“Change is inevitable. Part of the process. Old species give way to new.”
“Except for sharks. They’ve been around forever. Like crocodiles.”
“And cockroaches.” Donna smiled. “I guess nature does get it right every once in a while — then it can’t improve on perfection.”
“But it can sure find some piss-ant ways to force change. Meteors, ice ages, global warming, disease. And then here comes people to help the process out. Maybe we were destined to reach some kind of evolutionary plateau before the next big extinction came along. But no, we’re too impatient. Let’s not look at what consequences our actions will have. Let’s burn fossil fuel, strip the rainforests and clone extinct animals that have already had their heyday. Let’s tamper with whatever cosmic plan is in place because we can and because we demand instant gratification. Let’s do what will benefit us today and leave tomorrow for thinking up even more things we can do to hasten our demise.”
Donna frowned. “Maybe we have reached our evolutionary plateau. Have you considered that? Maybe nature is counting on our hubris to take us down. Maybe this,” she pointed at the rhino, “is how we are supposed to die. I’m sure the dinosaurs and the mammoths didn’t think their time should be up either when they started dying out. We can’t second-guess everything we do. We’ll just drive ourselves crazy.”
“You’re probably right.” Mike yanked out a handful of fur a few strands at a time and tucked it in his pocket. A souvenir. Something he hadn’t been able to pick up at Triple E. “We should go,” he said as he stood up. “The buzzards are hungry and we’re keeping them from their breakfast.”
He glanced back once as they tramped their way toward civilization. The still-life of a dozen great black birds sitting on a woolly rhino carcass trying to figure out how to consume it all sent an Ice Age shiver through him.
“I wonder if birds get VTSE,” Donna said, looking back with him. “Are they a vector? If they eat infected meat will VTSE prions come out the other end?”
Mike cupped her elbow and turned her away. “Let’s let someone else figure that one out, okay? Right now, we just need to find a phone.”
/////
Even living in such a remote part of the state, Donna was used to more activity in the fields. The odd steer or two at least. Even the occasional glimpse of a pronghorn. Not this eerie desolation. Her father had once told her how the skies had cleared of traffic for two days after the Twin Towers had been destroyed on 9/11. During the days he’d missed the hum of planes and the sight of contrails high in the sky. It was at night, though, when he’d most felt their non-presence. The same stars were there, the same city lights. But the familiar twinkles of aircraft were simply gone. Even the flashing beacons on radio towers warding planes away became a poignant reminder that something was missing there in the night skies.
Looking out over the fenced fields where only the occasional bird flew by gave her that same sense of emptiness. Of desolation. Of a world gone wrong.
Grimly, she kept moving, knowing there was simply no other choice.
Less than an hour later they finally stumbled across a road. It was ill-maintained but it was paved. That meant a high probability of finding a concentration of people somewhere along it. They turned north, picking their pace up a bit at the thought their long trek was nearly done.
The black 4-wheeler that appeared about ten minutes later confirmed they were closing in on their target. With a shout, they stood in the middle of the road, waving their arms to flag the driver down.
The vehicle slowed as the man behind the wheel palmed his phone, either to call a friend to tell them how he’d run across two strangers stupid enough to be walking down a remote road in the middle of a summer day, Mike thought, or to take a picture to prove it.
As the vehicle came closer, Donna saw the logo plastered on its hood and doors: three interlocked E’s.
“Run!”
She grabbed Mike’s arm and pulled him off the road toward the barbed wire fence beside it. Thank God for economical ranchers, she thought. Four strands of wire instead of the usual five meant there was more room between the strands. Yanking the middle two wires apart, she told Mike, “Go!”
He heaved himself through, ripping his shirt and his arm on the sharp points. Once on the other side, he held the wires apart so Donna could slide her smaller frame between. Together, they ran for a grove of trees in the field 50 yards away.
Behind them, the runabout revved up then slammed to a stop where they’d gone through the fence. Lim Chiou slid out of the vehicle, lifting a tranq gun off the seat beside him.
Grabbing the trunk of the nearest bur oak, Mike and Donna slung themselves around it just as the rifle cracked. The first dart flew within inches of the oak and thocked into a tree only a few feet beyond where Mike crouched. He opened wide eyes in Donna’s direction and gestured with a jerk of his head toward the dart that had embedded itself in the bark.
While Lim reloaded, he and Donna fled farther into the grove.
When they looked back, they saw Lim was on the move, climbing through the barbed wire fence.
Mike felt Donna’s hand tighten on his upper arm. His eyes followed where she pointed, away from the keeper.
A shape loped along the side of the nearby hill, paralleling the road. But instead of heading away from the area with the noise of the rifle and the engine as Mike assumed most wild animals would, this one was heading toward them. More precisely, toward the keeper, now in open pasture peering down the length of the rifle as he advanced.
Donna covered her mouth, fighting back the warning everything in her that was human begged her to scream.
Mike was slower on the uptake. But it was only a moment more before he saw what Donna had already seen. Stripes and fangs and a burled body that resembled nothing native on this prairie.
The cold reality of the cat sank in quickly. Of course the saber-tooth wouldn’t be afraid. In fact, it likely associated people — and all the noises related to them — with handouts. And for a cat that size, a brace of prairie chicks certainly wouldn’t have been enough to fill its belly.
His gut clenched. They’d had no clue the cat had been trailing them. If they had known …
The cat bounded toward the man it linked most closely with food. It was closing in fast, peripheral to the man’s field of vision, certainly out of his focus, gaining speed as it came.
Like Donna, Mike struggled to keep from crying out.
It wasn’t a true attack. A true attack, Mike thought, would have been swifter, more merciful.
Lim saw the charging cat far too late.
He swung and fired his rifle, the dart burying itself deep in the cat’s chest just before it reared over him. A smaller animal would certainly have reeled at the force of the impact, but the saber-tooth’s sheer mass kept its forward momentum true.
Had the keeper not fired out of instinct, Mike thought, the cat might have only mauled him a bit looking for its regular meal of raw steak or a haunch of pig. Whether it was the report of the gun from only feet away or the sudden pain from the dart that changed the cat’s outlook, what started out as a cat expressing impatience over a late breakfast quickly turned into something far more gruesome.
The cat wrapped its forelegs around Lim, bringing the keeper down using its weight much as a bear would. It nuzzled the downed keeper, trying in its muddled animal brain to decide what to do with him. Capitalizing on the cat’s hesitation, Lim, the breath nearly knocked out of him, hauled back and struck the cat across the muzzle with the stock of the rifle.
The cat raised its head and roared. Mike hadn’t known any animal’s jaws could open so wide.
Its paws still clenched around the keeper, the cat flexed its retractable claws, burying them in Lim’s ribs. The man screamed. Mike felt a sympathetic pang cut through his own chest just before he saw the spreading stain of blood.
Then the muscles in the big cat’s neck tensed and its head fell forward, its saber tee
th flashing, spearing, jaws closing not just over Lim’s exposed throat but half his head as well.
The keeper’s screams died abruptly.
The big cat raised its head. Mike expected it to roar, to flout its victory across the plains. Instead, it stretched its jaws and yawned. Arterial blood dripped off its fangs as its eyes squeezed shut. It shook its head, then reached down and ripped a chunk of flesh from the man’s stomach, looking for the nutrient-rich organs.
Mid-chew, its head began to nod. With a deep sigh, it settled itself beside its meal, its chin stretched out along its forelegs. It struggled once to open its eyes, failed and collapsed at last into drug-induced somnolence.
“It’s got its meal,” Donna whispered. “Even if it does wake up, it’ll probably just ignore us. We should be able to get by it now.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “How much are you willing to bet on that?”
Donna just stared back at him.
They waited a couple of minutes more to be sure the big cat was fully asleep before making a rush for the runabout. Not knowing how long the sedative from the dart might last, they ran full tilt for the road, their hearts pounding with every step and fear gnawing within as they tore their way through the barbed wire.
Scrambling over the doors of the 4-wheeler, they sped off east, heading for the nearest town.
CHAPTER 54
CARTWRIGHT WAS A QUIET, SLEEPY town on most days, coming awake mainly on the weekends when families came to check out the vegetable stands, buy feed for their stock, enjoy a parade or picnic on the town square.
Today, there were no picnics, no parades and little activity beyond the runabout — pushed to its speed limit, its engine groaning in protest — careening up to the building that doubled as both police and fire departments.
Donna swung open the driver’s door only to stumble on the cracked asphalt in the deserted street as her left leg momentarily gave under her when she stepped out. Mike rushed to her side, offering support. She gave him a weak smile of thanks as the leg steadied and she could bear her own weight again.
When they entered the office, the clatter of a cow bell rigged to ring when the door opened startled them both. The two men conferring at one of the pair of desks in the room frowned at the interruption. Their frowns deepened on seeing the disheveled and frantic state of their visitors.
“Something we can do for you?” one of the men wearing a rumpled uniform with an expression to match asked. It was a polite enough question, but the tone told Mike the officer sincerely hoped not.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Not just for us, but for the whole damn country. Where’s a phone?”
CHAPTER 55
“HOT DAMN.” THE BRIGADIER COLONEL sitting at the table that had been hastily set up in the training center at the National Guard Armory in Williston pretty much expressed everyone’s sentiments. The handful of agents from the CDC and CIA that had been called to the briefing all wore the same shell-shocked expressions. First the announcement about a pandemic that could topple every economic-politic construct around the globe followed by panic and chaos in the streets — and now this. Ice Age animals brought back to life and a possible cure offered up to Sino-Pakistani interests at a time that could alter whatever would be left of the world as the Western Hemisphere knew it.
Not quite two days had passed since Mike and Donna had spilled their story to the CDC and the dominoes had fallen fast. Most of the men and women at the table were hoping the rollercoaster would stop long enough for them to get back on firm ground for at least a few days, devise a plan and execute to it. That’s what they did best.
Rounding up the Triple E geneticists had been the preamble. Preventing the research from going offshore by confiscating personal assets from employees’ homes and taking what few assets remained intact at the company headquarters was a prerogative of the government during a national crisis — and they’d acted swiftly.
Even during non-crisis periods, free enterprise wasn’t so free anymore. Homeland Security frowned on companies participating in what the media had dubbed Supply Chain UnAmerican Acts, consorting with foreign interests that had only foreign interest at heart. While such practices weren’t strictly illegal, they had been increasingly subject to excessive scrutiny and long delays in getting necessary approvals, certifications and other legal documents. Depending on the activity, transactions could wait on desks or in queues for months or years in a passive-aggressive political play meant to squelch the life out of potential “UnAmerican” deals. Executives of companies that found ways to circumvent Homeland Security’s watchful eye often found themselves brought up on any number of charges: some fabricated but most of them simply minor, annoying and time consuming, like unpaid parking tickets or a few dollars discrepancy in tax returns.
Whether it was imposing it, confusing it or sidestepping it, bureaucracy was something the folk at the table understood intrinsically. For that reason, maneuvering Zia Khan out of the picture to avoid a prolonged scenario that could potentially end with the Americas third-worlders to a Sino-Pakistani regime was a lot easier to dance to than the Pleistocene Hustle.
But the Ice Age animals were as much a part of this as Zia Khan was and needed just as even a hand in figuring out how to disposition the players. For that reason, the CDC doctor tried to ignore the grandstanding of the cloning work and stay focused on the reason she’d been called in.
“I’ve briefly reviewed the animal trials and conclusions your team has reached, Dr. Volkov.” Dominique Waal peered over the top of the report in her hands at the Russian geneticist sitting across from her, flanked by Mike and Donna. “My expert opinion is that the human trials should normally still be at least a year out. But these are far from normal times right now. The research is promising, the crisis real and escalating. Even a short-term reversal of VTSE by your Vf prion is preferable to the millions of deaths otherwise predicted over the next few months. We don’t have the luxury of time to test proactively. We must take a reactive stance and buy ourselves time to confirm the benign nature of this new protein or to develop an acceptable alternative. That is the recommendation I’ve sent to my superiors in Atlanta.”
Dr. Volkov bowed his head and slowly exhaled. “That is good news, Dr. Waal. Thank you.” He looked back up. “What about my team? Surely they can be of service.”
CIA agent Jean-Paul Unger took up the debrief in a clipped voice that contained so many influences it was impossible to tell where the man was originally from. “Your genetics team, Dr. Volkov, including you, are mainly here in the U.S. on work visas. Deportation is not currently an option with the quarantine in effect, but it is within our jurisdiction to detain any suspect individuals during a national crisis. However, it is the determination of this crisis committee that your team acted solely on the advice of Triple E’s board of directors. They will be absolved and granted contract positions within the CDC to continue development and testing of the Vf prion or any alternative that may come out of the research. The CDC has set up temporary facilities in the labs at the University of North Dakota. Your team will report there for work assignments.
“This committee has also reviewed your involvement, Dr. Volkov, and come to the following determinations. As a board member of Triple E Enterprises, you can be held culpable for any and all decisions made by that board. Your actions regarding Dr. Bailey and Mr. Shafer, however, beg clemency on your behalf, as does your cooperation in turning over research documents to the CDC and offering statements to the CIA against your fellow board members. In addition, the country can ill afford to refuse the medical collaboration you’ve offered. Therefore, you will be allowed to join your team and continue your research under the supervision of the CDC.
“This decision, however, does not indemnify you. Nor does it preclude Homeland Security from entering your name as a suspect individual. Assuming this crisis passes, you will be prohibited from leaving the U.S. mainland and your travel within the continental U.S. along with any online activities w
ill be documented and periodically reviewed until this matter is fully and legally resolved. Is that clear?”
Dr. Volkov, visibly relieved, nodded. “As long as it does not interfere with my research and testing of the Vf prion, it is indeed quite clear and acceptable.”
“How about Walt Thurman?” Mike asked. “What happens to him? Not just for selling out his country, but, you know, for kidnapping and attempted manslaughter.”
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