The Pilgrim Strain

by Edgar, C. P.

  Einberg jumped in, “You are segregating patients by symptoms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the symptoms consistent with post-vaccination reactions?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “Things have become complicated.”

  “Complicated?” Miller thought he had heard in the past that complicated in medical terms meant fucking bad.

  “Yes. Most of the patients came in complaining of issues common to post-vaccination reactions like headaches, nausea or particular body aches. But those same patients have rapidly developed more aggressive neurological symptoms like progressive dementia, personality changes coupled with hallucinations, and in some cases aggression. Many have physical symptoms like myoclonus or ataxia, and we have seen an increase in seizures.”

  “Those all sound like indicators leading back to the vaccine,” Einberg stated resulting in a quizzical look from the doctor.

  “Yes. However, those types of reactions are usually present in a small ratio of those vaccinated, say five to ten percent tops. The numbers we are treating right now across all of the clinics in the camp exceed the total number of doses administered today.” She watched Einberg to see how he would react to this information.

  Einberg blew out his breath softly through pursed lips, one of his oh shit physical reactions.

  She laughed through her mask although clearly not because she was in a mood to be humored. More as a result of her seeing that he recognized the dilemma. “Yea, now you see the problem?”

  “What problem?” Miller asked looking slightly pissed off that he hadn’t solved their private equation.

  Einberg looked at Miller, “It’s contagious.” He felt slightly bad for his earlier jokes.

  “Fuck,” he whispered looking around at all the refugees interspersed with the medical staff wearing protective equipment. Miller had his filter mask around his neck while they had been talking but moved it over his mouth.

  Einberg turned back to the doctor. “You said just now that you had received the shipment for the vaccination today?”

  “Yes. It was delivered this afternoon. It is a prototype polio vaccination and was delivered by the pharmaceutical company that developed it,” she said.

  Einberg could tell she was becoming uncomfortable with the line of questioning. He pressed on anyways, “We hitched a ride this morning and were dropped off a few miles south of here. When we were walking in we saw a couple of panel trucks heading this way led by a black Mercedes. We had tried to thumb a ride in but they just drove by dusting us as they went. Were those the delivery trucks?”

  “Yes,” she looked between the two of them as they eyed each other.

  “Who are you guys? You know what, never mind. I have enough to worry about right now. You guys are free to stay and photograph the situation if that is actually what you came here to do. I may need the photos to help with documentation after we get it under control, but please stay out of the way.” She walked off toward the other side of the clinic where a tent was being erected by some of the medical staff.

  Miller looked at Einberg and the two retreated a few steps away. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Einberg ran his fingers through his sweat soaked hair and looked about. “I don’t know what to think, man. I’m trying to absorb what we’re seeing here. I think Rainer needs to know the reason why Brewster was here.” He went to key up the radio. Both he and Miller had slipped in their covert earbuds earlier.

  A single viscous scream broke from the area washing over everyone like a huge wave crashing onto rocks before drowning them in its midnight waters. The general murmur of talking, the movement of people and equipment from place to place, the moaning of the sick, the crying of children, all fell completely silent as everyone searched for the source of the wretched scream.

  Miller sprang into action and was the first of the two moving. Off to their right directly in front of the clinic in a cluster of people a man was laying across the top of a woman who was desperately struggling underneath him.

  Everyone in the entire area was frozen in place watching the two of them thrashing about. The man had his full body weight lying across her chest and his left hand was holding her head down across her mouth silencing her. She was bucking wildly underneath him, the strain evident although his weight was preventing her from escaping.

  Miller closed the distance in seconds having heard that scream before. He had his weapon drawn and maneuvered swiftly to get a clear shot at the woman. He had taken up a position to the left of the pair on the ground and centered his front sight on her forehead. He was pressing slightly on the trigger of the SIG but then glanced past the sights as she made eye contact with him. Her eyes were filled with terror, darting between the gun and the man on top of her. She is the victim, not the screamer.

  Miller rotated at the hips and pivoted just in time to see the man had switched positions on top of her and was up on one knee looking directly at him. The snarl was only partially concealed by the blood and gore smeared across his mouth and jaw. He coughed once and a mist of blood and spittle emitted. He began to rise on his legs when a bullet crashed through his left temple mushrooming and then exiting on the far side of his head taking most everything in-between with it. The man slumped to his right and fell onto his side with his legs bent underneath him.

  The place erupted into a frenzy of shouts and crying. Normal, panicked screams. People who were capable ran off in all directions, some carrying their sick loved ones. The place was in a panic.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Merissa screamed as she pushed Miller away from the girl and the dead man. She began administering aid to the girl but it was futile. She was pale and the blood that was once spraying out of her neck wound had been reduced to a flow. Her pulse was very weak and then stopped completely. Merissa took a few moments to gather herself and then moved to the man. She only spent a second taking a quick look at the exit wound and then stood. Her eyes were fiery.

  “I said what the hell are you doing? This man was unarmed and sick.” She stood pointing to the man still slumped over, his bloodshot eyes open but no energy was behind them.

  Einberg was beginning to reply when from his earbud he heard, “Juliet, Toad, Sierra One is reporting gunshots from within the camp. What’s your status over?” Rainer’s transmission was much clearer than when the TOC was located kilometers away, indicating that he was closer. Einberg looked to Miller who turned and began walking away from the group.

  “Where does he think he’s going? Samir these men need to be arrested.” Merissa’s skin was red from the anger boiling up within her.

  Samir and two UN peacekeepers had moved up alongside Merissa. Einberg recognized Samir as the man who had earlier entered the administration building. Einberg made a mental inventory of the threats they presented. Samir was a large man but appeared to be unarmed.

  The two UN peacekeepers were smaller in stature and only one had a rifle slung over his shoulder which was a well-worn AK-103 with a thirty-round magazine. Einberg doubted that a round was chambered in the rifle. Both men carried pistols in green hard plastic holsters with snap enclosures. With amazement Einberg saw that one of the pistols didn’t even have a magazine in it and again he doubted the other was chambered.

  “Doctor Manzak, arresting us is not an option,” he said looking at Samir directly, feeling like the large black man remained the only true threat. Einberg still had his pistol in his hand and decided to try and defuse the situation by holstering it. He turned to the doctor keeping her between him and the three men. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “When?” she asked not really wanting to know. She felt like she was teetering over the rabbit hole and didn’t want to completely fall in.

  “A few weeks ago. I can’t get into specifics but let’s just say that we ran into a nest of these ‘screamers’ and it got pretty ugly.”

  Miller had returned after having briefed Rainer on the situation via radio. He caught the tail end of Einbe
rg’s comments. He had been watching the tall black guy and his two goon UN peacekeepers, but shifted his gaze to a woman in the background about forty meters away.

  She was apparently one of the patients who had either been unconscious during the gunshots or too sick to leave but now she was laboring to get up on all fours. Miller watched with curiosity as she dry heaved two or three times, her mouth opening and closing with each heave, finally vomiting onto the ground. Sitting up and back on her legs she coughed once convulsing her entire body with the effort and then coughed again. The final cough produced a visible ejection of mucous, part of which hung from the corner of her mouth. She lifted her head and sniffed at the air looking around her immediate area. She fixated her stare on a male doctor standing about ten meters in front of her. He had his back to her and was watching the dialogue between Doctor Manzak and Einberg.

  Miller tensed. He thought he knew what was going to happen and he was unfortunately correct. She jumped to her feet springing forward into a sprint seeking the man to her front. Her colorful dress billowed in the wind. She screamed as she neared to within five meters of the man. He jumped at the sound and turned just in time for her to crash-land on top of him.

  She postured up onto his chest and he had his hand up in defense. She grabbed hold of his left arm and then bit down hard onto his hand. He screamed in protest which turned deep and sickening as she bit through his fingers. He pulled his hand in when she severed the digits. With the gap in his defense she slammed her head down with all her effort across the bridge of his nose knocking him unconscious and his body slumped. With her prey silenced, she uncoiled herself on top of him, easing herself down, taking a slow bite of his cheek. She sat up suddenly at the sound of nearby gasps, but she was content with her kill. Still chewing, she looked about from side to side eyeing the crowd, protecting her catch like a lioness.

  A muffled crack sounded out. The round came in low and took her at the base of the neck and then out the front of the throat. Blood sprayed across the unconscious man below. She died instantly but her body remained upright with her head pitched forward.

  Merissa was standing motionless, shocked to her core. She had turned when she had seen Miller tense and had taken in the whole scene. She traced the route the bullet had taken from its point of impact back to its source and saw Miller in a kneeling position. His backpack was broken apart and laying in the dirt to his front. A small black assault rifle with a black cylinder on the barrel was shouldered and he was looking down its sighting mechanism. A wisp of smoke was emanating from the end of the cylinder.

  She watched as he pressed the trigger two more times and she jumped as the rounds exited the barrel with two muffled pops. She turned on her heels just in time to see a teenage girl drop to the ground just a yard away from one of Merissa’s medical staffers. Merissa hadn’t even heard the scream. Merissa’s world began to silently spin. She was pulled and tugged through the abyss of reality for what seemed like hours. Time had distorted and the images she saw were memorialized in her mind as a sort of slideshow. She had let them lead her. No, more like drag her through these first few moments in time because she just didn’t know what to do. Everything moved past her in slow motion.

  She looked about as the massive dump of adrenaline had begun to dissipate, being replaced by dopamine causing her mind to finally find some clarity. She was with the two ‘reporters’—although calling them that seemed ridiculous now. Samir was holding her by the arm and one of the UN peacekeepers was directly behind her. They were running away from the clinic, away from her patients. The sounds of the camp came crashing back to her consciousness like a freight train.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “Stop! These people are sick, we can’t leave them.”

  Einberg slowed and then stopped, turning to face her. Miller placed his hand on his shoulder, giving him a quick squeeze as he continued a few paces in the direction they had been heading and took up a firing position while on a knee.

  From their rear, they could hear screams, some from the sick and some from their victims. The group was in a clearing cast in heavy darkness. Smoke had begun to sweep by from fires burning through the camp. Some had probably been for cooking, but others had probably been born out of the fighting. Einberg had always marveled at how fire always seemed omnipresent during conflicts.

  “We need to find some cover so we can regroup and put together an exit plan,” he said while ejecting the magazine from his MP7 and checking the round count. He hadn’t fired at any of the sick, this was more an act from years of training.

  She watched as he replaced the magazine in the weapon. She looked at him and then at Miller who was still on point, “You can’t kill innocent, unarmed, sick people. The violence they are exhibiting is extraordinary, I can attest to that, but it isn’t their fault. We need to try to find a way to restrain them until we can figure out what is going on here.”

  She looked to Samir for help on this. He, however, looked at the remaining UN peacekeeper, an Ethiopian, and said, “Give me your sidearm.”

  The young soldier traded stares with Samir and was deciding whether he should relinquish his pistol but Samir’s determination set in his jaw helped persuade him. He opened the snap enclosures on his holster and pulled out the ancient Makarov and handed it to Samir who pulled back on the slide to check if a round was chambered. He shook his head with disdain, dropped the magazine into his hand and seeing rounds slammed it back home and racked the weapon chambering a round. The soldier unslung his AK-103 and charged the rifle looking determined to regain some respect.

  “Restraining them is out of the question for the moment,” Einberg continued. “We’ve already established they’re contagious and we have little to no protective gear. I think we’ve all seen what happens when they get hold of someone.”

  “We need to move,” Miller announced softly from his position. He was having trouble seeing the perimeter in the darkness without the assistance of NVGs and thought he heard sporadic rustling from the edges of their current location. He had an ATN PS22 night vision scope to add to the front of the Elcan SpecterDR but it was in his backpack. He had hurriedly reconfigured the pack and threw it on when they were fighting their way out of the Clinic One area. He didn’t want to be messing around with modifying his weapon out here in the open.

  Einberg tried to find an alternative solution to being out in the open. “Do you have a place we can go that is secure?”

  Samir spoke up, his deep voice penetrating the area, “We have a UN security office about a half kilometer west of here on the main road. There is a radio there we can use to call for more help.”

  Merissa was buying into the new plan and added, “My shelter is not too far from that office. I left all the technical materials given to me today regarding the polio vaccine. I’d like to get those documents so I can see if they can shed some light on how we can help these people.”

  Einberg thought about this for a moment and then sighed. “You won’t need those.”

  “Why not? They could contain the key to remedying this mess.”

  “Because the drug you administered to all of these people today wasn’t a polio vaccine. It was a WMD.”

  Miller looked over his shoulder at Einberg letting him know to tread carefully. They were blown but there was no reason to go all in with this woman.

  “A what?” she asked with an incredulous look.

  “Based upon what I’ve seen and what I know, I believe you were given some form of a chemical or biological weapon which you administered on these people.” Einberg wasn’t being accusatory, he was just relaying the facts as he saw them in the most professional way he could.

  To their right, somewhere in the dark a scream broke loose. Everyone froze. Along the path which led to their position, they could clearly hear the sound of feet slapping against the dirt and gravel ground. Off to the north, the sound of sporadic gunfire was erupting in other parts of the camp.

  “Move!” Einberg commanded, pushing
Samir to the front where Miller was already up. “Lead us to that building, now.”

  He keyed up the radio mid-run using the Bluetooth Silynx module attached to the forearm rail of his HK MP7. “Top, this is Juliet. We’re going to need an evac out of here immediately. We’ve got a fucked up situation developing in here, over.”

  “Juliet, send sitrep.” Rainer could tell from the transmission that Einberg was running. He could hear him breathing heavily between words.

  “Roger, you remember those lunatics we met on our last op that were hell bent on eating us? This place is crawling with them.”

  The silence over the radio network continued for several moments. Long enough that Einberg had time to turn around and check to see if anyone was following them. Long enough to just make out a shirtless man running low but with amazing speed, the sweat glistening off his skin from cooking fire lights. He was only an arm’s reach from the Ethiopian who was laboring to keep up. Long enough for Einberg to sarcastically think to himself. I really thought Ethiopians were better runners.

  Einberg stopped and turned, bringing his right leg up and delivered a front kick directly into the mid-chest of the man, as the Ethiopian soldier continued past. The runner’s momentum and the force of the kick pitch him up off his feet into the air and he crashed down hard on his back skidding to a stop under Einberg. He had to pivot away to avoid being grabbed by the thrashing man who took the blow without issue.

  The man wasn’t much older than twenty but he looked rough. He had several lacerations running down both sides of his face almost as if someone or something had clawed down them. He began to roll onto his stomach placing both hands on the ground and coiled his legs under himself, trying to prepare to launch toward Einberg who had taken the moment to check him out.

  The man looked up through his blood-filled eyes and hissed at Einberg who could only laugh. “You’re a badass,” he said as he sighted the MP7’s holographic CQB reticle on the man’s forehead and squeezed off two quick rounds driving his head back into the ground.