The Final Outbreak

by M. L. Banner

  Another wave of dizziness hit, but he forced himself to stay conscious.

  “My-oh-my. You gentlemen were just in time. Thank you!” said the old woman in between shallow breaths.

  “It’s our pleasure ma’am,” answered Wasano.

  Jörgen helped Urban up.

  “I’m fine, sir,” Urban responded.

  “I guess Ye Olde Tavern was open already...” the security director stated what was obvious to all of them.

  “How about the life boats, sir?” Urban croaked.

  Both the security director and the captain shot each other glances, and then back to Urban.

  “That’s a terrific idea. There’s a first aid kit for you, as well as provisions, and because they’re locked up there won’t be any passengers or crew there. We should be safe,” the captain stated triumphantly. “And we’re on the shady side, which should have fewer passengers, because of lack of sun. Wasano, would you lead us?”

  “Yes, sir,” the security director said and then took them down the stairwell and out a hallway that led to a separate crew access door out on the starboard Promenade deck, right in front of lifeboat #35.

  A quick check both ways, and it appeared to be clear. So the four of them rushed out the door and across the rubberized decking to the locked gate. The security director already had the proper key ready, driving it in with purpose, and they were in.

  The captain had his arm wrapped around Urban, who could no longer move on his own. The elderly woman seemed more agile than she had appeared at first. The security director closed and tried to lock the gate, but the tumbler seemed broken.

  He threw open the door and hesitated momentary. When they heard a scream on the promenade deck, very close by, the four of them poured into the life boat and clicked the door closed.

  Before Urban lost consciousness for good, he caught a glimpse of a large, hulking man standing in back. Then he was out.

  54

  Swing Deck

  “Birds!” screamed Ágúst.

  If just their presence didn’t seem to do it, Ágúst’s screaming did the trick. The dozen or so birds thrashed at the air, desperate to get to them as quickly as they could.

  Jessica looked around for something to hide behind or to use to defend themselves with, but there was nothing on the swing deck. She had already slunk under a console, but there was nothing she could use to block the oncoming birds.

  She’d read about horrific events, like a car crash, when everything appears in slow motion. She understood the science behind it: all of your senses becoming aware of everything at once; the firing of so many neurons to catch the input of a billion pieces of stimuli around you; your brain just trying to catch up. Still, it was something she had only read about. Experiencing this firsthand was amazingly intense as the birds came at Ágúst and her. And at that moment, which had slowed to a crawl, something very strange happened.

  Images of her husband and her seven-year-old flashed in front of her. She had read about this too; it made sense. It was the human mind’s escape mechanism, a way to cope with the unbearable. She suspected it would have been natural for her to accept these images, just as it was to not fight the inevitable about to hit her. But she was a fighter.

  In fact, the images made her mad: she wasn’t going to let these birds take her away from her family. She would at least try.

  She looked up, remembering just then that there was a slide-out table above her, with keyboard. She clicked off the locks and slid the table out and off, the keyboard falling off its cradle and onto the deck. The birds hit at the moment she held out the table like it was a shield. They pummeled the table, as if individual fists were punching at her, pushing back her shield toward her. She pushed harder, locking her elbows, as they drilled down on her.

  She felt one peck at her leg, out of sight and she kicked at it and the others flapping nearby. She couldn’t see any of them. One attempted to come around and attack her side, but she was able to deflect its advance before it could get her face—they seemed to be going for her face.

  She held back the assault of what felt like hundreds of birds, but she knew it was probably still only some of that dozen she’d just seen a millennia of moments ago.

  Then she felt pecks at her fingers, followed by pain. Lots of pain. Several connected directly with her legs, despite her thrashing at them.

  She was starting to feel pain everywhere and more so, a sinking dread that she couldn’t keep this up much longer, when she heard ping... ping... ping.

  And still the assault continued, but now with fewer birds than before.

  Again she heard ping and something else. It was a grunt and then another ping.

  When she no longer felt the birds attacking, she ventured a look over her keyboard table-shield.

  It was Ágúst. He was standing in front of her, huffing and puffing, holding a small fire extinguisher. Before him were the dead bodies of at least a dozen birds.

  He’d killed them all.

  “You all right?” he begged, dropping the fire extinguisher and holding out his hand.

  She thrust out hers.

  “Oh no, your hands,” he said, his face twisted with concern.

  She pulled them back and examined them. Her hands were beat to hell. But they were still functional. She slid out from under the console and glared at the sky, sure another attack was imminent.

  Other than the occasional bird in the distance, there didn’t seem to be any interest in them. At least for now.

  She glanced at Ágúst and was surprised to see he didn’t have any injuries. She knew she must have looked like hell. She glared at her bloodied legs and then back at Ágúst. He didn’t have a scratch on him.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said, watching her.

  Then she remembered their larger problem. She spun on a heel and now focused her attention on the swing deck’s console. It was supposed to have had ninety percent of the bridge’s controls. She’d only used the swing deck controls for some basic system checks, since all the controls she needed had been on the bridge. But now she needed them.

  She flicked the power switch on, but none of the monitors flickered on.

  She toggled the on/off switch back and forth, but the screens remained black. “Dammit!” She pounded the middle of console with a balled fist.

  “What’s wrong?” Ágúst asked behind her.

  “I left the bridge before I was able to reset our navigation. I was hoping to do that here.”

  “So we don’t get our efficiency bonus this year by blowing through more fuel than scheduled. I can live with that,” Ágúst snickered.

  “You don’t understand. Because I wasn’t able to reset the controls, we’re still scheduled to run into the Azores in an hour or so.”

  He gulped back a breath, spun and dashed past the bridge hatch, sticking his face against the glass, cupping his hands around his head. He pulled back and glared at her, his face slackening.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Look,” he answered.

  She did.

  Inside the bridge were the two crazies, gazing slack-jawed at her console. It blared an alarm tone that warned there was 1:18.53 left until they’d run into one of the islands.

  “Okay, so how do you fix this?” Ágúst begged.

  Jessica ignored him and instead dashed to the most forward point of the swing deck. Reaching under that console, she found a set of binoculars.

  She pulled them to her face, glanced through them, and then handed them to Ágúst so he could understand what she did.

  Sao Miguel was just ahead and there was nothing they could do to stop them from running into it in a little more than an hour.

  55

  How Could It Get Worse?

  “Please just call me Ted.” Ted accepted the bare-chested man’s hand and returned his enthusiastic handshake, attempting with difficulty to match the man’s firm grip. He immediately noticed the Auschwitz tattoo on his forearm and thought, This m
an lived through the Nazis and is probably a tough customer. Ted suspected he would find this out firsthand, if they made it through the day.

  David continued pumping Ted’s hand, while his words tumbled out. “I’m a big fan, although I’m a little behind on my reading. Never finished your last one so I was starting it again, but was interrupted by the damned birds. Nice talk, by the way.”

  “I’m Evie,” said an equally skinny woman, sitting on a massage table, towel around her shoulders, with two other passengers who looked nervous. Evie waved her palm tentatively. “My husband won’t let you get in a word in edgewise; he’s a bit of an author groupie.”

  David tossed a scowl behind him at his wife obviously practiced over the years.

  Ted waved back at Evie and couldn’t help but smile at how odd life was: they’d just barely escaped with their lives, and now were in a spa room filled with Zen music, while making small talk with a concentration camp survivor, who was also a Bonaventure groupie. He couldn’t make this shit up.

  “Enough of the meet-and-greet,” demanded a rotund, bald British man seated in the back of the room, with an equally large pale-faced woman clutching his hand. He ignored Ted and David and focused his attention on Jean Pierre. “Staff Captain, what’s going on out there? Is the captain still in charge?”

  David’s expression changed almost immediately, as did Evie’s, a scowl finding what Ted suspected was a normal place on David’s face.

  Jean Pierre pushed past Ted and addressed the room. “Hello...”

  “Boris and my wife Penny,” said the large Brit.

  “Hello Boris and Penny, and David and Evie. I probably don’t know more than any of you. You saw the people attacking other people, didn’t you?”

  Ted suspected Jean Pierre had said this for the same reason Ted wanted to ask: it just didn’t seem real.

  “Yes, we did,” stated David, his face very serious now. “That’s why we’re here, hiding from them, like you.”

  “You saw this coming, didn’t you?” puffed Penny, glaring at Ted.

  This comment took Ted by complete surprise. He didn’t know this woman. And yet he’d been asking himself this very question over the last twenty-four hours. “Ah, no.” His voice was weak. His eyes darted around the room furtively. It felt very small inside at this moment and he could feel his pulse take off again. “My book was fiction, and in it only the animals were crazy. Plus, it was a terrorist that caused it all in the book, which I don’t believe is what we’re experiencing.”

  Ted realized then it wasn’t the woman’s question that got his heart racing; it was his wife. She had been completely silent this whole time, and usually she would have said something snarky about David’s adulation and certainly in response to the woman’s accusatory comment. He turned to look at her.

  “You’re being somewhat coy about this, Ted, aren’t you? I live with a man who’s guarded about most things,” Evie lobbed a knowing look back at her husband, “except when it comes to meeting his favorite authors.” She returned her gaze back to Ted. “Please share what you think is going on.”

  Ted ignored her question, as his eyes had not left his wife since he had turned to look at her.

  TJ was standing in the corner of the room, away from everyone. Her hands were planted on her hips, as she often did after a run. Likewise, her chest was heaving, mouth wide open to get air. Besides the oddity of her wearing a splash of blood across one of her arms, bare belly and cheek, she was still wearing her dark sunglasses inside. Further telegraphing her mood, her shoulders were hunched and head pointed at her shoes. She was upset about something, whereas she seemed fine after dealing with all the crazies in the Solarium.

  “Hey Yank, do tell us what you think. Why have so many gone all barmy? Will we go barmy too?”

  TJ looks distressed, he thought. “Hon, are you all right?”

  All attention turned to TJ, and she seemed to know it. She caught her breath and tilted her head up to meet Ted’s gaze, and shot him a weak grin. “I’m fine... Just a little freaked about the birds and the crazy people.”

  She huffed once and then stood up tall. She wasn’t going to say anything more, and neither should he push her to answer, until he had her alone.

  Jean Pierre seem to sense the awkward moment, and so he repeated the question, “Ted, please tell us what you think is going on.”

  Ted took a breath, turned to face the others, and started.

  ~~~

  “It’s a parasite; that’s what’s causing the fits of rage we’ve seen first in the animals, and then the people.” Dr. Molly Simmons stood again, adjusted her skirt, and sat back down, readying herself for more questions.

  “A parasite, you mean like a tapeworm? You think a tapeworm caused these people to go bonkers?” Hans shot a scornful frown at the elderly woman, as her fingers played with the contours of her odd-shaped cane.

  She mostly ignored him. “Tapeworms are but one of tens of thousands of species of parasites. In fact, there are five times as many parasites as all other organisms on earth.

  “This particular parasite is called toxoplasma Gondii or T-Gondii—”

  “Sounds like a fauking sexual disease, raweyet?” Hans blurted and held his hand up for a high-five from his brother Franz, who also ignored him, and then readjusted the blanket around his shoulders. Franz kept his attention on the smart old woman, as if his life depended on it.

  Molly disregarded this comment too, pushed her coke-bottle-sized specs further up her nose and continued, “And we are only just starting to learn how the T-Gondii rewires human and animal behaviors to do its bidding.”

  “Wait, Dr. Simmons,” the captain barked. “Are you saying this T-Gondii planned this? Why would it want animals and humans to go insane and kill each other?”

  “Yes, Captain, you’re correct on the ‘planned this’ part”—she made quotation symbols with her two hands in the air— “of your comment, but not in the way you and I would look at it.” She removed her glasses and rubbed away an invisible smudge on one lens and then polished the other, using one of the top ruffles of her long skirt. After a quick examination to make sure they were clear, she popped them back on her face.

  It was her way of collecting herself when she was nervous—this time she was scared beyond reason. But unlike an academic lecture in front of a boisterous classroom or a presentation before her peers, this talk was about the scariest parasite she thought she’d ever encountered. Parasites had killed maybe a billion people over the years. This one might end up killing all the rest, making what they were all experiencing an extinction event.

  Focus Molly, the captain, and others are counting on your knowledge.

  “The T-Gondii is... a single-cell organism. So it doesn’t have a brain, like you or me. But like us, the T-Gondii has DNA that tells it what to do, and we’ve seen many cases in the parasitic world where the organism transfers some of its DNA hard-wiring to its hosts, so that their hosts will do what it wants.”

  “But to what end?” the captain asked. “Why direct animals and people to attack and kill each other? Wouldn’t that lead to every host’s death?”

  “Sounds like a stupid fauking bacteria,” Hans chortled, raising his hand up toward his brother again in another attempt to get a high-five from him. After the moment lingered, when Franz avoided acknowledging him entirely, Hans lowered his hand and looked down.

  Typical bully, Molly thought. But at least this bully is listening to you.

  “No, sir. Far from stupid, in fact.” She wanted to say, “unlike you,” but such a comment would be juvenile, like him. “The protozoa has DNA, much like our own: a complex network, interconnected. It’s very much like what goes to make up our own brains, at least for some of us.” She couldn’t help the small dig, but thought better of carrying it any further and inciting the large man.“Whereas a bacteria is just a bag of loose DNA and proteins, this particular protozoa is very smart, indeed. And like all other organisms—to get to your question, Ca
ptain—T-Gondii wants to survive and thrive, and to do that, it must take out all threats. Only those who are not infected are a threat. Somehow each host infected with T-Gondii knows who’s not infected and desires to kill only those people or animals.”

  “What are you, some kind of damned expert on parasites?” the big German stated. It wasn’t a question.

  She turned away from the captain to address the man she had instantly disliked when they had arrived at this lifeboat: a skinhead, who must have instinctively known her Jewish roots. She assumed his brother was of similar ilk, although he wasn’t as bellicose as his Aryan brother. “In fact, sir, I am an expert on this subject. I’m a parasitologist.” She left off the “retired” part.

  She returned her gaze to the captain, then across from him to the unblinking eyes of the ship’s security chief and, head resting against this man’s shoulder, the severely injured man, who was listening with his eyes closed. This one looked very pale.

  “So I suspect that everyone who is not infected with T-Gondii will be attacked. Everyone who is infected will be mostly left alone.”

  “That makes sense, Captain,” chimed in the security chief, addressing his superior. “Remember some of the passengers were not getting attacked by the birds and others were?”

  Captain Jörgen considered this, and then looked back to Molly. “Please, no disrespect, Dr. Simmons, but how could you possibly know this with the limited anecdotal evidence we’ve seen?”

  “You are correct, this is a supposition of mine, based on limited observations, but also a lifetime of studying parasites, like this one. This is what parasites do.”

  “So...” Captain Jörgen, looked upward to remember something, and then, as if he plucked the thought from an imaginary mental file cabinet above his head, he continued, “...explain how thermophilic bacteria plays a role in all of this.”

  “Yes, of course, you would have spoken to our author-friend.” She grinned, just a little. “You cannot have the one operating without the other. Not on the scale we’re seeing. You see, most of the time the T-Gondii doesn’t appear to be active in most hosts. When it is active... Well, this is why, before this recent wave, we’ve been seeing more and more incidents of aggressive behavior by both humans and animals. But it still affects everyone it infects, having already done most of its work of reprogramming their brains, and then it lays in wait, for what we never knew. But I always believed it was waiting for some inciting stimulus to activate the T-Gondii and turn on the new programming in its hosts.”