Pandemic (37 page)

How many people had died during his time on Black Manitou? He wasn’t sure, but that number paled in comparison to the task force disaster, to five ships and over a thousand corpses resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Yet he had survived … 
again
. He was one of only three people to make it out alive. On top of that, he was now one of the few people in the world immune to that alien bullshit.

Probably
immune, anyway.

For now he was as safe as safe could be, sitting at a table in the
Coronado
’s cargo hold, sipping Lagavulin with three SEALs who had taken quite a shine to him.

“Let me get this straight,” said D’Shawn Bosh. “You’re saying you can tell if people are infected by how fast Tylenol sells?”

Tim nodded. “Basically, yeah. I can even do it from here on the
Coronado
. Klimas set me up with a laptop that ties into the TSCE.”

The
total ship computing environment
gave him ridiculously high-speed Internet access, even though they were floating in the middle of an inland sea.

Bosh smiled. “Well, look at my man, here —
TSCE —
like he’s been in the navy all his life.”

A day ago, a comment like that would have embarrassed Tim, made him wonder if these big, dangerous guys were mocking him, but not now. They
loved
him. He’d helped save one of their own. He’d done it under fire. It shocked him as much as it did anyone else, but when the shit had hit the fan he’d actually been
brave
.

Whatever bravery Tim had, however, paled in comparison to the man he’d helped save. A few hours earlier, a helicopter had taken Roger Levinson off the
Coronado
. Tim knew there was only one reason to do that: a human trial to test the inoculant against direct exposure to the crawlers kept on Black Manitou. No one else knew that, except for Levinson and probably Klimas, Levinson’s commanding officer. Their fellow SEALs didn’t know the mission, they only knew that Levinson had volunteered for some secret duty.
Volun-fucking-TEERED
. The courage and self-sacrifice needed to do that … Tim couldn’t quite process it.

Saccharomyces feely
would soon be put to the ultimate test. If Tim’s solution didn’t work, Roger Levinson would become infected. If that happened, Tim knew, everyone and everything was screwed.

Calvin Roth, the big one, drained his shot glass, set it down on the table. “What I don’t get are all the little critters floating through people’s bodies. We drank your nasty-ass yeast to protect us from crawlers, which are part plant, part
us
, but then there are also hydras, which maybe
aren’t
part plant, but
are
part us …”

He shook his head, pushed his glass over to Ramierez. “Fill me up, Ram. I need another shot to understand this shit.”

Ramierez dutifully filled the glass. Tim had to concentrate to not stare at the man’s patchy, pencil-thin mustache.

“You’re not that far off,” Tim said. “You drank the inoculant, which—”

“Camel-taint pus,” Roth said, raising his glass.

Ramierez raised his own. “I’ll drink to that. Knock ’em down, boys!”

Tim drained his glass, felt his throat burning. He set his glass on the table and made an educated guess that these men would drink to just about anything.

“Like I was saying, you guys drank the inoculant. That means even if you did get exposed to the infection when you rescued us, you’re fine, because the inoculant wipes out the infection if you take it within twenty-four hours of exposure. And if you weren’t exposed, now you’re safe as long as you keep
taking the inoculant doses every couple of weeks. If you get exposed from here on out, you technically still get infected, and the infection
will
modify your cells to make crawlers or other things, but those things will dissolve before they can do any damage because of the catalyst that’s in your blood.”

Bosh nodded. “It’s like if we had to dive into a vat of acid to assemble a bomb. All the parts of the bomb are there, but we don’t last long enough to put them together.”

Tim clapped and leaned back, almost fell over his chair. He was drunker than he thought.

“D-Day, you nailed it!”

The men had insisted Tim call them by their first names, or their nicknames:
D-Day, Ram
and plain-old Cal.

Ramierez shook his head. “I don’t get it. The hydras kill the infection. Why are we fucking around with this yeast when we could just, I don’t know,
pre
-infect ourselves with the hydras?”

Tim raised a finger. “Ah, a good point, my man. Two reasons. First, we don’t have any hydras — they went down with the
Brashear
. Second, even if we did have them we wouldn’t use them. Once the hydras get into your body, they start reproducing. We don’t know if they’ll stop at a certain point, or if they will keep on reproducing until there are so many of them they damage you, maybe even kill you.”

“Reproducing,” Roth said. “Little animal things in your blood, fucking away. Like a microscopic orgy?”

Tim laughed. “While I admire that analogy more than you will ever know, my extralarge friend, the hydras reproduce asexually. That means they don’t have to mate to produce offspring.”

Roth shook his head in disgust. “That’s as fucked-up as a football bat.”

Ramierez leaned in, the half-full bottle in his hand. “They do it with themselves because they can’t get laid, just like Cal.”

Roth drained his scotch, set the glass down. “For that, little man, you get to fill my glass. And I do it with myself because I’m just that damn good.”

“Hear hear,” Ramierez said, and poured another round of shots.

None of the fun seemed to have sunk into Bosh. To him, this was obviously serious business.

“It’s all so fucked,” he said. “I’d rather have an enemy I can see. Alien microbes? Modified yeast? Just give me something I can shoot.”

Ramierez nodded sagely. “Wiser words were never spoken, D-Day. Come on, boys, around the horn again. Let’s see those glasses.”

Everyone pushed their shot glasses toward Ramierez. He filled all four. The SEALs raised theirs and Tim followed suit. The men let out a loud
hooyah
, and they drank. Half of Tim’s shot slid down the side of his face. The glass slid out of his hand. Shoddy workmanship, apparently — go home, shot glass, you’re drunk.

That, or
he
was drunk. Drunk, and
safe
, isolated from everything, surrounded by trained killers who thought he was the bee’s knees.

Tim
was
lucky, after all. If that luck held, he could just stay right here, in this very safe place, until Cheng’s grand plan ran its course.

Clarence Otto stood on the
Coronado
’s rear deck. No wind for a change, just the oppressive cold. He stared out at the setting sun, wondering what might happen next.

He’d survived. Margaret had survived. Tim Feely had survived. Black Manitou was leading the effort for mass production of inoculant. By any measure, Clarence had succeeded in his assigned mission. Murray would probably try to give him a medal for the effort.

But Clarence didn’t want a medal … he wanted Margaret.

Onboard the
Carl Brashear
, the woman he’d fallen in love with had returned. She’d been decisive, insightful, tireless and brilliant. She’d been her old self, her
fighting
self.

And now? Now she wouldn’t see him.

All day long she’d stayed locked up in her mission module. He’d tried to get in to talk to her, but through the closed door she’d told him to go away. She sounded scared. She sounded
alone
.

For the last five years, whenever she’d felt those emotions she had come to him. He had comforted her, or at least he’d tried. She was his wife. His job was to protect her, help her through any problem no matter how great. At the end of the day, no matter how he sliced it, that was a mission he’d failed.

The sun finally ducked below the water, leaving only the residual glow of pink clouds to reflect against Lake Michigan’s tall waves.

Maybe tomorrow he could talk to her. Maybe he could make it all up to her.

If he worked hard enough at it, if he apologized enough, then maybe …
maybe
 … they could repair the damage they had done to each other.

Maybe they could be together again.

Clarence Otto had to die.

They
all
had to die.

All of them … all the
humans
.

Margaret had turned off the lights in her bunk module. She sat alone in the dark, thinking. She finally understood. Why had she fought against this for so long? It was so
obvious
. People had turned the earth into a cesspool of hatred and waste, had taken the gift of winning evolution’s grand game and pissed it away.

She got it now. She
understood
. The Orbital had tried to fix things, it had tried to do …

… to do …

… to do
God
’s work.

Not the God she had thought she’d known in the naiveté of childhood, or any of the thousands of randomly invented supernatural beings that caused people to slaughter each other throughout history. No, a
real
god. A god with the power to send ships across space. The power to change human beings into something else, something new.

Something
powerful
.

Humanity had shit all over this planet.

It was time to remove humanity, time to let the world start over.

Margaret
hated
them. She wanted to walk out of her little cabin and stab the first person she saw. Maybe find a wrench, bash them in the head again and again until bone cracked, until she saw the bloody mess that was their brains.

She wanted to kill Clarence.

She wanted to kill Tim.

She wanted to kill the sailors, the SEALs, sink this fucking ship and put them all on the bottom so they would never hurt anyone ever again.

Margaret stood. The thought of taking life thrilled her, infused her with excitement, made her vibrate and bubble with pure energy.

Who would be first?

She reached for the door handle, then stopped.

They outnumbered her. If she killed one of them, maybe even two or three, the rest would certainly get her. She couldn’t let that happen, because she was meant for something greater.

Margaret’s former self had tried to second-guess the Orbital, tried to figure out what strategy would come next. She’d never even considered its latest tactic: create an infectious agent that the cellulose kits didn’t detect.

An infectious agent that turned brilliant humans into converted
leaders
.

Leaders who could pass undetected among the humans. Leaders who could infiltrate human organizations. Leaders who could gather the troops of God together, make them operate as an organized unit.

Margaret could do all of those things. She had been chosen for it.

How ironic that Clarence turned out to be right after all: Margaret Montoya wasn’t a soldier — she was a
general
.

All she had to do was bide her time and wait for her army.

She wasn’t contagious. Her infection gave her that knowledge. No tongue triangles, no blisters with dandelion seeds, nothing that could reveal her true nature. That made perfect sense: if she showed those telltale symptoms, the humans would kill her.
Not
being contagious was actually a form of camouflage.

For now, while trapped on this ship, she had to blend in. She couldn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t do anything out of the ordinary. She had to wait. She had to be … 
calm
. Like Cantrell had been back on the
Brashear
. Not at first, no; he’d been jittery, paranoid. He must have been very close to finally realizing his role, just as Margaret now realized hers.

The Orbital must have engineered new crawlers that could penetrate BSL-4 suits. That was the only logical answer. It wouldn’t take much, just a microscopic hole, barely detectable if it was even detectable at all. Was that how Clark and Cantrell had become infected? Yes, that made sense, and when they were submerged in bleach, maybe the pressure change caused a tiny bit to leak through … that explained why they both reported smelling it.

But if the crawlers had worked their way through her suit, why hadn’t they worked their way through Tim’s? Why wasn’t he converted?

Because he’d ingested that yeast. Her exposure had to have come from Petrovsky’s body. Tim had worked on Petrovsky as well, had also been exposed, but he’d taken the yeast within twenty-four hours of that exposure. Margaret hadn’t ingested the inoculant until the next day … at least forty-eight hours after the likely exposure.

What a difference a day makes.

Margaret wanted to laugh. She wanted to scream with joy. The precautions and preparations of the thing she used to be had been useless against the glory of God’s plan. How foolish her former self had been, how
arrogant
, to think she could outsmart such a power.

But that didn’t matter anymore. God had chosen her.

Margaret reached for the door. She opened it. Time to join the others. Not to hurt them, not to drive a knife into their throats, but to simply pretend she was one of them.

If she played it smart, sooner or later she’d make it to the mainland. She’d find others like herself. She would organize them into an army of God.

Then the carnage would begin.

The small table still smelled slightly of spilled scotch. A few SEALs were walking around the cargo hold, checking various things and keeping busy, but Tim had the table to himself; plenty of room for his laptop and a cup of coffee.

On the laptop, a video-chat window showed the face of Kimber Lacey, a CDC staffer who’d been assigned as his mainland liaison. Tim could access the databases remotely, but it helped to have a direct contact at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, Georgia.