The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning

by Jason Kristopher

  Hard to imagine why she’d wanted to work outside, away from everyone else, with that sort of attention. It was the last thing she needed. She knew they meant well, but it still made things hard.

  “We’re all worried about you, sport,” David said as he sat next to her mother on the bench provided. “It’s one thing to have the tests and everything, but to actually go through it…”

  “How do you feel, honey?” her mom asked.

  Eden shrugged and tried not to fidget with the bandage covering her lower arm. It itched all the time, so much that it was driving her crazy. “I can’t stand the itching.”

  “That just means—”

  “I know what it means,” Eden said. “I’m fine. I just want to get out of here.”

  “Soon, sport,” her dad said. “Soon. Tell us again about the walker you fought.”

  And so Eden began her fifth telling of the story, the same as the last and the ones before that. She was reciting it from memory by now. What was weird was that her parents looked scared. She couldn’t ever remember seeing either one this upset. Eventually, they moved on to how she got back to the base, and she told them of the harrowing trip through the ruins.

  She sighed and waved back at them as they left, then turned toward the wall on her bunk. Everyone was going to make her stay here for at least a few days while they confirmed once and for all that she wouldn’t turn. And if she did… well, she wouldn’t have to worry about it then, would she?

  It was all too much, just too damned much. Eden felt the tears start, and as much as she wanted to hold them back, to be the strong Hunter, she couldn’t stop them. She was angry at the idea that she might not be as immune as she’d always thought. She was sad that she’d let her parents down somehow, again, even if she didn’t know exactly how. All the emotions of a normal teenage girl raged through her and left her exhausted and sleepy.

  As she drifted off, she wondered again what it was about that zombie that made it so much worse, so much tougher. She’d killed walkers before, many times, but none like that. And the reasoning, the intelligence, it had displayed left her with chills. She wouldn’t have slept for a week because of those nightmares. Fortunately or unfortunately for her, the drugs and emotional devastation left her little choice, and she passed out.

  Main Research Lab

  Bunker Seven

  Wheeler Peak, New Mexico

  Sabrina Atkins watched from outside the lab as her husband Jim threw yet another dry-erase marker across the room. Never a patient man, Jim had become more and more frustrated recently as his efforts to finalize the gene therapy for the zombie prion continued to fail. His partner in the project, Mary Maxwell, appeared calm. But Sabrina knew she was just as worried, and not only about the cure.

  As if on cue, Mary’s daughter Rachel turned the hallway corner, her long, dark ponytail bouncing as she rushed up the hallway. Rachel was of medium height and build, with a figure Sabrina would’ve killed for in her younger days. An upturned nose and ready smile made her into the kind of person guys had once called “the girl next door.”

  “Rachel, honey, would you mind getting the door for me?” she asked as she gestured with the three coffee cups she held.

  “Sure thing,” Rachel said, pulling the door open and waving her through.

  Sabrina set a coffee cup down near her husband and handed the second to Mary as the older woman released her daughter from the mother-mandated hug.

  “Heaven in a cup,” Jim said, breathing in the aroma of the coffee and exhaling with a smile. “I still can’t believe the beans are doing so well hydroponically.”

  “Too right.” Sabrina hadn’t visited her Australian home in years, but sometimes those old speech patterns crept up on her. “Boys down there said they’ll have another blend in a month or so, once it’s gone through testing.”

  “Just don’t tell anyone else,” Mary said with a laugh as she sipped her coffee. “Otherwise, we’re all gonna end up trucking coffee across the country.”

  “They can call me Juan Valdez for all I care,” Jim said, and the older ladies laughed.

  “I’ve got some news, mom,” Rachel said with a smile. To Sabrina, it was the smile of the proverbial cat who’d made a meal of the proverbial canary. “I made it. Full qualifications.” She held out a small ribbon of yellow and green, the insignia of a Hunter.

  “Oh, Rachel, honey, that’s… that’s great!” Mary took the ribbon and looked it over before handing it back. “When’s your first assignment?”

  “I’m going on patrol on Wednesday,” Rachel said.

  “That’s great news,” Jim said. “Bill and I were talking about the final solo hunt requirements the other day. Congratulations!”

  “Thanks, Mr. Atkins,” Rachel replied. “It was a nightmare, but I managed it okay. Took down three of them, but two were rotten, so I suppose they don’t count.”

  Sabrina knew she couldn’t have said, “I’m sure your father would be quite proud of you, dear.” At least not out loud. She would never say that, would she? But there they were, the words pouring out without even a token stop through her thoughts. She blinked, willing the universe to take back the words, and sighed.

  “Yeah, um, thanks,” Rachel said. “I think so too, Mrs. Atkins.”

  Mary turned away, and Sabrina could see her wipe her eyes. She and went over to her friend and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. Even now, years later, George Maxwell’s absence was still felt by everyone, but most especially Mary. He’d been a giant of a man, and Sabrina felt sure he was the inspiration for the saying about broken molds. They could’ve used his help about now.

  “It’s okay, Sabrina. I’m fine. Just tired and stressed out, I guess.”

  Jim, always uncomfortable in such situations, stood and shook the young girl’s hand. “Well, I think it’s great. You’re just what we need to whip those guys into shape, I think, and you’re one helluva shot. I’ve seen you on the range.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Atkins, I—”

  “That’s enough of that Mr. Atkins crap,” he said. “You’re a Hunter now, Rachel. I’m Jim, she’s Sabrina,” he continued, pointing at his wife. “Got it?”

  Rachel laughed. “It’ll be weird, but sure thing, Mr.…” she trailed off as he glanced her way, and she smiled. “. . . Jim. Sure thing, Jim.”

  “Good, now take your ribbon and get to your party,” he said. He looked at her over the top of his glasses. “You do have a party to get to, don’t you?”

  Rachel blushed. “Well, I wasn’t gonna say anything, but yeah, some of the others are getting together…” She looked over at her mom, who smiled.

  “You don’t need my permission now, Rachel,” Mary said. “You’re a Hunter. You can make your own decisions.”

  Rachel grinned and leapt off the stool to hug her mom before she ran out the door. “Thanks. See ya later!”

  “Well, shit,” Mary said, and Sabrina and Jim both laughed. “I mean, I’m happy for her, but I’d hoped—”

  “You’d hoped what all parents hope,” Sabrina said as she squeezed her friend’s shoulder. “That their children will never grow up. She’s a tough girl. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, Sabrina.”

  “Of course I am,” she said and finished off her coffee. She looked over the whiteboards the other scientists had filled with scrawled drawings and notes. Little of it made sense to her, but it was clear they’d been at it for some time. She’d always been more of a physical scientist—electronics, communications, that sort of thing. She sat down on a stool at one of their workbenches, her chin in her cupped hands and her elbows resting on the bench. “Now tell me where you’re at. And remember, I’m the only one in here without a doctorate, so dumb it down for me.”

  “So we’ve been looking at this as a two-pronged approach, as you know. Step one, create an artificial antibody that would bind to the abnormal areas of the prion and prevent its propagation. Step two, create a sequential gene-targeting
system to alter the gene responsible for the normal protein, effectively making all future generations immune without the need for the antibodies.”

  “With you so far,” Sabrina replied and smiled as Mary moved over to sit beside her.

  Jim gestured to the whiteboard and some results that looked like gobbledygook to Sabrina but she was sure justified his position. “Thanks to the volunteers we’ve had, we’ve all but finalized the antibody. Just another few rounds of tests and we’ll be able to inoculate everyone alive now.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Sabrina said and clapped her hands.

  Jim held up a hand. “But again, that only gets us halfway there. We still need the gene therapy. And we’re having troubles with that. We’re getting close, but it’s just not there yet.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Mary spoke up and walked over to a monitor, one that showed hundreds of mice in cages somewhere in another lab room. “We’re trying to use the knockout mice to help us induce a polymorphism in the gene responsible for the normal protein, which would essentially render it invisible to the prion.”

  Sabrina couldn’t help but giggle. “Knockout mice, sounds like a cartoon.”

  Mary smiled. “I’ve always thought so too. In any case, we’re having trouble locating the exact gene, even though we know from some prior research that we found that codons 127 and 129 are involved—”

  Sabrina held up a hand. “Straying a bit too technical for me, love.”

  “To put it another way,” Jim said as he picked up the conversation, “we’re close, but we don’t know how close, and we don’t know how long it will take us to know. You know?”

  “There’s still the ethical question too, Jim,” Mary said, and Sabrina could pick up the underlying tension in her words. This was an old argument that somehow had retained its fiery disposition. “Are we even human at that point? Do we have the right to play God like this? Not to mention the things we haven’t thought of, susceptibility to other diseases, unknown and catastrophic side effects…”

  “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But you’ve been working on it, right? With the mice?”

  “We’re ready to start human trials if we get approval from upstairs and volunteers,” Jim said.

  “But I thought—”

  “Jim and I differ in our opinion on this one, Sabrina,” Mary said with a stern look at her partner. “I think it’s too risky, he says we don’t have any choice.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “First off,” Jim said, “the mice are fine. We’ve run through twelve generations of them after the gene therapy, and they are clinically, physiologically, histopathologically, immunologically, and reproductively normal. Brain tissue homogenates are resistant to prion propagation in vitro as assessed by protein misfolding cyclic amplification.”

  Sabrina crooked an eyebrow at her husband, and he cleared his throat.

  “They are functionally and biologically the same as the control group. No difference whatsoever, except that they are immune to the prion. All twelve generations.”

  “Then it works!”

  “No, not yet,” Mary said. “We haven’t tried it on humans, and there’s no way to know what it would do on us until we proceed with the therapy and those subjects have children and then more children and more children… We can’t go experimenting on people like that. There is simply no way of knowing what potential problems might result from these trials.”

  “We don’t have a choice!” Jim slammed his hand down on his desk, knocking his coffee cup to the floor with a crash.

  “We always have a—”

  “No, Mary, we don’t, and you know it.” Jim walked over and knelt in front of his wife. “We’re dying, Sabrina. As a species. There’s less than a million of us out there across the whole planet. And there are still billions of walkers. It’s a war of attrition, and we’re losing. Unless we do something now, and I mean right now, we won’t see another hundred years. Maybe not even seventy or eighty. We’ll be gone.”

  Sabrina sat back against the chair and looked at her husband. She heard Mary swear and storm off, tossing papers around, but the woman eventually came back to sit beside her once more. Sabrina had just stared into her husband’s eyes the whole time, trying to come up with a way he wasn’t right.

  She failed.

  Sabrina stood next to him, put an arm around Jim’s waist, and looked at Mary. “Did any of the mice die horrible screaming deaths?”

  Mary’s eyebrows rose, and her mouth dropped open. “No, of course not!”

  “Then whatever problems they might possibly have someday are better than what happens every time someone turns into a zombie or gets killed by one.”

  Mary closed her mouth with a snap. That sort of logic was hard to argue with.

  “Shouldn’t we look at the bigger picture?” Sabrina asked. “No, we don’t know what may happen if we proceed with the gene therapy. We could end up with no problems like the mice or something awful or something in between.”

  She paused to look at her friend of more than twenty years. “What we do know is that eventually, without it, we will all die. Every one of us. And those kids that you’re worried about twelve generations from now who might have a problem will never be born.”

  Sabrina walked over to stand between the two whiteboards. “What you two have done is nothing short of miraculous. Yes, you had essentially unlimited resources and years to work on it, but even so… You’ve developed a way to inoculate everyone now living and protect all our children forever.”

  “It’s not quite that simple, Sabrina,” Mary said with a shake of her head. “The sheer scale alone… It’s not like we have massive manufacturing facilities that can run off a few hundred thousand doses or something.”

  “We don’t have a whole country to provide for anymore. Or rather, we do, but there’s a damn sight fewer people in it. If we made it a priority here and in a couple other bunkers, don’t you think we could make it happen? And we can take the time to ramp up, do it the right way. Any babies born between now and when the therapy is ready will just get the antibodies and boosters after however long, and then the therapy will come a little later. We can find an abandoned facility somewhere that used to make vitamins or whatever and get it going again.”

  Mary nodded, a bit of excitement and positivity in her tone. “We could turn out about, oh, a thousand doses a month here at least.” She smiled. “One benefit of being the ‘science bunker,’ I guess.”

  “Now, what happens when we start to breed with survivors up top?” Sabrina asked. “Wouldn’t that sort of normalize any mutations and eventually bring things to a sort of even keel?”

  “It could just as easily remove all our modifications,” Jim said. “Natural selection is a tricky thing.”

  Sabrina nudged him again. “I get that it will take some time to get it to the point where we’re ready to disseminate the treatment, and I get that it’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. But this way, not even the Driebachs can wipe us out. Honestly, no more horrible screaming deaths? I’d call that a good day.”

  ExForce Command

  Joint Base Lewis-McChord

  Eden approached command-and-control slower than she had in the past and winced as her left arm throbbed in the sling. At least she wasn’t limping and didn’t have to use a crutch or cane. That was all she needed, everyone thinking Daddy’s little girl couldn’t hack it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d somehow screwed things up with Marquez to the point where she had to report to his CO. Eden didn’t look forward to the rumors that would be going around about this little visit.

  The most annoying part of it was that she was good at her job—damn good. If she hadn’t been forced to be “David Blake’s daughter,” she’d be the Badass in Residence by now. At the same time, she loved her dad and wasn’t ashamed to be his daughter. But it made everything so much harder, especially since no one thought o
f it as being rough on her at all.

  Everyone would want to know what the whiny little princess had complained about to her boss’s boss.

  “Evening, Corporal Blake,” the one to the left said. His partner said nothing and kept his eyes forward. “The old man’s expecting you.” He turned, opened the door for her, and stepped out of the way.

  The room was busy. Uniformed soldiers and civilian personnel milled about, talking and going over maps of what looked like old Tacoma and southern Seattle. She glanced over her shoulder as the marine closed the door, and then she turned back around as she caught some of the chatter.

  “. . . almost ready now that the team is back. We’ll send in a cleanup crew…”

  “. . . Eatonville? That was a nice place, as I recall. There was this little store…”

  “Finished lollygaggin’, Corporal?” Lieutenant Colonel Dalton Gaines asked in his slow Georgian drawl.

  She snapped her head around and stood to attention. “Yes, sir! Corporal Blake reporting as ordered, sir.”

  Gaines was far enough over six feet that she had to look up at him, albeit only a little. Advancing age hadn’t softened him at all. If anything, he was harder, fitter, and was just a touch greyer in the last few years. He still made her think of a walking refrigerator, all barrel chest and giant muscles. She hadn’t had much direct contact with him since he’d moved out of the bunker to run ExForce, but he’d come over many times when she was growing up, a good friend of her parents. She’d learned not to underestimate him, as many did with his disarming “good ol’ boy” demeanor and accent.

  Underneath that amenable exterior was one of the toughest men she’d ever met, not to mention the strongest.

  Gaines snorted. “At ease, Corporal, and step into my office.” He maneuvered through the mess of the command center with a grace and economy of movement that she hoped she could develop herself one day. He opened a door to one side of the main room and entered a modest office complete with a desk, some chairs, a bookcase, and a filing cabinet. There was just enough space left over on the other side of the room for a small table with some water and… Could that be coffee that she smelled? Her mouth watered as she entered the room.