Paradise: An Apocalyptic Novel (8 page)

8

4 Years Ago: The Ambrosia Incident

“You have a
game preserve on this place,” Silver said, “my god, man, this is like some sort of little kid’s wet dream.”

Maverick grinned and
cheersed
Silver from across the table. This was the first group of people that had made it to The Hideaway. It’d been a year in the making, this trip, getting all the legal stuff and logistics nailed down. But now, the island retreat was open.

Maverick felt damn good. Cole sat to his right, Josephine to his left, and the dozen guests he’d brought were all in varying states of intoxication. There was no wait staff, no one else to speak of, besides Amanda, and she was off at the homestead.

Maverick got a look in his eye, and everyone seemed to fall silent at once. It was uncanny, how he could communicate his intentions without even uttering a word. Cole, in particular, was in awe of this—more jealous, if one had to be honest, but he respected the way Maverick could hold a room’s attention. Everyone held their breath.

Three fateful words.

“Let’s go hunting.”

This would be fun, like camping in the woods—if your tent cost a hundred million dollars, and you were hunting with high powered rifles. The night was bright, the stars shooting beams of light through the sky above. It was cool—cool, but comfortable.

No one said much, but they passed a look down the line, one to another. It wasn’t disbelief, just a simple
man, that’d be awesome
. Maverick was a visionary, always had been—and hunting big game in the middle of the night in a scenic jungle paradise, that was an experience that only he would think of putting on the docket.

When it seemed like the room would burst from pent-up excitement, Maverick grinned and nodded his head towards the gear cabinet. The weapons were kept upstairs, out of the safe room. That would change, after The Ambrosia Incident, but for now, it was happy go-lucky.

Josephine stayed behind, as did Cole; they weren’t into this type of thing, and the old man couldn’t get excited about gunning down game if he tried. Boris shadowed the group, not part of it, just keeping a wary—if somewhat drunken—eye out for trouble.

Baxter’s smooth, chiseled face lit up when he saw the guns. He’d never fired one before; most of them hadn’t. They were fitness gurus and scientists, not marksman or murderers. In the arena of savagery, they were mere vacationers, dilettantes.

The group strapped clips and ammo to their belts and set out. This was going to be fun.

It was because
of him. And her, but it started because of him.

The pair was like a hellacious version of Adam and Eve, the origin of all the sin, sorrow and bloodshed that would torment Maverick in the years to come. Silver and his cohorts had long since forgotten their names—or tried to, but the thought, it seemed, was a good start.

Him and her—they were the reason that, four years ago, everything changed.

How fast it shifted: the edge of excitement had worn off, reality traipsing over the group. This hunting, it was hard work—it wasn’t laconic, like lounging by the almost-finished pool.

Silver was stopped with Maverick, the two of them sharing a cigar by a tree, grinning about the good life. Boris waited somewhere behind, drawing from a flask. He carried the heavy artillery—an assault rifle that would rip up a tank, if given the chance, grenades, the whole outfit.

“Not bad, huh,” Maverick said, in between gasps, “what do you think?”

Silver could only shrug. This is where the Ambrosia Project had landed him: on the private island of a free-wheeling eccentric almost billionaire. He puffed on the fine tobacco and passed it back.

“It’s all great,” he managed, thinking of nothing else to say.

“How’s the project coming along?” It was coming, but Silver knew that it wasn’t coming along as fast as Maverick wanted. Maverick didn’t want to be old and live forever—he wanted to be young, locked-in to a fit, adult body. It was already ten years past his ideal prime.

“Still testing,” Silver said, “but I think—”

Maverick waved him off. “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a flourish, smoke trailing through the air, “it’ll be fine. Just don’t tell anyone. This one isn’t for the shareholders.” His tone wasn’t malicious—just greedy, maybe even concerned.

Immortality wouldn’t be good for the world—it’d mess with the natural order of things. Maybe that was why, Silver reasoned, it was so damn difficult to figure out how to trap it, bottle it. They’d run through hundreds of tests, each one failing. The most recent one, the girl, she’d tested it once—and gone silent.

He’d have to ask her about that.

But he never got a chance, because of that damned shot.

Him and Maverick heard it rip through her, even from two hundred yards, stop her still-beating heart, suck the life from her body. They heard it all, and even if they couldn’t, they felt it, knew when that everything was different.

He shot her. Adam shot Eve.

She had the vial on her—the test vial. The Ambrosia prototype. Why she brought it along, no one could figure out—but it’d be years before the surviving team members figured out all she’d done. No one knew the ramifications—not at that point.

Neither man knew all that, not right then. But one ran towards the shot, the other stayed still—and that, as the proverbial saying goes, made all the difference. Two hundred yards away, Silver stood over the young woman, her eyes pointed at the sky. The man who shot her, he was standing to the side, staring at the gun, as if wondering how it had torn the life from her body. It had all been fun, a noise-making expedition until a second ago.

And now, life and death interjected, and the man just stared, like if he could just figure out
where
it all went wrong he could fix it. But she was dead, and there was no bringing her back, and even if he had figured out how it happened—how he’d mistaken her movement for that of an animal, because she blended right into the fauna—he’d still have been just as screwed.

But he never got that chance, because Maverick uttered two more fateful words to Boris, off in the trees.

“Handle this.” And then Maverick threw up, all over himself, putrid, vile, like a plague.

Boris looked at him, almost amused, and just nodded. He’d handle this PR nightmare.

And the man who started it all—the Adam of this tale—he didn’t get a chance to figure it out, or make it right, because Boris came in—a minute thirty, two minutes, after the first shot—and fired a clip into his brainstem.

And then, for the rest of the team, the chase was on.

Behind them, the dying scream of that girl—close to a woman, smart as a whip, but far too young to die—had brought all the creatures in the jungle on their position. The blood, the fear; the predators lusted for that, survived on it. But the humans, they were just trying to survive; they all had guns, but Boris would cut them down before they could even get a clip loaded. The only option was escape.

Silver leapt to his feet, his fingers still wet with hot blood and the stickiness of the undiscovered Ambrosia prototype. He darted through the foliage, trampling over the once-serene landscape. Bullets zipped by his head, and he could hear the cries of his compatriots. Whether they’d been hit or were only surprised, scared, he didn’t know.

Blood rushed through his ears like a torrent of water through a narrow gorge, his legs pumping as he dove over a fallen log. He reached the river, and it stood in front of him, menacing, but not as dangerous as what lay behind him.

He was reminded of that by an explosion, the sound of cracking timber and the anguished cry of someone caught in it all. Then a single burst, and the cry stopped. Silver looked over his shoulder for a moment, could smell the smoke and taste blood, maybe even adrenaline in his mouth, and then he jumped.

As he fell, he thought it was strange that crimson droplets were trailing behind him. Then it all went black, the rush of water pounding him in its grasp, keeping him below the surface.

Silver washed up
on shore and vomited.

Again and again, until his stomach hurt, screamed for him to stop. The dry heaves wouldn’t cooperate, though; his body was determined to rid itself of this foreign substance, this unwelcome invader.

He gagged and a little river water came up. Silver sprawled out; his arm was throbbing, wispy streams of blood trickling down into the wet bank. Either Boris had lost it, gone haywire, or something else happened.

Above him, way up on the overhang from where he’d leapt, he could hear faint gunshots, the sounds of a chase. He’d have to keep moving. That was the only option. He gazed at his wound; a through-and-through, clean. It hurt, but he’d manage; he grabbed some leaves from the bank, prayed they weren’t poisonous, and wrapped them around his arm inside his shirt.

With a pained grunt, Silver rose to his feet and went into the jungle. Alone.

Maverick’s words had
been soft, but there was no mistaking the tone: no survivors. Boris wasn’t paid to ask questions, even if that seemed a little extreme. But he figured the company’s stock price, or something else, couldn’t withstand this type of scandal. Maverick would be through.

It was either him or the others, and Maverick was the one on the high ground. Might as well use it while the going was good.

The shots ripped through the guy’s brainstem like it was made of putty. No opportunity to scream, or even be scared. A good kill.

And then Boris darted off in pursuit of the others. He cut another one down quick; she’d tripped, confused why everything had gone haywire.

She was almost relieved to see him, until she saw the assault rifle aimed down on her. Then she screamed, but only for a second; the bullets saw that this was done. Behind him, Boris could have sworn he heard some of the jungle life—feral cats, bigger game—rooting around the bodies he’d left.

There was no time for that, though. He reloaded on the run, listening for the crunch of branches. This wasn’t like hunting deer in a wide open field, but it was damn close; these were rank amateurs, and their fear was going to kill them.

Nine left; that wasn’t a bad day, back in the agency. Boris wasn’t quite a psychopath, but he wouldn’t have been surprised if some people thought he was. You needed a certain amount of craziness and moral lassitude to make money snuffing out other people.

Up ahead, he saw the glimpse of something large, upright. He unloaded a clip in the direction, but he only managed to wound his target—he could tell as much from the pained cries. What the hell—time to get a little creative, shake things up.

The grenade flew through the air, nipping at the man’s heels. It was a perfect throw; a quarterback couldn’t have put the ball on target better. The man was blown from his feet, only yards away from a clearing, from the river.

Boris had slowed to a crawl, watching as the forest heaved and absorbed the explosion. The man, though he was missing a leg, was still alive, blubbering about this and that. A single burst ended that concern, and Boris took a moment on the ridge to scan his surroundings.

He could pick up the faint strains of cracking brush, of footsteps, but they were radiating out in all directions. Eight left.

He would track them down, or he’d claim that he did. He wasn’t as trustworthy as his company days, since there wasn’t anyone cracking the whip behind him. The agency, they’d kill you over a screw-up. Here? Well, no one had to know, and he had four bodies that he could get clever with. Make it look like twelve.

He trotted off, gun slung over his shoulder, in the direction of some rustling. Yeah, four or five would do just fine. That sounded all right. A swig from a flask, a nice view—this was a hell of a place.

A hell of a place.

Silver was shaking.
He didn’t know it, but a couple of the others were, too. They’d passed right over the woman’s body, breathed it in. They’d been exposed to the Ambrosia Virus, but they didn’t know what that meant.

None of them knew that the woman had been carrying the vial, planning to show it to Maverick, planning to impress him. She was young, ambitious, and those two facets were enemies of her natural intelligence. She’d gotten greedy, impatient, and, well, she’d unleashed a sort of monster.

Because what she hadn’t realized, in her cursory tests, was one thing: the Ambrosia Virus killed most people. It granted them super-human abilities and unheard of longevity, but only in certain genotypes. Rare ones—one in a hundred, one in a thousand. And that was only if you survived the virus’ brutal hold.

The first test, on some rhesus monkey or silly lab rat, had proven to be an astounding success. The thing not only had the health of a bull, but it was about as strong—once it stopped contorting like a puppet—with all of its functions cranking at uncharted levels.

But there was the problem: the outlier happened first, and that screwed up her instincts as a scientist. They were all scientists, the best of the best, but a funny thing happens when you’re at the top: you lose your identity, the essence of who you are. Trade it for fool’s gold.

But luck, it’s egalitarian. It came right back around, cut her down in the jungle, repaid her in kind and even let Pandora out of its cage. Into a bigger cage, since no one could get to and from The Hideaway with ease, but it was out there.

Silver hadn’t stopped vomiting.

But he hadn’t stopped moving, either.

He came to the windmill clearing. Above him, the giant metal blades beat a familiar, steady rhythm, drowning out the quiet tension of the jungle. Hair blown back by the force, Silver staggered onwards, across the field. The field was easier going than the jungle, even if it left him open to a shot.

They could kill him; the pain, the searing heat that was exploding from his insides, it was almost unbearable. Silver reached the edge of the field, staring into the jungle, then tumbled down into a ravine, branches and thorns slashing at his face.

He drifted from consciousness, his body landing at the bottom of the slope against a large tree.