The devil was in the wind now, and the earth itself was exhaling the parasites into the global weather pattern.
Soon Lucifer would be everywhere.
An aide came hurrying over and handed the president a paper, which he read, sighed, and handed to Blair. It was from Dr. Price. The Reaper counterparasite was in full development now. The first batches were being loaded into rockets for deployment over Pittsburgh.
“We’re going to use a monster to fight a monster,” said the president. “How wrong does that sound to you, Scott?”
“We have to try something. We have to try everything.”
“Yes, I suppose we do.”
One of the small windows showed an aerial surveillance feed of a line of yellow buses rolling through the forested hills of West Virginia. The president touched the image, brushing the vehicles with the tips of his fingers.
“All those children,” he said. “The children of Stebbins and the children everywhere…”
“Sir?”
“They will never forgive us for this,” said the president.
Blair’s mouth was a tight and bitter line. “Maybe they shouldn’t.”
The door burst open and Sylvia Ruddy came running in, her face flushed, eyes wide with a fierce excitement.
“Mr. President! Oh my God, Mr. President!”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE
ZABRISKE POINT BIOLOGICAL EVALUATION AND PRODUCTION STATION
DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
All of Z-point had become a
hive, filled with techs and aides and support staff who ran everywhere in a mad scramble to prepare all samples of Reaper, and to kick the manufacturing process into high gear.
Dick Price was the only person who stood still and silent.
There was a big glass window separating him from the main production floor of the station. Everyone on the far side of that three-inch-thick glass wore hazmat suits. He was in his immaculate white lab coat. To his right was a bank of security monitors and three of them showed exterior views of the helipad carved high onto a mountain far away from any possibility of civilian ground or air traffic. A powerful Chinook was lifting ponderously from the pad. In the air beyond it were three more. Waiting to land. Waiting to off-load viable organic vectors.
A nice name for people who had been transformed by Lucifer into something else.
The military kept bringing more of them here to Z-point in the hopes that among the samples would be evidence of mutation or variation. Within mutation lay potential. Mutation suggested that Volker’s monster was not unchangeable. Anything that could, in time, be changed could, in time, be understood and defeated.
In time.
Price felt icy lines of sweat trickle down his spine.
Three of the monitors had been switched to live news feeds.
Pittsburgh was in flames.
The whole city. Burning.
There were outbreaks in Philadelphia, New York, D.C., Atlanta. A dozen other cities. And now there were reports in Paris, London, and Madrid.
The experts the press trotted out decried these reports on the grounds that no disease could spread that fast. And that was true enough if this was the beginning of the twentieth century instead of well into the twenty-first. Any disease could spread at the speed of transportation.
A lot of planes flew out of Pittsburgh in the hours after the fuel-air bombs shot the parasites into the atmosphere and transformed Lucifer from a serum-transfer pathogen to an airborne pathogen.