The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs

call sign – or branch, unit, and rank.”
    “Listen. Hello. I haven’t got any of those. But it’s vitally important that you connect me with someone – a senior milit—”
    “Please state your call sign – or branch, unit, and rank.”
    The person on the other end sounded frazzled, busier than hell – and distinctly displeased to hear from Aliyev.
    He tried to control both his breathing and his tone of voice. “As I say, I haven’t got a call sign. But I’ve got something you need, something absolutely critica—”
    “This is a secure military channel. How did you get the encryption protocols for this channel?”
    “Not important. Listen, I don’t have much time. The battery on this thing is going to die. So you have to li—”
    “Stay off of this channel and military comms. Or there will be consequences.”
    “Please, no, just listen to me for one minute! Hello? Hello!”
    They’d hung up on him. He didn’t even bother powering down the radio again. There was no point.
    He was done for. Absolutely hosed.
    But then, pondering the matter in glum silence, Aliyev realized there actually was one other person on Earth whom he knew – and could, just maybe, try to call. It was completely crazy, but there was one guy. Aliyev had heard him mentioned by name, along with his purported vaccine, when eavesdropping on CentCom’s long-range frequencies – and it was the mention of him that had started him on this whole insane misadventure in the first place.
    And Aliyev knew the man personally.

How Green Was My Ferret
    JFK - Bridge
    “No, no, no,” the ensign at the radio station a few feet in front of Commander Abrams said. “You can not just talk to Dr. Park. You need to clear this channel. CVN-79 out.”
    Commander Abrams watched him put down the handset, then mutter to the man at the station next to him, “Fucking survivors, man.”
    “If he was a survivor, how’d he get on an encrypted military channel?”
    “…That’s actually a pretty good question. He also knew our hull number.”
    “Ensign Jones,” Abrams said crisply.
    “Sir,” the ensign replied, twisting at the waist.
    “What I’d really like to know is… how did he know Dr. Park’s name ?”
    “Yes, sir. That’s not a bad question, either.”
    Abrams picked up his own phone handset. And dialed the hospital lab.
    * * *
    “Who did this guy say he was?” Dr. Park asked, rushing onto the bridge, even before reaching the captain’s station.
    Abrams gestured down at the ensign on the radios, who looked up and answered, “He claimed to be a bioscientist, from Uzbekistan or somewhere – and he was babbling something about having some designer disease. Said it would kill all the dead. He just sounded like a crazy person.”
    Park’s mouth went for his shoes, and just hung there for a good two seconds. When it closed again, his face was a mask of determination. “You’ve got to get him back on the line – right now .”
    The ensign looked up at Abrams, who nodded his assent. So he picked up the handset, tapped his touchscreen, checked the frequency, then put the phone on speaker. Finally, he spoke crisply into the open air: “Unknown station, this is CVN-79, are you still receiving on this channel, over?”
    “Yes, yes! For God’s sake, I’m here. But I don’t have much time.”
    Five minutes later, most of it spent listening, Park’s mouth was hanging open again. Abrams, who had also been listening raptly, motioned to the ensign to turn off the speaker, then said to Park: “Okay. Is there any chance this guy is who he says he is? Or that he could have something like what he describes?”
    Park nodded. “I don’t know who else it could be. I don’t know how else he could know these things. And if it is him… well, I worked with him pretty closely at the biotech in Dusseldorf. And he might just be the one guy on Earth who could produce a bioengineered disease like that. Designer pathogens were his whole thing – and he was