The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [115]
Desperate for oxygen, Stokes flailed and bucked, trying to use his liberated stump for leverage.
Like riding a bronco, Flaherty couldn’t control the crazed pastor. To regain his balance, he had to relinquish his grip on Stokes’s wrist. That meant he had no choice but to pull his shoulder off Stokes’s mouth.
The pastor coughed fiercely, spraying blood on Flaherty’s neck.
Another forceful buck sent Flaherty tumbling on to the floor.
Stokes rolled on to his elbows and retched blood and bile on to the carpet.
It was the opportunity Brooke had been waiting for. In her hand, she clutched the nearest solid object she could find - the clay tablet. With all her might, she swung the map of Eden down at Stokes’s head. It connected. The pastor collapsed on to the floor.
64
IRAQ
‘Jesus Christ,’ Jason gasped, standing at the top of the stairs. He had to cover his mouth and nose with his sleeve to fight off a fetid stench.
In the room to the right, he caught a quick glimpse of the two men he’d struck blindly from downstairs. In opposite corners of the room, each body lay face down and twisted on the splintered floorboards.
‘In here, Google,’ Meat called again.
Jason lowered his AK-47, stepped over the dead guy Meat had gunned down on the landing, and went into the second room. The horrid smell sharpened, and its source was immediately apparent.
Sprawled atop a mattress that was the room’s only furnishing, Fahim Al-Zahrani lay in a gory mire of blood, vomit and tissue. Since much of the stringy red slime still draped from the corpse’s blue lips, Jason assumed it to be a puree of Al-Zahrani’s innards. Blood streamed like tears from the corpse’s lifeless eyes - the orbs solid red. And the entire mattress beneath his lower half was completely saturated in red, suggesting that blood and liquefied organs had found their way out every possible exit.
‘Man,’ Meat said from the far corner, ‘what the hell’s going on here?’
An elderly Arab - unarmed - sat on the floor beside Meat, legs tucked to his chest, rocking back and forth. He was chanting prayers in Arabic. Every few seconds, a spate of coughing interrupted the recitation. The old guy displayed the same pallid complexion Jason had noticed in the man whom Meat stabbed in the throat.
‘I mean, what did these guys do to him?’ Meat said.
‘They didn’t do this, Meat. They couldn’t have done this.’
‘Then who did?’
As if on cue, Jason’s sat-com vibrated. He dug in his pocket to find it, saw that it was Flaherty.
‘Tommy?’
‘Yeah, it’s me.’
‘Everything all right in Vegas?’
‘No. Not by a longshot, I’m afraid.’
Jason listened as Flaherty rehashed the candid tell-all discussion he and Brooke had had with Pastor Randall Stokes - the discovery of an ancient contagion that USAMRIID scientists under Frank Roselli’s guidance had weaponized for mass transmission throughout the Middle East. Staring over at Al-Zahrani, Jason felt his nerves turn to ice. When Flaherty detailed Stokes’s sinister objective - to annihilate the Arab male population - he could feel a dark cloud settling over him. He’d had a similar response when in September 2001 his sister Elizabeth had called to report that Matthew had officially gone missing at the World Trade Center.
‘Not sure if I’m buying what Stokes was saying about this virus he and Roselli concocted. Seemed a bit out there to me …’ Flaherty said.
‘He’s right, Tommy. Trust me. We just found Al-Zahrani and he’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But you only pulled him out of that cave a few hours ago.’
‘That’s right. We thought he had a fever. But now … God, it looks like something minced his organs and pushed them out his throat. We killed a few others that had been in contact with him … it’s a long story. But they weren’t looking too good either. If you ask me, I’d say they were showing early signs of being infected with this virus.’
‘Virus?’Meat said, looking alarmed.His eyes wentwide with concern