Was he up to the task? Did she trust him?
“Meredith?” Dom asked, breaking her reverie.
“If you turn into Kurtz, I can be your Marlow. I’ll bring you back from the darkness,” she promised.
One way or another, she would not let him go down that path.
-27-
Frank banked the Robinson R44 hard over the Chesapeake. Whitecaps glinted in the unobstructed sunlight, while sea craft ranging from twenty-foot sailboats to a luxury cruise liner floated on the bay. Some of the ships showed signs of life, people struggling to survive in the only safe place they knew: the open water.
Columns of smoke rose from towns lining the coast, and if Frank looked hard enough, he could see sidewalks tattooed in crimson splotches beside the burned-out shells of cars and restaurants, clothing stores and coffee shops, gas stations and schools. Society had collapsed in on itself, brought to its knees by the monsters prowling the streets and flitting through parks and forests, their heads tilted curiously as they watched the chopper fly by.
A Goliath clobbered its way through a pack of Skulls then rammed its shoulder into the front of a house. A plume of dust rose as wood and glass shattered, spraying across the Skulls clamoring to get in. The Goliath disappeared into the structure, and Frank watched helplessly, imagining the desperate screams of the house’s inhabitants. He could do nothing for them but watch the Skulls rush inside. He turned away from the slaughter and looked at Leigh. Dirt covered her cheeks and sweatshirt, and her eyes were still swollen and red from crying. She used the back of her hand to wipe a trail of snot dripping from her nose.
Frank expected her to continue her statue-like vigil in silence. But she surprised him. “My dad...my mom, my sister. They’re gone, aren’t they?”
“Well—”
“I’m not a baby,” Leigh said. “I know they’re dead. I saw them. I know I said all those things when we were leaving, but...but I know what happened.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Leigh’s brows scrunched as her eyes roved over the landscape. “Not with a stranger.” She looked at Frank, seeming to consider him. “I don’t even know your name, or why you were at the airport, or anything about you.”
“I understand. We don’t have to talk.”
A long beat of silence passed before Leigh broke it again.
“So, what’s your name?” she asked tentatively.
“Frank,” he said. “Frank Battaglia.”
“How do you know how to fly helicopters? Did you know my dad?” the girl asked.
He could see the thoughts behind her red-rimmed eyes, the question she was really asking. He knew because when his wife and son had left him, he had clung to every memory, recited every story to anyone willing to listen. Leigh didn’t care about Frank’s skills as a pilot—she wanted to hear something about her dad. She wanted something to hang on to, anything to remember Leonard when he’d been himself, the loving father she remembered instead of the monster he’d become.
“I’m sorry,” Frank said, unable to bring himself to lie. “I never met your father.”
Letting out a soft sigh, Leigh gazed down as she wrung her hands. Frank could see the calm before the storm in her defeated expression.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but I worked in the very same office before your dad took it over,” Frank began.
He told her about his first solo flights. How he served in the National Guard. And about his wife and son, about how much his boy used to love staring out over the Potomac Valley when they were up in a helicopter, watching all the tiny cars below.
And then he told her about losing them both.
He couldn’t help himself. Everything was too raw, too real. The ghosts haunting the Manassas Helicopter Flight Training School had hitched a ride with him.
Frank forced a wide smile. “I’m a hell of a talker, huh? Bet you didn’t think you’d get a free show with the flight.”
But Leigh didn’t smile. Instead, she looked up at him, tears brimming in her puppy-dog eyes, and gave his hand a gentle pat. “I’m sorry about your family.”
“Me too,” Frank said, his grin fading. He banked the chopper over the Chesapeake as a flock of gulls beat the air, trailing after the boats wallowing below.
“I don’t ever want to land,” Leigh said, leaning against the window and peering down.
“You ever seen a bird fly while it’s sleeping?” Frank asked her.
Leigh shook her head. “No, it’d crash!”
Frank shrugged. “That’s why we got to land eventually.”
“But I don’t want to. We can’t.” Leigh’s face turned red, and her eyes gleamed with the threat of more tears.
“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “I know a place that’s safe from the monsters, where people are still living and protecting each other. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?”
“Are you telling the truth?”
“I’m more honest than Abe.”
“Fine,” Leigh said. Then she scowled. “Will those monsters ever go away? I want to go back to school. I want to see my friends again. I want to see Grandma and Grandpa.”
There was no shielding her from the truth, not when they had a literal bird’s-eye view of civilization’s ruins, the drifting smoke and dancing flames, the packs of Skulls, Goliaths, and Droolers roaming the Earth. He couldn’t tell her everything would be all right. She wouldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t either.
“Things don’t look good,” Frank said, “but I’m part of a group trying to stop the monsters.”
Leigh tilted her head, considering him skeptically. “Really?”
“More honest than Abe,” he repeated.
She looked away. “Those monsters. They hurt my dad. They made him one of them. And then he...he took my sister and mom.” When she turned to face Frank, there was a fire burning in her light-blue eyes. “I want to help you stop them.”
Frank was taken aback by the sudden fury. “That’s real brave, Leigh, but I’m dropping you off with a friend. She’ll keep you safe.”
Midshipman Rachel Kaufman was a trusted ally. She might also be his only way of getting in touch with Dom and the others. Dom had given her a radio capable of secure communication with the Huntress, and Frank prayed she would still be on Kent with the device.
But as they drew closer to Kent, he saw Coast Guard cutters drifting through the bay. A menagerie of green transport trucks idled on the south end of the island, and several Black Hawks sat on a wide parking lot next to a hotel surrounded by golden sandstone walls. The sight of the military mobilizing forces on the island sent shudders through his flesh as he recalled the way General Kinsey had suckered the Hunters into the trap at the NIH.
Going into Kent Island as Frank Battaglia might not be the best plan.
He turned to Leigh. “I think I’m going to need your help after all.”
“Okay,” Leigh said. “I’ll do it. Anything.”
“You a good actress?”
She nodded.
“Then let me tell you how we’re going to have to do this.”
Frank relayed his impromptu plan to her, hoping the young girl would follow through. Their lives might very well depend on it. Minutes later, they touched down at the small airport on Kent. Soldiers rushed in around them, brandishing weapons, no doubt leery of anyone landing on the island with potentially contagious passengers. The soldiers shouted at them as the chopper blades wound down, and Frank gave Leigh a final reassuring glance.
“Ready for this?”
Her head bobbed. “Yeah, I can do it. Just got to pretend you’re my dad.”
“Exactly.” He unlocked the chopper door, stepped out, and was immediately assaulted by a squad pointing weapons at him and probing him for any signs of a Skull infection. The intensity of the search, the aggressive voices and commands, unnerved him, and he could only imagine how Leigh was feeling. He prayed she was as strong as he thought she was.
For his sake. For her sake.
<
br /> ***
Navid rotated a glass flask. Tiny translucent beads swirled in a solution as he studied the temperature reading on the hot plate under the flask. “You can never check the temperature too many times.”
“Too hot, and they all denature and melt. Too cold, they don’t form,” Kara said, repeating the words he’d told her earlier.
A smile crossed Navid’s face. “Right. And the speed—”
“Is just as important,” she finished for him.
She had followed his every move, sticking closer to him than his shadow. This morning, she had known nothing about polymer synthesis or nanoparticle formation or albumin. Now, Navid figured, she could repeat this whole damn procedure on her own. It had taken him the better part of a year of PhD work to perfect the process. He took a certain amount of pride in knowing his new pupil was ready to apply it herself.
“Hopefully,” he said, “if we got these beads right, they’ll contain pockets of the Phoenix Compound.”
“Kind of like paintballs?” Kara asked.
“Yeah. The albumin particle coating should help deliver the compound past the blood-brain barrier. Either it’ll work perfectly, or else we’ll discover that I wasted the last five years of my research.”
“It’ll work,” Kara said with stoic confidence. Navid wished he shared it. Too many experiments had failed during graduate school. The ambient humidity could entirely derail nanoparticle synthesis in a lab. Leave the hot plate on too long—even just a couple of minutes—and the beads disappeared, melting into the solution as quickly as they had appeared. Make the solution too acidic or too basic, and the precious pharmaceutical cargo the beads were supposed to hold might be destroyed.
Navid switched off the hot plate and turned off the stirring mechanism. The white pill-shaped magnetic stirring rod froze in place within the flask.
“Dinner’s ready,” he said as he lifted the flask from the plate. He let it cool on a lab bench.
Lauren turned from a nearby computer monitor. “Divya and Sean are prepping another organ-on-a-chip. Should be ready soon.”
Sean gave a thumbs-up from a stool next to the biosafety cabinet where he and Divya sat. “Right-o.”
Once the beads had settled enough, Navid slowly poured the flask’s contents into a set of plastic tubes. “Can’t be too careful. We don’t want to lose any of this. The stuff in this tube cost more than I made in a year on my graduate student stipend.”
“Yikes,” Kara said.
He deposited the tubes into a centrifuge machine and closed its lid. The tubes began to spin at over ten thousand RPM. “This will collect all the beads on the bottom so we can just pour the excess liquid off,” he explained for Kara’s benefit. He was enjoying being a teacher—or maybe she was just an exceptional student. Once the timer beeped, he showed Kara the results, holding the tubes, one by one, up to the fluorescent lights. “See the tiny pellet? The beads have stuck together to form one big clump.”
He gave the tubes to Divya and Sean. The scientists took over the experiment, administering the new nanoparticle-coated Phoenix Compound to the organ-on-a-chip within their biosafety cabinets. A long, slow breath escaped Navid. This had to work. He didn’t have the luxury of repeating an experiment dozens of times, troubleshooting it as he went until he finally achieved results worth publishing in a dusty academic journal that four or five people might read.
This time, his work mattered. Success meant saving millions of lives. He’d pursued a PhD in the hope of making a difference. It was a bitter irony that his dreams would only be realized during the darkest of nightmares.
“Yo, Navid, you with us?” Kara asked, snapping her fingers.
“Yeah, sorry. Just lost in thought.”
She shot him a sympathetic glance. He gave her a smile he hoped look strong and reassuring.
“Looks like you two are done for now,” Lauren said to them, interrupting the moment between them. “Want to go grab a bite to eat? I need to mull something over with the two of you.”
“With us?” Kara raised a questioning eyebrow.
“My other scientists are busy,” Lauren said, nodding to the rest of the team embroiled in work. “And this requires fresh, creative minds. The rest of us crusty old lab rats are too set in our ways.”
“Happy to do what we can,” Navid said.
They followed Lauren through the medical bay, where Peter was studying their patients’ charts. He gave Lauren a subtle nod, indicating Tammy was still stable and recovering. But the woman’s heart troubles weren’t what frightened Navid. Maybe her near-death experience was the sign of some pathogen boiling over in the woman’s body. A transmissible virus or bacteria could wreak as much havoc aboard this ship as the Oni Agent.
He pushed the thought from his mind as Lauren ushered them into the passageway leading to the mess hall. When they reached it, the doctor encouraged them to find a table while she ducked into the galley. She returned with a tray full of MREs and glasses of water. Sounds of ripping plastic and clunking plasticware permeated the air as they dug into their meals.
“I’ve got something I need to show you.” Lauren took a gulp of water and then set a computer tablet on the table between them. She pressed Play on a video. The screen fizzled gray before lighting up in mottled greens and blacks.
“The Hunters’ cam feeds,” Kara said.
In the shaky feed, Skulls scurried around branches and roots, jumping with the adeptness of acrobats. They were diminutive, but they possessed far more strength than a child—even a child turned Skull.
“It can’t be...” Navid looked up from the screen and locked eyes with Lauren. “The Oni Agent is zoonotic.”
“That’s what we think. Those things were monkeys. The Hunters are calling them Imps. Navid, you’re the neuro expert—does that make sense to you?”
Navid nodded. “It does. That’s what scared me back in Mount Vernon, when I voted to inject Maggie with the chelation treatment.”
“Why does it matter if monkeys can become Skulls? The Phoenix Compound is going to work. I know it will,” Kara said.
“I think eventually we can make it work,” Lauren said. Navid noted the hesitancy in her voice. “But there are a couple of things I need to know. First, how likely is it that the Oni Agent can spread between animals and humans? Is this just a one-off affecting this specific species?”
“If it spreads to primates,” Navid started, trying to keep his voice from shaking as he considered the implications, “then there are bound to be dozens of other species affected. It’s not like HIV or something that can only be passed between animals of a very similar genetic and chemical makeup. Prions are far more resilient. I mean, think of Mad Cow disease. The prions that make cow brains look like Swiss cheese do the same thing to humans. And they can affect everything from sheep and goats to mice.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Dark clouds hung behind Lauren’s eyes. “In suburban America, the human Skulls probably slaughtered most of the surviving pets and livestock. Might be why we didn’t notice so many animals-turned-Skulls there.”
Kara’s eyes widened, and she dropped her plastic fork into her mac and cheese. “But in the Congo...”
“There are hundreds of species that know the jungles better than we do. Thousands, millions of animals maybe, that might have been affected,” Lauren said.
Navid’s brain skipped into overdrive. “My God. The Oni Agent has done unpredictable things to people. Droolers, Goliaths. What in the hell is it going to do to animals?”
-28-
The low chugging of the diesel engines was comfortingly familiar to Dom. It reminded him of his days at sea before the Huntress, back when he was first learning to sail. The stench of boat fuel evoked a deep-seated nostalgia, and he pictured the gulls squawking overhead as he worked on his first yacht. When he had purchased the boat using his discretionary funds as a CIA officer, it had been a mess. Mildew covered the shredded vinyl upholstery in the lower deck cabin. Half th
e gauges at the flying bridge were cracked, and most didn’t work at all.
It was an ugly boat. But it was his boat. Weekends of work went into making the craft first seaworthy, then presentable. After a couple years, he had made it downright luxurious. The craft fit in with the crowds of luxury boats clustering in harbors from the Grand Cayman Islands to small island towns off the coast of Croatia.
Meredith had told him she’d only sail with him when the yacht no longer looked like it was a shipwreck waiting to happen. And on one blustery day in mid-October, decades past, Dom had taken her up on that offer.
“It’s so nice,” she had said. “It’s a damn shame you can’t throw a party on here.”
“No kidding,” Dom had said. “Would love to show this beauty off.” He had shown her the small galley, the heads, and the cabins on the lower deck. As she toured the craft, he had noticed a glint in her eyes, like there was something she was thinking but not telling him. They had gone back up to the aft deck, where the cool autumnal breeze blew over them, bringing with it the scent of brine.
“What do you think?” he had asked.
“Boss ain’t going to like it,” she had said. Meredith had never been one to mince words, then or now.
“I even put in my own money on this one.”
“Yeah, yeah, but they’re still not about to let you cruise the world in this looking for terrorists. It’s too...James Bond.”
“But that’s what makes it work. It’s a mobile safe house.”
A furrow had crossed Meredith’s brow, and the wind had tousled her hair. Dom remembered how her hair had shone that day, rivaling the red of a sunset. It hadn’t been important then; he’d seen her as nothing more than a close friend and work partner. It made all the difference now. She had started him on the path leading to the man he was today, and the task he’d given himself to fight the Oni Agent almost singlehandedly.
The Tide: Iron Wind (Tide Series Book 5) Page 17
