“Any luck with little Lolita?” he asked when Marcus picked up.
“Hey, you remembered the small talk,” Marcus laughed, but to Ryan he sounded distant, distracted. “You do listen.”
“Just enough to get by.”
“I told her what you said.”
“Is she going to at least lead you on and offer you false hope?”
“She said since it’s you asking, she’d think about it. I’m pretty sure she’d rather it was you chasing her.”
The pizza in Ryan’s stomach turned sour. Everything about Lolita was perfect. Her smile, her intelligence… the way her dresses hugged her hips. Despite his resentment toward Mel, he still loved her. Despite her abandoning them, she still held his heart captive.
Sixteen years. He was a fool. “Keep playing cat and mouse with her and I just might start.”
“Alright, alright. No need to threaten. It’s late, what’s up?”
Ryan wasn’t sure how much to tell him, or where to start. In the end, he told him everything. When he was finished, silence filled the line. “Marcus? You still there?”
“Yeah.” A heavy sigh traveled the airwaves. “Damn, Ryan. I wish you hadn’t seen that.”
“You and me, both. They’re working on getting more data from previous images. Going back to the data packets that were the most reliable and working their way forward. We need to find a way to prove it, to let people know.”
“Let me think on it, kid.” Another sigh was emitted by his friend and Ryan hated himself for burdening Marcus with their doomsday conspiracy before they had more evidence. “Don’t talk to anyone else about this, Ryan. Promise me.”
“And become the monster-crier I see on my way to work every morning? Not a chance.”
“Good. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Checking Mel’s cell one last time – still nothing – he sent the next picture and hid the phone. He was up to Eve’s sixth year. He had taken the pictures over the years with the hopes he’d be able to share them with Mel someday. Now, he wasn’t so sure he wasn’t sending them just to get her to make contact again, guilt-trip her into opening a dialogue.
In the living room, half of the pizza has been demolished. “Where did you put it all?”
“It takes an awful lot of fuel to keep this brain awesome,” she grinned. “You look better.”
“I feel better, Peanut.” He expected another wave of guilt over the lie and was surprised to find he meant it. A weight had been lifted off his shoulders in the telling. Marcus had connections. He was a respected environmental scientist. If anyone could figure out a way to tell the world what they had found without landing them all in the loony bin, it would be him.
“I think we should celebrate with ice cream and the Frankenstein episode.”
“Why stop there? Let’s pull out the stops and have sundaes.”
They stared at each other, both beginning to grin. There was only enough of their favorite flavor left for one person and they both knew it. As if a starter pistol had been fired, Eve launched herself off the couch and the race was on for the last bowl of mint chocolate chip.
10
Max was used to people begging for their lives, threatening him, or offering him money when they realized he was there to kill them. Never, in his thirty eight years had any one offered him food.
Not that the old man could afford to offer much. The only items in his small cupboard were a bowl of greenish mush and a single square of flatbread. Both were offered to Max without reservation.
He tore the flatbread in half and offered the larger piece to his host, before returning to his argument. “Yousef, the Genesis device has been destroyed. The lab that created it has been destroyed. Just about everyone who had contact with its development has been killed.”
The old man laughed and scooped up some of the lamb al Harees with his bread. “If you are so sure it was the only one, why do you come here? To the find the creator? Vengeance? This is not a man you can battle, my friend. He has placed himself high in his kingdom, his will touches all. And the Genesis device,” Yousef laughed, “is the least of his creations. You will become the gnat, a nuisance to be swatted without thought.”
“He’s not a god, Yousef.” Max glanced at his watch and wondered, not for the first time, how long before the martyr’s friends came calling. “He’s a man, and I mean to kill him and put an end to this.”
“Even if you were successful, it will not stop what is coming. Nothing can. It is a machine that has been given life, breath. It will grow without its creator.”
“God help me, Yousef. There’s something about you I like, but I am about to throttle you if you don’t start making sense.”
“Come,” he said in way of an answer and pushed his chair back from the table.
Max followed him up a rickety ladder to the roof where a cool wind had finally begun to blow, ruffling the hems of their kandooras and cooling the sweat on their skin.
Yousef held his arms out and turned in a slow circle. “What do you see?”
In the darkness on the rooftop, they were surrounded by a sea of false stars. If the scattered small lights of distant houses, streetlights, and offices were the stars, then the skyline of Dubai was the sun, stretching across the horizon.
“Hell,” Max said. “Too many people pressed together in too small of an area, in the middle of a desert whose temperatures would make the devil look for a summer home up north.”
“You have eyes, but you do not see.” Yousef shook his head and pointed to Dubai. “Did you notice nothing during your time in the city? The city, so new, is crumbling. Sewage fills the sea and washes up on the beach, making our people sick. Those beautiful monuments to man’s might are falling apart, leaking when it rains, shedding their tiles and their paint as a snake sheds its skin. No one admits it is happening, no one speaks of it.”
Yousef stepped to the edge of the roof and pointed at several darker areas embedded in the skyline. “There and there and there – the city has fallen dark. They’ve pulled back toward the largest building in the city, Burj al Arab. It is the only building that they truly take care of. The rest is window dressing to hide the decay.”
“The recession did this?” Lights on the horizon separated themselves from the rest, moving in a procession toward Sonapor. Max couldn’t be positive, but he thought his time was almost up.
“You still do not see. This is part of the plan. Nor is it just Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In cities all over the world, the powerful are consolidating their resources, putting on a show for the rest of the world that all is wonderful in their lands, all is fine. Yet behind their locked gates, they prepare.”
“Dammit, Yousef.” There was no doubt, the lights were heading their way, and fast. “Preparing for what?”
“The end of all things, my friend. The end of man’s reign on this earth.” Yousef laughed and shook his head. “Your Bible says ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’. The powerful have set into motion the darkest evils, to make sure that will not be the case.”
“You’re talking about Armageddon?”
“The scholars of your Bible, of my Quran, did not envision such an end as this.” Yousef turned to Max and grabbed his shoulders. “I have seen the lights as well. They are almost here, my friend. You must leave now.”
“Come with me.” Max surprised himself by asking. “We need someone who knows what’s going on.”
“It will do you no good.” Yousef’s laughter was gone. He paced the rooftop, watching as two dozen headlights converged at the wall to Sonapor. “This cannot be stopped. The beast grows every day, every hour. It has grown beyond any chance of salvation. The only hope you have is to survive it, and they will not make that easy.”
“Dammit, Yousef! Who?” Cars, nearly two dozen, stood idling where Max had discarded the white kandoora and the parting gift from the woman in the alley.
“’The Antichrist will be a false god among men’, your Bible says. Who is this world’s god?”<
br />
Max wanted to throttle the old man until he gave him a straight answer, “Quit with the bible references, Yousef. I’ve never read the damned thing. Who are you talking about?”
Lights flashed on in several windows as the small camp huts were roused. The search had begun.
“Who has done more to help the poor? The sick? Who stands out amongst men in every country he has touched? Whose reach casts a shadow across every land?”
As Max’s brain began making the connections, he shivered in the muggy night air. No matter how he looked at it, the same man came to mind over and over again. No other company had been a savior for so many.
Hundreds of thousands were lost when the superbugs swept through the hospitals. Every hospital had undergone a refit that stopped the pandemic, all out of one company’s pocket. More than that, they had built state-of-the-art hospitals in third world countries and revolutionized modern health care so that no one went without.
Gunshots, screams in the dark. The advance search squads were drawing closer.
“Why would they save so many, just to bring about the end of civilization?”
“You misunderstand,” Yousef answered, pushing Max back toward the stairs while watching the searchlights draw closer. “It is not the end of civilization they seek, but the extinction of what they see as a flawed species. They wish to make room for a new, modern human race. Their race.”
Yousef turned toward the sound of gunfire as it came from a new direction. “What better way to bring man to his knees, than to control everything they need for survival? To allow him to depend on you and then just when he needs you the most, has made no other preparations, you destroy his world and bar the gates against him?”
Gun smoke caught the small breeze and crawled across Sonapor like a death shroud. Yousef turned back to Max, his eyes pleading. “You must leave now!”
“They’re killing everyone, Yousef.” Max tried one last time. The search teams, the death squads, had splintered. They were being surrounded. “Come with me.”
“It is too late for me, my friend. If they find me gone, they will close the city down and you will never get out. Go to Bur Dubai, find Raheed the shoe maker. He will be in a small glass kiosk in an alley close to the main road. He works late into the night. Tell him I sent you, he will get you out of the city. Now go!”
With surprising strength, Yousef gave Max a shove that sent him stumbling down the narrow stairs. Gunfire, sounding too close for comfort, forced Max to turn his back on the old man on the roof. Sliding the curved blade of a knife out of his kandoora, Max slipped out the front door.
Two houses down on either side, men were yelling, some screaming. Rapid gunfire silenced both. Before their attention turned from the huts they were in, men, awakened by the shouting and gunfire, driven by panic, fled their hovels for the nearest section of crumbling wall.
Heedless of the thick layer of human waste in the narrow street, Max bolted across the road, losing one flip flop to the sludge before getting across. Ducking into the alley between huts across the street from Yousef’s, Max joined the throng of fleeing men, using them as cover to get to the wall without being singled out.
With the element of surprise gone and pandemonium in the streets and alleys, the black-clad Emirati police force opened fire on the fleeing backs of their slave class. Max began screaming in Arabic, hoping some of the panicked men would hear and pick up the chant in their native tongue. “Freedom!”
His shout was all but drowned out by panicked shouts and gunfire. When he stooped down, grabbed a chunk of coral stone from a decaying hut and turned to chuck it at the soldiers behind him, the men following did the same. One or two at first, followed by another, and another, reached for chunks of their squalid homes and returning fire with impotent ammunition.
Within seconds, panic was replaced with anger, fear was replaced by hatred. Before his eyes, Max saw the transformation from frightened, desperate men to mindless mob. Even as men ahead of them heard the cry and turned, prisoners fell to the barrage of automatic gunfire.
One moment, Max was running with the flow of panicked men toward the wall and the next he was fighting against the current of a raging flood. Pushed back ten feet for every foot of ground he gained, he had no choice but to turn back.
Outnumbered a hundred to one, the police force didn’t stand a chance. As each officer was overwhelmed and beaten to the ground, his weapon found its way into the screaming mob. The chant Max had started only moments before became a battle cry, filling the night like thunder and drowning out the weapons fire.
11
“Unless you have a death wish,” Bishop whispered in Mel’s ear, his warm breath caressing her skin as if he were still her lover instead of a high-powered thug, “I suggest you don’t do anything stupid.”
The barrel of a gun dug into the tender flesh between her shoulder blades before the men stepped back. Her clothes, stripped while she was unconscious, were thrown at her feet by a Chinese soldier. “Get dressed.”
Chilled from lying in the stagnant water of her cell, the battered flight suit and boots were a welcome comfort. Slipping into her coveralls, she winced and tried not to think about the stiffening patch of vomit on the leg or the dead boy that had left it there. Once they were in place, someone behind her grabbed her arms and pulled them back, snapping cuffs into place.
“Try to get out of these again, little girl.” Her Chinese guard grinned. “We have permission to shoot you next time.”
The Chinese soldiers spoke perfect English. Their inflections, their accents, could have placed them in any Midwestern town. If she closed her eyes and they spoke, she would have been convinced they were American.
“I’m glad to see you made it, Mel.” Spinning, Mel turned to look into the eyes of her XO, Carl Brannigan, from the U.S.S. Garrote. Seeing him in this subterranean hell was too much. He threw her flight bag to the floor at her feet. “Where are Gunny and Eagle?”
“We lost Gunny in the air, when I lost control of the chopper.” She nodded her head toward the guards. “They shot Eagle.”
He looked at her hard for several long moments and she couldn’t figure out if he was trying to see through her lie about Gunny, or if he was waiting for her to call him Sir. She refused to flinch under his gaze or look away from it. It would be a cold day in hell before she called him Sir and as angry as she was with Gunny, she wasn’t going to turn him in to the likes of these goons.
XO Brannigan nodded his head and looked to Bishop. “I personally went through her belongings. There’s nothing there.”
“Then you are dismissed.” Bishop said. If the XO prickled at all over Bishop’s arrogance, he didn’t show it. “The Chinese will push back in the morning at the Spratly’s. We need the world’s attention focused there for another two weeks.”
“Yes, sir.” The XO snapped to attention, stepped back and spun. Without another look at Mel, he performed a perfect about-face and left the room.
“And after that two weeks?” One of the Chinese officers stepped forward, his hand resting on his sidearm. “You have not mentioned how this is supposed to play out. The end game. Are we to lay down like dogs in the gutter and let the Americans walk over the top of us?”
Mel said a small prayer that the tension she felt in the officer would boil over. Pretending to ignore them, she turned, slowly, and scanned the doorways in the room. If the crap hit the fan, she might be able to make a break for it.
Gauging her chances with each doorway, something else caught Mel’s eyes. The collars of the Chinese uniforms. Something was different. Off. The colored bands around the neck were unlike anything she had ever seen adorn the Red Army’s uniform.
Bishop stepped forward and placed a hand on the officer’s shoulder as if they had been best friends since childhood. His words doused Mel’s last remaining hope. “General, I assure you. The end to this little conflict will be a complete withdrawal from the SCS by the Americans and British. You are part of our f
amily now. We’ll take good care of you.”
Using his hand on the General’s shoulder to turn him, Bishop stepped toward a door at the far end of the room and the General fell into step beside him. A sharp jab in the back with a gun encouraged Mel to follow.
The warrens below the artificially joined islands of Natura and Anambas were a labyrinth of twists and turns, a hastily thrown together web-work of tunnels and chambers that defied Mel’s attempt to navigate a way out in her mind. If she managed to break free, she had no idea which way to run.
Other than their echoing footsteps, all she could hear was the ever-constant drip-drip-dripping water that seeped through the brick and mortar walls. A reminder that the sea was at its eternal task of reclaiming this temporary redoubt, the purpose of which still eluded Mel’s grasp.
“A taste, Mel,” Bishop spoke quietly, almost reverently, as he stopped to stand in front of a metal door of immense dimensions. “A taste of what awaits you once you put away your petty morals and become, once again, a member of this family.”
The General, a cocky little grin playing on his thin lips, stepped forward. A retinal scan confirmed his authority and deep thuds resounded within the door as massive bolts were slid back. Light, almost too bright to look at, pierced the center of the door in a long vertical line. Mel’s feet picked up the vibrations before her ears heard the giant motors at work as the doors separated and slipped open.
“May I present… the future of the human race.” Bishop stepped aside, giving Mel the full view of the massive chamber behind the door. “Your future.”
Stunned, Mel stepped forward without thinking. The doors opened to a catwalk fit for a giant, which stretched across the yawning expanse. Halfway across, pads inset with the catwalk sat on huge pistons. Elevator pads that would haul God only knew what down to the bottom.
Standing on the first elevator pad, Mel stepped forward, leaned against the railing and after taking a deep breath, looked down. Her gasp pulled laughter from Bishop while the General beamed with pride. Below her sat rank upon rank of aircraft she had only dreamed of in her wildest imaginings. “What does he want from me?”
Genesis (Extinction Book 1) Page 12