by Brian Nelson
The stranger paused, leaving a silence that he seemed to want Eric to fill.
“Yes, you, Eric Montgomery Hill, are one of my fathers. Perhaps the most important of all, for I owe the great leap to you. That is why I am here. You gave me life. Now I return it.”
It was the scientist in Eric that spoke next—the part of him that yearned to know more, to see what he had helped create. “I want to see you.”
There came a sound that could have been a laugh. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s best for everyone this way. Trust me.”
And Eric did, at that moment, trust him. The stranger was doing it for Eric’s own good.
“But I don’t understand. Why didn’t you help us before?”
There was no answer.
“Please, I need to know.”
But all he heard was the wind.
After many minutes, the air became lighter. And once more, Eric felt the cold tingle under his skull, but in reverse. Now the cold sensation ran up the sides of his brain, swirling in a spot at the crown of this head, like a bathtub draining of water.
The instant they left him, he collapsed. His arms and legs had failed from his muscles being contracted for so long. For several minutes, he couldn’t move. He heard Ryan coughing and looked over to find him down on one knee, trying to catch his breath. Mei recovered quickest and dashed over to her mother. Eric was too weak to stop her. “Māmā, Māmā.” She reached the body, touched her mother hesitantly, and sobbed. She cradled the broken head, stroking her hair, as if trying to wake her up.
Eric saw himself in her pain: taken back to that day in high school when he found his father.
He looked around. Bodies littered the road. Twisted and contorted. All of them dead—even the few civilians who had the misfortune to be passing by in their cars. The stranger had left no one alive but them. Eric marveled at it. The stranger had the capacity to kill instantly and painlessly, yet he chose not to. Why? Eric couldn’t understand it. It was the act of someone who reveled in his power—the vengeance of an angry god.
The huge military trucks surrounding their little car had been pushed aside. One was tossed forty feet from the road. The three attack helicopters were burning heaps at various points in the distance, sending long plumes of black smoke into the sky.
Then he heard a moan. Eric turned. It was General Meng. Somehow, he was alive, trying to stand, but he couldn’t. There was something wrong with his arms. They flopped at his sides as if boneless.
For a moment, Eric didn’t understand. The stranger was not one to make a mistake. But then he realized it was not a mistake. Meng was alive for a reason, and conveniently incapacitated. The stranger wanted it that way. He wanted Eric to pick up a gun and kill the general himself—kill the man who had murdered so many. For a moment, Eric hesitated, feeling the manipulation. Then he remembered that this was the man who had killed Olex and threatened to kill Jane. He looked at Mei draped over her mother’s body, and the last of his misgivings vanished.
He picked up the general’s pistol and pointed it at his head. But then he stopped, suddenly knowing that it wouldn’t fire.
Was it possible? Did the stranger know of the modification that Eric had made to the shirt, making it not strictly defensive? It was the crudest of nanoweapons, untested and likely very messy. In fact, Eric gave it only a fifty-fifty chance of working. Did the stranger somehow know what he had done?
He tossed the pistol away and picked up the shirt.
He glanced over at Mei and found her studying him closely, waiting to see what he would do. Eric thought to tell her to look away, just as he had done in the storm drain, but he didn’t.
There was only one safety feature: he had to be touching the target. He put his finger on Meng’s forehead and whispered the command, a word combination that he would never say accidentally: “Carbon rain.”
He stood back and waited. Nothing happened. He dropped the shirt and was about to pick up the pistol, when Meng gave a sudden haunting gasp. He had a look of wild confusion on his face. Then the pain hit him, and he made a keening high-pitched scream. His body jolted and convulsed as if someone else were in control of his muscles. He tried to stand but kept falling, all the while screaming uncontrollably.
Then Eric saw the smoke. It was like skin-colored steam. It wisped from Meng’s forehead and from under his collar. The nanosites, in the process of disassembling him, were generating huge quantities of excess heat, cooking him alive. The frantic screaming suddenly stopped as Meng’s lungs combusted. A wide, silent howl followed as trails of black smoke came out of his mouth and nostrils.
Through the technicolor smoke, Eric watched Meng’s skin dissolve away, then the pink muscles beneath it, exposing veins and arteries filled with boiling blood. Next went the bone underneath—rib cage, spine, long bones, skull. It all melted away. Soon all that remained was a pile of yellowish ash.
Eric noticed that his chest was heaving. He had made himself watch. The man inside him wanted to look away, but the scientist was fascinated by what his own program would do.
Someone touched his shoulder, and he jumped.
It was Ryan. “Come on,” he said. “Pick her up. We have to get out of here.”
Eric nodded. Meng was dead. The danger had passed. Now he had to look after Mei once more. He went over and picked her up. At first, she welcomed his embrace, until she realized that he was taking her away.
“No! We can’t leave her.”
“She wanted you to live. That meant everything to her. Let’s make sure you do.”
She struggled again, but with less conviction. “Okay,” she said, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Eric relaxed his grip a little.
She instantly wriggled free and dashed back toward her mother. Eric ran after her, but then she passed the body and went to the spot where Meng had been. She picked up Eric’s shirt and came running back.
* * *
“Sir, the third Reaper has reached the crossroads.”
Hunter was still sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, almost asleep with exhaustion.
Curtiss reentered the command room and took in the new images. He saw the smoldering wreckage from the choppers, an overturned HG-17 truck, and dozens upon dozens of bodies. But something was wrong. There were no blast cones, and the bodies were all intact, as if they had died where they stood. And they were too clean—not enough blood. The Beehives should have turned them into hamburger. Something had killed them, but it wasn’t his bombs.
Then the weapons specialist spoke. “Where’s the car?”
Chapter Forty-One
Reunion
Outside of Tangshan, China
Ryan drove. Eric held Mei in his lap. She continued to weep, sometimes in loud fits, sometimes softer. Eric shushed her and rocked her and kept repeating his promise to keep her safe.
Finally, mercifully, she cried herself to sleep.
Eric took out Ryan’s iSheet and used it to find Mei’s tracking chip. The girl was so exhausted that she barely stirred when he removed it. Then he took the bloody chip and flicked it out the window.
“How do you know where we’re going?” Eric asked Ryan.
“Curtiss made me memorize this route—and five others.”
“How did you know they were going to kidnap you?”
“Curtiss told me it was a possibility about a month before replication. He asked me to work on the sabotage a few weeks later.”
Eric shook his head. It was all so crazy.
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” Ryan said. “But honestly, I’m glad you were.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just knowing that you were somewhere in that prison, going through the same thing—it gave me strength.”
Eric nodded. “Ditto, brother.”<
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Just then they came over a sudden rise, and a wide valley opened before them. Eric was struck by the beauty of it. The valley floor was full of long strips of farmland, different crops growing in contrasting hues of green and brown. And in the distance, a ridgeline of lush jade towers shrouded in an afternoon mist. They rose, impossibly steep, out of the valley floor, so close together that it seemed a person could leap from one to the next.
The sight made Eric ache. The beauty of the world made him want to live. To travel, to take Jane and Mei. To fill his remaining days with life.
They drove another half hour; then Ryan turned the battered little car onto a long dirt drive that disappeared into a copse of trees. Set far back and hidden from the road was an old mansion. Ryan drove the car into a shack of a garage, got out, and quickly pulled the garage door shut. Eric got out, carrying the sleeping Mei.
The property looked deserted. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
Jane burst out the back door and sprang on them, screaming with joy. Hugging and kissing them. The sight of her was so sudden and Jane was so … so herself—healthy and strong and bright-eyed—that tears welled up in Eric’s eyes.
Jane paused for a moment to touch Mei, who was now awake and looking around groggily, on the back. Jane’s expression seemed to ask, “Why so few?”
* * *
The next eighteen hours were a frenetic blur.
The safe house was full of people—soldiers, State Department personnel, Navy, CIA. Everyone was busy trying to get them out of the country as quickly as possible. A man in plain clothes—clearly a high-ranking military officer—said they had to get cleaned up, that they were going for a helicopter ride. They took showers and put on new clothes. Mei, however, refused to leave Eric’s side. In fact, they couldn’t even persuade her to go to the bathroom by herself. So Eric acquiesced to her every demand. There was no reason not to. Jane rose to the occasion, too, playing the big sister. They stood in the bathroom with Mei while she showered, Jane on the toilet seat telling her stories about her marathons and triathlons.
After they had showered, Eric took the shirt, which was now clean, and slid it over Mei’s head and helped her wiggle her arms in. It hung down to her knees, but she didn’t care. “I want you to wear this until we get home.” She smiled and hugged him around the waist.
Soon the man in street clothes ushered them behind the house, to a sleek black helicopter.
This whole time, they had not seen Curtiss. But as Eric sat at the open door of the helicopter, he caught sight of him and his men. They were checking weapons and preparing one of the helicopters. Curtiss turned, as if sensing Eric’s eyes on him. For a moment, he seemed tempted to come over, but then a look that might have been shame crossed his face, and he turned back to his work.
As the helicopter lifted off, the last rays of orange were disappearing behind the karst range to the west. They turned eastward, toward the darkness, and for the next hour they flew almost silent over the megalopolis of Eastern China, over millions and millions of lights, until those lights formed a sudden thick line—the edge of the continent—and they were out over the dark, gray ocean. Within a few minutes, the light pollution had faded, and the stars came out above them. Eric pulled Mei to him and pointed to the Milky Way. He had never seen it so clear and sparkling. With his arm still around Mei, he reached for Jane’s hand in the darkness. She took it and laced her fingers through his.
* * *
A hot night wind was blowing as Colonel Tong stepped from the helicopter at the crossroads. The rotor wash blew a sheet of dust into his face, momentarily blinding him. When he had blinked his eyes clear again, he saw a scene from hell.
He had been briefed that there were sixty-eight dead, but seeing them all together, it felt like more. Sodium lights cast long shadows on their contorted, agonized faces. And the smell. It had brought the flies. Millions of flies. They swirled around the lights like a black snowstorm and sat thick as ash on the bodies. Each time the disposal workers in their biohazard suits lifted a body, the flies rose up in irritated swarms.
The effect was unnerving: the sight of so many dead, the smell of vomit and feces, and the flies that tried to light on his face. It was all he could do to maintain his composure.
He forced himself to look at the dead. They bore no gunshot wounds, and there was no evidence of explosives. Yet something had killed these men—had made some of them crack open their own skulls. It had also downed three attack helicopters and tossed one of his HG-17 transport vehicles across the field as if it were a child’s toy.
He immediately thought of the new weapons. But this was much more advanced than anything they had thought possible.
At his feet lay his boss’s uniform and a pile of yellow ash. Looking at it, Tong felt certain that if he didn’t figure out what had happened here, and quickly, he would meet the same fate as Meng and his men.
Unfortunately, now that the terrorists had escaped, there was only one person who might be able to help him. The other twin.
But she was proving most difficult. He had just come from seeing her, and it had been a waste of time. She was nonsensical, talking gibberish. The doctors had told him he would have to wait to interrogate her—her wounds were too severe. But he didn’t have the luxury of waiting. So the interrogators had given her sodium pentothal, but it had interacted badly with the morphine that the doctors gave her. She was speaking nonsense: “You’re too late! It’s already in us!” Over and over again. Rocking back and forth as if her mind were damaged.
Tong had grown frustrated. He had to get the answers, so he had given the interrogator a nod. The man had pounded her face with his fist, then torn out three of her fingernails. But the torture had barely fazed the woman. Even when the interrogator held the fingernails in front of her face, it was as if she didn’t even see them.
Tong had screamed at the doctors for giving her too much morphine. That was why the truth serum wasn’t working. But in all honesty, it seemed to be more than that.
More flies landed on his face, on his lips and eyes. He swatted them away, but an instant later others took their places.
His lieutenant came running up. “Sir, we’ve found something.”
He handed Tong an iSheet.
Tong recognized the image of the assembler prototype—a bubbly insectoid shape magnified to the nth degree. But nothing about the picture looked unusual.
“Go on,” he snapped.
“Dr. Tuan says that it’s this, sir.” The lieutenant expanded the screen image with his fingers, enlarging it until a tiny node, a bubble, appeared on the prototype’s back.
“What is it?” Tong asked.
“Well, we aren’t sure, sir. We only know that it’s not supposed to be there.”
Tong felt a fresh wave of nausea come over him. He gave a heavy sigh and looked down at the yellow pile of ash at his feet. He thought again about the delirious woman’s words: “You’re too late! It’s already in us!”
* * *
Midnight. The silent helicopter landed with a jarring thump on the deck of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. It was a quick turnaround. They had a meal in the officers’ mess and shook hands with the captain, and an hour later they were catapulted into the night in a Grumman C-2 Greyhound cargo plane, on their way to Osan Air Base in South Korea. They arrived in the middle of the night, and by sunrise they were on a Boeing 757 heading for Washington, DC.
The plane was deserted except for three soldiers heading home on leave. They all rode in first class. They talked little—mostly slept and ate. Their bodies seemed to realize that they were safe, so they went into a sort of hibernation, trying to recuperate from all the accumulated stress. Mei sat next to Eric, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she watched movies. He heard her giggling a few times, and some of his concern over her subsided.
It was sometime in the midaft
ernoon, somewhere over the Arctic Sea, when Ryan turned to Eric, his face sober. “It’s about to start.”
Eric knew exactly what he meant.
Jane read the gravity on their faces. “What’s about to start?”
Eric glanced over at Mei to make sure she wasn’t listening—she had her ear buds in and was absorbed in a Disney film.
Eric told Jane about the virus that was about to wipe out the Tangshan lab, and that each of them had a hand in creating it. Eric’s lamprey idea had made it undetectable. Ryan’s artificial-intelligence program enabled it to find each victim and select them based on his parameters. And, finally, the virus itself …
“I made it for Olex,” she said as the realization hit her. “I didn’t know what he wanted it for.” She shook her head in disgust, an expression of anger and betrayal on her face. “How many people?”
“The workers come in two shifts of roughly twelve thousand five hundred each,” Ryan said. “Curtiss wanted a twenty-hour delay from the moment the virus was released until death, to make sure that both shifts were infected. Those who were infected during the first shift took the virus home with them. They’ll die in their sleep. Curtiss also insisted that all the military personnel on the whole base—not just the lab—be targeted. He was very specific about that. That’s an additional forty thousand people. Sixty-five thousand in all.”
Jane closed her eyes and tried to fathom the number, but it was too much to grasp. It was just a number. She nodded to herself slowly, then looked Eric straight in the eye. Her answer shocked him.
“Good,” she said.
Chapter Forty-Two
Angels
Tangshan Military Laboratory, China
Hui Lili was awake, but she kept her eyes closed. She knew they were watching her. Best to let them think she was still asleep.
She was in terrible pain. The bullet wounds in her arm and leg, her missing fingernails, her broken nose. She tried to control her mind, to distract it with pleasant thoughts, but it was impossible. Her mind and body perceived nothing but pain, moving from one screaming nerve cluster to another, unsure which needed the most attention.