“Could have been a cult,” suggested Joe as he knelt and removed Grimm’s helmet. The mastiff’s tongue lolled from between rubbery lips. “There were some big cults and pseudo-religions gaining followings around the world. My team ran into a few of them over the years. Some were well funded, highly organized, and extremely militant.”
“I thought about that too,” said McReady. “But really — who cares? The damage is done. They accomplished what they set out to do. They released a doomsday plague, and for most of the population of planet Earth, that’s what it was. Seven billion people died. If some groups hadn’t been able to find defensible positions and learn to work together instead of panicking like mice, we’d be as extinct as the dinosaurs. We’re lucky as many people survived as they did.” She shrugged. “Anyway, we heard about mutations in Washington, and we had to go check it out. The possibility of a mutation was exciting, because it meant that there was a chance of identifying the mutagen taking control of the mutation process.”
“What good would that do?” asked Lilah.
McReady nodded as if she approved of the question. “The pathogen is in a perfect form. You couldn’t make it more deadly than it is. Any change to its nature or structure would actually result in a reduction of its overall threat, because it would mean that it had shifted away from immutability. Follow me?”
“I… think so. If it’s changing, then it isn’t perfect anymore.”
“Smart girl,” said McReady.
Nix said, “We’ve seen some of the mutations. The R3’s. They’re so much faster and scarier.”
“Smarter, too,” said Lilah.
“How’s that a good thing?” asked Benny.
McReady shook her head. “Those are short-term effects. What’s happened is the dormant parasite eggs have been made to hatch. There are active threadworms in the newly infected, but they die off after they’ve laid eggs. As they die off, the process of host decomposition goes into a protracted stasis. We still don’t know how long a walker will last once they’ve reached the stasis point — clearly many years — and we still haven’t cracked all the science on that. Maybe someone will one of these days. Not my concern. When we set up Hope One, we found all sorts of mutations up there. Smarter walkers, faster walkers, with abilities all up and down the Seldon Scale, the evaluation method we developed after the plague started. It was exciting stuff. Dangerous, too… we learned the hard way about how smart and fast these mutations were. Lost a third of our staff in the first few weeks, and we lost more when we started actively looking for the most extreme mutations.”
“That must have been terrifying,” said Nix.
McReady shrugged. “It was worth it. This was real science again. We were doing ten, fifteen autopsies a day, every day. Running tissue samples and other cultures around the clock. What we found was that there was a new bacteria in the mix. This is one of nature’s little jokes, because after we’d looked at every kind of organism or causal agent that might trigger the parasites to hatch, the one we found shouldn’t even have an impact on the jewel wasp, which is the parasite at the heart of the Reaper disease cluster. It is in itself a mutation; in this case it’s a mutated form of the bacteria Brucella suis, a zoonosis that primarily affects pigs. My guess is that the walkers in northern California attacked some wild pigs and wild boars, biting and infecting them but not killing them. The Reaper interacted with the bacteria Brucella suis and caused a mutation there. This probably happened early on, ten, twelve years ago. The rate and form of the mutation is consistent with exposure to radiation, so these walkers may have been survivors of the nukes dropped on San Francisco or even Seattle. In any case, you have radiation causing mutation in the walkers who bit the pigs, and then the presence of the bacteria, which allowed for further mutation….”
Her voice ran down as she looked around.
“Are you following any of this?”
Benny held his thumb and index finger a half-inch apart. “About this much.”
“We met some of those infected pigs,” said Joe. “One of them nearly cut Lilah here in half.”
McReady sighed. “Live ones or dead ones?”
“Dead,” said Joe, “but spry.”
“That’s something we were afraid of. The bacteria Brucella suis allowed the Reaper pathogen to adapt to the pig’s biology. They started turning up about four years ago. We brought two from Hope One, and I radioed ahead to Dick Price to have his people get more of them for when my team arrived. He did, but in the process of bringing the infected boars to Death Valley, he may accidentally have spread the bacterial infection to the walkers in this area. In any case, he managed to get us the boars we needed. We had a pen of about forty of them for a while.”
“You kept them?” gasped Lilah.
“Of course we kept them,” said McReady. “Live boars and reanimated boars were a perfect place to grow the bacteria.”
“What happened to the boars?” asked Benny.
“When we got to the point where we’d devised a way to grow the bacteria synthetically, I ordered the boars terminated. Dick Price sent all ten of his soldiers out there. Not one of them came back.”
“The boars got them?”
“The boars got what was left of them. Reapers laid an ambush. We didn’t even know they were in the area. They trapped our team outside, forced them to give them the access codes to enter this complex. They killed a lot of our people and even let some of the boars loose in here. We had to fight them using brooms and folding chairs and whatever we could grab. The soldiers were all outside being slaughtered. Price’s science team panicked and overreacted. They used grenades and makeshift explosives to fight back, and one of the blasts did something to the air lock so we couldn’t get out. The reapers trashed our communications center. We cut them down, but it was too late. They also pushed our helicopter over the edge of the cliff. That was about a month after we got here. We killed the last of the reapers and slaughtered the pigs they let loose, but so what? We were stuck in here with no communication and no way out of this facility until you blew the door in. Between those who died in the ambush and the rest who killed themselves here, I’ve seen forty-one people die since coming here.”
CHAPTER 72
Benny understood the despair now.
The suicides and hopelessness.
McReady and her people had been trapped in this locked tomb of concrete and steel for almost a year and a half — a place that was so secret even Joe Ledger and his rangers didn’t know about it. The scientists and staff must have thought that they were doomed to die in here, forgotten by a dying world. Until McReady and then the reapers showed up.
Benny said, “Not everyone from the transport plane died in the crash. A few survived, and they joined the Night Church. I… um… killed one of them.” He cleared his throat. “One of them must have had a copy of the coordinates and gave them up when he joined the reapers. That’s probably how they found this place.”
McReady considered, sighed, and nodded. “That might also explain what happened to the missing notes and the samples of mutagen and Archangel I sent to Sanctuary.”
“We recovered some stuff,” said Joe. “Enough for Reid to make some weak versions of the mutagen, but she couldn’t work out how to process the mutagen into the cure. Without your notes Reid said that all they’ll ever hit are dead ends.”