Pandemic

  The pains grew worse, driving to her bones, through her bones and into the marrow inside.

  “I … I’m not infected,” she said. “The tests … I took the tests …”

  Perry reached out his right hand, cupped her naked breast. His skin felt icy cold, a knife-sharp contrast to the blast furnace that roiled around them.

  “The Orbital traveled across the stars,” he said. “It could rewrite our DNA. It could turn our bodies into factories that made the things it needed. Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo?”

  Her skin bubbled like the street’s boiling tar. She fell to her knees.

  Perry stood over her, gently stroking her head. Her scalp came away in bloody, wet-hair-covered clumps that clung to his huge hand.

  He squatted in front of her, put a finger under her chin, lifted it until she looked into his blue eyes. Then, he gave his finger the smallest flick — her jaw tore off, spiraled away.

  Perry smiled. “Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?”

  A shudder brought her awake. She sat up, pulled the blankets and sheets tight around her. She was alone in the tiny bunk room.

  She was on the Coronado. She was here with Tim, with Clarence, with Paulius and his SEALs.

  She was safe.

  Or was she?

  Outside that door stood a man with a gun — a man who would murder her if her next test blinked red.

  And Clarence … she couldn’t trust him. He’d worked with Cheng to keep her out of the project until it was too late, until Cheng got all the credit. Tim Feely had also helped Cheng, gone behind Margaret’s back, sabotaged her work. She had put her life on the line and the three of them — three men — had conspired to push the only woman out, to make sure she got no credit. No, not three, four, because Murray had to be part of it.

  Now that breweries were kicking out millions of bottles of Feely’s yeast — and how convenient the strain was named after him and not her — did Murray even need her anymore? Maybe that man outside with the gun wouldn’t stay outside for long. Maybe he was already planning on how to put a bullet in Margaret’s brain, maybe he was …

  Her thoughts trailed off. Her paranoid thoughts. Perry had been paranoid. All the infection victims had been.

  Paranoia.

  A sore throat.

  A headache … body pains.

  She had all the symptoms.

  The incubation period was around forty-eight hours. Her suit had been ripped during the battle, but that was just twenty hours ago — even if she had contracted the infection, she wouldn’t be showing symptoms yet. She couldn’t be infected … could she?

  No, she couldn’t, because she’d ingested Tim’s inoculant and introduced his modified yeast into her system. That should have killed the crawlers long before they could reach her brain.

  A knock at the door.

  “Margaret?”

  Klimas. Coming with another test.

  She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak.

  The door opened. Klimas stepped inside, a smiling assassin with a black eye.

  No preliminaries; he just offered the box. And why not? The drill was old hat. Klimas knew she wasn’t infected. She’d tested negative so many times already.

  But how could that be?

  Her hand reached out on its own, took the box. She didn’t want to die, not like this, not with a bullet to the head …

  She ripped open the foil, used the cool, wet cotton to clean her finger. She pressed the tester against her fingertip, felt the tiny sting of the needle punching home.

  Yellow … blinking yellow … slowing … slowing … slowing …

  Green.

  Klimas nodded. “Good to go. Thanks.”

  He took the blinking test and the empty box from her, then walked out. He shut the door behind him.

  Margaret’s body shuddered with both relief and terror — she was alive, but she was infected. Had to be. But why hadn’t it turned red …

  Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo? Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?

  She shook her head.

  “No,” she whispered. “Oh God, no.”

  Cantrell … he’d tested negative over and over again, but when he’d escaped his cell he’d come after her, tried to kill her. Cantrell … the one with the genius IQ, just like her. He’d been infected the whole time, right under their nose.

  The Orbital had created a new organism — an organism that the test didn’t detect.

  And she had it.

  She had to tell someone, warn everyone. She had to tell Klimas … but if she did, he’d kill her on the spot. If she didn’t, she’d convert, become one of them. But maybe she wouldn’t … this new organism, it was untested, un-proven. Maybe she wouldn’t convert.

  And, maybe she was just being crazy … the test turned green, not red, GREEN.

  She was okay. She wasn’t infected.

  She wasn’t.

  A PRAYER FOR THE DYING

  Murray sat on a couch in the Oval Office. In front of him was a table loaded with neat folders. Beyond that, a chair that held President Blackmon. They were alone.

  They had spent the last hour in the Situation Room — along with Admiral Porter, the secretary of defense and a few other big hitters — debriefing about the second naval disaster to occur on Lake Michigan in the last six days. At the end of that meeting, Blackmon had asked Murray to join her.

  For the first thirty minutes of that second meeting, her personal staff had been present, helping plan and explain the logistics of the immunization effort. It was the largest public health effort in the nation’s history, so there were a lot of logistics.

  Then, Blackmon had asked everyone to leave. Everyone except Murray.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d been alone with a president. Going on four decades, now, Murray had been summoned to this office to discuss things that could have no record of being discussed.

  Blackmon had her left leg crossed over her right, the hem of her stiff dress suit perfectly positioned over her left knee. In her lap, she had an open folder. Blackmon preferred paper over electronics whenever it was convenient — one of the few things about her that Murray found admirable.

  She shut the folder and looked up at him. “The first delivery of inoculant will be here tomorrow afternoon. Deliveries to military facilities will start arriving tomorrow night, and it will take a week before we reach them all. The first civilian deliveries are scheduled to arrive in major cities two days from now. I’m burning every last scrap of political capital I have on this, Director Longworth, so I have to put you on the spot — I want to know what Cheng saw when he tested it on his crawlers.”

  Now Murray understood the reason for the one-on-one meeting. In the wake of the Los Angeles’s attack, Murray had given Captain Yasaka a clear order — send Tim Feely down to the lab to process the bodies and have him package tissue samples to be sent to Black Manitou. Feely had been in such a rush that he’d only prepared samples from Petrovsky; an unfortunate choice, considering Margaret’s insistence that Walker’s hydras might be humanity’s final solution.

  The end result: crawlers had escaped the task force, because Murray had orchestrated it.

  The transport had been risky, of course, but had gone off without a hitch. Cheng’s team had a brain-dead woman on Black Manitou Island, which they were using to cultivate the crawlers for research and testing. Crawlers and test subjects alike were locked down in conditions that made BSL-4 precautions look about as difficult to pass through as airport security. Cheng and his team were just as sequestered on their island as Margaret, Clarence and Feely were on the Coronado.

  Murray could count the people who knew about the Black Manitou crawlers on two hands — and leave three fingers to spare. And that number included the president and himself. Murray hadn’t even told Margaret. Apparently, neither had Feely: something the man seeme
d to think was a favor to Murray. Feely had called in that imaginary marker during the argument with Cheng over who got to name the yeast. Murray could give a wet shit about the name of the damn stuff, so Feely got what he wanted. Besides, that had pissed off Cheng, and Murray hated Cheng.

  “Doctor Cheng tested the inoculant directly on the crawlers harvested from Charles Petrovsky’s corpse,” Murray said. “The substance dissolved the crawlers with one hundred percent efficiency. However, his team euthanized the subject and performed an autopsy — the inoculant had no effect on removing the infection from her brain. As Montoya and Feely predicted, once the infection reaches the brain, it’s too late.”

  “So it’s not a cure, and we still don’t know if it prevents infection,” Blackmon said. “Can we test it on lab animals? See if it really does inoculate them?”

  Murray shook his head. “The crawlers only survive in humans, Madam President. We don’t know why. They don’t even survive in primates.”

  Blackmon nodded. She fell silent, stared off.

  Murray waited. He already knew what she was going to ask.

  She looked at him. “The SEALs on the Coronado took the inoculant yesterday, did they not?”

  Murray nodded.

  Blackmon sighed. Murray had seen that before, too — a leader’s reluctant acceptance that he or she had to put someone directly in the line of fire.

  “We need a volunteer,” she said. “Get one of those SEALs to Black Manitou, inject him with the crawlers. We have to know for sure if this actually works.”

  She wasn’t fucking around. But to directly expose a serviceman to that risk … the soldier Murray had once been bristled at the thought.

  “Madam President, we have a little time to keep testing the—”

  “Now, Director Longworth. We’ve already turned a huge sector of our economy over to making the inoculant. If it doesn’t work, then we have to put all resources behind Doctor Montoya’s hydra theory.”

  Murray nodded again. The president was right, of course — protecting a single soldier wasn’t worth the wait. Four sunken navy ships and over a thousand dead sailors were ample enough evidence for that.

  “I’ll take care of it, Madam President.”

  “Thank you, Director Longworth.”

  He’d been dismissed. He left the Oval Office.

  The president had given him an order. Maybe one of Klimas’s men would actually volunteer. Knowing those crazy-ass SEALs, they probably all would.

  Murray hoped the inoculation worked.

  Hell, for once, he’d even pray.

  THE HANGOVER

  Steve Stanton threw up. Again. At least this time he’d made it to the toilet.

  When his stomach finally relaxed, he slumped down on his butt. He wondered how much dried urine from hotel residents past he was now sitting in.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d gone drinking, but he’d never partied that hard before. Now, he was paying the price.

  His head pounded so bad it hurt to move. His throat felt sore. His body ached.

  Becky had left a few hours earlier. Sometime around noon, if he remembered correctly. What a night.

  He, Steve Stanton, had gone out to a bar, met a girl and got laid. He could hardly believe it.

  But now, oh, man … his head.

  He had to stand up, then make his way back to bed. He’d sleep the day away, or at least try to.

  Tomorrow, maybe, he’d feel better.

  THE HANGOVER, PART II

  Cooper took the wet washcloth off his forehead, flipped it, then gently set it back in place, sighing as he felt the fabric’s coolness against his skin.

  He was getting too old for this shit. He was certainly old enough, experienced enough, to know what awaited him at the business end of ten beers and six shots.

  Cooper glanced at the room’s other bed. It held one occupant: the waitress from Monk’s. He didn’t remember Jeff bringing her back with them, nor did he remember hearing anything during the night. He didn’t remember seeing her when he’d stumbled to the bathroom for the washcloth. How far gone did he have to be to not know his best friend was tagging a hot waitress just a few feet away?

  A loud, sawing snoring sound came from the foot of the beds, by the TV on the dresser. Cooper slowly lifted himself up on his elbows. There was Jeff, buck naked, lying on the floor on top of his jeans and AC/DC shirt.

  “Strong work,” Cooper said.

  He lay back and closed his eyes, tried to manage his throbbing head. It hurt to swallow. Had he been screaming all night? He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t really remember anything after that sixth beer.

  Yes, he was old enough to know better. After he slept this one off, he’d make changes. Sure, he’d promised himself the same thing a hundred times before, but this time would be different.

  THE COOL KIDS

  Maybe Tim wasn’t so unlucky after all.

  He’d worked on Black Manitou long before it had been a government-owned facility. That had been his first job out of college, working for a civilian biotech company engaged in questionable research. That research had gone south: people had died in horrible ways. He’d almost died himself.

  After that, he’d taken the job with the Operation Wolf Head task force, preferring the isolation of a military ship on the water to the memories of what he’d seen on land. He hadn’t actually thought the infection could return. He’d felt protected, safe.

  But that hadn’t lasted.

  The infection’s reemergence and all the death that came with it made him think he was some kind of doomed soul. And yet, that math didn’t add up.

  How many people had died during his time on Black Manitou? He wasn’t sure, but that number paled in comparison to the task force disaster, to five ships and over a thousand corpses resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

  Yet he had survived … again. He was one of only three people to make it out alive. On top of that, he was now one of the few people in the world immune to that alien bullshit.

  Probably immune, anyway.

  For now he was as safe as safe could be, sitting at a table in the Coronado’s cargo hold, sipping Lagavulin with three SEALs who had taken quite a shine to him.

  “Let me get this straight,” said D’Shawn Bosh. “You’re saying you can tell if people are infected by how fast Tylenol sells?”

  Tim nodded. “Basically, yeah. I can even do it from here on the Coronado. Klimas set me up with a laptop that ties into the TSCE.”

  The total ship computing environment gave him ridiculously high-speed Internet access, even though they were floating in the middle of an inland sea.

  Bosh smiled. “Well, look at my man, here — TSCE — like he’s been in the navy all his life.”

  A day ago, a comment like that would have embarrassed Tim, made him wonder if these big, dangerous guys were mocking him, but not now. They loved him. He’d helped save one of their own. He’d done it under fire. It shocked him as much as it did anyone else, but when the shit had hit the fan he’d actually been brave.

  Whatever bravery Tim had, however, paled in comparison to the man he’d helped save. A few hours earlier, a helicopter had taken Roger Levinson off the Coronado. Tim knew there was only one reason to do that: a human trial to test the inoculant against direct exposure to the crawlers kept on Black Manitou. No one else knew that, except for Levinson and probably Klimas, Levinson’s commanding officer. Their fellow SEALs didn’t know the mission, they only knew that Levinson had volunteered for some secret duty. Volun-fucking-TEERED. The courage and self-sacrifice needed to do that … Tim couldn’t quite process it.

  Saccharomyces feely would soon be put to the ultimate test. If Tim’s solution didn’t work, Roger Levinson would become infected. If that happened, Tim knew, everyone and everything was screwed.

  Calvin Roth, the big one, drained his shot glass, set it down on the table. “What I don’t get are all the little critters floating through people’s bodies. We drank your nasty-a
ss yeast to protect us from crawlers, which are part plant, part us, but then there are also hydras, which maybe aren’t part plant, but are part us …”

  He shook his head, pushed his glass over to Ramierez. “Fill me up, Ram. I need another shot to understand this shit.”

  Ramierez dutifully filled the glass. Tim had to concentrate to not stare at the man’s patchy, pencil-thin mustache.

  “You’re not that far off,” Tim said. “You drank the inoculant, which—”

  “Camel-taint pus,” Roth said, raising his glass.

  Ramierez raised his own. “I’ll drink to that. Knock ’em down, boys!”

  Tim drained his glass, felt his throat burning. He set his glass on the table and made an educated guess that these men would drink to just about anything.

  “Like I was saying, you guys drank the inoculant. That means even if you did get exposed to the infection when you rescued us, you’re fine, because the inoculant wipes out the infection if you take it within twenty-four hours of exposure. And if you weren’t exposed, now you’re safe as long as you keep taking the inoculant doses every couple of weeks. If you get exposed from here on out, you technically still get infected, and the infection will modify your cells to make crawlers or other things, but those things will dissolve before they can do any damage because of the catalyst that’s in your blood.”

  Bosh nodded. “It’s like if we had to dive into a vat of acid to assemble a bomb. All the parts of the bomb are there, but we don’t last long enough to put them together.”

  Tim clapped and leaned back, almost fell over his chair. He was drunker than he thought.

  “D-Day, you nailed it!”

  The men had insisted Tim call them by their first names, or their nicknames: D-Day, Ram and plain-old Cal.

  Ramierez shook his head. “I don’t get it. The hydras kill the infection. Why are we fucking around with this yeast when we could just, I don’t know, pre-infect ourselves with the hydras?”

  Tim raised a finger. “Ah, a good point, my man. Two reasons. First, we don’t have any hydras — they went down with the Brashear. Second, even if we did have them we wouldn’t use them. Once the hydras get into your body, they start reproducing. We don’t know if they’ll stop at a certain point, or if they will keep on reproducing until there are so many of them they damage you, maybe even kill you.”