Chapter 9

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Infection Date 15, 2200 GMT (6:00 p.m. Local)

The high-speed Secret Service ride rattled Isabel’s nerves on the way to the truly frightening part: a full National Security Council meeting. Isabel tried to nap but kept waking at sharp turns or hard braking and catching glimpses of military preparations. A tank under camouflaged overhead nets in a Rite-Aid parking lot. Troops jogging down the side of the road in sweaty T-shirts. A helicopter flying over with a green generator suspended beneath it by a cable. Yet the only person at the White House fence held a Stop Abortion Now! sign.

Her new security badge didn’t seem to help much. She endured three pupillary response checks despite being escorted by a Secret Service woman. In the Situation Room, her attempt to scurry unseen to a wall chair failed miserably. “Ah! Dr. Miller,” the president said. “Just in time for the Pentagon’s latest video.” Maldonado patted a seat.

Isabel was drowsy and hoped she could stay awake for the video.

“It’s actually,” replied Browner, “from the WHO team in Harbin—Drs. Lange and Groenewalt, who are doing excellent work—and it’s the clearest yet of a mass attack.” The screen displayed a view through an apartment window of a huge crowd gathered on a street several stories below. “Twelve hundred Infecteds”—so that’s what we’re calling them—“built up, over time, at barricades manned by 107 Chinese officers and men. Four isolated shootings occurred over as many hours. A ranting man who couldn’t keep track of what he was doing. A woman dragging a dead dog down the street on a leash. A boy murdering a fellow Infected for his winter coat. And a man startled by everything and everyone, including other Infecteds.”

Browner tilted his reading glasses. “At each shooting by troops, Lange wrote, the crowd hardly stirred. Then after hours of passivity, seven Infecteds came running up from the rear, assaulting previously docile fellow Infecteds. And this happens.”

The bleary-eyed Marine general clicked a remote and seven, circled Infecteds raced through the crowd from the back toward the army’s lines, slashing with knives, stabbing with garden stakes, sometimes stopping and annihilating, other times rampaging on. One attacker fell and was stomped by her brethren, but the other six were being joined by Infecteds they passed. Browner played the video forward and backward like a football coach. “As crazies pass, dociles get riled up and follow. They go from hours of doing nothing, to full-on, unarmed charge, in seconds. This next is gonna be hard to watch.” He looked down through his angled glasses. “In the next twenty-four seconds, approximately half of the Infecteds, just over six hundred, will be grievously wounded or killed.”

“Oh-my-God,” someone muttered.

“Chinese troop losses,” Browner paused the video, “were 100 percent KIA.”

The room stilled. “That can’t be,” President Stoddard said, rocking forward, staring at soldiers manning barricades in proper order. “A hundred and seven troops? Armed with modern infantry weapons? Ready to fight?”

“Ultimately,” Browner said, “it comes down to time, distance, and numbers. Are you ready, sir?” There was something in the way he had asked . . .

Maldonado clutched her phone to her chest as Browner narrated. “By second sixteen, the seven original attackers had become 37. At 20 seconds”—there were gasps—“the entire crowd attacks en masse.” All 1,200 Infecteds suddenly and without warning surged as a solid mass toward the troops. Back and forth the video went between 16 seconds and 20. It was unreal. Like they had rehearsed it, like some flash mob, they all just . . . charged. “No bystanders here. No conscientious objectors. They went all-in. Every, single, last one—young and old, male and female, healthy and infirm—joined the attack.”

He let the video play. No one left the room, but several, including Maldonado, turned away. The high-strung aide spun her wedding band round and round and round.

There was no audio. The only sounds were the groans that greeted the first Infecteds to fall in the silent, scythe-like machine gun reaping.

“Most troops at least attempted to unlimber weapons or sought cover from which to engage the Infecteds. Only five, we counted, turned tail, but by then . . .” The video played in slow-motion. At twenty-one, fire erupted. “Two Type 88 5.8mm light machine guns opened fire instantly and held their triggers down to the end. The third opened fire a couple of seconds later. Half the riflemen had engaged by three seconds in, almost all the rest by five.”

At twenty-four, Isabel’s heart broke. Grown men, little children, and elderly women spun and fell as death found them at random. “Analysts estimate that, at such short range, each round had enough penetrating force to strike an average of 2.1 Infecteds.”

By twenty-six, Infecteds stumbled over bodies from the fallen front ranks, but the outstretched hands of the mass were only a few meters away from the nearest retreating troops. At twenty-eight, the mob set upon them. Helmeted men were swallowed by the crashing wave, never to reappear. At thirty, the mass trampled the first of two striped wooden barricades. By thirty-two, the main line of soldiers cowered, fetal and defenseless, as the merciless mass piled atop.
Browner thankfully froze the video. “Before I saw this, sir, I would’ve confidently predicted that a single light machine gun would clear that street. If you’ve never been on the business end of a machine gun—the sound, the heat, the feel . . .” He and the other generals seemed rattled. “I can’t overstate how incredibly abnormal this is.”

He hit Play. Gazes were averted as soldiers were pummeled with the butts of their own rifles. Stabbed with bayonets from their own scabbards. Strangled, punched, kicked, elbowed, kneed, and even bitten. Fingernails became fearsome, primal weapons. The camera zoomed in. Eyes were gouged. Noses, lips, and ears torn from screaming, thrashing faces. Heads wrenched from side to side but wouldn’t come free. It was almost impossible to watch, and it shredded any hope Isabel had for the future.

Browner hit replay and paused at thirty-three, where the sprinting mass shattered the second wooden barricade like runners in a photo finish. Rather than provide relief, it froze the horrors in a sickening tableaux. “Note,” he said, “Infecteds aren’t reveling in their victory. No celebrating, taking body part or equipment trophies. Frenzy, yes. Rage, you bet! But no fist pumps or high fives.” The awful video rolled in slow motion. Inhuman, Isabel thought, in every sense of the word. Soldiers in the rear fired heedlessly into their own ranks until tackled, or their magazines ran dry, or they braced or turned away just before impact.

Browner replayed the video, from thirty-four to forty-four seconds, over and over and over. Here and there, brief lone struggles ensued until five, ten, twenty attackers dove on top. Men who shook free for an instant disappeared under succeeding hordes. “From the mass charge by the previously docile crowd, to last visible signs of life among the Chinese troops, was twenty-four seconds.”

The Infecteds reminded Isabel of some wretched hive species, swarming its victims like bees on a beekeeper’s glove. As relentless as an ant pile attacking the man staked atop it. Men, women, children, and the elderly climbed over each other to inflict maximum violence on soldiers who, she hoped, had died quickly. And they kept at the destruction even after their victims were surely gone. How long do you live? she wondered, imagining the light being blotted out above her by crazed faces and clawing hands. Your body doesn’t know when to give up. How long must you endure being so sickeningly defiled? Shock would help. But when would brain death put a definitive end to the horror?

Maldonado rushed out of the room, as did a young man with a ponytail taking photos of the meeting for posterity. Would there be a posterity? There was nothing human recognizable in the behavior of that mob. Isabel couldn’t shake the feeling that these were the last days of mankind, and the first of whatever would follow it.

She forced herself to focus. There might be a quiz at the end. The Infecteds didn’t eat their victims, or focus sadistically on faces or genitalia. They simply demolished the corpses. In one abominable eddy of savagery, a middle-aged woman repeatedly chopped at a soldier’s hip with a folding shovel. Seconds later, three straining Infecteds pulled a leg free from its torso, which was pinned by grappling masses.

They didn’t raise the severed limb, or smear their cheeks with the copious volume of blood in which Infecteds slipped and slid. They dropped the bloody leg and hurled themselves onto another killing mound, reaching into the writhing mass, desperate for some part of the kill. Rewinding, Browner pointed with a laser to small fights that broke out among Infecteds, calling them “red-on-red engagements.” An arm stuck into a pile was clawed by another Infected. The mistaken identity escalated to what was surely a fatal mauling of a child by the bigger, stronger adult. One entire scrum devolved into an amorphous orgy of mindless bludgeoning and scratching.

Mindless, the thought recurred. A shiver ran up Isabel’s spine. But her eye was drawn to the right edge of the screen beyond the last broken barricade. The crowd surged into the empty street, found no more soldiers and stormed by the dozens into apartment buildings. Several carried rifles. Once roused, their killing appeared to continue until . . . what? They ran out of victims and calmed down?

The screen mercifully went blue. Around the room, eyes were closed in prayer, emotional overload or simple revulsion. Heads drooped, each alone with their selves screaming “this-isn’t-happening” denials or “that-won’t-happen-to-me” rationalizations, all the while probably tormented from the darkest recesses that doom, of course, was inevitable.

“Dr. Miller?” Browner said. There it is. Isabel batted heavy, damp eyelashes. “Why is it that Infecteds spend the time and enormous energy required to eviscerate their foes? Killing, I understand. That,” he nodded at the blank screen, “makes no sense.”

Isabel licked her dry lips. “Two analogs in nature come to mind. First, there was something herd-like in that attack, and swarm-like in their killing.” Browner nodded. “But an even closer analogy might be to a chimpanzee attack, with the victors annihilating the vanquished by torturing the last bit of life out of them. And also, would you mind putting that video back on the screen?” There were groans as the last image of the orgiastic killing reappeared. “Does it go on from here?”

Browner hit Play. In slow motion, blood-drenched Infecteds raced up stairs into buildings or smashed at ground-floor windows. There was a blur as the video panned to a living room. Groenewalt shouted and motioned frantically toward the door.

“Notice,” Isabel said, “that the mob continues its rampage even after it breaks through the barricades.” General Browner said something over his shoulder about analyzing follow-on behavior. “They must calm eventually,” she said, “but not immediately.”

The president asked her, “What do you think accounts for that crowd’s attack?”

Isabel heard a numbness in her own robotic voice. “Each Infected seems to have a dramatically lowered threshold for activation of their adrenal response. The crowd was probably an amplifier, but the trigger was clearly the seven crazies.”

“So what happened to flight?” Browner asked. “I thought it was fight-or-flight.”

“A herd response would override individual behaviors. It’s instinctive, not rational, like deer freezing in the headlights, buffalo stampeding over cliffs or collective suicides like whale beachings. But this is really outside my . . .”

“Why didn’t they,” Browner interrupted, “just grab whoever’s closest and fight them, Infected or not?”

Isabel said, “They clearly all knew who the enemy was. The intra-Infected violence appeared purely incidental. It was the uninfected who constituted the threat. When the crowd’s adrenal rage was triggered, they knew where to direct it.”

“And what happened,” Browner asked angrily, “to their hard-wired survival instinct? The rational thing wasn’t to charge the guns. It’s always to duck, tie your shoe, and say, ‘Oops, missed it.’ We have to overcome that instinct in every recruit. But those Infecteds just threw their lives away for nothing. No ideals, no belief system.”

Isabel took a deep breath. “Infecteds may not benefit from throwing their lives away. But it’s Pandoravirus’s traits that are subject to the laws of natural selection. It’s the virus that either successfully spreads or not. As long as one host survives a riot to re-infect on the other side of an obstacle, the violence benefits the virus by breaking down isolation barriers. That trait may well be the main reason for its high rate of transmission.”

Dr. Stavros said, “The high rate of transmission is the result of the short latency period, the time between exposure and contagiousness. According to the Chinese prisoner studies . . .” A debate erupted over using that data, which was ended when the president directed Stavros to continue. “They recorded average latency of forty-five minutes. Since the incubation period, the time between exposure and first symptoms, averages two hours, carriers are infecting people for an hour and fifteen minutes, on average, before they even know they’re sick. That window of presymptomatic infectivity is what’s primarily responsible for the high R-nought.”

Isabel disagreed. “If that were all you had to worry about, you could just go up to your cabin and wait for it to blow through your area. The thing that makes Pandoravirus impossible to contain is that.” She motioned toward the frozen image of Infecteds storming a building. “Look at how my sister contracted SED. It wasn’t by presymptomatic infection. It was by an attack on her helicopter that infected a soldier, and his attack on the medical staff and on her. The attackers died, but the virus spread.”

Browner said, “It sacrifices hosts to spread itself through violence? Hmm. Makes sense.” He turned to Stavros. “Did we learn anything else from the prisoner experiments?”

Stavros perused his notes. “There was one thing. Indoors, the pathogen lingers, but in the open air you have to be within ten meters of a carrier to contract SED.”

The president pondered for a moment before saying, “Dr. Miller, do you think there’s a chance we could coexist peacefully with them?”

How should I know? But she gave him her best guess. “No, sir. Probably not.” He frowned. That wasn’t the answer he wanted. “We might coexist, uneasily, with individual Infecteds, but they’ll always be unconstrained by anything we’d call humane, and the crowd violence is primal. At some level of excitation, incapable of suppression.”

“But isn’t violence,” Stoddard asked, “a trait of the virus, not of Infecteds? The sick are victims, not perpetrators. Our infected countrymen aren’t the enemy, the virus is.”

Isabel didn’t want to answer, but did. The virus’s relationship with infected hosts, she explained, wasn’t symbiotic. Both didn’t benefit from infection. It’s parasitic. The smaller organism benefits at the expense of the larger. “But in the end, there’s no difference between the virus and its host. Their DNA now essentially forms a new, extended phenotype. Infecteds are hybrids, sir, and it appears to me, well, that they threaten something like a selective sweep of mankind.”

“A what?” President Stoddard replied in what sounded like annoyance . . . at her.

“When a genetic mutation confers an evolutionary advantage, the mutated organism outcompetes its predecessors and eventually sweeps them from the gene pool. Not genetically, but demographically and sociologically, Homo sapiens risk being outcompeted by . . . Homo insapiens, who therefore seem to me to constitute an existential threat to our survival as a species.”

A stillness settled on the room until Browner said, “Mr. President, I need scientific help, like that, analyzing the violence we saw on the video. I need to prepare our troops.”

The president turned back to Isabel, who said, “Sir, you need a social psychologist specializing in crowd behavior.”

“Do you know any?” Stoddard asked. Isabel took a deep breath and nodded. He’d be perfect. At least for the science. “Then go hire him.”