. And so was I.” He smiled broadly at her, and she smiled back. Water under the bridge. “Now, I have to call General Smythe and let him know what you’ve found. The president needs to know how we can stop these things, Carolyn. He wants a viable option that doesn’t include blowing our own country to smithereens.”
“You said the Soviets had produced a number of these mutated human beings, Carolyn. How did they . . . dispose of them?” Garrett asked.
Carolyn looked back at the shattered body of the humanoid thing in the case. “Just like that,” she said. “They blew the hell out of them.”
CHAPTER 35
Lake Murray, just north of Little Rock, Arkansas, is the home of some remarkable channel cats, weighing in at thirty to forty pounds; they’re an angler’s dream if one is lucky enough to snag one.
Tonight, both men felt luck was on their side.
“Good night for it.”
“You bet it is.” He threaded a chunk of raw chicken liver on the thick steel hook, careful not to stick the barbed end through his finger. The heavy lead weight plunked into the water, and the bait started its slow journey toward the bottom and into the waiting mouth of one of the huge, whiskered bottom-feeders. That was the plan, anyway.
“Here, fishy, fishy, fishy . . .”
“Yeah, that’ll work.”
“Just watch. They love this stuff.”
“They like leeches, not chicken liver.”
“I don’t see you reeling anything in.”
“Neither are you, genius.”
High above the men, a full moon slowly slid through the nighttime sky. Neither man noticed the small black specks crossing in front of it. Just a few, at first.
“They don’t like chicken liver.”
“I caught a twenty-pounder on this same lake last year, with liver.”
“You were lucky.”
“Nope. They love it.”
“Leeches taste better.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“You just do?”
“That’s right.”
“Been eating your bait again?”
“Would you please quit yapping? You’re ruining the moment.”
A pause, and then a muffled laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Ruining the moment? I didn’t know we were on a date!”
“Whatever. Be quiet.”
More black specks crossed in front of the moon. Many more.
“You’re not gonna make a move on me, are you?”
“If you don’t shut the hell up, you’re going over the side.”
“A momma’s boy like you? Push me over the side?”
“You keep my momma out of this, and I’ll keep this out of your momma.”
“Here we are, out in the middle of nowhere, and you’re grabbing your crotch. Now I’m worried.”
“Stop yapping.”
“Okay. I will. I’ll stop yapping.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, I’ll stop. I really will.”
“Damn it! Would you quit already?”
“Wait . . . Did you hear that?”
“I can’t hear a thing with your lips flapping.”
“I’m not kidding! Listen—do you hear it?”
The sound was distant, odd—like a flag whipping in the wind. Thousands of flags.
“Is it the wind?”
“What wind! There’s not a breath of—”
“Well, what the heck is it?”
“I don’t know! It almost sounds like—”
Neither man had time to scream as they were covered with a flurry of talons and serrated beaks ripping and tearing at eyes, throats, and flailing arms.
It was over almost as suddenly as it had started.
The small boat was covered in blood, its occupants gone.
The full moon no longer cast its soft light on the lake below. It had been blacked out by an immense flock of mutated birds heading southeast toward the center of Little Rock, Arkansas.
CHAPTER 36
General Ray Smythe sat in the bowels of the Pentagon in the NMCC, frowning at the stream of reports from the NORTHCOM command center flashing up on the screens in front of him.
The five waves of things from the night before—now doubled in size—were back on their original courses.
Omaha was in the process of being eaten alive. The long lines of cars still trying to escape the city were systematically being emptied by the thousands of mutated creatures tearing through eastern Nebraska. He knew Lincoln, roughly an hour’s drive west from Omaha on I-80, would be hit later that night.
The University of Nebraska was there.
So was his daughter.
The cities of Wichita, Springfield, St. Louis, and Des Moines would also be hit that night. Thousands of people had tried to leave during the day, but it was fruitless. The interstates were hopelessly jammed with traffic, and the side roads and state highways just weren’t able to handle the incredible rush of traffic. Most of the evacuees were stuck in place, unable to travel, except by foot. They didn’t have a chance.
The general knew the ground forces arrayed around the threatened cities were going to be lost as well. The lesson from the previous night was all too clear: ground forces didn’t have a chance. They could stand their ground and kill hundreds of the things, but they would only be delaying the inevitable. They would be overrun and slaughtered just like the long lines of fleeing civilians they were trying to protect.
“General, the video-teleconference with the president will start in five minutes.” The aide stood by his general’s side, watching him stare at the map of the advance. Stare at the city of Lincoln. He knew the general had a daughter there. “Sir, is Laura—?”
“Yes. She’s still there.”
“Maybe she left when the sirens sounded, sir. If she was one of the first ones to hit the road, she’ll have a good chance of�
��”
“I just talked to her fifteen minutes ago. On her cell phone. She’s stuck in traffic, Jerry.”
“We’ll stop them, sir. She’ll be okay.”
Ray Smythe looked up at his aide, a pained look of resignation crossing his face. He knew his daughter probably wouldn’t be alive by the time the sun rose again. “Thanks, Jerry. That’ll be all.”
His direct line to the national security advisor rang, and he picked it up. There was a momentary delay as the line went secure. “This is General Smythe.”
“General, this is Jessie Hruska.”
Ray had grown to like the national security advisor over the last few years. He admired her direct approach to things, her low tolerance for bullshit, and the general manner in which she conducted herself. The last couple of days, however, he’d changed his opinion of her. She wasn’t functioning as well as she should in a time of national crisis. She’d failed to pass important information to the president, and, as a result, made him look like an incompetent ass.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I wanted to talk to you before the conference started. The president is desperate to find a way to stop these things without resorting to . . . other options. I think you know what I mean.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know exactly what you mean.”
“We’re not going to be able to stop them using conventional weapons, General.” It was a statement, not a question.
“That’s correct, Ms. Hruska. We’re hitting them from the air right now, but it’s not having much of an effect on their advance. Just like last night.” The Air Force was throwing all the heavy and tactical air power they could at the waves. It wasn’t working.
“What do you suggest, General?”
“We don’t have a lot of other options available right now, Ms. Hruska. Our ground forces will try to delay the advances to give the evacuations time to proceed, and we’ll continue to hit them with everything we’ve got from the air.”
“And we’re dropping conventional munitions, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There are other weapons we should consider, General. Non-nuclear weapons.”
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