"What the fuck?" Ian shouted.
The woman fell on him, slashing at his suit. Ian stumbled blindly backward into the sliding door. The others covered him with their rifles, but the two locked in melee were too close for a clear shot. Ian jammed his rifle between the woman and the door.
"Don't!" Bonnie screamed. "You'll break the—"
Ian pulled the trigger. The glass shattered. The woman's weight knocked him through the empty frame. He landed on his back in the hallway, the woman on top of him.
Bonnie's need to help overrode her fear and she jumped to her feet. "Lie still, Ian!"
But Ian struggled blindly with the woman, ripping open his suit on the jagged glass shards. Bonnie reached out to stop him, but Reiner yanked her back. "Achtung!"
A scalpel clutched by yet another purple-skinned lab tech narrowly missed her arm. Smallpox-ravaged lab assistants with oozing flaps of skin shuffled wetly down the hallway from Level 3 like an army of dead-eyed marionettes, coughing clouds of infected blood. Bonnie staggered back into Reiner, mind blank with horror.
Ian finally shoved the woman away. He ripped off his blood-streaked helmet. The horde bore down on him. His eyes found Bonnie and Reiner in the doorway.
"Go!" he yelled. “I've got the buggers!”
Ian grabbed a grenade off his belt and pulled the pin. He drew his arm back but the woman fell on him before he could throw.
Hot terror flooded Bonnie's limbs seeing the grenade slip from his grasp. Before she could think, Reiner had her off the floor. He pulled her with him as he dove behind the lab bench. Nathan and Petter piled in after, pushing Yuri in front of them. The hallway exploded. Orange fire burst through the doorframe, blowing glass shards and body parts across the room in a glittering cloud.
For a minute, nobody moved. Bonnie's ears rang. She couldn't seem to make herself let go of Reiner.
"Ian? Is he—" Bonnie began.
Reiner shook his head.
“What the fuck was wrong with those people?” Nathan shouted. “Why were they trying to kill us?”
Nathan clutched at his helmet like he wanted to rip it off in disgust.
“Nathan, don't!" Bonnie grabbed his hands. She could feel them trembling. Or maybe hers were.
"I don't know why they came after us, but whatever's happening to them, I don't think it's their fault.”
The rage cleared from Nathan's eyes. “What? How?”
Bonnie swallowed nervously. “That woman. When I took her pulse...she didn't have one.”
***
After checking the ruined hallway for signs of Ian or smallpox victims, Yuri led them through to Level 3.
“So...those people back there...they were zomb—” Nathan began.
“Don't say it,” Bonnie ordered. “There's an explanation for their behavior, and that's not it.”
No one looked like they believed her. She wasn't sure she believed herself either, but if she let herself think that word, she'd dissolve into a puddle of nerves. This was definitely not what she signed up for.
Warning signs announced their approach to Level 4. They passed through an empty locker room, a shower room, and a dressing room where yellow biosafety suits hung on hooks. Bonnie found the routine comforting. They went through the airlock in pairs, standing under the chemical shower with their arms up to decontaminate their suits. For the first time, a BSL-4 lab was probably less hot than the rest of the building.
Bonnie and Nathan were last.
"I'm getting wet!" Nathan exclaimed.
Bonnie hit the emergency stop on the shower and inspected Nathan's suit. There was a small tear underneath his left arm, probably made by flying glass. Her heart dropped. She hurriedly swiped the suit dry with a paper towel and slapped a piece of duct tape over the hole, knowing it was too late.
Nathan's horrified eyes met hers through the visor.
"Am I gonna die?"
Bonnie could see the beginnings of panic on his face. This was what her grandfather called “the worried face of smallpox.” If he lost it, so would she. She stomped down hard on her emotions.
"No," Bonnie insisted. She grabbed Nathan's helmet and forced him to look at her. "Nathan, you're not going to die. There's a vaccine here somewhere. We'll find it.”
“If they had a vaccine, why didn't they take it?”
“I don't know. Maybe they didn't understand what it was.”
Bonnie pushed Nathan into the lab. It was a bizarre cross between a rough, Soviet-era concrete institution and a shiny, white Apple Store. The remnants of medical experiments and quite a few computers littered the tables. Reiner and Petter checked each of the rooms but found no more smallpox victims. Bonnie left Nathan on a stool. She and Petter opened storage cabinets and freezers, directing Yuri and Reiner to do the same in the other room.
"Here. This is the one," Yuri said a few minutes later. He eagerly snatched a plastic tube from a rack.
"What does it say?" Bonnie asked Petter.
"Chernaya 1 Smallpox," Petter read from the label.
"Not vaccine?"
"No."
Bonnie glared at Yuri. "Try again."
Yuri paled behind his faceplate. He returned a minute later with another vial and handed it to Petter.
"Chernaya 1 Smallpox Vaccine," Petter read.
"We will be all right now, yes?" Yuri asked.
Bonnie could see from his face that he knew the answer was no, so she didn't say anything.
Bonnie went over to Nathan and carefully lined up the items she needed on the lab bench. She took hold of Nathan's wrist and turned it over to expose the port on his forearm. Positioned above the vein, it disinfected needles on the way in and out so that blood could be taken and vaccines could be given without compromising the suit's integrity. Bonnie took a few deep breaths to make sure her hands were steady, and inserted a syringe into the port.
"I'll check your blood first."
Bonnie withdrew the syringe and turned to one of the lab's microscopes. Her own field kit had been lost in the explosion, so she prepared a slide and examined it through the eyepiece. She was dismayed, though not surprised, to see smallpox bricks in Nathan's blood, along with the same black ovals she'd seen in Robert MacLeod, only this time they were moving. What the hell were they?
"What's the verdict, Doc?" Nathan asked nervously.
She patted his shoulder. "You were exposed, but don't worry. We got to you in time. You should be okay."
Nathan offered his arm again. Bonnie filled another syringe with fluid from Yuri's vial. Ordinary smallpox vaccine was administered by piercing the skin with a bifurcated needle, but in this case Bonnie felt that a more direct route would be better. She injected the vaccine into Nathan's bloodstream and mentally crossed her fingers.
"How long we must wait?" Reiner asked.
"If Nathan's okay after two hours, we should be in the clear."
Bonnie put Yuri and Reiner to work collecting vials of vaccine. Petter found and copied the formula from the lab computers and emailed it to the CDC, Porton Down, and the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases so they could start producing it.
Bonnie watched the black ovals swim around in Nathan's blood. She couldn’t figure out what they were doing. An oval would swim up to some cells, tickle them with its feelers, and then move on, like it was tasting the cells and finding them not to its liking.
"So...how come our guy in Scotland didn't rise from the dead and try to kill us?" Nathan asked after a while.
"I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with these things," Bonnie replied. She stepped aside to let Nathan look.
"Those black things?"
“I saw them in Robert MacLeod's blood, too, but they were dead. At least, they were by the time I got there. The cops reported seeing MacLeod move around through the window. I thought it was because he hadn't died yet, but what if..."
Bonnie trailed off, thinking.
"What if what?" Nathan prompted.
"Let me see your visor."
Nathan let Bonnie swab the seam where his faceplate met his suit. The chemical shower hadn't run its full course, so there was still some black blood and brain matter from the woman in Level 2.
Bonnie smeared the mess onto another slide and loaded it up. This time, things were different. There were red and white blood cells in the sample along with cells from the woman's brain that looked like spiky snowflakes. As Bonnie watched, one of the black ovals attached itself to a brain cell and emitted a flash that was picked up by the dendrites and transmitted along the axon terminals.
"Holy shit," she exclaimed.
"What?"
"They are zombies. At least in the sense that their corpses are being reanimated. The black ovals are attaching themselves to the victim's brain cells and sending messages. Move your arms. Move your legs. Cough."
"What the hell for?"
"To spread the virus. The mafia must not have been able to figure out how to slow the virus progression long enough for the victim to pass it on before he died, so they added the ovals, which reanimate the body and spread the disease."
"So what are they?"
Bonnie looked around at all the computers. Most of them had endless lines of code crawling across their screens.
"They're machines," Bonnie realized. "Nanotechnology. The mafia didn't hire virologists to improve their fuck-you weapon. They hired engineers."
"Jesus Christ. I didn't expect tha-aaaaaah!"
Nathan screamed as his body spasmed, dumping him off his stool. Reiner, Petter, and Yuri rushed over.
"Nathan!" Bonnie crouched down to help him into a sitting position. "What happened?"
"I don't know. I was just sitting here, and AAAAAAAH!"
Nathan seized again. His body curled into a fetal position then relaxed, all within a few seconds. Nathan looked up at Bonnie in dismay. "Am I getting sick?"
Bonnie was baffled. "I don't think so. If you were sick, you'd feel like you had the flu, then you'd get a rash."
"Then wha—aaaaaaa!"
Bonnie put herself between Nathan and the stool so he wouldn't crack his faceplate against the metal leg.
"Let me test you again," Bonnie urged.
She waited until Nathan's seizure was over, then quickly drew another blood sample and examined it under the microscope. The smallpox bricks were shredded, destroyed by the roving, y-shaped antibodies that Nathan's body had created in response to the vaccine. But the nanos were still there, big and black and looking for brain cells to latch onto.
"Shit. The vaccine killed the smallpox but the nanos are still active and trying to control you. Their signals are conflicting with your own and it's giving you seizures."
"H-how do we s-stop it?" Nathan asked, gritting his teeth as his body shook again.
Bonnie fought the urge to pound the desk in frustration. "How should I know? I'm a virologist, not an engineer."
"If it is a machine, it must have a kill switch," Petter said.
Reiner, Yuri, and Bonnie moved Nathan to a clear area while Petter inspected the computers.
"Here it is. Avariynoy Ostanovki. Emergency stop."
Petter typed in a command.
Everyone looked around, but nothing seemed different. Bonnie got up and looked hopefully into the microscope. The black ovals were still active. Nathan's body jerked again.
Her shoulders slumped. "It didn't work."
Petter's gloved fingers flew over the keyboard. "Yes, I see it did not work for them either. They designed the nanodevices to self-replicate using trace metals found in the blood and to spread themselves by triggering the cough reflex of the victim. When the nanos performed too efficiently, the Russians tried and failed to extinguish their creation."
"That must have been the source of the outbreak. The nanos spread the virus faster than they could kill it."
"Yes, and I am afraid there is more bad news."
"What now?"
Petter turned the screen to face them. "The mafia seems to have set up surveillance cameras in a wide zone around the facility. Had all of their employees not been dead, they would surely have seen us arrive."
"I'm not hearing bad news yet."
"The bad news is that the townspeople are infected and are attempting to spread the virus."
Petter brought up a surveillance feed from a building in town. Blackened corpses shambled down the main road heading out of town.
"If we do not stop them, I estimate they will reach the next town by midmorning."
"They are too many. We cannot be fighting them," Reiner said. "A way must be found to kill the machines."
"Ian's w-way s-seemed to w-work pretty w-well," Nathan said from the floor.
There was a moment of silence in which everyone knew what everyone else was thinking. Their suits were all contaminated. If blowing up the town was the only way to stop the nanos, they would all have to go with it.
Looks like I'm going to be a hero after all, Bonnie thought bleakly.
"Are we sure there is no other way?" Yuri asked timidly.
Bonnie had been thinking the same thing, but said: "There isn't. You know that. We can save ourselves by ignoring our duty today, but what about tomorrow? Next month? Next year? Your kids could get it, Yuri."
There was a moment of silence.
"Where would we find an explosion large enough?" Petter asked.
Yuri cleared his throat. "In Soviet times, there was a small nuclear strike missile in an underground silo not far from the field in which we landed."
"Is it s-still there?" Nathan asked.
Yuri shrugged. "When the Soviet Union collapsed, many things were sold. But many things that were buried have stayed buried."
"W-we have to t-try," Nathan insisted. "Those n-nanos could c-cause a pandemic."
"To launch a nuclear airstrike is to start a war," Reiner argued.
“Not if we let them know what we are doing,” Petter said, patting the radio on Reiner's back.
They broke radio silence to let the BRU know what was about to happen. The BRU didn't like it, but they didn't argue either. They knew better than anyone what was at stake. Bonnie was just glad she didn't have to break it to the Russians herself.
Bonnie and Yuri supported Nathan between them, bracing him when the seizures struck. Petter and Reiner protected them. They inched through the deserted, blood-splattered hallways in a cloud of tension that could have been cut with a knife. Every rustle, every scrape made Bonnie twitch. Her suit stank of fear. When they came to the ruined corridor where Ian had died, Bonnie couldn't look.
They emerged from the building into a cleared area lit with floodlights and stopped. People filled the field. Administrators, lab assistants, technologists, even a few who looked like mafia goons. All dead of smallpox and coughing up a storm as they tried to spread the disease. They had been stopped by the fence and blocked the team's path to the gate. They turned, almost as one, when they heard the broken door creak. Bonnie's heart seized as their eyes landed on her.
Part of Bonnie wanted to lie down and give up. Another part wanted to run and never stop. She clung hard to Nathan.
Reiner slowly shrugged off his pack and lifted it into Petter's arms. “You run for the gate as soon as they are moved,” he ordered.
Before anyone could argue, Reiner ran into the middle of the field. He yelled and sprayed bullets into the mob. The motley collection of oozing smallpox victims lurched into the bullet storm as the nanos responded to the stimulus. They descended upon Reiner en masse. He scrambled backward.
“Come on!” Bonnie urged Yuri. Together they helped Nathan across the lawn, Bonnie's rubbery knees threatening to give out with each step. Petter ran ahead of them to open the gate.
Bonnie turned back for Reiner just in time to see him get cornered. His back hit an outbuilding. There was nowhere left to go. In a second, he had disappeared under a pile of squirming bodies. His rifle fell silent. Tears blurred Bonnie's vision, and she looked away.
Bonnie's racing heart gradually calmed as they made their way to the farm in miserable silence. Yuri led them behind the house to a barn, which was really a hollow shell hiding the enormous sliding metal plate that protected the missile. They blew open a smaller hatch that let them into an underground control room filled with dormant switches from the 1980s that nevertheless reported gotovii—ready—when Petter powered up the console.
"Won't we n-need some s-sort of launch k-keys?" Nathan asked.
Bonnie and Yuri dropped him into a chair in front of the console and tied him to the backrest to keep his seizures from toppling him.
"Russia is not like America," Yuri said as they worked. "Moscow was much more concerned with the missiles not being fired when they were needed than with them being fired when they were not needed. They are designed to launch automatically if they receive a signal from Perimetr, a detection system in a bunker outside of Moscow."
"So we must retarget the missile and make it think it has heard the signal," Petter said. "Very simple."
"Very disturbing," Bonnie muttered, trying to wrap her head around the fact that she had only minutes left to live. What did exploding feel like? Or would it happen too fast to feel anything?
Petter spliced his laptop into the missile's control system. His fingers danced across the keys.
Yuri slumped into a chair and put his head in his hands. “I should have said no to this mission. At least then my children would have a father, even if he was carried away by the police in the dead of night to spend the rest of his life in a prison."
A spike of adrenaline lanced through Bonnie. "The police!" Yuri's words jogged the idea she had tried to bring forward earlier.
“Petter, the police said Robert MacLeod was moving around inside the house, but when the BRU got the door open, he was lying on the floor. Something must have happened to the nanos between those events."
Petter spun away from the control panel. "We used an EMP generator to disable the security system. And the EMP—"
"—killed the nanos." Bonnie finished excitedly.
Enter the Apocalypse Page 18