He hurried after her, anyway, wanted to keep her in sight. Quick glances at the rim of the gorge, both ahead and behind, made him feel more like a target than ever. There were a thousand spots up there that a halfway decent rifle shot could have taken any one of them out. He listened for a helicopter or an engine. The Blackcoats had to have heard the gunshots, if not the screams. They would be coming soon.
He hoped Rose and Maeve were right about finding a place to hide down here. Massive stone slabs lay scattered along the bottom of the gorge like some ancient giant had been playing with blocks and forgotten to pick them up. In some places, hiking trails ran along the rough terrain of the riverbank, and in others they had to clamber over the slabs. Walker hesitated the first time he reached a place where he needed both hands, unwilling to be without his gun, but the urgency thrumming in his bones left him no choice. He holstered the weapon again and kept going.
The river rushed past, swift and deep, no more than forty feet across here. They could swim if they had to, but they’d be dragged downstream a ways before they reached the other side. Walker glanced over his shoulder. Priya’s injury made it more difficult for her, forcing Rose to lag behind to help her over the obstacles in their path. Walker wished he could speed them along, but there was nothing to be done about it.
The gorge turned slightly leftward. Walker skidded down a slab at the water’s edge. His left boot splashed into the river, but he caught himself just in time to prevent a full dunking. Both hands on the rock, he scrabbled up and over.
A deep shadow to his right drew his attention, and he saw the cave there, narrow but dark enough that he couldn’t be sure how far it went back. Once he’d noticed that one, he realized there were others. The way the glacier had left these stones piled in its wake, thousands of years ago, it had created plenty of gaps.
Why hadn’t Maeve stopped to investigate them? Why hadn’t she shown Walker there were places to hide?
He slid down the opposite side of a slab and hit a narrow trail of tufted grass and weeds. His gaze ticked up to the rim of the gorge again, his heart pounding, skin prickling with the vulnerability of their exposure. The rain had all but stopped now, and for the first time he realized the sky had begun to clear. He hadn’t noticed because the breaks in the clouds revealed not blue but the slate shade of dusk, sliding toward the indigo of sundown. The storm might be passing, but night was about to fall. Somehow the hour had grown late without him realizing. It must be nearly eight o’clock by now.
That could be good, in that they would be more difficult to track at night.
Or bad, in that they could easily fall and shatter bones on the stone slabs inside the gorge.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Too many thoughts in his head.
He came to another huge slab. Walker glanced back at the others, saw them sliding down the last big stone he’d mounted, Rose still helping Priya, and he leaped upward, scaling the slab ahead. He scanned the trail ahead, the stones, the edge of the river.
No sign of Maeve.
“Down here, Walker.”
He turned toward her voice, nearly lost balance again. His boots skidded and he dropped to his knees on the slab, just managing to keep from falling. On hands and knees, he stared into the shadowed crevice between the gorge wall and the slab beneath him.
Red eyes stared back at him. Bleeding red, rimmed with sickly black. If she hadn’t been standing in the shadows, face etched with sorrow and regret, Maeve Sinclair would have looked like a murder victim instead of a killer.
Walker dared not move. She only had to reach up and touch his face and the countdown to his hideous death would begin. He wanted to reach for his gun. Felt its weight against his abdomen, handle jutting into his stomach.
She must have seen the fear in his eyes, because she took a step backward and spread her arms, hands out at her sides like Christ on the cross.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Draw your gun. Please.”
The way she said that last word broke his heart. He had never heard such desperation and surrender in his life. She might have been nearly thirty years old, but the pain in her made him think of her father, Ted, and that made Walker think of his own son.
Charlie, he thought, wishing he had never taken this assignment. Wishing Alena had never called. With staggering clarity, it came to him that someday he would make a promise to his son, break it, and run off on an assignment from which he would never return. All Charlie’s life, Walker had been disappointing him, but the idea that he might not be there to field the resulting resentment, that he might leave Charlie with no way to resolve his righteous anger, broke him.
Thinking of that ultimate abandonment, he felt a kind of fear he’d never known. His breath hitched in his chest. He raised his hands, sat back on his haunches, and stared into those bleeding red eyes as he drew his gun and took aim at Maeve Sinclair’s heart.
This woman, who exuded death, smiled at him as if he’d just given her the sweetest gift.
“There’s a cave down here,” she said in her own voice, not that serpent’s whisper that had come from her lips before. A cough erupted from her chest, but she calmed it and smiled again, black blood smeared on her mouth. “We can hide here.”
Was she herself again, now that she’d taken Agatha’s life? And if so … for how long?
Walker glanced to his right, heard Priya and Rose talking quietly as they began to scale the last slab, back the way Walker had come. Priya sounded desperate, worried she wouldn’t be able to make it much farther.
“Before they join us,” Maeve said, drawing his attention back to her red grimace of a smile, “I want you to listen to me.”
Walker gave a tilt of his chin. “Go on.”
“I’m still me, right now,” Maeve said, her voice cracking. “But I’m … I’m not alone in here, Walker. There’s something else. I thought it was the disease at first. It’s so strong, I get so feverish and disoriented, so I thought it was just that. But it’s more than that. I get so hungry, like it’s tearing me apart inside. You have no idea, Walker. Oh, my God, it feels…”
She became lost in the memory of that feeling for a moment, and Walker felt like he might puke. What the hell had the bastards at Garland Mountain created? What had General Wagner set loose?
Walker exhaled. “Maeve?”
She wiped at her mouth. Swallowed hard, visibly. “If I can’t control it, you’ll know. I’ll be … different. Like when I went after Agatha. If there’s any chance I’m going to hurt my sister, you shoot me.”
Walker frowned. Rose had said the same thing, but Priya had been the one to argue that Maeve didn’t know what she was doing. “What about Priya?”
The smile twisted the corners of Maeve’s mouth. She looked as if she might scream or laugh or both. She had said she was in control of herself, but Walker could see that had been a lie. This thing inside of her might not be holding the reins at the moment, but she must have been barely keeping it down.
“If you let me hurt my sister, I’ll make sure to kill you next.”
“Fair enough,” Walker said.
To his right, Rose helped Priya across a bit of grassy trail beside the river, and they reached the massive slab atop which Walker knelt. Night had deepened. They’d be able to see Walker from that spot, but Maeve would still be hidden from them until they crested the slab.
“We can’t stay out here in the open,” Walker said. “Get inside the cave. I’ll bring the others in.”
“Okay,” Maeve said, backing away, turning toward what he now saw was a gap between the next slab and the wall of the gorge. In the gloom, he could see that inside the cave, the floor sloped downward.
Maeve stopped and looked back at him. “Once we’re hidden away, I need to ask you something.”
Walker put his legs over the side of the slab and began to skid down after her. “Why don’t you just ask me now?”
Maeve stood just inside the darkness. Only her hands and face were visible
to him, her eyes narrowed. When she spoke again, he worried there might have been a hint of that snake’s hiss in her voice.
“Have you ever read Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”
Walker said he had. Then Priya was right behind him, on the slab where Walker had perched only moments before.
Maeve’s eyes gleamed red in the darkness. “Good,” she whispered. “I hope that will make this easier.”
She retreated into the shadows of the cave and was gone.
Walker had no choice but to follow.
* * *
Rue Crooker sat in the corner booth in the shadows at the back of the Candlelight Inn, wondering if anyone could hear their conversation. Whisper, she thought, studying Kat Isenberg. They spoke softly enough, she supposed, and the booth felt isolated, hidden away like the kind of table gangsters would choose in an old mob movie. Still, the conversation itself made her feel as if every ear in the place must be tilted toward them.
“You’re talking about mythology,” Rue said, brows knitted. “Folk-tales.”
“I’m not saying this right,” Isenberg replied. She let out a long breath. “History’s a distillation, okay? Everything we know as ‘facts’ where history is concerned is just a distillation of information taken from a billion different sources. Artifacts and written records are a part of that, and we assume they’re reliable, but think about evidence in a criminal case. Witness testimony is not always reliable. Even someone’s journal recounting events is tainted by their personal perspective. Now add hundreds or thousands of years of distance between the writing of that journal and its discovery. How reliable is that journal now?”
Rue leaned over the table, picking nervously at the edges of the coaster beneath her beer glass, and spoke just loudly enough for Isenberg to hear her over the old Amy Winehouse song pumping out of the overhead speakers.
“You’re saying history books are no different from a teenage girl’s diary?”
Isenberg’s nostrils flared with anger. “That is not what I said, Dr. Crooker.”
Rue held up both hands. “I’m sorry. That came out as flippant, and it wasn’t meant to. I understand what you’re saying, and I don’t disagree.”
Mollified, Isenberg went on. “The point is that mythology is one of the things that intersects with history. Folklore, legend, and let’s not forget religion. Actual events blur into myth on every level, including personal myth, the way so-called heroes and monarchs self-mythologize, even today. Maybe there was a guy named Jesus who walked on water or turned water into wine, or maybe not. Maybe Vlad Tepes really had visiting diplomats’ hats nailed to their heads if they didn’t remove them in his presence, or maybe not. Maybe JFK and Bobby Kennedy had regular three-ways with Marilyn Monroe, or maybe not. You following me?”
Rue smiled. “More or less. But none of those things comes close to what you’re talking about. Unless you want to talk about Vlad Tepes being a vampire. That’s more in line with—”
Isenberg pointed at her. “How do you know he wasn’t? Truly. How do you know?”
Rue shrugged. “I guess I don’t.”
“I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe,” she went on. “Including some files from an assignment your friend Walker was involved with in Ecuador or Guatemala or somewhere. I can’t remember which. The point is, ask Walker about bloodsucking monsters who can’t stand sunlight.”
Rue rolled her eyes. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
The group at the nearest table grew hushed and shifted a bit, and Rue realized she’d been too loud. The two of them waited a few seconds for the susurrus of voices around them to return to its former dull roar, and then Rue leaned forward again, hands around her sweating beer glass.
“Can you just get to it, please? How did we get here? What is going on at the lab? How do we keep anyone else from dying?”
Isenberg exhaled. “I can’t answer that last one. But maybe you’re right. I need to back up.” She took a long gulp of beer and steadied herself before continuing.
“The moment all of this turns on is the vanishing of an entire civilization in the Indus Valley, around 1500 B.C.E. In a couple of ancient cities in what would now be Pakistan, comparatively advanced civilization just stopped cold, as if one day everyone in the region decided to wander off into the wilderness and died.”
Rue cocked her head. “You know they died?”
“We do,” Isenberg said quietly, glancing around to make sure they weren’t overheard. “Four years ago, we found them.”
“Holy shit,” Rue whispered.
“There are coded files on this at Garland Mountain,” Isenberg said. “DARPA has them, too. I’m going to guess Walker’s boss knows all of this by now. There are written records, clay and stone tablets discovered with the mass graves in the Indus Valley that tell the story. It started with a builder called Pandya Ko. He was digging clay for bricks and cut himself on something that gave him an infection.”
Rue nodded. This, at least, sounded like science.
Isenberg exhaled. Hesitated. “I’m playing this through in my head,” she said. “You aren’t going to believe any of this until you see the files at the lab. If I can get you in.”
“You’d risk that?”
Isenberg shrugged. “I’m not sure what other choice there is. If someone doesn’t stop them, this is going to get bigger and so much worse.” She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t look at Rue while she continued her story. “The basics? Pandya Ko heard voices in his head. Or one voice, anyway. The infection in his blood spread and he grew sicker, and then he touched his sister, who had come to care for him, and she died.”
“Sounds familiar.”
Isenberg opened her eyes. “Yeah. But try this part. Pandya Ko said the voice in his head came from the god of death. That it had been born in the blood of ‘the first war,’ and thousands had worshipped it and killed in its name.”
Rue stared at her. “You say that as if you believe it.”
“You haven’t seen the tablets. Read the translations. I’m not saying I believe it, but Pandya Ko did, and so did the village elder who executed him and who then acquired the same killing touch. That village elder, who went mad with disease and hunger and told all who would listen that he had to feed the death god. The name he gave it in his own language, on those tablets, translates to Red Hands.”
“Project: Red Hands.”
Isenberg nodded. “Exactly.”
Rue slid lower in her chair, staring at her beer. She picked up the glass, took a small sip, and then followed that with a much larger one, downing half the glass.
“There’s more?” she asked.
“A hell of a lot more,” Isenberg confirmed. “The mystery of all those people vanishing, though of course they didn’t vanish. Red Hands passed from person to person—there are six named in the story—over the course of weeks. It spread so much and so fast that whole populations fled into the mountains, and Red Hands followed. The hunger grew and the sickness spread. The story ends with conjecture. Whoever carved out this history in that ancient language believed the host basically imploded from the infection’s hunger. From its need. Hundreds of people died, maybe thousands, as quickly as if an asteroid had impacted Earth, only it did no damage to the landscape. Everyone just dropped dead.”
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” Rue rasped. “Jesus. This is what we’re dealing with?”
“So it seems.”
Rue shook her head. “It makes no sense. Something like this doesn’t just vanish from the world and then resurrect itself centuries later. It’s not like there was a vaccine for it, and then idiots decided not to vaccinate their kids. This thing was gone.”
“Not gone,” Isenberg said. “Just buried. Dormant. And we…” She paled, had to breathe through her nose for a few seconds as if she fought the urge to vomit. “We didn’t just dig it up by accident. We found the tablets in 1997, and we’ve been looking for it ever since. Not just the remains of someone w
ho’d died from being touched by a host but the active bacterial contagion that infected the first one. A research team in Greenland located that—among other killer bacteria—over a year ago, a place where we believe a similar but much older ‘meltdown’ occurred, buried under the ice. Oscar Hecht was a colleague of mine. The project was his. I noticed his behavior changing, we all did, but we thought it was just overwork. He put a lot of pressure on himself, and a lot came down from above as well.”
The two of them fell quiet. Rue felt a chill settle deep into her bones. She thought the feeling would fade after a few seconds, but it lingered as she sat there, thinking about an ancient world where such a thing as a death god could exist. Not a god, perhaps, but some impossible hybrid of human and disease. Infectious bacteria were alive, after all, and the driving force of that life was to endure, to bloom into contagion.
Like all life, bacteria only wanted to propagate more of their species.
To infect.
And a deadly contagion existed only to kill.
“Sentient, malevolent disease,” Rue said quietly. “That’s not possible.”
“You prefer ‘death god’?” Dr. Isenberg lifted her beer to take a sip, but her hands were shaking so badly she had to use both of them to set the glass down again. “You can call it what you like. Believe whatever your science or religion allows. But it’s real. And it’s out there.”
Rue put both hands flat on the table, steadying herself. “You know what this sounds like, right? Someone able to walk across a battlefield or through a village, just touching people and they drop dead?”
“Of course I do,” Isenberg replied. “Poe became part of our research.”
Hard as it was for Rue to wrap her mind around the history Isenberg had shared, this went a step too far. She had first read Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction while in college. Her father had loved early American authors. Rue had tried reading Hawthorne and Melville in high school and been so bored that twice she had fallen asleep with her face holding her place in the book. Her drool had caused the pages of Moby-Dick to stick together, which was fine because she had never attempted to read it again.
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