They had their plans. But as Jake knew, sometimes things didn’t go as planned. And if they failed-if the Crawlers released the fungus, the results could be catastrophic.
Jake remembered a quote by William Osler, one of the forefathers of modern medicine: “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.”
Osler had seen the ravages of a world war. Sixteen million people had died in World War I, including three hundred thousand at Verdun alone. Sixteen million in four years. But the influenza that followed in 1918 killed many times that number in a matter of months.
And it wasn’t only the number of dead. A biological threat tore apart a society. War, for all its horror, galvanized a nation, pulled it together against a common opponent. But fever was a different kind of enemy. It struck from within, driving everyone into paranoid isolation, afraid of touching anyone around them. Jake had experienced it firsthand during the Gulf War. When the chem/bio weapons alarms went off and you put on your suit, you were alone and powerless inside that sweaty cocoon.
No honor, only suffering. Courage was useless against a bacterium, a fungal spore, a virus that slipped into you by water, by touch, by breath. No way to be brave in the face of danger when the danger was beyond your ability to see. There were no war memorials to influenza victims in towns across America. Those people just suffered and died, and everyone tried their best to forget any of it had ever happened.
An Uzumaki epidemic would be much worse than the 1918 flu pandemic, both in numbers and in the nature of the illness itself. The flu attacked only your body, but the Uzumaki turned you into a raving maniac, suicidal at best, homicidal at worst. An Uzumaki epidemic would be like hell on earth.
Jake paced his cell, wanted to punch the Plexiglas window separating him from the outside. Thousands of Crawlers. She could release them in waves, at hundreds of locations simultaneously. If only a few succeeded, that would be enough. He had seen a map once, showing the travel patterns of people, tracked by their cellphones. Dense mats of lines connecting the major hubs of L.A., Chicago, New York, Boston, and Seattle. Smaller lines fanning out everywhere else. Infect just a few people, let them spread out, go to work, go to school, stop by the local Walmart, get on a plane for California to see a friend. In a matter of days the Uzumaki could be everywhere. At that point, there was no way to stop it.
Game over.
DOCTOR ROSCOE KNOCKED AT THE WINDOW. HE LOOKED beaten down.
Jake picked up the phone, his heart racing. He thought of Maggie, wherever she was, so far away from her son. “Tell me,” he said.
Roscoe took a deep breath, looked down at the floor, then back to Jake. He met him head-on, one man to another. “It’s Dylan’s tests. I’m sorry. The news is bad.”
38
MAGGIE FLOATED IN DARKNESS, COOL AND BLACK. SHE TRIED to will herself out of the darkness, into being. But she felt nothing, not even the movement of her arms.
Dylan. Memories of Dylan. He was six years old, and they were looking for arrowheads at Taughannock Falls.
Dylan had asked who Taughannock was, and she told him he’d been a Delaware Indian. The Iroquois had captured him and threw him over the falls.
Dylan had stood at the waterfall’s bank for a long time, looking into the gorge, as if he saw the chief plummeting downward. “If I were falling, would you save me?”
“You can count on that, buddy.”
A SPARKLE, A SENSATION, LIKE A SILVERFISH IN MOONLIGHT.
Pain.
Her leg ached, the left one, for a reason she couldn’t remember. Her breathing was labored, her lungs constricted, unable to get enough air.
She jerked awake, eyes open, wincing at the onslaught of bright light. A wave of nausea hit her. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, breathing hard, fighting it off. The nausea crested, faded. She opened her eyes just a slit this time, let the light in slowly, titrating the light, until she could take its full force.
She was strapped to a table tilted about thirty degrees from the horizontal. Above her was a high ceiling, round, a half-dome, I-beam struts holding up what looked to be sheets of painted white metal. She tried to sit up, but she was held by a gray elastic band tight across her chest. She was handcuffed at the wrists to the table on which she lay.
Maggie looked around the room. In front of her were a pair of workbenches, one covered with electronic equipment: an oscilloscope, soldering irons, and spools of wire. The second was empty. Hanging above the workbench on a pair of hooks were two masks. Gas masks, she realized.
Maggie strained at her bonds, looked as far to the left as she could manage. She saw a pistol on a cabinet ten feet away with an unusual, larger-than-normal barrel. Next to it was a pair of cylinders the size of a roll of mints, each with a needle protruding from the end. A tranquilizer pistol. Beyond it she could see the top half of a large transparent sphere that looked to be made of glass, perhaps two feet in diameter.
She turned to the right and immediately froze. She could just make them out from the corner of her eye. On a metal table not a foot from her head.
She stared at them, fear like a hand slapping her. Five MicroCrawlers.
Next to them was a pair of tweezers, the objects laid out on a square of white cloth like dentist’s tools.
Maggie pulled at her bonds, fighting off panic.
A door opened and closed, the sound coming from the direction of the stairs. Then footsteps.
Maggie felt a chill run through her as Orchid came into view. “You’re awake,” Orchid said flatly. She wore a skintight black outfit, with black gloves. Her hair was cut short, like a man’s. She looked beaten up. The side of her face was black and blue. The fingers of her right hand were taped together.
“Where’s Dylan?” The words came out like a croak, her throat parched.
Orchid grabbed a water bottle. “Open,” she said. Orchid poured in half a mouthful.
Maggie swallowed, coughing. But the water was soothing.
Orchid didn’t respond. Instead she stood and went to a bench across the room. She returned with one of the gas masks Maggie had seen hanging on the wall. Orchid laid the mask on Maggie’s chest. It had a large, clear faceplate and dual particulate filters emerging from each side, like truncated tusks.
She leaned over Maggie, looking directly into her eyes. “How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”
“Screw you. Where is my son?”
Maggie saw a flash of rage cross Orchid’s eyes. She raised her arm and struck Maggie brutally hard in the chest with the base of her open palm, driving it into her sternum. Maggie gasped, the pain radiating outward as though she’d been cracked open. She saw spots before her eyes and was afraid that she would vomit.
Orchid said, “A word of advice. This is not going to be pleasant for you no matter how it goes. It’s your choice how bad it has to be. Now answer my question. How much do you know about the Uzumaki?”
Maggie was still breathing hard, her breastbone throbbing. She couldn’t come up with a good reason not to answer. “Look, before yesterday, I’d never heard of it.”
“Do you know the pathways of infection?”
“Ingestion,” Maggie said. “From what I know, it’s by ingestion.”
Orchid nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “Through the stomach. That is one possibility. But there is another one. Do you know what it is?”
“Inhalation,” Maggie said. “Spores.”
“Correct.”
Orchid picked up the gas mask and placed it on Maggie’s face. She pulled the straps around the back of Maggie’s head, tightening them, making the fit snug. She was methodical, careful, checking the seals with her fingers.
