City Under the Moon

by Sterbakov, Hugh

  The oxygen tank was still attached!

  “Is everything okay, Lizzy?”

  No time to disconnect! She put Mom back down, locked the chair into the lift and pushed to speed its maddeningly slow ascent. The chair lazily swung around to the second flight.

  A single decisive howl came from the werewolf wrecking crew. Somebody had won.

  Slam! The front door splintered from the impact, bending the frame inward. The decorative glass plopped to the floor in one piece and the werewolf peered through. Maybe it was looking over the menu?

  Then it backed off to reload.

  Slam! The door buckled. The wood had already surrendered; now it was just trying to get out of the way.

  The lift clicked to a stop. She pulled the release once, twice, three times until it fucking worked. Whipped the chair around. Pounded down the hall. Her gasps ricocheted between the walls.

  Smash! The door went down—

  Thump thump thump up the stairs—

  Keys in hand.

  Shaking.

  Top lock open.

  The bottom—

  —wolf coming fast—

  Door open. Mom in. Deadbolt—

  SLAM!

  —locked. Second one locked.

  SLAM!

  Dust exploded from the jambs.

  SLAM!

  Elizabeth collapsed onto the kitchen floor.

  SLAM!

  “Go away!” she screamed. “Go away!”

  SLAM!

  “Lizzy, I think someone is at the door,” Mom said. “Do you want me to answer it?”

  PART FIVE

  One

  CDC High-Security Biological Storage Unit

  Atlanta, Georgia

  January 1

  4:12 p.m. EST

  Jessica Tanner spent most of her waking hours in a building that also contained over forty biological specimens with the potential to catalyze the extinction of the human race. Call them Mother Nature’s greatest hits: a variety of killer influenzas, plagues, and viruses like mutated strains of HIV and Ebola. Each one could wipe us right off the dry erase board of life. If the wind blew in the right direction, it could happen in as little as a month or two.

  In fact, extinction-level events have already occurred on our planet.

  Five times.

  Five times the board was wiped clean, and nobody knows precisely why. Floods? Volcanic ash? Meteorite impacts? All theories.

  Mankind has reached further and learned more than any of the planet’s previous life forms. We’ve tripled our life span, developed artificial intelligence, glimpsed deep into the history of the universe, and even tinkered with the very building blocks of life. But still, we live on the brink.

  New threats appear with frightening frequency, and they’ll only come faster as reckless scientists tinker with biological systems we barely understand. Synthetic viruses designed to attack everyday diseases, next-generation vaccines or seemingly benign insecticides could—oops!—mutate into apocalyptic ecocides.

  Diseases have pushed us to the brink before. In the fourteenth century, 75 million Europeans—up to sixty percent of the population—were killed by a disease thought to be the bubonic plague. And today’s technology hardly makes us safe: In 2010, malaria was responsible for the death of one child every thirty seconds and twenty percent of all childhood deaths worldwide.

  Mankind’s archenemy has to be the smallpox virus, which may have ravaged civilizations dating back to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Smallpox arrived in America with Columbus and killed up to ninety percent of the original Native Americans while also decimating the populations of Mexico and Peru. Up to five hundred million lives were lost to smallpox in the twentieth century before it was finally declared eradicated in 1979, due to the globalization of a vaccine developed in 1796. It took nearly two hundred years to wipe out smallpox, even with the right weapon.

  And Jessica and her team couldn’t even rest after the fight was won, thanks to the ever-present danger of mutagenesis. What if a strain of smallpox mutated around our vaccine?

  The containment unit in the restricted-access Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory deep underneath the CDC Headquarters was one of only two known locations in the world to store living samples of smallpox. Every now and then some media outlet would harrumph about the inherent dangers of keeping the virus alive, but those samples would be vital to developing vaccines if ever a rogue specimen were to fall into the hands of a zealot or a fool.

  Besides, there are worse things than smallpox.

  Jessica waved her security badge across the scanner at the airlock door. She had already undergone a chemical shower and an ultraviolet examination, and passed through a vacuum to sterilize her hazmat suit. These were standard procedures to enter the most secure laboratory in the world, a self-contained ecosystem that could be entombed from the rest of the world with the press of a button.

  The first door sealed behind her and the air cycled before the inner door opened on the data observatory. She stepped into the well-lit room and approached one of the four computer stations custom-designed to accommodate her airtight suit’s bulky gloves. This was the last security check, a randomly generated password she had to decrypt from the personalized key she’d memorized. Each keystroke was logged via intranet to a secure offsite mainframe. If she input the wrong code twice, the lab would lock down until an override came from outside.

  Once she was in the system, the computer greeted her personally, displaying a customized GUI layout she’d designed on her own PC. The search field query autocompleted her input, and then a strip of glowing LEDs in the floor cordially directed her toward the laboratory’s main hub. The BSL-4 had four wings: biochem labs, observational studies, surgery, and living quarters. Jessica was headed for the farthest and heaviest door, which was situated behind yet another airlock.

  Finally she entered the specimen library, a cold catacomb of vacuum-metalized drawers with individual climate controls. The outer rim housed odd-sized compartments, while smaller, uniform drawers were arranged in three rows through the center. Many of the library’s specimens weren’t all that dangerous; in fact, most of them were new, designer agents with antigenic relationships to BSL-4 classified species—enemies of our enemies. But protocol required that they should be handled at this level until they could be properly studied.

  The LED indicator led Jessica along the outside corridor to the far wall, where it terminated against a single large incubator.

  Before they’d heard of werewolves, Richard and his special pathogens team had spent months studying an anti-personnel biological weapon discovered in an underground laboratory in Sar-e Pol, Afghanistan. The government referred to it by the codename “Sorcerer”; USAMRIID labeled it “Agent M7949”; and the CDC catalogued it as “Staphylococcus unclassified 241.” By any name, this thing was immediately recognized as a biological juggernaut and a wicked nemesis of mankind.

  Highly virulent and resistant to multiple drug therapies, the S.41 bacteria cause an infection resulting in rapid, lethal necrotizing fasciitis: flesh-eating disease. It’s a particularly attractive weapon because it perishes quickly; when its supply of harvestable flesh is exhausted, the bacteria starve to death. A city could be wiped out in a day and safely repopulated a couple of weeks later. The new inhabitants would just have to push aside some bones.

  Only one roadblock prevented Sorcerer from being used as an effective weapon: its own efficiency. The bacteria consumed flesh so quickly that it would starve if it weren’t kept frozen. A standard transport medium of saline infused with quick-reproducing fetal bovine serum wouldn’t last the time it’d take to load a chemical bomb and fly over the enemy. Even if the solution were defrosted just prior to dispersal, Sorcerer could gorge and starve in the air. Dilute the bacteria and we’d be dropping nothing but pig fetuses over our enemies’ heads.

  Sorcerer needed something that the military didn’t have.

  Jessica slid open the incubator drawer. She’d sp
ent countless hours poring over Sorcerer research, but she’d never seen the samples in person.

  She removed one of the Eppendorf tubes and examined it in her gloved hand. Her body heat began to defrost the frozen liquid inside.

  It may not have looked like much, but that pink goo was the last missing ingredient in the most revolutionary weapon in human history.

  Two

  Valenkov Estate

  Five Miles East of Covasna

  Transylvania

  11:45 p.m. Eastern European Time (4:45 p.m. EST)

  Brianna Tildascow believed in patience as a concept. From criminology to psychology to combat, patience rewarded. She liked her read on the Romanian who brought her to Yannic Ilecko, and she liked her read on Ilecko himself.

  This was the right place to be. She just wanted to get the fuck on with it.

  “Hunt for Demetrius begins here,” Ilecko had promised her in his muddled English.

  Valenkov’s father was dead, Ilecko told them, and his death had cured the previous werewolves. That meant Demetrius Valenkov was the new head of the bloodline. His death would cure the werewolves in New York.

  “Your soldiers will not find him,” Ilecko said.

  He spoke Valenkov’s name as if they were estranged but beloved brothers. It was his sincere disquiet that compelled her to follow him, even with Valenkov halfway around the world. When a man does something that tests his emotions, that something is reliably important.

  She’d called the Director and conveyed Ilecko’s warning about the strength of the werewolves during their full-moon transformation. The clock was set for tomorrow night’s moonrise, assuming the military managed to hold the quarantine tonight.

  And now they were walking into an ancient, mysterious castle.

  Beyond the stone curtain wall, the grounds were pitch black. The moon had set behind the mountains, and the courtyard’s tangle of trees blocked the stars.

  Her three Shadow Stalker commando escorts, Beethoven, Mantle, and Jaguar, donned their Panoramic Night Vision Goggles and proceeded with silver-loaded 9mm pistols at the ready. She struggled with her own PNVGs, a shit-sucking USAF model, and fell in behind Ilecko’s dim lantern.

  “Three o’clock,” Jaguar whispered, toggling his goggles to throw a directional red dot that appeared only through their lenses. She only caught a glimpse of the dark shape ascending the tree before it disappeared into the network of branches. From above, eyes floated in the darkness.

  “Four o’clock,” said Beethoven from the rear. “Multiples at seven.”

  “Ten,” reported Mantle. “We’re surrounded.”

  “Guardians,” Ilecko whispered. “They will not attack.”

  “So he controls them?” Lon asked.

  Once again, Ilecko left the question as the answer.

  They crunched through the pervasive silence until they arrived under the castle. The walls were lined with Byzantine ribbing, ornamental stonework that conveyed the sense of an outer skeleton.

  A lone frozen corpse lay at the end of the stone path, a man fallen in mid-stride with his back to the castle as if he’d been caught trying to escape. Black remnants of his decay had seeped into the crust and soil.

  The men on point kept moving, but Lon went stiff, staring at the corpse as if it were whispering a secret. Tildascow hesitated in case the kid had found something, but then she realized he’d probably never seen a dead person before. She put a hand on his shoulder and moved him along.

  They caught up with the others at the edge of the colonnade and proceeded on to the cloister, a tall outdoor corridor running along the base of the façade. As far as castles went, this guy seemed to know how to do ‘em.

  The thick cedar door at the main entrance had been demolished in the same manner as the outer gate. Scorched splinters of wood still dangled from the hinges.

  Two tall copper statues stood guard on either side of the door. On the left was a crowned king tied to a tree and riddled with arrows. “This is St. Edmund, a Saxon king,” Lon explained. “He was captured by Viking raiders, and when he refused to renounce his faith, they did that.”

  The other statue was of a wolf poised defensively, protecting the king’s severed head between his legs. Lon continued, “Then they cut off his head and left it in the woods. When the king’s subjects went searching for his head, they heard his voice calling out. And when they found it, it was being protected by this wolf. They took the head back to the kingdom, and when they placed it back on his body, it magically rejoined.”

  “And then what?” she asked.

  Lon shrugged. How should I know? Kid had a talent for making you feel stupid for asking any question he didn’t have the answer to.

  “So what’s he mean to Valenkov?” asked Jaguar.

  “He’s the patron saint of torture victims and wolves,” said Lon.

  “Of course he is,” she muttered.

  The statues and walls were smothered in cobwebs, so thick that they could barely see the intricate ribbed vaulting on the roof of the arcade. And a putrid smell was wafting from inside. Rotting corpses, no doubt.

  Ilecko stepped over the shattered door, leading with his lantern. The Shadow Stalkers covered them on all sides.

  The entrance hall could have fit a tennis court. Tildascow retrieved two flashlights from her vest and took off the night vision goggles to get an honest look.

  “Stay close,” she warned Lon, handing him the other flashlight.

  The castle had been ransacked: Luscious, hand-carved furniture smashed beyond recognition, delicate woodwork scorched by Molotov cocktails, artwork torn from the walls. In the grand fireplace that once served as the great hall’s centerpiece, rats had made a nest from the shredded canvas of a Chiaroscuro.

  Looking up, her light cast sparkling shadows off an exquisite chandelier. It was cradled by the domed ceiling that had to be fifty feet over their heads—the last untouched relic of the great hall’s former glory.

  A message had been scrawled on the naked wall over the mantle.

  Find a cure.

  “He knew we’d come,” she said.

  Ilecko reached into his bag, retrieving a quirky little shortsword that reminded Tildascow of an Anelace, a European compromise between dagger and sword. The blade was handmade and utilitarian, dented with pockmarks from hammer strikes. He deftly twirled it into a RGEO grip—reverse grip/edge out—the choice of a smarter fighter, since it allowed for either punching or stabbing.

  He’d forged his own weapon and understood how to use it. So sexy.

  And he knew the castle. They moved toward an alcove left of the entrance hall, where he cut through cobwebs to reveal an arched entrance to a spiral staircase. They took the stairs in single file. Dead lanterns and dusty tapestries marked the walls between shafts of starlight. The air currents moaned, trapped in the spire by the windowless bowmen ports.

  She felt a tingle in her left palm, a post-hypnotic reminder from her “prime” training that was triggered to her internal clock. It was time for her DARPA-prescribed pills, a cocktail of unmarked designer drugs.

  She’d agreed to the meds on a long jump of faith. She didn’t know what most of them did—she didn’t even have security clearance for their names. Six months ago, they told her they’d added promoter chemicals to begin preparing her white blood cells for the implementation of nanorobotics. Someday she was going to become the Bionic Bitch.

  But she had no reservations about being a test subject. She’d long lost interest in self-preservation. Even in the halfway houses, when she was teaching herself hand-to-hand, it wasn’t about self-protection. It was about doling out punishment. Or maybe justice. As long as justice meant punishment.

  They did choose to tell her one thing, although she’d never understood why. Somewhere in Arlington, close enough to DARPA, there was a four-year-old girl in a foster family, a girl with Lucy Tildascow’s tender eyes and floral hair: a clone of Brianna the Girl Scout Brownie, before the tragedy and the training. />
  Someday they were hoping to take her mind and put it into the younger copy of her body. And if they could pull it off, she planned to let them. Why not live a second life and get done all the shit you didn’t get done the first time? Take another trip through her sexual prime, watch the rich keep getting richer and the Mets keep losing?

  Sometimes she wondered what path her untarnished twin might take. Trophy wife? PR flack? Lawyer? Daddy’s daughter the plumber, or Mommy’s protégé the singer? Truthfully, she had no idea.

  Part of her wished she could see what was going to come of this little Brianna. This girl who was somewhere out there, building a life, unaware that one day she was going to disappear inside herself.

  Yeah, the cyclical aspect was nauseating.

  She swallowed four unmarked pills as Ilecko turned off the stairs. Crossing through an open door, they left the castle’s stale air behind and emerged onto a loggia running across the front of the main structure, perhaps two hundred feet above the ground. Stone columns gave way to a breathtaking view of the snowy mountainscape glowing under bright starlight.

  The inner corridor had been retrofitted with modern weatherproof windows. They couldn’t see through the heavy drawn curtains, but she felt movement on the other side. Maybe it was the aural tricks thrown by the loggia’s columns, making the whistling wind play hide and seek, or maybe it was the Stygian shadows that fell behind the columns, swallowing the stone walkway into whole blackness.

  Or maybe she was ready to shit out a horror novel.

  Ilecko stepped past a frozen Jaguar and started across the loggia. Tildascow nodded for him to get back on point.

  “Stay focused,” she said, to herself as much as to Jaguar.

  She cued Lon to remain at the cusp of the tower and he went sullen. His excitement must have temporarily surpassed his terror. A dangerous sensation on the battlefield or on prom night.

  Weapon drawn, she crept toward the outer edge of the loggia, beside a low parapet designed as a battlement, trying for the best angle on these windows. Goddamn wind was pushing hard enough to wobble the windows, making it impossible to distinguish anything inside. And at the far end of the exposed walkway, one of the windows was either broken or open. The curtains swelled and retracted in an organic rhythm.