Pandemic (15 page)

Margaret opened her eyes. Tim was looking at her, a scalpel in one gloved hand, a petri dish in the other.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“And I’m a six-five power forward for the Knicks. Call me Baron Dunk-O-Lition.”

Margaret stared at the man for a moment, then laughed. As far as laughs went, it was a small, pathetic thing.
Half
a laugh, really — but it was a sound she hadn’t made in years.

“You’re a funny guy, Baron,” she said. “You told me you collected live crawlers?”

“Correctamundo,” Tim said. “From Walker. I didn’t have much time when the bodies were brought in here. There were too many wounded that needed my help. But I isolated fifty crawlers from her, four of which are still alive.”

Margaret was impressed; in a crisis situation, with sailors dying up above, Tim had done what was needed with the dead before he tended to the living. Maybe he did say inappropriate things, but in crunch-time this man seemed to excel.

“Let’s do Petrovsky first,” she said. “We’ll start with the brain.”

“Sounds good. I’ll get the Stryker. Let’s crack some skulls.”

Motion
.

Vibrations from a bone saw, the regular probing of fingers and hands, these things resonated through the body.

These vibrations, these
movements
, triggered an ingrained, automatic response inside the cyst-encased neutrophils. They turned
on
. They secreted a new chemical, one that dissolved the shells protecting them against the forces of decomposition.

Newly exposed to the apoptosis chemicals, the neutrophils didn’t have much time. Some of them didn’t make it: caught in blobs of caustic rot, they died almost immediately. Others pushed up, pushed out, crawling through Charlie’s muscle, through his subcutaneous layer, through his dermis, then his epidermis and finally gathered just beneath the squamous epithelium — the skin’s outermost layer.

There they would wait, wait until they felt the pressure of another surface coming into contact.

When that happened, the neutrophils would cling to that new surface.

Then they would simply follow their programming, and do what they were made to do.

Clarence hated the suit. It made him feel clumsy, awkward. He’d strapped a holster to the outside of his thigh, but if things went south he wasn’t even sure if his gloved fingers could fit through his weapon’s trigger guard. Far more significant, though, was the fact that he might be just one tiny rip away from suffering the same fate as Diego Clark.

He hated the suit, true, but the heads-up display thing was amazing. He had Cantrell’s service record right in front of him, at the left edge of his vision. All he had to do was turn his head and read.

Clarence exited the airlock and walked to Clark’s cell. He stood in front of the clear door, staring in.

The mattress had been removed. Incinerated, probably. Clark lay on his back on the bed’s metal surface. Metal-mesh straps across his chest, hips and thighs held him tight to the bed’s metal surface, as did thick restraints around his wrists and ankles. All that was overkill at the moment — an IV ran into Clark’s right arm, a steady flow of drugs keeping him unconscious.

A voice from behind: “Makes me want to enlist all over again.”

Clarence turned to look at Kevin Cantrell. He was leaning against the wall of his cage, forearm and forehead pressed against the glass. The front of his clear cell looked directly into the front of Clark’s.

“Look at that poor bastard,” Cantrell said. “Years of service, and he’ll die horribly.” The diver tilted his head to the right, toward Edmund, who lay in his bed and would never wake again.

“Or him,” Cantrell said. “Good to know that the fucking navy can heap disgrace upon misery and use our bodies like we’re laboratory mice. I mean, doesn’t all this just make you want to sign up?”

“Already did,” Clarence said.

Cantrell raised his eyebrows, nodded. “Oh, that’s right, your little spat with Doc Feely. You enlisted. You’re one of
us
, right? Let me guess … Marines?”

“Rangers,” Clarence said. “Then Special Forces. Got shot at plenty, but no one strapped me to a table. I need to talk to you.”

Cantrell shrugged. “It’s not like my calendar is all that full at the moment.”

The man seemed different than he had just a little while earlier. He was calmer. Relaxed. He hadn’t exactly been freaking out earlier, nothing like that, but he’d seemed tense, jittery.

Clarence tilted his head toward Clark. “Sorry about your friend.”

“A real shame,” Cantrell said. “Seems inevitable, though. The pathogen obviously had some kind of reservoir that allowed it to maintain viability all these years. The
Los Angeles
likely found that reservoir. Clarkie drew the short straw.”

Clarence raised his eyebrows. “You seem to have a good grasp of what’s going on. At least I think you do, because I’m not entirely sure I understand what you just said.”

Cantrell shrugged. “I know me some biology. I was premed at Duke.”

“Jesus. Not the typical life story of a serviceman. How the hell did you wind up in the navy?”

“Fighting, I’m afraid,” Cantrell said. “I was an angry young black man raging against the inequities of life, even though I’d grown up in the suburbs and had a full ride.”

“You had a full ride to
Duke
? You must have been one hell of a baller. Point guard?”

Cantrell laughed. “If you were white, I’d call you racist. It was an
academic
full ride.”

“Oh.” Clarence actually
did
feel a little racist, which was a strange sensation. “What did you do to get the academic full ride?”

“Perfect score on the SAT.”

Clarence hadn’t even known that was possible. He’d taken the SAT once upon a time. His score was less than perfect, to say the least.

“You had college for free, but couldn’t keep your nose clean. Book smart, but no common sense?”

Cantrell nodded. “No concept of perspective, actually. But close enough.”

“So you enlisted?”

“I did,” Cantrell said. “I was out of options. Thought I’d do the GI Bill and save up enough to actually pay for college on my own, but I wound up in diving school and fell in love with it. I’m sure you’re surprised to hear this, Agent Otto, but in the navy there is no such thing as a dummy diver. You have to
be
smart
just to get in, and
smarter
to stay alive. In our job, one mistake can get you killed.” He tilted his head toward Clark’s cell. “Or get you infected, apparently.”

Clarence knew that Cantrell might also be infected, might be just one of Tim’s
little pricks
away from getting a death sentence of his own.

“I read your report,” Clarence said. “I didn’t see any opportunity for Clark to get infected, but it would help if you walked me through what happened when you guys picked up the bodies.”

Cantrell thought for a moment, scratched absently at his throat.

“Okay, sure,” he said. “When the shit hit the fan, Clarkie and I were ordered to suit up and search for bodies from the
Los Angeles
. We knew that meant a chance of handling infection victims. Our suits are aquatic BSL-4 arrays — positive pressure, completely internalized air, solid seals, similar to what you’re wearing now, only more streamlined for movement. A modified Seahawk flew us out to the target areas.”

“Modified? How?”

“Special lift cage,” Cantrell said. “Same thing we used to retrieve material of interest from the
Los Angeles
. ROVs from the
LA
bring up these sealed, decontaminated containers, we collect the containers, get in the lift cage, the Seahawk drops the lift cage near the
Brashear
’s port side.”

Cantrell pointed behind him, through his clear cell, across the prep area with its stainless steel instruments, to the wide, horizontal airlock door.

“The
Brashear
’s cargo crane picks up the cage and puts it right there,” he said. “In we go, divers, cage, ROV, even the cable the crane uses to connect to the cage.
Anything
that could possibly touch the sample container, or touch something that touches the container, gets fully deconned. The airlock seals up, completely fills with bleach, destroying any biocontaminants. When the bleach drains, the inner airlock door opens and we take the container to the prep area. Then we go
back
into the airlock, get another dose of bleach, then the crane brings us up on deck.”

The decon procedures seemed thorough. And yet, something had still gone wrong.

“So on the night of the attack, the Seahawk takes you and Clark out,” Clarence said. “What was different?”

“You mean other than the screaming, the blood and the fires?”

Clarence paused, nodded. “Other than that.”

“The ’Hawk’s pilot spotted a flasher on Walker’s SEIE suit,” Cantrell said. “Into the drink we went. She was alive when we found her, mumbling about the people she’d killed and how she’d sabotaged the LA.”

“So you touched her?”

The diver rolled his eyes. “No, Agent Otto, we sat back and told her she had nice titties. She was still alive. We were trying to save her.”

“Do you remember what she said?”

Cantrell stared back. “You’ve got my report right in front of you. Read it for yourself.”

The man didn’t want to repeat the words. Why not?

“But do you remember? Can you tell me?”

Cantrell sighed.

“Yeah. She said,
I took out the reactor
. Then she said,
They bit me. I killed them. I shot two of those bastards
.”

Clarence read from the statement. Cantrell had it word for word.

“Okay, so what happened then?”

“The ’Hawk dropped the collection cage,” Cantrell said. “Clark and I put Walker inside, then got in with her. We were just about to return to the
Brashear
when the pilot spotted a second body. Clark and I went back into the drink. Petrovsky was eviscerated, among other significant damage. We loaded him into the cage.”

A cage normally meant for two divers and a container had four people in it, two of them infected. Clarence wondered if there was something to that.

“Did you continue to search for bodies?”

Cantrell shook his head. “Command wanted the Seahawk to return and look for survivors from the
Forrest Sherman
. No part of the helicopter had touched us or the bodies, if that’s what you’re wondering. The ’Hawk dropped our cage into the water,
Brashear
’s crane took us up, we got in the airlock just like normal. This time, however, there were two man-size, airtight containers waiting for us. We loaded the bodies into the containers. Feely was talking to us at that point. We went through the bleach bath, then carried the body containers to the morgue trailer.”

Clarence called up Feely’s report. Cantrell’s recall matched the report exactly, as if he were reading directly from it. All except for one thing.

“It says here that when you entered with the bodies and went through the decon bath, you smelled bleach.”

Cantrell paused. “Of course I smelled it,” he said. “They bathe us in it. The suits smell like it when we’re done.”

“I’m not talking about when you’re done. You’re quoted in the report as saying,
I smelled bleach during decon step. Maybe a seal leaked
.”

Cantrell’s eyes narrowed. Was that a look of … anger?

“That is not accurate,” he said. “Maybe I typed it wrong.”

“So you
didn’t
smell bleach when you and Clark were submerged in the decon tank?”

Cantrell shook his head. “Not that I recall.”

Clarence reached out into air, called up Clark’s report on his HUD.

“Clark also reported smelling bleach,” Clarence said. “He was worried the suit would fill up with it.”

Cantrell clapped his hands together once, spread them out. “There you go, Agent Otto. Clark told me that right after we finished. I was exhausted. I must have put his words down as mine.”

Clarence studied the man. That explanation sounded perfectly logical. A battle, a high-risk recovery of infected bodies … that kind of stress could lead to significant fatigue, the blurring of memories. But Cantrell seemed to have a near-photographic memory of the event, all except for that one detail.

Had the vector somehow got inside Clark’s suit through a broken seal or a tiny tear that also allowed in a small amount of bleach? If Cantrell was now
lying
about smelling bleach, he was doing so because he knew evidence of a tear would lengthen his time in the cell. Or could he actually be infected and trying to protect himself? So far, though, Cantrell had tested negative.

Clarence felt he was missing something … but what?

“Let’s go over the entire day again,” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? Like you said, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

Margaret had thought diving back into this world would be hell. She’d thought working on the bodies of infection victims would further stir up the ever-present memories of Amos Braun, of Perry Dawsey, of Dew Phillips, of Detroit and everything else that had turned her life to shit.

But she didn’t think about any of those things.

In fact, almost as soon as she began the examination, those thoughts faded away. She didn’t think about anything
but
the work. And, most important, she didn’t think about Clarence.

In that way, at least, donning a BSL-4 suit and standing next to a body that had the potential to wipe out the human race was kind of … well, it was kind of
nice
.

She slowly ran her gloved hand over Candice Walker’s body. A meticulous search. She had Tim’s report up on the right side of her visor. She was getting the hang of the eye-track navigation; as she found torn pustules and other marks on Candice’s body, she checked to see if Tim had logged them. Maybe he’d missed something. Or, maybe something had grown after he’d completed his initial exam.

Margaret heard a rattle: the heavy, compact Stryker bone saw moving against a prep tray. Tim was cleaning Petrovsky’s powdered bone and that thick rot from the blade, preparing to use the device on the skull of Candice Walker. Petrovsky’s rot was accelerating now. Most of his skin looked black and wet, and it was already sloughing off at his left shoulder to show the sagging, decomposing muscles beneath.