Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation

by Hodge, Alister

  Mark had ten of his men with him near the enclosure, five to each side of the corner. The rest stood outside the paddock around the enclosure, their rifles tipped with bayonets ready to begin the cull. They also had a duty to watch for Carriers drawn by the screaming from the surrounding area.

  Ahead of the soldiers, Mark could see five shambling figures heading their way. As they came closer, he started to make out facial details of the Infected. One had already picked him as its target, a man in rotting overalls had lips pulled back in a grimace as he lurched through the waist-high grain. Unblinking eyes locked onto Mark with the intensity of a predator closing in for the kill. The Carrier was missing its left arm from the elbow down, two short spikes of radius and ulna all that was left of the forearm. Mark watched it impassively. He’d seen too many Carriers before to be intimidated by the paltry handful coming their way. The danger from the Infected came when you got caught by surprise, or they swarmed; neither of which applied to the scenario before him. Today’s exercise was all about using their predictable behaviour to advantage, and prove to the farmers that they could learn to manage the small numbers of Carriers moving through the local area.

  Off to his right, he saw Steph tracking a movement in the grain. Nothing could be seen above the top of the grain, and yet the stalks could be seen moving, bending to the side before springing back into place as something passed through them at ground level. Steph grimaced as a rotten head emerged from the edge of the grain. It was a female Carrier, dragging itself on outstretched hands. Half a scalp of gore-soaked hair had been ripped free, like someone had drawn a knife from between her eyes to the back of her skull, then torn one side down to the ear. It must have not happened that long ago, as the slab of clotted hair still dripped blood, coating one side of her face in a nightmare of gore. The Carrier’s legs were reduced to bone and sinew from mid-thigh down, except for the two feet that were in perfect condition below the ankle.

  Steph grimaced at the sight, lifted her rifle and drilled a bullet through one of the Carrier’s eyes. As Mark saw others start to raise their weapons as well, he raised his hand angrily.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. As much as he wanted the morning finished so he could nurse his hangover in peace, if they killed each of the Infected where they stood, the whole exercise would be a failure. ‘Fall back behind the fence, we need these bastards in the trap!’

  Mark kept an eye on the Carriers in his peripheral vision as he watched his men climb the barrier and move toward the holding pen in readiness. Now that he was the lone man in the paddock, each of the Infected zeroed in on him. Their anger was like a palpable entity that washed over him, soaking into his whiskey-blunted mind and paralysing his thoughts as he locked eyes with one of the creatures. He stood dumbly as he watched the approaching Carrier, the man in overalls coming closer with every lurching step, batting aside the grain until he was only a few paces away.

  ‘Mark!’

  He heard Steph shout as if from a great distance.

  ‘Mark, fucking snap out of it you stupid bastard!’ she screamed.

  Mark shook his head at the words, breaking eye contact with the Carrier that had pinned his mind like a cobra hunting a mouse. The Carrier closed the last pace and stabbed its severed forearm at him, the fork of exposed bones like twin spears towards his eyes. Mark flicked up his rifle, catching the forearm on his bayonet, the two spears of bone mere inches from his face. With a grunt, he shoved the corpse away. The Carrier’s foot caught in the grass and it tumbled backward giving him some space.

  Mark glanced about the field, noting the location of the other Carriers as he moved toward the enclosure. Mindful of the farmers watching, he forced himself to walk calmly, staying outside lunging distance of the ghouls as he drew them into the trap. The Carriers followed him into the narrow confines of the pen, their faces contorted in a rictus of anger as they snarled and tried to hook his body into an embrace of teeth and agony. Mark now backed between his soldiers on either side of the pen, their bayonets at the ready. His spine bumped against the end of the enclosure, catching him off guard for a second before he realised his location. He turned and climbed the metal rungs of the fence at speed, swinging his body over the top as an outstretched Carrier’s hand missed his foot by a hair’s breadth.

  Mark hunched over for a moment, head banging in time with his pulse, and hands on knees as his stomach threatened to empty itself over his boots. He forced himself to stand, spitting a sour taste from his mouth. The job still needed to be finished.

  Six Carriers lashed out between the wire of the fence, trying to reach the soldiers on the other side. Mark looked back out into the paddock, finding it empty of movement. Everything that had been out there was now within arm’s reach.

  ‘Kill ‘em!’ he ordered, his voice harsh.

  Mark’s men stabbed forward with bayonet tipped rifles. They demonstrated ruthless expertise, destroying brain tissue by puncturing weak bone at the temple, driving through the mouth into the brain stem, or skewering soft tissue beneath the chin, stabbing upwards until the steel point of the bayonet penetrated the brain.

  Steph braced her boot against the fence and wrenched her rifle backward. With an audible squeak, the blade of her bayonet loosened from where it had lodged in an eye socket, and she was able to jerk it free of the Carrier’s skull. The ghoul flopped to the ground, joining the other five, dead again in the grass.

  A smattering of applause brought Mark back to his senses, and he looked behind to where the group of local farmers stood. Joel walked up to him, clapping a hand to his shoulder in congratulations.

  ‘I reckon we’re onto a winning method here,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t take long to construct enclosures like this within each paddock under cultivation – although we’d need one on both sides of the fence. Those screaming rabbits will draw anything within ear shot, not just the enclosed land we want cleared.’

  Mark just nodded, wanting the morning over. Joel paused, his expression thoughtful for a moment as he regarded the officer before him who looked somewhat paler than usual.

  ‘What was with the display in the paddock before? Surely there wasn’t any need to let the beast get that near to you?’

  ‘I wanted the farmers here to see my squad isn’t fazed by Carriers, but the bastard thing wasn’t meant to get that close,’ said Mark reluctantly. ‘Let’s just say I’m not thinking as clearly as usual this morning and leave it at that.’

  ‘I thought as much. Maybe next time try doing the job without having a skin full of drink the night before,’ said Joel, without a trace of sympathy in his voice.

  Mark’s head jerked up with surprise at his words. ‘Who said I’ve been on the bottle?’

  ‘Oh, give me a break, Lieutenant,’ said the ex-mayor. ‘The stale fumes wafting off you and your Sergeant are enough to make eyes water at ten paces. The people of my town will be risking everything they’ve got if they follow you in defiance of the Spartans. The least you could do in return is have some goddamned self-discipline and keep yourself in a shape to fight.’

  Joel left him where he stood, his politicians face already wiped clear of the disgust that had painted it just moments earlier, as he turned to the task of recruiting the other farmers to their cause. Out the corner of Mark’s eye he saw his girlfriend, Steph, smirking at him.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ Mark grumbled as his headache redoubled its assault on the interior of his skull.

  ‘Ah, nothing, Boss,’ she said with a smile. ‘Just enjoying hearing the truth spoken by another mouth than my own for a change.’

  Mark grunted in annoyed capitulation, unwilling to get into another argument with her. He turned away, doing his best to ignore his headache as he called his soldiers in. ‘Good work out there, men! We’ve proved it works; now we have the pleasure of building a shitload more of them. I hope your backs are feeling better than mine, because we’ve got a long day in front of us.’

  Hangover or none, the work would c
ontinue.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Harry stood up, pressing fists into the small of his back to ease a dull ache that gnawed with every movement. He’d escaped the confines of the lab for an hour, spending the time in their new garden instead. Two thirds of the asphalt within the walls of the old gaol had been ripped up to make way for vegetable cultivation. It was the same outside every dwelling in Geelong now as survivors sought to replace a dwindling food supply from Tasmania. Many had started their own veggie patches earlier, however General Black had recently issued a mandate requiring all citizens to plant market gardens in useable soil around their dwellings.

  Harry didn’t mind the work. He’d found it somewhat calming to kneel in the dirt, outside thoughts pushed aside for a short time while he planted seedlings or weeded. Spotting a green leaf pushing up from the ground, Harry leant down and brushed a few bits of soil aside to allow the seedling to emerge. Focusing on the sensation of dirt about his fingers as he helped create new life, even if it was only in the form of a plant, had helped provide some balance to the death he witnessed daily.

  A small Willy Wag-tail hopped along the ground nearby, the dainty black and white bird taking advantage of the newly turned earth to catch exposed bugs and worms. Harry watched the tiny creature hop along the ground with a bemused expression on his face, and then stood again with a sigh. He brushed off a few clumps of soil from the knees of his jeans and walked over to a tap to wash his hands. As much as he would love to avoid the lab for a while longer, he knew there was still work that he had to do.

  Veronica had returned from Canberra the previous week. Excited by Harry’s case report, she had requested a transfer back to the Geelong lab so that she could be directly involved with testing the new drug. Unfortunately, the early success that Harry had experienced had only been reproduced once. All other candidates had progressed in the usual fashion, dying only to return as an abomination of nature. The setback had thrown his colleague into a dark place. Harry knew the symptoms of depression, from personal experience as well as his professional role as a doctor, and Veronica had him deeply worried. She was having trouble sleeping, her ability to concentrate was slipping and she was becoming increasingly obsessive on certain aspects of the study without evidence to back her assertions.

  Veronica had become convinced that the medicine would work if administered before the person was bitten. Their successes in preventing conversion to a Carrier had been achieved in patients where they had the medication administered quickly after a bite, so Harry saw merit in her reasoning, however, believed that injecting uninfected people with the medication presented too much risk to the test subject at this stage. After all, the medication targeted activity of mitochondria – if they altered functioning of this critical cellular component in a healthy individual, it had a high probability of killing them. The ethics committee in Canberra had agreed with Harry, refusing Veronica’s request until testing had first occurred on primate subjects – which were unsurprisingly in short supply. She hadn’t taken it well, blaming Harry for the failed ethics application despite him having no power over the outcome.

  Keeping in mind that her reaction was more due to her mental health than anything else, Harry had kept his irritation at her behaviour in check and pursued the only line of enquiry open to them – gaining earlier access to bite victims. He had pulled in some favours and acquired a position on Geelong’s early response squad. Instead of waiting for the team to bring survivors to the lab, Harry would join them in the field, administering the medication to bite victims at the scene. The thought of taking on a semi-combat role again had weighed lighter on his mind than expected. There was something about actively seeking confrontation with the predator that lessened his anxiety; moving his role from potential victim, to that of the hunter, felt like it placed a degree of control back in his hands.

  Harry smiled at that thought. Control. He was sensible enough to know that any sense of control was an illusion. The only thing he had power over was his own actions in response to whatever was thrown at him. And he was damned if he would give an inch in his pursuit to find a treatment for the plague. Harry brushed his right hand past the pager on his belt that the Rapid Response Team had supplied. It had lain silent for the two days he’d worn it so far, but he knew that wouldn’t last. He’d have contact with the Infected soon, of that he was certain.

  Harry picked up his spade and garden fork and dumped them with the other gardening implements in an old guard house against the curtain wall. A small table and bookcase in the room was littered with gardening stakes, pots of fertilizer and a few types of pesticide. He kicked a bag of manure aside so he could shut the door, and trudged to the main cellblock and lab.

  Harry fumbled a clean set of clothes on in the gloom of the toilets, moving more by touch and memory than sight. A tiny square of glass high on the wall provided the only light in the unisex staff toilets, casting a narrow beam upon a cracked wall tile. With a petrol generator providing the only source of power, Harry had long since unscrewed globes in non-work areas to conserve electricity, although, every time he used the bathroom he cursed himself that he had removed these particular light globes. On more than one occasion while sitting on a toilet in the dark, he’d heard sounds in the adjacent cubicle that were hard to place; footsteps and mumblings that shouldn’t be possible when he was the only person in the building. Over one hundred years of continuous habitation as a gaol had stained the site with death and depression long before Harry had filled the cells with Infected corpses.

  Harry did up the last of his shirt buttons at speed, leaving the door to slam shut as he returned to the open lab area between the cells. He was unsurprised to find Veronica slumped at one of the desks, her eyes fixed on a computer. Her work output had fallen significantly of late, much of her time spent watching and re-watching old video files of her dead husband and child. Not this time though. As Harry came closer, he saw a news reporter on the screen.

  At the sound of Harry’s approach, Veronica glanced over her shoulder. Grey bags under her eyes were a mute testament of exhaustion, her clothes unchanged for days. Despite this, she seemed more alive than recently, something she’d seen had sparked a flare of interest in her eyes. Harry pulled back a chair beside her and eased himself down, back and thigh muscles aching after his work in the vegetable plot.

  ‘I thought that channel folded a few months back,’ he said, pointing at the screen before her. A female news reporter from Southern Cross News stood on a street in Hobart, facing the camera with brow creased as she presented her story.

  ‘Yeah, it did, but their News show still posts segments online each week,’ she said. ‘With the state government becoming more fascist every day, it’s the only show brave enough to tell it like it is. I heard the reporter on screen, Maryanne Clayton, has even been getting death threats. Pretty fucked up, eh?’

  Harry was unsurprised by her words, and felt the usual anger blossom in his chest whenever he listened to the state of affairs in Tasmania.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘The bastards have the only virus free real estate in the Southern Hemisphere, and they respond by not only abandoning their countrymen on the mainland, but now they’re turning Tasmania into a police state?’

  Veronica’s eyes were fixed back on the screen as they talked. ‘And that’s not the half of it. People look bloody scared - Maryanne’s been trying for the past half hour to get people in the street to voice their own opinions about the Tasmanian Patriots Party, and no one’s willing to talk on camera.’

  Harry watched the screen with interest as the reporter turned to address the camera as another person ducked away from her questions, hiding their face with a raised magazine. He reached out a hand and turned up the volume.

  ‘And there you have it,’ said Maryanne Clayton, her features tight as she addressed her viewers. ‘Fear in the general community of violent reprisal from the Tasmanian Patriots has now grown to such a point that public dissent
has been stifled. I have detailed evidence linking the party with several killings in the greater Hobart area – all involving people that have openly opposed the Patriots, and yet the government does nothing to control this metastasizing cancer.

  ‘Starting with the incineration of opposition protesters at a rally, the violence has progressed, taking on sickening likeness to Hitler’s Brown Shirts, as thugs attached to Mr. Finart’s party move against opponents, seemingly without fear of investigation. Opinion polls completed with the protection of anonymity, demonstrate a clear majority of citizens are opposed to the increasingly violent, far-right party. Our police force are hamstrung, with leaders within their ranks stating off the record that they have been instructed not to investigate leads on multiple occasions.

  ‘Our Premier, Mr. Stephens refuses to condemn the Patriots, and as much as I wish this to be born of pure stupidity, I must confess to a growing fear that there is outright collusion between the Conservatives Party and this abomination.’

  Harry’s eyes were drawn to the right of the frame where an unmarked car had pulled to the curb. A thickset man spilled from the passenger door, his face concealed beneath a grey balaclava as he sprinted up from behind. Harry’s fingers tightened on the chair’s armrest, his breath catching as he noted a pistol in the man’s hand.

  ‘Fuck… no,’ Harry said beneath his breath.

  The cameraman and reporter were oblivious until it was too late. The man skidded to a stop and shoved the gun into the side of her head. Maryanne’s eyes widened in terror, her mouth forming a soundless ‘O’ as her head smashed to the side as the pistol fired, a bloody passage torn from one ear to the other. The reporter collapsed, falling into the mess of her own brains on the pavement. As the assailant raised his gun again, this time aimed at the cameraman, the footage abruptly stopped.