by Mark Wilson
Most viral particles took so long to replicate or cause significant disease in the host that the host could stay well, and the virus unnoticed, for many days, sometimes weeks. This gave ample time for the virus to be transmitted to as many new hosts as possible. The G-ENN-001 killed its host with the abandon of a serial-killer, and one who didn’t care if they were caught. If the original virus were to somehow infect the wider human population, it’d probably burn through a town or two before the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta were able to quarantine the affected area and let it burn itself out. It was simply too efficient a killer for its own good. Killing its host took priority over its own survival or proliferation. Despite its terrifying symptoms, it was a relative wimp when compared to influenza and other similarly-transmitted pathogens.
In manufacturing other strains of the G-ENN-001, Ennis had clearly removed the genes responsible for the aggressive destruction of the host and cherry-picked those genes from other viruses that enabled a more covert transmission between humans. The strains Alex had found in the population, whilst deriving from G-ENN-001, lacked any of its deadly intent and simply made the males infertile. It would be ridiculously easy for Ennis to isolate the genes Gayle had identified on the G-ENN-001 genome that would have a similar effect on female fertility and create yet another new strain. He was treating the human population like his own private lab, manipulating its health on a global scale. He’d altered the breeding capability and expectations of an entire species for a profit.
It seemed that Ennis’s interest in Alex’s DNA hadn’t merely been to repair the Synthi-sperm stock: he was clearly also worried that Randoms and parents of Randoms might possess the genes that would allow them to overcome the effects of any subsequent strain of G-ENN-001 he cared to introduce. No wonder he’d worked so hard over the years, behind the scenes, ensuring that Randoms were marginalised.
Alex knew for certain that his own immune system had produced antibodies to Ennis’s new strains: all one hundred or so fertile men who still remained had done so. He had taken a gamble that his body could manufacture the required antibodies to fight off the parent of the strains Ennis had released into the general populations. His body felt like he was losing that bet.
After hours of monitoring, checking and double-checking all the available data, hours more of running computer simulations of various combinations of drug treatments and genetic engineering combinations, he and Gayle were still at the mercy of his immune system. If it produced antibodies, he would live. If it didn’t then he wouldn’t. It was refreshingly simple science.
Alex felt himself fall forward and watched helplessly as the floor rushed up to meet him. He felt nothing as he face-planted the white tiles. Somewhere in the distance he heard Gayle call his name, but couldn’t answer. Alex’s eyes closed for the first time in almost four days.
24
Sarah grabbed Rob’s huge hand and let go of the rope ladder she clung to from the hull of Rena’s Pride. Jumping onto the little Zodiac craft below, she joined Tom on the seat to the stern of the little boat and watched Rob walk surefootedly over to the main console. Starting the engine up, the big man grinned broadly. He was clearly loving all the adventure. Whatever he’d been doing for the last few years, he obviously missed the life of an intelligent operative.
“Sit tight,” he yelled over his shoulder and twisted the wheel to starboard, gunning the Zodiac’s outboard.
Sarah felt the force pull her to the left and back and threw a hand up to grab a nearby rail. Tom laughed beside her and let out a whoop. Despite the situation and the reasons they were there, the men looked alive, their eyes dancing with excitement.
Bloody men, she thought to herself.
Less than fifteen minutes later they’d left Rena’s Pride well behind and had neared the shore of the island Natalie Aleesa had identified for them. Rob, all business now, steely-eyed in concentration, pulled back on the engine’s power and quietly swept around the island, staying maybe a half a mile out from the shore, hugging the shadows. The sky was dark and the rain fell hard: they couldn’t have asked for more perfect conditions.
All three scanned the shoreline. Sarah could see little of anything but Rob peered out into the darkness like his eyes could cut through the rising mist and driving rain to penetrate the darkness. He whispered details of structures and buildings which Tom scribbled down in a notepad, forming a map of sorts of the island.
Rob killed the engine and stepped astern to study the map his friend had made. Pointing at a spot he said quietly, “The northern-most point. That’s our sweet spot.” Rob lifted his arm, pointing to a spot off to their right. “There. Right over there.”
Sarah followed the trajectory his finger pointed in and peered into the night. As Rob quietly moved the Zodiac closer to the island, the site he’d indicated came into view.
A rocky crag at the tip of the island meant that the few lights they’d seen on their swoop around the island would be shielded by the rocks. They could come ashore easily here and be completely hidden from anyone in the main compound and outlying domiciles. As the bow of the Zodiac hit the sand, Sarah jumped from the boat onto the firm beach. Turning quickly, she grabbed a rope and nodded at Rob, who killed the engine and jumped down to join her on the beach. He took the rope from her and tugged effortlessly at the rope, pulling the Zodiac with Tom inside ten feet up the beach.
“Pretty spry for an old guy,” she said.
Rob, busy scanning the area, threw her a half-hearted grin.
“Should’ve seen me forty years ago,” he muttered. “Move your arse, Tommy, ya lazy old bastard,” he hissed.
Tom stepped from the Zodiac, looking a little sore from the bumping around.
“You all right, old yin?” Rob asked.
“Get it up ye.” Tom flipped a finger up at his old friend.
The smile on Rob’s face disappeared as his training took over.
He took the makeshift map from Tom and knelt on the sand, placing the map in front of him. Sarah and Tom joined him, Tom complaining at his knees.
Rob pointed to various markers and boxes on the map.
“We’ll start here, and follow the treeline around to the main building.” He drew a finger along the edge of the main block. “We’ll continue past the main compound and ascend the other side of the valley a little, see if we can get a better view from there.”
Sarah said “Fine.” She drew her finger around the other side of the compound. “I’ll do the same around this side whilst you two take Rob’s route.”
She sped off before either man had a chance to argue, climbing over the little rocky outcrop and into the trees. The humidity clung to her body despite the light rain. Weather like this was all wrong for Scottish people. Rain was supposed to be cold and come in at an angle. These tropical storms were alien to Scots. Sarah pushed quietly through ferns and small palms, treading lightly and scanning around as she moved. Coming to the tree line, she went down on one knee and poked her face through some foliage, revealing just enough of herself to get a look at the compound.
Aside from a few lights here and there illuminating pathways and entrances, the place was dead. It was three a.m. local time and it seemed that nobody on the island was a nighthawk. Just as she’d decided to pull back into the trees and move further along the perimeter, Sarah noticed a small electronic station posted under a security light. She’d been to enough large business compounds and theme parks to know what it was.
Slipping completely from the trees, she walked slowly and calmly towards the station and slipped her hand over the activation pad. A Holo-map of the compound sprang up in front of her with a big red marker saying You are here in the bottom left corner. Sarah calmly moved her eyes over the map, taking in all of the details of each of the domiciles, labs, kitchens, halls and offices quickly. Her eyes stopped at a building labelled, Main laboratory. Sarah cocked her head and peered through the night in the direction of the lab, noticing that it was one of the few buildi
ngs with lights shining. She couldn’t prevent a slight grin from forming.
Once certain that she’d committed the most important features to memory, she waved the map off and melted back into the trees, headed for her rendezvous on the east slope.
25
Gayle listened as the monitors blipped. The ventilator hissed and forced warm, oxygenated air and removed carbon dioxide from his lungs via the tube she’d forced into Alex’s trachea hours before. She ran her fingers over the fresh incisions she’d made on his chest and felt the bulge of the pacemaker she’d inserted under his skin when his heartbeat had begun to become dangerously irregular. Already, she was considering beginning haemodialysis, but was there any point? She was emotionally, mentally and physically drained. Gayle had forgotten that a person could feel so empty.
Alex had collapsed twelve hours after he’d infected himself with G-ENN-001. In the twenty-four hours that had passed since then, the malicious particle had replicated many millions of times, flooding his body with exact clones of itself. G-ENN-001 had disrupted the flow of electricity along his motor neurones and his sensory neurones. His entire autonomic nervous system, normally in charge of regulating vital body processes, was as good as useless.
Gayle had yet to make any real progress in detecting the vital antibodies that they hoped his body would produce. Either he wasn’t making them, or they were being produced in too low a concentration to take full effect yet. Despite the futility, Gayle was hoping for the latter. Whilst devastating, the damage that he’d done to his nervous system was mostly reversible, thanks to new treatments for re-growing myelin sheaths, the substance around neurones, vital for transmission of nerve impulses. If Alex’s immune system couldn’t generate antibodies capable of counteracting G-ENN-001 soon, it wouldn’t matter about re-growing myelin: whenever the life support machines were switched off, he would die.
Gayle sighed, fogging the plexi-glass of her biohazard suit’s mask. She moved her eyes over him, taking in his visible symptoms. He was so pale as to appear grey. He hadn’t responded to any stimulus from her in hours. He looked so fragile. She was sick of being beside him but she couldn’t leave. She’d spent hours trying to contact Ennis, in the hopes of bargaining with him for any treatment he might have. She’d spent hours more screaming at the cameras, their artificial eyes watching her impassively. She’d begged for Ennis to call her, for someone – anyone – to help her friend. In her heart she knew the truth: that even if he recovered, even if they produced a working vaccine, Ennis would never let them or it leave this island. Finally she’d accepted that Alex was going to die one way or another, and so was she.
The machines that were breathing for him, making his heart chambers contract, were at the mercy of the lab’s electrical input controlled by a corporation – by a man who wanted Alexander Kinsella to simply disappear. They’d come afterwards and take her friend’s body away, use it and the data he’d generated whilst he died to improve their engineered versions of G-ENN-001.
Gayle calmly stood. “No,” she said. Just no, nothing else.
She reached to the clips holding her gloves in place, and then her mask and undid them. Slipping free from the biohazard suit, she placed both hands on Alex’s cheeks and kissed him softly on the lips.
Unhurried, she left the little sealed room Alex lay in and strolled to the main lab area. Retrieving some bottles of ethanol from the chemical locker, Gayle slowly poured its contents across the lab floor, along filing cabinets and throughout her office. She emptied the first bottle and another, then a third, pouring the fluid into computer vents and over files and personal belongings. Turning back towards the sealed room that served as Alex’s intensive care unit, she whispered an apology, sparked a lighter and threw it into a pile of ethanol-soaked documents.
Turning to the nearest camera she yelled at it, “There’s your research, you absolute bastard.”
26
“And here, this is where the main lab is?” Rob asked, pointing from their vantage point out to the building a hundred feet or so away. Sarah nodded.
“Yeah. I strolled right into the main campus. There’s nobody around, but even if there had been I’m just another face on site. There are so many residences on the compound, there’s no way everyone knows everyone.”
Tom shot her a look of disapproval.
“I say, we just stroll in and open the door,” Sarah said, deadly serious.
“I agree,” Rob said softly. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out a pair of Glocks: a G42 for Sarah and a G41 for Tom.
“What the fuck is this?” Tom hissed.
“Well we call these guns, Thomas,” Rob said, with a grin.
“Get tae fuck, Robert. What the hell are you thinking?” Tom shoved the pistol back at his friend.
“I’m thinking that we’re going into an environment where anything could happen. We don’t know how many people are present. We don’t know if any of them are armed, or military, or aggressive. It could be an island full of science geeks or full of mercenaries. We need the weapons, it’s as simple as that.” Rob handed the pistol roughly back.
“Dick,” Tom spat, reaching for his gun.
“What about yours, Rob?” Sarah asked.
“Never used them,” Rob replied, turning away to scan the immediate area. Tom shook his head and stuffed his pistol into his belt.
“You ever shot one of those?” he asked Sarah. She shook her head.
“Fuck sake, Robert,” he muttered, before running Sarah through how to operate and hold the smaller gun Rob had given her.
Rob glanced back at them. “She’s fine, Tom. Point and shoot, just like a fuckin’ camera. S’easy.”
Tom shot daggers at him but stayed quiet and finished his brief tutorial with Sarah.
“Guys, look,” Rob whispered.
Seconds earlier an orange light had blossomed in a window of the main lab.
Sarah shot across to stand next to Rob, tucking her pistol into her belt as she went.
“Is that a fire?” she asked.
“Yes. In the main lab,” Robert replied.
Thirty seconds later they reached a door.
Finding it locked, Sarah began to panic. More people would notice and come to tackle the blaze. Their narrow window of opportunity just became a keyhole. Rob moved her aside gently and shoved hard at the door with his shoulder. Sarah watched as the big man leaned in and ripped it free from the frame, swinging the door inwards. Tom grinned.
“Should’ve seen what he could do in his youth.”
“So he told me,” Sarah said flatly, and led them through the door into the main lab.
Sarah rounded a dog-leg turn in the corridor and came skidding to a halt at the entrance to the main lab. The entire lab was ringed by a roaring circle of orange and blue flame. The fire was clinging to the walls, workbenches, cabinets and incubators filled with specimens of God knows what. Sarah put her forearm up to shield her eyes which had already begun to stream tears in reaction to the fumes.
Tom and Rob came behind her and peered into the flames.
“Shit,” said Rob. He stepped in front of Sarah. “I can see them. Stay here you two.” Rob stepped into the room but felt a tug at his arm. It was Tom.
“Robert. You can’t do this sort of thing anymore; you’re not the man you used to be. You’ll die in there. Let’s go and wait for whatever passes for a fire service around here to arrive.”
Rob turned and smiled at him. The smile never reached his eyes, which were filled with fear, not humour. “If I don’t go in there, right now, your grandson will die.”
Tom’s hand fell away from his best friend. He turned his eyes to the ground. Were he in Robert’s shoes, had he Robert’s physical gifts – even in old age he was a strong, agile man – if he had the man’s skill, he’d do the same for his best friend’s family.
“Thank you, Robert.” He kissed the big man on his cheek, then, feeling like a coward, he told him, “Go.”
Robert gri
nned again, a real one this time. The bastard was enjoying himself.
“I’ll be fine. I promise.” With a wink he disappeared into the smoke-filled laboratory leaving Sarah and Tom coughing in his wake.
Alex felt an impulse rack his exhausted body, sending another spasm of intense pain through his damaged neurones. He felt the unendurable pain travel along his chest and down his spine. Unable to respond to it, he merely observed as it travelled to his toes and left as quickly as it had come. The pain reminded him he that he still existed and that he had a purpose. He would change the world for the better if only his immune system would cooperate with him.
Alex focused on the voices around him in the room. He’d heard a roaring noise and then Gayle’s voice, less muffled than it had been, telling him she was sorry. Heat? Was that heat? Suddenly his bed jerked and it was moving. Heat – it was heat – roared intensely all around, but only for a second. Almost immediately he passed beyond it into a cooler area.
Other people were moving around his bed, talking, discussing him. Wondering aloud if he could hear them. He tried to respond many times to no avail.
Gayle’s voice. Voices that sounded like Sarah’s and his grandfather’s. Impossible, a dream, but a nice one at least. Part of him was ready to go somewhere else, now he’d heard them. Not yet, though. He had his face to cling to. Alex fixed his mind’s eye on the memory of the eleven-year-old face of his son and clung to life tightly. He indulged the stray thought that the voices he heard really did belong to his family instead of strangers.
