by Stark, Ken
Sarah didn't argue. Not exactly.
“Maybe so, but at least she was trying to be a benevolent god.”
“She?” Mason did the math. “Ah, the lady in white. The one on the cover. Chan, was it?”
Sarah nodded. “The science was sound and had incredible potential. Think of it – an army of machines all programmed to destroy harmful pathogens, repair damage, rebuild lost function. With one injection, they'd be able to regenerate spinal cords, reconstruct optic nerves, repair atrophied muscles. Every disease known to man could be eliminated in its initial stages. Eventually, even aging itself might be reversed. Every cell in our bodies would be continuously rebuilt by billions of microscopic robots, all dedicated to the single task of repairing and maintaining the machinery of our physiology. Theoretically, nanotech could keep a human body alive indefinitely. Can you imagine living ten lifetimes, Hansen? A hundred? A thousand?”
Mason could plainly see how excited Sarah was getting, and he couldn't blame her one bit. She was back in her world now – back in the world of science and medicine and everything pre-apocalypse. And even though she just so happened to be describing the step-by-step destruction of the whole world, he said nothing, lest he take from her these few fleeting moments of her old, happy life.
Sadly, Hansen was not so charitable. “One's plenty,” he growled, still flipping pages like he was looking for the crossword puzzle at the back of a TV Guide.
Sarah was undeterred. “Patient A was a young boy. Eight years old. He developed a brain tumour deep in his cerebellum. A medulloblastoma, far too deep for surgery and too advanced for chemotherapy or radiation. I had to read between the lines, but I'm guessing that the child's father was very rich and very influential. It would have cost billions, and to get it done as quickly as they did, undoubtedly, some laws would have been skirted, and some corners cut. But in the end, Chan and her team managed to create the tech. Then, they went on to perfect a technique to bond the tech to a virus.”
“And they put it in the boy,” Mason said.
“They did.” Sarah nodded, enthusiasm fully intact.
“A human guinea pig,” Hansen scoffed. “So, did it make him one of those... things?”
“Not at all!” Sarah fairly beamed. “In fact, the procedure worked perfectly! The tech was programmed to eliminate every last cancer cell and repair all of the damage to the cerebellum and brain stem, and that's exactly what it did. It was a monumental success! The boy's recovery was so astonishing and so rapid that he was released within the month. After all, no one anticipated any kind of complications...” And here, Sarah's excitement vanished in an instant. She swallowed hard and turned her eyes downward as if in prayer, and she added, sourly, “But Darwin knew better.”
She took a deep breath, then she continued. “The rest of this is conjecture. Understand, the JAMA report ends with that initial success. So, this is nothing more than an educated guess at what happened after, but it's probably as close to the truth as we'll ever come. I can only assume that while the technology was doing what it was programmed to do, the virus followed its own programming, courtesy of Mother Nature. You see, every new generation of every organism on Earth throws out random mutations. Those that benefit the organism are passed on to future generations, and those that don't, die off. That's evolution. We all learned about that in high school. A random ape is born with an extra cubic centimeter of brain mass, it's better able to survive and procreate, and a few million years and hundreds of thousands of mutations later, voilà... Homo sapiens. Well, even though a virus isn't technically alive, it follows the same rules. It throws off countless mutations in every generation – some stick, some don't. And believe it or not, some of those variations actually turn out to be beneficial to the human body. But sometimes, they turn out to be quite deadly.”
“So what you're saying is,” Hansen summed up in his own way, “the whole world ended because one doctor tried to fix a broken boy.”
“Well, obviously I can't be sure, but it makes sense. Look, viruses mutate. It's what they do. A virus endemic to one species throws off a single mutation in a billion that allows it to jump the species barrier, like the so-called Swine flu or Avian influenza. Or a crow carrying H5N1 dies and falls into a pig sty where one of the pigs is already infected with H1N1, and like two separate armies attacking a common enemy, they share information, swap genetic material, combine, mutate, recombine and mutate again. Ad infinitum. Until one lone virion manages to slip through a human immune system's defenses. I can only assume that Patient A passed the technovirus to someone else, and they passed it to someone else, and so on and so on. It might have spread to thousands or even millions of people – and they would have never known they carried it unless someone looked at a blood sample through an electron microscope. The only sign that they'd been infected at all would be a complete absence of medulloblastoma. So, it went undetected. Eventually, the virus must have either mutated on its own or come upon a host carrying another type of virus. It became deadly, and it became airborne. From there, it was just a short hop on a 747 to global pandemic.”
Mason stifled a gasp. A short hop on a 747. His return flight from that horrible week in Thailand. He'd told Sarah all about it. Blindness. Panic. Rage. An emergency landing. And all of it ending with a man in a suit biting the face of a rescue worker.
Jesus... Was that the short hop? Had he actually witnessed the beginning of the end?
“Clearly, a precious few must have been immune even then,” he heard Sarah say through the pulse thundering in his ears. But the words gave him little comfort. He tried to speak, but the words lodged in his throat.
Sarah put her other hand on his cheek and told him in no uncertain terms, “And those precious few should consider themselves extremely fortunate to have been given a second chance at life. Just imagine what good might come from it.”
He nodded and managed to force a smile, but the reality of it shook him down to the core. Here he thought he'd escaped the thing, thanks to his natural aversion to humans. But in reality, he'd been in the thick of it all along – elbow to elbow with those first few hundred lost souls.
“And what makes someone immune to a brand new disease?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.
Sarah shrugged. “Chance. Genetics. Luck of the draw. Divine providence, if you prefer.”
“I don't,” Mason admitted, feigning a grin.
“You make it sound like it was inevitable,” Hansen snorted, breaking into their reverie. “Like one virus or another was always destined to come along and take us down.”
Sarah answered honestly. “Well, the tech adds a new wrinkle, but there are more than a trillion trillion trillion viruses on Earth. They're the oldest organisms on the planet, and they'll probably be the last to go. They've adapted to changing conditions since the Earth cooled. They evolve continuously. It's what they do. It's how they're programmed. We humans were very lucky for a very long time. The last major outbreak was over a century ago. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed a hundred million people. Almost as many as the two World Wars combined. At the time, it amounted to five percent of the world's population.”
“Okay, I get the whole mutation and Darwin shit. After all, I'm living it! But tell me, Sarah, how the hell can a virus turn an otherwise normal human being into a raving, blood-thirsty maniac?”
“Actually, that's the only question I can answer with any kind of confidence. With all of the patients we treated at Trident, the one thing we were able to learn was that the virus systematically destroys all higher brain functions. It starts with the visual cortex, here in the occipital lobe,” she pointed to the back of her head, “then it spreads to the rest of the cerebrum. When all higher brain functions are gone, so is the human. No thought, no cognition, no pleasure, no pain. All that's left is the alpha, and all it knows is to feed.”
Hansen abandoned the JAMA report entirely, throwing it on the floor. “And just what kind of magical virus can resurrect a dead body, h
uh? Answer me that, if you can...”
She shrugged again. “Well, now we're back to conjecture, but think about that first case, Patient A. That young boy had a tumor deep in his cerebellum. The tech was programmed to eliminate cancer cells and repair damage to that specific area. Now, the cerebellum is the part of the brain that regulates movement, so it must be that – when the body dies, the tech keeps working. Repairing. Rebuilding. But not the whole brain, because technology can't evolve like organics. The tech was programmed to rebuild non-functioning neurons and axons in the lower brain, specifically the cerebellum and the brain stem. It wouldn't have the programming to repair anything in the cortex or neocortex.”
“It fixes just enough to make the dead move.”
“Exactly right.”
“To infect others?”
“To reproduce. The tech and the virus are one, so the tech rebuilds...”
“...So the virus can go walkabout,” Mason finished the thought for her.
Sarah nodded grimly and went on. “The initial outbreak was airborne, and it infected a huge majority of the population. The last we heard from the CDC, perhaps as much as ninety percent of the population had been affected. But then, the virus changed again. It became vector-borne in a single generation. That's amazing enough, but that new adaptation gave it an unprecedented delivery system. Some viruses infect through a cough or a sneeze, like influenza. Some remain virulent on a handrail or a doorknob for several days. Norovirus, for instance. Some require direct contact and will lie in wait long after the death of the host, until a loved one touches a cheek or holds a hand. Ebola is the perfect example. In the case of this... this technovirus, it doesn’t have to lie in wait or hope for surreptitious wind currents. It can actually propel an echo toward a potential new host.”
“Like marionettes,” Mason concluded. “Puppets. With the virus as the puppet master.”
“I can only assume that it's present in every drop of bodily fluid. Saliva, blood, sweat... Human skin is actually a good barrier against viruses, but if the skin is broken and even a single virion is able to enter the blood stream...”
Mason looked at his hands, then to the faces of the others, all splattered with blood. But before he could find the words for his fear, Sarah put his mind at ease.
“I know, Mace, I know. I worried about that too, but if it could pass through mucous membranes, we'd have caught it by now. It must require direct access to the circulatory system.”
He breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
“But your girl, Mackenzie,” Hansen interjected. “She was sick and she fought it off.”
“Yes, Mack was infected by the airborne strain, and her immune system was able to put up the right defenses. Who knows? Perhaps millions would have recovered under normal circumstances, but blindness in a world of predators isn’t exactly an asset. We’ll never know how many might have survived that initial outbreak. But I can tell you that no human immune system on Earth would be able to fend off the technovirus in its vector-borne form. Those little bastards start replicating immediately, and they have their own personal 747 in the form of sixty thousand miles of arteries and veins in the human body.”
“Well shit...” Hansen snarled, looking decidedly sick to his stomach as he kicked the JAMA report back to Sarah. “Fat lot of good that does. But tell you what... if I ever come across a good-looking Asian lady in a white coat, I believe I'll gladly wring that cunt's neck.”
CHAPTER XXII
Mason checked his watch.
“Almost time,” he said, slipping the knapsack off his back and dumping its contents on the floor. To anyone else, it might have looked like a load of laundry, but it was hardly that. This was every jacket, shirt, and towel the college kids could find in the Alamo to fashion themselves a few makeshift beds. Now, every bit of it was tied together end-to-end, just like a number of bed sheets in a certain hospital an eternity ago.
Hansen tiptoed back to the window overlooking building six, and while he was gone, Mason hushed quietly to Sarah.
“Sarah, this technovirus... once it's in you, it's in you, right?”
“Mace,” she told him, stroking his cheek lovingly, “even if it was on that plane, you're okay.”
Reluctantly, he took the hand from his cheek, but he didn't let it go. “I wasn't talking about me,” he hushed, leaning so close to her that their lips nearly touched. “I was talking about Mack.”
All at once, Sarah's back straightened. “What are you saying, Mace?”
She wasn't angry. She couldn't be. Not with him. But he'd clearly plucked a nerve. A nerve that she'd probably already worried into a frayed mess.
“I might have been immune, but Mack was infected. She had that thing in her, this... this technovirus. It was in her brain. Rebuilding. Rewiring. So all I'm asking is, is the thing still in there?”
Sarah pulled her hand away, and for the first time ever, she looked at him with something akin to anger. “We're not having this conversation,” she said, but as she made to rise, Mason pulled her back down.
If it were anyone else, Becks included, there would have been indignation. Harsh words. Maybe even a slap across the face. But this was Sarah, and this was Mason. Sarah gave a single huff, then she took his face in both of her hands and kissed him warmly on the lips.
“Mace, you're the sweetest man in the world. I know how much Mack means to you, and believe me, you mean every bit as much to her,” she kissed him again and hushed in his ear, “and to me.”
“But...”
“Mace,” she quieted him with a look, “she's okay. It's good news. Drop it.”
Mason struggled for the right words, any words, and finding none, he finally gave up and simply drank in the warmth of this wonderful woman he'd known for a few weeks and a lifetime.
The implications were clear. Were those little machines still inside Mack? Yes, undoubtedly. Was there any way to get them out? No, not a chance. Were they still at work, rebuilding, rewiring, reconnecting? Maybe, maybe not, there was no way to know. But if they were, was there the slightest possibility that those new connections might result in an alteration of mood or behaviour? It was anyone's guess, but there had to be a chance.
Or maybe it was just as Mason had imagined it. Maybe Mack was just wise beyond her years and adapting like mad to survive in this living Hell. And even if the technovirus was still at work and helping her along with a swift kick to the brain stem... so what? Who cared about the means as long as the end result was a Mack who still drew breath?
And that's where he left it, even if it was only in his own mind. Mack was alive. Period. Done.
“I have more good news.” Sarah cocked a grin as she reached into her pocket. “Look what I found. It's not an iPod, but it still works.”
It was a wristwatch. A man's. She must have taken it from one of the corpses while Mason was occupied. It looked like one he used to wear himself. One with an alarm. Not uncommon in the days before everyone carried a smartphone. She cut several feet of cord from the window blinds and tied the watch to one end. Now, it was perfect.
Mason watched Hansen throw a few more hand signals across the way, then he held up the chair cushion and got his reply. He unfurled the message, read it, checked his watch, then he tossed a few more signals – a thumbs-up and a final kiss – through the window, and tiptoed like an ungainly rhinoceros back to the others.
“Five minutes,” he said. “Get ready. I'll give you a ten second countdown.”
They moved to the window overlooking the Peterbilt. While Mason secured one end of the makeshift rope to a conveniently situated bookshelf, Hansen and Sarah saw to the window itself. It was thick, double-paned, and unlike the windows on the west side of the building, it didn't open. They had no other choice but to break it. But rather than throwing a chair through the thing and ringing the dinner bell, they took a decidedly more surgical approach.
Starting at the top corners, they placed a soft-covered book against the window and used the bu
tts of their pistols like hammers, thumping the glass in incrementally harder blows until it cracked and gave way. Then, they moved across the top and down the sides, chipping a few inches of window away as they went. The crowd below stirred, and some of the alphas directly against the building became enraged by the bits of glass raining down from above. But before long, Hansen caught the bulk of the window in his arms and the way was clear.
As Hansen cleared the last shards from the frame, Sarah scurried two windows away and repeated the process to open a hole at the bottom corner. She looked to Hansen, who raised a pair of fingers, and she set the watch accordingly. She then tossed it through the hole and threaded the line carefully through her fingers, until it hung just above the heads of the tallest creatures below.
Then, it was Mason's turn. He gave the makeshift rope a few sharp tugs, tossed the end of it out the window, and climbed up onto the ledge. Hansen raised a single finger, Mason acknowledged it with a nod, and as that last minute ticked away, he tucked his fifty pounds of rebar through a belt loop and studied the swarm, mapping the best possible route through the ungodly mess.
Here, an older alpha next to a hobbled female. There, a child. Beyond it, a big male dangling its guts like an apron. Closer to the truck, a pair of females, ravaged by the swarm. Hansen began a whispered countdown from ten, and all other thoughts left Mason's mind. All he knew was the rope in his hand and the swarm swirling below. When Hansen reached six, he turned his back to the swarm and took the first few steps down the side of the building.
He finished the countdown in his own head and took a single step down for every tick of the clock. When he reached the count of three, he could feel claws batting at the back of his shirt, billowing down as if it were a piñata. He held fast, took a deep breath, and ticked off the last two seconds with a familiar aching in his gut.
Two... one... Now!
An almighty explosion shook the Quad, then the tell-tale rat-a-tat-a-tat of a machine gun echoed between the buildings, punctuated with single shots from high-powered rifles.
