LZR-1143: Evolution Read online

She grimaced and nodded for me to follow our ever-present Marine escort. “Yeah, I’ve only been awake an extra 12 hours, but that’s the most he’s said to me the whole time. I will say one thing though, there is none, I mean zero, outside information in the ship. Televisions are off, radios are off, TV satellites have been taken offline…even the crew internet is disconnected.”

  Shrugging, I asked the obvious question. “What does it matter, right? I mean if the world isn’t there anymore …”

  “But it is there. Just not as much of it as before. There are television signals. BBC is still broadcasting, or at least they were in the bunker, right? And the internet can’t be turned off—it’s still out there. It’s just weird. I mean, it’s like they don’t want the crew…”

  “Sir, ma’am, your room. Sir, I’ll take you to your quarters after your meeting.”

  We hadn’t realized he had stopped. I smiled, not knowing whether he had heard us talking, or whether it mattered.

  “Thanks,” I searched his uniform in a glance for his rank insignia, but he filled in first.

  “Corporal, sir,” he said, stone faced.

  He was all of 19. If that.

  “Thanks, Corporal. We’ll see you in 20.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When did I become a sir? That sounded odd.

  I was going to have to do something about that.

  Chapter 3

  Kate had a small room, but it was hers. She wasn’t being forced to double up just yet, as there just weren’t that many survivors on board. We had retired to her quarters after leaving the infirmary, ostensibly to catch up before meeting with the Captain.

  In reality, I wanted to know what the hell was going on. Specifically, why we weren’t letting everyone else in on the big news.

  Truth be told, I wanted to be a hero again. There were thousands of people on this ship, and the last they had heard, I was a wife-murdering sociopath. It’s the kind of thing a guy wants to rectify if he has a chance.

  Besides, the whole ‘finder of the vaccine that saves the world’ thing was a pretty good down payment on that salvation.

  “Yeah, well. I was a little confused when I woke up, but I wasn’t sure … well, let’s just say it was really, really good to see you walk in. You know, all real and non-imaginary and stuff.”

  I was laying on her bed, arms behind my head, staring at her as she shut her door, checked the window, and asked absently how it felt to wake up alone in an empty room again.

  She smiled, grabbing her desk chair and flipping it around, so she was straddling the back with her arms resting on the headrest. She leaned forward, very close. Her dark hair fell forward, framing her face in shadow and soft light.

  “So?” she said, waiting for my question. “Go ahead and ask.”

  “I’m right, right?” I felt fairly cocky about it, believe it or not. After almost a week of not being sure whether you were crazy or not, it felt pretty good to have guessed about something far beyond my ken and to have been right. I had really been motivated in my faith in Maria, but it didn’t matter.

  I flexed my shoulder, pointed at my thigh demonstratively.

  “I mean, the stuff I injected you with—the stuff that Maria injected me with, both by design and by accident, the night she died—it has restorative qualities. It makes us heal faster. More importantly, it immunizes us from the beasty-bites, right? I mean … never mind. I know the answer to the questions I’m asking. More importantly, why the hell can’t we tell anyone? We’ve found what we were looking for. A way to save people!”

  “It looks that way, yes. At least, for us.” She said it slowly, but with hesitancy in her voice. Her eyes narrowed slightly, as she reached into her pocket.

  I pressed on, as she removed a small plastic device from her pocket.

  “What do you mean, for us? It’s not like we’re special. We’re flesh and blood humans, just like everyone else. Why did you need to keep this a secret? Seems like we’d be dead to rights in telling anyone and everyone about this stuff.”

  She tossed the item to me and I grabbed it out of the air, realizing as I looked into my opened palm that it was a thumb drive. I looked up, curious.

  She nodded at my hand. “Right before we left Kopland’s lab for the roof, I grabbed this from his desk. I had no idea what it was, but there weren’t any other data devices in there, so I figured it might be relevant. After you stuck me with that blue shit, I knew that something was off. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. Until now.”

  I was definitely missing something. Her face was serious and downcast. She looked worried.

  This couldn’t be good.

  “Uh, care to elaborate?” I asked stupidly, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Her voice was hard, serious. “Listen, they take a really hard line on bites on this ship. You’re bitten, you go overboard. Period. I’m not about to tell them that you were part of the undead buffet line and I lied about it until I’m sure that we have a functioning serum that we can…”

  I interrupted, holding my hand up and taking a jackass tone with her.

  “Hello! Isn’t this proof positive of a pretty damn good cocktail? I was mowed into like a happy meal burger at a fat kid’s birthday party, and not only am I not a mindless ghoul, but the bite is gone, my bullet wounds are healed, and I feel like a million bucks. What’s the god damned problem?”

  She pointed her finger animatedly at the thumb drive I held in my left hand, which I had been waving about like a conductor’s baton in agitation.

  “That’s the god damned problem. If you’d let me finish a sentence I’d tell you,” she replied, raising her voice in frustration.

  I suppressed the urge to talk back and crossed my arms over my chest like a petulant child, making a zipping motion across my mouth as I did so.

  She exhaled loudly, not amused.

  “Like I was saying,” she drew it out, annoyed, “I think there’s something else going on. According to the files on that drive, the stuff that LZR-1143 is made out of—the stuff they found overseas—is very slightly radioactive. Not enough to kill you or make you glow in the dark, at least not from short exposures, but enough to make you gradually ill. Something about the combination of ingesting the chemical, even in small amounts, and being exposed to the radiation, makes you turn if you die in proximity. They broke this chemical down, weaponized it, and now … well, we can see what came off it. If you ingest it directly, you die and turn. If you get bitten, you die and turn. Now we have this vaccine, that not only immunizes you from infection, but also operates as the virus was designed to—fast healing and God knows what else.”

  I still wasn’t catching on. I knew that I had been injected with the vaccine, and that I had survived without turning. I knew that Kate had been injected with the vaccine, and had survived without turning. I wasn’t clear on the problem.

  “This is all interesting, from the wacked out scientific standpoint, but I’m still not seeing the problem.”

  She sighed, changing tacks.

  “Mike, do you believe that Maria was a sociopathic lunatic bent on making a few extra bucks by destroying humanity?”

  Boy, that was blunt. I blinked, shaking my head.

  “No, absolutely not. We had plenty of money from my job. She worked because she enjoyed it. There’s no way she was stealing the virus. I know that without a doubt.” I almost yelled the last sentence. I knew it.

  Her tone remained tolerant. “Okay, so do you believe that she knew what she was doing? At least enough not to inadvertently inject herself with the virus?”

  I nodded again, seeing a vague outline of her destination now.

  “Of course, she was an experienced scientist. Even if she had accidentally poked herself, she wouldn’t have left the lab. Not knowing what she knew about the virus.”

  She went on. “So if we eliminate the possibility that she intentionally injected herself with LZR-1143, and we eliminate the possibility that she mistakenly injected herself
with it, what were are left with, in a nutshell, is a question mark.”

  I saw the point, but I still didn’t see the answer.

  “What about Kopland?” I asked, mind still moving forward slowly. “Couldn’t he have stuck her with the virus, intending her to spread it around by contact. He could have been trying to smuggle it out.”

  She leaned back, straightening her arms against the chair back and shaking her head softly.

  “No, that doesn’t make sense. He waited months after she was … after she died,” she corrected mid-sentence, avoiding saying that she was killed, “to release the virus. Besides, he seemed pretty damned convinced she was off on her own, stealing it for her own good. That means that he didn’t really know how she had been turned, it was just his theory. She had to have gotten infected some other way.”

  She was right. Kopland couldn’t have been to blame. It didn’t fit.

  “Think, Mike. What if she found out about Kopland? What if she knew about his organization and their plans, but had no idea who she could trust. If she knew about the vaccine, and was trying to work against him, maybe afraid she would be killed or exposed to the virus ...”

  Understanding, I groaned, and completed her sentence.

  “… then she would have injected herself with the vaccine, not the virus. That’s why she had it with her at home, and why she injected me with it.”

  She nodded, locking eyes with me over the back of the chair.

  But if that was true, we should have turned long ago. Something was missing.

  “So how do we explain the fact that we’re up and walking, perfectly immune and happy as clams?”

  She cocked her head slightly, flexing her legs and standing up over the chair.

  “I’ve got a theory,” she said, turning and walking to the other side of the room.

  “I think that the radioactivity has something to do with it. The files on that drive seem to make a lot of the fact that the radioactivity plays some small, indefinable part in the cell regeneration that’s at the heart of this virus. I think that close and intense exposure to the infected may trigger the vaccine’s curative and immunizing functions. That’s why you and I both ended up fine. It would also explain the nausea and the headaches that people experience when they’re in contact with the elemental base chemical.”

  Well that didn’t make sense.

  Maria worked with these things, didn’t she? If that was true, and she injected herself with the vaccine, she should never have turned.

  I asked as much.

  “Not exactly,” she answered, clearly having considered it. “You saw the precautions they took. Hazmat suits, gas masks. Even that picture of Maria on the video, she was separated from the creature by twelve feet and a bulletproof glass encasement behind the metal bars. They didn’t take any chances with this shit. And, ironically, that could have been their mistake.”

  I sighed, understanding.

  “So we have a vaccine that works, but only if you snuggle up to a zombie and expose yourself to whatever ambient energy they exude. Otherwise, the vaccine is as bad as the disease. In the mean time, we have a world tearing apart at the seams, hungry for anything that could help.”

  “And thus springs our problem.” She opened her desk drawer, removing a small blue vial from a wadded up pair of underwear. “What the flying frack do we do with this now?”

  I knew exactly what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t think Kate would like it.

  I smiled big, trying to cushion the impact.

  “Well, I’ve got a delivery to make.”

  She looked at me, a question in her eyes. “Don’t you think that’s a risk? Has he been exposed to enough infected? He’s a pilot, after all. He was never on the ground, close in with those things like us.”

  Maybe not, but he was close several times.

  “What about the roof? And when they landed for repairs? On the roof, they were only ten feet away when you took off, and you can’t tell me that if they landed in a town of some sort, they didn’t have a few of them moaning at the walls as they made repairs. I’m certain enough to give it a shot. We can’t let him die in that room. Not after he saved our asses. Twice.”

  She looked up briefly, as if thinking about the proposition. Finally, her face relaxed and she nodded, a small smile crossing her face.

  “Okay, we can give it a shot. But once he’s injected, we make sure to monitor him.”

  I just smiled once and nodded.

  Chapter 4

  We knocked together a simple plan while we waited for Corporal No Smile to escort us to the bridge. The plan was simple, but the risks inherent in being caught were enormous. Nevertheless, when I described my plan, Kate was all in. I don’t know if I had come to expect anything different, honestly.

  When our escort arrived, he was accompanied by the silent Commander Vincent. He grunted his way to the bridge in response to pointed questions from Kate and I. We eventually lost interest and silently decided to wait until we got to the bridge. It was a fair hike through the bowels of the ship. Seemingly endless hallways and low ceilings; narrow stairwells and tight hatches. It was a ship that had seen nearly half a century of war, and her age showed. But she was spotless and running smoothly—the mark of military efficiency. I was impressed, and I felt really lucky to be on board.

  We emerged onto the flight deck level and passed an open hatch facing the deck. Crewmen in tan jumpsuits and orange vests walked and ran to various points on the gray tarmac. The smell of tar and oil filtered in through the open door. In the distance, a speck on the horizon explained the flurry of activity. An airplane was approaching.

  We tried to watch, but Commander Vincent didn’t stop, and we were ushered up four more levels to the main bridge in short order. As we climbed, I noticed briefly how warm the stairwell felt, dragging a hand across my face and wiping a slight sheen of sweat from my brow. It definitely felt a little warmer here.

  The bridge was sealed off from the stairwell by a thick steel hatchway, which our Marine escort kindly opened for us as we walked over the small lip adjoining the floor into a large room with multiple windows and crew.

  It hummed with low conversation and electronics.

  On a scale from one to uber-Texan, Captain Allred defied measurement. Yep, I didn’t intend that to make sense. He was that off-the-charts.

  “Well holy shit boy, it’s good to meet you,” he boomed, welcoming us to the bridge from across the room. He rose from a large chair and strode to meet us. Long strides from his huge frame made it a short trip. He was a huge man, at least six and a half feet tall. His large paunch jutted over a massive pewter belt buckle with a depiction of the Enterprise stamped on the front. Cowboy boots peeked out from beneath his khaki pants.

  I smiled. That could not be in compliance with uniform regulations.

  Behind me, Kate chuckled softly under her breath as he grabbed my hand in one of his huge paws and pumped it furiously.

  “Welcome to the Enterprise, you lucky somma bitch,” he said loudly, smiling as he released my wounded appendage and turned to Kate.

  “Ma’am, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said to Kate, accosting her hand in the same fashion. Her smile quickly went from amused to strained. I could almost hear her small bones crackling under his grip.

  I did the gentlemanly thing and interrupted him mid-shake.

  “Captain, we can’t tell you how much we appreciate everything you’ve done. We would have died out there without your help. You and your men have our gratitude.” I didn’t want to get too much into details, so I kept it simple.

  He backed up a step and waived his huge arm through the air quickly, waving dismissively.

  “Hell son, that ain’t a goddamned thing. What we’re paid to do, in’t it? Shit. Wish we could help more folk like you. Nothin’ doin’ lately. Not a damned living thing to be saved, seems like.”

  He grimaced, walking over to a large table in the middle of the bridge. It wa
s the size of two pool tables laid side by side, and was entirely glass. It had an electronic map of the east coast projected on it, with multiple lights and colors signifying what I assumed to be cities and towns.

  “You two had a hell of a time of it, didn’t you? Doc tells me you escaped the Liverpool with barely a damn chicken scratch. Just a couple of bumps on the egg cradle, ain’t that right?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Kate surreptitiously stepped on my foot. It didn’t matter. Captain Allred wasn’t stopping.

  “Damn shame about the Liverpool,” he said, shaking his head. “Captain was a good man. Met him in an exercise few years back. Other than that damn arrogant accent of his, I liked the guy.”

  He looked up. “You two got anything interesting to tell me? We are damn short on first person intel these days, and I could use anything you got. Feel like I know less about what’s goin’ on out there on the ground level than a deaf mute whore on Sunday.”

  Kate spoke quickly. “I’m sorry sir, we were hoping you could tell us.”

  He grunted—a grunt that was half chuckle and half resigned. Captain Allred turned to the map suddenly, speaking over his shoulder as if he expected us to look at the map with him as he spoke, which we did.

  “I’ll tell you what we know, which ain’t enough to feed a hog for a week” he said, pointing at the map. “Ain’t nothing about this shit that’s top secret. Anything we’re doing you can see with your own eyes. What you see here is the best idea we got on how far the shit has spread from the fan. We’ve got sporadic com links, fuzzy sat pictures, and almost zero chatter on civilian bands. Last time we heard from Atlantic Command was three days ago, and we have no idea on the disposition of at least three quarters of the civilian command structure. We are still in contact with command and control in the Pentagon, but other than that, our coms are real sketchy.”

  He pointed at five pulsing red dots spread out over the maps of several states, blinking slowly on the semi-transparent glass. His finger jabbed a different point each time he named a city. I stared at the massive board, looking to make sense of the lights. For an instant, my eyes wouldn’t focus. I grabbed the edge of the table to steady myself suddenly.