Eden Plague - Latest Edition (44 page)

My eyes flicked toward Skull, in the front seat. I forced them away. He’d been a sniper. Not saying they were all bad, or even most, but a significant minority of snipers had serious problems coming back from war. Drawing a cold bead on enemy combatants, ending life after life from an impersonal distance, had to take a toll…unless he was already suited for it by a certain personality quirk. Unless he secretly liked it. Skull had wanted to execute the INS security, he’d wanted to liquidate the scientists…he’d put a gun to my chest.

I wondered what would happen if he got infected. Which way would his tightly-wound psyche turn? How long would he keep following Zeke’s orders? What if he decided Zeke wasn’t himself anymore, with the Eden Plague in him?

It was the same excuse uninfected humanity would use for wiping us out, or cutting our brains up, I realized. They would say we weren’t human anymore, and that would justify a whole legion of new Doctor Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp experimenter. They would say our will was not our own, that we were some kind of monsters, when in reality,
they
were the monsters.

All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz to see what kind of monsters humans could be.

Eventually it would come down to us against them, because by comparison, they were insane. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.

Because they were now the weaker species, so they would be afraid of us, I realized. That fear would push them into it. When people feared something they hated it and wanted to destroy it.

I couldn’t say this in front of everyone. I didn’t know what Zeke’s state of mind was, or what Skull or Spooky or Larry would do. Because despite the theory, I knew that the Eden Plague didn’t compromise my free will, or theirs. It didn’t stop me being human. No more than being in love or hating someone or being afraid or winning the lottery did. It was just one more piece of life. But once we got where we were going, things in our makeshift army might fall apart. The center might not hold. The fate of humanity might rest on just how this little group, these eight people and I, handled the next few days.

Just then a cell phone rang.

Everyone looked around in confusion. A babble of voices came over the net.

“Shut up!” Zeke roared. “Where is it?”

Elise pulled the offending instrument out of a pocket. “I took it off of Karl…the guy that tried to shoot us.” She looked apologetic. “I didn’t know for sure who you people were!”

I grabbed it, still ringing. I looked at the incoming number, pulled out a marker, and wrote it on my arm. Then I opened it up, pulled the battery and sim card out. “Just a minute…” I wiped our prints off it, then waited for the next overpass. I threw the whole mess out and down at speed.

“Vinny, I took the caller’s number. If I use a disposable phone to call it, and they have a trace ready, how long do I have?”

Vinny answered, “At least thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After that, they will know what wireless cell you are calling from, which will snapshot our position within a couple of miles.”

“Thanks.” I put the battery in my last disposable phone, sat there thinking about what I would say. Then I dialed. “Someone call out at five second intervals please.”

Ring.

“Jenkins.” A middle-aged male voice, rich, self-assured.

My brain stuttered. I swallowed. I hoped I was wrong.

“Mister Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Third?” I asked.

“FIVE.”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Sir…I’m sorry about your son. I apologize for my part in his death.”

A silence.

“TEN.”

“Markis? Daniel Markis? You have to come in. Everything depends on it.”

“Mister Jenkins, we have the Plagues. Both of them. Leave us alone. I can’t let them be used for what you want.”

“FIFTEEN.”

“What is it that I want?” he asked with forced amusement.

Stalling
.

“The Plagues are ticking time bombs, and only my restraint will keep them from exploding. Leave us alone.”

“TWENTY.”

“We recovered enough from the lab to restart the research.”

“It will be too late. I’m hanging up now, before the trace. I truly am sorry about your son.”

“TWENTY-FIVE.”

His tone changed then, chill and vicious. “You son of a bitch, I’ll hunt you down for Andy’s sake, I swear to God I will –”

I hung up. Took the battery out. Handed it to Elise. “Throw this out, will you?” I massaged my throbbing temples. I had no doubt he would try to do as he said.

***

A little while after we crossed into West Virginia we made a last stop for gas and food, then turned northward onto a nondescript two-lane that looked like it had last been repaved in the Eisenhower administration. It wended its way up into the central Appalachians, through towns with names like Cornstalk and Trout and Cold Knob, where bony women in faded pioneer dresses or worn jeans and tee shirts put their hands with cigarettes on their hips and stared suspiciously at us; where hard-eyed men in John Deere and Caterpillar caps spat tobacco juice from their rocking chairs on their front porches or out of their pickup truck windows; where every rickety house had an American flag on an angled pole nailed to the front post, and every store, no matter what kind, added “Bait and Tackle” and “Guns and Ammunition” and “Beer and Cigarettes” to its signage.

West Virginia was the only state to actually secede
from
the Confederacy
to
the Union, and they took their patriotism seriously. So did every one of our band, though I was sure we all had our own ideas about how to apply it.

It was a far cry from the thin splash of freeway suburbia along the interstate, where smiling cashiers fat with fast food asked, “Would you like fries with that?” in deliberately flattened accents. I expected the sound of banjos to come wafting through our opened windows.

We drove at mountain road speeds, twenty to forty, until we turned off on an unmarked gravel track, still more or less northwards by the angle of the chill sunlight.

We passed by beautiful, rugged woodland with patches of snow lingering in the shady spots. We were glad of our high clearances and four wheel drives when we had to cross a shallow but swift stream of snowmelt that cut the road. Larry had to be shown how to engage his 4WD on the Escalade. I don’t think he’d ever used it in urban Atlanta.

After another hour and progressively worsening terrain, we climbed a short way up a steep mountainside on what looked like a logging trail until we abruptly broke out onto a very wide, well-graded gravel highway. Turning sharply left, we climbed a couple of hundred yards more onto – into – an otherworldly landscape, a different world.

The road had abruptly leveled out and we drove through an unnaturally flattened plateau, with odd-shaped, artificial-looking hills scattered around. It appeared that a giant boy had played with his toy earthmovers, making arbitrary excavations and dumping dirt into cone-shaped sand-castle mounds, all sharp angles and straight sides. The whole thing was about a mile across, overgrown with a thin veneer of scrubby grass and thistle, and the gravel road we were on turned black. It put me in the mind of a fantasy book I’d read as a kid, where the hero would shift through the thin shadowy layers between strange worlds with his mind, past an evil black road.

“Mountaintop removal mining,” Zeke remarked. “Blast off the top of the peak, scoop up the material and process it for coal or whatever other ore is in it. Repeat as necessary. Not very pretty, but efficient. And our salvation.”

He led the way in the Land Rover, turning off the black road that crossed the plateau toward the only remaining natural feature, a rising piece of the mountain that had not been removed. It loomed more than thousand feet above, showing a covering of thick, undamaged natural forest. It was as if the miners had excavated up to the perimeter of this peak and decided to stop. Or maybe something convinced them to stop?

Zeke pulled the Land Rover to a halt, still well within the dug-out mining zone.

The rest of us pulled up in a line, getting out and stretching after the long drive. The men moved away from the lone woman in the group to pee behind the last SUV. Like so often happened, the lady was going to have to wait or squat behind a bush.

I looked at her and smiled, shrugged sympathetically.

She lifted her eyes to the sky, sneezed, then noticed my gaze. Her smile was warm. “I hope wherever we’re going, we’re close,” she said.

I nodded. “Probably.” Everything smelled of mountains: clean.

The afternoon sun felt warm but the air was biting with the chill of late winter. An eagle screamed high above, making lazy circles among the turkey buzzards riding a thermal over the warmer, exposed ground.

“We are really beyond hicksville,” Larry remarked. He had put on cammies this time, and had his war gear strapped on, sans armor.

I guess he must be feeling invincible after coming back from those injuries. I knew better. No plague in the world would bring you back from a bullet to the brain, or one that tore through the heart. It wasn’t magic.

I opened the back of the Jeep where I had packed my ice chest full of food, and slapped together a sandwich, popping open a soda can. I left the chow out for other hungry people, making a gesture of invitation. Then I went over to see what Zeke was doing.

I watched as he opened up a case and laid a topographical map on the hood of the Land Rover. He took a lensatic compass out of his pocket and started doing a resection. I realized that he was trying to locate something specific, old-school, without the GPSs we had dumped.

He took sightings on known points, in this case mountaintops, plotted the azimuths back from those points on the map, and found our exact position at the intersection of the plots. Once he had done that, he used a thin clear plastic military protractor to draw a line between our position and a point already marked on his map, measuring the angle. He then lifted the compass to his eye and sighted along it, turning until he was looking exactly along that bearing. He stared at something there for about fifteen seconds, fixing it in his mind. Then he turned back to the group, which by this time had formed a rough semicircle around him, watching. He rolled up the dummy cord attached to the compass, putting it in his pocket.

“Let me tell you a story,” he began didactically. “One day about ten years ago I got a funny call at my desk in the Pentagon. I was doing my hated staff tour and I really don’t know how the call got routed to me, but a lot of weird calls come to the Pentagon from concerned citizens about everything from UFOs to unexploded ordnance. This one was from a manager at a mining company who had run across some kind of old underground government installation in the course of their operations.” He pointed with an outstretched arm at where he had been looking just a moment ago. “Right there.”

“What is it?” Elise queried.

With the air of a showman, he responded, “I was hoping you would ask. I’ll show you. Follow along, kiddies, and don’t wander off.”

He climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and the rest of us piled back into the other trucks. He led the way directly across the plateau, powering over head-high thistles and through brambles, the only things that would take root in the mine tailings and basalt, a thin layer of green. After about three hundred yards we approached the untouched mass of older-growth forest. Majestic evergreens, ash and oaks rose abruptly at the dividing line, with lots of snow patches on the ground where the sun touched only weakly.

Looking back under the trees, we could see a dilapidated cyclone fence, with rusted and unreadable signs hanging every ten yards or so on it. Some were lying on the ground where they had fallen off. The Land Rover drove leftward along the tree line for a few seconds, then abruptly veered right, onto a barely-visible remnant of a concrete road. Thirty yards in, we came upon a still-standing steel-poled gate. The sign on this barrier was newer, and contained common military warning phrases like ‘Restricted Area’ and ‘Use of Deadly Force Authorized.’

Zeke hopped out, unlocked the new, heavy padlock on the chain that held it shut, then drove through. He must have been here before. Maybe the lock was his. We paused to let Spooky lock it up again.

There was some chatter over the net, but Zeke kept his mouth shut, probably enjoying the sense of mystery he had created. I was curious, but then, I kind of like a mystery, when nobody is trying to kill me because of it. I just kept my eyes open and tried to figure it out on my own.

We drove up the road, two hundred more yards of still-serviceable but overgrown concrete, until we came to an enormous set of double doors in the mountainside, hidden by trees that had grown up. The opening would be big enough to drive a five-ton military truck straight in if the doors were thrown back. I figured Zeke wouldn’t have driven us up here if he didn’t know how to get in.

The doors had a large wheel mechanism, like a ship’s pressure hatch, holding them shut, and a big handle next to a hooded boxy metal fitting. It looked like it would take two men to turn the wheel, if it would turn at all in its current state of disrepair. Apparently someone had slapped a coat of paint on the door and mechanism a few years back and there was another of the steel warning signs bolted to the front.

When everyone had dismounted from the trucks in front of the doors, in the twilight under the trees, Zeke called out in a loud, dramatic voice, “Welcome to the Bunker; code name: Sosthenes.”

Zeke sprayed some lubricant into the mechanism of the door, stuck a big odd key into a hole in the hooded box fitting, cranked the handle to the left like on a combination safe. It took two of us to turn the hatch wheel, and three of us to get it closed again from the inside. It was well-made, but it was old. There were manufacturing plates fastened to the inside of the door that said ‘US Army Corps of Engineers’ and ‘1943’ on them, among other things.