Pandemic r-1

by Craig DiLouie

  Pandemic

  ( Retreat - 1 )

  Craig Dilouie

  Stephen Knight

  Joe Mckinney

  The first episode in a new novella series by acclaimed horror writers Craig DiLouie, Joe McKinney, and Stephen Knight!

  As a new disease turns people into sadistic, laughing killers, in Boston, a battalion of light infantry struggles to maintain order. As the numbers of infected grow, the battalion loses control, and the soldiers find themselves fighting for their lives against the very people they once swore an oath to protect.

  During the ensuing collapse, the lost battalion learns the Army is still holding out in Florida, which has been cleared of the Infected. Harry Lee, its commander, decides the only hope for his men is to get there. But first they must cross more than a thousand miles of America that has been turned into a war zone, fighting a fearless, implacable and merciless enemy.

  Craig DiLouie

  with

  Stephen Knight and Joe McKinney

  THE RETREAT

  Episode One: Pandemic

  ONE.

  America. Boston. Christ Hospital.

  Forty-nine days of quarantine.

  At first, it was to shut the sick inside. Later, it was to keep them out.

  Outside, the world was dying. The world was going to die laughing.

  And the Klowns would own it all.

  The sirens had stopped long ago. All day and night, the air outside the hospital filled with heavy weapons fire as the Army fought to save what was left.

  The Army was losing.

  TWO.

  Dr. John Braddock had fought malaria, cholera, sleeping sickness, kala azar. He’d seen people bleed out of their eyes in Africa and shit themselves to death in droves in India.

  He’d never seen anything like the Bug.

  He eyed his watch with rising irritation. Chief Nurse Robbins was late.

  It was time to get her report. Do the rounds to check the patient charts. Review their dwindling supplies.

  He already knew the score. They would find some of the patients dead in their beds and supplies low across the board. But he had to take stock of everything.

  Normally, the Chief of Medicine handled that stuff, but she had the Bug, so the job had fallen on him.

  He closed his eyes and listened. A woman was crying in Pathology. Distant footsteps marked the progress of one of his skeleton crew.

  As a young, idealistic doctor, Braddock had joined Doctors Without Borders. After several years in Asia and Africa, the horrors he witnessed began to wear on him. In Aleppo, Syria, children lined up for measles vaccinations were torn apart in a rocket attack. In southern Sudan, refugees died from malaria after rebels looted his hospital.

  He’d come home but had a difficult time reintegrating. America lived in a bubble of prosperity. He regarded his colleagues as petty and competitive. Getting things done required socializing with people he didn’t understand. Hospital administrators and insurance companies constantly told him what he could and couldn’t do to save lives. He didn’t get along.

  Braddock resigned from one job after another. Nobody lifted a finger to make him stay. He was a big man, too intense and culturally out of touch. He intimidated people. He started drinking to dull the anger. He had no sense of self. America, his home, began to feel like another foreign land.

  Ellen White, Chief of Medicine at Boston’s Christ Hospital, visited Braddock in his shabby motel room and offered him a job: I believe in you, John. She offered him a place he could call home.

  He quit the bottle. Stopped fighting the system. Spent years in trauma therapy. He practiced medicine. Over time, he again began to feel like he was making a difference. He literally owed White his life. She’d brought him back from the dead.

  Then she caught the Bug. So many of the others had gone to be with their families, leaving thousands of patients in his care. It was an impossible task, but he wouldn’t let her down. He’d show them all, not least himself, what he was made of.

  Shoes pounded the floor. He opened his eyes as Robbins approached.

  “Dr. Braddock,” she said, her voice edged with panic.

  Another crisis. Adrenaline flooded his body. He welcomed it like a drug.

  “Soldiers,” she said. “They’re in the hospital.”

  “The Army? Here?”

  “They have guns.”

  “They’re the good guys,” Braddock assured her. “It’s going to be all right.”

  At the places he’d been, soldiers usually meant trouble. Guerillas, freedom fighters, Army, paramilitaries. But not in America. In America, soldiers didn’t loot hospitals.

  He couldn’t help but feel hopeful. They’d been on their own for months. Maybe the soldiers were here to help. Maybe they’d brought supplies so the hospital could keep functioning.

  He asked Robbins why they’d come.

  “I don’t know,” she said, fighting tears. “I asked them what they were doing here.” She started crying, her voice escalating. “They said we had to evacuate. They pushed me!”

  Braddock glanced over her shoulder. Another nurse watched them from a distance. “You’re Chief Nurse,” he whispered harshly. “Keep it together.”

  Seven weeks ago, she’d been overweight. Now her scrubs hung on her rail-thin body. Her sister was quarantined on the fifth floor. She hadn’t heard from the rest of her family in ten days. She was under enormous stress, as they all were. But he couldn’t have her cracking up. They all needed to be at their best, or they wouldn’t get through this.

  Robbins took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said in a softer tone. “Just tell me where they are. I’ll get some answers.”

  “They went upstairs.”

  His heart pounded. “Did they have protection? Masks, gloves—”

  “No. I don’t know. They weren’t wearing any when they came in.”

  “Christ. How many of them are there?”

  “A lot. Ten? Fifteen?”

  Braddock rubbed his eyes. He had to find them quickly. The thought of fifteen heavily armed soldiers catching the Bug horrified him to the bone. There’d be a massacre.

  THREE.

  Braddock parted the plastic sheeting and entered the quarantine zone. Smiling plague victims slept or stared at the ceiling. Intravenous drips fed them a barbiturate cocktail to keep them sedated. Glazed eyes followed him as he passed.

  He shook his head. They shouldn’t have been awake at all.

  The stale air stank of disease, sweat and neglected bedpans. It was the height of summer, and the air conditioning and ventilation had been turned off to conserve power. The hospital had become an oven. He heard the steady hiss of breath from hundreds of mouths.

  On a warm night six weeks ago, Braddock had been working in the emergency room. He thrived on the pulse of the ER—the rollercoaster of boredom and crisis. Even after everything, he was still an intensity seeker. The volume of admissions was staggering. Not a single patient had a disease. They were all trauma cases—broken bones, lacerations, gunshot and knife wounds. A man with a broken bottle in his ass. A woman with a yolky pulp where her left eye had been. A man partially flayed alive. Most were in deep shock. Those who could speak told stories of horror, about how the people they loved had savaged them.

  He’d never seen anything like it. When morning finally came, Braddock was sewing stitches into his ninth stab wound. The victims just kept coming. The wail of sirens filled the city—police vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks. The sky grayed with smoke.

  A SWAT team wearing respirator masks brought the first diseased people in armored cars. They dragged them inside by the necks with restra
int poles. The doctors sedated them, and orderlies strapped them onto gurneys. The first quarantine ward was established on the third floor. Then another and another until the hospital filled with carriers of the Bug.

  After that, the police quarantined the entire hospital, enforced it at gunpoint.

  The disease killed the old and the very young, while everybody else suffered from frontotemporal dementia similar to Pick’s Disease. The dementia resulted in a dysexecutive syndrome that manifested as severe aggression.

  All of which was a very scientific way of saying that men and women would suddenly decide to go after their loved ones with garden shears for a few hours of torture and murder.

  Nobody knew why they laughed.

  Pathological laughter could be caused by tumors, drug addiction or chromosomal and neurological disorders making the nervous system go haywire. Of all the possible causes, dementia seemed the most viable.

  But the laughter seemed purposeful. The infected appeared to enjoy inflicting or receiving pain. They laughed while they shoved a toilet plunger down somebody’s throat. Putting a bullet in their guts sent them into hysterics.

  Otherwise, the crazies retained higher brain function. They walked and talked. They displayed a rudimentary cunning. They remembered how to load a shotgun and where they kept the rake in the garage. But they had no sense of self. They felt compelled to seek out others and hurt them until they killed or infected them. They were puppets pulled on a string by the Bug. More than that, they were partners. The Bug wasn’t evil. It only wanted to be spread. The method of spreading was up to those it infected—their memories and creativity. That was the evil part.

  After a while, the Bug was categorized as a virus, but nobody knew where it had originated. It appeared to be synthetic, but if the government knew who made it, they weren’t telling. For a time, the media reported that members of an apocalyptic cult called the Four Rider Army had cooked up the Bug and had flown around the world spreading it. It boggled Braddock’s mind that a few crazy people could build a virus that could make the whole world go insane.

  Transmissibility: bodily fluids, which mainlined the virus to the brain.

  Infection rate: 100%.

  Incubation and symptoms: ten seconds to ten minutes.

  Braddock theorized that some people might not show symptoms for days. From a medical standpoint, it was fascinating. From a human standpoint, the worst horror imaginable. Humanity might not become extinct, but it might go crazy.

  If the Four Rider Army wanted an apocalypse, they were sure as hell getting one.

  The disease continued to spread outside the hospital. The news trucks sped off in search of other horrors. The police left with their barricades. The supplies stopped being delivered.

  After that, Braddock gave the staff a choice: Stay and try to keep the patients alive, or go home to their families. Most left.

  Braddock locked the doors and went to work. He avoided watching the news. Looking out the nearest window told him everything he needed to know. It was far worse out there than it was in here.

  They carried on. They had to. Braddock knew how cheap life was—and how valuable. The days blurred into weeks. Eventually, they would run out of sedative, and the patients would wake up hungry and wanting to play.

  After that…

  He hadn’t thought that far ahead. Maybe he’d find some other place where he could do some good. Maybe he’d just give up. Nurse Robbins would stay to the end because of her sister. Braddock would likely stay with her. The hospital was his home.

  On the fifth floor, Braddock found a group of heavily armed soldiers dragging his patients out of their beds and hog-tying them on the floor. The diseased opened their eyes and grinned.

  FOUR.

  The soldiers raised their weapons and screamed at him to get on the ground.

  “What are you doing to my patients?” Braddock demanded.

  “Get down on the fucking ground!”

  They wore camouflage Army combat uniforms tucked into brown boots. Tactical vests stiff with armor and bulging with gear. Kevlar helmets with that slightly unsettling Wehrmacht look.

  Their shoulder patches read MOUNTAIN with a symbol of two crossed swords.

  One of them had stenciled TEOTWAWKI on his helmet.

  “I’m not infected!” Braddock realized he probably looked it with his beard, matted hair and grimy scrubs and labcoat. He raised his hands and shut his eyes in fear.

  A stocky, powerfully muscled man commanded, “Lower your weapons. He doesn’t have it.” To Braddock, he added, “I’m Sergeant Ramos, Tenth Mountain Division. We’re under orders. You need to vacate this area immediately and let us do our jobs, sir.”

  The sir hung in the air, dripping with disdain. The bland, boyish faces of the squad regarded him as if they might have to shoot him anyway, just to be the safe side.

  Braddock stood over six feet tall. He’d boxed as a young man and would gladly take on any of these punks in the ring. As a group, though, they unnerved him. They’d been through hell. They were exhausted and close to the edge, relying on their training to keep it together.

  He tried to see them patriotically as American soldiers, men who risked their lives in defense of their country and did their jobs whether they agreed with the mission or not. But at the moment, they were invaders, and they scared the shit out of him.

  Braddock counted five. Robbins had made it sound as though there was a squad in the building, maybe two. Where were the rest?

  He spared a worried glance at Ellen White. She lay with her eyes closed and wearing her dreamy smile. Her long, graying hair lay neatly brushed on the pillow. He visited her often to give her status updates. He hoped she could somehow hear him and feel assured her hospital was still running. Even now, he sought her approval.

  The fifth floor was special for another reason. The ward was where Braddock had initiated an experimental treatment based on the Milwaukee Protocol, used to treat rabies. The patient was loaded with midazolam and ketamine to induce a coma, and then fed amantadine and ribavirin to fight the virus. He’d just started it. Anything was worth a try.

  Now these soldiers were ruining the experiment.

  “May I ask what your orders are?” he asked, trying to sound polite. He still trembled from the shock of seeing guns pointed at him.

  Ramos ignored his question. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am. I’m the acting Chief of Medicine.”

  “Then you’d better start evacuating the hospital. Get your staff out as fast as you can.”

  “And then what? Go where?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Wherever you want. Someplace safe. There are safety shelters.”

  “Who can I talk to about this? Who’s in command?”

  “The lieutenant. He’s upstairs with another fireteam.”

  Okay, we’re talking. This is good. We’re talking about it. “I’ll go speak to him then. Please don’t do anything until I get back. Ten minutes.”

  “We’ve got our orders. You have yours. Get your staff out.”

  The men smelled like smoke and fear. Their eyes were wild. They weren’t crossing the line. The whole country was. There’d been a decision at the top.

  “You don’t have to do this, Sergeant.”

  “Just get your people out, Doc,” Ramos said, his expression softening to reveal the man behind the mission mask. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “How bad is it out there?”

  “Bad enough for this. Desperate times, desperate measures. Understand?”

  “You still have a choice. These are innocent people. Innocent, sick people.”

  Fighting the infected out in the street was one thing. Murdering sick people in their beds in cold blood was something else. Sick civilians.

  “We have our orders.”

  “Shit orders,” a tall, wiry Black soldier said.

  Ramos wheeled. “What did you just say, Private?”

  The Black soldier nodded at
Braddock. “He’s right, Sergeant.” He pronounced it Sarrunt, making it sound deferential and defiant at the same time. “We don’t have to do it.”

  Braddock said nothing. He’d learned when to talk and when to shut up.

  “This is bullshit,” added another soldier with a handsome, boyish face. He looked like he’d be more at home surfing some wave in California than sweating here in a combat uniform. “It’s just us, with the ammo we got, and we have to waste the whole hospital? There are thousands of people here. Where’s the rest of the company?”

  “We lost our commo,” said the Black soldier. “Maybe the operation was scrubbed.”

  “Maybe the rest of the company is fucking dead,” said the surfer.

  A third soldier, sporting a stained bandage on his left cheek, pointed at the bodies in the beds. “You’ve seen what these people do. They killed our guys. They’re not even people. I say, kill them all.”

  “Best to put them out of their misery now before they wake up, and we have to fight them on the streets,” agreed a fourth soldier. “We should put down as many as we can.”

  The group was split down the middle. The sergeant was the tie-breaker.

  “It’s not up for a vote,” Ramos said. He lowered his shotgun and fired a round at the middle-aged man lying in front of him.

  Blood and brains sprayed across the floor. Some flew onto the legs of Braddock’s scrubs. The sound flattened his eardrums. His ears rang in the aftermath.

  The soldier with the bandaged face grinned, revealing two missing front teeth. “Hooah, Sergeant.”

  Ramos’s casual execution of one of the infected, which was supposed to demonstrate simplicity and resolve, backfired. The rest of the soldiers paled at the sight.

  Braddock backed away in horror. One of the patients on the floor tried to take a bite out of his leg, forcing him to take another step back. The woman’s jaws clamped shut with an audible click that made him shiver.