Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  If ever.

  This wasn’t how he or his scientist forebears had visualized the eventual Antarctic diaspora—pell-mell, desperate fumbling. But it was the outcome he now faced.

  Lima kicked off his shoes and stepped into the legs of the biohazard suit.

  Chapter Eight

  Ryan didn’t struggle as he was stripped out of the wet yellow coveralls. He was so drained after his third ice bath—the shock, the agonizing pain, the violent shivering—that it took all his strength to just breathe in and out. His mind felt decidedly better, as if the fever was beginning to ebb. It had cleared enough for him to realize something had definitely changed—his torturers were no longer dressed in street clothes; they were all wearing head-to-toe hazard suits with oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. They wanted no part of whatever he had come down with. The men in black had removed their blaster belts and strapped them over the outside of the suits, keeping the butts of their handblasters within easy reach.

  Though Ryan couldn’t fight back or even summon the power to protest as he was roughly toweled dry, he could watch and listen. And try to understand.

  “What’s his viral count now?” Lima asked. His face was visible through the clear plastic panel in his suit’s hood. He spoke not only in a near-shout, but with exaggerated slowness, so he could be understood through the helmet.

  “Peaking,” one of the women said. “The concentration in his blood is twice as high as the compound we injected him with.”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. We no longer have the time to try to duplicate natural transmission. It’s going to have to be by direct blood to blood transfer of the virus. That should reduce the incubation time by half. Get a line in him and start the blood draw.”

  “How much do you want us to take?” the other female asked.

  “At that concentration, 20 cc per test subject with some extra in case of spills or accidents. We may not have the opportunity to collect more from him. If the virus has tripped his kill switch, his life signs should begin to fail in minutes, and he has no more than an hour to live.”

  Ryan didn’t know what was meant by “kill switch,” but he didn’t like the sound of it. He liked having “no more than an hour to live” even less.

  If the agonizing treatment he’d received had corrected some mutated fuckup in his DNA, why was the head whitecoat saying he was dead meat? The whole we-will-fix-you story was obviously just whitecoat lies. From what little he’d overheard, he guessed that his blood and the virus in it were going to be injected into his companions, and that whatever his fate was they would suffer the same. The why of it was still a mystery; whitecoats always had a reason for the suffering they caused, some higher purpose that salved their guilty consciences, so there had to be one here, too.

  Strong hands held him still as a needle was inserted into his right arm. He watched a line of red shoot down the thin plastic tube to a waiting threaded glass jar. There was nothing he could do to stop the flow of poison his body had made. The vial filled higher and higher with every beat of his heart. Across the isolation chamber, the other female whitecoat was standing in front of a countertop working on an oversize, stainless-steel handblaster. It had a fairly standard grip and barrel, but the in-between part was unusual. It was cylindrical and massive, making the weapon look out of balance and awkward to point.

  After the glass jar was filled to the brim, the woman pinched off the flow of blood with a plastic clip, removed the container and connected an empty one. She carefully handed the vial to Lima, who picked up the handblaster, inverted it and then screwed the threaded container into its top.

  Ryan needed no further explanation about what kind of ammo the strange weapon fired.

  It shot blood bullets.

  They took three more vials of blood before disconnecting the needle from the crook of his arm.

  “Get him dressed and put him in a hazard suit,” Lima ordered. “We can’t move him out of isolation without it. He’s shedding a mountain of the virus every time he exhales.”

  Ryan stayed limp and pliant as they pulled a fresh set of yellow coveralls up over his legs. They wrestled a white plastic suit over the coveralls and dropped a soft kind of helmet over his head. Almost immediately he began to sweat, and it became difficult to breathe. Someone touched his back, and he heard the hiss of air from the oxygen tank. They finished by slipping yellow plastic boots over his suit’s plastic feet.

  When they tried to stand him up from the bed, Ryan’s knees buckled and he slipped to the floor.

  “Get a wheelchair in here, and hurry,” Lima said. “He’s already dying.”

  That was exactly what Ryan wanted him to think. The whitecoat’s prognosis alarmed him big-time, but it didn’t match how he was actually feeling, which was greatly improved over the past few minutes. He was still weak, but now he could move his arms and legs, and make a fist with both hands. Although it was hot inside the suit, he wasn’t feverish, nor were his ears ringing, and his heart wasn’t pounding, either. He realized it might be a temporary respite before total collapse, but in case it wasn’t, he didn’t want to appear so recovered that they’d feel the need to handcuff him again. When the wheelchair arrived, he made them work to lift him into it and slumped against the back. His labored breathing fogged the helmet’s view panel.

  It was called “playing to expectations,” and Ryan was willing to take the little game as far as it would go.

  “Order this room sterilized,” Lima said as he turned for the door, blood blaster in hand.

  One of the females pushed Ryan’s chair out into the spotless, gleaming admission room; Lima kept pace beside it. The other female whitecoat and the two black suits, also in hazard gear, followed a couple of steps behind.

  “Echo, I think I’ll take this one straight to autopsy and get a peek inside,” he said to the woman pushing the chair, talking as if Ryan wasn’t sitting in it, or he was already a corpse.

  “Yes, Doctor,” the woman replied.

  One of the trailing black suits ducked in front of them, opened one of the hallway doors and held it for them. Ryan rolled into the grim corridor beyond.

  After a pause, Lima spoke again, this time in a lower tone of voice. “Echo, I may need you to volunteer for something important.”

  “Volunteer for what, Doctor?”

  “As you know, the experimental protocols we devised were supposed to proceed in a logical order. We spent a good deal of time working out the most efficient sequence. The experiment we are conducting today on the genetically altered was supposed to precede testing the virulence of the strain on the genetically pure. If the virus doesn’t infect them, there is no point in testing it on us.”

  “I recall the discussions, Doctor.”

  “Well, the revised evacuation timetable has scrambled all our hard work. We can’t wait for a result of the first experiment before initiating the second. They need to be undertaken simultaneously. We can’t proceed with large scale manufacture of the virus without this critical safeguard. Otherwise we risk spreading infection—and perhaps death along with it—among our own people during the invasion.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Ryan remained slumped over in the chair, apparently on his last leg, but his mind was in overdrive.

  Invasion.

  He finally had a glimpse of the truth, of the purpose for his suffering and the suffering his companions would soon experience. The salve to guilty conscience was insular, it was “us versus them.” “Us” were losing ground in the ancient redoubt, as witnessed by the quake damage and the desire to create a weapon of mass destruction. “Us” had a right to survive, and that right superseded the rights of other living things. It was very familiar to Ryan. It was the story of Deathlands, and it had been retold millions upon millions of times.

  Simply put, it was k
ill or die.

  “Echo,” Lima went on, “our work is central to the success of the most important mission in the history of our people. It is the key to the retaking of South America, to cleansing the Deathlands of its mutated hordes, and ultimately to our husbandry of the entire planet. Before we allow the bioweapon to be deployed, we have to be absolutely confident that the virus will infect and kill only the mutated species. We have to be able to prove that to the military command with incontrovertible evidence.”

  “What are you asking me to do, Doctor?”

  “I want to remind you that the risk of infection is almost nil. All the pretesting with computer simulation has shown that. We’re talking about a one in one hundred thousand chance of being made sick.”

  Echo stopped pushing the chair.

  “Even in the remote possibility that you are infected,” Lima said, “the peptide trigger will not work on your DNA. It’s tailored to target only the mutated. At worst, you’ll just catch a case of the flu. That seems a small price to pay considering what you will be giving the colony. You’ll be a hero. You’ll make your ancestors proud.”

  “Why me and not those other two Deathlanders? The black woman and the old man we snared. Based on the tests we took, their genetics are pure and unaltered. Why can’t they be the heroes today?”

  “We don’t understand the reasons why their DNA was unaffected by the predark virus. Did their forebears have an immunity that protected them from the infection? If so, it could mean others had an immunity as well, and obviously that presents a major stumbling block to our plans—the kill switch we’ve designed will not work on such individuals. There is no designated target to hit. And their offspring have had a century to multiply. You must understand how valuable those two are to the advancement of science and the success of our endeavor. But for the time constraints and other priorities, we would be investigating their life histories right now.”

  “I do understand,” the woman said. “And I’ll do what you want, but you still haven’t told me what that is.”

  “When we arrive at the lab, I want you to remove your biohazard suit and simply remain in the room as a control until the experiment is completed. You don’t have to do anything else. We will monitor your vital signs throughout the procedure, and if we need to intervene for your safety’s sake and remove you from the room, we will do so.”

  “Okay,” the woman said, reluctance evident in her voice. “But, Dr. Lima, what if I’m out of my suit and they start throwing their poop? I don’t think I could stand going through that again.”

  “Don’t worry, I intend to break them of that habit first thing.”

  Chapter Nine

  The moaning of muties continued in the frigid darkness. Their plaintive groaning rose and fell in waves, as though they were trying to outdo one another. It put J.B.’s nerves on edge. He was trying not to think about the seat of his coveralls, which was freezing to his skin. Maybe it was just spilled water he’d landed in. It was impossible to tell without lights, and given the reek of the place, he couldn’t distinguish an associated bad smell from back there.

  “This isn’t good,” Krysty said from the cage to his right.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There’s no cure for what we’ve got—if we’ve even got anything. It was just a trick to land us behind bars.”

  “Yeah, well, what did I say? They’re whitecoats.”

  “I’d say this stinking hole is what was called death row predark.”

  “My guess, too.”

  “Unless Doc, Mildred or Ryan shows up, our chances of breaking free are zero.”

  “I think I might be able to pick the lock on this cage,” J.B. said, “but I can’t do it in the dark.”

  The Armorer was pacing back and forth, trying to keep warm when the lights and heat finally came back on. No one had come in to clean up the aftermath of the shit fight, which was not a big surprise. J.B. looked around to make sure Jak and Ricky were still among the living. Neither of them looked happy about having muties for next-door neighbors. When he turned his backside toward them, they assured him that what he’d sat in wasn’t brown. However, as the frost on the bars melted, the smell in the closed room got worse and worse. All the heating fans did was circulate it.

  “At some point you’d think the whitecoat bastards would hose this place out,” he said to Krysty.

  “Why norms in zoo?” said the scalie in the cage to his left. It scratched its nose as it leered at him, both hands encrusted with brown to the wrists.

  J.B. glowered at the scalie, then at the collection of stumpies caged across the aisle.

  “You gangfuck the baron’s daughter?” the scalie went on.

  The stumpies chortled behind their chin-whiskers, knee-high heads bobbing, hairy, outsize hands gripping the bars.

  “Do these triple stupes think this is still Deathlands?” Krysty asked.

  J.B. peered up at the scalie’s wasted, sallow face. There were gaps in the tiny sparkles on the skin of its drooping cheeks—it was losing its scales in clumps. Dark night, he thought, who knew a scalie could be even uglier?

  Keeping his distance from the shared set of bars, he asked, “How did they catch you? How long you been here?”

  There was a second or two delay as the questions unfolded in the mutie’s mind; more delay as it formulated the reply. “Sleeping off big meal in hidey-hole,” it said. “Brothers and sisters sleeping, too. We eat many goats. Baron’s men come. Couldn’t get away. Chilled all but the fattest, me and my sister they took to little place underground. We fall sleep, then wake up here. No food for days. No food! What baron want?”

  “There’s no baron here,” J.B. said. “This isn’t Deathlands.”

  The scalie cocked its head to one side and gave him a puzzled look. “No Deathlands?” it said.

  “Not even close. This is the end of the Earth, as far from Deathlands as you can get. And it doesn’t look like any of us will be going back there before we die.”

  The stumpies seemed to understand the Armorer’s explanation. They stopped laughing and glared at him.

  The scalie’s mouth opened, and it extended its tongue as it pondered the conundrum. Finding no resolution, only agitation, it fell back on its strongest drive. “Uh, ah, uh... Eat?”

  “They picked the fattest ones because they’d last longer in this kind of captivity,” Krysty said. “Never intended on feeding them for long. Or us, for that matter. Whatever they have in mind, it’s coming soon.”

  “Baron want sex show?” the scalie said hopefully. It pointed a filthy finger between its legs, then teasingly raised the shit-stained hem of its shift past sagging flesh of calves and thighs. “Mutie zoo always have sex show.”

  “Must be pretty dull here,” J.B. said, “but I don’t think that’s what they’re after.”

  The scalie looked lost.

  “This isn’t a mutie zoo,” J.B. explained. “More like a killing floor. I mean, look at the drains in every cell. It could be for hosing down the shit you muties like to throw, but could also be for hosing down the blood after they cut our throats.” He pointed at the lenses stationed at the corners of the ceiling. “Mebbe they just want to watch us die.”

  Then he remembered muties didn’t know what a camera was.

  “Baron eat me?” the scalie said in horror.

  “Not hungry anymore,” Ricky said.

  “Don’t worry, the baron won’t eat you while you’re alive,” J.B. said. “Only scalies like their meat kicking. You’ll be dead and it won’t hurt.”

  “We friends,” the scalie announced. “You come close, I make you so happy.”

  “I come close and you chew off my nose.”

  “Shirley sex you good, Mr. Hat,” the scalie said. Holding the hem of her soiled shift delicately between grub
by fingers, turning a shaky pirouette, the mutie started doing a shuffling dance, teetering back and forth, sliding her bare feet through the muck on the floor of her cage.

  “Shirley sex you good, J.B.,” Krysty said. “I’ll bet you don’t get that kind of offer every day. Might be your last chance. I say go for it.”

  “I’d rather take a bullet in the gut.”

  “Shirley no sex Mr. Hat?” The scalie sounded very disappointed.

  “Sorry, the attraction just isn’t there.”

  “Shirley help Mr. Hat. We go home.”

  “How are you going to help get us out of this mess?” J.B. asked the mutie, tiring of the triple stupe game. “Scalies can’t handle a blade or a blaster. You can’t chill someone with a gob of shit. You scalies can’t even aim a gob of shit.”

  “We bite and we squeeze,” Shirley said.

  A pouting, starving scalie was not a pretty sight.

  J.B. looked at the stumpies across the aisle. They were jumping up and down in their eagerness to join in on the potential mayhem, as unlikely as it was to ever come to pass. The little muties were triple mean, all right, but they had a bloodlust that could not be controlled. Once it was switched on, they were just as likely to attack their allies as their enemies, or one another for that matter. They were incapable of operating a firearm, couldn’t grasp even the basics of the process—which end was which. Giving a stumpie a blade or a club was a very desperate measure, and the results were bound to be disappointing.

  The scalie had already lost her train of thought, not to mention the to-and-fro of the discussion thus far.