Pandemic Page 38

Obviously, he’d been wrong. This s.h.i.t was real. If the infection got out, it could literally end the world. Like it or not, he was smack-dab in the middle of it.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: he got to work with Margaret Montoya. The Margaret Montoya. She didn’t understand what a legend she had become in scientific circles. For reasons Tim couldn’t fathom, she seemed to be concerned with what regular people thought, people who knew nothing about science, nothing about how her genius had saved their uneducated a.s.ses.

Plus, she was fine. Margaret wanted to pretend that she and Clarence were solid, but Tim sensed friction. A marriage cracking at the seams, if it hadn’t already shattered. Tim liked his women older, smart and powerful: Margaret was all three. He was helping save the world, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t keep the game afoot. Pursuing a s.e.xy woman gave him an edge, helped distract him from worrying about the fact that he’d probably never leave this ship alive.

While that pansy Agent Otto got out of his suit, Tim made good use of the time.

“Okay, Doctor Montoya,” Tim said, “I’ve queued up the images of dead crawlers from Petrovsky and Walker. Ready for the side-by-side comparison?”

“I am. And please, call me Margaret.”

“Can I call you Red Hot Momma?”

“You may not,” she said. “The crawlers, please?”

Tim eye-tracked through his HUD menus, called up the prepared video, then grabbed and tossed it at Margaret so that both of their visor displays showed the same thing: a side-by-side progression of dead crawler images. Walker’s were on the left, Petrovsky’s on the right.

Margaret made a clucking sound with her tongue as she thought. “Walker’s crawlers, they’re in an odd state of decay. Almost like they were … melted.”

At first glance, the crawlers all looked similar to oversized nerve cells: each consisted of a large, roundish end with dendrites that extended, split, and split again like tree branches; a long, thin central body, or axon; and finally a tail end that spread out in thin axon terminals. Closer examination, however, revealed that the crawlers were actually made up of modified muscle cells that could reach, that could grab and then crawl toward the brain.

Tim had been far too busy to do any comparative a.n.a.lysis. Lives had been at stake. As he looked at the images side-by-side for the first time, he saw immediate differences.

“Walker’s aren’t decomposing the same way as Petrovsky’s,” he said. “Petrovsky’s crawlers have spreading cl.u.s.ters of black spots, starting small and expanding, like a banana that’s just starting to go bad. With Walker’s, the cell damage looks uniform, like something is affecting them all at once. You hit the nail on the head — they look like they’re melting. You didn’t see anything like that in your prior work?”

Margaret shook her head. “No, we didn’t. We studied Carmen Sanchez through the whole crawler-infection process. Nothing like this in him, or in Betty Jewell, and she was in an advanced state of the apoptosis chain reaction. This … this is new.”

She reached out, manipulating her images. Tim eye-tracked through his menu, altering his display so he saw exactly what she saw. Margaret had zoomed in on Walker’s crawler.

“Uniform damage,” she said quietly. “These crawlers started out alive, moving, then something made them start to dissolve.” She reached out again, wiped away the images from Petrovsky. Only Walker’s remained. “You said you also extracted live crawlers from Walker. Can I see them?”

Tim menued through to the video he’d recorded. “Let me get one on visual.”

The image came up. Still moving, still twitching, still reaching. He placed it side by side with the dead, melted crawler.

Margaret stared at the two images for a moment. “Walker’s crawlers are significantly different. I’ve never seen this form before.”

Tim felt his face flush with embarra.s.sment that he hadn’t spotted it himself. Unlike all the other crawler images, this one didn’t have the spreading axon terminals at the tail end, just a long, thin body and the dendrite arms on what he presumed to be the top — and even that part was unusual. Where a normal crawler’s dendrite arms looked like a stubby tree with many branches, the living sample only had five arms of varying lengths.

Margaret’s eyes changed focus. Instead of seeing the images inside her visor, she looked through them to stare at Tim.

“Feely, why the h.e.l.l didn’t you tell me they looked different?”

His face flushed deeper, but this time with anger. “I didn’t notice. There wasn’t time to do any in-depth work.”

She put her hands on her hips, a gesture that looked oddly out of place for someone wearing a bulky biosafety suit.

“Didn’t have time? Are you kidding me?”

Tim stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, Montoya, but there was a G.o.dd.a.m.n battle up top!”

Her hands slid off her hips. She looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to her that he could blow up at someone. Well, he had, and he couldn’t stop the volcano of frustration and grief that came blasting out.

“I did what I could,” he said. “There weren’t enough hands to go around. I had to make snap decisions. If I took too much time to save one man, three others would die.”

The ship’s doctors, overwhelmed. Bodies all over the deck. He’d been covered in blood … the smell of burned flesh, the screams, people begging for help … all the drugs in the world weren’t going to erase those two days. His anger faded. He saw the faces of men who had looked at him, looked right at him when he was already writing them off because they were too far gone.