Turning, he motioned for us to follow him to the end of the room, where he asked me to sit down on the edge of a hospital bed. The sheets were crisp and clean, and the room smelled of bleach. It was an odd sense, this one of being clean and safe. I could get used to it.
“I’ll just take a cursory look at you, check you for a concussion. You two were in remarkably good shape when you arrived; if not for your unconsciousness, you would have been in the best shape of anyone we’ve seen come aboard in the last couple weeks.”
“How many?” I asked curiously before his penlight flashed brightly in my left eye.
“Survivors?” he responded, waving the light back and forth before moving to the other eye.
“One hundred and seventeen to date,” he answered clinically. “Two hundred and thirty-eight extractions in total. One hundred and twenty one casualties from the total.” He grunted as he finished the second eye.
“I must say, Mr. McKnight…” he began before I interrupted.
“Please, it’s Mike.”
He smiled briefly. “Okay, Mike then.” The pen light flashed again and he cocked his head to the side, impressed.
“You have some interesting light reflexes. I’ve never seen pupils react so fast. A little light-sensitive, but that’s to be expected after a blow to the head. Otherwise, you appear to be perfectly recovered. I’ll see you again tomorrow to check up on the pupil reaction, but otherwise, you’re good to go. No residual damage that I can see.”
He stared at me curiously for half a second, then swiveled away on his stool, writing something down. “You’re cleared from my end.”
“You said you had two hundred and thirty-eight extractions, but a total of a hundred and twenty-one casualties,” I began, inclined to believe I knew the answer already. “What happened to the casualties? Did they die on board?”
He continued writing, not looking up. His voice was flat, unemotional.
“Those parties chose to conceal a bite or a scratch wound, and were discovered upon inspection on board. They knew they were going to turn, but they came aboard anyway. So, they were … dealt with.”
Yep. Not unexpected at all. The Liverpool had proven that an isolated community had to take those precautions. It was the only way to stem the infection.
It occurred to me that the ship might have some sort of intelligence on the cause of the outbreak. Although we knew, I wondered if the remnants of power and authority had any idea of the culprits, or the actual physical cause. It was a natural question to ask, so I didn’t hesitate.
“Any information on what started this whole mess?” I asked.
He looked up briefly as he wrote, face slightly incredulous, but not at all hesitant.
“Turns out this whole thing was started by bottled water, can you believe that? We’ve got hundreds of folks sending confirmed reports of bottled water being infected. Tricky, I’ll say that for the terrorists. Only way to get it out to a lot of people, in a lot of places, fast. Apparently, the virus turns you faster if you drink it from the bottle—some sort of bioengineering to accelerate the infection. But once it starts spreading by bite, the first few bites from an infected person are the fastest to spread. After that, it depends on the bitten person’s body. They still turn, but lots of other factors come into play, like metabolism and bite location.”
He began to write again, then stood up, walking toward his small desk in the corner, which was neatly stacked with folders and small clear vials.
So Kopland had engineered the damn thing to spread fast from the initial infection, had he? Clever bastard. He had known that a slow moving virus might be contained, but a fast mover, dispersed through airplanes and trains and gas stations ... damn near impossible.
Cowell looked up from his desk to where I still sat, staring at nothing. He glanced at the door dismissively.
“Thank you for seeing me, Mike. If you’ll touch base with Commander Vincent on your way to your quarters, I think you’ll find that the Captain would like to debrief you.” He smiled briefly, as if telling a joke for which only he knew the punch line.
“No problem Doc. Thanks.” I followed Kate out the door and deeper into the belly of the giant ship.
Up four flights of stairs and after what seemed like another mile of steel tunnels, we met briefly with the Commander, who served as the executive officer on board. After a perfunctory introduction, he scheduled us for a meeting in thirty minutes with Captain Walter Allred on the bridge. Apparently the Captain didn’t leave the bridge much these days, and I was happy to oblige. In all my movies, one of my favorites had been filmed partially on board an aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson.
Although the Carl Vinson was smaller than the Enterprise, it was just as enthralling to watch airplanes literally catapulted from the deck, and feel the rush and rumble of a floating city underneath your feet.
I was also anxious for news. Unfortunately, Commander Vincent was pleasant, but not very forthcoming.
“Can you tell us anything about what’s going on,” I asked, staring at one television monitor in his office that was surprisingly turned off. “I mean, are stations still transmitting?”
“No can say, sir,” he replied as he ushered us out after quickly assigning us a time. Like I said, perfunctory.
“But, how …”
“Captain will tell you what you need to know. Thank you for seeing me.” He closed the door behind us.
I turned to Kate, “Nice fellow.”
She grimaced and nodded for me to follow our ever-present Marine escort. “Yeah, I’ve only been awake an extra 12 hours, but that’s the most he’s said to me the whole time. I will say one thing though, there is none, I mean zero, outside information in the ship. Televisions are off, radios are off, TV satellites have been taken offline…even the crew internet is disconnected.”
Shrugging, I asked the obvious question. “What does it matter, right? I mean if the world isn’t there anymore …”
“But it is there. Just not as much of it as before. There are television signals. BBC is still broadcasting, or at least they were in the bunker, right? And the internet can’t be turned off—it’s still out there. It’s just weird. I mean, it’s like they don’t want the crew…”
“Sir, ma’am, your room. Sir, I’ll take you to your quarters after your meeting.”
We hadn’t realized he had stopped. I smiled, not knowing whether he had heard us talking, or whether it mattered.
“Thanks,” I searched his uniform in a glance for his rank insignia, but he filled in first.
“Corporal, sir,” he said, stone faced.
He was all of 19. If that.
“Thanks, Corporal. We’ll see you in 20.”
“Yes, sir.”
When did I become a sir? That sounded odd.
I was going to have to do something about that.
Chapter 3
Kate had a small room, but it was hers. She wasn’t being forced to double up just yet, as there just weren’t that many survivors on board. We had retired to her quarters after leaving the infirmary, ostensibly to catch up before meeting with the Captain.
In reality, I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Specifically, why we weren’t letting everyone else in on the big news.
Truth be told, I wanted to be a hero again. There were thousands of people on this ship, and the last they had heard, I was a wife-murdering sociopath. It’s the kind of thing a guy wants to rectify if he has a chance.
Besides, the whole ‘finder of the vaccine that saves the world’ thing was a pretty good down payment on that salvation.
“Yeah, well. I was a little confused when I woke up, but I wasn’t sure … well, let’s just say it was really, really good to see you walk in. You know, all real and non-imaginary and stuff.”
I was laying on her bed, arms behind my head, staring at her as she shut her door, checked the window, and asked absently how it felt to wake up alone in an empty room again.
She smiled, grabbing her desk chair and flipping it around, so she was straddling the back with her arms resting on the headrest. She leaned forward, very close. Her dark hair fell forward, framing her face in shadow and soft light.
“So?” she said, waiting for my question. “
Go ahead and ask.”
“I’m right, right?” I felt fairly cocky about it, believe it or not. After almost a week of not being sure whether you were crazy or not, it felt pretty good to have guessed about something far beyond my ken and to have been right. I had really been motivated in my faith in Maria, but it didn’t matter.
I flexed my shoulder, pointed at my thigh demonstratively.
“I mean, the stuff I injected you with—the stuff that Maria injected me with, both by design and by accident, the night she died—it has restorative qualities. It makes us heal faster. More importantly, it immunizes us from the beasty-bites, right? I mean … never mind. I know the answer to the questions I’m asking. More importantly, why the hell can’t we tell anyone? We’ve found what we were looking for. A way to save people!”
“It looks that way, yes. At least, for us.” She said it slowly, but with hesitancy in her voice. Her eyes narrowed slightly, as she reached into her pocket.
I pressed on, as she removed a small plastic device from her pocket.
“What do you mean, for us? It’s not like we’re special. We’re flesh and blood humans, just like everyone else. Why did you need to keep this a secret? Seems like we’d be dead to rights in telling anyone and everyone about this stuff.”
She tossed the item to me and I grabbed it out of the air, realizing as I looked into my opened palm that it was a thumb drive. I looked up, curious.
She nodded at my hand. “Right before we left Kopland’s lab for the roof, I grabbed this from his desk. I had no idea what it was, but there weren’t any other data devices in there, so I figured it might be relevant. After you stuck me with that blue shit, I knew that something was off. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. Until now.”
I was definitely missing something. Her face was serious and downcast. She looked worried.
This couldn’t be good.
“Uh, care to elaborate?” I asked stupidly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Her voice was hard, serious. “Listen, they take a really hard line on bites on this ship. You’re bitten, you go overboard. Period. I’m not about to tell them that you were part of the undead buffet line and I lied about it until I’m sure that we have a functioning serum that we can…”
I interrupted, holding my hand up and taking a jackass tone with her.
“Hello! Isn’t this proof positive of a pretty damn good cocktail? I was mowed into like a happy meal burger at a fat kid’s birthday party, and not only am I not a mindless ghoul, but the bite is gone, my bullet wounds are healed, and I feel like a million bucks. What’s the god damned problem?”
She pointed her finger animatedly at the thumb drive I held in my left hand, which I had been waving about like a conductor’s baton in agitation.
“
That’s
the god damned problem. If you’d let me finish a sentence I’d tell you,” she replied, raising her voice in frustration.
I suppressed the urge to talk back and crossed my arms over my chest like a petulant child, making a zipping motion across my mouth as I did so.
She exhaled loudly, not amused.
“Like I was saying,” she drew it out, annoyed, “I think there’s something else going on. According to the files on that drive, the stuff that LZR-1143 is made out of—the stuff they found overseas—is very slightly radioactive. Not enough to kill you or make you glow in the dark, at least not from short exposures, but enough to make you gradually ill. Something about the combination of ingesting the chemical, even in small amounts, and being exposed to the radiation, makes you turn if you die in proximity. They broke this chemical down, weaponized it, and now … well, we can see what came off it. If you ingest it directly, you die and turn. If you get bitten, you die and turn. Now we have this vaccine, that not only immunizes you from infection, but also operates as the virus was designed to—fast healing and God knows what else.”
I still wasn’t catching on. I knew that I had been injected with the vaccine, and that I had survived without turning. I knew that Kate had been injected with the vaccine, and had survived without turning. I wasn’t clear on the problem.
“This is all interesting, from the wacked out scientific standpoint, but I’m still not seeing the problem.”
She sighed, changing tacks.
“Mike, do you believe that Maria was a sociopathic lunatic bent on making a few extra bucks by destroying humanity?”
Boy, that was blunt. I blinked, shaking my head.
“No, absolutely not. We had plenty of money from my job. She worked because she enjoyed it. There’s no way she was stealing the virus. I know that without a doubt.” I almost yelled the last sentence. I knew it.
Her tone remained tolerant. “Okay, so do you believe that she knew what she was doing? At least enough not to inadvertently inject herself with the virus?”
I nodded again, seeing a vague outline of her destination now.
“Of course, she was an experienced scientist. Even if she had accidentally poked herself, she wouldn’t have left the lab. Not knowing what she knew about the virus.”
She went on. “So if we eliminate the possibility that she intentionally injected herself with LZR-1143, and we eliminate the possibility that she mistakenly injected herself with it, what were are left with, in a nutshell, is a question mark.”
I saw the point, but I still didn’t see the answer.
“What about Kopland?” I asked, mind still moving forward slowly. “Couldn’t he have stuck her with the virus, intending her to spread it around by contact. He could have been trying to smuggle it out.”
She leaned back, straightening her arms against the chair back and shaking her head softly.
“No, that doesn’t make sense. He waited months after she was … after she died,” she corrected mid-sentence, avoiding saying that she was killed, “to release the virus. Besides, he seemed pretty damned convinced she was off on her own, stealing it for her own good. That means that he didn’t really know how she had been turned, it was just his theory. She had to have gotten infected some other way.”