by Scott Sigler
All she had to do was bide her time and wait for her army.
She wasn’t contagious. Her infection gave her that knowledge. No tongue triangles, no blisters with dandelion seeds, nothing that could reveal her true nature. That made perfect sense: if she showed those telltale symptoms, the humans would kill her. Not being contagious was actually a form of camouflage.
For now, while trapped on this ship, she had to blend in. She couldn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She had to wait. She had to be… calm. Like Cantrell had been back on the Brashear. Not at first, no; he’d been jittery, paranoid. He must have been very close to finally realizing his role, just as Margaret now realized hers.
The Orbital must have engineered new crawlers that could penetrate BSL-4 suits. That was the only logical answer. It wouldn’t take much, just a microscopic hole, barely detectable if it was even detectable at all. Was that how Clark and Cantrell had become infected? Yes, that made sense, and when they were submerged in bleach, maybe the pressure change caused a tiny bit to leak through… that explained why they both reported smelling it.
But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?
Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day… at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.
What a difference a day makes.
Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how arrogant, to think she could outsmart such a power.
But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.
Margaret reached for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.
If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.
Then the carnage would begin.
STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT
The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.
On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.
“Doctor Feely, the latest results of your data-mining algorithm are coming in,” Kimber said. She had big, dark eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.
“Kimber, I have to wonder about your life choices.”
She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean with a face like that, why aren’t you in Hollywood making movies?”
She shook her head, but also blushed a little. “Doctor Feely, can we just go over the results?”
“Sure. Let’s hope there aren’t any.”
“Let’s hope.”
A pattern of medication consumption had revealed the Pinckney’s advanced level of infection. If the vector had somehow escaped the flotilla and made it to the mainland, the same consumption patterns would likely hold true. Through Kimber, Tim had programmed the CDC’s database to track spikes in the purchase of cough suppressant, pain medication and fever reducer.
Kimber typed with her mouth open. Damn, that girl had pretty lips.
“Here we are,” she said. “They just came in. Let’s see…”
She stopped talking. She just sat there.
“Kimber, what is it?”
She blinked, looked up at the camera, those dark eyes widening with fright.
“There’s a geospecific spike,” she said. Her words rattled with tension. “I read a nine hundred percent increase in cough suppressant, eleven hundred in pain meds, and a two thousand percent jump in fever reducer.”
Tim said nothing. He didn’t have to, because the numbers said it all — the infection had escaped quarantine. Could Cheng’s team on Black Manitou have fucked something up? That seemed impossible; Tim had seen the facilities there, knew how foolproof they were. Then how? Had something floated away from the Los Angeles, drifted for miles until it was picked up by some random boater?
He swallowed. There was still hope; maybe this was an isolated outbreak. A small town in Wisconsin, perhaps, something that Longworth’s semi-illegal DST soldiers could isolate and quarantine.
Tim closed his eyes. Before he spoke, he gave in to superstition.
God, please don’t let it be a major city…
“Where?”
She didn’t want to say it any more than he wanted to hear it.
“The one I just read you, that’s the biggest one… it’s from Chicago.”
Tim’s balls felt like they wanted to shrivel up and hide somewhere in his belly. Chicago — the third-largest city in America, the very heart of the Midwest.
“The biggest one? There are others?”
She nodded. “Statistically significant spikes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and” — she looked straight into the camera, dead into Tim’s eyes — “New York City.”
Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? It was already too late: nothing could stop it from spreading.
“Send me the data.”
He looked at the numbers himself, hoping Kimber had suddenly contracted a case of the stupids, hoping she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
Forty-odd hours had passed since the Pinckney and the Brashear went to the bottom. The statistical spikes indicated the Chicago infection had begun shortly after that battle.
The second-largest spike came from Benton Harbor, a town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. That infection looked to have started just a few hours after Chicago’s began, New York’s and Minneapolis’s three to four hours after that.
It had begun in Chicago. Benton Harbor was only two hours away… based on what Tim knew of incubation periods, someone could have driven there from Chicago. That matched what he saw in the data. But New York? A twelve-hour drive. The level of spikes indicated New York was only six to eight hours behind Chicago in the level of infection.
That meant one thing and one thing only: a carrier had been in an airport.
MURDER
Steve Stanton sat up and turned on the light. He squinted, blinked. Was it still night? The heavy curtains shut out all traces of the outside. He looked at the alarm clock on the little nightstand next to his hotel bed: 11:52.
He squinted, saw a little red light at the bottom left of the time, next to white letters that read “AM.”
Eleven fifty-two in the morning. He’d slept all day, all night, and into the next day. Were hangovers supposed to last this long?
He reached to the nightstand and grabbed the bottle of Chloraseptic he’d paid a bellboy to bring him. He opened his mouth, sprayed the cooling, numbing mist against the back of his throat.
It helped a little.
Steve wondered how Cooper and Jeff were doing. Maybe they’d already checked out of the hotel and were headed back to Michigan.
He’d wanted to tell Cooper what had really happened, maybe get some help in case Bo Pan came back. Steve had worked it all out in his head the night before, thought he was safe… but maybe he wasn’t. Should he call the police? If he did, would that put his family in jeopardy? And for that matter, would the police turn him over to the CIA? Maybe even send him to China?
But… what if Cooper had contacted Bo Pan? What if Cooper and Jeff had given Bo Pan Steve’s room number… what if all three of them were on their
way to kill Steve right now?
He sucked in a big breath. That was a crazy thought. It didn’t even make sense. How could Cooper reach Bo Pan? Steve didn’t need to make up illogical fears about Cooper and Jeff, not when there were plenty of very real things to worry about.
Like the small matter of a dead navy diver. Murder. An act of war.
Some “hero” Steve had turned out to be.
What was he going to do? Maybe he was missing something, not thinking it through because he felt so awful.
He sprayed again, letting the cool feeling spread through his throat. That was enough for now. He needed rest.
Steve put his head back down on the pillow. He closed his eyes.
The hero slept.
LEADERSHIP
Murray had never heard the Situation Room this quiet. The only sound came from a few monitors that played newscasts at low volume. He couldn’t hear anyone typing. No one talked. No one cleared their throats. No one even moved.
Blackmon folded her hands together, rested her forearms on the tabletop.
“How did it get off the flotilla?”
When she got mad, when the cameras weren’t around, her stare burned with intensity. She looked predatory.
“We don’t know, Madam President,” Murray said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.
The predator’s stare bore into him.
“Three cities,” she said. “Chicago, Minneapolis, New York. Is that all?”
“And western Michigan,” Murray said. “Doctor Feely thinks there will be more. He thinks a carrier went through one of the Chicago airports.”
She still had that presidential look about her, but how long would that visage stay at the fore? The disease had broken quarantine, spread to three areas of very dense population. Things were about to get bad in a hurry, and on her watch — she couldn’t blame Gutierrez for this one.
“Do we know who the carrier is? Can we trace the travel pattern?”
Murray shook his head. “No, Madam President. At this point we have no idea who the carrier is, or where the carrier went.”
Hands still folded, Blackmon tapped her left pointer finger against the back of her right hand.
“What do Doctor Cheng and Doctor Montoya think?”
Murray felt a little embarrassed.
“Doctor Montoya is still on the Coronado, so she can’t help us much right now.” Margaret was there, and mad as hell. She had predicted the infection would escape, said they needed to be preparing a “hydra strategy,” and Murray hadn’t backed her play. After all the times she’d been right, he’d doubted her: now he was paying the price.
Margaret was out of the picture, which meant he had to rely on the man who, frankly, wasn’t in her league.
“Doctor Cheng thinks we’re now in a race against time,” Murray said. “The vector is in the wild. He said the patterns show it’s highly contagious, on a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The only thing we can do to mitigate exposure is to inoculate as many people as possible, as fast as possible.”
Blackmon stared at Murray like she wanted to pin the blame on him. But she knew as well as he did that she couldn’t politic her way out of this one. Americans were going to die: what remained to be seen was how many.
The president turned to Admiral Porter. “What’s the status of inoculating our troops?”
The first batches of inoculant had come to Washington, of course. Murray had drank a bottle of the nasty stuff himself. The military was next in line. If the people with guns became converted, that would create another level of problems.
Admiral Palmer rattled off a litany of bases. The biggest of them — Fort Hood, Norfolk, Fort Bragg, and a few others — were inoculating their own troops and already creating starter cultures for other bases. Within three days, five at the most, every soldier, sailor and airman on U.S. soil would be protected. That was, of course, if the infection wasn’t already spreading through some of those garrisons.
“We’ve also ordered all bases on foreign soil to lock up tight,” Porter said. “No one in and no one out. They’re already constructing their own culturing plants. As soon as starter cultures are available, we’ll ship them. We project eight to ten days until all foreign bases are fully inoculated.”
Blackmon turned to Nancy Whittaker, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
“Nancy, what’s the status of our domestic inoculation production?”
The military took care of its own logistics. For everything else, inoculation management fell to Whittaker. So far, she had been unflappable — it didn’t seem to faze her that the health and safety of an entire nation had somehow fallen into her lap.
“Trucks are already shipping finished product on the East Coast and in the Midwest,” Whittaker said. The former Georgia governor had never bothered to train away her drawl. “Seattle started brewing almost immediately — fifty thousand doses have already been delivered to final FEMA distribution points. In the next twenty-four hours, Madam President, we believe all participating breweries will at least be at fifty percent production capacity, and full distribution will be under way in all major cities.” Blackmon’s deadly gaze swept the room.
“Twenty-four hours,” she said. “How many Americans will already be infected by then?”
No one had an answer. Murray couldn’t even guess, so he stayed quiet.
Blackmon stared down at the table, stared so hard Murray had to wonder if the table could feel as intimidated as he did.
“We have to slow the disease’s spread,” she said. “Shut down air travel.”
All heads turned to a short, fat, bald man who stood in the corner of the packed Situation Room. As secretary of transportation, Dennis Shaneworth needed to be present but wasn’t important enough to merit a seat at the table.
“Right away, Madam President,” he said. “Chicago, Minneapolis and New York?”
Blackmon looked at him. “Shut it down everywhere. Cancel all civilian passenger flights immediately. Allow cargo flights only if they are needed to distribute the inoculant. Do it now.”
The room’s silence vanished as hands flew to phones and people scrambled to carry out her orders.
Murray felt a spark of hope. So far the only data they had was a run on drugstores for cough drops and pain reliever. Some politicians would have waited a half-day, maybe more, just to be sure a shutdown was necessary. He hadn’t expected Blackmon to move so decisively.
She again looked at Murray. She curled a finger at him, calling him over. Murray stood and walked to his commander in chief.
“Chicago,” she said quietly. “That’s the start of this?”
Murray nodded. “The word is epicenter, Madam President.”
She let out a slow breath. Up this close, he saw the fear in her eyes.
“Chicago is the epicenter,” she said. “Should I have Whittaker prioritize inoculant shipments there?”
“Yes,” Murray said. “As much as she can spare. Doctor Feely figures we’re in day two of the exposure. But” — he leaned closer, so only she could hear him — “Madam President, may I be frank?”
“You mean there’s a time you show restraint?” She closed her eyes, as if that might protect her from more bad news. “Yes, tell me.”
“According to Feely’s statistical models, the majority of Chicago’s population is either already infected, or will be before we can help. My honest opinion is that the city is fucked.”
Her eyes opened. The predator’s stare faded away, at least as much as it could for her.
“Find ways to increase production, Murray,” she said. “I want a list of any factory in the United States, Canada or Mexico that cultivates yeast, for any purpose. We’ll find a way. I won’t give up on Chicago.”
Blackmon sat straight, faced the room. That brief moment of genuine empathy vanished.
“I’m declaring a federal emergency under the Stafford Act,” she said. “I want SecHHS and FEMA to put together a task force to run thi
s inoculation. Let’s get Congress and SCOTUS notified. Director Longworth” — she again turned to face him — “is Montoya safe to travel?”
He shook his head. “Cheng quarantined the Coronado for two weeks, to make absolutely sure no one onboard is infected. Margaret needs to stay there.”
The president silently mouthed the word dammit. “Then get me Cheng. I want him here.”
She turned to Porter. “Admiral, I want the Joint Chiefs and the National Security staff to notify Congress of my intent and desire for a total mobilization of reserve forces.”
Blackmon took in a breath as if to make a grand statement, then seemed to remember something. She again turned to her chief of staff and spoke quietly, but Murray was close enough to hear.
“Get the speechwriters. In two hours I want to address Congress, and I want every network carrying it live. Prepare that footage Montoya sent of the sailors from the Brashear — people need to see what this plague does to the human body. Go.”
The chief of staff scurried off.
Blackmon put her shoulders back and her chest out — more true leader than pure politician.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t act now, we are quite possibly facing a worst-case scenario. The nation is counting on us.”
Murray started dialing: he had much do and little time in which to do it.
ALL CHANNELS
Jeff lifted his head from the pillow. “Dude, is that the president? Get that Republicunt off the TV, will you?”
Cooper nodded. His head felt heavy, full of the same goop that he blew out of his nose every five minutes.
He used the remote to change the hotel TV’s channel, from Channel 3 to Channel 4 — and there, again, was President Blackmon. Channel 5: Blackmon. Channel 6: Blackmon.
“She’s on all the big networks,” Cooper said. He tried ESPN, only to find the same thing. “Holy shit, dude — she’s on all the channels.”
“She’s a stinky, hate-filled, nasty—”
“Hold on a sec,” Cooper said. “This has to be something big.”