Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  Murray nodded. He looked less than pleased.

  “I can see that,” he said. “Doctor Montoya, get some rest. Doctor Cheng, assign more people to look at that stem cell therapy, as Doctor Montoya requested.”

  Cheng couldn’t hide his smirk. He stared right at her.

  “Of course, Director Longworth,” he said.

  “Good,” Murray said. “That will be all.”

  His side of the screen blanked out, leaving just Cheng’s face.

  “Good day, Doctor Montoya,” he said. “Enjoy your time away.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Margaret said, then she stormed out of the mission module.

  PORT

  Cooper and José worked to tie the Mary Ellen Moffett to the long pier. Jeff was in the pilothouse, managing the fine maneuvering that brought the ship into place.

  Waiting at their slip were three vehicles: a white van, a long, black limo and a pickup truck. Four Chinese men stood outside the white van. They wore jeans and sweatshirts, very nondescript, but Cooper wouldn’t have wanted to bump into any of them in a bar. Hands in pockets, shoulders shrugged against the cold — they clearly hadn’t understood that the temperature at the docks was usually the same as the temperature out on the water. Maybe they were here to help Steve and Bo Pan?

  The pickup truck’s doors opened and two men — properly dressed against the cold in work jackets and insulated pants — stepped out. They had the burly look of dockworkers. They approached the Mary Ellen. Cooper had no idea who these men were, either. He noticed that when the dockworkers came forward, the Chinese men shrank back, just a little bit.

  The limo was the most interesting of all: a man in a chauffeur suit — the driver, obviously — stood in front of it, a drop-dead-gorgeous woman on each arm. The women were laughing and smiling, but also shivering beneath thick fur coats. Past the hem of their coats, Cooper saw sparkly dresses and high heels.

  The hanging bumpers on the Mary Ellen’s port side ground against the seawall.

  Cooper was about to greet the two approaching men when a voice called out from behind him.

  “Wait!”

  He turned to see a bundled-up Steve Stanton rushing out of the cabin door. Steve ran across the deck, two overstuffed laptop bags strung around his shoulders. And not far behind Steve, Cooper saw Jeff descending from the bridge.

  Steve slid to a stop, pointed at the dockworkers. “I hired these men,” he said in a rush. “And a bonus for you!” He pointed to the limo. Or maybe at the girls, Cooper wasn’t sure.

  “A bonus?”

  Steve nodded hard. “Yes! For such a good job. I have two nights at the Trump Tower for everyone! All paid for. The limo will take us there.”

  Jeff joined them, a wide smile on his face.

  “Stop the presses,” he said. “Did I hear you say you bought us two nights at the Trump Tower, and a limo ride with some girlies?”

  Steve nodded furiously. He seemed overly hyped up. Stressed, maybe? His eyes kept darting to the cabin door. Was he waiting for Bo Pan?

  “My way of saying thanks,” he said. “And maybe we can all get a beer after we check in?”

  Cooper frowned. “You’re there, too?” Cooper just wanted to be rid of the guy who bothered Jeff so much. Although at the moment, Jeff couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t quit looking at the girls.

  Again Steve’s eyes flicked to the door. He looked at Cooper, forced a smile.

  “I need a break, too,” Steve said. “If I can hang out with you guys tonight, I’ll pay for one more day at our agreed rate. I really think I should, uh, be around you for a while.”

  Cooper started to say no — he’d had his fill of Steve Stanton and this weird job — but Jeff put an arm around Steve’s shoulders and gave the smaller man a friendly, solid shake.

  “Hell yes, you can hang out with us,” Jeff said. “Thanks for the gift, Steve! We appreciate it. Coop and I will show you all the good spots in town. Won’t we, Coop?”

  Hours earlier, Jeff had wanted to get as far away from Steve Stanton as possible, and now he wanted to be the kid’s best friend? A couple of nights in a five-star hotel — and a limo loaded with some high-class ladies — could have that effect.

  “Sure,” Cooper said. Cooper pointed up to the two dockworkers, who were standing at the edge of the pier, waiting for instructions. “Steve also hired these guys to help us unload.”

  Jeff slapped Steve’s back, then invited the dockworkers aboard. He led them to the crane and gave them the rundown on how they’d off-load Steve’s crates.

  Steve glanced to the cabin door again, and this time he froze. Cooper looked as well — Bo Pan was quickly approaching, a duffel bag over his shoulder. Inside of it, Cooper knew, was the case recovered from the lake bottom. Bo Pan looked like he was trying to control his temper.

  “Steve,” the old man said, “what is going on?”

  Steve took a step away.

  “I hired help for unloading,” he said.

  Bo Pan looked to the dock, saw the white van, pointed at it. “We have help.”

  “They’re not union,” Steve said. “We have to hire union labor in Chicago, right, Cooper?”

  Cooper glanced at the Chinese men near the white van. They were edging closer, like they wanted to approach but were waiting for instructions. Bo Pan looked furious.

  Cooper thought of pointing out that they could have unloaded themselves, and therefore didn’t need to hire help — union or otherwise — but Steve looked more than on edge… he looked afraid.

  Steve was the one in charge, wasn’t he? Or had this all been some kind of strange sham all along? Was Bo Pan the one who called the shots? And if so, just how much trouble was Steve in?

  “Steve is right,” Cooper said, following an instant instinct to protect the kid. “If you hire labor to unload, Bo Pan, they’ve got be union. This is Chicago, my friend.”

  Bo Pan’s bony hands clutched into fists. Anger smoldered in his wrinkled eyes. He looked to the dock.

  “I see,” he said. “And the limousine? And those women, standing there, watching us… are they union, too?”

  “Steve gave us a bonus,” Cooper said. “In fact, Mister Stanton, why don’t you wait in the limo? We’ll be off-loaded in just a moment.”

  Steve shook his head. “Uh… I’d rather stay on the ship with you and Jeff until everything is finished.”

  That line made Bo Pan even angrier. He coughed up a wad of phlegm, spat it onto the deck, then started climbing out of the slightly moving boat onto the pier. Two of the Chinese men ran over to help him. One took the duffel bag. The man handled the bag delicately, reverently.

  Bo Pan and the men got in the van, which quietly drove down the dock toward the pier gate.

  Cooper turned to Steve.

  “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

  Steve shook his head. “No. I do not.” The kid looked like he might puke at any moment. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills and handed it to Cooper.

  “Another part of your bonus.”

  Cooper looked at it, dumbfounded. Another mad stack, another ten grand, just like that.

  Steve started climbing out of the boat. Cooper had to help him, thanks to two computer bags, one of which was stuffed with two laptops.

  As Steve walked to the limo, Cooper wondered what had just happened. He’d try to get it out of Steve later, if, indeed, Steve was really going to hang out.

  Cooper turned, waved to José. The Filipino came running over.

  “Yes, Jefe?”

  “Big surprise,” Cooper said. “We’re all staying in the Trump Tower for the next two nights. All free, big guy.”

  José’s smile faded. “A tower?”

  “A hotel,” Cooper said. “Big one. Fancy as hell, from what I hear. Steve paid for it. We even get a limo ride.” He nodded toward the long, black car, the shivering girls.

  José coughed, then sneezed. He wiped his nose with the bac
k of his hand.

  “Bless you,” Cooper said. “You okay?”

  José shrugged. “Coming down with something. I think I’ll just go home. I miss my family.”

  Cooper wanted to talk him into coming but could see there was no point. José missed his family, true, but he was also always paranoid of anything that involved giving ID or being around lots of strangers. The man was so hardworking, so at home on the boat; it was easy to forget that once on land, he didn’t have the same rights and privileges that Cooper and Jeff enjoyed.

  “Okay,” Cooper said. “You need a ride anywhere?”

  José shook his head. “My cousin is coming to get me. It’s just a two-hour drive to Benton Harbor, no problem.”

  He coughed again, much harder this time. His eyes watered.

  “Damn, dude,” Cooper said. “Maybe you should swing by a hospital and get that checked out.”

  José cleared his throat, shook his head and smiled; he thought Cooper was joking.

  Cooper felt like an idiot for the second time in as many minutes — José was as afraid of hospitals as he was of hotels. He probably feared that a trip to the hospital might turn into a visit with the INS. A ridiculous fear, Cooper knew, but then again he never had to deal with such concerns.

  Cooper peeled off twenty one-hundred-dollar bills from the stack, handed them to José.

  “Tell your cousin not to drive like a goddamn illegal, will ya?”

  José’s face lit up in surprise. He put the money in his pocket. “Sometimes, Jefe Cooper, you’re a good guy — for a racist asshole, I mean. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Cooper said. “Great work. Now help get Steve’s crap off the boat, okay?”

  José jogged over to join Jeff and the two dockworkers, who were already unloading Steve’s crate.

  A tickle flared up in Cooper’s windpipe, a tickle that quickly turned into a small cough. He cleared his throat… felt a little scratchy.

  Well, he wouldn’t let a little cold stop him from having one grade-A bitch of a good time.

  Windy City? Here we come.

  FREQUENT FLIERS

  Bo Pan put a bottle of water and a tin of Sucrets on the counter.

  The cashier grabbed it, ran it across the scanner, spoke to him without looking up.

  “Hello, sir,” she said. “How are you today?” Her name tag said Madha. She held out her hand. “That will be seven fifty-five.”

  Bo Pan adjusted the strap of his carry-on bag so he could get at his wallet, then handed over the money. When he did, his hand touched hers.

  Neutrophils detected contact, reversed their grip, letting go of Bo Pan and clinging to Madha instead. In two days, she would kill her husband by driving the point of a clothes iron into the back of his skull.

  “Would you like a bag, sir?”

  Bo Pan shook his head. “No, thank you. I am fine.”

  She offered him his change. “Thank you for shopping at Hudson News.”

  He took his money, moved to the magazine rack. Bo Pan pretended to look at the covers showing bright cars, men with too much muscle or women showing too much skin. Americans certainly loved big breasts.

  He tried hard to stay calm — his contact was late. His plane boarded in ten minutes.

  What if Ling didn’t show?

  He unwrapped a Sucret and popped it into his mouth. Cherry flavor. He liked that. His throat was scratchy, and it felt like he had a fever coming on.

  Bo Pan heard the rattling of wheels rolling along the concourse’s tile floor. He looked up just as Ling rolled a dolly into Hudson News. The dolly held five blue plastic trays, each loaded with soft drinks. Ling met Bo Pan’s eyes but didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

  Ling rolled his dolly of drinks toward the glass refrigerator.

  Bo Pan turned quickly to follow; when he did, he bumped into Paulette Duchovny from Minneapolis. Bo Pan’s hand came up immediately, reactively touching Paulette’s bare forearm.

  “Oh!” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”

  Three hours from that moment, Paulette would be back in Minneapolis. Two days after that, she would infect seven other people, including her son, Mark, and her daughter, Cindy. Mark and Cindy would lock up the house and stand guard as Paulette transformed into something that was not fully human. Before the sun set on the fourth day, Paulette Duchovny would do what a voice in her head told her to do — she would murder a family of five in their home, ending the slaughter by gutting a three-month-old baby.

  Paulette smiled at Bo Pan. “That’s okay, no problem.”

  He nodded again, then walked to the refrigerator. Ling was already there, the glass door pinned open by his dolly. He was pulling bottles of Coke out of the plastic bins, then reaching into the refrigerator to place them behind the bottles that were already there.

  Ling saw Bo Pan, then took a step back and gestured at the open refrigerator. “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Bo Pan said. He grabbed a Coke.

  “Oh,” Ling said, then reached down to the floor and picked up a black fanny pack. The pack’s pouch looked like it held something cylindrical, perhaps about the size of a travel mug.

  He offered it to Bo Pan. “You dropped this.”

  Bo Pan’s heart hammered in his chest. It couldn’t be this easy to get an object past the TSA. It simply could not. The CIA was here, somewhere, they were watching, waiting for him to take it. They would start shooting at any moment.

  Bo Pan took the fanny pack. As he did, his left pinkie touched Ling’s right thumb.

  In three days, Ling would be dead, a leaking bag of fluid slowly sloughing off of a prone skeleton. The infection would not properly work with his particular physiology, and he would slowly dissolve in a chain reaction of apoptosis. But before he died — and after he became contagious — Ling would stock a total of twenty-two airport refrigerators. He would leave mutated neutrophils on over three hundred bottles, neutrophils that would be nicely refrigerated until a hand touched them, or a pair of lips brushed against them.

  Bo Pan turned and walked away, waiting to hear screams of get down on the floor! But all he heard were the normal sounds of an airport. He walked to his gate just as his group was boarding.

  The last thing Bo Pan did before getting on the plane was to hand his ticket to Enrique Calderone, who lived in the Boystown area of Chicago.

  In three days Enrique would grab a kitchen knife and chase his lover through their apartment building, slashing him on the shoulder, the forearm and the temple. His lover would run, leaving a long trail of blood, before finding a fire axe, which he would swing at Enrique’s stomach, burying the blade in Enrique’s ribs just under his left arm. Enrique would bleed to death a few feet away from his building’s laundry room.

  As for the people on Flight 245, some of them would prove to be unlucky as well. By the end of the two-hour flight to Newark, seven of them would have touched a surface previously touched by Bo Pan. His neutrophils would already have penetrated their new hosts’ skin, would already be cutting open stem cells, rewriting DNA and starting the cycle anew.

  Two of those people were on their way home to New York City. They would take the PATH train to Penn Station, then get on the F-train, one of them headed to the Upper East Side and the other to Queens.

  Another passenger would transfer to a flight to North Carolina.

  Another would board an El Al flight to Morocco.

  A fifth was catching a red-eye to London.

  The final two, like Bo Pan, were heading to Beijing.

  He took his seat, almost giddy with success. He wore Ling’s fanny pack in the front. The pack would never be out of his sight or his touch.

  After twenty-two years in America, he was finally going home. In fourteen hours, he would land as a national hero.

  Unfortunately for Bo Pan, his body would not be able to handle the infection’s final transformation changes. He would not become one of the “Converted.” The process was already weakening an artery in hi
s right temple, creating an aneurysm. In fourteen hours, yes, he would land as a hero of the people. In fifteen hours, that artery in his head would rupture, causing a stroke — he would die of a hemorrhage.

  Bo Pan’s infection, however, would live on. Live on in the most densely populated nation on the planet.

  THAT TODDLIN’ TOWN

  Steve Stanton didn’t know how to handle his hurricane of emotions. Bo Pan would have killed Jeff, Cooper and José, probably with the help of those men at the dock. That alone felt terrifying. Add to that Steve’s guilt over the death of the navy diver. Steve’s creation killed the man, killed a soldier who wanted nothing more than to serve his country — just like Steve had wanted to do. Which, in turn, stirred up confusion; just which country was Steve’s, anyway? He’d grown up American. He’d never even been to China — how could he count that distant nation as his home?

  Fear, guilt, confusion and a final emotion that, in contrast, made the others all the more intense: happiness.

  He was out having a blast with Jeff Brockman and Cooper Mitchell, two men who in their younger days probably picked on and ridiculed guys like Steve. They had no idea that he’d saved their lives, and Jose’s as well. The five unexpected witnesses Steve hired — the two girls, their driver and the two dockworkers — had forced Bo Pan to leave the Moffett’s crew alive.

  By now, Bo Pan was on a plane to New York, then London, and finally Beijing. He would probably never come back. Why would his bosses take the chance that Bo Pan could make a mistake, be picked up and interrogated, when they could just keep him in China and know his secrets would forever stay safe?

  And if Bo Pan’s bosses sent Steve another handler? Well, Steve was the only one who could maintain and operate the Platypus, which meant he was probably safe. As for Cooper and Jeff? Now that Bo Pan had escaped the country with his prize in hand, Steve couldn’t think of a logical reason why someone would want them dead.

  Still, Steve knew he would spend the rest of his life wondering if someone would come for him… and his parents, maybe. Someone who would want to tie up loose ends and silence anyone who knew anything.