Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

Both Tim and Margaret read through the info playing on the inside of their visors.

  “Fancy,” Tim said. “It’s like Cliff’s Notes for Holy Shit the World Is Going to End Theater. Bullet points? Please, Agent Otto, don’t spend any time going into actual detail.”

  “Tim, cut it out,” Margaret said, still reading. “This is how I want my data. Clarence knows what I like.”

  That line shut Tim up. He glared up at the control booth. Clarence knew Margaret hadn’t meant anything sexual by the reference, but he couldn’t help but give Tim a little nod that said, Awww yeah, I know what she likes, and you never will.

  Margaret tapped the air, shutting off the report.

  “The bleach thing is interesting,” she said. “Is anyone checking their suits for holes or malfunctions?”

  “I asked Captain Yasaka if someone could test them,” Clarence said. “She’s going to have the nonquarantined divers run a pressurized rate of fall test as soon as they can, probably first thing tomorrow morning. The divers pressurize the suit and watch the gauges, see if there is a loss greater than expected. In other words, fill it with air and see if it leaks.”

  “The holes could be small,” Tim said. “The crawler spores are tiny. We’re talking microns, here. Gauges might not show pressure loss from something that size.”

  Clarence nodded. “Correct, which is why if they don’t find a leak that way, they will then go for a full submersion test. They need our airlock for that, the big one that leads outside the ship.”

  Margaret waved a hand dismissively. “Any hole so small the pressure test won’t show it is too small to worry about. I mean, a spore or a crawler would have to randomly land on that tiny hole, and somehow fall through that hole when the suits are pressurized to push air out, and then still land on skin.”

  Her eyes again focused on the report displaying inside her visor.

  “You emphasize Cantrell’s intelligence,” she said. “Why?”

  “When he told me what happened, it was almost a word-for-word rendition of what he wrote in his incident report,” Clarence said. “He remembered what he said perfectly, all except for smelling bleach. It strikes me odd he has perfect recall for everything save for that one detail.”

  “So you think Cantrell is lying,” Tim said.

  Clarence wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Something just didn’t seem to add up.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Another thing about that report struck me as odd. When he and Clark reached Walker, one of the things she said was they bit me. Did you guys find a bite mark on her body?”

  “None,” Tim said. “But just because we didn’t find one doesn’t mean Clark and Cantrell were lying about hearing her say that.”

  Clarence rubbed his face. He already felt so damn tired. “Yeah, that’s a good point. But the bleach discrepancy still bothers me. Maybe Tim should test him again.”

  Margaret tapped the report back on, read something, tapped it back off.

  “It’s been thirty-six hours since Cantrell was exposed,” she said. “If he was infected, he’d have probably come up positive by now. Even if he’s got a longer incubation period than we’ve seen in the past, he’s being tested every three hours so we’ll find out soon enough. He’s scheduled for his next test in twenty minutes. Clarence, can you take over the testing duties? I need Doctor Feely here with me.”

  Clarence looked at Tim.

  Tim nodded: Awwww yeah.

  Clarence ground his teeth. “Sure, Margo,” he said. “I’ll make sure Cantrell is tested every three hours.”

  She turned back to the table. Tim got to work; Clarence heard the bone saw’s whine even through the control room’s security glass.

  Then, Margaret turned back. She stared up at Clarence.

  He had seen that look on her face before. She had figured something out, or was just on the edge of doing so.

  “Margo, what is it?”

  She looked down at Walker’s corpse. Margaret lifted the severed arm, stared at it.

  “The bite,” she said. “Walker claimed to be bitten, but there are no bite marks. What if she was bitten on the arm?”

  Tim stopped cutting into the skull. “You’re thinking she cut off her own arm not because she was infected, like Dawsey, but because she thought it would prevent her from being infected?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Tim set the saw on a tray. He reached out into the air and started calling up information.

  Clarence tried to imagine himself in Walker’s shoes. A submarine full of people, some of them turning into killers, killers that worked together like those soldiers in Michigan did during the last outbreak … and nowhere to run.

  “It can spread from a bite?” he asked.

  “Probably,” Margaret said. “Some of the infection victims had growths on the tongue that could spread the contagion. But what matters is if Walker thought it could spread from a bite. Maybe she saw her friends being turned into murderers, maybe she did anything she could to not become one herself.”

  “Like a zombie movie,” Clarence said. “You think she got bit, panicked, did what she thought might keep her from becoming one of the bad guys?”

  Tim shook his head. “Timeline doesn’t add up for that,” he said. “She cut off that arm around thirty-eight hours ago. Based on the state of her crawlers, she was already heavily infected by that time. She was already … what’s the word I want … oh, she was already converted. Why would she cut off her own arm if one of her own kind bit her? Hell, Margaret, why would one of them bite her at all? The Converted all work together, like ants in a colony.”

  “My point exactly,” Margaret said. Her eyes were sharp, full of sudden assuredness. “The Converted. That’s an excellent term. Candice Walker had crawlers, absolutely, but she was not converted. Feely, get that brain out, and get it out now.”

  BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

  Steve Stanton was done with the cold weather. The small stateroom he shared with Bo Pan wasn’t toasty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was easily thirty degrees warmer than it was up on deck. Plus, no wind. Plus, no ice-cold water spray.

  Maybe he should have hired a bigger boat. The guest stateroom was smaller than his freshman dorm room back at Berkeley. It was cramped to begin with — sharing the space with Bo Pan made it miserable. Bo Pan didn’t do much, mostly just sat in his bunk. Sat and watched Steve type code.

  A small table built into the wall held two of Steve’s three laptops. The other rested on top of the blankets of his bunk (he got the top bunk — he was the “boss” of this trip, after all).

  Cooper had warned him that spending too much time belowdecks could lead to seasickness, but so far Steve had felt no ill effects. If anything, the constant rocking motion made him hungry. He chewed mouthfuls of Doritos, which he washed down with swigs of Diet Coke. He felt Bo Pan staring at him. Steve kept typing, tried to ignore his bunkmate.

  “Disgusting,” Bo Pan said. “I do not know how you eat such garbage. We have paid to rent this boat. They would let me use the little kitchen. I could cook you something.”

  Steve tipped the bag of Doritos toward the old man. “Breakfast of champions, Bo Pan. Want some? Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch, can’t go wrong.”

  Bo Pan’s face wrinkled in disgust. He looked away.

  Steve shrugged and reached in for more. Imagine the dichotomy: Bo “King of Phlegm” Pan calling someone else disgusting.

  “Your machine,” Bo Pan said. “Do you have its twat yet?”

  Steve’s eyebrows rose. “Uh, its what?”

  Bo Pan leaned back slightly, confused. “Twat. Is that not what you call it? The Twatter messages your machine sends?”

  “Ah,” Steve said. “Twitter. It’s a tweet, not a twat. Big difference.”

  The old man waved a hand, a gesture that might as well have been sign language for get off my lawn. “Have you received any?”

  “Not yet. I’m sure it will twat at any moment.”

  Using Twitter t
o send and receive messages from the Platypus had been an act of genius, if Steve did say so himself. Twitter boasted five hundred million accounts sending up to three hundred million tweets a day. It added up to an overwhelming amount of data flying across the Internet, 140 characters at a time. The typhoon of content was a perfect place for hiding messages, especially if they corresponded with a code held only by the receiver and the sender. Get in the kitchen and make me some pie might be an innocuous quote from a TV show, but if Steve sent it from his account, @MonstaMush, to @TheMadPlatypus, his lovely machine would know it was time to return to the launch point.

  There were over a thousand such tweet-based commands stored in the Platypus’s memory. Steve had programmed his baby to surface periodically and log on to the Internet by using a communication method ubiquitous throughout the United States: cell-phone signals.

  Even though the UUV’s sonar-dampening “fur” made it practically invisible to sonar, the U.S. naval assets in the area still made surfacing dangerous; Steve had to limit the number of surface trips the Platypus could make.

  He called up a bathymetry map of Lake Michigan. Different bands of color represented different depths: reds and yellows for zero to 50 feet, greens into greenish-blue to 150 feet, blues through 300. There hadn’t been a color for depths beyond 300 feet, because Lake Michigan’s average depth was 279 feet. So Steve had programmed more: blue-purple to purple for 300 to 500 feet, purple to dark purple for 501 to 800 feet, dark purple to black for the deepest spots the lake had to offer.

  The Platypus’s destination? The blackest spot on the map. Bo Pan’s coordinates were in a spot known as Chippewa Basin, the very bottom of which was 923 feet deep.

  “How solid are these coordinates?” Steve asked. “I’ll program a search field. It would help to know how far out I have to plot for.”

  The old man shrugged. He shrugged a lot.

  “I only know what I have been told,” he said. “It is the same location the American navy has. That means ROVs and divers will be in the area. You had better hope your claims of near invisibility are accurate.”

  Steve rocked slightly back and forth. He tried to control his excitement. Not just excitement, but also fear, stress and anxiety. He believed he’d constructed the most advanced UUV ever created. Manufacturers and fabricators in a dozen countries had provided parts, had unknowingly helped him build the Platypus. He’d had a huge budget to make his creation, but there was another organization with a far bigger checkbook: the U.S. Navy.

  The navy had remotely operated vehicles. The navy had unmanned vehicles. The navy had some of the best minds in the world creating, designing, building. But the navy had one limitation that Steve did not — the navy itself. Proposals, funding, approvals, bidding, construction checks, supervised tests … dozens of administrative layers and miles of red tape that slowed down the creative process. Steve suffered through none of those things.

  The Platypus incorporated the best components. Some were prototypes from other designers, things that had yet to enter beta testing, let alone hit the market. Others, Steve had designed himself. The biggest advantage, however, was that Steve had designed the Platypus for one purpose and one purpose only — military contractors had to make machines that could do multiple things in order to serve multiple masters.

  If Steve’s creation went up against black-budget DARPA machines, which would come out on top? Could he really out-invent the world’s largest buyer of weapons?

  Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spat it into his cup with a wet plop. He smiled. “You seem nervous.”

  Steve felt instantly insulted. “Nervous? No. Just excited. Well, a little nervous. We don’t know what the navy has. If something goes wrong with the Platypus and it can’t surface to send a signal, we’d never hear from it again. We’d never know what went wrong.”

  The old man’s smile faded. “Do you know how much money was spent on your machine?”

  Steve shook his head.

  “Guess,” Bo Pan said. “I am curious if you are even close.”

  Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.

  “Um … eighteen million?”

  Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.

  “Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”

  A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.

  “One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”

  Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.

  One hundred and ten million dollars …

  “I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”

  Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”

  The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.

  CLEAR YOUR MIND

  Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.

  Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.

  Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”

  Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margaret could have seen with the naked eye.

  She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

  There weren’t any.

  Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”

  Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.

  “Tim, is there any evidence of the black rot in Walker’s brain?”

  He shook his head. “No, none.” He looked at Walker’s body. “In fact, I haven’t observed any apoptosis on her at all — according to the normal timeline, we should be seeing that by now. She’s just not rotting like Petrovsky and the other infected victims.”

  Melted crawlers … no rot … no growths in the brain …

  The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a glorious conclusion.

  “Candice was infected by crawlers, but not under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”

  “Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”

  She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.

  “I can’t calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”

  Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt
with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.

  “Your engineered yeast,” she said. “You’ve taken genetic information out of the crawlers, put it into the yeast. You can get your yeast to produce the catalyst that kills the crawlers.”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “But like I told you, the catalyst kills the yeast as well. So it’s a dead end.”

  “Was a dead end. The hydras survive an environment that kills the crawlers, Tim. If we can figure out how they survive it—”

  “Maybe we can put that survival trait in the yeast,” Tim finished, his eyes wide with renewed energy. “Then we could generate huge colonies of yeast that would produce the catalyst … an endless supply of something that kills crawlers dead.”

  Margaret reached out, grabbed Tim’s shoulder. If they weren’t in the suits, she might have kissed the man.

  “Tim, I think the hydras made Candice immune to the infection, to the crawlers, to all of it. We still don’t know what the hydras are, what else they can do to a host, but if we can figure out how they survive when crawlers die, and if we can reproduce that ability … maybe we can make everyone immune.”

  GET LICKED

  Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy didn’t know much about the original infection.

  Like everyone else in the world, he’d been glued to the news when that disaster hit. He’d watched reports of Detroit’s blistering end and the aftermath that followed. He’d heard the endless public service announcements hammering home the acronym “T.E.A.M.S.” Like everyone else, he knew the methods of transmission: get infected by a spore, or get licked — yes, literally licked — by a host.

  But since then, God had created new vectors.

  Orin didn’t have to lick people. All he had to do was touch them. He didn’t know how he knew this, he just knew. Touch them, and a few days later, they would be his kind.