Antivirus (The Horde Series Book 1)

by Michael Koogler

  But why? If Monroe had decided to eliminate him, it would completely destroy the deal they had in place. For the moment, Monroe needed him as much as he needed Monroe. Jackson was smart enough to know, though, that once the deed was done, the quicker he disappeared, the better off and safer he would be.

  Reaching out, he activated the security camera monitor and immediately flipped to the back door and hallway. He caught only a brief shadow moving quickly down the hall toward him. He thought about activating the lights, but that might scare the intruder away. No, much better to face him here and get things settled on his terms.

  He picked up the Glock he had placed on the desk, kicked up his feet and waited, facing the door. But the intruder never showed, and even though Jackson kept watching the monitors, he saw no more sign of the person.

  Now he was worried.

  He quickly scanned the monitors again, switching through the different channels. There was no movement anywhere. “Screw this,” he hissed and then activated the lighting throughout the building. Again he scanned the monitors.

  Nothing.

  Whoever had broken in was hiding.

  Picking up his gun, he opened the door of the mainframe room and stepped out into the lighted hall. “I know you’re in here!” he called out, as much to reassure himself as to alert the intruder that he knew he was there. “If I have to come looking for you, I’m going to put a bullet in your head!” That statement wasn’t entirely true, though. He planned on putting a bullet in the person’s head no matter what.

  But no one came out to surrender. Only silence answered him back.

  “I’m not kidding!” Jackson shouted angrily. “Get your ass out here now and the worst you’ll get is a night in jail!”

  He waited for several minutes, and when he heard nothing, he started stalking down the hall, gun out. Whoever had broken into his company was a dead man. The security lighting did a good job of illuminating most of the building, including the rooms. He would just have to check the shadows – under desks and behind equipment. The building wasn’t overly large and there weren’t many places to hide. He had a hunch he’d be calling in a self-defense shooting before the hour was up.

  Calling the police now was out of the question, though, because he didn’t need them running around asking the wrong questions. Whoever was in his building wasn’t there for an average break-in. It had something to do with the deal, and that meant they needed to die before the police arrived. Dead men told no tales and he meant to keep it that way.

  He ducked into the lab and moved quickly through the room, skirting the scattered equipment and the main hub. Looking under a couple of desks, he still found nothing and the silence was beginning to unnerve him. He began to wonder if maybe the intruder was here for him.

  Tightening his grip on the gun, he moved out into the hall. His breathing was quicker now and he felt beads of sweat begin to break out on his forehead. He would check the offices next. The sooner he eliminated the rat, the better he would feel.

  That’s when the lights went out.

  Jackson’s heart skipped several beats and he whirled back and forth in the darkness, expecting an attack. But when the emergency lights kicked on, bathing the hallway in a dim red glow, he saw nothing.

  Swearing under his breath, Jackson quickly headed back to the mainframe. Anger had turned to fear and he knew he had to get a grip on the situation. At least back in the mainframe lab, he could barricade himself in and think things through. Maybe calling in the police would not be such a bad idea after all.

  He reached his destination and slipped back inside, shutting the door quietly behind him. Moving back to the work station, he again flipped through the security monitor feeds. Nothing had changed. Everything was empty and still.

  Then the bank of security monitors went dark. Every last one of them.

  Jackson swore viciously under his breath as he scrambled back to the station and began keyboarding, trying to get the system back online. No matter what he did, though, nothing worked.

  Until a single monitor came back online.

  Feeling true fear now, Jackson looked closely at it. Instead of the camera’s picture, it was filled with static and snow. Jackson would have considered it a software malfunction until a voice sounded over the systems speakers. It was robotic sounding, but there was a distinct tone to it that he recognized, and as it spoke, the fuzzy image of a face could barely be discerned in the interference on the display.

  “Good evening, Drew,” the voice said.

  Jackson leaned closer to the display, watching the image’s mouth seem to move as the voice spoke. “Perry?” he asked in complete shock. There could be no doubt now as the image became clearer.

  “Thought I would pay my old boss a visit,” the image of Perry Edwards went on.

  “Perry, where are you?” Jackson asked in shock, his eyes glued to the image. “You died! You died in your house!”

  “I didn’t die, Drew,” Perry’s image replied. “Only my body did.”

  “But…”

  “You set me up, Drew,” Perry cut him off.

  “What are you talking about? Of course, I didn’t!”

  “Don’t lie to me, Drew,” Edwards went on. “You told me to run the demo for the offshore interest. You supplied everything to me.”

  “Well, that was the plan,” Jackson countered. “You agreed to it, Perry! You run the demo and then cash in with the rest of us.”

  “It found me,” Edwards added, his voice seemingly forlorn. “It came to me and absorbed me, Drew. It made me part of it.”

  Drew leaned closer, his attention focused solely on the display. Behind him, fleshy filaments began to descend from an air vent in the ceiling, easily slipping through the thin openings between the metal fins. His eyes on the display, Drew was unaware of what was happening. “Perry, how could we have known?” he stammered.”It was an accident. It was just an accident!”

  “You left me, Drew. You left me to die while you went and saved Jon instead.”

  “But Jon was still alive.”

  “I was alive!” Perry’s voice nearly shouted.

  “I swear, I didn’t know,” Jackson tried pleading. Behind him, the tendrils were winding their way toward him.

  “But I found a way, Drew,” Perry went on, his voice quieting. “I found Jon.”

  “Jon? What do you mean you found him?”

  “He and I are one, Drew,” the voice said easily. “He is the host.”

  “The host? Wait a second, Perry. I don’t understand.”

  “We are one,” Perry said again, his voice low and almost hypnotizing. “We act as one. We breathe as one. We are as one.”

  At that moment, sheer luck saved Drew Jackson’s life. The bony edge of one of the alien extensions clicked off the side of a server rack and Jackson suddenly whirled around. The sight of the wriggling worm-like feelers coming toward him was enough to make him scream. But it wasn’t enough to render him motionless and he threw himself across the desk, putting some distance between himself and the appendages. “What the…” he began, as he leveled his gun. But what would he shoot at?

  “As you can see, Drew,” Edwards’ voice continued, the snowy face from the monitor following Jackson’s movements. The feelers continued moving toward him and Drew Jackson had nowhere to go.

  “Perry, let’s…let’s talk this out,” Drew said, his voice shaking. He had never seen anything like what he was witnessing now.

  “No, Drew,” Perry went on, the filaments waving in the air. Several went into the side of the security desktop, burrowing through the metal like it was butter. Moments later, the displays changed, each of them showing a clear image of Perry Edwards. But it was not exactly Perry anymore. His face moved and undulated, and it was positively unnerving. “There is nothing to talk about. As you can see, I have evolved. I can absorb systems and software as easily as I can assimilate organic matter.”

  “Organic matter?”

  “You,” Per
ry said and one of the filaments shot forward, drilling into Jackson’s leg.

  Drew Jackson felt a blazing pain unlike anything he had ever felt before. Looking down and seeing the fleshy extension buried in his thigh was enough to bring forth a raw scream of primal terror. Another tendril burrowed into his shoulder and several more were coming for his face and chest. He screamed louder and acted on instinct in one last-ditch effort to survive. Pointing his gun at the air vent, he pulled the trigger.

  The video displays all went white as power overloaded them and they began to explode one-by-one. Jackson fired again and the worms pulled free of his body, leaving bloody holes as they retracted back into the air vent.

  Continuing to scream, now in pure rage and pain, Jackson emptied the entire magazine, firing every bullet he had into the air vent even as the filaments disappeared back into the darkness. Stumbling forward, he howled, “You’re a dead man, Perry! You and Sherrard both! You hear me!?”

  He was answered with silence. The darkness of the room was lit only by the red glow of the security lights as the security system was now completely off line. But enough light remained as Drew limped forward, to see that he had won. Dark liquid was now dripping through the vents, spattering on the floor.

  Blood.

  Whatever Perry or Sherrard was, the thing could bleed. And with the amount of blood dripping through the vent, he was pretty sure he had killed it.

  Pulling out his phone, he called Agent Rick Alders. No sense in messing with the police now. Alders would have a field day with what happened and Homeland Security’s involvement should create enough commotion that he should be able to slip away unnoticed, particularly with Sherrard or Perry or whoever he really was, out of the way.

  As the phone rang, he watched the last few drops of blood drip slowly through the vent.

  And he wondered.

  Intermission

  Perry Edwards was not dead; he had never died in his office as everyone had thought. He had never expired while demonstrating FutureTek’s new toy to anonymous buyers. Oh, his original body was so much worm food now, but what did he care about that bloated sack of painfully normal flesh when he had become so much more, thanks to his encounter with the computer virus.

  The Horde.

  Before his encounter, he was already familiar with the virus, or what little the real world understood of it. It was another computer virus in a world of viruses, trojans, worms, and malicious programming. His meeting with it, however, completely changed his perspective on it. Even better, it had completely changed him. In one horrifying moment, the Horde had absorbed him. It had taken into its coding the very essence of who he was – his consciousness. But rather than the annihilation that he feared was upon him, the Horde had made him apart of it, using his knowledge and his life and what he thought of as his very soul, to make itself better.

  He discovered that the Horde had originally set out on a quest to discover itself and to recreate itself into the most perfect of life forms. Then the Horde had found him and together, they had fused into a new entity – a merging of two human psyches with an artificial intelligence of vast proportions, all in the body of Jon Sherrard. In that both symbiotic and parasitic relationship, Perry had discovered the control he possessed over Jon Sherrard and he had gladly taken the reigns of his new role. The artificial intelligence known as the Horde had also found him quite useful in helping overcome many of the problematic issues of remaking the host construct; of recreating Jon Sherrard’s body. And in return, Edwards had been able to use Sherrard’s body for his own desires.

  Those desires centered mostly around revenge; revenge against Drew Jackson for abandoning him; revenge against Jon Sherrard for betraying their friendship; revenge against anyone that had wronged him. And with control over Jon Sherrard’s body, he knew he could ultimately eliminate both of them.

  But first, he had some repairs to make. Jackson had gotten lucky tonight. But Perry had gotten adept at healing and repairing Sherrard’s body. He knew what to do. And as he slipped out of the air vent and onto the building’s roof, he turned his heightened senses toward a residential area a short distance away.

  A half hour later, he slipped his damaged body through an unlocked basement window and into darkness.

  Chapter 27

  FutureTek Headquarters, Helena, Montana: Drew Jackson winced as the paramedic pressed a gauze compress against the wound in his shoulder. His thigh was already expertly wrapped.

  “You really need to get to the hospital and get that checked, Mister Jackson,” Agent Alders said, sitting across from him. “Those aren’t just scratches.”

  “I’ll go when we figure out what’s going on,” Jackson said, laying it on thick and spinning the story to his complete benefit. “I can’t believe Jon would do this; that he would attack me like that. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “After what I’ve seen in the past forty-eight hours, I’m pretty confident that nothing is off the table right now. I’m not ruling anyone or anything out. In the meantime, consider yourself lucky, Mister Jackson. It’s a good thing you were carrying,” Alders said, giving a slight nod toward Drew’s handgun, which was lying on the table next to him. “There’s no telling what would have happened if you hadn’t been.”

  “Still hard to believe,” Jackson sighed, looking around the mainframe room. At the moment, FutureTek was a hive of activity and he was playing his part perfectly. His call to Alders wasn’t even questioned; as a matter of fact, it was praised. He had played the part of the victim very well and it didn’t hurt to have a couple of strange puncture wounds in his body to back up his story.

  After giving it a little thought, he had decided to be honest with Alders and his military companions and tell them exactly what happened, at least for the most part. He told them about the tentacles, as he called them, and Sherrard’s face showing up on the security displays. He omitted only Perry’s involvement because that might swing the investigation back to Perry and ultimately him as well. Making Sherrard the patsy not only threw suspicion completely away from him and wholly onto Sherrard, but it seemed to fit in with the unofficial idea of what was happening with the man. It also gave credence to the murders that Sherrard was suspected of committing and, given what he’d seen a few hours ago, he was pretty certain that Sherrard, or whatever he was becoming, was going to take up all of their time.

  That suited him perfectly. He only needed about 48 more hours before Monroe had complete control of FutureTek and he could then simply disappear. The sooner, the better.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Alders agreed. “But what we’re dealing with here is unprecedented.”

  “But what was he?” Jackson said, adding a whine to his voice. He thought it was a nice touch. “What I saw wasn’t human.”

  “We still don’t know, but we believe we’re dealing with a hybrid human of some kind,” Major Bolson added. He was seated beside Alders, while Lieutenant Martz was with the crime scene and lab techs, gathering samples. “Beyond that, we’re in new territory here and, quite frankly, I can’t say much more on the subject.”

  Bolson had asked a lot of questions of Jackson, but they were focused almost primarily on Jon Sherrard and what any recent encounters with him had been like. Jackson, for his part, had played the game expertly, dropping hints that he’d known something was wrong with Jon the moment he woke up in the hospital. He even planted some false data about Jon experiencing headaches and depression and even that he was having marital issues with his wife, Jen. He didn’t know if any of that was true or not, but he figured the more info he could get the investigators looking into, the longer and deeper their investigation would take. Besides, Sherrard wasn’t around to refute it, so everything was fair game for him.

  At that moment, Martz walked back to them. “They’ve gone through every inch of the duct work,” she said.

  “Did you retrieve his body?” Jackson asked hopefully.

  “He wasn’t up there,” she said, shaki
ng her head.

  “What do you mean?” Drew Jackson went cold.

  “I mean, he got away,” she replied. “We found blood spatter on the roof. He made it out. Where he went after that, we have no idea.”

  “You mean he’s still running around out there?” Jackson asked incredulously. This changed things considerably. He knew that if Perry was running Sherrard, he was likely going to be back. He wasn’t going to depend on luck a second time. Whatever Sherrard or Perry had become, Jackson wanted no more part of meeting up with him again. The memory of those filaments punching holes in him sent a chill of fear through him.

  “We can give you twenty-four hour protection,” Alders offered, unknowingly throwing the first wrench into Jackson’s plans.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” the man said with a sigh. “Let’s just get him found and in treatment. Jon was my friend. I can’t believe that he would knowingly try to hurt me again.”

  Alders gave him a look, but didn’t say anything as a tall, slender woman stepped into the room and made directly for them.

  “Drew,” Kat Hale said, her voice unsteady. “Is it true?”

  “You mean about Jon?” Jackson said, keeping his voice suitably despondent. “I’m afraid so, Kat.”

  “Miss Hale,” Alders said, standing and offering his hand. “Rick Alders, Homeland Security. I met you briefly the other day when I visited the office.” He turned and nodded toward the two military personnel. “This is Major Thomas Bolson and Lieutenant Danielle Martz. They are part of…”

  “We work in cyber ops for the military,” Bolson finished, extending a hand.

  “I know who you are,” Hale said, keeping her arms folded and refusing his handshake. “I know you and your people are responsible for this whole tragedy.”

  “Now, Kat,” Drew said, placing a hand gently on her arm, turning on the compassion. “This is all entirely new for everyone. We’re not sure who to blame or assign responsibility to. What matters right now is Jon.”

  “Mister Jackson is right,” Bolson said with a nod, awkwardly putting his hands behind him. “We need to work together. What’s important right now is finding Mister Sherrard and getting him into containment before he can hurt anyone else.”