Pandemic Page 79

He had a point. Tim had ingested the concoction over twenty-four hours earlier, and he seemed fine. Worst-case scenario, really, was that it might make people a little sick. Best-case scenario: immunity from the horrific infection.

Klimas stepped closer. “As I said earlier, Margaret, my men and I came into direct contact with you, Tim and Agent Otto. If any microorganisms survived the bleach spray, then we were also exposed. Considering we just had to shoot at our own countrymen, we chose to take our chances with Doctor Feelygood’s camel-taint pus.”

Margaret’s eyebrows raised. “Doctor Feelygood?”

Tim nodded, a huge grin on his face, the grin of a nerd who knew he’d been taken in and genuinely accepted by the coolest kids in school. “That’s right,” he said. “Seems Commander Klimas is a fan of Mötley Crüe.”

Tim dipped the ladle into the smelly broth. He poured the contents into a cup and offered the cup to her.

“All my genetic tinkering has given this vintage quite the lovely bouquet,” he said. “Hints of chocolate and elderberry, I think.”

The soldiers watched, waited for her reaction. All of a sudden she found herself in a bizarre variation of a fraternity hazing ritual — drink if you want to be one of us.

Margaret took the cup, felt the broth’s warmth through the plastic. Inside, thick bubbles floated on the milky yellow surface. It smelled like wet gym shoes stuffed with wilted cabbage.

She looked around the room. “To the SEALs,” she said, and brought the cup to her lips.

They shouted in encouragement as she tipped her head back, letting the whole cup’s contents slide into her mouth. She sensed the warmth a moment before she experienced the taste. Her stomach heaved and she gagged, but the men were watching her — if they could do it, so could she.

Margaret pinched her nose shut, braced herself, and started swallowing. It took three gulps to get it all down.

She gagged again, but nothing came up. She lifted the cup high, laughing at how close she’d come to vomiting.

Klimas was the first to smile wide and pat her on the back. He wasn’t the last. Everyone did.

Everyone except Clarence. He just lowered his head, turned and walked deeper into the cargo hold.

NEUTROPHILS

Bo Pan slept. His body did not.

Thousands of crawlers worked their way up his nervous system, following the electrochemical signals along the pathways, heading ever closer to the source of those signals: the brain.

But the crawlers weren’t the only microorganisms moving through his body.

Hundreds of thousands of neutrophils navigated in a different direction, moving down his arms, searching for his hands. In particular, for his fingertips.

There they would stay until Bo Pan touched something: a tabletop, perhaps, or a door handle, maybe a mug or a glass. The neutrophils could survive on that surface for a day or two, three at the most. If fortune smiled upon them, someone else would touch that same surface long before their time expired.

And when that happened, the neutrophil would stick, it would burrow, and it would go to work on its new host.

THE EVER-PLEASANT DR. CHENG

One of the Coronado’s mission modules was a small teleconference center. Paulius referred to it as the “SPA,” an acronym for “SEAL Planning Area.”

Margaret sat at the room’s conference table, Tim to her right, Clarence across from her. A flat-panel monitor hung on one end of the module, the image split down the middle: on the left, Murray Longworth in Washington; on the right, Dr. Frank Cheng in the research lab on Black Manitou Island.

Murray looked like he hadn’t slept in days. But then again, he always looked that way. His tailored suit hung looser than she remembered it, as if he’d lost even more weight in the three days since Margaret had last seen him.

Three days? Had all this happened in just three days?

Murray’s body looked like it might fail him at any moment, but his eyes burned with undiminished intensity. He was close to winning, and he knew it.

As for Cheng’s fat face, Margaret could barely stand to look at it. While she had hidden away in her home, Cheng had been climbing the ladders of both the CDC and the Department of Special Threats. In the CDC, he was the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. That made him the top dog there for dealing with the alien infection. If Tim’s yeast worked, if it provided immunity, Cheng would be a shoo-in to become the CDC’s next overall director.

As for the Department of Special Threats, the organizational chart wasn’t as neatly defined. Murray put people into roles as needed. There was no doubt, however, that Cheng was the DST’s number one scientist. Frank Cheng answered to Murray Longworth, to the president of the United States, and to no one else.

All Cheng’s power and status could have been hers. All she’d had to do was take it, but she’d chosen the coward’s way out.

Or maybe … maybe Cheng had tricked her somehow. Had he? And had someone helped him?

Margaret looked across the table, at Clarence. Clarence, who had allowed her to stay home all that time. Had he worked with Cheng to keep her out of the picture?

She chased away that random, illogical thought, wrote it off to exhaustion. She rubbed her eyes as she listened to Cheng speak.

“We are making progress,” he said, his fat face split by an arrogant smile of self-satisfaction. “I’ve perfected the genome of the YBR yeast strain.”

Tim held up a finger. “Excuse me? The what strain?”

Chapter end