“I’m not a doctor.”
“Closest thing we got, right?”
“No, that would be Daniel. I’m just a scientist, I never practiced on anybody.”
“Except for injecting people with the Plague.” Zeke grinned. “Like the Swiss Army knife of combat medicine.”
“Funny you should say that. Take this too.” Elise handed him a zippered pouch.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
“Syringes? See, you’re a doc. What’s in it?”
“Like you said, Eden Plague. From my saliva.”
“But I can just bite anyone I need to.”
“I think this will work faster. Bigger dose. And it might have its uses.”
He opened the pouch, looked at the two preloaded syringes wrapped in padding. “Okay.”
Elise took his hand. “Good luck, Zeke. I’m looking forward to seeing your wife and Ricky and…”
“Millie.”
“Right. “ She smiled crookedly. “Bring them back safe. I’m tired of being the only woman here.”
He hugged her like a father, like a brother. “Thanks, Elise. I will. Take care of DJ.”
***
Zeke and Larry took the Land Rover, Skull and Spooky the Cherokee, a natural division. On the way Zeke and Larry hardly stopped talking, reminiscing about missions and comrades, friends and golf games, women and bars.
The other two drove in relative silence, listening to the radio and making a few comments about the road. They all had their secure radios but kept them in push-to-talk mode.
Eight hours later the pair of SUVs pulled into a truck stop at the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, just after dark. They sent Spooky in for food.
Zeke opened up a disposable cell phone, activated it, and called a special set of digits. He entered a code and his home number. This process masked the call, routing it through an offshore international service, nearly impossible to trace.
“Hi, Cass, it’s me. How’re the kids?”
“Everything's green here, Mister J.”
Zeke’s blood chilled. “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll be gone for two more weeks.” He rambled on about family concerns couple of minutes before hanging up. Disposing of the phone, he switched his secure radio to voice-activated mode.
“They’re under surveillance. My wife gave me the code for ‘being watched.’ I told her to expect extraction at two a.m.”
“Damn, Sam, you got that girl well trained,” Larry chucked.
“Actually, she got me trained. I never told you what she did before, did I?”
“Not really. State Department or something?”
“Well, I did meet her at the US Embassy in Moscow. I was there as a military attaché. She was deputy station chief.”
“She was Agency?”
“Yup. In the ultimate tradecraft training ground city. She’ll be fine. We just have to make a plan to get them out and break contact. That means we have to locate the surveillance and shut them down.”
Skull chuckled. “Does that mean I’m weapons free now that DJ Do-Right is out of the picture?”
Zeke sighed, exasperated. “Alan, if we kill their people it will raise the stakes tenfold. Right now daddy Jenkins is trying to keep everything hush-hush. Dead Feds, or even contractors, will force him to fess up to his superiors and they’ll come after us like a pack of hounds.”
“Joking, boss, joking.”
“I hope so. If you have to shoot, wound them. One of us will bite them if we have to.”
“Why don’t you do that anyway? Won’t that screw them up? Get them fighting the disease instead of us?”
A long, thoughtful pause. “Interesting idea. Maybe when we get back we should start trying to weaponize this thing. Create a delivery system. Darts or something. See if it can be put in a water supply. So we can make good on our threats.”
“Hmmm.”
Spooky returned with the food.
“How do you think they connected you with Markis?”
“Good intel work. Assemble a database of all his associates. Cross match with things like, ‘Did he treat them in the field?’ ‘Are they at home or out of town?’ Stuff like that.”
“I hate intel pukes,” Skull growled.
“Only when they’re on the other side.”
“I hate them all.”
Zeke exchanged silent looks with Larry. He shrugged.
“Let’s focus on our five-meter targets, shall we? We make a sweep of my neighborhood. Locate the surveillance. Make a plan. Ready?”
Affirmative grunts and sounds.
They drove into Fayetteville. Zeke led them to an unused corner of a large, well-lit gas station. “This is our ORP. Make your sweep, maintain commo, meet here.”
The SUVs split up, approaching Zeke’s suburban middle-class home from two different directions. They quartered and searched the blocks, looking for vehicles with the telltale signs of a surveillance team: being parked on the street, not in a driveway; extra antennas; roomy models, like vans or big SUVs; too-black windows; sitting heavy and low on their suspensions; magnetic business logos, the kind that can be slapped on and peeled off easily. There were many clues if you knew what to look for.
It didn’t take long. Skull spotted them first. “I got a cable service truck on your street. Old van, new paint, UHF and satellite, antenna, barrier between the driving and cargo compartment. Parked between houses.”
“That’s probably it. No cable technicians working this time of night.”
“Do they ever work?”
“Ha ha. We going in light or heavy?”
“No way to sneak up on them. If you want them deactivated, we have to do it heavy.”
“Understood. Rally now at the ORP.” They met back at the gas station.
“We need a shock truck. Spooky?”
“If we can find it, I can steal it.”
“Okay, spread out, report when we got one.”
It took them twenty-five minutes to locate a suitable truck, a flatbed two-ton. Spooky had it gone in sixty seconds. Skull drove. They talked over their plan of attack on the way.
Zeke and Larry pulled up at the end of the alley that ran behind his house. “In position.”
“Roger. Commencing shock run.”
Skull put the truck into gear, coming around the corner nose-on the surveillance van. At the same time Spooky drove the Cherokee around the opposite corner, slowly, focusing the watchers’ attention on him as they looked out the back window.
The shock truck was going forty when its heavy steel bumper smashed into the nose of the van. Impact drove the vehicle several car-lengths down the street, coming to rest on its side.
Spooky pulled up in the Cherokee. He and Skull jumped out of their vehicles, charging the van. Through the shattered back window they could see broken electronics and camera equipment, and two men lying amid the wreckage, moving weakly. The shock had jumbled them like mice in a paint shaker, and the smell of leaking gasoline wafted through the mess.
Spooky stepped through the opening and pistol-whipped each in turn, ensuring unconsciousness. Then he pulled out the syringe Zeke had given him and pumped half of the contents into each. “Get them out, Skull.”
“We should let ‘em burn,” he grumbled, reaching in to drag the men out with Spooky’s help, tossing them roughly onto the closest suburban lawn. He keyed his mike. “Van and team out of commission and infected. We’re extracting, people are already coming out of their houses.” Skull popped a smoke grenade and tossed it into the van. The flaming smoke mix soon ignited the dripping gasoline and the vehicle caught fire with a whoosh. By that time they were around the block and heading toward the ORP.
Zeke and Larry had already pulled through the alley up to his house’s back gate, blasting twice on the horn. Zeke got out, fastening the barrier out of the way, and then bolted inside. A moment later he ran out, carrying a skeletal boy wrapped in a blanket. Larry held the door open. Right behind him followed an athletic woman of
about forty and a girl of eight.
“Hi, Cass. Hi Millie,” Larry rumbled.
“Hi Mister Larry!” piped the girl.
Cassandra nodded to Larry, handing him a suitcase.
Headlights appeared and the roaring of an engine sounded at the end of the alley, accelerated toward them. Cass shoved Millie into the Land Rover, while Larry reached for his shotgun under the seat.
Muzzle flashes sparkled from both sides of the oncoming vehicle, and Larry’s twelve-gauge roared over and over. Zeke hunched over Ricky, shielding him with his body, while Cassandra drew a pistol from the small of her back, taking cover behind the door to return a rapid hail of bullets.
The headlights wobbled, then skewed leftward as the oncoming vehicle bucked and rolled down the alley with a grinding crash of metal. Cassandra reloaded while Larry ran at the smoking wreck of a Suburban. He looked inside, seeing two men unconscious. He reached in, taking their guns and tossing them into a nearby garbage can, then knelt down among the wreckage.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said aloud to himself, then bit them each in turn. “Feel like a freakin’ vampire.” He returned to the Land Rover.
Larry was almost there when he heard an anguished sob, choked off, then a high keening. He leaped forward, shotgun searching for a target, but there wasn’t anything to shoot.
Cassandra knelt over Zeke, who lay stretched out on the ground. Millie stood there wailing, her small hands tangled in her hair, pulling. Larry pushed her gently aside, confident the Eden Plague would make it all right.
Not this time.
Zeke’s eyes stared sightless at the glowing suburban sky. Blood and brains leaked from the hole in his head. Cassandra stroked his face, crooning, “No, no, no…”
Larry cursed, a string of bitter vulgarities. “Come on, Cass, he’s gone. He’s gone. More might be on the way, we have to get going, we have to break contact.” Larry’s mind screamed at him, why do the thugs get to live while Zeke dies? It’s not fair!
Cassandra growled with frustration, muttering under her breath, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Help me get him in. We’re not leaving him.” She forced down her grief.
Together they rolled Zeke in a blanket, then manhandled his body into the back of the SUV. Larry drove them away from the scene as rapidly as he could without attracting attention.
“What was that?” asked Spooky over the radio.
“They got Zeke. Lucky head shot. He’s gone,” Larry answered miserably.
Silence. Then, “Shit.”
“Meet at the ORP. We still have to get Zeke’s mom.”
“What?” asked Cassandra. “Why? She’s in a facility. What can we do?” Her face was a frozen mask of iron control.
“Because we can cure her Alzheimer’s, we think. It’s a new thing. But if we cure her we have to take her with us because if they find out we did, they will turn her into a guinea pig in a lab somewhere.”
Cassandra digested this as they met at the ORP. “All right, I’ll tell you where to go. Do you think they’ll be watching her?”
“We have to hope not. They can’t be everywhere.”
Twenty minutes later they pulled into a complex labeled ‘Green Pastures Managed Care facility.’ They took her out the back way in a wheelchair, dodging a sleepy staff, and got her into the vehicle.
The return trip to the bunker was a smooth surreal nightmare. Ten bags of truck stop ice packed Zeke’s body in the back of the Cherokee; still no one could forget what had happened. Larry drove the Land Rover, silent, bleak. Zeke’s mother Beulah sat buckled into the front seat, humming softly to herself for a while before falling asleep. Cassandra sobbed from time to time, an arm around each of her children in the back seat. Millie slept most of the way, which was a relief; it wasn’t real to her.
About two hours out, Ricky spoke up. “I’m hungry, mama.” He reached up to grasp her arm.
“Ricky!” She took his hand in hers, feeling the strength of his grip.
“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”
“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”
“That’s not for kids!”
Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”
“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”
Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.
He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.
“His hands are strong! That’s amazing, just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”
“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.
She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.
-19-
Elise and Daniel met them hand in hand at the cavern with all the vehicles, what they called the Motor Pool. Elise knew there was something seriously wrong when she saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.
“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” She saw the Land Rover but didn’t see Zeke. By the time she had looked around, they had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.
Daniel stared at it in shock. At them. “How?” Elise clutched his hand, her eyes pouring tears.
“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then than Daniel had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.
Daniel wanted to make some kind of gesture to Skull. If it had been Larry, he might have hugged him. He settled for putting a hand on the bald man’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
Skull shrugged his hand off, turned away. Daniel could smell his barely-buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.
They took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, they were sure. They got the family settled into quarters and turned in. Elise stayed with them, and even though they’d only just met, the two women clung to each other in sisterly comfort. The children accepted her naturally as a second mother, or at least an older sister. Eventually they all slept.
Elise’s sleep was troubled with images of death and horror, of bodies lying asleep and she couldn’t wake them. She woke in the middle of the night, thinking, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way! Eden Plague carriers don’t die! He had a thousand years of life in front of him!
But they did, she knew. They still died.
The next morning brought some relief. Elise was delighted to see Ricky walking and eating. They hadn’t been sure the Eden Plague would work on him.
When Daniel got to breakfast he found Ricky shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie and Elise at the table with him, eating more sedately. He got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them. He spoke to the boy. “How you doin, sport? You remember me?”
Ricky shook his head.
“That’s all right, it was five years back or so.” He looked at Cassandra. “Sorry to be such a stranger. And I’m sorry to have brought this on you and your family. If I’d have known…”
“None of us can know, Dan. We’re in God’s hands.”
That made Elise angry, though not as angry as she might have been before the
Plague. “How can you believe that? With all this crap going on, how can you believe God cares?”
Cassandra turned to the other woman. “Maybe because I think things would be a lot worse if He didn’t.”
“Then why doesn’t he clean the world up? Why just keep things not too bad and not too good?”
“Maybe He expects us to do our part. Make our own mistakes. Take responsibility. Maybe He doesn’t want to be our nanny. And maybe he works through people – people who make things like the Eden Plague.”
Daniel held up a placating hand. “Please, let’s not have my two favorite women in the world fighting.”
“We’re not fighting, we’re arguing.” Elise looked petulant, irritated.
“Either way. We’re all friends here, we’re just under a lot of stress.”
Cassandra reached across the table to put her hand on Elise’s arm with earnest, tear-filled eyes. “My heart aches for Zeke, but he died doing what he wanted to. Protecting people. Saving people. Saving us. He passed this Eden thing on to Ricky and saved his life. We treated Beulah and she recognized me this morning! We have to hold on to the good he did. And this Eden Plague is so amazing! This whole thing. It will change the world. He was willing to die for that.”
Daniel said, “Yeah. But will it change the world for the better? It could be a wrecking ball.” He exchanged glances with Elise. She nodded. Peace. Then Spooky caught his eye from across the room.
“Excuse me a minute.” Daniel walked over to the Vietnamese man.
“We go now. Skull and me. Better that way. You want to reach me, you talk to Van Vinh.”
“What about…what about Skull?”
“I don’t know. He love Zeke. He very angry. Maybe he stir up the hornets. What can we do? No man can live in another’s heart.”
Daniel licked his lips. “You still have some Eden Plague in that other syringe?”
“Yes.”
Daniel stared at him, willing him to understand.
His eyes widened fractionally. He nodded, slowly. “Only if I must.”
“It’s better than killing him. At least then he has a chance to change. Maybe the Eden Plague will help him heal some of his pain.”
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