Down to one round, he sprang to his feet and sprinted for his boat, hearing footsteps behind him. He thundered down the wooden dock and leapt onto the cabin cruiser, clawed at the pocket on his pack and extracted a fresh magazine. He ejected the empty and popped in the new one in one smooth motion, wheeled and shot the two that were bearing down on him.
He stuffed two fresh magazines in his pocket, swapped out the partial one in the gun for the last full one, and headed off at a run in the direction his friends had taken. He hadn’t made it past the first bend in the trail when he heard the sound of multiple gunshots through the trees, and then a scream cut short. He moved more cautiously when he neared the source of the sound. A dead tree lay across the trail. On the ground on the other side of it lay his friend Yuri, his throat torn open and most of his face gone. There was blood everywhere.
Farther along he could see three Infected gathered around Gosha’s corpse, feeding intently. Two more lay nearby, lifeless. At least Gosha had managed to take out a couple of the bastards, he thought. He crept quietly toward the feeders unnoticed until he was a few meters away. He shot two of them before they even saw him, and the third was rising and turning to face him when he dropped it with a round behind the ear.
Arkady slowly shambled back to his boat, tears streaming down his cheeks. He considered gathering up the bodies of his friends and hauling them back to the boat so he could take them home for a proper burial, but he couldn’t know how many of the things were racing toward him through the forest at this very moment. He untied the lines, started the engine and opened the throttle. The village of Taysnet sat a mile or so farther down the shore. He’d have to warn them, if they hadn’t already been overrun. But when he rounded the pine-covered point at the village’s edge he could see it was too late. Two Infected squatted, animal-like, in the street near the docks. One, he could tell, had been a woman with blonde hair. The other looked like a girl, probably not much more than seven or eight.
He throttled back and checked the depth finder. The bottom here was about twenty feet. He killed the engine, and then dropped his fore and aft anchors, positioning his boat so it lay broadside to the town, about a hundred feet offshore. He opened the case and pulled out the Lobaev and his telescopic sight, attached it to his rifle using the turret screws, and inserted a bore sight. He carefully adjusted the horizontal and vertical so the cross-hairs matched the laser dot and then removed the device. He snapped on a full magazine and sighted on the woman’s head. Even at the lowest power, her head (its head, he had to remind himself, because the thing he saw in his scope was no longer a human being) practically filled the scope. He exhaled half a breath, stopped, and squeezed the trigger. Through the scope he saw the right side of its head explode in a spray of fragments.
He lowered the weapon and made a slight adjustment to the scope, and then shot the thing that was once a little girl. The round hit dead center. Satisfied, he set the rifle aside and sat down in the captain’s chair. He opened the cabinet at his knee and pulled out a bottle of vodka and an air horn. He took a deep swig from the bottle and began blasting the horn in the direction of the town.
Infected came pouring out. They came from behind the buildings, out of the woods and down the town’s sole street. He even saw a few throwing themselves through the windows of nearby homes, landing on the ground below amid the shattered glass. They all crowded onto the town’s two docks. Just as the reports had said, they seemed to have an aversion to water. Most stood staring at his boat, their arms hanging limply at their sides. Several were forced off the docks by the press and fell in, and he watched them flounder helplessly. Some sank from sight; a couple bobbed below the surface.
He blew the horn intermittently for the next twenty minutes, until no more seemed to trickle in.
Then he shouldered the Lobaev and went to work. At 100 feet with the scope, he could hardly miss, and they made it easy by standing almost still and facing him directly. His aiming point was the tips of their noses. A trigger pull and their heads would explode as the big magnum rounds did their work. He varied his shots a little, gauging their effect. A well-placed round in the throat would often decapitate them, or leave their heads hanging by a few scraps while their bodies tumbled backwards.
He recognized a few of them. He had sometimes stopped in for supplies, or to have a few drinks at the town’s lone tavern, a crude affair with a plank on a couple of sawhorses for a bar. They were all ages, from old people to children. But he didn’t hesitate. They were no longer human beings. They were Infected.
He kept a count, and when he had finished there were seventy-three bodies. Add to that the sixteen back at the cabins and the half a dozen that had fallen into the lake and he could account for ninety-five people. He knew the population of the village had been around 300. That left over 200 unaccounted for. Many were dead, undoubtedly, but who knew where the rest were? Had many people gotten away? Or were they all Infected now, wandering in the woods looking for a meal? He hoped they’d try their luck on a big brown bear. He smiled at the thought.
He raised his anchors and kicked the big engines to life. The town of Noveselovo lay about twenty minutes up the lake, on the opposite side of the long reservoir. With any luck this plague hadn’t reached them yet.
White House
April 21st
President Vincent Ormund stood quietly at a window of the Oval Office, looking out at the demonstrators on Pennsylvania Avenue. The thick glass possessed a slight tint and the clarity wasn’t perfect, since it was designed to stand up to a rocket-propelled grenade, but he could still read the signs they carried demanding “The Cure.” He shook his head, partly in sorrow and partly in disgust.
He stood a bit shorter than average with square shoulders and a weathered face, a testament to the years he’d spent outside, both as a Marine and before that, growing up in Texas. He’d been born a few miles down the Pedernales River from the LBJ ranch north of San Antonio; in fact, his father had been one of the ex-president’s ranch hands for a few years before he bought his own spread. He’d gone to Texas A&M on a full scholastic scholarship and majored in engineering but quit after two years and enlisted in the Corps and spent two tours in Vietnam. When his enlistment ended, he finished his degree and went on to study the relatively new field of computer science.
In 1988, IBM bought his data processing company for $2.2 billion dollars, making him, at the time, one of the richest men in America. His next adventure had been a foray into spatial recognition software, teaching computers how to read and interpret 3-D environments. He’d sold that company too, for over $12 billion, and then ran for the Senate, which he’d won handily. He’d resigned toward the end of his second term to become Secretary of Defense, and finally won election to the White House two years ago. And now it looked like he could be the last president in the country’s history.
“Mr. President, I have Doctor Eugene Rush from AMRIID on the line. He says it’s urgent he speak with you.”
“Thank you, Jennifer. Put him on. Doctor Rush, you have news?”
“Yes, Mr. President. We’ve had a breakthrough of sorts. We believe we’ve identified the source of the infection.”
“Great! What have you found?” The president figured he could use some good news. Since his ban of all overseas flights, all the major airports had been jammed by massive demonstrations accusing him of isolationism and xenophobia. Twitter had gone totally batshit, and the White House switchboard had been bombarded by angry callers. The networks had been uniformly critical, calling the ban unnecessary and devastating to the economy. Polls had his popularity numbers tumbling. The stock market was in free fall, having given up 2800 points in one week. He didn’t give a damn. He had sworn to protect the country from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and if the pessimists were right, this epidemic could be the very worst enemy the country had ever faced. Still, it would be nice to hear something positive for a change.
&n
bsp; “It’s a spore of some kind. We can’t identify it yet, but we have people around the world working on it. A team in Tokyo discovered it. They’re calling it the Tawada-Soseki parasite, after the two men who found it.”
“A spore? You mean like from a mushroom?”
“Exactly, sir, but much smaller. About one one-thirtieth of a micron, which is a millionth of a meter. On the order of one one-hundredth the size of a typical spore. It takes an electron microscope to see it clearly. It’s in about the same size range as some of the largest viruses.”
“But it’s spore, not a virus? What’s the difference?”
“Well sir, a virus is really just a bundle of DNA, or usually RNA. It invades a cell and commandeers it to make lots more viruses, which then burst out of the cell and look for other cells to infect. A virus isn’t even alive, as we know it.
“A spore is basically a seed. When it finds a place to grow, it creates a whole organism, like mold or mushrooms. Unfortunately, this particular spore is parasitic. Once inside the human body, it takes over the nervous system until it kills the host, and then it operates the body directly.”
“And you’re sure this is what’s causing the epidemic?”
“It’s pretty certain. A preliminary DNA analysis shows a match to what’s infecting all those people, although the DNA is… difficult. My people are still trying to get their arms around it. But now that we know what to look for, we’re finding it everywhere. Even Antarctica, where right now it’s thirty below.”
“Here too? In this country?”
“Unfortunately, yes, Mr. President. Here too. The distribution is very pervasive, but it’s also very uneven, which you’d expect from an airborne particle. We’re trying to get spore collection equipment to the places that have had the worst outbreaks. I expect we’ll find much higher concentrations in those areas.
“We also don’t know the concentration it takes to create an infection. Is one spore enough, or does it take ten? Or a thousand? There’s a lot we don’t know yet.”
The President sat quiet for a moment. “So what can we do?”
Within an hour of Doctor Rush’s phone call the White House held a press conference, and the press secretary gave the briefing wearing a surgical mask. Homeland Security and HHS gave simultaneous masked briefings out of their respective offices. The Surgeon General gave her own press conference two hours later and mostly reiterated what had been said, and added the advice that masks should be sprayed lightly with Lysol or a similar disinfectant. The White House and Homeland Security websites posted detailed explanations of what precautions were needed.
Amazon nearly crashed in the hours after the press briefing. Every sort of face mask and particle filter they carried almost immediately sold out. Overseas sites like Ali Baba in China suffered the same difficulties. The problem was, the best face masks only filtered particles down to around .3 microns. The Tawada-Soseki spores were one-tenth that size.
Draethen, Wales
April 21st
A soft evening breeze played over the low rolling hills of South Wales. A full moon hung high in the sky and a few low clouds scudded across its face. It shone down on an old farmstead, a low stone house and a few outbuildings, including a newer pole building. An open door on the pole building led to a fenced-in pasture, which contained about sixty sheep. They were Llanwenogs, a sweet-tempered Welsh breed with black faces and calm dispositions. However, tonight they milled anxiously around the pen, bleating softly.
On a chair by the house, a large man dozed, an empty beer mug and an unlit pipe on the table next to him. Inside, a television cast a blueish light around the parlor of the old stone house. A woman and three young children sat together on the sofa, all covered by a big quilt. They ate popcorn and watched a movie together while their father napped outside.
April is the end of lambing season, and the man, whose name was Andras Hughes, had spent the last two hours assisting in a difficult birth. The lamb had been a breach, turned backwards in the womb, and he’d had difficulty getting it turned around right. Finally he got the little lamb in the proper position, with its front legs leading the way and its little head between the legs like a high-diver entering the water, and with one quick push by the ewe it popped right out. Within minutes it stood and nuzzled its mother for milk.
With only sixty sheep, the farm was really little more than a hobby. Andras had a good job in Cardiff as a senior mechanic at a heavy equipment dealership, but he’d been born and raised on a big working sheep farm that ran nearly two thousand head, and he wanted his daughters to experience some of that life.
Now he slept so soundly that he missed the frantic bleating of his flock as they milled around the pen. He woke instead to the scream of a ewe in pain, which sounds very much like a human child. He jumped out of his chair and grabbed a flashlight off the table, and a double-barreled shotgun that leaned against the house.
Damn fox! he thought, as he hopped over the low fence. To people in the US, foxes are cute, clever creatures with pretty orange coats. To farmers in England and Wales, especially sheep farmers, they are dangerous vermin to be shot on sight. Lambing season was an especially difficult time, and he had already lost three lambs to foxes. He set his jaw and strode through the pasture, determined not to lose another.
He flashed his light past the milling, panicked sheep until it lit on a bizarre sight… three naked people hunched over a dead, bloody sheep. “Coc y gath!” he shouted. “It’s that blue thing!” The three Infected turned at the noise and looked his way. The light shone back from within their eyes; they looked like demons from Hell.
Two of them started to rise from the corpse and he shot them both, their heads coming apart in a spray of bone and buckshot. He patted his pockets for more shells, and with a curse realized they were in his other jacket. The third one sprang from the sheep’s carcass and raced toward him, bloody mouth agape. He reversed the shotgun and hit the thing on the side of the head with a swing that would have sent a baseball over the outfield fence. Bones cracked and the creature hit the ground, rolling twice until it ended up motionless on its back, its lifeless eyes reflecting the moonlight.
His wife stood in the open doorway of their home, their kids peeking past her. “Did you get the fox?” she called. He stopped short and looked at his little family there in the doorway of his warm and cozy home and thought to himself, Everything I care about is right there. He would remember that moment almost a year later as he watched his house, and the bodies inside, burn.
White House
April 22nd
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President.” Everyone in the long Cabinet conference room stood as the president stalked in and seated himself at the head of the large table. Most of the Cabinet attended, including the Surgeon General and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Congressional “gang of eight” sat along one side, the Majority and Minority leaders from both houses of Congress, plus the majority and minority leaders from both the respective Intelligence Committees. Further down the table sat the Joint Chiefs and other people in uniform. Across from them sat the heads of the major intelligence services, including Homeland Security and the CIA. At the far end of the table the seats were taken by more civilians, mostly State Department and DOD. Along both walls in chairs, aides to all the important personages around the table clutched folders and briefcases.
When the room became quiet, the President addressed the assembled crowd. “All right, everyone,” he said. “Let’s skip the formalities and get right to it.” He turned to his Chief of Staff who stood at his side. “Jim?”
“Thank you, Mr. President. First I think we should hear from the Surgeon General. Doctor Vreelander?” The doctor stood up. She had been a highly successful heart surgeon, having developed a number of breakthrough techniques in the field, and a past Executive Director of the AMA. She had known the President and his wife for many years. After two mo
nths of arm-twisting, she had reluctantly accepted the job. However, she refused to wear the uniform, which made her feel silly, like a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
“Mr. President, so far we have had a total of one hundred eighty-seven cases in the United States. We divide these into two categories: primary infection and secondary infection. Secondary infections are those where the means of transmission is obvious, namely a bite mark. Primary infections are those where there is no obvious source of infection, where we must surmise that the person became infected by some vector in the environment. Of the one hundred and eighty-seven cases, one hundred and sixty-one were primary and twenty-six were secondary. Of the primary cases, most were in people who had recently traveled to or from the Far East, mostly China, Japan and Korea. Eight were in people who traveled to Europe, and twelve more to Africa.
“There are twelve primary cases among people who have not traveled outside this country. Ten of them were from Alaska, mostly the western part of the Aleutian Islands. That would seem to go along with the idea that this disease is moving from east to west. That part of the Aleutians is on the same longitude as Fiji and American Samoa, where they’re also reporting cases. It’s the other two primary cases that are the most troubling. One occurred in Maine and the other in Massachusetts, outside of Boston. Together they account for nine of the secondary cases, either directly or indirectly through retransmission, or in plain terms, when someone they bit then bit someone else. Neither case was caught before the individuals ‘turned.’ Neither of the individuals had been out of the country, nor had they apparently had contact with anyone who had. Of course in the Boston case, there’s no way to be sure who they might have passed on the street or sat next to in a restaurant. But the Maine case was a farmer in an isolated area, who killed his wife and three children before he was… stopped.
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 10
