Reborn

by Kate Danley

  But Karl Neumann really wanted to carry a gun and shoot at people. Private security wasn’t nearly so picky about Karl not being able to operate a color wheel. So he went to work for Tigon Security and, because of his basically mean disposition, rose to the top ranks of the division that dealt with corporate and executive protection.

  If that sounded like a glamorous profession, like something from paperback novels, Karl was here to testify that it wasn’t. It consisted mostly of watching video monitors and doing perimeter checks and sitting on his ass waiting for something to happen. He hardly ever got to draw his gun on angry thugs to protect a curvaceous woman wearing nothing but a small hand towel.

  And then there was the university, the worst gig he’d ever gotten. Run by faceless bureaucrats who were totally paranoid about security for whatever research they were doing, it was more tight-ass than even the U.S. government. And Dr. Janet Dorcott, the administrator in charge of research. There was a stone-cold bitch if Karl had ever met one. Not bad to look at, but boy, if you ever tried to fuck her, she’d probably cut your cock off and put it in one of those labs she guarded so jealously.

  This was the sort of thing Karl Neumann thought about while sitting at his station and staring at the bank of security monitors that surrounded him. Had he lived long enough, he would eventually have woven those daydreams into stories and published them as a series of moderately successful erotic S and M e-books under the pseudonym Uriana Fallopina. But life had other plans for Karl Neumann.

  Now there was this latest news, coming down from on high yesterday and throwing everything into turmoil. Like it was the end of the world.

  Karl’s train of thought was broken when the front door opened and five people and a dog raced down the hall towards him. The man in the front of the pack was brandishing an ax. Reaching to his holster, Karl finally got a chance to pull his gun in order to blow somebody the fuck away.

  Unfortunately, by the time he’d raised his Glock and brought it to bear, some crazy chick swung a hammer down on it and knocked it from his hands. The ax went chopping into Karl’s console with a shower of sparks and shattered glass, stopping him from sending a warning to the rest of the building.

  Somebody else grabbed Karl from behind, while the guy with ax brought his face in close and demanded, “Where’s the virus?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Karl said. “And if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you.”

  The man with the ax looked at him with murder in his eyes. Then he glanced to the man who was holding Karl and nodded. Karl waited to be struck in the face or the gut. But nothing happened.

  Then the hands that were holding Karl began to heat up. At first they just grew warm in a curious kind of way. Then they started to get uncomfortable. Then they began to burn. The hands squeezed Karl tighter and the sleeves of his shirt began to sizzle, then burst into flames.

  Karl screamed as his flesh was seared.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Everyone has gone!”

  The man let go of him and Karl dropped to the floor. The pain didn’t stop, just eased somewhat. The Ax Man lifted Karl by his burned arms and asked him, “What do you mean?”

  “She got a message from somebody on a boat somewhere. That’s the rumor. She just came out and told everybody to leave town. Said it was too dangerous to stay. So they went.”

  “Who told them?”

  “Dr. Dorcott.”

  From the way the Ax Man reacted, Karl could tell he was familiar with the woman. He squeezed Karl’s arms more tightly and there was more hate in his eyes.

  “You mean she’s not here?”

  What the hell? Why defend that bitch of a doctor? Why not send Ax Man after her? “Oh, she didn’t leave. She said she had some things to wrap up. Besides, she’s not afraid of anything.”

  The Ax Man gave Karl a look that made his blood run cold, in spite of the burns on his arms.

  “She should be,” the Ax Man said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Fort College

  Matt raced down the hallway, determined not to lose the element of surprise. Tanis was at his side. They ran up to a door marked “QUARANTINE.” Matt entered the password into the keypad.

  A message came up on the display screen: DENIED.

  Matt looked at it for a second, considered. Then he chopped at the door with his ax. The ax bit into the door but bounced off with a clang of metal. Wilson’s dog jumped up and sniffed the scar on the door as an alarm rang out.

  They waited. Then they heard the sound of several footsteps running towards the closed door from the other side. Matt gestured for the others to move back while pointing to Carrie to take point.

  Carrie moved to the middle of the hallway and began to glow. By the time the door swung open and five armed guards rushed out, Carrie was blazing like a lighthouse. The guards stopped for a second, blinded, as Matt and Tanis drove down on them from behind. Slamming her hammer down on the ballistic helmet of the man closest to her, she put all her weight behind it and felt his knees buckle. Matt swung the butt end of the ax up at his face and knocked him back against another guard, wiping them both out. He took another chop at them, this time with the blade edge of the ax. Blood spurted.

  Wilson’s dog brought another man down, while Lowell grabbed a fourth with his burning hands. Matt swung his ax at the last man and caught him under his chin, carrying him, like a long line drive, to the wall.

  Carrie dimmed her light. They stood breathing heavily in the suddenly quiet room. Tanis looked down at the fallen guards and saw, for the first time, their rotting features under their police helmets. She turned to Matt.

  “I wasn’t sure,” she said.

  “Wasn’t sure of what?” Matt asked.

  “That they were rotting. I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure it was right to kill them.”

  Matt hefted his ax onto his shoulder. “I was sure,” he said.

  # # #

  In the gleaming white-walled laboratory, Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 played softly on the sound system but failed to drown out the screaming. Dr. Janet Dorcott was used to that. She didn’t play the music to hide the screams, but to enhance them. To make them even more beautiful.

  Subject 07 was a difficult one, and to tell the truth, Dr. Dorcott was sorry she couldn’t keep her alive just a little bit longer. If things were normal, she would have kept the subject alive for months, continuing her research, which had been so promising.

  But things weren’t normal. Changes were coming. Dr. Dorcott had to cut her losses.

  She had begun by flaying the patient alive. She was interested in seeing if there was anything between the dermis and the epidermis that could account for the strange effect Subject 07 had on others. So far, she had separated the skin from the right shoulder down to the wrist but found nothing unusual.

  Oh, well. Science was full of disappointments. Dr. Dorcott placed her scalpel on a tray held by a nurse who wiped her brow. The nurse had volunteered to stay with Dr. Dorcott and do the cleanup here, rather than leave with the rest. To escape what was coming. Dr. Dorcott supposed she did this to curry favor with her. If so, it didn’t work. Dr. Dorcott didn’t favor anyone.

  The nurse dropped the tray to the floor with a clattering of steel on linoleum, and Dr. Dorcott looked up to see Matt Cahill and a bunch of freaks come barging in. He didn’t look a day older than he had when she’d first experimented on him.

  “Drop the scalpel,” he said.

  “My idiot nurse already did that.” She sighed and pulled off her surgical mask. “I must say, Matt, that your timing is impeccable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re here just in time for the Apocalypse.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The Coast of Washington, Approaching Puget Sound

  Heather Paxton hadn’t eaten for two days. She hadn’t moved, not an inch, for eight hours. She didn’t know that, of course, for time meant nothing to he
r, crouched as she was in the bowels of the dromon, with nothing to keep time with but the beating of her heart.

  She had run here, to the ship’s darkest hold, yesterday. Or was it the day before? She had pressed herself in the dark crevice, scarcely daring to breath, while the slaughter went on around her. It had gone on for hours or days or minutes while she shut her eyes to keep the glowing of the hieroglyphics out of her mind.

  But they remained, burned into her mind. In every ancient language known to man and some unknown since the dawn of time. They all translated to the same thing:

  WE ARE COMING.

  EPISODE 4

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Fort College

  Dr. Mendelsohn bandaged his wife’s mutilated arm, and Tanis Archer could see tears in his eyes. As he worked, Mrs. Mendelsohn stroked her husband’s hair with her good hand, looking more concerned for him than she was for herself.

  “I knew you’d come,” Mendelsohn’s wife whispered.

  Dr. Mendelsohn kissed her forehead softly.

  Tanis watched this encounter, experiencing an odd mixture of feelings. After the horror she’d been through in the past days, she didn’t think she’d ever see such tenderness in the world again. But the happiness she felt was mixed with envy, because she doubted she’d ever have such simple, pure love in her life. And it was all overshadowed by a sense of awe as she watched Vincent Mendelsohn grow younger under his wife’s touch. He’d gone from fifty years old to thirty, all in the space of five minutes.

  Amelia Mendelsohn was quite a freak.

  Matt Cahill was impatient. He turned to Carrie, who still glowed translucently in the aftermath of the fight. “When Dr. Mendelsohn is done, try to locate the virus.”

  Wilson’s dog growled at the nurse and Dr. Dorcott. He had them pinned in the corner, and it looked like it was taking all his self-control to keep from ripping their throats out.

  Matt walked over to the doctor. Her lab coat was smeared with Amelia Mendelsohn’s blood. Given that Dr. Dorcott was cornered by a big man with an ax, a weirdly intelligent snarling dog, a glowing skeleton of a woman, a naked man whose flesh blended in with the lab’s white walls, another man whose hands burned like coals, and a crazed-looking chick with a hammer, you’d have though she’d be terrified or at least intimidated. Instead, Dr. Dorcott looked like she felt she had the upper hand.

  “It will happen in just a few hours,” the doctor said. “I’ll enjoy seeing you ripped apart, Matt. Especially if you don’t die. I wonder if the pieces if you will live on, separately. That will be interesting to observe.”

  “I’m not going to ask you what you’re talking about,” Matt said. “We’re just here for the virus.”

  “What are you going to do with us?” the nurse asked, her voice quavering with fear.

  Matt looked at her as if he were considering something he hadn’t thought of before. The nurse was in her early thirties, plump, and sweating. To Tanis, she looked like any one of the customers at the coffee shop she’d worked at in Dallas. One of the ones who would order a latte macchiato with an extra shot of espresso and then complain because it was too strong.

  “Yes,” Dr. Dorcott said, challengingly. “What are you going to do with us?”

  “We should kill you, Doctor,” Matt said. Wilson’s dog yapped in agreement. “But we’re not like that. We’re just going to lock you in here. Tie you up. Give ourselves a chance to get away.”

  The nurse looked at Matt in terror. “You can’t do that! You can’t leave me here!”

  Dr. Mendelsohn spoke from the table where his wife was hugging him. He looked younger than ever. “I’ll look for the virus now.”

  Matt smiled. “Dr. Dorcott will help you find it.”

  “You think so?” the doctor said with a smile.

  “If you don’t, I’ll let Wilson’s dog here chew through your Achilles tendon and leave you here for whatever happens.”

  Dr. Dorcott looked slightly disconcerted. Then she recovered her old confidence. “You’re bluffing. The Matt Cahill I knew would never do that.”

  Matt step closer to her, his face as hard as stone. “I’ve changed.”

  Wilson’s dog nipped at Dr. Dorcott’s ankle. She backed against the wall.

  “I’ll help you,” Dr. Dorcott said. “Just promise you’ll take me out of here before daybreak.”

  Matt smiled. It was a smile without warmth. “I promise I won’t let you out of my sight.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The nurse’s name was Mildred. She was born in the eighties, when old-fashioned names like Max and Schuyler were all the rage, and her parents thought “Mildred” would catch on. It didn’t. It just gave her something else to hate them for.

  Mildred sat quietly with just a crazed-looking woman holding a hammer to keep her company. The other intruders had gone off to look for the virus. The hammer in the woman’s hand had blood caked on it. It made Mildred uneasy.

  Mildred jumped when the man Dr. Dorcott had called Matt Cahill walked back into the room. She could tell from his gait that this was the man in charge now. Mildred automatically assumed a subservient stance. She’d learned long ago to bow down to authority.

  “Have they found it?” Hammer Girl asked.

  “They’re looking,” Matt Cahill said. Then he turned his eyes on Mildred. “What are you afraid of?”

  “You,” Mildred said.

  “But there’s something you’re even more afraid of. Some reason you’d rather go with us than stay here. Tell me what it is.”

  Mildred looked down at the floor. It was time to change sides, she thought. Always land on your feet, her mother had taught her.

  “It’s the dromon,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  # # #

  The room was lined with television screens surrounding a conference table that was littered with half-filled coffee cups, some of them knocked over on their sides, as if whoever had been watching these monitors had left in a hurry.

  Matt and Tanis sat among the discarded paper cups and watched the flickering images on the screens. The deck of a ship could be seen. An ancient wooden ship. Covered with hieroglyphs carved into every inch of its surface.

  Mildred hit the “fast-forward” button. She stopped on the image of a wooden crate lashed to the ship’s rail. The camera tilted up and a score of wooden crates could be seen, all lashed to the side of the ship, the glassy sea beyond them.

  Then, all at once, darkness fell. One camera whipped up to see the sun being swallowed by the moon. An eclipse.

  The other cameras stayed focused on the crates. In the dim light, Tanis could see the crates begin to vibrate, could hear the sloshing of water. The wooden lids of the crates began to split as if struck by blows from within. White fingers crept out, clawed their way through the splintered wood, and pried the lids open. Dripping figures in gleaming white robes emerged from the watery containers. They opened their eyes and Tanis saw the same yellow glow she had seen in her brother’s eyes. Her breath caught in her throat.

  Then the robed men leapt out of the crates and onto the deck. The cameras were dashed to the ground. Most of them went black. One of them held an image. An upside-down shot of a man in a captain’s uniform being attacked by four of the men in white robes. Their teeth bit into the captain as he tried to fend them off.

  Tanis had to look away.

  This last camera went blank.

  Matt broke the long silence with a question. “Where is the ship now?”

  “It’ll be in Puget Sound by daybreak,” Nurse Mildred said. “Should reach the Bremerton docks by noon.”

  Dr. Mendelsohn burst into the room, brandishing a small glass bottle in his hand. He was followed by Jake and Lowell and Dr. Dorcott, held firmly in Lowell’s dangerous hands.

  “We have it!” Dr. Mendelsohn said. Matt looked at the bottle. It was filled with a plain clear liquid that didn’t glow ominously or emit a kind of unearthl
y hum. It looked positively prosaic, but it held within it the promise of salvation.

  “Where can you go to work on it?” Matt asked him.

  “A place out in the country,” Dr. Mendelsohn said. “Moses Lake. There’s a lab there, BioGen Industries. It’s run by a friend. He should take us in.”

  “Will this friend ask questions?”

  “Yes, but I won’t answer them.”

  Matt smiled. Then he turned to Dr. Dorcott. “What happens when that Byzantine ship makes landfall?”

  Dr. Dorcott frowned thoughtfully. “You know, that’s not really in my wheelhouse. I’m more in the medical department. But the way I understand it is…Well, to use an old cliché quite literally, all hell will break loose.”

  Matt grabbed his ax off the table. “All right. Jake, go with Dr. Mendelsohn and his wife to Moses Lake. And take Mildred, here, with you. The rest of you, if you want to clear out of here, that’s fine. But I could use your help.”

  “What are we going to do?” Tanis asked. The we was thrown in as an afterthought. Of course she was going with him.

  “We have to stop that boat full of hell spawn from docking in Seattle.”

  “What do we do with her?” Lowell asked, shoving Dr. Dorcott to the middle of the room.

  Matt raised his ax as if to strike her down. She looked up at him, for the first time real fear in her cold eyes.

  Matt stopped and lowered his ax.

  “Bring her with us,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Bremerton Docks

  A weather-beaten sign reading “Demeter Boat Charter” was mounted over the door of a boathouse. The boathouse, which looked like it had seen better days, and that from a distance, was built on pilings that straddled Blackjack Creek as it emptied into Puget Sound.