MARCH 20
11:31 A.M. MAXIM TIME
Geoffrey came out of their dorm after a fitful sleep. He saw that the others were peering through the window of the maternity ward excitedly.
“Trees,” Dimitri said. “They must be trees! But they’re moving.…”
“They’re Henders trees,” Otto said.
“They’re animals,” Katsuyuki explained.
“They only look like trees,” Geoffrey said as he approached them and looked through the glass. A miniature jungle had sprung up over the last week and formed tunnels five feet tall through which ravenous jet streams of Henders bugs and even rats now circulated. A variety of the pseudo-palms retracted lines of glistening bait-eggs that dangled from their fronds.
Geoffrey looked at Katsuyuki wearily. “How did these species get to an island off Japan, Katsuyuki?” he asked. “Did you ever figure that out?”
“We think they came from a jar in a raft that washed ashore.”
“A raft?” Geoffrey wondered suddenly. “Thatcher?”
“Yes, actually!” Katsuyuki exclaimed. “We found Thatcher Redmond in the raft.”
“Alive?”
“No! Very dead.”
“A bug jar from Hender’s house must have been in the Zodiac,” Geoffrey muttered. “Oh, Christ! We used jars of glowing animals to signal the boat that rescued us. We must have left one in the raft! But Hender’s jars didn’t have rats in them.… Where did they come from?”
“You call those rats?” Dimitri said. “They have eight legs and—and two sets of eyes—”
“Yes, and they have two brains,” Geoffrey conceded. “They’re mammal-like arthropods that evolved in isolation on Henders Island. We just called them rats. What I don’t understand is how they got off the island.”
“All of this came from one suitcase of specimens,” insisted Dimitri.
“Do you have any photographic record of what was in that suitcase?”
“Yes, of course.” Dimitri called up a gallery of images on a laptop.
Geoffrey took over from him and scrolled through the images. One photo showed two brown lumps that looked like dates. He paused on them and zoomed in.
“What?” Katsuyuki said.
“Resting eggs?” Geoffrey muttered. He looked up at Katsuyuki. “Like the kind copepods and daphnia lay during periods of stress to make clones?”
“Yes.” Katsuyuki nodded. “A very effective survival mechanism. You think Henders rats might use resting eggs, too?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe Hender put them in his light jars as a food supply for the bugs. I wish he were here so I could ask him. If those things are resting eggs and they hatched into clones and mated, they would have exchanged millions of sex cells by now. Both would be assembly lines of baby rats, as would all of their offspring.”
“But how could those ‘trees’ get here?” Dimitri asked.
“They’re related to disk-ants.” Geoffrey peered through the clear spots as he moved along the window. “A certain percentage of disk-ants latch on to the ground and metamorphose into about six or seven varieties of animal that superficially resemble palm trees.”
“How long was this island isolated?” Dimitri muttered in amazement.
“More than half a billion years, three supercontinents ago,” Otto said.
“Hey!” Geoffrey spotted something as he reached the center of the window and looked down. The others gathered round and looked where he pointed.
Hundreds of eight-legged Henders “rats” were speeding through tunnels between the trees. They seemed to be converging on a spot four feet from the window, where they delivered regurgitated food to a single rat that had grown to the size of a German shepherd.
“Oh, no,” Otto whispered.
“Does that camera work?” Geoffrey pointed at the camera mounted on a track inside the chamber above the window.
“Yes.” Dimitri pointed out the control toggle at the end of a conduit hanging down from a hole drilled above the window.
“You drilled through the wall there?” Geoffrey asked as he reached up to toggle the camera down.
“Yes. But we filled the holes with cement,” said Dimitri.
Geoffrey shook his head grimly as he rotated the camera down.
Dimitri grabbed his wrist and stopped him. “Careful, my friend! We don’t want to break the window.”
Geoffrey agreed. “You do it, then.”
Geoffrey observed as the Russian used the controls to toggle the heavy camera housing that was mounted on a thick steel arm. The camera slid along the track at the top of the window inside the chamber. When the camera reached them, Geoffrey said, “Point it down at that thing and let’s get a look at it.”
The image of a large squirming animal surrounded by the rats became visible on a screen mounted over the window and on various laptops on the lab counters. Unmistakable stripes of iridescent colors radiated over its bony frill. Sizzling stripes of pink and orange zigzagged on its furry back. It drummed its limbs in spasms, staying in place. “That,” Geoffrey sighed, “is a spiger.”
Katsuyuki frowned. “How?”
“We never figured out where spigers come from. But that’s one right there. The rats must be able to develop into them. But, why?” Geoffrey pressed his mind for some evolutionary pressure that could explain it. “Why would rats turn into spigers?”
“Maybe they’re breeding their own food,” Otto said.
“Like we breed pigs and cows!” Katsuyuki agreed.
Geoffrey nodded. “Perhaps. Spigers had scarcely any big game to hunt except for other spigers. So maybe the rats made enough spigers to ensure spiger-on-spiger kills, which would provide the rats with a feast, as well.”
“Why wouldn’t both spigers be eaten in the feeding frenzy?” Otto wondered.
“Yes, how could they survive?” Katsuyuki asked.
“The larger animals on Henders Island were protected by armies of symbiants,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve been learning about them from the hendros. We call them ‘symbiants’ since they seem to have been related to disk-ants. They fed on anything that attacked their host, even knitting together to protect wounds. But if a wound was too severe, the symbiants seemed to sense it and abandoned the sinking ship, sometimes even turning on their host. When symbiants turn and are ready to migrate to viable new hosts, other animals can sense it and attack their dying host. As a consequence, only the losers in a spiger fight would have been attacked, unless both spigers were mortally wounded. Healthy spigers could gorge themselves to their heart’s content right alongside the rats and not be touched, and inherit a lot of their prey’s symbiants simultaneously.”
“So rats grow their own beef,” Katsuyuki said.
“And butchers, too,” Geoffrey said. “These cows are both.”
“It’s like vultures breeding wildebeest,” Otto wondered, his mouth opening in shock. “But how do the rats make them?”
“Like bees, maybe,” Dimitri said.
“Of course,” Katsuyuki said. “Bees feed royal jelly to larvae to turn them into queens.”
Geoffrey nodded. “Right. They could be regurgitating food with some enzyme or hormone. Or they could be like locusts. Environmental pressures trigger a dormant genetic expression that changes grasshoppers into locusts. We used to think they were different species.”
“Christ, can you imagine?” Otto said. “If these things got loose above, they’d be creating locusts the size of SUVs.”
Dimitri looked at Geoffrey, betraying fear now for the first time. “So how do we kill this stuff, Geoffrey?”
“Henders life is already eating through the walls,” Geoffrey said. “That lichenlike stuff growing on everything in there uses sulfuric acid to dissolve rock. It’s what carved Henders Island into a giant bowl. We called it clover. And you may have clover in there, too, creatures that eat the clover with acid. Any number of Henders species could penetrate structural weaknesses down here. Nano-ants probably chewed through the electrical insulation. Clover may have followed and widened the holes. That may be how Sector Four was breached. Who knows? However they did it, they’re spreading—fast. Is this place contained? The whole place, I mean? Is there any way this stuff can reach the surface, Dimitri, other than the railroad tunnel in Sector Seven?”
“The city is sealed, do not worry,” Dimitri said. “The air pumps in all the ventilation shafts are built with elaborate filters, more elaborate than the ventilation system of Cheyenne Mountain, which was built four years after Pobedograd. These filtration systems were engineered to block radiation, poison gas … nothing larger than a microbe could ever reach the surface through them, I assure you. And Sector Seven is always sealed off from the rest of the city.”
“Not always.” Geoffrey frowned. “We came through it when we arrived. If one wasp or ant had gotten through and made it to that tunnel.”
“Unless those filters are made out of diamonds,” Otto said, “then it’s just a matter of time before Henders life eats through them, too. They’ll only slow it down. It’s got millions of years now.”
“And now Maxim wants us to make some repellent so he can turn the power on down here. It’s madness,” Geoffrey said.
“Why would that make any difference?” Dimitri asked.
“Look through the window,” Geoffrey said. “With just those chandeliers, Henders clover has already covered every surface that is directly illuminated. That’s the base of the food chain. These species would quickly exhaust the supply of oxygen down here. But with light, the clover will photosynthesize and produce oxygen. Every species will carry scales of Henders clover and distribute it wherever they go. As dangerous as this ecosystem is, the planet may not be threatened yet, since there is limited light, oxygen, and food down here. But if we turn the power plant on, there will be light. We’d be pouring gasoline on a fire.”
“He’s right, man,” Otto said. “You don’t understand the reproductive capacity of these things in optimal conditions. Their offspring are already producing offspring before they’re even born!”
“OK, OK!” Dimitri said, touching his forehead with trembling fingers. “But it sounds like we should make some repellent, no matter what.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Geoffrey said. “And you’re right.” He looked around the room, spotting the four hatches—one that led to their dorm, another to the garage downstairs, another to the stairs in front of the hospital. He pointed to the last one in the wall to the left of the window. “Where does that hatch go?”
“We don’t open that one,” Dimitri said.
“Why not?”
“It’s an antechamber to the nursery—a storage room—which we used as a sort of air lock for a while, till things got out of hand.”
“Till those two died, you mean?” Geoffrey pointed at the dissolved remains inside the chamber, their outlines obscured under growth.
“Yes.” Dimitri closed his eyes. “They died after going through the door on the other side of that room. They closed the door behind them, thankfully, but we haven’t gone back in since.”
Geoffrey considered the situation. “All right. First we have to find out if the ante-room was compromised.”
“How?” Katsuyuki asked.
“Get me a stethoscope and a piece of meat.” He looked at the guards.
“We can communicate directly with Maxim through the Undernet.” Dimitri pulled a laptop on the nearest counter.
“The Undernet?” Otto asked.
“It’s a wireless network of relays and transponders that isn’t connected to the outside world, unfortunately,” Dimitri said.
Geoffrey watched Dimitri’s fingers as he logged in to the underground web, but they moved too fast for him to catch his password.
2:19 P.M.
The crystal room around Nell was like a gigantic eye that peered into the world of lucid nightmares tumbling in fluid darkness around her. Two days had passed, according to Nell’s watch, which she had set for Maxim’s upside-down time zone shortly after arriving.
Nell felt naked in the glass room that protruded into the Pandemonium Sea, where she saw countless creatures as she reclined on the lavender bed, suspended in a euphoria of wonder and fear. A three-foot-wide Spanish dancer nudibranch, its surface outlined by pinlights of purple and gold, flapped like a magic carpet above her. Blue squids shaped like artillery shells chased one another in single file, flashing as they careened around the room. Limpets rasped their radulae against the surface of the crystal walls like Zamboni machines grinding away the strange algaelike growth before it could accumulate.
Nell rolled onto her stomach. In the murky distance through the crystal wall, she saw radiating red and orange arms, each twenty feet long, rising together from the bottom of the lake.
She spotted a light switch next to the window and turned it on, and two dozen beams of light pierced the water in a semicircle outside the invisible room. A new palette of colors emerged from the darkness. The Spanish dancers were now orange, yellow, and red; the gammies were now yellow, red, and white; and the giant arms rising from the lake bottom fifty feet away were reticulated white, purple, and orange.
She now saw that the eight arms bristled with lacy white stalks, each a yard long and releasing a stream of organisms delaminating like budding medusae. Some of the juveniles swam away solo while others linked together and stroked their legs in a pulsing wave. A cloud of multicolored chunks of particulate matter billowed up in the water from the mouth of the mega-medusa. As the plume rose, a squadron of squids converged in a swirling frenzy to feed on the bits of matter. Nell noticed that the young medusae that had broken off from the mega-medusa now did an extraordinary thing: The free-swimming solitary ones latched on to those that had linked together in chains and began dragging them through the feeding animals. As the chains came in contact, the squids and other creatures were instantly paralyzed and sank into the waiting mouth of the mega-medusa.
Perhaps the monster was more like a giant Cassiopeia, Nell thought now—a rare jellyfish that lived upside down attached to the sea bottom. Whatever it was, she had never seen a species whose young hunted food for it so that the adult could concentrate on reproduction—except for ant or termite colonies. “What do you think, Ivan?” she whispered, rubbing the dog’s head. Ivan barked. “I agree,” she said.
Just then she heard someone clanking on the door outside. Men’s voices yelled. The door began to open. Ivan looked at her. She mouthed barking, and he started barking immediately, to her astonished gratitude. She heard men yelling loudly in Russian as the door began to push in.
Nell remembered that Sasha had recorded a message in case the guards found her. Nell scrambled to the CD player and pressed START. Then she dashed around the corner to the bathroom as Sasha’s message played: “Get out of here! I’ll tell Papa! Don’t you dare come closer! Oh, my God, I hate you! Ivan’s going to eat you! Go away! I’m naked!” Then Sasha screamed long and loud on her recording.
The door closed decisively as Nell hunkered down. She crept back into the room and switched off the lights, crawling under the covers of the bed and trying to hide somehow in the fishbowl of Sasha’s secret room.
2:24 P.M.
Maxim sat in the conservatory, scanning the views of security cameras arrayed on the wall behind his desk.
Sasha suddenly banged on her father’s desk, startling him. “Papa!”
A moment after, three guards marched through the main hatch to report to Maxim. Their mouths froze open, amazed to see that Sasha had gotten there before them.
Sasha identified the look in their eyes and immediately screamed. “There they are! These are the ones who keep harassing me, Papa!”
They visibly shrank in front of Maxim’s desk as he swiveled toward them in his chair.
“I’ve found a nice room for me and Ivan, and these pervs tried to barge in on me again just now! Didn’t you? Why can’t I get any privacy around here!” she screamed.
“Now, now, shinka!” He glared at the men. “What have you to say about this?”
“Um, we did find a passageway to the room Sasha was in, Chief, and we thought we should check it out. We didn’t know she was inside!”
“You’re Peeping Toms!” Sasha shouted, pointing at each of them. “They totally heard me and they barged in anyway. Didn’t you?”
“All right, what about this, damn it?” Maxim demanded.
“We did not mean to intrude on her, Chief. We were looking for Nell Binswanger.”
“We’re very sorry, Miss Dragolovich!”
“I was naked! Just like the last time you barged in on me!”
“We closed the door as soon as we heard her, Chief!”
Maxim glared at the men with ominous fury.
Sasha ran around his desk and kissed him. “Bye, Papochka!” Then she trotted to the spiral stairs and waved at the guards before flipping them off and leaving them to fend for themselves.
“I can’t believe she got here before us, Chief,” said one of the confused men. “We came straight here.…”
“She’s explored more of this palace than anyone,” Maxim fired back in Russian. “Find Nell Binswanger instead of spying on my naked daughter! You are to leave Sasha alone, do you hear me? How many times must I tell you! Can you manage that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thanks, Chief!”
“What if—?”
“What?” Maxim snapped.
“A ghost may have gotten her.”
“They seem to be everywhere in the city, Chief.”
“She might have wandered off by herself and—”
“Get out! Find her! Before I feed you to a ghost!”
4:45 P.M.
The scientists in the maternity ward cranked the latch of the door to the storage room and pulled it open a crack.
Geoffrey dumped a can of Vienna sausages into the room, and they slammed the hatch shut.
Otto listened to the door with a stethoscope, noticing his cloven right thumb, the nail deformed after a Henders rat hatchling had split it down the middle on Henders Island. He placed the head of the scope to different parts of the door and closed his eyes as he osculated.
“What if Henders animals don’t like the salt in the Vienna sausages?” Dimitri said.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of sodium in those things,” Katsuyuki agreed.
“For that matter, why do they like to eat us?” Otto said. “We’ve got salt in our blood, sweat, and tears, just like the ocean.”
“It’s a myth that we have the same amount of salt in us as the ocean,” Geoffrey said. “Seawater has three and a half times the concentration of salt that we have in our blood. We might have the same amount of salt in our blood as the ocean did when our ancestors crawled out on land. But now there is enough of a difference in seawater to trigger a warning signal in these things and not enough in our blood to keep us off the menu. They probably have about as much salt in their blood as we do. They just can’t slough off excess salt, so when they’re exposed to saltwater the magnesium buildup anesthetizes and kills them. Hear anything, Otto?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“OK, so next, a visual test.” Geoffrey turned. “Anyone have a camera with a flash?”
Katsuyuki produced a small camera from his shirt pocket.
Geoffrey charged the flash, and when they opened the door, Geoffrey stuck the camera in, pointed it at the floor, set off the flash, and pulled his hand in as they slammed the door. They saw the picture of all seven Vienna sausages lying unmolested on the white tile floor of the storage room. “The room’s clear,” Geoffrey said.
“What makes you so sure?” Dimitri asked.
“We’re sure,” Otto said.
“Let’s rig a way to open the far hatch, let in some Henders critters, and then close the door, all from here,” Geoffrey said. “Then we’ll set up saltwater sprayers to collect their repellent.”
“Hey!” Dimitri noticed a security camera view on his laptop sitting on the nearest lab counter: two limousines were arriving in front of the hospital. Maxim and his entourage got out and rushed up the stairs from the street.
“Great,” Otto said.
Maxim entered through the far hatch. “Have you figured it out, Geoffrey?” Maxim asked.
Geoffrey turned to him. “We will need saltwater, Maxim.”
“We have our own ocean,” Maxim replied. “What else?”
Geoffrey held his eyes. “Got any ice chests? Big ones? Fifteen of them would be good. And something we can spray water with.”
“Throw in duct tape, rope, and string. And some plastic bags and cable ties,” Otto said. As a former NASA systems engineer, Otto considered these items essential prototyping materials.
“And cheesecloth,” Geoffrey said.
“E-mail a list to me,” Maxim said to Dimitri. “I’m very glad to see you’re making progress, Geoffrey. Very good!”
“Where’s my wife, Maxim?” Geoffrey said.
Irritation returned to Maxim’s face. “We will bring her to you soon. If you do not complete this task, it won’t matter, Geoffrey.”
“God damn it, where is she, you son of a bitch!” Geoffrey glared at him. “Are you trying to blackmail me? Where is she?”
Maxim looked at him, a startled look in his eyes, which surprised Geoffrey. “Carry on, Dr. Binswanger,” he said gravely. “I only meant that all of us are in danger if you fail. Your wife has managed to get herself lost in Pobedograd. I cannot guarantee her safety. Only you can do that, by doing what you can to stop these creatures.”
“Why did you bring them here?”
“For insurance.”
“To use as weapons?”
“When your enemy has very big weapons, you need them, too.”
“You can’t aim these weapons, Maxim! Not at a country or even a continent. They will destroy everything, everywhere, if they ever get out! What were you planning to do with them?”
“If they ever tried to attack this city, they would trigger their own destruction.”
“Who is they, Maxim?”
Maxim leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes piercing Geoffrey. “The human race.”
After a brief word with Dimitri in Russian, he departed. As he passed, his two armed guards replanted their feet against the wall behind them.
4:49 P.M.
Only when Sasha brought food in and called her name did Nell come out of hiding. “Thank you, Sasha,” she sighed. “I think Ivan saved me! He’s a very smart dog.”
“Of course,” Sasha said. “Dogs are as smart as their owners.”
“You may be right.” Nell smiled. “Interesting theory.”
“I brought you chocolate cake. But you have to give me a bite. Here is your dinner, madam,” Sasha handed her a plate of piled food with a dramatic flourish. “I even brought you a fork.” She handed her a silver fork and then ran, dive-bombing the lavender bed.
“Thank you,” Nell said. Through the floor and walls behind Sasha, she saw the mega-medusa’s arms now opening on the lake bottom.
Nell sat with her on the edge of the bed, absently nibbling on a couple of eclectic forkfuls of food, finding herself eating a green bean, chocolate cake, and chicken simultaneously and not minding it. She was famished. Ivan whimpered in front of her, sitting as still as one of the Queen’s guards.
Sasha scooped a piece of chocolate cake with two fingers and ate it gluttonously in front of the frozen Samoyed. “You shush, Ivan! I’ll have to take him for a walk in the farm, again.”
Ivan barked and Sasha laughed.
“Sasha,” Nell began.
“I got you two bottles of water.” Sasha pulled the small chilled bottles from her purse.
“Thank you.” Nell reached for one and took a grateful swig. “You said Geoffrey’s in a lab with the other scientists on the other side of the city. Right? Can you communicate with them?”
“Hmm. Maybe.” Sasha lay back and Ivan leaped onto the bed next to her, licking her face. “We could use the Undernet. Right, Ivan?” She squealed as she pushed off the dog.
“The Undernet?” Nell asked.
8:01 P.M.
Maxim looked into Pandemonium through the oval window embedded in the wall of the small room fifty feet above the conservatory. On the other side of the thick glass was the steel gondola deck, which had been cantilevered from the cave wall. The surface of the subterranean sea was eighty feet below.
On the deck, six men in hazmat suits reeled up buckets of salt water beside the large gray gondola, which looked like two airplane noses fused together and suspended by thick cables reaching out into the gloom.
The men pulled up plastic jugs dipped in the lake and strung on ropes. One man capped and stacked the filled jugs on the landing. In the darkness above, flocks of pink and orange bubbles rose to join a mass like a sunlit cloud near the high ceiling.
“Hey, Chief, it looks like a crowd of gammies are coming,” came a voice across an intercom speaker. “Start moving the water in before they get here,” Maxim said. He opened the hatch and waved at them. “Come on, come on!”
Maxim slid the plastic jugs one after another across the floor as one man passed them through the hatch.
Two orbs dangling crimson streamers like the tentacles of Portuguese man-of-wars drifted down toward the men on the landing. “Chief!”
Galia reached the top of the spiral stairs and saw Maxim pulling jugs in through the open hatch. Galia looked through the window to the right of the hatch and saw two floating man-of-wars release a shower of red embers over two men on the gondola deck. He heard them scream as the flaring embers burned through their suits and the paralyzing nematocysts touched their skin with circuit-blowing agony.
Even as both men fell over the rail into the lake, Maxim yelled, “Keep going! They are gone! Keep going, damn it!”
“Maxim!” Galia hissed.
Maxim turned, his eyes glinting at him like knifepoints, before he turned back to the men on the landing. “Come on, come on!”
The other men hauled in their last jugs of water and began capping them with fumbling hands. Then, from all directions, a tide of gammarids brimmed over the landing like beagle-sized army ants. They tore into the men’s suits and climbed over their bodies, covering them up to their heads.
Maxim grabbed the last bucket and shut the hatch on them. He cranked the wheel and gave Galia a look as bloody as his murder. They heard the dying shrieks fade away on the intercom. “Get some men to carry this water, Galia,” he said, turning off the intercom with his fist.
“Maxim—”
“NOW, Galia!” Maxim screamed.
9:20 P.M.
Twenty 2.5-gallon jugs filled with salt water were carried into the lab by five of Maxim’s men. They also delivered ten large blue Igloo ice chests and two backpack agricultural sprayers that had come from the farm.
Otto inspected these last items. The sprayers shot through a nozzle at the end of a lance to cover a wide area while a pump on the other side of the red backpack tanks was operated by the other arm. “Yeah, these should work.”
Maxim came through the hatch from the garage downstairs and approached Geoffrey. “So, you have all you need, yes?”
“To each according to their need,” Geoffrey sneered.
“And from each according to their ability,” Maxim replied fiercely.
“You said you were a capitalist,” Geoffrey said.
“Don’t underestimate how serious I can be, Dr. Binswanger, when I must be. This is an emergency. And in emergencies the rules change.”
“That’s what every dictator says,” said Geoffrey.
Maxim reached down and grabbed Katsuyuki’s neck with his giant left hand and produced a handgun with his right. He placed the barrel of the gun on Katsuyuki’s forehead. “Next time I will pull trigger, yes?”
The biologist fell to the ground, making choking sounds.
“Now get it done!” Maxim turned and left the room, closing the hatch to the garage behind him.
“He’s out of his f*cking mind,” Otto said.
3:19 A.M. BRAZILIA TIME
Hender, Andy, Cynthea, and Zero flew twenty-nine thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean.
The humans slept as Hender quietly typed an entry on his laptop to soothe his worries, translating more fragments of the sels’ past from memory.
The 5th Darkness
Before the fifth darkness came, 29,498,517 years ago, one tribe had united and forced all other sels to follow Alok, their angry god.
But the giant waves tore off the last petal of Henderica—the place where the tribe of Alok had lived, and all its leaders were swallowed by the poison sea—all except for one. All of Kuzu’s tribe descended from him.
12:01 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Kuzu reviewed YouTube videos of Hender neutralizing his attacker in the human city of London, approving of his technique. But the hulking sel was increasingly angered by what humans were saying about Hender on the Internet.
Some humans continued to protest the sels’ imprisonment, and suggested their rights according to the “Geneva Conventions” and the “Constitution” were being violated. But others protested that sels were not people at all and that they were not protected by any law of man, and they used Hender’s act of self-defense as evidence that sels were dangerous.
“These beasts were not meant to live with us!” shouted one human on YouTube. “Their island was sinking until we interfered. They don’t belong on this planet with us. They are an abomination against God!” Kuzu’s fur boiled reds and purples as he journeyed through the Internet, a mounting rage banking in his mind.
9:53 P.M. MAXIM TIME
Hardly speaking to one another, the four scientists connected nozzles made from pinpricked latex gloves with surgical tubing attached to the drains of ice chests set on the top shelves of the storage room.
Working side by side, they clamped the tubes with old Soviet-style paper clips Maxim’s men had supplied. They used duct tape to patch garbage bags together, draping them down each side of the room to catch the water and drain it into six ice chests placed on the floor.
They carefully cranked open the lock of the far hatch and tied one rope to the top of the dog wheel on the door, hooking the rope around a pilaster of the shelves to the right of the hatch so that when they pulled on the rope, it would turn the dog wheel enough to unlatch and open it. Then they tied another rope to the center of the wheel to pull the door open wider.
All the paper clips constricting water flow to the gloves were tied to strings taped to a tug-line leading back to the door with the other ropes. Ropes were also tied to the handles of all six ice chests on the floor. They soaked the ends of the tug-line and ropes in trays of saltwater.
“OK,” Geoffrey said.
“All we need is some bait,” Otto said.
They turned to Maxim’s guards.
10:38 P.M.
Maxim’s men arrived, carrying an entire side of beef.
They laid it in the center of the floor inside the antechamber between the ice chests and then departed.
“Well, that should do it,” Geoffrey said.
The two guards holding pistols behind the four scientists watched, fascinated.
Geoffrey and Otto pulled the outer door of the storage room three-quarters shut.
Otto pointed a webcam around the door, and they watched the video feed on a laptop that Dimitri held. Gripping all the tethers they had rigged, Geoffrey yanked the rope that pulled the far hatch open a crack.
Sparks swirled into the room through the far hatch on the monitor.
“Shut it,” Dimitri said.
“Shhh!” Geoffrey put his hand on Dimitri’s mouth as another burst of glowing bugs flew into the room. He waited just long enough to suggest he was suicidal before yanking the tug-line and the eight surgical gloves inflated with saltwater, spraying through hundreds of pinholes. “OK,” Geoffrey whispered.
Geoffrey and Otto pulled the rope strung around the shelf post and swung the far hatch closed. They gave the line another hard tug, cranking the wheel just enough to latch it. Then they dropped all the other lines inside the room and pulled the near hatch closed.
Just before the door shut, Geoffrey caught a whiff of the Henders warning pheromone, which smelled vaguely like cilantro.… “Good going, guys! I think we got it,” he said.
They waited.
The men used the time to douse themselves with saltwater.
Inside the storage room, the saltwater continued to spray from the glove-nozzles. Otto put the stethoscope to the door. “Pleasure to work with you, MacGyver.” He nodded at Geoffrey. “The room’s buzzing, man!”
“OK, let’s fill those insecticide sprayers with saltwater and get ready to open the door. Saltwater’s not the best repellent, but it’s the next best thing. Maybe we can get the guards to put their guns down and help us, eh, Dimitri?”
Dimitri nodded and spoke to them in rapid Russian.
11:20 P.M.
At last, after a few rehearsals, they opened the hatch.
Geoffrey reached through the crack and took hold of the rope tied to the handle of the nearest ice chest. He and Otto pulled hard on the rope. The guards furiously sprayed salt water through the gap as the chest slid toward the door.
Otto watched the laptop feed coming from the webcam Katsuyuki pointed around the corner. “So far, so good,” Otto said. “They’re staying back!”
As they widened the door, Geoffrey splashed the water inside the ice chest over the doorway. “Pull it up!”
They dragged the ice chest up and over the hatchway, and the others clapped the cover on it as Geoffrey and Otto closed the door.
“We did it,” Dimitri sighed.
After hoisting the ice chest onto a lab counter, they filled plastic water jugs with repellent through the drain, which they filtered through cheesecloth. They emptied the backpack sprayers and refilled them with the repellent-infused mixture.
They proceeded to spray this mixture through the hatch as they opened it to retrieve the other five ice chests.
It worked perfectly until, as they were pulling the last one through, a seven-inch Henders wasp made it through the door, defying the repellent.
“Get it!” Geoffrey yelled, slamming the door shut.
“Kill that freakin’ thing now!” Otto moaned.
It landed on the stomach of the guard next to Geoffrey. Geoffrey punched the guard as hard as he could. The man doubled over, but the five-winged, ten-clawed bug was crushed and fell into the ice chest, bursting a cloud of blue blood.
The other guard grabbed Geoffrey angrily.
“He just saved his life!” Otto shouted.
Dimitri spoke rapidly to them in Russian and the guard backed off.
As they looked into the last ice chest, they were startled to see a number of Henders specimens caught in the water, moving very slowly under the surface. Ants, wasps, and drill-worms sprayed repellent as they died, producing an oily rainbow sheen on the water’s surface.
They filled the rest of the 2.5-gallon jugs from the ice chests, and Geoffrey labeled them with a black felt-tip, when a phone rang. Dimitri answered on the landline phone next to his laptop on the lab counter. “How soon will you be ready?” Dimitri relayed.
Geoffrey sat on a lab stool, exhausted, looking at Otto and Katsuyuki. “Tell him it’s ready.”
Dimitri relayed the news. “Maxim is very pleased with the progress you have made, Geoffrey.”
Geoffrey nodded. “Awesome.”
Dimitri hung up. “It looks like we’ll be testing your repellent tomorrow. That is, four hours from now.”
“Testing it?” Geoffrey got off the stool, putting his hands on his hips. “What?”
“The power plant,” Dimitri said.
“OK, we have to think about this,” Geoffrey said.
“Let’s get some sleep,” said Dimitri. He motioned toward their dormitory with his eyes, and they all got the message. They went to their quarters, away from the guards.
11:58 P.M.
“We can’t let him turn the power on down here,” Geoffrey whispered.
“Agreed,” Otto said.
“Yes!” Katsuyuki said.
“Hey,” Otto said to Dimitri. “Are you with us?”
“Maxim is insane,” Dimitri agreed. “If I must choose between him or the world, then of course I’m with you.” Dimitri jerked as he noticed something on his laptop, which he had brought in and set next to him on his bed. Dimitri called Geoffrey over. “Look.” He pointed to an e-mail he had just received from Maxim’s address:
Hey guys. I’m here in the palace with Sasha.
Can we help?!
BTW, WE CAN SEE YOU RIGHT NOW!
Wife
“She’s alive!” Geoffrey shouted.
“They must see us through that camera!” Otto pointed at a camera mounted over the hatch.
“They must be in Maxim’s office,” Dimitri said.
They all waved at the camera frantically.
11:59 P.M.
Sasha and Nell looked at a screen behind Maxim’s desk in the conservatory and saw the men waving.
Sasha had shown Nell how the hatch to this room could be locked from the inside, as could all the doors radiating out from this room throughout the city. No one could enter now as they accessed the Undernet.
“Wait—look!” Nell indicated Maxim’s e-mail box as a reply arrived.
How are you? – Husby
“We should go. I’ll erase these messages so Papa doesn’t see them.”
“Wait! Here comes another.”
Are you safe?
“Type yes, Sasha!”
“OK.” Sasha sent the reply.
“They’re replying!”
I’ll try to come and get you. Don’t come to us. Bye.
(It’s bad.)
OK, BYE, Nell typed, and sent.
Sasha deleted the messages and emptied the trash. “Come on. We better go.”
Nell looked back at the monitor on the wall as Geoffrey waved to her.
“Papa comes here sometimes. But not after two A.M., usually. We’ll come back then. OK, Nell?”
“OK…”
MARCH 21
2:28 A.M. MAXIM TIME
Maxim sat in the middle of the thirty-foot crescent of his couch atop the Star Tower, gazing through the glass walls of his penthouse apartment at his subterranean utopia. Life went on below. For the moment, at least, the power lines from the surface had not been cut off. In a few hours now, it would not matter.
The phone rang on the couch beside him. “Yes?” he asked, his thick voice cracking.
“My friend…,” Galia said. “News from above.”
“Just tell me what you have to say, damn it.”
“I can’t—”
“No! Tell me!”
“Alexei is dead, Maxim.”
“Don’t say it.… Damn you!”
“Maxim,” Galia implored.
Maxim exhaled his soul as he turned off the phone.
Galia knew then what he must do. He headed for Sector Seven. He was the only one, other than Maxim, with the authority to make the guards let him pass.
2:35 A.M.
Sasha waved Nell on up the winding stairway to the conservatory, which was now dark and empty. The curtain had been drawn over Hell’s Window. They both ran to the wall behind Maxim’s desk on the far side of the room.
Nell and Sasha saw a screen on the wall showing Geoffrey, Otto, Katsuyuki, and Dimitri. They were standing in an observation room of some sort, looking through a wide window.
“Wait a minute…” Nell looked closer at the HD screen. “Can you zoom this view closer and see what they’re looking at through that window, Sasha?”
“Of course!” Sasha clicked the mouse and the camera zoomed in. “You want to see the monsters from Henders Island, right?”
“Yes—what?” Nell turned pale as she looked down at her. “Why did you say that, honey?”
“The creepy-crawlies that Papa bought.”
Nell fell back in Maxim’s chair, the air sucked out of her lungs.
“What’s the matter?” Sasha said.
“What … are you talking about?”
Sasha zoomed in on the view of the window in the lab. “Papa’s monsters. That’s what they’re looking at.”
“Henders—” Nell couldn’t speak as the image expanded on the screen.
Sasha shrugged. “Papa said you’re an expert on Henders Island. That’s why he brought you here.”
Ivan jumped on the arm of the chair and licked Nell’s face.
“Are you OK, Nell?”
2:35 A.M.
The hatch door from the garage burst open and Maxim stepped through, followed by four armed guards. The billionaire strode forward and pointed at Geoffrey, his arm like a rifle. “Get repellent ready. We are starting power right now, Geoffrey. You!” He pointed at Katsuyuki. “Help my men take that downstairs.” He pointed at the five-gallon water bottle on the lab counter, which was filled with live Henders specimens. They had been testing various poisons on the specimens, which had not seemed to be affected by any of the toxic substances they had tried.
“Why?” Katsuyuki asked. “What are you going to do with them?”
Maxim pointed his pistol at Katsuyuki’s head and fired the gun.
The scientist fell to the ground, dead, as the others staggered back in horror.
“You!” Maxim pointed the gun at Otto. “Do it!”
Geoffrey glanced at Otto.
“Maxim!” Dimitri hissed. “Do not trust them!”
Maxim wheeled and pointed the gun at Dimitri in blind rage before he had processed what Dimitri had said.
Geoffrey reached up and toggled the controls of the camera outside the window.
“Watch out!” Dimitri shouted, pushing Maxim away.
The heavy camera swung down and shattered the glass.
Geoffrey grabbed a scalpel and slashed open one of the plastic jugs of repellent. He pulled Otto’s arm and dumped the repellent out of the jug over both their heads as bugs and rats gushed into the room through the window.
The flood of creatures avoided them as the other men screamed, instantly attracting orgies of feeding predators. Geoffrey grabbed another jug, and Otto snagged one of the backpack sprayers as they both ran toward the door to the garage, ducking behind the 2.5-gallon jugs stacked on the lab counters.
Maxim’s men dragged him through the hatch into the dormitory as he fired his gun at the two scientists, but the bullets struck the water jugs as Geoffrey and Otto slipped through the door and slammed it closed behind them.
As they cranked the wheel, Geoffrey and Otto felt someone on the other side of the door twisting it in the other direction. Geoffrey and Otto heard shouting, and they both bore down, bracing themselves against the wall. They could hear a whine of Henders animals whirring like a jet engine on the other side of the hatch as the pressure resisting them weakened and finally stopped. They turned and plunged down the stairs to the garage.
“Where are we going?” Otto asked.
“Maxim’s car!”
2:38 A.M.
Nell and Sasha saw Maxim point his gun at Katsuyuki. They saw the scientist fall and Sasha screamed.
Then they saw the window shatter silently. Geoffrey and Otto ran out of the camera’s frame to the right. Dimitri and Maxim ran to the left with two of his bodyguards as Maxim fired his gun again. The guards shoved Maxim off the screen as strange animals flew through the broken window. Sasha saw her father and his guards appear in the screen below, inside the room where they had first spotted Geoffrey and the other scientists. A guard sealed the hatch behind them.
On the screen above, the rest of Maxim’s men who had failed to get out of the way of the rushing horde were swarmed. A spiger as big as a deer jumped through the window and spiked the chest of one of the men. The man beside him screamed and was instantly covered by a mass of flying bugs and disk-ants.
In a screen to the right, they saw two more guards running down a flight of stairs, chased by the glowing bugs flowing through the open hatch behind them. In the next screen over, they saw the guards run down the stairs in front of the building to an SUV parked at the curb. Nell and Sasha watched the deluge of animals spread over the screens on the wall. “Oh, no!” Nell shouted, desperately searching the screens for any sign of Geoffrey.
“Papa!” Sasha screamed.
2:39 A.M.
Geoffrey and Otto leaped into Maxim’s limo in the garage. With trembling fingers, Geoffrey pushed the remote door opener on the visor. The door began to open and Geoffrey pressed the gas pedal, launching the limo in reverse and scraping the still-rising door. The heavy car’s tires screeched as he mashed the brakes, shifting, then tearing forward.
“We gotta get to the train station in Sector Seven!” Otto said.
“No. We can’t let anything get to Sector Seven. Not even us! We gotta get to the palace!” Geoffrey shouted. He turned right and approached the gate to Sector Two.
“Tinted windows,” Otto said as they approached the guards. “That’s handy.”
Geoffrey nodded, adrenaline racing through his bloodstream as he approached the gate. “This is Maxim’s limo, so they might let us through,” he said, his voice distant as his rushing pulse pounded in his ears.
“What if they don’t?”
Geoffrey noticed a machine gun resting on the seat next to him, and he pulled it closer with a shaking hand.
The two guards jumped up from chairs and operated a control panel. The gate began to open and they waved them through.
“Awesome,” whispered Otto.
The guards on the outside of the gate also waved them along, but as the gate started rolling shut behind them, Geoffrey saw one of the guards on the other side grab his neck and fall just before it closed.
Geoffrey turned right and stepped on the gas, pushing the heavily armored car up the road as fast as it could go. “This is the way to the palace, right?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Otto said. “My God, Maxim killed him.” He shuddered and looked at Geoffrey. “He shot Katsuyuki! What are we going to do, man?”
“Make sure that sprayer’s ready,” Geoffrey said. “Something might be chasing us. If we get through the door to the palace, we can’t afford to let anything get in with us.”
“How will we get in, man? There must be guards with f*cking guns outside the gate and they won’t just wave us through this time!”
“This is Maxim’s limo,” Geoffrey said. “It can probably take a direct hit from a nuke. And Stalin’s palace is the most secure place in the city.”
“Shit, this is hairy, man, I don’t know!”
“It’s all we’ve got. Get ready!” Geoffrey hit the brakes and skidded around a corner to the left, pushing the gas up the last length of tunnel.
2:40 A.M.
Sasha and Nell spotted the limousine racing toward the palace on ever closer cameras. Sasha cried, tears streaking her face. “What about Papa?”
“He’s OK,” Nell said. “He’s safe, Sasha. We’ve got to let them through the gate, all right?”
Sasha tapped the keys on her father’s keyboard. “We have to rescue Papa!”
“We will! But you’ve got to open the gate! Geoffrey will die if he can’t get through!”
“I can open the door,” Sasha said.
“Great, honey. Thank you!”
Sasha sniffled. “The guards inside will kill him, though.”
“They will?”
“Yes.”
Nell thought. “Can we call Geoffrey and warn him, honey?”
“Uuuh—hey, yeah.” Sasha clicked on some prompts and they heard a phone blurting on the computer’s speakers. “Good thinking, Nell.”
2:40 A.M.
Geoffrey followed his headlights up the long tunnel, its walls honeycombed with the doors and windows of medieval dwellings carved out for the villagers of Gursk to inhabit in the event of invasion. He did not see anything following them in the dark through the rearview mirror. “Answer the phone, Otto.”
“Phone?” Otto asked.
Geoffrey pointed at the ringing phone on the dashboard. “Answer it!”
Otto grabbed it. “Yeah?”
“Geoffrey, the guards will kill you,” Nell said.
“Nell?” Otto said.
“Oh, Otto—is Geoffrey with you?”
“Yeah, he’s driving.”
Nell sighed. “Listen. We’ll open the gate for you. But the guards will kill you when you come through the door. OK?”
“Um, OK. Nell says she can open the gate but the guards will kill us.”
“How many guards are there?” asked Geoffrey.
2:40 A.M.
Nell heard his question. “How many guards are there, Sasha?”
“Two outside the gate and two on the stairs. I kicked the others out of the palace.”
“Is that all?”
“I think so.… There might be more. I don’t know,” Sasha sighed, waiting with two fingers poised over the keyboard.
2:40 A.M.
“Two at the gate and two on the stairs, maybe more,” Otto relayed.
“Where are Nell and Sasha?” Geoffrey said.
2:41 A.M.
Nell heard him and answered, “We’re in Maxim’s conservatory. Can you lock the gate from the inside, Sasha, after they get through?”
“All the doors lock from the inside around the palace so Stalin could keep everybody out. I can change the entry code so nobody can come in. Want me to?”
“Yes! Good!”
2:41 A.M.
“They’re in Maxim’s conservatory,” Otto said. “They can lock the gate.”
“Get the sprayer ready in case anything is chasing us. And hand me that machine gun. See if you can figure out how to take the safety off without shooting me, OK? Let’s see if we can get through without a fight first.”
“Right.” Otto shrank down under the dash as Geoffrey approached the guards before the steel door marked SEKTOP 1 in tall red letters. He whispered in the phone: “We’re at the gate now.”
The two guards strode forward leisurely with Kalashnikovs. Apparently they had not been warned yet by the others. The man who approached the driver’s side waved to lower the window.
Geoffrey rolled down the window ten inches and stuck his hand out, waving twice as he imitated what he had seen Maxim do. He raised the window again. That’s when he realized his mistake. Maxim had waved from the backseat, of course. He had waved from the driver’s seat.
The man knocked on the window hard as the other guard lifted a walkie-talkie from his belt.
2:42 A.M.
“Come on, Sasha,” Nell said.
“Um, I’m trying to figure it out!” Sasha yelled. “Wait!”
“We don’t have time, honey.”
“I know, I know!”
2:42 A.M.
The guard proceeded to the window behind Geoffrey and knocked on the window.
“Shit,” whispered Geoffrey.
“Uh,” Otto whispered into the phone. “We’re f*cked.…”
The other guard moved in front of the limousine and pointed his weapon at them.
Geoffrey reached for the machine gun, hoping the glass was truly one-way.
“Watch this!” Otto heard Sasha shout in the phone.
The gate behind the men started sliding open, surprising the guards. The men shrugged and stepped aside as Geoffrey surged forward through the opening gate. They must have assumed it was OK since the gates could only be controlled remotely by Maxim or Galia. The men answered their walkie-talkies as Sasha was closing the gate behind the limo. Geoffrey noticed them suddenly wave their arms as the doorway narrowed. They shouted at them to stop. In the rearview mirror, Geoffrey saw them point and fire their machine guns through the closing crack, scarring the bulletproof rear window as the door slid into the rock wall and sealed them off.
2:43 A.M.
“Lock the gate, Sasha!” Nell shouted.
“OK, OK! I’m trying! There it is. I need Papa’s password.”
“Do you know it?”
“Sure.” She typed out the letters with one finger as she said them aloud. “A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R-G-R-eight. That’s after my brother, Alexei,” she said. “Wait, where’s the eight again?”
Nell saw the men outside the gate running toward the switch to open it. “Hurry, honey!”
“There it is!” She poked a dimpled finger.
2:43 A.M.
One guard ran down the steps in front of the palace as he fired a Kalashnikov across the courtyard at them. The bullets raked the windshield.
“Ram him!” Otto shouted.
As the bullets sprayed in front of his face, adrenaline exploded through Geoffrey’s body and tears streamed from his eyes as he steered the heavy vehicle toward the guard, whose body slammed with grisly smacks into the hood, windshield, and roof, each sound impacting on Geoffrey’s soul.
2:43 A.M.
“Got it!” Sasha squealed. “It’s locked.”
“So they can’t open it?”
“Duh. Yeah!” Sasha said.
“Awesome, Sasha. Good job!” Nell hugged her, hiding Sasha’s eyes from what she saw Geoffrey doing on the screen.
2:43 A.M.
Flooring the gas pedal of the monster limo up the cascade of steps, Geoffrey spotted another guard rushing down the stairs and firing a high caliber handgun right at Geoffrey that cracked spiderwebs into the windshield. The sparks of the rounds blinded Geoffrey for a moment.
“Kill him!” shouted Otto.
Geoffrey accelerated, ducking behind the dash, feeling the slight thud; he pulled his foot off the gas and saw the guard’s body fly backwards into a marble pillar, tumbling to the ground. Geoffrey sobbed as he drove past the man’s broken body directly into the palace foyer, the tires stamping bloody tracks on the inlaid marble floor.
He stopped and turned off the limo’s engine, hanging his head as he gripped the steering wheel, breathing hard and nausea welling in his throat.
“You did good, man.” Otto slapped his arm. “You got us through. That was freaking awesome! They were trying to kill us, dude. They would have killed us! It’s OK. Don’t worry about it!”
Geoffrey shook his head. “Man,” he breathed. “Is that ever easy for you to say.”
“We’d be dead now if you didn’t do it!” Tears streamed from Otto’s eyes, too, now, in the aftermath.
“It’s not a f*cking video game,” Geoffrey said.
“I know,” Otto gripped his shoulder. “OK. Let’s just wait here. We’ll watch and listen for a while before we do anything. Right? This car is the safest place we can be right now, right?”
“Yeah.” Geoffrey nodded. “Are they still on the phone?”
Otto checked the line. “Hello?”
2:45 A.M.
“Hello?” Nell asked. “They’re not there, Sash!”
“Yeah, the phone doesn’t work inside, because the palace is lined with lead or something.”
“How does it reach outside, then?”
“Transponders?” Sasha shrugged dramatically.
“Is there a camera in the foyer?” Nell said.
“I’m looking.” Sasha scrolled through galleries of security camera views, looking for the limo.
“God, he’s got more cameras than London,” Nell muttered. “He must be more paranoid than Stalin!”
“You might be right,” Sasha said pensively.
“There—that looks like the riverfront, Sasha.” Nell tapped the screen. “And that over there looks like the bridge to Sector Seven. Maybe go back in the other direction?”
“OK…”
“Maybe the closer to us the camera is, the closer to the top of the list?” Nell said.
“That makes sense!”
2:50 A.M.
Five minutes passed as Geoffrey and Otto peered out of the limo in all directions through its blackened windows at the domed foyer under the glittering chandelier. Neither of them could see or hear anyone.
“OK,” Geoffrey said finally. “Let’s try to get to the conservatory.”
Otto turned sideways on the seat and strapped the repellent-sprayer on his back. Geoffrey lugged one of the 2.5-gallon jugs of repellent onto his left thigh and slung the shoulder strap of the machine gun over his neck. Holding the gun’s grip with his right hand, he kicked open the door. “You’re sure the safety’s off?”
“I think so.”
“All right, let’s go.”
They both stepped out of the limousine into the foyer. Geoffrey carried the jug and pointed the gun erratically with his right hand as they ventured up the red carpet of the curving staircase on the left.
When they reached the upper level, they saw no one. They ran between a row of doors, and one of them suddenly opened.
2:50 A.M.
“There they are!” Sasha jumped up and down and put the view on the big screen. “They’re right outside!” she yelled.
“Let’s open the door!”
“Wait— Oh, no!”
2:50 A.M.
A guard buttoning his jeans emerged from a door on the other side of the hall. He noticed them, and one of his hands fumbled for a pistol strapped under his shoulder.
“Wait!” Geoffrey said. “It’s OK! Don’t shoot!”
The guard unsnapped his holster and pulled out his gun.
“Wait!” Geoffrey said.
“Shoot him!” Otto yelled.
The guard fired first, the first shot striking Otto in the neck, the second shot striking Geoffrey in the foot as he jumped to the side and fired a barrage of wild bullets that wounded the guard’s hand. Geoffrey dropped the jug of water and lunged at the guard, who picked up the gun with his other hand. Geoffrey aimed his machine gun and shouted, “No!” But a mere touch of the trigger blasted three bullets into the guard’s face.
Geoffrey retched as the guard fell forward, his head splattering on the stone floor. Geoffrey turned away, limping on his bloody foot, and saw that Otto was lying still. Using the gun as a crutch, he hobbled closer. He could see that Otto was dead from the vacant look in his staring eyes. Geoffrey grabbed the water jug from where he had dropped it and ran to the end of the hall, turning left up the short flight of stairs to Maxim’s office, leaving a red trail of footprints.
He pounded on the door. The hatch opened.
“Come on!” Nell said.
He clambered through the hatch and dropped the gun and heavy jug before falling to his knees.
Nell shut the hatch and cranked the wheel, locking it.
Sasha approached Geoffrey, staring at his foot. “You’re bleeding!”
Nell embraced him from behind. “Come on! We have to look at that!”
He turned and kissed her as though she could absolve him, knowing she could not. He had watched ten people die in the last few days, some, certainly, because of him.
She stroked his head and saw the blood spatter on his shoulder. “I would never have forgiven you if you had gotten yourself killed,” she said. “You did what you had to do.” She squeezed his hand in hers.
After they got him to the chair behind Maxim’s desk, Nell pulled off his shoe. He noticed the screens on the wall. She pulled the bloody sock off and saw that the bullet had gone through the bone in his foot leading to his small toe. She pulled the lace out of his shoe and tied it around his ankle, cinching it tight.
Geoffrey pointed to one of the screens in which a burning SUV had crashed into the wall across the street from the hospital. Green cyclones swirled over the bodies of two men in the street. They watched a man get out of a limo parked in front of the hospital only to be immediately smothered by wasps and drill-worms gushing out of the door.
Sasha hid her eyes, turning away.
“They’re from Henders Island,” Geoffrey murmured.
“I know!” Nell said.
“We’ve got to warn people,” he said.
“Sasha, do you know where a first aid kit is?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the bottom drawer of Papa’s desk.”
Nell pulled it out and saw an antique leather-bound book on top of the first aid kit. She set the book on top of the desk and opened the kit.
Geoffrey saw on the next screen over that the two men still stood guard outside the gate of the hospital sector. He sighed in relief. “Thank God,” he said, feeling woozy as he gripped the arms of the chair. “The gate closed in time. We can’t open the gate to Sector Three.” The screen to the other side showed the dormitory where they had stayed next to the lab. Maxim, Dimitri, and two of his bodyguards were now trapped inside.
Geoffrey saw Maxim pointing at him through the TV screen and realized that Maxim must be able to see them. Then he noticed a webcam over the screens extending toward them. “He sees us!” Geoffrey whispered.
“Papa!” Sasha ran to the computer. “I think he can hear us, too.” She boosted the volume as her father moved closer to the camera, climbing on a bed as his face filled the monitor.
Maxim shouted: “The whole world will pay for what you did!”
“Papa!” Sasha cried.
“Sasha!” Maxim’s face recoiled.
“You be nice to Geoffrey!”
“We can still make it out of here alive, Maxim,” Nell said. “Help us!”
“Why?” Maxim bellowed. “Then they will kill me, and there will never be justice for what they’ve done!” Maxim gestured behind him to one of his men, who opened a laptop on the bed and kneeled in front of it.
“Maxim!” Geoffrey yelled. “You can’t!”
“Let hell rise.…”
“Where’s Alexei, Papa?” Sasha said.
“Alexei is dead!” Maxim roared in a cruel eruption.
“For God’s sake!” Nell said as Sasha fell to the floor, sobbing.
“There is no God!” Maxim laughed hideously. “There is only the Devil! They killed my son! They killed my grandfather, my father, my brother, and millions more! And there was no justice! There were no charges, no trials, no convictions. As if there were no crimes! And they call me a criminal?”
“You condemn the whole human race?” Geoffrey asked. “You would slaughter all the innocents, all the ones you love, to get back at the guilty? You sound like Koba, Maxim.”
“They began it! I will end it.”
“What about your daughter?” Nell said.
“They will kill her, also. They will hunt her down like the rest! And they will go on and on and on, forever!” Maxim looked down at the laptop his guard now held for him. He typed with one hand. “But not this time!”
“Hey!” Sasha jumped up now and pointed at two screens on the wall. “He’s opening the gates!”
2:55 A.M.
Dimitri watched the tycoon, who was hunched intently over the laptop at the edge of a bed in the dormitory. Maxim’s face contorted with fury as he tapped the keys, scanning security-camera views of his city. One screen showed luminous creatures flying through the opening gate from Sector Four and spigers with fiery coats leaping into the hospital sector. On another, the gate to Sector Three opened and hordes of rats and swarms of Henders insects poured into the garrison sector, overwhelming the two guards there. Another view showed the door to the main city in Sector Six opening. Then Dimitri saw the gate to Sector Seven opening at the train station across the river.
“Maxim, what are you doing?” Dimitri screamed.
Maxim accessed the password screen for each gate and bashed his right hand on the keyboard to set a new password—hihu9-g7890—copying it, confirming it, and closing the window as he moved to the next.
2:55 A.M.
“Stop, Maxim!” Geoffrey implored. “Don’t do this!”
“I had hoped to save some souls here, Geoffrey. But that’s impossible now. Find a way out if you can. You’ll have some years left if you do.”
Geoffrey noticed Maxim’s daughter beside him, jabbing the keyboard furiously with two fingers. Trying to delay him, he shouted, “You will be worse than everything you hate, worse than Stalin ever was!”
Maxim lashed out at the camera, pointing at him. “You made this happen!”
“You’re delusional!” Geoffrey answered as Sasha probed his security system. “Where were you going to take that bottle of Henders specimens?”
Maxim was quiet, shrinking on the screen.
“You were planning to use these species as weapons all along. You were taking that sample to Sector Seven to release them, weren’t you? You knew they would migrate through the train tunnel. All the way to Moscow, isn’t that right? That is what you were going to do, Maxim! Admit it!”
“The deaths of millions made this place and a thousand others like it,” the billionaire muttered.
Nell pointed at a screen that showed the gate to downtown Pobedograd opening as the letters of SEKTOP 6 disappeared into the rock wall. “Oh, my God. Sasha, you have to close that door!”
“I can’t close it,” Sasha said. “He locked it!”
“The city!” Nell said. “Close the door to Sector Seven, then, Sasha!” she hissed.
“Are you going to sit back and watch everyone inside your city die? What kind of devil are you? God damn it, shut the gates, Maxim! Now!” Geoffrey shouted.
Tears streamed down Sasha’s face as she called up window after window of security clearances until she finally got in to the password authority prompt for Maxim’s user ID. Nell watched her type in a new ten-letter password painfully with two fingers, confirming it twice: ILOVESASHA. Then the young girl confirmed it once more before clicking open the gate control interface and closing the gate to Sector Six.
On two screens, Nell, Geoffrey, and Maxim could see the gate to the main city at the northeast corner stop and reverse its motion, as it rolled closed.
“What?” Maxim growled.
“Awesome, girl!” Geoffrey whispered to Sasha.
Dimitri sighed gratefully behind Maxim.
But as the gate narrowed, a truck tried to squeeze through from the city, and halfway through the door, the truck’s trailer was caught and pinched like a tube of toothpaste. The truck tires burned on the road as they spun. Two men jumped out of the cab and surveyed the totaled trailer wedged inside the door. In the next instant, both were struck by a glowing wave and they sprawled on the ground, writhing as the attacking creatures swarmed around the truck trailer, flying and slipping through the gaping gate into the city.
2:56 A.M.
Dimitri wept as he saw the door to the city jammed open. A spiger the size of a hippo vaulted onto the truck cab and wriggled through the crack on top of the squeezed trailer.
Maxim switched to another view that showed the spiger pulling itself with spiked arms on top of the truck trailer as flying and leaping creatures burst into Sector Six.
Dimitri bowed his head into his hands, unable to watch.
2:56 A.M.
Geoffrey saw that the large door in the train station’s façade was now wide open. “Sasha, you’ve got to seal Sector Seven!”
“Close that door, honey,” Nell urged her softly.
“There’s still time,” Geoffrey said. “But hurry!”
“I’m trying!” Sasha sobbed as she navigated the door’s controls.
“What are you doing?” Maxim roared through the speakers, glaring at them through the screen on the wall.
“Shut up, Papa! Shut up!” Sasha shouted as she finally activated the gate and locked in a new password. It rolled out of the wall, sealing the train station as the red letters on the door emerged: SEKTOP 7.
2:56 A.M.
Maxim called up another screen, this one showing the front of the train station across the river. Its large steel door was now sealed.
“Thank God, Maxim,” Dimitri breathed.
Maxim punched keys with his fingers. The gate control now asked for his password. They must have hijacked his own user ID and changed the door codes. Who could do that? “Sasha!” he shouted. He typed in his password again and it was rejected.
“Thank God, Maxim,” Dimitri said again.
Maxim swung at Dimitri, knocking him onto the bed behind him. He tried passwords now that she might have used: IVAN, SASHA, ALEXANDRA, ALEXEI, ILOVEIVAN.… Finally, the security system locked him out and he smashed his fist onto the keys.
Dimitri almost fainted in relief as he watched the hulking back of the madman, who threw the laptop on the floor and sobbed, seizing his head in his giant hands.
The other two men, Maxim’s elite bodyguards, glanced at Dimitri from across the room and one of them ran to Maxim now. “What you need, Chief?”
Maxim was unresponsive as the other guard approached and picked the laptop up off the floor. “We’ll need this, Chief,” he said softly.
“The room is secure,” said the first guard. “We have plenty of food and water to last awhile here, and even a lavatory.”
The second guard looked harshly at Dimitri. “What happens if we lose power?”
“An emergency generator downstairs will kick in,” Dimitri said. “After that, we’re down to batteries and that bicycle generator in the corner.” He pointed.
“How long do we have air?”
“Each room has separate air ducts, and the filters should hold them back,” Dimitri said.
“All right.” The guard patted Maxim’s shoulder. “Get some sleep, Chief. You’ve been up too long. We need you to be sharp. OK?”
Maxim fell sideways on the bed and curled into a fetal position.
Outside the boarded windows, they heard what sounded like a haunted house of shrieks, cackles, and whining hums.
“Let’s turn off some of these lights,” Dimitri said.“They’re attracted to light and sound.”
2:57 A.M.
Sasha’s ice-blue eyes melted tears as she looked at her father crumpled on the bed. “Papa,” Sasha cried. “Why don’t you know the password?”
The room around her father darkened by degrees as the men turned off the lights.
“He’s OK, Sasha,” Nell reassured her. “Can you shut the gates to Sector Three and Four?”
“No! He changed the codes for them before I could get there,” Sasha cried.
“He should be safe till we can help him,” Geoffrey said.
A stream of howling creatures poured out of Sector Four and flooded past the hospital into the garrison sector, gushing into downtown Pobedograd. Nell hugged the little girl, hiding her eyes from the screens arrayed on the wall as, one by one, they turned into a horror show.
A night-shift construction crew in the center of the city was besieged and chased down the street by cat-sized animals that sprang in thirty-foot leaps. In the center of the city, thirty-five stories up, workers installing windows and lights on the Star Tower were welding, showering comet tails of sparks down the face of the building. Then squadrons of flying creatures, attracted by the light, arrived and attacked, and the workers’ bodies fell from the scaffolding.
Feeding frenzies clumped, like ants around sugar cubes, in the streets as a new kind of traffic began coursing through the streets and people ran in terror on screen after screen.
“Geoffrey,” Nell whispered. She looked at him hopelessly.
He shook his head.
They saw a view from a camera on a lamppost looking east along the riverfront. Groups of people stampeded down the steps in front of the restaurant where they had eaten on their first night in Pobedograd. Some of the patrons fell down, while others ran ahead toward the screen. Three young spigers the size of mastiffs launched behind them off their catapult tails, raising their spiked arms.
“God!” Geoffrey whispered.
Sasha recognized Dennis Appleton, who made it closest to the camera before a horse-sized spiger bit him in half with vertical jaws.
Sasha tried to look, but Nell blocked her view. “No, sweetie!” Sasha pushed her head against Nell’s stomach, sobbing.
They watched helplessly as the city was inundated by a carnivorous tsunami. The mayhem spread, a premonition of what would engulf the globe if any of these species reached the surface.
“What about the farm? Can anyone get to the farm in Sector Five?”
Geoffrey touched the screen that displayed the steel door marked SEKTOP 5. There was no motion on the street outside the gate.
“Can we warn the people in the city, Sasha, so they can try to get to the farm?” Nell asked.
Then a glowing green speck streaked by the farm’s door on the screen.
“Damn!” Geoffrey said as a dozen more shapes like large dragonflies passed the door from the right. A few stopped, hovering, their bodies hanging straight down like glow sticks. “They’ve already made it to the other side of the city.…”
Fear pressed down on them like the mountain above as they realized their predicament. Geoffrey gripped Nell’s hand. “We’re safe here, for now,” he insisted.
“There’s food and water downstairs,” Nell said, nodding and hiding her tears from Sasha. “Is there any way to communicate with the outside world, Sasha?”
“No!” she yelled angrily.
“Come on, let’s fix your foot, Geoffrey. It looks like there’s morphine, antibiotics, and even a sewing kit in here. Sasha, can you help me? Geoffrey needs our help. OK?”
Sasha pulled away from Nell and wiped her eyes. “OK, OK!”
Nell noticed a large lavender envelope on Maxim’s desk. “To Sasha from Uncle Galia, with love,” she read. “Have you seen this, Sasha?”
“Huh?” Sasha said, reading it. “I hate Galia!”
“Open it.”
She tore open the envelope and pulled out a card. She read aloud, “I will come back for you, Uncle Galia.”
Sasha threw it down on the floor.
Geoffrey and Nell looked at each other. Nell took the card and saw the date written on the card: it was today’s date. “That’s good news, honey,” Nell said.
“He left without us!” Sasha cried. “And he’s not even my uncle!”