Bøger af W W Watson

Most days he didn't think of his old life, but when he did it wasn't with regrets. The hardest thing of all had been shooting Nikki. When she had said she had killed April, he had remembered that a body had been found the day before. He just hadn't connected the two things. And it would've made no connection in his head anyway. He hadn't known April Evans. Nikki Moore had become April Evans to him. He would never have known the difference.What he had known was that she had not been entirely honest with him. He had caught her more than once doing things that were stupid, outright dangerous when they had been on the run. And she would play stupid when he would catch her. You can't be stupid one minute and smart the next. He had stopped trusting her the second she had insisted on trying to make the deal even though their faces had been on TV, and the next morning when he had seen the paper and compared the faces he wondered. She looked so different. Again she laughed it off: Said it was an old junior high school picture.She had left the car to use the ladies room and he had checked the guns. He knew then that something was wrong. She had them parked in an enclosed area: There would be no place to run if something went wrong, and one of the guns had an empty clip. They were the same model, one chrome one blued-steel. The clips mounted exactly the same. So he'd switched the clips. It made the gun with the full clip heavier, but he doubted that she would notice. She knew which gun she had put the empty clip into.She had already been talking about calling the cop, and he couldn't reason it. He didn't feel like giving up, and he didn't care what the radio said about him he wouldn't give up, and he didn't believe she would either. He had been hoping she'd simply screwed up with the guns, but when she had looked at them both before she handed him the one that had been empty, he had known then she either meant to kill him or have him killed.He didn't feel guilty about it at the time, only sad: Now he didn't even feel sad, only grateful that her plans had fallen through.Doug had a small fishing boat. They went out most days and fished, selling their catch in Poza Rica. Life couldn't be better or more laid back: The house on the beach. The way time seemed to stand still, even so he was going, but the word had come to him late last night that La Policía were looking for him, and not the local Policía, these guys were rumored to be dressed in military garb and carrying automatic weapons. The Federales: All kinds of bad; especially for an American in the country illegally.He had been expecting it, just hoping it would hold off a while longer. He had briefly wondered what had led them to him, but in the end it hadn't mattered. He had purchased an old truck in town. Rolled a thirty gallon drum into the bed and chained it down. He had filled it with gasoline and once the sun set he would be on his way through the desert. California... Texas if that didn't work out: Or maybe he'd work his way up the west coast and head for Alaska. There were a million places there to disappear."Second thoughts?" Dougie asked. He wore a funny little half smile on his face."No, I was just thinking about how lucky I've been... Hope it holds out." The sun was right on the edge of setting and he wanted to be a far way into the great nothing before the moon came up.He left the deck and walked across the sand to the old truck. It would be a wonder if it didn't leave him stranded somewhere in the desert. He raised one hand to Dougie and Mayte as he started the truck. They waved back and a few seconds later he dropped the old truck and gear and lumbered off into the desert.

The first quake had been minor, the last few had not. The big one was coming. The satellite links were down, but Doctor Alan Weber didn't need to have a satellite link up to know that. He touched one hand to his head, the fingertips came away bloody. In any other circumstances he would be hurrying to get his head wound taken care of, but these were not just any circumstances. The entire world was ending and it was a miracle to him that he had made it through the complex above and down into the control to the office.All main-line Comm links were down, probably because of the loss of the satellite systems. Underground back-up cable Comm: Down. The facility was in bad shape, and he was not kidding himself, there was no help on the way. No hope of reaching the surface and the worst was not yet here. He had spent the last several years here in the Canadian wilderness running the chemical countermeasure unit at the base. He had worked on a top secret virus designed to prolong human life in cases of extreme deprivation: Nuclear attack, war and other unlikely scenarios. He had spent the last two weeks working up to this event from his subterranean office complex. All wreckage now. Still, he had sent operatives out from here three days ago to do what they could to seed the virus: Following his final orders sent down through some now probably non-existent chain of command. He had heard absolutely nothing since, and believed that was because there was no one left in command any longer.Several bases had secretly been infected and studied. The commanders of the armed forces had, had no idea that anything was being tested on their men. The troops had done well, surviving their training with little food and water much better than they usually did, but over the next week nearly every bird in the area had died. Some side effect they had not been able to ferret out.That virus build had also been crippled. It had a built in self destruct mechanism to kill the virus after a short amount of time, but the newest version had no such mechanism and would go on reinfecting indefinitely. The entire virus design and its capabilities were top secret. Top secret. And usually Top Secret meant dozens of people knew, but this time it had meant that it really had been Top Secret. Withheld from the public, and even those in charge for years had known nothing of the true nature of the virus.Last week the news had come down from the finest scientific minds that an extinction event was about to take place. Up to ninety percent of the world population would likely be killed off as events unfolded. It was not a maybe, it was an absolute.The public knew that there was a meteor on a near collision course with the Earth. The truth was that the meteor might miss, barely, a near miss, but it wouldn't matter because it would contribute to a natural chain of events that would make a meteor impact look like small change. The big deal, the bigger than a meteor deal, was the earthquakes that had already started and would probably continue until most of the civilized world was dead or dying. Crumbled into ruin from super earthquakes and volcanic activity that had never been seen by modern civilization. The fact was that this was a natural course of events. It had happened before and it would happen again in some distant future.The virus was an answer, help, solution, but Alan Weber was unsure how well the solution would work. It was, like everything else, a stop gap measure, and probably too little too late. And it was definitely flawed, but he had temporarily pushed that knowledge away in his mind. Even now as he sat and waited for the end, which would surely come, out in the world operatives were disbursing the virus that could save humanity.