Pandemic Page 59

Hydras, on the other hand, reproduced on their own. Like the crawlers, they hijacked stem cells, made those stem cells produce more hydras. As far as Margaret could tell, hydras would provide permanent immunity from the infection — no booster doses needed.

But with that possibly permanent immunity came a larger problem: Margaret still had no idea what else the hydras might do. Using them might very well be trading the devil she knew for the one that she didn’t.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s get in there.”

She opened the airlock door and stepped into the containment area. Four hospital-gown-clad captives looked at her.

Clark was still sedated and strapped to his bunk. Triangles were beginning to show; pale blue shapes beneath his white skin.

Edmund, of course, wasn’t ever getting up again.

Cantrell stared out, eyes only for her. She’d done nothing to the man, but he couldn’t hide his hate for her. She didn’t know why and didn’t have time to worry about it.

Margaret looked at the three new men.

Men? Of course they were men, although two of them looked like boys. Especially the one who cried silently, tears wetting his young cheeks.

He was in the cell next to Edmund. How old was this boy? Nineteen? Maybe twenty, tops? Had Margaret made different choices in her life, he was young enough to be her son, just like Candice Walker was young enough to have been her daughter.

Margaret closed her eyes briefly, gathered herself. There was no time for those thoughts.

“Clarence, which one was the killer?”

Clarence pointed his gloved hand at a thick-chested man in the second cell in the left row, the one just past the prone Clark.

“Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy,” Clarence said. “Killed two men with a pipe wrench. They were trying to give him the cellulose test.”

Nagy stood ramrod straight, fists at his sides, staring out at Margaret with rage-filled eyes and a smile that promised pain. He had a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. Blood trickled from a purple welt on his forehead. His gown’s short sleeves revealed arms knotted with long muscles, skin dotted with faded tattoos. He looked like a navy man from a ’60s movie.

He didn’t seem to notice the wound on his head. Margaret felt fear just looking at the man, at meeting his dead, psychotic stare.

“We’ll need to put him under and dress his wound,” she said, then gestured to the crying boy. “And him?”

“Conroy Austin,” Clarence said. “The last one is Lionel Chappas. Both of them were found on the same testing sweep that triggered Nagy’s attack.”

She turned to Tim. “Is the outbreak just on the Pinckney and the Brashear? Any infected on the other two ships?”

He shook his head. “The Truxtun and the Coronado haven’t reported any positive results. That’s not surprising for the Coronado, though — the crew and the SEALs onboard haven’t been allowed to interact with anyone at any point. They weren’t even allowed to help rescue people after the battle. The task force has upped the cellulose testing schedule to every two hours. Captain Yasaka reported that there are new deliveries of testing kits being flown here to make sure we don’t run out.”

The Pinckney had 380 crewmembers. That ship alone now required forty-five hundred tests a day. That would wreak havoc on the crew’s sleep, causing people to be tired, irritable … sloppy. But if the increased testing caught any other infected personnel before they became contagious, then maybe there was still a chance.

Maybe, but she doubted it.

“Tim, as soon as you split the culture for Clarence, split it again. Four ways. Keep one as a new starter culture — we’re going to use the other three on the three new men, see what happens.”

She had no idea what effect ingesting the yeast would have on someone who was already infected. There was a possibility it could kill off the infections growing inside of them, though, and that was reason enough to try.

Tim turned to face her. “Three doses for them, or three doses for us? They’re already infected — we don’t even know if the yeast will do that much for them. But we get that yeast in our system, right now, and within a few hours we’ll have enough cellulase in our blood that the infection probably can’t take root. If we do become exposed, the infection is stopped before it even starts. A dose now will last us about a week, I think, but by the end of that week I’ll have cultured far more and we’ll be able to take booster doses. It makes way more sense to take it ourselves, Margo.”

Was he right? Did it make sense to use themselves as guinea pigs? She’d been witness to what the disease did to people: she would kill herself before she let it change her. Tim was offering another alternative. But there wasn’t enough yeast right now to give herself a dose and to know if it might be a cure for those already infected. Every second mattered.

“These men are infected now,” she said. “If there’s a chance the small amount of yeast we have will help them, we need to do it. Besides, that’s data we need to capture and send to Black Manitou before …”

Before it’s too late is what she started to say.

Tim’s eyes narrowed with frustration. “It’s too late for them. We are the ones that can stop this thing, Margaret. We are the ones that need to live, not a bunch of grunts.”

She winced at the use of that word. She’d called Clarence the same thing. Margaret looked at Clarence, saw the sadness in his eyes — but he didn’t object to Tim’s statement. She knew Clarence was doing his own kind of math: the military math of acceptable losses, of choosing the greater good. He didn’t care about himself, she knew, but he obviously wanted her and Tim to be protected, to keep working as long as possible.

Chapter end