"You don’t believe me," Joran said, reading it in his face. "I understand. I’d rather not have to give you a pep talk, it's humiliating for us both, but here we both are." He spread his arms. "If you give up, it won’t matter if I find a real cure. They’ll block it."
They sat quietly for a time. Both of them knew this was true.
"So what do you want?" James While asked. "If you're not trying to win?"
"I am trying to win," Joran said, and smiled. "Just not yet."
James While found that annoying. "You'll have to explain that a little more."
"I started seeing things differently after my Array blew. A bigger scope, perhaps. Victory in one year was impossible, so I started looking at two years, ten, even beyond my lifetime. I imagined our struggle as a kind of generational goal, a movement. Call it a secret society, if you like, because that way we get to be knights." He grinned. "Something like the shadow SEAL Olan Harrison built for himself. A conspiracy."
James While frowned. "I've seen the readouts. We have days left, only, then the Arks are underground for ten years. What generation is coming after us?"
Joran didn't say anything. Instead he tapped the case on the table. James could guess what was in it; the cure. Joran had suggested it might buy them ten years; a potent combination of drugs and genetic therapies, extremely expensive, each dose worth something like a billion dollars.
"Who's the next generation?" While asked again. "Who carries the torch on after we die?"
Joran shrugged. "I can't predict that. Someone from the bunkers, perhaps. Maybe one of the coma survivors out there."
"We're killing the coma-survivors off. You wrote that part of the plan yourself."
"Maybe," said Joran. "But we don't know what will happen. Perhaps this Amo in New York will turn out to be a great leader. Maybe Drake will be a genius who sees things on the line that I can't. It could be anyone. We need to be ready for that possibility, we need to prepare the tools for them to carry our fight across the finish line. That's our goal now. Not so we're going to win, but so the next person to come along might."
While watched him.
He hadn't thought about that. It was a timescale and a worldview he hadn't considered. It required a kind of blind faith that was the opposite of all the work he'd done as COO. Still, he turned the concept in his head. Not to win, but to ready the ground.
It was alluring. For years he'd run the SEAL and considered himself just one part of a bigger idea, an ideal; to improve people's lives. He'd known that he wouldn't achieve perfection within his lifetime. Perhaps this was the same, a different kind of legacy.
That moved the end zone. It said that this wasn't the end, but the beginning.
He put his hand on the case. Nothing more needed to be said.
"Give it to me," he said. "Cure me."
Joran pulled out a series of syringes. One by one, he gave James While the injections he required.
Three days later the apocalypse finally came.
15. BEECHCRAFT
The Beechcraft King Air 350i purred through the air above the snowy mountains of Romania, circling the herd of twelve lepers far below.
They were too far ahead.
In the eight days that had passed since Anna and Helen Tailor had assumed control over the Istanbul bunker, the lepers had traveled an incredible eight hundred miles. Three times further than expected, halfway to the Brezno bunker already.
They'd thought they had more time.
In those eight days of control, they'd done a great deal. Survivors were put into teams and set to the various necessary jobs: shifting and burning the corpse piles, getting power back up to parts of the bunker, clearing Command of smoke, shifting the injured down into proper wards with air conditioning and running water and supplies, training new nursing squads to tend to those injured mentally by what Amo had done.
All that was done, but the challenges that remained were overwhelming. The shield was irretrievably fried. Comms with other bunkers either were non-functional or were being ignored, just like comms with New LA. And more people were getting sick every day.
"It's because of the line," Lucas had explained, when the first of them came in three days after the blast, complaining of headaches, dizziness and exhaustion.
"But the line's gone," Anna had said. "The leper in Istanbul blew it away."
Lucas was exhausted too. They all were. They all had headaches and dizziness to some degree. He had barely slept since the handover, wracked with the pressure to help Jake and the other Lyell's sufferers, to come up with a cure for the bunker survivors using readings from the baby in Anna's belly, figure out a way to halt the advance of the lepers on Brezno, and deal with this crater on the line.
His face was blotchy and his words slurred. He shook his head.
"That's the problem. We need the line. It's like oxygen."
Anna frowned.
"You know this," he went on. "We've seen it. The line's fine for us, because we're adapted to it. Most people it turns into zombies. But even a bad signal on the line can impact us. The demons, the lepers. Whatever it is that you've been doing with your 'thought bullets'." He waved a hand. Few of them were comfortable talking about Anna's new powers. "It's a medium, like the air. People need oxygen in the air to breathe. This emptiness in the line, it's like low oxygen because there's no air. They don't get infected, but they also can't breathe properly."
Anna grimaced.
"How long?"
He gulped down a breath. "Twenty-three already sick, three dead, and not from anything Amo did. They were fine after his attack. Their symptoms started after, and they match. It's the lack of the line. It's killing them as surely as asphyxiation. I can only guess at the timescale, but assuming normal disease vectors, maybe two months before they're all in comas."
"Shit."
He nodded.
"If the bunkers don't bomb us first."
"Or the lepers don't come back," he added.
He looked at her. He was angry as well as weary. Angry at her. Angry at the universe. Angry at what had been done to Jake. Anna was too.
"Sleep," she said. "That's an order. You're no good to anyone like this."
He snorted. "When did you last sleep?"
She hadn't. Not really. They'd set up an office for her in Hangar 7, with Helen and Peters, and she'd even spent some time organizing papers and thinking about instituting a filing system, but she'd fallen asleep at her desk, only to wake hours later with a blanket across her shoulders, and Peters looking down at her warmly.
She'd been angry then, too.
"You needed it," he said. "Your baby needs it."
"The baby's already dead," she'd answered, then strode out without saying any more. She didn't sit at the desk again.
"Sleep or you'll make a mistake," she told Lucas. "And we can't afford that."
"If I sleep I'll never make a cure. There isn't time."
The trouble was, he was right. There wasn't time. People fell sick too fast. They started putting the worst of them into sedative comas, using up the bunker's supplies just to reduce the time required to care for them. Jake was one of the first to go under, along with the other advanced Lyell's sufferers.
Anna had spoken to him briefly, before he went under. He couldn't talk much anyway, for the pain and the pain meds already warring in his system. Wrapped up in white, he barely looked like a person.
She held her hand near his, unable to even touch him, and wept for them both, and promised him things would get better soon. He'd wept a little too, and the tears came out tinged pink.
They put him down. His pain ended and he slept.
Anna turned her attention to the lepers. The technology they'd need to stop them didn't exist yet.
"I'm working on it," was all Lucas could say. He had numerous teams working on all aspects of the line at the same time in the bunker's labs; a crazy flurry of activity. "They had containment cells here, but those were loops split off the main shield, a
nd the main shield is down. I don't know how to make another."
There weren't any good answers. "I'm expecting the lepers to hit Brezno in two months," Anna said. "That's how fast the ocean went. But the lepers may go faster. If I don't stop them before they hit, they'll be an unstoppable flood by the time they come back. Thousands of them."
Lucas sighed. He knew it. "There are too many unknowns, Anna. Too much to do. I can't give you a date. I'm doing everything I can."
So was she. So were they all.
She went looking, and found the Beechcraft King Air in Hangar 7 on the south side of the airport. It was a large turboprop with four engines, boasting a cruise range of over three thousand kilometers. It could take them all the way to Brezno, and she had a distant, hopeful plan for that. Perhaps, if she could shift all the bodies at Brezno into the bunker, and seal it off completely, then the lepers might not be able to convert them. And even if the signal could reach down through the unshielded earth and convert them, at least they would be trapped inside the bunker, and perhaps they couldn't get out.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
She ran scenarios through her mind while she labored on the Beechcraft with a team of expert engineers, Peters at her side. To try it, they'd just have to go. They'd have to see. In snatched hours of sleep she dreamed of three thousand people choking in a vacuum of the line. They choked and choked, and kept choking.
"All right," Peters would say, when she woke in the dark or light of the Hangar, the clanking sounds of engine checks in the background. "All right, Anna."
She'd get back to work.
At times they talked about the baby, or the Alps, or her powers. She'd tried to teach him, tried to teach the others too, but it seemed nobody else could do what she could. When they pushed, when they reached down to twist, Anna felt something fizzle in them, but the spark didn't light. They couldn't send out a cold demon fog, or shoot thought bullets, and it annoyed no one more than Peters.
He worked on replacement panels for the rusted wings, filtered and purified the fuel, and stewed on it. He wanted to be useful, she could see that. He didn't want to be helpless again.
"Maybe it was Amo," she tried. "Whatever Amo did to me. It changed me, and now I can do this. Maybe if you keep practicing-"
He only grunted, as she trailed off. She'd seen him practicing, achieving nothing more than the fizzle. Maybe it just wasn't there. Still, he tried.
Days passed by, each one another length of fuse burned down. The Beechcraft reached readiness.
"We are seeking information only," Peters explained to Helen. "We fly above the lepers, and measure their pace. We will then know how many people to take to Brezno, to shift the bodies."
Helen OK-ed the mission. It was only supposed to take a round-trip of three to four hours. If the lepers were where they expected them, they would barely be past the border of Turkey.
Only a few people from the bunker came out to see them off, those who weren't buried in their own work, but they didn't cheer or show much enthusiasm. The absence of the line was having a dimming effect on them all, even if the headaches and confusion hadn't yet begun.
The plane bounced along the buckled tarmac and lifted off with a hundred yards of runway left. The familiar lurch and wobble felt like coming home. Swiftly they began to climb.
"Here we are, Anna," Peters said, smiling in the co-pilot's seat. "We are always better in the air."
They did find them, but not within three or four hours. The lepers were not in Turkey, or anywhere near the border. They weren't in Bulgaria, nor at the border heading north. Rather they were in the mountains of central Romania eight hundred miles away, fully halfway to Brezno already.
* * *
It was a terrifying realization. It changed everything, and kept on dawning like a series of hammer blows as the plane circled hard, and the jagged sense of lepers refined on the line below. Anna looked at Peters and he looked at her, and neither of them knew what to say.
They would hit Brezno in another eight days, or sooner. Lucas was never going to have new shielding technology ready in time. Could they get enough people there in time to load all the bodies into the bunker?
It didn't seem possible. Not in the Beechcraft alone, and there was no time to prep another plane. That meant Brezno was going to fall, and thousands of people were going to turn.
From there the dominos would drop. Gap would be next, even as half the leper tide would surely come washing back toward Istanbul. They wouldn't be able to save either of them. They'd have to evacuate, but without a portable shield there was no way to take anyone with them.
Perhaps they could be locked underground while the lepers prowled above, but they'd surely die down there when the resources ran out, if the infecting signal of the lepers didn't reach down through the earth and get them first.
"Shit," said Peters.
It was shit. It hit home with a devastating thump in Anna's belly. A horde of three thousand lepers, of six thousand, would be unstoppable. They would sweep over the world, swallowing Istanbul and the other bunkers like pieces of chewing gum, swallowing the world in just a few months, keeping a sea of infection alive for another decade at least.
Every second she'd spent working to save Istanbul would have been wasted. Everything she'd been through in the Alps would be for nothing, and all the pain Amo had caused would be pointless.
She flew the plane and the weight of it thickened, welling up from the rabid creatures below and crackling on the line. These twelve lepers were an Ocean seed, ready to spawn the tsunami. It was happening right now, right here, and she couldn't do a thing.
Long moments passed.
"They jump," Peters said. He was studying the imagery from the aerial camera they'd mounted on the Beechcraft's belly. "It explains why they are so fast."
Anna watched the screen, and grunted agreement. She'd never actually seen the lepers before, only felt the rabid effect of them on the line grow stronger as they'd drawn closer. On the screen they were black and white blips, twelve bodies that zagged and flickered, disobeying basic laws of physics. They didn't really walk, more they crackled and leapfrogged forward in impossible spurts, covering ground far faster than any sprinting demon.
On the line they tasted of blown gunpowder and chaos, like a streak of electricity through the air. She tried to follow their paths back to the root and felt her own thoughts corrupting; twisting, losing focus, throwing up strange and dark ideas.
"What are you doing?" Peters asked abruptly, jolting her back to focus. She looked up at him blearily, seeing the concern on his face. "Look."
He pointed, and she looked at the screen, where three thousand feet below the lepers had stopped moving. Her heart skipped a beat. Their black and white faces were raised to the sky, as if they were looking at her. The strange thought hit that at any moment they would leapfrog up into the Beechcraft.
"They feel me," Anna said quietly. "Studying them."
"So stop it, Anna."
With an effort of will she shifted her attention away from the lepers, sucking up out of the line like a boot out of thick mud. Instead she studied the clouds and looked at the Beechcraft's dials. She listened to the engine revving and counted specks on the windshield, until-
"They're moving again," said Peters. "Anna, what was that?"
She didn't know what to say.
"I was listening to them," she managed. "On the line. They're, I don't know. They're broken, somehow. If I could reach in and straighten them out, maybe-"
"No," Peters said firmly. "Anna, listen to yourself. Look what Amo did to Istanbul, with just one of them. How would that help us now?"
She didn't know. Peters went on, talking about the possibilities that he knew were hopeless, trying to convince himself and her that there was some other way. She tried to listen, but ignoring the lepers was getting harder; the sense of them lapped at her thoughts like a riptide, each taste a hanging question, the urgent sense of something left undone, an addi
ction that led only to-
"Anna," Peters said, shaking her arm.
She didn't need to look at the screen to see it; she could feel their eyes gazing up into her just as she was gazing into them. That way led to madness, yes, but she'd been mad before; madness was an old friend and ally, a weapon she could turn at will, and what else was she supposed to do now? There just wasn't enough time. She needed an answer, and the more she tracked them on the line, the more she thought that answer lay with them.
"We need to go back," Peters said firmly. "Turn the plane around, Anna, we have to go back to Lucas, he can have an idea, but we have to-"
She didn't have to think.
She knew Lucas would have no ideas. There weren't any to have; the lepers were a hard wall, inflexible, with no trick ways through.
There was no need to think now, anyway, not with their buzz rising up on the line. She never had thought on her catamaran, reading the swells of the ocean just to stay alive. How was this any different? These creatures were part of the ocean, and so was Anna. She knew what she had to do.
She pushed the stick forward, and the Beechcraft rocked into a hard dive that threw Peters forward, cutting him off mid-speech. His safety belt caught him sharply. He turned to her with a look of baffled horror.
"What are you doing?"
It was simple. She had to do something and this was it. The baby in her belly was no good for anyone if the virus metastasized at Brezno.
"I'm following the waves," she said, her voice emerging from some deep, automatic place in the back of her head, not under her own control.
"What waves? Anna, stop listening to them, they are mad! I feel it too. We have to go back."
They had agreed to go back, Anna knew, but she couldn't. The pivot point was right here, in this moment, and only she was in the position to decide.
She shoved the stick and steepened the dive.
Peters let out an involuntary bark and braced himself against the cockpit readouts, but whatever he said was muted by the rush of wind and the sound of the lepers calling up to her, their voices synchronizing in a detuned, white static call.
The Last Mayor Box Set 3 Page 47
