Altered Genes: Genesis (20 page)

T
he dead-end
street that led to the back of the industrial park was littered with potholes, some the size of baseballs, others large enough to break an axle. Gong drove slowly, weaving the car between them as water splashed up from the ones he hit.

1427…1431…1435—it has to be here somewhere,
Mei thought as she read the street numbers bolted to the side of the run-down buildings that lined the road.
Maybe just a little further, probably the one at the end.

An eight-foot high rusted chain-link fence enclosed the property and a set of industrial truck scales sat beside a small shack just inside the gate.
EnviroTech Waste Management
.
God, I hope this is it
.
She sucked in an anxious breath and ran her eyes across the lot as Gong pulled up to the gate and stopped the car.

It was the ninth or tenth location they had visited that morning. When he called Emma for help, Simmons hadn’t been able to provide any more detail beyond “I’m at a garbage dump somewhere outside of the city.”

A quick search through the yellow pages Lucia had snatched from a broken down phone booth listed twenty-seven potential locations. There were scrap-yards, plastic recyclers, collection services and a myriad of other companies.
Who would have guessed that garbage was such a big business?

“I bet it’s this one,” Emma chimed from the backseat. “It looks good. Best one we’ve seen so far. Anyone want to make a bet?” She looked at Saanvi. “What do you think?” The younger girl smiled weakly but said nothing.

Mei sighed. If talk was rain, Emma was a hurricane, a relentless downpour of words that lashed you in a never-ending torrent. After spending the entire morning listening to her, she almost wished she hadn’t agreed to let her travel in the car with them. But it was better for Saanvi to be near someone closer to her own age.

The supplies from Gong’s car were now in the van. He didn’t object and somehow it was just taken for granted that he would continue to travel with them.

He rolled the window down and sniffed at the damp air. “I think you are correct,” he said, agreeing with Emma. She smiled back him. Mei didn’t understand, but somehow he wasn’t the least bit bothered by Emma’s non-stop chatter.

“Why this one?” she asked the two of them.

“I can smell the garbage,” they said together.

“Jinx,” Emma shouted. Gong looked confused.

As Emma explained what
jinx
meant, Mei looked around. The other locations didn’t have much of a smell or what smell they had was of oil and metal, the smell of plastic. This one smelled of vegetables and compost, a rich pungent odor that lingered in your nose. It was worth a look.

“Okay, let’s check it out.”

He turned the car off and they tumbled out of it. Lucia joined them, making every effort to not lock eyes with Emma. Mei stared at the sky in silent prayer.
They hadn’t come to blows yet, but she could tell that Lucia didn’t think much of the college student.

A thick steel chain wove through the two halves of the gate. It was locked with a large padlock. Gong rattled it. “I will use the car to break it open.” He walked away without waiting for a reply.

Mei felt a tug on her arm. It was Saanvi. The girl pointed across the building’s grounds and then stepped behind her for protection.

A homeless man wearing a green garbage bag as a raincoat emerged from a covered building at the back of the property. He carried a steel bar and shook it in their direction.
As if he were trying to scare off a barking dog,
Mei thought. He reminded her of the bums in New York who stood guard, protecting their space
on top of the subway grates.

Halfway across the yard, he stopped and dropped the bar at his feet. “Thank god…” he cried in a hoarse voice.

Tony?

Emma ran to the gate and shook it. “Professor Simmons…Professor Simmons!” She turned to the rest of them and cried out. “Look, it’s Professor Simmons.”

Mei gawked in astonishment at the figure that hobbled towards them.

“Tony?”

His face was splotched with dabs of grease and rotten vegetables. He had tangled knots in his hair that looked like they would need a pair of scissors to free them. She couldn’t see his shirt beneath the garbage bag, but his beige dress pants were splotched with stains the color of stagnant swamp water. He was missing a shoe.

He placed his hands on the fence, wrapped his dirty fingers around the chain links and choked out two words.

“Water please…”

Emma ran to the van and returned with a couple of bottles. The first bottle disappeared in one continuous swig and he signaled for the second.

When he finished it, Mei motioned the others away from the gate.

“Tony, get back. We’ll use the car to break the gate open.”

Gong slowly reversed until the rear bumper touched the gate. With one final check to ensure everyone was clear, he gave the car a shot of gas. The gate buckled inward for a second and then violently snapped open. The two halves slammed against the fence with a rattle and bounced back.

Mei and Emma ran through the gate towards Simmons. When they reached him, his eyes darted between the two women until they finally settled on Mei.

“You’re here—I can’t believe it. You look good.”

She smiled as she studied him.
He was a mess, nothing like the man she once knew. But still, it was him.
“I’m here…but you don’t look so good.”

He grinned and pointed to the garbage bag that hung from his shoulders. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have dressed for the occasion.”

He turned to Emma and spoke warmly. “I owe you. Thanks.”

She gave him an aw-shucks grin and sniffed the air. “No problem, Professor Simmons, but wow… you smell pretty bad…like the garbage under my sink when it’s hot, and I put a piece of meat in and forget it for a few days. You really—“

“I think he probably knows,” Mei said with a laugh.

“Yeah, but phew!” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.

Mei watched as he looked over to the side of the car where Gong, Saanvi, and Lucia stood.

God, where do I even begin?

“Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

A short while later, he emerged from behind the building, barefoot and wearing a pair of Gong’s black pants. They were tight around the waist and three inches too short. An over-sized woman’s nightshirt hung loosely from his shoulders. He handed Mei a pair of white tube socks.

“I’ll save these until I find a pair of shoes.”

Emma whistled in feigned admiration.

He smiled at the college student. “I know…not exactly stylish but beggars can’t be choosers. Do either of you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

Mei handed him an energy bar.

When he finished, she took him by the arm. “Come on, Tony. Let’s get caught up and then I’ll introduce you to the others.”

They left Emma and walked to a bench by the side of the small shack. The ground was littered with cigarette butts and shiny metal pull tabs. She brushed them aside with the toe of her shoe and motioned him to sit. She sat down next to him.

“Emma said the army took you to the base to work on something related to the bacteria. How did you end up here?” She leaned in towards him and listened intently as he told her the story.

When he finished, she stared at him, slack-jawed. He looked lost for a moment.

“You believe me don’t you?”

She squeezed his hand. “Of course, I believe you but I don’t understand why this Raine guy tried to kill you. What is it that you discovered? And how is Dr. Mayer involved?”

He stared off into the distance. “I don’t know. They were worried about files I saw on her computer account.”

“What was in them?”

He shrugged. “No idea, I never had a chance to look at them closely, but it had something to do with antibiotic resistance.” His nostrils flared as he began to get angry. “They were hiding something, Mei. Something important. I need to tell someone but that bas—”

“We’ll figure it out,” she said calming him. “But first, we need to get out of here, find somewhere safe to plan our next steps.”

His eyes regained their focus and he nodded. “We weren’t allowed to leave the base, what’s it like out there?” He looked at her. “I heard about the quarantine. Did they lift it?”

“
It was awful, Tony, worse than you could ever possibly imagine. We couldn’t sanitize quickly enough to contain the spread of the infection. After we were quarantined, it moved from room to room and floor to floor. The patients fell ill and then the staff. Nothing worked. At the end, there was almost no one left…just me and Lucia and a few others.”

“How did you get out?”

“Through the tunnels.” She told him about Charlie and the time they spent on the road, glossing over some of the details and leaving their experience in the Walmart parking lot completely out. She’d tell him about that later.

“Who is she?”

She followed his eyes to Lucia who stood by the side of the van, aloof from the others.

“A patient—well, she wasn’t a patient, her children were. A little girl…a beautiful little girl and a boy.” She stopped and kicked at the pile of cigarette butts as her voice broke. “They died…I tried to save them, but nothing worked.”

“Mei, a lot of people have died and a lot more are going to.” He placed his hand on her knee.

“What about those two?” he asked with a nod towards the car. Saanvi had returned to the back seat while Gong stood by the open door watching them intently.

“They’re both a bit of a mystery,” she said and told him about the events at the boarding school. “Saanvi won’t talk about it, but I think she was raped by those men.”

She stole a glance at the Asian man and lowered her voice. “We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for Gong, but you should talk to Emma about him. She’s convinced he followed you and her from the university and then watched her house after the army took you away.”

Simmons’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s the man from the restaurant?” He jerked his head towards Gong who nodded as if he knew they were talking about him.

“I don’t know who he is, but he shot and killed those men like it was a walk in the park.” Her stomach knotted up as she remembered the gunfire and screams that followed. “He must be military or police.”

“Has he said anything suspicious or mentioned my name?”

“No—he hasn’t said very much at all. The one time I tried to ask him a few questions, he changed the subject.”

He nodded and stared at Gong for a few more seconds. “Well then, I think the first order of business is to find out exactly what secret he’s hiding.”

He stood and offered her his hand. “I have two questions for you.” She tilted her head and looked up at him.

He smiled grimly. “Do you have a gun and do you want to join me?”

G
ong smiled
as they left the bench and strode across the pavement towards him.
They are coming to confront me.
He could see it in their posture.
He would tell them the truth. There was nothing to be gained from lying, not any longer. They were in this together.

He watched as Simmons led, his fists clenched by his side, a stern look on his face while Mei followed, her shorter legs taking twice as many steps to keep up.

Halfway to the car, she veered off to talk to Lucia. He nodded as the two women stole a quick glance towards him. He watched Lucia reach into the van for the gun he knew she had stored there. Seconds later, Mei joined Simmons in front of him.

Simmons stared him in the eye and asked, “Did you follow Emma and I from the university?”

“Yes.”

Taken aback by his blunt one-word answer, Simmons blinked in surprise and then stammered, “Why…what for?”

“I was sent for you. To find you and take you back to China to assist our scientists in their fight against the bacteria.”

“You’re Chinese, not American?” Simmons seemed surprised.

He nodded.

“But what if I didn’t want to go?”

“That was not an option,” he replied dryly. “But with the borders closed and no communications, it is no longer possible for me to return to China.”

“Why are you telling us this?” Simmons’s eyes narrowed as he spoke. He squinted suspiciously at him.

“Because I am stranded here—with you. Trust will be important in the days to come.” He watched them share a look of astonishment and added, “I will answer all of your questions to the best of my ability.”

Simmons was the first to regain his wits. “Why me?”

“Our scientists said you could help them. I assume they were working on the same thing as you—antibiotics, a vaccine. When I left, they had made no progress. Perhaps things have changed, I don’t know.”

“Did China help North Korea develop this?”

He shook his head. “The North Koreans released it, but it was your government that provided them with the bacteria.”

Mei scoffed out loud.

Simmons stared at him for a few seconds as he processed the new information. His eyes brightened with understanding.

“Son-of-a-bitch! He’s right, Mei. It makes sense now. That’s why Raine and Mayer were so scared. They thought I had found something that linked them back to this. But I don’t understand why we or the Koreans would do something this insane.”

“A pandemic was not the expected outcome,” he explained. “We believe a group within your intelligence community sought to create an excuse that could be used to justify a war to change the regime’s leadership. A war that would have had the backing of most of the world if North Korea was discovered to have used biological weapons.”

Mei shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. There is no war and even the worst of the warmongers in our government wouldn’t do something so reckless.”

“War is futile at this point. As I said, the pandemic was not intentional. The original bacterial weapon was not supposed to spread. ”

Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know all of this?”

“We had a contact inside the operation. The North Koreans received the bacteria from a person they believed to be sympathetic to their regime. They did not know he was CIA. Once the bacteria was delivered to the first hospital, our agent was able to obtain a sample.”

“I still don’t understand how they expected to control its spread. It’s not as if you can just put up a fence,” she said derisively.

“Our scientists do not know and I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to offer an opinion.”

“Tony, what do you think?” she asked.

“Tony?”

They watched Simmons rock back and forth on his toes. His eyes were closed. After a moment he opened them. “There is a way.”

“A way to what?” Mei asked.

“To fence it in.”

He turned to her and explained. “If what he says is correct, that it wasn’t supposed to spread, then the best way to stop it from spreading is to take away something it needs to survive or give it something that will kill it.”

She shook her head. “In the hospital, we tried every type of antibiotic available and nothing worked.”

He nodded. “So did the team at Fort Detrick, but it has resistance designed into it…What we didn’t try doing was starving it.”

“Excuse me, Professor,” Gong said, interrupting them, “As I mentioned earlier, I am not knowledgeable on such matters, but does the bacteria not get its food from the host’s stomach? To starve it, would the host not also have to starve?”

“The bacteria absorbs nutrients from the intestine, not the stomach,” Simmons said, correcting him.

“What are you thinking, Tony? How would you starve it without killing the patient?” Mei asked.

“I’ve seen research that suggests it might be possible to control the inadvertent spread of genetically modified organisms by making them dependent on something artificial—a substance which if it is taken away, causes the organism to die out—a so-called kill switch.

“Mayer and Raine may have included a kill switch—perhaps an artificial amino acid that has to be present in the host’s gut for the bacteria to grow. That might explain how they expected to keep it confined to a few hospitals.”

She frowned. “How would that work?”

“If a patient’s food had this amino acid added to it, the bacteria would prosper and patient would get sick, but once the amino acid was removed from the food, the bacteria would die off and everything would return to normal. They’d be able to turn it on and off relatively easily.”

“But, it’s everywhere now,” Mei said, a puzzled look on her face.

Simmmons nodded. “It mutated. That’s what bacteria do. They mutate. If the amino acid selected for the kill switch wasn’t sufficiently different from those normally found in the body, then it’s possible a small mutation would have changed the bacteria’s dietary needs allowing it to prosper everywhere.”

“How do we change it back—switch it off?”

“It’s too late,” Simmons said in a flat voice. “The genie’s out of the bottle. The bacteria’s mutated. The kill switch is disabled.”

“Professor, are you suggesting that there is no way to combat the bacteria?”

Simmons stared at him for a few long seconds.
“I don’t know,” he said finally, the weight of his uncertainty hanging heavy in those three simple words.

“What about a vaccine?” Mei asked.

“We were working on one at Fort Detrick, but it wasn’t going well. I couldn’t isolate an antigen for the binary toxin, and we were struggling to develop a scalable production system. Maybe in time, we would have been successful but…” His voice trailed off.

“So what do we do?”

Simmons thought about it and answered, “If it’s dependent on specific amino acid, a change in the body’s biochemistry might upset it.” He became to pace again. “I need to get this new information to the researchers at Fort Detrick. It may not be enough to make any difference, but it’s all we have.”

Mei grabbed his arm. “Tony, you can’t go back.”

He reached out and clasped her hands. “I have to. I know it’s risky but this could be important. There’s a scientist from John Hopkins. If I can get the information to her without being caught then—“

Gong interrupted him. “I will help you get a message to them but why did you leave the military facility?”

Mei grew increasingly agitated as Simmons told him about the events at the base. She shook her head. “It’s too risky, Tony. You can’t go back there.”

Gong reassured her. “He will be safe. I have an idea. But if they are indeed searching for him, it is only a matter of time before they come here to look. We must leave now.”

E
mma felt
the butterflies in her stomach grow as Gong turned right onto Veterans drive and drove up the road to the main gate. He looked over at her as he slowed.

“Just like we practiced, okay?”

She nodded nervously.

“You don’t have to do this,” Professor Simmons said from the backseat.

“I want to help. I’ll be fine.”

“Just like we practiced,” Gong repeated.

She opened the car door and climbed out. Gong had stopped the car well before the guardhouse. As she walked, she could hear him turning it around, pointing it away from the base.

The thick iron gates were closed. Concrete barriers had been positioned to create a maze, wide enough for an army truck, but angled in such away to prevent vehicles from crashing through the gates. It would be impossible to drive faster than a few miles per hour while entering or exiting Fort Detrick.

A young-looking soldier stepped out of the gatehouse and eyed her suspiciously.
Just like we practiced.
She sauntered towards him as if she didn’t have a care in the world and smiled.

“Hi, I have an important message for Dr. Reynolds. She’s one of the scientists on the base. She’s from John Hopkins.”

He gave her a once over and spoke. “Sorry, Miss. The base is closed to visitors.”

“Oh, that’s okay—maybe I could just borrow your phone and leave a message for her…Except, I don’t know her phone number, do you?” She giggled and looked at him expectantly.

He shook his head. “Afraid I can’t do that, Miss. You’ll have to call her from off base.”

She curled her lower lip in a pout. “But it’s important and I can’t call her from off the base. I told you I don’t have her phone number.”

He shrugged and gave her hard look. “Not my problem, Miss.” He motioned towards the car. “You need to go now.”

This wasn’t going well.

Annoyed, she glared at him and pulled a folded up piece of paper out of her back pocket. She waved it at him. “I told you it was an important message.”

She had no idea what the words meant but she began to read out loud. “Dr. Reynolds, I have important information about the bacteria. Look for signs of a unique amino acid dependency in the bacteria’s Strickland fermentation reactions. The bacteria might have been designed with a kill-switch. The transcriptional activator protein, PrdR, could be a metabolism regulator that controls preferential utilization of proline and—“

“Okay, Okay…Stop, Miss.” He had his hands in the air and looked befuddled. “Wait here, I’ll see if she’s in the directory. What was her name again?”

She smiled broadly at him. “Dr. Reynolds.”

She turned back and waved to Gong and Professor Simmons.

The soldier was back a minute later with pained expression on his face. “She isn’t in the directory.”

Her face sagged and she looked back to the car. This time with a frown.

D
amn it
…
Simmons had watched as the events unfolded. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but everything looked to be going so well—until now.

As he pondered their options, a second soldier stepped out of the guardhouse.
It was the soldier from the other night.
Simmons slouched down even further to avoid being seen. He watched over the back of the rear seat as Emma had a spirited conversation with the two soldiers. She folded the paper back up, handed it to the second soldier and turned to the car. She gave them a thumbs up.

He smiled and nodded to himself.
Good job, Emma…it worked, whatever you said.

She walked back to the car with a skip in her step and grin on her face. The second soldier headed down the road towards the administration building.

He slid over in the seat, climbed out and opened the door for her. She had almost reached the car when a desert-brown humvee pulled up on the other side of the gate. The driver rolled down the window, handed the guard a set of papers and motioned to the backseat. After a brief conversation, the person in the backseat rolled the window down.

Simmons recognized Raine at exactly the same instant as Raine recognized him. Both men did a double-take, but Raine was the first to react. His hand shot up and he pointed at the car “Stop him, he killed, Colonel Young.” The words erupted from his mouth in a scream.

Simmons grabbed Emma’s arm and yanked her in to the car. Once she was inside, he yelled at Gong, “Go now!”