by John Ringo
“Expand,” Tom said pointedly.
“It makes two types of virii, a previously unknown mechanism called dual expression,” Curry said with a little side-eye to Tom. He didn’t like to be interrupted in one of his spiels. “The first packet is just another H7D3 virus, which carries on the process, looking for another cell to compromise and spread the disease further, behaving like a seasonal flu virus. The second packet is the one that attacks the victim’s brain and creates the zombie symptoms. It’s also an engineered component, based largely on rabies. It attacks the central nervous system, especially the brain stem and specific brain components, including the frontal lobe and parts of the parietal lobe. These areas are responsible for critical thought, speech, pattern recognition, etc.”
Murmurs greeted this extended explanation. In the Security and Emergency Response team, researching the fundamentals of virology had become even more popular than checking stock prices during working hours. Staff might not have Ph.D.s, but “rabies” was a term they could understand.
Curry paused and took a bite of popcorn from the bowl on the table and then drained his coffee cup. Behind him, Jones passed him a bottle of water.
“Any questions on that bit, because it isn’t the most important part.”
“Assume some sort of cure,” Rune said. “Does the…afflicted have a chance of regaining…”
“No,” Tom replied curtly. “There have been some people who have naturally thrown off the virus after going through all the symptoms. They’re…pretty much the same. Sometimes with slightly higher or lower levels of aggression but always nonsentient. Once you’re a zombie you stay a violent zombie or remain in a vegetative state. No take backs.”
Tom had planted that question with Rune because it was important to the rest of the discussion. There was no murmur this time, just brief glances.
“The second and most important new bit of data is confirmation of what you all suspected: the rate of the spread of the disease is accelerating,” the virologist continued tightly. “If we can’t begin manufacturing a vaccine in industrial amounts very soon we’ll have no hope of getting in front of the disease. We don’t have long, not very long at all.”
Curry stopped, swallowed, then closed his eyes for a moment before proceeding.
“The good news, for values of good, is that we have been given a green light to proceed with plan to start making a vaccine. It won’t be a cure, but it should block further spread of the virus. The virus concentrates in the afflicted nerve tissue of its victims, which so far are limited to higher order primates. What we need is to harvest the nerve tissue of higher order primates saturated with the virus.”
“Does that mean we need to start sourcing rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees and so forth?” Rune perked up. He hadn’t been told the reason for the planted question. “Can’t be too many of those in the city. We’ll probably have to look international—”
Curry looked unhappy, but replied.
“The amount of raw materials needed rules out zoo animals and imports,” Curry said, shaking his head. “You get, maybe, one dose of vaccine from a green monkey, the most available primate. And they’re being swept up in Africa in job lots for research. Very few are available on the market and the price is staggering. Being absolutely blunt: There is only one large-scale source of higher order primates currently available.”
Faces around the table looked puzzled. Slowly comprehension dawned. Tom watched the team work through the obvious. Jones’s face was stone.
Someone knocked their chair against the table, loudly. About to speak, Curry looked up, irritated. Down the table, Skorpio’s chair knocked against the conference table again, as he scratched his ribs vigorously.
“Hey, Phil,” Smith said, looking down the table. “PHIL!”
* * *
Someone was calling his name. Kept calling his name.
Irritated, and feeling itchier by the second, Skorpio looked up.
What the fuck was under his suit? Goddamn…
* * *
Tom cursed himself. The existing bank protocols were entirely inadequate. From the time that his trusted security deputy had screamed, then roared and started tearing at his clothes, to the moment when Smith had drawn his bank-issued SIG Sauer P226 and staged the trigger, only two seconds passed. Fully aimed, Tom waited until others had moved away from Skorpio. He’d waited a further fifteen seconds until it became obvious that there was neither a Taser in the room nor time for a security detail to make it to their floor, high in the Bank of the Americas’ tower. Then he floated five empty casings, putting every round into the newly turned zombie’s center of mass.
Instantly two things happened.
Skorpio dropped, flailing, to the carpeted floor and writhed, screaming all the while. And Tom’s hearing was overlain with the siren song of damaged cochlear cells—tinnitus—which provided a semipermanent ringing sound that contributed to the unreality of the scene: Tom shooting another employee in his own fortieth-floor conference room.
His shots must have struck the zombie’s spine while avoiding the heart, because Skorpio had begun very slowly crawling across the floor towards the cluster of people now scuttling behind Smith, including Rune, Curry and others. With single-minded, predatorlike determination, the mostly naked zombie buried its fingers in the plush carpet and pulled itself by main force towards its intended quarry.
Tom sidestepped away from the group and put his back to the conference room glass wall, which looked out over a dirty brown East River. He kept his pistol at a low ready and scanned the rest of the group, who looked back at him uncomprehendingly.
“Everyone stand up straight, show me your face.” This from their resident mad scientist. Unsurprisingly, Curry mentally got there first. “Show me your eyes!” he commanded.
“Do what he says,” Smith added. “New rules, is anyone feeling sneezy or itchy? Everyone look left, look right—examine them like your life depended on it.”
Comprehension dawned on the group, and they began looking at each other and back at the zombie. It was still several feet away, slowly working its way across the plush carpet, leaving a broad and slippery red trail.
“No visible symptoms, Mr. Smith,” Curry said. “I just got focused on the business problem and didn’t see his.” He gestured to the zombie, which was within ten feet.
Smith looked at the group one more time and coldly barked: “Security rounds!”
He fired once more, striking Skorpio in the head. The zombie dropped, motionless, yellow brain matter visible from the exit wound.
Smith decocked and reholstered; his face was drawn with anger.
“This simply won’t do.”
He looked over at the door, which had just been flung open, and where Durante had just skidded to a halt, pistol drawn. Kaplan bumped into him from behind, having run from the elevator with a few others.
“Congratulations, Dr. Curry,” Tom said. One side of his mouth twitched a bit in what might, charitably, be called a smile. “You now have some live virus with which to proceed.”
* * *
“You are officially insane,” the city attorney said, quietly addressing the head of the OEM. If his statement bothered her, it wasn’t obvious to the audience.
Kohn had been making her case to manufacture the attenuated vaccine since she had co-opted the status report and update being delivered by the deputy mayor for Health and Human Services.
You could see the individual beads of sweat across the brows of some city administrators, even though they were miles away. This unhelpfully clear detail was usually a positive feature of the high-definition tele-presence display that covered the entire wall of the underground conference facility beneath city hall. Each participant was rendered in life-size scale, enhancing the feeling that all of the attendees were actually there in person. This time though, the details didn’t inspire confidence.
The visible underarm stains and sweaty collars were there for all to see. Grim looks or blank
faces predominated.
Kohn was smiling on the inside, where no one could see. Fear was to her advantage.
The city of New York enjoyed excellent communications infrastructure, especially for the channels serving critical disaster response and crisis management functions. After 9/11, a combination of federal funding and fees collected from the financial services sector had built a large integrated surveillance and communications system.
Initially dubbed the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, it first focused on protecting the city’s life blood, the bankers and insurers clustered in lower Manhattan from which location they generated the revenue that made the entire city possible. Later, the system had grown to cover most of the island and the important areas of the adjoining boroughs. Supported by major technology companies, the effort eventually grew into the integrated City of New York Domain Awareness System, and now it could connect NYC officials by video anywhere in the city, as well as control tens of thousands of cameras, street barriers, traffic lights and special sensors.
The distributed secure video capability was a good thing because the mayor had decamped from downtown early in the crisis and was ensconced in an undisclosed location, funded in part by the licensing of his successful business systems and media brands. Naturally, he had empowered the first deputy mayor and other commissioners to make routine decisions. However, Kohn knew that a decision of this magnitude would need his personal approval.
“Mr. Mayor, the biochemistry and technology to make an attenuated vaccine is a known quantity,” Kohn said, ignoring the city attorney. “If we begin prototyping the process now, and if we can assure a large supply of live virus, we may be able to vaccinate not only the remaining emergency services personnel and critical city staff, but their families.”
Say what you will about the mayor’s physical courage, he didn’t shy away from the core issue.
“Joanna, I want to be perfectly clear,” he said in clipped tones. “What you are talking about is euthanizing the surviving infected people that we are now confining and using them to gather the ‘live’ virus. Do you know how many laws that would break?”
Angry faces stared back at Kohn from both the video teleconference monitors and from around the conference table. She ignored them all. Only the mayor could approve her plan. Or kill it.
She reached backwards with one open hand and Schweizer placed a blue binder in it. Kohn plunked it onto the table.
“All of them, Your Honor,” she said, tapping the binder with one finger. Her tone wasn’t insubordinate, exactly. “However, ask HHS if they think that there is an alternative. Ask them how much we know about the virus. Especially, ask how much time we have left to act.”
She waved to her right, signaling the Health and Human Services official. He had remained standing during her interruption, and was poised in front of the large polished conference table that fronted the wall of virtual meeting attendees.
Wearing a deer-in-the-headlights expression that failed to inspire confidence, HHS continued where he had left off.
“To recap, Mr. Mayor, the Pacific flu is a complex, manufactured biological agent,” he said. The HHS rep apparently noted the slight quaver in his voice and took a breath. “The disease has been artificially spread using air fresheners placed in public bathrooms all along the eastern and western seaboards, the length of the Mississippi and most major international airports in the United States. This dispersion pattern has been replicated globally and Asia is especially hard hit. There’s as yet no cure and no clear path to any therapy. Further, there’s no practical way to rapidly manufacture vaccine using conventional processes. The infection rate is accelerating and, well, it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”
The mayor asked the question on everyone’s mind.
“How long do we have before the disease spreads so far that we can’t stop it?”
“Physical containment measures are already being introduced, with OEM’s help,” the sweating man said, with a deferential nod to Kohn. “We are trying to firewall locations where infection clusters occur, rapidly segregating anyone that’s been exposed. The efficacy of this isn’t yet known, in a practical sense.”
“Practical sense?” asked the city attorney.
“I mean we haven’t been doing it long enough to know if the changes in the infection rate, the rhythm if you will, is due to our response, or if the natural incubation rate is creating populations of infected persons who will reach stage two of infection as a group, each time jumping the perceived infection rate.” The HHS man paused for a breath.
“But, bottom line, if we can’t slow the infection we won’t be able to provide city wide basic services such as transportation and law enforcement in something like six weeks, perhaps eight,” he said, consulting his notes. “Fresh water isn’t a problem, and primary power generation retains ample margin, but a lot depends on how long we can keep refined fuels flowing. Fuels are critical to keeping basic requirements like food, health care and security functioning. The fuels industry relies utterly on intra-bank liquidity. If we lose that, the total collapse of the refined fuel sector follows in less than a week. Once we lose fuels, we lose everything else in days. If we don’t restart the energy sector within forty-eight hours then the cascade failure becomes effectively irreversible on a regional basis.”
A staffer spoke up. “We have Indian Point, it can supply a large part of the critical energy requirement, probably for years.”
Indian Point, a very old but still operating nuclear power plant, was located up the Hudson River, only a short distance from the City.
“Commercial nuclear power plants actually need some electricity from off site to function.” Kohn spoke impatiently. She was aware that the newest plants could actually self-generate, but Indian Point was nearly thirty years old and there was no point in polluting the limited technical comprehension of her audience with precise details.
“If they perceive that there is going to be a loss of load, they will start slowing the reactors, and if they have to, they will use their onsite diesel to run the cooling systems until the reactors can be safely shut all the way down. Even if they did not shut down, you can not power trucks, trains and cars with Indian Point.”
She nodded her head at the HHS officer, who resumed his seat. It was evident who was in charge. She looked back at the mayor.
“Our experts on the global pandemic all agree, to a point,” she said, leaning over and tapping the tabletop in front of her. “As you just heard, there is no routine, available and accepted process to mass produce a vaccine in time to fight this plague. But…
“But,” she continued, looking around at the audience, “we can make an attenuated vaccine. With a little luck, we might be able to vaccinate all of the critical city staff and their families. If we do that, we can then vaccinate enough of the citizen base that we can prevent the complete collapse of city services, the logistics infrastructure that we all depend upon and the economy that provides the cash flow that keeps everything running.”
The City public affairs officer tried to interject but Joanna’s words hammered over top of the feeble effort.
“If we keep businesses running long enough, we can keep at least the regional economy moving at a pace sufficient to buy the pharma industry, FEMA and CDC the time needed to begin a large-scale traditional vaccination program based on less…fraught manufacturing techniques. We can even start to reverse the disease trend lines—we can beat this.”
Before she could proceed, the chief counsel to the mayor cut her off.
“Can you even feel remorse?” he yelled. “Do you know how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of doses that is? How many murders do you propose that the mayor authorize?”
Joanna drew upon the core of her belief in change. She had to convince the mayor and he had to take the critical step. This arrogant puffball of a city attorney could not see the entire picture. He could be dealt with later.
“Unacceptable.” She struck the
tabletop with a closed fist. “What this is, is life or death. If we do not stop the infection, This Is The End. All capital letters. There is no plan coming from Washington. The military has its own problems—we’ll be lucky if we can hold onto the local National Guard. We have failed to get in front of every crisis that has hit this city in the past. If we had improved the emergency response after the ’93 bombing, we might have gotten more people out of World Trade on 9/11. If we had built the floodwalls before Irene and Sandy, we would not have had to rebuild Rockaway and pump out lower Manhattan. Now we are faced with another decision. A harder decision. You are worried about the political damage to the mayor—I am worried about keeping the City alive. We could even save the country, and you want to argue.”
She turned to squarely face the mayor’s image.
“Sir, you have to sign the emergency finding that I drafted.” Without so much as a glance at the attorney, she held a palm up to silence his exasperated objection before he could even begin. “With that authority, I can organize emergency services, the PD, and begin a coordination effort with the major city players. We can use the already afflicted and recover something from their loss by harvesting their infected tissue to make vaccine. Every day we wait takes us closer to a precipice beyond which lies eternal night.”
The mayor squinted, chewing his lip. Her absolute conviction could not be doubted. He looked around the room, and the face of each person in the meeting revealed that everyone was visibly evaluating one of mankind’s oldest compromises.
Maybe the ends justify the means…
However, the mayor also understood liability. Early in his career a mentor had cautioned him to praise publicly and criticize privately. The converse was true of taking on a liability, even one with a huge payoff.