The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  Yes, Clara hated the academic world. To be fair, though, she hated everyone. At least, she told herself that. A lifetime without truly living had taught her that the world was populated by those who had more than they needed but always wanted more: ingrates and selfish germs deserving of eradication, shit stains on the dirty underpants of a sweaty asshole world.

  Of course, that might have been her bitterness talking. Her constant attempts to convince herself of this ‘undeniable truth’ were undermined by her continual drive to heal all wounds, destroy disease, and remedy societal and individual aches and pains, even those that manifested in her heart.

  Those sometimes seemed the hardest to fix, particularly on cold, empty nights when pain twisted her muscles and blissful, oblivious sleep would not come. On those nights, Clara sometimes wished she had a friend to comfort her, maybe even a—

  If you don’t let them close, they can never hurt you, she reminded herself. She let out a long sigh then forced a smile. Besides, you do have friends. Four of them, to be exact.

  Lost in thought, Clara had rolled to a stop. Seeing her coattails hanging loose, she tucked them between her legs to keep them from catching in the wheels of her chair, the old-fashioned, hand-rolled kind. She liked it that way. Pushing herself around kept her arms and shoulders strong and able, ready for those times when her legs betrayed her.

  Lately, that had been always.

  She sighed but fought against her crashing mood. Zigzagging her way through the corridors, Clara passed several labs of varying shapes and orientation. From a central hub, hallways ran like spokes on a wheel, except the spokes had so many bending and winding offshoots that the end result looked like a circle maze. Clara had gotten lost in those hallways more times than she cared to admit.

  She looked at a door to her right. Chem-Lab 601, she read. That’s new. She threw up her hands and groaned but pressed forward anyway.

  Fortunately, the clean room where she performed most of her experimentation wasn’t too far away. A left, a right, then another left down a shiny, over-waxed corridor brought her into familiar territory.

  “Bonjour, Dr. St. Pierre,” a cheery voice called out to her in an almost singsongy way as she approached the biology labs.

  Clara stared up into the deep chocolate eyes of a young, shapely Indian woman who was the polar opposite of her in all the ways that mattered to Clara: healthy, happy, and beautiful. Though her heart panged at the sight of so much she couldn’t have, Clara didn’t resent the younger woman for her blessings. In fact, she even kind of liked her once Clara managed to get past the grad student’s endless positive energy.

  Clara racked her brain but could not come up with the student’s name. Something like Angie? Angel? The student worked under that Polish fellow, Dr. Werniewski, but she wasn’t from Poland.

  “Hi…uh….”

  “Anju. Anju Denali. We met at orientation.” The grad student’s smile was as infectious as most of the known viruses in that place. She had a mouth full of perfect, pearly-white teeth, as healthy as the rest of her. Anju had a lot to be happy about, so Clara forgave the student for whistling sunshine out of her asshole.

  “Anju…. Yes, that’s right. From orientation.” Clara sighed. “I’m sorry. There’s just so many people here that—”

  “Oh, I completely understand,” Anju said, bouncing in place. She giggled a chirpy little noise that, like her, was bubblier than shaken soda. “I am…kind of forgettable. You, on the other hand, I could never forget. Your paper on the manipulation of the double-helix formation as an alternative to pharmacology was absolutely instrumental to my research project last spring. There is no ceiling, I believe, to what we can accomplish through gene splicing and genome manipulation. I would love to talk with you about it sometime – that is, if you have the time.”

  “There’s no need to butter me up, kid. I’m nothing like the rest of these stiffs.”

  “They are a rather lackluster group, are they not? Sometimes I feel like they are afraid to fart for fear of discrediting their own mirages of perfection.” Anju chuckled and looked away, covering her mouth as if shocked by what she herself had just said.

  Clara couldn’t help but chuckle along with her new acquaintance. She decided she liked Anju. “I’ll tell you what. You bring me a bottle of decent wine – red wine, French wine, not that Californian piss – to that conversation, and we can, as that infuriating American botanist likes to say, ‘shoot the shit’ about whatever you’d like to talk about.”

  “Dr. St. Pierre—”

  “Please, call me Clara.”

  Anju smiled warmly, the corners of her mouth threatening to spread beyond her face. Her cheeks curved grotesquely, as if she’d swallowed a boomerang. And still, she was hatefully adorable. “Clara, then.” She held out her hand. “We have ourselves a deal.”

  Clara shook it. “Good. Now, I think you had better run along. If I’m not mistaken, that was Dr. Werniewski whom I just heard break wind, and I suppose he’ll be needing a ratchet to seal up that tight ass of his.”

  She and Anju laughed. Doing so hurt, but it also felt good. Clara couldn’t remember the last time she’d been privy to a joke, never mind having made one herself.

  Anju had earned herself a spot in a very select group, currently three people at the research center to whom Clara had taken a liking. The second was the charming, if a little hokey, American botanist, Jordan Phillips, who never once treated her any differently on account of her disease than he treated others. When she looked into his smooth, dark eyes, she saw respect, dignity, humanity…not what she had come to expect from her scientific brethren: pity, revulsion, rejection, underhandedness, and worse, false sympathy.

  The whole lot of them should take their phony compassion and stick it so far up their asses that no amount of cleansing could ever wash it free.

  However, when the good botanist had ushered Clara into his greenhouse to show her some of the flowers his team had nurtured back from extinction from a handful of seeds found in the nest, Clara was impressed with both man and scientist. She couldn’t help but admire and, in that moment, share his passion for his work and the many lives he had created.

  Focus, Clara. She rolled on. Best to keep him at a distance lest I give him a chance to prove myself wrong about him. She sighed. Men are such shallow and fickle beasts.

  She turned a corner and entered the hall leading to Bio-Lab 347. There, in front of her clean room, stood the third person Clara couldn’t help but like. Montgomery Seymour Flint was an Australian national and military type who’d apparently transferred into the better-paying private-security arena. He was a hard-headed, heavy-fisted sort of man, the type typically employed by the Allied Security and Asset Protection Corporation, or ASAP, a privately owned international security company that served as governmental consultants to many of the United Nations members and, Clara suspected, many of those who weren’t. ASAP must have had dirt on everyone. Not one country ever made a fuss over the apparent conflict of interest. Clara knew better than to ask questions.

  ASAP represented everything Clara despised about the research center, yet she adored Monty all the same – real, sarcastic, and cynical, just like her. In crossing paths with the guard on a daily basis, his post usually being outside the clean room, she had come to know him. Instead of the massive machine guns and thousand-yard stares that plagued many of his comrades-in-arms, Monty, as he permitted her to call him, opted for a much smaller, less-obnoxious firearm, which he kept holstered at his hip. He never, ever, looked past her or down his nose at her but met her eyes and always offered a kindly, sincere smile.

  As she pushed her chair toward him, he offered one of those smiles. “G’day, mate,” he said, playing up his accent. “A frog, is it? Shall I throw another shrimp on the barbie and mutter something incoherent about dingoes and wallabies on walkabout while playing a three-note tune on my didgeridoo?”


  “Why, Monty, do I detect a bit of sarcasm?” Clara smirked. “Is someone here stereotyping you because of your accent?”

  “Oh, Christ, Doctor, it’s driving me loony.” He ran a hand over his finger-length hair, which matched the color of his dandy stubble. “Your friend there – Dr. Werniewski – has a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock!”

  Clara looked up at him, eyes squinting. Her left eyebrow shot up. “Top paddock?”

  Monty let out a guffaw that sounded a little like a horse neighing. “There I go, proving Figjam right. Dr. W. likes to go all Steve Irwin/Paul Hogan on me every time he stops by. I swear, if he sings one more Wiggles song, I may have to wiggle his head up his arse…begging your pardon, Doctor.”

  “No need. He’s an associate, not a friend, and believe me, I know exactly how he can be. ‘Figjam’?”

  Monty snickered. “Uh, yeah, that one’s a tough one to explain, maybe. An Australian expression. Anyway, that bloke ain’t the only one. You Yanks are all bat-shit crazy. I may have to go Crocodile Dundee on some of your friends here, is all I’m saying.”

  “I’m not sure if I was born when that movie came out. Anyway, as long as you don’t go all Wolf Creek, we’ll get along just fine.”

  “Surprise, surprise! The nerd here’s a fan of that kind of film. You Yanks never cease to amaze me.” He rubbed his chin and gave Clara a hard stare before breaking into laughter. “I loved that flick. Classic horror. Now there’s an Australian hero I can stand behind.”

  “Why are you surprised? Is it because I’m a woman or a stuck-up scientist that I can’t like horror films? Now who’s stereotyping? And stop lumping me in with the Yanks. I know you know I’m French.”

  Monty shrugged. “North America, Europe…. You’re all Yanks to me.”

  “By that logic – given the circumstances of your country’s settlement and unless you’re Aboriginal – I’d say you’re about as much Yank as I am.”

  “You wound me, Doctor. Hurtful words you say.” Monty pantomimed tears. “So hurtful.”

  Clara pinched his arm, smirking and almost outright smiling for the second time in one morning. She wondered if one of the viruses had infected her with the smile bug. She hated smiling. It hurt her face worse than frowning did.

  She cleared her throat, resurrecting the wall she kept between herself and others of her species. “So, any big plans for the weekend?”

  “Weekend? I don’t get weekends off any more than you do. Besides, there ain’t nothing to do out there but freeze your nether parts off…or drink ’til they’re warm again. But I do have a vacation coming up. Me and me mates…ahem, my mates and I are having a scrimmage against the blokes who won our ASAP Australian branch league cup last year. It’ll start off relatively civil but likely deteriorate into a few black eyes, chipped teeth, and broken noses, I suspect. Good ol’ fashioned rugby, like it’s meant to be played.”

  “Sounds…interesting. I’m sure it will be good to get away, especially someplace warm.” Clara studied her shoes. She wondered where she would go if she ever took a true vacation. If I ever had someone to go with.

  “Where I’m from, it’s beautiful, Doctor. A small town about sixty kilometers north of Sydney. You ever want to see it, you’ve got a free place to stay.”

  Clara considered a fake smile, but that time, she couldn’t will it to materialize. “Thanks.”

  “What about you, Doctor? You plan on sticking around here all weekend, unlocking Pandora’s Box?”

  “Excuse me?” She huffed. As if I don’t get enough of that crap outside—

  “Ah, I don’t mean anything by it. Just something one of the protesters blocking the private road had on his sign. ‘Open Pandora’s Box. Release God’s Vengeance’ or something to that effect. Some freak with a black cross painted on his forehead. I wouldn’t have paid him any attention but for the fact he was standing in the middle of the road, so I couldn’t get by. Nearly had to run him down to get here.” Monty shook his head. “There’s more and more of those freaks out there every day, lining the highway and camping closer and closer to this facility. And for what? To freeze their asses off?”

  “They just have strong opinions on what we’re doing here.”

  “Yeah, well, opinions are like shit.”

  “Don’t you mean, ‘Opinions are like assholes’?”

  “No, ‘shit’. They run too freely from careless openings.”

  “That’s…not a saying.”

  “No?” Monty chuckled. “You sure?” He sighed. “Anyway, Hitler had opinions. That guy in Wolf Creek had opinions. Some of these assholes with their high-and-mighty opinions might be dangerous.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re in here and we’ve got you to protect us.” She patted his arm but didn’t let her hand linger there. Though Monty was a good guy, she wasn’t trying to give him any wrong signals. Not that he’d answer them if I did.

  Monty clenched his jaw, and for a moment, Clara thought she might have offended him. Am I that revolting? She shrank into her chair.

  But Monty wasn’t looking at her. His lips pursed as his gaze drifted away into nothingness. Ridges formed on his forehead.

  He looks…worried? A mischievous smirk twitched Clara’s lip at its corner as a realization hit her. This ought to be good. “Don’t tell me that a big, strong macho man such as yourself is afraid of a few protesters.”

  Monty’s glazed-over eyes filled with awareness. “Hmm?” He met her stare and clenched his jaw. “Nah. That guy’s a freak. His long, gnarly hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks, and his clothes? Sheesh! They looked like he’d rolled around with a hog in its pen. Probably did, the freak. I could smell his stink just by looking at him.” He let out a breath. “Still…the way he looked at me when I blared my horn and told him to get the fuck out of my way…. It gave me the willies.”

  She sneered and rolled her eyes but then gawped when she realized Monty wasn’t chuckling. “You’re serious?”

  Monty scowled, and his face reddened a little. “You didn’t see his eyes. He had this intense stare, the kind that seems to see right through you. He didn’t move or say a word, like we were in some twisted game of chicken. And I had a mind to run him down, I tell you. I don’t think the sorry whacker would have cared one way or the other. In the end, I backed up and went around him.” Monty shuddered and pointed at his head. “He wasn’t right up here, that one. I could feel his eyes crawling like sand fleas on my skin as I passed.”

  Clara tried to stifle her incredulous chortle, but it came out before she could. “I’m…I’m sorry,” she said between snorts. “Come now, Monty. Don’t you think you’re being a bit melodramatic?”

  “If you saw this guy, you probably wouldn’t say that.”

  “I think you’ve been watching too many horror films.”

  “Whatever.”

  Clara tsked. “It’s this place, Monty. It’s cold and desolate, and out there are hordes of people who hate us for reasons I don’t think they even understand. The guy you’re talking about is probably some vagrant or religious fanatic or both, and probably dangerous. I know I’d keep my distance. But discoveries like this always bring out the lunatics. A tough Aussie like you can’t really be afraid of a man armed with markers and poster boards?”

  “More like I’m afraid he’s right,” Monty muttered.

  Clara caught it. “What’s that, now?”

  “Nothing, just…be careful if you leave the base.”

  “You don’t agree with what we’re doing here?” Clara pushed.

  “My apologies, Doctor. I spoke out of turn.”

  “Nonsense.” Clara leaned in close. “Whatever you say to me stays between us. And you never have to hold back with me or treat me with kid gloves.”

  Monty let out a breath and relaxed, but only a little. His fingers wagged back and forth
at his sides. “It’s just that…. Don’t you ever wonder if you’re messing with something beyond your control or even your comprehension? Christ! The things in that fridge are called giant viruses, a.k.a. pandoraviruses. Personally, I think regular-sized viruses are bad enough.”

  “The size of the virus doesn’t necessarily correlate with its—”

  Monty threw his hands up. “I know, I know. But these things…. You know they’re dangerous. Tampering with them is just like jiggling the latch on Pandora’s Box.”

  “You sound like those protesters outside, and you were just poking fun at one of them?”

  “I don’t like them. I know their kind. They take things too far. That doesn’t mean I disagree with their message. But shit, I have bills to pay, the same as everyone else.”

  “We use every precaution, every safety measure imaginable.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Without risk, we will not advance. Monty, these viruses may be the answer to any number of health conditions. They may be the answer to disease, cancer, death.” She couldn’t keep her passion and excitement from flowing into her words. “They may hold the keys to the secrets of life itself.”

  Monty ran a hand down his face and scratched the stubble on his chin. “If God wanted us to know those secrets, He wouldn’t have guarded them with something so deadly.”

  Clara considered that. Science always pushed for knowledge and understanding even in the face of undeniable danger. She could never convince a layman that the potential fruit borne from her research more than justified the risk, even the risk of an epidemic.

  Maybe an epidemic is what humankind needs. Hit the reset button on ol’ planet Earth.

  She shrugged off the thought and offered Monty a nod. “Relax, big guy. If I screw up in there, you’ll be the first to know.”