S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

  But then she saw the dark stains on the front steps and she knew.

  Some wild animal brayed off in the distance. A car horn blasted for a long time before fading away. The muffled pops of isolated gunfire.

  But their street was strangely quiet. Unnaturally quiet.

  Ramon was trying to run. Cassie was jouncing in his arms, her head bobbing over his shoulder, her dark eyes staring balefully at Lyssa. Lyssa could hear him speaking to her, his words punctuated by the running.

  Shinji had returned and was whining at Lyssa’s heels.

  “Come on,” she whispered to him. She didn’t like standing out here.

  But Shinji had turned. He stared growling toward the darkness between a pair of houses on the other side of the street.

  “Lyssa!” Ramon called. His voice pierced the night, bouncing off the fronts of the houses. “Come on!”

  Yes, hurry up.

  She could feel them out there, the infected. The dead.

  Zombies.

  She turned, beckoning Shinji again, and that’s when she noticed the car, shiny and black.

  Not just a car— the car.

  It was parked a couple houses past their own, across the street. Light glinted off the car’s taillights.

  She hurried across the road, hoping to approach it from the driver’s blind spot. But Shinji began to bark, compromising her approach.

  “Lyssa! Shinji!”

  She wanted Ramon to go and Shinji to stop.

  Ramon turned and cut across their lawn, aiming for the front door.

  Lyssa slid along the side of the car in a crouch, found the door handle.

  She’d expected it to be locked, but it swung open easily. The light came on inside, accompanied by a soft chime. The keys were in the ignition. The car was empty.

  It’s not the same one.

  Ramon had already made his way inside the house. She watched as the kitchen lights came on, illuminating the side yard. The light in the upstairs hall came next.

  Lyssa slipped toward the front of the car and felt the hood. It was cold.

  Shinji had run off. She could hear him barking somewhere between houses down the street, the sound echoing in a way that made it impossible to tell where he was.

  The barks abruptly stopped with a strangled cry. Silence rushed in to fill the vacuum.

  “Shinji?” she whispered.

  Her front door never looked so far away.

  A breeze ruffled the leaves above her, sounding like whispers. She could smell rain on it. Above her, storm clouds were building. They would soon overtake the moon. A stronger wind blew, gusting down the street and rattling branches, moaning beneath the eaves of the empty houses.

  Then: a single frantic bark.

  Lyssa pivoted toward the sound. “Shinji!”

  The wind gusted, then died. But the moaning continued.

  The dog emerged from the shadows and came racing toward her. Behind him the darkness shifted and swirled like the blackest smoke. And out of it they came, the infected.

  “Run!” she screamed. And then she turned to run herself.

  Straight into the outstretched arms of a giant, and he would not yield.

  CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

  He stood nearly seven feet tall and seemed almost as wide. And in his jeans and flannel shirt, he looked like Paul Bunyan brought to life.

  “My name is Marion,” he told them. “Marion Lemas. And what’s happening now, here on Long Island, I’m part of a team trying to stop it.”

  “You’re with the government?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is that your car out there?” Lyssa asked him. “Are you the one who’s been following me around?”

  This time he nodded, but he didn’t explain.

  They were in the kitchen, she and Lemas sitting at the table. Lyssa was grateful he wasn’t standing anymore. On his feet, he towered over them all. She’d never before met another human being as massive as him.

  Ramon had settled Cassie onto the couch in the back living room and was now pacing anxiously behind the stranger, eying him warily each time he passed. “Okay, so tell us. What exactly is going on here?” he demanded. “And how do you plan to stop it? You going to arm wrestle it to the ground?”

  A smile crinkled the corners of Marion’s eyes, but it was the only indication he gave of amusement. “You already know what’s going on. We’re in the middle of a deadly outbreak.”

  “But what the hell kind? Is it some weird variant of rabies like they’ve been saying?”

  “No. That’s a lie. It’s something different altogether, something entirely artificial.”

  Lyssa’s head snapped up. “The Stream?”

  Marion frowned. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  But Ramon interrupted. “It’s viral, isn’t it?”

  Marion nodded. “Completely engineered.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Because I helped create it.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Well, part of it anyway. Have you ever heard of Stephen Archdeacon?”

  “The scientist who cured Dengue Fever?” Ramon asked. “Of course. Everyone has.”

  “I was a post-graduate fellow in his lab when the cure was announced. I helped develop it, a harmless version of the virus which would be much more efficiently transmitted between carrier and host. Being more successful, it would outcompete the natural form while providing immune resistance. It was a long shot, but, to our surprise, it worked.”

  “Whatever happened to him, Archdeacon? Everyone thought he’d win the Nobel Prize, but then he dropped out of sight.”

  “He discovered a flaw in the cure. He was planning to go public with the news when he was kidnapped. We now believe he was murdered.”

  “We?”

  “A small group of scientists and strategists.”

  Ramon circled the table, his arms crossed. “What was the flaw?”

  “The cure was predicated on the idea that the engineered version would integrate in a semi-stable manner into our own cells, and express a protein target for our body’s immune system. What we didn’t expect was how efficiently and permanently that integration would be. We discovered that it settles into our mitochondrial DNA. It’s even found its way into the germline. In less than three generations, every single human being on this planet will have the vaccine in their cells. It’s the first case of bioengineering on a global and heritable scale.”

  “If it provides resistance to Dengue, why is this a problem?”

  “Normally, I’d say it isn’t. But the government found they could exploit the sequences in their Omegaman program by tweaking our virus. They hijacked our work and created a new strain which could reanimate the dead.”

  Ramon and Lyssa exchanged glances.

  “Wait, are you saying this virus is transmissible by mosquitoes?”

  Marion shook his head. “We don’t believe it is. It appears at this time to require more direct contact, specifically biting. The infective virus isn’t found except at very low concentrations in the blood. It circulates, but is rapidly taken up into cells. It seems to be shed into the mouth as some sort of transmission strategy.”

  Ramon whistled through his teeth. “Biting.”

  “Once infected, viruses have to find a hospitable place to replicate before the body’s innate immune response takes it out. In this case, every cell is a suitable host. It’s what accounts for the rapidity of the disease from infection to death in an individual.”

  “So,” Ramon said, “if Archdeacon had succeeded in going public with this, it would’ve meant the end of the Omegaman program.” He looked over at Marion. “How did they do it? How did they create reanimation?”

  “By arresting the process of cellular apoptosis.”

  “Naturally occurring cell death?”

  Marion nodded. “When cells get injured or sick, genetic pathways are activated which trigger their destruction. These pathways can be artificially disrupted. We believe the mi
litary was interested in these pathways as a way to delay tissue destruction incurred by both chemical and physical trauma on the battlefield. What they found was that certain anti-apoptotic proteins, if produced at high enough levels in cells, not only arrested cell death but reversed it. They were able to restore basal functions, from the cellular level to whole tissues. But when it came to whole organisms, they failed. The body became a vehicle for the virus; put another way, the virus hijacked the body. And like all biological systems, there is an innate drive to replicate, to make more of itself.”

  “By biting the uninfected,” Lyssa whispered.

  Marion nodded. “The drive to spread the disease can be squelched. That’s what the neural implants mediate. Releasing control by shutting down the Stream restores this disease imperative. The infected reverts to its ground state and becomes—”

  “A zombie,” Lyssa finished.

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “So, what happened? Did they lose control of one of the work crew?” She remembered the man who had fallen from its perch during the rain storm.

  “No, we believe it was a premature release of the virus into the general population.”

  “You think this was planned? Why?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Ramon shook his head vehemently. “I don’t buy it. Our government wouldn’t create—”

  “Our government no longer exists, Doctor. Not the government you think we have. Washington has become a front for corporate concerns. Policy is created in boardrooms and is driven by investors focused solely on profits. The company you’ve been contracting with, Ames Research? They’re one of its tentacles. iTech, the provider of neural implant technology and the Stream, is another. There are dozens of these groups, all stemming from the same head, a nebulous consortium of very rich, very powerful, unscrupulous people. This is their doing.”

  “If you knew about all this, then why haven’t you gone public with it?” Ramon challenged. “Why haven’t they come after you?”

  “They’ve been trying. For the past three years, I’ve been completely off-grid.”

  Living in the mountains, Lyssa thought. Chopping down trees with an axe. She knew it was a crazy image, but she was having a hard time parsing everything he’d just told them.

  “So what do you want with us? Why have you been following my wife around?”

  “Not her, actually,” Marion replied. “I’ve been following you.”

  “Me? How can I help? I don’t know anything about Dengue. Or even infectious diseases, for that matter. I was trained as an endocrinologist, just like Lyssa. If either of us is better prepared to deal with this, it’s her. She’s the one with the medical background.”

  “This new project you signed on for with the Ames people,” Marion answered. “What can you tell me about it?”

  Ramon looked like he wasn’t going to respond. But then he said, “It was just a series of animal studies. We never got a chance to start them, though.”

  “I think we did,” Lyssa uttered. “I think that’s what Drew was doing when all this happened. He was trying to cover the fact he was conducting secret experiments by making me believe we were working on the PGE project. I should’ve known something was fishy. It was too much of a long shot.”

  “I told you we couldn’t trust him,” Ramon snapped.

  “You can,” Marion countered. “He’s the one who called me to Long Island. It’s on his orders that I’ve been keeping an eye on you.”

  “And what’s his role in all this?”

  “He’s been trying to develop a cure. He thought he was close once, but . . . .” He shook his head.

  Ramon stood. Lyssa could see that he was wobbly. The shock of the new disclosures, combined with the lack of food and sleep was affecting them all. He wandered out of the kitchen, then reappeared a moment later with his computer tablet. “All Ames told me when they sent me the samples was that they were interested in testing a new biopolymeric coating for the implants. They wouldn’t give me any more information on it. I handed everything over to Drew. There were two tubes.”

  He held the tablet over for Marion to see. “The first was labeled ‘RDL-418.’ Any idea what it is?”

  Marion nodded. “It’s a code for a chemical Ames developed a few months ago. They think it blocks the key protein responsible for preventing tissue decay. They obviously wanted you to test in animals if it did. Clearly they’d have a vested interest in having a cure, even if they didn’t want it to become widely available. It’s a chemical called deprolidone.”

  Lyssa gasped. “A man showed up here a couple days ago. I think he mentioned that word.”

  “An older man with short-cropped hair?” Marion asked. “Looks like he was chiseled out of stone?”

  Lyssa nodded. “They called him the Colonel. There were three of them. One he called Fred. The third was the housemate of our daughter’s nanny, Brad.”

  You remembered his name!

  She didn’t think she’d ever forget it ever again. Not now.

  “Fred Smallwood is from the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “He was the one who first contacted me about Sudha and Drew.”

  Marion gave her a solemn nod. “Smallwood and the Colonel have known each other for years. The last . . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know who this Brad guy is.”

  “So, the Colonel is with the police department?”

  “Private citizen. His name is Ulysses Daniels. He was once in charge of the Omegaman Program for the Marines, but he was fired after Congress found out he’d been hiding the risks. I’m afraid to ask. What did he want?”

  “He asked about Drew, wanted to know where he was. I didn’t know. They took off when the evacuation was called.”

  “Just like that? They didn’t want anything else?”

  “They took the printout of the results Brookhaven sent me.”

  “Damn it,” Marion said under his breath. “That’s what I was hoping to get from you.”

  “There were two tubes,” Ramon whispered. “What was the second sample?”

  Marion leaned back in his chair and the metal and vinyl frame creaked and groaned beneath him. He let out a measured breath.

  “The reanimation virus itself.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY TWO

  “I was afraid of something like this,” Ramon said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ames asked that no work-up be done on the samples. They didn’t expressly forbid it, but they made it clear they intended us to do the study completely blind. I’m mean, we’ve done these sorts of things in the past for clients, pharmaceutical companies mostly. They’re always paranoid about the proprietary nature of their new drugs. But I had my suspicions about this particular setup, so I asked Drew to do some in-house workup on them. I wanted an idea if they were telling me the truth.”

  “What exactly made you suspicious they weren’t?”

  “To begin with, Ames was paying us a nice chunk of change for requiring such a small set of animal studies. They wanted a two-man team at most and they demanded utmost secrecy. When I questioned these conditions a couple weeks later, instead of pulling back, they suddenly added a pile more work. That’s when I brought Lyssa and the rest of the team in.”

  “A distraction,” Marion said. “They waved more money in your face and calculated you’d back off.”

  “Drew must’ve suspected something too, because he sent the samples to Brookhaven,” Lyssa offered.

  She turned to Marion. “I’m worried he may have infected himself. If he handled the tube with the virus with his bare hands—”

  Marion shook his head. “He knows what rd4.07 is. Besides, as I mentioned, the infection cycle is very quick. From exposure to death and then to reanimation, it’s almost never longer than two days. In cases of superinfection from massive bites, the cycle can take mere minutes. Anyway, I’ve been in contact with him.”

  “Where is he? How is he?”

  “
As to where, I don’t know. He’s fine.”

  “And Sudha? The police say she attacked and murdered her children. Could she have been infected? She might’ve been the first.”

  Again, Marion shook his head. “Drew insists she wasn’t. But as to what happened with her, he won’t say. The first to be infected was actually a young couple who had been reported missing a few days before the murder of those poor children. This couple had been hiking up in Rocky Point. What wasn’t reported was that an off-duty police officer found the boy eating the girl. He drew his service revolver and shot him in the head. Killed him. The officer’s name was Fred Smallwood. We follow these things very closely. That’s why Drew called me to come out.”

  “He texted me the other day,” Lyssa said. “He told me to stay put.”

  “I don’t believe that. Knowing Drew, he would’ve wanted you to get out.”

  That was the text to Ramon’s phone. Drew had tried to warn us to get off the island days ago.

  “I think the Colonel sent that message,” Marion surmised. He turned to Ramon. “We need those results. If they are indeed a cure, we need to know everything we can about its chemical structure, properties, stability . . . . Unfortunately, the samples are gone, as is Drew’s notebook, presumably by the Ames people. Brookhaven’s shutdown, and the only copy of the test results is now in our enemy’s hands.”

  “I thought you said the Colonel had been fired? If he’s not with the government anymore, who’s he with?”

  “Himself.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ramon exclaimed. “You’ve been inside Laroda? How?”

  “You should’ve opted for the more expensive security package.”

  Ramon raised his hands in exasperation, while Lyssa humphed.

  “Without those results, we’re back at square one.”

  “There might be a way,” Lyssa said. “But we’d have to go back to the lab.”