by Steve Alten
A sliver of moonlight revealed the southbound trail. It looped to their right, leading to a small wooden bridge that crossed a stream.
Standing on the bridge was the Grim Reaper.
“Paolo, my feet… I need to rest a moment.” Oblivious to the Angel of Death, Francesca approached the bridge, leaning back against its wooden rail.
Shep attempted to shout a warning, only his voice constricted, as if a weight were pressing against his throat. His eyes widened in terror as he watched the Reaper silently raise its scythe high over its right shoulder, the curved metal edge targeting the back of the pregnant woman’s frail neck!
Francesca shivered, her exhaled breath thick and blue in the moonlight. “Suddenly it’s so cold.”
Death grinned at Shep as its cloaked arms — bone wrapped in decaying ligaments, tendons, and flesh — sent its olive-tinged blade arcing downward.
Shep pushed past Paolo in two quick strides, unfurling a backhand strike with his steel prosthetic. The metallic arm caught the Reaper’s scythe mid-strike, the clack of metal meeting metal generating a brilliant orange spark that briefly illuminated the entire ravine.
Temporarily blinded by the light, Shep dropped to one knee, his body trembling.
“What was that?” Francesca whipped her head around, staring wide-eyed at her husband.
“What was what?”
“You didn’t see that flash?”
“No, my love. Virgil?”
The old man was kneeling by Shep. “Son… are you all right?”
“The Reaper… it’s after Francesca.”
Virgil stared into Shep’s constricted pupils. “Paolo, give your wife the vaccine.”
“But you said—”
“Do it now.”
Francesca took the vial from her husband and drained it, choking on the clear elixir.
Shep stood, the purple spots in his vision gradually fading. “I met his blade with mine. Tell me you saw the spark of light.”
“No, but Francesca obviously saw it. You must have pulled her from the tunnel.”
“The tunnel?”
“The passage every soul must travel through when leaving Malchut, the physical world. The tunnel leads to the Cave of Machpelah, where the patriarchs of all humanity are buried.”
Shep pulled him aside. “The plague… all this death — it’s like bait to him, isn’t it?”
“It’s not death, Patrick, it’s the negativity… the reactive behavior that is increasing the power of Satan. In a way, the Angel of Darkness is a barometer of man’s psyche. The transgressions of the world have tipped the scales beyond a critical mass, granting Death a free reign. The End of Days is upon us, and this time even the souls of the innocent will not be spared.”
Governor’s Island
3:29 A.M.
The biohazard lab had been set up in one of the island’s former military residences. Powered by a portable generator growling in the open garage.
Doug Nichols handed Leigh Nelson a mug of coffee. The lieutenant colonel had arrived seven hours earlier from Fort Detrick to supervise the analysis and replication of the Scythe vaccine. The square-jawed veteran smiled at the pretty brunette. “Are you all right?”
Leigh’s lower lip quivered. “I’d be much better if you allowed me five minutes to contact my husband.”
The smile waned. “You can use my cell phone… after we’ve identified the vaccine.”
“You’re a real sport.”
“You say you held the box containing the serum? Think you could identify it if you saw it again?”
“Probably.”
Nichols opened his laptop. Typed in the address of a secured Web site. “These are standard field carrying cases Dr. Klipot would have had access to. For instance, these packs are used to transport influenza vaccine.”
“No, it wasn’t metal. This was a polished wood case, fitted with foam packing for twelve vials, each about three fluid ounces.”
“Any identifying marks on the box? Serial numbers? Department logos?”
“None that I can remember. But there was a warning inside the lid. Something about the vaccine containing a powerful neurotransmitter that could produce temporary hallucinogenic effects.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“Positive. The Klipot woman wigged out on me shortly after I gave her the antidote. I remember thinking—”
The lieutenant colonel clicked through several pages, searching the site. “Was this the box?”
Leigh stared at the image. “Yes. That’s it, I’m sure of it. What’s wrong?”
“This is a shipping case used for antimicrobic therapies, including tetra-cyclines, chloramphenicol, or streptomycin. AMTs are grown in artificial media from organisms inactivated with formaldehyde and preserved in 0.5 percent phenol. For that reasons and others, serum antibodies need direct access into the bloodstream. You of all people should know that digestible antimicrobic sera can't cross the brain-blood barrier, they must be injected.”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“The Klipot woman escaped under your care. So did Sergeant Shepherd. Now you’re deliberately lying about the nature of the cure. Either everything’s just an inconvenient coincidence, or you’re working with the terrorist groups responsible for infecting Manhattan.”
“That’s insane.”
“Guard!”
An MP rushed in from the next room. “Yes, sir.”
“Dr. Nelson’s been lying to us. Have Captain Zwawa question her… under suitable duress.”
Central Park, New York
3:51 A.M.
They had made their way through the North Woods. Circumnavigating the North Meadow and the orgy of shadows segregated by bonfires, they crossed the bridge at 97th Street, where they stopped to rest by the life-sized bronze statue of Danish sculptor Albert Thorvaldsen.
Patrick had left them there to do reconnaissance along the eastern border of the park. Remaining concealed behind a four-foot stone wall, he had surveyed Fifth Avenue. Vehicles clogged the artery. Shadows stirred beneath dark awnings. He was about to leave when a disturbance shook the night.
The two black Hummers were weaving their way south on Fifth Avenue, avoiding the gridlocked lanes by veering onto the extra-wide sidewalk bordering Central Park. Screams cut through the frigid night air as the military vehicles ran over civilians sprawled out along the walkway, crushing limbs and skulls beneath the Hummers’ double-wide tires.
Patrick hurried back through the park, locating the others on the East 96th Street playground. “They’re coming. We have to move.”
Francesca moaned, her feet aching. “How did they find us so quickly?”
Shep glanced up at the overcast heavens. “Probably using aerial drones to track us down. Come on.”
“Where are we supposed to go?” Paolo asked, annoyed. “We came from the north, there’s nothing to the west but athletic fields, and everything to the south is blocked by the reservoir. They’d overtake us long before we could get around it.”
“We were safer at the pizzeria,” Francesca complained. “I told you not to let them in, Paolo. I begged you.”
“Francesca, please.” Paolo knelt by the frost-covered sliding board, closing his eyes to pray. “God, why have you led us here only to kill us? Lead us out of here safely… show us the way!”
“Help us, God, show us the way.” Virgil mimicked Paolo, his inflection dripping with sarcasm.
“Virgil, please—”
“And Moses whined to God, ‘God, do something. We have the Red Sea in front of us and Egyptians in back of us.’ And God answers back, ma titzach alai—why are you yelling to me?’ That’s right, Paolo, Moses was screaming to God, ‘help us’ and God was screaming back, "Why are you yelling to me?’”
Paolo stood. “I… I never read this Bible passage before.”
“That’s because the King James version removed it, and no rabbi or priest will ever discuss it. Few could accept that God would answ
er Moses like this, after all, God is good… God is just. What God was telling the Israelites was that they held the power to help themselves.”
“I don’t understand. How could the Israelites cross the Red Sea without God’s help?”
“The answer lies in the verse itself, Exodus verse 14, the most important passage in the entire Torah. By pulling letters in a specific order from lines 19 through 21, you are left with seventy-two three-letter words — the very triads that God had engraved on Moses’s staff.”
“What were they?” Paolo asks.
“The 72 names of God. Not names in the ordinary sense but a combination of Aramaic letters that can strengthen the soul’s connection to the spiritual realm and channel the unfiltered Light. Abraham used the 72 names in his youth to keep from being burned alive by Emperor Nimrod when he was tossed in an oven. Moses used the energy to control the physical universe.”
“Virgil, I’m sorry… but how can any of this help us now?”
“Paolo, if you truly believe God is all-knowing and all-seeing, then it’s insulting to think He needs to be reminded to help you. ‘Hey, God, I need you down here, and don't forget my soul mate, my money, my food.’ That's why God the Creator, God the Light said to Moses, ma titzach alai—why are you yelling to me? What God was saying was, ‘Moses, wake up, you have the technology, use it! It’s the concept of mind over matter.”
Shep paced, his eyes focused in the direction of the approaching engines. “Virgil, this really isn’t the time for a sermon.”
The old man grimaced. “Patrick, the connection fostered by the 72 names won't work when your thoughts and actions are impure. Moses doubted, so the sea didn’t part. But one man never wavered in his belief. One devout man took Moses’s staff, engraved with the 72 names, and walked straight into the Red Sea until the water was up to his chin… and that was when the waters parted. You see, Paolo, when it comes to faith, there can be no doubt, no ego, only certainty. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. One key letter is missing from the 72 names of God — the gimel, which stands for ga'avah—the human ego. If you truly believe in God, there can be no room for doubt.”
Shep turned away from the conversation, his adrenaline pumping as he waited for the military vehicles to appear. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide… slowed down by a crazy old man and a pregnant woman.
He looked out at the reservoir. So vast was the waterway that its borders stretched nearly from one end of the park to another, its ten-block horizon disappearing in a fog bank.
Fog?
“Paolo… we need to find a boat!”
* * *
The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir was a forty-foot-deep, 106-acre body of water encircled by a 1.58-mile jogging track and tall chain-link fence. The reservoir’s maintenance shed was located off the bridle path.
Shep kicked open the door. Paolo peered inside with his light. The yellow inflatable raft was hanging from the ceiling, secured to the wooden beams by two pulleys. Shep cut the lines with one swing of his prosthetic arm. Grabbing an oar, he helped Paolo drag the rubber craft outside.
“Over here.” Virgil and Francesca were waiting by the jogging track’s public bathrooms. The old man had pulled a section of fencing loose from where it attached to the edge of the brick facing, allowing them access to the water.
The building’s facade was covered in spray-painted graffiti, representing everything from gang insignias and messages of love to colorful artistic endeavors that would put Peter Max to shame. Appearing along the top of the wall, painted in black letters, was a prophetic message:
you are under surveillance.
Below that, represented in four-foot-high stylized white letters was a rock fan’s homage to his favorite band:
STYX
Shep stared at the stylized graffiti, a distant memory tugging at his brain.
“Patrick, we need you.” Virgil and Paolo had pulled back the loose section of fence, allowing Shep to maneuver the raft through the opening and into the water. Paolo climbed down into the boat first, then reached up to assist Francesca and Virgil.
Squeezing through the opening, Shep dragged the fencing back into place and lowered himself into a kneeling position in the stern next to Virgil. He gripped the middle of the oar in his right fist but could not secure the top with the mangled pincer of his prosthetic left arm.
“Allow me, my friend.” Paolo took the oar from Patrick and stroked, guiding the raft away from the reservoir’s northern wall. The water was dark and murky, though noticeably warmer than the frigid night air, the temperature differential the cause of the dense fog bank.
The shoreline gradually disappeared from view, along with the night sky.
Paolo continued paddling, quickly losing all sense of direction. “This isn’t good. I could be taking us in an endless circle.”
Virgil held up his hand. “Listen.”
They heard a crowd cheering somewhere in the distance.
“Head for the sound, Paolo. It will guide you to the southern end of the reservoir.”
Altering their course, he paddled, the sound of the water crisp in the December air, the fog thickening with each stroke.
The smell reached them first, the putrid scent similar to an open sewer.
The bow struck an unseen object. Then another.
Paolo abruptly withdrew the oar. Snatching the lantern from Francesca, he again attempted to light the wick, succeeding on his third try. He held the lamp out over the side, the fog-veiled glow revealing what lay upon the surface. “Mother of God.”
There were thousands of them, floating like human flotsam. Some drifted facedown, most were facing up, their red-rimmed eyes bulging in death, their mottled flesh bloated and pale, their necks festooned with grapefruit-sized purplish black buboes, swollen even more from their immersion in water. Men and women, old and young — the cold water having combined with the plague to disguise their ethnicity, their body compositions determining their ranking within the reservoir. The heaviest among them, being the most buoyant, occupied the surface of the man-made lake. The thin and muscled, unable to float, had been relegated to the mid and deeper waters, along with the infants and children.
Paolo cupped his hand over his wife’s mouth before she could scream. “Close your eyes, look away. Scream, and the soldiers will find us.”
Virgil wiped at cold tears. “Paolo, douse the light and work your oar… take us across this river of death.”
“River of death… Styx.” The words of the Divine Comedy cracked open another sealed chamber of Shep’s memory, Dante’s hellish prose laid out before him. The water was a dark purplish gray, and we, following its somber undulation, pursued a strange path down to where there lay a marsh at the slope's culmination—
— Styx was the name that swamp bore.
Shep’s eyes widened as the vaccine-created hallucination gripped his mind, the flock of floating corpses spinning in his vision—
— the dead suddenly animating!
Limbs gyrate. Waterlogged hands paw blindly at one another, stripping clothing from skin in the process. Growing steadily more restless, the awakening dead reach out to tug at their neighbors’ hair and gouge their eyes. Several of the more feisty corpses actually propel their ghastly heads from the frigid water, sinking their bared yellowed teeth into another plague victim’s rotting flesh as if they were zombies.
As Shep watches in horror, bizarre flashes of bluish white light ignite randomly from somewhere within the depths, each strobe-like burst revealing haunting glimpses of more plague victims — a submerged army of the dead fighting their way to the surface. Suddenly, Shep finds himself looking out onto a sea of faces — Iraqi faces — all staring at him in judgment, their silence deafening.
“Ignore them, Shepherd, they’re nothing but godless heathens.”
Patrick looks down, stunned to find Lieutenant Colonel Philip Argenti. The clergyman is floating on his back next to the raft, his body dressed in his long, flowi
ng black cassock, his corpse towed by the boat’s moving current.
“War is hell, Shepherd. Sacrifices had to be made in order to achieve our objectives. We did what was necessary.”
“Necessary… for who?”
“Freedom comes with a price.”
“And who pays that price? We killed families… entire villages. These people never asked to be bombed and invaded.”
“Whoa there, Sergeant. People? They’re Muslims, scourge of the earth. Bunch of no-good Arabs hell-bent on destroying Western society.”
“You’re wrong. The majority of these people simply wanted to live in peace.”
“No one asked for your opinion of the mission, Sergeant. You were trained to defend America against those who seek to destroy our way of life. Instead, you took the coward’s way out, you cut and ran. In doing so, you shamed your family, you disgraced the uniform… but most of all, you betrayed our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus was a man of peace. He’d never support any act of violence.”
“Wake up, Sergeant! America is a Christian nation. One nation, under God.”
“Since when is America a Christian nation? Since when does God need man to fight His holy wars? Invoking God’s name in our military actions does not sanctify violence any more than al-Qaeda proclaiming Jihad. Take a good look at them, Colonel. These are the lives we’ve butchered in God’s name, the people we vilified as an excuse to bomb their cities, the children we’ve slaughtered in order to—”
“Save your speech, traitor. Would you stand by and allow these Islamic extremists to strike our shores again? What kind of an American are you?”
“One who refuses to be your tool any longer. Linking 9/11 with Saddam, weapons of mass destruction, democracy on the march… it was all a lie. All you fanatics ever wanted was an excuse to gain control of Iraq’s oil supply. War is nothing more than a cash cow for the military-industrial complex. Who’s next? Iran? Venezuela? Is that all part of God’s plan, too?”
