“I’m sorry,” Vance said. “We’ve sent what we can spare. If you want me and my people to pack up and go home, we will. You saw their faces. They don’t want to defend some foreign land while their wives and husbands and children and parents are back up north, unsure if they’re going to make it another day.”
“I don’t believe this,” Ringgold said.
“I really am sorry, but this is out of my hands,” Vance said. “Remember, you don’t fight with the army you want. You fight with the one you have. That’s what we’re doing—and that’s what you’ll have to do as well.”
Ringgold fumed at the last-minute change, but she understood Canada’s perspective. She should have seen this coming. “Cornelius, if we identify a target, does this change our tentative plans to destroy the Prophet?”
“It does,” he said. “We’ll have to consult with General Souza again, but by my rough estimates, any concerted attack, regardless of the Prophet’s location, will require at least another five-hundred troops to make up for what the Canadians aren’t sending.”
He shot Vance a look filled with daggers.
Ringgold knew that five-hundred troops could make or break their eventual assault. They needed the total number of armed forces properly trained and equipped for an all-out offensive. But she still regretted the solution that came to mind, hoping she would not come to regret it.
“General, you’ve been working closely with Captain Beckham to train our newest recruits,” Ringgold said. “How soon before you believe they’ll be prepared for an offensive strike?”
Cornelius was a staunch, confident man, but even he squirmed. “A few of their units have already seen action when we sent them to help reinforce Outpost Houston. They’ll be the best equipped in any offensive maneuvers. I can reassign them immediately and focus their training on offensive instead of defensive tactics.”
“Do it,” Ringgold said. “We might not have long. The final battle is coming, and we need every able-bodied person left to fight it.”
***
Azrael savored the smell of blood and antiseptic chemicals. This lab had kicked off his empire, from a single follower to an army on the verge of a decisive victory. Past rows of laboratory equipment was a space that Azrael had personally helped design.
The room used to be a special sterile environment suited for animal experiments.
Now it had been adapted for humans.
It was here, in this very room, where he had created VX-102 and started his initial human trials.
The formerly white walls were covered in a wallpaper of red tendrils from his organic communication network, another testament to the technological achievements he had accomplished with the help of his scientist cohort. Most of them had seen early on the success of VX-102, and they had chosen to elevate themselves to the status of Scions, like himself. He welcomed them into his fold.
Others who were not as mentally fit maintained their frail human bodies. The delicate, skinny fingers of humans were an abhorrent necessity to work with sensitive laboratory equipment, like some of the microscopes and analytical chemistry instrumentation that had been designed for their unevolved bodies.
Fortunately, the Scions’ clawed fingers were much better at other tasks. Especially the ones that Azrael cherished, like the one he was about to help with now.
Sporadic screams of horror and pained groans echoed from the test specimens behind the various partitions, all isolated by plastic curtains. The buzz of surgical saws cutting through bone and the slurp of organs sliding from bodies into metal pans was music to Azrael’s ears.
He peeled back a plastic blood-spattered curtain to reveal his faithful old doctor, Murphy, working over a humanoid body.
The wrinkled old man held surgical tools and prepared to replace some of the patient’s organs with transplants from a dead Variant.
“Is this him?” Azrael asked.
“Yes, this is the one we recovered from Katahdin,” Murphy replied. “The latest version of VX-102 has worked extraordinarily fast in him. I believe that with these final surgeries, he’ll be complete.”
“And his brain?”
“Fully intact, Prophet,” the doctor said. “When he isn’t passed out from the pain, he can talk coherently. He’s very, very angry about something, although it usually doesn’t take long for the pain to make him pass out again during my operations.”
Azrael traced his own clawed fingers over the long claws jutting from the patient’s fingers. “These transplants from Variant donors are truly improving the development of the Scions.”
“Yes, you made a wise decision adopting this practice,” Murphy said. “Not only do our patients immediately get the benefit of some of the physical attributes of the Scion, but the resulting inflammation and irritation from the surgeries help to activate the body’s healing response. All the resulting signaling cascades accelerate the VX-102 activity and enhance the epigenetic changes.”
Azrael narrowed his eyes and used a claw to pull down the doctor’s mask to reveal the man’s lips. The doctor trembled.
“You do not need to explain the science to me,” Azrael said. “I invented it. I know precisely what it does.”
The man bowed. “Yes, of course, Prophet. How foolish of me to assume otherwise.”
“How long until he’s complete?”
“He will need at least three more days, and more for recovery.”
“You have two,” Azrael said. “He will recover just fine.”
The Prophet left Murphy’s operating area and moved into another nearby OR.
There a single woman was strung up, red vines squirming into her nostrils, ear canals, and throat. She let out a whimper when she saw him.
“Please… help,” she managed to choke out.
“I am about to,” Azrael said. “You have been chosen.”
He glanced at a surgical tray beside where the woman was suspended. Everything had already been prepped by his assistants as instructed. The only thing he needed was the donor Variant organs, which were waiting on ice inside a cooler near the surgical tray.
“Chosen…” she said, coughing. “Chosen for—”
Azrael didn’t give her a chance to finish her words. He swiped at her abdomen with his claw. This was something human fingers definitely could not do. He relished the woman’s scream. Her face went white, and she squirmed a few moments before she passed out.
That was quicker than he would have liked. He began the tedious process of placing hemostats over severed vessels so she wouldn’t bleed to death. His preparations and the red tendrils roping through her body would keep her alive as he cut out a few of her organs to replace with the donor Variant organs his people had harvested.
After an hour of work, the curtains to his surgical room were peeled back.
“Prophet,” a rasping voice came. “You told me to meet you here, yes?”
Azrael didn’t have to turn his attention away from his patient to know who it was. He had told the monster to meet him here while he worked. “Yes, Elijah. I have a task for you.”
“I stand ready, master.”
“The general has failed me in Canada,” Azrael said, trying hard not to crush the woman’s intestines in anger as he extracted them. He finished pulling out a rope, snapped it in half, and flung it onto a metal pan. “Team Ghost escaped.”
“Shall I pursue them?” Elijah asked.
“No.”
Azrael licked the blood off his claws and turned to Elijah. The Scion was larger than most with bulging muscles pressing against the fabric of his dark clothes. He wore a ragged cape, and in one set of claws, he carried the front half of a human skull that he had fashioned into a mask.
He was one of Azrael’s first creations, a faithful servant, and had chosen the name Elijah after his rebirth.
Azrael picked up a small electric device from his surgical tray. “Do you know what this is?”
Elijah shook his head.
“It’s a GPS chip.” Az
rael held the dime-sized device between his claws, rotating it to reflect the light. “The flexible microelectric arrays hanging off it harvest energy from the body to power it. This device helps me keep track of the faithful.”
He went back to the human woman. After cutting into her bicep, he sutured the device to the inside of her flesh and connected the array to her muscle.
“I have allies tracking our quarry up north, thanks to a device like this in one of our escaped Scions,” Azrael said. “So you will understand now why I’m less concerned about where these people go. We will always find them, so long as they have the tracked Scion with them.”
“Then what do you need from me?”
“I have different plans for you,” Azrael said. He finished suturing the woman’s bicep and turned toward her guts again. All this surgery was making him hungry, and he caught himself salivating.
“I live to serve,” Elijah said.
“You live because you serve.”
The woman started to wake, her eyelids fluttering. She groaned, blood dribbling down her open abdomen.
“Wha… wha…” she started to murmur.
She twisted her head enough against the tendrils holding her in place to see her stomach. Her mouth opened, and she let out a muffled scream.
This time, the pain wasn’t enough to make her pass out.
“You are almost there,” Azrael said. He placed a claw on her lips, and she writhed. “Patience.”
She thrashed against the vines holding her into place, moving enough that Azrael couldn’t continue the surgery.
No matter. It was time for him to eat anyway.
He picked up the length of intestine he had removed from her.
“Do you recognize this?” he held it up so she could see.
Her eyes bulged.
He took a bite of it, letting blood trickle over his chin. “You are delicious.”
She finally fainted again, and he finished his meal, throwing a scrap to Elijah. The Scion hungrily stuffed it into his mouth.
“I’m growing tired of these heretics,” Azrael said. “It takes too long to turn a person like her into a magnificent Scion like you.”
“Yes, yes,” Elijah said.
“Unfortunately, we have not located the humans who have infiltrated our network. They have built too many safeguards for our faithful to get past. I’ve been told it could take weeks to locate the humans. I fear that if we wait too long, they will regroup. And we have heard rumors that they have sought the assistance of other nations.”
“They will fail, master, we will stop them.”
“Indeed we will.” Azrael began suturing the woman’s abdomen together again. “I want the rest of the Allied States crushed before we have to deal with too many other nations of heretics.”
Azrael looped in the last suture and turned toward Elijah.
“What do you propose, Prophet?” Elijah asked.
“We have the advantage,” Azrael said. “The humans don’t know we’re aware of their activities infiltrating our communication network. It’s time that we use this against them. Instead of laboring to root out the heretics, we will bring them to us.”
“And then we will defeat them.”
Azrael turned and traced a claw along the neck of the patient, watching her sutured-covered chest rise and fall as she breathed slowly. “Then you will get your chance to bring in Team Ghost, Beckham, and all the rest of these traitorous bastards.”
“How, Prophet?”
“It’s easy. Just tell them exactly what they want to hear.”
— 9 —
Strapped to a chair in the parking garage outside a Variant tunnel, Kate’s head filled with a thousand pained voices crying out to be free. Men, women, children, all prisoners of the Variants, imprisoned in the webbing network. She wished she could send them some words of reassurance.
But a single moment of weakness would ruin all her efforts.
If she so much as sent them a single message, the masterminds would know she was a spy in their midst. She had to drown out their screams of agony and pleas for help.
The only way to help these people was to zero-in on what really mattered.
Finding the Prophet. Finding where the New Gods were. And sabotage any incoming attacks.
She had already missed the attack on Banff and the monsters’ communications regarding the scouts outside Houston.
The longer she remained hooked up to the network filtering through the messages, the more her head throbbed. Cold sweat dripped over her flesh, and she trembled as she listened to the terrified voices of people hooked up to the vines around the country, their bodies wasting away to feed the spreading network.
“Help!”
“Mom? Mom, where are you?”
“I can’t… breathe… I can’t…”
The voices overwhelmed her. She could hardly stand it.
Feed me. Feed. Food.
Kill it. It threatens us. Heretics.
Attack the camp. Kill the humans. Bring them to us.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
She tried to keep her mind focused. But the human voices won out again. Her muscles contracted and her skull flared with pain.
Suddenly all the voices disappeared. She blinked, her blurred vision clearing to Ron standing above her.
“Kate, you with me?” he asked, gingerly touching her shoulder.
“Yeah… How long have I been…”
“A few hours.”
“Felt like days.”
“Leslie just finished up a chromatography experiment upstairs. Maybe it would be a good time for you two to swap.”
Kate straightened in the chair. A few soldiers guarding the parking garage glanced at her, worry clear in their expression. She twisted to see Sammy at the computer behind her.
“Was it that bad?” Kate asked.
“You were screaming,” Sammy said, twisting one of her dreadlocks. “You sure you’re okay?”
Kate massaged her temples. “I need a break. Ron, you’re right. Where’s Leslie?”
“We just sent for her,” Sammy said. She walked over and handed Kate a towel for the sweat.
“Thanks,” Kate said. She felt a little embarrassed to have her assistants treating her so gently, but she couldn’t let pride get in their way.
“I can learn how to do this too, so it’s not just Leslie and you,” Ron said.
“We’ll see.”
Footsteps soon echoed down the stairs, and Leslie appeared.
“I’m ready to go,” she said. “And I’ve got the last bits of data processing upstairs for you. Took me nearly the entire day to get it ready.”
“Give me the rundown,” Kate said.
“Figuring out what was in the grenade was relatively easy. It took me a few hours to run through the basic battery of biological agent assessments, but since we knew it was bacteria, that made it easier.”
Kate braced herself. “It isn’t a new variation of airborne VX-99, is it?”
“No, actually, it contained anthrax spores.”
“Were they genetically modified?”
“Not according to the gene sequencing.”
“There’s something else this tells us,” Kate said.
“What’s that?” Ron asked.
“Anthrax isn’t hard to grow or distribute, but before the war, existing strains in the United States were tightly guarded,” she said. “Only a few national labs had access for testing and research purposes. Maybe that’s another connection we can exploit.”
“I can compile a list of all those laboratories and institutions,” Ron said.
“This might be a long shot, but we already know that the person or people responsible for the New Gods had access to several DARPA technologies. The high concentrations of activity in those former research labs in Denver and Seattle proved that.”
“But those labs only housed parts of the research for the microelectric arrays and the neural programming technology for the webbing net
work.”
“Exactly. And while Seattle turned out to be a site of Chimera research, there was no sign of the Prophet there. Based on the presence of anthrax in that grenade and all the crazy biological horrors like the bats, masterminds, network, and Chimeras, we need to be focusing on labs related to biodefense.”
“We’re looking for one sick former government biologist behind all this, aren’t we?” Sammy said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. It was a rogue military officer who led to the initial VX-99 outbreak, and with the number of technologies the New Gods have used, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that some traitorous Department of Defense scientist or an entire research group is behind all this.”
“But when we found out about Denver and Seattle, how would we have missed this place when we were tracking all that communication activity over the network?” Ron asked.
Sammy answered for Kate. “Firewalls, encrypted comms. Think basic cybersecurity, except adapted for a biological network. Whoever this Prophet is, he keeps proving himself smarter than we ever anticipated. If he was previously involved in national security, the guy would know to protect his digital and physical footprint.”
“Sammy, I want you to dig a little deeper in the network with Leslie,” Kate said. “See if you can find any dark corners of the network that might be protected by these firewalls. We need to redouble our search efforts.”
“I’ll get started now,” Sammy said.
Kate turned to Leslie. “How about the biopsied Chimera tissues?”
“The last of the chromatography and PCR runs were just finishing when I came down. Should be ready for you in less than half-an-hour.”
“Thank you,” Kate said.
“Anything else you need from me now?”
“Tap into the network when you feel up to it.”
“I’m ready.”
Leslie eagerly took the seat where Kate had been as Ron prepared the webbing for her to integrate with. Once she was in the chair, Ron glanced at his wristwatch.
“She can probably withstand listening for a good four or five hours,” Ron said. “I can join you up in the lab once we know Leslie’s connection to the network is stable.”
Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 107
