Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Whitman ignored her and went to the door she indicated. A small glass panel reinforced with chicken wire looked into what might have been a classroom once. There were cots lined up inside, though nobody was using them. Instead, the room’s inhabitants sat on the floor, rocking back and forth, hugging themselves. They were mostly naked and they looked filthy.

“We did what we could,” the woman said in a quiet voice.

There were twenty-five people in that room, at least. Every one of them a living subject. A sufferer of the new pathogen.

“Jesus,” Whitman said.

“Please, in this place, don’t take His name in vain,” the woman said.

Whitman stared at her. “You just herded them in there, together, and… and warehoused them? These people need medical care.”

“Their families couldn’t afford to look after them. Neither can we. When it was just one or two of them at a time, maybe… but there are more every day.”

Whitman shook his head. He didn’t even know how to proceed.

Atlanta, GA

Subject 13 died with a long, sustained breath that just… stopped. In the observation suite, Philips covered his eyes and wept for a moment. Then he pulled on a level four containment suit and headed down to the surgery. He plugged in the various hoses for his air supply. Checked the seals on his gloves. Picked up a bone saw and got to work.

The top of subject 13’s skull came away in one neat, clean piece. Philips had been a very good surgeon, once.

With a scalpel he cut away her brain and lifted it into a waiting pan. A nurse took it away to the microtome room, where it would be cut down into exceedingly thin slices. The slices would then be prepared on microscope slides.

Philips closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see what came next.

But it was his job. And nobody else was volunteering to do it for him.

Chicago, IL

“Keep it moving, don’t let them get up if you can,” Whitman called through the door. Inside the room, a dozen cops were squeezed in with the subjects, outnumbered but at least they had all the advantages he could give them. They’d waited for proper gear to come in—riot armor, face shields, heavy bite-proof gloves. One by one they got the subjects ready for transport. In contrast with the cops’ high-tech gear, they’d gone primitive for the restraints—plastic self-locking loops for handcuffs and thick canvas bags to put over the subjects’ heads. A fleet of ambulances stood outside, waiting to take the subjects away.

Whitman turned to the woman who had been caring for the subjects all this time. She was weeping openly, now. “You said you cleaned them—I assume that means you hosed them off once a week. Did you or your staff have any direct contact with them?”

The woman stared at him through her tears. “Of course,” she said. “We didn’t treat them like animals.”

Whitman lifted one hand in perfunctory apology. It didn’t give him pleasure to be mean to people. He just didn’t have time for bullshit. “Were any of you bitten?”

“It… happens,” the woman said, with a shrug.

Crap . Whitman had a feeling he was going to have to bring the church staff in as well, if just for observation.

“No one ever got sick from a bite, so we assumed it wasn’t contagious,” the woman explained.

Inside the room someone shouted. Whitman couldn’t make out the words. He stepped toward the doorway, just in time to see a cop smash a subject’s teeth out with his baton. Another cop waded through the subjects to try to help, but three of the infected grabbed him and pulled him off his feet.

One of them started tearing the cop’s face shield off.

“Out now!” Whitman shouted, but it was too late. The cops all drew their batons and started laying into the subjects around them. But there was no order to it, no discipline. They were just scared.

Whitman reached for the nearest cop and grabbed his shoulder. The man whirled around and smacked Whitman right in the gut with his baton. Whitman fell backwards, out of the doorway, clutching his stomach.

That was when everything went to shit.

Atlanta, GA

Philips adjusted the focus on the microscope. It didn’t help. The tiny holes were there and couldn’t be ignored. It was exactly what he’d expected to see.

“Give me sample 39a,” he said, and a technician changed the slide. Philips didn’t even lift his head from the eyepieces. Pink and white ovals filled the view, looking a great deal like a close-up of a slice of salami. That was normal, it was what healthy brain tissue looked like. But subject 13 hadn’t been healthy. This slice of her brain, like all the others, was riddled with thousands of microscopic holes. Like it had been eaten away by tiny mice working at random.

“Sample 40a,” Philips said.

Chicago, IL

A man in a black suit ran screaming from the church, his face torn open and blood soaking into his collar. The stained glass windows lit up from inside with the bright flashes of gunshots. Whitman stumbled out of the church, one arm wrapped around the screaming woman who had run the hospice program. She was unhurt but inconsolable. He pushed her away from him and turned around to look back inside. A subject in a torn sweatshirt was stomping up the pews, blood slicking the front of his jaw. A cop was down by the pulpit, not moving.

Whitman grabbed his Taser from inside his jacket. He fired it into the subject’s chest and the subject went down, at least momentarily. Whitman ran over to the cop and checked his pulse. The cop was alive and breathing but he wasn’t getting up. Shock, Whitman thought. The man had succumbed to shock after getting three of his fingers bitten off.

Whitman had enough medical training to know what to do. He took off his belt and wrapped it around the cop’s wrist, pulling it as tight as he could to make a tourniquet.

Behind him the subject pulled himself back onto his feet, using the side of a pew for leverage. He didn’t make a sound.

Whitman grabbed for his Taser again, but that was useless—it was a one-shot weapon. He’d never needed more than one shot before.

The subject took a halting step toward him. It was still shrugging off the effects of the Taser.

Another step.

Behind Whitman, more subjects were coming up the stairs.

Washington, DC

There were other people in the room, but Philips barely noticed them. He forced himself to make eye contact with the President. He forced himself to speak.

“Our finding is that this is a prion disease,” he said.

The President must have been given a pre-briefing, because he said, “Like Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or Kuru? I’m not entirely sure what a prion is.”

Philips nodded. “Those two diseases are prion diseases, yes. A prion is a kind of pathogen that is not technically alive. A protein that has gotten folded the wrong way. Prions are normally only spread by exposure to brain tissue from an infected individual. But this one is different. It has… well, mutated is the wrong word. But it has changed. This one is spread by fluid contact.”

“Like a virus.”

“Yes. But unlike viruses even the slightest exposure is enough to infect someone. The prion enters the brain and once there it cannot be ejected. Our bodies’ immune systems do not react to its presence at all. Safe inside its host, it begins to replicate. It makes more copies of itself. Over time these copies have a destructive effect on the brain tissue.”

“How destructive?”