She was raised by a series of Marine Corps' Family Child Care providers (her dad picking up the tab and arranging for someone new each time she became “too difficult” for her surrogate parents). For most of them, the financial benefit of caring for a pre-teen with attitude who then grew into a teenager with severe anger and abandonment issues, just wasn’t worth it. So she bounced from home to home until she was old enough to enlist herself.
She guessed, no, hoped, that if she joined the Corp she’d get to see him, get close enough to be acknowledged - Daddy’s girl following in his footsteps. It didn’t work out that way. He had come to watch her graduate from boot camp, but that was it. He called once when word got around of her daring leadership during an assault on a Taliban stronghold in Waziristan, Pakistan. She’d won a bronze star (the trinket had helped when she was facing that possible court-martial for killing the rapist Sudanese chief). Her dad had asked her about the fight and she found herself embellishing what was really just a classic assault on a fortified house. The difference was that her actions had helped save the life of a US Senator’s son (a brave soldier who was pinned down and badly wounded). Her dad sniffed out the embellishments and the conversation turned from a pride-filled occasion to his disappointment with her need to lie. That was the last time she’d spoken with him.
She focused on the road and realized that she had drifted into the oncoming lane, not that anything was coming the other way. She glanced over her shoulder and smiled crookedly as a soft snore escaped Jon’s lips. She had to admire this reporter guy. He’d stayed behind to tell the tale. It seemed a bit suicidal, but his survival instinct was clearly intact.
They were approaching the Sugarloaf ski resort when Jon woke. He sat up looking dazed. “Wow, was I out. Where are we?”
“Some ski area.”
The hill was covered in meadows where in winter they would be covered in ski-happy revelers. A large herd of deer grazed on the face of one of the wider slopes.
Jon wiped the sleep from his eyes. “It’s a good sign if deer can relax.”
They passed a sign indicating Flagstaff Lake 1 mile and just then, a green Subaru wagon came over the rise ahead. Nikki had to swerve into her own lane as the car shot past them going south. The driver had beeped repeatedly, flicked his passing lights on and off and disappeared, tires squealing around a bend. The deer bounded off into the woods.
“What the hell?” Nikki exclaimed.
“We better slow down.”
“I’m not sure I want to keep going.”
Jon climbed back in front and grabbed the map. “Can we turn around and go another way?”
“It’s a lot of lost ground, but yes. Problem is, it takes us to Route 201, a bigger artery.”
They passed a house. Nikki saw movement - a flash of a man in an attic window. “You see that? That guy had a radio.”
“Didn’t see it.”
“Mmm, this doesn’t feel good.”
“So let’s stop. Maybe we walk up to that rise. See what we see.”
“Let’s just take it easy, I’ll be ready to flip a bitch. Floor it if we have to.”
They went over the rise without incident and houses became thicker as Route 16 became yet another Small Town Main Street. Nikki feathered the gas and the brakes, not wanting to slow down too much and ready to floor it if she had to.
Jon looked at the houses and saw a curtain flutter here and there and then caught the eyes of a child watching them. “This town isn’t abandoned. There’s people in some of these houses.”
They came around the next curve and found themselves in a perfect ambush. The road ahead was blocked by smashed up cars. One car, just moments before, had overturned trying to stop. Its wheels were still spinning. A family was trapped inside, screaming.
Several men wearing assorted hunting and military gear stepped out from behind the cars, armed to the teeth.
Nikki swore, “Fuck. I’m such an asshole!” She slammed on the brakes, put the car in reverse, but had to slam on the brakes again as another group of armed men ran onto the road behind them and laid a telephone pole across it. They were trapped. A man wearing an Army officer’s uniform and sporting an M-16 stepped out in front of the others and leveled the gun. “Out of the car. Hands in the air. Fuck around and we shoot you.” He nodded to the side of the road where two bodies lay face down, apparently shot execution style.
Some of the men began pulling the people out of the flipped car, using little mercy.
Jon flicked on the cruiser’s PA switch and spoke into the mic. “You people are interfering with officers of the law. Hold down your weapons and let us pass.”
The guy with the M-16, flanked by a guy wearing sergeant stripes and full battle fatigues stepped up to the driver side of the car. Both Jon and Nikki pointed their weapons toward them. The man spoke evenly, his voice clear through the hole in the windshield, “Major Gerald Deighton, United States Army. You’ve entered my area of operations.”
Jon tried again through the PA so others could hear. “Step back from the car. Put your weapons down. We have urgent business.”
“We all have urgent business. Ours is recruiting soldiers for the defense of this town. You are not police officers. You are surrounded. You will pull to the side of the road, step out of the vehicle, leaving your weapons inside. This is not a request. We shoot all deserters.”
Jon turned to Nikki, “What do you think?”
“We do as he says. I’ve met enough of these angry PTSD types to know that it’s worthless to argue.” She nodded at the dead people. “Clearly they are not fooling around.”
The major said, “I can hear you just fine, ma’am, and I don’t cotton to the PTSD bullshit. The people of this town are doing their patriotic duty to defend and then take back this country.”
Nikki said, “Can you hear me tell my friend here, that you are probably bat shit crazy and have no idea what’s coming up that road?”
The sergeant elevated his weapon so it pointed directly at Nikki's face. Deighton said, “There won’t be a third request.”
Nikki put the car in park and unfastened her seatbelt. She and Jon stepped out, leaving their guns on the seat.
Deighton said, “That’s the right attitude. Keep it up and we’ll even give you your weapons back.”
Jon looked the major in the eye and tried to gauge the level of his sanity. He decided that he and Nikki were probably in big trouble. “Sir, the orders from our government are clear. All citizens are to get their asses up to Canada. The country is to be bombed with chemical weapons.”
“I’m well aware of the orders… Mr.?”
“Washington, Jon. I’m an embedded reporter assigned to the Army. My colleague and I have a job to do.”
“Perfect, then you can report from right here. The place where America started to take her country back.”
“Sir,” said Nikki again, loud enough for the couple dozen others nearby. “When we left New Hampshire, we had thousands of infected right behind us. My guess is there are millions of the things heading north. I was with a group of people holed up in an extremely secure mansion with heavy weapons and months of supplies. We were overrun in a few days. I’m the only survivor. I can see a couple of dozen heads here. What army are you planning to stop them with?”
Deighton gave her a good looking over and decided he didn’t like what he saw. “We have more showing up by the hour. Most are armed, all want their country back.” He turned to the others, “Right people!”
He got cheers from the group.
“Now, we are not on a major route north, the bulk of the enemy will flow, as they have so far, up the main highways. We’ve given enough ground. It’s time to hold some.”
Jon said, “Forgive me major. Have you fought these things? They are not insurgents or even suicide bombers. They’re voraciously hungry, feel little pain, and have zero emotion left to appeal to. In fact they love killing. They seem to hunt well in packs and there are millions of them. Oh –
and they seem to have some ability to mess with your head.” He nodded at Nikki. “The mansion she is talking about wasn’t breached. They somehow convinced someone to open the door.”
“That might be a stretch,” said Nikki. “That was just one guy losing his cool.”
“No. I saw it. It sounds crazy, but it happened.”
The major broke in. “We have not yet had the pleasure of killing any infected humans, but I am very confident in the town’s plans for defense. We are not concerned with the threat of chemical weapons. We are too small for such a waste of precious resources. It is the job of the foot soldier to root out and kill the enemy.”
Jon decided to try the honest approach, “Be that as it may, sir, you have no right to hold us here against our will. We will not stand and fight with you. If you remain in this place, you will all be dead or infected in two days or less. I can guarantee it.”
This got some of the other defenders to look around and mumble private worries and I-told-you-sos.
“SILENCE!” yelled Deighton. He turned back to Jon and Nikki, “We’ll let you stew about whether you want to help or not with some like minded folks.” He turned to two rough looking soldiers, “Escort our new guests to the alternate facilities.”
CHAPTER THREE
SOUTHBOUND
It was Tran’s first helicopter ride. He was only two seats away from one of the door gunners and therefore had a decent view outside. He decided that he liked helicopters. It was the oddest sensation to at one moment feel the weight of the huge machine on the ground, the astonishing noise and vibration of the engines ramping up, and in the next, the wheels lifting off the tarmac. Even though his own weight felt the same, strapped as he was into a fold down webbed seat, he nevertheless got the sensation that he was floating. A sense of glee rose up through his chest, filling his throat and he felt his face grow warm with childlike wonder. Then his organs were pushed down as the g-forces changed. He saw the ground sweep past the window as the Chinook banked to the right, finally leveling off for its primary direction of flight. The flat farmland outside fell away and reduced in scale until it became an uncanny representation of a model railroad world. They crossed the Saint Lawrence about thirty minutes later and Northern New York State revealed its vast sea of trees and small bodies of water. To his left he could see the headwaters of Lake Champlain (the backbone of the new wall that would eventually divide a reclaimed New England from the rest of the country). The flight was downright peaceful as the pastoral scenery moved past the windows. As they crossed over the dairy land that surrounded Plattsburgh, one of the door gunners broke the serenity, yelling out, “Holy fuckin’ shit!”
Those who could, looked outside and gasped. Humans, infected humans, slowly moved north in massive packs. Many simply stopped walking and watched the helicopters go by. Some turned around in useless pursuit. A dairy farm had been overrun, and thousands of Fiends gorged themselves on hundreds of defenseless cattle. One corral was nothing but a sea of moving gore as the infected crawled through blood and guts, coating themselves in the ghastly mixture.
Susan turned away and gagged reflexively. “God help us.”
“I thought God was off the table for you Susan,” said Decker with a sarcastic tone.
Susan’s eyelids became hooded as she turned to Decker. “Let’s not, shall we, Rick? Your charm is more than enough at the office. We don’t need to fill the skies with it too.”
The gunner, Casper Rodriguez, Ghost to his fellow Rangers, turned to both of them. “You better hope that God isn’t off the table.” The soldier had been thinking about God a lot lately. His entire family had holed up at their ranch in Colorado. The big house on two thousand acres had been his ancestral home for ten generations, before the US Cavalry, before Lewis and Clark, before Colorado was Colorado. Seeing the slaughter below made his stomach tighten with the thought of his familia’s horrible end. With the exception of himself and his brother, who was serving with the Marines in Afghanistan, the whole clan Rodriguez: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters had chosen to make a stand at the ranch. It was naturally fortified at a bend in a river with a cliff behind and the water to the front. The open areas that were left were natural kill zones where an attacker was ultimately forced into one narrow choice. The Rodriguez Ranch had withstood many an assault from Native Americans until it was finally accepted as a part of the landscape in the early Eighteen-Hundreds. Fires and flood had been nothing to them. Their beef cattle had become world famous for its quality and the cache´ of its ancient Western roots. The Fiends had overwhelmed the Rodriguez’ in a matter of hours. Casper’s father had called via satellite phone to say good-bye. He could hear the last of the gunfire and the screaming in the background. They were about to be overrun. There were no more bullets. Casper, all the way up in Canada, was filled with more helplessness and rage than he thought he could feel. His mother got on the phone weeping and told him to pray, “Pray every day for our souls, son. Pray that we do not become like them. Pray, pray, pray.” Casper promised through tears and gritted teeth. He told his mother how much he loved her, and then a loud crashing sound came through his phone’s speaker. His mother screamed in horror and he held the phone away from him. He still heard the children’s screams in his dreams. He told himself that God didn’t have anything to do with this, that this was the Devil’s work.
Though Ghost was on a scientific mission to save humanity, science didn’t enter his mind for a minute. When it came to the devils below, this wasn’t science, this was the Book of Revelation. Satan was rising.
Corporal Beau Preston, who was sitting next to Aaron Burnbaum asked, “So why a chicken farm in Florida?”
Aaron turned to the beefy Corporal without looking him in the eye. These people naturally intimidated the researcher and he found himself wishing he could just sleep or look through the notes on his laptop. Instead, he spoke up, offering his lecture tone as a buffer. “We have posited that the original bacterium, which caused the FND-z pandemic, was created, probably inadvertently, at a chicken farm.”
“Yeah? So why a chicken farm?” Aaron tried to smile through lips bent with conceit, and Preston followed up. “I’d like to know why we stopped our re-invasion training and are instead risking our asses to fly all the way to Florida to hunt chickens.”
Aaron looked at the man’s eyes for the first time and saw deep intelligence and a look of genuine interest. He chastened himself, slightly, for being narrow-minded.
“Have you heard of meningitis?”
Preston nodded.
Aaron wasn’t exactly oblivious about his personality. He could feel his annoyingly pedantic nature unfold from the box that barely contained it. “Bacterial Meningitis is one of the leading causes of death and permanent disability among children. The disabilities may include cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness or seizures. In extreme cases, difficulties with limbs may require amputations. In short, it is caused by certain bacteria, the most common being streptococcus, crossing the blood-brain barrier, or meninges, and interacting with the micro vascular endothelial cells.” He paused, “Still with me?” Preston nodded and several other Rangers leaned in to listen. “Large-scale inflammation results, due to the body’s own immune response, thereby reducing blood flow to the brain and brain stem. The brain cells are deprived of oxygen and undergo apoptosis.”
Aaron glanced at Robert Tran and noted the amused look on the man’s face. Tran’s amused look always got under Aaron’s skin. As far as he was concerned, the researcher had no respect for the broader teachings of science. He continued, “Apoptosis is the word for automated cell death, which of course leads to the complications that I just outlined. Meningitis is highly contagious, and is usually spread through the systems that we all have for mucous formation and delivery. In the case of FND-z, or Cain’s Disease, as it has become commonly termed, the frontal lobes of the brain are primarily affected, leaving the more base elements of the organ healthy. We haven’t b
een able to determine the exact nature of the aggressive response that follows, other than the fact that the more primitive parts of the brain seem to compensate for the loss of higher function; what we might describe as the moral judgment that comes with the development of frontal lobes in Homo Sapiens-Sapiens. These more reptilian instincts are instead pushed into some type of overdrive. Also unknown is the cause for the apparently insatiable desire to kill and eat the flesh of living things. There is of course the evolutionary obvious ideal, that the disease spreads itself through the interaction of bodily fluids. But why then eat the victim? Why not just bite?”
Preston said, “We all gotta eat, Doc.”
This got a chuckle out of the group.
Aidman, Cowboy Johnston spoke up. “So you’re sayin’ some chicken farmer started all this shit?”
Un-amused, Aaron sat back in his seat and nodded at Tran, “Robert, why don’t you finish?”
Tran smiled and said, “We think so.” He raised his voice to be heard better. “It’s our hope, everybody, that if we can isolate the bacteria in its original form, we can, through gene therapy, block the molecule that allows it to pass through the brain blood barrier. We have already achieved this with certain bacteria that cause meningitis. We can then create a vaccine with our new designer mutant gene or perhaps even an antidote for those that come into contact with the infected.”
Preston asked, “So you can cure people?”
"Not likely a cure. More of a stopgap for those that haven’t yet had the bug get into their head. Once FND-z passes the meninges, the brain damage is irreversible, and as we all know, the infection works fast, usually within twenty-four hours, in rare cases within six. However, an antidote delivered early, say within three hours, may stave off the infection and save the victim. A vaccine of course would offer immunity, but would have to be injected before any possible contact with the disease."
The Search For A Cure Page 2
