Nicholas Smith - Extinction Horizon

“So where is this place?” Horn asked. “How far?”

A condescending laugh crackled over the comm. “Do you really think the government would have built a secret facility out in the open?” Riley said. “Haven’t you ever heard of the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” replied Horn.

“The government built a massive bunker under the resort there. Kept it a secret for years. It wasn’t until they declassified it that the public knew. If people were fucking in suites above a bunker built to house the President in a time of war, I’m pretty sure they can hide a small facility out here from the public.”

“Radio silence,” Beckham said harshly, embarrassed his men had not acted with more discipline. He trotted over to Caster, who had retrieved a GPS locator from his pack. The coordinates blinked on the display. Judging by their location, it looked like they had about a quarter-mile to trek. Beckham had been slightly surprised to learn neither of the men had been to the facility, but Riley’s description of the Greenbrier reminded him the government had many secrets. Team Ghost was the perfect example.

Beckham moved first, climbing up the sandy hill. Over the ridgeline, a lightly traveled frontage road ran along the length of the beach. A loose power line whipped back and forth in the slight breeze. Besides the crashing of the waves, the island was eerily quiet.

With a few quick hand signals, Beckham broke the group into strike teams. Bravo fanned out across the road and into the ditch on the right, while Alpha trekked toward a series of sand dunes to the left. The landscape was stark and empty; nothing but underbrush and a few sporadic palm trees juxtaposed with the mostly barren terrain.

Overhead, the moon disappeared under sudden dense cloud cover, and the teams halted to switch on their NVGs. Beckham had hoped they wouldn’t have to use them until they entered Building 8, but with the moonlight gone, they had no choice.

With the optics active, he now had a hundred-degree horizontal view and a forty-degree vertical field of view. The sight revealed a landscape devoid of life. He slowly swept the optics to the right and then back to the left.

Nothing.

Did the animals know something he didn’t? There had to be a reasonable explanation.

The more he scanned the area, the more he wondered. The optics normally picked up even the slightest movement, down to a single critter the size of a mouse.

Beckham tried to convince himself that they were hibernating or hiding. It wasn’t that cold and surely a few nocturnal creatures would be out scavenging for their next meal. Tightening his grip on his MP5, he shrugged the question away and started up the loose sand of the closest dune. At the top, he had the first good vantage of the entire island.

To the north, just beyond another cluster of hills, he could make out the airstrip and a collection of buildings. Bringing his MP5 to his visor, he scoped the area below, stopping on a sign at the bottom of the dune.

Balling his fist, he took a knee and waved Caster forward. The man scrambled up the dune and pulled his GPS locator out, studying the screen intensely.

“We’re close. Within five hundred feet of the facility,” Caster said.

Beckham looked out over the landscape and saw nothing except for an empty road that looked like it led to a dumping ground.

Chinning his comm pad, he said, “Tenor, you see anything?”

“Negative, just a large embankment,” Tenor said. “I have a bad taste in my mouth. There’s nothing out here.”

Beckham listened to the sound of hissing sand. It was freakishly quiet, the kind of quiet that gave him the chills. He used the moment to think. There was simply no way they had the wrong coordinates. He was missing something.

“Regroup and show me this embankment,” Beckham said. He stood and waved Riley and Horn forward. After a quick peek over his shoulder to check their six, Beckham followed them. They made their way past another series of sand dunes and came to a paved road. Littered in the ditch were mounds of trash. The wind had blown some of it across the area. Plastic bottles crunched beneath the weight of the team’s boots. The sound didn’t bother him. The sight of the trash did. It looked like no one had used the street in days.

There was no sign of vehicles, no sign of Building 8, and no sign of animals of any kind. What the fuck is going on ? Beckham thought. He was used to training Afghani forces or fighting insurgents that he could zoom in on with a red dot sight. This mysterious shit pissed him off.

Grunting, he followed the curved road through a mass of dirt embankments. The brown hills ended at the bottom of what looked like a landfill.

“Over there,” Caster said. He held up the GPS device and pointed to a single metal building aged with rust in the middle of the lot. There were no windows, just a single steel door that had the same NO TRESPASSING sign.

Bravo had already taken up position on the west side of the building. All three men hid in the underbrush, the pointed outlines of their rifles aimed on the steel door.

“Tenor, get in there and see what the hell we’re dealing with,” Beckham ordered.

The four men were moving before the sound of Beckham’s voice faded over the net. Spinoza pressed his back up against the building next to Tenor, while Edwards shouldered his tactical shotgun.

Noble approached the door and twisted the knob. It clicked. Hesitating, the major slowly inched it open and slipped inside the darkness. Tenor waved Bravo inside.

Beckham checked his watch before motioning his team to follow.

0435 hours.

19 April, 2015.

His gut told him it would be a date he would never forget.

Dr. Kate Lovato paused to study the simulation of a brilliant sunrise filling the east wall of the lobby outside her lab. She’d called the facility home since the first case of Ebola hit Guinea months earlier. The lab was buried deep beneath the surface of the Centers for Disease Control Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center, or as workers called it, Building 18.

The artificial rays were really starting to look like the real thing. At least that’s what she kept telling herself. And truthfully, she had started to believe it.

Funny what working beneath the surface for an extended amount of time can do to a mind , she thought. Kate knew she wasn’t immune to the mental strains of isolation, but it could always be worse. She’d worked around the globe before accepting a position with the CDC a year before. And she’d seen the worst the microscopic world of viruses had to offer: from child Malaria victims during the dead of summer in Sri Lanka to a village in Uganda struck by an outbreak of Yellow Fever. What gave most people nightmares was part of her everyday life.

She found this part of her work ironic, knowing that several city blocks away the citizens of Atlanta went about their daily routine, most of them blissfully unaware that somewhere under their feet scientists were working with some of the deadliest diseases known to man.

Only a handful of those scientists were working with the Slate Wiper, as Ebola had been dubbed by the majority of the scientific community. Kate was one of them. She was part of a small team of two other virologists isolated from the rest of the CDC. They even had their own Level 4 biohazard laboratory. It took a special person to want to work on the Slate Wiper Team.

She took a swig of coffee and approached the glass doors. Even though the lab contained microscopic viruses that could kill her within hours, she’d always felt safe here. The faint hum of the advanced air filtration system designed specifically for the facility reminded her how much the government had spent to ensure what was on the other side never got out. They hadn’t just spent money to keep things from getting out—they had also spent it to prevent the wrong people from getting in. The vestibule connecting the labs required voice and fingerprint recognition. Nothing short of a rocket-propelled grenade was going to bring down the glass wall.