“That’s wrong on so many levels,” said Riker. “This was inflicted by a lady I met at the Greyhound station in Muncie.”
Under Eyebrow’s watchful stare, the female soldier used a tongue depressor and looked inside Riker’s mouth.
Indicating the poster near the door admonishing bullying of any kind, Riker said, “Isn’t denying me my due process a form of bullying? When do I get to make my phone call?”
“Circuits are overloaded,” said Eyebrows.
The woman soldier said nothing as she tossed the depressor into an overflowing garbage can.
“When do I get my shots, Nurse Ratchet? It’s what we came here for.”
“That may not be necessary,” she answered. “The facts of the event are still being sorted.” She took his temperature at the temple with a handheld device and jotted something on a sheet of paper.
Riker’s neck and shoulder went tight and the ringing in his ears was back. He looked to Eyebrows. “Is this a chemical, nuclear, or biological event?”
“Need to know,” replied Eyebrows, shifting from foot to foot.
The female soldier donned a stethoscope and strapped a blood pressure cuff on Riker. As she went through the motions while staring at the wall-mounted clock, Riker saw that her hands were shaking. Drawing in a deep breath, he asked, “Am I going to live to see another sunrise?”
The question went unanswered.
Nodding toward the other poster beside the door, Riker tried the comedy route on the stoic pair. “So if there’s no I in TEAM … what does that make me? I don’t feel like a citizen of the United States at the moment. And I am no longer a member of the Big Green Machine.” He stared hard at Eyebrows. “So where exactly do I stand in all of this?”
Carbine still at a low-ready, Eyebrows made no reply.
The female soldier removed the cuff, and her demeanor instantly changed. The sharp edge to her voice gone, she told Riker to hold still, adding a “please” prior to issuing the order. She took a syringe from its sterile wrapping and drew several mils of a clear liquid from a stoppered bottle. “This is just an inoculation.”
“Against what?” asked Riker.
“All kinds of things,” she said. “Everyone receives it.” She cleaned the injection site on his shoulder with an alcohol swab, then wasted no time sticking the needle in him and pushing the plunger.
Riker tensed as he received the inoculation. Part of him wanted to fight. To bash Eyebrows in the face and escape the room. Run naked down the hall in search of the exit. But he couldn’t. There were men with guns outside the door. And he had no idea where Tara was.
Whatever she was administering stung as it entered Riker’s body. As the soldier tossed the used syringe in a plastic receptacle with a one-way opening, he asked, “So I can leave now with my sister?”
“Not how it works,” said the female soldier. “You may get dressed now.”
Riker dressed slowly and then presented his hands to Eyebrows to be cuffed.
“They’re not necessary for quarantine.”
“What about my sister?”
“Follow me.”
Riker asked, “What’s your name?”
Eyebrows paused at the door. “Logan.”
“Branch and unit?”
Logan said nothing.
“We have somewhere we need to be,” said Riker. “We’ve really done nothing wrong. Why don’t you just let us go?”
Logan shook his head slowly side to side. “I’m Army … like you used to be. Fourth Infantry Division out of Carson at first. I’m now running 10th Group.”
Deploying Special Forces for a simple quarantine? Bullshit, thought Riker. “What’s this all about?” he asked.
“Trust me,” said Logan over his shoulder. He paused to usher Riker into the hall, then added, “You don’t want to go out there right now.”
“Can you do me a solid?”
Logan didn’t respond as he started off down the hall at a leisurely pace.
“Get my NRA bag from that little ass car?” called Riker. “The clean sleeves I line my bionic with are in it.”
Logan kept walking.
“You’ll find it on the package tray next to my mom.”
Logan slowed and turned around and walked backwards down the wide hall. His rifle barrel dropped vertical with his leg. One brow arched up, the unruly red hairs crowding the black beret.
Your mom?” said Logan. “I’m not following.”
“She’s in the urn next to my bag. It’s a bronze number with silver roses on it. Can’t leave her out there all night with those things creeping around.”
Logan nodded, then spun around on his heel and continued on down the hall, his pace quickening with each step.
With the female soldier beginning to crowd him from behind, Riker double-timed it to catch up with the SF shooter he guessed to be at least a captain in rank. He followed in silence and pulled up when the soldier paused to use a key to unlock a set of double doors. Once they pushed through the doors, Riker was struck by the eye-opening scale of the facility. He was standing in a Cold-War-era fallout shelter that before being put into service by FEMA or whoever the soldiers answered to looked to have been used only as storage for old desks and worn gym equipment. It was currently home to at least three hundred people. Some were lounging on cots with their kids. Others were sitting on folding chairs, solo or in small groups, talking quietly amongst themselves.
An Indiana National Guard soldier approached Riker and offered him a bottled water, which he politely declined, for a dozen feet in front of him was Tara. No hood. No cuffs. And a smile spreading on her face at the realization that everything was in fact going to be all right—for now.
Chapter 21
“For now” ended at six in the morning when a commotion kicked up at the far end of the near dark room Riker guessed still held at least a hundred people—down from the three hundred he estimated were being held there when he and Tara had been brought in a handful of hours ago.
The slow trickle of people being removed had begun around midnight.
Since being led into the facility, Riker hadn’t seen the SF soldier, Logan, the female soldier in the lab coat, or any of the cheerful National Guard soldiers who were present earlier. Instead, a dozen soldiers clad in black and armed with high-dollar carbines were running the show. Like the Special Forces contingent Riker and Tara had encountered outside, the soldiers’ uniforms bore nothing that spoke of their rank, unit, or branch of service. What troubled Riker most was the bare hook-and-loop field on their shoulders where an American Flag patch should be.
A six-footer with a full black beard and hard eyes seemed to be calling the shots, leading twenty men out in the first wave. Their ages ranged from twentysomething to upper sixties. Some were coughing into handkerchiefs. Others were hanging their heads in defeat. A couple of the older men grumbled for a bit but finally acquiesced and moved out willingly when Black Beard raised his voice and threatened to have them flex-cuffed. Amazingly, not a man among the group had put up a real fight. Not even those leaving loved ones behind. Sheep to the slaughter, thought Riker at the time.
The room Riker and Tara had spent the night in was nearly identical in its accoutrements to the Atlanta Mission. Out of the pan and into the fire was a good way to describe how his previous day had begun and ended.
Thanks to Riker insisting to Logan upon entering the room that he had been waging a lifelong battle with claustrophobia—a lie made up and told on the fly—Logan had a National Guard soldier procure cots for them and set them up on the periphery of the room near the doors Riker had initially entered through.
The floor was a sea of pale green vinyl tiles on which sat roughly twenty rows of folding cots. The canvas and aluminum numbers looked to be Army-issue and stretched the entire length of the building. More of the same were pushed against the walls beneath a row of opaque windows. Inset into the cement wall several feet overhead, the windows ran the entire length of the subterranean
facility. At first blush it looked to Riker that even if he could get close and manage to pry one open, no way was his head fitting through, let alone his wide shoulders and barrel chest.
At the far end of the room, where rolled-up wrestling mats and an assortment of gymnastic equipment was being stored, were clusters of pushed-together cots where entire families awaited their fate.
Riker estimated the cement ceiling to be at least twelve feet overhead. The walls were poured cement, the horizontal lines where each batch had settled and cured clearly visible. Though measurement and distance had never been Riker’s strong suits, he figured the room had the same footprint as the gymnasium above them. In his mind’s eye, he saw the brick gym abutting the football field. Gleaming aluminum bleachers ran away to the west from the makeshift quarantine building. In his head he was seeing those damn glossy black body bags again. Only now the neat rows from the night before were buried under a shifting mound of bags conjured up by his imagination. His jaw took a hard set and his gut did a back flip as he realized it may not be far from the truth. After all, where had all the people gone? Were there busses waiting topside? At thirty passengers a bus, it would take a half-dozen of them to relocate all of those now missing to the post quarantine depository he had overheard Black Beard mention.
Busses?
He hadn’t seen a single one on the way in—Shenandoah High, Middletown city bus like the one the shooter allegedly slaughtered the people on, or otherwise.
“What are you thinking about, Bro?”
Riker caught himself looking right through Tara. He blinked once and stared her hard in the face. She was still on her cot, but now her head was propped up on one hand.
“Our current predicament is what’s on my mind,” he whispered. “Did you sleep?”
She shook her head. Just a subtle side to side wag.
“Me neither.”
From the direction of the cot islands, someone called out for water. When the request wasn’t immediately acknowledged, an expletive-laden threat was directed at the soldiers in general, then Black Beard specifically.
The room was quiet for half a beat, then more shouted demands echoed from the periphery of the room.
Someone screaming “I’m an American!” threw one of the metal bedpans provided earlier by the National Guard soldiers.
The person splashed by the bedpan’s contents turned on the person who had thrown it.
Riker looked away from the mayhem unfolding a hundred feet beyond the foot of his cot. Locked eyes with Tara and asked, “What time do you have?”
She shrugged and showed him both bare wrists. “They took it along with my phone and wallet.”
“Same here,” conceded Riker. Looking away from the growing throng of people, the pair and their meteorically rising tempers at the center, he let his gaze land on the set of double doors leading to the long hall he and Tara had been marched down after their medical check.
Nothing.
The squad of uniformed men and women he expected to burst through by now weren’t coming.
Or, more than likely, they were being rousted from their sleep and gunning up.
The hall behind the windows in the door was black as night. Meaning the lights in the hall were extinguished. Meaning he had a decision to make: What do I do when the inevitable happens?
The ruckus was now a full-blown shoving match between two men in their forties.
Tara nodded toward the cot nosed perpendicular to the nearest pillar. On it was a small form curled up underneath a blanket. On the floor by the cot was a stuffed kangaroo, its orange and white coat matted and worn.
“The toy,” she said. “Get it.”
He shot her a quizzical look.
“Just do it,” she hissed.
Riker rolled over onto his right side, planted his right hand on the floor for stability, and reached out for the plush toy with his left. Straining mightily, arm at full extension, he trapped one stub ear against the polished floor. Applying pressure with his index finger, he slowly drew his arm back, bringing the well-loved kangaroo along for the ride.
Someone screamed. A woman. Her voice was shrill and full of worry.
The boy stirred and then sat bolt upright. As the blanket slithered to the floor, the kid panned his head toward the growing commotion.
Beckoning with one hand, Tara leaned forward to accept the toy.
Sitting up, kangaroo in hand, Riker said, “What do you want with this?” He turned it over, inspecting its appendages and long, tapered tail.
“It’s in the pouch, Lee,” she said, still gesturing for him to hand it over.
The kid two cots away was now scratching his head and scanning his surroundings. He was calm. Which told Tara he was no stranger to drama. The shouting and shoving seemed to have already slipped off his radar.
Riker probed the kangaroo’s belly. He found the slit and reached inside. His fingers brushed something slim and cool and smooth. When he introduced the mystery item to the light of day, he had what looked to him like an iPhone pinched between thumb and forefinger.
“What’s a kid his age doing with a phone?” he asked.
Again with the gimme hands, Tara said, “It’s an iPod Touch. Give it here.”
Handing over the sleek black device, Riker said, “And what good is an iPod to us?” He felt foolish sitting there on the cot in a room that now smelled just like the one he left behind the day before. The stink of fear-laced sweat hanging in the air now had a tinge of urine to it. Perfect, he thought. Should have stayed in Atlanta.
Tara’s fingers were already dancing across the shiny glass screen. She spoke as she tapped. “It’s good for playing Angry Birds, which is what little Johnny there was playing.”
The screen flared to life.
“How’d you know his password?” asked Riker as he tightened his boot laces.
“Watched him tap it out. One, two, three across the top—”
“And five in the middle,” finished Riker.
She nodded.
Riker ran his hands through his beard. Then he cracked his neck, saying, “So what … you going to play Angry Birds while the folks play WWE wrestling down there?”
Now the kid was actively searching for his kangaroo. Mouth agape, he whipped his head around one final time before falling to his knees beside his cot and rifling through the blanket’s many folds.
Focused only on the screen and swiping and tapping away furiously, Tara said, “Most of these things have Wi-Fi connectivity and a web browser of some sort.”
“Boob Tube?”
“Yeah … YouTube, too.”
While Riker was shooting Tara a questioning look, the kid had gotten back on his feet and was turning to face them.
Seeing the movement in his side vision, Riker turned toward the kid. The kid locked eyes with him momentarily, then dropped his gaze to the kangaroo still sitting on his lap. Fighting hard to keep a sheepish grin at bay, Riker spoke out of the side of his mouth. “What are you doing, Sis?”
Just as the kid opened his mouth to say something—or scream bloody murder—a whole bunch of things happened.
Down at the end of the room the sharp reports of skin slapping skin were interspersed by hollow thuds of punches finding their mark.
Nearby, the windows on the entry door lit up with a soft yellow glow. The light was ranging around, which told Riker it was likely the beam from someone’s flashlight. A second or two passed, then the clunk of the door lock being thrown sounded in Riker’s right ear and the doors blasted inward.
Riker stayed seated and watched as a half-dozen armed soldiers clad in black body armor charged in from the hallway.
Looking up from the glowing screen, Tara’s face was a mask of worry bathed in color thrown from the bright display. “No service,” she said, her eyes tracking the soldiers as they fanned out and wove serpentine patterns between the support columns and folding cots full of bleary-eyed citizens.
The twin gunshot-like bang of the d
oors hitting the stops woke everyone who had been able to sleep through the altercation, the kid’s mother counted among them. She hinged up and regarded the boy, who was just voicing his displeasure at seeing one stranger holding his stuffed animal hostage and another playing with his iPod.
Just as the woman swung her gaze Riker’s way and he got a good look into eyes that were red and glassy from what he guessed was an Ambien-induced slumber, he was casting the kangaroo toward the double doors and saying a silent prayer. On the heels of the whispered words, he stood, leaned forward, and hauled Tara up onto her bare feet.
“My shoes,” she protested as he pulled her along with him. My jacket, he thought, seeing it crumpled in a ball on the floor underneath the cot.
There were squeaks of rubber on the slick flooring. The soldiers were now shouting orders to the disgruntled masses crowding in to see what was happening.
On the move, Riker tracked the kangaroo’s travel with his eyes. After sliding the first six or seven feet face down and rump up, the toy went flat and began to spin in lazy counterclockwise circles all the while heading straight for the rapidly shrinking gap between the closing entry doors.
Still a yard from the door and picking up a head of steam, Riker witnessed the kangaroo reach the threshold and stop mid-spin, instantly becoming wedged between the closing doors.
Slipping his fingers into the vertical gap and dropping his shoulder, Riker yanked the right side door toward him.
“Left or right?” he bellowed.
“Ramp to outside is to the left,” said Tara. “But our stuff is in the coach’s office to the right.”
Can’t leave without Mom, thought Riker. Without giving the matter a second’s thought, he struck off right, the subtle creak of his ankle joint and steady slap of Tara’s feet in direct competition with the rasp of his labored breathing.
Chapter 22
Zen Pharmaceuticals’ CEO James Merkur stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows in his corner office atop Four World Trade Center surveying all of Lower Manhattan spread out before him. Two blocks by crow, and casting a long, narrow shadow on the Hudson River, One World Trade Center—all glass and steel and beveled edges—spiraled gracefully 1,776 feet into the brilliant blue October sky.
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise Page 10
