Chris braked and cut the engine. As the car became quiet, the front door to the small home opened, throwing an arc of light on the dirt track. In the entrance stood a man that Chris hadn’t met before. Wearing a bomber jacket with a thick beanie pulled down to his eyes, he was almost broad enough to fill the doorway. Chris leant over and extracted a hand gun from the glove compartment, checked the safety and shoved it down the back of his jeans before climbing out of the van. He zipped up his jacket against the biting cold and approached the house, breath pluming ahead of him as he walked.
‘Are you Tom Burrell?’
‘Yeah, that’s me. I take it you’re Chris?’ he asked, before enveloping his hand in a bone crushing handshake.
Chris’s fingers throbbed as he extracted them from Tom’s pathetic attempt to establish dominance. Anger could wait, first he wanted what he’d come for.
‘Frank said you’ve finally gathered enough fertilizer to fill our order?’ If he’d driven this far out of Hobart in the dark for nothing, he’d be bloody furious.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got your stuff. It just took a while to source enough of it without drawing the cops’ attention. I swear I must have driven around this bloody island five times to find this shit,’ he said, brushing past Chris to walk down the side of his house. ‘It’s in a shed at the side. If you back up your van, I’ll help you load.’
Chris followed the man, leaving a pace or two between them. Tom had the smell of a man who didn’t place a high value on body hygiene, and he had no desire to be closer than necessary. In the lee of the house stood a single car garage built from fibro sheeting. Tom clicked open a padlock at the door’s base and lifted the metal entrance, exposing a pitch-black interior. He pulled a torch from his pocket and flicked it on, bathing the garage in harsh white light. Chris felt his heart rate surge as he saw what he needed on the floor. A pallet’s worth of fertilizer lay on the ground in twenty litre bags.
Chris reversed his van, and with Tom’s help, loaded the fertilizer on board. Chris heaved the last bag into the van and stood up. His back emitted a dull thud as he stretched, pushing hands into the base where a deep-seated ache gnawed at the muscles. It had been worth it though. He’d sourced the electronics needed to construct the bombs the previous week, and now that he had the fuel, all he had to do was put the masterpiece together.
Tom let out a low whistle as he looked at the bags. ‘I knew it was a lot, but it didn’t really register just how much until now,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually ask questions about a job, but this one’s got me a little worried. Your group’s got nothing to do with farming as far as I can work out, so it kind of only leaves one other use for such an amount of fertilizer...’
Chris copped a waft of Tom’s body odour and grimaced. The man was starting to get on his nerves. ‘I think you already know the answer to the question you’re hinting at. Yes, Tom. It’s going to fuel a bomb – if you’ve got a problem with that, I’m happy to ease your conscience by not paying.’
‘Nah, man,’ said Tom backing away. ‘It’s cool, as long as I get my cash it’s no business of mine. Speaking of payment, I wouldn’t mind wrapping this up and getting out of the cold, yeah?’
Chris opened the van door and pulled a bag out from under the driver’s seat. ‘In cash as requested,’ he said, holding out the money.
Tom smiled as he took the package, finding rolls of yellow fifty dollar notes carefully bundled inside. ‘Nice doing business with you,’ he said.
Chris’s eyes hardened as the man walked away from him. He liked a job with few loose ends, and a man that asked too many questions was a liability. He pulled the revolver from his jeans and aimed at the back of Tom’s head.
‘One last thing, Tom.’
The man turned back to Chris, a half smile fading as he saw the gun.
‘As much as I appreciate your service, I won’t be needing it again.’ Chris fired, grinning as the bullet smashed through his victim’s teeth, exiting the base of his skull in a spray of tissue, bone and blood. Tom hit the dirt with a meaty thud, his eyes staring sightlessly into the bush.
Chris collected the money from where it had fallen and returned to the van, a look of contentment on his face. He knew his father would be proud, and outside a growing urge for violence, there was little else that mattered.
He had a few weeks grace to create the bombs. Chris had secured a contact within the police force, a simple cleaner employed by a Hobart Police Station whose far-right political views perfectly matched The Patriots. Ignored by the police while he worked, he’d been free to read notice boards and papers left on desks. The day before, he’d hit pay dirt and contacted Chris with a perfect scenario to inflict maximum damage. The Hobart Police station on Liverpool St. would be hosting an education day in three weeks’ time, where all non-essential police officers from across the state would be crammed into the one location. The education day was to outline changes in policy toward disaster management. Chris couldn’t help but smile at the irony, it was just too good an opportunity to miss. He’d be happy to add a little realism to their disaster exercise, and with the Royal Hobart Hospital across the road, if the stars aligned for him – maybe he’d even get to involve Julie in the fun.
Chapter Fifteen
The doors at the end of the prison wing smashed open, banging loudly off the brick wall as the army extraction team pushed two trolleys into Harry’s lab. The four-man team looked on edge, dust and blood-spattered faces streaked with sweat as they jogged forward.
Harry ditched the paperwork before him and ran to help transfer the patients onto laboratory beds. After a few close calls where thrashing Carriers had nearly tipped their trolleys, Harry had taken the step of bolting the bed frames to the ground and making permanent steel restraints that fastened around upper and lower arms of the patient to prevent movement.
The leader of the extraction group, a Corporal Helmad by his uniform badge, spoke up as they fastened the last of the clips about the second patient. ‘These two have been bitten for a while, so I don’t know how much use they’ll be to your trial, Doc.’
The first patient, a middle-aged man, had fallen unconscious during the transfer. The other was a young woman. Sweat beaded her pale forehead as she watched Harry and the paramedics with sad eyes.
‘How long since they were bitten?’ asked Harry, while he burrowed a wide bore cannula into the woman’s forearm.
‘Around an hour. We had a hell of a time getting them out after it fucking turned to shit. What had been reported as a single Carrier over the radio, recruited ten others by the time we got on site.’
‘Where were they?’ asked Harry.
‘The wharf again, those poor bastards keep getting the worst of it. One of the fishermen got bit by a Carrier pulled up in a net, but kept it hidden from the rest of the crew. When they got back to shore, he died in a back room, then came back and wreaked hell.’
Harry grunted in disgust at the man’s cowardice. If there was one universally accepted rule since the plague outbreak, it was that once you got bitten, you ensured that you did not become a risk to family and friends. Most achieved this with a self-administered bullet to the brain, otherwise the job fell to a family member or a doctor like Harry when no-one else was willing. But all those scenarios required the victim to notify others of their bite, so that they could be restrained appropriately before death.
As food supplies ran out, dependence on fishing as a source of protein had grown rapidly. Unfortunately for those delegated the task of operating the trawlers, it also came with moderate risk of plague exposure. At least once a week, a Carrier was pulled from the ocean floor in a drag net. Hidden amongst slippery, squirming fish, it often wasn’t until the contents of the net were dumped in the boat that the Carrier was found. These water-logged specimens were usually slow from cold, but their teeth were still sharp, fastening onto unwary fingers as fish were unloaded from above.
Harry felt for a carotid pulse on the side of the man’s ne
ck. Nothing. The man was dead. Harry double checked the man’s restraints, then injected the trial medication into his shoulder deltoid muscle, having little hope for success. If either of the subjects had a chance today, it would be the woman.
With another syringe of trial medication tight in his fist, Harry turned his attention to the second bite victim. He felt his gut clench as he looked at the young woman. Red lines tracked up the inside of her arm, emanating along lymphatic drainage pathways from the bite at her forearm. She looked young, owning features of a teenager. But her eyes were old, reflecting a mind prematurely aged by violence and loss.
‘Is this medication going to work, Doc?’ she asked, voice barely more than a whisper. Just the effort of speaking spiked her heart rate on the monitor.
Harry paused for a moment as he framed his reply. He held little to no hope that the medication would achieve any change, let alone stop the disease entirely – but that wasn’t what gave him pause. In times like this, his greatest aim was to ease the suffering of his patients. For some, this meant lessening their anxiety by bolstering unfounded hope. Whereas others became angry at such meaningless reassurances, preferring to have stripped back facts as they faced their final moments with grim stoicism. Harry met her eyes and decided the young lady before him was one such person.
‘Probably not,’ he said, resting a hand lightly on her shoulder in apology. ‘But I hope to God I’m wrong.’
The woman’s eyes became glassy at his pronouncement, a lone tear falling from the corner of her eye. ‘But it’s not a waste of time, right? This trial might help some other person survive in the future?’
Harry felt a weight descend on his chest at her words, his heart aching that a kid had accepted her own death sentence with mute bravery, choosing to focus instead on how it might help others.
‘Every failed trial leads us closer to a cure – that’s what we’ve got to believe,’ he said.
Harry uncapped the syringe, forcing himself to concentrate on job specifics to distract his mind. Behind him, the first patient screamed and began to wrench against his restraints, the sound echoing about the cells so that it came from multiple places at once. Harry didn’t need to look around to know the man had reanimated as a Carrier. He gritted his teeth and jabbed the needle into the woman’s shoulder, administering the dose in a hurry. He could only hope that giving the medication prior to death would produce a different outcome than the thrashing Carrier behind him.
Medication delivered, he retrieved the captive-bolt gun and silenced the first patient with a single shot. Blood leaked from a neat hole above the Carrier’s ear onto the sheet as quiet was restored to the lab, broken only by the laboured breathing of the young woman. The army retrieval team had withdrawn to the far end of the jail wing, giving Harry space while they too waited on the outcome.
Harry moved to the side of the woman. As she deteriorated, she grabbed onto Harry’s fingers, seeking some human contact. She was now looking her age, a frightened girl who didn’t want to die. Harry squeezed her fingers back, knowing there were no words that could make it any better, all he could do was just be there for her.
Suddenly her limbs started jerking against the restraints as a seizure took hold. Harry extracted his hand from her fingers and stood back from the bed, helpless to change the outcome. Saliva began to pour from her mouth, bubbling in frothy masses. Her eyes were open but vacant as the seizure eased, leaving her limbs still. The saliva continued to froth from her mouth, something that Harry hadn’t seen in any other of the Lysan Plague victims, striking him as odd until his mind finally clicked. She was experiencing symptoms of end-stage Lyssavirus, rather than that of the mutated Lysan plague.
The woman’s chest rattled with every breath as she struggled to move air past aspirated saliva, slowly drowning in her own secretions. Gradually her respiration rate fell. The cardiac tracing on the screen became erratic, deteriorating as her heart ceased to function properly, then at all.
It was a few moments before Harry realised she was gone, that the room was now completely silent. He leant forward and closed her eyes. At Harry’s movement, the soldiers watching quietly from the end of the wing got up and exited, shoulders stooped and faces grim.
Harry felt washed out and so very tired as he looked down at the girl. With leaden feet, he went to retrieve the captive-bolt gun and placed the barrel end against her temple. In a few short minutes of acquaintance, Harry had gained respect for the woman’s bravery, and had no desire to see her transformed by the plague. Harry started to squeeze the trigger, and then froze. His heart raced with a new thought. She had displayed signs of Lyssavirus, not Lysan Plague as she died! If this was the case, it could prove crucial in whether or not the virus progressed to the next stage of re-animating the body.
Harry’s hand shook as he backed away and dumped the gun on the bench. If the medication could make a victim remain on the right side of the grave, it could represent a game-changing win against the plague. Harry rooted around the desk until he found a timer that he set to counting. He moved a stool to the foot of his patient’s bed and began a nervous watch.
***
A sound woke Harry. He jerked his head off the bench and looked over at the woman’s body, silently swearing at himself for falling asleep. His heart rate began to ease again as he saw she remained still. The noise that had woken Harry sounded again and he looked in its direction, toward the first plague victim. Harry felt his gorge rise as he saw a large grey rat sitting on the man’s face, chewing hungrily at the corpse’s upper lip. Somehow, he’d slept through much of the rat’s feast, with an eye and much of the nose already gnawed away. Harry picked up the first thing that came to hand, a heavy textbook, and flung it at the beast. The rat squealed with indignation, landing on the tiles in a sprawling mess before scurrying for the nearest cover.
Harry grimaced at the gruesome mess. Rodents seemed to be one of the few mammals to have benefited from the plague, exploding in numbers as they fed on the dead and grew increasingly defiant and unafraid of humans. Harry felt an uncomfortable squirm as he realised the creatures probably viewed humans as a food source now, rather than a predator to be avoided. He’d kept a rat as a pet when he was a kid, but now when he looked upon a wild specimen, he felt nothing but revulsion.
As Harry turned back to the body of his female patient, his eye caught the time on his watch. All thoughts of the rat were banished as he picked up his phone and dialled Veronica in Canberra. She picked up on the fifth ring.
‘I think you’re on to something with the last batch of medication, Ronnie,’ he said, barely able to catch his breath as he looked from his watch and back to the immobile corpse. ‘It’s eight hours post death – and the victim hasn’t reanimated.’
Chapter Sixteen
Mark squinted against the morning sun. A dew-covered field of grain reflected light like a million diamonds, exacerbating his headache painfully. Vinh had somehow found a bottle of Jack Daniel’s the night before, and Mark had joined his Sergeant in a glass of bourbon after they’d finished preparing for today’s operation. Compared to the moonshine his platoon occasionally brewed at the barracks in Geelong, it had tasted like nectar. One drink had turned into a few more, and suddenly the two men had been staring at an empty bottle. It had seemed amusing the night before, but now that he was standing in a wet paddock with the snarl of approaching Carriers on the wind, he was less than impressed by his own actions. Vinh didn’t look much better, his Sergeant’s hangover voiced through a foul mood as he ordered soldiers into the desired formation.
Steph walked up to him, disgust clear on her face. ‘How’s your head?’
Mark grunted a non-committal reply, refusing to admit a headache that was gradually building to migraine. Steph had given them both a mouthful of abuse last night when she’d walked into their room and seen the empty bottle, furious that either man would compromise their fighting ability for the sake of a few drinks.
‘Are you up to leading today?�
�� she asked in a low voice, ensuring it didn’t carry to any other soldier. Steph looked behind them at the contingent of locals who eyed their preparations with interest from the other side of the fence. Joel had invited them to watch Mark trial a new method for clearing a field of Carriers, hoping that they would subsequently join the program. ‘We can’t afford this to go wrong if we want to build their trust.’
‘I’m fine,’ he muttered. The last thing Mark wanted was a lecture. ‘How about you stick to your job, and I’ll hold my end of the bargain. There seems to be a hole in the line with your name on it, Corporal, how about you fill it.’
Steph’s mouth tightened in anger at the dismissal, but she kept her lips closed and returned to her allocated position. Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly, cursing himself for biting. He knew he’d pay for that later, but hell, that’d be karma for his stupidity the night before.
Mark turned around to Joel who was holding a speaker set and gave him a nod to start the recording. The mayor hit play and turned up the volume, emitting a recording of rabbits screaming. Mark winced slightly, the awful noise piercing his brain like a hot needle. Out in the paddock, he could see movement in the waist high grain as several Carriers responded, zeroing in on their location.
Mark and his soldiers had changed the paddock’s fence at one corner. Inspired by a cattle yard design where animals are funnelled into a narrow area for loading onto trucks, the fence at the corner of the paddock had been altered. Instead of meeting in a right angle, one fence stopped just short of the corner, turning to run parallel with the neighbouring paddock, producing a one by twenty-metre-long enclosure. The plan was to attract Carriers into the funnel for culling. After much deliberation, Mark had chosen this method to give farmers the option of conserving ammunition by dispatching the Infected without a firearm. If it worked, farmers could put speaker sets on timers in the morning to gather any Carriers that had wandered onto the land overnight for easy culling before starting the day’s work.
Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation Page 11
