“Don’t patronize me,” Curtis growled. Then, turning to Coleridge, he said in a calm voice, “General, it would probably be a good idea to let the military know that we weren’t just nuked by the Russians or Chinese.”
“Sir,” Coleridge said, then quietly left the room.
As the door whispered shut, Curtis went on to The Other, “I made the decision and I’ll take the responsibility, but don’t tell me there was no other choice. If there was a mistake, it was that I trusted in you to be omnipotent and omniscient, that you and your kind could keep us away from disasters like this. And make no mistake: this is a disaster. We believed in you too much, and this is the price we have to pay.” And it’s just too goddamned high, he cursed himself, even for my daughter’s sake.
Just then the door burst open. It was his chief of staff, Paul Rochelle, followed by half a dozen Secret Service agents with guns drawn.
“Mr. President!” Rochelle exclaimed as the agents gathered around Curtis, intending to manhandle him to safety, if necessary. “NORAD reported that we’ve been attacked with a nuclear weapon! There was an explosion just moments ago in Calif–”
“I tried to stop them, Mr. President,” Coleridge said, storming into the room behind the agents, “But they wouldn’t listen.”
“Listen to what?” Rochelle shouted. “We’ve been attacked!”
“No, Paul,” Curtis told him quietly, motioning for the Secret Service agents that he didn’t need their assistance. “It was...I ordered it. It was the Earth Defense Society base. There wasn’t any time and we had to be sure we took them out. They...”
He stopped, shaking his head. As if he were a balloon that had suddenly deflated, Curtis slumped down into his chair at the head of the table. “Casualties,” he muttered miserably. “Do we have any estimates yet?”
“No...no, sir,” Rochelle replied, stunned. “How could we? We just found out. I...Mr. President, I don’t understand. How...?”
“Tell the governor of California that we’ll provide any and all assistance they require,” Curtis told him, holding up his hand to forestall any more questions. “Get the staff going on that right away, and get FEMA moving. Then get the press secretary in here so we can get an explanation of this out to the public.” He glanced at the Clement-thing. “But right now, I need a few minutes alone.
Everyone made to move toward the door except Clement.
“I said alone,” Curtis snapped.
Nodding respectfully, or at least making a good show of it, “Clement” followed the others out.
In the sudden silence after the door closed, the President stared at the roiling, glowing mushroom cloud that now towered over Sutter Buttes and the devastated wasteland around it.
Then Norman Curtis, the most powerful man in the world, put his face in his hands and wept.
***
“Sir!”
Paul Rochelle had just closed the door to the President’s conference room when a Secret Service agent called from the door to the next conference room down the hall.
“What is it?” Rochelle asked dully. His voice was still weak as he fought to grapple with the nightmare reality into which he and the rest of the country had just been plunged. He still couldn’t believe that what had happened had really happened.
“FBI Director Ridley, sir,” the agent said, gesturing into the other room. “I was supposed to make sure she wasn’t disturbed. She needed some rest, the President said after they spoke earlier. But after what happened, I checked on her, and...” He looked into the room, then back at Rochelle, shaking his head in disbelief. “I’m sorry, sir, but you need to see this.”
Rochelle cursed under his breath and walked quickly to the door, looking where the agent pointed.
Ray Clement watched the exchange impassively, then turned and quickly walked out of the situation room complex.
“Oh, my God,” Rochelle said as he rushed into the room to kneel next to the twisted, motionless woman who lay on the floor. “Call the medical unit and get somebody down here right now!”
“Already done, sir,” the agent replied, his eyes riveted on Ridley, who lay curled in a fetal position where she had fallen from a chair along the wall. A secure phone was still in her hand, but her fingers no longer had the strength to hold it. There was a trace of blood on her blouse, just above her waist.
“Director Ridley,” Rochelle said quietly, lowering himself so he could see her face, afraid to roll her over in case she’d injured her back or spine. “Director, what happened? How badly are you hurt? Talk to me!”
Her eyes were open and fixed on him, and she tried to move her lips, but no words came out.
“What is it?” Rochelle asked, bending closer, her lips now right to his ear.
“Clement...imposter,” she breathed. “Stop...him...”
“Who’s Clement?” Rochelle asked, not recognizing the name. He looked up at the Secret Service agent. “Do you know who she’s talking about?”
“He was a senior FBI agent accompanying Director Ridley,” the agent said. “A big guy, African-American, with–”
“Find him!” Rochelle barked. “And for God’s sake, don’t let him get near the President!”
As the agent ran from the room, gun drawn and microphone to his lips to alert the rest of the White House protective detail, Rochelle turned to Ridley and said soothingly, “Don’t worry, help is on the way. You’ll be okay.”
The only answer she could give him were the wordless tears that crept down her cheeks.
***
Clement walked briskly toward the entrance used by tourists, rather than the one for official visitors, planning to lose itself in the crowd. Had it truly been human, it might have smiled at the convenient timing of an incoming group of people streaming through from the visitor center.
But it wasn’t human. Its outward expression was impassive as it strode past the goggling tourists. It contemplated thoughts in the way of its species, altogether indecipherable to humankind.
“Everyone on the floor, now!”
The sudden order was followed by the sound of running feet and the metallic clicks of weapons being taken off safe.
“Down! Down! Down!” the same voice boomed. Around Clement, the humans noisily fell to the floor, crying and cursing in fear.
“Freeze, Clement!”
The creature stopped, then slowly turned to face the human who had spoken to it. It was a Secret Service agent who stood with a dozen more, all of them with guns leveled at Clement’s chest.
“On the floor. Now!” the agent growled. “I won’t ask you a second time.”
The creature stared at him. It felt no fear, for emotions were simply another facet of the mimicry that allowed it to blend in with its prey, or avoid the rare true predators that walked among this species. It understood fear, for it had seen it on the face of Ray Clement as he died: the creature had replaced him the night Sheldon Crane had infiltrated the Lincoln facility, hoping that in the guise of Clement it could help regain control of what Crane had taken.
“Clement” – it had taken the name as well as the DNA of its victim, for it did not have a name as a human might understand it – knew that it had failed, as had the others. Of all those on The List, only one would soon remain. Clement could still sense it, knew that it was alive. The others had all perished at the New Horizons facility.
It expressed no sadness, no frustration or regret at their deaths, its worldview one of ultimate nihilism. Yet it knew that the trucks carrying the precious seeds were on their way into the world. Its species would yet survive.
Returning its attention to the Secret Service agent, it said cryptically, “There will be others.”
Then it launched itself at the humans.
***
“Mr. President,” Rochelle said urgently as he struggled to keep up with Curtis’s angry stride, “you don’t have time for this!”
“Yes,” Curtis snapped, “I do. This is the one thing in the world right now that
I must have time for.”
Striding into the visitor center, he was confronted with a bloody scene. Four Secret Service agents lay dead, two of them looking like they’d run into a chainsaw, while the other two had died in contortions of unimaginable agony. Three more writhed on the floor, screaming in pain, with doctors and nurses from the White House Medical Unit doing what little they could to ease their suffering.
Miraculously, none of the civilians had been hurt, despite the dozens of rounds the agents had fired, shots that had snapped Curtis out of his melancholy reverie in the Situation Room. The far wall of this room, where he now stood, was peppered with bullet holes. He wrinkled his nose at an incredibly foul odor beyond the sharp stink of the gun powder that permeated the room.
One agent stood alone over a sheet-shrouded mass about the size of a man that was soaked with an ichor fluid. He was still holding his weapon trained on whatever was under the sheet, his expression a mixture of rage and fear.
“Show me,” Curtis said quietly.
Looking at him with haunted eyes, the agent nodded. But instead of turning back the sheet, he pulled his Uzi tight into his shoulder, aiming it at the object of Curtis’s interest as another agent stepped closer and gingerly pulled back the soaked covering.
“What the devil,” Curtis whispered as he beheld the misshapen creature, or what was left of it, that was revealed when the sheet was pulled back. It looked nothing at all like the beautiful alien that Kempf had revealed herself to be, and for a moment he wondered if they were two totally different species.
“How can this possibly be...” he murmured before admitting the truth to himself: The Others had lied about everything, and had preyed upon the emotional weakness of Curtis and people like him to advance their own agenda. Part of him still recoiled from the possibility that his daughter would have the gift The Others had given her taken away. But the rest of him seethed at having been taken for a fool and turning down a path that would leave his name in the halls of infamy, as the President who had dropped a nuclear weapon on his own country, who had killed thousands of those he had sworn to protect.
In that moment of clarity another truth struck him: all this time, the Earth Defense Society had indeed been working to defend their world and humankind. The terrorist attacks, the strange goings-on that had been reported in the genetic engineering industry, all of it had been the work of The Others. Only the so-called lunatics of the EDS had seen the truth and had tried to fight back. And he had done everything possible to exterminate them.
After a long moment of staring at the mottled mass of oozing flesh and exoskeleton, dark and glistening where it had not been smashed by bullets fired by the Secret Service agents, he nodded to the agent holding the sheet, who gratefully put it back over the body.
“Burn it,” he ordered grimly. “And sterilize this room. I don’t want a single damned molecule of that thing left when you’re done.”
Then, kneeling down next to one of the doctors struggling to control the agony of one of the wounded agents, he asked, “How is he?”
“He won’t make it,” the doctor told him, his features drawn downward by the weight of resignation that he would lose these patients. “Whatever...it was, it hit him and the others with some sort of stinger and injected them with a toxin of some sort. None of us have seen anything remotely like this, and none of the drugs we’ve given them is even touching it. There’s nothing I can do to save them. I can’t even ease their pain,” he finished bitterly.
“Just do what you can,” Curtis said woodenly, grasping the doctor briefly on the shoulder.
Turning to Rochelle, he said, “I want to see the staff and General Coleridge in the Oval Office in five minutes.” He glanced out a window as a white-topped Marine Corps Sea King helicopter settled onto the White House lawn, summoned by Rochelle as soon as he’d learned of the nuclear strike. It was known as Marine One when the President was aboard, which he would be soon. “And alert Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base to be ready to take off as soon as I get there. I’m heading to California.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“We don’t have a choice,” Naomi said grimly. “We’ve got to get out of here. And there’s only one way we can go: through the antenna complex.”
The inhabitants of the old Titan base were gathered in the smoke-shrouded junction between the command and lab domes. Renee and some of the others had restored additional power by making a dangerous trek back into the lab dome, but their fix wouldn’t last long: the flood of diesel fuel from the enormous storage tanks in the exhaust complex had continued unabated, and it was now spilling out onto the floor of the junction, covering it in a slick of the stinking liquid and filling the air with fumes. The partially restored power had allowed Livingston, the engineer, to close the blast locks that led to the missile silos that contained the seed vaults. Even if the rest of the complex was consumed by fire, the vaults would be safe.
Unfortunately, restoring partial power hadn’t gained them the one thing they needed more than anything else: the ability to open the portal’s surface doors. The inner door connecting the portal to the junction had opened after power had been restored. When Renee had tried to open the surface doors from the command center, however, it became clear that no one was going to be leaving that way: the mounting of one of the hydraulic rams used to push the leaves of the door upward gave way with an ear-splitting crack. The sudden increase in load on the other rams resulted in a complete failure, and the doors, which had risen a total of two inches, slammed back down with a thunderous boom.
After that, Naomi had sent Livingston to check on the power leads to the antenna complex, to see if they could use the auxiliary elevator to escape.
“There was no way we could get there,” Livingston explained after he and the two men who went with him returned early. “The smoke was so thick that we couldn’t see at all, and I got separated from the others. I found them, finally, but it’s just not safe down there, Naomi. We shouldn’t go that way.”
“So, you don’t know if the antenna complex has power?” she asked him pointedly.
Livingston shook his head stubbornly. “It doesn’t matter. We should open the blast locks and stay safe in the silo complexes. We’d at least have power from the batteries, with fresh air and food until–”
“Until what?” Naomi interrupted him, tired of the man’s refusal to give in to the obvious. Pointing to the door to the lab dome, she said, “We’re going to lose power. Soon. And when that happens, anybody on the far side of the blast locks will be trapped. The batteries in the silo arks are there to manage the liquid nitrogen cooling system for short periods if main power goes out. Those circuits don’t activate the hydraulics in any of the doors. Only the power from the lab dome does, and we’re going to lose that soon when the diesel fuel ignites. And if the heat from the resulting fire is intense enough, the junction and the tunnels might collapse. You’d be buried alive.”
“Fuck that,” someone muttered quietly.
“But they just lit off an atomic bomb out there!” someone else cried. “We’ll die of radiation poisoning!”
“That’s definitely going to happen if we stay in here,” Renee said tiredly as she stood up from some equipment she’d been working on with the help of a few others holding flashlights for her. “But it won’t happen any time soon if we’re smart. See that lovely smoke we’ve been breathing in? I thought at first it was just something inside that was burning. But it’s from outside, folks. Those FBI cuckoos – no offense,” she added sarcastically to Special Agent Franzman, whose expression hardened slightly, “– with the explosives damaged the blast valves in the intake complex. The NBC filters aren’t working very well, and all the smoke that came in through the intake is contaminated.” She nodded to the small pile of gear on the floor at her feet. “I finally got one of the goddamn Geiger counters working, and we’ve gotten the radiation equivalent to a few dental X-rays so far. Jack got more when he went after the harvester
in the intake complex, but it still shouldn’t be too bad.” She looked around at the others, then at Livingston. “Staying in here isn’t much better than being topside. At least out there the wind is working to disperse the fallout. Down here it’s just going to keep concentrating and getting worse.” As Livingston opened his mouth to argue, she added, “And the air in the complex behind the blast locks isn’t clean, Wade. It’s just as contaminated as it is in here. So shut up and give it a rest.”
“What about the heat on the surface?” Jack asked. “If we were at ground zero, things topside are likely to be a bit toasty.”
“No doubt about it,” Renee said. “There’ll probably be some local fires still burning, and the ground’s going to be hot as hell. Maybe we can rig something up to pump out some fresh water to cool the ground off a bit around the antenna complex. But out there we might have a chance. Once the inferno in the lab dome kicks off when the fuel leaks into an active electrical circuit, if we’re not burned to death or die of smoke inhalation, we’ll definitely be asphyxiated as the fire eats up all the oxygen. Or we can choose the Wade Option and die of asphyxiation and radiation poisoning behind the blast locks. I don’t know about you, Romeo, but none of those are on my Top Ten List of Ways To Die.”
“I say we vote,” Livingston protested, refusing to give up.
“I say,” Richards growled, drawing his pistol and pointing it at Livingston’s forehead, “that if another word comes out of your pie hole, I’m going to blow your head off. As I understand it, this lady,” he gave a quick nod in Naomi’s direction, “is in charge here. You said your piece and you were overruled. So just...shut...up.”
Livingston glared at Richards. “There aren’t enough respirators for everyone to make it through the tunnel,” he persisted, ignoring the pistol aimed between his eyes.
“Yes, there are,” Naomi grated. “If you remember our discussion from before you went to check the lines to the antenna complex, there are plenty of respirators and even environmental hazard suits in the hazardous storage silo where the elevator is. There’s plenty for everybody, along with survival gear.”
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