Surface: Doomed Planet

Excerpt 15-Progress

The longer I was stuck on the planet, the less I liked it. About half way back to the hotel, a really bad rainstorm came out of...well hell if I know. Once second the sky was blue, then about five minutes later it was like someone in heaven had ripped the side of their huge swimming pool right open. I normally didn't mind the rain, but you have to understand, the 80 pounds of gear I normally carried was more like 200 when waterlogged. When you added in the fact that the truck mike was driving had lost all traction in the rear, and the truck was rear wheel drive, you start to see the problem. When we did make it back to the hotel, we found that the activity level had been reduced to almost nothing except the medical tent, which was open and using rubber tent pads to keep the inside dry. It looked quiet inside, the doctors standing in the entry way talking. The tank drove into the parking garage and parked by the other tanks, idling for a few seconds before dying. Ryu was down there with Sarah waiting for us.

"I'm assuming the storm took you by surprise no?", Ryu asked.

"Yep", I said hopping off the tank, "One second it's clear and the next it's dumping an ocean on my head, nature on this planet is a bitch. By the way, we encountered a new type of....zombie, I guess."

"What do you mean?", Sarah asked.

"Hey..", I said turning to the tank commander.

"Steven", he said.

"Do you have the video of those ghouls from the tunnels on your PDA?"

"Right here", Steven said tossing it to me. I flipped through the video files, found one with the tank's barrel in the lower left hand corner and hit play before handing it to Sarah. She watched the footage about 3 times before handing back to me.

"I have something important to show you", she said, sounding dead tired, "come on."

I followed Sarah to the back of the garage and up a flight of stairs to a room on the 22nd floor that had been converted to a lab. There was a large counter in the middle of the room which was flanked by three more counters and cabinets that formed a U shape around the room. There was a large chemistry set on the middle table, while computers, chips and monitors lined the back one and the counter on the left side was stacked with paper and the one on the right, an exam table, had black blood on it.

"You just get done with a specimen?", I asked motioning to the exam table.

"Yeah", Sarah said, "I was testing a few different chemicals to see what would happen, but that was before I found this."

She picked up a remote, pointed it at a TV and hit play. The footage that rolled was of a cell, which I assumed was from Agent 41, consuming a few red blood cells. Then I watched as it seemed to spit out another cell that was an exact clone of itself.

"What the hell did I just watch?", I asked.

"Progress", Sarah said, "this is important, this is important in ways you can't even comprehend."

"How so?"

"The cells of Agent 41 don't multiply like normal, instead of splitting apart, whenever one of them get's enough to eat, blargh, and there's another one. One makes, two, two makes four and on and on. However, the key point here is that, upon further inspection, I found that there is so, so much going on underneath their shells."

"Like what?", I asked.

"Remember in eighth grade science when you learned that an atom is mostly empty space?", Sarah asked.

"Yes", I said.

"So think of the Agent 41 infection as an Atom, you have the cell, electrons and a nucleus, the rest is empty space."