by Glynn James
And then Wesley went to see how Derwin was.
Now, at last, he was back in his own cabin – the new one he’d been assigned, after seeing the old one destroyed by an act of God, or rather an act of war – and Judy sat on the other side of it, looking straight at him.
“You were protecting us, weren’t you?” Wesley said into the quiet air. “Back in Stores. When any of us tried to touch Anderson, you stopped them. You could smell the infection and you weren’t letting us near him.”
Judy sniffed and tilted her head. Then she stood up, walked over to him, and rested her head on his lap.
Zero Dark Thirty
The Kazakh’s Dacha - Altai Mountains, 30 Miles from the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility
The Dacha – Russian for Lodge – that was how Aliyev thought of it, capitalizing it in his mind. But the name was misleading, as it was not nearly so rustic as all that. In fact, looked at objectively, it was much more like the mountain fortress of an evil genius, or perhaps a Bond villain.
Both of which, Aliyev figured, captured him pretty well.
As for the Kazakh… well, that was how the Somalis had referred to him – those Islamist nut-jobs in the East African al-Qaeda offshoot called al-Shabaab, the ones who had paid for the virus – and who had actually paid for much of the complex that surrounded him now. And also the same clumsy dipshits who had lost control of the virus, thus causing all of the death that surrounded the Dacha, all the way out to the edges of the Earth.
Or so Aliyev tried to tell himself – that they had caused this. He knew that the virus had changed somehow, mutated in some terrible way he had been unable to foresee. But he had also instantly recognized it, when reports of the first outbreaks emerged from the Horn of Africa. If the symptoms hadn’t already been familiar enough, then the point of disease emergence was a dead giveaway.
Something had gone horribly wrong with his bug. As he probably should have known it would. And pretty soon it was out and rampaging unchecked through the entire world.
The Kazakh, Aliyev thought again, with a snort.
He’d always had a funny feeling the Somalis weren’t the only ones who called him that. Very likely, the Western intelligence agencies and counter-terrorist units had referred to him that way, as well. And they’d almost gotten him in Somalia – thought they had got him, in fact, in a horrific explosion of the small lab he had put together there to weaponize the virus for his al-Shabaab clients.
But he had thought ahead, and sensed them coming, and also gotten very lucky. And he had slipped away.
It’s funny, Aliyev thought now. How ridiculous the things we used to be afraid of…
From where he knelt now on the white tile floor of the lab, he glanced through the open door into the living area of the Dacha – where he could just see his copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, sitting in its usual place on top of the big shortwave radio set in the bay window.
And he remembered one of his favorite lines from that book: “For the entire earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner in it; and how many are therein who will praise you, and what sort of men are they?”
Anyway, these were the thoughts of Oleg Aliyev, the Kazakh, as he laboriously disinfected the lab floor with iodine, while wearing thick rubber biohazard gloves and a lab smock. This was after mopping up the remains of the perfectly good zombie whose head he had turned into a canoe with his handgun. At least he still had three intact ones – the first one he had brought in without incident today, and two others that he had not yet tested the pathogen on.
A few more test subjects, as well as a control, would have been great. But scientific rigor might have to fall by the wayside. It wasn’t like there were any scientific peers left to validate his work, or try to reproduce his results. No, he only needed to know if it worked. He didn’t have to prove it.
And these three should be enough to tell the tale.
He already knew his new creation, his latest and hopefully last genetically engineered pathogen, was fatal to the dead. Its virulence and lethality had been established. No, what he needed to understand now was its communicability – its contagiousness. Whether it would spread on its own, like a second brushfire spreading across the surface of the world, putting out the globe-engulfing flames his first one had lit.
Aliyev schlepped the mop, bucket, and jug of iodine back to the supply closet, and stripped off the protective clothing. He then sighed, sat himself down on a stool at a lab bench, and took a tired, resigned look around him.
The lab was absolutely state-of-the-art, with nothing but the best equipment – and absolutely everything that might be needed by the discriminating freelance bioweaponeer. Aliyev had known exactly what to buy, because no one had ever rivaled Biopreparat, the Soviet bioweapons program, in the science and technology of creating biowarfare agents. And Aliyev had absorbed all of that knowledge and expertise in his years there. Hell, he had planned, stocked, and launched three new labs himself, including the last, biggest, and best-funded of all – the Chimera Lab, at Stepnogorsk.
Along the way, Aliyev had became extremely knowledgeable about such nightmare pathogens as typhus, smallpox, yellow fever… tularemia, anthrax, myelin toxin… pneumonic and bubonic plague… He became expert at breeding strains of these diseases that were resistant to antibiotics… versions that were so bio-hacked they could not be inoculated against with existing vaccines… and others that were even more virulent than nature designed them – and much more contagious.
But Aliyev’s real specialty, and where his true talent lay – as well as the reason he rose so quickly through the ranks of Biopreparat, and got paid such enormous sums later – was in the creation of chimera viruses: a single bug that would give you two or more diseases at the same time.
And it was the design and development of chimera viruses that had paid for all this.
Comprising nearly 2,400 square feet of modern, heated, well-lit interior space, the Dacha was powered by solar panels that covered the rooftops, as well as nearly a half-acre of nearby mountainside. All of the panels were on spindles that angled them for maximum energy input – and also covered them up with camouflaged and UV-neutral tarpaulins, on a schedule that corresponded exactly to the overflight of American military and surveillance satellites.
Though fewer of those flew over all the time.
In addition to the big lab, there was a lavishly furnished attached living area, including a den with a sunken fireplace, fur-covered couches, and home-theater system, with a 4-terabyte hard drive filled with digital movies. There was a bedroom with remote-controlled everything and mood lighting. A bathroom with multi-jet power showers, fed by a water tank on the roof and a gravity plumbing system. A fucking beautiful and ridiculously expensive Williams-Sonoma Kitchen. He had a workshop, powered storm shutters, storage areas.
One whole outbuilding, in fact, a large shed or small warehouse, held almost nothing but non-perishable foodstuffs.
In addition, he had guns, ammo, even explosives, the finest hardware that could be purchased on the Russian black market – which was to say the finest anywhere. He had radios, batteries, medical supplies, general-purpose tools – and sufficient skills to repair anything likely to break. There was tons of expensive outdoors gear, and technical clothing – some of which, like the rip-stop hiking pants, had saved his life. In addition to the solar cells, he had a significant underground tank of fuel oil – plus aviation gas for the helo.
Ah, then there was the helipad, and what sat on it: a Eurocopter EC175, which had set him back over $4 million in hard currency. But, then again, what was it worth to have reliable transport to and from your mountaintop fortress? Learning to fly the helo himself had been the bigger problem, but he’d had some time on his hands, after he’d earned more money than he could realistically spend. And he was a fast learner, plus had always been of a hands-on, independent bent.
Moreover, every additional person who know about the Dacha, s
uch as a pilot, made it that much more likely he would eventually be tracked down. Bin Laden had been pretty damned isolated in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But just a single courier, coming and going at long intervals, had been enough to do him in.
Aliyev himself hadn’t had cause to go anywhere in a long time – and there was no longer anywhere to go – but the helo had also been invaluable in getting shit up here in the first place. That included the construction contractors he’d brought in from hundreds of miles away, and then paid handsomely to go away again.
Aliyev sighed and touched the barrel of the handgun, which was now laid out before him on the lab bench. The barrel was still warm, from the five shots he’d triggered off. The guns were great fun, but he’d known all along they’d never be enough to protect him. No – only the extreme remoteness of the Dacha, and operating in total secrecy, could do that.
Because he hadn’t, in fact, built the Dacha to ride out the zombie apocalypse.
No, as one of the world’s preeminent bioweaponeers, he was simply trying to stay a step ahead of the CIA – and Seal Team Six. He’d seen Zero-Dark Thirty. He knew what those guys could do, and he knew he’d be one of their very top targets. And he knew they’d be coming for him – one day, sooner or later.
But what he hadn’t known was that the whole world would end first.
However, it turned out that a fully provisioned fortress way up in the world’s most remote mountain range was also a pretty damned good place to stay clear of seven billion infected dead people.
So Oleg Aliyev had lived.
While virtually everyone else on Earth died.
Fatal to the Dead
The Kazakh’s Dacha - Altai Mountains
And then there was Aliyev’s lab. As lavish as the rest of the Dacha was, it was the lab that had really taken the big bucks to stock and equip.
Looking around him now, even all this time later, he still got pleasure from the fact that this joint truly had it all: flow cytometers, digital and analog cell analyzers, ultracentrifuges of all sizes (one refrigerated). It had equipment for biomolecular interaction analysis (including a very pricey Biacore), a liquid nitrogen storage system, CO2 incubators, a heated incubator. There were liquid scintillation counters, a fluoro-image analyzer, a Gamma irradiator… it went on and on, a full-service, one-stop shop for deadly pathogen design.
Aliyev had truly been a one-man army in his freelance days.
Now, he let his eye wander across the rows of equipment, and finally to the four big glass enclosures at the end of the lab. Those he had put in special – and after the fall. At first, after working out what had happened out in the world, and that he had been to blame, Aliyev had tried to develop some kind of a vaccine for the zombie virus. But vaccine development had just not been his field at all, and he got nowhere, despite six months of tortured, frustrated effort.
He had briefly gotten excited when the behavioral similarities between Hargeisa and rabies inspired him to try out post-infection therapeutic treatments for that illness – specifically, injections of human rabies immunoglobulin (HRIG). Unfortunately, not only had this not cured them – it had actually made them worse, causing his test subjects to become even more agitated and aggressive. They had started clawing and shoving at one another – in addition to lunging at the one living person there, on the other side of the glass.
No – he finally decided it was simply too late to hop silos into a totally different area of scientific expertise, and he gave up in despair. He was never going to be able to cure this wretched thing.
But then, after a few weeks of swilling Scotch, watching bad action movies, and “relaxing” to his personal archive of excellent digital porn… he finally remembered what he was really good at. And if he couldn’t design a vaccine to save humanity… then perhaps he could do the next best thing, and at least create a new virus that would kill all the dead.
Now, his eye moved finally to the left side of the lab, and the oversized, gleaming, stainless-steel refrigerator that dominated that edge of the room. Inside were the spoils of his pillaging of Biopreparat in the last days before the communist empire went down, as everything fell apart and disappeared into the post-Soviet vortex.
On the way out, he had taken with him cultures of E. coli, salmonella, tetanus, staphylococcus, syphilis, tuberculosis… plus all the big killers that were thought to be long eradicated, such as smallpox and polio… and also the rare, super-lethal, and uniquely horrifying hemorrhagic fevers – Marburg, Ebola, Lassa fever, and Bolivian hemorrhagic fever… And, finally, quite a lot of shit they’d cooked up at Biopreparat that didn’t even exist in nature.
And, after working out a reasonably safe system of trapping test subjects, Aliyev had tried out all of these diseases on the dead. The trouble was… they were fucking dead. They had almost no living tissue to serve as a host for viruses or bacteria… He’d also tried parasitic viruses, fungal ones, brain prions, all with equally disappointing results.
No, it was only when he got in the region of the brain that he started to gain some traction. A little clever experimentation had revealed there was only one anatomical area of the dead that still lived on in any significant way.
And that was the brainstem.
This had allowed him to further zero in, focusing on common pathogens of the brain: encephalitis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, myelitis… It wasn’t long before he hit on a winner: meningitis. This was an acute inflammation of the protective membranes covering the spinal cord and brainstem known as the meninges. The disease could be caused by infection with viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms, and less commonly by certain drugs. And the disease could be life-threatening because of the inflammation’s proximity to the brain and spinal cord.
Basically, it was some seriously nasty shit.
His initial tests showed significant pathology in the brainstems of dead subjects who he infected with it.
He initially focused on the viral form of the disease, but found the effects were too minor. Bacterial meningitis was known to be much more devastating, anyway. It was a truly evil bug, which in the living first caused fever and vomiting, then severe muscle pain and headache, convulsions and seizures – often followed, finally, by coma and death.
That it might also kill the dead had been Aliyev’s great hope, and it became his great scientific challenge. In the end, it had taken several months of careful genetic tweaking. But he successfully turned bacterial meningitis into a totally lethal, raging, eater of the dead.
No, he already knew it killed them. What he needed to know now was, if he released it out into the wild, would it reliably spread amongst them, from one to the next? Because there were too damned many of the dead bastards to go around infecting them one by one.
Aliyev took a deep breath, hopped off his stool, and walked over to what he had come to think of as… the Fridge of Death. He paused with his hand on the handle, regarding the thing balefully. Taken together, the vast microbial menagerie contained in that refrigerator had killed millions… hundreds of millions… billions, really. And that was before Hargeisa, the zombie virus. Which he also had in there.
But now, improbably, it contained one single bacterial pathogen that might actually do some good. Aliyev tightened his grip on the Fridge of Death, opened it up, and took out his latest and perhaps last creation.
Back in the world, there had been known to be three main strains of bacterial meningitis – called A, B, and C. At first, Aliyev had simply referred to his new genetically hacked version as meningitis D. But, before long, his theatrical flair and dark humor got the better of him, and he renamed it meningitis… Z. After all, it was unlikely to be followed by any other new strains or mutations, and certainly not anyone to name it.
It was unlikely to be followed by anything at all.
Because once it killed all the dead… it would very likely kill any remaining humans as well, none of whom were vaccinated against it. But that was all a ways down the road. And only if he ultimat
ely had the balls to use it.
For now, his creation was already loaded up into a fat syringe. He removed it, closed the fridge, and walked it carefully over to the glass enclosures. Working as with a mean and highly venomous snake, he loaded it into an interior box, inserted his hands into the long, thick, impenetrable gloves that jutted into the enclosure… and then, without delay or ceremony, he stabbed the dead guy inside in the neck, depressed his plunger – and infected what was already a corpse with what turned out to be the only known bug that was fatal to the dead.
He then pulled over a stool, sat down – and watched the havoc which man could wreak.
After a few minutes, and the onset of the first visible symptoms – spasms, tremors, the joints bending stiffly at odd angles – Aliyev stood, took two steps to the right, and pressed the two buttons that would raise the partitions between this enclosure and the next two.
A little banging with his fist on the glass, and the two healthy, or at any rate uninfected, specimens crowded into the first enclosure, nearer to Aliyev. All three flailed and shoved at one another, trying to get through the two-inch plexiglas at the healthy living human on the other side.
“Now, you sons of bitches,” Aliyev said, retaking his seat. “Have fun. And do us a favor and don’t cover your coughs.”
He put his chin on his hand, and watched and waited.
28 Days Later
SAS Saldanha - Military Docks
The ghostly South African port facility, abandoned two years earlier, was now just another post-apocalyptic sound stage – a place of former bustling human activity which the humans had all been removed from, as if beamed away into outer space.
Virtually the whole world was weirdly alike in this way now – like a scene from 28 Days Later, double-decker buses overturned on Westminster Bridge, trash and debris blowing in the streets, and the silence of total depopulation so loud it roared in your ears.