Текст книги "The Eden Plague"

Автор книги: David VanDyke

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

-13-

Daniel opened up an MRE, Meal Ready-to-Eat standard field ration, and started sharing it between himself and Elise. It was twelve hundred calories in a package about the size of a bag of potato chips, but they ate it all fast.

Zeke gave Vinny a summary situation report, then came over to the rest of them. By then everyone was gathered around Larry, who seemed to be out of danger.

Daniel thought about giving him a dose of morphine but decided against it. If Elise could deal with the pain of being shot, Larry could too.

“We have to extract,” said Zeke urgently. “That last bastard had a radio and a phone in the security room there. No doubt he made a call. If they’re brave and stupid they’ll react with their helo. If they’re smarter, they’ll get together something we can’t handle. Either way, we don’t wanna hang around. Larry, can you move?”

Larry’s eyes were open by then. He opened his mouth, coughed, and said, “Yeah, I think so. Hey, pretty lady.”

Elise pressed her lips together in a wan, tearful smile. “Hang in there. You’ll be fine now.”

They helped Larry to his feet, leaving the shreds of his armor and most of his clothing in a bloody heap on the floor. Daniel handed him an MRE, then opened another one. Mmmm, chicken a la king. He could have eaten raw chicken at this point. He laughed to himself. Actually yes, I could. Salmonella is no threat anymore.

Skull dragged in the hog-tied man they had caught sleeping, slung him next to the other one. “What about these two?” he asked, gesturing at the immobilized men on the floor.

Spooky walked over to them with his P90 aimed.

“No!” Daniel yelled.

“Shut up, Markis,” warned Skull. He swung his HK Daniel’s direction, an implicit threat. “It’s not your call.”

Daniel stood up, stepped up to Skull. His forward motion stopped with the flash suppressor of the HK in his chest. One twitch of the man’s finger and he might be dead. He wasn’t at all sure his armor could stop a high-powered rifle bullet at point blank range.

Their eyes locked.

“I’m making it my call. This guy’s not the enemy, he’s just doing a job.” Daniel reached up to grasp the barrel with his left hand, shoving it aside. Then he stared Skull down.

“They almost killed Larry,” the thin sniper grated, his eyes cold and fixed.

“But they didn’t. And we saved his life. Nothing to avenge.” Daniel stepped into Skull’s personal space, put a hand on his chest, pushing him inexorably back. Skull stumbled, and Daniel shoved his skinny frame. The thin man sprawled on his back as Daniel pointed a finger at him. “Next time you aim a weapon at me, you better shoot me, or I’ll shove it up your ass.”

Skull spread his hands, backing down for the moment, but Daniel could tell it wasn’t over between them.

“He’s right,” rumbled Zeke. “Nobody kills anybody if we don’t need to.”

Daniel let his breath out with relief. Elise stepped up behind, staring at the unconscious man on the floor. “It’s Miguel,” she said softly. “He’s a slimy bastard and rapist. This is the first time I’ve regretted the virtue effect. I’d like to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget. But I have a better idea.” She reached over to open a drawer and pulled out a syringe. She filled it with blood from her own arm, then plunged it into each of the prisoners in turn.

“Great. You’re rewarding them for being assholes?” Skull asked disgustedly.

“Actually,” she said, “this is the best revenge. The virtue effect will make him regret his own misdeeds, and he won’t repeat them. Maybe it will keep other people safe from him later. And he’ll be useless to the Company now. They both will be.”

“That’s smart, and kind,” said Daniel approvingly.

Elise brightened with his praise. She reached to embrace him, putting her head against his chest.

Skull snorted.

A note of envy in there I think, Daniel said to himself.

Zeke broke the moment. “That’s enough of that. Time to get out. Listen, you,” he poked Miguel, “tell your masters that we got the healing stuff. If they want it kept under control for a while longer, they’ll stop coming after us. Otherwise, maybe we’ll just release it into the water supply. Or start biting people.”

Elise shook her head, started to say something.

Daniel held up a hand to stop her. Rogett remained out cold. Miguel was blindfolded, and Daniel didn’t want him to see Zeke or hear any commentary, because he knew Zeke was bluffing.

Or Daniel thought he was.

He also didn’t think the bluff would work. Governments, or government employees, generally don’t react well to blackmail. We’ve bloodied their noses, embarrassed them, stolen their secret formula, and the person or people behind the whole thing will want it back. The only question was, would they still try to do damage control, or would it be confession time, bump it up to higher authority and turn it into an official reaction by the whole Agency or worse. Daniel really didn’t want that. “Sure wish we could destroy this lab,” he remarked. “That would slow them down a bit.”

Spooky said, “We could burn it. Best we can do. We have to go.”

“Oh, I got something better,” answered Larry in a gravel voice. “I got claymores. And thermite. In the bag in the first closet.” Claymores were command-detonated explosive mines. Not ideal for blowing up buildings, but good enough as a field expedient. Thermite was a high-temperature incendiary that would melt its way through damned near anything.

Zeke nodded. “Excellent. Set them up. Find the fire suppression system and turn it off. Skull, Spooky, get some flammables. Miss Wallis, are there records?”

She pointed at one wall, where several computers sat, with rows of disks and a big commercial-grade hard drive.

Daniel walked over, started dumping all the recordable data media and drives he could find into a pile onto the floor. “Make sure we pour some accelerant over here,” he said.

Elise went over to the computers, opening a drawer and reaching far into the back. She came up with something in her hand, something small, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “Flash drive. It’s got a secret copy of almost all of our work on it, just in case.”

In case of what, Daniel wondered? He supposed in case of something like this.

“Take this and go over there.” She handed him the flash drive and pointed toward the door.

Puzzled, Daniel complied, moving away.

She picked up a strange heavy device with a handle and a thick three-prong cord on it. She plugged it in and flipped a switch. It started to hum with a noise that made his teeth hurt. “Electromagnet,” she said. “It’ll wipe everything.” She started running the thing over the computer cases and hard drives. He saw now why she sent him and the precious flash drive away.

Skull came in with a five-gallon jerry can of diesel and started pouring it all over everything. The guy in the hood began to scream through the gagging tape when he smelled it.

Probably thinks we’re going to burn him. Daniel thought, watching Skull carefully.

Zeke shoved Skull out of the way, dragged the bound man outside.

Spooky kicked Karl, who was either still unconscious or shamming. “One of you strongmen grab this one. I am no weightlifter.”

Daniel left Elise to her magnetic wiping and grabbed Karl by a leg, then dragged him none too gently out into the parking lot and left him with the other one by the Jeep.

It was quiet outside, except for a faint buzzing sound, like a weed-eater heard from two yards over. Or a helo a few miles out. It was getting louder.

“We got company coming, fellas,” Daniel said. “ETA one to two minutes. I can hear a bird inbound.”

Zeke answered for everyone. “Roger. Rally at the ORP, go go go.”

“Wait, I have to let the chimps out!” cried Elise. She ran for the other room, frantically opening cages. She led the two apes outside, holding each by a hand.

“We have to leave them, you know,” Zeke said gently. Elise looked pleadingly at him but he shook his head. “They’ll be fine; they will want them for the future research program. Just lock them up in the other building.”

Elise nodded tearfully and quickly did so. The childlike primates did not want to let her go but she had no choice.

The six of them streamed for the rally point, flames licking at the laboratory behind them. They heard two explosions inside, rattling the walls and spitting dust and debris out the doors. Larry’s claymores and thermite had done their work.

Zeke counted heads as they arrived, then led everyone quickly through the woods by moonlight. Daniel stayed right behind Elise. A couple of brief minutes later they got to the rubber boat.

The buzzing of the helicopter was closer, but the only thing they knew was it was coming from the east, and the trees blocked their view. They couldn’t embark on the raft until they were sure the helo wasn’t a threat. They heard it making a couple of passes near the burning lab, then it turned toward them.

It raced overhead, suddenly visible as it passed above the tree line and then out over the water. It looked like an OH-6 or Hughes 500 variant, commonly called a “Loach,” or “Little Bird,” probably the best light helicopter ever made. It made a sharp turn south, paralleling the shoreline two hundred yards out.

Suddenly tracers spat from the helo’s open door, striking the rented boat. Two assault weapons on full auto responded from the little squad on the beach, reaching out to intersect the insectlike device in flight. The helo’s tracers started to shift toward them, then the bird staggered in the air and lost power. Smoke started pouring from it, and they could see flames. A moment later it made a hard splashdown in the water beyond the boat, pieces of rotor flying.

“Stupid,” said Zeke, pain in his voice. “Dammit, why did they do that?” It sounded like the Eden Plague was plaguing his conscience as well.

At least it isn’t just me, Daniel thought.

“Arrogant,” responded Spooky. “Be glad they did. Is one less variable.”

“We have a bigger problem,” said Skull, standing up and walking out of the trees onto the rocky beach. “Look.”

Their rented boat, their way off the island, was already listing noticeably. The helo’s shooter must have holed it badly below the waterline before it was knocked down.

“Dammit,” said Larry, staring. “What now?”

“What are you doing, DJ?” Zeke asked. “We can’t save the boat.”

Daniel was singlehandedly dragging the rubber raft toward the water. “How about the people in the helo!” he yelled. “There might be survivors!”

Zeke stared at him for a second, then grabbed the other side of the raft and helped him get it to the water’s edge. “Spooky, you and DJ paddle out there.” Zeke ran back to the tree line. “Elise, is there a boat in that boathouse?”

“Yes there is! An 18-foot powerboat. Let’s go get it!” she said eagerly. She started back into the woods in the direction of the dock, Skull and Zeke following right behind.

Daniel and Spooky rowed out to where the Loach had hit. Wreckage was still floating, and there was one man clinging to a piece. They dragged him into the rubber boat and he lay there gasping. Spooky kept a weapon pointed at his nose. They looked around but couldn’t find anyone else. Daniel kept his mouth shut. They’d saved one man anyway.

By this time they heard, then saw, the powerboat screaming around the south end of the island at thirty knots or more. Daniel hoped they didn’t hit a submerged rock at that speed. As they got closer he could see Skull driving, with Elise in the back. The boat soon pulled in close to shore.

They got their feet wet loading up, leaving the helo survivor on the shore with his hands zip-cuffed and his eyes taped over. He could peel off the tape, walk back to the burned complex, find a sharp piece of metal to cut the cuffs, and free his two buddies, but by that time the team would be long gone.

It was crowded in the boat, but Daniel didn’t mind. Elise was pushed up against him, shivering in the cold spindrift wind. He wrapped his arms around her, just enjoying the feeling of survival, freedom and healthy woman.

She responded, pressing herself against his muscular warmth, but suddenly pushed him gently away. She put her left foot up against the coaming and pulled up her pants leg. Strapped to her ankle was an electronic device with a light on it, flashing angry red. “Cut it off,” she instructed. “They said they could track me with it.”

While the rest stared, Daniel took out his knife again and carefully sliced the strap. He tossed it into the blacking sea. Track that, spy-boys.

“Anything else you want to tell us?” Zeke yelled into the noise of the rushing air. Elise shook her head, looked down, embarrassed. Daniel squeezed her hand.

Spooky remarked over the net, “If I was them I would have a tracker on this boat.”

“Right. Zeke to Vinny, meet us at alternate marina Charlie with a bug-finder. We’ll pull in and you can give it a once-over. ETA maybe five minutes, so haul ass.”

Vinny met them at a little marina a couple of miles down the coast from where they had rented the boat. He went over the speedboat with an electronic detector, soon yanking out a fist-sized GPS transmitter. He tossed that into the water.

Larry, Elise and Daniel piled into Vinny’s Toyota and drove back to the motel. Skull roared off in the powerboat, to a different marina. Vinny dropped them off, then went to pick up the rest. Good thing there were dozens of landing places up and down the coast.

In the hotel room Daniel phoned in a huge order of Chinese for delivery. In the meantime they ate and drank everything that was handy. Crackers, cookies, cans of vegetable juice, full-sugar soda, tuna, it was all shoveled into their gullets like pelicans at a fish farm. When the take-out arrived, they plowed into that, too. When the others returned to the hotel, they found a half-eaten styrofoam buffet and two stuffed Eden Plague carriers sitting on the floor half-asleep. The third, Larry, was in the bathroom cleaning up.

Zeke caught a whiff of the food and grabbed the nearest box, eating with a grim determination. Daniel saw his rigger belt was cinched up tight and he looked like he had lost twenty pounds today. The other three started eating as well, though with only normal human urgency.

“We gotta get out of here,” Daniel said over the noise of the gobbling. He forced himself up to sit on the bed. “Even if they don’t make us here, they know we’re in the area.”

The rest nodded.

“All right, people,” Zeke said between bites. “Tear it down. Get ready to roll out.”

“Wait,” said Skull forcefully. He swept everyone with an even harder look than usual. “The lab’s burnt and unless there’s a lot of data stored off-site, we set them back years. But there are two loose ends. Or three.”

“Yes,” agreed Spooky. “The scientists and the doctor.”

Daniel preempted their argument. “So we go snap them up. Now. We know where they are. We know four of six shooters are out of the picture – at least two in the helo, two from the lab. We can probably snatch the scientists in their beds not three miles from here. Does the doctor in charge live here?”

“No, Durgan lives in Annapolis,” said Elise. “He comes down once a week or so. But he’s just an educated manager; he couldn’t recreate the work, though Arthur and Roger and I together could. Daniel is right.” She hugged his arm, sitting there next to him, and he felt warm all over.

“Much easier to just put a bullet into their heads,” observed Skull. He was staring at Daniel, like he was ready for the inevitable argument.

Zeke beat him to it. “No. No murder.”

“It’s preemptive self-defense,” retorted the sniper.

“No, it’s assassination. It’s not justified.” Zeke was firm.

“The hell it’s not. Those guys were trying to kill us at the lab. That’s war in my book, and that makes them targets. Enemy combatants.”

“Those were their shooters. These guys are just scientists.”

Skull insisted, “You don’t think all those enemy nuclear physicists that disappeared in the last twenty or thirty years just fell into random holes, do you? We killed a bunch of them ourselves, and the Israelis got the rest.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” chimed in Elise, her eyes blazing. “Maybe that makes us just as bad as they are.”

Daniel put a restraining hand on her arm, knowing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with these guys that way. She had proved herself to him, but not to them. “Let’s not sink to their level, I think is what she means,” he said mildly.

“Perhaps they would be useful. It is not so much more trouble to take them with us, I think,” said Spooky softly.

Skull snorted. “Zeke, your A-team is turning into a bunch of wussies.”

Zeke locked eyes with him. “Yeah, my A-team. Not yours. You want out?”

Skull stared at Zeke a long moment. “Not yet,” he finally said.

“Well, you let me know when ‘yet’ comes. Until then I need to rely on you. Can I rely on you, Skull?” His eyes bored in.

Skull swallowed, nodded once, solemnly. “Yeah. Of course you can, Zeke. It’s your call.”

Zeke grinned and patted Skull’s cheek, breaking the tension. “I love you too, man. Okay, hasty operation, we snatch our mad scientists. Half an hour for planning, then we go.”

***

An hour later they were on the road with two more guests. Both had been very happy to come with them. Both had been glad to get rid of their ankle bracelets.

They traveled in a convoy of four SUVs. Vinny had wired the vehicles with secure commo for their tactical net. That way they could talk freely as they drove, and everyone could hear. Daniel was glad; he didn’t want to wait until the end of another road trip for answers, and he had no idea where they were going or how far.

They sweated some before they got off the peninsula; until they made it through the Virginia Beach – Norfolk area, they were bottlenecked. Fortunately they were ahead of the posse, it seemed, and soon they were wending their way up I-64 toward Richmond, Charlottesville and points west.

They gave the two scientists an abbreviated version of what was going on. Elise said neither of them was an Eden Plague carrier. They both expressed relief at being out of the situation, along with natural fear of the government reaction. Welcome to the club, Daniel thought. Welcome through the looking glass.

Then it was time for some explanations. After a little bit of discussion among the former INS, Inc. employees, Roger mumbled, “Elise should tell it. She’s been around the longest, she knows the most.”

So Elise started to speak, in a kind of detached remembering voice.

-14-

“I was the first to do real research on the Eden Plague, in this century anyway, I think.  Before me there was just an MD named Raphe Durgan. He said he was from the USDA, Department of Agriculture, but he didn’t act like it. He acted like an arrogant spymaster, always bragging about being ‘in the black world’ and ‘behind the green door’ and terms like those. Anyway, Durgan had figured out just from his initial analysis that the virus would have some interesting effects, maybe curative ones. He tried it out on animals but it didn’t do much; it seemed made for people. So he wanted a human test subject that would be grateful no matter what – someone dying, like I was.

   “With me he got more than he bargained for – a complete cure – so he got me hired for the team and swore me to secrecy with all those government confidentiality clauses. He was ecstatic, and sent me over to Plum Island research center to take a look at the biological materials. He said the things were captured in Iraq from some technology smugglers looting the crumbling Soviet Union. Samples sealed in some Soviet-style containers, nothing but bio-hazard symbols on them. He’d gotten the Eden Plague virus from those samples – though we hadn’t named it yet.

“I knew there was some sort of politics involved. That old ‘WMD in Iraq’ argument. That’s why they set it up under the CDC, I think – someone outside of the usual national security establishment. I got the impression there was a lot of infighting among the CIA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice about it. It was all very hush-hush; I kept my mouth shut and just did the work. It’s what you do when you have a security clearance and you work on secret projects. I just wanted to do the research.”

“What about the containers?” Daniel asked, impatient.

“All but one had human remains in them. One had a whole human head, a woman. The others held half-burned pieces of flesh. One of them had a smaller container inside, that had been opened but was still half-full of a purified virus-like organism in an inert matrix.”

“So that was the Eden Plague?” inquired Zeke.

“No, it was something else. But the human remains were contaminated with the Eden Plague.”

“What about the pure sample?” Daniel asked.

“Let me tell it in my own way, okay sweetie?”

Daniel sat back and twined his fingers in hers. She’d called him “sweetie.” He shut up, a stupid grin on his face. The grin faded as he thought further. He didn’t usually react this way to a woman, getting hyper-infatuated. Another side-effect of the Eden Plague? That plus the combat high? His mind worried at the question, like a dog with a bone.

Elise went on. “After a cursory analysis, it was obvious both plagues were never-before-seen stuff, something new. I reported everything to Durgan alone. Pretty soon the CDC informed me the project was being transferred to Durgan’s company under a privatization initiative. He offered me double what I was making, so I gave my notice right away. Actually I’d have done it for the same pay. I wanted to figure out what we had, and I was so grateful to just be alive I was ready to do almost anything he wanted.

“So pretty soon I started work at the brand-new lab on Watts Island, along with Roger and Arthur. The government seems to like islands, though technically it was the company’s facility. They can control islands better. We’ve been working there ever since. Almost five years.

“We started basic testing, deconstruction, gene sequencing on both viruses, plagues. We called them phages or plagues for want of a better term, since they were different from most other viruses. Durgan took our reports, helped a little in the lab, asked some smart questions, but we did all the work. He wouldn’t hire any technicians, so it went slower than it should have. I know now he was more concerned about secrecy than progress. I think he had some notion of cashing in on our discoveries, keeping them from his secret government masters.

“We got whatever gear we wanted. I hear they paid millions for the island, but the equipment cost ten times as much. More. Nothing but the best. DNA sequencers, electron microscopes, virus incubators, whatever we wanted. And they kept raising our pay, too. We worked like demons. That’s ironic; you’ll hear why soon.

“So you asked about the pure sample. It was a far simpler virus, or proto-virus, than the other. It acted like a phage, invading whatever cells we gave it and damaging them, but the effects were much more subtle than one would expect. In simple organisms it didn’t have much effect at all. In more complex organisms it degraded everything, every process, but it was very hit or miss, and didn’t seem like a big deal. I’m compressing years of study into minutes here, okay?

“Also, without getting too deep into why we thought so, it seemed like maybe this virus could be the evolutionary ancestor of all viruses. Virus Zero. So Arthur came up with an idea. We used some powerful modeling software to ‘back out’ the virus and its computed effects from living organisms. We ran the infection process backward in the computer, so to speak, undoing the damage this thing did on our model organisms, all the way up to people, to homo sapiens.

“You know what we got in our no-virus model? Incredibly healthy people, physically, mentally, emotionally. They were strong, they didn’t get sick, they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t develop mental illness. They had long life spans, at the theoretical limit of telomere degradation and cell division. A thousand years or more. Like Methuselah in the Bible.

“So imagine Earth before this thing arrived. With no viruses and no degrading effect of this plague, it would be Eden. Everything more healthy, everything in better balance. Then this plague showed up sometime during the last ten thousand years, before recorded human history but after the Ice Age.

“Maybe it evolved here, but I just don’t see how. I think it’s extraterrestrial. If anything can survive a naked journey through space to another planet, a virus could. It could be the result of a life-bearing planet being destroyed, the debris scattered through interstellar space carrying it. Or it could be sent from some aliens that wish us harm. What better way to attack another world on the cheap? Biological warfare, like smallpox blankets and the Indians, or plague corpses catapulted over the castle walls.”

Zeke broke in, “Maybe we should keep that to ourselves. People will say we’ve been infected by alien viruses and are not human any longer…like we’re pod people or something.”

That stopped Elise for a moment. “Yeah, right. Shut up about aliens. So anyway we – mostly Roger – made an extremely sophisticated computer model of our Eden, with humans and animals living in balance, with those long lifespans, with telomeres that didn’t degrade…everything we had learned by the virtual-undoing model. Then we introduced the virtual plague to see what would happen. We ran the infection model forward again.”

Elise took a deep breath. “It spread like wildfire, infecting everything. Living things degraded, subtly but thoroughly. The higher order the organism, the more it degraded. It affected humans most of all, promoting animalistic behavior.

“The plague left most host cells intact, but with a bunch of mutations and other damage to every system in the body. It shortened lifespans, made everyone stupider and weaker, more selfish, more violent, less altruistic and social in their behavior. It also boosted the fertility of both male and female, so it accelerated population explosions, competition for territory. Humans and animals both began overeating, overkilling, gorging on prey, overgrazing land and trees. Killing for sport. Fighting for territory, fighting over mating rights. They stopped cooperating. Humans started tribal wars. Everything just went to hell, hell on Earth, compared to what went before.”

She rubbed her face with both of her hands. “So we called it the Devil Plague. This devil corrupted our virtual Eden.”

Daniel’s mind whirled with the implications. Maybe those old stories had a grain of truth in them. The Devil was supposed to have come from Heaven to Earth, corrupting the Garden of Eden. This was the panspermia scenario’s evil twin; instead of a life-bearing meteorite jump-starting life, it damaged what was already here. He said, “So you believe this is what happened in the real world? Like the model?”

“Actually, yes,” she said. “It makes sense. But by this time Dr. Durgan thought we had a biological weapon we could use. We couldn’t convince him that it wouldn’t work that way. He thought we were holding out on him, so he assigned us those…commissars. Minders. Slave drivers. We couldn’t take vacations, or visit our families. He thought we were acting like those German nuclear scientists under the Nazis, the ones that slowed down their atomic bomb program…but we weren’t! We would have resisted if it really was a bio-weapon. Ironically, we were being punished for a moral choice we never had to make.”

“So it can’t be weaponized?” asked Vinny.

Arthur spoke up. “No, the Devil Plague wouldn’t do much to anyone now. It has done all the damage it was going to do more than ten thousand years ago. There is a kind of limit. It will only put so much of a load on the physiological system, and then it just stops replicating itself and goes inert. In fact, it’s everywhere even now. You can find it in everything in a dormant state, in low concentrations. It only flares up occasionally, almost at random. And it’s actually fairly easy to generate resistance. In the real world, we demonstrated that every eukaryotic organism on Earth has enough residual immunity to make it just a nuisance disease. No worse than a cold. It was a dead end, except as a research subject.”

Elise picked up the thread smoothly. “Yes, it seems like humans got lucky. Developed a certain amount of immunity. So we started studying the Eden Plague. Of course we didn’t call it that then, but once we figured it out, the name was inevitable. But this one is certainly a designed organism, probably by humans. I’d guess the Soviets created it. They did a lot of research on biologicals, on phages. They have medical phage clinics even now, to treat superbug bacterial infections. Phages to kill bacteria.”

Daniel stuck his hand up like a kid in class. “How come you don’t think the Eden Plague is extraterrestrial too?”

She replied, “Because it looks like it was built directly from the Devil Plague. Genetically engineered with known techniques. You need the poison to design the antidote. That’s the only reason it was even possible, because they had isolated and purified the proto-DP to study it in its non-mutated state.

“So Durgan was hoping this was his bio-weapon, but it wasn’t. It seemed to us that the Eden Plague was specifically designed to reverse the Devil Plague process. To restore certain organisms – in this case humans – to their former state. And it almost works! With a few years and a billion dollars I’m pretty sure it could be perfected. We’ve come a long way in genetic engineering the past few decades since they made this.”

Elise sounded enthusiastic, but smart as she was, Daniel didn’t think she had thought it through as far as he had. He said, “Even in its current imperfect form, it seems like a cure for a lot of diseases. So what if the patient has to eat a lot of food. That’s a small price to pay for saving someone’s life. But if word gets out, and it’s in short supply, the whole world will be after it. It could plunge us into World War Three.”