Genesis Plague

Table of Contents

PART ONE: DISCOVERY

-[
Prologue
]-

-[
Treasure
]-

-[
Almost
Paradise
]-

-[
Base Camp
]-

-[
Ascent
]-

-[
Descent
]-

-[
Cataclysm
]-

PART TWO: OUTBREAK

-[
Quarantine
]-

-[
Chaos and
Chemistry
]-

-[
Dark
Revelations
]-

-[
Assault
]-

-[
Flight
]-

PART THREE: DARK ROADS

-[
Running on
Empty
]-

-[
Road Rage
]-

-[
Dead City
]-

-[
Highway to Hell
]-

-[
Small Town USA
]-

-[
End of the Line
]-

PART FOUR: ORIGINS

-[
Closed for
Business
]-

-[
The Belly of
the Beast
]-

-[
Under the Knife
]-

-[
Behind the
Curtain
]-

-[
Evolution
]-

-[
Epilogue
]-

Author’s Note

THE FUTURE…

T
he cold is the only
thing keeping me alive.

I trudge through the
freezing blizzard like a machine, lifting one booted foot after the other and
stomping it down into the hard white snow. I can no longer feel my legs. The
cold sun blinks dimly on the horizon like a dying headlamp, offering no warmth,
before it is quickly covered again by the storm.

There is ice in the
wind. It bites my exposed face, peeling back raw flesh—and thank God for the
ice, because one of the vials broke, and I’m infected.

I can
feel
the
microscopic terror crawling over my skin, making its home, working its death.
It moves slower up here, this far north—that’s why they built the research
facilities in the arctic circle. What takes the bug a week to do near the
equator takes almost a month in this eternal winter.

And thank God for that,
too, because I might still have time.

The wool cap over my
dark, shaggy hair only comes halfway down my forehead. The tips of my exposed
locks are icicles. My beard and eyebrows are frozen solid. With every blink, my
eyelashes freeze together and pull apart like Velcro.

One foot, then the
other. This is what keeps me going, this one myopic action. Simple walking, but
not so simple for a man thigh-deep in snow who just crawled from the mangled
wreckage of an airplane.

I see an amber light
ahead, through the slashing blizzard: the small glowing star that is my
destination. Behind me, the path I cut through the snow is gone, filled in by
the blowing white. If you could see the path and follow it to where I started,
you would find the Cessna, nose buried in the hard ground, tail pointed at the
sky. No wings. Those ripped off in the crash.

You might see the
bodies, too, if they weren’t already covered by the quick snow.

In front of me is the
light. Between here and there is a wide field of perfectly flat, treacherously
calm fallen snow. The blizzard doesn’t seem to touch the surface. White sworls
dance calmly over the smooth, unbroken plain, as if the rest of the world were
not in chaos.

With numb hands, I pat
the leather pouch tied around my waist to make sure it is still there. The
glass vials shift reassuringly within. Even though they carry the purest form
of the virus, all hope is lost without them, for the cure cannot be derived
from the newer, more evolved variants.

The bug mutates too
quickly, adapts too efficiently. This is a fact we learned at great cost. The
only way to attack it is to break down its core building blocks, the DNA
fragments which remain unchanged throughout its rapid development.

This is my unproven
hope, anyway. I have little else to keep me going.

After the crash, my
first fear wasn’t that I had been paralyzed, or that I’d lost a limb—it was
that the vials had shattered. It had taken the life of Frank Walker to keep
them safe. He had clasped the packing box to his chest as the plane went down,
even as I shouted for him to strap in. Strapping in would have meant using both
hands, and in the beginning, Frank would have had plenty of time.

Instead, he went for
the medicine fridge and dug out the small plastic box of vials while Sherri and
I scrambled for our safety tethers. The box was lined with a thin layer of
packing foam to keep the vials from shifting during the flight—but it wouldn’t
be enough, not in the violence of those last few moments.

The vibrations rattled
my bones and my vision, making it difficult to close the tether’s clasp over my
chest and waist.

That’s when we lost the
first wing.

Sherri Walker, Frank’s
wife and the pilot of our Cessna, had lost all visibility in the freak blizzard
that stood between our plane and our destination: a narrow airstrip beside the
building with the amber light. One moment the sky had been clear, and in the
next, the storm rose up from the ground like a blanket rises when fluffed—except
beneath its top layer was a churning cloud of frozen air.

The plane shuddered and
groaned, and then the mountain edge none of us had seen was suddenly
there
.
Sherri screamed and banked hard, but it was too late. The right wing was sheared
clean off the body.

After that, the plane
was nothing more than an oversized lawn dart spiraling down to the earth. Frank
still clutched the vials to his chest, but he was pinned to the inner wall of
the plane from the spin. He couldn’t make it to his seat.

Sherri took her eyes
off the controls to look back at him, and an understanding passed unspoken.
Frank stuffed the vials into his inner jacket pocket, then grabbed whatever
tumbling debris he could to press against his chest with the hope of keeping
the small tubes of glass intact. He grabbed a sweatshirt when it hit the wall
next to him. He plucked a cube of Styrofoam packing from the air as it bounced
around the cabin.

For a second I wanted
to yell at him, to scream that it didn’t matter anymore, that we had failed.
What did he think, that they would find us out here in the solid white next to
our scattered plane; find us and then find the vials, and somehow still get the
cure?

Yet in the next moment
I was ripping off my own jacket.

“No,” Frank shouted,
shaking his head. There was a calmness in him that I could not fathom in that
moment, a quiet harbor of peace in the spinning, groaning plane. “You might
need it.”

And he was right. I’d
be dead now without it.

As I trudge toward the
amber firefly stuck in the snow ahead—the welcome beacon of the research
facility that we all hoped and prayed would have the answer—I have to force
myself not to think of Frank’s and Sherri’s broken bodies in the ice; to not
think of reaching into Frank’s open ribcage to pull out the wrapped vials of
red liquid, saved only because he didn’t take the time to drop the small
packing box and strap into his chair during the crash.

All of them saved but
one.

I knew what it meant
when the drop of thick red liquid hit my exposed, bleeding, shaking hand. I knew
what it meant, but it didn’t matter. I was going to die out here in the snow
regardless, so what difference did it make if I had a little infection when I
checked out? I was going to bury these damned things as far down into the snow
as I could, so there was still one clean place left on this forsaken planet.

And then the soft ping
of Sherri’s tracking monitor sounded from the cockpit. I scrambled past her
twisted body, already half-covered in snow, and tapped the cracked, dying
screen.

We had crashed only two
miles from the research facility.

Maybe I could make it.

Instead of lying down
next to my friends in the snow, instead of taking the easy way out and letting
humanity wallow in its downfall without the one small hope I carry in a leather
pouch around my waist, I force myself to focus on the only thing that will get
me to that amber light ahead: one foot in front of the other, into and out of
the freezing snow.

Across the field of
smooth snow and ice, two hundred yards away, the blocky research facility is
nothing more than a dark outline in the background. The amber light flickers,
and for one terrifying moment I think it was an illusion the whole time. Then I
see the shadow of a figure pass in front of the light. A small spark of orange
light flares in the figure’s hands, briefly illuminating his face and the
cigarette in his mouth.

Whatever caution that
remains leaves me instantly. I run across the smooth, white plain, shouting and
waving my arms. The ground is hard beneath the layer of soft snow, and some
distant part of my mind registers that I’m running across ice.

I can’t be sure, but I
think the man hears me. I shout louder, and the glowing ember of his cigarette
turns in my direction—

—then the icy ground
below me cracks as if it were made of thin glass, and suddenly there is nothing
under my feet. One second I am running toward the research facility, and the
next I am falling through darkness, waiting for the impact.