The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  Starting to shiver, she pulled Kyra to her, and the two of them huddled close to the greasy surface of the bracken water. “Heads down,” she whispered, not wanting a flash of white skin from under the coating of mud to be seen by the driver. Peering up through her eyebrows, she saw the vehicle glide into view.

  And that white oval with the blood red lips looked right at her from behind the wheel.

  Anna didn’t breathe.

  She clutched Kyra tighter. “Don’t so much as twitch.”

  The car moved on.

  A second and a third car followed, the drivers scanning either side of the road, but neither of them looked toward the bulrushes. Then they too disappeared into the gloom, the haze of their taillights floating like ball lightening through the fog.

  Wey Chen had brought a lot of help.

  And there’d still be four vehicles back near the causeway.

  A pincer movement, the same way they’d surrounded her in Guangzhou.

  The image of dark figures coming out of the mist from two sides played so vividly in her head that she glanced right and left, making sure no one was there for real.

  It’s only a matter of time, the hard voice decreed.

  No way! Anna thought. She’d crawl across the bog carrying Kyra on her back rather than give up. After all, this was the land where their spirits learned to soar free. “Let’s go!” she whispered, urging Kyra to her feet, “before they come back for a closer look.

  As they turned toward the flats, she saw several white flashes, like flashbulbs going off, in the direction of her house.

  Why would anyone be taking pictures?

  She put it out of mind, eyed the gleaming black surface ahead of her, and took the first step.

  The goo received her leg up to the knee with a loud gurgle, and bubbles of swamp gas released the foul, sour odor of decayed vegetation.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” she told Kyra, trying not to gag.

  They plodded on, the muck sucking at their legs with every step, its grip releasing only after a sustained pull that lurched them off balance. The slurp of coming unstuck sounded loud enough to alert everyone on the spit that they were out here, but Anna kept telling herself that it couldn’t be heard above the constant roar of distant surf. Drenched with sweat despite the cold, she looked back over her shoulder, and could barely see the broken reeds where they’d hid. A few more yards, and they’d be invisible to anyone on shore.

  Then she saw the yellow glow from a vehicle approaching from the direction of her house.

  “Hurry, Kyra,” she urged.

  At least the liquidity of where they trod filled in their tracks as soon as they were made. Get far enough out, and there’d be no trace that they had tried to cross here.

  Unless the hunters see the broken reeds, the voice needled.

  Shut the fuck up, Anna shot back. Those hunters were just as likely to assume that two frightened women wouldn’t be fool enough to try and cross here. Hide in the mud at the water’s edge, yes. Get back on the spit and run for the causeway, another yes. But risk death by quicksand, unthinkable.

  She pressed forward. Small islands of reeds dotted the flats out there. With any luck she and Kyra were bound to stumble onto one and could rest.

  The water got deeper.

  Icy cold, it climbed to her thighs, then her hips.

  And the bottom stayed just as soft.

  If they had to swim, hypothermia would do them in before Wey Chen ever found them.

  She waded on, whispering ever more encouragement for Kyra, but the channel grew deeper, and the bottom threatened to pull them under.

  Once more she glanced back. The reeds and shoreline had a seeped out quality, like a watercolor painting streaked with rain. Another time she’d have found it pretty. Now it simply meant that they themselves were nearly invisible.

  But not quite.

  A ghostly form emerged from the mist and walked to the water’s edge. Her dark clothing blended with the charcoal-tinted fog, and the white oval face stood out, once more giving the appearance of a disembodied head that floated toward Anna.

  Wey Chen raised her arm and pointed what appeared to be an unnaturally long finger toward Kyra, but it had a stubby cylinder on the end. “You’ve no where to go, Dr. Katasova,” she said, her voice chillingly soft.

  Anna struggled to step sideways, placing herself between Kyra and the line of fire. “Let my daughter go.”

  “Not possible.”

  A faint squeak sounded farther up the shore, followed by a tiny splash. It repeated itself over and over.

  “Kyra, keep moving,” Anna whispered. “Remember what I told you to do if we separated.”

  “No, I’m not leaving you--”

  “Go!”

  The squeak and dip drew closer.

  “I said no. The FBI can’t arrest me. I’m just a kid--”

  “They’re not FBI,” Anna cried, voice shaking from desperation. “They’re killers. I love you. Now get help. Please. It’s our only chance . . .”

  Her words died. From the middle of the channel a rowboat bearing two figures loomed into view, one sitting at the oars, the other crouched at the bow leveling a gun at them, it too equipped with a silencer.

  Again Anna lurched sideways, to shield Kyra from the newcomers.

  Wey Chen fired, four rapid “chuffs,” dry as a dog’s cough, and each muzzle flash illuminated the mist like lightning inside a cloud.

  Anna screamed, and practically leapt out of the water in a desperate lunge back toward Kyra, but the world had lapsed into slow motion. It took forever to float down onto her daughter’s body.

  More shots erupted, this time from the boat.

  A stinging pain lanced her neck, snapping it forward. Pins and needles cobwebbed over her shoulders and into her arms. She tried to shout Kyra’s name, but a gurgling noise took its place. The next breath threw her into a spasm of choking, and a hissing sound came out the front of her throat. To her experienced ear, it meant that her trachea had been severed.

  Time slowed even more, until she seemed suspended over Kyra.

  She strained to draw another breath, but inhaled blood and shredded flesh into her torn windpipe, plugging the passage to her lungs. Her chest wall heaved against the obstruction, no air moving in or out. Yet even as her agony mounted, an island of cold clinical objectivity set itself apart, poised to observe her demise, as if naming each stage of it could defang death and reduce the pain.

  Her slow descent toward Kyra resumed.

  In a flash, she began to hallucinate.

  Yuri looked up at her over the freshly opened chest cavity of a corpse and offered her the lungs, his boyish eyes full of hope. You’ll be proud of me, Anna.

  Those black eyes became Kyra’s, her pupils pulsing open with terror as a circle of crimson widened on her coat, turning it cranberry red.

  Anna attempted to place her hand on the wound and staunch the flow, but for some reason, her limbs didn’t work properly. Instead, her brain spiraled into darkness, and, just as she reached the bottom of her fall, drawing near enough to feel Kyra’s cheek against her own, that precious face sank from sight, sucked into the rot below.

  She attempted to grope through the water, to pull the girl back, and once more failed to move. “Kyra!” she shrieked, but emitted only a hideous rattle out the front of her neck.

  Lack of oxygen embroidered what remained of Anna’s vision in black, then narrowed it to a white dot as if drawing her sight closed with a purse string. Even the dot disappeared when her own face submerged itself in the muck. But she could still hear. Bubbles from Kyra’s breath broke from beneath the surface and churned the oily liquid with a muffled scream.

  Then silence.

  Anna’s lifetime of raising the child--the sum of all that Kyra was and the shape of the woman she might have become--had been voided in an instant. Barely conscious, driven near mad with grief, she chose her one recourse.

  Allowed herself to sink and fo
llowed Kyra down.

  Found her, and somehow touched her.

  Told her, You’re not alone, my love.

  Chapter 25

  The following morning, Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 10:00 A.M. EST

  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

  “Thank you for coming, Dr. Ryder,” Phillippa Holt said, walking out from behind one of the most famous desks in the world. Its polished top and sides had been carved from the timbers of HMS Resolute, a nineteenth-century, arctic-discovery vessel, the writing surface put to use by both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as Jack Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and her immediate predecessor, Jim Holt.

  She carried a thick, blue-bound manual entitled Bioterrorism: Emergency Preparedness and Response. Five years ago Terry had handed it over to her husband in this very room. Virtually as useless as the title was ponderous, it let the country pretend they were all a little safer.

  Grasping his hand and giving it a vigorous shake, President Holt II tossed the tome onto a mahogany coffee table. It landed with a thud beside a vase of pink chrysanthemums, sending a tremble through their petals. “These are difficult days,” she said.

  “Yes, they are, Madame President.”

  “Please, sit down.” She gestured to a pair of blue and gold striped chairs in front of the white marble mantelpiece, then took the one that let her see the bust of Churchill behind Terry’s back, the painting of Abraham Lincoln over Terry’s head, and, by turning a little to the right, a portrait of George Washington looking down on them both. “There’s a lot of scary diseases in there.” She gestured toward the blue book. “I read through about as much as I could take. God, some of your descriptions and scenarios--let me tell you, I know they scared the hell out of my husband when he first saw them. Didn’t sleep that night. But back then you never mentioned anything about the likes of SHAKES.”

  Her robust demeanor slipped, and she looked tired, her eyes appearing sunken, as if the blackness behind her pupils went on forever. Terry knew that kind of fatigue. It usually accumulated over years, not days. He’d seen it creep into the features of physicians, soldiers, cops, and others whose job it was to attend the dead and dying. Traces of it even greeted him when he looked in the mirror. “I’m afraid what I have to say won’t help you sleep any better, Madame President.”

  “Fire away. I couldn’t sleep any worse.”

  “That report,” Terry continued, pointing at the volume that had consumed the last of his optimism, “gave us our best chance to counter and contain a bioterror attack on our soil, provided the attacker used known organisms. Nobody, back then, wanted to hear anything about engineered microbes--”

  “You mean my husband. He regrets that now.”

  Terry’s visual memory as time-machine whisked him to April 2004 when the man stood by that same mahogany table and clutched that same blue book with both hands.

  “Don’t worry, Dr. Ryder,” the former president had said, his tight rolls of gray, wavy hair glistening in the morning sunlight that fell through the windows behind his desk. “These recommendations are a go.” He tapped the manual with his finger. “They’re reasonable, based on science, and I can sell them. As to justifying billions of dollars to do research on bugs that don’t even exist yet, especially after we didn’t come up with a single weapon of mass destruction in Iraq, I can just hear what my critics would make of that one.” He smiled, put his arm around Terry’s shoulder, and held the thick volume a little higher, like raising a torch. “With this in effect, I’m confident none of the terrible days you describe will ever arrive, Dr. Ryder, at least not on my watch.” Neither of them knew it then, but those decisive, somewhat dismissive words would be the most prophetic proclamation of his presidency, given that the “terrible days” arrived a week after he’d relinquished power to his wife.

  “I also understand from DOD that no one wants to hear about your three-little-blue-pins theory,” Phillippa Holt said, pulling him back to the present.

  Terry cocked an eyebrow at her and leaned forward in his chair. “You know about that?”

  “I checked you out very thoroughly, Dr. Ryder, through several sources. And you do leave a strong impression on people. My husband can still quote you, word for word, why a nuclear explosion in Times Square or a ricin attack on the subway system right here in Washington would be preferable to a successful bioterror assault.”

  “Really?” Her husband had also looked some of the world’s worst tyrants in the eye and seen only what he wanted to see. “Allies,” he sometimes called them, or “a good friend.” It helped him pose as a statesman bent on improving international relations. In reality, he left America never more hated.

  “Let me see if I can remember the passage,” she continued. “‘Because as hideous as a nuclear explosion would be, it must behave within the laws of physics. There would be a finite megatonnage of blast, and a defined area of radioactivity, more or less. And ricin, as horrific as its effects are, must behave within the laws of chemistry. The dispersion, the duration of toxic levels, its kill radius--all would be concrete and fixed. But something like smallpox or plague or bird flu or any of the forty-one other infectious agents we list in the report, especially if they’ve been genetically altered to increase transmission and resist existent treatments or vaccines, might have no limits of spread. The numbers of casualties could continue to grow by factors of ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, like a Richter scale. Even if we managed to get all our countermeasures up and running without a hitch, which we won’t, the spread could be uncontainable.’ Is that an accurate rendering?”

  Terry nodded, astonished to hear what he’d written half a decade ago repeated back to him verbatim. In a thousand-page book, she’d nailed the key text.

  Phillippa Holt smiled, obviously pleased to show off the steel-trap mind that a nation had slowly become aware existed beneath her modest, prissy, big Texas hair. It’s what had gotten her elected. “Who among you hasn’t been forced to stay on the sidelines, all the while knowing how to do the job right?” she’d declared, ambushing Republicans and Democrats alike in announcing her intention to run as an independent. Women of both political stripes, all nationalities, rich or poor, took this to mean, “Who among them hasn’t had to clean up a mess left by their man?” They flocked to her in droves.

  “So, Dr. Ryder, convince me that SHAKES is a weapon, that we’re under attack, and the perpetrator is China. DOD keeps trying to point me toward the Middle East, but I don’t buy it.

  Quite the lady.

  “I’ll need a computer.”

  She walked back to the HMS Resolute desk and opened a slim laptop lying on its surface. “Help yourself.”

  He rapidly clicked into the WHO data banks and brought up G-TOED. “Are you aware--”

  “Global Tracking Of Emergent Diseases. Yes, I’m aware.”

  Really quite the lady.

  He clicked back to the stored records of the map from last Thursday. “In the early hours after the wreck of the Reagan, as G-TOED registered all the chatter about SHAKES and red lights were popping up in every country on the planet, China pretty much remained in the black, except for around a few of its major cities. After an hour or so, G-TOED began to pick up reports coming from the rest of its provinces, and a full spread of lights appeared. The people at WHO figured the old-school reflex to cover up bad news had initially kicked in at some bureaucratic level, only to be overruled.”

  “Yes, I saw the briefing.”

  “But I think there’s another explanation.” He clicked through a sequence of map images, each one showing a proliferation of crimson dots in China. “If China unleashed SHAKES on the rest of the world, it would have to at least appear to be coming down with it as well.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Ryder, but there’s no ‘appear to be’ about it. They really are taking a hit. Our ambassador there reports that hospitals in Beijing and Hong Kong are as full with victims as ours are here.”

  Terry shook his head. “Like Coven
try.”

  “Pardon.”

  “During the second world war, Winston Churchill allowed civilians in Coventry to be bombed so as not to give away the Allies’ biggest secret, that they had Enigma and could decode all German top secret transmissions, including where they planned to attack.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The majority of China’s population is still in rural areas or small towns.” He pointed to the crimson patterns away from the larger cities. “A general I’ve worked with over the years, Robert Daikens, the one sent to fetch me here, has built up an unofficial network of informants throughout China. Last Friday, he made contact with these observers, and they, in turn, spent the last few days talking with locals in the less urban regions. Yesterday, he requested that I pass on the resulting data to you, personally.” Terry paused, letting her dangle long enough to really want what came next. It was an old teaching trick that got residents to seize on important teaching points.

  “Go on,” she said, her tone impatient.

  “Nobody knows anyone who’s sick.”

  She didn’t so much as blink. Just studied Terry with a steady gaze as if she were double-checking some internal math, summing up both him and what he’d said. “So you believe that whoever’s responsible for this has allowed Hong Kong, Beijing, and the other big centers to take a hit, thinking that that will keep us from noticing how the rest of their country is just fine.”

  “Its not so far-fetched. Maximum damage occurs where the concentration of foreigners is greatest and reporting of the devastation will be global. Using quarantines and travel restrictions as an excuse, everywhere else can be pretty well shut down to outside eyes, and inhabitants there aren’t likely to make a public fuss that they’re not getting as sick as the rest of the world. As for the false data being fed to G-TOED, it’s probably computer generated, but with everyone else on the planet in crisis, the programmers probably didn’t think anyone would dispute it. Even if we did, in a country as vast and populous as China, how do you prove a negative, that people aren’t sick? At best it would take an army of investigators. I tell you, these perpetrators had reason to believe their ruse would hold.”