Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

You have seven minutes to evacuate the area.

Carson raced from the Zoo and down the hall to the exit air lock. Seeing him approach, de Vaca opened the rubber-sealed door, and the two moved quickly into the decontamination chamber. As the sterilizing agents began to rain down on them, Carson stood near the hatchway door, looking through the glass plate back into the Fever Tank. By now, he knew, the force of the chimps’ pounding would have shaken free the faceplates and opened the cage doors. He imagined the creatures, sick and angry, racing through the darkened facility, over lab tables, along corridors ... down ladders ...

You have five minutes to evacuate the area.

Suddenly, Carson realized his lungs were no longer drawing in air. He turned to de Vaca and made a chopping movement across his neck. If they continued trying to breathe, they would simply inspire carbon dioxide.

The yellowish bath stopped and the far hatchway opened. Carson moved into the next air lock, struggling against an overwhelming desire to breathe. As the immense driers roared into life, a terrible need for oxygen set fire to his lungs. He looked over at de Vaca, leaning weakly against the wall. She shook her head.

Was that a shotgun blast? Over the hum of the drying mechanism, Carson couldn’t be sure.

Suddenly the last air lock opened and they tumbled into the ready room. Carson helped de Vaca remove her helmet, then tugged desperately at his own, dropping it to the floor and gulping in the fresh, sweet air.

You have three minutes to evacuate the area.

They struggled out of their bluesuits, then left the ready room, moving down the hallway and into the elevator leading up to the operations building. “They may be waiting for us outside,” Carson said.

“No way,” de Vaca gasped as she gulped in large lungfuls of air. “They’re going to be running like hell to the other side of the compound.”

The hallways of the operations building remained dark and empty. They raced down the corridor and through the atrium, pausing briefly at the front entrance. As Carson cracked the door open, the frantic blatting of emergency sirens rushed in to meet them. He looked around, then moved quickly into the shadows outside, motioning de Vaca to follow him.

Mount Dragon was in chaos. Carson could see several small knots of people huddled together, talking or yelling among themselves. In a pool of light outside the residency compound, several scientists were standing—some clad in pajamas—talking excitedly. Carson could see Harper among them, shaking a raised fist. Figures could be seen, marching and sometimes running between the probing beams of the klieg lights.

They moved quickly through the deserted inner perimeter gate and into the shadow of the incinerator. As Carson scanned the far end of the compound, his eyes fell on the motor pool. Half a dozen armed guards surrounded the Hummers, brilliantly spotlighted in a bank of lights. In the center of the group stood Nye. Carson saw the security director gesture in the direction of the Fever Tank.

“The stables!” Carson shouted in de Vaca’s ear.

They found the horses standing in their stalls, restless, alert to the excitement. De Vaca led the horses to the tack room while Carson ran ahead to secure the blankets and saddles.

As Carson turned toward Roscoe, saddle in both hands, the earth suddenly shuddered beneath his feet. Then a flash of intense light illuminated the inside of the stables in a stark, unyielding glare. The explosion began as a muffled thump, followed by an endlessly building roar. Carson felt the wave of overpressure rock the stables, and the windows along the far wall burst inward, scattering shards of wood and glass across the barn floor. De Vaca’s Appaloosa reared in terror.

“Easy, boy,” said de Vaca, catching the reins and stroking the animal’s neck.

Carson looked quickly around the stables, saw Nye’s saddlebags, grabbed them and tossed them to de Vaca. “There should be canteens inside. Fill them in the horse trough!” he shouted, throwing on the blankets and reaching for the saddles.

When she raced back, he was tightening Roscoe’s flank cinch. Carson slapped the saddlebags on the skirts and tied them with the saddle strings as de Vaca mounted.

“Wait a minute,” Carson said. He ran back and grabbed two riding hats from their pegs in the tack room. Then, returning, he climbed onto Roscoe and they moved through the open door.

The heat of the fire slapped against their faces as they stared at the devastation outside. The low filtration housing that marked the roof of the Fever Tank was now a ruined crater from which gouts of flame licked skyward. The concrete roof of the operations building had buckled, and a reddish glow rose from its interior. In the residency compound, curtains whipped crazily through a hundred shattered windows. An intense fire roared out of the incinerator, coloring the surrounding sand a brilliant orange.

The path of the blast had cut a swath of destruction through the compound, peeling back the roof of the canteen and flattening a large section of the perimeter fence. “Follow me!” Carson shouted, giving his horse the heel. They raced through the smoke and fire to the blowdown, jumped the twisted wreckage of the perimeter fence, and galloped across the desert toward the welcoming darkness.

When they were half a mile from the compound and beyond the glow of the fire, Carson slowed his horse to a trot.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said as de Vaca pulled up alongside. “We’d better take it easy on these horses.”

As he spoke, another explosion rocked the ruins of the operations building, and a massive fireball arose from the hole in the ground that had been the Fever Tank, roiling toward the sky. Several secondary blasts slapped the darkness like aftershocks: the transfection lab crumbled into nothingness, and the walls of the residency compound shuddered, then collapsed.

The lights of Mount Dragon winked out, leaving only the lambent flickering of the burning buildings to mark the remains of the complex.

“There goes my pre-war Gibson flathead,” Carson muttered.

As he turned Roscoe back into the well of blackness ahead, he saw pencil beams of light begin to stab across the desert. The beams seemed to be moving toward them, blinking in and out of sight as they followed the bumpy terrain. Suddenly, powerful spotlights snapped on, illuminating the desert in long yellow lances.

“ Qué chinga’o ,” said de Vaca. “The Hummers survived the explosion. We’ll never outrun those bastards in this desert.”

Carson said nothing. With any luck, they could evade the Hummers. He was thinking, instead, about their almost total lack of water.

Scopes sat alone in the octagon, examining his state of mind.

Carson and de Vaca were all but taken care of. Escape was impossible.

He had intercepted their transmission and cut off Carson’s data feed almost immediately. True, the transparent relay he’d used as an alarm would not have stopped the initial part of the data transmission. It was within the realm of possibility that Levine—or whoever Levine was using to hack into the GeneDyne net—would pick up the aborted transmission. But Scopes had already taken the steps to ensure that such unauthorized entry would not happen again. Drastic steps, perhaps, yet necessary. Especially at this delicate time.

In any case, very little of the intended download had gotten through. And what Carson had sent seemed to make little sense. It was all about PurBlood. Even if Levine received the data, he would have learned nothing of value about X-FLU. And he was now so thoroughly discredited that no one would pay attention to any story of his, whatever it might be.