Rob Jones
The Armageddon Protocol
DEDICATION
For T, and his new chapter
PROLOGUE
An autumn rain had been falling for days now, running through the canopies of the spruce trees and lashing the conifer cone-littered forest floor below. Henrik Andersson’s normal pathway through the trees had become no more than a bog, and even Karo, his faithful black labrador was struggling to make headway.
Most days, Henrik and Karo walked for at least an hour in these woods, but today both had been worn down by the conditions and decided to go back to the cabin early. There, they both knew a crackling fire and a warm bowl split-pea soup awaited them. It was late in the season now and already the days were drawing in.
“Karo!” Henrik whispered a curse as his old dog slipped out of sight and disappeared into the trees. “Get back here!”
He moved forward to chase the dog but the slippery mud slowed him down. “Karo!”
Henrik turned the corner to see Karo giving chase to a rabbit. “Get back here!”
He took off after the dog, whose progress had mercifully been slowed down when the rabbit darted into a thicket of brambles, but then it slipped out of sight again. Henrik continued his pursuit, his almost immediate breathlessness an unpleasant reminder that he really had to start his diet again.
He ran for several minutes, calling out after the dog once again, and then relief flooded over him when he turned a shallow corner in the path and saw his beloved dog padding back toward him with his tail between his legs and his ears pulled back.
“Where have you been, you crazy animal?” Henrik laughed as he clipped the lead to the animal’s collar and patted him gently on his back. “Now we’re lost! You must come when I call or…”
A terrible scream filled the woods and stopped Henrik in mid-sentence.
Karo jumped back and looked at Henrik, but his owner knew no more than the dog. “Vad fan var det?” he mumbled. “What the hell was that?”
He climbed a low rise to his right to get closer to where he thought he had heard the scream, and then he saw it — the low, long roofline of a strange-looking building made of glass and stainless steel.
“What is that place?” he asked himself. “I think the scream came from inside.”
Henrik was certain he had never seen the building before. As far as he was concerned, this forest was nothing but pines, firs and spruces for miles in every direction, and yet here was what looked like some kind of research facility. Harmless enough, he thought, but then again — that scream sounded anything but harmless.
Karo whined and took a step back.
Henrik tried to comfort him, but wondered if really he was trying to calm himself. “It’s nothing to worry about, old friend — it’s probably just some kind of government building. When we get home I’ll have a closer look at the map, but in the meantime, maybe we’ll just see if we can get a bit nearer without drawing any attention to ourselves — you can be quiet for me can’t you, boy?”
Henrik crouched a little and left the muddy path. They walked a few hundred yards through knee-high brambles, with Henrik crushing the plants down so Karo could follow in his steps.
Stopping well back from the small complex, Henrik held on tightly to Karo’s collar and gently stroked the animal, not only to calm the dog but to lower his own adrenalin levels. That scream had not sounded human to him, and the simple memory of it set his heart racing once again.
Slowly, he moved forward, making sure to keep himself concealed behind the trunks of the pine trees. Feeling safer behind a raised bank of tangled rose hips and lingonberries, he peered around the edge of a broad trunk and watched with nervous interest as people moved around inside the strange, squat building. Now he could see that most of it must be underground because only a couple of meters of it was visible above the earth — a white painted wall lined with windows, and capped by a small open hatch in the roof.
“This gets curiouser and curiouser, my old friend,” Henrik said, beginning to grow nervous. He checked his cell phone but there was no signal. Damn it all. He had seen no signs warning him of a secret facility — neither back on the road nor anywhere along the walk, and yet here was some kind of research base that looked to him like it had been deliberately hidden from the public. If he hadn’t had to chase Karo he would never have found it.
“What’s this, old friend? Someone’s running to that strange little hatch.”
Henrik looked closer as a man emerged from the hatch. He was wearing a white lab coat and disposable nitrile gloves. He staggered away from the low building, clutching at his throat, and began gasping for air like a drowning man.
Henrik watched as the man struggled to heave air into his lungs, and at first he thought the man had accidentally breathed in some kind of toxin. After a few moments the man’s breathing came back under control and he knew that couldn’t be it. As a chemist, Henrik had considered cyanide — a terrible chemical that creates the compound cyano-hemoglobin on contact with blood. This stops the blood from carrying oxygen around the body, so no matter how hard you breathe in, you still feel like you are suffocating.
But whatever was going on here, it was not this. Now, the man was breathing slowly and he was calming down, but on his face he wore a terrible expression of fear — his eyes haunted by profound guilt.
Before Henrik had any more time to think, another man crawled out of the hatch — another white lab coat and the same gloves. Then a woman climbed out. The new arrivals were followed by another dozen men and women in white lab coats. They stared at each other for a matter of seconds before conversely rapidly and then fleeing into the trees.
Henrik held tightly to Karo as he moved him silently away from the compound — he felt his anxiety levels rise now — what was going on? He tracked the desperate path of the people in the lab coats as they sprinted into the trees, slipping around on the boggy path and tumbling over here and there. Something about them didn’t look right to him.
Then, scattered all over the woodland, they all stopped running and stood perfectly still at exactly the same time. He noticed how calm they all appeared as they looked at each other. They looked up at the sky, the rain falling in their eyes. Strange contortions appeared on their terrified faces as they stared upwards into the rain.
And then they all dropped dead down into the mud.
For a few seconds, Henrik forgot to breath. Startled, he spun around to see Karo was gone again. Then he saw a movement in the corner of his eyes. A ghost in his peripheral vision. Two men in white lab coats were emerging from the hatch, but these men wore gas masks and were each clutching something in their arms — something very precious by the way they were clinging to them.
“You there!” Henrik called out to them as they weaved through the corpses on the muddy grass. “What’s going on? What have you done to these people?”
The men never heard him, or if they did they ignored him and then they were gone — vanished into the pine forest like rabbits fleeing for their lives.
Then he felt his body shudder and shake.
Oh God… not me…
Some strange compulsion made him stare up into the sky. It felt like he was no longer alone in his own mind. He felt like he was possessed, and then he collapsed forward into the freezing mud and it was all over.
ONE
Pablo Reyes stepped off the bus and looked over his shoulder as he emerged into the Spanish winter sunshine. The man in the leather jacket and aviator shades was still following him, he was certain of it.