A Time to Die (38 page)

Lisha hadn’t slept since that scene from hell. And there was no more contact with anyone in Japan. A few websites were still up, broadcasting preprogrammed responses of other traffic. It was her assistant, Edith, who found her the worst. A webcam from Shibuya, Tokyo. The street crossing was famous as an example of the non-stop vibrant life of living in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world. Tens of thousands could be seen crossing the street on webcam nearly twenty-four hours a day. The webcam was still up, and the street was still crowded. But now it was a sea of infected, moving about aimlessly, and sometimes preying on each other.

Everyone in the project was numb with shock at the events. Even the self-appointed zombie squad was in stunned disbelief. Despite everyone who had knowledge of the virus and how it was spreading worldwide, few believed it would come to this. Japan, one of the most advanced nations of the world, a hundred and twenty-five million people. Gone.

They’d finished isolating the virus in several forms. Strain Delta had four distinct vectors that she had isolated. The omnipresent version was, as far as she could tell, in every living thing on the planet. After more than five hundred tests of everything from flies to a cat done around the world by other researchers at her behest, it was found in them all. It appeared to be airborne, and inert until it entered a living host at which point it quietly set up production. It was invisible to all forms of terrestrial immune systems, and appeared to do no harm. Until it met one of the two basic forms.

One of the other forms appeared in living animals. Usually complicated lifeforms, sometimes simpler ones, and rarely insects. Never plants. She was trying to understand this version. It appeared similar to the widely found version in everyone. But this one was somehow established differently, and she didn’t understand how. There was no vector for its spread. It was just there.

The other form was in the planet’s water supply. It was in all the oceans, and some of the fresh waters of the planet. Though not all, and that was confusing.

Mixing of either of those two with the one in people resulted in the final version, though a sort of controlled mutation. The result was Strain Delta. The truly confusing part was it didn’t happen in all animals. Only some. She didn’t have a substantial stock of test animals. In fact, she had damned few. Mostly rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits. She tried it on all of them, and only the guinea pigs resulted in a transformation to Strain Delta. The animals didn’t become insane like humans. They became weird. The watched their human handlers intently, almost like they were thinking. When she’d reached in for one, it did its level best to try and bite her. The leather gloves proved more than resistant to small rodent bites. Even energetic ones.

They’d vivisected the pig and examined it carefully. There wasn’t much brain to work with, but the microscope revealed exactly what she’d expected. Similar restructuring to human victims of the virus. She sampled the other animals and found no sign of the final mutation of Strain Delta. Absolutely nothing.

So she moved on trying to create the mutation in lab conditions, and failed. Under no circumstances could she get it to replicate.

She knew things were going from bad to worse on the mainland. Fewer and fewer phone calls were returned. And more of the web was inaccessible every hour. It was getting where fewer emails went through than got bounced back.

Her analysis of the virus in its various stages had gone as far as possible. She’d hoped to use the CDC’s facilities to further her research. Those numbers and emails were among the others who would never again be answered. One of the mechanics, now on the Zombie Response Team (despite her efforts, that name was widely used) had gotten a failing webcam to work in Atlanta that showed millions of zombies roaming the streets. Lisha had turned her efforts towards defeating the virus. She quickly wished she had never tried.

Thanks to her involuntary volunteers she now had very detailed records of how the virus progressed in a human host, and somewhat less so in the guinea pigs. You could kill the virus with heat. There was some variation, but the minimum was 300°F. The first time she boiled a pot of water full of the virus, collected the steam, condensed it and found living virus in that water she’d gasped.

That test had been carried out a dozen times, always with the same results. A few organisms on earth could survive being boiled, so she probably shouldn’t have been that surprised. But Strain Delta didn’t appear to be hardened. It was some of those unidentifiable proteins in its sequence. Proteins the damned beasties manufactured as they reproduced using human biological material. “It’s like a doomsday machine,” she remarked. One of her assistant doctors was of the opinion it might not even really be alive, in the sense of how humans understood that condition. They might be some kind of alien machine. Since Lisha had no way of testing that hypothesis, it just stayed where it was, unsolved and unverifiable.

A day ago they’d cobbled together a pressure cooker with a steam takeoff. The steam reached temperature of almost 400°F, and it destroyed all the virus.

“So all we have to do is boil all the victims at 400 degrees,” Edith joked in dark humor. Lisha didn’t laugh, but she admitted the woman was right.

The facility’s water had depended on salt water condensers, which she’d ordered shut down as soon as the fact that the boilers likely weren’t purging the virus, were almost empty. The boilers were modified and temperate increased to 350°F, as high as they could safely be operated. After emptying the tanks and cleaning them with acid (which thankfully killed the bug), they were now filling again with verified safe water. Lisha had a tech testing the tanks every two hours, just to be sure.

She couldn’t do anything about the virus floating in the air. The facility had some watertight doors, but wasn’t a submarine. It couldn’t be isolated from the air. It had no such facilities. Thankfully just breathing infected air wasn’t enough to cause the mutation. She didn’t think drinking water would either, but wasn’t ready to take that risk. Since she could provide virus-free water, she did so. Regardless, she’d verified that a standard HEPA filters could remove all the virus. The bug was over half a micron in size.

So she’d set about finding anything that killed the bug, or at least stopped it from replicating and mutating. Like much of the rest of her endeavors, she felt like she’d wasted most of her time. The virus was happy to exist in any environment that humans could, and more than a few that man could not live in. It practically loved several types of antiseptic fluids.

She’d just stopped to go get some breakfast. Food supplies were dwindling, of course. Unable to fish to stretch their supplies, and forced to dump case after case of fresh foods over the side, they were subsisting on canned and frozen foods more than thirty days old. Her supply chief estimated they had eight weeks’ worth, so Lisha had ordered a reduction of 25% to all rations, pushing their survival out to ten weeks.

In the cafeteria there was a selection of oatmeal, poptarts, and scrambled eggs. The supply chief was sure the eggs were well over a month old. She’d still tested a few, just to be sure. She got a bowl of oatmeal, sweetened it with some honey, and added some eggs. Everyone was eating eggs while they held out. Aside from some ground round, it was the only fresh protein left in the cooler.

Her breakfast done, she was about to return to her lab when someone came running up. Even with the facilities reduced staff she didn’t recognize the young man.

“Dr. Breda!”

“Yes?”

“There is a radio call for you.”

“You mean telephone?”

“No, ma’am, radio. It’s the Coast Guard!”

“Oh!” she said and got up to quickly follow the man.

They went up three decks to the top level of the old oil rig. It was the command center of the facility, and had once been the operations center when the gigantic machine had extracted fossil fuels from miles under the ocean’s floor. Many of its functions stayed here when converted. Generator control, environmental engineering, security cameras, and radios. It’s where they’d sent the ill-advised Mayday that first summoned the Coast Guard after their zombie outbreak. When she arrived she found the head of the zombie team, Robert Boyer, sitting in a chair listening and watching. He might have seemed a flake, but he took his new job seriously.

The radio man looked up and waved her over, flipping a switch she could hear a woman’s voice.

“…I say again, this is USS
Boutwell
, WHEC 71, United States Coast Guard. HAARP facility, how do you read, over?” Lisha held out her hand and the radio man handed her a microphone. He pointed at a button and she nodded.

“
Boutwell
, this is HAARP Director Dr. Lisha Breda, we hear you.”

“Good to hear your voice, Doctor.”

“And yours,” Lisha replied. “Is this Lieutenant Grange?”

“Yes, ma’am. Lieutenant Grange, acting commander of the
Boutwell
.”

Uh oh, Lisha thought. “What can we do for you, Lieutenant?”

“We are going to be alongside in a few minutes. We have 119 boats alongside and want to use the rig as a staging area.”

Lisha considered for a second, chewing her bottom lip.

“Why’s a junior officer in charge of a cutter?” Robert asked, giving voice to her concern.

“That’s a good question,” Lisha said, and keyed the mic. “Lieutenant, where is your commanding officer? Wasn’t there a captain?”

“There was,” the officer replied. “We were involved in relief operations of a Panamax container ship. The Captain was meeting with the senior surviving officer of the container ship, when the man went insane and bit our captain who then succumbed to the virus. In all, we lost twenty-nine crewmen and nine officers. I’m operating with a skeleton crew.”

“I have to ask,” Lisha said, “have you been eating any fresh food?”

“Negative. We got that information from command in time to avoid secondary infections. We’ve been subsisting on canned goods and MREs. Luckily, we have a lot of both.”

“Very good. You have permission to come alongside. However, no one will be allowed into the facility without a blood screening. We’re actually researching the virus here.”

“I never completely bought your story of pirates,” the ship’s commander said with a chuckle. “Your moorings and docks will be sufficient. In a few days we have some much more powerful friends on the way and this is an ideal area of operation.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hard to explain, Doctor. But on the civilian side, there are hundreds of ships out here, many uninfected, and we want to hand off the ones we have and go help more.”

“Understood. See you soon,” Lisha said and handed the radio back.

“Hundreds of ships,” Robert repeated. “None of them are going to the mainland.” Lisha stared at him and rubbed her chin. They both knew what that meant. America was not secure anymore. Perhaps nowhere was.

An hour later the cutter appeared with its flotilla of private vessels. Everything from mega yachts to fishing ships, cruise ships to cargo ships, tankers and sail boats. Many were being towed or barely making headway. She stood up the open top deck and watched them approach along with other senior staff, and her zombie response team.

“There must be ten thousand people on those ships,” Joseph the zombie hunter said. Working in stores, he had a realistic view of the situation. “What are they all going to eat?”

“Reminds me of Battlestar Galactica,” someone said. A few people snorted, but others nodded.

“Only we don’t have any spaceships with which to run away from the enemy in,” Lisha said, and that ended the humor.

A short time later they saw what the lieutenant had meant by powerful friends. The huge shape of a Marine amphibious assault carrier was steaming towards them.

“And here comes the Pegasus,” Joseph chuckled.

* * *

The CH-47 swept in on a long arc round the east side of the base just past the primary perimeter fence. Kathy and Tobey rode next to an Army gunner who grimly manned an M-240 machine gun. He wasn’t sure why the soldier looked so depressed until they got a few miles from the base and he could see it was essentially surrounded.

The base was roughly divided into three parts, the military airfield being one of those parts. He could see that most of the base was overrun with the infected people everyone insisted on calling zombies. At first Kathy thought the base was still filled with thousands of personnel, until they got close enough to see individuals.

“You aren’t engaging them?” Tobey asked the gunner, a corporal.

“No sir,” the man replied. “We’ve been ordered to conserve ammo for perimeter security.”

As they approached and circled the airfield he could see all the survivors had crowded into the airbase perimeter. The outer fence was double strength and very strong. But the inner fence was only tall chain link.  It had been reinforced with hundreds of concrete traffic barriers and topped with miles of razor wire. All along the perimeter were soldiers with weapons in twenty-five foot tall guard towers and roving in Stryker armored cars. Even over the pounding of the double rotors the sound of weapons fire was a constant roar.

The other survivors from the farm house were all huddled in the cavernous rear of the Chinook. A squad of soldiers were arrayed along the back door which was open about half way. The chopper flared and began to settle. The pilot was good and they hardly felt any shock at all. The ramp motors whined and it quickly fell. The rotors began to spin down.