Jonathan Maberry - The Dragon Factory

“Is Gilpin alive?”

“I doubt it. The Russian team commander downloaded the information to us just a few minutes ago. However, Gilpin was able to confirm that the Haeckel records are at a storage facility called Deep Iron, near Denver.”

Cyrus looked pleased. “Who do we have in the area?”

“In Denver? No one, but I sent a team.”

“More Russians?”

Otto shrugged. “Better them than our own.”

They watched the animals. A juvenile mammoth was trumpeting and banging its massive shoulders against the sides of its cage. The air above them was filled with a flock of passenger pigeons. Cyrus leaned his forearms on the pipe rail and watched as handlers used winches and slings to carefully off-load a sedated dire wolf from an electric cart. The female had received in vitro fertilization but had miscarried twice already. The embryologist-one of the Indians-thought they’d solved the problem. A gene that was coding for the wrong hormone sequence.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Otto grunted. He had almost no interest in reclamation genetics. To him it was an expensive hobby that drained time and manpower from more important work, but for Cyrus it was a lifelong passion. To reclaim the past and then improve it so that what went forward was stronger and more evolved.

“This is how God must feel,” murmured Cyrus. It was something he said at least three or four times a week. Otto said nothing.

In the adjoining cage a saber-toothed cat sat and watched the handlers with icy patience. Even from here the cat reminded Cyrus of his daughter, Hecate. The same eyes, the same arctic patience.

He glanced at his watch, which was not set to real time but synchronized with the Extinction Clock. As the numbers ticked down, second by second, Cyrus felt a great happiness settle over him.

Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, August 28, 8:45 A.M.

Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 15 minutes

I was scared. I admit it.

I’d been in worse physical danger before. Hell, I’d been in worse physical danger two days ago, so it wasn’t that. But as I drove I started getting a serious case of the shakes because the NSA-the actual National Security frigging Agency-was trying to arrest me. If they hadn’t had just cause beforehand, they certainly did now, and I was beginning to regret how I had played it.

Sure, Church had warned me not to get taken. Message received and understood; but I know that I did more collateral damage to those guys simply because they braced me at Helen’s grave. If they’d come at me in the parking lot of my apartment building they might have gotten off with a couple of bruises. But I was pretty sure that at least two of them were in the hospital and a couple of others would be carrying around bruises that would be daily reminders of Joe Ledger, world’s oldest adolescent.

I took a bunch of random turns, double- and triple-checking that I had no tail.

My best friend, Rudy Sanchez-who’s also my shrink and used to be Helen’s shrink right up until she killed herself-has been working with me for years to control some of my less mature urges. He calls them unrefined primal responses to negative stimulation. I think he gets wood when he can toss out phrases like that.

My boss may think I’m hot shit and even the guys on Echo Team might think I’m cool and together, but Rudy knows the score. I’ve got enough baggage to start a luggage store, and I have a whole bunch of buttons that I don’t like pushed.

Disrespecting Helen-even through ignorance of her existence-did not play well with me. If they’d pushed harder I would like to believe that I wouldn’t have gone apeshit on them. There are a lot of things I’d like to believe in.

I was gripping the steering wheel too hard. The more I thought about it, the more anger rose up to replace the fear. I didn’t want either emotion screwing with my head. It was already a junk pile.

I dug out my cell and tried to call Rudy, but I got no answer.

“Shit,” I snarled, and tossed the phone down on the seat.

And kept driving fast, heading nowhere.

Hebron, Louisiana

Saturday, August 28, 8:55 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 5 minutes

Rabbi Scheiner was an old man, but he had bright green eyes and a face well used to smiling. However, as he walked beside his nephew, Dr. David Meyer, the rabbi’s mouth was pulled into a tight line and his eyes were dark with concern.

“How sure are you about this, David?” the rabbi asked, pitching his voice low enough so that the nurses and patients in the ward could not overhear.

David Meyer shook the sheaf of papers in his hand. “We ran every test we could, and the lab in Baton Rouge confirmed our findings.”

“It’s unfortunate, David… but it does happen. You know more than I do that there’s no cure for this, and that the best we can do is screen young people and counsel them before marriage. Warn them of the risks.”

“That’s the point, Rabbi,” insisted Meyer. “We did those screens. We have a very high concentration of Ashkenazi Jews here, most of them from families that fled the Rhine as things were going bad in the late nineteen thirties. Virtually everyone in Hebron, Tefka, and Muellersville has been screened-we still get grants from Israel to run the polymerase chain reaction techniques, and they’re very accurate. We know the carriers, and we have counseled them. If these occurrences were within the group of known carriers, then I wouldn’t have called you.”

“Then I don’t understand. Haaretz reported that the disease was virtually eradicated. You yourself told me that there had been no babies born to Jewish families here in America with the disease since 2003.”

Meyer took the rabbi by the arm and led him into a small alcove.

“I know; I know,” said Meyer. His face was bright with stress, and sweat beaded his forehead. “However, in the last month clinics throughout the area have been reporting many cases of patients presenting with classic symptoms: slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, unsteadiness of gait, spasticity, sharp and sudden cognitive declines, and a variety of psychiatric illnesses that include psychosis typical of schizophrenia. Individually any one or two of those symptoms in an adult would not suggest LOTS, but when five or six symptoms present in virtually every patient… then what else could I think? I sent nurses out to take samples for genetic testing and we ran our own enzyme assay tests, but they’re not as precise at genetic testing as PCR tests, so I had the samples shipped to a lab in Baton Rouge.” He shook the sheaf of papers. “These are the results.”

Rabbi Scheiner reluctantly took the papers from Meyer and quickly read through them. In the comment notes he read: “Late Onset Tay-Sachs (LOTS) disease is a rare form of the disorder, typically occurring in patients in their twenties and early thirties. This disease is frequently misdiagnosed and usually nonfatal.”

He looked up.

“So you have several patients who have become sick?”

Meyer shook his head slowly. “Rabbi… I’ve had eleven patients here in Hebron, and there were nine in Tefka and six in Muellersville.”

The rabbi caught the phrasing. “You say you ‘had’ eleven patients…”

Meyer gave him a bleak stare. “Three have already died. Two more are… well, they have lapsed into comas. The others are getting sicker almost as I watch. The muscles needed to swallow become atrophic and paralyzed. We’ve intubated them, and I’ve even trached a few, but the paralysis spreads so fast. I don’t know how to treat any of them.”

“There’s no cure…” The rabbi said it as a statement. “God help us.”