Gideon's Corpse

72

Simon Blaine stumbled backward with a cry as the puck struck the floor and split open, spewing its contents with a puff of condensation, the pieces of plastic and glass bouncing off the door frame and skittering across the floor. He could see the crystalline powder melt on contact with the floor.

With lightning clarity his mind saw the future: the sealing off of Washington and its suburbs, the quarantine, the inexorable spread of the disease, the frantic and useless vaccination efforts, the galloping pandemic, the mobilizing of the National Guard, the riots, the ports closed and borders sealed, curfews, states of emergency, bombing sorties, war along the borders with Canada and Mexico… And of course the total collapse of the US economy. He saw these things with a certainty born of knowledge. These were not speculations: this was exactly how it was going to happen, because he had already seen it happen to the enemy in their computer simulations, over and over again.

All this flashed through his brain in a few seconds. He knew they were all likely infected already; the disease was as catching as the common cold, and the amount of smallpox in the puck represented a staggering quantity of virus, enough to directly infect almost a hundred million people. With the shattering of the puck, it had been rendered airborne. They were already, all of them, breathing it in. He and the rest of them were dead men.

He saw all this with a horrific lucidity. And then he became aware of the shouts, the cries of the soldiers, the hollering of Dart.

“Don’t move,” he said in a commanding voice. “Don’t stir the air. Stop yelling. Shut up.”

They obeyed him. Instant silence.

“We need to get the building sealed,” he said, with a strange, sudden calm that surprised even himself. “Now. If we can keep everyone inside, we might just contain it.”

“But what about us?” Dart asked, his face white.

“We’re finished,” said Blaine. “Now we need to save our country.”

A long silence. A soldier suddenly screamed and bolted, leaping over the doorsill and tearing off down the hall. Without hesitation, Blaine drew his weapon, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger. The old Peacemaker kicked with a roar and the soldier went down, screaming and gargling.

“Fuck this, I’m putting a suit on,” Dart said, his voice breaking, scrabbling at the rack, pulling down suits. “We’ll be safe in the lab!” Several suits fell off the rack with a crash and now the soldiers rushed in, grabbing at suits, shoving one another, all semblance of discipline vanished.

Multiply that panic by a hundred million, Blaine thought. That’s what the country was facing.

His eye fell back on the faint, damp patches where the crystallized virus and its substrate had sprayed across the floor and walls. It was unspeakable. He couldn’t believe Gideon had actually done it. Blaine knew he was perfectly willing to give his life for his country—in fact he had expected to—but not like this. Not like this.

And then he noticed something.

He bent down. Looked closer. Got on his hands and knees. And then reached out and picked up the broken puck. A small serial number was stamped on the side, along with an identification label in tiny type:

INFLUENZA A/H9N2 KILLED

“My God!” he cried. “This isn’t smallpox! We’ve been tricked. Spread out, search the building, find him! This is a different puck. He switched pucks. He’s still got the smallpox! He’s still got the smallpox!”