Extinction Age Read online

  Hearing those simple words drained the anger from him. It flowed out with a breath and was gone. He pulled Kate toward him and kissed her with a soft ferocity.

  Their lips parted and Beckham bowed his forehead against hers. “You get to the lab. I’m going to go check on Riley and then sleep for a day or two, if I can.”

  Kate smiled, flashing the dimples that made his heart race. She gave him another kiss that kindled an emotion he had spent most of his life trying to bury. Now, after all hope seemed lost, it had arisen from the grave. He decided then to embrace it. To stop hiding behind his armor and weapons. He could be more than just a soldier.

  Beckham gave Kate a meaningful look, and reached down to help her up.

  “Where’d you find her?” Kate asked as they walked up the stairs. “The woman you brought back.”

  Beckham stopped mid-stride, remembering the nightmarish lair beneath New York.

  “Reed?”

  He shook his head and turned partially toward her.

  “If you’d rather not talk about it, I understand,” Kate said.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We found her in the sewers. There were hundreds of survivors down there. Maybe more. I don’t know.”

  Kate squinted, her features tensing. “What do you mean there were survivors?”

  Beckham could see she was trying to understand, but nothing he said could describe the true horrors his team had stumbled upon beneath the streets. There was no simple way to explain what he’d seen, and the thought of admitting to her that he’d killed the human prisoners made him feel queasy.

  “Reed, you can tell me. I can handle it.” Kate swept a strand of brown hair behind an ear. “I need to know.”

  Beckham didn’t want her to feel responsible. The burden she carried was already heavy enough to send a normal person over the edge. She’d blamed herself for the Variants since the deployment of her bioweapon. If she knew what they were doing and what he had tried to stop…

  “If I’m going to design another weapon, I need to know everything you do. I’m assuming what you saw is no different than in other cities. I already know they are going underground to avoid sunlight.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” Beckham replied, a bit too fast. He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath and exhaled. “They store their food down there, Kate.”

  When he opened his eyes, Kate had taken a step back. “Store their food?” Her blue eyes widened as she realized what he meant.

  “We discovered a lair of human prisoners. There were hundreds of mutilated survivors that the Variants were feeding on. We saved Meg, but…I was forced to kill the others.”

  Kate cupped a hand over her mouth. She whimpered into her palm and then peeled it away. “I’m so sorry.”

  Beckham wrapped his arms around her. “It’s not your fault. The blame rests solely on that bastard Gibson.”

  “No,” Kate said, pulling away. She sobbed and wiped away a tear. “If VX9H9 had killed all of the Variants, this would never have happened. There wouldn’t be any lairs. You wouldn’t have had to kill anyone.”

  Meg jerked awake and reached for her axe that wasn’t there. The movement sent the most awful pain of her life searing through her legs. She gritted her teeth, but a whimper slipped through. Behind blurred eyes, she saw a bank of lights. Her mind went blank a moment later, the agony shutting off her brain.

  When she woke again, she felt nothing. If it weren’t for the nurse staring down at her, she would have thought she was dead. A warm, reassuring smile touched the sides of the young woman’s face.

  “This might sting,” the nurse said. She reached forward with a needle that looked more like a small knife.

  Meg didn’t bother protesting. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. She watched as the nurse inserted the tip into her arm. It hurt as bad as she thought it would. Her muscles knotted, tensing around the needle. She blinked, a tear falling from her eye, and then there was darkness.

  The third time she woke, she was alone. Her body felt strange, like it wasn’t hers anymore. She knew it was the drugs. In the past she would have refused them. She was an all-natural kind of a gal, but a lot had changed in the last month. Her husband was dead, and the world was full of monsters. She drew a deep breath in an attempt to calm her nerves. The door squeaked open a moment later and a bearded man with neatly parted brown hair entered her room.

  “Hi, Meg, I’m Dr. Hill,” he said. He approached her bedside with his eyes locked on a clipboard.

  She tried to sit up by scooting her legs. That hurt worse than the needle. She grimaced as the pain passed.

  “Probably want to sit still,” Hill said gingerly. “Your legs are pretty torn up. I stitched them back together, but honestly, I’m not a surgeon.” He flipped a page over the clipboard and continued, “I was a physical therapist working at Fort Bragg. Got lucky and was rescued about a week ago.”

  She glared at him incredulously. A physical therapist had stitched her up? She didn’t want to see what was beneath the white covers.

  “Thanks,” she murmured.

  “Good news is you’re going to be fine. Will take some time for your legs to heal, but once we get you hydrated you’ll start feeling better.”

  Meg craned her neck to the left and looked out the window. A patrol of armed soldiers walked down a concrete pathway.

  “Where am I?”

  “Plum Island,” Hill replied. “You’re safe now.”

  Meg let out a weak laugh and closed her eyes again, drifting back into the perpetual nightmare inside her head.

  Fitz scoped the beach with his new MK11. It was mid-afternoon and he was still on edge from the attack the night before. He played the crosshairs over the water, half expecting to see the pale flesh of a swimming Variant. After an hour of pacing back and forth, he finally took a seat on a stool and rested his aching body. He was fighting to keep his eyelids open, and his thigh muscles burned like he’d just finished a marathon. He desperately needed sleep, a deep tissue massage, and a shot of whiskey.

  Scratch that. He needed a bottle of whiskey.

  Just when he was starting to relax, his earpiece crackled.

  “Tower 4, Command. We have a report of an unidentified ship drifting south in Gardiners Bay. You got eyes on?”

  “Stand by,” Fitz said.

  He walked to the edge of the box. This wasn’t the first report of a derelict ship. Vessels dotted the horizon like shells on a beach. Their crews had either abandoned them or were dead.

  Hoisting his rifle onto the ledge, he set the bipod and pointed the sleek black muzzle toward the bay. The horizon warned of a mid-afternoon storm. Swollen gray clouds rolled across the sky, a sharp contrast to the calm teal waves. Fitz squared his shoulders, and then roved his aim slowly to the right until he saw the dull gray of metal.

  “Got eyes,” Fitz said. “Definitely a ship. Stand by for identification.”

  He zoomed in expecting to see a freighter, or perhaps a yacht out of Martha’s Vineyard. Instead of a luxury cruiser, he saw a Navy destroyer. And it wasn’t anchored, either. A powerful wake trailed the boat as she split through the water.

  “Command, Tower 4. I have eyes on a Navy destroyer with the markings USS Truxtun, 103. She’s coming in pretty fast.”

  There was a hard pause of static, enough to tell Fitz that command was already planning a strategy to blow the boat out of the water if it got too close. Unless Lieutenant Colonel Jensen had some hellfire missiles Fitz didn’t know about, that wasn’t going to happen.

  The electronic wail of a siren sounded from the public address system before Fitz could get his thoughts straight. He brought his eye back to the scope. The ship appeared to be on a collision course with the island.

  Fitz chambered a round and centered his sight on the bow—as if a shot from his gun would do anything. Still, the cold steel in his hands made him feel better. He scanned the deck of the boat for contacts as it came into focus, but there wasn’t a single person in sight
.

  A ghost ship.

  He imagined a Variant at the helm, crazed and starving, its yellow eyes focused on the island. His heart rate increased as the whine of the emergency sirens blared louder.

  “Command, Tower 4. No hostiles. Please advise. Over,” Fitz said.

  The whoosh of helicopter blades pulled Fitz’s gaze to the north. Strike teams raced across the tarmac and piled into the trio of grounded Blackhawks. By the time he moved back to the other side of his tower, the birds were airborne. The mechanical chatter of their rotors masked his labored breaths. He watched them race across the sky toward the Truxtun.

  “Tower 4, stand by for orders,” the operator finally replied.

  Fitz brought the scope back to his eye. The ship plowed through the water at full speed, whitecaps bursting around the bow. Echo 1 intercepted it first. The crew chief didn’t hesitate. They opened up with the M240 and sprayed a line of projectiles across the ship’s path. Echo 2 and 3 flanked the destroyer as it shot by, circling and giving chase.

  Fitz followed the ship’s progress with his scope. It looked like it was going to hit the eastern peninsula of the island. “Come on,” he murmured. “Stop, you son of a bitch.”

  He watched, astonished, as the new threat continued barreling toward the island. That was the thing about the apocalypse; you never knew what would happen next.

  The mechanical whine of gas-powered turbines pulled Fitz from his thoughts. Echo 1 had opened up on the bow of the Truxtun. Whoever was steering the ship didn’t change course. The destroyer charged right through the hail of gunfire. Echo 2 and Echo 3 unleashed a barrage on the port and starboard sides of the ship.

  Why would a Navy ship ram the fucking island?

  If they wanted resources, all they had to do was point their Tomahawk missiles and Lieutenant Colonel Jensen would wave a white flag.

  Nothing made sense… until the ship shot by the shoreline and continued on a straight course toward the Connecticut shoreline. The Blackhawks seemed just as surprised as Fitz. They hovered over the water like oversized bees, their blades buzzing as they waited for orders.

  Then Fitz understood. The ship had never been on a collision course at all—there was no one at the helm. The Truxtun was truly just a ghost ship.

  Fitz watched the destroyer continue toward mainland as the choppers returned to base. When the ship was only a speck on the horizon, he collapsed on the stool, took in a long breath, and exhaled.

  “Command, Tower 4. Anyone got any whiskey?”

  -7-

  Kate held out her arms as Ellis zipped up the back of her suit. Five minutes had passed since the alarms had stopped screaming, but the sound was still reverberating in her ears.

  “A destroyer?” Ellis asked. “With no one behind the wheel? How the hell does that make any sense?”

  Kate frowned. “Does anything make sense anymore?” Mentally, she was beyond exhausted, but she needed her wits for what came next.

  Kate was beginning to hate the lab. It was yet another reminder of what she’d created here. The other labs beyond the glass windows were dark. There were no scientists in CBR suits huddling around computer monitors in the other levels or robotic arms retrieving samples in the centrifuge. They’d lost most of their support staff in the attack, and the survivors had been given time to regroup. Kate and Ellis were the only ones determined—or crazy—enough to be here today.

  “Not going to lie,” Ellis said, waving his badge over the security terminal. “I’m excited to get back to it. I’ve been thinking about another bioweapon and I have an idea.”

  The glass doors whispered apart and Kate strolled past the empty lab stations. Banks of LED lights clicked on simultaneously and the room lit up with a clean, white glow. The absence of the other scientists chilled her even further in her already freezing suit.

  “I have an idea, too,” Kate said after a long pause.

  “You first,” Ellis said. He pulled a stool across the floor to her station.

  Kate sat, keyed in her credentials, and moused over to a research paper she’d read earlier.

  “What do we know about the Variants’ weaknesses?” Kate asked.

  Ellis glanced up at her, his brow furrowed. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “No. I’m being serious.”

  He shrugged. “We know they’re sensitive to light. That’s about it.”

  “That’s why I’ve been reading about optogenetics,” Kate said. She scooted her stool over and pointed at the PDF on screen. “Know anything about it?”

  “Only what Wikipedia taught me,” he chuckled. “One of my old classmates worked in the field, and I didn’t want to sound like an idiot the last time we had dinner. I used my phone to look up the details in the cab ride across Manhattan.”

  Kate would have laughed a month ago, but she didn’t feel much like laughing now. She forced a smile he probably couldn’t even see.

  “I’m not an expert on it either, but I know that light has been used to control neural activity through genetic targeting. Before everything that’s happened, researchers made breakthroughs in controlling the behavior of animals—”

  Ellis interrupted her by shaking his helmet. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you? You were the one who said the Variants aren’t animals we can control.”

  “I’m not talking about controlling them. I’m talking about killing them,” Kate said, her voice cutting. She shifted her gaze from the computer to his eyes. “You don’t need to remind me what I’ve said in the past.”

  He shied away, slouching half a degree in his chair. “Sorry.”

  Kate was silent for a moment. There was so much going on in her head she was having a hard time keeping it straight. She pawed her visor in a futile attempt to rub her tired eyes, forgetting she even had her helmet on.

  “The main problem is weaponizing it. Most of the applications require light-sensitive probes to be implanted in the brains of subjects,” she said.

  “That’s not exactly an option.”

  “No, but what if we could use the same concept to kill them? To exploit their weakness to light.”

  Ellis frowned and said, “What’s the difference between shooting them with bullets or shooting them with some sort of light gun? Both require soldiers, and last I checked the world was running very short on those.”

  Kate thought of Beckham. No matter what she designed, someone would have to test the weapon in the field. The idea of him risking his life out there again made her heart flutter.

  “What’s your idea?” Kate asked. She turned away from her monitor, crossed her arms and waited.

  “I’ve been so focused on the epigenetic changes the Variants are going through, I’ve neglected the obvious,” Ellis said, talking quickly and waving his hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this weeks ago. I was just so stuck on the—”

  “Slow down,” Kate said.

  “Right, sorry,” he replied after a pause. “Remember how the stem cells are proliferating at a rapid rate?”

  “I do. They’re responsible for their healing capabilities, immune system health, and rapid transformation.” Kate tried to guess where he was going with this, but she was too exhausted to speculate. He didn’t wait for her questions anyway.

  “Well, what if we isolate a sample of bone marrow stems cells from one of the Variants? We could run it through the HTS system and look for a protein that’s only expressed in the infected. Then we could develop antibodies that would target their stem cells and deliver something to knock them out,” he said. His voice carried a sense of awe. “It would only work on Variants, since the protein would be specific to them.”

  Kate considered the idea. It wasn’t much different from what she had created with VX9H9. The bioweapon had worked on only those infected with the Hemorrhage virus. But this time whatever they ended up developing would need to kill every one of the creatures. There was no margin for error.

  Ellis studied Kate for
a reaction, his eyes bright behind his visor.

  “So you think we should use a technology like targeted drug delivery?” Kate asked.

  “Precisely,” Ellis said, nodding. “Think it might work?”

  “Not sure,” Kate said. “But I like the idea.”

  A childish grin broke across Ellis’s face that reminded Kate of her brother, Javier. It was the same smile he’d used to get out of countless scrapes when they were growing up. “First things first,” she said, forcing herself to focus on the present. “We need to start with the bone marrow stem cells.”

  Kate turned to the exit of the lab.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To take a sample from a Variant,” she said. “Are you just going to sit there, or are you coming with me?”

  Beckham awoke with a violent jerk. His breathing was heavy, his back drenched with sweat. The distant memory of a nightmare clung to his mind. He had been in the tunnels, plastered to a wall, unable to shoot the Variants crawling toward him. For a moment he was paralyzed by the shock of the powerful dream.

  “Jesus, boss. Are you okay?” Horn sat on the adjacent bunk, his daughters on each side. Riley was in his wheelchair at the end of his bed.

  “‘Bout time you got your ass up,” Riley said with the hint of a grin.

  Beckham ran a hand through hair that needed trimming and looked at his watch. The slight movement of his shoulder sent pain racing across his battered chest.

  “Fuck, I’ve been out a while,” he said, trying to hide the pain.

  “Hey, little ears on deck here,” Horn said with a pointed look toward his daughters.

  “Right. Sorry, Big Horn. And sorry, Tasha and Jenny,” Beckham said, nodding at each girl in turn.

  “You’ve been out five hours,” Riley said. “If you don’t count the weirdness with the boat and the alarms. That woke us all up, but you fell right back asleep.”

  Beckham scooted to the edge of his bed and scanned the mostly empty room. The other soldiers were on patrol, and the majority of the civilians had been issued rooms in Building 1. Horn and his girls had one of those, but they’d stuck around to sit with Beckham. Kate had offered him her bed, but he wanted to be with his men for now.