Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  A few hours? Clarence fought down his immediate reaction. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up this fast.

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “What do you need to make this happen?”

  Now Tim glanced at Margaret. She looked away, looked down.

  “We need to make more hydras,” she said. “And there’s only one way to do that.”

  HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

  Margaret had killed one of the hydras to analyze it. Another had died on its own; she assumed the last two surviving hydras couldn’t be far behind.

  Time was running out.

  Candice Walker was dead, as was everything inside of her. There were no more hydras to be had from her corpse.

  Margaret entered the clear cell of Eric Edmund. She carried a small tray holding an alcohol swab and a syringe. She set the tray down on Edmund’s stomach. She had to remind herself that the man was brain-dead. He would never recover.

  Edmund’s self, all that he had ever been, that was gone forever… but his body lived on. His heart pumped, his blood flowed, his cells divided. The human body was the hydras’ natural environment. There, hopefully, they would modify Edmund’s stem cells, make copies of themselves — they would replicate.

  Margaret picked up the alcohol swab and wiped Edmund’s shoulder, cleaning her target area. She set the swab down and lifted the syringe. She stared at it through her visor. Just one CC of saline, and inside that fluid, a pair of passengers.

  Only two left.

  A slap on the glass. She turned to see Cantrell, staring at her, the lighter skin of his palms resting on the clear wall. His eyes… he looked like he was trying to control his anger.

  “Doctor Montoya, what are you doing?” Cantrell smiled. He looked at the syringe. “Don’t you need permission for something like that?”

  How could he know what she was doing? He didn’t know; he was just being difficult.

  “Not your concern,” she said.

  Cantrell frowned, spoke sweetly. “Awww, Doc, of course it is. He’s in the cell next to mine. What if something breaks? What you do to him could affect me.”

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Margaret said. “You’re not infected, Cantrell.”

  The smile returned. A chilling smile.

  “Then let me out,” he said. “I keep testing negative… just let me out.”

  Those eyes, so intense, so angry even though his voice sounded smooth and calm.

  Why was she wasting time with him?

  Only two left…

  Margaret slid the needle into Edmund’s shoulder, then pushed the plunger all the way down. The saline emptied into his arm.

  That was that. She could only hope those hydras were as reproductively efficient as the crawlers that had taken over Betty Jewel, Carmen Sanchez and so many others.

  All Margaret’s energy drained away. She felt hollow. The biosafety suit suddenly seemed so heavy. If she could just get out of it for a little bit, maybe rest her eyes.

  She heard the click of someone coming onto her channel.

  “Margo,” Clarence said. “Where are you?”

  “Detainment.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m working, Clarence. What do you want?”

  “The diver is going into the Los Angeles in forty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d want to watch.”

  She did want to see that. Maybe the diver would come across the subject of Candice Walker’s final drawings, the three men in the membrane. Forty-five minutes… enough time to decon, get out of the suit, grab twenty minutes of sleep.

  She turned to leave, felt Cantrell’s eyes upon her. For just a moment, she froze — he looked like he wanted to kill her — and then the moment was gone.

  Cantrell walked to his bed and sat.

  Margaret picked up her tray and left Edmund’s cell.

  FOLLOW-THROUGH

  When he’d been ten years old, Orin Nagy’s father finally showed him how to properly swing a baseball bat. It was all in the hips, his father had said. Twisting them at the right moment brought your body around, maximized your swing velocity. Arm strength mattered, sure, but the real power came from the hips. The hips, and following through.

  The same advice held true for swinging a pipe wrench.

  Orin swung, Orin twisted, bringing twenty pounds of unforgiving metal to bear on the motherfucker that wanted to make him take the cellulose test.

  The man’s biosafety suit offered little protection. The heavy wrench caved in his right temple like a hammer slammed into a ripe melon.

  And, just like the good boy he’d once been, Orin followed through.

  The man dropped like a bag of wet shit.

  Daddy would have been proud.

  Orin heard men screaming angry things. He saw another one raising a pistol. Orin let the follow-through carry him all the way around in a fast 360-degree turn. As he came out of that turn, he swung again, more overhand axe-chop than smooth baseball swing. The results were much the same: the wet crunch of a crushed skull.

  The gun went off. A pair of bodies slammed into Orin, dragged him to the ground.

  He fought, because God commanded he do so, and also because before he died he wanted to kill just one more of the cock-sucking pissant humans that he hated so fucking much…

  140 CHARACTERS

  Six miles clear of the navy flotilla and fifty feet below the empty, roiling surface of Lake Michigan, the Platypus hovered, motionless save for the slight back-and-forth tug of the waves high above. It might have been a dead fish. It might have been a log.

  A clamp released, freeing a fist-sized piece of plastic. The plastic floated upward, trailed by a thin cable. Forty feet… thirty… twenty…

  The plastic reached the surface, bobbed there. It extended a telescoping antenna that was no thicker than a pencil at the base, little more than a stiff wire where it topped out four feet above the water.

  The Platypus floated, unmoving, waiting for instructions.

  A signal came in: a tweet. Then another. Five 140-character alphanumeric messages in all. Each message called up commands stored in the Platypus’s memory.

  The Platypus retracted the antennae, then reeled in the plastic float. The machine tilted down, started to swim. A hundred feet down, then two hundred, then three hundred.

  Ten feet from the bottom, the Platypus leveled out. It called up the recorded bearing that would lead it back to the Los Angeles. It followed the lake floor’s contour, going deeper and deeper as it closed the distance.

  The Platypus scanned for any signal, any communication, ready to adjust its path based on the presence of other craft.

  A half mile out, it detected pings from a powerful sonar almost a thousand feet above: signals from a surface ship sent to submerged vessels. The Platypus couldn’t read those messages — they were encrypted — but the signals themselves alerted it to a danger of detection.

  Steve Stanton’s creation slowed to a crawl. It sank to the bottom, resting its underside on Lake Michigan’s thick muck. It used its side fins as arms rather than paddles, pressing against rocks and sand and mud to pull its body slowly forward.

  It detected light, light coming from yellow shapes. The Platypus stopped moving, ran the visual data through pattern analysis programs. It quickly identified the shapes as U.S. Navy ROVs.

  The Platypus shut down everything but its detection systems.

  Eventually, the yellow shapes moved away, away and up, taking their light with them. When that light dropped below a certain level, the Platypus started a timing subroutine. If the light didn’t come back after four minutes, it would proceed.

  Infrared cameras searched and found none of the moving objects it was programmed to avoid. Sonar continued to sweep the area, but the Platypus’s furry foam coating absorbed those signals, let almost nothing bounce away. What little echo escaped would show as nothing more than a fish.

  The Platypus moved forward again, slinking across th
e bottom toward its goal.

  So far, the machine had done nothing remarkable: Move toward an obstacle; search for unobstructed space; enter unobstructed space; repeat while moving toward the preprogrammed target location. To a robotics engineer, such maneuvers were child’s play, part of freshman robotics classes — high school freshman classes, that is.

  The Platypus swam closer to the Los Angeles. Lined up next to the 362 feet of the wrecked sub, Steve Stanton’s 10-foot-long, narrow robot kind of did look like a fish. A tiny fish.

  Rear fins undulated slowly, pushing the Platypus toward the crack in the dry deck shelter. Small internal motors activated, pulling the machine’s sides in tighter. As it slid through the crack, it hit something soft — the severed leg that had once belonged to Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

  From the black shoe, which was still tied, up to midthigh, the leg looked normal. Wet, but normal. From the midthigh up, however, it was a study in damage. A jagged shard of bone stuck up from streamers of pale, bloodless muscle. The impact with the Platypus made Charlie’s leg spin in a slow-motion circle, shreds of tissue marking the curve like morbid little comet tails.

  Just as the Platypus moved past, the fleshy mass of Charlie’s thigh spun into the sonar-eating foam, kicking up a small cloud of Charlie meat that danced in the robot’s wake.

  The leg bounced away.

  The Platypus moved to the open hatch that Bo Pan had spotted several hours earlier. In it went. It swam past motionless bodies, moved around wreckage, squeezed through doors that had been bent and torn by a torpedo’s lethal shock wave.

  Steve Stanton’s creation quickly found the submarine’s nose. It entered. It located the locker that stored its objective. Recent programming told the Platypus to wait here, wait for someone or something to come and open that locker.

  It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.

  The Platypus flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.

  A threat, or, an opportunity.

  For the second time, the Platypus shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.

  It watched.

  SCARY PERRY

  She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.

  “Hello, Perry.”

  Perry Dawsey smiled.

  They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.

  They had touched Perry.

  He was going to die. He knew that.

  “Hey, Margo,” he said.

  “Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.

  “I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but… I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

  I’ve got those things inside of me, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was: again. What he hadn’t said was: It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway.

  His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.

  “It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”

  They: the crawlers that were already working their way up his nervous system, heading for his head. There, they would spread their interweaving tendrils. They would take him over, change him, and destroy who he was in the process.

  “You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”

  And now her gift to him, his reward for standing tall in the face of absolute destruction, for being the one person willing to fight no matter what the odds.

  She heard a growing whistle — the sound of an incoming artillery shell. A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.

  Perry stared at her. His smile returned, a smile of exhausted disbelief.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Are you nuking me?”

  “Yes,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.

  The shadow-circle grew larger, engulfing their feet, then spreading until they were both standing in its shade.

  A wet laugh joined Perry’s corpse smile. “Dew said I’m like a cockroach, that nothing can kill me. I don’t think physics is on my side this time, though.”

  He was dead twice over, yet still he cracked jokes, for her, a last effort to lift some of the blame from her shoulders.

  Perry coughed. Little hatchlings shot out of his mouth, fell to the ground. They righted themselves and sprinted away, out of the shadow and into the light.

  They wouldn’t escape. Nothing would.

  Perry wiped his mouth. His blue eyes bore into her.

  “How long do I have?”

  “About fifteen seconds,” she said.

  Then she started to float away, leaving Perry behind.

  He looked up. “No shit? That’s kind of fucked up.”

  The bomb’s shadow spread faster, throwing the buildings on either side of the street into deep blackness. Perry stood in the shadow’s center, his blond hair and blue eyes still as bright as if the sun reached down and set them alight.

  Margaret floated higher. Perry looked smaller and smaller.

  He cupped his hands to his face and shouted: “Margo?”

  Shooting up into the sky, she shouted back: “Yes?”

  She saw the bomb now — as big as the city itself, a cartoony thing that would crush Detroit by impact alone even if it didn’t detonate.

  Perry drew in a huge breath, and screamed his final words.

  “Thank you for saving my life!”

  The giant bomb exploded. The mushroom cloud rose up far beneath her feet. It wouldn’t reach her. She wouldn’t feel the effects.

  She was safe: it was only other people who died.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  • • •

  Margaret Montoya opened her eyes. She’d failed Perry. She’d failed Dew Phillips. She’d failed Amos Braun.

  She sat up in bed, trying to remember where she was. A bed, clean sheets that smelled faintly of bleach, heavy blankets… her room aboard the Carl Brashear.

  A nap, a short nap that had done nothing to ease her exhaustion.

  She wanted to watch the diver go into the Los Angeles, but she could barely move. Maybe it was time to take Tim up on his offer for Adderall. She’d had four hours of sleep in the last twenty — every hour of sleep was a lost hour of analysis and research.

  Margaret pushed herself out of bed. She could watch the diver’s efforts while she waited for the initial results from Tim’s yeast modification. Saccharomyces feely. That was the answer, it had to be.

  The hydras were a fascinating development, but largely unknown. What effect would they have on a living host? They might wind up being as bad as — or worse than — the crawlers that they killed. Tim had found his living hydras inside pustules on Walker; that was one way the crawlers spread. Would the hydras also puff out, microscopic bits floating on the air until they landed on a new host?

  If so, the hydras could become an airborne contagion.

  Tim’s yeast, on the other hand, carried no such threat. He’d ramped up the growth rate somehow, making it reproduce two to three times faster than most yeast. It wasn’t contagious — and even if it was, it was just yeast with a piece of the hydra’s coding: no threat
of any kind. Still, she had sent Murray a message to look into the Spectrum Health HAC study. If one participant in that study produced hydras, other participants might as well. She couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility that could provide a potential weapon.

  Margaret stood. She felt old, she felt creaky. She’d watch the diver, then maybe take one of Tim’s pills.

  Tired or not, the work wouldn’t wait.

  POSITIVE THOUGHTS

  Tim Feely walked down the white corridor, toweling off his hair as he went. Amazing what a shower could do for the soul. His flip-flops flapped against the floor. He wore a thick, white, terrycloth robe, a gift from Captain Yasaka. That poor, poor woman; she commanded an entire ship’s worth of sailors, day in, day out, but sometimes a girl just needed someone else to take charge.

  Tim wondered if Margaret Montoya was that kind of woman in the bedroom. Or did her boudoir policies stray into the dictatorial realm? He certainly couldn’t see Clarence Otto as the kind of guy who let his lady boss him around. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Margaret was too aggressive for Tall, Dark & Don’t Threaten My Manhood. If Margo wanted to call the shots, that wouldn’t bother Tim in the least.

  If the ladies liked it, Tim liked it — a simple philosophy that opened up a world of possibilities.

  Could he land Margaret? Why the fuck not? He felt on top of the world, he felt like a king. He’d isolated the hydra’s catalyst-producing gene sequence and inserted it into his fast-growing yeast, which was now happily diving away. It remained to be seen, however, if the modified yeast actually produced the catalyst, and if that catalyst actually worked.

  From everything he’d seen so far, it would. Which meant — Tim Feely might very well have just saved the world.

  And if that don’t get you laid, nothing will.