by Scott Sigler
Bo Pan had something in his hands: a black tube, about the size of a travel mug. The old man unzipped his jacket and stuffed it inside. He headed for the door that led below, moving as fast as he could in the rough conditions.
Steve followed close behind.
Cooper felt a strong arm slap down hard around his shoulders.
“Hey, Coop!” A smiling Jeff screamed to be heard over the wind. He sniffed his free hand and wrinkled his face in disgust. “Coop, that thing smells like your old girlfriend’s cooch.” Jeff started laughing, as if he’d just made the wittiest statement in all of history.
“Funny,” Cooper said. “Let’s get out of this mess. Time to head for Chicago. And dibs on the shower.”
Just a few hours more, and the Mary Ellen would be free of her strange guests. Cooper and Jeff could head back to Benton Harbor, pay off a shitload of debts, and they’d never have to worry about this whole strange incident ever again.
HATCHING
It wasn’t fair.
No time… no time…
Margaret knew she had the tools to beat the monster, to put a sword deep into its heart, but the monster was already breeding, already spreading.
She stood in the containment area, walking up and down the aisle. Ten clear cells, each with an occupant, all unconscious. Full house. Four more tests had turned up positive on the Carl Brashear. The men had been delivered to the clear holding cells. Another six positives reported from the Pinckney — those sailors were dead, executed on the orders of Captain Tubberville, their remains already incinerated.
Although all the captives were unconscious, their bodies continued to change. Austin’s metamorphosis had kicked into high gear. Even worse, Clark’s triangles were hatching.
Tim had bailed, said he had other things to do. She was done arguing with him. Clarence, however, was there, right by her side.
“Margaret,” he said, “are you sure you have to watch this?”
She nodded. “I do.”
Someone had to be there with Clark, even if he was so doped up he had no idea what was going on. She’d exposed him to Edmund’s hydra-filled blood, naively hoping for a miracle. The hydras had begun to reproduce almost immediately. She didn’t know what, if anything, would happen next.
“Clarence, if you don’t want to watch, I understand.”
He shook his head. “If you’re going to endure it, then I’ll endure it with you.”
A noble gesture coming from a man who had left her. That was his nature, though — he’d have done the same for anyone he was assigned to.
Her heart raced. Maybe that was from the Adderall, not the situation, but the situation was enough to give anyone a coronary.
Austin lay on the floor of his cell. Brown fibers were sprouting from all over his young body, slowly crawling across his skin, sticking to both the metal grate deck and the clear glass walls. If she stood still and watched carefully, she could see those fibers moving, see new fibers pushing out of his body. It was like looking at time-lapse footage of a growing plant. At this rate, he’d be covered in a matter of hours. She was uploading a live feed of that to Black Manitou, making sure the information would survive even if things got really bad.
She was also sending live video of Clark. His triangles had started moving a few minutes ago. Blinking, twitching and jiggling as the tentacle-legs hidden inside him started to flex, to push, trying to drive the creatures out of the man’s body.
Margaret had seen a hatching once before, when three of the monsters had torn out of a woman named Bernadette Smith. Clark’s hatching seemed different… like something was wrong. The black eyes that had stared out with visible hate, visible intelligence, now widened, shut tight, widened again.
Almost as if the creatures were in pain.
The triangles started to lurch, to push against Clark’s pale skin. Out and back, out and back, a little farther each time, stretching his skin so taut it reflected the lights from above.
He lay there, unconscious thanks to the anesthesia — a mercy for his final moments.
Clarence shook his head. “This is awful.” His voice cracked with the strain. The horror show had gotten even to him. She reached her left hand out to the side, slowly, until it brushed against his. Without hesitation, he held her hand tight, their gloved fingers linking together.
The triangles jumped harder, so hard the man’s prone body shook, made his straps snap, made the solid metal table rattle like a snare drum.
This was the reason Perry Dawsey had cut into himself, over and over. He’d sensed this was coming and done what no man could do, what Clark hadn’t had the chance to do.
One of the triangles stopped jumping. It was on Clark’s left abdomen. The man’s skin sagged like a sock with a tennis ball inside. The hatchling wasn’t moving. Its eyes looked… lifeless.
The one on his shoulder started to vibrate.
Her fingers clamped down tighter on Clarence’s.
The shoulder triangle’s eyes widened, bulged… then one eye popped in a tiny splash of black and green. The triangle kept twitching but no longer pulled against the stretched and torn skin. It spasmed like a moth caught in a spider’s web.
She looked at a third, this one on his muscular thigh… it was swelling.
“It works,” she said, barely able to believe the words herself. “It’s the hydras, has to be… they’re killing the hatchlings.”
The sound of fists pounding against glass startled her, made her jump away. Clarence didn’t let go of her hand.
Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy, the man who’d killed two people with a pipe-wrench, stared out. Madness wrinkled his face into a twisted mask. He’d been gassed and should have been under for at least another two hours — how the hell had he woken up?
He pointed at her.
“Your little trick won’t work on me, bitch! I know you put something in my belly, but you know what? I’m fucking fine, thanks for asking!”
Had his crawlers overcome the anesthesia? Counteracted it, somehow?
A slight pull on her hand — Clarence, pointing into Clark’s cell. The hatchling on Clark’s thigh had swollen to water-balloon proportions, triangular sides bowed outward against taut skin.
Skin and triangle alike ruptured, spurting purple and black and red a foot into the air before it splashed down on top of his thigh, sticking like thick mucus.
Then another pop, and another.
Then, nothing. No motion at all, not from Clark, not from his triangles… just the slow, oozing drip of blood and viscous fluids pattering down to the floor of his cage.
“Jesus,” Clarence said. “What do we do now?”
She had failed to save Clark, but his death wasn’t in vain — now she had a weapon, even if she did not yet understand how to use it. His death had served a greater purpose.
Margaret turned, met the crazed stare of Nagy. His death would also serve a purpose. And in truth, the man he’d once been had died days before.
“I’ll tell you what we do now,” she said. “We find something that will put Nagy under, and we dissect his brain so we can see if Tim’s yeast did anything to him.”
She smiled. Only a little, but she couldn’t help it. She hoped the infected still had some degree of communication, at least a shred of their inexplicable telepathy. She wanted them to know she was about to kill Nagy… first him, then all of them.
SELF-MEDICATION
Tim knew what was going on in the cells. That didn’t mean he had to watch. If his yeast inoculant didn’t work, that could very well be him in one of those cells, with some jackass doctor or scientist calmly watching monsters tear out of his body. Maybe they would take notes. Maybe they would frown sadly at his imminent demise.
For the moment, his talents were best used elsewhere. He sat alone in the analysis module, taking advantage of the opportunity to examine his biosurveillance results. He’d set up two algorithms: the first to scan the medical records of the seventeen confirmed positives, look f
or any commonalities or recent trips to the ship doctor; the second to analyze prescriptions and over-the-counter sales of medicine taskforce-wide.
Six of the seventeen infection victims had visited ship doctors. There could have been more than that — all medical staffers were impossibly overworked taking care of the wounded, and there was no way of knowing if they’d properly tracked visits.
Of those six, though, there was an instant commonality: they had reported to the infirmary with complaints of headaches, body pain, sinus drip, and sore throats. Minor things, especially at a time like this. The docs had prescribed ibuprofen and cough suppressants. Basic treatments for common ailments. So common, in fact, that most people with aches and a sore throat wouldn’t talk to a doctor at all — they’d just tough it out.
Tough it out, or, self-medicate.
He called up his second algorithm, the one that data-mined records of all medical supplies across the entire task force.
When the results came up, he felt a cold ball of fear swell up in his stomach, felt a panicked tingling in his balls.
He had to tell Margaret.
CONSUMER HABITS
Margaret and Clarence sat in the theater/briefing room, waiting for Tim to come in and deliver his urgent news.
She had just watched a man die, yet she felt… excited. Walker’s hydras were a weapon, a contagious weapon. They spread via contact with blood. If pustules formed on Edmund, she would test those as well but she already knew that would also result in contagion.
The hydras killed the infection, but what else did they do? Hopefully she would have enough time to study that, find out what the side effects might be.
So far, Tim’s yeast had produced no noticeable effect on Chappas. It was several hours into the test, yet they had no way of knowing what the catalyst’s effects might be, if there were any at all. Maybe they’d get lucky with Chappas; maybe the yeast would cure him.
She’d dissected Nagy’s brain herself, found it thickly webbed with the crawler-built mesh. Tim’s hypothesis seemed correct: once the crawlers reached the brain, it was too late.
But that didn’t change the possibility that the yeast could inoculate the uninfected. Sooner or later they would have to test that theory. Since Tim had selfishly helped himself to part of the first precious batch, Margaret wondered if he might volunteer. Somehow, she didn’t see that happening. Tim was an excellent scientist, but he was also a coward. He didn’t have an ounce of Clarence’s self-sacrificing nature.
Speak of the blond-haired devil: Tim rushed into the room, more wide-eyed than ever. He smelled of sweat. He carried a laptop, information already displayed on the screen.
Margaret stood. Her legs ached. Her whole body ached. “So what’s this critical information, Tim?”
He handed her the open laptop.
“I found a significant indicator for infection,” he said. “We can probably detect outbreaks across larger populations, and do it even before victims would test positive for cellulose.”
Margaret looked at the screen: a chart showing purchases of cold medication? Clarence came up to stand by her side, read as well.
At first, she didn’t understand the significance, but then it clicked and clicked hard.
Clarence shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “People buying cough drops and ibuprofen shows that they’re infected?”
“Not on an individual basis,” Tim said. “But in the bigger picture, yes. It’s how the CDC can spot a flu outbreak, based on an abnormal spike in sales of medicine that treats flu symptoms. Seventeen people on this flotilla have tested positive so far — shortly after the battle, six of them reported coldlike symptoms of headaches and body pain.”
Margaret read through Tim’s numbers; they painted a frightening picture.
“Ibuprofen could be meaningless,” she said. “People are working hard, they’re beat-up, stressed, but look at this — the Pinckney’s ship store is out of Chloraseptic, Robitussin and Sucrets. Almost out of Motrin and Tylenol.”
“Inventory for those items was at eighty-five percent the day before the Los Angeles attacked,” Tim said. “Two days after the attack, inventory on pain meds and cold meds dropped to fifty-five percent. Three days after the attack, those supplies were at about thirty percent. Today — four days after the attack — the supplies are gone. Those supplies should have lasted six months or more.”
He sniffed, whipped the back of his hand across his nose. His bloodshot eyes stared out. Tim was in bad shape.
“The Brashear isn’t as bad,” he said. “But consumption is clearly up. If I’m right, the Pinckney is badly infected and the Brashear is close behind.”
Margaret noticed that Clarence was staring at Tim. Not in disbelief, or in surprise or admiration, but in suspicion.
“Tim,” he said, “you have a runny nose?”
Margaret felt the room grow cold. Clarence’s hand had drifted near the pistol strapped to his left side.
Tim, however, didn’t seem to notice. “A little,” he said. “I’m kinda wired and worn out, you know? Fuck-all long days it’s been.”
Then he, too, saw Clarence’s stare, and understood. Tim leaned back, held up his hands.
“Don’t get crazy, big fella. I just tested negative like ten minutes ago. Besides, the yeast probably made me immune.”
“Probably,” Clarence said. “But if you were already infected for more than a day or two, the yeast doesn’t do anything, right? You were here during the attack, treating dozens of sailors. You could have been exposed.”
Margaret reached out, put a hand on Clarence’s arm.
“Just test him again,” she said. “Remember, he’ll test positive well before he’s contagious to us, so calm down. I doubt he’s infected.”
Clarence raised his eyebrows: how do we know that?
“I’ve got the sniffles, too,” she said. “And my body hurts all over.”
Clarence took a step back, giving himself enough space to watch both her and Tim.
Margaret sighed in exasperation. “Clarence, for fuck’s sake. Tim and I are working around the clock here — at some point, the body breaks down. You get the sniffles, you get headaches. So how about we all test now, together, just to be sure? We can test again every time we step out of the suits.”
Clarence relaxed slightly, almost imperceptibly, but he wasn’t convinced.
“Okay,” he said. “But unless you’re in your suits, I need you two to stay away from each other. And both of you keep your distance from me, got it?”
She let out a sarcastic huff. “Good to see you’re consistent.”
Now he looked only at her. There was hurt in his eyes. She wanted to take those words back, but she couldn’t.
Clarence put both hands on his face, pressed hard, rubbed. He lifted his head, blinking rapidly, sniffing in a big breath.
“If Tim’s theory is right, we have to assume well over half of the Pinckney is infected, about to convert and become violent. I need you both to suit up and finish whatever you’re doing in the lab. Get samples of your work packed up and ready to travel on a moment’s notice.”
Margaret had been thinking only of numbers, but Clarence’s urgency drove home a harsh reality: the Pinckney was a heavily armed warship, one that might soon be overwhelmed with the Converted.
THE SEAL
Paulius Klimas had never seen a cell phone quite like the one that had been handed to him by the captain of the Coronado. It was a bit smaller than the satellite phones he’d carried into at least a dozen missions, and ridiculously heavy for its size.
The captain had asked Paulius to his stateroom, provided the phone, then left, giving Paulius privacy. That alone indicated some important shit was about to go down. The first call to the new phone had come from none other than Admiral Porter himself. That call had lasted all of three minutes, long enough for Porter to stress that the safety and future of the United States was on the line, and that Paulius was to facilitate in any way po
ssible the next person who would call.
Maybe that finally meant some action.
When the battle had occurred four days earlier, he and his men had been ordered to do nothing. The Coronado hadn’t launched boats to rescue the drowning, hadn’t welcomed the wounded aboard. Zero contact.
As other ships sank, as flaming oil spread across the water, Paulius had watched sailors fighting for life and he had done nothing to help them. He and his men from SEAL Team Two could have put their three Zodiacs into the lake, could have grabbed dozens of sailors from the water, could have saved many lives — he had never felt so ashamed of following an order.
But he had obeyed. He had made sure his men obeyed.
Paulius understood the order, even if he didn’t agree with it; so far, no one on the Coronado — SEAL Team Two included — had tested positive for the infection. He and his men were a contingency plan, to be used in a worst-case scenario.
And now, it seemed, that scenario had arrived.
The Pinckney, the Brashear and now even the damaged Truxtun had reported positive tests, incidents of violence and murder, even the execution of military personnel. Porter’s call meant it was almost time to act.
The phone buzzed. Paulius answered.
“This is Commander Klimas.”
“Hello, Commander,” said a baritone voice on the other end. “This is Agent Clarence Otto.”
Paulius nodded. Yes, finally, there would be a role to play.
“Agent Otto, I have been instructed to follow your orders.”
“Good,” Otto said. “What have you been told so far?”
“That you control the package, and that the package is our highest priority.”
The package, in this case, was a person — one Dr. Margaret Montoya, and whatever she might be carrying. Tim Feely and Agent Otto were to be rescued as well, if possible, but Dr. Montoya had become the focus of Klimas and his team.
