Orbital Decay

by A. G. Claymore

  Ben tilted his head to the side as he thought it through. Am I really taking a chance on this guy, if he’s the only chance we have of getting out of here? I probably need him more than he needs me. He extended a hand. “Ben Marks.”

  “Abe Peters.”

  Dwight went back into the aircraft, taking a syringe and vial from the cooler. “Abe, if you’re going into an infected area, we’d better give you a shot.” He waved the needle with a theatrical leer.

  “What’s in that?” Abe took an involuntary step backwards.

  “Same stuff that caused this plague in the first place,” Ben answered with a grin. “It has a one-in-a-hundred chance of mutating and making you into another plague monkey.” He watched the flyer, gauging his reaction. No panic, that’s good, at least. “Of course, if you don’t get a shot, you will turn eventually. Also, there’s a side effect that you can’t avoid.”

  “And that is?”

  “You live for at least a thousand years.”

  “No shit?”

  “Not even a faint odor of it.”

  “Huh!” Abe looked around the group, seeing that nobody was laughing. He took a deep breath and blew it out. “Well, when you pile it all on the scales, it looks like taking the shot is my only real chance. Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah, and you’ll ride in the front seat of the canoe,” Ben stated as he watched the needle slide into Abe’s arm.

  “Fair enough,” Abe replied mildly. “I’d be useless in the back seat. Never could master a J-stroke.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ben nodded as the one-in-a-hundred chance slid back out of the man’s arm. “That’s what I was thinking…”

  Chicago

  Thorn Creek

  Leaves fell all around them as they paddled, forming a mottled skin on the slow-moving surface. Ben looked down at the G-19 leaning against the stern thwart. When he’d done his basic training in the Army, he had used the latest descendent of the M-16.

  This weapon was completely different. For starters, it had no brass cartridges. The rounds weren’t even round anymore. The magazines, one along the top of the barrel and a second below it, each held seventy rectangular, caseless cartridges half the length of the military rounds he was accustomed to.

  There was no charging handle to pull on either, just a cocking knob that you turned to put a round in the chamber. After the first magazine was emptied, you simply rotated the knob the other way to load the second.

  Ben thought it looked ugly as hell, but it carried more loaded ammunition than he used to carry in webbing pouches and he had another two hundred eighty rounds ready to go, strapped into the load-bearing vest that Abe had given him.

  He was starting to like Abe.

  “Patrol to port,” the pilot advised.

  Not knowing which was which, Ben swiveled his head. “Just say left next time,” he growled as they doubled their efforts. They reached the three-hundred-foot-long tunnel under the I-294 and relaxed, drifting for almost half the distance before hearing the gravelly buzz of military tires through the concrete above.

  “Sure doesn’t sound like they’re slowing down,” Abe mused, looking up at the heavy arches. “We’re probably in the clear for now.”

  Ben squinted, staring past Abe at the far end of the passage. A lone figure stood there. Not moving – just standing. “Someone’s up there, Abe.” He felt a momentary flash of fear. Had the Army posted a man here to prevent escape? He had been counting on them to concentrate on vehicle traffic but it seemed they had anticipated his scheme. He took another quick look at the G-19 in front of him. Could he shoot an uninfected man if it meant saving his family?

  “Plague monkey,” Abe said quietly, his pilot’s eyes sharper than Ben’s.

  As they drew closer, the form began to shuffle down the bank and into the water. It was on an intercept course.

  “Lordy,” Abe muttered. “I think rot monkey might be a better name for them.” The figure was only twenty feet away by now, and his face was hanging from his skull as though made of filthy, melting wax.

  Abe was drawing back his paddle as they came even with the flailing form, but it went under just before he was about to swing. Bubbles marked where he stood. His fingers scratched along the bottom of the canoe as they passed.

  Abe looked back at Ben for a few seconds before shaking his head and settling back down to paddle. “I sure as hell hope that shot doesn’t go bad on me.”

  They passed out into the light and Abe stopped paddling again. “There’s a camp up there,” he said quietly.

  It felt wrong immediately. It was getting cold, but no smoke drifted up through the balding branches. He had seen the homeless campsite before, canoeing with Brendan and Lise.

  Maybe it was abandoned?

  A low growling drifted across the water, sounding like dogs fighting over meat. Both men watched silently as they ghosted past the tents and makeshift shelters, paddles forgotten. As they reached a large, open space in the center of the site, they could see five grisly forms on their hands and knees, tearing at a small body on the ground.

  “God!” Abe whispered. “I think they’re eating a dog’s corpse.”

  As if on cue, five pairs of rheumy eyes turned their way. The figures got up and started moving toward the creek.

  “Paddle,” Ben hissed, though the need to be quiet no longer existed. They both dug in and quickly left the disgusting scene behind as they shot past the rail bridge.

  “We’re heading for the left bank,” Ben wheezed as he turned the canoe. They pulled the small craft up on somebody’s back lawn and picked up their weapons.

  Ben led the way past a pool that had an expensive fence surrounding it. He shook his head. A fence to protect the owner from drowning liability.

  In a yard that backed on a fast-running creek.

  Somewhere nearby, a murder of crows fought over a choice find, croaks echoing loudly in the cold air.

  They passed between two houses and Ben stood in the wide, semi-circular driveway of the house that had the pool. “Pretty sure that’s the street I need.” He pointed to the small green and white marker at the intersection. They set off, turning left onto what proved to be the right street, looking around at the eerily quiet, seventies-era neighborhood of bungalows. Recycling and garbage bins sat open or lay on their sides amidst several days’ accumulation of blowing leaves.

  A car sat at an odd angle in the end of a driveway, its doors open and the headlights gleaming faintly. Ben looked inside and the keys were still there in the ‘on’ position. “Ran out of gas,” he said, standing back up to look at the house in front of him.

  “Gahhhh!” Abe’s exclamation was followed by a crunching sound.

  Ben spun around to see him backing away from a walking corpse in a charcoal grey suit with a fresh crease across it’s face. Abe brought his weapon up to his shoulder and fired a three round burst. In less than sixty milliseconds, the three rounds left the weapon and shattered what was left of the corpse’s brain, dropping him to the cold asphalt.

  “Son of a bitch!” Abe panted. “Where the hell did he come from? Must have been rooting through a garbage bin.”

  A loud thump came from an open garage down the street. Both men turned to search for the source.

  “They were drawn to us, back at the camp when you spoke,” Ben whispered. “I think they still have enough brain power to equate noise with food.”

  “Then we better get moving,” Abe finished for him.

  They set off at a jog, weaving around bins and abandoned cars. More lurching bodies started to show up, coming from open vehicles, doors or back yards.

  “This does not bode well for our return trip,” Abe panted as they picked up the pace by unspoken consent.

  When they were only a hundred yards from the house that backed onto Ben’s place, he realized that they had a problem. He looked back. Shit! “We can’t just run straight through or we’ll have at least thirty of the bastards trying to get in my house when I’m getting my
family ready to bug out.” He pointed his rifle to the right. “We’ll cut through the church parking lot and go up the next street. Maybe we’ll lose some of them.”

  They raced across the lot, rounding the corner to find at least twenty more animated corpses milling around the middle of the street in their best clothes. Ben and Abe skidded to a halt. Their pursuers were thirty, maybe forty feet behind them.

  “Hey! Up here!”

  Both men looked up at the roof of the large brick structure that jutted out into the parking area. A man was waving down at them and pointing to a set of doors at ground level. He looked back over his shoulder. “Open up – we got two live ones!”

  The gymnasium floor was covered with blankets and sleeping bags. A serving counter on the far side held coffee urns and the smell of food hit Ben with a shock. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. Aside from a packet of peanuts on the shuttle up to the hotel, his last meal had been sitting on the grill at Papa’s when the explosion destroyed his loft last night.

  “Ben?”

  He turned, his throat so tight he could hardly breathe. And there she was, standing at what must have been the entrance to the sanctuary. She had a look of utter amazement on her face. “Lise!” He ran to her and she met him in the middle of the large room, her hug so tight it hurt his neck.

  Funny how a little thing like a global pandemic can change your perspective, he thought wryly. He pulled back suddenly. “Brendan?”

  She smiled. “He’s playing with the other kids in a room down the hall.”

  “How did you end up here?” Ben looked back toward the kitchen again. “If we hadn’t been forced to detour, we would have missed you entirely.” He shuddered, thinking how he could have walked past this building and never found them.

  She gave him that sardonic look that he used to find so annoying a year ago. Now it made him smile. She looked at the G-19 hanging from his shoulder, then back up at her husband. “You mean you haven’t been to the house yet?”

  “No, we were trying to find a way there when someone on the roof called out to us.”

  She nodded. “You know, a couple of days ago, I would have said I had no use for churches, but this one really came through for us. Things changed so suddenly. When I woke up this morning, we were under quarantine, and the government was on every channel, telling us to stay in our houses.”

  She frowned at his shoulder as she talked. “They didn’t say how to reconcile ‘stay in your homes’ with ‘oh my God – looters are breaking down our front door!’” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe it – ten hours at the most and we had armed looters. I lowered Brendan over the back fence and we ran through the Guildersons’ yard.” She waved a hand around at their surroundings. “This was the first thing I saw, and the big sign out front said ‘Shelter here’.”

  She looked up at his face. “You’ve seen them, Ben? Those poor people who got hit with this plague? It’s faster than any infection anyone’s ever heard of – just hours and you start to fade.” Her eyes were moist. “We had to put a man out of here just an hour ago because he had the symptoms. His wife and children are with the pastor now…” She broke off in mid-sentence and just hugged him.

  Ben wasn’t quite sure what to do. He had planned to get to the house, inoculate Lise and Brendan, and then get them out. Now he was faced with a small community; one that had taken in his family and protected them. Then he remembered Dr.’s Brown and Riggs.

  And their blood type.

  “Hon, do you think we have some folks here with O-negative blood?”

  The question shifted her into doctor mode so seamlessly, she forgot to notice the weirdness of the question. “O neg is roughly six to seven percent of the local population and we have about sixty people here.” She furrowed her brow as she did the math. “Three, maybe four people might have it. Why?”

  Ben pulled out the small packet that Dwight had given him. “This is the only known cure. It’s based on a longevity serum that mutated and started this whole mess in the first place. We think it carries a one percent chance of mutating and causing the infection rather than stopping it, but it’s the only real chance anyone has. If you’re lucky enough to be in the ninety-nine percent, you can expect to live at least a thousand years. Brendan would likely live for at least six or seven thousand since his genes haven’t aged as much as ours.”

  Lise stared at her husband for a long time. “What?” She shook her head. “What the hell are you talking about? How do you happen to be standing here with ‘Humanity’s only hope’ only hours after everything fell apart?” She touched his face. “Ben, this has been rough on all of us, but we’ll get through this.”

  Oh hell, he thought. I should have expected this. She thinks I’ve lost it and who could blame her? How does a murder detective suddenly appear with a cure only hours after an outbreak like this? It all made sense to Ben, but he’d been there every step, heard the explanations. That’s it! The explanations.

  “Alright,” he allowed. “That did sound a little high on the nut-o-meter, so let me explain. I was investigating the murder of a researcher from Gaia Bio Design and I snuck aboard their orbital platform to try and get some answers…”

  “Yeah, that sounds a lot less crazy.” She smiled to take some of the sting from the words but she was clearly concerned.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t have a lot of other options because the government was trying to kill me…” Brilliant… You’ve just gone from ‘might be slightly disturbed’ to ‘confiscate belt and shoelaces’. Just tell her about the science stuff.

  “Alright, that didn’t help much,” he said, holding up a hand to ask for one more chance. “The guys at Gaia were working on reverse engineering the longevity of the Midgaard and it went horribly wrong for them. They were using a retrovirus to prep our genomes. Once we produce the necessary proteins, the organelles from the Midgaard would be able to survive in our cells. The retrovirus went haywire and started adding the genes into the organelles instead and activated a whole lot of unfriendliness.”

  Lise’s eyes narrowed. She stared for another long pause. “That was the most sense you’ve ever made, talking about biology.” She looked back down at the packet in his hand.

  “Look, Lise, I bet every time something massive happens, there’s some poor schmuck who got caught up in it against all odds and everybody thinks he’s nuts.” He held up the packet. “I need you to trust me on this. I’ve got enough for seven shots in here. That’s you, Brendan and whoever happens to have O-negative. The retrovirus goes dormant after a few days but it stays in the blood for a while. If we give it to the O-negatives, they can cut their hand and inoculate anyone. Their red blood cells survive the process to pass on the immunity.”

  That seemed to convince her. Ben was the last person she expected to hear this kind of stuff from and yet, he was making sense. “One percent chance?” She took the packet and opened it, heading for the counter at the back of the room. She pulled out the syringe. “Just the one?” She waved it in front of Ben.

  He nodded.

  “Gwen,” she said, turning to a young woman behind the counter. “Could you get me some boiling water, please?”

  “Sure thing, Doc.” The young woman flashed her a smile before turning to the stove.

  “I feel like a junkie,” Lise muttered as she drew a dose from the vial. She held it to a vein on the underside of her forearm. “Here goes nothing.” She slid it in.

  Or everything, Ben thought as he watched the plunger slide down.

  “Daddy!” Little Brendan came into the room in the middle of a hurricane of young children, shouts, squeals and angry retorts. He ran over and hugged Ben’s leg. To him, this was just a day of adventure, topped by seeing his father two days ahead of the agreed schedule.

  Ben rested a hand on his son’s head and looked up at Lise. She was gazing down at her little boy, fear and hope mingled in her features. “There’s no choice to make,” he said softly. “Nobody will escape this infect
ion. Sooner or later it’s going to wipe us all out unless we can spread the cure. This…” he stopped and swallowed hard. “This is the only chance he’s got.”

  Nodding, Lise turned to the pot of boiling water that Gwen had set on the counter. She popped the needle off the syringe and dropped it into the hot water. Gwen caught on immediately and turned to the counter on the far side, coming back with a set of tongs.

  “Mommy’s going to give you a shot, Bren,” she said with forced cheer as she fished out the needle. “It’ll keep you from getting sick!” There were tears in the corners of her eyes. She might be killing her precious little boy with this shot.

  “I’ll need to sit in your lap, Daddy,” he looked up at Ben with the solemnity that only a three-year-old boy can possess. “So you don’t get scared.”

  Brendan took the shot better than his parents, perhaps reluctant to show fear in front of his new playmates. When it was done, he had to squirm to get out of Ben’s arms. He raced off to join a small group pretending that a sleeping bag was a tent.

  It took a long time for Ben to get his emotions under control. Abe helped himself to coffee and a sandwich and moved a discreet distance from the young couple. Lise took over Brendan’s perch on Ben’s lap and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “He’s going to be OK, right?” she whispered.

  “He will,” he answered forcefully, as though he could make it true through sheer force of will.

  “Honey,” she said, still at a whisper, “who is that guy?”

  Ben followed her gaze and saw Abe, finishing off a sandwich. “That’s Abe Peters. He was one of the government guys trying to kill me so CPD could close out the Mortensen case.” He chuckled. “He’s had a change of heart.”

  “Just like that?” She lifted her head to look her husband in the eye. “He goes from your worst enemy to your best pal like flicking a switch?”

  “Keeping me quiet didn’t seem nearly so important once the plague got loose. Kind of like what Granddad used to say about flying those secret bombing missions in Cambodia. It was sure as hell no secret for the Cambodians.”