Pandemic Page 28

“My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”

“Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”

She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”

Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”

How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got harassed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with shit like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.

“Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”

“Like I could miss it,” Tim said. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”

He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a ship.

On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.

Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical analysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.

“Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”

He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”

Three trailers, each capable of comfortably supporting four or five people working simultaneously, and yet Tim was the only one here. And along the same lines, the facility had ten bedrooms — nine of which had been empty before Margaret and Clarence had arrived.

“Doctor Feely,” she said, “where is the rest of the staff?”

Tim flung his gloved hands up in annoyance. “They’re all pursuing their disciplines at other facilities or at the research base on Black Manitou Island. When they first brought me in, I was part of a ten-person staff. Year after year, as the navy didn’t find anything significant, the rest of the staff found ways to conduct their research off the ship. But believe it or not, one guy can do the majority of the grunt work down here. Most of the equipment is automated, and all of it is the best money can buy.”

“You’re still here,” she said to Tim. “Why aren’t you on Black Manitou?”

His bloodshot eyes narrowed. He looked at the wall. “I worked there a few years ago when it was a civilian biotech facility, before DST took it over. I’m not allowed to talk about what we were working on, other than that it involved technologies for rapid growth. There were some … accidents.” He gave his head a little shake. “Anyway, I don’t ever want to go back. It’s safer here.”

Safer here, on a task force dedicated to working with a vector that had the potential to wipe out the human race. Margaret wondered just what kind of accidents Tim was talking about. Whatever the reason, he had chosen to stay down here, mostly alone. He was a shut-in, just like she was.

“What have you worked on all that time?”

“Lots of stuff,” Tim said. “My tan, mostly. Oh, and trying to engineer a new strain of yeast, Saccharomyces feely, to secrete the infection’s self-destruct catalyst so we’d have a weapon if the disease ever struck again.”

“Saccharomyces feely,” Margaret said. “Naming it after yourself?”

Tim grinned. “Don’t hate the player, girl … hate the game.”

This one was quite full of himself.

Regardless of what he named the strain, it was a worthwhile pursuit. When a victim died, the infection triggered two chemical chain reactions that combined to leave scientists with nothing to study.

The first reaction: uncontrolled apoptosis. Apoptosis was the normal process of cell destruction. When a cell has damage to the DNA or other areas, that cell, in effect, commits suicide, removing itself from the organism. The infection modified that process so it didn’t shut off — a cell swelled and burst, spreading the chain reaction to the cells around it, which then swelled and burst, and so on. Within a day or two, a corpse became little more than black sludge dripping off a skeleton.

Chapter end