Shiver: Pandemic Poker (A Night Moves Novel Book 1) Read online

  If it hadn’t been for Mewborn’s epic fail, first denying an epidemic existed, then trying to cover it up, Tamberello wouldn’t have gone looking for a hatchet man to clean up Mewborn’s mess.

  Kayd recalled the way the densely built Italian-American PhD and director of the CDC had examined him from behind a skinny oak desk piled high with unread reports. A technophobe, Sal Tamberello hadn’t met an electronic device he couldn’t destroy with a sneeze.

  The man leaned a beefy arm on one precarious paper pillar. Pages squeezed out from the stack’s center like meat in a Dagwood sandwich.

  The hairless center of Sal’s dark-olive head gleamed under the filtered sunlight of his many-windowed office. A wreath of healthy black hair grew around the magnificent pate. Imitation tortoiseshell glasses dangled on the edge of his long Roman nose. His thick New York accent was more mob boss than scientist. “You in or you out?”

  Kayd wasn’t about to ante up without knowing the stakes. “Resources.”

  “Whatever it takes.”

  A no-nonsense ante. His cards remained facedown, but the stakes were clear. And Sal was all in.

  Kayd pulled his mobile device out from one of the pockets of his cargos. Pulled up the electronic requisition. Hit the send button. Now, so was he.

  Time to call. “And when we deliver?”

  Sal sat forward in his chair and placed his other elbow on another lopsided pillar of paper. Beads of perspiration sprouted around his pate and upper lip, despite the air-conditioning.

  “What do ya want?”

  Time to raise. “What are you offering?”

  Sal’s laugh was the sound of jawbreakers clanging out of a cheap gumball machine.

  “My job—”

  The familiar tug of muscles beneath his lips tightened in anticipation, but he bit down and turned his grin into a sharp, thin line.

  Sal shrugged. “I retire in six months.”

  Time to show his hand. “You want a hatchet man? You got one.”

  Sal leaned his hard-packed mass back into the expensive ergonomic chair. It squealed.

  “You’re off leash, Izmitt. You will track, hunt, and kill this virus before the next black moon—”

  “What the hell is a—”

  “Figure it out. And if you kill this thing, you can take my job and—”

  Turning away from the memory, Kayd picked up the tray with a steady and practiced hand. Careful not to spill its contents.

  A calendar month without a full moon. Easy enough to calculate. But why the arcane reference?

  Bzzt.

  Bzzt.

  Bzzt.

  His mobile device vibrated against his leg. And like a sonic needle, the three vibrant bursts catapulted into the nerve endings in his thigh. The muscles spasmed. The reflex traveled up his torso, down his elbow, ending at his wrist. It twitched. The specimen’s last serology sample spilled out of the microplate’s minuscule wells and onto the laboratory floor.

  He knew, without looking at his mobile device, its screen displayed a text message: “Edris. Unauthorized entrance Tank. 18:59. 09/30/16.”

  The witch had impeded his progress in any number of ways. Restricting the number and types of biological withdrawals from the specimen. Limiting designated personnel authorized to enter the Tank, effectively locking him out. And otherwise ignoring or defying his authority at every opportunity.

  This…this was the last time she would ever get in his way.

  21:42 Complex Level 5 Hallway E 09/30/16

  Kayd stalked through the safety doors. And plowed through a swing-shifter-filled hallway. Scientists, technicians, and administrators skittered out of his way. Down adjacent corridors and into dark offices. The staff, like roaches caught in flagrante delicto, fled. Prior experience conditioned their acute stress response to flee in his presence. But his anger blinded him to all of it. All but his prey. All but her.

  21:59 Complex Quarantine Security Station 09/30/16

  Overhead lights blinked. Kayd slammed through the last set of double doors, leading to the bowels of the Complex and into a wave of night shifters reporting for duty. The diverse, irreverent, pierced, tattooed, branded, gender-bent, and brilliant scientists of the night shift, who knew better than to react in fear. Instead, the wave parted like a dark ocean, and he passed without notice.

  Night-shifter genius crunched day-shifter data. Fitting scraps of disparate information into a cohesive whole, bringing him closer to a viable antiviral. For all their left-brained brilliance, night shifters couldn’t fit together the edgeless puzzle pieces that made up the witch.

  But that wasn’t their job.

  She didn’t affect them the way she affected him. And to fight her effect, he had to figure her out.

  As a rule, she had little to say. But when she did, her words sounded as though they’d come through a throat chock-full of rocks. Her grinding growl made him want her to do things to him.

  Terrible things.

  Unspeakable things.

  He stopped dead.

  A short in the overhead light made a rhythmic zzt-zzt-zzt. Light strobed in time with the short.

  No, his scientist corrected, you don’t want her. The beast. It wants her. You want to fulfill your promise, the scientist continued. You promised to make the child’s death mean something. Something more than a death by your hands.

  All these years later, her death still drove him.

  Liar, a third voice, a voice he didn’t recognize, whispered.

  The overhead lights went out.

  22:15 Complex Quarantine Ground Floor 09/30/16

  Anger unabated, Kayd stalked up to the glass circle set high in the wall. He placed his left eye in front of the quarter-size circle, and infrared light scanned the tissues at the back of his eye.

  With his identity confirmed, the locking mechanism released, and the doors slid aside silently. He marched from the dark hallway, past velvet curtains, into absolute dark, and waited. His anger bubbling.

  Gradually, his pupils expanded. Adjusted. And shadows against shadows revealed themselves to him.

  The Outbreak had changed the rules of viral engagement. Scientists were baffled. Left with no clues other than the small, sad bodies of dead ferals. The scientific and medical communities didn’t know why or how they died.

  Natural causes didn’t fit.

  Nothing natural about dead children.

  It seemed no one—no adult—could get within five hundred feet of the ferals. But her. Electric tension prickled along his forearms. His short-fuse temper crackled in frustration.

  No one on the planet could implement a capture program, no matter how noninvasive. Even the hint of an adult in their vicinity and the ferals dropped dead.

  His colleagues concluded the virus induced death as a defense mechanism against external interference. But the current definition of life excludes viruses. Thus, these preeminent minds couldn’t explain how the virus detected interference, or why it favored its host’s death over continued replication.

  Thumbs tied behind their backs, with ever-increasing media and public exposure and outcry, the scientific and medical communities did what they did best.

  Observe. Document. Analyze. Theorize. They followed the scientific method.

  Various field researchers documented the virus’s effects on healthy children. One common theme was its effect on human perception. Within twenty-four hours of infection, human auditory, visual, and olfactory senses were similar to carnivores found in the northern and middle Rockies. Yet amplified perceptions did not ensure survival. Like its victims, it was as if wasn’t fully formed.

  Still smoldering, Kayd grabbed the recessed handrails, inches away in the gloom, and climbed up the ladder to the catwalk. He’d spent the past year studying the Outbreak’s logic, deciphering why it allowed the witch access to ferals and denied access to others. But the data made no sense.

  At the top of the catwalk, frustration bellowed out of him like an invisible cloak as he made his
way to the observation deck and surveyed his domain.

  Quarantine.

  No surface had escaped the government contractor’s obsidian paintbrush. To his specifications, the contractor covered the amphitheater in multiple coats. Ebony concealed the ceiling, walls, and floors. The lightless color hid doors, grills, vents, ducts, and fans. One-hundred-foot velvet sound- and light-resistant curtains veiled the monstrous space in a silence absolute.

  Surveillance equipment, the color of pitch—their glass displays a burned umber—arrayed the arena. Coal disguised the enormity of the chamber, while a dome-encased arena, squatting at its center, hinted at the amphitheater’s expanse. Despite his bubbling anger, Kayd took pleasure in tracing the biosphere’s outline.

  Encased within its geodesic center was its heart—the Tank. Trillions of nanocameras, within the Tank’s latticed crystal shell, stepped nimbly from thread to thread. Minuscule graceful spiders. Each capable of homing in on the smallest particle. And collectively magnifying an image, on to the dark glass displays surrounding the arena’s perimeter and stationed in the observation deck, to a comprehensible size.

  22:22 Complex Quarantine Observation Deck 09/30/16

  Within the biosphere’s outer shell, nanoemitters released sensory-manipulating sound waves. Similar to the way music affects human emotion, sound waves generated by the nanoemitters bypassed all sensory organs, but taste, and fed sensory information directly into the neural cortex. Generating auditory and visual hallucinations.

  Built by the CIA, the unit remained in the company’s vault, untested, until Kayd got the call about the witch and the specimen.

  His second in command suggested they test the Tank’s efficacy with the specimen. “It’ll work or it won’t,” she said. “Either way, no one will know.”

  “No one but us,” he replied. There were times his second’s indifference to the ferals shocked him.

  “We don’t have time for debate,” his second argued. “We get paid to deliver results.”

  He knew his second was right. Even so, this was a slippery slope. One it seemed he’d been sliding down for some time.

  But it had worked. Even the specimen’s enhanced perceptions couldn’t detect the difference between the technologically disguised Tank and its former home on the austere peak.

  Kayd released a shaky breath at the memory. With the next breath, he recalled the changes the damned witch programmed into the Tank’s operating system.

  It always comes back to her, doesn’t it?

  Within the deck’s control room, Kayd tapped on a glass panel. Nanocams came online, magnifying pallid light glinting from a dewdrop. A few more taps changed the cams’ magnification. Kayd looked up to the glass display as millions of dewdrops came into focus.

  Filled with moon glow, beads of moisture sheened the witch’s body. Liquid satin flowed over her rounded hips, long arms, and taut legs. It muted the sharp angles of her face. Angles at odds with the sleek, homogenous, and civilized world.

  His palms itched with the need to feel the softness of her skin.

  She sat beneath an Alder, surveying the artificial landscape. She lifted her left ear, followed by her right. She listened to night noises, then twitched scents into her nose. All the while ignoring the antics of the lanky child behind her.

  The specimen pounced.

  Knocked off balance, she quickly righted herself, snapping playfully at the child. Unafraid, the child planted herself firmly against the witch’s hip, alert and intent.

  He followed the play of moonlight as it danced along translucent fringes of the witch’s dandelion hair—her Afro. Its vibrant brown-gold mass reminded him of a cooled supernova. The cascading shifts in color and curl pulled his eyes into its orbit.

  His fingertips twitched to dig deep into her gravity-defying Afro. Feel the soft texture of tight curls brush against his calloused fingers as he gathered up her halo into his palms and buried his nose in her rose, pistachio, and nougat musk.

  He shuddered unconsciously. And took in a steadying breath.

  Her muscular form and angular features excluded her from supermodel androgyny. Her large bones prevented anyone from considering her delicate or frail. But he couldn’t deny vulnerability outlined in her spare shoulders, long fingers, and in the lines at the corners of her eyes.

  You don’t want her, his scientist reminded him in a reasonable tone. You want to catalog the witch’s violations.

  A noise, sharp and distinct, stabbed through the shadows. Adrenaline jerked Kayd’s body into motion. Thoughts tumbled through his mind, one on top of another.

  Though he was the only person who could access Quarantine, several floors below him, the witch was the only person who could access the Tank. The Complex was a high-security white site. If an external sound interfered with the sound waves generated by the nanoemitters, the Tank’s artificial environment would disappear, warning the virus it was no longer in its natural habitat. The specimen would die.

  The beast awoke, alert.

  Kayd moved slowly and silently away from the control panel, but the beast stilled his forward momentum and erased all but one clear—menacing—thought.

  Invader.

  22:46 Complex Quarantine Ground Floor 09/30/16

  Slipping from the deck to the catwalk, Kayd made it to the ground floor soundlessly. He headed toward the invader, but the beast stopped him again.

  And made him listen.

  At first, the noise sounded like the crackling of a plastic wrapper. The hard, thin film covering store-bought electronics. Plastic immune to teeth or keys. Only a sharp pair of scissors could penetrate. As he homed in on the noise, a pattern emerged from the random crinkles and crackles.

  Words. Liquid-nitrogen-coated words of hate bit out from between clenched teeth. Their meaning, stilettos of ice. A short phrase, and to the point.

  A scorching inhuman rage erupted from Kayd’s chest, incinerating the bars of the mental prison holding the wildness in him captive. The beast stepped into the forefront of his mind. An invisible sizzling energy, like repeated jolts from a light socket, zapped up Kayd’s spine. He took a step forward. And then another. There. An alien presence. Right. There.

  “No—” His words bullets. “You won’t.”

  TWO

  22:46 Complex Tank Biosphere 09/30/16

  A snapping scission of sound drifted down from hallucinate stars. The sound made the hairs on her nape prickle. Her hands twitched and suddenly turned cold.

  Taleia turned her head, but before she got a bead on the child, the scientist growled above her.

  He knows better than to put Boi at risk. If I hear it, then she can, too, and if she—

  Taleia swiveled her eyes to where a button-nosed little girl—no more than five years old with hazel eyes, chocolate skin, and lanky, undernourished arms and legs—tucked her chin over her throat. Dread pounded through Taleia’s constricted veins.

  The child bent her body until her joints flexed at acute, unnatural angles. Raising her hindquarters, staring at the stars, she bared her teeth. And growled. Taleia’s heart thudded madly against her ribs.

  Regression’s neurochemicals swamped the child’s neural pathways. If she did nothing to stop the corrosive from melting the little girl’s mind, the killing machine, known as Permanence, would take over.

  She turned. The motion slow, deliberate, until she sat tall on her haunches. Exhaling a bored yawn, she looked down her nose at the child, her body language clear.

  Why are you fussing, pup? There is no threat here but me.

  But the child paid Taleia no attention and just stared in the direction of the disturbance.

  Still looking down her nose at the child, Taleia shifted. Blocking the girl’s line of sight, she narrowed her eyes into impatient slits and stared into the girl’s eyes.

  No. Don’t look there. Look here. I am the threat.

  Still growling, the child circled left and peeled her lips away from her gums in defiance, revealing a row
of sharp, pointed teeth.

  Taleia’s heartbeat tripled.

  22:49 Complex Quarantine Ground Floor 09/30/16

  Never losing sight of the target, Kayd risked a glance over his shoulder at the nearest display. Teeth and nails bared, the specimen lunged toward the witch.

  Indifferent to Regression’s disastrous effects on the specimen, his scientist considered the many advantages of holding the witch responsible for the intruder’s breach.

  Two birds. One stone.

  The beast, enraged by the threat of a trespasser on his territory, lifted his lips in a snarl.

  Ignoring both, Kayd sped toward the threat.

  He followed the infiltrator toward the security doors on the other side of the amphitheater. Picking up his pace, he rounded a blind corner, emerged past the slow, heavy sway of the sound- and light-resistant curtains and into a sliver of light.

  Startled, he shadowed his face in the crook of his arm. His eyes adjusted in time to see a gray silhouette, the intruder’s calf, slip through the closing security doors.

  Click.

  Lunging forward, Kayd jabbed a four-digit override code and shoved the doors open. As soon as they slid apart, he shot out his left arm. His hand hovered over the tip of a gray hoodie pulled high and tight—obscuring the intruder’s identity.

  His fingernails clawed at the hood. The intruder stepped left, but careened right and down the opposite corridor. Wisps of cotton brushed against Kayd’s fingertips.

  Sprinting down the dark, vacant corridor after the outline, the thick, sinuous ropes of his thigh muscles made short work of the distance. Still, he wasn’t fast enough.

  With a loud chu-chunk, the fire doors opened and a blur of motion slid past. But even in the dim light, he could still make out the sole of a running shoe as it disappeared behind stainless steel. He scrambled off his feet and through the door.