Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  “Negative so far,” Clarence said. “So’s Feely. If the shit hits the fan, we must get them out of here so they can continue their work.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Murray said sharply, an automatic rebuke. Then, softer: “You know I can’t let anyone who’s been exposed fly back to the mainland.”

  “Then keep her at sea,” Clarence said. “Has the Coronado followed orders to steer clear of any other task force ships and personnel?”

  Murray fell silent. The lack of response answered Clarence’s question: the Coronado remained an infection-free place to stash Margo and Feely.

  Finally, the director spoke. “SEAL Team Two isn’t a taxi service for your wife, Otto. The SEALs are my insurance policy. If the command structure of any ship becomes infected, their mission is kill those people. You think I’m going to take a chance that they could become compromised just to keep Margaret alive?”

  Clarence closed his eyes. All this talk of life and death — at least he was no longer in danger of falling asleep.

  “Sir, Margaret is too great an asset to waste. She’s working on more than just the inoculant. If you don’t want to lose her, then give me direct contact with the Coronado. If things go bad, I can get her off the Brashear.”

  “And what if she’s infected and doesn’t know it? Better yet, what if you’re infected, and you use the Coronado to shit all over the mainland?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to gamble.”

  Murray huffed, a sound that turned into a laugh of disgust. “Gamble.” Gamble with a disease that can make us extinct?”

  “That’s right,” Clarence said. “You know Margaret is worth the risk.”

  He waited through a long pause.

  “All right, Otto. I’ll get you in contact with the Coronado. But the ride is for a clean Margaret Montoya. If you find out she’s infected…”

  Clarence licked his suddenly dry lips. For better or for worse.

  “Director, if it comes to that, I’ll do us both.”

  “Good man,” Murray said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  A NEW HOPE

  Margaret double-checked the time in her visor’s HUD, just to confirm what she already knew; yes, it had been only eight hours since she’d injected two microscopic hydras into the body of Eric Edmund.

  They had multiplied.

  Samples taken from his spinal column showed a few hydras, as was to be expected. What surprised her was Edmund’s blood: there were already thousands of them in his circulatory system. They thrived in there, reproducing at a rate that defied logic, even strained the limits of her imagination. The hydras reprogrammed stem cells to make more hydras, which then reprogrammed additional stem cells, creating an exponential population increase. If he had thousands inside of eight hours, within twenty-four he would have millions.

  Then what? Would they keep reproducing until there were billions? Trillions? Would the hydra population in his body expand until it overwhelmed him, until it started to damage him?

  She had no way of knowing, other than to just watch Edmund.

  What were the hydras? Were they friend? Foe? Or were they neither, just a parasite that used the human body? And if she dared to hope, what if they weren’t a parasite at all — what if they were symbiotic, something that could live inside the human body without harming it while at the same time protecting against the infection?

  The hydras had kept Candice Walker from becoming one of the infected, from becoming converted, but that didn’t mean the new microorganisms were harmless, purely beneficial things. They found their way into the host’s brain — the human brain hadn’t exactly evolved with room for passengers.

  Charlie Petrovsky had finally been consumed by the black rot. Other than a pitted skeleton, there was nothing left of him to study. Complete liquefaction just three days after death.

  Candice Walker, on the other hand, still showed no sign of the infection’s rapid decomposition.

  Margaret eye-tracked through her HUD menus. She directed a microscope to lock onto one of the hydras in Edmund’s blood sample. Its waving tendrils reached out, blindly feeling for something to grab, to pull itself forward.

  Walker’s stem cell therapy had introduced something new, something the Orbital hadn’t encountered before. Her infection had modified some of her normal stem cells, which probably produced the crawlers Margaret had seen so many times before. But some of the hacked stem cells must have had that artificial chromosome — was that what produced the hydras? A variant so different that it didn’t recognize the original crawlers as “self”?

  The new hydra strain reproduced at a phenomenal rate, but so far didn’t seem to damage the host in any way. Walker had only had the hydras for three or four days, at most — there was no telling what might have happened had they continued to grow inside of her.

  So many unknowns, but there was one fact that Margaret couldn’t deny: the hydras secreted a catalyst that killed off earlier strains of the infection — strains that damaged the human host, even killed it.

  “You’re protecting your environment,” she said to the microscopic image on the HUD, as if it could hear her, as if it could think about her words. “Walker was your world… when she died, most of your kind died as well. You’re something new. You aren’t a means to the Orbital’s ends at all, are you?”

  The hydra didn’t answer. It kept reaching, kept pulling.

  Margaret felt her stomach churning. One too many of Tim’s Adderalls? The excitement at discovering a new form of life? Or was it that the hydras’ potential went way beyond Tim’s yeast? Walker’s pustules had contained hydras, hydras that might become an airborne contagion spreading from person to person, all across the globe, promising permanent immunity to the Orbital’s infection.

  A different kind of pandemic.

  Margaret shook her head. Too risky. Too many unknowns for something that had been created, after all, by the Orbital’s alien technology.

  An alert popped up in her HUD: Tim Feely was calling her. She eye-tracked to the icon and connected. His face appeared in a small window in the upper-left corner of her visor.

  “Margaret, I’m finished processing the samples taken from the three new victims. Can you join me in the analysis module? I think you better take a look.”

  “On my way,” she said.

  Tim’s face blinked out.

  So little time…

  SQUARE-JAWED MAN

  Tim knew that if he made it out of this alive, he was changing careers. Janitor, maybe. At a grade school. Mopping floors, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning up puke — he’d be the happiest employee around.

  Two doctorates. A lifetime of advanced learning. His work on Black Manitou had been a part of one of the most revolutionary projects in human history, and now here he was neck-deep in another. And where did all that put him? Right in the crosshairs of disaster.

  “Tim? Hello?”

  His head snapped right, toward Margaret. Clarence was with her; he’d suited up for once, decided to join the party.

  Margaret smiled at him. “Tim, you okay?”

  He wasn’t. He never would be again.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He wanted to rub the crust from his eyes, but the goddamn suit meant he couldn’t touch them.

  “Looks like our three new hosts give us a mixed bag of infections,” he said. “Brain biopsy shows crawler material in Nagy. He’s already converted, obviously. The samples from Chappas show signs of those dandelion seeds you documented in Detroit, so it looks like he’s on his way to becoming a puffball.”

  Margaret nodded slowly. “All right. And what about Austin?”

  Conroy Austin, the boy who had cried right up until he’d been gassed.

  “His body is changing on a scale unlike anything you documented before,” Tim said. “Your earlier research showed the infection seems to concentrate on specific areas of the host’s body, so the altered stem cells are packed in tight. Like a supply chain — the closer the factories are toge
ther, the faster and easier it is to combine the parts, right?”

  Margaret nodded.

  Tim called up an image and shared it with both Margaret’s and Clarence’s headsets.

  “The infection is hitting Austin everywhere, and all at once. The poor bastard. It isn’t just rewriting his stem cells… it’s rewriting him.”

  “To make what?” Clarence asked. “Maybe that encased man that Walker drew, could that be happening to Austin? We saw a man like that in the Los Angeles’s nose cone, too. We’ve got video of it.”

  Margaret reached out, started grabbing and poking at the air. She fumbled her way through a directory that only she could see, then she made a tossing gesture Tim’s way. The video popped up on his helmet screen. Tim recognized it: the encased man from the sub’s lab.

  “We already watched this,” Tim said. “There’s no way to figure out what that covering material is, not from video of this quality.”

  “Don’t look at the cocoon,” Margaret said. “Look at the temporomandibular joint.”

  Clarence leaned in. “The what?”

  “His jaw hinge,” Tim said as he reached out, zoomed in on that part of the video. With the poor lighting, the glowing bits of particulate floating in the way, at first the body looked perfectly normal. But… something was off. He adjusted the contrast, making the dark areas absolutely black, the brighter areas varying shades of light gray.

  Tim saw what Margaret had seen. “Holy shit. The TMJ, his mandible, they’re massive — they look too damn big for his head. And the masseter… it’s at least four times normal size.”

  The man’s entire skull looked distorted, like a sculpture more finished on one side than on the other.

  Margaret reached out again, adjusting what she saw. “This sailor, he was getting bigger.”

  “Impossible,” Tim said. “He can’t get visibly bigger if he’s not ingesting massive amounts of food. Even if the infection is hot-wiring his system somehow, it can’t make something out of nothing.”

  “He doesn’t have to eat, at least not in the way one usually does… he’s not alone in there.” Margaret again shared what she was seeing.

  Tim looked at the new image. She had zoomed in on the torso. Tim saw her focal point: two left hands. There was another body under the membrane. Was Margaret saying that one person was absorbing the other?

  “Fuck this,” Tim said. “Honestly? I don’t even want to know what’s going on in there.”

  Margaret turned to Clarence — she, apparently, did want to know.

  “Clarence, from a military perspective, what do you think it could be? Clark has triangles, which turn into hatchlings that can build gates. Crawlers turn people into killers that can protect the hatchlings. Puffballs are for mass infection. What role would could this new thing play?”

  Clarence shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Margaret sneered. “Then guess, goddamit. You’re the soldier, remember?”

  Tim leaned back, stayed quiet. There was so much emphasis on the word soldier it clearly had a special meaning for the two of them.

  Clarence raised his eyebrows, nodded, an expression that said you got me there.

  “Okay, let me think this through out loud,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’m not that worried about a new gate. A dozen satellites have been launched since Detroit, and their only job is to scan for gate signatures. If the infection gets out and the hatchlings try to build one, we’ll know in plenty of time to blow the hell out of it. Besides, Murray is pretty sure they can’t build one without the Orbital. It acted as some kind of telepathy hub, letting them work together like ants in a colony.”

  Tim focused on the image of the two left hands. Did one of them look… shriveled?

  “So you think whatever is forming under that membrane might act as a new communication device,” he said. “A walking cell-phone tower or something?”

  “Maybe,” Clarence said. “Or, possibly, the Orbital thought like a general. The units it had on the battlefield didn’t get the job done, so maybe it wanted something new.”

  Margaret closed her eyes, hung her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We have three doses of the yeast, we give one each to Nagy, Austin and Chappas. Then we see what happens.”

  It was time to fess up, and Tim knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “We have two doses,” he said. “Not three.”

  Margaret’s eyes narrowed in confusion, then widened in understanding.

  “You took a dose?”

  Tim shrugged. “If it’s any consolation, it tasted like a baboon’s ass speckled with hot bat guano.”

  Clarence’s gloved hands noisily curled into fists. “You disobeyed orders.”

  “Oh, whatever,” Tim said. “I’m not military, you goon, and what are you gonna do, cut it out of me? We can’t waste all of it on those guys when we don’t even know if it will help them. We need to know if it works on the uninfected, and that’s me.”

  They were angry, sure, but Tim knew he had done the right thing. Not just the right thing, the smart thing. He wasn’t going to take any shit for it. He was ready to stand his ground, argue his case.

  What he wasn’t ready for, however, was Margaret’s reaction.

  She started to cry softly. Tears glistened on her cheeks — she couldn’t reach inside her helmet to wipe them away, so on her cheeks they stayed.

  “Fine,” she said. “Since we don’t have the resources to treat them all, we choose two for the yeast.”

  She looked up at Tim, her wet eyes screaming of hopelessness and anguish.

  He felt small, insignificant.

  “Nagy and Chappas,” she said. “Edmund’s blood is packed with hydras — we’ll try that on Clark since Clark is already so far gone. We’ll apply Edmund’s blood to Clark’s skin. We already know the hydras can replicate if they’re injected directly into the body. This method will let us test if they can also spread by exposure to blood, and, if that works, what impact they have on someone who has triangles.”

  She was writing Clark off, and with good reason. His triangles couldn’t be cut out. Tim had taken X-rays, seen the spiked triangle tails wrapped around Clark’s heart, lying against his arteries. Removing the triangles would kill him.

  Nagy and Austin, however, were in the early stages of infection. It was worth a shot to see if the yeast could cure them.

  Clark, Nagy, Chappas… that left one.

  “What about Austin?” Tim said. “The kid who was crying. Are you going to expose him to the hydras?”

  Margaret sniffed sharply. Her expression changed — she was done crying.

  “We’re not treating him at all,” she said. “We have to know what we’re up against. We have to let Austin’s infection run its course, so we can see what he becomes.”

  She turned and walked out of the analysis module. Clarence stared at Tim for a few moments — maybe because of Tim’s selfish choice, or maybe just because Tim had made his wife cry — then followed her out.

  HOMECOMING

  Cooper stood on the deck of the Mary Ellen Moffett, waiting for the Platypus to close in.

  He was experienced and sure-footed, yet the screaming wind and the rough water made him hold the rail to keep from falling overboard. Steve Stanton’s machine had brought with it bad weather, the worst of the trip so far. Stanton and Bo Pan stood close by, watching carefully.

  Cooper turned to José. “You ready?”

  The Filipino was wearing only swim trunks, flippers, a mask and a snorkel. He gave Cooper a thumbs-up. How in the hell the little man could tolerate frigid temperatures was beyond Cooper’s knowledge.

  “You sure you don’t want a wet suit? That water will freeze your balls off.”

  José smiled. “I am married with two children. I haven’t seen my balls in years.”

  With that, the short man sat on the rail, put his hand tight to his mask and fell backward to splash into Lake Michigan. He surfaced in seconds. He grabbed a buoy that
held a cable lead, then turned and swam toward the blinking light of Steve Stanton’s UUV.

  The Platypus sat low in the water. The fuzzy, gray, wet material blended in with both the water and the cloudless night, making it look like a sea monster that might suddenly attack José.

  José put his hands on the foam surface, pulled it in close. The cable lead had a hook on it, which he threaded through an eyebolt sticking out of the Platypus’s back. José yanked the connection to make sure it was secure, then gave Cooper a thumbs-up.

  Cooper looked up to the crane’s tiny pilothouse, where Jeff was waiting. Cooper flashed a thumbs-up of his own. Jeff nodded, then worked the controls.

  The winch whined as it reeled in the cable, lifting the UUV high. Water poured down from the machine’s foam covering, first in a triangular downpour, then a thick stream, then drips and drops as the crane pivoted, bringing the UUV over the Mary Ellen’s deck.

  Jeff lowered the machine. Seconds after the Platypus touched down, a wave caught the Mary Ellen broadside, tilted the boat severely and splashed a high spray of water across the deck. The Platypus skidded starboard, heading for the edge.

  Cooper rushed forward, one hand on the rail to keep his balance. With the other, he grabbed at the wet, gray machine — he couldn’t get a firm grip on the slippery surface. Then Bo Pan was there, throwing himself on top of the Platypus. Steve grabbed the tail; his feet slid out from under him and he fell hard on his ass, but he held on tight.

  The two men seemed to have it; Cooper took a quick look to make sure José was safe — he was, already climbing up a rope ladder — then pulled the Platypus toward its storage crate. Jeff came out of the crane cabin and also grabbed hold.

  Another wave rocked the Mary Ellen, but four men gripped the UUV and it wasn’t going anywhere. They slid it into the custom-built storage crate, then locked the crate shut. Cooper and Jeff strapped down the lid.

  The Platypus was secure.

  Cooper smelled something. He looked at his hands, then sniffed them — ugh, like dead fish, or worse. He wiped his hands against his jeans.