Immortal (37 page)

‘Half of the town died. It killed them very quickly, just a few days.’

Devereux turned to the agents behind him.

‘Get the bio-suits out and have this area cordoned off right away.’

As the agents hurried to carry out his orders, Devereux turned to the Inuit.

‘What killed these people?’ he asked.

‘The great sickness,’ he replied. ‘You call it the Spanish Flu.’

Devereux stood rooted to the spot as the man’s words echoed through his skull, provoking memories of long forgotten stories learned at high school and from television documentaries. The
1918 Spanish Flu had been an extremely severe influenza pandemic that spread across the entire globe during the aftermath of World War One. Most victims had been healthy young adults, in contrast
to most influenza outbreaks which predominantly affected juveniles or the elderly. Lasting three years, the pandemic killed between fifty and one hundred million people, making it one of the
deadliest natural disasters in history. At least five hundred million people had been infected. Although little was known about the geographical origin of the disease, it had been concluded that it
killed via what was known as a cytokine storm, a massively excessive response of the human body’s immune system. The influenza’s modus operandi explained its severe nature and the age
of its victims. The strong immune systems of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children, middle-aged and elderly adults resulted in fewer deaths.

‘It killed half of the town?’ he asked the Inuit.

‘More than that. This town was known as Teller Mission at the time. It lost eighty-five percent of its population in less than a week.’

Devereux turned and watched as his agents, now dressed in bio-suits, began digging down into the hard soil, making far greater progress than could be expected through permafrost; evidently the
soil had already been turned over recently.

‘You think the man died here because he dug up the body?’ the Inuit asked.

Devereux nodded but did not reply as he slipped on his own bio-hazard suit. Another, more insidious suspicion had already crept into his mind as he watched his men digging deeper and deeper into
the frozen soil until suddenly one of the shovels hit something. Devereux waved the Inuit back from the grave.

‘Stay upwind of us,’ he said, acutely aware of the possibility of airborne infection.

Devereux approached the grave, coming to stand on the edge. He looked down into the depths of the freezing earth and felt a primal fear creeping through his veins. The muddied corpse of a woman
who had clearly been dead for at least a century stared up at him, gruesomely preserved by the rock-hard permafrost in which she had been interred. Devereux’s men backed nervously away from
the body, covering their noses and coughing as a pungent waft of putrefaction spilled onto the cold air.

‘Looks normal enough to me,’ one of the agents said, ‘for somebody who’s been dead a hundred years.’

Devereux nodded thoughtfully, and was about to turn away when a sudden thought occurred to him.

‘A hundred years,’ he echoed. ‘If she’s been here that long, then why is she stinking like she died yesterday?’

A silence enveloped the men for a moment, and then Devereux grabbed a shovel and stepped back to the edge of the grave. He plunged the shovel down into the earth alongside the body of the woman,
and then hauled back on the handle, prizing her rigid body free of the earth and tipping it up against the side of the grave before driving the shovel into the earth behind her to pin her in
place.

‘Give me another shovel here!’ he said urgently.

An agent passed him a shovel, and Devereux scraped away at the loose soil beneath where the woman’s corpse had lain. As the soil fell away, the stench became overpowering and a patch of
flesh appeared. Devereux scraped furiously until half of another body was revealed encased in soil.

The face of a man stared back up at him. One eye was open, the eyeball rolled up and the white exposed. Soil smudged his face and filled his slackly hanging mouth, and through the dirt Devereux
could see blood staining his shirt. What bothered him more was that the man was wearing a modern fleece, thick boots and a digital watch on his left wrist.

‘Er, boss,’ said one of the agents beside Devereux, ‘that ain’t no 1918 corpse.’

Devereux nodded, his voice a ghostly whisper above the buffeting winds.

‘That’s not what bothers me,’ he replied. ‘What I want to know is: what the hell were they doing with that original, infected corpse?’

Beside them, the Inuit pointed toward the distant airstrip and made a sweeping gesture with his hands up into the sky.

‘The other man who came here, he fly away with bits of the body.’

Devereux pulled a photograph from his pocket, one sent to him by the DIA, and showed it to the Inuit. The native nodded vigorously and pointed at the image. Devereux pulled out a satellite phone
from his jacket and punched in a number as he wondered what kind of unimaginable shit-storm was going to go down at the Pentagon when they found out that Colonel Donald Wolfe had apparently turned
into an international terrorist.

5.12 a.m.

‘Pull off the main road here.’

Lopez pointed out a dust track illuminated by the weak beams of the GMC’s headlights and Ethan turned off the highway and onto the track, the vehicle bucking and loud knocking sounds
emanating from the suspension. Lopez put the map she had been consulting into her pocket.

‘This is about as far as we can go in the truck,’ she said.

Ethan slowed down as the vehicle struggled through ruts in the sand, then killed the headlights and turned off the engine.

‘Where are we?’

‘A few miles north of the main entrance to Carlsbad Caverns,’ Lopez said, ‘just on the edge of the park. This is the area where Ruby Lily said the soldiers have been seen in
the past.’

Ethan climbed out of the truck and peered out into the darkness. The whisper of bat’s wings fluttered through the night sky above.

‘We need high ground and we need some light, or we’ll miss them when they come through.’

Lopez scanned her map again and orientated herself to their position.

‘Out that way,’ she said, pointing into the night, ‘there’s an old river course that’s carved a valley. We can climb to the top of the ridge and hopefully spot them
as they come in.’

Ethan grabbed his Bergen from the back of the truck and checked his pistol before setting off. Lopez followed behind, whispering urgently.

‘There’s hundreds of square miles of desert to cover,’ she said. ‘And we don’t even know which cave they’re heading for.’

Ethan spoke between breaths as they hiked up the steep hillside.

‘They’ll most likely pick the route of least resistance, following key features like dry river beds. As for the cave, we’ll just have to make sure we don’t expose
ourselves until they find it.’

‘That could be harder than you think,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘They’re experts at living out here and can probably move undetected far better than we can. Following them
unobserved will be tricky at best, impossible at worst.’

Ethan shrugged, striding toward the top of the ridge.

‘Maybe, but at least there’s no chance of them knowing we’re here ahead of them. The greatest weapon we have right now is surprise. As long as we’ve got that,
there’s no chance of them finding us first.’

Ethan climbed the last few steps and reached the top of the hill to come face to face with a bayonet pointed unwaveringly at his face. Ethan looked past the bayonet and the gaping muzzle of the
long-barreled rifle and straight into the eyes of the big man he’d last seen at Sedillo Park, fleeing the scene of Lee Carson’s murder. Ellison Thorne.

Lopez walked straight into his back as he froze, the steel of the bayonet scant inches from his face. For a brief moment he thought that Ellison might simply pull the trigger, but then his
gravelly voice growled in the darkness.

‘Sound travels a ways at night, specially when you’re jawing like old women.’

Before Ethan could react, four more men appeared from where they were crouching amongst the scrub, their weapons trained on Ethan and Lopez. He could see that they were carrying pouches of
ammunition, water bottles and leather sacks filled with what looked like sticks of dynamite.

‘You’ll be droppin’ your weapons now,’ Thorne said.

Ethan didn’t move.

‘We’re not carrying,’ he lied smoothly. ‘How did you get here so fast?’

Soft chuckles of disdain rippled through the men as they looked at Ethan. Ellison Thorne smiled coldly.

‘You’ve never heard of horses then?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Plenty for the takin’ if’n you know where to look. Much better than that noisy old bucket you
came clattering out here in.’

‘We’re not here to hurt you,’ Ethan said quickly. ‘We already know who you are.’

‘That so?’

‘Your name is Ellison Thorne,’ Ethan said. ‘Your companions here are Nathanial McQuire, Kip Wren, Edward Copthorne and John Cochrane. Every last one of you was alive in
1862.’

There was a silence on the hillside as the men stared at Ethan. One of them, a young man whom Ethan assumed was McQuire, spoke up.

‘How’d you know that?’

‘Tyler Willis,’ Ethan answered. ‘Hiram Conley went to him for help when something began happening to him, when he began aging. Lee Carson wanted to do the same, didn’t
he, but you wouldn’t let him because you know that Jeb Oppenheimer at SkinGen is hunting you. The man’s insane, wants to patent the bacteria that caused this and sell it to the wealthy
elite while the rest of the world is forced to cease reproducing.’

John Cochrane spoke over the barrel of his rifle.

‘You sayin’ this is bacteria we’ve got?’

‘You don’t know about that?’ Ethan inquired.

‘Doesn’t matter what we don’t know,’ Ellison Thorne cut across them. ‘What we do know is that we need to get back to where this all started, and you’re in our
way.’

‘Doing that doesn’t make any sense,’ Ethan protested. ‘If you don’t know what’s happened to you in the first place, then running back to those caves might not
do anything for you at all.’

‘It’ll do a damned sight more than standing here listenin’ to your balderdash, boy!’ Ellison boomed, losing patience and turning to Copthorne. ‘Bind them up good,
Corporal, then we move out!’

Ethan saw Copthorne hesitating, as though he wasn’t sure that by following Ellison’s order he could be sending himself to his doom.

‘I don’t know, Ellison,’ Copthorne said. ‘What if there’s a bit of truth in all he’s sayin’?’

Ethan didn’t wait for Ellison to answer.

‘There’s more to this than just all of you,’ he said urgently. ‘Jeb Oppenheimer is an old man himself. It’s not going to be enough for him to just arrest his aging.
He’ll be like all of you, frozen in time as you were back in 1862.’ Ethan looked at Copthorne, guessing his age. ‘I’d bet that being stuck aged sixty or so for a century and
a half isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?’

Copthorne raised an eyebrow. ‘You wouldn’t believe the goddamned arthritis, and—’

‘Better alive than dead,’ Ellison Thorne cut his corporal off with a sharp glance. ‘We don’t have time for this. Sooner or later we’ll be tracked down, and out here
we’re sitting ducks. Either you’re in or you’re out.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Lopez said. ‘There’s a bigger problem. Jeb Oppenheimer’s plan is to genetically modify the bacteria that you carry, so that it
can rejuvenate the carrier instead of just delaying their aging.’

A moment of silence fell over the soldiers as they digested this new piece of information.

‘Is that true?’ Kip Wren asked.

‘As far as we can tell.’ Ethan nodded. ‘A drug that inhibits aging would be valuable enough, but Oppenheimer’s not doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He wants
to be young again and will stop at nothing to achieve it. His plan is to stop his own aging in its tracks, before working out how to reverse it. If he succeeds . . .’

Nathaniel McQuire figured it out quickly enough. ‘He’ll make sure that only people like him, the rich and the powerful, will have the drug.’

‘And everyone else will grow old and die,’ Copthorne said. ‘I’ll be damned.’

Ethan took a pace closer to Ellison and looked up at the man who towered over him.

‘You’ve got a chance to do something more, something better with your lives than just exist. If this bacteria gets into Oppenheimer’s hands we’re all dead regardless. But
if we can shut the caves down, hide them from existence, then Oppenheimer won’t be able to finish his crazed little scheme, and from what I’ve seen he’ll be dead before the end of
next year. Problem solved.’

Ellison Thorne glared down at him.

‘And when you shut those caves down, what happens to us?’

Ethan held his gaze for a moment before speaking.

‘You die,’ he said finally, looking at the other soldiers, ‘and countless millions of others live. You’ve already lived the lives of three men each, and whatever bacteria
is in your bodies or whatever Jeb Oppenheimer might achieve, it’s too late for you to reverse what’s begun. Hiram Conley was mummified overnight after he died. None of you can survive
much longer. It’s your choice: save yourselves and maybe risk Jeb Oppenheimer locating you and sacrificing the lives of millions of people, or sacrifice yourselves for the chance to stop
him.’

Lopez moved to stand beside Ethan. Ellison Thorne was now silhouetted against a horizon glowing with the first light of dawn.

‘This is your chance to stop running,’ Ethan said, ‘and start fighting back. This is your chance to do the right thing, Ellison.’

The soldiers looked at each other for a long moment, before looking at Ellison Thorne. Slowly, the big man lowered his rifle.

6.35 a.m.

‘Hands up! Stay still!’

The desk sergeant reacted instantaneously, a heavy-looking pistol whipping from its holster to point directly at Saffron Oppenheimer as she strode through the doors of the station as though it
belonged to her. She raised her hands above her head as through a door poured a frenzied mass of officers. Before she knew it she was face down on the cold tiles, a thick forearm pinning her neck
and chest to the ground as cuffs were snapped around her wrists. Pain bolted through her shoulders as she was yanked to her feet and hustled past the front desk and into the depths of the police
department, surrounded by the black-shirted bodies of the police officers.