“We… don’t know.”
“Have you done tests, for God’s sake?”
“We have. It’s noma… but the disease has become more aggressive.”
“Are you talking mutation?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “I’m not sure what to call it.”
Frieda Jaeger was a pediatric nurse in her fourth month in Nigeria. She was clearly out of her depth.
“Who is handling the tests?” snapped Koertig.
She gave him the name of the lab. The doctor finished scrubbing and then hurried out to make some calls. Noma was an old disease. It was vicious but stable, predictable.
Terror gripped his heart as he ran to his trailer and the satellite phone he used for emergencies.
God help these children if it had mutated.
God help the children everywhere.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Deep Iron Storage Facility
Saturday, August 28, 3:59 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 1 minute E.S.T.
I kicked my way out from under the boxes and rolled over into a crouch, pulling my Beretta.
Top Sims knelt nearby, his M4 in his hands. He had a shallow cut across the bridge of his nose and one eye was puffed shut.
“Clear!” he yelled.
“Clear!” I heard Bunny growl, and to my right I saw him crawling out from another mountain of toppled boxes.
“Where are the hostiles?” I demanded.
Bunny switched on a minilantern and pointed to the rear door, which stood ajar. He kicked it shut. There was no interior lock.
“We giving chase?”
“No. Barricade the door.”
We worked fast and stacked boxes in front of both doors. Top was watching me as we worked.
“What?” I asked.
“Looked like that last box hit you in the head. You need me to go through all that ‘do you know who you are and who’s the President of the United States?’ crap, Cap’n?”
“I know who I am, and for the record the Vice President’s a total dick,” I said.
Top grinned. “You’ll live.”
Bunny sat down on the floor and began applying butterfly stitches to a long, shallow slash on his thigh. “Well,” he said, “this was fun. Don’t know about you fellas, but I’m getting tired of being ambushed by people who shouldn’t even be mad at me. I mean… what the hell was that all about? Did we just have a firefight with the Hulk and the Thing?”
“Something like that.” I looked at the bloody remains of the Russian team.
Top said, “Any idea what the hell we just stepped into, Cap’n?”
“I’m starting to,” I said but didn’t elaborate. “It seems pretty clear that there were at least two teams down here searching for the same stuff.”
“Three teams,” said Top, “if Jigsaw’s down here somewhere.”
I didn’t comment on that. If Jigsaw was in Deep Iron and hadn’t come to investigate the gunfire, then it meant that they weren’t able to. Top read my face and didn’t pursue it. Bunny was watching us both and he cursed under his breath.
The flashlights did a good job of lighting the room. The firefight with the Russians had taken place in one corner, over by the door through which we’d come. That part of the room was a charnel house of mangled bodies. I’d seen a lot of death and I’d caused a lot of death, but there was something about this that was jabbing wires into my brain. I wanted to turn away, but I knew that would be the wrong choice. Denial is always a bear trap-you’ll forget about it and step in it later.
Top pulled the magazine from his M4, saw that he was down to three rounds, and replaced it with a full one. “Cap’n, either I’m getting too old for this shit or we nearly got our asses handed to us by just two guys. They were winning, too, until you shanked one in the mouth.”
“No joke,” said Bunny. “One of those guys knocked my rifle out of my hands-and not to blow my own horn, but that’s not so easy to do. So I laid into him, hit him four times. Two uppercuts, a hook to the ribs, and an overhand right. I might as well have been brushing lint off his lapels.” Bunny had twenty-two-inch biceps and could bench 460. When he laid a combination into a pair of boxing mitts, whoever was holding them went numb to the wrists. Bunny’s blue eyes looked deeply spooked. “Son of a bitch didn’t even grunt. It’s not doing a lot for my self- esteem.”
“He’s right, Cap’n,” Top agreed. “I put a full mag into both of those assholes and it barely even knocked them back. Sure as hell didn’t knock them down. I think we’re seeing a new kind of body armor, something that absorbs impact like nothing I ever seen. It was only when I went for a head shot that he turned tail and ducked behind the boxes. But… until then I was slowing him down, but I wasn’t hurting him.”
“Nobody’s got body armor that good,” Bunny said.
“I may have clipped one of them in the leg-the one you didn’t stab-because he was limping when he went out the door. He should have been Swiss cheese, though. And, considering how strong these guys were, maybe we’re looking at an exoskeleton. They’ve been working on that stuff for-”
Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard, Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”
“Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with all the confusion-”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had something extra, so we’re lucky we were able to turn the tables on them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”
“Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m okay with that.”
They stood on either side of me and looked at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere, but most of the floor was clear.
“Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find much, but we have to look.”
“Balls,” murmured Bunny.
“Then I want to move the remains to that section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were no boxes.
“Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked Top.
“Because we have work to do and we don’t want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”
He nodded.
I squatted down and began searching the dead Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me, none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose, and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily substances the room was getting ripe.
As expected, the search yielded nothing. No ID. Nothing.
Without saying a word we began moving the bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of thing before in Iraq-pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond the capability of the rational mind to associate this with deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from a guy like me-someone who’s killed people with guns, knives, grenades, garrotes, and bare hands-but there is a difference between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly clinical. This was… what? The two
