53. Chapter 53
Chapter fifty-three
Day 24 Denali, Alaska
Wolf avoided Aiden’s eyes as he brushed past him and headed for the front door with long, urgent strides. Aiden followed. The nanobot update had certainly put a damper on Benioko’s summons.
He waited until the door closed behind him before asking the obvious question. “Vibrating? What the hell does that mean?”
There he went, asking what again. Wolf, he noticed, was pretending he didn’t exist. No glances in his direction, no adjustments in his strides to accommodate Aiden’s pace, no response to his question. He’d never seen his big bro so passive aggressively determined to avoid something that obviously bugged the shit out of him. Benioko’s Taounaha nonsense had sure shoved a bug up his brother’s ass.
“Come on, bro.” Aiden raised his voice and increased his speed to keep up. “You can’t actually believe all that bullshit back there. I’m not the mouthpiece of your gods.”
“Not yet,” Wolf agreed, except he sounded grimmer than ever.
“Not ever.”
Wolf slowed and flicked an intent glance at Aiden’s face. “Yet you dream of them.”
White screaming faces…
Aiden banished the image. He was not letting those assholes haunt him during the day. “I don’t know what my dreams represent, but they sure as hell aren’t about your shadow gods.”
Wolf’s grunt was full of disbelief. So was the look he turned on Aiden.
“Jesus, man.” Aiden’s voice rose. So did his blood pressure. He was not the mouthpiece of the Shadow Warrior! No fucking way! “I admit the dreams are whacked. But, if I’m the fucking mouthpiece to your Shadow Warrior, why the fuck doesn’t he give me anything to say? Nobody says a damn word in those dreams.”
His brother stopped so abruptly, Aiden cruised past him and had to wheel back around.
“Perhaps…” Wolf’s voice was so tight, Aiden had to strain to hear the words. “You refuse to listen.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Yeah—this was getting them nowhere fast. Time to focus on what was important, which wasn’t trivial superstition.
“Look, let’s shelve this discussion and move on.” He waited for Wolf to walk again. “You said the nanobots are vibrating. What’s going on there?”
The last he’d heard, the bots Wolf had retrieved from Kuznetsov were still sitting in their containment tank in one of the labs.
His brother shrugged but accepted the change of subject. “The case the bots are in started vibrating. This is all I know.”
“Is the vibration coming from the bots?” Aiden asked as they reached the two utility carts. Wolf climbed into the driver’s seat of the vehicle that was there when Aiden arrived.
“It appears so. The case has no cause to vibrate. Faith says the bots are huddled together. The vibrations appear to be coming from them.”
Aiden hopped into the passenger seat.
Before the phone call from the lab, Benioko had announced the beginning of the end of times—or something to that effect. He’d issued the warning prior to Faith’s report about the nanobot vibrations. The two warnings had to be connected.
“We should turn back and talk to Benioko, find out what he knows about these vibrations. He knew something was up before Faith called.”
Wolf frowned at the suggestion, his finger hovering over the cart’s start button. His phone rang again. Wolf plucked it from the cargo pocket of his tactical pants and lifted it to his ear. Even from the passenger seat, Aiden could hear the shrill voice coming over the cell phone. Not the words—but the tone, the sharp pitch and urgent cadence to it.
His scalp tightened beneath a sudden surge of foreboding.
What the hell was wrong now?
His brother’s face paled, going from flat to stunned, and then horrified. Even more horrified than it had been earlier during that fucked up conversation with Benioko.
“This is not possible,” Wolf huffed out. He listened more. “Lock them in. Vent the oxygen from the room. They must not escape. We are on our way.”
Aiden’s gut twisted. Memories slashed through his mind.
Squirrel’s snarling face and twitching fingers. Muddy, enraged eyes. Rifles rising. The crack of gunfire.
“The bots got out?” Christ, what a catastrophe.
Had they already infected the lab techs? How were they going to contain a microscopic entity that could slip through the smallest of cracks? According to Kuznetsov, when Samuel had interrogated him, the bots had a built-in kill switch, which had been activated after the testing on his team. Which was why no one from the Shadow Mountain team had been infected. How the hell were they going to turn this new batch off?
“It is not just the nanobots in the lab.” Wolf punched the start button with a stiff index finger, slammed the cart into reverse, and rapidly backed the utility vehicle out onto the main thoroughfare. He glanced at Aiden, disbelief heavy in his eyes. “Your teammates just sat up. All of them. At once.”
“What?” Aiden reeled back in the passenger seat. “That’s not possible. They’re dead! They’ve been dead for weeks.”
“Nevertheless…” Wolf’s voice, hoarse with shock, trailed off.
There had to be some mistake. The dead didn’t sit up.
The trip to the new section of base was silent, tense. Wolf pulled into a parking slot in front of the ER. The isolation unit had no dedicated morgue, so one of the sealed chambers had been filled with gurneys and flooded with cold. His teammates’ sheeted bodies were stored there. A short dude with thinning red hair and a full-body tic met them as soon as they stepped out of the cart.
“They sat up. At the same time. Like fucking zombies!” The redhead sounded winded, as if the sight had knocked the breath from him and he hadn’t gotten it back yet.
“Zombies…” Wolf repeated beneath his breath. A startled look flashed across his face. “Have they spoken? Moved beyond the sitting?”
“No.” The isolation tech’s green scrubs fluttered around him. There was no breeze, so the dude’s wired energy had to be creating the movement. “But they’re sitting upright.”
Aiden still didn’t believe it. Outside of Hollywood and the Bible, dead men didn’t suddenly arise.
The isolation wing was next door to the ER. The glass doors sprung open allowing them entrance. The hallway Aiden found himself in was icy. The air was stagnant, the walls a chilling white. The corridor seemed to go on forever, twisting left, and then right. Doors periodically popped up with metal, eye-level labels. IT1. IT2. Supplies . They rounded another curve, which deposited them into a large, rectangular room with glass-enclosed chambers along the right and left. The air was even colder here, which was odd. Aiden didn’t remember freezing during his stint in the isolation chamber.
The redheaded tech led them across the room to the last glass-enclosed chamber on the right. Aiden froze, staring in morbid fascination at the five gurneys. Or more like stared at the five tattered, man-shaped things sitting with sheets pooled over their crotches and their legs draped over the edges of the stainless steel exam tables.
Not. Fucking. Possible.
“I told you to vent it.”
Wolf’s voice was a distant, gritty rumble as Aiden’s eyes drifted from one shimmering table to the next.
“We did,” said a high, nervous voice. “It had no effect. They’re still sitting up.”
Movement on the first gurney caught Aiden’s attention. His eyes tracked the motion. The thing on the table tilted its head. The motion was jerky, almost birdlike.
High on the creature’s neck, just below its ear, a tattoo flashed beneath the overhead lights—the bronze and gold scales of a coiled snake.
Squirrel’s tattoo.
Squirrel’s dead body.
His moving, dead body.
A tangled combination of horror and hope climbed his throat.
Flashes of memories reeled through his mind. Brashness and a firm handshake as Squirrel introduced himself during those first days of BUD/S. His dress whites and grim face, the brashness gone, at their first pounding of the Trident after Booker had taken a round to spare their lives. His steady aim and unrelenting focus during assault after assault. His squinty-eyed laugh and squinty-eyed frown.
Twitching fingers and twitching eyes. A snarling face. His rifle rising.
Christ . Aiden massaged his burning eyes.
When he dropped his hands, the Squirrel thing was wobbling toward the window. His face was a mangled mess—empty eye sockets, missing nose, chunks of forehead, cheeks, and chin gone.
But he was standing.
He was walking.
New, fragile tissue was forming over the missing parts of his face. The abdominal stitching running the length of his torso after the autopsy looked like a healing wound rather than a stitched cut.
Dead flesh did not heal. Yet…it was healing.
The Squirrel thing took another wobbly, shambling step forward. The movement was uncoordinated and reeked of effort. Yet its dead legs were holding it up. Its dead legs were walking.
The thing that used to be his best friend stumbled up to the window and stopped. Its empty eyes sockets, with their delicate webbing of new tissue, stared directly into Aiden’s face. It cocked its head in that oddly birdlike movement.
Then, it opened its mouth.