Z-Minus (Book 5)

by Perrin Briar

  “They shouldn’t be calling anyone,” Richard said. “If the secret gets out that we had the virus before everyone else even knew about it…”

  “The secret’s already out,” Susan said, “and it’s tearing through New York, Boston, and now it’s here and about to tear through all of us.”

  “Yes,” Richard said, “but no one knows we knew about it before it got here.”

  “People are a little too distracted at the moment to start pointing fingers, don’t you think?” Susan said.

  “Right now they are,” Richard said. “But they won’t be after all this gets cleared up. They’ll want to blame someone. Who do you think they’re going to go after?”

  “You’re assuming this whole thing is going to blow over,” Susan said. “It might not.”

  Richard frowned.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I mean, what if this is the start of something?” Susan said. “What if this is the new era of human development? What if this is what the future is?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Richard said. “They’re animals. They could never defeat us. They’re dumb.”

  “A rock is dumb,” Susan said. “But it wiped out the dinosaurs. My point is, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Nothing might happen, and then we’ll be lucky to have to deal with the problem you’re talking about. The army is throwing everything they’ve got at them and who knows the effect they’re having.”

  Richard frowned, taking all this in. The thought they wouldn’t ultimately triumph hadn’t occurred to him before.

  “I doubt anyone will much care about what happened,” Susan said. “Only what we did to try and stop it. They won’t blame us. It’s not our fault. We didn’t design it, and we didn’t let it out. But we’re as sure as hell trying to stop it. We’re going to need these guys to help us do that. They’ll feel a lot better about their situation if they can call their friends and family and tell them what’s going on, to take away a little of their fear.”

  Richard nodded, but he still didn’t like it.

  “Yes,” he said. “All right.”

  Susan took her and Richard’s cellphones and offered them to Oaks.

  “Call your friends and family,” she said. “You must all be worried sick.”

  Oaks looked at the phones, but didn’t take them.

  “Have you ever served in the military?” he said.

  “No,” Susan said.

  She took a seat beside Oaks, getting comfortable. Oaks continued to shave slivers off the edge of his knife, blowing on it to clear them.

  “There are times when you’re sitting there,” Steve said, “maybe you’re being shelled or you’re told of an insurgency heading your way, and you wait and wait, and all the time you can only think about one thing. Home. It’s where you wish you were, because it’s where your heart belongs. You wonder what you’re doing halfway around the world in a country that doesn’t want you there. But more than that, you want to know your friends and family are all right. But you don’t call them often. Do you know why?”

  Susan shook her head.

  “You don’t call them because you need to keep your mind on what you’re doing,” Oaks said. “And if they don’t answer, you don’t need to be worried about something that might have happened. They could have been involved in a car accident, could have fallen down the stairs, a million and one things that could happen to anyone, anywhere. Could have gone to the doctor and discovered a lump or abnormality. And they might even tell you all this, depending on the person you’re talking to. Because they don’t understand what you’re going through.

  “So, I thank you for the offer, but we’d all prefer to ride this out, get to the end, and then call them. Plus, our partners knew what they signed up for. It’s not like they wouldn’t have learnt a thing or two from us. They know how to look after themselves.”

  Susan nodded. She didn’t really understand. She wanted nothing more than to speak to Amy, to hear her voice. But then, she couldn’t understand their situation anyway. Amy wore a kind of armor nothing could penetrate. Susan tucked the cellphones back in her pocket.

  “How’s your little girl?” Oaks said.

  “She’s fine,” Susan said. “She’s probably really scared right now.”

  “She won’t be the only one,” Oaks said. “A lot of people will be running scared, running to whoever they think will help them, not knowing it should be themselves they should be relying on. Everyone’s so used to having someone else take care of their problems that they’re helpless, worse than any kid, because at least they can adapt. We’ve been ripe for a disaster like this for a long time.”

  An ambulance screamed, its siren crying.

  Susan peered through the slats over the windows. The ambulance pulled up outside Charlotte General Hospital, dropped injured people off, and then took off again. It had to swerve around cars that had been dumped and left on the pavement. People carried loved ones in their arms screaming, crying and wailing.

  One man carried a small body in his arms. He looked from the hospital’s main entrance to the research center tucked behind it. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the crowds and chaos, or he was confused, not knowing whether the research center was a hospital or not. Perhaps he was just too desperate to care. He followed the path to the center.

  “Oh no,” Steve said, peering through the windows.

  “Shouldn’t we open the door?” Susan said. “We have medicine, food. We could help him.”

  “And what do you think will happen if we did let him in?” Steve said.

  Susan frowned.

  “We could save his kid?” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If we help him, the other people on the street would see him enter,” Steve said. “Then they’d start pushing and shoving to get inside. It would become chaos, like the hospital. They would get inside, eventually. The cure would be exposed, and there would be no way to protect it.”

  “We can’t just sit here!” Susan said.

  “That’s exactly what we’ve got to do,” Steve said. “The cure is more important than him, or his kid.”

  The man approached the research center and leaned in close to peer through the windows. The soldiers ducked down and hid out of sight.

  “Hello?” the man said. “Is there anyone in there?”

  The survivors were silent. The man moved away from the windows and banged on the front door.

  “Please,” he said, voice full of sadness and fear. “Let me in. I have a little girl. She needs help.”

  The look on the man’s face was distraught. Susan understood. She imagined herself in the same situation, cradling Amy in her arms, but quickly slammed the door on it. Otherwise, she would have pulled the door open and gestured for him to enter.

  Susan wanted to shout out to him, to tell him to go to the hospital, but knew he would only press all the harder to get them to let him in. Finally, hope lost, the man turned away. He stumbled down the ramp to the main hospital entrance. He pushed into the crowd, fighting for position.

  Susan relaxed, letting out a sigh. The others did likewise. Susan peered through the slats again.

  The people at the hospital’s entrance were shouting something. A couple of fistfights broke out. It was a disaster waiting to happen. That many people, jammed together into a space that small, it was only a matter of time before the virus spread like wildfire.

  Susan felt guilty relief they hadn’t opened their doors to the man and his daughter. But what were they becoming when they wouldn’t even help each other in their most desperate time of need? Even chimps extended the arm of friendship to those in need of aid.

  Susan had to remind herself that they were doing something more important than helping a single man and his daughter. We’re trying to save the world. We’re doing something greater than any of us. She would tell herself that for years to come, she knew, but it wouldn’t lessen the sting when she recalled the man’s heart-rending cries, de
sperately clinging to his child, who might have been dead for all the blood that drenched her.

  Susan thought of Amy. What if it had been her daughter at the door? She knew in a heartbeat she would have opened it, no matter what state she was in – infected or not, whether it doomed the world or not. She was her everything. Perhaps it was motherly nature. She would have put them all in danger. She didn’t care.

  Susan knew then she wasn’t to be trusted.

  Z-MINUS: 5 minutes 12 minutes

  Archie’s twin robotic arms whirred as they turned and spun in intricate movements, plucking chemicals from the wall behind it and adding them to its concoction. It could do the job of a dozen scientists. Richard was watching Archie as Susan entered.

  “How’s it going?” Susan said.

  “It’s at fifteen percent,” Richard said.

  “Fifteen?” Susan said. “Is that all?”

  “I know,” Richard said. “Feels like it should be a lot farther along than that, doesn’t it? So much has happened in such a short time.”

  The circular counter ticked to sixteen percent.

  “Any word from Rosario?” Richard said.

  No. But there should have been. The thought had been running around Susan’s mind for the past hour. It was all she could think about. She checked her phone every couple of minutes, but as yet there had been no correspondence. That was a good thing, she told herself. It meant they were busy, getting away from Charlotte and out into the countryside. But she was still worried. How long did it really take to send a message? Having said that, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen Rosario send a text message, or used it for any other purpose than checking the time.

  “None yet,” Susan said.

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Richard said.

  He didn’t need to refer to who ‘she’ was. Despite their divorce, Susan felt a sliver of calm. She nodded.

  “Do you think Archie will be successful?” she said.

  “He has to be,” Richard said. “If he isn’t, what’ll we do?”

  A silence followed, a silence that drove a wedge between them. Such silences never occurred when they were married. They’d always felt comfortable in one another’s presence. But now it was just another reminder of the love they had lost.

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” Susan said.

  “All right,” Richard said, a tinge of sadness in his voice as he turned back to look at Archie.

  Susan walked down the stairs one at a time, always seeming to make the mistake of thinking there was one more step when there wasn’t. She stumbled and gripped the railing tight. An apocalypse was meant to bring people together, wasn’t it? Was meant to make them realize the limited time they had was precious, finite.

  She looked up the set of stairs to the floor above. She should go back up there, grab him, and tell him how she still felt about him. The time for subtlety was over.

  She turned, but took no step forward. She couldn’t force herself to do that, even then. He had given up their daughter because of her condition, had left them, left her, to deal with it herself. She would not go begging back to him. She wouldn’t allow it. She turned and continued down the steps to the second floor.

  Taylor was already eating by the time Susan got there. Susan picked up a couple of sandwiches they’d lifted from the canteen and joined her. They ate sitting on the floor, the rest of the furniture having been removed and used as barricades.

  Steve had set up a lookout facing each direction. Currently, Steve stood at the window, keeping watch on the road leading to the hospital entrance. Oaks would be watching the opposite direction. They would all have their turn.

  “They’re taking this defense thing pretty seriously aren’t they?” Phil said.

  Susan jumped. She hadn’t heard him creeping up behind her. For such a big man, he moved very quietly.

  “It’s in their nature,” Susan said. “They probably feel more at home here now than they have since they got here. They’re no longer patients, but soldiers again. Plus, I bet they can’t wait to put some of their robot limbs to work.”

  “I didn’t think about it like that,” Phil said. “They’re used to warzones. I guess this time the war came to them, didn’t it?”

  He grinned, but it wasn’t really filled with mirth.

  “Oh, I thought I’d do some experiments to see how this virus works,” he said. “You know, when it comes in contact with us. Better to know as much about our opponent as possible, right?”

  “That’s a good idea,” Susan said. “What have you come up with so far?”

  Phil shuffled closer.

  “Well, I put some of the virus Archie made in a petri dish with some human tissue,” he said.

  “What did you find?” Susan said.

  “Do you want to see?” Phil said. “It’s only early stages, but it’s already pretty exciting.”

  He pulled out a tablet computer and tapped the screen. It showed a video of two sets of colors. It could have been a low-budget video game. In actual fact it was the viewpoint of a camera mounted above a petri dish on the fifth floor. Nothing much was happening.

  The virus was inanimate. The tissue jittered, alive with energy. Phil hit fast forward. The red virus dye made contact with the blue human tissue. Phil pressed play, and the video played out in normal time. The virus latched onto the human tissue and spread through it, turning the blue dye red. The human cells stopped moving, dead, upon contact.

  “I’ve been looking over the virus information,” Phil said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What do you mean?” Susan said.

  “Look at this,” Phil said. “The virus kills our cells. No one should still be alive after contracting it.”

  “So what are you saying?” Susan said. “We know they’re still alive when they contract it. We’ve seen them wandering around.”

  “I know…” Phil said.

  He spoke in the tone of voice Susan always hated, a doubtful tone, that suggested he knew more than she did.

  “What?” Susan said.

  “Maybe they aren’t still alive,” Phil said.

  “What are you talking about?” Susan said.

  Phil pointed to the microscopic battle taking place on his tablet.

  “See here?” Phil said. “It takes over our cells, killing them. At first I thought it worked like a strain of Ebola. But then, after a while, the cells reanimate again. Look.”

  Phil was right. The human cells were jittering with life once more. But they had been dead.

  “That’s impossible,” Susan said.

  “It might work a bit like Ebola at first, killing the carrier from inside, but it’s much faster,” Phil said. “By my calculations the person would be fully infected within eight hours.”

  Eight hours! Ebola usually took days or weeks to kill its host. Susan suddenly felt very weak.

  “Are you sure?” Susan said.

  “Positive,” Phil said. “I’ve run the calculations several times. It’s right.”

  Susan shook her head. This was unbelievable. Eight hours to turn into one of those things… Eight hours for Archie to create the cure… Life was full of coincidences.

  “Maybe just their brain functions are destroyed, unable to reanimate, and that’s why they’re acting like cornered wild animals,” Phil said.

  The image sunk in. A human with no consciousness, no inner voice, no humanity. They would be little more than animals with the basest of urges. To hunt, kill, feed… Exactly the kind of thing they’d seen on the news earlier.

  Steve approached Taylor, who was just finishing off her meal. He whispered something in her ear. Taylor nodded and stood up. She left, limping on her prosthetic leg. Something was happening.

  Susan got up and approached Steve.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  Steve looked down at her, his eyes distant and haunted. He seemed to be thinking something through. To lie to her? To be honest?

&
nbsp; Finally, he said: “They’re here.”

  Z-MINUS: 4 hours 51 minutes

  Their arms swung in lazy arches, pushing their momentum forward, their feet barely able to catch them before they fell. Heads lolled to one side on clearly broken necks. Other bodies were stiff and bolt upright. But all the infected were easy to identify with their unnatural gait, if you were paying attention. If you weren’t, they could creep up on you without your knowing, and that was exactly what was about to happen to the hospital crowd.

  The crowd had swelled larger over the past hour, until people were queuing up down the street, their loved ones lying on the pavement. A low murmur of sadness and despair pervaded. Doctors and nurses rushed from one patient to another, administering help to those they could, ignoring those they couldn’t.

  “The crowd’s making noise,” Steve said. “It’s attracting them.”

  “With those things out there, wouldn’t you be making some noise?” Susan said.

  “Not if I knew it attracted them,” Steve said.

  The infected ambled down the road toward the crowded entrance of the hospital. They circled like wolves approaching grazing sheep.

  The patients hadn’t notice them, too concerned with their loved ones to care.

  And then a scream went up.

  Movement. A lone figure turned to run. The other patients, confused, looked from the screaming girl to what she was screaming at.

  “No!” they screamed. “No!”

  They grabbed their loved ones and ran, bumping into one another in their haste to get away, tramping over the badly injured and sick. Some tripped, hitting the pavement hard. The infected fell upon them. They weren’t coordinated, acting more by instinct, descending from all directions at once.

  One infected grabbed a man – he looked to be the same who’d knocked on their door earlier. Once he was within the monster’s clutches he couldn’t seem to pull away. He was pulled into the wide open jaws of the infected, who bit him on the cheek. He cried and screamed, pummeling at the undead with his fists. It did no good. The infected tore his face apart, blood spraying in a fountain over them both. It was more horrendous than any gory horror movie Susan had ever seen, their victim’s cries more heartbreaking than any actor. Sensing an easy meal, a pack of infected fell upon the fallen man. They pried at his body, digging out his entrails and fighting for the scraps like wild dogs.