The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  * * *

  Later—she did not know how much later—her eyes fluttered briefly open, and she saw people rushing around her, medical personnel in hazmat suits shifting her to a gurney and rushing her away from the helicopter. For a moment, she thought they had arrived at a medical center, but she could smell the ocean and could see the ropes and the markings, and she realized they were on some kind of hospital ship.

  The helicopter rotors whined, the sound diminishing enough that she heard someone shouting at others to keep back, to clear a path. Sophie’s head lolled to one side, and she spotted a group of personnel in white hazmat suits surrounding a single figure in blue. They rushed the blue hazmat suit across the deck toward a door marked with a massive red cross. Someone opened the door, and as the crowd thinned to pass through the door, Sophie saw that the figure in blue still wore the contagion box strapped across her back, the box itself still clutched against her abdomen.

  Kim, she thought.

  If the doctors on board could find a way to help them, at least Kim might come out of this alive. That was something. Someone would live to tell the story so that Sophie’s mother would know how and why she had died and what she had died for.

  She found strange comfort in the thought.

  THIRTY

  When Walker awoke and heard the beep and hiss of medical machinery, he lay frozen on the painfully hard bed and held his breath, waiting. Just waiting. Seconds ticked by as he lay there with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, listening to the beeping, knowing that his limbs were not his own and expecting that giddy violence to seize him again.

  Half a minute went by with him waiting, barely breathing.

  Walker blinked. He flexed his fingers and discovered that they were his to control. Drug-dulled pain throbbed in the places he’d been shot and in other places he didn’t remember injuring, but when he tried to shift his legs, they moved for him. Spikes of pain rushed through him, but it was his pain. His body. And that counted for a great deal.

  Charlie, he thought. If he’d had the strength for tears, he would have been crying. He could see his son’s face in his mind. As hope surged within him that he might get home alive, he felt a determination unlike any he had ever known. He would see his son again.

  “Charlie,” he said aloud, his voice little more than a croak.

  Something shifted to his left, in shadow, the creak of weight moving on the adjacent bed. He shifted his head, inviting a spike of pain in his chest, but it was enough to see Dr. Tang sitting on the edge of another hospital bed. The figure lying in that bed did not move, but just from the braids, he recognized the back of Sophie Durand’s head.

  “Well, well,” Dr. Tang said. “I wondered which of you would come around first.”

  Walker tried to speak, but he coughed instead. Lightly, but enough to light up his chest with pain. He put a hand gently on top of the thick bandages over his chest, wincing.

  Dr. Tang hesitated, watching him with concern. After a moment, she exhaled.

  “Just a dry throat,” she said. “Maybe a residual cough. But you’re getting better. We all are.”

  Walker frowned and groaned as he turned his head the other direction. This ward had eight beds, but only two were full—three, assuming that Dr. Tang had been sleeping in one of them.

  “What about—”

  “Kim’s fine, or she will be,” Dr. Tang said. “She was the least affected. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Beyza. She’s isolated in an intensive care infectious disease unit down the hall. It’s touch and go, at least from what I’ve been able to get them to tell me.”

  Walker laid his head back, stared up at the ceiling. Kim was fine.

  “No ghosts?” he rasped.

  “No sign in any of us. Beyza hasn’t regained consciousness at all since they dredged her out of the river, so there’s no way of knowing.”

  Walker turned his head, frowning at her. “In your medical opinion, Doctor.”

  “In my medical opinion? We’re damned lucky to have gotten out of there alive. Even luckier that the navy had a hospital ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Beyza would be dead if rescue had taken any longer, and you and Sophie would certainly be dead if we had spent any more time underwater. They won’t even tell me what they’re treating us with, but I’m going to get to the bottom of it. I’d like to know where they’ve encountered a plague like this in the past, how they recognized its signature so quickly that they knew how to treat us.”

  They were good questions, but not what Walker wanted to talk about.

  “The ghosts,” he said again.

  Dr. Tang shook her head. “No sign of anything since they dragged me out of the river. I saw something then, but with the sun so bright it might have been dust or just the glare. That was it.”

  “They haven’t done anything … like bring in a priest or something?”

  “No priest.” She smiled, though she seemed more haunted than amused. “No exorcist. The only treatment that I’ve seen has been medical, but that’s been enough to scare the shit out of them.”

  “They’re right to be scared,” he rasped.

  The pain throbbed in his wounds, but Walker allowed himself a flicker of a smile as he thought of Charlie, of going home. Maybe the time had come to quit this life. He owed that to his son, owed it to himself. But he wasn’t going anywhere until he was absolutely certain nothing remained in him from this mission—no trace of anything that had come from that jar, be it illness or the seed of malice.

  He glanced down at his body, saw that his clothes had been removed—likely burned—and now he wore only a hospital gown. Walker flexed his hands again, feeling no trace of the cruelty and lust for violence that had possessed him, though the scars of that memory would always remain.

  “What about the jar?” he asked.

  When the answer came, it wasn’t Dr. Tang who provided it.

  “Mission accomplished, I guess,” the voice said, and Walker craned his neck to see that Kim had entered the room. She wore a hazmat suit, this one white instead of the blue they’d had before. Behind the plastic face shield, her eyes held an unfamiliar hardness, as if they were strangers.

  “My mission or yours?” Walker asked.

  Kim walked only as far as the bed where Sophie lay unconscious and upon which Dr. Tang still perched.

  “Want to hazard a guess? The United States has decided the events of the past two days prove the jar presents a clear and present danger to their own security. Your government might be a three-ring circus of ineptitude these days, but there are still enough strings and levers in place for them to pressure the U.N. to capitulate. The jar is on board this, an American vessel. The second we’re out in the open ocean, expect a special ops team to land a helicopter on the deck and make the jar vanish.”

  Walker felt the anger rising inside him. “How long?”

  “An hour or two at most.” Kim cocked her head, hazmat suit crinkling crisply. “You should be happy, Walker. You’ve done your job. Your bosses will be very pleased.”

  It required no special skill for him to intuit the rest of her thoughts. If and when the contents of the jar were used to kill someone, possibly many someones, Walker would share the blame.

  He reached up and ripped the IV out of his arm, then forced himself to sit upright, turning to let his legs hang over the side of the bed. Heat flushed his cheeks, and a wave of nausea struck him, driven by the sting of pain that overrode whatever drugs they’d given him. He ripped off the little pads that had been stuck to his skin to monitor his condition, and the machines began to beep angrily, one producing a low but antagonistic alarm.

  “Jesus, Walker, lie down!” Dr. Tang said, jumping up and rushing to take hold of him.

  Walker grabbed her wrist and pushed her back. “Not now, Erika.”

  He groaned as he rose to his feet. Something shifted in his shoulder, grinding bone against bone, as if the bullet might still be in there, but he didn’t care. For a moment, he wavered a
nd thought his legs would go out from beneath him, but he took a deep breath and forced himself to walk stiff-legged, a Frankenstein’s monster of a man.

  Dr. Tang kept talking to him, but Walker ignored her, heading for Kim.

  “Where is it?” he asked, staring at Kim.

  “What’s the point?” she said. “Your work is done, Walker. You did your job.”

  One hand over the bandaged wound at his side, he glared at her. “Where is it, Kim?”

  “Three doors down. This whole corridor is quarantined.”

  Walker slid past her. Kim grabbed his arm, but he twisted free of her grasp and yanked open the door. It probably should have been locked—probably would have been locked if Kim hadn’t just come in. In the corridor outside the door, a hazmat-suited guard glanced up at him, and his bored expression vanished as he realized it wasn’t Kim leaving.

  “Sir, you can’t—” the guard began, not bothering to reach for his sidearm.

  Walker reached up with both hands and twisted the headpiece of his hazmat suit halfway around so the guy couldn’t see a thing. The guard scrabbled for his sidearm, but Walker had already snatched it from its holster. He shoved the guy against the wall, poked him in the head with the gun’s barrel, and then shoved him again.

  “Do not test me.”

  Even blinded, the guard tried to wrest the gun from his hand. Walker smashed him in the skull with the butt of the weapon, then did it again. The guard began to slump, but Walker did not wait to see if he fell. Instead, he turned to run to his left, down the long corridor.

  He should have expected the other guard to be there.

  Gun pointing at Walker.

  “On your knees, right now!” the guard shouted.

  Walker obeyed. The man was armed, nervous, and pointing a weapon at his chest, so he followed further instructions as well. He set his stolen gun on the floor, slid it away from him, laced his hands behind his head. The guard he’d attacked groaned and shifted on the floor, but Walker ignored him, focused on the other one—the man walking toward him now.

  The guard came an inch too close. Suffused with bright pain, heart galloping, Walker grabbed the barrel of the guard’s gun, twisted it sideways, and as the man pulled the trigger, Walker punched him in the crotch. The guard let out a terrible cry as Walker rose, stripped him of his weapon, and raced along the corridor. Bones ground together. A suture at his shoulder tore and began to bleed again.

  The whole corridor was under quarantine. There were only patients here, and not an endless supply of hazmat suits, so these were the only two guards. Walker winced as he ran, beginning to limp.

  He fired three shots into the locking mechanism of the door Kim had named—the door the guy he’d dick-punched had been guarding—and kicked it in.

  The jar had been left inside the contagion box, but the box had been put inside a portable isolation chamber. To Walker, it looked like the sort of thing a sickly newborn would be placed inside at a natal ICU, but this one had the contagion box within its transparent walls. The same dirty cooler with its tangled strap, much the worse for their trip through the tunnel and the river, but still somehow intact.

  Walker left the stolen gun on a table. In his hospital gown, he had nowhere to hide it. He unzipped the isolation chamber, reached inside and hoisted the contagion box out by its strap, then slid the strap around his neck and over his right shoulder.

  Rushing from the room, he heard shouts from the guards he had assaulted, but they weren’t talking to him. They were calling to others who had heard the gunshots and were responding. As Walker came out of the room with the box, he saw the two newcomers stepping through the plastic sheeting at the end of the corridor, where the quarantine zone ended.

  Before the second guard had come through the plastic sheeting, Walker was on them both. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead as he struck the first man in the throat, took his gun, and kneed him in the gut. He turned the gun on the second guard as he entered the corridor, and the man raised both hands.

  Walker punched him twice in the ribs and shoved him aside. The man grunted, swore, and drew his gun. Walker slammed his foot down, trapping the gun and breaking the guard’s fingers, possibly his wrist.

  Down the corridor, Kim and Dr. Tang emerged from Walker’s own hospital room.

  “Ben!” Kim called. “There’s nowhere to go!”

  Walker heard more guards about to enter the quarantined area, and he realized that he would never fight his way out of here. Hands trembling, he discarded the gun and unzipped the contagion box. Fishing one hand inside, he drew out the jar, tilting it against his chest to keep it from falling. It no longer mattered to him—if it ever had—whether the jar had belonged to Pandora or Anesidora, or whether it was the box of legend in the first place.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Dr. Tang shouted, starting along the corridor toward him.

  He held the jar against his chest with both hands. Warm, fresh blood soaked through his hospital gown, a stain spreading at his side and another at his shoulder. Shadows played at the edges of his mind, and he felt the strength leeching out of him. The initial surge of adrenaline had gotten him this far, and now he forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, practically crashing forward.

  He purposefully did not hold the jar up to see if the crack in the seal had grown larger in the aftermath of all this jostling. Lurching toward the end of the quarantined corridor, he pushed through the plastic sheeting. On the other side, he found the Plexiglas door to a decontamination chamber.

  Walker entered the chamber, yanked the door shut behind him, and hit the red button for decon. He slumped against the wall inside the chamber as jets sprayed him with chemicals and hot water. For long seconds, his mind went dark, nodding off while standing, and then he snapped awake and alert with the pain singing through his body.

  A light turned green, and he heard the door unlock.

  Walker shoved through it, expecting a dozen guards on the other side, summoned by the gunshots in the corridor. Instead he saw one tech, sitting in a booth where he ought to have been monitoring the decon chamber but was instead reading some kind of textbook. Doing homework for something.

  The urge to attack prodded him forward, but Walker shook it off.

  As he reached a metal staircase, he heard the tech shout at him, and he did his best to run up the steps. The guards in the quarantine area would be after him now, and this guy he should have knocked out would be raising an alarm, but the best Walker could manage was a fast limp.

  The jar felt warm against his chest. A smell rose from it, the dry, powdery scent of old paper. The shadows at the edges of his mind began to swallow his thoughts, and he felt himself falling. Turning, he protected the jar, and he crashed his good shoulder against the stairs. The pain seared through him, could have blacked him out but instead woke him up with a fresh spike of adrenaline.

  Jaw clenched against the pain, Walker snarled as he rose. Only three more steps, and he stumbled up them to a landing, a door just ahead.

  He heard the stomping of the guards on the metal stairs even as he opened the door and burst out into the hot, humid night under a moonlit sky on the Strait of Hormuz. More voices shouted, not from behind but from either side. An alarm began to sound, the clangor of panic and urgency as news of his theft spread.

  Threats were shouted. Guns were raised. Lights were brought to bear on him.

  But Walker had the jar, and nobody would dare to shoot him now. They didn’t want to breathe whatever it contained.

  He shook his head to clear it, unconsciousness threatening, darkness dragging at him.

  The railing caught him as he stumbled forward. His forearm cracked against the metal, and he wondered if the bone had broken but knew it was better his bones than the jar.

  Drowning in voices and warnings, he hefted the jar over the railing and gave it a shove. Walker collapsed onto the railing, hung draped over it as he watched the jar tumble down through the dark. When it hit
the waves, it went straight down as if it held something far heavier than herbs and spells and sins.

  It vanished with the tiniest of ripples.

  Sailors grabbed him by his hospital gown, twisted him around, and slammed him to the deck. Guards had recovered their weapons, and now they and others took aim, waiting for an order, practically begging for that order.

  An officer shoved one sailor aside and grabbed Walker by the throat.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” he screamed.

  Walker smiled.

  Kim appeared then, forcing her way among the sailors. “It’s not him! I told you already, and Dr. Tang told you, he’s not the one doing this.”

  The Strait of Hormuz was one of the most disputed maritime territories on earth. A U.S. Navy officer sneezed wrong and it could start another Gulf War or worse. An Iranian vessel grew too ambitious, misjudged a moment of hostility, and the result might be just as catastrophic. Simply bringing a navy hospital ship into these waters would have the region on high alert. The United States could never tell anyone what had just happened, never reveal that the jar was at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz, or a war would erupt before anyone managed to dredge it up from the bottom. If Walker’s employers wanted to get their hands on it, they would have to be 100 percent certain they could do so in secrecy. That wasn’t likely to happen soon.

  By the time they managed to search for it, the currents might have shifted it anywhere. The jar might never be found.

  The officer swore at Walker, slammed his head against the deck.

  Kim grabbed him by the arm. “Listen to me! Whatever got inside him still hasn’t completely burned itself out. This isn’t him.”

  Dr. Tang’s voice lifted over the crowd of sailors and guards. “You’ve also just exposed yourself, Commander. You’ll need to be quarantined.”

  The commander threw up his hands and swore, then turned and started cursing out the guards for letting this happen.