Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  She reached out, manipulating her images. Tim eye-tracked through his menu, altering his display so he saw exactly what she saw. Margaret had zoomed in on Walker’s crawler.

  “Uniform damage,” she said quietly. “These crawlers started out alive, moving, then something made them start to dissolve.” She reached out again, wiped away the images from Petrovsky. Only Walker’s remained. “You said you also extracted live crawlers from Walker. Can I see them?”

  Tim menued through to the video he’d recorded. “Let me get one on visual.”

  The image came up. Still moving, still twitching, still reaching. He placed it side by side with the dead, melted crawler.

  Margaret stared at the two images for a moment. “Walker’s crawlers are significantly different. I’ve never seen this form before.”

  Tim felt his face flush with embarrassment that he hadn’t spotted it himself. Unlike all the other crawler images, this one didn’t have the spreading axon terminals at the tail end, just a long, thin body and the dendrite arms on what he presumed to be the top — and even that part was unusual. Where a normal crawler’s dendrite arms looked like a stubby tree with many branches, the living sample only had five arms of varying lengths.

  Margaret’s eyes changed focus. Instead of seeing the images inside her visor, she looked through them to stare at Tim.

  “Feely, why the hell didn’t you tell me they looked different?”

  His face flushed deeper, but this time with anger. “I didn’t notice. There wasn’t time to do any in-depth work.”

  She put her hands on her hips, a gesture that looked oddly out of place for someone wearing a bulky biosafety suit.

  “Didn’t have time? Are you kidding me?”

  Tim stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, Montoya, but there was a goddamn battle up top!”

  Her hands slid off her hips. She looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to her that he could blow up at someone. Well, he had, and he couldn’t stop the volcano of frustration and grief that came blasting out.

  “I did what I could,” he said. “There weren’t enough hands to go around. I had to make snap decisions. If I took too much time to save one man, three others would die.”

  The ship’s doctors, overwhelmed. Bodies all over the deck. He’d been covered in blood … the smell of burned flesh, the screams, people begging for help … all the drugs in the world weren’t going to erase those two days. His anger faded. He saw the faces of men who had looked at him, looked right at him when he was already writing them off because they were too far gone.

  And then there was Murray’s order to collect some crawlers and seal them up for shipment to Black Manitou. Tim had done that the day of the battle, grabbing a few samples from Petrovsky and sending them on. He knew he should have fought that order, but all he wanted to do was satisfy Murray’s request so he could get back to the wounded. Murray had sworn Tim to secrecy on that — Tim couldn’t tell anyone, and in truth, he was ashamed of caving in and didn’t want to tell anyone.

  “I worked two days straight to save as many as I could. The only time I stopped was when Yasaka had two men drag me — literally drag me — down here to do some basic sample gathering on Walker and Petrovsky. And when I came down, I made sure not to touch the bodies, at all, just on the off chance I might bring contagion up with me when I returned to the wounded. I only used needles to gather samples, and I gathered those samples as quickly as I could. Know why? I had more important things to do than play with corpses. So no, Margaret, I didn’t pay that much attention to the motherfucking crawlers.”

  Margaret sighed. She looked sad.

  “I apologize,” she said. “I should know better. We have so little time to get this work done. I’m sure I’m missing things, and there are tests we should be running that just have to wait because we don’t have the resources. Everything is hurried, rushed, and you had it even worse with all the wounded. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  He could see she meant it. The sincerity of her response made his anger fade away as quickly as it had erupted.

  Tim shrugged, feeling the bulk of his suit on his shoulders when he did.

  “You’re really sorry?”

  She nodded.

  “Sorry enough for apology sex?”

  “Not that sorry, no.”

  “Oh well, worth a try.”

  Margaret shook her head, a sad dismissal of his feeble attempt. She focused on the images in her HUD.

  “These new crawlers from Walker … where exactly were they inside her body?”

  “The pustules,” Tim said. “That was the fastest and easiest place to get a sample, so I started there. I collected crawlers from other areas as well, but all of those were dead. And, come to think of it, all of the dead ones look the same as those I collected from Petrovsky.”

  Margaret frowned. She reached out, turning the image of the living crawler, looking at it from multiple angles. “Sanchez had pustules, but what was in them didn’t look like these. So we know that Walker definitely had the old kind of crawlers, the ones we saw back in Detroit, the same that are in Petrovsky, but she also had this new kind.”

  Tim studied the images on his own HUD. The new crawlers reminded him of a microorganism he’d seen way back in his undergrad days.

  “They kind of look like hydras,” he said.

  Margaret nodded. “Yeah, a little bit. As good a name as any for the variant.” She stared. The tip of her tongue traced her upper lip. “So the hydras and the crawlers were in Walker at the same time, but only the crawlers were melted.”

  Tim watched the real-time image of the hydra, watched it reach and move, searching for something to grab onto. Walker’s crawlers had melted; Petrovsky’s, Sanchez’s and Jewell’s had not. Her hydras were the only known variable.

  “Maybe the hydras killed the crawlers,” he said. “Something they secreted, perhaps.”

  Margaret thought about that for a moment. “Possibly. But … why? Crawlers and hydras are on the same side, so to speak.”

  “Maybe it’s a new design,” Tim said. “The first round of infections — with Perry Dawsey and the other early victims — they only had the triangular growths. But later on, when Detroit got crazy, you saw the crawler-based infections, and even that woman you said blew up like a puffball.”

  The look on Margaret’s face made it clear she didn’t want to remember that moment.

  “The disease seemed to adapt,” she said. “We stopped the triangles. In the following outbreak the disease expressed itself in at least two new ways.”

  Tim closed his eyes, let his brain work through the details, hoping he could find that spark of inspiration. “We’ve had no new activity since the Orbital was shot down. Now we find a piece of the Orbital, and blammo, we’ve a third new form. So it’s reasonable to hypothesize that all the designs originated with the Orbital. You stopped the first attempt, the Dawsey-era infections, so it retooled and tried again with the things you saw in Detroit. You stopped that, so maybe it was already making additional changes when it was shot down. Maybe the hydras are that new design.”

  Margaret bit at her lower lip. “Maybe. But that doesn’t explain why hydras would kill crawlers. Why would the Orbital make something that kills something else the Orbital made?”

  Tim didn’t have an answer for that. He felt like he was on the right path, although he couldn’t see where that path ended.

  “Well, the hydras aren’t an accident,” he said. “The infection reprogrammed Walker’s body to make them.”

  Margaret’s eyes stared off, seemed to lose focus. Her lips moved slightly, like she was talking quietly to herself.

  “An accident,” she said. She closed her eyes, kept mumbling to herself like a student trying to work out a complex math problem. Tim wasn’t even sure if she knew he was there anymore.

  “Tim, what if was an accident. Or rather, a mutation. Maybe there was something different about Walker’
s body, about the way her cellular factories reacted to the infection’s reprogramming.” Margaret blinked rapidly, raised her eyebrows — her eyes again focused on him. “Can you get Walker’s medical records?”

  “Of course. What do you want to know?”

  “Start with her medical history. Maybe there’s something unusual in her system that wasn’t in the other victims.”

  Tim called up Walker’s records, scanned through the usual list of military checkups, inoculations, physicals … then found exactly what Margaret was looking for: something unusual.

  “She had lupus,” he said.

  Margaret shook her head. “That can’t be it. I can’t see how an autoimmune disease would affect the crawlers. They hijack stem cells to produce copies of themselves.”

  Tim looked deeper in the record. When he found the next difference, he felt his heart start to hammer.

  “Jesus, Margaret … Walker underwent HAC therapy to treat the lupus.”

  Margaret narrowed her eyes, not understanding. “What’s HAC therapy?”

  That question surprised Tim. She hadn’t just tuned out from life, she’d tuned out from medicine altogether. She wasn’t even reading research journals.

  “HAC is human artificial chromosome treatment. It’s an experimental way to treat genetic defects. The process introduces a new chromosome into stem cells. The end result is stem cells with forty-seven chromosomes instead of the normal forty-six that all cells are supposed to have. The forty-seventh chromosome probably has a myriad of immune system modulators meant to reprogram cells to stop the autoimmune effects of lupus — new transcription factors, genetic code to modify gene response, et cetera. In some cases HAC even introduces fully artificial gene sequences.”

  Even as he said the words, it struck him how similar the process sounded to the Orbital’s infection strategy: targeted changes to the host’s DNA, altering the processes created by millions of years of evolution. Was humanity that far away from harnessing the very technology that threatened to wipe it out forever?

  Margaret’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared. Normally, she looked like she couldn’t hurt a fly, but now her expression was that of a predator.

  “An artificial chromosome in stem cells,” she said. “Maybe the Orbital’s technology can’t properly integrate that forty-seventh chromosome.”

  She nodded, slowly at first, then gradually faster.

  “This therapy,” she said. “Where did Walker get it?”

  “Let me check.” Tim read through Walker’s records. “Looks like a clinic within the Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Cutting-edge stuff, only ten people in the trial.”

  Margaret thought for a moment. Her excitement seemed to grow.

  “Correlation isn’t causation, but this is one hell of a correlation,” she said. “We need to see if these new, larger crawlers colonized Walker’s brain, like the older ones colonized Petrovsky’s. Let’s find out right now.”

  Tim walked to his prep tray and lifted the compact Stryker saw, preparing to cut into Walker’s skull.

  PREPROGRAMMING

  Perhaps a thousand modified neutrophils had reached Charlie Petrovsky’s squamous epithelium. Most of them died there, wiped out by the ever-growing apoptosis chain reaction that steadily turned Charlie into a pile of black sludge.

  Some, however, held on to life, held on just long enough for a gloved hand to brush against Charlie’s skin.

  When that gloved hand moved away, a dozen neutrophils moved with it.

  They emitted a new chemical, an airborne signal that announced their presence to any other neutrophils that might be near. If a neutrophil detected that chemical coming from mostly one direction, it moved in that direction: flow, reach, pull … flow, reach, pull. If it detected roughly equal amounts of the chemical coming from multiple directions, it stayed where it was. This simple process created an instant implementation of quorum sensing, of individuals using a basic cue to communicate as a single individual.

  The microscopic neutrophils had a relatively massive area to cover. The equivalent, perhaps, of a dozen mice scattered onto an area the size of a dozen football fields. Much ground to cover, and yet the neutrophils had been designed for this very action.

  Three were too weak to make the journey. They expired along the way, leaving nine that found each other, amorphous blobs pressing in on each other.

  At the center of this shifting pile, three neutrophils underwent a rapid physical change. They altered their internal workings to produce a caustic chemical, a chemical specifically preprogrammed by the Orbital some five years earlier. This trio pressed themselves flat against the Tyvek material of the gloves upon which they rode. The trio started to swell, to fill with fluid, until — following those same, preprogrammed instructions — they sacrificed themselves by tearing open their own cell walls.

  The caustic chemical spilled onto the Tyvek: just a microscopic drop, something not even visible to the naked eye, but enough to weaken the material, to create a tiny divot.

  Another neutrophil flowed into the divot, then repeated the process, deepening the hole. Then another, and another.

  The chemical burst of the last one was enough to punch all the way through.

  Pressurized air flowed out, an infinitesimal, nearly immeasurable amount, sliding past the flat bodies of the seventh and eight neutrophils that climbed through the microscopic hole all the way to the glove’s inner surface. These, too, began a phase change — their bodies quickly split into dozens of tiny, self-contained particles.

  Those particles flaked away, scattered like an invisible shower onto the skin of the person wearing the gloves. There the particles began to burrow.

  The Orbital had watched. The Orbital had learned. It knew of the primitive-yet-effective technology the humans had developed to protect themselves from infection. Drawing on the knowledge of a vastly superior technology, the Orbital had prepared a way to defeat this protection.

  The last neutrophil sensed that its fellow microbes had succeeded. It underwent the final portion of the preprogrammed dance. It slid into the microscopic hole and began to swell, bloating until it pushed against the sides.

  Air stopped flowing out of the glove.

  That final neutrophil hardened, then died, fulfilling its role as nothing more than a plug in a hole so tiny it would take an electron microscope to see it, if anyone ever looked.

  And no one ever would.

  IT’S ABOUT CANTRELL

  Clarence needed a shower. At least he was out of that suit. Built-in air conditioner or not, when he wore it, he sweated like a whore in church — probably less from any heat and more because of what waited just outside of the thin material.

  He sat in the small control center that looked down through the clear roofs of the three science modules. The console in front of him and the walls on either side were packed with computers, monitors and communication equipment — neat, tidy, space-conscious military design. The built-in microphone in front of him let him speak to people in the modules; speakers in the console let him hear them talk.

  Through the control center’s glass, he saw Margaret and Tim working away. They’d pulled Candice Walker’s scalp down over her face. The inside-out flesh looked bone-white, smeared with tacky blood. Tim was cutting into her skull with a handheld saw.

  Clarence had been in the BSL-4 suit for about two hours, total, and had been counting the minutes until he could get out of it. He didn’t know how Margaret and Feely managed it so well; the two of them would probably be in their suits for another eight to ten hours, at least. They had both opted for devices that allowed them to urinate and defecate while still in the suit.

  You told her she’s not a soldier. You can barely keep your suit on for ninety minutes but she can piss and shit inside of hers for twenty-four hours straight if she has to.

  Not that Clarence hadn’t faced his own fair share of awful conditions. In Iraq, his unit had been pinned down. Waiting for support, he a
nd his buddy, Louis Oakley, had hidden behind rocks, suffering 120-degree heat while dreading that the next bullet would hit home. Lou-Lou took a round to the head. He died instantly. Clarence had lain there for the better part of a day, unable to move away from the corpse, willing his body to press closer to the ground. Louis had looked on, unblinking.

  Clarence shook his head, came back to the moment. No time to get lost in those memories.

  He finished up the notes from his interview with Cantrell. Margaret preferred her information summarized, the most-important stuff bullet-pointed right up top. If she needed info beyond that summary, she would ask.

  At times, being in a relationship with a woman who was clearly much, much smarter than he was felt a little intimidating. In their day-to-day life it hadn’t been noticeable — she was a woman, he was a man, things worked out. But when it came to talking politics, finances, history, or — God forbid — science, the gap in their IQs became clear. At least he knew more about football than she did. Or, at least that’s what she let him believe. He was never really sure about that one.

  Clarence turned on the microphone. “Margo, is now still a good time?”

  She and Tim stopped what they were doing, looked up. Margaret nodded.

  Tim had a shit-eating grin on his face. “Suit’s a little stuffy, eh, fella? You want me to go to the kitchen and fetch you a nice glass of lemonade to cool you off?”

  Clarence ground his teeth in embarrassment.

  “Or some talcum powder,” Tim said. “Maybe your bottom is damp?”

  Margaret reached out, slapped Tim lightly on the shoulder. He stopped talking, but the grin didn’t go away. Was he actually posturing, trying to impress Margaret? At a time like this, the guy was hitting on her?

  Just hope we never step into the ring, you little runt. We’ll find out who’s the better man.

  “Margo,” Clarence said, “verbal or send it to your HUD?”

  She tapped her visor. “HUD. Tim’s as well.”

  Clarence did as he was asked.