Kinnick’s mouth stuck open.
“Don’t stare dumbstruck. That’s an order. Make me a plan to save millions. The generals say it’s impossible.” The vice president shrugged his shoulders. “You say it’s not. Prove it. Be daring. Be great.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do something worthwhile for Christ’s sake.” He slurped up some scotch and crunched the melting ice from the bottom of the glass.
“I. Sir, I’m not sure what to say.” Kinnick could feel the sweat beading on his forehead in little droplets. The smell of the scotch was making his stomach turn over, or was it the scotch in his stomach?
Brady guzzled the rest of his golden-brown alcohol. “Don’t say anything.” The vice president stood up abruptly. His glass banged loudly on the table as he set it down. Kinnick tentatively followed, standing upright.
“You have twenty-four hours, Colonel, to come up with a plan to save the Western Seaboard.”
STEELE
Little Sable Point, MI
Two pickups parted ways so the motorcycle scouting party could drive back through the entrance to Little Sable Point. The pickups rolled back into place, sealing the ring of vehicles as if they were settlers in covered wagons on the wild frontier. Tess was there waiting for them.
Tess stopped pacing as they flicked off the engines. Wrapping a thick arm around Half-Barrel, Steele strained to lift the heavy biker off the back of the motorcycle.
“What happened?” she demanded. Her eyes were a sparkling obsidian.
“A pack of infected got in too close while we were stopped. Half-Barrel had a heck of a time.”
Steele helped the 300-pound plus man limp to a nearby chair.
“Must of been at least a hundred of them,” Half-Barrel breathed as he got settled.
“Prolly get that knee propped up and ice if someone has any. Take a couple of these,” Steele said tossing the man a bottle from the satchel.
“Where’d you get those?” Tess asked him.
“Came across a pharmacy in Pentwater and took everything that hadn’t been picked over. Not much. Generic anti-inflammatories, a few painkillers people couldn’t identify, none of the good stuff, heartburn medicine, diabetes meds, anti-fungal cream. Figured it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
Tess watched him, her eyes unwavering in her judgment. “I’m glad you came back.” Her lips curled upward as if she held in the funniest joke ever told but didn’t want to share it.
Steele leaned out of Half-Barrel’s earshot. “Between you and me, the pack was like six infected, and Quarter-Barrel fell off his motorcycle when they closed in, pinning himself underneath it.”
She gave Half-Barrel a sly glance, rubbing her tattooed arms. Scaled green and red dragons crawled up her forearms all the way to her shoulders.
She looked amused. “I’m glad you brought him back in one piece. He may be a simpleton, but he’s our simpleton.”
Steele nodded. “Everyone here has been generous. It’s the least I could do.”
She peered up at him. “You should think about staying for awhile. We could always use the help.”
“I’ll consider it, but I must find her.” He looked over her shoulder at the camp.
“Is Pagan’s crew back?” Steele asked, looking down at her.
“No. We haven’t heard anything. I was hoping you would have an idea.”
Steele checked his six. “I don’t.” He looked out at the ring of vehicles surrounding the lighthouse. His eyes ran over the mishmash of whatever vehicles and supplies people had when the outbreak started or what they had acquired since then. Could we defend against a horde? What about a determined enemy force? These people were mere nomads. No, they are only refugees.
“He’ll be back if he knows any better.” She reached up, tugging at his beard playfully.
Steele could only stare back in surprise at this woman he hardly knew holding his beard hostage with her fingers.
She released him. “We’ll talk later,” she said, walking away. Steele watched her go, confused as men are with women. Is she hitting on me? No, can’t be. She knows I’m with Gwen. Girl Code, right?
A light finger on his shoulder drew his eyes away from Tess’s backside.
His beautiful blonde stood there. “Gwen,” he said with a smile, feeling shame but not knowing why.
“What’d she want?” she asked. Her eyes watched Tess and turned back toward him with suspicion.
“Checking on our supplies we found.”
“Did you find any signs of Mary?”
“Nothing.” Frustration cloaked his insides.
She straightened his coat, staring down at it then back up at him. “You’ll find her. I know you, and I know your will.” Dark circles had formed around her eyes. Combined with her pale skin, those dark circles made it look like a terminal illness was lurking inside her.
He reached out and touched her face gently. “Are you okay? You don’t look well.”
Tears rushed to her eyes, and she looked like she wanted to break down and cry. It scared him a bit. She hadn’t shed any tears since Pittsburgh. She was a strong woman, and it was easy to overlook that she had been through so much between the outbreak, her captivity, and the loss of friends and family. When she became vulnerable, it was difficult for him to watch her struggle.
She had hardened over the last few weeks, and now, he was on the verge of getting the exact opposite. The mystery of this female continued to elude him. Will they ever make sense? In fact, the more he aged, the more he realized he would never understand them, only learn to skim the watery surface of the female mystique.
She wiped a teardrop from the corner of her eye. “I’m fine. What was she saying to you?” she said, eyes still watering and her face set in a pout.
“I was only telling her what we found out there.”
Her eyes narrowed as if he were in a conspiracy against her.
He reached for her and gently gripped her shoulders. “I’m not sure what I can do to help.”
She removed herself from his hands by shifting her shoulders. “You can’t.” She covered her chest with her folded arms closing him off. She looked away from him toward the ground. “What’s our plan?”
“I’m not sure.” He gazed around the camp. “Not sure I want to drag myself back out in the wilderness without more information on where my mother went. This isn’t a bad base to search from.”
Her eyes shifted. “You remember what happened on Mount Eden. No place is truly safe.” Mount Eden, a giant military base and government continuity of operations center atop of a mountain in Virginia had been overrun in thirty minutes.
“You’re right.” The idea of a false sense of security was always in the back of his mind. Little Sable Point would get swarmed under in thirty seconds by a horde half that size. The thought soured his whole mood.
She looked like she was about to tell him something, but she choked it down.
“Pagan still hasn’t returned yet with the other Red Stripes. If he doesn’t return tomorrow, that’s a bad sign. Something bad is happening south of here.”
“What does that mean for us?” she said.
“More running. Either way, we’re in danger. As nice as these people have been, they could turn on us quick.”
Her eyes flitted up to his. “I mean us.”
“We keep fighting until we find a place for us.”
“We should stay,” she offered. She glanced at the vehicles around them. “We could live here. There’s food, water, safety,” she said.
He eyed the crude ring of vehicles with disgust.
“We are further from the cities. Maybe it’s far enough away to be safe. A place like this, free and safe, but organized and cohesive in purpose.” Her words sounded like a pipe dream, when in reality, they lived in a nightmare.
“That sounds amazing, but this place is lucky to exist and wouldn’t stand a chance against a horde.”
She looked at the ground. “I’m not sure, but we have to reach
for something better than survival or we will die tired, beaten and our spirits crushed. I need something. I need to believe in it. Back there in West Virginia, I saw people at their worst. Not like the infected. People like you and me, and it crushed me. It took away my hope. When you rescued us, a glimmer of hope was there, but when you left me again and Lucia died, I knew I was wrong to hope. People are evil. They lack morality and conviction. They don’t even have a sliver of compassion for others. It makes me sick to be like that. I’ve seen the good in people in the past, and I want it back. Even if it’s just a lie I tell myself so I can sleep at night.”
Steele’s jaw dropped a little, his mouth hanging open a crack. It had been days since she had said more than a few sentences at once to him. “I…I understand. I want all those things too, but I’m not sure where they even exist at this point.”
Her eyes grew impassioned. “We can run trying to find them, or we can make them. I may not be the same person I was, things might never be the same in our relationship, but we can only reap what we sow. We either build a society we want to live in, or we perish in the flames of someone else’s.”
Her words burned inside him. “The world will never be the same. I’ve accepted that. But everything I’ve done was to keep you and others safe. I’m no saint, but I’m trying to do the right thing.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You never would have left me in Pittsburgh if that was true,” she said.
He shook his head no. I am going to be paying for that decision for awhile. “I thought we were over this.”
“No. You have to understand why you were wrong.”
“I had to leave. It was the only way Colonel Jackson would let us go.”
“We should have left then, escaped.”
He threw his hands in the air. “With Mauser on crutches. No vehicle. Mountains to climb. Hundreds of thousands of infected between us and here. There was no way. We needed them.”
“You left me alone.” She looked away, trying to compose herself.
“You weren’t alone. Mauser was there along with Kevin and Joseph.” Mauser’s name was a bitter mint on his tongue.
“They aren’t you.”
“They aren’t, but if I thought there was a better way, I would have done it. Colonel Jackson threatened your life if I didn’t do it, and you and I both know he meant it. We’re lucky to be free of the man.”
She was silent. “I understand you have your duty, but remember you have a duty to come back to me. You have a duty to include me in your life. You have a duty…,” she stopped, her sentence trailing off.
“I’ll always come back to you. I’ve always promised I would.”
She sniffed hard, rubbing her nose. Awkward tension filled the air.
He reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, removing the yellow, packaged birth control pills.
“I found these for you. Probably won’t need these, but,” he said, giving her a careful look. He placed the plastic wrapped package in her hand.
She stared down at the package and back at him. It was as if she held Pandora’s box in her hands, infinitely tempting but only woes were locked deep inside.
“That’s the right kind, right?” he asked, confused by her response, thinking she would be appreciative or at least want them.
The disc-shaped object sat atop her open palm. She eyed them poisonously.
“Are they not right ones?”
She quickly put them in her pocket and wiped her hands on her camouflage pants.
She gave him a short smile. He was confused. He expected some sort of thanks.
“Of course they are. Thank you,” she said quickly.
“Okay, good. Can’t be too careful. Jesus, can you imagine if you got pregnant now?”
Her throat jiggled up and down as she swallowed.
“I can’t.”
JOSEPH
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO
An air-pressure resistant door closed behind him with a whoosh. It sealed closed and the air was sucked out of the chamber, leveling the air pressure with Patient Zero’s containment room. The low pressure made it difficult for pathogens to escape. A rubber bladder inflated, making the seal tight along the door edges.
Joseph’s blue HAZMAT suit wrinkled and scrunched as he turned toward Dr. Weinroth. Behind her plastic faceplate, she flashed him a nervous smile.
Their section of Cheyenne Mountain was a Biosafety Level Four Laboratory (BSL-4), meaning they could handle any and all known diseases that were fatal and had no known vaccine or cure. In this case, their current viral enemy was both, unknown with no known treatment.
“Are you ready?” he asked Dr. Weinroth. Her eyes were anxious beneath her fogging glasses.
“Of course,” she said. Her voice shook a bit in his headset earpiece. “My glasses are kind of a pain,” she added softly, pushing on her plastic faceplate.
“Mine too,” Joseph said into his microphone. They both wore headsets to communicate effectively inside their suits. She stared at the metal door as if it were the gate to Hell. A red biohazard sign covered the middle of the door, reading Authorized Personnel Only over the glass.
Whether or not she was ready, it was time. He timidly pressed the flat of his palm onto a large, circular red button on the wall. This was his first day without a sling, and his arm was shaky at best. When he let his mind drift at night, he could still feel the blade sticking into his flesh and through the muscle, the cold foreign metal inside his body.
The button depressed and an orange siren on the ceiling spun. It honked away like a submarine under attack from above. If they were exiting the lab, vertical banks of nozzles would be spraying them with a decontamination shower for over seven minutes.
The doors rolled open. With a look at one another for courage, the two doctors hesitantly stepped inside the white room. The overhead fluorescent lights shone down with extreme brightness. They were encased in airtight boxes to prevent viruses from collecting along the edges. Epoxy was lathered over any fixture where a pathogen could hide.
Richard Thompson lay on a single shiny metal table in the middle of the room. His arms were bound at his sides. A white sheet covered his lower body. His head was strapped down with a band across his forehead. Machines lined the head of the bed. They beeped out Richard’s heartbeat and other bodily functions with robotic consistency. A miracle in itself, he was the only infected person still alive.
The doctors’ blue biohazard suits crunched step-by-step like they were walking across a bubble wrap covered floor for Patient Zero. The room’s ceilings were high, well over twenty-five-feet tall. The room was all white except for the two-way mirror on the wall. The other doctors observed from the opposing side.
Richard’s eyes, the color of chalky chocolate milk, moved from one doctor to the other. “Who are you? What are you doing to me?” Richard stammered. His chin shook with fright and his breath quivered from his lips.
“Richard. It’s me, Dr. Jackowski. I found you at your home in Grand Haven.” There were others. Your wife and daughter. Dead. Joseph digested the thought hoping the man couldn’t read his thoughts.
Richard closed his eyes. “My wife? And Helen?”
“I am so sorry, but they have passed,” Joseph said.
Richard stayed with his eyes forced closed for a moment. “No. No,” he whispered. When he opened them, they blamed Joseph with angry tears.
“I wish there was something I could have done for them.”
“You could have started by having your friends not shoot them,” Richard spat. Richard tried to turn his head away but had to settle with averting his almost white eyes.
Joseph swallowed hard. No choice, but how could we ever make this man understand? “If you cooperate with us you will be able to save the lives of millions of people.” If that many are left.
Richard twisted his face. Joseph touched Richard’s shoulder. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“Who’s the girl?” Richard said. His eyes turned to
Dr. Weinroth like a predator.
“This is Dr. Weinroth. She is an infectious disease specialist with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. We are going to run some very basic tests in an attempt to learn more about the virus.”
“Hello, Richard. We are here to help,” Dr. Weinroth said with a sad smile.
“What’s wrong with me?” Richard cried. His arms pulled against his restraints. His normally nonexistent veins became vascular, crisscrossing his forearms. “Why am I strapped down? Let me out of here.” His hands rolled in a circle as he searched for a way to free himself. Dr. Weinroth took a step back. Joseph locked eyes with her, trying to give her strength. Her pretty face was stricken with worry.
Joseph nodded to her. “It’s okay. He’s harmless in his current state.”
She shook herself. “I’ve…” She looked at him again. “I haven’t been this close to an infected patient yet.”
“You haven’t? How?”
“I’ve been here since the outbreak. I wasn’t with Colonel Byrnes at Detrick. They only sent us samples, but no live specimens.”
Joseph gave her a comforting smile from behind his suit mask. He glanced over her shoulder at the mirror. He was certain Byrnes scrutinized him on the other side.
“Let us begin. Richard, I am going to give you a topical anesthetic, and we are going to biopsy some of your poxes.”
“Okay,” Richard said quietly.
Joseph picked a syringe up and pressed it into Richard’s shoulder.
“Ow,” Richard uttered. Joseph ignored him and injected his shoulder. He removed the needle and set it down.
“Now that’s not so bad is it?” he said to Richard.
“It stung.” Richard’s eyes kept going from doctor to doctor.
“Dr. Weinroth. Can you hand me the scalpel?” His eyes briefly grazed her plastic-covered face. She handed Joseph the surgical knife. He tapped Richard’s skin.
“Do you feel that?” Joseph looked at Richard’s whitish-hued eyes. It was unsettling to see a live person with such a dead stare. Joseph tried to smile.
“No. Only pressure,” Richard said.
The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 83
