She didn’t wait for an answer.
“He was killed a few months ago – and this guy says, I’ll never forget it – ‘what makes your family so goddamned special?’
“And all of a sudden, I remembered the letter,” she said. “It scared me to death, tell you the truth. I couldn’t remember all the details in it, but I remembered Penumbra and Denver. After our community fell apart, I figured I had nothing else to lose.”
“My goodness,” Gruber replied. His eyes were shiny with tears.
“Who wrote the letter?” Rachel asked. “How did they know I might someday have questions about my family being special?”
This was a bit of a risk, but one worth taking. It was only natural she would have questions, particularly now that she was having this discussion validated the contents of this nonexistent letter.
Gruber took a sip of his drink, undoubtedly trying to decide how much of her story was bullshit.
“You had a child after the epidemic, didn’t you?”
“I did,” she said. “Yes. He was born two years after the plague.”
“Where is he now?”
“He died.”
A look of puzzlement crossed Gruber’s face.
“How, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“He, uh, was killed in an accident when he was five.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
Gruber raised his glass, which shimmered in the light of the fire.
“To your son.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you know why you’re still alive? Why your father survived? Why your son survived?”
She felt like she had been shoved onstage, into the world’s saddest story, in front of the countless billions who had perished, in front of all the generations that would never be, the faceless, the nameless, the born and the unborn, who were looking at her and asking why.
Another one of those moments where you knew what the answer was, but you didn’t want to admit it.
Occam’s razor.
The simplest explanation was usually the correct one.
“We were vaccinated.”
“Precisely,” he said.
If she were honest with herself, she had suspected this to be the case for years. It was the only thing that made any logical sense. One day many years ago, she had sat down and tried to calculate the probability that three generations of her family had been naturally immune to the virus, based on their best guess as to its mortality rate. If it had just been her and her father who’d been immune, she could have written it off to dumb luck. But Will. Will’s immunity changed the game. The odds were so infinitesimally small as to be no better than zero.
But when would she have received a vaccine? She had grown up in San Diego, living her wonderfully geeky life, never even having met her grandfather. She scoured her memory banks for any one-offs, any medical visits or procedures that stuck out for one reason for another. Nothing. Bits and pieces of memory floated through her subconscious, but she could not pull them together into a coherent picture. And now she was confronted with this place, full of little ones who shared Will’s stout defense to the Medusa virus. It was their mothers Rachel was most like.
“Before the plague,” he continued, “I owned the Penumbra Corporation. To the extent anyone could own a publicly traded company back then, I guess. Ever hear of it?”
“No.”
“It was a big company. More than a hundred thousand employees worldwide. One of its subsidiaries was a company called PenLabs,” he said. “The name speaks for itself, I would imagine. PenLabs had several defense contracts, including one for the development and production of bioweapons.”
“I thought America didn’t produce biological weapons. Didn’t we sign a treaty?”
“Please don’t be naïve,” he said. “These were black ops, the blackest of black ops. Technically, they didn’t exist.”
“Are you saying Penumbra created the Medusa virus? That you did this?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Not exactly. We did develop the Medusa virus as a bioweapon, a last-resort weapon, if you will.”
“Jesus Christ, why?”
“About ten years before the outbreak, the U.S. military came to us and asked us to build it,” he replied. “And we were better equipped than anyone in the world to do it.”
“Just because you could do it didn’t mean you should have.”
“That’s where I disagree,” he replied. “If we didn’t, someone else would. I hired the best virologists and genetic engineers. And the best nanotechnology team ever assembled. Our security protocols were second to none.”
“Obviously, seeing how everyone is dead.”
“Well,” he said, looking away, toward the fire. “That’s on me a little bit. This virologist I had, Miles Chadwick, he turned out to be an anarchist. By the time we got wind of what he was doing, it was too late. We were able to vaccinate the folks here. But that was it.”
But she played along, watched him ruminate about how it had come to this.
“If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t seem terribly broken up over it.”
“Ms. Fisher, I’ve had thirteen years to try and make my peace with what that man did. I never will fully do that. I have all these people to look after.”
“How did my grandfather fit into all this? How did you even know him?”
He smiled a wistful smile. The good old days.
“I met your grandfather when we were freshmen at Princeton. We lived across the hall from each other.”
Rachel’s stomach flipped as she struggled to keep a straight face. The fate of the world had turned on the decision of a Princeton housing official decades ago. Good Lord if that didn’t twist your noodle.
“We were like brothers. Eventually, he came to work for me at Penumbra, and I put him in charge of our nanotechnology division. Jack was an extraordinarily brilliant man.”
“What does nanotechnology have to do with all this?”
“We built the vaccine with nanotechnology. Or more specifically, your grandfather was one of the primary architects behind it. The nanovaccine was specifically designed to target and destroy the virus upon exposure. “Our nanotech was going to change everything. I mean everything. He was a genius, truly.”
“And I was given this vaccine.”
“Correct.”
“My son never received the vaccine.”
“The nanoparticles that make up the vaccine are self-replicating.”
“And they transfer to the fetus?”
“Exactly.”
“I guess I should thank you.”
“Your grandfather is the one who deserves your thanks. You’re alive because of him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Jack hated the Medusa project. It drove him like nothing I’d ever seen. He didn’t believe the government would use it as a weapon of last resort. It’s like Chekov’s gun. You see a gun in the first act, it had better go off by the third one. He believed the virus would one day get out and he wanted a way to fight it.”
“If he hated the project so much, why did he keep working here?”
He chuckled softly.
“Leaving the project was not an option.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“The Pentagon had a way of being very convincing.”
She tilted her head in confusion.
“These men, they wanted their bioweapon, you see. They left us no choice.”
“Everyone has a choice,” she said.
“Not one your grandfather was willing to make.”
“Then my grandfather was a coward,” she said, her skin prickly and hot.
Gruber looked down at his drink.
“You think he was afraid of what they would do to him?” he asked, his eyes focused on the liquor swirling in the glass.
“Everyone has a choice,” she repeated.
Gruber got out of his chair and stoked the fire wit
h the black poker. A large log in the center, weakened by fire, split in the middle with a satisfying pfft, sending a plume of flame high into the flue. Immediately, a burst of warmth washed over her.
“Jack didn’t care what happened to him,” he said, his back to her as he worked the fire. “And they knew it. One day, this man from the Pentagon comes here for a progress visit. By then, the bigwigs knew Jack was pushing back hard, that the project was too dangerous to continue, and to be honest, I was starting to agree with him. I was ready to pull the plug, destroy all the remaining samples of the virus. We weren’t even at the final iteration of the virus, and that was terrifying enough. That was No. 6, which had a mortality rate of eighty-two percent.
“We’re in the conference room with this guy from the Pentagon,” he said. “Mr. Cunningham was his name. And Jack is raising holy hell, and I mean it, he was apoplectic. When he got angry, this vein on his neck would bulge out, and it was rippling that day.”
Rachel felt a chill. She’d seen the same vein on her neck bulge when she got good and lathered.
“Then Cunningham opens an envelope and slides an eight-by-ten photograph right under Jack’s nose.
“Jack looks down, and the blood drained out of his face. He went white as a sheet.”
Rachel felt cold.
“What was the picture of?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.
Gruber looked up from his glass.
“It was of you.”
Her shoulders slumped down.
“And this Mr. Cunningham said, ‘finish the job, or there won’t be enough left of her to identify the body.’”
“No,” she said.
“The outbreak began a year later.”
Her stomach lurched and it took all her willpower to keep what little food in her stomach down. She stood up from her chair, took in a deep breath, let it out, took in another. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale. It wasn’t possible. It was impossible. The world had died so she could live.
“No,” she said again, as if she could undo all that had happened by simply denying what Gruber was telling her.
Because as it stood, she wasn’t sure she could hold onto rational thought much longer. Like a balloon breaking free of its anchors, she felt her mind begin to drift away from reality because reality was no place she wanted to be right now. How did you process what Gruber had told her, that the fate of humanity had passed through her without her even knowing it? One day, maybe when she’d been in high school or perhaps even middle school, perhaps in fourth-period biology, maybe eating lunch in the cafeteria, hunched over her laptop, evil men had started an engine of destruction, evil men had negotiated mankind’s extinction.
It was a lot for a girl to take in.
She crumpled back into her seat, her mind blank, her body cold and rigid. It was as if she had finally died, Medusa finally infecting her like it had infected no other, attaching itself to her soul, to her essence, braiding itself to her until there was no difference between one and the other.
Rachel was Medusa.
Medusa was Rachel.
Gruber polished off his drink and set it on the table. Just two friends enjoying an after-work cocktail. He got up, smoothed his pants, placed a hand on her shoulder.
“There’s much more I’d like to tell you,” he said, standing up. “Perhaps in time.”
“What happens to me now?” she asked.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Will. A tiny flicker of light, a whisper of hope.
“I’ll need to think very carefully about that. I have a community to run here. And we’re approaching one of our most important events of the year.”
She briefly considered inquiring further but decided against it. If he wanted her to know more, he would tell her. Besides, most of the tale he was telling was probably bullshit anyway. The idea Chadwick had gone rogue was simply too much to believe. Not to mention that she had her own agenda.
“How many people live here?”
“Over a thousand.”
This perplexed her most of all. That there had been so many people willing to snuff out humanity, to bring about this harsh cataclysm. Like they had been building a bridge or raising a house. Was that really who they had been?
“I must say, I’m quite surprised,” he said.
“By what?”
“You’ve taken all this quite well.”
“The world is what it is. I guess I’m glad to be alive.”
“We’ll talk again soon. Until then, your movements will be restricted, but you’ll be comfortable. You’ll have food, water, shelter.”
He left.
35
She didn’t sleep all night.
They had put her in this small room on an upper floor. It was spartan, a twin bed, a desk, a chest of drawers, the walls bare. She was curled up on the bed, her mind working a million miles a minute. She did some breathing exercises, trying to rein in her runaway imagination.
Her thoughts kept drifting back to the playroom, to the children. There must have been at least twenty of them, many of them clearly much younger than Will, some as young as two. As she lay in the dark, she painted the scene as best as she could in her mind’s eye, trying to remember every detail, every face of every child she had seen in those precious few seconds. A girl of about three with a long ponytail hunched over a coloring book, her chubby little fingers wrapped around a crayon. A boy, maybe five or six, smiling a big toothless grin at something that had caught his fancy, out of Rachel’s view. Her eye swept to the corner of the room, where two little girls were dancing on an electronic mat in sync with the dance video game on the large television screen. One had strawberry hair and freckles, beautiful freckles, more than the stars in the night sky.
It was like having an out-of-reach itch scratched. The room was electric with life, with hope, with joy, more than she had seen since before Erin Thompson’s baby had died. In fact, part of her was glad they had hustled her away from the room; it was almost too much to process, that sudden, dizzying rush of sugar that hit your brain from a bite of delicious chocolate pie.
She got out of bed and went to the window facing the Rockies. In the light of the moon shimmered across the snow-capped peaks to the west. Focusing on the vista beyond helped calm her. She hadn’t had this kind of view at the Citadel, that was for sure.
The Citadel.
The walled compound in the hinterlands of Nebraska. Home to fifty men and fifty women who had dedicated their lives to wiping out the human race and starting anew. But something had gone wrong with their monstrous plot, something that had left every woman there infertile.
And so they had set out to find out what had gone wrong with their plan. That led to Rachel’s capture on a highway not far from here, now that she thought about it, while she’d been traveling to Virginia to find her father, back when she hadn’t even known if he’d survived the outbreak. She and the other women, more than thirty in all, poked and prodded and tested until Chadwick had figured out that yes, indeed, it had been their own vaccine that had sterilized the women.
The place had come undone because of it.
It had led to a failed uprising.
But what Chadwick had died not knowing was that the babies of those surviving women, the ones they had impregnated at the Citadel, would die too.
But Rachel’s baby had not.
One of these things was not like the other.
It could not have been a coincidence that the one baby who had survived had been born to the woman whose grandfather had had his fingers in this apocalyptic pie. Like winning the SuperBall lottery before stepping onto an airliner that crashed in the ocean.
It proved Leon Gruber was a lying sack of shit, it was proof he had been in it from the beginning, that Chadwick was never supposed to succeed in rebuilding society. Chadwick and the others at the Citadel had had one job, to wipe the slate clean and then when he had done that, Gruber had cut him loose.
Planned obsolescence.
No. Not just Gruber.
Her knees buckled under her.
That meant her grandfather had been in on it as well.
Dear God in heaven.
A flash of memory.
During her time at the Citadel, Chadwick’s chief lieutenant, Dr. James Rogers, had tried recruiting her into a coup against Chadwick. He and a handful of the others had regretted what they had done, way too late for it to make any difference for the world, but regret nonetheless. And just before Chadwick had sniffed him out, he had started to confess something to Rachel. They’d convened a surreptitious meeting, huddled together around lanterns in a little warehouse office on the edges of Beatrice, Nebraska. What was it he had said? That there was more to the story? Something like that. In the end, it really didn’t matter what he had started to say; moments later, Chadwick’s stormtroopers had burst in, rounded them all up and an hour later, the traitors had all been executed.
Maybe he was about to tell her about this place. Maybe he was about to tell her she had been vaccinated. If she’d been vaccinated against Medusa, and her baby had survived where the others hadn’t, it could only mean one thing.
There were two vaccines.
It made sense. It was how Gruber would ensure his people, and his people alone would populate this new world. At some point during her pregnancy, these tiny microscopic machines had wound their way into unborn Will, where they had protected him from that moment forward.
And although the naturally immune women weren’t infertile, they were infecting their babies with the Medusa antibodies flowing through their veins. That’s why the babies died. If she could get her hands on the vaccine, she could reboot humanity’s hard drive. If she could do that, then anything was possible. Her body buzzed with excitement. A future. Thinking about the future with something resembling hope had been a rare act indeed.
She needed two things.
First, for the vaccine to still exist.
That was what worried her the most. If there were no more vaccine, if they had used it all, or worse, if Gruber had destroyed the remaining supplies, then that was game, set and match.
The second thing she needed was to find it.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 85