“Help the planet?” Caplan shook his head. “You wouldn’t help a little old lady cross the street unless she paid you for it.”
“I’m many things, Zach. Some good, some bad. But greedy certainly isn’t one of them.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Caplan saw the cabin door slide open. A pistol, clenched in a small hand, appeared.
Morgan popped out of the grass and slammed the door on the hand. A screeching yelp rang out. Wasting no time, she opened the door again and yanked the hand. An aloof middle-aged man tumbled out of the helicopter. Morgan aimed the rifle at him. “Remember me?” she asked with a twisted smile. “Yeah, I thought so. Do yourself a favor and stay quiet.”
For the next two minutes, Caplan kept up a steady aim on the cabin. Meanwhile, Morgan emptied it one-by-one, frisking the big shots before sending them to join the others.
“It’s okay. I can handle this.” Corbotch flashed the panicked big shots a calming smile before turning back to Caplan. “Do you know what’s going on here? I mean, what’s really going on?”
At any second, Pearson could return. And then there was the fire, still throbbing, still drawing dangerously close. There was no time to waste. He needed to call to Perkins and the others, board the chopper, and get the hell out of the cursed forest. “The better question is, do I care? And the answer is, no, I don’t.”
“I lied to you earlier. Oblivion isn’t inching our way. It’s already here.”
Caplan wanted to dismiss him. But the sincerity of Corbotch’s tone gave him pause. “What are you talking about?”
“The Holocene extinction is about to kick into high gear, Zach. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s merely an inevitable consequence of the strange and massive loss of megafauna during the Pleistocene epoch.” Corbotch stared unblinking into Caplan’s eyes. “Regardless, the world is in serious trouble. Vallerio Foundation experts expect systemic ecosystem failure to occur across the globe within six months.”
Morgan gave him a hard look. “You told us—”
“I told you what you needed to hear, nothing more. The truth is very few people know how bad this is about to get. The only ones that know, besides me and some select researchers, are them.” He jabbed his thumb at the big shots, packed close together in the clearing.
“If ecosystems are about to collapse,” Caplan’s eyes flitted to the forest, “then why do they look so healthy?”
“The Vallerio, along with many other places, look fine on the outside. But on the inside, they’re rotting away at a jaw-dropping rate. In the next few years, my experts expect sixty-five percent of all families, eighty-five to ninety percent of all genera, and ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of all species to perish before nature’s wrath.”
Caplan wanted to leave. But he couldn’t, not yet anyway. It wasn’t that he trusted Corbotch. He didn’t. Not really. He just… well, he just wanted to be sure. “If that’s a fact, then how come this is the first I’m hearing about it? How come the whole world isn’t in crisis mode?”
“The smart people — survivalists like you — are prepping. They might not know the exact mechanism, but they can sense the coming disaster. The scientific community, by and large, is aware of the Holocene extinction. But they don’t have my equipment, my resources. So, they have no idea how close it is or how bad things are about to get.” He shrugged. “As for the general public, they’re skeptical of the vague warnings delivered by the scientific community. And who can blame them? Rising politicization has undermined scientific credibility. Plus, the survival of captive populations obscures how many species are truly extinct in the wild. And many recent extinctions have been among life forms that get little attention, like arthropods.”
Caplan readied a mocking quip. But then he noticed Morgan, noticed how she was looking at Corbotch. Something had clicked in her facial features, causing her skepticism to fade away. Horrible realization had taken its place. “Don’t tell me you’re buying this crap,” he said.
She blinked, looked at Caplan. And in that moment, he knew that she wasn’t just buying it. She understood it. Understood it like someone who had stared at puzzle pieces for years, but had only just now put them together.
“I thought rewilding could stop it,” Corbotch continued. “I stocked the Vallerio’s ecosystems with proxies. Horses, bison, jaguars, zebras… they all found a home here. But it didn’t work. Remember the horse apple trees I told you about on the way here? Well, elephants didn’t spread their seeds like we’d hoped. Not even close. And that’s just the beginning. All in all, our rewilding project was a complete failure.”
“That’s when you hired us,” Morgan said.
“Yes,” Corbotch replied. “I brought in the finest minds the world had to offer and tasked you with the ultimate challenge… recreating the entire spectrum of lost Pleistocene megafauna.”
Morgan shook her head. “We only worked on megafauna indigenous to North America.”
“True. But what makes you think Hatcher is my only research facility?”
Caplan gawked at him. “There are others?”
Corbotch merely smiled.
“I don’t understand something,” Morgan said after a moment. “Why’d you lie to us? Why didn’t you just tell us the real timeline?”
“Make no mistake about it, Amanda. The world as you know it is about to undergo the largest extinction event of all time. Nothing can stop it. And that means people will die. Lots of people. Our entire species if my plans don’t work. And even if they do, I’ll only be able to save a tiny slice of the population. Those people — the best, brightest, and youngest — have already been selected. If I had told you that in advance, do you think you could’ve handled it?”
Morgan didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”
“You’ve got a sister, right? Lelanie, I believe.”
Morgan froze.
So did Caplan. He knew about Tony, but a sister? Morgan had never mentioned her before.
“As I recall, she teaches fourth grade. In Florida, I think. She’s clearly a bright woman and probably good at her job. But her skills, pardon me for saying this, will be useless in the coming world.” He paused. “Do you think you could’ve handled that truth? Or would you have wasted time and resources fighting to keep her alive?”
Morgan didn’t reply.
“So, she just dies?” Caplan shook his head. “You get a kick out of playing god, don’t you?”
“Actually, I despise it,” Corbotch replied. “Do you really think I like picking who lives or dies? I’m doing what I must to preserve our species.”
You didn’t seem to have a problem picking who died in your 1-Gen killing fields,” Morgan whispered.
“That’s different.”
“You’re a murderer.”
“Those people threatened everything.”
“They were innocent.”
“They were greedy. Greedy for money, power, influence.”
“It’s still murder,” Morgan said.
“I prefer to call it justice.”
Morgan glared at him.
“I wish I could stop this,” Corbotch continued. “But I can’t. The best I can hope to do is prepare for the future. The Vallerio, Hatcher Station, even the 1- and 2-Gen animals are just a small part of what’s to come. I’ve set wheels in motion across the globe. Wheels no one will see coming, wheels that will bring this planet and our species back from the brink of disaster. That is, assuming you don’t kill me right here.”
Just kill him, Caplan thought. What’s the worst that can happen? Hell, everyone’s about to die anyway!
But deep down, Caplan knew the issue was bigger than that. Corbotch had linked his very existence to the survival of their species. In other words, kill Corbotch and humanity was on its way out of evolution’s backdoor. On the other hand, Corbotch was a master manipulator and a lunatic. A man who’d disposed of his enemies on a Pleistocene-inspired killing ground. Was he really the best person to lead the post-extinction world?