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It was really only a matter of time until something made it there to Earth from Mars.
Sam had been saying so for years by the time it happened, something about how it made no sense that they had only one Ark mechanism for a planet the size of Mars and one day, God forbid, they'd discover another way to get there. She said they needed protocols because everything she'd seen back at Olduvai suggested that a release of the 24th chromosome into the general population there on Earth would be entirely catastrophic. She said they needed - needed - the total quarantine of Mars. They ignored her. By the time they realised she'd been right all along, it was already too late. John wasn't surprised; Sam was always right somehow, even when she wasn't.
When the second Ark turned out to be less theory than reality, no one said a word about the fucking thing officially for months. There were questions, though; scientists came out to the base more than once and he got shipped to them more than once, too, who asked him about Olduvai and what had happened before the Ark had blown. It piqued his curiosity so he asked around - he had contacts, not just Sam but people he'd worked with, people he'd saved, ones he'd not used before but he used them then. They'd set up a new station on Mars, he found out three months later, around an archaeological site ten times the size of Olduvai. When he told them they needed to pull the damn scientists out, right now, right fucking now, all they said was this could be the most important discovery of the century. By the time they realised he'd been right, that both damn Grimms had been right, it was already too late.
When the time came, the military told John he was needed and when he looked at the situation, the videos, the call for help, he supposed he couldn't say he wasn't. He was head of his unit by then, had been promoted up the chain after Sarge 'cause even if they'd believed he'd disobeyed direct orders, it was nothing they could ever prove when the evidence had all gone up in smoke. He and Sam had lied their collective ass off in the debrief, stories just inconsistent enough to be the truth, and she'd found herself a new job doing something scientific for the Pentagon while he was made head of the RRTS. They'd had to call him a hero. He had to bet that'd really pissed them off.
That day they pulled him in, stern-faced and fucking serious, the information from the other side all pointed to another Olduvai. His superiors were panicked, more than thirty scientists on Mars really merited, and then in a rush, in a moment of sickly damn horror, John realised why: they'd brought three of the scientists home already. What they needed securing was the Ark facility on Earth. They were headed to the woods somewhere in Oregon, not to Mars.
"Do you want to get the general on the phone and say I told you so or should I do it?" Sam said, looking halfway between tired and stricken on the secure military video call from her lab in Washington. The picture was kinda grainy - she was a long way underground - but her expression was clear enough.
"I think he gets the picture, Sam," John replied. She understood from that, no need for more - he'd already had that conversation.
By the time the team got there, it was far too late. Infected base staff had ignored the call for quarantine and fled in all directions; before they knew it, they were tracking down and shooting people in their homes because they'd started changing, in beds, in basements, woodsheds, neighbors' barns, but it wasn't enough. It was too little too late. First they quarantined the town, then the county, the tri-county area, closed the roads and directed people into camps, but they kept on changing and they kept on killing until three weeks had passed and Oregon was pretty much lost and then Washington and California started going under. Scared people boarding flights and dodging roadblocks while ignoring symptoms took it east and north and south and John knew what was coming, could see it a mile away: it was going to be war, or the end of the world. He just wasn't sure which would get there first. He wasn't so sure they were mutually exclusive, either.
"You can't," Sam told him when she got there to the forward base, when he told her what the next step was, but he didn't have a choice and they both knew it. She didn't try to stop him, not at all, not for a second, so that was how he knew she knew. She just screwed up her face and she told him no and she threatened to leave, but she had nowhere to go because after everything, the base was still the safest place to be. Even her lab back in DC wasn't close to safe, and they both knew it was better they were there together. In the end, she put on her white coat and she helped him do it. She primed the needles; he stuck them in. She would've done it herself if he'd've asked her, but he did it so she wouldn't have to. They didn't have a cure, after all. For the majority, they knew it was a death sentence; the hell of it was they couldn't sell it that way.
They injected one hundred soldiers with vials of the chromosome, volunteers from all across the US services, mostly marines and mostly enlisted more than officers and John guessed that meant something. They infected them with 24 and waited to see, although they didn't really have the time to waste. They shot eighty-six of them eighteen hours later and took their bodies down to the incinerator. Sam threw up and John didn't, though he was pretty sure the fact he didn't said nothing good about his state of mind.
Fourteen of them didn't change. Fourteen out of a hundred. John took them out immediately into the field with him, no time for training, dropped in from choppers over towns, while Sam and their team of military doctors took in the next hundred volunteers. He didn't ask how many died after that, creating soldiers who could save the world. He just took the extra troops and pointed them in the right direction, at the next of the people who'd changed the other way and not like they had, and when he spoke to Sam it wasn't about the end of the world, at least as much as they could get away from it. It didn't feel much like Good vs Evil, not this time if it ever had. It was more like a race to the end, or a race to the bottom.
Three weeks became three months became three fucking years and John Grimm's ten squads of fifteen supersoldiers each kept the plague at bay, slimmed it down, drove it back. They drove it bit by bit back to Oregon and, day by day, they killed it out while they tried to keep the ones who'd turned to fucking nightmares from taking them down with them. He lost whole squads and all they could do was call in more volunteers and hope. Human rights groups right across the world called for capture and control until scientists could find a cure, but there was no capture, there was no control, there was no cure except extermination if anyone wanted to survive. They saved the ones they could; they killed the rest; they moved on.
Two million people dead, four years gone, they thought it was finally over. There were celebrations, beers, smiles they'd barely cracked in months, talk they'd get transferred back to their old squads at their old bases but it didn't happen. John Grimm's beat-up, exhausted supersoldiers got back onto the trucks and turned to lab rats once they'd all wiped off the blood and dirt and, in the end, epidemic over but the political battles lost, so did John. They marched them in and locked them up in the same fucking base that all the Martian bullshit had escaped from in the first place, in Oregon by their second Ark facility and Jesus Christ, they hadn't even shut that shit down after all that'd happened, sons of fucking bitches that the generals all were.
Some thanks for all they'd done, John thought, sitting there locked up in his room, his cell, and for all that they'd been asked to do. He should've known, he guessed, 'cause once the fight was over they were more valuable for tests than as cannon fodder, and they tried real hard to sell it to them all as their duty, for whatever the fuck that was worth. Sam was permitted to visit him and all the rest, just because she'd done the only thing she really could and joined the project staff. They talked for hours, about their childhood, about their lives or the books they'd read, or sometimes or they didn't talk at all, just sat around together each on their own side of the glass while Sam tapped away on her computer and John read or used the sturdy sprinkler system in the ceiling to do chin-ups - they'd taken everything from him he could've used to hang himself, so that was fine and dandy.
Time passed with tests, stamina and endurance, tissue samples, blood draws with no sign of an end and so John resigned himself to half-assedly pissing off the guards all day every day, reading the books Sam gave him she'd been recommending for years, and tried not to dream of Olduvai. It was hard. He was pretty sure he'd be dreaming of Olduvai his whole miserable life.
Two years later, when it all broke out again - suspiciously - in Syria, spread north to Turkey then Greece and into central Europe, it was Sam who came to tell him and he near enough read it in her face before she even said a word. She'd never learned to cover up the things she felt, not like he'd had to, so there it was: the government wanted to uncage their lab rats and sent them in, though it was clear enough they'd been the ones to start it in the first place, like that shit was anything they could control. The generals called it duty. John called it bullshit. They still had no cure except extermination.
"No," he said, though he'd barely said a single word in months. "Fuck that, Sam. I'm not doing it again."
"I'm not asking you to," Sam replied, her hands flat on the glass in his cell wall, and then he understood.
Once they'd been freed to take transports to Europe, the one hundred twenty-seven that remained of John Grimm's supersoldiers were more than a match for the rest of the base combined. They took what they needed, food and clothes and weapons and equipment, and they stormed the Ark facility down below. They left Earth in groups, in their old squads, though it had seemed by then everyone but them had forgotten they'd existed. John had always seen end irony in how the human rights groups didn't give a shit about the bunch of them except when they were doing something to piss them off.
Once they'd been freed, the ones who wanted to stay stayed and the ones who wanted to run ran - they weren't many. The rest, the majority, said a big fuck you and went to Mars. They closed the door behind them.
Their parents had died at Olduvai and there they were, John and Sam, taking charge of a research station just like Olduvai had been except maybe ten times larger. They rooted out the monsters that'd been left there, killed them, burned the bodies, just like they'd done before. With their numbers and their strength and skills, it was pretty easy even for a bunch of jailbirds lacking recent training or meaningful exercise. John still no new how to lead and they were still sharp. They'd always be sharp and out there that was good, that was worth more than needles and prison cells.
"Stay," John said, by the airlock. "We'll be back before you know it."
Sam put her hands on her hips. She raised her brows. He didn't need to ask what that meant 'cause he'd gotten to know her just as well as he knew himself, just like when they'd been kids at Olduvai.
She was the only one of them who hadn't been changed and so then, when the base was safe or at least as safe as it could reasonably be assumed to be, when they put on their suits and went out onto the planet surface, when they made the trip to Olduvai to pull out what was left of the resources there, John asked her to stay behind. She wouldn't, because of course she wouldn't. Getting there was harder on her than on any of the others, but she wouldn't not go. She had to see what was left, just like he did. They stood side by side at the airlock, walked side by side in the ruined corridors, peered into the site where their parents had died. What was left wasn't much. There was next to nothing left of the past; what they had then was the future.
One hundred nine was one hundred nineteen within eighteen months. Their colony grew, expanded, built, labored, made a home for themselves where no one could touch them. They weathered the end of the world just fine. Maybe they should've asked what happened to Earth, but they didn't. They'd saved it once already, it was some other fool's turn now.
Twenty years later now and they've never gone back. They've never reopened the Ark to so much as take a peek. Sometimes they wonder what might have happened there and if they might have been the only ones who could have stopped it.
"No regrets," Sam says tonight like she sometimes does, at their usual table in the mess hall where the whole community congregates for every meal. They still run the place like it's military; they even train the kids that way so if anything ever comes for them, by God they'll be prepared. Sam's never married, never had kids, and neither has John, but these days he guesses at least they've got each other - he wishes it hadn't taken the end of the world to bring them back together.
"No regrets, John," Sam says, like she sometimes does.
Sometimes, he even believes her.