Genesis Plague (20 page)

T
he soldier shrieked in surprise and stumbled backward, out of
Levino’s grasp. Levino tore at the divider wall like a madman, ripping away
chunks of plaster. His fingernails popped off as he scraped at the wall. The
skin over his knuckles shredded to ribbons, but nothing slowed him down.

Parker scrambled across
the floor, grabbing for the rifle on his back. The strap was looped around the
hilt of a knife sheathed to his vest, and he couldn’t yank it free.

Levino pulled himself
through the hole, scraping his flesh on the sharp edges as he popped free into
Conny’s room. She huddled in the far corner, looking away from the chaos.

“Roger!” I shouted.

Levino stopped and
looked at me, his movements as sharp and quick as a bird’s. Dark pupils were
almost lost in a solid orb of red as he studied me. If anything, I didn’t see a
man who had lost his mind. Despite his lesions, despite the black veins
crawling over his skin, I saw such a fierce intelligence that for a moment I
couldn’t think of anything else to say. Where Dan Grayson seemed almost
catatonic until his outburst at the end, Levino had the keen awareness of a man
in the prime of his life.

He opened his mouth,
and I thought he was trying to speak. Instead, he vomited dark red liquid onto
the acrylic wall. He turned away from me and ran toward Parker, who had almost
freed his rifle from its snag. Levino’s stained hospital gown billowed absurdly
as he ran.

Parker screamed as
Levino fell on him, but just as quickly, Levino was standing again, walking
toward the transparent wall with something in his hands.

“Jesus, Paul,” Flint
said behind me.

Levino’s hands trembled
as he held the object toward me, as if he were bringing me a gift. It was an
incendiary grenade, and one of his fingers was hooked through the loop of the
pin.

His mouth worked up and
down as he stared at me with those red eyes, unblinking. I thought he was
trying to say,
I’m sorry
, but all that came out was a steady dribble of
clear red liquid.

Blood spattered the
acrylic wall in front of me as Parker fired three rounds through Levino’s back.
He stumbled forward and smacked into the wall, smearing blood across its clear
surface. His eyes were fixed on mine the whole time.

Behind him, Conny ran
over to Parker and yanked Nash’s ID card off his belt. He turned to grab at her
but fell short. She ran to the door and swiped the card. Before Parker could
raise his rifle, the door was already closing behind her.

Parker stumbled to his
feet, screaming in a blind rage.

Levino pulled the pin
out of the grenade.

Liquid flame exploded
outward, engulfing Levino and expanding to the four walls of the room. It
cascaded down the acrylic wall, curling into itself as it dropped to the floor
like a curtain of fire.

Levino did not scream.

He dropped to his
knees, his entire body burning, and leaned forward against the acrylic. Tiny hairline
cracks appeared in the dense plastic.

Parker wailed like a man
tossed into a volcano. He ran through the dancing inferno, arms outstretched,
gibbering like a turkey and wearing a coat of violent flame. His eyes quickly
melted, and he bashed into walls before finally slowing down in the center of
the room.

His screams faded, and
he fell forward onto his stomach. A rush of flame pushed out from his body when
he hit the floor, as if he had fallen into a lake of fire and created a large
ripple.

There was a noise from
the hallway, and I halfway expected the soldiers to come back and finish us
off.

Conny stumbled into
view, her dark hair clinging to her sweating face. Her eyes blazed with life as
she caught her breath. She held a surgical mask in one hand, which she quickly
put over her mouth. Her tee shirt that read “Ask Me About My PhD” was stained
with blood.

A connection tickled at
the back of my mind. I slowly turned away from Conny to look at the fiery
observation room. Flame licked through the hole in the divider wall, scorching
the other side.

I thought about the
Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, and about how the virus could survive outside a host
for up to three days. I thought of the eruption spewing the virus into the
atmosphere on the volcanic ash to be carried away and dropped onto the west
coast of the United States.

But my mind was
straining to make another connection. Something about Conny’s lab. Something
about the chimpanzees…

Then I remembered.

I looked up at the
smoke rising from the flames in the observation room. The smoke drifted up to
the ceiling, where it was sucked into the vent that led into chimp Number
Three’s container in Conny’s lab.

The same container that
one of the soldiers had cracked open.

“W
hat do we do?!” Flint shouted.

I pushed past him, into
the hallway. There should have been three more biosafety suits in the
decontamination chamber behind the observation rooms. Conny stepped back as I
ran past, pressing her surgical mask harder against her mouth.

If I could make it in
there and grab the suits before the smoke reached the third chimpanzee
container, then—

I stopped short, my
sneakers squeaking on the polished floor. Black smoke roiled out of Conny’s
lab, wafting into the hallway and blocking my path to the decontamination room.

Flint grabbed my collar
from behind and yanked me backward.

“Time to leave, Paul!”

I stumbled after him as
he ran down the hallway, away from the smoke. Conny was already at the elevator,
swiping the key card she took from Parker. The door opened and we pushed inside,
breathing hard as the smoke rolled down the hallway, as if it was seeking prey.

The door closed and we
descended. Flint let out a heavy sigh. Conny huddled in the corner, her hand
pressed to her surgical mask, face turned away.

“We run for it,” I said,
answering a questioning look in Flint’s eyes.

He nodded.

The elevator door opened
on the first floor, and the shouts of the mob outside echoed down the long
decontamination hallway. The plastic lining had been torn from the walls and
ceiling. The vents that sprayed disinfectant were bent and broken. The front
door to the building was gone. Shattered glass lay on the floor all around us.
Our shoes crunched against it as we walked down the corridor.

The crowd was in here
at one point, but they were gone now. I could see the backs of countless people
outside, screaming and fighting as they compressed around a central point.

“Let’s hurry,” I said
as we approached the door.

I bet I wasn’t the only
one of us to reflect on how, until a few minutes ago, the building had been the
safest place to be, especially after we learned that the virus was out in the
open.

Now we had to go from
the frying pan into the fire. There was no more safety.

Flint stayed right on
my heels, and Conny followed a few feet back with her head lowered and arms
crossed. I slowed down briefly as we passed the bodies of Johnson and Caruso,
splayed out on their backs just inside the door, bullet holes in each of their
foreheads.

Flint cursed behind me
when he saw the bodies. A few steps later, he bent down and picked up a small shiny
object from the ground. He was reaching out to hand it to me when a gunshot
cracked from the middle of the crowd and I moved quickly for the exit.

“Keep going,” I said.

Sunlight beat down as I
stepped outside. The air was thick with energy, all of it being channeled
toward the center of the crowd. The armored truck was still parked in the
middle of the intersection, but its doors were dented inward.

The chaos was not
limited to the streets immediately outside our building. Above the city,
several blocks away, a steady stream of gray smoke belched up into the air. Car
horns blasted from all directions.

Several news trucks
were parked near one of the barricades. Reporters stood in front of their
cameramen, speaking rapidly into their microphones and gesturing to the crowd.

I hurried along the
front of the building, careful to stay as far away from the mob as possible.

“Paul, look!” Flint
said.

He pointed to a break
in the crowd, where the bodies of several people lay in pools of their own
blood. Those standing next to the bodies kicked spent shell casings across the
ground. I heard the sharp
tink
of metal on asphalt, even over the roar
of the mob.

Then the crowd shouted
in victory as they hoisted the body of one of the soldiers into the air. It was
the leader. He fought the clawing hands that rolled him over the crowd. He
still clutched the vaccine samples in one hand, holding them close to his
chest.

With a loud scream, he
was pulled down into the mob. A moment later, a young man rose above the
others, shouting and holding a vaccine tube high into the air. He was quickly
swarmed by the crowd and dragged down, disappearing into the sea of moving
bodies.

“Where’s Nash?” asked
Conny.

Flint shook his head.
“I don’t see him.”

I searched the crowd
and saw nothing but bared teeth and crazed eyes. Then I looked down and saw
Nash, crawling on the ground toward me, almost to the edge of the crowd.

“Meet me around back,”
I said to Flint as I ran toward the mob.

“Paul, wait!” he called
after me.

I barreled through the
sparse outer rim of the mob, elbowing people aside and shoving them to the
ground when they wouldn’t move. A woman with frizzy, knotted hair screamed
guttural curses in my face when I was forced to pick her up and throw her to
the side.

“Dr. Nassai!” Nash
shouted from the ground.

I was almost to him.

Two men held him by the
legs as they dragged him back toward the center of the mob. I looked up to see
the lifeless body of the leader of the soldiers hoisted above the crowd, blood
flowing from his mouth. The mob screamed happily as the man’s limp body was
tossed into the air.

I grabbed for Nash’s
groping hands and pulled hard. An image flashed through my mind of his dead
body lifted high for the mob’s amusement.

“Kick!” I yelled.

He thrashed his legs
against the men behind him, kicking their shins and knees. One of them stumbled
backward and I managed to drag Nash a few feet away from the center of the
chaos.

The man still holding
his leg pulled back hard, and for a moment we were equally matched, poor Nash
stretched between us.

In that moment, I
caught a glint of hard plastic on the ground as an unbroken vaccine tube rolled
out from the mob. A woman stepped on it and my heart stopped, but the
transparent plastic grinded against the street and spun out from beneath her
heel. It clattered across the asphalt. The pale orange liquid within sloshed
wildly inside the container. The tube stopped against a man’s shoe less than
two feet away from me.

The man Nash had kicked
off his leg emerged from the crowd and grabbed the MP’s waistband, redoubling
his efforts.

Nash saw the vaccine
tube and looked up at me in horror.

“
Please don’t let me
go!
” he screamed, tears streaming from his eyes.

But I did. I had to.

I said, “I’m sorry,”
and I released him to reach for the vaccine. Nash was sucked away as I picked
up the plastic cylinder. He disappeared into the mob, which closed in after him
to create an impenetrable wall of bodies.

His screams turned high-pitched
and inhuman as I hid the vaccine tube under my shirt and fought my way out of
the crowd.