Three Days in April
Page 6
Sir Munchalot:
Drew P. Wiener:
Sir Munchalot:
Drew P. Wiener:
The fact that Drew was able to pull the clips before Sauron’s Eye redacted them means the NatSec bots are about ten seconds slower than Drew’s. That’s good to know. The fact that the feeds got redacted at all, on the other hand, means that NatSec has invoked terror-response protocols. This is also good to know, because it means that possession of these clips could probably get all of us tossed down the memory hole.
Hayley 9000:
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Hayley 9000:
Fenrir:
Argyle Dragon:
Fenrir:
Sir Munchalot:
Fenrir:
Sir Munchalot:
Fenrir:
Angry Irish Inch:
Inch drops a link to an audio file. I stream it.
“ . . . need to know what we’re dealing with here. What’s the kill rate?”
“Estimated at eighty-eight percent currently. Survivors appear completely unaffected. No deaths observed since the initial strike.”
“Do we have containment?”
“Affirmative. Eighty-plus percent of survivors are children. They’re mostly staying put. We’ve had a few takedowns on the perimeter. Expect more in the next two hours.”
“Are we a go on the burn?”
“Affirmative. Getting assets into position now.”
“Do we have consensus on that? With twelve percent survivors?”
“Best estimate is that if this breaks out, a fifty percent death rate would be sufficient for a national soft kill.”
“We don’t even know that this is contagious.”
“We don’t know that it’s not.”
Fenrir:
Angry Irish Inch:
Argyle Dragon:
Hayley 9000:
Sir Munchalot:
I blink my windows closed, and start down the stairs.
Anders looks up when I step into the room. He’s on the sofa with Terry, arms around her shoulders. Her face is buried in his chest. Huh. Would not have called that.
“Well?” he says.
“Pretty grim,” I reply, and drop into a recliner. “Survivorship is under fifteen percent, mostly kids.”
Terry looks up at that. Her face is still screwed up in a half sob, which when you throw in the brow ridge and the gob of snot coming out of her left nostril, is pretty much a horror show in and of itself.
“Survivors?” Terry says. “The wallscreen said there were no survivors.”
I shrug.
“Well, I’m guessing that’ll be true pretty soon. Sounds like they’re planning on a burn-down.”
She wipes her nose with her arm, which just smears things around. I toss her a screen rag from the cargo slot in the recliner’s arm. She catches it, wipes down her face and arm, and winds up to throw it back. I hold up one hand.
“Keep it,” I say. “Please.”
She half smiles her thanks.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “What’s a burn-down?”
She looks weirdly hopeful now. Maybe ‘burn’ didn’t mean what it does now, before she got frozen in a glacier or whatever.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I say. I glance over at Anders. He’s glaring at me for some reason. “I guess they could use a nuke, but considering we’re basically downwind, I hope not. More likely an FAE.”
“That’s enough,” says Anders. His head looks like it’s about to explode.
“An FAE?” Terry says.
“Right,” I say. “Fuel-air explosive. The poor-man’s nuke. Most of the boom, with none of the fallout.”
“Shut up,” says Anders.
“You said there were survivors,” says Terry. “They wouldn’t do that if there were people still alive in there, would they?”
“Au contraire—”
“I said shut up,” Anders growls.
“No, Anders,” says Terry. “You shut up. I’m not your fucking damsel in distress. I want to hear what he has to say.”
I’m about to go on, but just then some administration tool comes on the wallscreen and starts talking about sterilization. We all listen to his spiel in silence.
“You see?” I say when he’s done, and they cut back to the studio mannequin. “Burn-down. They’re gonna turn that entire place into a smoking hole in the ground. Only way to guarantee containment.”
Terry’s crying again.
“My sister is in there,” she sobs.
I shake my head.
“Probably not. The estimate I heard, which came from an unnamed but reliable source, was twelve percent survivors with eighty percent of those, children. That puts the adult survival rate at two-point-four percent.”
I stop and think for a minute.
“Wait. No, it doesn’t. That’s not factoring in the preexisting demographics. Say kids under 18 make up thirty percent of the original population. If your overall survival is twelve percent, and eighty percent of those are children, that makes the survival rate for children . . . thirty percent . . . and for adults about four-point-three.”
That gets us a solid ten seconds of awkward silence.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Terry finally. “If what you’re saying is right, there must be over five thousand people still alive. They can’t just burn them, can they?”
I shake my head again.
“That’s what I was trying to say before Anders interrupted. If everyone were really dead like they’re saying, they could probably afford to wait for a while, maybe send in some bots to poke around and see what went down. With survivors, though . . . if this is a virus, all we need is for one person to sneak out of town with this stuff percolating in his gut, and before you know it, it’s eighty-eight
percent of North America dead. Better to make it one hundred percent of Hagerstown, and leave it at that.”
Anders is glaring at me again. Terry’s face is blank and slack as a rubber mask.
“And they said . . .”
“Right,” I say. “They said there were no survivors because saying that we’re about to cook a few thousand adorable little scamps down to scrapple would probably upset some people.”
She stares at me through a long, awkward pause.
“But you think it’s the right thing to do,” she says finally.
I kick the footrest up, knit my fingers behind my head, and look up at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the joint compound that runs all the way from one end of the room to the other. I never noticed that before.
“I’ll say this,” I say. “If I were in charge, and I had to make the call on whether or not to slag a few thousand rug rats in order to prevent the release of an engineered virus that had just ripped through an entire town in under an hour, with an eighty-eight percent fatality rate . . . I would be very sorely tempted to do it.”
The sofa creaks as Anders shifts his weight. That crack runs right underneath the wall that separates Anders’ room from the hallway. Is that a load-bearing wall?
“Do your friends think that’s what this is?” Terry asks. “A virus?”
I sigh.
“No, ma’am. They do not.”
We sit in silence then. Terry and Anders watch some idiot on the wallscreen drone on about containment protocols for a while, and then they cycle through the same clips they were showing before. I blink to my ocular again, and query similar incidents in the past fifteen years. I get a link to a feed about an outbreak of black pox in a CDC facility in Bismarck, a bunch of links related to that brain fungus thing that got set loose in Tokyo a few years ago, and a couple of dozen fictional vids about viruses that turn everyone into zombies.
I actually consider trying to do some research, but I kind of have a thing for zombie vids, so I wind up streaming one of those instead. This one is called The Omega Protocol. It’s got a couple of decent actors, and a CGI group that usually does a nice job. It starts out with a little bit of promise, but after about twenty minutes, I click it off in disgust. I like zombies, but I cannot stand zombie vids that take themselves seriously. In this one, zombieism is caused by a virus that can only be spread through the bite of an infected person. Once a victim gets bitten, the virus gestates for a while—to give him time for angst-y conversations with his loved ones and contemplation of suicide, I guess—and then turns him into a shambling, rotting wreck with a hankering for human flesh. At the point where the story picks up, literally everyone on Earth except for the heroes is infected.
Which is all well and good, I guess, except for this: We already have a virus that is spread through bites, that causes you to act crazy, and that is 100 percent fatal. It’s called rabies. And yet somehow, not every person on Earth has contracted it.
Something bounces off my head. I blink the ocular back off and look over at Anders.
“Hey,” he says. “Why don’t you check in with your friends, and see what’s really going on?”
Fine. I pop open another chat frame.
Sir Munchalot:
Angry Irish Inch:
Sir Munchalot:
Angry Irish Inch:
Argyle Dragon:
Argyle Dragon:
Angry Irish Inch:
Fenrir:
Hayley 9000:
Drew P. Wiener:
Argyle Dragon:
I blink the frame closed again. They’ve clearly got nothing. I sit up and look around. Terry and Anders are sitting close together. His hands are in his lap, and she’s leaning her head against his shoulder. The wallscreen is muted. The view is still cycling between static shots of corpses, overhead shots of corpses, and spysat shots of corpses.
“Nothing new,” I say. “Except that one of my peeps has NatSec crawling up his ass, I mean.”
Neither of them even glances at me. I kick the footrest down and stand.
“I’m gonna get a drink. Either of you want anything?”
Terry closes her eyes. Anders looks at me like I’m something he scraped off the bottom of his shoe.
“Um . . . I guess not,” I say finally, then turn and walk out to the kitchen.
The screen over the stove comes alive when I open the fridge door. I pull out a can of BrainBump, give it a quick shake, and pop the top. I don’t usually drink this stuff straight, but I decide to make an exception under the circumstances. I down it in one long, sweet, chocolatey pull while a pretty blonde caster from Washington explains that while nobody wants to do what they’re going to do, it’s simply a matter of national survival.
“House,” I say. “Can you find me a feed that’s a little less moronic?”
The screen switches over to SpaceLab.
“Ooooh, baby. You do know what I like.”
I’ve seen this episode before, of course, but it’s a classic. Science Officer Scott is traveling back to the station by shuttlecraft when he runs into a temporal anomaly—just as he’s trying to fart in his spacesuit, loses control, and winds up sharting instead. The anomaly throws him back in time by thirty seconds, and he’s forced to relive the sharting over and over until he realizes what’s happening and finds a way to break the temporal cycle. In this case, breaking the temporal cycle requires squeezing the gas all the way up his digestive system and belching it out instead. I’m not one hundred percent clear on the physics behind this, but the BrainBump nanos are stimulating my giggle centers, and by the end of the episode I’m laughing out loud.
At least until Anders grabs my head in one giant spider hand, tilts it back until I feel my neck crack, and slams me to the floor.
I’m about to say something, maybe ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing, when I get a look at his face and abruptly shut my mouth. Just then there’s a flash outside the window, like catching a reflection of the sun off the windshield of a passing car. He kicks me once in the ass, and then walks away. I lie there on the floor for a minute or so, wondering what just happened. I’m just getting to my feet when a boom like distant thunder rattles the windows.
Right. That.
Forty-five minutes later, and we’re all three back in the living room again, watching replays of the bombs going off—it turns out they actually used three of them, synchronized for simultaneous detonation—from a half dozen different vantages. After a while, they switch over to orbital perspectives post-detonation. I kind of expected everything to be on fire, but it’s not. The whole town is just a big, black, lumpy splotch on the ground. Apparently, that’s one of the beauties of a fuel-air explosive. It sucks up all of the oxygen over a wide area, so that (a) you don’t need to worry about survivors anywhere within the blast radius, as long as they’re not wearing space suits, and (b) there’s not a whole lot of secondary burn, which means your advancing forces can move into the area very quickly after a bombardment.
Of course, in this case we don’t have any advancing forces. Just a bunch of bots poking around, looking for any evidence that would help clear up exactly what happened there.
Fenrir:
What NatSec Doesn’t Want You to Know About Hagerstown
Earlier today, something truly horrifying happened in Hagerstown, Maryland. A terrible virus struck with lightning speed, killing the entire population, down to the last man, woman and child, in a matter of minutes. Fortunately, NatSec units were already positioned in the Hagerstown area, and they were able to secure the hot zone in less than an hour. A thorough search for survivors was conducted by drone and crawler, and when none were found, NatSec Acting Director Dey reluctantly made the hard decision to sterilize the area, thus saving the rest of us from the threat of contamination.
That’s what our good friends at NatSec would have us believe, in any case. Here are the facts:
1. Within seconds of the outbreak in Hagerstown, every civilian drone, crawler, fixed camera, and orbital asset was taken offline, and all existing feeds were redacted to a point approximately ten seconds before the first casualty. If every citizen of Hagerstown died within minutes of the outbreak, what were they afraid to let us see?
2. Throughout the crisis, the only data feeds coming from Hagerstown were those passed to the official media through NatSec channels. What were they afraid to let us see?