Genesis Plague (17 page)

M
y hands shook as I prepared another sample for the electron
microscope. The door to Conny’s lab and the door to the observation room were
closed, but I could still hear her muffled cries. I should have gone back in
there and turned off the comm panel, but I didn’t want to face her just yet. I
hated to leave Dan’s body on the floor, especially in the same room as Conny.

I told myself I would
go back in, just as soon as my hands stopped shaking.

I made a phone call to
CDC in Atlanta, but they didn’t seem enthusiastic about sending any more people
until we got things under control. I told them that wouldn’t happen until we
got more people. Classic administrative feedback loop.

I took a deep breath
and looked through the eyepiece of the scope, doing my best to stay distracted
from the horror in the other room.

The electron microscope
was in the corner of the lab, away from the chimpanzee containers. All three of
the apes were sleeping, apparently exhausted after a prolonged violent outburst
while Dan Grayson was busy bashing his brains against the wall.

The electron scope was
bulky, like a regular table-top scope on steroids. The beast looked more like a
large telescope suspended vertically a few inches off the desk.  Its supports
were built into the desk, which also housed two display monitors.

The power supply inside
the desk hummed quietly as I panned across the sample inside the scope. The
microbes on the slide came into sharp focus, and I saw a familiar sight: the
Loasis
virus, inert and useless, floating in a gelatinous solution.

Inert until it makes
contact with a desirable host
, I reminded myself.

The virus was almost
too large to see in its entirety with the powerful magnification of the bigger
scope. Its size was yet one more puzzle in a long list. Tiny black filaments,
like short wires, also floated in the sample. The best we geniuses could figure
out, these filaments were food for the slug-like
Polychaeta Loasis
specimens, and the virus was a waste byproduct. Or perhaps the virus came from
another source entirely.

Jesus, I was tired. I
leaned back from the scope and rubbed my eyes, trying to clear my blurry
vision.

I had been thinking a
lot about what Xander took from the cave. He carried several sample tubes of
red liquid when he came back to camp at the base of Mauna Loa, before the
eruption.

There had been an
explosion when he was alone the cave. I remembered the unusual rock at the edge
of the lava lake inside the cavern. The majority of
Loasis
specimens
congregated on or near this rock. Xander had wanted us to crack it open

I twisted the dials on
the side of the scope to zoom out slightly and focus on one of the larger virus
microbes. A multifaceted protein capsid head sat atop a slender tube, called a
sheath. At the opposite end, the sheath terminated in several jointed limbs
called spikes. They looked almost like delicate spider legs. They weren’t true
legs, since a virus was always suspended in fluid and didn’t need to walk anywhere.
The spikes were what the virus used to clamp down on a blood cell so it could
inject its own DNA into the cell’s cytoplasm, mutating it. The nucleic acid
came down from the jeweled capsid head, traveled through the slender sheath,
and was injected into the blood cell.

The thing that had us
stumped from the beginning with the
Loasis
virus was the presence of a
second head on some of the larger microbes. There was no biological reason for
a virus to be as big as some of the examples I had seen, because it would be
too massive to infect a tiny blood cell, negating the purpose for its own
existence. Yet I was finding a small percentage of engorged microbes, visible
without the necessity for electron microscopy. The second head on those larger
microbes was nearly identical to the first, multifaceted and attached by a thin
collar, but it stuck out at an odd angle, almost as if it had grown from the
virus as an afterthought. A hairline crack ran down one side of this additional
capsid encasement. The other head, the one I was used to seeing, had no such
crack.

I leaned back from the
scope again and sighed.

There was a knock on
the door and Johann poked his head into the room.

“You have a video
call,” he said. He set a laptop on the desk next to me and walked toward the
door.

“Johann,” I said.

He turned, and for a
moment I thought he was going to say the type of thing I had come to expect
from him. Instead, he waited patiently.

“Thanks for stopping
me,” I said. “I knew it was too late, I just—I just—”

His shoulders relaxed.
I didn’t see aggravation or anger, only exhaustion.

“You’re welcome, Paul,”
he said.

He looked at me a
moment longer, then left the room.

I turned the laptop so
the screen faced me and pressed a key to accept the call. Maria Fontaine smiled
in the video box on-screen. She looked more than a little tired, but of course
I would never say that out loud. It had only taken me two times to learn that
rule.

Her dark hair was pulled
back in a bun, which I knew she only did when she hadn’t showered in a couple
of days. I was reminded of our late-night video chats while we were dating,
when we were halfway around the world from each other on various assignments
for the university.

“Well, look who I
found,” she said. “Good to see you, Paul.”

“You, too,” I said, and
I meant it. Something about seeing a familiar face outside this cursed facility
overwhelmed me with a desire to get the hell out as fast as I could.

“What’s wrong?” she
asked.

“We’ve had a rough day
here.”

“Oh? Anything I can
help with?”

“I wish it were that
easy.”

“Making any progress on
the vaccine?”

“I think so,” I said,
glancing at the clock. “Johann’s probably pulling out the newest batch for
testing as we speak.”

“Good. Things are
moving fast here.”

She moved her camera so
I could see out of her window. On the street below the building, men in black fatigues
stood by large concrete barricades.

“They’re not letting
anyone in or out, Paul. They’ve turned this place into a fortress.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There is
a rumor going around that a private company has started building remote research
bases to study the virus, way out in the middle of nowhere, away from prying
eyes.”

“Well, I’m sure we’re
not the only ones trying to fight it.”

She shook her head. “I
kept all the surviving
Loasis
samples with me in San Francisco. They
would have deteriorated during the trip to Seattle. Whatever these people are
studying, they didn’t get it from us.”

I found that I was too
exhausted to give it much thought.

“Nothing we can do
about it now.”

“Always the optimist,” Maria
said with a small grin. “I guess I should tell you why I really called.”

I heard the rapid
typing of keys on her keyboard and a close-up image of the
Polychaeta Loasis
organism popped up on-screen. It looked exactly like I remembered it from the
cave: slug-like, with a broad foot and long furry hairs along its back, each
tipped with a spot of green. A mass of sensory tubes were clustered atop what I
assumed to be its head, though it had no other facial characteristics.

“Your friend and mine,”
said Maria. “This’ll blow your overworked brain.”

“I’m listening.”

“The virus is in no way
related to the
Loasis
organism.”

“At all? Is it a waste
byproduct?”

“Nope. The virus is a
hitchhiker. I’ve discovered extremely powerful antiviral agents in the
Loasis
organism that makes it the perfect host for the virus.”

“So where does the
virus originate?”

“My best guess is from
a microbial colony or growth inside the cave rock. You remember the one that
Xander was so interested in blowing open?”

“I remember.”

“These little slugs
were crawling all over it when we showed up. I think the contents of that rock
seep up through the porous exterior, superheated by magma from within, and the
Loasis
feed on whatever comes out.”

“Some kind of algae?”

“That’s my guess. But
the algae has a tagalong. A hitchhiker.”

“The virus.”

“Exactly. The
Loasis
eat the algae, and they pick up the virus as a result. When the
Loasis
excrete acidic fluid as a defense mechanism, which we witnessed in the cave,
the virus goes along for the ride in the excretion.”

I suddenly thought of
Cassidy, and how one of the
Loasis
organisms melted a hole through her
glove, burning her hand.

“There’s something
else, Paul.”

More typing, and a new
image showed up on-screen. This one showed a dissected
Loasis
slug in a
metal tray. Clear fluid leaked from a long incision down its ‘spine’.

“How many of them do
you have left?” I asked.

“Three, not counting
this one. The others didn’t make it back from Hawaii. It’s the heat. They need
it to survive, otherwise the molecular proteins in their system break down. I
think that’s one of the reasons the fur on their backs is loaded with bacteria.”

“Temperature
regulation?”

“I believe so, but the
rapid cooling they experienced when we transported them back here was too much
for most of them. All but four of them liquefied in their sample tubes. But
that isn’t what I wanted to show you. You see the incision along the dorsal
ridge of this specimen?”

“Yes…”

“There’s a long cavity
here, just under the flesh, below the hairs on its back. It runs the entire
length of the organism, almost like a narrow pocket.”

“I see it. What’s the
purpose? Is that a chamber for the defense fluid?”

“That’s what I thought
at first, too, but no. It’s for
this
.”

She hit a key and the
image changed to another metal tray. A worm-like creature, no wider than a
pencil, lay in a shallow pool of watery black liquid. Small, fibrous threads
stuck out from the length of its two-inch body, like stringy plant roots. At
one end of the narrow body, there was a clump of fleshy tubes.

“You gotta be kidding
me,” I said.

“Nope,” Maria said with
satisfaction.

She went back to the
image of the dissected
Loasis
specimen. I hadn’t noticed before, but the
cluster of tubes over its ‘head’ were missing – the cluster I thought was a
sensory organ.

“It’s a parasite,” said
Maria. “A completely different organism that grows inside the slugs.”

“T
hose roots you see hanging from its body burrow into the
sensory ganglia of
Loasis
, forming some kind of symbiotic relationship,”
Maria said.

“Are all of the
specimens infested?”

“All of the samples I
still have, yes. I didn’t think to check the other ones before they
deteriorated.”

“Any idea what the
parasite is?”

“Not a clue. I can’t
find a common link between this new species and any living organism. This
discovery just created a solid decade of work for me.” She could barely keep
from bursting with excitement. “You really should be here to study it with me.”

I looked away, thinking
of Cassidy. Thankfully, Maria didn’t let the moment drag on.

“So what have you
found?” she asked. “Anything new?”

“Johann thinks the
virus is ancient.”

“How ancient?”

“It pre-dates all known
species. He even went so far as to suggest it could have softened up the
dinosaurs for extinction.”

Maria laughed, and I
smiled despite myself.

“I miss you, Paul,” she
said. I had a hard time looking into the camera, and she cleared her throat
politely. “Any word from Cassidy?”

I shook my head. “How’s
Mike?”

She smiled, but it was
a lonely expression. Empty.

“He left me. I’m alone
here, now.” I saw in her eyes that she suspected it would end that way all
along. Then she laughed easily, trying to make us both feel better. “But I
still have you, right Paul? You would come and get me if anything happened.”

I smiled, but it was
shaky. “Sure.”

Maria sighed. “Well, I
was hoping to give you this news in person, but that could still be a while,
given how things are going around here.”

“Did you find Xander?”
I asked, leaning forward eagerly. I hadn’t planned on bringing it up until she
did, not wanting to rub my personal problems in her face.

“Paul,” Maria said,
“what you should understand is that, if Cassidy was infected in Hawaii, then
there’s nothing you can do to save her. She’s already gone. Admit that much, at
least.”

I shook my head.

“I need to hear you say
it before I tell you what I found.”

I clenched my jaw, then
nodded. “Alright, Maria. I agree there is probably nothing I can do.
If
she was infected.”

She sighed. “I guess
that’ll have to do. My contact at PharmaCor sent me this. It’s from one of the
company’s processing plants.”

She typed rapidly on
her keyboard, and a gritty image popped up on the screen. It was black and
white, blurry, probably pulled from a security camera feed. It showed a
concrete stairway attached to the outside of a large building. It was night,
and a bright halogen lamp illuminated the top of the stairs.

I immediately picked
out Alexander King in the center of a group of people walking up the steps. His
bald head gleamed in the bright light, and he wore the same dirty white pants
and shirt as he had when I last saw him in Hawaii.

I didn’t recognize any
of the others except the person directly behind him. Looking into the camera,
eyes full of sadness, was Cassidy.