Pandemic Page 90

“Let me get this straight,” said D’Shawn Bosh. “You’re saying you can tell if people are infected by how fast Tylenol sells?”

Tim nodded. “Basically, yeah. I can even do it from here on the Coronado. Klimas set me up with a laptop that ties into the TSCE.”

The total s.h.i.+p computing environment gave him ridiculously high-speed Internet access, even though they were floating in the middle of an inland sea.

Bosh smiled. “Well, look at my man, here — TSCE — like he’s been in the navy all his life.”

A day ago, a comment like that would have embarra.s.sed Tim, made him wonder if these big, dangerous guys were mocking him, but not now. They loved him. He’d helped save one of their own. He’d done it under fire. It shocked him as much as it did anyone else, but when the s.h.i.+t had hit the fan he’d actually been brave.

Whatever bravery Tim had, however, paled in comparison to the man he’d helped save. A few hours earlier, a helicopter had taken Roger Levinson off the Coronado. Tim knew there was only one reason to do that: a human trial to test the inoculant against direct exposure to the crawlers kept on Black Manitou. No one else knew that, except for Levinson and probably Klimas, Levinson’s commanding officer. Their fellow SEALs didn’t know the mission, they only knew that Levinson had volunteered for some secret duty. Volun-f.u.c.king-TEERED. The courage and self-sacrifice needed to do that … Tim couldn’t quite process it.

Saccharomyces feely would soon be put to the ultimate test. If Tim’s solution didn’t work, Roger Levinson would become infected. If that happened, Tim knew, everyone and everything was screwed.

Calvin Roth, the big one, drained his shot gla.s.s, set it down on the table. “What I don’t get are all the little critters floating through people’s bodies. We drank your nasty-a.s.s yeast to protect us from crawlers, which are part plant, part us, but then there are also hydras, which maybe aren’t part plant, but are part us …”

He shook his head, pushed his gla.s.s over to Ramierez. “Fill me up, Ram. I need another shot to understand this s.h.i.+t.”

Ramierez dutifully filled the gla.s.s. Tim had to concentrate to not stare at the man’s patchy, pencil-thin mustache.

“You’re not that far off,” Tim said. “You drank the inoculant, which—”

“Camel-taint pus,” Roth said, raising his gla.s.s.

Ramierez raised his own. “I’ll drink to that. Knock ’em down, boys!”

Tim drained his gla.s.s, felt his throat burning. He set his gla.s.s on the table and made an educated guess that these men would drink to just about anything.

“Like I was saying, you guys drank the inoculant. That means even if you did get exposed to the infection when you rescued us, you’re fine, because the inoculant wipes out the infection if you take it within twenty-four hours of exposure. And if you weren’t exposed, now you’re safe as long as you keep taking the inoculant doses every couple of weeks. If you get exposed from here on out, you technically still get infected, and the infection will modify your cells to make crawlers or other things, but those things will dissolve before they can do any damage because of the catalyst that’s in your blood.”

Bosh nodded. “It’s like if we had to dive into a vat of acid to a.s.semble a bomb. All the parts of the bomb are there, but we don’t last long enough to put them together.”

Tim clapped and leaned back, almost fell over his chair. He was drunker than he thought.

“D-Day, you nailed it!”

The men had insisted Tim call them by their first names, or their nicknames: D-Day, Ram and plain-old Cal.

Ramierez shook his head. “I don’t get it. The hydras kill the infection. Why are we f.u.c.king around with this yeast when we could just, I don’t know, pre-infect ourselves with the hydras?”

Tim raised a finger. “Ah, a good point, my man. Two reasons. First, we don’t have any hydras — they went down with the Brashear. Second, even if we did have them we wouldn’t use them. Once the hydras get into your body, they start reproducing. We don’t know if they’ll stop at a certain point, or if they will keep on reproducing until there are so many of them they damage you, maybe even kill you.”

“Reproducing,” Roth said. “Little animal things in your blood, f.u.c.king away. Like a microscopic orgy?”

Tim laughed. “While I admire that a.n.a.logy more than you will ever know, my extralarge friend, the hydras reproduce as.e.xually. That means they don’t have to mate to produce offspring.”

Roth shook his head in disgust. “That’s as f.u.c.ked-up as a football bat.”

Ramierez leaned in, the half-full bottle in his hand. “They do it with themselves because they can’t get laid, just like Cal.”

Roth drained his scotch, set the gla.s.s down. “For that, little man, you get to fill my gla.s.s. And I do it with myself because I’m just that d.a.m.n good.”

“Hear hear,” Ramierez said, and poured another round of shots.

None of the fun seemed to have sunk into Bosh. To him, this was obviously serious business.

“It’s all so f.u.c.ked,” he said. “I’d rather have an enemy I can see. Alien microbes? Modified yeast? Just give me something I can shoot.”

Ramierez nodded sagely. “Wiser words were never spoken, D-Day. Come on, boys, around the horn again. Let’s see those gla.s.ses.”

Everyone pushed their shot gla.s.ses toward Ramierez. He filled all four. The SEALs raised theirs and Tim followed suit. The men let out a loud hooyah, and they drank. Half of Tim’s shot slid down the side of his face. The gla.s.s slid out of his hand. Shoddy workmans.h.i.+p, apparently — go home, shot gla.s.s, you’re drunk.