The Seventh Plague Page 41

  Promise me.

  Now his father fussed with the edges of his blanket as if trying to find meaning. He barely spoke any longer. He battled demons when he slept, pawing at the air, kicking feebly with his one leg, enough to get a bedsore on his heel.

  Gray had spoken to the nurse practitioner yesterday. While Gray had been away, his father had a small stroke, and according to her, he was stable, on blood thinners, but he might never improve from his current baselines. The prognosis was that he could stay this way for months, if not years.

  As Gray sat now, he held his father’s hand, feeling the bones. He rubbed a thumb over the thin skin, trying to remember the last time he had held his father’s hand, or really even touched him. So he took advantage of that now.

  His father mumbled in his sleep, but when Gray shifted his gaze from those frail fingers to his father’s face, his eyes were open, staring back at him.

  “Hey, Dad, didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Lips moved, cracked and dry. He swallowed, then tried again.

  “Gray . . .”

  It had been ten days since his father had recognized him.

  “Gray, your mother . . . your mother’s coming.”

  He patted his father’s hand, long past trying to find significance in the needle-skips of the man’s memory. Better to just go along. “Is she? When’s she coming?”

  His brow knit, as if posed a challenging question. “Huh?”

  “When’s Mom coming?”

  “Harriet?”

  “That’s right.”

  His father searched, even lifting his head from the pillow. He stared toward an empty chair in the corner. “What’re you talking about? She’s right there.”

  Gray stared at the empty chair, then back to his father. His head had settled back to the pillow, but his gaze remained on the chair, his lips moving as if speaking to the apparition sitting there.

  Then his eyes closed, and he was gone again, fingers twitching at the edge of his blanket.

  Promise me . . .

  He now knew what his father had been asking him, and filled in the words that disease had silenced.

  . . . when the time is right . . .

  Gray kept holding his father’s hand, but with his other, he pushed the plunger on the morphine syringe stabbed into the IV line.

  Now’s the time, Pop.

  He leaned over and kissed his forehead.

  Fingers squeezed his, then relaxed.

  He moved his lips to his father’s ear. “Go see Mom.”

  Gray clutched that hand one last time, stood up, and left.

  He strode through the nursing home, out the front door, and to the woman waiting in the bright morning sunlight. He took her hand, never breaking stride, and together they headed away.

  “Are you ready to find that fire escape?” he asked.

  She smiled and gripped his hand so very tight. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  ETERNAL AND UNKNOWABLE

  The large bull leads the others up the narrow canyon. His shoulders brush the vines and leaves to either side. His chest rumbles his solemnity as he leads the herd.

  Behind him lies their new home, a deep bowl warmed by steaming vents. There, the forest grows far taller, its canopy more sheltered than their old home. Water flows from its high edges, splashes into many pools.

  It is a good place.

  The man who brought them here follows now. The bull allows it. He senses no threat from the man, only wellness and concern. So for now, the man is herd, too. He must come.

  The bull follows the cleft to a grotto at its end. Small, flat stones cover the ground, shaded in half by an overhanging shelf of rock. A small pool shines to one side. When they first came here, the bull carried old water in his trunk and blew it deep into the pool. The surface is already starting to blush with promise.

  But that is not why the herd is here.

  He takes them to the other side.

  Upon the smooth stones rests a broken body. It is not whole, but it is enough. The man has brought these pieces, too, dug from their old home and brought here.

  The bull comes first. He smells the burns upon the flesh, but he brings his trunk to the curve of her head, lets his nostrils brush her white skin.

  He then gently places the branch he carries over her and backs away.

  He stands beside her as the others come, each placing another bough. One by one, stick by stick, she is covered. The man comes last and places his branch, then steps aside, revealing there still is one more.

  It is he who will protect them.

  The bull knows this because she had shown him, before she died.

  The large white cat draws forward, splayed paws crunching the stone. He carries a long bough in his teeth and drops it on the pile. He nudges it with his flat nose to rest it better.

  The cat shifts to the man, who pats him.

  It is good. It is done.

  She will be remembered.

  The bull lifts his trunk high and trumpets to the skies, mournful yet hopeful, challenging yet respectful. The others follow, adding their lungs, their voices. Their song is eternal.

  One other joins in.

  The cat steps forward, stretching his neck high—and roars for the very first time.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READERS: TRUTH OR FICTION

  I am a collector of bread crumbs, all those bits of science and history that I mash and knead together to build my stories. And now that the bread is baked and served, my goal here is to try to separate those slices of the story that are based on substantial fact from those that are pure fabrication.

  So here we go.

  Historical Characters

  I thought I’d pair these guys up, as I found it fascinating that so many bigger-than-life historical figures not only knew each other, but were involved in each other’s lives and pursuits. I knew I wanted to write a story sometime that highlighted such a coming together of giants. And, of course, for that to happen, it would require an adventure of biblical proportions.

  Stanley and Livingstone

  While doing research on these two characters, I was struck by how different the pair of them were. When taken at face value, the much-publicized and ballyhooed story of Henry Morton Stanley’s rescue of Dr. David Livingstone seems to cast Livingstone as an inept, bumbling adventurer who nearly got himself killed. But upon deeper reading, it’s discovered that David Livingstone was the true hero of the story of Africa. He was a missionary and explorer who sought to better the lives of the tribes in Africa. Even after being rescued, near death, he stayed on the continent to continue his fight against the slave trade. Whereas the “heroic” Stanley, a notable racist, had to be pressured into going to Africa in the first place, and he treated his porters and any tribesmen he encountered with brutality and cruelty. To make matters worse, he was eventually employed by King Leopold II of Belgium to open the Congo, which involved forced labor and the slaughter of tribes, and ended with a large swath of the Congo privately owned by the Belgian king.

  It is this difference in character and outcome that ended with Livingstone being interred in Westminster Abbey and Stanley being denied this honor. So for my story, I wanted to highlight Livingstone’s life and death. And, yes, it is true that his body was indeed mummified by the natives and sent back to England in a cylinder of bark. But his heart remains in Africa, buried under a Mobola plum tree.

  Stanley and Twain

  Yes, Henry Morton Stanley and Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) were indeed friends. To get a better flavor of their close and intimate relationship, I suggest you read the novelization of that friendship:

  Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise, by Oscar Hijuelos

  And, no, I don’t think the pair had their own adventures in Egypt, but how much fun is it to think they did?

  Twain and Tesla

  I find this relationship the most delightful. Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla were great buddies. Twain even spent time in Tesla’s lab, helping with experiments
, and I’m sure being a general nuisance. The anecdote of Twain testing Tesla’s “earthquake machine” to help with his constipation is true. Twain stepped on the inventor’s large oscillating device and promptly excused himself to the restroom.

  So again, I had to write a story where Twain and Tesla get into some Sigma-style adventure of their own. But let’s talk more about Tesla.

  Nikola Tesla truly was a visionary genius—if not the most business savvy or practical. I could spend pages writing about his life, his work, and his legacy. Luckily I don’t have to, as there are multiple books that could expand on this for the intellectually curious. Here are two I found most enlightening while writing this book:

  Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century, by Sean Patrick

  Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, by W. Bernard Carlson

  But I do want to talk more about the specific aspects of his life and inventions that played a role in this novel. He truly believed in wireless energy, to the point that everything I talked about in regard to Wardenclyffe Tower is factual; so too were his later claims to have stumbled upon a new, never-before-seen energy source. His inventions and claims so worried the U.S. government that upon the man’s death his rooms at the New Yorker were raided and most of his papers taken. It took years of pressure from Tesla’s nephew before the government finally returned them, but not all of them. The one notebook that Tesla’s nephew was specifically told by his uncle to secure upon his death remains missing. And, yes, the National Defense Research Committee, who were called in to review all of Tesla’s papers after his death, was run at the time by John G. Trump, the uncle of a certain New York real estate magnate (or president of the United States, as I’m writing this before the election of 2016).

  So let’s continue with the historical aspects of the novel, but for that, we’re going a little further back in time.

  The Book of Exodus and the Biblical Plagues

  This novel proposes an alternate historical timeline to the events in Exodus. For a more thorough exploration of this New Chronology, I recommend the following books both written by the same author.

  Exodus: Myth or History, by David Rohl

  The Lords of Avaris, by David Rohl

  There have been numerous attempts to scientifically explain the ten plagues inflicted on the Egyptians by Moses, so I figured I’d add my voice to that chorus. Most of what is written here is, of course, conjecture and speculation, but it’s based on real science. For example, the eruption of the Mediterranean volcano, Thera, some 3,500 years ago is believed to have been the strongest eruption ever witnessed by humans. The atmospheric and climatic changes associated with an ash plume of that magnitude would have been significant. Could it have created an equatorial aurora? The 2006 eruption of Augustine Volcano in Alaska was studied because of the dramatic lightning associated with its ash plume. It is said to have been so powerful that it even affected the aurora borealis.

  So let’s move on to some of the novel’s science.

  Electric Bacteria and the Archaea Domain

  This novel features a rather nasty little microorganism, but most everything about it is actually real. Scientists have discovered a whole slew of these electron-eating bacteria by shocking mud and seeing what comes to feed. Various labs around the world are exploring practical applications for these newly revealed and strange microbes, from looking into growing living biocables that could transmit electricity to using them to power nanomachines capable of all sorts of industrial uses, including cleaning up the environment.

  As to the strange Archaea microbes featured in this novel, those aspects of the story are all true. Archaea are distinctly different from bacteria and are indeed shapeshifters able to form long filaments (perfect for rewiring a brain). And this third branch of life did evolve alongside viruses, often incorporating their genetic material. So in this novel, I devised a very unique disease, using a pathogenic Archaea that is itself deadly, yet also holds a virus in its back pocket, similar to Zika, that could cause birth defects. And when I learned that many Archaea species turn waters red (from a lake in Iran to the salt lakes of Utah), I thought it was the perfect organism to trigger a biblical plague (maybe even ten of them).

  One other part of the story that is true: The outer layers of the planet’s atmosphere do indeed harbor bacterial colonies, who are up there feeding and multiplying all on their own.

  Climate Change and the State of the Arctic

  As Twain writes in the novel, I’m a man of words more than a man of science, so I’m not about to get on a soapbox and debate the merits of climate science or how man might play a role in it. But it’s hard to deny that the Arctic is getting warmer, the ice caps are getting smaller, and it’s opening up the entire north to exploration. Cruise ships are indeed plying the Northwest Passage, a trek once considered too hazardous to even contemplate and which led to the deaths of countless explorers, including the crews of the HMS Erebus and Terror.

  By the way, if you want to get a flavor of that fateful journey, I highly recommend the novel by one of my favorite writers:

  The Terror, by Dan Simmons

  Most climate scientists believe we are near, at, or past the tipping point to do something about the imperiled state of the world. Some researchers are looking to geo-engineering as a possible solution. These are massive projects, such as enclosing the earth in a solar shield, or flooding Death Valley, or even wrapping Greenland in a blanket. The only problem—beyond the feasibility of funding or accomplishing them—is the danger of unintended consequences, disasters that no one could predict because the number of variables is so huge when talking about a globe-wide engineering project. So, of course, I wanted to explore what might happen.

  This book also talks about the HAARP installation in Alaska, along with the rumors and conspiracy theories that surround it. Since the Aurora Station featured in this novel is basically a giant version of HAARP, I decided to make all those rumors true and set the sky on fire (which is indeed one of the charges claimed about HAARP).

  Mummification and Tattooed Mummies

  This book opens with a body from a person who underwent a ritual of self-mummification. As gruesome and painful as that may sound, it is real. Sokushinbutsu—or Buddhas in the flesh—are found in Japan, where the practitioners undergo great lengths to preserve their tissues after death. This involves fasting, consuming special bark and teas, and swallowing stones—then entombing oneself alive. You’ll also find similar practices in China and India.

  As to tattoos found on mummies, there have been twelve Egyptian mummies who have been discovered covered in skin art. Using modern imaging software and infrared scanners that can see through layers of skin, archaeologists are able to bring these tattoos to life.

  Elephants

  Everything that the elephants do in this novel may seem amazing but is easily within behavior noted about elephants at zoos or in the wild. That includes painting, vocalizing in human voices, observing death ceremonies, mimicry, even self-medicating. The story of people in Kenya being “taught” by elephants how to induce labor by chewing on leaves is true. Mankind has a long history of observing nature and its survival methods to keep ourselves alive.

  All of this elephant behavior is attributable to their big brains—all eleven pounds’ worth. And they do have the same number of neurons and synapses in their cerebral cortexes as us humans. Likewise, they put all that brainpower to good use. They use tools and solve problems and even show altruistic behavior. They are also self-aware and have a concept of art.

  So quit shooting them, please.

  A Few Miscellaneous Bread Crumbs

  I had a chance to visit SAINT MARY’S CHURCH in Ashwell. Most of the details are accurate but my visit was a decade ago, so memory and time may have altered a few aspects. But the church does indeed have medieval graffiti scribbled all over inside, some meaningful and some quite comical. There is also a spring behind the church, set in a park and crossed via
stepping-stones. I shifted the cemetery over a touch for the action sequence, but mostly everything else is as written.

  I based NOAH’S ARK on an amphibious vehicle called a Swamp Spryte. It looked so much fun, I had to put it in a book.

  The same is true of Kowalski’s PIEZER weapon. It is based on the Department of Homeland Security’s concept for a shotgun that can fire showers of piezoelectric crystals to shock their target from 150 feet away, all without those pesky Taser wires. So, of course, Sigma Force would be perfect to field test such a weapon.

  Lastly, the book talks a bit about the electrical nature of MEMORY—from the storage of short-term reflections in the hippocampus to the fact that long-term memories are recoded and spread in a network across our brain. It’s also been demonstrated that our memories can be made stronger and more vivid via electric stimulation. So what might happen if one of those electric-loving microbes were pathogenic? How might it affect our memories? I think I’d rather write about it than experience it.

  So that covers the basics of the novel. There are, of course, a thousand more bread crumbs that are true, but I’d need tweezers to get them all out, and it would take many more pages to cover them. So I suggest you simply believe everything in the book.

  I’ve peppered this novel with a few Nikola Tesla quotes, so I thought I’d end with one more, a testament to the connectivity that joins all humanity:

  Though free to think and act, we are all held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable.

  Except that I must separate from you all for now—at least until Sigma gets into more trouble, which of course won’t take them too long.

  ALSO BY JAMES ROLLINS

  The Bone Labyrinth

  The 6th Extinction

  The Eye of God

  Bloodline

  The Devil Colony

  Altar of Eden