Halverson didn’t want to draw the letter opener because he knew the CCTV was recording everything that was taking place in this room. Once Guzman saw the letter opener, he would confiscate it. It was the only weapon Halverson had and he wanted to hold onto it as long as possible. He would need it for their escape attempt.
Regardless of what Nordstrom had said, Halverson knew they had to break out of the bunker or they would wind up dead. Like Swiggum, he believed Guzman had killed Probst and Simone. Halverson wasn’t sure what had happened to Klecko. If Klecko was indeed Guzman’s mole, Klecko’s life might have been spared.
As for Guzman, Halverson didn’t know why the guy was taking out their whole group. Halverson didn’t have enough to go on to figure it out. There had to be some reason Guzman was whacking them, but for the life of him Halverson didn’t know what it was. Maybe it was just ill will on Guzman’s part, but Halverson doubted that. The guy was no fool, Halverson knew. There had to be a reason for the murders. And what about the flesh eaters Guzman had imprisoned here? There had to be a reason for that, too.
“I got bad news,” said Halverson.
“Don’t try to change the subject, mole.”
“Hector’s keeping flesh eaters inside this bunker.”
Swiggum assimilated Halverson’s information with surprise. “Why would he be harboring those filthy murdering things in here?”
“I’m convinced something’s going on here.”
“And you’re in on it, mole,” said Swiggum.
Scowling, he took another step toward Halverson.
“What could be going on in here?” said Victoria.
“I bet it has something to do with that decontamination room,” said Halverson, keeping a wary eye on Swiggum.
“Did you see it?”
“No.”
“Did you see any flesh eaters?”
“I saw one out in the hall.”
“Enough of this,” said Swiggum. “We can’t believe a word he says.”
“I don’t think he’s the mole,” said Victoria. “Or why would he be telling us all this?”
“To save his neck.”
The door opened.
Halverson whipped his head toward it.
Wolfman slipped inside the room. “Nordstrom, you’re next.”
“Finally,” said Nordstrom with a broad smile, hopped to his feet from his seat on the tabletop, and strode toward him.
CHAPTER 60
Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center
Mellors approached Holmes’s office and rapped twice on the door.
“Time is money,” came the response from inside.
Did that mean he wasn’t permitted to enter? wondered Mellors. Maybe everybody in the NSA talked in riddles. Whatever.
Mellors cracked the door and exposed his head for Holmes to see.
Clad in a black suit which conferred on him the aura of an undertaker especially when added to his pallid complexion, Holmes was sitting behind his desk peering with his blue grey beady eyes over his rimless spectacles at Mellors. “Don’t you have anything else to do other than bother me?”
Mellors angled into the office and shut the door behind him. “This is important.”
“My work is important,” protested Holmes and shuffled papers on his desktop.
Mellors approached Holmes’s desk. “I’d like to access one of your NSA computers. Your intranet is working, right?”
“Of course. But you don’t have clearance to enter the NSA floor.”
“I know that. That’s why I’m here. Could you loan me a key card to the NSA?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Holmes leaned back in his chair with his head drawn back, accentuating his double chin. “Absolutely not.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t have clearance.”
“That’s why I’m here asking you for a key card.”
“You’re missing the point. You still don’t have clearance. It’s way above your pay grade.”
“I’m the deputy director of the NCS for Christ’s sake.”
“Not good enough.”
“So how do I get clearance?” said Mellors, champing at the bit.
“You have to go through channels.”
“I don’t have time for all that red tape. This is an emergency!”
“This may be the end of the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that we must follow protocol.”
“Protocol be damned!”
Mellors leaned over the desktop and took a swing at Holmes’s plump cheek with his fist. Holmes’s spectacles flew off his face and skittered across the floor as his head jerked to the side, absorbing the brunt of Mellors’s blow. Out cold, Holmes slumped in his chair.
Mellors dashed behind the desk and rifled Holmes’s pockets in search of an NSA key card. Mellors dug a wallet out of Holmes’s trousers and flipped through it. Pawing through the plastic credit cards, Mellors located Holmes’s NSA key card. Pocketing it Mellors fled out of the room and shut the door behind him. He had to get into the NSA before Holmes came to and alerted the guards.
Mellors whisked through the corridor and punched the button at the elevator. The elevator seemed to take forever. Mellors kept glancing back toward Holmes’s office to make sure Holmes had not regained consciousness and was giving chase.
“Come on,” said Mellors, drumming a flurried tattoo on the elevator’s steel door with his fingers.
He had hit Holmes as hard as he could, but there was no telling how long the guy would be out. Mellors had to get a move on it.
At last the elevator’s door whooshed open.
Mellors darted inside the elevator and with the heel of his fist pounded the plastic button to the NSA’s floor.
The elevator stopped at the floor, but did not open. Mellors hammered the button on the control panel again and again. Nothing doing. The door didn’t budge.
The key card, he decided. He needed to use the card to open the door. That must be it. But where? Where was he supposed to insert the key card?
He scrutinized the control panel, casting around for a slot that would accommodate the NSA key card in his hand. He located several slots lined up in a row. He shook his head in bafflement. Which one? he wondered.
He would just have to try all of them.
He inserted the key card into the first slot on the left. Nothing doing. He tried the second slot. No soap. He was running out of time, he knew. He had to get onto the NSA floor before Holmes woke up.
Breaking into a sweat, Mellors tried the third slot. What would he do if this slot didn’t work? he wondered. Why was he so keyed up about this apocalypse equation anyway? The world was already demolished. What difference did it make who caused it?
A lot of it was guilt, he decided. He felt guilty for wasting Coogan, the black ops agent that had tumbled to the involvement of Orchid in the debacle at the Erasmus Medical Center. Coogan had also found out about the apocalypse equation. Mellors had known nothing of either Orchid or the apocalypse equation at the time that he killed Coogan. Mellors had shot Coogan because Coogan was revealing over the phone to Halverson eyes-only intel about the CIA’s involvement in the funding of the Erasmus plague experiments. Now, it turned out, Coogan had known more about what was actually happening at Erasmus than had Mellors.
Guilt was eating away at Mellors. He should never have killed Coogan. Instead, Mellors should have picked Coogan’s brains about his knowledge of the spreading of the plague.
Maybe Mellors was seeking atonement by getting to the bottom of the meaning of the apocalypse equation and how Orchid tied into it. Or maybe he was simply trying to find the truth. Probably, he decided, it was a combination of both that motivated him. In any case, he was emotionally invested in the search and he wasn’t about to give up on it.
CHAPTER 61
As Mellors fed the key card into the third slot, the elevator door slid open, startling him out of his reverie.
Heart racing, Mellors bucketed into the
spacious office.
He took stock of his whereabouts. To his left he quickly noticed a cubicle that housed an NSA operative hunched over a computer, deep in concentration.
Mellors barreled into the cubicle and slugged the short twentysomething guy in the chops before he knew what hit him. Mellors shoved the weedy operative’s limp body out of his chair and took a seat in front of the computer terminal.
He googled the term apocalypse equation. Unbelievably, he spotted an entry by that name near the top of the screen and clicked on it. It was the title of a master’s thesis that had been written by a member of the counterterrorism division of the CIA, of all places. The author’s name had been redacted.
Mellors skimmed through the article.
The sustainable population of human beings on earth was only 1.5 billion, whereas now there were over 7 billion persons, said the article. The reason for the rapid increase in the population was due to oil, which helped feed additional people because it provided fuel for transportation of food. The problem was, according to this article, that the world’s oil reserves would soon run dry. The need for oil was what was precipitating all of the wars in the Middle East. But the fact remained, even with access to all of the oil in the Middle East, there would reach a point in the near future when the oil would run out—which would trigger economic collapse worldwide.
The article then discussed “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” He had heard about Maslow before. Somebody had told him recently about Maslow. Mellors racked his overheated brain trying to recall who had told him about Maslow. Christ, it was Slocum, Mellors remembered, which figured when you thought about it. The author of this thesis worked for Slocum in the counterterrorism division of the Agency. The thesis was no doubt part of the author’s CV that Slocum had vetted somewhere down the line.
In fact, this whole article was jogging Mellor’s memory about his conversation with Slocum, who had also talked about overpopulation and the inevitable depletion of the world’s oil reserves.
Fascinated, Mellors read further in the article that he was scrolling through on the computer’s monitor.
The only solution to the problem of the impending collapse of modern societies was “mass genocide,” which would shrink the population to a “sustainable level commensurate with our earth’s resources.” In short, the population had to be reduced or it would mean the end of the world. The best way to reduce the population was with a “limited nuclear conflict” in major urban areas of the world that had the densest concentrations of people. Another viable agent of population control was the release of plague and toxic chemicals to infect masses of human beings.
There it was in black and white! decided Mellors. This article suggested that the infection of the world with plague was no accident but a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of human beings on the planet. Not only that, the article advocated the use of nuclear weapons as well.
It was mindboggling. Mellors could not believe his eyes. The outbreak of plague and the nuclear annihilation of the earth that followed may have been engineered by somebody or, more likely, some cadre! A deliberate secret plot to reduce the population. Who had dreamed up this mad scenario? And worse, who had implemented it?
Mellors had to know.
This thesis had been written by a member of the CIA, but that did not necessarily mean the CIA had deliberately unleashed the plague on the world. It could have been anybody at the Erasmus Medical Center who believed in the validity of the apocalypse equation that had deliberately infected the world with the pathogen.
What about the Orchid Organization? thought Mellors with a flash of insight. He knew that Orchid was involved in the creation of the zombie virus in Rotterdam. It stood to reason that they were also the ones that willfully exposed the world to it.
It was appalling to consider that anybody in his right mind would go to such lengths to prevent overpopulation, decided Mellors, and yet somebody had. The annihilation of the world, first by plague, then by nukes—just as prescribed in “The Apocalypse Equation”—served as proof.
Now he had to ID the members of Orchid to find out which of them were government officials. If any of the group had infiltrated the government, and Paris had told him that they had, there was no telling what they might do next with their influence in the corridors of power. What was the next step in their conspiracy?
Mellors flinched.
He felt a cold steel ring pressing against the nape of his neck. He tensed.
There was a handgun pointed at his neck.
A bullet exited the gun’s muzzle, entered Mellors’s brain, exited with gobbets of brain and spalls of skull from his forehead, and flew into the computer’s screen, shattering it. A slumgullion of blood, brain nubbins, and bone fragments splattered the broken monitor.
CHAPTER 62
Nevada
Clad in their hazmat uniforms, Wolfman and Shorty escorted Nordstrom into room 208.
“Thanks,” said Nordstrom, smiling.
Wolfman and Shorty looked at him with blank eyes through their visors then retreated from the room, locking its door behind them.
Nordstrom shrugged in bafflement. What was with the thousand-yard-stare routine from those two? he wondered. Unlike the fools back in the guest room, Nordstrom wanted to get decontaminated. He didn’t want to walk around for the rest of his life with radiation in his system eating him alive. If Halverson and those guys wanted to die of radiation poisoning, that was their problem.
Now where was the shower? he wondered, flicking his eyes around the pristine white empty room. He inspected the ceiling. No showerheads in it. He looked down. He did, however, spot a drain in the floor.
Strange, he decided. Why did the room need a drain if there was no running water in sight?
There wasn’t even anything to take a picture of. Just an empty room. If he wasn’t snapping pictures, he wasn’t living, as far as he was concerned. Despite the emptiness and monotony of the room, he raised his camera to his face and snapped pictures of a couple of the walls as well as one of the drain. That was when he spotted something near the drain. He could barely make it out because it was white like the floor.
Hiking up his trousers at the knees, he squatted down to get a better look at it. The better part of an inch from the drain’s circumference lay a broken tooth. It looked human, decided Nordstrom, pinching it between his forefinger and thumb and lifting it for a closer look.
There was no doubt about it. It was a human tooth. A chipped incisor, to be exact.
Nordstorm had no idea what was going on. Why would the decontamination procedure break a tooth? How could you break a tooth taking a shower? What kind of a procedure was this anyway? he wondered.
Mulling it over, he straightened up. Whose tooth was it? he wondered. Was it Probst’s or Simone’s or somebody else’s? He inspected the tooth again. It looked smaller than a man’s tooth. Maybe it was Simone’s. He flicked it to the floor.
Apprehension gripped him. Maybe the others were right about not wanting to come here. There was something hinky about this place. He felt his heartbeat skyrocketing.
His gaze settled on the door on the other side of the room. He stole toward the door and cracked it gingerly. It opened onto a white corridor. What was with all the whiteness? On closer examination he realized the walls and floor were ceramic. It was like being in a giant toilet bowl. What the hell?
Was he supposed to wait in this room for the decontaminators to come to him or was he supposed to walk down that hall to meet them? he wondered.
He made out a door at the end of the hallway. The door was difficult to discern thanks to its whiteness that blended in with the walls and floor.
Time to go check the other end of the toilet bowl, he told himself. Maybe the decontaminators were waiting for him in that room.
He padded down the corridor, snapping pictures of the surrounding whiteness all the while.
He never made it to the end of the corridor.
The door
swung open, propelled by flesh eaters that stumbled out of the room, elbowing their way toward him.
Nordstrom took snapshots of the creatures as they piled out of the room slobbering on the floor.
As he realized what he was photographing he lowered his camera and screamed, “No!”
There must be some mistake, he decided in a funk. What were infected flesh eaters doing inside the decontamination area?
He took more photos as if by some magic he could freeze the creatures in place the same way his camera froze them in a photograph. In many ways he saw his camera as a weapon. It provided him with a livelihood and it served as testimony of crimes against him. He like to had a mystical relationship with his camera.
But it wasn’t working. No matter how many photos he snapped of the approaching mob of flesh eaters, the creatures just kept coming. His photographing them had no effect on them.
He took a powder to the main room and shut its door behind him. He could not lock it, he soon realized, as the knot of zombies exerted their combined weight against the door till it gave and Nordstrom retreated to the other side of the room, breaking into a cold sweat of fear.
The lead creature that was fat and had a partially bald head plodded toward Nordstrom. Nordstrom hauled back and took a swing at the creature’s necrotic face that was oozing pus. Nordstrom’s fist landed splat in the middle of the creature’s cheek, which promptly disintegrated and suppurated onto his knuckles.
At the same time, Fats jabbed his hand into Nordstrom’s stomach, pierced the flesh, snagged an intestine, and yanked the gut out as he walked away from Nordstrom with his prize in his grasp.
Nordstrom howled in pain. He didn’t know which was worse—the pain in his stomach or helplessly standing by and watching his entrails pour out of his body.
Puzzled, the other flesh eaters watched Fats, wondering what he was doing.
Fats drew twenty-odd feet of the entrails out, then pirouetted back toward Nordstrom, coiling the innards around himself, wrapping himself up in the bloody guts as though luxuriating in them. He looked for all the world like a child gamboling with a huge stretch of taffy.
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