by Scott Sigler
“That can’t be right,” he said. “Ten seconds after it started moving, it wasn’t even thirty feet away from us.”
At a distance of thirty feet, something artificial the size of the Platypus should have been a bright white signal.
José paused the playback. He looked at Cooper. For once, the man wasn’t smiling.
“That’s not just expensive equipment, Jefe Cooper. That’s stealth. Military-grade, maybe. Is Stanton running drugs or something? What if the Coast Guard comes out here?”
Cooper finally understood José’s concern.
“Steve Stanton is not running drugs,” Cooper said. “We won’t get busted by the Coasties. You won’t get deported. You’re fine.”
José looked at the paused recording. He hit “play” and again let it run. It showed nothing. He looked up at Cooper again.
“And no gang war? No one will shoot at us?”
“No gang war,” Cooper said. “We’re safe. I promise. Just…” Cooper couldn’t help looking at the screen again, noting that the time stamp was thirty seconds into the Platypus launch — the thing should have still been kicking back sonar like mad. “You were right to tell only me. Jeff will just get all fired up, and it’s nothing. Between us, right?”
José nodded, raised his hands in a gesture that said, You told me what I needed to hear.
“Okay, Jefe Cooper. Sorry to wake you up.” He stood and walked to the door.
“No problem,” Cooper said. “You go on, get some sleep. I’ve got the helm.”
José left.
Cooper sat, feeling mixed emotions.
Stealth. Military-grade.
If Jeff found out…
Cooper shook his head. Jeff wouldn’t find out. So the customer had expensive equipment, crazy expensive, so what? That wasn’t Cooper’s business, and it wasn’t Jeff’s business, either. They were getting paid like kings to facilitate Steve Stanton’s search for the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes.
Jeff’s instincts and decisions had almost put the business under. It was Cooper’s turn to call the shots. A few more days, a week at the most, and this would be over.
THE BODIES
“Margo,” Clarence said, “you okay?”
Margaret heard his voice through the speakers in her wide helmet, but also from outside the suit. Clarence was right behind her, in a BSL-4 rig of his own.
She’d tuned out, got lost in her memories. Amos… Dew… Betty Jewell… Chelsea… Perry. The mind-ripping horror of it all. No, she wasn’t okay. Not even close.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”
She hadn’t been on the Carl Brashear for more than a few hours, and there was already one person infected. The divers had done something wrong, exposed themselves somehow.
Margaret was already far behind in the race.
To center herself, she took a long look at the trailer Tim called the hurt locker. The place had been designed with volume in mind. Ten metal tables were lined up in parallel, running down the trailer’s length. Each table had its own rack of analysis equipment. Maybe the engineers assumed the Carl Brashear would have a full complement of scientists when the shit hit the fan.
She reached up, checked the hose connected to her helmet: secure, no problems. When moving from trailer to trailer, the suits used internal air supplies. For working in one area, however, ceiling-mounted hoses provided breathable air.
Two of the metal tables held corpses of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky. Tim was already working on Petrovsky, taking samples from all over his body.
Margaret couldn’t put it off any longer: she had to get to work, figure out what had happened. One of those bodies — or both — had infected Diego Clark.
“Clarence, I need you to talk to Cantrell,” she said. “Clark’s diving gear was BSL-4 rated. We have to figure out how he got infected.”
“I can do that,” Clarence said. “I’ve read his report, seems like everything was solid.”
She’d also read the report, hadn’t seen any mistakes. “Maybe he missed something. Maybe the suits malfunctioned, somehow.”
“Maybe,” Clarence said. “I’ll find out. Do you need anything before I go talk to him?”
She shook her head. From her helmet’s speakers, she could hear him breathing. He was there with her, like he always was, like he had been since he’d been assigned to her when all of this began nearly six years earlier. What would life be like without him? And how had she managed to let a man like him slip away?
Margaret had to get her head in the game. She couldn’t rely on Clarence to be her crutch anymore.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just go, Clarence. Talk to Cantrell.”
She walked toward the bodies.
Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made bumpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.
The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.
Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.
Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.
Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.
Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.
Amos… his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery… Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her bloody hand slid free…
“Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”
Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”
Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing. Half a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.
“You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”
“Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”
Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.
“Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”
“Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”
AWAKENING
Motion.
Vibrations from a bone saw, the regular probing of fingers and hands,
these things resonated through the body.
These vibrations, these movements, triggered an ingrained, automatic response inside the cyst-encased neutrophils. They turned on. They secreted a new chemical, one that dissolved the shells protecting them against the forces of decomposition.
Newly exposed to the apoptosis chemicals, the neutrophils didn’t have much time. Some of them didn’t make it: caught in blobs of caustic rot, they died almost immediately. Others pushed up, pushed out, crawling through Charlie’s muscle, through his subcutaneous layer, through his dermis, then his epidermis and finally gathered just beneath the squamous epithelium — the skin’s outermost layer.
There they would wait, wait until they felt the pressure of another surface coming into contact.
When that happened, the neutrophils would cling to that new surface.
Then they would simply follow their programming, and do what they were made to do.
THE FULL RIDE
Clarence hated the suit. It made him feel clumsy, awkward. He’d strapped a holster to the outside of his thigh, but if things went south he wasn’t even sure if his gloved fingers could fit through his weapon’s trigger guard. Far more significant, though, was the fact that he might be just one tiny rip away from suffering the same fate as Diego Clark.
He hated the suit, true, but the heads-up display thing was amazing. He had Cantrell’s service record right in front of him, at the left edge of his vision. All he had to do was turn his head and read.
Clarence exited the airlock and walked to Clark’s cell. He stood in front of the clear door, staring in.
The mattress had been removed. Incinerated, probably. Clark lay on his back on the bed’s metal surface. Metal-mesh straps across his chest, hips and thighs held him tight to the bed’s metal surface, as did thick restraints around his wrists and ankles. All that was overkill at the moment — an IV ran into Clark’s right arm, a steady flow of drugs keeping him unconscious.
A voice from behind: “Makes me want to enlist all over again.”
Clarence turned to look at Kevin Cantrell. He was leaning against the wall of his cage, forearm and forehead pressed against the glass. The front of his clear cell looked directly into the front of Clark’s.
“Look at that poor bastard,” Cantrell said. “Years of service, and he’ll die horribly.” The diver tilted his head to the right, toward Edmund, who lay in his bed and would never wake again.
“Or him,” Cantrell said. “Good to know that the fucking navy can heap disgrace upon misery and use our bodies like we’re laboratory mice. I mean, doesn’t all this just make you want to sign up?”
“Already did,” Clarence said.
Cantrell raised his eyebrows, nodded. “Oh, that’s right, your little spat with Doc Feely. You enlisted. You’re one of us, right? Let me guess… Marines?”
“Rangers,” Clarence said. “Then Special Forces. Got shot at plenty, but no one strapped me to a table. I need to talk to you.”
Cantrell shrugged. “It’s not like my calendar is all that full at the moment.”
The man seemed different than he had just a little while earlier. He was calmer. Relaxed. He hadn’t exactly been freaking out earlier, nothing like that, but he’d seemed tense, jittery.
Clarence tilted his head toward Clark. “Sorry about your friend.”
“A real shame,” Cantrell said. “Seems inevitable, though. The pathogen obviously had some kind of reservoir that allowed it to maintain viability all these years. The Los Angeles likely found that reservoir. Clarkie drew the short straw.”
Clarence raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on. At least I think you do, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what you just said.”
Cantrell shrugged. “I know me some biology. I was premed at Duke.”
“Jesus. Not the typical life story of a serviceman. How the hell did you wind up in the navy?”
“Fighting, I’m afraid,” Cantrell said. “I was an angry young black man raging against the inequities of life, even though I’d grown up in the suburbs and had a full ride.”
“You had a full ride to Duke? You must have been one hell of a baller. Point guard?”
Cantrell laughed. “If you were white, I’d call you racist. It was an academic full ride.”
“Oh.” Clarence actually did feel a little racist, which was a strange sensation. “What did you do to get the academic full ride?”
“Perfect score on the SAT.”
Clarence hadn’t even known that was possible. He’d taken the SAT once upon a time. His score was less than perfect, to say the least.
“You had college for free, but couldn’t keep your nose clean. Book smart, but no common sense?”
Cantrell nodded. “No concept of perspective, actually. But close enough.”
“So you enlisted?”
“I did,” Cantrell said. “I was out of options. Thought I’d do the GI Bill and save up enough to actually pay for college on my own, but I wound up in diving school and fell in love with it. I’m sure you’re surprised to hear this, Agent Otto, but in the navy there is no such thing as a dummy diver. You have to be smart just to get in, and smarter to stay alive. In our job, one mistake can get you killed.” He tilted his head toward Clark’s cell. “Or get you infected, apparently.”
Clarence knew that Cantrell might also be infected, might be just one of Tim’s little pricks away from getting a death sentence of his own.
“I read your report,” Clarence said. “I didn’t see any opportunity for Clark to get infected, but it would help if you walked me through what happened when you guys picked up the bodies.”
Cantrell thought for a moment, scratched absently at his throat.
“Okay, sure,” he said. “When the shit hit the fan, Clarkie and I were ordered to suit up and search for bodies from the Los Angeles. We knew that meant a chance of handling infection victims. Our suits are aquatic BSL-4 arrays — positive pressure, completely internalized air, solid seals, similar to what you’re wearing now, only more streamlined for movement. A modified Seahawk flew us out to the target areas.”
“Modified? How?”
“Special lift cage,” Cantrell said. “Same thing we used to retrieve material of interest from the Los Angeles. ROVs from the LA bring up these sealed, decontaminated containers, we collect the containers, get in the lift cage, the Seahawk drops the lift cage near the Brashear’s port side.”
Cantrell pointed behind him, through his clear cell, across the prep area with its stainless steel instruments, to the wide, horizontal airlock door.
“The Brashear’s cargo crane picks up the cage and puts it right there,” he said. “In we go, divers, cage, ROV, even the cable the crane uses to connect to the cage. Anything that could possibly touch the sample container, or touch something that touches the container, gets fully deconned. The airlock seals up, completely fills with bleach, destroying any biocontaminants. When the bleach drains, the inner airlock door opens and we take the container to the prep area. Then we go back into the airlock, get another dose of bleach, then the crane brings us up on deck.”
The decon procedures seemed thorough. And yet, something had still gone wrong.
“So on the night of the attack, the Seahawk takes you and Clark out,” Clarence said. “What was different?”
“You mean other than the screaming, the blood and the fires?”
Clarence paused, nodded. “Other than that.”
“The ’Hawk’s pilot spotted a flasher on Walker’s SEIE suit,” Cantrell said. “Into the drink we went. She was alive when we found her, mumbling about the people she’d killed and how she’d sabotaged the LA.”
“So you touched her?”
The diver rolled his eyes. “No, Agent Otto, we sat back and told her she had nice titties. She was still alive. We were trying to save her.”
“Do you remember what she said?”
Cantrell stared back. “You’ve got my report right in front
of you. Read it for yourself.”
The man didn’t want to repeat the words. Why not?
“But do you remember? Can you tell me?”
Cantrell sighed.
“Yeah. She said, I took out the reactor. Then she said, They bit me. I killed them. I shot two of those bastards.”
Clarence read from the statement. Cantrell had it word for word.
“Okay, so what happened then?”
“The ’Hawk dropped the collection cage,” Cantrell said. “Clark and I put Walker inside, then got in with her. We were just about to return to the Brashear when the pilot spotted a second body. Clark and I went back into the drink. Petrovsky was eviscerated, among other significant damage. We loaded him into the cage.”
A cage normally meant for two divers and a container had four people in it, two of them infected. Clarence wondered if there was something to that.
“Did you continue to search for bodies?”
Cantrell shook his head. “Command wanted the Seahawk to return and look for survivors from the Forrest Sherman. No part of the helicopter had touched us or the bodies, if that’s what you’re wondering. The ’Hawk dropped our cage into the water, Brashear’s crane took us up, we got in the airlock just like normal. This time, however, there were two man-size, airtight containers waiting for us. We loaded the bodies into the containers. Feely was talking to us at that point. We went through the bleach bath, then carried the body containers to the morgue trailer.”
Clarence called up Feely’s report. Cantrell’s recall matched the report exactly, as if he were reading directly from it. All except for one thing.
“It says here that when you entered with the bodies and went through the decon bath, you smelled bleach.”
Cantrell paused. “Of course I smelled it,” he said. “They bathe us in it. The suits smell like it when we’re done.”
“I’m not talking about when you’re done. You’re quoted in the report as saying, I smelled bleach during decon step. Maybe a seal leaked.”
