The Apocalypse Strain

by Jason Parent

  “Those inside me,” Clara said. Jordan reached out for her hand again. She let him take it.

  Dr. Werniewski shook his head. “If only that were true.”

  Jordan sprang to his feet. “You insensitive prick. I should—”

  Dr. Werniewski held up a hand toward Jordan, who quieted like an obedient dog. “I only meant that we have a more serious problem than Dr. St. Pierre’s medical abnormality. I don’t mean to downplay your infection, Clara, but your vitals are aboveboard, and barring intravenous or other intrusive forms of contact” – he eyeballed Jordan, who looked away, face apple red – “you appear to be no more of a threat to human safety than a carrier of HIV. You don’t have any plans to mutate on us, do you?”

  “I feel fine,” Clara said and meant it. “Better than fine, even. The aches from sitting in this chair so long are gone.”

  “Anju did a great service in protecting you,” Dr. Werniewski said. “Thus far, though this organism lives inside you as it did the infected, you seem to be experiencing no ill effects from its presence. At this stage, we have no data to calculate how many people this organism could infect or how quickly it could spread. We have no idea what segment of the population may be immune or resistant. Your body’s apparent ability to ward off the symptoms of your infection is more than just a blessing. We will need to find its root cause, isolate it, and begin work on an inhibiter if not a cure.”

  “I agree,” Clara said.

  “Easier said than done,” Jordan added.

  Dr. Werniewski ignored him. “On the other hand, Sergei Kobozev, or more accurately, the life-form that once was Sergei Kobozev, remains a vital source of contamination. Anju has provided two teams of ASAP guards with scanners retrofitted in the same manner as that one. With any luck, they will destroy the organism before it can spread and, hopefully, without burning this place down.”

  Clara frowned. “So Jordan mentioned that you took a closer look at my biometrics and discovered an increased level of white blood cells. That’s not uncommon for sufferers of MS.”

  “‘Increased’ hardly begins to cover it.”

  “Okay, how much are we talking? And what do you suppose it means?”

  Dr. Werniewski shrugged. “You were somewhere in the range of twenty thousand cells per microliter but have since reverted to a healthy human range. I would like to begin testing on you, as you say, tout suite. We’ve been asked to stay put, but given the immediate interest we all have in working toward a cure for this…affliction…. I am not so sure ASAP security rules trump our moral obligations.” He paused, scratching white lines into his bald head. “As for your resistance to a full-body takeover of this parasite – and let’s not split hairs, this organism is clearly feeding off its hosts – my guess would be that your body is producing massive amounts of antibodies to fight off the foreign invaders. This is just a guess, but there seems to be something different about your immune system that is kicking it into fourth gear. It’s astounding, really. I could probably inject you with measles, shingles, Ebola, and bubonic plague right now, and with or without proper vaccinations, your immune system would give each some serious resistance. I doubt you’d experience so much as a cough or runny nose.”

  “When I contracted the organism,” Clara said, “I stood up soon after. I mean, I can stand up on rare occasions, so this alone may not be too surprising. But as Sergei held me up in the air….” She choked up then settled herself and continued. “While he was strangling me, I kicked him. And not just some feeble leg jerk. I kicked him so hard underneath his chin that his teeth clenched down on his tongue and severed it. I felt the muscles in my legs working, felt the pain when he clawed them up.”

  With all eyes on her shredded jeans, Clara pulled up her cuff to expose her calf. She twisted her leg inward, but could see no injuries to her skin. If she could just lift her leg, she could show them all.

  She gripped the arms of her wheelchair until they screeched from the pressure. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I felt my legs like I haven’t felt them in years! I used them!”

  “Can you feel them now?” Anju asked.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Clara did know. She could feel the muscles in her legs, full of energy and life. But she shuddered at the thought that the feeling might be a mirage. Trying to stand meant risking a fall. When it came to falling down with respect to her career, Clara always bounced back up, used it to rise higher. But when it came to her disease, falling down meant down and out. There was no getting back up.

  She shifted everyone’s attention elsewhere. “When I was in the clean room, I had an opportunity to study the organism. Molli is an invasive species, no doubt about that, but as it interacted with the amoebas in the petri dish, it penetrated them but did not consume them. As you say, Dr. Werniewski, Molli acted like a parasite. And no good parasite kills the host that feeds it.”

  Clara pictured the infected amoebas as they’d appeared after Molli invaded them. “In fact, the amoebas were noticeably larger and appeared stronger, healthier, still retaining their typical features. What if….”

  Clara knew her stream of thought was leaving science and wandering dangerously close to science fiction, but all science had begun once as science fiction. Still, her theory was so far outside the box, it had left the damn thing’s orbit.

  She shook her head. “Never mind.”

  “Please,” Jordan said, his smile inviting. “Go on.”

  “Well, the organism was discovered in the same squirrel nest as the seeds that spawned your super flowers. Certain bacteria can withstand extreme elemental conditions, live inside vastly different terrains and climates, some even inside a vacuum. Molli may not be a bacterium, but she’s more bacterium than virus. Is it really so hard to believe that Molli….”

  Jordan stiffened and looked as if he were about to object but then simply said, “Yes?”

  Clara nodded. “Isn’t it reasonable to believe that Molli was or has become part of everything found in that nest? That we’ve been concentrating on the so-called pandoravirus in the abstract, in an extracted sample pulled from its environment when maybe we should be looking at the organism as part of its environment and maybe as an essential component to it.”

  “The seeds we found in the nest, in all respects, were normal seeds, albeit of some very old flowers,” Jordan said.

  “But that’s exactly my point!” Clara couldn’t help her excitement. “The seeds retained their shape and form much like the amoebas did, and much like…I do. And what those seeds produce are bigger, stronger, and better in all ways. I think that whatever Molli is, in the right conditions….”

  “I think I see where you’re going with this,” Jordan said. “You think Molli, for lack of a better term, acts like some kind of growth stimulator and has boosted the amoebas’ structural integrity, the flowers’ ability to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy and oxygen, and your own autoimmune system.” He looked away. “That sounds…all well and good, Clara, but I just think that maybe you are looking for a miracle where maybe only a horror exists.”

  “I’d say,” Dr. Werniewski snorted. “What sort of organism would have such an ameliorative cross-species impact in both the plant and animal kingdoms? It’s outright preposterous.”

  Clara’s face flushed with her embarrassment, which only made her defensive. “Is it? All life, be it plant or animal, contains proteins, enzymes, amino acids…maybe we’ve discovered an organism that excretes reparative enzymes or reconstructive proteins or-or-or…or a goddamn god gene! Can you really turn your heads to the idea that maybe we’ve stumbled on the reason for the existence of life itself?”

  No one said a word. They didn’t have to. Clara could read their disbelief in their gaping mouths, furrowed brows, and open glares.

  At last, Dr. Werniewski spoke. “Dr. St. Pierre, you’ve had a long, difficult day, and—”


  “I am happy to help prove or disprove your hypothesis,” Anju interrupted. Her tone was strained as she chose her words carefully.

  Clara wondered if the grad student had realized how close Clara had been to exploding.

  “Maybe in your personal time,” Dr. Werniewski said.

  Anju ignored him. “Who knows what secrets hide in this thing’s DNA? I, for one, am excited to find out. At the least, we may discover an inhibiter to the symptoms of MS, or” – she smiled – “an evolutionary building block or two.”

  “Tell that to Sergei Kobozev,” Dr. Werniewski said.

  Jordan frowned. But before he could say what had entered his mind, Clara touched his arm.

  “No, he’s right.” Even if he is downright infuriating. She sighed. “My passion makes me stupid sometimes.”

  “No need to be so hard on yourself, my dear,” Dr. Werniewski said. “Intelligent persons with debilitating conditions such as yours have always looked for cures wherever a suggestion of hope could be extracted, grasping at proverbial straws where the wealth of evidence points to the contrary. It’s human nature, I suppose.”

  Clara ignored the comment as best she could. She said, “Here’s what I do know: the organism, as I said, more closely resembles a bacterium than any other known form of life. It can reconfigure human biology in the most extreme ways—”

  “That,” Dr. Werniewski said, “has not been confirmed.”

  “What?” Clara wanted to strangle that thick-headed snot. She had seen what she had seen, and she hadn’t been the only one to see it.

  “You were unconscious when ASAP found you. Your recollection cannot be trusted.”

  “What about the other witnesses?” Anju asked.

  “A criminal and two ASAP guards, likely of low intellect?” Dr. Werniewski stroked his chin. “I’m not sure what their game is, but if they are telling the truth, then it seems far more likely that the sample released some sort of toxin, possibly hallucinogenic.”

  “I have to admit,” Jordan said. “That is a lot easier to swallow.”

  “What about me, then?” Clara asked. “Am I not living proof of the organism’s ability to repair, if not reconfigure, its host? If it is symbiotic, as I suspected when I tested it in the lab, isn’t it possible that my high T-cell count was indicative of my body’s…or Molli’s attempts to fix me?”

  “It seems more likely that the high white-blood-cell count reflected your body’s attempts to fight off Molli,” Dr. Werniewski countered.

  “MS is an autoimmune disease. We’ve seen a little of what Molli can do. Maybe the reason I still feel the same, the reason I am not like Sergei Kobozev or the guard he infected, is because Molli supercharged my immune system so well that it is defending against any of the organism’s negative side effects. It healed me to make me a better host but did its job so well that it damned itself.”

  Clara shrugged. Listening to her theory spoken aloud, even she couldn’t believe it. She sighed. “Or maybe I’m just speculating, based on the obvious difference between myself and the other infected individuals. For all we know, maybe it was the oatmeal I had for breakfast this morning that saved me from Sergei’s fate.”

  “I hope so,” Dr. Werniewski said flatly. “I had the oatmeal, too.”

  The room fell silent, lapsing into awkwardness.

  “Well,” Jordan said, alleviating the maddening noiselessness, “until ASAP clears the facility, we’re supposed to be confined to our rooms.”

  Anju snickered and raised her arms. “And how is that working out for everyone?”

  Jordan smiled. “Anyway, we have a pretty good collection of minds right here. So if anyone has any other ideas that might help ASAP make this place safe a little quicker, let’s hear it.” He leaned in close to Clara. “What about you? Were you able to learn anything else about this organism?”

  She rubbed her hands together. She’d been holding back the weirdest part of the encounter, at least before Sergei decided to shoot barbed tendrils out of his fingertips. And she really didn’t want to tell them then, but….

  “There is…one more thing, but you’re not going to believe me.”

  Jordan and Anju leaned so close they were almost sitting on her lap. Dr. Werniewski huffed impatiently.

  Clara took a breath. “Molli spoke to me.”

  “That’s imbecilic!” Dr. Werniewski threw his arms up and walked toward the door. “Absolutely absurd. Clearly a hallucination.” He turned and faced Clara. “That’s…Dr. St. Pierre, do I really need to tell you how insane that sounds? It’s ludicrous.” He shook his head, waved a hand dismissively, then headed back toward the door. “I’m not even going to entertain that line of inquiry. You can’t truly believe that a single-celled organism, after having been buried in ice for thirty thousand years, invaded a Russian astrobiologist and used his mouth to…to what, exactly? To speak to you? In what language? This sounds like some kind of first-contact nonsense. Did Molli ask you to take it to your leader?”

  Anju put a hand on Dr. Werniewski’s shoulder, and his excitement dwindled.

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered for good measure under his breath. He raised his head and met the others’ stares. “This organism is just a virus or bacterium perhaps. It is not sentient! Do you know how complex the human brain is? To suggest a single-celled organism could have the capacity to think and communicate, in our tongues no less, is heretical to the gospel of evolution. What you saw was a man, a sick man, plain and simple. Whatever he said was the result of his sickness, ailments caused by a new disease we are tasked with curing.”

  Clara had to concede that it sounded implausible, but she’d heard what she’d heard. Either Sergei, for whatever reason, thought he was under another’s influence, wanted everyone to believe he was under another’s influence, or actually was under another’s influence. She opened her mouth to push the issue but shut it again, realizing her comments would only cause more friction. All her theories and all their proposed research came secondary to the matter of containment.

  “All right, Dr. Werniewski,” Clara said. “What do you suggest we do next?”

  “We sit tight, let ASAP destroy the specimen. The samples too, if they’re of a mind. We can always extract Molli from you if we need it.”

  “And that criminal who helped rescue me?” Clara asked.

  Dr. Werniewski didn’t miss a beat. “Also ASAP’s problem now.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Monty felt pretty good for a guy who’d been stabbed in the eye with a fork.

  I mean, who does that? Who stabs a bloke in the eye with fucking silverware?

  He was taking it rather well, all things considered. The question, he decided, was of little consequence. The fact was: someone had stabbed him in the eye with a fork. He saw no use in crying about it then, even if the tear duct was still functional.

  What’s done is done, mate, he told himself. What’s done is done. Of course, I’ll kill the fucker once I get out of here if he ain’t already dead.

  He sighed and collapsed back onto his examination table, allowing himself a short-lived and well-earned reprieve from active duty. He supposed getting stabbed in the eye had that as a necessary and unavoidable consequence. What he really wanted was a fucking cigarette. But the self-righteous whackers who ran the joint didn’t allow smokes anywhere on the property, not even out in the parking garage.

  Every man needs a vice. Who are they to stifle mine?

  His nicotine addiction had put him on edge, so he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tar-colored gum that was supposed to stave off his cravings. He popped the small, square morsel through its plastic sheath and tossed it into his mouth.

  “Mmm,” he muttered, grimacing at the taste and the pointlessness. He still wanted a smoke.

  He folded his hands behind his head and stared up at the ceiling through his o
ne good eye. Replaying the attack in his mind, Monty thought about all the ways he might have prevented it. He could have ducked. He could have drawn his gun sooner. He could have done a lot of things differently. Instead, he got stabbed in the eye.

  “Who the fuck stabs a bloke in the eye with a motherfucking fork?” he asked again, this time aloud.

  “You okay in there?” Ms. Valentina, his attending nurse and a blond Russian bombshell to boot, called through his curtain separator.

  “Right as rain, beautiful,” Monty answered.

  Still, as much as he wanted to move on from the topic of his now multi-pupiled eye, he couldn’t let it go. Alone with his thoughts, he had nothing better to do. Things could have been worse. I could have been stabbed with a steak knife, for example, or maybe a fondue skewer. Hell, I might even have been stabbed with a pencil or a safety pin. Any one of those, he figured, might have broken all the way through his eye and damaged his optic nerve, causing instant blindness.

  As his condition stood, Monty did not know if he’d ever be able to see out of his damaged eye again, but uncertainty left him with at least a little hope. Nobody had ruled sight out yet. The cover of bandages pressed tightly over his socket rendered his left eye useless for the time being. The retina had detached, but hell, he still had one good one.

  One beautiful, perfect eye. He smiled, but without mirth.

  As he rested his head on his hands, he used his good eye to map the cracks in the stucco ceiling. The ceiling was nothing special to look at – just a flat white, for the most part an even and totally noncaptivating surface, as boring to watch as the PGA Tour.

  Perhaps I’m being too hard on the ceiling. He laughed.

  Then the ceiling moved.

  At least, he thought the ceiling had moved. Or is the paint…melting? The infirmary was kind of warm – not Earth’s-core warm or solar-flare warm, but toasty fireplace warm. Definitely not ceiling-starting-to-melt warm. He wondered if perhaps he were just feeling the residual effects of Nurse Valentina’s plump, fine ass from when she’d sashayed through his temporary quarters fifteen minutes before. And it was fine, no doubt about that. What I wouldn’t do, given fifteen minutes with that.