Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  She opened the envelope, expecting to see the cheek-swab analysis device she and Amos had invented. Instead, she saw a simple, six-inch plastic tube, white, with three colored LEDs built into it: yellow, green and red.

  Margaret held it up. “You don’t use the swab test anymore?”

  “You’ve been on vacay for a while, I take it,” Tim said. “Yours was susceptible to false-positives if the test subject had recently eaten plant material. Considering the level of concern in this joint, I didn’t want some guy getting shot because he had a piece of spinach stuck in his teeth. The one you’re holding is a blood test. Spring-loaded needle. Just press it against your fingertip.”

  Clarence huffed. “Are you serious? We just got here.”

  Tim nodded. “While I may have the natural good looks of a late-night TV host, I assure you I’m serious. I’m negative and I mean to stay that way.”

  Smart thinking. Margaret thought of a line she’d read in a book once: perfect paranoia is perfect awareness. She liked Tim already.

  Margaret opened an alcohol swab, rubbed down the pad of her thumb, then pressed the tube’s tip against it. She heard a tiny click, felt a sharp poke. She lifted the tube, looked at it: the needle had retracted. A small smear of her blood remained on the unit’s flat end.

  The yellow light started to flash. She had a brief, intense flash of fear … what if she’d already caught the disease? What if the light turned red? The yellow flashing slowed. The tiniest mistake could make her change, turn her into a killer, it could—

  The green light blinked on.

  Margaret let out a long breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. She was right back in it again, dead center in the hot zone.

  Clarence picked up the second box, repeated Margaret’s actions. In seconds, his test flashed green.

  The airlock door slid open with a light hiss of air. The blond man stepped out. He all but ignored Clarence in his rush to offer Margaret an overly excited handshake.

  “I’m Tim Feely,” he said. “Biology, mostly, but also regular-old doctorin’ when it’s needed.”

  His hands felt soft.

  “I’m Margaret Montoya.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. A genuine, I don’t care what anybody thinks laugh. In a bar or on a date, this one would be quite the charmer.

  “I know who you are,” he said. He turned to Clarence. “As if I don’t know who she is, right?” He turned back to Margaret, his moves twitchy, like a bird’s. “Everyone knows. You’re the woman who saved the world. Thanks for that, by the way.”

  He wasn’t being sarcastic — he meant it, said it with real admiration. On the Internet and the news talk shows, no one thanked her. But this man had.

  Tim bowed with a flourish, gestured toward the airlock. “Come one, come all, to the midnight ball. Fuck am I glad to have some help down here.”

  “Thank you,” Margaret said. “That’s quite a welcome.”

  “I try, I try,” Tim said. He tilted his head toward Clarence. “Who’s the stiff?”

  Margaret noticed that Tim was trying — and failing — not to stare at her breasts.

  “Agent Clarence Otto,” she said. “My husband.”

  Tim looked Clarence up and down, and not in the same way he’d scoped out Margaret.

  “Nice suit,” Tim said. “Not many suits in lab work. I don’t suppose you can do anything down here that’s actually helpful?”

  “You never know,” Clarence said. “Sometimes shooting people is a useful skill.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. “Oh, great, an action hero. That will come in handy among all the dead bodies. Come on in. Let me give you the tour. After you, m’lady.”

  She stepped into the airlock, faced an interior door. Clarence and Tim followed. Margaret glanced around, saw drains in the floor and the familiar nozzles and vents — the airlock doubled as a decontamination chamber.

  “The lab complex has a slightly negative internal pressure,” Tim said as he shut the exterior door and cycled the airlock. “Anything punches a hole in the wall, outside air comes in, any cooties we might have don’t go out. Plus when you need that extra-clean feeling, this baby gives you a little chlorine, a little sodium, a little oxygen … all the things a growing boy needs.”

  Clarence’s nose wrinkled in a look of confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “Bleach,” Margaret said. “The nozzles spray bleach.”

  Clarence looked annoyed. Maybe he felt dumb for not getting Tim’s reference. Clarence hated to feel dumb.

  The internal door opened. After so much battleship gray, Margaret was surprised to see white walls and floors. Framed prints added color, as did potted plants.

  “This is the living section,” Tim said. “All the comforts of home while floating on an inland sea.”

  The place looked like the lobby of a small, posh hotel: couches, chairs, a table with a chess set ready for play, a huge, flat-panel monitor up on the wall. Soft overhead lighting made things look, well, cozy. It didn’t feel like being on a military ship at all.

  The decor seemed to bother Clarence. “Nice,” he said. “Good thing you don’t have to put up with the same conditions as the enlisted men who are taking care of you.”

  Tim nodded, missing the dig. “Tell me about it, brother,” he said. “This place makes the time somewhat passable.”

  He walked to a picture mounted on a wall. It was an emergency escape diagram, a long, vertical rectangle broken into three squares. The top was labeled Living Quarters, the middle Lab Space, and the bottom one Receiving & Containment.

  Margaret noticed that all escape routes led back to the airlock they’d just exited. Just one way in, and one way out.

  Tim pointed to the top square.

  “That’s where we are now,” he said. “Living Quarters consists of ten small bedrooms, communal bathrooms, the room we’re standing in — I call it the Rumpus Room, by the way, because who doesn’t want to have a Rumpus Room — a kitchen with our own food supply, and a briefing room that doubles as a whoop-ass movie theater.”

  He pointed to a green icon on the right side, on top of a line that divided the Living Quarters from the Lab Space below it. The Lab Space square contained three long, vertical rectangles. Margaret recognized the symbols: research trailers, ready-made modules that could be hauled by a semi or shipped as cargo. She felt a shudder — the trailers were probably similar to the MargoMobile where her friend Amos Braun had died a horrible death at the skinless hands of Betty Jewel. The rectangle on the left was labeled Morgue, the one in the middle Analysis, and the one on the right Misc.

  Tim tapped the green icon. “This is the second airlock, the one that leads to the lab section, another step down in negative pressure. Keep them pathogens where they belong, my grandmother always used to say. Suits are in that airlock.” He turned to Clarence, smiled. “Real suits, my friend, the kind that matter.”

  Clarence ignored the gibe.

  Tim turned back to the map, traced his finger down through still another green icon. “This airlock leads from the lab space to the Receiving and Containment section. That’s where they brought in any material recovered by the Los Angeles. It’s a cool setup, you’ll dig it. It’s also where we keep any living subjects, which includes the two navy divers who retrieved the bodies of Walker and Petrovsky.”

  He rubbed his hands together. “So, y’all ready to get to work, or do you want to take a little nap before we go in? Maybe powder your noses? I have a little single malt in the theater, if you want to wet your whistles.”

  “No,” Margaret said quickly. “I don’t need a drink. The bodies, are they affected by the black rot?”

  That was the thing that made it so difficult to work on infection victims. The crawlers set off a chain reaction that caused cell death on a massive level. An unrefrigerated body could decompose in just thirty-six hours, becoming little more than a mass of sludge that sloughed off the skeleton.

  Tim shrugged. “Wal
ker’s body is okay, but Petrovsky is already showing signs of liquefaction. By tomorrow I think he’ll be blood pudding.”

  Like always, a ticking clock held sway over everything.

  Margaret nodded. “Then let’s get to work.”

  FAKE FUR

  “What the fuck is that thing?”

  Jeff Brockman had such a way with words, although Cooper had to agree with the sentiment.

  The Mary Ellen Moffett’s deck lights lit up Steve Stanton’s strange machine. The lights wouldn’t be needed for long: the sun was only minutes from sliding up on the horizon, its glow already turning the low-hanging clouds a pinkish-orange. Five-foot swells continued to rock the boat, but at least the wind had finally died down. When the sun did rise, Cooper hoped the temperature might climb into the double digits.

  Breath frosting from their mouths, Cooper, Jeff, José, Steve and Steve’s buddy Bo Pan stood in a loose circle, staring down at the cargo they’d hauled out to the middle of Lake Michigan.

  When Steve Stanton had spoken of his ROV, Cooper assumed he knew what to expect: a boxy metal frame, about six feet wide and tall, maybe ten feet long, yellow ballast tanks on top, a couple of turbines in the back and a pair of robotic arms in the front. Throw in a camera suite and a long-ass cable, and you were in business.

  But this?

  For starters, it wasn’t yellow. It was covered in elephant-gray material studded with little points, kind of like acoustic foam. Ten feet long, sure, but there was nothing boxy about this contraption. The ROV’s front end came to a streamlined point. From there, it flared wide with the outline of a fish before tapering down again to a pair of flippers in the rear, like those of a Cape fur seal. On each side was a wide fin, like that of a penguin.

  Jeff stared down at it. He crossed his arms, frowned.

  “It’s fuzzy,” he said. He looked at Stanton. “You made an ROV with fur?”

  “It’s an antiturbulence material,” Steve said. “Helps adjust the water flow for greater speed. Once it gets wet it looks very different.”

  Cooper reached down and gently poked one of the furry points with a finger — felt like a stiff foam.

  Steve shot out a panicked hand. “Please don’t touch!”

  Cooper stood, held up both hands, palms out. “Wow, sorry.”

  The kid blinked, looked around, saw that everyone was staring at him. He forced a smile.

  “The material is just delicate is all,” he said. “My bad, I should have asked everyone not to touch it earlier.”

  Cooper felt Jeff glaring at him. Jeff had that suspicious expression on his face again — the ROV was beyond state of the art, something altogether new, and that bothered him. Jeff subtly held up his hand, thumb rubbing against his fingertips: that thing looks like big money.

  Cooper nodded. Of course Steve had money; he was part of some lawyer’s class-action lawsuit. Millions of dollars on the line. Cooper felt bad for the people who now ran Delta Airlines; this was going to wind up being one high-toned bitch of a lawsuit.

  José craned his head around, looked at the ROV from all sides.

  “Hey, Jefe Steve,” he said. “Where do you connect the control cable?” José insisted on calling everyone jefe, Spanish for boss. He looked around the deck, as if he suddenly realized he was missing something. “And where is the cable? Is that in the other box?”

  He started toward the smaller of Steve’s two boxes, the one still strapped to the deck.

  “Please don’t touch that one, either,” Steve said. Again, the words were rushed, nearly panicky.

  Jeff glared. Cooper felt uncomfortable — the customer was acting very strange.

  Steve shook his head, forced another smile. “There isn’t a cable. The Platypus is remote controlled to some extent, but mostly autonomous.”

  Autonomous? An unmanned underwater vehicle; a robot. Cooper winced: that meant it cost exponentially more. He looked at Jeff, who was already shaking his head, lips pressed together in held-back anger.

  “You told us you had an ROV,” Jeff said. “Now you’re telling us this is a UUV?”

  Steve’s eyes widened. He glanced over to Bo Pan, just for the briefest second, but Bo Pan kept staring at the deck.

  Cooper was losing his patience. Jeff could still blow this job if he kept being difficult.

  “Jeff, it’s all good,” Cooper said. “UUV, ROV, ABC, whatever, let’s just get it in the water, okay?”

  Jeff looked at Cooper, looked at the machine. He nodded.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. Then, his booming I’m the boss voice returned. “Cooper, man the crane. José, get ready to get wet. Mister Stanton, if you’ll point out the right way for us to hook up your machine so we don’t break it, we’ll get her in the drink and you can do your thing.”

  Everyone moved into action. Everyone except for Bo Pan. As Cooper headed to the Mary Ellen’s crane, he noticed Bo Pan watching Jeff, then watching José. Then, his eyes locked with Cooper’s.

  For just a moment, Bo Pan didn’t look like the old man who had come aboard. His eyes were hard, cold … dangerous. Then the expression vanished — he looked out to the water, hawked a huge loogie and spat it over the side.

  Just some old dude along for the ride. Right?

  Cooper felt a shiver that wasn’t from the cold. He shook off the sensation, then got to work.

  KILLER MATH FOR $200

  Testing units weren’t the only thing that had changed in the last five years.

  Margaret stood in the second airlock with Tim and Clarence. The three of them wore BSL-4 suits.

  At first, the suit had seemed familiar. Like those she’d worn before, it was made of airtight Tyvek, a synthetic material. A heavy-gauge seal secured the oversized helmet onto the suit, and the helmet itself had a tall, wide, clear, curved visor that gave her full range of vision.

  The visor itself, however, was something out of a movie.

  “This is crazy,” she said. “So much information.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Tim said. “Before you know it, it’ll be second nature.”

  She looked at him. She could see him through her visor, but her eyes also tried to register the information playing on the inside of it — the visor was a full-on heads-up display, scrolling data about the airlock and a medical report about the two divers in observation. She was wearing a computer screen in front of her face.

  “My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”

  “Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”

  She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”

  Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”

  How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got harassed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with shit like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.

  “Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”

  “Like I could miss it,” Tim s
aid. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”

  He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a ship.

  On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.

  Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical analysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.

  “Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”

  He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”

  Three trailers, each capable of comfortably supporting four or five people working simultaneously, and yet Tim was the only one here. And along the same lines, the facility had ten bedrooms — nine of which had been empty before Margaret and Clarence had arrived.

  “Doctor Feely,” she said, “where is the rest of the staff?”

  Tim flung his gloved hands up in annoyance. “They’re all pursuing their disciplines at other facilities or at the research base on Black Manitou Island. When they first brought me in, I was part of a ten-person staff. Year after year, as the navy didn’t find anything significant, the rest of the staff found ways to conduct their research off the ship. But believe it or not, one guy can do the majority of the grunt work down here. Most of the equipment is automated, and all of it is the best money can buy.”