The Holocaust Engine, page 29
“I can tell you a little about what we’ve learned. Bontrager’s Disease is a nasty little bugger, but I suppose all of you knew that already. It’s a virus, communicated through bodily fluids—blood, and if you will excuse the children, uh, intimate contact. You can’t get it from sneezing or touching a door knob. The virus itself is initially harmless, if you can believe that.”
He waited for a reaction, but the room full of grimy faces stayed perfectly silent.
“The disease itself is a secondary component. We had a heck of time figuring it out. Lonnie Hofstadter at the Atlanta office really had the breakthrough. It... it... it....” He stumbled with growing animation. “It produces a chemical when attacked by human T cells, which passes through the blood-brain barrier and works on the brain’s ability to excrete waste products. Parts of the brain, particularly in the cortex, begin to suffer damage, and very quickly one will notice a loss of normal mental faculties, such as memory loss and changes in mood. What happens next is fascinating. I wish you had electricity here in the cafeteria.” He peered at the stoic Dr. White and smiled awkwardly before continuing on. “I could show you a 3-D model. What happens is that, as the more complicated functioning of the forebrain fails, the more primitive regions of the brain stem take over and become dominant. Decision-making changes, such as fight or flight. Of course, a few of the victims of Bontrager’s experience a state of prolonged agitation we call ‘excited delirium.’ They undergo certain visible changes, as decreased blood flow to the facial area turns the lips purple, and lack of autonomic response causes red-eye in most cases. These effects gave some people the idea that they were zombies.”
He stifled a laugh and apologized.
“Well, these zombies can be rendered harmless. We’ve found that lessening stimulus—just putting them in a warm saltwater pool and turning down the lights—prevents nearly all of the aggressive behaviors.” He turned to where Dr. White stood with his arms folded. “You should be able to come up with something for any patients you currently have in your care while waiting for relief. And—” He shouted back to the crowd. “—speaking of relief, I’m sure you all have plenty of questions. So, not all at once, please—”
They didn’t ask at once. They asked one at a time, slow and deliberate.
“How will we leave the island?”
McCaffrey said, “There are a few different options. Most likely by pontoon bridge to a waiting camp on Boca Chica, then off to freedom once everything is clear.”
“How soon?”
“Hopefully very soon. We’ll know more in the next few days, maybe two weeks.”
“Do they still know we’re alive?”
McCaffrey nodded. “Of course... of course they do. You guys are all going to be famous when this is over—interviews on the evening news, book deals.”
“Were any other cities disrupted like ours?”
“Like yours? No. Oh no. Lots of fear, mostly over nothing. It’s too hard to spread. The worst—and this is a funny story—was on this little catamaran that left off your island before the navy arrived. It had at least five or six infected on it and.... Maybe this isn’t the best story for a room with children.”
Dr. McCaffrey didn’t seem to think anything of the steady stream of questions, but after Margaret Lawrence asked about cases outside of the United States, missed her line, and corrected herself, the one called Dr. Thorpe did.
Reagan Castaneda gave the scratching-his-scalp signal, and when Dr. White saw it, he clapped his hands.
“All right,” Dr. White said. “That’s about all we have time for now. Dr. Morenz should be back any minute, and a lot of you need to get to work on the evening meal, and the rest need to get back to their assigned chores. Maybe we can trouble the good doctor for a few more questions after dinner.”
Dr. Dave White steepled his fingers. “Ruth, what’s our status?”
To his right, at the end of the conference table, Ruth Hutchins, the white-haired gastroenterologist, answered with a troubled sigh. “I left them at 206 to drop off their bags. They should be with Rose and Nurse Reed by now, getting the tour. We’ve got at least an hour still.”
“All right, we have a choice to make.”
“They die,” Artis Buehl cut in from the other side of the table, “and they die this afternoon. The only choice we need to make is how.”
“If we’re talking murder,” said Mary Stratton, “I think I will wait outside.”
“Not like that, Mary,” he said, softer than before. “The island will do it for us. They clearly haven’t got a clue how bad it is. We put them in a car, send them into Old Town, and let The Dragon take care of them.”
“Oh God, Artis, they’ll want at least one of us with them,” said Dr. Alicia Nguyen, a thirty-two-year-old pediatrician, whose face was now set with haggard lines that made her look forty-two. “And just who are we sending off to be executed this time?”
Dr. White lifted his hands for silence. “Let’s take a moment. What did we learn in there?”
“We learned that the Republic hasn’t come clean,” said Terry Miller, slender, balding, early fifties, with a laugh that everyone in the room could understand. “They’ve been feeding them a line of bullshit for at least the last two months.”
“And we know why,” said Buehl. “Don’t we?”
Dr. White sighed. “It explains why we haven’t seen more of a military response, and I suppose it only confirms what many of us suspected. They’re totally in the dark. They think we have a few cases of Bontragers. They have no idea what it has become.”
“Then I say we tell them,” said Mary Stratton.
“C’mon!”
“I mean it, Artis. They have to know. Someone in authority has to know. I say we tell the two doctors.”
Next to Mary Stratton, Randy Fenton, a nurse nearing fifty, pointed to the man who had not yet spoken. “What about him?”
“Reagan.”
Reagan Castaneda was not seated. He leaned against the wall by the door of the third-floor conference room. He looked at Dr. White, but kept his arms folded defensively. “One doctor, not two. The other guy is something else.”
Dave White nodded. “Military intelligence... Delta force... something. I agree. That guy is here to gather intel.”
“Which is why it has to be tonight,” said Buehl. “And I don’t buy that one of us has to go with them. We play it cool. We act like we’re trying to keep an eye on them—like we’re hiding something—and I bet they go out there by themselves just to get away from us and find out what we’re keeping secret.”
Terry Miller nodded, and Dr. Nguyen’s eyebrows arched with interest as she considered the possibility.
Mary Stratton spoke again. “May I say something?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Artis barked.
She seemed to wilt, her shoulders collapsing inward, but her voice held steady. “My daughter, all that is left of my family, is on this island. I don’t want to die any more than anyone else here, but I would rather that than letting those... things... off of this island. I could not live with myself if I knew that it spread onto the mainland, maybe around the world, because the people with the guns and the bombs didn’t know what it was when they still could have done something.”
Buehl leapt to his feet and slapped the table with both hands.
“Sit down, Artis.” Reagan’s quiet voice dripped murder. “Now.”
“We vote. We vote, and this shit,” said Buehl, pointing behind his back to Reagan, “does not get a vote this time. He doesn’t have a department. He’s not one of us, and he’s just going to go along with whatever Mary says anyway.”
Reagan came off the wall.
Buehl huffed, grabbed his chair, and violently set it back in its place before roughly dropping back onto it.
“You guys seem to think that they’ll nuke us if we come clean,” said Dr. Hutchins with a voice that growled like a chain-smoker. “I almost want to tell them just to see the looks on their faces, but I don’t guarantee the Army pushes the button just because they get wind of our true situation.”
“I would,” said Artis.
“Yes, we all know you would, but boys with guns sometimes think that they can solve almost anything. Even if they know the extent of the infection, I’m wondering if they will still believe they can solve it with planes and a few soldiers.”
Artis smiled a tired smile. “Yeah, well, it would be fun to see that little bastard’s face when he finds out what he just rappelled down into.”
They voted.
When it was over, Artis and Reagan rounded up a group of orderlies and found the two visitors on the roof, looking at the pigeon cages and the communications tower. The one called Dr. Thorpe’s face fell when he saw the men coming for him.
“Just don’t,” said Reagan with a weary voice.
“The hell is this?” McCaffrey railed.
Buehl smiled. “Call it the last stop on the tour.”
While four men held guns, Reagan roughly patted Thorpe down, and found nothing.
They walked the two men down into the conference room, McCaffrey promising every kind of retribution. He stopped speaking when he saw the grim faces looking up at him, and the enormous map of the island that covered the table. They were instructed to sit, with Artis and Reagan standing behind them, along with one of the armed orderlies. The others stood outside the dimly lit room in the hall.
“Dr. McCaffrey,” Dave White began, “before we get started, I want to tell you that we have taken a vote, and although it was close, we have decided not to kill you.”
“What is this?” asked McCaffrey with equal parts violation and wonder.
“This,” said Dr. White, pointing to the map, “is what is left of Key West and Stock Island. The flags represent confines. I’m sorry... that’s what we call the places where groups have barricaded themselves. Not sure how it got that name. Confined. Places of confinement. It’s what the Republic people were calling them—”
“Where the hell is Morenz? What about... what about the patient on Trumbo Point?”
“Dr. Morenz died four days ago.” He waited while the implications set in. “Trying to make it to Trumbo Point. We’ve made two more attempts to cross the channel and reestablish contact with the Republic Confine. Both have failed. We’re trapped here, Doctor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t. While you were getting a handle on the outbreak on the mainland, things here took a sharp turn for the worse. Over a third of our people have died in the last two months. We’re going to explain why, but first, let me make a few introductions. These are the department chairs: starting next to me is Dr. Ruth Hutchins, who is over our triage and extended care.”
The woman simply glared.
“Dr. Nguyen is currently over immediate stabilization. Terry Miller is over engineering, and is the reason that our main building still has very limited power.”
The little man nodded.
“Nurse Fenton is in charge of medical equipment, and has overseen the hospital’s transformation from normal medicines to the sorts of things we do now.”
“Think slapping honey on the wound and getting a few puffs off a joint for the pain,” interjected the nurse. “Try not to get hurt too badly.”
“Of course, you’ve already met Mr. Artis Buehl. He’s the head of our external operations. You’ll have to excuse his rough demeanor. Mr. Buehl is the fourth man to hold that post in the last two months. None of the others has lived longer than three weeks. It will be Mr. Buehl’s three-week anniversary this Friday. And this lovely lady to my right is Mary Stratton. She has worked miracles with our food distribution, and you can thank her for your dinner tonight. Now,” said Dr. White, adjusting his posture, “what is really happening on this island? Essentially, it is our recommendation that you bomb both Key West and Stock Island down to the bedrock.”
“God, you idiots. You mindless idiots. You’re not in some zombie movie. This is a disease. It has—”
Buehl smacked the wall behind him with a fist, the impact echoing through the room. “Now you listen to me, you limp-dicked little can of cat shit.”
“Artis—”
“While you fuckers have been having a fine ol’ time sticking people in salt baths, we kinda ran out of food.”
“We gave you food!”
“You didn’t give us any bullets, Ass Clown!” Buehl erupted. “Everybody except your friends on Trumbo have been starving. They couldn’t get things under control, even stopped getting the food out. So guess what?”
“Arty.”
“Shut up, Doc. This little piece of work thinks he’s not in zombie movie. Bontragers. Get ’em in the dark. How stupid are we? Well, guess what they did when the food ran out? A man gets hungry enough, the man next to him looks mighty tasty. And your little Bontragers? That ‘not so easy to get’ got a whole lot easier to catch when they started eating each other! And when their brains went all soft, the last thing they were thinking about was how hungry they were, and how nice a big ol’ chunk of human meat would taste.”
McCaffrey shrank in his seat, visibly recoiling from the tirade taking place directly above him.
“Take your ass across the channel and see what happens. They come out of the God damn woodwork! They get all amped up and they get you on the ground and they start eating you. They fucking eat you! There’s no mercy. There’s no quarter. There’s just a mindless killing machine clawing at your skin and tearing pieces out you with his God damn teeth!”
“Artis!”
Buehl stopped, not because of Dr. White, but rather because he was spent, breathing hard, his eyes welling with tears.
“So, yeah,” Reagan finished calmly. “We’re in a zombie movie.”
McCaffrey swallowed. “Why don’t you go in a vehicle? Something they can’t get into?”
“Because,” said Dave White. “He’s only talking about the Ones.”
McCaffrey looked a question, and mouthed the word ‘Ones’ as if trying to think of what it could possibly mean.
Dr. Nguyen lifted the map and pulled out a little stack of pictures from beneath, all of them rough, printed on plain paper. She spread them like a poker hand in front of McCaffrey and Thorpe.
Thorpe stiffened.
“These are the Twos,” she said.
“The... the... I don’t understand.”
“We thought that was why you were here. The patient on Trumbo Point?”
“We were told that... that one of the potential infected patients was showing a different set of symptoms. We were supposed to see the patient. We had to rule out the possibility of a different strain.”
Thorpe reached out and lifted one of the pieces of paper, a picture of a man, big, jeans, no shirt, his body blackened with char.
“We call that one ‘Colossus’,” Dave White said. “One of our number, a man named Wietzner who was already nearly dead, delivered a container of homemade napalm right up to that one and ignited it.” He nodded at the crude photograph. “We estimate he has third and fourth degree burns over nearly two thirds of his body.”
“Then he’s dead.”
“No, Doctor, he is not. We’ve tried everything. We’ve thrown everything at them. Every time, they just keep on going.”
Thorpe set down the one he was holding and picked up another, looking at the one covered with tattoos on the end out of the corner of his eye.
“The one you are pretending not to notice we call ‘The Dragon.’ He seems to be the leader.”
“I’m an epidemiologist,” Thorpe protested at the implication.
“Spell it!” Ruth Hutchins scoffed. “Spell it out and I’ll believe you.”
Dave White continued. “We think he was a part of the SEAL training program formerly housed here on the island. He’s killed more of us than any of the others.”
“So why didn’t you try the fire bomb on him?”
“He’s a tricky one to get close to. Also, we’ve never seen him pick up a car.”
Then it was McCaffrey who laughed, a pained sound of skepticism trying to peek its way through the fear. “Get real. You had me going, you really did. Now I know you people are crazy.” He flinched as Buehl leaned into him. “And get this asshole off of me!”
Dave White held up a hand to command calm. “I really don’t care what you think, Doctor. I lost hope of ever seeing this island return to normal a long time ago, and with what I’ve seen in the last four months, death sounds like a comfort.” He nodded to the picture that Thorpe now held, the closest of any of them to a portrait—tall, athletic build, thinning hair, long in the back, and eyes that flickered with life. “We call him ‘Lucifer’—not as big as Colossus, not as deadly as The Dragon, but make no mistake.... Meet him once and he’s the one that you’ll see in your nightmares. He has a penchant for killing his victims in... unusual ways.”
“Why can’t you kill them?” Thorpe asked in a breathy voice without looking up.
“They don’t hold still for head shots or stay in one place while you decapitate them. The rest makes sense in light of the overall symptomatology. When you think about why we humans die from physical injuries, often it has more to do with the body’s response than with the injury itself. Most traumas are, strictly speaking, survivable. Of course, the cerebral effects of Bontrager’s seem to disable the body’s responses. They don’t go into shock, or even seem to feel pain at any but the most detached levels. We’re not trying to kill them as much as annihilate them. We’re still hoping that Colossus will succumb to the secondary effects of skin loss and tissue damage eventually, but it’s been ten days and, as far as we know, he’s still moving.”
“Is this all of them?” Thorpe waved a hand over the pictures.
“We’ve identified nine, total. We’ve photographed seven. We haven’t been able to take a picture of ‘Jones’ or ‘Mr. Gray’ just yet.”
“The names?”
“They have to be something that’s understandable even if screamed. Other than that, it is something of an organic process.”
“How quickly is he—”
