He paused at the door, looking at the wall-mounted TV. His face appeared, grim and serious, but with a practiced spark of hope. The words he had spoken an hour previous were still fresh in his mind. “Friends, we find ourselves in a difficult and troubling situation.”
“Sir,” Boucher’s voice interrupted the TV as the recorded Duncan went on to explain the disease and provide a more accurate portrayal of the situation. Washington, D.C., was under quarantine. The airports had been shut down. And while neither a curfew or martial law had been ordered, they were options on the table in cities where looting had become rampant. And then he gave them hope. America’s finest were on the task and he was confident—confident—a solution would be found.
“Sir,” Boucher repeated.
Duncan looked at him.
“Are you sure about this?”
“I am.”
“You’re taking a big risk.”
“The whole world is at risk.”
Boucher let himself smile. “You’re a better man than most.”
“We’ll see.”
“And when the world comes knocking at our doorstep tomorrow morning? They’ll expect to hear from you again, you know.”
“I’ll be back in time for breakfast.”
Boucher rolled his neck, popping a few vertebrae. “And if you’re not?”
“If I’m not back? Then it won’t matter, will it?”
A frown creased beneath Boucher’s mustache. “No. It won’t.”
They resumed walking, leaving the recorded Duncan behind as he continued to urge calm. After two flights of stairs they entered an underground parking garage that exited four blocks away inside what appeared to be a personal garage. An array of black SUVs and stretch limos filled the space, all heavily armored and ready to speed the president away in the event of an emergency that Marine One, the president’s personal helicopter, couldn’t handle (should Washington’s airspace become compromised).
But Duncan didn’t approach the black vehicles. Instead he walked up to an unassuming Hyundai Entourage. It was as heavily armored as the rest of the vehicles in the garage, but when he drove it with a baseball cap on his head and dummy children strapped into the backseat, no one would recognize him for who he was.
Boucher handed him the keys. “Never pictured you as a family man.”
The van’s lights blinked twice as Duncan unlocked the doors. “Never too late to start, right?” He climbed onto the driver’s seat.
“Superdad.”
“Dom, listen,” Duncan said, his voice low so the Secret Service men guarding the garage entrance couldn’t hear. “If things get worse, lock down the cities. Keep people from moving. If people are smart, we can keep this thing contained.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, ask the FBI to send some guys with guns to Fox and let them know what it’s like to have fear shoved down their throats.”
Boucher smiled. “My pleasure, sir.”
Duncan started the van, rolled down the window, and steered for the exit. He leaned out the window as he passed Boucher. “Up, up, and away.”
FIFTY-SIX
Mount Meru—Vietnam
MAJOR GENERAL TRUNG could sense the enemy surrounding him and thirty of his best—all that remained of his original strike force. They had launched a successful sneak attack on a small group of the hairy beasts, but the noise had attracted more. Many more. And they found themselves suddenly outnumbered and encircled.
The jungle had gone silent, save for the wind shaking the tree branches above and warning of an approaching storm. But on occasion, the branches would sway and creak without a breeze present, and sometimes the tall trees would bend against the wind.
They’re coming. He recognized the signs he had missed prior to his first encounter with the creatures in 2009.
And, he thought with anger, the most recent ambush. They had lost the American prisoners. More important, they had lost the scientist they had gone to so much trouble to acquire.
But what had started out as a slaughter had turned into a victory when his men—the men who now shared the jungle floor with him—pushed the enemy back.
Their prize had been lost, but she would no doubt be found.
He only hoped she would still be alive at that point.
A shift in the breeze bent the jungle toward his position, surely hiding the approaching force above their heads. But it also carried their foul scent.
They were close.
But Trung was ready. He signaled to his men. Half of them raised their weapons to their shoulders and aimed. Up. The rest crouched to one knee and swept their weapons back and forth, forming an impenetrable, three-hundred-sixty-degree perimeter.
Trung squinted into the humid haze lit by the few streams of light filtering down from above. As the wind picked up, the light moved and danced on the forest floor. In the space between light and shadow, he detected movement of another sort, but couldn’t trace it. His index finger tightened on his AK-47’s trigger.
The enemy had arrived.
But they were waiting.
His thoughts turned to Queen. He wondered for a moment if it was she who was now stalking him. His breath caught in his throat as he pictured her face, ripe with ferocity and bearing the bloodred insignia of his Death Volunteers. Trung flinched back as a loud voice filled the forest.
“You shouldn’t have come back!”
Trung recognized the voice as the same he’d heard in 2009, and again during the ambush on the VPLA camp. It was the voice of his enemy, and his enemy was American.
“Give me the woman, and we will leave,” Trung said. It was the truth. He had no desire to fight this man, and his . . . brood, again. Having the location carpet bombed would be a much easier solution.
Movement dead ahead caught his attention. He focused on it.
The man emerged.
“Don’t shoot,” he said with raised arms.
Trung held his fire and his men followed his lead. The man was tall, rising a foot above Trung’s tallest soldier. He was also nearly naked, clothed only in some kind of loincloth, and had a fresh bite wound on his shoulder, like some kind of primitive.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” the man said.
Trung did not respond, allowing his silence to ask the questions. Why?
“She belongs to me,” was the answer.
Belongs to him? Though he could plainly see the man’s reversion to a primal lifestyle (despite the glasses on his face), Trung was stunned by the man’s cavemanlike assertion that he now owned the woman.
He scanned the forest, looking for others, and saw none. But he knew the man was not alone. One man on his own could not create such a stink as now swirled around them. “She is important to the people of Vietnam,” Trung said, doing his best to hide his growing animosity.
“Of that I am sure,” the man said. “But you cannot have her.”
Trung squinted as he took aim at the man’s head, but the subtle change in facial expression did not go unnoticed.
He tracked the man as he ducked, never losing aim as his finger applied pressure to the trigger. Despite being focused on his quarry, he saw a shadow shift in his peripheral vision. Something was rising up behind the man.
Trung’s finger depressed the trigger and three shots rattled off, but his aim was sourly off now that he, too, was diving to the jungle floor. A thick-bodied hairy woman had risen up behind the man, spear in hand, and had let it fly with a mighty heave. He heard the shaft cutting through the thick air as it slid past his cheek. It struck, with a wet smack, dead center in the back of the man who had been covering the group’s rear position.
The soldier fell to the ground silently, his spinal cord severed.
Chaos erupted as his twenty-nine remaining men opened fire, first at nothing, then at the large hairy bodies emerging from the forest. They came from the trees and the jungle floor simultaneously. The first to arrive were already dead—falling from above as they were pl
ucked from the trees like rotted fruit. Each landed with a thud and an explosion of brush, filling the air with plumes of crushed leaf litter.
Trung squeezed off a quick three-round burst. One of the creatures pitched forward, tumbled, and fell, sliding to a stop at his feet. But the stumbling body had concealed the man’s approach. He charged forward, spear raised high in one hand, a knife in the other. The look in his eyes was wild. Frenzied. Any sense of the man willing to let them leave after a simple conversation had vanished.
Then the spear was in the air and Trung was ducking once more. But he was not the intended target. The rod struck the man next to Trung, knocking him off his feet and pinning him to a tree.
Trung’s eyes widened. The savage man was a warrior.
With a whistle, the major general called six of his men to his side while the others continued to fire into the encroaching mass of bodies. His plan would take timing, finesse, and sacrifice.
A pause in the gunfire signified clips running dry. The soldiers were adept at changing the spent clips out for fresh ones, but the few-second delay was all the enemy needed. The white man raised his knife in the air with a battle cry. This was the moment Trung was waiting for.
He released the grenade from his hand with a sideways toss, letting it bounce, mostly concealed, across the jungle floor.
“Get down!” he shouted to his men. Before ducking behind a fallen tree, he saw, with pleasure, the caveman’s spectacled eyes widen. The man shouted a warning and dove to the side, but the battle cries of his brutish brethren and the reports of the VPLA weapons drowned out his voice.
The explosion sent shrapnel and a wave of pressure into anyone standing in range. Trung stood from his position without pause. When the caveman and his brethren picked themselves up and rejoined the battle, they would find Trung and nine of his men gone. The old tunnel discovered on a Vietcong map would lead them past the battleground. They emerged like snakes from a den, the sounds of battle behind them.
They had breached the front line. And the city gates were next.
Trung left the majority of his men behind. They would either win the day or die in combat—the way of the Death Volunteer. It was a price they all accepted, and often the cost of success. When the jungle cleared, he knew the sacrifice had not been made in vain. A village had been constructed at the base of a mountain, which rose high above them. A village populated by more of the man-creatures. But these were not warriors, and fled into the jungle at the sight of them.
Trung paused at the village center while his men searched the huts. They reported to him quickly. The village was empty. One of the men pointed out a large cave descending into the mountain. Torchlight licked the walls.
Trung ordered his men in.
Moments later, the gunfire in the jungle ceased. It was followed by the roar of a man.
Having heard the angry howl, Trung paused at the cave’s mouth. The caveman was coming.
FIFTY-SEVEN
MOMENTS PASSED. THE cardioverter defibrillator never activated. As Sara feared, it had been fried by the torture King had endured. Without knowing it, the major general had arranged King’s death the first time he held that stun gun to his chest and blasted him with eight hundred thousand volts.
Sara wept for King quietly, containing her sobs for fear of being discovered. Her body arched as she convulsed with tears. She had seen people die before, but never someone she knew well. Her last surviving grandmother had died when she was ten. But she’d hardly known her. Granted, she had only recently met King, but she now knew that it wasn’t absence that made the heart grow fonder, it was suffering. And they’d endured a lifetime in the past few days.
Kneeling over King’s lifeless form on the first stair down toward the fish pool, looking into his blank stare, Sara could no longer hold herself up. She fell forward, gripping King’s wet shirt with one hand and his leg with the other as she continued to sob, each exhalation pushing out her will to fight on, each inhalation sucking in anxiety and hopelessness.
How could she escape without King? How could she evade Weston and Lucy? Or the hordes of other hybrids, for that matter. Even if she could escape she still had to survive in the jungle. And for how long? Days? Months? She had no idea which direction to go. She might walk right into a hybrid lair or into the hands of the Death Volunteers. Enemies surrounded her. She was thousands of miles from home. Hidden in an ancient city buried beneath a mountain, surrounded by enemies, and holding the one thing that could save the human race from extinction within her body.
“Damnit!” Sara screamed it, not caring who might hear. And she punched King’s limp leg. A sharp pain shot through her hand as she struck something hard. Turning to the offending pant leg, and about to let out another curse, a question struck home in Sara’s consciousness. What did King have in his cargo pant pocket that Weston or his goons would overlook? Certainly not a gun. Perhaps a radio? Maybe she could contact help?
A tingle of hope took root as she fished into the pocket. She pulled out a small device. Her hopes came crashing down. It wasn’t a radio. Then she recognized the device. A solid black body featuring a single button and two metal prongs. The stun gun!
Sara gasped and sat up straight. Would it work? She shook the device next to her ear and didn’t hear any water inside. It had to work! Gasping and grunting in desperation, Sara yanked King’s shirt open, found the stitched-up incision where the cardioverter defibrillator had been implanted, and placed the stun gun against his bare skin.
She pushed the button, sending eight hundred thousand volts into King’s body. Much of the charge filtered out across his skin, through his organs and muscles, but the proximity of the charge and the severe voltage of it caused King’s heart to beat.
Once.
Sara growled loudly and pushed the button again, pushing the prongs down hard against his skin.
The second shock had the same effect. The heart, responding to the pulse of electricity, beat.
And then beat again.
And again.
King’s eyes shifted and blinked.
Sara dropped the stun gun and covered her mouth as she cried. King was alive! The device that had sealed his fate had saved him from it. She wanted to throw herself on top of him, to squeeze him, hug him, thank him for coming back. But she just sat there crying, afraid to touch him for fear that his life would shrink away.
But King’s heart was healthy. His whole body hale. And he lived once again.
King looked up into Sara’s terrified yet relieved wet eyes. He’d been dead. And she had saved him. He looked to the side, for the object she had dropped when he came to. He found it. The stun gun. She’d shocked him back to life. But the cardio . . . King remembered the last time he’d felt the sting of the stun gun and realized the same thing Sara had. His cardioverter defibrillator no longer worked.
“Thanks,” he said, and then smiled. “Rook was full of shit. . . .”
Sara wrinkled her forehead. What?
“This is way worse than heartburn.”
Sara smiled, laughed, and then caught her breath. King’s eyes went wide and he grabbed her wrist, staring at the outbreak meter’s red glow. “No,” he whispered, and then closed his eyes and lay still again. Panic began clawing at her insides. She lunged out a hand and checked for a pulse on his neck. The beat was regular and strong.
But he was unconscious, and helpless.
FIFTY-EIGHT
WHEN KING OPENED his eyes again, he was no longer staring up at the giant mountain crystals through the atrium-style ceiling of the fish pool room. The firm surface of the top stair no longer supported him.
Instead, he lay on a bed. A handmade mattress covered the surface. Its leaf-stuffed cushion crunched beneath him as he shifted his weight. Not exactly a Sealy Posturepedic, but certainly more comfortable than the stone floor. Looking to the side he found a small window—the room’s only source of light, through which the now-dull crystal light glowed. The sun must be setting, he thoug
ht, and then what? Pitch dark?
A chill swept over King’s body, not from thoughts of the dark or what might linger in it, but from his body. He looked down and found himself nearly naked, covered only by a large dry leaf, like the classic Adam.
He looked around for a clue of what was going on. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, the room around him began to take shape. There were crude shelves formed from freshly cut wood. A table. Several stools. A woodpile. An unused fire pit. A rope had been strung up across the room and on it, clothes hung. He couldn’t tell, but assumed they were his clothes, hung to dry after his dip in the ancient fishpond. Beyond the clothes, hidden in the shadows, he saw something else . . . someone else.
“It’s a bedroom.” Sara’s voice came from the dark corner.
“In the temple?” King asked. He wanted to be as far away from that hub of evil as he could get.
“In the city. Third gallery. Crowded little neighborhood . . . as weird as that sounds. Should take them forever to find us. How are you feeling?”
King smiled despite the fact that his body ached. “Exposed.”
“Sorry, there weren’t any blankets.”
“Why are you in the corner?” King asked.
“Didn’t want to freak you out.”
“Because I’m naked?”
“No . . .” Sara leaned forward, entering the stream of light coming in from the window. He could only see the top half of her torso. The rest of her sat in darkness. Her hands covered her small breasts, but her shoulders, collarbone, and smooth skin were stunning on their own. “Because I am.”
“Don’t worry. I’m used to sharing a locker room with a buxom blonde, remember? I’m good at controlling my libido.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m not.” She shifted, feeling awkward. “I mean, I’m not used to sharing a locker room. Not with a blonde. I didn’t mean controlling—”
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