The two cells closest to her had avoided the worst of the damage, but thick cracks lined their walls. The cell on the left held Clark’s hatchling-ridden corpse, still strapped to the metal bed. But the cell on the right, Cantrell’s cell … it was empty. The cracked door hung open, its flat-panel monitor black and still.
Where was he? He’d tested negative all the way through. Could he come with them?
Clarence released her shoulder. He stepped out of the airlock door, pistol in both hands, barrel in front of him. He moved to his right along the bulkhead wall that separated the containment room from the lab area, keeping the metal to his back. Bleach rain drizzled on his suit, ran down it in rivulets.
He looked back at her, reached out his left hand and curled his fingers inward: follow me.
Tim gently pushed Margaret’s back, urging her forward. She stepped out and followed Clarence. Bleach beaded up on her visor. She quickly reached her right hand up and held her left shoulder, covering the hole in her suit as best she could.
Clarence kept moving to his right, eyes on the shattered cells in front of him. He reached the empty prep area just inside the wide exterior airlock. The endless rain splattered off the stainless steel equipment. He looked back at her, urgently waved her forward.
She stumbled toward the garage-door-sized airlock. Tim ran past her, head still tilted down as much as he could manage, his blue suit wet and gleaming.
The bleach smell grew stronger — some of it had leaked into her suit. It wouldn’t be long until the fumes made her lungs burn. Clarence had to get them out fast or she’d be as good as dead.
Tim reached a keypad to the right of the airlock. He punched in a code. The heavy door let out a hiss of compressed air, then slid open.
Margaret stared out into a nighttime blizzard. Through the whipping snow she saw shimmering lights — the Pinckney looked like a mystical fortress rising from the depths. Snaps of orange and yellow dotted the sky, muzzle flashes lighting up like the sparkle of cameras in a dark arena.
Fresh air blew in hard, making the bleach spray in any direction but down.
“Oh shit,” Clarence said. He grabbed her, held her tight. “Tim, hold on!”
From the rear of the shimmering, gray leviathan that was the Pinckney, Margaret saw a billowing cone of fire and heard a simultaneous blast that hammered her ears. The deck bounced beneath her. She fell, landing on top of Clarence’s thick chest.
A roar overhead; Margaret looked out and up, saw a bulky helicopter moving through the whipping snow, away from the Brashear and toward the Pinckney. Something flashed from under the helicopter’s stubby wing. A missile shot forward trailing a rope of glowing smoke. The missile closed the distance in two seconds: a fireball erupted from where the Pinckney had just fired.
“Margaret, hold still.”
Clarence, shouting to be heard over the alarm and the explosions. She turned to see something moving toward her face. She closed her eyes, trusted him, felt that something tug down around her neck and shoulders, pushing her suit against her skin.
A life jacket.
“Look at me,” Clarence said.
She opened her eyes. Bits of snow and ice clung to her visor, sliding down the glass along with the spraying bleach. Through it, and through his visor as well, she locked onto his intense eyes, his commanding eyes.
He shouted. She listened.
“The jacket will keep you afloat,” he said. “We have to jump. You’ll hit and go under, but you’ll pop right up.”
She heard a ripping sound, looked to the source — Tim Feely, wrapping sticky tape around his back and belly, over and over again, fastening the yeast container to his stomach.
Clarence ran to the wall and grabbed another life jacket. He pulled it around Tim’s head even as the smaller man kept taping. Clarence fastened the life jacket as Tim cut the tape and tossed the roll away.
Through the wind and the spray and the sound of gunfire, Margaret heard something to her right — the labored breathing of a man in pain.
She turned and saw Cantrell coming for her, not even ten feet away, black skin wet from the bleach rain, his squinting eyes red and swollen.
In his hands, a fire axe.
She took a step backward, away from the man. “Clarence!”
He was there, instantly, stepping between her and Cantrell, pistol raised and firing.
Margaret kept backing up as the first round made Cantrell twitch to the right. The second bullet blew out the side of his head. He fell like he had no bones at all, face slapping on the metal deck.
She took one more step back to stop her momentum, but the foot hit empty air.
The fall lasted forever and less than a second, a moment of nothingness before she slammed into the water.
All noise ceased instantly; someone had turned off the volume. In front of her, blackness.
Cold hit her hard and from all sides. Her body went rigid. Her breath locked in her chest. Then, sudden heat across her skin as her suit automatically tried to compensate for the drop in temperature; she felt it everywhere but her shoulder — there, a creeping, icy death as water poured in.
She had a sensation of rushing upward, saw tiny, wavering lights, then her helmet-covered head popped back into the noise of war. Gunfire and screaming, the roar of flames, the concussive pulse of explosions so powerful that air slapped against the water. The surface reflected the firework flashes from above.
In front and behind, towering ship hulls rose up like smooth, impenetrable castle walls. Swells lifted her and dropped her.
She felt that numbing cold, that clutching snake wrapping around her feet — water pouring in through the tear in her suit, filling up her boots.
Margaret turned sharply, trying to lift her left shoulder out of the water. She dipped into a deep trough. From her right came a new roar as a black monster tore free from the top of the wave, kicking out a spray of water that sparkled orange from the reflected fire above. The black shape crested, almost flew, then came down hard in another splash of molten orange.
Not a monster: a black boat, a raft, packed with men who looked like robots, dark bulky shapes and smooth helmets and huge guns mounted to the raft itself.
A line of splashes burst up in front of her face. Bullets, someone shooting at her from up on the Brashear or the Pinckney. As one, the boat’s gunners aimed up: the black monster breathed fire.
The boat rapidly slowed to a stop near her, its bow wave pushing her back. A black man — no, a man wearing blackface — pointed a black rifle at her, screaming to be heard over the gunfire. “Identify yourself!”
“Muh … muh …” Her jaw chattered so hard it hurt her teeth.
“Identify yourself!”
“Muh … Margaret … Montoya!”
The point of the rifle lifted. The man leaned forward and reached, grabbed her life jacket and pulled her toward the boat.
“I’m Commander Klimas,” he said as he yanked her up. “Stay down and don’t move.”
She felt a strong hand push her, not to harm her but rather to hold her still. Margaret found herself in the bottom of the raft, lying against a soaked and shivering Tim Feely. Most of his suit had been cut away. A black blanket covered his shoulders. His bloody scrubs clung to his body. He clutched the container of yeast tight to his chest.
The deafening guns continued to roar, to spit tongues of flame up at the sky. Shell casings rained down, bouncing off her visor, landing in the boat or hitting the surrounding water where they vanished with an audible tsst.
She saw a knife move near her face, then a rapid tugging on her suit as someone cut it away in long shreds. A long, heavy blanket was thrown on top of her, tucked around her shoulders.
The boat shot forward, smashing against the tall waves, rolling her against black-booted feet. She sat up, knees to her chest, pulling the blanket close to try to fight off the cold that rattled her body.
“Where is Clarence?” She screamed to no one, to everyone. One of
these men had to know. “Agent Otto, where is he?”
The unmistakable plunk-plunk-plunk of bullets smacking into the boat.
Something hammered into her right thigh, made the muscles numb — she was trying to get her bearings when the numbness quickly faded, replaced by a branding-iron pain that seemed to singe her femur.
Wincing, fearing the worst, she opened the blanket to look at her leg. Blood poured from the wound, hot against her ice-cold skin, matting her scrubs to her thigh. She grabbed the thin fabric of her pants and ripped — a long gash ran from a few inches below her hip down to midthigh. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, only grazed her.
A man landed hard in front of her, black face tight in a grimace of agony, left arm across his chest, left hand clutching at the back of his neck. Blood poured out from between his fingers, looking just as black as everything else.
She forgot about her leg, lurched forward to help the soldier.
“Tim! Come here!”
Tim stuffed the yeast canister into his scrub top, then leaned over the wounded man, trying to keep his balance as the boat rose up and smashed down again and again and again. Tim’s hands probed the back of the man’s neck.
Margaret wiped her cold, bloody fingers against her soaked scrub top, then slid them along the man’s throat, looking for additional wounds.
“Clear and breathing,” she said. “How bad is the wound?”
“The bullet took out most of the posterior musculature on the right,” Tim said. “The jugular and carotid were spared, but he has significant hemorrhaging from the wound. I think the brachial nerve plexus is gone.” Tim sounded calm, of all things. Margaret briefly wondered why he’d gone into research — the man had been born for this.
Gunfire roared around her. She sat up higher, hands searching the man’s combat webbing for something that felt like a flashlight.
Again a hand came down from above, grabbed the back of her neck, tried to force her flat. Her palms pressed against the bottom of the boat.
“Stay down!”
The boat hit hard against a wave: it felt like driving a car into a wall. The hand came off her for a second. She pushed up and swung her right elbow back as hard as she could, felt it clonk into something both hard and soft.
“I’m a doctor, goddamit, let me work! And give me a fucking light!”
Plunk-plunk-plunk, another string of bullets stitched across the small boat.
She felt the hand reach down again, but this time it pressed something against her chest: a small flashlight. Margaret flicked it on and scanned the man’s body; he might have other wounds that were even worse.
The boat hammered across the waves, repeatedly rising up hard then dropping to smash against the concrete surface.
She found nothing.
“No additional wounds,” she said, then handed the light to Tim.
That strong hand on her yet again, on her shoulder this time. Klimas, the SEAL who had pulled her in, knelt next to her.
“Agent Otto is in the other zodiac,” he said. “He’s okay.”
She felt a burst of relief, albeit a brief one — she had her hands full trying to save a life.
Tim adjusted his grip on the wounded soldier. “He’s still breathing, he’s moving his legs, and I think the major vessels are intact. He can survive this if we can control the bleeding.”
“Cease fire,” another voice called out. “Cease fire!”
The gunfire stopped, leaving only the driving snow and the howling of the wind.
Klimas stood. “Recovery complete,” he said. “We’re clear.”
From high above, she heard the loudest sound yet. She looked up in time to see a flicker of flame heading behind them, toward the Pinckney and the Brashear.
A missile.
She looked away just before it hit and became a deafening, temporary sun that lit up the surface of Lake Michigan.
The task force was done for. Captain Yasaka, Cantrell, Austin, Chappas, Edmund, all the crew from both ships and the Truxtun as well — all gone.
So, too, were the last of the hydras.
A black-gloved hand dropped a black canvas pouch in front of her. It was about twice the size of a paperback. She looked up, saw the black-faced Klimas looking down.
“Trauma kit,” he said. “Save him.”
She nodded.
Thoughts of Clarence, the battle, the dead, the hydras, even the awareness of her shivering body and her own wound faded away as she and Tim Feely went to work.
THE SELECTION PROCESS
In the deepest points of Lake Michigan, the water temperature remains steady at just a few degrees above the freezing point.
The intense cold hadn’t stopped the apoptosis chain reaction from affecting the Los Angeles’s dead crew, but it had slowed the process enough so that plenty of rotting meat remained on their bones. Meat, for example, that was on the severed leg of one Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.
When the Platypus ground its way past that leg, slimy flesh sloughed off onto the machine’s acoustic foam covering. This coating of partially rotted tissue contained thousands of cyst-encased neutrophils.
As the Platypus returned from its mission, the regular, mechanical vibrations of its fins and inner workings caused the neutrophils to come out of hibernation. The microscopic organisms shed their cyst coats and prepared for the touch that might give them a host. When Cooper Mitchell, Jeff Brockman, José Lucero, Steve Stanton and Bo Pan worked to secure the Platypus to the deck, Charlie-slime smeared onto exposed skin — the neutrophils found their new homes.
The five men had no idea what had happened. They had no idea what was coming next.
The neutrophils secreted chemicals to make microscopic fissures in the hosts’ skin, then slid through those fissures, penetrating deep inside. The little bits of crawling infection sought out stem cells, tore them open and read the DNA within.
It was there, at that initial point of analysis, that the neutrophils chose the role of each host.
One host had a genetic disposition for increased size — significant height, heavy bone density, above-normal muscle mass — so the crawlers in that host programmed stem cells for one of the two new designs.
Another host’s genes showed significant indicators for high intelligence. Extremely high intelligence. For this host, the neutrophils chose the other new design, a design that would be the true masterpiece of the long-lost Orbital’s bioengineering efforts. The neutrophils rapidly changed their form, shedding cellulose to become a microorganism made from normal human proteins. Then, they converted stem cells to produce millions of copies of themselves. From there, all would head straight for the host’s brain.
The genetic makeups of the final three men were unremarkable. They were normal. For those three, the crawlers chose between three random options — these men would become a kissyface, turn into a hatchling factory or swell up with gas, soon to pop and spread the infection wherever their spores would reach.
In twenty-four hours, one of the hosts would become contagious. In forty-eight hours or so, all of the hosts’ brains would start to change. Sometime past seventy-two hours of incubation, they would start to recognize each other, realize that they were all members of a new species, a species above and beyond humanity.
Roughly ninety-six hours after infection — in just four days — they would not only recognize each other, they would start to work together.
Work together … to spread.
DAY FIVE
A LITTLE PRICK
Margaret slowly awoke. Darkness, save for the lights of medical equipment. She lay on her back, blankets pulled up to her chest. She started to rise, but a bodywide ache froze her in place.
“Oh, man,” she said.
The last time she’d felt like this was the day after her first Boxercise class — everything hurt. This was what she got for years of sitting on her ass. But at least her muscles had served her well enough to get out; she was alive, which was more than could be said for
most of the poor souls on that task force fleet.
She was in what looked like yet another trailer. A kind of trailer, anyway — this one was small, barely big enough for two field hospital beds, cardiorespiratory monitors, ventilators, a rack of IV pumps, a spotlight, and compact cabinets packed with supplies. An IV line ran into her arm.
A man lay in the other bed. She didn’t recognize him. Margaret did, however, recognize the wound area — this was the SEAL she and Tim had worked on. They had saved this man’s life. That felt good. It seemed ridiculous to feel that way, considering the hundreds of bodies now at the bottom of Lake Michigan, and yet, it mattered.
She slid her hospital gown down over her shoulder. As she’d suspected, not that bad of a wound at all. Eight stitches. Could have been so much worse.
Could have been and probably was: she’d been exposed. She might test positive in a day or two, possibly even less considering she didn’t know how long she’d been asleep.
Margaret flipped the blanket from her leg, looked at her thigh. It had been neatly dressed. Black ink on the white bandage … was that writing? She slowly lifted her leg for a closer look.
For a good time, call Tim.
Margaret laughed, and even that hurt.
The trailer door opened. A man stepped in. He wore fatigues printed with a pixilated digital pattern of gray, black and blue. Nice-looking man: pale, pink skin, a heavy jaw and a chin that would have got him work in Hollywood were it not for his beady eyes, which seemed to be just a bit too close together. His right eye had a bruise under it.
The man shut the door. He took off his camo hat and held it behind himself with both hands. He stood between the beds, mostly because there wasn’t enough space to really stand anywhere else. He stared at her, as if he expected her to know who he was.
“Hello,” Margaret said. “Is there something I can do for you?”
He smiled. “Don’t recognize me without my makeup?”
The voice brought it home — it was the SEAL who had yanked her out of the water, covered her body with his own as bullets rained down around them.