The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  JASON PARENT

  The Apocalypse Strain

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  Chapter One

  Come closer, Papa.

  “Repeat last transmission,” Sergei Kobozev said into his helmet’s comm system. “Sebastian? Was that you? Over.”

  Sebastian’s voice came in loud and clear through the built-in speaker beside Sergei’s ear. “I didn’t say anything. Over.”

  “Oh…sorry.”

  Closer, Papa. Don’t you remember me? Don’t you want to see me?

  Sergei flipped off his comm and froze. “Who’s there?” The crisp air was silent and still, dead except for the sound of his breaths humming against the fishbowl enclosing his head. That sound increased in frequency. His body trembled. His heart thudded louder and louder in his chest.

  “That voice…. It can’t be.”

  A wave of nausea came over him, and he stumbled forward, bracing himself against a boulder jutting out of the frozen tundra. He took deep breaths, trying to calm his nerves and his stomach. Retching inside his helmet was high up on his list of unpleasant occupational hazards, having experienced it more than once during launch simulation and antigravity training. Even in his thermal linens and wind-resistant, temperature-controlled suit, Sergei could feel the bite of the cold, somehow more vicious than it had been throughout the starless night.

  Yes, Papa. Closer.

  Sergei jumped, his heartbeat kicking up another notch. He looked left and right, turned completely around, but saw no one. He scanned the vast Siberian ice field that was the Kolyma Lowlands. Had his visor not fogged up, he could have seen a mile in every direction.

  He could see well enough. No one was nearby.

  A joke? If so, someone would pay dearly for it.

  He studied the other members of his team, toiling in the distance: six astronauts and astrobiologists drilling into the Siberian permafrost, a bunch of morons preparing for a mission to Mars’s polar caps that would never come.

  Not in his lifetime, anyway.

  Sergei couldn’t tell one member of his team from another in their blue gender-nondescript spacesuits. Except for Alfonse. He was a foot taller than the rest of them and easily twice as brawny.

  And twice as full of himself. Not to mention his wicked sense of humor. I wouldn’t put it past him to place some kind of recording into my comm or tamper with its filters. Alfonse never took anything seriously unless it could improve his rank, pay, or station. God, if he is made captain of our crew, I’ll….

  He slapped his thighs. I’ll do nothing. He sighed. Alfonse wasn’t to blame if Sergei was losing it.

  But that didn’t mean he could forgive Alfonse or any of the others if someone was acting out a malicious prank. Sergei’s past was no secret. He squinted across the flatland at each of his colleagues, men and women who were supposed to be his peers, his comrades even. They worked at various stations, none paying him any mind, one of them possibly playing him for a fool.

  Any one of them could have been responsible for the tasteless joke, so-called intellectuals as ignorant as he had been before he learned what truly had meaning in life, before—

  It’s me, Papa. The voice resonated through his head again. It’s not a joke. Don’t you remember my voice? Don’t you remember me?

  Sergei whacked his fist against his helmet, attempting to bite on his knuckle to quell the shriek rising in his throat. He pursed his lips, and his cry, stifled, passed softly between them, a low whimper that trickled into the laughter of a madman.

  The voice had seemed much closer, all around him, on top of him – clear and unmistakable. Soft and soothing, barely more than a whisper, it did not belong to Sebastian and definitely not to Alfonse. The voice was female, but it did not match that of either woman on his team. And it hadn’t come through his helmet’s speakers but rather out of the air inside his helmet itself. He knew that voice, and that knowledge caused his teeth to grind and the hairs on his neck to stand on end.

  The voice of a little girl.

  You do remember! Oh, Papa, it’s me. It’s really—

  “Enough!” Sergei shouted as he tried to click off his comm again before realizing he already had. He rubbed a gloved hand over the outside of his helmet where the condensation was thickest. It didn’t wipe away. Why is it foggy?

  The little girl he could not see began to cry. But it is me, Papa. Please, talk to me. Don’t leave me. Not again, Papa. Not again.

  Sergei pretended that he couldn’t hear the voice, that he hadn’t yet lost his mind. “Maybe I’ve been out in this cold for too long. Is this…hypothermic shock? Fuck!” He turned and headed toward his team’s small encampment.

  You can’t leave me, Papa. More sobs rang through Sergei’s ears. You can’t….

  “I must!” he shouted even as he stopped moving. He shook his head and sucked up the snot running down to his lip. Tears stung his cheeks as they iced over. “You’re not real. You can’t be real.”

  I am real, the little-girl voice said sharply. It softened. It’s me, your little ballerina. Don’t you remember?

  “But….” Sergei opened and closed his fingers. Anger, fear, outrage, frenzy – all welled up at once inside him and boiled over, flooding out and leaving him hollow once more, aching with the emptiness of despair. So many consecutive days had eventually tallied into two years of holding himself together, exerting every effort just to get by. He had wasted away as he pretended to be strong for the sake of a marriage that had failed regardless. The counselors – and there had been many – had told him how difficult it was for couples to move together past the loss of a child, the burden heavier when both parents blamed themselves for the accident.

  “It can’t be you. I was there. I watched you drown. I…I could do nothing to stop it.” He shook his head and gritted his teeth. “Oh God…. I’ve finally lost it.” Tears streamed down Sergei’s cheeks. His warm, damp sobs fogged up the rest of the helmet’s clear plastic shield.

  The condensation forced his scientific mind back into action. Without a sudden drop in temperature, his warm breath would not affect his visibility. Plummeting temperatures outside the helmet, where the Siberian cold could kill an exposed man in a matter of minutes, were equally irrelevant. But if inside my helmet, where the temperature is system regulated, were to freeze over….

  He focused on the problem, ignoring the voice as best he could for the moment. The condensation meant one of three things: either his suit’s temperature controls were malfunctioning or he was going crazy and hallucinating the frosted plastic and everything he was experiencing or, perhaps even more frightening but not beyond the realm of possibility, some unseen presence, a gaseous, subzero particle with consciousness had coated itself to his visor and—

  An invisible hand poked two dots in the condensation. Underneath those dots, a U appeared.

  A smiley face.

  Sergei laughed as he cried, still unable to determine if what he was seeing and hearing was real, his mind twisting in knots he couldn’t untie. Part of him knew, even then, that to hear Natalya’s voice was madness, but God help him, he welcomed it. He would have gladly given his sanity to hear her beautiful, innocent voice, alive in his fragile mind, if not anywhere else. But sanity yet had a tentative grip.

  “Is it…. Is it really you, Natalya? Can it be?”

  Yes, Papa. It really is me. I’ve missed you so much. I’ve been down here all alone. I miss you…and I miss Mama…and Mr. Snuggums.

  Sergei sniffled and snorted out a laugh. “Your precious teddy bear. I still have him, you know? I still have everythi
ng. Your room is exactly the same as it was when….”

  I know, Papa. It can be like it was.

  How Sergei wished that were true. But his mind wasn’t so far gone as to believe the dead could live again. The ice beneath his feet was frozen solid even if the ice of his psyche was beginning to spiderweb, intricate patterns of cracks and fissures expanding to the farthest reaches. His thoughts warred against themselves, half grounding themselves in reality, the other half succumbing to a desire to believe in the impossible.

  “Natalya, I…I buried you.”

  I’m still buried, Papa. Just not where you last saw me. Your little ballerina’s stuck down here, right here at your feet. I’m scared and alone, Papa. It’s cold and it’s dark, and I’m so lonely here.

  “Where, angel moy? I can’t see you.”

  You won’t be able to see me. Not at first. I’m alive, just not…all together yet. But all you need is the teensy-weensiest part of me, and we can be together forever. It will all make sense soon enough. You’ll see. Then we can both be happy again.

  “I’d…I’d like that. I love you so much, my little ballerina.”

  I love you to infinity, Papa!

  Sergei sobbed, his eyes blurring as they filled with fresh tears. The outline of a heart appeared on his visor. His own heart filled with joy.

  One eyebrow shot up, and he gasped. “But how will I find you?”

  Easy-peasy, Papa. Remember how we used to play Hot and Cold? I’m underneath you, surrounded by ice, so I think we’ll play it so that ‘colder’ means ‘closer’. Right now, you’re volcano hot, but take just one step forward, and you’re already getting a lot colder. And when I tell you you’re polar-bear cold, you’re right on top of me. That’s where you drill your borehole. You won’t stop drilling until you find me, will you, Papa?

  “I won’t.”

  You promise?

  “I promise, my little ballerina. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Chapter Two

  Clara St. Pierre had always wanted to make the big discoveries out in the field, exploring hard-to-reach places, studying life – from the simplest organisms to those complex beyond science’s comprehension – in all its wildly diverse habitats. She would start with what her eyes could see and, from there, go deeper, smaller, finding whole worlds of life buried within worlds, tiny beings composing the meat and bones of a larger one. In her hand lay a whole cosmos to explore, so long as technology made a microscope powerful enough to define it. Outside her door lay a massive world and the infinity of space beyond.

  In her college years, she had dreamed big and small, but her disease had dampened those dreams well before it had confined her to a wheelchair. Her legs had become so weak some days that she might as well have been paralyzed. Those days were blessings, days without pain.

  Other days, her bones screamed like metal in a forge. Her muscles toughened and tightened. The multiple sclerosis had ravaged her body, gobbled up a lithe sprinter and swimmer, and shat out a contorted heap of wasted flesh, and worse still, it continued day after day to do so, like a snake eating its tail.

  The toll it took on her personality had perhaps been more severe. Clara had been social, energetic, positive, and friendly. None of those traits had survived six months of disease. Six more years had reversed them completely. And though her passion and youthful naïveté had all but been obliterated, her disease sharpened her mind, or at least her will to feed it.

  In her discipline, Clara reigned supreme. Medical genomics and bioinformatics required a mind that could deconstruct enigmas and reduce life, even humanity, to its base parts. She’d experienced firsthand just how human existence could break down, and in the genes that engineered her own fall from grace, she searched for the cheat code that could repair what had gone wrong, if not make her invincible. All the accolades she’d accumulated over the course of her life – she’d recently celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday for the fourth year in a row – had failed to bring her a modicum of happiness. She would have traded everything she had, every last euro, to rid herself of her disease.

  She spent her days as a professor of microbiology and genetics at Paris Descartes University, but her nights moonlighting as a laboratory consultant, genomics expert, and project leader had gotten her on that plane to the most desolate place in the world outside her heart: the Shakhova-Mendelsen Siberian Research Center, a United Nations-sponsored, state-of-the-art scientific facility. Clara suspected a quiet agreement between American and Russian interests post-Cold War had led to its creation – a place where each country’s mad scientists created biological and chemical agents of mass destruction in adjacent rooms. In any event, it had proven a conveniently located structure for the discovery made in the Kolyma Lowlands.

  Yeah, perfect. The only thing colder than Siberia is Northern Siberia.

  Clara could never rid herself of her sarcasm. That was ingrained, a security blanket that had cloaked her since her disease had set in. But it masked the truth of her spirits that morning, burying all her pain – all her anguish, mental and physical, and all her late-night screaming at a god she might have considered cruel and merciless had she truly believed in him – deep within her subconscious. On that rare day, misery gave way to something surprising.

  For the first time in too long, Clara was happy.

  The reason for her happiness lay behind the password-encoded door of a refrigerator stationed in a sterilized laboratory, a clean room, which itself was situated behind a heavy, vault-like door that required a keycard to enter. Clara had such a keycard. She knew the nine-digit code for the refrigerator.

  And she was on her way toward it.

  Do I have everything?

  She took in her modest quarters, a dull, uninspiring room that she bet her pampered peers were having difficulty accepting. It was enough for her, having only a cot, a desk, and a bureau for her personal effects, completely unadorned save for a sole picture of Benny, a service dog she’d lost a few months prior and hadn’t the heart to replace.

  Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  When she saw the picture, she winced at fond memories tinged with sadness, times forever lost. She turned away, and her eyes fell upon a small mirror. Looking at herself, frumpy and tired, Clara wanted to spit at what she saw. She bit into her lip and retied her loose, limp brown hair back into a long ponytail. She didn’t bother to color over the increasing number of gray hairs or liven up her blotchy skin with a bit of rouge or cover the wells of her tears with eyeliner. No one noticed her. Not in that way.

  She let out a long, cleansing breath. Today is a good day. Clara nodded at her reflection as if to affirm the thought and pressed her lips flat. Then she turned her chair toward the door.

  Before exiting, she stopped to pat herself down. ID badge clipped to my breast pocket? Check. Lanyard and keycard attached to my belt? Check. Room key? Check.

  Satisfied she had everything she needed, Clara twisted her chair sidelong to the door, reached up for the doorknob, turned it, and spun her chair forward again to push the door open with her feet. She moved out into the hallway.

  The acidic odor of cheap disinfectant and stale air made the reticent plaster walls and white tile floor of the research center feel like the inside of a mausoleum. Though dry, the walls always seemed slick, like an in-ground pool recently emptied. Clara wasn’t oblivious to the fact that her hands refused to touch them. The place needed color, to look lived in, even if no one wanted to live there.

  She looked at the corridor signs. Each hall had a number. She knew hers, and she knew that of the hallway where her precious samples waited. Every day, she would have to guess which twists and turns to make between them. She cracked her knuckles and pushed her chair forward.

  I’m coming, Molli.

  The giant virus stored in that refrigerator – Mollivirus sibericum, which Clara and the other researchers had taken to calli
ng ‘Molli’ – was the fourth virus to have been extracted from seeds found in an ancient squirrel’s nest buried deep within Siberian permafrost for more than thirty thousand years. Millennia upon millennia, a treasure trove of cryogenically frozen life had been stored under their feet, waiting to be rediscovered.

  The nest had been found almost completely by accident, so the newspapers had claimed, when a coalition of American and Russian astrobiologists used the tundra to replicate excavation conditions on Mars. The team was credited with the find, but Clara had it on good authority that one man in particular, a Sergei Kobozev, had been the true discoverer. Though she knew all the astrobiologists were present at the Shakhova-Mendelsen Siberian Research Center, she had yet to meet any of them.

  She hoped she would meet Sergei. She wanted to shake his hand. His discovery had given her life meaning again. She wiped her eyes quickly, not wanting anyone to see her cry.

  A few weeks after that Russian scientist had drilled a hole into a really old ice cube and found life, Clara had been on a flight out of Paris heading to Moscow. There, she met a smorgasbord of leading experts in the fields of microbiology, disease control, bioinformatics, and a plethora of other highly specialized concentrations. They were all ready to work on the discovery of a lifetime, alongside the many other highly specialized and top-secret projects the facility had a reputation for. In addition to the astrobiologists and the genome junkies, the center culled the international crème de la crème from a wide array of natural sciences – from botanists studying the seeds and nuts found in the nest to geologists looking for further proof of Pangaea – everyone with an agenda they thought trumped all others.

  Clara kept her distance, preferring to work alone. She retreated from her colleagues’ company, not out of fear but out of disgust. Like them, she had more letters following her name than all the Henrys and Georges of England. But unlike them, she didn’t see herself as any better than anyone else. Her idea of fun was watching classic cinema or reading a thriller with a glass of wine in her hand, not debating evolutionary theory with Christian Scientists and tormenting students with obscure assignments and witless banter. As for her contribution toward the greater good, Clara would gladly show her team spirit by sharing the findings of work done solo.