The 6th Extinction (53 page)

Then finally she collapsed to her side, unmoving, dead, the mighty hunter brought down by a lowly frog.

Must have been one of Cutter’s toxic creations
.

As if the violent death were a cue, more of the sloths charged out, drawn by the scream, the bloodshed, the death of one of their own.

Jenna retreated with the others, pursued through the jungle, chased by the roaring from many throats. They all simply ran, forgoing any attempt to even fire at the beasts.

Never make it . . .

Then the canopy ripped apart over them, letting in the blinding sun shattering the darkness. Winds whipped and tore at the forest. The craft overhead roared far louder than any
Megatherium
.

The pack fell back, intimidated and confused. Then as one, the beasts slunk back into the deeper shadows and retreated.

Lines fell from the aircraft, and men traveled smoothly down them to land in the forest, carrying heavy automatic weapons and wearing body armor.

Cutter’s group was quickly subdued, stripped of their weapons.

One of the soldiers came forward to her. “You’re a hard lady to find.”

He tipped his helmet back, revealing a familiar face. Even through the fog, she knew him—and smiled. Relief flooded through her, accompanied by a surge of warmth from deeper inside, an emotion still new and unexplored with this brave man.

“Drake . . .”

“At least you remember me. That’s gotta be a good sign.” He reached forward, jabbed a syringe into her neck, and pushed the plunger. “A small gift from Dr. Hess.”

2:39
P
.
M
.

Cutter rose through the air on a stretcher, lifting free of the dark canopy and out into the blaze of the day. He surveyed his handiwork, the many-tiered gardens, his Galapagos in the sky. He took a moment to appreciate his triumphs and defeats.

Around him was a crucible of evolution, one driven by a simple edict.

Survival of the fittest.

The Law of the Jungle.

But doubt had settled into that perfect garden of his soul, a bright seed of new possibility, shown to him by the small figure of a woman, an Eve in the guise of a park ranger. She had pointed to a new Eden, maybe one that need not be so
dark
.

He had witnessed today something new.

The Law of the Jungle was not all there was to life, to evolution, but that in equal parts altruism, even morality, could be as strong an environmental factor as any, a wind for change to drive the world to a more vital, healthier existence.

Yes . . .

It was time to start anew, to plant a fresh garden.

But to do that, the old one must die and be tilled over.

Besides, it is my work. Why should I share it with a world that was far from ready, too myopic to see as clearly as myself?

He slipped a hand to his pocket, picturing the munitions buried in the oldest tunnels underneath the sinkhole.

He pressed the button, activating the countdown.

God created the heavens and the earth in seven
days
.

He would destroy his in seven
minutes
.

11:40
A
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M
. PDT
Sierra Nevada Mountains, CA

Lisa rode in the back of a Dodge Ram 2500 fitted with a camper shell as it raced across the Marine base. She kept a hand on Nikko’s sealed gurney to steady it. Up front, Corporal Jessup sat beside her boyfriend, an apple-cheeked young chaplain with a big heart named Dennis Young.

As she requested, he had the pedal firmly pressed to the floor, flying across the deserted base. They had no time to spare with trivialities like stop signs or traffic lights. She stared down at Nikko. The dog would not likely last past the next couple of hours. He was showing evidence of major organ failure.

Hang in there, Nikko
.

They sped into the empty parking lot of the small base hospital. The medical facility had just upgraded their radiological suite to include an MRI machine. Edmund Dent already waited at the entrance. Lisa had used the time preparing Nikko for transport to gather all key players to this one spot.

The Ram truck blasted into the emergency bay and braked hard in front of Edmund. The virologist waved to some of his colleagues who were also scheduled to leave on the last chopper. Together, they all got Nikko out and rolling toward the radiology unit.

Edmund panted beside her. “Already got the scanner warmed up. A technician attuned the magnets to”—he checked what was written on the back of his hand—“0.456 Tesla. Static field.”

“What about a sample of the engineered organism?”

“Oh, right here.” He reached to a pocket and pulled out a test tube that was tightly plugged and duct-taped.

Nothing like improvisation
.

They reached the radiology unit to find two members of the nuclear team, along with Dr. Lindahl.

“This had better not be a waste of everyone’s time,” Lindahl greeted her. “Plus after this is all over, I’m going to initiate a formal inquiry into your behavior. Absconding with a test patient.”

“Nikko is not a
test
patient. He’s a decorated search-and-rescue dog who just happened to get sick assisting all of us.”

“Whatever,” Lindahl said. “Let’s get this over with.”

It took four of them to lift Nikko’s sealed patient containment unit from the gurney and place it on the MRI table.

The technician pounded on the glass. “No metal!”

Lisa swore under her breath. In all her haste, she hadn’t considered this detail. Nothing metallic could go through an MRI machine; that included the components of Nikko’s patient containment unit.

Edmund looked at her.

Got to do this the hard way
.

She pointed to the door. “Everyone out.”

“Lisa . . .” Edmund warned. From his tone, he knew what she was planning. “What if the data is false? Or simply wrong?”

“I’ll take that chance versus nuking these mountains. Besides, the science sounds right.” She shooed him toward the door, taking his test tube first. “Out.”

Once clear, she crossed to Nikko’s PCU, took a deep breath, and cracked it open.

Painter, you’d better be right
.

With great care, she gently lifted Nikko over to the table. His limp form seemed much lighter, as if something vital had already left him. She placed him down and rested a hand on his side. It felt good to be able to touch him with her bare hands rather than with a glove. She combed her fingers through his fur.

Good boy
.

She placed the tube of virus next to the dog and gave the technician a thumbs-up.

After a few seconds, the machine erupted with a noisy clacking, and the table holding Nikko slowly slid through the ring of those magnets. They did a double pass to make sure.

All the while, she paced the room nervously, chewing a thumbnail.

Gonna need a manicure before the wedding
.

“That’s it,” the technician announced over the intercom.

Lisa quickly took a syringe from a rolling plastic cart and drew a blood sample from Nikko’s catheter. She injected the syringe into a Vacutainer tube. Then sealed both it and Edmund’s tube into a hazardous waste bag, which she handled only with sterile gloves. She left it near the door and stepped back.

Edmund risked collecting it himself.

“Hurry,” she said.

He nodded and raced off, heading to his lab at the hangar.

It was the longest ten minutes of her life. She used the time to pass her own body through the scanner to kill any contamination from handling Nikko. She then sat on the table with him, cradling his head on her lap.

Finally a call came through, patched through the intercom.

She heard the triumph in his voice. “Dead. It’s all genetic mush. Both the raw sample and the viral load in Nikko’s blood.”

She closed her eyes and bent over Nikko.

“See what a good boy you are,” she whispered to him.

She took another moment to collect herself, then picked up the phone and spoke to Edmund. “What’s the plan from here?”

She heard arguing in the background, raised voices, most of it coming from Raymond Lindahl.

“Still trouble,” Edmund said. “And you can guess from who.”

She hung up and stared at the door, wondering what she should do.

Before she could decide, the door shoved open, and Sarah flew in, pointing a finger at her. “I heard. You’d better get over there. I’ll dog-sit. Dennis will drive you.”

She smiled, hugged the corporal, and flew out the door.

Dennis drove his Ram truck at top speed over the quarter of a mile to the hangar. She was out the door before it had even stopped moving. She ran into the hangar to find Lindahl with his back to her, nose to nose with the head nuclear technician.

“We stick to the original plan until I hear otherwise from D.C.,” Lindahl said. “All these new results are . . . are at best preliminary. And in my opinion, still disputable.”

“But, sir, I can readily modify—”

“Nothing changes. We stay the course.”

Lisa strode up behind Lindahl and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned with a look of stunned surprise to find her there, she drew back her arm and punched him hard in the face. His head snapped back, and he slumped leadenly to the floor.

Wincing, she shook her hand and nodded to the head tech. “You were saying?”

“From what we just learned, I should be able to lower the yield of our nuke to as little as a single kiloton. If we can get that bomb to blow four miles up—which that drone chopper can reach—it should produce an electromagnetic pulse of at least 0.5 Tesla. It’ll cover more than enough territory to sweep the hot zone with negligible radiation. Nothing worse than what you’d get from a dental X-ray.”

“How long will it take?”

“I can still make that noon deadline.”

She nodded. “Do it.”

“What about D.C.?”

“Let me worry about D.C. You get that nuke in the air.”

As he hurried off, she looked at her bruised knuckles.

Definitely will need a manicure
.

2:45
P
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M
.
Roraima, Brazil

Kendall watched the tepui drop below as the V-280 Valor fled from the summit. They had only a minute to spare before Cutter’s charges exploded, destroying his macabre experiment in synthetic biology and genetic engineering.

Good riddance
.

He returned his attention to the cabin. The space was packed with people. Cutter’s private helicopter had already left with Ashuu and Jori, but only after ferrying two flights of native workers out into the surrounding rain forest, getting them clear of any danger.

He presently shared the back of the cabin with Cutter, who was strapped down in his stretcher, one wrist handcuffed to a railing. An IV line ran to a catheter in the back of his hand. His deep wounds still needed surgical attention, but a thick compression wrap around his chest should last until the aircraft reached Boa Vista in a couple of hours to refuel.

Cutter stared out the window near his head. “Ten seconds.”

Kendall followed the other’s gaze toward that cloud-wrapped summit. He silently counted down. When he reached zero—a towering blast of smoke and rock shot from the summit, occluding the sun, turning it bloodred. Thunder rolled over that shattered mountaintop, as if mourning the deaths of so much strange life. Then slowly the plateau cracked, shedding a shoulder of rock, like a calving glacier. The pond on top spilled over that fracture, reflecting that bloody sunlight, becoming a flow of fire down that broken rock.

“Beautiful,” Cutter whispered.

“A fitting end to Dark Eden,” Kendall added.

Cutter glanced over to Jenna. “But you saved a sliver of it. For her.”

“And maybe for the world.” He pictured his frantic search for those vials before destroying the lab. “That counteragent may hold some promise of treatments for other mental disabilities. It will certainly bear more study. Some good may yet come from your work.”

“And you saved nothing else? Nothing from my genetic library?”

“No. It’s better off lost forever.”

“Nothing’s lost forever. Especially when it’s all up here.” Cutter tapped a finger against his skull.

“It won’t be there for long,” Kendall said.

The man was simply too dangerous.

With everyone distracted by the show beyond the window, Kendall lifted what he had secretly pocketed back at the lab, what Cutter himself had foolishly left on a tabletop in his panic over his son. He leaned forward and pressed the jet-injector pistol against the side of the man’s throat. It was the same tool used on Jenna. The intact vial still held one last dose of Cutter’s engineered code.

Cutter’s eyes widened with horror as Kendall pulled the device’s trigger. Compressed gas shot the dose into the man’s neck.

With his other hand, Kendall injected a sedative into Cutter’s IV.

“By the time you wake, my friend, it’ll all be over.”

Cutter looked on in dismay.

“This time Cutter Elwes will die,” Kendall promised. “Maybe not the body, but the man.”

34

May 29, 11:29
P
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M
. PDT
Yosemite Valley, California

“Wasn’t exactly your beachside wedding,” Painter said, swirling a glass of single malt in one hand, the love of his life snuggled under his other arm.

“It was perfect.” Lisa pulled tighter against him.

They had both changed out of formal attire and found this deep-cushioned love seat before the massive stone fireplace of the Great Lounge of the Ahwahnee Hotel. The reception party was winding down behind them as guests either filtered to rooms or headed home.