by Howard, Bob
His new way of thinking had actually been the way early medicine had approached the problem. Find the source, and decontaminate it, rather than provide potential victims with a vaccine. Now he just had to find a way to decontaminate the planet.
Grace could hear Anton laughing inside his biohazard suit as he went through the door into decontamination, and she knew he was laughing about something ironic and would have to ask him later what it was. That was what made Anton smile the most, and she knew it was his cynical nature that humor had to be dark, but she understood it better than the other kind of laughter that came from happiness.
It didn’t take more than two hours for Grace to set up the lab containment rooms to test her theory about the sound, and most of that time was spent decontaminating while making several trips inside. When she was finished, Anton saw that he shouldn’t have been surprised at how easy it was to control for other variables. She had simply limited their senses to hearing. The thought of putting a blindfold on each of the infected gave him his second laugh of the day, but Grace had just turned off the lights.
There were already cameras in the containment areas, but Grace had never needed the rooms to be dark. Night vision cameras were set up to view all ten rooms, and the audiometer had been equipped with WiFi controls. They were able to operate the audiometer and monitor the cameras remotely, so the lab technicians were all sent to their quarters. Anton and Grace used strict experimental paradigms, so they began recording, logged the times, and initiated the frequency from the audiometer for exact bursts in duration. The results were unquestionable.
With the labs totally dark, the infected inside the containment rooms began milling around with no specific interest in anything. Most of them stood still, but it was noted in the documentation which directions each of them faced, and it was agreed they were sufficiently varied to be called random. Then Grace initiated a burst of sound at a frequency unheard by human ears. All twenty subjects turned in the direction of the audiometer and reached toward the source as if they could touch it. When their hands met the glass, they pushed their wet faces against it and snapped their teeth.
The smiles were real this time, and Grace knew she had a new goal. She would talk with Marshall and Ted to locate the engineers among their survivors. Hopefully, there were some talented people who could design the equipment needed to amplify the sound and broadcast it over a long distance. The other hope would be that Anton could develop the weapon they needed to be able to exterminate the infected in large numbers.
There was one other hurdle, though. Marshall and Ted could see that they were on the brink of a discovery that would change the entire landscape of the apocalypse, but while the scientists were singularly focused on the resolution, the two bureaucrats saw the human implications. There were still living people out there.
The two scientists met with Marshall and Ted in the stateroom. They felt uncomfortable, not because of the expensive decor but because they had spent years rarely leaving the lower decks. They didn’t care to associate with people who didn’t think like them, so they didn’t see much point in visiting the other parts of the ship.
When the idea was placed on the table, the first reaction was mixed. Just as Anton hadn’t seen what was so important about the discovery, the bureaucrats didn’t see what it meant to the big picture. They might as well have discovered that the infected preferred the taste of chicken. It was an interesting idea, but what was it good for?
Expecting no less, Grace explained that they could make the rest of the world safer by exterminating more infected at one time. She told them they would begin work on a weapon that would kill more infected at one time now that they had the ability to call them together.
Ted was the first to put the impact into words, but it wasn’t out of concern for the living. It was born out of his natural tendency to make a joke out of something serious. The class clown was often a source of words of wisdom.
“I’d hate to get in the way of all those infected headed in the same direction.”
There was a palpable silence as the words sank in.
The expression on the face of Dr. Grace Williams was as if she had just been criticized for doing something wrong, and she was prepared to defend herself.
Anton Mikhailov grinned and appeared to be seeing something beyond the walls of the ship. Undoubtedly he was seeing people running helplessly ahead of a slowly moving horde. Women were carrying children as men sacrificed themselves in a futile attempt to slow the horde. No, he wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Ted was as easy to read as a comic book. He realized what he said as he said it, and he was deciding whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. He hadn’t really decided it would cause harm to people in the way. After all, if they were in the way, all they had to do was move out of the way.
Marshall studied each expression, and it may have been partially out of concern for voters, but at least he saw it in terms of human loss and suffering.
“There’s no way to warn everyone. People could get out of the way if they were warned, but what kind of range are we talking about? For every mile that thing can broadcast, how many more infected will it summon? I’ll give you an idea. Think in terms of cities. How far to the next one? You summon everything stumbling around between here and Columbia. That’s likely to be at least a million of those things.”
As he spoke, he became more animated, and his voice got louder.
“Remember we aren’t just talking about how many people there were on the last census. We’re talking about how many people were on I-95 when CEL Day One happened. Everyone passing through the state died. There are pockets of people out there, and if we drag every infected down here, they’re going to have a lot of people joining their ranks by the time they get here.”
There was no argument that would convince Marshall that they should use it, but there was one that convinced him to build it. As far as they knew, there was no one else who had discovered it. They would be famous for at least coming up with something no one else did, and fame was the motivation Marshall lived for.
The final decision that came out of the meeting was that they would build it as a means of self-defense. It could control the creatures, so they could use it as a short range weapon if they ever needed to. Marshall ordered them to proceed with their research to develop a weapon and to learn anything else they could about it, and like all other infectious diseases stored at USAMRIID, he told them to find a way to weaponize it. Not for their own use, of course, but just in case someone else did.
******
It was dark in the deepest corners of the old ship. There was no need for lights, and the wide variety of insects liked it that way. The spiders were largely unaffected by the chemicals that were occasionally dumped into the damp compartments, but over the years those chemicals hadn’t arrived, and nothing stopped the insects from seeking new corners where they could breed.
When the sound came, the one that caused a prickly sensation across their nervous systems, it also caused them to become aggressive. Not all of the spiders…just the ones that really mattered. Instead of hiding in their milky webs, they searched for the cracks and holes in the bulkheads that would allow them to get closer to the sound.
CHAPTER TWENTY
River’s End
Contagion Extinction Level - Six Years Later
Jed and Mattie almost gave up on reaching Charleston. By the time they had dodged swarms of infected that materialized from practically every street, every building that was open, and every corner where they had been deposited by the massive horde that had crashed through the surrounding area, Jed felt like it would be enough to just take Mattie somewhere safe and keep her alive.
The decision was made for them to some extent when they were cut off from the only escape route that would take them back the way they had come. Every time they tried to move in a direction away from Mt. Pleasant, they were forced to detour. It was like the old days when moving traffic jammed th
e highways. If you got stuck in the wrong lane, sometimes you just had to go where the flow took you.
What Jed found to be even more disturbing than their inability to escape from the press of the infected into the Lowcountry was the fact that they weren’t alone. It was obvious that animals were being pressed to move ahead of the infected just as they were, but the cats and dogs of this new world order had adapted their own survival instincts to include immediate flight when the infected were nearby. Their scent was different from living people, and the heightened senses of animals helped them to slip through gaps in the ever-shrinking cordon around them.
But it wasn’t animals or people that accompanied them on their journey to find the source of the sound that summoned the dead. It was spiders. When Jed had come upon the massive web in the Pinopolis lock, it was certainly unusual to find the dirty and dangerous tangle of sticky silk, but out in the country surrounded by trees wasn’t as unusual as finding thousands of them draped across buildings. He also knew that an estimation of thousands was likely to be low. They were everywhere.
Jed had been so busy navigating away from the infected that he hadn’t really paid much attention to the webs. It wasn’t until Mattie commented that she hated spiders that Jed saw how they were swallowing territory that had belonged to man. When she brought it to his attention, he realized that the collapse of the Pinopolis lock had done more than destroy the colony and his entire circle of friends. The water had carried a deadly cargo of brown recluse spiders and deposited them along every square inch of the riverbanks. He took Mattie by the hand and increased their pace.
The river wasn’t too far away from the road he was traveling, and he didn’t know how much he would be able to see from the Don Holt bridge, but he had to know how bad it had become. He was already within view of the highway that began the long climb to the top of the bridge, and he could see entire parking lots full of cars covered by a dusty brown blanket that had to be home to millions of spiders. It looked liked someone had emptied the lint screen of a giant clothes dryer onto the city.
Jed scooped Mattie up and ran to the top of the bridge, and he saw that it was far worse than he could have imagined. Both banks of the river came into view, and as far as the eye could see there were immense pillows of recluse webs on the trees, boats, docks, and houses that lined the river. He stopped and stared, wondering how there could be so many over so many miles. It didn’t take long for Jed to realize he had misunderstood the impact of the collapse of the lock. He couldn’t do the math, but he could guess. He guessed billions of baby brown recluse spiders had washed downriver toward the city of Charleston, and as they were deposited along the shore on the backs of the bodies where they had bred, they built their homes and multiplied even more.
He eventually reached the highest span of the bridge, and the panoramic view of the Cooper and Wando Rivers, the cities of North Charleston, Charleston, and Mt. Pleasant, and the harbor were all stretched out in front of him. From above it reminded him of the trip he had made to New York when he was a boy. It was the only time in his life when he had flown in an airplane, and he would never forget the realization that he was above the clouds instead of under them. He had squinted his eyes at the little window and pretended that the world was upside down, but when he opened them he found it was more fun not to pretend. This time it wasn’t fun. Inside these dirty clouds were eight legged creatures that were feeding on human flesh. Infected human flesh.
Downriver was the Arthur Ravenel bridge and the Yorktown. The bridge didn’t look right to him. Once again he squinted his eyes above the clouds, but this time it wasn’t to pretend, it was against the glare of the light reflecting from the webs that shrouded everything for miles. Jed wondered how he would be able to cross Mt. Pleasant without becoming food for this new threat.
There was something on the bridge. Something had been built on the deck from the road up, and from what he could tell without binoculars it appeared that the road had been walled off to prevent anything from crossing it. There was also something that he had never seen on the top of the highest part of the bridge where the big, steel cables were attached. It was small at this distance, but it had the familiar shape of a satellite dish. Jed searched his memories for anything that told him otherwise, but he could find nothing that said this thing had been there before the infection. It had to be the source of the sound that was calling out to the infected, and from where he stood on the Don Holt Bridge, the barrier on the Ravenel bridge reminded him of a walled castle. Those walls wrapped like protective arms around the Yorktown.
Jed couldn’t imagine the kind of power and resources behind such an operation. Someone had fortified the bridge and then put up a protective barrier around Patriots Point. Whoever they were, they were responsible for the deaths of a lot of people. Jed wondered if they knew.
“I don’t like it here, Mr. Jed.”
Mattie’s voice was shaking, and he became aware of his own when he answered her.
“We’re not staying here, but I think we have to go there.”
He pointed at the carrier and the bridge that seemed so out of place.
“Why?”
Mattie’s question wasn’t the typical beginning of a string of ‘whys’ that kids could use to annoy their parents. She really wanted to know why they had to go there. Maybe because it looked like a place that they should avoid. Before Jed could answer she followed with a more direct question.
“Can the spiders go there?”
Jed had been carrying Mattie, and he put her down as he turned in a circle at the top of the bridge. Behind them and to their left the webs blanketed enough of the landscape for him to know they could never go back that way. Ahead of them the webs still had a large amount of forested countryside to cross, and trees slowed the progress of the spiders more than the remnants of mankind. Buildings, cars, and roads made it easier for them.
Their choices were obvious because they didn’t have many. They could go forward, or they could stay where they were, and that would have been the same as giving up. Mattie pointed back the way they had come, and Jed saw a small horde of the infected emerge from the billowing webs between two tractor trailers.
Jed remembered a zombie movie he had laughed at along with his friends when they were kids. A bunch of zombies lurched out of a graveyard that just happened to be shrouded in fog, and as they stumbled toward a group of teenagers who didn’t have the sense to run, the fog had swirled around them.
Jed and his friends yelled insults at the teenagers and threats at the zombies, but mostly they laughed at the bad special effects. Years later as he stood on the top of this bridge he remembered those special effects and thought how much better they looked than the real things.
At least eight of the infected had come into view as if they came out of a tunnel underneath the web, but each of them had filaments, threads, and even bundles of the sticky webs stretched out behind them. It didn’t swirl around them the way the fog had in the movie. The infected dragged it with them and helped it to spread over new territory. Jed imagined the brown recluse spiders reacting the same way they had when he had encountered their webs as a kid. They would become agitated as if they were angry, and they would eventually attack. The infected walked as if nothing was happening, but they were undoubtedly being bitten from head to toe.
At the pace the infected walked, it would take them close to an hour to walk up the bridge to where Jed and Mattie stood, but in one hour their choice would be narrowed to one of their two options. There was no reason to hang around. Besides, the big holes in the webs were closing even as they watched. By the time another horde came through, there would be more web for them to drag along with them.
Jed scooped Mattie up again, not because she was tired but because Jed suddenly felt the need to expand his options. He didn’t think he could travel fast enough to circle around the menace that was coming from the north, but he didn’t plan to let it catch up with him. That thought made him turn his eyes t
o the north again as he descended the other side of the Don Holt bridge toward Mt. Pleasant. He couldn’t see it from the bridge, but somewhere beyond the forests was Highway 17, and a small part of him wondered if it was at all possible that he could reach it before the spider webs. If he could, he felt like he knew the area well enough to dodge the infected that were coming south in answer to the call of the contraption on the Arthur Ravenel Bridge.
Highway 17 had been the main stomping grounds of his colony. They were all born and raised in the area, so he knew where it was safe to travel. He knew the bridges were gone near Georgetown, but there were still boats that could be salvaged from marinas, and he could use the Intracoastal Waterway to go far enough around the infected and the spiders.
Jed felt energized by the thought and let the slope of the bridge build up his speed to a trot. He kept a watchful eye on the rusting hulks of the cars and trucks that jammed the road and wondered why there were no infected up ahead. As a matter of fact, there were as many vehicles as he would have expected, but there was something about the way they were spread out in some places that made him wonder if they had moved recently.
His suspicions were partly confirmed when he came to a wide gap between vehicles. He almost missed it because there were so many piles of rusty junk in every lane, but one tractor trailer was missing the rig. The trailer had been detached and left where it was, and the rig had apparently been driven away. Cars had been moved aside on the left and the right in a zigzag pattern up ahead, and Jed knew someone had used the bridge since the infection began.
