by Franks, JK
Chapter Eighteen
The morning broke clear and bright, the seagulls were already diving for morsels in the blue-green surf. So much has not changed, he thought, but…so much has. He had moved down here to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to escape. To escape a bad marriage, to escape a city that wasn’t home; now it had really become an escape in the truest sense of the word. The issues of the previous night were fading. It was a new day, and he was determined for it to be better.
“What’s the matter, Scott?
He reached up and gently touched the hand now resting on his shoulder.
“Nothing, G, just thinking about the past.”
“You mean the time before me?”
He laughed, “No, silly, nothing existed before you.”
She nodded approvingly. She had returned to the coast the day before after almost a week at another lab. Scott wasn’t sure if it was a Navy facility or one of the remaining Catalyst labs. All he knew was she was wearing herself out searching for a treatment for the pandemic. Her actual birthday was tomorrow, and she’d already let him know she would be working.
He sighed, “No, just thinking about how much luckier we are here than most parts of the world, and what happens if we have to leave? And what becomes of our country?
I’m not good as this, Gia, not meant to be a leader.”
“Sweetie, that is what makes you a good leader. You want action, you want to do, not just talk or delegate, but mostly because you see the bigger picture.”
She took a long sip of coffee and moved over to the rail of the ship, leaning against it for support. “I know you went with the team to get those new people.”
Oh, shit, he thought. She went on, “That was reckless and…well, you already know what I’m going to say. You did it anyway. Scott, you are the leader this community needs, hell, you’re probably the leader this country needs.” She looked down. “Just never forget I need you, too.”
He nodded, slightly chastised, but also amazed at this woman before him. He felt the ring in his pocket again, but the moment passed, and she was once again all business.
“I talked to Tahir and DJ. Went over his…” she paused, searching for the right word. “His hypothesis. You are right about him. He does have a brilliant mind, but…”
“But he is completely crazy on this one?” Scott asked hopefully.
A frown briefly crossed her face, “That’s just it, Scott. I think he’s on the right track. It fits in with way too much of what my team and the other labs have uncovered. We keep trying to pin down the virus, and yet, it always has moved on, changed, evolved….mutated.”
“Gia, how does this alter anything, your approach will still be the same, right?”
She shook her head, “If he is right, and I really do believe he is – we will never develop a truly effective treatment for that A-side virus. It’s a lost cause. We must go after the Archaea. I have one lab that works exclusively on that. I may need to go there to see what progress they’ve made.”
She let out a sigh that seemed filled with regret. “We don’t really understand the Archaea domain yet. Much of it is still very alien to us. The one thing we do now know is that it uses viruses to carry out much of its dirty work. Adapting and modifying life for extreme conditions.”
“Yeah, that’s what Tahir said. So, the virus is more like a tool for the Archaea. Just another way of getting the genetic coding into a host body.”
She nodded and watched as one of the morning seabirds circled overhead. “That is why the mashup is so crude from a design standpoint but also so effective as a killing machine. If this had been something natural, it wouldn’t be killing off so many of the hosts.”
“If it had been natural, it would have also taken hundreds of thousands of years to develop…right?”
“Yes, the changes would have likely been more gradual. I like Tahir’s thoughts that perhaps the genetic payload was not set, and that’s why it is firing everything, but I am not so sure he is correct on that.”
“Gia, are you going to be able to stop this thing?”
“I have to, Scott.”
She said the words with such determination that he believed her, but he also detected something else in her voice. Hopelessness, he thought. He reached for her hand. He wanted to give her hope, he wanted her to know better days awaited them both.
She pulled back slightly from his touch, “Scott, you need to get this ship ready to move. Even if we are right, no way I see us having a treatment before the pandemic gets too close. I’ll talk to Garret as well, we’ll need to move the Navy lab farther offshore.”
Scott nodded glumly, “Where can we go, we have to have food and fuel. Can’t get that out on the open sea. Where can we find safe harbor?”
“Anywhere but here, anywhere but America, at least until this thing dies out. Right now, just buy me some time, so I can keep working somewhere safe. We are already making plans to move the three other labs off shore. Of those I am the most remote, the safest for now— so no immediate problem, but eventually, even the Bataan will be too close.”
“Probably best, if the disease doesn’t get us, I am afraid our new president might.”
Gia sat the cup down on the rail and looked at him quizzically.
“Sorry, it’s nothing you need to worry about, just something Bobby mentioned.” He had not told her about Jack’s reports of NSF at the farms nor any of the Simpsons’ details on the brutality. He really didn’t want her thinking about the country’s other problems. He stalled, then relented, “Just seems like we may be in the early stages of another civil war. The president apparently has her agenda, and the former military, nor the American people, seem to be part of it.”
“What specifically did Bobby hear and from whom?”
“Just one of our contacts on the Patriot Network. You know, the amateur radio operators that pass along messages?”
Her look of concern was obvious. He continued, “Yeah, everything they have said has been accurate. I think this one, Sentinel, has a direct link into some of the military bases’ chain of command.”
Gia looked like she wanted to ask more, but she let it go and slipped her arm inside of his pulling him close. “We’re going to be ok, Scott.”
He was unsure if it was a statement or a question.
A bald head popped in the cabin door, then a much smaller head just below it. Bartos called, “Hey, Doc, can I borrow him for a few?”
She smiled, “Morning, Bartos, sure…he has served his purpose to me – he is dismissed.”
Bartos smacked him on the shoulder with a grin, “You dog, you.”
“I thought I saw Jacob with you.”
“He is…somewhere. You know how he likes to disappear. I think he could teach the Ghost a few tricks.”
Scott nodded, “I don’t think he likes me, seems to always vanish when I’m around. Bobby said he gets that way sometimes. Anyway, what’s up?”
“Making some progress on our special project, and me and the Navy guys have worked out a few new ways to make fuel.”
“No shit, really?”
They watched as Solo padded around a corner followed closely by Jacob. The boy kept pulling at the fierce dog’s tail, then running away as the dog playfully snapped his jaws at him. The psychopathic canine killer acted like a goofy puppy around the boy. Scott smiled at the scene; when those two were together was the happiest either ever seemed. Bobby obviously didn’t know the dog’s well-earned reputation, if so, he would have never let Jacob near him.
“Yeah, I’d like for you to come out and check it out when you can. Just running the numbers, and I have a problem. We are way short of one of the main things we need.”
Chapter Nineteen
Bartos’ plan for making fuel was two-fold. The first was making fuel from the many tanks of waste motor oil the county had. Every garage, fast-lube shop, and he knew many of the gas stations, had underground storage tanks for customers’ old motor oil. The process to convert t
his to diesel was straightforward. Heat it up, pump it through a series of filters and condensers and at the end, in theory, you had a workable diesel fuel.
The second solution was a bit more complex. That was to make diesel from crude oil. This was the raw unprocessed petroleum. They had one tanker car full of crude from an old abandoned train they had found after the CME blast. If the process to refine it could be found, additional sources of crude were located all around the Gulf Coast.
As Tahir and the Navy guys had said: to distill diesel from crude, you had to go through a lot more steps. Extreme heat and pressure were needed to separate, or ‘crack,’ the molecular bonds between different hydrocarbons. Chemicals like bauxite were added to speed this along. Then, the temperature had to be closely monitored to extract diesel and not gasoline which is what happened if it got too hot, or kerosene if it was too low. To be honest, you got some of these byproducts anyway. It was a natural part of the process, but Bartos’ total focus was to get fuel for the big ship.
The Navy was eager to help also, as most of their ships used diesel as well. Something in increasingly short supply for them. Of course, they also wanted him to make JP1 – jet fuel, or avgas, but that wasn’t possible with Bartos’ homebrew set-up.
“That thing is butt-ugly, Cajun.”
“Screw you, Scott,” the man said without pause. “What it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in performance.”
“Where in the hell did you learn a word like that?”
Bartos gave one of his evil grins, “What, ‘performance’? Your girlfriend taught it to me.”
The men were in a building in what was formerly Harris Springs’ mostly failed excuse of an industrial park, one of the few non-tourist industries in the area before the collapse of parts manufacturing for the shipbuilders in Pascagoula. “This is the main pressure vessel, Scott. Damn lucky to have found one this strong. See, the oil must be heated to very high temps, over 1000 degrees. That’s why we need the electricity from the dam, and why we’re so far from town. It really is a lot like cooking off mash to make alcohol…just a, well…a shit-load more dangerous.”
“How much diesel fuel do you think you can make?”
“Well,” he said, scratching his head, “this one is just the waste oil setup. I’m going to start with the few drums we already had recovered. Scoots tells me there’re probably 30,000 gallons of waste oil in nearby tanks. We’ll lose a lot of that during the process, but I’m guessing 10,000 gallons. From there, we can venture out farther to collect more, if it all works, that is.”
“How much do the tanks on the Goddess hold?”
“A shit-load, nearly 4000 tons of fuel, total.”
“Damn, that seems like a lot, Bartos.”
The little bald man filed away at one of the welded metal joints. “Well, it is…and it isn’t. It’ll take us a long time to make that much, but the beast drinks it like water. She gets lousy mileage, man—only about fifty feet to the gallon if I read the charts correctly. Even so, with full tanks, that should be enough for nearly two weeks at sea.”
Scott went through the math in his head. “That’s over ten times the amount you can make with the used waste oil on hand.”
“I know, I know, Scott, but what are our other options? The good thing is the AG can run on ‘bunker’ fuel. I checked that out, it’s still diesel, but doesn’t have to be super clean or overly refined. I’m confident we can make that. And she still has some in her tanks. It also appears to be more stable than diesel, but still, we need more. I’m letting the Navy guys take lead on refining the crude. They mentioned possibly tapping into the SOR tanks over in Louisiana. Tahir is working with their engineers to try and get everything we’ll need to do that.”
“What the hell is the SOR?”
Bartos laughed, “Damn, college-boy, don’t you know nothing? The Strategic Oil Reserves, the nation’s emergency supply of crude oil.”
Scott nodded, that did ring a bell. “Don’t you mean the president’s?”
“Minor difference,” the man said as he inspected the joint. “Navy thinks they can take it, more power to them. It’s definitely an emergency situation, no idea what else they would be saving it for.”
“Fuck, fuck… Uh, uh, no. Forget it, man, I ain’t going near that shit.” DeVonte stepped off the yellow tractor leaving it idling. Two of the Navy divers waved for him to finish pulling up the basket of debris. A pale blue arm hung from the jumble of limbs, roots and old car tires. A human arm, maybe a child’s—or a girl’s.
Lt. Garret walked over to the basket. “Damn, that’s like the third one.”
Todd leaned in and moved some of the other material away from the corpse. DeVonte was asking if it was anyone they knew.
“No.” He let the arm drop. A dark outline of a cross tattoo was on the backside of one hand. “She was one of them.” They all knew who he meant, one of the Messengers.
“I don’t care, I am not hauling off no more dead bodies!” DeVonte started walking down the roadway to the far side of the dam.
“Fine,” Todd said as he climbed up on the tractor.
The debris pile at the base of the dam had turned out to be much larger than anticipated. In addition to the trees and bodies, was all manner of accumulated trash, including two cars. How cars got in the lake and washed this far down was almost beyond belief. The Navy divers were relying on tethered air lines, so they could stay down longer, but it was brutal work. The operation had been going for almost two weeks, but they were beginning to see an end. Most of the intake grille was cleared already. Now, they were just removing nearby debris to form an open radius for the water intake. They didn’t need it to stay clear forever, just the next six months or so.
Todd was reluctantly getting the ship back on track. He wasn’t convinced it would ever be seaworthy, but everyone was pitching in. The pressure on everyone seemed to be ratcheting up. They all knew the pandemic was getting closer, and Dr. Colton still had no treatment. The AG was still dead in the water, and oh, yeah, the NSF was all over the state causing problems. Getting electricity generated would give them some significant advantages, but he knew it would also make Harris Springs an even bigger target.
Chapter Twenty
Mount Weather, Virginia
President Madelyn Chambers held the satellite phone slightly away from her ear as she listened. This was partially to avoid mussing her hair on that side but mainly to add a fraction more distance between her and the person speaking.
“Yes, ma’am.”
That had been the extent of her responses to the irate woman. Ms. Levy was not happy with her pick for the top office.
“Madelyn, dear, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. You may have presidential authority, but you do not have mine.”
“I’m sorry, the Army, they…” she was cut off again mid-sentence.
The sound of Ms. Levy’s frustration was ringing in her ears like a death bell. “Madam President, you are making us look bad when the whole world is watching. We are not going to start a war on American soil. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes ma’am.” She hated herself for sounding weak, but shit, she was weak. No one stood up to Ms. Levy or any sitting member of the Council.
“The point of having power, sweetie, is to never use it. You simply threaten to use it. Now tell me, did you disperse the agent at the aid camps?”
The silence was answer enough. “You fucking bitch! Did you release SA1297 on Americans? Answer me now, or you will not survive the morning.”
The president stammered when she answered, she knew the threat was real. “The virus, it’s already here. It seemed to be the only deterrent that would stop them.”
Them…the US Army, Marines, National Guard…who knew what they were now? The military had refused to follow the president’s orders en masse. They didn’t accept the legitimacy of her rise to power after the deaths of all those in front of her in the line of succession. They had refused to perform law enforcement dutie
s domestically unless Congress ordered them to. What Congress? Barely half the House and less than a third of the Senate was currently filled. Chambers' hand was shaking noticeably now as she waited for the response from the other end.
The icy silence stretched and stretched as Madelyn Chambers, the first female President of the US awaited word on her fate. The calm voice of Ms. Levy cut through the quiet like a scalpel. “I am very disappointed in you, Madelyn. Our goal is to save the republic, not watch it burn. I am sending someone over to see you. Someone who can help…guide you in your decision making from here on.”
Ms. Levy sat in the quiet contemplating her next move. Sitting in the small room of the immense underground complex was increasingly causing her to feel claustrophobic. She had plans for everything. The Council spent years, generations even, working out various contingencies. Those that would help the republic and those plans that brought…other benefits. The Catalyst plans had been in constant refinement for years. The basic outline had been drawn up in the mid-50s.
The concept was simple, use a significant natural disaster to reduce government and lower class elements of society to more manageable levels. Every civilization faced similar obstacles throughout history. Political systems became corrupted. Candidates focused too much attention and money on getting re-elected instead of leading or making decisions that benefited everyone. The soft underbelly of the state, the burgeoning masses on the public handout got more and more and the working class and the wealthy paid the ever-increasing bills. Revolution comes to every society eventually.
At its heart, she found Catalyst to be a humanitarian mission. A total reset on the country. She had not been the architect for the plans, but her father and his father had been. Most of her life she had resisted the pull of the Council, the chair that held her secret family name. Like the Council, the name, too, had changed over the years from Levi to Levy, neither was what was on her birth certificate. When her father eventually stepped down, she had no choice but to assume his role. The other sitting members of the Council were less important but still useful: Mr. Church, Ms. Wolfe, Mr. Adams and the rest. Seven members in total, representing six families and one at-large chair.
