The Lazarus Strain Chronicles (Book 2): The Rise

by Deville, Sean

  Viktor could see that this was going to cause trouble. Getting the women to agree to his “romantic” advances was all part of the game Clay liked to play. Usually it was the promise of money and material wealth, Viktor choosing the targets from the desperate and the vulnerable. With Susan it was the promise of survival that would perhaps buy her compliance. That was a promise that Viktor knew would eventually be broken. For the game always ended the same way as it gradually escalated in intensity, the nearby forest buried deep with the hacked up corpses that had been created by Clay’s murderous hands.

  This was the true secret that Viktor helped hide from the world. It was also the character trait that Viktor knew would be Clay’s ultimate undoing. Every man had a weakness, and for those who sought power, it was often that weakness that was used to destroy them. When that time came, Viktor was sure he could easily step into his boss’ shoes.

  23.08.19

  Washington DC, USA

  With his failure, Campbell had considered his career with the Defence Intelligence Agency to be over. Now he wasn’t so sure. Upon relocation back to the United States, he had been transported to a non-descript building where he had been kept under guard. In a sense he didn’t mind because the fewer the number of people he came into contact with, the less chance he had of contracting Lazarus.

  He was in a DIA safe house, designed to withstand armed assault as well as ensuring the people placed there stayed put. Situated well away from the centre of the nation’s capital, it looked like just any other suburban house, but it was strategically located to offer quick extraction in case relocation of those inside was needed. This was where his employers had put him whilst they figured out what to do with him. It was actually encouraging to Campbell and strongly suggested that his sins were about to be forgiven. He was an accomplished field agent and one that wasn’t about to turn into a zombie like half of DC. That was a major plus in his favour.

  He was not surprised when the short convoy of three SUV’s pulled up outside the house in what had been a quiet and deserted street. There were no flashing lights to announce the importance of the people inside, and looking out of the bedroom window, Campbell watched as men got out to form a protective detail. One opened the back door of the second SUV so the woman who had interrogated him in England could step out of the car unhindered.

  There was a lot of firepower on display down there. Only the woman entered the safe house though. Ms Winters was here, most of her face hidden beneath a high tech surgical mask. The very air held the prospect of death now. When Campbell finally came downstairs, she was sat in the living room waiting for him. One of the house guards had made them both cups of coffee, those same guards now conspicuous by their absence.

  “Ms Winters,” he said joining her. She had placed herself in a leather backed chair that gave her a full view of the room and she watched him with a calculating eye. Winters blew on the coffee which had been delivered in a large mug that seemed too heavy for her deceptively delicate hands. She looked tired, like she had the weight of the world on her slender shoulders. Winters obviously felt it was safe to remove her mask here.

  On the coffee table, there was an electronic tablet which had been placed next to the second steaming mug of coffee. Royal Mile Coffee, no cheap shit here. A fine example of the taxpayer’s money being spent wisely. Campbell sat down, ignoring the mug for now so as to wait for it to cool down a tad.

  “I assume this is for me?” he said picking up the tablet. She nodded.

  “You are being reinstated to active duty,” Winters said. “We have information we want following up.” Campbell flipped through the files on the tablet, the file of the woman seemed to be the dominant feature.

  “Who is this?” Campbell asked.

  “Maria Braun, ex KGB. Your friends at MI13 managed to get a name, and the computers at Langley did the rest. Very good of them to share it with us, considering.” The look on Campbell’s face told her the name didn’t mean anything to him. “You might know her better as Mother.” When Mother had given Nick her first name, he had told Natasha to input it into Moros with the instructions to share it with the other intelligence agencies, including the Americans. The CIA had huge files on the illegals program, and they had been able to connect many of the dots. The CIA went hunting for a piece of hay in a great big stack of needles and had actually come up trumps, their facial recognition software able to age the images they had of Maria whose identity was relatively easy to determine with all the other information they held. There were only so many ex KGB female agents left in their database.

  “So, you know who she is.”

  “Better, we know where she is.” Winters let the words hang there for a moment. “She was captured on airport cameras at LAX eighteen months ago. From there we easily followed her trail, despite the fake passport and private jets.” A desperate trip Mother had made to see the top cancer specialist in California. Following her back through the international flight passenger manifests, they got lucky. The false name she had travelled under had chartered a helicopter at Brasilia International Airport which had taken her to a private address which the CIA had easily acquired.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “We want her, David. I’m sending you with a Delta team to extract her and bring her back to the States. We need what she knows.” Why though? thought Campbell, reading through more of the tablet. What use could she possibly be?

  “Where is she?”

  “Northern Brazil. It’s a simple exfil. In, out. You will be going in via Columbia.”

  “Will we be telling the Brazilian government?”

  “No, that would be foolish,” said Winters.

  “Any word on a cure?”

  “The CDC are working on it. I’m told they think they can synthesise the antiserum the Brits concocted with the data they shared. The Japanese have said they also have made a breakthrough. No luck on a vaccine yet though.” She didn’t mention that Tokyo was in a worse state than London or New York. Winters also didn’t mention the Japanese had killed dozens of people in their attempts to hamper Lazarus.

  “Okay, I can do this. When do I leave?”

  “You have time to finish your coffee,” Winters said, standing. She set her mug down and walked to leave the room before turning to Campbell. “We need this woman alive Campbell.” There it was, the formality again. “If you are unable to retrieve her for us, don’t bother coming back to the US.”

  “Will there even be a country for me to come back to?” Campbell enquired. Winters didn’t answer that, instead she gave him a look that could almost be described as pity.

  ***

  On the streets of Washington, order was barely being maintained, troops presently sweeping in from the west in a street by street action backed up by heavy armour. Most key government buildings were still secured, even though the virus was crawling through the people inside with a relentless pace. The one building that wasn’t secure was the very seat of government, the fences along Pennsylvania Avenue no hindrance to the zombies that had easily scaled the metal barriers and overwhelmed the depleted armed men and women there. Thousands of them had amassed, surging north along Fifteenth and Seventeenth Streets, overpowering anything in their path. Just as in the UK, the Americans found its superior air power grounded due to the relentless assaults from birds who had fed off the carcases that were lain strewn in the streets of the nation’s capital.

  The Whitehouse fell from without and within, the deaths of the people around Jessy accelerating. Some died bravely, others less so. Then the dead had become all there was leaving Jessy the last person standing.

  Now Jessy was alone, wondering if there was anyone left alive down here with her. When those around her had started dying in significant numbers, the human’s defenders quickly became overrun. It wasn’t a matter of just killing the zombies and waiting for back up because those waiting ultimately turned into the very thing they were fighting. There was no sign of imminent external help
, the chance of aid arriving being shattered by the sheer numbers of undead that were making their way across this part of Washington above ground. One by one the people who held the reins of power began to succumb to the dreadful effects of Lazarus.

  The moment she knew it was all over was when she had heard the gunshot from inside the President’s bedroom, the man she admired shooting himself rather than becoming one of those things. That had been the final straw for Jessy, part of her breaking inside. She did the only thing she could do, she ran and hid, barely escaping from a zombie that had grabbed her briefly before the last remaining marine had shot it.

  She should have left when the President had subtly offered her the opportunity. It was too late for that now. All she could do was sit and listen to the fists that pounded on the other side of the steel door in the room she was in. A bunker within a bunker, the panic room designed in case foreign agents were able to storm the supposedly secure subterranean fortress below the White House. The designers had thought of everything.

  She had food and water, as well as a direct satellite uplink that allowed her to communicate to the various installations of the military industrial complex. There was also fear in her heart, the bite wound on her hand painful physically, and also mentally devastating due to the ultimate death it surely represented. The wound hardly bled, the teeth marks red and angry with the disease that had been implanted beneath the surface of her pale and freckled skin.

  How long did she have? Hours?

  Weaker people would have collapsed into despair, but Jessy chose to do what she knew needed to be done. For her country, for the memory of her President, a man who had almost been a father to her. It was Jessy herself who told the world the President of the United States was dead along with the Head of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defence. She also told the world that she was bitten, the woman on the other end staying on the line with her to keep her company in the finality of her life.

  Twenty-seven minutes later, Jacqueline Fairchild was given the news that filled the Attorney General’s heart with joy.

  Sat on the desk beside Jessy, the pistol that had been discarded there was in no way inviting to her. Committing suicide was a mortal sin and it was not something she could even contemplate. So she sat and she talked, a broken stream of conversation often punctuated by sobs and prolonged silence. Minutes would turn into hours and as she stayed alive, the thought began to dawn on Jessy.

  Was she immune?

  On the other end of the radio, that thought also occurred to those who listened in on the words spoken by President Ryan’s Chief of Staff. There was a survivor, someone who had been bitten and was yet still alive. Was this the hope they were looking for?

  23.09.19

  Houston, USA

  Dr Lee had done the blood test herself, and the results were unmistakeable. Deputy Reece was immune to Lazarus, a modicum of hope in the finality that the virus now meant. In the last hour, thirty-seven people had died and resurrected. It was only a matter of time before the sick started to die faster than the rate at which the infected were presently being delivered. Lee had feared the moment they would need to double up on the cages, but now she feared the speed of the deaths from the infection even more. What would it be like a week from now?

  Clearly this was why the tens of thousands of plastic coffins piled up in the Astrodome car park were designed to take more than one corpse. The human body was so miraculous, but at the same time so devastatingly vulnerable.

  Lazarus was definitely airborne now, spread by touch, by bodily fluids and the expired moisture from people’s lungs. Animal studies had shown that it was also contagious to a host of non-human species. With the way it was spreading, the whole planet risked being overwhelmed by it. Earth risked becoming a world owned by the undead. Army engineers were presently busy within Houston segregating the city up so that future outbreaks could be more easily contained. A monumental task that would eventually mean abandoning most of the suburbs.

  Lee had inputted her findings about Reece into the central CDC database and, sat at her computer with the echoes of gunshots ringing out across the Astrodome, the first email response came. To date Reece was only the second person to show immunity to Lazarus on the continental United States, a depressing statistic given the size of the US population. There would be more, but would they be enough to stem the tide of the virus? Sitting in front of her computer, she listened to the hum of the machines that were keeping her cool. Would there likely come a time when air conditioning became just the myth of stories?

  Lee no longer looked at the computer predictions. Quite frankly they scared the shit out of her and she needed to focus on saving as many people as she could. She couldn’t worry about the state of the world, just her little part in it. Connected to the secure CDC email server in Atlanta, it took Lee several seconds to notice a new message had been delivered.

  Michael Perry
  Re: Immune Individual CR28HT

  Jee, I knew I could count on you. We’ve looked at the tests you sent, and it’s been confirmed. Arrangements have already been made to have your patient transferred. I know you aren’t happy with that, but it’s out of my hands. The CDC isn’t running the show any more.

  The military want her, a containment team from USAMRIID will likely be with you within the next five hours.

  Do me a favour and don’t fight them on this. I no longer have any say in how things are being handled. Atlanta isn’t faring well, there are just too many of us infected to be effective anymore.

  You’re one of our best Jee, so I’ve arranged for you to leave with this Reece woman. The army brass took one look at your resume and almost demanded you join the team they are putting together to fight this.

  They want the best and the brightest in one place. I’ll put Dereck in charge of Houston once you leave, he should be able to handle things in your absence.

  Regards,

  Michael Perry MD

  Director

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  Direct line: 800-232-4636

  Lee read the email through several times, dragging the subtext out of it. She only knew Perry on a professional basis, so the formality in the email was to be expected, but she already knew that he too had been infected with Lazarus. How long was there left for him? If they could get the antiserum synthesised then maybe he had a chance.

  For the CDC centre of operations in Atlanta to be abandoned was as bad as it got so she pleaded quietly that this wouldn’t happen. And the army taking over worried her. She’d had experience with military scientists before and found that sometimes they pushed the ethical boundaries further than she would have liked. Perhaps that was what was needed here though. Maybe worrying about the rights of individuals was now less important than throwing everything available at the contagion. They were already under martial law, how much worse could things get? Jee would learn the answer to that question.

  Perry was right, she was one of the best and she knew it. Lee had a PhD in Medical Virology as well as a PhD in Virology and Microbial Pathogenesis. It was crazy, but the doctorates hadn’t meant anywhere near as much to her parents as the medical degree she also held. Her parents had always wanted her to be a doctor, and not just a doctor of letters. What she wasn’t aware of was that Lazarus had actually saved her. If not for the outbreak, Gabriel would have soon received a courier package with her name in it with the instructions that she was to die by heroin overdose. Sometimes just killing someone wasn’t enough. Sometimes you had to destroy their reputation as well.

  Clarice Reece would be very thankful that one of Mother’s assassins never got to practice his art on Doctor Jee Lee.

  23.09.19

  Preston, UK

  Smith was stunned to see the barrack’s medical building under full security lockdown. The four SAS soldiers guarding the entrance to the barrack’s medical facility were unmistakeable in their unique
protective gear.

  “What the fuck is this?” the Voice screamed in Smith’s inner mind. Smith didn’t answer. He wanted to know himself.

  “Can I help you Colonel?” one of the soldiers asked. The four men were clearly positioned so as to stop people entering the building. None of them bothered to salute.

  “Out of my way soldier,” Smith ordered. “I need access to my patient.” Instead of letting Smith in, one of the SAS detached himself from the group and went inside himself.

  “Sorry sir, but I have orders not to allow that.”

  “Orders? Orders from who?” Smith demanded. Behind him, Renfield fidgeted. The Private had the sense to keep his hands well away from his weapon. This wasn’t what Renfield had been promised. Should he have taken his chance this morning after all?

  “From Lieutenant Colonel Carter sir. I’m sure he will explain it all to you.” With the gas mask on, Smith couldn’t decipher the facial expression of the SAS soldier who was giving him the outrageous news. Smith felt though that there was a very strong possibility that the SAS man was mocking him, and Smith seethed inside.

  “I’m not having this,” the voice squealed. Smith felt it pushing at him again, but found he could easily push it back down. Now was definitely not the time to lose control.

  “Are you alright sir?” the SAS man enquired. “You’ve suddenly gone all pale.”

  “I insist you let me in,” Smith tried again, almost petulantly. Nobody answered him, so he took a step towards the door causing the three remaining guards to raise their weapons ever so slightly. The closest soldier even put a hand against Smith’s chest to halt his progress. “You have to be kidding me. I’ll have you on a charge for this.”

  “As I said, Lieutenant Colonel Carter will explain everything.”