The Last Peak (Book 2): The Darwin Collapse (2 page)

The boy doubled over, crying out to anyone that would listen.

No one did.

“You filthy scum! Try to pinch me?”

Blows rained down on the boy until he collapsed into a stream of sewage. He couldn’t smell it through the blood filling his nose. He curled into a ball and covered up as the man continued to kick and stomp.

Eventually, the beating stopped.

The boy peeked out, wondering if he’d died. But while the beating had stopped, the agony had not. He was still alive.

The man bent over, holding his knees, breathing hard. He caught the boy’s gaze and grinned wickedly. His eyes lit up.

“We’re not done yet, boy. You’re not going to leave this alley.”

The boy noticed movement behind the rich man. It looked like a flickering shadow at first.
 

The shadow emerged behind the rich man. The older boy. The dangerous looking one he’d succeeded in avoiding.
 

Well, it was over. Perhaps they would take turns beating him to death. Maybe that would make it end faster, at least.

The tall boy gazed down at him, at the bloodied mess curled on the ground. There was no softness in his eyes. No pity. He drew a long, thin shadow from inside his shabby coat. The razor edge glinted as it caught the light.

The rich man spat on the injured boy and snarled. “What say we finish this?”

It wasn’t a question.

The tall boy stepped to his side and the long, thin shadow in his hand pierced the rich man’s neck. The shadow sliced sideways and parted the neck into a grisly smile.

Blood spilled down the man’s coat as he clutched at the gaping wound in shock. He collapsed in a heap. Blood poured out of his neck, pooling first and then running through the cracks between the uneven cobblestones.
 

The tall boy kicked the man over onto his back. He rifled through the man’s pockets and found the wallet. He opened it and pulled out a huge wad of bills. He snapped through the stack and grinned. He stepped on the dying man’s chest, pulled the boy up to a sit and leaned him against the brick wall.

“This is my street. I should kill you to send a message.”

The boy’s head hung low, because it was too painful to lift. Breathing was agony. Maybe death would be better. Probably.

“Do you want to die?”

The tall boy lifted his chin, not gently, and gazed hard into his eyes.

“Do you want to die?”

As easy as it would’ve been, as preferable to the unending misery that was all he could remember, he yet wanted to live. Something inside raged to take one more breath.

He shook his head.

“Then you work for me now. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded.

The tall boy slipped the razor shadow under the boy’s neck. The blade pressed a hard line into his throat.
 

“I have only one rule. Absolute loyalty. Break that and you’ll wish this suit killed you.”

The boy nodded.

The tall boy sifted through the wallet and pulled out a coin. He turned it from side to side.

“Must be foreign. Keep it.”

He flipped the coin into the boy’s lap and then dropped the empty wallet on the sputtering man’s chest. He wiped the steel shadow clean on the rich man’s fine wool coat. He stood and gazed down at the boy.

“Loyalty. Unquestioned and absolute.”

He turned and strode away.

A Week into Collapse

Los Angeles, California

DR. ANTON RESHENKO
gazed out of the floor-to-ceiling windows on the seventy-third floor of the Milagro Tower. He barely registered the startling changes of the City of Angels. Urban centers around the world had undergone similar transformations. Movies had once been the region’s most famous export.

No longer.

The virus had spread with astonishing speed, killing off most of the world’s population. He couldn’t have been a prouder father.

Like a modern Mount Olympus, the cylinder of glass and white concrete raised him into the heavens. The crown of the building had the Milagro name in big, block letters that shone at night, even now when few had power.

It truly was a miracle.

Rather,
he
was the miracle.

Like Jesus with the merchants and the moneylenders, Anton had swept the disease from the temple and laid the foundation for a glorious future.

His thoughts soared above the inconsequential happenings and struggles of those bound to the surface below. All of them but one. The one that tethered him to mortality. He abhorred weakness in others and he found it no less offensive in himself. She was the single off flavor in his grand achievement.

How he longed to pluck her out and, at last, be free of petty emotion. But he could not. She was too much like her mother.

He gazed out over the Pacific Ocean to the west and experienced a certain kinship, a soulful resonance, with explorers from bygone days.
 

Surely, they felt both fear and delight at the prospect of sailing into the unknown, into a future of unlimited potential.
 

He felt the same way.

After centuries of increasingly imbecilic decision-making, after a continual weakening of the human mind through dependence and distraction, profound change had finally arrived. And he was the spark that had lit the fire from which a new and better world would emerge.

To wield such power was gratifying.

In the left pocket of his rumpled pants, Anton rubbed the silver Dirham of Genghis Khan between his thumb and index finger. So deep was his reverie that the pain of the blistered and bleeding flesh went unnoticed.

Objectively, he grasped that some might think his actions were those of a delusional megalomaniac. A villain with a soul so black that archetypal historical villains seemed a shade of gray in comparison.

People regularly cited the evils of Hitler and his campaign that ended the lives of over forty million people. And yet few recalled Genghis Khan, a conqueror who dispatched a similar number. And gallingly, even fewer factored in the period in which each man lived. Khan made his name when the earth held just four-hundred million people. He wiped away ten percent of the planet's population, whereas Hitler claimed less than two percent.

And
Khan did so with the crude and laborious implements of his day. His genius was as breathtaking as it was underappreciated.

Anton felt a close kinship with the ancient Khan. He often wondered if the infamous Mongol somehow felt the same connection through the ages. As magnificent as Genghis Khan's achievements were, they were nothing to the changes Anton himself had wrought.

He suspected even the great Khan would sink to his knees in supplication. The knowledge warmed him.

Like no conqueror ever before, Anton had changed the course of humanity's evolution forever. His bravery and intellect set a new course into a great unknown, one where mankind might reach the greatness that was its birthright.

The same potential it had let drown in an ocean of satisfied complacency.
 

A voice from behind startled him.

"Do you expect me to just stand here all day?"

The senator’s voice sounded infinitely more weary than it had just a week ago before the change began. It sounded infinitely more
pathetic
.

Anton turned away from his thoughts as his right hand subconsciously scratched at the growing bald spot in his formerly glorious sideburns. His nose curled as a whiff of old age and frailty wafted from the elderly man. His stomach churned as it always did after he’d been thinking of her.

Iridia. His daughter.

The source of his worry.

Her absence was the crack in his heart and mind. The fault line disgusted him. His words flicked like a whip in the senator's direction.

"What I expect you to do is retrieve my daughter!"

Senator Charles Rawlings pushed his thick-lensed glasses up the bridge of his nose and shook his head.

"I got us here from D.C. And with all the chaos, that was no small feat. Let me remind you!"

"That was four days ago," Anton answered and then looked around theatrically, "and yet I still do not see my daughter standing next to me." His cheek itched like fire. He scratched at it for a measure of fleeting relief.

"From what little communications we've received," Rawlings replied, "the command and control structure of the United States of America is a shambles. I’m the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and even I can't call up a rescue team from nothing."

Anton rounded the elegant desk of glass and air and confronted the elderly senator. He leaned forward until their eyes were inches apart.

"You
were
the chairman.
Now
, you are a useless old man. One for which I have fewer and fewer reasons to keep alive."

“How dare you!” the old man said. “I brought you on board. Without me, you would be nothing!”

Anton slapped the senator across the face with all of his might. It, perhaps, offended good taste to hit a man of such advanced years, but Anton was in no mood to be challenged just now.

The senator dabbed a crooked finger to his bleeding lip and stared at the small patch of black marble floor that separated them. "We don't know that she's still alive. Or, if so, that she’s still like she was."
 

Anton's palm connected again with the slack skin of the senator’s face almost before he considered the act. "Never say that! She's with a resourceful colleague of Mr. Pike's."

He turned to the tall bodyguard standing by the door, stoically looking ahead. "Mr. Pike, what do you say?"

The bodyguard broke into an easy grin. "Shit, Sarge could keep a penguin alive in the Sahara. I reckon if anyone can survive that shitstorm out there, it's him."

The towering Texan's enthusiasm wasn't one of Anton's favorite qualities. Fortunately for him, he had other skills of greater import. He was deadly. He was efficient. But most important of all, he was loyal.

Anton returned his attention to the sniveling goat before him. "She's out there and
you
need to get her for me."

"I'm doing everything I can with limited communications and limited connections to other areas of organized activity."

"Mr. Pike, please leave the office and close the door. The senator and I have classified information to discuss."

"Yes, sir," the beefy man replied with a nod and then did as he was told.

Anton smiled. He appreciated unquestioning obedience. Casimiro Pike knew his place in life and he performed his role. An important role considering the changes. A bodyguard was no longer a luxury of the rich. It was a necessity of the living.

The door clicked shut.

Anton turned to Senator Rawlings. He grabbed the old man's collar and curled it in his fist.

"The problem is you lack sufficient motivation."

The broken politician quailed in terror.
 

Anton tore open the senator's oxford shirt and raised a syringe in his other hand. He slammed it down and buried the long silver needle into paper-thin, crinkled flesh. He pressed the plunger and delivered the death sentence.

Anton stepped back, leaving the syringe stuck in Rawlings' chest.

The old man yanked it free and flung it away in horror. "What have you done?"

Anton smiled with genuine pleasure. "I injected you with the Delta Virus."

It still bothered him that
Delta Virus
had somehow caught on in the popular media, before said media went dark and thankfully stopped broadcasting its repetitive puke.

He informally thought of MT-1 as the Darwin Virus. The name had a poet's truth. But even using the name repeatedly in those first interviews streamed around the world didn't anchor it sufficiently in the public consciousness.

The
Delta Virus
caught on instead. Delta in science meaning
the change
in something. People began to witness the incredible effects of the virus and The Change Virus was all they could come up with. Though he appreciated the scientific angle, as any man of intellect would, it was still unimaginative and inferior to his version.

Who knew how such viral movements took shape? It would be a fascinating topic for later research.

The change
was a rather rudimentary description of an infinitely complex set of chemical and neurological processes that, in the end, resulted in the way forward that Anton had envisioned so long ago.

The senator's knees buckled and he collapsed onto a svelte black office chair. "No! No! No!" His head dropped so low it looked like his neck had surrendered.
 

"Yes."

Anton grabbed his chin and lifted it so their eyes met. "You will get the resources to retrieve my daughter or you will die horribly. Or, worst yet, wish you had."

The senator's eyes went wide and white. "How long do I have?"

"You've seen the pathology. Somewhere between twenty-four and seventy-two hours."
Anton turned to the closed office door. "Mr. Pike!"

The door opened and Anton's bodyguard entered. "Yes, sir?" His eyes darted around the room searching for signs of danger.

He would find none visible, the danger was only beginning to flourish in Senator Rawlings' blood stream.

"Escort Charles to the comms station. He has vital business to attend to."

MASON WEST
checked the time on his watch. One minute to noon. He reached over the kitchen sink and grabbed the small emergency radio from the windowsill. The solar panel on the top warmed his palm. He clicked it on and stared out into the backyard, waiting for the broadcast to begin.

Cold thoughts began to creep in when warm arms encircled his waist and an equally warm body hugged his backside. He knew the feel of Elizabeth’s body on an instinctual level. Over fifteen years of marriage could do that.

And that was just it.

It
could
do that.

There were no guarantees. The passage of time didn’t require that closeness. Quite the opposite, in fact. It seemed the passage of time often induced distance; a growing apart as the years sped by.