Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  But the memories…

  I used to be Bishop, the giant thought as he ran. But not anymore.

  The memories were a burden.

  What is Pierce doing here? Looking for me?

  That didn’t seem possible. Not a day went by where he did not half-expect to see one of his former teammates come strolling through the door, demanding to know why he had gone AWOL, but Pierce?

  He clenched his jaw, as if trying to bite through the umbilical cord that still connected him to the man he had been, and he kept running.

  The vines were like the tentacles of a kraken, writhing around him, latching on at the slightest contact, slithering through the tiniest holes in the fabric of his suit. The acid stung his skin, burned in his eyes like a blast of pepper-spray. He thought about tearing off the suit, but without its slight protection, even he might not be able to survive.

  Probably best not test those limits right now.

  There had not been time to process what was now happening with the plants. Earlier in the day, when the team had discovered the infestation, the risk had seemed manageable, and in a way, preferable to what they had been expecting. Their suits had provided sufficient protection from the mild stinging vapor that was released when the plants were cut or crushed, and as long as they kept moving, the vine shoots were merely a nuisance. It had only been when they reached the village that the full scope of the threat had become apparent.

  The vines had killed every living thing in the village.

  The scientists, including Carter, had been at a loss to explain how this had happened. While it was evident that the plants secreted an enzyme that could digest flesh and bone, it was impossible to imagine the people in the village simply rolling over and letting the vines devour them.

  But now he understood how it had happened, what had changed.

  It had gotten dark.

  He didn’t completely understand the mechanism at work. He had acquired a diverse body of knowledge over the course of his life, but he was not a botanist any more than he was an infectious disease expert. Yet, he did know that plants behaved differently when the sun went down and photosynthesis stopped. Maybe darkness or cooling temperatures acted as a signal for the plant to seek out a new source of energy or nutrients. Perhaps they were drawn to the heat of bodies or some specific chemical marker. Figuring out exactly what was happening, and for that matter, determining where the plant had come from in the first place, would be a job for the survivors. And there would be at least one. He had made sure of that.

  When the vines had gone on the attack, he had acted without hesitation, almost without conscious thought, tearing through the web of growth, ignoring the tendrils that wormed through the taped seams of his suit, ignoring the cries of the other aid workers. He had immediately recognized the danger, not just to himself but to Felice, and by extension, to the rest of the world.

  Only Felice mattered.

  If she died, the world would die.

  Or maybe not. It was impossible to say, just as it was impossible for him to separate that overarching motivation from his feelings for her.

  But now that she was safe, he could not simply abandon the others.

  He quickly found the place where he had rescued Felice and Pierce. A vine-covered lump lay across the trail, the shape unmistakably that of a body. There had been someone else there, someone he had missed.

  He bent down and tore at the blanket of vines, exposing a body. He couldn’t distinguish the man’s face, but he wore ordinary street clothes instead of a bio-safety suit. A villager, or someone traveling with Pierce. It didn’t matter. Alive or dead?

  That didn’t matter either.

  He bent over and scooped the man up into his arms. He threw him over one shoulder, just as he had done with the others, and started forward again.

  Or tried to.

  The vines had curled around his feet, holding him fast. He kicked against them, but this time there were too many of the fibrous strands to be so easily overcome. Unbalanced, he toppled forward, his human burden slipping to the ground. More tendrils shot out, curling up his arms, clinging to the faceplate of his suit, worming into the folds of his mask’s filter.

  To remain still, even for a moment, was certain death. He arched his back, attempting to wrench his hands free, but to no avail. He was caught. A fly in a spider’s web.

  But then his fingers brushed against something hard. A rock? No, it was metal. The blade of a long bush knife. He curled his fist around the machete, and then using his other hand for additional leverage, he wrenched both his hand and the blade free.

  He hacked at the ground with furious abandon, throwing up shreds of plants and huge clots of soil. In a few moments, he had cleared a rough circle of ground. He got back to his feet and hoisted the unconscious man onto his shoulder again, but new shoots sprang up from the fresh mulch.

  Time to get moving again.

  He hit the surrounding web of vines at a full sprint, his momentum allowing him to tear through them. The blocky shapes of houses appeared before him, but he did not slow.

  His goal lay two hundred yards beyond the village, where the aid team had cleared an area and established a camp site. Although surrounded by the infestation, they had deemed the environment safe, even with the sorry state of their protective equipment. But that had been before nightfall.

  Before the change.

  He spotted a glow directly ahead, artificial light coming from the camp, and allowed himself a small measure of hope. As the tents came into view, he could see suited figures moving about, but any sense of relief was tempered by the fact that several of the tents were already partially covered in foliage. The camp wouldn’t last long.

  As he skidded into the ever-tightening circle of cleared ground, one of the suited figures called out. “Lazarus! Thank God!”

  Lazarus was the name he had taken for himself, the name of the man who had come back from the dead, but that wasn’t what had happened to him.

  Erik Somers—‘Bishop’—had died. The man who had come back, Erik Lazarus, was someone else.

  “Where’s Felice?” asked another of the suited figures.

  “Safe,” was all Lazarus said. He did a quick head count. They were all there. All had made it to the relative safety of the camp. It would not be safe much longer. The vines were advancing, growing toward the besieged doctors and scientists, an inch or two with every passing second.

  “We have to go,” he announced. He regarded the machete in his hand for a moment then passed it to the nearest man. It would not do for what he had in mind. Instead, he turned toward the stack of gear they had packed in—medical equipment and camping supplies. He selected a short-handled shovel with an eight-inch-wide blade. It was hardly ideal, but given what he had to work with, it would have to do. “I’ll try to clear a trail,” he told the others. “Stay on it. Stay close to me. If I go down, run as fast as you can and don’t stop until you are clear. Got it?”

  He got wide-eyed looks and tentative nods as an answer. That would have to suffice.

  He lowered the shovel, the back of the blade flat against the ground, and then launched into motion, plowing a narrow strip through the sea of green. The vines peeled off in great clumps, rolling to the side or, more often than not, dropping back into his footpath, but he simply kicked these out of the way as he ran.

  He did not stop. He did not look back.

  There was nothing more he could do to save the others. Whether or not they survived was up to them now.

  21

  The pain gradually receded, fading to a dull glow and a persistent itch that was, in its own way, almost worse than the chemical burn. But while the physical effects seemed to steadily abate, Pierce’s shock at seeing Erik Somers, alive and evidently well, only compounded with the passage of time.

  Somers—whom Pierce thought of primarily by his military callsign: Bishop—had been a member of Jack Sigler’s team. They had worked together closely during the years when Pierc
e had served as an instructor for the team. They had not been what Pierce would call ‘friends.’ The Iranian-born, American-raised giant had not allowed many people to get close to him. But the man was as unshakably trustworthy as he was physically unstoppable. Pierce had been stunned to learn of his death, eighteen months earlier, during a mission in the Congo region of Africa.

  A mission where Sigler’s team had crossed paths with Felice Carter.

  Evidently someone had finally gotten close to Bishop after all.

  Pierce rolled over on his side and regarded Carter, who was suffering through her recovery. Now that she was no longer encumbered by the environment suit, he was able to really see her. Carter was tall and lean, with the physique of a distance runner. He did not doubt that she was attractive, though in her present state it was hard to say. Her straight black hair was pulled back in a utilitarian pony-tail, though several strands had escaped the elastic band and were now plastered to her angular face.

  “I guess now I know why he didn’t come back,” Pierce murmured.

  He hadn’t intended to say it aloud, but the effect on Carter was immediate. She flashed him an angry look that hit him like a physical blow. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know that there are people who love him, and are still in a lot pain because they think he died.”

  “He did die,” she replied.

  “Is he regenning again?” The question caught her by surprise and left her momentarily at loss for words. Pierce decided to fill the silence. “Yeah, I know all about it.”

  Pierce thought about saying more, thought about telling her that he and Bishop had shared the strangest of bonds—they had both been used as lab rats by Richard Ridley. The mad geneticist had, at least in that phase of his life, been obsessed with giving humans the ability to regrow lost limbs or recover almost instantaneously from even the most grievous wounds. His early attempts had yielded the desired results, but the healing process was so agonizing that it transformed the recipient into a ravening, mindless—and virtually invincible—animal. Bishop had received a dose of that serum, but had, through nothing more than the strength of his will alone, resisted the effects long enough to find a way to keep the bestial rage in check. Pierce had received a slightly different version of the serum, one derived from the DNA of the mythological Hydra, which had come with its own set of side effects and, unfortunately for Bishop, a different antidote. Alexander Diotrephes and the Herculean Society, had supplied a drug to completely restore Pierce, but the compound had had no effect on Bishop. For several years thereafter, Somers had lived with the knowledge that a serious injury might turn him into an unstoppable rage beast, and given his position as the member of an elite special ops team, the likelihood of that happening was extremely high.

  Much later, Ridley had utilized his knowledge of the Mother Tongue to ‘heal’ Bishop of the affliction, permanently stripping away his regenerative ability, or so everyone had believed.

  Carter’s reaction was not quite what Pierce expected. Her initial ire seemed to melt away, replaced by something more like sadness. “I honestly don’t know. Something terrible happened to him. When he found me, later, he was…different.”

  She took a breath, got to her feet, and then to Pierce’s utter surprise, offered a hand to help him up. “Maybe seeing you will be good for him. He might open up to you. Despite what you must think, I’m not keeping him here.”

  Pierce accepted her hand. “I’m sorry. I jumped to a conclusion. It’s just…” He gave a helpless shrug. “We all thought…” He let the sentiment hang. There was too much happening, too many lives lost or in immediate danger. He turned his gaze to the woods. In the growing darkness, it was difficult to distinguish where the vine infestation began. “Is there something we can do to help him?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “We barely had time to make sense of what happened here. But if anyone can survive this, it’s him.”

  “So what did happen? Where did this come from?”

  “I’m not an expert in plant biology, but I do know that this growth is unlike anything seen before. That tells me it’s not naturally occurring. Someone created this and set it loose here.”

  “A GMO,” Pierce said. A genetically modified organism. It was a catchall term that could be applied to any artificially created species, whether the process involved hybrid breeding or the direct manipulation of genetic material in the laboratory—gene splicing. The subject was the focus of intense controversy, with some people imagining a doomsday scenario with created ‘Frankenfood’ crops destroying or outcompeting naturally occurring species, though the vine infestation certainly seemed like that particular nightmare come true.

  “I’ll have to analyze it, of course,” Carter went on. “But this didn’t just happen out of the blue. Someone is responsible for this.”

  Pierce nodded slowly. “I’ll help in any way I can.”

  When she did not answer, he decided to take a concrete step forward. He took out the damaged passport and his phone. Dourado might be able to backtrack the document’s owner and figure out if Van Der Hausen was involved, and who, if anyone, he was working with.

  Before he could snap a photo of the passport page however, he saw that he had missed a call from Gallo. He debated calling her back but decided it could probably wait. Only one call and no voicemail message. How serious could it be?

  He took the photo. The built-in flash briefly illuminated the woods, showing the creeping advance of the vines only twenty yards away. Instead of radiating outward uniformly in all directions, there was a pronounced bulge directly in front of Pierce, as if the plants were intentionally trying to reach him and Carter.

  A moment later, he had Dourado on the line. After briefly explaining the situation, he sent her the picture of Van Der Hausen and instructed her to make it a top priority.

  “Already on it,” she told him. He could hear her tapping on her keyboard in the background. “Is there anything else I can do? Should I alert the Liberian authorities?”

  Pierce relayed the question to Carter, who shook her head. “Let me analyze it first. Figure out how best to kill it. The last thing we need is the army descending on this place with flamethrowers, burning the whole jungle down and inadvertently spreading it further.”

  “Cintia, I’m going to put Dr. Carter on the line. Get whatever equipment she needs and have it overnighted to Monrovia.” He held out the phone to Carter. “Whatever you need,” he told her. “Sky’s the limit. You can even get an espresso machine, if you want.”

  “This doesn’t mean I’m going to come work for you.”

  “No strings attached. Except, of course, that I do expect you to save the world from that.” He pointed to the infested zone.

  Carter regarded him with a mixture of admiration and wariness, but she took the phone and rattled off the names of a few pieces of equipment. Pierce got the impression that she was holding back, asking only for a bare minimum, perhaps still harboring some distrust about the gift. When she was done, she handed the phone back to him. “Thank you.”

  He nodded and spoke to Dourado again. “I’ll be wrapping things up here as soon as I can. Do me a favor and let Augustina know. Tell her I’ll call as soon as I can.”

  “Will do. And I will call back as soon as I have more information about Van Der Hausen.”

  He hung up and activated the phone’s built-in flashlight. He aimed the light at the forest, a beacon to guide Bishop and any other survivors to safety. In the ambient glow, he could see red splotches on his hands. Chemical burns, though nowhere near as bad as the level of pain led him to expect. The enzyme was a slow-acting acid. The vines were the real threat, since they immobilized victims, allowing the plants to digest them over the course of hours, perhaps days.

  A few minutes later, he heard shouts from the forest and saw a group of people running toward them, with the gigantic form of Bishop in the lead, literally plowing a path to safety with the blade of a shovel. A partially v
ine-wrapped figure was slung over one shoulder. Cooper.

  Pierce allowed himself a relieved sigh. He didn’t know if his guide was still alive, but he was glad that the man had not been left behind to be devoured by the jungle.

  “They all made it,” Carter whispered. “Thank God.”

  “Thank Bishop,” Pierce murmured.

  “Don’t call him that,” she warned. “He goes by Lazarus now. Or just Erik.”

  “Lazarus.” Pierce nodded. The resurrected man. Of course. As if to keep him from commenting on this, Dourado chose that moment to keep her promise.

  “Prompt as always,” he said into the phone. “What have you learned?”

  “I have some information about Van Der Hausen.” Dourado’s tone was unusually subdued. “And there’s something else.”

  “Van Der Hausen, first.”

  Dourado related the salient facts about the passport and the man, a genetic engineer who had volunteered to work in Liberia during the early days of the Ebola outbreak. He had returned to Europe and started his own boutique gene-splicing company. “Some of his working capital came from Cerberus shell companies.”

  “Cerberus is behind this?” Pierce said it more loudly than he had intended. His outburst did not go unnoticed by Carter. Pierce covered the phone’s mouthpiece. “I think we found our culprit. And you were right. It’s an engineered species.”

  Dourado spoke again. “Until we know more about Cerberus, it’s impossible to say exactly what role they played, but yes, there does seem to be a connection.”

  “Keep digging. Whether or not this has anything to do with Kenner, we need to stop Cerberus.”

  “Dr. Gallo is not responding.” Dourado said. “Not by computer or telephone. They are not in the citadel. The door was last accessed more than eight hours ago.”