Chimera, p.30
Chimera, page 30
He charges onto the dam and fires indiscriminately at the colored silhouettes streaking away from him, driving them to the ground. He rounds on the icebreaker, aims at the windows of the pilothouse, and fires until his magazine runs dry.
Glass shatters and light overwhelms his optics. The vessel’s engine roars. Water churns from its stern as it attempts to maneuver out of range.
Waller climbs up onto the rail, the silver canister held high like a trophy, and prepares to jump to its deck, but Dr. Rantanen is upon him before he has the chance. The container slips from his grasp and falls into the fjord as she drags him down. He lands squarely on his back and opens his mouth to scream, but she tears into him before he can do so. Golden spatters fling from her slashing fingertips and burst from her snapping jaws.
Cameron stops, loads a fresh magazine, and steadies his rifle.
Dr. Rantanen rounds on him, her face glowing with Waller’s blood.
He forces aside his reservations and takes careful aim.
Something breaks inside of him as he squeezes the trigger.
53
The echo of the final gunshot fades beneath the howling wind.
Mira sobs as she runs from the bottom of the stairs. She slips and falls. Pushes herself back up, only to fall again. Rush helps her to her feet, but she shoves him away. Her eyes never leave the spot where she’d last seen Sammie, her naked form limned with blood, rushing out onto the dam.
The icebreaker swings away from the shoreline, making a wide turn toward the far side of the fjord, its silhouette merging into the storm. The roar of its engine grows more distant by the second.
She skirts the dead man’s remains, the surrounding earth glimmering with crimson ice, and hurries across the windswept rock.
The lone figure standing on the dam drops to his knees and vanishes behind the raised concrete wall. She doesn’t see him again until she’s racing out onto the dam.
Cameron turns at the sound of her approach, rises to his feet, and hurries to intercept her. Wrapping his arms around her, he attempts to turn her around and steer her in the opposite direction. She catches a glimpse of Sammie’s body over his shoulder and moans in anguish.
Her friend lies on her back, legs crumpled underneath her, arms flung out to her sides. Rapidly cooling blood gives substance to her transparent form, the faint green iridescence fading with the northern lights in the sky. The gunshot wound between her breasts leaves little doubt as to her condition.
Mira beats her fists against the man’s chest until she’s overwhelmed by exhaustion. She slumps to the ground, a flood of emotions rising within her and spilling from her eyes as tears. Memories of death overwhelm her.
Porter hanging in the stairwell. Anthony’s body sprawled on the floor of the lounge and Laurie’s propped against the wall in the hallway. Nichols’s blue corpse disappearing beneath the accumulation outside the front door. Swearengin lying behind the serving bar. Blood pulsing from Leo’s severed carotid. Elroy sacrificing himself so they could escape the garage and Moore falling beneath the polar bear’s claws. Jen’s body floating to the surface of the lake amid the broken sea ice. Carrie and Dougherty crumpled in the dry storage room, their skeletal faces absolved of flesh. Amy’s final breath burbling from the rapidly eroding wound in her throat. And now Sammie, who’d been responsible for so much suffering, but who’d never deserved this fate.
Of the fifteen of them who’d called Academy Station home, only she and Aaron remained.
This was all her fault. She should have been the one bleeding out on the ice.
She should have been able to save them.
Rush and Speedy reach underneath her arms and lift her to her feet, drawing her away from Sammie as gently as they can. Her legs go numb, and she has no choice but to allow them to drag her back toward the shore. She watches her friend’s body fall away behind her until she passes Cameron, who looks at her with a tortured expression on his face. He lowers his eyes and stares at his hands, as though expecting to find them covered with blood.
Cameron staggers from the dam onto the rocky ridge, the wind battering him from seemingly every direction at once. He can barely see the conning tower of the icebreaker in the distance as it heads back out to sea. It doesn’t matter now, though. He’ll find that vessel if it’s the last thing he does and make sure that someone is held accountable, even if it leads him all the way up the chain to Colonel Patrick, or his bosses at the Pentagon.
In fact, a part of him hopes it does.
Whether personally or professionally, his commanding officer had been in bed with a private corporate entity whose interests didn’t align with his country’s. Because of them—because of their shared greed—six men under his command had died. Six good men. And then there were the scientists, whose remains he’ll soon have to collect. While their bodies can’t be returned to their families, their loved ones need to know what happened to them. He won’t be party to some grand cover-up.
Nothing like this can ever be allowed to happen again.
Cameron stares up at Academy Station, perched precariously overhead. It’s only a matter of time before someone on that icebreaker alerts the powers that be to their failure—if they haven’t already—and another team is dispatched to collect samples of the microorganisms. There needs to be nothing left of the facility when they arrive. Surely, between the SUSV and the arctic vehicles in the garage, there’s enough fuel to burn this whole place to the ground. He’ll be damned if he’s going to allow more lives to be lost in the pursuit of profit when his sole mission has always been to save them.
Forcing aside his anger and guilt, he inhales a deep breath and takes charge of the situation.
“Rush: take Dr. Stone back to the station. See what you can do about moving Ryder and Dr. Wallace into the medical suite. Tending to the three of them is your sole priority. Speedy: siphon as much gasoline as you can from every vehicle you can find. I want to turn this entire complex into a bonfire you can see from space. I’ll begin gathering bodies—”
“Drop your weapons.”
Cameron turns to face the speaker, knowing full well to whom the voice belongs.
Waller shove Rush out of the way and grabs Dr. Stone around the neck. He produces the knife from the sheath underneath his left arm and presses the tip into the side of her throat, summoning a trickle of blood. She tries to speak, but he gives the blade a slight twist and she manages only a gasp.
“You don’t want to do this,” Cameron says, narrowing his eyes.
Deep lacerations crisscross Waller’s face and neck. The surrounding skin is pale to the point of translucence. He sways as though struggling to maintain consciousness and bares his teeth against the pain.
“Your guns,” he says. “I won’t ask again.”
Cameron holds his M4 at arm’s length, sets it down on the ground, and slowly raises his empty hands. Rush steps around from behind him, but he signals for his tech sergeant and Speedy to follow his lead and relinquish their rifles. Waller kicks their weapons from the path and down the rocky slope.
“Listen carefully and don’t test my resolve,” Waller says. “You and your men are going to take off your boots and throw them down onto the lake while Dr. Stone and I return to the station, where we’ll barricade ourselves inside and await transport back to the States. If you so much as think about trying anything stupid, I’ll sever her carotid, and you’ll have to watch her bleed out, knowing there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
Cameron wants nothing more than to tear Waller apart with his bare hands, but he’s not willing to risk the lives of any more innocents, even if it means sacrificing his own.
“Take me instead,” he says. “I’ll go willingly, and my men will do exactly as I say.”
“You might not care about your life, but I know you care about hers. As long as I have Dr. Stone, you’ll obey my every command. Now . . . take off your boots.”
Cameron stares down Waller for several seconds—his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching—before dropping to one knee. He catches a hint of movement from the corner of his eye as he unties the laces of his right boot.
“You’d kill us all,” he says. “And for what? Money?”
Waller scoffs.
“You don’t have the slightest idea what I can do with this organism, do you? The future of warfare is biological. You think COVID was an accident? It was a deliberate shot across our bow by our most dangerous enemy, one meant to demonstrate its prowess and its willingness to deploy such a weapon, even if it had to use its own citizens as vectors. Such wars were not meant to be cold, with labs stockpiling viruses capable of wiping out the population a thousand times over. They must be won quickly and decisively, and with the utmost prejudice.”
Waller slowly starts backing away, dragging Dr. Stone with him. He’s unsteady on his feet, the blood loss beginning to take its toll. The tip of the knife slips deeper into her neck. She cocks her head away from it, her eyes widening in panic.
“Imagine releasing these chimeric organisms in the heart of Beijing or Moscow,” he says. “How long would it take before the infected were slaughtering everyone and everything in their way? We could eliminate all of our enemies in one fell swoop and make sure they never rise against us again. And all without firing a single shot.”
“If you release it, you’ll destroy every life form on the planet,” Cameron says, slipping off his boots. The cold cuts right through his socks and burrows into his feet. Again, he senses movement from his peripheral vision, but he can’t risk drawing attention to it. At least not yet. “There will be no way to stop its spread, no hope of containing it without catastrophic loss of life.”
“As it stands now, maybe. But give me time to work with it. Give me a chance to map its genome, to engineer it to do what I want it to do.” He carefully crouches and retrieves the red plastic sack Kato dropped. “Give me a year with this”—he holds up the biohazard specimen bag, its contents roughly the size and shape of a fish—“and I’ll give you the most powerful weapon the world has ever known. One for which only we will have the cure.”
Cameron detects a faint shimmer to his right, like steam seeping out from behind the concrete wall lining the top of the dam. He meets Dr. Stone’s gaze, then deliberately looks to his right, drawing her attention to the source of the movement. Her eyes widen in surprise.
He hopes to God she’s ready for what’s about to happen.
Mira watches the transparent figure stagger from the dam, its outline partially silhouetted in blood. She suppresses the urge to scream and again meets Cameron’s stare. He offers a subtle nod. His hands drift away from his boots and he plants them in the snow, his legs tensing in anticipation.
She has to distract the man with the knife in her neck.
“You can’t control . . . an organism . . . like this,” she says through bared teeth, every word seemingly causing the blade to sink deeper into her flesh. “This species evolved . . . before our very eyes. Who’s going to stop that . . . from happening again?”
“I am,” Waller says, his eyes never leaving Cameron. “Now toss those boots.”
The three soldiers comply without argument. Their boots tumble down the incline and land near their rifles, just past the shoreline of the frozen lake. Their toes won’t last an hour in these conditions, which is presumably what Waller is counting on. It will take time to climb down and collect them, buying him enough time to reach the station first.
A twist of the knife gets Mira moving. One foot behind the other as he pulls her backward, alternately glancing at the path leading uphill to the station and the national guardsmen behind him. His hands begin to tremble.
Mira looks to her left, where the figure collapses to the ground. It rises again like steam from a sewer grate, its body taking form from nothingness. A massive gunshot wound, framed by a starburst of blood, mars its chest. Ice has already formed on its shoulders, in its hair and lashes, on its cheekbones and the bridge of its nose. A glass-like image of Sammie materializes from thin air, although her friend is long gone. The chimera’s head lolls on its neck, as though the creature lacks the strength to hold it up.
Waller stumbles and nearly falls, jerking Mira so suddenly that his blade slices her skin all the way back to her ear. A freshet of blood pours down her neck and soaks into her collar. She slaps her hand over it and desperately attempts to hold the laceration closed.
He turns and freezes. His entire body grows unnaturally still.
Waller must have seen Sammie.
The pressure on Mira’s neck suddenly relents. Before she realizes what’s happening, Waller jabs the tip of the knife into her side, cutting through her parka and prodding her ribs. He ducks behind her as though attempting to use her as a human shield.
Mira glances at Cameron, who shifts his weight forward, just waiting for the right moment to make his move. To her left, Sammie lumbers closer, her disjointed movements reminiscent of the way the sculpin had tried to crawl across the floor after its death, the microorganisms that animated it firing their final electrical commands through the wiring of its nervous system. Her head rocks back and she makes a retching sound that Mira recognizes immediately.
She drops like a sack of potatoes. Waller’s knife slices straight up the side of her jacket and through her hood. The moment she hits the ground, she starts to roll.
Fluid spatters behind her.
Waller screams as the acid burns through his face and chest. He claws at his liquefying flesh, even as Sammie throws her arms around him and opens her mouth wide enough to engulf the entirety of his lower face—
Cameron seizes the opportunity. He leaps over Dr. Stone and plows into Waller and Dr. Rantanen, wrapping his arms around them. The three of them hit the ground and tumble toward the edge of the escarpment overlooking the fjord. Their momentum carries them over the precipice.
A sensation of weightlessness.
The scream of air rushing past his ears.
A fleeting glimpse of the black water rising to meet them.
Cameron lands on top of Waller, the impact with the rugged shoreline knocking the wind out of him. Waller’s head strikes the edge of a boulder, the granite edge opening the back of his skull like a hatchet. Dr. Rantanen lands on her back, her neck folding over a rock formation with a sharp crack, severing her spinal cord. Her body slumps over the side and starts to fall toward the shallows, but Cameron grabs her arm before she splashes into the water.
His breath returns with a lurch. He rolls over and looks up into the storm, the wind assailing him with sleet that feels like needles stabbing his bare skin.
From the corner of his eye, he sees a red plastic bag drift inland on the current and sink beneath the waves.
Epilogue
Mira winces as Rush applies the butterfly bandages to the wound on her neck. They’d found some Dermabond tissue adhesive in the medical suite and used it to hold the edges of the laceration closed, hopefully minimizing the scarring. She wasn’t overly optimistic, but, unlike so many others, at least she was still alive.
Fortunately for Ryder, his wounds appeared to be less severe than they’d initially suspected. Rush had irrigated his chemical burns, applied salve, and bandaged the side of his face. He now slept in the bed across the room from her, an IV delivering a cocktail of painkillers and fluids into his arm and every blacklight they’d been able to find shining down on him. The green flashlight confirmed that the chimeras that had infiltrated his wounds had already begun to die off. They’d run his blood through a UV sterilizer when they returned home, just to be sure.
The others grew increasingly worried about the fates awaiting them stateside. With all of the survivors in stable condition, they’d decided to wait for as long as possible before calling for retrieval, buying themselves enough time to sanitize the facilities. Cameron was understandably concerned about the consequences of her microorganism falling into the wrong hands—or any hands for that matter—as Waller and the men from NeXgen had already demonstrated. They’d been willing to let every single one of them die just to get their grubby little mitts on her chimeras.
A part of Mira mourns the loss of her research and everything she could have used it to accomplish, but not so much that she wouldn’t happily be the one to strike the match and set this whole infernal complex ablaze. As long as she lived, there was still hope, and she fully intended to make sure she didn’t waste the opportunity afforded her by the sacrifices of her colleagues. She would find another way to combat climate change, and she’d be damned if she didn’t succeed, if for no other reason than to honor their memories.
Mira nods her thanks to Rush and rises without a word from the desk that once belonged to Dr. Porter, whose dried blood still decorates the floor. Aaron pushes himself up from the chair opposite hers and starts to follow her. She turns around and gently squeezes his hand.
“Thanks,” she says, “but I need to be alone for a little while.”
“I’m here if you need me,” he says, although she suspects he likely needs her more than she needs him. He’d been here for nearly two years by the time she arrived and had lost everyone he held dear, but she’s of no use to anyone like this. She promises herself she’ll make an effort to be there for him when all is said and done. For now, she needs to be able to think without being constantly reminded of everything that had transpired over the last seventy-two hours, especially if she’s going to make sure it never happens again.
The hallway smells of gasoline. She hears Speedy’s footsteps overhead as he carries tank after tank of fuel into the station. As soon as Ryder’s ready to move back to the SUSV, they’ll douse every last inch of Academy Station and burn it to the ground. Before that happens, however, she has to make sure that everything in her lab is as it should be. The last thing she wants to do is spend the rest of her life wondering if anything had been removed prior to its incineration. As it is, she’s going to have a hard enough time deleting all of her video logs and the data she’d uploaded to the system, although Rush seems confident that he can pull it off.
