Buck sniffed, wrinkling his nose and drawing phlegm into the back of his mouth. He worked it across his tongue and then spat it at the man, hitting the ruffle of leaves in front of his face.
He used the rifle to pull himself to his feet. He was trudging back toward his camp when he noticed the men had pulled back the tarp on his Humvee. They’d rifled through his belongings. It made him feel better about dispatching them with prejudice. They’d had it coming.
An hour later, he’d cleaned up his camp and maneuvered the Humvee onto the dirt road leading to the interstate access road. He left the bodies where they were, not busying himself with burying them or hiding them. It would be days before anybody found them, if anyone ever did. By then, the animals would have done plenty of work on them and he would be long gone.
He eased the fueled Humvee onto the interstate and accelerated, feeling the hum and rumble of the oversized tires spinning on the asphalt. He sank into his seat and leaned against the headrest. It wasn’t far to his destination now.
As he reached speed, a sense of comfort washed over him for the first time in a long time. He hadn’t thought about it until now, but with three kills under his belt and blood spattered across his black denim jacket, Rufus Buck was at home. The post-Scourge world was a war zone. It was every man for himself. To the victor went the spoils.
A broad smile spread across his face and he laughed. Then he started singing. It was Metallica. His fingers thumped the beat on the wheel, his shoulders moving in rhythm. Adrenaline surged through his body and he pressed the accelerator to the floor.
CHAPTER 7
MARCH 12, 2033
SCOURGE +162 DAYS
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Before the Scourge, there had been thirteen biosafety level four laboratories in the United States. Now, less than six months after the disease gripped humanity’s throat and choked the life from it, there were three and two of them were in Galveston, Texas. They didn’t count though. Not since the Lone Star Republic went rogue. The third and largest, was at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
There were four BSL categories, one through four. The higher the number, the deadlier the work inside the protected lab walls and the more important the containment. The Scourge was definitely a BSL-4 disease. Work inside the lab was tedious, fraught with challenges and dangers and required a series of procedures to ensure the contagions held inside the lab stayed where they were. Working in the lab was Gwendolyn Sharp’s least favorite part of her job.
She stood naked, studying herself in the full-length mirror affixed to the side of her locker door. She touched her hand to her flat stomach then ran a finger across the skin that stretched over the pelvic bone at her hip.
Instrumental music played through the speakers recessed into the ceiling. Gwendolyn absently hummed along with the recognizable tune she couldn’t quite place.
How much weight have I lost? Too much.
She considered the old maxim that one could never be too rich or too thin. Staring at her physique, which somehow felt like it belonged to someone else older and sickly, she decided only the first half of the saying was true.
From the shelf inside the locker, she withdrew a fresh set of crisply starched pale green scrubs. Gwendolyn pulled the cinched waist above her hips and tied a knot in the drawstring she hoped would hold the pants in place. Braless, she slid the top over her head and adjusted the sleeves on her arms.
“Earth, Wind & Fire,” she said to herself and shut the locker door. There was a lock, but she didn’t engage it. No other women used the locker room attached to the series of anterooms that fed the BSL-4 lab better known as the vault.
Humming, she moved from the locker room to a smaller space immediately next to the lab. From the wall, she plucked a stark white positive-pressure suit. Using a stainless steel bench for balance, she donned the suit and connected herself to a coiled tube.
After a series of final checks, she entered the lab. Now connected to a fresh supply of air, Gwendolyn took deep breaths to acclimate herself.
The smell of the off-gassing plastic suit and the hiss of oxygen into her headgear was enough to make a claustrophobe of a cave diver, but Gwendolyn adhered to her routine and steadied her nerves. She flexed her hands inside oversized gloves. She hummed. She slowed her breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Through the speakers in her helmet, a familiar voice greeted her.
“Welcome back to the vault,” Charles Morel said. “You’re late.”
She lifted her wrist and looked at a watch that wasn’t there. “You’re early.”
Morel glared at her. “Let’s get to work, please. I’ve got other places to be.”
She crossed the lab toward a glass-encased bench that ran along one side of the room. Treadgold was already seated at a terminal, his hands manipulating a joystick, which controlled a mechanism on the other side of the glass.
“You sound like you’re from The Hague,” Gwendolyn said, “but with less enthusiasm.”
Treadgold let go of the joystick. “Enough of the bickering, please. I can’t abide it today. Too much going on.”
Gwendolyn raised her hands in surrender. She wasn’t the one with the problem. It was Morel. Since they’d come back to the States, their relationship had deteriorated because of his own insecurities. At least that was how she saw it.
In Ukraine, Morel was her boss. She took orders from him. Not anymore. Colonel Whittenburg had empowered her with more authority than Morel. And given the military change in the CDC leadership structure, Whittenburg’s decisions held sway.
When she’d questioned the colonel privately about this move, about her concerns Morel might try to usurp her new position, Whittenburg dismissed her with a military idiom. He’d looked her straight in the eye and said, “Don’t confuse rank with authority. He might outrank you. But you have more power. Period. End of story.”
Morel didn’t like his diminished role and he took it out on Gwendolyn. He overtly suggested she’d aggressively sought to leapfrog him.
She feigned innocence, as if she’d had nothing to do with her own meteoric ascension and pretended Morel’s assertions were unfounded. They weren’t.
They stood on either side of Treadgold. Gwendolyn liked the hooded suit if only so she didn’t have to see Morel at the edges of her vision. Effectively having on blinders was a nice side effect of the uncomfortable suit. She could taste the plastic in her mouth.
Treadgold pointed a gloved hand at a large flat-panel monitor affixed to the wall on the other side of the glass. The screen displayed the magnified images of a petri dish underneath the lens of a powerful microscope. At the center of the image was a collection of green tube-shaped bacteria.
“This is an original sample of Yersinia pestis,” said Treadgold. “It’s from the 2014 infection in Yumen, China.”
Gwendolyn chuckled. “It looks like a turd.”
She’d seen the bacteria countless times before. It always struck her that the deadly microbe looked exactly like a perfectly formed stool.
Treadgold pivoted in his seat and leaned back to look at Gwendolyn through his mask, his face squeezed with irritation. “Really?” he asked. “What are you eating?”
The surprise attempt at humor from the typically droll researcher drew laughter from Morel.
Gwendolyn tried to suppress a smile but failed. “Funny,” she said. “Treadgold plus one.”
Her face flushed. Despite the rush of cool air, Gwendolyn was suddenly hot. She tried to recover. “I remember the China case,” she said. “A man died from contact with a dead marmot. They quarantined more than a hundred people and shut down the city of thirty thousand. They acted quickly and stopped a potential plague.”
“There’s something to be said for authoritarian governments,” offered Morel. “A lack of freedom is sometimes the best way to protect liberty.”
“That’s some doublespeak,” said Gwendolyn. “I would suggest tha
t—”
“Let’s get back to work, please,” said Treadgold. “This is important.”
Gwendolyn exhaled audibly in her helmet. “Fine. Proceed.”
Treadgold turned back to the monitor, his suit crinkling and palmed the joystick. The image on the monitor changed, enlarging one of the green tubes. At higher resolution, hairlike tendrils visibly extended from the tube. “You notice the structure of the bacteria. Gram-negative, nonmotile rod-shaped coccobacillus. No spores.”
Now it was Morel who huffed. “We know this. It’s elementary. I don’t understand the need to—”
Treadgold raised a glove to silence Morel. “Stay with me. I have a point.”
The display shifted again. Now there were two separate but similar images on the screen, both of them magnified images of the bacteria. “The image on the right is the China sample,” said Treadgold. “The image on the left is from Syria, taken eight months ago.”
Gwendolyn inched toward the glass, focusing on the screen. “They’re identical.”
Treadgold zoomed in on the Syrian sample. “Virtually. There are tiny differences. You can’t see it here, but the chromosome strain KIM is twenty-eight pairs longer. And this one hosts two plasmids that the China sample doesn’t host.”
“So it’s a different strain,” said Morel. “What’s special about that?”
Treadgold’s voice lifted an octave and he spoke more quickly. Clearly, he was getting to the meat of the discovery. “From what we’ve been able to deduce, this Syrian strain is quicker to attack the plasmin enzyme in humans. That’s what accounts for its virulence. But that’s not all.”
When he didn’t immediately clarify, Gwendolyn pivoted to look at Treadgold. “Okay. I’ll bite.”
The display changed. This time the Syrian strain appeared markedly different. Gwendolyn studied it. The more she looked at its features, the less it looked like the Syrian strain. In fact, it was nothing like it at all.
“Are you sure that’s Syrian?” she asked Treadgold.
The scientist pivoted awkwardly toward her, his suit crinkling. There was a puff of condensation on his visor. He nodded. “Yes. It’s the same strain. This one, though, is a newer generation. Some three removed from the initial sample. Notice the viral agent here?”
“Fast mutations in plasmids are nothing new,” said Gwendolyn.
“But like this?” asked Treadgold. “With the viral attachment? It’s like they’re feeding off each other. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
The virus looked like a popcorn ball. It was much smaller than the tube-shaped bacteria. There were dozens of them attached to each bacterium.
Treadgold pointed to the screen. “This is why vaccines are useless.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Morel corrected him. “The pneumonic form of the disease has never responded well to the KWC vaccines formerly in production. And they didn’t respond to the samples we tested in our early days of work in Kiev.”
KWC meant “killed whole cells.” EV76, a live attenuated vaccine, was virtually useless. There was no hope of a vaccine. That was why they’d come back to Atlanta. It was time to turn the Scourge to their advantage.
“It’s clear to me we have an out-of-control viral-charged bacteria,” said Treadgold. “It’s building upon itself like a snowball rolling downhill. We cannot stop it. It will have to run its course. But we’ve made a breakthrough.”
Gwendolyn had been waiting for this. “What is it?”
Treadgold stepped back to the joystick and maneuvered the image on the display. Using the joystick, he thumbed a button, which added an overlay onto the screen. A complex mathematical equation was superimposed over the images of the mutating plague.
“I’ve isolated the timing of each mutation. There’s an algorithm that predicts it now. We know when and how each phase of the disease will transform into its next, more deadly, iteration.”
Gwendolyn nodded. “Excellent work.”
“It’s what you asked of me.”
Morel stepped back from the glass. “It’s the perfect bioweapon.” He looked stunned, like the reality of it had just now hit him. His gaze was somewhere outside the lab. His voice sounded as if he were talking to people who weren’t there. It was as if he’d not even heard Treadgold acknowledge the completion of an assignment about which he’d not known.
“I knew it when they pulled us from Kiev,” he said. “But seeing it here…the speed at which it keeps morphing, staying one step, two steps, three steps ahead of us… It’s eventually going to wipe out everyone.”
“Some are immune,” said Treadgold. “Others carry it but don’t exhibit symptoms.”
Morel refocused. “That’s less than thirty percent.”
“Thirty-two point four,” Treadgold amended.
“Whatever,” said Morel. “The world as we know it is gone. Our efforts failed. They’re failing now.”
Gwendolyn engaged now. “Are they?”
Morel glowered through his visor. “Are they what?”
“Are they failing? Are we throwing good effort after bad?”
Neither man said anything. They look confused, like Gwendolyn was speaking some ancient tongue nobody understood.
She pointed to the monitor with her gloved hand. “This is a breakthrough. Our ability to see the transformation, to know the speed and genesis of each mutation, is remarkable.”
This was an inflection point. Treadgold didn’t know what he’d achieved. That was something above his classification.
Whittenburg had given the order to Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn gave it to Treadgold. Morel was never in the loop. And he hadn’t caught onto that. He was in his own head, lamenting the work he hadn’t accomplished in Kiev months before.
“What good is it if we can’t stop it?” asked Treadgold.
Gwendolyn took a deliberate step toward him, Morel at her side now. She couldn’t see his face. All of her attention was focused on the man who’d made the breakthrough.
“Can we harness the mutation? Make it work for us?”
Gwendolyn blurted it out without thinking. At first she wasn’t even sure she’d said it aloud. Then both men looked at her. Treadgold remained silent. Morel took the first stab at understanding the question.
“What are you saying? That we turn the disease into an agent?”
She hadn’t planned on telling either of them. Not yet. Whittenburg wanted to wait. Too late now. The cat was out of the bag and its turd was in the punch bowl.
Gwendolyn thought about the mixed metaphors and almost smiled. She steeled herself and took a step closer to her colleagues. Over Treadgold’s shoulder, mounted on the wall near the ceiling, was one of three cameras. They were being recorded. She’d already said enough to get in trouble. She had to walk back the implications.
“I’m not saying anything. I’m only asking a question. Can we make the best of a bad situation?”
Treadgold laughed incredulously. It almost sounded like a cough. His eyes settled on hers for a moment before moving to Morel. Then both men stared at her again.
Morel’s face was red. “Is this because I called it the perfect agent? You latch onto that and think bioweapon? You can’t be—”
Gwendolyn balled her gloved hands into fists. “Don’t flatter yourself, Charles. My ideas aren’t a mutation of yours.”
Morel seethed behind his visor. “No. You’re right, Gwen, they’re not. They’re a monstrous adaptation of whatever thoughts Colonel Whittenburg injects into your brain.”
He was right. Gwendolyn was doing Whittenburg’s bidding. The military wanted to develop a stable mutant form of the disease, one they could predict.
These were uncertain times; governments could fall. There had to be a way to ensure the survival of the United States, to end threats before they became too great.
Gwendolyn understood Whittenburg’s objective. She would do everything she could to see it to its fruition no matter how long it took. No matter what it took.
She took in a deep breath of the filtered air and exhaled. Calming herself, she flexed her hands inside the gloves. She had to deescalate the situation.
“Charles,” she said, “you can say about me whatever you want. Call me names, question my intelligence, it doesn’t matter to me. I’m the one with the authority here, not you. Get on board or get out.”
Morel’s face twitched. His eyes darted around the room. His clenched jaw relaxed and his lips parted. He bumped past Gwendolyn on his way out of the lab.
Gwendolyn put her hand on Treadgold’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about him.”
“I won’t. I’ll worry about you.”
CHAPTER 8
MARCH 12, 2033
SCOURGE +162 DAYS
ROCKLEDGE, FLORIDA
The smell of burning meat was mouthwatering. It didn’t matter to Trick McQuarry that it was squirrel. He wanted something other than fish.
He lifted the top of the charcoal grill and the heat washed across his face in waves. The thin strips of meat were white now. With a pair of tongs, he gripped a piece and flipped it to reveal blackened grill marks. He flipped the other four pieces.
“There gonna be enough for everyone?” asked Neil. “It doesn’t look like there’s gonna be enough for everyone.”
McQuarry shot Neil a glare but didn’t answer the question. He lowered the grill’s hinged top and hung the tongs on the handle, then pointed to the plastic cooler near Neil’s feet. “Hand me another beer.”
Neil looked at the cooler as if seeing it for the first time, unlatched it and reached in to retrieve a beer. He twisted off the cap and handed it to McQuarry. “It’s not cold. We don’t have any ice.”
McQuarry took a long pull from the air-temperature Funky Buddha beer. The carbonation tickled his sinuses. The beer was funky. He didn’t care. He took another swig and swished it around in his mouth before he swallowed.
With the beer bottle McQuarry gestured toward the house. “Where is everybody?”
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 7
