by Nick Thacker
“I’ve read about stuff like this, Julie. It could get pretty bad.”
“It’s going to be fine. We just need to find out the source and then stabilize the potent properties, then get it to the higher-ups for processing and propagation. Standard stuff, really. You know that.”
Ben got the impression, listening to the conversation, that Stephens was the type of person who was constantly paranoid. Julie seemed to be playing the role of concerned parent, trying to console the hyperactive imagination of her child.
“You’re right. Sorry. Figure out what this thing is, okay? I’ve always worried about something like this getting out of hand, especially today. This country isn’t united enough to save itself.” He paused a moment.
“Where are you two headed now?” The coffee machine behind him woke up and began gurgling hot water down through the filter. Almost immediately, the smell of coffee filled the office air. Ben suddenly felt more awake — he knew that even the smell of coffee was enough to cause alertness. He licked his lips, just now realizing that he had driven the bulk of the journey from Yellowstone.
“Back to my place first,” Julie said, “then we’ll find him a hotel,” gesturing toward Ben. “Livingston won’t cut his golf game short for anything short of a nuclear attack, but he’ll be expecting all of us to work an all-nighter tonight if this thing blows up.” She winced at her poor choice of words but continued. “Like I said, give me what you have whenever you can and keep it coming. As long as he’s got information coming in, he’ll stay quiet.”
Stephens nodded in approval and walked back to his desk. He sank down into his chair, slouching. “Sure would be easier around here if you ran this place,” he said almost under his breath.
“I would keep it down if I were you,” Julie said. “Knowing Livingston, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has this place bugged, as well as each of our houses.”
“Right. I’ve seen the budget for this operation — I think we’ll be okay.”
Julie turned and raised her eyebrows, silently asking Ben if there was more to cover. He shrugged. She walked toward the hallway again, and Ben followed closely behind.
18
The evening had turned into a bluish haze, thanks to a gentle showering of rain a few hours before and a near-full moon. Livingston clicked the key fob of his car and waited for the telltale beeping sound.
The 2012 Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG was his pride and joy. He’d taken out a second mortgage on his condominium to ride in this kind of style, and he hadn’t regretted a moment of it. As a government employee, he understood the irony and the juxtaposition of seeing a man of his status rolling around in a vehicle like this, but that was all the more reason to love it.
He’d always been fond of money. His first word, in fact, was “money,” a story he loved sharing at parties and around the office.
Livingston walked toward the squat warehouse building that served as his temporary office. He liked to think of it that way: temporary. Everything in this life was temporary, he knew, but especially dead-end jobs like this one. He’d get to ten years, cash in his tenure play, and move on to a middle management job in a huge corporate bank or investment firm. Companies like that were always looking for management who weren’t pushing for more and driving everyone around them to insanity. He’d fit in well at a company that needed an axe-man or a standard-issue pencil-pusher.
He’d also fit in well at a place that enjoyed the same type of indulgences.
Julie, Benjamin, Charles, his executive assistant Laura — these people didn’t understand him. He couldn’t care less if they did or not, but he at least expected more respect than he got.
Wasn’t a $400,000 luxury car enough to make an impression?
He entered his four-digit entry code into the keypad and opened the door. He sniffed — God, he hated this place. Walking toward the T-intersection in the hallway, he stopped to check his appearance in the long window of the lab room.
Tall, dark, and slightly heavyset, he wasn’t a bad-looking man. Years of sedentary work had taken his college swagger and turned it into a waddling gait, but he still had a full head of brownish-blond hair and a proud jaw. He had been a hockey player in college, but he’d lost his youthful spryness long ago, as well as a few of his front teeth.
He nodded to his reflection and continued down the hall, taking a left at the intersection and a right into his office.
He dropped his briefcase on the chair next to the door and hung up his overcoat. After business hours or not, he hated being caught underdressed, so he usually wore his work suit around town and sometimes at home. Livingston poured himself a double shot of scotch and opened the miniature freezer to find a cube of ice.
Perfect. Laura couldn’t even remember to do that.
He slammed the door shut and sat down at his desk. Like his car, the desk was an indulgence even the United States government wouldn’t waste money on. He’d spent all $2,000 of his office decoration budget line item as well as another $1,500 to get this antique mahogany desk, complete with a hidden door beneath the top drawer.
He opened the laptop in front of him and clicked around, finally finding the folder he was searching for. A password entry prompt opened, and he entered a string of characters. The folder opened, and Livingston browsed through the list of pictures, sipping on the warm scotch.
Double-clicking on one particular image, Livingston sat up straight in his chair. It was a picture of Julie Richardson, smiling in a two-piece bathing suit at the local branch’s company picnic. She was holding a volleyball under one arm and talking to someone off-camera.
He clicked on another. This time Julie was mid-serve, the volleyball inches above her right hand, and her body stretched out to its maximum length.
Livingston didn’t know who had taken the pictures, but when Laura had given everyone in the office Dropbox access to them, he’d made sure to save them locally to his hard drive.
Another picture opened — Julie and Benjamin Stephens sitting at a picnic table across from one another. Julie’s back was to the camera, and Livingston clicked the magnifying glass to zoom in slightly…
The phone rang.
He blinked and sat back in the leather office chair. His daughter. It rang a second and third time, and finally waited for it to go to voicemail. He hadn’t talked to Rebecca in almost a year, and he knew he’d regret not answering it later.
The answering machine picked up. He groaned as the sound of his own voice interrupted his thoughts. “This is the voicemail box of David Livingston, Director…”
At the beep, his daughter’s voice punched through the low-quality phone speaker and into his office. “Daddy? Hey, it’s me… Just wanted to say hi. I figured you’d be working late again, but I wasn’t sure.” The voice paused for a moment. “Listen, call me back sometime. It’s been awhile.”
Another pause, then the sound of a phone hanging up. Livingston swirled a sip of scotch in his mouth and stared at the conference phone on his desk. He swirled again, swallowed, then took another deep sip.
He pressed his eyes together tightly, holding them for a moment as the burn of the low-quality scotch ran down his esophagus. “I miss you too, honey,” he said to no one. “I do miss you. It’s been nine years since we were all together, and I miss you both.”
“But she left us, remember?” He took another drink. “She walked out. After she slept with that rat-bastard from the softball team…”
He looked around, suddenly aware that he was the only one around.
He sniffed, trying to shake off the feeling of delirium caused by the whiskey. Get it together, Livingston. You’re better than this. Livingston slammed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the far corner of his desk.
He needed a way to keep tabs on Julie without raising a flag in the data center. He thought for a moment, then sat back up and clicked away from the picture.
The image of Julie at the park bench disappeared, replaced by a browser window. It displa
yed the SecuNet homepage, an intranet server with a user interface for the company’s secure communications and file storage.
He almost laughed out loud. Though SecuNet was secure enough for the CDC’s standards, he knew all too well how unsecure Internet Explorer was. It had been thoroughly proven unsafe by just about every web development and tech blog on the net, but it was the mandatory browser installed on any government computer.
The page had a few options available, and he clicked on one toward the bottom in the first column. The site redirected him to a secure page, and he typed his username and password in the respective boxes and was soon faced with a new dialog box:
“Email Redirect: Choose Orginator”
Being considered “executive” at a government organization did have its perks, even if it didn’t pay well enough. Livingston entered Julie’s email address, then added a second Originator email address entry for Benjamin Stephens. In the “Enter Forwarding Address” box, he entered his own email account and pressed “submit.”
The dialog box disappeared, and Livingston closed the browser window. The redirect would be “silent,” meaning it would run invisibly in the background — neither of his employees would know they were being tracked via email — and it would be relatively untraceable. Only a seasoned IT veteran specifically looking for the redirect would be able to find it.
He stood, refilled his scotch, and sat back down at the computer. He smiled at the computer screen and once again opened the folder containing the pictures from the company picnic.
19
Dr. Diana Torres looked through the compound microscope once more. Whatever it was, she hadn’t seen it before. The structure was different than a normal virus. First, the integumentary system that protected the rest of the microscopic body from external elements and diseases was studded with odd bumps and scrapes, as if the virus itself was infected with something. Secondly, while she recognized the lipid and protein structures that made up the bulk of the body, she couldn’t quite place their configuration.
Finally, the entire inner cavity of each individual viral body was made up of the traditional nucleocapsid and capsomeres, but also other bodies she didn’t recognize that seemed to be crammed in as well. While the overall structure was standard for a type of herpesvirus, it didn’t fit any of the eight strains modern science was aware of.
She took another measurement and checked her notes.
“Varicella Zoster strain; assumption smaller form. Standard nucleocapsid and lipid envelopes; odd protein buildup differs from traditional strains.”
“Most spherical virions 80 to 90 nm in diameter; largest observed 93 nm, smallest observed 73 nm.”
The results were accurate; her measurements weren’t off. Her assistant, Charlie Furmann, had reserved the lab space at 8:30 that evening and she’d been inside until now. She checked her watch.
7:30 PM.
The act of checking her watch suddenly triggered her body to announce it was exhausted, and she yawned and stretched her arms. Standing, she shut the light from the microscope on the long lab table in order to prevent any unwanted reactions in the sample. She slipped on her lab coat — essentially her entry key to the myriad of rooms, labs, and closets spread around the building.
It would also get her into the cafeteria on the main level; her current destination. The nature of the work done at the research facility, as well as the personality types of those doing it, meant that the facility had 24/7 cafeteria access. The scientists and research assistants that populated these offices weren’t governed by traditional nine-to-five jobs, nor did they care for culturally accepted norms about when to sleep and when to work.
At any given point during the day, not just during posted breakfast, lunch, and dinner times, the cafeteria could be either completely empty or filled with talkative scientists discussing their latest research.
Dr. Torres stepped off the elevator on the main level. The halls were dimly lit with security lights, but the open doors of the cafeteria were filled with light that spilled into the corridor, beckoning. Another involuntary response in her brain was triggered by the light and the smell of food, and suddenly she felt pangs of hunger run up and down her insides.
Surprised to see that there was no one inside the cafeteria, she walked to an open-faced refrigerator unit and pulled out a small plastic bin of hummus and crackers and a 20-ounce bottle of Pepsi. She carried the Pepsi and hummus to a small point-of-sale system and cash register near the door and tapped her identification card on the credit card terminal. After the terminal beeped, she clipped the badge back to her lab coat pocket and walked back into the hallway. Just then, she felt her cell phone buzz in the pocket of her jeans. She shuffled the Pepsi around and reached in for her phone. It was a text from Charlie.
“Where are you? Wanted to check in with this model.”
She frowned, wondering why he had taken the time to send her a text message when he could have just waited for her to return. Stopping in the hallway, she sent a quick reply.
“Went to cafeteria. On my way back. What’s up?”
She didn’t wait for a response; instead, she stepped into the elevator and pressed the number for her floor. The elevator deposited her onto her floor, and she walked into the lab. She found Charlie, his back to her, hunched over the microscope.
“Hey, Charlie. What’s going on?”
Charlie jumped, then turned. “What is this, Dr. Torres? Is this the same sample that was sent over from earlier?”
“Yes…” Dr. Torres replied.
“Did they say what it was?”
“What do you mean? They sent over a standard laboratory-required specimen size for examination and classification. If they knew what it was already, they wouldn’t have sent it.”
Charlie frowned, then nodded. “I know, I guess I’m just confused…”
“What? What is it?”
“Well, I don’t understand why you would have mounted both samples at once.”
Now it was Dr. Torres’ turn to be confused. “Both? What do you mean?”
Charlie plugged in the external monitor display to the microscope’s output line, projecting the image seen by the microscope onto a 40-inch HDTV hanging on the wall behind them. “Look,” he said, as he used a wireless computer mouse to draw a circle around one of the spherical objects on the screen. “This is your virus, right? The ‘Varicella Zoster’ strain, or whatever?”
She nodded.
“Well, when you continue to zoom in, you’ll see the standard components — nucleocapsid, lipids, different protein amalgamations, etcetera.”
Dr. Torres nodded again, trying to hurry him along.
“But then if you keep increasing the magnification…” he paused to reset the microscope’s magnification wheels, “you’ll notice that the interior structure of the virion is completely crammed with foreign bodies.”
“Foreign? How can they be? They’re part of the virus.”
“Right — but that doesn’t mean they always were. The virus certainly doesn’t look like it wants them in there, does it? They’re all bulging at the seams, thanks to these spirillum pushing everything around.”
Dr. Torres looked up sharply. “Spirillum? What are you talking about?”
He zoomed in even more. As the microscopic components of the viral organism came into focus, she saw the unmistakable spiraling of one of the common bacterial shapes. The twisted object grew as Charlie pushed the microscope to its limits; the screen suddenly appearing grainy and slightly out of focus.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“You didn’t see this before?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head.
“So, then, I’m guessing there weren’t two different samples?”
Both scientists were speechless as they stared at the TV monitor. The fuzzy black and white image was unmistakable.
“No. No, Charlie. There weren’t,” she said. “We’re looking at some sort of herpesvirus that contains a li
ving, breathing, bacterial infection.”
“That’s impossible,” Charlie said. “There’s no way for the virions to provide livable conditions for the bacteria.”
“I know,” Dr. Torres said. “But we’re dealing with something completely different here; something outside the realm of what either of us has studied before.” As she spoke and stared at the screen in front of her, Dr. Torres grew more and more confident that what she was looking at was, in fact, what she said it was.
Impossible or not, what they were looking at was a living bacteria fully functioning inside a virus.
20
Six Months Ago
Dr. Malcolm Fischer gasped. Sucking in a huge breath of air, he tried to swallow. It was painful; somehow, something wasn’t right. He tried to look down, but had a hard time moving his head.
Weird.
He tried moving his hands instead. Nothing.
His fingers, maybe?
Nope.
Malcolm felt glued down, lying on his back. At least it was comfortable.
What do I have control over, then? he wondered.
He opened his eyes, blinking once, twice. He moved his eyeballs around; at least he could see.
He tried to make sense of his surroundings. Bright lights, fluorescent. The kind used in offices and commercial buildings. Whitish walls, some sort of sterile color.
That was it.
Okay, what does that mean? Malcolm tried to move his body. Anything. Nothing would give. It was as if he was —
Am I paralyzed?
He considered it a moment. He didn’t remember taking a fall, or any type of accident. Actually, now that he thought harder, he couldn’t remember of anything. There was…
A helicopter.
Oh, God.
The memory roared back into Malcolm’s mind in a flash. The students…
He remembered being forced into the chopper at gunpoint, being pushed down into a seat and strapped in, then the gentle upward motion of the pilot’s expert takeoff. They ascended only a few feet off the ground.
