Geoff North - How the World Ends

Cats started howling. They scratched at the wired walls of their tiny cages, and hissed at Louie as he worked his way along the narrow aisles. He covered his nose and mouth with one hand to block out the stench of feces and urine, and started to run. There was nothing in here he could use against his tormenters. Louie could see a door in the shadows up ahead. It wasn’t the way he’d come in, but Louie didn’t care. He needed to get out, and he needed to get out fast. The security card fell from his shaking fingers as he tried inserting it into the key slot. He started to whimper on his hands and knees searching for it in the red and black gloom. He found it seconds later, resting in a pool of dried blood and drool, inches away from a dead animal carcass. It had been a goat, or possibly a sheep—Louie could never tell the difference—and its pointed nose was jammed into the black wire of its cage. It had died there like that, stuck, starving, and thrashing. The black lifeless eyes stared at Louie as he scooped the key back up. He inserted it into the slot and escaped into the next room.

It was much quieter, and the smell was tolerable. Louie pushed the strands of hair back hanging over his eyes, and wiped the sweat from his forehead. There was no way he was going back through that screaming hell and stench. He would have to find another way to the elevator. The lighting was better in here, and there was a calm order to the glass containers lining the walls on either side of him. Louie peered into one and saw a bug as thick and long as his thumb crawling about in a layer of black soil. Another one poked its way out of the dirt and started climbing up the glass. There were a thousand flies in the next one, feeding on a mat of squirming white maggots.

Louie walked slowly, running his finger tips along the glass surfaces. I could load up a gurney with a whole bunch of these insect aquariums… toss them through the doors and let those assholes deal with a bug infestation. He decided against it. With his clumsy luck, one of the containers would undoubtedly break open before he ever got back down to level 10. There was another door down at the end of the aisle. Louie rushed towards it, hoping to find a corridor that would lead him back to the elevator.

He found a small lab instead. A stool had been knocked over at an island counter in the room’s center. Papers had fallen to the floor. Someone had been in a hurry to get out when word arrived that the nukes were flying. They had left their work strewn all over the counter. Louie saw a small glass container on the counter. It was rectangular in shape, like the bug boxes in the room before, but a quarter the size. It was empty but looked dirty inside, the inner walls coated with blackish grime.

Louie picked some of the papers up from the floor and started reading. Most of it was gibberish—charts, time tables and pie graphs, formulas and equations—proving he didn’t have what it took to become a research scientist, and never would. But some of it was easy enough to understand. They had been studying Lyme disease—a bacteria carried by deer ticks. Everyone knew about Lyme disease in Manitoba. The prairies were infested with ticks in the spring months. Though hardly life threatening, the disease could cause years of discomfort if not treated in its early stages. Louie’s mother had warned him as a child to never stand too long in high grass, and to always pull up his socks and wear long pants. Kids always came home with wood ticks stuck in their legs and bellies. Some even managed to crawl all the way up into their hair, and could go undiscovered for days.

But wood ticks weren’t deer ticks. Deer ticks were much smaller, and harder to spot. The little fuckers would fill up on blood and eventually fall away, leaving their bacterial infection behind as a way of saying thank you.

So where were the ticks? Louie looked about the lab, trying to spot jars on the shelves filled with the little brown arachnids. He spotted a vault door left open in the wall. He looked inside and discovered it empty. The area was small, smaller than a bread box, and there was a tiny socket receptor built into the back wall. It’s a cooling unit. Louie clicked the door shut and read the label attached to it. TICK LDV3. There were two more cooling vaults next to it labelled TICK LDV1 and TICK LDV2. He pulled the handle open on one of them and discovered a frosted-over glass container fitted inside. Louie looked back at the island work station where the dirty container was sitting.

So that’s TICK LDV3.

He went back to the counter and lifted the glass box up for a better look. Louie could see where it attached inside its cooling unit. There was a tiny docking socket in the upper corner, and a second one in the opposite corner that must have acted as an air circulator. The grime stuck up inside the glass walls started to move. Louie placed the container back down hurriedly and stepped back. The dirt—what he had thought was dirt—was swirling about inside like a thin layer of dark grey smoke. It coalesced up against the wall facing Louie and stopped.

“What the hell is that?” He moved back towards it and placed a single finger up against the glass. The grey cloud clustered in towards the warmth, swarming into a thick black circle. Louie pulled his finger away, and the circle slowly started to spread back out, breaking up and becoming grey once again. “My God, what were they working on down here?”

If Louie could’ve studied the creeping grey mist on a microscopic level, he would’ve discovered over a billion crawling ticks. He had to find that out by reading more of the scattered papers. TICK LDV3 stood for TICK Lyme Disease Variant 3 . Louie pulled the stool as far from the container as possible and continued reading at the corner of the work counter. When he’d finished deciphering what he could, Louie pushed the papers away. He stared at the container and watched the grey cloud sway back and forth.

“I don’t know if you little frickers are dangerous or not, but I’m betting you could really get under the skin of some friends of mine.”

Louie decided to wear a hazmat suit for his second trip down to level 10. He held the container out at arm’s length the entire way, watching in revulsion as the dark mist broke into two groups, and clung up to the sides where his gloved hands were. This is bad. I think this might be really bad. He carried on anyway.

There was a computer on the desk in the reception area of level 10. Louie placed his package down carefully and went behind the counter. He sat in the chair and brought up the video image on the other side of the doors leading into the emergency evacuation living quarters. The gurney was still up against the wall, and the containers filled with disease Louie had tried to kill his co-workers with were nestled on top. There was no one in sight.

Do it fast, Louie. Open the doors, throw it against the floor, and get the hell out.

He picked the container back up and went to the doors. He hesitated putting the key card into the slot. Maybe I shouldn’t do this. Maybe I should think things over… sleep on it. He remembered Tom Braden’s condescending face on the surveillance monitor. “He’s not better than me. None of them are.” The card went in and the light turned green. The three deadbolts snapped back into the wall, and Louie opened the doors. He tossed the glass box into the air like a grenade ready to explode, and watched. It hit the floor on one corner and clunked over three times. It didn’t shatter into pieces.

“God- fucking -damn it!” Louie ran in and grabbed one of the disease sample canisters. He gripped one end in both gloved hands and swung down like a caveman wielding a club. It smashed into the glass and a spider web of cracks blossomed out. The grey mist inside merged towards it in a frenetic rush.