Genesis Plague (37 page)

W
e were forced to slow down as soon as we passed the first tree.
The jungle was dense. Thick roots threatened to trip us with every step. In
some places they completely covered the ground, spread out like a blanket of
enormous veins. We were further hindered by the trunks of fallen trees or clumps
of impassable vegetation.

“Well,” Flint said,
already huffing from exertion, “I wasn’t with you in Peru, but if it was
anything like this, I would have
hated
it.”

A wet leaf the size of
a garbage can lid slapped me in the face. The dew it had been collecting tasted
fresh, like mineral water from a spring.

“Whoever made this
rainforest got it right,” said Maria, stepping over a fallen branch. “Each of
these trees belongs here. Walking palms, rubber, even ungurahui. It’s hard not
to be impressed.”

“Feels like a movie
set,” I said.

“Regulating the weather
in an enclosed space to keep a rainforest ecosystem intact would be hard
enough,” said Maria.

“So it’s a big
greenhouse,” Flint said. He grimaced as he ducked under a low branch and put
too much weight on his twisted ankle. He noticed me watching him and waved me
off impatiently. “I’m fine.”

In the silence that
followed, I strained to listen for the animal trying to break through the door.
Either we were too far away or it had given up the chase. I noticed a distinct
lack of something else, as well.

“No insects,” I said.
“No frogs, no anything.”

The others held their
breath and listened. The silence was absolute.

“So what ate the dead
guy?” asked Flint, looking around warily.

“I don’t want to find
out,” said Maria, pushing ahead.

“You sure that ankle’s
okay?” I asked, resting my hand on Flint’s shoulder.

He shrugged away from
my hand and limped after Maria. “Just a sprain, Paul. Best if I don’t think
about it. Where are we headed?”

“We should maintain our
bearing by moving in a straight line from the door we came through,” said
Maria.

“Shouldn’t we walk the
perimeter?” asked Flint. “Maybe there’s another way out.”

“Maybe each door has a
pissed-off animal behind it,” I said.

“We’ll have to find an
exit eventually. Can’t stay here forever, as our thin friend back there proves.
Who puts a goddam jungle in their basement, anyway?”

“I think it’s a test,”
said Maria. She walked slightly ahead of me, scouting the best path through the
jungle. “Whatever the surgeons did to their patients, this was the next step.”

“What kind of test?” I
asked.

She shrugged. “Who
knows? Maybe just to survive.”

“If it’s a simple
endurance test,” Flint said, “I think we’ll get out just fine.”

“Wait a second,” I said.
“If it’s a test, then maybe whoever is running the show has a way to watch
what’s going on.”

“You mean like
cameras?”

“Maybe. If we can find
one, we can get someone’s attention.”

“If they wanted to help
us, Paul, we wouldn’t still be here,” said Maria. “Besides, I think the whole
facility is abandoned. They probably evacuated along with everyone else.”

“So we’re stuck in some
kind of automated funhouse that, for whatever reason, puts its test subjects in
grave danger,” said Flint.

“Sounds about right.”

“Fantastic. And I
thought it was dangerous on the
out
side.”

“Here’s another
question,” I said. “Let’s assume this really is a test of some kind. We saw what
happens when you fail. What happens if you pass?”

“Getting out alive would
be enough reward for me,” Flint said quietly.

We passed the next
half-hour in silence, pushing our way through the dense jungle until we came to
a thin stream bubbling across our path. By then we had sweated about a gallon
each.

“Think that’s safe to
drink?” asked Maria.

“Absolutely not.”

“So thirsty,” Flint
said, smacking his lips.

“You better stick it
out, big guy,” I said. “Last thing you want is some weird bug crawling around
in your intestines.”

“It would be worth it,”
Flint said, but he hopped over the stream with me and Maria and he didn’t look
back.

“What are you really
expecting to find here, Paul?” asked Maria, moving once again to the front of
our exhausted caravan.

“Anything that could
help us. Humanity, I mean.”

“Why is it on the three
of us?” she asked. “Why not anyone else?”

“You two didn’t have to
come here,” I said, following close behind her. “That was
your
choice.”

“I came here for
you
,
you idiot,” she said, stomping ahead.

“I never asked you to do
that. You know I’m with Cassidy.”

She spun around quickly
and jabbed a finger in my chest. “Then
where
is she, Paul?”

“She’s the other reason
I’m here!” I said, trying hard not to shout.

“It’s the
only
reason!” yelled Maria, not showing the same restraint. “You’d have just as much
of a chance finding a cure if you buckled down in a lab out there instead of—”

She cut off abruptly
and looked behind me.

“Where’s Flint?!”

I turned back and saw
nothing but jungle.

Then, somewhere in the
distance, he screamed.

“W
hich direction?!” I shouted, turning uselessly in a circle as
I tried to pinpoint the location of Flint’s scream.

“I couldn’t tell!” said
Maria. “Maybe this way?”

She pointed back the
way we came. Flint screamed again, this time farther away.

“Over there!”

I pushed through the
jungle, trying not to fall flat on my face. It wasn’t easy. I jumped over snaking
roots and ducked under low branches. Maria stayed close behind, cursing as wet
leaves slapped her in the face.

“FLINT!” I yelled as
loud as I could, my throat burning from exertion. Breathing the humid air was
like sucking oxygen through cheesecloth.

“I see something!” Maria
shouted from behind.

My world was a bouncing
mass of green as I ran hard, jumping and ducking. A wall of wet fronds blocked
my path. I couldn’t tell if there was anything on the other side.

I stopped short at the
last second and Maria slammed into my back, pushing me through the wall of
fronds and out into a clearing. She landed on top of me, breathing hard, her
head jerking like a bird’s as she quickly looked around.

The clearing was like a
hollowed-out cavern below the jungle canopy. The ground was flat, covered in wet
grass. Thin trees punctuated the clearing. Their trunks climbed to the canopy, like
pillars holding up a ceiling of leaves.

Across the clearing,
Flint burst from the dark jungle and broke left, limping fast on his twisted
ankle.

I called to him and he
saw me, but he didn’t stop running. In all our time together, I had never seen
him move that fast.

Then I saw why.

“RUN!” he screamed.

The jungle exploded behind
him as something leaped into the clearing, close on his heels.

“
RUNRUNRUN!
” he
screeched.

Maria and I pushed
ourselves up and stared at the horror across the clearing.

It was a man, or at
least it
had
been at one point. He was rail-thin, easily seven feet
tall, completely bald, with solid red eyes and pale white skin. His loose
shorts were black from filth. Even at a distance, I could see pronounced black
veins covering his head and torso, as if someone had drawn them on with a thick
marker.

He ran after Flint, focused
on him like a heat-seeking missile.

Flint looked wildly
around the clearing, searching for an escape.

The infected man
reached out, his hands almost touching Flint, when I yelled, “
HEY!
”

The man skid to a stop
and Flint jumped into the jungle, the trees swaying in his wake.

The infected man turned
and looked right at me, his red eyes gleaming.

“Paul,” whispered
Maria, “what the hell are you doing?”

“My best.”

The man opened his
blackened mouth and tried to scream at us. Just like with Dan Grayson, all that
came out from the swollen throat was a scratchy, wheezy growl.

He charged, his
shoeless feet pounding the forest floor, his solid red eyes focused on me.

“Maybe try a different
tactic next time,” Maria said quickly. She took off, running along the edge of
the clearing.

The infected man
ignored her and continued his thunderous charge in my direction. The only thing
I could think to do was to run away from both Maria and Flint. Maybe it would
buy them some time.

I bolted right, hugging
the treeline. The infected man still had me locked in his sights as he rapidly
approached.

Maria screamed behind
me.

There was another
infected man just a few feet from her at the edge of the clearing. He had lunged
for her through a wall of thick vines and had become entangled. I could tell he
was just as tall as the first infected man. Bald as well, and wiry, like his thin
skin was stretched tightly over his skeleton. He reached out for Maria,
growling at her as he tried to break free of the vines.

Maria turned and ran back
the way she came, her face set and determined, as the man fought to free
himself from the vines. His eyes never left her for a second. I caught a
glimpse of his shorts as he struggled – they were the same as the other
infected man’s, but clean enough to read the words
PharmaCor Genetics
printed down one side, just like on the broken barrels in the silo room. There
was also a bar code.

The terrain in the
clearing wasn’t complicated enough to lose the infected man chasing me. I cut
ninety degrees and met up with Maria in the middle. We ran side-by-side,
heading toward the far end of the clearing.

The man stuck in the
vines suddenly stopped struggling. I looked back, beyond the man who was still
chasing us. The one in the vines looked upward, toward the canopy.

Slowly, deliberately,
he began wrapping the thick vines around his arms, coiling them from his wrists
to his shoulders. He pulled down hard and there was a tremendous crack from
above as he ripped heavy branches clean off their trunks. Maria and I were
almost to the far end of the clearing when he began his pursuit, dragging the
vines and broken tree branches behind him as he loped across the clearing.

The other infected man
was quickly closing the gap between us.

“We’d have a better
chance in there,” said Maria between quick breaths, pointing at the jungle
ahead.

“Just don’t stop,” I
said. “Even if we get separated.”

She nodded and somehow
managed to find the energy to speed up. I had forgotten how quick she could be,
and soon I was lagging behind, the pounding footsteps of the infected men
growing louder behind me.

We were ten feet from
leaping into the jungle when a mass of green fronds ahead of us parted to
reveal the wet, red eyes of an infected woman.

Same story as before: overly
tall, emaciated, pale skin covered with thick black veins, totally bald. She
wore a skin-tight covering instead of shorts, almost like a wet suit for
diving. Like the men’s shorts, it was filthy, covered with patches of black and
dark rust. Dried blood.

Maria bolted left but
the woman was too quick. She charged Maria with lightning speed and knocked her
spinning to the ground.

I was reaching down to
scoop her up as I ran past when the woman grabbed my shoulders and easily lifted
me high in the air. She slammed me down against the ground, flat on my back.
The two infected men stood a few feet away, watching intently.

I gasped for air and
turned on my side. A filthy foot covered in black veins blocked my view. I looked
up into the infected face of a nightmare. The woman studied me for a moment,
then she brought her fist swinging down on my head and the world snapped to
black.