Eden Plague - Latest Edition

by David VanDyke

  “Patricks, if it ain’t intel, put it down. We got the whole place to clear.”

  “But sir…” He held it up. “They didn’t say there were kids here.”

  “Shit.” The lieutenant changed freqs to the general net, and transmitted, “Common push, this is Delta Alpha One, we have evidence of children here, over.”

  A series of double-clicks and pops came in acknowledgment, but nothing else. Chatter was discouraged, communications discipline was strict. Alpha Team spread out, with one more thing to think about. Nobody wanted to kill kids.

  ***

  My next awakening was brief. I heard the door open, saw the barrel of some kind of gun pointed my way, heard a hiss and felt the sting of a dart. It was a blessed relief from the twisting in my belly and the pain that ran through my starving, concentration-camp body.

  I came around in a different environment completely, an IV in my arm and a feeling of well-being coursing through me. I lifted my left hand. It looked thin, but not skeletal anymore. They must have fed me through the IV, or maybe stuck a feeding tube down my throat while I was sedated.

  This place looked more like a hospital room, though I noticed locked restraints on my legs. I also felt heavy, tired and a bit euphoric. Probably valium or some other kind of drug to keep me under control. It didn’t matter. It was out of my hands now. I had to just hope and pray that others could execute my plan. It was hard to be optimistic right now. I wondered how Elise and the rest were doing.

  ***

  Thirty-five minutes later, the major in charge of the Delta squadron reported the bunker was clear. “No one at all secured, though, sir,” he said to Jenkins, who slammed his console in frustration.

  “Drive us in there, now. I want to see this place. And tell the intel people to get in there immediately and start figuring out where they went!”

  The command truck lurched into motion, joining the convoy of military and government vehicles rolling into the mountainside entrance. The cavern soon filled up with two dozen Humvees, trucks, vans, and Suburbans, parked haphazardly among the old five-ton trucks and ancient jeeps. Men in combat fatigues mingled with groups in biohazard suits. There were reports of a laboratory, and a body on ice, and they were taking no chances.

  As the last of the vehicles passed through the inner tunnel archway, they felt a shock go through the mountainside. A rolling wave of dust flowed out of the big tube, chasing the trucks, and the people inside moved en masse toward the personnel doors away from the cloud.

  “Don’t worry, the virus won’t let them kill us,” Jenkins said with a confidence he didn’t really feel.

  “Not on purpose,” muttered one of the techs.

  The executive stepped onto the back bumper of the command vehicle, looking around at the confusion. It quickly sorted itself out without his intervention. These people were professionals, and as soon as it was clear that the roof wasn’t coming down, they kept on with their business.

  Two minutes later, smoking a cigarette inside the nearest bunker office, Jenkins heard a series of smaller blasts. Immediately, the overhead sprinkler system burst forth with a fine rain of water.

  “Oh, come on.” He looked at his soaked cigarette, then threw it down. “Somebody get that turned off! We can’t work in this!” He ran back to the command vehicle, taking off his suit coat and grabbing some paper towels, drying off. “At least it will settle the dust.”

  He ran the soaking papers over his face, and then froze. Stared at the soggy mess in his hand like it was a snake getting ready to bite. “No…” he whispered, as he smelled the slightly sweet cloying odor that he knew from before, in the laboratory of INS, Inc. The odor of the virus breeder gel, generated by the decomposing unicellular organisms that had been burned out, used up by the turbocharged metabolism imposed by the Eden Plague.

  He slumped in the contoured seat. It was too late. There was no way he could get out – no way he could avoid the infection. There was only one thing he could do, and he had to do it right now, while his mind was still his own.

  Before his resolve failed.

  “Major, I need to see you in the command vehicle.”

  The Delta commander trotted up, wiping liquid off his face. “Sorry, sir. I was looking at this.” He held up a box full of papers.

  “Come in, Major. Shut the door. You guys, take a break. Go to the john or something.” The other three men left, giving them privacy.

  “What is that?”

  The major reached into the box, showing him a thick stack of waxy pieces of paper, the name of the world’s foremost private package company on the backs. “I think they are those things that are left after you put address and customs stickers on packages.”

  Jenkins stared at the scores of sheets in the man’s hand, the hundreds in the box, and he knew in that moment that they had already lost. They had failed, and he didn’t want to live in a world where he’d wrecked the train so badly; nor one where in a few hours his infected brain would be begging to please admit what a mistake he made, and ask forgiveness of someone; nor one where he would cheerfully give up all his enormous wealth and privilege so he could slave for the good of mankind.

  A world where he didn’t get to torture Daniel Markis, or even hate him for winning the game.

  “Major, I have some terrible news.” He stared at the man for a moment, until he had his full, weighty attention. “I have made a horrible mistake. This liquid dispensed out of the sprinklers is filled with the biological weapon. Everyone inside is now in the first stages of infection. If any one of us gets out of here, he could spread the disease, and millions will die. Our families will die. The United States might not survive it. We have only one choice.” He spoke the lie with complete conviction.

  The major licked his lips, wiping his mouth convulsively, eyes bulging. He took a deep breath, straightened up, and finally said, “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  “Not everyone will have the fortitude you do. Even if your men maintain discipline, some of the others won’t. So before we become incapacitated, your men must seal off all exits, permanently. Use explosives, collapse the tunnels.”

  “That will be easy. The terrorists already did most of it for us. That was the explosions you heard.”

  Jenkins sat back in relief. “Good. They did us a favor. They wanted us to think ourselves trapped and try to escape, not realizing that the sense of duty of good men like ourselves would keep us here anyway. We will maintain discipline and work as long as we can, and we will see if some miracle cure will come to us, but for now, just make sure no one leaves.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jenkins dismissed the major and then got out of the vehicle. The sprinkler system had run out of liquid. The air smelled like dirt and sweet cloying humidity, and the ground was covered with a thin layer of mud. His shoes made squelching sounds as he walked across to the armored sedan.

  A back door opened, and he slid inside next to the National Security Advisor. The man had an old-fashioned car-telephone handset pressed to his ear.

  “Yes, Mister President. One moment please sir. What is it?”

  “You have him on the line?”

  “Yes, the ultra-wideband repeaters we planted were able to find their way through the rock fall.”

  “Good,” Jenkins said. “Put us on speaker, please? Mister President, we have a situation.”

  Nineteen minutes later the B2 Spirit stealth heavy bombers orbiting above certain locations released their special payloads.

  A new sun briefly blossomed in the West Virginia mountains. Then another, larger one in Los Angeles. The President came on nationwide television almost immediately, preempting all broadcast channels.

  “My fellow Americans: A few minutes ago, terrorists detonated an improvised nuclear device in Los Angeles, California, and another in rural West Virginia. They have attacked a cruise ship in the Atlantic ocean, and all aboard were lost. There may be more attacks to come. Ladies and gentlemen, we must act now.”


  “Therefore, in consultation with, and with the full support and ratification of both houses of Congress, the United States is declared, as of this moment, under martial law.”

  ***

  Vinny Nguyen drove the old jeep through the West Virginia nighttime, northwestward toward Pittsburg, Cleveland, and eventually Canada, he hoped. He should meet up there with the rest of the community, who had filtered out of the bunker over the last week.

  He had dug his way through the last few feet of soft dirt after he had triggered the explosions that sealed Jenkins and his people in, and then wirelessly activated the modern electronic valves that flooded the complex with contaminated fluid. He smiled as he thought about the trap he had laid, and the flawless way his systems functioned.

  At least he died happy as blackest night turned to atomic day.

  ***

  The video went viral less than an hour after the nuclear explosions. Despite the best efforts of the National Security Agency, US Cyber Command and every other arm of the US Government, it was posted and reposted to servers all over the world, to social networking pages, to websites and just simply e-mailed to people everywhere.

  DJ Markis’ face looked at the camera, calm and composed. He smiled briefly, looked down at his script, and then spoke in a strong, confident voice.

  Hello, my fellow homo sapiens. I’m Daniel John Markis, and I’m here to tell you about a better world.

  But before that world arrives, there will be some problems. Your own governments and leaders will try to suppress this video and the knowledge in it. But it won’t work. Information wants to be free.

  Then they will try to suppress the miracles. But that won’t work either. The miracles have already been sent to too many places.

  You will have heard scattered reports by now of miraculous cures of terminal illnesses, in Central America and Mexico, in Los Angeles, in the US State of Georgia, in Bermuda and many other places. But the miracles are right next door to you now.

  Over one thousand packages have been sent by private service to hospitals in a thousand cities around the world. The greatest number were sent to places where poverty and disease is rampant – to places like Calcutta and Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro and Cairo and Cape Town, as well as the great centers of civilization like New York and London and Paris and Moscow and Beijing.

  Each package contains a simple bottle of a miracle solution. Less than one milliliter of this liquid will cure anyone injected with it of almost any known disease. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just give that tiny amount to any patient, any person, with a terminal illness, anyone who volunteers. As far as I have been able to tell, it has a one hundred percent success rate.

  If you run out of the cure, then there is an easy solution. Anyone who has been cured already can pass the cure on through blood or saliva or any other bodily fluid. Once you are confident of its power, all you have to do is pass it on.

  If anyone tries to hoard the cure, don’t worry. Don’t do violence. Just seek someone out that has been cured, they can pass it on to you. Share a drink, or a mint. Kiss them if you know them well enough. If you are a medical professional, use a syringe or a swab or an inoculation gun. It doesn’t matter. And if it doesn’t work, try it again. Because miracles really do happen.

  Good night, good luck, and welcome to a better world.

  ***

  I woke up from the nightmare again, the nightmare where I could see the food behind the glass but I couldn’t reach it. I stumbled over to the bathroom faucet, drinking cup after cup of water. My dinner was long gone and I couldn’t convince them that I needed more calories. Or maybe they wanted to study me in this state of starvation. I looked in the mirror, seeing a concentration camp victim already.

  They came in from time to time in their hazmat suits and took blood or saliva swabs. They did biopsies of my liver and other organs with painful needles; they cut me and watched me heal. Each time I spoke to them, calling them by name if I could, trying to make them see me as human. Eventually they put a leather gag on me.

  The promised tortures hadn’t yet materialized; I suspected Jenkins had bigger fish to fry for a while. I just had to make it through day to day.

  They had been kind enough, if that was the word, to re-break my bones and straighten me out. They used no anesthetic and they recorded the whole procedure, hooked me up to all sorts of electrodes and machines. At least they fed me then.

  I lay back down, but I had a hard time sleeping. Because I was awake, I heard the rattles of bullets ricocheting like marbles in a bathtub, the muffled thuds, the thump of something hitting my locked door, the yelling and screaming faint through the soundproofing. I sat up in bed, waiting for whatever came.

  The door swung open abruptly, revealing a tall, thin figure, backlit so I couldn’t see his face; but I knew the posture and the way of moving.

  “Have you come to kill me, Skull?”

  He stepped into the room but left the light off. There was an MP5 submachine-gun with a long suppressor in his hand.

  “I ought to. It’s your fault Zeke is dead.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If you’d just have gone with them, if you’d never run and asked for Zeke’s help, none of this would have happened.”

  “It’s because of me he was alive at all, if you want to trace a chain of causality. I put him back together on a Kandahar mountainside, and I killed fourteen Taliban at close range doing it. Maybe ten other guys in the world could have done that, and I paid for it later. I didn’t kill him, Skull. But if it eases your pain, then shoot me now. I’m ready.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you. I’d have done that back in the cave if I was going to. Do you have a death wish? Why are you even here? You could have just sent the stuff around the world and escaped. Why did you get yourself captured?”

  “Because it seemed like the right thing to do.”

  He snorted in disbelief.

  “Okay, how’s this. Maybe I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. Maybe I wanted to distract them from the real plan, let them think they’d won. Maybe I wanted to provoke them to rash action, which I did, God forgive me. Maybe I deserve to be punished; I did murder Jenkins, and I brought on the death of a couple hundred thousand Angelenos. Maybe the people that have been experimenting on me need to see the truth, despite the lies. Or maybe the world needs a martyr, a symbol to rally around.”

  “You really are full of yourself, aren’t you? God damn you and your martyrdom and your symbol and your sainthood,” he snarled. “What’s with people like you? You don’t live in the real world.”

  “I live in the world of ideas now, because that’s what changes worlds.”

  “Oh, you make me sick. Get up and come with me. I’m not going to let them win even if you want them to.”

  “The old me would tell you to go to hell, take that weapon from you and do what I promised the last time you had me at gunpoint. The new me…just says no, I'm not coming with you. The new me isn’t afraid anymore. It doesn’t mean I’m a saint. It just means I consider myself already dead, so you can’t scare me. Nobody can. And that scares you.”

  He cursed me then, words he wanted to wound and hurt, but I was beyond the sticks and stones. I wished I could help him. I wished he would accept the gift, and surrender all that pain and hate and anger. But for some people, that pain and hate and anger is who they are, is all they are, and they can’t give that up.

  He turned and went away muttering and cursing, defeated by my refusal to be intimidated. He didn’t kill me, so on some level I think he knew I was right.

  I understood. I forgave. I was glad, because it meant he had a conscience after all.

  I was also glad he left the door open. Perhaps if I’d been stronger I could have stayed, but I found that given the way out, and the cost of staying, I wasn’t strong enough to remain to be tortured and dissected. Maybe that’s what was supposed to happen. Maybe staying would be the coward’s way out afte
r all. Maybe I had more work to do.

  I followed him out at a distance, past a sad trail of bodies. It grieved me to see his killing rage, but as someone had once told me, no man can live in another man’s heart.

  Epilogue

  Interstellar space, 1.6 light years from Earth, velocity .17C.

  The organisms on the Meme scout ship were known by their functions. Thus, Commander was awakened earliest, and was the first to begin processing many thousands of planetary revolutions-worth of stored data from the target world. Some time later, two other organisms joined it in consciousness, to digest with Commander. They were designated Biologist and Executive.

  It was two full revolutions more before they felt the need to confer. The Meme were meticulous beings, and they examined the data in detail, scanning from the moment their Lightbearer probe had deposited the Adversary Worm onto the target world thousands of cycles ago, until the moment of anomaly.

  Commander was first to speak, as was proper. “Biologist. Explain the existence of these sentients. Why did the Adversary Worm not corrupt them sufficiently to reduce them to animals?”

  “I cannot explain at this time, Commander. We must continue to process the stored data, and analyze. Perhaps the data will yet relate their fall.”

  “Noted. Continue.”

  A half a revolution later the Commander spoke again. “I am processing data from circa timepoint minus 3000. The sentients formed large collectives, developed symbolic communication, built permanent structures, and made organized war upon each other. They grow more numerous.”

  Biologist replied, “I do not yet have sufficient data to form a conjecture. The Watcher probe is limited in its ability to sample at its orbital distance, and it is only transmitting Level One data.”