Last Man Standing (Book 2): Cordyceps (7 page)

The radio crackles as Warren adjusts the dial, searching back and forth in the dim light glowing from his lamp until he finally regains the signal.

"—see them from the window of our technician's booth. We have her out there right now checking out street level, but I can't actually get visual confirmation myself without leaving the studio. Kathy? Kathy, are you still with us, hon?"

Quick, shallow breathing emits from the speakers before the DJ returns. He speaks with the same clipped, affected radio newscaster voice everyone seems to use, but it does little to hide his panic. It takes me a few seconds to realize it's Barry Brooks - the Big Double Bee - a nationwide drive time DJ I've listened to for years. It seems strange to hear him talk about something serious, since his usual fare tends to lean towards wacky politics and celebrity gossip.

"OK, I don't seem to have Kathy right now, but I can only assume she's still in the building. I'll get an update for you just as soon as she returns to her booth but for now, to recap for listeners just tuning in, all I can say is that something troubling appears to be going on in the streets below our studio up on the twelfth floor of the LeVeque Tower on Broad Street. We... ah, we don't want to alarm listeners unduly so I really don't want to speculate on what exactly is the cause of the unrest, but I can tell you that there have been ongoing protests concerning the influx of refugees into the state in recent weeks that have threatened to spill over into violence. Obviously I don't want to make light of this... ah, or in any way diminish or dismiss the complaints of the protesters, but I'm sure all our listeners are with me in hoping that the unrest on the streets below is a simple protest and not... ah, OK, we have a caller on the line. I don't have Kathy to route the calls but I'm gonna try to put it on air. Caller, can you hear me?"

The voice comes through muffled and muddy, but audible. "Yeah I can hear you, Barry. Am I on?" It's a woman. She sounds terrified.

"You're coming through loud and clear, caller. Now, can you tell us where you are? Is anything going on in your location?"

"Barry, yeah, I'm just across the river from you in Franklinton about six blocks from the science museum. I'm real scared, Barry. I don't know what to do."

Barry lowers his voice to a comforting tone. "You're perfectly safe, caller, we're all right here with you. Now why don't you tell me your name, and try to tell me a little about what's happening on your side of the river?"

She sniffs. "It's Pam," she says, tears in her voice. "I was just, umm, I was about to get ready for bed about a half hour ago but then I heard a loud noise outside, like an engine or something, you know? So I went outside to try to figure out what was making all that racket and I saw a plane fly overhead. Real low, you know, like
too
low? It was headed over in your direction, and for a minute I just thought,
oh my gosh
, it's gonna hit one of the buildings, but it just went between them and then headed back out of town. But when it passed over the river I saw that it was... I don't know,
venting
something? There was something white coming out the back of the plane and drifting towards the ground, and just a few minutes later I started to hear screams out in the street. I was about to go look when I switched on the radio and heard you talking about some trouble."

Barry's voice is full of concern now. "Pam, are you somewhere safe? Don't go out to the street, Pam. Right now we just don't know what's happening, but I don't want you risking your safety out there. Are you safe, Pam?"

"Yeah, I'm in the upstairs bathroom right now, Barry, but I have to go fetch my daughter from her room. I'm gonna try to take a quick look out the window while I'm— oh honey, thank God. Come on inside, honey. Come on, it's safe in here. My gosh, you're burning up!"

"Pam, what's going on there? Talk to me, Pam."

A few loud clicks and muffled thumps come through the speaker, as if Pam set the phone down on the floor. After a moment her voice returns, more distant now. "Oh, honey, you've soaked right through your nightgown. It's OK, don't worry about it. Come on, come to momma. There's a good girl... No, honey, that's too hard. No. Stop it, honey. Stop it! Honey,
stop
..."

"Pam? Talk to me, Pam. What's happening?"

It sounds like the phone skates across the floor before a loud bang, maybe the sound of it hitting the wall, but the background noise is barely audible over the scream. It's ear splitting, and a long moment passes before Barry manages to cut off the call.

"Oh God, I'm sorry, listeners, I couldn't... I didn't know how to, ah..." Barry falls silent for a moment before continuing. "OK, I'm gonna see if I can figure out how to go mobile. I need to see what's going on in the street. Bear with me a second, I'm just... Look, if you're listening right now I'm begging you not to leave your homes. Just... just lock all your doors and windows and get to the most secure room in your house. Obviously we don't really know what's happening, but if this is airborne we're... just stay indoors and wait for help, OK?"

The sound cuts out for about twenty seconds. Dead air, not even static, then it suddenly returns with a confused jumble of echoing sounds.

"I don't know if I'm still on the air. I think I've got this rig wired up right, but I'm no technician. If you can still hear me I've just left the studio on the twelfth floor, and I'm headed to the windows overlooking Broad Street. I'm, ah... it's pretty dark in here, but I think I can make it across. OK, I'm here in the office of, ah... I think this is the Daystar broadcast studio. Here's the window..."

He falls silent for another moment. "OK, listeners, I'm looking down on Broad Street right now, and I have to tell you I don't see a thing. I'm leaning out the window and I've got a good clear view of City Hall to the west and the statehouse to the east, and it looks to me like the streets are pretty empty. I'm hoping that means... ah, I don't even want to say it, but right now I'm hoping this is just some kind of sick hoax, and if it is I have to say it's in remarkably poor taste. I'd hope my listeners wouldn't—
Jesus!
"

For a few seconds we hear nothing but Barry's panicked breathing.

"
Somebody jumped!
" His calm, collected radio voice has gone now. "Somebody jumped, or, or, or was pushed, or something. I just saw a person fall right past my window and down to the street. I can't see where they landed or what happened but... Oh mother of God, there's more of them! Friends, I'm looking over at the Doubletree Hotel just a block to the south of the studio and I'm seeing jumpers from the parking structure." Barry's voice seems to slur a little, like he's had a couple of drinks. "They're... oh God, they're just leaping from the garage levels, four, five floors above the street. Some of them are... Jesus, some of them are getting back up again. They're just... they're getting up from the ground and they're chasing the... oh no, something's..." He sounds completely drunk now. "I can see it on the window. Little, umm... little... I'm having a little trouble here. Can't... can't think of the, umm... the words. It's... little, umm, droplets." For a few moments all we hear is his breathing, them his voice returns a final time. Small. Quiet. Sad.

"Oh no."

He drifts off, and for the length of a dozen heartbeats there's nothing but a rustling sound. The mic against clothing? Then more heavy breathing. Deep. Irregular.

Now a noise that sounds like the inside of a wind tunnel, a rushing roar.

Now a dull thud.

Now nothing. Silence.

Samuel Whelan sits slumped over the long rosewood table in the situation room, head in hands, avoiding the sight of the big screen on the wall. Every few seconds a new red dot blooms on the map. Albuquerque. Bakersfield. Salt Lake City. Seattle. Each new dot represents a successful strike. Each dot means a puny little crop duster, a massive DC10 or a Bell 205 forest fire helicopter has successfully dropped its load on an unsuspecting city. Each dot represents chaos. Violence. Tens of thousands more dead and infected.

Each new dot brings with it a loud beep, and Whelan cringes with each one as if it brings him physical pain.

This was his plan. It was his brainchild, twisted and bastardized until it had become the exact opposite of what he'd intended. A thousand or so civilian, former military and emergency services pilots, each volunteering whatever craft they had available to save the country. He'd worked for weeks to corral them, getting the word out to fire departments, flight schools and private airfields across the nation to orchestrate what may be the single largest airstrike in the history of the planet.

The strike was supposed to save the country, and Whelan would have gone down in history as the architect of that miracle. Samuel Barnes Whelan, a man who'd spent his entire career tirelessly fighting for the interests of his nation. This would have been his crowning glory, the ultimate bloodless coup, as countless cities were bathed in a lifesaving vaccine that stopped
Cordyceps bangkokii
in its tracks and took back the nation from the infection.

And then he told Lassiter about it.

Whelan spins in his chair just quickly enough to grab the trash can before vomiting. A little splashes on his suit pants but he manages to catch most of it. He spits, wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve and turns away from the screen once again, but not before noticing the red dot over Des Moines. His home town, gone in an instant.

Terrence fucking Lassiter.

Whelan came up through the ranks as a field agent in the Eighties. He'd spent years running dangerous missions all across the globe, and his service record was so heavily redacted it was basically just a binder of black paper with his name on the front page. He'd come face to face with everyone from Afghan Mujahideen to North Korean spies to Colombian cartel kingpins. He'd fought the worst of the worst, serious bad guys, and he'd lived to tell the tale.

In all those years as a field agent, a desk warrior and a shrewd political operator in the Washington machine he'd never come across anyone as dangerous as Terrence Lassiter. He'd heard the stories, of course. Everyone in DC had heard the stories. Lassiter was a lunatic. A fanatic. An honest to goodness religious nut, as unhinged as the worst cult leader. You couldn't trust him as far as you could throw him, and he'd happily feed you and your entire family to the lions if it helped him take a single step closer to his goals.

But everyone talked like that in DC about everyone else. Everyone threw hyperbolic insults back and forth, and everyone on the other side of the aisle was made out to be Satan personified. That was just the reality in the capital, and the problem is that it all became a little like the way people misused the word 'literally' when they really meant 'figuratively', and they did it so much that eventually even the dictionary gave up the battle as lost.

When everyone in DC describes everyone else as Satan, how the fuck can you tell when the
real
Satan comes along? The warnings have all been devalued and watered down. They don't mean anything any more, so you just tune them out.

Lassiter is truly insane. Whelan knows that now, but it's far too late.

When he arrived from Langley on the first day everyone warned him.
Watch out for that Lassiter
, they said.
He's a power hungry son of a bitch.
Of course he ignored them. People had said the same about every President from Reagan to Howard, and most of them had turned out to be fine at the end of the day. Sure, some were a little too eager to send other people's kids to war, and others were a little too gung-ho about socialized medicine, but at the end of the day they were all just typical politicians. You wouldn't trust them to hold your wallet, but you never worried they'd line you up against the wall and give the order to fire.

It took eleven days for Whelan to finally learn the truth, and the truth came with a bullet, but once Lassiter started ordering the executions of 'traitors and defectors', as he called them, it was already far too late to get away. By that point Whelan was just riding the tiger. If he tried to leave he'd find himself before a firing squad, and that wasn't an option. Whelan was a born survivor.

No, the only viable option was to stick it out. To try to guide Lassiter as best he could in the right direction. Maybe - just maybe, and he could barely even countenance the idea - find enough allies at Site R to muster a coup. To take Lassiter out, and install a President who wasn't so obviously insane.

Operation Crop Dust was meant to be his way out. It was meant to get everyone back up to the surface where the cold light of day might allow them to regain some perspective and escape the warping influence of their plainly untethered commander in chief.

And so he'd played along with Lassiter's madness. He'd nodded and smiled like someone trying to placate an armed lunatic when Lassiter described to him his vision of a 'pure' United States. When he explained that
Cordyceps
had been a blessing in disguise. That it would allow them to clear out the deadwood, rid themselves of the cancer of liberal politics and return the nation to its rightful place as God's own country. Lassiter envisioned a vast evacuation effort in which a hand-picked group of the truly righteous were protected from the infection and safely hidden away while the rest of the country - the liberals, atheists, minorities, homosexuals and anyone else Lassiter deemed unworthy of life - tore each other apart, after which the righteous would arise from the ashes and begin to rebuild.

Obviously, it was plain to any fool that the plan was utterly abhorrent. It was pure evil but it was also completely impractical, and a great way to keep Lassiter occupied while Whelan worked around him. Lassiter could waste his time orchestrating his insane little scheme to turn the United States into his delusional wet dream, and it would buy Whelan time to find a real, plausible solution that would save the country.

He'd spent the first week as Lassiter's right hand man liaising with the doctors and scientists working at Camp One. Unlike many he actually
did
agree that it might be worth sacrificing a few thousand innocents if it meant saving the nation. He didn't like the idea - far from it - but he was a realist. He lived in a world of hard choices, and he knew from long experience that sometimes there simply weren't any good solutions. Sometimes you just had to settle for the one that promised the least degree of harm.

Site R's point man at the camp was a man named Major Ronald Armitage. He was an accomplished scientist, the Deputy Director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he assured Whelan that his team would be able to find a solution. They were pursuing an extremely promising path with a newly developed clinical vaccine against
Candida
, a fungus that causes often fatal invasive infections in immuno-suppressed patients. The vaccine ruptures and breaks down the cell walls of
Candida
spores, preventing them from latching onto blood cells and blocking them from accessing the energy they need to reproduce. Before the attacks the vaccine had already been through two years of successful human trials, and it was just waiting on FDA approval.

Armitage had said there was an excellent chance the
Candida
vaccine could be fairly easily re-engineered to target
Cordyceps bangkokii.
Both fungi were extremely similar in structure and behavior, and with a little fine tuning the vaccine could be just as effective against the new threat. What's more, Armitage already knew that the
Candida
vaccine could be effectively aerosolized and was hardy enough to survive long spells outside the body, which meant it should be possible to deliver it directly to large populations by air drop. It was a beautifully elegant solution. The only things that stood in the way of immunizing the entire population against
Cordyceps
were funding, resources and time, and Whelan was more than happy to grant all three.

He failed to understand two important things. The first was that Lassiter, while delusional, wasn't nearly as oblivious to reality as Whelan assumed. The second was that Lassiter was also in direct contact with Major Armitage, and he was issuing him very different orders.

While Armitage worked to develop his vaccine, on Lassiter's orders he'd also set aside a large number of refugees to use as... the best term may be
Cordyceps
factories. Hundreds were immobilized, deliberately infected with the fungus and harvested as it multiplied within their bodies, before being dispatched and discarded in mass graves when the fungus had burned through all available energy. The stockpiles of Cordyceps were then unwittingly transported around the nation by private security forces, FEMA and what little remained of the armed forces.

When Whelan relayed the go order for Operation Crop Dust he'd been under the impression that they were delivering the vaccine. Armitage had assured him it was ready, and was being stockpiled and distributed. He'd lied to him, on Lassiter's orders.

Samuel Barnes Whelan had, about two hours earlier, unwittingly ordered the wholesale slaughter of millions of his fellow Americans. He'd sentenced millions to death with a single phone call, and thanks to Lassiter's lies he'd snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

That's why, on the lustrous rosewood table in front of him, just beside the phone he used to relay the order, sits a small folding knife, and beside it two clear glass vials. They're just tiny things, not much larger than a sample sized bottle of cologne. There aren't even any markings on them. There's nothing at all to suggest what's inside.

He steels himself for a moment before turning to the wall screen, takes a look at the countless dots still spreading across the United States, and says a silent prayer for the many millions of people he unwittingly condemned. He knows he'll never be able to truly atone for his sins, but while those he killed will never know it he'd like to think they'd approve of what comes next.

Whelan takes a sip of water, pushes back his chair, slips the knife in his pocket and closes his fist carefully over one of the vials. He straightens his tie, steps to the air conditioning duct at the wall, opens the cap and pours the other through the grating. He knows the system will carry the contents efficiently around the complex within an hour or so.

The other vial is just for him.

He walks to the door and nods politely to the guard on the way out. At this time of night the hallways are virtually empty, the lights dimmed to simulate the same kind of day/night cycle as up on the surface, but he can see from the glow at the foot of the door that the chapel lights are burning bright. Lassiter's in there, praying to a God he truly believes with all his heart would condone his actions.

Whelan pushes open the door and steps through into the light. It's only his second time in the chapel. He's not a particularly religious man. It's difficult to keep the faith in his line of work, and what tattered scraps of belief remained after all these years were decisively burned away over the last month. He doesn't fear eternal judgment. He just wants an end to the suffering.

Lassiter rests on his knees by the front row of pews, silently praying and oblivious to Whelan's presence. He doesn't hear Whelan approach until it's far too late.

Samuel Barnes Whelan was trained in close combat as a CIA field agent. It may have been twenty years since he last needed to draw on that training, but it's like riding a bicycle. You never really forget. Lassiter turns at the sound of Whelan's loafers squeaking on the tile floor. His eyes widen in fear as he sees the hate radiating from his right hand man, but before he can open his mouth to cry out Whelan thrusts the heel of his palm into Lassiter's throat.

The old man falls back and wheezes, struggling to breathe. It will be difficult, but he'll be able to take in enough air to stay alive. That's important to Whelan. He wants Lassiter awake and aware. He just doesn't want him to be able to call for a guard.

Lassiter tries to scramble to his feet, clutching the marble pulpit with his bony fingers. Whelan slips the folding knife from his pocket, leans down, takes hold of Lassiter's right calf and calmly slices his Achilles' tendon. The President lets out a wheezing breath, trying to scream but unable to get it out. Whelan ignores him, grips his left leg and repeats the process.