by Weston Ochse
I noted that he said mostly, which meant there was a margin of error. I wonder what happened then. Did the cure just not work, or did it kill? I guess I was about to find out.
Phillips jointed in the conversation, talking to me as though he believed I could understand him. “It’s all in the streptomyces within the fungus. Pre-invasion streptomyces produced over two-thirds of the clinically useful antibiotics of natural origin, such as neomycin and streptomycin.”
Okay, well, I knew what an antibiotic was, which made for one word in that sentence.
“But it’s a totally different matter with this fungus. In Ophiocordyceps invasionalis, the streptomyces have the characteristics of Parastreptomyces abscessus, which was a novel organism not yet studied but almost always fatal. So instead of providing benefits, the streptomyces of the invading fungal agents bind with white blood cells by replicating phosphatidylserine-binding proteins found in the blood cells. By binding, they inhibit the white blood cell function, thus allowing the spores to grow unabated within the host.”
Alright, I was pretty much lost in the Latin there, but I knew what a white blood cell was, so I was more or less on top of the explanation. The fungus cripples white blood cells, so the white blood cells can’t attack the fungus. I didn’t even know white blood cells worked against fungus—I thought they were just for viruses and bacteria and stuff—but there you go.
“We’ve found a way to attack the streptomyces using a combination of invermectin, ZMAPP and broad spectrum antibiotics. If we can stop the immunosuppression, then your own body can fight the infection. So we’re going to dart you up and get you into a medical suite we’ve created.”
About damn time. Whatever all those things were.
But wait a moment. Did that mean that I’d lose my ability to communicate with Michelle?
Michelle, are you still there?
I am.
I never did tell you that I love you.
Don’t get mushy on me, soldier.
Do you... can you still feel?
Yes. I can still feel.
And what do you feel?
That I’ve been robbed of a time when we could be together. But it wasn’t Mr. Pink who robbed us. It was the Hypocrealiacs. She paused for a moment, and in the silence I could hear so much unspoken sentiment. Listen, Ben. I have to tell you before they dart you. Sebring is creating more of us. No one knows but me and you. He’s captured Sandi and he’s looking to capture you. It’s the PTSD. It’s always been the PTSD. The chemistry in our brains makes being an HMID easier. Don’t go back to Los Angeles. He’ll know and he’ll get you and make you into something like me.
If it means we can be togeth—
Now you are being a stupid grunt. You fight your way, I’ll fight mine. And Mason?
Yes.
I do—
I felt the dart hit me.
Fade to black.
The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by human parasite.
Richard Preston,
The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
MY BODY SHUDDERED and fought. I’d wake for brief periods where pain ruled every haggard breath, then thankfully fall back into blissful, dreamless darkness. Cold and hot. Hot and cold. Twice I woke screaming, only to have arms push me down, voices speak to me as I fell a thousand miles into my fever. Then just as suddenly as the dart had put me out, I was awake, shivering on a narrow bed as light streamed through a high, barred window. When I reached down to pull up the sheets I’d kicked away, pain jabbed across my shoulders and neck. I craned my head and saw several sets of stitches on my left shoulder, probably where they’d removed the ascocarps.
It struck me that I could once again control my body. I held out my right hand and stared at it as I wiggled my fingers. Then I touched my shoulders and my neck, feeling stitches that even now hurt deliciously. I touched my face, feeling the stubble there.
“Hello,” I said to no one at all, grinning as my voice filled the small space. Then I sang, “I’m a little tea pot, short and stout. This is my handle, this is my spout.”
My voice was back.
I sat up in bed, wrapping the sheet around my midsection as I stared out the window. Never had the desert of Death Valley looked so good as at that moment. I tried to get up and sat down again as a sudden wave of dizziness gripped me. I let it subside, before standing more slowly this time, letting my legs and head come to a better understanding. I examined my room. It was a regular private hospital room, most likely in the base hospital. It had a bathroom and a locker. Beside the bed was a chair.
In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked haggard and wan. I’d lost weight. My cheekbones stood out on a gaunt face. I could see my ribs. But contrary to my appearance, I felt healthy and hale. The stitches would heal. My hair would grow back. Was the infection truly over? Had they really cured me? It still seemed too good to be true.
I washed my face and hands, then brushed my teeth. From the locker I drew a set of MultiCams. I was busily lacing up my boots when there came a knock at the door.
“Come in.”
Ohirra stuck her head tentatively into the room, then upon seeing me came in all the way. Her face glowed with pleasure. “They said you were awake. How do you feel?”
I stood and threw my arms around her. She accepted, a little surprised, then put her arms around me. I gave her a resounding hug, appreciating the feel of someone else. When I released her, she crossed her arms protectively. I laughed. I’d forgotten for a moment how reserved she was.
“I feel incredible. I—I thought I was a dead man.”
“We all did.”
“Then how?”
“Dupree. You have him to thank for this. Without his notes... he had it almost figured out. All Phillips and the others had to do was fill in the gaps.”
“Dupree.” I remembered how the needle moths had taken him down. “He was a good man. I should have been more careful with him.”
“That’s the Mason I know. Always taking the blame.”
“No, really. I...” I sighed. “How long have I been out?”
“Since we brought you in when you were infected, or since we started the cure?”
“Uh... both?”
“Okay, but don’t freak out, okay?”
“Why would I freak out?”
“We brought you in one-hundred and thirty-seven days ago.”
“What? That’s more than four months! Are you serious?”
She nodded. “The cure took three weeks.”
“Three weeks,” I whispered. “Four months.”
“They’ve turned the basement morgue into a Level Four Containment Zone. Olivares sent out hunter teams to bring back more infected. They’re figuring out how to speed up the cure. You and Ethridge were the first two on the planet to get cured.”
Ethridge. He must have been the other one inside the cage with me. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. Woke up two days ago. We’ve all been wondering when you’d be up and around.”
I chuckled and sat on the side of my bed, feeling a little dizzy. “I guess I’m a slowpoke.” I reached out to balance myself, feeling suddenly like I was going to keel over.
“Easy, Mason. You’re weaker than you think. Your body has fought off an alien infection and you’ve been bedridden for twenty-one days.”
“When can I get out of here?”
“Phillips wants to clear you, then you’re on light duty for the next week. After that, we have a mission.”
“Am I going back to L.A.?”
She nodded.
I remembered what Michelle had said about not going back, but I had to. Sandi had been taken by Sebring. I couldn’t leave her.
“Can’t we go any sooner?”
Now it was Ohirra’s turn to laugh. “In your condition? You wouldn’t make it a mile before you passed out. Give it a week, hero, then we’ll see. This mission’s too important for us to
send you in before you’re ready.”
“So you waited for me?”
“This one’s all about you. So take the rest of the day, then tomorrow we want you to come in for a mission debrief.”
Now I was really intrigued. But Ohirra had been as forthcoming as she was going to be. I had to wait another hour and a half before Dr. Phillips saw me. Half an hour after that I was walking out of the hospital and into the bright, clear California air. All around me was the hustle and bustle of a busy military base. Trucks, soldiers, even a line of tanks. Overhead a Blackhawk buzzed in for a landing. So much life. So much activity. So much the opposite of my last four months. It still boggled me that I’d been in the grip of the infection for so long.
I stopped cold as a voice rang in my head.
Possessed Girl calling Dumb Grunt. Can you hear me, over.
I concentrated and tried not to smile. Dumb Grunt to Possessed Girl, I read you Lima Charlie, over.
There you are.
I couldn’t help grinning. I just woke up and I—wait a minute. Didn’t you say that we were communicating using beta waves because of the infection?
Turns out that your DNA has changed slightly. You’re no longer strictly human.
What does that mean?
The infection... changed you.
What can I do? Leap tall buildings in a single bound? Fly?
Nothing like that. They think some of the effects reported might be permanent. For instance, Ethridge reported seeing red halos around the infected.
I saw those too.
We need to test and see whether or not you can still see them and whether or not the infected react to you in a similar way.
You mean by not attacking me?
Exactly.
Then I walked, and we talked. Even as I did and noted how weird our relationship was becoming, I realized that I didn’t care. I’d wanted to be with Michelle from the first moment I saw her on the plane to Wyoming. I thought she’d been taken away from me forever. But now, at the end of the world as we knew it, we’d found each other again, and we were together...
Sort of.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Robert Heinlein
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
BACK IN MY hooch, I busied myself filling out a requisitions form so I could replace my missing equipment. I’d hold onto it until I knew the parameters of the upcoming mission, but the very act of filling out the form helped ground me in the comfortable bureaucracy of the military. When I was done, I squared away my area, before heading out to get a weapons issue. I wasn’t comfortable without them, even if I was surrounded by several thousand armed OMBRA military men and women. On the way back with my preferred P226 and HK416, I finally realized that everyone was saluting me. I’d noted that they were doing it before, but thought it must be someone behind me. I’d been given a field promotion to lieutenant before the last mission, but this was really the first time I’d been in a garrison area since that promotion. When I finally began to return the salutes, it felt like I was pretending at being something I wasn’t. I told myself I’d get used to it. Part of me actually believed it.
When I got back, Olivares was sitting on the edge of his cot. He’d removed his shirt and was unlacing his boots.
He nodded to me. “’Sup, patient zero.”
I nodded back. It was actually good to see him.
“I’d heard you recovered.” He removed one boot, then started working on the other. “Glad to have you back in the land of the living.”
“Glad to be back.” I sat down on my cot and began unlacing my boots. “You going running?”
He nodded again. “What was it like?”
“About the most terrible fucking thing that’s ever happened to me. I was trapped. The spores had complete control over me.”
He looked up sharply. “You mean you knew what was happening but you couldn’t stop yourself?”
“Yeah. Fucking horrendous.”
He shook his head as he removed his other boot. Then he moved to change into shorts and a t-shirt. “Don’t let any of the judies or joes hear that.”
“Why not?”
“Right now the fungees are mindless zombies to them and no one hesitates to shoot. If they realize that there are actual human beings trapped inside the bodies, they might hesitate. And that could kill them.”
I shucked off my boots and shrugged out of my uniform. He made a good point, one that I had better remember, especially since I was due to lead another team soon.
I put on my own PT uniform and we headed out into the cooling day. At six in the evening the temperature was down to a tolerable ninety degrees. I didn’t know how far I’d be able to run, but I needed to get back in shape as fast as I could. Thankfully Olivares liked to run at a slow pace. Not so thankfully, he liked to do it for several miles.
“How was Vegas? Meet any hotties?”
He rolled his eyes. “It ain’t your momma’s Vegas anymore. Nothing but fungees and a hive.”
“What’d you do?”
“That was months ago, you do know that, right?”
“For me it was yesterday.”
“Pink had me escorting an HMID to a paramilitary team he has in place. Fucking nasty business. Since then, I’ve had to do it three more times.”
“Did you know who it was... who they were?”
“The HMIDs? No. We never looked inside the black box.”
“What about in your dreams? They can ride your theta waves.”
He eyed me, then grunted an acknowledgement. “Maybe that’s why we had nightmares every damn night.”
We ran for a few minutes in silence.
“Where’s the line, do you think?” I asked.
“What line?”
“The line we shouldn’t cross. The line where we lose our humanity.”
“You’re talking about the HMIDs.”
“I am. You called them nasty business.”
“They are. If I didn’t know they were helping, I’d crash the whole system. But it’s one of the only things allowing us to fight what the Hypocrealiacs are doing to our planet.”
I sidestepped a dead rattler that had been trying to cross the road; some dumb grunt had run it over rather than letting it live. “Is it fair, though?” I asked.
“They sign up for it.”
“Brother, they sign up but they don’t know what they’re getting into.” I remembered Michelle’s command to killmekillmekillmekillme. She seemed to be of two minds now. When she couldn’t communicate with me she wanted to die, but now that she could, all she wanted was to talk.
I stopped running.
My old friend Jon Carte had a saying when it came to girls. They tell you what they think you want to hear. Listen to what they say and believe the opposite.
It was a touch sexist, but could what Jon had said be true of Michelle? Was she telling me what I wanted to hear so I wouldn’t come to her rescue? Do that terrible thing that she’d earlier begged me to do?
Olivares swung back by. “Come on, we’ve barely gone a mile.”
I started running again. I ran the conversations Michelle and I had shared over and over in my mind. They’d been too happy, and in retrospect, almost forced. As my feet fell one after the other, I realized I’d been played. I ran another mile, then stopped again. I waved for Olivares to continue. He gave me a worried look, then continued on.
Hands on my hips, I waited for my breathing to return to normal. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but shouting her name out loud seemed over the top. So instead, I closed my eyes and just concentrated on Michelle’s name, throwing all my effort into it, blocking out everything else, making the sound of it my uni
verse.
The result was instantaneous.
Whoa there, fella. You don’t have to scream.
I wasn’t sure how to get your attention.
That’ll do it. I bet every HMID in a three state area could hear you.
About the HMIDs...
I received silence in return.
I remember when you begged me to kill you.
More silence.
What happened to that? Do you still want me to kill you?
A moment of silence then,
Why... are you offering?
What is it you want? I’m confused. Before you were invading my theta waves, telling me to kill you and giving me these God-awful nightmares. Now it’s like we’re two teenagers separated by a telephone.
If you mean do I like being an HMID, the answer is complicated. I want to be able to touch you. I’d love to taste food again or even walk. But I have so many connections, so many eyes from which to see, it’s as if I’m the virtual version of the black vine, creeping out of the cities. I feel... I feel...
What do you feel?
I feel everything. I feel... useful.
Are you sure the word you’re looking for isn’t used?
Are you sure you just don’t want someone to put your arms around?
There are plenty of young gals here in Death Valley. I’m sure one or two might want a piece of the Hero of the Mound. And yes, I’d like to wrap my arms around you again. But what I want to know is, do you want to be a woman or a machine?
Can’t I be both?
I don’t know. You tell me. Can you?
A long silence was finally followed by a single word.
No.
Then which is it?
Why are you making me choose?
I’m not making you do anything. That’s what this is about—our own humanity. It’s about personal freedom. If we lose that, we lose everything. If we don’t worry ourselves about it, then why in the hell are we fighting?
Don’t you think that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?
Of course I do, Mr. Spock, but if this wasn’t something you signed up for and you want out, then you should be allowed to leave.