“Since when do you trust Fleck?” Did he read my mind?
“Was I talking out loud?” she asked.
“Talking about what, DD?” Isaac asked, in a strangely gentle and soothing manner.
The coffee cup, nearly empty, hit the floor and DD stared at it stupidly. “We were talking about the plastic.”
The Styrofoam cup didn’t dissolve but maybe that was because the coffee killed the alkanivorax. I should tell him.
But instead, she kicked her feet up onto the hard steel bunk, laid her head on the foam rubber mattress, and closed her eyes. Isaac walked silently over to the door and unlocked it to let the taller man back inside.
XXX.
White Rabbit: The Interview
“DD…DD…”
Deedeededee… She sang, “Deedeededee…” She laughed at the sound of her own voice. She realized her eyes were closed and she opened them. She thought she opened them.
“Just let me open my eyes…things are blurry…”
“It’s okay, DD. Let me help you up.” Isaac took her hand. She grasped his hand firmly and pulled herself up to sitting. She rose cautiously but her legs felt soft and rubbery; she stumbled into him. He steadied her. She felt a surge of strength and stood upright, her hand on his shoulder. Then she remembered he wasn’t her friend.
“What do you mean, I’m not your friend?” Isaac asked.
Did I say that out loud? Too funny!
“You know,” DD grinned slyly, looking at him from the corner of her eyes. “You know!”
She took a step away from Isaac's side. Coffee Breath was standing by the door. She took another step back, away from both of them, and hit something hard. She realized she was against the wall. She pushed off suddenly from the wall and took a run at the door, but next thing she knew she was whirling, with Coffee Breath’s arm around her waist.
“Whee! Shall we dance?” She giggled. He took her shoulders and danced her backwards, and then she was sitting on the bed. Her hands startled her. No, his hands startled her. Her heart was beating fast and her mouth was dry. Her coffee cup was overturned on the floor, and her mouth was so dry! She felt a sense of loss over the mouthful of spilled sweet drink and whimpered, feeling tears rise to her eyes, pointing at the tiny puddle of coffee.
“It’s okay, DD, I’ll get you some more coffee.” One of them said. Said. Said.
“I want some more. That coffee is good stuff. I’m feeling much more energetic now.”
“Good! Maybe you can focus now on who gave you the cultures,” suggested Isaac.
“Tim ordered them. He does all the ordering,” DD said.
“Don’t play dumb.”
“I am dumb.” That's not right. “No, I’m smart. If I’m dumb, you must be an idiot, right?” She chuckled and stood up. “Bye!” Time to go! She tried to sidestep Isaac and Tall Coffee Breath pushed her easily back onto the bunk.
“DD, just tell us. Who did you meet with? What did that person look like?” Isaac said. His name is Isaac.
“Isaac. Isaac who?” DD asked.
“Who did you meet with?”
“What’s your last name, Isaac? Mine is Davis.” She held out her right hand. He ignored it.
“Dr. Davis, who did you meet with about the cultures?”
“He didn’t give me any choice but to meet with him,” DD said sadly.
Isaac’s eyebrows twitched upwards. He leaned forward.
“Who didn’t?” he said eagerly. “Who didn't give you any choice?”
“The man who came to my room early in the morning.”
“What did he look like?”
“The same.” He knows what Fleck looks like. Why would he look any different yesterday morning?
“The same as what?”
DD noticed the grain in the plywood near the ceiling above Isaac’s head was crawling. Not crawling exactly…not getting anywhere …shrinking…no, not really shrinking…pulsing. Did they put something in the coffee? Shit, that hasn’t happened to me since I was 15!
“The same as what, DD?” Urged Isaac gently. Annoying. He's annoying me.
“Fleck. It was Fleck.” Isaac slumped.
She began to hum. “Bela Fleck, do you recognize the song?”
“Not Fleck, DD, the other one, the one who gave you the cultures,” Isaac tried again.
“There was another one! Yes, there was! Two!” DD smiled, happy to be helpful.
“Who were they?”
She blinked. Who were they? Who were I? Who were we? We… they… you… you two… you all…
“Y’all. My head hurts.” She put her hand to her temple and then stared at the blood on her hand. Dry. I’m bleeding dry blood.
She held it out to Isaac “Look it’s dry blood. Just like the movie.”
“What movie?”
“The Andromeda Strain. Before your time. Before my time. Old sci-fi.”
Isaac glanced at the taller man, who pulled out a memo pad and jotted something on it. This struck DD as funny, him thinking The Andromeda Strain was something significant, big spy stuff, and she giggled.
“DD,” Isaac said, “who did you talk to before you made the last batch of cultures?”
“Talk to?”
“Did you talk to Viswanathan?”
She was getting angry. “Look, I told you I don’t know him. He did the classic work.”
“It's okay, DD. We know you’re not the one responsible. If you help us by letting us know who set you up, we’ll make sure the prosecutor goes easy on you. The work you did on p davisii wasn’t your own, we understand that.”
She stood up. She wanted to frame a cogent argument, but all at once she was seeing red, red and black pulsating before her eyes, and she was clawing, kicking, scratching. Something hit her head. The blow came in the same place as before, just as hard, but she couldn’t feel any pain, just the rage. Someone was screaming in rage and it was coming from her throat, and something was hitting her hard in the stomach so the scream was wobbling like a Tarzan yell, like a bellows, and she had a handful of hair and it was attached and then it wasn’t, and she was biting something soft which tasted like rust. Her elbows were pulled behind her and she thrashed and kicked, making a resonant thrum when her shin hit the bunk that should hurt but it doesn’t. Not like it used to when Daddy did it.
She was panting, her arms behind her, also in a way that should hurt but didn’t, and she screamed, “Fuck you! Fuck you! It’s mine! I made it, it’s mine by contract, and I can do what I want with it. You can talk to my lawyer if you don’t believe me. I worked for this. I worked for years in that fucking state-funded academic gutter. You don’t know how many asses I had to kiss. You have NO IDEA how many stupid political games I had to play. Stupid. Stupid…egotistical…” Suddenly she was sobbing. She let her body slump forward. She observed remotely that her shoulders felt better as she leaned forward, which was odd that they should feel better, because they hadn’t hurt exactly, but the sobs were wracking her body and distracting her from that.
Suddenly she was face down on the floor and the door was slamming. She was alone in the room. She was still sobbing. She crawled over and vomited brown coffee into the steel toilet and the sobbing ceased. She gathered up the foam mattress and hugged it with her arms and legs. Her breath gradually slowed. She slept.
Outside the door, Isaac and his partner peered at each other under their brows, shaking their heads. “Leave her here a couple of days?”
Isaac nodded. “One more round of questioning. Then dispose of her.”
“Sure we can’t just do it now? I don’t think she…Shit!” He lost his footing on the linoleum floor; his feet slid out from under him.
Isaac stifled his laughter, stepped over to offer the other man a hand up, and wound up on his hands and knees in the puddle of soupy melting plastic.
XXXI.
Guillotined
“The declaration of emergency has gone out, but we don’t know how many units actually got the message,” Stev
e said, from his seat at POTUS’s right hand at the conference table.
“What does Homeland Security have to say?”
“We can’t contact them.”
“Well, get me the Secretary of Defense then.”
“We are trying, Mr. President. We’ve lost contact with approximately 67 per cent of Secret Service units, 44 per cent of FBI, and 89 per cent of Marines. Whoever's behind this, it’s everywhere.”
“What about the secure satellite uplinks?” He directed his attention to the NSA director.
“The satellites are unaffected,” he said. “From the limited information we have been able to glean in brief moments of contact, it appears that other nations’ satellites are also unharmed.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
The Secret Service Special Agent in Charge pulled the spiral headset cord from the back of his neck. He held it out and pinched the wire with his fingertips, pulling the wire straight as it slipped through his opposed nails. The plastic insulating the wire came away in a gummy wad. He threw the headset down in disgust. “Don't you get it? This is happening to all of us! It's gotten into all our equipment! Even the EMP-hardened stuff!”
“This is like an EMP attack, on steroids! Every level of communication is cut off, in every geographical location. We have no contingency plan for this!”
“I suppose what will happen now,” POTUS said, listlessly processing the situation, “is that everyone will try to get instructions for how to deal with the emergency. But they won’t be able to.” He looked up. “The government is like an animal with its head cut off. It will be chaos!”
The SAC and Steve exchanged glances of relief that he seemed to be catching on. Steve prompted, “But in this case, each agency has its protocols...”
A light came on in POTUS’s eyes. “They’ll break apart into cells and each will attempt to further their last stated goals and missions.”
“That’s right, Mr. President.” Said the SSSPA-in-charge. He was the one who’d taught him the protocols when he was inaugurated. “And what else?” He nudged, trying not to sound like a preschool teacher.
“Make regular attempts to re-establish contact with the hierarchy.”
“Very good.” He struggled to keep any condescension from his voice; the last thing they needed was for POTUS to erupt into one of his face-saving tirades, as he tended to do when his authority was challenged. He was just glad that Congress had been on recess when this hit, or they’d have had to deal with a pissing contest as they all tried to take charge.
“So. What are my resources?” POTUS was making an effort to gear his mind up to the speed of the evolving situation, accustomed as he was to having a small crowd of sharp and driven aides and staffers to deliver the summary distillation of gigabytes of data and information, along with their well-considered recommendations. This was just him, and he felt disarmed, naked, exposed, awkward.
“Mr. President, your resources at this time are what you see in front of you, in this room. These people: your security detail and personal retinue. If you fire one, there is no one to replace him. These computers, which don’t work without power, which we may lose at any moment. And the tiny amount of information which is printed on paper in this room.”
“So.” He paused. “We wait. No other choice, is there?” He glanced around, and no one contradicted him.
“The only decision to be made is, where?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Steve brought POTUS a glass of water and set it beside him on the conference table. This room should be a hubbub of activity. But fully two-thirds of the monitors ranging the periphery of the room sat dark or displayed the manufacturer’s logo or “NO SIGNAL.” A few staffers sat at the few functioning workstations, running on back-up batteries, copying data onto thumb drives and SD cards. The high-grade laser printers in the next room were spewing mailing lists, address lists, and database spreadsheets in hard copy form at their maximum draft speed.
“No internet?” POTUS asked.
“Not in DC. One of the major cell carriers has two bars of service. For now. It looks like all the rest of the towers are infected,” The SAC said. “The cellular networks around the country are also, apparently, going down at an alarming rate.”
“And these computers?” He waved his hand to encompass the workstations lining the walls.
“Are connected in-house only. Glass fiber optic cables still use plastic connectors. No one has touched the internal White House cables since the last security sweep three days ago, so our wiring seems uncontaminated. For now. Who knows if any of these memory cards are infected?” An aide who was sitting at a computer was listening in, and his face fell. He pressed the SD card and it popped out of its socket into his hand. He held it before his face and scrutinized it closely.
“And the electricity?”
“The back-up generators are fueled by gasoline. The tanks are metal, and they haven't been refilled or rotated in over a month, so they should be alright. Again: we think, if no one has touched the tanks with contaminated hands. We have enough of a reserve to run them for two weeks on full power, a month if we drop back to economy consumption. Basically, the White House is off-grid.”
Suddenly, as if on cue, a background din which he'd barely been aware of, vanished: The massive back-up generators which kept the White House in power had automatically switched to the next sequential fuel tank, and just like that, there was no more electricity.
In the silence, the big man spoke, his voice uncharacteristically tiny in the big room. “Damn. I assume it's a priority to bring us back up?”
The SAC hesitated, glanced at Steve as if for guidance or support.
“Mr. President, we have no way of knowing that.” Steve spoke softly.
“Can't you contact Pepco?” The President named the Washington, DC power company.
“Mr. President, landline and cellular phone service is out for the entire city.”
“Can't we send our own techs out to troubleshoot our line?”
He sighed. “First, the line is probably shorted out at multiple points, due to the insulation and connectors dissolving. Second, our infrastructure geek gives us a 92% chance that the power station itself is contaminated to the point of being non-functional.
“And, third, no one is going out of this compound without full military and law enforcement guard details, because the streets are already bedlam. Looting, fires, and people trying to escape the city on foot. The police have no communications and few working vehicles, but there are rumors that over half of them have deserted their posts already.”
“Contaminated? What do you mean, contaminated?”
“Let Birdwell explain it to you. He's the Army Corps of Engineer's ecology geek.”
Lt. Col. Birdwell was, despite his WASP-like name, olive-skinned and black-eyed. He was tall and slender, his jowl just beginning to soften in middle age, his black hair gray at the temples. “Mr. President,” he began, “we believe some sort of microorganism, capable of consuming everything composed of petroleum or plastic, is spreading exponentially, turning everything it touches into water and a semi-solid polymer gel. We don't know for sure where it began, though the NSA,” he nodded at the NSA chief, leaning discreetly against the wall opposite, “believes they have a fix on the originator of the culture. Unfortunately, they've lost contact with the unit that was assigned to acquire that asset.”
POTUS grimaced at the NSA head, who suddenly found his cufflinks extremely interesting.
“Everyone: Sit!” he barked in the haranguing tone of voice that had put him in the Oval Office. “If you're not cleared to be here, leave. Get out!”
The technicians and staffers at the monitors rose instantly and filed out. His security detail, Birdwell, Steve, and Susan Steiner, Secretary of Education, who’d happened to be present for the bill signing, were the only ones in the room with him. He looked around the table.
“Alright, men, we need a plan. But first, we need to
know what we're dealing with. Is this bioterrorism? Is it those ISIS sons of bitches?”
The NSA head spoke up. “We believe it may be. There are actually four possible viruses and bacteria that could be behind this outbreak. Two of them come from geographically unlikely sources, one in Iceland and one in Nairobi. The Russians could easily have developed something like this, though we’d no intel about anything like it beforehand, and we are going over the documents we still have access to, to see if we missed something. But the most likely candidate is a disgruntled academic, a gun nut from the south, DD Davis, and we think she was funded by the Chinese. I am confident we will hear back from the group that is detaining her shortly, and we will have a more definitive answer at that time.”
“Well, that's not much to go on. But it's better than nothing.” He waved his hand, and added as an afterthought, “Anyone else have anything to add?”
Everyone remained silent. “Alright, then. We need a plan. Thoughts?”
One by one, everyone present weighed in. The final decision was, that they couldn’t remain here, but it would be foolish to move right away. The state of mayhem in the city of DC itself would likely peak in 72 hours or so and, they assumed, then die down to a tenuous, gang-enforced peace. They would finish getting as much as they could in hard-copy form, using back-up battery power.
They would assess their resources for moving. If they had vehicles with uncontaminated gas tanks, it might make sense to use the gas in the reserve tanks to get to Camp David instead of trying to get the generators running for a few more weeks. They would also prioritize ascertaining the whereabouts of the First Lady and her children, who’d been at POTUS's New York skyscraper residence earlier in the day. They would continue trying to establish contact with foreign leaders. In the end, there was little they could do, but they set to work doing it with diligence.
XXXII.
A Flea and A Fly in a Flue
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 11