Infected (10 page)

“Play it,” she said, before she could change her mind.

Tanner leaned against the headboard next to her and propped the computer on his knees. Wordlessly, he clicked on the file.

There was Uncle Walter, wearing his favorite sweater, a heather-blue one made for hiking even though the closest he ever came to hiking was pacing the halls of the house when he was trying to solve some problem. She tried to remember if he had worn it that morning—it had been unexpectedly chilly that week, so he very well could have chosen this sweater.

“Hey, Carrie,” he said into the camera with a wobbly smile. Tears popped into Carina’s eyes: he was the only person in the world who was allowed to call her Carrie.

He cleared his throat. “Uh, this is kind of weird because if you’re seeing this, well …” He stared down at his lap. “I mean, it’s not good, right? But what’s important now, no matter what else has happened, is that you do exactly what I say. If you got this far, then you got my message to avoid Sheila. I’m so sorry about that. She fooled me, Carrie. She fooled us all.”

Tanner squeezed Carina’s hand. “You okay watching this?”

She nodded, not wanting to miss a word.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am to put you in this position. I never wanted … I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you. So what I need you to do is to take care of yourself. Keep yourself safe, Carrie, I mean it. There are other files on this computer that will expose secrets that will get a lot of people in trouble. You need to get in touch with Major Nathan Wynnside with the Army Criminal Investigation Command. I’ve told him about my, uh … situation. He is expecting to hear from me when I return from Houston. If anything happens to me, I have told him that someone else will be in touch. This is the phone number you should call.” He slowly and clearly recited a string of numbers. “Do not call from this room. Take the phone that I have left for you on the desk and go somewhere safe. A public location is best, a busy park or a shopping center. Call using that phone—not your own phone, Carrie, that is very important—and tell Major Wynnside where to look. I know you’ll be able to figure that out from my note. Don’t worry about it being locked. For the major, this will not be a problem. The key is only a spare.”

He paused and drew a breath, appearing to consider what to say next. “You should never need to go to that place yourself, Carrie. What is contained in that locker … I do not want you connected with it in any way. The other files on this computer describe what we have been working on, the project that has consumed us for the last few years. If
you watch them, I think you’ll understand. Our work, the things we have created, they must never be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. And, Carrie, if you have access to them, then you automatically become a target. I—”

Walter’s voice broke, and he cleared his throat before continuing. “I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you. Too much has been lost already. Anyway, after you call Major Wynnside, you must make sure you are safe, so return to this room and
stay here
. There’s enough food and water to last you many days. Watch the news and you’ll know when it’s safe to return home. I have a feeling things will move quickly once Major Wynnside is involved, but I don’t think we can be too careful in this case.”

Walter paused, looking deeply into the camera. “Well, that’s it, then, I guess. Like I said at the beginning … Carrie, if you are watching this, then the worst has happened, and I won’t get another chance to say this. So I want you to know that you have been the greatest joy in my life. I love you.”

He gave a last, weak smile and the clip ended.

Tears spilled down Carina’s cheeks. Her uncle had been buried today, and she would never get to hug him again, never get to tell him how much she loved him in return. He’d never said it out loud when he was alive. She hadn’t doubted his love, but they weren’t the kind of family who said it with words.

She wished they had been.

Tanner hadn’t let go of her the whole time, holding her close against him. He gently brushed the tears from her face. “You okay?”

“Yes, I think so,” Carina said. It was so tempting to sink into the comfort Tanner offered, to stay here where it seemed safe, but they had bigger problems now. “Let’s just figure out what to do next.”

“Well, according to the video, Walter left you an untraceable disposable phone. You walk out there onto the streets like any other tourist and call this Major Wynnside and give him the locker number at the BART station, and he takes it from there.”

“It would have to lead to Sheila getting arrested,” Carina mused. “I mean, whatever Uncle Walter left for the major must be enough to incriminate her and whoever she’s working with.”

“And then you’d be clear too.”

“Yeah, and I could go … home.” Carina hated the way her voice hitched on the last word. She didn’t have a home to go to. There was the house she’d shared with Walter, but did she still have a right to live there now? Walter had provided for her financially, but had he also left her a place to live? She’d inherited some money from her mother too, but Walter had taken care of all the details. Carina had no idea where to start to track it all down.

“You know you can stay with us,” Tanner said. “My folks would love to have you. It’s only a month until graduation, and—”

“Thanks,” Carina said quickly, cutting him off. “Seriously. We can figure all that out as soon as we get through this.”

Staying with the Sloans sounded good. Better than good—they were a real family, the kind Carina had never had, with a mom and dad and annoying little brothers. They had a big, comfortable house with a white picket fence and a rose garden and an American flag flying over the front door. There was family movie night and football in the backyard
and a chore chart. The worst thing that ever happened at the Sloans’ was arguing over whose turn it was to do the dishes, or enduring an embarrassing family nickname.

But now Carina had dragged Tanner into a world of trouble. She couldn’t imagine involving his family too, not until the danger was past and there was no chance of it resurfacing.

“Tanner.” She swallowed, overwhelmed by what she had to say. “Sheila knows who you are. If she thinks she could use you to get to me … I’m worried about your family.”

“That’s ridiculous, Car, I don’t have any connection to the lab. She’s got to know I don’t have anything they can use.”

“No, but … she knows I care about you. She might try to use you to get me to give her the information. Can’t you maybe just call your mom and tell them to be careful?” She looked down at her hands. “Or just go. Tanner, you should just go home. If you’re there, Sheila can be sure you aren’t helping me, and then—”

But Tanner’s face had gone white. He dug for his phone and stared at it in horror. “Oh shit,” he said. “You just made me realize something, I’ve got to …”

He leapt off the bed and looked frantically around the room. He settled on a can of generic peas and grabbed it off the shelf. Laying the phone on the desk, he began hitting it over and over with the can, smashing it to pieces. He sorted through the shards, picking up a tiny square chip between his finger and thumb, and whacked it hard.

“Tanner, stop it. Someone’s going to hear you!”

“Two things,” he said grimly, placing the smashed electronio
bit almost gently on the table next to the destroyed phone. “First, I bet your uncle has soundproofed this place. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s all kinds of insulation under the floors and behind the walls. And second, every cell phone in America has a tracking device built in. I don’t think they could hack it this fast, but with the right access and equipment, they could identify exactly where we are.”

Carina stared at the shards of plastic and metal and silicon. “But not anymore, I take it.”

“Yeah. And there’s no way they could have been on it already,” he said, sounding slightly less certain. “Not in that amount of time. I mean, tracing it would be pretty straightforward, but getting the number would be hard, even for them.”

“And mine’s back in that alley.” Carina couldn’t remember the exact moment she’d dropped her purse; it hadn’t made it on the BART train with her.

“I’ll bet it was untraceable anyway. There’s a reason your uncle wouldn’t let you have a smartphone, and it wasn’t because he didn’t trust you.” Tanner frowned, took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes.

“Hey, are you all right?”

“Yeah, I am.… I just feel off, like my senses aren’t reacting properly. Like I’m forgetting to blink or something.”

Carina knew the feeling, which was strange, because it was difficult to put into words. Whatever Tanner was coming down with, she had it too. “Kind of like there’s too much stimulation, right? Like the colors are too bright and the sounds too loud?”

“Yeah, and like I have too much energy. I mean, I feel like
I just need to
move
.” He shrugged sheepishly, as though the admission embarrassed him. But Carina had noticed something else—something she didn’t want to mention because she didn’t know what it meant, and it scared her: his eye had begun to twitch more frequently at the corner. Just like hers. “Look, forget it, I’m sure I’m fine. Listen, you want to check out a couple more of the videos? Might help us figure out what Walter was really doing.”

He picked up the laptop and tapped the keyboard as they looked at the file list together.

“Try Project Venice Overview,” Carina said, watching him carefully; the twitch subsided.

The file opened and as the video prepared to play, she saw that it was Uncle Walter, in this same room. He was wearing different clothes, and the room was rearranged slightly: he was sitting in the desk chair off to the side. She could see the door to the bathroom in the corner of the screen. He must have set the recording device on the desk to take the video.

“My name is Walter Xavier Monroe,” he said in a clear, somber voice. “I am employed as a senior lead analyst at Calaveras National Laboratory.” He went on to give his employee ID and Social Security numbers.

“I have been working on Project Venice, which was undertaken by the Calaveras laboratory in March of 2010 after meetings with several branches of the armed services. I was not a part of those initial meetings, and my role has been strictly developmental. Our intent has been to create a synthetic virus to improve performance of US forces on the battlefield.”

“Wait,” Carina said. Tanner paused the video. “
Virus?
I—I’ve never heard of anything like this. Not from Walter or my mom.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Tanner said. “You want to keep watching?”

She nodded, and Tanner hit play. As Walter talked, she realized with growing horror that she’d known nothing about his work. And that it was a project that had gone very wrong.

The virus had been under development for years. Walter and Sheila and the rest of the team, including her mother, had been trying to isolate a virus that could enhance a soldier’s abilities for a short period of time in battle. The current version had what Uncle Walter called, with bitter irony, “the biggest potential.” It sharpened all five senses, making them more acute; it caused spikes in the production and release of adrenaline and other hormones and neurotransmitters, resulting in short-term improvement in strength, mental processing speed and acuity, and sensory perception and processing. Reaction times were markedly improved, and both fine and gross motor skills showed dramatic increases. The virus could be delivered directly into the bloodstream and had an extremely low rejection rate, and the microbes reproduced at a rate of one million percent within half an hour of delivery. It was not airborne and could be transmitted from one human to another only via saliva or blood contact, which was most effectively done in the first few hours after infection.

“A breakthrough like this could dramatically reduce casualty rates among US forces,” Walter said. “Incidents of
fatigue, failure to advance position, friendly fire—we used various modeling to show that all of these could be curbed significantly. There was so much excitement during the first year of the study. It was classified top-secret, but we were assured that the project had the enthusiastic support of the government agencies involved, and there was a feeling of optimism among all of us.

“That was the good news,” Uncle Walter said, his voice tired. “Unfortunately, it was followed by a lot of bad news. For one thing, most iterations of the virus were plagued by a range of unpleasant symptoms. For most people, these were mild and included fever, increased appetite, dizziness, fainting, and mild arrhythmia, but for slightly less than two percent of the population there was a risk of heart failure. Slightly more than three-quarters of the test subjects experienced uncontrollable movements, mostly facial tics in the early stage and, later, gross-motor interruptions and even seizures.”

“Wait,” Carina said. “That’s, I mean—”

She didn’t finish her sentence, not wanting to miss anything Walter was saying, but those were
their
symptoms, the things she and Tanner had been feeling since this morning. The racing heart, the appetite, the enhancements to their senses and strength—even the twitching.