Pandemic

by Scott Sigler

  “Reproducing,” Roth said. “Little animal things in your blood, fucking away. Like a microscopic orgy?”

  Tim laughed. “While I admire that analogy more than you will ever know, my extralarge friend, the hydras reproduce asexually. That means they don’t have to mate to produce offspring.”

  Roth shook his head in disgust. “That’s as fucked-up as a football bat.”

  Ramierez leaned in, the half-full bottle in his hand. “They do it with themselves because they can’t get laid, just like Cal.”

  Roth drained his scotch, set the glass down. “For that, little man, you get to fill my glass. And I do it with myself because I’m just that damn good.”

  “Hear hear,” Ramierez said, and poured another round of shots.

  None of the fun seemed to have sunk into Bosh. To him, this was obviously serious business.

  “It’s all so fucked,” he said. “I’d rather have an enemy I can see. Alien microbes? Modified yeast? Just give me something I can shoot.”

  Ramierez nodded sagely. “Wiser words were never spoken, D-Day. Come on, boys, around the horn again. Let’s see those glasses.”

  Everyone pushed their shot glasses toward Ramierez. He filled all four. The SEALs raised theirs and Tim followed suit. The men let out a loud hooyah, and they drank. Half of Tim’s shot slid down the side of his face. The glass slid out of his hand. Shoddy workmanship, apparently — go home, shot glass, you’re drunk.

  That, or he was drunk. Drunk, and safe, isolated from everything, surrounded by trained killers who thought he was the bee’s knees.

  Tim was lucky, after all. If that luck held, he could just stay right here, in this very safe place, until Cheng’s grand plan ran its course.

  A HUSBAND’S ROLE

  Clarence Otto stood on the Coronado’s rear deck. No wind for a change, just the oppressive cold. He stared out at the setting sun, wondering what might happen next.

  He’d survived. Margaret had survived. Tim Feely had survived. Black Manitou was leading the effort for mass production of inoculant. By any measure, Clarence had succeeded in his assigned mission. Murray would probably try to give him a medal for the effort.

  But Clarence didn’t want a medal … he wanted Margaret.

  Onboard the Carl Brashear, the woman he’d fallen in love with had returned. She’d been decisive, insightful, tireless and brilliant. She’d been her old self, her fighting self.

  And now? Now she wouldn’t see him.

  All day long she’d stayed locked up in her mission module. He’d tried to get in to talk to her, but through the closed door she’d told him to go away. She sounded scared. She sounded alone.

  For the last five years, whenever she’d felt those emotions she had come to him. He had comforted her, or at least he’d tried. She was his wife. His job was to protect her, help her through any problem no matter how great. At the end of the day, no matter how he sliced it, that was a mission he’d failed.

  The sun finally ducked below the water, leaving only the residual glow of pink clouds to reflect against Lake Michigan’s tall waves.

  Maybe tomorrow he could talk to her. Maybe he could make it all up to her.

  If he worked hard enough at it, if he apologized enough, then maybe … maybe … they could repair the damage they had done to each other.

  Maybe they could be together again.

  DAY SEVEN

  ACTUALIZATION

  Clarence Otto had to die.

  They all had to die.

  All of them … all the humans.

  Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so obvious. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.

  She got it now. She understood. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do …

  … to do …

  … to do God’s work.

  Not the God she had thought she’d known in the naiveté of childhood, or any of the thousands of randomly invented supernatural beings that caused people to slaughter each other throughout history. No, a real god. A god with the power to send ships across space. The power to change human beings into something else, something new.

  Something powerful.

  Humanity had shit all over this planet.

  It was time to remove humanity, time to let the world start over.

  Margaret hated them. She wanted to walk out of her little cabin and stab the first person she saw. Maybe find a wrench, bash them in the head again and again until bone cracked, until she saw the bloody mess that was their brains.

  She wanted to kill Clarence.

  She wanted to kill Tim.

  She wanted to kill the sailors, the SEALs, sink this fucking ship and put them all on the bottom so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

  Margaret stood. The thought of taking life thrilled her, infused her with excitement, made her vibrate and bubble with pure energy.

  Who would be first?

  She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

  They outnumbered her. If she killed one of them, maybe even two or three, the rest would certainly get her. She couldn’t let that happen, because she was meant for something greater.

  Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.

  An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted leaders.

  Leaders who could pass undetected among the humans. Leaders who could infiltrate human organizations. Leaders who could gather the troops of God together, make them operate as an organized unit.

  Margaret could do all of those things. She had been chosen for it.

  How ironic that Clarence turned out to be right after all: Margaret Montoya wasn’t a soldier — she was a general.

  All she had to do was bide her time and wait for her army.

  She wasn’t contagious. Her infection gave her that knowledge. No tongue triangles, no blisters with dandelion seeds, nothing that could reveal her true nature. That made perfect sense: if she showed those telltale symptoms, the humans would kill her. Not being contagious was actually a form of camouflage.

  For now, while trapped on this ship, she had to blend in. She couldn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She had to wait. She had to be … calm. Like Cantrell had been back on the Brashear. Not at first, no; he’d been jittery, paranoid. He must have been very close to finally realizing his role, just as Margaret now realized hers.

  The Orbital must have engineered new crawlers that could penetrate BSL-4 suits. That was the only logical answer. It wouldn’t take much, just a microscopic hole, barely detectable if it was even detectable at all. Was that how Clark and Cantrell had become infected? Yes, that made sense, and when they were submerged in bleach, maybe the pressure change caused a tiny bit to leak through … that explained why they both reported smelling it.

  But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?

  Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day … at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.

  What a difference a day makes.

  Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how arrogant, to think she could outsmart such a power.

  But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.

  Margaret reach
ed for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.

  If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.

  Then the carnage would begin.

  STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT

  The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.

  On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.

  “Doctor Feely, the latest results of your data-mining algorithm are coming in,” Kimber said. She had big, dark eyes and deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.

  “Kimber, I have to wonder about your life choices.”

  She looked concerned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean with a face like that, why aren’t you in Hollywood making movies?”

  She shook her head, but also blushed a little. “Doctor Feely, can we just go over the results?”

  “Sure. Let’s hope there aren’t any.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  A pattern of medication consumption had revealed the Pinckney’s advanced level of infection. If the vector had somehow escaped the flotilla and made it to the mainland, the same consumption patterns would likely hold true. Through Kimber, Tim had programmed the CDC’s database to track spikes in the purchase of cough suppressant, pain medication and fever reducer.

  Kimber typed with her mouth open. Damn, that girl had pretty lips.

  “Here we are,” she said. “They just came in. Let’s see …”

  She stopped talking. She just sat there.

  “Kimber, what is it?”

  She blinked, looked up at the camera, those dark eyes widening with fright.

  “There’s a geospecific spike,” she said. Her words rattled with tension. “I read a nine hundred percent increase in cough suppressant, eleven hundred in pain meds, and a two thousand percent jump in fever reducer.”

  Tim said nothing. He didn’t have to, because the numbers said it all — the infection had escaped quarantine. Could Cheng’s team on Black Manitou have fucked something up? That seemed impossible; Tim had seen the facilities there, knew how foolproof they were. Then how? Had something floated away from the Los Angeles, drifted for miles until it was picked up by some random boater?

  He swallowed. There was still hope; maybe this was an isolated outbreak. A small town in Wisconsin, perhaps, something that Longworth’s semi-illegal DST soldiers could isolate and quarantine.

  Tim closed his eyes. Before he spoke, he gave in to superstition.

  God, please don’t let it be a major city …

  “Where?”

  She didn’t want to say it any more than he wanted to hear it.

  “The one I just read you, that’s the biggest one … it’s from Chicago.”

  Tim’s balls felt like they wanted to shrivel up and hide somewhere in his belly. Chicago — the third-largest city in America, the very heart of the Midwest.

  “The biggest one? There are others?”

  She nodded. “Statistically significant spikes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and” — she looked straight into the camera, dead into Tim’s eyes — “New York City.”

  Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? It was already too late: nothing could stop it from spreading.

  “Send me the data.”

  He looked at the numbers himself, hoping Kimber had suddenly contracted a case of the stupids, hoping she was wrong.

  She wasn’t.

  Forty-odd hours had passed since the Pinckney and the Brashear went to the bottom. The statistical spikes indicated the Chicago infection had begun shortly after that battle.

  The second-largest spike came from Benton Harbor, a town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. That infection looked to have started just a few hours after Chicago’s began, New York’s and Minneapolis’s three to four hours after that.

  It had begun in Chicago. Benton Harbor was only two hours away … based on what Tim knew of incubation periods, someone could have driven there from Chicago. That matched what he saw in the data. But New York? A twelve-hour drive. The level of spikes indicated New York was only six to eight hours behind Chicago in the level of infection.

  That meant one thing and one thing only: a carrier had been in an airport.

  MURDER

  Steve Stanton sat up and turned on the light. He squinted, blinked. Was it still night? The heavy curtains shut out all traces of the outside. He looked at the alarm clock on the little nightstand next to his hotel bed: 11:52.

  He squinted, saw a little red light at the bottom left of the time, next to white letters that read “AM.”

  Eleven fifty-two in the morning. He’d slept all day, all night, and into the next day. Were hangovers supposed to last this long?

  He reached to the nightstand and grabbed the bottle of Chloraseptic he’d paid a bellboy to bring him. He opened his mouth, sprayed the cooling, numbing mist against the back of his throat.

  It helped a little.

  Steve wondered how Cooper and Jeff were doing. Maybe they’d already checked out of the hotel and were headed back to Michigan.

  He’d wanted to tell Cooper what had really happened, maybe get some help in case Bo Pan came back. Steve had worked it all out in his head the night before, thought he was safe … but maybe he wasn’t. Should he call the police? If he did, would that put his family in jeopardy? And for that matter, would the police turn him over to the CIA? Maybe even send him to China?

  But … what if Cooper had contacted Bo Pan? What if Cooper and Jeff had given Bo Pan Steve’s room number … what if all three of them were on their way to kill Steve right now?

  He sucked in a big breath. That was a crazy thought. It didn’t even make sense. How could Cooper reach Bo Pan? Steve didn’t need to make up illogical fears about Cooper and Jeff, not when there were plenty of very real things to worry about.

  Like the small matter of a dead navy diver. Murder. An act of war.

  Some “hero” Steve had turned out to be.

  What was he going to do? Maybe he was missing something, not thinking it through because he felt so awful.

  He sprayed again, letting the cool feeling spread through his throat. That was enough for now. He needed rest.

  Steve put his head back down on the pillow. He closed his eyes.

  The hero slept.

  LEADERSHIP

  Murray had never heard the Situation Room this quiet. The only sound came from a few monitors that played newscasts at low volume. He couldn’t hear anyone typing. No one talked. No one cleared their throats. No one even moved.

  Blackmon folded her hands together, rested her forearms on the tabletop.

  “How did it get off the flotilla?”

  When she got mad, when the cameras weren’t around, her stare burned with intensity. She looked predatory.

  “We don’t know, Madam President,” Murray said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.

  The predator’s stare bore into him.

  “Three cities,” she said. “Chicago, Minneapolis, New York. Is that all?”

  “And western Michigan,” Murray said. “Doctor Feely thinks there will be more. He thinks a carrier went through one of the Chicago airports.”

  She still had that presidential look about her, but how long would that visage stay at the fore? The disease had broken quarantine, spread to three areas of very dense population. Things were about to get bad in a hurry, and on her watch — she couldn’t blame Gutierrez for this one.

  “Do we know who the carrier is? Can we trace the travel pattern?”<
br />
  Murray shook his head. “No, Madam President. At this point we have no idea who the carrier is, or where the carrier went.”

  Hands still folded, Blackmon tapped her left pointer finger against the back of her right hand.

  “What do Doctor Cheng and Doctor Montoya think?”

  Murray felt a little embarrassed.

  “Doctor Montoya is still on the Coronado, so she can’t help us much right now.” Margaret was there, and mad as hell. She had predicted the infection would escape, said they needed to be preparing a “hydra strategy,” and Murray hadn’t backed her play. After all the times she’d been right, he’d doubted her: now he was paying the price.

  Margaret was out of the picture, which meant he had to rely on the man who, frankly, wasn’t in her league.

  “Doctor Cheng thinks we’re now in a race against time,” Murray said. “The vector is in the wild. He said the patterns show it’s highly contagious, on a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The only thing we can do to mitigate exposure is to inoculate as many people as possible, as fast as possible.”

  Blackmon stared at Murray like she wanted to pin the blame on him. But she knew as well as he did that she couldn’t politic her way out of this one. Americans were going to die: what remained to be seen was how many.

  The president turned to Admiral Porter. “What’s the status of inoculating our troops?”

  The first batches of inoculant had come to Washington, of course. Murray had drank a bottle of the nasty stuff himself. The military was next in line. If the people with guns became converted, that would create another level of problems.