"Sir, Parker is dead," Barnes said from somewhere far away.
Kendal shouted, "I demand an explanation!"
Costa acted again.
"Senator, we're getting you out of here." He stepped into the bungalow and grabbed his charge by the arm. Costa had decided to get on the move, driving through any threat, if need be.
"What is the situation?"
"I don't—"
"Costa! Holy Christ! Costa!"
In ten years of protecting government officials both at home and overseas, agent Costa had never heard the sound of outright terror in a fellow agent's voice. He turned and saw why.
They came from the banyan trees, moving from the shadows into the boiling morning sun. Dozens of them. People. Shabby, shuffling, stumbling people. The people of the island. Costa immediately recognized the nurse from the island's clinic … the local constable with whom Costa had interfaced just the day before … the Hispanic man who managed the small airstrip.
The senator spoke the first thought on Costa's mind: "What is wrong with them?"
The mob walked forward quietly, like a tide slowly rolling in. The sunlight illuminated bloodstains, shredded clothes, missing fingers, and ripped flesh, as well as strange white bulbs, some on necks, others on arms, some hidden just inside T-shirts or above hemlines.
Costa whispered, "Fire …"
Barnes did not hear. He stood near the toppled Jeep; his professional instincts jammed into inaction by the illogic … the fantastic … the horrific.
"FIRE!" Costa found more wind.
Barnes followed the command. His machine gun spat bullets in three-round bursts, clearly hitting the forward-most attackers. One — a half-naked, fat, pale-white man in boxer shorts with his chest torn open — crumpled to the ground, but the others kept moving, the bullets seemingly unnoticed.
Kendal babbled uncontrollably. Costa did not hear. He fired a burst from his MP5, focusing on the front line of the mob, with all six of his armor-piercing shots hitting a skinny black man dressed in mechanic's overalls. Costa placed one bullet squarely in the guy's head between two pasty-white eyes. The top half of his skull blew apart in thick chunks. The skinny black man in overalls staggered, then continued to wade forward like a blind man feeling his way.
Twenty yards.
Costa stumbled back across the porch and into the bungalow wall, his gun barrel hanging lazily. He realized he still held his cell phone and glanced at it.
As if by divine intervention, the display changed from NO SIGNAL to four full bars right before his eyes. He dialed again while Barnes reloaded and fired.
"This is K5 declaring an emergency! K5 declaring an emergency! Edelweiss! I say, Edelweiss—"
Click.
NO SIGNAL.
Costa stared at his phone for a second, and then tossed it to the ground in a burst of panicked frustration.
"YOU GOTTA GET ME OUTTA HERE — DO YOU HEAR ME?" The senator shouted, grabbing Costa's shirt as he blabbered. The lead agent knocked him into the bungalow and turned to face the threat.
The shambling mass reached the rolled Jeep. Barnes fired at point-blank range, knocking two more down before turning to retreat.
He did not get away. Parker — or what had been Parker — crawled from his prone position and jammed his teeth into Barnes's leg just below the knee. The agent's finger yanked the trigger in spasms, sending bullets into the beautiful clear blue sky.
Costa saw it all. He saw the flood break around the cars and flow toward the bungalow. He saw Parker's fingers claw at Barnes, dragging him to the dusty ground at the foot of the steps.
He saw their sickly, milky-white eyes as they came for him.
And then there were one hundred.
2
Lieutenant Colonel Liz Thunder sat at a plain metal desk and surveyed her office. It felt rather cold and unfamiliar, despite her having worked on sublevel one in Pylon A at the Darwin Research Facility for nearly three months.
General Albert Friez had called this little corner of the massive underground complex home before moving on to bigger desks and greater responsibilities at the Pentagon. His act of moving out meant no more than grabbing his personal files and his hat and heading topside to catch a helicopter ride off the Fort Irwin grounds. It seemed Friez never brought any of his personal affects to the base, which was in keeping with his cold and distant disposition.
Liz did not mean to mimic the general's approach to office décor, but she found she lacked the right personal items to give the place a more comfortable feel. After all, she did not like reaching into her professional past because she found only scars there: memories of botched Psyops experiments, investigations, and reprimand. She had kept no group pictures, she had earned no ribbons, and the brass years ago had sealed all documentation of her projects.
True, she had somewhat redeemed her reputation in the eyes of her superiors during a brief stint as commander at Red Rock in Pennsylvania, but that short-lived assignment had failed to produce any fond mementos, either.
As for family and friends, well, Liz Thunder worked underground but she might as well have lived there, too. The top-secret nature of her employment had long ago cut ties with school and childhood friends. Currently she knew a few neighbors in her block of townhouses by their first names, but that was about it.
At the same time, her family tree held very few branches and she sat way out on a limb. She had not found out that her grandmother had died until six months after the fact, and her divorced parents grew new roots on opposite ends of the country.
She felt an ice pick — like jab in her heart as she realized the true extent of her isolation. While she might head topside and home at the end of the day, she was as much a prisoner as any of the specimens down on sublevel six.
Well, at least her containment cell provided a view, of sorts.
Most of the facility's levels used concrete as the primary building block, however the designers had seen fit to use glass along her particular stretch of sublevel one. Her room sat at the end of a row of three offices, each separated by thick windows allowing — with all the blinds retracted — a clear view from her seat all the way over to Major Gant's chair, two offices away.
While the inner walls were thick slabs of concrete, the outer walls were also glass, looking out on the tube-like corridor running from one end of Pylon A sublevel one to the other. In her case, she was afforded the added view of a perpendicular passage leading to an elevator that only went down.
As luck would have it, all of those blinds were retracted and Liz could, in fact, see all the way over to Thom Gant's office. While he spent very little time there, she saw him sitting there now on the receiving end of a rather animated discussion.
His accoster was a petite young woman — maybe ten years younger than Liz, placing her at about twenty-seven or so — with short spiky black hair and wearing a white lab coat over a dark shirt.
The sight might have seemed somewhat comical to a newcomer: this diminutive woman shouting at the sturdy soldier who — if he stood from his chair — would hover a good foot taller than the scientist. However, Liz knew Thom Gant to be a chivalrous man. He would sit there and listen patiently. Nonetheless, the woman's chance of bullying him into a decision he did not agree with was not in the cards.
As for that woman, Dr. Annabelle Stacy had been on-staff for nearly a month. In that short time Liz had learned enough about the young prodigy to know her competence in several different fields of scientific study was matched by an incredible amount of determination. No doubt that was why she had earned doctorates in three distinct specialties in the first place.
It also meant that Liz knew what was going to happen, and it played out exactly as expected.
From her vantage point two offices over, Liz watched Dr. Stacy throw her arms up in frustration and exit Thom Gant's office. She then marched between the wall of concrete and the wall of glass and metal that framed the corridor directly to the C.O.'s office. That C.O., of course, was Liz Thunder.