Pestilence Boxed Set [Books 1 & 2]

by Craig McDonough

  It was all going too fast, too damn fast, and something told her Calgleef was behind it. The sight of police and the National Guard out front, told Grace confronting them would not be wise. She needed to call Calgleef.

  That asshole!

  She marched back to the nurses’ station and demanded a phone. She heard several beeps on the line as the call was relayed; she received the same answer each time.

  All calls are being monitored. Now she was positive Calgleef’s fingerprints were all over this.

  “This is Grace Delaney, I need to speak to Director Calgleef immediately, do you hear, immediately!” She picked up a ballpoint pen from the counter and anxiously depressed and released the button on the top.

  “What’s going on, Calgleef, why are you sealing off the building?” she appealed to her director. “How did you know the outbreak had worsened—do you have someone working for you on the inside?”

  Calgleef chuckled before he answered. “Of course we do, Miss Delaney. You! And as you know I’m bound by CDC rules to seal off any building where an outbreak of a contagious disease occurs. Unfortunately this means you and your team will have to remain inside until the all-clear is given.” Calgleef sounded calm, too calm for the director of the CDC facing an outbreak of a major contagion.

  “Do you intend to inform the public of the possibility of the Baltic flu right here in downtown Des Moines?”

  “Have you gone mad, do know the panic that would ensue?”

  “That’s not what I meant and you—”

  “Dr. Delaney, you have to come, quick. There is something I’m sure you’ll want to see.” Tilford ran from the outpatients area.

  Calgleef took the opportunity to beat a hasty retreat.

  “I can see you have your hands full, Miss Delaney. I’ll call you soon. This is strictly precautionary, and as soon as we can confirm there is no danger of an influenza outbreak, the quarantine will be lifted. But not until then.”

  “Wait, hold on you… bastard!” She slammed the phone on top of the counter.

  “Dr. Delaney, Dr. Del—”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, stop calling me that. Its Grace, okay?” She was in no mood for the “Dr. Delaney” bullshit. She would have preferred they got to first-name basis in more intimate surrounds, but…

  Well, if we get out of this in one piece, it’ll definitely be intimate, that’s for sure.

  “Sure, sure. Grace it is, but you got to hurry!”

  Tilford had left the nurse on her own to watch over Ms. Enticing Tits. He thought it was a bad decision at the time; he was about to discover exactly how bad.

  “Yes, yes indeed. They’re on their way as we speak, Mr. Gerard,” Calgleef informed the hospital CEO.

  Gerard didn’t like losing, especially to a woman and a smart-ass first-year doctor, and as soon as he left the out patients clinic he called the director of the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia. He told the clerk who answered, his call concerned the vaccination program taking place in his hospital, and he was put through instantly.

  “Just sit tight, Mr. Gerard, let us handle it from here. It appears there has been a mix up in the vaccines, but please, a word to the wise,” Calgleef was the perfect silver-tongued devil, “don’t call anyone. If the media gets hold of this, they’ll blow it out of proportion, and that will only hinder our efforts and that could damage your reputation as well as the your hospitals. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

  Calgleef was a man who knew how to use the right words to extol and to caution at the same time. A wiry, thin man in his mid-forties with a receding hairline, he was thankful for his family wealth; with thick creases across his forehead, a long, pointed nose, and beady eyes set far too close together, money was all he had going for him.

  The instant he ended his conversation with Gerard, the CDC director called Dr. Moya.

  “I just spoke with the hospital CEO, he knows there’s a problem with the vaccine. Patients have had adverse reactions,”

  “Well, if the patients are becoming ill after receiving the shot, I’m sure half the hospital knows by now,” Moya reasoned.

  “He called me with his concerns, but I’m afraid this man might go to the governor’s office, he—”

  “We can’t risk that for a moment, not for a moment. You have the power to isolate the hospital, do you not?”

  “I’m not sure I follow you. I’ve arranged for a biological team to go in now and seal off the building. The governor has agreed to send a contingent of police to—”

  “There you go,” Moya pointed out to him, like a teacher explaining rudimentary addition, “now to add the National Guard it has to be declared an emergency, right? So there is your reason to prevent telephones calls going out. That will alleviate our problem.”

  “It’s not that simple, Dr. Moya,” Calgleef countered, though he was impressed with Moya’s knowledge of US martial law. Calgleef didn’t know if he was correct or not. “It’s a hospital, so it has emergency communications, two-way radio, and people have cell phones. Switching off the telephones won’t prevent any calls going out.”

  “Then you’ll have to use the CIA or NSA to monitor all hospital frequencies and cell phones and prevent any calls from going out. I don’t need to remind you, Calgleef, that if this fails, then we’re talking a loss of billions in the first year alone!” Moya showed he knew even more about the US system. He spent a considerable amount of time researching the US intelligence apparatus and how it operated. He knew more about the way the US government—and its close association with big business—operated than most Americans.

  “It’s an emergency, Calgleef, you have their numbers… make the call!”

  Neither Moya or Calgleef were aware of the NSA’a involvement, or at least not the extent of it—which included monitoring all phone calls to the hospital.

  Moya ended his call with the director. He’d had enough of these phone calls. He wasn’t good with telecommunications, hated using them; he was an “in-person” man.

  He walked over to the small fridge in his room and got another bottle of cold water when his cell rang again. He picked it up, looked at the number shown on the ID display and tossed it on the bed. It was the Delaney woman at the hospital; he wasn’t interested in her histrionics either.

  He slid open the glass door to the balcony, sat down on the stool and drank his water. He thought about plans to get out of the US while his health was still good. If this was the full-fledged Baltic flu, it wouldn’t take long for the US to cancel outbound flights and he’d be stuck here—another thing he knew about the US government.

  “No… life with your own peace of mind and a semblance of sanity is worth more than all the money there is—and that’s a fact!” He toasted the air and took a mouthful of the regular tap water sold as mountain spring water. Like everything else, just another scam. Swishing the water around in his mouth, he asked himself why, at this late a stage in his life, he had become a whore and sold out his ideals.

  Not finding an answer, he stood and walked to the balcony and looked down to the parked cars below.

  “Fuck it!” He tossed the bottle to the parking lot below and watched it explode on a silver Buick. He was becoming less and less interested with this project the more it went on.

  6

  Six

  As Tilford reached out to open the door to the consultation room, he hesitated. The grip of fear had a hold on his lungs and squeezed the air from him.

  “Are you all right, Isaac?” Grace asked him.

  “Yeah, I just lost my breath for a sec—”

  He opened the door and was immediately confronted by a ghastly sight that caused him to lose more than just his breath. The coffee and doughnuts he’d ate less than half an hour ago gushed from the pit of his stomach, up his throat and spurted out of his mouth like a broken fire hydrant.

  “Oh my God!” Grace staggered back against the frame of the door.

  Before them, on the floor of the consultation room,
the naked woman with the blood-filled eyes sat astride the midriff of the nurse. Blood was smeared all over her mouth, ran down her chin to her neck and smeared around her breast’s—which Tilford found no longer enticing. The nurse lay crumpled on her back, a large chunk of skin torn from her neck. When Tilford entered, the blood-eyed woman was smearing the blood of the nurse all over her bare breasts. It was obvious by the blood around her mouth she had also dined on the nectar of life.

  Ms. Enticing Tits snarled, like a wild animal caught in a cage; she didn’t like having her meal interrupted. She raised both her hands, fingers curled in angry claws. One of the locked doors to the observation/isolation room to the side was ajar. Whether the nurse opened it for some unexplained reason or her attacker did, no one knew nor cared at this stage. Grace Delaney now believed what she’d been told back at the nurses’ station—that patients drank the blood of their victims.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Grace yelled. “COME ON, DOCTOR!” She grabbed Tilford’s arm and pulled him back through the door then slammed it shut behind them. She knew that wouldn’t stop the blood-drinking fiend, but she might return to her feasting instead.

  They heard muffled cries for help coming from some of the other consultation rooms as Grace and Tilford ran back toward the nurses’ station.

  “Intensive care, intensive care,” Beth Sanders screeched at Grace when she arrived, “attacks have broken out in IC.”

  “Phone, give me a phone,” Grace said to the nurse. She had to tell Calgleef of the situation. Surely he couldn’t turn his back on them now.

  “Hello? Hello, what… who is this?” she demanded when an officious-sounding clerk answered on the other end and asked for her name and the reason for her call. “What the fuck…”

  She ended the call thinking it a wrong number and pushed the buttons for Calgleef’s direct number a second time. When the same clerk answered, Grace dropped the phone by her side. She looked across the hallway at the men in the hazmat suits taping thick clear plastic over the windows, and remembered: all calls were monitored.

  “Delaney, my name is Grace Delaney with the CDC,” she said cautiously into the phone, “and I’d like to speak with Director Calgleef.”

  She made no mention of where she was. How many hospitals could there be that have been sealed off by the CDC and have their calls monitored by NSA, the CIA, the FBI or who-the-fuck knows?

  “The nature of your call, ma’am?”

  “Nature of my call? Are you fucking kidding me?” When she realized the calls were being monitored, Grace thought some manners might help in obtaining her desired goal, which was to speak to Calgleef. But when the clerk asked for the nature of the call as if it was a call to the local county, she went ballistic.

  “I need to speak with Calgleef, the vaccination recipients are attacking patients, we have a plague, a damn,” she paused to catch her breath, “pestilence has broken out and I need answers, damn you!”

  “Hello, hello…” she repeated when the line appeared to go dead.

  “Miss Delaney, how good of you to keep us up to date.” Calgleef continued to call her “Miss” instead of her medical title.

  “Keep you up to date? You know damn well what’s going on here, or do you?” she snapped at him, her anger enough to catch the attention of the staff members nearby, until more calls for help from outpatients redirected their interest.

  “I believe this batch of vaccines has been tampered with, Miss—” He started to spin yet another story but wasn’t allowed to finish. Grace had had more than enough of his bullshit.

  “Tampered with? You lying sack of shit, you have no idea what’s taking place in here, do you? You’re just doing what you’ve been told, right? Well, let me fill you in—the Baltic flu, or some super strain of it, has broken out in the patients who received a shot, and now they’re attacking staff of the hospital, biting chunks from their necks and drinking their blood… so there you go, Miss-ter Calgleef. Now you know exactly what’s going on in here!” She dragged his name out, then added, “Oh and now that your controllers have us sealed in, and you don’t have to worry about the profits being jeopardized from the sale of the vaccine. But of course you wouldn’t be part of that, would you?”

  The return answer she got was the sound of Calgleef’s cell as it smashed against the wall before the signal went dead.

  Yep, the truth hurts. She made up the last bit about the controllers and the vaccine profits in her anger, but the response from the CDC director told her she had hit a raw nerve.

  Calgleef knew, Moya knew, obviously the pharmaceutical company and goodness knows who else also knew; to have access to government agencies and emergency services to cover their tracks, it had to be big: VERY, VERY BIG.

  It would go without saying that if she knew, then they now knew she did, and there was no way they would let her out—not alive.

  Riverside Hospital consisted of three floors and a basement all connected via elevators or stairs, with the basement and the roof of the building accessible only by keycard. ER was on the first floor along with outpatients, but on the opposite side an entry was also controlled by keycard.

  It was these thoughts (patient safety rather than her own) that occupied Grace’s mind as the minutes ticked by. She would like nothing more than to get her hands around that bastard Calgleef’s neck and squeeze the miserable life out of him, but there were a lot of patients in the hospital, and after what she and Tilford had just witnessed, that would make for a lot of meals for the infected.

  “What did he say?” Tilford could tell by the frown on her face the phone call hadn’t provided any assurances.

  “Not anything that’s going to help us. But believe me, he knows about this. He—”

  “Oh my God! Oh my f-f-f—” A nurse at the station counter, frantically trying to call 911, jumped out of her seat and pointed to the ICU doors, then collapsed.

  A dark-haired orderly in blue scrubs staggered through the swinging doors. Bent over with pain, his skin was a pale chalk color, and a pinkish liquid frothed from his mouth. He forced himself toward the counter at the nurses’ station. With the last of his strength, he stood up, revealing a mouth-sized hole on the side of his neck. Several teeth marks were also evident on his exposed skin.

  “They, they…” The orderly pointed back to IC, but his eyes rolled into the back of his head, his knees wobbled and he collapsed. Dead.

  “Come on, we have to move!” Grace told those present, and conscious. The longer they waited the more difficult it would be, to escape.

  “The patients, what about the patients?” Beth Sanders said as she backed away nervously from the counter.

  “We don’t have time, Nurse, we have to get out before we’re next.” Grace pointed to the dead orderly.

  “She’s right, Beth, we’ve got to go.” Tilford backed up the doctor from the CDC. He was impressed by her medical acumen but more so by her ability to make logical decisions under these conditions, and she wasn’t bad on the eye for her age. “We’ll take the stairs to the second floor. We might be able to block it off.” He motioned toward the stairway to the side of the aisle behind the counter.

  “Okay lead the way,” Grace told Tilford, then directed Nurse Sanders to follow. “Come on, Nurse, we have no choice!”

  “All right, all right, but what about Nurse Childs?”

  Childs was the nurse who had collapsed on seeing the orderly stagger from IC. She was known throughout the hospital for her jovial personality and a love of dough-nuts. She weighed in the vicinity of three hundred pounds, and along with Grace, Isaac Tilford and Nurse Sanders, was the only other staff member in the vicinity. Grace took a hard look at Childs, then looked questioningly at Tilford. She was going to leave this decision to him.

  “If we can’t rouse her, we won’t be able to carry her up the stairs,” Tilford had to be practical, their lives were at stake.

  This was a tough decision, but it was made for them when three infected patien
ts burst through the door from IC.

  “Oh shit!” Sanders cried.

  “Exactly, Nurse, now let’s GO!” Grace grabbed a handful of Sanders’s uniform and pulled her toward the stairs. The last vision she had was of the three blood-eyed ghouls as they descended upon the orderlies’ body. Grace didn’t think that morsel would occupy them for long, considering that he looked to be drained of blood, but she thought the discovery of Nurse Childs would present a fine offering.

  Sick. Sick. She shook her head to remove the heartless notion. It’s survival of the fittest now, survival of the fittest, she reminded herself.

  They started up the steps when an authoritative voice called from behind.

  Gerard.

  “Wait, you there. Wait for me. Do you—” Gerard called out to Grace Delaney but stopped when he saw the three infected hunched over the orderly biting chunks of flesh from his body, then drawing the red liquid in. “Oh my fucking… what in the name of—”

  The three infected stared at the hospital CEO, their eyes filled with blood, and their faces smeared with it. Slowly they rose in one motion but remained bent over at the knees and hips, coiled like snakes about to strike.

  In a flash all three covered the distance between themselves and Gerard. The hospital CEO was thrown to the floor screaming and thrashing the infected bit holes into any exposed flesh they could find. It was a terrifying sight for Grace and Tilford. Nurse Sanders, already in the stairwell, was spared the horror. The ghoulish brutes felt no remorse or pity as they sucked blood from their victim while he cried for mercy, totally ignorant of his suffering. Gerard screamed until he lost consciousness.