by Brian Nelson
They had told her that Mei and her sister were dead, that the whole plan to escape had failed. But she didn’t believe them. She could tell that something was wrong. She could hear it in Colonel Tong’s voice: the fear. And where was Meng? That sadist would never miss out on her interrogation willingly. Something had happened to him. No, she assured herself, her sister and niece were alive. That was why they were so frantic to figure out what she and her sister had done.
Another wave of pain rolled over her. The bullet wound to her arm was the gravest, yet somehow her fingers hurt more.
It was then, as she was fighting the pain, that she felt a warmth at the top her spine. She knew instantly what it was. It ran down to her tailbone, then diverged into her legs and down to her toes. Ahhh, she thought, so this is what it feels like. The pain began to subside quickly, replaced by a comforting warmth. It reminded her of being a child in the wintertime, running with her sister to the bathhouse in their matching robes. Letting their bodies get cold on purpose, running in the snow, seeing how long they could bear it, just so the warmth of the bathtub would be that much sweeter. Finally, when they could take it no longer, they had slid in together. On the count of three. One … two … Giggling and gasping. Looking over at her smiling sister, the steam rising between them.
She opened her eyes but didn’t like what she saw. The bleak wall. The bloody hospital sheets. Her broken body. She closed her eyes again. Much better to go back to the memory, back to the warmth and love of that winter bath, back to her childhood, back to her twin sister.
* * *
Life was beginning to return to normal in the Great Lab. The section around the containment sphere had been cordoned off, and work crews were busy reconstructing the parts that had been burned or destroyed. A heavy smell like charcoal still hung in the air, but throughout the rest of the expanse, the workers in their lab coats could be seen toiling at their work stations, just as before. There was the familiar drone of activity: the low din of conversation, plastic keystrokes, and electronic beeps.
Suddenly, there was a cacophony of noise as vials, coffee mugs, iSheets, and several thousand bodies hit the floor simultaneously. A guard making his circuit on the catwalk was the last to land. He rolled off the ledge and fell forty feet, crashing into a cart of lab supplies, which spilled and rattled for a few seconds.
Then all was quiet. From that moment on, the lab security cameras captured no movement or sound.
Chapter Forty-Three
Loose Ends
Tangshan Military Laboratory, China
The UH-60 Stealth Black Hawk cruised low over the city of Tangshan, flying almost silent, invisible to radar. In the cabin, Admiral Curtiss was fighting off nausea. It was not that different from the way he had felt the first time he went into combat: the mix of terror and exhilaration, of not knowing whether he could handle whatever was about to happen.
The chopper banked along the low mountain that ran along the north side of the Fort Yue Fei military base. The pilot hugged the ground, ready to take evasive action should the base still be active. Then it came into view: the brightly lit barracks and shopping districts, the hangars and control towers. He saw a fire blazing at the end of the runway—the virus must have struck just as a cargo plane was attempting to take off. All that remained of it now were the skeletal ribs and the tail fin.
Almost immediately, he began to notice the bodies. It was a huge base, extending for miles. Yet even from this distance, he could see the motionless forms scattered on the ground. Along the main road, a dozen cars had run off the road or crashed into each other, their headlights still shining off into the darkness. The Black Hawk flew lower, passing more barracks, an academic campus, and officers’ quarters. All the lights were on. But no one was moving.
Even though the nanosites had struck in the middle of the night, thousands of people had been outdoors—on a huge base such as this, there was activity around the clock. Outside a grocery store, two dozen figures lay scattered about the parking lot. They flew on. More bodies.
More bodies.
More bodies.
They saw no one alive. The nanovirus had worked. Curtiss had done it. He had annihilated his enemy just as he had promised he would, just as the Preacher knew he would. In fact, he had just conducted the largest mass killing of human beings since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. And even though the death toll here was lower, there was an enormous gap in sophistication between the two weapons. The atomic bombs that had ended the Second World War had killed as many people as they possibly could. In contrast, there was no limit to the number of people his nanosites could kill.
It was impossible not to look at all the bodies and wonder whether it had been necessary. Would China have used the weapons to kill en masse? Would it have used them for political assassination? To tip the balance of global power in their favor? Would it have caused more war—whether outright or proxy—that would kill American soldiers? Would it have created a world where Curtiss’s sons might one day be victims? Yes, Curtiss believed unequivocally that it would. So he had done the right thing. But that didn’t stop him from feeling sick.
Sawyer tapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry, Admiral,” the old SEAL said, “but the signal’s coming from over there.” He motioned to the east. Curtiss nodded, and Sawyer relayed the information to the pilot.
A minute later, Curtiss and his five SEALs were on the ground outside the lab. Patel was on point, Sawyer behind him with an iSheet. They moved cautiously, rifles up and ready. Checking corners, watching the bodies closely for movement. The place was eerily silent. Curtiss didn’t want to go in. He didn’t want to see what he had done. But he knew he had to. They had one final mission to complete.
Chapter Forty-Four
Home Again
May 19, 2026
Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
They all crashed in Jane’s apartment. It was never discussed. Eric didn’t ask. Jane didn’t offer. And Mei didn’t know that they had just become a couple. She assumed they had been together for a long time.
They closed the blackout curtains and made the apartment into a cave; then all three of them climbed into bed together. Eric and Jane on the sides, Mei in the middle, still wearing the shirt. They slept for twelve hours, woke up and ordered pizza, ate it in bed, then slept another eight hours. Through all this time, no one spoke. Not because they were speechless, but because there was no need. Rest was all they wanted.
In the middle of the third long sleep, Eric and Jane slipped out of bed, one at a time, and met in the bathroom. They undressed in silence, and in the low visibility created by a cheap orange night-light, they got in the shower. After they had washed each other, they made love for the first time. Slowly. Gratefully. Face-to-face. Jane with one leg over Eric’s hip. Becoming one.
When it was over, they stood panting in the steam. Jane turned on the cold water, and they let it break over them. The wonderful contrast.
They were grateful just to be alive.
They began to laugh.
Then they both cried.
“I thought I lost you.” It could have been either of them saying it.
* * *
That afternoon, there came a knock on the door. Eric opened it to find one of Curtiss’s SEALs. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, sir, but Admiral Curtiss needs you.”
Jane came up behind Eric.
“All of you,” he added. “Dr. Hunter and the girl, too.”
“What’s this about, Sawyer?” Jane asked.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m not at liberty to say.”
Fifteen minutes later they were in the medical wing, walking past the nurses’ station. Eric couldn’t help noticing that when the nurses saw Mei, they began to smile and whisper. One of them even stood and came closer, as if she didn’t want to miss something.
Eric saw Ryan at the
end of the hallway, peering into one of the rooms. Then Admiral Curtiss emerged from the same room and approached them.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Jane gave him a hard stare, and to Eric’s surprise, Curtiss wouldn’t meet her gaze. Instead, he squatted down to talk to Mei.
“Hi, my name is Jim.”
“It’s nice to meet you. My name is Mei.”
He smiled. “I know, and I also know that you have been through a great deal.” He paused. “However, I have some good news for you.”
Mei’s eyes lit up with curiosity.
“But I need to tell you a few things first, just to prepare you, okay?”
Mei nodded.
“Your aunt Lili is going to be all right.”
“A yi!” The girl’s hand flew to her mouth.
Eric heard a woman’s voice from inside the room. “Mei-Mei?” It was a voice with tears of happiness behind it.
“A yi!” Mei cried again as she ran for the open door.
Curtiss made a halfhearted attempt to stop her, then seemed to change his mind.
The next thing Eric heard was, “Ouch! Wait! No, not there! Sit on this side. There, that’s better.”
He and Jane stepped up next to Ryan, who was peering through the large window into the room. There was Mei, sitting on Hui Lili’s lap. The girl’s arms and legs were wrapped tight as a python’s coils around her aunt, and their cheeks were pressed together. Mei wore a voracious grin and didn’t appear to notice all the casts and bandages that enveloped her aunt.
Hui Lili’s eyes were running with tears, but she chattered away like her old self. “Look at you! Did you grow? Did you miss me? From the way you’re acting … Go on, admit it!”
Mei looked too ecstatic to speak and could only bite her lower lip and nod enthusiastically.
“Well, I certainly missed you.” Then her voice grew softer. “Thank God you made it out.” She clutched the girl tighter.
Eric felt Jane’s fingers touch and intertwine with his. She leaned her head on his shoulder.
He looked over at Ryan, who was looking particularly smug. “Feeling proud of ourselves, are we?”
“Why, yes we are,” Ryan said. “It wasn’t easy getting a good sample of her DNA and reprogramming the virus to sedate her.”
Jane gave him a skeptical smile. “Okay, maybe you’re not a complete idiot after all.”
* * *
The next morning, Eric woke early and left the other two in bed. It would be another week before Hui Lili could leave the hospital. He ate leftover pizza, standing over the kitchen sink. He looked around Jane’s apartment. It still felt like a gym and the walls were still covered with the posters of famous athletes. But the portrait of Jane’s father was gone. Now there was just an empty picture frame.
Eric went to the window and pulled back the dark curtains. Even though the day was overcast and rainy, the light made him squint. He watched the Potomac River moving water to the Chesapeake Bay. Airliners taxiing on the runway at Reagan Airport. Traffic rolling across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
The world.
Almost no one out there knew what he knew. None of them had seen what he had seen. To them, everything was still the same. But things weren’t the same. They were very, very different.
He knew he had to face the fear that he had been trying so hard to ignore. The fear that had been growing in him—that they had only exchanged one enemy for another. Yes, the Chinese had been defeated. America had won. Yet out of their headlong race to replication, they had created something infinitely more dangerous: the Inventor, as Eric had begun to think of him, a man who was no longer a man and who could not be defeated by any weapon that existed on earth.
He didn’t want to think about it. He preferred to be happy. And he reminded himself that he was free and home and safe, and that he even had a family again. But the problem would not leave him, and so his mind began to tinker with it, turning it over, trying to understand.
The crossroads replayed in his mind. The soldiers’ silent screams. The sound of the man’s head repeatedly smacking against the window. Ragged bone jutting through skin. The Inventor had killed so many, so easily. Yet he had also saved Mei and Ryan and Eric. Eric found himself caught up in the contradictions: the Inventor was a sadistic murderer, but he had saved their lives. A killer with a poet’s voice.
And there was the other thing, the most disturbing thing of all: that Eric had created him. I owe my life to many fathers. Whatever the stranger did next, Eric was a part of it.
He thought back to the night at FBI headquarters. What were the Inventor’s plans? Was he creator or destroyer? Somehow both options frightened him.
After a long time, he turned away from the open window and the world that kept turning outside. There would be time for worry later, he told himself. Now he must do his best to not think about it. Instead he would savor the new life he had. So he returned to the bedroom and to the beautiful little girl and the beautiful woman who waited there.
* * *
In the afternoon, Eric woke with a start. The dream had been so real. A dream of a great reset, a wiping clean of the earth. He had been standing on the National Mall, in front of the Smithsonian.
It was a hot summer day, the Fourth of July, and the mall was packed with people. Everywhere. People. Mothers carried babies on their hips. Teenagers, long-haired and shirtless, played Frisbee. Children in strollers waved little American flags. People talking, laughing, eating ice-cream sandwiches.
The sun was hot and high.
He looked down toward the Lincoln Memorial, across a mile and a half of lawn. It hit them like a shock wave, traveling faster than sound. Bodies began to fall, all in the same direction. There were no screams, no cries. Then it reached him, like a hot wind, blowing his hair up and pulling at his clothes. Then it ran on toward the Capitol. The next instant, he was alone. Standing there.
He heard a deep moaning from above and looked up. Satellites were streaking across the blue sky: white balls with thick black tails of smoke. Then the buildings began to dissolve, melting as if they were ice under a hot sun, disassembled in a matter of seconds. This was more than the killing of billions. It was an erasure of all that man had wrought. A restart. Everything—every sidewalk, subway, and street sign—was being deconstructed, converted to its most basic atoms and returned to the earth.
Then he woke up, sweating and panting as if he had truly been there.
Then a new fear entered his mind. Perhaps the Inventor’s nanosites had not really left him. Perhaps some were still inside him, working, and the dream had not been a dream at all.
Epilogue
Forty-nine days after the flash pandemic in Tangshan, China, in the tiny mountain village of Tadingxiang, Tibet, a nineteen-year-old girl named Dohna gave birth to twins.
The boy, dark-eyed and with beautiful pink skin, came first. But the girl was reluctant, and it took the midwife six hours to coax her from her mother’s womb.
“She was waiting for her soul,” the midwife said.
Dohna could immediately see that the boy was as stubborn as a yak. He was small but very determined. The whole time he was waiting for his sister, he cried inconsolably, refusing the breast. Only after his sister had been washed and cleaned, and he had been put beside her and could once again smell her and grip her cupped hands, did he calm down.
Dohna’s sister immediately ran to her uncle’s compound, where her cousin, Norbu, had miscarried just two days before. Norbu was crying anew when her cousin arrived—her milk had come in and it saddened her beyond words that there was no child to drink it. But when she heard the news of the twins, she stanched her tears and came running. Dohna, exhausted from the long labor, gave the babies to Norbu, who fed the little girl first, then the boy. They both latched immediately, and as Norbu looked down on each newborn, she wept
again.
It was agreed that when the political officer visited the village at the end of the week, Norbu would say that her child had lived. They also decided that Norbu would live with Dohna and be a second mother to the children. The government would never know that Dohna had given birth to twins.
Acknowledgments
The initial concept for this book came to me during a solitary road trip from Washington, DC, to Ohio in 2000. That long timeline makes it feel like a long collaboration, since all my family and friends had to put up with me talking about it for such an awfully long time. With that in mind, please know that if I have forgotten anyone, it is not intention, but retention, that is to blame.
First, I want to thank those who read early versions of the book, sometimes more than once: Jack Genn, Andrew Davis (a wonderful hard-core sci-fi fan who gave me great advice), Meg Smith, Jamie Bowie, Steve Barish (who pushed to get the story out of America and into Asia), Will James, Paul James, and Rich Izzo. I deeply appreciate the counsel of my final beta testers: Sachin Waikar, Vincent Ercolano, Marcelo Alonso, Sam Waltzer, Alejandro Tarre, and Phil Gunson. Special thanks to Robb Anthony for the tough love, and to Jill Marsal for saying no the first time.
To the K63 Tech Training Class at Electronic Data Systems, including Marcelo Alonso (again) and Michael Lee, who were there for a friend in need. With their help, I learned—a bit like Admiral Curtiss—to do difficult things.
To my manuscript advisor, Aurelie Sheehan at the University of Arizona, who saw a very basic treatment of this idea when I was a graduate student more than sixteen years ago, and my workshop friends, who were exposed to—er, suffered through—many an embryonic draft of this book.