The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  “I have two phones,” Jordan said proudly. “Surely, they must go back online in a crisis.”

  No one said a word. Clara let Jordan figure it out for himself as he mashed the buttons on his phone.

  After a minute, he growled and whipped his cell phone against a wall. He turned to Alfonse. “I’m guessing there has to be some kind of vent, maintenance hatch, rooftop exit, bulkhead…something that will get us out of the building and past the gate.”

  “Even if that were so,” Clara said, “we don’t know where that is or where to look. We’d be dead before we found it.”

  “So we find someone who does know,” Jordan said, waving his arms like a drunken composer as he spoke. “I bet those ASAP pricks know half a dozen ways out.” He took a deep breath then pointed a finger inches from Alfonse’s face. “Should we just put our faith blindly in this guy? We don’t even know who he is.”

  “As I was trying to explain” – Alfonse folded his fingers and squeezed them tightly – “Sebastian and I are astrobiologists assigned to the Mars Big Dig Mission—”

  “Again,” Jordan interrupted, “I fail to see the relevance—”

  “That’s because you won’t shut the fuck up long enough for him to explain it, asshole,” Sebastian snapped.

  “He’s just scared,” Clara said meekly.

  “We all are,” Sebastian said. “It doesn’t give him the right to act like an asshole.” He grumbled more curses under his breath. “Anyway, what my more patient friend is trying to tell you is that we have a way off this rock. Or, at least, out of this godforsaken research center.”

  “Exactly,” Alfonse said. “You see, NASA would never let one of its multibillion-dollar pieces of equipment blow up without first trying to extract it—”

  “Wait,” Jordan said. “What do you mean, ‘blow up’?”

  “For the last time—” Sebastian began.

  “Now hold on.” Clara turned in her seat to face him. “That’s a legitimate question.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know about this center’s self-destruct capabilities?” Sebastian asked, rolling his eyes. “They put that in because of all the deadly viruses and bacteria being studied here. If one were to ever get loose….” Sebastian slowly extended his arms up and out, making the sound of an explosion.

  Then Jordan gave Clara a look that could kill.

  She shook her head. Not a word, Jordan. Not a word. He got the message and kept his mouth shut.

  “We know about that,” Clara said. “But no one’s triggered it.”

  “No one has to,” Alfonse said. “Rumor has it that it can be detonated remotely.”

  “So what you’re saying is, we not only have to worry about being killed by human puppets inside, but by those outside, too?” Jordan asked.

  “Don’t worry,” Sebastian said. “By the time they go through all the red tape needed to blow up this place, we’ll be long dead – if we’re still in here, anyway.”

  “That’s…comforting,” Jordan said.

  “And that’s why we are taking the rover and getting the hell out of here, capisce?” Alfonse asked.

  “Rover?” Jordan asked. “As in a Mars rover?”

  “Top of the line, baby!” Sebastian said. “She’s a real beauty. Not only is she equipped with all the fixings for all-terrain travel, but a self-propulsion system that can shoot us all the way into the Earth’s orbit if we so choose.” He beamed with pride as if he’d had a hand in building it. “We call her Edna.”

  Clara realized that, as a group, they’d begun moving again, and she wondered when that decision had been reached. Sebastian had resumed his guardianship of her wheelchair and was already building to a moderate pace.

  She didn’t know much about space exploration and knew even less about Martian vehicles, but Jordan seemed interested in the topic beyond whether or not it could save their lives. “I remember the Curiosity and the Opportunity rovers from my childhood. I even had the toys. But if I remember correctly, those things were unmanned. I don’t remember any of them since ever being manned.”

  “Next gens were designed to seat one person, and there were plenty of us willing to volunteer for such a mission,” Sebastian said, his words coming out excited, as if spewed from a turret, “but human psychology just isn’t designed for that length and duration of solo space travel. The Endeavor and the Pioneer were both disasters, the extra unused equipment just getting in the way of their more practical functions. But Edna, better known as the Herald, is the first of its class.” He exchanged a glance with Alfonse. “She should be able to get all of us out of here safely.”

  “But what about the shutters?” Jordan asked.

  “A good question.” Alfonse gave Sebastian a wink. “I think he’s finally paying attention, Sebastian.” He smiled at Jordan. “There is no shutter over the landing platform. Like the faraway finger on the trigger, NASA can and will operate the rover remotely if or when it feels its property is in jeopardy, or we can manually commence launch ourselves any time Sebastian or I see fit to do so. NASA will intend to launch it unmanned. But regardless of whether NASA launches it or we do, we need to be onboard. It will seat the four of us comfortably, but…that’s about it.”

  “And if we can’t get out,” Sebastian said as he gave Clara a pat on the shoulder, “there’s enough rocket fuel in the rover to blow us and this place to kingdom come.”

  “Again,” Jordan said, “not comforting.” He shuddered. “So what are we waiting for?”

  “This whole place is like a giant wheel with the rover and launch pad at its hub,” Sebastian said. “Unfortunately, this wheel’s spokes make up a rat-race lattice filled with dead-end corridors and blind turns that look exactly like the real ones until you try them and find your nose pressing against a wall.”

  “There are two entrances to the hub,” Alfonse added. “A north and a south entrance. We’ve been weaving our way toward the southern entrance. Both entrances require a keycard and passcode like every high-security area here, and both Sebastian and I know those passcodes and have those keycards. The problem is: we don’t know if the path to either entrance is clear.”

  “Well, we certainly can’t go back the way we came,” Clara said. “And I doubt we can hide from—”

  “But maybe that’s exactly what we should do!” Jordan shouted. “Hide. Lay low. Stay safe. Hole up until the cavalry arrives.”

  “Like talking to a fucking wall.” Sebastian groaned.

  Clara rolled her eyes. “Who do you think is coming, Jordan? Who out there would you call who isn’t automatically informed of our situation as soon as those shutters fall? We are in full-system lockdown. No one is coming inside here until either this entire facility is deemed safe and germ-free or everyone in the facility is dead alongside the organism.”

  “Look,” Jordan said. “I’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. I’m a botanist, for Christ’s sake. I’m just trying to help.”

  “That explains it,” Sebastian muttered, but only Clara seemed to have caught it. Louder, he said, “Easy. Just keep your shit together.”

  Jordan raised his voice in response. “I think my shit’s together pretty well, all things considered, thank you.”

  “Everyone, relax!” Alfonse shouted. “You Americans – always bickering. We’re making too much noise!” Perhaps realizing the irony of his remark, he added in a lower voice, “Listen. I don’t know what attracts these infected freaks, but it seems foolish to assume they can’t see, smell, or hear us. So let’s keep moving,” he turned the corner, “and pray to whichever god you worship that we don’t run into any of those – gyahh!”

  Alfonse dove out of the way of something plump and slithery that seemed to swim along the floor. Human skin, part resembling the wrinkled, spotted flesh on and around a kneecap, made up most of its body, but the rest was unidentifiable, part
icularly when it was oozing and sliding its way toward them like snot sneezed onto a mirror.

  The bulbous mound was heading straight for Clara, who dug her nails so far into the padding on the arms of her chair that she broke more than half of them. I’m going to die.

  She shrieked and jerked sideways. Her chair tipped over and dumped her onto the cold, unsympathetic tile.

  “Sebastian!” Alfonse ran to his friend, reaching out toward the tail of the whipping eel creature that had buried its head in Sebastian’s chest.

  It wiggled into Sebastian like sperm penetrating an egg and having much success, already deep into the astrobiologist’s muscle.

  “No!” Clara shouted. “Don’t touch him!”

  Alfonse ignored her. But even as he reached for the wriggling tail, Sebastian sidestepped his advance. “R-Run,” he said hoarsely, his voice hardly recognizable as human. His eyes rolled back, revealing the blank whites. As he began to seize, he bit down on his tongue so hard that blood squirted from his mouth.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alfonse said through tears. He roared in pain and anger and dropped to a knee. Clara thought he was lost to them and she, in turn, was lost as well.

  But Alfonse rose and looked down at Clara with deep sadness but also sheer strength of will shining in his tear-filled eyes. “Jordan, help me get her…. Jordan!”

  Clara followed Alfonse’s raving-mad glare to see Jordan dashing toward the end of the hall and disappearing around a bend. He was running away from them, from her, leaving her to fend for herself. Some man he turned out to be.

  Alfonse said it best. “Coward!”

  More wriggling limb eels oozed into the corridor up ahead. Screams followed closely behind. Alfonse kicked her wheelchair aside, scooped Clara up, and carried her toward their only hope of a way out, a room in the middle of the hall, labeled Radiology.

  Alfonse flung Clara over his shoulder and held her up with one hand as he tried the doorknob with the other. The door was locked.

  “I have access.” Clara’s voice quivered as the flesh monsters bore down on them in a grotesque wave of slurping, sliding, and even crunching – on what, only God knew. “My keycard – it’s on my belt!”

  If Alfonse was even a quarter as terrified as she was, he wasn’t showing it. He grabbed the card and tore it from her waist. With a steady hand, he slid it through the card reader.

  “Please,” Clara begged. “Hurry.” As she spoke, she heard the sound of the locking mechanism retracting. “Vite! They’re coming!”

  Alfonse tore open the door and burst into the room behind it. He spun and slammed the door shut.

  Wham! Wham! Wham!

  Bang after bang after bang came from the door as it rattled in its frame. Alfonse braced it with his free shoulder. The lock reactivated, and the bolt sealed the door shut. Only then did Alfonse back away.

  The banging didn’t stop. It’s not going to stop. “We have no time to waste,” Clara said. “If we’re going to do something, it has to be quick. They’ll be under that door soon enough.”

  “Any ideas?” Alfonse said, sobbing quietly.

  “Not a one, friend,” she said. “Not a one.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Though a death-metal dirge of confusion and fear filled the passageways, the path to the security control room had thus far been clear. As Dante trotted down one hall then another, he was no longer guided by instinct or experience. He simply allowed himself to follow the ASAP guards in what seemed like a rational plan, at least until he saw a way to affect a plan of his own making.

  Get to the control room. Assess the scope of infection. Seal off as many of the infected as we can. But the control room itself was proving harder to get into than Mother Teresa’s underwear.

  The fire alarm continued its unremitting wail, reminding him of another alarm that wouldn’t quit when he’d escaped an off-the-grid Cambodian prison, which in turn, reminded him of the great number and deadly extent of dangers to which his work had exposed him.

  Human evil was a fact of life, probably far more so in his life than in most others’, granted. Dante had seen so much of it that he could take one look at a man and know the depths of his depravity, the sins he would commit without second thought if given the right provocation, and the blackness that pumped viscous sludge through his heart. Women were trickier, not so much due to any particular guile on their part, but more because of Dante’s own semichivalrous, semichauvinistic failings. Even then, he always read them right before it was too late.

  The infected were another ballgame. He’d already seen enough of them to know that trying to read them, trying to predict their movements, was an exercise in futility, like pissing into a hurricane. Their faces were expressionless, perfect poker faces, and their methods of combat thus far completely erratic. Am I afraid? The sensation seemed strange since death had been breathing down his neck since long before he’d taken up assignment with the Pointy Hats. He assumed his fear found its roots in the fact that, before that day, he’d always understood the evil he’d been up against: Stearns’s kind of evil, motivated by malice or money or revenge – the human kind.

  Dante didn’t understand that other form of evil, as alien as anything born from outer space. He didn’t understand it, and he hadn’t signed up for it. He wondered if his employer had understood it and had sent him in anyway.

  His mind drifted back to his last meeting with the Pointy Hats, which Dante had taken to calling them since they had no official name – at least not one they’d told him. They weren’t wearing their hats then, though – just black hoodies and scowling mouths as they converged in that back alley of the Vatican. And Dante had been scowling right back.

  He’d never liked the Pointy Hats. They’d consistently shown him contempt, acting as if they were so special, so much better than he was because of what he did for them. They found him repugnant, and the feeling was mutual. Dante couldn’t count how many times he’d had to remind himself that the Pointy Hats were the good guys. That was the truth, he knew. Despite all their arrogant assholishness, they were trying to save the world in their own way, one crisis at a time. Behind the scenes, the Pointy Hats did what governments and global peacekeepers couldn’t because their bureaucratic heads were so far up the asses of politics and nepotism and, oddly enough, moral constraints.

  The Pointy Hats often reminded him of that famous philosophical question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler before his rise to power, before his adulthood even, would you? Most people in his experience, Dante included, answered affirmatively. The Pointy Hats would’ve built a time machine just for that purpose. They would’ve traveled back in time to cut little Adolf’s throat while he was still in the womb if they’d had the power to.

  Well, they wouldn’t have gone back themselves. Dante grimaced. They would have sent me.

  And there he was at the Shakhova-Mendelsen Siberian Research Center at the Pointy Hats’ command. They’d sent him to save the world from a potential virus or disease that, according to his well-informed benefactors, had already been the impetus for many backroom deals and behind-the-scenes governmental maneuvers. The research center itself was the brainchild of a conglomeration of United Nations member countries, each trying to get a leg up on the other while nonmember factions tried to get a foot in the door.

  Like most divorcing parents, each country wanted more than joint custody of the child. Each wanted sole custody, though none would openly admit it. Each was willing to tear its child apart before letting another parent take that child away.

  The worst offender in Dante’s quagmire was the presumably neutral court officer, ASAP, hired to keep the peace and enforce joint-custody privileges. Ostensibly, the security company served as a high-functioning babysitter, but in reality, the private corporation was little more than a facilitator for the greedy without a soul to sell to the highest bidder.

 
Instead, it had the viruses to sell.

  Fortunately, not every country wanted the potentially deadly biological weaponry for themselves, and some had strong claims or good reasons for wanting what they wanted from the facility. Nevertheless, the Pointy Hats had declared the viruses off-limits. They gave Dante a dossier filled with blueprints; personnel files for both the center and for ASAP; photographs; equipment specifications; laboratory and cold-storage locations; detailed insight into top-secret projects; the names and identities of stooges, plants, spies, and double agents; and the same for those with top-level facility access and knowledge of the forever-changing passcodes – the best information money and influence could gather.

  Beyond that, the Pointy Hats had given Dante a briefcase with two million incentives for a job well done and the promise of another two million once the job was completed. They’d sent him on his way, leaving in his capable hands the details of how he would get inside the building and bring their plan to fruition.

  Getting inside places had always been Dante’s forte. A child without a family, at least one that gave a damn, he’d grown up sneaking and thieving and conning, mostly in Rome, where he’d learned every escape route. He’d gotten by for a long time lifting wallets before he realized he could do far better. As he got older, the game got riskier and the scores bigger. He rarely got caught, and he never got caught with the goods. The few that caught him would always turn him loose with the hope that he’d lead them to where he’d stashed his prize, but Dante would always give them the slip.

  Until the last time he was caught. That time, his captors offered him training in lock picking and safecracking, advanced burglary techniques, martial arts of various disciplines, marksmanship and weaponry, hacking and languages…even a full education in the humanities. They asked nothing but commitment in return, but even then, Dante wondered what the true cost of acceptance would be.