Reset: A Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Fantasy (Contaminant Series Book 1) (4 page)

***

“Hey, space cadet!” Anna called out, “We’re running low on fuel so snap out of it.”

Michael blinked a few times, returning to reality, “What?”

“We need to stop and refuel.  We need you alert.”

They soon exited the interstate and drove a little further into the city.  They went from corner to corner, going over the plan to get in and get out quickly before they were found out.  The next corner they rounded held a plethora of abandoned vehicles.

Peter drove right up to where they intended to go and left the car running.  It was quiet.  Leaves and trash could be heard scurrying about the ground.  Michael grabbed at the hose and gas can and hopped out of the car.

Anna pointed with her head, “You ever syphon before?”

“No, but I understand how.  I’ll find you if I need help.”  Michael turned to the first car near him and popped the gas door with the bent screwdriver.

Peter and Anna began searching the cars for food or water or weapons or anything they could use.  They stayed together and didn’t go far.  By the time they returned, Michael had gotten enough to refuel their car.  He was filling up for a second time.

Peter went around to the driver side of the car and popped the trunk, where Anna was waiting.  A couple duffle bags, about a dozen bottles of water, a few protein bars, extra clothes, a bag of chips were dropped off by the time Michael lugged the gas can over.  He swung it up and over the bumper and dropped it in the trunk. 

Anna looked at her watch, “We made good time, guys.  You want me to drive, so you can get some rest?”

Peter answered her by sitting down in the driver seat and closing the door.  “I’ve got a few more hours in me.”

The other two climbed in and shut the doors and soon, the little blue Taurus was going eighty on the interstate.  Everyone seemed to relax more the further away they got from the earlier events of the day.  But Michael had a question that had been nagging at him ever since that morning.

He sat up in his seat so that Peter and Anna in the front could hear him over the roar of the wind, “I have this question that’s been on my mind.  If it was so dangerous out here, why did you two risk it?”

Peter only half-looked back at Michael, “They told us that they had the area secured and that nothing more than street gangs roamed about, protesting.”

Michael looked confused, “The report was emailed...”

Anna gave an irritated sigh, “Because nobody wants to eat synthetic food without a face to blame.  We gave our pitch months ago.  People were still thinking that this was temporary and wanted to hold off on a ‘radical’ approach.  We made our decision based on a government that was still in control…” She looked around her and grunted, “What matters now is getting that food out.”

            “Does your facility ever have to deal with mobs and stuff?”

            Peter looked at Michael through the rear-view mirror, “Yeah.”

Michael sat back in his seat.  He felt satisfied, his curiosity, quenched. 

Peter glanced back, “Can we get that phone from you?  Now is a good time to check in.”

Michael didn’t protest.  He dug it out the front jacket pocket and handed it over, “1314 is the code.”  And with that, he locked his door and leaned back into the corner, letting the sound of rushing air loll him to sleep.

Chapter Five

At the university, it was just before 5:30pm when a cell phone in a zip-locked bag sounded off.  After four rings, it was answered by a pair of gloves, a suit, and a low, muffled and feminine, “Hello?”

Peter’s voice was on the other end, “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

The suit exited the lab and locked the door, “Good news.”

“We got the go-ahead from the president himself.” He sounded exhausted.

The suit gave a deep sigh and made a smacking sound, “And, the bad news.” With a sharp, quick walk, it headed down a corridor a short ways, till it reached the stairwell.

“The White House fell.  Locals overran it.  We barely got out.” There was a long pause wrapped in silence before Peter said, “You still there?”

Anna could be heard in the background of Peter’s voice, “What did she say?”

The muffled voice sighed, “I’m here.  Hang on. I’ve got to get somewhere more secure.”

One flight of stairs down and through the attached garage, the suit ended up standing in a makeshift decontamination room that was more like a thick plastic tent.  With the hit of a button, the spout in the middle of this tent shot out liquid and vapor and with open arms, the suit immersed itself and even spun around for good measure.

The liquid ceased spewing and the suit walked out of the tent and removed the head covering that had been muffling her voice.  The woman finished shedding her wet, plastic suit and hung it up to dry, clipping the head piece to the hook.  She even took the cellphone out of the wet baggie and secured it by the head piece so that it may dry as well.  Cellphone in hand, the woman reentered the university through a second door and made her way up two flights of stairs to a small classroom that had been turned into living quarters.

 “I’m back.  Let me talk to Anna.”

Two seconds later, Anna’s voice came through, “Were you able to get a better look at that component?”

The next sentence was spoken apprehensively, “Yeah.  It’s not at all what we initially thought.  Contrary to what we thought we knew, the contaminant appears to be… engineered…”

Anna rushed to interrupt, “Wait a minute, Jenna.  Engineered?  So, no more virus theory?”

Jenna’s voice was strained, “Not quite.  Anna, I can show you the research when you get here.  What I’ve found is enough to cause World War III, okay.  It is…”

Jenna’s voice hushed to barely audible, “Nano-tech-nology.  And it’s not anything like what we’re used to.”

“Nanotechnology? Yeah, okay.  But, I need to see the research on this” Anna was all but dismissive.

 Jenna hissed “I mean it.  This stays between you, me, and Peter.”

Anna spoke slowly, “And… Michael.”

“Who the hell is Michael?”

“White House Aide.  He got us out.”  Anna sounded as though she might say more but, she didn’t.

Jenna paused just a second or two, before nodding to herself, “I’ll see you when you get here.”

***

The blackboard in Jenna’s quarters was filled with pictures, theories, timelines, findings, and calculations.  She scanned the blackboard, stopping at the virus theory... and erased it.  In its place she wrote ‘
nanotechnology’
, circling it, and drawing several lines extending from the circle.  On each of the extending lines, she wrote, ‘
(1) camouflages as a cell, (2) deactivates growth, (3) high contamination rate, (4) potential for autoimmune response, (5)30% active.

Jenna didn’t want to know what the other 70 percent did but knew that she would have to find out.  She looked at the chalkboard.  No… Jenna
stared
it down as she did every night, refusing to sleep until a breakthrough, a revelation, an epiphany or
something
brought her one step closer to finding a solution.  She never went outside anymore.  She had already watched the grass die and the people turn gaunt and hollow like ghouls.   Nevertheless, only results mattered and they wouldn’t be found outside.

She went back over every piece of information that she had taped, pinned or strung up.  Her eyes slowly scanned over each piece waiting for something useful to jump out at her.  This ritual went on for almost twenty more minutes before Jenna returned to her diagram.  After a brief pause, she began writing under it and when she was done, she underlined it thickly.

ETA till world is affected by contaminants = Unknown

She dusted the chalk off her hands as best she could and sprawled out on her couch taken from one of the commons area.  It was covered in curtains because Jenna couldn’t fathom sleeping on a community couch at a college.  The thought made her feel contaminated.  She got the same exact feeling thinking about this advanced technology.  

Nevertheless, she put all thoughts about it out of her head as she practiced deep breathing.  It was just about seven o’clock in the evening and Peter and Anna could return as soon as seven in the morning.  With time, Jenna drifted off to the sound of her own breathing.

***

When she woke, her cellphone was diligently disturbing the peace, the dinner alarm.  2am was a strange time for most people, but for Jenna, she could do more with the silence of early morning than most people could do with eight hours of daylight.  Turning off the alarm, Jenna slowly sat up on the couch, swiveling her body around so that she could sit on the couch properly.  She felt the anxiety settle on her.   It was as if, as soon as Jenna regained full consciousness, this clock started counting down, promising doom at the end.  Hunger gnawed at her and she stood up to take care of it.

Jenna entered the office only three doors down from her makeshift quarters.  When she opened the fridge, a styrofoam plate wrapped in foil was waiting patiently.  Jenna took it out, unwrapped it, and left the fridge door to close on its own.  It was two small breakfast burritos: dehydrated eggs and potatoes, a roll of bread, and grits.  Jenna ate it cold and she ate slow, thinking about how to conduct her experiment.  After eating her grits and burritos, Jenna absent-mindedly used her roll to wipe any juice from the dehydrated eggs of the plate.  When she finished, she dumped the tray in the trash and headed back down the stairs that lead to the garage and then the lab.

Jenna brought along the suit and baggie from earlier but didn’t put it on.  She would be working from a different angle today.  A room, next to the one in which Jenna previously worked, held three digital microscopes, a file cabinet, a camera, a computer, and a refrigerator full of petri dishes.  Jenna entered and immediately washed her hands and donned her lab coat, protective glasses, and a mask although she didn’t put it on yet.  She brought out a journal, a voice recorder, and a pen from the computer desk drawer and placed them on the counter to the right of the far most right telescope.

Jenna turned on her recorder, and began skimming her notes as she spoke:

“March 7
^th
, the discovered nanotechnology has qualities that pose more questions than it answers: Why is it only thirty percent operational? What is it programmed to do at one hundred percent?

This nanotechnology does not actively pursue contamination.  Meaning, if someone touches soil or plants with their bare hands, studies have shown that the contaminant will not try to enter the body.  However, it still begs the question: How does it interact with human blood?”

Jenna ended here and turned off the recorder.  She went to the gray metal file cabinet and pulled out the middle drawer.  There were eye droppers, cotton swabs, alcohol swabs, really thin, slender blood collection vials and finger sticks.  Jenna grabbed one of each along with four microscope slides and laid it all out over a protective, wax-paper-like sheet. 

She gave the pointer finger on her left hand a brief rub with the alcohol swab and with the finger stick, she stuck herself.  Blood balled up just outside the puncture site and immediately swelled.  Acting quickly, Jenna put one drop on two of the slides and put several drops in the collection vial by squeezing her finger over the hole.  With that, she put the cotton swab against her finger and applied pressure.  The bleeding stopped in no time.

From here, Jenna gave her hands a good wash once more, dried them, and slipped them into latex gloves.  She returned to her work station where she gently placed an empty slide on top of a slide with blood on it and slid it into place.  With the glass stuck together she taped it shut and put it under a microscope.  Jenna worked to focus the lens and then grabbed her voice recorder,

“Experiment 1:  Since I can only answer one question, we’ll start with, ‘How does this technology interact with human blood?’  I have taken a sample of my blood and placed it on 2 slides.  One slide is to be the control for this experiment and therefore, untampered with.  The other slide will be introduced to a plant serum taken from a contaminated plant.”

With that, Jenna put her mask on and removed a vial of plant serum from the refrigerator.  With the eye dropper, she withdrew not even a fourth of the eye dropper’s total capacity.  While still holding the dropper, she closed the lid on the vial and placed it back inside the refrigerator.

Returning to the second slide, Jenna added a drop of serum to the slide and let the eyedropper fall into the hazardous waste bucket.  She, then, quickly proceeded to add the second slide to the first and apply two tiny strips of tape.  She slid the slide under the second microscope and adjusted the vision so that she could see.

The serum was only partially mixed in with the blood.  Jenna focused on one cell that she could see really well.  Even though the digital microscopes allowed the activity to be recorded, Jenna also preferred to have the first look.  She looked back at the computer to make sure that the image displayed.

Under the microscope, the mechanisms were branching out from the serum and into the blood.  Jenna narrated with her recorder,

“The serum has been added and after an initial period of three to four seconds, the mechanisms are drawn to Type T - white blood cells.  It appears to operate similarly to HIV, tricking the T-cell into allowing entry.  The mechanism appears to carry a bit of code already that it matches to the host DNA, allowing the mechanism to reprogram the T-cell.  The cells in observation are lying dormant and it remains to be seen what the T-cells have been reprogramed to produce.

“This mechanism has the potential to destroy the human race.  And it’s lying in wait, in our food, our dirt, and our fresh water supply.  And… it’s mostly likely found a human host, if not several.”

With that, Jenna slumped at the desk.  She rubbed her neck. Food supply was a solution that they were getting a handle on, but the aftereffects of this
thing
had yet to be seen, and no one even knew about it.