‘Couple of hundred. But they would have died anyway. The penitentiaries were abandoned. COs fled, leaving convicts in their cells to starve. It’s not like anyone was going to throw open the prison gates and let a bunch of gangbangers and maniacs loose on the streets. This way, they got a few days more life.’
‘What was your part in all this?’
‘Logistics. Second Wing delivered some of the trailers. Sling loads beneath the Chinook. Brought a couple of CDC guys from Florida as well. Want me to feel bad about it? The killing? The guys working out here were fucking heroic. Proud to play a part.’
They kept walking.
A burned-out office unit. No roof. A single wall left standing.
The unit looked like it had been converted to a bio containment lab. Scraps of polythene suggested the unit might once have been hermetically sealed. Lengths of silver hose suggested elaborate air filtration. The skeletal frame sagging against the unit suggested a sequence of decon showers.
Toppled drums of solvent. Discarded bottles of bleach. A couple of ripped Tyvek suits.
Noble approached the charred wreckage. A zinc necropsy table at the centre of the ruined lab.
He kicked at sample containers among the debris, the kind of high-impact, flip-latch boxes used to transport donor organs.
Some kind of weird half-skull symbol on the lids, like someone improvised danger signs with a Sharpie.
‘I’d stay away from that shit, if I were you,’ said Trenchman. ‘That was the dissection room. They used to joke about it. Called it The Deli, cause people got laid on the counter and sliced real fine. They played music over the tannoy, but it didn’t smother the screams. Everyone hated the place. Seriously. Keep away. Bad hoodoo.’
Trenchman led Noble across the helipad to a mobile office unit. They ducked inside.
Scattered papers. Toppled chairs.
Trenchman sat on a desk.
Noble picked a ring binder from the floor and flipped pages.
‘Doesn’t anyone else want this stuff?’ asked Noble. ‘All this research, whatever the fuck it is. Might be useful to someone. Ought to be preserved.’
‘There’s nobody left. There used to be a mirror team working out of Bellevue, New York. Guess they died when the bomb dropped. Another bunch down a missile silo in Florida. Lost contact a while back.’
A sheaf of black and white photographs.
A convict strapped to a chair. A big, Slavic guy with a biker beard. A swastika tattooed at the centre of his forehead, Manson style. He exhibited the first signs of infection: one eyeball haemorrhaged black and a bunch of irregularities beneath the chest fabric of his jumpsuit hinting at the tumourous knots and ropes erupting from his skin.
A couple of tripod microphones set up in front of the guy. Headphones clamped to his head.
‘What’s the deal with the microphones? Some kind of indoctrination? Were they trying to create super-soldiers or something?’
Trenchman shook his head.
‘Most infected folk are dumber than cockroaches. Trace metabolic function. Negligible brain activity. No memories, emotions. They are effectively dead. But now and again one of these bastards starts to demonstrate a sly intelligence. And one or two of them can talk.’ Trenchman gestured to the photo in Noble’s hand. ‘That guy. Valdemar. Russian mob. Low-level enforcer. He was a star exhibit.’
Trenchman poked through clutter on one of the desks until he found a digital recorder.
‘Listen to this.’
He pressed Play.
‘Let’s start with the basics. Tell me your name.’
Long pause.
Louder, clearer:
‘Tell me your name.’
A guttural, unearthly slur:
‘Franklin Delano Fuckyourself.’
‘Do you know where you are?’
‘West of hell.’
‘Do you understand what’s going on here?’
‘Better than you.’
‘According to the ECG, your heart is beating about once a minute. You shouldn’t be conscious. Hell, you shouldn’t be alive. How do you feel, Valdemar? Tell me what it’s like.’
‘Guessing you’ll find out soon enough.’
Long pause. A faint slurp suggesting the interrogator was taking a meditative sip of coffee, gathering his thoughts.
‘Okay. I want to talk to someone else, Val. There’s something inside you. Something keeping you alive.’
Long pause.
‘Can you hear me? I’m talking to the thing inside Valdemar. Can you understand what I’m saying?’
Long pause.
‘I know you’re in there, looking through Val’s eyes. Use him. Use his mind, his speech. Please. Talk to me directly.’
Another long pause, then the microphones picked up a slow exhalation like a venomous hiss.
‘Val. The thing in your head. The thing that’s taken over your body, invaded your mind. What can you tell me about it? Can you tell me what it wants?’
The convict’s voice, tired, broken:
‘Help me. Please. It won’t let me die.’
Trenchman shut off the recorder.
‘Is that what all this shit is about?’ asked Noble, gesturing to the paperwork and trashed laptops carpeting the floor. ‘They were trying to talk to the disease?’
‘The virus isn’t some mutated strain of Ebola or Spanish Flu. It’s way more complex. Super-lethal, super-adaptive. Some of the guys that studied its behaviour started to think it might, on some level, be sentient.’
‘A self-aware disease?’
‘It dropped out of the sky with a bunch of contaminated Soviet space junk. Maybe it’s some kind of messed-up bioweapon. Or maybe it originated from somewhere else entirely.’
‘Somewhere else.’
‘That’s the one question that nags at anyone who studied this disease. Where exactly did it come from?’
Trenchman thumbed through pictures.
The same convict, strapped in the chair, the crown of his head removed, exposing brain. Electrodes sunk in his parietal cortex like a row of acupuncture needles. The convict was looking up, and to the left.
‘Eyes always point to the site of a stroke, ever hear that?’ said Trenchman, gesturing to the picture. ‘They turn towards the point of cerebral occlusion.’
‘Talking to a virus,’ said Noble, shaking his head. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘Pretty interesting project, right? What if you could interview a brain tumour? What if cancer could talk? What would it have to say?’
‘So how did they go about negotiating with a virus?’
‘They tried everything to establish a common language. They used mathematics as a universal baseline. Fired synaptic impulses, ran sequences of prime numbers, logic gates, all kinds of shit way beyond my pay grade.’
‘Did the disease ever answer back?’
‘No. The head CDC guy was the conservative type. Didn’t say much. But last time I was here he was in a bad way. Big sense of failure. He and his boys came out here looking for some kind of breakthrough. But, in the end, they achieved jack shit, so he took to his trailer with a case of Scotch. I got him talking. He reckoned the virus understood their communications well enough. Reckoned all the while Disease Control were studying the disease, it was studying them back. Some kind of hive mind. A single intelligence. Every infected bastard the world over is a facet of a vast, all-seeing eye.’
‘So I guess that’s definitive,’ said Noble. He crouched and stuffed jumbled papers into his backpack. ‘No vaccine. No cure.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And no reasoning with it.’