The Noise

by James Patterson

  “…Dad?”

  He said the word so soft, barely audible, but it felt like the loudest thing he’d ever spoken.

  “This is not…your fight…son.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  “You’re interfering…in the natural order…of things.”

  The static was back, threatening to drown him out. The voice slipped away to near-nothingness.

  “Let it…happen.”

  Fraser turned back around and faced the little girl.

  Sophie had stopped moving and was glaring at him, her face blank, her lips slightly parted.

  “This is you!” he shouted at her. “Some kind of trick!”

  His father’s voice faded back in, fighting the static. “…over soon.”

  The noise erupted from the phone receiver. This screeching, terrible sound. Far worse than the recording, worse even than what he experienced in the helicopter over the horde. It felt as if a knife blade shot from the speaker in the phone and plunged into his ear. Fraser tried to pull the receiver away and found that he couldn’t. Instead, his hand pushed it tighter against his head, squeezing his ear between with enough force to crush the cartilage. He heard himself screaming and couldn’t stop that, either. He twisted hard to the right, slammed his back against the wall, then against his arm holding the phone, but his grip only tightened.

  He caught glimpses of the doctors in the room, the two girls, and Fraser had no memory of pulling his sidearm from the holster, but he caught a glimpse of that, too, the 9mm coming up. Felt his finger tighten on the trigger—once, twice, six times—the first shot targeting a soldier, then Harbin, finding him before turning on the others. The shots no doubt loud but unheard over all else.

  “So proud, son,” he heard his father say.

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  President

  When the video conference connected in the main cabin of Air Force One, the president stared up at the screen. Fraser looked out at the room with dead eyes. There was no other way to explain it. Distant, unfocused. The man looked like he was sleepwalking.

  On the president’s left, General Westin leaned forward, narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Soldier, are you okay?”

  The question seemed to take a moment to process. Then Fraser nodded. “Yes.”

  “You don’t look okay.”

  Fraser shifted nervously in his chair. “It’s been a trying day, sir.”

  The president let out a breath. “That it has.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you, sir.” He paused for a second, adding, “On several fronts.”

  “Explain.”

  Fraser did. He told them what happened with the bodies postmortem.

  “Like some kind of spontaneous combustion? How is that possible?”

  He went on to explain about the vibrations causing the noise. The friction on a cellular level somehow creating unprecedented levels of heat in the dead, that heat igniting when it had no place else to go.

  His words came slow, forced.

  Probably just tired. They all were.

  Westin was the first to respond. “So we can’t just kill them. We need to incinerate them before that combustion takes place, is that what you’re telling us?”

  Fraser didn’t answer. He only stared at them blankly.

  “Soldier?”

  His eyes blinked. “Sorry. I…I don’t know if that would work.”

  “You have test subjects there. Test it!” Westin fumed. “Incinerate one of those bastards!”

  The president placed a hand on the man’s arm. “General, that’s enough.”

  Westin’s face grew redder. “We’re about to lose the western seaboard. The time for any morality—perceived, real, or otherwise—is long gone!”

  The president was ready to object when Fraser spoke again.

  “The test subjects are all dead, sir. The last one died a few minutes ago during an fMRI scan.”

  “Christ.”

  “What did you do to the body?” Westin asked.

  “We managed to get it outside before it combusted, but it was close. Faster than the others. Dr. Harbin theorized it was because she was one of the original runners from Mount Hood. He thinks the longer they’ve been infected, the faster the reaction after death.”

  The president said, “This explains all the fires cropping up behind them. We thought they were secondary, caused by damage to the infrastructure after the horde passes through, but that didn’t explain the ones back in the mountains—there’s nothing left of Zigzag.” He paused as another thought entered his head. “What happens if they stop running?”

  “Harbin believes that may be a trigger, too,” Fraser replied. “Their bodies are producing excessive amounts of energy, they’re burning much of it by running, by keeping in motion. This buildup seems to occur when they’re still…dead or alive.”

  The president looked down at the table. “Then our plan won’t work.”

  Westin turned to him. “It will still work if we add a final component—we blow the bridges, trap the horde, and incinerate them.”

  Fraser cocked his head. “Plan, sir?”

  “Remember what I told you about the Columbia River?”

  “They can’t cross. The river is too wide.”

  The president nodded. “The Willamette River runs along the eastern edge of Portland and poses a similar challenge for them. To reach the city, they need to cross the water, but it’s deep in most parts. General Westin has suggested blowing all the bridges between the horde and the city as they near it.”

  “Before they have a chance to react and alter course,” Westin jumped in. “We blow the bridges, trap them on one side of the water.” He looked back at the president. “Sir, that’s our window, our only offensive option. While they’re backed up at the river’s edge, stumbling over one another trying to get around that water, we take them out.”

  “By killing them,” the president said flatly.

  Westin was no longer holding back. “Every last one, yes, sir.”

  “How do we know a bomb won’t trigger this spontaneous combustion and create a secondary explosion, something we don’t have control over?”

  “We use a thermobaric weapon,” Westin told him. “A fuel-air explosive. Thermobarics use all the surrounding oxygen in their blast wave. Without oxygen to fuel it, there is no secondary explosion.”

  “You don’t know that. Not for sure,” Fraser countered.

  Westin glared at the screen. “Do you still have the girls?”

  Fraser nodded.

  “Then test the theory. Put one of them in the hyperbaric chamber at McChord, suck the air out, and see what happens.”

  Fraser didn’t reply. He seemed to be waiting for the president to object.

  The president didn’t.

  Fraser finally said, “It wouldn’t be a valid test. Neither girl appears to be a hundred percent infected. The older one is no longer showing symptoms, and the younger one is somewhere in between.”

  Westin turned back to the president. “Sir, we need a decision on this. If we’re going to mobilize, we need to do it now.”

  The president said, “Have your doctors come up with another option? Some other way to stop them?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir.”

  The president fell silent for a moment. He felt additional eyes on him but didn’t turn to see who had entered the room. It really didn’t matter anymore. Westin was right. They were out of time. He needed to act. “Then we no longer have a choice. Our closest assets are at McChord, Lieutenant Colonel. I’ll need you to coordinate this from the ground under General Westin’s command.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Westin said, “Report to the airfield and stand by, soldier. I’ll be in touch shortly.”

  The president reached forward and pressed a button on the conference table’s embedded panel, disconnecting the call.

  “You’re doing the right thing, sir,” Westin told him.

  How
could killing nearly one million Americans be the right thing?

  The president didn’t answer. Instead, he rose and started back toward his office.

  Westin stopped him at the door. “Sir. Thermobaric weapons should be effective. There’s also no radiological effect. They’re the perfect first choice.”

  “But…”

  Westin fell silent for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “We’ve also got the capability to launch a nuclear strike from orbit. Surgical, defined.” He hesitated. “I’d like permission to align those assets as a backup plan should the thermobaric fail.”

  The president couldn’t look at him.

  “I need a moment.”

  He pushed by and entered his office, closing the door in the general’s face.

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Martha

  As the president’s face vanished from the monitor in the Lewis–McChord dead room, Fraser cocked his head over his shoulder. “You can untie me. I’m okay now.”

  Martha stood in the shadows off to the side, Harbin opposite her, both purposely concealed from the video conference camera. With his good arm, Harbin was holding a 9mm against his thigh, his index finger hovering over the trigger guard. Martha had told him she didn’t want a weapon.

  “It wore off, whatever she did to me with that phone call. Untie me.”

  Stepping behind Fraser’s back, Harbin looked over at her, a light sheen of sweat on his pale face. She’d bandaged his arm as best she could with such limited time. The bullet had managed to avoid the humerus and gone straight through, but the bleeding hadn’t stopped, only slowed. He’d need stitches.

  Fraser’s neck was red and angry where she’d hit him with the heavy battery, the only thing that had been within reach when he started shooting.

  When he had pulled his gun, things seemed to move in slow motion.

  Martha saw the sweeping motion of his arm, watched as he took aim, first at one of the soldiers, then at Harbin. The soldier had been facing away and went down instantly. Harbin managed to rock to the side, more of a flinch at the harsh sound of the first shot than an attempt at evasion, and that probably saved his life. Even as Fraser fired, it was clear he tried to fight whatever commanded him—he threw the phone receiver aside, his arm shaking. After the shot that hit Harbin, he swung the weapon to his left and down, putting four bullets into Rosalin Agar, killing her while she lay bound and immobile in the fMRI machine. His gun was rising and aligning with Sophie when Martha picked up the battery and brought it down on the back of his head, at the base of his neck. The awkward angle with which she struck sent her to the ground right behind him, and her head hit the concrete a few inches from the phone receiver. For one brief instant, she heard a voice on the other side of that call, an impossible voice: her little girl, Emily.

  Come home, Momma. Come run with me.

  When she scooped up the receiver, there was no one there, only dead air.

  Martha shook off the memory and peered at Fraser in the dimly lit dead room.

  Although clearly agitated, his voice remained calm. “I don’t know how she did it, but now that we know she can, we can prevent it. We know it’s not real.”

  “What did you hear?” Harbin asked him.

  Fraser’s eyes fell to the top of the conference table, but he didn’t hold back. “My father.”

  “Your dead father.”

  He nodded. “Ben. Ben Fraser. The other name that girl mentioned, Eldridge, is my grandfather. I don’t understand how she’d know either of those names.”

  Martha had brought the iPad. She pointed the camera down at Fraser. She studied the screen for a moment, then turned it toward Harbin so he could see, too.

  Harbin said, “You’re not vibrating. You’re not infected. At least, not now.”

  “Untie me.”

  Martha only glared at him. “The president ordered you to kill the girls.”

  “And now he knows I won’t do that. Do you think I’m the last person he’ll ask? There’s too much at stake, especially if they consider her to be a source of the infection. They might be on the line with someone else right now. Untie me.”

  “So you can what? Get out to the airfield and run point for Westin?”

  “Yes. Do you think you’ll somehow stop our response by keeping me here? The military option is already in motion. You had your chance; it’s too late. If the horde absorbs Portland, this is over. It will overrun the country, the continent, possibly beyond that if some other government doesn’t shut it down first.”

  “Your orders are to corral all these people so that general can exterminate them. I can’t be part of that,” Martha countered.

  Harbin had fallen oddly quiet. He was slowly pacing the floor. When he stopped, there was a resigned look on his face. He reached over and gently squeezed Martha’s shoulder. “We need to let him go. He’s right. He has a job to do. We failed.”

  Martha turned on him. “One million people! They’re going to kill one million people!”

  “The president has no other option. We were meant to provide one and we failed. It’s time to step aside.”

  “Look, Doctor,” Fraser said, “I know this is difficult to hear, but if the president doesn’t act, if he doesn’t stop this, some other government will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but they will. There’s already chatter coming out of the European Union, Russia, Korea, China…You’ve seen how fast this spreads. If it’s allowed to continue for a week, how many will die then? How many in two weeks? How long before it can’t be stopped at all?”

  Martha shook him off and took a step back. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “We’re close. We’re missing something. We can’t just give up.”

  “We’re out of options. Out of time.”

  She looked back down at Fraser. “The man you found in Dover, the one handcuffed in his basement. You said he was alone, right?”

  Fraser nodded.

  “That’s what I don’t understand. If he was alone, how was he infected?”

  “The noise,” Harbin replied. “That sound somehow reached him.”

  “We’ve all been exposed to the noise at some level and we’re not infected, at least not completely. Those two girls most of all. Tennant has recovered and Sophie is…she’s something, but not full-blown infected, not like the others.” She looked up at them, her eyes growing wide. “We know the people in the horde are generating the noise but what if that’s only part of it? What if the noise isn’t the source of the infection at all but some kind of by-product? What if something else is infecting everyone and the noise is the result of that infection rather than the other way around?”

  “Could it be two things?” Harbin suggested. “The noise, when combined with something else, leads to full-blown infection? C4 is benign until you run a current through it. Bleach is fairly harmless until you mix it with something acidic, then you get chlorine gas. Maybe that’s why we’re having so much trouble identifying the source—there are two sources. Two halves to a whole.” To illustrate this he held out both his arms and brought them together, clasping his fingers. “That still gives us a chicken and egg scenario—what came first, the noise or the infection? Where did it come from?”

  Martha looked over at Fraser. “You said USGS believed the noise was generating from underground.”

  “I was told that’s initially what they believed.”

  “But not anymore?”

  Fraser didn’t answer.

  “We need to speak with Frederick Hoover.”

  “It’s too late, Hoover’s a waste of time.”

  There was something in the way he said that last bit, both Martha and Harbin heard it.

  The 9mm twitched in Harbin’s good hand. He knelt beside Fraser’s chair. “You know something. You’re holding back.”

  Fraser’s gaze went from Harbin to Martha and back again. Finally, he said, “Hoover’s a dead end.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Again, Fraser
went quiet.

  “We’re close, I know we are,” Martha said, attempting to control the emotion in her voice. “We can’t stand around and wait for the bombs to drop. Let us try.”

  A long moment passed, Fraser studying both of them. Finally, he said, “My right pants pocket.”

  Martha looked up at Harbin who nodded; she reached into Fraser’s pocket. She found a small hard drive and held it up to the light. “What’s on it?”

  Fraser ignored her question. “I need a radio. I’ve got to speak to one of my men.”

  “No way.”

  He looked her dead in the eye. “You either trust me or you don’t.”

  “Do you hear the noise anymore?”

  Fraser shook his head.

  “What about Sophie?”

  “Nothing. I don’t hear a damn thing. I’m fine. You can trust me.”

  Harbin leaned closer to Martha and said softly, “What choice do we have? Without his help, we’ll be locked in a room watching this play out.”

  She didn’t trust that man, not one bit, but Harbin was right. They had maybe an hour before the horde reached Portland. The president’s plan was in motion, already decided. Even if Fraser somehow betrayed them, they’d be no worse off for it. She reached for the radio transmitter on the conference table and held the microphone out to him.

  Fraser said, “Put it on channel one thirty-eight.”

  Harbin studied the controls, twisted a knob, and nodded at Martha. She pressed the transmit button.

  Fraser cleared his throat, “McMichael? This is Fraser. Copy?”

  “Copy, sir.”

  “I need you to prep a chopper on runway beta. Radio ahead and tell LaValley to ready for flight. Dr. Harbin will accompany you.”

  “Destination?”

  Martha snatched the microphone from him. “Why not me and the girls? Why just Harbin?”

  Fraser looked up at her, his face hard. “This only works if someone gets out unnoticed. There are too many eyes on the girls and I need you to stay with them, keep the young one…stable.”

  “He’s right,” Harbin agreed. “We’d never get Sophie out of that hangar.”