Breakthrough
Breakthrough
#57 in the Deathlands series
James Axler
Prologue
A chunk of burning plastic the size of a softball sailed past Dr. Huth’s lowered head. Smaller objects, bits of concrete, shards of metal and rock, pelted his arms and legs as he struggled down the middle of the street under the terrible weight that lay upon his shoulders, a weight that bent his back to the breaking point and made his thighs tremble.
Seven levels below the surface of the planet, in the swirling smoke of open trash fires, a mob packed the crumbling sidewalks and spilled onto the potholed roadway. Their angry chant of “Die, whitecoat, die! Die, whitecoat, die!” echoed off the two-story-high, gridwork concrete ceiling and the wall-to-wall buildings that lined the gritty street. Like an earthquake, it rattled the No Response Zone’s few surviving windowpanes.
This was Gloomtown, so named because neither the light of day nor the dark of night penetrated here. Mercury-vapor lamps caged in the soot-stained ceiling cast a perpetual sulfurous pall over its squalor and suffering. In Gloomtown there were no police. No emergency services. And there was no way out, alive or dead.
As Dr. Huth advanced along the mob’s gauntlet, grinding out one shaky step after another, tears flowed down his cheeks. Everything he had ever done in his remarkable scientific career, he had done for them. Not for “them” individually, of course, or even for “them” as a social class, but “them” as in, for the survival of humanity.
The survival of Huth’s species had become an issue shortly after the turn of the second millennium A.D., when the long-sputtering population bomb had finally gone thermonuclear. Now, less than a century later, the planet was supporting one hundred billion people, and the rationing of food to the multitudes had become the all consuming task of science and the one-world, government known as FIVE. Because of the shortage of available calories, economic, social and political control teetered on the verge of global collapse. Dr. Huth and the other top scientists of FIVE were like whitecoated little Dutch boys sticking their fingers in a massively leaking dike. Their desperate measures had produced unforeseen and disastrous consequences.
Several structural levels down, a few hundred yards directly below Dr. Huth’s feet, was the border of the Slime Zone, a vast area of the megalopolis made uninhabitable by an invasion of agricultural bacteria, the result of a failed attempt to solve the food problem. In computer simulation, the genetically altered cyano-bacteria had looked like a perfect answer to the crisis. They were fast breeding, required no maintenance and were an inexhaustible source of easily digestible protein. Outside FIVE’s biotech laboratories, they had proved themselves all of that, and more.
Once actual cultivation began, despite the protective measures put in place, the tailored bacteria quickly escaped the confines of the deep-level slime farms and began to swallow up the lower sections of the megacity, block by block. All efforts to turn them back, and to reclaim lost territory, had failed. And the irony was, the protein-rich bacteria were no longer even harvested for fear of spreading the contamination.
Because of Gloomtown’s proximity to the Slime Zone, its residents lived under constant threat of suffocation. When the bacterial spores were inhaled, they bloomed in the lungs, rapidly filling them with their wet weight. Only the condensation layer of the atmosphere, a band of land fog at Level Eight, kept the slime at bay. If the climate fluctuated so much as a few degrees, Gloomtown would be enveloped by floor-to-ceiling drapes of smothering green slunk.
The cyanobacteria weren’t the only lethal white-coat-created hazard Gloomtowners faced on a daily basis. Equally deadly was the carniphage, an escaped biotech mil weapon. When inhaled, it ate a person from the inside out, stripping flesh from bone. The carniphages remained dormant in rivers and lakes for most of their life cycle, but during their reproductive phase, clouds of them were carried on the wind, eating and killing every animal in their path.
When the megacity’s warning sirens announced an impending bloom of carniphages, the people of Gloomtown packed themselves into windowless rooms and closets, and sealed the doors with rags and dirt. Those caught outside were found after the all-clear, their bones picked clean, plastic bags or trash cans pulled over their heads. On the upper levels of the city, for the convenience of FIVE’s CEOs, its whitecoats, and its white-collar support staffs, there were ample, roomy, phage-proof shelters.