Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  Clark instantly shook his head. Whatever Tim used as knockout gas, it clearly had unpleasant side effects. Clark tore the foil envelope open, took the time to use the alcohol swab — which Cantrell hadn’t bothered with, Clarence realized — then stabbed the end into his finger.

  The yellow light flashed faster, then slowed.

  Then, stopped.

  The red light came on.

  No one said a word. Clarence stared, stunned into thoughtlessness. The man had looked fine.

  Cantrell broke the silence. “ ‘If you poison us,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘do we not die?’ ”

  Clark raised the testing kit to eye level, his wide stare locked on the steady, red light.

  Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “No … we won.”

  Tim finally reacted. He moved his hands in front of his face, accessing something on his HUD.

  “Clark, Diego L., tested positive for cellulose,” he said. “Administering anesthesia.”

  He tapped the empty air. Something up above beeped. Clark looked up, eyes wide, body shaking.

  “Don’t light me up, man,” he said, “don’t … light …”

  He sagged to the floor. He didn’t move.

  RUNNING DRUGS

  “Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

  José spoke quietly, but Cooper heard the words loud and clear. He tried to ignore them. He was sleeping, after all.

  “Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

  Cooper lifted his head, opened his eyes. Smiling José was kneeling next to the bed. He was close, almost leaning over Cooper, but the tiny half-stateroom didn’t leave much of an option; it was already too cramped for just one person, let alone a second.

  José offered a steaming cup of coffee. “Ah, you’re awake,” he said, as if it was a lucky coincidence.

  “I am now,” Cooper said. “And I don’t want to be. I haven’t slept all night, man. Is everything okay?”

  José shrugged. “Probably. But … can I show you something?”

  Cooper flopped his face back into the pillow. “Does it involve me getting up?”

  José laughed, but it seemed forced. “Why, is there something of mine you want to see while you’re lying in bed?”

  “Good point. Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”

  “I am,” José said. “But I think this is really important.”

  Cooper sat up quickly. “Is Jeff …”

  His voice trailed off. He was about to ask if Jeff had the helm, but the loud snoring from the other side of a thin wall told him Jeff was out cold. When they’d bought the Mary Ellen, Jeff had built a wall dividing the ten-by-ten captain’s stateroom into two equal five-by-ten rooms. He’d put in another door, even installed a second sink so they would each have one. Partners, fifty-fifty all the way, as they’d been since childhood. While it gave Cooper the luxury of a small amount of privacy, it also meant he heard everything that went on in Jeff’s stateroom. What Jeff did more than anything else in there was snore. Loudly.

  Cooper took the cup of coffee. “You left the bridge unattended. This better be fucking important, dude.”

  José nodded quickly, placatingly. “Yes, Jefe Cooper, I know. Maybe it’s nothing. Come up to the bridge, okay? And … and don’t wake up Jefe Jeff, yet, okay?”

  “Why?”

  José shrugged. “I need the money from this job. If I don’t get it, my family will get kicked out of our house.”

  That meant the problem had something to do with Stanton. Jeff seemed one more incident away from insisting on turning back, killing the contract and dumping Stanton and Bo Pan back on shore. José needed the money — so did Cooper, so did Jeff.

  “Okay,” Cooper said. “But you do know how ridiculous Jefe Jeff sounds, right?”

  José smiled, shrugged. He slid out of the stateroom and into the corridor.

  Cooper took a sip of the coffee, set the mug on his half-desk. He stood, slid his feet into his shoes. He was already dressed — in bad weather, you had to be ready to move quick.

  He left the stateroom, stopped in front of his best friend’s door. It felt wrong to not wake Jeff up, involve him in this, but Jeff just wasn’t thinking clearly. Cooper would handle it. If it turned out to be anything important, he’d wake Jeff right away.

  Cooper headed up. José was waiting for him on the Mary Ellen’s small bridge. Cooper stepped inside, shut the door behind him. The bridge had only a little more room than his stateroom; on the Mary Ellen, everything was nice and cozy.

  “Okay, what’s this about?”

  “Jefe Stanton’s robot ship,” José said. “Something you need to see from when it launched.”

  He turned to the sonar unit and started to call up a recording.

  “You woke me up to show me sonar of the customer’s ROV?”

  “UUV,” José corrected.

  “Right, UUV, whatever.”

  Jose finished loading the recording. He played it. Cooper leaned in to look at the sonar readout, and as he did, he grew angry.

  The Platypus was ten feet long, not quite two feet wide at its widest point, a long, thick eel of a machine with flippers at the end and the sides. It was artificial — metal and carbon fiber, materials that bounced back sonar loud and strong. The image on the sonar recording didn’t look artificial at all.

  “Goddamit, José, that’s a sonar signature from a fucking fish. This is what I get for letting an illegal Filipino play with expensive equipment.”

  “Putang ina mo,” José said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you have pretty eyes, Jefe Cooper.”

  “I’m quite certain that’s not what it means,” Cooper said. “Just because you don’t know how to work the equipment doesn’t mean you can insult me.”

  “And calling me an illegal isn’t an insult? I’m an undocumented worker.”

  José paused the playback. His finger reached out, rested below the screen’s time readout. Cooper saw it, made the connection — the recording was from the time of that morning’s launch.

  Cooper leaned in. “What the hell?”

  “This is when the Platypus was right next to the boat,” Jose said. “Watch as it starts to move away …”

  He hit “play.” The sonar signal faded, then vanished. Cooper looked at the time readout: only ten seconds had passed.

  “That can’t be right,” he said. “Ten seconds after it started moving, it wasn’t even thirty feet away from us.”

  At a distance of thirty feet, something artificial the size of the Platypus should have been a bright white signal.

  José paused the playback. He looked at Cooper. For once, the man wasn’t smiling.

  “That’s not just expensive equipment, Jefe Cooper. That’s stealth. Military-grade, maybe. Is Stanton running drugs or something? What if the Coast Guard comes out here?”

  Cooper finally understood José’s concern.

  “Steve Stanton is not running drugs,” Cooper said. “We won’t get busted by the Coasties. You won’t get deported. You’re fine.”

  José looked at the paused recording. He hit “play” and again let it run. It showed nothing. He looked up at Cooper again.

  “And no gang war? No one will shoot at us?”

  “No gang war,” Cooper said. “We’re safe. I promise. Just …” Cooper couldn’t help looking at the screen again, noting that the time stamp was thirty seconds into the Platypus launch — the thing should have still been kicking back sonar like mad. “You were right to tell only me. Jeff will just get all fired up, and it’s nothing. Between us, right?”

  José nodded, raised his hands in a gesture that said, You told me what I needed to hear.

  “Okay, Jefe Cooper. Sorry to wake you up.” He stood and walked to the door.

  “No problem,” Cooper said. “You go on, get some sleep. I’ve got the helm.”

  José left.

  Cooper sat, feeling mixed emotions.

  Stealth. Military-grade.

  If Jeff
found out …

  Cooper shook his head. Jeff wouldn’t find out. So the customer had expensive equipment, crazy expensive, so what? That wasn’t Cooper’s business, and it wasn’t Jeff’s business, either. They were getting paid like kings to facilitate Steve Stanton’s search for the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes.

  Jeff’s instincts and decisions had almost put the business under. It was Cooper’s turn to call the shots. A few more days, a week at the most, and this would be over.

  THE BODIES

  “Margo,” Clarence said, “you okay?”

  Margaret heard his voice through the speakers in her wide helmet, but also from outside the suit. Clarence was right behind her, in a BSL-4 rig of his own.

  She’d tuned out, got lost in her memories. Amos … Dew … Betty Jewell … Chelsea … Perry. The mind-ripping horror of it all. No, she wasn’t okay. Not even close.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

  She hadn’t been on the Carl Brashear for more than a few hours, and there was already one person infected. The divers had done something wrong, exposed themselves somehow.

  Margaret was already far behind in the race.

  To center herself, she took a long look at the trailer Tim called the hurt locker. The place had been designed with volume in mind. Ten metal tables were lined up in parallel, running down the trailer’s length. Each table had its own rack of analysis equipment. Maybe the engineers assumed the Carl Brashear would have a full complement of scientists when the shit hit the fan.

  She reached up, checked the hose connected to her helmet: secure, no problems. When moving from trailer to trailer, the suits used internal air supplies. For working in one area, however, ceiling-mounted hoses provided breathable air.

  Two of the metal tables held corpses of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky. Tim was already working on Petrovsky, taking samples from all over his body.

  Margaret couldn’t put it off any longer: she had to get to work, figure out what had happened. One of those bodies — or both — had infected Diego Clark.

  “Clarence, I need you to talk to Cantrell,” she said. “Clark’s diving gear was BSL-4 rated. We have to figure out how he got infected.”

  “I can do that,” Clarence said. “I’ve read his report, seems like everything was solid.”

  She’d also read the report, hadn’t seen any mistakes. “Maybe he missed something. Maybe the suits malfunctioned, somehow.”

  “Maybe,” Clarence said. “I’ll find out. Do you need anything before I go talk to him?”

  She shook her head. From her helmet’s speakers, she could hear him breathing. He was there with her, like he always was, like he had been since he’d been assigned to her when all of this began nearly six years earlier. What would life be like without him? And how had she managed to let a man like him slip away?

  Margaret had to get her head in the game. She couldn’t rely on Clarence to be her crutch anymore.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just go, Clarence. Talk to Cantrell.”

  She walked toward the bodies.

  Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made bumpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.

  The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.

  Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.

  Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.

  Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.

  Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.

  Amos … his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery … Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her bloody hand slid free …

  “Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”

  Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”

  Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing. Half a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.

  “You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”

  “Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”

  Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.

  “Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”

  AWAKENING

  Motion.

  Vibrations from a bone saw, the regular probing of fingers and hands, these things resonated through the body.

  These vibrations, these movements, triggered an ingrained, automatic response inside the cyst-encased neutrophils. They turned on. They secreted a new chemical, one that dissolved the shells protecting them against the forces of decomposition.

  Newly exposed to the apoptosis chemicals, the neutrophils didn’t have much time. Some of them didn’t make it: caught in blobs of caustic rot, they died almost immediately. Others pushed up, pushed out, crawling through Charlie’s muscle, through his subcutaneous layer, through his dermis, then his epidermis and finally gathered just beneath the squamous epithelium — the skin’s outermost layer.

  There they would wait, wait until they felt the pressure of another surface coming into contact.

  When that happened, the neutrophils would cling to that new surface.

  Then they would simply follow their programming, and do what they were made to do.

  THE FULL RIDE

  Clarence hated the suit. It made him feel clumsy, awkward. He’d strapped a holster to the outside of his thigh, but if things went south he wasn’t even sure if his gloved fingers could fit through his weapon’s trigger guard. Far more significant, though, was the fact that he might be just one tiny rip away from suffering the same fate as Diego Clark.

  He hated the suit, true, but the heads-up display thing was amazing. He had Cantrell’s service record right in front of him, at the left edge of his vision. All he had to do was turn his head and read.

  Clarence exited the airlock and walked to Clark’s cell. He stood in front of the clear door, staring in.

  The mattress had been removed. Incinerated, probabl
y. Clark lay on his back on the bed’s metal surface. Metal-mesh straps across his chest, hips and thighs held him tight to the bed’s metal surface, as did thick restraints around his wrists and ankles. All that was overkill at the moment — an IV ran into Clark’s right arm, a steady flow of drugs keeping him unconscious.

  A voice from behind: “Makes me want to enlist all over again.”

  Clarence turned to look at Kevin Cantrell. He was leaning against the wall of his cage, forearm and forehead pressed against the glass. The front of his clear cell looked directly into the front of Clark’s.

  “Look at that poor bastard,” Cantrell said. “Years of service, and he’ll die horribly.” The diver tilted his head to the right, toward Edmund, who lay in his bed and would never wake again.

  “Or him,” Cantrell said. “Good to know that the fucking navy can heap disgrace upon misery and use our bodies like we’re laboratory mice. I mean, doesn’t all this just make you want to sign up?”

  “Already did,” Clarence said.

  Cantrell raised his eyebrows, nodded. “Oh, that’s right, your little spat with Doc Feely. You enlisted. You’re one of us, right? Let me guess … Marines?”

  “Rangers,” Clarence said. “Then Special Forces. Got shot at plenty, but no one strapped me to a table. I need to talk to you.”

  Cantrell shrugged. “It’s not like my calendar is all that full at the moment.”

  The man seemed different than he had just a little while earlier. He was calmer. Relaxed. He hadn’t exactly been freaking out earlier, nothing like that, but he’d seemed tense, jittery.

  Clarence tilted his head toward Clark. “Sorry about your friend.”

  “A real shame,” Cantrell said. “Seems inevitable, though. The pathogen obviously had some kind of reservoir that allowed it to maintain viability all these years. The Los Angeles likely found that reservoir. Clarkie drew the short straw.”

  Clarence raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on. At least I think you do, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what you just said.”