Marsh nearly lost it right there. But then the Snakehead pulled away. It moved backward, and the others did the same.
Marsh was about ready to believe he’d escaped when, almost as a parting gesture, the Snakehead reached out one claw and sliced a furrow deep into Marsh’s cheek.
He screamed and hid his face, tried to worm his bulk further into the corner of the cell, ready for more pain.
Nothing happened. When he finally opened his eyes, he was alone again. And despite the burning gash on his face, he felt pretty good.
It was almost as if they’d recognized him, he realized. As if they’d marked him as one of their own.
LEVEL FIVE
Zach was a dead man.
He’d seen Cade take on these things and he knew what they were capable of. They would run him down in less than a hundred yards. They would rip him apart like a crocodile snatching a gazelle from the bank of a watering hole. They’d open a hole in his chest and tear out his organs. They were faster and stronger. He was going to die.
He ran anyway.
He heard their claws on the floor, not too far back. He wasn’t sure where he was going—the place was laid out like a maze, but he kept turning corners, trying to keep the distance between them.
It wasn’t until he saw the steel door that he realized he’d just turned down a dead end.
He still wasn’t going to give up. Just like the idiots in the horror movies, he tried to open the door. When he found it was locked (of course), he pounded on it. Nothing.
Now he was really dead.
Maybe it was just as idiotic as pounding on the door, but he wanted to see the end coming.
He turned to face the Snakeheads.
Only there were no Snakeheads.
Somewhere along the way—Zach had been too busy running to notice when—the Snakeheads had stopped following him. He couldn’t even hear them now.
Zach waited, doubled over, trying to catch his breath.
The corridors behind him were eerily silent. As if the creatures had simply given up on him.
Zach had no way of knowing that he’d stumbled on the one thing the Snakeheads truly feared: the door behind him. All of them remembered, on a dim Pavlovian level, being taken behind that door. They knew horrible things had been done to them there. They knew that not everyone taken behind the door would come out. Even as twisted as their brains now were by the change, they knew that the door meant pain and death.
They weren’t going to get close to it again. Not ever.
Zach didn’t know this, but he wasn’t about to waste the chance he’d been given.
He waited as long as he thought possible, and then carefully made his way back to the main corridor.
He started looking for a way out.
LEVEL FOUR
Darnell Pendle was off-shift, dozing in front of a TV screen in the rec room, when the alarms sounded, only to be stopped in mid-screech. Huh. That was weird. He went back to sleep.
A little while later—he wasn’t sure how long it was—Pendle sat up. He thought he heard something. It almost sounded like someone whispering, “Hush.” Now he knew something was off. Nobody in the dorms was ever quiet, especially when he was trying to sleep.
“Anyone there?” Pendle called.
He heard it again. Hush, hush.
He knew what made that noise.
Pendle went for his gun.
Something lashed out at him, whip-fast. He felt a quick, sharp pain at his wrists.
He looked down and realized he didn’t have the gun. He couldn’t hold it because he had no hands.
At the ends of his wrists, there was nothing but exposed white bone and empty air.
There should be blood, he thought numbly, and then it came jetting out of him.
He heard himself screaming, although there was no real pain, not yet. Or if there was, his brain simply hadn’t caught up with it yet.
He looked up, and the Snakehead’s claws were coming down again. This time, he saw the long, knife-like edges—
It tore across his face, and his right eye no longer worked.
He knew someone had to hear him screaming by now.
His one good eye saw the blood all over him. The Snakehead ducked in with his teeth, right at Pendle’s chest.
He was no longer screaming, he realized. Maybe it was because he couldn’t feel much of anything. Or more likely, it was because he couldn’t seem to get any breath into his lungs.
He looked up again and saw the Snakehead over him. The white teeth, peeled back in what looked like a grin.
He raised the stub of his arm, but the Snakehead nuzzled it aside, almost gently, and then opened wide again.
Pendle felt cold all over, but he still wanted to ask how this happened. How did the thing get out of its cage?
The Snakehead didn’t have any answers, of course. It just kept grinning, tearing away great strips of skin with each jerk of its head.
LEVEL FOUR
Marsh walked the corridors with a crooked smile. He listened to the occasional sound of gunfire, the occasional scream. He nodded his head, agreeing with some unspoken question.
A soldier ran screaming down the hall, blood all over him. Marsh didn’t even look twice.
The bleeding on his face had stopped. It seemed stupid to wait inside the cell any longer. And he didn’t feel like he was in the slightest danger. He couldn’t explain it. But he didn’t stop to think much about it, either.
Suddenly, Marsh was pulled into a room off the main corridor. A small group of soldiers blockaded themselves inside.
They shouted things at him he didn’t bother to understand.
After a while of shouting, they left him alone, his back against the wall, as they looked out into the hallway, standing guard against whatever was out there.
Marsh decided he could wait here awhile. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, but he knew it was coming. Whatever it was, he was looking forward to it.
He had never felt so happy in all his life.
LEVEL FOUR
Dobbs walked into the toilet. He wasn’t the typical Archer/Andrews recruit. He was out of shape, with an undistinguished service record. But he was the guy who could get you anything. Someone had dropped him in supply and logistics at the start of his army career, and an obscene kind of genius flowered there. He supplied soldiers the world over with illegal drugs, porn, hookers and guns.
Then he discovered the real money was in livestock.
It began with a fluke. An Afghan warlord wanted to celebrate a victory with some Special Forces guys. Only problem: they were in a desolate section of the mountains where all the local livestock had been bombed, along with the people. Dobbs found himself transporting a dozen live goats, in crates, in a top-secret military aircraft.
He was pissed. He’d been ordered to do the job, so he didn’t make any money. He even had to clean the plane afterward, because the regular crews didn’t have security clearance for it. Everything about the mission was classified, even the goat shit.
Dobbs had one of those lightning flashes of business genius. He could transport more than just goats. Those crates with air holes could fit something far more valuable.
The U.S., Europe and Saudi Arabia all wanted children. For all kinds of different uses. And the one big surplus in any war zone or disaster area was kids. Wandering around, stunned and stupid, ready to follow anyone with a uniform and a candy bar.
So for a year before he was recruited by Archer/Andrews, Dobbs ran a successful child-smuggling ring. That’s how he joined the Company.
Like any good middleman, Dobbs didn’t think about what happened to his cargo once he got it from Point A to Point B. With the magic of the U.S. Army’s international transport system, he could have those orphans, sleeping quietly in a ketamine-induced coma, anyplace in the world in seventy-two hours or less.
You had to allow for some breakage in-flight. Not enough air in the container, overdose of sedatives, whatever. But th
e profit margins were amazing; even better than drugs.
Dobbs lowered his bulk onto the toilet.
The lights went out.
Bastards, Dobbs thought. “Hey,” he said. “Hey! I’m in here!”
No reply. He heard the sirens wail, then die almost immediately. Must be a power outage. The P.A. would have an announcement, but there were no speakers in the latrines.
“Asshole!” Dobbs yelled, just in case.
He heard the restroom door slam. A scratching noise, tentative at first. Like a dog or cat trying to open the stalls.
No, Dobbs thought. His throat closed. He began sweating wildly. There were no pets at the Site. There was only one thing that could be scratching.
The scratching continued. It went down the line of stalls, opening each door in turn.
For some reason, Dobbs thought of one of his shipments.
The missing fingernails, the broken knuckles. The skin gone blue and cyanotic at the edges. He’d seen this hand when he pried open a crate on one of his first deliveries. He’d misjudged the amount of air, and he’d lost six of ten of his cargo.
The kid on top had tried to scratch his way out of the crate, but the lid was nailed shut.
Dobbs remembered it so clearly, because he’d had to give back half his fee; he barely made anything on that deal.
The scratching stopped when it reached his stall and the door wouldn’t open. Dobbs looked down and saw the clawlike feet on the floor. The stall began to rattle and shake, and then the Snakehead was looking back at him, staring up from the floor as it slithered under the obstacle to reach him.
Ten minutes later, it left. What remained of Dobbs was stuck, headfirst, in the toilet, limbs splayed at disjointed angles.
He looked as if he had been flushed and spat out again, as if he was too foul even for the sewer pipe below.
MARSH KEPT SITTING THERE, waiting in the blockaded room with the other people. He’d listened, and he’d learned their names. He might have been happy to stay there forever, but something kept interrupting his peaceful daze.
The one called Copeland was cracking his gum again. Marsh hated that.
Marsh could even smell it. Copeland had a big wad of some sugary brand Marsh hadn’t seen since he stole candy as a kid. Marsh listened to the sound, like a cow mashing up its cud—and then, snap, pop goes the tiny bubble.
It wouldn’t be so bad, Marsh thought, if only there were some pattern to it. But it came at random moments. Snap. Snap. Snap. Then a long pause. Nothing but chewing. Then, just when he was used to the relative silence—another snap.
He decided to kill Copeland. That would end the noise.
The more the idea buzzed through his head, the more Marsh liked it. He still wasn’t exactly sure where the notion came from, but it made him feel warm. It made him feel better.
Because something was going on in his body. Something was making his heart beat faster, and making him angry. Way angrier than he’d ever been on meth, and he’d once punched through a wall of glass bricks while on meth. But at the same time, the anger made him happy. Filled him with all kinds of other images and feelings—
Snap. Snap. Snap.
Enough.
He stood up and immediately stumbled. One of the men, a guy with a blond crew cut, noticed.
“Take it easy, man,” he said. He helped Marsh sit back down. “You don’t look good.”
Marsh was a little premature. He kept breathing deeply. He looked at his skin and began picking, and saw the green-black scales under the sores. He felt the teeth behind his teeth, pushing forward.
No, Marsh was not good. But he could be worse.
Much, much worse.
They had their backs to him again. Marsh stood up once more. This time, he stayed on his feet. This time, he began walking.
He started with Copeland.
Snap.
LEVEL FOUR
The Snakeheads regrouped. They were running out of prey on the lower levels. Something told them they could find more as they rose up.
Like cattle in a chute, they began to stream through the only pathway left in the maze of corridors, stopping when they hit steel walls and turning in the new direction.
Some of their victims, not quite dead, rose up and followed them as soon as the change hit them. It transformed their bodies and healed them, but left them famished.
Clusters of Snakeheads still got stuck in the sally ports as they overloaded the hatches and tried to squeeze through. Biting fights broke out that left some of them wounded and an easy meal for the rest.
But the creatures still made their way to the surface, drawn by the scent of prey, rich with fat, heavy and slow on its feet, noisy and complacent. They twisted upward, more like one long serpent than individual creatures, slithering from a hole in the earth.
LIBERTY MALL, GROUND LEVEL
Twenty-six hundred feet above the Site, people were still arriving. They got into the spirit. Estimates put the crowd at a hundred thousand or more. They all waited, more or less patiently, standing room only, waiting to be funneled inside.
10:49 P.M. A little more than one hour to go, and all the doors would open. Then the fun would really begin.
THIRTY-SIX
A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an “excess of democracy,” when “what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy,” to improve “governability.” Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on “Control Over Man’s Development and Behavior” to devise “new means of social control,” especially in “advanced societies.” In the coming New World Order, the natives apparently have yet to be civilized.
—John Whalen and Jonathan Vankin, The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
OSCEOLA MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, IOWA
The pilot was right on time. Graves met him in the hangar at the small, private airport outside Liberty. He carried only a duffel bag.
After takeoff, Graves sat comfortably in the leather chair of the Gulfstream and watched the Mall recede in the distance. By first light, this would be Ground Zero. People would not believe it, even when they saw the proof on TV, even when it was right in front of their eyes. From the center of the country, the new dominant species on the planet would spread outward.
Graves figured six months, a year at the most, before humanity was reduced to a few thousand people, not including those selected for the special shelters—like him.
The speaker above his seat clicked on. “We’ll be at Dulles before you know it, sir,” the pilot told him.
Graves pressed his own intercom button. “Thank you. Let me know when you’ve got an exact landing time.”
“Yes sir,” the pilot said, and clicked off.
Graves was no movie villain, no mad scientist who sticks around to see if his experiment works. He’d done everything he could. He’d fulfilled his duty to the Company. And Cade? Well, if Cade made it out in one piece, he could witness the new world. The Company could try to fit him into its plans then.
He had one last job to do; a reward, or a punishment, depending on the loyalty of his aides.
Just before he’d left the Site, he’d called Book and Bell from their quarters to his office. He figured they would be waiting there by now. He took out his sat-phone and dialed his own line.
It rang three times before Bell picked up. She always was the curious one.
“Put me on speaker,” he ordered. He could picture them both, standing more or less at attention in front of the desk, more or less baffled.
“Where are you?” Bell asked. “The cells have been opened, and the fail-safes are down. It’s a nightmare down on Level Five, and I don’t think it’s going to stay contained.”
“It’s not,” Graves said. “Within a few hours, everyone at the Site will either be infected or dead.”
Silence. He quite liked imagining the shock on their faces.
“You’re gone, aren’t you?” Bell again. Her voice was flat.
“Approaching cruising altitude,” Graves agreed. “But I trust you to monitor the situation.”
Book finally spoke up. “You’ve fucking killed us, haven’t you, old man?”
“I wouldn’t repay your service like that,” Graves said. “Look on the desk.”
By now, they would have seen the vials and the jet injector guns he’d left for them.
“This is the new, final strain of the virus,” he explained. “You’ll retain most of your intellect, probably most of your memories as well. You’ll be the Alphas of the new people. Stronger than the basic-model Snakehead. Faster, too. And much smarter. Within a few hours, there will be thousands of those creatures, basically mindless, operating only on instinct. They will be looking for leadership. This is your chance to forge your own nation.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Bell screeched.
Book didn’t say anything.
“I’m offering you this duty and this reward,” he said. “I hope you choose to accept it.”
Bell began to scream other things at him, but he shut off the phone.
Graves was done. He’d completed his mission. It had taken him almost fifty years and dozens of false starts and aborted plans, but he’d done it.
Tomorrow, he would turn on the TV, and he would be living in the new world.
He pressed the intercom button again. “Tell me, is there any booze on this thing? I feel like celebrating.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
1951—Antarctica—An expedition is sent to the Arctic to retrace the steps of the Pabodie explorers, with the hope of finding some trace of the discoveries left behind. After a brief radio report of finding what appeared to be an alien craft, the expedition lost all contact during a massive storm. No survivors were found.
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