Z-Volution (4 page)

5.

Langley, Virginia

Alex paced the floor inside what felt more like an interrogation chamber than a waiting room. He imagined there were cameras behind the walls watching his every move, and half expected that when the doors opened, the water-boarding would begin. Or the men with the white coats would rush in to take him away after he continued ranting about dinosaurs and zombies and evil plans to annihilate civilization.

He was still somewhat in shock that a room full of some of the most powerful people on the planet actually seemed to believe what he and Veronica had described, but he supposed seeing was truly believing. Especially when seeing a prehistoric sea monster cut through a naval destroyer and a contingent of highly-trained soldiers in a matter of seconds.

Before Alex had been ushered out of the strategy room, he overheard Veronica and the advisors talking hurriedly about defense initiatives, about aircraft carrier repositioning, about sealing off borders and putting the nation on high alert.

Alex had tried to butt in and tell them to make sure they alerted nearby countries. The coastline of South America for one—Brazil, Peru—any number of highly-populated regions could be hit first, and Alex could only imagine how fast the zombie virus—or whatever they should technically be calling this scourge—would spread. He could envision them losing the entire southern continent and then trying to contain the damage by sealing off borders, but could that even work?

Even as he ran through the scenarios in his mind, feeling helpless like a toddler standing before a towering unstoppable tsunami, he thought for the first time in days about his mother.

He hadn’t heard from Elsa Ramirez in more than a week. After his return from Adranos Island and after the loss of his father just as they had been repairing old wounds, he had sought out his mom. Maybe it was the guilt finally settling in, or maybe it was just finally his maturity—or maybe it could have had something to do with surviving a string of brutal attacks from zombies and dinosaurs—that had given him new perspective. He had to reconcile with his mother too, while there was still time.

Veronica encouraged him, even insisted. Regret would be a lifelong scar on his soul if his mother passed before he could patch things up with her, before he could thank her for so many things, before he could share all that had happened with his father. Maybe, just maybe, his presence could even give her strength, help her beat the cancer.

So he had gone. It hadn’t been easy, seeing her like that after so many chemo treatments and multiple surgeries. Not after he had been gone so long, and after being such a distant, ungrateful son. Not after putting the concerns of exotic species and microscopic life forms over the lives of his family, but of course, his mother hadn’t seen it that way.

Surprisingly, and in a rush of emotion Alex hadn’t expected, she had been proud of him. Instead of his father’s initial shame and disappointment, Alex’s mother greeted him with open arms and brought him into her little two-room apartment where to his shock, he found himself surrounded by a veritable resume of his life: framed newspaper articles, his diploma, even media clippings about his eco-warrior convictions were on the walls in places of distinction, as if his mother had been proud of his every misstep and had celebrated his flaunting of authority.

“You acted and remained true to your values,” she had said as they sat and shared a cup of tea. “I didn’t like you taking chances with people’s safety, including your own, but you always did what you thought was right. That’s how I raised you, and you never, ever let me down.”

So floored by this, Alex could say nothing, but just wept and held his mother—bald and frail—and he wept even more, feeling her ribs and her brittle bones and knowing that he was going to be too late.

Far too late to this reunion, far too late to save her. Too late for anything but spending time with her, whatever time she had left. That at least was another value he honored, for her, breaking away only on rare occasions like today when his mission took him to the U.N. itself. Up until a few days ago, he had worked as much as he could behind the scenes, on calls and Skype and limiting face-to-face meetings to times when his mother had care or was in the hospital for overnight treatments.

Things had gotten progressively worse over the past few weeks, but surprisingly their relationship was the best it had ever been, at least as far back as he could remember, since when he was just a kid opening presents from Santa with his mom and dad, and everything was right in the snowy world.

Even Veronica had met her and spent some time—the three of them together, and sometimes Alex thought that without that experience, without Veronica living through it and seeing Alex’s growth and dedication and compassion, maybe they wouldn’t be together right now. Of course, he and Veronica hadn’t had a lot of time together either, but that would come soon enough, once more urgent matters were settled. Once the threat was passed.

Alex’s mother had been a priority, at least until today, until what just happened, but then—his phone rang and the caller ID showed him her name, and Alex’s heart leapt. She had gone for another treatment, something new her doctor had suggested. Alex didn’t know the specifics, and was taken aback that she had only just sprung this information on him while he was on his way out the door to fly to Washington last night.

He hadn’t known where she was going, how she was getting there, or what was involved— whether it was a new procedure or drug or whatever.

So, dying to hear the details, he eagerly answered the phone.

He listened, his relief at hearing her voice turning to concern and then, crushing sadness and heartbreak as she told him the news.

#

Veronica found Alex in the waiting room, talking on his phone. His eyes brimmed with tears as he ended the call with a choked goodbye.

She said nothing, just searched his red-rimmed eyes as a lump lodged in her throat.

“How…how did it go?” he asked, wiping away a tear.

She shook her head. “You probably heard it all before you left. All the main stuff. We’re locking down the borders, putting the navy on alert, redirecting the satellites and trying to get other countries on board with shared surveillance and cooperation.”

“There’s a lot of ocean between here and there,” Alex said. “A lot of ports.”

“Yeah, but we have a head start.”

“You saw all those ships, Veronica. Only one needs to get through to a major city. Or even a minor one. Out of the thousands of ships docking every day, maybe tens of thousands. How can they stop them all?”

Veronica had to ask, and wanted to change the subject. “Was that your mom?”

His eyes fell.

“She…left the country three days ago.”

“What?”

“An experimental treatment in Grenada. She just called from there, where they tried some last ditch cryo-surgical procedure.”

“It didn’t work?”

Alex shook his head. “She…isn’t coming back.”

“Oh, Alex.” She went to him, slipped her arms around his neck and hugged him, just held him tight, feeling his chest tighten and his breath escape. “I’m sorry.”

“I have to go,” he whispered.

“No…”

“I need to be with her. At the end. She’s completely alone. She needs me.”

Veronica pulled back, stared into his eyes. “If you go, you may not be able to get back in. For I don’t know how long.”

“I know. But maybe…”

“Maybe you’re better off there. Safe,” Veronica said, nodding as if the debate was over. “Go, and let all this settle. We’ll stop DeKirk and whatever he’s got planned, and in the meantime, you’ll be isolated there, away from any contagion, away from…”

“Dinosaurs and zombies who will be coming to devour the woman I love?”

She swallowed. “I love you too, but you’re not part of this fight anymore.”

“The hell I’m not.”

“Way above your pay grade, sport.”

“Really? I’m more experienced than any soldier you’ve got at taking out crylopholosaurs with a helicopter rotor.”

She pulled away, and then held his hands. “I’ll grant you that, but if they get that far again that you need to use such creative methods of dispatch, it’ll already be too late. We have to stop them before they make landfall.”

“We?” He searched her eyes. “I knew they’d want you, but can’t you step away, too? Come with me, be safe and we’ll wait it out, or consult with your bosses long distance. What does it matter if you’re there in person?”

“Alex. I need to be here. DeKirk was my mission. This…this is all mine, no one has the expertise or knowledge base that I do.”

“High on yourself much?”

“I’m not kidding. It’s too late in the game to debrief anyone else. I need to be here at the heart of it all if there’s any chance of tracking DeKirk and ending this before it gets any worse.”

Alex sighed, and Veronica could see the acceptance in his eyes. He knew she was right.

“Go,” she repeated. “Be with your mother, kiss her and give her my love, and… God, I don’t know what to say at this point.”

“You’ve said and done so much already,” Alex said. “She loves you too, like the daughter she wishes I had been.” He gave an emotional laugh. “I…”

Veronica leaned and stood on her toes, giving him a big kiss. “Get to the airport. I’ll send clearance and reserve a plane for you. I’m assuming you can mark and track your own flight plan.”

He nodded.

“Good, because we may need all the other pilots we can get.”

“That’s why I think I should stay,” Alex said. “Or at least, can I come back and help out after…?”

He let that trail off, and Veronica shrugged. “Maybe, and yes you’re right, we may need you. Stay close to a phone and be safe.”

“You too.” He pulled her to him and hugged her close, feeling as if it might be the last time.

6.

Underground Bunker—Location Secret

As he was prone to do of late, William DeKirk sat alone in the dark. The shadows and the lack of background illumination served to highlight the focus and reality of what he surveyed on the dozen or so screens on the wall in front of him, and the two more on his desk. A bank of servers and land-based phones occupied an alcove to his right while a great steel door stood guard at his back, behind a long conference table. Literal flesh and bone guards barred the entrance on the other side, but inside this room, he was truly by himself.

He knew he wouldn’t be alone for much longer, so he planned to enjoy his last day of secrecy, seclusion and virtual anonymity, savoring every minute before the final thrust of his plan began.

Checking the status of his secure communications arrays and internet pathways—a tangled and complex routing of multiple hubs and locations, all built out from this site and expanded across far-flung geographic zones without anyone being the wiser—he smiled to himself.

This had been decades in coming, and his plan had always had just one blind spot. Actually not so much as a blind spot as what he liked to call a confident future opportunity. One he had been sure would present itself when he needed it. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have a small army of bio-engineers, researchers and doctors all working on various pieces of a puzzle only he could see in its entirety. All he needed was for one of them to come up with the silver bullet—the ultimate weapon he would unleash to bring the world to its knees and allow him to step in and take control. There had been many other potential superbugs—viruses he could have tried, ways to an end—but he was ever the perfectionist, and decided to wait until just the right tool came along.

He was that confident in himself and his destiny, never doubting that he would find a way, and that when he needed it, a solution would present itself. All he had to do was nudge it along and make sure he was ready to act when he saw it.

Antarctica was the silver bullet, and what a bullet!

He still couldn’t believe how perfect it all turned out. Flexing his right arm, he felt the flesh tighten, the muscle ripple. Felt the blood in his veins, cool and yet seething with energized power, and he shuddered. Giddy with the energy coursing through his body, he fit his right wrist into a device like a blood pressure cuff on his desk. Except this one punctured his skin in three places and took readings, feeding the results of his internal scan directly into the system.

Three treatments was all it had taken. Treatments that he once thought could have gone either way and could have just as easily ended his dreams and taken his life, except for one little thing.

Destiny.

It wasn’t his fate to lose. It wasn’t even a risk.

Nothing could stop him now, just as nothing and no one had come close in all these years of efforts. He had to laugh, thinking about the CIA, Interpol and many others who had been after him for decades. They had stepped up their search in recent years, and despite all their money, technology and legions of agents, spooks, and mercenaries, they hadn’t even gotten a whiff of his true location or goals.

He cackled again, thinking about how he had always been six moves ahead of them, how he had eventually positioned himself to hide right under their noses. Only fitting that the hunters were about to become the hunted.

His vision lovingly caressed the visuals on the monitors, lingering a few moments on each screen. He watched the internal views of the tanker ships, where three crylopholosaurs and a Z.rex slumbered amidst a floor seething with human zombies, like dragons atop their treasure hoard. Another screen revealed a pair of chained creatures, enormous wings folded tight to their sinewy bodies, snapping at each other with long pelican-like beaks between incensed red eyes. The next monitor presented a deck-top viewpoint of churning waves and an immense titanium chain over the side, dragging along a beast with a serrated sail that thrashed and surfaced and dipped and snapped at the chain with monstrous teeth.

DeKirk savored each visual and felt his blood surge and his muscles harden, and more—he felt the hunger growing.

His stomach rumbled and his insides clenched and his mouth filled with saliva. This was beyond hunger, he knew. A rabid, instinctual
need to feed.
However, as bad as it was, DeKirk had his technicians modify the prion’s molecular structure, tinkering here and there with its protein strands and inherent makeup, not unlike splicing genes. Once the feeding impulse had been isolated, it could be tempered. But first they had to attack and re-sequence the element that would destroy the host’s consciousness and personality.

No point in becoming a god if you wouldn’t be left with enough sense to appreciate your new position.

That part hadn’t been easy, but thanks to Xander Dyson’s initial research, DeKirk had been able to have his other brainiacs complete the task. At first he was worried about Dyson’s rambling about a failsafe, and that perhaps he had been shrewder than he gave the man credit for, that maybe he had managed to get word to someone outside the island. The paranoid little freak would definitely do something like that, but DeKirk felt he could rest easy. Three months and no word of it? He would have picked up something for sure in all this time, and besides, Dyson didn’t really have an abundance of free time last he saw the man. From the moment DeKirk had cut him off and left him to die, the biochemist would have been on the run on an island full of rampaging zombies and voracious dinosaurs.

No, there was no doubt; his failsafe died with him—if he even had one in the first place and wasn’t bluffing.

Now, three treatments later, and DeKirk—the sole beneficiary of the zombie protein modifications—was on his way to perfection. By all projections, he should be fully transformed within the next twelve hours. Unstoppable, immortal and in control of all that power. All the benefits of being a zombie with none of the drawbacks. A god to a new race that, he found, would answer to him through a combination of naturally-occurring electromagnetic field radiation that the prions used to communicate and control other hosts, as well as implanted microchip technology where necessary (as with the dinosaurs, which could be overly unruly and chaotic without properly directed discipline).

Grinning, DeKirk flexed and then interlaced his fingers as he stared at another screen depicting some kind of medical chamber, where a frail bald woman lay on a table, IVs in her arms. A bevy of technicians stood around monitoring her vitals.

DeKirk licked his lips, anticipating the delicious irony to come. He had scores to settle with more than a few people, but this selection of Patient Zero would be a more than fitting assault on someone who had come oh-so-close to derailing DeKirk’s ambitions—something not easily done nor readily forgiven.

One final screen captured his attention: a view from atop a mast looking down on a flat ship’s deck where the largest of the lizards he had ever imagined lay strapped down, still in frozen slumber.

My dreadnought
, he mused. At forty tons and twenty-five meters long, it was a smaller individual than some of the fossils they had discovered in South America. It had been found in a cavern, frozen almost throughout, just a short distance from Vostok. It had certainly been part of that same lake, lured there from whatever it had called home while the rest of the Earth began its methane or asteroid-induced climate change. Whatever it was, DeKirk didn’t really care. Let the eggheads argue about what caused mass extinctions, because he was pretty sure he had the answer.

The prions did their work, and hunger did the rest. If an animal was hungry enough, it would eat anything—do anything—to sate itself and kill those relentlessly nagging impulses. A person would literally eat his neighbor’s child, DeKirk had always thought, if things got bad enough. And dinosaurs, well…a mere reptile possessed not the faintest shred of restraint or morality. They were no match for starvation.

Hunger was the ultimate constant. Every species feared it, every organism experienced it at one time or another. Hunger drove migrations, and hunger—more specifically, the fear of it—gave birth to civilization, agriculture, and everything that came with it. Stars burned energy just as every organism consumed prey. A living thing was merely a biological machine, and machines must be fueled or they stop running.

Only now, DeKirk could control the perceived sensation of hunger in a zombified organism—human or dinosaur. Direct it, shut it off once necessary, once his goals had been achieved.

But first, he thought, as he perused his monitors once more, his army would feed.

And feed well.