A Time to Die (31 page)

* * *

A San Diego harbor patrol boat, responding to a call of a vessel adrift, came up on the seventy-two foot Caravel charter boat
Killer Catch
, drifting just outside the Shelter Island Yacht Basin. The boat rolled gently in the swells with no signs of life aboard. Following procedure, the twenty-nine foot patrol boat came aside slowly, lights flashing. The pilot nodded to his partner and the siren was chirped twice before he picked up the mic and called if anyone was aboard the
Killer Catch
.

For a long moment there was no response, then a series of yells. The two men looked at each other. It hadn’t sounded like people, more like some kind of animal. The
Killer Catch
had three decks. A lower fan tail, a low open mid deck, and a flying bridge. Someone stood up on the flying bridge and looked down at them. The patrolmen gaped in surprise as they could see the man’s face was covered in blood, it running down his front to stain his once pristine white shirt. The partner started to put the mic to his mouth to ask if the man was already when ten more appeared on the mid deck, rushing from the interior cabin.

They didn’t slow as they reached the railing, but vaulted over the side, right at the patrol boat. Two fell completely short, plummeting into the basin’s cold water. Another hit the gunwale of the patrol boat face first, flesh splitting and bone pulverizing to splatter the two stunned patrolmen with blood and brains. The other seven made the leap with varying amounts of success.

The patrolman at the controls screamed in panic, slamming the throttles full forward. The dual two hundred and twenty-five horse Mercury outboards roared, sending the boat rocketing towards the San Diego Yacht Club a quarter of a mile away as the new passengers began tearing the screaming men to pieces.

* * *

The Director of the CDC was sitting in his plush office chair behind a mahogany desk with more square feet than many Manhattan apartments, working on a draft of his acceptance speech for Attorney General. The old one committed suicide hours ago and rumor had it he was on the short list. The rumor was right, he’d gotten the call an hour ago. He was just trying to find the correct spelling for ‘magnanimous’ when there was an urgent knock on his door. He looked up in surprise. He could hear the loud protestations of his secretary and the reply.

“There isn’t time for that,” a man said and the door was opened. He’d recognized the voice of his chief virologist even before his portly frame pushed through the door. Dr. David Cury (no relation and scared of radiation, he’d say when being introduced) was in his mid-fifties, sporting an ample beer gut well on its way to substantial, he broke with conventional scientist wisdom and wore his hair in an almost classic redneck mullet. The fact that most of the top was bald and he had a proclivity to wear long sleeve dress shirts covered in prints of half-naked fantasy girls didn’t help the mental image that he belonged in an East Texas honky-tonk, not the CDC. The simple truth was he had an IQ that would make Stephen Hawking whistle and nod, and had written more papers on biochemistry than most third-year grad students had read. “Dr. Gallatin, it’s Strain Delta.”

Gallatin was confused. What would cause the normally unflappable David Cury to burst in on him in the middle of the day? “What’s all of this?” he asked. “Delta is contained.”

“I tried to warn you, Chris,” Cury said and pushed the door closed in the face of the Director’s flummoxed secretary.

“It’s okay, Edith,” the director called out, and she stopped trying to get through the door allowing David to waddle across the room to his desk. “What are you talking about?”

“When you issued that memorandum to the Surgeon General, I emailed you my dissenting opinion and included the R0 data on Delta. Of course I was far too overly optimistic, it turns out. Anyway, I sent the data to the SG myself yesterday.”

“You did what!?” the director roared. Unflappable as usual, David continued. 

“It had to be done,” he explained, “You didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of what we have here.”

“Suppose you explain it to a lowly scientist like myself.” Though Director Gallatin was a well-respected scientist in his own right, it was common knowledge that it was David Cury who’d carried him to the top. They’d met at a conference twenty-five years ago, struck up a fast relationship around old SF movies and beer, and helped each other’s careers ever since. To Gallatin’s advantage, David was not nearly as eager for higher office, allowing David to rocket to the top of his field largely based on his friend’s vast genius.

“We believed it was a common virus that expressed with encephalitis-like symptoms. Perhaps a blood pathogen, but that hadn’t been determined. The vector of its spread was confusing, almost defying understanding. That is until we more or less isolated the contagion.”

“How can you ‘more or less’ isolate a contagion?” the director asked.

“Because there appears to be three contagions!” David said and handed the director a stack of papers held together with a Curry signature red clip. David continued his discussion even as the director started paging through the documents. “We were going crazy trying to isolate an active pathogen. The reports of infection were so damned variable, nothing made sense. Then we got some samples from the infected customs agent out of Texas.”

“The one that took off Dr. Hansen’s pinkie?”

“The very same,” David said with a nod. “We got some more data when Dr. Hansen succumbed to the disease. Between the two, we had the truth. Three distinctly different organisms, three different vectors.” He took out a broadcasting remote, something all the senior CDC staff carried, and linked it with the display in the Director’s office. On the screen was an electron microscope image like nothing Dr. Gallatin had even seen.

“That isn’t any virus we’ve ever encountered.”

“No,” agreed Cury, a gleam in his eye. He flicked his remote and another different organism appeared. “Or this one,” click, “or this one either.” The final one was the most, well, alien of them all. It reminded him of a five sided snowflake, each point possessed what looked like the sensory antenna of a moth, fine and infinitely complex.

“How are they getting around?”

“This last one is airborne. And it’s everywhere.” The director looked up, eyes wide. “Yes, I got this sample from the executive coffee lounge an hour ago. To be certain I sent teams out in all the cardinal directions around Atlanta, twenty miles away to be safe. All four brought back this little guy. I’m still waiting on reports from our counterparts in the other G8 countries, but I suspect I’ll know the results.” Click, all three organisms shared the upper half of the screen.

“We’ve been unable to extract anything like DNA. Mass spectrometer data says they’re mostly carbon with some silicates and other stuff we have no idea what that could be.”

“Nothing like this exists on the planet,” the director said, shaking his head.

“Right again.” The two locked eyes. “It’s got to be extraterrestrial.”

“Okay, forget that shit now. If this one,” he pointed at the snowflake, “is in all the air, why isn’t it pandemic already?”

“Because each individual organism is harmless.” Click, and an inset screen in the middle bottom came in. A new organism was there. It had a more recognizable structure. A little like a virus, a little like a biological cellular organism. “Meet strain delta, Director Gallatin.” There were a series of images of each type encountering one of the other types. In each case, they seemed to merge into another form. In each case it looked the same. “I’ve never seen this kind of process before. Any two of the three creates the final form as you see here.”

“What’s the vector of the other two?”

“Animal life, passed by bites or direct contact we think. Working on that. And water. Mix them in water or air, and they don’t combine. But put them in an organism, and bingo. Sometimes a fresh blood sample works, sometimes not. We just don’t know enough yet. We do know it’s just about everywhere. We’re trying to get a test working.”

This image was obviously microscopic digital shots in media, and a film, not a still. The organism moved on its own, like many small organisms found in nature. There was a swirl in the water and Gallatin recognized several human white blood cells being introduced. The organism instantly moved towards the nearest cell and invaded it. In only moments the cell broke apart, various elements were caught by the organism which moved on to another cell.

“It has a distinct taste,” Gallatin said. “The bugger prefers white blood cells.”

“But the effects are more like encephalitis,” Gallatin complained.

“Yes, it prefers white cells for fuel and components, but it works on brain cells.” Click. On the screen was obviously a slide of brain tissue. The neurons were clearly visible in the web-like connections. Among them, a fraction of the neurons size, were the delta strain organisms. They weren’t attacking the neurons themselves, they were attacking the connections.

“Holy shit,” the director gasped. “Are they destroying all the neural connections? That would explain the psychopathic behavior.”

“Only to some degree,” David said, “but eventually the damage would render the infected comatose then dead. No, this isn’t a simple pathological attack. Delta is doing something.” He considered the image for a while then took out an old fashioned note pad and scribbled in it, seemingly forgetting where he was. He gestured at the screen absently. “No, this thing is doing something.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know, yet.” Click. Now they saw the late Dr. Hansen, strapped to a table in a specially constructed room. He shook, fighting the restraints, eyes wide and animalistic, following people off camera with a disturbing intensity. “But I intend to find out.”

“How many outbreaks?” the director asked, leafing through the bright red pages at the back of the report.

“As of ten minutes ago, over forty.”

“My God,” the Director said and set the report on his desk with a growing sense of dread. David continued flicking through slides, mumbling and shaking his head, a slight smile on his face that meant he was discovering something new and interesting. The Director was also discovering something: why the Surgeon General had killed himself.

* * *

Just 20 miles west of Lake Placid a dozen hunters were celebrating the end of another successful hog hunt. The feral porcine had been causing massive damage to crops and displacing native species in Florida for many years. Only after the introduction of no-fee hunting and helicopter hunts had the corner finally been turned. This particular group used a combination of men in helicopters with semiautomatic Saiga shotguns and a groundside ambush to rack up nearly a hundred hogs in just a few hours.

Volunteers finished cleaning and butchering the day’s kills, which were packed into refrigerated trucks and sent off to programs that fed the homeless in Tampa, Orlando, and Palm Beach. In only hours they would be tons of pulled pork sandwiches and sausage.

To repay the hunters’ hard work, the charity hunt organizer and land owners hosted a huge open pit barbeque of the biggest hog. The hunters and everyone lined up to fill their plates with fresh, steaming, and rare slices of tasty hog. Hours later as none of the attendees returned home, family and friends began to wonder if something was wrong…

* * *

On the cruise ship
Bahamas Odyssey
, the sushi night was a great success, thanks to the fisherman brought aboard at Nassau. After only a few hours’ work, a wide variety of fish were brought aboard for the sushi chefs to cut up and make tasty treats for everyone. Most of the passengers tried at least a piece, the captain sharing some of the best with his table.

After the meal, the leftovers were quite popular with the wait staff and some even found its way down to the engine room.

* * *

Just a few miles from the headquarters of the CDC in Atlanta, the annual zombie walk was underway, sponsored by a famous cable television show about the same. Thousands of hardcore fans, dressed up in costume and makeup that went from amateurish to unbelievably realistic, paraded down the streets to the delight of onlookers and horror of the police department. To make it even more exciting, impromptu groups of ‘zombie hunters’ would sometimes attack the walkers with Nerf guns and convincing looking weapons.

As the walk moved past a restaurant district a few of the zombies couldn’t resist stopping for a snack, or posing with a Dos Equis. I don’t always eat brains, but when I do it’s in Atlanta! So when a zombie with almost no makeup, only a torn shirt and blood all over his face and chest, came running out of a popular barbecue joint, a few cellphones turned to record the event with some interest. The zombie howled, looked around in confusion for a moment, then screamed and jumped on the nearest person, a woman with her young daughter in hand.

There were a few shouts of surprise and some applause. When the zombie tore the woman’s throat out as the little girl screamed, almost everyone decided it was an elaborate performance of some kind. The little girl tried to stop the zombie, grabbing him by his hair and pulling back. It turned, mouth full of her mother’s flesh, and backhanded the girl, sending her spinning to the concrete. The crowd fell into an outraged silence just as four more zombies staggered out of the barbeque shop, looking for victims.