Scott Sigler: Pandemic

The girls were pulling on sweatshirts of their own, stepping into form-fitting jeans. The temperature was dropping.

“I’m not lazy,” Steve said to Bo Pan. “I’m efficient — my work is done, remember?”

The old man shook his head. “No longer. We have a search location.”

Steve sat up. He forgot about the girls, forgot about the sun.

“A location?”

The older man smiled, showing the space where his front right incisor once resided.

A location . Five years of effort, millions of dollars spent — Steve didn’t know exactly how much, but it was a lot — the whole reason his family and the People’s Party had hidden him away in this inflamed hemorrhoid of a town, and now it was finally his moment to shine. He didn’t know what to think, how to feel. Afraid? Excited? After all this time, was it finally his turn?

“A location,” Steve repeated. “How did we get it?”

Bo Pan shrugged. “The American love of money knows no bounds.”

“No, I mean how did we, or they — or whatever — get the location? Satellite? Did someone properly model the entry angle? Did someone find…” His voice trailed off.

Did he dare to hope?

Gutierrez’s green men. The story of the century. Steve’s task: build a machine that could dive, undetected, to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Could there be actual pieces of an alien spacecraft?

“Wreckage,” he said. “Did someone find wreckage ?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “You don’t need that information.”

Steve nodded automatically, acquiescing to Bo Pan as if the man was something more than a simple go-between.

Wreckage. It had to be. Steve had finished work on the Platypus three months earlier. His baby was more a piece of art than a cutting-edge unmanned underwater vehicle. It sat in a crate like a caged animal, unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose. Other than midnight test runs, there had been no point in putting the UUV to work. Unless Steve knew where to look, he couldn’t have the machine go out and explore 22,400 square miles of Lake Michigan.

But now, they had a location.

The old man cleared his throat, dug his left pointer finger into the folds of flesh below his left eye, rubbed there. “When I last spoke with you, you said you had researched a local vessel that could take your machine far out on the water?”

Steve nodded. “JBS Salvage.”

“A small operation, as I asked? Not a big fleet of ships?”

“Just two men,” Steve said. “Only one boat.”

“Good. And you check on them frequently?”

“Every week.” A lie; a lie fueled by a stab of fear that maybe JBS had finally landed a job, that they wouldn’t be available. It had been three weeks since he’d even bothered to see if their boat was still in port.

Bo Pan cleared his throat again. This time, he spit phlegm onto the dirt. “Can you talk to them right now?”

“Of course,” Steve said, that feeling of foolishness growing. Why hadn’t he checked every week? Bo Pan was right — Steve had been lazy. If they had to find another company to carry the Platypus to the target area, how long would that take? Days? Weeks?

Bo Pan’s eyes narrowed. “You seem unsure.”

“It’s fine,” Steve said. “I got this.”

“And your strange machine… it is ready? There is nothing you need to tell me?”

Steve smiled: that was something he didn’t have to lie about.

“My gear is ready to rock, playa.”

Bo Pan nodded. “Good, good. They will be happy to hear that. If you hire the boat company today, how soon do you think we can leave?”

Steve felt a small burning in his chest. “We?”

Bo Pan looked away, embarrassed. “They want me to go with you.”

Of course. There had to be something to diminish the moment. Steve would be stuck on a boat with this old man for days, maybe even weeks. Well, that was a small price to pay to finally put the Platypus to work.

And, at the very least, it was better than rolling up forks and knives in napkins.

“I’ll go see JBS right now,” Steve said. “Maybe we can leave in a day or two.”

Bo Pan slid both of his hands into his sweatshirt’s front pocket. He pulled out a thick envelope and a cell phone.

He handed the envelope over. “Tonight,” he said. “Make them leave tonight .”

Steve took the envelope. It felt solid, heavy, a brick of money.

Bo Pan then handed Steve the cell.

“Call me when you know,” Bo Pan said. “Use this phone only. I am already prepared for the trip.”

The old man turned and walked across the park grass, headed for his rust-spotted, ten-year-old Chevy pickup.

Steve turned back to face the water. The girls were gone. The wind was already growing from a stiff breeze into shirt-pulling gusts. November was supposed to be the worst time to be out on Lake Michigan.

Five years preparing for this day. No, more like nine considering that they’d recognized his intelligence early and sent him to Berkeley, readying him for a project that would require a brilliant, deeply embedded engineer. Embedded? That wasn’t even the right word. Steve had been born right here, in Benton Harbor. He was as American as those girls, and yet he longed to serve a country he had never seen.

A lifetime of waiting for a chance to serve his people, his heritage, and now — perhaps — his moment had finally come.

He just hoped no one would get hurt.

Sitting on the couch in her living room, Margaret felt newly aware of how much she had fallen apart.

Clarence sat on her left, as he if were really still by her side. That made him a liar. She wanted to hate him. He’d tightened the tie, dabbed the forehead, and once again looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of Government Agent Quarterly .

In a chair across from them sat Murray Longworth, director of the Department of Special Threats. Or, as people in the know tended to call it, the second-most-powerful agency you’ve never heard of .

A black cane lay across Murray’s lap, the handle atop it a twisted, brass double helix shape of DNA. Murray Longworth hadn’t aged well. He looked frail, as if somehow he’d bathed in Detroit’s nuclear glow and was slowly melting like a candle left sitting on a heater. His dark-gray suit was a little too big; Margaret guessed it had been tailored for him several years ago, several pounds ago.

A thick man in a black suit — a suit so indiscernible from Clarence’s the two men might as well have been wearing matching uniforms — stood behind Murray’s chair. A flesh-colored coil ran from a tiny, hidden earpiece to somewhere behind his neck. The man stared straight ahead, seeing everything and looking at nothing.

Three men in suits. She hadn’t bothered changing. Her sweatpants had two small holes in the left knee and an avocado stain on the right thigh. She hadn’t showered in three days. Margaret wondered if she smelled.

Murray forced a smile, his old, wrinkled face cracking like a windshield hit by a brick.

“Hello, Margaret,” he said. “You look like a bag of assholes.”

The man’s penchant for pleasantries hadn’t changed.

“And you look like an ad for a convalescent home,” Margaret said. “Isn’t there a mandatory retirement age in government work?”

Another smile, this one genuine. “I wish I could retire. My wrinkled old ass should be in a fishing boat in Florida, catching redfish and croakers.” The smile faded. “Not everybody gets that choice.”

Margaret felt a wave of guilt. Murray Longworth was over seventy, possibly even seventy-five. He worked ridiculous hours for a department that barely existed on paper, a department tasked with anticipating and defeating the country’s next biological nightmare. He was right: he should be retired, and yet he served every day while she sat on her behind and hid from the world.