DD couldn’t curse. She couldn’t speak. She could hardly breathe for a moment.
XXVI.
Still Beats the VA Clinic
The cab driver was an old-time Chicago native who’d wanted to exchange notes, if not entire genealogies, once he found out Juni had family in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, but Juni was answering him in monosyllables, so he gave up. He was having to be extra-creative with his course-plotting anyway, because several major streets were completely blocked by stalled cars and cars with blown-out tires. Juni kept looking at her phone; it kept saying “no signal.” No signal, in downtown Chicago! What was going on? Was it a war? A terrorist attack? Finally, they passed into an area where she had three bars of service.
Juni called her brother, who worked nights, waking him. It took a few moments to get his groggy mind to understand the situation, and she found herself speaking sharply to him, afraid the signal would drop before he got it. He got it–finally! –and said he’d call her husband at work and either one or both of them would meet her at the urgent care center.
The trip from the university to the hospital took almost an hour, twice as long as it would normally take, and Juni handed the cab driver her Visa card. He slid the card through the reader, but it sang a little tune of disappointment.
“Network’s down. You got cash?”
Juni pulled a few bills out of her jacket pocket. She was a dollar short, but the driver accepted it. “Don’t worry about it! I hope someone would do the same for my wife.”
Juni got gingerly out of the cab, standing on her uninjured foot, the toe of the sprained one touching the ground. She looked around as the cab pulled away around the semicircular driveway, but there was no one there to assist her, so she limped over to the door of the urgent care center, pinwheeling her arms for balance and wincing in pain with each step. She approached the automatic door, but the motion sensor failed to see her for some reason. She waved her arms, but the door still didn’t open. Finally, she noticed that a little door off to the side was propped open, and she supported herself with a palm on the useless sliding-glass door to totter over to it.
Once inside, apparent turmoil resolved itself into dozens of individual dramas. Children wailed and wheezed, and people held bloody towels to heads or limbs. The molded-plastic chairs arrayed around the waiting room were broken, some of them lying in Daliesque puddles, some merely broken off their metal bases. Her bare right foot and the ball of her injured left foot sunk into the putty-like substance which the linoleum floor’s traffic areas had turned into. The reception counter was abandoned by the staff. Juni turned and saw a smaller alcove next to the doorway, where the linoleum floor was still solid and people were sprawled out, curled up, or sitting; one woman coughed relentlessly into a squelchy kleenex. Juni fished a packet of tissues from her jacket pocket and handed them to the woman without a word; the woman looked up gratefully. Another woman, very young, was pale and dull-eyed, with dry lips, panting and resting her head on the lap of a worried-looking youth who stroked her hair with desperate concentration.
Juni hobbled up to the counter and leaned on her elbows, taking the weight off her injured foot. After quite a long wait, a petite and pretty woman in teal-and-purple scrubs came out, her face cycling through expressions signaling that she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She gave Juni a pile of forms and a lead pencil. Juni’s forearms stuck to the formica countertop when she reached out to take them. “Our clipboards and pens are destroyed, sorry. Just fill this out if you really think you want to be seen.”
“Why wouldn’t I want to be seen? I sprained my ankle.”
“Well, we can’t X-ray it, because the top of the X-ray table is now on the floor, and the X-ray unit won’t work anyway. We can’t cast it because our casting materials are all polymer and they aren’t setting up. All we can do is wrap it in an Ace bandage and send you home with Tylenol.”
At that moment a half-sobbing, half-shrieking voice ululated from somewhere behind her. “Yeah.” The girl jerked her head towards the sound. “We don’t have any hypodermics left, either, for local anesthetic,” the girl said, striving for cynical but with a waver in her voice betraying her despair. “Or IVs. Staying or going?”
“Well, I have an Ace bandage and Tylenol at home.” Juni found herself speaking slowly. Her mind felt like honey in winter, slow-motion, unreal, trying to fit this scene into something that made sense, failing utterly.
The girl made an impatient half-shrug. Juni handed her back the pencil and the form and hobbled outside. A rescuing chariot, her brother’s car pulled up the driveway at that moment. Her husband, her dear, sweet Bill, jumped out and wrapped one arm around her shoulders, taking her other hand, and tenderly assisted her into the back seat. She sniffled, sighed in relief, and collapsed against him.
XXVII.
Gotta Get that Gasoline
LeRoy pulled his '77 Malibu into the Quick Stop N Go. Peewee and Jack were sitting in their usual spots by the water hose, running their daily business as usual. LeRoy didn’t need anything in that way today, and that was good because he’d just enough money in his account to pay for a tank of gas to get him to work the rest of the week, plus the EBT card, and Peewee and Jack didn't have any way to take EBT since Jack's sister's fish market had closed up shop because they caught that Mexican gal working there.
To his surprise, all eight pumps were blocked by cars. But the drivers weren’t pumping gas; they weren’t inside paying for gas and getting smokes or soda; they were standing around, waving their arms, talking to each other, talking on their cell phones, or talking to Buddy, who was standing there scratching his head and shrugging his shoulders.
The body language of everyone at the pumps was so clearly semaphoring, “What the fuck?” that it made LeRoy laugh. He turned off his engine and lit a cigarette, draping his wrist over the sturdy plastic of the Malibu’s steering wheel, and waited to see what happened next.
What happened next was that Buddy, who was supposedly not the owner of the station, but sure acted like the owner, and nobody’d ever seen the owner, walked over to a corrugated metal shed, unlocked it, pulled out a flat wooden block, and then walked over to one of the metal filling holes over the in-ground fuel tanks, which just happened to be a few feet in front of LeRoy’s bumper. Buddy squatted and used both hands to take the cap off the hole, then stood up. LeRoy saw that the wooden block was actually a long stick of wood, riveted end-to-end so it unfolded into a yardstick. When the stick was unfolded, it was longer than Buddy was tall, and Buddy slowly lowered the end of it into the hole.
When he pulled the stick out, LeRoy tipped his head to the side. The last foot-and-a-half of the stick was coated with what looked like mayhaw jelly. Buddy stared at the stick for a moment, perplexed, then pulled a rag out of his belt and wiped it clean. The second time, he watched it real closely and carefully as he dipped it into the center of the tubular channel, not letting it touch the sides. He drew it out, just as carefully, and once again it was covered in a clotted, sticky amber substance. Buddy noticed LeRoy watching, and he pivoted, so that the end of the stick was hidden from LeRoy’s view.
Buddy looked furtively under his brows at the people standing by their cars. LeRoy watched one woman shut her cheap flip phone, climb back into her SUV, and turn the key hopefully, with no success. She slumped in frustration. A man showed up in a battered blue Kia and the woman at Pump 1, dressed in a McDonald’s uniform and scowling in frustration, locked her little Honda with the key-fob remote and jumped in with him. There was one man, tall, beefy, tattooed, bloodshot, and scarred, who was standing next to a pimped-out black Escalade with “2 Fast 4 U Niggas” lettered in script at the top of the windshield, staring fixedly at Buddy. Buddy folded the stick up and walked back towards the shed. He tossed the stick in and closed the shed. LeRoy noticed he didn’t lock it. Out of the corner of his eye, LeRoy saw the big, ugly Escalade owner start to move. LeRoy’d always found that the best way to deal with trouble was
n’t to be there when it happened. He figured that now would be an excellent time to depart. He glanced down to turn the ignition key, and when he looked up from starting the car, Buddy was gone. That fast!
In a few seconds, so was LeRoy.
XXVIII.
In Whom We Trust
DD’s hands were cold on the metal railing of the boat now ferrying her ashore from the oil rig. She zipped her windbreaker. It helped with the chilly breeze which had suddenly thrashed its way out of nowhere, but she still felt cold inside. She repeated over and over inside her head what she’d told Jeff: It wasn’t a question of if the wells would burst, but when. She resisted the urge to look behind her at the gentle waves in the Gulf; there’d be no sign of the eruption, which would occur underwater, until the oil slowly began to bob to the surface, and even that would hardly be noticeable from this angle. The floor of the Gulf of Mexico would be perforated with thousands of open oil wells, weeping black tears of crude. Would the p davisii reproduce fast enough to eat the oil? A nauseous feeling rose inside her as she mentally calculated the volumes and realized the volume of bacteria that would result from multiple wells giving way would completely change the biochemistry of the water: metabolic by-products, heat from what was, effectively, fermentation of unimaginably huge volumes. It would even cause mechanical changes in the viscosity of the water. A horrible thought struck her: how would that affect larger animals, as marine creatures tried to swim through goo? And what about the food chain, from krill on up to mammals?
She heard masculine voices raised in excitement from below decks. Two crew members in coveralls with the Amrencorp logo hustled to the top of the steps to look down into the boat’s innards. She heard a compressor start up: the bilge pump. “I thought the hull was inspected in dry dock last month?” She overheard one of the crewmen say. The two of them, frowning, started down the steep stairway and their dialogue was muffled.
The boat approached the pier, and though the water seemed no rougher, the craft was definitely rocking more vigorously now. The boat wallowed as it came about, and slowly swung into place to line up beside the weathered wood. DD noticed that the ship’s rail, which had been at her eye level when she was standing on the pier before they boarded, was now only knee-height above the pier. The crew flipped the ramp out anyway, horizontal instead of sloping down, then disappeared below again. She minced carefully across that bridge to the dock. Several oil-rig roustabouts had been on the boat with her, coming ashore for their much-anticipated months off. But instead of surging across the ramp, they’d dumped their luggage at the rail, and apparently joined the group below decks trying to puzzle out what was wrong with the boat. She looked at the belly of the craft at the waterline and was surprised to see it pitted with craters like the surface of the moon, with little shreds of fiber sticking out like mangy fur. Her mouth opened in shock as a thought occurred to her. What kind of polymer is used in that fiberglass hull? Would p. davisii be able to eat it?
Her train of thought derailed abruptly as a familiar face popped up in front of her: a man wearing a trench coat, khakis, and deck shoes. She smiled in recognition: someone she’d met at the presentation? Then she placed the out-of-context face and her smile collapsed. The sick feeling in her stomach turned into a clutching pain. Not him again! Not now.
“Mr. Fleck.” She said noncommittally.
“DD…Dr. Davis…I have to talk to you.” His eyes were red and watering…the stiff salt breeze? But the emotion in his voice and the quivering of his lips suggested some deranged excitement instead.
“About what?” She drew back. His agitation put her immediately into fight-or-flight mode and she unlocked her knees.
He took a step closer to her, and so she took two quick steps to the side, so he wasn’t blocking her way to run up the pier towards land if escape was needed. No one was on the boat’s deck or on the pier at that moment, and all the people on shore were at least 100 yards away and not paying any attention. Still in an easy semi-squat, prepared to run, she slipped her right hand in her pocket and curled her fingers around the stock of her gun, her finger parked comfortingly on the outside of the trigger guard.
Fleck was strident, his voice cracking. “This is it. The end. It’s happening. Now. We have to get out of here!” He reached out to take her arm and she easily stepped away, shaking off his fingers as they brushed her arm, and he let his hand fall to his side and looked silently down at the boards of the pier for a moment. He could definitely outrun me with those long legs. She sidled over a little further, still facing him; she was between him and the shore now and she eased backed a step. Two steps.
He raised his head, his face more composed. “Dr. Davis, I know how this must sound. But please believe me: you want to come with me. Things are about to get ugly, not just here but all over the world, and I can keep you safe. Your bacteria is about to cause a global disaster.”
DD snickered incredulously, rolling her eyes just a little, and as she did, her attention was captured by the sight of the boat. The deck was inches from the water; each wave washed over the stern and slopped over the inwale into the stairway, soaking the upholstered benches and streaming down the treads. As she watched, the first crew member hurried out, cursing floridly, his coveralls wet to the waist, and suddenly a stream of uniformed crewmen and jeans-clad roustabouts came pouring out, clattering across the ramp at a run, some grabbing their bags piled on the deck, others not even pausing. One vaulted the railing, bypassing the ramp completely to land on the pier with a thump that shook both DD and Fleck. All twelve of them lined up to stare at the craft, cursing under their breaths, but otherwise speechless. The boat rode higher for a moment with the weight of the big men off it, then resumed its accelerating sinking. The ropes holding it ashore stretched taut.
Fleck, momentarily forgotten, gently cupped her left elbow. “P. davisii eats fiberglass,” He said quietly, right next to her ear. “It eats all plastic. And it’s spreading. Here, and in Asia, and we think in East Africa. Nothing can stop it now.”
DD turned to look at him. Something inside her shifted; she was scared and she wanted someone to trust. She dropped her hand down behind his to take his right arm and let him lead her off the dock. I am numb. Shocked. Details popped out at her with acute clarity: a pelican on a piling; a post stuck in a concrete footing, now leaning against a cement block wall; a bottle cap on the ground. I’ve never dealt with something like this before. I need help, to figure out what's going on and how to cope with it. As they stepped off the wooden pier onto the concrete seawall, she turned to see the boat’s gunwales completely underwater, the craft listing crazily away from the pier, and the roof of the cabin being held out of the drink only by the straining ropes. One of the roustabouts who'd come ashore had pulled off one of his shoes and was sitting on his duffel, looking at the sole. The waffled tread was gone; the bottom of the shoe was melted smooth.
Fleck led her into the little canteen by the dock. They sat at a rickety table. A bleached-and-teased fiftyish waitress poured them coffee. Fleck explained. “I don’t really work for TERRI.”
No shit. “I figured that out. Who do you work for?”
“I’d rather not say. But this is bigger than my Agency. The UN, the Chinese, the Russians, and all the US intelligence agencies are all mobilizing together on this one.”
“What one? What exactly is happening?”
Fleck gestured at the TV mounted on the wall above the window to the kitchen. CNN was streaming images of pile-ups on freeways, collapsing buildings, airplane crashes, a delivery truck with milk streaming into puddles on the ground, a half-naked Asian woman running screaming through streets with Chinese signage, her clothing in tatters…
“You don’t think about how many things in our lives are made of petroleum polymers, do you?” Fleck asked sadly.
DD distractedly nodded, the implications coming fully clear to her now.
“DD,” Fleck said, “you made this bacterium. You can help us stop it.”
>
“I don’t know…” she said thoughtfully, the microbiologist part of her mind kicking back into gear to toy with the problem, glad to have something familiar to latch onto. If I could just regain control of the growth rate, I’d have a chance. But why is it doing this?
Mistaking her doubt for resistance, he said, “You have a moral obligation to help undo the harm it’s done.”
“Yes, yes, I agree,” DD said, too engrossed in the mental puzzle to take the emotional bait. “The other OHCBs always burned themselves out when the spill was gone,” she mused aloud. “We never thought this could happen. I still don’t know how or why it’s started digesting polymers. Especially when you consider how many different types of bonds there are in plastic substrates…”
“The fact remains, you are our best hope.” He looked solemn, but as she came out of her distraction, DD’s bullshit detector went off on the solemnity, even as molecular models twirled in her head. There must be genes for enzymes being expressed that I somehow missed in the haplotyping. Those enzymes have to be dissolving the polymers. Is there any evidence of alkanivorax or p putida producing polymer-cleaving enzymes? How quickly could they evolve them in real-world settings?
“I’ll try everything I can to figure it out, as soon as I get back to the lab. I was planning to spend the night here and go back in the morning, but I’ll grab my stuff and head back right now. Amrencorp's shuttle was supposed to be here to take me to the hotel, but I don’t see it.”
“You can’t go back there.”
“The hotel?”
“Your lab.”
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 9