Genesis Plague (34 page)

THE PAST…

R
ain pounded the ship, coating every surface with a thin layer
of water that was slicker than ice. You couldn’t walk across the deck. You had
to slide. Grasping for the rail was like trying to hold on to a snake coated in
oil.

Twenty-foot waves curled
over the railing, hanging in space for the briefest of moments before crashing
onto the deck. The ship was at the mercy of the storm, which showed no sign of abating.

The South China Sea
during monsoon season: perfect vacation getaway or terrifying plan to remove
yourself from life’s equation?

The question never
occurred to me back when Cassidy suggested we should celebrate our one-year anniversary
early by hopping a last-minute flight to Hong Kong. Neither of us had ever been
to China, so what the hell, right?

It just
happened
to be a coincidence that she was writing a paper on the volcanic regions near
Sai Kung. The anticipated week of lounging by a pool turned out to be slightly
more perilous than I had expected.

It had never been hard
for Cass to talk me into anything, though. You could imagine how little I
complained when she flashed me her smile after I agreed to con Levino into chartering
a fifty-foot research vessel out of Hong Kong so Cass could pull some fresh
data from a geothermal hot-zone just off the coast.

But that was before the
storm. Even Cass’s smile couldn’t turn away gale-force winds and rain that hit
so hard you were sure it would leave permanent dents in your skin.

She stood at the front
of the ship, helping a crewmember lash down a radio antenna that had snapped
off its base from the impact of the last wave. I was just outside the bridge,
pulling out as many lifejackets from a storage bin as I could carry, when I
heard Cass calling to me over the sound of driving rain.

“Paul!” she yelled,
pointing into the swirling darkness past the railing.

In a flash of
lightning, I saw the wave, triple the size of anything that hit us before. It
towered overhead like a sheer wall of black water. White foam churned at the
crest, slowly moving over the ship like the edge of a blanket pulled across the
sky.

I screamed for Cass and
dropped the lifejackets. My feet slid out from under me as I tried to run
toward the bow. I had no traction, no way to grip the deck.

It didn’t matter. The
wave slammed down on the boat, pushing it lower until the deck was even with
the violent surface of the sea. A torrent of freezing water picked me up threw me
across the deck like a rag doll. My hands gripped for anything to hold on to as
the wave pushed me away from Cass.

I hit the railing like
a piece of debris flushed against a storm drain. My elbow clanged against metal
and I lost feeling in that arm. The churning water around me reddened from the
deep gash.

The wave passed and I
sank to the deck on my hands and knees, gasping for air. I slid toward the
front of the ship on all fours, not daring to stand, choking and coughing as I
tried to call for Cass.

Two slender hands gripped
the railing at the bow. Rain stung my face as I pulled myself up to look over
the side. Cass was barely holding on, her feet kicking as she fought to pull
herself up.

She looked up at me
when I grabbed her wrists, terror in her eyes.

“I have you!” I screamed
over the sound of the storm. “I’m not letting go!”

A few seconds later, we
were lying next to each other on the deck as the ship continued its struggle to
stay upright.

Cass slicked back her
wet hair as she rolled over and gave me the best damn kiss I ever had while
stuck on a boat in the middle of a monsoon.

“I’m glad you were
there for me,” she said.

“I’ll always be there,
for as long as you want me.”

A wave crashed against
the port railing and dumped more water on us.

Cass sputtered and
grinned.

“Hell of a vacation,”
she said.

I wiped water from my
face and shook my head. “Next time I pick the place.”

She scowled, feigning
insult. Then she opened her palms to catch the rain as if the downpour were
nothing more than a light shower. “You’re not having fun?”

“Oh, I’m having a
blast
.”

The captain stuck his
head out of the bridge window and yelled for us idiots to get inside.

As I flipped over to
begin the scramble to the bridge, Cass said, “I love you, Paul.”

Still thinking she was messing
around, I looked at her and was surprised to see that she was being serious.

Even with the rain
pounding down and the waves crashing against the sides of the ship, I wouldn’t
trade that moment for anything.

…NOW.

T
he PharmaCor building loomed above. It was an impassable wall
of mirrored windows that reflected the last orange rays of the setting sun.

“What kind of building
has no entrance?” asked Flint, scratching his gray-black beard. He leaned back
to look up at the pharmaceutical processing plant.

“The kind they don’t
want you to get inside,” said Maria. She followed the wall of the building, her
palms sliding over the glass. Occasionally she stopped and scratched at what
she thought might be the seam of a door. The reflective wall perfectly mirrored
her beautiful, but tired, face. She sighed.

“What do you think,
Paul?”

“I think we’re
screwed,” I said.

The perimeter fence was
behind us, its gate still open. There was no lock, no security guard to stop
us. Down the road past the gate, Frank and Sherri waited by their Cessna, two
small figures shimmering in the dying heat near the horizon. Emma, the little
girl who rode with me from Helena, was with them. Perhaps she was sitting in the
plane, out of the sun. I couldn’t tell from that distance, but I imagined Frank
and Sherri were watching us as we tried to find a way inside.

Given the lack of
personnel, I thought it would be easy to get in. I wasn’t sure what to expect
on first approach – maybe a volley of gunfire and clipped orders to lay face-down
on the ground. But this place was deserted.

The building stretched
for several hundred yards along the base of a mountain, which was the last in a
wide range that disappeared into the distance. An array of solar panels
blanketed the mountainside almost to the peak, tilted vertical to catch the
last rays of daylight.

I joined Maria and
tried to find a door hidden in the wall of glass windows. My own reflection was
foreign to me as I walked along the mirrored wall. My beard, grown unchecked,
was short but bushy. Trying to tame my wild, shaggy hair was fruitless. I had
already realized that I could deal with a temporary lapse in hygiene, all
things considered.

What got to me were my
eyes. Dark circles hung below them, giving my face a sunken, deathly quality.
My first thought was that I looked like a walking corpse. It wasn’t so much the
lack of sleep that dulled the gleam in my eyes as it was the lack of hope. I
had tried so hard to ignore the gnawing doubt that we would find anything useful
inside this building, but there it was, written all over the hollow face that
stared back at me in my reflection.

“Hey, Paul,” Flint said,
“you want to snap out of it, man? We’re not inside yet.” He pounded on the
glass with his fist. “I think you’re right. We’re screwed.”

“We could drive the car
through it,” said Maria.

“We might need it
later,” I said.

“What’s more important,
the car or getting inside?”

I shrugged and started
walking back to the car. Flint hurried past me, rubbing his hands.

“I’ll do it!” he said excitedly.
“Always wanted to drive a car through a building.”

“What stopped you
before?” asked Maria.

“Social convention!” he
said, moving at a quick jog.

I went back to the
building and cupped my hands to the glass. All I could see within were the thin
support struts bracing the wall. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem for a car
moving at thirty or forty miles per hour.

“Paul,” Maria said.

“Hm?”

“You left me in San
Francisco.”

Flint was too far away
to save me from this conversation.

“I didn’t have a choice,”
I said.

“You could have been
the one to deliver the vaccine instead of Flint. You could have sent him to
Rapid City while you took the plane.”

“No, I couldn’t have.
You
know
I couldn’t have.”

“You promised,” she
whispered, hugging herself. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You promised you
would come for me.”

“Maria, I’m sorry.”

“She’s gone, you know
that? There’s no way she could still be alive. I saw the look on her face when
she was being led inside this building. She was already dead, and she knew it,
and there’s no way—”

“Wait a second, what
did you just say?”

“Cassidy is dead,
Paul!”

“No, after that, about
her going inside the building. Do you remember the surveillance image of this
complex? There was a stairway leading to a door outside of a building! But not
this one. The walls in the image were concrete.”

There wasn’t another
building in sight. I scanned the field of solar panels on the mountainside. A collection
of white pipes ran around the side to the back of the peak – presumably to
another building.

“Come on!” I said,
grabbing her hand and hurrying along the glass building.

A car engine roared and
Flint sped through the open gate. He whooped with delight as the car hit a
small dip and bounced out.

“Flint, wait!” I yelled
as loud as I could.

He didn’t hear me. In
the final second before impact, the jubilant expression on his face turned to
one of concern, as if the implications of what he was doing hit him all at
once.

The sedan crashed into
one of the large glass windows, shattering it inward. With a wrenching crunch,
the vehicle hit an impassible wall. The back end rose quickly and slammed back
down as the car came to a rest. Shards of glass tinkled to the ground. The
engine hissed.

Flint stumbled out of
the car, holding his forehead.

“Support beam,” he said
weakly. “Didn’t even budge when I hit it.”

Peering in through the
hole he just made, I saw a thick black steel beam running from floor to
ceiling. More like it were spaced just inside the wall, ten feet apart. A
couple feet to either side and Flint would have kept right on going. Now we were
out a car if we ended up needing it later.

“You okay?” asked
Maria, squeezing his shoulder.

“Just a little bump,”
Flint said. “It was worth it.”

She smiled. “Cross that
one off your bucket list.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

My feet crunched on
broken glass as I walked through the jagged hole in the wall, past the car, and
into the building.