Minutes to Burn (2001)

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The rain slowed, then stopped, leaving the canvas above bowed. Though morning was only a few minutes away, the sky was still gray. Cameron slept soundly on her sleeping pad to Derek's right, and the cruise box containing the larva was still safely latched.

  Again, he had not slept. Frustration had honed its edge on his sleep-lessness, but he resisted it. He rose and walked outside, where Justin was standing watch.

  Justin turned his fingers in a reverse temple and cracked them sharply across his forehead as he yawned. He shifted on the log, groaning. "My ass feels like I just spent the night with the Marquis de Sade."

  Derek stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the waving tops of the Scalesias. His face was swollen, puffy around the eyes and through the cheeks. He blinked long and hard and looked back at Justin, forcing his eyes to adjust. The spikes from the GPS tripods were lined up on the ground by Justin's feet. Beside them were four flares and the bolt Tank had taken from the specimen freezer.

  He walked a few paces off and urinated into the higher grass. "Get the others mustered for recon," he mumbled over his shoulder.

  The softness of the forest floor was surprising. Cameron felt it was yielding to her, giving way beneath her heavy boots. The spike swung at her side.

  Moving stealthily through the trees in their cammies, their skin tender from the sun and greasy with sunblock, Cameron and Derek blurred from spot to spot like shadows. If they needed to, they could just disap-pear, stepping back against the trunk of a tree, lying flat on the forest floor, fading into bushes.

  Once, in Iraq, she and Derek had been caught by surprise by a truck-ful of enemy soldiers. They'd been wearing their desert cammies, and they'd leaned back on the steep dune behind them, kicking sand over their black boots and letting more sand crumble down over their faces. The truck had rattled past them so close she'd been worried it would run over her feet.

  Cameron led, forging through the branches with her shoulders and chest. When they didn't give way, she could usually snap them with a shove. Her legs were firm beneath her, solid through the thighs and ass. If she ever stopped working out, her figure would soften into volup-tuousness. She didn't plan to ever stop working out.

  Derek followed in her wake. Trapped beneath the canopy, the air was thick with humidity, stirring with clouds of gnats and particles of leaves and bark. About every ten yards, they'd pause, surveying the area around them and listening for movement. At all times, they had 360-degree security coverage. Cameron scanned the area to the front and the sides, and Derek covered the rear, turning in circles to check behind them. Their patrolling formation was tighter than usual because of the limited visibility; the canopy made it seem like it was dusk.

  They fell into a rhythm, Cameron and Derek, when they worked like this, sharing each other's senses, movements, and instincts. Years of functioning as a buddy pair had welded them into one entity. They tra-versed the forest, two beating hearts moving through the thickets and tree trunks. They did not speak. They never even had to gesture when they switched point.

  Cameron always knew where Derek was, not because she could hear him or see him, but because she sensed him, sensed the life moving behind her among the trees, the life for which she was responsible. If something happened to Derek, she sometimes thought, it would be almost as upsetting as if something happened to her own husband. That made his recent behavior all the more alarming.

  Since they weren't humping gear, they didn't stop to rehydrate every hour as they normally would. Cameron's movements became almost hypnotic--the rise of her feet, the sink of her boots into the thick mud, the pattern of her steps. One, two, three, and a crossing side step to dodge a tree trunk. Her breathing was slow and even, her face damp with the heat. She felt sweat stinging her eyes.

  About halfway to the forest's peak, a small clearing opened among the trunks of the trees, a break of a few square yards matted with decaying leaves and dead ferns. Vines twisted their way along the ground, winding themselves through the low brush and darting up the trees around the clearing. The Scalesias stretched overhead, growing together in a living tapestry. Some of the larger trees faded away, their trunks reaching up and up until they were lost in the canopy.

  The forest felt suddenly alive to Cameron. Like it was watching her.

  She held up a hand, stopping Derek in his tracks. Her grip on the spike tightened. Derek sidestepped quickly behind a trunk, leaning against the white spotted bark.

  The forest was moving all around her, leaves, fronds, and branches swaying in the wind. The slow, hypnotic motions reminded her of a mating dance. The air was musky with the scents of mud, hidden creatures, fresh and rotting fruit.

  She scanned the area but saw only green and brown, vines dripping from branches like stalactites, foliage vibrating in the breeze. For a moment, she closed her eyes and listened. The buzz of insects, the flap-ping of a bird, the creek of bending trees. She opened her eyes again and saw nothing, though she still felt the eyes of the forest on her.

  A length of vine by her foot hissed and slid away, rustling in the dark-ness. Between the trunks, the forest stretched on forever, a dim under-world.

  Moving slowly to her right, stepping sideways foot over foot so that she could remain facing forward, Cameron headed out of the clearing. She counted off fifteen paces before Derek followed her. They disap-peared into the shadows ahead.

  A spiderweb broke across Cameron's face, but she didn't flinch. She wiped it away using the back of her hand that held the spike. The spider fell to the ground, scurrying clumsily for cover, and she crushed it underfoot. A triad of birds left a tree in a burst of noise, darting through the branches and calling to one another.

  Cameron raised her hand and snapped her fingers. Derek froze and they stood perfectly still, Cameron resisting the urge to swipe away the last strands of the spiderweb stubbornly clinging to the bridge of her nose. Finally, she signaled him forward with two fingers and pointed to the ground, where a gnawed head lay, about the size of a medicine ball-- the male's head that the female had chewed off during mating.

  Cameron stepped forward and picked up the head carefully, as if con-cerned it would spring to life. The shell of the head was intact, but much of the insides had been eaten by ants. She tilted it in a shaft of light fil-tering through the treetops, admiring the hard, jagged line of the mandibles.

  "Looks like it's just us and the larvae now," she said.

  Chapter 50

  Samantha nearly fell out of bed when she heard the loud banging at the slammer window. She jolted upright, eyes swollen with sleep, her hands immediately dancing along the countertop beside her bed in search of her glasses. She found them and pushed them onto her head at an angle. Her scrubs were twisted around her hips and she loosened them and pulled them straight.

  Tom was at the window, his face animated with excitement. "It's the same virus!"

  "What?" Samantha said. "Who?"

  "In the thermoproteaceae living in the deep sea cores they pulled off the coast of Sangre de Dios. They must've been released from the crust by the drilling and entered the ocean, where they infected the species of dinoflagellates. Since the dinos were pushed toward the ocean's surface by quakes, they were made susceptible by UV exposure, and the virus must have bridged that structural gap. And get this--just like Dr. Den-ton noticed that the dinos were altered, somehow, genetically, the ther-moproteaceae are all fucked up. Each one has a different genetic profile than the next."

  "How is that..."

  Tom shrugged. "Rajit's been playing with it in lab, trying to nail its eti-ology and pathogenicity, and make sense of the PCR test. The virus seems to contain a massive range of DNA code--blueprints for pro-teins from all kinds of species. The guys have already nicknamed it: the Darwin virus."

  Samantha scratched her head. "Just don't name it after a location-- the last thing we need right now is an outraged Chamber of Commerce somewhere."

  "What's been happening with the rabbits?" Tom asked.

&
nbsp; "Not a thing as of last night," Samantha said. "Cytopathic effect is what I'm thinking. We might have to bleed them, get the serum under a scope."

  "Have you checked on them this morning?" he asked. She shook her head. "Well, you'd better hurry and take a peek before they shitcan you and ship you home in a bubble."

  Still rubbing her eyes, Samantha trudged over to the crash door and pushed through into the next room. Tom waited for her at the window rather than walking around to the observation post. When she reap-peared, she was ghost white.

  "You'd better suit up and get in here," she said, her voice trembling. "You need to see this."

  Several tables were set up outside the slammer window, a team of virolo-gists and high-ranking officers gathered around them. Phones, faxes, and computers were running simultaneously, blinking, beeping, and ringing. Still clad only in medical scrubs, Samantha pulled a chair up to the glass and sat watching the others. Though her viral count was contin-uing to decrease, it was not yet zero; she would not be cleared from quar-antine until she'd been held the requisite seven days. A stack of micrographs sat in her lap.

  Colonel Douglas Strickland strode up the hallway behind the makeshift workstation, his polished shoes clicking on the tile. The work-ers froze.

  He pulled to a halt, facing Samantha through the window. "Dr. Everett," he said.

  She smiled and nodded. "Yes, darling?"

  He grimaced. "I've been informed we have something of a crisis on our hands."

  "You could say that."

  Strickland removed his beret and shuttled it through his hands. "If you continue to lend us your professional expertise in contending with this problem, I'm quite certain that such efforts will counterbalance the charges that have been leveled against you for your prior indiscretions. Assuming, of course, that you express remorse to the JAG officer."

  Samantha stood up. "The only thing I'm remorseful about is that I placed myself in a position where my medical judgment was subject to military review."

  "I would hardly--"

  "Don't panic, Doug. I'll help you, but not for that reason. I'll help you because I'm actually still foolish enough to give a shit. So here's question number one for you: Is this something you've been working on behind the fence?"

  Strickland's face drained of color. "You're implying that we devel-oped this killer virus here on the premises for the sake of biological war-fare?"

  "We don't have time for implying--I'm asking outright. Is this virus out of the BW facility or not?"

  Strickland stepped forward until his nose was almost touching the glass. His face was almost comically red, his jaw clenched. "Look at my face, Dr. Everett. Do you think I'd be exhibiting this level of concern if I had any idea with what we are contending?"

  Samantha looked at him. Believed him.

  "I saw the...offspring of that rabbit." Strickland shuddered. Sam-antha did not imagine he shuddered often. "Creatures unlike any-thing...abortions,all of them."

  "Unviable mutations," Samantha said.

  "Did the virus actually impregnate the rabbit?"

  "No. We checked the records from the Crimean Congo virus study-- the one the rabbits were shipped in for. One was pregnant, a few days, maybe. The virus drastically accelerated the pregnancy, but it didn't cause it to begin with."

  "Is this thing going to spread?"

  Samantha shrugged. "As it stands, we don't know if it will infect humans. But technically, a virus's sole mission is to replicate. To survive, it's got to hop continually from host to host, usually mutating, adapting and evolving as it goes. Viruses are mindless--just as short-sighted as humans, in fact. They have no long-term strategy. This virus could run virulent through its population and extinguish itself by killing off all available hosts. Dr. Denton and I are crunching the numbers right now to estimate the odds of another mutated mantid lineage on Sangre de Dios."

  "How does it function? This...Darwin virus?"

  Samantha nodded at the bustling work station behind Strickland. "That's what we're working on now."

  "What is your informed opinion--or your hunch--at this stage?" he asked.

  She sighed, winding a fist in the bottom of her scrub top. "My prelim-inary analysis of the genetic sequencing has shown that the virus itself contains genetic sequences from myriad other life forms. Like all viruses, it invades the host cells, using their machinery to replicate itself. In higher organisms, it seems to splice into the site between a promoter gene and a gene expressed only during embryonic development--in the case of the rabbits, the HOX series. Because of that, the viral DNA is promoted only during embryonic development. During this time, it attacks the DNA sequencing of its host, inserting its own segments of functional DNA code into the equation, and using these materials like primordial building blocks to create new life forms in the next generation."

  "Segments of functional DNA code?"

  "Yes. They carry the marching orders for cells, causing them to form complex structures, like wings, legs, skeletal configuration, lungs, and other structures with or without utility."

  Strickland shook his head in disbelief. "So if this thing spreads, we could have dogs with gills? Humans running around with wings?"

  "It's highly unlikely, but not impossible. We forget how closely linked we are genetically to other animals. Only about a thousand genes out of a hundred thousand differentiate us from chimps. Even organisms as distant from us as roundworms have DNA sequences similar to ours, like variant spellings of the same word. If something gets into the code of any animal and tampers with it, even a little bit, the phenotypic alter-ations can be extraordinary." She tried to straighten her glasses, but they still tilted to the left.

  "How can it create..." His eyes glazed as he took in his reflection in the window.

  "You have to understand how viruses function. They can't live out-side their hosts, so it's to a virus's advantage for its host animal to survive and reproduce, passing the virus along. The Darwin virus alters the host plant or animal's offspring so it exists in a wide variety of organisms. Natural selection then acts as the executioner of the unfit, killing off those less viable mutations." She gestured to the crash door. "Like the rabbit's offspring. But if this virus is indeed playing with segments of functional DNA code, sooner or later, it's bound to come up with viable mutations--offspring that'll survive and reproduce in turn. The virus introduces wild cards to the genetic deck, and shuffles over and over-- maybe thousands of times. On Sangre de Dios, it finally dealt itself a winning hand.

  "It's like that famous example where you have a million monkeys on a million typewriters typing for eternity. Eventually, the argument goes, one of them would randomly type Hamlet. Evolution works in similar fashion. It's unthinking; all that's necessary is variation and sheer num-bers. But think how much more quickly one of the monkeys would arrive at Hamlet were they already using words, or complete sentences, instead of merely letters. That's what's occurring here. This virus shuf-fles entire blocks of genetic code, drastically boosting the odds that viable offspring will be produced.Those offspring that survive...they'd have massive fitness potential. It's as if they've evolved instantaneously. What usually takes millions of years has been hit upon in a single gener-ation. That's what's occurred on Sangre de Dios. Bear in mind that variation is not predirected in favorable ways, so when it's this massive, random, and viable... " She threw her arms wide and let them clap to her sides. "Those animals...it's amazing."

  "Amazing?" Strickland took a deep breath. "The ramifications if this thing spreads are horrific. Dangerous biological agents are an issue of international security. Do you know, Dr. Everett, that a plane carrying a hundred kilograms of anthrax spores and equipped with a run-of-themill crop sprayer could fly over Washington, D.C., and deliver a fatal dose to about three million people? That a taxi could pump enough out its tailpipe on a sunny afternoon in Manhattan to kill five or six million people?"

  "Yes, sir, I do." Samantha smiled curtly and turned back to the stack of micro
graphs in her lap. "I wrote that study."

  Chapter 51

  Donald's nasal voice clicked through Derek's shoulder. "Gentlemen," he said. "And women. I'm calling in from Fort Detrick, conferenced with Dr. Samantha Everett."

  "You're in Maryland?" Rex asked. "You flew out?"

  "Yes," Donald said. "And after I explain our preliminary findings about this virus, you'll understand why."

  Donald introduced Samantha, and the squad circled tightly as she proceeded to explain what they'd gleaned about the virus so far. Diego and Rex interrupted occasionally to explain the scientific terms to the soldiers, and to update Donald and Samantha about what they'd discov-ered in the specimen freezer and the water samples. When Samantha finished describing her hypotheses about the virus, there was a long pause.

  Cameron felt the blood leave her face. If she contracted the virus, it would go to work on the embryo inside her. She had stood in the freezer with the others, the infected bodies swinging and dripping all around her. She'd already had morning sickness once--she was hardly at the top of her game, and if things went south, there was nothing anyone could do for her. Tank was watching her, maybe with concern, but he averted his eyes quickly when she looked over.

  "But if this is how the virus works," Diego was saying, "then why do all the larvae look identical? Why are they not all different like the last generation we saw captured in the specimen freezer?"

  "The virus must go dormant after the first generation," Samantha answered.

  "So the first generation is all different," Szabla said, "but the second wave of offspring resemble their parents."

  Savage lit a cigarette and Diego didn't even bother to comment.

  "Of course," Rex said. "From a fitness perspective, if one of the mutated organisms survives to reproduce, it would be advantageous for it to replicate its own phenotype in its offspring. Continued mutation would compromise stability."