Genesis Plague (8 page)

R
enfield led the way out of the tent. Levino grabbed my elbow
and pointed after Maria and Cassidy as they walked through the canvas door.

“Are they going to be a
problem?”

I pulled my arm out of
his grasp. “You’ll have to ask them.”

He sighed and relaxed
slightly. I could suddenly see the weight of the situation resting on his
shoulders, and I’m glad – not for the first time in my life – that I went into
research instead of administration.

“This was supposed to
be
fun
,” said Levino. “Discovery of a new species, and God knows what
else! It’s why we got into this field to begin with! And now we’re forced into
a foolish race with the other universities, and against men like that damnable
King, who would take this wondrous creature and twist it toward their own
profit.”

I figured it wasn’t the
best time to remind him that, technically, we were doing the exact same thing,
albeit under the auspices of the expansion of knowledge. I could see his point,
though.

“I think,” continued
Levino, “that after this little trip, I may resign my station and go back to
the lab.”

My eyebrows went up in
surprise.

“If you’d have me, of
course!” he chuckled as he patted my back. “I tell you Paul, regardless of the
stress this whole circus has dumped on me, I feel more alive than I have in a
long time. You don’t get this kind of excitement sitting in an office, reading
over contracts and insurance policies and fretting about what kind of bowtie to
wear to the university president’s yearly staff luncheon.”

Another sigh, and then
with a deliberate shift in posture, he re-shouldered the stress he had
temporarily pushed off.

“Shall we?” he asked,
gesturing toward the exit.

T
he sky outside the tent was dark and foreboding. Low, heavy
clouds pushed their way across the sky. Pierre had said that the category three
hurricane wouldn’t make landfall for another two days, yet it looked as if it
was already on Hawaii’s doorstep.

“It’s a category four,
now,” said Renfield when I asked him about it.

He stood at the back of
an off-road SUV, digging through a crate of field equipment.

“They’ve just suspended
incoming air traffic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did the same for outbound
flights later this evening, if not sooner.”

“Are they evacuating?”
asked Levino.

Renfield nodded.
“That’s the only reason they haven’t stopped all air traffic completely. A lot
of folks have already gone, but there are still plenty left who will just have
to weather the storm. Not to mention the ones who refuse to leave.”

“What about us?” asked
Flint.

“If anyone wants to
quit,” said Levino with a smile, “they are more than welcome. Except you,
Flint, my boy. The burden of competence, I’m afraid.”

“Tell me about it,”
grumbled Flint.

A knowing look passed
between the group; a silent agreement that we would rather be close to a
potential discovery than anywhere else, hurricane or not.

“Besides,” said
Renfield. “A little rain never hurt anyone.”

He tossed me a pair of
heavy boots. I flipped them over and pushed down on the heat-resistant lug
soles. “We can walk in the cave with these?”

“For a while. They’re
tested up to five-hundred degrees.”

“Just watch your step,”
said Maria, and winked at me.

 Renfield pulled out a
large, clamshell plastic bin and popped the clasps on its side.

“You might feel a
little silly in these,” he said, “but I assure you, they’re necessary.”

He opened the bin and
started handing out full-body protective suits, made of a shimmering,
cloth-like material. I took mine and rubbed a portion of it between my fingers.
The pearlescent fabric felt almost like lizard skin.

“I don’t do disco,”
said Flint, shaking his head at the offered suit.

“I kind of like it,”
said Maria, stretching hers with her hands. “And I bet Mike looks great in
his.” He grinned back at her. I could practically see his puppy tail wagging.

“Unless you want your
skin to melt off, Flint,” said Renfield, “I suggest you take it.”

“Hey, man, it’s your
slug, remember? I’m just here to take the mountain’s temperature.”

“And what better way to
do that than from inside its mouth?”

Flint looked at me and
I shrugged. Resignedly, he snatched the suit out of Renfield’s hand, who smiled
broadly.

“Now then!” he said, clearly
in his element. He reached into the bin and pulled out a stack of full-face
masks with clear plastic shields and black filters over the mouths. “These are
just a precaution, but since we don’t know what else we’ll find in the cave, it
seems only prudent.”

Cassidy took her mask
and examined it. “But you’ve already been inside. The air is breathable.”

“Completely!” Renfield
said happily. “But it was foolish to go into the cave without first measuring
the air quality. Who knows how old the air is down there? There could be all
manner of contamination floating, just floating around. Not to mention our own
exhalations! But as I said, these masks are only a precaution. My two
assistants who went inside are perfectly fine. In fact, there’s Dan Grayson
now.”

Grayson was in his
mid-twenties, with white-blonde hair and fair skin. He shook Renfield’s hand and
looked around at the rest of us, nodding his greetings.

“So this is the
A-Team,” he said.

“That’s us,” said Cass.

“You look a lot bigger
on TV.”

That got a round of
chuckles, and riotous laughter from Flint. Renfield handed Grayson a set of
gear.

“Dan will be joining us
on the ascent. The more the merrier, right?”

A voice broke in from
outside the group. “My thoughts exactly.”

I turned around to see Alexander
King nearby, leaning casually against Mike Pahalo’s white Jeep. Surprisingly,
Mike didn’t leap to shove him off.

“Having trouble getting
clearance to go up the mountain?” asked Cassidy.

“You’re very beautiful,
Ms. Baker,” said Xander. “I can see why Paul likes you.”

Her mouth opened, then
closed. Her face flushed briefly. She was either embarrassed or flattered, or
maybe embarrassed about being flattered.

Xander took a step
toward the group and stopped, his hands in his pockets. I put my hand on
Cassidy’s smooth shoulder and guided her a few inches away. The corner of
Xander’s mouth rose up slightly when he noticed what I was doing.

“The people whom I
represent have very strict rules that often conflict with my…somewhat
cavalier
methods of research,” he said.

“What you do isn’t
research,” I said, remembering the circumstances of our last encounter. “You
don’t care who gets hurt as long as you get what you want.”

“That’s your own
misguided opinion,
Dr.
Nassai.” The disdain with which he pronounced
doctor
would have been obvious to a two-year-old. “I allow people to pay for their own
incompetence so they never again put anyone else in real danger, whereas people
like you are doomed to suffer the same mistakes at the hands of the inept over
and over again. It’s quite amusing, if you can step far enough away to see it
clearly.”

“So go ahead and step
far away, now, to get a better look at
this
situation,” I said.

“What do you want?”
asked Levino.

“The same thing I
wanted when I spoke with you earlier. I wish to accompany your team up Mauna
Loa.”

“Absolutely not,” said
Levino. “You gave me no reason to allow it earlier, and nothing has changed.”

“Oh, but it has,” Xander
said with a grin. He pulled out a piece of paper from his back pocket and held
it up. “And you will find that you have no choice, Dr. Levino, but to accept.”

“T
hey
bought
the insurance company?!” shouted Levino, his
face red with rage. He flipped through the papers that were handed to him,
scanning them with intense befuddlement.

“How is that even
possible?” asked Cassidy.

“It would help if you
understood,” said Xander, a look of smug satisfaction on his face, “that I’m
here as the representative of a cadre of corporations, not just one. Together,
they form a global conglomerate with a GDP more than that of many countries.
The potential monetary benefit to pharmaceutical research of whatever you
discover up there is immeasurable.”

“What if we don’t find
anything?” I asked.

Xander turned to me.
“Then we can always resort to physical violence, like last time.”

“You got in a fight?”
asked Mike, showing slight interest for the first time since I met him.

“More like a brawl,”
said Maria.

“You were there?”

“They were fighting
over me to begin with.”

“I doubt
that’s
true,” said Cassidy.

“Let’s all just calm
down,” said Levino, holding up his hands to try and placate the group.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” asked Maria, turning toward Cassidy and putting a hand on
her hip. It was happening straight out of a soap opera, I swear to God.

“It wasn’t so much
over
her as it was
about
her. It was an issue of safety,” I tried to explain.

“I would have fought,
too,” said Mike.

“Jesus Christ,” said
Levino, rubbing his eyes. “Can we
please
just get moving?” He turned to
Renfield. “Tell me we’re out of protective gear.”

Renfield frowned. “We
have one more full set.”

Xander stepped forward
with his hand out. “I’ll take that, if you please.”

T
he late afternoon sun remained hidden above a ceiling of swift-moving
gray clouds as we began our climb.

Renfield went first,
following the same path his team had been using for their studies before the cave
was discovered. Dan Grayson was next, then Levino, Maria, Mike Pahalo, Flint,
myself, Cassidy, and Xander. A regular bunch of merry climbers, we.

The grade was easy near
the bottom of the volcano, sweeping gently upward toward the peak. Halfway between
base camp and the summit was our target: the cave along the fissure.

“Nice view from back
here,” said Xander.

He grinned up at
Cassidy as she walked in front of him. I paused and let her pass, then fell
into step behind her. I’d be damned if he wasn’t right, though. She wore these
khaki shorts that hugged her upper thighs perfectly. It gave me something to
think about for a while, anyway, instead of focusing on Xander and how badly I
wanted to smash his teeth in. My default setting was far from violent, but
something about the bastard really got my blood boiling.

The trail turned rocky
as we climbed higher.

“You know,” said Xander
thoughtfully, “scientists in general are meek creatures who usually shy away
from physical confrontation. But not you, Paul. You are one microbiologist who
breaks from the herd of sheep and charges the wolf. Our last confrontation
proves my point.”

“Don’t flatter
yourself,” I said. So
that’s
the thing about Xander that switched off my
higher brain functions and made me see red: he knew exactly how to push my
buttons.

“Paul’s always been
like that,” Flint said. “Once he decked a salesman who sold the lab a scanning
microscope that wasn’t properly shielded. One of the lab techs suffered minor
radiation poisoning because of it.”

“That’s not the whole
story,” I said defensively.

The whole story was
that the salesman wouldn’t take responsibility for his company’s mistake, and
he was smug about it when I brought up the problem. He blamed our lab tech for
getting poisoned, and even went so far as to call the young man stupid and
incompetent. I think that’s when I hit the salesman. Then I told him it was his
own damned fault because he showed up for work that morning. The irony was lost
on him.

“Is it true, Paul?”
asked Cass. Guess I had forgotten to tell her the story.

I shrugged. “Being the
youngest of four brothers and having the biggest brain were mutually exclusive
as a kid.”

“Ah,” said Xander with
a smug, punchable grin. “A product of your environment, are you?”

“My father was a real
piece of work, yeah,” I said. “I had to learn to defend myself quickly, or my
mother would have to see my black eyes and missing teeth in every one of my
school pictures. Sometimes I had to defend my brothers as well. Flint,” I said,
hoping to change the subject, “did you pick up anything from those readings you
were studying in the tent?”

His long gray hair was
pulled back in a ponytail, and he wore a red patterned bandana tied around his
forehead. He hopped quickly over a large rock in the path, and I was once again
surprised out how spry he was, despite his Buddha-like beer belly.

“Nothing,” he said.
“The tremors ended yesterday, after the big one that split the mountain.”

“It’s been quiet since
then?”

“Not even so much as a
microquake.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Not at all. Active
volcanoes rumble a little bit now and then. ‘Active’ doesn’t necessarily mean
‘erupting violently’, it simply means the volcano isn’t extinct yet.”

“Volcanoes can go
extinct?” asked Mike.

“Absolutely,” said
Cassidy. “Mauna Loa is technically the largest active volcano in the world, but
it’s only the second largest if you include the extinct ones.”

“What’s the largest?”

“Tamu Massif,” I said
with a quick glance at Maria. She turned back and looked at me, and for a brief
moment she was the woman I used to love instead of the classically fake
celebrity she seemed to have become. Her eyes were almost apologetic, pleading.
Then she turned back to continue uphill, and the moment was gone.

“It’s an underwater
volcano near Japan,” Flint said. “Big bad son of a bitch, back in its day.”

“If I recall,” said
Xander from the back of the line, “Tamu Massif is where Ms. Fontaine made her
great discovery.”

“Shut up, Xander,” she
said firmly, and to my surprise, he did.

Flint barked laughter,
and I couldn’t help but smile.

“I wish we would have
had this gear earlier,” said Dan Grayson, stepping over a small crevice. He
carried his suit and mask in one hand, and a transparent, cube-shaped case in
the other. The inside of the case was lined with compartments of varying sizes,
each one containing a specimen tube.

“There was no way of
knowing we would need it,” said Renfield. “Besides, now we can take our time
without our shoes melting.” He grunted as he pulled himself up onto a low,
rocky shelf. “We’re close.”

There was no vegetation
halfway to the peak. The ground had become a mottled expanse of rock and black
sand, laced with the charred remains of old lava flows. Ahead, the ground
opened narrowly at the beginning of the fissure, like the tip of a long dagger.
Within the fissure, lava pulsed, emitting a red-orange glow that painted the
nearby ground.

“Don’t get too close to
the opening,” said Renfield as he walked parallel the edge, looking in.

A steady stream of
molten rock flowed ten feet below. Everyone but Mike and Grayson gave it a wide
berth.

I turned back to
Xander. “Sure you don’t want to take a closer look?”

“After you, doctor,” he
said.

“The cave is only
several hundred feet from the start of the fissure,” said Renfield. “If you’ll
step this way, I think you’ll find—”

His next words were
lost in a sharp crack of rock splitting. Everyone jumped back from the fissure
as a thin ring of black sand shot up into the air, outlining a section of the
ground breaking off from the whole.

The only person still
in danger was Maria. The expanding crack surrounded her as she ran away from
the fissure. A five-foot section of the ground beneath her feet dropped down
and splashed into the river of lava.

The force of the impact
slammed her to her knees. She crawled to the edge of her small, floating island,
her eyes wide with terror as it began to sink.