The End Is Nigh

David Wellington — AGENT UNKNOWN

Wilmington, DE

“Fucking animals,” Whitman hissed, as a gray hand reached for the cuff of his pant leg. He kicked it away. For a second he looked down into the man’s slack face. Nothing there. He looked lower and saw the hypodermic still plunged into the man’s arm. He tried to tell himself the junkie was just sick, a victim of a disease, but that metaphor had never really held water for him.

A field agent for the CDC, Whitman knew what diseases really were and knew that addiction was a very different kind of disorder.

He waved his flashlight around the room, looking for anyone conscious enough to tell him why he’d come here. He saw three people lounging on pieces of broken furniture or just slumped on the floor, all of them as wasted as the one who’d tried to grab him. Someone in this house had called the police to report violent behavior. The caller had reported that the violent individual was non-communicative and had bloodshot eyes. That had been enough of a red flag for the local cops to send for Whitman.

He’d been in Philadelphia two hours ago. The latest situation report said the cops had contained the suspect and would wait until he arrived before making an arrest. So far, so good—there might be a chance to get a live subject here, and that might make all the difference.

Whitman hadn’t known what he was getting into, though, when he hit the ground with his sampling gear. He’d had no idea he was walking into a shooting gallery.

He heard the crackle of a police radio and looked up. A uniformed cop waved him over, a big guy with a bristly mustache and dead eyes. “Sergeant Crispen,” he said, and shook Whitman’s hand.

“How many people are in this house?” Whitman asked.

Crispen shrugged. “Maybe a dozen. Normally we would’ve moved ’em out of here but your people said to sit on ’em instead, keep ’em here.”

Whitman nodded. “They’ll need to be quarantined, just in case. Where’s the subject?”

“Through here,” Crispen said. He flicked on his own flashlight—the house had no working lights—and gestured down a short hallway. Two more cops stood at its end, flanking a closed door.

“Do you know who called this in?” Whitman asked.

“One of the other junkies—he’s pretty messed up. We have him in the kitchen. Bites and scrapes all over him; though with this sort… who knows—could be completely unrelated. We, uh, haven’t been able to get a statement yet.”

Whitman could well imagine. If the symptoms were bloodshot eyes and aphasia, probably everyone in the house was a potential subject. “Alright,” he said. “I’d better go in and take a look.”

“The one in there’s pretty psycho. I’m not sure it’s safe—”

Whitman cut him off by pulling the Taser out of his jacket. “I’ll be okay.”

The cop looked at the weapon in Whitman’s hand and just shrugged.

The door wasn’t locked. It looked like someone had kicked it open at one point and it had never been repaired. Whitman stepped inside the dark room and moved his flashlight carefully across the furniture. He saw a dresser with no drawers, a broken television set. On the far side of the room a pile of blankets had been heaped on the floor. It was moving. Just rising and falling slowly, as if someone was under there, breathing.

“What’s your name?” Whitman called out, in case this was a false lead. “I’m Whitman. I’m here to help. Can you speak to me? Can you tell me your name?”

There was no response. The pile of blankets kept breathing. Whitman took a step closer. “I need you to say something,” Whitman announced. “Can you come out of there? Are you sick?”

The idea of reaching into those blankets with his hands made Whitman’s blood run cold. Somebody had to make an assessment, though, and he’d drawn the short stick. He looked around for a piece of wood, for anything he could use to push the blankets back. For a second or two he moved the flashlight away from the blanket pile.

When he looked back the subject was up and running across the room, straight at him. In the flashlight beam the subject’s eyes were so red they glowed.

Whitman had a moment to register what was happening. Most of that time he spent thinking to himself, teeth, nails, open sores—the things you had to stay away from, the things that could get you contaminated.

He saw the teeth all right. They were yellow and broken and they snapped at the air and they were coming right for his throat.

He brought the Taser up but never had a chance to fire it. The subject lashed out with both arms, knocking Whitman’s hands away. His flashlight spun free of his grip and Whitman felt a hundred and twenty pounds of stinking flesh collide with his chest, knocking him down, spinning him sideways.

He felt those teeth meet around his gloved hand. Felt them press down.

There was a gunshot, incredibly loud and bright in the dark room, and then people were running and shouting and Whitman’s heart beat so loud in his ears he was sure it would burst. He recovered himself and scrambled to his feet, raced out the door, down the hall, following the back of one cop who was running away from him, running toward the front door of the house, and then they were outside in the blinding sunlight. He threw one arm over his eyes but kept running. Ahead of him the street sloped down a hill, cheap houses and check cashing stores on either side, high tension wires strung overhead. He saw the cops, all three of them, and then he saw the subject, for the first time getting a clear look.

It was a woman, no, a girl of no more than twenty, dressed in nothing but an open flannel shirt and a stained pair of panties. In the sunlight her eyes just looked bloodshot. She staggered down the hill, her legs not quite working properly, her face turning in one direction, then the other. Her hair was a dark thicket of tangles that barely moved as it swung around.

Crispen and his men had drawn their guns and were shouting for her to stop. Whitman cursed as he dashed past them. If she got away—if she ducked into an alley—they might never find her again. He didn’t waste his breath shouting at her. What was left of her brain wouldn’t be able to make sense of words. He got as close as he dared and lifted the Taser, pointed it at her back.

She started to turn, to look at him, and she was hissing. Ready to fight.

He pulled the trigger. The two tiny barbs went right through her shirt, and the Taser made its horrible clacking sound. She dropped to the pavement, twitching and kicking, but she didn’t scream. She didn’t make any sound at all.

Behind Whitman, Crispen came running up, his weapon held in both hands. “You got her,” he said, over and over again, “you got her,” and Whitman could hear the relief in the cop’s voice.

“This time,” Whitman said. “Yeah.”

Atlanta, GA

Dan Philips watched from an observation suite as they brought Subject 13 in. She was alive—that was good. It was crucial.

Twelve bodies lay in a morgue deep inside the CDC complex that was Philips’ headquarters. Twelve bodies, or what was left of them. Bit by bit, organ by organ, they were being dismantled, their cells broken down in centrifuges, their bacterial and viral load analyzed by legions of technicians with scanning electron microscopes. But dead bodies could only tell you so much.

On his television screens Philips watched his field agent sign the new subject in. Nobody bothered to read her any rights or even give her any comforting words as she was shoved into a negative pressure room. Nobody touched her if they could help it. They’d bound her hands behind her back and put a plastic mask over her mouth. She was a known biter and the CDC didn’t mess around with those.

The room was kept at a slightly lower atmospheric pressure than the corridor outside, so that when the door was opened air flowed in rather than out—hopefully making sure any pathogens she carried stayed inside with her. No one was allowed into the room without wearing a level two biohazard suit. Cameras on the walls tracked her at all times, and other instruments monitored her body temperature, her heart rate, and her blood oxygen levels.

Director Philips had been a neurosurgeon, once, a long time ago. Now he had the perfect hair and twinkling eyes of a politician. He didn’t smile as Whitman stepped into the observation suite. For a long while they just watched the subject together.

Not that there was much to see. Once the suited technicians left the room, she seemed to simply collapse. With no one to bite or attack, she just crouched on the floor—ignoring the bed they’d provided for her—and rocked back and forth in what was obviously a self-comforting gesture.

Eventually, Philips cleared his throat. “You must have made record time.”

Whitman nodded. Of the twelve bodies in the morgue, not a single one had died of natural causes. Ever since they’d alerted the police networks to the new disease, Whitman was called in every time the cops found a potential subject. But it could take him hours, even days, to arrive after he got the call. The subjects were so violent the police usually had to shoot them to keep them from hurting anybody. Cops didn’t mess around with biters, either. “I was close by, and we had a helicopter ready to lift off. Everything kind of came together.”

“This is what we need,” Philips said, sighing in relief. “This is what we need to beat this thing, I know it.”

The disease that afflicted Subject 13 was definitely some kind of brain fever, they were sure of that. But that was almost the only thing they knew. When the cops had killed the previous twelve they’d ruined the best chance the CDC had to study this thing as it progressed. Subject 13 could be a very important catch.

Bringing her in alive also meant they could get some epidemiological data, too. They couldn’t question her—like all of the subjects, she was completely incapable of speech—but they could study her clothing for any trace of environmental toxins, look at her teeth to get an idea of her diet. The clue to identifying the pathogen could come from anywhere.

They definitely needed some kind of clue. 13, and the twelve bodies in the morgue, were just the tip of the iceberg, they were sure. There was no way to know how many other people had been infected with the pathogen, how many people they’d missed. Early cases might have been dismissed as PCP overdoses or just psychotic breaks. Subjects might have wandered out into traffic and gotten themselves killed before they were diagnosed.

If they were going to figure this thing out—isolate the pathogen and come up with a vaccine or at least some kind of treatment—they needed information, and that meant finding a live subject. Whitman had been given that duty because he was a senior field agent.

“What’s her name?” Philips asked.

Whitman blinked in surprise. “Sorry?”

“Her name,” the Director repeated. “She must have one.”

Whitman thought for a second but nothing came to him. “They told me but… I forgot. It’s in my report.” He rubbed his temples with his fingertips as if that would jog his memory. “It’s been a long day, Director, and if—”

Philips reached over and grabbed Whitman’s right hand.

Both of them looked at the two red dots on Whitman’s index finger, tiny bruises that were clearly the imprints of teeth.

Philips raised an eyebrow.

He didn’t need to ask aloud. Whitman knew what the question was. “She bit through my glove. Yeah. But she didn’t break the skin.”

“You’re absolutely certain?”

Whitman looked away. “Absolutely.”

Philips wondered if his agent was telling the truth. He had a strong enough incentive to lie. If he had been infected, if there was any chance, well—Whitman would very quickly find himself in a negative pressure room of his own. But Philips knew he needed Whitman, still. He nodded and turned back to the monitors, back to watching 13 rock back and forth.

Atlanta, GA

This was a bad one.

Whitman had been through some bad ones before. After washing out of med school with a biology degree, he’d joined the CDC just in time to get in on the circus that was SARS. He’d see outbreaks of cholera and TB in cities up and down the eastern seaboard, and of course the e. coli flare-ups that hit every time a restaurant tried to save some money by buying second-grade meat. As a field agent, he didn’t even have the luxury of looking at it all through a microscope or the plastic viewport of a containment suit. He’d been down in the streets with the panicking victims, often wearing no more than a surgical mask and a pair of latex gloves, covered in blood and much worse day after day. The bad ones left him with nightmares and a need to wash his hands every time he passed a sink.

This one… it was worse, maybe. Nobody had coughed in his face on this case, nor had he had to watch anybody die. But he knew those bloodshot eyes were going to haunt him.

There was nothing there. Nobody home.

The nice thing about the bad ones, of course, was that they didn’t last. Killer pathogens had a way of burning themselves out, wiping out their host populations before they could pass on their genes, or simply mutating out of the killer phase. In the worst cases it just meant somebody had to isolate the pathogen and find a counteragent in a hurry. And he wouldn’t be the one pulling all-nighters for a week to make that happen.

The very best thing about the bad ones was that he got to go home. He wasn’t the one who had to make the decisions about who to quarantine, or who got the actual vaccine and who got the very convincing placebo.

That night, he managed to sleep for nearly seven hours in a row with no one bothering him. When the phone rang, he answered it. Because he knew if he didn’t they would start texting him. And if he ignored the texts they would send someone to knock on his door. He had signed the contract and he knew it said he was always on call.

“I’m on vacation,” he told the phone. “Call me in three days.”

It was Philips. Not a good sign, if the Director was making the call himself. “All vacation time is rescinded, as of now.”

“You’re taking away my days off for—”

Philips’ voice got very, very serious. “Vacation time is rescinded for all CDC personnel until further notice.”

Whitman got out of bed, the cell phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder as he grabbed his pants. The CDC employed 15,000 people. If they were all being called in, that meant one thing.

Epidemic.

“Where am I going?” Whitman asked.

“Flagstaff.”

“Arizona? Seriously?”

All thirteen known cases of the mystery brain disorder had come from the northeast corridor, from Vermont down to Washington, DC. What the hell was it doing out west?

Whitman buttoned his shirt one-handed. “Did 13 tell us something?” he asked.

“Nothing we wanted to hear.”

Flagstaff, AZ

Whitman had a welcoming party waiting for him when his plane landed: the local sheriff, a guy in a short-sleeve, button-down shirt from Public Health, and a couple of ranchers in cowboy hats and permanent tans. Whitman might have sent the ranchers away until the sheriff explained the situation.

Subject 14 was alive, and he wasn’t going anywhere. It looked like he might have been some kid, some teenager just out for a long drive in the desert. Now he was stuck in a barbed wire fence. He kept trying to drag himself free, pulling at his clothes and his leg where it was tangled in the wire. The fence marked the divide between two pastures—hence the ranchers, who argued the whole time about who was liable if the kid died on the fence.

“I figure if he just calmed down a second, thought it through, he could get himself free,” the sheriff said. They had parked about two hundred yards from where 14 was stuck. He hadn’t shown any sign of noticing them yet. Whitman was happy to keep his distance. “He’s not firing on all cylinders, is he?” He handed a pair of binoculars to Whitman.

Bloodshot eyes. A lot of open wounds on that leg. This was going to be dicey.

Whitman frowned. “What’s that stuff by his feet? Looks like a torn-up paper bag. Was he carrying that when you found him?”

“We had orders not to approach, but it took you twelve hours to get out here after we called it in,” the guy from Public Health said. “I had a sandwich in my car—it was going to be my lunch. I got as close as I dared and then I tossed it to him.”

“Did he eat it?” Whitman asked.

“The sandwich and part of the wrapper it came in. I was worried he might choke.”

Through the binoculars Whitman watched as 14 pulled and pulled at the wire. A piece of his pantleg tore free, curling down over his knee cap.

No, Whitman thought. That wasn’t his pant leg. It was the skin of his thigh.

Limited pain response, he thought, adding to the catalog of symptoms for this new disease. Maybe some kind of neuropathy?

The immediate problem was that 14 was now one third of the way free of the fence. A couple more tugs and he would be out and running right toward them, looking for someone to bite or scratch.

Whitman made a call to bring in a helicopter that could take 14 away from all this. Then he waded across the pasture, looking out for cow pats, and pulled his Taser from his jacket. 14 went down, slumping across the fence.

“You have any wire cutters?” Whitman asked the sheriff. “I’m going to have to cut him free.”

One of the ranchers took off his cowboy hat and slapped it against his leg. “Who’s gonna pay to fix the damage to my fence?”

The helicopter lifted away from the field and carried subject 14 off, and the ranchers dispersed. The sheriff waited in his truck while Whitman made some calls. As he was finishing up, the weedy guy from Public Health came trotting up, a serious look in his eye.

“This, uh… well, anything I should know about this?” he asked.

Whitman switched off his phone and looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Just. You know. Should I tell the local doctors to be on the lookout for anything? Any precautions they should take?”

Whitman frowned.

He could tell the man what they’d discovered from studying subject 13. He could say that it was fluid-borne. They’d traced 13’s history enough to know she once shared needles with subject 8. They’d also found a link between subject 5 and subject 2: 5 had donated blood once, and 2 had received some of it in a transfusion following an appendectomy.

But—why didn’t the Public Health guy know that already? It was the first break in the case, and it should have gone out to every doctor in the country, every police department, every public health official. So far the CDC had kept the media from finding out about the mystery illness—no need to cause a panic—but the caregivers should already have been notified.

If this guy didn’t know what was going on, that meant Director Philips didn’t want him to know. For reasons Whitman couldn’t imagine.

Still.

“Nope,” Whitman said. “Nothing to worry about. If something comes up, we’ll be sure to let you know.”

Atlanta, GA

Back in the observation suite again. A new living subject. Philips sipped at his coffee. He felt like he hadn’t slept in days.

“What’s going on?” Whitman demanded. “Damn it, I have a right to know, at least. You’ve got me out in the field, putting myself at risk. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have your two live subjects—”

“Six,” Philips interrupted.

“What?”

The director sat back in his chair. Whitman was right, he decided. He should know what was going on. “Did you think you were the only field agent I had working on this? We’ve got six live subjects in the negative pressure rooms.”

He watched Whitman’s jaw fall open. “How many? How many reported cases?”

Philips took a long, deep breath before answering. “Eighty-nine. Confirmed.”

“How long has this been going on?” Whitman asked.

“The first case we’re sure about showed up seven years ago. For a long time then there was nothing. We thought it was just some fluke. But then more of them came to light,” Philips said.

Whitman shook his head. He walked across the room to where a monitor showed the feed from Subject 13’s room. She was still sitting there, rocking back and forth. She’d moved to a different corner of the room but that was the only change.

“What’s going on?” Whitman asked.

“Tell me something, first,” Philips said. “Tell me why you didn’t finish medical school.”

Whitman grimaced. “I wasn’t empathetic enough, they said. My bedside manner was lousy.”

“When you didn’t know 13’s name, I thought as much,” Philips told him. “Most doctors—we aren’t equipped for this. We take an oath, you see. ‘First, do no harm.’ Even when it could save other lives.”

“What are you getting at?” Whitman demanded.

Philips nodded at the screen. At subject 13.

“The President called me this morning.”

“The President of the United States?” Whitman asked. “He’s been briefed about this case?”

“He’s being updated every twelve hours.”

Philips closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

“He called… to give me the authorization to find this thing no matter what it takes. You see, we can’t detect anything in her system. No virus. No bacterium, no fungal infection, no parasites. This thing’s invisible.”

“For now,” Whitman pointed out. “We couldn’t find HIV for a long time, either, but we did.”

Philips shook his head. “It isn’t like that. And anyway, we don’t have time to find out. This thing is spreading, and it’s moving fast. We have eighty-nine confirmed cases today. We could have a thousand tomorrow. The President gave me authorization to euthanize her and do an autopsy.”

Whitman was stunned. “But she’s a… a living person. A human being. She may be brain dead, but she still has basic rights.”

“Not, apparently, in the face of an epidemic. I was supposed to do it this morning, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to kill her, even in the name of public good. Though maybe it’s not just squeamishness. I have a suspicion I know what it actually is. But oh, Lord, do I want to be wrong this time.”

He looked up at Whitman with pleading eyes. The question went unasked but they both knew it. Philips desperately wanted Whitman to say he would do it. Go down to the negative pressure room and kill Subject 13 so they could cut her open.

But Philips knew it couldn’t be that easy.

First thing in the morning, they came for subject 13.

She was in a straitjacket and her facial mask, but they didn’t take any chances. A technician in a bite-proof containment suit stood outside the room and shot her with a massive dose of sedative. Once she was unconscious they strapped her to a gurney and wheeled her into an operating room where three doctors waited. One of them was Philips.

Each of the doctors had a hypodermic needle. Two of them were filled with harmless saline solution. The other had the same chemical cocktail used for lethal injections in prisons. None of the doctors knew which of them had the bad needle.

That was intentional.

One by one they made their injections.

Chicago, IL

Whitman wasn’t asleep when the next call came in. Somehow he’d known it was coming. Another mission.

“This one’s a little different,” Philips told him.

He was on a plane an hour later. Fully briefed by the time he set down.

The church had been Catholic once, but it had been sold to some other denomination. Whitman didn’t bother finding out which one. Outside, a dozen policemen stood around looking bored—nobody had told them what was going on. Inside the church was all frothy stonework and stained glass and lanterns hanging from chains. Holy men in severe suits stood around wringing their hands and clutching bibles, unwilling to meet Whitman’s gaze.

A middle-aged woman called his name and told him to come with her. She led him down a flight of stairs into a basement with tan-painted walls that glared in the overhead fluorescents.

“How long has this been going on?” Whitman asked.

The woman wouldn’t make eye contact, either. The church had fought with the CDC, even threatened legal action. A federal judge had slapped that down—the church had no choice but to turn over its parishioners now. “About thirty-nine months,” the woman said. She was in charge of the church’s community outreach. Running homeless shelters and literacy programs. And their hospice.

“The doctors said there was nothing they could do,” she explained. “We kept them fed, gave them clothing, and kept them clean. Was that so wrong?”

Whitman ignored her and went to the door she indicated. A small glass panel reinforced with chicken wire looked into what might have been a classroom once. There were cots lined up inside, though nobody was using them. Instead, the room’s inhabitants sat on the floor, rocking back and forth, hugging themselves. They were mostly naked and they looked filthy.

“We did what we could,” the woman said in a quiet voice.

There were twenty-five people in that room, at least. Every one of them a living subject. A sufferer of the new pathogen.

“Jesus,” Whitman said.

“Please, in this place, don’t take His name in vain,” the woman said.

Whitman stared at her. “You just herded them in there, together, and… and warehoused them? These people need medical care.”

“Their families couldn’t afford to look after them. Neither can we. When it was just one or two of them at a time, maybe… but there are more every day.”

Whitman shook his head. He didn’t even know how to proceed.

Atlanta, GA

Subject 13 died with a long, sustained breath that just… stopped. In the observation suite, Philips covered his eyes and wept for a moment. Then he pulled on a level four containment suit and headed down to the surgery. He plugged in the various hoses for his air supply. Checked the seals on his gloves. Picked up a bone saw and got to work.

The top of subject 13’s skull came away in one neat, clean piece. Philips had been a very good surgeon, once.

With a scalpel he cut away her brain and lifted it into a waiting pan. A nurse took it away to the microtome room, where it would be cut down into exceedingly thin slices. The slices would then be prepared on microscope slides.

Philips closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see what came next.

But it was his job. And nobody else was volunteering to do it for him.

Chicago, IL

“Keep it moving, don’t let them get up if you can,” Whitman called through the door. Inside the room, a dozen cops were squeezed in with the subjects, outnumbered but at least they had all the advantages he could give them. They’d waited for proper gear to come in—riot armor, face shields, heavy bite-proof gloves. One by one they got the subjects ready for transport. In contrast with the cops’ high-tech gear, they’d gone primitive for the restraints—plastic self-locking loops for handcuffs and thick canvas bags to put over the subjects’ heads. A fleet of ambulances stood outside, waiting to take the subjects away.

Whitman turned to the woman who had been caring for the subjects all this time. She was weeping openly, now. “You said you cleaned them—I assume that means you hosed them off once a week. Did you or your staff have any direct contact with them?”

The woman stared at him through her tears. “Of course,” she said. “We didn’t treat them like animals.”

Whitman lifted one hand in perfunctory apology. It didn’t give him pleasure to be mean to people. He just didn’t have time for bullshit. “Were any of you bitten?”

“It… happens,” the woman said, with a shrug.

Crap. Whitman had a feeling he was going to have to bring the church staff in as well, if just for observation.

“No one ever got sick from a bite, so we assumed it wasn’t contagious,” the woman explained.

Inside the room someone shouted. Whitman couldn’t make out the words. He stepped toward the doorway, just in time to see a cop smash a subject’s teeth out with his baton. Another cop waded through the subjects to try to help, but three of the infected grabbed him and pulled him off his feet.

One of them started tearing the cop’s face shield off.

“Out now!” Whitman shouted, but it was too late. The cops all drew their batons and started laying into the subjects around them. But there was no order to it, no discipline. They were just scared.

Whitman reached for the nearest cop and grabbed his shoulder. The man whirled around and smacked Whitman right in the gut with his baton. Whitman fell backwards, out of the doorway, clutching his stomach.

That was when everything went to shit.

Atlanta, GA

Philips adjusted the focus on the microscope. It didn’t help. The tiny holes were there and couldn’t be ignored. It was exactly what he’d expected to see.

“Give me sample 39a,” he said, and a technician changed the slide. Philips didn’t even lift his head from the eyepieces. Pink and white ovals filled the view, looking a great deal like a close-up of a slice of salami. That was normal, it was what healthy brain tissue looked like. But subject 13 hadn’t been healthy. This slice of her brain, like all the others, was riddled with thousands of microscopic holes. Like it had been eaten away by tiny mice working at random.

“Sample 40a,” Philips said.

Chicago, IL

A man in a black suit ran screaming from the church, his face torn open and blood soaking into his collar. The stained glass windows lit up from inside with the bright flashes of gunshots. Whitman stumbled out of the church, one arm wrapped around the screaming woman who had run the hospice program. She was unhurt but inconsolable. He pushed her away from him and turned around to look back inside. A subject in a torn sweatshirt was stomping up the pews, blood slicking the front of his jaw. A cop was down by the pulpit, not moving.

Whitman grabbed his Taser from inside his jacket. He fired it into the subject’s chest and the subject went down, at least momentarily. Whitman ran over to the cop and checked his pulse. The cop was alive and breathing but he wasn’t getting up. Shock, Whitman thought. The man had succumbed to shock after getting three of his fingers bitten off.

Whitman had enough medical training to know what to do. He took off his belt and wrapped it around the cop’s wrist, pulling it as tight as he could to make a tourniquet.

Behind him the subject pulled himself back onto his feet, using the side of a pew for leverage. He didn’t make a sound.

Whitman grabbed for his Taser again, but that was useless—it was a one-shot weapon. He’d never needed more than one shot before.

The subject took a halting step toward him. It was still shrugging off the effects of the Taser.

Another step.

Behind Whitman, more subjects were coming up the stairs.

Washington, DC

There were other people in the room, but Philips barely noticed them. He forced himself to make eye contact with the President. He forced himself to speak.

“Our finding is that this is a prion disease,” he said.

The President must have been given a pre-briefing, because he said, “Like Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or Kuru? I’m not entirely sure what a prion is.”

Philips nodded. “Those two diseases are prion diseases, yes. A prion is a kind of pathogen that is not technically alive. A protein that has gotten folded the wrong way. Prions are normally only spread by exposure to brain tissue from an infected individual. But this one is different. It has… well, mutated is the wrong word. But it has changed. This one is spread by fluid contact.”

“Like a virus.”

“Yes. But unlike viruses even the slightest exposure is enough to infect someone. The prion enters the brain and once there it cannot be ejected. Our bodies’ immune systems do not react to its presence at all. Safe inside its host, it begins to replicate. It makes more copies of itself. Over time these copies have a destructive effect on the brain tissue.”

“How destructive?”

Philips cleared his throat. “Over time they lead to complete failure of the cerebrum. This particular prion leaves a victim essentially brain dead. The subjects we observed have no higher brain function at all—no thoughts. Their inner lives are replaced completely with animal drives. Hunger. The need for sleep. Fight or flight reflexes.”

“That’s why they attack anyone they see?”

“Yes,” Philips answered. “Yes, that’s… that’s why.”

“How do we cure this? Or even treat it?”

“We can’t,” Philips said. “There’s nothing we can do for them. Once the prion has replicated enough, the brain shuts down and we can’t stop it.”

The president shook his head. “What about detection? If we catch it early enough, can we help these poor people?”

“There’s no way to detect it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There’s no test for prion infection. Nor are there any symptoms, until it’s far too late. The only way to tell if someone has this disease is to dissect their brain.” Philips tried a weak smile. “Post-mortem, of course.”

The President whispered something to one of his advisers. Then he turned to face Philips again. “How long does it take, from exposure to mental breakdown?”

“That… may be the worst part. Assuming this pathogen is similar to known prions, it could have an incubation phase of as long as twenty years.”

The President leaned forward. “You’re saying these… these subjects of yours might have gotten infected twenty years ago? That they could have been infecting other people the whole time? And we didn’t know about it until now?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Chicago, IL

Whitman fumbled with the leather strap on the cop’s belt. He was so scared his fingers barely worked.

The subject took another step closer. Its eyes glowed like red lamps.

It bent over, its jaws snapping at Whitman’s face. Fell to its knees and crawled toward him.

The catch came loose. Whitman pulled the cop’s gun free and lifted it, surprised at how heavy it was. He’d never fired a gun before. He pointed it at the subject’s face and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. The subject crawled closer. In another second it was going to bite him. Whitman kicked at it but the subject just grabbed his ankle and leaned in to bite his leg.

Safety. The safety must be on. Whitman found a little lever on the side of the gun. Flipped it down.

The subject’s teeth were inches from Whitman’s flesh.

He blew its head off. Blood and brain tissue went everywhere, some of it flecking Whitman’s face. He clamped his mouth shut to keep any of it from getting inside.

Then he turned and faced the entrance to the stairway. More subjects were coming up.

He hoped he had enough bullets.

Washington, DC

“Let’s, uh, let’s move on to recommendations,” the President said, flipping through the thin dossier Philips had brought. “You say we can’t treat these infected people. We can’t even make them comfortable.”

Philips inhaled sharply. “No. The best course there is… euthanasia. I don’t say this lightly.”

“I’m sure you don’t. But what about the healthy population? How do we keep them safe?”

“The only measure available to us is quarantine. We need to look at everyone who has reached the brain death phase very carefully. We need to look into their lives and find everyone they’ve had contact with, everyone they’ve exchanged fluids with, over the last two decades. And we need to separate those people from the healthy population. This needs to be done immediately. We won’t be able to stop the prion from spreading, not altogether. But we need to minimize that spread.”

The President studied the documents in front of him for a long while without speaking. Finally he looked up. “Anybody they’ve exchanged fluids with. You’re talking about blood transfusions, shared needles, sexual contact—”

“Sir,” Philips interrupted, “This isn’t an STD. Even the slightest contact can lead to exposure. Even so little as an open mouth kiss.”

“Every single person these infected subjects have kissed.”

“And everyone who has kissed someone they have kissed.”

“Rounded up and put in quarantine. That’s got to be a lot people.”

Philips lowered his gaze. “We’ve done the math. The spread is exponential—if one person infects ten in those twenty years, and those ten go on to infect ten others, and so on—”

“Give me a number,” the President demanded.

“Perhaps twenty percent of the entire population of the country is at risk for testing positive for the prion disease,” Philips replied.

The president’s hands trembled as he set the dossier down on the table. “One in five people, rounded up and put in camps for… for what, for twenty years until we’re sure they’re safe? That’s logistically impossible. Not to mention unconscionable.”

“It’s necessary,” Philips told him. “If we don’t do it, this will be the end of the human race.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Wellington is the author of the Monster Island trilogy of zombie novels, the 13 Bullets series of vampire books, and most recently the Jim Chapel thrillers Chimera and The Hydra Protocol. “Agent Unknown” is a prequel to Positive, his forthcoming zombie epic. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.