“Can they drown?”
“Good question. The answer is generally no, at least not exactly. Zekes don’t breathe, so they can’t drown. They’re neutrally buoyant, meaning they don’t swim but they don’t sink either. They just hang in the water column. And they don’t seem to have any sense of direction in the water, meaning they’re as likely to float upside down as right-side up. So if the water’s not shallow enough for them to stand upright, they’re pretty much helpless. However, if submerged for a period of a few days or more, their tissue gets waterlogged and the parasite dies. It seems to short-circuit them. They generally avoid water, and fire too for that matter, but I wouldn’t stake my life on it.
“One thing to remember, gentleman. The Infected come in stupid,” he said. A slow motion video lit up the screen showing a ragged line of blue-skinned zekes charging directly at the camera. A pair of gloved hands holding a Glock 19 rose into view and began firing at one Infected after another. It looked very much like a sequence from a first-person-shooter video game. “They lead with their mouths. You’ll see that their arms are often dangling by their sides, apparently forgotten. When they close on you, sometimes they’ll grab at you, but more often they’ll just dive right in and try to bite.
“In close quarter fighting they generally make no effort to defend themselves, like by raising their arms to ward off a blow. They simply attack with their mouths, and keep attacking until you kill them.
“We’ve also noticed two distinct patterns of attacking behavior in the Infected. If there is only one target in the area, they will often stop to feed once they bring it down. And they don’t just target humans. Any living thing will be considered food by them. However, if there are multiple targets, they go into what is basically a biting frenzy, apparently trying to spread the parasite as widely as possible. They bite one victim and immediately move on to the next one.”
“So where does this stuff come from, sir?”
“That’s above my pay grade, I’m afraid. All I can tell you is how to kill them. Now good luck and good hunting.”
They worked their way up the trail, advancing slowly. The noise the team made with their firearms was like ringing a dinner bell. Zekes seemed to come at them in clusters; you didn’t usually find singles if there was more than one in the area. Sometimes you could actually smell them before you saw them, a putrid vinegary odor, even through the breather on the suit.
A half dozen of them burst from cover like a covey of quail and the team turned as one and fired, and heads exploded in clouds of gray and white.
More of them streamed out of the brush and the firing continued, and there were calls of “Loading!” The captain called out, “Henry! Cover our six!” as an enormous zeke with a huge white belly that hung so low it almost covered its genitals came stomping up toward their rear. Staff Sergeant Tom “Mad Dog” Henry popped him twice in the head and looked at him in disgust. “Look at this fat bastard! I’ll bet he’s one of the rich guys from those yachts in the harbor. Bet he came here with a boatload of honeys, too.”
“Can the chatter!” the captain said brusquely. The flood of zekes had tapered off, at least for the moment. They were almost to the top of the hill, the highest point on the island, the Australian group’s last known position.
A few minutes and three kills later they entered a clearing at the summit. There were four tents still pitched there, though one was torn and splashed with blood that had dried a rusty brown. The remains of a body lay in the tent. Male or female, there wasn’t enough left to be sure. Even through the breathers on their suits, they could still smell the stench of rotting flesh.
One of them men leaned into the tent. “Gravy Train! Makes Its Own Gravy!” he said. A couple of the guys went “Ruff! Ruff!”
“Knock it off, you clowns. Rogers, Jenkins, Rodriquez and Hernandez, break out the bags and start taking samples. Huizenga, photograph everything. The rest of you form a perimeter. I want us out of here in fifteen minutes.”
“Hey Captain Worley, what’s this thing?” Rogers pointed to a small portable table about a foot square. On it sat a fat metal cylinder about the size of a large stockpot. A slender metal arm stuck out from the pot’s lid, at the end of which hung a sheet of thin plastic. One side of the sheet was flat white, but the other side was shiny, and its color reminded him of vaseline. Two wires from the table connected to a portable battery on the ground next to it that looked like a jump pack for a car. In fact it was a jump pack, he saw, American made. The switch on the jump pack sat in the ON position, but the needle indicated it was dead.
The captain touched his headset and made sure he faced directly at the equipment. “Base, are you seeing this?”
“Affirmative, Captain. We have good viz.”
“Any idea what this is?”
“Not a clue, Captain. Wait one… Major says bring it in.”
“Roger that, base.”
“Buck, Major says we’re taking it with us. See if you can take it down without breaking it.” He figured there should be a case for it somewhere, so he looked in the largest of the three tents. Inside the door there were three black plastic equipment boxes, each about two feet long and as wide and high as a sheet of paper. He stuck his head back out of the tent and looked again at the plastic sheet. “Hang on, Rogers.” He popped open one of the boxes. Inside were a bunch of slim plastic cases, each containing one sheet like the one on the machine outside. He pulled one out and looked at it closely. The case bore a label which read, “2/24, #1.”
He looked around and found an open carton nearby. This one contained empty cases. He grabbed one and walked over to the machine. The plastic sheet, he saw, was held on by a couple small clips. He undid them and carefully slipped the sheet into the case, and snapped it shut. Then he laid the case carefully on top of the cases in the open toolbox and closed it up.
He straightened and saw that Rogers had been watching him. “Do you think that could be important, sir?”
He shook his head. “Damned if I know. That’s for the big brains to figure out. Now let’s pack up and get out of here.”
At the base, the colonel leaned over the monitor and peered at a still from the video. “Let’s kick this upstairs and see what we’ve got.”
Fort Detrick, Maryland
April 14th
The technician sat at her monitor and scrolled through photo after photo. She was a civilian employee, so she wore casual clothes and a lanyard around her neck. She stopped scrolling and backed up a few shots. She peered intently at the screen for a moment, then looked around and waved over her supervisor. “Hey Captain, is that what I think it is?”
The older woman in trim military fatigues leaned over her shoulder and looked closely at the screen. “If you’re thinking ‘fungal spore collector’ then yes, you’re right. That looks like an older Jansen model. Where’s this from?”
“First Special Forces Group, Third Battalion sent it in last night. Taken from… let’s see. Cuyo Island in the Philippines.”
“Never heard of it. Who’s in charge of collections there? See if you can get them on the horn.”
The technician clicked her mouse a couple times. “It’s a Major Ben Jackson, their XO.” She checked her watch. “It’s almost 2:00 a.m. there. Sure you want me to wake him?”
The major chuckled at that. “Didn’t you hear, girl? The Army never sleeps. Make the call.”
A moment later the technician said, “Ma’am, I have Manila Special Ops on the phone.”
The major touched her earpiece. “This is Captain Shandra Wilson at AMRIID. I need to speak to Major Jackson immediately. All right, have him call me here. You have the number? Fine. My extension is 4121.”
Six minutes later she had the major on the line. “Major, this is Captain Shandra Wilson at AMRIID. I’m calling about photo number P413 dash 4667. Yes I’ll wait… Got it? That is a fungal spore collector. I
t should… well, I’m certainly glad I could help. Listen, you see that thing that looks like a piece of paper hanging off the arm? That’s a collection sheet. There should be more of them… Pam, pull up 4692. Yes, that’s them. Very good.” She wrapped her hand around the mike next to her mouth. “Who’s doing spores in Southeast Asia?”
The technician clicked through a couple directories and highlighted a name for her. “I want them sent to Professor Hideko Tawada at the NIID in Tokyo. I need them there asap. Your people will have his info. Yes, that’s fine. Thank you, Major.” She disconnected.
Across the room another tech held his hand up. “Captain Wilson?”
“Coming,” she said.
NIID Headquarters, Tokyo
April 17th
Osamu Soseki, MBS, sat on a swivel chair, watching a monitor in front of him. He was clad head to toe in a gleaming white hazmat suit, not so much to protect him from what might be in the room, but to protect the room from him, or, more specifically, from what he might inadvertently transfer to the room’s contents. In the room around him, seven other technicians wearing identical racal suits sat on identical chairs in front of identical monitors.
He peered through a small window in front of him, listening to the quiet rhythmic hiss and clatter from the machine beyond it. Inside the machine, sealed away from the room, robot arms gripped a succession of clear plastic cases, gently removed the stiff plastic sheets within, and deftly slipped them into a slotted frame. The frame then flipped into a horizontal position where it was scanned by a powerful compound microscope, capable of resolution to less than a millionth of meter.
Soseki had a master’s degree in oomycetology, the study of what are basically water fungi. He had been working at Waseda University on his doctorate, centered on a relative of the American oomycete Plasmopara viticola that had ruined vineyards all over France in the 1870s. French wine producers, reeling from an invasion of the aphids known as grape phylloxera, imported aphid-resistant strains of vines from the US to help combat the invasion. Unfortunately, along with the vines came the plasmopara, which destroyed many of the remaining vineyards. The incident was forever after referred to as the Great French Wine Blight.
But now Soseki, like every other fungal expert that could be found in Tokyo, was pressed into service at the nearby National Institute of Infectious Diseases. Under the supervision of the famed Dr. Tawada, his group had been tasked to analyze fungal spores from all over the world, trying to find a source for the mysterious outbreak. Given the complex structures the parasite created, Soseki thought that a fungus was the likely culprit, but many machine-hours of analysis had failed to turn up anything new.
As the microscope scanned each sheet, a computer compared its contents to all the world’s know fungal spores, looking for something new, something unidentified. The spores were classified, counted, and the next sheet was examined.
It was the job of Soseki and the other techs, fungal experts all, to react to any anomalies. Sometimes the computer would emit a low beep. The monitor would then display the sheet in question and the computer would zoom in on the offending particle and circle it for the technician to inspect. Usually they turned out to be microscopic particles of dust or sand, or sometimes some form of airborne pollutant. Anything under one micron could be dismissed, since the smallest fungal spore ever discovered was 4.6 microns and it was believed that 4.6 was effectively the bottom range for a viable spore.
A flashing light over the door caught his eye, signaling that the decontamination chamber was in use. Spores are everywhere, from the frigid wastes of Antarctica to the middle of the Sahara Desert. They’re in every building and home in the world and they’re the reason that the cucumber you forgot about in your crisper drawer turned into a nightmare. In order to avoid possible contamination of the collector sheets, everyone who entered the lab had to go through a full decontamination regime, as though they were dealing with a Level Four bio-hazard.
The door finally shooshed open and revealed Doctor Tawada and two of his assistants in full hazmat gear. All eight lab technicians immediately jumped out of their chairs and bowed deeply to the old professor. Tawada won a Nobel Prize in 2007. To the average citizen he was merely a nice old man, but in the field of fungal research he was a giant.
Just then, Soseki’s computer chimed. He checked the screen. Another bit of pollutant. He was about to click the mouse to restart the process when he paused. In the corner of the zoom area were three faint shapes, hardly more than a few blurry pixels each. He leaned forward and peered closely at the screen, hoping they would resolve themselves into something familiar. He sat back in his chair and then leaned forward again, squinting.
A muffled voice over his shoulder asked, “What do you see?”
“These particles right here, Doctor. They’re less than a micron, but.... Maybe it’s just the light, but they look... blue.”
Yenisei, Russia
April 20th
Arkady Neftichenko crouched below the low stone wall, listening closely. There were still at least three of those things out there. Not far from him he could see the body of his friend Anton, or what was left of him. They hadn’t been off the boat for three minutes, humping the first load up to Arkady’s cabin, when they’d been attacked by a dozen or more naked maniacs charging down out of the pine forest, their pale bodies streaked and mottled like lumps of blue cheese.
He and the other three men had motored up the Yenisei River from Abakan in his big cruiser, heading to his hunting cabin on the Krasnoyarsk Reservoir near the little town of Taysnet for a week of hunting, shooting and drinking. Two years ago Arkady had scored a fine brown bear, a huge brute that weighed almost 500 kilos, and he hoped to break his own record. Of course the official hunting season didn’t start for months, but for high-ranking officers of the law such considerations were unimportant. This time of the year, the cabins were mostly empty, except for a few fishermen, which suited Arkady and his hard-drinking cop friends just fine.
Neftichenko held the rank of senior lieutenant on the metropolitan police force in Abakan. His position entitled him to a share of the graft from the whorehouses, smuggling and gambling operations, which enabled him to afford the boat and cabin. It also made him privy to the bulletins from Moscow about this strange new plague. His three friends were also on the force. Their leaves had all almost been canceled because of the plague, but so far there had only been a couple hundred cases in the city and almost all had been caught before they turned.
Fortunately they’d all strapped on their department-issued Makarovs before they’d landed; it was not unheard of for the massive bears to wander among the cabins, even in broad daylight. Personally, Arkady doubted a 9mm round could even penetrate a brown bear’s thick skull, but at least the noise might scare them off.
He had heard a movement through the trees on the hillside above them, something large, and he set his bags down and put his hand on his pistol. A bear? he wondered. Suddenly, a naked man with blank eyes and dried blood on his face and torso burst out of the thick pine forest and came pelting down the steep hill directly at Arkady. He drew his pistol and braced in a two-handed shooter’s stance and aimed carefully at the thing’s head. One loud report from the Makarov and the thing’s head jerked back, and it crumpled and fell, tumbling several yards down the hill. Before it even quit moving, the pines erupted with naked bodies, all fish-belly white and smeared with blood, looking like demons from a cold hell.
As the Infected raced down the hill at them, Arkady yelled, “The heads! Shoot for the heads!” Unfortunately, hitting a head-size target when it was hanging stationary in a shooting range even at ten yards was not easy. Head shots on naked demons charging down through the woods straight at you were much more difficult, especially if you lost your nerve. Arkady, who still practiced weekly at the department’s range, dropped three himself but he spent almost a full magazine doing it. Yuri and Gosha managed two betwee
n them and then took off running down the path along the lake, with a crowd of them in hot pursuit.
Arkady listened carefully for any telltale sounds around him, but other than the wind in the trees and the chirping of birds, he could hear nothing.
Poor fat Anton had fumbled and dropped his pistol and shrieked in pure terror as three of them converged on him. Arkady darted between two cabins and listened to Anton’s screams as they tore him apart. There was no way he could save his friend… he had only one round left in the chamber and another in the magazine, and he didn’t have a spare mag on him. He had plenty of ammo for the Makarov on the boat, and better still he had his beloved Lobaev .338 magnum rifle. But the boat rocked next to the dock at least fifty meters away.
He heard a rustling of leaves behind him, between the cabins, and then one of the demon things stepped into view searching, no doubt, for him. Fortunately for the policeman, it looked to its right first, and Arkady, on its left, shot it through the back of the head. Another of the things leapt into view, but it lost its footing on the steep pine-needled slope and went down hard, sliding a couple of meters. As it struggled to its feet, Arkady shot it and it went down like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Another one popped out between the cabins and tried to make the turn toward Arkady too fast. It hopped several times on one foot trying to maintain its balance before it too tumbled down into the brush. But Arkady was out of ammo.
By the time the thing got to its feet, Arkady was already racing for the body of his downed friend and dove for the pistol that lay near him on the ground. He rolled over onto his back and tried to shoot the thing coming at him… and nothing happened! “Der’mo!” he yelled. That fat idiot never even chambered a round! He jerked the slide back, thumbed the safety and snapped off four quick rounds. His first two missed but the last two rounds caught it in the mouth and bridge of its nose and down it went. Still lying on his back he heard a sound behind him, flopped onto his stomach and fired three shots up under the jaw of another one that was almost on top of him. It thudded to the ground, its eyes inches from Arkady’s own.
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 9
