Hanging upside down, Fiona was in full panic mode, desperate to grab onto anything that could restore order to the world. The interior of the car had gone dark. The air was thick with the smell of scorched metal and plastic, gasoline fumes and something else…a strange ammonia smell.
There was a crunching sound—glass being pulverized, metal and fiberglass crushed like an old soda can—as the overturned vehicle tilted forward, borne down by the weight of the engine. Fiona’s center of gravity shifted again.
She heard a low moan from out of the darkness.
“Aunt Gus?” Her own voice was barely audible. She couldn’t seem to draw a breath. The seat belt, which had saved her life, now felt like a saw blade, cutting across her torso. She groped blindly, trying to find the buckle.
A different noise filled her ears now, the loud scream of an engine, with an underlying rhythm, a deep, resonant thumping.
Helicopter.
In a matter of seconds, the noise reached a feverish crescendo. A tempest swirled through the crushed vehicle, blasting Fiona with debris particles. The storm’s intensity abated after a moment, but the helicopter’s noise had grown to deafening proportions. It had landed, somewhere close by.
A light filled the misshapen space where the window had once been, growing brighter as its source moved closer. The silhouette of a hand appeared in front of her face, fingers curling around the door frame. Then with another squeal of tortured metal, the entire door was ripped off its hinges. The whole car shuddered, and Fiona felt a fresh wave of pain as the seatbelt dug into her body.
A face materialized before her. Shrouded in the shadows cast by the flashlight, she could not make out any details, but she immediately recognized the hulking outline.
Vigor Rohn.
“No!” She scrabbled for the seatbelt release again, desperate to get free, knowing that even if she did, there was nowhere to go.
Hard, strong hands closed around her shoulders, immobilizing her. She felt a sharp twinge of pain at the base of her neck, followed by a cold sensation that spread quickly to her extremities. As she descended into a narcotic fog, Rohn laughed.
19
Liberia
Pierce snapped back to consciousness with painful abruptness. Something hard was grinding into his abdomen, pounding his guts like repeated punches, while the rest of his body seemed to be floating in mid-air. He threw out his hands, trying to grab onto something, and in that moment, the acid bath’s all-consuming pain returned with a vengeance and threatened to drag him down again. He clenched his teeth and fought to make sense of what was happening.
In the dim light, he could see the outline of trees moving past, seeming to jump up and down in time with the rhythmic pummeling.
I’m moving. Someone is carrying me.
He turned his head and tried to locate his rescuer, but all he could see was a broad back, clad in a tattered Tyvek bio-safety suit. The sharp object pressing into his innards was the shoulder of his savior. He had been scooped up like a sack of potatoes. He glimpsed something moving at the same level as his head. Another figure, wrapped in an environment suit, was slung over the opposite shoulder.
It was Carter. Which meant that the person carrying them had to be one of the WHO aid workers that had come with her.
A glimmer of hope shone through the pain-induced fog, but it was just as quickly replaced by despair. Cooper was still back there, still caught in the green trap. He wanted to tell his rescuer to stop, to put him down and let him go back, but he knew how futile the gesture would be. His own survival was still at risk.
And yet, the person carrying both him and Carter seemed impervious to the carnivorous plants. Pierce could see the man’s feet moving in and out of view with each step. The vines snaked around his ankles, trying to ensnare him and drag him down, but the man tore through the green tendrils like they were party streamers. Perhaps the suit protected him from the assault, but Pierce recalled how those tiny fibrous threads had so quickly overwhelmed him and Carter. Their rescuer was as strong and relentless as a bull.
The faintest hint of a breeze brought momentary relief from the stinging miasma. Fresh air. He blinked away the tears blurring his vision. He saw trees and dark earth, untouched by the vines.
They were clear of the infested zone.
The man ran on another fifty feet before stopping and easing his burdens to the ground. Pierce rolled away, and began tearing at his clothes. He could still feel the vines on him, clinging to his skin, burning him with acidic secretions, still very much alive and intent on consuming him.
A few feet away, his rescuer was bent over Carter’s unmoving form, similarly stripping off the suit that had failed to protect her. In the dim twilight, Pierce could see long green tentacles moving on the man’s legs, throwing off still more tendrils in a search for nutrient-rich flesh, but the man’s attention was completely focused on helping Carter. He ripped through the suit like wet tissue paper, and then tore the vines away from her face.