“Captain,” he said. “How are things developing?”

  I took several minutes to fill him in on the latest. “I have a hunch there’s a connection between this leasing agreement and the outbreak,” I finished. “Not to mention the chief’s death. But we won’t know the connection until we can locate the site in question and figure out what they’re using it for.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “How’s the other team doing?” I asked.

  “They’re doing, but they haven’t come nearly as far. They’ve isolated the contagion, as Sarah has, and are looking for weaknesses. No progress on its origin, though. I’ll alert them to the land-lease arrangement.”

  “And how are we doing for time?” I asked.

  “DAWA seems to think the trickle of cases is going to become a gusher soon.”

  “We should have a comprehensive list of potential sites later today. We’ll work through the night if we have to.”

  “My team is processing the lumina,” he said. “We’ll have an ammo delivery ready to go in the next few hours.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “I have some things that need attending in the meantime, which will put me out of communication. Continue sending reports to the DAWA team. I’ll have access to those.” He paused. “How are you doing, Captain?” He meant Dani.

  “Managing.” I was going to end it there, but I added, “I appreciate you getting some help to her.”

  “Anything you need, just let me know.”

  I ended the call and joined Rusty at his computer bank. While he set up the algorithm to compare the present and past satellite images, I took over the drones, examining the feed on one while sending the other to the next sacred site in a hopscotch manner. It took me more than an hour to exhaust the sites Billy had given us, but without a hit. Rusty didn’t fare any better with the satellite images.

  “Not a danged thing,” he complained.

  I swore and began pacing, heart pounding as if I’d just drunk a large pot of coffee. It was the time factor—the trickle becoming a gusher, as well as what Billy had said about the Maldonado family. Everything seemed to be ticking down, closing in. And even if Billy returned with the site data in the next ten minutes, it was going to take hours to pore over. There had to be a way to cut into that time.

  What else can I be doing?

  On the couch, the gnome had finished the flask, peed his pants, and then dozed off. Now he was climbing down to get into some other mischief. I grabbed him and stuffed him into a vest pouch.

  “The fuck are you doing?” he demanded, trying to jab me with his pointed hat.

  “You’re going home,” I said, securing him in place. “Rusty, I’m heading back to Dezba’s.”

  “What for?”

  “The wind’s been our best lead so far,” I said. “Maybe it has more to tell us.”

  10

  I shouted Dezba’s name and banged on her front door, but no one answered. No excited dogs, either. When I called, I heard the landline ringing inside. By the fifth ring, my mind was working out worst-case scenarios. Had someone silenced her like they’d done the chief? I decided to check out the back yard before forcing my way in.

  At the gates, the gnome grumbled a command from my vest pouch, and the latch released. I entered the back yard, leading with my sidearm. The truck Dezba had been working on earlier was gone, faint tire tracks coming out the way we’d entered.

  “Any idea where she went?” I asked.

  “The fuck should I know,” the gnome grunted, using his pointed hat to try to open the Velcro.

  Beams of sunlight gleamed low through the pine trees. The day was getting away from us. I removed the gnome from my pouch and gripped him in front of me at face level.

  “Dezba,” I said, peering into his painted eyes. “If you can hear me, I need to talk to you.”

  Once again, I didn’t know how their connection worked, but the gnome was clearly bonded to her in some way. He responded by trying to spit in my face. I dodged, and the attack sailed into the grass. I tossed the filthy creature after it and began pacing a circle around the yard.

  I reviewed everything we’d discovered, from the infection site at Brush Island to the deal the now-dead chief had made with the mysterious entity. I remained confident that if we found the land in question, we’d have our answers.

  The still air kicked up suddenly, rustling the trees.

  “I don’t speak your language,” I growled in annoyance.

  The next gust was more insistent, nearly shoving me sideways. Needles rained from the surrounding pine trees and blew off in a wave. As I watched them, gears began shifting in my brain.

  Maybe we were speaking the same language.

  I radioed Sarah. “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “I still can’t destroy the pathogen in vitro without eliminating an unacceptable number of human cells. However, the samples you gave me are reassuring. They contain the pathogen, but the organisms are all dead.”

  “So they have to come in direct contact with living tissue?”

  “It appears so. Also, I’ve found a method to visualize them using a moleculaser. That will help us identify the active spread.”

  That wasn’t an instrument I was familiar with, but I cut to the point of my call. “Do you know what days the victims visited Brush Island?”

  “Not off hand, but that info is in my investigation file.”

  “All right, we’ll check it out. We might have something. I’ll let you know if we do.”

  When I radioed Rusty, he started right in. “Billy came back with the site data, and I’m going over it, but danged if there aren’t a lot of them. Some are ten, twenty miles apart. This is going to take all freaking night and half of tomorrow!”

  “Let’s see what we can do about that. I want you to go into Sarah’s file and pull the dates that every victim visited Brush Island.”

  Following a rapid series of keystrokes, he said, “Got ’em.”

  He began reading them off, but I interrupted him. “I just need the prevailing wind direction in the area on those dates.” Around me, the trees rustled softly as if the wind patron were telling me I was on the right track.

  As Rusty resumed typing, I pictured him checking the dates against those on a meteorological site. “Looks like it was pretty consistently out of the north-northwest,” he said after a moment.

  “How consistently?”

  “Let’s see. Every single date.”

  “Good, now I want you to go to the satellite map and track that exact wind direction in reverse, starting at Brush Island. Tell me if it crosses any of the sites that Billy indicated.”

  “Ahhh,” Rusty said, catching on. “Bingo-ringo! One site. Another island, over a mile away. What does it mean?”

  “It means the pathogen is falling from the sky and infecting whatever living tissue it’s being blown onto. Get a drone over that island. I’m calling everyone back to base. We’re going there as a team.”

  As I jogged from the yard, the gnome called after me. “Hey!”

  I glanced back to find him scurrying through the tall grass to catch up to me. I ran faster.

  “Dezba wants me to go with you again!” he panted.

  Yeah, right, I thought. You just want another crack at Yoofi’s stash.

  But the trees rustled, as if in affirmation of the gnome’s claim. When I didn’t stop, they rustled a second time, harder.

  Dammit, I thought, slowing down.

  By dusk, my teammates and I were armed and pulling out in a pair of airboats. Sarah and Yoofi rode in the front of the one Olaf commanded, while Billy operated mine. Following the incident at Brush Island, I hadn’t wanted to expose any more of the tribe to the danger, but Billy had insisted on coming.

  “You need a guide,” he argued. “Someone who can assess the site with local eyes.” But I also sensed he was doing this for his brother. Protected inside a hazmat suit, he steered us through cypress trees, opening the throttle as we hit the swamp.

  “Your route is clear,” Rusty radioed.

  “Stay overhead,” I told him.

  The island was a former ceremonial site. According to the elders it hadn’t been used in more than a half century—making it a good place to hide something. Drone reconnaissance hadn’t turned up anything from the air, save for impressions of mounds through the foliage. Billy thought they were old burial sites. We’d know soon enough.

  I called Ace on my sat phone. He was maintaining the roadblock, watching for any vehicles. “How are things going?”

  “Quiet, so far,” he replied. “And we almost never get visitors after dark.”

  I peered west, where the sun had recently set, casting the sky in bruising shades of purple.

  “Good,” I said, needing it to stay that way. I didn’t want any surprises from the Maldonado family.

  Twenty minutes later, the nameless island rose into view. It was larger than Brush Island and tear shaped, much of it covered in scraggly oak.

  I signaled to Olaf to steer his boat around one side. Billy took us the other way. I covered the shoreline with my MP88.

  We hadn’t encountered any infected alligators, and I didn’t see any now, but I could smell them. At the far side of the island, we found them. A mass of gator carcasses had washed into an inlet and were rotting, their pale gray hide marking them as plague victims.

  Olaf’s boat drifted up beside ours, both our propellers winding down.

  “Before you incinerate them,” Sarah said, “I want to get a visual.”

  The device she pulled from her bag looked like a shop flashlight with a handle. When she turned it on, a flat purple beam emerged. Her moleculaser. She passed it over the gators, exposing a constellation of gray specks. A scan of the water around them showed the specks drifting away in thinning concentrations.

  “Dead pathogen,” Sarah announced.

  But as she said it, my lupine vision caught a single bright white speck falling down through her beam.

  “Can you aim that higher?” I asked.

  It was nearly dark now and a gentle breeze stirred past. As she raised the moleculaser, the flat beam showed clear against the night sky. Every so often, another white speck would drift through the sheet of light, like a snowflake. She followed the specks backwards. More and more of them appeared. By the time the instrument was aimed above the island, the sky looked like Christmas Eve in Siberia.

  “Live pathogen,” she said gravely.

  Yoofi yelped and brushed the shoulders of his coat before checking to make sure his suit was secure.

  I tried to squint past the spilling pathogen. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

  She moved the beam this way and that, eventually returning to the area of thickest concentration. “The source is too high,” she said. “Beyond the reach of the moleculaser, anyway.” I became aware of a very faint tremor that seemed to be coming up through the water, vibrating the boat.

  “Let’s get some boots on the island,” I said.

  Olaf and I hit the gator carcasses from two angles with our flamethrowers. As the mass ignited, the boats started back up. We soon found a good place to land. Grabbing a couple collapsible shovels, I had Olaf and Yoofi come with me while Sarah and Billy remained on the boats. We waded through the sawgrass shallows and onto solid land, where I could feel the vibrating in the soles of my feet.

  The wider end of the island opened into a leaf-covered clearing overhung by oak branches. At its center were the two mounds we’d spied from the air. I handed Olaf a shovel as we approached them.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Wolfe?” Yoofi asked nervously. “Many bad things can happen when you disturb the dead.”

  “If someone wanted to hide something,” I said, plunging my shovel into a mound, “what better place than under sacred earth?”

  With a grunt, I heaved the scoop of dirt aside. Olaf started his dig into the other mound a few feet away. After several minutes, my shovel keened against metal. I dug around the side of a dome, then dropped to my knees to clear away the dirt with my hands. The metal dome wasn’t smooth but made up of small triangular panels. Opposite me, Olaf struck metal too—the other side of the structure.

  “Ooh, I can’t look,” Yoofi said.

  “It’s not native,” I said, heaving more dirt aside. “It’s made of modern steel.”

  It wasn’t inert, either. Something was powering it. The same subtle vibrations I’d felt in the water and on land were coursing up through the dome. As I dug deeper, I soon discovered it wasn’t a dome, but an orb. On the underside, I reached a stem. I climbed out and took several photos with my flex tablet.

  “Can you make anything of this?” I radioed Rusty.

  “Almost looks like a radome,” he said, studying the uploaded images. “They’re those big enclosures to protect radar antenna. Look like giant golf balls?”

  “So this is sending something into the atmosphere?” I peered up at where the thickest concentration of pathogen had shown in Sarah’s light and imagined it falling over us now like fresh snow.

  “Hard to tell from here,” Rusty said. “Can you see a way to open it?”

  I walked over to where Olaf was still working. “Looks solid all the way around.”

  “Then let me do an image search against the available tech out there. I’ll get back to you.”

  As we signed off, I handed Yoofi my shovel. “You and Olaf keep digging until you reach whatever this thing’s anchored to.”

  “Where are you going?” Yoofi asked.

  “To grab some explosives.”

  Back at the boats, I updated Sarah and Billy on our discovery. “Rusty’s looking into it, but the structure happens to be sitting right under the source of the pathogen. That can’t be a coincidence.” I opened a duffel bag I’d packed with C-4 and began priming several blocks.

  “Do you think the mechanism opened a breach?” she asked.

  “That would be my bet,” I said. “Might also explain why the pathogen appeared at two distinct locations. Odds are, there’s another one under Crow soil. If we can’t figure out how to shut it down, we’re going to have to blow it.”

  I straightened suddenly, my hearing picking up a distant sound. “Hey, Rusty?” I radioed. “Sounds like we have boats incoming.”

  “What?” he said distractedly. “Oh, crap, you sure do. Five of them.”

  “Stand by,” I told him and sat-phoned Ace at the roadblock. No answer.

  “Something I forgot to mention,” Billy said. “The Maldonados had me chipped.”

  I stared at him. “Chipped?”

  “Yeah, so they could keep tabs on my whereabouts.” He patted his right wrist. “It’s been so long, I didn’t think—”

  His eyes went wide through his face shield, and he fell into a crouch, arms wrapping his head. Above the droning of the approaching airboats, a shriek rose, flattening my ears. The gnome, whom I’d sealed back inside a vest pouch, reacted too. He kicked and shouted a muffled string of swear words.

  “Th-that’s the thing,” Billy stammered, clutching his hand with the missing finger. “The thing from the basement. Please don’t let it get me. Please, I’m begging you.”

  I lifted my MP88 and radioed my teammates.

  “Hostiles approaching!”

  11

  “Should I smoke ’em?” Rusty asked.

  “Get me some close-ups,” I said, accessing the drone feed on my forearm tablet.

  The feed centered on a boat and zoomed in. Three men rode in front wearing night-vision goggles and armed with Uzi submachine guns. Esteban’s goons. The man in the back, the one driving, was what I’d been afraid of—a Chocasukee. Esteban had commandeered them and their airboats.

  As Rusty zoomed in on the other boats, I saw they were similarly manned, each one with a Chocasukee driver.

  “Hold fire,” I told Rusty. “Innocents aboard.”

  “Copy that,” he responded.

  He was zooming in on the lead boat now. A tall figure stood in front, a dark coat flapping around him. Esteban. Something large was tethered to the boat and flying just off its bow. It looked like a giant-sized bat with leathery wings. A barbed tail trailed behind it. We’d seen something like it in the Chagrath’s realm in Mexico, but this was much bigger. When it shrieked, my ears flattened again.

  I pulled Billy to his feet. “Go with Sarah onto the island.”

  “Please, I don’t want to see that thing again,” he whimpered, trying to cower back to the deck. “Please, man…”

  I jerked him straight. “Do you want to live?” I roared. “Then do what we say!”

  He nodded desperately, and I helped him off the boat to where Sarah was waiting, her M4 carbine hanging at her side from its tactical sling. I tapped my own wrist to remind her of Billy’s chip.

  “Olaf, come back here,” I radioed. “Yoofi, stay where you are. Sarah and Billy are coming to you. I want you three cloaked and protected.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wolfe,” Yoofi answered.

  As Yoofi’s magic warped the air, Sarah peered toward the growing sound of the airboats, no doubt thinking the same thing as me. The pathogen was falling like snow, and the Chocasukee on the boats had no protection.

  “Go ahead,” I told her. “We’re going to lead them away.”

  “And if they land?”

  “Coordinate with Yoofi and take out the goons.”

  After a year of training and a dozen missions, my teammates were more than capable. Sarah ducked into the foliage, leading Billy by the arm. I checked my tablet. Rusty had pulled the drone feed out again so I had a good visual on the island and approaching boats. They were about a kilometer offshore now.

  When Olaf appeared, I signaled for him to take the other boat. We were on the far side of the island from the approaching hostiles, out of sight, but that was about to change.

  “We’re heading that way,” I told Olaf, pointing out another island. “Take lead, but stay low. You may receive fire. Don’t return fire unless I give the order. I’m going to hang back and pick them off.”