“All Commonwealth colonies are under strict quarantine, and any unauthorized spacecraft attempting to land will be fired upon.” The woman closed her eyes for a moment as if allowing the listeners to digest the news. “While we lack the ability to enforce this on unincorporated settlements, we strongly advise you to cut off contact with other systems until you receive further notice from official sources. There is currently no known test for this virus, but if you notice anyone acting strange or showing… unnatural abilities of any kind, it’s recommended that you notify local authorities… and that they respond with lethal force. This may seem drastic, but if this virus spreads, it will mean the deaths of thousands, perhaps millions. Please remain vigilant for any future amendments to this alert.”
The recording ended but I stared at the screen, unable to move. I’d expected a pirate attack, something explainable. This was not explainable.
Of course it is, Jim observed. You simply don’t want to think about the explanation.
“Cam,” Vicky called, a note of concern in her voice, “what’s going on? Is everything all right?”
A chill traveled up my back, and maybe it was sweat drying in the shadow of the cliff, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I knew exactly what Jim was talking about.
“No,” I told Vicky, being honest with her and myself. “I don’t believe it is.”
An inhuman shriek brought my head around, but before I could turn toward the closed end of the office, something that smelled like death hit me and I went down hard.
[ 3 ]
Air flooded out of me in a whoosh, the hard edges of the pulse carbine punching into my side and driving out my breath under the weight of what felt like a tattered sandbag. Stars exploded in my vision and sharp edges tried hard to pierce through the fabric of my fatigue shirt, but I thrashed sideways and whatever had landed on my back was now on top of me.
Rancid breath filled my face as a living skull slavered at me through a mouth full of rotting and broken teeth and fingernails fifteen centimeters long clawed at my eyes. His forearms were as skinny as toothpicks, yet the muscle inside them was like corded metal, fueled by desperation and twice as strong as any man I’d ever fought before. The darkness of the office couldn’t conceal the rags of his clothing hanging off him like a tent, or the open sores on his skin weeping puss.
“No!” His voice sounded like a man gargling with broken glass, like he hadn’t spoken aloud in months. “No! I was the last! You can’t be here! You’re all dead! I was the last!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I grunted, not seriously expecting an answer but hoping to distract him.
“You were Changed,” he hissed at me, spittle flying, fingernails coming closer to my eyes, shutting out everything else, all my focus on the jagged edges. “There’s only room for one!”
The fuck?
I couldn’t hold back that desperate strength, not with his weight atop me, but I could redirect it. I lurched to the right and the zombie went off balance, tumbling away. He rolled, growling and snapping like a wild animal as he tried to get back at me, and I barely had time to swing my legs around between us. The zombie lunged again, but his torso slammed into my outstretched boots with enough force to bend my knees into my chest, to knock me onto my back.
Adrenaline gave me a momentary jolt of strength to match his madness and I pistoned my legs forward, rocketing him across the room into the opposite wall with a crunch that must have been ribs breaking. Any normal man would have been out of commission after a hit like that, but this maniac bounced off like he hadn’t felt it, stumbling back toward me.
The martial arts I’d practiced for the last few years with Top paid off in a kip-up that took me back to my feet, a move I never thought I’d use in a real fight. It took me into position to block the slashing downward blow he aimed at my face, and I caught the arm against my chest and used his momentum to throw him over my hip. Crashing into the desk, he suddenly looked smaller than he had before, less an undead monster and more a withered, sickly old man.
I didn’t try to swing around the carbine, instead drawing my service pistol from its chest holster.
“Stop!” I yelled at him. “Don’t do it!”
His head came up, broken and pointed teeth bared in a snarl, and he tensed for another spring at me. I touched the trigger and the pistol pushed back against the web of my hand, cold gas kicking the round free before the mini-rocket ignited. No time for it to get to full velocity, but this guy wasn’t wearing body armor. Or much of anything. The round punched through his chest with a flash of the igniting warhead and he jerked backward, eyes rolling up into his head before he slumped to the floor.
I kept the gun trained on him, not trusting that he wouldn’t make one more run at me, that whatever madness had kept him going all this time might keep him alive through the fist-sized hole in his chest, but he didn’t move.
I stumbled back against the desk, feeling every bruise.
“Hey, Vicky,” I rasped into my audio pickup, reholstering my gun, “remind me never, ever to get out of my suit again.”
“A virus?” Nance repeated as the replay of the video ended, his expression a mirror of the one I’d made when I’d heard the message. “That doesn’t make one bit of sense.”
“Neither does this bullshit about shooting anyone who shows the symptoms!” Dr. Hallonen added, her pale face beet red at the suggestion. “Even if the virus turns people rabidly violent, surely they could be restrained with less-than-lethal weapons!”
The Ellen Campbell lacked an operations center, the compartment where we’d met for these conversations on the Orion, but we were making do with the ship’s bridge. There wasn’t anyone to keep secrets from anymore really, but not everyone could fit in the control room, which limited the immediate attendance to the bridge crew, Nagarro, Springfield, Vicky, and me. And, for this discussion, Doc Hallonen. We’d brief the others once we had a coherent response to give them. And once we decided what to do next.
Everyone muttered agreement with Hallonen… everyone except Vicky and me. She knew what I suspected and didn’t like it, but we didn’t want to spring that one on them with nothing except guesswork to support it.
“That’s not the only thing that doesn’t make sense,” Lt. Springfield said softly, frowning at the footage I’d brought back of the inside of the buildings. She pointed at the bones inside the government office. “Some of the bodies were shot, but here and in a couple other places, everyone was… ripped apart. By what? Animals? I didn’t see anything on the scans larger than a coyote or a bobcat.” She peered over at me. “Why did they introduce bobcats and coyotes?”
I rolled my eyes. Like I would know… but then I did know, thanks to the implant computer.
“Rodent control,” I told her absently. “Rats and mice get into the food shipments and there’s no way to stop it. Commonwealth immigration control won’t allow housecats because they wipe out native bird species, but coyotes and bobcats are acceptable.”
“Well, the damned coyotes and bobcats didn’t tear people apart,” she went on. “Not unless they’d already been dead for at least a few weeks. And as nasty as that guy was who tried to claw your eyes out, he didn’t do it with his bare hands. So what killed them? It was either the getting ripped apart or something that didn’t leave a mark on their clothes.”
I had no real answer, but I pondered the woman who’d asked the question. When all this had started, Jesse Springfield had been a junior platoon leader, not quite just out of Armor school but close enough. She’d been quiet, a mouse in a corner waiting for orders from Captain Solano, so soft-spoken I’d barely been aware of her existence until mounting casualties had forced her into a command position.
I barely recognized that young officer in the woman who sat across from me on one of the spare acceleration couches. Her features had sharpened, her eyes hardened, and she’d somehow evolved into as good of a company commander as Captain Solano had ever been, someone I could put in charge and depend on to keep my Marines alive.
And I didn’t know a damned thing about her. The thought slapped me in the face hard enough to make me want to deny it instinctively, but it was true and it was on purpose. I’d stopped trying to get to know the other Marines after Top died. I’d stopped trying to get to know anyone. I trusted Springfield with my life and the lives of dozens of the Marines under my charge, and if someone had asked me if she was married I couldn’t have answered without checking her personnel file.
She’s not, Jim assured me.
“That warning talked about strange abilities,” Nance mused, stroking his beard. “Could this whole thing about them turning violent have something to do with it?” He looked a question at Hallonen. “Maybe this virus is shutting down their pain receptors or something and they’re killing people with their bare hands because they don’t feel the damage they’re doing to themselves?”
“And what stopped all those guns I found from killing them?” I pointed out, though the argument was half-hearted. I knew the truth—well, I had an intuition that Jim had told me was almost certainly the truth—and didn’t really want to get to that point yet. “I mean, that… Changed, or whatever he was, wasn’t bulletproof.”
“Maybe they did, eventually,” Springfield argued, hands spread demonstratively like she was in some college debate class. Or the ones I’d audited on video anyway, since my own college degree had come from remote learning on a troop carrier. I did recall that Springfield had gone to the Academy, and I didn’t even need the implant computer or Jim for that. “You found a couple bodies that had been shot. They could have been the killers, surviving one bullet wound after another until they finally succumbed.”
“We’re trying to build a castle from a couple bricks here,” Vicky judged, staring at the deck as if she was afraid to meet the eyes of the others, afraid they’d read the truth there. “Maybe we should just head back to Earth. We only stopped here to make sure the drive worked and we were in the Cluster.” She shrugged. “It did and we are. Everything beyond that is just us chasing our tails. Let’s go to the source and we’ll find out exactly what happened.”
