by M. L. Banner
The guard held his radio up in front of him like some sort of radio Geiger counter and pressed the talk button firmly. The hidden radios squealed louder now.
It was time to make his move. His heart raced, and his fear wanted desperately to take over, but he had to confront these two men and he couldn’t let this guard get in his way.
He rose abruptly, unintentionally banging his knee against the desk. Carrington’s presence, the banging noise and the gun pointed at him startled the guard so much, he dropped his radio. When the guard saw that Carrington’s hand was shaking, he had a shot of confidence. He stuck his palm out, while his other hand moved slowly toward his gun.
“Hold it, Dr. Reid,” he said. “You don’t want to do anything stupid.” The crease of a smile on the guard’s face told Carrington what he didn’t want to know. “Now give me your gun,” he demanded, moving his hand closer to his own.
Carrington knew there was only one way forward for him, and he was committed to his course. It was time to cross his own Rubicon.
He pulled the trigger.
The gunshot jolted her and her eyes popped open.
“What the hell?” Westerling said softly.
Lunder beckoned him back with his hands. “Shhhh.” He drew his Luger and walked out of her view, toward the door.
She looked back at Westerling, who was withdrawing farther from the door, eyes fixated on the area around it. Maybe someone else was going to do her work for her. She just wished she could see past the damn furniture inside the senator’s office that blocked her view. She watched him and listened.
Westerling stepped back a few paces, and then behind his leather chair. He seemed to shrink a couple of inches, as if he was about to duck to the ground.
The sound of a door opening quickly and then banging into a wall caused him to jump slightly. He lifted his arms in the air, as a sign of surrender, and displayed that false grin he loved to shine on people, the one that said “vote for me.”
A familiar voice demanded, “Where is Lunder?”
Westerling tensed up like something was about to happen and then he ducked behind his chair and peeked over the edge.
“Right behind you, asshole,” Lunder stridently announced. “Drop it.”
There was a loud metallic clank and she saw Westerling stand up resolutely. He walked back to where he was standing before. Some other movement came into her view… as she feared, it’s Carrington!
He walked toward Westerling, shoulders stooped in defeat. Lunder followed, holding his Luger and now a second gun on her husband.
Carr was caught.
“What the hell did you think you were going to do with this, Dr. Reid?” Lunder walked around him and wiggled his gun at him like a parent admonishing a child, before tossing it on Westerling’s desk. It clanked and came to rest at the opposite side, way out of reach. “He killed Clyde outside your door,” Lunder said to Westerling. “Shot him in the chest.”
“Look who else we caught.” Westerling pointed at the conference room on the opposite side of the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Carr could see his wife tied up on the floor of a conference room, her eyes filled with anger and fear. “Little bitch tried to shoot me too. But we’re smarter than both of you. That wall is hardened to withstand a rifle blast. So, she had a better chance of shooting herself than me. Now, we will pass sentence for your crimes.”
Carrington was shocked to see her lying there. But, as hard as it would be for her, she had to witness this and she had to know what he knew. If only she could hear them.
Her voice crackled through a speaker above them. “Shouldn’t we be together if you’re going to judge us?”
“Shit, she can hear us,” Westerling grumbled, wringing his hands.
“Doesn’t matter; they’re both dead,” Lunder stated.
“Since we’ve already been condemed to die,” Carrrington jumped in, hoping to stop Lunder from getting Melanie, “and since my wife can hear this, perhaps you can explain what you’re doing with a fission reactor that is venting large quantities of gamma radiation into a volcanic vent?”
Lunder froze in his tracks, halfway between them and the glass wall. He started to walk back to Carrington. “How? How could you know this?”
“Remember, we’re in the presence of the brilliant Dr. Carrington Reid.” Westerling stepped to the bar area and poured himself a bourbon, and then sat calmly on the sofa facing him. “You’ve been poking around where you shouldn’t have.”
“What I don’t understand is why? Why would you do something that not only puts your people and your daughter and granddaughter at risk, but puts the whole world at risk?”
“One word, Dr. Reid: control.” Westerling took a sip, enjoying this almost as much as one of his best Cubans.
“A number of years ago, something monumental yet tragic happened. My wife and my son-in-law were killed by some two-bit hoodlum on the day of my granddaughter’s birth. That changed me.” He looked pained and paused for a moment.
“I was already working on the Bios-2 project, hiding its billion-dollar cost in multiple appropriations bills to keep it out of public scrutiny. But, B2 was only a carbon copy of Cicada at the time, using plans we had bought from Cicada’s manager. My ultimate plan didn’t materialize until the day after my wife and son died. You see, I realized then that society was broken; I was going to find the means to fix it, using B2 as the platform.
“It was fortuitous, then, that I told Lunder here my plan and Lunder handed me the means to carry it out. Together, we swiftly changed B2 to what it is today, all in preparation for the Event. I didn’t know when the Event would occur, certainly didn’t expect such a big solar flare, knowing an X1 or X2 would do just fine and those occurred all the time, as you constantly reminded us subscribers to your newsletter. But my waiting paid off and we were rewarded with an X45 flare; again, thanks for the warning. It was the big one that you and all the other solar scientists were dreading and few prepared for, even though it was inevitable.
“And so I executed my plan. It was a simple one, really. After a few years, I alone would have control of the world, scrubbing away the scum that once inhabited it. Sure, billions would die, but with them, so would the lazy bums who sucked off the tits of the working population. And in the end, I would give this new world to my surviving daughter and granddaughter. The world would be reborn in an image of my choosing. And I would have total control over it.”
Carrington had suspected all this, but to hear it articulated so blatantly and with such disregard for human life was shocking, unimaginable. “So, you murdered billions just for control?”
“To quote from my favorite movies, but in my own way, ‘The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many.’”
“You’re a monster.”
He smiled and took another gulp.
Carrington turned and looked at Melanie in the next room. “Did you hear all of this?”
Tears streaming from her eyes and her head nodding confirmed it. She mouthed, “Yes.”
“I’m sorry for what I’m about to do, my love. I hope you will forgive me. And if there is life after this one, I hope we meet again. I l-love y-you,” he stuttered.
Her face contorted in confusion. “What are you doing, Carr?” Her voice was scratchy over the speaker.
Carrington turned and walked toward Westerling. “I knew this, but I wanted her to hear you, so that she could tell the others after I killed you two.” He lifted his shirt and showed them that he was wearing a bomb strapped to his torso. “Goodbye, assholes.”
Melanie realized what Carrington was about to do when he lifted his shirt. He was going to kill them, and he knew that she would be protected behind the hardened wall—and now she knew everything they did.
In quick motions, she sliced her bindings off and yelled, “Carr, don’t!”
She stood up and saw that Lunder had already dashed toward Carrington and hit him with his entire body weight, knocking him down to the floor.
29.
Cicada
Max hobbled into his residence, exhausted and in agony. He hadn’t slept for over sixty hours, and there was no way he was going to get any sleep soon. He tossed his equipment down in a heap in the living room, grimacing at the burn raging in his right bicep, where he took a bullet and his swollen left ankle, where he landed after falling from the rope.
He limped over to the bookshelves between the living room and office and stopped at the one garnering the most attention since his return. He called it his Decision Shelf, because he knew life came down to one of these two decisions: on one side of the shelf was a three-quarters-full bottle of tequila and on the other side, his military leather Bible. The bottle of tequila had lost most of its dust; the book was still covered by over a year’s worth of neglect. He knew the decision he would make right now, even though the other offered wisdom and peace. He didn’t want peace; he wanted justice. He wanted to seek revenge and had no desire to find peace or purpose in all of this.
Max swiped the bottle and a glass from another shelf and moved over to his desk. A healthy pour later, he slumped in his chair, deflated. He gazed at the amber liquid, its satisfying fragrance already greeting his nose, beckoning him to take a sip. He took a gulp as he mulled things over.
Senator Brian Westerling, the leader of Bios-2, a Cicada copy, was killing the world and probably didn’t even know it. Yet this man, who convinced Preston to give up their building and design plans and to divert their scientists and who had killed two of his people today, seemed determined to kill them or make them suffer. And now Bios-2 had sent an invading army.
But why?
He took another gulp, his festering anger not at all tempered by the tequila’s harshness, despite its spreading warmth. “And where the hell are you, Bill? Cockerell said you took the hovercraft. Did you really go on some stupid mission just to get intel while riding on some experimental blue toaster?” He hollered at the tequila bottle, as if it were responsible.
He cackled at the thought of calling Bill’s mission stupid when his own mission was at best a fool’s errand. How could he have thought that taking five people, four with little training, on an assault mission to a place they’ve never been to and had no intelligence on, all to turn off a nuclear reactor that was killing the planet, was anything but idiotic?
“How could you be so damned stupid?” he scolded himself. First Felix was zapped by some sort of lightning gun, burning him so completely, you couldn’t carbon date him. Then Rob died while Max was carrying him back. And then there were Sue’s and Pel’s injuries, which weren’t life threatening, but still serious. These casualties were because of his rush to judgement and poor planning. It was so unlike him. He always planned.
But lately he had been filled with rage; a frustration born from a desire to keep everyone safe.
He took another sip of the harsh liquid as he tilted back in his chair with his eyes closed.
Think Max, think.
“We have a mole.” He sprang forward and glared at the bottle that held all the answers. “Westerling found out about our raid from the mole. No other way he could have known I was there and taken credit for my killing. And that’s why they were ready for us. He was contacted by one of the people we trust. It had to be someone who has phone access, too.”
He looked to the left of the bottle and noticed the portable hard drive and notebook he had taken from Sampson’s lab on his desk, waiting for him to investigate. “Sampson, you must have been up to something, or why else would your apartment have been tossed? Someone, probably our mole, was looking for something, but what?”
Max booted up his computer, and while he waited, he slid the notebook to him and started to thumb through it. When the computer was ready, he plugged in Sampson’s portable drive and then leaned back and looked at Sampson’s nearly illegible handwriting, hoping he could make sense of it.
He was sure the answers lay within.
Sally King was grinning, babying the new-to-her copy of The Stand under her arm and gripping Max’s monster flashlight as she emerged from Cicada’s not-at-all-public Library. She was excited, almost giddy. Uncle Max was alive, and she had a date. Okay, maybe not a date in the normal sense of the word, but she was meeting Webber in Comms. He had just stopped by after the man-whose-name-she-still-can’t-remember told her the news about Max. Webber told her not to worry about the invading army, as they had a plan, and he wanted her help in Comms because Magdalena was with Max in the infirmary. Afterward, they’d have some dinner at the Rec Facility. She wasn’t sure if it was the tech or the man or both, but she was positively excited about this.
She strolled through the Library’s grand doorway, its hinges not making a peep as it closed, and she practically skipped to the elevator.
She heard something and stopped.
The sound of a man’s voice, muffled as if he was holding his hand over his mouth, perhaps in an attempt to be not heard. The disjointed mutter seemed to come from above, floating down from the concrete ceiling. It was a man’s voice and it sounded familiar. She shuffled around trying to determine its origination.
The closet.
It was the utility closet, and besides Dr. Ron’s laboratory and the Library, it was the only other door on this floor.
She was told that there were communications boxes and much of the network cabling running through there to other points in this building and out to the others. But currently inside this closet was a man having a conversation with someone, but she only heard the one voice, as if he were on a phone.
Max stopped at a note in Sampson’s notebook, scribbled in almost illegible script, and read it twice:
There is one other on the inside, like me: he is IT.
Max thought about what that meant. This mole, who has been working under their noses this whole time, whose sole purpose has been to hurt us and was directly responsible for today’s deaths of Felix and Rob. It had to be someone he didn’t know. It had to be someone who Bios-2 sent to them or they got to, like Sampson, although he still didn’t understand Sampson’s motivations. Perhaps this would be on his portable drive, but he didn’t have the time or the desire to investigate someone’s motivations. He was much more interested in their actions. The land they now lived in required decisive actions, with little consideration to the reasons why. And when someone committed a crime, the punishment needed to be quick and absolute.
Who could it be? he wondered. What the hell did he mean by he is it? He looked again and noticed that Sampson had written I T, not it; he meant the mole is an Informational Technologies guy.
Then he knew who it was.
“Yes, plans are in place,” the muffled male voice said, much more clearly, her ear practically on the door.
Silence as the man must be listening to the other voice on a what? Phone? Radio? Probably not a radio because you couldn’t transmit out of this building. It had to be a phone.
“When will it happen?”
Silence.
“What, in an hour?”
Rustling sounds, as if equipment was being moved. He’s leaving!
“Okay, I’ll be waiting for a sign—” Click-click-click. “—Operations, are you there?”
Then there was a louder click and more movement.
Sally softly bounced on the balls of her feet toward the Library, to a niche where she thought she could hide in the shadows. She saw the closet door open further, just as she slipped into the protective darkness.
The door closed and the man’s footsteps moved away from her, to the elevator.
Tentatively, she stuck her head out, just enough to see him walking away. He was carrying a small orange case, the kind that might carry a two-way speakerphone butt-set, used to test and talk on phone lines. And… he was wearing a blue baseball cap, just like Webber’s.
Max drained his tumbler in one gulp and slammed it down on the desk, almost breaking it. Grabbing his .45 and scabbard o
ff the pile on the floor, he slipped both into his belt against the small of his back while moving to the door.
The burn of anger squelched his pain and fatigue.
Before he was out his front door, he examined the picture of the Kings and said to Bill’s image, “Hang on, buddy. I need to kill an asshole traitor first before I can go out and find you.”
30.
Bios-2
The blast was strong enough to blow back one of the glass wall’s doors, propelling her backwards into the window-wall. Now Melanie felt like all the air was sucked out of her lungs. She breathed so rapidly that she was hyperventilating and near passing out.
Did this just happen?
Had she seen the man she loved kill himself and take out Lunder and Westerling?
She could only gape, dumbfounded and desperately trying to take in air. It was as if she forgot how to breathe.
Westerling’s office was obliterated. Wires and pipes hung from the ceiling, water spurting from a severed pipe; sparks flew, arced and then dropped into the smoky air like fireworks; and ragged debris hung or piled up everywhere. The glass wall held up, with only one panel laced with cracks; thousands of little bits of glass still held together as one but threatening to fall into a heap of unrecognizable pieces like the rest of the office.
There was no other movement inside. After that blast, she didn’t expect to see any. Carrington had been thorough, planning every part of this, and they hadn’t seen it coming; neither did she. He wanted her to hear what that monster had done, to all of them… to the whole earth. She couldn’t fathom that one man would kill billions of people just to have control over the surviving population.
