The Unraveling: Book 1 of the Bound to Survive Series

by Charley Hogwood

  Silence ensued for a few minutes until they heard a door squeak and slow footsteps. There was no talking out there, but the girls could sense someone’s presence just by the tension and the seeming air pressure changes one feels when they are playing hide and seek.

  The fear was beginning to be unbearable. All of a sudden, they heard a dog barking and growling like he wanted to tear fresh meat. There was a scuffle and then just the scratching of paws on the floor from an excited puppy. The girls heard the dog running back and forth through the house as if it wanted to play.

  As the girls watched the door, they experienced tunnel vision and could only think of fighting. Footstep shadows appeared in the light under the door. They heard the click of the latch from the other side and the door eased open with a rifle barrel raised as it entered. The tension was too much and Amber squeezed the trigger on the spear gun. The powerful bands took over and propelled the spring steel shaft of the spear toward the door. She aimed at center mass but jerked the trigger and the spear flew directly at the head of the intruder. It missed Cal’s ear by a fraction of an inch, flew past Rusty’s shoulder, and the barbed tip buried in the wall behind him.

  “Whoa! Amber! It’s dad! Cease fire.” The girls dropped their weapons and ran to Cal in tears for a group hug. “Are you two ok?”

  “We are now. I didn’t mean to shoot you with a spear. We thought you were the bad guys.”

  “Yeah, that was close. Rusty are you ok?”

  Rusty was standing there wide-eyed, with the tail of the spear resting on his shoulder as it hung out of the wall.

  “Uhh, I think so?” He paused and looked over his shoulder.

  “Holy shit dude, the dog saved my life. If I had not bent down to hold him out of your way I would have been stapled to the wall.”

  Cal realized that there was no time for a reunion.

  “We need to get moving. Rusty, take point since you have the NODS. Girls, I’ll follow you.”

  The group moved to the side door where Shane had already entered and was watching outward for any sign of trouble.

  Amber turned to her dad and said sarcastically, “We should burn it down.”

  While Mandy resumed her questioning of Amber’s mental stability, Rusty and Shane looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. Shane nonchalantly set a nearby burning candle under a pile of newspapers on the couch with a pirate’s smile and nurtured the flame. Everyone looked at him in the glowing campfire that was recently a couch.

  “What!? Candles are a fire hazard,” was his only reply.

  There seemed to be an overall sense of approval in the exit plan and the group moved to the Mustang to gather the girls’ gear.

  Cal turned to Mandy at the car and asked, “Do you want to take this with you?,” referring to the car. She looked at it for a moment.

  “No, I hate this thing.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked away.

  When they got back to the truck, Cal walked around to the driver’s side, where he found Rusty struggling to lift the rear half of a giant lazy hound into the rear seat of the crew cab.

  “Seriously, dude?”

  “Hey,” Rusty said breathily, while straining to load the 170-pound uninterested hound.

  “This big boy saved my life, I owe him.”

  Cal rolled his eyes and watched in mild amusement as the dog looked back at him as if trying to figure out what exactly was happening here.

  By the time they stuffed everyone into the crew cab, to include the dog, the house was aglow, totally engulfed in flames and casting jumpy shadows through the banana trees.

  As they made their way onto the main road, Cal felt a sense of relief over the successful mission. That feeling was interrupted as a large wet snout appeared from the back seat and rested on his shoulders. “It’s been a helluva Monday,” Cal said under his breath.

  17

  Chapter 17

  Monday, January 8th (late night)

  West Palm Beach, Florida

  Duane Rogers fancied himself as a people’s journalist. He looked like a cross between a hipster and a hippie, dressed in style but with wrinkled clothes and hair so matted it looked as if he was going for the dreadlocks look someday.

  Everything was a conspiracy to him. He had achieved a cult following by challenging everything from artificial sweeteners that caused cancer to secret government labs that were funded by multi-billionaires who wanted to find ways to reduce the world’s population so there would be more resources for the rich.

  In the old days, he would have been seen as another acid-minded cretin, but with social media, he could scheme video attacks that could be watched instantly worldwide. Stings, he liked to call them. He would say he was going to “Sting The Man”. There were even STM bumper stickers created by followers and pasted on everything considered an injustice. Duane’s core crew would film and then edit together some cheesy video footage in a way that portrayed a story in his own narrative, regardless of what was truly happening. He lived for the sting. The problem for him was that eventually the story did not seem to be enough. He began to inject himself into the story and mix what he felt was going on with influences he would increasingly create. Duane found that his new approach was yielding strong media hits and a subset of his followers were reaching out to him for more. Everyone wanted to get involved, it seemed. His phrase of “Sting The Man” turned from exposing injustices to physically carrying out justice in their minds. The group even called themselves “The Stingers”, believing themselves to be the metaphorical equivalent of the scorpion that would exact justice by attacking its prey with speed and violence. The Stinger group had been responsible for a few smaller terroristic attacks on corporate offices, and even had gone so far as to set fire to a fleet of border patrol buses because they were against deportation of children of undocumented immigrants.

  Today, Duane’s target for examination was the so-called Shadow Flu. He was sure that the flu was another concoction created by a conglomerate of overlords that included the CDC, Homeland Security, and the original founder of MacroSoft. In Duane’s latest video, he alluded to the need for someone to stand up and stop the eradication of humans.

  “If you don’t make more than six figures, you are being classified as a target for eugenics 2.0,” Duane seethed in the report, referring to the theory that humans should be improved genetically by selective breeding, and that undesirable DNA had to be removed from the gene pool.

  “You are all, WE… are all considered to be the green slime at the shallow end of the gene pool! They want us gone, scrubbed from existence so they… the corporate overlords, can have this planet all to themselves. But who, you may ask would provide the menial labor, the mundane of tasks? Who would be the toilet paper that wipes the shit from the lower side of the upper class? I’ll tell you who: artificial intelligence, that’s who. Robots that these corporate tech lords are designing to replace you. But don’t worry, they will only be programmed to be just smart enough,” he said, dripping with sarcasm.

  “But I’ll tell you this. The tech lords don’t know what they are messing with. Their artificial intelligence will figure it out. A.I. will bring the tech lords, oligarchs, and the rest of the planet to reign! But we will never slip quietly into the night!

  Stay tuned for our next report on the truth. You’ll see for yourselves how this so-called Shadow Flu is ravaging our ranks. Hear the truth before it’s too late. Go now, my little mushrooms, and wait in the dark until I reveal the next STING!”

  “And we are clear,” the webmaster said, as he killed the uplink.

  “We need to go big on this one,” Duane announced.

  “The flu story is the one. This is where it all leads. Everything we have uncovered has led us here to this point in time where we make a stand or we fail to exist.” When Duane talked, he almost believed the crap he was saying.

  “Do you want to dig up some archive footage of the Bilderberg meeting from last year and splice it with some CDC med
ia releases on the plague in Madagascar?” one of Duane’s crew asked.

  “That’s a start but we need more. We need on-camera live footage of bodies in a hospital and people in biohazard suits on American soil. We need to show a militaristic response so we can reveal the truth of their cover up.”

  “My cousin is a night janitor at a local hospital in Wellington. We used to trade places at night for work and no one ever figured it out because the hospital is so big. We took turns for Saturday nights to party,” the sound crew leader said jokingly.

  “Perfect! That’s what we need. Get him on board. Can he get us into the morgue? We need real bodies, to show what’s happening to real people. I want us in there tomorrow night. Let’s go out today and take a drive-by to see the layout of the place.”

  The crew seemed to be jazzed about a live shot and set about putting it together.

  18

  Chapter 18

  Tuesday, January 9th

  Wellington, Florida

  At the hospital, Mark Welby was being pulled in many directions.

  “Doctor!” A nurse rushed up to get his attention. “Can we get some help on the floor? I’ve already made multiple requests through administration and the director’s office. The floor is beyond capacity and people are not showing up for work.”

  As they walked down the hall they had to avoid a large, bloody, green puddle forming under a gurney with a sheet-covered body, one in a seemingly unending line of such gurneys lining the hall. Someone had taken the time to place a yellow spill sign, but had not bothered to mop it up.

  “Nurse, I am not the one to ask. I have already reported the conditions to the director, the Health Department, and even the CDC Regional office. It’s not just your floor and it is not just this hospital. We are going to have to do what we can with what we have.” Mark reached out to reassure her and awkwardly pulled his hand back. She noticed and that just made things worse, rather than better, for her. Another nurse came up and interrupted.

  “Ma’am, we have more of these,” she pointed to the covered gurneys in the hall, “but we are out of gurneys, the room beds are full, and more patients are overflowing into the family waiting room at the end of the hall. What do we do?”

  The young nurse looked bad. Her eyes were not totally focusing and she went into a coughing fit. Instinctively, Mark and the Charge Nurse stepped back the requisite six feet. The young nurse began to lose her balance and lurched toward them. Again they stepped back, out of some primal self-preservation instinct. The nurse caught herself on a sheet from one of the gurneys, which slid off the body it was covering, and she and the sheet tumbled onto the floor, into the thick puddle. Watching her attempt to recover while wrapped in the sheet, Mark and the Charge Nurse looked around helplessly for something to work with since they were not in proper PPE to wrestle with someone covered in a deadly fluid cocktail.

  In the end it did not matter much anyway. The young nurse, on all fours, draped in the contaminated sheet, lurched like a giant cat trying to pass a furball for a few moments, and face-planted onto the tile floor.

  This was one of the most traumatic things the Charge Nurse had ever seen. She looked at Mark and all she said was, “I can’t do this,” with total resignation. As she turned away and passed the nurses station, she coughed. The cough stopped her in her tracks for a moment. With that, she turned again and walked straight out the door, never to return.

  Mark was left standing there, trying to grasp some sense of control. He decided that these bodies had to be removed and a complete infection control protocol needed to be restarted. He went to the Environmental Services Department himself to look for the department head. He went to the first person in sight.

  “Excuse me, who’s in charge please?”

  The older lady he was looking at replied. “Well, normally it is Mr. Bostick, but he ain’t showed up yet.”

  “What time does he normally come in?” Mark asked.

  “About two hours ago,” she replied.

  “We are in a bit of a pinch upstairs. Do you suppose you could help me get some people together?”

  She looked at him and said, “Why not, this place ain’t gonna fix itself.”

  They gathered anyone that was left in the department and held a quick meeting. Everyone got a refresher on how to dress properly to prevent infection and a plan was hatched to use large laundry carts to carry the dirty linen to the hospital’s incinerator. For now, the laundry service would not be washing the linens. Anyone not moving linen was divided up into two crews: a mop brigade for spills and teams to push gurneys to the morgue area and stack the corpses in anticipation of transport to the city morgue.

  The plan was working until Mark went to the morgue and saw that it was stacked so full with bodies that they had fallen over and jammed the only door. Now they couldn’t even get into the room to take the bodies out. Maintenance would need to come and remove the door.

  Mark headed down to the incinerator to make sure the linens were being properly isolated and bagged to prevent the infectious fluids from running out into the loading bays used for supply trucks bringing in clean materials. What he found there was beyond a disaster.

  Someone thought that the incinerator would be a good place to cremate whole corpses in light of the morgue pile up. The problem was that it was not the right kind of incinerator for that duty. It was only intended for bags of biohazard trash and smaller items like amputated limbs and internal organs removed during surgery. The two guys standing there looking confused at a body stuck half in and half out, melted to the incinerator doorway seemed to have realized this too late.

  Mark knew that control was lost. Then he heard a commotion outside, around the corner, at the Emergency Room entrance.

  He walked outside in the midday heat and saw a crowd gathered at the entrance with several hospital security and several more local police forming a blockade to the ER. The automatic doors were just going back and forth with so many people moving around in front of the electric eye.

  People were yelling to be allowed in for treatment and to get information on loved ones. The police were not about to let anyone else inside since the ER was already packed. The mood of the crowd was worsening, and the image of authorities wearing face masks and Tyvek gowns not letting them in was not helping. As Mark came around the corner, someone at the edge of the crowd realized that he must have come out of a door and ran toward him. Several others noticed and a large part of the crowd split off and followed with a mob mentality. Mark realized this was bad and ran back to the incinerator room door and slammed it shut behind him with no time to spare as the runners crashed into the door in anger.

  “Close the loading bay doors, now!” he yelled at the men on the loading dock. “Close them now!” he screamed pointing toward the ER.

  They looked at him quizzically and then saw the crowd coming their way. They each ran and grabbed a chain that lowered the large overhead doors. With a few quick pulls, the doors began to fall under their own weight and the spinning chains flew wildly. The men had to let go as the bay doors crashed down. One of the two doors made it down in time but the second one’s chain tangled for a moment, until the worker yanked it clear. The heavy door began to fall again but the tangle allowed enough time for a young guy to dive halfway under the door before it smashed down and broke his back. Several sets of hands were reaching under the remaining six inches of space. The runners were succeeding in lifting the heavy door. The workers pulled the chain harder and cinched it down on the hook that secured it. The whole scene was like something from a zombie movie, with faceless hands trying to climb under the big door, a twitching body smashed under the bay door, and a body hanging half-burned out of the incinerator. Everyone inside the loading bay was visibly shaken.

  Mark stood there breathlessly, looking at the two workers still wearing soiled white Tyvek suits and disposable face shields.

  Mumbling to himself, “This is not working,” he knew they were going need profes
sional help before this kind of hysteria spread to the general population. He did not realize that today was not an isolated incident. Hospitals from Texas to New Jersey and much of the southeast were in the same shape, as of this afternoon.

  Mark headed off to the hospital director’s office to find out where the refrigerated trucks were that he ordered. Director Jack Whesilton was leaning forward in his office chair glancing out of the plate glass window at the large water fountain in the retention pond outside. He clearly wanted to be somewhere else today, but so did the rest of the hospital staff.

  The phone intercom chimed and snapped him from his fantasy of just walking out, never to return.

  “Mr. Greene from Pharmastat is here to see you, sir.” As if things could not get worse…

  “Send him in,” Jack replied, as he pressed the button.

  He wondered if the audible sigh he let out transmitted before he released the button.

  The door opened and Damien Greene entered as if he owned the place. In a way he did–if not for Pharmastat the hospital would have probably gone broke within the next two years. The pressure on health care, regulatory compliance, and the swarms of ambulance chasers were a bigger drain on resources than the stream of patients who were not able to pay the bills for their own healthcare.

  Sometimes Jack wondered if there was a lawyer garden out back where slimy attorneys were sprouted up like weeds and pointed toward the hospital.

  “Jack, old friend. How are you?” Damien said, as if they were actually old friends. Nothing could be further than the truth and they both knew it. Jack was nothing but a useful idiot in the eyes of Pharmastat and Pharmastat was nothing but a well-funded corporate teat that the hospital was forced to feed from. But in the interest of job security they both played the game of cooperation.