Genesis (Extinction Book 1) (6 page)

When bullets began ripping through the walls around her, Mittie Kate ducked back behind the wall of the building next to the Mission. Covering her face to protect her eyes, she could hear nothing over the cacophony caused by the assault rifles and the steady drone of the chopper. Blind and deaf to what was happening around her, she tried to scoot backwards along the wall to get out of the danger zone.

When she could no longer feel the small debris pellets tearing into her skin, she looked up. Despite the rounds that still peppered the mission, Ling dropped from the roof, tucked and rolled, and came up at a run, heading straight for her.

Wrapping himself protectively around her, he pushed and shoved until they were behind the mission. He didn’t stop until they were down the stairs. Shoving her into the corner farthest from the battle on the street in front, he covered her body with his own and waited.

The sudden silence was more frightening than the barrage of weapons fire. “Do they have it? Did they get the device?”

“Max would not let that happen,” Ling answered, his voice as Zen-calm as ever.

“What if they killed him?”

“Give him time, Mittie,” he whispered. Despite his words and the reassurance she heard in his voice, Ling reached into his tunic and withdrew his sidearm.

As the quiet stretched out, he adjusted himself to have a clear line of sight at the door. When the noise from the chopper grew and then faded away, Mittie tried to rise up.

“Wait,” was all Ling said, gently pushing her back to the floor of the basement, his eyes watching the door and the floor of the mission above them.

Screams, faint at first, but growing in both volume and number, reached her in the darkness and she could sit still no longer. “They’re gone, Ling. People need help.”

Thinking the soldiers had turned their fire on the civilians when they had been unable to get to her group, Mittie Kate was prepared to find carnage in the dirt streets around the mission. She was no stranger to war zones, no virgin to the sights and sounds of slaughter. Yet nothing, not even her wildest imaginings, could have prepared her for the horror she found on the streets of Las Madre.

Max stood in the center of the street, tears streaking through the dirt, grit and blood on his face. A bottle of Jim Beam was held in one hand, open and partially drained. In the other was a handgun. At his feet, the cassock once worn by the padre fluttered in the morning breeze. Black ash, the remains which hadn’t been blown clear of the chopper, stained the ground where his body had once been.

Ash littered the street in the immediate area where men, women, and children had huddled to watch the spectacle or to escape gunfire. The soldiers who had been on the ground were likewise returned to the earth, the synthetic material of their gear and uniforms left behind as a poor memorial.

Two blocks away, others had not been so lucky. Some lay still, burned by the radiation of the Genesis device, others had stumbled out of their meager shelters, flailing and falling, ridden and eaten by pain and panic in equal measure.

She moved toward Max in the drunken-dazed stupor of shock as he moved to stand over the small, still form of a child. Three feet away, a tortured form stumbled out of a doorway and thrashed on the wooden sidewalk.

“We have to do something,” she heard herself say. Though she had no idea what anyone could do to help these poor wretches.

Max wiped tears from his cheek, smearing the dirt. “It works like gamma rays. The particles move so fast, with no charge of their own, they kick out electrons wherever they punch through. These people are already dead, they just don’t know it yet.”

Stunned, she could only stare, gaped-mouthed at him. “We can’t just let them suffer like this. We need to get help.”

“Have you tried the Jeep, to see if it’ll start? Have you tried your electronics? The Jeep was far enough away from the device that it might still work, maybe even your phone. But even if they do who are you going to call?”

Shock was giving way to helpless fury, and she screamed. “We have to do something!”

Max took another long drink from the bottle, and stepped onto the porch where the screaming – man? Or was it a woman? – continued to thrash. A single bullet ended its suffering.

Horrified, filled with more grief than she had ever known, impotent against the screams drifting from the streets and houses around them, Mittie Kate sank to her knees in the middle of the road and cried. Only as Ling began to walk the other side of the street, the sound of his gun pounding home the finality of their failure, did she begin to fully understand the new, horrible, race for power that had begun.

Threshold

Digging around in the back of his desk drawer, Ryan’s fingers touched the hard shell of the only thing he had left of Mel. The cellphone. He froze. He hadn’t seen that phone in years, thought it had been lost for good on one of their hair-brained adventures.

Why he had held on to it all these years, he didn’t know. Why he used it to snap pictures of Eve while she was growing up eluded him even further. There was no one waiting on the other end to receive them. Never had been, never would be.

He plugged it in. Waiting to see if the battery would even acknowledge the long-awaited power supply as the door to his office opened.

“You look like you just swallowed the canary, Dad. What did you do?” Eve plopped down on the couch opposite his desk and smiled.

His heart skipped a beat. She was the spitting image of her mother, albeit her social phobias had been more extreme. Ryan would have given his last dollar to find out if Mel had been as socially awkward as Eve when she was a child, or if he had caused it by homeschooling her.

He smiled and hoped it didn’t reveal how guilty he felt about his obsession with the dead phone. “Just getting ready for class. How about you? Ready for your first day?”

“I’ve been running around this campus since I could walk,” she laughed, but there was a familiar nervous edge to it.

Forgetting about the phone, he moved to sit next to Eve on the couch and put his arm around her. “Yes, but this is different, Peanut. You are officially one of
them
.”

“You mean a rude, entitled, know-it-all college student?”

He laughed despite himself. She
had
been paying attention. “They’re not all bad. Once in a while I get a handful of students who remind me why I do this.”

“And here I thought you did it for the glory of teaching.”

Ryan laughed and gave her a squeeze. “Between me, you, and a fence post, I do it for access to all the cool science equipment. Now tell me how you’re really doing.”

“I feel—” Soft chimes filled the room and they both turned to look at the phone on his desk. His heart seemed to skid to a stop and he forgot how to breathe.

Eve nudged him. “You gonna get that?”

He faked a smile he didn’t feel and forced his attention back to his daughter. She needed him. Thanks to Mel, he had been all she had in this world her whole life. He wasn’t going to drop the ball now. Besides, it was probably just a glitch, or a jingle to let him know the battery was charging. He shook his head. “It can wait. Talk to me.”

“I feel like my insides are going to shake loose.” She finished stuffing her backpack and tossed it to the floor in frustration. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head into his shoulder and said, “I don’t understand. This campus is my second home, but it feels like a different world today.”

He kissed the top of her head and smoothed down her hair. “It’ll be okay. Give it time. Just sit in the front of the class and don’t look at the students sitting behind you. I’ve already talked to your other professors – they get it. No pressure for the first couple of weeks. Just do your work and keep your head down. They’ll ease you into the group environment.”

“Why can’t I do the other classes online? Just do your classes here?”

“Because you need to start dealing with this. You might puke on your shoes a time or two, but eventually you’ll be able to handle big groups enough to have a life, once you flee the nest.”

She lifted her head and looked him in the eye. “Flee the nest? I’m sixteen and you’re already packing my bags? Do I cramp your style?”

“What? No!”

Her smile broke through and he shoved her off the couch, laughing. “That’s right. I have a standing invitation to be the Playboy Mansion’s new curator and you, you little brat, are holding me back.”

She sat on the floor, giggling. Just like her mother. His eyes drifted to the phone sitting on the desk. “Peanut, we need to talk about your mom.”

All of her humor drained away and he could see it being replaced by a steely determination that let show the woman she would become. “She is not part of the equation, Dad. Never was, never will be.”

“Peanut—”

“No.” She stood up and threw her backpack over her shoulder. “I’m going to get ready for class. I’ll see you in a couple of hours for Water Resources.” She hesitated at the door and looked back. “It’s you and me against the world, Dad. As long as I have you, I don’t need, or want, anything else.”

When she closed the door softly behind her, he sighed. “Well. That could have gone better.”

He watched the phone for several minutes as if he expected it to crawl across the desk and start doing backflips. Maybe he did. If it did, the message it held would be far less intimidating.

A glance at the clock told him he had thirty minutes before he needed to be in the lab for his first class. Reluctantly, he moved to sit behind his desk and toyed with the phone, building up the courage to bring up the screen.

He started to put the phone down and picked it back up. Put it down again, and forced himself to get his stack of first class papers together. Syllabi on top, orientation assignment regarding the growing fresh drinking water shortage on bottom. When the phone chimed again, he touched the screen to bring it to life. The little envelope that indicated there was a text message waiting caused his heart to soar.

Without giving himself time to chicken out again, he opened the file and his heart sank. It made even less sense than the message Mel left the night she abandoned them.

“Trust your research, Ryan. Trust your instincts. A storm is coming.”

He read it three times and it still didn’t make sense. He said as much in his reply.

The phone remained silent, unyielding of clues to the riddle. He sent another text, then another. Still the phone refused to cooperate. Despite his best efforts, Mel was gone again, if she had even been there to begin with.

Stepping into the hallway, his papers forgotten, he watched as the young men and women moved along the hall, their secret highway of knowledge. “What storm?” he murmured to himself, drawing looks from some of the passersby and ignored by the rest.

The longer he looked at those young faces, their bright futures ready and waiting around the next corner, the more uneasy he became. “Damn you, Mel.”

What storm? And how did she even know about his research? She knew because he had published. Back in his office, his door closed and locked, he fired up his computer and opened the folder that contained all of his published works. The only way she could have known about any of his research is if she’d been following his career through environmental periodicals and journals.

He shivered. Wherever she was, whatever she was doing… the idea that she had been keeping tabs on him was downright creepy. He scrolled through the list of files, looking for a common thread. There was only one. Climate change.

The possibilities of a collapse related to climate change were endless, and frightening. When Mel was with him, before they went into hiding, she had been working for some major power hitters in science and technology. If her warning was real and not some sort of sick hoax, there was no way to know from which direction a complete breakdown in infrastructure would come, and why.

Refusing to get worked up over a single text message that might or might not be from the love of his life, who just happened to have bailed on them right after the birth of their daughter, Ryan grabbed his personal phone. He hit the speed-dial number for Marcus and jumped in as soon as the old man answered. “Do we have the new data packets from the ISS yet?”

“Well hi, Ryan. Why yes, I’m doing well. How about you?”

Ryan snorted back a laugh and forced himself to relax. “Sorry old friend. How are you doing?”

Marcus’ belly-laugh carried across the phone lines. “Grouchy and old.”

“Tell me something new. Have you managed to catch that little Lolita from accounting?”

“Nope, she’s still playing hard to get. Give me time and I’ll win her over.”

“I bet you will. Now, is that enough small talk?”

“It’ll do. But I’m afraid I don’t have the best news for you.” Marcus sighed. “The data pack was corrupt. We haven’t been able to filter out the data yet.”

Sixteen years ago he had called Marcus, hoping to restore sanity after Mel’s last message, only to find out about the attacks in Washington. Then, as now, he had hoped it was just a coincidence. The station was old, long past its scheduled termination date. Only the C.O.R.E upgrades kept it alive. There’s no way a data pack would have come across corrupted after all these years. Not right after getting that message from Mel. One coincidence, okay. Two? He had to call bull-pucky.

“Any chance I could talk you into sending the raw packet to me? We’ve got a hell of a tech department.”

Marcus was silent for a moment. “You think they can pull the data?”

“Don’t know. I doubt it. But it would be good practice for them.”

“It’s worth a try. What are you expecting to find? Even your own research has verified a cooling trend in the oceans.”

“Theoretically, the glacier melt-off should increase the oceans capacity as a carbon dioxide sink, enabling more to be pulled out of the atmosphere. The data we’ve seen has shown a marked drop in atmospheric CO2 levels over the past twenty years, so that should enable the earth to find a new balance. I just want to verify that we are making the dent in it that I think we are.”

“Don’t go finding bad news, Ryan. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re fresh out of glaciers. Thanks to lowering CO2 emissions and new technologies developed by folks like C.O.R.E, we’ve been able to push back the climate change doomsday. If we start calling warnings again, we’ll be right up there with the scientist who first tried to bring it to people’s attention.”

“Crackpots?”

“Crackpots.” Marcus sighed again. “Don’t make me regret liking you. If you find anything, I want to be the first to know.”

“You got it, Marcus. Thank you. I promise to make small talk first next time.”

“Sure, that’s what they all say.”

“Tell Lolita I said to give you a little false hope once in a while. Chasing her keeps you out of trouble.”

Marcus hmmphed and hung up the phone. Ryan’s own smile faded as he looked at the cellphone on his desk. Another game? God, he hoped so. Just in case, he had to find another route to current data. He had to know for sure that the earth had found a new balance. Had to know for sure that the changing climate had stabilized.