Darkness Falls (26 page)

"Are you alright?" Beamon said, sounding sincerely concerned. Erin disappeared through the door and returned a moment later with a paper bag. He dumped a sandwich and some chips onto the floor and handed the bag to Jenna, who began breathing into it.

"She does this," he explained to Beamon. "She'll be okay."

Beamon watched her slide to the floor, the bag expanding and contracting rhythmically as her ability to focus slowly returned.

"You were about to put this in perspective for me," he said, turning to Erin.

"Yeah . . . look, if this was something like bubonic plague you could probably expect about a twenty percent kill rate. This is going to be a lot higher."

"Higher? Than a disease? I don't --"

"Think about the way we live now, Mark. There's something like three hundred million people living in the U. S., about one percent of whom have any idea how to grow a vegetable or tend a farm animal. Most people have no survival skills at all; and, besides, the country isn't set up for that kind of lifestyle anymore. Let me put it this way: What happens here in D. C. if the grocery stores stop getting food for even a couple of weeks and there's no gas for you to go somewhere food is available? How would you feed yourself?"

Beamon thought about it for a moment. "My fiancee has a garden. I guess I'd eat a lot of squash."

Erin nodded. "Is there a fence around it?" "No."

"And how many of her neighbors know about that garden but don't garden themselves?"

"I don't know. A lot."

"Okay. How many of them would you be willing to kill when they got hungry and came after your squash?"

Beamon didn't answer.

"Now let's cut off everybody's power. No more refrigeration. Do you know how to build a root cellar? Could you can the vegetables your fiancee is growing? Do you have enough to last the winter? And even if you're one of the few people who can say yes to all those questions and you have a whole lot of guns, how are you going to stay warm? But you're one of the lucky ones --you can heat with wood. Where are you going to get that wood and how are you going to transport it to your house?"

Once started, Beamon's mind began working through the never-ending ripples that would be caused by the sudden destruction of the world's oil supply and no matter how he twisted it, he came to the same conclusion Erin had: in a few years there would be a couple of million survivors in the U. S. working individual sustenance farms. He thought about Carrie and Emory. About his friends and what was left of his family. About the chaos and violence that they'd be thrown into.

"Mark, are you still with me?"

"What if it does get out? Can you kill it?" "Maybe if it was confined to a small isolated area. I suppose it's possible." "But what if it isn't confined?"

Erin shook his head as Jenna pushed herself to her feet again.

"Better?" Erin asked.

She nodded.

"This isn't a convenient time for the end of the world. I'm getting married next month," Beamon said, starting to feel uncharacteristically panicked. "I'm going to have a goddamned family. Look, you chased Teague out of his facility a couple of weeks ago, right? That would have to slow him down."

"Probably not as much as you think," Jenna said. "He wasn't set up to breed that bacteria on a large scale there. He must have another facility somewhere."

"Something closer to the target," Erin added.

"What target? I thought the whole world was the target."

Jenna shook her head miserably. "You've got to understand that you can't just go out and throw a few handfuls of this stuff into the wind and expect it to spread all over the globe. You'd have to start with a lot of it and then dump it somewhere it could get a good foothold in nature."

"And how would you do that?"

"How the hell would I know? I didn't --"

"Jenna," Erin said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Calm down. Mark isn't accusing you of anything. But you did work with Teague. Maybe you know something and don't even realize it."

"Well, I don't. I hadn't even seen them for almost two years until he showed up on my doorstep. I --"

"Enough," Beamon said. "This isn't getting us anywhere. Sometimes when I'm in a situation like this, I put myself in the shoes of the guy I'm chasing. If you were him, how would you do it? How would you release this stuff?"

They fell silent for a few moments before Erin spoke up. "Could he put it down a water injector and let it build up in a reserve?"

"Underground doesn't really work," Jenna said. "Sure it'd spread, but how would it get released? The minute we found it, we'd cap off all the wells. What you really need is a big, open pool of oil."

"What if I blew up an oil tanker," Beamon said. "That would cause a big spill and then I could just fly over it with a crop duster."

"Too complicated and too short-term," Erin said. "It'd be easier just to go to Russia and dump it on the oil fields they've got leaking all over the place."

"Still, it seems like you'd need more scale," Jenna said.

They both fell silent again for a moment. "That only leaves one thing," Erin said. Jenna nodded. "Canada."

"What?" Beamon asked. "What about Canada?"

"It's perfect," Jenna said. "You've been watching television, right? Canada has the tar sands -- oil-permeated sand dunes that cover tens of thousands of square miles. Plus, they're fuel self-sufficient, so you can still get around."

"And they speak English, so it wouldn't be that hard for him to blend in," Erin said.

"So that's it," Beamon said. "If they can get it to take hold in the tar sands, it would spread."

Erin nodded. "Assuming they could breed enough of it and release it over a wide enough area, the stuff would go nuts. And then the wind would take it and that's it."

Chapter
36.

President Dunn actually laughed, though it seemed likely that it was because he had no idea how else to react. He was the only one in the room standing, frozen at the head of the crowded table.

"You're talking to me about the end of human civilization? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?"

Mark Beamon cleared his throat, feeling the weight of what he knew continue to settle on his shoulders. "Not exactly the end of human civilization, sir. The end of industrialized human civilization. According to the people I'm talking to, we'll see a die-off of somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty percent of the world's population, with a lot of variation depending on where you live and how you live. Obviously, if you're a sustenance farmer in New Guinea, you're not going to be all that heavily affected."

"And if you're an American?"

"We're on the other side of the equation a heavily armed population that's completely reliant on energy for just about everything."

"And who exactly are these people you're talking to?"

"Erin Neal and Jenna Kalin."

"The ones responsible for all this," the president said. "Where are they?"

Beamon had briefly considered bringing Erin and Jenna to this meeting, but it seemed more likely that they would turn it into a circus rather than provide useful information. "They're at the lab --"

"You've given them access to our facility?"

Beamon sighed quietly. There was no time for this. "I put them in charge of it."

Not surprisingly, that prompted Jack Reynolds to speak up. "Mark, doesn't that seem a little stupid? I mean, get them involved, let them consult, but --"

"Come on, Jack. Erin had nothing to do with any of this, and I'm convinced that Jenna just wanted the Alaska fields shut down -- something that wouldn't have had any consequences beyond cutting oil company profits from a hundred billion a year to ninety billion."

"Are you willing to bet your life on that?"

the president asked.

"I think I have, sir."

The room went silent as the president lowered himself unsteadily into his chair. "What you're telling us creates . . . complications."

"I'm not sure I understand."

"You're certain they're going to use Canada's tar sands to spread the bacteria?"

"No, not certain. It's by far the most obvious target, though -- a huge amount of exposed petroleum with strong winds blowing across it. It could be as simple as flying a crop duster over the area or driving a tanker truck along one of the roads through it "

.

"But at this point, you don't think they have the bacteria available."

"We're working under the theory that they're currently producing the bacteria at a facility somewhere in Canada."

"So we still have time?"

"We're working under that assumption because the alternative is . . . well, let's just say we're not thinking about the alternative right now."

"Then your recommendation is that we warn the Canadian government and have them secure the area."

"Absolutely."

The president turned to a man in a military uniform. "How would that affect your plans?"

He crossed his arms, an act accompanied by the quiet clink of medals. "Obviously, a heavy Canadian military presence in the tar sands area would complicate things and could present some logistical problems none of them insurmountable, though. Canada's military capabilities just aren't that substantial and the element of surprise is on our side."

Beamon's brow started to furrow, prompting Jack Reynolds to grab him by the arm and pull him to the back of the room. "Not a word, Mark. This has nothing to do with you or your investigation."

"What the hell are they talking about, Jack? Are we going to war with Canada?"

"We've been able to hold things together so far, Mark, but I don't think even you know how close the country is to complete economic collapse. Canada has the largest petroleum reserves in the world and there'll have to be some fair distribution system that doesn't involve them driving around in gold-plated Humvees while the American people starve."

"Are you fucking kidding me, Jack? We're

"There's a ninety-nine percent chance that this is all going to get done through diplomatic channels, Mark. But it makes sense to have a contingency plan -- and that's all we're talking about here. Stay focused on what you're doing, okay?"

Beamon opened his mouth to reply, but then fell silent as the president stood again.

"If Mr. Beamon here is right and we don't stop the release of this new bacteria, would we have a nuclear option?"

A man Beamon didn't recognize shook his head. "We've done simulations with conventional biological attacks and found that it's more likely the blast would accelerate the spread."

"So we have no ideas at all as to what to do if we don't find these people in time?" Silence. No one even looked at each other. "What about provisions to keep the government operational?"

Reynolds tugged on Beamon's arm to bring him back to the table, but Beamon just shrugged him off. The more distance the better as far as he was concerned.

"Relocation to NORAD would probably be most viable."

"And would that provide adequate protection?"

The man didn't answer immediately, and Beamon found himself staring intently at him. It was bad enough that when faced with an unprecedented human disaster, the politicians' focus turned so quickly to saving their own necks, but what was worse was that it might work. Instead of repopulating the world with doctors, farmers, and craftsmen, it would be repopulated with lawyers, politicians, and generals.

"NORAD was designed to withstand a very different kind of attack, sir."

"But a biological attack was one of them."

"Yes, but a biological attack on humans. We'll put our top people on it, but the facility was built with state-of-the-art materials the kind that would be susceptible to these bacteria. It could very quickly turn into a dark hole in the ground."

"This needs to be a top priority -- I want to know later today what kind of retrofitting can be done to adapt it."

"We'll do our best, sir."

The uncertainty in the man's voice cheered Beamon up a bit. If he was going down, he sure as hell wanted these assholes to go down with him.

The president seemed confused for a moment, but regained his resolve before speaking. "Based on Mr. Beamon's recommendation, we're going to warn Canada about the possibility of a bacterial attack on their tar sands, and we'll just have to revise our attack plan accordingly." He looked in Beamon's direction. "As much as I hate to say it, our future -- everyone's future is in your hands."

Chapter
37.

"It is Erin and Jenna's doing," Jonas said, leaning between the seats of the four-wheel-drive vehicle they had transferred to. "You know this."

Teague ignored him and gunned the vehicle over a decaying log, bringing them out of the dense trees and into a small clearing dominated by a camouflaged metal building a little larger than the one they'd occupied in Texas.

Even Jonas fell silent when he saw it. While it wasn't particularly impressive or unique, it represented the end of years of work and sacrifice and the beginning of the most significant transformation the earth had undergone since the extinction of the dinosaurs. But this transformation wouldn't be precipitated by a meteor or climate change. It would be their doing.