“The rest of the men have surrendered,” the soldier continued.
“Just like that?” Alex asked. He had been prepared to die, then ready for a bitter fight, and now that it was over, he was left shaking, unprepared for the sudden change in reality.
“Where are the others?” the major demanded. “The people in charge?”
“They’re in a safe room at the bottommost level,” Campbell explained. “With their families.”
The major nodded. “Secure everyone who just surrendered. I want them locked up until we sort all this out.”
“Got it,” Campbell said, then turned to his men. “Watkins, make it happen. The rest of you, you’re with him.” Campbell’s men ran off towards the back of the chamber where two sets of double doors led to well lit corridors.
“Take us to this safe room,” Terkeurst ordered. Campbell led them through the same double doors and a series of corridors. There were people there, staring out of open doorways, whispering quietly. Alex caught a glimpse inside one of the rooms. Personnel quarters, eerily similar to the cabins back in the colony, at least on the inside.
“Who are these people?” the major asked.
“Soldiers’ families,” Campbell explained. “Technicians, engineers. That sort of thing.”
“Your families?” the major demanded. “They survived? They’re here?”
Campbell nodded. “Some of us, yeah. Wives and kids only, though. They claimed they didn’t have time to save the others.”
Terkeurst said nothing, but Alex could tell what he was thinking.
Eventually they came to a set of heavy metal doors, presumably titanium.
“How do we get them open?” the major asked.
Campbell raised his radio. “XO to command center, open safe room doors.”
“XO, this is command center, opening doors.”
Alex briefly heard a mechanical whine before it was drowned out by the rumbling of the big doors sliding open. He braced himself. He was about to come face to face with the greatest mass murderers in the history of the human race.
“There are two soldiers inside,” Campbell warned. “But they acknowledged the surrender.”
“Get ready,” Terkeurst ordered, and Alex and the others raised their weapons.
As the door slid open, Alex saw something he didn’t expect, though of course his expectations were foolish. He saw faces, ordinary faces, scared, huddled together. The two soldiers stood in the front, their unloaded weapons on the floor by their feet. A white haired corpse lay in a pool of dark blood, a pistol lying near his head. The President of the United States. Had he really killed himself? Or were these two responsible?
“Secure those men,” the major ordered, and four of the assault team stepped forward and used zip ties to tie the soldier’s hands behind their backs.
Alex looked around at the huddled leaders of the new world order and their families. Most of them were women and children, some as young as three or four, some in their teens, both boys and girls. The remainder were men, ranging in age from late thirties or forties to old men with white hair. Some looked familiar, others didn’t. He had probably seen them on television—politicians, captains of industry, whatever. They stared at Alex and his team with undisguised terror.
“What does one say to things like you?” Terkeurst said coldly. “Murderer doesn’t even begin to describe what you are.” He waited, but no one said anything. “I want you to try to deny it, or even better, try to explain it to me. Tell me why you murdered my family! My niece was two years old!” He was screaming, trembling with rage. Finally, he turned around and faced his men.
“Waste them all,” he ordered in the coldest voice Alex had ever heard a human being use. The men hesitated, then raised their weapons. A young girl screamed, and others followed. There was movement as they scrambled to protect themselves behind chairs and tables, hands in front of faces, mothers shielding children.
Can I count on you, son?
“Hold your fire!” Alex shouted, then moved in front of the men and turned to face them. “Don’t any of you dare fire!”
Terkeurst whirled on him. “What the hell do you think—”
“You asked me to do what you couldn’t do,” Alex said to him. “You asked me to kill the ones responsible if you couldn’t pull the trigger. And now you want to murder women and children? Yes, I’m a killer, and yes, I can kill every rotten old bastard in this room. But not their god damned families! Not their children! And I won’t let you do it either. If you want to kill them, you’re going to have to kill me first.”
“And me,” Campbell said, and stood next to Alex. “I didn’t surrender the complex to you so you could do this. These people are guilty, I understand that now. But not their families.”
The soldiers looked at each other and lowered their weapons, some of them with ashen faces. They looked at Alex with gratitude. What they would have done here, none of them could have lived with.
“They had to have known!” Terkeurst shouted, still furious. “They had to have known what they did! They had to have gone along!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” A woman shouted. “What did they do?” She turned to the man next to her. “What did you do?”
“Shut that bitch up!” the major growled. “Or I’ll shoot it myself!” He was enraged, not thinking clearly.
“You want revenge,” Alex said. “I understand that. But we didn’t come here for revenge, we came here for justice. If you can’t tell the difference anymore, then you need to stand down, major.”
Terkeurst glared at him, his eyes flaring in enraged indignity. “I…” he started to say, then looked around, blinking, as though surprised. He looked at the people he had ordered shot, then at the faces of his men, and seemed to deflate.
“Captain Meyer,” he said softly. “Take command of the operation. You know what has to be done.”
“Yes sir,” Alex said, and Terkeurst turned around and walked out of the room. He had left Alex with a heavy burden, maybe too heavy, but it had to be done.
“Get the women and children out of here,” Alex said to the others. “At least those women who weren’t in charge. Bill, you know who they are, help sort them out.”
Winters and a few of the others began herding the family members out of the room. When they were done, thirty two men and two women stood near the far wall, staring about in fear and disbelief.
Alex opened his mouth to give the order, then stopped. “I can’t do this,” he said. “God help me, but I can’t do it.” He looked at Campbell, then at the members of his team, looking for help, support, whatever. No one could meet his gaze. It seemed he wasn’t quite the killer Terkeurst had thought.
“I had a daughter,” someone whispered. Alex looked for the speaker and saw Takahashi. He was weeping. “She was three years old. She made pictures for me, and they weren’t just stick figures either, she was good. ‘I made this for you, chichi’, she would say.” He looked up at Alex, almost apologetically. “That means dad in Japanese.”
“I thought they weren’t supposed to pick people with children,” one of the others said.
“Her mother died,” Takahashi explained. “Legally, my grandmother was her guardian. I was away all the time.”
“Looks like they fucked up,” Winters said. “I’m real sorry, man.”
“Let me do this,” Takahashi pleaded, looking at Alex. “Please, let me do this. For her.”
“Everyone, clear the room,” Alex ordered, and followed them out.
Chapter 36
Just as they turned into the corridor, they heard someone shout, “Wait! We didn’t do this! Please! Let us explain, please!”
Alex hesitated. Maybe something they said would mean they wouldn’t have to kill them. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but he knew relief was a major candidate.
“Hold on, Takahashi, hold your fire.” He walked back into room, avoiding the eyes of the people he was about to murder. Campbel
l and the others followed him.
“Alex…” Takahashi said in a voice that was almost a growl.
“If we’re going to kill them, the least we can do is hear them out. Who was that talking before?”
A woman stepped forward. She was in her fifties, perhaps sixties, slender, still clinging on to youthful beauty despite steel gray hair and hard lines.
“Who are you?” Alex demanded.
“Chambers,” she said timidly. “Madeline. Formerly the Deputy Director of the CDC.” The others were silent, all staring at the floor. A few looked up every now and then but quickly turned away when he or one of the other soldiers made eye contact.
“The only thing I want to hear from you,” Alex said. “Is what kind of idiot you think I am.” He was angry, partly at her, but mostly at himself. She looked so pleasant, so normal, so human, that he didn’t want to see her shot. But she was a monster, a destroyer of worlds on a scale Oppenheimer never imagined. She had to die. They all did.
“I don’t understand.”
“You expect me to believe that you didn’t do this? That you didn’t engineer those…those things…and use them to wipe out most of humanity? We have the evidence. We hacked your servers, we know all about it.”
She seemed to deflate, but then her body tensed and relaxed, and she returned his gaze, suddenly resolved.
“Then you know,” she said. “That Fonseca made them. They were supposed to be a waste disposal system.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s in your data.”
She nodded. “Do you also know that they lost control of them? That they started showing up outside of containment?”
Alex nodded, though there were few details about that part of it in the servers.
“Hang on,” he said, then turned to Bill. “Can you get Tom on video conference? Like a laptop or something? He’s the one who read their files, he should be here to shoot down whatever bullshit excuses she tries to feed me.”
“On it,” Campbell said and left the room.
“You just shut the fuck up until he gets back,” Alex told Chambers. She nodded and wiped at her eyes.
Bill returned in a few minutes carrying a laptop with Tom’s grinning face on the screen.
“Chief!” Tom said. “You did it!”
“It’s not done yet, Tom. Did Campbell tell you why I want you here?”
“Yep. I’m ready to listen.”
“May I speak now?” Chambers asked.
“Go ahead,” Alex said as Campbell set the laptop down on a nearby table with the camera pointing at Alex and the woman.
“You have to understand,” Chambers began. “They were supposed to be an industrial waste disposal system. The need for such a system was more immediate than most people ever knew. Our oceans were choking, we were drowning in waste. Fonseca offered us salvation. They tested them for years in containment, and they worked perfectly. No one knows how they got out. No one knows what went wrong. It could have been a mutation, sabotage or just bad design. But they were out there, and they spread.”
“How did they spread?” Tom said. Alex could see him working the laptop’s keyboard and touchpad, probably looking for the data on selective breeding and network theory that he had mentioned earlier. He was giving Chambers enough rope to hang herself, which was just fine by Alex. He wanted there to be no doubt when he gave Takahashi the go ahead.
Chambers frowned, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. “Please, you have to understand. We had no choice! You have to let me explain!”
Alex narrowed his eyes. “You will be allowed to speak. Take your time.”
She nodded, swiping at her eyes and dripping nose. “They were spreading everywhere, slowly. Starting in the Midwest and working their way out. By the time Fonseca realized that they couldn’t handle it and called in the CDC, they were making their way into Canada and Mexico, and there were incursions into Europe, China, the Middle East, everywhere.”
“Was this before or after you people stepped in and helped them spread even faster?” Alex demanded.
“Before,” she said. “Of course we tried to find a way to eradicate them, but it was impossible. We can’t eradicate lice and these things are a fraction of the size. We couldn’t even figure out a way to detect them.”
“There was no way to detect them? And you were about to approve them for commercial use? Are you fucking insane?”
“They weren’t supposed to breed outside of a specific environment! There were all manner of safeguards, but they—”
“Well obviously not fucking enough!”
“It wasn’t my job to approve them, or not to. I’m just telling you what I know.”
“Great,” Alex hissed. “Pass the buck.” He knew he was berating her, and that he should stop and let her talk before he broke her resolve, but he couldn’t help himself.
She looked like she was about to speak, but faltered under his glare. “I can’t!” She began to sob, covering her face with her hands. Too late. The damage was done.
A man coughed and stepped forward. “May I?”
“Go ahead,” Alex said.
The man, short and plump with thinning white hair, said, “Andrew Hughes, Deputy Secretary of State. Former, that is.” He had narrow eyes that moved a lot, back and forth. Alex didn’t like his face.
“I don’t give a shit who you are,” he said. “Just explain what she wants you to explain.” He was angry, and getting angrier by the second. Knowing that he was mostly angry at himself made it worse. Was he doing the right thing, letting them try to weasel their way out of it? If so, he knew he was going about it poorly. He had to get his emotions under control.
“Of course…” Hughes hesitated, as though unsure where to start. “After they got out, they spread by…”
“I know how they spread. I also know you helped spread them.”
Hughes nodded. “Yes, we did. We also had Fonseca create a version that targeted human DNA.”
Alex blinked. “You…you’re just going to admit that?”
Hughes nodded. “There is no sense in denying it. We did what we had to do. And if you didn’t know most of it, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Alex,” Takahashi growled. “I’ve heard enough.”
“No,” Alex said. “Let him finish.” His curiosity was eclipsing his anger. Why would he just admit that? Didn’t he realize he was sealing his fate?
“They were spreading everywhere. They were triggered randomly. They would be all over a building and just sit there, eating, shitting, reproducing. Then a few would trigger, and that triggered all the ones near them. Within range, that is. They were networked, you see. A simple biological implementation of a digital technology, but effective enough. We had building collapses, bridge collapses and worse. We did our best to keep as much of it out of the news as possible. Towards the end we had the military occupying entire towns and keeping them under martial law. Stuff still leaked out on social media, but people dismissed it as the usual conspiracy theory nonsense. Jade Helm and such. The more of them there were in an area, the more densely packed they were, the more the trigger effect would spread. Once they reached sufficient density, then a single triggering event would set off all of them, across the entire world. Or at least a continent. And then it wouldn’t take long before the others were triggered.”
“Why help them spread? Why build ones that target humans?”
Hughes looked at Alex. No, he glared at him. “Because we had to! Can you imagine, son, what would happen if one day, all of our buildings, all of our infrastructure, all of our technology, just disappeared? Down to the last screwdriver? Seven billion people just standing around, no way to feed themselves, nowhere to take shelter? No tools, no technology, nothing!”
Alex couldn’t believe what he had heard. He took a step toward Hughes, fists clenched. “You…you thought life would be too hard so your answer was to fucking kill everyone?” He wanted to reach for his rifle. Takahashi could have the rest, but this bastard
was his.
“No,” Hughes said, looking at Alex with an expression that was almost pitying. “Of course not, son. We tried everything we knew how, and some things we didn’t. We came up with the disruption field, the one we ended up using in the barriers. We started sweeping vast areas of the country with it. It worked, to a degree, but not enough. Power was the issue. A small area, a few thousand feet, no problem. More than that and the field was too weak to be effective. Either way, we’d miss a spot. And they’d come back. We tried it for months, tried increasing the power. We even developed fusion power to make it happen. ” He smiled wistfully. “Too little too late. It’s amazing what you can achieve though, when you’re trying to save the world. But it wasn’t enough, and we all have to live with that.” He swallowed, then hastily added, “For as long as you let us.”
Alex stared at him, unsure of what to say. Hughes had preempted his question about using the barrier technology. “I still don’t understand how you could have allowed Fonseca to develop a self replicating organism capable of wiping out human civilization.”
“Fonseca was a mega corp, son. Nobody let them do anything. They did most of their early work overseas. By the time they had enough invested in these things, they had an army of PR people and lawyers convincing every congressman and senator that the WasteAway system would solve all of our problems and was completely safe. And to their credit, they put in a lot of work to make it safe. I’m not gonna bore you with the details unless you want me to, but they had a lot of safeguards built in. What happened…it wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. Every contingency was planned for. But…it just happened. Like any fuckup. No one saw it coming. And we never did figure out how. Suffice it to say that the transports that…that ended up…out there…they were not like the ones that Fonseca initially produced.” He was faltering, finding it hard to speak, which Alex found surprising. The man had been so sure of himself.
“Mutations?” Tom asked.
Hughes shrugged. “I suppose. As I said, no one was able to figure it out in time. There were people who warned us that this could happen, but come on. Destroy the world? It sounded crazy at the time. Then it started happening.”
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