“Care to explain, Captain?”
Benton didn’t need to guess what they were. His letters to General Harper stared back at him; she had them all. But how?
“Where did you get these?” he said. He knew she would never tell him, but he voiced his thoughts anyway. He was caught, there was no use denying it now.
Albrecht smiled. Her lips were naturally mauve, darker than pink. They separated into a fine line as she sat on the edge of her desk, reminding him of a snake, cracking its lips in an anticipated attack.
“Let me ask you something, Captain,” she said, crossing her hands neatly over her knees. “What is it that you think we do here?”
Benton snorted. What a rhetorical question? Every time he thought he was beginning to understand what they did here on Plum Island, something new would throw him for a loop. It didn’t matter, though. It didn’t matter if Operation Blackout was a mystery or not. All that mattered was his job, and right now, in this very moment, it was on the line.
After he didn’t answer, Albrecht said, “Let me rephrase the question, Captain. Why would your superiors hire you to spy on a project that they are in charge of developing? What would be the purpose?”
It was a good question. No, a great one. Benton had wondered it himself many times, but he had no answer then and certainly not now.
“I’ll tell you why,” she said, hopping down from her desk. “Because they’re afraid of me. They’re afraid of anything they can’t control. All men are designed that way. No offense, Captain. But men are control freaks. Take a wild horse and try to tame her, that’s all men ever want to do. But not all animals can be disciplined, nor should they. Some are just too powerful to be restrained, and it is that very power that makes them beautiful.”
Benton chose his words carefully. “If that were so, then you wouldn’t be here. They would’ve chosen someone else for the project—”
Albrecht laughed at him as though he had said the funniest thing in the world. It scared the hell out of him.
“You have no idea who I am, do you?” she said. The smile vanished from her face. “If your superiors could have a man in my place, believe me, they would, but there isn’t a man on this planet that can do what I can, Captain. Women are the life force of this planet. Men may control it, but it is we who give it life.”
She opened her office door and motioned for him to follow. “Come, I want to show you something.”
Despite his instinct, Benton followed her anyway. They rode the elevator down in silence. For all he knew, she could be leading him straight to his death, sending him back in a box just like they did with the one before him, but once they were outside, he knew exactly where she was taking him. The slaughtered livestock in the compound had been replaced with fresh cows, the claw marks in the walls had been repaired; all visible signs of a mysterious creature attack had been erased from the island.
Quietly, without a word, she led him to the compound, using her keycard to get inside. Benton eyed it, making a note of the clip she kept it on.
He barely recognized the laboratory when they entered: It was teeming with scientists and strange looking equipment; animals trapped in cages, and people in hazard suits, rushing around with trays of petri dishes and loaded vials. Adam and Eve were nestled inside their cell, playing cards as though it were an ordinary day at the doctor’s office.
She led him down the ramp. “This laboratory was created for my father, Dr Abraham Albrecht. You may have heard of him. He received a Nobel Prize for his research in virology, and several others as well, including the Breakthrough Prize which earned him millions.”
“Money can buy you a lot of things,” said Benton. “Why not a lab?”
“Don’t misunderstand me, Captain. It wasn’t the money my father wanted, nor the fame. It was to heal the world, to find a way to end its suffering.”
Benton eyed a scientist injecting a serum into a helpless rabbit. “Some way to end suffering,” he muttered as the rabbit squirmed.
Albrecht followed his gaze. “It may seem cruel to you, Captain, but was it cruel when the Allies defeated Hitler? Or when the Chinese Kingdom of Xi Xia defeated the mad Genghis Khan? Without tragedy, there could be no future. We don’t consider any of what we do here, cruel, it’s science—"
“Comparing psychos to science isn’t exactly a good metaphor,” said Benton, following her over to a cage with clear walls, where a white rat sat with beady red eyes.
“You fail to see my point.” Albrecht slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and withdrew a needle from a secured, pressurized cabinet. It was filled with a dark substance.
“Have you ever heard of the Black Death, Captain?” she asked, carefully slipping her hands through the holes on top of the cage. “It was a plague back in the fourteenth century that nearly wiped out half of Europe’s population.” She grabbed the rat in her gloved-fist; it fidgeted beneath her grasp. “People rotted from the inside out, children lost parents, parents lost children; the streets were filled with corpses, the disease spreading faster than wildfire.”
The rat squirmed as she injected it with the needle.
All those deaths, and for what?” she said, her breath fogging the clear glass of the cage. “All because they couldn’t find a cure fast enough.”
She withdrew the needle and closed the cage. Benton watched as the rat’s movements became slow and heavy, dragging itself across the cage. He felt bad for the little bugger. Just like him, it had no choice. The rat fell on its back. It was having a seizure; its toes curled, its tail trembled, and within seconds, the rat was dead.
“Congratulations,” growled Benton. “You just produced the world’s worst pesticide—"
“Just wait . . .”
Wait? Wait for what? But the answer came shortly after. Suddenly, the rat’s body began to twitch. Its mouth chattered, its tail flickered to life. It was alive! It opened its eyes, but they were no longer red. They were black, as black as pitch. It rolled to its feet, taking one crippled step at a time. A strange clucking sound rose from its throat—Benton yelped in surprise as its tail split into three, whipping around the cage like tentacles. Its lips peeled back over its teeth. Bones broke and twisted; its toes turned into claws; its pale fur drifted down like snowflakes, covering the bottom of the cage—
It threw itself against the cage, driving its teeth across the surface; a black tongue lapped at them from behind the glass.
Benton’s horrified reflection danced in its beady, black eyes. It took him a while to find the words. “What the hell is that?” he uttered.
“That,” said Albrecht. “Is the reason why you are here. To make sure this,” she pointed to the rat creature, “doesn’t happen.”
Benton put two and two together. He looked up and said, “Are you telling me there’s some kind of virus out there that can do this?”
Albrecht crossed her hands behind her back. “You see, Captain, scientifically viruses are not living things. They’re nothing more than a gathering of molecules that need to enter a living cell in order to thrive. But my father, it was my father who believed that viruses are far more complex than what we originally thought; they can evolve, just like any other specimen on this planet, becoming stronger, mutating to survive in a world designed to destroy them, such as what you just saw, the Black.”
He felt a lump in his throat. “The Black?”
“It’s the most complex virus we’ve ever come across; something we’ve never seen before. Its effects are devastating. It not only kills its host, but it takes over their mind and body, turning them into the ultimate killing machine. The Black is unique in that way, it can survive and spread in ways you’ve never seen, making it impossible to destroy.”
Benton looked from the rat, trying to claw its way out of the cage, to Albrecht. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re saying this can’t be stopped?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” she said.
Benton looked back at the twins,
Adam and Eve, locked behind four clear walls. They were staring at the rat, more interested in it than their card game. He wondered what their part in it all was.
He said, “It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To find a cure for it; to find a way to keep it from getting out.”
Albrecht smiled at him, but there was nothing sincere about it. “Now why would I want to do that, Captain? I’m the one that created it—”
“Created it?” Benton scoffed. “This? I don’t believe you,” but he did. He didn’t know why, but he did, “Why would you do that? Why . . .”
“The question you need to ask yourself, Captain, isn’t why I did this, but why your superiors wanted me to. General Harper isn’t who you think he is, and Operation Blackout is just a stupid nickname given to a wicked game played by a bunch of greedy kings, no better than Hitler, Khan and the rest of them. But if you don’t believe me, then by all means, go back to your General and tell him what you saw here today. Tell him everything. Go on if you like. I won’t stop you. Conner did . . .”
She leaned in and whispered, “And look what happened to him.”
When Albrecht was finished with him, Benton returned to his room, no longer confused but terrified. Albrecht called it a virus, but that rat—that thing—that was no virus, that was something else entirely. He grabbed his duffel bag out of the closet and began filling it; shirts, pants, boots, toothbrush—his diary. It was a habit he developed many years ago, something to keep him busy while he was away at war. He flipped it open and grabbed his pen . . .
I have seen many things throughout my life, things I have done and witnessed that still haunt me to this day. There are few in this world that aren’t tortured by their mistakes. I am no exception. I am certainly no angel. When I was a boy, my mother once told me that Man is blessed with not only an angel on his shoulder but a devil as well. And that is why we are capable of both good and evil. I used to laugh at her when she said it, but now I know she was telling the truth. Demons do exist, I saw one today morph before my very eyes, turning a regular rodent into some unearthly creature. And I saw angels, too. Two tiny twins that appeared to be some kind of light down a very dark tunnel they call the Black. How they are a part of it, I can’t say for sure. But I do know one thing . . .
I can’t stay on this island any longer.
Chapter Eleven
The sun slipped past the horizon; shadows stirred in the cracks and crevices of a fallen neighborhood; crowded with ravaged homes, most of them with their rooftops caved in, or their windows smashed, and doors boarded; cars sat abandoned in the street. Signs flapped in the wind, posted on every street lamp and doorway, quarantining the entire area. A child’s swing set swayed in the wind, surrounded by trash pinwheeling across the playground; a dumpster sat on its side, filled with overflowing garbage—something moved inside it.
Two black, beady eyes emerged from the rubbish, glowing inside a shrunken skull, hairless and as black as pitch; the creature had no lips, no nose other than two slits above rotten, stunted teeth. It crawled out of the dumpster on legs that were long and spindly, bent back like that of a grasshopper; its spine was bony and curved, arched by a mountain of vertebrae protruding from its leathery flesh.
A clicking sound rose from its throat as it leapt from the ground and landed on top of the swing set with a heavy thump, rattling all the swings. It hovered on the rail like a gargoyle, peering out into the distance where hundreds of dark figures swept across the land. More appeared from behind the houses, crawling out of broken windows, slinking out of shadows, and hurdling across rooftops.
The hideous creature atop the swing set let out an ear-piercing howl and sprang from the swing set, rushing off to join the passing hoard . . .
Something was calling them.
* * *
The entire Nest was buzzing with news of the outsider. Everyone was talking about it; there wasn’t a man or woman or child in sight who wasn’t. The entire elevator ride down to the residential levels, Karma was bombarded with questions; people wanting to know where he came from, who he was, what happened to him and so forth. She had no answers for them. She didn’t know herself. All she knew was that whoever he was, wherever he came from, wasn’t normal, and she had the bruises on her wrist to prove it.
“Try to get some rest,” her mother said when they came through the door to their family bunker. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”
But she couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the outsider’s face, his dark eyes, dead and black, staring at her, wearing that strange expression across his face, like he was more scared of her than her of him.
During dinner, she barely touched it.
“Your peas are getting cold,” her mother warned her, but Karma wasn’t listening. Her mind was somewhere else—back in the underground laboratory and the tank where they discovered the outsider.
“Karma?”
She looked up from her plate with a blank stare. “Huh?”
Her mother shook her head but didn’t say anything. She was still mad about the junk run, she could tell.
“Tomorrow, I want Dr Carter to take a look at those,” her mother said, nodding toward the bruises on her wrist. “Make sure nothing’s broken.”
“I’m fine,” Karma uttered, mustering the energy to shovel a forkful of peas into her mouth. Her mother was right, the peas were cold.
“I’d rather be safe than sorry,” her mother said. “Ben can take you.”
Her mother looked at Ben, sitting there quietly eating his dinner—or pretending to—with his eyes plastered on his plate. For once, he had nothing to say. He hadn’t spoken since they returned from the med ward.
“I don’t need an escort,” Karma mumbled.
“It’s not up for debate,” her mother urged. She grabbed her empty plate and stood, giving Karma what she called the ‘stink eye.’
“And the next time you decide to volunteer for something,” her mother chastised. “I want to know about it.”
So, that’s what this was. Punishment. The first junk run in years and she was being punished for it.
After dinner, Karma retreated to her bedroom. She wanted to be alone, alone with her thoughts, but the minute she flopped on her bed, there was a soft knock at the door. She looked up and found Ben standing there, eyeing her with a similar ‘stink eye’ he inherited from their mother.
“I can’t believe you,” he said. He looked angry—no, furious. “What were you thinking volunteering for that junk run? You could’ve been killed.”
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t need to hear it from you, too. If anybody should be mad, it should be me.”
“You?” he blurted. “What for?”
“You know why,” she said. “I know you took that journal.”
Ben turned his nose to the ceiling. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Liar,” she spat. “You took it! I know you did!”
“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “All you ever do is deflect. You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?”
She felt like she had been hit in the face with a frying pan. “What?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know,” he said. “Admit it, you’re the favorite. You always have been—”
“Ben, that’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” he grumbled. “You don’t think I notice? Karma the smart one, the talented one. Nothing like her tormented, geeky, loser brother who comes home with black eyes every week.”
Karma was confused. She had no idea where any of this animosity was coming from. When she returned from the junk run, he looked so happy to see her back safe and sound, and now . . . now this.
“What’s your problem?” she lashed out. She was done with squabbling over nothing. If Ben had a point, she wanted him to get to it. Quick.
“I should’ve been the one out on that junk run,” he avowed. “I should’ve been the one out there in the field. Not you—”
“Ben, I . . .” she trailed off.
When she looked up, his eyes were brimming with tears.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like. The watchmen is all I have, and you can’t even give me that.”
“Ben,” she called after him, but he stormed away, ignoring her pleas to come back. She thought about chasing after him but decided against it. She knew better than to argue with him when he got into one of his rages.
She had gone on a junk run. So what? What was she supposed to do? Only Ben would take something so stupid so personal. If she could take it back, she would, especially if she knew how much it would hurt his feelings, but it was too late now. Maybe Ben was right. She didn’t get it. She didn’t understand how something so simple would stir so many emotions. When she volunteered for the junk run, she thought she was being brave, but all she managed to do was upset her entire family.
She curled into a ball on her bed, studying the bruises on her wrist. Malik insisted the outsider was no threat. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
The next morning, despite her mother’s protests, Karma returned to work. She was willing to do anything to keep her own thoughts from torturing her. That, and she didn’t want to see Ben who was off from training that day. There was no apology from either one of them during breakfast, and the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
For the first time in a really long time—really, really long time, that is—she took the stairwell to work, wanting to avoid the crowds and the questions, and not once did she think about her father. Instead, other things occupied her mind. And she wasn’t the only one—
“I wonder how the outsider managed to avoid the Flesh Rotters for so long,” Varra said, clinging onto the rail for support. The stairwell was huge, creeping up the narrow corridor like a giant caterpillar. “Do you think he could be from another silo?”
The Black (The Black Trilogy Book 1) Page 8
