Sector C (31 page)

Encouraged by at least one cohort’s success, Jim tripped the igniter.

He slapped his hands together in satisfaction at the resultant boom and immediate flicker of flame.

Fire sped up the anchoring pole and quickly spread like wings unfolding along the fence to either side. Just accelerant and dry bark were burning now, but Jim knew it wouldn’t take long for the intensity of the heat to build enough in the interiors of the log poles for them to catch and crack.

A puff of wind blew up to help the cause, shattering the tips of the gathering flames into a thousand sparks that leapt free of the fence to land in tall stands of prairie grass, dried by summer heat. On the compound side, fed by the dry tinder, sparks grew into flames that crept across the open pasture, finding other flames to bolster them until a thick carpet of fire crawled its way inward, devouring the land as it spread.

As burnoff in the form of oily smoke rose victoriously from the first of the fence posts, Jim moved on to light the others.

THE SUDDEN
BREEP BREEP
OF THE fire alarm brought Walt Thurman to his feet, instinctively sniffing the air. Barely a moment
later his
phone buzzed with a brief text:
Not a drill. Wildfire on animal ranges in Sectors B & C. Main buildings in path. Evacuate!

Damn
. Walt grabbed his Pad-L and a handful of files from his desk then rushed into the hall where other staff hurried for the exits hugging their Pad-Ls close.

“Deanne!”
He shouted to his assistant who was still gathering items from her work area. “What about the labs?”

He saw the panic in her face as she stacked Pad-L, files, handbag, personal photos and an African violet into a precarious pile on her desk. “I don’t know, Mr. Thurman. I got the same message as you.”

“Anyone still around from security?” he bellowed into the quickly emptying building. When no one answered he raced to the nearest exit, leaving Deanne to handle the evacuation on her own. He thumbed a number on his phone and heard it picked up on the other side just as he hit the door.

“
Yes, Mr. Thurman
?” The voice of Triple E’s security chief, Sam, was clearly harried but still deferential.

“Are the labs in danger?”

“The last fence will hold the fire awhile. But the wind is bringing it right to our door. Even if we can get a fire department out here, I don’t know how much help they’ll — Jesus!
Just a sec.”

Now outside, Walt could see the blanket of smoke billowing over the compound. The stockade fence just behind the main buildings was the same material that ringed the entire perimeter of the animal enclosures. High, thick and solid, it would provide a formidable barrier to the first flames that reached it. But the creosote-treated poles wouldn’t hold long against a gathering onslaught.

He hurried toward the labs as a cacophony of sound erupted around him. Security officers and others shouted directions to the people exiting the buildings. Elephants and mammoths trumpeted their fright while roars from panicked bears and tigers punctuated the smoke-filled sky.

Squeals from the nearby nursery added to the overall distress. The smoke wasn’t billowing from that direction yet, so Walt assumed the brood stock and their young were simply agitated by the noise and the acrid smell of burning grass and timber that his own unevolved nose was already picking up.     

Just as his foot hit the concrete walkway at the rear entrance of the lab building, a backhoe from the maintenance garage lumbered past. Off to dig a fire break, Walt assumed. Hopefully it could manage one deep enough and wide enough on its own as there likely wouldn’t be much support from the fire departments for some time.

“
You still there?”
asked the harried security chief.

“Go ahead.”

“I’m told the perimeter fence is down in Sector C. Across several of the ranges. Looks like the fire started at the fence line.”

“Started at —?” 

“Arson.”

Fuck. “What about the animals?”

“Don’t know. Seeley’s taking a jeep there now. But he’s gonna need help, whether they’re out yet or not. Give me the priority — the buildings or the animals.”

The backhoe had dug in and was beginning its slow cut down the fence line, scoop by shallow scoop. Sparks shattered on the fence, sending bits of themselves skyward, topping the fence to land upon grass that was little better than dry kindling. It wouldn’t be long before the stockade was breached.

The future rested on Walt’s next words.

 
“The labs and the museum.
Put everything you have on them. We’ll round up the inventory later.”

There was a disaster plan somewhere, Walt knew.
Written up years ago before the museum and the research had become such critical components.
When the business was still about the hunt and the animals and the cool factor.
Back then, the nursery would have been the first priority — all other staff not involved with its safety would have been directed to keeping the stock from escaping. To ensuring animals committed to hunters would be available. He had helped put those very objectives into the plan, had even walked through the obligatory practices. When they’d drafted the plan, it never occurred to them there would ever be a priority greater than stopping millions of dollars from running off the compound.

Unplanned current events always had a funny way of shredding the most carefully thought-out business plans. That’s because most events couldn’t be seen coming a month or two ahead much less a year or more. Corporate executives created their own golden parachutes by demanding not only one-year plans but three-year, five-year, and even ten-year plans. Constant readjustments to the changing business climate and strategic objectives of those business plans was what kept them employed. They stayed engaged not by charging ahead with a clear, single-minded goal and strategy, but by documenting new plans for changing the business model and the target. By reinventing the company annually so they were always “on plan”.

Today, “on plan” meant sacrificing the inventory and the goodwill of current clients to protect future income streams and opportunities.

The rarely used sprinkler system kicked on, patiently spewing water onto the xeriscaped grounds. A maintenance man grabbed a garden hose and began spraying the roof, trying to buy a few precious minutes should the fire reach them. Further down, one of the keepers had a hose strung from the main building and was wetting down the propane tanks. The compound had its own well along with several small ponds, so fire trucks would be able to refill onsite — good news considering the distances involved.

 Inside the research center, geneticists and aides raced about, identifying which projects to preserve and which to abandon at need. Agar plates, test tubes, equipment and animals were all being marked “go” items and moved for easiest transfer. As Walt hurried through the halls, he realized personnel were being overly ambitious about what they’d be able to take with them. Another round of culling was going to have to happen before they could start loading out. He desperately hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Walt found Dr. Volkov in his lab tagging the last of the specimens for removal. A pile of equipment sat on a rolling cart in the middle of the room. “Can I help?”

“If we have to evacuate, we’ll need every hand we can get. Right now, no. How close is the fire?”

“It’s at the fence, but it’ll take a while to burn through.”

“The nursery?”

“It’ll get there before it gets here.”

“We need a big truck.”

“We need time. We need help. We need to put the goddamn fire out.” Walt thumbed a button on his phone. “Get the maintenance truck cleaned out and over to the lab,” he told Sam, who by default had become the operations manager for the duration. 

Dr. Volkov nodded. The maintenance truck wouldn’t be nearly big enough, but it was the best they had. Between it and a couple of dozen SUVs they would be able to get a good chunk of their research out. “What about our three guests?”

In fact, Walt hadn’t even thought about them. But fire could prove an elegant solution to the problem they posed.
One which would keep his own hands clean.
“They stay where they are. We’ll deal with them after — if there is an after.”

The meaning was clear enough to Dr. Volkov. It was a fine legal line between innocence and culpability. What Walt proposed might be morally reprehensible but it would take a jury to decide if it was negligence or manslaughter should there not be an “after”. Walt had been a decent businessman and a man Volkov had been proud to call a business partner for many years. But ever since it became clear the megabeasts had introduced — or more technically, re-introduced — a new prion to the world, something had shifted in Walt’s behavior and he’d been putting his soul deeper and deeper into jeopardy since. The greater misfortune, to Dr. Volkov’s mind, was that Walt had been dragging Triple E right down with him.

No matter the outcome today, Dr. Volkov decided, he was done with Walt and Triple E. Zia Khan had been busy recruiting in the last 24 hours and the offer they’d put on his table would not have been easy to refuse in the best of times. These times were not even close to the best. Tomorrow, he’d tell them yes.

Right now, he had other things to worry about.

A COLUMN OF THICK, DARK SMOKE boiled into the sky as Lim Chiou stared in growing horror. The near-black color signaled one thing — creosote. That meant somewhere in Sector C another fence laden with the flammable chemical was burning. Already the fire had swept its way to the perimeter near the main buildings.
As one tendril of it worked at the fence there, another devoured its way toward the nursery where Lim and the rest of the keepers gathered.

Repeated calls to security went unanswered. One keeper, Sandy Tempkin, held the only hose attached to a spigot, poor defense against the hot flames steadily approaching. She was shaking, but she kept the flow of water aimed first at the roof then at the dry grass beyond the runs. A second keeper ran from one self-watering device to the next turning them on full blast.

The two other keepers, Kristin and Carl, looked to
Lim,
waiting for the answer to a question it seemed had been asked ages ago: “What if we can’t keep back the fire?”

He’d waited to answer, partly hoping to hear the sound of firefighters arriving to save the nursery, partly because he didn’t want this decision to be his. Stalling, he’d picked up one of the ever-present rifles by the door and loaded it before turning his attention back to the fire rushing across the prairie grass.

Now, though, as the first of the flames licked at the outer edges of the long runs that extended radially around the nursery barn like the long tentacles of an octopus, it was clear help wasn’t coming and a decision had to be made.

An iron gate clattered behind him as a grizzly shook the bars. Wolves and tigers paced nervously in their pens, clearly agitated by the smell of smoke and the unusual amount of activity around them. Animals already nervous and on the verge of panic would be especially dangerous. That played a heavy factor in what their next course of action would be. Lim knew how much these creatures meant to their keepers, to him. Knew, too, how unpredictable a panicked animal could be. In other circumstances, he knew the risk would have been worth it. As it was —

“They’re dead anyway, whether from the fire now, a bullet next week or VTSE if we let them free. I say leave them.”

“No!” Kristin’s sharp cry was not one of surprise but resolution.

The ex-army man rounded on the young woman. While he admired that intrepidness around the predators, it wasn’t something he was going to tolerate here. “That wasn’t a suggestion.”

Flames snaked along one of the beams that ran from the far end of a run to the barn. Sandy blasted the beam with a stream of water from her hose, smiling in grim satisfaction as the flames died back. Her smile froze when, to her right, the fire caught up to one of the circuit breakers, igniting a small explosion that knocked Sandy back and threw bits of flaming debris barnward.