Pandemic Page 16

  THE BARRIER

  Clarence sat in the observation module. He watched a monitor, trying to make sense of the video Tim and Margaret were so excited to share with him. It was time-lapse footage, two side-by-side bits of Charlie Petrovsky’s rotting flesh. Five hours compressed into fifteen seconds let Clarence immediately see a significant difference.

  He looked over the console, down into the Analysis Module where Tim and Margaret stared up at him, waiting.

  “Okay, I watched it,” Clarence said. “The one on the left is rotting faster than the one on the right. What’s it mean?”

  Tim turned to Margaret, half bowed, lowered his arm in a sweeping gesture: after you, madame. Margaret mocked a curtsy, which looked ridiculous in her bulky suit.

  To say their mood had changed was an understatement; they thought they were on to something big.

  “The sample on the left is the control,” Margaret said. “That’s Petrovsky’s tissue, getting hit hard by the black rot. The one on the right is also his tissue but was treated with a solution that contained Walker’s blood.”

  Clarence glanced at the footage again. “Walker’s blood stops the black rot?”

  This time Margaret turned to Tim, bowed, made the after you gesture. Tim kept form and mocked a curtsy of his own — a little better than Margaret’s, Clarence had to admit.

  “Not Walker’s blood, exactly, but a chemical that’s in it,” Tim said. “I found a compound in her blood that wasn’t present in Petrovsky. We then detected that same compound in the few living hydras we have left. Ergo, the hydras make it. The compound is a catalyst that alters the black-rot process — it turns off the part that makes human bodies undergo exponential apoptosis, but it doesn’t do anything to the chemical that makes the infected tissues and microorganisms undergo their own chain-reaction decomposition.”

  Clarence had to play back the words in his head to make sure he wasn’t oversimplifying what he’d heard. Could it be that straightforward?

  “So it’s a cure,” he said. “It kills the infection, but leaves our tissue alone?”

  Tim thought for a moment. “Sort of. It depends on how long the person has been exposed. See, the catalyst is a really big molecule. You know anything about the blood-brain barrier?”

  Clarence hesitated for a moment, wondering if Tim was trying to make him look stupid in front of Margaret, but both of them seemed far too excited to be playing any games.

  “No, not really.”

  “Think of it like a mesh,” Margaret said. “It’s a semipermeable membrane. That means things of a certain size can penetrate it, but things larger than that size cannot. It evolved to keep circulating blood separate from the extracellular fluid” — she paused, perhaps realizing she was going too far into detail — “to keep blood and other things separated from actual brain tissue. Blood can’t go through the barrier, but oxygen diffused from blood can. So if things are small enough, they can slide through the mesh. If they’re too big, they can’t. Follow me so far?”

  Clarence nodded.

  Tim held out his hands wide, like he was talking about the fish that got away.

  “The hydra catalyst is too large to penetrate the barrier,” he said. “So to answer your question, the catalyst first works as an inoculant — if it’s already in your system before you are exposed to the infection, any crawlers produced will die before they can reach your brain. It makes you immune. And if you’ve already been infected but the crawlers have not yet reached your brain, the catalyst can kill off those crawlers. Meaning, if you get infected right now and we get this catalyst in your system within twenty-four hours, it will probably cure you.”

  Clarence now understood their excitement. He was beginning to feel it himself.

  “So if you take it soon enough, it is a cure,” he said. “What happens after the twenty-four hours?”

  Tim shrugged. “The crawlers need about twenty-four hours to form, find your nervous system and reach your brain. If enough of them get in, they rework your brain into the cellulose-based structures we’ve seen. At that point, it’s too late.”

  Clarence looked at Margaret. “But you said Walker had hydras in her brain. Hydras can get in there?”

  Margaret nodded. “They can, following the same path the crawlers do. We don’t have much evidence to go on right now, but it seems possible the hydras travel to the brain instinctually, because they are so closely related to the crawlers. But there’s a difference — the hydras don’t seem to alter brain tissue. They’re just there.”

  As far as cures went, alien organisms in the brain didn’t seem all that encouraging.

  “Say the crawlers get to the brain first,” Clarence said. “They start changing everything around, and then the hydras get there. What happens then?”

  Margaret glanced at Tim.

  “The hydras probably keep secreting their catalyst,” he said. “Since they’re on the other side of the blood-brain barrier, and so are the crawlers, any crawlers exposed to the catalyst will die. Any cellulose-based structures probably dissolve.”

  “Which means what to the host?”

  “Death,” Tim said. “It means death.”

  For a few minutes, Clarence had dared to hope that it was all over, that if some poor soul was infected, he or she could be saved with a shot or a pill. Life didn’t work that way, it seemed. Still, at least now there was something to fight with.

  “Impressive work,” Clarence said. “So what happens next?”

  “Tim goes to work on genetically sequencing the hydras,” Margaret said. “He isolates the genetic code that makes the catalyst, inserts that bit of code into the genome of his yeast, and the yeast produces the catalyst.”

  That sounded impossible.

  “Feely, you can really do that?”

  Tim shrugged. “It’s how insulin is made for diabetics. The DNA that makes insulin is inserted into bacteria, the bacteria secrete the insulin, which is harvested and purified. When the bacteria reproduce, the subsequent generations have that same inserted DNA. Boom, you have a permanent, insulin-producing population.

  “The basic technology is decades old. I’ve spent the last two years inserting crawler coding into my fast-growing yeast, so at this point it’s just plug-and-play. The only question is if my yeast will survive the new coding. If so, we’ll have Saccharomyces feely producing the catalyst inside of a few hours.”

  A few hours? Clarence fought down his immediate reaction. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up this fast.

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” he said. “What do you need to make this happen?”

  Now Tim glanced at Margaret. She looked away, looked down.

  “We need to make more hydras,” she said. “And there’s only one way to do that.”

  HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

  Margaret had killed one of the hydras to analyze it. Another had died on its own; she assumed the last two surviving hydras couldn’t be far behind.

  Time was running out.

  Candice Walker was dead, as was everything inside of her. There were no more hydras to be had from her corpse.

  Margaret entered the clear cell of Eric Edmund. She carried a small tray holding an alcohol swab and a syringe. She set the tray down on Edmund’s stomach. She had to remind herself that the man was brain-dead. He would never recover.

  Edmund’s self, all that he had ever been, that was gone forever … but his body lived on. His heart pumped, his blood flowed, his cells divided. The human body was the hydras’ natural environment. There, hopefully, they would modify Edmund’s stem cells, make copies of themselves — they would replicate.

  Margaret picked up the alcohol swab and wiped Edmund’s shoulder, cleaning her target area. She set the swab down and lifted the syringe. She stared at it through her visor. Just one CC of saline, and inside that fluid, a pair of passengers.

  Only two left.

  A slap on the glass. She turned to see Cantrell, staring at her, the lighter skin of his palms res
ting on the clear wall. His eyes … he looked like he was trying to control his anger.

  “Doctor Montoya, what are you doing?” Cantrell smiled. He looked at the syringe. “Don’t you need permission for something like that?”

  How could he know what she was doing? He didn’t know; he was just being difficult.

  “Not your concern,” she said.

  Cantrell frowned, spoke sweetly. “Awww, Doc, of course it is. He’s in the cell next to mine. What if something breaks? What you do to him could affect me.”

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Margaret said. “You’re not infected, Cantrell.”

  The smile returned. A chilling smile.

  “Then let me out,” he said. “I keep testing negative … just let me out.”

  Those eyes, so intense, so angry even though his voice sounded smooth and calm.

  Why was she wasting time with him?

  Only two left …

  Margaret slid the needle into Edmund’s shoulder, then pushed the plunger all the way down. The saline emptied into his arm.

  That was that. She could only hope those hydras were as reproductively efficient as the crawlers that had taken over Betty Jewel, Carmen Sanchez and so many others.

  All Margaret’s energy drained away. She felt hollow. The biosafety suit suddenly seemed so heavy. If she could just get out of it for a little bit, maybe rest her eyes.

  She heard the click of someone coming onto her channel.

  “Margo,” Clarence said. “Where are you?”

  “Detainment.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “I’m working, Clarence. What do you want?”

  “The diver is going into the Los Angeles in forty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d want to watch.”

  She did want to see that. Maybe the diver would come across the subject of Candice Walker’s final drawings, the three men in the membrane. Forty-five minutes … enough time to decon, get out of the suit, grab twenty minutes of sleep.

  She turned to leave, felt Cantrell’s eyes upon her. For just a moment, she froze — he looked like he wanted to kill her — and then the moment was gone.

  Cantrell walked to his bed and sat.

  Margaret picked up her tray and left Edmund’s cell.

  FOLLOW-THROUGH

  When he’d been ten years old, Orin Nagy’s father finally showed him how to properly swing a baseball bat. It was all in the hips, his father had said. Twisting them at the right moment brought your body around, maximized your swing velocity. Arm strength mattered, sure, but the real power came from the hips. The hips, and following through.

  The same advice held true for swinging a pipe wrench.

  Orin swung, Orin twisted, bringing twenty pounds of unforgiving metal to bear on the motherfucker that wanted to make him take the cellulose test.

  The man’s biosafety suit offered little protection. The heavy wrench caved in his right temple like a hammer slammed into a ripe melon.

  And, just like the good boy he’d once been, Orin followed through.

  The man dropped like a bag of wet shit.

  Daddy would have been proud.

  Orin heard men screaming angry things. He saw another one raising a pistol. Orin let the follow-through carry him all the way around in a fast 360-degree turn. As he came out of that turn, he swung again, more overhand axe-chop than smooth baseball swing. The results were much the same: the wet crunch of a crushed skull.

  The gun went off. A pair of bodies slammed into Orin, dragged him to the ground.

  He fought, because God commanded he do so, and also because before he died he wanted to kill just one more of the cock-sucking pissant humans that he hated so fucking much …

  140 CHARACTERS

  Six miles clear of the navy flotilla and fifty feet below the empty, roiling surface of Lake Michigan, the Platypus hovered, motionless save for the slight back-and-forth tug of the waves high above. It might have been a dead fish. It might have been a log.

  A clamp released, freeing a fist-sized piece of plastic. The plastic floated upward, trailed by a thin cable. Forty feet … thirty … twenty …

  The plastic reached the surface, bobbed there. It extended a telescoping antenna that was no thicker than a pencil at the base, little more than a stiff wire where it topped out four feet above the water.

  The Platypus floated, unmoving, waiting for instructions.

  A signal came in: a tweet. Then another. Five 140-character alphanumeric messages in all. Each message called up commands stored in the Platypus’s memory.

  The Platypus retracted the antennae, then reeled in the plastic float. The machine tilted down, started to swim. A hundred feet down, then two hundred, then three hundred.

  Ten feet from the bottom, the Platypus leveled out. It called up the recorded bearing that would lead it back to the Los Angeles. It followed the lake floor’s contour, going deeper and deeper as it closed the distance.

  The Platypus scanned for any signal, any communication, ready to adjust its path based on the presence of other craft.

  A half mile out, it detected pings from a powerful sonar almost a thousand feet above: signals from a surface ship sent to submerged vessels. The Platypus couldn’t read those messages — they were encrypted — but the signals themselves alerted it to a danger of detection.

  Steve Stanton’s creation slowed to a crawl. It sank to the bottom, resting its underside on Lake Michigan’s thick muck. It used its side fins as arms rather than paddles, pressing against rocks and sand and mud to pull its body slowly forward.

  It detected light, light coming from yellow shapes. The Platypus stopped moving, ran the visual data through pattern analysis programs. It quickly identified the shapes as U.S. Navy ROVs.

  The Platypus shut down everything but its detection systems.

  Eventually, the yellow shapes moved away, away and up, taking their light with them. When that light dropped below a certain level, the Platypus started a timing subroutine. If the light didn’t come back after four minutes, it would proceed.

  Infrared cameras searched and found none of the moving objects it was programmed to avoid. Sonar continued to sweep the area, but the Platypus’s furry foam coating absorbed those signals, let almost nothing bounce away. What little echo escaped would show as nothing more than a fish.

  The Platypus moved forward again, slinking across the bottom toward its goal.

  So far, the machine had done nothing remarkable: Move toward an obstacle; search for unobstructed space; enter unobstructed space; repeat while moving toward the preprogrammed target location. To a robotics engineer, such maneuvers were child’s play, part of freshman robotics classes — high school freshman classes, that is.

  The Platypus swam closer to the Los Angeles. Lined up next to the 362 feet of the wrecked sub, Steve Stanton’s 10-foot-long, narrow robot kind of did look like a fish. A tiny fish.

  Rear fins undulated slowly, pushing the Platypus toward the crack in the dry deck shelter. Small internal motors activated, pulling the machine’s sides in tighter. As it slid through the crack, it hit something soft — the severed leg that had once belonged to Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

  From the black shoe, which was still tied, up to midthigh, the leg looked normal. Wet, but normal. From the midthigh up, however, it was a study in damage. A jagged shard of bone stuck up from streamers of pale, bloodless muscle. The impact with the Platypus made Charlie’s leg spin in a slow-motion circle, shreds of tissue marking the curve like morbid little comet tails.

  Just as the Platypus moved past, the fleshy mass of Charlie’s thigh spun into the sonar-eating foam, kicking up a small cloud of Charlie meat that danced in the robot’s wake.

  The leg bounced away.

  The Platypus moved to the open hatch that Bo Pan had spotted several hours earlier. In it went. It swam past motionless bodies, moved around wreckage, squeezed through doors that had been bent and torn by a torpedo’s lethal shock wave.

&nb
sp; Steve Stanton’s creation quickly found the submarine’s nose. It entered. It located the locker that stored its objective. Recent programming told the Platypus to wait here, wait for someone or something to come and open that locker.

  It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.

  The Platypus flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.

  A threat, or, an opportunity.

  For the second time, the Platypus shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.

  It watched.

  SCARY PERRY

  She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.

  “Hello, Perry.”

  Perry Dawsey smiled.

  They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.

  They had touched Perry.

  He was going to die. He knew that.

  “Hey, Margo,” he said.

  “Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.

  “I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but … I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

  I’ve got those things inside of me, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was: again. What he hadn’t said was: It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway.