Night Zero- Second Day
Page 42
It glowed on the horizon, a small brightness greater than the blinding sun, a pinprick of white against the backdrop of spreading gold.
It had a name, this place, where she would build her colony.
Tuscaloosa.
* * * * *
Leaving wasn’t as simple as walking out of the med-tent and into a waiting helicopter.
Jesse was allowed to retrieve his personal gear from his airplane, before borrowing a couple of young men to help haul his Cessna to a safe parking area. Locking the doors and slipping the keys into his pockets, Jesse couldn’t stifle a feeling of loss.
When Kimmy died, his hobby of learning to fly became an obsession. Other than paying the bills to keep the lights on and the roof intact, Jesse worked only to support his lessons. Once those were complete, all his disposable income went to the purchase of his Skyhawk.
It was his pride and the one real joy left to him.
And he was saying good-bye.
The battalion only had a couple of birds, and both were currently in use ferrying personnel around to other strategic locations. Jesse had time to kill before one could be dispatched to take him to Washington.
Possible savior or medical volunteer, neither designation earned him any respect from the other members of Sergeant Harding’s command. They weren’t hostile to him, just unwelcoming. Jesse didn’t mind. He remembered what it felt like to be a part of that brotherhood, and how distrustful they were of outsiders. In a lot of ways, they would see him like the high school alumnus trying to recapture some of his youth by showing up at a teenager’s party after the big game.
PFC Patrick was willing to talk, but Jesse figured it was because not too many of his fellow soldiers wanted to listen. When a man with his boyish exuberance can’t find a willing audience, anyone could become an acceptable target. Jesse spent ten minutes with the young medic before deciding he’d be better off finding a shower and another hot meal. He did allow Dallas to examine his wound one more time, which showed signs of good healing and only minimal redness around the bite marks.
“You’re lucky,” Dallas commented. “Much deeper and there might have been some tendon damage.”
“So I’ve been told,” Jesse replied.
The soldiers had cleaned out the “break room,” allowing their men and women use of the showers in the locker rooms. Jesse’s travel bag included toiletries and a change of clothes.
Showered, cleaned, and changed, he emerged refreshed and returned to the medical tent to await his ride.
He woke up with a new sun rising above the horizon, surprised to have fallen asleep.
The reason no one came to get him was quickly apparent.
The helo had never arrived, and the country was now under martial law.
* * * * *
In the immediate aftermath of the Public Health Announcement and the pronouncement of Martial Law, chaos reigned.
The very thing the government sought to avoid came to pass, and the cities were the worst.
Families packed their cars and headed away from home with no plan but to get out, to get away. They’d seen the news reports, censored though they might be. Worse, they’d seen the videos on Facebook and the pictures on Instagram and Twitter before the government shut down the Internet—DC in flames, mobs of strangely listless people like zombies surrounding the CDC in Atlanta, people collapsing in the waiting rooms of hospitals, dying in the plastic seats before they could be seen by a doctor. They knew the President and his cabinet were in an unnamed, secure location. They saw the city as a problem and the road as a solution. Unfortunately, everyone came to the same realization.
Traffic jammed up the highways, backing onto the secondary roads which then backed into their very neighborhoods, cars so densely packed that some found they couldn’t even get out of their driveways.
They were easy pickings, like sardines trapped in a can and just waiting for the hungry become to open it.
Those in rural America fared better, at least initially. Like those in the city, they viewed the city as the problem, and took measures to protect themselves lest the problems of the city come their way. Rather than run, they came together. People took to the streets, most often peaceably, neighbors shaking hands over small town fences, then walking side by side to their small-town community centers where small-town sheriffs asked for volunteer deputies and small-town mayors made plans to keep their towns safe.
Outside the towns, where the streets were often known by numbers and gravel and dirt were more common than asphalt, the farmers and homesteaders, survivalists and preppers, off-the-grid’ers and good old-fashioned hermits, hunkered down on their land. Windows were boarded and weapons loaded, generators were tested and topped off, and everything which could run on a battery was checked and made ready.
No one knew how bad it was or how bad it was going to get.
They thought the declaration of Martial Law a precaution, a way to retain control of the country while whatever was happening was put to rights.
They were wrong, but they couldn’t know that.
They would learn.
* * * * *
The female hunter raised her head as a strange sensation rushed through her.
She huddled in a small copse of trees along the north-south Interstate, whiling away the daytime hours. The people in the towns around her were becoming, but there weren’t so many that she could risk open movement in daylight.
It wasn’t a person which roused her, no sneaking human of heroic intent, thinking to end her existence and thus cement a reputation for himself.
Instead, it was as if a compass had flipped, the pull of her prey shifting from being in one direction to another.
The three she’d been tracking all along the miles were no longer where they should be.
A helicopter passed high above, and though she had no way of knowing it, she was certain her prey were passengers within, being ferried far away and out of her reach, possibly forever.
There would be no more trail to follow. Even if she continued on her path, letting the scent take her to wherever they were when they boarded the craft, she would lose it.
She couldn’t track airborne prey.
Something erupted from within her, a scream of frustration and primal rage. She was made to hunt, to follow a trail wherever it led, to run her prey to the ground. But with her prey now out of reach, she was suddenly set adrift, rudderless. A hunter without prey was like a loaded gun without a target. Not useless, no, but suddenly more dangerous and less predictable.
A hunter without prey might hunt anyone, just as a loaded gun without purposeful aim became an accident waiting to happen.
The scream subsided, and the hunter left her hiding place.
Let all those who weren’t become beware.
The hunter was loose.
And no one was safe.
* * * * *
The partying on the ship began as soon as the passengers set aside their concern for family and friends. The bartenders made each “free” drink a little stronger, perhaps wishing someone could do the same for them. One drink became two, and once the free drinks were used up, well, the passengers were already pre-treated enough to spring for more for themselves.
Keep the party going, and all that.
Being a nightclub on three levels, the Fantail had several male and female restrooms. Because it was near a shopping concourse, even more public facilities were available. And, because it was a nightclub near a bunch of restaurants on a ship, there were perhaps twice as many facilities as might be found on shore. There might have been one or two passengers slightly miffed at finding a women’s bathroom locked all through the evening, but not so much that anyone reported it. Where one door was locked, there were always three or four others open.
In that locked stall, Priya Anand stoically passed through the waves of debilitating nausea and crippling stomach cramps. She passed diarrhea that burned her ass and vomit so acidic that the fumes stung her eyes. And she never cried out
. Where she came from, women didn’t make scenes like that.
The rich, toffee complexion which gave her skin an ageless quality paled as the toxin claimed her life.
The woman whose name meant ‘Joy’ opened her dark eyes to a new reality. The stench of her last agonizing hours clung to her as she emerged from the locked bathroom. The front of her dress carried the stains of her passing, with enough dark red visible that only the most inebriated of dancers failed to notice.
“Miss? Are you all right?”
It wasn’t the handsome man from the night before. He’d probably found someone else to warm his cabin.
This one was younger, middle twenties maybe, and handsome enough that three or four young ladies were obviously awaiting his attention, beckoning him back to the dance floor.
He was just being polite.
Too bad for him.
The screams started in the Fantail but echoed all the way to the center of the ship, where Andy rolled over in his bed and sat up, the awareness of a new become blossoming in his mind.
“Mmph, what time is it?” Chris asked, reaching out to touch his lover’s back.
Andy smiled.
Six hours behind them, Chelsie Young moaned and thrashed her last in an emergency room at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital. The floor around her bed was a slippery sea of blood, vomit, and shit, with discarded sterile plastic wrappers floating like so much debris after a shipwreck. The staff had fought valiantly to save the life of the elderly American woman, going above and beyond what anyone would think were reasonable measures.
They had no idea what they were fighting.
And as the young Canadian doctor came for his final check, stethoscope out to listen for her heartbeat, the last perfunctory exam prior to announcing time of death, Chelsie opened her eyes and lashed out.
To be continued
Rob Horner is a Virginia Beach native and former Navy Avionics Technician who spent twenty years working with electronics before finding his calling in medicine. Now a nurse practitioner with Urgent Care of Mountain View, primarily in the Morganton and Hickory, North Carolina locations, he splits his time between work, writing, and family. He is blessed with a loving wife, two sons, and three beautiful daughters. He and his family live in Lenoir, NC.
He can be found in various places on the web:
Twitter @RobHorner8
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via email at fansofrobhorner@gmail.com,
or on his blog at Rob-Horner.com.