Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (14 page)

18

Greece

Fiona tapped the phone’s screen to accept the incoming call and thumbed another button to put it in speaker mode. “Hello?”

“Hello? Dr. Gallo, is it you?” came the reply, an unfamiliar voice. English but the accent was strange. Definitely not Kenner.

“Speaking,” Gallo said in a tight, cautious tone.

“Thank heavens. Dr. Gallo, I am in the car behind you. Please don’t be alarmed. I mean you no harm.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Matthew James. I work for Aegis International Services. Dr. Pierce hired me in Gibraltar to look after you.”

Fiona gaped at Gallo, wide-eyed. She was familiar with Aegis, a security consulting firm that provided protection and logistical support for international businessmen and even a few small governments. It was one of the many subsidiary agencies discreetly owned by the Herculean Society, and like the rest, it was an asset that could be readily employed in the pursuit of the Society’s agenda, if the need arose.

The man chasing after them was not an enemy, but a bodyguard.

Gallo’s face transformed in an instant. “Son of a bitch,” she said in a low but angry tone.

“It was not my intention to frighten you,” James went on. “I was only supposed to watch from a distance, but... Please, slow down.”

Gallo looked over at Fiona. “He knew. He knew we wouldn’t stay in the cave, so he hired a babysitter.”

Fiona shrugged, and then nodded to the highway ahead. “Could be worse, right?”

Gallo raised her voice. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“Dr. Pierce gave me your number. You can call him and verify, if you like.”

Fiona thought that sounded like a good idea. “Should I?”

Gallo gave a nod.

Fiona ended the call without comment and scrolled through Gallo’s contacts to find the number for Pierce’s satellite phone. As the call went out, she noted that Gallo had slowed the Fox to a reasonably safe highway speed, and the trailing vehicle had backed off. Both were encouraging developments.

The call went to voicemail.

Fiona looked at Gallo again. “Now what?”

Gallo nodded her head toward their bodyguard. “Call him back.”

James picked up on the first ring. “Do you believe me now?”

Gallo ignored the question. “If you’re going to tag along, we’re going to have to set some ground rules.”

“Certainly,” James replied. “Keeping you safe is my first priority, but your—”

James’s voice went to static as an artificial sun rose behind them.

What?

Fiona whipped her head around and caught a glimpse of the expanding ball of flame in the middle of the highway. She could feel heat radiating through the windows. Then the sound of the explosion reverberated through the car, simultaneous with a shock wave that swatted the Fox like an invisible hand, sending it into a spin.

Gallo swore as she fought to regain control. Beside her, Fiona could do nothing more than hang on.

An explosion. James’s car just blew up. James is dead.

Just as Gallo got the Fox back under control, there was another bloom of fire, this one directly in their path and much closer.

The blast tore into the little Volkswagen. The windshield didn’t shatter, but the hood peeled up, momentarily eclipsing Fiona’s view of this new explosion. Then, the bottom dropped out of the world as the explosion lifted the Fox off the road like a balsa wood glider, flipping it end over end. It landed upside down, with a crunch that crumpled the roof and blew out all the windows.

Hanging upside down, Fiona was in full panic mode, desperate to grab onto anything that could restore order to the world. The interior of the car had gone dark. The air was thick with the smell of scorched metal and plastic, gasoline fumes and something else…a strange ammonia smell.

There was a crunching sound—glass being pulverized, metal and fiberglass crushed like an old soda can—as the overturned vehicle tilted forward, borne down by the weight of the engine. Fiona’s center of gravity shifted again.

She heard a low moan from out of the darkness.

“Aunt Gus?” Her own voice was barely audible. She couldn’t seem to draw a breath. The seat belt, which had saved her life, now felt like a saw blade, cutting across her torso. She groped blindly, trying to find the buckle.

A different noise filled her ears now, the loud scream of an engine, with an underlying rhythm, a deep, resonant thumping.

Helicopter.

In a matter of seconds, the noise reached a feverish crescendo. A tempest swirled through the crushed vehicle, blasting Fiona with debris particles. The storm’s intensity abated after a moment, but the helicopter’s noise had grown to deafening proportions. It had landed, somewhere close by.

A light filled the misshapen space where the window had once been, growing brighter as its source moved closer. The silhouette of a hand appeared in front of her face, fingers curling around the door frame. Then with another squeal of tortured metal, the entire door was ripped off its hinges. The whole car shuddered, and Fiona felt a fresh wave of pain as the seatbelt dug into her body.

A face materialized before her. Shrouded in the shadows cast by the flashlight, she could not make out any details, but she immediately recognized the hulking outline.

Vigor Rohn.

“No!” She scrabbled for the seatbelt release again, desperate to get free, knowing that even if she did, there was nowhere to go.

Hard, strong hands closed around her shoulders, immobilizing her. She felt a sharp twinge of pain at the base of her neck, followed by a cold sensation that spread quickly to her extremities. As she descended into a narcotic fog, Rohn laughed.

19

Liberia

Pierce snapped back to consciousness with painful abruptness. Something hard was grinding into his abdomen, pounding his guts like repeated punches, while the rest of his body seemed to be floating in mid-air. He threw out his hands, trying to grab onto something, and in that moment, the acid bath’s all-consuming pain returned with a vengeance and threatened to drag him down again. He clenched his teeth and fought to make sense of what was happening.

In the dim light, he could see the outline of trees moving past, seeming to jump up and down in time with the rhythmic pummeling.

I’m moving. Someone is carrying me
.

He turned his head and tried to locate his rescuer, but all he could see was a broad back, clad in a tattered Tyvek bio-safety suit. The sharp object pressing into his innards was the shoulder of his savior. He had been scooped up like a sack of potatoes. He glimpsed something moving at the same level as his head. Another figure, wrapped in an environment suit, was slung over the opposite shoulder.

It was Carter. Which meant that the person carrying them had to be one of the WHO aid workers that had come with her.

A glimmer of hope shone through the pain-induced fog, but it was just as quickly replaced by despair. Cooper was still back there, still caught in the green trap. He wanted to tell his rescuer to stop, to put him down and let him go back, but he knew how futile the gesture would be. His own survival was still at risk.

And yet, the person carrying both him and Carter seemed impervious to the carnivorous plants. Pierce could see the man’s feet moving in and out of view with each step. The vines snaked around his ankles, trying to ensnare him and drag him down, but the man tore through the green tendrils like they were party streamers. Perhaps the suit protected him from the assault, but Pierce recalled how those tiny fibrous threads had so quickly overwhelmed him and Carter. Their rescuer was as strong and relentless as a bull.

The faintest hint of a breeze brought momentary relief from the stinging miasma. Fresh air. He blinked away the tears blurring his vision. He saw trees and dark earth, untouched by the vines.

They were clear of the infested zone.

The man ran on another fifty feet before stopping and easing his burdens to the ground. Pierce rolled away, and began tearing at his clothes. He could still feel the vines on him, clinging to his skin, burning him with acidic secretions, still very much alive and intent on consuming him.

A few feet away, his rescuer was bent over Carter’s unmoving form, similarly stripping off the suit that had failed to protect her. In the dim twilight, Pierce could see long green tentacles moving on the man’s legs, throwing off still more tendrils in a search for nutrient-rich flesh, but the man’s attention was completely focused on helping Carter. He ripped through the suit like wet tissue paper, and then tore the vines away from her face.

Carter’s eyes opened. Though her face was twisted in a mask of agony, she managed a grateful smile. “The others. Help the others.”

Pierce could sense hesitancy in the man’s bunched shoulders, but after a few silent seconds, he got to his feet and turned back toward the vine-shrouded forest. The man was tall, easily six-four, and built like a living colossus. Then Pierce caught a glimpse of the hard visage behind the plastic face-shield, and his heart skipped a beat.

Not possible.

He was looking at a dead man.

The giant met his gaze for an instant, just long enough to register both recognition and surprise, then the man was running again, vanishing into the green hell.

Pierce tried to shake off his paralysis and call out to the man, but he was a fraction of a second too slow, and his cry simply echoed away into oblivion.

“Bishop!”

20

Bishop
.

He fought back the rush of memories triggered by hearing his old name, with the same ferocity that drove him through the clinging vines. The fiery chemical burn spreading across his skin helped him sharpen his focus. Pain had a way of doing that for him, and he had not felt such clarity in a very long time.

But the memories…

I used to be Bishop
, the giant thought as he ran.
But not anymore
.

The memories were a burden.

What is Pierce doing here? Looking for me?

That didn’t seem possible. Not a day went by where he did not half-expect to see one of his former teammates come strolling through the door, demanding to know why he had gone AWOL, but Pierce?

He clenched his jaw, as if trying to bite through the umbilical cord that still connected him to the man he had been, and he kept running.

The vines were like the tentacles of a kraken, writhing around him, latching on at the slightest contact, slithering through the tiniest holes in the fabric of his suit. The acid stung his skin, burned in his eyes like a blast of pepper-spray. He thought about tearing off the suit, but without its slight protection, even
he
might not be able to survive.

Probably best not test those limits right now.

There had not been time to process what was now happening with the plants. Earlier in the day, when the team had discovered the infestation, the risk had seemed manageable, and in a way, preferable to what they had been expecting. Their suits had provided sufficient protection from the mild stinging vapor that was released when the plants were cut or crushed, and as long as they kept moving, the vine shoots were merely a nuisance. It had only been when they reached the village that the full scope of the threat had become apparent.

The vines had killed every living thing in the village.

The scientists, including Carter, had been at a loss to explain how this had happened. While it was evident that the plants secreted an enzyme that could digest flesh and bone, it was impossible to imagine the people in the village simply rolling over and letting the vines devour them.

But now he understood how it had happened, what had changed.

It had gotten dark.

He didn’t completely understand the mechanism at work. He had acquired a diverse body of knowledge over the course of his life, but he was not a botanist any more than he was an infectious disease expert. Yet, he did know that plants behaved differently when the sun went down and photosynthesis stopped. Maybe darkness or cooling temperatures acted as a signal for the plant to seek out a new source of energy or nutrients. Perhaps they were drawn to the heat of bodies or some specific chemical marker. Figuring out exactly what was happening, and for that matter, determining where the plant had come from in the first place, would be a job for the survivors. And there would be at least one. He had made sure of that.

When the vines had gone on the attack, he had acted without hesitation, almost without conscious thought, tearing through the web of growth, ignoring the tendrils that wormed through the taped seams of his suit, ignoring the cries of the other aid workers. He had immediately recognized the danger, not just to himself but to Felice, and by extension, to the rest of the world.

Only Felice mattered.

If she died, the world would die.

Or maybe not. It was impossible to say, just as it was impossible for him to separate that overarching motivation from his feelings for her.

But now that she was safe, he could not simply abandon the others.

He quickly found the place where he had rescued Felice and Pierce. A vine-covered lump lay across the trail, the shape unmistakably that of a body. There had been someone else there, someone he had missed.

He bent down and tore at the blanket of vines, exposing a body. He couldn’t distinguish the man’s face, but he wore ordinary street clothes instead of a bio-safety suit. A villager, or someone traveling with Pierce. It didn’t matter. Alive or dead?

That didn’t matter either.

He bent over and scooped the man up into his arms. He threw him over one shoulder, just as he had done with the others, and started forward again.

Or tried to.

The vines had curled around his feet, holding him fast. He kicked against them, but this time there were too many of the fibrous strands to be so easily overcome. Unbalanced, he toppled forward, his human burden slipping to the ground. More tendrils shot out, curling up his arms, clinging to the faceplate of his suit, worming into the folds of his mask’s filter.

To remain still, even for a moment, was certain death. He arched his back, attempting to wrench his hands free, but to no avail. He was caught. A fly in a spider’s web.

But then his fingers brushed against something hard.
A rock?
No, it was metal. The blade of a long bush knife. He curled his fist around the machete, and then using his other hand for additional leverage, he wrenched both his hand and the blade free.

He hacked at the ground with furious abandon, throwing up shreds of plants and huge clots of soil. In a few moments, he had cleared a rough circle of ground. He got back to his feet and hoisted the unconscious man onto his shoulder again, but new shoots sprang up from the fresh mulch.

Time to get moving again.

He hit the surrounding web of vines at a full sprint, his momentum allowing him to tear through them. The blocky shapes of houses appeared before him, but he did not slow.

His goal lay two hundred yards beyond the village, where the aid team had cleared an area and established a camp site. Although surrounded by the infestation, they had deemed the environment safe, even with the sorry state of their protective equipment. But that had been before nightfall.

Before the change.

He spotted a glow directly ahead, artificial light coming from the camp, and allowed himself a small measure of hope. As the tents came into view, he could see suited figures moving about, but any sense of relief was tempered by the fact that several of the tents were already partially covered in foliage. The camp wouldn’t last long.

As he skidded into the ever-tightening circle of cleared ground, one of the suited figures called out. “Lazarus! Thank God!”

Lazarus was the name he had taken for himself, the name of the man who had come back from the dead, but that wasn’t what had happened to him.

Erik Somers—‘Bishop’—had died. The man who had come back, Erik Lazarus, was someone else.

“Where’s Felice?” asked another of the suited figures.

“Safe,” was all Lazarus said. He did a quick head count. They were all there. All had made it to the relative safety of the camp. It would not be safe much longer. The vines were advancing, growing toward the besieged doctors and scientists, an inch or two with every passing second.

“We have to go,” he announced. He regarded the machete in his hand for a moment then passed it to the nearest man. It would not do for what he had in mind. Instead, he turned toward the stack of gear they had packed in—medical equipment and camping supplies. He selected a short-handled shovel with an eight-inch-wide blade. It was hardly ideal, but given what he had to work with, it would have to do. “I’ll try to clear a trail,” he told the others. “Stay on it. Stay close to me. If I go down, run as fast as you can and don’t stop until you are clear. Got it?”

He got wide-eyed looks and tentative nods as an answer. That would have to suffice.

He lowered the shovel, the back of the blade flat against the ground, and then launched into motion, plowing a narrow strip through the sea of green. The vines peeled off in great clumps, rolling to the side or, more often than not, dropping back into his footpath, but he simply kicked these out of the way as he ran.

He did not stop. He did not look back.

There was nothing more he could do to save the others. Whether or not they survived was up to them now.