“Please,” he said to the sounds of salvation that flew in formation above the storm clouds. “Please.”
But there was no one and nothing to help him.
Lonnie turned and headed along a side street toward the edge of town.
Trying to go home.
CHAPTER EIGHT
OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Scott Blair, the national security advisor, wanted a drink so bad his skin ached. He was not normally a drinking man. A few martinis at a State Department dinner, a beer after eighteen holes. But now he wanted to crawl into a closet with a bottle of bourbon and chug the entire thing.
Instead he opened a drawer, removed a bottle of Tums E-X, shook ten of them into his palm, and them shoved the entire handful into his mouth.
Everything was spinning. His head, the room, the media, and maybe the world.
The actual world.
All because of a tiny shithole town in an inbred part of Pennsylvania no one gave a damn about. Not in any strategic sense.
The devil is off the chain.
That was how it started. For Blair and for everyone.
The director of Central Intelligence called the president to forward an urgent message from a nonentity named Oscar Price, a CIA handler whose only job it was to babysit retired Soviet defectors. How hard could it be to keep tabs on a bunch of old men? Instead, one of Price’s charges, Dr. Herman Volker, a former Cold War scientist, had taken an old and classified bit of science and turned it into what could only be described as a “doomsday weapon.”
Doomsday.
There was a time in Blair’s life when that concept was a ludicrous abstraction. A scenario to be considered with no more reality than something cooked up by a Dungeons & Dragons games master.
Except now this wasn’t a role-playing game for nerds. It was the most important issue to ever cross Blair’s desk. Perhaps the most important issue to ever cross the desk to fall under the umbrella of “national security.”
A doomsday weapon. Conceived by devious minds, funded by a desperate government, constructed in covert labs, and then brought to America by a defector who was long past the point of relevance.
And given a name that was far too appropriate.
Lucifer.
Blair wondered if that kind of name was too close to actually tempting fate. It felt like a challenge. Or an invitation.
All Price had to do was keep the old prick out of trouble until old age or the grace of a just God killed the son of a bitch.
But then that message came in.
The devil was off the chain.
That was how it started. A flurry of phone calls, teams of investigators put into the field, and the machinery of control and containment put into play. Except that nothing was controlled, and Blair did not share the president’s confidence in General Zetter that this thing was contained.
His desk was littered with intelligence reports. The latest on the storm. Satellite pictures and thermal scans of Stebbins County. Casualty estimates. And projections of how bad this could get if even a single infected person made it past the Q-zone. This wasn’t swine flu or bird flu or any other damn flu. It was a genetically engineered bioweapon driven by parasitic urges that were a million times more immediate and aggressive than those of a virus, though equally as encompassing and indifferent to suffering. Every infected person became a violent vector. Everyone
exposed to the black blood was likely to become infected, even if they were not bitten. The larvae in the infected blood clung to the skin and would find an opening. Any opening. A scratch would do it.
There were response protocols. Of course there were. Politics floated on a sea of paper, so there were reports for everything. There were reams of notes on the Lucifer program. Tens of thousands of pages. And right now virologists and microbiologists and parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, and over a dozen bioweapons labs were poring over those protocols and the accompanying scientific research records. The protocols prepared after Volker’s defection were very specific. Coldly alarming, detailing in precise terms the consequences of inaction or insufficient action.
There was, in fact, only one possible outcome of a Lucifer outbreak.