Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  Candice reached to the small of her back, drew her pistol. She’d shot two men dead; how many additional crew had she killed with her act of sabotage? She wished the answer was all of them.

  She had to reach the dry deck shelter. The surface … she had to get to the surface.

  Sweating, shivering and bleeding, Candice stepped out of the TDU.

  She almost slipped when a cracking voice sounded over the intercom.

  “This is the … the captain.”

  Candice froze as if he was actually in the passageway with her, as if he could see her. It was his voice, familiar from so many months, yet not his at the same time. He fought to get the words out.

  “Man Battle Stations Torpedo. I say again, man … man Battle Stations Torpedo. That … that is all.”

  She flinched at the harsh click of the PA shutting off. Torpedo launch? Against who? There wasn’t an enemy out there, wasn’t anyone at all except for …

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  She’d disabled the sub’s ability to escape; she hadn’t disabled its ability to fight.

  Escape. They were coming for her … she had to escape.

  Candice held her severed arm close to her chest, her right shoulder shrugged up almost to her ear. She moved down the passageway, waiting for each step to bring one of her tormentors running.

  If she could get to the forward escape trunk hatch that led to the dry deck shelter, if she could get into one of the SEIE suits, then she could make it to the surface. The dry deck shelter was amidships, just aft of the control room and attack center. To reach it, she would have to walk through the crew’s mess, past all the dead bodies.

  And some of them, she knew, weren’t all the way dead.

  Candice felt a vibration under her feet: the torpedo tubes flooding, the final step before launch. Only seconds until Mark 48 ADCAPs shot out at fifty-five knots, heading for ships that had no idea what was coming.

  She walked into the darkness of the crew’s mess. An aisle ran down the center. Small, four-person booths lined either side. In those booths, she could make out lumpy shadows, the still forms of corpses, the crimson shade of dried blood.

  This was where they had tried to bring her.

  A dim light filtered in from up ahead, shone down from the open, overhead escape trunk hatch.

  Her eyes adjusted enough to make out something on the ground just in front of her.

  A severed head.

  And she recognized it: Bobby Biltmore, an ensign from Kansas.

  Congrats, Bobby — at least you’re actually dead.

  She stepped over the head and kept moving through the aisle, waiting for one of the corpses to rise up and grab her, pull her under a table, do to her what they’d done to the others.

  The smell of rot, fighting for dominance against the scent of her own cooked flesh.

  Only a few more feet to go. The shadows seemed to move, to take shape and reach out for her. Her hand tightened on the pistol’s grip, squeezed hard enough to somehow force back the scream building in her chest and throat.

  Candice Walker felt another vibration.

  Fish in the water … torpedo launch. The targets wouldn’t just sit there, they would fire back. That meant the Los Angeles only had minutes to live.

  She focused on the light ahead. A ladder led up to the escape trunk hatch. The ladder usually hung from brackets on an adjacent bulkhead — someone had connected it.

  Candice reached the ladder and started up, her only hand holding the gun, using her elbow and smoldering stump to keep her balance as exhausted legs pushed her higher.

  She climbed up into the cylindrical escape trunk: empty, thank God. At five feet in diameter, there wasn’t much space, but she didn’t care — salvation lay one more ladder up, one more hatch up into the dry deck shelter.

  That hatch, too, was already open.

  She stayed very still. She saw someone walk by the hatch. She saw a face, a flash of color. Wicked Charlie Petrovsky. He was wearing a bright-red SEIE suit: submarine escape immersion equipment.

  Candice Walker’s pain didn’t vanish, but it took a backseat to the rage that engulfed her. Was Charlie like her? Or was he like them? Either way, it didn’t matter — she needed that suit.

  The sub vibrated again. Another torpedo had just launched.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair! She’d done more than anyone could ask. She wanted to live.

  Candice sniffed once, tightened her grip on the pistol, then quietly started up the ladder.

  WICKED CHARLIE PETROVSKY

  Wicked Charlie Petrovsky came to.

  He lay on the floor of the dry deck shelter, bleeding from a bullet lodged in his neck. He kept his eyes closed, didn’t make any noise — he could hear her moving around nearby.

  Candice Walker: the woman who had shot him.

  Charlie was a guitar player. That was why he started calling himself “Wicked Charlie,” because he was wicked-awesome on the six-string. He’d known it was kind of douchey to give himself a nickname, but everyone liked him and he could flat-out shred on his vintage Kramer, so the moniker stuck.

  None of that mattered anymore, though, because he knew he’d never play another note.

  So cold. His eyes fluttered open to a view of Bennie Addison. Bennie’s eyes were also open, but they weren’t seeing anything because Bennie Addison had an exit wound above his left eye.

  Charlie heard footsteps, heard the zwip-zwip sound of someone walking while wearing thick, synthetic fabric. She was somewhere behind him. The DDS was a squashed, metal tube some thirty-five feet long but only five feet wide — she’d have to step over him to reach the rounded door that led into the small decon chamber. The divers used it to clean themselves up after returning from a search, to make sure they didn’t bring any of the outside in.

  The sound came closer, then feet stepped down in front of his face; right, then left, both encased in the SEIE suit’s bright red, watertight boots. He heard muffled crying coming from inside the sealed hood.

  Charlie stayed very still. If he moved, she would shoot him again. Couldn’t risk that; he was on a mission from God. He couldn’t complete God’s work if he was dead.

  He didn’t dare to look up, but he knew what she was doing — opening the door so she could step through, close it behind her, then flood the decon chamber. Once that chamber flooded, she could exit it and enter the water.

  She was heading for the surface.

  That was wrong. Charlie was supposed to be the one heading to the surface. God said so. God told him where to go, and what to do when he got there.

  Wicked Charlie Petrovsky would not fail God.

  Candice stepped into the decon chamber. The heavy door clanged shut behind her.

  Charlie waited until he heard the door wheel spin, sealing the chamber tight.

  He pushed himself up on his hip. He felt his own blood coursing down his shoulder. He pressed a hand hard against his neck. He didn’t have long to live, he knew that. That he’d survived at all was a miracle, the hand of God obvious and undeniable.

  Charlie tried to stand. He could not. One hand on the cold deck, the other pressed against his bleeding neck, one foot pushing him along, Charlie crawled toward a life vest hanging from a bulkhead. He awkwardly reached it, slid first one arm through, then his head. His shivering, blood-covered hands fumbled with the straps.

  Would God be mad at him?

  The answer came immediately.

  He heard a whump that shook the air a split second before the DDS’s starboard bulkhead ripped inward. A hammer blow of jagged metal tore into him, as did a simultaneous blast of high-pressure water that slammed him against the far wall, shattering bones on impact.

  Not that Charlie felt it. He would never feel anything ever again.

  The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned.

  Its first infection vector had been rather simple in concept: spores that floated on the air, released by the Orbital from its position so
me forty miles above the earth. Those spores hijacked the host’s stem cells, reprogrammed them, turned them into microscopic factories. The factories punched out parts that self-assembled into triangles. Left unchecked, those triangles grew into hatchlings.

  The shotgun approach of a high-altitude release meant that most spores were wasted. They blew into areas of low population, got stuck on the ground, or simply fell into wet areas where they crumbled into bits of nothing. When spores did land on a host, they worked well, but a hatchling couldn’t make more hatchlings. Nor could a hatchling spread the contagion by infecting additional human hosts.

  So the Orbital had changed strategy.

  It created a new design: the microscopic crawlers. Crawlers didn’t hatch out of a host. Instead, they migrated into the host’s brain, reshaped it, modified the host’s instincts and behaviors. A crawler-infected host could make new crawlers to infect other hosts. Unlike the hatchlings, crawlers could reproduce. They could spread.

  The crawler method of contagion worked on a one-to-one basis, something a blond-haired little girl named Chelsea Jewel had once referred to as “smoochies.” Smoochies created the capacity for an ever-expanding army of infected, but the method was slow. It didn’t allow for continued, mass infections to occur.

  It was Chelsea — not the Orbital — who solved that problem.

  She created a third mode of transmission: turning her own mother into an obscenely bloated gas-filled bag containing millions of spores. At some point this swollen host would burst, scattering spores onto the wind like dandelion seeds carried by a summer breeze. The method was similar to the Orbital’s original infection strategy, but the swelling host was already on the ground — that meant better odds for a higher rate of transmission. Each spore could infect a host with triangles, or with crawlers, or it could turn that host into yet another gasbag that would burst and continue the cycle.

  Before the Orbital was shot down, its logic processes determined it needed yet another mode of transmission, something that allowed for infection by touch alone, or — more important — by a vector that lingered in areas of high contact where multiple potential hosts could be exposed. As part of that strategy, the Orbital also wanted one additional key element: that this new vector could continue to infect long after the host died …

  The swirling, churning, angry water spun Wicked Charlie like an insect dropped into a boiling pot, sucked him out of the submarine and into the cold, silent black.

  His body seemed to hang for a moment, motionless, as if he were that same insect trapped in dark amber. Then, the life vest began to rise, bringing Charlie along with it.

  His body floated toward the surface.

  Charlie’s flame of life finally flickered out. His systems shut down, a cascading effect that should have ended all activity in his body.

  Should have.

  His stem cells had been hijacked to produce crawlers. These microorganisms had instinctively followed his nervous system, using it as a pathway to reach his brain. There they had collected, altered their shape and changed him.

  A very specific type of his stem cells, however, had been reprogrammed to make something never seen before the infection that overwhelmed the Los Angeles.

  That special type: hematopoietic stem cells, also known as HSCs.

  HSCs have the ability to produce any type of blood cell. Charlie’s HSCs had been hacked to produce one specific creation, a modification of something common throughout the human body: neutrophils, more commonly called white blood cells.

  White blood cells are a critical part of the immune system. They hunt down bacteria and other foreign matter, engulf and destroy the things that could hurt us. Neutrophils are amorphous, meaning they are without form. They move like amoebae: reaching out pseudopods, finding their path, then the rest of their shapeless bodies follow along.

  When Charlie’s mutated neutrophils detected a severe lack of oxygen in his blood, the microorganisms reacted as they were programmed to react. They weren’t sentient, at least not by themselves, but the lack of oxygen told them that their host was dead — time to prepare to abandon ship.

  The Orbital had watched humans respond to its infection iterations. It had measured humanity’s reactions, its processes and equipment, and it had prepared a new strategy to deal with both.

  Charlie’s neutrophils secreted chemicals that would harden into cysts, cysts to help protect them from the decomposition chain reaction that would soon turn Charlie’s body to mush. Protect them for a little while, at least — hopefully long enough for a new host to come along.

  That done, the neutrophils “turned off,” entering a static state beyond even hibernation. From that moment on, only specific physical cues would cause the microscopic organisms to reactivate, to shed their cysts and seek out a new host.

  Those cues? Vibrations. Movement. Regular movement, the kind only exhibited by living beings. Until they detected such signals, the neutrophils would remain motionless, almost as dead as the tissue that surrounded them.

  DAY TWO

  THE END

  REPUBOTHUGGY: Like anyone would ever believe Gutierrez’s “little green men” bullshit and the work of his “scientist whore” Montoya. they should find those spics and shoot them liek the traitor that he is.

  JAMES U: (in reply to REPUBOTHUGGY) A republican would say something like that, which shows your lack of education. Thanks for trying, though. Maybe you should read a book.

  J-C-DOOMTROOPER: (in reply to JAMES U) I bet I read twice as many books as you, lib-tard, and the ones you read are full of pictures. I read philosophy, stratgy, history and the most importan book of all THE BIBLE!!!!!!!! Detroit got nukes because it was a soddham and gamhora and it was God’s will.

  CAROL B: (in reply to J-C-DOOMTROOPER) Stupidtrooper, you can’t even spell, which is so typical of people who think the Bible (a.k.a., the “storybook”) is real. Your words show how stupid you actually are, so good job on that.

  “Margo?”

  Margaret Montoya reflexively closed the laptop. It shut with a sharp click. She felt instantly foolish; caught in the act, she’d reacted without thinking when simply closing the web browser window would have done the job.

  Clarence Otto stood in the doorway of their home office. He glanced down at the laptop in front of her.

  He frowned. “Torturing yourself again?”

  “No,” she said. “It was just some research.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Really?”

  Margaret felt her face flush. She knew better than to try to lie to him, especially about that.

  She glanced at the clock next to the computer — he’d left work a bit early.

  His black suit still looked pristine on his tall, thick frame, as sharp as when he’d left that morning. To anyone else, he probably looked all buttoned up, the kind of man who didn’t have to get off a bar stool to leave the place with three new phone numbers. But Margaret had known him for six years — four of those as his wife — and she saw the telltale signs of a long day: the tie just a bit askew; lines at the corners of his eyes because when he got tired, he started to squint; the slight discoloration on the collar of his white shirt, because he always sweated a little even in air-conditioning; the slight, damp gleam on his forehead that made his black skin glow.

  Clarence walked into the office to stand next to her. She stared at the closed laptop. He reached a hand down to her chin, gently tilted it up until their eyes met.

  “We talked about this,” he said. “We’ve been to therapy.”

  She snapped her chin away. “And that was a waste of time, just like I told you it would be.”

  Margaret searched his eyes, searched for the love that used to be there. She didn’t find it. Truth was she hadn’t seen that for a long time, hadn’t felt his warmth. Its absence made her feel far colder than if she’d never known it at all. Now when he looked at her, it was with pity. Sometimes, even contempt.

  He tapped the closed laptop. “This is what you d
o all day,” he said. “You read the comments of uneducated idiots who have no idea that they’re only alive because of what you did.” He looked her up and down. “And I see that you also followed the therapist’s advice about waking up, getting showered and dressed?”

  She’d forgotten she was still wearing the same ratty blue sweatpants and long-sleeved University of Oregon T-shirt she’d slept in. She’d meant to shower, but that thought had slipped away sometime during the second or third blog post she’d read. Was she angry at Clarence for calling her out on that, or at herself for not doing something so utterly basic?

  “What I wear is none of your business. And I have to do something with my time — It’s not like you’re ever around.”

  He tapped a fingertip against his sternum. “I work. You know, that thing that keeps a roof over our heads?”

  She laughed. Even as she did she heard how hateful and dismissive it sounded. He was supposed to be on her side, not riding her ass.

  “You think your job keeps a roof over our heads, Clarence? Oh please. We never have to work another day in our lives. We saved the world, remember? Uncle Sam will give us a check anytime we ask, just to keep us quiet.”

  Margaret stood, stared at his face. He was a full foot taller than she was. Once upon a time, she’d loved that — now it was just annoying to always have to look up.

  “You don’t work because you have to,” she said. “You work because you’re so goddamn naive you actually think you still make a difference.”

  He said nothing. She saw the veins pulsing in his temples. They popped out like that when he clenched his jaw. He clenched his jaw when he was trying to control his temper.

  “I do make a difference,” he said softly. “And so did you, before you decided to hide from the world. Before you decided to quit life.”

  He controlled his anger, as always; his discipline enraged her. The world threw hate at her day in, day out, yet off to work he went, leaving her to face everything alone. She felt a thick rage bubbling in her stomach and chest, a physical, tangible thing with a life of its own. She had to dial that back, or once again she would feel like a helpless participant who could only watch as someone else used her mouth to say awful things.