Terminus o-2

by Adam Baker

  She jacked the microphone and pressed Transmit.

  ‘Rescue to Ridgeway, do you copy, over?’

  It took fifteen minutes to raise a reply.

  The Chief, shouting through whistling static.

  ‘Go ahead, Rescue.’

  ‘This is Donahue.’

  ‘Where’s Captain Nariko?’

  ‘Dead, Sir.’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘The Captain is dead.’

  ‘What about Ekks?’

  ‘We found him.’

  ‘What is his condition?’

  ‘Unconscious. He’s sick, heavily irradiated, but he’s breathing.’

  ‘Has he spoken? Has he talked?’

  ‘No, sir. Completely unresponsive.’

  ‘What’s the status of his team? Are there any other survivors?’

  ‘They’re dead.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘They didn’t survive the bomb. But we have their papers, their data.’

  ‘Good job, Donahue. Tell your people. Outstanding work. The site is secure?’

  ‘Negative. We’re losing ground. We’re drawing heavy heat down here. Getting worse by the minute. There are still plenty of infected people among the ruins, messed up but moving. They’ve sniffed us out, big time. We’re pretty much overrun. We need backup, anything you got. Guns, grenades, RPGs. We’ve got a serious fight on our hands.’

  ‘I’ll put a couple of men on the helicopter. They will provide cover fire during extraction. But you must protect Ekks until we can reach you. Everything in your power, yes?’

  ‘We need a ride out of here asap, Sir. We need immediate evac.’

  ‘The helicopter is scouting for a new base. It’s out of radio range. We can’t reach the pilot.’

  ‘I don’t mean to speak out of line, sir, but ten hours from now we’ll probably be dead.’

  ‘Problems of our own, Donahue. Hundreds of infected bastards massing outside the perimeter.’

  ‘Don’t forget us, Chief. Don’t leave us stranded.’

  ‘I’ll come myself. And like I said, I’ll bring a couple of guys with AR-15s. We’ll take care of you.’

  ‘Copy that.’

  ‘Good luck, Donahue. You are in our prayers.’

  43

  Sicknote stood at the plant room door. He caressed the wood grain. He rested his hand on the panelling and closed his eyes, like he was trying to commune with the creatures milling in the ticket hall.

  Tombes crouched by the wall. He watched through half-closed eyes as Sicknote stroked blistered varnish.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  Sicknote jumped back.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then get away from the damned door.’

  Sicknote shrugged and gave a dreamy smile. He wandered to the back of the room. He sat beside Ekks and drew patterns in the dust with his finger.

  Tombes stood and checked the rack pinning the door closed. He shook it. Heavy iron. Solid. Hadn’t moved an inch.

  He checked the door. Sturdy. No cracks. Rusted strap hinges holding firm.

  Lupe joined him. She yawned and stretched.

  ‘No sound from our guests outside,’ she said. ‘I guess they’re automatons. Just kind of shut down if they don’t have an obvious target. Go dormant. Soon as they catch a scent, they perk up and snap into action.’

  ‘They don’t sleep. I know that much.’

  ‘Best if we keep our voices down. Don’t remind them we are here. Maybe they’ll leave us alone. Get bored and head back to the surface.’

  ‘You honestly believe that?’ asked Tombes.

  ‘Grasping at straws. We could encourage them to leave, I guess. Maybe cut power to the ticket hall, put out the lights for a while. Let them stumble around in the dark.’

  ‘They like the dark.’

  ‘What’s the deal with you and Sicknote?’ asked Lupe.

  ‘I don’t like the way he keeps heading for the door. Can’t take his eyes off it. He’s mesmerised. How long has he been off his meds?’

  ‘A while.’

  ‘Look in his eyes,’ said Tombes. ‘Batshit. Pure madness. He’s walking around nice enough, but there are bombs going off in his head. He’ll hurt someone, given a chance.’

  ‘Think he wants to open the door? Let those bastards inside?’

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me. Kind of crazy thing he might do. He’s going to die. Might want to take the rest of us with him. Like Galloway.’

  ‘You want to tie him up?’ asked Lupe. ‘Lash him to a water pipe?’

  ‘What else can we do with the guy? They won’t let him on the chopper, that’s for sure. If he gets back to Ridgeway, the Chief will give the order. And if his men hesitate to pull the trigger, he’ll do it himself.’

  ‘He needs a shrink, not a prison cell. Sure as shit deserves to get out of this dungeon.’

  ‘I saw him on TV. He doesn’t deserve a damned thing.’

  Cloke sat cross-legged in the corner of the room. He thumbed through the battered notebook. He flipped pages patched with tape, studied the dense biro scrawl. He rubbed his eyes. He tried to make sense of letters and symbols.

  He lay a crumpled sheet of paper across his knee and began to make notes with the stub of a pencil.

  Lupe sat cross-legged beside him.

  ‘So what is it?’ She gestured to the notebook. ‘The letters. What do they mean?’

  ‘I have no idea. Ekks had this book in his hands when we found him. Gripping it tight. Must be significant. But look at it. Line after line, page after page. What the hell is it? An insanely long equation? Some kind of epic chemical formula? The whole notebook. Letters and little hieroglyphs. Triangles, circles, diamonds. Symbol clusters. Recurring patterns. The slashes seem to indicate word breaks. If I had to make a guess, I would say we are looking at some sort of crude substitution code.’

  ‘Can you crack it?’

  ‘I can try. It’s hardly my area of expertise. Shit, I can barely finish a crossword. Haven’t got the mindset. Sudoku give me a nose bleed. But if this is a classic substitution code we should be able to discern some obvious patterns. ‘E’ is the most frequently used letter in the English language. ‘O’ runs pretty close. Single-letter words will be either ‘A’ or ‘I’. Regular groupings might imply sound-clusters like ‘TH’ or ‘ING’. Nail those recurring symbols, and you could start to turn this gibberish back to actual words.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Guess I could take a section of text and work out the placement. But Ekks is a smart guy. I doubt he would create such a simple code, something so easy to decipher. It’ll be more complicated than that. There will be an additional step. Maybe some kind of weird algorithm. A shifting transposition. A key, that only he can provide.’

  ‘So he’s the only one who knows what this shit means?’

  ‘If we had a big-ass computer and the right software we could probably crack the code without his help. Get a couple of chess grandmasters on the case. But we don’t have those kind of resources any more. If we can’t figure out the code with pen and paper, his research will die with him.’

  ‘But why would he do that?’ asked Lupe. ‘Encrypt his notes? What was he afraid of?’

  Cloke shrugged.

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want to be abandoned down here in the tunnels. He wanted to be indispensable. He made sure the documentation was unreadable without his help. A way of ensuring his ass got flown out of here in one piece.’

  ‘The man is a fraud. Hundred bucks says there is no code. Those letters? Those symbols? A sick joke. Page after page of bullshit.’

  ‘We can’t be sure.’

  ‘That book is pure voodoo. A prop. An illusion. Might as well be a book of spells and incantations. He has no secret knowledge. He doesn’t know anything about this virus. Doctor of Lies. Doctor of Nothing. Happily knife the fucker.’

  ‘The man is an accomplished neurosurgeon. When he turned up at medical conferences he got mobbed like a
rock star.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean a damn thing.’

  ‘A Saudi prince had a stroke a couple of years back. A young guy. Champion polo player. A maid found him face down on the marble floor of his penthouse bathroom. They summoned Ekks, sent a private jet to ferry him to the Emirates. Ekks declined to leave New York, said he had too many patients in need of care. They offered him millions. The State Department pressured the hospital board. But he still said no. So they loaded that prince on a Gulfstream in Dubai and flew him to Manhattan. They took over an entire floor of Bellevue. Wouldn’t trust anyone else to work on their boy.’

  ‘Like I said. The guy’s a control freak.’

  ‘You’ve barely spoken to the man.’

  ‘I’ve looked into his eyes. One glance. That’s all it took. He knew me, and I knew him. I’m a connoisseur of evil. On the streets, in the yard. I’ve met monsters, and this guy is off the scale. All kinds of horrors crowding his brain. Sure he never acted on his fantasies. Always kept a perfect facade. Smiled and laughed at cocktail parties, turned up at every charity fundraiser with a speech and a big-ass cheque. All round nice guy. But at night, when the lights are out, you can bet demons dance behind his eyes. You think Sicknote is trouble? You think those fucks massing outside the door are a problem? This guy is a hundred times worse.’

  44

  Lupe sat with her back to the wall. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the brickwork. Faint snore.

  Cloke watched her sleep. A subtle transformation. Her jaw-jutting aggression slowly softened. Hard years melted away and she was a girl once more.

  He tore tape and flapped open the plastic bag. Jumbled documents. Photographs, data, suicide notes blotted with tears.

  He pulled out a handwritten sheet of paper and started to read.

  Harold Donner

  Bellevue Dept of Neurosurgery

  I killed a man. I, along with my colleagues, participated in murder. We took a healthy person. We infected him, watched him suffer and succumb, then dissected his body. It was an extrajudicial killing. Those of us involved took refuge in circumlocutory language. We called it ‘extreme therapeutic measures’. We discussed ‘the procedure’. But it was murder, plain and simple. I’m not proud of what I did. I have no doubt it was an absolute betrayal of the Hippocratic Oath.

  It had to be done.

  We were desperate to find an antidote to this terrible disease. But to fully understand the pathology of the virus, we would need to study its progress from the moment of infection, examine samples of bone marrow and cerebrospinal fluid, watch replicating cells populate a bloodstream and fuse with a central nervous system.

  It would cost a life.

  A terrible choice. Ekks was adamant each member of our team should play a role. Three doctors, three nurses. We would share responsibility. None of us would shoulder the burden alone.

  We could have refused, kept our integrity, gone to our graves morally intact. But that would have been an indulgence.

  It was my job to select the test subject.

  The day we fled Bellevue hospital, we were accompanied by four prisoners from the Special Management Control Unit. I suspect the orderlies charged with keeping them secure would have happily left them to starve in their cells or get ripped apart by prowlers. But Ekks insisted they travel with us.

  Looking back, he already had a plan.

  We ran to the 23rd Street Station. We seized a train and rode south to Fenwick Street. We pitched camp.

  Ekks outlined his proposal. He wanted to observe the moment of infection, second by second.

  Weeks earlier, the Centre for Disease Control had supplied our team with a sample of the virus in its purest form. It arrived under military escort. A white biocontainment box with a strange half-skull symbol on the lid, as if someone hurriedly tried to scribble a warning glyph:

  Inside the box was a gloved hand. The glove looked like it had been cut from a cosmonaut pressure suit. White canvas, cooling capillaries, dimpled rubber palm-grip. Splintered bone and dried flesh protruded from the gauntlet. There was a blue anodised lock-ring at the wrist. Cyrillic lettering and part numbers etched into the titanium.

  Each outbreak of this disease had been associated with Russian space debris. Months ago, a fuel tank re-entered the atmosphere and crashed to earth in forest north of Spokane. The following weeks saw further starfalls over northern Europe and the Arctic Circle. Each impact was followed by the outbreak of a lethal haemorrhagic pathogen designated Mystery Pathogen 01, aka EmPath.

  I asked Ekks about the glove. Was it part of some secret military space programme? Had a Soyuz capsule fallen to earth?

  He smiled. He said the gloved hand represented the original, most lethal strain of the virus.

  He wanted to observe the virus colonise a human body. He wanted to see it pervade the blood stream, infiltrate tissue, bore into the spinal column and brain stem. Could the initial colonisation be blocked by antineoplastic agents? If it were treated like any other malignancy, attacked in the early stages using anti-cancer drugs such as Thioguanine or Methotrexate, could it be stopped?

  It was a problem that dogged us during our time sequestered in Bellevue. We had unlimited access to infected subjects snatched off the street. But they were too far gone. Advanced cases. The process of infection, the manner in which the virus first fused with its host, remained a mystery.

  Ekks put it to a vote. He wouldn’t undertake the procedure unless we gave unanimous consent.

  We talked it over. I trusted Ekks. I trusted his judgement. His expertise far exceeded my own. In all the years I have know him, followed his work at Bellevue, he has always acted with the highest integrity. He had been a second father, a guiding hand. So when he sequestered the medical team in one of the subway carriages and laid out his plan, I had no choice but to raise my hand in assent.

  It seems ridiculous to spend my last minutes on earth writing this account of our time below ground. We are sealed in a tunnel. Our bodies will never be found. We will lie here for ever, entombed like the pharaohs.

  Why should a single death matter? The execution of a recidivist piece of garbage, a valueless fleck of human junk. A man who wasted his entire life, spread misery, achieved nothing. Why care? Every survivor on this continent has witnessed unimaginable slaughter, experienced terrible grief. The world has become an abattoir. New York itself is burning above our heads. The entire city levelled by a nuclear firestorm. Thousands killed. Our team, down here in these tunnels, conspired to take a single life. A trivial deed, by comparison. An insignificant man, a vicious criminal. Is it absurd that this act torments me? That I can’t scrub away the disgusting taint of my own complicity?

  ‘Choose,’ Ekks told me. ‘We will all carry the burden. Like pallbearers, we will each shoulder a fraction of the load. Your duty is to choose. We have four prisoners, four worthless criminals. Decide. Who will be the sacrifice? Who must give his life?’

  It haunts me. The moment I stood in front of the captives, pointed a finger and said ‘Him’.

  Ekks stirred. He shifted his head.

  Cloke checked the man’s pulse, his breathing.

  He leaned close and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Can you hear me? Doctor Ekks? Can you hear me?’

  No response.

  Cloke poured a capful of water into the man’s mouth. Reflex swallow.

  ‘Give me a sign. Blink, or move your fingers, if you can hear my voice.’

  No reaction.

  Cloke watched him awhile, then resumed reading the sheaf of notes.

  The presidential order arrived nine days before the bomb dropped. Our last direct contact with the outside world.

  We pleaded for rescue time and again, but help never came. One by one, all radio contacts fell silent. Every army unit that might have conceivably come to our aid had been surrounded, overrun, torn apart.

  It added new urgency to our work. The realisation our lives had no value unless we made significant progress
in our research.

  We were marooned with no hope of fighting our way to safety. Then we received a terse radio message. A chopper would land that afternoon. It had been dispatched from an airfield upstate. It would carry fresh orders.

  A brief and perilous touchdown at the junction of Lafayette and Canal. Chief Jefferson and a couple of NYPD SWAT. It must have been a nightmare journey. A quarter-mile dash down the street, ducking between wrecked cars, advancing cover/fire as infected creatures stumbled out of doorways to meet them.

  The Fenwick entrance gate was so rusted it took us ten minutes to hammer the padlock loose. Jefferson and his men took position at the mouth of the alley while we worked. They slapped a fresh mag into his rifle and methodically took down a shambling mob of infected headed their way.

  We released the gate. Jefferson and his escort ran down the steps to the safety of the station. We sealed the entrance behind them.

  The Chief brought a presidential order from the continuity government based at NORAD. As soon as he reached the ticket hall he took the envelope from his jacket pocket and presented it to Doctor Ekks.

  Ekks tore open the envelope and read the note.

  ‘You understand the situation?’ asked the Chief. ‘We haven’t got the manpower or equipment to shift your entire team. You folks are stuck here for the duration. It’s chaos out there. Anarchy. It’s down to you guys now. Continue your work as long as you can.’

  Ekks nodded.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You’ll do what needs to be done?’

  ‘Count on it.’

  The cops glanced around. They checked out our camp. Six medical staff. Twelve guards. Boxes and bunks. Cold, damp subterranean squalor.

  We offered them food. They declined. Their chopper was circling Manhattan. It was a small vehicle, limited fuel capacity. A Bell JetRanger commandeered from a Pittsburgh TV station.

  There would be room aboard the helicopter for one additional man.

  ‘Not you, doc. You’ve got work to do.’

  We conferred. Lawson, the youngest member of the 101st platoon, drew the most votes. He shook hands and said goodbye. We gave him letters to pass to our relatives, if they could be found.