Tooth and Nail (32 page)

It is locked.

“If there is somebody inside this room, open the door,” Lewis says.

He hears a muffled groan, but nothing more. The door does not open. While he prepares some C4, the boys take a knee and pull security around him, listening to the sound of small arms fire erupting in another part of the facility. It is the second grab team, putting down another stray Mad Dog.

Lewis shouts at the door: “If you are inside and can hear me, we are going to blow the lock. Get as far back as you can and get on the floor!”

“And if your name is Maddy, stand right next to it,” Bailey says, making the boys laugh.

The squad retreats to a safe distance.

“Fire in the hole!”

The door blows and the squad pours into the smoking hole, carbines at the ready, sweeping the room.

“Clear!” the boys sound off one by one.

“Sarge, I got a survivor!” Perez calls out. “In the bathroom back here!”

“Holy shit,” Parsons drawls.

The woman lies shivering on the floor curled up under a pile of labcoats, some of them torn and darkly stained, clutching a flashlight that has stopped working, its batteries drained and dead. She lies surrounded by empty bags of snack food and candy wrappers and an odd collection of beakers, test tubes and planters, some filled with water. She apparently has been saving the toilet as a final backup water supply and using a trash can as a toilet instead, surrounded by rags torn from a labcoat for toilet paper.

Lewis is flooded with admiration. This woman somehow managed to stay alive for several days in virtual total darkness and with little food or water, while the Mad Dogs hunted her in the dark by sense of hearing and smell.

This is one tough broad, he thinks.

Her eyes searching blindly in the dark, she starts shouting.

“What’s she saying?” Perez asks.

“I think she’s talking in Russian,” Jaworski says.

“Right—but what’s she saying?”

“How the hell do I know what she’s saying? My people are Polish, not Russian, and I only speak American.”

Lewis drops down and squats on his haunches.

“Ma’am, it’s all right,” he says several times until she begins to calm down. “I am Sergeant Grant Lewis with the U.S. Army, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

The woman licks her lips and says dryly, “Army?”

He cracks a glow stick, which gleams bright against the dark, and holds it out to her. She seizes it with both hands and stares at its light intensely, tears streaming down her face.

“That’s right, Ma’am,” he says, flipping up his NVGs and grinning in the green glow. “We’re the U.S. Army.”

Feeling warm and safe in a pair of sneakers and oversized BDUs, Valeriya Petrova wolfs down the MRE that the soldiers handed her, washing it down with long pulls on a canteen. She blinks in the bright Command Center, its lighting the result of a few easy repairs of the emergency generator in the downstairs electrical room.

Petrova marvels at the dull, institutional colors in the Command Center, washed in fluorescent light. After days of darkness, even the dull is starkly beautiful.

She survived. Later, she will wonder why she alone survived among all of the people trapped in the building, both the research team and the mob; she will certainly feel survivor’s guilt. But not now. Right now, she is exultant just to exist.

The medic calling himself Doc Waters stands nearby, studying her closely with his arms crossed, making her nervous. Does he expect her to drop dead? She has lost weight and she is undernourished, but she is not starving. She was able to stay hydrated even after the power failed. She can’t run just yet, but she can walk just fine.

The truth is she has never felt more alive.

In any case, the time of running is over. She is with the military now. She is safe. The boys around her—they strike her as incredibly young, these beefy kids—keep talking about helicopters coming to get them. Soon, she will be airlifted to a secure place where she can isolate a new sample of the Mad Dog strain and finish her work on a vaccine.

The door opens and a young man appears. The soldiers straighten their posture and stare at him in respectful silence for a few moments as he enters the room, marking him as an officer, a leader.

He sits across from her and smiles.

“I’m Captain Bowman,” he says.

“And I am Dr. Valeriya Petrova.”

“I hope you find your new clothes acceptable, Dr. Petrova.”

“After wearing the same clothing for the past several days, I am finding this uniform perfectly comfortable, Captain Bowman.”

Neither insist on familiarity, on being called by their first names. The truth is she needs him to be Captain Bowman, her savior, and he apparently needs her to be Dr. Petrova, the scientist who can stop the plague.

“Doc tells me you’re feeling well,” he continues. “That you’re fit to travel.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he nods. “Can you tell me what happened here, Dr. Petrova?” How can she explain the nightmare? The madness, the murders, the infection, the blood. The weak and slowly dying mob intentionally infecting the Guardsman and coming up in the elevators only to be savaged and infected by a berserk Dr. Lucas and Dr. Saunders. The endless darkness with little hope for survival, staying sane only by imagining herself in Central Park, on a blanket in Sheep Meadow, reading a book while nearby her husband and child laughed and played.

The screaming in the corridors as they all died one by one.

The slowly dimming hope that rescue would come.

The darkness that began to seep into and shroud even her memories. “I survived,” she says, shivering.

He nods again. He understands.

“We survived, too,” he tells her. “Just yesterday, I was a second lieutenant.”

Now it is her turn to nod. She is not familiar with the military, but she gets the idea. The Army chain of command in the area has sustained significant losses.

“So the world outside. . . . It is bad?”

“Dr. Petrova, it’s so bad, there may not be a world soon.”

“I do not suppose you have any news of . . . Europe.”

“Sorry. My situation awareness was once limited to New York, and is now limited pretty much to this building. I only know ground that my men can hold by force.”

She swallows hard to choke back a sob. The Army is not in command of the city. They are refugees, like her, seeking flight. And if that is true, the same must be true in all of the big cities. Washington. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. London.

He adds, “Dr. Petrova, my superiors have instructed me to secure both you and whatever projects you were working on.” His eyes look hopeful. “A cure, I understand?”

Petrova’s eyes flicker to the other soldiers in the room.

“Clear the room,” Bowman says, his eyes never leaving her face.

The boys file out reluctantly, leaving her alone with the Captain, Doc Waters and the man who is apparently Bowman’s second in command, Sergeant Kemper. This man frightens her for some reason. While the soldiers are mostly boys, quick to grin even in their desperate circumstances, the sergeants strike her as very hard men.

“The Mad Dog disease is a separate disease,” she says, then pauses.

“I’m listening,” he tells her.

“Lyssa, as you know, is bad enough, but it is a Trojan Horse for the Mad Dog strain, which revealed itself by presenting a new vector for transmission—saliva. Biting.”

The Captain exchanges a glance with Kemper.

“That matches our understanding of the situation,” he tells her. “Go on, Doctor.”

“I isolated the Mad Dog strain and produced a pure sample, but it was ruined when the power went out and we lost refrigeration in the labs. I already forwarded my work electronically to CDC and USAMRIID before the power went out for the last time. But I need to get back into a proper lab with a proper staff to produce another pure sample and finish my work on a vaccine.”

Bowman does not appear to be satisfied with the answer. He stares at her intensely and says, “You seem to be saying there is no cure, only a vaccine, and that it will be a long time before we have such a vaccine in any quantity.”

“That is correct, Captain.”

Petrova lowers her eyes. She knows they rescued her at enormous risk to themselves, and her answer is not very satisfying to them. In part, they are here because she told a white lie to push CDC and USAMRIID to rescue her. But the scientific process is not like a military process, with quick, definitive results. One cannot shoot and kill a virus with a rifle. Science is a slow, laborious, collaborative effort. A pure sample must be grown in a cell culture. Then it must be tested for susceptibility against antiviral drugs. Then it can be distilled to produce a vaccine through a painful trial and error process. Make it too weak, and the host gains no immunity. Make it too strong, and you kill the host.

Her discovery is a major breakthrough, and it is the best shot they have at defeating the virus. Not immediately, but over time.

But the Captain was obviously hoping for immediate results. The world is ending right now. Soon, there may not be an America to defend anymore, if what he told her about the outside world is true.

“I am sorry if you were looking for more definitive results,” she says.

“Even if I had a vaccine in my hands right now, it would still take months to manufacture in significant quantities, assuming the biomedical factories are still working.”

“My men risked their lives coming here,” he tells her. “Obviously, we can’t tell them that you have a cure and that they can be vaccinated before we get picked up. But if you want to promote a slight fiction that it will take less than months, I wouldn’t correct you.”

“I see. . . .”

“I hope you do, Doctor. We’ll be moving out within a half hour, as soon as our birds get in the air. We may have to fight every step of the way to reach them. If the men feel like they are fighting for an important cause, it might help instead of hurt.”

She is nodding now.

“We understand each other, Captain. I will help you any way I can.”

Captain Bowman stares at the beautiful scientist sitting across from him and realizes that he and his men might end up dying for her today. They are risking their necks simply because she has the best theory on how to cure the disease. They will fight in the next few hours, and they might die without seeing the sun again, to get this woman back into a working laboratory so she can produce a vaccine. A vaccine that will not be ready until the Mad Dogs have virtually overrun America and destroyed everything he loves about it.

All this effort for a cure that will come too late.

It is the classic Army bull, but he should have known better. He should have known she would not deliver instant salvation. A quick fix to a global disaster like this would be highly unlikely, if not impossible. Life is so much more complex than he’d like it to be. Many soldiers complain about this, but he is mentally flexible and accepts the complexity of life as a law of nature.

In short, it figures. But he wanted to believe.

The fact is, if he were General Kirkland, he would make the same call. This woman is the only scientist who spotted the real threat. She may be the best shot America has at producing a vaccine. She is a primary asset in a war that must be won, plain and simple. Even if there is not enough time to make a difference, America must try to find a cure. Where bullets and bayonets failed, medical science might still, one day, prevail. If she dies and nobody else steps up to cure Lyssa, the virus will have won the war against mankind even as it slowly burns itself out, perhaps permanently, perhaps to rise again.

Dr. Petrova is also our ticket out of here, he tells himself. At this moment, she is more valuable than we are. Without her, we might be left behind. The situation is unstable, chaotic. The Army is apparently in a shambles during its retreat from the cities, shedding units and equipment in the confusion and constant attrition. He had to bargain with Immunity, in fact, just to get them to live up to their promise of airlifting all of them out. Immunity had taken a line that they would extract the scientist from a nearby roof, and then they would see what they could do about rounding up a few CH-47s to evacuate Bowman’s troops. Perhaps in a few days, assuming the Mad Dogs would all be dead then. For Bowman, there were too many what-ifs, assumptions and empty promises. He knows Immunity is heading south and within a few days, it will be far away and may not even exist. No Chinooks, no scientist, he told them. He will catch hell for that later, he knows. Possibly lose his command. They might even put him against a wall and shoot him. But his men will survive, if only to fight again, and perhaps even die, another day.

“I have to ask one thing, Dr. Petrova,” he says.

“Yes,” she says.

“Two things, actually.” He stumbles a bit. “Yes, two things.”

She eyes him curiously.

“Of course.”

“My first question is: How did this happen?”

“I developed a hypothesis. But a scientific hypothesis, you see, is only—”

“I understand, Doctor. What’s your theory?”

“My apologies. My theory is based on several observations. The virus is too perfect. Lyssa somehow snaps back to its Mad Dog ancestor once it enters the brain. The incubation period defies belief. It must have been bioengineered.”

Behind Bowman, Doc Waters gasps.

Kemper says, “A terrorist weapon?”

“Why produce a terrorist weapon that will kill so many people on all sides?” Doc Waters says.

“Maybe the terrorists think they’ll survive it and come out ahead,”

Kemper says. “Maybe they think it will level the playing field.”

“It sounds too good, though. It must have had government sponsorship.”