Noah's Ark: Contagion (22 page)

Jake brushed his hand gently over the panel. The rubber gloves made it hard to feel anything, but he was sure there were other switches or controls. There was no way of seeing exactly what they were because with a flicker, his torch finally gave out completely.

Sitting there in the dark, in pain, he rested his hand on the red handle. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he repeated to himself, and pulled down the handle with a clunk.

• • •

“I think gas masks would be prudent at this stage, Janice,” Vardy said.

“Good plan.”

Both doctors picked up masks that had been brought to the makeshift lab by the submariners who had kitted it out while the landing party had been away.
 

They were in another store room down on deck one, near to Janice’s temporary morgue. Three tables borrowed from a restaurant had been assembled in a U shape. Vardy’s equipment from the
Ambush
occupied one table. On another was a rack of test tubes filled with blood. Each was neatly labelled with a name. Next to the tubes was a writing pad. Names corresponding to those on the tubes were listed on the topmost page, and alongside each were details including the age of the patient, how long they had been suffering or paralysed when the sample was taken, and where they were now.

On the third table was the Heimat Brinkdolph Gemini 5001 machine, and a plastic container filled with ash. It was this container that Vardy and Janice had turned their attention to.

With mask securely in place, Vardy cautiously opened it. He took a plastic beaker in one hand, turned to the tubes of blood, selected one, and poured a small sample into the bottom. Then with a plastic spoon he scooped up a tiny amount of ash and sprinkled it over the blood.

The reaction was almost instantaneous. The ash soaked up the blood and began to fizz and boil. Vardy and Janice both pulled away instinctively, but it lasted only a few seconds.

“Jesus! Have you ever seen anything like that?” Vardy said. He leaned over the beaker, staring inside.

“Never. What even happened? I mean, there was no visible gas given off. Where did the blood go? It seemed to boil, but there was no visible gas?”

Vardy picked up the beaker and swilled it around. The blood had indeed disappeared, leaving just the spoonful of ash which looked as dry as before.

He took another beaker, placed it on a digital scale, then put in some more ash.

“Four point three grams,” he said. “Stand back.” He poured a few drops of blood onto the ash, and they both watched as the exact same reaction took place. When he was sure it was over, he re-read the scale.

“Six point two grams. So the blood’s still there, but it’s changed form.”

“Russell, I’m sure this is fascinating, and another time it would be worthy of study, but we need to get this antiviral underway.”

“Of course, of course. But this is an important step. Now we know that we’re going to have to use a microscopic amount of ash to mutate the vaccine, otherwise we could end up turning the vaccine to ash.”

Janice nodded. “How microscopic does the amount have to be?”

“That’s what we need to figure out.”

They spent most of the next half an hour performing tests with the ash, combining it with blood, water, alcohol, and most other liquids they could get their hands on. The reaction was largely the same in every case, with the ash turning the liquid into more ash. But they did find a limit.

“So we’re agreed,” Vardy said finally. “Anything less than a tenth of a gram of ash dissolved in anything more than ten millilitres of liquid appears to be stable.”

“Uh huh. How much vaccine do you have?”

“There are three kits. Each one contains ten mills of flu vaccine. The 5001 machine can make more, but it will take too long. Do you want to prep the vaccine or the ash?”

“I’ll take the ash,” Janice said.

“Here, it goes in this.” Vardy handed her what looked like a tiny jam jar with a plastic lid. She placed it on the scale and set the readout to zero. Then, using the tip of a plastic spatula, she very carefully dropped just a few grains of the ash into it. The readout on the scale counted upwards, then back down, settling on a figure of 0.09 grams. She retrieved the jar and affixed the lid. Letting out the breath she had been holding, she handed the beaker to Vardy. “Over to you,” she said, relieved.

Vardy placed Janice’s jar in a small tray that protruded from the body of the Gemini 5001 and pressed a button. An electric motor whirred, and with a click the tray slid inside the machine.

“Just like loading a CD,” Janice observed.

Vardy took a second tiny jar and placed it on the scale. On the table with the test tubes was a bright orange box that looked like a tiny briefcase. He undid two plastic catches and lifted the lid. Inside were a dozen glass vials of different sizes, each labelled with the name of the vaccine it contained, and a date after which is should no longer be used. He selected the influenza vaccine. Taking a hypodermic needle and syringe, he pierced the seal on the vial and drew out the entire contents. The clear liquid was then injected into the small glass jar. With the lid securely in place, he put the jar into a second tray that sat waiting on the front of the blue machine, and pressed the button. With another whir and a click, the jar was pulled inside.

“What happens now?” Janice asked.

“Now? We wait. The machine will work its magic. It will constantly analyse the vaccine, and once it detects any kind of mutation, it will sound an alarm. We’ll need to manually verify with the microscope of course.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. Could happen quickly, could take a few hours.”

“And if it works? How are we going to treat three thousand people when there are only two more vaccine kits?”

“The machine can make more. It functions as a miniature bioreactor. If this antiviral works, we hold some back and put it back into the machine along with a base liquid. It can’t create huge volumes. I won’t lie to you, it’s unlikely we can make enough to treat everyone in time, but I’m not going to worry about that until we know if this even works.”

• • •

For a few seconds it seemed as though nothing was going to happen. Then the rumbling started. A low, repetitive sound. Jake thought it sounded like a pump. Whatever it was, it was just the precursor to a much louder noise, a noise he knew very well: the noise of a huge diesel engine coming to life. The tiny red light had turned green, but it was still the only illumination in the room for another two and a half minutes. Precisely one hundred and fifty seconds after he pulled the handle came the unmistakable sound of a generator spinning up and then, quite suddenly, Jake was blinded by what seemed like a thousand floodlights all coming on at once. His arms flew up to cover his eyes, protecting them from the dazzling, brilliant light.

The noise around him abated slightly, as the diesel motor warmed up and settled down, and the initial load of so many lights coming on at once had been met. At the same time Jake’s eyes had begun to adjust, and through slotted fingers he could observe his surroundings properly for the first time.

The room he was in was huge. He’d only seen the hall containing the biohazard tanks with the aid of torchlight, but he had the impression this room was easily as big. He estimated that it must be at least half the size of level three, meaning that combined with the labs and the toxic store, level four was considerably larger than the others.

The panel with the lever that had started the generator stretched away for some distance. It was covered in meters and readouts, which as far as he could tell were all to do with the state of the electrical systems in the facility.
 

Much of the rest of the space was filled with giant tanks. Although they looked a lot like the toxic tanks they had seen before, these were clearly marked as being filled with diesel, no doubt for powering the generator, which from the sound of it was located somewhere further back, out of sight.

The door through which he had entered was still wide open, and through it Jake could see that the concrete tunnel outside was also now illuminated. Spurred on by the possibility to explore further without the need of a torch, he shuffled back towards the door. Halfway there, something caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it on the way in; his pocket light was too weak to have picked it out in the darkness. A little deeper into the room, near the first of the giant diesel tanks, was a small blue flat-bed trolley. He shuffled over to it backwards, dragging his useless and increasingly painful legs. The trolley was loaded up with a gas bottle. Jake was able to haul it off quite easily as the bottle appeared to be empty. By repositioning the trolley so it butted up against the diesel tank and thus did not roll anywhere, he pushed himself up off the floor and slid onto it. He wriggled around as best he could. His back was leaning against the handle, his legs stuck out in front of him, and only his ankles and feet were unsupported, and dangled off the end. The trolley was very low to the floor, which made it easy to load and unload. For Jake, it meant he could reach the ground with his hands by leaning forwards just a little. The grated floor once again offered a perfect surface to grip with his fingertips, and with a little effort, he pulled himself—and the trolley—forwards. It rolled easily, and he was at the door in seconds.

Getting out of the door and turning ninety degrees into the tunnel proved a little more difficult, but again the grated floor helped, and by pulling harder on one side than the other, he soon got the hang of steering on the move. Once outside and rolling straight, he couldn’t help but let out a whoop of joy at his newfound mobility.

Twenty-Two

“V
ARDY
? V
ARDY
! W
AKE
up!”

“Wha…what? What is it?” Russell rubbed his eyes and looked around him, confused.

“You fell asleep,” Janice scolded gently.

“Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to. Rough couple of days.”

“Don’t sweat it. Listen, your machine is beeping, I thought you ought to know.”

“Right, yes, thank you.” He pulled himself out of the armchair on the far side of the room, stretched his arms high above his head, and yawned. “God, I could use some coffee.”

“From what I’ve heard, you’ll be lucky to get any kind of refreshment on this ship. And if God is handing out favours, I’d ask for a working antiviral before caffeinated hot drinks.”

Vardy walked over to the machine and pressed a button, muting the feeble bleeping noise. Numbers and codes scrolled across a little LCD display built into the front of the unit; he read them off aloud. “Okay, so the machine thinks the mutation is complete. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

A couple more buttons and a drawer popped out of the machine. It held one of the two small jars. Inside, where the clear vaccine had been, was now a very slightly milky yellow liquid. Vardy ripped open a sterile packet and took out a new syringe. He pierced the lid of the jar and extracted a few drops of the substance, then pushed the plunger of the syringe back down, forcing out the drops onto an open microscope slide.
 

“Alright, what have we got here?” he said, arranging the slide under one of the two microscopes. He adjusted the focus, and spent some time examining their new creation.

“Well?” Janice asked. She couldn’t stand the wait, she was desperate to know whether the mutation had worked.

“Well, I think this has gone better than expected. Here, take a look yourself. Look at this one first,” he said, pointing to the second microscope. “That’s the mutated virus.”

Janice sat down at the table and lined her eyes up with the eyepiece. She could see the cells infected with the virus. They looked like some kind of miniature alien: bizarre, spiky, ugly, but also familiar. “I remember studying this kind of thing in med school,” she said. “Nothing quite like that though.”

“That’s the mutation. Most unusual, right?”

Janice lifted her head and nodded. “And the antiviral?”

“Help yourself.” He held out a hand towards the microscope he had just been studying.

She moved her chair sideways, lining herself up to get comfortable. “Wow, okay, yeah. I see the similarity. That’s amazing, that the ash could mutate the vaccine like that so quickly.” She sat back and looked at Vardy. “But will it work?”

“Let’s try it on some infected blood.” He located a small Petri dish and consulted the notepad with the list of names. “Roger Marston, sixty-eight years old. Infected since at least twelve hours ago. Okay Roger, let’s see what we can do with your kindly donated blood sample.”

Vardy ran his finger along the row of test tubes until he found the one with Roger’s name on it. Taking care not to spill any, he removed the tube, poured some of the blood into the Petri dish, replaced it, then used the syringe to squeeze a couple of drops of the mutated vaccine onto the blood.

“I’ll get this under the microscope, quickly,” he said.

For a while, he watched in silence. Janice waited patiently. She knew there would be no instant results. Suddenly Vardy’s hand shot up in the air and he clicked his fingers repeatedly. “Janice! Note down the time. I think it’s started!”

Janice checked her watch and scribbled on a page of notes they had been keeping as they went along.

“Three minutes to the first reaction,” she said.

“Yes! There it was again. And another one! This is incredible, it looks like it could actually be working!”

“Can I see?”

“Yeah, of course.” He pulled away and looked at Janice with an expression of triumph mixed with disbelief. “I have to admit, I wasn’t hopeful. Take a look and see what you think.”

Janice positioned herself over the microscope again, and altered the focus slightly for her own eyes. She saw the mutated virus and the antiviral made from the mutated vaccine. She didn’t have to wait long to see what Vardy had been talking about. Right in front of her, the antiviral attacked a virus-infected cell. It was like watching a rabid dog on the offensive as the mutated vaccine went for the virus, overpowering it, and eventually killing it. The more she watched, the more attacks she saw.