Fire & Ash (31 page)

Her voice ran down as she looked around.

“Are you following any of this?”

Benny held his thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. “About this much.”

“We met some of those infected pigs,” said Joe. “One of them nearly cut Lilah here in half.”

McReady sighed. “Live ones or dead ones?”

“Dead,” said Joe, “but spry.”

“That’s something we were afraid of. The bacteria
Brucella suis
allowed the Reaper pathogen to adapt to the pig’s biology. They started turning up about four years ago. We brought two from Hope One, and I radioed ahead to Dick Price to have his people get more of them for when my team arrived. He did, but in the process of bringing the infected boars to Death Valley, he may accidentally have spread the bacterial infection to the walkers in this area. In any case, he managed to get us the boars we needed. We had a pen of about forty of them for a while.”

“You
kept
them?” gasped Lilah.

“Of course we kept them,” said McReady. “Live boars and reanimated boars were a perfect place to grow the bacteria.”

“What happened to the boars?” asked Benny.

“When we got to the point where we’d devised a way to grow the bacteria synthetically, I ordered the boars terminated. Dick Price sent all ten of his soldiers out there. Not one of them came back.”

“The boars got them?”

“The boars got what was left of them. Reapers laid an ambush. We didn’t even know they were in the area. They trapped our team outside, forced them to give them the access codes to enter this complex. They killed a lot of our people and even let some of the boars loose in here. We had to fight them using brooms and folding chairs and whatever we could grab. The soldiers were all outside being slaughtered. Price’s science team panicked and overreacted. They used grenades and makeshift explosives to fight back, and one of the blasts did something to the air lock so we couldn’t get out. The reapers trashed our communications center. We cut them down, but it was too late. They also pushed our helicopter over the edge of the cliff. That was about a month after we got here. We killed the last of the reapers and slaughtered the pigs they let loose, but so what? We were stuck in here with no communication and no way out of this facility until you blew the door in. Between those who died in the ambush and the rest who killed themselves here, I’ve seen forty-one people die since coming here.”

72

B
ENNY UNDERSTOOD THE DESPAIR NOW.

The suicides and hopelessness.

McReady and her people had been trapped in this locked tomb of concrete and steel for almost a year and a half—a place that was so secret even Joe Ledger and his rangers didn’t know about it. The scientists and staff must have thought that they were doomed to die in here, forgotten by a dying world. Until McReady and then the reapers showed up.

Benny said, “Not everyone from the transport plane died in the crash. A few survived, and they joined the Night Church. I . . . um . . . killed one of them.” He cleared his throat. “One of them must have had a copy of the coordinates and gave them up when he joined the reapers. That’s probably how they found this place.”

McReady considered, sighed, and nodded. “That might also explain what happened to the missing notes and the samples of mutagen and Archangel I sent to Sanctuary.”

“We recovered some stuff,” said Joe. “Enough for Reid to make some weak versions of the mutagen, but she couldn’t work out how to process the mutagen into the cure. Without your notes Reid said that all they’ll ever hit are dead ends.”

“Damn.” McReady rubbed her eyes. They were paler in color than Benny had expected, less of the intense dark brown of the face in the Teambook photo and more of a dusty burned-gold hue. “The one upside to working in total isolation is that it focuses your concentration.” She nodded at the stacks of containers and heaps of bags. “See those boxes? Eleven tons of a powdered version of the mutagen, boxed to make it easier to transport and store. But you do not want to get any of it in a mucous membrane. Any moisture will activate the bacteria, and that starts the worms hatching.” She laughed. “Those worms are something else. Industrious and clever little buggers. Once they become active in a walker, all the walker’s tissues become softer, more pliant. This is why the R3’s are able to move so much more quickly.”

“What’s in the bags?” asked Nix. “Is that the cure? Is that Archangel?”

“Yes. We have 968,000 capsules as of yesterday’s count. They have enough supplies back at Sanctuary to make a million doses a month.”

“We can save the world,” whispered Nix.

McReady rubbed her eyes. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “Yes, we can.”

They stared at the bags. Benny felt like the floor was tilting under him.

Lilah cut into the silence. “The mutagen doesn’t just make the zoms faster. They got smarter, too.”

Benny nodded. “One of them picked up a stick and hit me with it.”

“Mm,” McReady said diffidently. “The appearance of increased intelligence is nothing magical. From the initial
infection, the parasites feed tiny amounts of oxygen to the brain as well as other key proteins and chemicals to the nervous system. That means the brains never die a complete death as they do in ordinary mortality. The parasites have to preserve some of the cranial nerves in order for the host body to walk, grab, eat, chew.”

“But they don’t need to eat,” said Benny. “Everyone knows that.”

“Sure they do. When they don’t or can’t, they go into a deeper stasis. They stop moving, stop expending energy. It’s like a super-amplified version of the hibernation state, similar to that of a ground squirrel. The squirrel’s metabolic rate drops to one percent, but with the walkers it’s down to one thousandth of one percent. They are dead by any standard clinical model, but not in point of fact. The parasites can’t let the host body completely decay, otherwise it’s of no value as a vector for spreading the disease. So the process of necrosis is slowed to an almost negligible level. However, when they do eat, the food they consume is broken down by enzymes at an incredibly slow rate. It might take them months or even years to fully digest whatever protein they’ve consumed. All the while the parasites are being fed.”

“Why don’t people
know
this?” asked Nix.

“People do,” said McReady. “Everyone in the American Nation knows this. It’s taught in school. I’m surprised you
don’t
know it.”

“That’s not the kind of thing they teach us at home,” said Nix.

“Pity,” sniffed McReady. “Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge is suicide.”

Benny did not reply to that. He asked, “I’m confused about a few things. Like, why did that man, Mr. Price, write what he wrote?”

“Price spent his life designing bioweapons. Airborne Ebola and a form of tuberculosis used for assassinations, that sort of stuff. He was Dr. Death for thirty years before the Fall. I guess he thought he had a lot to answer for. He probably
did
have a lot to answer for. Maybe not Reaper, but enough other monsters.”

“Why did you think Joe was here to kill you?”

She almost smiled. “When I saw Joe, I thought that Jane Reid or one of her masters figured I’d gone off the reservation, maybe gone crazy and joined the reapers. Whatever. Generally, if you see Joe Ledger show up pointing a gun at you, I guess you start reexamining your conscience.”

“I’m not an assassin,” said Joe mildly.

“I’m sure that was never on your business card,” was McReady’s cold reply.

“There’s something else,” interrupted Benny. “You said that there were R3’s in Washington and then some around here . . . but Nix and I saw some fast zoms near where we live, up by Yosemite National Park, in Mariposa County.”

“Drifters,” said McReady. “Probably wild boars spreading the mutation.”

“But what about the boars that attacked Lilah in Nevada, and the R3’s Nix and Lilah fought? Wild boars don’t live in deserts.”

McReady grunted. “I . . . don’t know.” She looked at Joe. “Could Reid have been—?”

“Reid doesn’t have the D-series notes. I gave her some
samples of the mutagen, but she didn’t know what to do with it. And even if she did, she wouldn’t try it on walkers in the wild. She’s not a genius, but she’s not suicidally stupid.”

“Reapers,” said Lilah.

Everyone looked at her. McReady said, “Only if they had the missing notes and a good scientist. A chemist, a molecular biologist, an epidemiologist. Someone who understands the kind of science we’re talking about.”

“Could the reapers have someone like that?” asked Nix. “I mean . . . they’re religious nuts.”

“They’re religious nuts now,” said Benny. “Who and what were they before they joined the Night Church?”

It was an ugly question, and the answers seemed to scream at them.

“I have a question,” said Nix into the silence. She nodded to the wall of plastic containers. “You made all this. Why? I mean . . . if you were trapped, if you thought you’d never get out, why did you—?”

McReady’s eyes softened for the first time. “Because there’s always hope, isn’t there?”

“Is there?” asked Lilah, her voice strained. “Hope for whom?”

“For everyone. Even if we died in here, there was always the chance someone would find us and find the stores of Archangel. And—I thought that my notes, my research, was in the hands of Jane Reid’s people at Sanctuary. I thought by now they’d have mass-produced a million tons of it. They
should
have. Once the parasites are active again, the process of decay kicks in, and the swine bacteria accelerates it. The walkers will become more dangerous, that’s a given, but only
for a week or so. Then the decay will have weakened their connective tissues. They’ll start falling apart.”

“The zoms outside looked pretty spry,” said Joe. “I had to gun ’em down.”

“No, that’s the natural mutation from the pigs. They’re faster, but the decomposition is still slow. We figure it will take forty-eight to sixty months for those walkers to fall. Our synthetic version of the natural mutagen—the one we developed before we evacuated Hope One—is different. You get a very fast walker for two or three days, and then you get one that’s slow and awkward, and then you have a pile of meat and bones.”

“What about someone who’s infected but not dead?” asked Lilah. “Would Archangel save them . . . or kill them?”

“You have to give them Archangel before they’re exposed to the mutagen. At least a full dose. Two capsules. Luckily, it kicks in fast, but without Archangel in their system, the mutagen will only kill them faster.”

“And
with
Archangel?” demanded Lilah.

“Depends on what you’re asking. If someone takes Archangel and dies, they don’t reanimate.”

“My brother died and he didn’t reanimate,” said Benny.

McReady nodded. “Same thing happened to a few people here. We think that’s a side effect of the mutation. As the new version of the pathogen spreads, some people are developing immunity to the reanimative aspects of the plague. Our computer models indicate that in time—maybe ten or fifteen years—as many as one percent of the population will develop immunity. While that sounds hopeful, it isn’t an answer. You say your brother didn’t reanimate? Then count yourself lucky.”

“No, said Nix, “that’s not how it is. We saw maybe fifty
or sixty people killed in that fight, and at least six or seven of them didn’t reanimate. That’s more like ten percent.”

“Then there must be a higher concentration of the
Brucella suis
bacteria in certain places. Again, count yourselves lucky. In most places the concentration is very low, and the bacteria won’t even grow in certain climates. Just be happy that your brother caught a break.”

“He still died.”

“Everybody dies,” said the scientist.

“What about someone who’s infected but not dead?” asked Lilah again. “Would Archangel save them or kill them?”

McReady straightened. “Why do you ask?”

The grief and fear in Lilah’s face was almost too much for Benny to look at.

Lilah said, “My . . . I mean, Chong . . . the . . . boy I . . . love is infected.”

“How did it happen?”

“Kid was shot with an arrow dipped in walker flesh,” said Joe.

“How long ago?”

“Little over a month.”

“But—he should be dead.” Then McReady nodded. “He’s at Sanctuary, isn’t he? Joe, you said they have everything except the D-series?”

“Yes.”

“Then they definitely have the metabolic stabilizer.”

“Yes. They used it on him.”

“On Chong,” said Lilah. “His name is Chong. They gave him injections.”

“Is he conscious?” she asked. “Do you know what
his vitals are? What’s his core temperature? Has it gone below ninety-six? Does he have a—?”

“We don’t know,” barked Lilah as tears boiled from the corners of her eyes. “He’s sick. He’s lost and he doesn’t know me. My town boy doesn’t know me.”

Nix hurried over to her and put her arm around the Lost Girl’s shoulder.

“Is there any hope for him?” asked Benny. “Any at all?”

Dr. McReady looked at him for a long time before she answered. The only sounds were Grimm’s panting breaths and Lilah’s sobs.

“Yes,” said McReady, “there’s definitely hope.”

Everyone stiffened; every eye was on her.

Dr. McReady undid the fastenings on the sides of the hazmat suit and let it puddle around her feet. She wore a sweat-stained T-shirt and shorts. Her bare arms and legs were as ashy pale as her face. She turned her leg to show a long, jagged scar. It was curved, top and bottom.

It was the distinctive scar of a bite.

“When the reapers let the infected boars in here,” she said slowly, “I was bitten on the calf. Dick Price got the stabilizer into me, and then I dosed myself with Archangel. First human test subject, didn’t have a choice.”

“God . . . ,” breathed Nix.

“Archangel . . . worked?” whispered Lilah. “You’re cured.”

Dr. Monica McReady smiled. It was a strange smile, made stranger by her unnaturally pale skin.

“I take two pills twice a day, every day, and I probably will for the rest of my life. But . . . at least I have a life.” She pointed to the bags. “If you can get me to Sanctuary, I can save Mr. Chong.”