by Mark Wandrey
Back inside the main building she was met by one of the few surviving research assistants. “Have you confirmed the number?” she asked.
“Eleven, Doctor, including you and me.” the man said after consulting his tablet.
She nodded and sighed. Seventy-two men and women had been on the installation before the insanity began. Fifty-one people she’d known and worked with for almost a decade were gone. And, forced into it by the panic call from a scared tech to the coast guard, they’d all gone down the trash chute to the sharks. “You deserved better than that,” she silently told their ghosts. But, considering what she’d found…
“Is the team in the lab?”
“Waiting for you,” he said. She nodded and he climbed into the lift with her. Like most of the rest of the facility it stank of bleach. They’d used almost five hundred gallons of the stuff, working in respirators to wash down the halls. Lisha told the Coasties that it was because of their research work. Luckily for her, he’d bought it.
The main lab, the level that had once held the oil platform’s dining hall and offices, had been enclosed with glass and segmented into the project labs. As she walked in the survivors all turned to look at her. There was a mixture of shock, pain and anger on their faces. Outside, the USS Boutwell was just finishing coming about. Foam roiled behind her transom as power was applied and she began to sail away.
“I know some of you are mad,” she said and instantly saw who would cause trouble. “And I know others are scared. Even the preliminary data we’ve gotten from the infected is enough to scare the shit out of even me.”
“Why didn’t you ask them for help?”
It was Adam Viterri, the only surviving French on the team. Two of his friends had gone to the sharks after they’d went insane, along with his girlfriend.
“You really think that would be a good idea?” she asked. He nodded emphatically. “So we call them and say we were attacked by some kind of a fucking zombie plague brought by pirates? Sure, let’s do that. This is a biological research installation involved in work many consider to be on highly questionable ethical grounding. Tell me, Mr. Viterri, what do you think will be the results of this? 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 while they figured that out, of course.”
“Unless they just 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 the edge here, but we need to work on this. We’re not in some B-rate 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 badly reduced we’re better than a lot of what you find at universities on the mainland.” She saw some heads nodding in agreement.
Lisha talked with them for a few more minutes, answering questions as best as she could and alleviating 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 what had been a large storage room that now served a different purpose. A Plexiglas shield and half wall was hastily installed but carefully sealed. Biological filters kept positive pressure in the front part of the room on the other side from 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 then reached for one of the protective suits hanging from the wall. The other tech began donning the other suit without comment as Lisha opened a medical bag. Inside was an air gun, darts, and tranquilizer.
“We better get to work,” she said as she loaded the gun. Grant Porter drooled down his dry blood encrusted clothing and stared hatred at her through the glass as he banged on it with bloody hands over and over again.
* * *
Jeremiah gritted his teeth at the insistent hammering of the helicopters rotors as they cut across the hill country of South Central Texas. The thirty year old jet Ranger was one of a fleet of four he’d managed to get with a check that wouldn’t cash, and a promise that was worth what the check was. Now he was praying that he scored on this mission, or he really 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. The leasing agent had balked at five. “Switch to Grid #19.”
The distant pilot acknowledged and Jeremiah turned back to the screen. More than two thirds of the map had been covered with his magnetometer equipped copters.
Two hours later, the afternoon sun closing in on the horizon, Jeremiah was considering how to best wrap up the operations for the afternoon and thinking about a cold beer when they struck pay dirt.
“Copter Two, we have a signal.”
Jeremiah looked up in surprise. The dreams of a cold beer went poof, but the possibility of a paid gig expanded greatly. “Relay coordinates,” he ordered and the data arrived. It was actually in the 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 man 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 coms 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 much taller hills of the parks southern region were just off to the south as well as the river dividing the United States and Mexico.
“Do you have a precise location, Copter Two?” Jeremiah asked over the radio.
“Let me see if I can lase the target,” the other pilot said.
“I don’t think he has to,” Jeremiah’s own pilot said.
Jeremiah looked up and saw the pilot in broken formation and circling tighter, banking the craft heavily to the left and pointing out his window. There, about two hundred feet below them, several of the little trees were shattered, 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 again 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 way 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 had low level protocol protective clothing on, a clear plastic hood over his head and was holding a long tube on a pole as he stepped away from the copter and towards the scorch marks. On his back was a sensitive instrument taking constant air readings. It could detect a hundred dangerous gases, most types of radiation, and provide a running data track of all the recorded information.
“You picking up anything, Alex?” Jeremiah asked from where he was still sealed in the copter. Decades of working around space programs and the potentially hazardous fumes those craft could produce ha
d 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 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 towards the scorch marks in the desert ground. As he approached he slowed and used the probe to sample the air and taste at the ground. “Less radiation here,” he said he said as he got closer. “The sensor is getting some gases it can’t make sense of.”
“What does that mean?” Jeremiah asked.
“If the computer can’t tell, I sure can’t.” But Alex moved much more slowly as he stepped onto the scorch marks and examined them. “Whatever hit this was fucking seriously hot,” he said. “There is some glassification here.”
Came in pretty damn hot, Jeremiah thought. He pulled up the file his friend Theodore from NASA gave him on the meteors. This one had been tracked coming in on a 23% angle. That steep it should have plowed pretty much straight in. He leaned over 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 as 5%, no more. Either NASA was completely wrong, or it 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 had made upon impact.
Jeremiah felt himself getting excited and wished they’d landed a few yard to the left, then he could have seen along the crash line as Alex disappeared from view 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 mike. “Copter Three and Four, vector in on us and start a spiral search grid. There isn’t much concealment around here for a mile in every direction. See if you can spot this Ken Taylor. Redeploy drones too.” When he looked back, Alex was walking back toward the copter with his helmet under his arm and looking at a tablet screen. 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 there,” Alex explained. “But there is no contaminates that I can detect. There’s a dead fox and a lot of dead little animals, birds and stuff. Come on and take a look.”
Jeremiah paused long enough to grab his walking stick, legacy of a trick knee, and followed. He waved to the crew of the other copter and they began jumping out to join the group. The sound of more approaching helicopters was getting louder and a little UAV quadcopter shot overhead.
Just as Alex had said, the sandy, rocky soil crunched in places as a sign that some had been fused to glass from the heat of the meteor impact. Whatever it was had shattered a couple smaller trees less than six inches in diameter, further testament to how powerful the crash had been.
As they followed the burned debris trail Jeremiah noted the dead animals, just like Alex had described, and wondered what killed them. The man 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 had come in contact with 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 direction of the impact. The trees truck was almost split in two and it had burned from the heat of the impact. It reminded Jeremiah of some lightning strikes, only with kinetics thrown in for good measures.
“It’s down there,” Alex said and pointed with a still suited gloved hand to the disturbed earth at the base of the burned tree. “Magnetometer’s peaked at that point there. It’s giving off a little more radiation too, but not much,” he added at a look from his boss. “We’d 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 then, “he was actually more than five miles south of here when he was attacked by that pig.”
“Want I should just head south?”
“No,” Jeremiah said instantly, “I want a sweep here. Anything out of the ordinary report immediately.”
“You got it, Boss.”
Jeremiah turned to his team, now six strong standing there taking in the surroundings. One was kneeled next to the desiccated corpse of the fox Alex had mentioned. 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 tools and let’s excavate this 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. But despite a couple of delays to payday, all his checks had cashed so far. With a mutual group of shrugs, everyone headed back to the copters to gather tools.
* * *
Jeremiah fished the last cold bottle of water from the cooler that had been filled with ice hours ago, now just cold water sloshed around. It didn’t occur to him to ask if anyone else wanted it. His waning fortune had funded this expedition. Besides, there were cases of bottled water in the cargo compartment 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. Despite it being spring, the dig site was hot as hell.
Several of the men looked up at him with the last cold bottle of water and cast him baleful looks before going back to their digging. The meteor was at least a yard under the rock filled soil and it was turning into a major job to reach it.
Shortly after the men went to work Jeremiah got on the sat network and fired off an email to Theodore at NASA to let him know he’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 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 knew from briefings by NASA that it could be quite a bit smaller than you would expect. The man on the shovel put it aside and dropped to his knees in the dirt, using his hands to push dark soil aside as everyone crowded in 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 whole. Everyone could hear the crackle of the Geiger counter and the entire group fell back as if the hole started spewing cobras.
“It’s elevated,” Alex announced rather unnecessarily then adjusted the instrument. “Looks like about 22 millirems per hour.”
“How much is that?” Jeremiah wanted to know.
“Well, 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 10 millirems on a coast to coast flight. So it’s high by background comparisons, but as long as you don’t lay down on it for a nap you should be fine.”
“Okay, let’s see what this is,” he said to the men, who to the last, just looked at him. “Come on guys, Alex says it’s safe.”
“No,” said one of the pilots, “Alex said that 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 his hand into doing something personally distaste
ful. 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 and took the shovel from him, “give me that before you hurt yourself.”
Because it was emitting active radiation, he had them work in shifts, two on and four off every ten minutes. “Must be a satellite,” one of the men said as a curved length of shiny metal began to emerge.
“No way,” another said, “satellite would never survive reentry.”
“Maybe it’s a nuclear missile, you know, a MIRV warhead like in that movie True Lies? It was pointy and like that.”
Once again the work came to a screeching halt.
“It’s not a nuke,” Jeremiah assured them. “NASA would have known that.” They all 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 there were being incredibly careful not to even touch the thing with their shovels. After the fourth shift of digging, it was completely revealed. To Jeremiah chagrin, the damned thing looked almost just like that nuclear warhead from True Lies. The only difference being the pointy end was somewhat melted, and there was a hatch-like opening on the top side.
“Boss?” asked one of the men.
“Alex,” Jeremiah said and gestured at the thing.
The man moved forward, the wand of the instrument held out almost like a defensive talisman against the unknown, examining the little readout in his other hand. “Almost no radiation from the thing itself,” he announced, then inserted the tip of the probe into the opening. “Zero inside. Some residual gas the computer can’t identify, but it’s not flagging as hazardous.”