Pandemic (14 page)

Clark slapped the glass again. “Let me
out
! We were just doing our jobs, we shouldn’t be locked up! This is horseshit! Where’s my CO? Where’s my lawyer?”

“Less talky-talky,” Tim said, “more testy-testy.”

Clark opened the box and removed the foil envelope, then threw the box down and stomped on it.

“When I get out of here, Feely,” he said, “I’m going to shove one of these straight up your ass.”

“As long as you buy me dinner first,” Tim said. “Now do the damn test.”

Clark again looked up to the ceiling, then shook his head.

“Ain’t gonna burn
me
,” he said.

Burn
. That triggered Clarence’s memory. He again looked up at the cell ceiling, and understood why the brass nozzle seemed familiar: it looked like a flamethrower. Clark was right to be afraid — his cage could be instantly turned into a fire-filled oven that would burn him alive.

Tim sighed, clearly bored with the drama. He slowly raised a finger toward the flat-panel controls of Clark’s cell.

“You’re getting tested,” Tim said. “You can either be conscious for it, or I can knock you out and give it to you myself. Your choice.”

Clark instantly shook his head. Whatever Tim used as knockout gas, it clearly had unpleasant side effects. Clark tore the foil envelope open, took the time to use the alcohol swab — which Cantrell hadn’t bothered with, Clarence realized — then stabbed the end into his finger.

The yellow light flashed faster, then slowed.

Then, stopped.

The red light came on.

No one said a word. Clarence stared, stunned into thoughtlessness. The man had looked fine.

Cantrell broke the silence. “ ‘If you poison us,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘do we not die?’ ”

Clark raised the testing kit to eye level, his wide stare locked on the steady, red light.

Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “No … we
won
.”

Tim finally reacted. He moved his hands in front of his face, accessing something on his HUD.

“Clark, Diego L., tested positive for cellulose,” he said. “Administering anesthesia.”

He tapped the empty air. Something up above beeped. Clark looked up, eyes wide, body shaking.

“Don’t light me up, man,” he said, “don’t … light …”

He sagged to the floor. He didn’t move.

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

José spoke quietly, but Cooper heard the words loud and clear. He tried to ignore them. He was sleeping, after all.

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

Cooper lifted his head, opened his eyes. Smiling José was kneeling next to the bed. He was close, almost leaning over Cooper, but the tiny half-stateroom didn’t leave much of an option; it was already too cramped for just one person, let alone a second.

José offered a steaming cup of coffee. “Ah, you’re awake,” he said, as if it was a lucky coincidence.

“I am now,” Cooper said. “And I don’t want to be. I haven’t slept all night, man. Is everything okay?”

José shrugged. “Probably. But … can I show you something?”

Cooper flopped his face back into the pillow. “Does it involve me getting up?”

José laughed, but it seemed forced. “Why, is there something of mine you want to see while you’re lying in bed?”

“Good point. Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”

“I am,” José said. “But I think this is really important.”

Cooper sat up quickly. “Is Jeff …”

His voice trailed off. He was about to ask if Jeff had the helm, but the loud snoring from the other side of a thin wall told him Jeff was out cold. When they’d bought the
Mary Ellen
, Jeff had built a wall dividing the ten-by-ten captain’s stateroom into two equal five-by-ten rooms. He’d put in another door, even installed a second sink so they would each have one. Partners, fifty-fifty all the way, as they’d been since childhood. While it gave Cooper the luxury of a small amount of privacy, it also meant he heard everything that went on in Jeff’s stateroom. What Jeff did more than anything else in there was snore. Loudly.

Cooper took the cup of coffee. “You left the bridge unattended. This better be fucking important, dude.”

José nodded quickly, placatingly. “Yes, Jefe Cooper, I know. Maybe it’s nothing. Come up to the bridge, okay? And … and don’t wake up Jefe Jeff, yet, okay?”

“Why?”

José shrugged. “I need the money from this job. If I don’t get it, my family will get kicked out of our house.”

That meant the problem had something to do with Stanton. Jeff seemed one more incident away from insisting on turning back, killing the contract and dumping Stanton and Bo Pan back on shore. José needed the money — so did Cooper, so did Jeff.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “But you do know how ridiculous
Jefe Jeff
sounds, right?”

José smiled, shrugged. He slid out of the stateroom and into the corridor.

Cooper took a sip of the coffee, set the mug on his half-desk. He stood, slid his feet into his shoes. He was already dressed — in bad weather, you had to be ready to move quick.

He left the stateroom, stopped in front of his best friend’s door. It felt wrong to not wake Jeff up, involve him in this, but Jeff just wasn’t thinking clearly. Cooper would handle it. If it turned out to be anything important, he’d wake Jeff right away.

Cooper headed up. José was waiting for him on the
Mary Ellen
’s small bridge. Cooper stepped inside, shut the door behind him. The bridge had only a little more room than his stateroom; on the
Mary Ellen
, everything was nice and cozy.

“Okay, what’s this about?”

“Jefe Stanton’s robot ship,” José said. “Something you need to see from when it launched.”

He turned to the sonar unit and started to call up a recording.

“You woke me up to show me sonar of the customer’s ROV?”

“UUV,” José corrected.

“Right, UUV, whatever.”

Jose finished loading the recording. He played it. Cooper leaned in to look at the sonar readout, and as he did, he grew angry.

The
Platypus
was ten feet long, not quite two feet wide at its widest point,
a long, thick eel of a machine with flippers at the end and the sides. It was
artificial —
metal and carbon fiber, materials that bounced back sonar loud and strong. The image on the sonar recording didn’t look artificial at all.

“Goddamit, José, that’s a sonar signature from a fucking
fish
. This is what I get for letting an illegal Filipino play with expensive equipment.”

“Putang ina mo,” José said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you have pretty eyes, Jefe Cooper.”

“I’m quite certain that’s
not
what it means,” Cooper said. “Just because you don’t know how to work the equipment doesn’t mean you can insult me.”

“And calling me an
illegal
isn’t an insult? I’m an undocumented worker.”

José paused the playback. His finger reached out, rested below the screen’s time readout. Cooper saw it, made the connection — the recording was from the time of that morning’s launch.

Cooper leaned in. “What the hell?”

“This is when the
Platypus
was right next to the boat,” Jose said. “Watch as it starts to move away …”

He hit “play.” The sonar signal faded, then vanished. Cooper looked at the time readout: only ten seconds had passed.

“That can’t be right,” he said. “Ten seconds after it started moving, it wasn’t even thirty feet away from us.”

At a distance of thirty feet, something artificial the size of the
Platypus
should have been a bright white signal.

José paused the playback. He looked at Cooper. For once, the man wasn’t smiling.

“That’s not just
expensive
equipment, Jefe Cooper. That’s
stealth
. Military-grade, maybe. Is Stanton running drugs or something? What if the Coast Guard comes out here?”

Cooper finally understood José’s concern.

“Steve Stanton is not running drugs,” Cooper said. “We won’t get busted by the Coasties. You won’t get deported. You’re fine.”

José looked at the paused recording. He hit “play” and again let it run. It showed nothing. He looked up at Cooper again.

“And no gang war? No one will shoot at us?”

“No gang war,” Cooper said. “We’re safe. I promise. Just …” Cooper couldn’t help looking at the screen again, noting that the time stamp was
thirty seconds into the
Platypus
launch — the thing should have still been kicking back sonar like mad. “You were right to tell only me. Jeff will just get all fired up, and it’s nothing. Between us, right?”

José nodded, raised his hands in a gesture that said,
You told me what I needed to hear
.

“Okay, Jefe Cooper. Sorry to wake you up.” He stood and walked to the door.

“No problem,” Cooper said. “You go on, get some sleep. I’ve got the helm.”

José left.

Cooper sat, feeling mixed emotions.

Stealth. Military-grade
.

If Jeff found out …

Cooper shook his head. Jeff wouldn’t find out. So the customer had expensive equipment,
crazy
expensive, so what? That wasn’t Cooper’s business, and it wasn’t Jeff’s business, either. They were getting paid like kings to facilitate Steve Stanton’s search for the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes.

Jeff’s instincts and decisions had almost put the business under. It was Cooper’s turn to call the shots. A few more days, a week at the most, and this would be over.

“Margo,” Clarence said, “you okay?”

Margaret heard his voice through the speakers in her wide helmet, but also from outside the suit. Clarence was right behind her, in a BSL-4 rig of his own.

She’d tuned out, got lost in her memories.
Amos … Dew … Betty Jewell … Chelsea … Perry
. The mind-ripping horror of it all. No, she wasn’t okay. Not even close.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just give me a minute.”

She hadn’t been on the
Carl Brashear
for more than a few hours, and there was already one person infected. The divers had done something wrong, exposed themselves somehow.

Margaret was already far behind in the race.

To center herself, she took a long look at the trailer Tim called the
hurt locker
. The place had been designed with volume in mind. Ten metal tables were lined up in parallel, running down the trailer’s length. Each table had its own rack of analysis equipment. Maybe the engineers assumed the
Carl Brashear
would have a full complement of scientists when the shit hit the fan.

She reached up, checked the hose connected to her helmet: secure, no problems. When moving from trailer to trailer, the suits used internal air supplies. For working in one area, however, ceiling-mounted hoses provided breathable air.

Two of the metal tables held corpses of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky. Tim was already working on Petrovsky, taking samples from all over his body.

Margaret couldn’t put it off any longer: she had to get to work, figure out what had happened. One of those bodies — or both — had infected Diego Clark.

“Clarence, I need you to talk to Cantrell,” she said. “Clark’s diving gear was BSL-4 rated. We have to figure out how he got infected.”

“I can do that,” Clarence said. “I’ve read his report, seems like everything was solid.”

She’d also read the report, hadn’t seen any mistakes. “Maybe he missed something. Maybe the suits malfunctioned, somehow.”

“Maybe,” Clarence said. “I’ll find out. Do you need anything before I go talk to him?”

She shook her head. From her helmet’s speakers, she could hear him breathing. He was there with her, like he always was, like he had been since he’d been assigned to her when all of this began nearly six years earlier. What would life be like without him? And how had she managed to let a man like him slip away?

Margaret had to get her head in the game. She couldn’t rely on Clarence to be her crutch anymore.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just go, Clarence. Talk to Cantrell.”

She walked toward the bodies.

Candice Walker had suffered horribly, but Charlie Petrovsky had it even worse. His entrails were mostly missing, as was his left hip and the leg that would have been attached to it. His left arm looked fine, but his right was a ribbon of flesh made bumpy by the broken bits of bone beneath.

The rapid decomposition had started in, giving his skin a gray pallor. Large black spots dotted his torn flesh. Smaller black spots peppered his body — Tim was right, within the next twenty-four hours that unstoppable chain reaction would turn Petrovsky into a pitted skeleton and a puddle of black slime streaked with gossamer threads of green mold.

Candice Walker’s naked body had yet to show the black rot. She had died later than Petrovsky, obviously, but her rapid decomposition would soon start to show. Margaret noticed some small pustules on Walker’s left thigh, right breast and right shoulder.

Margaret had seen similar pustules on Carmen Sanchez, the Detroit police officer whom she had studied as the infection raged through his body. The pustules were likely full of crawlers, modified so they could be carried away on the wind when the skin broke open. If the crawlers landed on a host, they would burrow under the skin and start modifying stem cells to produce more of their kind.

Stripped of her uniform, Walker looked barely out of her teens. She could
have been a giggly college freshman killed in a spring break drunk-driving accident. Could have been, except for the sawed-off arm.

Margaret closed her eyes as a memory flared up, powerful and hot and so real it felt like it had happened only moments earlier.

Amos … his gloved hands grabbing at his throat but unable to reach it because of the Tyvek suit, blood trickling from a hole in that suit and also jetting against the inside of his visor, pulsing from a severed artery … Amos falling as Betty Jewel rose up from her examination table, pulling at the cuff that kept her there until her skin sloughed off and her bloody hand slid free …

“Doctor Montoya,” Tim said. “You okay?”