Craig Dilouie - Tooth And Nail

Lewis is flooded with admiration. This woman somehow managed to stay alive for several days in virtual total darkness and with little food or water, while the Mad Dogs hunted her in the dark by sense of hearing and smell.

This is one tough broad, he thinks.

Her eyes searching blindly in the dark, she starts shouting.

“What’s she saying?” Perez asks.

“I think she’s talking in Russian,” Jaworski says.

“Right—but what’s she saying?”

“How the hell do I know what she’s saying? My people are Polish, not Russian, and I only speak American.”

Lewis drops down and squats on his haunches.

“Ma’am, it’s all right,” he says several times until she begins to calm down. “I am Sergeant Grant Lewis with the U.S. Army, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

The woman licks her lips and says dryly, “Army?”

He cracks a glow stick, which gleams bright against the dark, and holds it out to her. She seizes it with both hands and stares at its light intensely, tears streaming down her face.

“That’s right, Ma’am,” he says, flipping up his NVGs and grinning in the green glow. “We’re the U.S. Army.”

I survived

Feeling warm and safe in a pair of sneakers and oversized BDUs, Valeriya Petrova wolfs down the MRE that the soldiers handed her, washing it down with long pulls on a canteen. She blinks in the bright Command Center, its lighting the result of a few easy repairs of the emergency generator in the downstairs electrical room.

Petrova marvels at the dull, institutional colors in the Command Center, washed in fluorescent light. After days of darkness, even the dull is starkly beautiful.

She survived. Later, she will wonder why she alone survived among all of the people trapped in the building, both the research team and the mob; she will certainly feel survivor’s guilt. But not now. Right now, she is exultant just to exist.

The medic calling himself Doc Waters stands nearby, studying her closely with his arms crossed, making her nervous. Does he expect her to drop dead? She has lost weight and she is undernourished, but she is not starving. She was able to stay hydrated even after the power failed. She can’t run just yet, but she can walk just fine.

The truth is she has never felt more alive.

In any case, the time of running is over. She is with the military now. She is safe. The boys around her—they strike her as incredibly young, these beefy kids—keep talking about helicopters coming to get them. Soon, she will be airlifted to a secure place where she can isolate a new sample of the Mad Dog strain and finish her work on a vaccine.

The door opens and a young man appears. The soldiers straighten their posture and stare at him in respectful silence for a few moments as he enters the room, marking him as an officer, a leader.

He sits across from her and smiles.

“I’m Captain Bowman,” he says.

“And I am Dr. Valeriya Petrova.”

“I hope you find your new clothes acceptable, Dr. Petrova.”

“After wearing the same clothing for the past several days, I am finding this uniform perfectly comfortable, Captain Bowman.”

Neither insist on familiarity, on being called by their first names. The truth is she needs him to be Captain Bowman, her savior, and he apparently needs her to be Dr. Petrova, the scientist who can stop the plague.

“Doc tells me you’re feeling well,” he continues. “That you’re fit to travel.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he nods. “Can you tell me what happened here, Dr. Petrova?”

How can she explain the nightmare? The madness, the murders, the infection, the blood. The weak and slowly dying mob intentionally infecting the Guardsman and coming up in the elevators only to be savaged and infected by a berserk Dr. Lucas and Dr. Saunders. The endless darkness with little hope for survival, staying sane only by imagining herself in Central Park, on a blanket in Sheep Meadow, reading a book while nearby her husband and child laughed and played.

The screaming in the corridors as they all died one by one.

The slowly dimming hope that rescue would come.

The darkness that began to seep into and shroud even her memories.

“I survived,” she says, shivering.

He nods again. He understands.

“We survived, too,” he tells her. “Just yesterday, I was a second lieutenant.”

Now it is her turn to nod. She is not familiar with the military, but she gets the idea. The Army chain of command in the area has sustained significant losses.

“So the world outside. . . . It is bad?”

“Dr. Petrova, it’s so bad, there may not be a world soon.”

“I do not suppose you have any news of . . . Europe.”

“Sorry. My situation awareness was once limited to New York, and is now limited pretty much to this building. I only know ground that my men can hold by force.”

She swallows hard to choke back a sob. The Army is not in command of the city. They are refugees, like her, seeking flight. And if that is true, the same must be true in all of the big cities. Washington. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. London.

He adds, “Dr. Petrova, my superiors have instructed me to secure both you and whatever projects you were working on.” His eyes look hopeful. “A cure, I understand?”

Petrova’s eyes flicker to the other soldiers in the room.

“Clear the room,” Bowman says, his eyes never leaving her face.

The boys file out reluctantly, leaving her alone with the Captain, Doc Waters and the man who is apparently Bowman’s second in command, Sergeant Kemper. This man frightens her for some reason. While the soldiers are mostly boys, quick to grin even in their desperate circumstances, the sergeants strike her as very hard men.

“The Mad Dog disease is a separate disease,” she says, then pauses.

“I’m listening,” he tells her.

“Lyssa, as you know, is bad enough, but it is a Trojan Horse for the Mad Dog strain, which revealed itself by presenting a new vector for transmission—saliva. Biting.”

The Captain exchanges a glance with Kemper.

“That matches our understanding of the situation,” he tells her. “Go on, Doctor.”

“I isolated the Mad Dog strain and produced a pure sample, but it was ruined when the power went out and we lost refrigeration in the labs. I already forwarded my work electronically to CDC and USAMRIID before the power went out for the last time. But I need to get back into a proper lab with a proper staff to produce another pure sample and finish my work on a vaccine.”

Bowman does not appear to be satisfied with the answer. He stares at her intensely and says, “You seem to be saying there is no cure, only a vaccine, and that it will be a long time before we have such a vaccine in any quantity.”

“That is correct, Captain.”

Petrova lowers her eyes. She knows they rescued her at enormous risk to themselves, and her answer is not very satisfying to them. In part, they are here because she told a white lie to push CDC and USAMRIID to rescue her. But the scientific process is not like a military process, with quick, definitive results. One cannot shoot and kill a virus with a rifle. Science is a slow, laborious, collaborative effort. A pure sample must be grown in a cell culture. Then it must be tested for susceptibility against antiviral drugs. Then it can be distilled to produce a vaccine through a painful trial and error process. Make it too weak, and the host gains no immunity. Make it too strong, and you kill the host.

Her discovery is a major breakthrough, and it is the best shot they have at defeating the virus. Not immediately, but over time.

But the Captain was obviously hoping for immediate results. The world is ending right now. Soon, there may not be an America to defend anymore, if what he told her about the outside world is true.