She unzipped it, and turned the radio off.
“I need you to do it,” said Kurt, prone on the pavement.
Her lips curled as she approached, staring at his compound fracture.
“It’s going to suck, but I need you to do it.”
Kurt extended his arm across the road, palm down. Sophie held her foot a few inches above the bone and balanced herself.
“Just step down, like you were taking the stairs. Don’t stomp. Don’t put half your weight on it and freak out and pull back. Put all your weight down. OK?”
She nodded.
“OK.” He closed his eyes. As her foot rolled across the bone, snapping it back in line, he slammed his other fist against the ground and cursed.
She unscrewed the peroxide bottle and poured it over the wound. It foamed and turned pink with blood. He sat up, fighting the urge to vomit.
“Wrap it,” he said.
She placed a large flat bandage across the open wound and wrapped gauze around it, over and over. Once it was tight and thick, she bound it with two metal clips.
“OK, OK, OK... gonna lie down for a bit. Water, please. Water.”
They rested about ten minutes. He had kept his arm on his chest as he lay on the road, keeping the wound higher than his heart. The tight binding had stopped the bleeding. His stomach settled down, and he took six Advil.
“We need to go.” He said it more to himself than to Sophie. She held his bike while he climbed on, and they continued south.
The dead man’s knife was clipped to her waistband, the handle brushing against her thigh with each pump of her legs. It was a slender Gerber blade. She had decided to keep it, partly because it was well made, but mostly because it was hers, truly hers, forever hers.
Chapter 13: Foil Hats
They heard the ocean.
The water at Galveston was brown, but not from pollution. Silt naturally spread along the coast, brought to the Atlantic by the Mississippi River and its smaller offspring which spread its gifts from New Orleans east to Texas and west to Mississippi. Five miles from shore, the water was clear as beer.
As they crossed the bridge to Galveston Island, they could see the Fort Worth. It was a littoral combat ship, built for shallow waters. To Kurt’s untrained eye, it looked like a life-size token from the Battleship board game, the one that took three pegs to sink.
They crossed the bridge to Pelican Island, dropped the bikes, and started waving white t-shirts. A light flashed from the ship, Morse code, though Kurt couldn’t read it. A moment later, the away boat – an inflatable motormount – sped towards them across a calm sea. Four sailors were aboard. As two jumped out, Kurt could see they were armed with 9mm Beretta M9 pistols, but had not drawn them yet. The two who stayed on the boat also had M4 carbines, held high.
The sailor closest to them said, “Who was the first President of the United States?”
“Under our Constitution, or before then?” said Kurt.
The sailor rested his hand on his holster. “The regular answer, not the smart-ass answer.”
“George Washington.”
“OK,” the sailor said. Let the little lady answer this one, please. How many states are there in the United States?
“Fifty-one,” she said.
“Which was the last one admitted?”
“Puerto Rico.”
The sailors relaxed. Then, the closest one said, “I’m sorry sir, but we can only take able-bodied survivors. We’ll send a medic out to give you a look, but we can’t take you aboard.”
Kurt said, “I’ll be able bodied by morning. Tell your doc that, and I’ll bet he’ll want to see me on board.”
The sailor squinted. “I don’t follow, sir.”
Kurt held out his left hand, and nodded to Sophie. She unfolded her Gerber blade and drew it across his palm. As Kurt held his hand up, the bleeding stopped in about ten seconds.
“You heal like one of them, but you’re not stupid or crazy. Yeah. I think the doc’ll want to see that.”
The two sailors helped Kurt and Sophie get aboard the boat, and they sped back to the Fort Worth.
* * *
Captain Nicole Rodriguez MD was a petite woman with dark brown eyes and straight black hair, cut short. Her glasses highlighted her Asian features; without them, people assumed she was from Central America instead of the Philippines.
She had qualified as a flight surgeon right after her internship, but had been pulled back into bio warfare research after the terrorist attack on Atlanta in 2028 that infected 20,000 people with yersinia pestis bacteria, which developed into pneumonic plague for half of them, killing a total of 5,000 over a six month period, mostly children and the elderly. Nicole had a keen love of science, but still held on to a few familiar superstitions. She was cautious when she heard about Kurt and his daughter, and didn’t shake hands when she met them.
When they agreed to let her take a blood sample, she had the nurse draw it.
“Did they explain to you why we’re taking survivors?”
Kurt shook his head.
“We can’t keep sailors who die and come back. Burying them at sea seemed cruel, so we take them to shore and go elsewhere to find replacements. If you decide to stay aboard, you will be expected to follow our protocols and contribute to work around the ship. You are not being pressed into Navy service. You would be treated as contractors. Make sense?”
“Yes. You’ve lost 40-something people?”
“No. That’s just the most we can carry, in addition to the staff. Most of you won’t work out, and will be dropped back at shore. The usual problems are fitness, intelligence, and work ethic. We can figure out all three pretty quickly. If you’ve got those traits, you’re useful. If you don’t, you’re not. We only have room for useful people.”
“What about kids?”
“We have three aboard right now who have been contracted, two under the supervision of their guardians, one solo. It’s an option we’re open to in wartime.”
“War? Who are we at war with?”
“We don’t know. But on during the 2034 Leonids, they released nanites across the atmosphere of Earth which were designed to bond to humans, and which activate upon death, repairing the body and keeping it in a low-functioning but high-healing state indefinitely.”
“Except for the Devils.”
“Right. For some, it doesn’t work well. We estimate 92% of people come back as Angels, 8% Devils. We don’t know why.”
“Why didn’t the government tell us this?”
“We didn’t know until recently, and we still don’t know what the purpose is, or how to fix it. Dealing with all the walking dead used a lot of our resources, and as you know, it crippled our economy and infrastructure. We figure it’s a wounding strategy.”
“What’s that?”
“Shoot a guy dead, and that’s that. But wound him, and two other guys have to help him. With one bullet, you’ve removed three guys from the battle. It’s resource starvation, weakening the enemy before the big attack.”
“And when’s that going to be?”
“If our data are correct, any day now. We crossed the tipping point a week ago. Most civilians are out of ammunition, no one’s been born in three years, and no one’s died. Normally, we lose 1% of the population each year, and gain a little more than that. But since the Leonids, we’ve only lost people without replacements. Add to that the 2% we already had in prison, the panic and mass killings of the first few months, and the prolonged high death rate due to loss of infrastructure and medical care, and we’ve effectively been through 10 Civil Wars, back to back. With our communications and distribution networks crippled, the ancient Greeks could show up off the coast of South Carolina in triremes and take half the East Coast.”
“But ancient Greeks probably didn’t create targeted nanite clouds.”
“No,” she said. “I’m afraid that by the time we find out who did this to us, there won’t be anything we can do about it. We’re half
blind, half deaf, and starving, and the fight hasn’t even started yet.”
“So, we need to prepare for war?”
“No. We need to prepare a doomsday weapon. We need to figure out who or what has done this, find a weakness, and cripple them in one strike. We cannot win in a stand-up fight against beings of this technological sophistication. We’re the natives, and they’re the colonists. We need to make staying here so expensive that moving on to another world, even light years away, is more appealing than staying. We need a terror weapon.”
“Maybe that’s where you come in,” she said. “I’ve been hoping to find a mutation in the gene pool, someone who didn't respond like everyone else, and whose differences can help me understand how the nanites work. Come back this evening, after we’ve done the analysis. And don’t talk to the other evacuees about what we’ve discussed. We don’t know how they would react. They might be jealous, and make things difficult for you.”
“How do you know I won’t just tell them?”
“You just fought your way across 300 miles of Texas to give your daughter a better chance. I don’t think you’ll jeopardize that for a few social points. If I’ve misjudged you, and you do something that puts my mission at risk, I will have you and your daughter thrown in the brig, and every other non-com troublemaker taken back to shore and left without so much as a C-ration and a pair of disposable swim trunks.”
She called the ensign, who escorted Kurt and Sophie to their quarters.
* * *
A man stood before their empty, neat bunks. “So, you’re the last two.”
“Hi. I’m Kurt, and this is my daughter, Sophie.” His outstretched hand was not taken.
“I was expecting two friends.”
“I see. Can’t say I’m sorry.”
“No. You can’t.” He stepped aside.
Sophie took the top bunk. Each bed had clean sheets, one pillow, a thin blanket and a plastic box with a light blue or pink cross on it. Sophie opened hers, the light blue one. It contained bandages, shaving cream, three disposable razors, nail clippers, flossing picks, and a dozen other items. Kurt opened his, and noticed the neatly-stacked sanitary napkins. They switched boxes.
After meeting some of the friendlier evacuees, they learned there were not 41 of them aboard, as Sophie had heard on the first broadcast she caught. The original message was for 60. They had accepted 15, including Kurt and Sophie. The others were taken back to shore, some calmly, some in handcuffs. The most common cause for rejection: Mental instability.
“What’d they tell you, after they took your blood?” a middle-aged woman asked.
“Not much. Just, be useful or we’ll throw you in the brig. I’m Kurt.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Phoebe. Yeah, that’s what they told me, too. I’ve been here three days, though, and they haven’t asked me to do anything useful. Just, stay out of the way.”
“How do you pass the time?”
“We’ve got cards and poker chips, but the serious players like Paul,” she gestured to the unfriendly man, “bet their supplies instead. Some draw or write. Surprising how much paper there is on this ship; they let us use the scraps from the dot matrix printouts.”
“Dot matrix? You mean, impact printers?”
“Yeah, they still use those in the Navy. I think it’s for multiple-copy forms. Mostly navigation reports, weather warnings, that sort of thing. At least, those are the scraps they give us.”
There was an announcement over the intercom, and the ship started moving.
“Well, I guess you really are the last two.”
Paul cursed, then glared at Kurt.
* * *
The USS Fort Worth was built for shallow water, capable of sailing up rivers in pursuit of their missions. In fact, it had been tested in the great lakes near Wisconsin, not the North Atlantic.
The sleek grey ship sailed east, seeking the mouth of the Mississippi.
* * *
The Ensign interrupted their friendly Texas Hold ‘Em game and asked Kurt and Sophie to accompany him to medical. Kurt looked to Phoebe, who said, “You’re the first to be asked back.”
From the serious poker table, Paul stared.
* * *
“Sophie, I’d like you to sit up on this table, please.”
“What’s going on?” said Kurt.
“I think you know,” said Nicole. She pushed up one of Sophie’s eye lids and shined a pen light. “Follow my finger, please.” She moved it left and right, up and down, then checked the other eye.
“Ensign, can you excuse us, please?”
Surprised, he left.
Nicole turned a monitor on and swiveled it towards them.
“You have non-human DNA, sweetie. Not a lot, but it doesn’t take a lot to make a big change. I can see it in your eyes, of course, and I know your father has, too. When did the change start to occur?”
“I noticed a couple of days ago,” said Kurt. “There was also a change in behavior, though I’m not sure how much of that is just becoming a teenager. She’s become... more aggressive.”
Sophie just watched them talk.
“Have you experienced any changes?”
“We both heal very quickly. I guess that started about the same time.”
“Right. Well, you don’t have any non-human DNA, so I already knew the answer to that, but I wanted to be sure.”
“Here’s what we know, so far. The nanites bond to each person, and become integrated into their bodies, copying the DNA so they won’t be rejected by the body. Somehow, Sophie’s nanites got exposed to additional DNA during that bonding procedure. What I can’t explain is, why that only happened recently. She was exposed to the nanites three years ago, like everyone else. Their adaptive process should have been fixed within a week. Yet from what I can tell, your nanites – both of you – are recent adoptees. And, here’s the really strange part,” she said, zooming the screen in on a graphic neither Kurt nor Sophie understood.
“Both of you have nanites that copied DNA from a direct blood relative – but not you, Sophie, nor you, Kurt. Someone else. Sophie, do you have any brothers or sisters who have died?”
Sophie gasped. “My older sister, Kristine, died the same year as the meteor shower. We visited her at the cemetery just before our trip down here. During our visit, she... well, she kind of blessed us. She was aware, though not fully there. She touched Dad and I at the same time, and ran her thumb across our foreheads. She’d... never done anything like that before.”
“I see. Did anything happen around that time that might have sparked her into acting differently?”
“Well, I snuck out to bring her a walkie talkie.” She looked at her dad, and he nodded with a knowing grin. “I just wanted to talk to her, even if she couldn’t talk back.” Tears dripped as she continued. “I heard her key the mic on, once. At least, I think it was her.” She looked at her father.
“I listened in once, but I never keyed my mic. If you got a broadcast signal, it was from her.”
Nicole’s eyes lit up. “That’s it. That explains everything. These nanites could respond to certain radio frequencies. Whatever frequency your walkie talkies were set to activated them somehow, at least within the close range of a handheld transmitter.”
“Ensign!” He came inside. “Get the XO. His ears only.”
* * *
Commander Eric Bozek was a trim man in his mid-40s, congenial but serious.
“They respond to certain radio frequencies. These things are going to be activated, to do something, remotely.”
“Like what?”
“Still working on that. Different frequencies may activate different functions. What was your walkie-talkie set to, Sophie?”
“Walkie-talkie?” said the Commander.
“Channel C. Sorry, I don’t know what frequency that is.”
“Probably something within the 27 megahertz range, the citizens band,” the Commander said to Sophie. “I was a Radio Shack geek when I was your a
ge.”
Sophie smiled.
“Can we test different frequencies without... well... activating these two? I don’t need two civvies exploding or turning into monsters on my ship.” He winked at Sophie, but his voice resonated with genuine concern.
“If we can line the test chamber with something that blocks radio waves, they should be fine.”
“Easy. We can practically make a Faraday cage with of some aluminum foil and duct tape.”
“It’s always duct tape, isn’t it?” said Nicole.
“Binds the universe together,” said the Commander, tenting his fingers. “I’ll report to the CO. Good work. Keep me apprised. And,” he said, turning to Kurt and Sophie, “keep this under your foil hats, for now.”
Sophie looked confused. Kurt raised a finger to his lips, and she got it.
Chapter 14: Hide until You Hear English
Two hours later, Nicole had her test box. It looked like a fish tank with aluminum foil on the inside and a small trap door with wires going into it on top. Two parabolic mics pointed at it from opposite sides.
“I need fresh samples,” she said, and filled two test tubes with blood. “Now I need you to leave the room.” Kurt and Sophie waited outside.
Opening the lid to the test chamber, she placed the first two samples into a rack at the bottom, then closed the lid with a half-turn of the handle.
Sliding her chair to the keyboard, she tapped a command and ran the test. No radio waves escaped the chamber. Good.
Next, she ran a series of radio pulses, each sustained for ten seconds, in the 27 kHz range.
Then she adjusted the microprobe which had been inserted into each sample, locking onto a patch of blood cells in each, and watching on a split screen. The nanites, normally transparent, shone violet-white in the ultraviolet light of the text box. They were busy, locking into two-nanite hybrids. Once assembled, they quickly repaired every damaged cell they touched.
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