Survivors (40 page)

Thomas, meanwhile, seemed frustrated with his own suit, grumbling as he pulled it on. “I never signed up to be no goddamn astronaut.”

“You get used to them,” said Anna, rolling duct tape around the joints of her gloves. “After a while, you don’t even realize you’re wearing them.”

“I don’t know,” said Stiles, flexing his arms to get a feel for the Chemturion. “Kind of makes me feel like a space marine.”

“That’s not far from the truth,” said Anna, checking her seals. “You’re all about to enter a completely contained environment. We keep it under negative air pressure, so if there are any leaks, air flows in, not out. It’s totally sealed off from the outside world. Once you’re inside, you have to hook up to air hoses pumping clean atmo from outside the lab. You can’t breathe the air in there. It’s contaminated. It’s the closest thing to being in space you’ll ever get to experience, short of an actual shuttle ride.”

Rebecca, also present, worked her way into her suit without a word of complaint. She’d been through the procedure a dozen times working with Anna, and knew precisely what to expect.

“All right,” said Anna, satisfied that her group had suited up safely and securely. “Next we go through decon.”

Sherman grunted. “I thought this was decon.”

Anna chuckled. “Oh, no, sir, we don’t take any chances when it comes to these bugs. BL4 agents, I mean. There’s a whole mess of security to pass through before we’re in the lab.”

Sherman shrugged. “Lead on. I’m in over my head here.”

Thomas grunted in agreement.

“It’s not so bad,” said Stiles. “Seems pretty fun. And good company, too.” He glanced at Rebecca, but she stared straight ahead, ignoring the soldier.

“Decon shower,” said Anna, pulling open a door and gesturing into the compartment within. “Everyone inside.”

The party made their way into the decon chamber. Anna pulled the door shut behind them, and a bright green light on the wall clicked over to a dim red, bathing the room in a dull glow.

For a moment, nothing happened. The occupants stood silently, waiting.

Stiles found his voice first. “Is something supposed to—”

Jets of disinfectant sprayed out from nozzles on the wall, drenching the occupants in moments.

“Oh,” added Stiles, wiping disinfectant from the faceplate of his suit. “Never mind.”

After a brace of minutes, the showers shut off, leaving the occupants of the narrow room soaked and dripping disinfectant onto the grated floor. Stiles felt thankful for the suit. Inside, he remained dry as a bone.

“What next?” asked Sherman.

“Next? Just open the door. We’re clear to enter,” said Anna, gesturing at the heavy metal door at the far end of the decon chamber. The red light on the wall had changed back over to bright green.

Sherman pushed open the heavy portal.

Tiled floors and walls gave the impression of impeccable hygiene, and every instrument on each of the numerous counters was placed just so, inches apart from one another. Everything was neatly ordered.

“Welcome back to BL4,” said Anna, her voice muffled behind the faceplate of her suit. She walked over to a coiled nozzle hanging from the ceiling and plugged it into the back of her suit. The hiss of oxygen was audible even to her guests, and her suit swelled up. She raised her voice to be heard above the rush of air. “Find yourselves a hose and hook up.”

“Sherman!” Brewster bellowed as he came into the Fac. “Or Thomas! Fuck . . . Denton!”

He ran farther into the Fac, yelling for Sherman and Thomas. Passing the break room, he almost collided with Denton.

“What’s up, man? Infected?”

Brewster grabbed Denton’s shoulders. “No. Living!”

“What?”

Breathlessly, Brewster related to Denton the radio contact that came with the flares.

“. . . so I came in here to find Sherman. If there are more survivors out there, answering the call, they might have wounded. Or, you know, the sun’s going down. They’ll probably end up with carriers on their asses.”

Denton nodded. “Well, bad news. Sherman and Thomas are both down in BL4 with the Doc, looking into her breakthrough. Who knows how long they’ll be down, and Anna and Becky are the only two who really know all the ins and outs of getting in there.”

Brewster eyed him. “So, it’s up to you, then.”

“What?” Denton exploded. “What the hell are you—”

“Come on, Denton. Sherman put you in charge of the next big scavenging run tomorrow. As far as I’m concerned, that makes you third in command. So make the call.”

“Make what call?” Jack the Welder asked.

“Survivors,” Brewster said. “Hal raised some on the radio, and—”

“Survivors?” Jack nearly yelled, bringing Juni and Mitsui running. Allen came not long after, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“All right, all right,” Denton said, holding his head. He blew out a big breath. “Fuck it. Suit up, everyone. Except Juni.”

“Oh,
chinga tu madre,
” she yelled, and flounced off to her customary spot on the couch in the entry foyer.

When the rest of Anna’s guests had attached themselves to nozzles of their own, she directed them to a small, clear plastic cage on one of the countertops. Within scurried about a banged-up rat, lapping at its water dispenser and pushing wood shavings into a corner, busily building a den.

“This is it?” asked Sherman, leaning forward to stare at the rat through the thick plastic of his suit’s faceplate. “A rat?”

“Frank,” said Anna, “I infected this rat with the Morningstar strain yesterday. With that much time elapsed, the thing should have gone wild by now. But look at it. It’s fine. Not a single symptom. It’s not even running a fever.”

Frank peered in closer. “How’s this different than the other one?”

“That rat was infected a day ago, by bites,” insisted Anna. “And it’s not showing any signs of the virus. Not one sign. Its blood samples are clear, like the other one. I had to make sure I tried both methods of transmission. The only problem that remains, as far as I can tell . . .”

Stiles grunted. “Healing the bites. Right?” He whistled appreciatively.

“You did it, Anna,” whispered Rebecca. “You did it!”

“I had a little help,” Anna said, casting glances at Rebecca and Stiles. “But yes—this is the good news I had to share with you all. Stiles’s blood kept our furry little friend here alive. We’re close. We’re very close. We just have to tweak it a little bit, and make sure it’ll work on humans as well as my rats.”

“How long?” asked Sherman.

Anna shrugged, the shoulders of her suit ballooning up with the motion. “With some more of Stiles’s blood, and Rebecca’s help, I could have us a working test sample in a couple of days, if everything goes right.”

Thomas grunted. “That’s a big if.”

Anna grinned at the sergeant major. “We’ve been lucky recently, Thomas. Just pray it holds a while longer.

“Do you need anything that’s not already on Denton’s list for tomorrow?”

Anna twisted her lips behind her faceplate. “Probably plenty. The normal way to grow a vaccine is to mix a virus with another virus and let them grow together in a hybrid, which takes weeks. However”—she shot another smile at Stiles—“we don’t need to do that. The next thing is to measure the spread of the virus with reagents, which I’ve already started. The WHO expects this part to take three months if they’re going to give it their blessing.”

“The WHO is dead,” Thomas said, his gruff voice only slightly muffled by the face shield. “Can we skip that step?”

Anna looked at her apparatus. “I think so. Morningstar grows so fast, and Stiles’s blood works on it so well. That’s the big bottleneck, you know, when it comes to mass production of vaccines. But like you said, the WHO is dead.

“If we had hens and eggs, we could have a big fucking batch of antigen in two weeks,” she continued. “But we don’t. The alternative . . . well, the alternative will only work with whoever’s got the same blood type as Stiles, I think. He’s our multiple-use and walking, talking incubator.”

“You’re going to put my blood into someone else?” Stiles asked, looking a little pale.

“Well, it’s you or our other guest, the only other person in the Fac that has Morningstar in his veins. And I don’t think anyone’s going to want a vaccine from that batch. You guys remember Dr. Mayer?”

“All right, people, listen up,” Denton said. “Trev, Mbutu, and Allen come with me. Brewster, you’ve got Mitsui and Jack.”

“What about Stone and Hal?” Allen asked.

“They’ve grafted themselves to that dispatch station. And besides, if Hal gets something clear, he can give us a location. As for us, we should split up, go in parallel lines down the streets to about where the flares came from. Between us, we should find whoever it was and guide them back to the Fac. Any questions? Then, uh, check your radios and good hunting!”

Brewster, Mitsui, and Jack headed perpendicular to the course Denton’s group had taken. Brewster couldn’t wait for the excursion to bear fruit. For one thing, the threat of death hung over his head every time he left the Fac behind. So, he reasoned, if there were more people at the Fac, the deeper the talent pool for scavenging runs. For another, and he realized that this was more important, he kept imagining trucks bulging with survivors, they way they’d shagged ass out of Hyattsburg—enough to make the difference between the small camp they had now and a real, live settlement.

He didn’t normally think this way, but the weeks and weeks of unchanging company were starting to really chafe him. And he felt himself growing slightly away from his fellow ex-soldiers, which is why he’d started to feel more and more connected to Trev. And Allen, too. The arrival of just a few new people (even if one of them was badly wounded) had been enough to raise his spirits. Not to mention Stiles and his surprising resistance to Morningstar. Brewster had begun to feel the stirrings of hope, something he’d given up on some time ago.

The small group was headed for a line of squat brick structures. Brewster guessed they were apartments, and the thought eased the stress building in his mind. Apartments were easy to clear. Infected could only come from a few directions, and being surrounded was, at best, a remote possibility.

“All right,” said Brewster, shotgun at the ready. “Let’s take this first place. Stay alert! Sons of bitches could be anywhere.”