Eden Plague - Latest Edition

by David VanDyke

  Zeke counted heads as we arrived, then led us quickly through the woods by moonlight. I stayed right behind Elise. A couple of brief minutes later we got to the rubber boat.

  The buzzing of the helicopter was closer, but the only thing I knew was it was coming from the east, and the trees blocked our view. We couldn’t embark on the raft until we were sure the helo wasn’t a threat. We heard it making a couple of passes near the burning lab, then it turned toward us.

  It raced overhead, suddenly visible as it passed above the treeline and then out over the water. It looked like an OH-6 or Hughes 500 variant, commonly called a ‘Loach,’ or ‘Little Bird,’ probably the best light helicopter ever made. It made a sharp turn south, paralleling the shoreline two hundred yards out.

  Suddenly, tracers spat from the helo’s open door, striking the rented boat. Two assault weapons on full auto responded from our little squad, reaching out to intersect the insectlike device in flight. The tracers started to shift toward us, then the bird staggered in the air and lost power. Smoke started pouring from it, and I could see flames. A moment later it made a hard splashdown in the water beyond the boat, pieces of rotor flying.

  “Stupid,” said Zeke, pain in his voice. “Dammit, why did they do that?” It sounded like the Eden Plague was plaguing his conscience as well. At least it wasn’t just me.

  “Arrogant,” responded Spooky. “Be glad they did. Is one less variable.”

  “We have a bigger problem,” said Skull, standing up and walking out of the trees onto the rocky beach. “Look.”

  Our rented boat, our way off the island, was already listing noticeably. The helo’s shooter must have holed it badly below the waterline before we knocked it down.

  “Dammit,” said Larry, staring. “What now?”

  “What are you doing, DJ?” Zeke asked me. “We can’t save the boat.”

  I was singlehandedly dragging the rubber raft toward the water. “How about the people in the helo!” I screamed. “There might be survivors!”

  Zeke stared at me for a second, then grabbed the other side of the raft and helped me get it to the water’s edge. “Spooky, you and DJ paddle out there.” Zeke ran back to the treeline. “Elise, is there a boat in that boathouse?”

  “Yes there is! An 18-foot powerboat. Let’s go get it!” she said eagerly. She started back into the woods in the direction of the dock, Skull and Zeke following right behind.

  We rowed out to where the Loach had hit. Wreckage was still floating, and there was one guy clinging to a piece. We dragged him in to the rubber boat and he lay there gasping. Spooky kept his weapon pointed at his nose. We looked around but couldn’t find anyone else. I kept my mouth shut. We’d saved one man anyway.

  By this time we heard, then saw, the powerboat screaming around the south end of the island at thirty knots or more. I hoped they didn’t hit a submerged rock at that speed. As they got closer I could see Skull driving. He soon pulled in close to shore.

  We got our feet wet loading up, leaving the helo survivor on the shore with his hands zip-cuffed and his eyes taped over. That was always a bitch to remove. He would walk back to the burned complex, find a sharp piece of metal to cut the cuffs, and free his two buddies, but by that time we would be long gone.

  It was crowded in the boat, but I didn’t mind. Elise was pressed up against me, shivering in the cold spindrift wind. I wrapped my arms around her, just enjoying the feeling of survival, freedom and healthy woman.

  She suddenly pushed me gently away, then put her left foot up against the coaming and pulled up her pants leg. Strapped to her ankle was some kind of electronic device with a light on it, flashing angry red. “Cut it off,” she instructed. “They said they could track me with it.”

  While the rest stared, I took out my knife again and carefully sliced it off. I tossed it into the blacking sea. Track that, spy-boys.

  “Anything else you want to tell us?” Zeke yelled into the noise of the rushing air. Elise shook her head, looked down, embarrassed.

  Spooky remarked over the net, “If I was them I would have a tracker on this boat.”

  “Right. Zeke to Vinny, meet us at alternate marina Charlie with a bug-finder. We’ll pull in and you can give it a once-over. ETA maybe five minutes, so haul ass.”

  Vinny met us at a little marina a couple of miles down the coast from where we had rented the boat. He went over our speedboat with an electronic detector, soon yanking out a fist-sized GPS transmitter. He tossed that into the water.

  Larry, Elise and I piled into Vinny’s Toyota and drove back to the motel. Skull roared off in the powerboat, to a different marina. Vinny dropped us off, then went to pick up the rest. Good thing there were dozens of landing places up and down the coast.

  In my hotel room I phoned in a huge order of Chinese for delivery. In the meantime we ate and drank everything we had handy. Crackers, cookies, cans of vegetable juice, full-sugar soda, tuna, it was all shoveled into our gullets like pelicans at a fish farm. When the take-out arrived, we plowed into that, too. When the others arrived, they found a half-eaten styrofoam buffet and two stuffed Eden Plague carriers sitting on the floor half-asleep. Larry was in the bathroom cleaning up.

  Zeke caught a whiff of the food and grabbed the nearest box, eating with a grim determination. I saw his rigger belt was cinched up tight and he looked like he had lost twenty pounds today. The other three started eating as well, though with only normal human urgency.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I said over the noise of the gobbling. I forced myself up to sit on the bed. “Even if they don’t make us here, they know we’re in the area.”

  The rest nodded.

  “All right, people,” Zeke said between bites. “Tear it down. Get ready to roll out.”

  “Wait,” said Skull forcefully. He swept everyone with an even harder look than usual. “The lab’s burnt and unless there’s a lot of data stored off-site, we set them back years. But there are two loose ends. Or three.”

  “Yes,” agreed Spooky. “The scientists and the doctor.”

  I preempted their argument. “So we go snap them up. Now. We know where they are. We know four of six shooters are out of the picture – at least two in the helo, two from the lab. We can probably snatch the scientists in their beds not two miles from here. Does the doctor in charge live here?”

  “No, he lives in Annapolis,” said Elise. “He comes down once a week or so. But he’s just an educated manager; he couldn’t recreate the work, though Arthur and Roger and I together could. Dan is right.” She hugged my arm, sitting there next to me, and I felt warm all over.

  “Much easier to just put a bullet into their heads,” observed Skull. He was staring at me, like he was ready for the inevitable argument.

  Zeke beat me to it. “No. No murder.”

  “It’s preemptive self-defense,” retorted the sniper.

  “No, it’s assassination. It’s not justified.” Zeke was firm.

  “The hell it’s not. Those guys were trying to kill us at the lab. That’s war in my book, and that makes them targets. Enemy combatants.”

  “Those were their shooters. These guys are just scientists.”

  Skull insisted, “You don’t think all those enemy nuclear physicists that disappeared just fell into random holes, do you? We killed a bunch of them ourselves in the last twenty or thirty years, and the Israelis got the rest.”

  “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” chimed in Elise, her eyes blazing. “Maybe that makes us just as bad as they are.”

  I put a restraining hand on her arm, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with these guys that way. She had proved herself to me, but not to them. “Let’s not sink to their level, I think is what she means,” I said mildly.

  “Perhaps they would be useful. It is not so much more trouble to take them, I think,” said Spooky softly.

  Skull snorted. “Zeke, your A-team is turning into a bunch of wussies.”

  Zeke locked eyes with him. �
�Yeah, my A-team. Not yours. You want out?”

  He stared at Zeke a long moment. “Not yet,” he finally said.

  “Well, you let me know when ‘yet’ comes. Until then I need to rely on you. Can I rely on you, Alan?” His eyes bored in.

  Skull swallowed, nodded once, solemnly. “Yeah. Of course you can. It’s your call.”

  Zeke grinned, breaking the tension. “I love you too, man. Okay, hasty operation, we snatch our three mad scientists. Half an hour for planning, then we go.”

  ***

  An hour later we were on the road with two more guests. Both had been very happy to come with us. Both had been glad to get rid of their ankle bracelets.

  We were in a convoy of our four SUVs. Vinny had wired the vehicles with secure commo for our tactical net. That way we could talk freely as we drove, and everyone could hear. I was glad; I didn’t want to wait until the end of another road trip for answers, and I had no idea where we were going or how far.

  We sweated some before we got off the peninsula; until we made it through the Virginia Beach – Norfolk area, we were bottlenecked. Fortunately we were ahead of the posse, it seemed, and soon we were wending our way eastward on I-64 toward Richmond, Charlottesville and points east.

  We gave the two scientists an abbreviated version of what was going on. Elise said neither of them was an Eden Plague carrier. They both expressed relief at being out of the situation, along with natural fear of the government reaction. Welcome to the club. Welcome through the looking glass.

  Then it was time for some explanations. After a little bit of discussion among the former INS, Inc. employees, Roger mumbled, “Elise should tell it. She’s been around the longest, she knows the most.”

  So Elise started to speak, in a kind of detached remembering voice.

  -14-

  “I was the first to take a look at the Eden Plague, in this century anyway, I think. I was working for the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, about five years ago. They sent me over to Plum Island research center to take a look at some biological materials we had obtained. They said they were captured in Iraq from some technology smugglers looting the crumbling Soviet Union. Samples sealed in some Soviet-style containers, nothing but bio-hazard symbols on them. I was supposed to open them up and identify what was in them. Just me alone, compartmented for secrecy.”

  “I knew there was some sort of politics involved. That old ‘WMD in Iraq’ argument. That’s why they asked for the CDC, I think – someone outside of the usual national security establishment. I got the impression there was a lot of infighting among the CIA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice about it.”

  “It was all very hush-hush; there was a man I had to report to, an MD named Raphe Durgan. He said he was from the USDA, Department of Agriculture, but he didn’t act like it. He acted like an arrogant spymaster, always bragging about being ‘in the black world’ and ‘behind the green door’ and terms like those. I kept my mouth shut and just did the work. It’s what you do when you have a security clearance and you work on secret projects. I just wanted to do the research.”

  “What about the containers?” I asked, impatient.

  “All but one had human remains in them. One had a whole human head, a woman. The others held half-burned pieces of flesh. One of them had a smaller container inside, that had been opened but was still half-full of a purified virus-like organism in an inert matrix.”

  “So that was the Eden Plague?” inquired Zeke.

  “No, it was something else. But the human remains were contaminated with the Eden Plague.”

  “What about the pure sample?” I asked.

  “Let me tell it in my own way, okay sweetie?”

  I sat back. She’d called me ‘sweetie.’ I shut up, a stupid grin on my face. The grin faded as I thought further. I didn’t usually react this way to a woman, getting hyper-infatuated. Another side-effect of the Eden Plague? That plus the combat high? Dog my mind worried at its bone.

  “After a cursory analysis, it was obvious the plagues were never-before-seen stuff, something new. I reported this to Durgan immediately. Pretty soon the CDC informed me the project was being transferred to Durgan’s company under a privatization initiative. He offered me double what I was making, so I gave my notice right away. Actually I’d have done it for the same pay. I wanted to figure out what we had.”

  “So pretty soon I started work at the brand-new lab on Watts Island, along with Roger and Arthur. The government seems to like islands, though technically it was the company’s facility. They can control islands better. We’ve been working there ever since. Almost five years.”

  “We started basic testing, deconstruction, gene sequencing on both viruses, plagues. We called them phages or plagues for want of a better term, since they were different from most other viruses, but basically worked the same way. Durgan took our reports, helped a little in the lab, asked some smart questions, but we did all the work. He wouldn’t hire any technicians, so it went slower than it should have. I know now he was more concerned about secrecy than progress. I think he had some notion of cashing in on our discoveries, keeping them from his secret government masters.”

  “We got whatever gear we wanted. I hear they paid, what, two million for the island, but the equipment cost ten times as much. More. Nothing but the best. DNA sequencers, electron microscopes, virus incubators, whatever we wanted. And they kept raising our pay, too. We worked like demons. That’s ironic, you’ll hear why soon.”

  “So you asked about the pure sample. It was a far simpler virus, or proto-virus, than the other. It acted like a phage, invading whatever cells we gave it and damaging them, but the effects were much more subtle than one would expect. In simple organisms it didn’t have much effect at all. In more complex organisms it kind of degraded everything, every process, but it was very hit or miss, and didn’t seem like a big deal. I’m compressing years of study into minutes here, okay?”

  “Also, without getting too deep into why we thought so, it seemed like maybe this virus could be the evolutionary ancestor of all viruses. Virus Zero. So Arthur came up with an idea. We used some powerful modeling software to kind of ‘back out’ the virus and its computed effects from living organisms. We ran the infection process backward in the computer, so to speak, undoing the damage this thing did on our model organisms, all the way up to people, to homo sapiens.”

  “You know what we got in our no-virus model? Incredibly healthy people, physically, mentally, emotionally. They were strong, they didn’t get sick, they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t develop mental illness. They had long life spans, at the theoretical limit of telomere degradation and cell division. A thousand years or more. Like Methuselah in the Bible.”

  “So imagine Earth before this thing arrived. With no viruses and no degrading effect of this plague, it would be a kind of Eden. Everything more healthy, everything in better balance. Then this plague showed up sometime during the last ten thousand years, before recorded human history but after the Ice Age.”

  “Maybe it evolved here, but I just don’t see how. I think it’s extraterrestrial. If anything can survive a naked journey through space to another planet, a virus could. It could be the result of a life-bearing planet being destroyed, the debris scattered through interstellar space carrying it. Or it could be sent from some aliens that wish us harm. What better way to attack another world on the cheap? Biological warfare, like smallpox blankets, or plague corpses catapulted over the castle walls.”

  Zeke broke in, “Maybe we want to keep that to ourselves. People will say we’ve been infected by alien viruses and are not human any longer…like we’re pod people or something.”

  That stopped Elise for just a moment. “Yeah, right. Shut up about aliens. So anyway we – mostly Roger - made an extremely sophisticated ecological model of our Eden, with humans and animals living in balance, with those long lifespans, with telomeres that didn’t degrade…everything we had learned by the virtual-undoing
model. Then we introduced the virtual plague to see what would happen. We ran the infection model forward again.”

  “It spread like wildfire, like God’s curse, infecting everything. Living things got degraded, subtly but thoroughly. The higher order the organism, the more it degraded. It affected humans most of all, promoting almost animalistic behavior.”

  “The plague reproduced by shedding, leaving all the host cells intact, but with a bunch of mutations and damage to every system in the body. It shortened lifespans, made everyone stupider and weaker, more selfish, more violent, less altruistic and social in their behavior. It also boosted the fertility of both male and female, so it accelerated population explosions, competition for territory. Humans and animals both began overeating, overkilling, gorging on prey, overgrazing land and trees. Killing for sport. Fighting for territory, fighting over mating rights, stopped cooperating. Humans started tribal wars. Everything just went to hell, hell on earth, compared to what went before.”

  She rubbed her face with both of her hands. “So we called it the Devil Plague. This devil corrupted our virtual Eden.”

  My mind whirled with the implications. Maybe those old stories had a grain of truth in them. The Devil was supposed to have been cast out of heaven, corrupting the Garden of Eden. This was the panspermia scenario’s evil twin; instead of a life-bearing meteorite jump-starting life, it damaged what was already here. I said, “So you believe this is what happened in the real world? Like the model?”

  “Actually, yes,” she said. “It makes sense. But by this time Dr. Durgan thought we had a biological weapon we could use. We couldn’t convince him that it wouldn’t work that way. He thought we were holding out on him, so he assigned us those…commissars. Minders. Slave drivers. We couldn’t take vacations, or visit our families. They put those ankle trackers on us, like we were criminals. He thought we were acting like those German nuclear scientists under the Nazis, the ones that slowed down their atomic bomb program…but we weren’t! We would have resisted if it really was a bio-weapon. Ironically, we were being punished for a moral choice we never had to make.”