Toxic (30 page)

I
n the confusion of the hasty departure, Hector had sensed that it wasn’t a good idea to take refuge under the amphibious boat. Masters had forced his point of view, pointing out – and rightly so – the menace of the alien drones capable of spotting them on the surface. For lack of a better alternative to propose, the trafficker had followed the soldier and had hidden the semi-sub under the troop transport. They watched the black hull through the portholes in the cockpit. Everybody was thinking about the two women who they had just abandoned to their fate.

“We can’t leave them,” Bruce said, indignant, with a revolted look on his face.

The young guy had somewhat of a naïve attitude, the Colombian thought. They had had the chance to get out.
Al contrario
, the colonel didn’t harbor any delusions.

“Do you want to go back?” he retorted. “Face the L-Ds and the aliens? Is that what you’re proposing?”

The biologist scowled with grief.

Alison and Dew, sitting on the bench, observed them silently. The two children protected by the nurse were once again orphans in a way. Hector admitted that she had taken care of them like an affectionate
mamá
. Especially with the Asian. The gringo was asking for a miracle: getting their companions back alive.

Like an echo of his thoughts, a violent shudder shook the semi-sub. Knocked off balance, the Colombian was thrown towards Masters, who fell down in turn.

“
¡Madre de Dios!
What was that?” he muttered, his face against the ground.

“It sounded like an explosion.”

Bruce had found a place to hold on to not fall. He pointed at the porthole. “Look at the boat, it’s moving!”

At once, Hector thought the guy had been hit on the head. Getting back up, the troubling glow of the surface caught his attention. The ship was also listing. He noticed the slant of the hull. In reality, the troop transport was sinking, which called for an immediate reaction on his part to avoid an imminent collision. The Colombian hurried towards the navigation post, an alcove in the corner to the right of the stairs going up to the stern. He pushed on the ignition button. The electric motor started to hum immediately and he bent the joystick to the right to get out of the trap. Too bad about the drones, he told himself. They had no choice.

In addition to listing on the port side, the warship was sinking in the back. The shipwreck seemed inevitable. A new burst of light marked a second explosion. They withstood the tremor, which was less strong than the previous one. Each of them held on where they could. Alison stifled a cry. Masters reassured her by holding her to him. Hector hung on tight to the command area. The wide open eyes of the biologist expressed distress. The Colombian closed his eyes. The curved silhouette of the singer, leaning on the rail, came to his mind.

“Alva...”

The chances of her getting out of there went down to zero. Hector grabbed the cross attached to his pendant and mumbled a brief prayer. Deep down inside, he asked for a divine intervention in hell.

Elaine woke up in the middle of the ocean, overwhelmed by the cold and the night. A panic attack overcame her. She shuddered and panted, letting out small white puffs in the nighttime air. The water compressed her chest like a freezing vice. The disturbing sensation of numbness stopped her from developing coherent thoughts or from calming herself. The anxiety attack caused by the temperature obliterated all coherence. She could barely feel her legs, which she moved around energetically in her hopelessness to get her blood flow back. Her head, kept above the waves by a sort of thick foam collar, throbbed when she moved it from right to left. She managed to lift up an arm. Her fingers had white cracks in them.

The stars glowed in the sky where a few dark clouds lit up by the Moon were visible. The celestial body of the night, round and full like a ripe fruit, shone with a thousand flames above the horizon. The boat had disappeared. The surface, almost still, stretched out as far as the eye could see. Debris floated, scattered about like confetti reflecting the ashen light. The nurse continued to hurry to heat herself up. She tried to gather her thoughts and fill in the blanks in her memory.

How did she get here? She couldn’t even remember having jumped from the ship. Then, the escape came to her in successive images; an incoherent mix that she had trouble putting into an intelligible order. Their panting escape, the wounded corpses that were following them, the alien brandishing its weapon... She was alive. The creature hadn’t killed them. It had struck Alva first.

“My God, Alva,” she managed to speak.

Where was she?

She did a half turn around. A life jacket was floating not far from her, only a few meters away. It was impossible to know if it was the singer or just debris. She noticed that a rope tied them together. Who had tied it? The nurse pulled on it to get closer. As soon as she was close, she made out the black hair mixed with the waves. Held above the water thanks to the life jacket, the artist’s pale face turned towards her. She kicked her legs faster. She grabbed the frozen hands and found a pulse, weak but there. The diva had hypothermia.

“Alva!” she repeated.

Her professional habits took over. She thrashed about to position herself so that she could grab her in the hope of giving her the little heat that she, herself, had, a movement which she accompanied with pats on her cheeks and an arm massage. The wait ensued, long, too long. Alva still wasn’t reacting.

“Good God, now’s not the time to give in!”

It was night now, and a half-burned wood board was floating in front of her, followed by a string of debris. What had happened to the troop transport and to the others?

The speculations jostled around in her mind.

“First of all Alva.”

She continued to rub her skin, which seemed to get back its color. That was a positive sign. Elaine kept at it and was paid back a few minutes later. Or a few hours. Shocked and disoriented, she had lost her notion of time.

Alva shook her head and closed her fingers. Entering into panic, she wanted to push away.

“What happened? Where are we? The boat, the aliens...”

The words escaped from the still blue lips as fast as her chaotic thoughts.

“Softly,” the nurse whispered to her.

“Elaine...”

“I’m here. Try to move your legs. You have to get the blood circulating in your body to transport the heat produced by your muscles. Don’t stop moving.”

“The creature... It shot me.”

The diva shook and then moved once again.

“Calm down.”

“Why am I alive?”

She didn’t know how to answer that. Instead, Elaine told her to concentrate on her legs and to move them, even slowly, but to not stop moving them.

“Pretty,” Alva murmured, looking up at the full moon. “You could call it the entrance to paradise.”

She was delirious.

“Yeah, it’s beautiful.”

A coughing fit shook the singer’s body.

“My mom... My mom always told me that I would finish bad,” she continued.

As long as she talked, she would remain conscious. Elaine encouraged her.

“She was afraid of finding me on the bathroom floor with a needle in my vein.”

“She was your mother; she was worried; that’s normal...”

“She was wrong. I’m having a nice death. I fought. For the first time in my life, I got up and faced the problem.”

Elaine hugged herself against Alva.

“I’m sure that she’s seeing it,” she reassured her.

“I’m having a nice death. The ocean, the Moon... Earth never seemed so nice to me.”

“We’re not going to die.”

“In that case, I’d like a smoke and a line of coke. Do you think Hector has any? That Latino creep felt up my ass... He wants to fuck me.”

The burst of vulgarity didn’t surprise her. Her experience as a woman had probably been one of the most exotic ones. As for her relationship with men...

“I hope they find us,” Elaine cut her off.

The wait grew longer. The two women floated around, tied together. The Gulf Stream was likely dragging them into the open sea and towards the old continent, the nurse assumed, with her thoughts disintegrating as time went by. Lost in her distraught dreams, she noticed the light, which she likened to a surface reflection. The glow danced on the water. It swayed in the shady space from right to left and then in the opposite direction. All of a sudden, she understood. Her first reflex was to shout and call out for help, but she didn’t have the breath. She moved her hands. A second light appeared. The first went out. She closed her eyes. A distant voice came to her.

“Over here! They’re here! Quickly!”

F
iasco.

Since he had invaded Earth and sent its civilization back to the Stone Age, Naakrit had dealt with failure after failure, a continuous degradation of the situation. The evidence exploded in his thoughts: he was losing control. In itself, the expedition to Site B demonstrated that he was running after a pipe dream. It symbolized the infernal spiral that was sucking him down to the bottom of an abyss from which he would never be able to emerge if he didn’t find a solution quickly.

The cure was the only hope of one day re-establishing the full market potential of the human race. The third planet was home to a real treasure trove. That treasure legally belonged to him. For the moment, he was just pecking at the crumbs, tracking miserable groups of natives across the five continents. The Nairobi operation would change the situation, but that would only be for a while. In the meantime, it was indisputably marking a turning point. Success would offer him a break and revitalize his business. A failure... He preferred to not think about that right now. He was planning to get all the luck on his side and to not neglect any details.

The Primark stood on the front steps of the Dubai Headquarters tower. The sun at its zenith crushed the syntho-concrete with its heat. The sparkling white domes resembled the stomachs of lazy gods spread out behind the shade of the buildings. A cargo ship took off from the former airport, tracing its course in the blue sky. He felt a presence at his side.

“How many?” he asked his lieutenant.

They had just received a delivery of healthy products. That was no cause to celebrate.

“Around three hundred. They were hiding inside a sort of worship area built in the high mountains.”

“Where?”

“In Tibet. An isolated region.”

The emissary was right, he told himself. The areas far from the big urban centers had more interesting targets. Humans concentrated there more easily due to less pressure exerted by the hordes. This lot would be enough to keep the manufacturing chain moving for one miserable quarto-diem. Beyond the defensive perimeter, he watched the tide of infected. Billions were wandering around the planet. What a phenomenal waste!

Was he in the process of missing out on his fortune?

Naakrit went back to the main room. He sat in front of the information landscape, which showed a diagram of the progress of the construction of the new African base. The work had taken up all of his attention since his return from Florida. He was betting a great deal – or even everything – on this undertaking. The Arthrosian in his purple shell, chief of operations since the death of the Sybarian, came to him with good news. His bony jaws spread.

“The drones have found targets; the raiders will leave in one octo-diem.”

On the map, shining squares showed a camp here and a village there, or even further along, a population concentration. The region was rich in healthy products. His morale shot right up. His tongue clicked in his mouth. Naakrit studied his troops’ reports.

The security zone engulfed the former airport as well as surrounding neighborhoods. They had cleared a lot of space to make room for four domes, the manufacturing chain and two EMP units. To accommodate the swarm of T-Js and automatic ships, the troops had retrofitted a portion of the facilities. The chief engineers had even reinforced the tarmac built by the humans. Good work. He didn’t expect any less.

“Perfect,” he whistled.

He pointed to a flow coming from one of the botcams: a shady, moving mass.

“What is it?”

“Infected. They’re descending from neighboring hills and according to the reports, they’re increasing in numbers. They can’t cross the force field wall. We connected two EMPs to it, one backing up the other in the event of failure.”

Naakrit observed the scene. “It’s the same everywhere,” he grumbled. The noise attracted the creatures like djrells to a pot of sugar compound.

“Where’s the emissary?”

“In his quarters.”

Jave stared at the vial on the table.

The blue label magnetized his gaze. He had come to the conclusion that the first part of the writing indicated the number of the original origin of the product it contained. The tera-servers remained silent about the complete reference, but he was swamped with documentation concerning Siva-B.

SD966
−
NT
.

S
for Siva.
D
for the variant. That made sense. The numbers following it were maybe a mutation, a date, some order or a meaning that was not yet known to him. As for
NT
... Like the color, he had the feeling that this detail was of utmost importance. The expedition to Site B had informed him that with improvised means, the humans were working on a cure and were making progress, even if they hadn’t obtained conclusive results. He also couldn’t explain the absence of scientists on the boat. Had they been evacuated,transferred to less exposed facilities, on the land or the sea? He hoped that they were continuing their efforts. Their survival as a species depended on it.