Extinction Horizon

-21-

There was no cure.

Kate cupped her helmet in her hands and peeked through a fort of gloved fingers at her computer monitor in the lab. She’d worked through the night. Testing several rhesus monkeys infected with the Hemorrhage virus.

Finding a cure in the past would have meant simply dealing with the virus, but there were two parts to the microscopic weapon tearing the world apart. The VX-99 hybrid nanoparticles had resulted in permanent epigenetic changes. And with the nanoparticles self-replicating they were spread every time the virus was passed to a new host.

A flashback to the creatures in Atlanta reminded her that the infected were no longer people. They were monsters, and there wasn’t anything she could do bring them back.

The sound of crunching plastic pulled Kate away from the results on her computer.

Ellis stood a few feet away, stretching in his space suit. “What are we going to do?”

Kate blinked, trying to focus on her colleague. Her eyes were glazed, her vision blurry. She was tired and tense. Her thoughts were a muddled mess of potential theories. And they all circled back to the one she didn’t want to admit.

“In order to kill a monster, you have to create one,” she muttered.

“What do you mean?” Ellis said.

Pulling her gloves away from her visor, she stiffened. “Maybe Michael was right,” she said. “Maybe there is no way to cure the Hemorrhage virus. Maybe we need to create a monster of our own.”

“I don’t like where you’re going with this,” Ellis said. Dark bags rimmed his exhausted eyes. He brought a finger to his visor and rubbed the panel, like he was trying to scratch a phantom itch.

“A bioweapon,” Kate whispered. “If I can create a viral vector system to target the endothelial cells in the infected, then perhaps we can find a way to stop the virus after all.”

Ellis stared back at her with an incredulous look. “You’re talking about a weapon that will cause the victims to bleed out? To hemorrhage internally?”

Kate pursed her lips to respond, but instead bowed her helmet to the floor and nodded.

“I better tell Lieutenant Colonel Jensen,” Ellis said. “He wanted a progress report before the briefing.”

Kate nodded, but she was hardly listening. “A monster of our own,” she whispered. “A monster of our own.”

Beckham sat across from Horn and watched the man’s chest move up and down as he slept. He’d taken the news of Fort Bragg much like Beckham thought he would—by punching the nearest wall. It had taken Beckham and Riley’s combined effort to restrain Horn from going apeshit and waking up the entire room of sleeping soldiers.

When Horn had finally calmed down it was close to midnight. He’d woken up several times during the night, leaning over to Beckham and asking if the news about Bragg was really true.

Beckham felt the overwhelming sadness trickle over him as he thought of Horn’s two daughters and his wife. He’d told Horn they would be safer at Bragg, and now he was responsible for their fate.

But he wasn’t going to give up on them yet. Maybe by some miracle they had survived and escaped Fort Bragg. If they were alive somewhere, Beckham would find them.

At 0715 the PA system barked to life.

“Attention, all personnel. Please report to the mess hall for briefing.”

Beckham poked Horn in the arm. He grunted and shooed Beckham’s hand away.

“Horn, briefing,” Beckham said.

Riley jumped out of his bed a few feet away. “We’re going to be late.”

Beckham hesitated, knowing that Horn was not in the mood for an argument, but he wasn’t going to let the man just lay there either.

“Horn, get your ass up,” Beckham said sternly. “Your family could still be alive. Sitting around moping isn’t going to help them.”

Horn slowly sat up, running a hand through his messy hair. He wiped his forearm across his face.

“Let’s go,” Beckham said.

The barracks slowly emptied as the other men and women left for the briefing. Beckham watched a group of Marines file out the front entrance and wondered what news Jensen had in store for them. He knew it couldn’t be good.

Horn stood, grumbling something to himself that Beckham couldn’t make out.

Putting a hand on his friend’s back, Beckham followed Horn out of the room in silence. There wasn’t anything Beckham could say to alleviate any of the man’s pain. His family was likely dead. He needed time to grieve.

The cafeteria was swollen with staff by the time they arrived. Men and women representing every branch of military and mixed in with them were the scientists that Colonel Gibson had helped collect from around the country.

He scanned the crowd and found Kate toward the center. Slowly, he pushed his way through the collage of color. When he got to Kate he tapped her in the shoulder.

The woman that turned to face him looked like a former shell of herself. Dark bags hung under dark blue eyes.

“How are you doing?” Beckham asked.

“Hanging in there,” she replied solemnly, “How about you? How’s Horn?” She glanced over his shoulder to look for him.

“Not good. He took the news pretty hard. We all did.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. After a brief pause she said, “I just found out that the Hemorrhage virus has spread across the globe. My parents are in Europe.”

“Shit,” Beckham mumbled, his eyes falling to the floor. “Are we any closer to finding a way to stop it?”

“I think so,” Kate said. “But I need more time.”

Noise from the front of the mess hall pulled their attention to Lieutenant Colonel Jensen. He entered with Major Smith and a trio of soldiers Beckham didn’t recognize.

Jensen wasted no time. He grabbed a mic and walked to the head of the crowd. “Good morning, everyone. I’m going to cut right to the chase. As you all know I’ve lifted the communication cloak. For the past twelve hours my staff has been working on figuring out what’s going on outside.”

After a brief pause, Jensen continued. “POTUS is dead. Every major city has been overrun by infected. The world we all knew is gone. X9H9, or what scientists are calling the Hemorrhage virus, has spread to all corners of the globe. No continent has been spared. In less than eight days, the pandemic has infected over half of the world’s population. Projections show that in another two weeks over eighty-five percent of the world’s population will be dead or infected.”

Several gasps echoed through the room as the crowd digested the news. Jensen waited for it to sink in and then continued.

“Operation Reaper was launched to stop the spread of the virus. As you know, this meant the military targeted high-density population zones. The mission was simple. Bomb these target areas and send boots in to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, Operation Reaper failed and now only a handful of military installations remain active and secure.”

“What about Camp Pendleton?” yelled a man somewhere behind Beckham.

“And Fort Bragg?” asked a Marine a few feet away.

“Please. Hold your questions,” Jensen replied calmly. “We’re still processing the information and will get it to COs as soon as we can.”

“This is fucking bullshit! You kept us all in the dark while the world was collapsing around us!” a woman barked from the front of the crowd.

“Colonel Rick Gibson believed this was the only way to keep you all busy on finding a cure.”

“I heard there is no cure. I heard this thing is a bioweapon,” came another voice.

Jensen clenched his jaw, sucked in a breath through his nostrils and then raised his left hand. “What you’ve heard is correct,” he replied. “X9H9 was designed in a lab. In one of our own. Colonel Gibson has been arrested for his crimes and will stand trial. I assure you. He will pay for—”

Chaos erupted. Angry shouts filled the room as the crowd swelled and inched forward. Beckham grabbed Kate and pulled her away from a shouting Marine.

Jensen held up his hand and shouted into the mic. “Please calm down! You are men and women of the United States Armed Forces! Stand down! That is a direct order!” A vein bulged from his forehead as he screamed into the mic.

The room instantly quieted. Beckham had never seen the officer lose control like that. But everyone had a breaking point, and after discovering his CO was behind the virus destroying the world, Beckham couldn’t blame Jensen for his outrage.

After the mess hall had quieted he continued, his voice raspy behind his tightened jaw. “Believe me, I know what you are all thinking. But in the end it doesn’t matter where this virus came from. We all still have a job to do. We may be humanity’s last hope. Several of our scientists are working on a new bioweapon, one that will destroy those infected with X9H9.”

“So there is a cure?” Riley shouted.

Jensen paused and collected himself as he searched the room. “Doctor Lovato, are you here?”

Kate raised a hand. The officer narrowed in on her and waved her forward. “Would you please explain your theory?”

Making her way through the crowd, Kate grabbed the mic.

“I’m Doctor Kate Lovato with the Centers for Disease Control,” she said in a low, apprehensive voice. “I understand that we aren’t all scientists in this room so I am going to explain this in the simplest way I can. The Hemorrhage virus was lab engineered. It’s the marriage of a chemical weapon called VX-99 and the Ebola virus. The infection sweeping the country is a result of the worst of man and the worst of Mother Nature. Those people outside,” she pointed toward the door, “they aren’t people anymore. I know this is hard to accept because I had to accept this myself when my brother turned into one of them. Those things are monsters. There is no cure. There is no bringing them back. The changes caused by VX-99 are irreversible epigenetic changes. The only way to stop this virus is…”

Kate lowered the mic and scanned the room. She found Beckham and he offered her a reassuring nod, adding a smile when he saw her lift the mic to her mouth again.

“The only way to stop this virus is to kill the infected. That’s what my staff and I are working on. A bioweapon that will destroy the host.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Jensen said. He placed a hand on her shoulder and then took the mic.

“As you can see, we are doing everything we can to stop the outbreak. We have the most capable scientists in the world on the island and the communication cloak has been lifted, so I will keep everyone updated as we receive information.”

Jensen’s words struck a chord inside Beckham. They may have shared a moment back in Gibson’s office, but his gut told him not to trust the man. Not yet. He could have been kept in the dark about Gibson’s work, or he could have been involved. If Beckham found out the latter he was going to make sure Jensen paid the same price as his CO.

Still, Beckham couldn’t help but see a decent man standing at the front of the room, a leader that the men and women of Plum Island so desperately needed. Only time would tell if Jensen lived up to his word.

Finding a cure for most diseases would take months, if not longer, but designing an experimental weapon had only taken Kate five hours. Understanding the Hemorrhage virus had allowed her to design a synthesized virus of her own that she hoped would attack the endothelial cells and cause massive vascular damage to anyone infected with the Hemorrhage virus.

Her synthesized virus would only target the cells that were expressed in the proteins they had identified in the infected. Anyone exposed to the weapon that wasn’t infected with the Hemorrhage virus would remain healthy.

Kate sucked in a breath of cold, filtered oxygen and looked toward Ellis. He stood in his space suit a few feet away, hovering over a dozen samples of infected cell cultures.

“You ready?” Ellis asked.

“When you are,” Kate replied.

“Let’s see if it works.”

Holding her breath, Kate used a transfer pipette to insert the synthesized virus she’d designed into the cultures. After allowing the virus to incubate for several minutes with the cells, she performed the fixation procedure to prevent the sample from deteriorating and to stabilize it for microscopic analysis under the intense beams of an electron microscope.

Each minute spent waiting for the samples to become fully fixed was agonizing. With her heart racing, she took one of the trays and inserted it under the microscope and joined Ellis at the main computer terminal.

Blinking rapidly, she studied the spaghetti string images of the virus on her screen. The small glycoprotein spikes that surrounded the virus strands were now attaching to the endothelial cells!

“I’ll be damned,” Ellis said.

Kate looked beyond the computer monitor, staring intensely at the robotic arm inside the center room. It was waiting for her command.

All she had to do was type in a series of codes and the bot would go to work, creating the synthesized virus and preparing it for use on the boy that Beckham and his men had brought back from Niantic. If she authorized this, they could potentially have a working weapon by morning. Of course there would be more tests, but the building blocks would be in place.

Kate’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she reflected on the ramifications of her next move. This was humanity’s final and most desperate attempt to prevent extinction.

As her mind drifted, her heart rate increased. She could feel the pulse in her head, the sound echoing inside her helmet.

She thought suddenly of Javier, and the monster he had become. He was out there somewhere, hunting with the rest of the infected. She couldn’t bear to think of her brother like that.

A beat passed and she saw Michael gripping his shredded arm in the Blackhawk. She could see those final moments clearly now—she could see the fear radiating from his eyes as he took Beckham’s pistol and jumped out of the Blackhawk. His last act reflected how he’d lived his life.

Courageously.

Drawing on his strength, Kate blinked and took in a long breath. Holding it in her lungs, she punched in a series of commands that authorized the robot to finish what she had started. The automated process would take hours, maybe longer, but in the morning they would know whether her weapon would work.

A blank cursor blinked on her screen. The computer was prompting her to name the weapon. Without hesitation she typed in a single word.

VariantX9H9.