by Mark Wandrey
“Then return to the RHIB and keep an eye out. The rest of you, let’s go to the station.” She gestured and the rest all headed down the trail. Grange activated her own radio link with the ship. “Boutwell, this is Grange.”
“Boutwell here, Captain,” came Howell’s comforting voice immediately. She was regretting not sending the 40-year-old senior noncom. He’d probably done shit like this before. She quickly described what they’d found.
“Sounds like government agents,” he said, immediately echoing what she’d thought.
“But why would they fire on a US Coast Guard ship?” she asked. “It’s not like the big white ship with the red slash is hard to mistake.”
“Not to mention the country is in the middle of its worst disaster ever.”
“Is it?” Grange said aloud. “I mean, now I’m wondering. We haven’t heard word one from Washington. All the satcoms are down, and no one is talking.” She looked around at the woods on either side of the trail. The tire tracks of the Humvees coming in were obvious. The ground was damp, and any others would have shown up easily. They’d come in only a short time ago. Someone had known they were coming. But why open fire on them? “Howell, keep a close eye on radar. Don’t let anything sneak up on us. Have fire control manned 24/7. Oh, and unship the .50 calibers and find someone who can use them.”
“You’re starting to worry me, Captain.”
“I’m worrying myself. We’ll report back when we get to the Coast Guard station. Grange out.”
They moved carefully, staying to the edge of the trail to make use of cover from the trees. The sun was high but not visible through the clouds. A light rain began to fall, a common thing in this area. It was quite a bit cooler than San Diego, and Grange found herself missing the warmer climate now that it was peeing on her.
As they approached the edge of the hill that blocked the view of the station, they slowed and began moving forward to cover each other. The buildings came into view; they were all smoking ruins.
Grange had the group spread out and search in teams of two. They didn’t find any bodies or materiel. The buildings around the headlands were intact, but also stripped. The only thing still there was the armory, and it was locked. Effectively a big concrete bank vault, someone had taken an acetylene torch to it, a crowbar, and who knows what else, but had been unable to get into it. The military built armories well, since they’d hold everything up to 25mm ammo for their Bushmaster, though not the bigger 76mm. Only the station commander and the armorer would have the combination.
“Looks like maybe our people took the boats and evaced. They might’ve taken all the small arms; I can’t be sure.” She looked around as Howell reported that there’d been no other ships moving in the area. Something about the situation made a shiver run up her spine. “No sign of military personnel, civilians, or infected.” Nearby one of her men was coming out of a maintenance building. She looked at him and he shook his head. Nothing. “Okay,” she said, finally. “We’re returning to the ship,” she said.
A few minutes later she gathered the team up and headed back to Boutwell, all the while feeling like someone, or something, was watching her.
* * *
The Flotilla, 150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
Dr. Lisha Breda chewed her gum and watched Grant Porter pound on the plexiglass door. He was like a metronome. In fact, she’d timed his beating. It was within one or two minor deviations of perfect. Exactly 2.46 hertz, which matched the former researcher’s brain frequency. She’d been running a record of his brain frequency for days now. Nine days, to be precise. The sensors had been installed in his cerebellum at the same time she’d removed a significant part of his brain for examination. A surgery that should have left him unable to live.
Thump, thump, thump…on and on it went. She leaned over the computer and scrolled through the data. At installation, the readings had all but flat-lined, as she’d expected. The biopsy (more like a mutilation) removed parts of his brain which governed how his body worked. She’d expected a coma, followed closely by organ shutdown. Yet, ten minutes after she’d closed the incision and placed the brain samples into containment, his brain…rebooted.
“Rebooted.” She chuckled in the quiet lab. It was a ridiculous term to use in relation to a human brain. Was Grant human anymore? She looked at the data from nine days ago. Flat-line. No mental activity for ten minutes. To a human brain, ten minutes was forever. Nothing, then blip, everything started up again, but at exactly 2.46 hertz. That frequency hadn’t changed for nine days. The human brain didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a computer.
She examined the data again. The startup blip was a long one. Was it really a blip? She loaded an analysis package to examine the signal. It was recorded at an extremely high data rate. Lisha ran the data through the analysis software. The blip exploded.
“Holy shit,” she hissed. The tiny blip became an entire sonata. The saw tooth ridges of a massive mountain range that went on, and on, and on. She recorded it all in another file and started playing with it. An hour later she sighed and got up to stretch her legs. Thump, thump, thump. “Oh, knock it off,” she said. Porter’s eyes followed her every move as he pummeled.
“You okay, ma’am?” She looked over and saw Oz peeking in. Jon “Oz” Osborne was a member of the group who called themselves the Zombie Squad, three of the rig crew who’d brought guns and gear along, presumably for target practice, and were now eagerly awaiting the next outbreak so they could shoot more people. Still, they made her feel slightly more secure than scared, so she tolerated their fun and games.
“Fine, Oz,” she said. “I just need to stretch my legs.”
“No problem, ma’am, I’ll get Robert to escort you.”
“I’m not going to be ambushed by the undead while walking on the deck.” Oz frowned, hand on the huge handgun he wore on his hip, then nodded. “Keep an eye on Porter there, will you?” Oz looked at the former researcher pounding on the glass, his eyes narrowing.
“We should just pop it in the brainpan and drop it to the sharks.”
“Just keep an eye on him?” she asked, then walked out of her lab, through a door, and up a series of metal steps. At the top was another door, which opened into the bright noon sun. Sea spray filled her nostrils as she stepped out on the walkway which circled the platform and breathed in the clean air. The atmosphere cleaning system on the rig was world class—one of only a handful of BSL 4 facilities in the world which were not owned and operated by a government. Containment was crap now, because of all the shit they’d been through. One of her priorities was getting protocols back in place. She shook her head. There was no way she could do it with so few people.
She looked to the south where clouds were moving west and saw all the Navy ships moving with them. The small carrier was going with them, and it was moving pretty fast, she thought. Footsteps on the walkway made her jump as her mind instantly turned to zombies.
“Dr. Breda, I’m sorry,” a man said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oz, damn,” she laughed.
“Who did you think I was?”
Grant Porter. “Nobody,” she said, and shook her head. “What did you need? I thought you were watching the subject for me.”
“I know you were just humbling me. No human could break through two inches of solid Lucite.” She looked at him with an appraising glance.
“What do you do on the project?”
“Computer engineer,” he said.
“Right, I’d forgotten.”
“Not all gun-nuts are rednecks, ma’am.”
“Sorry,” she said.
He shrugged. “I noticed the data you left up on the screen.”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask what it is?”
“Sure. It’s a tiny segment of a brain scan from the subject you were watching.” The brows on the man knitted as he thought about that. He looked confused.
“How tiny?”
“It was quick
,” she said. “I’d have to say less than a hundredth of a second. I was using the analysis software because I had the crazy idea it was a computer program or something.” She laughed and shook her head again. “I must have gone loopy to think that.”
“You know what I did before I went into biomedical IT work?” he asked. She’d never even laid eyes on him until everything had gone crazy. Recruiters had hired him and sent him out to HAARP to do a job. The financial backer took care of all that sort of stuff, so she was free to do the project’s real job.
“I’m sorry, Oz, I have no idea.”
“It’s okay, I didn’t expect you to.” He took out a small tablet from his pocket, and she came closer to look, “I was into computer games.” She chuckled and so did he. “Big surprise, right? Well, the industry evolves almost faster than you can keep up. Especially an old guy like me. I’m 51 years old, and that’s an old fart for the gaming industry.” The tablet showed an image from a game. It was simple graphics—something like you might have seen in the 80’s. A primitive image of a zombie. That wasn’t surprising either.
“Oz, do you have a point?”
“Sorry, ma’am…”
“Stop apologizing, Oz, and get to the point.”
“Okay,” he said. “I couldn’t keep up with development back in the day. I was a good engineer, but the games were evolving faster than my skillset, so I went into biomedical IT. Basic data instead of games. Then, the old games got new again.”
“Sure,” she said, “retro.”
“Right,” he agreed. “Well, I dusted off some of the old zombie games I wrote and started selling them. I wasn’t making a lot, but it was enough to be worth my time between gigs. When this job came along, I was in the middle of rehabbing an old zombie maze game I wrote in 1990. That game used raster graphics. I was vectorizing the raster graphics so they could run on modern mobile devices, like this little tablet.” He pointed back to the lab. “The raster graphics data looked like the data you had on your screen. Well, not just like it, but it looked like the same format.”
Lisha felt a cold chill run down her spine, like someone had dropped an ice cube down the back of her shirt. What Oz had said sent a flood of ideas exploding in her brain. Connections and interrelated ideas collided, moved, and rejoined again in a flood. She was physically staggered, and Oz grabbed her to keep her from dropping to her knees.
“Doctor, are you okay?” She looked up at him in a daze. His eyes were wide in fear, obviously afraid she was having a seizure or something.
“Data,” she said, “but like an image file?” Oz shook his head, not understanding. “Bio encoding in the form of images.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I need to get to my workstation,” she said, coming back to herself and shaking him off.
“Should I call someone?”
“Yes,” she said, then shook her head. “No, I’ll take care of it.” She was nearly running as she threw the door open and used the stair’s handrails to half slide down. “Beth!” she yelled for her assistant as she threw open the door to her lab. The younger woman let out a surprised yelp as Lisha burst in. “Get someone from the DNA team in here, ASAP,” she instructed. “I also need one of the super-computer operators.”
“They’re all dead,” Beth said, looking shocked. “Remember?”
“Oh, right, well whoever is keeping things going, get them in here. We need to run some data. And find Oz, I need to design an interface.” Lisha grabbed a notebook from a table, tore off pages of someone’s notes to find a clean page, and wrote furiously, completely unmindful of what important research she might be tossing aside, just like she’d already forgotten that she’d just been talking to Oz. “We have a lot of work to do.” In the next room Grant Porter continued to beat on the plexiglass at a rate of 2.46 times per second.
* * *
Lt. Andrew Tobin squatted at the edge of the USS Gerald R. Ford’s flight deck and watched as the team of plane handlers examined the C-17 with an appraising eye. They’d been going over it for an hour now. They were obviously trying to come up with the best way to get the huge cargo transport off the deck.
A roar echoed across the waters as an F-18 catapulted into the sky off the Reagan in the near distance. Less than ten seconds, later another took off. The Carl Vinson and the George Washington’s decks were alive with helicopters taking off and turning east.
Andrew knew what was going on, thanks to Commander James Young. After they’d met in the hangar deck, the two had talked for a while. In a way, the pilots were in a similar situation. Andrew didn’t have an F-15 to fly, the fighter he’d spent thousands of hours flying. Commander Young’s craft of choice was stranded. What surprised Young was realizing they’d worked together in development. They were both in the same boat, so to speak.
Andrew went below decks. Time to look up an old friend. Andrew wasn’t supposed to know where he was, but scuttlebutt existed on every base, facility, and of course, ship. All you had to do was shut up and listen.
He ended up in a nondescript hallway at an equally nondescript door. He walked one watertight doorway past it and stopped to lean against the companionway and wait. It only took five minutes for him to show up.
“Wade Watts,” he said, almost startling the overweight computer geek out of his skin. “Imagine meeting you here!”
“Andrew!” Wade said, nearly dropping the armload of potato chips and soda cans. “W-what are you doing here?” He looked spooked.
“Wondering how you got access to the ship’s SCIF?”
“Skiff? What do you mean?”
“Wade, old buddy, don’t play coy with me. Who dragged you all the way from Monterrey, Mexico and got you out alive?”
“You did, of course.” Andrew grabbed a bag of corn chips, tore it open, and popped a couple in his mouth. “W-what do you want, Andrew.”
“Lieutenant Tobin,” Andrew corrected him. “If you’re going to work for the military, you need to know these kinds of things.” Wade looked confused and a little insulted. “And you know perfectly well what a SCIF is, since that’s your new hangout. Got some nice computers in there?”
“Yeah,” Wade said, his eyes betraying his excitement, “the Ford is new, and they had a lot of plans…” he tapered off and looked around. “What do you want, Lieutenant Tobin?”
“To know what you’re up to in there.”
“I can’t tell you that!” he whined.
“Yes, you can.” Wade shook his head, but Andrew continued. “If Chis and I hadn’t gotten you out of Monterrey, you’d be dead a dozen times over.”
“I helped,” Wade said, still whining. Andrew stared him in the eye, and the overweight geek broke eye contact.
“I’m not asking to get in there,” Andrew said, tipping his head toward the nondescript hatch a short distance away, “just what you are up to?”
Wade looked at Andrew, then at the closed hatch, and thought. Andrew could see him weighing options. “I’m trying to break the comms shutdown.” Andrew’s jaw dropped. That was an option he hadn’t thought about.
“That was some government press suppression program gone wrong, right?”
“No,” Wade said, lowering his voice so Andrew had to lean in close. “This was on purpose. It’s a sophisticated virus. Makes the Stuxnet virus look like Tinker Toys. It was written by someone—I don’t know who—and released into all the computers, everywhere. It just sat around, a line of code here, a line of code there, until someone triggered it. We think it was the president’s decision to activate the internet suppression program, which was legit and meant to stop private communications. Only they got much more than they’d bargained for. Not just the country, the world. There isn’t a cell phone or telephone that’s computer-controlled on the planet that’s working, probably.” Wade sighed. “This thing is insane. It’s also responding to our attempts to stop it.”
“You’re talking like it’s alive,” Andrew said.
“I think
it is.”
Andrew stared at him. “That’s nuts. You mean like Hal 9000, or something?”
“No, not a computer program, a worldwide program.”
“Who could do that? Iranians?” Andrew asked, laughing a little.
“Same ones who turned lose an alien zombie virus on the planet.” Andrew stopped laughing. “Yeah.” More silence before Wade continued. “Look, I need to get back in there. We’re getting close.”
“You can stop the virus?”
“No.” Wade laughed this time. “I don’t know if that’s possible. We’ve figured out a way to go around it. GPS is still working—you know that?” Andrew thought about flying the C-17, then nodded. “Well, we’re still getting carrier signals from the military comms satellites. They’re up there and unaffected. They were designed not to accept groundside input without the right codes, so they weren’t susceptible. Some probably were, but the newest weren’t. We don’t know many, but we’re working on getting some gear set up on this side that can communicate. We’re having to program it all from scratch.” He shook his head. “I haven’t keyed in raw code since I was in college! None of the kids I’m working with have ever done it.”
“How long?”
“Probably a couple more days, if it works. Look, can I go now?” Andrew didn’t stop him as the other man pushed past and shambled down the hall. Alien virus, both biological and computer? God, were they being invaded? He stood there for quite some time, uncertain what to do.
* * *
Marine Colonel Tad Alinsky watched from the bridge of LCAC 20 as they rounded Point Loma. The Landing Craft, Air Cushioned was the USMC’s ultimate expression of rapid mobility. Fast, nimble, and able to project force beyond the horizon, they were fantastic. They were quick, but loud. A hundred yards to the left, on the end of the point, was New Point Loma Lighthouse. Around its base swarmed several dozen denizens. The LCAC always drew a crowd when it skimmed past a populated area, but usually it was beaches full of people waving and filming. These people were screaming and wading out into the water, and many of them were naked and covered in blood. They were infected, and they wanted to kill him.
