ViraVax (28 page)

Sonja held the small young woman as the sobs started. She and Harry had walked through the bodies, but this woman had watched them fall.

“You were here all along?” Sonja asked. “Do you know anything about what’s going on?”

“I just know that the people who run this place are crazy,” Marte said. “And they’re having some kind of family feud. You’re in the middle of it.”

“Us?” Harry asked. “How?”

“This Mishwe guy had you picked up,” Marte said. “Mishwe is psychotic and has been a problem lately. Casey, the boss, was livid. Mishwe killed him, and the rest of these poor people.”

“I vote we don’t wait for the rescue if we don’t have to,” Harry said. He jerked a thumb towards the lift pad. “Let’s get up there and get gone.”

“Right,” Sonja agreed. “We don’t know whether help is coming tomorrow or next week. This place is shutting down. It might have some automatic defenses rigged, too. The sooner we get off the ground, the better.”

“There’s no way up there,” Marte said. “I’ve been all around the building. No doors unlocked. No stairs or ladders up the outside.”

“Maybe we can find a way up,” Harry said.

Sonja pointed towards a huge, bunker-like structure down by the farm. “There,” she said. “Some kind of shop. Look in the doorway.”

Under the doorway light, she saw a tractor and a forklift. Ropes.

“I want out of here,” Marte said. “I don’t care how we do it, or who it is. Some of them started. . . burning up. God, I want out of here and now all the doors are shut.”

Sonja scanned the grounds. Clear sky, tail end of a rain squall spilling over the mountaintops, no breeze. A perfect night for a lift-off.

Neither big bird was in its hangar bay, so she gathered they were both atop the hangar, and, like Marte, standing on tiptoe didn’t get her any closer. All access bays to stairs, elevators, transport and passageways were double-sealed. Warning bells continued their clanging.

More vultures dropped in from their circles—first, to the treetops around the perimeter, then the fencetop, lift pad and finally to the ground at the head end of some faceless human mess.

“Look!”

Harry pointed to a set of running lights on the southern sky that became two sets, three.

“Choppers,” Sonja said. “Probably Garcia. He’ll send two more and an observer to flank us, probably east because. . . there!”

Out of the moonlight bobbed the other three dots, wavy with heat and distance.

The alarms ceased their mind-numbing clatter. The first sound Sonja heard when the ringing stopped was the
blap-blap-blap
of old rotors, holding off. Harry’s glance told her that he’d noticed, too.

“They’re not coming,” he said.

“They just can’t see us,” Marte said.

She unfolded a thin, silver rain slicker from her back pocket, opened it with a
snap
and waved at the nearest chopper. It hovered just past the fence line, about five hundred meters south. Sonja felt the
whump
of a concussion underfoot. Then another.

Harry yanked her and Marte under the protection of the hangar’s bunker-like roof.

“They know we’re here,” Harry told Marte. “They want to keep us here. It’s a lot more important to keep people from getting
out
of this place. Nobody worries about people who want to get in.”

A series of three explosions blew out ventilation shafts in front of each of the nearby buildings. The concrete caps of the shafts pulverized with a flash, and rained chunks of concrete and vegetation all around them. Smoke and steam roiled from the topside elevator and transporter accesses.

“What’s going on?” Marte shouted, waving her arms at the voyeurs flying those choppers. “I thought they were coming to rescue us.”

Harry gave her the bad news, the news he had been unwilling to believe because it was too logical and it weighed too heavily against them.

“Garcia’s forces aren’t here to rescue us,” Harry said. “They’re here to rescue the rest of the world
from
us. The place is sealing off, burying itself. This is the ultimate quarantine.”

“They’ll have to catch us,” Sonja reminded him. “And then they’ll take us to some other lab who will study us for the rest of our lives. Or they’ll see us as vermin and shoot us,” she added. “It’s happened before, in Japan and the Philippines.”

A blast from the nearest warehouse dropped all three of them to the ground. A buzzard, feeding on a corpse in the doorway, blew out of one of its wings and skidded, quivering, on the concrete in front of them. More blasts followed inside the hangar, though muffled by the sealed-off Plexi and concrete.

“Automatic charges,” Harry said. “Let’s hope they don’t include the aircraft.”

All stairwells, ladders, shafts and ventilators leading from the ground level to the lift pad exploded at one-second intervals, beginning at the southwest corner and continuing around the huge, squat building to their position.

Harry jogged towards the warehouse and called back to her.

“I’ll find something to get us up there. You two stay under cover.”

Chapter 39

Harry sprinted for the open doorway and hoped he could make it before the doors sealed him out—or in. The half-minute sprint left him breathless but alive inside a huge agricultural equipment shed. His cramps had reduced themselves to twitches and he felt himself getting stronger as he caught his breath. Some kind of turbine or fan clanked itself to a stop just a few meters away.

Harry saw the prisoner, trussed-up and struggling on a big stainless-steel cart. He was strapped to the top of the cart, and very much alive. The man had worked his head back and forth against the restraints, bloodying the back of his scalp nearly enough to slip out. His left arm flailed weakly, uselessly at the bloody straps.

Nearby lay the remains of two of the ViraVax security team. One of them, beside the forklift, could have been ground zero of an explosion, except nothing else was damaged. The other could have been dead for moments or months, only his charred uniform lending him any hint of humanity.

Harry scanned the undamaged forklift.

We might get out of here yet.

Harry approached the captive carefully, the man’s gray gaze following him with suspicion or fear. Something familiar, something . . .
 

“Jesus!” Harry said, still out of breath from the run.

He stumbled to the Colonel’s side and started unfastening the restraints with clumsy fingers.

“Harry!” his father croaked. “What the hell, boy?”

“Jesus!” Harry repeated, and blinked as though to clear the vision. “I suppose you’re the mysterious, superhuman rescue squad.”

“That’s me,” Rico said. “Let’s get moving.”

“Looks like the rest of them are all dead.”

Harry tore at the double-taped restraints holding his father to the cart.

Rico rolled his head slowly back and forth to free the spasms in his neck.

“Who’s with you?”

“Two more,” Harry said. “Sonja and another woman, Marte Chang.”

Rico freed his legs and ankles, then tried, unsuccessfully, to stand by himself.

“Shit,” he wheezed. “I can hardly walk.”

“It’ll wear off,” Harry said. “Just don’t do anything twitchy.”

“I’ve let myself get pretty rusty.”

The Colonel reached out to Harry and rested an arm across his shoulders. Harry put an arm around his father’s waist and gripped a belt loop. Harry couldn’t think of anything to say, except that his father didn’t smell of whiskey for the first time in years, but he didn’t think it was the time to mention that.

“I thought at first that Garcia took you and Sonja to hold against me,” Rico said. “I knew the guerrillas didn’t blow up the embassy and I knew
I
didn’t blow it. I didn’t think of this outfit at first because they’re so low-key. Blowing things up is not their style. A lot of people were investigating ViraVax all of a sudden, including my people. There was some interior struggle with this Children of Eden bunch. Didn’t think it would go like this.”

“How were you getting out?”

“Access shaft to the dam. It’s not in the drawings. You?”

Harry pointed to the lift pad atop the hangars.

“Sonja was going to fly us out,” he said. “Access to the lift pad was the first to go. I came looking for another way up there. Thanks, by the way.”

“For what?”

The Colonel lifted his head in surprise, setting off a new wave of spasm. No more explosions, suddenly. Harry set his father down for a moment and let the spasms pass. Sonja and Marte huddled inside the hangar doorway, watching.

“No sudden moves,” Harry said. “They got me with something like it, too. It wears off fast, once it starts going. Try not to fight it.”

“Thank me for what?” his father mumbled.

Harry laughed.

“For fifth grade,” he said. “When you used to take me into the elevator shafts at the embassy and the Intercontinental for lunch. I’ll tell you about it when we get out of here.”

“Seen Garcia’s choppers yet?”

“Yeah,” Harry nodded. “They got here about five minutes ago.”

Another three
whump-whump-whumps.

The Colonel asked, “The facility is in shutdown?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” the Colonel sighed, “you know that Garcia’s men will have to shoot you down if you try to leave the grounds.”

“What?
You mean, it’s
true?”

“Yeah.”

The Colonel sat up and chuckled, his voice clearing.

“ ‘Contain everything and everyone within the perimeter. Destroy anything or anyone who violates that perimeter until directed otherwise.’ Protocols for the government’s response to a shutdown situation—I wrote them myself.”

“Great!” Harry groaned. “Now there’s no way out!”

“No,” his father said, and grabbed Harry’s shoulder to pull himself up. “If those doors closed, others will open to us. Helicopters can be distracted or destroyed or outrun. Garcia’s men are notoriously bad shots. With a radio to the Gs—”

Small-arms fire
snap-snap-snapped
from the direction of the dam.

“Shit,” the Colonel said. “I think I can walk now. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Rico shuffled to the body of his guard and gingerly extracted his scorched radio and trank gun from the mess he was becoming.

“My tool kit,” Rico said.

Rico couldn’t quite make the high step onto the tall container loader, so Harry gave him a boost. Harry jumped up beside him as his father slipped a lever, threw two switches and fired up the sleeping beast. They sputtered across the infield towards the women.

The Colonel signaled Sonja and Marte to wait where they were.

“I should take a look first,” the Colonel said. “You just push this lever forward to send me up, pull back to bring me down.”

“I can go, Dad,” Harry said.

The Colonel put up a hand.

“This is not personal,” he said. “We need to see if there’s a plane up there, yeah. But there could be a surviving sentry, and he could still be doing his job. Just take that last two meters, very, very slow.”

Harry watched his dad’s hand signals near the top, and slipped him over the edge smoothly. The Colonel disappeared for a few long minutes, then reappeared at the top, signaling to come down. Harry dropped the forks and braked them at the last instant.

“Kind of frisky with this thing, don’t you think?” the Colonel commented with a wink.

Harry accepted it as the first compliment from his father in a long, long time.

The Colonel informed the others: “We have two airplanes up there and no sentries. We’ll have to check for charges but I think they didn’t have time to set them. Hello, Sonja. Hello, Dr. Chang, and greetings from Mariposa.”

The Colonel loaded Harry, Sonja and Marte aboard the forks and lifted them atop the hangar, then tied the lever off to make the trip himself.

Harry gave the Colonel a hand off the moving forks just as a loud
whoomp
and a series of
pop-pop-pops
caught his attention. Towards the dam, a large black plume streaked the sky.

“One chopper down,” the Colonel said. “Four to go. Ever fly any runs, Sonja?”

“Just simulations,” she said. “These are armed?”

“Nothing fancy,” he said, “just a cannon on each one. I don’t know how much ammo. We didn’t want any of these people to be able to fight their way out.”

Harry was conscious of the casual way his father said this, and the shocked disbelief on Marte Chang’s face when she heard it.

“I can handle it,” Sonja said.

Freckles stood out like buckshot in her pale face, and her lips tightened into a thin line. Harry had no doubt that she could.

Another chopper left its observation post and sped towards the guerrilla emplacement at the dam.

“Get going!” Rico said, and gave Harry a push towards the B/M-3. “If they spot you up here, they’ll shoot you.”

Rico turned back towards the forklift.

“Where are you going?” Harry asked.

“I’m going after whoever it is that initiated shutdown,” Rico said. “He could get away with this, live down there for years. I want to make sure he doesn’t come after us again.”

“You can’t. . . ” was all Harry got out.

His father had already dialed a load on the trank gun and popped it into his thigh. Harry felt equal measures of relief and betrayal and little else. He was aware, but helpless.

His father dragged Harry to the loading bay and Sonja helped him inside. Marte scrambled up beside him and strapped him in.

“They’ll hit you as soon as you lift,” Harry heard his father tell Sonja. “Just clear the compound and get as high up the valley as you can before you have to set down.” He indicated his radio. “You’ll have support.”

Sonja grunted and busied herself with her checklist. Harry heard the hiss that preceded the whine of the turbine, and his father talking into his radio outside. Then his father leaned down next to his ear.

“I love you, son,” he whispered, and left, latching the hatch behind him.

The Colonel had been right about Garcia’s choppers. Sonja blasted off the pad, and the ticking of sand and gravel into the fuselage was replaced with the heavier
tick-tick-tick
of machine-gun fire. The plane lurched aloft as though slung by a rubber band. The turbine was loud, but not loud enough to drown out Sonja’s expletives from the pilot’s seat. He had never heard her swear seriously in either Spanish or English. Her eloquence in both surprised him.

They teetered left, hard left, and the engine started a
pop-pop, pop-pop
that developed into a
clank-clunk, clank-clunk
just as they pancaked into the hillside.

We’re out!
he thought, and felt Marte scrabbling for his belt release.

Sonja’s face appeared above his own, a laceration across her forehead bleeding freely. She and Marte worked together with hardly more than a few grunts to get him out of the plane. They dragged him a few dozen meters into the brush, set him down, and Marte shrieked. Harry couldn’t see what startled her, but he could see Marte and Sonja pale even more.

Both women put up their hands, Sonja weaving slightly, her face awash in moonlight and blood. A well-armed squad of four men and three women stepped out of the foliage and into Harry’s view, the muzzles of their weapons scenting the air ahead of them.

“Who are you?” the nearest one challenged.

He was the shortest of the men, and looked the oldest. His well-worn fatigues bore neither rank nor insignia.

“Shut up,” one of the women barked, and shouldered past him to take Sonja by the shoulders.

“Sit,” she ordered, and Sonja sat.

To the short man, she said, “Give me the bag, Cortes.”

Nothing more was said and the rest of them stood uneasily listening to the fight at the dam while the woman shook a Kotex out of its wrapper, pressed it to Sonja’s forehead and taped it in place.

“The boy,” a bearded man asked. “Is he all right?”

“A tranquilizer,” Sonja said. “He didn’t want to leave without his father. Ah!” She winced as the tape cinched her dressing tight.

“The Colonel?” the man asked Marte, first in Spanish, then in halting English. “He is not with you?”

“He said he stayed to get Mishwe,” Marte explained. “The man who started all this. . . .”

The beard’s face paled. He glanced at his watch, snapped his fingers, and another of the women produced a small radio.

“Are those charges secured?” he asked. “The Colonel is still inside.”

Static came back, then: “Mercury switches, set to detonate if moved. We pulled the men out. Too late.”

Sputters of fighting increased nearby, the small-arms fire punctuated by mortar and the occasional rocket. Harry felt his body returning to him. He sat up, shaky, and faced the guerrilla leader, indistinguishable from the army in his jungle turnouts, except for the beard. Harry didn’t like the expression that met his gaze.

“You can. . . you can get him out, can’t you?” Harry asked.

His tongue made a mush of the words, but the man understood. Harry could tell by the stricken look in his eyes that the man understood completely.

Suddenly, the ground rocked them to their hands and knees, followed a split second later by a concussion that popped their ears and knocked their breath away. Harry tried to get up but his legs wouldn’t hold him.

Water and mud rained down on them through the trees.

“The dam!” the leader shouted, and pointed up the valley. “It goes!”

Harry heard the rush of water before he saw its muddy tongue lick the hillside just a few hundred meters away. The brown snarl of water shouldered trees and tractors alike against the downstream fence at the Double-Vee. Then, in a spurt of muck, the Cyclone fence gave way. At one point all that Harry saw of ViraVax was the top of the lift pad, and his father wasn’t on it. “Goddammit,” Harry said, his voice choking. “God
dammit
!”