Killer Thrillers Box Set: 3 Techno-Thriller, Action/Adventure Science Fiction Thrillers (112 page)

59

“EVERYONE BEHIND THE WALL!” JULIE heard Officer Wardley shout.

There were seven others at the rest stop when they pulled up, including Wardley, Randy, and the officer he’d ridden with.

A few stragglers made their way over to the rest stop’s building, a simple men’s and women’s restroom with an outdoor water fountain, covered by a slanted roof. A brick wall stood at the other end, forming a short breezeway area that Wardley and a few other men and women were now huddling behind.
 

Ben followed Julie as she stepped up onto the concrete floor of the pavilion and restroom.

“Glad you made it, you two,” Wardley said as they approached.
 

With two minutes left,
Julie thought.
Maybe less
. She wondered if it would have been wiser to just continue driving, see how far away they could get. But she knew it was irrational. Nothing they did at this point was going to change the outcome — either the bomb detonated with or without causing a cataclysmic eruption as well.

A few other officers were wide-eyed, as if they were staring at an apparition, and Julie knew they had questions — question about the bomb, where it was hidden, how Ben knew it would safely erupt over the water, and more. But Ben didn’t seem interested in entertaining questions. He waited for Julie to press in to the group and stood stoically right at the edge of the pavilion.
 

She moved back a few steps to join him, and her hand found his. He turned to meet her gaze.
 

“You think this will work?” he asked.
 

“Stephens — they — seemed to have it all pretty well figured out,” Julie said. “But I can’t imagine the bomb’s blast being enough to open a major fissure in the Earth’s crust. This place has been here for 600,000 years without a major catastrophe like that, so I have to believe it’s stronger than that.”
 

“Yeah,” was all Ben said.
 

“I have a question for you, now,” Julie said. She noticed a few officers, as well as Randy, slowly making their way over to the pair at the edge of the concrete step.
 

“What’s that?” he asked.
 

“How’d you know about the single occupant campsites? Why did it just suddenly hit you that Stephens or his cronies would be stashing the payloads at those sites?”

Before Ben could answer, Wardley spoke up. “Yeah, and why not just dump the powder in the woods, where no one would ever find them?”
 

Ben looked at each of the others in turn before he answered. “It was a guess, really. A hunch. But I was thinking about my — about Diana Torres — one of the people this Stephens guy murdered. She was alone, ever since my dad… left.” Julie understood how emotional this must have been for him, and how he was surely not ready to bare the truth in front of these other people.
 

She also began to understand where he was going with it all. “And Livingston…”
 

“Right,” he said. “Livingston was the epitome of ‘alone.’ Even surrounded by the people he worked with, he had an estranged family and nothing but fancy toys to keep him company. Charlie Furmann was alone, too. Worked with Diana, but otherwise lived by himself.”
 

One of the officers stepped forward, looking confused. “That’s a pretty wild guess, Bennett. I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but I wouldn’t be able to stand trial with evidence like that.”
 

He seemed to be waiting for a response, as did everyone else, and Julie was surprised when he gave them one. “I know. I thought about it long and hard, and the reason it was so compelling to me is that it lines up perfectly with my theory about this virus. About how to beat it.”
 

Everyone’s eyes, if they weren’t already, were now riveted on Ben. Julie stared at him, too. They all waited for him to reveal his theory, but he wasn’t given the opportunity.
 

A flash of light washed over Julie’s eyes, and she took a stumbling step backward. She tried to blink the light away, but it was almost immediately replaced by the loudest noise she’d ever heard.
 

The cracking sound was like standing on a lightning bolt as it ripped open the earth, but it lasted longer. Her eyes must have been bleeding, and there was no way her eardrums could be intact after a sound like that. She tried to reach up and cover them as her vision returned.
 

Through the white haze, she saw the treetops of the forest bending and crunching under some unseen force, followed closely by a massive shockwave of dust and debris. Her face was glued to the scene, unfolding front of her as if it were an action movie in slow motion.
 

She felt something pulling at her, and her body was yanked backwards just as the force smashed against the brick wall. The roof above her was gone in an instant, and she saw the blue sky above her head. Dust filled every bit of the empty air in front of her face, and she felt it mingle with the saliva at the back of her throat, causing her to hack and cough.
 

Still, the force beat down on them. The bricks at the very top of the wall were the first to go, then she watched in horror as a larger portion of them flew away, like birds fleeing from a predator.
 

And just as quickly as it had started, it was over. She felt a heavy arm covering her, and it relaxed a little as the owner also realized the blast was finished.
 

“You okay?” she heard Ben’s muffled voice whisper — or was he yelling? — into her ear. She nodded and stood up.
 

The others recovered from the shock quickly, and soon each of them was examining the wreckage and destruction. Julie stepped off the concrete step and looked in the direction from which the blast had come.
 

A large, blossoming, mushroom-shaped cloud, probably ten times the size of the one she’d seen only days earlier, had formed and was reaching up to the sky. It was a whitish-gray color, and she could see that toward the bottom of it, a layer seemed to be peeling off.
 

“It’s the water,” Ben said. He still had his arm around her and was now holding her close. “It probably offset a million gallons of water, but it doesn’t seem like —”

A massive tremble directly below their feet caused Ben’s words to be clipped short.
 

Julie panicked, running back onto the concrete slab, unsure of what to do.
 

“Julie — get away from the building!” she heard Ben yell. For some reason, she obeyed, though her mind felt like mush. She ran off the step just as the brick wall they’d been standing under collapsed.
 

And still the ground shook. She saw jittery images of a policeman scream as the wall fell directly onto him, and another image of a stand of trees not a hundred feet from them simply disappear into the earth.
 

The earthquake stretched on, growing more and more violent, but there was nowhere to go.
 

Ben held her, and together they just waited.
 

She thought every bone in her body was going to be shaken loose, and only then did she remember Ben’s leg injury. She glanced over to him and saw that he was clenching his jaw, trying to steady himself. He was leaning almost completely on his good foot, doing his best to ignore the pain.
 

And then it stopped.
 

Just like the bomb’s initial blast, the earthquake just
stopped
. It was as if the Earth was resetting itself, shaking itself off from a fight.
 

She looked around. If it was bad before, this was a disaster. The entire brick structure was rubble, reduced to bits of brick and metal rebar. Trees were toppled, more on the ground than there were still standing, and a large crater had formed just on the other side of the road.
 

“Is it over?” she heard someone ask.

“No idea. I think if it was going to blow, it would have done so by now!” another voice yelled in response.
 

They waited for almost an hour, milling about and checking their vehicles for damage. Except for a few small aftershocks, the ground seemed able to hold the supervolcano at bay. Julie was on edge the entire time, waiting for everything to be incinerated without warning, but when no fire came up out of the ground, she began to relax a little.
 

She and Ben were standing by the truck, ready to head back to civilization, when a group of officers came over. One of them, the man who’d questioned Ben earlier, started up the same conversation thread from before. “Bennett, you mentioned something about figuring out the virus earlier. What was that? What did you figure out?”
 

“Like I said, it’s still a theory, but I think it’s worth exploring. Once Julie’s emailed her headquarters at the CDC about it, we’ll be able to test it and get some hard data soon.”
 

The man’s expression softened a bit. “Ben, you’ve gotten us through this far. You were right about the caches, and you were right about the bomb.”
 

Another officer was standing nearby, smiling. “Yeah. You know, you’re either working for the bad guys or you’re just smarter than you look. Tell us what you’re thinking, man.”

Julie saw Ben sigh. “Okay, maybe you can help me piece it together. Basically, Stephens — that guy we thought was on our side — has been leading us on the whole time. He wasn’t just doing his job, though. It was personal to him, for whatever reason. He had more investment in this thing than just trying to accomplish a goal. I think he was trying to make a point.”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“Well, back at the lab, I heard him say something like ‘America isn’t united enough…”

“…To save itself,” Julie finished. “Yeah, I heard him say that too. Three times.”
 

“Well,” Ben continued, “I think he was trying to tell us something. That, and he only murdered people who were single, alone, and clearly isolated in some way. He even tried to kill me, just before all of this.”
 

Julie was quickly brought back to that fateful moment. Beating Stephens to a pulp after believing Ben was dead.
 

“So I’ve been thinking about what it all
meant
. We already knew he wanted us to figure it out — he admitted that much himself. So I had to ask myself why he’d do it that way, when it would have been far easier to just blow the park and caldera silently, without taking us along for the ride.

“And that led to thinking about the virus. Julie and I both had it — we were covered in the rash; they even took her in to quarantine.”
 

“But it worked its way out of your system, right? After it killed itself off?” Officer Wardley asked.
 

“It did, but when Julie and I were
together
, like physically close to one another, it didn’t get worse. Only when we were separated was when it grew in each of us.”

Julie was now confused as well. “Are you saying this thing can be beaten just by getting people close together?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But from what we learned in the lab, and from our own experience, I’d say it’s worth a shot.”
 

The answer was too simplistic to be possible. She looked around at the others, and many were nodding. As she thought about it more and more, it
did
seem obvious to her as well.
 

“So what do we do?” she asked. “Get everyone together in a room and hope that it spreads, like chickenpox?”
 

“Maybe. I’ll leave that up to your people,” Ben said. “But I’d bet it’s a start.”

60

BEN AND JULIE SPENT THE remainder of the day quarantined inside a massive white CDC tent set up just outside Yellowstone National Park. Her email had reached the highest levels of government, and each of the departments involved with the investigation of the enigma strain virus weighed in, including the CDC.
 

In the end, Ben’s ideas were deemed sound enough to be fully tested and researched, and new quarantine locations were launched and data was gathered. Across the United States, each zone was given an updated protocol that included instructions based upon Julie and Ben’s findings, with the expectation that each area would send their research back to corporate headquarters in Atlanta.

The tent outside Yellowstone was no different, and Ben and Julie found themselves helping with anything and everything to get the station set up and prepared, only to become the first test subjects. They’d explained everything that had happened so far, including Stephens’ involvement, how Ben and Julie discovered where the caches and the bomb were hidden, and what they thought might be the way to defeat the virus.
 

Each of them had been assigned a separate bed, but because of their discovery of the “close proximity” rule, each bed was arranged close to another bed, and all of the infected patients were placed into the same large room, allowing for the disease to proliferate and spread among them. Within a matter of hours, the CDC confirmed Ben’s prediction that the proximity effect had a massive impact on slowing the spread of the virus, and within another few hours, they’d all but confirmed the suspicion that extended exposure to the virus led to an eventual recovery and inoculation.
 

They were released shortly after verifying that they were virus-free, and the research continued, using patients gathered from cities and towns in the surrounding two hundred mile radius around the camp.

Within two days, news of the virus’s weakness was spread among major outlets over television, radio, and internet sources. The key was proximity, and “recovery stations” were set up inside or near every major metropolitan area, including parks, arenas, stadiums, and larger government buildings. Smaller, more rural areas had similar stations, utilizing VFW posts, public meeting houses, and judicial centers.