Spiral

by Paul Mceuen

  The Japanese had worked on it but had never gotten past the stage of producing the drug by the thimbleful. Probably not more than a handful of Japanese citizens had ever taken the drug.

  What if that was the missing piece? The more Liam thought about it, the more sense it made. It was brilliant. Weakness to strength.

  Liam met Kitano’s gaze. He stared at him for maybe thirty seconds. Then Liam said, “Penicillin.” He saw an involuntary flash of recognition in Kitano’s face. It was quickly gone, replaced by his dead stare.

  A tingling ran up Liam’s spine. “You gave your test subjects penicillin, didn’t you?”

  Kitano started to speak, stopped, faltered. Kitano’s hand was shaking. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Liam was on his feet. “You damn sure do, you bloody bastard.”

  THE ENGINES WERE RUNNING FULL TILT WHEN LIAM MADE IT to the bridge.

  Penicillin. That was the difference. The Allies had penicillin. The Japanese did not. Penicillin was a miracle drug because it killed deadly bacteria that led to infections. But after a regimen of penicillin, the human digestive tract was also wiped nearly clean of beneficial bacteria. Yes, it killed off the problematic bacteria and saved your life. But it also wiped out the natural bacteria in you, including the ones that kept fungal invaders at bay. Leaving a person susceptible to fungal invasion. Yeast infections, oral thrush—all were common fungal infections that could flare up after a regimen of penicillin. Without the right gut bacteria, the human body was defenseless.

  Defenseless, Liam now understood, to the Uzumaki.

  “Tell everyone to stop taking penicillin now,” Liam yelled as he hit the bridge. “The penicillin makes you vulnerable for God knows how long.” Everyone on the bridge was busy, serious, barely acknowledging him. The USS North Dakota was turning away from the Vanguard. All the other ships were doing the same. “What’s going on?” Liam asked. “Is it the goose?”

  “No,” Scilla said. “The goose landed on one of the chase ships. A sailor tossed a tarp over it, then beat it to death.” He handed Liam his binoculars. “Look at the stern.”

  Liam took the binoculars, caught sight of the mayhem aboard the Vanguard. A few of the sailors were strung up by their necks. Others were beating them with bars of metal. Another was stabbing at the dangling bodies with a bayonet.

  “It’s all broken loose. They are completely crazy,” Scilla said. “The captain of the Vanguard was screaming and ranting just before he cut off communications.” Scilla opened the watertight door to the control room. “Willoughby called in the bomber two hours ago. It’ll be here any moment.”

  AT FIRST THE PLANE WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A DOT ON the horizon.

  “Are we far enough?” Liam heard a sailor ask nervously.

  “We’re at five miles,” another said.

  The plane grew larger, coming toward them in a perfectly straight line. Then the rumbling, the throaty burble of the props of the B-29 Superfortress.

  Liam watched the B-29 pass directly overhead, impossibly high. A second dot appeared below it, separating, pulling away. It fell in a graceful arc, growing larger by the second, a stone tossed from heaven.

  Bethe talked while it dropped. “Inside the bomb, a spherical shell of explosives will detonate. It is an implosion device, the explosives launching an inward shock wave, generating tremendous heat and pressure, compressing the plutonium encased inside, creating critical mass. It’s not so complicated, once you understand. Dear God, a talented undergraduate could design one.”

  The bomb fell, a spear aimed from above. Just before it hit, a blinding flash. For the fourth time in human history, a nuclear chain reaction sparked into life, multiplied, and spread, vaporizing everything near it, pushing heat and air and dust into the heavens.

  KITANO FELT THE PULSE RATTLE THROUGH THE SHIP LIKE A giant hammer blow. He was thrown back, knocking his head hard against the bulkhead. He shook it off, put his focus back where it needed to be. This was his moment. Connor knew Kitano’s secret. He must act now.

  His hands were cuffed together, but this was not an impediment. He took three sharp breaths, a Bushido technique to ready a warrior before a crucial act. Then he raised his hands and placed the middle finger of his right hand into his mouth. He set his teeth precisely at the joint, just as he had practiced a hundred times before, on live prisoners. With a sudden violent chomp, he bit through the meat, separating it at the gap between the proximal and medial phalange, as cleanly as when he had practiced with the fingers of prisoners.

  The pain was nothing. Kitano was greater than pain.

  He spit his finger out on the table, black spots before his eyes.

  He focused on it, grabbed the bone and snapped it, using the edge of the table as a wedge. A small brass cylinder, as thin as a twig, protruded outward from the bone.

  Kitano was bleeding profusely now. They could be here at any moment. But no matter. He needed just a few seconds more.

  He heard a click. The door opened.

  THE FIRST THING LIAM SAW WAS BLOOD SPLATTERED IN DROPS on the metal floor. He glanced around the room. It was empty. Where was Kitano? Had he escaped?

  Liam stepped inside, and Kitano blindsided him.

  The impact drove Liam sideways into the wall. Liam felt something give in his shoulder and pain flared. He turned to fight, but Kitano caught him with a head butt, blood erupting into Liam’s eyes. Blind, Liam managed to shove Kitano away, giving himself a second to breathe.

  But only a second. Kitano came at him, cuffed hands held over his head like a club. Liam ducked low and drove a shoulder into Kitano’s midsection, sending them both to the floor.

  They fought silently, viciously. They traded blows for what seemed like hours but Liam would later estimate to be less than thirty seconds. In the end, Liam delivered the decisive strike. He got behind Kitano and ran him headfirst into the steel bulkhead adjacent to the door. Kitano fell to the floor, dazed, barely conscious.

  Kitano was streaked with red. Blood was everywhere.

  Liam tried to catch his breath. His shoulder ached. “You knew about the penicillin all along.”

  Kitano didn’t answer. His eyes gave away nothing.

  Liam looked around the room. Near his foot he saw a detached, bloody finger.

  He grabbed Kitano’s hand. The right one. It was missing the last two sections of the middle finger.

  What the hell?

  Liam nudged the finger with his foot. He bent over, studying it. Sticking out of the flesh was a small brass object.

  He pulled it free, wiped the blood off with his fingers. It was perhaps an inch long, threaded at the middle. A small brass cylinder, a miniature version of the ones that Kitano had described, the ones carried by the seven Tokkō. Cylinders containing the Uzumaki.

  “Jesus. You tell me everything, you bastard. Right now.”

  Kitano didn’t speak, and in a fury now, Liam struck him again and again. It was strangely quiet in the room, no cries. Kitano took the blows silently.

  “Tell me, you goddamn psychopath.”

  Kitano didn’t answer. He was limp, his eyes half closed. Liam was holding him up by his collar. When he finally released him, Kitano fell to the floor. Liam stood over him, breathing hard, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Not moving, Kitano looked back up at him with glassy eyes.

  Liam tried to calm down, sort it all out. He and Kitano were alone. The guard was on deck. Everyone was still on deck, Liam was sure, mesmerized by the size and spectacle of an atomic explosion.

  Kitano stirred. He tried to stand but then fell back against the wall. He shook his head, trying to get his wits about him, attempted again to stand. He saw Liam, the cylinder.

  Liam held up the cylinder. “It’s in here, isn’t it? The Uzumaki?”

  Kitano slumped back, defeated. Neither spoke. Liam watched him, the man’s hands still cuffed together, finger missing. The blood dripped steadily from Kitano’s hand, forming a sticky p
ool on the floor. He was bleeding to death. Liam could stand here another five minutes and Kitano would bleed out. He would die. He should let him die. Liam wrapped his fingers around the cylinder, held it tight. “You goddamn bastard.”

  Finally Kitano said, “Kill me.”

  “What?”

  “Kill me. I want to die. I failed. Please. Kill me.”

  LIAM WAS ALONE ON THE DECK OF THE USS NORTH DAKOTA. It was past two a.m.

  He looked down at the small brass cylinder in his hand.

  He’d spent the last six hours in debriefings with Willoughby and his lieutenants, helping them prepare a communiqué to MacArthur describing the events leading to the destruction of the Vanguard. A second communiqué covered everything that he had discovered: that penicillin made you vulnerable to full-on infection. The vulnerability could persist for weeks, even years. Within hours, the Uzumaki takes over your GI tract. Transmission by fecal matter or stomach juices: vomiting, perhaps even spit. Once it is in your lungs, the spores spread from your breath. No known cure. The mycotoxins attack your sanity, producing mania, hallucinations, then suicidal and homicidal urges. Later, they attack your organs, causing internal hemorrhaging. Within a day, you are mad. Within a week, you are dead. You live only long enough to infect those around you, a walking biological time bomb.

  He had told them about confronting Kitano after the explosion, finding him wounded, having bitten off his own finger, trying to kill himself, trying to bleed to death.

  They had fought. Liam had subdued him and then gone for help.

  That was the story he’d told.

  He hadn’t told them about the small brass cylinder in his hand.

  Throw it overboard, he thought. Toss it over. To the bottom of the sea with it.

  Toss it, you dumb Irish bastard.

  WHEN KITANO AWOKE, HE WAS IN THE INFIRMARY. HE WAS strapped down. He was alone. His finger was bandaged, missing the top two joints.

  The cylinder was gone. He expected the MPs to come, interrogate him, torture him. Tear at his body until he’d told them everything about the Uzumaki.

  But it never happened.

  They questioned him about the penicillin for hours. But nothing more. Nothing about the cylinder that had been in his finger.

  Over the next hours, his certainty grew until it was rock-solid. They did not know. They did not know what he had possessed. Liam Connor had not told them.

  A few days after, he saw Connor briefly. They had brought him up for a few minutes of sunlight. Connor stood by the railing. Their eyes met. Connor shook his head almost imperceptibly. He glanced toward the sea. To say I threw it overboard.

  Kitano nodded back, then turned and looked away, saying with his countenance that he understood, that it was over. That the Uzumaki was now at the bottom of the ocean.

  But what Kitano thought was: He still has it.

  SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER

  DAY 1

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 25

  THE CRAWLERS IN THE GARDEN

  1

  LIAM CONNOR LOVED CORNELL. HE HAD TAUGHT AT THE university for more than half a century and expected full well to die shuffling between the Arts Quad and the Big Red Barn. Cornell was a chimera, both a member of the Ivy League and the New York state agricultural school. Nabokov wrote Lolita here, and Feynman started his scribbling about quantum electrodynamics, but Cornell was also a place where you could get your wheat checked for smut or your cow autopsied.

  The campus was perched on a hill overlooking the city of Ithaca, population twenty-nine thousand, tucked between a pair of glacier-carved gorges. It was founded in 1865 by the millionaire and philanthropist Ezra Cornell, founder of Western Union and a freethinker who believed that the practical sciences should be taught with the same zeal as the classics. Cornell had made his money on the telegraph, the new communication technology that had remade society as fundamentally as would the Internet one hundred and fifty years later. He used his fortune to create a new kind of university, utterly different from the religion- and tradition-bound schools of the era: “An institution where any person could find instruction in any study,” a quote that would become the school’s motto. Coed and nondenominational from the day it opened, the university graduated its first female student in 1873 and its first African American in 1897. Liam was proud of the university’s heritage—he had a deep appreciation and respect for the underdog. A person’s value, he believed, was set by who they were, not by how others treated them. For eight centuries, the Irish had been treated as little more than apes by the British, and Liam never forgot it.

  LIAM’S LABORATORIES WERE TUCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT of the Physical Sciences Building, a new glass, steel, and stone structure in the center of campus wedged between the old façades of Rockefeller and Baker halls. This evening he stood in the middle of his lab, a pair of silver, sharp-point #5 tweezers in his hand. The old Irishman was eighty-six years old, dressed in brown dungarees, a gray sweater, and old white sneakers. During his sixty years at Cornell, Liam had put together one of the most unusual and diverse collections of living fungi on the planet. The Gardens of Decay, as he called them, consisted of ten thousand postage stamp–sized plots of different mycological species laid out on a square grid, a mottled menagerie of yellows, greens, and grays, like farmland seen from thirty thousand feet. They occupied three large custom-built granite-topped tables, each almost nine feet across and weighing half a ton. To count all the species, ticking off one a second, would take hours, a testament to the power and fecundity of evolution.

  Each of the tiny plots was labeled by a pair of letters and a three-digit number. Plot #HV-324 was Hemileia vastatrix, the rust fungus that invaded the British coffee plantations in Ceylon in 1875. Within a few years it decimated the crops and turned England into a nation of tea drinkers. A few rows over was Aspergillus niger, which was used for, among other things, the making of smokable chandoo opium during the height of the opium trade.

  Next to it was Entomophthora muscae, the “fly destroyer” fungus, very tricky to grow in culture. It first invades the nervous system of the common housefly. Somehow—no one knew exactly how—E. muscae commands the fly to crawl to the highest place it can find and die there with its tail pointed skyward. After consuming the fly’s innards for food, E. muscae uses the fly’s lifeless husk as a launching pad, firing billions of spores skyward, each spore another fly massacre in the making.

  Liam dug into one of the plots with his tweezers, uncovering a plastic bottle cap half covered with a grayish growth. He held it up to the light, his hand shaking slightly. The specimen was like most of the fungi in Liam’s gardens: a saprobe, or feeder on the dead. They fed on the fallen, from plants to people, and Liam was expanding their definition of food. With a combination of trial, error, and genetic engineering, he was teaching them to feed on the detritus of modern society, to break down everything from credit cards to corn husks.

  “Pop-pop?” Dylan said.

  Liam looked up at his redheaded nine-year-old great-grandson. “Yes?”

  “What’s the difference between elephants and blueberries?”

  Liam said, “Haven’t a clue.”

  “They’re both blue, except for the elephant. What did Tarzan say when he saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

  “Tell me.”

  “ ‘Here come the elephants.’ What did Jane say when she saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “She said, ‘Here come the blueberries.’ She was color-blind.”

  They both laughed. Dylan had a thing for elephant jokes. “Pop-pop? You know pretty much everything, right?”

  Liam turned to face him. “I know a few things,” he said.

  “How do you know if a girl is… you know. Interested.”

  Liam raised his eyebrows. “A woman’s smiles are hard to read, for a woman’s secrets are many indeed.”

  “Come on. No rhymes.”

  He put down his tweezer
s. “Well. Let’s see… How do you know? With your great-grandmother Edith, God rest her, it was simple. It was how she stood. She’d bend her leg, her right leg, so that her foot was on its toe. Then her heel would rotate in small circles. She claimed to find me as attractive as a spotted newt, but her heel said otherwise.”

  “You’re making this up, aren’t you? You’re telling stories.”

  “If I’m lying, I’ll hang in a tree, but her heel twisted for—”

  “—none but me,” Dylan finished, laughing.

  Liam brightened, glad to see Dylan light of heart. Since the car accident with his mom nearly a year before, he’d had a tough time of it, brushing up against death at an age when he should be engaged with grasshoppers and multiplication tables. Liam fretted about him, picturing himself gone just when the boy needed him most.

  But maybe Dylan was finally turning a corner.

  In the gardens, a MicroCrawler came running, barely a blur as it zipped down one of the packed-dirt passageways between the rows of fungal plots. The Crawler stopped and used its razor-sharp silicon legs to slice off a sample of fungus. It headed for the corner of the table, where it loaded the sample into a device that analyzed it for RNA and protein expression. The spider-sized silicon-and-metal micro-robots called MicroCrawlers were tenders of the gardens. There were fourteen in all, each smaller than a dime, watched by a camera overhead and directed by a computer in the corner. Dylan was in love with the little robots, gave them all names.

  Liam looked at Dylan. “Who’s the girl?”

  “Just someone. And I didn’t notice anything with her heel.”

  “They’re all different. But they all do something. When you look at her, what does she do?”

  “Her eyes get funny. Like she’s squinting.”

  “Hmmm. That could go either way. What else?”

  “She makes fists.”

  “Are her thumbs on the inside or outside?”