Paul McEuen - Spiral

His thoughts were disjointed, flashes of scenes. Jake was at the bedside of his mother on the day before she died, her lips on his cheek. He was in the trenches of the Iraq desert, watching bulldozers push mounds of dirt. He felt the rumble of the machine as it chugged through the earth, tearing it up, coming to bury him. He imagined hearing Maggie’s voice, saw her running toward Dylan with Liam’s cure, but then she was obscured by a wall of black.

Struggling to rise, Jake saw that Kitano was half off the bridge, his torso dangling over the water, a knife protruding at a right angle. The old man had eviscerated himself. A shock of bright red spread across his belly and the white silk robe.

Jake got to his feet and crossed the bridge. He reached for the blood-slick Kitano, but it was too late: the old man slid over the edge, splashing into the river. In an instant he was over the falls. Kitano had won.

Jake collapsed in pain. A white streak shot across the sky. With each labored breath, he felt his connection to the world slipping away. Closing his eyes, the pain flared, then dulled. His senses muted. The roar of the river receded to a background murmur.

MAGGIE TRIED TO GET HIM TO HIS FEET. “JAKE—PLEASE.”

Jake could barely speak. “Go. Maggie. You have to…”

She looked up at the airplanes almost directly overhead now. How long did she have? Twenty seconds?

She frantically opened the vials and dumped their glowing contents off the bridge. Crying now, she longed to tell a barely conscious Jake about what she had found on the yellow sheet of paper, Liam’s last message: “…the fluorescent fungus is a dispersal vector for the cure…” Liam had designed the cure to spread the same way the Uzumaki did. The geese would carry it.

The glowing strands drifted down into the water, blinking bits of red, yellow, and green. Within seconds it was all gone, swept over the falls. The last vial she put in her pocket, saving it for Dylan.

Grabbing Jake’s arm, she dragged him to the edge of the bridge. Was he breathing? Oh, God, she couldn’t tell. She lay down on top of him. His skin was so cold against hers, their faces inches apart. Rocking them back and forth, the next thing she knew she was underwater, still holding on to Jake. The brutally cold water dragged them toward the falls. Maggie held him as tightly as she could, harder than she had ever held anything in her life.

In seconds, they were at the falls’ crest, then over its edge, locked together when the sky exploded, a shock wave like a giant hammer striking them down.

They were airborne, falling, a deafening hurricane roar coming from overhead. The sky above was red, swirling fire, a twisting maelstrom of flame. Then a violent slap like hitting a wall. They struck the bottom of the falls and were immediately sucked under the surface. Stunned and confused, Maggie was twisted and tossed by the churning water, unsure which direction was up.

She fought her way to the surface, spitting and coughing.

She couldn’t see Jake. The white froth of the waterfall was churning around her, its roar drowning her voice, the orange flames overhead raging like the end of the world.

THE FIRST SOLDIERS AIRLIFTED IN FROM FORT DRUM FOUND her wandering about in the shallows, shivering, her arm broken. She gave them the vial with the cure, explaining what Liam had done. She said again and again, “Where is Jake? Please, you have to find Jake.”

They found him in the reeds near the river’s edge, as if he’d dragged himself partly out of the water. His bullet wounds were washed clean, skin white, nearly drained of blood. They checked for a pulse. A tiny thing, then even that faltered. They went to work, pumping his chest.

“Oh, God, no,” Maggie whispered. “Please. Please.”

HIS HEART HAD STOPPED WHEN THE MEDICS LOADED HIM into the helicopter, Maggie piling in after them. Jake had lost more than forty percent of his blood, no vital signs, but they kept working on him to get a pulse. A decision was made to divert to Fort Detrick, where they had the containment facilities to handle them.

A medic tended to her wounds. She had a broken arm and a fractured bone in her wrist from pulling her hand from the cuff. After they had put her arm in a sling and secured it to her chest, Maggie stayed beside Jake the rest of the way. “Hold on, Jake,” she begged. “Please hold on.”

WHEN THEY LANDED AT DETRICK, MAGGIE WAS TAKEN TO THE slammer. Two hours in, they let her talk to Dylan through the glass of his quarantine unit. The doctors administered the antidote she’d given them. She forced herself not to break down at the sight of her drugged and barely conscious son. In a moment of lucidity, he asked about Jake. “Is he going to be okay?”

“I don’t know, Dylan. Let’s you and I pray with every bit of hope that we have.”

No one was sure of the final outcome for Jake Sterling, not the first day, not the next. On the third day, he’d opened his eyes. On the next, he’d asked for water. Not long after that, beside his hospital bed, Maggie held his hand while he slept. She sobbed like a baby for reasons she only half understood.

THE UZUMAKI WAS A DISTANT MEMORY. ALMOST FOUR HUNDRED people around the Hazelton prison and Camp David came down with early symptoms. Hundreds of other clusters of cases appeared up and down the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways, but none of these expanded into a full-blown epidemic, thanks to Liam Connor’s last gift to the world, the fungus Maggie had released alongside the Uzumaki. The cure had spread like a branching river from the release spot, Liam Connor’s fungal creation quickly taking root in fields up and down North America. Later, spores had carried the cure overseas, with the fungus turning up everywhere from Africa to Australia, France to the Falklands.

Liam’s cure came from the protective bacterium that lived in the guts of people who were antibiotic-free. It flipped a genetic switch that turned Fusarium spirale from its deadly form back to the relatively harmless, single-celled version that Liam had first discovered in Brazil five decades ago. Liam had taken the genes and inserted them in a fluorescent fungus that could spread just like the Uzumaki. People merely had to ingest a small amount. Maggie named the cure Fusarium spero , borrowing from the Latin phrase Dum spiro, spero . While I breathe, I hope.

An FBI investigation into Kitano revealed that he had been spying on Liam for years. After he learned about Liam’s labs at the Seneca Army Depot, he had hired Orchid. It had been her job to deliver the cure to the Chinese and Japanese governments. Hitoshi Kitano, the last Tokkō, would finally destroy America.

But Kitano hadn’t counted on Jake Sterling. Or Liam Connor.

Liam’s cure was not perfect. It worked reliably only when adminstered immediately after the infection. Of the three hundred and seventy-two known cases of the Uzumaki that occurred before the cure was widely available, twenty-nine had died, including Lawrence Dunne. The deputy national security adviser had lasted three weeks, completely mad the entire time, screaming and cursing and begging to die.

The UN hearings on the Uzumaki in the months after the crisis had held the world in thrall. Maggie’s testimony, along with Jake’s, was said to have drawn a worldwide audience of more than three billion. Pressure was building, and negotiations were under way for new limits on biological-weapons programs, with all the major powers participating.