Fire & Ash (30 page)

This was something totally outside of Riot’s experience. It was so absurd, so bizarre, that she found herself smiling.

Had the monks done this?

No, that was ridiculous.

The soldiers at the hangar?

As if in answer to that thought, the sirens abruptly began their banshee wail. The dead paused, and many of them turned toward the sound. A few even lumbered that way, drawn by sound or some rudimentary habit of the limbs and nerves. But the others did not follow.

The sirens were far away. The balloons were right there.

“Stay here,” Riot said to Eve, and she slipped out of the
play area and ran to the edge of the trench. Her pulse was already fluttering in her chest.

One by one the dead turned away from the sirens. They grabbed the nearest balloons, growling when they popped. Riot saw a flash of color. Not the bright yellows and blues and greens of the rubber, but a bright red that puffed into the air as each balloon burst. Was it dust?

Or . . . powder?

It clung to the skin of the zoms. It fell on their eyes and into their open mouths, propelled by the explosion of the balloons.

“What in tarnation?” she said aloud.

Some of the dead stopped where they were, their bodies shuddering and trembling as if they stood on ground troubled by an earthquake. However, the cause of their agitation came from no external force that Riot could see. It had to be something
inside
them. Something that rippled under the surface of their withered skin.

Then the world was rocked by a series of explosions. Not close—they were to the east, beyond the distant fence. Riot squinted through heat haze as fireballs leaped up from the fields.

There was a rumor among the monks and nuns that the army had laid mines out in those fields. Until now Riot hadn’t believed it.

There was movement out there, and Riot, long practiced at telling the difference between the living and the dead, saw masses of zoms running across the minefield. Running and then flying apart as the mines exploded. More came behind.
And more. The mines detonated, and the zoms kept coming, running as if they had a purpose.

Running as if driven.

Behind them, Riot saw a wave of reapers on quads.

As they drew closer, she could see that they wore scarves wrapped around their heads and old-fashioned swimmers’ goggles over their eyes. Each of them had a silver dog whistle clamped between his teeth. They drove a flock of zoms across the minefield, clearing it by exploding it. Opening the way for the mass of reapers who followed.

And here, closer, the balloons bounced along. The dead caught them, bit them, exploded them, and were doused by red powder.

Riot had been trained as a warrior and a leader of warriors. She understood what was happening. She turned and looked at the blank and unresponsive wall of the blockhouse, at the closed doors of the hangar. At the helpless masses of monks and the dying people they tended.

She turned slowly back to watch the oncoming tide of death.

“God,” she breathed.

71

T
HIS THING SHOULD HAVE BEEN
over by now.

All the walkers should have been dead by now.

Benny actually felt as if Dr. McReady’s words were physical blows that pounded him in the heart and over the head.

“Are you . . . serious?” asked Nix.

“Of course I’m serious,” barked McReady. “You think I’d joke about something like that?” She nodded to the plastic containers of Archangel. “Why do you think I came here? This base is the best biomaterials production facility west of the Rockies. Ten times better than the setup at Sanctuary, but even a lunkhead like Jane Reid should have managed
something
.”

Joe sighed. “Without the D-series notes, all she managed to do was make the metabolic stabilizer and a very, very weak version of Archangel. She tried it on a few walkers and got mixed results.”

McReady closed her eyes. “Save me from idiots.”

“Listen, Monica,” said Joe. “How’d you even know about this place? I sure as heck never heard of it.”

McReady snorted. “There are half a dozen bases like this you never heard of. Places
nobody
ever heard of unless they were on the right lists.”

“I was supposed to be on
every
list.”

“Oh, cry me a river,” said McReady. “There’s always another level of secrecy, don’t you know that? I know about this place because I wrote the protocols so they could build it. Just like I wrote the protocols for the redesign and repurposing of the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Oregon.”

“Why?”

“Because the United States of America needed to stay safe, and we couldn’t afford to let naive international chemical weapons treaties hamstring us. Every third-rate country who couldn’t afford a nuclear weapons program but got a Junior Chemistry Wizard set for Christmas was cooking up bioweapons and nerve agents. What were we supposed to do? Wait until someone launched something and then complain to Congress that we had no response because our funding was cut and our charters revoked? Grow up, Joe.”

“I guess that worked out really well for you,” observed Nix.

Dr. McReady gave her such a lethal and venomous look that Benny thought Nix would drop right there; but Nix narrowed her green eyes and gave it back full blast.

Before the two could explode into an argument, Benny asked, “Where’s the rest of the staff? We saw some bodies. One guy in his office . . . ?”

“Shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Dick Price. He was the last. No great loss.” The scientist gave another derisive snort. “The rest are dead. Most of them killed themselves. Cowards.”

Benny felt sorry for the scientist, but it was getting harder and harder to like her.

“By the time my team got here,” said McReady without a trace of remorse, “more than two-thirds of the staff were already gone. Before and after we got locked in. The staff who’d been here were torn up by speculation as to whether some of the biological terrors they’d helped to create had been used to destroy the world. Might be true, too. There were suicides . . . murder-suicide pacts. Heart attacks from stress. A couple just wandered off into the badlands to let the desert or the dead have them.” She shook her head in disgust. “We’re struggling to save the world, to preserve life, and these idiots can’t wait to catch the bus out of here.”

“That guy, Mr. Price, left a message,” said Benny. “He wrote, ‘May God forgive us for what we have done . . .’ ”

“ ‘We are the horsemen. We deserve to burn,’ ” finished McReady. “All very dramatic.”

“If he killed himself out of guilt,” she said, “what were you all guilty of?”

McReady’s eyes didn’t blink or waver. “If you’re asking me if I participated in the development of the Reaper Plague, then no.”

“I’m sorry—”

McReady pointed down the hall toward Price’s office. “
He
did. The people here did.”

“They started the plague?” asked Benny, aghast.

“Don’t be an idiot. Why would we release a doomsday plague? We’re scientists. We research, we develop—we don’t implement. Other people—politicians and generals—take science and turn it into a weapon. I expect Captain Ledger here’s been filling your head with his left-of-liberal antimilitary propaganda.”

“First off,” said Joe, “I was a moderate back when elections mattered. Second, I’m
in
the military. Now, stop evading their questions, Monica. We come here to rescue you and we find a base that I should have been told about, a staff that’s killed themselves in remorse, and suicide messages that talk about guilt. Stop being such a hard-ass and
tell us what happened
.”

Benny thought that the scientist was going to argue, but instead she seemed to deflate. “Okay, okay . . . I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been alone too long. Months. Here’s the short version. I took my team to Hope One to investigate reports of mutations among the population of walkers in Washington State. I was very interested in this because mutation was deemed unlikely, since Reaper was designed to be ultra-stable. As you may or may not know, Reaper is a combination of several designer bioweapons, including nine separate viruses, fourteen bacteria, and five genetically altered parasites including the big daddy—the jewel wasp. The core is something called Lucifer 113, which was developed by the Soviets during the Cold War. That one got out of the bag a couple of times and almost lived up to its promise of being an ultimate weapon. It was stopped, though, and all known samples of it were either destroyed or sent to secure facilities like this one. But someone obtained a sample of Lucifer 113, and that sample wound up in the hands of some off-the-radar design lab, which married it to an old terrorist bioweapon called
seif al din
—wasn’t that one you stopped from being released, Joe?”

“Twice,” he said sadly, and then cursed.

“Our bioweapons teams were given that super-plague and tasked with creating the ultimate version, and then using that as a staring point to create a defensive protocol in case it—or
anything like it—ever got out. But somehow the superstrain of it was released,
our
version. No one knows quite how, and we all have proof that there has never been a more aggressive or deliberately destructive disease.

“Because Reaper is driven by parasites, there’s no such thing as natural immunity, though there is a range of reaction time in terms of symptom onset, necrosis, and other factors. Bottom line: Everyone who’s exposed is infected, and everybody worldwide is exposed. Whoever released this spent years laying the groundwork. They must have introduced eggs and bacteria into water sources all over the world. We started getting wind of it almost two years before the actual outbreak. Labs were reporting the presence of the components in soil throughout the agricultural regions, in water tables and reservoirs, even in processed foods. Best guess is that these components were introduced into the biosphere beginning no later than ten years before the global outbreak. It would have needed at least that much time for the bacteria and parasites to spread. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration—all the power players were involved in researching the spread of the components, but no one really understood what kind of a threat it was.”

She shook her head. “In a strange way you have to admire the
scope
of that. A coordinated worldwide release of components of a doomsday plague. For that to happen there had to be huge money—hundreds of millions of dollars—and a large number of persons involved. Just the administration of something like that is staggering.”

“Could have been a cult,” suggested Joe as he knelt and removed Grimm’s helmet. The mastiff’s tongue lolled from between rubbery lips. “There were some big cults and pseudo-religions gaining followings around the world. My team ran into a few of them over the years. Some were well funded, highly organized, and extremely militant.”

“I thought about that too,” said McReady. “But really—who cares? The damage is done. They accomplished what they set out to do. They released a doomsday plague, and for most of the population of planet Earth, that’s what it was. Seven billion people died. If some groups hadn’t been able to find defensible positions and learn to work together instead of panicking like mice, we’d be as extinct as the dinosaurs. We’re lucky as many people survived as they did.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we heard about mutations in Washington, and we had to go check it out. The possibility of a mutation was exciting, because it meant that there was a chance of identifying the mutagen taking control of the mutation process.”

“What good would that do?” asked Lilah.

McReady nodded as if she approved of the question. “The pathogen is in a perfect form. You couldn’t make it more deadly than it is. Any change to its nature or structure would actually result in a reduction of its overall threat, because it would mean that it had shifted away from immutability. Follow me?”

“I . . . think so. If it’s changing, then it isn’t perfect anymore.”

“Smart girl,” said McReady.

Nix said, “We’ve seen some of the mutations. The R3’s. They’re so much faster and scarier.”

“Smarter, too,” said Lilah.

“How’s that a good thing?” asked Benny.

McReady shook her head. “Those are short-term effects. What’s happened is the dormant parasite eggs have been made to hatch. There are active threadworms in the newly infected, but they die off after they’ve laid eggs. As they die off, the process of host decomposition goes into a protracted stasis. We still don’t know how long a walker will last once they’ve reached the stasis point—clearly many years—and we still haven’t cracked all the science on that. Maybe someone will one of these days. Not my concern. When we set up Hope One, we found all sorts of mutations up there. Smarter walkers, faster walkers, with abilities all up and down the Seldon Scale, the evaluation method we developed after the plague started. It was exciting stuff. Dangerous, too . . . we learned the hard way about how smart and fast these mutations were. Lost a third of our staff in the first few weeks, and we lost more when we started actively looking for the most extreme mutations.”

“That must have been terrifying,” said Nix.

McReady shrugged. “It was worth it. This was real science again. We were doing ten, fifteen autopsies a day, every day. Running tissue samples and other cultures around the clock. What we found was that there was a new bacteria in the mix. This is one of nature’s little jokes, because after we’d looked at every kind of organism or causal agent that might trigger the parasites to hatch, the one we found shouldn’t even have an impact on the jewel wasp, which is the parasite at the heart of the Reaper disease cluster. It is in itself a mutation; in this case it’s a mutated form of the
bacteria
Brucella suis
, a zoonosis that primarily affects pigs. My guess is that the walkers in northern California attacked some wild pigs and wild boars, biting and infecting them but not killing them. The Reaper interacted with the bacteria
Brucella suis
and caused a mutation there. This probably happened early on, ten, twelve years ago. The rate and form of the mutation is consistent with exposure to radiation, so these walkers may have been survivors of the nukes dropped on San Francisco or even Seattle. In any case, you have radiation causing mutation in the walkers who bit the pigs, and then the presence of the bacteria, which allowed for further mutation. . . .”