Reaper's Run: Plague Wars Series, #1

CHAPTER 1

Speculations on the Eden Plague by B. B. Larson – Online Excerpt

Greatness tries to change the world for the better. Small-mindedness resists, reacts – and ordinary people get caught in the gears. Usually they are ground up and spit out, but sometimes, once in a while, they win through to produce a fundamental alteration of everything we know.

The long-awaited apocalypse arrived not with a bang but with a slow-motion, grinding crash. It began with irrational fear in the minds of men, a self-fulfilling prophecy of overreaction that brought the world to the stuttering brink of annihilation.

It started with a man named Aaronovsky, a secret Jew that kept his Talmud and his Torah behind a false panel in his miserable little apartment on a bleak biological warfare research base in the middle of Siberia. This one man had the courage to respond to anonymous messages that showed up on his computer and keep the conversation hidden from his Soviet masters.

Whoever was on the other end provided information on how to build a prototype virus that might save humanity: from illness, from death – perhaps even from itself. It was an amazing feat of genetic engineering, decades ahead of its time. Unbeknownst to him, this information, this communication, was of extraterrestrial origin – but that is another story.

For long years he used the knowledge, and the laboratory, to create what eventually came to be known as the Eden Plague. That he did it right under his supervisors’ noses was a testimony to his courage and determination. Unfortunately, he did not have time to complete his work. The virus he had made, though amazing, was imperfect.

No one living knows exactly what happened, but in 1989, politics intervened: the Soviet Union fell apart, and its technologies were stolen, its scientists and research trafficked to brutal regimes with oil money, and the almost-miracle disappeared into a black hole.

That is, until it surfaced in the form of some samples of tissue, a whole human head, and a canister of a virus, in an abandoned biological facility buried in the Iraqi desert. There it had waited until someone, probably local salvagers, found it.

From there its path wended murky, but eventually it fell into the hands of an ambitious CIA man, a spymaster in the classic mold – an old-moneyed New England dabbler named Jervis A. Jenkins III. He believed in putting wealth and power to use, and in this experimental biotechnology he saw a source of both.

Keeping the secret even from his own superiors, he created a small, closed corporation to investigate the germ that showed the potential to heal and to extend life. If harnessed, it would be of immeasurable value. Who wouldn’t give everything they owned to conquer cancer, AIDS, even old age itself?

But the so-called Eden Plague had a flaw – at least, from Jenkins’ point of view. Not only did it heal the body, but the brain, and perhaps the mind, as well. Test subjects changed for the better; their morality tended to improve as a so-called virtue effect took hold. Were the virus to be distributed, crime, drug addiction, selfishness and misuse of power would drop precipitously. For those like Jenkins, this was a drawback they could not stomach. If corruption were stamped out, so would be his unchecked exercise of power over his fellow man.

Additionally, because the agent of change was a communicable disease, it could not be controlled. Easily transferred from person to person, in its present form it was useless for Jenkins' selfish purposes. The virus had to be modified – perfected – to get rid of this virtue effect, and also its easy transmissibility. Only when it could be controlled, withheld for the elite who could pay, and held out like a carrot to the hoi polloi, would it be publicized.

Then the world would beat a path to his doorstep, cash in hand.

The elder Jenkins’ major mistake? Bringing in his son and namesake to manage the corporation. When Jervis A. Jenkins IV botched his attempt to recruit Air Force combat lifesaver Daniel Markis into the program, he set off a chain of events culminating in the Eden Plague spreading throughout the world.

But just like Jenkins, the national power structures, especially the people at the top, were not ready to allow such a revolution in their societies.

The U.S. tried to burn the virus out with nuclear weapons on its own soil, as did the Russians and the Chinese. Especially within these three superpowers, Eden Plague carriers, or Sickos as they were labeled, were hunted down, rounded up, locked away – or worse.

Aboard Royal Princes Cruise Line’s Royal Neptune

Sergeant Jill Reaper Repeth, U.S. Marine Corps, started the day as she always did: with a protein shake and one hundred pull-ups on a tension bar she had brought aboard and set up in the doorway of her room’s balcony. Facing out to sea looking over the railing, her head and shoulders rose and fell, eyes on the horizon. Her lungs expanded, pumping the fresh sea air in and out.

It is great to be alive, she told herself, one of a series of mantras of encouragement. Twenty-five and still alive. Every day above ground is a good day. Every day I am not being shot at is a good day. She believed these things more today than on some other days.

Jill Repeth was a One Percenter. Most Marines didn’t know about them, because most Marines weren’t female. Only a small fraction of the Corps was composed of women, because unlike the other services, the Marines didn’t bend its physical standards very much to admit them. Measure up or leave, they said.

But the One Percent was an unofficial secret club of female Marines that strove to outperform the men – that could, would and did beat them at their own game. Marathoners, triathletes, gymnasts, distance swimmers, biathletes. Thus One Percent, because perhaps one in a hundred already fit Marine women could do it – could perform at this Olympic level of physical prowess.

The cruise line had given her a private room on a middle-high deck, something she would have struggled to afford if she hadn’t been selected through their Wounded Warriors promotion that provided free cruises to the nation’s war-damaged service members. Jill was glad of that privacy as she finished the hundred, hardly more winded at the end than at the start. Taking that as a good sign, she knocked out another fifty before stopping.

That was more than she’d ever done before at a stretch. Perhaps it was because she had an advantage over the average Marine, male or female: she weighed at least twenty pounds lighter than normal.

Missing everything below both knees put less strain on the cardiovascular system. Absent lower legs didn’t need blood and oxygen.

Stay positive, stay focused.

Ever since the mortar shell that took her feet and shins, that’s what she told herself.

Dropping gently to the deck onto her buttocks, she maneuvered with wiry muscled arms and leg stumps over to her prostheses. Sitting on the floor, she strapped them on, fiddling and adjusting for a longer span than usual. She finally got them to some semblance of stability, and wobbled to her artificial feet.

Jill stared down at the legs and the metal-and-plastic structures. They didn’t feel right. Her good mood evaporated. Some days the damn things just didn’t sit well on her, and it looked like this would be one. She wasn’t even going to turn on the microprocessor control and servos that helped her walk and run with a semblance of normalcy. She still hoped she could work up to a marathon again. Maybe with those bladerunner things.

Jill sat down on the bed and took the prostheses off, rubbing at the end of the stumps. They always itched a bit, but today they positively screamed to be scratched. She did so, vigorously, and then looked more closely at them. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that the stumps had lengthened slightly.

Maybe they were just swollen.

She shrugged to herself. Rather than fight with the artificial legs, she phoned for a wheelchair pick-up. She’d come back after breakfast and fiddle with the things. She was starving.

An hour later, after bolting down everything she could shove into her face at the buffet, she returned to her room, bewildered. The ship had gone crazy, in a good way. People claiming to be cured of cancer. A blind man seeing. A paraplegic standing up and walking. People talking about the Second Coming of Christ, seeing the Virgin Mary on their walls and their pizzas, gossiping about miracles and the aliens landing.

Well, nobody had disappeared off the ship, so at least that ruled out the Rapture. Other people spoke of a viral video some had seen before the ship’s internet went down, where a man named Daniel Markis claimed to have released a curative disease that everyone could have.

Jill stared down at her stumps again and wondered.

Two days later, Jill peered out over the balcony rail. The object of her gaze was the U.S. Navy frigate Ingraham, keeping station to windward at about two nautical miles distance. Beyond, hull up on the horizon perhaps twelve miles off floated a Landing Platform/Dock amphibious assault ship, probably the USS Somerset. It was this ship that held her frustrated attention.

She lowered herself down from her hold on the railing; she had been perched there with her hands taking all her weight. Settling into the comfortable deck chair, she picked up her small five-power optical binoculars. Jill cursed herself for not bringing her eighteen-power electronic monsters, but she hated to carry a month’s pay around on a Caribbean cruise.

The LPD leaped into view, the angled, radar-deflecting planes of its superstructure identifying it as one of the most modern ships of the U.S. Navy. She was familiar with the type, having served a Fleet Marine Force tour on her sister ship, the USS Arlington.

Twelve miles away. Just sitting there for the last forty-eight hours.

Food aboard the cruise ship had dwindled, and was now rationed; Jill had recognized the impending problem as soon as the vessel had been detained. She had taken pains to smuggle everything that would keep back to her cabin and stash it in anticipation of making a break, but her stock would run out shortly, and there was no sign of them being allowed to land or disembark.

The announcements aboard ship had said they were quarantined because of a dangerous disease. That dangerous disease had apparently cured cancer, blindness, even old age among those aboard, and had started to regrow her legs. Between the official word and the Daniel Markis video, she decided she believed the latter.

Hunger became her constant companion. She didn’t know why for sure. Her caloric intake had exploded; for a triathlete like her, that was a sign something was seriously out of whack. The appetite must have something to do with the miracle disease.

She looked down at the strange pink skin down there, contrasting with the tan that ended just below her knees. The nubs couldn’t bear her weight without excruciating pain, and they wouldn’t fit her prosthetics anymore, so she had used the wheelchair service a lot. Reaching down to scratch the itchy growth, she pushed aside thoughts of why it had happened, or even how, and concentrated on what she had to do.

Night began to fall over the Atlantic. Making her final preparations, she wrote a letter to her parents in Los Angeles, leaving it addressed on the table for the steward to find. She ate as much as she could hold, and put the rest into the waterproof bag, along with her combat utility uniform, her wallet and identification, and the jury-rigged prostheses. She had ripped the expensive electronic guts out of them and she now had something that she could use, if barely. Padded with pillow stuffing and cut-up blankets, they strapped onto her stumps and allowed her to stand, even walk gingerly, as long as she could take the pain, and look somewhat normal in her uniform.

A bottle of ibuprofen went in as well, and a few other odds and ends. Then she sealed it up and put it in her rucksack. Wet suit on next, a stylish blue and green never intended for clandestine work, but it was all she had. Then the scuba gear she had brought to use – she thought – for recreation; her combat knife; and a rucksack strapped in reverse to sit over her belly. Lastly the swim fins, reconfigured to fit her regenerating stumps.

Levering herself up to the rail, she looked out between the slats at the two ships, now visible mainly by their navigation lights. Earlier she had seen hovercraft embarking and disembarking out of the combat well at the back of the LPD. Now she could see a strobe and running lights from a helo landing on the flight deck at the rear, one of a continuous droning above and around the ships. She had seen Hornet and Lightning naval fighters high overhead earlier in the day, so there was a supercarrier out there somewhere too, running combat air patrol.

She took several deep breaths, wondering if she was making the biggest mistake of her life. Hell, there’s an old Corps saying, she thought. The worst plan executed quickly and violently is better than the best plan not executed at all.

Far better to do something than to do nothing.

Facemask and regulator on, she hoisted herself up to the railing, looked at the water thirty feet below, and launched over the rail like a gymnast. Balling up, she wrapped herself around the rucksack, holding her hands to her face to shield the delicate apparatus from the impact. The sea struck her like a cold wet fist, and she fought to stay out of sight below the surface, fought to get the mouthpiece settled and clear it of water. For a moment she just floated beneath the waves, recovering her breath.

Then she began the long swim.

She navigated by lights from the ships. At first she steered by the brilliant glare of the bright cruise ship behind her, easy enough to see through the water above her head. All she had to do was keep going directly away. A half hour later, when she couldn’t see it any more, she cautiously broke the surface to get her bearings and adjust.

Her stomach already complained; she rolled over on her back and pulled a plastic coffee can out of a rucksack pocket, gulping down the cold spaghetti and meatballs packed inside, shoving it into her mouth with her fingers. It was the best she could come up with for eating on the trip; she hoped she had enough food to last. A half-liter of water followed.

The surface swim seemed interminable; even with the fins, she estimated it would take four to six hours to reach the LPD. The critical variable was the hunger, the thing she'd had to learn to live with and manage for the last two days. How often would she have to stop, how much would she have to eat – would her food and water run out? She laughed to herself at the idea of being thirsty in the ocean.

Eating every thirty minutes, she burned calories at a prodigious rate.

The answer came after three hours. Ingraham was far to her rear; she had bypassed it by a good mile, having no desire to be spotted and caught. It appeared that no one had even considered the possibility that someone would swim away from their floating prison, particularly not in the direction of their captors. But now she’d eaten the last of the food outside the waterproof bag. It looked like about an hour to the LPD. She wished she could ditch the scuba tank, but she might need it when she reached the ship.

A half hour later her gut demanded food again, and she didn’t have anything accessible to give it. If she opened the waterproof bag, she would flood everything inside with seawater – the food and her uniform in particular. She clamped down on the discomfort, bringing the discipline of a lifetime of triathlon training into play.

Pain is just weakness leaving the body. No pain, no gain – no pain, no brain. Pain is a feeling, and Marines don’t get issued feelings.

Two hundred yards from the stern of the LPD, the starving wolverine in her belly cramped her up completely, curling her into a fetal ball. She ground her teeth, pushing through the pain. She put her head under water and screamed. She pounded her thigh, trying to distract her nervous system.

Looming above her, the ship showed nothing except for its navigation lights. Uncramping just enough to propel herself to the stern, she hoped that someone didn’t pick that moment to look out into the dark water and see her in the moonlight. She forced her legs to push her closer, finally rounding the corner.

The well ramp had closed.

She groaned, fighting the cramps and starvation. Pulling out a water bottle, she drank, hoping the fluid would ease the sensations. She cursed herself for not thinking of putting something with nutrition in the containers – protein shake, orange juice, anything.

Milk would have been