8:00 p.m. FEMA camp. Martinez.
"How could it go pandemic?" Paglino yelled. "It's an incapacitating agent. Some kind of hopped-up riot-control gas..." He trailed off, frowning, then seemed to remember what he was going to say. "It's like that crap they used on the IMF protests last year...some kind of gas. It causes hallucinations. Freak-outs..."
"These aren't simple hallucinations." MacMillan was sitting up without any assistance, but he still looked pretty shaky. Leaning over, he braced his elbows on his knees and stared at his clenched hands, flinching at the screams in the yard. "LSD. DMT. Psilocybin. Military deliriants like BZ. They're nothing compared to this."
"So what is it?" Drake asked. "It looks viral the way it's spreading."
The doctor glanced at him, then turned away, touching his swollen lip. He was resigned to talking now, probably thought it didn't matter anymore. And he was probably right. It was starting to look like they'd never get out of the camp in one piece.
"BLOWTORCH isn't a virus," he went on, "but it spreads like a virus. A very exotic virus. Technically, it's a recombinant, non-pathogenic replicon, a kind of synthetic plasmid genetically modified to cross the blood-brain barrier and colonize the thalamus in the human brain. That's why it produces such extreme psychotropic effects."
"Try it in English," Paglino said. "What's a replicon?"
"A self-replicating DNA molecule," the doctor said. "Commonly found in bacteria and certain types of eukaryotic organisms. BLOWTORCH is different from naturally-occurring plasmids, though. Very different. It's a designer mutation coded to attack certain receptors in one particular organ in the brain."
"The thalamus." Drake didn't want to hear any of this.
MacMillan nodded. "The thalamus is a very ancient organ located just above the medulla oblongata at the top of the brainstem. It relays impulses from sensory neurons to the visual and auditory cortices and other areas responsible for attention and motivation. Basically, it's like a filter that creates perception from raw sensory data. It processes all of this abstract information—touch, smell, taste, sound, light waves—filters out the noise and transforms it into what we experience as the ordinary, three-dimensional world. BLOWTORCH hijacks the neurotransmitters that regulate the activity of the neurons in the thalamus. Dopamine. Serotonin. We don't know exactly how it works, but it turns off the filter and floods the brain with raw sensation."
"And it's infectious." Drake locked eyes with Paglino, then looked over at Gena. She was standing next to the window, arms folded across her chest, looking around the warehouse nervously. The sun was down, the noise getting louder outside: metal crashing, people shouting, sirens on the street out front. It sounded like a new convoy had arrived with another load of prisoners and the guards were running them through the turnstiles.
"Hyper-infectious," MacMillan said. "It spreads opportunistically through fluids, contact, airborne transmission—very rapidly—but it doesn't need a host to replicate. One particle will divide and multiply explosively, filling a room with millions of duplicates in the space of a few hours. It's like a bomb. A self-replicating molecular bomb."
"That's impossible," Paglino said desperately. "They took tissue samples at the hotel, sent the canister to the CDC. Nobody found a thing."
"They weren't supposed to." MacMillan's face glistened in the flickering red glow from the window. "The infection can be seen on a PET scan, but the replicon itself is a stealth organism—asymptomatic until it reaches a critical density which varies from person to person. There is no natural immune response. It's undetectable by standard virological tests and it can't be cultured like an ordinary virus or bacterium. It's organic, but it almost qualifies as a form of nanotechnology."
"And we're infected." Drake stared at him, trying to keep it together.
MacMillan nodded. "You were exposed at the hotel along with hundreds of other people including the President and his entourage. They took it back to Washington and the rest of the survivors spread it through the evacuation centers to the emergency personnel." He glanced at Gena. "The two of you carried it back to WESTCOM, but you just accelerated the process by a few hours. It's already in the suburbs. By this time tomorrow, hot zones will be appearing all over the country."
"Son of a bitch." Gena looked up at the rafters and closed her eyes.
"WESTCOM." Drake remembered his last call to Paxton. Something had happened in Walnut Creek while they were talking. He'd heard shouting in the background, then their connection had been terminated abruptly.
"I'm afraid so." The doctor shook his head. "By the time we realized you had been at the hotel, it was already too late. BLOWTORCH has a very short lead-time bias—the length of time between initial exposure and its first clinical presentation. One to four hours at most. It can survive for weeks on surfaces and it forms clouds in the open air, but it isn't a passive organism. It looks for hosts. Each particle is like a heatseeking missile."
"My wife was at the hotel," Drake said. "They can't find her."
MacMillan shifted nervously, avoiding his eyes.
"It's non-pathogenic," he said after a while. "It's not fatal and it doesn't cause disease in the normal sense of the word. The main danger at this point comes from violent reactions and accidental injury caused by the delirium, but this is just the beginning. If she can find shelter from the crowds..."
Glass shattered outside. The screams got louder.
"What happens now?" Drake asked weakly.
"BLOWTORCH was designed for extreme amplification." The doctor shrugged, staring into space. "The Pandemic Severity Index doesn't even begin to describe it. This is going to be worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu. A lot worse. BLOWTORCH has an infection rate of one-hundred percent and it will infect one-hundred percent of the population in the absence of radical quarantine procedures. No one has ever seen anything like it before."
"A hundred percent."
"Most likely."
"You're talking about the entire planet."
MacMillan nodded. "It's just theoretical, of course. Nobody knows how a replicon like this would evolve in the wild. It could die out after a while or it could mutate into something we've never seen before." He hesitated. "That's supposed to be impossible, though. We built in safeguards against mutation..."
"How long would it take?"
"Global saturation? Six months. A year. Nobody knows."
"And they let it loose." Drake struggled to keep his focus. The warehouse seemed darker now, the corrugated-iron walls less distinct, almost translucent. The noise in the yard sounded like it was hundreds of miles away.
"You said there's a vaccine." Paglino was sweating.
"A counter-agent," the doctor said. "It prevents infection and suppresses the neurological effects if you've already been exposed, but it's only good for forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Requires constant boosters. I was vaccinated before the attack on the hotel. So was Christine and the rest of my team, but we're running out of time. They control the vaccine. Don't you see? It gives them total control."
"They want to control us with a vaccine?" Gena asked.
"They want to control your access to Reality, Miss Hahn. They're using Reality...normality...as a tool for social control."
"Hell of a weapon," Paglino said vaguely. "If you don't do what they say, they just cut you off from the vaccine and you go crazy."
"People will go along with it, too," MacMillan said. "They'll have to. They'll beg to be vaccinated. EFFIGY's manufacturing tons of the counter-agent at the Tangent Facility, so they must be planning some kind of mass-vaccination program. I don't know how many others got it, but everyone who was vaccinated was fitted with one of these wristbands." He raised his left hand. "They're radio-tagged with biometric information and they control our access when we're inside the base. I think they're planning to replace them with subdermal implants."
Drake turned to Paglino and Gena.
"We've got to get out of here," he said.
"How the hell are we going to do that?" Paglino looked stunned.
"I don't know, but we've got to get the word out."
"Get it out to who? Headquarters? They're in on it."
"I don't know. Maybe we can get to this base."
"It's too late, Mr. Drake." MacMillan shook his head. "You've already gone through two phases. You'd be lucky to make it to Utah."
"What're you talking about?" Gena asked, her voice breaking.
"The infection develops in phases," MacMillan said. "That's why you keep drifting in and out of a hallucinatory state. The thalamus tries to regulate itself, adjusting to a certain level of infection while the replicon builds up in the cell walls. When BLOWTORCH reaches a critical threshhold, it takes over with explosive effects, then the thalamus adapts again and regains control. For a while. We've identified four primary cycles before the condition becomes permanent."
"Permanent?"
"Yes." MacMillan stared at them. "Phase Four is irreversible."