Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  They’d enclosed the level that once held the oil platform’s dining hall and offices with glass, and segmented it into project labs. As she walked in, the survivors turned to look at her. There was a mixture of shock, pain, and anger on their faces. Outside, the U.S.S. Boutwell pulled away from the rig. Foam roiled behind her transom as they applied power, and she began to sail away.

  “I know some of you are mad,” she said and instantly identified who would cause trouble. “And I know others are scared. The preliminary data we’ve gotten from the infected is enough to scare the shit out of anyone, even me.”

  “Why didn’t you ask them for help?”

  The man asking the question was Adam Viterri, the only surviving Frenchman on the team. Two of his fellows went to the sharks after they’d gone insane.

  “You really think that would be a good idea?” she asked. He nodded emphatically. “So, we call them and say a fucking zombie plague brought by pirates attacked us? Sure, let’s do that. This is a biological research installation involved in work many consider to be on highly questionable ethical grounds. Tell me, Mr. Viterri, what do you think would be the result of that? Do you think we’d ever see the light of day again?”

  “It isn’t our fault,” he responded, sounding doubtful now.

  “Maybe they’d figure that out, after a few years of research. We’d have to spend that time in a Level Four biological containment facility, of course.”

  “Unless they shelled the installation and burned it instead,” another scientist said. He’d worked for the CDC years ago, and his words sent a chill up her spine. Dumping the bodies had been his call.

  “Look, we’re all on edge here, but we need to work on this. We’re not in some B movie on the Syfy channel. Zombies don’t exist! Some sort of pathogen is at work here, and this is the best group of scientists to figure out what’s going on. Even with our numbers reduced, we’re better than a lot of what you’d find at universities on the mainland.” She saw some heads nodding in agreement.

  Lisha talked for a few minutes more, answering questions as best as she could and trying to alleviate some of their fears. She knew it didn’t get them all the way there, but it had to be enough. As the meeting broke up, the last two senior technicians followed her to the rear of the lab where she entered her code and opened the door.

  Inside was a large storage room that now served a different purpose. They had hastily installed a Plexiglas shield and half wall, and carefully sealed them. Biological filters kept positive pressure in the front part of the room on the side opposite the wall. As Lisha closed the door, she could hear the growling on the other side of the shield. By the time she turned around, the occupant was throwing himself against the protective wall like a football player trying to break a block.

  “He never stops,” one of the technicians noted and reached for one of a pair of protective suits hanging from the wall. The other tech donned the second suit without comment as Lisha opened a medical bag. Inside was an air gun, darts, and a tranquilizer.

  “We better get to work,” she said as she loaded the gun. Grant Porter drooled down the front of his blood-encrusted clothing and stared at her with bloodthirsty rage as he continued to bang on the glass with bloody hands.

  * * *

  Jeremiah gritted his teeth at the insistent hammering of the helicopter’s rotors as they cut across the hill country of South Central Texas. The 30-year-old Bell Jet Ranger was one of a fleet of four he’d managed to buy with a check that wouldn’t cash, and a promise that was worth the same amount. Now he was praying he had scored on this mission, or he was truly screwed.

  “Sector 11 is clear.” The noise-cancelling headphones relayed a distant voice so clearly it was like having someone whisper in his ear.

  “Acknowledged,” he said and made a note in the tablet locked into a frame. The rear of the chopper was his command center. They were looking too, but he ran the operation from there. He’d originally planned on five copters with one as a dedicated command center. The leasing agent had balked at five. “Switch to Grid #19.”

  The distant pilot acknowledged, and Jeremiah turned back to the screen. His magnetometer-equipped copters had covered more than two-thirds of the map.

  Two hours later, with the afternoon sun closing in on the horizon, Jeremiah was considering how to best wrap up operations for the afternoon, and dreaming about a cold beer, when they struck pay dirt.

  “Copter Two, we have a signal.”

  Jeremiah looked up in surprise. The vision of a cold beer went poof, but the possibility of a paid gig expanded greatly. “Relay coordinates,” he ordered, and the data arrived. The coordinates led to Big Bend Park, within shouting distance of the Rio Grande River.

  “The signal is strong,” the pilot told him. “We’re vectoring in on it now.”

  “Roger that,” Jeremiah said and tapped the pilot on the back of his helmet. The pilot glanced back at him, and Jeremiah pointed emphatically in the general direction of the southern horizon. The pilot had been listening in on the channel, and he nodded in understanding, shaking his head at the lack of comms from his boss.

  In a few minutes, they were flying in formation with one of the other aged Jet Rangers, circling a copse of stunted trees near a low hill. The park’s taller hills were just off to the south as was the river that divided the United States and Mexico.

  “Do you have a precise location, Copter Two?” Jeremiah asked over the radio.

  “I don’t think he has to,” Jeremiah’s pilot said.

  Jeremiah looked up and saw the pilot pointing to the left. There, about two hundred feet below them, he saw several shattered trees, their branches thrown about. Jeremiah cocked his head trying to make sense of it until the copter came around, and he saw what had caused it. A black scorch mark on the ground cut right through the trees and came to a stop against the largest in the group.

  “I think we have a winner,” Jeremiah said. “Set her down,” he ordered.

  The two helicopters settled down on either side of the copse, just far enough away to avoid low branches that might have interfered with the delicate machines. The other occupant of Jeremiah’s craft, one of his hazmat technicians, was the first out. He wore low-level protective clothing and a clear plastic hood over his head, and he held a long tube on a pole as he stepped away from the copter toward the scorch marks. On his back was a sensitive instrument taking constant air readings. It could detect a hundred dangerous gases and most types of radiation, and it provided a running data track of all the recorded information.

  “You picking up anything, Alex?” Jeremiah asked from the sealed confines of the copter. Decades of working around space programs and the potentially hazardous fumes the associated craft could produce had given him a healthy respect for such things. While this was only supposed to be an unusual asteroid, he wasn’t taking any chances with his own skin.

  “I’ve got some rare gases,” the man said over his suit’s radio as he examined his instruments, “and a little ionizing radiation.”

  Jeremiah felt his sphincter tighten. “H-how much?”

  “Just a little, Boss,” Alex said and began walking toward the scorch marks in the desert ground. As he approached, he slowed and used the probe to sample the air and ground. “Less radiation here,” he said he said as he got closer. “The sensor is registering some gases it can’t make sense of.”

  “What does that mean?” Jeremiah asked.

  “If the computer can’t tell, I sure can’t.” Alex moved much more slowly as he stepped onto the scorch marks and examined them. “Whatever hit this was seriously fucking hot,” he said. “There is some vitrification here.”

  Came in pretty damn hot, Jeremiah thought. He pulled up the file his friend, Theodore from NASA, gave him on the meteors. They had tracked this one coming in on a 23-degree angle. With an angle that steep, it should have plowed pretty much straight down. He leaned as far as he could see out the helicopter window. The ground was a little angled
here, though not much. He guessed the angle of impact at 5 degrees, no more. Either NASA was completely wrong, or the object radically changed course just before impact.

  “There’s something at the base of that tree,” Alex announced as he moved along the gouge the meteorite made on impact.

  Jeremiah felt himself getting excited and wished they’d landed a few yards to the left, then he could have seen along the crash line. Alex disappeared to investigate the tree. If the meteor was there, he would get paid. Then he remembered the other part of the recovery mission and keyed his mic. “Copters Three and Four, vector in on us and start a spiral search grid. There isn’t much concealment around here for miles in any direction. See if you can spot this Ken Taylor guy. Redeploy drones, too.” When he looked back, Alex was walking back toward the copter with his helmet under his arm, looking at a tablet. Deciding it must be safe, Jeremiah popped the door and met him. “What do you have? Is the meteorite there?”

  “Frankly, I’m not sure what’s down here,” Alex explained. “But, there are no contaminants I can detect. There’s a dead fox and a lot of dead little animals, birds, and stuff. Come and look.”

  Jeremiah followed. He waved to the crew of the other copter, and they began jumping out to join him. They heard approaching helicopters, and a little UAV quadcopter shot overhead.

  Just as Alex had said, the sandy, rocky soil crunched in places indicating the heat of the meteor impact had fused some to glass. The meteor had also shattered a couple of small trees less than six inches in diameter, further testament to how powerful the crash was.

  As they followed the burned debris trail, Jeremiah noted the dead animals, and wondered what killed them. Alex had detected no elevated radiation, after all. The burned gouge in the earth came to a stop against the trunk of a large tree, more than two feet across. By the time the thing contacted the tree it was almost a foot underground, and still the impact had managed to mostly dislodge the root mass and shift the tree nearly two feet away from the impact. The tree’s trunk split almost in two and burned from the heat of the meteor. It reminded Jeremiah of some lightning strikes, with kinetics thrown in for good measure.

  “It’s down there,” Alex said, and pointed with a still-gloved hand to the disturbed earth at the base of the burned tree. “Magnetometer peaked there. It’s giving off a little radiation too, but not much,” he added at a look from his boss. “We’ll be safe for hours unless it goes up a lot.”

  Jeremiah keyed the Bluetooth radio in his ear. “Any sign from the drones of our missing scientist?”

  “Not yet,” replied the drone operator aboard one of the circling copters. “We’re spiraling outwards.”

  “Concentrate south,” he told them. “He was more than five miles south of here when he was attacked by that pig.”

  “I should just head south?”

  “No,” Jeremiah said instantly, “I want a sweep here. If you see anything out of the ordinary, report it immediately.”

  “You got it, Boss.”

  Jeremiah turned to his team, now six strong, standing there taking in the surroundings. One knelt next to the desiccated corpse of the fox Alex found. Jeremiah glanced at it. The thing appeared deformed. Maybe it had been nearby when the meteor hit? “Well, let’s see what’s down there,” he said. “Unship the tools, and let’s excavate the site.” The men looked at each other and shrugged. He’d said it like he meant to help, but everyone knew that hands-on was not something Mr. Jeremiah Osborne practiced. Despite a couple of delays, though, all his checks had cashed so far. With a mutual group of shrugs, everyone headed back to the copters to grab the tools.

  * * *

  Jeremiah fished the last cold bottle of water from the cooler, which they’d filled with ice hours ago. Now cold water sloshed around inside. It didn’t occur to him to ask if anyone else wanted it. His waning fortune had funded the expedition, after all. Besides, there were cases of bottled water in the cargo compartments of the copters, though likely they hovered around a hundred degrees per bottle. As he hiked back to the excavation, he drank lavishly and poured about a quarter of it over his head. Although it was spring, the dig site was hot as hell.

  Several of the men looked at the last cold bottle of water and cast him baleful glances before going back to their digging. The meteor was a bit over a foot under the rock-filled soil and reaching it looked to be a major job. There was some disturbance of the ground, right over the center of where the meteor likely ended its path. Alex noted before the digging began, saying it looked like something had already tried to dig it up. Jeremiah desperately hoped it was still there.

  Shortly after the men went to work, Jeremiah accessed the satellite network and fired off an email to Theodore at NASA, letting him know they’d likely found the meteor Taylor had been looking for, but not the researcher himself. The other copters and drones had pushed the search out to more than a mile now, and there was still no sign of him.

  One of the shovels went clink!

  “That sounded metallic,” he said as he walked closer to look. The hole was wider than it was deep to reduce the chances of missing the meteor. They’d started in the center, where Alex noted the disturbed ground, and worked their way outwards. They knew from briefings by NASA that it could be quite a bit smaller than expected. The man shoveling put the tool aside and dropped to his knees in the dirt, using his hands to push dark soil away as everyone crowded around him. When his hand uncovered a shiny piece of metal, he stopped in confusion.

  “What the fuck?” one of them asked.

  “Funny meteor,” another said.

  “Alex,” Jeremiah yelled, “bring your detection gear.” The man nodded and ran back to the copter where he’d stored his gear, returning in less than a minute to hold the probe over the hole. Everyone could hear the crackle of the Geiger counter, and the entire group fell back as if the hole had started spewing cobras.

  “It’s elevated,” Alex announced unnecessarily. He adjusted the instrument. “Looks like about 22 millirems per hour.”

  “How much is that?” Jeremiah wanted to know.

  “If you live at sea level, you get about 36 a year.”

  “Shit,” someone gulped.

  “Don’t be a pussy,” Alex chastised him. “We absorb about ten millirems on a coast-to-coast flight. So, it’s high by comparison, but as long as you don’t lie down on it for a nap, you should be fine.”

  “Okay, let’s see what this is,” Jeremiah said. The men looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Come on guys, Alex says it’s safe.”

  “No,” one of the pilots said, “Alex said the thing is giving off twice as much radiation as a cross-country flight every hour.”

  “So, hurry,” Alex chided.

  Jeremiah looked them over and sighed. They were forcing him to do something personally distasteful. With a sigh, he walked over and took a shovel from one of the men and started awkwardly digging.

  “Jesus, boss,” one of the men said, taking the shovel from him, “give me that before you hurt yourself.”

  Because it was emitting active radiation, he had them work in shifts to minimize their exposure. “Must be a satellite,” one of the men said as a curved length of shiny metal began to emerge.

  “No way,” another said, “a satellite would never survive reentry.”

  “Maybe it’s a nuclear missile, you know, a MIRV warhead like in that movie?”

  Once again, the work came to a screeching halt.

  “It’s not a nuke,” Jeremiah assured them. “NASA would have known if it was.” They looked at him with searching expressions. Luckily for him, Jeremiah was a far better poker player than he was a ditch digger. In a minute, they were back to it, though he noticed they were being incredibly careful not to touch the thing with their shovels. After the fourth shift of digging, they had completely revealed the object. To Jeremiah’s chagrin, the damned thing was cylindrical, like a nuclear missile might look, and there was a hatch-like opening on the side facing
them.

  “Boss?” asked one of the men.

  “Alex,” Jeremiah said, gesturing at the thing.

  The man moved forward, the wand of his instrument held out like a defensive talisman against the unknown, and examined the readout in his other hand. “There’s almost no radiation from the thing itself,” he announced. He lifted up the hatch and inserted the tip of the probe into the opening. “Zero inside. There’s some residual gas the computer can’t identify, but it’s not flagging it as hazardous.”

  Declared safe by their “expert,” Jeremiah moved in to examine the thing in more detail. It was bigger than he first thought, almost two meters long and less than half that wide at the rear. It actually wasn’t cylindrical so much as a flattened cone. The point was still stuck in the ground. He poked at some of the soil the men had removed when they’d dug around it. The dirt had fused, and now resembled solidified lava.

  “Damn thing came in hot,” he remarked. Hot enough to melt rock? Without thinking, he grabbed a shovel and excavated some more of the nose. Although the object hadn’t burned, the impact had blunted it. He put the shovel aside and knelt next to it, looking at it closely. The thing, constructed of seamless metal, cast a yellowish glint in the dying light. There was no sign of any rivets, welds, or heat distortion from carbon scoring. “No effects from reentry,” he said to himself.

  “What does that mean, boss?” Alex asked.

  “Well, NASA said it came in at more than 20 degrees, going better than 38,000 miles per hour, or about 11 miles per second. Even though it only spent a minute or so in the atmosphere, it would have kicked up unbelievable thermals.”

  “Like a meteor burning in,” one of the men said.

  “Bingo,” Jeremiah said without looking up. He finished his examination of the exterior, then tried to get a look inside. The opening was too small to admit his head, and was full of dirt. The pieces he could see looked like they had coatings of plastic or carbon fiber. And just like the exterior, there was no sign of heat damage from the insane reentry. He didn’t want to turn this into a high school ballistics lesson, so he kept the part that bothered him the most to himself. It might have hit the atmosphere at more than 10 miles per second at an attitude of 23 degrees, but it had hit the ground at less than five degrees.