After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Dr Reed took point a few feet ahead of Marcus and headed down the cracked, weed infested asphalt road toward the abandoned city ahead. His holosap was being beamed directly from the research station, his visual and audio provided by Marcus’s equipment along with algorithms that created an “off–set”, allowing him a sort of quasi–freedom of movement as long as he stayed within visual range of Marcus.

  He led the way for several minutes before pausing beside a pool of brackish water. Marcus stopped beside him and scooped a half–quart of green water into a transparent cylinder and sealed the lid.

  ‘It’s everywhere.’

  The seething heat would have been bad enough even without the Level 4 Hazmat suit as Marcus swilled the water in the cylinder.

  ‘At what density?’ asked Dr Reed.

  The searing equatorial sun caused his holographic image to appear washed out and there was a slight flicker caused by the extreme range of the projection.

  ‘Stand by,’ Marcus said.

  He turned the cylinder over on itself a few times and then depressed a small button set into the lid. A squirt of blue liquid was injected into the green water and Marcus shook the cylinder for a few seconds before holding it in the shade of his body.

  Dr Reed watched as within the now pale yellow fluid floated a billion tiny black flecks.

  ‘Overwhelming,’ Marcus replied finally. ‘Concentrations are likely now high enough that even mild exposure to infected water would kill any human being within a matter of hours.’

  Marcus, Kerry and Dr Reed had arrived in Louisiana four months previously, despatched from what was left of New York City to search for any species that may have survived or developed a resistance to The Falling. The tragedy of mankind’s greatest pandemic was that it had originated somewhere in the American deep south, specifically in the Bayou in Louisiana, according to genetic analysis of victims of the disease.

  Marcus was standing in what was believed to be Ground Zero.

  No warm or cold blooded vertebrates had yet been found that were not vulnerable to The Falling, which got its name from the extraordinary speed with which its victims were overcome. The fungal infection attacked flesh, and in doing so rapidly degraded things like nerves, tendons and muscles, common features of all mammals. One of the first things that happened as an infection took hold was loss of local motor control, depending on where the infection was introduced to the body.

  The reality of the pandemic was far more horrific than any Hollywood movie. The infection spread easily through bodily fluids, sweat, saliva and even hair follicles. By the time the first symptoms were showing in victims around the Gulf of Mexico, tens of thousands of people had been infected. Flights out of New Orleans transmitted the disease across the continental United States and around the globe before it had even been properly identified and studied. Attempts at global quarantine were hopeless – the disease was already present in millions within days of its discovery in Louisiana.

  Symptoms appeared typically within eight to twelve hours of infection. Rashes and blisters on the skin quickly festered and bled, helping to spread the disease to carers and family members alike. The fungus did not really eat flesh, but merely hastened its decay by feeding on tissue and veins, cutting off the flow of blood to muscles and organs and causing them to rot.

  Within twenty four hours infected victims might be completely immobilised, or have flesh falling in chunks from their face, chest or abdomen, depending on where the infection struck first. At times in some cities it seemed as though leprosy had returned from the Middle Ages to haunt the present, infected people begging and crying for surcease from their agony. Some victim’s vocal chords and tongues became infected first, causing starvation and dehydration as their ruined throats no longer allowed food to pass through or they died from asphyxiation as their throats collapsed into their lungs.

  Marcus had been trying to stem the tide of victims in New York City until the pull–out was enforced. Doctors were replaced by the National Guard as strict curfew and quarantines were put in place, but by then everybody knew it was too late. The streets were full of people bleeding from every orifice, some with limbs hanging by threads or already bloody stumps of meat. The zombie apocalypse realised, but with the added reality of true suffering as otherwise sentient human beings rotted into pieces while still alive.

  The worst of it though, for Marcus, was not the human tragedy but the global tragedy. All vertebrates were affected alike: dogs, cats, mice, birds, cattle, everything. Birds dropped out of the sky as wings were severed in flight. Cattle lay dead and bloated in fields across the Midwest. Rodents sprawled on asphalt, rigid with death and teeth bared. They were fed upon by others, who then contracted the infection.

  Six months. That was how long it took for over six billion human beings to die, along with at least eighty per cent of all vertebrate species. Only the bugs, some species of fish and other marine species remained. The collapse of the entire food chain had sparked the biggest mass extinction since the Cretaceous Period some sixty–five million years before, and Marcus was now standing perilously exposed at the very spot where the devastating pandemic had begun.

  ‘We’re here,’ Dr Reed said, pausing on the edge of a river bank.

  Marcus slowed, noticed the gently swaying reed banks brushing into Reed’s legs, vanishing only to reappear again moments later.

  ‘The river’s the border, can’t cross beyond it,’ Marcus said.

  ‘I can,’ Reed smiled.

  The holosap stepped out and strode across the green surface of the river. He even still had his hands in his pockets, like it was nothing.

  Marcus shivered. Like most all folk, he’d never really got used to the idea of people being dead and alive at the same time. Seeing shit like this didn’t much help his unease. He knew it was all something to do with quantum computers, bent light and who the hell knew what else, but his field was classical biology and that’s where he intended his expertise to stay. Besides, he couldn’t afford an upload even if he’d wanted one. Dr Reed’s Nobel laureate and expertise were his key to immortality. By contrast, Marcus was a novice.

  Dr Reed was almost across the river when Marcus saw the threat.

  ‘Reed, move, now!’

  It was an instinctive act born of human nature, to alert a fellow human being to danger. Marcus had barely got the words out of his mouth when Dr Reed turned casually to observe the shape speeding silkily through the water toward him. Moments later the snake jerked as its head lifted out of the murky green water and slashed fangs across Dr Reed’s leg.

  The snake flashed through the holosap and splashed back into the water to disappear into its murky depths.

  ‘Nerodia rhombifer,’ Dr Reed observed with interest. ‘Very poisonous and one of the few surviving vertebrate species.’

  Marcus got his heartbeat back under control.

  ‘Diamondback water snake,’ he replied. ‘They shouldn’t have lasted this long out here without anything to eat.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Dr Reed said, looking about from the opposite river bank. ‘But we’ve only seen a few of them along this stretch of water, and snakes can go for extremely long periods without food.’

  ‘Not for twenty–five years they can’t,’ Marcus argued. ‘They don’t eat insects and this water’s far too brackish for fish. There’s something else out here, a survivor.’

  It was nature’s way that just as some species evolved to become efficient killers, so others would evolve in response a defence mechanism against those predators. If a mutation appeared quickly enough that defended well enough against the new attack, the defending species would survive and propagate its defence throughout the population through breeding. If it did not, it became extinct.

  ‘Nutria,’ Dr Reed said. ‘It was present in sufficient numbers to have perhaps evolved immunity to the disease.’ He looked up at Marcus. ‘Like us, it needed to adapt to survive.’

  Nutria was an Argentinian species of rodent that l
ooked somewhat like a cross between a rat and a beaver. Up to fifteen or so pounds in weight, they devoured up to a quarter of their bodyweight each day by eating the vegetation that bound soil together. The erosion it had caused before The Falling has resulted in vast programs to eradicate and even eat the species. Now, Marcus would have given up almost anything to locate a single one of them, because their habitat and diet meant that of all species on the planet they were the most likely to have developed an immunity to The Falling.

  ‘We’ll set traps, all along here,’ he said, indicating the river banks. ‘We’ve never seen mink, otter or any other species that could have thrived when the eagles and ‘gators went, so it’s probably nutria.’

  ‘There!’

  Dr Reed pointed across the river and Marcus saw another snake appear as it lunged toward him. He leaped backward as the snake’s brilliant white fangs flashed in the sunlight as droplets of water sparkled like diamond chips in the sunlight.

  Marcus staggered over the rough ground as the snake struck into the reeds at the water’s edge, and something burst from within them. Marcus saw the big rodent lurch away from the snake’s fangs with a high–pitched squeal of terror. It’s thick wet fur was covered in strips of reed and grass from where it had been concealed in the undergrowth.

  ‘Grab it!’

  Dr Reed’s voice was almost a screech as Marcus regained his balance and hurled himself down on the fat nutria. The rodent squealed again as Marcus landed on it and wrapped his arms around it.

  ‘It’s too wet!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t keep hold of it!’

  The surface of his HazMat suit was drenched from the nutria, which scrambled desperately to escape his grip. Marcus tightened his hold on the nutria but it squirmed free of his arms.

  Marcus, on his knees, let himself fall flat on top of the creature to pin it in place.

  ‘I’ve got it!’

  Marcus heard the sound before he saw the snake. The hiss was the only warning he got before the bright fangs flashed across his face and smacked against his face mask before falling away toward the nutria’s head poking from beneath his chest. Dr Reed yelled at him.

  ‘Marcus, pit viper!’

  Marcus grabbed the snake’s head with one gloved hand and yanked it away from the nutria. The viper recoiled and changed position as it tried to wrap itself around Marcus’s arm.

  ‘Throw it clear!’

  Dr Reed’s cry came too late. Marcus panicked.

  He hurled the snake but as soon as he released his grip the viper, still coiled around his forearm, struck again and white pain ripped through his arm as the snake’s fangs sliced straight through his Hazmat Suit and into his flesh.

  Marcus screamed in pain and released the nutria as he grabbed at the snake just behind its head and pulled it away from his arm. The snake coiled around his right arm, but this time Marcus turned the snake head–down toward the ground and rammed it into the soil. He heard a soft cracking sound, and the snake slumped like a rope onto the ground.

  ‘Marcus!’

  Dr Reed scrambled to his side and looked at his arm.

  Marcus could see the two pin–prick holes in his HazMat suit, and the blood spilling from the two puncture wounds somewhere within as the pain spread up his arm.

  ‘The nutria,’ Marcus gasped.

  ‘It’s over there,’ Dr Reed pointed. ‘Come on, we need to get you back to the compound right now!’

  Marcus staggered to his feet and Dr Reed guided him to where the nutria was laying in the thick grass, its chest heaving as it struggled to escape, one leg dragging uselessly behind it where Marcus’s weight must have broken it.

  ‘We’ve got only a few minutes before you’re dead,’ Dr Reed urged. ‘Hurry.’

  Marcus winced in pain as he picked the nutria up in his uninjured arm and then staggered toward the distant compound, Dr Reed by his side.

  ***

  8

  Marcus felt this heart start to thump inside his chest, more from than just fear now. He sensed, somehow, the lethal neurotoxins flooding into his nervous system from the snakebite, threatening to shut down his lungs, liver and kidneys before paralysing his heart in a final and massive cardiac arrest.

  He blinked sweat from his eyes and willed his legs to push him onward.

  Beyond where they struggled through the listless palm trees and swamps lay the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond the rest of the world, immense expanses of wilderness and all of it filled to the brim with a fungus that had been responsible for wiping out some ninety per cent of all mammalian life on the planet. Including his own wife and three children.

  Not a virus. Not a bacteria. A fungus.

  Nobody was quite sure how it had made the leap into mammals, and the likely explanation after years of study was that the outbreak had occurred in many places, many times before truly taking hold.

  Marcus remembered the old zombie movies, of people walking about with flesh hanging off their bodies, desperate for human blood and biting anything that moved. The reality had been far more horrifying in its simplicity than anybody could ever have imagined. He looked down at the galaxy of black specks floating now in what looked like yellow pus in the cylinder in his hand, the nutria making small noises as it dangled in the crook of his arm. Already a cloud of insects were humming around the cylinder.

  ‘Apophysomyces,’ he whispered, and shivered in the heat as his body started to react to the snake venom coursing through his veins.

  The fungus was commonplace around the world and probably had been for millions of years, for it made its home in common soil, wood and water. Usually entirely harmless to humans, it only made its real danger known when introduced inside the human body, perhaps through a scratch or wound. There, it became an infection known as Zygomycosis, causing thrombosis but also tissue necrosis. In short, the usually benign fungus began consuming flesh, essentially causing the victim to decay from within as the infection shut off blood flow to infected areas of the body. The more the infection spread the faster the body decayed, and it was one of the fastest spreading fungal infections known to man.

  Prognosis from infection to death was usually less than forty–eight hours, all of it spent in the agony of necrosis and then organ failure as the body turned to a bloodied mush from the inside out.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Reed said, his voice touched with concern. ‘We don’t know if your air filters are as effective in this heat.’

  Marcus nodded, his breathing rasping in his ears along with Kerry’s voice coming from the research station.

  ‘Marcus, you’ve got elevated levels across the board. Are you okay?’

  ‘Snake bite,’ Marcus gasped in reply.

  ‘Shit!’ He heard the panic sear Kerry’s voice. ‘Species?’

  ‘Cottonmouth,’ Marcus replied, ‘pit viper.’

  Same family as Copperhead and rattlers. Severe hemotoxic venom. Death within a few hours if untreated. They’d all been briefed before departing for the Bayou, in search of the source of The Falling, and preparations had been made.

  ‘I’ll get the antivenin ready,’ Kerry replied, ‘hurry.’

  Marcus nodded, almost to himself, as he stumbled through the foliage and tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

  It was the so–called sentinel species, amphibians, that showed the first signs of the impending apocalypse a quarter of a century ago, when Marcus was just a child. Delicate, sensitive to climate and temperature, they began dying in ever increasing numbers in tropical regions around the globe from rapid and advanced necrosis. Scientists examined them, unable to pinpoint the exact cause of the infections.

  Cases of The Falling, as it became known, began to rise as climate change altered ocean salinity and temperature and caused an increase in micro–species such as algae, bacteria and fungi. The same altered climate conditions had caused an increase in the frequency and ferocity of tropical storms that annually battered the east coasts of South and Nort
h America, Mexico and the Caribbean, the warming waters fuelling the storms that swept through annually. DNA analysis by World Health Organisation scientists confirmed that several strains of Apophysomyces were responsible, revealing that the fungus was well established in all areas of the globe and had simply been unleashed by increasing storm events due to climate change. Hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones and all manner of violent natural events helped to churn up the soil, broke down trees and flooded landscapes, spreading the fungus from its natural environment into new terrain where evolution took its natural course. Strains of the fungus emerged that could survive the upheavals, reducing its proximity to humans and animals, increasing its virulence and survival rates.

  The devastation caused by these storms also produced an increase in injuries associated with soil laden debris, which in turn led to the increase in infections in both human and other mammalian species across the gulf. Bodies pierced by wooden splinters, lesions stained by damp soil, mixed blood and other bodily fluids in the chaotic aftermath of major tropical storms provided a lush breeding ground for fungal growths. At some point, somewhere near the Florida panhandle, the fungus had made the leap from fungal parasite to airborne contagion, probably through mutation and infection in a victim’s lungs via ingestion. Able to pass on as easily as a common cold, the effects after The Falling became an airborne pathogen were horrendous.

  Beginning in the paranasal sinuses, the infection spread with extreme rapidity throughout the body, often killing its host within twenty four hours as necrosis collapsed the airways and throat. Its rapid mortality in immuno–suppressed individuals transferred to an equally voracious mortality in healthy humans and animals. Even as the first World Health Organisation warnings were hitting the headlines as infections broke out all over the gulf and the southern United States, air travel meant that the outbreak moved faster than any containment strategy world governments could implement. Poor sanitation and health centres in economically depressed countries led to the first pandemics as the infection spread unchecked.