She added a few parasites to a sample of her own uncontaminated blood and watched them multiply at a frightening rate. Working on information she received from Renfield and me she tried the simple approach first. She cultivated some maggots, ground them into a fine paste, and added a dab of that paste to the drop of blood containing parasites.
The parasites were not affected at all.
For now, there would be no cure for the smiling sickness.
Yet when she added a dab of the paste to uncontaminated blood first, and then introduced parasites to the blood, the parasites died.
Until she had better facilities and equipment Dr. Anders would not be able to determine exactly what prevented the parasites from gaining a foothold in immunized blood, but those deadly little bastards died fast, and that was good enough for now.
We couldn’t decide who should test our potential cure, and we debated that for days. Kids were not an option, neither was anyone with a skill we could not lose, like Hawthorne, our fisherman, or Conaghan, who was an engineer and was keeping a close eye on the solar panels. I was trying to convince some of the older folks to draw straws and receiving outraged responses when Randall came into the Ranger’s station, our venue for sensitive discussions.
He held up a glass vial full of blood. “Is this infected stuff?”
The doctor gave him a wary nod. He took a police issue Glock from a belt holster and handed it to her, and before anyone could react he took a sip from the vial.
“Ate some of that maggot paste you made yesterday, Doc,” he said, belching against the back of his hand.
Randall was fully immunized and fine . . . if you didn’t take into account how goddamned crazy he could be.
I told Renfield to get on the radio and share the cure. He did, and came back to me hours later saying that most of the people he talked to didn’t believe there was any cure, that the UCTF was now broadcasting on the AM and emergency shortwave bands and telling people there was no cure and that they should gather at specified safety zones to ensure their well-being. There were rumors that the safety zones were nothing more than slaughterhouses for innocent, disease-free men, women and children. The man in charge of the Unified Containment Task Force, known only as General Morturn, had declared himself to be ‘Commander in Chief and Defender of the United States of America.’
News from around the world, more rumor than fact, was just as grim. China, Russia, India, Pakistan and North Korea had engaged in brief and limited nuclear wars. The United Kingdom and France were forming a new Franco-British Empire, fiercely protecting their borders to the exclusion of all others. Germany, Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe were falling back toward fascism. Mexico was utterly lost to the smiler sickness, as were the countries of South America, and Africa; brutal tribal wars had spread across that continent. Canada had fortified its southern border with a volunteer civilian army, a militia called the Northern Fusiliers. The only nations on Earth that were staying ahead of sickness outbreaks were New Zealand and Australia, which were said to be pouring all of their efforts and resources into building a defensive naval force.
On a warm and sunny winter day we all gathered in the old prison exercise yard, where maggot puree was given to everyone. It was mixed with water and rose hips; there were roses growing wild everywhere, and rose hips are loaded with vitamins and minerals. Watching the smaller children grimace and force that gunk down was a hoot.
It was a pleasant get together. There were artichokes and figs growing wild, and we nibbled on them with some fish that had been baked indoors, the smoke from a brick oven carefully disbursed as it was vented, so it could not be seen.
We even immunized Randall’s dog Clyde, and the gray and white cat that had adopted Renfield.
Renfield named the cat Skyhook. The cat was eating better than any of us. There were a lot of mice on Alcatraz.
I heard one of the teenagers, the girl named Annie, singing on the far side of our group. She was usually quite timid; seeing and hearing her sing so freely was a pleasant surprise. I saw Benjamin looking at her too, and saw Marisol watching Ben. Annie was coming into the kind of curves that you knew would cause a lot of heartbreak and trouble down the road. I smiled. It was good to see that some things hadn't changed.
Annie was singing American Pie, her voice lilting and strong. For a moment I wondered if I would ever hear recorded music again, at least the stuff I like. This country had a lot of rebuilding ahead. Whatever music we had on the island existed on a few phones and MP3 players, and most of them had dead batteries and no chargers.
As I sat down on the edge of a salt-eroded wall and enjoyed Annie’s impromptu performance, a feeling of peacefulness swept over me. It had been a long time coming and might not last, but it had been earned hard and I was savoring it.
And then Rose Lubitsch had her baby.
* * * * *
Rose’s water broke and a moment later she was having serious contractions, as if the baby was a runaway train that was coming out right now, no matter what.
The smaller kids were taken inside and Rose was taken to the old Chapel, which was our makeshift hospital.
She was only in labor an hour. Randall assisted, after telling the Doctor he had helped deliver two other babies. I watched from the far side of the room, once again wondering who the hell Randall was and what he had done before everything fell apart. Randall was as close-lipped as ever and never talked about himself.
Dr. Anders took us aside and said the baby was underweight but should be able to survive, and she gave me a list of medications to add to the WANT list.
“That little girl has two teeth already,” Anders said, explaining that it was rare, but not unheard of.
Rose was sitting up on a bed made of crates and old mattresses. She was holding the baby close, and shifted it to one breast. The baby began to suck. Then it began to bite. Then Rose began to scream.
The Doctor took a step toward them and I held her back. I nodded to Randall, who stepped away from up, drawing the Glock that he wore constantly.
Rose staggered to her feet, dropping the baby onto the old floorboards. She shook her head and began to grin. The baby was grinning as well.
I all but dragged the Doctor out of the hospital as Randall went about his grim business.
The Doctor theorized later that Rose had not become infected when Montagne had assaulted her, yet the baby had. Somehow. Somehow.
Something in the placenta had prevented the infection, the parasites, from spreading into Rose’s body. But when the baby had been born and bit her, Rose became infected like so many others.
It was when we were digging our first graves that I realized Alcatraz could not, would not be our home. It was a safe harbor, but it was only a temporary one.
A month later, after two aborted supply runs to Sausalito and one successful one, the smiler sickness fought back once again . . . in a way none of us could have ever imagined.
* * * * *
It was an eagle-eyed and energetic little boy named Johnny Sin who saw it first, the writer in me thinking a name like that could only exist in a book. Johnny was one of only three survivors from San Francisco’s Chinatown. He was up on the water tower when he saw something floating on the bay. It was east of us, moving out to sea with the current, moving toward Alcatraz.
We had three pairs of binoculars now, one of them quite powerful. We all took turns looking at the blob, the mass, that distant dark pink something that was floating on the water.
It didn’t bob up and down on the waves, it was too big for that. It rode over the waves, bending and shifting but never coming apart.
“It’s about sixty feet across,” Randall said, handing the binoculars to Dr. Anders. “Damned if I know what it is though.”
The Doctor took a look. She lowered the binoculars and glared at me as if this was some sort of practical joke. Then she looked again.
“I see . . . tissue,” she said.
There was a crowd of us now, people
standing near the boat dock and shielding their eyes from the midday sun as they stared into the Bay.
I looked at Randall. “Get one of the drums,” I said. I was referring to the drums of diesel fuel we had stored away, fuel that helped power the generators when there was heavy cloud cover and solar power didn’t cut it.
Randall left without a word.
I had no idea what was floating toward us and with luck it would swing north of the island on its way to the Pacific, but the Doctor looked unsettled, and scared. That was enough for me.
I began issuing assignments and was relieved by the quick response, as we had drilled for emergencies even here, on our island sanctuary. I sent some people to gather the children together in the safety of the cellblock. I had some people begin setting aside go bags.
When the dock has cleared, I asked Dr. Anders what was out there.
She took another look through the binoculars, and told me what she was seeing.
“I see a mass. A contorted, impossible mass. I see flesh, I see muscle. I see healing scar tissue. I see . . . “
Randall came down the ramp to the dock with a drum of diesel on a handcart. He also had a cardboard case full of glass bottles.
We had trained for this as well. We had guns, and thanks to Randall, we also had a way of making very simple explosives. The bottles contained a mixture of gasoline and diesel, ignited by a burning rag that was stopper and wick; classic Molotov cocktails.
I was thankful that it was a clear day. If the island had been socked in by fog we might not have seen the floating mass until far too late.
“It’s a biomass,” Anders said. “I see expanses of flesh. I see parts of organs, and muscle tissue, and bone arranged in a support structure—”
The Doctor stepped back abruptly, still looking through the binoculars, her mouth open in horror.
Using less powerful binoculars I also looked at that mass floating on the water and realized it had come on a fitting day. It was the end of October. Halloween.
“My God . . . It’s breathing,” the Doctor said. She gave me a pleading look; make it go away.
Randall looked at it again through the third pair of binoculars. “Clever,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if the biomass which grew more disturbing as it drew closer was something he saw every day. “Whatever that is, it’s using exhaled air for propulsion.”
I looked again. Now I could see manhole sized apertures set in a ring on top of the mass. They opened in unison, and then closed, and the mass seemed to swell. The mass settled and a surge of air came out of the furthest end of the mass, leaving behind a white wake. Then the apertures opened again, repeating the cycle.
I also saw patches of what could be fur from a cat or dog. Caucasian skin. Asian and African-American skin. Plates of white bone like armor. Swatches of hair and tufts that looked like feathers. And eyes. That mass was studded with hundreds of blinking eyes.
“Doctor,” I said, “We saw that the smiling sickness was changing people, their hands, for instance, were becoming more effective weapons. Could this be a . . . further evolution of that sickness?”
Anders slowly shook her head. “I don’t . . . there’s nothing like this in nature. . . ” She gave me that pleading look again.
A seagull hovered over the biomass, doomed by its own curiosity. It settled onto the biomass and sank its beak into it, pulling on a red sinewy string. A flap of tissue rose up over the bird, a flap lined with teeth. It closed on the seagull and the bird was gone.
This living mass of flesh and bone, this biological stew, was hungry, and it ate whatever it came in contact with. I saw scraps of plastic entwined in that raw, repurposed flesh. Glints of glass. Imbedded on one side was a chrome-plated hubcap.
“We can’t let that thing onto the island,” I said.
“Agreed,” Randall said. His tone was calm and controlled. “For all we know, it’s got legs and feet on the bottom.”
The idea made my skin crawl.
“Let’s burn it,” Randall said.
And we did. Or we tried.
As the biomass came closer, not drifting but steering toward Alcatraz, we prepared out explosive cocktails. I had to wonder why the thing had not landed on any of the nearby coasts . . . Did it know it would receive violent opposition to the north and east? Did it know that San Francisco was a charred wasteland? Was I crediting it with intelligence it did not have?
The closer the biomass came the more I was filled with loathing. I could see muscles flexing in that mass, tendons tightening and relaxing, the beat of many different pulse points, and when it inhaled through those many apertures, it sounded monstrously human. Human too were the blatting farting sounds it made when it exhaled underwater, enabling its weak but sufficient jet propulsion and leaving a scattering of small bobbing turds in its wake, proof that it was eating and excreting birds, fish, and whatever else it could capture.
Doctor Anders appeared to be sickened and fascinated at the same time.
Randall was Randall. Cool and calm, holding a pink Bic lighter in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other.
I gave him a nod and flicked my own plastic lighter. The gasoline-soaked rag wicks flared alight, and we threw our bombs. Randall’s struck a ridge of bone and burst open, igniting a blanket of flame on the thing. My bottle didn’t break, but it rolled into Randall’s flames and shattered in the heat, furthering the injury in that one spot.
Hundreds of eyes of every shape and color rolled toward us. Some gave us stony stares. Some gave us angry glares. Some wept.
Randall and I each threw another cocktail, and then the biomass, the leviathan, slowly turned and followed a northern heading toward Angel Island and its riches of flora and fauna, one side still burning until the thing rolled over once, extinguishing the flames and showing it’s true size—it was immense, probably too big to survive without the buoyancy of the sea.
“Let’s hope that was the only one,” Randall said crisply, before walking away.
* * * * *
We kept watch on Angel Island and the bay. We saw no other biomasses, which we now referred to as stews, in the water, but . . . something was happening on Angel Island. That island was rich and green after heavy winter rains; storms that maintained our supplies of fresh water and helped our small vegetable gardens grow. We made supply runs to Sausalito now; the way to Tiburon passed too close to Angel Island.
The shores of that nearby island were now pink and red, as if the biomass had landed there and was now engulfing the island and consuming all matter in its path, plant and animal.
In December a winter storm that brought strong winds and violent sea surges broke boats free of their moorings in marinas all over the bay. A fine morning a week before Christmas dawned clear and crisp, and we saw that the bay was filled with ships.
I stood in the lighthouse with Ben and looked down at the Bay. Of the many boats drifting past Alcatraz on their way to the open sea, two caught my eye; a fifty-foot ketch and a thirty-five foot sloop. I was told what they were by Randall, later that day. Both appeared seaworthy . . . and to my untrained eye that meant they were still floating and had nice paint jobs. I assumed, I hoped, that the clean lines and bright paint indicated the boats had been well maintained over the years.
I was watching the boats drift closer and considering calling a meeting when I saw Randall, Renfield and Ayala heading for the dock. I caught up with them as they were getting into one of the Zodiacs.
“Looks like we’re going to have a Merry Christmas after,” Randall said.
They brought back the ketch and the sloop, and a smaller Jeanneau Gin Fizz that Randall claimed as his own.
We had a community meeting. Two adults and two teens refused to leave Alcatraz, our gardening expert Sister Sunshine being one of them.
The rest of us agreed to set sail . . . For any remote island with vegetation and a source of fresh water.
“We could die out there,” Randall said with a half-smile, “But
staying here is not a permanent solution.
When I asked, not without trepidation, which if any of us could sail, Randall, Renfield, and Benjamin raised their hands, as did a young orphan girl named Sissy, who had taken to shyly following me around from time to time. That was good. I could issue commands and suggestions all day, but I could barely swim.
Thirty-one of us would be packed into those boats.
We divided all of our supplies fairly. Doctor Anders begged those who wanted to remain to reconsider, to no avail.
Conaghan took one third of the solar panels. He was sure he could rig them on the smaller boats so we could power a few lights. The big ketch must have had an environmentally conscious owner with money to burn. It was already outfitted with solar panels and had four sumptuous cabins.
It took until the end of January to ready the boats. Every day I watched Angel Island, seeing the red and pink of the biomass claim more and more of the land, until it was climbing up the sides of Mount Livermore, the island’s highest point.
We wanted to make as many supply runs to Sausalito as possible. Thankfully they were easier now. We had not seen a helicopter cross over the Bay in weeks. Just two days before our scheduled departure, with one run left, to raid a pharmacy and a hardware store, the biomass completely engulfed Angel Island . . . and began to swell.
The sickeningly vital redness of the biomass began to leach out of the lower regions, and the swelling on top of the mass took on an angry dark red hue.
I didn’t like the look of it. Neither did Dr. Anders.
Randall was the one who finally said what we were all thinking.
“That thing’s gonna pop like the world’s biggest zit.”
And so it did. The biomass erupted at sundown, venting yellowish gas and spewing a torrent of pus-colored liquid high into the sky. When the eruption was over the remaining tired looking pale pink skin of the biomass began falling away from mountain and island, revealing bare rock that had been stripped of every living thing. The shed skin formed into balls that rolled into the waters of the Bay
4POCALYPSE - Four Tales Of A Dark Future Page 27
