by Sean Ellis
Fulbright was taking out his phone, preparing to make another call, but she gripped his arm, forestalling him. “They’re coming.”
6.
The Old Mother dreamed of a place of death.
“Old Mother” was what her clan called her. The honorific was a sign of great respect; her stature in the clan was something akin to what would, many thousands of years hence, be called ‘divine.’
Indeed, it was she who had brought forth the great change, though few in the clan truly understood just how important that was. Only two of her children still lived and could recall the time before, when their fathers had been no different than the other beasts living in the valley, unable to make or understand speech, able to use only the crudest of tools, fearful of fire despite the Old Mother’s mastery of the element. She alone remembered what it had been like before that.
Her earliest recollections were of frustration. Her head was filled with thoughts which she yearned to share, but the grunts which the others in the clan used to communicate could not convey such complicated things. Worse still, the others seemed incapable of sharing her sense of wonder at the world that surrounded them. She had been thrilled by her discovery, as a very young child, that it was possible to use the sharp edges of a broken rock to cut through animal flesh, but when she had tried to show the dominant male, he had cuffed her in the head and taken the fresh kill for himself.
Yet, although she had been an outsider even among her own kind, her unique gifts served her well. The dominant male had taken her as his mate, protecting and feeding her, while other females were allowed to perish when food was scarce, and in time, when she bore offspring, she discovered that they shared her abilities. She conceived of a way to pass information to them, a system of communication where sounds and gestures had specific meaning that all of them understood.
Not surprisingly, her children thrived. Her first male child matured to become the dominant male, and his offspring, as well as all those of the Old Mother’s brood, also shared her gift. Within two generations, all the offspring born to the clan were of her bloodline.
Now she was old. It had been a long time since the blood flowed from her loins, even longer since any of the males showed even the slightest desire to mate with her. In many ways, her offspring had surpassed her, building on the knowledge she had given to them, innovating, and improving their common language to express new concepts and make new discoveries.
But she was still the Old Mother, and greatly honored.
And she was the only one who had the dreams.
The dreams guided the clan, leading them to abundant hunting grounds, guiding them to water and shelter, warning of dangers like the coming of storms that took fire from the sky and set the grasslands ablaze. She had taught the others how to read signs in earth and sky-to anticipate the changing of the seasons, or the migration of the animals-but none of her children or her children’s children experienced the visions that first enabled her to grasp these concepts. When she was gone, the dreams would be no more.
That time was drawing near. This also she had dreamed.
She dreamed of a place of death. She dreamed of her destiny approaching like a great gray wall, emerging from the setting sun.
Then, one night, she awoke from the dream.
It was time.
The Old Mother looked around the cave where the clan slept, oblivious to their wondrous future. The dim embers of the cook-fire offered little illumination, but she could make out the clumped shapes of mated pairs and families huddled together in repose.
She struggled to her feet, her age clinging to her withering muscles and creaky joints. It was good that this moment had finally come; in a few more turnings of the moon, she wouldn’t be able to move at all.
None in the clan stirred as she made her way to the mouth of the cave. A half-moon cast a silvery glow on the landscape and a bright river of stars lit up the sky. Yet, the Old Mother did not need illumination; the path she followed was one glimpsed in a dream and she could have followed it blind.
She walked all night, the urgency of her purpose pushing her onward through the pain and fatigue. At last, as the sun broke over the horizon, she found them.
She was not unfamiliar with the great beasts. The land belonged to them. Like her clan, they were herd animals, usually gathering in groups that numbered more than she could count on all of her fingers. From time to time, the clan would hunt them, taking stragglers that were too old or weak to keep up with the herd, but there was great risk in that endeavor. Even the weakest of the great beasts could crush them with hardly a second thought. The clan never approached a herd directly.
This herd was like nothing she had ever seen before.
Their numbers were, despite her gift, beyond her ability to comprehend. They were a great mass, stretching out in the direction where the sun would set at day’s end, farther than her eye could see. And as she drew near, they began to stir.
A shiver of excitement gripped her as the beasts began trumpeting and stamping their massive feet. She was afraid and awestruck, but this was the moment she had dreamed of, and witnessing the great herd, feeling the earth shake as they danced, was strangely satisfying.
Then, from out of the thunderous mass, several of the beasts advanced.
They were old, like her, the matriarchs of dozens of herds. She felt a tremor of fear as they drew close, surrounding her, but they did not attack. Instead, acting in unison, they knelt before her.
Images flooded into her mind, the thoughts not just of the matriarchs, but of the entire assembly, and a scream tore from her throat…
# # #
Felice Carter awoke from her long dream, and opened her eyes in the middle of a nightmare.
7.
King spun away an instant before the thermate compound in each grenade ignited. Unlike the flash-bangs, there was no detonation, no deafening blast. Rather, there was only a flare of light, as bright as an arc welder, followed by a palpable wave of heat that permeated the room.
The carpeted floor instantly erupted in flames, as did the wooden tables nearest the ignition. The molded plastic containers which had been used to transport the CDC team’s equipment began to melt, despite being several feet away from the flames, and as the emerging conflagration began to destroy natural fibers and manmade compounds alike, a miasma of black smoke filled the room.
All of this happened in mere seconds.
King felt the waves of heat at his back and the stinging of chemical fumes in his eyes as he searched the room for some other exit. He couldn’t exit through the door; the gunmen would almost certainly be waiting for him. What did that leave?
Through the persistent ringing in his ears he heard a new sound, the low wailing of a fire alarm, and at almost the same instant, it started to rain in the room. King glanced back, trying to avoid directly looking at the blinding incendiary flares, and saw that the automated sprinkler system was having little effect on the fire. The droplets simply flashed to steam, while under the shelter of the tables, the flames were spreading.
He returned his attention to the matter of escaping the room. There were no windows, but as his vision improved, he saw that one of the walls was different. It was not a true wall, but rather a series of temporary partitions that had been set up to divide a much larger area into two smaller rooms. He dashed past the blossoming inferno to the partition, stepped back and then delivered his best door-smashing kick.
The partition didn’t budge. His heel rebounded and a wave of agony shuddered through his entire body, aggravating injuries that he didn’t even know he’d suffered. A grunt of pain escaped through his clenched teeth.
Stupid, Jack. Very stupid.
He shook off the hurt and took another look at the partition. It was mounted on tracks, one on the floor and another on the ceiling, similar to a sliding patio door, and secured in place with a flush-bolt. He thumbed the latch mechanism and heard a click as the bolt released, allowing him to slide the parti
tion away with almost no effort.
Lesson learned, he thought. Think next time.
He sprinted through the adjoining room to the door in the corner, and with his MP5 ready, pushed it open.
Beyond was a scene of total chaos as people fled in response to the fire alarm. He peeked out, looking down the hallway, and saw two black-clad figures lingering at the doorway to the other half of the conference room, a good thirty meters away. Their very presence only intensified the general hysteria, but they seemed oblivious; their attention was fixed on the doorway.
He considered taking them out but quickly dismissed the idea. He knew they were wearing body armor, so the only way to guarantee a kill was a head shot. He might be able to get one of them, but if he failed to get them both, it would mean a firefight, and that would only keep him from his real objective, to say nothing of putting a lot of innocent lives in jeopardy.
He took a deep breath, and then strode out into the hallway, moving into the crowd of people evacuating from deeper within the hospital. The urge to look back at the gunmen was almost overwhelming, but doing so would risk drawing their attention. Instead, he focused on searching the crowd for Sara. She wasn’t there, but as he moved through their midst, he soon located a stairwell packed with people escaping the upper levels. Like a salmon thrashing up the face of a waterfall, he muscled into the mass of people and started climbing.
He recalled what Frey had told him, just before the attack. Sara had gone to the fourth floor. Was she still there?
Is she still alive?
King abandoned all pretense of being polite. We waved the gun ahead of him, and the crowd parted like sea in some biblical miracle. He reached the fourth floor a few moments later and burst through the door.
Most visitors had already evacuated, but the medical staff was busy moving patients, beds and all, to the elevator. Hospitals were one of the few places where using elevators in a fire was an absolute necessity. King caught the eye of one of the nurses, and was about to ask for Sara’s whereabouts, when a bloodcurdling shriek from down the hall startled them both.
“Never mind,” King breathed, and took off in the direction of the noise.
It wasn’t Sara. That wasn’t just wishful thinking. It hadn’t been Sara’s voice-he knew that with complete certainty-but more to the point, he couldn’t imagine any circumstances where Sara would scream. That knowledge however didn’t necessarily make him feel any better. Whatever was causing the persistent howl couldn’t be good.
The shriek led him to an open door, and he charged through with the MP5 at the ready. The scream was issuing from the woman thrashing in the single hospital bed in the room, but King barely noticed her. His attention was fixed on the two men in black assault gear that stood on the far side of the bed. One of them was in the process of sealing a plastic biohazard bag over what looked to King like a skull. The other was raising his gun.
King shot him between the eyes, but even as his finger released the trigger, the full impact of what he had just seen landed on him like a ton of bricks. That gun…
He shifted the machine pistol to the left, ready to take out the other attacker, but withheld fire when he saw the incendiary grenade in the man’s outstretched right hand. The pin was out and only the pressure of his fingers, covering the trigger spoon, kept it from deflagrating.
“Kill me and we all burn,” snarled the gunman.
King kept the weapon trained on the man and weighed the consequences of simply taking the shot. He knew he could escape the room before the grenade started burning, but there were other considerations, not the least of which was the hysterical patient.
The shooter edged away from the bed, the biohazard bag with its mysterious contents tucked under his left arm. He glanced down at his fallen comrade, and then met King’s stare. Although the balaclava concealed his visage, there was no mistaking the rage burning in his eyes. “Maybe not today, but you’re a dead man.”
King ignored the bluster, keeping his gaze and his MP5 steady as the man backed toward the door, but both of them knew exactly how it would end. The man took one more step toward the door, and then threw the grenade.
The gray cylinder arced through the air and landed on the bed. King squeezed the trigger, but the man was already gone, ducking as he fled into the hallway. The shot was an indulgence-a Hail Mary pass-and he hadn’t really expected to hit his target. Hit or miss, he had other things to worry about.
Unlike standard fragmentation grenades, which had a 3-to-5 second time delay fuze, the M201A1 igniter in the incendiary grenade burned in less than 2 seconds. In the instant he saw the spoon fly away from grenade body, even before it left his opponent’s hand, King started a very short countdown clock.
One Mississippi…
Even as the grenade landed on the bed… even as the round from his MP5 flashed through the suppressor on its way to nowhere, King’s mind tumbled with conflicting priorities.
The grenade! Deal with that first. How?
Two Mississippi…
He must have been counting too fast because nothing had happened yet.
None too gently, he snared the female patient’s flailing arm with his left hand and pulled her to him. In the same motion, he launched a kick at the bed’s side rail. Because its roll-brake had been engaged, the heavy bed only scooted a couple yards. Before King could lower his extended foot, the room was filled with brilliant white light.
He looked away quickly, but bright streaks now painted his retinas. The bed erupted in flames and smoke, both rendered almost invisible by the intensely bright fire from the burning grenade. Barely able to see anything except with his peripheral vision, King knelt over the frantic woman, hugging her to his chest, and stabbed the MP5 at the doorway.
He figured the odds were about fifty-fifty that the black clad intruder would be waiting for him in the hall; he expected to walk into a blast from the man’s very distinctive handgun. But staying in the room was not an option, and ‘maybe dead’ beat ‘definitely dead’ any day of the week.
This time, the odds broke in his favor. The other man was gone, evidently eager to escape with the prize contained in the plastic biohazard bag.
“You can let go.”
The voice, weak and breathless, startled him. He glanced down at the woman, locked in the embrace of his left arm, and realized she was no longer thrashing. He eased the pressure of his grip, but didn’t release her. She didn’t look strong enough to stand on her own, much less negotiate four flights of stairs to safety. Despite her abruptly calm demeanor, there was a trace of madness in her eyes. Her face was streaked with something that looked like baby food, and blood was leaking from her arm where her IV had ripped out.
King glanced at the blood, and for the first time, it occurred to him that this woman was almost certainly the patient whom Kerry Frey had spoken of, the patient in the isolation room. The patient whose illness had summoned Sara and her team across the ocean in the first place.
Wonderful, he thought, trying to imagine what almost-always-fatal new disease he had just been exposed to. There were definite drawbacks to having a CDC disease detective for a girlfriend.
But Sara wasn’t here. He didn’t think she would have abandoned a patient when the fire alarm sounded. So where was she?
Black smoke was beginning to billow from the open doorway, and he felt the glow of radiant heat on the exposed skin of his face and arms.
He turned to the woman again. “What’s your name?”
“Felice.”
“Felice, I’m Jack. I’m going to get you out of here, but you need to do what I say, okay?”
She nodded.
“Can you walk?”
“I think so. Let go.” He did, gradually releasing his embrace, but ready to catch her if her strength failed. After a few seconds on her own, she nodded again. “I can manage.”
“Good. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
8.
Fulbright cocked his head sideways, li
stening, and then frowned as he too heard the sound of footsteps echoing up the stairwell. “Damn it. All right, this isn’t going to be pretty. Just stay close to me.”
The lady or the tiger? Sara thought, recalling the classic short story of a Roman gladiator faced with two equally undesirable choices. She half-expected him to charge down the stairs, headlong into the force of unknown but surely superior strength, with guns blazing in typical CIA cowboy fashion, but instead he chose the other door. Literally.
He opened the roof access door just enough for them to squeeze through single file. As she stepped out, Sara got a better look at the waiting helicopter, and at the two men who appeared to be guarding it. Like the pair she had seen in hospital ward, they were clad entirely in black assault gear.
Sara felt very exposed as she followed Fulbright along the perimeter of the raised concrete superstructure that housed the stairwell. She expected at any moment to hear gunfire. Or maybe she wouldn’t hear anything; the bullet that would snuff her out of existence would probably be traveling faster than the sound of the shot.
That’s the kind of thing Jack would know.
But if the two men noticed their presence, they gave no indication.
Suddenly, the roof access door flew open behind them with such force that it rebounded off the exterior wall with a bang that, given Sara’s state of mind, sounded like a shot. She whirled involuntarily and caught sight of a lone individual, dressed in the now familiar black uniform, sprinting toward the helicopter. As he passed them, Sara saw that he was carrying a clear plastic bag with a large white-yellow object inside.
The ape skull!
The man did not even glance in their direction, but a moment later, two more men burst from the door, and they did look.
Sara gaped at them. It was like watching a movie. The two men turned, squared their shoulders, and raised their guns.
