by Jason Parent
A second explosion, from the northern entrance, shook her from her reverie. The door blew off its hinges, and the wall crumbled and fell around it. Someone or something climbed over the debris.
A man in an ASAP guard’s uniform. “Go, go, go!” he shouted.
Clara panicked. She didn’t know if the man was healthy or infected. She searched for the button or lever that would close the cockpit, instead finding one that read ‘Launch’.
She pushed it.
Instantly, the hood started to descend. She watched the man rushing across the hub toward her. He was fast. Too fast? She couldn’t tell. She looked around for a weapon but found nothing. Come on. She tried to will the hood to close faster.
It was too slow. She raised her fist as the man dove inside with only seconds to spare. The cockpit sealed itself shut.
“You won’t be needing that,” the man said, glancing at her balled-up hand. “I’m not one of them.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
He ignored the remark, fiddling with knobs and equipment, looking for only he knew what. “Well?” he asked. “How do we work this thing?”
“I already hit the Launch button,” Clara said. “I have no idea what I am supposed to do next.”
“You mean you don’t know how to fly it?” The man looked her up and down, noticing the lab coat. “Not one of the space guys?”
“Nope.”
“That man you were with – I’m Visely Belgrade, by the way, the one who sealed off the passageway here for you – he was the astronaut?”
“Yep.”
“And he’s…?”
“Yep.”
Belgrade sighed. “Nothing’s ever easy.”
They had another problem. Clara pointed up. The dome was closed. If they tried to launch, they would meet the same fate as birds that flew into closed glass doors.
“Great. How do we open that?”
With a thud and the sound of cranks, the dome above them began to retract. They both stared in wonder as the sky opened up before them. Even the cold, gray afternoon outside was a welcomed escape from the desolate climate within.
“The shutter really doesn’t extend over the hub?” Belgrade asked. “I can’t believe it.”
“Some things are easy.” Tears welled in her eyes. Thank you, Alfonse.
“About freaking time.”
Clara jabbed him with her finger.
“Ow!” Belgrade frowned. “Do you want to settle down? We still have to figure out how to launch this thing.”
“Sorry.” But she wasn’t. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t, you know, mushy.”
Belgrade leveled his eyes at her. He tried on a smile, but it didn’t suit his face.
Still, Clara appreciated the effort. “Are we all that’s left?”
“Honest answer: I don’t know. I think so.”
“Are you infected?”
Belgrade sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” His gaze ventured outside the windshield. His eyes widened. “But I know they are!”
Mutated and contorted humans and conglomerations of flesh flooded in through the broken wall. Every last one of them was converging upon the launchpad.
The cones of the thrusters folded inward, positioning for launch. Apparently, Alfonse had prepared the entire sequence when he plotted their flight plan. She wished he were coming with her. Instead, she had this stranger she didn’t know and couldn’t trust.
Alfonse….
A roar emitted from below them. Smoke billowed up around them. The console switched from dormant to active in the span of a second. However, the creatures were rocking the ship. Some were climbing atop it.
“We’re not going to make it,” Clara said as the creatures swarmed the rover.
Some looked as though they were trying to destroy it, others as though they were trying to hitch a ride. Still others were stretching and oozing and searching for ways inside the cockpit. More than one got too close to the flames below and burst into flames of their own.
Takeoff was slow, so slow Clara hadn’t noticed when they’d left the ground.
“See? We are going to make it,” Belgrade said as the Herald rose.
Something was driving the mutants toward them with even greater conviction than they’d shown in the corridors. “They chance the smoke and the fire now, and for what? Trying to escape? Do they know about the self-destruct sequence?”
“Self-destruct sequence?”
“Yes, this whole place is rigged to blow. But don’t worry, we have plenty of time.”
My research, Clara thought and immediately felt selfish for thinking it. She snickered. As long as she remained alive, she’d have plenty of samples to research.
A bang rattled the windshield, and she nearly jumped out of her seat. A mostly human figure stared in at them through one eye, the other eye covered by some kind of thick green husk.
“Jordan?”
His cheek slid, wet and slimy, down the windshield as his weight and gravity worked against his efforts to hold on. Blood dripped from a quarter-sized hole in his forehead. As he slid lower, Clara could see that the back half of his head was gone. Jordan Phillips was no more. What she was looking at didn’t belong on the Herald.
She smiled when it fell.
As the thrusters sent them higher, the rocket fuel blasting everything in range of the launchpad into fiery tumbleweeds, rolling into others of their kind and spreading fire like infection, the blaze found its way up to the Herald over the tentacles trying to hold it down. The smaller creatures who had latched on to the rover found themselves on fire, the Herald shining like a meteor burning up upon entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The temperature in the cockpit rose to sweltering levels. Malfunction warnings flashed across the console as equipment failed or smoked.
Still, they continued to rise.
The fear of crashing became secondary in Clara’s mind to a concern that had just occurred to her. The shelter was open. The creatures could mutate. Some could climb.
What if they can fly?
Chapter Thirty-Two
Anju stumbled around in the darkness for what seemed like an eternity. She had lost all concept of time in never-ending blindness, the last indicator of its passage having been the notification by the facility’s central computer system that the facility would ‘purify’ itself, a description she found wholly inaccurate, in sixty minutes. That had seemed like an hour ago and had made her move faster. Still, she did not feel as though she had gotten anywhere.
Her knees were covered in bruises from all the times she had fallen. Every time she fell, she got up and carried forward. She had encountered no infected in that dark hole, which would likely become her tomb, none that she could see or that had chosen to make itself known.
Is that…? She raised a hand over her eyes as if a glare was causing her inability to see. It had no effect on her sight, but it did raise her confidence in the fact that her eyes were not deceiving her. A sliver of pale yellow broke through the darkness, like a hallway light outside a closed bedroom door. And it was only….
How far? She could not gauge the distance with no walls or floor to measure it by. She ran toward the light regardless, hoping and praying that nothing waited in her path.
She tripped. Falling forward, she braced herself with her palms and skidded then stopped on the cold, earthen floor. Her knee had again hit against something hard, another bruise for her collection. Wincing, she stood. Nothing seemed to be broken. She wiped her hands on her pants, and felt and heard little pebbles and dirt fall from the new grooves she had scratched into them.
Whatever she had tripped on was not hard like rock. It was soft like….
A body? Anju gasped then swallowed hard, trying to stop herself from making any noise. Calm down. If it were one of those things, it would have a
lready attacked you. You do not know what it was. It could have been anything.
She turned to continue toward the light, at first content to never know what had tripped her. She stopped. What if it is a person? He could need your help. She moaned. Her conscience was her own worst enemy.
She took a deep breath. “Hello?” She crouched and felt around the tunnel floor, duck-walking slowly, cautiously closer to the place where her foot had collided with the object. Her fingertip brushed against fabric. It could have been someone’s clothes. “Hello?” Her voice was barely more than a whisper.
When no answer came, she reached out and grabbed the object. It was light, big enough to be a jacket, but it definitely did not have anyone in it. If she got out, she could use a jacket. God, she was already freezing. Her teeth were chattering, and her sweat had cooled against her skin. The cold seemed to reach right through her. She wondered why she was noticing it only then.
She bundled the object in her arms and ran back toward the light. That time, she did not trip, though she did smack her shin against a metal bar of some sort, something big she had to skirt around in an area where the floor was covered with rubble. Soon, she could see her hands in front of her. She could see what was in them: a backpack with a giant black cross painted on its flap.
That man…he blew up the garage. The flap was not buckled down. She opened up the bag, hoping to find something useful inside, a lighter maybe, but found nothing.
She tossed the bag aside and continued toward the sliver of light. She began to piece together the evidence. The man had had bombs. His bombs were gone. So either he used them all in the garage, or someone else had them. And maybe….
The gate! They used them to blow up the gate! Her shin, stinging with its fresh bruise, pulsated its agreement. “Which means,” she said aloud though afraid to believe it, “that there is nothing blocking my way out?”
She continued toward the light. It illuminated a stairwell leading up to a bulkhead. The light was shining through a crack where rusted metal doors met a stone basin.
Please do not be locked. Please do not be locked.
She paused, trying not to let her excitement trump her good sense, and listened for sounds outside. She heard breathing, but it came from behind her. The hairs on her neck stood on end. She was too scared to turn around and face what she knew in her heart would kill her.
But whoever or whatever was behind her fell. She turned to see an ASAP guard lying on the tunnel floor. He was clutching his stomach as black liquid poured through his fingers.
“You have been infected!” she shouted and turned to run before her brain reprocessed what she had seen. The poor lighting only made the liquid look black. The man was bleeding, and he needed help.
She hurried back to where he lay and lifted his head in her arms. He clenched both hands over his belly as he tried to hold his life force in. His face was bone white, smudged with grime, and young. He couldn’t have been past his early twenties. He might have been handsome if he had not been at death’s door.
He tried to speak. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Anju leaned closer to listen.
“Don’t… go out there,” he struggled to say.
But she had to go out there. The guard was losing too much blood. If the impending explosion or the creatures did not kill him first, his blood loss would. He needed qualified medical assistance and quickly. She fell short of breath, imagining what that man must have been thinking, that Anju was going to leave him all alone to die in the dark.
She lowered his head gently to the ground and stood. She hesitated briefly, but she had to leave if either of them was going to survive. “Keep pressure on the wound. I will be back with help, I promise.” She climbed the steps.
“No…wait…” the young guard moaned.
Anju pushed open the bulkhead. The cold air hit her face and brought with it the smell of ferns and firs and wet earth and fresh snow. The sunlight reflecting off snow and ice was blinding at first, her eyes needing a moment to adjust. A forest?
“Wait, don’t!” the dying man shouted. “Don’t go out there!”
She walked out into the gray light, a bleak day only dazzling in comparison to the tunnel. Anything was better than the tunnel. The bulkhead had been built in a small clearing encircled by tall trees. She turned and peered through the interspersed trunks and thought she could make out the research center somewhere near the horizon.
How far did I walk? She tried to prop the bulkhead door open, hoping the sunlight would offer the guard some comfort. As she did, her hand slipped on a thick, dark substance. She sniffed it, hoping it was sap, but its coppery smell gave it away.
“Gyah!”
She wiped her hand on her leg, turning around. She stepped forward, and her foot landed in something squishy, thick like mud, and without looking, Anju knew what it was.
But she had to look. “Oh God.” So much blood, crimson against the snow.
Bile rose from her stomach. It escaped when she saw the bodies lying around her, at least eight of them. Some belonged to acquaintances she had met at the research center, others to ASAP guards and facility staff members. One even belonged to the cook who had been serving the steel-carved oatmeal that morning.
All had been gunned down as they tried to make an escape.
Anju felt the first bullet rip through her even before she heard the gunshot. Before the second bullet tore through her shoulder, she started to seize.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The flight had been rocky and the landing way off the mark, but somehow they had survived it. In the distance, the Shakhova-Mendelsen Siberian Research Center was exploding. It reminded Clara of a party around a bonfire she had gone to as a teenager, with her friends setting off fireworks and enjoying a simpler time. But her celebration was tinged with a hint of sadness. All that remained of the work Clara had performed there was herself and the virus that lived inside her.
And maybe the burning bits of Molli that had fused to the rover.
Visely Belgrade – she had learned much about him during their hectic flight while they tried to distract themselves from any number of possible ways of dying, including mile-high combustion and mile-low plummeting – had kicked open the partially fried-shut cockpit hood and was watching the billowing mushroom cloud in the distance with arms crossed. A wildfire raged through the center and had made some progress downwind, east through a slightly wooded plateau. But the frozen Siberian tundra would prevent it from spreading too far. He tore himself away and returned to help Clara from the rover.
Before her feet could touch the snow-and-mud-covered ground, Belgrade scooped her into his arms as if he were some fancy-pants in a bad romance flick. She balked at being manhandled, stiffened in his grasp and pushed off him, her confusion and fear increasing her fight.
“I can walk just fine,” she said. “I don’t need to be carried anymore.”
Belgrade probably didn’t know she hadn’t been able to walk a mere eight or nine hours earlier, and because of that, her imagined reasons for his carrying her grew that much more terrifying.
“I’m not going to harm you,” he said.
Clara didn’t relax. “Put me down!”
“The Americans, the Russians, NATO…I don’t know who for sure, but someone is coming for us, and they’re probably already getting close.” He walked through the snow, away from the rover, carrying her as if she were his newly betrothed. “If we’re the only survivors, I’m guessing first responders will be shoot-first-then-shoot-again types.”
Clara’s mouth dropped open. “You mean….”
“That we just went through hell only for our own governments to kill us anyway?” He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they’ll just throw us in quarantine for the rest of our lives. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t trust them, I don’t trust them, and neither should you. I used to be one of
those guys.”
Clara calmed. She still didn’t like being carried, but she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He carried her over to a large boulder and placed her atop a gradual slope. She grimaced. The rock was ice cold beneath her bare hands and even through her jeans.
“Climb to the other side of the rock and head south. We’re fortunate today is warmer than yesterday, or we would die of exposure in less than twenty minutes. And if it was winter, we’d already be half-dead. Still, I’d hurry before night sets in, not only to keep your blood pumping, stay warm, and get the hell out of here, but to stave off hypothermia. If you start to feel tired, don’t stop. You stop, you die.”
Clara nodded. “What about you?”
He smiled. “I’ll be fine. Hopefully, they’ll never notice your tracks and will follow mine. The Kolyma Highway should only be a few kilometers south of here, give or take a few kilometers. You should head toward it. Despite its name, it isn’t much of a road. I wouldn’t expect a lot of traffic out here, and most of what you do find on it will be military or other parties interested in the research center. But no one knows you’re alive or will be looking for survivors that far south, so you may be able to flag someone down and get lucky. Even if it’s soldiers, I doubt they would have kill orders. These things aren’t handed out like candy since the general public tends to find them controversial.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“It will be, but at least you’ll have a chance.” He paused and stroked his chin. “Of course, if you don’t find anyone, you will die of exposure, so if you’d rather just give yourself up or take your chances with me—”
“No!” she blurted, a little too forcefully than she’d intended. If the forces that be were willing to kill those they thought might be infected, Clara was sure to be shot and cremated by nightfall. She wanted to live. Fate had seen fit to give her her health and her legs back, as well as the greatest scientific discovery of the last half century in a self-contained form. She’d not let anyone take either of them from her without a fight. “I’ll take my chances.”