by Layton Green
Do prdele, Viktor thought. How powerful is that current?
The professor had no idea if the machine was helping his friend or destroying his body even further. Had Naomi done something wrong? Cranked the controls too high?
At last the cables calmed, the hum returned to a steady low thrum, and the green light began to pulse again.
As far as Viktor could tell, nothing had happened. Disappointment burned through him. He took his friend’s hand in his own, not caring if he subjected himself to the energy source the machine was harnessing.
Grey’s body went rigid a final time and then relaxed.
Viktor bowed his head.
When he blinked away his tears and finally looked up, sure the experiment had been a failure, Grey’s eyes popped open.
-51-
“How is she?” Jax asked, rising from his chair in the hallway.
His shoulder bandaged and his right wrist in a splint, Grey eased the door shut behind him, not wanting to disturb Charlie’s sleep. He felt an unfamiliar lump in his throat that he disguised with a gruff edge to his voice. “Doc says she’s gonna make it.”
They were at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, which happened to be the site of the world’s first human heart transplant. Grey found it an appropriate venue after all that had happened, including his miraculous recovery.
Commotio cordis was the Latin name for the injury he had suffered. A deadly disruption of the heart’s rhythm that can occur when a heavy blow—such as a gunshot from the Browning Hi-Power automatic pistol Robey was using—impacts the precordial region within the vulnerable phase of cardiac repolarisation, fifteen to thirty milliseconds before the T-wave peak.
In plain English, Grey remembered the doctor saying, the blow has to hit directly above the heart, during the one percent of the beat cycle that can cause sudden cardiac arrest.
A rare event, though not unheard of, especially for young boys playing sports. The cardiologist speculated that Grey’s emaciated frame might have contributed to the incident, though commotio cordis had occurred over a wide age range and in a variety of situations, including police officers wearing bulletproof vests. The fatality rate was extremely high.
While poorly understood, researchers speculated that the cause of commotio cordis was probably related to the heart’s ion channels—the same proteins that regulate the body’s electrical signals, and which Viktor speculated were manipulated by van Draker’s machine.
Grey could only shake his head, surprised and thankful he was alive.
Viktor and Jax had popped in and out of the hospital, but Grey hadn’t left. It had been touch and go for the last forty-eight hours, ever since the vaccine had taken effect. But Charlie’s vitals had gradually stabilized, and except for the hair loss, she no longer presented symptoms of the horrific virus.
“She’s a tough one,” Jax said.
Grey’s hand lingered on the doorknob. If Charlie hadn’t pulled through, he thought he might have died right there with her.
“The toughest,” Grey agreed.
“Before she got too sick,” Jax said, “she must have eaten twenty chicken legs in that shack. Almost cleaned them out.”
Grey’s laugh was the first one that had sounded genuine to his ears in months.
Jax clasped him on the shoulder. “Maybe you’ll stop being such a dick to everyone, now.”
Grey rolled his eyes.
“You going back to work with Viktor?” Jax asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, I don’t really see you teaching high school. Hey, you ever need some cash, I could always use a hand . . .”
Grey pointed towards the end of the hall.
Jax spread his palms and grinned. “Good doing business with you.”
He turned to leave, and Grey took him by the arm. “Thanks. For watching out for her when I couldn’t.”
“I’m just glad we stuck it to those assholes.”
Grey’s eyes hardened. “It was a real pity Dag got unplugged before the authorities arrived.”
Jax chuckled and stepped away. “Listen. You let that other thing go, too. And take another shower.”
Grey compressed his lips and looked away. One thing at a time.
Jax gave a mock salute and left. Grey sank into the chair in the hallway, exhausted, his mind spinning. He’d been so worried about Charlie he had not had time to process anything else.
The case, the whole incredible sequence of events, crashed over him like a freezing ocean wave. The violence. The horrors of the lab. The traumatized eyes of the children they had freed. The fear, the hate, the prejudice.
When will it stop? he wondered. When will a few madmen stop plunging the world into madness and horror?
Most of humanity just wanted to wake up to a beautiful sunrise, pursue their passions, enjoy their friends and family in peace.
Damn those monsters.
He shivered at the thought of his mental state after Charlie was captured, his filter gone, moral compass spinning wildly. He had wanted to take out Dag and his people as if he was picking grapes in a field, their spilled blood a balm for his soul.
And he would do it again.
Revenge solves problems, he knew. It absolutely does.
But it doesn’t heal.
It was all so absurd, he thought. One tiny planet in the middle of a universe vast beyond belief, its very existence dependent on a combination of factors the probability of which is so astronomical they break the largest computers. Yet humanity can’t get it together enough to work towards the common goal of survival and a better life. Instead we have politics and armies and our country versus yours and our religion and our race and our half of the valley. Our high school, our gang, our family.
We take, take, take. Claim, claim, claim. Kill, kill, kill.
Footsteps from the hallway. Grey looked up and saw Viktor.
After Grey reported on Charlie, the professor sank into a chair beside him. “Thank goodness she’ll be fine.”
They hadn’t talked much since Grey had opened his eyes on the gurney and a team of special unit police officers from Cape Town had escorted them out of the manor. Reeling from his ordeal, staying awake with caffeine and willpower, Grey had made them take him straight to Charlie.
They reached her just as her mind started to slip. A few minutes longer, the doctors had said, and she might not have made it.
A cabal of worldwide W.A.R. members exposed. Chapters unearthed in South Africa, the United States, and across Western Europe. Dozens of arrests made, targeting anyone remotely linked to the virus.
The name Eric Winter, the former congressman’s son, was never mentioned.
The South African government had appropriated van Draker’s lab and allowed the CDC inside for immediate study. Doctor Varela had led the task force. While they found plenty of vaccine, the lack of research had been troubling. The computers were missing key data points, and van Draker’s personal files had never been found. Not only that, but during the chaos of the police raid, the power core of the pyramidal apparatus that had revived Grey, The Resurrector, had gone missing. No one could figure out how to make it work again.
Grey remembered what Viktor had said about the events of that night. Some of the last words van Draker had spoken.
The master files are . . . elsewhere.
A raid by the Iceland authorities on the coordinates Grey and Jax had provided led to half a glacier buried beneath an avalanche. The avalanche looked recent, and the stress points pointed to explosives.
Even if the authorities dug it out, Grey had the feeling the preserved Nazi soldiers had been moved elsewhere. Awaiting a new master, a different age.
“There’s something I haven’t told you,” Grey said, after he and Viktor lingered in silence. “I had an experience.”
Viktor looked over.
“When I was . . . dead. I saw things. Went someplace.”
“The doctors said you were brain dead for over twenty minutes.
It must have occurred before then, with the neocortex still functioning.”
Grey shrugged. “All I know is that it felt real. More real than anything else in my life.”
Viktor tried to act nonchalant as he asked the next question, but Grey heard the underlying intensity. “What did you see? A tunnel? A bright light?”
“Nothing like that. It wasn’t so much what I saw, but what I felt. For a while I was floating in deep blackness, and then there was a barrage of color, more vibrant than I’ve ever seen, in a space that felt multi-dimensional. Ten-dimensional, twenty. I can’t . . . I can’t explain it. There were mountains and cities and worlds and whole universes, Viktor. All at once. Everywhere. Then I saw images from my past, alongside images of me with people I had never seen before, as if I was seeing the future, or an alternate reality. You and Charlie were in some. Nya and my mother, too.” He swallowed. “I know I’m not making sense, but the experience didn’t make sense. It was like time didn’t exist, the past and the present and the future all mixed together. I felt emotions so pure I almost couldn’t bear them, love and terror and awe and comfort. And the thing I remember most of all—still as clear as day in my mind—is thinking, knowing, that the universe is way more complicated than we can ever imagine.”
“That’s unsurprising,” the professor said wryly.
Grey shook his head. “I’m not talking about the stuff we saw in that lab or juju or the mystery of black holes. I mean way more complicated. I’m no scientist or theologian, but I had the overwhelming feeling that something was out there. Something vast and eternal and . . . beyond us. As if my mind had just been uploaded into a computer program that made what we know of reality seem like two paddles and a Ping-Pong ball.”
Viktor didn’t respond. When Grey finally looked over, he saw a cauldron of emotion stirring in the professor’s intelligent brown eyes.
Yet the emotion that registered most of all on Viktor’s face—and it took Grey a moment to realize it—was jealousy.
“I used to think human existence was like a baby abandoned on the doorstep,” Grey said. “And maybe I still do. But abandoned by what?”
A faint smile graced Viktor’s lips. “Are you telling me you’ve become a believer?”
“To be honest,” Grey said, looking off to the side, towards the door to Charlie’s room, “I don’t care about that any more than I used to.”
The professor leaned forward. “We should record your experience. Study it.”
Grey shrugged. “It’s already starting to fade. Like a dream. Wherever I was, inside my own brain or in some meta-reality, I don’t think our conscious minds are capable of handling it.”
“Then why tell me?” Viktor said, disappointed.
Grey looked him in the eye. “Because I wanted you to know I don’t think you’re searching in vain.”
The professor looked at a loss for words, as if he had expected a very different response and had prepared a very different answer. “Thank you for saying that,” he said slowly.
“Thanks for saving my life.” Grey pushed to his feet. Only a bruise remained from the rare injury that had taken his life. A bruise and memories he would deal with later. Right now he had an agenda that overwhelmed all others.
“Where are you going?” the professor asked.
Grey yawned and blinked to stay awake. “To get some caffeine.”
In the waiting room, Grey got a Coke out of a vending machine and saw the other visitors watching a news broadcast on the television. He edged closer. “Viktor! It’s Dr. Varela.”
Someone turned the volume up. The broadcast was from CDC headquarters, a special report declaring that a team of epidemiologists, led by Dr. Hannah Varela, had finally cracked the code to the gargoyle virus vaccine. Mass production had already begun, and shipment to destinations worldwide would start within days.
Since the CDC still did not have a handle on the transmission rate of the virus, governments planned to issue the vaccine to all people with a certain percentage of melanin, in the countries affected by the outbreaks.
“Thank God,” a woman in the waiting room said.
One by one, everyone began to clap.
Grey looked over and saw an uneasy frown on Viktor’s face. “What is it?” Grey said. “This is great news, right?”
The professor crossed his arms and watched the television long after the broadcast ended. “You know what we didn’t find in the lab?” he said finally. “Masses and masses of the virus.”
“Maybe they were relying on the transmission rate, which we still don’t understand.”
Viktor was still staring at the screen. “What if it isn’t communicable at all?”
“Come again?”
“What if W.A.R. injected far more victims than we thought—what if they injected all of them? Or what if the number of victims were manipulated by the press?”
“Who would be in a position to do that?”
“I don’t know.”
All of a sudden, Grey’s soft drink didn’t taste so good.
“Van Draker was focused on the science,” Viktor said, turning to face Grey. “Dag was a military man. As dangerous as they were, doesn’t it feel as if there was someone missing in the W.A.R. equation? Someone who coordinated the effort worldwide?”
“I . . . what are you saying?”
“Jans said he considered his work a failure. If these people were truly waging a global war and the gargoyle virus was not communicable, and van Draker’s lab didn’t have the capacity to mass produce enough virus, then what does that tell you? Was it all a bluff, or did they have another agenda?”
“These people don’t bluff,” Grey said.
“I agree.”
Grey thought about it for a moment, and then a chill spread through him, slow and sure. “It could mean the virus was manufactured somewhere else. In mass quantity.”
“And?” Viktor said quietly. “What about the distribution? Using members of W.A.R. to inject every person of color in the world, one by one, isn’t practical. Even if they had not been stopped.”
As Grey stared at the television screen, he had a sudden thought, an epiphany about who was in a position to spread the gargoyle virus to millions. He felt his knees go weak at the knowledge, and he gripped Viktor’s arm. “Get Jacques on the phone. Tell him we need a background search, right damn now.”
-52-
The door to the master bedroom in the plush Atlanta townhome swung open. Doctor Hannah Varela stepped inside holding a wine glass. The bedroom had a white-and-silver color scheme and lots of delicate knick-knacks on the shelves. Things like colored soap and perfume bottles and blown glass figurines of opera singers and ballet dancers. A single photo graced the bedside table: Dr. Varela holding hands in a city park with a boy of eight or nine, wavy blond hair, dimples, a smile to melt a glacier.
A wrought-iron headboard climbed the wall opposite the door. To the right of the bed, the east-facing wall had a vertical window showcasing houselights sprinkling the darkness like fireflies. When Grey had arrived a few hours earlier, during the day, he had glimpsed Stone Mountain in the distance.
At first, as she kicked off her work shoes, Dr. Varela didn’t notice the lean man in jeans and a motorcycle jacket standing by the window with crossed arms. When she turned on the light and saw him, she gasped and dropped the wine glass, shattering it on the wood floor.
“I admit,” Grey said, “staging the attack that night behind the restaurant was a clever move.”
“Thank God,” Dr. Varela said, when she saw who it was. Her expression turned puzzled. “How did you get in? What are you doing here?”
“Don’t bother,” Grey said.
“What?”
“You would have killed millions.”
“Are you feeling okay?” She dug a phone out of her purse. “I can call—”
“Put the phone and the purse on the bed. Now.” Grey was close enough to grab her if needed, and he knew she didn’t carry a firearm to work.
He was worried more about Mace.
After she complied, Grey set the phone and the purse by the window.
“I don’t understand,” she said, though he could tell by her roving eyes, searching for an escape, that she very much did.
“The Swedish company that manufactured the vaccine for the CDC—a company staffed by W.A.R.—produced the gargoyle virus instead,” Grey said. “Millions and millions of bottles. That was the plan all along, wasn’t it? Van Draker couldn’t make it communicable, so you decided to whip up panic worldwide, buy yourself a few journalists and pharmaceutical regulators, and plant some fake news. You let Akhona escape to seed fear and terror, and knew the threat of a manufactured virus would only create more tension. Even when we uncovered the lab and gave the CDC the vaccine, it just moved up your timeline, gave you a reason to pretend to reverse-engineer it. Great job. The world is begging for the vaccine.”
Dr. Varela edged toward the far side of the bed. “Are you feeling okay?”
“We’ve identified the W.A.R. sympathizers you hired at the CDC, and paid off in the customs offices of various countries. The other workers, I’m sure, just did what they were told.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” she said.
“By the time anyone would have figured it out, God knows how many people would have taken the vaccine.”
Hannah drew closer to the bedside table. “I need a Valium,” she said, reaching for a pill bottle behind the photo of her and the child. Only two pills remained, Grey knew, so he didn’t worry about an overdose.
“The FBI knows everything,” he continued. “Bottles have been tested.”
“And I would do such a terrible thing,” she lifted her palms, “for what purpose?”
“For him,” Grey said quietly, pointing at the photo.
Her eyes flashed, but he noticed her hands never shook as she opened the pill bottle and shook one out.
“Your real name is Annalena Fleischer. Your parents were both Nazis who emigrated to Mendoza to escape the war tribunals. Both prominent scientists who traveled on ratlines established by Juan Peron to bring talented German professionals into Argentina, to help improve his own country. Your parents’ true identity has been known to Interpol for some time, but they died years ago, and you were never on the radar. Still, fearing scandal, you changed your name when you went to Chicago to study epidemiology. In the beginning, you wanted to escape your past, didn’t you? Or at least ignore it.” Grey shook his head. “Maybe you would have had a normal life, maybe not. But then they killed your boy.”
