Pandemic (21 page)

“We need to make more hydras,” she said. “And there’s only one way to do that.”

Margaret had killed one of the hydras to analyze it. Another had died on its own; she assumed the last two surviving hydras couldn’t be far behind.

Time was running out.

Candice Walker was dead, as was everything inside of her. There were no more hydras to be had from her corpse.

Margaret entered the clear cell of Eric Edmund. She carried a small tray holding an alcohol swab and a syringe. She set the tray down on Edmund’s stomach. She had to remind herself that the man was brain-dead. He would never recover.

Edmund’s
self
, all that he had ever been, that was gone forever … but his body lived on. His heart pumped, his blood flowed, his cells divided. The human body was the hydras’ natural environment. There, hopefully, they would modify Edmund’s stem cells, make copies of themselves — they would replicate.

Margaret picked up the alcohol swab and wiped Edmund’s shoulder, cleaning her target area. She set the swab down and lifted the syringe. She stared at it through her visor. Just one CC of saline, and inside that fluid, a pair of passengers.

Only two left
.

A slap on the glass. She turned to see Cantrell, staring at her, the lighter skin of his palms resting on the clear wall. His eyes … he looked like he was trying to control his anger.

“Doctor Montoya, what are you doing?” Cantrell smiled. He looked at the syringe. “Don’t you need permission for something like that?”

How could he know what she was doing? He didn’t know; he was just being difficult.

“Not your concern,” she said.

Cantrell frowned, spoke sweetly. “Awww, Doc, of course it is. He’s in the cell next to mine. What if something breaks? What you do to him could affect me.”

“You have nothing to worry about,” Margaret said. “You’re not infected, Cantrell.”

The smile returned. A chilling smile.

“Then let me out,” he said. “I keep testing negative … just let me out.”

Those eyes, so intense, so
angry
even though his voice sounded smooth and calm.

Why was she wasting time with him?

Only two left
 …

Margaret slid the needle into Edmund’s shoulder, then pushed the plunger all the way down. The saline emptied into his arm.

That was that. She could only hope those hydras were as reproductively efficient as the crawlers that had taken over Betty Jewel, Carmen Sanchez and so many others.

All Margaret’s energy drained away. She felt hollow. The biosafety suit suddenly seemed so heavy. If she could just get out of it for a little bit, maybe rest her eyes.

She heard the click of someone coming onto her channel.

“Margo,” Clarence said. “Where are you?”

“Detainment.”

“What are you doing there?”

“I’m working, Clarence. What do you want?”

“The diver is going into the
Los Angeles
in forty-five minutes,” he said. “I thought you’d want to watch.”

She did want to see that. Maybe the diver would come across the subject of Candice Walker’s final drawings, the three men in the membrane. Forty-five minutes … enough time to decon, get out of the suit, grab twenty minutes of sleep.

She turned to leave, felt Cantrell’s eyes upon her. For just a moment, she froze — he looked like he wanted to kill her — and then the moment was gone.

Cantrell walked to his bed and sat.

Margaret picked up her tray and left Edmund’s cell.

When he’d been ten years old, Orin Nagy’s father finally showed him how to properly swing a baseball bat. It was all in the hips, his father had said. Twisting them at the right moment brought your body around, maximized your swing velocity. Arm strength mattered, sure, but the
real
power came from the hips. The hips, and following through.

The same advice held true for swinging a pipe wrench.

Orin swung, Orin
twisted
, bringing twenty pounds of unforgiving metal to bear on the motherfucker that wanted to make him take the cellulose test.

The man’s biosafety suit offered little protection. The heavy wrench caved in his right temple like a hammer slammed into a ripe melon.

And, just like the good boy he’d once been, Orin followed through.

The man dropped like a bag of wet shit.

Daddy would have been proud.

Orin heard men screaming angry things. He saw another one raising a pistol. Orin let the follow-through carry him all the way around in a fast 360-degree turn. As he came out of that turn, he swung again, more overhand axe-chop than smooth baseball swing. The results were much the same: the wet
crunch
of a crushed skull.

The gun went off. A pair of bodies slammed into Orin, dragged him to the ground.

He fought, because God commanded he do so, and also because before he died he wanted to kill just one more of the cock-sucking pissant humans that he hated so fucking much …

Six miles clear of the navy flotilla and fifty feet below the empty, roiling surface of Lake Michigan, the
Platypus
hovered, motionless save for the slight back-and-forth tug of the waves high above. It might have been a dead fish. It might have been a log.

A clamp released, freeing a fist-sized piece of plastic. The plastic floated upward, trailed by a thin cable. Forty feet … thirty … twenty …

The plastic reached the surface, bobbed there. It extended a telescoping antenna that was no thicker than a pencil at the base, little more than a stiff wire where it topped out four feet above the water.

The
Platypus
floated, unmoving, waiting for instructions.

A signal came in: a tweet. Then another. Five 140-character alphanumeric messages in all. Each message called up commands stored in the
Platypus
’s memory.

The
Platypus
retracted the antennae, then reeled in the plastic float. The machine tilted down, started to swim. A hundred feet down, then two hundred, then three hundred.

Ten feet from the bottom, the
Platypus
leveled out. It called up the recorded bearing that would lead it back to the
Los Angeles
. It followed the lake floor’s contour, going deeper and deeper as it closed the distance.

The
Platypus
scanned for any signal, any communication, ready to adjust its path based on the presence of other craft.

A half mile out, it detected pings from a powerful sonar almost a thousand feet above: signals from a surface ship sent to submerged vessels. The
Platypus
couldn’t read those messages — they were encrypted — but the signals themselves alerted it to a danger of detection.

Steve Stanton’s creation slowed to a crawl. It sank to the bottom, resting its underside on Lake Michigan’s thick muck. It used its side fins as arms rather than paddles, pressing against rocks and sand and mud to pull its body slowly forward.

It detected light, light coming from yellow shapes. The
Platypus
stopped
moving, ran the visual data through pattern analysis programs. It quickly identified the shapes as U.S. Navy ROVs.

The
Platypus
shut down everything but its detection systems.

Eventually, the yellow shapes moved away, away and
up
, taking their light with them. When that light dropped below a certain level, the
Platypus
started a timing subroutine. If the light didn’t come back after four minutes, it would proceed.

Infrared cameras searched and found none of the moving objects it was programmed to avoid. Sonar continued to sweep the area, but the
Platypus
’s furry foam coating absorbed those signals, let almost nothing bounce away. What little echo escaped would show as nothing more than a fish.

The
Platypus
moved forward again, slinking across the bottom toward its goal.

So far, the machine had done nothing remarkable:
Move toward an obstacle; search for unobstructed space; enter unobstructed space; repeat while moving toward the preprogrammed target location
. To a robotics engineer, such maneuvers were child’s play, part of freshman robotics classes —
high school
freshman classes, that is.

The
Platypus
swam closer to the
Los Angeles
. Lined up next to the 362 feet of the wrecked sub, Steve Stanton’s 10-foot-long, narrow robot kind of did look like a fish. A
tiny
fish.

Rear fins undulated slowly, pushing the
Platypus
toward the crack in the dry deck shelter. Small internal motors activated, pulling the machine’s sides in tighter. As it slid through the crack, it hit something soft — the severed leg that had once belonged to Wicked Charlie Petrovsky.

From the black shoe, which was still tied, up to midthigh, the leg looked normal. Wet, but normal. From the midthigh up, however, it was a study in damage. A jagged shard of bone stuck up from streamers of pale, bloodless muscle. The impact with the
Platypus
made Charlie’s leg spin in a slow-motion circle, shreds of tissue marking the curve like morbid little comet tails.

Just as the
Platypus
moved past, the fleshy mass of Charlie’s thigh spun into the sonar-eating foam, kicking up a small cloud of Charlie meat that danced in the robot’s wake.

The leg bounced away.

The
Platypus
moved to the open hatch that Bo Pan had spotted several hours earlier. In it went. It swam past motionless bodies, moved around
wreckage, squeezed through doors that had been bent and torn by a torpedo’s lethal shock wave.

Steve Stanton’s creation quickly found the submarine’s nose. It entered. It located the locker that stored its objective. Recent programming told the
Platypus
to wait here, wait for someone or something to come and open that locker.

It used infrared to scan the room: measuring, calculating, searching for the best place to hide. Empty racks lined the walls. Airtight cases that had once rested on those racks now gently bobbed against the ceiling.

The
Platypus
flapped all its fins, gently but firmly, turning as it did. It swam into the empty racks and wedged itself down near the floor, nose aimed into the room in case it sensed a threat and needed to move quickly.

A threat, or, an opportunity.

For the second time, the
Platypus
shut down almost all its systems. No lights, no motors, nothing but a camera lens that was — ironically — shaped like a fish eye.

It watched.

She knew she was dreaming, because she’d had this dream before. So many times. That didn’t make it any less gutting.

“Hello, Perry.”

Perry Dawsey smiled.

They stood on an empty street in a desperate, run-down area of Detroit. It was the last place she had seen him alive. The bloated, Thanksgiving Day Parade float of a woman had just burst, scattering a dense, expanding cloud to float on the light breeze. The cloud was made of dandelion spores, little self-contained crawlers that would instantly infect whomever they touched.

They had touched Perry.

He was going to die. He knew that.

“Hey, Margo,” he said.

“Hey,” Margaret said. The words in the dream were always identical, both her part and his.

“I got Chelsea,” he said. His smile faded. “The voices have finally stopped, but … I don’t think I’m doing so good. I’ve got those things inside of me.”

I’ve got those things inside of me
, he’d said. What he hadn’t said was:
again
. What he hadn’t said was:
It’s not fair. I fought hard. I won. And I’m going to die anyway
.

His face wrinkled into a frown, a steady wince of pain.

“It hurts,” he said. “Bad. I think they’re moving to my brain. Margaret, I don’t want to lose control again.”

They:
the crawlers that were already working their way up his nervous system, heading for his head. There, they would spread their interweaving tendrils. They would take him over,
change
him, and destroy who he was in the process.

“You won’t,” she said. “They won’t have time.”

And now her gift to him, his reward for standing tall in the face of absolute destruction, for being the one person willing to fight no matter what the odds.

She heard a growing whistle — the sound of an incoming artillery shell. A small shadow appeared on the ground between their feet, a quivering circle of black.

Perry stared at her. His smile returned, a smile of exhausted disbelief.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Are you nuking me?”

“Yes,” she said, because there was nothing else to say.

The shadow-circle grew larger, engulfing their feet, then spreading until they were both standing in its shade.

A wet laugh joined Perry’s corpse smile. “Dew said I’m like a cockroach, that nothing can kill me. I don’t think physics is on my side this time, though.”

He was dead twice over, yet still he cracked jokes, for
her
, a last effort to lift some of the blame from her shoulders.

Perry coughed. Little hatchlings shot out of his mouth, fell to the ground. They righted themselves and sprinted away, out of the shadow and into the light.

They wouldn’t escape. Nothing would.

Perry wiped his mouth. His blue eyes bore into her.

“How long do I have?”

“About fifteen seconds,” she said.

Then she started to float away, leaving Perry behind.

He looked up. “No shit? That’s kind of fucked up.”

The bomb’s shadow spread faster, throwing the buildings on either side of the street into deep blackness. Perry stood in the shadow’s center, his blond hair and blue eyes still as bright as if the sun reached down and set them alight.

Margaret floated higher. Perry looked smaller and smaller.

He cupped his hands to his face and shouted: “Margo?”

Shooting up into the sky, she shouted back: “Yes?”

She saw the bomb now — as big as the city itself, a cartoony thing that would crush Detroit by impact alone even if it didn’t detonate.