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“YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT A LOT of things,” said Karen, “but there’s so much more to the story. Even I don’t know all of it, but . . . well . . . I know a lot.”
“How do you know?” asked Gutsy.
“Some of it was stuff I knew from when the town council was formed. They know too. Half the guards know. Some of the people in town, too. Some are in on it, and I mean really in on it. They’re not really townsfolk. They’re spies, plants. Or maybe they’re watchdogs. A little of all of that.” Karen folded her hands on the tabletop. “Other stuff I pieced together from things I heard or saw. And some of it was told to me because of my job and they needed me to be able to cooperate.”
Everyone nodded.
“The stories about a hidden base are true,” said Karen. “It’s here. The official name is the Laredo Chemical and Biological Weapon Defense Research Facility. You won’t have heard of it. It was what they called a black budget site. Actually illegal according to a whole lot of treaties with other countries. All bioweapons testing was supposed to have been stopped by the major powers, but none of them ever really stopped. They kept going in secret on the as
sumption that other countries would still be developing their biological warfare weapons, and if we stopped doing research we wouldn’t be prepared. They fudged their way through congressional budget hearings by saying that their whole purpose was to study bioweapons in order to create vaccines and countermeasures.” She cut a look at the teenagers. “Do you understand any of that?”
“Enough,” said Alethea. “We’ve had pretty good history and science teachers.”
The Chess Players gave her small nods and smiles.
“Okay,” said Karen, “so the base was already here. Secret, hidden. Then the End happened. It wasn’t an attack by another country, but the plague that was used had been developed in Russia back in the 1980s, during the Cold War. It wasn’t a virus or a bacterium. It was a parasite like the green jewel wasp and some others. They wanted a bioweapon that would not only infect the host, but drive the host to aggressively spread the parasite larvae through bites. They also engineered it so the infected would feed on animal proteins in order to keep going, even while shutting down a lot of the body’s unnecessary functions—higher reasoning, natural human reproduction, and like that. They wanted a host that was all about protecting and perpetuating the bioweapon, and that’s what they got. The inventor, Dr. Herman Volker, made it worse, though, because he genetically reengineered the parasites so that they no longer had a normal life cycle. Like some jellyfish and these tiny freshwater animals called hydra, the parasites were designed to endlessly regenerate. All they need is protein, and not much of that. When they don’t get protein, they go into a kind of hibernation, which is why you sometimes see los muertos just standing there, year after year. Never quite rotting all the way to nothing. Everything the living dead do, everything they are, was designed into them.”
“What is the basis for the plague, then?” asked Urrea. “What are the parasites?”
“They used different kinds of parasites found in nature,” explained Karen. “The bioweapon was called Lucifer, and there are a lot of different versions of it. The one that started the plague was Lucifer 113, the one Dr. Volker redesigned after he defected to the States.”
She explained about Dr. Volker’s warped idea of punishment for a serial killer at a prison in Western Pennsylvania. She explained how the unfortunate arrival of a major storm slowed down the police and military attempts to control the spread of the outbreak, and how it then went on to spread around the world as people fled the area. Movement of populations via cars, trains, and planes helped it spread.
Gutsy felt like she’d been punched in the face. She glanced around at the looks of horror on the faces of everyone at the table. Even Karen. Or maybe especially Karen, since this was knowledge she had been carrying around with her.
“After the End,” continued Karen, “the base here kept working, and they established a field lab too. Both of them are still here. All this time they’ve been trying to come up with a cure, with treatments for those who are infected but not yet turned. They’re also trying to modify the behavior of the fully infected.”
“Modify?” asked Spider.
“I’m getting to that. Originally they scrambled to come up with a mutating agent to disrupt the parasite life cycle in the hopes that Lucifer 113 would become inert. They tried different versions on animals, trying to find a species that could be infected, but they didn’t have much luck. That was part of the design of the bioweapon, because the last thing they wanted was infected flies, mosquitoes, rats . . . or any of that.”
“People have been talking about los muertos wild pigs,” said Alethea.
Karen nodded. “Sure. Pigs are biologically close to humans. So are monkeys, and there were a lot of test animals at the base. Didn’t work, though. The wild boars escaped from the lab somehow and since then have attacked everything, including other pigs and even other animals. I heard something about them hoping that if the infected mated with or infected wild boars it might result in the wild boars developing some kind of immunity. But no. It was all a mess. What did happen out there was that some other kinds of animals survived the bites. All kinds of species, and the mutated strain in the hogs somehow broke through the resistance and caused interspecies infection. And some of them had babies. The babies were different. They carried the disease in radical new forms, and none of them were benign. It seemed that every generation, every new strain, was either just as dangerous as the original, or more so.”
“All kinds of animals?” asked Spider.
“I doubt anyone knows the answer to that. The base had small testing stations all over, mostly disguised as small settlements of refugees, but most of them have been wiped out.”
“By the wolf packs?” suggested Ford, and Karen nodded.
“And that’s where this gets even worse.”
Alethea gave her a sour look. “Speaking for everyone here, I don’t particularly like ‘worse’ when we’re talking about the apocalypse. We already have los muertos, half infected, mutant animals, wolf packs, and the Rat Catchers. Is there a ‘worse’?”
“Before I answer that,” said Karen, “let me say this. I’m not defending what those people are doing, but I understand why they’re doing it. And maybe I even understand why they’re being so cold and brutal about it.”
“Oh, I need to hear this,” said Alethea.
Karen gave her a hard look. “Think about the problem, then. The plague killed most of humanity and turned them into flesh-eating monsters. There were billions of living dead and only thousands of us left. Every single person who dies, no matter how they die, comes back as one of them. There’s no government left, not much in the way of resources, and the clock is ticking. If you were one of the scientists in the lab, and you believed—actually believed—that it was on you to find a way to save humanity from becoming completely extinct, tell me, Alethea, how far would you be willing to go?”
“I wouldn’t make healthy people sick,” said Alethea firmly. “I wouldn’t spread other kinds of diseases, like the one that killed Gutsy’s mama. I wouldn’t let anyone else die, because that would just make the problem worse.”
Karen shook her head. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Then uncomplicate it,” said Gutsy. “Why did they give Mama tuberculosis?”
Karen’s hands balled into fists. “For the same reason they gave the plague to my daughter, Sarah.”
