Or tried to.
The vines had curled around his feet, holding him fast. He kicked against them, but this time there were too many of the fibrous strands to be so easily overcome. Unbalanced, he toppled forward, his human burden slipping to the ground. More tendrils shot out, curling up his arms, clinging to the faceplate of his suit, worming into the folds of his mask’s filter.
To remain still, even for a moment, was certain death. He arched his back, attempting to wrench his hands free, but to no avail. He was caught. A fly in a spider’s web.
But then his fingers brushed against something hard. A rock? No, it was metal. The blade of a long bush knife. He curled his fist around the machete, and then using his other hand for additional leverage, he wrenched both his hand and the blade free.
He hacked at the ground with furious abandon, throwing up shreds of plants and huge clots of soil. In a few moments, he had cleared a rough circle of ground. He got back to his feet and hoisted the unconscious man onto his shoulder again, but new shoots sprang up from the fresh mulch.
Time to get moving again.
He hit the surrounding web of vines at a full sprint, his momentum allowing him to tear through them. The blocky shapes of houses appeared before him, but he did not slow.
His goal lay two hundred yards beyond the village, where the aid team had cleared an area and established a camp site. Although surrounded by the infestation, they had deemed the environment safe, even with the sorry state of their protective equipment. But that had been before nightfall.
Before the change.
He spotted a glow directly ahead, artificial light coming from the camp, and allowed himself a small measure of hope. As the tents came into view, he could see suited figures moving about, but any sense of relief was tempered by the fact that several of the tents were already partially covered in foliage. The camp wouldn’t last long.
As he skidded into the ever-tightening circle of cleared ground, one of the suited figures called out. “Lazarus! Thank God!”
Lazarus was the name he had taken for himself, the name of the man who had come back from the dead, but that wasn’t what had happened to him.
Erik Somers—‘Bishop’—had died. The man who had come back, Erik Lazarus, was someone else.
“Where’s Felice?” asked another of the suited figures.
“Safe,” was all Lazarus said. He did a quick head count. They were all there. All had made it to the relative safety of the camp. It would not be safe much longer. The vines were advancing, growing toward the besieged doctors and scientists, an inch or two with every passing second.
“We have to go,” he announced. He regarded the machete in his hand for a moment then passed it to the nearest man. It would not do for what he had in mind. Instead, he turned toward the stack of gear they had packed in—medical equipment and camping supplies. He selected a short-handled shovel with an eight-inch-wide blade. It was hardly ideal, but given what he had to work with, it would have to do. “I’ll try to clear a trail,” he told the others. “Stay on it. Stay close to me. If I go down, run as fast as you can and don’t stop until you are clear. Got it?”
He got wide-eyed looks and tentative nods as an answer. That would have to suffice.
He lowered the shovel, the back of the blade flat against the ground, and then launched into motion, plowing a narrow strip through the sea of green. The vines peeled off in great clumps, rolling to the side or, more often than not, dropping back into his footpath, but he simply kicked these out of the way as he ran.
He did not stop. He did not look back.
There was nothing more he could do to save the others. Whether or not they survived was up to them now.
21
The pain gradually receded, fading to a dull glow and a persistent itch that was, in its own way, almost worse than the chemical burn. But while the physical effects seemed to steadily abate, Pierce’s shock at seeing Erik Somers, alive and evidently well, only compounded with the passage of time.
Somers—whom Pierce thought of primarily by his military callsign: Bishop—had been a member of Jack Sigler’s team. They had worked together closely during the years when Pierce had served as an instructor for the team. They had not been what Pierce would call ‘friends.’ The Iranian-born, American-raised giant had not allowed many people to get close to him. But the man was as unshakably trustworthy as he was physically unstoppable. Pierce had been stunned to learn of his death, eighteen months earlier, during a mission in the Congo region of Africa.
A mission where Sigler’s team had crossed paths with Felice Carter.