Next to the Palace of fine Arts is Alameda Central Park. It was a huge splash of green, with lots of blue fountains, in the otherwise grey view.
Eventually, she had to return below to use the toilet. Inside she received a shock; the cubicle she used had a floor to ceiling window. It felt like she was suspended in the air. It was the best – and most frightening –toilet she had every used.
She felt a little cold from standing outside for so long, so she decided to grab a table and order a coffee.
As she sat on the forty-first floor, she could physically feel the building swaying slightly. It was an unnerving feeling. However, the building had survived the 1985 8.1 earthquake, so she presumed it would survive a little wind.
She grabbed some leaflets from a table by the bar. She sat looking for something interesting to do on her last few days in the city.
One photo caught her attention. It was called The Dance of the Flyers. It was an ancient ritual. Four men would climb an eighty-foot pole, which had rope wrapped around it. The rope was then tied around the men’s ankles, and they would hang from four bars eighty feet up, upside down as the rope slowly unwound, while playing musical instrument’s upside down as they gracefully dropped down to the ground below.
The display was in Chapultepec, more commonly called the Bosque de Chapultepec – Chapultepec Forest, which is one of the largest city parks in the Western Hemisphere, the leaflet stated.
There was also a zoo inside the park, and the Museum of Anthropology, she read.
She looked up from her reading, as she sipped her coffee, and studied the people around her, and the view out the window, she decided she couldn’t put it off any longer; she had to check her messages.
As she restarted her Samsung Note mobile phone, she nibbled on a biscuit that came with her coffee, as the large screen booted up.
As it flashed on the time announced it was 12:24 PM. She didn’t realize she had been ambling around for that long.
She got another even bigger shock when the servers kicked in. There were seventeen missed phone calls, twenty-nine texts, and nineteen emails.
When she opened the first email from Bull, the squads Comms Specialist, she understood why. Her stomach dropped, and she felt like the building was crashing down around her. Her worst nightmare had just taken physical form.
3
The email read:
From: [email protected]
Date: Friday, December 14, 2:17 AM GMT
To: [email protected]
Subject: The RABBIT is OUT of the hat!
Echo,
I repeat, the RABBIT is OUT of the hat! You are to get the next available flight home ASAP!
Echo’s head was still spinning. It was a coded message, one she always dreaded she would receive, but deep down, she believed would never arrive in her lifetime. It meant the seventh pod had been discovered and activated.
She checked the date. It was sent the day she flew out to Mexico. It had been spreading for five days!
She put her head in her hands, and closed her eyes. A single tear ran down over her high cheekbone and down her face.
The world as she knew it was about to change. Billions will die.
She had to get back to the base on Dartmoor. She had to return and do her job.
The little girl in the market who braided her hair popped into her mind. The old woman eating soup. The beggar on the metro. All of them would be gone within weeks. Everyone around her would be dead. The world was about to be scoured – wiped clean of all humans, apart from a select few chosen to carry the human race on.
Echo ignored all the other emails, texts and phone calls. It was obvious what they were all about.
She paid for the coffee as if she was in a daydream, and rode the elevator back to the street far below. It was as if her perspective of the world had just changed. One moment she was enjoying it, taking photos, arranging what to visit. The next, as she looked around all she could see was death. Everyone around her would become delivery devices for the virus.
Once outside the warmth hit her again, so low to the heated concrete jungle.
She wandered around a corner and leaned against the wall. People walked past as if nothing had happened.
If only they knew, she thought.
She dialed a number.
“Echo? Jesus am I glad to hear your voice. Where have you been? No one could get hold of you. Your father has been kicking up a shit storm,” Bull announced.
Echo ignored everything he said.
“Is it true?” She held her breath.
“I’m afraid so.” The squad’s communication expert listened to empty space for a few seconds while she realigned herself, letting the worse news possible truly sink in.
“When and where?” she muttered.
“You haven’t been listening to the news, or even seen a newspaper?”
“I’ve been unplugged from everything, enjoying my holiday.”
“It started in Madagascar. I have just sent you a link; you can watch it while you catch a taxi straight to the airport. Don’t even bother going back to your hotel.”
“I need my passport–” she started to say, when Bull cut her off. She could hear him typing on a keyboard.
“I’ve just diverted a military cargo plane that’s traveling from The Falkland Islands to Morocco; it will pick you up. It will be there within the hour. You are to meet it at Benito Juárez International Airport.” She could hear him still typing.
“Okay, it will meet you at Gate 14. I’m now arranging for someone to meet you at the departure entrance.”
Echo’s head was spinning. One minute she was enjoying her holiday, appreciating the view and people, and then the next minute, everything had dissolved around her.
“I will see you soon,” she muttered as she hung up the phone after remembering the details.
Echo hailed a green and white beetle taxicab. She stated the airport. The driver sped away.
She removed her earphones from her bag and plugged them into her phone. She watched the attachment that Bull had just sent. It was a report from the CNN news network.
“A group of nine loggers were airlifted out of a work site next to the Nosivolo River in Marolambo, Madagascar, and taken to Cape Town, South Africa, after apparently suffering from some unknown malady.
“Reports are sketchy at the moment, but what is known is within eight hours of the helicopter leaving for the Mananjary Airport, eighty-one miles away, the Madagascan government declared Marolambo, in the Atsinanana Region, in the Province of Tamatave, a quarantined area. All twenty-six thousand residents are said to be under house arrest.
“Also, the city of Mananjary, Fianarantsoa, where the plane took off from, has also been quarantined, with an estimated twenty-eight thousand civilians under house arrest.”
And there it was confirmation of her worst nightmare. To most people, it was just another outbreak that would be in the news a few days and fade away. Just like the swine or bird flu. Just people overreacting. However, she knew different; she knew what it truly meant. This one would only fade away after it had wiped humanity off the face of the planet.
Echo paid the taxi driver with a shaking hand. She wanted to shout at the man to run and hide, to take his family somewhere safe. However, she knew there were only a few locations in the world prepared for this situation.
Outside the departure’s main entrance, a man in an expensive dark grey suit was waiting for her. It looked like he had only just arrived himself.
“Miss. Philips, I’m Justin Huntington from the British Embassy; I’ve been sent to collect you and take you directly to your waiting plane, bypassing check-in. He waved a diplomatic document.” He looked about for her bags. He said nothing when he noticed she only carried a cloth handbag. It wasn’t his place to question orders.
“Please follow me.”
4
Echo sat covered with a thick green military blanket in a harnessed mesh seat just outside the coc
kpit of the large Boeing C-17 Globemaster III transport plane. It was on a standard delivery detail until it was diverted to pick her up.
It was cold in the unheated cargo hold.
The plane took off at 1:29 PM.
The hold was massive – cavernous in size. It held large crates strapped to the cargo floor and a helicopter with its blades folded back, and two jeeps. The plane could carry just over seventy tonnes. She had been on similar planes many times.
As the vibrations and hum of the plane dulled Echo’s senses, she sat staring at nothing, while working through her emotions.
She felt pleased that her father had ordered Bull to get her home as soon as humanly possible.
She knew if she stayed the remainder of her holiday, by the time the two weeks were over, there would be no commercial planes to take her home – they would all be grounded at an attempt to stop the virus spreading. It would be a futile endeavor – it would already be too late.
However, at the same time as being pleased with her father’s orders, she was annoyed that he was so bipolar with his affections. It was as if he only treated her a certain way because that was what was expected of him as a general in the British army.
After her mother passed away, she would go months without seeing him, even though they lived in the same large house, inside the prison walls.
Echo never considered it strange living so close to violent criminals. It wasn’t as if she had to live and shower with them. In all her years living at Dartmoor Prison, she only ever saw the prisoners if they were on day release, working on the compound.
As she grew older, she became more aware of them. As her body grew into a woman, they also became more aware of her. But she never had any bad experiences with any of them. When she was younger, the prison was for the worst of the worst – violent killers and rapists. But that all changed when it turned into a category C prison, which was for non-violent, white-collar inmates.
There was one old man she fondly remembered called Ronny, who pottered about the garden of her home. She never knew what he was inside for, but he was pleasant enough, and he obviously wasn’t very dangerous if her father allowed him around her.
Ronny taught her how to play chess and backgammon in the garden on an old, faded double-sided board, next to a large green house.
She remembered how he used to collect the old tea bags to place at the bottom of the tomato plants, claiming they worked magic. His tomatoes were always large, bright red and shiny, and tasted delicious. He had a habit of putting sea salt on a plate, then cutting the tomato in half, and slicing a cross in the cut side and grinding it into the salt before eating it like half an apple.
Then one day, when she was fourteen, Ronny disappeared; he went back to his cell and never returned. She asked what had happened to him, but she never received an answer. She often wondered if he passed away. She would have liked to be able to have paid her respects.
The large plane hit turbulence, and Echo was bumped out of her distracting reminiscing.
She pulled the netting tighter.
The memory of the crash into the coastal waters just off Tunisia flashed in her mind. The images, even years later were still so vivid. The feeling of weightlessness, and then the crushing force of the water as it poured over her, filling her mouth, nose and ears. The sound of the rendering metal and the pressure inside the cargo hold escaping through the ripped open fuselage in great hissing bursts. However, by far the worst part was the headless corpse of the soldier next to her, slumped against her shoulder.
One of her worst fears was flying. However, being in the army she had little choice in the matter. Whenever she had a holiday, she tried to fly as far as possible, trying to regain some sense of control.
The plane dropped forty or so feet as it hit a pocket of cooler air.
Echo gripped the webbing until her knuckles turned white.
The copilot touched her knee, jolting her from her daydreaming reminiscing.
“Touch down in twenty minutes,” he shouted over the hum and vibrations of the plane’s engines.
Echo simply nodded and gave a strained smile that she guessed looked false.
She knew the army pilot had no idea of what was coming, just like the vast majority of the human race. He would soon be a distant memory along with life as she knew it. Everything had changed in the moment that logger had touched the black, pulsating pod.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the padded seat.
The C-17 touched down in Agadir Morocco at 12:41 AM, where she then climbed into the back seat of the two seater Eurofighter Typhoon. It took the fighter jet, traveling at its 1.320 mph maximum speed, just over an hour to travel the fifteen hundred miles to reach the public airport of Exeter, where she was quickly placed on a Merlin helicopter and ferried to Dartmoor Prison.
5
Friday 21st December 2012
Day 6
As Echo touched down on the roof helipad at 2:38 AM, after traveling nonstop for just over thirteen hours, it wasn’t her father stood waiting for her; it was her aunty, Heather.
Heather waited for Echo to reach the door, and she pulled it open for her. She didn’t bother speaking until they were both inside, and the insulation of the door saved them from the worst of the sound of the downwash of the rotor blades.
Heather was looking elegant as usual, even though it was so early. Echo couldn’t tell if she had been up all night, or had just woken up. Even at the end of the world she looked like she was about to appear on the cover of a magazine, with her expensive clothes and perfectly positioned hair.
“Come here dear,” Heather muttered as she pulled her niece in for a hug.
Echo let her aunty hold her tight. She was always so touchy-feely, as if trying to make up for her having no mother and distant father.
She released Echo from the bear hug and held her at arm’s length, appraising her.
“You must be freezing in that?” She looked her up and down. She changed the topic.
“Your father said to tell you, you have five hours before you start back on duty. He said to clean up and catch some sleep. Your unit has been notified of your return, and they will meet you up at 8 AM in the Mess Hall.”
Heather was always the go between if ever Echo and her dad had a fight, or were having one of their quiet periods, where neither could be bothered to make the effort to be the first to break a month’s silence. Luckily, Echo had superiors and she didn’t have to answer to her father personally – there were way too many people between her lowly corporal position and him as a towering general.
“You know he would have liked to come up himself... But what with everything that’s happening, well, you know. He–”
“It’s okay Aunt. I understand.” She tried to smile, but she was so tired.
“Thanks for meeting me. I’m gonna hit the sack.”
“Okay.” She squeezed Echo’s shoulders affectionately. She still hadn’t release her. She pulled her in for one more hug, and then let her niece go.
“You’ll feel much better after a nice hot shower and a sleep,” she heard her aunty state as she wandered off to the lift.
Better? The world as we know it has started its downwards spiral into oblivion, and she thinks a few home comforts will right all the wrongs?
She loved her aunt Heather, and she didn’t know what she would do without her; sometimes she was her only anchor. However, Heather was still her father’s sister, and because of that, she still had some of his traits. They were nowhere near as bad as her fathers, but sometimes they did surface.
Echo wandered past some technicians who were jogging down the corridor. She stopped at the elevator. Then she realized something.
“Aunt Heather, I–” But as she went to turn her aunty was stood behind her.
“Here you go pumpkin,” Heather said as she swiped her card to access the lift. Echo’s card was still in the safe in her hotel room along with her passport.
Heather
said no more as the lift closed and Echo stood in the lift alone as it descended into the vast underground base.
Through the glass lift sides, she could see Zone 1, the main Adam and Eve city stretching out below. There were the tall trees, grass, and lakes around the circumference, with numerous buildings laid out in blocks.
This is where the chosen few will live and breed. Over a twenty-year period, they will fill the city with descendants, ready to reclaim the Earth above.
The army had their own section, Zone 6. That’s where Echo’s room was located, along with her squad and many other military personnel. The scientists and technicians lived in Zone 1, in their particular buildings.
There will be two hundred adult Adam and Eve finalists, along with their one hundred children. Also, two hundred and fifty scientist, one hundred doctors, two hundred military personnel – comprising of one hundred army, fifty navy, and fifty air force, and one hundred and fifty support staff, making a grand total of a thousand living in the subterranean bunker.
However, only the Adam and Eve finalist will be able to breed. Once everyone is safely locked away below the surface, everyone not selected to be a breeder will have their tubes tied.
Only the offspring of the chosen few will once again have the privilege of living on the planets surface. This is only after the hundreds of millions of souls above die in agonizing cries of pain and suffering, as the rolling black spores spread their death and darkness across the world, engulfing country after country, as the empty cities become becalmed for a twenty-year silence.
6
The Ark is vast.
The Sixth Extinction & The First Three Weeks & The Squads First Three Weeks Omnibus [Books 1-10] Page 48
