by Jon Land
Vicky kept right on going. “I do.”
* * *
The exam and hospital-type rooms, which turned out to be more like wards cut into cubicles with plastic curtains draped between beds, were all empty. No patient, infected or otherwise, was present. But rumpled bed linens remained in place, stained in patches by something the color of mold.
Vicky took out her phone and snapped some pictures. The automatic flash cut through the murky darkness, illuminating something on the floor.
“Clearly, the clinic’s been evacuated,” Van Royce was saying. “By the Egyptian government or military.”
Vicky crouched and activated the flashlight feature on her phone. “We need to know what happened here. We need to figure this out.”
“Not if it means walking straight into a hot zone,” he cautioned. “We shouldn’t have ventured in this far, should never have risked exposure. Where the hell did they go; the patients, the doctors, the Egyptian government representatives we were supposed to meet?… What in God’s name happened?”
“Look at this,” Vicky said, aiming her iPhone’s flashlight downward, so Van Royce could see what she’d just spotted.
She felt him crouch alongside her. “Are those…”
“Footprints,” Vicky completed for him, using the focused beam to trace their shape, dried dark red. “Left in blood, leading from that bed with the rumpled linens.”
Van Royce tugged her back upright with him. “We’ll drive into the village, find the nearest military post,” Van Royce said, leading the way outside as he checked his phone yet again. “Nothing,” he reported.
“Then let’s go find something.”
* * *
They saw no other moving vehicles, as their driver wound about the hard-packed gravel streets strewn with mud ruts. The only signs of life they passed were squawking chickens, a few stray dogs, and a soccer ball blowing back and forth between a pair of buildings with battered roofs encased in plastic.
“It’s been evacuated,” Van Royce said, sweeping his gaze about.
“No,” corrected Vicky, “abandoned, and fast. If it had been evacuated, a perimeter zone would’ve been established by the Egyptian military.” She spotted a shape, a shadow ahead, just off to the right. “Did you see that?” she asked Van Royce.
“See what?”
“I don’t know,” Vicky told him, looking for it again.
They were edging toward what looked like an outdoor market perched in a covered alley that turned day into night. She saw another shape, then a third, seeming to move from the darkness to the light, as if stirred by their presence.
“Did you—”
“Yes,” Van Royce interrupted, “this time, yes. There’s something moving out there, I saw them moving.…”
Van Royce stopped when, incredibly, Vicky’s phone buzzed, signaling an incoming call. She held his stare as she unclasped her iPhone from its holster and drew it upward.
Nothing, the screen dark, meaning no call had ever come in. She checked the watch Thomas had given her and found no CALL icon there either.
“Must be a glitch,” she said to Van Royce, not at all convinced of that.
Then Vicky’s Apple Watch chimed, signaling an incoming text message.
GET OUT! the watch display face read.
“Vicky!” Van Royce called to her.
Another chime.
GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!
Filling out the entire face of the watch and then continuing to scroll downward without pause.
“Vicky!”
Vicky looked up from the watch face toward their Egyptian driver “We need to get out of here,” she said, abruptly enough to startle him. “Now!”
“Vicky!” Van Royce wailed, his voice prickling with fear, eyes bulging.
“Drive!” she ordered the man behind the wheel whose name she suddenly couldn’t remember. “Drive!”
He gave the Land Rover as much gas as it would take, the tires squealing against the gravel.
“Faster, faster, for the love of God!” Vicky urged.
The driver reversed wildly, spinning the car around to retrace their route from the village.
GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!
The message scroll continued, as the Land Rover thumped and thudded over the rut-strewn street, the desert beyond the village in clear view now. It tore down the lone access road, both Vicky and Van Royce looking back at the village’s shrinking form.
GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OUT!GET OU-
The scroll finally stopped there, just as the first two explosions sounded, igniting a flame burst that swallowed the town from sight. The next two blasts followed in rapid succession, pushing out a shock wave that lifted the Land Rover off the road and dropped it back down without missing a step. The driver struggled to maintain control, the vehicle bucking like a bronco, and Vicky realized the windows and sunroof had cracked into varying sizes of spiderweb patterns from the same shock wave that had lifted the vehicle up and dropped it back down.
Behind them the village had vanished in a thick gush of smoke still belching plumes of fire. Vicky wasn’t sure whether the blast of heat she felt next was conjured by the continued ripple of secondary explosions or her imagination. But it didn’t matter.
Because the town of Ashkar, and whatever secrets it held, had vanished into oblivion.
Her breathing steadied, Vicky finally looked back at her watch’s face, the texts gone, seemingly sucked back into the ether of cyberspace, as if they’d never been there at all. But the number from which they’d come was embedded in her mind, frozen before her eyes.
404 … A Georgia exchange.
Her dead fiancé Thomas’s phone number.
PART 3
BEFORE
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing.
—Edmund Burke
TWENTY-THREE
London, England; 1990
The meteorite was the size of a football, though jagged at the edges, its ridged structure bright and shiny beneath the spill of the fluorescent work lights.
“It looks like quartz,” a young man whose name tag identified him as NICK advanced, rising from a crouch over the ground depression in which the purported meteorite had landed.
“Is that a scientific conclusion?” his field partner BETH, according to her name tag, asked him.
Nick smirked. “I was only saying.”
“We’re not supposed to do that,” she said, pad and pen in hand. “This is a scientific exploration, strictly.”
“Then my hypothesis is that the space object’s structure and appearance most closely resembles quartz deposits on our planet.”
“That’s better.…”
“Thank you.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Beth said acerbically, having jotted down the note Nick had recited. “I was going to say that’s better but…”
“There’s always a but, isn’t there?”
“… you should’ve said potential space object until we have gained confirmation.”
“Fine,” Nick relented. “Potential space object.”
“What kind? We need to determine a classification,” Beth told him.
Nick yanked the rock hammer from his tool belt. “Why don’t we just take a sample; you know, to shave off and examine under a microscope? Get a real close look.”
“Well,” Beth said, weighing Nick’s suggestion, “that would facilitate the carbon dating process.”
Nick flashed the smile that had been winning him girls since he was fourteen. “See, I’m not as stupid as I look.”
Beth gazed back into the depression in the ground shaped like a miniature crater. “Then how would you classify it?”
“We back to that again?”
“Come on, Nick: chondrit
e, iron, or carbonaceous?”
“Give me a hint.”
“Chondrite means stony.”
“Chondrite!”
Beth rolled her eyes. “But it’s ridged, not smooth.”
“Carbon-whatever then.”
“Last guess.”
“Okay, iron,” Nick said, positioning the rock hammer over one of the ridged finger-like extensions jutting out from the football-sized rock, where it looked to have broken off from a larger body. “Now it’s my turn.”
With that, he tapped the rock hammer lightly against the largest extension. When the sample he sought refused to yield, he tapped harder, then followed that up with a third strike that dropped the jagged knob into his work glove, revealing a dark hole.
“Uh-oh,” Nick managed, just before a thin cloud burst from inside the small meteorite, showering him in white drizzle that looked like powdered sugar.
The door to London’s Science Museum teaching lab opened and Pascal Jimenez stepped through, followed by the rest of the sixth form students from the Reading School, the equivalent of high school seniors in America, who’d come to the museum for a hands-on field trip. For Jimenez, professor of astrobiology and planetary science at the University of Oxford, everything had to be hands-on.
“I believe we’ve all learned an important lesson,” Jimenez announced, once all the students were squeezed into the lab. “Never assume an object is harmless. Never disrupt an object’s integrity until you are certain of its composition and, even, origins.”
Nick was still brushing the white powder Jimenez had rigged inside the faux-meteorite sample from his face and clothes. “How was I supposed to know it was dangerous?”
“You weren’t,” Jimenez told him, told them all. “That’s the point. You must assume it’s dangerous until proven otherwise.” He rotated his gaze about the students clustered around him. “The crude belief is that meteorites are just space rocks, broken off splinters of debris floating through outer space. In fact, in some cases they may have traveled billions of miles from planetary systems entirely different from our own. And the mistake too many make is to regard even the smallest samples as safe, when they may, in fact, be quite dangerous.”
Jimenez turned toward the sixth former with Johnson’s Baby Powder stubbornly clinging to his clothes. “Can you tell me what ALH84001 is?”
“Er, no, sir,” Nick said sheepishly.
“Of course you can’t; I wouldn’t expect you could. ALH84001 is a four-point-five-billion-year-old rock discovered in Antarctica that’s believed to have been dislodged from Mars sixteen million years ago and fell to Earth thirteen thousand years ago. Some believe it contains fossil evidence that life on Mars actually existed at one point.”
“And did it?” the girl, whose name tag read BETH in big black letters, asked.
“No one knows for sure, young woman,” Jimenez told her, “and that is precisely my point.” His gaze fell back on the sample rock he used for classroom demonstrations like this. “Mankind is under the mistaken impression that the worst damage meteorites can do would be something equivalent to the strike that brought on the Ice Age and wiped out the dinosaurs.”
Nick chuckled. “You mean, there’s something worse than that?”
“I do indeed, young man,” Jimenez replied, taking a few steps toward him. “We have barely scratched the surface of the secrets our own universe and others may hold. That baby powder you’re now wearing could just as easily have been a foreign germ, some virus or bacteria, released into a world where no natural immunity to its ravages exists and no medical means to treat it can be found in time before it wipes out all life on Earth.”
“Wow,” said the girl named Beth, “that’s scary.”
Jimenez nodded. “Quite so, young lady, quite so. It wouldn’t take a meteorite of the size that wiped out the dinosaurs to end life on Earth again.” His gaze drifted to his football-sized sample rock. “It wouldn’t take something very big at all.”
“But you’ve got no evidence of that,” Nick argued halfheartedly. “It’s not like it’s ever happened.”
“No,” Jimenez acknowledged, pausing long enough to meet the gazes of the other students. “But what if the meteorite that caused the Ice Age was no larger than our demonstration model here? The theory of singularity postulates that objects no bigger than our model at all could have a mass equal to objects a trillion times larger. And they wouldn’t even require such mass, if they were able to radiate a comparable level of energy minus it. Confounding prospects, I know; that’s what makes me still as much a student of our planet as you.”
With that, Beth fished a copy of Jimenez’s book on just that subject from her backpack.
“Speaking of which, would you sign my book?” she asked, handing it over.
Jimenez readied his pen, took the book in hand. “For Beth,” Jimenez narrated, as he jotted an inscription onto the title page, “some mysteries can never be solved.”
TWENTY-FOUR
New York City, 1990
“I’m pregnant.”
At first, Ben Younger felt he must’ve heard his wife wrong, but the look on her face told him he hadn’t.
“Are you screwing with me?” he asked, standing on the balcony of their tenth-floor penthouse that overlooked Central Park.
Melissa grinned. “No, we did that together.”
Before the oil strike in Mexico, with the condition of the fledgling energy concern he’d started with Dale Denton truly dire, Ben would look down at the homeless people pushing their shopping carts along the concrete grid that cut through the park. He’d watch them scouring through trash cans, their life’s possessions bulging out of black trash bags, in fear over how close he and Melissa were to the same fate. They were several months behind on the mortgage they’d fought to get based on expectations that hadn’t come to pass and American Express seemed to have their numbers on speed dial. But they’d weathered that storm just long enough for luck to turn their way in the Yucatán.
A few nights after returning from Mexico, though, Ben had been awakened by horrible, guttural shrieks and rushed out onto the balcony. Gazing downward, he spotted two huge black dogs fighting madly. The animals seemed intent on tearing each other apart, neither giving an inch. Ben couldn’t bear to watch, imagining he could see the spray of blood and froth into the air. The dogs were screaming so loud, he had trouble falling back to sleep, even once the night finally grew silent. The balcony was his first stop again when he gave up tossing and turning just after dawn. He gazed downward, half expecting to see the body of at least one of the dogs, but there was nothing.
The strange mark covered by a gauze bandage wrapped tightly around his palm was itching horribly. Ben didn’t remember much of what had happened down in that cave he’d somehow managed to climb out of. But he remembered the rock he’d grasped and the mark it had left on his palm in a fiery red color that seemed to have drained all the blood from the rest of his hand. The first doctor he’d seen insisted it was a burn and treated it as such with salves and gauze, counseling patience. But the morning after watching the dogs fight, two weeks after his return from the Yucatán, it had begun itching horribly and hadn’t stopped since, as if, as if …
As if what?
Ben tried not to think about the dogs anymore, but every time he lapsed, the itching grew worse again.
* * *
“Could you repeat that please?” he said to Melissa, standing in the very same spot. “I just want to make sure I heard it right.”
“If I say it again, we might end up with twins,” Melissa grinned, her eyes shiny with tears of joy.
“Missy” was all Ben could manage. “I…”
“Yeah, that was my first thought too.” She noticed him scratching. “What’s wrong with your hand?”
He pulled the wrapped palm behind him. “It’s itchy. Healing process, that’s all.”
Melissa didn’t look convinced. “Maybe you should get it checked again.”
“I
t’s fine,” Ben said, a wave of happiness like none he’d ever experienced before catching him in its grasp.
* * *
Ben thought there was no news that could possibly trump what he’d learned from Dale Denton earlier that day about the potential size of the reserves their oil field was producing. Unprecedented didn’t begin to describe it.
Nor did it even begin to describe the news Missy had just shared …
I’m pregnant.
… because it was impossible. They’d been trying to have a child for eight years now, ever since they’d been married. After five, they learned Missy was infertile, and all attempts at artificial insemination, leaving them no hope they’d ever be able to have a child.
Until now.
And, strangely, for Ben the impossible was nothing new, especially after going to an orthopedist to have the leg he thought he’d broken when he’d fallen inside the cave examined. The doctor had reviewed the X-rays, seemingly baffled by the fact that there was indeed a fracture, but it had healed entirely. The doctor could offer no explanation for the anomaly, other than to suggest it was actually an older break. So maybe the fall hadn’t been as bad as Ben had thought, a trick played by the memory that continued to betray him. And now Melissa was pregnant. A month ago, Ben was broke with a mortgage he couldn’t afford and a marriage he feared would crumble under the weight of the pressure. Now he was about to become a father and soon to be rich, beyond anything he’d ever imagined.
His hand had started itching even worse, after Missy had given him the miraculous news, and all the scratching had shredded the tape and frayed the gauze beneath it. Ben decided the wound he’d suffered upon grasping the rock just needed redressing, maybe an extra layer of antibiotic ointment.
He moved to the bathroom, leaving the door open so he’d be able to hear Missy if she called out to him. Not even five minutes after hearing the news, Ben couldn’t imagine letting her too far out of his sight for the next nine months.
He peeled off the tape and unwrapped the gauze layered beneath it, exposure to fresh air seeming to effectively quell the itching then and there. Ben still plucked the Neosporin from the medicine cabinet behind the mirror and squeezed some onto his finger. Ready to smear it on and rebandage the wound as the doctor who’d first dressed it in Mexico advised when he spotted a pale shape amid the inflamed red patch of skin. A scratchy assemblage of lines crisscrossing each other like some random figure of calligraphy.
