Pandemic Page 42

“The holes could be small,” Tim said. “The crawler spores are tiny. We’re talking microns, here. Gauges might not show pressure loss from something that size.”

Clarence nodded. “Correct, which is why if they don’t find a leak that way, they will then go for a full submersion test. They need our airlock for that, the big one that leads outside the ship.”

Margaret waved a hand dismissively. “Any hole so small the pressure test won’t show it is too small to worry about. I mean, a spore or a crawler would have to randomly land on that tiny hole, and somehow fall through that hole when the suits are pressurized to push air out, and then still land on skin.”

Her eyes again focused on the report displaying inside her visor.

“You emphasize Cantrell’s intelligence,” she said. “Why?”

“When he told me what happened, it was almost a word-for-word rendition of what he wrote in his incident report,” Clarence said. “He remembered what he said perfectly, all except for smelling bleach. It strikes me odd he has perfect recall for everything save for that one detail.”

“So you think Cantrell is lying,” Tim said.

Clarence wasn’t sure what he was thinking. Something just didn’t seem to add up.

“Maybe, maybe not. Another thing about that report struck me as odd. When he and Clark reached Walker, one of the things she said was they bit me. Did you guys find a bite mark on her body?”

“None,” Tim said. “But just because we didn’t find one doesn’t mean Clark and Cantrell were lying about hearing her say that.”

Clarence rubbed his face. He already felt so damn tired. “Yeah, that’s a good point. But the bleach discrepancy still bothers me. Maybe Tim should test him again.”

Margaret tapped the report back on, read something, tapped it back off.

“It’s been thirty-six hours since Cantrell was exposed,” she said. “If he was infected, he’d have probably come up positive by now. Even if he’s got a longer incubation period than we’ve seen in the past, he’s being tested every three hours so we’ll find out soon enough. He’s scheduled for his next test in twenty minutes. Clarence, can you take over the testing duties? I need Doctor Feely here with me.”

Clarence looked at Tim.

Tim nodded: Awwww yeah.

Clarence ground his teeth. “Sure, Margo,” he said. “I’ll make sure Cantrell is tested every three hours.”

She turned back to the table. Tim got to work; Clarence heard the bone saw’s whine even through the control room’s security glass.

Then, Margaret turned back. She stared up at Clarence.

He had seen that look on her face before. She had figured something out, or was just on the edge of doing so.

“Margo, what is it?”

She looked down at Walker’s corpse. Margaret lifted the severed arm, stared at it.

“The bite,” she said. “Walker claimed to be bitten, but there are no bite marks. What if she was bitten on the arm?”

Tim stopped cutting into the skull. “You’re thinking she cut off her own arm not because she was infected, like Dawsey, but because she thought it would prevent her from being infected?”

“Maybe,” she said.

Tim set the saw on a tray. He reached out into the air and started calling up information.

Clarence tried to imagine himself in Walker’s shoes. A submarine full of people, some of them turning into killers, killers that worked together like those soldiers in Michigan did during the last outbreak … and nowhere to run.

“It can spread from a bite?” he asked.

“Probably,” Margaret said. “Some of the infection victims had growths on the tongue that could spread the contagion. But what matters is if Walker thought it could spread from a bite. Maybe she saw her friends being turned into murderers, maybe she did anything she could to not become one herself.”

“Like a zombie movie,” Clarence said. “You think she got bit, panicked, did what she thought might keep her from becoming one of the bad guys?”

Tim shook his head. “Timeline doesn’t add up for that,” he said. “She cut off that arm around thirty-eight hours ago. Based on the state of her crawlers, she was already heavily infected by that time. She was already … what’s the word I want … oh, she was already converted. Why would she cut off her own arm if one of her own kind bit her? Hell, Margaret, why would one of them bite her at all? The Converted all work together, like ants in a colony.”

“My point exactly,” Margaret said. Her eyes were sharp, full of sudden assuredness. “The Converted. That’s an excellent term. Candice Walker had crawlers, absolutely, but she was not converted. Feely, get that brain out, and get it out now.”

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Steve Stanton was done with the cold weather. The small stateroom he shared with Bo Pan wasn’t toasty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was easily thirty degrees warmer than it was up on deck. Plus, no wind. Plus, no ice-cold water spray.

Maybe he should have hired a bigger boat. The guest stateroom was smaller than his freshman dorm room back at Berkeley. It was cramped to begin with — sharing the space with Bo Pan made it miserable. Bo Pan didn’t do much, mostly just sat in his bunk. Sat and watched Steve type code.

A small table built into the wall held two of Steve’s three laptops. The other rested on top of the blankets of his bunk (he got the top bunk — he was the “boss” of this trip, after all).

Chapter end