by Holmes, John
“If you insist. My last assignment, as I told you last night, Sergeant Agostine, was at Fort Detrick. By then I was twenty-six years into the Army, and I’d gone as far as I could, even among Sergeant Majors. I had no intention of continuing, and the only logical assignment left for me would be at Division level. But I had dropped my retirement packet after Bryan was diagnosed with brain cancer, our dreams of building a farm here to putter around gone along with his health. For the last nine months, ticking down to the day I’d leave, they asked me to run the Inspector General’s Office. Hardly a glamorous assignment, and not the one I should have gotten, but by then the only thing a bad NCOER could do was give me a paper cut.” Doc and I chuckled, Doc’s ending with a wince as he curled one arm around his ribs.
“Detrick was the home of the Army’s bioweapons program, despite all denials of it, and at my level I knew the basics of what was going on. There was an entire complex beneath the fort, something like six or seven stories below the surface. Supposedly it was capable of containing any virus that might have been accidentally released. Containment levels and eradication protocols so complex I don’t think any one person could have understood them all. I think that’s why what happened is so horrifying to contemplate: the release of the ‘reanimation’ plague was intentional.”
We sat in stunned silence for a long moment. “No. Fucking. Way.” Red finally whispered hoarsely. “How could someone do that – on purpose? Who would even think of that?”
“This woman should never have been employed by the U.S. military. She should have been killed at birth.” The Sergeant Major said softly, with venom.
I knew the name, I spoke it at the same time she did. “Doctor Morano.”
I felt her glance pierce me. “You know her?”
“She did this.” Brit lifted the damned pirate eye patch I had never been able to break her of using, and the Sergeant Major leaned forward to examine the white eyeball, the iris so clouded it was almost invisible.
“That looks like her work.” She settled back into her chair. “You know, a question a lot of people asked after World War II was how Mengele could get away with his work. Everyone wanted to know if the times made the man, or if the man took advantage of the times. You could ask the same question about her. Her reputation on post was such that everyone referred to her as ‘Doctor Moreau.’ I suspect she took it as a complement.”
“She’s a fucking psycho,” I said, hoarsely. My wife’s face flashed in my mind. Our daughter’s arm in her hands, the splash of blood across her torso, the red eyes. I had married her with so much love and hope for the future, our daughter’s birth had been the best day of our lives, and thanks to one mass murderer all that was gone. I loved Brit, but there was nothing I wouldn’t trade, not even her, to have my family back. My old life and the old world back.
“She’s a sociopath for certain. I never understood why no one suspected her after the parasite was released, but I suppose in the general chaos no one got around to asking questions, and if she’s popped back up on the government’s radar, as she seems to have done, they may not care so long as she appears to be making progress towards a cure.”
“She’s based out of Seattle now, but she hops around the country. She’s got two Delta goons for bodyguards.” I told her.
Our host nodded slowly. “That’s enough to keep her in funding, and to give her whatever guinea pigs she wants.”
Ahmed leaned forward. “Tell us about the beginning, please.”
The wind had died, and just as she opened her mouth, the faint zombie howl echoed across the water. We all jerked upright, reacting on instinct to the sound, but our host only turned her head slightly, as if to hear better. She raised one hand to keep us in our seats. “What you’re hearing is Chazy, New York. The wind drops in early evening and you can sometimes hear it across the water. We’re safe here.” Pierre stepped back out on the porch to listen himself, his shotgun strapped across his back. “The wall is fully guarded in the evening, and there is no way across the water. You’re safe.” The sun was almost fully down, the sky a pale lavender in the west, fading to deep indigo. The moon was still new, and the stars blazed. Above our heads the Milky Way splashed rich and bright, and Brit sighed softly as she looked at it. The Sergeant Major continued her story, and slowly we all felt the chill of her words take hold.
“Even as IG, I had no influence or authority over the complex beneath us. It was administered by DARPA, I think in conjunction with JSOC, and it was made clear to me that the limits of my authority ended at the surface. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn. All I really cared about was counting down the days until I could get back here and be with Bryan for the last half of his chemotherapy. My stepson was up here with him, but he had his own life as a photographer in Florida and we knew he would be flying back south as soon as I left the military. There had been persistent reports that soldiers were disappearing from Detrick, and I had noticed on the local news that the number of homeless in surrounding cities was also dropping. There was no explanation for it, but many were of the opinion that it had something to do with Detrick. The base was gradually developing a rather sinister reputation. I’m a practical woman, but even I began to suspect. I asked around among the other Sergeants Major on post – there’s nothing to match the E-9 mafia, I can tell you – and finally one of them admitted that the disappearances had started about the time Moreau arrived.
“Finally, she snatched the wrong soldier: my NCOIC at IG. Before, she’d been careful to take soldiers already known as trouble-makers, choosing the drug abusers, recently-chaptered troops, or those who were most likely to be reported as AWOL. But I knew Staff Sergeant Roberts, and he was utterly dedicated to the Army. Not married, no children, he had nothing but the Army, and he worshipped it. Now I was pissed. It was one thing to hear rumors, but another thing to take one of my soldiers, steal him out of his own apartment, and experiment on him.” Even now, years later, I saw the NCO come out in her face, the old rage that someone had hurt one of her people. No NCO worth their stripes took the misuse of a subordinate by someone else, anyone else, lightly. “I confronted the Sergeant Major who supervised the bioweapons complex. We knew each other from Iraq, Harold Schumaker. He had balls, let me tell you. When Hasan Akbar fragged those two tents, Harry apprehended him in flip-flops and PTs. Get Harry drunk, and he’d tell you he clotheslined the little bastard as he ran between two tents after tossing his last grenade. Harry wasn’t scared of anything. Mortars, IEDs, suicide bombers, you name it: everyone and everything that tried to kill him failed. But when I confronted him about Roberts, he begged me to let it go. Begged me.” She shook her head, incredulous.
“Why the fuck should I let it go, Harry? She took my troop for her experiments. He’s not a lab rat, for Christ’s sake.’
“But I looked in his face and I saw real fear, the kind of fear that keeps a man up at night. I saw a terrified child staring back at me. ‘You have to let this go, Cassie,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about your soldier but you have to believe me, he’s beyond your help now.’
“Not much frightens me, but the sight of this huge, hulking man scared out of his wits, scared me. ‘What did she do to him, Harry? Why won’t you tell me?’
“He could only shake his head. ‘You don’t want to know, Cassie. I swear to God you don’t want to know.’
“’We have to stop her, Harry. Whatever she’s doing, you have to stop it. If there’s protocol, ways to seal her and her little Nazi scientists in there, you have to hit that button. How many victims is it this year alone? The cops are saying three hundred homeless are missing. If I go through the MPs’ records, how many more victims will I find?’
“He wouldn’t answer me. He just shook his head and told me to leave. I guess the best thing about that conversation, the only good to come out of it, for me at least, is that I confronted him the day after my retirement party. It was Friday, and I had cleared out my quarters that morning. I had ridden to post on my Harley, my truck pa
rked at a hotel near Catoctin Mountain Park. I climb, you know, and I wanted to climb that one before I left for home. Since I lived off-post, the bitch didn’t know that I was already moved out and miles away. I drove back to the hotel, tired and pissed-off, after dark. I figured I’d climb the mountain the next morning, then be on the road by 1500 or so. Instead, I got a call around one am. It was Harry.”
Chapter 24
We sat in silence, unable to turn away. I realized dimly that the island was pitch-black around us, all lights doused, and that eerie howling a gruesome accompaniment to what I already knew, in my heart of hearts, what she would say. Her face was pinched with old pain. “He was terrified, crying with fear. I could hear a pounding on a door somewhere in the background, with that same scream we hear right now. I could barely hear him. ‘Get out of your house!’ he cried to me. “For God’s sake, you have to run! She’s sending them after you.”
“Who, Harry?’ I shouted down the phone. ‘Who is she sending? What is that noise?’
“It’s too late for me.’ He sucked in a huge, sobbing breath and spoke as calmly as he could. ‘I’m so sorry, I should have done what you asked, and long before this. It’s all my fault.’ I could hear him loading a pistol in the background, and he came back on the line. ‘Forgive me, Old Girl. I hope you’re right, and God forgives all sins, because what’s about to happen is on my head.’
“’Harry!’ I yelled at him. ‘Don’t!’”
“’I have to. You don’t know what will happen to me otherwise.’
“The gunshot was loud on the phone, louder than I expected. I heard the phone drop, and then the sound of the door smashing in and a howling noise. It sounded like his office was being torn apart. Then the phone went dead.” The expression of bitter grief on her face gave me the shudders. She wasn’t just telling us this; she was reliving it.
“I didn’t know what he’d been screaming about, and I had no idea what that noise had been. But I’ve learned, over the years, to trust my gut. Better, I knew to trust him. I packed my bag, turned in the hotel key, and got the hell out of there. I didn’t know how much time I had, so I ditched the trailer with my motorcycle in the parking lot and left in the truck. I was on the road twenty minutes after his phone call. I called Bryan and my stepson answered. I told him I was on my way back north and he needed to keep one eye on the news. I turned on NPR, and less than an hour later the first reports came in. I set my speedometer for ninety miles an hour and drove without stopping for eight hours, taking back roads. I got here in less than twelve hours. By then the infection had spread to Baltimore and D.C. The island had a meeting in the schoolhouse, and I told them what I knew. We started planning the wall that night. Two of our people are general contractors, so we took all of our trucks to their sites and loaded up as much construction material as we could fit, load after load for eighteen hours straight. After that, it was only about a month and a half before the plague reached Burlington. We’ve been walled up here ever since.”
“Fuck me, that’s hideous,” Doc said hoarsely.
She leaned forward and speared each of us with her intense gaze. Pierre had lit candles after the sun fell and it was in their flickering light that she stared us down. “Doctor Morano condemned our entire world to satisfy her ego. I don’t think she released the zombies because I started asking questions. Harry had told me a few days before I confronted him that the funding was going to get cut in the bioweapons program. The staff were subject to the same furlough as every other DA civilian. Morano released her test subjects because she didn’t want to lose her job.” She leaned back, bitter. “Six and a half billion people are either dead or in some grotesque half-dead limbo because one woman wanted to play God at her own whim and get paid to do it.”
“It can’t be that simple.” Red protested. “There’s no way she could do something that horrible just to keep her job.”
“Hitler became Hitler because he couldn’t get into art school.” Brit said grimly. “Sometimes it is that simple, Injun.”
“And the Army is still paying her.” I breathed. “She’s been crisscrossing the country, testing ‘cure’ after ‘cure.’ It must all be an act.”
“Remember the VX nerve agent that killed Mya?” Brit reminded me. “She probably did it as much in the hopes of killing us as to see if it worked on the Zs.”
“She’s a sadist.” Doc said. “She gets off on inflicting pain. It must be a wet dream, to wake up every day and know she made this world.”
“I’m going to kill her.” I said simply, my wife’s face hovering again in my mind. “I’m going to wrap my hands around her throat and choke her to death slowly.”
“Get in line,” Brit said, grimly.
Hart stood up and leaned over in the Sergeant Major’s face. “Goddamn YOU to hell. You could have called it in, could have stopped it at the start. You ran. You fucking coward.” She slapped the Sergeant Major hard across the face, knocking her out of her chair, then ran from the room, tears streaming down her face. Red got up and followed her out.
“I suppose I deserved that. Not that it would have made any difference. You know how fast it spreads.” She rubbed her face where the imprint of Hart’s big hand was turning red. “Still, she’s right.”
Ahmed broke the uncomfortable silence that followed. “So, now what?”
Chapter 25
Outside the room there was a large crash, followed by a gunshot. Then the door burst in, and we were staring down the barrel of an old Thompson submachine gun. The .45 caliber barrel looked like a train tunnel, and it was pointed directly at me. Behind it stood Pierre, glaring at all of the team. Behind him, on the floor, I could see Hart buried under a pile of bodies, and Red was slumped on the floor, blood running from his forehead, smoking .22 still clutched in his hand. One of the islanders sat next to him on the floor, holding his arm where, I learned later, Red’s shot had cut a groove out of the muscle.
The Sergeant Majors’ voice rang out like a pistol shot. “STOP!” Ahmed immediately lifted his gun into the air; it had had appeared in the instant Pierre had kicked the door in. Pierre looked over at McIntyre. “Madame, are you alright? We saw the woman strike you, on the camera, and got here as fast as we could. I had to hit the Indian with my gun stock.”
“I’m fine, Pierre. A misunderstanding among old soldiers, that is all.” He stepped back, lowering his gun but still eyeing us warily. Brit rushed into the hall, where Pierre’s men were getting up from the prone figure of Hart. She kneeled in front of Red and lifted his eyelid, checking his pupils, then gave me a thumbs-up sign. Despite the blood running from her own split lip, Hart knelt next to her and started pressing a bandage to his forehead.
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I had been holding. Pierre’s finger had been on the trigger, and my stomach was a knot. Damn, that was close. He would have swept the whole room with .45 caliber slugs. Ahmed may have gotten him, but not before he had me and maybe someone else. I was getting too old for this crap. I waved my hand in a stand down sign to the team.
“You have very loyal people, Sergeant Major McIntyre.”
She looked at Ahmed, putting his pistol back in its holster, then at Ziv, who was placing a steak knife back down on the table. He had had it held back over his shoulder, about to throw it at Pierre. “So do you, Sergeant First Class Agostine.”
“Well, I’m glad that didn’t end badly. Though I think Red is going to have a bit of a headache in the morning. “
“I will have Doctor Brundage keep an eye on him. After all, we all know how important Specialist Redshirt is, don’t we?” She raised her eyebrows at me.
I looked at Doc. He looked back, understanding my thoughts exactly. She knew about Redshirts’ immunity to the infection, and Doc understood the look I had given him. If the next minute didn’t go well, Doc would give the word for the team to kill everyone in the room, and anyone in the way as we got the hell out of Dodge. I tensed up, and my voice turned cold.
“I don’t
know what you‘re talking about, Sergeant Major.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Nick. We ran blood tests on everyone. Brundage told me before dinner. I congratulate you on keeping him safe from the authorities for so long.”
I knew what this meant to her. If they took Red and turned him over to Doctor Morano, the island’s safety was assured. Weapons, ammo, food. Whatever they wanted. I studied her lined face for a moment, noticing the creases around her eyes, and I took a chance.
“Thanks. I trust you will keep our secret.” She looked back at me, and her face broke into the smile that I had seen worn into her eyes. No one who smiled and laughed often enough that it wore into the lines in their face could be evil. Hard, yes, but not evil.
“Of course. I would see Morano in hell before I turned over anyone to her experiments. I would suggest that after she is dead, you allow us to send our sample of his blood into the government. We can say it was from one of our islanders who died from an accident. Drowned, unfortunately, his body never recovered.”
“Sounds like a plan. Now, let’s see what we can do about getting your people some supplies. Do you have a length of road that a C-130 can land on?”
She motioned to Pierre, who jumped at the chance to leave the room. I turned to the former Serbian Special Forces soldier sitting next to me. “Ziv, can you go with him? You know what we need. And please don’t kill him. Make nice with the Frenchman.”
“He has more balls than any Frenchman I have ever seen” growled Ziv.
“I am NOT French! I am Quebecois!”
Brit walked back into the room, followed by Hart, who was holding a bandage to her own face. The Sergeant major looked at her, and was about to say something, but I broke in first.
“Hart, the next time you act without orders, you are off this team and on your own in the wilderness. Had we been in a combat situation and you had done something so foolish, I would have shot you myself. You put the whole team in jeopardy by antagonizing our host, and I’d like you to apologize to her. Now.”
