wave like a giant hammer striking them down.
They were airborne, falling, a deafening hurricane roar coming from overhead. The sky above was red, swirling fire, a twisting maelstrom of flame. Then a violent slap like hitting a wall. They struck the bottom of the falls and were immediately sucked under the surface. Stunned and confused, Maggie was twisted and tossed by the churning water, unsure which direction was up.
She fought her way to the surface, spitting and coughing.
She couldn’t see Jake. The white froth of the waterfall was churning around her, its roar drowning her voice, the orange flames overhead raging like the end of the world.
54
THE FIRST SOLDIERS AIRLIFTED IN FROM FORT DRUM FOUND her wandering about in the shallows, shivering, her arm broken. She gave them the vial with the cure, explaining what Liam had done. She said again and again, “Where is Jake? Please, you have to find Jake.”
They found him in the reeds near the river’s edge, as if he’d dragged himself partly out of the water. His bullet wounds were washed clean, skin white, nearly drained of blood. They checked for a pulse. A tiny thing, then even that faltered. They went to work, pumping his chest.
“Oh, God, no,” Maggie whispered. “Please. Please.”
HIS HEART HAD STOPPED WHEN THE MEDICS LOADED HIM into the helicopter, Maggie piling in after them. Jake had lost more than forty percent of his blood, no vital signs, but they kept working on him to get a pulse. A decision was made to divert to Fort Detrick, where they had the containment facilities to handle them.
A medic tended to her wounds. She had a broken arm and a fractured bone in her wrist from pulling her hand from the cuff. After they had put her arm in a sling and secured it to her chest, Maggie stayed beside Jake the rest of the way. “Hold on, Jake,” she begged. “Please hold on.”
WHEN THEY LANDED AT DETRICK, MAGGIE WAS TAKEN TO THE slammer. Two hours in, they let her talk to Dylan through the glass of his quarantine unit. The doctors administered the antidote she’d given them. She forced herself not to break down at the sight of her drugged and barely conscious son. In a moment of lucidity, he asked about Jake. “Is he going to be okay?”
“I don’t know, Dylan. Let’s you and I pray with every bit of hope that we have.”
No one was sure of the final outcome for Jake Sterling, not the first day, not the next. On the third day, he’d opened his eyes. On the next, he’d asked for water. Not long after that, beside his hospital bed, Maggie held his hand while he slept. She sobbed like a baby for reasons she only half understood.
ONE YEAR AFTER
THE SMALLEST THING
THE UZUMAKI WAS A DISTANT MEMORY. ALMOST FOUR HUNDRED people around the Hazelton prison and Camp David came down with early symptoms. Hundreds of other clusters of cases appeared up and down the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways, but none of these expanded into a full-blown epidemic, thanks to Liam Connor’s last gift to the world, the fungus Maggie had released alongside the Uzumaki. The cure had spread like a branching river from the release spot, Liam Connor’s fungal creation quickly taking root in fields up and down North America. Later, spores had carried the cure overseas, with the fungus turning up everywhere from Africa to Australia, France to the Falklands.
Liam’s cure came from the protective bacterium that lived in the guts of people who were antibiotic-free. It flipped a genetic switch that turned
An FBI investigation into Kitano revealed that he had been spying on Liam for years. After he learned about Liam’s labs at the Seneca Army Depot, he had hired Orchid. It had been her job to deliver the cure to the Chinese and Japanese governments. Hitoshi Kitano, the last Tokko, would finally destroy America.
But Kitano hadn’t counted on Jake Sterling. Or Liam Connor.
Liam’s cure was not perfect. It worked reliably only when adminstered immediately after the infection. Of the three hundred and seventy-two known cases of the Uzumaki that occurred before the cure was widely available, twenty-nine had died, including Lawrence Dunne. The deputy national security adviser had lasted three weeks, completely mad the entire time, screaming and cursing and begging to die.
The UN hearings on the Uzumaki in the months after the crisis had held the world in thrall. Maggie’s testimony, along with Jake’s, was said to have drawn a worldwide audience of more than three billion. Pressure was building, and negotiations were under way for new limits on biological-weapons programs, with all the major powers participating.
THEY’D BURIED LIAM CONNOR AT A LITTLE GRAVEYARD IN Ellis Hollow, laid him to rest beside his beloved Edith in a quiet ceremony with no press. Life slowly returned to normal but with a few changes. Jake still taught at Cornell, still built microbots, but he had started a side project creating custom prosthetic limbs for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. He would visit the soldiers, listen to their stories, fit them with their new limbs. It was therapeutic for him. Jake came back from the sessions at the Syracuse VA shaken but somehow more alive. Maybe one day Dylan would join him. He was calmer by the day, the panic attacks almost gone.
Maggie had started her own project, using the almost eighty million dollars that Liam had left her. On the site of the old Seneca Army Depot, she’d started construction on a living herbarium, a gigantic garden of decay, going after the entire fungal kingdom. Fungi were among the most remarkable, versatile, and powerful forms of life, yet they were also among the most mysterious. Ninety-five percent of all fungal species remained to be identified, their genetic makeup and their morphological variations still to be classified. She was going to change that. By the time they put her in the ground, the Kingdom of Fungi would no longer be a mystery.
There had been other changes, too.
JUST BEFORE DUSK, THE LITTLE EXPEDITION SET OUT TO SEE the colors.
Dylan and Turtle led the way, Maggie behind them. Jake was happy to bring up the rear. The best spot for viewing came at the end of a long walk through Treman State Park that had been one of Liam and Edith’s favorites, a stretch of the Finger Lakes Trail that ran above Lucifer Falls.
They stopped at a spot on a small bluff. Turtle sniffed the earth. Around them was a stand of tall trees, leaves shimmering in daylight’s last rays.
Jake reached his hand to Maggie’s, their fingers intertwining. They’d married the month before, in a big outdoor celebration in the backyard of Rivendell. For a time, she’d resisted his proposals-but she never really had a chance after realizing that what had kept them apart for way too long was fear. Fear exposed is the weakest of emotions; love is so much stronger.
Jake had often wondered about himself. After the war, his marriage had fallen apart, and he’d never really been able to put himself back together. No one seemed to be able to touch him. Now he knew why. He was waiting for these two people. Maggie and Dylan had brought him back to the land of the living.
Together they looked out over the cornfield, waiting for the peak of the colors. At dusk, the sight was unbelievably beautiful. As the last sunlight faded, they began: a million little fungi, all flashing in reds, yellows, and greens, like multicolored stars. The cure had spread around the world, Liam Connor’s fungal creation. As if the old man had taken one last, great breath and exhaled it all over the world.
