HAYWIRE: A Pandemic Thriller (The F.A.S.T. Series Book 2)

by Shane M Brown

  ‘Where are we?’ asked King.

  ‘The lower back area of the ship,’ whispered Erin. ‘The fine dining boulevard. We’re under the main dining rooms, behind the promenade.’

  King had his bearings now.

  ‘This elevator is dangerous,’ he said.

  Forest pointed to some curved stairs leading to the upper level.

  ‘Okay. Let’s go,’ agreed King, glancing toward the gunmen. ‘While they’re still busy.’

  Erin struck off first. King followed Forest and had nearly reached the top when the gunfire behind him stopped.

  He heard someone yelling.

  ‘There! The Marines!’

  He glanced over his shoulder.

  Four gunmen wheeled around.

  ‘Get down!’ yelled King.

  All three hit the deck and began crawling as four automatic rifles unloaded on their position. The polished wooden handrail flew apart, sending shards of wood flying toward them. The lights smashed above their heads.

  The stairs led to a piano bar. The bar was shaped like a giant silver piano.

  King looked where the bullets were pounding into the bar and toppling over black leather stools. Behind the bar, bottles of liquor and spirits on glass shelves exploded in colorful bursts of liquid and glass. One corner of the huge black piano splintered away as though someone were hacking at it with an axe.

  Right now they were under the gunmen’s line of fire.

  But only until the men came up the stairs. King heard their boots running for the stairs. He heard ammunition magazines bouncing on the marble floor as the men reloaded.

  He had to act now.

  ‘Keep going!’ he yelled.

  He leaped to his feet and ran back toward the stairs. He didn’t run straight back though.

  Partway there he bent low, tensed his shoulders and braced his body as though making a football tackle.

  He hit the piano with all his bulk.

  If the piano legs were bolted to the deck, he was going to break the bolts off.

  The piano wasn’t bolted to the deck.

  It shuddered as King threw his full weight against it, almost lifting one side of it off the deck as he began pushing with all the strength in his legs and back.

  On the smooth marble floor, King had the piano sliding at a good speed when it reached the top of the stairs.

  With satisfaction he released a huge roar and toppled the piano down the stairs.

  The first two gunmen running up the stairs never stood a chance.

  While they were shooting bullets, King was shooting pianos.

  Sideways, the piano was almost as wide as the stairs.

  The first man collapsed under the rolling piano as though his bones were made of cardboard. The second man turned to flee back down the stairs, but didn’t manage a single step.

  The piano rolled right over the top of him, crushing him to death on the steps.

  The last two gunmen had no choice. They couldn’t go up. They had no time to go down. They both leaped over the handrail and fell to the marble floor below. The fall wasn’t high enough to seriously hurt them, but it slowed them down enough for King and the others to get a head start.

  King looked for another service door. Erin’s superior knowledge of the service corridors had kept them one step ahead of the gunmen so far.

  He couldn’t see one.

  ‘Quickly, in here!’ barked Forest.

  It was just a restaurant, like dozens of others they were running past.

  King and Erin ran in.

  Once inside, King immediately saw why Forest had chosen it.

  Forest knew they had only seconds before the gunmen who survived the piano avalanche would reach them.

  King had taken down two of them, so that left two more.

  The restaurant they’d entered was called the Siren’s Call.

  It was a live seafood restaurant - meaning the diners’ chose the particular fish or crab or lobster they wanted to eat from inside the tanks lining the walls. Hurricane lamps hung from the ceiling, along with rope nets, fishing rods, wooden oars and all manner of maritime oddities.

  Erin ran through the kitchen to find the restaurant’s service entrance.

  Forest was tired of running.

  They needed weapons. Real firearms that fired real bullets.

  He had a plan.

  He and King crouched behind the main lobster tank in the middle of the restaurant, listening for the gunmen’s approach.

  King was rubbing something between his thumb and fingers.

  Forest glanced down, read part of an imprinted name and then did a double-take.

  ‘What’s that?’

  King closed his hand, but Forest knew what he saw.

  ‘Are they Marlin’s dog tags?’

  King opened his hand, revealing the tags.

  But that’s impossible, thought Forest. Marlin was wearing those tags when he died. He was incinerated.

  Forest knew Marlin’s remains had been recovered with a vacuum. Nothing identifiable was found. Marlin had been cremated up in those ventilation ducts. His dog tags should have melted.

  The tags in King’s hand weren’t even scorched.

  King met Forest’s questioning stare.

  ‘Bora gave them to me in the hospital. He said once I’m better, he’s going to find me.’

  ‘He’ll have to get in line,’ whispered Forest. ‘Listen. Here they come.’

  The sound of boots stopped outside the restaurant where King and Forest had discarded their now-useless weapons. The plan was to make the gunmen feel overconfident.

  It didn’t work.

  Instead of charging into the restaurant and into Forest’s trap, the two gunmen began hosing down the restaurant with gunfire.

  The lobster tank above Forest and King exploded.

  Glass smashed down between them.

  Water cascaded over their helmets and shoulders.

  Huge lobsters rained down over them.

  All around the restaurant, tanks exploded as the gunmen opened fire. Hundreds of fish and crabs and eels poured down onto the floor, flopping over tables and scuttling under the chairs.

  Everywhere Forest looked, the floor was writhing with sea life.

  The lobsters pumped their tails madly, getting nowhere for their efforts. Crabs raised their claws aggressively. Fish flipped themselves in the air.

  The gunmen began walking into the restaurant, kicking aside the animals, firing in spurts as they came.

  King nodded at Forest.

  This was it.

  They would only get one shot.

  Quite literally.

  Together, they sprung up from behind the broken lobster tank and fired.

  Forest had spotted the weapons hanging on the back wall. The two spear guns looked ancient. They probably hadn’t been fired in years.

  To Forest’s relief, both guns fired.

  The stretched surgical rubber accelerated Forest’s solid steel spear straight at his target. The man stood just two meters away.

  The steel point drove through the man’s light body armor, into his chest and straight through his left lung before emerging out his back. The impact knocked him backward over a chair. His rifle clattered to the floor.

  Forest glanced at the second gunman.

  King had fired too early.

  He’d hit, but he’d speared the other gunman through the thigh. The spear had gone clean through the man’s leg, only stopping because of the rope tether joining the spear to the gun.

  The gunman staggered backward, but raised his weapon.

  Forest dived for the fallen firearm, but knew he’d never reach it in time.

  The gunman had a clear shot at King.

  As he raised his weapon, King jerked the spear gun with both hands over his head.

  The tether designed for pulling in big fish yanked the wounded gunman’s leg out from under him.

  The man slammed down onto his back.

  Before
he could recover, King leaped on him.

  Forest watched King crush the man’s throat with the spear gun.

  The sound was gut-wrenching, but over quickly.

  King took the man’s gun and what little ammunition remained.

  Forest did likewise.

  At the rear of the restaurant they found no sign of Erin until Forest approached the service door.

  She swung the door open from the other side, obviously relieved.

  ‘Your plan worked!’

  ‘Kind of,’ said Forest.

  King nodded. ‘We’ve got weapons and they’ve got corpses. It’s a good start.’

  Bolton’s team moved much faster now that they’d placed the explosives in the engine room.

  They’d abandoned the trolleys.

  The two men taking point had the occasional insane passenger to incinerate, but that barely slowed them down.

  Bolton folded away the map he’d taken from the bridge.

  After years of looking at schematic maps, he knew all the cryptic symbols by rote. He barely glanced at the map now as he led his men down the steps, through a security door and finally into a short passageway painted bright red.

  Everything was red. The walls, the ceiling - even the carpet was bright red.

  Clever, thought Bolton, studying one wall. If you didn’t know they were here, you’d walk right by them, but the bright red color made them obvious to staff who needed fast access in an emergency.

  Bolton pointed at the wall.

  ‘This is it. Open it up.’

  Two men with breaching tools hammered the chisel-like ends of their tools into the barely-visible groove.

  They wrenched back on the tools.

  The concealed lock broke apart.

  The doors flew wide open.

  Recessed behind the doors lay the most important switchboard on the ship. If the First Lady of the Sea had a brain, then Bolton had just cut into her spinal column, the conduit through which she received and sent signals around the entire ship.

  But not just any signals. The ship had hundreds of switchboards. Almost a thousand, in fact. Only this one mattered to Bolton

  This switchboard controlled the ship’s anti-saturation measures.

  Anti-saturation was a fancy way of saying ‘not sinking’.

  The ship was fitted with the most advanced anti-saturation measures ever devised. She was very difficult to sink. Even when you tried to sink her on purpose. Even after you strategically packed critical areas with high explosives to blow massive holes in her hull.

  Even then she wouldn’t sink.

  Large holes weren’t enough. Not nearly enough.

  Sensors all over the ship monitored humidity, air pressure, temperature, and half a dozen other variables to ensure every part of every deck stayed dry.

  Ingress of water anywhere was detected in seconds. The ship didn’t rely on lagging human response times to slow it down. She monitored herself constantly.

  Once a hull breach was detected, the ship activated her anti-saturation measures.

  Forty-eight bulkheads descended automatically, isolating the breached area. Gigantic air-bladders inflated inside the ship’s hull, sealing holes and increasing buoyancy. Outside the hull, under the waterline, a system of long inflatable bags would burst from their compartments to form the world’s largest life jacket.

  A life jacket for a ship.

  Then there were the pumps.

  The First Lady of the Sea had the most powerful pumps ever installed on a cruise ship. Capable of pushing out three million liters of water per minute, the force of the jets could literally push the ship through the water.

  But all those systems needed power.

  Power that ran through this switchboard.

  A switchboard protected by hundreds of fuses.

  Bolton stood back and waved three men forward.

  ‘Pull out all those fuses. Quickly. All of them!’

  The fuses were coded, not labeled, and Christov wasn’t taking chances.

  Best to yank them all out to be sure.

  The men began pulling out the black fuses.

  ZAAAAAP!

  The man closest to Bolton flew back from the switchboard. His boots didn’t touch the floor.

  THUMP!

  He smashed into the opposite wall and collapsed into a lifeless-looking mess on the carpet

  ‘Idiot,’ spat Bolton, taking the man’s place. ‘Don’t touch anything metal. The switchboard is still live.’

  With each fuse he jerked free, Bolton imagined the ship growing dumber and dumber.

  When he finished, the ship would be so stupid she wouldn’t know she was sinking until she crashed into the seabed.

  ‘Find them!’ Christov yelled into his radio. ‘She’s in a wheelchair, for God’s sake! How hard can she be to find!’

  His men on the bridge were searching the surveillance cameras for Neve and the Marine captain.

  He pressed the radio to his forehead, thinking.

  His watch beeped.

  He stared at his wristwatch in disbelief. No. That must be wrong. That much time hasn’t passed already.

  It wasn’t wrong.

  The acid drive would self-wipe in less than sixty minutes. He had sixty minutes to recover the drive and reset the timer.

  He touched the tool on his chest.

  I had them, he told himself again. I had them surrounded in the casino!

  Then the crazies had attacked. Christov had never seen them attack with a pack mentality. Of the six men he’d taken into the casino, only two had survived. The Marine had killed two. The crazies had killed two more. Had his team not had flamethrowers, the crazies would have totally overwhelmed them.

  He needed to reprioritize his remaining manpower.

  He changed channels and keyed his radio. ‘Bolton. What’s your status?’

  ‘On schedule,’ reported Bolton. ‘The explosives are ready. We’ve stripped the switchboard. The ship is blind.’

  ‘How’s your team?’

  ‘Lost one,’ replied Bolton. ‘Fried by the switchboard.’

  Christov made some quick mental calculations. He had two small teams pursuing the other Marines in case they had the acid drive.

  ‘Send me two of your men,’ Christov ordered. ‘Change their radios to my frequency.’

  That will give me four men to kill the Marine and the bitch in the wheelchair.

  ‘They’re on their way,’ confirmed Bolton. ‘I know where you are.’

  Bolton had obviously been monitoring both radio frequencies.

  Christov stood before a massive window that looked into the aquarium.

  He approached the glass and stared at the sea life beyond.

  Just two meters away, he saw it.

  Tall and tubular, the animal rose from a coral outcrop like some kind of underwater chimney.

  A sea sponge. You caused all this trouble.

  It had all started with a sea sponge. The strange animals clustered like motionless sentinels around the deep sea thermal vents that Elizabeth studied. Elizabeth’s remote-controlled submersible had collected samples from all of them. Pharmafirst already knew the sponges functioned like little chemical factories, but they needed Elizabeth to identify the species with potential.

  The potential to provide new drugs.

  ‘They’re like animals from another planet,’ Elizabeth had told Christov. ‘The thermal vent is their sun. It’s their entire world. Every world is unique.’

  Many showed promise, but it was the tall, bright yellow sponges growing around thermal vent number nineteen that provided their miracle drug.

  The drug stimulated human tissue growth. And not just any human tissue. It stimulated growth and repair in neural tissue - a hurdle modern science had yet to achieve.

  Elizabeth had done it.

  The most incredible medical discovery of the twenty-first century had been found in a sea sponge on the bottom of the ocean.

  Pharmafirst fast-trac
ked the drug’s development. Christov and Elizabeth worked side-by-side every day.

  Everything ran to schedule until the chimpanzees.

  The drug sent the chimpanzees berserk.

  ‘A side effect,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘I can fix it. I just need time.’

  Christov watched Elizabeth dissecting the chimps’ brains.

  It was repulsive.

  The chemical proved far more complicated than they’d imagined. The side effects were shocking. Some brain areas had withered while others grew like tumors.

  The sea sponges provided the answer.

  A sea sponge couldn’t move. It made an easy target for predators.

  In response, this particular species had developed an ingenious defense mechanism.

  A neurotoxin.

  A neurotoxin designed to turn its predators against their own kind by over-stimulating the territoriality response. Any animal that consumed part of the sponge became enraged by its own species and attacked its cohorts mercilessly, essentially becoming the sea sponge’s bodyguard.

  The miracle drug and the neurotoxin were part of the same chemical compound.

  It became Elizabeth’s job to eliminate the toxic side effects.

  In the meantime, Christov took steps to ensure that even if Elizabeth failed, Pharmafirst would profit.

  The potential for the drug to function as a weapon was glaringly obvious. Christov hadn’t set out to produce a contagious drug that would turn a nation’s enemies against themselves – but he was no fool.

  With the tremendous investment already poured into the drug and its dispersal mechanism, Pharmafirst needed to be ready if Elizabeth failed to perfect the drug.

  Christov was so busy trying to cover every angle that he overlooked the real threat.

  Never for a moment did he suspect Elizabeth would betray him.

  But she did.

  Using her privileged status as lead researcher, she’d stolen her own research from Pharmafirst and physically destroyed the backup copies.

  Was it for money? Christov wondered. What had the Americans offered her?

  It didn’t matter now. She was dead. And soon the Marines she was meeting would be dead too. Not long after that, every trace of what had happened on this ship would be on its way to the deepest part of the ocean.