The Tide: Breakwater (Tide Series Book 2)

by Melchiorri, Anthony J

  She paused, shivering. Miguel placed a hand on her back. It felt inhumanly cold and heavy, until she recalled he had a prosthetic limb. The artificial forearm and hand were relics of his past service. While the cost of war manifested itself physically on Miguel, she wondered what psychological scars he might carry. Would she be like him someday—seemingly unaffected by the death and destruction around them? She felt certain the damage she had accumulated from this war against the Oni Agent would run deep within her. The guilt of ending someone’s life, someone who was a victim—someone like her mother. A sick, innocent person who’d been affected by a bioweapon. Someone who hadn’t chosen to fight her.

  “You all right?” Miguel asked.

  Gulping, Kara managed a nod and then wrapped her arms around her sister. If bearing these weights on her conscience meant her sister lived, she would readily sacrifice her mental and physical health. The Hunters rushed about the room with the medics and nurses, ensuring no one had been injured by the Skulls or any ricocheting rounds.

  Kara exhaled slowly and stared at the gaping skylight. A clear blue sky lay beyond, and sunlight poured through. Somehow, they’d done it; they’d kept the beasts from harming any of the others sheltered here. They’d been lucky the Skulls had done most of the work for them by falling three stories to the floor. If they’d broken through at ground level, Kara, the Hunters, and the rest of them might not have been so lucky.

  As if on cue, the doors to the east side of the gym burst open.

  -4-

  In the Huntress’s medical bay laboratory, Lauren Winters adjusted the stage on her light microscope. The persistent hum of the lab’s ventilation system kept her company while she deposited a histology slide under the scope’s lens. Peter Mikos stood beside her, anxiously awaiting their first magnified glimpse at the autopsied tissue they’d obtained from Brett Fielding’s brain—the first Hunter victim of the Oni Agent. Even before they’d biopsied the tissue, they could see the empty spaces formed by the infectious proteins, the prions, that had taken residence in the gray organ.

  Flicking the scope’s light source on, Lauren leaned over the eyepiece. White empty spaces, voids left by the spread of the disease, made the thin slice of tissue appear like Swiss cheese. That was why prion diseases were categorized as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies—they attacked the brain, turning it into something with the texture of a sponge.

  “Take a look,” she said and let Peter position himself over the scope.

  “Shit. This is awful. I can’t believe the disease progressed this fast in such a short time.”

  “Bioweapon engineering at its finest,” Lauren said. She slipped another slide under the scope. “Markers of astrocytic gliosis are stained a dark brown here.”

  The stain indicated regions of central nervous system damage and marked the destruction of cells crucial to the health and stability of the brain. All across the sample, dark splotches littered the tissue. She flicked another switch on the scope to turn on the microscope’s camera. An image of the damaged tissue stabilized on a nearby computer monitor.

  “That brain tissue looks more torn up than Dresden after World War II,” said Peter.

  “And that might be an understatement,” Lauren said. She typed a command on the keyboard and brought up the results of an earlier test. Several graphs displayed across the computer screen. “Check out these results.”

  “Ah, a luminescent immunoassay,” Peter said. “So the more prions present, the darker the blue.”

  “Exactly,” Lauren said. “I ran the samples in our spectrometer to assess how much light the solution absorbed.” Sure enough, their tiny samples had turned the solution a deep midnight hue, and the spectrometer readings confirmed the high concentration of prions present in the samples.

  “So you think we can attribute the aggression of the Skulls to these prions?”

  “I think so,” Lauren said, holding up one gloved hand. “Prion disease has been documented to cause confusion, hallucinations, dementia, and personality changes among other neurological alterations.” She ticked off the symptoms on her fingers. “It’s not farfetched to think these prions have been selected and engineered to cause extreme aggression.”

  “I suppose that’s especially true if Chao’s and Samantha’s reports on the Oni Agent’s early development in the Amanojaku Project are accurate.”

  “That’s what I’d guess. If researchers have been working on this since World War II, that would explain how it does what it does so successfully.”

  “Just think if these people had been focused on developing treatments for diseases like cancer, malaria, or even the flu. Healing instead of killing...”

  “I know,” Lauren said. “What a waste of intellect and scientific progress.”

  “And now we’re wasting our time cleaning up their mess. Instead of worrying about all the maladies Mother Nature throws at us, we also have to fight off what humans are engineering to destroy each other.”

  Lauren nodded, silent for a moment. “I suppose we could keep waxing philosophical about the ramifications of biological weapons, but that doesn’t help us right now.”

  “Fair enough,” Peter said. “So back to business: We can eliminate the nanobacteria that cause the extra-skeletal formations and produce the prions in the Skulls. And if we do that soon enough, we can prevent neurodegeneration and the resulting aggressive tendencies.”

  “Right,” Lauren said. “We can even eliminate the nanobacteria in people who’ve been exposed to the Oni Agent for an extended period of time, but if the nanobacteria have had time to produce the prions, we have no way to reverse the damage.”

  Lauren turned off the microscope. She pressed a gloved hand against the window separating the lab from the isolation ward where Scott Ashworth and Ivan Price were medically sedated. Though the outward signs of their Oni Agent infections had been eliminated, their brains were still overrun with the debilitating prions left there by the nanobacteria.

  “God, even if we can somehow stop the prions, we still have to find a way to restore the ravaged brain tissue,” she said.

  “Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

  “Can’t help it,” Lauren said, turning away from Scott and Ivan. She couldn’t believe they might as well be as good as dead. “So let’s focus on eliminating the prions.” She scrolled through the research papers she’d compiled. “I found a few case studies on a small-molecule treatment used to prolong the lives of those with prion disease.”

  “But it doesn’t cure the disease?”

  Lauren shook her head. “There have been half a dozen studies using strong antibiotics, but those too simply slowed the onset of prion disease symptoms.”

  “I feel like we’re out of our league here.”

  “Yeah, immunotherapy, silencing RNA, polyanionic compounds...nothing seems to do anything more than delay the inevitable.”

  “All these papers make it seem like a prion disease therapy might be on the cusp of scientific development, but I wouldn’t know where to begin. So many different experiments to run, treatments to test...” Peter drummed his fingers along a lab bench. “And I imagine you need someone skilled in neuroscience to deal with the matters of degeneration, along with someone who knows more about drug development than we do.”

  “No doubt. I’m used to handling bioweapons, when we can apply existing cures and therapies to a well-characterized disease, but this is something else.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Lauren glanced at the list of scientific papers on her monitor. Each paper had been spearheaded by different research groups in academic and medical institutions worldwide.

  “What do we do?” Lauren repeated Peter’s question. “We find someone who can help us.”

  ***

  Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases

  Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

  A distant rumble shook the windows and jolted Navid Ghasemi awake. He froze at the sound, his eyes wide
. The sound of the blast faded. A few ghostly howls rent the air. Then silence. He wrapped his arm tighter around Abby Martin as they lay on the hard floor. Abby continued to sleep, so Navid slowly stood, careful not to disturb her. A crick in his back hurt. He straightened his spine to assuage the slight pain.

  He glanced out the window but a pervasive darkness shrouded the world. Not even the moon was visible, hidden behind a blanket of unseen clouds. Probably better that way, Navid thought.

  He knew what it looked like in the daylight. Crazy people prowling the streets, attacking each other with all the ferocity of starving wolves, abandoned cars and the odd military vehicle, some charred. Trash strewn about and the occasional pigeon picking through the refuse of a fallen society.

  Whatever it was that had spread through the people of Boston had struck with the unexpected force of a tidal wave. He rubbed his eyes as he inched past the empty desks of his colleagues. He and Abby had stayed in the graduate student office while the other researchers ran for home.

  Their one-bedroom apartment was only a couple of miles away over the Charles River. Most of the time, Navid took the subway system, the so-called T, straight to work. Abby always biked. Home was so close, but he’d been too scared to risk the short journey through the madness he’d seen in the streets. Judging by the conditions of the area around the hospital, he doubted many of his colleagues had been lucky enough to take the T home to Cambridge, Fenway, or Beacon Hill.

  Still, he wasn’t certain he’d made the right decision to stay at Mass Gen with Abby. Trying to get home might not have been safe, but was staying in this hospital any better?

  He trudged toward the office door. He and Abby had pushed a desk in front of it to create a barrier between them and what lay outside. The desk had been Brian’s—another grad student. Next to the computer monitor on it sat three plush toys. Each was a cartoonish rendition, complete with eyes and a smile, of a deadly pathogen: Ebola, E. coli, and salmonella. Navid brushed the toys aside and leaned over the desk to glance through the small window in the door. The window was made of frosted glass that prevented Navid from getting a good look at what lay beyond this meager barricade. The only thing he could see was the persistent flash of the hospital’s crimson emergency lights.

  A dark, blotchy shape flitted in front of the window, momentarily blotting out the flashes of red. He ducked down, willing his hammering heart to slow, and tried to control his breathing. He and Abby had avoided contact with the zombies or crazies or whatever they were so far, and he didn’t intend to tempt fate now.

  He returned to Abby’s side and sat on the floor against the desk. He couldn’t fall back to sleep. The adrenaline from the distant explosion he’d heard and the possibility that someone—or something—might be outside their office kept him from nodding off.

  His cell phone sat on the surface of his desk, which was still littered with scientific papers he’d printed off and marked up in a bevy of highlights and pen marks. All of it was useless. What good was science in a destroyed world? Navid’s doctoral thesis was going to be on delivering drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases. His twenty-some years of education were worthless now.

  He picked up the cell phone and rubbed his thumb over the black screen. Technology was just as useless. The charge in their phones had long since been used up during their desperate efforts to contact their friends and family.

  His parents had emigrated from Iran to Canada during the Iranian Revolution. They’d feared the consequences of the burgeoning theocracy. It was almost forty years ago that they had run away for a better life. Now, Navid figured it didn’t matter whether they were still in Iran or Canada or anywhere else in the world. There was no running away to safety. He hadn’t been able to get a call through to either of his parents or his younger sister, all of whom he prayed were somewhere safe near their Toronto home.

  Abby had spent the same fruitless efforts trying to reach her family in Springfield, Illinois. None of her calls had resulted in anything more than a prerecorded message stating, “This number cannot be reached.”

  As far as they knew, it was just the two of them against the world. Since the outbreak, they’d been sheltering in the small, seven-desk office space alone, surviving on the food and drinks they rationed from the mini-fridge where the graduate students kept their lunches.

  Navid’s stomach growled.

  Abby rolled over and yawned. “You hungry, too, huh?” She pulled herself up next to Navid and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “Starving.” Navid brushed his hand through her long blond hair.

  Another distant explosion sounded. The windows rattled again, and Abby raised herself to the lip of the one nearest them. Navid joined her as they peered into the darkness.

  Orange and red flames licked up about a half-mile from their position. Black smoke billowed off the raging fire spreading to the neighboring buildings.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Navid muttered.

  Abby’s eyes remained glued to the conflagration.

  A chorus of blood-chilling, animalistic howls rose up. Navid couldn’t see the source of the din, but he knew it was the crazies. The flickering light cast by the flames provided enough light for him to make out a few dark silhouettes flitting between low-lying brick buildings. He saw one humanoid shape plunge through the broken window of the Yankee Dock Shop where he and Abby often dropped by for a lobster roll and fries for lunch.

  His stomach rumbled again.

  “We can’t stay here, can we?” Abby asked, turning away from the window.

  “I don’t think the fire will make it this far.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” she said. “Food. We need food, and all we’ve got are two moldy cheese sticks and some curdled milk.”

  Navid sighed. An intense pang of despair stabbed at him. “I know. It’s just—”

  “We don’t have a choice. We have to go out there. We have to risk it.”

  Navid shook his head. “I just keep praying help is going to come. Soldiers or policemen or someone is going to come bursting in here and whisk us away.”

  “The only people I see bursting in here are the goddamned crazies.” Abby’s chin dropped to her chest. “We should get food and move.”

  “Where to?” Navid asked.

  “Hell if I know, but if we don’t risk our asses out there, what chance do we have? We either face the crazies or we starve.”

  “Not much of a choice.” Navid stood. Abby held out a hand, and he pulled her up. Again, he felt a deep-seated pang of despair. Were they the only ones left alive in this hospital? Her eyes locked with his, and he pulled her close. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too,” she said.

  Navid gulped, trying to put on a brave face. At least the darkness might shadow the fear coursing through him. But he tried to be strong, tried to be resilient. Because they were alone. They had no one else to depend on. He interlaced his fingers with hers and gave her hand a squeeze before he started pushing the desk away from the office door. “Here we go.”

  -5-

  Kara leveled her handgun at the burst-open gym doors. Her pulse raced, and she waited with bated breath for the Skulls to surge through. When the dust settled, she saw someone with familiar blue eyes and light brown, almost sandy hair: her father. With Meredith by his side, Dom rushed to his daughters while training his gun on the scattered bodies of the dead Skulls. A dozen soldiers followed.

  Dom hugged Kara and Sadie. “God, am I glad you two are okay. When we saw those things had started coming through the roof...”

  Miguel patted Dom’s back. “Kara’s a hell of a fighter. Skulls didn’t stand a chance.”

  The soldiers flooded into the gym. They encircled the other civilians and began ushering them out the door they’d come through.

  “What’s going on?” Kara asked.

  “The Skulls forced their way over a gate.”

  “Were they all pushed back?” Miguel asked.

  �
��Not yet,” Meredith said. “But the Army just managed to regain control of the gate. A few Skulls may be scattered around the base, and there are still dozens of them around the commissary.”

  “That’s basically next door,” Hector said.

  “Exactly,” Dom said. “We need to move everyone while they’re holding the Skulls off.”

  Medics carried the injured out of the gymnasium, and soldiers hurried the last of the civilians out. The sound of gunfire resounded intermittently outside.

  “Last truck’s ready to move,” a soldier yelled from the gym’s entrance.

  “Let’s go!” Dom said.

  Kara followed the Hunters with Maggie and Sadie close on her heels. She stole a final glance at the bodies of the Skulls and for a second considered the tremendous waste of human life. That introspection was short-lived when the rattle of a jeep-mounted M240 greeted their exit from the fitness facility. Dirt and grass kicked up around several bone-plated, snarling Skulls in shredded police uniforms rushing toward the convoy idling on the street. Once enforcers and protectors of the law, the creatures abided only by the law of nature now: kill or be killed. But the beasts soon stumbled and fell as machine gun rounds tore into their flesh.

  Dom helped Kara, Sadie, and their dog into the back of a jeep.

  “We’re good to go,” Dom said.

  The driver gave a thumbs up, and the vehicle took off. Instead of falling in line with the rest of the convoy carrying the civilians to safety, a Humvee in front of them took off down another street. Their jeep followed.

  A voice came over the driver’s radio. “South gate secure, commissary clear.”

  They rumbled over several roads and an open lawn until the two vehicles slowed to a stop outside a building with shattered windows. Kara stared at the rows of lumpy, canvas-draped forms laid out around the building. She knew what must be under those olive-drab sheets.