Disease

There’s little I’d say about the outbreak itself, except that it was lethal and quick.

It affected the colony badly, of course, there were only six hundred of us, to begin with, and by the time the outbreak was done there were less than fifty.

The deaths were nothing as compared to the result of our future interactions.  We couldn’t, or rather, wouldn’t approach each other.  We became spread out, interdependent, but totally isolated.

By experimentation, we knew that the transmission of the virus was vitally impaired by the passage of time and air, and that would be an end to it, but the thing would crawl around plastics and get in between any crack or gap.  Plastics helped it spread.  We lost the last half dozen people finding this out.

We changed to cotton and raw material for everything.  It was like going backwards.  We couldn’t trust the landing ships, mostly plastics and metals, and after a month or two of isolation, we realized that we could still talk to each other, just not meet.

It was like having everyone you love just the other side of a wall, we could speak but not touch.

It took away something we needed.

So we co-operated, approaching the places we need to be to collaborate at separate times.  Careful planning was everything.  We always knew where everyone was, since our very existence depended on not meeting we always kept the ship’s computers and our limited GPS on standby, searching and informing.

Inevitably the young wouldn’t believe and would think that the virus had gone as if it might have run its course, but the thing’s secret was that it wouldn’t reproduce in a body unless it had somewhere to go, some vector for growth.  How it knew, well, we didn’t have tools left to find out, and even less to do something about it.

So, the young ones didn’t believe and two formed a bond over the radios and decided that they couldn’t live without each other.  They certainly couldn’t live with each other, as they found out within minutes of their meeting.

They were both infected and formed the single and joint thing that the virus created to spread itself.  This disjoint being, this amalgam of arms and legs hauled itself along to the nearest homestead and while the remains of the boy died the girl cackled madly as the being tried to enter Bob’s fortified cabin.  It set a fire to smoke him out, but he was ready for it and trapped it in the tiny space, and it burned.

It took three days.  Bob radioed us regularly and was setting the fire hard and keeping the thing in by shooting it mercilessly with his shotgun.  I don’t think he had a wink of sleep the whole time, and he sounded a bit mad by the end.  He wasn’t one to give in, he had a strength about him, but he took off into the wilds after that and I don’t think he’s coming back.  He radios every now and again, and I think the animals he’s discovering are growing larger.  It’s only a matter of time.

Forty-seven.

Even knowing this, May and Frank couldn’t live apart.  We tried to argue them out of it, even got between them and threatened to shoot, but forty-seven people.  We were already too few to properly survive.  We couldn’t shoot and they went silent, and that was worse, a lot worse.

I wish we had.

We didn’t hear from them for a while and we should have been a lot more worried than we were because they were the biologists and we hadn’t even then got the idea that the virus was using the host’s knowledge.

What saved some of the rest of us was the idea that we were alone and apart, and so they couldn’t get all of us with the spray.

It was such a simple idea too.  Since the virus would stick to plastics, they made a spray of micro fibre beads and flew one of the shuttles over the settlements; we breathed it in, or got it on our skin or just ran into it in the fields, or ate it.  Didn’t matter how.  There were seven of us left after that day.

And the rest came after us.

We ran.

There really wasn’t anywhere to run to as such.  This was an experimental colony and we were tiny in the first place so we were going as much into the wilds as Bob, and we couldn’t risk being near each other so we had to live off the land, and we were not sure we could.

Our crops and animals were genetically designed to be compatible with the planet and feed us, but we had not conceived of the idea that we might have to live off the land with bows and arrows for hunting or rely on gathering native plants for vitamins and minerals.

Water was plentiful, so at least no-one died of thirst.

We ran far.

We all had vehicles, we could have taken gear with us, but we could trust the vehicles themselves not be infected?  And we left on foot, with whatever we could carry on our backs, all natural.

Two of us literally ran into each other and lost control within seconds, then we were five.

We worked out a scheme where we would be far enough away not to invoke the virus but we could physically keep an eye on each other through binoculars.

This planet has snakes, and earthly snakes strike quickly, but we didn’t know it was possible for one of these to swallow someone whole from above.  We saw her struggles, but in seconds Kate was gone.

We all carried long sticks then as a precaution, to keep them from descending on us.

Four.

Jane acquitted herself well.  The two who had amalgamated tracked her down, we think the thing they turned into had been on her scent for a while, but it was wily and didn’t quickly give itself away.

She was sleeping suspended from a branch, the snakes couldn’t descend on her, and the bear things couldn’t creep up on her.  She froze the branch to stop the ant things eating her while she slept.

It sniffed around looking like a dreadful spider simulacrum, crawling and sniffing with its twin heads, somewhat evolved now, and arrived directly below her.  I was watching from a mile away sat in another tree, chewing the last of the gum food we’d bought.

She woke immediately and clicked her radio to let me know she was awake.  Whatever plan she had, she didn’t want it to know she was awake.

I knew she’d been brewing some sort of concoction the last few days, picking particular plant berries we knew were poisonous and distilling down some sort of liquid.  She didn’t want to give it away so we’d talked in carefully coded language about the idea, basically a poison that would work instantly.

I could see her carefully extending her stick down to just above the thing’s heads, trickling down the precious fluid along the stick, a drip wouldn’t be enough, but something even a little more would be sufficient to poison the thing in short order.

The stick remained there for a minute as the fluid travelled down it slowly towards the creature, still sniffing the air, turning, turning in place as the bead ran down the long rod.

There was a stillness as it stopped, something amiss, and then a scream as the thing looked up at Jane and her trap.  Jane didn’t hesitate, she cut the line securing her to the tree branch and plummeted down gripping the rod tightly as she impaled the thing mightily through the mouth and down into the ground; pinning it there even as the other head screamed in pain, and then she set off a small incendiary device that blew her and the creature to smithereens.

I think her last words were “Screw you virus!”

Three.

We ran again.

Rolf was taken by some new creature we had not seen before, judging by what he said, which amounted to “What the hell was that.”

Lenny and I did a sort of autopsy, which is to say we close enough to see what happened as well as we could through binoculars.

They were still chowing down on his corpse.  We could hear the bones crunching through the forest.

It wasn’t pleasant.

Still, it wasn’t the virus, and we recorded this.

Two.

I was pretty unimpressed by Lenny for a while.  He became morose and it seemed like he had lost hope.

He said I was too optimistic, that there were two of us left and so we had nothing.

I knew something he’d forgotten, but I didn’t want to remind him, not over the radios.  I think the radios are infected, but they have a certain ubiquity, and I think the virus doesn’t see them.

And it’s like this, Bob might be gone, but I think he’s gone this way.  I hear a click on the radio now and again.  Not from Lenny.

But Lenny wants to end it all because he’s lost hope.  And that’s a bad idea; Bob’s out there and if he’s still out there he’s found something.  A solution.

We’re going to find Bob.

I’m keeping Lenny alive by the expedient of promising that his death is going to be painful if I have something to do with it.  People don’t mind dying if they think it’s not going to last too long, but I have promised faithfully that Lenny is going to last a long, long time if I have anything to do with it, and he knows I’m trailing him.

I’m ruthless enough to do it too.

I know Bob can hear this.  He must think I’m some sort of real bastard, but I’m hoping he’s got the idea.

The wolf-things were coming for Lenny but I set a trap by getting around him for a bit.  People without hope don’t move too fast. I told him about it, and he was going to avoid it, but I’m a great threat.  Worse than the wolf-things.

The first of them running into the trap was a great rush of adrenaline for me, I didn’t want to see Lenny taken apart by those things, but I was using him as bait, so when the ropes grabbed them and pulled that was good because the other wolf-things could see it struggle, and then the saplings tensioning the creature gave way to the trees and with a great howl the wolf thing was torn ever so slowly apart in front of its pack mates.

I don’t know what earthy wolves would do but they just stopped there for a second, and I let out a great bellow that startled the whole forest, far as I could make out.

Lenny just stood there frozen.  He was scared, but I think it was the first time the apex predators had ever known fear and they ran.  I could see them take to the treetops and run over the canopy as they let their fear overtake them and I let my savage-self overtake me.  I jumped down from my branches and ran to the clearing in furs and wielding my stick.  I looked nothing so much as a cavewoman crowing over her kill.

Lenny was still frozen in fear and say shaking his head as I danced around, he was saying something, something important, but I was too excited by the kill to hear at first. It was Bob on the radio that brought me around.

I was standing in the clearing with Lenny.

What he was saying, it was

“No no no no no no no…” on and on, but he stood rooted to the spot in fear.

I realized what I had done.  And what was happening?

That cavewoman was still in me.

And no virus.

Immune.