“First off,” said Joe, “I was a moderate back when elections mattered. Second, I’m in the military. Now, stop evading their questions, Monica. We come here to rescue you and we find a base that I should have been told about, a staff that’s killed themselves in remorse, and suicide messages that talk about guilt. Stop being such a hard-ass and tell us what happened.”
Benny thought that the scientist was going to argue, but instead she seemed to deflate. “Okay, okay . . . I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been alone too long. Months. Here’s the short version. I took my team to Hope One to investigate reports of mutations among the population of walkers in Washington State. I was very interested in this because mutation was deemed unlikely, since Reaper was designed to be ultra-stable. As you may or may not know, Reaper is a combination of several designer bioweapons, including nine separate viruses, fourteen bacteria, and five genetically altered parasites including the big daddy—the jewel wasp. The core is something called Lucifer 113, which was developed by the Soviets during the Cold War. That one got out of the bag a couple of times and almost lived up to its promise of being an ultimate weapon. It was stopped, though, and all known samples of it were either destroyed or sent to secure facilities like this one. But someone obtained a sample of Lucifer 113, and that sample wound up in the hands of some off-the-radar design lab, which married it to an old terrorist bioweapon called seif al din—wasn’t that one you stopped from being released, Joe?”
“Twice,” he said sadly, and then cursed.
“Our bioweapons teams were given that super-plague and tasked with creating the ultimate version, and then using that as a staring point to create a defensive protocol in case it—or anything like it—ever got out. But somehow the superstrain of it was released, our version. No one knows quite how, and we all have proof that there has never been a more aggressive or deliberately destructive disease.
“Because Reaper is driven by parasites, there’s no such thing as natural immunity, though there is a range of reaction time in terms of symptom onset, necrosis, and other factors. Bottom line: Everyone who’s exposed is infected, and everybody worldwide is exposed. Whoever released this spent years laying the groundwork. They must have introduced eggs and bacteria into water sources all over the world. We started getting wind of it almost two years before the actual outbreak. Labs were reporting the presence of the components in soil throughout the agricultural regions, in water tables and reservoirs, even in processed foods. Best guess is that these components were introduced into the biosphere beginning no later than ten years before the global outbreak. It would have needed at least that much time for the bacteria and parasites to spread. The World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration—all the power players were involved in researching the spread of the components, but no one really understood what kind of a threat it was.”
She shook her head. “In a strange way you have to admire the scope of that. A coordinated worldwide release of components of a doomsday plague. For that to happen there had to be huge money—hundreds of millions of dollars—and a large number of persons involved. Just the administration of something like that is staggering.”
“Could have been a cult,” suggested Joe as he knelt and removed Grimm’s helmet. The mastiff’s tongue lolled from between rubbery lips. “There were some big cults and pseudo-religions gaining followings around the world. My team ran into a few of them over the years. Some were well funded, highly organized, and extremely militant.”
“I thought about that too,” said McReady. “But really—who cares? The damage is done. They accomplished what they set out to do. They released a doomsday plague, and for most of the population of planet Earth, that’s what it was. Seven billion people died. If some groups hadn’t been able to find defensible positions and learn to work together instead of panicking like mice, we’d be as extinct as the dinosaurs. We’re lucky as many people survived as they did.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we heard about mutations in Washington, and we had to go check it out. The possibility of a mutation was exciting, because it meant that there was a chance of identifying the mutagen taking control of the mutation process.”
“What good would that do?” asked Lilah.
McReady nodded as if she approved of the question. “The pathogen is in a perfect form. You couldn’t make it more deadly than it is. Any change to its nature or structure would actually result in a reduction of its overall threat, because it would mean that it had shifted away from immutability. Follow me?”
“I . . . think so. If it’s changing, then it isn’t perfect anymore.”
“Smart girl,” said McReady.
Nix said, “We’ve seen some of the mutations. The R3’s. They’re so much faster and scarier.”
“Smarter, too,” said Lilah.
“How’s that a good thing?” asked Benny.
McReady shook her head. “Those are short-term effects. What’s happened is the dormant parasite eggs have been made to hatch. There are active threadworms in the newly infected, but they die off after they’ve laid eggs. As they die off, the process of host decomposition goes into a protracted stasis. We still don’t know how long a walker will last once they’ve reached the stasis point—clearly many years—and we still haven’t cracked all the science on that. Maybe someone will one of these days. Not my concern. When we set up Hope One, we found all sorts of mutations up there. Smarter walkers, faster walkers, with abilities all up and down the Seldon Scale, the evaluation method we developed after the plague started. It was exciting stuff. Dangerous, too . . . we learned the hard way about how smart and fast these mutations were. Lost a third of our staff in the first few weeks, and we lost more when we started actively l
ooking for the most extreme mutations.”
“That must have been terrifying,” said Nix.
McReady shrugged. “It was worth it. This was real science again. We were doing ten, fifteen autopsies a day, every day. Running tissue samples and other cultures around the clock. What we found was that there was a new bacteria in the mix. This is one of nature’s little jokes, because after we’d looked at every kind of organism or causal agent that might trigger the parasites to hatch, the one we found shouldn’t even have an impact on the jewel wasp, which is the parasite at the heart of the Reaper disease cluster. It is in itself a mutation; in this case it’s a mutated form of the bacteria Brucella suis, a zoonosis that primarily affects pigs. My guess is that the walkers in northern California attacked some wild pigs and wild boars, biting and infecting them but not killing them. The Reaper interacted with the bacteria Brucella suis and caused a mutation there. This probably happened early on, ten, twelve years ago. The rate and form of the mutation is consistent with exposure to radiation, so these walkers may have been survivors of the nukes dropped on San Francisco or even Seattle. In any case, you have radiation causing mutation in the walkers who bit the pigs, and then the presence of the bacteria, which allowed for further mutation. . . .”
Her voice ran down as she looked around.
“Are you following any of this?”
Benny held his thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. “About this much.”
“We met some of those infected pigs,” said Joe. “One of them nearly cut Lilah here in half.”
McReady sighed. “Live ones or dead ones?”
“Dead,” said Joe, “but spry.”
“That’s something we were afraid of. The bacteria Brucella suis allowed the Reaper pathogen to adapt to the pig’s biology. They started turning up about four years ago. We brought two from Hope One, and I radioed ahead to Dick Price to have his people get more of them for when my team arrived. He did, but in the process of bringing the infected boars to Death Valley, he may accidentally have spread the bacterial infection to the walkers in this area. In any case, he managed to get us the boars we needed. We had a pen of about forty of them for a while.”
“You kept them?” gasped Lilah.
“Of course we kept them,” said McReady. “Live boars and reanimated boars were a perfect place to grow the bacteria.”
“What happened to the boars?” asked Benny.
“When we got to the point where we’d devised a way to grow the bacteria synthetically, I ordered the boars terminated. Dick Price sent all ten of his soldiers out there. Not one of them came back.”