Thunder and Ashes

by Z. A. Recht

  Trev gunned the motor of the pickup truck, increasing his speed somewhat. Junko looked over from the passenger seat at the speedometer and frowned.

  “If there were still cops you’d be getting a ticket right now,” Junko scolded. “You’re pushing ninety.”

  “Ha ha!” Trev said, grinning widely. “But once I reach 88 miles per hour, the flux capacitor will take us back to . . .”

  He trailed off as he saw that Junko had no idea what he was referencing.

  “Never mind,” he said, waving a hand and smiling. He eased his foot off the accelerator some. “We’ll just cruise and conserve some gas, then. You’re no fun, Juni.”

  She grinned and punched him in the shoulder by way of reply.

  “No, seriously,” Trev pressed. “Here we are, not a car in sight, the entire Interstate Highway System is at our feet—and you want us to go the speed limit.”

  Trev blew a raspberry in Juni’s direction. She stuck out her tongue at him in reply.

  “Now, maybe we’ll find a nice dealership in one of these little dead towns and get something with some real power,” Trev prattled on. “A V-8. Hell, a V-16. Zero to sixty in point five seconds. Ha! I have to put that on my list of things to do once we clear out the demons from some of these towns down the line.”

  In the back of the truck, the conversation had fallen flat. The four occupants lounged around, each engrossed in their own thoughts and activities. Julie dozed in the corner, hair whipping around her face as she rested. Mason was systematically disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling his pistol, repeating the process over and over. It was a trick to keep all the pieces together in the jouncing bed of the truck, but to Mason, it merely added a degree of challenge to an activity he could (literally) do blindfolded.

  Anna was still engrossed in her PDA, gratified at the full charge it had acquired from the truck’s cigarette lighter. She checked their position on the GPS feature and smiled to herself. In one day they’d covered more distance than they had in two weeks on foot. She switched back over to her research notes and continued to read. She felt it was her duty to keep the data as fresh as possible in her mind.

  July 23, 2004—Log Entry #792

  Have assigned Joseph and Virginia to run the RNA sequencer on the Marburg strain samples again to check for possible errors. We’ve been experiencing a lot of employee turnover recently and I really didn’t want to have to give them that order. It’s extremely dull work and you have to do it all in an environment suit, which is hot and stuffy and more than a little claustrophobic. Most of our researchers don’t last long in Level 4. They always request transfers to Levels 2 or 3 after a while of dealing with these organisms.

  But the funny thing is, it’s not the organisms themselves that are driving researchers away from my department. It’s the department itself. Isn’t that ironic? The environment designed to keep you safe from the living things you’re working on is what sends you running from those living things. I wax pedantic.

  We received and processed tissue samples today from two apes who are suspected victims of hemhorrhagic fever from a zoo in China; I have made running those samples top priority. If they come back positive for anything that’s contagious and deadly in humans we’ll have to issue a quarantine order for the zoo and maybe for the city it’s in.

  As far as Morningstar goes, we’ve made little progress. I honestly can’t understand why they’ve assigned this virus to our team, too. We already have enough on our plates. Besides, from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, the Deucalion Co-op and the Centers for Disease Control are already researching the bug.

  Probably it’s political. In fact, I virtually guarantee it. They just need to cover their asses if there’s ever an outbreak. They said Ebola would never break out, and it did, several times—they finally got wise and started researching it seriously so they could point and say, “Look, we’ve done all we can.”

  I wish I could get the Deucalion Co-op to share what they have on the virus with me. I know next to nothing about it besides it’s a filovirus and a nasty one. The brief I received said, and I’m writing this quoted word for word, that “the Morningstar strain possesses an infectious nature and fatal potential that has not yet been exceeded by any other known virus.”

  That makes me damn curious. Even though I resent the extra workload, I can’t wait to see what this little bug can do.

  In the bed of the truck, Anna sighed and rolled her eyes after reading her own words. Even though they were only a couple of years past, they seemed like a lifetime ago, and she felt like an entirely different person.

  I can’t wait to see what this little bug can do.

  She almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of the line.

  Matt was facing away from the group, sitting cross-legged at the rear of the bed and staring at the road as it receded behind them, occupied with his own thoughts.

  “So what’s on the docket today, Doc?” Mason asked without looking up from his pile of gun parts. “Anything interesting?”

  “Not really,” Anna drawled. “Just my daily log entries. I just read an entry dated right after I first was assigned to Morningstar. It’s almost funny how naive I was.”

  “Well, you got a lot better fast, if it’s any consolation,” Mason said.

  “A little,” Anna grinned. “Still, I just don’t know where to begin when it comes to this vaccine. My data’s incomplete. Maybe if I had the hard drives from the CDC, USAMRIID, and the Deucalion Co-op all together, along with a team of skilled researchers and proper facilities—maybe then I’d be able to get something real done.”

  “Give it time, Doc. Right now your only lab is that little gizmo of yours. You’ll find a way,” Mason said.

  “Wait a minute,” Matt said, looking over at Anna with a quizzical expression on his face. “What’s a Deucalion Co-op?”

  “The third facility,” Anna said.

  Matt stared at her blankly a moment. “What?”

  “The third facility,” Anna repeated. “Remember that whole conversation we had back in town when we met? About there only being two Biosafety Level 4 labs in the US and I said there were three, and the third was a joint operation?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Matt said, nodding. “Yeah, I remember that. So the third one calls itself the Deucalion Co-op. What’s the significance of that?”

  “They were feeling a little ambitious in their naming,” Anna said wryly. “The staff there is made up of private-sector employees, military doctors, and representatives from the CDC. They called themselves Deucalion because they were focusing on ways to use the viruses to, ah, improve humanity. Or at least, that was their foremost stated goal.”

  Matt shook his head, still confused. “I still don’t get it. Deucalion?”

  Anna lowered her PDA to her knees, sighed, and launched into her explanation. “Deucalion was a man in Greek legend who was sort of like Noah. The gods decided that the human race was too weak to survive. It had been crafted out of the living clay of the earth, but was vice-riddled and crime-torn.”

  “Sounds like pretty much any city today,” Mason murmured.

  “The gods decide that they’re going to kill all of the human race, but they save Deucalion and his wife, who had remained above temptation and were, you know, worthy of being saved. Problem was, once the extermination was complete, Deucalion and his wife were pretty lonely, what with being the only human beings left on the planet.”

  “Sometimes I feel like that, at least these past few months,” Mason interjected once more.

  Anna went on as if Mason hadn’t spoken.

  “The gods took pity on Deucalion and his wife and they said, ‘Pick up the bones of your mother and throw them over your shoulders, and you will have companions.’”

  “The bones of their mothers?” Matt interrupted, a scowl crossing his face. “Those old myths sure can be foul, man.”

  “Wait, wait,” Anna said, waving a hand. “The gods weren’t being literal. The mother of
all humanity is the earth, and the bones of the earth are rocks. They didn’t mean literally throwing the bones of their mothers over their shoulders.”

  “Small mercies,” Matt snorted.

  “So Deucalion and his wife pick up handfuls of stones, throw them over their shoulders, and sure enough, up springs twenty men behind Deucalion and twenty women behind his wife. Since the old race that was made of clay had been destroyed, this new race was made of stone and was supposed to be able to withstand vice and evil better than, for lack of a better term, Humanity version 101,” Anna explained. “So these people call themselves the Deucalion Co-op because they’re looking for, and this is a stretch of a metaphor, a way to change humanity from clay to stone.”

  “Ah,” Matt said, nodding slowly. “So they’re arrogant bastards, is that it?”

  That brought a hearty chuckle from Anna, and even Julie grinned as she leaned back against the side rail of the bed again.

  Anna tapped the screen of her PDA and brought up a list of her journal entries. She sighed, watching the list scroll by slowly, entry after entry. She had diligently added her thoughts into her files at the end of every day, entertaining the vague notion of perhaps condensing them into a book or research manual for future generations. Now she was simply hoping to milk any last bit of data about the virus out of them.

  September 12, 2004—Log Entry #821

  I halted the studies on Marburg and Sudan today. Lassa will probably be up next on the chopping block. I’ve been getting a lot of pressure to focus on Morningstar and I can’t keep running my researchers ragged. The more I learn about this virus the less I want to admit it even exists. It multiplies like Ebola, similar initial symptoms, but instead of crashing and bleeding, the victims go feral. We’re guessing the fever has something to do with it, but it’s a really a very effective technique for spreading the virus. The feral hosts attack whatever is nearby. They’ll bite and scratch and spread infected fluid that way.

  We’ve got fully half the lab dedicated to Morningstar research now. I’m still keeping myself busied running epidemic simulations and the results are never pretty. We used a colony of mice to simulate an outbreak in a rural village. It was tough getting a properly controlled environment for the project since we couldn’t exactly build a miniature replica of the Congo River basin in the BSL4 lab, but we made do with some large clear plastic cages and some tubing.

  We put one infected mouse in with fifteen others and observed the results. At first, the mice accepted the infected newcomer as one of their own but as symptoms began to develop the healthy mice reacted unexpectedly. As far as we as humans know, animals are ignorant of the knowledge of disease and how to react to it. Despite this, the healthy mice forced the infected one into a kind of “quarantine.” It was something worth a National Geographic article, I’m sure. They ostracized the mouse, kept it away from their food and water sources and generally refused to play nicely with it. They seemed to want it out.

  The data suggested by this reaction indicates that the healthy mice had some recognition of the infected mouse’s illness. We wondered what might happen in the wild: whether if, when one animal is infected, the rest put enough distance between themselves that the infected creature dies without being able to spread the disease. That might explain why we haven’t seen a major outbreak of it yet.

  Of course, humans are another story. As far as I know we don’t possess any kind of sixth sense that lets us know when a fellow human is infected. And we’re just dumb enough to get close to the poor bastard when he goes feral, too.

  Anyway, the infected mouse’s harassment by his peers lasted three days before the virus had replicated enough to cause the feral reaction I was speaking of. When that happened, that poor, tormented little rodent got his revenge: by the end of the day all fifteen healthy mice had been infected with Morningstar. No matter where they went in the cage and its tubes, the infected mouse found them, one by one, and systematically infected them all.

  It was disturbing to watch. It’s as if the little bugger developed one hell of a predatory instinct, as if the virus erased all that was that made him a mouse and turned him into a killer.

  I’m really not liking this assignment right now. It’s keeping me up at night.

  Anna swallowed. Her throat felt dry and scratchy, and she lowered the PDA to her lap to retrieve a canteen of water from one of the bags in the bed of the truck. She unscrewed the cap and took a long, satisfying gulp, a small rivulet of water running down her neck. She sighed, replaced the canteen, and looked around the truck.

  The occupants were all still busily doing plenty of nothing. Mason was on his umpteenth repetition of disassembling and reassembling his pistol. Julie looked as if she was completely asleep, her head lolling back and forth gently and her mouth hanging open slightly. Matt sat cross-legged in the rear of the bed where he had always been, still staring at the road behind them.

  Anna suddenly felt a tremendous rush of responsibility fall over her. It was heavy and smothering as a blanket soaked in cold kerosene. The lives of billions had ended over the past few months and she, one of the chief researchers into the problem, hadn’t been able to do a damn thing about it.

  Then again, she thought to herself, I did warn them. Several times.

  Just as suddenly, the heavy weight lifted, and Anna felt as if she could breathe again. It was wrong of her to blame herself for the outbreak. She’d had nothing to do with it, and even the governments she’d tried to warn had done their best once they’d begun to take her seriously. This was nature’s way, and nothing one small species could do could stop it.

  Unless I find the vaccine.

  And that was the ringer, Anna thought. The big If. From an epidemiologist’s point of view, she figured the human race had two options.

  First, they could hole up wherever they could stay alive and bolt the doors, wait out the pandemic. It would, as with all pandemics, burn itself out after enough time had passed. The problem with this idea is that even once all of the carriers had died, including the shamblers, whether it be from violence or pure decay, infectious material would be scattered all across the globe.

  A spot of blood from an infected man might have landed in a warm, shaded puddle or some other natural petri dish and the virus would continue to exist. Outbreaks of Morningstar would be never-ending for the human race. Generations down the line, men and women would have to fight off the virus over and over as Anna and her friends were attempting to do now.

  The second option was for her to create a vaccine. The pressure of that Herculean task was not lost on her and weighed down on her just as much as the guilt she’d felt when she’d momentarily blamed herself for the pandemic. If she succeeded, she would be responsible for immunizing the human race to the Morningstar strain. Never again would a carrier be able to infect a human being. The only worries the survivors would have would be the physical threat of feral infected biting, clawing, or otherwise mauling them to death—not pleasant, but no less so than the thought of infection.

  The pressure was doubled by the fact that Anna Demilio had never focused her research on finding a vaccine. That responsibility had rested with the Deucalion Co-op and their plethora of experiments. They had certainly not succeeded, Anna rationalized, given the current infected state of the world, but they might have made progress.

  Anna was banking on them having made boatloads of progress. She was hoping that most of the work had been done—the RNA sequencing, genome investigations, blood and serum tests. In order to make a vaccine work, she had to figure out how to disable the Morningstar strain’s virulent properties. She knew from reading the regular updates that circulated between USAMRIID, the CDC, and Deucalion that the first attempt at a vaccine using killed cells of the Morningstar strain—much the same as a flu shot might—had no effect whatsoever. The human immune system attacked the dead viruses, of course, but no immunity was built up from the injections.

  Her better shot was to try and create a vac
cine that used a live virus. It was riskier, but it had a better shot of success. The problem there lay in the human immune system itself. Billions of cases worldwide had proved better than any laboratory could that the human immune system couldn’t fight off Morningstar and therefore couldn’t build up an immunity to it.

  Either she needed to find a way to reinforce the immune system or find someone whose body made them naturally immune, and use their blood to culture the antibodies she’d need. The former was the option she was considering chasing once they arrived in Omaha, as she’d never heard of so much as a single infected person who didn’t succumb to the disease.

  Anna picked up her PDA once more and scrolled through the entries, looking for ones that dealt with immunization and their experiments.

  October 09, 2004—Log Entry #869

  Today was a busy day. Joseph didn’t come in, complaining of a fever and nausea. I believe him. ’Tis the season for influenza, or getting there, anyway. I joked that he should come in anyway and offer himself as a test subject to the guys in BL2. Virginia and I were the only two researchers on duty so we thought we’d take a light day and try out a few experiments on the Morningstar strain. Our funding for Lassa research was cut off last week and handed over to another department anyway, so we figured, why not?

  We’d just received a new shipment of mice. We’re not mean or, what’s the word I’m looking for here, sadistic, that’s it, but we were extremely intrigued with the responses of healthy mice to hosts. We can reasonably hypothesize that a human reaction would be different, so we changed tactics a bit and focused on the behaviors of the infected rodents.

  We set up the following variables:

  Heat/cold were set in the cage, light/darkness were set up, healthy mice were kept on hand as bait, and we started to brainstorm some obstacles. We were trying to categorize the behavior of the infected mice besides a simple “feral.”