Another crash of thunder, this one rattling the windows, and the power died, the residue of the light hanging in the air like a ghostly apparition before it, too, faded away. The basement was plunged into blackness, a darkness so extreme that Adam couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. In the black silence, he could feel the blood rushing in his ears, the way the ocean sounded on a dark night.
You just need your eyes to adjust, just give it a minute.
But his eyes didn’t adjust, and it remained pitch black, a photo negative, the inverse of light. It felt ten degrees hotter in the room, like someone had started preheating an oven; a drop of sweat traced its way down Adam’s flank. He began seeing shadows rippling against the wall, even though he knew he was imagining it, twisted shadows of evil men whispering to each other and rubbing their bony hands in anticipation of a sleepy little boy drifting off, like the ones he had seen through his bedroom window as a child. A bug of panic crawled up his legs.
He bolted for the steps, crashing over a half-filled laundry basket on the way, and raced up the stairs as if he had escaped a portal from some hellish dimension. By the time he burst into the corridor on the first floor, he could barely breathe, the fear lassoing his airway like a cowboy roping a steer. He tried to collect his thoughts, to remind himself what he still needed to pack, but his box had ruptured like the bulkheads on Titanic, and now terror was flooding the hull of the H.M.S. Adam. He’d kept it in for two weeks, but that was over now; every strand of his DNA had sounded the alarm, the one you did not ignore.
He felt his way down the hallway from memory, and mercifully, his keys and phone were still in the basket where he’d left them. As he grabbed his keys, it hit him. His SUV wasn’t here. It was still down at Holden Beach. He had no car. He giggled. He couldn’t stop himself, and the giggles bloomed into full-blown hysterics. His laughs echoed in the evening gloom, bouncing through the ether, sounding huge and insane. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Insane. You’re going insane, he thought as the giggles faded away.
He grabbed a flashlight and went next door to Jeanette’s, the rain soaking his clothes. Her Honda remained parked at the curb, and her body was still lying in the yard, just another scene from the apocalypse, dontcha know? Her body had been picked over some by the animals, which really must have been sporting giant woodies with the vast selection of carrion that had suddenly been bestowed upon them. Adam avoided looking at her as he went up to the front door and let himself inside.
The house was a wreck. Clothes, food, the sour stench of something turned over. He stepped gingerly to the kitchen, where he knew she kept her car keys, hoping they were still there. He found them on the counter and then he rushed back outside, down the porch steps, and back to his house before the hot spike of guilt overwhelmed him.
It’s OK, he thought. It’s an emergency.
He loaded the car as quickly as he could, oblivious to the storm raging around him. When he was done, he ran back inside to change out of his wet clothes. He had to go, go, go! But as he did so, standing there in his wet shorts dripping on his floor, the absurdity of his impatience struck him. Where was he going at this hour, a terrible thunderstorm buffeting the city, the power out? He suspected the going would be tough enough in broad daylight, but to try it now would be just asking for trouble. In the morning, he decided. He would set off in the morning.
By nine o’clock, the storm had pushed off to the east, leaving behind a clear, moonless night. Adam stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. The darkness was total and complete, the city sealed tight in black ink. Sure, Richmond had had its share of storm-related power outages, but those were usually brief, nothing like the immense blackness he now faced, as though the entire city had been shoved inside a body bag and forgotten. No generators hummed, no candles warmed the windows. That was the difference. Blackouts had once been communal affairs, bringing people onto their porches with their Pinot and gin and tonics, their cigarettes and their pipes, laughter peppering the evening air, their jam-packed schedules paused, if only for a little while. This, though, was something else. Unseen back rooms of impromptu parties, where the roaches and spiders and rats scurried about, where evil men lured small children and young women and left forever scars no one could see.
He spent the night on his couch, the gun perched on his chest.
Part II
Void
How lonely it is going to be now on the Yellow Brick Road.
-Ray Bolger, The Scarecrow
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dawn.
The sun spread its virgin light across the plains, covering up the darkness like a fresh coat of paint. Miles Chadwick was up early, as he usually was, sipping coffee and looking out across the eight-hundred-acre Citadel compound. He kept his office in his living quarters, on the second floor of the main building. Floor-to-wall windows looked west toward the growing fields, which would provide sustenance for their new world, the proverbial bottle for the infant society. It had been a good summer for the crops, and the land was alive, breathing, pulsing. The summer harvest was in full swing, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, zucchini coming into the kitchens by the truckload. A pair of tractors was already out, chugging along, preparing the ground for the fall planting season.
He still found it hard to believe they’d made it. They’d executed the plan to perfection. As he did every day, he thought about the first time he’d met Leon Gruber, the German billionaire who’d made all this possible. Gruber was the majority stakeholder in the Penumbra Corporation, a multinational conglomerate with nearly 100,000 employees worldwide. Penumbra had its fingers in a number of pies, most notably transportation, energy, weapons, technology, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. Starting when he was twenty, Gruber had built the company from the ground up and held more than ninety percent of its shares.
When Gruber approached him, Chadwick had been in Special Pathogens at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, passed over for promotion yet again. Gruber approached him at a Wendy’s near the CDC and invited him to head up his private lab, dedicated to the study of exotic pathogens. The lab was off the books, with no government oversight to interfere with their work. As he sat there, chewing his spicy chicken sandwich, Chadwick relished the idea of telling his bosses in Special Pathogens to go fuck themselves.
The facility was top notch, the security better than he’d seen at the Centers for Disease Control. He’d never asked where or how Gruber had assembled the Citadel’s stock of pathogens, the viruses and bacteria that could lay waste to millions of people; he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. He worked there for six months before Gruber told him what he really wanted Chadwick to do.
It had been a good six months, the most productive in Chadwick’s career. He was having dinner at Gruber’s home on the lake in the northwest corner of the compound, briefing the elderly man on his work. Chadwick believed he was close to developing a vaccine for Ebola Sudan; it wasn’t the deadliest of the Ebola strains, but a vaccine would constitute one of modern medicine’s great achievements and would be worth billions for Gruber and Chadwick. A huge victory against the tropical viruses that kept health officials around the world awake at night and wondering when one would mutate just right, bust loose like the cartoon Tasmanian devil, and take humanity down with it.
At first, Chadwick thought it had been a hypothetical question.
Could he fashion a virus deadly enough and communicable enough to wipe out the human race?
Enjoying the academic nature of the conversation, Chadwick talked about the challenges inherent in such an endeavor. Balancing virulence with communicability, both of which would have to be at a level unseen in human history. Engineering it so that it wouldn’t discriminate against this ethnic group or that age group. Possibly a virus that was constantly mutating so that the human immune system eventually gave out. It would be tough, Chadwick had said, but not impossible.
“So will you do it?” Gruber had asked.
In that moment, as the proposal hung there, pure, virginal, a Schrodinger’s cat of an idea that had neither been accepted nor rejected, he expected to be filled with horror. But he hadn’t been. Saying yes, joining the greatest conspiracy the world had ever known, had seemed so easy, as though he had been meant to do it.
“Yes,” Chadwick had said.
“I realize what I’m asking you to do,” Gruber said. “But don’t think of it as me asking if you to end the world.
“Think of it as my asking you to end climate change.
“Hunger.
“Racism.
“War.
“And for Zoe,” Chadwick had said softly, almost unaware that he’d said it. He was almost in a trance, picturing a world that he could control, a world stripped clean of all the evil that had cut its purity like cheap heroin.
“And all the Zoes,” Gruber had said, placing his hand on Chadwick’s shoulder. He hadn’t even realized Gruber had gotten out of his chair, now looming above him. “It’s time for the world to evolve, Miles.”
Chadwick drank his scotch.
“You knew I’d say yes, didn’t you?” he said to Gruber, unable to look the man in the eye.
“I couldn’t afford not to know,” Gruber said.
And so he had gone all in with Gruber.
Zoe.
Chadwick tried not to think about her because it had been better, less painful, to pack it away deep, rather than think about the meth-addled mugger who had shot his new bride Zoe, six months pregnant, right there at the ATM machine in Atlanta for the forty dollars she had just withdrawn. Twenty-eight years old, a brilliant career ahead of him, and just like that, his life had been turned into a smoking crater. Her killer had never been caught, and Miles took some small measure of comfort in the thought that the virus had almost certainly exacted justice for him and Zoe and their unborn baby. When you got right down to it, the virus had been for him.
So he’d worked and worked, creating iteration after iteration, each virus coming up a bit short until finally, he’d developed Medusa (although it hadn’t been his name for the virus, he thought it was terribly apropos). Then the gathering of the test subjects, the runaways, the vagrants, the homeless, the ones who had already slipped through the cracks and wouldn’t be missed. That last clinical trial was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Aerosol infection of Patient Zero, then exposing her to Patient One for less than fifteen seconds, then One to Two, a chain of exposures, and so on through Patient Forty-Four, the virus airborne and moving even before the host developed symptoms. The virus infected every single test subject, and within thirty-six hours of exposure, every single test subject was dead.
But left unchecked, the virus would be the villain of the story Gruber wanted to tell. No, their story needed a hero. And that was where James Rogers, a specialist in nanomedicine from one of Penumbra’s subsidiaries, had come in. He used cutting-edge nanotechnology to build the vaccine, the yin to the virus’ yang, the light to its dark. They’d been prouder of the vaccine than the virus, using technology to assert dominion over nature, these microscopic machines coded specifically to target and destroy the Medusa virus.
Telling Gruber about each project milestone, recruiting the team to the Citadel, planning the August release, which they had code-named Zero Day, it had all gone off without a hitch. Then about a year before Zero Day, Chadwick received word that Gruber, who was rarely at the compound, had died at the age of eighty-four. Penumbra’s general counsel, a man named Dave Buckley, had shown up at the compound bearing the news. He told Chadwick that Gruber’s will had bequeathed his privately held fortune to the Citadel entity and left specific instructions that the project was to continue unabated with Chadwick at the helm.
Keens in Manhattan, the night they’d released the virus at Yankee Stadium. After Miles had received the telephone call from Patrick Riccards, his director of security, he’d kept on drinking, the alcohol serving as a restrictor plate for his panic. He’d polished off most of the bottle of Dalwhinnie and woke up the next morning with an exquisite hangover. That afternoon, he caught a flight to Omaha, where he’d left a car, and drove three hours to the Citadel compound. The place had been his home for more than a decade, and he had worked hard to integrate himself with the nearby town of Beatrice, Nebraska, about twenty miles to the east. He was generous with his time and his money, he appeared in town frequently. He was a big believer in the hide-in-plain-sight theory. There was never any local curiosity as to what went on in the compound because people just liked him so damn much. He threw parties, organized toy drives. There was even an annual 5K race for charity. Well, there had been, at least.
He’d waited out the plague at the compound, even dropping into town once the virus popped up in that section of the state. He saw patients in the local emergency room in the first week of the outbreak, before things had just totally collapsed. Even he had been stunned by the pathogen’s virulence; he felt close to madness as the dead piled up, in the hospital and urgent care clinic near the center of town, in the churches and houses, from the trailer parks in the southern part of town to the aging Victorian mansions in the east. Although he’d heard about the massive traffic jams in some of the big cities, that hadn’t happened in Beatrice because these people had had nowhere else to go. Many of them had never crossed the town limits in their entire lives, rooted to their birthplaces by poverty, family, lack of education, lack of opportunity.
There were one hundred of them at the Citadel now, the chosen ones, handpicked by Chadwick himself. It had been a long, careful process, one that had taken years. None of the men were older than forty-five; the oldest woman was thirty-six. His and Rogers’ first recruit had been Charlie Gale, a psychiatrist who’d worked with NASA in screening candidates for a manned mission to Mars. Then the government had all but scrapped the space program, a decision that, as it turned out, had been one of the nails in humanity’s coffin. A checkpoint on the highway to extinction. Chadwick had little use for a society that elected to stop learning, to stop exploring. The vast universe beyond the Earth’s troposphere, a rich, undiscovered bed of mysteries, and mankind had said, Nope, we’re good! Together, Rogers, Chadwick and Gale had developed the criteria for membership in the Citadel so they could identify those that would thrive in the new world they were creating. There was no room for error, none whatsoever. Each recruit had to be perfect.
Fifty men. Fifty women. They were doctors, engineers, scientists, botanists, agronomists, survivalists. Single and never married. No children. Rigorous physical examinations. No religious background or participation because the last thing he needed was for humanity’s saviors to wipe each other out in a holy war six months later. Even more rigorous psychological evaluations, because these people had to hold up once they executed the plan.
And he didn’t even put them through the Citadel screening process until he himself had performed his own thorough background check on each of them. He’d followed each of them for months, studied their habits, their trash, their comings and goings, read their Twitter feeds, subscribed to their public Facebook postings.
There had been hiccups, of course. One bright doctor, an epidemiologist who had looked terrific on paper, quickly figured out what the Citadel was up to. That was as close as the project had come to being exposed, and that was when Chadwick realized how lucky he was to have Patrick Riccards as his head of security. Riccards was ex-CIA, a former covert operative who’d served in Afghanistan. Riccards had sensed a vibe from the kid, nothing more than a hunch. But he’d sniffed him out.
The coffee contained a healthy splash of Bailey’s, a little habit he’d picked during the first week of the epidemic, as they’d watched their dark dream come to life. As they watched global news coverage delivered via the satellite link
up, as they’d stayed in contact with their field operatives, his heart was constantly racing, racing, and he found the morning cocktail helped throttle things down a bit. He didn’t know why he was so on edge, why he’d been snapping at his senior advisers, even after it became clear they’d executed the plan flawlessly, that the virus had exceeded their wildest expectations. Based on some of the field reports, mortality from Medusa had exceeded ninety-eight percent in many areas.
And the nanovaccine had worked perfectly. This had been their greatest fear. That the vaccine would fail at the critical moment, that someone would break with the virus. But no one did. Three people had developed non-specific symptoms in the first week of the outbreak, incidents that had launched their collective testicles into their collective throats, but they hadn’t become ill. One person had experienced a mild heart attack during the epidemic, revealing a previously undiagnosed heart condition, but he had recovered and was on medication.
It was all but over now, and it was time to look ahead. Time to begin the work that would carry him through the rest of his life. A quiet world, a blank canvas on which to paint his masterpiece. A new society in which the population was carefully controlled, in which the planet was given time to heal the scars inflicted upon it by the weighty load of seven billion people. But a world in which they’d have all the freedom they could ever want. A society free of crime, of fear, of hate, of partisanship, of ideology, of extremism, of wants, of hunger. They could recreate society in their image, in his image.
He was still considering his options regarding the unvaccinated survivors of the plague, the ones beyond these walls, the ones who, whether they knew it or not, whether they intended it or not, constituted the biggest threat to his grand vision. Chadwick estimated there were approximately five to seven million survivors in the United States alone. Not today, not next month, probably not even next year. But eventually, they could undo everything they had worked so hard to build. He’d put it off long enough. He had to spend some time coming up with a solution.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 14
