Catalyst (Breakthrough Book 3) (12 page)

18

Minutes later, Alison was sprinting at full speed back down the hallway.  She burst through the double doors and continued across the room where she raced up the wide stairs.  At the top, she continued until she reached the lab.  In one motion she yanked the door open and rushed in, finding all three of the guys at Lee’s desk.

“Something wrong?”

She didn’t respond.  Instead, she quickly crossed the room.  Their expressions grew more concerned as she approached.

When she reached the desk, her eyes were on Chris, gazing at his face.  She examined both cheeks and stepped back.  “Take off your shirt.”

“What?”

“Take off your shirt!”

He blinked and shot a confused look at Lee and Juan.  “Wh-why do you want me to take off my shirt?”

“TAKE IT OFF!”

Chris jumped.  He promptly raised his hands and pulled his white polo shirt up and over his head, revealing his olive-colored chest and stomach.  The latter was carrying about ten pounds too many. 

He stood waiting.  “Happy?”

Alison examined his front and then spun him sideways to see his back.  “Your bruises are gone.”

“Yes, Ali.  It’s called healing.”

She turned her gaze to Lee, who was also standing.  “And what about you?”

He instinctively raised his hands when she stepped toward him.  “Whoa!  Whoa!” he grinned.  “I’m married.”

“Quiet.”  She closed in to place her hand on his side then pressed gently.  There was no reaction.  “What happened to your ribs?!”

Lee shrugged.  “They’re better.”

“Ribs don’t heal that fast!”

“Maybe I have good bones.”

“It’s not the bones, Lee.  It’s all the muscles around them.  They should take months longer to heal.”

“Well, I guess it wasn’t as bad as they thought.”

She didn’t answer.  Instead she glanced at the younger Juan, causing him to jump back.  “I’m good!”

“Ali-” Before Chris could finish his sentence, Alison was already rushing back to the door.  Once outside, she ran to the stairs and descended as fast as she could.

From the tank, Dirk and Sally noticed Alison rush back down the stairs.  They continued watching as she crossed the room and grabbed her bag off a nearby table.

She rummaged through it and looked up, frustrated.  She said something that IMIS couldn’t translate.  She was clearly upset.

Her phone was still in her car,
damn it.
  Alison thought for a moment, finally raising her eyes to the tank and to Dirk and Sally on the other side.  They were observing her carefully.

She stepped forward and placed her hands on her hips.  “Why don’t you have a word for sick?!”

It was a rhetorical question, but Sally drifted closer and replied.

We have Alison.

“No!  Not injured…I mean sick!  Like a cold, or a virus…or a
disease
!”

Sally stared at her. 

No understand Alison.  You not happy?

She folded her arms in front of her, catching her breath.  “It’s hard to explain.”

Alison you mad?

“No, Dirk.  I’m not mad.  I-”  She stopped when she saw an image appear in the reflection behind her and turned to face a solemn DeeAnn Draper.  She reached back to turn off the voice translation.

“Something weird is happening.”

DeeAnn nodded.  “I’ll say.  Sofia is suddenly standing just two days after we saw her.”

“That’s not all.  Chris’s bruises are gone and Lee can’t feel his injuries anymore either.”

“What’s going on here, Alison?”

“I don’t know.”  She fell quiet, thinking.  The truth was she
did
know.  She knew what Clay and Caesare had found in the jungle.  What the Chinese had found.  Those plants.  The same plants Neely Lawton was studying aboard the Bowditch when it sank.  Plants with a mysterious piece of DNA that allowed them to regenerate at an accelerated rate.  But she couldn’t see or understand how those abilities could possibly be connected with them, or for that matter, Sofia.

None of them had come in contact with the sample Lawton had shown them in her lab.  In fact, Chris and Lee hadn’t even been in the lab.  Which meant that Alison was the variable.

Was it possible she’d come in contact with the bacteria without realizing it?  She couldn’t see how.

Alison began backing herself out of her thought process.  If there was no link then what was happening to them now had to be unrelated.  Something different.  But what else could explain it?  If Sofia was suddenly healing too, what could cause it in all three of them at the same time?  

She looked at her own arm again.  She’d already removed the bandage but raised her wrist and yet again moved it back and forth.  There was still no pain in either direction. 
What was happening?!

DeeAnn was watching her, silently.  Finally, she frowned and took a deep breath.  “I guess you’d better tell me what you all found up on that mountain.”

“What?”

“What you and Steve wanted to tell me the other day.”

“I thought you didn’t want to know.”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.  Just like that.”

“Does that mean you’re going with Steve?”

“It means I want to know more before I decide.”

“Okay,” Alison nodded.  “Then you may want to sit down.”

DeeAnn smiled, but when she realized Alison was serious she grabbed a chair from next to the table, lowering herself into it.

Still standing and with arms crossed, Alison thought for a moment.  “You remember when we were all on Alves’ helicopter?”

“Of course.  I woke up when John and Steve were raiding the inside.”

“That’s right.  Unfortunately, things changed when we left the helicopter.  We were able to track those compounds back to the source, where a high concentration originated near a cliff wall.  But the water wasn’t coming down the wall.  It was coming from
within
it.”

“Within the wall?”

“Yes.”

“You mean like inside the rock?”

“I mean like on the other side of it.  There was a cavern carved inside of the mountain, Dee.  And the wall was a giant door.”

“What do you mean the wall was a door?”

“I mean the wall
opened
!”

“What?”

“The cliff wall.  It opened.  And on the other side there was a giant room.  The water had leaked inside and by the time it seeped back out, it was changed.”

“Changed how?”

Alison took a deep breath.  “Okay, this is the part that might sound a little…hard to believe.  Inside the wall were giant columns.  All standing like pillars in this pitch-black cavern.  They were made of some kind of glass because you could see what was inside them.  It was a greenish-looking liquid and each of the columns were holding thousands of little spheres inside, like large bubbles.  And inside those spheres were what looked to be seeds…and embryos.”

DeeAnn raised her eyebrows and spoke slowly.  “Did you say
embryos
?”

“Yes.”

“You found embryos hidden inside this place?!”

“Thousands.  Maybe tens of thousands.  And that water was seeping inside and being changed by those things.  The same water that changed those plants after seeping back outside.”

From her chair, DeeAnn stared motionlessly up at Alison, her large eyes blinking repeatedly.

“The water wasn’t the source.  The source was the things inside that giant cave.  The columns and whatever was inside them.”  Alison lowered her voice without realizing it.  “The Chinese found the plants, Dee.  They grabbed as much as they could and then burned the rest.  But I don’t think they knew about the water.  And they sure as hell didn’t know what was hidden in that cliff.”

  “So who put it there?”

“We don’t know,” Alison said.  “But whoever it was …wasn’t us.”

DeeAnn’s eyes opened wide.  “
Wasn’t
us?”

“They couldn’t have been.  Dee, these things were advanced.  I mean
really
advanced.  Even Wil Borger couldn’t believe it.  And there was enough dust on the ground to tell me that no one had been in there for a looong time.”

“How long?”

“Long.  Hundreds of years, at least.  Maybe thousands.”

DeeAnn was having as much trouble processing it as they had.  “But…why?  Why would someone…or something…put that there?”

“Wil thinks it’s some kind of vault, from another species.  Put here to ensure their DNA survives forever.  He said scientists have already done something like it up north, in Norway, I think.”

“A vault,” DeeAnn mumbled incredulously.  “An embryo vault.”

“Steve Caesare calls it something else…an alien ARK.”

DeeAnn gasped.  “Holy-”

“That puts it in a different perspective, doesn’t it?”

“My God,” she whispered.  “An
ark
?”

Alison nodded.  “But instead of sending animals, they sent embryos.  And seeds.  Wil thinks the liquid inside the tubes is some kind of nutrient, keeping them all alive.”  She lowered herself onto the edge of the table.  “Now you can understand why Steve is going back.  Because somehow what ended up in that water, and those plants, also ended up in that little capuchin monkey.”

“That’s why he’s so old,” DeeAnn whispered, incredulous.

“That’s the theory.  The plants were destroyed, but the DNA strain is likely still preserved in the monkey.  And since our DNA is so similar to his, it may also be transferrable.”

DeeAnn dropped her gaze to the table, shaking her head.  She was stunned.  After several seconds, she looked back at Alison.  “Okay, wait.  What does all that have to do with us, and Sofia?”

“I don’t know.  The effects seem too similar not to be related, but I can’t understand how we would have picked it up.  Maybe the water was trickling down to the ocean or something?”

“Wouldn’t that mean you’d then have these giant plants popping up all the way down to the coast?”

“Probably.  Which means it has to be something else.”

“Right.  Besides, once it got into the ocean, you’d probably have everything growing like crazy underwater too.  Maybe-” DeeAnn shrugged, but suddenly fell quiet when she looked back at Alison, whose jaw had dropped and her face had begun losing color.

“Oh my God!”

“What?”

“OH MY GOD!”

DeeAnn looked confused.  “What?  What is it?”

Alison leaped up.  “It IS in the water!  The ocean!” She spun around to face Dirk and Sally, who were still watching them.  “I SAW it!  I saw it and didn’t even realize!”  She peered up at the top of the enormous tank.  “That’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“Don’t you see?!” Alison cried.  “Sofia!  None of the guys were in the water with her.  Only me.  But I’m not the one who brought it back.  It was DIRK AND SALLY WHO BROUGHT IT BACK!”

“Holy cow.”

“Holy cow is right!”  Alison grabbed her backpack again and dug into the small pocket in the front, retrieving her car keys.  She then dropped the pack and began running for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To get my phone!”

19

The Florida Everglades was truly a sight to behold for anyone seeing it for the first time.  Spanning nearly half the state, the Everglades rested upon a large limestone shelf, causing water leaving enormous Lake Okeechobee to form a slow moving
river
stretching more than sixty miles wide and one hundred miles long –– a river flowing steadily through vast sawgrass marshes and mangrove forests to the southern half of the state.  That was where it emptied into Florida Bay and the Caribbean Sea beyond.

Now, over a century after the first large-scale projects were proposed, a network of over 1,400 miles of canals and levees were harnessing a huge portion of the Everglade’s massive water supply. The result of which were dozens of modern cities that could never have existed without a huge, yet shallow, river called the Everglades. 

The late morning air was growing warmer from the southwesterly wind blowing gently through the endless marshes, leaving behind only slight ripples across the clear, shallow water.  Too slight, in fact, to affect the fifteen-foot-long canoe gliding smoothly in and around one of many mangrove systems.

The lone woman held her paddle steady on one side, turning back out into the small channel before switching sides and rounding another outcropping.  The tangled roots jutted far out across the water, slowly making their own crossing as if trying to reunite with those on the other side.

The mysterious Everglades was her favorite place in the world after studying for four years at the nearby University of Miami.  She’d spent weeks at a time deep in the Everglades studying its vastly complicated ecosystem and biological systems.  And the deeper she went, the more beautiful it all became.

The woman paddled slowly among the trees, allowing the canoe to coast against the soft ripples as she examined a sprawling manchineel tree, reaching ominously from the bank.  The manchineel was one of the deadliest trees in the world, native to Florida.  Its leaves were highly toxic as was its small flowering fruit, resembling a small apple.  The tree was legendary for its poisonous sap, used for centuries by Carib Indians to poison the tips of their arrows, ensuring a long agonizing death for their enemies.  A poison which held perhaps the most tragic and ironic reputation in history, being used to kill in battle the famed explorer Juan Ponce de León, who was searching for the legendary fountain of youth.

The manchineel was also the tree on which she had done her senior thesis.  She was fascinated by the sheer power of its biological design, and deadly toxins, all wrapped in a cocoon of natural beauty and innocence.  A plant-based eukaryote that could destroy an animal eukaryote so quickly, from a single brush, that it was one of the closest things she’d seen to an evolutionary anomaly.  It was not the only poisonous plant in the world, but its efficacy and speed of eukaryote destruction put it in a class all its own.

The universe was balanced.  Of that, she was sure.  There was no existence of light without darkness or heat without cold.  No death without life.  Contraction and expansion, amorphous and formed, the list went on and on.  What truly fascinated her about the manchineel tree was the
rarity
of those toxins coming together in an evolutionary process creating something so deadly.  Including some toxins which still remained unidentified.

To her, it was proof that even the longest biological odds existed somewhere.  And if one organism had evolved into a nearly perfect killer, its very existence suggested there could be another, somewhere, that had evolved into the perfect healer.  An organism whose existence was just as much an anomaly as the manchineel tree.

And she thought she’d found it.  No, she was sure she had found it.  But so had someone else and the events that unfolded as a result were devastating.  She’d briefly had in her hands the greatest biological anomaly in history, just days before it all came to a violent end.

She was aboard the Bowditch when it sank in a twisted heap of fire and steel.  She was one of the crewmembers who made it off in time, thanks to one man who, in the face of the worst possible situation, still managed to save most of the lives on his ship.  The same man who died trying to save his chief engineer below deck.  In the end, the Captain was the greatest hero she had ever seen.  And he was more than just a captain, he was her
father
.  A father who didn’t just save his crew…but one who stood between death and his own daughter, and won.

Her eyes began to well up again as she pulled the paddle up and onto her lap, allowing the canoe to slow to a stop again, against the water’s soft ebbing. 

Her father was gone.  Her hero.  Her dad.

Neely Lawton’s tears came again, as though they would never end.  A week alone in the solitude of her Everglades still wasn’t enough to help heal her broken heart.  She knew it would take time and yet she still didn’t want to let go.  She didn’t want him to simply become a memory, or images she thought of periodically.  She didn’t want him to fade.

She sat listlessly in the channel, listening to the subtle sounds of the earth around her –– the chirping birds and the trickling of the water around the worn hull of her canoe.  In front of her knees sat her pack and tent, neatly bundled.

Neely had remained motionless against a large mangrove shoot for nearly thirty minutes when she heard it.  The sound of an engine approaching.  It had a distinct pitch which told her it was an airboat, a common craft in Florida used in shallow waters.   And she was surprised to hear it. 

Neely was
miles
from the larger lakes and channels.  She hadn’t seen a soul for days, which filled her with a sense of both curiosity and concern.

It was unlikely to just happen upon someone that far up the Watson River, but the sound of the engine told Neely that the craft was headed straight for her.

She hadn’t seen anyone…but it didn’t mean someone had not seen her.

Someone
had
seen her.  Someone she was about to wish had not.  

Sitting on tall seats atop an old and dingy airboat, Sal and Jered Hicks had grown up in the backwoods and swamps of Southern Florida.  Brothers who both had spent the better part of their lives among the unpatrolled waters of the northwestern Everglades hunting anything they could sell on the black market, protected or not.  Yet the Glades provided something far more important to the brothers than just a source of poached alligators.  It provided obscurity.  The ability to simply disappear within the jungle-like terrain for months at a time.  Especially when people might be looking for them.  To the Hicks brothers, the state of Florida’s greatest natural treasure was the ultimate protection to its inhabitants from the world outside. 

Sal and Jered spotted the red canoe earlier that morning and had been quietly following it until they were sure the woman was alone.  Because once they started the engine, they had to move fast.

Neely leaned forward as the boat sped into view around a nearby embankment.  Two men were aboard.  Each was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts with one donning a large camouflage hat, the wide circling brim hiding much of his unshaven face.  The second man looked to be wearing a similarly sized, and seemingly dirtier, straw hat.

As they roared down the channel toward her, she could hear the throttle ease up, causing the boat to dip forward and begin slowing.  When the men were within two hundred feet, they dropped the engine to an idle and examined Neely as the last of their boat’s momentum took them the rest of the way.

The short-bearded man at the controls smiled under his straw hat.  “Howdy.”

Neely’s response was reserved.  “Hello.”

“What’s a perty thing like you doing way out here?  You lost?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

Her eyes left the first visitor and were now watching the man whose face was partially concealed.

“I’m sure.”

The pilot of the craft nodded and scooted in his seat, turning around and scanning the area.  “I don’t see any friends.  I hope yer not alone out here all by yerself.   Lot a nasty things crawling around out here, worse than gators and crocs.”

“I’m fine.”

“You want us to tow you in?  Be a lot faster.”

“Really, I’m fine.  Thanks.”

The pilot nodded again and scanned behind them a second time.  He turned to his brother Jered, who was watching the woman with his dark eyes.  Without a word, Jered lowered his hand and dropped his empty beer can onto the already littered floor of their boat.  His foot was resting on the top of a dirty ice cooler, held in place by an even dirtier and fraying bungee cord.

A smile slowly spread across his thin lips.  “I guess she doesn’t want a tow.”

“I said I was fine.”

Her response caused Jered’s smile to widen, exposing a set of yellowed teeth.  “She says she’s fine.”

The larger and fatter Sal shook his head.  “I don’t think she knows what a dangerous place it is out here.”  His eyes peered intently at Neely.  “Why, there’s gators out here big enough to-”  He suddenly stopped when he noticed her position. 

Her body was leaning forward as though supporting herself with a hand on the forward seat.  But her hand wasn’t on the seat.  Instead it was just a few inches farther, resting inside the opening to her pack. 

“What you got there, girl?”

Jered noticed it too and continued smiling.  “I don’t think your phone is going to work out here.”

She watched quietly as both men laughed.  Jered nodded and stood up out of his chair, approaching the front edge of the flat-bottom boat.  The engine was still idling as the craft inched slowly forward, leaving less than fifteen feet between the two boats.

Sal responded to his brother’s nod by reaching down for the throttle.  Another quick blast of air would push them within reach of the canoe.

But just as Sal’s hand fell onto the metal knob, his entire body abruptly froze at the sight of Neely sliding a gun out of her bag, her hand wrapped firmly around the handle. 

Her index finger was resting just above the trigger of a nickel-plated 9mm Sig Sauer, the 1911 her father had given her after graduating from Officer Training Command.

Her eyes remained fixed on Jered, who was now leaning toward her and had been waiting for his brother to push them forward.  Instead, his eyes widened when he too noticed the bright glint of the gun’s barrel.  He immediately straightened and looked back up to her face where her gray-blue eyes stared at him, unblinking.

His hands shot up in front of his chest.  “Whoa.  Easy, sweetheart.  We’re just being friendly now, right?”  He turned to Sal who still wasn’t moving either. 

“T-that’s right.  It’s a long way back.  Just thought it’d be gentlemanly if we gave you a hand.”

“I don’t need a hand.”

“We can see that.”

Jered calmly glanced down at a large duffle bag beneath his seat.  Inside was his own gun.  He had put it away to avoid getting it wet.  Now he wished he hadn’t.  He was also wondering how quickly he could retrieve it.  It was loaded and ready.

The two men stared at each other with the same thought.  They’d been in scrapes before…far worse than this.  They exchanged a knowing look that
just because a woman had a gun didn’t mean she knew how to use it.
 

They were considering their options when Neely unexpectedly reached into the bag with her free hand and retrieved another item.  This time, it was a piece of clothing, and it was about to put an end to any thoughts the two had of escalating this confrontation.

She calmly pulled out a dark blue baseball hat and pulled it over her head from back to front.  Above the cap’s bill were four large, unmistakable white letters.

N-A-V-Y.

Both men’s expressions changed instantly.  This woman clearly knew how to use the gun in her hand.

“She doesn’t want any help, J.”

Jered nodded his head and stepped back from the front edge of their boat.  Behind him, his brother throttled up and turned the vertical rudders, twisting the fanboat into a hard turn.  It slowly curved away from the canoe and continued a 180-degree turn, just clearing the embankment on the far side of the channel.  Once clear of another mangrove patch, their engine and fan emitted a deafening roar and accelerated the craft back along the path from which they came.

The burst of hot air, coupled with the smell of grease and gasoline, washed over Neely as she watched their retreat.  Her heart was pounding in her chest and a bead of sweat escaped from under the cap, running down past her left ear.  She hadn’t been that frightened in a long time.

Hours later, Neely Lawton rounded the river’s mouth in her canoe. She was heading for Tarpon Creek, situated on the southeast end of Whitewater Bay.  She took a break and glanced at the sun, which was beginning its descent into another stunning Everglade sunset.  As she stretched her back, Neely watched dozens of birds take flight into the warm, windless sky.  Near the edge of the water, an alligator watched her intently with only its eyes and nose protruding above the surface.