The Last Peak (Book 2): The Darwin Collapse (39 page)

Numerous dead and partially dismembered deltas surrounded a body at the center. Despite its mutilated state, he recognized the beard and lanky frame.
 

Ahmed.

An M4 rifle and an empty magazine lay on the pavement next to him. Evidence of shrapnel hits radiated from his position. A fragmentation grenade.
 

He must’ve sacrificed himself to give the others a chance.

Mason stared at Ahmed’s shredded corpse and closed his eyes. As sorry as he was for the man, he couldn’t help but register elation that it hadn’t been Theresa or Beth.

He lifted into the air and left the gruesome scene behind. Looking ahead, he saw a group of deltas disappear inside the tall, white cylindrical tower.

He prayed to any god that would listen that his daughter and wife were still alive.

And would remain so.

Skimming above the ground, Mason searched for signs that his family had come this way. He saw nothing but the occasional body of a dead delta that had likely been shot. So much death. So much darkness. All because of some virus.
 

The final days of news media coverage ran stories speculating that the virus had been manufactured. What if it was true?

Technology had taken mankind to unimaginable heights. Could it be that it also brought them to such depths? Irony was a concept only an advanced brain could appreciate.
Appreciate
was perhaps not quite the right word.

Would modern man die off leaving the deltas to scratch their way back to civilization or, perhaps more likely, to surrender to oblivion?

Mason cut off the morose ponderings as he neared the tower. Melancholic contemplation wasn’t going to do shit to help his family.

Several deltas emerged from the building’s entrance. They glared up at him some fifty feet above their heads. A few more joined them.
 

He wasn’t going to get inside on the ground floor. Which left only one other option. He pushed the throttle forward and the transport climbed higher. Office windows slid by in a blur as he picked up speed. The roofs of surrounding buildings appeared as he neared the top.

A gust of wind hit him from behind. PAT careened toward the face of the building. Mason jerked the nav joystick back and the machine slid to a stop two feet from a huge glass window. At this close distance, the interior revealed itself. An expanse of tightly packed cubicles. Empty aisles carved channels through the ordered hive. The quintessential model of corporate productivity. But all the worker bees were gone. Surprisingly, there were no signs of the devastation that had claimed the city. Neat stacks of papers lay on desks. White boards hung on cubicle walls held grand schematics that no longer mattered.

On the desk nearest to the window, small framed pictures of loved ones sat in a neat row next to a dark flatscreen. Whoever once gazed upon those pictures to marshall the grit needed to grind out another day in the matrix was now long gone.

In all likelihood, the ones in the pictures were as well.

Mason backed away from the vertical surface and continued his ascent. Another minute and he crested the edge of the roof. A large circular helipad occupied the center. Maybe a hundred feet in diameter. In the center of it was a painted red circle with the number twelve inside. This must’ve been the chopper’s intended destination.
 

Before it crashed and became a delta magnet.

A lower deck shaped like a twenty pointed star surrounded the helipad. It extended beyond the helipad on all sides, likely to catch anyone that got blown off before they pitched over the actual edge and fell a thousand feet to a conclusive end below.

Mason rose above the helipad and then slid over to line up in the center of the circle. Hovering above the painted number, he eased back on the power. A gust hammered him from the side. PAT glided toward the edge as Mason brought it down hard. The skids bounced a few times and then ground to a stop.

Los Angeles extended in all directions. He punched through the screen to initiate the shutdown sequence. The turbines spun down as Mason released the latches on the harness. He stepped down and stumbled forward, finding the solidity of the surface unfamiliar.

Another gust of wind whipped across the roof and he braced against it. It wasn’t like a hurricane about to toss him off the top like a coconut from a palm tree, but it was still damn unsettling.
 

He climbed down the ladder at the east edge of the helipad onto the larger deck below. As he stepped off the final rung, muffled voices echoed through the door to his right. He couldn’t make out the words above the whistling wind.

Mason posted up on the side of the door and waited.

The handle rattled but the door stayed closed. It rattled again. The door itself shook as whoever was inside tried to batter it down.

“Get that goddamn thing open!”

Mason recognized the voice. Anton’s. The bastard that had taken his family and left him to die.

A shot fired and the lock blew outward.
 

Mason hugged the wall waiting for the door to open.
 

Another shot and then a body rammed the door open. A large figure in a dark suit fell forward.

Mason tackled him to the ground before he had a chance to recover. He caught the guy in the temple with a vicious elbow. A 1911 pistol clattered away and Mason dove for it. He recovered it and had the sites aligned and his finger inside the trigger guard even before the suit managed to lift his head. A part of his brain registered the unique filigree design along the chromed slide. A yellow rose of Texas. There was only one person in the world that carried a Dan Wesson ECO 1911 .45 with a filigreed yellow rose of Texas along the slide.
 

The face that looked up at him was no surprise.

“Sarge? I thought you were dead!”

Two more figures stumbled through the open door and Mason pivoted to line up the front site on the second one. Anton Reshenko. A man with a pot belly that extended further than his time left on earth.

Mason shoved him up against the wall and dug the muzzle of the pistol into his fleshy throat.
 

The bastard’s eyes opened wide in a most gratifying way. He knew this was it. Good. Mason cocked the hammer and grinned wickedly when Anton flinched at the clicking sound.

“Where is my family?” Mason shouted in his face.

“Please don’t hurt my papa,” Iridia cried out.
 

Miro picked himself up and pulled Iridia away from the confrontation. He knew Mason well enough to see the danger. “Sarge! Don’t do it!”

Mason dug the muzzle up under Anton’s jawbone. The dirtbag groaned in pain. Lucky for him all his suffering would soon be over. The brain can’t process input when it’s painting a wall in a splatter pattern. “Stay out of this, Miro!”

Iridia struggled to break free but Miro’s bulky six-six frame held her fast. “Don’t hurt him!” she screamed.

Mason added more pressure to the metal stabbing up under Anton’s fleshy chin. “Where the fuck is my family? I won’t ask again.”

“Please, Sarge! We need him! He has the cure for this thing that’s destroying the world!”

If his family was gone, Mason honestly didn’t care what happened to the rest of the world. He’d just about decided to squeeze the trigger when voices from inside the building echoed up the stairwell. He recognized them at once. He drew back and whipped the grip into Anton’s temple sending him crashing to the deck.

He ran inside just as Beth rounded the staircase with her arm under Theresa’s, helping their daughter up. Elio and Noor helped Maria along behind them. Maria saw him and scowled. Her hate would have to wait. He hurried down the stairs and picked Theresa up in his arms.
 

“Go!” Beth shouted. “They are coming up after us!”

Mason didn’t need to know who the
they
were. Their inchoate shrieking echoed up the stairwell. He carried Theresa up the last flight and out onto the roof. Iridia knelt beside her father stroking his cheek and blubbering.

“Miro, find something to barricade the door!”

“Copy that,” Miro said as he cast around for something suitable.

“Are you okay?” Mason asked Theresa as he laid her gently on the deck as far from the roof access door as possible.

She stared past him with unresponsive, bloodshot eyes.

“Honey?”

She broke into a coughing fit. Blood flecked from her lips onto Mason’s face. Her skin glowed with a pale sheen. Red veins traced through the whites of her eyes. He wiped away the gathering sweat above her eyebrows. Her forehead nearly burned his fingertips.

“You’re evil!” Beth screamed from behind.

Mason turned to see Beth leap at Anton. Her right fist broke through his upraised arms and smashed into his nose. Red exploded down over his chin and onto a wrinkled shirt and coat. She connected with a right hook to his ear before Mason dragged her back.
 

Elio and Noor helped Maria out onto the deck. “They aren’t far behind!” he said as he moved the trio away from the door.

A growing hum of shouting and shrieking echoed up the stairwell.
 

“You murderer!” Beth spat at Anton. “You did it!”

“Beth,” Mason said into her ear. “What are you talking about?”

His words distracted her bloodlust and she calmed a little. She answered in words dripping with hate. “He created the Delta Virus.”

“What?” Mason and Miro said in unison.

Beth stopped straining to get free. Her animal mind relinquished control back to her thinking mind. “He did it.” She waved her hands around. “He did all of this. He’s insane.”

Anton wiped at the blood streaming out of his nose. The terror in his eyes flashed to fury. “Insane?” he shouted. “I’m insane?” He spat blood onto the deck.
 

“You destroyed mankind!” Beth said.

“I saved mankind! That you don’t see it is no great surprise.”

“Papa? What do you mean?” Iridia froze as she tried to understand his meaning.

Mason couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d never believed the conspiracy theories. Surely the virus had been a freak of nature? A freak of biological potential that humanity knew always existed but hoped would never arise.

Miro ran to the door with a metal pipe he’d found. He slammed the door shut and wedged it between the door handle and nearby conduit. It wasn’t going to hold forever. Maybe not even for long. Miro drew his ankle pistol and covered the door. He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Feels uncomfortably like the Alamo, huh Sarge?”

Only a dyed-in-the-wool Texan could make light of their dire situation. It was one of the things that Mason appreciated most during their tour in the sandbox.

Mason released Beth now that she appeared to be in control again. He kept the forty-five aimed at Anton’s chest. “Talk.”

Anton glared at him disdainfully, as if the pistol pointed at his chest didn’t exist. “Your wife was partially correct. I did, in fact, create the Delta Virus, or what should more properly be called the Darwin Virus.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Anton asked incredulously. “Because our wisdom had yet to catch up with our technology. We were the most successful cancer the world has ever seen. We were killing our host. And like any parasite, we would’ve all died when the host died.”

It took every ounce of resolve for Mason not to pull the trigger until the slide locked back. “You’re insane.”
 

Anton laughed. “Every genius in history has been called insane by the mediocre minds surrounding him. Truly great men rise above the petty concerns of the merely average. Am I insane not to have wasted my life in a haze of mindless consumption?”

“No,” Mason said. “You’re insane because you think killing mankind is the way to save it.”

Anton wiped at the blood dripping from his chin. “You’re a fool to believe anything else could have. You misunderstand an evolutionary truth of our species. We choose comfort over pain. We choose the known over the unknown. These two primal urges paired together guaranteed we would never take either sufficient or timely action to save the host, and hence ourselves.”

“People were starting to get it,” Beth said.

Anton laughed derisively. “Changing lightbulbs and dumping Amazon boxes in recycling bins were their solutions. The ones everyone could get behind. Pathetic. It changed nothing. Worse, it made people feel effective even as humanity continued to fall.”

“And so you decided to handle oblivion yourself?”

“I pre-empted the inevitable, desperate madness. The decline that would’ve brought mankind back to the dark ages or worse. All that we’d struggled for lost to darkness and degradation.”

“How is what you did any different?”

“We now have a chance to move forward, replete with relative abundance, while still retaining our technological and intellectual achievements. The planet requires time to heal and our reduced population will offer it that respite. By the time we have regained our previous peak, we will have gained the wisdom to sustainably coexist with it.”

“You’re twisted.”

“I’m a realist. I don’t live in the fantasy that mankind can somehow live apart from the world that sustains it.”

Enough of this bullshit. While some of what this guy said rang with truth, killing off most of mankind wasn’t the solution.

“Where’s the cure?” Mason asked. The bigger picture stuff could wait. His daughter desperately needed help.

“Here!” Beth said as she dug a vial out of her pocket.

The door shook as the first few deltas encountered the barrier between themselves and their prey. Their primal rage spilled through the door.

The faint sound of rotor blades chewing through the air drew Mason’s attention. He scanned the horizon to the north and saw a huge chopper heading their way. A VH-3D Sea King by the looks of it.
 

“You expecting company?” he asked.

Anton grinned and nodded.

Shit. Two handguns weren’t going to last long against an assault team.