The Atlantis Plague: A Thriller (The Origin Mystery, Book 2)

by Riddle, A. G.

  She bent over and began feeling around in the darkness under the cot. Finally, she grasped the bottle of vodka and brought it out. She grabbed a paper cup from the bedside table, blew out the dust, poured a sailor-sized gulp, and turned the bottom up.

  She set the bottle down and stretched out on the bed. She extended her arm past her head and punched the button to turn the old radio on. It was her only source of information on the outside world, but what she heard she hardly believed.

  The radio reports described a world that had been saved from the Atlantis Plague by a miracle drug: Orchid. In the wake of the global outbreak, industrialized nations had closed their borders and declared martial law. She had never heard how many had died from the pandemic. The surviving population, however many there were, had been herded into Orchid Districts—massive camps where the people clung to life and took their daily dose of Orchid, a drug that kept the plague at bay, but never fully cured it.

  Kate had spent the last ten years doing clinical research, most recently focused on finding a cure for autism. Drugs weren’t developed overnight, no matter how much money was spent or how urgent the need. Orchid had to be a lie. And if it was, what was the world outside really like?

  She had only seen glimpses. Three weeks ago, Martin had saved her and two of the boys in her autism trial from certain death in a massive structure buried under the Bay of Gibraltar. Kate and the boys had escaped to the Gibraltar structure—what she now believed to be the lost city of Atlantis—from a similar complex two miles below the surface of Antarctica. Her biological father, Patrick Pierce, had covered their retreat in Gibraltar by exploding two nuclear bombs, destroying the ancient ruin and spewing debris into the straits, almost closing them. Martin had spirited them away in a short-range submersible just minutes before the blasts. The sub barely had enough power to navigate the debris field and reach Marbella, Spain—a coastal resort town roughly fifty miles up the coast from Gibraltar. They had abandoned the sub in the marina and entered Marbella under the cover of night. Martin had said it would only be temporary, and Kate hadn’t taken any notice of her surroundings. She knew they had entered a guarded resort, and she and the two boys had been confined to the spa building since.

  Martin had told Kate that she could contribute to the research being done here—trying to find a cure for the Atlantis Plague. But since her arrival here, she had rarely seen him or anyone else, save for the handlers that brought food and instructions for her work, which she hardly understood.

  She turned the tube around in her hand, wondering why it was so important to them and when they would come for it. And who would come for it.

  She looked over at the clock. The afternoon update would come on soon. She never missed it. She told herself she wanted to know what was happening out there, but the truth was more simple. What she really wanted to hear was news of one person: David Vale. But that report never came, and it probably wouldn’t. There were two ways out of the tombs in Antarctica—through the ice entrance there in Antarctica or via the portal to Gibraltar. Her father had closed the Gibraltar exit permanently, and the Immari army was waiting in Antarctica. They would never let David live. Kate tried to push the thought away as the radio announcer came on.

  You’re listening to the BBC, the voice of human triumph on this, the 78th day of the Atlantis Plague. In this hour, we bring you three special reports. First, a group of four offshore oil rig operators who survived three days at sea without food to reach safety and salvation in the Orchid District of Corpus Christi, Texas. Second, a special report from Hugo Gordon, who visited the massive Orchid production facility outside Dresden, Germany and dispels vicious rumors that production of the plague-fighting drug is slowing. We end the hour with a roundtable discussion featuring four distinguished members of the royal society who predict a cure could come in weeks, not months. But first, reports of courage and perseverance from Southern Brazil, where freedom fighters yesterday won a decisive victory against guerrilla forces from Immari-controlled Argentina...

  CHAPTER 2

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Dr. Paul Brenner rubbed his eyelids as he sat down at his computer. He hadn’t slept in twenty hours. His brain was fried, and it was affecting his work. Intellectually, he knew he needed rest, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. The computer screen flashed to life, and he decided he would check his messages, then allow himself a one-hour nap—tops.

  1 NEW MESSAGE

  He grabbed his mouse and clicked it, feeling a new surge of energy…

  FROM: Marbella (OD-108)

  SUBJECT: Alpha-493 Results (Subject MB-2918)

  The message contained no text, only a video that instantly began playing. Dr. Kate Warner filled his screen, and Paul fidgeted in his chair. She was gorgeous. For some reason, just seeing her made him nervous.

  Atlantis Plague, Trial Alpha-493… result negative.

  When the video ended, Paul picked up the phone. “Set up a conference—All of them—Yes, now.”

  Fifteen minutes later he sat at the end of a conference table, staring at the twelve screens in front of him, each filled with the face of a different researcher at a different site around the world.

  Paul stood. “I just received the results of Trial Alpha-493. Negative. I—”

  The scientists erupted with questions and incriminations. Eleven weeks ago, in the wake of the outbreak, this group had been clinical, civil… focused.

  Now the prevailing feeling was fear. And it was warranted.

  CHAPTER 3

  Orchid District

  Marbella, Spain

  It was the same dream, and that pleased Kate to no end. She almost felt as though she could control it now, like a video she could rewind and relive at will. It was the only thing that brought her joy anymore.

  She lay in a bed in Gibraltar, on the second floor of a villa just steps from the shore. A cool breeze blew through the open doors to the veranda, pushing the thin white linen curtains into the room, then letting them fall back to the wall. The breeze seemed to drift in and retreat out in sync with the waves below, and with her long, slow breaths there in the bed. It was a perfect moment, all things in harmony, as if the entire world were a single heart, beating as one.

  She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, not daring to close her eyes. David was asleep beside her, on his stomach. His muscular arm rested haphazardly across her stomach, covering most of the large scar there. She wanted to touch his arm, but she wouldn’t risk it—or any act that could end the dream.

  She felt the arm move slightly. The subtle motion seemed to shatter the scene, like an earthquake shaking, then bringing down the walls and ceiling. The room shuddered one last time and faded to black, to the darkened, cramped “cell” she occupied in Marbella. The soft comfort of the queen bed was gone, and she lay again on the harsh mattress of the narrow cot. But… the arm was still there. Not David’s. A different arm. It was moving, reaching across her stomach. Kate froze. The hand wrapped around her, patted her pocket, then fumbled for her closed hand, trying to get the tube. She grabbed the thief’s wrist and twisted it as hard as she could.

  A man screamed in pain as Kate stood, jerked the chain on the light above, and stared down at…

  Martin.

  “So they sent you.”

  Her adoptive father struggled to get back to his feet. He was well past sixty, and the last few months had taken a toll on him physically. He looked haggard, but his voice was still soft, grandfatherly. “You know, you can be overly dramatic sometimes, Kate.”

  “I’m not the one breaking into people’s rooms and patting them down in the dark.” She held the tube up. “Why do you want this so much? What’s going on here?”

  Martin rubbed his wrist and squinted at her, as if the single light bulb swinging in the room was blinding him. He turned, grabbed a sack off the small table in the corner, and handed it to her. “Put this on.”

  Kate
turned it over. It wasn’t a sack at all—it was a floppy white sun hat, the type one of her fun but high-maintenance college friends might have worn to a horse race. Martin must have taken it from the remains of one of the Marbellan vacationers. “Why?” Kate asked.

  “Can’t you just trust me?”

  “Apparently I can’t.” She motioned to the bed.

  Martin’s voice was flat, cold, and matter of fact. “It’s to hide your face. There are guards outside this building, and if they see you, they’ll take you into custody, or worse, shoot you on sight.” He walked out of the room.

  Kate hesitated a moment, then followed him, clutching the hat at her side. “Wait. Where are you taking me?”

  “You want some answers?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “But I want to check on the boys before we go.”

  Martin eyed her, then nodded.

  Kate cracked the door to the boys’ small room and found them doing what they spent ninety-nine percent of their time doing: writing on the walls. For most seven- and eight-year-old boys, the scribblings would have been dinosaurs and soldiers, but Adi and Surya had created an almost wall-to-wall tapestry of equations and math symbols.

  The two Indonesian children still displayed so many of the hallmark characteristics of autism. They were completely consumed with their work; neither noticed Kate enter the room. Adi was balancing on a chair he had placed on one of the desks, reaching up, writing on one of the last empty places on the wall.

  Kate rushed to him and pulled him off the chair. He waved the pencil in the air and protested in words Kate couldn’t make out. She moved the chair back to its rightful place: in front of the desk, not on top of it.

  She squatted down and held Adi by the shoulders. “Adi, I’ve told you: do not stack furniture and stand on it.”

  “We’re out of room.”

  She turned to Martin. “Get them something to write on.”

  He looked at her incredulously.

  “I’m serious.”

  He left and Kate again focused on the boys. “Are you hungry?”

  “They brought sandwiches earlier.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Can’t tell you, Kate.”

  Kate nodded seriously. “Right. Top secret.”

  Martin returned and handed her two yellow legal pads.

  Kate reached over and took Surya by the arm to make sure she had his attention. She held up the pads. “From now on, you write on these, understand?”

  Both boys nodded and took the pads. They flipped through them, inspecting each page for marks. When they were satisfied, they wandered back to their desks, climbed in the chairs, and resumed working quietly.

  Kate and Martin retreated from the room without another word. Martin led Kate down the hall. “Do you think it’s wise to let them go on like that?” Martin asked.

  “They don’t show it, but they’re scared. And confused. They enjoy math, and it takes their minds off things.”

  “Yes, but is it healthy to let them obsess like that? Doesn’t it make them worse off?”

  Kate stopped walking. “Worse off than what?”

  “Now, Kate—”

  “The world’s most successful people are simply obsessed with something—something the world needs. The boys have found something productive that they love. That’s good for them.”

  “I only meant… that it would be disruptive for them if we had to move them.”

  “Are we moving them?”

  Martin sighed and looked away. “Put your hat on.” He led her down another hallway and swiped a key card at the door at the end. He swung it open and the rays of sunlight almost blinded Kate. She threw her arm up and tried to keep up with Martin.

  Slowly, the scene came into focus. They had exited a one-story building right on the coast, at the edge of the resort compound. To her right, three whitewashed resort towers rose high above the lush tropical trees and previously well-maintained grounds. The glitzy hotel towers struck a harsh contrast to the twenty-foot tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that lined the development. In the light of day, this place looked like a resort that had been made into a prison. Were the fences to keep people in—or out? Or both?

  With each passing step, the strong odor that hung in the air seemed to grow more pungent. What was it? Sickness? Death? Maybe, but there was something else. Kate scanned the grounds near the bases of the towers, searching for the source. A series of long white tents covered tables where people worked with knives, processing something. Fish. That was the smell, but only part of it.

  “Where are we?” Kate asked.

  “The Marbella Orchid Ghetto.”

  “An Orchid District?”

  Martin resumed walking on a path that led to another building along the beach. “The people inside call it a ghetto, but yes.”

  Kate jogged to catch up. She held her hat in place. Seeing this place and the fences had instantly made her take Martin’s words more seriously.

  She glanced back at the spa building they had exited. Its walls and roof were covered in something—a dull gray-black sheeting. Lead was Kate’s first thought, but it looked so odd—the small, gray, lead-encased building by the coast, sitting in the shadow of the gleaming white towers.

  As they moved along the path, Kate caught more glimpses of the camp. In every building, on every floor, there were a few people standing, looking out the sliding glass doors, but there wasn’t a single person on a balcony. Then she saw why: a jagged silver scar ran the length of the metal frame of every door. They had been welded shut.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  Martin motioned to the single-story building ahead. “To the hospital.”

  The “hospital” had clearly been a large beachside restaurant on the resort grounds. They passed an abandoned beach bar, and Kate noticed that the shelves that would have held liquor bottles were empty. At the other end of the camp, beyond the white towers, a convoy of loud diesel trucks roared to the gate and stopped. Kate paused to watch them. The trucks were old, like something from World War II, and they hid their cargo behind flopping green canvases pulled over the ridges of their spines. The lead driver shouted to the guards, and the chain-link gate parted to let the trucks pass.

  Kate noticed blue flags hanging from the guard towers on each side of the gate. At first she thought it was the UN flag—it was light blue with a white design in the middle. But the white design in the center wasn’t a white globe surrounded by olive branches. It was an orchid. The white petals were symmetrical, but the red pattern that spread out from the center was uneven, like rays of sunlight peeking out from behind a darkened moon during a solar eclipse.

  The trucks pulled to a stop just beyond the gate and soldiers began dragging people out—men, women, and even a few children. Each person’s hands were bound, and many struggled with the guards, shouting in Spanish.

  “They’re rounding up survivors,” Martin whispered, as if they could hear him from this distance. “It’s illegal to be caught outside.”

  “Why?” Another thought struck Kate. “There are survivors—who aren’t taking Orchid?”

  “Yes. But… they aren’t what we expected. You’ll see.” He led her the rest of the way to the restaurant, and after a few words with the guard, they passed inside—into a plastic-lined decontamination chamber. Sprinkler nozzles at the top and sides opened and sprayed them down with a mist that stung slightly. For the second time, Kate was glad to have the hat. In the corner of the plastic chamber, the red miniature traffic light changed from red to green, and Martin pushed through the flaps. He paused just outside the threshold. “You won’t need the hat. Everyone here knows who you are.”

  As Kate pulled the hat from her head, she got her first full view of the large room—what had been the dining room. She could barely believe the scene that spread out before her. “What is this?”

  Martin spoke softly. “The world isn’t what they describe on the radio. This is the true
shape of the Atlantis Plague.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Two Miles Below Immari Operations Base Prism

  Antarctica

  David Vale couldn’t stop looking at his dead body. It lay there in the corridor, in a pool of his blood, his eyes still open, staring at the ceiling above. Another body lay across him—that of his killer, Dorian Sloane. Sloane’s body was a mangled mess—David’s final bullets had hit Sloane at close range. Occasionally a piece of the carnage would peel off the ceiling, like a slowly disintegrating piñata.

  David looked away from the scene. The glass tube that held him was less than three feet wide, and the thick wisps of white fog that floated through it made it feel even smaller. He glanced down the length of the giant chamber, at the miles of other tubes, stacked from the floor to a ceiling so high he couldn’t see the end. The fog was thicker in those tubes, hiding the inhabitants. The only person he could see stood in the tube across from him. Sloane. Unlike David, he never looked around. Sloane simply stared straight at David, hate in his eyes, his only movement the occasional flexing of his jaw muscles.

  David briefly looked into his killer’s glaring eyes, then resumed studying his tube for the hundredth time. His CIA training didn’t cover anything like this: how to escape from a hibernation tube in a two-million-year-old structure two miles below the surface of Antarctica. There was that class on escaping from tubes in one-million-year-old structures, but he had missed that day. David smiled at his own lame joke. Whatever he was, he hadn’t lost his memories—or his sense of humor. As the thought faded, he remembered Sloane’s constant stare, and David let the smile slip away, hoping the fog had hidden it from his enemy.

  David felt another pair of eyes on him. He looked up, then around, then up and down the chamber. It was empty, but David was sure there had been someone there. He tried to lean forward, straining to see deeper into the corridor with the dead bodies. Nothing. As he panned around, something alarmed him—Sloane. He wasn’t staring at David. David followed Sloane’s gaze into the vast chamber. Between their tubes, a man stood. At least, he looked like a man. Had he come from outside or inside? Was he an Atlantean? Whatever he was, he was tall, easily over six feet, and dressed in a crisp black suit that looked like a military uniform. His skin was white, almost translucent, and he was clean-shaven. His only hair was a thick stock of white atop his head—which might have been a little oversized for his body.