XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop Read online

  When Janis turned back, she found him holding out a folded-over piece of paper. By the ragged perforated edge, she could tell that it had been pulled from his notebook, the one he composed songs in.

  He nodded for her to take it. “I changed the last couple of lines.”

  Janis felt her brow contracting in question. But even before she unfolded the paper, she understood. It was the poem he had shared with her on their drive to Tallahassee. He had rewritten it on a clean sheet of paper, in a neater hand.

  Her eyes fell to the last few lines, and she smiled. The revised lines read, “We pray for heroes who now exist/ And open our eyes to the forgotten truth/ That these Champions are in us, and we are all in them.”

  “Much better,” she said.

  “What you and Scott did with those missiles … If that wasn’t heroism, I’m not sure what is. You’re part of the reason, maybe the only reason, I’m all right with being a Champion.”

  “I’m glad. I mean, we both are—Scott and I.” She jerked her head toward the school. “You coming?”

  “Naw. Not in a huge hurry to dive into another year of remedial English.” His laughter sounded exhausted. “Anyway, we’re not supposed to be seen together, remember?”

  Disappointment weighed on Janis’s chest. She had forgotten.

  “Why don’t you go on ahead?” He fished a crumpled pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket and lifted it to his mouth. “Think I’ll hang out here for another few.”

  “All right. But just for the record, that’s ridiculous.”

  An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips. “What?”

  She held up the folded song he’d given to her. “Remedial English, Tyler? Seriously?”

  His lips nearly fumbled the cigarette as they broke into a smile. “Remedial English two, actually.”

  “See you at training,” she called over her shoulder. He nodded, giving a salute with his finger. As Janis emerged from the trees and back into the frenetic student body, she caught herself missing his company already.

  4

  Graystone household

  Friday, September 6

  6:28 p.m.

  Janis cleaved her giant meatball in half, releasing a fresh breath of steam. Then she cut the half in half, and so on. Friday night was pasta night at the Graystones’, and Janis was employing a system she had used ever since she could hold a fork and a knife—a bit of meatball for every forkful of spaghetti.

  Utensils clinked around her, a sound as reassuring as the savory scent of the meal. If her mother had managed to preserve one bit of normalcy in their post-normal lives, it was dinnertime.

  “Impressions of your first week of school?” she asked.

  Janis could see the fragile hope in her mother’s eyes and didn’t want to kill it. “So far, so good,” she replied, and took a bite of pasta.

  The truth was, she felt like even more of an alien at Thirteenth Street High this year. Or maybe the other two thousand students were the aliens and she the Earthling, like the mind game she used to play with herself when she was younger. Either way, she was enduring being there. That was all.

  “How’s the workload?” her mother asked. “Not too heavy, I hope.”

  “Well, now that I’m down to zero AP courses, it actually feels a little light.” Before the Champions Program, her father had insisted on all Advanced Placement courses. Now he set the ceiling at Honors. He called it resetting her priorities. “What I don’t finish in study hall, I’m able to knock off after school. Especially now that I’m finished with sports, I guess.”

  Janis hadn’t meant for the last part to come out sad-sounding, but it had. There were parts of her old life she still missed, soccer and softball topping the list. She watched the skin around her mother’s mouth crimp down. If her mother had had her way, the family would be far from Oakwood.

  “I’m running into the same problem,” Margaret cut in. “I mean, only four courses?” She laughed as if the idea were the height of absurdity.

  From what Janis understood, four courses a term was the college norm.

  “Be grateful,” her father said, aiming the remote control past her shoulder. “I had to negotiate with the Program for them to allow you to take even those.” He unmuted the television.

  “Tonight on the World News,” the anchor said, “a rare look inside the Soviet Union and at its president-general Alexander Dementyev.”

  Janis’s mother’s fork clacked down. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jim. Could you please turn that off? The girls have enough of the world in their heads right now to have to listen to it over dinner.”

  But Margaret had already stood and begun drifting toward the den. Janis followed, eyes riveted on the television. They sat together on the giant floor pillow and stared up at the screen, like they used to do when they were girls. Except they weren’t watching Little House on the Prairie, and there would be no games of thumb war during the commercial breaks. The screen showed a huge, barrel-chested man with sharp lips and a red-clenched face.

  The man we’ll have to stop one day, Janis thought to herself.

  Stars studded the shoulder straps of his olive-green uniform, and every time he pumped his fist, rows of military metals shook against his chest. A translator voiced over the shouted stream of Russian.

  “Who is the United States to draw lines on the map of our continent?” General Dementyev was asking, his eyes black with anger. “Who is the United States to define the limits of the Soviet empire? The United States, a regime so dishonest and corrupt, they spend their ill-gotten treasure on entertainers to distract their people from the truth. And that truth, my comrades, is history. It is on our side, not theirs. If they persist in challenging that truth, the United States will soon face the full fury of the Soviet Union and its Red Army.”

  The camera panned from the parade stand to Moscow’s Red Square, imposing buildings and the iconic cathedral with its onion domes rising into view. The square was filled by block after block of soldiers, rifles braced to their chests. Do they really believe what Dementyev is telling them? Janis wondered. More and more soldiers filled the screen. Thousands. Tens of thousands.

  “Jiminy Christmas,” Margaret whispered.

  Suddenly, war planes ripped overhead in an arrow-shaped formation. The soldiers parted in lock-step as a procession of eighteen-wheeled flatbed trucks began trundling through the square. Each truck hauled a building-sized missile blazoned with the Soviet emblem.

  “Their nuclear arsenal,” Margaret said.

  Janis closed her eyes and saw the blooming mushroom clouds from her nightmares. Dementyev’s voice boomed through the image. “Soon, very soon,” he promised, “history will bury the United States. The Soviet Union will be left standing. That is our Manifest Destiny.”

  Something shivered through Janis’s core.

  “After what we’ve just seen and heard,” the news anchor intoned, “we all may very well be asking, are we on the brink?”

  He left the question unanswered.

  5

  Koltsovo, Siberia

  Laboratory V-8724

  Stepan Dobroslavsky saw the official vehicles as he steered his Lada into the lot, and assumed they belonged to someone from the Military Industrial Commission. Urakov, most likely. Resentment ulcerated Stepan’s stomach. He grunted and killed the sputtering engine. Urakov wasn’t a scientist. He was a party dimwit. The town’s stray dogs knew more about microbes, biological pathogens, and toxins than he did. All Urakov knew were the official platitudes.

  “Production, not excuses,” Stepan mimicked, stepping into the frostbitten air.

  Ashen snow crunched underfoot as he drew his coat around him and huffed across the lot. The front wall of the Institute loomed prison-like. As Stepan entered its shadow, he felt a cold hand enclose his heart, the same hand he’d felt every morning for the last two years.

  He’d been lured from his university chairmanship with promises of a larger apartment, better pay, his own research team, and
, most important to Stepan, reliable funding.

  Researching what? he had asked.

  Industrial uses for these microbes you study, he was told. For the benefit of mankind.

  Stepan snorted. The Institute held a narrow definition of mankind, it turned out.

  But he believed the lie at the time. With a growing family and visions of academic recognition, how could he allow himself to doubt? But there were no academic papers, no peer review journals, no international conferences.

  Only weapons.

  Stepan produced a key and turned the frozen bolt. As he stepped into a massive airlock, he thought it odd that the guards weren’t at their post.

  “Pavel?” he called when he’d emerged into the hallway. “Sergei?”

  He followed the echoes of his voice into the main laboratory, shedding his coat and hat. His eyes searched the fermenters, the drying and milling machines, the centrifuges, the rows of fume hoods. Where was his staff? What in the devil had Urakov done with his staff?

  “Urakov?” he called tentatively.

  “Back here,” a voice boomed from the labyrinth of quarantine rooms.

  If he wants production, Stepan thought, stomping across the laboratory, what is he doing interrupting our work? He thinks he is an authority, but he is only a child making a nuisance of himself. Stepan remembered the time Urakov had forced him, in front of his research staff, to kneel and polish his jack boots. “For insolence,” Urakov said with a leering grin.

  Well, no more.

  Stepan rounded the corner and found his staff and the guards standing in a stiff line, faces waxen. And of course there was Urakov at their helm, probably preparing to deliver the latest party message. Stepan tensed his fists.

  “What’s this about?” he demanded. “Why are you—”

  But it wasn’t Urakov. The man he was raising his voice to was their president, General Dementyev. Stepan’s words choked to silence as though someone had seized his windpipe. He staggered backward. “You-your Excellency,” he stammered. “What a pleasure.”

  Dementyev’s coal-black eyes stared back at him. Stepan fought to keep his legs from collapsing. General Dementyev had sent his citizens to the firing squads for far lesser offenses, and Stepan knew he wouldn’t stop there. Their leader believed in collective punishment. An image of his wife and boys swaying from a grim gallows jagged through his head.

  “You are the lead scientist here?” Dementyev asked, though it sounded like an accusation.

  Stepan could see the pale ovals of his staff’s faces in his peripheral vision. He didn’t have to look to know their gazes were on the floor, afraid to associate with the condemned man. Could he blame them?

  Stepan swallowed. “Da, I am the lead scientist.”

  Dementyev’s boots clicked over the tiles. “You are working on B-factor?”

  B-factor. A project that was months behind schedule—or so Stepan had been telling his superiors. “Da.”

  When the towering general stopped in front of him, Stepan’s bladder quaked and spurted urine. Had someone on his staff informed on him? He darted a glance past Dementyev’s shoulder. A formation of swarthy soldiers watched with self-satisfied grins. Stepan’s eyes returned to the general’s cold stare.

  “You must work faster,” the general said.

  “I will work faster,” Stepan answered through his constricted throat.

  “We have a special need, crucial to our success.”

  Stepan caught himself preparing to say, You have a special need, crucial to your success. One of the foremost scientists in microbiology and he had been reduced to robotic responses.

  “Come,” Dementyev snapped.

  He wheeled on his polished boots. The soldiers fell into lockstep beside him, and they marched toward the glassed-in rooms reserved for primate testing. Stepan and the other scientists followed, daring to exchange questioning glances now. They rounded a corner and Stepan nearly screamed.

  Beyond the glass wall of the quarantine room, a large, disfigured man sat on a metal table. But could he even be called a man? He looked like—how did one say?—a Frankenstein, like in the English story.

  “What is it?” Stepan asked, pushing up his glasses.

  Dementyev’s eyes shone with pride as they stared past the glass. “Stand!” he commanded.

  The man behind the glass stirred and pressed himself to his feet. He was plated in some sort of exoskeleton, tubes blooming from his head. Stepan could see where sections of his skull had been removed.

  “Turn!” Dementyev said.

  The man stepped in a half circle. A tank had been … installed in his back. Stepan knew of no other way to put it. The tank featured several cylinders, where liquids sloshed. When the man was back in profile, Stepan recognized him. He staggered and pressed the back of a hand to his mouth.

  “That is Urakov?” he managed.

  Stepan thought of all the times he had wished death on the meddlesome official, but Stepan wouldn’t have wished what he was seeing now on anyone. This was worse than death. He choked down a tide of hot bile.

  “He is a prodigy,” Dementyev said, “gifted with an infallible immune system. And now he is our newest super-soldier, harbinger of death and annihilation. He will be our victory. I just need you to arm him.”

  “With B-factor?” Stepan challenged before he could restrain himself. “It’s engineered to enter through the skin. He would be dead within seconds.”

  “At the moment, he is armed with weaponized anthrax,” Dementyev said. “I am not a biologist, but I understand it is one of the deadliest pathogens we possess. Does he appear ill to you?”

  “That’s because it is contained in the tank,” Stepan responded. “He—”

  “Now!” Dementyev shouted.

  The rear door to the testing room flew open, and two young men were shoved inside. They spun back to the door, but it had already been resealed and locked. They fought futilely with the knob. Stepan recognized the young men—boys, really—as laboratory assistants, arrived from Novosibirsk the month before. He had spoken to one of their mothers on the phone, assuring her that her son would be safe. The Institute’s protocols were rigidly followed, he told her. There was nothing to fear.

  “What are you doing?” Stepan asked faintly.

  He watched Urakov plod toward the boys and raise his right arm. White vapor spewed from the atomizer, beclouding them in deadly pathogen.

  “No!” Stepan shouted. He lunged toward the door to the testing room, but two of Dementyev’s soldiers seized him.

  He watched as one of the boys fell to his side, dark blood appearing from his open mouth. The other boy—Nestor, Stepan remembered, his name was Nestor, the son of the woman he had spoken to—staggered forward, a hand to his mouth. He swung his fist into Urakov’s plated shoulder.

  Urakov seized Nestor by the back of his neck and plunged a row of hypodermic needles into his stomach. The pathogen had been engineered to work immediately. The boy seized and collapsed.

  Urakov returned to the metal table and sat. Stepan stared at the man’s needles for fingers, then at the stricken, lifeless bodies of the two assistants. You are not so changed, Stepan thought, meeting Urakov’s glowing eye. Only more sadistic. Urakov’s lips slanted into a grin.

  Men in hazmat suits entered the room and began spraying it down, dead assistants and all. Free from the guards’ hold, Stepan staggered to the glass wall and pressed his hands against it.

  “We need the B-factor,” Dementyev said.

  “You need the B-factor,” Stepan heard himself answer.

  “You have one month.”

  “I have one month.”

  6

  Gainesville, Florida

  Wednesday, September 11

  8:10 p.m.

  Jesse’s gaze lingered where Steel was standing beside the Barn’s control panel, the other trainers—Gus, Chad, Gabriella, Mr. Giles, and Mrs. Fern—on either side of her. He turned toward the simulated missile silo, where they were a
ll looking. Two of Agent Steel’s armored team guarded the door in the silo’s crown, face shields down, fingers on the trigger guards of their laser carbines.

  “Tyler?” Agent Steel said.

  From behind a barrier to Jesse’s right, energy crackled. Tyler’s job was to scramble the silo’s surveillance features without blowing them. Same for the silo’s communication system.

  “All right, I’m around them,” he called.

  Steel consulted the panel. “Margaret, proceed.”

  Jesse watched Janis’s older sister stand and stride toward the silo, her yellow jumpsuit whispering quietly. The guards signaled for her to stop. Jesse could see by her moving head that she was talking. They approached her in careful steps, leading with pointed carbines.

  Seconds passed. The guards straightened, their carbines drifting lower and lower until they were aimed at the floor. At last, Margaret nodded. The guards’ helmets did the same. She made a two-fingered gesture behind her low back.

  “Entry team,” Agent Steel called.

  That was him. Jesse rose from his haunches and lumbered beside Janis, Scott, and Creed. When they arrived next to Margaret, she introduced them to the guards as the scheduled maintenance crew. They all exchanged Soviet salutes. Wordlessly, one of the guards punched a code into a keypad beside the silo door. The other guard watched in a listless posture as the door slid upward.

  “Kick ass!” Creed remarked with a giggle.

  “No unnecessary talking,” Agent Steel said. “Creed, tour the silo and report back.”

  “Yes, your highness.” He shot through the doorway and returned seconds later. “Six soldiers and a pair of eggheads. If you’d let me loose one of these damned times, I could waste them. Make everyone’s job easier.”

  Agent Steel’s scarred lips tensed. “You’re out.”

  “What?” he cried.

  “Insubordination. If you can’t follow orders without a running commentary of your grievances, you’re not going to be a part of this operation. If it continues, you’re not going to be a part of this team.”