by Jon Land
“When was he found?” she asked al-Hawashleh.
“Just over ninety-six hours ago now.”
Vicky did the rough calculations in her head, contrasting the timing against the first reported case to the WHO that had sent her and Neil Van Royce to Jordan. This victim’s infection was advanced a full day beyond the first victims struck down in that village.
She thought back to the Egyptian village in the Sinai her team had barely escaped when it was shelled. Vicky was certain General Malik hadn’t told her and Van Royce everything, just as she was certain she was facing something here that was utterly unprecedented in the annals of medicine.
Vicky looked down at Gunther Brune.
Gunther Brune looked back through his inky slits.
And that’s when she heard Van Royce scream.
* * *
Brune had latched a stone-like hand onto Van Royce’s wrist, somehow managing to flex his fingers, fastening them in place like a pit bull’s bite. Vicky watched Van Royce’s hand trembling madly and going beet red, his fingers spasming in an odd, melodic fashion like a madman playing the piano.
“Vicky!” he cried out, his voice more a high-pitched wail.
Dr. al-Hawashleh had already started trying to pry the fingers off, Vicky realizing immediately she wasn’t having any luck and wouldn’t.
Crack!
Van Royce’s orange-sheathed wrist bone snapped audibly, loud as a gunshot, and he gasped, only air flooding out his mouth when he tried to scream. His knees went out, as if the floor had been ripped from under him, prevented from collapsing only by the ash-colored hand that seemed to be tightening its grasp upon him even more.
Vicky rushed over to the other side of the bed and lent her efforts to al-Hawashleh’s in trying to pry Gunther Brune’s hand off Van Royce. Her gloves made the task difficult, but it was the rigidity and power of the fingers that made it impossible. Like trying to bend back steel.
Crack!
The sound softer this time, a smaller bone snapping like a twig or chicken bone, one of the soldiers lending his efforts to free Van Royce as well, to no avail.
Vicky burst out of the examination room into the hallway, recalling the fire axe and commercial extinguisher hanging from a hallway wall. She ignored the extinguisher.
Grabbed the axe, so heavy she more dragged than carried it back into the room.
Van Royce’s face had gone white as a sheet, the agony of having his wrist literally crushed pushing him into the shock.
“Stand back!” Vicky ordered al-Hawashleh and the Lebanese soldier, finding the strength to hoist the fire axe overhead with both hands.
Aiming it was something else again, but she knew she had no choice. Brought the axe ringing downward as close to Gunther Brune’s wrist as she could.
The blade ended up striking further up his forearm with an ear-numbing clang, steel to stone. And, worse, his grayish, ridged hand tightened even more, whatever was left of Van Royce’s bones crackling audibly.
Vicky watched his eyes roll back in his head from the pain, the poor man unable to speak, barely able to breathe. She brought the axe back overhead a second time, felt it freeze in the air when a pop sounded.
And Neal Van Royce’s hand from the wrist down broke off, left in the grasp of the stone-like fingers which continued to tighten around the severed limb. Van Royce dropped all the way to the floor, blood shooting from his stump in a soft geyser, clearing the path for Vicky’s next strike.
She tilted the axe lower, so the blade was even with her shoulder blades to build more momentum. Felt more speed building as she let it slash downward.
Vicky thought she’d missed when the blade sank into the mattress, coughing stuffing into the air. But she followed its path to see a gap between Gunther Brune and his severed hand, the now disembodied stone-like fingers still digging hard into Van Royce’s similarly disembodied wrist.
Blood, thick and black as ink, oozed out from Gunther Brune’s severed hand, pooling on the floor in thick globs.
Vicky took the axe blade up and started hammering the back of Brune’s severed stone hand. Each blow sent shockwaves of tingling pain up her own arm into her shoulder, like trying to hammer a nail through steel, until the stone-like fingers finally locked open.
Then Gunther Brune lurched from the bed, his entire body minus the missing hand moving in what looked like stop-motion animation, one frame at a time.
The closer of the two Lebanese soldiers moved to restrain him, the other frozen in place. The closer soldier succeeded briefly in pushing Brune back down, but then his remaining stone-like hand closed over the man’s face. Vicky heard the sounds of bone and cartilage cracking, a muffled raspy whoosh of air pouring out of the soldier’s mouth in what had started as a scream. Suddenly he was airborne, striking the wall with enough force to crack the plaster. Sliding downward with his face mashed to pulp, features utterly unrecognizable. Cheekbones exposed through his flesh, eye sockets turned into black holes shoved backward in his skull, nose and mouth morphed into one mangled assemblage.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!” Vicky cried out to the still-frozen soldier, al-Hawashleh dragging the helpless Van Royce across the floor, as the now standing Gunther Brune started toward them. “Shoot him!”
Before the soldier could move, Brune charged him in a motion so swift, it was lost to a blur. Vicky watched the teeth, all of them, emerge as if no longer part of his mouth, again recalling the fresh set she’d detected the patient in Jordan was growing. Digging those teeth deep into the soldier’s throat, shredding it the way a wild animal would and splattering blood through the air against the walls and floor.
Vicky saw the soldier’s feet twitching, realized Brune had hoisted him off his feet, continuing to rip and shred until his head came free and landed with a sickening plop. She choked down the shock and recovered enough of her bearings to bring her axe up again, then slash it down hard, lurching forward in the same motion.
Clunk!
She’d buried the axe blade to the hilt in Brune’s chest. But he still kept moving, cutting off al-Hawashleh’s path to the door with Van Royce in tow.
Out of the corner of her eye, Vicky saw the hospital room door burst open, banging against the wall under the force of a combat boot. Major Musa, biohazard suit pulled over his uniform but wearing no helmet, sprayed Gunther Brune with automatic fire, the bullets punching him backward. Flecks and shards of what looked like granite spewed into the air, formless divots dug out of Brune’s torso instead of bloody holes.
“The head!” Vicky cried out. “Shoot him in the head!”
Musa turned his fire on Brune’s face, his features vanishing in a burst of gray, jagged fragments Vicky knew were as much hardened flesh as bone.
Click.
Musa was trying to snatch a fresh magazine from the confines of his biohazard suit when Gunther Brune finally swayed like a felled tree, bounced off the bed and struck the floor with the force of a toppled statue. Shedding more granite-like flecks on impact that hit the air like a dust shower, Vicky unable to take her eyes from him.
Gunther Brune had fled that former bio-weapons facility just a few miles to the south, and that’s where she needed to go now.
THIRTY-NINE
Houston, Texas
“You need to put your goggles on,” Orson Beekman said to Dale Denton, extending a pair toward him.
Denton looked at the glass wall before which they were standing. “That’s twelve inches thick.”
“Eighteen. It was replaced this morning after the twelve-inch glass cracked last night during our first series of experiments on the rock.”
Denton peered through the glass at the rock currently resting in a slot scooped out of a thick granite table that extended all the way to and, actually, through the floor.
“Didn’t you read my report?” Beekman asked him.
“I saw the e-mail while I was traveling home. Thought it could wait until this morning. Why don’t you give me the broad stroke
s?”
They were standing five stories beneath Western Energy Technologies’ corporate headquarters along the West Houston Energy Corridor. Denton had purchased the twenty-story building for a song from a renewable energy company whose best intentions had led to bankruptcy. Then he’d used just about all the money he’d saved on the deal to construct a research and development lab worthy of NASA five stories down amid layers of steel and concrete to immunize the efforts undertaken there against corporate espionage and exposure if anything went wrong. Denton had built the facility a decade back to develop the most secretive, and potentially lucrative, of WET’s experiments on new means to potentially power the future. Chief among these, of course, was the rock that had been his personal obsession ever since the day they’d struck oil in the Yucatán. All things considered, it had been the best and happiest day of his life, and recovering the strange object that had left its mark on Ben Younger’s hand had rekindled that feeling.
Denton stood with Beekman today feeling the flutter he’d last experienced when oil had inexplicably burst from the leased grounds around him in Mexico, dousing him and his workers in a black sheen that had become the foundation for everything he’d built since. Including this twenty-thousand-square-foot facility that was one of the most advanced of its kind within the private sector anywhere in the world.
“We powered up the machines to run our initial series of diagnostics on the object yesterday, while you were in transit,” Beekman explained, getting Denton up to speed.
“And?”
“And the glass cracked.”
Denton tightened the goggles over his eyes. “Wait a minute, all you did was flip a few switches?”
“More or less. And it wasn’t just the glass. There were four technicians down here with me. All but one of us made the mistake of carrying our smart phones.”
“Mistake?”
“They all stopped working. No damage, visible or otherwise. They turned off and wouldn’t turn back on. When I finally got mine powered up this morning, everything was gone, including the operating system. Just a metal shell that lights up.”
“Suggesting?”
“What I’ve suspected all along, ever since 1990,” Beekman said, trembling from the mere thought the memories evoked. “What today’s experiment will hopefully demonstrate.”
Denton looked toward the object recently recovered from the Yucatán. “If the glass holds up this time, you mean.”
“It’s been replaced by a far thicker polymer. And both the housing in which the object’s been placed, and the chamber itself, are sealed from the inside, completely airtight. As an added precaution, we can shut the experiment down immediately in the event our monitors record an energy spike.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel safe?”
Beekman turned his gaze back to the fist-sized rock to avoid answering the question. “Upon initial inspection, and from Ben Younger’s description, I thought we were dealing with some kind of igneous volcanic fragment. That’s what the appearance, scaling, weight, and general physical characteristics suggest. The problem is the density levels are all wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“To the point where none of our X-ray, magnetometer, or magnetic resonance devices can approximate a three-dimensional rendering.”
“In other words,” Denton elaborated for himself, “we’ve got no idea what’s going on inside it.”
“Or what elements it’s composed of. Since I don’t dare risk removing any surface samples, I was relying on structural and quantum analysis to tell us what we need to know. Now I realize that even if such an analysis was successful, we’d still be left scratching our heads.”
“It’s not of this world—that’s what you’re suggesting, isn’t it, Professor? It’s the product of a meteorite, not a volcanic eruption.”
Beekman shook his head, a reflection of it caught in the thick glass that looked into the chamber holding the rock. “No.”
“No?”
“The odds of a meteorite fragment being perfectly spherical is a statistical impossibility.”
“Any more than what we experienced in the Yucatán? All I’m saying is we’ve been chasing the impossible for over twenty-five years. We should’ve been prepared.”
“I don’t think preparing for what’s in that chamber was ever possible. We should have known that from the moment Ben Younger uncovered it. From the moment wells without a power source uncovered one of the largest oil strikes in history. From the moment Ben Younger regained consciousness over a mile from where he had been with no recollection of how he got there or managed to climb out of the cave. From the moment the animals anywhere close to the site went crazy for no apparent reason.”
“Riddles, Professor.”
“No—facts. Allow me to demonstrate.”
With that, Denton watched Beekman nod to his technicians who went to work behind their various displays and computer controls. Almost immediately, he felt a hum in his ears, like a buzzing he couldn’t shake with all the annoyance of a mosquito he couldn’t squash. A sound at the outer limits of his hearing’s range.
“We’re hitting the rock with electricity in the amount of point zero zero zero zero five kilowatts, the equivalent of what it takes to make your cell phone screen light up,” Beekman explained.
“Not much, in other words.”
“Virtually immeasurable, in fact. Virtually—”
Something more like a whine, or a harmonic growl, froze Beekman’s words there. In the next instant, the plastic polymer showed a small fissure line that quickly branched outward like a spiderweb being stitched by an Etch A Sketch toy. The cracks spread, converging and crossing to the point where they riddled the entire clear wall.
“The rock’s doing that,” Denton said, transfixed by the process.
“It’s sending back out what it received.”
“It only received enough energy to light a phone screen.”
“And that’s what it radiated back, when factoring in its own quotients and relative ratios, multiplied on the level of ten to the fifth power.”
“In English please, Professor.”
“The rock, as you call it, doesn’t generate any power on its own—it’s not a source of energy in and of itself, in other words. Instead it acts as a magnifier, an amplifier, scientifically speaking. It seems to absorb energy and radiate it back out, amplifying it on a virtually immeasurable, quantum level.”
“Ten to the fifth power, you said,” Denton recalled.
Beekman nodded. “So assume one megawatt of electricity can power as many as one thousand homes. Fifty megawatts is what it takes to generate energy for a city of a hundred thousand, while it would take in the area of seven hundred fifty megawatts to supply power to a city of one million.” Beekman stopped, either to compose himself or form his next thoughts. “In order to power that city of one million, our object would need a kilowatt base equivalent to the energy expended by a sixty-watt bulb.”
Denton actually pinched himself in the forearm to make sure he was awake. “You’re saying we can power a city of one million with the energy produced by a lightbulb?”
“A bit more, if you want to do it for an entire day, say two lightbulbs.”
“Because of that thing in there, what by all indications is what Ben Younger found down deep below the surface of the Earth,” Denton said, bobbing his head toward the spiderwebbed wall. “Because of its ability to magnify the output of an existing energy source exponentially.”
Beekman kept looking at him but didn’t nod this time. “Harness that ability, find a way to channel the energy it produces through amplification, and all other energy sources would be rendered obsolete.”
“Does it put out any radiation, or anything else that’s potentially dangerous?”
Beekman shook his head. “Not that our instruments can detect. But that’s hardly surprising.”
“Why?”
Beekman ran a hand through his thinning wedges of hair ato
p his round head and looked through the cracked glass as if to wonder if the rock was still there. “Because it’s not of this world. It doesn’t play by our rules of physics. We don’t know where it’s from or what it’s made of. And we have no idea yet of the range or the extent of its capabilities.”
“When Ben touched the thing, it left that mark on his hand. Then his son was born with a matching mark on his palm, identical in all respects. You want to tell me how that’s possible?”
“DNA,” the older man said, his thoughts seeming elsewhere. “Touching it must’ve altered something in Ben Younger’s genetic structure, something he passed on in the form of the mark. But for some reason…”
“For some reason what?” Denton prodded, when Beekman’s voice tailed off.
Beekman’s face had paled. “I saw firsthand what touching that rock can do,” he reminded. “So why didn’t it affect Ben Younger the same way?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“You should; we all should, because it doesn’t make any sense. What happened down in Mexico, what I saw, can’t be explained in any rational or scientific sense.”
“And that leaves…”
“Something inexplicable, even paranormal. You didn’t see what I did in the Yucatán three days ago.”
“I’m not convinced you saw what you think you did,” Denton said, his gaze narrowing on Beekman, flashing sudden concern. “Your ears, Professor, they’re bleeding.”
Beekman touched a finger to one ear and then the other, coming away with twin dabs of blood. He realized he was feeling light-headed, looked at Denton to tell him.
“Your nose,” he said instead.
Denton touched his nose, pressed the blood dabbled there between his thumb and middle finger. He and Beekman turned toward the technicians gathered in the control and monitoring room to find them similarly afflicted. They noticed a woman in a white lab coat with red rivulets leaking from the corners of her eyes, as if she were crying blood.
