The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 3): The Fall

by Deville, Sean

  How many corpses would be torched before all this was over?

  “Ma’am,” John insisted, and Jessy did the only thing she could do. She opened the door before someone took it into their head to blow it. A single marine soldier stood there in clothing designed to protect against biological contagion, gun held ready and aimed right at her. Jessy almost panicked. “Ma’am…Jessy, I’m going to need you to put down the gun.” Jessy did as she was ordered, bending her knees so she could place it carefully on the ground. John’s voice sounded ominous, distorted as it was by the respirator. Still, she could kind of tell it wasn’t his intention to hurt her.

  “Thanks for coming for me.” John nodded.

  “Ma’am, I know you’re scared, and I will need you to follow my instructions. That way we can get you out of here and get you safe. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Two other soldiers appeared, both dressed the same. One carried the Nuclear Briefcase that surprisingly Jessy had only seen once before. Jessy suddenly had visions of it being plucked from the dead hand of the Secret Service Agent she had last seen carrying it.

  “Alpha team to Overwatch, Football acquired,” John said. Jessy knew he was obviously speaking to someone off-site.

  “Is there anyone else alive?” Jessy almost pleaded. She felt somewhat guilty about locking herself away behind cold hard steel. What if someone else had survived? Could she have somehow helped them? But nobody else had come begging for entry, and if there had been anyone else down here, really, what could she have realistically done? Trained soldiers and Secret Service agents had been overwhelmed by the events that had unfolded. She wouldn’t have stood a chance. Hiding as she had done was the only reasonable option that had been available to her.

  “No Jessy. We didn’t find anyone else. Now, please step out of the door. I’m going to ask you not to make any sudden movements, and please keep your distance from us unless instructed otherwise.” Jessy complied with John’s orders, the fear of getting shot competing with the joy of being rescued.

  Further off in the bunker more gunshots rang out, making Jessy jump. The undead were still here. Were these men enough to keep her safe?

  “We need to get the assets out of here. We only have a short window before that horde reaches our location,” the soldier next to John said. Assets? Thought Jessy. John didn’t ignore his fellow soldier, but his concentration was on Jessy.

  “Jessy,” John said, “are you injured?”

  “I’ve been bitten,” she said, the words drying in her mouth. She choked up and fought back sobs. Had she just signed her own death sentence? Would her saviour raise his gun and shoot her between her now tear-filled eyes?

  “Let me have a look,” John ordered, Jessy raising the aching limb for his inspection. “I need to do a blood test of you, keep your hand held up.” Jessy did as requested, and was surprised when John pressed a finger pricker against her thumb.

  “Ow,” she said, more out of surprise than pain. John gently held her hand and pressed the welling blood against something that very much reminded her of a pregnancy test. Jessy suddenly remembered the time, several years ago, where she had waited with bated breath as the test she had taken showed her she wasn’t actually pregnant. The wrong result with this test, she suspected, would likely be much more severe than to be told she was carrying an unwanted baby. A baby would have curtailed her career. A wrong result here might see her brains be splattered all over the wall.

  “Sorry,” John said, releasing her hand. He placed the test strip device into a self-sealing plastic tube, and Jessy watched it disappear into one of his pockets.

  “Can you move quickly?” the other soldier asked her.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “Good.” John actually sounded relieved. “We are going to move to the surface where a helicopter is waiting for us. When we get outside, it’s going to be noisy. The army is trying to regain control of this part of the city. I want you to focus on the helicopter and know that I will be right behind you.”

  “Okay,” Jessy said, getting control of her breathing.

  “Alpha team to Overwatch, extracting the assets now.”

  ***

  She heard it even before she had reached the ground floor of the Whitehouse, the sound of thunderous battle. The ten-man squad that had rescued her propelled her and the Football up several flights of stairs, and then through the bullet-ridden and body-strewn corridors of the building that the British had once burnt to the ground. Some of the bodies she saw were clearly several days old. While she had been down below, carnage must have raged here. She tried not to look at the dead as she passed them, but several of the corpses gazed up at her with eyes blacker than pitch. There had been a battle for the White House whilst she had been in the bunker, and humanity had lost.

  Everything was a blur, panic threatening to grip hold of her in its loving and reassuring embrace. Jessy kept it together, mainly helped by the calmness that John had displayed in her initial rescue. If only she had been able to see his face, but only a maniac would have entered a biological hazard like the White House without proper protection.

  If she was immune, what did it mean for her?

  She was surprised by how well these men knew their way through the corridors, never taking a wrong move, walking her swiftly to the front of the building and out onto the White House lawn where the reason for John’s warning became clear. The day around her was filled with smoke, fire and mayhem, the noise of the helicopter struggling to compete. Its rotors were running, ready to whisk her off to safety.

  Jessy felt a gentle hand in her back to defy her brief hesitation and then she was whisked across the White House lawn, the open door to the helicopter the only thing she concentrated on. She didn’t look at the zombies being blown apart outside the White House perimeter fence, nor did she see the men there sacrificing their lives to help get her out of there.

  John stopped her from entering, withdrawing the blood test device. He held it up before his face, his head nodding when he saw that the result met his expectations.

  “Good to go,” John said with satisfaction.

  Her foot hit the first step, and then she was inside, men bundling in with her. The door shut, and the helicopter began to rise. Jessy had always hated helicopters, but not at that moment. To her, it might as well have been sent down from the heavens by a host of angels.

  “Thank you John,” she said, relief finally flooding her, her whole body relaxing into the seat. She nearly fainted, and clumsy hands helped her get strapped in. Sat in the middle between two huge men, she wasn’t able to see properly out of the windows to either side. She couldn’t see the way Washington DC burned.

  “Overwatch, contact Major Carson,” Jessy heard John say. “Tell him the intel was correct and that we likely have another immune individual for him.” Jessy listened to the words, the hope that she could escape the virus through her own immunity suddenly punctured by the sharpness that was thrust into the side of her neck. She felt the warmth injected into her as the plunger on the syringe was depressed, her arms suddenly pinned against her sides.

  “Sorry Ma’am, orders” were the last words John said to her before she drifted off into the realm of chemical oblivion. Jessy thought they had come to save her, but she would soon find that the rescue wasn’t for her benefit. Captain John Fairclough felt bad about sedating the woman in this fashion, but orders were orders.

  23.08.19

  Glasgow, UK

  Nicholas Connery didn’t believe a word if it. The news channels told him that there was a virus ravaging parts of the country, but there was no way the dead were rising up from the ground, that was just simply impossible. Surely if that were the case, the streets outside his flat would be flooded by the zombie hordes.

  All he saw out there were police and the army.

  This was clearly something more sinister, something he knew had been coming for decades. This was the damned New World Order
making their power play. The stock market crash and martial law had nothing to do with the “undead”. That was just a ruse to get everyone scared for their lives whilst rich families increased their already immense fortunes.

  Frightened people did what they were told. They were compliant, malleable. And Connery wasn’t going to fall for it.

  He had known this day would come. The one bookshelf in his pitiful flat was filled with books that told him the truth about the world. As he told people loudly, and often, he didn’t believe in conspiracy theory, he believed in conspiracy fact. The forces of darkness would come, and they would seize ultimate power using deception and the threat of an enemy that would bring the populace into line. That was exactly what was happening now, he was sure of it.

  Connery gave them their due of course. He never would have thought they would have used a zombie apocalypse. The way they had done it was also impressive, the doctored images given to the masses over the TV and the internet exceptionally well done. Even he had almost fallen for it. Almost. They weren’t going to play him for a fool.

  The nighttime curfew didn’t have anything to do with his safety. It was just to keep the streets clear so that the “powers that be” could erect their checkpoints and their containment camps. He knew that was coming, and he didn’t fear the very real prospect that he was on a list somewhere. As he often said to his friend who shared his somewhat bizarre ideas about the world, he had already reserved himself a bunk in the re-education centre.

  As a self-confessed conspiracy nut, he had taken preparations for this day, without actually thinking about the long term implications of what such a world-changing event would mean. He had cupboards full of food and bottled water, so he didn’t need to venture outside his flat for sustenance. He had books to read and candles for when the power went out, which would all be part of the softening up process. Of course, the next step would be for law and order to seemingly break down, so using the candles at night would have to be limited. He didn’t want those desperate for food to have a beacon they could follow. Just as with the rest of the UK, the rioting would eventually hit Glasgow, and the people would cower and beg for salvation from their omnipotent overlords.

  The food and the books would only last so long, however. There was also a more pressing problem that he hadn’t really accounted for. Already he was feeling it, the cabin fever that was creeping into his mind. Connery wasn’t the kind of person who could spend long periods alone. He needed social interaction, which was the big flaw in his survival plan. Cooped up here, with nobody to talk to now the internet and the phone networks were down…it was sending him bloody doolally. It had only been a couple of days, and already he was feeling lost and afraid.

  Connery realised now that he should have worked better to create a support network. Most of his mates didn’t share his controversial opinions, but they tolerated them because he often used humour to express his unconventional beliefs. He liked nothing better than to be down the pub, a cool pint in hand, indoctrinating those who had eyes but who could not see. Pubs, there was another example of how the oppression had been building over the years. Pubs were one of the last safe places people could meet and discuss ideas, and they had been closing down in their thousands over the years. All part of some non-existent master plan that was now being unveiled to the world.

  In desperation, he had even been outside in the times allowed by the quarantine. Connery had found the streets deserted, except for the puppets of the New World Order, and he hadn’t dared approach them. He knew the types they recruited into the police and the military these days, even though he had never met any of them. The YouTube videos, all self-selecting and biased, had shown him everything he needed to know about the uniformed jackals that would prey on the weak. So he had kept to the shadows and tried to find anything that was open. Everything was shuttered tight, and without access to a car, he couldn’t go far. Even with a vehicle, he would have just encountered roadblocks and demands for his identification.

  “Citizen, your papers please.” The four words he probably dreaded more than any other.

  Before he knew it, they would be forcing everyone to take the tracking microchip for their safety. It was always about safety, wasn’t it? Give up your liberty for the promise of security, and remember to think about the welfare of the children.

  You could, therefore, understand Connery’s surprise when he discovered that zombies were in fact real. The crushing silence and the boredom of his apartment had dragged him back out onto the street. Strangely there were no police or military this time, and he could almost taste it in the air that something was wrong. There were distant sounds that he couldn’t quite place that should have sent him scurrying back to safety. Foolishly, he didn’t listen to the voice in his head that told him to get the hell off the streets. Instead, he took it upon himself to discover what was causing those sounds. There was something familiar about them, and yet they were totally alien to the surrounding environment.

  At the end of his street, he turned left, pulling the hood of his coat up as a light rain began to fall. The air smelled of smoke, although he couldn’t tell where it was originating from. Something else for him to worry about because, in martial law such as this, there would unlikely be any emergency services to deal with the raging fires. A conflagration could take and spread unchecked through the terraced houses and the apartment buildings that made up this part of the city. Without civil order and emergency services, the cities would become death traps. Perhaps they had been designed like that, to suck in as many people as possible to aide in the great purge that was planned.

  He knew there was to be a purge because the “experts” he listened to and read religiously said there would be. Seven billion down to five hundred thousand was the ultimate plan, the survivors all trapped in compact cities overseen by a political and economic elite that believed in transhumanism and eugenics. Connery had to wonder if he even wanted to survive in such a world. It never once occurred to him that if this elite were so all-powerful, why was it that they had allowed the population to grow so out of control in the first place. It was never good to let logic invade an awakened mind.

  The noise got louder, and from the corner of his eye, he saw curtains twitch. Most of the people who lived in the city would have followed the instructions given to them by the media, at least at first. When you learnt that all the major arteries out of the city had either been sealed off or cut, there really was little point trying to flee. Connery himself knew he should have left Glasgow, but he didn’t for the simple reason he didn’t have anywhere to go. He had spent all his free time researching about the coming dystopian future instead of actually acquiring skills to survive when the shit finally hit the fan. What was he going to do, fill a backpack with food and go and camp in the woods? Firstly, he didn’t have a backpack, and secondly, he hadn’t the slightest idea of how to survive without civilised warmth and shelter.

  Connery realised too late that he was in no way prepared for the world he had been secretly longing for. And wasn’t that the truth of it? He had fallen into the whole conspiracy web because, on some level, he actually wanted to see it all come crashing down. Secretly, in the darkest rooms of his heart, he knew that he had been a failure by conventional standards, and he hated the world around him for highlighting his own inadequacies. His corrupted ego and arrogance told him he would be one of the survivors, but when a light was shone on his plans, they were seen to be nothing but mist and mirrors.

  When Connery found out what the noise actually was, it was already too late for him.

  A single zombie was walking down the centre of the street, its left wrist handcuffed to a car door it was dragging along with it. How on earth that had come about, Connery didn’t know. But when he saw the way the creature moved, the blood that covered its face and the blackness in its eyes, Connery knew instantly that he had been wrong. This wasn’t some plot to cow the population. The zombie menace was, in fact, real, and he had willingly wa
lked away from the illusionary safety of his flat.

  Part of him froze for several seconds before he had the sense to turn and run. The zombie came after him, but it was hindered by the door. The noise it made wasn’t though, it was like an alarm to anything in the surrounding area.

  Unfortunately for Connery, he had another issue. The other thing he had been neglecting was his own fitness: beer, pizza and marijuana his staple diet. Secondary school was most likely the last time he had actually done any intentional exercise. Running for the bus was the only test he put on his legs, so despite the terror in him, Connery found that he quickly tired. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just the one hampered zombie. But as he fled, the streets that bled onto the one where he wheezed seemed to fill with jackals regurgitated from hell itself.

  Whereas he had walked the streets alone, now the undead surrounded him. While not all of their number came for him personally, there were enough of them running at him full pelt for Connery to realise he didn’t stand a chance of getting back to his home. Putting on a last desperate burst of speed that sent fire coursing through his lungs, Connery actually stumbled, his muscles and joints not used to such abuse. He didn’t fall, but his foot landed at an odd angle, sending pain shooting into his ankle.

  Connery found he couldn’t run anymore, and the monsters were closing on him rapidly as if he was the last human left on the planet. The only thing left for him was to seek some kind of refuge, a futile plan at best. The closest home was to his right, and he navigated the rusty gate that led to a pathetically unkempt front garden. The PVC door shook as he desperately slammed his fists on it.

  “Please,” he begged, “let me in.” The door remained firmly closed of course, the only sign of life inside a dark shadow that he briefly saw move thanks to the door’s privacy glass. The person in there clearly wasn’t in any hurry to be a good Samaritan.

  “Please,” he begged again, the word almost choking him. Connery heard something impact the gate behind him, and he frantically looked behind to see four zombies stood on the pavement. Their black eyes seemed to stare at him as if Connery was the most amazing thing in the world. For a moment, they just seemed to stand there, gazing in awe at some unique exhibit put on the world for their endless amusement. Then they came at him as one, two more running up from behind, the remaining mass of them surely only moments away.