Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation

by Hodge, Alister

  He punched the access code into a pad by the entrance, disengaging the electronic lock, then shoved the door aside. The centre of the building was open air, empty cells rising in three levels to either side of the gap. The open area on the ground floor was now a maelstrom of activity. Two emergency department trolleys were parked on the ground, each with a bite victim tied in place. The ambulance crew were finishing the job of securing the limbs of a lifeless man to the trolley. A woman with dark curly hair glanced up at Harry as he entered. She was one of his fellow researchers, a doctor named Veronica. She hastily pushed a pair of glasses back up the bridge of her nose with a gloved hand as she paused to address him.

  ‘Harry, we’re too late for that guy,’ she said, pointing to a middle-aged man tied to the stretcher on the right. ‘Can you put him in one of the cells then get back here. I need your help with this one – we might still have a chance with her.’

  Harry’s eyes flicked about the scene, absorbing details to get a handle on what was going on. The middle-aged man was dead, a chunk of flesh and two fingers missing on one hand and another crescent shaped wound to his upper arm.

  Lysan Plague had a varying speed of onset from one victim to another. Some took only minutes to convert, while others could take hours. The determining factor was severity of trauma. More traumatic injuries involved larger blood vessels, giving the virus quick access to the body and transport via the circulatory system to the brain. In these cases, death was due to blood loss. Harry’s research however, focused on victims with minor bite wounds. In these patients, the virus caused an overwhelming infection, eventually killing the victim through septic shock before taking control of the body.

  The middle-aged man was covered in congealing blood down one side of his torso. The bite wound to the arm had severed a larger vessel that couldn’t be sewn off in time, leading him to bleed out in transit. Harry closed the distance to the trolley in a few steps, grabbing the end and kicking off the wheel’s brakes. One foot twitched as he shoved the trolley into motion, heading for the closest cell. Suddenly the man’s eyes opened and his head jerked off the bed, rage contorting his face as he screamed. He was no longer human. The personality, thoughts and memories that had made him unique, were gone. He had become one of the Infected, a creature governed only by rage, violence and a need to feed.

  The ghoul locked eyes on Harry, jaws snapping as it lunged against its restraints. Harry controlled his urge to recoil and finished pushing the trolley into a cell. He locked the door and left the Carrier to impotently snarl and thrash. If only we could shut the bastards up. Too many of his dreams were disturbed by Carrier screams, but he knew he wasn’t alone in this regard. Even the most functional of survivors suffered from recurring night terrors.

  He hurried to Veronica’s side. Next to her was a young woman, barely into her twenties. Sweat matted the victim’s blonde hair, soaking into the bed sheet below. Her eyes were vacant and blood shot, the surrounding skin an unhealthy grey. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, while a pulse barely flickered under Harry’s fingers on her wrist. She was on the way out and they had maybe fifteen minutes at best.

  Veronica held a syringe filled with a light-yellow liquid clenched in her right hand. ‘Shall we administer it intravenously this time, try and speed overall uptake of the drug?’

  ‘I don’t think we have a choice, she’s not going to be with us much longer,’ said Harry, with little hope that the drug would work. They’d already tried hundreds of variations, and none of them had even slowed down the progression of the disease, let alone stopped it.

  Veronica found a vein on the inner aspect of her elbow and gently inserted the syringe until she got a flash back of blood. Now certain she was in the vein, she injected ten millilitres of trial medication. Veronica dumped the used needle into a sharps bin and stood back from the girl.

  ‘Ok, that’s Lysan Trial number 189 administered,’ she said, looking hopefully at a screen displaying her patient’s vital signs.

  Nothing happened for a few moments. Harry jotted down the serial number of the vial, and the first set of observations. As he glanced toward the monitor, a frown creased his forehead. The woman’s heart rate was sky rocketing, quickly approaching 200 beats a minute. As they watched, her heart rhythm deteriorated into ventricular tachycardia. Losing cardiac output, the patient stopped breathing, eyes staring sightlessly beyond the veil.

  Harry reached out a hand, feeling for a carotid pulse under the patient’s jaw.

  ‘Any output?’ asked Veronica.

  Harry shook his head. ‘Grab the pads, she’s in a shockable rhythm.’

  Veronica switched on the defibrillator that was stationed near the head of the bed, and then stopped, her shoulders slumping.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Pass them over while she still has a chance,’ said Harry as he exposed the woman’s chest, ready to apply the pads.

  ‘There’s no point, Harry. We should be saving this equipment for uninfected humans that it might actually help.’

  Harry bit back a sharp reply and thumped the side of the trolley in frustration. She was right, and he knew it. Didn’t stop the situation from pissing him off though. The chances of success were non-existent and shocking her would only serve to waste a resource that was now severely limited. Just like most of the equipment in the hospital.

  Veronica walked to the other side of the bed and looked down at the dead woman. She looked exhausted, skin pale, movements blunted. Harry’s gaze was drawn to her eyes. They conveyed a sadness that he found difficult to witness, as she wore her grief at a lost husband and son freely for any person to see. And yet she worked on somehow, like they all did.

  ‘We should probably park her in one of the cells before she converts,’ said Harry quietly.

  The other Carrier screamed once more from his enclosure, threatening to tip the heavy trolley with his violent movements. Harry turned to the ruckus, distracted for a moment. Abruptly he felt his wrist jerked to the side, clamped in an iron grip. Harry whipped his head back around to find the woman was sitting up, teeth bared. She emitted an animalistic snarl and yanked his wrist toward her mouth.

  Harry pulled back, trying in vain to rip his arm out of her grip as a low wail of terror escaped his mouth. Insanely strong, the Carrier was winning the tug of war, teeth snapping as his hand came closer to its mouth.

  From the other side of the bed, Veronica grabbed a pair of surgical scissors and stabbed them in a backward swing, deep into the Carrier’s right eye. Still the beast fought on, oblivious to the jelly sliming her cheek from the punctured globe. Veronica followed up with an open palm hit against the handle of the scissors, driving the blades through the bone at the back of the eyes, and deep into the brain. The Carrier flopped back onto the bed, releasing Harry’s wrist.

  ‘I could have sworn the retrieval team tied her down after moving her onto our trolley,’ she said, voice shaking. ‘Did she get you?’

  Harry lifted his hand before his eyes, checking each surface for a breach in the skin. Nothing. He breathed a ragged sigh of relief. ‘No, I’m good,’ he replied. ‘But that was a little close for comfort.’

  ‘No shit,’ said Veronica as she got back to her feet. The male Carrier screamed again from his cell, making her flinch. A look of irritation crossed her face at the sound. ‘Can you shut him up, I’ve had about as much as I can take today.’

  Harry nodded, and walked to the side of the room where the lab’s captive-pin gun was kept for such duties. Whenever possible, they avoided firearms to reduce the danger of ricochets and equipment damage. Harry checked through the cell door that the Carrier hadn’t escaped its restraints, then let himself into the room. Wasting no time, he paced to the head of the bed, pressed the barrel against the Carrier’s skull and pulled the trigger. A metal rod punched deep into the brain, killing the ghoul outright. The Carrier fell limp, features relaxing into permanent death.

  ‘Even if I do this for the next twenty years, I’ll never get u
sed to it,’ said Veronica from the cell’s doorway.

  Harry backed away from the corpse. After the surge of adrenaline, he felt a little wired and shaky.

  ‘None of these medications targeting the virus are having any effect,’ he said, forcing himself to move past the near-death experience and get his mind on track. ‘Maybe we should attack the problem from a different angle, stop trying to kill the actual virus, and focus on how it gets a dead body up and moving. Once we understand that, it might open up a whole new pathway by which we can block its effect on humans.’

  Veronica shook her head tiredly. ‘And as I’ve said to you a million times before, to this exact line of reasoning I might add – we still have not the slightest idea how the virus achieves reanimation. It should be scientifically impossible and yet it happens. What we can look at, is disabling the actual Lysan plague virus. Until we know how it activates a cell – we’re standing dead in the water with nowhere to go for your line of enquiry. We can’t afford to waste that much time. Leave that to the bigger labs in Canberra – we should stick to testing the medications they send us and do the job that’s been assigned.’

  Harry was about to argue further but was interrupted by his pager. He glanced down, sighing as he read the short message.

  ‘They need some help at the Emergency Department, there’s been a surge of patients,’ he said. ‘I better get down there.’ There was no chance he’d sleep in the next few hours after what had just happened, so he might as well keep working for the next while.

  Harry stepped past Veronica out of the cell and flicked off the plastic gloves he’d been wearing into a bin. He looked over at the female Carrier’s body and felt a shiver of revulsion at the scissors standing proud from her eye socket. ‘Anyway, I think me and her need a little distance for a while. Do you want to come? We can clear this mess up later.’

  Veronica nodded, following Harry as he left the building.

  ***

  Harry placed a mug of steaming coffee into Veronica’s hand and sat on a nearby seat at the staff station. With all hands on deck, it had taken less than an hour to work through the surge of patients. Since the plague, the patient mix coming to the ED had changed somewhat. Each person that walked through the doors genuinely needed to be there. His time wasn’t wasted by common colds or sprained ankles these days – those who had survived the outbreak had learnt to look after the minor stuff themselves. People knew that resources in the hospital were extremely limited and tried to manage what they could on their own.

  ‘I like that patients aren’t wasting our time with minor shit, but I kind of think it’s gone too far in the other direction,’ said Harry as he leaned back in his chair. ‘Take that lady you saw with pneumonia, she should have been in here days ago.’

  The patient in question emitted a series of hacking coughs before spitting a massive clump of green phlegm into a cup. Exhausted from the effort, she slumped back on the bed, pale and breathless.

  ‘I hear you. She needs a course of intravenous antibiotics, but we’re now officially out of stock,’ said Veronica.

  Harry swore. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yep. She just got our last vial of ceftriaxone. Either she turns the corner with oral Amoxicillin, or she kicks the bucket. It’s not like we’ve got an Intensive Care Unit.’

  Harry grumbled to himself in irritation although he was far from surprised. ‘We’ll have to hit up that list of Geelong pharmacies, see which ones we haven’t stripped bare. That might get us a few more weeks of stock?’

  Veronica shrugged, ‘Yeah, give it a try I guess.’

  The limited resources of the hospital were not the only thing that had changed in Geelong since the plague. Much of the city remained empty. Survivors had moved into the town centre, clustering in abandoned houses around the new army barracks. It was easy to tell which houses were occupied these days. You only had to look at the windows – if they still had unprotected glass, there was little chance of the premises holding a live human. Adequate defence trumped all other features of property appeal these days.

  Two storey properties were the preferred construction for safety. By replacing stairs with a removable ladder, an occupant could ensure they were unreachable in the advent of a Carrier home invasion. New construction was also in hand, building upon cleared land created by the incendiary bombs that had wiped out key suburbs the previous year. A builder had solved the problem of materials by merely scavenging from uninhabited houses, and provided a simple remedy for safety by raising houses off the ground on high piers with retractable stairs for access.

  Harry finished the last of his coffee and yawned. ‘I’m going for a ward round, hopefully there will be someone good enough to send home.’ The only active parts of the hospital were the Emergency Department and a lone general ward for patients too sick for discharge.

  ‘Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. I’ll meet you afterwards back at the lab? Better shift those bodies before they start stinking up the place, yeah?’

  Veronica, who had been a paediatrician in her former life, grimaced as she nodded, clearly unexcited at the prospect.

  As he turned to go, she stopped him. ‘Hey Harry, do you think we’re wasting our time with the research? We haven’t had one iota of success,’ said Veronica, eyes downcast.

  Harry looked at her, noting the growing despair that had marked his colleague over the previous weeks. ‘It’s not a waste of time, Ronnie. This won’t be any different to the hundreds of other diseases that have been cured in the past. It’ll just take time and perseverance.’

  ‘Ok, I guess I have to believe that,’ she said. ‘Because if we don’t succeed – this nightmare’s never going to end.’

  Chapter Five

  Chris zipped up the front of his leather jacket and shivered. Although the sun dominated a blue morning sky, it was still bitterly cold where he stood in a building’s shadow on Argyle street. He looked at his watch yet again. 10.30AM. His girlfriend had usually arrived for a coffee by now after finishing her morning rounds in Royal Hobart Hospital. While he waited, he checked his appearance in his phone, getting his hair just right, then inspected his fingernails. Chris frowned as he noted a rough edge on his right little finger. He’d have to sort that out later. Little details mattered to him, even if he knew others were too lazy to care.

  Movement across the street caught his gaze. Julie had appeared. She had a half smile on her face as she looked each way on the road, then trotted across the street to the footpath on his side.

  Julie walked right past him without a second glance.

  She was always distracted like that. His eyes followed her as she weaved through the morning foot traffic to her favourite café. He loved watching her move as she walked, short brown pony-tail bobbing with each step like it had a life of its own. He knew she liked his attentiveness, even if they’d had a few hiccups in their relationship. If he was honest to himself, it was more than a hiccup. She’d been outright rude to him the last time they’d talked, and he planned on sorting that out now. After straightening his jacket, he stood up straight and followed her.

  Julie had just been served a coffee (he knew she loved her skim latte cool enough to drink straight away) and had taken a seat at one of the long bench tables in the café. Naked brick gave the place an industrial feel that Chris appreciated as he took a seat opposite her. It took a few moments before Julie looked up and noticed him. Her pupils dilated and skin blanched as their eyes met.

  Julie had seen Chris from across the street as soon as she’d left the hospital grounds. As per usual, she kept her eyes busy, searching out other things on the street to prevent her from having to make inadvertent eye contact with the man. The freak had been stalking her for weeks. A one-night-stand followed by a few uncomfortable dates had been enough to make her run for the hills. And yet he still didn’t get the point that she had no interest in him, and he was starting to seriously scare her. Julie was certain he’d been on the street outside her home e
arlier in the week, trying to see through her bedroom window. Since she’d last confronted him, screaming for him to leave her alone, he’d kept his distance somewhat, but she knew he was still following her and keeping tabs.

  And now the bastard was sitting right before her, just when Dane was due to join her any minute. She found herself holding her breath, her chest tight - the guy scared the shit out of her. Julie forced herself to take a slow breath, deliberately unclenching a white knuckled hand from about her coffee. The guy fed off fear, and the last thing she wanted to do, was give him what he wanted.

  Chris watched her with a wry grin as he saw her expression change and adopt a mask before breaking eye contact. But he’d seen that first look, knew she was frightened that she’d pushed him too far with her rudeness during their last interaction. Chris was feeling magnanimous, he’d let her off this time.

  ‘Hey, babe, how’s your day kicking off?’ he asked, lounging back in his chair to make himself comfortable.

  ‘What are you doing here, Chris? I thought you said you weren’t going to follow me around anymore?’

  Chris ignored her comment.

  ‘Any interesting patient cases?’ he asked, casually reaching out a finger to stroke the back of her hand on the table. Julie snatched her hand away, chair legs screeching on the floor as she pushed it back from the table. Chris rose an eyebrow, his face subtly hardening.

  ‘Well, that was rude.’

  ‘I don’t want to make a scene, but you need to leave,’ Julie’s eyes had become glassy, tears threatening to spill.