CBN.com – Finally, my brethren,
be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole
armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in high places.
—Ephesians 6:10–12 KJV
And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels,
Go your ways, and our out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.
And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there
fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the
beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.
—Revelation 16:1–2 KJV
Prologue
The final plague began on April 1st, a fitting and ironic beginning to
an end, a day of fools and folly, a day when all but a handful of humans
across the global village smiled into mirrors, broke bread with friends
and family, sang lullabies to sleepy-eyed children, or turned on the evening
news. Little did they know that the glory days of bread and circuses would
soon be at an end, and that their glittering boxes of light and shadow
would soon spit out lies to bury the terrible seeds that six men now sowed
in a New Mexico desert.
“Can you hear me?” called a short man to his much taller
companion. The pair was joined by four more men emerging from two shiny
black cars. Each of them wore a ghostly white Hazmat suit and filtered
mask.
“Is that the farm over there?” called the taller to the first
man.
The short man nodded. “Rick! See that first shed—the one
with the open door? I think that’s where we need to start. Can you
hear me?”
Rick Albertson nodded. He looked like a fat, white worm in the hot jumpsuit.
Sweat already poured down his cheeks, and he wiped at his brow, his gloved
hand clicking against the heavy plastic of the face shield. “Curse
it all! Why couldn’t we get the techs to do this?”
The short man patted his taller, heavier colleague on the shoulder sympathetically.
“It’s for the best, Rick. You, me, and the others, we might
not be field ops, but we understand this stuff better than the techs ever
could. Half an hour, and we’ll be back in our cars and looking forward
to a round of beers. How’s that sound?”
“Like it’s half an hour too long to wait,” the white
worm replied, his gray marble eyes searching the dusty farm for signs
of life. “OK, let’s do this. Three teams, right? Two each.
Who do you want me to work with, Arnie?”
Dr. Arnold Smith pointed to the other four men, indicating a thin blob
of white with a small tank attached to a sling on his back. “Why
don’t you go with Pete over there. Hey, Pete! You and Rick take
that first shed. Look for signs of life first, then start spraying. Charlie,
you and Tom take that second shed. Sam and I will take the house for now.
We’ll all meet up in the barn. Got it?”
“I don’t like this wind, Arnie,” came a mellow voice
in Smith’s ear.
“I hear that, Tommy, but we don’t have much choice in the
matter. The orders are to disperse the solution. Look, this is just a
test farm. The folks in weather approved this morning’s run, so
let’s get it over with. Everyone set? Let’s rock and roll.”
The six men fanned out in pairs, two to a battered chicken shed on the
northwest end of the test farm; two to the second chicken shed, slightly
longer in length but equally weathered and rotting; two to a spindly building
known as the house, an empty shell filled with magazines, ancient furniture,
and a rusting sink.
A dry wind etched fine lines into their face masks, and the mid-morning
sun felt hot enough to melt flesh. A recent rash of solar flares had kicked
up the temperatures in the New Mexican desert, and today’s afternoon
high would easily hit 115 degrees. Ridiculous for early April.
Dr. Tom Foil followed his team leader, a molecular biologist and longtime
friend named Charles Hilliard, to the second shed. The pair looked like
aliens in the strange landscape, and Hilliard laughed as they stepped
into the abandoned building.
“We look like a couple of moon men, Tommy. Say, is that a chicken?
I thought this place was supposed to be empty.”
Inside, in the far right corner sat a scrawny white bird, stubbornly
squatting upon a nest of six eggs.
“Ah, shoot! This isn’t supposed to happen! Goble said he
checked this place out. Arnie, you there? We got a brooding chicken in
here!”
Smith answered from his position inside the crumbling house. “Chicken?
Are you serious? Check it. It’s got to be dead.”
“He says check it,” Foil said to Hilliard. “He doesn’t
believe me.”
Hilliard shrugged and stooped next to the chicken, wincing as his seventy-one-year-old
knees complained. “Hey there, Henrietta. You alive or not?”
The hen squawked, scratched at Charlie’s shield, and began racing
around the dusty floorboards, feigning a wing injury to keep the intruders
from her precious nest.
“That’s an affirmative,” Hilliard laughed. “She’s
got four pretty whites and two browns. What do you say? We could take
these home and introduce them to Irish potatoes and a rasher of bacon.”
“Negative,” Smith called back, not the least bit amused.
“Take nothing, touch nothing. Leave the hen. She’s not going
to last in this climate anyway. Just spray the area so we can say we did
it. When we come back in two weeks to collect samples, she’ll be
dead, even if we find that 456 can’t survive in the arid conditions
of the desert. Copy that?”
“Yeah, sure, I copy,” Hilliard replied, not bothering to
conceal his frustration. “Tommy, you ready? I want to get this over
with and get back to the lab. I’m too old for this field stuff,
especially in this kind of weather. Man, it’s hot!”
Foil, ten years younger than Hilliard but feeling the heat, bit his lip.
“The suits don’t help, C. D. What’s Arnie thinking,
telling us to spray with this chicken in here? I’m not sure that’s
a good idea.”
“I understand, Tommy, but Henrietta here isn’t going to spread
456 to anyone or anything, not with the safety features we built into
it. We’ll lock the door behind us when we leave, and if 456 works
at all, she’ll be dead within a couple of days. If it doesn’t
work, she’ll still be dead in a couple days, with the heat and all.
Come on. Let’s get it over with. My ticker’s gonna short-circuit
if we don’t get back to air-conditioning soon.”
Foil nodded, switched on the canister marked Sln. 456, and lifted the
trigger sprayer from its holster. “Here goes,” he said as
his forefinger pulled on the plastic trigger.
A fine spray began to fill the air, and the chicken stopped her frenzied
dance to stare for a moment. As if sensing the danger, the Rhode Island
White scurried back to the meager nest and covered the six smooth eggs
with her emaciated body.
Noticing the hen’s bravery, Foil paused for a second, wishing he
could snatch up the chicken and remove her and her eggs from harm’s
way. Too late, he thought. She’s already exposed. Biting his lower
lip so hard he drew a thin trickle of blood, Foil reactivated the spray
head and dispensed the remainder of the container. He watched the fine
mist hang in the air, illuminated by the yellow fingers of the morning
sun, and he suddenly realized what he and the other scientists from BioStrain
had unleashed. It’s no good letting it bother you, he thought to
himself. You can’t unstop the bottle now. May God forgive us.
The pair of scientists finished up their task, each emptying a canister
of 456 into the shed. Small dust devils took up the aerosolized virus
and carried it to freedom outside the rotting timbers. The Rhode Island
White watched from her dark corner. Within seconds, the lethal virus had
infiltrated her lungs and eyes, where it swiftly began compromising cell
walls and weakening blood vessels. After only five minutes, the hen began
to twitch, and bright blood poured from her black eyes and pale beak.
Red life dripped onto the brown and white eggs, and the mother hen spat
and coughed, her body racked by convulsions.
As they watched in horror, the two men stared at each other, dumbfounded,
their pale faces reflecting their shock.
“Oh, my dear God! It isn’t supposed to work this fast! What
have we done?” shouted Tom. In his ear, he could hear Smith’s
reprimands, orders to act like a scientist instead of a child. Tom didn’t
care. “Charlie! It isn’t supposed to react like this! What
in heaven’s name is in this canister?”
Charles Hilliard couldn’t answer. His mouth had flown open, and
his eyes glazed over with shock. As he regained his composure, he grabbed
Tom Foil’s arm and shouted. “We’ve been had, Tommy!
This isn’t what we’ve spent the last four years creating!
It’s that Grayson!”
As the chicken bled out, neither man noticed the pale iguana that had
slipped into the shed, mouth open, tail held high. The lizard’s
cold eyes followed the men’s white shapes, waiting until they had
disappeared through the doorway. They barred the door and locked it with
a steel padlock. Neither man saw the iguana steal toward the unguarded
nest and take a brown egg into its jaws.
Once the lizard had gorged upon the bloody eggs, it crept back into the
blazing desert, carrying Solution 456 in its own resistant veins, ready
to infect a hungry condor that had been watching the iguana’s movements
since dawn.
As the two black company cars sped away toward the underground laboratories
of BioStrain, the condor pounced, carrying the iguana back to its own
clutch of hatchlings not far from the small village of Los Muertos, New
Mexico.
The Armageddon Strain had been born.
Purchase The
Armageddon Strain
Excerpted from The Armageddon Strain by Sharon Gilbert, Copyright
2005. Published by Whitaker House Publishers and Deeper Calling Entertainment.
For more information visit www.whitakerhouse.com
and www.MythArc.com.
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