The 6th Extinction (20 page)

But the main lodge wasn’t their destination this morning.

The four-man Marine team had parked their nondescript vehicle in a back lot. Drake led the way toward the woods bordering the hotel, drawing Jenna and Nikko with him. They were all dressed in civilian gear, made bulkier by the Kevlar body armor under their clothes, and kept their weapons out of sight.

Jenna had her compact .40-caliber Smith & Wesson M&P belted at her waist, hidden by the fall of her jacket, along with a pair of handcuffs hanging on her other hip.

Ten minutes ago, the team had been airlifted by helicopter over the Sierra Nevada range, passing through some rough weather, to reach the Yosemite Valley. The wide meadow next to the Ahwahnee was a common landing spot for rescue choppers in the park, but Drake had feared they might spook their quarry, so he chose a site farther out—landing at nearby Stoneman Meadow.

“Car,” Lance Corporal Schmitt said.

He pointed to a white Toyota Camry with Massachusetts plates. The license number was a match. The vehicle belonged to Amy Serpry.

An hour ago, Painter had expedited a GPS search for a vehicle matching the car’s VIN number. They had discovered it here, in Yosemite Valley, not far from the region of the mountains that had been evacuated and quarantined.

Initially everyone thought the woman had abandoned the car, possibly switching vehicles. An inquiry to the hotel had revealed no record of an Amy Serpry checking in. But a photo was sent to the front desk. It seemed a woman matching her description had booked a room under an alias, arriving with false identification and credit cards.

An undeniable sign of guilt
.

But why had the suspect settled here, so close to the border of the quarantine zone? Did she stay in the area to observe the aftermath of her handiwork?

Anger burned in Jenna’s gut, picturing the wasteland, all the dead wildlife. She shied away from remembering the fall of the axe, the screaming. She had held Josh’s shoulders when Drake did what had to be done. Afterward, the gunnery sergeant refused to speak during the return trip, his gaze lost in the hills.

“She must still be here,” Schmitt said, as they filed past her car. “Unless she left in another vehicle from here.”

Let’s hope not. We need answers
.

Drake marched in the lead, his face hard and stoic. He clearly wanted more than answers; he wanted payback.

The Toyota was parked near a small path that led back through a stand of Ponderosa pines. The Ahwahnee maintained twenty-four rustic rental cabins, all hidden in the woods. Amy must have booked one of those remote cottages in order to keep a low profile.

The team set off down the path. The scent of pine pitch swelled under the dripping canopy of the forest. At a fork, two of Drake’s men flanked to the right. Steps later, the gunnery sergeant headed with another Marine into the woods to the left. They intended to circle the cabin, to lay a noose around the place.

As the Marines vanished, she and Nikko headed directly for the cottage. The plan was for Jenna to make the first approach. In civilian clothes with a dog at her side, she looked like any other tourist. The goal was to get Amy to let her guard down, to perhaps open the door to a lost hiker.

After a turn in the pathway, a quaint cedar-plank cottage appeared, nestled among the pines. It was painted green to better blend into the forest. A wet stone patio framed a door with two sidelights. The windows were all draped shut, as were the glass panes in the door.

Looks like somebody sure wants her privacy
.

Jenna felt no misgivings about striding forward on her own, knowing the Marines had her back. Still, she gave her armored vest a surreptitious tug. Nikko kept to her knee, as if sensing her tension.

As she reached the door, she shook back her hood, ignoring the rain, and plastered on a feigned look of confusion. She knocked firmly, then stepped back.

“Hello,” she called out. “I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to the Ahwahnee’s lobby?”

A faint sound reached her.

So somebody was inside
.

She leaned closer, bringing her ear near the door. “Hello!” she tried again, louder this time.

As she listened, she realized the noise was the muffled ringing of a phone. From the tone, it had to be a cell phone.

She took in a breath to call again when somebody responded, hoarse, barely audible.

“
. . . help me . . .
”

Reacting instinctively to the plaintive cry, Jenna pulled out her Smith & Wesson and used the butt of her pistol to smash the side light next to the doorknob. As the window shattered, she yanked the cuff of her jacket lower over her hand, brushed the worst of the glass out of the way, then reached through and tugged on the door latch inside, disengaging the lock.

She heard boots pounding up behind her.

A glance back revealed Drake running her way. “Wait!”

Now unlocked, the door swung open on its own.

Jenna kept sheltered to the side and raised her pistol in both hands. Drake reached her, taking a position on the other side.

A single bedside lamp glowed inside the shadowy room. It revealed a figure in the bed, half covered by a comforter. From the blond hair, it had to be Amy Serpry—but the woman’s face was swollen and blotched, her skin blistering, darkening the edges of her lips. Vomit stained the top of the quilt, while the sheets were tangled as if she had fought within them.

Earlier, Jenna had heard about Josh having a seizure.

She suspected Amy had suffered similarly.

No wonder she hadn’t escaped too far. She must’ve gotten sick and went to ground where she could
.

Jenna felt little sympathy for the saboteur, knowing how many had died because of the woman’s actions.

Amy’s head tilted on the pillow, falling in the direction of the door. Her eyes were an opaque white, likely blind. Her mouth opened, as if to again plead for help.

Instead, blood poured forth, swamping the pillow and soaking the mattress. The body sagged in the bed, going slack and still.

Jenna took a step to go to her aid, but Drake blocked her at the threshold with his arm.

“Look at the rug,” he warned.

At first Jenna could make no sense of the small shapes dotting the floor. Then her mind snapped to what she was seeing.

Mice . . . dead mice
.

She had heard stories of the tiny trespassers who often shared these cottages with the hotel guests. A friend of hers from college had stayed in one of these cabins last year. Afterward, all she could talk about was how mice bounded across her bed at night, rooted through her luggage, even deposited a few droppings in her shoes.

To deal with the vermin problem, the hotel maintained an ongoing war, especially after cases of mouse-borne hantavirus broke out in the valley.

But the war inside
this
cottage was already over.

Or almost over.

A lone mouse hopped feebly across the carpet, its body shaking.

Jenna reacted too slowly, too focused on the horrors inside.

Nikko burst past her, the motion igniting his hunter’s instinct.

“Nikko, no!”

The husky stopped at her command, but he already had the mouse in his teeth. He turned back, his tail dropping, knowing he had done something wrong.

“Nikko . . .”

The dog dropped the mouse and came sheepishly toward her, his head bowed, his tail tucked.

Drake pushed Jenna back with one arm—then reached and closed the door. What lurked inside that room was something far worse than any hantavirus.

On the opposite side of the door, Nikko whined, pleading to be let out.

9:01
A
.
M
.

Lisa waited inside the air lock for the pressure to stabilize before she could open the inner door that led into the lab complex. Through the walls, she heard the light
tin-tinning
of raindrops on the metal roof of the cavernous hangar.

It reminded her that time was running short.

According to the local meteorologists, the massive storm front continued to push into the region. As of yet, the dead acres surrounding ground zero remained dry, but it was only a matter of time before those dark skies opened up over the area. A logistical group had been tasked to figure out how far this disease might spread, employing computerized modeling programs to calculate runoff patterns based on topography and local geology.

Their initial reports were harrowing.

Painter was currently teleconferencing with various state and federal officials, trying to stay one step ahead of this disaster. Unfortunately, a new arrival in the middle of the night had proven to be a headache. The technical director from the DTC—the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command—had flown in from Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, which handled the nation’s defense against nuclear, chemical, and biological threats. In the few short hours since the man had arrived, he’d already become a pain in Painter’s ass.

The light above the inner door turned green, and the magnetic lock released with an audible pop of pressure. Lisa stepped through, all too glad to leave the political hassles to Painter. She had a greater challenge that needed her full attention.

She glanced over a shoulder toward the patient containment unit on the hangar’s far side. Josh was resting again, on a diazepam drip. The cause of his brief seizure remained unknown, but she feared it was a possible sign of infection spreading to his central nervous system.

She pictured the thorn sticking out of his leg.

I hope I’m wrong
.

But until she knew for sure, she intended to keep working.

“Dr. Cummings, you’re back. Fantastic.”

The voice came through her radio earpiece. She turned and spotted Dr. Edmund Dent, the CDC virologist, on the far side of a window, standing in his lab. He lifted an arm in greeting—then waved for her to come inside.

“Thanks to your work, I think we’ve made some significant progress in isolating the infectious particle,” he radioed to her. “Once we knew to look for something so small, we’ve started to make good headway. But I’d love to get your input on what we’ve found so far.”

“Of course,” she said.

Excited for even a measure of progress, Lisa hurried through the smaller air lock to reach his lab. His section of the BSL4 suite was all shiny with steel hardware: high-speed centrifuges, a mass spectrometer, a Leica ultramicrotome and cryochamber, along with a pair of electron microscopes.

She discovered another suited figure seated at one of the computer stations, bowed over a monitor. She failed to recognize him until he turned. She kept the surprise out of her face as best she could.

It was Dr. Raymond Lindahl, the technical director from the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command. Through his face shield, the man looked to be in his early fifties, with dyed black hair and a matching goatee. Since his arrival, he had been sticking his long nose into all of Painter’s work, making snap judgments, ordering changes when it was in his prerogative to do so—which, frustratingly for Painter, was all too often.

Now it seemed Painter’s pain was about to become her own.

Of course, it was not inappropriate for the man to be here. Lisa had heard about Lindahl’s background as both a geneticist and a bioengineer. He was brilliant in his own right and had the arrogance to go along with it.

“Dr. Dent,” Lindahl said stiffly, “I’m not sure we need Dr. Cummings’s expertise in medicine and physiology here. Her time is better spent with clinical work, concentrating on her animal studies, not at this level of research.”

The virologist did not back down, which made Lisa like him all the more. Edmund was ten years younger than Lindahl and had a bohemian attitude, likely honed from his time spent at Berkeley and Stanford. Though she had never seen the virologist out of his protective suit, she always imagined him in Birkenstocks and a tie-dyed T-shirt.

“It was Lisa’s work that enabled our progress here,” Edmund reminded Lindahl. “And it never hurts to get another pair of eyes on a problem. Besides, when is honey ever made with only one bee in a hive?”

An exasperated sigh escaped Lindahl, but he let the matter drop.

Edmund rolled a chair next to the DTC director. “Lisa, let me catch you up. I mentioned at the earlier meeting that I thought I might have caught a glimpse of the monster in play here. Here’s a transmission electron micrograph of a cross section of alveoli from the lungs of an infected rat.”

Lisa leaned closer, studying the pockets of tiny particles densely packed into the lung’s small air cells.

“Those definitely look like virions—viral particles,” Lisa admitted. “But I’ve never seen anything so small.”

Edmund nodded his head. “I took measurements from some particles budding along infected cardiac muscle fibers. This is from a scanning electron micrograph, offering more of a 3-D view.”