Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Now Murray understood the reason for the one-on-one meeting. In the wake of the Los Angeles’s attack, Murray had given Captain Yasaka a clear order — send Tim Feely down to the lab to process the bodies and have him package tissue samples to be sent to Black Manitou. Feely had been in such a rush that he’d only prepared samples from Petrovsky; an unfortunate choice, considering Margaret’s insistence that Walker’s hydras might be humanity’s final solution.

  The end result: crawlers had escaped the task force, because Murray had orchestrated it.

  The transport had been risky, of course, but had gone off without a hitch. Cheng’s team had a brain-dead woman on Black Manitou Island, which they were using to cultivate the crawlers for research and testing. Crawlers and test subjects alike were locked down in conditions that made BSL-4 precautions look about as difficult to pass through as airport security. Cheng and his team were just as sequestered on their island as Margaret, Clarence and Feely were on the Coronado.

  Murray could count the people who knew about the Black Manitou crawlers on two hands — and leave three fingers to spare. And that number included the president and himself. Murray hadn’t even told Margaret. Apparently, neither had Feely: something the man seemed to think was a favor to Murray. Feely had called in that imaginary marker during the argument with Cheng over who got to name the yeast. Murray could give a wet shit about the name of the damn stuff, so Feely got what he wanted. Besides, that had pissed off Cheng, and Murray hated Cheng.

  “Doctor Cheng tested the inoculant directly on the crawlers harvested from Charles Petrovsky’s corpse,” Murray said. “The substance dissolved the crawlers with one hundred percent efficiency. However, his team euthanized the subject and performed an autopsy — the inoculant had no effect on removing the infection from her brain. As Montoya and Feely predicted, once the infection reaches the brain, it’s too late.”

  “So it’s not a cure, and we still don’t know if it prevents infection,” Blackmon said. “Can we test it on lab animals? See if it really does inoculate them?”

  Murray shook his head. “The crawlers only survive in humans, Madam President. We don’t know why. They don’t even survive in primates.”

  Blackmon nodded. She fell silent, stared off.

  Murray waited. He already knew what she was going to ask.

  She looked at him. “The SEALs on the Coronado took the inoculant yesterday, did they not?”

  Murray nodded.

  Blackmon sighed. Murray had seen that before, too — a leader’s reluctant acceptance that he or she had to put someone directly in the line of fire.

  “We need a volunteer,” she said. “Get one of those SEALs to Black Manitou, inject him with the crawlers. We have to know for sure if this actually works.”

  She wasn’t fucking around. But to directly expose a serviceman to that risk… the soldier Murray had once been bristled at the thought.

  “Madam President, we have a little time to keep testing the—”

  “Now, Director Longworth. We’ve already turned a huge sector of our economy over to making the inoculant. If it doesn’t work, then we have to put all resources behind Doctor Montoya’s hydra theory.”

  Murray nodded again. The president was right, of course — protecting a single soldier wasn’t worth the wait. Four sunken navy ships and over a thousand dead sailors were ample enough evidence for that.

  “I’ll take care of it, Madam President.”

  “Thank you, Director Longworth.”

  He’d been dismissed. He left the Oval Office.

  The president had given him an order. Maybe one of Klimas’s men would actually volunteer. Knowing those crazy-ass SEALs, they probably all would.

  Murray hoped the inoculation worked.

  Hell, for once, he’d even pray.

  THE HANGOVER

  Steve Stanton threw up. Again. At least this time he’d made it to the toilet.

  When his stomach finally relaxed, he slumped down on his butt. He wondered how much dried urine from hotel residents past he was now sitting in.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d gone drinking, but he’d never partied that hard before. Now, he was paying the price.

  His head pounded so bad it hurt to move. His throat felt sore. His body ached.

  Becky had left a few hours earlier. Sometime around noon, if he remembered correctly. What a night.

  He, Steve Stanton, had gone out to a bar, met a girl and got laid. He could hardly believe it.

  But now, oh, man… his head.

  He had to stand up, then make his way back to bed. He’d sleep the day away, or at least try to.

  Tomorrow, maybe, he’d feel better.

  THE HANGOVER, PART II

  Cooper took the wet washcloth off his forehead, flipped it, then gently set it back in place, sighing as he felt the fabric’s coolness against his skin.

  He was getting too old for this shit. He was certainly old enough, experienced enough, to know what awaited him at the business end of ten beers and six shots.

  Cooper glanced at the room’s other bed. It held one occupant: the waitress from Monk’s. He didn’t remember Jeff bringing her back with them, nor did he remember hearing anything during the night. He didn’t remember seeing her when he’d stumbled to the bathroom for the washcloth. How far gone did he have to be to not know his best friend was tagging a hot waitress just a few feet away?

  A loud, sawing snoring sound came from the foot of the beds, by the TV on the dresser. Cooper slowly lifted himself up on his elbows. There was Jeff, buck naked, lying on the floor on top of his jeans and AC/DC shirt.

  “Strong work,” Cooper said.

  He lay back and closed his eyes, tried to manage his throbbing head. It hurt to swallow. Had he been screaming all night? He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t really remember anything after that sixth beer.

  Yes, he was old enough to know better. After he slept this one off, he’d make changes. Sure, he’d promised himself the same thing a hundred times before, but this time would be different.

  THE COOL KIDS

  Maybe Tim wasn’t so unlucky after all.

  He’d worked on Black Manitou long before it had been a government-owned facility. That had been his first job out of college, working for a civilian biotech company engaged in questionable research. That research had gone south: people had died in horrible ways. He’d almost died himself.

  After that, he’d taken the job with the Operation Wolf Head task force, preferring the isolation of a military ship on the water to the memories of what he’d seen on land. He hadn’t actually thought the infection could return. He’d felt protected, safe.

  But that hadn’t lasted.

  The infection’s reemergence and all the death that came with it made him think he was some kind of doomed soul. And yet, that math didn’t add up.

  How many people had died during his time on Black Manitou? He wasn’t sure, but that number paled in comparison to the task force disaster, to five ships and over a thousand corpses resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

  Yet he had survived… again. He was one of only three people to make it out alive. On top of that, he was now one of the few people in the world immune to that alien bullshit.

  Probably immune, anyway.

  For now he was as safe as safe could be, sitting at a table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, sipping Lagavulin with three SEALs who had taken quite a shine to him.

  “Let me get this straight,” said D’Shawn Bosh. “You’re saying you can tell if people are infected by how fast Tylenol sells?”

  Tim nodded. “Basically, yeah. I can even do it from here on the Coronado. Klimas set me up with a laptop that ties into the TSCE.”

  The total ship computing environment gave him ridiculously high-speed Internet access, even though they were floating in the middle of an inland sea.

  Bosh smiled. “Well, look at my man, here — TSCE — like he’s been in the navy all his life.”

  A day ago
, a comment like that would have embarrassed Tim, made him wonder if these big, dangerous guys were mocking him, but not now. They loved him. He’d helped save one of their own. He’d done it under fire. It shocked him as much as it did anyone else, but when the shit had hit the fan he’d actually been brave.

  Whatever bravery Tim had, however, paled in comparison to the man he’d helped save. A few hours earlier, a helicopter had taken Roger Levinson off the Coronado. Tim knew there was only one reason to do that: a human trial to test the inoculant against direct exposure to the crawlers kept on Black Manitou. No one else knew that, except for Levinson and probably Klimas, Levinson’s commanding officer. Their fellow SEALs didn’t know the mission, they only knew that Levinson had volunteered for some secret duty. Volun-fucking-TEERED. The courage and self-sacrifice needed to do that… Tim couldn’t quite process it.

  Saccharomyces feely would soon be put to the ultimate test. If Tim’s solution didn’t work, Roger Levinson would become infected. If that happened, Tim knew, everyone and everything was screwed.

  Calvin Roth, the big one, drained his shot glass, set it down on the table. “What I don’t get are all the little critters floating through people’s bodies. We drank your nasty-ass yeast to protect us from crawlers, which are part plant, part us, but then there are also hydras, which maybe aren’t part plant, but are part us…”

  He shook his head, pushed his glass over to Ramierez. “Fill me up, Ram. I need another shot to understand this shit.”

  Ramierez dutifully filled the glass. Tim had to concentrate to not stare at the man’s patchy, pencil-thin mustache.

  “You’re not that far off,” Tim said. “You drank the inoculant, which—”

  “Camel-taint pus,” Roth said, raising his glass.

  Ramierez raised his own. “I’ll drink to that. Knock ’em down, boys!”

  Tim drained his glass, felt his throat burning. He set his glass on the table and made an educated guess that these men would drink to just about anything.

  “Like I was saying, you guys drank the inoculant. That means even if you did get exposed to the infection when you rescued us, you’re fine, because the inoculant wipes out the infection if you take it within twenty-four hours of exposure. And if you weren’t exposed, now you’re safe as long as you keep taking the inoculant doses every couple of weeks. If you get exposed from here on out, you technically still get infected, and the infection will modify your cells to make crawlers or other things, but those things will dissolve before they can do any damage because of the catalyst that’s in your blood.”

  Bosh nodded. “It’s like if we had to dive into a vat of acid to assemble a bomb. All the parts of the bomb are there, but we don’t last long enough to put them together.”

  Tim clapped and leaned back, almost fell over his chair. He was drunker than he thought.

  “D-Day, you nailed it!”

  The men had insisted Tim call them by their first names, or their nicknames: D-Day, Ram and plain-old Cal.

  Ramierez shook his head. “I don’t get it. The hydras kill the infection. Why are we fucking around with this yeast when we could just, I don’t know, pre-infect ourselves with the hydras?”

  Tim raised a finger. “Ah, a good point, my man. Two reasons. First, we don’t have any hydras — they went down with the Brashear. Second, even if we did have them we wouldn’t use them. Once the hydras get into your body, they start reproducing. We don’t know if they’ll stop at a certain point, or if they will keep on reproducing until there are so many of them they damage you, maybe even kill you.”

  “Reproducing,” Roth said. “Little animal things in your blood, fucking away. Like a microscopic orgy?”

  Tim laughed. “While I admire that analogy more than you will ever know, my extralarge friend, the hydras reproduce asexually. That means they don’t have to mate to produce offspring.”

  Roth shook his head in disgust. “That’s as fucked-up as a football bat.”

  Ramierez leaned in, the half-full bottle in his hand. “They do it with themselves because they can’t get laid, just like Cal.”

  Roth drained his scotch, set the glass down. “For that, little man, you get to fill my glass. And I do it with myself because I’m just that damn good.”

  “Hear hear,” Ramierez said, and poured another round of shots.

  None of the fun seemed to have sunk into Bosh. To him, this was obviously serious business.

  “It’s all so fucked,” he said. “I’d rather have an enemy I can see. Alien microbes? Modified yeast? Just give me something I can shoot.”

  Ramierez nodded sagely. “Wiser words were never spoken, D-Day. Come on, boys, around the horn again. Let’s see those glasses.”

  Everyone pushed their shot glasses toward Ramierez. He filled all four. The SEALs raised theirs and Tim followed suit. The men let out a loud hooyah, and they drank. Half of Tim’s shot slid down the side of his face. The glass slid out of his hand. Shoddy workmanship, apparently — go home, shot glass, you’re drunk.

  That, or he was drunk. Drunk, and safe, isolated from everything, surrounded by trained killers who thought he was the bee’s knees.

  Tim was lucky, after all. If that luck held, he could just stay right here, in this very safe place, until Cheng’s grand plan ran its course.

  A HUSBAND’S ROLE

  Clarence Otto stood on the Coronado’s rear deck. No wind for a change, just the oppressive cold. He stared out at the setting sun, wondering what might happen next.

  He’d survived. Margaret had survived. Tim Feely had survived. Black Manitou was leading the effort for mass production of inoculant. By any measure, Clarence had succeeded in his assigned mission. Murray would probably try to give him a medal for the effort.

  But Clarence didn’t want a medal… he wanted Margaret.

  Onboard the Carl Brashear, the woman he’d fallen in love with had returned. She’d been decisive, insightful, tireless and brilliant. She’d been her old self, her fighting self.

  And now? Now she wouldn’t see him.

  All day long she’d stayed locked up in her mission module. He’d tried to get in to talk to her, but through the closed door she’d told him to go away. She sounded scared. She sounded alone.

  For the last five years, whenever she’d felt those emotions she had come to him. He had comforted her, or at least he’d tried. She was his wife. His job was to protect her, help her through any problem no matter how great. At the end of the day, no matter how he sliced it, that was a mission he’d failed.

  The sun finally ducked below the water, leaving only the residual glow of pink clouds to reflect against Lake Michigan’s tall waves.

  Maybe tomorrow he could talk to her. Maybe he could make it all up to her.

  If he worked hard enough at it, if he apologized enough, then maybe… maybe… they could repair the damage they had done to each other.

  Maybe they could be together again.

  DAY SEVEN

  ACTUALIZATION

  Clarence Otto had to die.

  They all had to die.

  All of them… all the humans.

  Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so obvious. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.

  She got it now. She understood. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do…

  …to do…

  …to do God’s work.

  Not the God she had thought she’d known in the naiveté of childhood, or any of the thousands of randomly invented supernatural beings that caused people to slaughter each other throughout history. No, a real god. A god with the power to send ships across space. The power to change human beings into something else, something new.

  Something powerful.

  Humanity had shit all over this planet.

 
It was time to remove humanity, time to let the world start over.

  Margaret hated them. She wanted to walk out of her little cabin and stab the first person she saw. Maybe find a wrench, bash them in the head again and again until bone cracked, until she saw the bloody mess that was their brains.

  She wanted to kill Clarence.

  She wanted to kill Tim.

  She wanted to kill the sailors, the SEALs, sink this fucking ship and put them all on the bottom so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

  Margaret stood. The thought of taking life thrilled her, infused her with excitement, made her vibrate and bubble with pure energy.

  Who would be first?

  She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

  They outnumbered her. If she killed one of them, maybe even two or three, the rest would certainly get her. She couldn’t let that happen, because she was meant for something greater.

  Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.

  An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted leaders.

  Leaders who could pass undetected among the humans. Leaders who could infiltrate human organizations. Leaders who could gather the troops of God together, make them operate as an organized unit.

  Margaret could do all of those things. She had been chosen for it.

  How ironic that Clarence turned out to be right after all: Margaret Montoya wasn’t a soldier — she was a general.