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Chapter 30
Zach Croft: 2053
Nothing but sleeping, soon-to-be-dead faces here.
Zach dragged his hand along the lids of the pods, feeling the icy droplets on his palm as he moved silently through the cryobay.
Each chamber was fully frosted over, other than a small circle in the center that showed the person inside. As he walked, all Zach heard was the low hum of the cryopods and the clacking of his shoes. One by one, he went down the lines of pods and picked out the ones of those he knew. Their faces were so peaceful. It was a small consolation considering what Zach and his friends were about to do, but it was better than nothing.
Down the line, Zach spotted Cora. She loomed over her pod, wearing a tank top undershirt, with her face twisted in despair. Wasn’t she eager to do this? It sure seemed like Cora Keaton was 100% on board, but one look that this fragile, kind person would say quite the opposite.
He approached her and rested two comforting hands on his friend’s shoulders. “Hey.”
She touched one of his fingers, then returned to the chest-level bed. “Hi.”
“Do you need help?” Zach asked.
Cora pushed her hair behind her ears and adjusted her shorts. “No… no, I’m fine. Can you sit with me for a little while, though?” She raised her eyebrows, and a bit of her former self surfaced.
Zach smiled. “Of course. Here. Sit.” Even though the walkway between the two rows of pods was only about four feet wide, they sat beside each other with their knees pulled in close. Cold radiated from the chambers behind them. “I’m not going anywhere.” Zach draped an arm over Cora, and she leaned into his shoulder. He had to stay strong, no matter what. If he broke down, Cora could only follow suit. Not because she was weak—hell, Cora was about the strongest person he knew—but because he knew she hated to see people cry.
Cora propped her chin on his arm and gazed at him with those ocean-blue eyes. “Remember spring break, ’41?”
Zach strained for the memory. “Junior year of college, right?” He had gone to Harvard while she went to Cornell. Whenever they got time away from school, they’d spend it together.
Cora nodded. “Senior for me, though.”
“Yeah, I remember. We…” Zach smiled. “We flew to Pasadena, then took your mom’s car to Oregon. We went thirty above the speed limit and got arrested.”
“I forgot about that!” She definitely hadn’t. “Carver bailed us out.”
“Yeah. He did.” Zach fell silent, thinking of all the times Carver had gotten him out of the most difficult scenarios. “Did you ever see the darker side of him?”
Cora drummed her fingers as if playing the piano. “Honestly? Yeah, I did. But you guys were so close…”
“So you kept it to yourself?”
“So I kept it to myself,” Cora echoed. “I thought we were supposed to be talking about happy things. Like… what happened when we got back from Oregon.” She perked up.
“Your mom charged us both the bail price as punishment. How’d she even find out, anyway?”
Cora mulled it over. “Carver, probably.”
“Damn snitch,” Zach joked, and they both laughed.
The short-lived happiness died out as reality set in.
“Thank you, Zach. For everything.” Cora tugged him in closer.
Zach patted her on the arm. The list of thank yous he could make was too long to count. “You too. For keeping me out of trouble.”
“Never for very long. You’re too damn stubborn!” She mock-punched him in the stomach, and he pretended to double over.
“FIVE MINUTES TO SHUT DOWN,” the system called out. That meant air, heating— basically everything—was about to go into the shitter. Cora gave one last dimpled smile and stood back up. She hopped into her pod, laid down on the cool sheets, and wiped away a tear that streamed down her temple.
“It’s going to be okay,” Zach comforted, but his voice lacked conviction. The truth was, they weren’t going to be okay. This was the end. The bitter close to their lives. “Are you ready?”
Cora hesitated, then nodded before any more thoughts could sway her otherwise. She reached out and grazed Zach’s hand quickly, then went rigid. Zach pressed the activation button, stepped back, and waited. A glass lid emerged from the wall, Cora’s pod slid back, and they met in the middle. The edges clicked into a place. A second later, the supercooled gas was pumped in, and temperatures dropped.
Zach watched as ice crystals began to climb around the edges of the pod, sprouting all around until only the tiny oval around Cora’s face was visible. Then something struck him. A realization.
His mind traveled back to Mars. To the irogen mine. There were just so, so many crystals. Before the meteor, Prescott had struggled to find just a few, and even those were underground. An entire mining operation was dedicated to digging them out of the rocky Martian dirt. But when Zach returned as an adult, the crystals were everywhere. Where had they come from? There must have been something different about them. But what?
An idea struck him like a bolt of lightning from the gods, hitting him with such force that it took his breath away. He leaned forward against Cora’s pod, resting both hands on the cool glass as he tried to control his breathing. Then he shouted out, “Gateway! Stop the shutdown!”
For the next hour, Zach pored over every file he could find in the Gateway’s computers related to irogen. Research papers, computer models, charts, graphs, and even an animated video made for a kids’ science class on Prescott. Then he radioed Ryker, Erik, and Mabel and asked them to meet him in the cafeteria.
“What’s going on?” Mabel asked, concern in her eyes. “Is everything okay?”
“Maybe,” Zach said breathlessly. And he meant it. For the first time since discovering Earth was lost, he felt something resembling hope.
Ryker leaned against a table, his arms crossed over his chest. “Why’d you stop the shutdown?”
“I have an idea. It may be nothing, but it may be worth a try.” The others exchanged skeptical looks. Zach didn’t blame them. They had spent countless hours trying to find a way out of their situation—what were the odds that Zach had suddenly thought of some brilliant solution they hadn’t considered? Probably next to zero, but Zach didn’t care. “I was thinking: why was there so much irogen when we returned to Prescott?” He turned to Erik. “Any ideas?”
“Not really,” Erik replied.
“Come on, you’re a geologist.” Zach tapped his temple. “How did the crystals grow in the first place? They didn’t just magically appear, right?”
“Of course not. You can’t create something from nothing. It just comes down to chemistry. If you combine the right elements…” He trailed off, thinking.
“You get where I’m going?”
Erik nodded. “The raw materials for irogen. Right. But I don’t know. We didn’t go to Mars to make irogen—we were getting what was already there out of the ground.”
Mabel stood and began pacing, her mind clearly working on the problem. “The elements would have to be on Mars, though. So, that narrows it down a bit.”
Ryker rolled his eyes, “If you’re suggesting we go back to Mars again…”
“No, but think,” Zach said. “Prescott was a mining colony. We had to mine the irogen. It wasn’t easy to get at, was it?”
Erik snorted out a laugh. “No, not quite.”
“Except when we went back to Prescott, it was. It was everywhere. There was so much there that we had to move it out of the way to get into the mine. The question is: why? What changed? Why was there suddenly so much?” Zach didn’t have any answers. He was just spitballing, fishing for any hint of a solution to their problem. If they could figure out how the irogen multiplied, maybe they could get it to multiply for them. And if they could do that, they could make enough to get to Alpha Cen. It was incredibly unlikely, but Zach still had to ask.
Erik nodded thoughtfully. “Well, the meteor hit. That was a change.”
“Come on,” Ryker said, maintaining his skeptical attitude. “A meteor full of irogen hitting an irogen mine? That seems kind of unlikely.”
Mabel stopped pacing. “What about the heat? Or the pressure? Like when coal turns to diamonds or whatever. Could that have done it?”
Zach suppressed a small smile. She was spitballing too, which is exactly what he wanted. He needed her brainpower to help figure this out.
“Even if that was true, how does that help?” Ryker asked. “Does anybody have an extra meteor in their pocket? No?” He stood up and shoved a chair against the table, causing the legs to screech along the floor. “You’re wasting your time. We’ve been through every possible option—”
“So? What does it hurt to try?” Zach asked. “We literally have nothing else to lose.”
“Because we’re just delaying the inevitable! It was hard enough to make this decision in the first place, and now you want to go back to where we started.”
“The Red Plague,” Erik interjected. “That’s another thing that changed.”
Ryker threw up his hands. “So? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Yeah, I’m not sure if that’s relevant,” Zach agreed.
Mabel drew in a sharp breath. “Actually, maybe it is.” Zach and Ryker both looked at her doubtfully. She rolled up the sleeves of her blue sweater as she explained. “Have you ever heard of biomining?”
Zach and Ryker shook their heads. Erik’s eyes widened. “Ahh,” he said as if beginning to understand.
Mabel continued. “Some colleagues from my graduate program worked on it a few years ago, for a computer company.”
“Why would a computer company be doing biomining?” Zach questioned.
“There are certain types of microorganisms that consume metals for sustenance. My friends would feed them motherboards, circuits, anything with high concentrations of precious metals. And in return, the organisms would filter out all the impurities from the metals, turning them back into their original form. It was phenomenal.”
“Of course, that makes sense,” Ryker quipped. “Bacteria that shits metal.”
Zach tapped his fingers against his lips in thought. “So, you’re saying the Red Plague created irogen?”
“I’m saying it’s possible.”
“No, it’s not,” Erik countered with a downtrodden sigh. “Irogen was there long before the meteor. Probably millions of years before.”
Zach deflated. Erik was right. It wasn’t like the irogen had started growing after the meteor hit. It was already there. There was just more of it.
Grabbing a water bottle from the cooler and taking a swig, Mabel wiped her mouth and asked, “That’s true. But how sure are we that the Red Plague arrived on the meteor?”
Ryker held out his hands as if explaining something obvious. “Well, that’s when everyone got sick.”
“But that doesn’t mean the plague came on the meteor. For all we know, it was already on Mars.”
“But wouldn’t people have been getting sick before?”
“Not necessarily. It could have been dormant,” Mabel suggested. “Frozen, maybe? Then when the meteor came…”
Zach nodded slowly. “The heat could have thawed it out.” Mabel pointed at Zach as if to say, “exactly.”
“Let me see if I follow.” Ryker looked at the ceiling and ran down a list in his head. “An alien bacteria first created irogen millions of years ago but then froze in permafrost. A meteor shows up, murders my dad, then reanimates the crystal shitters. Irogen production picks up again, starts multiplying, and we bring some back to the colony, with a little Red Plague along for the ride. But then why did people get sick from it?”
“That part’s easy,” said Mabel. “We had no immunity. It’s like European settlers coming to the Americas. They brought smallpox, which the Natives hadn’t been exposed to, and that killed millions of people. The same thing could have happened in Prescott.”
Zach turned to Erik. “Let’s say Mabel’s right. Whatever caused the plague still can’t make something from nothing, right? So we’re back to the question of elements. What did it have?”
“Whatever was in the ground,” Erik answered. “Iron, mostly. That’s the most common element on Mars. It’s everywhere.”
Zach extended his hand to Mabel. She passed him the water bottle. He took a swig, then asked. “Is this something we can test?”
Ryker resumed his position leaning against the table. He looked fed up. “What, exactly, do you want to test?”
“That the Red Plague can turn Martian dirt into irogen.”
Ryker closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into his temples. “This is crazy.”
Mabel cast her eyes at the floor. “Even if it was possible to test, we don’t have any rocks from Mars. And thank god we don’t have the Red Plague…”
“We might,” revealed Ryker. “There’s a door in the Science Center with a biohazard sign.”
“What’s in there?” Zach asked.
“I don’t know. Biohazards? I never bothered to look.”
“If there were going to be samples of the Red Plague anywhere, that’s probably where they’d be,” Mabel confirmed. “We should check it out.”
“Even if there are samples, we don’t have the dirt,” Ryker said.
“Yeah, we do.” Everyone turned to look at Erik in surprise. “At least, we might. My brother constantly complained about how the sand on Mars stuck to everything. So, what about the dropship? There’s gotta be some dirt stuck somewhere.”
Zach nodded. “On the landing gears. Or the ramp. Or—”
“Okay, hang on,” Mabel interrupted. “One thing at a time. Let’s figure out if we’ve got samples of the Plague first. Then we’ll worry about the dirt.” She strode for the door in the direction of the Science Center. As she exited the cafeteria, she shivered, clutching her arms. “Oh, and someone turn the damn heat back on!”
Zach Croft: 2030
The cryogenic gas had only begun to clear when Zach searched for his father’s voice. A friendly “you’re awake” or “how’d you sleep?” Wasn’t that part of the promise? That he’d be there when they awoke? That he would pull them back to reality?
Zach sat up and immediately climbed out of his pod, reaching out for Quinton, wherever he may be. But all that greeted him was the railing of a nearby shelf. Gaining his composure, Zach rose to his feet and helped Ryker do the same.
Bits of the room had shifted from the last time they saw it. The lines of metal racks had been arranged in a labyrinth, possibly to hide the pods? They were largely picked clean of any supplies they once held.
Zach peered between the shelves, trying to see whether Quinton was amongst them. He wasn’t. So, where was he? Was he running late? As far as Zach knew, there wasn’t an exact time of day the pods were supposed to open. Only that they’d disengage when the Gateway reached Earth.
Earth! They were back! Quinton had gotten them home.
“EARTH ORBIT STABILIZED. FURTHER HUMAN GUIDANCE REQUIRED,” the intercom instructed.
“Should we go find your dad?” asked Ryker.
Zach looked around a moment longer, then agreed. They stepped out into the hall. The air was chilly, almost icy. When Zach exhaled, his breath hung in the air as if they were in the arctic. He clutched his biceps, teeth chattering.
The corridor was deserted. From end to end, not a single person was visible. Where was everyone? Zach briefly considered that it could be mealtime. Still, it was odd that there weren’t at least a few stragglers in the hall. But there was no one.
No one at all.
The lights overhead flickered off, drawing a gasp from Ryker. After a moment, they turned back on. A few seconds later, they went off again. The cold, the lights… Was something wrong with the power?
“Hello?” Zach called out.
“Stop, stop. Do you hear that?”
Zach listened intently, searching for the noise. It was a whistle, like the sound of a balloon slowly deflating. They walked in its direction. The lights flickered several more times before they reached a burst steam pipe on one of the walls. “No one fixed it,” Zach observed.
Now, he was getting scared. What was going on? Where was everyone? Could they have gone to the ground without Zach and Ryker? Had they forgotten them? No. Quinton would never let that happen. But what if something had happened to him?
They approached a nearby door and knocked on it. When no one answered, Zach slowly pushed it open and stepped inside. He didn’t know whose living quarters it was, but the two beds were strewn with dirty sheets piled with clothing. Everything was still there. If the colonists had gone to the ground, they would have taken their stuff. Wouldn’t they?
A gushing sound filled Zach’s ears. He turned to see Ryker in the bathroom, hunched over the sink. “Running water,” said Ryker. “That’s good.”
“But that’s not.” Zach indicated the mirror above the faucet. It was shattered. The floor and the counter were spotted with blood.
As they stepped back into the hall, Ryker reintroduced the ‘left behind’ argument, to which Zach assured him, “My father wouldn’t let them do that.”
“I don’t know, Zach. There’s no one here…”
This reminded Zach of something. What was it? “Roanoke…” he whispered, remembering the story of the early American colony where the settlers had mysteriously disappeared. He silenced the thought. “We don’t know that yet. I’m sure they’re around somewhere.”
The following rooms they inspected didn’t provide much solace. Besides some packed suitcases, most everything remained right where Zach would expect it to be. Shirts still hung on racks. Soap sat deformed in the showers. Even as they entered the cafeteria, plates covered the tables. A few held rotting food. On the bright side, yellow distress lights illuminated the common area when the main lamps flickered. At least the emergency backup systems were working.
There was also something about the air. As Zach inhaled, his nostrils burned. That couldn’t be a good sign. “They’re not here, and they’re not in most of the rooms. Where else might they be?” Zach left it open to suggestions.
“We should check to see if all the dropships are still here.”
Zach stopped at a window when they reached the hallway leading to the docking bay. Through it, he could see the outside of the dock and all the dropships attached to it.
At least that told them something. The colonists hadn’t gone home. They had to be somewhere on the ship—all Zach and Ryker had to do was find them.
One corridor was particularly unsettling. Sheets of plastic hung from doorways in some attempt to, what, quarantine? The entrances themselves were ajar, and the flats behind them were bare. The ground was littered with articles of clothing, trash bags, and papers.
There was blood splattered on the wall, dried and brown. When Zach saw it, he immediately steered clear. It didn’t look like a handprint or the by-product of a gunshot wound. From a cough, maybe?
Ryker noticed the blood too. “Do you think it was the Red Plague?”
Zach hated to admit it, but he was thinking the same thing. After all, people had been dropping like flies when he and Ryker went into cryo. Quinton had said he’d try to cure them, but what if he failed? But if he had, where were all the bodies? It made no sense. The colonists couldn’t have died in the tight confines of a space station and suddenly evaporated into thin air. They had to still be alive somewhere.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Zach. They walked to the next hallway over.
“We’ve checked half the ship and found nothing. We’re alone!” Ryker burst out. He kicked a trash can, then calmed himself by rubbing the ring on his finger.
“We don’t know that.”
By early afternoon, they had covered eighty percent of the Homestead and were discussing whether to check the Spark when a subtle alarm grabbed their attention. It was quiet, almost impossible to hear if not for the silence of the corridor. Where did Zach recognize that from? Oh, it was a watch. That was it. A watch alarm.
They followed the noise and came to the entrance of the Science Center. The two swinging doors were slightly parted in the middle, allowing them to peek into the room. There were microscopes. Desks. Lab coats. Research devices scattered across the tabletops. Where was the watch?
Zach stepped inside fully and identified the sound’s source. In the back of the room was a long, angled desk that rounded the left corner of the lab. Black shoes stuck out from behind it. A few hesitant steps forward brought the ankle cuffs of black pants into view.
“I don’t want to go in there,” announced Ryker.
“Be quiet.” Zach walked several more steps until he was in the center of the room. He shot a look back to the door. Ryker hesitantly entered. The tail of a dirty lab coat now came into Zach’s view. The sight hit him hard. He felt a hammer pounding his chest. A wrecking ball smashing into him. A million punches to the gut. “No…”
He ran to it and nearly stepped in the dried blood puddles around the corpse’s wrists. Zach paused as he was about to touch the man’s head, to pull him up and reveal his identity. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out who it was. But he had no choice. He held his breath and pulled the head up a few inches.
He felt his grasp on reality loosen when he saw the face.
It was Quinton.
“He… he promised.” Zach dropped his father’s head and scuttled back across the floor. “He told us…”
Ryker noticed the body. He slid down next to Zach and wrapped his arms around him. “I’m so sorry.”
Quinton told them he’d be there when they woke up! How could he lie about that? And it clearly wasn’t the Red Plague that got him! At least not entirely! One look at the puddles of red surrounding his hands and the scalpel dropped beneath the table nearby could tell you that. No, he meant to break the promise. It was his choice.
“Why don’t we get out of here? Okay?” Ryker asked, trying to pull Zach up.
But Zach resisted. “I can’t just leave him.” His anguish was momentarily replaced by anger. His father had abandoned him. He left the world knowing his son was still in it. What kind of person did that? Certainly not someone like Quinton—good, selfless Quinton. Then, why was his body here, left for Zach to find like some twisted treasure hunt? What were they supposed to do now? There were no signs of anyone else, and, well, Quinton would be of no help. How would they get home?
“Is that broken glass?” Ryker asked, pointing at clusters of tiny shards in Quinton’s red splotches of blood.
“I— I don’t know. I don’t know,” Zach stammered.
“It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.” Ryker tightened his grip on Zach and pulled him up. “Come on.”
As Ryker tried to lead Zach away from his father’s body, Zach spotted a handwritten note on a torn piece of paper on a nearby desk. He broke away from Ryker, picked up the letter, and began to read.
Dear Zach,
He recognized Quinton’s handwriting immediately.
I’m sorry that I had to do this. I’m sorry that I broke my promise to be there when you woke up. I’m the only one left. Everyone else is floating with the stars now.
Floating with the stars? What did that mean? Did they jettison the Red Plague’s victims out to space? That would explain why there were no bodies.
I wish it didn’t have to end this way. That we could go home and return to our daily lives. Go out for ice cream after school.
Then, why did he kill himself?
I need you to know it’s going to be okay. You can go on without me. If you’re reading this right now, that means I was right. Cryo did kill the plague. I considered putting myself under, but I’m already too far gone.
If you’re awake, you made it. When you look outside, you’ll see blue and green. That’s Earth. Don’t contact the ground for help. I know it sounds strange, but you’ve got to trust me.
Take a dropship. The power button is beneath the control module. From there, go to Navigation. It has autopilot. All you need to do is initiate that, and the dropship will do the rest. It might seem difficult, but you’re smart and strong, Zach. Ryker is too. You can make it.
Wait. Hold on. Quinton wanted them to fly a dropship? They were just kids!
I love you, Zach. More than you’ll ever know.
— Love, Dad
Zach Croft: 2053
Zach didn’t want to be in the Science Center any longer than he had to be. Most of the Gateway held some horrid memory, but this sterile, quartz-white room was the worst. It was where he found his father, bloodied and lifeless, with a handwritten suicide note beside him. Part of him felt like Quinton was a coward for taking the easy way out, for abandoning them, when he could have gone into one of the prisoner pods and survived. But another part of him was sure that Quinton had no choice. He never would have done it otherwise.
Perhaps he was worried he’d give the Plague to Zach upon waking up. That must have been it. Quinton felt that if cryo had given Zach and Ryker a second chance, he didn’t want to risk them getting infected upon their return to Earth. And the only way to avoid contaminating them was to die. As the last person on the Gateway who had the Red Plague, killing himself meant the Plague died with him. Weirdly, it was the noblest thing he could have done.
Zach’s chest felt on the verge of splitting open as he entered the room. He noticed the desk in the corner, the same desk under which Quinton had died, and tears welled in his eyes. But he forced them back down. “Let’s get this done fast.”
Zach tried to walk forward, but Ryker pressed a weak hand into his chest. “I’ll tell you what: Mabel and I can do this. Why don’t you go help Erik with—”
“I’m fine. Really.” He joined Mabel toward the center of the room. “Where’s the door, Ryker?”
“This way.” Ryker led them down a hallway that broke off from the back of the lab, pointing to the end of it. There, a door marked with a biohazard sign caught Zach’s eye. A shred of caution tape dangled from the brass knob. A hazmat suit hung from a rack beside it.
Upon reaching the door, Zach found that the entrance practically radiated cold. Zach rattled the doorknob, but it didn’t budge. Of course. Why wouldn’t it be locked?
“Do we need a key?” Mabel asked, trying the knob herself.
“Looks like it.” Zach thought about where the key could be. In a drawer? Filing cabinet? Upon further thought, that wouldn’t be particularly secure, so one of the scientists would probably carry it.
Ah, fuck.
Quinton would have had it, but his body was halfway across the galaxy by now. And even if he was still here, Zach couldn’t imagine looting his corpse. There were still some lines he wasn’t willing to cross. “I need something to break the handle.” Zach retreated to the main lab and began rummaging around in a cabinet.
Ryker followed him. “Are you sure we should go in there?”
“What’s it matter? We’re dead anyway.” Zach found an old, worn-out microscope with a broken lens and tested its weight in his hands. “This will work.” He went back to the door and slammed it into the knob.
Once.
Twice.
On the third, it came clean out of its socket, bouncing off the floor. Zach used his shoulder to force the door open. A burning blue light filtered out. UV? Zach thought, putting his arm over his eyes. It made sense—UV light was used as a disinfectant.
As he entered the biohazard unit, the dirt and dust peppering Zach’s clothes glowed in the blacklight. He approached an octagonal machine, about waist height, that resembled a stockier cryopod. While the glass was frozen, a slight heat seemed to radiate from behind it.
“It’s keeping it at just the right temperature,” Mabel observed, dragging a finger gingerly over it. “Brilliant. So it doesn’t freeze, but also doesn’t grow.”
Zach wiped away some of the ice on the outside. He could make out a few canisters of grayish sludge under the glass. Next, he wiped the metal edges, clearing them of any dust. With the sheen of grime gone, the words DO NOT OPEN could be seen. Promising. Real promising.
“This is a horrible idea,” Ryker said
“We’ve done worse.” They were no strangers to messing with things they shouldn’t. The crater, the irogen, the dropship, the Gateway. What was one more thing? Zach pressed his fingers around the lid to find a release. His fingers grazed a switch, and the covering retracted into the wall. Decompression jets pumped out a warm gas, dispersing its cryogenic counterpart. Ice crystals clinging to the glass jars melted back into water droplets. They slid down and pooled on the inner floor.
“Gloves.” He motioned to a box on a nearby shelf. Ryker pulled out a pair of blue nitrile gloves and tossed them over. Zach slid them onto his trembling hands, then reached in and clutched one of the jars. It felt slippery, and he was careful not to drop it as he raised it into the blue light. Thawing air bubbles rose to the top of the alien fluid.
“We’ll make sure this is it, then get the rest.” With his free hand, Zach closed the pod. He walked back into the lab, then placed the glass beside an intact microscope.
Mabel sat at the desk, flattened out her pants, and searched for something. “Can one of you get me a petri dish?”
“Sure.” Zach began to scan tables for the basic equipment but couldn’t see one anywhere. The hunt brought Zach to a set of filing cabinets. They were unlocked. Inside was a collection of documents stored in hanging file folders. Out of pure curiosity, he pulled one out. It was signed with the name QUINTON CROFT.
Zach peeled open the cover. The first several entries had no useful information; they were simply an angered Quinton stating how he had no fucking clue what was going on.
But on page nine, article three, something drew his attention. It was an autopsy report dated a week after Zach and Ryker went into cryo. Zach began to read.
The subject’s symptoms began two days ago: coughing up blood, bruising all over the body, and numerous points of swelling. Today, while in quarantine, he passed away in his sleep. Upon further investigation, we discovered strange formations within his bloodstream. We don’t know what they are yet, but the crystalline structures seemed to have ruptured the blood vessels, causing the abnormal bruising. We can assume that a similar phenomenon is affecting the others in quarantine. I’ll try my best to keep this journal updated.
More soon, Quinton.
Zach stared vacantly at the last three words. More soon, Quinton. He knew the handwriting. He felt his father on that page. “Crystals,” he said under his breath, turning around.
In the time it took to read the file, Ryker had already found a petri dish and given it to Mabel. She peered into the microscope’s lens.
“What did you say?” Mabel asked as she studied the sample.
“Crystals. They were forming in the colonists’ bloodstreams. The infected ones.”
Mabel nodded thoughtfully. “Interesting…” As she adjusted the petri dish beneath the scope, something else occurred to her, something important enough to pull her eyes up to Zach. The realization was so powerful that it made her gasp. “Iron. Iron in the blood.”
“What?” Zach asked.
“It was biomining them,” she said with quiet fascination. “It was extracting the iron from their blood and turning it into irogen.”
An image flashed through Zach’s memory: his father’s body lying still with two lakes of dried blood beneath his wrists. He remembered the shards in Quinton’s blood. He had thought it was broken glass. But could it have been irogen?
The idea sickened him.
Zach tried to imagine what that was like for the Red Plague’s victims, what it would feel like to have thousands of tiny shards rushing through every artery, every vein. He pictured the blood vessels in his eyes bursting. The feeling of barbed wire sliding through his jugular. The agony of irogen crystals forming in his heart, in his lungs, in his liver. It explained the bleeding eyes, the oozing bruises, the coughing and vomiting of blood. The Red Plague was crystallizing people from the inside out.
Mabel pulled on a pair of gloves and looked back into the lens. “I can see something moving around.” She zoomed in. “A lot of somethings, actually.”
“May I?” Zach asked. Mabel slid her chair aside, allowing Zach to gaze at the petri dish. Circles were beginning to stir. The first few awoke from their decades-long slumber and shot across the surface like oil in water. They bumped into a few others. Those woke up too, and the process continued until the microscope’s lens looked like TV static. “There’s a lot of them, all right. I’m surprised they’re still alive.”
“Aren’t we gonna get infected, being this close to it?” Ryker covered his nose and mouth as if it would make a difference.
“It’s not airborne,” Zach said as he returned the microscope to Mabel. “That’s one thing my dad did know about it, even back in Prescott. We all would’ve been infected way sooner if it had been.”
Adjusting the lens to her liking, she smiled. “They’re all awake. And assuming this isn’t the only surviving batch, I’d say we’ve got plenty to work with.”
“Great.” Zach picked up a scalpel off the table and pricked the tip of his finger. A round globe of bright red blood emerged from the wound.
“What’re you doing?” Mabel asked, alarmed.
Zach brought his hand over the petri dish and allowed a drop of blood to fall into the sample. “Testing our theory.” He squeezed his finger until another few drops splashed into the dish.
Mabel stared into the microscope for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, a small smile curled her lips.
“Well?” Zach asked. “Is it working?”
She pulled away from the eyepiece and slid aside again. “See for yourself.”
Zach peered through the microscope. The drops of blood looked like giant red islands in a sea of squiggling bacteria. The microorganisms seemed drawn to the blood by some form of magnetism. Then, abruptly, they pounced, extruding siphons only a few nanometers thick into the plasma. The siphons turned red, followed by the bodies of the bacteria themselves. As more and more bacteria consumed the blood, tiny crystals of blue and purple began forming on the liquid’s surface.
And as the new irogen grew, Zach’s hope grew with it.
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