The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  Monty chuckled. “Yeah, that’s because after you, I’ll be the first infected.”

  Chapter Three

  Clara stands at the edge of the pool. Her quads flex as she takes position, the muscles full of strength. Her calves stretch as she rises onto her toes. The feeling is familiar. She remembers her defined swimmer’s legs. But these legs are fake, memories of times past. They aren’t her legs anymore.

  Are they? She looks down at the water and sees her reflection smiling back. Clara isn’t smiling. At least, she doesn’t think she’s smiling. The reflection is her but not her. It is a mirror’s surface of a younger girl, strong, vibrant, and…happy.

  Something she has not been for so long. Too long.

  Competitors take their positions beside her. Their faces are wrong, those of her colleagues, not those of the athletes she once knew. To her left stands Anju, wearing a two-piece bathing suit and nothing else under her white lab coat. She offers a nod and a kindly smile.

  On Clara’s right, Jordan rubs his palms together. He is laughing. “You had better be ready,” he says, flashing that uneasy, I-don’t-know-I’m-handsome grin of his. His chocolate-sweet eyes are gleaming beneath swim goggles instead of his usual wire-rimmed glasses. He is shirtless, his body toned but rugged – a man’s body, muscular and hairy, not like all those boys she swam against and beat.

  She bites into her lip, having never seen him shirtless before. She follows a trail of hair down to his black Speedo then blushes as she catches his eyes following hers. His laugh fills with an almost wicked delight.

  “I’m going to beat you this time,” he says.

  “Beat me?” she asks. Her voice echoes. Jordan points to the opposite side of the pool, where a tall, slender woman in her fifties stands with a starter pistol raised high.

  Clara narrows her gaze. “Ms. Claverie?” The woman certainly looks like her private swim coach, whom she had trained under well before university, when she was still a little girl.

  A ghost from her past.

  The acrid smell of chlorine bombards her nostrils. Empty stands along the walls of the hall fill with the sounds of a hundred murmuring voices. Clara straightens her cap and pulls the goggles resting atop her head over her eyes. A slight draft raises goose bumps on her arms. The hairs of her neck stand up. She is suddenly aware that she is wearing nothing but a skintight black swimsuit, replacing the biohazard suit she’d been wearing only moments ago.

  Wait. What is this? What’s going on?

  The pistol fires. Instinct takes over. Clara dives.

  She cuts through the water like a dolphin. Beneath the surface, she kicks with the deftness and ability of a pro. The coolness of the water, the heat of muscles in action, the poise and sublime feeling of finding a passion and a calling, the stillness of her breath – sensations she’d missed so deeply – threaten to overwhelm her in their deluge.

  She knows it’s not real. She knows she has fallen asleep, has found a brief reprieve from the cruelty of the real world. But she will not let go of the mirage, not until some other portion of her brain makes her.

  She is at the wall now, flipping, back-stroking back the way she came. Dreams like this should last forever.

  “They can, Clara.” A gentle voice, female, almost motherly – no, too motherly – echoes in her submerged ears.

  “Mom?”

  Clara stops racing and treads water in the middle of the pool. The sounds of splashing and exertion have vanished. She lifts her goggles, wipes her eyes, and scans the pool area. She is alone.

  “Hello? Anybody here?”

  She swims to the pool’s edge, pulls herself out of the water, and walks to a nearby bench, where a towel has been laid out for her. She recognizes it immediately: the giant and ever-so-soft plush Mickey Mouse towel her parents bought for her when they took her to Disney World what seems like an eternity ago.

  One of her fondest memories, when she was someone else. She frowns. A Disney princess, living a fairy tale.

  Clara was only eight when they took the trip, but she kept that towel well into her adult life, until that day three years ago when she buried it alongside her mother.

  “You can walk, Clarabelle,” a voice, definitely her mother’s, says. Only her parents had ever called her Clarabelle. “You don’t have to go through life with so much pain.”

  Clara wraps herself in the towel. She brings one corner up to her nose and inhales deeply, closing her eyes and letting the aromatic smell of her mother’s laundry detergent spawn fond memories. She shivers, and her teeth chatter. Her legs are still dripping wet, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them, trying to hold on to the moment, unwilling to move for fear of stirring herself from the dream.

  “This can be real, Clara.”

  She hugs the towel close, balling the cloth in her hands. She tries to call out to her mother, but the words catch in her throat. What do I say? What does one say to the dead? She swallows hard.

  “I’m sorry,” she mutters, not knowing why she says it.

  Her relationship with her mother had always been good, her disease causing no more strain there than it did with her other family and friends. Clara was the one who stopped taking calls, and maybe that is part of why she is sorry. Her mother had been there for Clara until she could be there no longer. Her family had been perfect until she fell into self-pity and her mother died, breaking the tenuous grip her father had on his sanity. Clara wonders if her mom liked the person her daughter had become.

  As if reading her mind, her mother says, “I’ve always been proud of you. I’ve always loved you.”

  “Mom?” Clara squeezes the towel more tightly as she looks around for the source of her mother’s voice. “Where are you, Mom? Are you…real?”

  “I’m down here, Clarabelle. Don’t be afraid. I want to help you. I want to heal you. And I can, Clarabelle. I truly can. I can take away all of your pain.”

  With unsure steps, her knees trembling and legs weakening with each one, Clara creeps to the water’s edge. She gasps but is not afraid when she sees her mother standing on the pool bottom, smiling and waving up at her from the depths, looking every bit as lovely as she did in life.

  Her mother speaks, but no air bubbles come out of her mouth. “Let me take your pain away, dear.” She beckons her daughter closer. “Let me take it all away.”

  “Mom?” Clara begins to sob. “It hurts so much, Mom. Every day, living in this…this…useless body, not good for a damn thing. And I’m so alone. You should have lived. I should have gotten the tumor and died. You were always there for me, and when you needed me most, I could do nothing for you. God, I wish I was dead.”

  “Don’t say that, dear. I love you. Your father loves you.” Her mother approaches. “Come closer, Clarabelle. I can take your sorrows from you. I can make you happy again. Don’t you want to be happy again?”

  Clara straightens, tries to be strong, but crumples into her towel. “I don’t know how.”

  Her mother raises her arms toward Clara, and her fingers nearly reach the surface, just a sliver shy of breaching it. “All you have to do is take my hand, and everything will be fine again. Everything will be as it should be.”

  “I’m scared, Mom. I’m scared to die, but I’m even more scared to live.”

  “I know, Clarabelle. I know. I’ll make everything okay, dear. Just take my hand.”

  Clara kneels by the pool. Her warm tears form concentric circles as they drop into the water. Slowly, she reaches toward her mother’s hand. Only a foot separates her from her mother and the freedom from pain that she offers. Clara leans forward, moving closer.

  Her mother doesn’t move. She is grinning wildly now, her eyes alive with energy, the look of a fanatic.

  Clara’s mouth goes dry, and she starts to sweat, but she has gone too far. Over the edge. She can’t pull back. She moves closer still.


  Closer. Only an inch or two separate her from her mother. If she dares to cross the distance, she will be reunited with someone she thought she could never have back.

  A loud rumble courses through the pool area. Clara is shoved backward by an unseen force. She scrambles to her feet as the walls around her crumble. The ceiling begins to collapse. Even the floor opens into great fissures that run through the pool like cracks through a mirror, canyons into infinite blackness.

  As the false existence falls away around her, Clara hears her mother howl, not in fright or anguish, but in pure, unadulterated rage. In one split-second glimpse, Clara no longer sees the happy, healthy mother of Clara’s swim-meet days wallowing in the deep. Instead, her mother’s lips have curled back, and her frame has withered. Clara sees her mother as she had last seen her; the woman she watched die glowers up from the deep through cataract-filled eyes.

  * * *

  Clara screamed. A blank, white world engulfed her, the details of which quickly came into focus. She was standing on legs she couldn’t feel, her hand hovering over a petri dish partially filled with an odd, purplish growth medium. She tottered a moment then fell backward, lucky that her wheelchair was there to catch her fall.

  The clean room? When did I enter the clean room? Her confusion was only slightly allayed by the familiarity of her surroundings. She scanned the gleaming metal lab equipment, machines with sharp angles and hard corners, arranged precisely in a pristine, whitewashed room with immaculate tabletops and a spotless floor. Not a mote of dust, no speck of lint or particle of dirt, marred the confines of the room. The pungent odor of bleach filled the air. Nothing was out of place except the petri dish and pipette on the table in front of her.

  And her glove.

  She stared at her hand, and her mouth dropped open. Her glove was gone. She didn’t remember taking it off. Certainly, she had no reason to. Why would I take off my glove? And what caused the building to shake? And…was I…standing?

  She shook her head, trying to dispel the many questions, to focus on the present. Her potential exposure to whatever lay in that petri dish was her first priority. Her scientific mind took a backseat to panicked thoughts of disease and outbreak. I know better. Why would I do this? What sort of madness could have compelled me to take off my…. “Merde!” she shouted, staring down at the dish with fire behind her eyes. Her entire body trembled. Why on earth was I putting my hand into the dish? That was what I was doing, wasn’t it? None of it makes any sense.

  She didn’t even know where the petri dish had come from, never mind what was in it. Surely, she had been in a daydream. She wondered if people in wheelchairs sleep-rolled in dreams. Even if they did, she never had before.

  And sleepwalk? On the rare occasions Clara could stand at all, she’d done so only with considerable assistance. She barely remembered entering the clean room. In her groggy state, hours seemed to have passed. She couldn’t have punched in the passcode, opened the refrigerator, pulled out a culture, set up shop, and….

  “Oh God, the sample!”

  Clara rolled her chair into the table. Just a handful of particles of the wrong virus could cause an epidemic, and she’d tried to dip her fingers into one. The bottle and dropper next to the petri dish, clearly labeled ‘Mollivirus sibericum’, represented an unknown quantity, not something to handle frivolously.

  And here I am with my goddamn glove off! What the hell was I doing? What was I thinking?

  She stared at the petri dish, remembering vague details of her dream. The solution inside, a growth medium consisting mostly of water and amoebas, rocked gently.

  “Mom?” Clara shook her head, feeling stupid. She wondered what had made her think of her mother just then, as if the dead woman’s ghost had been standing beside her, whispering incantations in her ear. “Get it together, Clara.”

  One thing was certain: she had been working with a sample of a giant virus with her hand uncovered. She had to assume the worst-case scenario, that she had been exposed to the virus. The research into Molli was still in its very early stages. She had no evidence to suggest the sample was in any way dangerous to herself or others, but she had no evidence to suggest that it wasn’t either. However, her team had ruled out any danger of airborne pathogens at the outset of testing. As long as she and the sample stayed in that room, the rest of the facility would be just fine. She’d have Monty alert Dr. Werniewski and—

  “Everyone, please remain calm and return to your rooms in an orderly fashion,” a man’s voice, thick with a Russian accent and the language’s usual solemnity, sounded over a loudspeaker in the hallway outside. An alarm blared. “The research center will be going into lockdown. No one will be permitted to leave or enter the center until we have analyzed the nature of the threat. All external communication devices will be offline.”

  Clara wondered if her screwup had led to the lockdown until she remembered the earthquake. An explosion? Fantastic. “Don’t panic, everyone. We’re only under attack.” Brilliant, ASAP, just brilliant. She rolled her eyes. “And things go from bad to worse.”

  She figured she would have to rely on Monty to protect her and the samples from any external threats. She had enough problems of her own to deal with. Yeah, like whether or not you have an unknown, untested virus all over you. She gathered up her discarded glove, the petri dish, and the dropper and carried them on a tray across her lap to the biohazardous waste-disposal unit, where she dumped in everything, tray and all. Then she rolled herself into the sterilization chamber and activated the system. She breathed in the gas released, hoping the chemicals would cleanse her mind as well as her body.

  “Initiating scan for biological contamination,” the post-sterilization scanner said.

  Clara closed her eyes and relaxed in her chair as the computer inspected her every inch. A series of lenses took thousands of successive photographs, starting with her epidermis, then x-raying and delving deeper and deeper, level by level, until it had scanned her entire body in intervals, the portions spread out like rings of a severed tree trunk.

  “Scan completed,” the computer announced. “Air quality normal. Biometrics negative for foreign agents. No contaminants detected in room or personnel.”

  Clara breathed a sigh of relief. With the process complete, she saw Monty peering into the chamber through the small window in its hallway door.

  He said into a speaker, “Sorry, Doctor. I can’t rely on the scanner and let you out just yet. You know, incubation periods, faulty equipment…you know, just in case the scan is wrong. For the sake of the facility, you’re under quarantine, but only until we can get another from your team to come and clear you.”

  Clara nodded. She hit a button on the intercom by the door. “I expected as much. Can you at least tell me what’s going on out there?”

  Monty frowned. “I wish I knew, Doctor.”

  Chapter Four

  He whistled a tune from the opera Rigoletto, the name of which he’d long forgotten, as he strolled toward the guard booth. The weight of his backpack caused its straps to dig grooves into his shoulders even through his filth-stained gray vest and black undershirt, but the pain was of little consequence. In the past, he’d shouldered much heavier burdens for much longer distances. Though he took nothing for granted, he thought his present burden would be a weight easily borne.

  The guard stationed there, a man of average build in his early twenties, his eyes full of inexperience and doubt, came out of the booth and approached, his hand squeezing the grip of his assault rifle tightly.

  The man tossed back his oily black hair, exposing the black cross he’d painted in the middle of his forehead so that the guard might get a good look at it. Also for the guard’s benefit, the man wiped his hands on his tattered black pants, which had never been washed, at least not for as long as he’d possessed them. The chilly air made his eyes water as he studied the guard through predatory vision, asse
ssing the ticket puncher’s every movement and body language. At least he hasn’t raised his weapon. Not so inexperienced that he’s trigger happy.

  “Sir,” the guard said, his voice shaking, though he did not otherwise seem afraid.

  Cold, probably, the man assumed. Sure, the guard couldn’t know who he was dealing with, but he did have the only weapon visible, so the man forgave him his tall stance.

  “May I see your badge, please?” the guard asked.

  A badge? Why didn’t I just get one of those? It would have made this so much easier. He smiled. But so boring.

  The man with the backpack continued to whistle. He liked whistling, and the song was finally getting to his favorite part. He also kept walking.

  “Sir, this is a government-sponsored private facility. Only employees may enter. If you do not have an employee badge, I am going to have to ask you to vacate the premises immediately.” The guard raised his gun and held it across his chest.

  The man whistled louder. He would not lose his spot in the song and have to start over on account of a blabbering ASAP employee who had no ear for fine music. His whistle crescendoed, and he threw his arms up and stared into the gray, empty sky. “Bonjour, Rigoletto,” he sang – and well, he thought, though not his finest moment. He smirked with the knowledge that he had chosen to sing the French version of Verdi’s opera though, like Verdi, he was from a country famous for its many operas in his primary language.

  The guard did not seem amused. He raised his firearm.

  “Ils sont tous de mèche,” muttered the man with the black cross on his forehead. He kept his arms raised, but he lowered his eyes to meet the guard’s harried stare. A new song came to mind, one he found laughably fitting. He whistled the tune from an old Western released well before his time, maybe before his father’s time, the one with the funny name: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

  The guard stiffened. “Look, mister, I don’t know who you are or what your game is, but I’m not playing it. Last chance to get the hell out of here before I take you in.”