Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Tim tapped the green icon. “This is the second airlock, the one that leads to the lab section, another step down in negative pressure. Keep them pathogens where they belong, my grandmother always used to say. Suits are in that airlock.” He turned to Clarence, smiled. “Real suits, my friend, the kind that matter.”

  Clarence ignored the gibe.

  Tim turned back to the map, traced his finger down through still another green icon. “This airlock leads from the lab space to the Receiving and Containment section. That’s where they brought in any material recovered by the Los Angeles. It’s a cool setup, you’ll dig it. It’s also where we keep any living subjects, which includes the two navy divers who retrieved the bodies of Walker and Petrovsky.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “So, y’all ready to get to work, or do you want to take a little nap before we go in? Maybe powder your noses? I have a little single malt in the theater, if you want to wet your whistles.”

  “No,” Margaret said quickly. “I don’t need a drink. The bodies, are they affected by the black rot?”

  That was the thing that made it so difficult to work on infection victims. The crawlers set off a chain reaction that caused cell death on a massive level. An unrefrigerated body could decompose in just thirty-six hours, becoming little more than a mass of sludge that sloughed off the skeleton.

  Tim shrugged. “Walker’s body is okay, but Petrovsky is already showing signs of liquefaction. By tomorrow I think he’ll be blood pudding.”

  Like always, a ticking clock held sway over everything.

  Margaret nodded. “Then let’s get to work.”

  FAKE FUR

  “What the fuck is that thing?”

  Jeff Brockman had such a way with words, although Cooper had to agree with the sentiment.

  The Mary Ellen Moffett’s deck lights lit up Steve Stanton’s strange machine. The lights wouldn’t be needed for long: the sun was only minutes from sliding up on the horizon, its glow already turning the low-hanging clouds a pinkish-orange. Five-foot swells continued to rock the boat, but at least the wind had finally died down. When the sun did rise, Cooper hoped the temperature might climb into the double digits.

  Breath frosting from their mouths, Cooper, Jeff, José, Steve and Steve’s buddy Bo Pan stood in a loose circle, staring down at the cargo they’d hauled out to the middle of Lake Michigan.

  When Steve Stanton had spoken of his ROV, Cooper assumed he knew what to expect: a boxy metal frame, about six feet wide and tall, maybe ten feet long, yellow ballast tanks on top, a couple of turbines in the back and a pair of robotic arms in the front. Throw in a camera suite and a long-ass cable, and you were in business.

  But this?

  For starters, it wasn’t yellow. It was covered in elephant-gray material studded with little points, kind of like acoustic foam. Ten feet long, sure, but there was nothing boxy about this contraption. The ROV’s front end came to a streamlined point. From there, it flared wide with the outline of a fish before tapering down again to a pair of flippers in the rear, like those of a Cape fur seal. On each side was a wide fin, like that of a penguin.

  Jeff stared down at it. He crossed his arms, frowned.

  “It’s fuzzy,” he said. He looked at Stanton. “You made an ROV with fur?”

  “It’s an antiturbulence material,” Steve said. “Helps adjust the water flow for greater speed. Once it gets wet it looks very different.”

  Cooper reached down and gently poked one of the furry points with a finger — felt like a stiff foam.

  Steve shot out a panicked hand. “Please don’t touch!”

  Cooper stood, held up both hands, palms out. “Wow, sorry.”

  The kid blinked, looked around, saw that everyone was staring at him. He forced a smile.

  “The material is just delicate is all,” he said. “My bad, I should have asked everyone not to touch it earlier.”

  Cooper felt Jeff glaring at him. Jeff had that suspicious expression on his face again — the ROV was beyond state of the art, something altogether new, and that bothered him. Jeff subtly held up his hand, thumb rubbing against his fingertips: that thing looks like big money.

  Cooper nodded. Of course Steve had money; he was part of some lawyer’s class-action lawsuit. Millions of dollars on the line. Cooper felt bad for the people who now ran Delta Airlines; this was going to wind up being one high-toned bitch of a lawsuit.

  José craned his head around, looked at the ROV from all sides.

  “Hey, Jefe Steve,” he said. “Where do you connect the control cable?” José insisted on calling everyone jefe, Spanish for boss. He looked around the deck, as if he suddenly realized he was missing something. “And where is the cable? Is that in the other box?”

  He started toward the smaller of Steve’s two boxes, the one still strapped to the deck.

  “Please don’t touch that one, either,” Steve said. Again, the words were rushed, nearly panicky.

  Jeff glared. Cooper felt uncomfortable — the customer was acting very strange.

  Steve shook his head, forced another smile. “There isn’t a cable. The Platypus is remote controlled to some extent, but mostly autonomous.”

  Autonomous? An unmanned underwater vehicle; a robot. Cooper winced: that meant it cost exponentially more. He looked at Jeff, who was already shaking his head, lips pressed together in held-back anger.

  “You told us you had an ROV,” Jeff said. “Now you’re telling us this is a UUV?”

  Steve’s eyes widened. He glanced over to Bo Pan, just for the briefest second, but Bo Pan kept staring at the deck.

  Cooper was losing his patience. Jeff could still blow this job if he kept being difficult.

  “Jeff, it’s all good,” Cooper said. “UUV, ROV, ABC, whatever, let’s just get it in the water, okay?”

  Jeff looked at Cooper, looked at the machine. He nodded.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. Then, his booming I’m the boss voice returned. “Cooper, man the crane. José, get ready to get wet. Mister Stanton, if you’ll point out the right way for us to hook up your machine so we don’t break it, we’ll get her in the drink and you can do your thing.”

  Everyone moved into action. Everyone except for Bo Pan. As Cooper headed to the Mary Ellen’s crane, he noticed Bo Pan watching Jeff, then watching José. Then, his eyes locked with Cooper’s.

  For just a moment, Bo Pan didn’t look like the old man who had come aboard. His eyes were hard, cold… dangerous. Then the expression vanished — he looked out to the water, hawked a huge loogie and spat it over the side.

  Just some old dude along for the ride. Right?

  Cooper felt a shiver that wasn’t from the cold. He shook off the sensation, then got to work.

  KILLER MATH FOR $200

  Testing units weren’t the only thing that had changed in the last five years.

  Margaret stood in the second airlock with Tim and Clarence. The three of them wore BSL-4 suits.

  At first, the suit had seemed familiar. Like those she’d worn before, it was made of airtight Tyvek, a synthetic material. A heavy-gauge seal secured the oversized helmet onto the suit, and the helmet itself had a tall, wide, clear, curved visor that gave her full range of vision.

  The visor itself, however, was something out of a movie.

  “This is crazy,” she said. “So much information.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Tim said. “Before you know it, it’ll be second nature.”

  She looked at him. She could see him through her visor, but her eyes also tried to register the information playing on the inside of it — the visor was a full-on heads-up display, scrolling data about the airlock and a medical report about the two divers in observation. She was wearing a computer screen in front of her face.

  “My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”

  “Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”<
br />
  She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”

  Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”

  How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got harassed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with shit like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.

  “Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”

  “Like I could miss it,” Tim said. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”

  He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a ship.

  On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.

  Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical analysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.

  “Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”

  He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”

  Three trailers, each capable of comfortably supporting four or five people working simultaneously, and yet Tim was the only one here. And along the same lines, the facility had ten bedrooms — nine of which had been empty before Margaret and Clarence had arrived.

  “Doctor Feely,” she said, “where is the rest of the staff?”

  Tim flung his gloved hands up in annoyance. “They’re all pursuing their disciplines at other facilities or at the research base on Black Manitou Island. When they first brought me in, I was part of a ten-person staff. Year after year, as the navy didn’t find anything significant, the rest of the staff found ways to conduct their research off the ship. But believe it or not, one guy can do the majority of the grunt work down here. Most of the equipment is automated, and all of it is the best money can buy.”

  “You’re still here,” she said to Tim. “Why aren’t you on Black Manitou?”

  His bloodshot eyes narrowed. He looked at the wall. “I worked there a few years ago when it was a civilian biotech facility, before DST took it over. I’m not allowed to talk about what we were working on, other than that it involved technologies for rapid growth. There were some… accidents.” He gave his head a little shake. “Anyway, I don’t ever want to go back. It’s safer here.”

  Safer here, on a task force dedicated to working with a vector that had the potential to wipe out the human race. Margaret wondered just what kind of accidents Tim was talking about. Whatever the reason, he had chosen to stay down here, mostly alone. He was a shut-in, just like she was.

  “What have you worked on all that time?”

  “Lots of stuff,” Tim said. “My tan, mostly. Oh, and trying to engineer a new strain of yeast, Saccharomyces feely, to secrete the infection’s self-destruct catalyst so we’d have a weapon if the disease ever struck again.”

  “Saccharomyces feely,” Margaret said. “Naming it after yourself?”

  Tim grinned. “Don’t hate the player, girl… hate the game.”

  This one was quite full of himself.

  Regardless of what he named the strain, it was a worthwhile pursuit. When a victim died, the infection triggered two chemical chain reactions that combined to leave scientists with nothing to study.

  The first reaction: uncontrolled apoptosis. Apoptosis was the normal process of cell destruction. When a cell has damage to the DNA or other areas, that cell, in effect, commits suicide, removing itself from the organism. The infection modified that process so it didn’t shut off — a cell swelled and burst, spreading the chain reaction to the cells around it, which then swelled and burst, and so on. Within a day or two, a corpse became little more than black sludge dripping off a skeleton.

  The second chain reaction had the same effect on the infection’s cellulose structures. Instead of apoptosis, infection’s cells produced a cellulase. Cellulase dissolved cellulose, the cell swelled and burst, spreading the cellulase catalyst to surrounding cells, and so on.

  The Orbital had hijacked human systems; Tim was trying to turn the tables and do the same to the Orbital’s creations.

  “Speaking of grunts,” Clarence said, appearing to refer to Tim’s comment about grunt work but intending it as a slap-back at Margaret’s insult, “What does Saccharomyces mean?”

  “Yeast,” Margaret said. She felt her face heat with shame. No matter how bad she and Clarence fought, there was no valid excuse to insinuate he wasn’t smart, that his work didn’t matter. When she was fully rational, she knew that. Problem was, that man made her irrational far more often than she cared to admit.

  She tried to shake it off, turned to face Tim. “Yeast, that’s smart. Modify their germline DNA so that subsequent generations produce that cellulase catalyst, and you’ve got an endless supply of something that kills the infection. Any luck?”

  Tim shook his head. “Close, but no cigar. I was able to get the yeast to produce the catalyst, but that catalyst is toxic to the yeast as well. The engineered yeast die before they can reproduce, so we don’t even get a second generation, let alone the massive colonies needed to secrete the amount of catalyst we’d need.”

  Clarence fidgeted in his bulky suit, pulling at the blue material, trying to make it settle on him better.

  “So, Doctor Feely, it’s just you down here,” he said. “Captain Yasaka mentioned you also helped with the wounded. How much sleep have you had?”

  Tim frowned, made a show of counting on his gloved fingers. “Let’s see, carry the one, divide by four, and… Alex, the question is, what is zero?”

  That didn’t surprise Margaret, not with the number of wounded up above.

  “No sleep,” Clarence said. “You on drugs or something?”

  “If by drugs you mean Adderall, Deprenyl and/or Sudafed — mostly and, though — then yes, I am on drugs.”

  Margaret saw Clarence taking a deep, disapproving breath. She put her gloved hand on his arm.

  “Clarence, relax,” she said. “Any doctor pulling a triple shift might do the same.”

  He turned to her, disbelieving. “Have you?”

  “More times than I can count. I had a life before I met you, you know. And apparently a life after.”

  If he wanted to make snide comments, she could do the same. The words caught him off guard, s
tung him. They also piqued Tim’s interest. Margaret wanted to kick herself for the slipup, for exposing personal problems at a time like this. She had to stay on point.

  Tim grinned at Margaret. “Come on, it’s the scheduled time to give my little prick to the two divers. After that, we can touch bodies. Dead bodies, that is.”

  Clarence sighed again, and Margaret couldn’t blame him.

  GOD’S CHOSEN

  Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy had always dreamed of serving in the navy. The big ships, seeing the world on Uncle Sam’s dime, the service, the career — he had wanted all these things.

  He hadn’t wanted to murder people, though.

  Until now.

  Now, he wanted to murder a lot of people. Ever single person he saw, in fact.

  The biosafety suit made him sweat. It also bounced his own voice back to him when he talked, made him sound strange.

  “Lattimer, John J.,” he called out, reading from the list on the clipboard as he’d been instructed to do. “Cellulose test.”

  Four wounded men were lying on the floor in the corner of the bunk room. They were too wounded to do work, but less wounded than the men who occupied the actual bunks. Second-degree burns covered one man’s arm. Another sailor had a red-spotted bandage wrapped around his head, something straight out of a shitty war movie.

  Orin wanted to shoot them. Stab them. Maybe stomp down on their throats and watch them suffocate to death. But for now, he had to keep up appearances.

  “Lattimer, John J.,” he said again. “Which one of you is Lattimer, John J.?”