The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 4

  “Take first squad and check the vehicles,” Mikhailov ordered, his breath steaming in the cold air as he raised his binoculars to scan the small windows of the buildings. There was nothing.

  “Sir.” With hand signals and a few spoken words, Rudenko had the men form a skirmish line, with the soldiers of the first squad inspecting the vehicles outside the gate. They checked everything: inside, underneath, in the trunks, and under the hood. All the vehicles were unoccupied. All were unlocked.

  “There’s nothing, sir,” Rudenko reported. “No bodies, no blood. The drivers must have just parked and gone into the complex.”

  “And never returned.” Mikhailov pursed his lips. “Very well. Let’s go.”

  Rudenko passed the order, and the men of the platoon formed into two columns. They quickly moved through the main gate in the four meter-high fence before spreading out in a line facing the lab building.

  Rudenko had the first squad continue to check the vehicles parked along the hundred meter entrance drive that led from the gate to the main parking lot. On either side of the drive were fallow fields, through which the rest of the platoon kept pace. Their weapons were trained on the windows and main entry door to the lab.

  As they neared the parking lot itself, Mikhailov glanced at Rudenko, who shook his head. There was nothing, and no one, in the vehicles along the drive.

  One of his men, standing next to one of the police cars, held up his hand, and something in his fingers glittered. The keys. The soldier shrugged, tossing the keys back into the car before moving forward.

  When they reached the cars in the parking lot, they were confronted with a mystery.

  “Bozhe moi,” Mikhailov whispered as he gingerly opened the door of a green hatchback. The dashboard of the car was missing. It hadn’t been torn out or removed, for the metal fasteners were still in place. It was just that the plastic had disappeared. The entire interior, other than glass, metal components and wires, all of which looked as if it had been highly polished, was gone.

  The tires of the cars were also missing. But not the metal rims or even the metal parts of the valve stems. Only the rubber parts of the tires.

  Kneeling down next to one of the car’s front wheels, Mikhailov picked up two mesh ribbons draped over the rim. They were the steel belts that had been molded into the tire when it was made.

  “Kapitan. This one is locked. And look inside.”

  Dropping the shiny steel belts as if they were burning his fingers, Mikhailov moved to where Rudenko stood, two cars away. The interior of the car was much the same as the others, except for something on the metal liner of the dashboard. Mikhailov saw two shiny metal rods, about twenty centimeters long, and a dozen gleaming metal screws. They looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place them.

  “I took a bullet in my leg in Chechnya,” Rudenko said quietly. “It shattered one of my shin bones. The doctors fixed it with a metal rod and screws that look almost exactly like that.”

  That is when Mikhailov made the connection. He had seen such things in x-rays before. “But that is impossible!”

  Rudenko shrugged. “Moi kapitan, it clearly is possible. We simply do not know how. And I am not so sure I wish to find out.” He paused. “Curious. I wonder why they are on the dashboard?”

  “I do not care to guess.” Mikhailov looked toward the door leading into the lab building. “Let us…” He paused, considering. He could simply go in behind a barrage of grenades and all guns blazing, but that might needlessly destroy evidence of what had happened here. There was also the chance that there were survivors or hostages, although in his gut he did not believe it. “Let us treat this as a reconnaissance, unless we meet resistance or find that there are truly ‘terrorists’ holding prisoners.”

  “And if we do meet resistance?”

  “We are to defend ourselves, kill anyone or anything who opposes us, and do our best to save any civilians who may be alive.”

  “Sir!” Rudenko quickly got the platoon organized. When he was done, four men were positioned around the entrance door, while the rest of the platoon was lined up to quickly file inside.

  He gave his captain a thumbs-up.

  With butterflies filling his belly, Mikhailov clutched his shotgun. His men watched him intently. “Go!”

  A soldier yanked the door open and the other three men of the entry team stormed inside.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dr. Vijay Chidambaram leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. For nearly twelve hours a day for the last week in his cramped and stuffy office in the Andhra Pradesh Department of Agriculture’s headquarters in Hyderabad, India, he had been sifting through a mountain of folders his assistant had piled onto his desk. In those folders were hundreds of reports detailing the state’s crop production, and it was his job to prepare the quarterly summary briefing that would go to the state’s Minister for Agriculture. Vijay wouldn’t be giving the briefing himself, of course. His boss would have that particular honor as he was trying to further ingratiate himself to the minister. Vijay didn’t mind. He hated giving briefings. If given a choice, he would much rather be rooting around in the soil, looking for worms.

  No, his task was to gather and wade through the data so his boss could give the minister good news every quarter. It was a good job, a prestigious job in its way, and he knew that he was very lucky to have it.

  That didn’t change the fact that he hated it. The job had been a gift, in a way, from one of his uncles after Vijay had returned to India from the United States after what had happened the year before in California. He had been, and still was, in heart if not in name, a member of the Earth Defense Society, fighting its secret war against the harvesters. But after the American government had absorbed the EDS and wrapped it in secrecy, Vijay had been left out in the cold. He knew that Jack and Naomi had fought tenaciously for him to be included in their new agency, but the government had demanded that everyone working there had a top secret security clearance. Unfortunately, Vijay wasn’t a U.S. Citizen, which was a non-negotiable requirement.

  Disheartened, Vijay had decided to return home. He had been offered a field research position by the central government, but his uncles and aunts, who filled in for his long-dead mother and father, had protested vigorously. The job, they had claimed, was unworthy of his talents, and one of his uncles was close to a joint director at the Andhra Pradesh Ministry of Agriculture. After a few phone calls and a meeting with the joint director, Vijay had a new job that paid over twice as much, had an office and an assistant, and made the family look good. Enjoying the work wasn’t part of the bargain.

  With that checked off the list, his family was now working on finding him a suitable wife. Vijay was quite happy as a bachelor, but had given up trying to dissuade them. Better that he simply accepted his karma. The only saving grace had been that the family’s astrologer had not offered any good news on the subject, despite unrelenting interrogation by (and not a little extra money from) Vijay’s aunts.

  Opening his eyes again, he leaned forward and carefully dropped the folder he had just finished reviewing onto the growing stack on the floor. But the stack on his desk was still far taller.

  He checked his watch: it was nearly four in the afternoon, but he wouldn’t be going home for quite a while yet.

  With a sign of resignation, he took the next folder and flipped it open to the report inside, cringing as he saw that it was hand-written, and in a particularly atrocious scrawl. Far more used to typing on the computer than writing by hand, he could barely understand his own handwriting these days, let alone anyone else’s.

  Aligning a wooden ruler, a treasured keepsake from his childhood, under the first line of squiggled figures in the report, he was just typing the first set of numbers into the spreadsheet on his computer when his cell phone rang.

  Thankful for the interruption, he picked up the phone and flipped it open. He saw on the display that it was one of his colleagues and friends, Dr. Naresh Sharma, and pressed t
he answer button.

  Before Vijay could even say hello, he heard Naresh shouting through the phone.

  “Those bastards! They did it again!”

  “Naresh, what is it? What are you talking about?”

  “AnGrow,” Naresh spat. “I just inspected one of their fields and found they’d planted again without authorization. More GMO maize that hasn’t received proper approval. Damn them!”

  “Just a moment, Naresh.” Grimacing, Vijay stood up and closed the door to his office, ignoring the questioning glance from his assistant who sat at a small desk outside. This was a conversation he didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  AnGrow was an agricultural company in India that had worked closely with New Horizons and other biotechnology companies to help them gain a foothold in the Indian market. But with as much money as those companies could throw at government officials, the foothold had become an invasion beachhead. Genetically engineered strains of nearly every food plant on which India’s population depended had been created or were being developed, and companies like AnGrow fought to bring them through the byzantine government regulations to commercial production. Whether the means employed to do that were entirely legitimate or not, as Vijay was painfully aware, depended entirely on one’s point of view.

  While New Horizons itself had gone bankrupt and had its assets bought up by other companies, AnGrow had continued to prosper. Most of its revenues came from acting as an intermediary for foreign agriculture firms wanting to do business in India, but it also conducted its own lab and field research.

  Part of that research, of course, involved planting genetically engineered plants in test plots in various parts of India. Such tests were supposed to be coordinated and approved by the central and state agriculture ministries, and eventually approved by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, or GEAC, for production of the crops being tested.

  But in several instances (those that had been discovered, Vijay reminded himself), the biotechnology companies had planted test strains of genetically engineered crops without approval or authorization. Organizations concerned about biotechnology applications in the country, particularly after the disastrous experience with genetically engineered cotton, had raised a protest, but their cries had largely fallen upon deaf ears in the government. Far too much money was at stake, and far too much was changing hands. No one could prove it, but Vijay knew it was happening. His boss, for example, met frequently with executives from AnGrow on the side, and boasted a posh residence well beyond his government pay. Vijay was torn: he wanted to have the man investigated for taking bribes, but such a thing would have backlashed against his family. For that reason, and that alone, did he hold his tongue.

  AnGrow had been on his watch list for a long time, of course, ever since he had entered the fold of the EDS and had discovered their connection with New Horizons as the EDS tried to map out the enterprises in which the harvesters might be involved. But try as he might, he could never discover any sinister connections to AnGrow. They appeared to be motivated by nothing more unusual than greed.

  Taking his seat again, Vijay lowered his voice. “Okay, tell me what happened.”

  “I recently took twelve samples from an AnGrow maize test plot outside of Koratikal. When I tested them, three matched the approved test strains. But the other nine did not. I have submitted them for more testing, but I have never seen anything like this, Vijay. Whatever they have planted here, it’s totally new.”

  “It is not a Bt variant?” Bt was short for Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that produced toxins with insecticidal properties, and whose genes were commonly inserted into various commercial plant species to provide them with built-in protection from insect pests. Or so the theory went.

  “No, no. Not at all,” Naresh said. “While the outward structure of the maize is typical, it shows significant differences at the cellular level. The cells you would expect to see are present, but there are also other elements that I haven’t been able to classify. They appear to be protein shells, perhaps, containing what might be some sort of nucleic material. RNA, perhaps? I do not know. All I do know is that it is very, very strange, and should not have been there.” He paused, awaiting a reply. “Vijay? Vijay, are you there?”

  Vijay sat in his chair, immobilized by an icy band of fear that had tightened around his heart. Naresh’s words came back to him, echoing in his mind: They appear to be protein shells, perhaps, containing what might be some sort of nucleic material.

  While it was conceivable there was another explanation, Naresh’s description was far too close to the RNA delivery system that the harvesters had conceived for the Revolutions line of genetically engineered seed produced by New Horizons. But the RNA it would deliver to anyone or anything that consumed the corn would not cure disease as had been promised. Instead, it would transform the unwitting human or animal into a harvester, as had happened to a hapless rhesus monkey at the EDS base in California. If crops that contained harvester genetic material ever got loose in India, or anywhere else on Earth, mankind could easily face extinction.

  He moved his lips, but no sound came out. After clearing his throat, he said in a shaking voice, “Naresh, has that plot been harvested?”

  “I don’t know. I took the samples last week, but didn’t have time to analyze them until now. But if it hasn’t, it will be soon. It is early in the year, so it is the Rabi harvest, of course. AnGrow claims the plot was planted in mid-October, if one can trust anything they tell us, and the plants were clearly nearing harvest time when I took the samples. And the bastards will probably sell the harvest to the locals to make a few more rupees.”

  “Where are you now?” Vijay logged out of his computer and headed out the door. “I will be gone for the rest of the day,” he barked at his assistant, startling the boy, as he strode quickly out of the office. While the fear was still with him, he knew he had to act. He had to know.

  “I am at the lab, of course.” Naresh worked at one of the state agriculture ministry’s two seed testing laboratories in Hyderabad. “Did you want to come by and we can get dinner?”

  “Forget dinner. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  The two hours it took them to drive from Hyderabad to Koratikal were the longest in Vijay’s life. When he arrived at the lab to pick up Naresh, he had taken a look at the suspect maize kernels and the slides Naresh had made. Vijay’s specialty was the study of creatures such as worms, bees, and butterflies that assisted plant growth and reproduction. But he knew enough from his experience with the EDS to recognize the encapsulated delivery system that New Horizons had created, largely with the unwitting help of Naomi Perrault. He also knew that the technology involved in creating that system wasn’t something another company could have easily reproduced, especially since all the records of how it had been created had been destroyed.

  Over Naresh’s protestations, they had skipped dinner, and Vijay had driven like a madman, speeding east on National Highway 202 in his Maruti Swift as if he were in the last few kilometers of the Monaco Grand Prix. Just past the village of Raigiri, he left the highway and headed toward Mothkur Road, and turned north when he reached the town of Atmakur, about four kilometers south of Koratikal.

  Following Naresh’s directions, he made his way along a series of back roads to where the AnGrow plot was located. The sun had set, and they had to backtrack twice to find the right plot in the growing darkness.

  “Damn.” Bringing the car to a stop next to the small AnGrow sign marking the plot, he stared at the empty field. The corn had been harvested, and even the stalks were gone, no doubt to be used as food for livestock or to burn for cooking. “We’re too late.”

  “We should file a complaint with the GEAC. What AnGrow is doing is outrageous.”

  “More than you know, my friend,” Vijay told him, sick to his stomach. “More than you know. Let’s see if we can find someone who might know about this.”

  “The workers are f
rom a village right down the road.” Naresh pointed in the direction the car was facing. “I spoke to them when I took the samples.”

  * * *

  As they drove toward the village, they caught up with a group of men trudging along in the same direction.

  Vijay pulled just ahead of them and stopped the car. He and Naresh got out and faced the approaching villagers. “Excuse me,” he said.

  The men came to a stop, looking at him, then at the car, then back at him.

  “We’re from the State Ministry of Agriculture,” he went on. “Can you tell me when the AnGrow field back there,” Vijay pointed in the direction of the plot, “was harvested?”

  “Just today,” one of the men said quietly, wiping sweat from his brow with his arm. “We harvested that plot this morning.”

  “Do you know what happened to the maize?”

  All of the men smiled. “Some was taken by the AnGrow people,” the same man said. “The rest they let us take in exchange for harvesting it for them. They are very kind.”

  Vijay leaned forward, a flare of hope in his chest that he wasn’t too late. “You haven’t eaten any of it yet, have you?”

  In the dim light, the men exchanged uneasy glances, and he could tell what they were thinking. That corn was food on their table, and without it there very well might not be any. They were afraid he would try to take it away from them, and if he had the power and authority, he would.

  Unfortunately, he had neither. In the uncomfortable silence that followed, the hope that had blossomed a moment earlier faded and died.

  Vijay reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card, handing it to the closest man. “The maize AnGrow gave you was not given a safety approval by the government,” Vijay told the men. “It was experimental, and might make you and your families very, very sick. It might even kill you. If someone falls ill any time in the next day or two, please call me immediately.”

  The man looked at the card, and Vijay wondered if he could read what it said. Even if he could, these men were terribly poor, and making a telephone call was not simply a matter of reaching into a pocket for a cell phone. They would have to walk to the nearest village where they could use a communal telephone. “This is very important,” Vijay told them, his voice laced with urgency. “You must destroy any of the maize you took from this plot. Do not eat any, and do not give it or the stalks to your livestock. Think of it as being poisonous. You must burn it. All of it. Do you understand?”