Jeff Somers - Digital Plague

“The general admission area,” Marko said, nodding, “and the emergency room processing area.”

“Wa,” I said, “what the fuck’s up there?”

“Walk and talk, Avery. There’s no time to waste.” The old man spun and strode purposefully for the elevator, producing two more guns from inside his coat. I limped after him, pulling Lukens and Marko along in my orbit.

“Your man Zeke here can probably shade in the fine points, of course, but what you’ve seen so far-this plague-is just the first stage of the nanobots processing. Once the body has been killed and allowed to, well, marinate or something, reach some level of early-onset rot that is somehow magically necessary, they take over.” He stopped to sweep his hand toward the yawning elevator cab. “They reanimate. The bodies.”

I stopped in front of him. “They come back to life,” I said slowly.

“No,” Belling corrected, putting a hand on my back and pushing me gently into the elevator. “They reanimate. Except better.”

We all entered the cab and turned to look out into what appeared to be perfect darkness, Lukens sweeping the field with her shredder as Belling plucked his rusted pry bar from the cab floor and used it to pull the doors shut. As they clicked into place, a double row of circular buttons lit up to one side. I’d thought the basement had been quiet, but inside the elevator we’d found a new level of silence.

Belling reached over and jabbed one of the buttons near the top. The cab lurched disturbingly, making us all stumble and reach for the walls, and then nothing happened for several seconds as we gently swung there in the dark. With a lazy grinding noise the cab began to shudder, which I took to indicate movement.

Marko’s face was so close to his handheld I thought he might swallow it. “This is some thick code, Mr. Cates. I can only see the packets being transmitted, but there’s some serious shit going on nearby. I’ve got signals burning off the nanobots like crazy.” He looked up at me and licked his lips. His beard had gotten a little tangled and crazy. “I’m guessing at some of this, based on papers Squalor published in his youth and some of the work I’ve seen Kieth do in European cases-we study some of them in training-but I think… I think the nanobots are remaining functional after biological death and taking over respiratory functions.” He stared at me for a second and then ticked his head. “They’re breathing and pumping blood. People get sick, they die, and then the nanos… bring them back.”

A full-body shiver swept through me. “Why?”

“Mr. Kieth,” Belling said, his voice melodious in the darkness, “called it Phase Two. Squalor cannot fabricate Monks anymore. Even if he has a handful of intact, unused chassis around, even if he searches the dumps of the System for burned-out chassis that can be reused, he no longer has the ability to acquire new converts. As I understand it from Kieth, the nanos kill you-brain death, at least-then keep you upright and walking, and start to link together to form a brain.” I heard his coat rustle as he shrugged. “And there you go: breedable Monks.”

Lukens muttered, “Fucking hell.”

For a second we all stood there in silence. I understood why Belling had cut and run-things must be getting pretty hot with Kev and his merry band of Monks, and it didn’t sound as if the immortality he’d been offered was what he’d been expecting.

The cab shuddered again, and I felt a distinct gravitational drag as a metallic screech filled the air. We lurched up and then settled back, lurched up again and finally stopped dead, flat silence rushing into the tight space. We waited, looking around for some sign of progress.

“Aw, hell,” Marko muttered.

“Baby,” I heard Lukens mutter.

“Patience,” Belling whispered, waving a negligent hand in our direction.

I thought, If this is a trap, if this is Belling fucking me in the ass again, then this is when it comes. I resisted the urge to check my gun’s action, to check the chamber and feel it move in my hands, and settled for tightening my grip on it. I was hot and my head swam, and the constant, maddening itching in my chest had taken on a burning edge I didn’t care for. I pictured the tiny little bastards inside me, tearing, ripping, filling me with my own blood. I straightened up, reached out my arm, and put the barrel of my gun against the back of his head. “Wa, I’m having a crisis of faith back here. And I swear, if you’ve-”

With another lurch the cab squealed into motion again and shuddered upward for several seconds. I left my gun where it was, and Belling ticked his head toward me slightly. “Patience, Mr. Cates.”

“Fuck you, patience. We are being eaten alive. ”

“Mr. Cates, I was in Kampala thirty-three years ago with Mr. Orel. A young man. We’d been hired by the Americans to assassinate three Germans, because the Americans-well, those Americans-were trying to derail the Unification process. On entering the country our documents were questioned, we had some trouble escaping, and I was shot in the back. Bullet lodged in the muscle. Pain like you’ve never imagined. Every movement felt like someone was cutting me open with a dull blade, and there was a chance of paralysis. I did not complain. I did not recuse myself from the operation. The bullet was there when we were finished, and I had it taken care of then. I was patient. ”

I tapped the back of his head sharply. “I am very impressed, Mr. Belling.”

There was a soft ding and the elevator stuttered to a halt. Belling grinned in the dim light, picked up his pry bar, and snapped the doors open with one grunting heave.

Horrible yellow electric light flooded our little space, making me wince. Belling turned back to us and drew one of his guns. Behind him was a blank white wall pockmarked with large jagged holes and an unbelievably wide blood streak that disappeared behind Belling’s smiling face, continued past him and off into infinity, clotty red turning a dull, crusty brown. The smell was sudden and monolithic, something so terrible and rotten that it defeated any attempt to break it down into its component horrors. I gagged and immediately convulsed, unable to breathe as my lungs heaved. I went down to my knees and puked stringy blood from my own lungs, my vision going black, little red dots dancing in front of my eyes.

I started to stagger out of the cab but Belling placed a hand on my chest.

“Avery,” he said, standing there backlit and terrible. “This is going to be hard. On you.”

I breathed shallowly and the red dots in my vision pulsed with my ragged heartbeat. “Why?”

For the first time I could remember, Belling looked unhappy. “Because some old friends are waiting for you.”

“Explain it to me,” I snapped as I followed Belling into the hall. I was getting sick and tired of mysteries.

“It takes a bit of time,” he said conversationally, as if discussing the action on his gun or the juice rates on illegal loans off the Bowery. “First they have to die-that varies, as you’ve no doubt noticed. Some go right away, some linger for days while their chests collapse and they cough blood. Once they’re dead, there’s that marinating. They look dead. They are dead. But those tiny little buggers inside them are doing something.”

“Repairing damage,” Marko said without looking up from his handheld. “Bringing the physical shell of the body back into basic operating shape. Sealing off and rebuilding broken vessels. Taking cellular material from the portion of the body they won’t need anymore-the brain-and modifying it to create stem cells, which are used to repair arteries and destroyed organs.”