Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  Dr. McReady gave her such a lethal and venomous look that Benny thought Nix would drop right there; but Nix narrowed her green eyes and gave it back full blast.

  Before the two could explode into an argument, Benny asked, “Where’s the rest of the staff? We saw some bodies. One guy in his office . . . ?”

  “Shotgun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dick Price. He was the last. No great loss.” The scientist gave another derisive snort. “The rest are dead. Most of them killed themselves. Cowards.”

  Benny felt sorry for the scientist, but it was getting harder and harder to like her.

  “By the time my team got here,” said McReady without a trace of remorse, “more than two-thirds of the staff were already gone. Before and after we got locked in. The staff who’d been here were torn up by speculation as to whether some of the biological terrors they’d helped to create had been used to destroy the world. Might be true, too. There were suicides . . . murder-suicide pacts. Heart attacks from stress. A couple just wandered off into the badlands to let the desert or the dead have them.” She shook her head in disgust. “We’re struggling to save the world, to preserve life, and these idiots can’t wait to catch the bus out of here.”

  “That guy, Mr. Price, left a message,” said Benny. “He wrote, ‘May God forgive us for what we have done . . .’ ”

  “ ‘We are the horsemen. We deserve to burn,’ ” finished McReady. “All very dramatic.”

  “If he killed himself out of guilt,” she said, “what were you all guilty of?”

  McReady’s eyes didn’t blink or waver. “If you’re asking me if I participated in the development of the Reaper Plague, then no.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  McReady pointed down the hall toward Price’s office. “He did. The people here did.”

  “They started the plague?” asked Benny, aghast.

  “Don’t be an idiot. Why would we release a doomsday plague? We’re scientists. We research, we develop—we don’t implement. Other people—politicians and generals—take science and turn it into a weapon. I expect Captain Ledger here’s been filling your head with his left-of-liberal antimilitary propaganda.”

  “First off,” said Joe, “I was a moderate back when elections mattered. Second, I’m in the military. Now, stop evading their questions, Monica. We come here to rescue you and we find a base that I should have been told about, a staff that’s killed themselves in remorse, and suicide messages that talk about guilt. Stop being such a hard-ass and tell us what happened.”

  Benny thought that the scientist was going to argue, but instead she seemed to deflate. “Okay, okay . . . I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been alone too long. Months. Here’s the short version. I took my team to Hope One to investigate reports of mutations among the population of walkers in Washington State. I was very interested in this because mutation was deemed unlikely, since Reaper was designed to be ultra-stable. As you may or may not know, Reaper is a combination of several designer bioweapons, including nine separate viruses, fourteen bacteria, and five genetically altered parasites including the big daddy—the jewel wasp. The core is something called Lucifer 113, which was developed by the Soviets during the Cold War. That one got out of the bag a couple of times and almost lived up to its promise of being an ultimate weapon. It was stopped, though, and all known samples of it were either destroyed or sent to secure facilities like this one. But someone obtained a sample of Lucifer 113, and that sample wound up in the hands of some off-the-radar design lab, which married it to an old terrorist bioweapon called seif al din—wasn’t that one you stopped from being released, Joe?”

  “Twice,” he said sadly, and then cursed.

  “Our bioweapons teams were given that super-plague and tasked with creating the ultimate version, and then using that as a staring point to create a defensive protocol in case it—or anything like it—ever got out. But somehow the superstrain of it was released, our version. No one knows quite how, and we all have proof that there has never been a more aggressive or deliberately destructive disease.

  “Because Reaper is driven by parasites, there’s no such thing as natural immunity, though there is a range of reaction time in terms of symptom onset, necrosis, and other factors. Bottom line: Everyone who’s exposed is infected, and everybody worldwide is exposed. Whoever released this spent years laying the groundwork. They must have introduced eggs and bacteria into water sources all over the world. We started getting wind of it almost two years before the actual outbreak. Labs were reporting the presence of the components in soil throughout the agricultural regions, in water tables and reservoirs, even in processed foods. Best guess is that these components were introduced into the biosphere beginning no later than ten years before the global outbreak. It would have needed at least that much time for the bacteria and parasites to spread. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration—all the power players were involved in researching the spread of the components, but no one really understood what kind of a threat it was.”

  She shook her head. “In a strange way you have to admire the scope of that. A coordinated worldwide release of components of a doomsday plague. For that to happen there had to be huge money—hundreds of millions of dollars—and a large number of persons involved. Just the administration of something like that is staggering.”

  “Could have been a cult,” suggested Joe as he knelt and removed Grimm’s helmet. The mastiff’s tongue lolled from between rubbery lips. “There were some big cults and pseudo-religions gaining followings around the world. My team ran into a few of them over the years. Some were well funded, highly organized, and extremely militant.”

  “I thought about that too,” said McReady. “But really—who cares? The damage is done. They accomplished what they set out to do. They released a doomsday plague, and for most of the population of planet Earth, that’s what it was. Seven billion people died. If some groups hadn’t been able to find defensible positions and learn to work together instead of panicking like mice, we’d be as extinct as the dinosaurs. We’re lucky as many people survived as they did.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we heard about mutations in Washington, and we had to go check it out. The possibility of a mutation was exciting, because it meant that there was a chance of identifying the mutagen taking control of the mutation process.”

  “What good would that do?” asked Lilah.

  McReady nodded as if she approved of the question. “The pathogen is in a perfect form. You couldn’t make it more deadly than it is. Any change to its nature or structure would actually result in a reduction of its overall threat, because it would mean that it had shifted away from immutability. Follow me?”

  “I . . . think so. If it’s changing, then it isn’t perfect anymore.”

  “Smart girl,” said McReady.

  Nix said, “We’ve seen some of the mutations. The R3’s. They’re so much faster and scarier.”

  “Smarter, too,” said Lilah.

  “How’s that a good thing?” asked Benny.

  McReady shook her head. “Those are short-term effects. What’s happened is the dormant parasite eggs have been made to hatch. There are active threadworms in the newly infected, but they die off after they’ve laid eggs. As they die off, the process of host decomposition goes into a protracted stasis. We still don’t know how long a walker will last once they’ve reached the stasis point—clearly many years—and we still haven’t cracked all the science on that. Maybe someone will one of these days. Not my concern. When we set up Hope One, we found all sorts of mutations up there. Smarter walkers, faster walkers, with abilities all up and down the Seldon Scale, the evaluation method we developed after the plague started. It was exciting stuff. Dangerous, too . . . we learned the hard way about how smart and fast these mutations were. Lost a third of our staff in the first few weeks, and we lost more when we started actively l
ooking for the most extreme mutations.”

  “That must have been terrifying,” said Nix.

  McReady shrugged. “It was worth it. This was real science again. We were doing ten, fifteen autopsies a day, every day. Running tissue samples and other cultures around the clock. What we found was that there was a new bacteria in the mix. This is one of nature’s little jokes, because after we’d looked at every kind of organism or causal agent that might trigger the parasites to hatch, the one we found shouldn’t even have an impact on the jewel wasp, which is the parasite at the heart of the Reaper disease cluster. It is in itself a mutation; in this case it’s a mutated form of the bacteria Brucella suis, a zoonosis that primarily affects pigs. My guess is that the walkers in northern California attacked some wild pigs and wild boars, biting and infecting them but not killing them. The Reaper interacted with the bacteria Brucella suis and caused a mutation there. This probably happened early on, ten, twelve years ago. The rate and form of the mutation is consistent with exposure to radiation, so these walkers may have been survivors of the nukes dropped on San Francisco or even Seattle. In any case, you have radiation causing mutation in the walkers who bit the pigs, and then the presence of the bacteria, which allowed for further mutation. . . .”

  Her voice ran down as she looked around.

  “Are you following any of this?”

  Benny held his thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. “About this much.”

  “We met some of those infected pigs,” said Joe. “One of them nearly cut Lilah here in half.”

  McReady sighed. “Live ones or dead ones?”

  “Dead,” said Joe, “but spry.”

  “That’s something we were afraid of. The bacteria Brucella suis allowed the Reaper pathogen to adapt to the pig’s biology. They started turning up about four years ago. We brought two from Hope One, and I radioed ahead to Dick Price to have his people get more of them for when my team arrived. He did, but in the process of bringing the infected boars to Death Valley, he may accidentally have spread the bacterial infection to the walkers in this area. In any case, he managed to get us the boars we needed. We had a pen of about forty of them for a while.”

  “You kept them?” gasped Lilah.

  “Of course we kept them,” said McReady. “Live boars and reanimated boars were a perfect place to grow the bacteria.”

  “What happened to the boars?” asked Benny.

  “When we got to the point where we’d devised a way to grow the bacteria synthetically, I ordered the boars terminated. Dick Price sent all ten of his soldiers out there. Not one of them came back.”

  “The boars got them?”

  “The boars got what was left of them. Reapers laid an ambush. We didn’t even know they were in the area. They trapped our team outside, forced them to give them the access codes to enter this complex. They killed a lot of our people and even let some of the boars loose in here. We had to fight them using brooms and folding chairs and whatever we could grab. The soldiers were all outside being slaughtered. Price’s science team panicked and overreacted. They used grenades and makeshift explosives to fight back, and one of the blasts did something to the air lock so we couldn’t get out. The reapers trashed our communications center. We cut them down, but it was too late. They also pushed our helicopter over the edge of the cliff. That was about a month after we got here. We killed the last of the reapers and slaughtered the pigs they let loose, but so what? We were stuck in here with no communication and no way out of this facility until you blew the door in. Between those who died in the ambush and the rest who killed themselves here, I’ve seen forty-one people die since coming here.”

  72

  BENNY UNDERSTOOD THE DESPAIR NOW.

  The suicides and hopelessness.

  McReady and her people had been trapped in this locked tomb of concrete and steel for almost a year and a half—a place that was so secret even Joe Ledger and his rangers didn’t know about it. The scientists and staff must have thought that they were doomed to die in here, forgotten by a dying world. Until McReady and then the reapers showed up.

  Benny said, “Not everyone from the transport plane died in the crash. A few survived, and they joined the Night Church. I . . . um . . . killed one of them.” He cleared his throat. “One of them must have had a copy of the coordinates and gave them up when he joined the reapers. That’s probably how they found this place.”

  McReady considered, sighed, and nodded. “That might also explain what happened to the missing notes and the samples of mutagen and Archangel I sent to Sanctuary.”

  “We recovered some stuff,” said Joe. “Enough for Reid to make some weak versions of the mutagen, but she couldn’t work out how to process the mutagen into the cure. Without your notes Reid said that all they’ll ever hit are dead ends.”

  “Damn.” McReady rubbed her eyes. They were paler in color than Benny had expected, less of the intense dark brown of the face in the Teambook photo and more of a dusty burned-gold hue. “The one upside to working in total isolation is that it focuses your concentration.” She nodded at the stacks of containers and heaps of bags. “See those boxes? Eleven tons of a powdered version of the mutagen, boxed to make it easier to transport and store. But you do not want to get any of it in a mucous membrane. Any moisture will activate the bacteria, and that starts the worms hatching.” She laughed. “Those worms are something else. Industrious and clever little buggers. Once they become active in a walker, all the walker’s tissues become softer, more pliant. This is why the R3’s are able to move so much more quickly.”

  “What’s in the bags?” asked Nix. “Is that the cure? Is that Archangel?”

  “Yes. We have 968,000 capsules as of yesterday’s count. They have enough supplies back at Sanctuary to make a million doses a month.”

  “We can save the world,” whispered Nix.

  McReady rubbed her eyes. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes, we can.”

  They stared at the bags. Benny felt like the floor was tilting under him.

  Lilah cut into the silence. “The mutagen doesn’t just make the zoms faster. They got smarter, too.”

  Benny nodded. “One of them picked up a stick and hit me with it.”

  “Mm,” McReady said diffidently. “The appearance of increased intelligence is nothing magical. From the initial infection, the parasites feed tiny amounts of oxygen to the brain as well as other key proteins and chemicals to the nervous system. That means the brains never die a complete death as they do in ordinary mortality. The parasites have to preserve some of the cranial nerves in order for the host body to walk, grab, eat, chew.”

  “But they don’t need to eat,” said Benny. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Sure they do. When they don’t or can’t, they go into a deeper stasis. They stop moving, stop expending energy. It’s like a super-amplified version of the hibernation state, similar to that of a ground squirrel. The squirrel’s metabolic rate drops to one percent, but with the walkers it’s down to one thousandth of one percent. They are dead by any standard clinical model, but not in point of fact. The parasites can’t let the host body completely decay, otherwise it’s of no value as a vector for spreading the disease. So the process of necrosis is slowed to an almost negligible level. However, when they do eat, the food they consume is broken down by enzymes at an incredibly slow rate. It might take them months or even years to fully digest whatever protein they’ve consumed. All the while the parasites are being fed.”

  “Why don’t people know this?” asked Nix.

  “People do,” said McReady. “Everyone in the American Nation knows this. It’s taught in school. I’m surprised you don’t know it.”

  “That’s not the kind of thing they teach us at home,” said Nix.

  “Pity,” sniffed McReady. “Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge is suicide.”

  Benny did not reply to that. He asked, “I’m confused about a few things. Like, why did that man, Mr. Price, write what he wrote?”r />
  “Price spent his life designing bioweapons. Airborne Ebola and a form of tuberculosis used for assassinations, that sort of stuff. He was Dr. Death for thirty years before the Fall. I guess he thought he had a lot to answer for. He probably did have a lot to answer for. Maybe not Reaper, but enough other monsters.”

  “Why did you think Joe was here to kill you?”

  She almost smiled. “When I saw Joe, I thought that Jane Reid or one of her masters figured I’d gone off the reservation, maybe gone crazy and joined the reapers. Whatever. Generally, if you see Joe Ledger show up pointing a gun at you, I guess you start reexamining your conscience.”

  “I’m not an assassin,” said Joe mildly.

  “I’m sure that was never on your business card,” was McReady’s cold reply.

  “There’s something else,” interrupted Benny. “You said that there were R3’s in Washington and then some around here . . . but Nix and I saw some fast zoms near where we live, up by Yosemite National Park, in Mariposa County.”

  “Drifters,” said McReady. “Probably wild boars spreading the mutation.”

  “But what about the boars that attacked Lilah in Nevada, and the R3’s Nix and Lilah fought? Wild boars don’t live in deserts.”

  McReady grunted. “I . . . don’t know.” She looked at Joe. “Could Reid have been—?”

  “Reid doesn’t have the D-series notes. I gave her some samples of the mutagen, but she didn’t know what to do with it. And even if she did, she wouldn’t try it on walkers in the wild. She’s not a genius, but she’s not suicidally stupid.”

  “Reapers,” said Lilah.

  Everyone looked at her. McReady said, “Only if they had the missing notes and a good scientist. A chemist, a molecular biologist, an epidemiologist. Someone who understands the kind of science we’re talking about.”

  “Could the reapers have someone like that?” asked Nix. “I mean . . . they’re religious nuts.”

  “They’re religious nuts now,” said Benny. “Who and what were they before they joined the Night Church?”