by Mark Wandrey
It took every boat he had available, and even then the tugs operating crew had to throw rafts over the side and jump for their lives as Jeremiah watched Angel One return to the depths with a loud sucking sound and leaving behind a huge swirling mess of flotsam and jetsam. A siren sounded and a Coast Guard ship came careening around the jetty, lights flashing.
“God, what else?” Jeremiah asked the skies as the coastguard began deploying lifesavers and all other manner of disaster response equipment. A couple of frogmen jumped over the side as their ship came abreast of the now sunken Angel One. “Oh, don’t do that,” he moaned.
It was almost noon before the very pissed Coast Guard Lieutenant-Commander left his office in OOE’s San Diego office. There had been complaints, admonitions, and threats of prosecution as well. All in a day’s work, he grumbled. Then someone knocked on his door. “For the love of God, fuck off?”
“You might want to talk to me,” came the voice of Alison through the door.
“Why, so you can bust my balls some more about my not following your scientific procedures?”
The door opened and she came in. Jeremiah made a mental note to remember to lock it when he wanted to hate himself in peace. “No, because you want to see this data.” She held a nondescript SD data chip in her hand. He felt a glimmer of hope.
“Is it good?”
“We’re all getting Nobel Prize kind of good,” she said and his eyes got wide. He took the chip and plugged it into his personal computer. A self-activating PowerPoint came up on the huge 80” LCD next to his desk. “As much as it pains me to admit it, you were absolutely right about the machine.” She gestured at the display that showed a series of graphs.
“Like we showed in the bench test, it has the ability to neutralize gravity, which is really annoying because we don’t really even know how gravity works.”
“Thought you physicists had it all figured out with that Hardon Collider and stuff?”
“Hadron Collider,” she corrected with a chuckle, “I don’t even want to think about what you called it. And no, that sort of particle physics often creates more questions than it answers. I’m an electrical engineer, that’s what you hired me for on the shuttle out there,” she said and gestured to where it still sat suspended from its harness, ready to be mated to a booster. He’d never been happier she’d talked him out of using it in the experiment. “Theoretical physics is more of my hobby. It’s hard to find a paying job in the field, especially when you can’t piss standing up.”
“I never cared how you piss as long as you produce results.”
“That’s where industry kicks academia’s ass regularly,” she said. “But building spaceships isn’t as sexy as giving the universe a colonoscopy.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “So what does all this mean? It looks like lift statistics but there are no aerodynamics.”
“Exactly,” she said. “We knew it neutralized gravity from the bench tests, but we couldn’t figure out how to apply that other than as an anti-gravity generator. Now granted, that alone would make us all as rich as Bill Gates, but there has to be more. The thing came out of a spaceship, right?”
He nodded. “Yes, and a spaceship with no obvious motive power.”
She also nodded. “So everything pointed to this being both lift, and thrust. So, how to get it to behave? We’re sure there were no data inputs. Well, if there were we didn’t know how to recognize them. All we had were those power inputs. Stood to reason they were the source of data control points as well.”
“But nothing worked at the low power settings,” he said.
“Right, and nothing was working on the high power either, as I kept telling you.”
“So what happened to make you suddenly go all Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?”
“One of the morons you gave me told a dirty joke. Never did find out what it was. He was so pleased with himself, he slapped the table and hit the computer controlling the power input.” He tapped his keyboard and the screen changed to show four power grids moving across the screen, time stamps indexing their movement. Set in a window on the bottom was another graph, this one with positive and negative values. The trace stayed on zero. Suddenly one of the four input power traces began to fluctuate up and down in a graceful but quick waveform.
“He changed it from DC to AC?”
“Bingo,” she said, shaking her head.
“But we tried that in the lab,” he complained.
“We tried minor square wave alternating power. You have to realize we were working with such small power levels, that it’s harder to do this sort of thing. The higher the power, the more wiggle room you get to mess with frequencies. This input was just under 200 kHz. Once I got everyone dried off back in the lab I hooked it up to a bench rig again and started pumping power into it. We were sure it wasn’t going to explode anymore.”
More graphs appeared and she examined them for a minute. “The waveform controls the intensity of the effect. Actually, after we figured that out we also realized you can input higher voltages as well. Orders from 440 volt, 880, 1760,” she began ticking off on her fingers until he held up a hand at 7,040 volts. She shrugged. “Like I said, we don’t know what that does, I was a little worried we’d lift the building off its foundation.”
“I appreciate your restraint,” he said.
“Using 440, we were able to register 2,000 tons of force at 600 kHz. We couldn’t go any higher.”
“Why?”
“We broke the meter.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Jeremiah, this thing eats some real power. Way more than a couple solar cells kind of power. But you can lift a battleship into orbit with it, if you wanted to. Whatever force it exerts is transmitting through ferrous metal. We have to experiment to see how far the field extends past that metal, and the best way is to attach this thing to it, but that’s just fiddly bits.”
“Holy fucking shit,” he said.
“Yep. Oh, we’ve finished preliminary examination of the ship’s power source. Capacitors.”
“Must be some big ass capacitors,” he said.
“They’re some kind of carbon nanotube capacitors, but very stable. I think we can replicate them.”
“So that little ship had no power generation capacity?” he asked.
“Nope, just capacitors.” She shrugged. “Very little life support too.”
“And with a drive like that?”
“Regardless,” she said, “it looks like some kind of lifeboat to me.”
“Lifeboat,” Jeremiah repeated, then shifted gears like he often did. “How long before you have enough data to mount another large scale test?”
“Well, Angel One is at the bottom of San Diego harbor…”
“I have the fines from the Coast Guard to prove it,” Jeremiah agreed. “I was thinking of mounting it in sometime more appropriate...”
* * *
The sun was just climbing over the horizon when Tobey stopped the vehicle next to a long dead tree. Kathy had been fighting extreme exhaustion, sitting in the passenger seat with a semi-automatic pistol in her lap and watching the unchanging landscape moving past them.
“What’s wrong?” she half mumbled.
“House ahead,” he said and pointed. Even from several hundred yards away she could see it was mostly dilapidated. She could also see the half dozen cars and trucks parked around it and a curl of smoke coming up from its chimney. “People camped there.”
“I see,” she said and tried to sit up straight. “What are you going to do?”
“Well, that’s the old Hughes estate,” he explained, “When Dan Hughes died ten years ago, the family sold it and the acres to my father. So that’s my land, actually.”
“When did we cross the border?”
“Last night after you fell asleep for a few minutes. I didn’t want to wake you up.”
Kathy nodded in understanding. “You want to know what’s going on.”
“
Exactly,” he said and put the machine in gear.
It only took a minute to approach the house. As they pulled to a stop, the front door opened and a pair of men came out. One held a baseball bat, the other a machete. Tobey swung out of the machine, his HK91 slung cross body, barrel angled downward, hand holding the pistol grip with finger extended along the side of the trigger.
“Quién eres?” asked the man with the machete, the older of the two.
“That’s my house,” Tobey replied in English. “Habla Ingles?”
“Si,” the man replied, “I am a little rough, though.” He lowered the bat and gestured to the other man to do the same. “We are sorry, we needed a place to rest.”
“Who are you and why are you here?”
“We are fleeing from the enfermo.”
“Sick?” Tobey asked.
“Si, they are enfermo, and out of their minds.”
“They kill everyone,” the younger man said, his English easier to understand. “Some have seen them eat people.”
“Let’s go inside and talk,” Tobey said and slung the rifle. “My friend here is very tired and needs to sleep.”
Kathy didn’t know how she ended up in a dusty bedroom but suddenly she was being laid down on a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow under her head. “I’m fine,” she complained weakly. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“Get some sleep, I’ll bring you up to date later.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” she asked, suddenly feeling vulnerable.
He put the handgun he’d loaned her next to her head and put her hand on it. “You’ll be fine,” he assured her and left. She lay there for a moment, listening to the voices somewhere else in the house. She struggled mightily with herself for several long moments, then succumbed and dropped into a deep, dreamless slumber.
Kathy jerked away suddenly. Completely disorientated, she fumbled for and found the handgun before she realized she was in the room where Tobey had left her. She sat up and breathed hard. Had she been dreaming? She couldn’t remember. The light coming from the filthy old window was at a different angle. She had slept for some hours, but didn’t have any idea how many. She hadn’t checked her watch before falling asleep.
She rolled up off her sleeping bag and got to her feet, looking around the room. She could see several others curled up under blankets, snores coming from them. She went to the door and left as quietly as possible. Down the stairs she went into the living room and found Tobey sitting in a dusty armchair talking to the two men who’d met them on the porch.
“Up already?” Tobey asked when he spotted her.
“How long was I out?”
“Only five hours. You want to get some more sleep?”
She shook her head no and walked over next to him. There was a little white gas stove set up on an end table, a pot on it was giving off delicious coffee smells. The younger man saw her looking at it longingly and got up to pour her a cup.
“I don’t want to drink your coffee,” she complained.
“This is your husband’s home,” he said, “it is the least we can offer.”
“We’re not married,” Tobey said. “She’s just… a good friend.”
The older man looked from him to her, cocked an eyebrow and a wry smile grew on his face. “Friends,” he said, with a nod.
“What’s the story here?” Kathy asked her, friend.
Tobey relayed the story. The people in the house were survivors of scattered settlements east of Monterrey. Several days ago the military had come through ordering everyone to evacuate to the east. Many left immediately, but being naturally suspicious of the military they headed north. They’d gotten word that many of those who fled to the east were now out of contact. The military had lost control.
He continued, saying how some of the groups had encountered ‘enfermo’ there, as the man called them. Running fights had been fought. Those with cars and gas fled, others tried to run. More died. What was in Tobey’s old second-hand farmhouse were the remnants of one of those groups. Roughly three dozen families. Despite being a massive old farmhouse, it was literally jammed with almost a hundred people.
“Mexico appears over-run,” Tobey said, “and they’re heading north. You’ve always known more about this than you’ve said. Will you explain it to me now?”
“I need my gear,” she said. Tobey took her over by the door where she found the contents of the trailer as well as her pack. Inside the pack she removed her precious case full of SD cards and her ultra-compact laptop. She booted up the machine, noting it still had 92% power after sitting unused for days, and quickly found the file she was looking for. “I recorded this from a drone in Mexico only a week ago.”
After the video played out she talked about her detainment by the government, questioning, and ultimately her fleeing from custody and arriving at his farm.
“Holy shit,” he said as she finished up. “So you went down to get first hand footage hoping it would… what exactly?”
“I didn’t think that far in advance,” she admitted. “It’s a journalist thing.”
“So our government doesn’t know what’s going on?”
“I don’t think so. They’re actively trying to cover it all up, including spiking stories and arresting journalists that release those stories against orders.”
“Fuck me,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Kathy looked at the two men who’d watched and listened to the entire interplay. “So you were in a village when all this started?”
“Si,” the older man said. “My name is Enrico. Enrico Vetares, at your service, Seniorita.” He got up from the old couch long enough to affect a slight bow. “And this is Manuel, my son.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Manuel said with a smile. “Though I wish under better circumstances. I admit I believed I recognized you when I first saw you. You did a story for GNN about drug-resistant tuberculosis coming up from Mexico. It was rebroadcast on Telemundo. It was quite fair, and very accurate. Our country has many problems with diseases made much worse by the drug lords.”
Kathy had removed her small interview camera from the bag and sat it on the floor next to her, flipping it on and pointing it at Manuel & Enrico without them realizing what she was doing. A skill born through long hours of interviewing subjects. She listened quietly until it was set up and operating. “Do you think it began in Mexico?” she asked.
“I do not think this is the case,” Enrico said. “These sorts of things start slowly. Besides, it appeared to come from the north and moved south.”
“Moved south?” Kathy asked, “Are you sure?’
“Yes, I heard this too,” his son agreed.
“Are all the, enfermo as you call them, the same?”
“Do you mean killers?” Enrico asked. Kathy nodded her head. “Yes.”
“It is so,” Manuel agreed with his father. “And they are…”
“Cannibals,” Tobey said, speaking for the first time. It was a statement though, not a question. Both men nodded their heads.
“People said that early they would just bite and claw,” Enrico said. “Then it got worse. Mucho, mucho worse.”
“Yes,” Manuel agreed. “And it spread slowly. The military controlled it, set up road blocks. The news said there was nothing to worry about. Then, a few days ago, it just seemed to explode. It was everywhere.”
“It went away for a while,” someone said. It was an older woman, her hair white and thin. Her English was even better than Manuel. Kathy gestured and she came over to the couch where the camera could see her. “The enfermo were taken by the government. To care for them,” she said. “But we never heard from them again.”
Another woman spoke in rapid fire Spanish. Manuel translated without being asked. “Our village was having a feast. You know, to celebrate that everything was going to be alright.” Others were coming over upon hearing the conversation. The woman looked at the floor when she talked, tears running down her face. “We butchere
d a steer. It was cooking on a spit over a fire. The men were drinking tequila and slicing off bits of meat to share. Talking loudly and joking the way men do. Then, they became ill, and then started acting strangely, and then they were enfermo. It happened very fast.”
“How fast?” Kathy asked.
“From the time the first got sick? Maybe a half an hour? Perhaps less. Who is to know?”
Slowly at first, then with more urgency, people came forward to tell their tales. Tales of villages found dead, others with nothing but butchered bodies, and still more empty with no signs of life. Food still sat on the table, hot water boiled on the stove. One man talked about how the Army came and killed everyone in his village while he and his daughter watched in horror from a nearby vineyard. The girl just held him, her eyes wide but not seeing.
It was several hours later when Kathy finally managed to end the impromptu interviews. Tobey carried her pack for her as they went upstairs and back into the room she’d been sleeping in. It was empty now. “The master’s room,” he told her. “We’re too crowded. I tried to insist on sharing, but none of them would have anything to do with it.”
“What are you going to do with them all?” she asked.
“Is that the reporter asking?”
“Sort of,” she admitted. “A hundred illegals smuggled across the border during a plague outbreak? That wouldn’t be looked upon to fondly by INS, I suspect.”
He looked at her like she’d said something funny, then shook his head and spoke. “Help them, of course. Regardless of how they got here, they’re on my land now, and I don’t let guests get eaten.”
“They weren’t your guests when they broke in here.”
“They are my guests now,” he said with finality. “And that’s that.”
She sat back on the sleeping bag and he stood there for a while, just looking out the window and pulling his lower lip. His eyes appeared to be gazing a million miles away.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking how this is all going to end.”
“You didn’t seem to be this big of a thinker when I met you back at that gas station,” she said.