Pandemic Page 10

  “You’re still here,” she said to Tim. “Why aren’t you on Black Manitou?”

  His bloodshot eyes narrowed. He looked at the wall. “I worked there a few years ago when it was a civilian biotech facility, before DST took it over. I’m not allowed to talk about what we were working on, other than that it involved technologies for rapid growth. There were some … accidents.” He gave his head a little shake. “Anyway, I don’t ever want to go back. It’s safer here.”

  Safer here, on a task force dedicated to working with a vector that had the potential to wipe out the human race. Margaret wondered just what kind of accidents Tim was talking about. Whatever the reason, he had chosen to stay down here, mostly alone. He was a shut-in, just like she was.

  “What have you worked on all that time?”

  “Lots of stuff,” Tim said. “My tan, mostly. Oh, and trying to engineer a new strain of yeast, Saccharomyces feely, to secrete the infection’s self-destruct catalyst so we’d have a weapon if the disease ever struck again.”

  “Saccharomyces feely,” Margaret said. “Naming it after yourself?”

  Tim grinned. “Don’t hate the player, girl … hate the game.”

  This one was quite full of himself.

  Regardless of what he named the strain, it was a worthwhile pursuit. When a victim died, the infection triggered two chemical chain reactions that combined to leave scientists with nothing to study.

  The first reaction: uncontrolled apoptosis. Apoptosis was the normal process of cell destruction. When a cell has damage to the DNA or other areas, that cell, in effect, commits suicide, removing itself from the organism. The infection modified that process so it didn’t shut off — a cell swelled and burst, spreading the chain reaction to the cells around it, which then swelled and burst, and so on. Within a day or two, a corpse became little more than black sludge dripping off a skeleton.

  The second chain reaction had the same effect on the infection’s cellulose structures. Instead of apoptosis, infection’s cells produced a cellulase. Cellulase dissolved cellulose, the cell swelled and burst, spreading the cellulase catalyst to surrounding cells, and so on.

  The Orbital had hijacked human systems; Tim was trying to turn the tables and do the same to the Orbital’s creations.

  “Speaking of grunts,” Clarence said, appearing to refer to Tim’s comment about grunt work but intending it as a slap-back at Margaret’s insult, “What does Saccharomyces mean?”

  “Yeast,” Margaret said. She felt her face heat with shame. No matter how bad she and Clarence fought, there was no valid excuse to insinuate he wasn’t smart, that his work didn’t matter. When she was fully rational, she knew that. Problem was, that man made her irrational far more often than she cared to admit.

  She tried to shake it off, turned to face Tim. “Yeast, that’s smart. Modify their germline DNA so that subsequent generations produce that cellulase catalyst, and you’ve got an endless supply of something that kills the infection. Any luck?”

  Tim shook his head. “Close, but no cigar. I was able to get the yeast to produce the catalyst, but that catalyst is toxic to the yeast as well. The engineered yeast die before they can reproduce, so we don’t even get a second generation, let alone the massive colonies needed to secrete the amount of catalyst we’d need.”

  Clarence fidgeted in his bulky suit, pulling at the blue material, trying to make it settle on him better.

  “So, Doctor Feely, it’s just you down here,” he said. “Captain Yasaka mentioned you also helped with the wounded. How much sleep have you had?”

  Tim frowned, made a show of counting on his gloved fingers. “Let’s see, carry the one, divide by four, and … Alex, the question is, what is zero?”

  That didn’t surprise Margaret, not with the number of wounded up above.

  “No sleep,” Clarence said. “You on drugs or something?”

  “If by drugs you mean Adderall, Deprenyl and/or Sudafed — mostly and, though — then yes, I am on drugs.”

  Margaret saw Clarence taking a deep, disapproving breath. She put her gloved hand on his arm.

  “Clarence, relax,” she said. “Any doctor pulling a triple shift might do the same.”

  He turned to her, disbelieving. “Have you?”

  “More times than I can count. I had a life before I met you, you know. And apparently a life after.”

  If he wanted to make snide comments, she could do the same. The words caught him off guard, stung him. They also piqued Tim’s interest. Margaret wanted to kick herself for the slipup, for exposing personal problems at a time like this. She had to stay on point.

  Tim grinned at Margaret. “Come on, it’s the scheduled time to give my little prick to the two divers. After that, we can touch bodies. Dead bodies, that is.”

  Clarence sighed again, and Margaret couldn’t blame him.

  GOD’S CHOSEN

  Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy had always dreamed of serving in the navy. The big ships, seeing the world on Uncle Sam’s dime, the service, the career — he had wanted all these things.

  He hadn’t wanted to murder people, though.

  Until now.

  Now, he wanted to murder a lot of people. Ever single person he saw, in fact.

  The biosafety suit made him sweat. It also bounced his own voice back to him when he talked, made him sound strange.

  “Lattimer, John J.,” he called out, reading from the list on the clipboard as he’d been instructed to do. “Cellulose test.”

  Four wounded men were lying on the floor in the corner of the bunk room. They were too wounded to do work, but less wounded than the men who occupied the actual bunks. Second-degree burns covered one man’s arm. Another sailor had a red-spotted bandage wrapped around his head, something straight out of a shitty war movie.

  Orin wanted to shoot them. Stab them. Maybe stomp down on their throats and watch them suffocate to death. But for now, he had to keep up appearances.

  “Lattimer, John J.,” he said again. “Which one of you is Lattimer, John J.?”

  The one with the head bandage raised his hand.

  Orin pulled a cellulose testing kit out of the bag slung over his shoulder, handed it over. Orin knew he wasn’t human anymore, but he could still appreciate the irony that he was one of the sailors testing people to see if they were infected.

  His turn was coming soon enough. He’d managed to dodge his last test, when he’d already realized God had chosen him. Orin had pretended to fall, jabbed the end of his testing stick into a sleeping man. It worked: his test administrator had been distracted, had been counting down names on the list, looking for the next testee. If it had been business as usual aboard the Brashear, the administrator would have been eyes-on, carefully watching the results. But it wasn’t business as usual; God had seen to it to place hundreds of extra men onboard, many severely wounded, creating confusion, making people lose focus.

  Still, Orin knew that he probably wouldn’t be able to fake his way through the next test. They, the humans, they would find out about him, and they would try to kill him. That test was scheduled in two hours.

  In thirty minutes, his shift in the suit was up.

  That would give him ninety minutes to touch as many people as he could, to spread the gift that he’d been given.

  Then, maybe, he could answer that burning, churning need in his chest.

  He could finally kill.

  TESTY-TESTY

  The final airlock cycled. Clarence stepped out first, took in a large area hemmed in by the now-familiar white walls. In front of him were two rows of high-ceilinged, ten-by-ten glass cells stretching to the back of the room.

  A man stood in each of the two closest cells: a black man on the left, a white man on the right, both wearing gray hospital gowns. They were just there to be observed, but that didn’t make it any less of a prison. Both men seemed fit and healthy, arms lined with lean muscle.

  Each cell had a small steel desk, a steel chair beneath it, and a plastic-
covered mattress that lay on top of a stainless steel bed. A tablet computer sat on each desk — the divers’ entertainment and reading material, perhaps. Other than that there was nothing, save for a steel toilet that looked to be a raised hole without plumbing.

  In a third cell, behind that of the white man, Clarence saw an Asian man lying motionless on the bed. Medical equipment surrounded him, a technological monster clutching at him with wires and sensors, looking inside him through tubes up his nose and IVs in his arms.

  Through their clear cell walls, the two standing men watched Clarence, Margaret and Tim. The men looked afraid. They watched. They waited.

  To Clarence’s right, past the line of glass cages, was an open space ringed with gleaming steel tables, clamps, saws, robotic arms … various equipment to prepare material brought up from the lake bottom, he assumed. The reason for the prep area was clear: to receive material from yet another airlock, this one the biggest he had ever seen. It was the width of a two-car garage. Nozzles and vents lined the ceiling; everything in this room here could be sprayed down, disinfected in a rainstorm of bleach.

  Margaret walked to the aisle that ran between the two rows of cells. The cell doors opened onto that aisle — if they would ever be opened, that was. Clarence knew those men might very well die in those cells. A flat-panel monitor was mounted at the left side of each cell door. On those monitors, Clarence saw the familiar spikes of an EKG, various other numbers revealing the physical state of the men inside.

  How much did these men know? Did they truly understand why they were being held?

  “They look okay,” Clarence said.

  “They do,” Tim said. “They’re tested every three hours, all negatives so far. The rest of the ship is tested every six hours. Including me. And, now, both of you.”

  He pointed to the cell with the prone man. “That fellow, on the other hand, is unfortunately brain-dead. Ensign Eric Edmund. Couldn’t exactly call him okay.”

  Margaret stepped into the aisle between cells. “Was Edmund also a diver?”

  “No,” Tim said. “Injured in the battle. He’s a gift from Captain Yasaka, in case I need a living subject for my yeast experimentation.”

  Clarence felt his anger flare up. He spun to face Tim.

  “Experiment? Brain-dead or not, that’s a serviceman in there, not a gift.”

  Tim didn’t bother to hide a look of contempt. “Agent Otto, Ensign Edmund isn’t coming back. If he wasn’t in that cell, he’d have already been put in the incinerator along with the other dead bodies. Machines are the only thing keeping him alive.”

  “Alive for your research,” Clarence said. “Which you already told us was a failure.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. “How about you use that oversized melon of yours for something other than a hat rack? We have no idea what we’ll need. If we have to experiment, it’s Edmund or some other sailor, maybe one who’s not brain-dead.”

  “What’s the matter, Feely? Don’t have the balls to experiment on yourself?”

  Feely shrugged. “I didn’t enlist, big fella. If you’re dumb enough to sign your life over to Uncle Sam, then Uncle Sam gets to decide what happens to you.”

  Clarence moved closer, stared down at the smaller man. “I was dumb enough to enlist, you asshole.”

  He’d assumed his size would intimidate Feely, that his position with the DST might make Tim rethink his opinion of servicemen — but Tim just smiled an arrogant smile.

  “You were a soldier? And here I was thinking you had a particle physics degree in your pants — maybe you’re just glad to see me.”

  “Enough,” Margaret said, her words loud enough to rattle the speakers in Clarence’s helmet. He turned, looked at her, and felt instantly foolish — this was no time to let someone like Feely get a rise out of him.

  Margaret glared at them both. “If you two want to have a pissing contest, save it for later. Doctor Feely, if it weren’t for Agent Otto, you wouldn’t be here. I didn’t save the world all by myself, you know. Give him the respect he deserves.”

  Clarence had a brief moment to feel justified, to feel that Margaret was backing him up, before she turned her anger on him.

  “And you, Clarence, wake up — before this is over, we might have to do far worse things than experiment on a man who’s already gone. Now, if the two of you are done posturing, can we get to work?”

  Clarence’s anger shifted instantly into embarrassment. He nodded.

  “Sorry,” Tim said. “From now on, I’ll be sugar and spice and everything nice.”

  Feely was still being a smart-ass, but Clarence thought he heard a hint of sincerity in there.

  Margaret reached out, tapped at the left-hand cell’s panel. “They’ve been in here for” — she tapped again — “thirty-eight hours.”

  “Correct,” Tim said. “Your notes described an incubation period of between twenty-four and forty-eight hours before infected victims start to show symptoms. So if we’re lucky, these men are in there another two days, just to be sure.”

  The black diver spoke. “I find your definition of luck somewhat wanting, Doctor Feely.”

  The white diver rested his forehead against the inside of his cell wall. “Oh, man … two more days?”

  Tim walked back to the airlock door and opened a cabinet mounted just to its left. He pulled out two cellulose test boxes, then returned to the black diver’s cell.

  “Master Diver Kevin Cantrell, meet Doctor Montoya and Agent Otto,” Tim said. “How about you show them our fun little drama called it puts the lotion in the basket.”

  Tim placed the box in a small, rotating airlock mounted in the clear door, then moved his hands in midair. It took Clarence a second to remember Tim was using his suit’s HUD to control things. The airlock turned. Cantrell opened the white box, pulled out the foil envelope inside.

  He stared at it like it was a living thing, something pretending to be still until it was ready to bite.

  “Your title is wrong,” Cantrell said. “I prefer The Merchant of Venice.”

  “Venice,” Tim said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  Margaret answered. “It’s Shakespeare — If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

  Cantrell glanced at her, then at the testing unit, then looked at her again, stared hard.

  “Lady, are you … are you here to kill me?”

  A direct question, but it didn’t make sense. Clarence noticed a slight gleam on Cantrell’s forehead. He was perspiring a little … did he have a fever?

  Margaret answered in a calm, measured voice. “Mister Cantrell, why do you think I want to kill you?”

  Clarence understood: she thought Cantrell might be showing signs of paranoia, one of the main symptoms of infection.

  Cantrell blinked rapidly, sniffed. He forced a smile, gestured to the walls around him.

  “I’m a guinea pig, ma’am,” he said. “It’s a logical question.”

  Before Margaret could ask another question, Cantrell removed the white plastic tube, pressed it against the tip of his right pointer finger. The yellow light started flashing immediately.

  Clarence watched, tension pulling his body forward, making his hand itch to draw his weapon — a weapon he didn’t have. He felt naked. He needed to get a rig that would let him wear a holster over the suit. Was Cantrell’s light about to turn red? Was a piece of thick glass all that separated Margaret from one of the infected?

  The flashing yellow slowed, then stopped and blinked out.

  The green light turned on.

  Clarence’s body relaxed slightly, a tight spring uncoiling halfway. Maybe these guys still had a chance.

  Cantrell carried his test — box and envelope and all — to his toilet. He tossed everything down the open hole. Clarence heard a soft whump: an incinerator flaring to life.

  The other diver slapped on the glass of his cell, making Margaret jump.

  “Ma’am, you got to get me out of here,” he said to her. “We’re fine,
the tests keep coming up negative, we’re fine.”

  It took Tim only two steps to cross the aisle. He put the other box in the airlock, rotated it through.

  “And this fine gentleman is Diego Clark,” Tim said. “Clark, how about you quit with the whining and make with the pricking?”

  Clark looked at the test box like it was poisonous. He then looked up at the cluster of nozzles mounted in his cell’s high ceiling. Some of the nozzles were stainless steel, others were brass. The brass nozzles reminded Clarence of something, but he couldn’t place what. The stainless steel ones he recognized, as he’d seen them in the MargoMobile — they were for knockout gas, in case Tim and Margaret had to go in and work on a dangerous infection victim.

  Clark slapped the glass again. “Let me out! We were just doing our jobs, we shouldn’t be locked up! This is horseshit! Where’s my CO? Where’s my lawyer?”

  “Less talky-talky,” Tim said, “more testy-testy.”

  Clark opened the box and removed the foil envelope, then threw the box down and stomped on it.

  “When I get out of here, Feely,” he said, “I’m going to shove one of these straight up your ass.”

  “As long as you buy me dinner first,” Tim said. “Now do the damn test.”

  Clark again looked up to the ceiling, then shook his head.

  “Ain’t gonna burn me,” he said.

  Burn. That triggered Clarence’s memory. He again looked up at the cell ceiling, and understood why the brass nozzle seemed familiar: it looked like a flamethrower. Clark was right to be afraid — his cage could be instantly turned into a fire-filled oven that would burn him alive.

  Tim sighed, clearly bored with the drama. He slowly raised a finger toward the flat-panel controls of Clark’s cell.

  “You’re getting tested,” Tim said. “You can either be conscious for it, or I can knock you out and give it to you myself. Your choice.”