The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery 2)

“Where’d you learn boating? You just pick it up?”

“From my father. He used to take me sailing when I was a kid.”

“You talk to him much?”

David shifted awkwardly on the bed. “No. He died when I was young.”

Kate opened her mouth to speak, but David cut her off. “Don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago. ’83. Lebanon. I was seven.”

“The bombing at the Marine barracks?”

David nodded. His eyes drifted over to the Immari uniform and to the silver wings of a lieutenant colonel. “He was thirty-seven and already a lieutenant colonel. He might have made brigadier general or even higher. That was my dream as a kid. I had this image in my mind of standing in a Marine Corps uniform with a general’s star on my shoulder. It’s funny, I can still see the picture of myself that I held in my mind for so long. It’s amazing how clear your dreams are when you’re a kid and how complicated life gets after that. How a single ambition turns into a hundred desires and details—most of which are about what you want and who you want to be.”

Kate took her eyes away from him, then turned in the bed and lay beside him, looking away.

Was it her way of giving him space? David didn’t know, but he liked having her beside him, how her soft skin felt on his, her warm body heating the places where they touched.

“The day of the funeral, my mother came home and placed the folded-up flag over the mantel. It sat there for the next twenty years, in a triangle-shaped dark wood case with a few too many coats of varnish and a glass door. Beside it she placed two pictures: a headshot of him in his uniform and a picture of them together, somewhere tropical, somewhere they were happy. The house was filled with people that day. They kept saying the same things. I went into the kitchen, got out the biggest black trash bag I could find and filled it with my toys—anything that was a soldier, a tank, or even remotely connected to the military. Then I went in my room and played Nintendo for about the next three years.”

Kate gently kissed his head where his forehead met his hairline. “Zelda?”

“I got the Triforce like two million times.” He looked over at her and smiled. “Then, at some point, I got really interested in history. I read everything I could get my hands on. Military history in particular. Especially European and Middle Eastern history. I wanted to know how the world got to be the way it is. Or maybe I thought being a history teacher would be the safest job in the world, the furthest place on the planet from an actual battlefield. But when 9/11 happened, the only thing I wanted to do was be a soldier. It’s like when my world was turned upside down, I wanted revenge, but I also wanted to do the one thing I thought I would be good at—what I was destined to do all along but afraid to do. Maybe a man can’t escape his fate. No matter what you do, you can’t change what you really are, what’s deep down inside you, supposedly dead and buried, but driving you all along.”

Kate didn’t say anything, and David appreciated that. She simply pressed her body next to his and buried her face in the space between his head and his shoulder.

Sometime later, David felt her breathing slow, and he knew she was asleep.

He kissed her forehead.

As his lips released, he realized just how exhausted he was. Mentally, from discussing Martin’s notes; physically, from his time with Kate; and emotionally, from telling her the things he had never told anyone.

He moved the gun out from the pillow and laid it next to him, where he could get to it more easily. He glanced at the door. He would hear it if it opened. He would have time if anyone came for them. He would just close his eyes for a second.

CHAPTER 71

When David opened his eyes, he knew he was back in the Mediterranean villa. Kate stood beside him. An arched wooden door loomed at the end of the hall. On their right, two open doors flooded the narrow space with light.

David knew the doors and the rooms beyond—he had seen Kate there.

This is her dream. I’m in it, David thought.

Kate walked to the end of the hall and reached for the door.

“Don’t,” David said.

“I have to. The answers are behind it.”

“Don’t do it, Kate—”

“Why?”

David was scared, and here in the dream, he knew why. “I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to lose you. Let’s stay here, where we are.”

“Come with me.” She opened the door and light consumed the corridor.

He raced after her, bounding through the door—

David sat up in bed, panting, fighting for air.

He had thrown Kate off of him, but it hadn’t awoken her.

He rolled her head to face him. “Kate!”

Sweat poured off of her. But her pulse was faint. She was burning up. And she was unconscious.

What do I do? Get one of the doctors? I can’t trust them. Terror—of a magnitude he’d never felt before—gripped him. He pulled her close to him.

To Kate’s surprise, the door led her outside.

She turned to look at the door, but—a massive ship towered above her. She stood on a beach, and the ship spread out on the shore. Somehow Kate knew what it was—the Alpha Lander. What the primitive humans on this world would call Atlantis.

She looked down. She wore an environmental suit.

The sky above her was dark, ash-filled. At first she thought it was night, but she saw a dim sun directly overhead, struggling to break through the ash that blanketed the clouds.

Impossible, Kate thought. This is the Toba Catastrophe, seventy thousand years ago.

A voice echoed in her helmet. “Last recorded life signs are just beyond the ridge, bearing two-five degrees.”

“Copy,” she heard herself say as she set off at a brisk pace across the ash-covered beach.

Beyond the ridge, she saw them: black bodies stacked on the ground from the valley all the way to the mouth of a cave.

She crossed the distance and entered the cave.

The infrared sensors in her suit confirmed it: they were all dead.

She had almost given up hope when a single sliver of crimson lit up her display. A survivor. She moved closer.

Behind her, she heard footsteps. She turned to find a large male, an incredible physical specimen. He barreled toward her with something in his hand.

She gripped her stun baton, but the male broke off his charge. He collapsed next to the female and handed her something: a rotting piece of flesh. She tore into it wildly.

Kate saw it now. The female carried another life sign. An infant. Two hundred forty-seven local days since inception.