TEN
“Oh, dear God!” Professor Grewal cried as the contents of the cargo net thrashed and hissed and shrieked at him and his small team. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
“Not my problem,” Miller answered flatly, hiding the enjoyment he was lapping up from frightening the British scientist. With a hand signal, he and his team melted away from the makeshift lab, having fulfilled their responsibilities for the night and leaving to get something to eat and some sleep.
Grewal, left with a lethal cargo and no way to control it, turned desperately with pleading eyes aimed at the man from the US army’s infectious diseases department. The man, a sergeant as far as Grewal could make out from the multiple stripes on his sleeve, smirked.
“Alright, boys,” he said, “suit up. Doc, you might wanna get yourself clear for this part…”
Four of the soldiers, all wearing heavily padded suits with an outer layer of thick, rubbery material and plastic visors covering their faces, approached the cargo net which had been dragged into a large caged area. The taut ropes keeping the mouth of the net closed were loosened, and the suited soldiers stepped forwards with long poles complete with loops of heavy wire sprouting from the ends. Grewal recognised them as the kind of thing used to secure and control dangerous dogs, and he had to admit that the principle was an easily transferrable one.
With a lot of yelling and a few tense moments when one of the soldiers was forced onto his back by the attacks of the soaked and shrieking beasts, eventually both of them were secured, each with two poles looped around their neck. The difficulty came then when they couldn’t figure out how to drag them out of the larger cage and into the smaller ones where they could be used as lab rats.
“Fuck this shit,” the sergeant said, reaching up to strip off his own helmet and rummage in his removed equipment to retrieve a cigarette and lighter. He struck flame to the end of a smoke and inhaled deeply, his eyes closed, before he stepped forwards and opened the cage.
“Alright, assholes,” he announced, gaining the instant and undivided attention of the thrashing corpses. He blew smoke at them and brought up both hands to gesture them forward. “If you’ll step right this way, thaaat’s it, keep following the sound of my voice…” he paced backwards, luring them towards him as both bubbled and tried to shriek at their slowly escaping meal. One by one, they were corralled into individual cages, the loops being removed from their necks before the team took off their suits and began to scrub them down with a strong-smelling bleach solution.
“Draw straws for the next time,” their sergeant said, “unless one of you screws up, then being the bait can be your reward. Oh, hey, Docs.” This last was aimed at Grewal and Chambers, who had re-entered ahead of their own team. “All yours. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you not to stick your fingers through the bars. These animals may bite…”
“No,” Grewal answered, “you don’t.”
“Your team are staying here, though, right?” Chambers added. In answer, the sergeant raised his eyes to a section of the shed elevated about twenty feet from the floor. Up there, just visible in the gloom, was a pair of soldiers sitting behind a heavy machine gun, ready to end the experiment should anything go awry. Chambers nodded his understanding, turning to give his orders.
“Full tissue samples,” he ordered them. “Run everything from the beginning. Blood, DNA, everything. And anyone getting themselves bitten will find themselves instantly dismissed from this team.” A heavy clunk of metal sounded from behind him, prompting all of them to turn and look.
“Anyone gets themselves bit,” the sergeant said dourly, his hand still resting on the heavy semi-automatic pistol he had produced, “and I’ll personally guarantee your dismissal from the human race through the medium of my forty-five.” They all stared at him, waiting for his face to crack and betray the fact that he was joking. His face, however, stayed resolute and the awkward silence extended until the lead scientist cleared his throat for their attention.
“Get the samples,” Grewal told them, “set up the tests and then we can get some sleep. We’ll deal with the results in the morning.”
Grewal watched as the grunt work of their scientific mission was undertaken. He hung back, offering such encouragement as he thought fit in the form of loud tutting and the occasional patronising slow shake of his head. Seeing the suspicious and permanently scowling sergeant still sitting cradling the large handgun he’d threatened them with, he drew himself up to his full, if meagre, height and approached him.
“I’d prefer,” he began, his courage abandoning him slightly as the sergeant’s head turned slowly to glare at him. He made a low noise in his throat, as though he wanted to cough but fought the urge. “I’d prefer it if you weren’t quite so… hostile, to my staff.”
“I’d prefer it if you weren’t such an asshole,” he replied without a trace of humour. “But we don’t often get what we want now, do we?”
“What’s your name?” Grewal demanded, as if the implied threat of a complaint could frighten the man.
“Yates. Staff Sergeant Yates.”
“Well, Staff Sergeant Yates, as I said I’d pref—”
“I heard you,” Yates snarled quietly. “I also don’t give a shit. You and your little science project set the whole goddam world on fire, and now me and my people are putting our lives at risk so you can do it again. You want a,” he sarcastically air-quoted with his finger, “less hostile work environment? Don’t kill half the people in the goddam world. Period.”
Grewal shut his mouth and backed away, watching the sergeant lean back in his uncomfortable chair to resume staring at the two bedraggled creatures in their cages, who had given up their frantic shrieking and were satisfied just to moan and chew at the heavy mesh to try and get to the living.
He waited in the shadows of the barn lab until the samples were taken and placed in the chillers to await the response to the serum he and Chambers had developed.
Finding a way to attack the virus had been a simple thing to approach, but a very difficult one to refine. Using highly infectious host carriers to deliver it, as he had with the original disease, was his first and only thought on the matter, but he was anxious to see how the tests fared in a real-world experiment. Using something aggressive had been automatic for him, and he toyed with a few possibilities.
He experimented with the world’s newest killer virus on professor Chambers’ insistence: HIV; despite his concerns that the rate of degradation would be too slow for his style. The biggest problem with that disease was that it killed its human hosts by attacking their natural ability to defend themselves through their immune system. Given that the infected didn’t respond with their immune system, the early tests had failed to give them any kind of positive results.
After two weeks of failed lab experiments using anti-viral medication, Grewal turned back to what he did best and began messing with nature on a cellular level. He attacked the deadly zombie virus samples with Dengue fever, hoping that he could cause some kind of catastrophic body shutdown in the infected humans, but while on the cellular level it did indeed attack the virus, the delivery method still escaped them.
That’s when he circled back around to the only aggressive virus he knew well, and one that boasted a one hundred percent mortality rate if untreated. Trying to combine Dengue fever with rabies was impossible, given that the lyssavirus was just so incompatible with the haemorrhagic fever, and he was forced back to the metaphorical drawing board.
A wasted week of working alone followed in the gloom of their subterranean lab. In a rare moment of reflection, he realised he didn’t even know which state it was in. This period of solitary labour saw him combine the samples at his disposal and utilise the aggressive nature of rabies to deliver the haemorrhagic properties of Dengue fever.
Eventually, working through the samples of every infectious disease known to mankind, courtesy of the US Army MRIID and combined CDC freezers, he stumbled on a rare example of v
irus he’d never even considered using, until he saw the four letters stencilled on the glass vial. IHNV. Infectious haematopoietic necrosis virus; a form of flesh-eating infection seen in certain fish.
The destructive properties of the virus, those which effectively turned the insides of an infected host to gloop, fit his requirements perfectly.
Infected tissue, when treated with this serum, haemorrhaged and effectively died at the cellular level in every single test they conducted. When the plain suits who deflected attention whenever they were asked if they were CIA heard the explanation, it became clear to Grewal that they had very different expectations about the work.
“So you’ve developed a cure?” they had been asked. Grewal turned to Chambers, the two men locking eyes and hoping that the other would answer. Chambers stayed quiet so Grewal let out a sigh.
“There is no cure as such,” he explained. “Not unless you change the parameters of cure to include the destruction of an infected host.” He’d seen the annoyance on the man’s face and went on to explain further.
“The virus destroys the brain function, effectively killing the host anyway. Even if we could somehow find a way to purge it from their bodies, they’d be left a brain-dead vessel, capable of barely remaining alive at absolute best. More likely, from what we’ve been told, they’d have acquired injuries or simply rotted away so that there would be very little left, physically. So no, we can’t bring anyone back, but we do think we can kill them off a second, more permanent, time.”
That conversation led them to where they were, on a cold and windswept Scottish island with two former human beings in cages, minus chunks of their mottled flesh which were sitting in glass dishes, waiting to see if the theory worked in the real world, instead of just in a laboratory.
The following morning, after a short and uncomfortable sleep, Grewal returned to their lab wrapped in multiple layers of clothing in an attempt to keep the biting wind from seeking out any gap it could find to chill him to the bone. He poured coffee, shuddering at the sachets of foul-looking powder the Americans called ‘creamer’, and hugged the cup in both hands, before making his way towards the sample fridges and the start of their real work.
The discovery they made, the one that would change the fate of the world’s survivors, wasn’t due to any of the complex biological work, but due instead to the most random of occurrences.
Grewal walked past the position where he had suffered the conversation with Yates only hours before, glancing down at the soldier fiddling with the dials of a radio to fill the space with the hissing crackle of static.
“Cut it out, Mancini,” another uniformed man chided him. “You ain’t gonna find anyone playing songs anymore.”
“Oh, ye of little faith, Corporal,” the man evidently named Mancini retorted, just as the feedback from the speakers shrieked and hissed, before emitting a low hum that barely registered in the ears of the humans.
Grewal froze, glued to the spot as his chest heaved in animalistic terror at the sounds coming from his right. Mancini carried on spinning the dial and the two caged zombies stopped shrieking and launching themselves at the bars, to lapse back into their slower state of animation.
“Do that again, Private,” he said, with a finger pointed at Mancini.
“Specialist,” the man muttered back, turning the dial as instructed. When the sound dipped back into the low, barely audible hum again, the two corpses wailed and attacked the heavy mesh to get to them.
No, Grewal though, not us; the radio.
“Take it back again and leave it there.” The soldier did as he was told, his wide eyes fixed firmly on the two occupied cages. When the hiss and whistle of static gave way to the low frequency sound once more, the dead went into a state of savage behaviour, trying to force their faces through the wide mesh to reach for the source of their excitement.
“Oh, Jesus,” one of the American lab assistants cried, seeing what the smaller of their two test subjects was doing. All eyes turned to it, many turning away in repulsion as it—she—forced her face through the small gap in the mesh to strip the mottled skin away, like a potato being peeled, to expose a bright slash of white cheek bone beneath. Someone vomited noisily, the meagre breakfast of toast and coffee splattering onto the concrete floor of the shed. From behind them, a wavering voice wailed, “Oh, dear God!” before a single, booming noise made them all flinch in fright and sudden deafness.
The half-peeled face snapped back, the contents of the skull fountaining outwards where the back of the head had been ejected in bloody chunks of bone and scalp. The half-headless body slumped slowly, mouth closing as it sank down to its knees to rest against the mesh.
“Shut that shit off, Mancini,” Yates barked, weapon trained on the head of the second zombie, in case that one tried to pour itself out of the cage like the other. The radio clicked off and everyone relaxed.
“Sergeant,” Grewal began, seeing the solider whirl on him and holster the heavy pistol.
“Staff Sergeant,” Yates snapped. “You don’t hear me going around calling you the wrong thing, Doc.” Grewal opened his mouth to correct him but thought better of it.
“You didn’t have to kill the subj—” he began.
“You do science,” Yates interrupted him, “I’ll do security. You rile ‘em up again and run the risk of one breaking out, you’ll see me do that again. And now I’ve got to explain to a bunch of Navy SEALs that they have to risk their lives, again, to fetch you another lab rat…”
Grewal ignored his words, turning to look at the shocked young man still sitting by the radio he’d been playing with in the vain hope of finding some entertainment.
“Specialist,” Grewal said, the word unfamiliar to him as something he would call another person, “could you take that very far away from here and find out exactly what frequency that was?” Mancini looked up to Yates, who nodded. “And someone find Agent Fisher urgently.”
ELEVEN
“Major?” Mac said gently, still managing to sound almost angry at everything as he spoke. If not angry, then very disappointed at the least. Downes opened one eye, then the other, groaning and moving to sit up, like he had the mother of all hangovers. His body ached all over, worse than after any PT session he’d ever experienced, but nobody told him to stay flat on his back or rushed to help him up; perhaps because they knew he’d just shrug them off anyway.
“How long?” he croaked.
“About eighteen hours,” Mac answered, sounding jealous.
“Jesus,” Downes swore as he rubbed the heels of both hands into his sunken and dark eye sockets. “What’s the gen?”
The ‘gen’, according to Mac at least, was that they’d been better off down south, but he didn’t want to give that opinion to his major just yet.
“Best you get your strength up and meet the Colonel yourself,” he answered cryptically, the absence of facts speaking volumes. With more groaning, swearing and a liberal amount of blasphemy, Downes stood unsteadily and took a moment to acclimatise to being upright. Blinking open his eyes again to aid his balance, his vision cleared to take in the form of the tank captain, smiling and offering him a bone china cup on a saucer.
“Always trust an officer of Her Majesty’s armed forces to bring the good china on a campaign,” he joked weakly, with slowly formed words. A crooked smile joined his jest, which Palmer acknowledged with one of his own.
“Quite right, Major,” he said. “Although I’m ashamed to admit that all the good brandy and cigars have perished; casualties of war, I’m afraid. And I’ve misplaced my backgammon board.” Downes accepted the tea, taking in a long gulp of it, despite the heat, and letting the sugary goodness coat his throat as the strong aroma filled his sinuses and worked to wake his brain up the rest of the way. With an almost ungentlemanly aaah, he replaced the delicate cup on the matching saucer and regarded the young officer.
“I trust you handled everything in your stride while I was incapacitated?” he asked with an apolo
getic edge to his words.
“Not much to handle, truth be told. The Royal Marines’ medic declared you unfit on account of exposure.” He held up a hand to ward off the protests and explain more. “A combination of the cold water, a lack of rations and exhaustion. In his words,” he pulled an amused face and attempted to affect the accent of the Midlander.
“There weren’t enough heat left in the coals to revive the fire!”
Downes smiled at the terrible impression but recognised it for what it was; an attempt to alleviate the stress and embarrassment with a little weak humour, much as he had done when he first woke. He gulped the remainder of the tea, his thirst intensifying, as if the small cup he’d just finished had awoken his senses. He turned wordlessly to Mac, wearing a look one could only call ‘hopeful’, and the dour Scot took the cup and left the room, muttering to himself.
“Something of a character, your Mister Kelly…” Palmer said when the two officers were alone. Downes’ expression darkened at the second intimation that things weren’t as rosy as they should be.
“Tell me,” he said.
Palmer shifted in his seat, his exquisite manners fighting against his tiredness and natural urge to be blunt. Eventually, after a stern and quizzical look from the SAS major, tiredness won through.
“I never expected a military dictatorship to be this…”
“This what?”
“Well, it’s not quite as enjoyable as one would imagine.”
Downes hmmm’d in response but was saved from making any immediate reply as the door banged open and Mac reappeared arse-first to spin in the doorway, revealing a tray with a pot of tea, more cups and the most welcome sight of thickly sliced bread bearing the unmistakable smell of fried sausages. Mac put the tray down with as much care as he would a sack of potatoes and shoved a plate towards the major.
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 89
