Pandemic

  Steve wished he could have come alone. Or, if they had to send someone with him, maybe someone better than this useless, seasick messenger.

  Noise came from farther back on the deck. Cooper Mitchell and a short Mexican man named José were following Jeff Brockman around the deck. Bo Pan had been agitated that Cooper and Brockman brought another crewmember. Steve couldn’t figure out why — you had to have enough people to run the boat, after all.

  José was all of five-foot-five, wiry, with a heavy mop of black hair and a face so happy it looked like he had to concentrate to show anything but a smile. He seemed to look up to Brockman, both literally and figuratively.

  Brockman was always first to laugh, first to scowl, first to talk, as if he felt compelled to drive every conversation and every action. He was fun to be around, but Steve suspected that Cooper was the only reason Brockman had a business at all.

  The three men checked the straps securing a pair of long, custom-made shipping crates. The bigger of the pair was five feet high and wide, fifteen feet long. Inside lay Steve’s baby, the Platypus. The second crate was smaller, only about four feet long and lower to the deck. It held another of Steve’s creations, one he hoped he wouldn’t have to use.

  Bo Pan watched the commotion as well. “How soon can we put your machine in the water?”

  Steve’s brain automatically looked for a reason not to do that, checking for something he’d missed, something he’d forgotten, but there was nothing. He was prepared.

  “Right now, I suppose,” he said.

  Steve watched Brockman and Cooper. He waited for something to happen. After a few minutes, he realized he was waiting for Bo Pan to tell Brockman to get started. But Bo Pan wasn’t in charge.

  Steve was.

  It was all on him, and him alone. Now he really wished Bo Pan’s handlers had sent someone else. As strange as it felt, Steve was now a real-life spy — the future of his country might actually rely on how well he handled the situation. No pressure, right?

  He cupped his hands and shouted. “Hey!” The men looked at him. “Can we get it in the water?”

  Brockman looked out at the horizon, as if gauging the wind and the waves, then he glanced at Cooper. Cooper nodded.

  Brockman gave Steve a thumbs-up. “We’re on it, boss!”

  They started unstrapping the crate.

  Steve spoke, and three men jumped into action?

  Maybe being in charge would be kind of fun.

  LITTLE GREEN MEN

  Clarence Otto sat in a chair in front of the captain’s desk, waiting for Captain Gillian Yasaka to arrive. Margaret sat in a chair to his left. She stayed quiet, kept her thoughts to herself. Clarence couldn’t blame her.

  The trip from the landing deck to this tidy office had been disturbing, to say the least. The wounded seemed to be countless. Every open space held prone sailors stretched out on tables, on cots, even lying on the floor with nothing more than a thin blanket to give them some padding. Some of the wounded slept. Others moaned, tossed and turned, overwhelmed by hideous burns on hands, arms and faces. Some of these men would be scarred for life.

  Margaret had tried to stop a half-dozen times, her years as a medical doctor compelling her to do something, to help those in pain. Clarence had had to keep her moving, gentle steady pushes that reminded her she had to think of the bigger picture — there wasn’t enough time to help any of them, let alone all of them.

  The Brashear’s overcrowding made Clarence nervous. People packed that tight would speed the spread of any contagion. One infected person would quickly turn into ten, into a hundred. Maybe that was why Margaret was staying quiet, because she was worried about the same thing.

  Yeah, right.

  If the woman he’d married was still in there, somewhere, Clarence didn’t know how to find her. He’d tried. He’d tried to understand her, to help her, tried to deal with years of constant crying, constant sadness, the obsessive reading of blog posts and comments. He had tried to stay calm while being her endless punching bag, the target of a rage she couldn’t control. He had tried to be there for her, guide her through all of it.

  At what point does a man say I’ve had enough?

  Did he have to give up any chance at happiness in exchange for spending his short life watching her wither away? For better or worse looked great under the showroom lights. Once you drove it off the lot, it was a different story.

  He couldn’t fight for Margaret if Margaret wouldn’t fight for herself.

  She sat in her chair, stared straight ahead. Did she still love him? No, probably not — truth was she hadn’t loved anything for years. She still needed him, absolutely, but the way a crippled man needs a crutch, or the way a drunk needs a bottle. Still, as messed up as she was, Clarence knew that Margaret Montoya was the person for the job. The only person. His love for her had faded, but not his belief; she could figure this out, she could stop it.

  He would play his role. He’d make sure she ate, make sure she slept, because she forgot to do both when she lost herself in research. He’d fetch her coffee. He’d clean her clothes. Whatever it took; when the real shit hit the fan, Margaret Montoya took center stage, and Clarence was fine with that.

  Captain Yasaka entered. Clarence stood up instantly, faster than he would have liked — leftover reactions from his days in the service. At least he didn’t salute.

  Margaret stayed seated.

  Captain Yasaka — actual rank of commander, but operating under the honorary title of captain like the commander of every ship in the navy — was as neat and clean as her stateroom. Her graying black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her dark-blue coveralls looked like they had been pressed and then hung on a mannequin protected behind a plateglass window. Her belt buckle was the only thing that outshined her shoes. She stood all of five-six, but Clarence could tell that she had the presence needed to make tall boys quake in their boots if they failed in their duties.

  All her meticulous grooming, however, didn’t hide her exhaustion, a certain slackness to her face. Yasaka looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t.

  “Doctor Montoya,” she said. She shook hands with Margaret, then Clarence. “Agent Otto.”

  Clarence nodded. “Captain.”

  Yasaka gestured to Clarence’s chair: sit, relax.

  Clarence sat, as did the captain.

  “My apologies for making you wait,” she said. “We’re on full alert, and there were things that required my attention.”

  Clarence waited for Margaret to speak. It was her show, after all; he was just the wingman. When she said nothing, he spoke for them both.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Clarence said. “We understand.”

  “I need to make this short,” the captain said. “I have a ship full of wounded, and I have to report about this meeting to Captain Tubberville over on the Pinckney. He’s the task force commander. So I can answer your questions, but please, let’s get to it.”

  Margaret nodded. “I need to know what happened,” she said. “The timeline. Timelines are very important.”

  Yasaka’s jaw muscles twitched. “Six days ago, at twenty-one-fourteen hours, an ROV from the Los Angeles located an object of interest. The ship commander dispatched a diver to recover that object. The diver wore an ADS 2000, the atmospheric diving suit required for such depths. He disembarked from a dry deck shelter modified for decontamination. The diver recovered the object, then returned to the DDS. While still wearing the ADS, he was sprayed in bleach to kill any possible external contaminant before reentering the ship proper.”

  Margaret leaned forward. “The ROV spotted something special? Sending out a diver was unusual?”

  “Not at all,” Yasaka said. “In fact, this was the six hundred and fifty-second time a diver from the Los Angeles had performed that task. Every two or three days, on average, the ROV saw something the onboard crew couldn’t identify. Whenever that happened, Captain Banks sent out a diver.”

  Clarence w
ondered if the repetitive, uneventful nature of their job had made the divers sloppy.

  Yasaka continued. “At twenty-one-fifty-five hours that same day, the Los Angeles notified us that the object was a significant discovery.”

  Margaret looked at Clarence, then at the captain. “So if they thought it was significant, why wasn’t it brought up to the Brashear? I was told this ship has a full BSL-4 research lab.”

  Biosafety Level Four … Clarence hated those words. The most stringent safety procedures known to man, used for work with lethal, highly contagious airborne diseases like Marburg and Ebola, shit that could kill millions. BSL-4 suits — the kind Margaret wore to study the alien infection — had positive pressure: if something poked a hole in the suit, air pushed out instead of in, because contact with even a single, microscopic pathogen could mean death.

  “My ship’s facilities are fully compliant,” Yasaka said. “We’ve brought up fifteen objects over the last five years. Scraps of Orbital hull, mostly. Bringing potentially contaminated items up from nine hundred feet below is dangerous, Doctor Montoya, and expensive, so the Los Angeles was retrofitted with a small lab of its own. Standard procedure was to make sure an object was not of terrestrial origin before sending it up.”

  Margaret looked angry, annoyed. “So they found an alien object and they just held on to it for a few days?”

  Yasaka nodded. “If they had found an alien body, or something that was clearly made by little green men, that would have been different. What they found looked like a strange can, so they prepped it and waited until they had enough data to merit the extensive procedures required to send something to the surface.”

  Margaret wasn’t the only one getting annoyed; Clarence could see that Yasaka didn’t appreciate Margaret’s intensity. The captain had a ship full of wounded. Her crew had probably recovered hundreds of dead bodies from the Forrest Sherman and the Stratton. This wasn’t the time for Margaret to grill Yasaka about procedure. Clarence’s job of helping Margaret included stepping in when she was about to burn a bridge.

  “So it was business as usual,” he said. “You would have probably ordered the object to be brought up, but you didn’t get the chance. What happened next?”

  Margaret leaned back in her chair, tried to relax. She’d picked up on Clarence’s cue, knew she needed to back off a little.

  Yasaka folded her hands on her desk. “Three days ago, the Los Angeles reported erratic behavior among the crew. A fight involving a few injuries. I’m afraid there wasn’t much detail. Captain Banks made his scheduled daily report, but he seemed … strange. Agitated, but not angry. He didn’t exhibit any of the behaviors associated with the Detroit disease, nor did any of his crew send a message that they suspected he might be infected.”

  That surprised Clarence. “I’m sorry, Captain, you’re saying that the crew could contact the Brashear without the captain’s knowledge?”

  She nodded. “The navy knows what could be down there, Agent Otto. Procedures were in place that would allow anyone to raise a red flag if something seemed amiss with anyone on the crew, including the captain.”

  “But no one raised a flag.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Yasaka said. “We now believe that the captain was infected, and he either sabotaged the red-flag system before anyone could use it, or put guards at the various red-flag stations, preventing anyone from calling up. His report about the fight was the last communication we received from the Los Angeles.

  “At twelve hundred hours on the day of the battle, we attempted to perform our daily, scheduled communication with the Los Angeles. We received no response. Sonar told us the Los Angeles was just sitting there at eight hundred feet, not moving at all.”

  Yasaka paused. She licked her dry lips, then continued. “We were trying to figure out what to do next when the Los Angeles fired on the Forrest Sherman. No warning. At that range, the Sherman had no chance. The Pinckney was the first to respond — Tubberville ordered counterfire, but the Los Angeles managed two more torps before she sank. One hit the Stratton, sinking it, and the other damaged the Truxtun.”

  The captain sat back in her chair. She stared off at some invisible thing in her stateroom. “Since then it’s been a nonstop process of recovery and aid.” Her voice was low, haunted. “I’ve got a hold full of dead sailors stacked up like goddamn firewood. We’ve been ordered to burn the bodies — their families don’t even get to say good-bye.”

  She shook her head, blinked rapidly, sat up straight. “One of my recovery teams — in full BSL-4 diving gear, before you ask — found the bodies of Lieutenant Walker and Petty Officer Petrovsky and brought them aboard. Those divers are in containment cells for observation and won’t be released unless you give the green light. Walker and Petrovksy are the only two crewmembers recovered from the Los Angeles, which means over a hundred bodies are still on the bottom. I pray to God that we haven’t missed any.”

  Clarence wasn’t a religious man, but he’d match that prayer. One severed hand, floating to the surface, escaping detection, bobbing toward shore … if that happened, all the containment efforts could be for naught.

  “We’ve sent UUVs down to get eyes on the Los Angeles,” Yasaka said. “They only came close enough to get visual confirmation that she’s destroyed. The Brashear has two ADS suits onboard. Tomorrow, we’re sending a diver down to try to recover the object.”

  Clarence’s stomach churned. Margaret already had to autopsy the infected bodies. If Yasaka’s divers succeeded, Margaret would also have to deal with the object that had started this whole slaughterfest.

  The captain stood. Clarence rose immediately. Margaret stood as well.

  “I have to get back to my crew,” Yasaka said. “Doctor Tim Feely is waiting for you in the research facility, belowdecks.”

  “He’s an M.D.?” Margaret asked.

  “Degrees in genetics and bioinformatics, actually,” the captain said. “But the man sure as hell knows his medicine. He saved a lot of lives in the battle’s aftermath. He’s a civilian researcher from Special Threats, Doctor Montoya, like you. Hopefully you’ll get along, because you’re going to be here for a while. I’ve been told Walker and Petrovsky — and the object, if we find it — are too risky to ship to the mainland.”

  Margaret nodded. “That’s right. Every bit of travel, every exchange, there is a small chance that something will go wrong. A plane crash, a car wreck, a helicopter’s emergency landing … if even the tiniest speck of the pathogen gets out, it could spread too fast to contain.”

  Yasaka sighed. “And then we start dropping nukes.”

  Clarence saw Margaret look down. Her face flushed. He knew she’d taken that the wrong way, that she thought Yasaka was blaming her for Detroit, blaming her just like the rest of the world blamed her.

  “Right,” Margaret said. “If it gets out, we start dropping nukes again.” She looked up, stared back at Captain Yasaka. “It’s been five years. If the disease had the ability to swim away from this location, it would have done so by now. This task force is a floating isolation lab. We have to make sure nothing leaves.”

  Yasaka nodded, slowly and grimly. She knew the stakes. Clarence recognized the look in her eyes — Yasaka didn’t think she would ever set foot on land again.

  Clarence hoped she was wrong.

  If she wasn’t, he and Margaret would die right along with her.

  CASA DE FEELY

  Margaret thought the lower areas of the Carl Brashear were much like the top floor — or deck, or whatever they called it — a lot of gray paint, a lot of metal, neatly printed warning signs all over the place.

  After the meeting with Captain Yasaka, a twentysomething lieutenant had been waiting for her and Clarence. The lieutenant had led them out of Yasaka’s stateroom, past the wounded packed into every available space, and had taken them amidships to a door guarded by two young men with rifles. The men carefully checked her ID, Clarence’s and even the lieutenant’s, someone they clearly already k
new.

  Very meticulous, very disciplined.

  The lieutenant held the door open for them.

  “Doctor Feely will take it from here,” he said. “Just go down the stairs.”

  Clarence thanked the man. Margaret said nothing. Clarence went down first. Even on a secure ship, he wanted to make sure it was safe for her.

  The steep, switchback flights were more ladder than stairs. The same gray walls, but no wounded here because there was nowhere to put them. Margaret found the descent eerily silent.

  The last flight opened up to a small room. Gray walls lined three of its sides. A white airlock door made up the fourth. Through a thick window in the middle of the door, Margaret saw a short man reach out and press an unseen button. She heard his voice through speakers mounted on top of the airlock.

  “Welcome-welcome-welcome,” he said. “Casa de Feely is happy to have you, Doctor Montoya.”

  Feely had thick, blond hair that seemed instantly out of place in a military setting, although judging from the way it stuck up in unkempt bunches he clearly hadn’t washed it in days. Maybe he had a pair of holey sweatpants just like she did. If not, hers would have fit him: they were the same height, although she probably weighed a bit more than he did. His brand of skinny came from lack of sleep and lack of food rather than exercise. The thing that really caught her attention, though, were his eyes — alert but hollow and bloodshot.

  She’d seen eyes like that many times, when looking in the mirror after a forty-eight-hour on-call stint from her doctor days, or during the marathon sessions she and Amos had put in when they’d tried to cure the infection.

  Clarence rapped his knuckles against the glass.

  “You going to let us in?”

  “Absolutely,” Feely said. “Just as soon as you take my little prick.”

  Clarence scowled. “Excuse me?”

  Tim pointed down. “At your feet,” he said. “Cellulose test. Be a pair of dears, won’t you?”

  At the base of the door were two small, white boxes, each about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Clarence picked one up and opened it. He looked, then showed the contents to Margaret: sealed alcohol swabs and a metal foil envelope.