Tenacity Gene

By D. Michael Battey

It is July 2039, and two highly disciplined men with nerves of steel honed in a $2 billion nuclear submarine are obsessively discussing infectious diseases. Marine Lt. Colonel Buzz Striker and Navy Commander Dwight Hoggue are sitting on highly classified information from the Chinese that an aggressive virus reported to cause a cytokine storm in its victims in a matter of hours has been unleashed on the world. They prepare for the worst.

Six months later, Striker is in hiding, and Commander Hoggue is devastated. His grandchildren and his wife are dead. Isolated in a cabin outside a Floridian forest, Hoggue watches helplessly as the virus spreads across the United States, eventually collapsing the government and leaving only the addicted and compulsive unaffected by the disease. Suddenly, Hoggue becomes a man on a mission, determined to build his own paramilitary organization that will combat those who wish to enslave the survivors for their own selfish purposes.

In this science fiction tale, a societal collapse reveals a futuristic hell populated only by alcoholic, drug-addicted, cruel enslavers. As a devastated population awaits a miracle, two military commanders must do everything in their power to bring order, salvation, and ultimately hopebefore all life ends forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475955002

D. Michael Battey

D. Michael Battey is a former United States Navy nuclear engineer who served during the Vietnam conflict. After attending Palmer College of Chiropractic, he managed a private practice in Florida for nearly thirty years. Now semiretired, he resides and works in Orlando, Florida, where he loves spoiling his miniature pinscher, Lula.

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Prologue

July 4, 2035. The nuclear submarine USS Virginia was being chased by a Chinese fishing trawler, bristling with antennae and parabolic radar masts, and the sub was following a deep thermal layer, staying below the depth where Chinese sonar could hear them. This was the usual cat-and-mouse game, just routine.

Marine Lt. Colonel Buzz Striker was sitting just behind the reactor operator (RO) in the maneuvering room of the USS Virginia, a Trident II ballistic missile nuclear submarine. He had come aft from the con, just to enjoy a Marsh Wheeling stogie and shoot the bull with the guys on duty in the upper-level engine room. The stark, small maneuvering room with all of the gauges, meters, switches, and indicator lights filled Striker and his comrades with the strength and potency of controlling the lifeblood of an immensely powerful propulsion system.

Commander Hoggue—pronounced Hoag—was the engineering officer of the deck, or EOOD, of all the reactor and propulsion rooms, very fortunately. A less-seasoned, gutless EOOD would surely have made a fatal decision.

The High Pressure Air Compressor (HiPAC) had been offline for more than a day, until spare piston rings could be found. They had not been stowed in the right location, and a meticulous search was ongoing. The high-pressure air tanks had just less than four thousand psi pressure in them, not enough to blow the ballast tanks at their present depth. Without the buoyancy provided by the ballast tanks, the sub could never get back to the surface.

Hot runner in the torpedo room! Tube number three, came the message over the main comm channel. Hoggue suddenly had severe pucker factor in his rectum, his mind wrapping around we can’t blow ballast tanks, and Chief Spelgotti is already in the aux reactor room getting ready to trip the SCRAM breakers for a drill.

The power surging through those large electrical breakers was holding up the control rods so the 225 million watt nuclear reactor could operate normally. In a split second of thought, Hoggue grabbed the mic of the engineering room speakers and started to say, Chief, don’t—

Reactor SCRAM, reactor SCRAM, announced the RO, just after forty-eight control rods slammed into the nuclear reactor core. The RO quickly began an emergency startup procedure. The mechanical operator (MO) closed the steam valves to the main engine and the electric generators, saving the heat in the reactor. The electrical operator (EO) switched the electricity-hogging main coolant pumps to slow speed and took both main electrical buses offline.

Automatic electrical bus transfers slapped shut in a millisecond, each making a crack like a rifle shot at a firing squad execution. The engine room lights flickered as the motor-generators kicked in and the whole sub began running off battery power.

Prepare to launch tube number three was the panicked command from the control room OOD.

Prepare to launch tube number three, aye, sir! screamed the terrified torpedo-man. Flooding tube number three. Tube three is flooded, ready to launch on your command.

Fire tube number three! the OOD shouted in a raspy, horrified voice as his worst nightmare came true.

As the hot-running torpedo left the tube, the peroxide in its motor exploded violently, jamming the torpedo tube’s outer door and blowing in the hastily closed inner door. A violent rush of seawater flooded the torpedo room, as if sprayed from a gigantic fire hose from hell. The explosive force of the ocean pressure instantly killed all twenty crewmen in the torpedo room. The nose of the titanic submarine immediately tipped down almost thirty degrees, slipping into miles of deep ocean.

The con OOD barked, Sail planes on full rise; drain forward trim tanks, but it was not helping much.

Full astern, three hundred RPM, growled the control room OOD. Hoggue, get that screw turning, Goddammit, or we fucking die!

Negative on that order, Control, Commander Hoggue said matter-of-factly. I need that battery power to restart the reactor.

We will be at crush depth in no more than four minutes, Hoggue. You’ve got three, said the con OOD.

Chief Andrews, you heard that, Hoggue said.

Aye, sir. All I need is another thirty seconds. Andrews kept shimming the last two groups of control rods, keeping an eye on his decade meter, finessing the shim switches like a pinball wizard on his flipper buttons. The meter went over 3.0, and the mighty nuclear engine automatically shut down again. Crap! Reactor SCRAM.

Andy, you can do this; you’ve done it a hundred times. Slow and steady; you’ve got almost three full minutes; don’t sweat it, Hoggue said very calmly, very respectfully, like he had all the faith in the world in his old friend Chief Andrews—which he did, actually.

* * *

Suddenly, everyone in the maneuvering room got calm. The MO yawned and stretched, acting bored—jaded even. A palpable sense of relaxed assurance replaced the previous tension. Striker took a puff of cigar smoke, inhaled it, and blew it out slowly, savoring the life-and-death moment. Buzz lazily handed Andrews his cigar for a few puffs while Andy’s other hand raised group six rods, the last of them, with quick little flips of his right hand. The seconds ticked down to zero.

Hoggue called the OOD in the control room: Control, give us a few more seconds.

The control room OOD, a black man who had suddenly turned ashen, could barely answer, as the depth gauge indicated they were nearly at crush depth.

Chief Andrews’s breath rushed out. Reactor is critical, sir.

Control, we have power; MO, full reverse! But the mechanical operator had already started to spin valve handles, the main turbines revved up, and the sub’s single huge brass propeller accelerated up to three hundred rpm in the reverse direction. The thick steel hull’s box girders popped like shotgun blasts as the screw stopped the sub’s descent just at crush depth and then slowly hauled the extremely nose-heavy sub up from the abyss.

The forward control room already smelled like shit and urine, and now it smelled like vomit. Back in the maneuvering room, the disciplined, obsessive-compulsive, adrenaline-junkie crew had not even broken a sweat.

Chapter 1

July 7, 2039: The home security system announced, Commander Hoggue, Buzz Striker on line one, which room?

Right here, Nellie, thank you.

Marine Lt. Colonel Theodore Buzz Striker’s audio and video streams were routed to the monitor in the kitchen. Buzz, who appeared to be in the den at his condo on the DuPont Circle in Washington, DC, was now a highly placed intelligence officer at an NSA office in the Pentagon. His field of expertise was biological warfare, and the Chinese were his forte.

Dwight, you remember my recommendations when Sandra and I were down there last month? Navy Commander Dwight Hoggue did take Buzz’s recommendations to heart. They chilled him to the bone, then and now.

Hoggue and Striker were highly disciplined, steely-nerved men, cut from the same genetic cloth. They had been forged, tempered, and annealed in a $2 billion nuclear submarine. The two men, who had stared death in the face and prevailed, seemed possessed during that last visit, obsessively talking about infectious diseases. Their intelligent wives were entranced instead of bored by the dialogue, and they eagerly joined the macabre conversation.

Dwight’s mind flashed on the many years ago he was in that airport in Albany, New York, after visiting his mom. Hoggue was on furlough after his graduation from Annapolis. He was reading The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett. From that book and many others since, Dwight Hoggue learned about Ebola, prions, mutated viruses of all kinds, more than a few infectious particles with and without nucleic acids, recombinant DNA, and gene therapy. The Coming Plague was scary stuff, until that lady in the shawl and the granny glasses read the cover and, in that rude, nasal New York tone said, The Coming Plaque. So what are you? A dentist?

Presently, Dwight was still in the navy but was now stationed at CentCom at MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida. His command and Buzz’s command interacted with each other often.

Yeah, Buzz, how could I forget?

Silence lasted several long, long seconds.

Dwight broke the silence. No!

Yes, said Striker.

An index case of the Big One?

Numerous index cases, so it has to be man-made, Striker said with overwhelming sadness in his voice. "The Chinese say it’s a highly mutated, highly aggressive H5N1 avian RNA virus, causing a cytokine storm in its victims in a matter of hours. The CDC received some samples from our diplomatic staff in Beijing, and the CDC says that’s bullshit. It’s not naturally occurring. They’ve never seen anything like it.

Each particle has a lipoprotein capsule around two distinct nucleic acid molecules: number 1—coding genes that work in trans, which are heterologous plasmids; and number 2, cis-acting sequences to do some kind of transduction.

Hoggue was well aware that transduction was a dead-end infection that introduces functional genetic information into target cells.

Striker sadly, ominously continued. Dwight, we believe this is an engineered infectious agent, like a synthetic nano-probe for gene therapy. And get this—the envelope has a terrifying resemblance to smallpox!

"Smallpox, Buzz? Is there even a sample of that anywhere in the world?

Yes, Dwight, one in the United States and one in Russia. And God help us, the coding genes and the cis-acting sequences are recombining into productive, viral-like particles. If this is gene therapy, that is not supposed to happen.

Then what the hell is causing the plasmids and the cis-sequences to reconstitute? Hoggue asked, disbelief in his voice.

We … don’t … know, dammit! It’s worse than anything we could have imagined; if our intel is correct, there’s a 100 percent lethality. Point of infection is human body fluid of any kind, including any little cough, and the particles stay viable on surfaces such as shopping cart handles for hours and hours, thanks to that very sturdy lipoprotein envelope. Did you and Marty do like I said and get a mortgage on both houses?

Yes, Buzz. When you tell it to Marty and me like you did last month, we have to take it to the bank, and we did, literally. Between my son’s equity, Marty and me getting mortgages on both houses, cashing in my Northwestern mutual accounts, and with Marty’s inheritance, we had a cool million dollars. I talked to that Reynolds guy in St. Petersburg and got all million of it converted to Krugerrands. The ’rands were authenticated by that jewelry appraiser in Altamonte Springs that you referred me to. The ’rands are in the safe at the house here in Tampa, but we’re ready to move to the cabin. Should we go now?

Absolutely, Dwight. Pack up your son and his family—and then you, Marty, your son, and his family skedaddle out of Orlando and go to your cabin in the panhandle with lots of rifles, ammo, groceries, bottled water, and supplies. Get ready to stay isolated for three months, maybe longer. With a little luck, you can then return to Orlando. You take your pickup truck. Tell your boy to drive his dualie and keep enough fuel in reserve tanks to get back to Orlando, in case some Florida crackers siphon all the fuel from the trucks’ tanks. Those Florida good ol’ boys refer to eight feet of garden hose as a ‘Carolina credit card.’

Oh Christ, Buzz. That bad? You think this is ‘the Big One’?

Yes, I do, Dwight. I hope all of you are still alive when this is all over. I hope Sandra and I are alive as well, but be prepared for the worst. And by that I mean losing some of your grandkids, your wife, your son, or your daughter-in-law, if you don’t lose yourself as well. You can’t do anything about your daughter and her family in Albuquerque, except immediately warn them and get them to her cabin in the Jemez Mountains. Did you prepare her like I suggested?

Yes, Buzz, and she’s spent the past month stockpiling stuff at her cabin, thank God, as Marty and I have been stockpiling the cabin near Defuniak Springs. I sent Heather enough money to buy everything she needed for lasting more than three months in the Jemez Mountains. She knows how to hunt; she’ll be fine for weeks, even months, after that. Thank you, Buzz. We owe you our lives. We didn’t think it would be this soon.

You can thank me when all this shit is over. It hasn’t hit the fan yet, but it will in the next two weeks or so, when it spreads outside of China. Mark my words. Buy everything you can for a long siege; stock the cabin well during the next week. After that, stay out of town and away from everybody. I mean it, Dwight. One week, then complete isolation. Gotta go, Commander, lots more calls to make to family and loved ones.

Chapter 2

Christmas Day, 2039. Commander Hoggue was devastated. Both his grandchildren were dead. His wife had died. His son, Donald, and daughter-in-law, Madeline, had survived. What the hell had happened? How contagious was this virus or whatever it was? They’d had no contact with anyone after a week at the cabin. They made limited contact with people, shopping at night for six days, and then only gassing up the trucks and filling the jerry cans on the seventh day. No reports of sickness yet in Milton, Bagdad, or Crestview. A few members of the overseas flight crews at Eglin Air Force Base were getting sick, but no one outside the base knew it.

Thank God for the Grid, the laser fiber-optic network that was ten thousand times faster than the old Internet. It was the mature spin-off from CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, the particle physics center that created the World Wide Web. After they’d heard initial reports of the plague on the Grid and then lost the broadband signal, the commander and his family were fine for more than two months. They still had enough supplies for another month, and they had fresh venison. It spoiled quickly without refrigeration, so they took the spoiling meat far from the cabin and tossed it in crevices in the rocks. It attracted no carrion eaters, and the commander thought that was odd. This was still Florida; vultures, opossums, and wild hogs were common.

The cabin was on the edge of the Blackwater River State Forest. Commander Hoggue and his son, Donald, forayed near the town of Milton, and they scanned the town from about a quarter mile away through powerful navy binoculars. They saw the reason there were no carrion eaters left in the forest near the cabin. They had all moved to town for the easy scavenging there. Father and son saw the bodies in the streets, saw animals plundering the corpses, smelled the stench, and became sick to their stomachs.

* * *

They arrived back at the cabin in late afternoon. A small dog was in the driveway and had brownish-red glop on its muzzle. The dog, a very young Doberman, was a friendly thing, wagging its tail and not afraid at all. Commander Hoggue was wary. The dog came near, and Hoggue took his Model 1980 Colt .45 out of a hand-tooled holster. He shot the Doberman in the heart, lest brains get splattered in the driveway.

Little Timmy came running down the driveway, crying, You kill my doggy. Why you shoot my doggy? Timmy went to pet the dog, as he had done before his dad and grandpa had arrived home.

No, Timmy! his dad screamed, and he grabbed his son’s hands, noticing the traces of old, clotted blood on the child’s fingers. Timmy, did you pet the doggy?

He’s my doggy. I want my doggy, the child wailed.

Oh Christ, Dad, the dog’s been eating carrion. Look at his muzzle, and look at Timmy’s hands.

Let’s get him washed up, son. I hope it wasn’t human remains.

It was.

* * *

Timmy died first, three days and five hours after his doggy was shot, seventy-seven hours almost on the dot. His grammy and his sister went next, within the hour. They had all screamed at first, often, for the first day. The second and third day, they were so galvanized and racked with pain that all they could do was pant and grunt, their tortured eyes and gray tongues bulging, every muscle taut, like one constant grand mal seizure from hell. At the end, their bodies twisted into a death throe posture known as opisthotonus, an extreme, dorsally hyperextended posture of the spine, characterized by the skull and neck recurved over the back, throat stretched and finally closed, and they gasped their last breath.

Commander Hoggue stood with his son and daughter-in-law and watched in horror, too stunned to do anything but fall into an exhausted sleep for a few hours.

Commander Hoggue buried his wife. Donnie and Maddie buried their children. They stayed at the cabin for another month, grief-stricken and numb, eating little, crying themselves to sleep and all jerking awake a short time later from the same nightmare.

* * *

January 25, 2040: The three went into Milton, finding an abandoned café on the edge of town. The old 6G air card didn’t have a signal, so they plugged their iPad D4 into an old 5G router in a back room that appeared to be an office. Maddie plugged the router into the iPad’s myPower charger, and wonder of wonders, they had access to the Grid!

Commander Hoggue had a hunch that if any newspapers had published to the bitter end, it would be the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. He was right. They spent the day at the café, opening cans of food, eating, reading the last issues of both newspapers, and loading the truck with cans and boxes from a very well-stocked storeroom that had yet to be discovered and plundered. There were several unopened five gallon jugs of Zephyrhills spring water in the office, and they took those as well.

* * *

The situation was grave and getting worse, according to both newspapers. It had started quietly enough, a slow news day turned into a fast one as reports filtered out of China. The country was then placated by the American Medical Association, mollified and pacified by every TV medical guru that it cannot become a pandemic—they were seeing to that. This nonsense was repeated by state medical societies, area hospitals, and not a few enterprising physicians who offered discounted vaccines and shots. Chiropractors and naturopaths offered homeopathic medicines and miracle nutritional and herbal pills.

It was a variant of H1N1, and if you took precautions and improved your sanitation, it would not spread even if it came to the United States. The truth was, as America found out a week later, it had already come to the states. Yes, it was contagious, the media medicos said, but they had enough doses of vaccine for those who had not had an H1N1 booster.

As immunized folks started dying by the millions, the culprit was H1N2, then H3N1, then H2N3, and no!, it wasn’t swine influenza A, it was influenza C. No! Recent tests indicate it was Avian H5N1. No! New tests showed it was a Hendra-like virus! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!

Chapter 3

October–December 2039: Over a period of ten weeks, the federal government collapsed, as had state and local governments. Complete anarchy had asserted itself within three months, at least in the smaller cities and rural areas. Orphaned children were already being herded into group camps, where they were at least fed, but their indoctrination and exploitation had begun.

In northern Georgia and in the Carolinas, a neo-Nazi named Speer, pronounced Schpeer, had organized several anarchist groups into a paramilitary organization. In Florida, a neo-Nazi named Volksburg was organizing the anarchist groups into his paramilitary union-like structure. He was said to have several young teenage brides and had the demeanor and sexual stamina of Charles Manson.

The military was distributing food and other supplies, but without pay or discipline from their superiors, the military deserters joined up with paramilitary anarchist groups who were scavenging and stockpiling children, young adults, and all the food, supplies, guns, and ammo they could plunder from abandoned stores, warehouses, and armories.

With the population reduced by more than two-thirds, there was plenty for everyone. In the larger cities, law enforcement stood their ground for the most part against lawlessness but had their own skins and families to think about, if they had any family left. Acting police chiefs had their hands full seeing to the needs for survival for their beleaguered troops, and for the most part, the police forces were able to maintain some semblance of order. Looters were ignored, but not the slavers, crowed the newspapers.

The Pollyanna twits at both newspapers predicted that law and order would quickly reassert itself as the federal government was resurrected, and the rebels would be subdued with Bibles and law books. Hallelujah and praise God-a, but it didn’t happen-a that way-a! Can you give me an amen, brothers and-a sisters?

* * *

January 26, 2040: Driving back to Orlando, Commander Hoggue had his doubts about the federal government being resurrected. He knew bureaucracy well and knew the civil service rats had deserted the sinking ship of state, never to return. They had been there for the paycheck, and unless and until that was guaranteed in writing, all bets were off. Commander Hoggue had a family to care for, but a plan was already coming together in his mind. He would build his own paramilitary organization to combat those who would enslave young folks, using them for God-knows-what.

Suddenly he was a man on a mission. He would enslave the enslavers. The Christian Science Monitor was the first to make the observation, backed up by their medical experts, and this one time they got it right. The plague seemed to spare many who were drug-addicted, alcoholic, workaholic, sex-addicted, anorexic, bulimic, OCD, ADHD, and every other acronym that the DSM-VI had to offer to describe mental diseases that resulted from dopamine reward deficiency gone amok. For reasons unknown, almost the entire Amish and Mennonite population had survived.

Hoggue was intrigued. He had read several books by Dr. Jay Holder of the Holder Research Institute on the genetics of alcoholism and compulsive diseases. Hoggue knew about Reward Deficiency Syndrome, and he was well aware that psychiatrists still ignored the plethora of good science that addictions, alcoholism, and obsessive-compulsive diseases were the same, single metabolic disorder that resulted from a single, obscure gene switch on the D2 dopamine receptor site gene, serendipitously discovered in 1990 by Dr. Kenneth Blum. Since there was no drug therapy or cure for Reward Deficiency Syndrome, psychiatrists still continued to invent replacement diseases that would respond only to drugs that only they were qualified to prescribe.

* * *

Commander Hoggue, like every other American, alas, like every thinking human being on the planet, was now sick of doctors, their bullshit platitudes, their bullshit wisdom, their cavalier doctor attitudes and piss-poor bedside manner toward real people and the real diseases they suffered from. Okay then, it was time to take medicine away from mainstream doctors.

Hoggue was going to become a drug expert, investing his $1 million worth of Krugerrands, manufacturing and distributing medicines through his own network. He would provide the really addictive drugs to these rebel bands, making them dependent on him for their daily fix, and then hit them hard with his own paramilitary force, liberating the minds, bodies, and spirits of children and young adults who were being turned toward a life of servitude, compulsory paramilitary service, sexual slavery, and petty crimes. He enlisted his son, Donnie, and daughter-in-law, Maddie, that very day, the first two to serve on his board of directors.

Chapter 4

It was spring 2044, March 1, on the Dorshug farm in Mountain City, Tennessee. At 5:00 a.m., Doug Dorshug the third went down the hill to the milking barn. There was more than a nip in the air, but not the God-awful frozen wasteland the Amish were accustomed to up in Ohio at this time of year. Doug could hear the barn’s AC generator humming in the distance. The milk was collected by vacuum milkers on the teats of the cows and pumped to a storage vat. It was cooled by water that was circulated through a cooling tower. Keeping the milk twenty degrees cooler helped prevent spoilage until it could be used to make cheese in the next building.

Heinrich Yoder was in the cheese facility, and Doug found him a little past five. Yoder insisted the milk not be pasteurized. Making a parmesan-style cheese today, Mr. Yoder? Doug asked.

Ya, English, that’s what will earn us the most money in the long run, don’t you agree?

Doug did.

Yoder claimed he made the best parmesan and romano-style cheese on the East Coast, and yes, it had to ripen more than two years at least, but each large wheel would command a fortune when mature.

Too soon oldt, too late schmart, Yoder said, his usual jibe for the intelligent Englishman who could not see that Yoder’s daughter was head-over-heels in love with him.

It was soon followed by another Amish maxim, When two hearts unite, the road is short, the burden light, Papa Yoder would say, nodding his head toward his daughter.

Doug sort of got it but was still clueless about the not-quite-pretty twenty-two-year-old Amish woman, Ruthie, in her plain dress, bonnet, blonde hair done up in a bun, and beautiful but pale skin. Yoder wondered why the man was so thick about a woman who clearly adored him.

Ruthie was reserved and inconspicuous about it of course—admiring him only when his back was turned, lest Doug catch her worshipping gaze. She loved her Lord of course, and that came first, but even a young Amish woman could not escape her hormones and whatever mysterious combination of brain chemistry and spiritual connection made for true love.

Papa Yoder loved his wife, even if the marriage had been arranged, and they had grown together for thirty years, never apart. He wanted the same for his daughter, and he was perfectly willing to let her choose her mate.

He actually approved of a union between his daughter and this smart, resourceful, good-looking Englishman named Doug, even though he wasn’t Amish. His lifestyle was almost Amish, except for the music and the drinking of course—and the cigars. Papa Yoder secretly enjoyed the music, especially the hymns that Doug played on his lap dulcimer.

Doug had learned their language in the month after they’d arrived, speaking the high old Germanic Deitsch dialect with ease. That was only one of the things about Doug that impressed Papa Yoder. It was Doug’s equanimity, his genuine respect for everyone, and his enthusiasm for their wisdom—not only the wisdom and devotion to God exhibited by the Amish but anyone’s and everyone’s wisdom and experience. It was Doug’s calm, quiet, measured patience, his forbearance, and his honest affinity for everyone—especially his employees. Everyone on the farm was respectful of everyone’s cultural differences, ethnicity, and racial heritage, and it stemmed from Doug