Pandemic (36 page)

Her suit melted away, leaving her naked. Stabbing pains rippled across her skin, the hard sensation of long needles sliding into her muscles, her organs.

Perry frowned. “Margo, what’s wrong?”

“It hurts,” she said. “Bad.”

He nodded knowingly. “I think they’re moving to your brain. I know you don’t want to lose control, but it will be okay.”

The pains grew worse, driving to her bones,
through
her bones and into the marrow inside.

“I … I’m not infected,” she said. “The tests … I took the tests …”

Perry reached out his right hand, cupped her naked breast. His skin felt icy cold, a knife-sharp contrast to the blast furnace that roiled around them.

“The Orbital traveled across the stars,” he said. “It could rewrite our DNA. It could turn our bodies into factories that made the things it needed. Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo?”

Her skin bubbled like the street’s boiling tar. She fell to her knees.

Perry stood over her, gently stroking her head. Her scalp came away in bloody, wet-hair-covered clumps that clung to his huge hand.

He squatted in front of her, put a finger under her chin, lifted it until she looked into his blue eyes. Then, he gave his finger the smallest
flick —
her jaw tore off, spiraled away.

Perry smiled. “Did you
really
think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?”

A shudder brought her
awake. She sat up, pulled the blankets and sheets tight around her. She was alone in the tiny bunk room.

She was on the
Coronado
. She was here with Tim, with Clarence, with Paulius and his SEALs.

She was safe.

Or was she?

Outside that door stood a man with a gun — a man who would murder her if her next test blinked red.

And Clarence … she couldn’t trust him. He’d worked with Cheng to keep her out of the project until it was too late, until Cheng got all the credit. Tim Feely had also helped Cheng, gone behind Margaret’s back, sabotaged her work. She had put her life on the line and the three of them — three
men —
had conspired to push the only woman out, to make sure she got no credit. No, not three,
four
, because Murray
had
to be part of it.

Now that breweries were kicking out millions of bottles of Feely’s yeast — and how convenient the strain was named after him and not her — did Murray even need her anymore? Maybe that man outside with the gun wouldn’t stay outside for long. Maybe he was already planning on how to put a bullet in Margaret’s brain, maybe he was …

Her thoughts trailed off. Her
paranoid
thoughts. Perry had been paranoid. All the infection victims had been.

Paranoia.

A sore throat.

A headache … body pains.

She had all the symptoms.

The incubation period was around forty-eight hours. Her suit had been ripped during the battle, but that was just
twenty
hours ago — even if she had contracted the infection, she wouldn’t be showing symptoms yet. She
couldn’t
be infected … could she?

No, she couldn’t, because she’d ingested Tim’s inoculant and introduced his modified yeast into her system. That should have killed the crawlers long before they could reach her brain.

A knock at the door.

“Margaret?”

Klimas. Coming with another test.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak.

The door opened. Klimas stepped inside, a smiling assassin with a black eye.

No preliminaries; he just offered the box. And why not? The drill was old hat. Klimas knew she wasn’t infected. She’d tested negative so many times already.

But how could that be?

Her hand reached out on its own, took the box. She didn’t want to die, not like this, not with a bullet to the head …

She ripped open the foil, used the cool, wet cotton to clean her finger. She pressed the tester against her fingertip, felt the tiny sting of the needle punching home.

Yellow … blinking yellow … slowing … slowing … slowing …

Green.

Klimas nodded. “Good to go. Thanks.”

He took the blinking test and the empty box from her, then walked out. He shut the door behind him.

Margaret’s body shuddered with both relief and terror — she was alive, but she was infected.
Had
to be. But why hadn’t it turned red …

Did you think it wasn’t smart enough to make changes, Margo? Did you really think it wasn’t capable of beating your silly little test?

She shook her head.

“No,” she whispered. “Oh God, no.”

Cantrell … he’d tested negative over and over again, but when he’d escaped his cell he’d come after her, tried to kill her. Cantrell … the one with the genius IQ, just like her. He’d been infected the whole time, right under their nose.

The Orbital had created a new organism — an organism that the test didn’t detect.

And
she
had it.

She had to tell someone, warn everyone. She had to tell Klimas … but if she did, he’d kill her on the spot. If she didn’t, she’d convert, become one of
them
. But maybe she wouldn’t … this new organism, it was untested, un-proven. Maybe she wouldn’t convert.

And, maybe she was just being crazy … the test turned
green
, not red,
GREEN
.

She was okay. She wasn’t infected.

She
wasn’t
.

Murray sat on a couch in the Oval Office. In front of him was a table loaded with neat folders. Beyond that, a chair that held President Blackmon. They were alone.

They had spent the last hour in the Situation Room — along with Admiral Porter, the secretary of defense and a few other big hitters — debriefing about the
second
naval disaster to occur on Lake Michigan in the last six days. At the end of that meeting, Blackmon had asked Murray to join her.

For the first thirty minutes of that second meeting, her personal staff had been present, helping plan and explain the logistics of the immunization effort. It was the largest public health effort in the nation’s history, so there were a
lot
of logistics.

Then, Blackmon had asked everyone to leave. Everyone except Murray.

This wasn’t the first time he’d been alone with a president. Going on four decades, now, Murray had been summoned to this office to discuss things that could have no record of being discussed.

Blackmon had her left leg crossed over her right, the hem of her stiff dress suit perfectly positioned over her left knee. In her lap, she had an open folder. Blackmon preferred paper over electronics whenever it was convenient — one of the few things about her that Murray found admirable.

She shut the folder and looked up at him. “The first delivery of inoculant will be here tomorrow afternoon. Deliveries to military facilities will start arriving tomorrow night, and it will take a week before we reach them all. The first civilian deliveries are scheduled to arrive in major cities two days from now. I’m burning every last scrap of political capital I have on this, Director Longworth, so I have to put you on the spot — I want to know what Cheng saw when he tested it on his crawlers.”

Now Murray understood the reason for the one-on-one meeting. In the wake of the
Los Angeles
’s attack, Murray had given Captain Yasaka a clear order — send Tim Feely down to the lab to process the bodies and have him package tissue samples to be sent to Black Manitou. Feely had been in such a
rush that he’d only prepared samples from Petrovsky; an unfortunate choice, considering Margaret’s insistence that Walker’s hydras might be humanity’s final solution.

The end result: crawlers
had
escaped the task force, because Murray had orchestrated it.

The transport had been risky, of course, but had gone off without a hitch. Cheng’s team had a brain-dead woman on Black Manitou Island, which they were using to cultivate the crawlers for research and testing. Crawlers and test subjects alike were locked down in conditions that made BSL-4 precautions look about as difficult to pass through as airport security. Cheng and his team were just as sequestered on their island as Margaret, Clarence and Feely were on the
Coronado
.

Murray could count the people who knew about the Black Manitou crawlers on two hands — and leave three fingers to spare. And that number included the president and himself. Murray hadn’t even told Margaret. Apparently, neither had Feely: something the man seemed to think was a favor to Murray. Feely had called in that imaginary marker during the argument with Cheng over who got to name the yeast. Murray could give a wet shit about the name of the damn stuff, so Feely got what he wanted. Besides, that had pissed off Cheng, and Murray hated Cheng.

“Doctor Cheng tested the inoculant directly on the crawlers harvested from Charles Petrovsky’s corpse,” Murray said. “The substance dissolved the crawlers with one hundred percent efficiency. However, his team euthanized the subject and performed an autopsy — the inoculant had no effect on removing the infection from her brain. As Montoya and Feely predicted, once the infection reaches the brain, it’s too late.”

“So it’s not a cure, and we still don’t know if it prevents infection,” Blackmon said. “Can we test it on lab animals? See if it really does inoculate them?”

Murray shook his head. “The crawlers only survive in humans, Madam President. We don’t know why. They don’t even survive in primates.”

Blackmon nodded. She fell silent, stared off.

Murray waited. He already knew what she was going to ask.

She looked at him. “The SEALs on the
Coronado
took the inoculant yesterday, did they not?”

Murray nodded.

Blackmon sighed. Murray had seen that before, too — a leader’s reluctant acceptance that he or she had to put someone directly in the line of fire.

“We need a volunteer,” she said. “Get one of those SEALs to Black Manitou, inject him with the crawlers. We have to know for sure if this actually works.”

She wasn’t fucking around. But to directly expose a serviceman to that risk … the soldier Murray had once been bristled at the thought.

“Madam President, we have a little time to keep testing the—”

“
Now
, Director Longworth. We’ve already turned a huge sector of our economy over to making the inoculant. If it
doesn’t
work, then we have to put all resources behind Doctor Montoya’s hydra theory.”

Murray nodded again. The president was right, of course — protecting a single soldier wasn’t worth the wait. Four sunken navy ships and over a thousand dead sailors were ample enough evidence for that.

“I’ll take care of it, Madam President.”

“Thank you, Director Longworth.”

He’d been dismissed. He left the Oval Office.

The president had given him an order. Maybe one of Klimas’s men would actually volunteer. Knowing those crazy-ass SEALs, they probably all would.

Murray hoped the inoculation worked.

Hell, for once, he’d even
pray
.

Steve Stanton threw up. Again. At least this time he’d made it to the toilet.

When his stomach finally relaxed, he slumped down on his butt. He wondered how much dried urine from hotel residents past he was now sitting in.

It wasn’t the first time he’d gone drinking, but he’d
never
partied that hard before. Now, he was paying the price.

His head pounded so bad it hurt to move. His throat felt sore. His body ached.

Becky had left a few hours earlier. Sometime around noon, if he remembered correctly. What a night.

He, Steve Stanton, had gone out to a bar, met a girl and got laid. He could hardly believe it.

But now, oh, man … his
head
.

He had to stand up, then make his way back to bed. He’d sleep the day away, or at least try to.

Tomorrow, maybe, he’d feel better.

Cooper took the wet washcloth off his forehead, flipped it, then gently set it back in place, sighing as he felt the fabric’s coolness against his skin.

He was getting too old for this shit. He was certainly old enough,
experienced
enough, to know what awaited him at the business end of ten beers and six shots.

Cooper glanced at the room’s other bed. It held one occupant: the waitress from Monk’s. He didn’t remember Jeff bringing her back with them, nor did he remember hearing anything during the night. He didn’t remember seeing her when he’d stumbled to the bathroom for the washcloth. How far gone did he have to be to not know his best friend was tagging a hot waitress just a few feet away?

A loud, sawing snoring sound came from the foot of the beds, by the TV on the dresser. Cooper slowly lifted himself up on his elbows. There was Jeff, buck naked, lying on the floor on top of his jeans and AC/DC shirt.

“Strong work,” Cooper said.

He lay back and closed his eyes, tried to manage his throbbing head. It hurt to swallow. Had he been screaming all night? He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t really remember anything after that sixth beer.

Yes, he was old enough to know better. After he slept this one off, he’d make changes. Sure, he’d promised himself the same thing a hundred times before, but this time would be different.

Maybe Tim wasn’t so unlucky after all.

He’d worked on Black Manitou long before it had been a government-owned facility. That had been his first job out of college, working for a civilian biotech company engaged in questionable research. That research had gone south: people had died in horrible ways. He’d almost died himself.

After that, he’d taken the job with the Operation Wolf Head task force, preferring the isolation of a military ship on the water to the memories of what he’d seen on land. He hadn’t actually thought the infection could return. He’d felt protected, safe.

But that hadn’t lasted.

The infection’s reemergence and all the death that came with it made him think he was some kind of doomed soul. And yet, that math didn’t add up.