Dark Light--Dawn

by Jon Land

  Al-Qadir had decided to keep the creature alive for a purpose God had not shared with him. He had no real sense of that purpose, until his fighters had tracked the woman from the WHO to a cave in the Sinjār Mountains and brought her here. Only then did truly divine inspiration of what he must do strike him.

  The pathogen soon to spread across the world might’ve been based upon samples recovered from the meteor strike in Nigeria all those years before, but it had taken on a life all its own, in accordance with God’s will. The fact that it had escaped the laboratory to wreak havoc no one had expected only reinforced al-Qadir’s commitment to the cause. For what, other than the direct intervention of Allah, could possibly have caused that?

  Al-Qadir shouldered one Kalashnikov and readied another before him.

  “Put her in the room,” he ordered his guards, the din of gunfire that had ratcheted through his eardrums, down now to a sporadic rattle. “Let’s introduce her to the future of man.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Al-Raqqah

  Rain poured from the sky in blinding sheets, precluding Max’s view of the carnage swirling around him. He walked through it untouched, didn’t even feel the rain drenching him, as he continued to steer toward Vicky.

  Max wished he’d felt nothing, instead of a flit of joy that followed each shot, each scream, each death around him. He felt the hot surge of a near primal exuberance, continuing to increase every time he thought it had peaked. He’d never felt so fulfilled, so triumphant, so alive, the feeling one he wished he could cling to forever. He wanted the killing to go on, and on, and on. Go on forever, with him at its center, as its instrument.

  What’s happening to me?

  It didn’t matter; Vicky was all that mattered. She was everything, the rest of the world paling by comparison. Let it burn, so long as she lived. Max tried not to think what he’d do if he found her dead at al-Qadir’s hands, the purpose in life he had found with her last night stripped away again. Max realized Vicky was his life, his love, and always had been.

  If she’s dead …

  Again, Max failed to complete the thought, afraid to this time, afraid to consider what his unleashed rage and energy could do, afraid the carnage here in the central square was just a microcosm of it. He felt an indescribable power surging through him, a race car engine running in the red while somehow holding to the track. Max’s track brought him to the left, toward a square building, featuring a bombed-out façade.

  Max waded through the refuse, a pair of fighters spinning out from behind crumbled walls. They tried to pull their triggers, but their fingers refused to complete the task. Max stared at them intensely, watched as their arms trembled horribly, their weapons angling upward against their determined efforts to hold them down, muzzles ending up flush under their chins and …

  BANG! BANG!

  … Max was showered with blood and brain matter, after their fingers finally squeezed inward. He spotted a staircase on his right and steered toward it.

  Cape Horn

  Having lost total control of the energy building in the particle accelerator, Ernst Stowell had ordered a total evacuation of the facility, Denton not bothering to protest.

  Outside, the air pulsed with the same irregular jostling he’d first felt a mere half hour before. If that air had been solid, Denton would’ve said it was tearing itself apart. Meanwhile, the entire structure built over WET’s supercollider was quaking, its structural integrity compromised, cracks and fissures spreading across its exterior, as it began to break apart. It seemed to lift in the air, only to drop down again, the massive burst of energy still contained in the particle accelerator soon to be unleashed onto the world.

  Denton’s thinking froze there, because a dull hum lacing the air had built into a banshee-like screech played on a constant loop, stealing his thoughts from him and numbing his mind.

  Beekman had been right all along, and so had Ben Younger. Fuck them both, men unwilling to take the risks he had in an attempt to change the world forever.

  As Denton heaved for breath amid the oxygen-depleted air, he thought he heard the laughter of a young child through all the screeching, a little girl.

  Al-Raqqah

  “If you are watching me now,” Mohammed al-Qadir spoke into the camera positioned before him, “it is because you are following God’s will, just as I am. I come before you today charged with an awesome responsibility as both maker and messenger. To inform you of what I have wrought on God’s behalf. That would be my God, not yours, because your God has let the world reach the point of its own destruction, so mine can preserve the little that’s worthy to survive.

  “And I come before you today to state it isn’t too late for you to join the survivors. All you must do is renounce your material lives and worship of your false gods, and turn to the one true God in their place. Embrace Allah and the word of the prophet Mohammed and you can be saved to live on after the End of Days fully dawns. That dawn is beginning to shine even now. You can’t escape it, or the army the West’s own insolence and disregard has bequeathed on the world.

  “I would like to reveal a soldier in that army to you now,” al-Qadir continued, toward the camera. “I would like to show you the fate that awaits all infidels.”

  The camera followed al-Qadir as he moved to an old-fashioned lever built into a wall of the ancient police station that had once occupied this building. Yanking that lever down would release the tension on the chain holding the creature back inside the adjoining chamber, so it could reach the woman whose excruciating death would be replayed over and over again, the instrument of the End of Days revealed to the world.

  “Now,” al-Qadir told his audience, “behold.”

  * * *

  Inside the chamber, Vicky noted the positioning of cameras on the walls, as she clung to the farthest one to stay out of range of the creature stretching the bonds of its chains to reach her. Snapping and clawing at her, no longer seeming even remotely human.

  It moved in a stoop, hunched over to exaggerate the knobs of vertebrae pressed out to the limits of its skin’s bonds. Not human skin, but something that looked more like rubber, folds and folds of it wrapped around each other, which accounted for the ridges and depressions that dominated the creature’s face and body. Its eyes peeked out from behind mere slits, colored entirely black and never blinking. Its teeth kept clacking together, blood leaking between its lips, as if it were chewing on the tissue inside its mouth.

  The creature reared back and flung itself at her, the chain holding it just inches from Vicky’s throat. Dying terrified her, but the thought of being bitten, and transforming into one of these things, was even more unthinkable.

  Max, she thought, Max, where are you?

  * * *

  Max heard Vicky calling his name, as he exploded through the heavy security door like it wasn’t even there. A pair of New Islamic Front fighters trained their weapons upon him, only to freeze up briefly as he poured fire into them, streams of bullets holding them up until Max eased back on the trigger.

  They fell, leaving Max face-to-face with Mohammed al-Qadir, his hand just about to yank down on a lever built into the wall, a camera recording all that transpired within a separate chamber equipped with a bulkhead-style door. Max steadied his M4, al-Qadir regarding him with a mix of fear and uncertainty.

  “Don’t move!”

  Al-Qadir froze, but left his hand on the lever. He’d shed one of his assault rifles to manage the task before him, but now flirted with the notion of twisting the Kalashnikov from his shoulder. Meeting the eyes of the man before him, though utterly black without any trace of white, filled him with a sense of fear and foreboding he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

  “Shaitan,” he muttered, shaking his head in disbelief, as something made him switch to English. “You are Satan, he whom I’ve been chosen to defeat.”

  “Close enough,” Max told him, just short of pulling back on the trigger.

  Shoot! Kill him!

&
nbsp; But Max didn’t, couldn’t for some reason lost to his consciousness.

  “No,” al-Qadir raged, “you must see, you must know!”

  With that, al-Qadir moved his right hand across to his left arm, and peeled off a tight, flesh-colored sleeve to reveal an arm that looked as if it had turned to stone above a pulsing, oozing, raised reddish fleshy patch where his wrist should’ve been.

  “Behold the mark,” al-Qadir ranted. “I was sure I was going to die, but Allah saved me for this purpose, for this day. So I may open the gates of heaven in His stead.”

  “Only gates you’re going to see are the gates of hell,” Max said, and pulled his M4’s trigger.

  Click.

  It was empty, even though he’d just changed magazines … or had he? The memory eluding him, as al-Qadir worked his hand back over a lever.

  “Behold the future!” al-Qadir ranted, and jerked it downward.

  * * *

  The creature came at Vicky, plenty of slack in the chain now to reach her. She managed to duck beneath its initial charge, grabbing the chain and yanking to tip its balance briefly.

  “Max!” she cried out, as it lurched at her again.

  * * *

  Max twisted away from al-Qadir, as soon as he heard Vicky’s voice scream his name. And by the time he swung back, al-Qadir was gone, having disappeared through a secret panel carved out of the wall that was swinging closed again.

  Vicky!

  It was either save her or pursue al-Qadir, not much of a choice in Max’s mind. This was his chance, maybe the last one he’d ever get.

  He rushed to the entrance to the inner chamber from which he’d heard Vicky scream his name, spilling over the camera that shattered on impact with the floor. He threw back the lock and thrust it open with such fury that it split from its hinges.

  The creature inside twisted its face away from a jagged bite carved through Vicky’s thigh, and lunged with snapping teeth bared toward her throat. Max’s gaze locked on the chain. Pictured it retracting, and then watched it retract, snapping back toward the wall and jerking the creature with it. The thing fought futilely to reach Vicky again, but the slack had all been taken up.

  Max formed a fresh picture in his head, and the length of the chain still extending from the wall wrapped around the creature’s throat.

  And tightened.

  Then tightened some more.

  Until the creature’s head was torn off, the chain left dangling now, as the rest of the creature that had once been a man seemed to seize up and topple straight over forward to the floor.

  Max rushed to Vicky.

  “Better late than never,” she managed, failing to muster the smile he saw her try for.

  “Don’t move,” he said, crouched over her with eyes on the gaping wound in her thigh that was gushing blood.

  Vicky looked at him, puzzled. “Your eyes…”

  “Stay still.”

  “… They looked all … black, but they’re not now. Am I losing my mind?”

  “No, just blood, but I can stop it.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said, eyes misting up, voice sounding heavy. “I’m infected. I’m going to transform. Leave me, please, just leave me.”

  Max tore off his shirt, applying pressure to the wound as he turned the fabric into a tourniquet wrapped tightly over the sucking wound.

  “Max,” Vicky started.

  “I’m busy.”

  “It’s no use.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said, lifting her into his arms.

  Cape Horn

  “A black hole!” Beekman cried out. “That was a black hole! I think we may have just witnessed a miniature re-creation of the Big Bang.”

  Dale Denton was continuing to drag him along, when a prickly ripple in the air left Denton swinging back toward the complex housing the supercollider. He could swear it was wavering, blowing like a piece of notebook paper slung in a binder, in the last moment before a single bright flash flared. He watched the earth open up into a spreading pit of empty darkness that seemed to swallow the entire facility in a single gulp. A vast torrent of water gushed out moments later, from the gaping hole left behind that must’ve extended down through the entire substructure of the island.

  The geyser climbed for the sky in a manner that reminded Denton of that first oil strike in the Yucatán, courtesy of the same rock that had sewn the seeds of what he’d just witnessed. The facility not falling into the sea or exploding, so much as sucked out of the world.

  A vast circular pit remained, filling rapidly with churning water that swirled in blinding fashion. Denton felt a tug, something like a gust of wind angling him back toward the low ground. He fought against the pull, more like a rope’s now, fighting it to a stalemate long enough to allow him to reclaim his footing and slog on.

  Others were not so lucky.

  Denton turned to the sight of dozens of people being drawn violently toward the spinning whirlpool, as if being sucked in by a vacuum cleaner. Uprooted trees obliterated those in their path to the sucking vortex that continued to swallow vehicles, the remnants of structures decimated by the loosed wave of energy, and more people who flapped and flailed the whole way down into the gaping chasm.

  Wop-wop-wop-wop …

  The sound drew Denton’s gaze upward, toward the helicopter angling for a flat stretch of high ground that would serve as its landing pad. He’d summoned it at the first sign of trouble calling for potential evacuation. Almost to the clearing, Denton heard, and felt, an earthquake-like rumbling that shook the world to its very core. Swinging again toward the remnants of the supercollider, he spotted a tsunami-like wall of water burst from the crater, climbing toward the higher ground from the massive hole drilled out of the ground. Denton tried to catch his breath, running again as the ground seemed to shift under the force of the flood, and the wall of water darkened the day.

  He crested the ridge where his helicopter waited, warm and ready, a trio of guards armed with assault rifles standing between it and the surging hordes, holding back the throngs who would’ve otherwise stormed it in their desperation. Denton pushed his way through them, Beekman becoming a lead weight behind him.

  “You’re a murderer!” he rasped, terrified. “This was all your fault, every bit of it! All these deaths!”

  Denton stopped long enough to kick the man’s legs out from under him, and he dropped like a felled tree.

  “So what’s one more? Fuck you, Beekman. I hope you can swim.”

  He rushed the rest of the way to the chopper, past the three gunmen there to keep anyone else from following. The last gunman slid the door closed behind him, the chopper lifting off, just as the massive wall of water swallowed the world below.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  George H. W. Bush

  “You want to give that to me again?” Red said to Admiral Darby.

  “You heard what I said, son. That firefight in al-Raqqah was one-sided, New Islamic Front fighters shooting each other. Another inexplicable massacre, in other words.”

  “And that’s confirmed?”

  “You bet your ass; from intel assets on the ground. You want to lie to me and tell me you’re surprised, go ahead.”

  Before Red could, the intercom flared from the carrier’s communications center.

  “Admiral, we have incoming traffic from Syria heading straight for al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq.”

  “Specify.”

  “An MH-6 Little Bird.”

  “One of ours?”

  “Transponder designation indicates it was delivered to the Iraqi military, one of those seized by the New Islamic Front.”

  “Well, god-fucking-damn.”

  “Hold on, sir,” the voice blared over the intercom. “Whoever’s flying it is communicating via the base’s exclusive frequency.”

  “Put it on speaker.”

  And a moment later Max Borgia’s voice boomed through the room.

  “… Repeat, this is Commander Borgia, SEAL Team 6
. I am incoming with wounded. Please have a medical team standing by. I say again, Mayday, Mayday!”

  Darby and Red just looked at each other.

  Ayn al-Asad Airbase, Iraq

  An armed phalanx of troops was waiting when Max touched down in the Little Bird. He was ordered to stand down and eased himself from the pilot’s seat. He reached back for Vicky and lifted her out as gingerly as he could, the troops before him making no move to part.

  “There’s no time! She’s dying!” he yelled at them.

  The captain in charge nodded slowly and signaled his men to break formation, before falling into step behind Max as he hustled Vicky toward the base hospital.

  * * *

  “I’m a mess, Max,” she said, the blood dribbling out her mouth now, bubbling with froth.

  “I’ll give you that much.”

  Her eyes widened, through the blood leaking out of them, and bore into his. “Promise me you won’t let me change. Promise me.”

  Max noticed drops of blood were seeping out of Vicky’s ears now too. “No need. You’re not going to die.”

  * * *

  Vicky was placed in isolation at the base’s medical center, the trauma team seeming to take forever to get their heavy biohazard suits on. Max stayed with her the whole time, refusing a suit for himself, the doctor reporting the results of his initial examination while Max was still poised over her.

  “She’s lost a lot of blood,” he said, his voice sounding like it was being channeled through a cheese grater. “We need to get her transfused before we even address the bite. But there’s a problem.”

  “What?”

  “She’s AB negative, rarest blood type there is and not compatible with the universal brand of—”

  “I’m AB negative, just like her,” Max told him. “Use my blood to transfuse her. As much as she needs, that’s how much you’ll take.”

  “She needs more than you can give her, not without dying yourself.”