Eden Plague - Latest Edition (16 page)

They got their feet wet loading up, leaving the helo survivor on the shore with his hands zip-cuffed and his eyes taped over.
That will be a bitch to remove
. He could walk back to the burned complex, find a sharp piece of metal to cut the cuffs, and free his two buddies, but by that time the team would be long gone.

It was crowded in the boat, but Daniel didn’t mind. Elise was pushed up against him, shivering in the cold spindrift wind. He wrapped his arms around her, just enjoying the feeling of survival, freedom and healthy woman.

She responded, pressing herself against his muscular warmth, but suddenly pushed him gently away. She put her left foot up against the coaming and pulled up her pants leg. Strapped to her ankle was some kind of electronic device with a light on it, flashing angry red. “Cut it off,” she instructed. “They said they could track me with it.”

While the rest stared, DJ took out his knife again and carefully sliced it off. He tossed it into the blacking sea.
Track that, spy-boys.

“Anything else you want to tell us?” Zeke yelled into the noise of the rushing air. Elise shook her head, looked down, embarrassed. Daniel squeezed her hand.

Spooky remarked over the net, “If I was them I would have a tracker on this boat.”

“Right. Zeke to Vinny, meet us at alternate marina Charlie with a bug-finder. We’ll pull in and you can give it a once-over. ETA maybe five minutes, so haul ass.”

Vinny met them at a little marina a couple of miles down the coast from where they had rented the boat. He went over the speedboat with an electronic detector, soon yanking out a fist-sized GPS transmitter. He tossed that into the water.

Larry, Elise and Daniel piled into Vinny’s Toyota and drove back to the motel. Skull roared off in the powerboat, to a different marina. Vinny dropped them off, then went to pick up the rest. Good thing there were dozens of landing places up and down the coast.

In the hotel room Daniel phoned in a huge order of Chinese for delivery. In the meantime they ate and drank everything that was handy. Crackers, cookies, cans of vegetable juice, full-sugar soda, tuna, it was all shoveled into their gullets like pelicans at a fish farm. When the take-out arrived, they plowed into that, too. When the others returned to the hotel, they found a half-eaten styrofoam buffet and two stuffed Eden Plague carriers sitting on the floor half-asleep. The third, Larry, was in the bathroom cleaning up.

Zeke caught a whiff of the food and grabbed the nearest box, eating with a grim determination. Daniel saw his rigger belt was cinched up tight and he looked like he had lost twenty pounds today. The other three started eating as well, though with only normal human urgency.

“We gotta get out of here,” Daniel said over the noise of the gobbling. He forced himself up to sit on the bed. “Even if they don’t make us here, they know we’re in the area.”

The rest nodded.

“All right, people,” Zeke said between bites. “Tear it down. Get ready to roll out.”

“Wait,” said Skull forcefully. He swept everyone with an even harder look than usual. “The lab’s burnt and unless there’s a lot of data stored off-site, we set them back years. But there are two loose ends. Or three.”

“Yes,” agreed Spooky. “The scientists and the doctor.”

Daniel preempted their argument. “So we go snap them up. Now. We know where they are. We know four of six shooters are out of the picture – at least two in the helo, two from the lab. We can probably snatch the scientists in their beds not three miles from here. Does the doctor in charge live here?”

“No, he lives in Annapolis,” said Elise. “He comes down once a week or so. But he’s just an educated manager; he couldn’t recreate the work, though Arthur and Roger and I together could. Dan is right.” She hugged his arm, sitting there next to him, and he felt warm all over.

“Much easier to just put a bullet into their heads,” observed Skull. He was staring at Daniel, like he was ready for the inevitable argument.

Zeke beat him to it. “No. No murder.”

“It’s preemptive self-defense,” retorted the sniper.

“No, it’s assassination. It’s not justified.” Zeke was firm.

“The hell it’s not. Those guys were trying to kill us at the lab. That’s war in my book, and that makes them targets. Enemy combatants.”

“Those were their shooters. These guys are just scientists.”

Skull insisted, “You don’t think all those enemy nuclear physicists that disappeared just fell into random holes, do you? We killed a bunch of them ourselves in the last twenty or thirty years, and the Israelis got the rest.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” chimed in Elise, her eyes blazing. “Maybe that makes us just as bad as they are.”

Daniel put a restraining hand on her arm, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with these guys that way. She had proved herself to him, but not to them. “Let’s not sink to their level, I think is what she means,” he said mildly.

“Perhaps they would be useful. It is not so much more trouble to take them with us, I think,” said Spooky softly.

Skull snorted. “Zeke, your A-team is turning into a bunch of wussies.”

Zeke locked eyes with him. “Yeah,
my
A-team. Not yours. You want out?”

He stared at Zeke a long moment. “Not yet,” he finally said.

“Well, you let me know when ‘yet’ comes. Until then I need to rely on you. Can I rely on you, Alan?” His eyes bored in.

Skull swallowed, nodded once, solemnly. “Yeah. Of course you can, Zeke. It’s your call.”

Zeke grinned and patted Skull’s cheek, breaking the tension. “I love you too, man. Okay, hasty operation, we snatch our three mad scientists. Half an hour for planning, then we go.”

***

An hour later they were on the road with two more guests. Both had been very happy to come with them. Both had been glad to get rid of their ankle bracelets.

They were in a convoy of four SUVs. Vinny had wired the vehicles with secure commo for their tactical net. That way they could talk freely as they drove, and everyone could hear. Daniel was glad; he didn’t want to wait until the end of another road trip for answers, and he had no idea where they were going or how far.

They sweated some before they got off the peninsula; until they made it through the Virginia Beach – Norfolk area, they were bottlenecked. Fortunately they were ahead of the posse, it seemed, and soon they were wending their way eastward on I-64 toward Richmond, Charlottesville and points east.

They gave the two scientists an abbreviated version of what was going on. Elise said neither of them was an Eden Plague carrier. They both expressed relief at being out of the situation, along with natural fear of the government reaction. Welcome to the club. Welcome through the looking glass.

Then it was time for some explanations. After a little bit of discussion among the former INS, Inc. employees, Roger mumbled, “Elise should tell it. She’s been around the longest, she knows the most.”

So Elise started to speak, in a kind of detached remembering voice.

“I was the first to take a look at the Eden Plague, in this century anyway, I think. I was working for the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, about five years ago. They sent me over to Plum Island research center to take a look at some biological materials we had obtained. They said the materials were captured in Iraq from some technology smugglers looting the crumbling Soviet Union. Samples sealed in some Soviet-style containers, nothing but bio-hazard symbols on them. I was supposed to open them up and identify what was in them. Just me alone, compartmented for secrecy.”

“I knew there was some sort of politics involved. That old ‘WMD in Iraq’ argument. That’s why they asked for the CDC, I think – someone outside of the usual national security establishment. I got the impression there was a lot of infighting among the CIA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice about it.”

“It was all very hush-hush; there was a man I had to report to, an MD named Raphe Durgan. He said he was from the USDA, Department of Agriculture, but he didn’t act like it. He acted like an arrogant spymaster, always bragging about being ‘in the black world’ and ‘behind the green door’ and terms like those. I kept my mouth shut and just did the work. It’s what you do when you have a security clearance and you work on secret projects. I just wanted to do the research.”

“What about the containers?” Daniel asked, impatient.

“All but one had human remains in them. One had a whole human head, a woman. The others held half-burned pieces of flesh. One of them had a smaller container inside, that had been opened but was still half-full of a purified virus-like organism in an inert matrix.”

“So that was the Eden Plague?” inquired Zeke.

“No, it was something else. But the human remains were contaminated with the Eden Plague.”

“What about the pure sample?” Daniel asked.

“Let me tell it in my own way, okay sweetie?”

Daniel sat back and twined his fingers in hers. She’d called him ‘sweetie.’ He shut up, a stupid grin on his face. The grin faded as he thought further. He didn’t usually react this way to a woman, getting hyper-infatuated. Another side-effect of the Eden Plague? That plus the combat high? His mind worried at the question, dog with bone.

She went on. “After a cursory analysis, it was obvious the plagues were never-before-seen stuff, something new. I reported this to Durgan immediately. Pretty soon the CDC informed me the project was being transferred to Durgan’s company under a privatization initiative. He offered me double what I was making, so I gave my notice right away. Actually I’d have done it for the same pay. I wanted to figure out what we had.”

“So pretty soon I started work at the brand-new lab on Watts Island, along with Roger and Arthur. The government seems to like islands, though technically it was the company’s facility. They can control islands better. We’ve been working there ever since. Almost five years.”

“We started basic testing, deconstruction, gene sequencing on both viruses, plagues. We called them phages or plagues for want of a better term, since they were different from most other viruses, but basically worked the same way. Durgan took our reports, helped a little in the lab, asked some smart questions, but we did all the work. He wouldn’t hire any technicians, so it went slower than it should have. I know now he was more concerned about secrecy than progress. I think he had some notion of cashing in on our discoveries, keeping them from his secret government masters.”

“We got whatever gear we wanted. I hear they paid, what, two million for the island, but the equipment cost ten times as much. More. Nothing but the best. DNA sequencers, electron microscopes, virus incubators, whatever we wanted. And they kept raising our pay, too. We worked like demons. That’s ironic, you’ll hear why soon.”

“So you asked about the pure sample. It was a far simpler virus, or proto-virus, than the other. It acted like a phage, invading whatever cells we gave it and damaging them, but the effects were much more subtle than one would expect. In simple organisms it didn’t have much effect at all. In more complex organisms it kind of degraded everything, every process, but it was very hit or miss, and didn’t seem like a big deal. I’m compressing years of study into minutes here, okay?”

“Also, without getting too deep into why we thought so, it seemed like maybe this virus could be the evolutionary ancestor of all viruses. Virus Zero. So Arthur came up with an idea. We used some powerful modeling software to kind of ‘back out’ the virus and its computed effects from living organisms. We ran the infection process backward in the computer, so to speak, undoing the damage this thing did on our model organisms, all the way up to people, to
homo sapiens
.”

“You know what we got in our no-virus model? Incredibly healthy people, physically, mentally, emotionally. They were strong, they didn’t get sick, they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t develop mental illness. They had long life spans, at the theoretical limit of telomere degradation and cell division. A thousand years or more. Like Methuselah in the Bible.”

“So imagine Earth before this thing arrived. With no viruses and no degrading effect of this plague, it would be a kind of Eden. Everything more healthy, everything in better balance. Then this plague showed up sometime during the last ten thousand years, before recorded human history but after the Ice Age.”

“Maybe it evolved here, but I just don’t see how. I think it’s extraterrestrial. If anything can survive a naked journey through space to another planet, a virus could. It could be the result of a life-bearing planet being destroyed, the debris scattered through interstellar space carrying it. Or it could be sent from some aliens that wish us harm. What better way to attack another world on the cheap? Biological warfare, like smallpox blankets and the Indians, or plague corpses catapulted over the castle walls.”

Zeke broke in, “Maybe we should keep that to ourselves. People will say we’ve been infected by alien viruses and are not human any longer…like we’re pod people or something.”

That stopped Elise for a moment. “Yeah, right. Shut up about aliens. So anyway we – mostly Roger - made an extremely sophisticated computer model of our Eden, with humans and animals living in balance, with those long lifespans, with telomeres that didn’t degrade…everything we had learned by the virtual-undoing model. Then we introduced the virtual plague to see what would happen. We ran the infection model forward again.”

“It spread like wildfire, like God’s curse, infecting everything. Living things got degraded, subtly but thoroughly. The higher order the organism, the more it degraded. It affected humans most of all, promoting almost animalistic behavior.”

“The plague reproduced by shedding, leaving all the host cells intact, but with a bunch of mutations and damage to every system in the body. It shortened lifespans, made everyone stupider and weaker, more selfish, more violent, less altruistic and social in their behavior. It also boosted the fertility of both male and female, so it accelerated population explosions, competition for territory. Humans and animals both began overeating, overkilling, gorging on prey, overgrazing land and trees. Killing for sport. Fighting for territory, fighting over mating rights, they stopped cooperating. Humans started tribal wars. Everything just went to hell, hell on earth, compared to what went before.”