by Howard, Bob
Just as suddenly as it started, the man who tore open the shirt was laughing, and the other men joined in. One of them had a red cross on an armband, and he was examining Phillip’s chest closely. He sat back on his heels and grabbed Phillip by his forearm. Phillip was yanked into a sitting position, and incredibly he was laughing along with the men.
Denise took a swing at one of them, and he easily ducked it. Through the noise of the helicopter’s rotors she finally heard the medic telling her something.
“He’s going to be fine. The infected bit his shirt and missed his skin, but when you yanked the head off of his chest, it ripped out a bunch of his chest hair. There’s no bite mark, just a big bald patch that looks like it got a hot wax.”
She didn’t know if she wanted to kiss Phillip or slap him, but he was ready for it and deflected her swing.
“Why’re you hitting me?” he yelled.
“You were screaming so much I thought you were going to die.”
She was angry, and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“I never had my chest hair ripped out before.”
That was supposed to be enough for her, but instead it was enough to send the uniformed men into hysterics. To a man, they all told her Phillip had a right to scream if he wanted to.
The medic cleaned the area where Phillip had been bleeding and inspected it closely. He pronounced it as being non-terminal but painful and put a bandage over it. As he worked, the pilot came down from the cockpit and introduced herself to Denise. She pulled a curtain across the inside of the helicopter and privately inspected her for bite marks. Denise liked her, and she liked the way the uniformed woman made her feel at ease. She caught herself forgetting that these people were the enemy and wondered for the first time what it had been that made her dangerous.
The woman asked her a few questions, and Denise stuck to the script. They expected to be asked how they had come to be in that part of Johns Island and where they had been before that, but the script had a flaw. She had to stick with it because she knew Phillip would be asked the same questions, but she saw the expression of doubt on the woman’s face when she answered that they had been on Mount Pleasant when the infection had started. There’s no way Denise could have known it, but the helicopter crews had rescued dozens of people, and they were the first to have been in Mount Pleasant on the first day of the infection. They were just going to need to be convincing when they told their story.
Mount Pleasant had been cut off from Charleston, and if they had gone over land to get from Mount Pleasant to Johns Island, they would have been forced to cross the city. The only other way would have been a forty to fifty mile journey across several bridges, through West Ashley, and finally onto James Island at yet another bridge. Denise and Phillip gave the same answer when questioned separately, and as improbable as it sounded, they made it convincing.
As they explained it, they escaped from Mount Pleasant on a small boat and managed to get past the jetties at the mouth of the Charleston harbor. From there the current pulled them south past Morris Island and Folly Beach until they came to the mouth of the Stono River. They used the river to travel far enough inland until they were away from the metropolitan areas. They almost made it safely out of the areas where the infected were concentrated, but they had been forced backward by advancing hordes.
When the pilot filed her report, Captain Miller assigned some personnel to watch them more closely than usual, but their story was possible. She also told him she didn’t know how they had survived so long, because they were almost clumsy when they defended themselves. Then she amended it to say they weren’t almost clumsy. They were clumsy, and it was a miracle they had survived so long.
As the helicopters lined up to make their descent for landing at Fort Sumter, Denise whispered to her husband, “Why was our cover story so impossible? Why couldn’t we just say we’ve been surviving on Johns Island?”
“Marshall said these people have probably rescued a lot of survivors from Johns Island. If we said we had been over here for six years, they would have wondered how they hadn’t come across us sooner. Just stick to the script. They have to believe it, and we can’t change it now.”
They watched through the windows as the walls of the fort came up on the sides. The landing area was small, so the helicopters landed in the open and were towed to a parking spot after the rotors stopped. It meant they wouldn’t be able to take off at the same time, but they could see by the efficiency of the flight crews that this group was as practiced as a pit crew at a stock car race. One helicopter wasn’t in the air long before the next one would join it.
There was a crew of maintenance workers standing by with their equipment, and one of the pilots was talking with them about changes they were making. From what Denise overheard, they were sealing the entrances to the shelter, and the helicopters were supposed to land at the back entrance.
“What do you make of that?” she whispered to Phillip.
“I didn’t know Fort Sumter has a basement,” he answered.
“Not only a basement but a back door. There must be a tunnel from here to somewhere else, but it would be underwater.”
After six years of living on the Yorktown, their perception of life at Fort Sumter had to be something along the lines of living in a hot, humid, sand flea infested mud hut. There was brick and mortar, but from what they could see, living in the ship was like living in a five star hotel compared to Fort Sumter.
One of the crew handed each of them an ice cold bottle of water, and the real surprise was that the bottles still had their original seals. Another helicopter was hovering a short distance away, so the landing crew had to get everyone clear of the first one to land. The Corrigans were escorted away from the aircraft toward a door, and before they could mentally absorb what they saw in front of them when the door opened, they were slipped into harnesses that buckled around their chests and waists.
“These are just a safety precaution,” said one of the soldiers. “We don’t want you to make it this far only to slip and fall down a ladder. It’s a long climb. If you fall, we’ve got you.”
They had stepped through the door onto a landing that was perched at the top of a deep shaft. A ladder descended into the brightly lit shaft, and for the first time either of them could recall, they were glad to use a safety harness and rope to climb down a ladder.
“How deep is this place?” asked Denise.
For some reason the soldiers thought her question was funny.
“This is just the entrance shaft, Ma’am. The elevators will take us down the rest of the way.”
“Elevators?”
One of the soldiers went first while the second took Denise by the arm and guided her into position. The rope slipped through a winch system that would feed her line out at an even pace as long as she didn’t fall. If she did, it would pull her to an abrupt stop. Phillip was urged forward as Denise climbed down, and from his view above her, it looked like they were going down the inside of the world’s biggest aluminum can.
If they thought the view was spectacular from the top, it was nothing compared with the view from the bottom. They stood next to each other with their heads leaned backward as the soldiers untied their harnesses. The ladder shrank into the distance above them until it disappeared through the platform, but the surprises didn’t end there. A polished metal door that seamlessly followed the curve of the wall slid open, and they were escorted into a carpeted hallway that rivaled anything they had seen in the Charleston hotel where they had stayed six years ago.
From there they entered an elevator and their guide pressed a button that took them down six floors. Phillip stared at the lit elevator button as if he had never seen one before. He was trying to understand how they could be going down six floors after already climbing down that ladder. The soldier with him had seen that reaction before and offered some understanding advice.
“Don’t let it overwhelm you. After everything you’ve been through
it’s hard to accept that something like this even exists, but it’s real. You’re going to be okay now. Just let it all soak in.”
The second soldier added, “We’re going to drop you off at the mess hall. You’ll be able to smell it before we get there. The cooks have this special dish they like to make for newcomers, and we radioed ahead to let them know you were coming. It’s all kinds of meat and cheese baked in a crust. After you’re finished eating there’ll be some people who will get you settled in your quarters.”
The door of the elevator opened, and the man had been telling the truth. The aroma of freshly baked food made their stomachs growl.
“Welcome to Fort Sumter,” said a pleasant lady with a big smile. She was short and had dark hair that was also short. “You’re in for a real treat. If you don’t mind, I’ll join you. My name is Jean.” She gestured toward the room where people were lining up for supper.
******
Dr. Grace Williams could remember a time when she had patients, and they mattered to her. Things changed when they started to matter too much. When it was her own husband who became sick, and she watched the treatment take the life out of him, she forgot the rest of her patients. She neglected her practice until it went broke, and she eventually found herself in the silence of a forensic pathology lab. She didn’t think of the people in the drawers of the lab as patients. She didn’t think of them at all.
Her cold indifference toward men and women both made people avoid her, and she liked it that way. Just like her feelings toward patients, her feelings toward friends dwindled away until her work was the only thing that mattered to her. That was why she was a perfect lab partner for Anton Mikhailov. His disposition was as abrasive as sandpaper toward everyone except Dr. Williams, but together they studied the virus and made discoveries beyond their wildest expectations.
The simple fact that it could reanimate dead people was startling enough, but their Holy Grail was the way it worked. How did it reproduce? How did it cause muscles to move in something that appeared to be voluntary action? Like when the infected heard a sound and decided to investigate? There was clearly something more at work than what anyone had ever seen in common viruses. Their best guess was that there were genetic and environmental influences, and if that was true, the virus became even more frightening because it meant it had the capacity to learn. As a matter of fact, before the news networks completely disappeared the French had labeled it as the “Learning Virus”.
While the rest of the ship had suffered through the first thirty days inside their cabins, the two scientists had unraveled the infection as if it had been gift wrapped and delivered to them. Despite the insufferable American politician, they found a common cause that needed the attention of their talents. Marshall Sayer needed this success to validate his worth, and Ted Atwater got them anything they needed to keep his boss happy. Anything.
******
When the doors had been sealed on the Yorktown, there were over five hundred people inside the ship, and most of them didn’t need to know what went on in the laboratory. Grace and her Russian counterpart gave Marshall a list of things they needed to begin their work, and the initial stages were going to be too hard to hide, so he ordered Ted to manufacture an explanation everyone could live with. Thirty days of silence was a brilliant idea.
While everyone else was restricted to their quarters and the dining facilities, the lab and its support facilities were brought into full operation. Ted often asked himself what the rest of the people on the ship would do if they knew about the experiments being conducted in the lower levels, but he doubted they would like the idea of bringing the infected dead into the ship, even if it might lead to a cure.
Six years ago Ted would have been willing to bet any amount of money that the infection couldn’t be contained in the special rooms attached to the labs. He visited the area in the early days to ensure the work was being done, but watching the infected rot in their sealed rooms wasn’t something he could stomach. He could tell that Grace and Anton enjoyed his squeamishness, and it would give them satisfaction if he stayed away, but he wasn’t stubborn enough to win that battle. They could have their dungeon as long as they got results, and if he didn’t go down there, he didn’t have to pretend to ignore what they were doing when they crossed ethical boundaries. He wasn’t so sure their work would pass the ‘smell test’ literally or figuratively.
One of the biggest surprises came when Marshall visited the labs and learned that Grace and Anton had accidentally discovered that the infected could hear sounds that humans couldn’t. It was a simple matter of frequencies, and everyone knew that many animals had better hearing than humans. Somehow the virus improved the hearing of its victims.
Anton was focusing his work on the virus, while Grace was studying the infected. They had separate biohazard labs, but they kept up with each other’s work religiously. Both were excited about everything they learned, but it wasn’t until the third year had passed until the biggest discoveries were made. Anton was examining samples inside his lab when he heard the rapping on the glass. He looked up and saw Grace waving frantically for him to join her in her lab. That meant he would need to decontaminate and put on a fresh biohazard suit. They were self-contained when they needed to be and had their own oxygen supplies when they knew they wouldn’t be inside very long. If they needed to work longer, they could connect to the oxygen and cooling systems inside the lab.
It took Anton a half hour to decontaminate and swap suits, but whatever had Grace so excited, it was still going to be there because she was positively ecstatic. She was standing in front of a row of ten rooms that were the holding cells for infected they used as subjects. At the moment they held twenty of the creatures, two per room. Anton didn’t know how she could handle the smell that seemed to defeat the air purifying system on his hazmat suit. The smell of the entire lab had begun to assault his senses by the end of the second year, and he knew what he was smelling was likely to be the smell he remembered rather than what was really there.
He stepped over to her and saw she was holding an audiometer. She was tapping one of the displays that read ten thousand hertz. A dial was set at minus five decibels, and as Grace turned it to minus fifteen decibels the infected dead in each room became more animated. They had already been drawn to their presence and pressed up against the glass enclosures, but they doubled their efforts when she applied power to the audiometer.
Anton could see that Grace was smiling. Something she rarely did. She turned inside the awkward biohazard suit to better see his face. He couldn’t help returning the smile, but he didn’t completely grasp why she was so excited. It was an interesting anomaly, but what made it cause for celebration?
She saw his hesitation, but it didn’t deflate her excitement just yet.
“Don’t you see, Anton? Don’t you see what it does to them?”
“Yes, yes I do, but we have to prove there isn’t another cause for their behavior, and even if we prove they are able to hear frequencies we can’t, what good will that do us?”
“It will be easy to prove, but don’t you see? If they are drawn to the sound we can summon them, and that frequency is one that can be transmitted a great distance.”
Anton understood but was still uncertain about her reason for summoning the infected. His blank stare was enough for her to know he was too focused on the microbiology.
She said, “Before you can kill flying insects on the wires of a bug lamp, you have to draw them to the wires. You do that with light. We can use sound to bring them to us and then use some form of mass destruction.”
“But we haven’t discovered a way to kill the virus other than blunt force trauma to the head.”
Grace regarded Anton for a long moment. He was a brilliant scientist, but he could get stuck on the simplest form of practical application. She could tell he had been thinking only about finding a cure.
“Anton, what are we trying to do here? Are we only trying to find a cure?”
>
When put in the simplest terms, he realized as much as he despised his American partners in this venture, he was only doing what he had been told. He hadn’t tried to go beyond his instructions. Marshall Sayer had told him to find a cure, so that’s what he was doing.
She could see the realization dawn on his face.
“That’s it, my friend. You can see it now. We should be finding a cure so we can stop the spread of this virus, but we have millions…no, billions of carriers to deal with. What are we going to do about them? If we want to exterminate them, we need to find a way to do it all at once, and that means we need for them to come to us.”
It made sense, and he was nodding. They could spend a lifetime hunting the infected down and shooting them in the head, but did they have enough bullets? They could use knives or clubs, but did they have enough people to use their arms to stab at them or swing at them? They could burn them to destroy their ability to walk, but everyone knew the infected were still dangerous even when they were a pile of ashes. He and Grace had performed an autopsy on one that had burned, and they marveled at how little tissue was left, yet it still snapped its teeth at them. Even reduced to charred flesh it focused its attempts to spread the infection to them.
“How do you plan to prove it’s the sound they are attracted to?”
“That’s simple. I’ll set it up, but instead of focusing all of your attention on finding a cure, you need to divide your time to devote your work to something that will kill them other than blunt force trauma.”
It was a new phase in their work. As a virologist, of course he was interested in more than just the cure in one host. His focus was too narrow in that it was aimed at producing a vaccine that would prevent healthy people from contracting the disease if they were bitten. That was an essential goal when developing a vaccine for any disease. To prevent measles, people get a vaccination against measles. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever be exposed to measles. It just means exposure won’t cause the disease to spread. The same was true for this infection. If he developed a vaccine, getting the vaccination wouldn’t prevent you from being bitten.