by Nick Thacker
He seemed to be waiting for a response, as did everyone else, and Julie was surprised when he gave them one. “I know. I thought about it long and hard, and the reason it was so compelling to me is that it lines up perfectly with my theory about this virus. About how to beat it.”
Everyone’s eyes, if they weren’t already, were now riveted on Ben. Julie stared at him, too. They all waited for him to reveal his theory, but he wasn’t given the opportunity.
A flash of light washed over Julie’s eyes, and she took a stumbling step backward. She tried to blink the light away, but it was almost immediately replaced by the loudest noise she’d ever heard.
The cracking sound was like standing on a lightning bolt as it ripped open the earth, but it lasted longer. Her eyes must have been bleeding, and there was no way her eardrums could be intact after a sound like that. She tried to reach up and cover them as her vision returned.
Through the white haze, she saw the treetops of the forest bending and crunching under some unseen force, followed closely by a massive shockwave of dust and debris. Her face was glued to the scene, unfolding front of her as if it were an action movie in slow motion.
She felt something pulling at her, and her body was yanked backwards just as the force smashed against the brick wall. The roof above her was gone in an instant, and she saw the blue sky above her head. Dust filled every bit of the empty air in front of her face, and she felt it mingle with the saliva at the back of her throat, causing her to hack and cough.
Still, the force beat down on them. The bricks at the very top of the wall were the first to go, then she watched in horror as a larger portion of them flew away, like birds fleeing from a predator.
And just as quickly as it had started, it was over. She felt a heavy arm covering her, and it relaxed a little as the owner also realized the blast was finished.
“You okay?” she heard Ben’s muffled voice whisper — or was he yelling? — into her ear. She nodded and stood up.
The others recovered from the shock quickly, and soon each of them was examining the wreckage and destruction. Julie stepped off the concrete step and looked in the direction from which the blast had come.
A large, blossoming, mushroom-shaped cloud, probably ten times the size of the one she’d seen only days earlier, had formed and was reaching up to the sky. It was a whitish-gray color, and she could see that toward the bottom of it, a layer seemed to be peeling off.
“It’s the water,” Ben said. He still had his arm around her and was now holding her close. “It probably offset a million gallons of water, but it doesn’t seem like —”
A massive tremble directly below their feet caused Ben’s words to be clipped short.
Julie panicked, running back onto the concrete slab, unsure of what to do.
“Julie — get away from the building!” she heard Ben yell. For some reason, she obeyed, though her mind felt like mush. She ran off the step just as the brick wall they’d been standing under collapsed.
And still the ground shook. She saw jittery images of a policeman scream as the wall fell directly onto him, and another image of a stand of trees not a hundred feet from them simply disappear into the earth.
The earthquake stretched on, growing more and more violent, but there was nowhere to go.
Ben held her, and together they just waited.
She thought every bone in her body was going to be shaken loose, and only then did she remember Ben’s leg injury. She glanced over to him and saw that he was clenching his jaw, trying to steady himself. He was leaning almost completely on his good foot, doing his best to ignore the pain.
And then it stopped.
Just like the bomb’s initial blast, the earthquake just stopped. It was as if the Earth was resetting itself, shaking itself off from a fight.
She looked around. If it was bad before, this was a disaster. The entire brick structure was rubble, reduced to bits of brick and metal rebar. Trees were toppled, more on the ground than there were still standing, and a large crater had formed just on the other side of the road.
“Is it over?” she heard someone ask.
“No idea. I think if it was going to blow, it would have done so by now!” another voice yelled in response.
They waited for almost an hour, milling about and checking their vehicles for damage. Except for a few small aftershocks, the ground seemed able to hold the supervolcano at bay. Julie was on edge the entire time, waiting for everything to be incinerated without warning, but when no fire came up out of the ground, she began to relax a little.
She and Ben were standing by the truck, ready to head back to civilization, when a group of officers came over. One of them, the man who’d questioned Ben earlier, started up the same conversation thread from before. “Bennett, you mentioned something about figuring out the virus earlier. What was that? What did you figure out?”
“Like I said, it’s still a theory, but I think it’s worth exploring. Once Julie’s emailed her headquarters at the CDC about it, we’ll be able to test it and get some hard data soon.”
The man’s expression softened a bit. “Ben, you’ve gotten us through this far. You were right about the caches, and you were right about the bomb.”
Another officer was standing nearby, smiling. “Yeah. You know, you’re either working for the bad guys or you’re just smarter than you look. Tell us what you’re thinking, man.”
Julie saw Ben sigh. “Okay, maybe you can help me piece it together. Basically, Stephens — that guy we thought was on our side — has been leading us on the whole time. He wasn’t just doing his job, though. It was personal to him, for whatever reason. He had more investment in this thing than just trying to accomplish a goal. I think he was trying to make a point.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, back at the lab, I heard him say something like ‘America isn’t united enough…”
“…To save itself,” Julie finished. “Yeah, I heard him say that too. Three times.”
“Well,” Ben continued, “I think he was trying to tell us something. That, and he only murdered people who were single, alone, and clearly isolated in some way. He even tried to kill me, just before all of this.”
Julie was quickly brought back to that fateful moment. Beating Stephens to a pulp after believing Ben was dead.
“So I’ve been thinking about what it all meant. We already knew he wanted us to figure it out — he admitted that much himself. So I had to ask myself why he’d do it that way, when it would have been far easier to just blow the park and caldera silently, without taking us along for the ride.
“And that led to thinking about the virus. Julie and I both had it — we were covered in the rash; they even took her in to quarantine.”
“But it worked its way out of your system, right? After it killed itself off?” Officer Wardley asked.
“It did, but when Julie and I were together, like physically close to one another, it didn’t get worse. Only when we were separated was when it grew in each of us.”
Julie was now confused as well. “Are you saying this thing can be beaten just by getting people close together?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But from what we learned in the lab, and from our own experience, I’d say it’s worth a shot.”
The answer was too simplistic to be possible. She looked around at the others, and many were nodding. As she thought about it more and more, it did seem obvious to her as well.
“So what do we do?” she asked. “Get everyone together in a room and hope that it spreads, like chickenpox?”
“Maybe. I’ll leave that up to your people,” Ben said. “But I’d bet it’s a start.”
60
Ben and Julie spent the remainder of the day quarantined inside a massive white CDC tent set up just outside Yellowstone National Park. Her email had reached the highest levels of government, and each of the departments involved with the investigation of the enigma strain virus weighed in, including the CDC.
In the end, Ben’s ideas were deemed sound enough to be fully tested and researched, and new quarantine locations were launched and data was gathered. Across the United States, each zone was given an updated protocol that included instructions based upon Julie and Ben’s findings, with the expectation that each area would send their research back to corporate headquarters in Atlanta.
The tent outside Yellowstone was no different, and Ben and Julie found themselves helping with anything and everything to get the station set up and prepared, only to become the first test subjects. They’d explained everything that had happened so far, including Stephens’ involvement, how Ben and Julie discovered where the caches and the bomb were hidden, and what they thought might be the way to defeat the virus.
Each of them had been assigned a separate bed, but because of their discovery of the “close proximity” rule, each bed was arranged close to another bed, and all of the infected patients were placed into the same large room, allowing for the disease to proliferate and spread among them. Within a matter of hours, the CDC confirmed Ben’s prediction that the proximity effect had a massive impact on slowing the spread of the virus, and within another few hours, they’d all but confirmed the suspicion that extended exposure to the virus led to an eventual recovery and inoculation.
They were released shortly after verifying that they were virus-free, and the research continued, using patients gathered from cities and towns in the surrounding two hundred mile radius around the camp.
Within two days, news of the virus’s weakness was spread among major outlets over television, radio, and internet sources. The key was proximity, and “recovery stations” were set up inside or near every major metropolitan area, including parks, arenas, stadiums, and larger government buildings. Smaller, more rural areas had similar stations, utilizing VFW posts, public meeting houses, and judicial centers.
Large or small, the goal was the same: get as many people under one roof as possible, each with enough supplies to last a week. FEMA, Red Cross, and a dozen other agencies and organizations were simultaneously instructed to provide infrastructure support and training for the massive relief effort. And thanks to the efforts of large telecommunications companies, many of the relief locations were provided WIFI access and secure data points, allowing work to continue without major conflicts.
Wall Street found little interruption in their operations, using mobile and wireless access points to continue trading and prevent any slowdowns in the US economy, and was able to ensure that losses in the major indexes were kept to a minimum. The government itself, operating for so long on pre-internet technology, seemed to be completely capable of keeping itself afloat without outside help.
Overall, the disaster relief efforts, while long and far-reaching, were successful. The nation watched as day after day, more public services were restarted, businesses were reopened, and municipal governments were resumed. Due to the staggering effect of healing the virus in phases throughout the population, as well as the increased desire to see America united again, many people were faced with nothing more than a week or two of unpaid vacation time while they were immunized against the disease.
Within a month’s time, the enigma strain virus was deemed to be ‘a minor threat’ by the Centers for Disease Control, citing the work done by Ben and Julie as well as the data gathered by each of the quarantine stations. The virus/bacteria was expected to reveal itself in less than 5% of the population over the coming year, and while an actual antidote was still out of reach, plans had been made to control the infection by forced exposure and proximity, eventually leading to full immunization against the disease.
61
“Valère, what happened?” Emilio asked through the screen.
Valère was pacing around the office, the speakers beaming the other man’s voice directly to his ears, as if Emilio was not behind a computer monitor but instead right there in the room with him.
“I have sent over a detailed analysis of the events that transpired —”
“Not now, SARA,” Emilio yelled. “I know you ‘sent over’ your little AI understanding of ‘these events,’ but I’m not asking that. Hell, it’s all over the news! I know exactly what happened. I’m asking Mr. Valère.”
Valère looked up, his eyes narrowed as he focused on the monitor. “Mr. Vasquez, I apologize for causing you undue stress. I assure you, our investments remain sound, as does our plan.”
“Our plan?” Emilio shouted. SARA automatically reduced the sound level before it was sent to Valère’s ears, so as not to cause any hearing pain. “Our plan has failed miserably. This was supposed to cripple the nation, not create a more patriotic and united one!”
Valère let the man continue, uninterrupted.
“Stephens failed, thanks to that escaped specimen Fischer, and those two CDC —”
“One CDC agent, Mr. Vasquez. The other was merely a park ranger at —”
“SARA, enough!” Emilio yelled.
Valère turned to the screen, noticing the rage building in his partner’s face. He held up a hand just as Emilio was about to start again. “Please, my friend, give yourself room to understand the true depth of what we have accomplished here.”
Emilio sneered but remained silent.
“Our plans have failed, perhaps, when seen through the narrow lens of the project’s parameters. But the Company remains strong, stronger than ever, perhaps, and that is in no small part due to the events that have transpired in America.”
Emilio nodded.
“In addition, the Company has confirmed that research continues in Brazil, and preparations are underway in Antarctica. We remain beneath the radar and will continue operations while the governments involved clean up the mess.”
“But at what cost, Valère? We failed. There is nothing we have accomplished by —”
“By what?” Valère asked. He steeled himself, pushing down the nervousness that he could feel creeping upward through his body. “There is nothing we have accomplished by failing? That is true. But what, exactly, do you think we were supposed to accomplish?”
Emilio frowned.
“Your parameters and objectives were the same as mine, and according to them, we have failed. Stephens was a loose cannon, and we have shown a lack of control over many of our contingencies. But what do you think the purpose was?”
“Of the failure?”
“Of even the success, were we to achieve it?”
“I — I don’t understand where you’re going with this, Francis.”
Valère paused. “Of course you don’t, Emilio. You were tapped for this project, and this one alone. But the Company has other interests, as I’m sure you’re aware. So what could they possibly expect to gain from a project such as this?”
Again, Emilio frowned.
“Nothing, my friend. Nothing directly. This project is busy work. It was something that seemed large enough to matter, though not crucial enough to place the entire weight and infrastructure of the Company behind it.”
“You mean…”
“Yes, Emilio. The Company needed us to create a distraction. One that would raise few eyebrows, regardless of success or failure. One that required little in the way of resources and management, yet caused all eyes to focus inward.”
“So the project —”
“The project was just that, Emilio. A project. A test, really. And we failed, but only in the sense of the direct mission. In this overall game, I believe we have achieved success. Massive success.
“Every eye in the developed world has been watching America, watching to see how they react. America is in fits, recovering, trying to stabilize itself. It will, in time. But it will be too late. The Company was working on a much larger project when they discovered the enigma strain. The virus was a side effect, a wonderful addendum to our research. I wrote the project’s overview and had it approved as a way to divert more attention away from their larger goal.
“And may I ask what that goal is, M
r. Valère?” Emilio asked.
Valère smiled, his eyes heavy, as he reached for the control to switch off the monitor.
“I’m sorry, Emilio. You may not.”
62
The cold had been creeping in for the past few hours, and Ben’s jacket seemed to be doing no more good. He sighed, watching his breath hang in the air and crystallize, the tiny specks sparkling as they collected and fell to the snowy ground.
He raised the long-handled axe and swung it once more. A satisfying crack reverberated around the tall pines, eventually getting lost in the white landscape. The block of wood split down the middle, sending the two halves in opposite directions, where two piles already lay. Ben paused, examining his work, then heaved the axe up onto his shoulder and began to walk toward one of the piles. He filled a wheelbarrow, then rolled the load back up a narrow dirt path.
As he exited the thick stand of trees, the sight in front of him almost stopped him in his tracks. The deep mocha-colored wood of the cabin’s exterior stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding forest. A thin chimney piped out a few wisps of smoke from a fire he’d left unattended hours ago, but he could still smell the faint odor of burning logs.
He started up the path again, stopping only when he reached the front door. He set the wheelbarrow down on its mounts and stacked the wood in careful lines on both sides of the door. As he worked, he tried to calculate the fruits of the day’s labor. Half a cord, maybe more.
Not enough, but not bad either, considering how slow he’d been lately thanks to his healing foot.
Finally finished with the wheelbarrow, he leaned it up against the wall of the cabin and reached for the door handle.
It opened before he got a grip on it.
“Took you long enough — it’s getting a little chilly in here.”
He smiled as he tried to think of a witty response.
