The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page A

good . Seriously good. Like, to the point that we worried about what he was going to do with them.”
    Abrams paused and cocked his head. “But the world is a very tricksy place, Dr. Park. We can’t be taken in. You’ve got to try and verify him somehow.”
    Park nodded, and the ensign flipped the speaker switch. “Dr. Aliyev,” Park said. “What’s the molar mass of adenine?”
    “What…? Okay, okay. About a hundred and thirty-five grams per mole.”
    Abrams looked down at Park, who nodded – close enough . “What does the MC1R recessive gene variant cause?”
    “Redheads!” The Kazakh sounded like he was getting into it now. He spoke in an easy, competent English, with an accent that sounded kind of Russian but kind of not – the R s weren’t so hard, and the H s were heavier.
    “What color was the ferret owned by the director at the lab in Dusseldorf?”
    “Trick question. It wasn’t a ferret, it was a badger. And all badgers are black and white. Hint of brown maybe.”
    Park exhaled. His look to Abrams said it all. “And you’ve really got a designer pathogen that will destroy the dead?”
    “I swear on my life. Kills zombies dead – better than Raid on cockroaches. Massively virulent – and as contagious as freshman dorm flu.”
    Park paused and took a deep breath. “Okay. Just tell me one last thing. Who were you really working for back in Dusseldorf?”
    Long pause. “The FSB.”
    “I knew it! You were a goddamned Russian spy.”
    “Yes. Sorry. I swear I will spend the rest of eternity making it up to you – if you just get me the ever-living fuck out of here. Please, Simon. Save me – save humanity. Between your vaccine, and my pathogen, we can fix all this. You just have to come and get me.”
    Park looked up to Abrams, his expression twice as serious as it had been when he first came up here to talk him into something – namely the mission to retrieve the DNA sequencer from Saudi Arabia.
    He said, “We’ve got to go get this guy, Commander. Whatever it takes. This will change everything.”
    * * *
    “We’ve lost the transmission,” the ensign said.
    Park nodded. Aliyev’s radio must have died, as he’d warned them it would. But they’d managed to get some details out of him before the end. And what he told them about his location, bizarre as it sounded, jibed with what radio direction-finding told them. They’d been triangulating from the carrier and from their airborne F-35, giving them a reliable transmission source.
    Park repeated himself, a foot away from Abrams’s face. “Seriously. We have got to go get him out of there.”
    Abrams exhaled wearily. “Who exactly is we ?”
    “I don’t know. Someone in Britain, I think. CentCom. They’re a lot closer.”
    Abrams shook his head. “We’ve already been through this with them. They don’t have any more long-range air transport. Their only refueling tanker is halfway to us right now.”
    Park looked down to the map display already up on Abrams’s screen. “But this is a much shorter flight. Look…” He scrolled and zoomed out the map, then eyeballed the map scale, and pinched off the distances. “It’s nearly four thousand miles from London to us here in the Gulf of Aden… But it’s probably no more than… fifteen hundred from London to Moscow. Plus it doesn’t have to be an aircraft that can land on a carrier.”
    “Yeah,” Abrams said, unimpressed. “Instead it has to land in Red Square. With God knows how many undead on the ground there. Quite a few, if your guy is to be believed. Wait a minute – how do you know him again?”
    Park shook this off. “It’s not important. Look, they’ve got to make this happen – whatever it takes. Professor Close and I have already talked about this, and nobody else has any plan for getting rid of the seven billion walking dead plaguing our planet. Infecting them with a lethal virus or bacterium is probably the only way we’re going to get the Earth back in our