The Tide (Tide Series Book 1)

by Melchiorri, Anthony J

  “You mean that shit’s on board?” Mark cried out again, ignoring formal rank-order respect. Others clamored around him, their faces turning red with anger. Their words began to drown out Dom’s thoughts.

  “Quiet!” he yelled. “Quiet! I’m being open with you because you all deserve that much. We’re in unknown territory, but each of you accepted that risk the day you boarded the Huntress.” He stretched his arms to encompass every crewman and crewwoman. “You all serve a vital role in protecting our friends and families, along with our nation, from biological and chemical weapons. And our most recent mission is a testament both to our dedication and to the frightening enemy we face each and every day. Our enemy isn’t defined by a single nation or terrorist organization; we’re fighting against the unethical, corrupt use of weapons and technologies perverted to harm those we hold dear at home and across the globe. If you would like to renege on your commitment to this ship and the rest of the crew, feel free to do so. I’ll be happy to sign your relinquishment papers after we’re done here. But not until we’re sure we aren’t carrying any biological agents.”

  The crew sat in stunned silence.

  Renee stood at attention. “I’m behind you, Captain.”

  “Same here,” Glenn said, joining her.

  The rest of the crew followed suit, their voices raised in support. Eventually Mark O’Malley did too.

  Again, Dom held up his hand and drew in a breath. “Remember, the world may not know about your service, but I hope you all know that your work here could save it.” He took a second to scan individual faces and then said, “Dismissed.”

  The crew filtered out of the mess hall and into the ship’s corridors. Thomas stayed behind and waited for the last crew member to leave. He approached Dom and placed a hand against the bulkhead. “You forgot to mention when we’ll be holding Brett’s burial at sea. Bad luck to delay a sailor’s funeral.”

  “I didn’t forget. We haven’t scheduled services.”

  Thomas raised a skeptical eyebrow. “And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, you aren’t going to.”

  “Not any time soon.”

  “The man’s gone,” Thomas said. “What are we waiting for?”

  “I’m afraid Lauren’s going to need to observe him for a while.”

  “Observe him?” Thomas’s voice rose. “KIA or not, he’s a human being, not a science experiment.”

  Dom straightened, but he kept his voice calm. “I’m well aware. But we need to keep his remains quarantined. Lauren needs to determine whether or not he was exposed to the agent responsible for the Skulls.”

  “You’ve got your damn samples. Isn’t that good enough?” Thomas’s brow creased. He pulled a cigar from his front pants pocket and rolled it back and forth between his fingers. “Let the poor man rest his soul.”

  “He came in direct contact with the creatures,” Dom said, his voice sharp. “I get where you’re coming from, but we’re dealing with unusual circumstances.” He took a step forward and narrowed his eyes. “I don’t want to have to deal with more funerals at sea because Lauren’s team missed out on a vital piece of data.”

  Thomas clenched his jaw, muscle tightening under his five o’clock shadow.

  “I know it doesn’t feel right,” Dom said when Thomas didn’t respond. “But if Brett was infected with something, we’ve got to understand what it does to the human body and how we might stop it.”

  The red drained from Thomas’s face, and he nodded reluctantly.

  “If we can study this contagion, we might be able to ensure the rest of the crew doesn’t suffer. Hell, maybe even the rest of the world.”

  “I know you’re right. I know what you’re doing is logical. But it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel okay.”

  Dom waited for him to continue.

  “I just wanted to let you know I don’t like it.”

  Dom nodded. “I understand. That’s why I keep you around. To question me, to make me think about my actions. This time, I know what we’re doing is necessary.”

  “As long as you note my objection,” Thomas said.

  “Objection noted. Anything else before I head to medical bay? I want to see if the man Renee’s team recovered has anything to say.”

  “Nothing currently.” Thomas tilted his head to the side, gesturing toward the mess hall exit. He stuck his unlit cigar into the corner of his mouth. “Mind if I join you for that chat?”

  “Be my guest,” Dom said. They walked, side by side, into the corridor.

  “Dom! Urgent call!” Chao waved, his head poking out of the electronics workshop. “Meredith’s on the line!”

  ***

  Lauren Winters examined the round plastic dishes holding the samples of yellow tissue she’d isolated from Scott Ashworth’s wounds. In each dish, pink liquid—cell media—nourished the cells in the samples. She placed a dish under an inverted microscope and pressed her biohazard suit’s visor against the eyepiece. The tiny chunks of supposed scar tissue seemed to have grown.

  “This is odd. Take a look.”

  Peter took his turn on the microscope. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this looks like calcified tissue indicative of—”

  “Bone growth,” Lauren finished for him. “But the strange thing is, I don’t see any osteoblasts.”

  Peter pressed his visor against the scope’s eyepiece again. “You’re right. Those cells would be visible at this magnification. They’d be easy to identify. For that matter, I don’t see any cells at all.”

  “So I’m not going crazy?”

  “I want to say no, but maybe we both are.”

  “For their sake, I want to hold onto my sanity a bit longer.” Lauren glanced through the window separating the patient quarantine chamber from the laboratory, where Miguel stood talking to Scott behind the glass.

  “Jesus, I can’t believe both of their suits were compromised.” Peter shook his head. “You think they caught whatever it is?”

  “I hope not, but if they did, we still have no idea what the symptoms would look like—or when they’d hit.”

  “At least Miguel still looks healthy,” Peter said.

  Lauren agreed; Miguel certainly appeared ruddy and animated. “But Scott’s still lethargic, and he’s complaining of joint pain along with a killer headache.”

  “Yeah, I wish I knew how to explain all those symptoms.”

  “Right? I didn’t find any evidence of cranial contusions or trauma. And in spite of everything he says is bothering him, he hasn’t said a word about the wounds in his abdomen we stitched up.”

  Peter’s mouth dropped into a frown behind his visor. “His condition makes our work all the more important.” He pulled up the results of their virus and bacteria screening assays. “Most of the microfluidic experiments and sequencing experiments are still running. We’ve still got a slog of tests to identify what might be in the samples from the IBSL.”

  Lauren glanced over Peter’s shoulder at the scrolling lists of ongoing and upcoming experiments. “It’ll take the better part of this day and the next before half the initial tests are completed.” In the cramped laboratory setup aboard the Huntress, space was at a premium, and Lauren didn’t have access to the sheer inventory of equipment like at her old job in the CDC. “And we don’t have any positive IDs yet?”

  “Nope. Whatever might be in those samples doesn’t match any known bacteria or virus so far.”

  “You’ve checked it against botulism, rabies, anthrax, Ebola, neurotropic drugs, everything?”

  Peter shook his head again, jostling his suit. They’d already tested for a variety of contagions they hypothesized might be part of the agents from the rig. Any substances that could be used in a biological weapon or to turn people into killing machines were potential candidates.

  “It’s all too strange.” Lauren looked into the scope again. The granular tissue filled her view. “This calcification isn’t just happening spontaneously. Something must be causing this gro
wth.”

  “Whatever it is, we need to identify it soon.” Peter nodded toward Scott. “Because I don’t like the way Scott’s wounds are shaping up.”

  Lauren nodded. They’d found more of that granular yellow tissue in the stitched-up lacerations. She feared it might be one of the symptoms of the Skull infection. Yet the regrowth of tissue hadn’t reached nearly the extent it had when they first brought him into surgery. An idea struck her.

  “When Scott first came in here, this calcified tissue had essentially healed his wounds, right?”

  “I can see those wheels turning. What’s on your mind?”

  “The time between Scott’s injury and the time he came into the OR was no more than an hour.”

  Peter’s eyes widened.

  “And it’s been several hours since we operated on him,” she continued. “Yet the tissue has only grown back to what I’d estimate as a quarter or so of what it was before.”

  Peter picked up her train of thought. “So maybe, just maybe, something we’re doing, something we gave him is slowing the growth of this mystery calcification.”

  “I think so,” Lauren said. A victorious grin spread across her face. If something they’d done was slowing the progress of this calcified substance, it meant they might be slowing whatever caused the abnormal bone growth. Slowing its progression meant maybe they could stop it. If Scott and Miguel were indeed infected, her team might at least be a step closer toward a cure. She glanced into the microscope again.

  “Even if we did slow its progress, we still need to get to the root cause of these spontaneous formations,” she said as she twisted a knob on the side of the scope. Another lens clicked into place and increased the magnification. With another flick of a button, the image on the scope shone on a computer monitor. Across the display, branching nodules grew out of the yellow tissue-like formations. Tiny pores dotted their surface. “There’s something we’re missing.”

  Peter squinted at the screen. “Up close, this looks familiar. Almost like coral.”

  Lauren was ready to dismiss his statement as nothing more than a casual observation until she considered it more seriously. The vast array of colorful and intricate hard coral formations that made up reefs were not just pretty rocks. Rather, the bulk structure of coral was constructed by a colony of tiny polyps. These polyps created their own exoskeleton by secreting calcium carbonate.

  “Interesting idea,” she said.

  “What?” Peter asked. “You think this is some kind of mutant coral?”

  “No, of course not. But maybe something living, even if we can’t find it, is responsible for what’s going on here.” She magnified the image as best as she could, but like before, she found no cells, much less polyps in the pores of the calcified granule samples.

  “Nothing,” Peter said. “At least, nothing we can see yet.”

  “What I would give to have an SEM for this shit.” A scanning electron microscope, or SEM, would enable her to reach a magnification of almost 250 times greater than the meager light microscope they used now.

  Peter laughed. “Good luck using that at sea.”

  “No kidding,” Lauren said. The bulky, sensitive hardware required for an SEM wouldn’t survive the harsh environment of an ocean-going lab. Still, the idea that something invisible to their microscope was responsible for the calcification they saw in the culture dish didn’t seem entirely unreasonable. That gave her another idea. “There are plenty of bacteria too small to see on our scope, right?”

  “Yes, but we’re already running microfluidic assays to detect them.”

  Lauren nodded. “Right, but we’re looking for bacteria that have previously been studied. Bacteria that scientists have documented in the lab. What if this is something different?”

  Peter’s suit rustled as he walked over to the clear partition separating the lab from the isolation ward. He pressed a hand against it and stared at Miguel and Scott. “If we’re dealing with an unknown bacteria, something that creates those calcified formations, and something potentially responsible for turning people into those Skulls...” He stopped and turned around. “If that was what those people on the IBSL were developing, I hope to God it went down with the rest of that platform.”

  -17-

  Dom leaned forward and strained to hear Meredith’s voice amid the static. “Meredith, this is Dom. You have a SITREP for me?”

  “That’s right,” Meredith replied. She summarized the past couple days she’d spent on the run from the agency. In turn, Dom told her what they’d discovered since recovering the mangled data and biological samples from the rig.

  “What did you say this project was called?” Meredith asked.

  “Amanojaku,” Chao Li said.

  “What exactly is a—what did you call it?”

  Chao looked up for permission. Dom gestured for him to answer her.

  “An amanojaku is a demon-like creature from Japanese folklore, a small oni, or spirit, that causes people to act on dark, evil desires. From what my team’s gathered, the biological agent under development at the rig is supposed to do just that.”

  “So have you uncovered what this amana...amajuka”—Meredith hesitated—“Have you uncovered what this Oni Agent does biologically?”

  “Not yet, I’m afraid,” Chao said. “But if the Oni Agent, to use your term, is what turned those people into Skulls, it causes rage, violence...and hunger.”

  “I see. Whatever this Oni Agent is, it’s spreading,” she said. “People have found mutated bodies all along the Eastern seaboard.”

  Dom wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. “You mean dead Skulls?”

  A crackle of static drowned out her words. Thomas and Dom shared a nervous look. Chao’s fingers tapped at his keyboard until Meredith’s smooth voice replaced the noise.

  “Yes, Skulls, whatever you want to call those people-turned-monsters. Several were found washed up across the Atlantic shore.”

  Samantha caught Dom’s eyes, her thin eyebrows curved upward. He understood her skepticism immediately. “Several of those things jumped into the ocean after us,” Dom said, “but there’s no way the currents carried them so quickly to shore. They couldn’t have beaten us back to the States.”

  “It’s not just the States, Dom.” She paused. “But you’re right. These bodies aren’t recent. My guess is they’ve been dead for a while. I’d also be willing to bet the washed-up corpses were casualties from when the IBSL went dark. Hell, there could’ve been a lifeboat full of people trying to escape that turned into those creatures.”

  “And what’s the government saying about the bodies?” Dom asked.

  “They aren’t saying much. At first they tried to write it off as a hoax.”

  “If someone at the CIA was keeping it under wraps from you,” Dom said, “then it goes without saying that most of the federal government probably doesn’t know the lab, much less these Skulls, even existed.”

  “That’s all true. The president declared a state of emergency. It’s not just—”

  Dom’s heart stopped when static jumbled her words. Chao’s fingers clacked across the keyboard as he recovered her transmission.

  “—in other countries too.”

  “Can you repeat that?” Dom asked.

  “It’s gone worldwide. People going crazy in Mexico City. A bunch of tourists wreaking havoc in Rome. Kids attacking their parents in Brazil.”

  Dom, Thomas, and the three members of the electronics workshop remained silent.

  “Huntress, do you still read?” Meredith asked.

  “Copy,” Dom said. “You suspect all these events are connected with the Oni Agent?”

  “Seems like it. I’m looking forward to hearing more about your team’s analysis to confirm this is the case, and in the meantime, I’m headed to Fort Detrick.”

  “Hold on,” Dom said. “You’re on the run, and now you’re going to jump straight back into the Feds’ grasp? You’re our landside link. If you go dark again, we lose
what little ties we have to the US government.”

  “Dom, we’re already shut out from the government,” she reminded him. “I think all this has gone way over our heads. I want to feel things out, see if I can’t be of some help and—”

  Dom cut her off as he understood better what she planned to do. “You want to see if we can be of some help.”

  “Your team is potentially the best-equipped group in the world to study the Oni Agent. You have live samples, and you’ve recovered data from the rig. You’re trained for action against biological and chemical warfare threats, and I think this is about the biggest threat we’ve faced.” She paused. “That being said, if there’s any group on US soil that can help protect the population against this threat, they’ve got to be at Fort Detrick.”

  “I would assume so, but what if the Army—and not just the CIA—had a hand in keeping the IBSL secret?” Another realization sprung up in Dom’s mind as he considered the destroyed oil rig and its former inhabitants. “And let me guess: if you want us to keep studying the Oni Agent, that means you don’t think they have a cure.”

  “Correct,” Meredith said.

  “If there was a cure—if the CIA or anybody else who knew how to reverse the effects of the Oni Agent—we wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate an oil rig filled with monsters, would we? The chaos in the US would already be contained.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, I think the IBSL researchers were playing with a caliber of biological weapon they had no business messing with.”

  “Then you might as well get your ass to Detrick,” Dom said. “I want to know what those people started cooking to stop the damn Oni Agent.”

  “That makes two of us,” Meredith said.

  Once again, Dom pictured the reigning chaos as people around the world succumbed to the Oni Agent. His thoughts turned toward Kara and Sadie, hundreds of miles away. “Meredith?”

  There was a pause and flicker of static that told Dom she was waiting for his question.

  “In your message, you mentioned you’d owe me a favor if we took your IBSL mission.”