‘You can’t be fucking serious?’ said Harry, absolutely horrified at her proposal.
‘Why not? Other researchers have done similar things in the past. What about when Barry Marshall drank a beaker of Helicobacter pylori to prove the bacteria caused stomach ulcers? No one believed him until he proved his theory with his own body.’
‘The idiot wasn’t risking his life, Veronica. You can’t compare gastric ulcers to what you’re proposing!’
Veronica scowled at him. ‘It’ll work, Harry. I know it will, it just needs someone brave enough to trial it.’
‘No, not brave enough, Veronica. This isn’t bravery, it’s just plain reckless, that or...’
‘Or what?’ she said, eyes hard.
Harry took a breath, hesitant to say the truth that needed to be spoken.
‘You’re clinically depressed. We both know it. I think this kid’s just a trigger, because what you’re proposing sounds like a suicide attempt.’
Veronica took a step forward and slapped Harry across the face. ‘How dare you?’ She looked like she’d say something more, then closed her mouth and walked quickly across the room to a fridge on the far wall.
It only took Harry a moment to catch onto what she was planning to do. ‘Don’t do it, Ronnie. If you want to help people, keep researching. Treat patients in the hospital – but don’t do this, please.’
Veronica ignored him, pulling one of the syringes pre-filled with the trial drug from the fridge. She uncapped the needle and jammed it into her own thigh before Harry could close the distance to stop her.
‘I’m not a coward like you, Harry, and I won’t run from what needs to be done,’ she spat.
Harry felt a growing anger in his chest at her actions. ‘This isn’t bravery. It’s a fucking cop out, and I’ll be damned if I’ll help you kill yourself.’
‘Good. I’ll do it on my own,’ she said, and stalked away, leaving Harry alone in the lab.
Harry clenched his fists, his emotions a mix of anger and sadness at what she was throwing away. He looked back at the little girl on the bed, feeling his heart drop further at the next task before him. Given the situation, an autopsy needed to be completed, and better he do it with Veronica out of the lab. With leaden feet, he picked up a tray holding an array of scalpels and tools needed for the procedure and walked over to begin.
Chapter Eighteen
Mac dismissed one of the younger members after listening to his reconnaissance report upon movements of the platoon. Once he was alone again, Mac reached a hand up to his scalp, his eyes closed as he fingered the new scar. He winced as his fingertips traced the lumpy, red wound. It had healed imperfectly, part of it still weeping a slurry of serous fluid and pus. Since the soldier had smashed his head with the rifle, he’d been struggling to maintain control. His skull had been fractured, he was sure of it. A constant source of agony, it felt like a rat was gnawing from the inside out. Nausea followed him everywhere, and he’d been lucky to keep down more than a few bits of toast a day. A temper that had always been labile, was now out of control. Rage constantly lurked a hair’s breadth away, needing nothing but an imagined insult to make it explode.
He was convinced that his men were starting to talk behind his back and question his leadership. Mac needed a win. He needed to make the soldiers that had invaded his town bleed, needed to show his men that the Spartans were still in control. Up until now, it had taken everything he had just to get out of bed each day, let alone to organize an attack. But that would change today.
What he would have done for some smack or even a few tablets of Endone, anything to take the edge off his migraine, or at least make him care less about it. Drugs were one of the few things he truly missed of the pre-apocalypse world. The Spartans had run through their own stock within weeks of the plague hitting, forcing Mac and his boys to go cold turkey, an agonizing time of cold sweats, abdominal pain and hideous muscle cramps. He put on a pair of sunglasses and walked outside, determined to keep any sign of weakness hidden from the other men.
The eight-foot walls surrounding the chapter quarters were constructed of brick. Along the top, shattered glass had been stuck in a layer of cement as it set, providing an unforgiving obstacle to any person stupid enough to try and break in. This early in the morning, the angle of the sun caught the glass, sending needles of light across the yard in a thousand different directions. Behind the wall, he’d had a battlement walkway constructed out of scaffolding, allowing his men to dispatch Carriers drawn to the noise within. The complex of buildings stood five kilometres out of town, in easy striking distance of Joel Tipper’s farm. Mac ground his teeth together as he thought of the man. Joel had been a constant pain in his arse, the only farmer since the outbreak of plague willing to defy him openly.
He spotted his Sergeant at Arms leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette.
‘Get ten of the men ready to leave. I want them armed to the hilt and ready to fight,’ said Mac. ‘Load what we’ve got from the holding pen as well, they’ll provide a bit of cover for our boys during the assault.’
A predatory grin spread across the face of his Sergeant at Arms as he dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it under foot. ‘Good to have you back, Prez,’ he said. ‘Are we hitting those soldier-boy pussies at last?’ As his chapter president gave confirmation, the Sergeant at Arms pumped his fist in excitement. ‘Fuck, yeah! I’ve been wanting to smash the look off that officer’s face for weeks.’
‘We’re not after him,’ said Mac. ‘I want to make him hurt in a different way. I heard he’s screwing that pretty blonde in his squad. She’s the target. If he wants to get her back, he’ll have to leave town. If not, she’s not going to be beautiful for much longer.’
Chapter Nineteen
Dust motes danced in a spear of light over Harry’s shoulder as he zipped the blue plastic of the body bag over Ruby’s face. He signed off the last of the papers documenting his autopsy of the girl and looked toward the eastern side of the cell block at the morning sun, now penetrating through the tiny windows high on the wall. He felt exhausted and hungry, realising that hours had passed since his argument with Veronica. Harry had blocked out their discussion while he worked, having convinced himself that she would see sense with the light of day. He needed to touch base to ensure that the medication hadn’t caused any serious adverse effects.
Harry picked up and dialled Veronica’s number, praying that she’d calmed down after leaving and not done anything stupid. It rang out, going to voicemail. He tried twice more before giving up. Starting to become more concerned, he grabbed his stuff to go and find her. He paused at the threshold, debating with himself for a moment before running back in and grabbing a syringe of the trial medication from the fridge, just in case. She lived in a building only a block away from his, and he set off at a jog for her house, hoping like hell that he’d find her in a deep sleep or something to account for her lack of answer.
He pulled up, slowing to a walk as he approached her house, eyes darting about the scene out of habit. The front garden was overgrown, and weed-filled lawn knee-length. Despite the threat of fines and decreased rations for those who didn’t grow food staples around their properties, Veronica had made no effort. This didn’t surprise Harry, who knew she’d been struggling with the basics of self-hygiene and getting to work, let alone the extra workload of tilling a garden.
Harry’s breath quickened as he saw the front door slightly ajar. He drew his revolver, holding it at the ready as he pushed the door wide. The hallway was empty, lights off. He waited for a second, listening for any movement.
‘Veronica?’ he called out. ‘It’s Harry, I just want to talk for a minute.’
Silence.
Harry stepped over the threshold, checking the rooms to each side as he walked. It was the first time he’d been in her house since before she’d left for Canberra, and the place was a mess. Dishes covered in rotting food scraps lay in the sink, while clothes littered the floor about h
er bed. On the plus side, there was no sign of a struggle, no blood to suggest a Carrier attack. But the front door had been left open, so for whatever reason, she’d left in a hurry. That, or her mind was continuing to deteriorate and starting to miss the basic necessities of safety.
Harry grabbed a scrap of paper from his pocket and sat at the kitchen table, clearing a space for himself to brain storm a list of possible places she might be. With phone in hand, he started calling, apprehension growing with every minute. The Emergency Department hadn’t seen her, the guard at the gaol/lab complex confirmed that she hadn’t returned there, and the few friends that Harry knew she held in town had not touched base with her in days.
Harry looked at the last idea on his list – the Rapid Response Team. Veronica had stated she wanted to inoculate herself with Carrier saliva, and the soldiers of the Response Team would be her best bet to acquire such a thing. He dialled their headquarters and had the fortune to get Sergeant Larkin on the line.
‘Yeah, Doc, she called through about thirty minutes ago. To tell the truth, she sounded a bit scattered, not quite making sense.’
‘Did she ask for access to a Carrier by any chance?’ asked Harry, his knee starting to bounce in agitation under the table.
‘She wanted to join the squad on its next call out instead of you.’
‘And?’
‘I declined her request,’ said Larkin off hand. ‘I’m happy to support your research efforts where I can, but until she’s completed basic training, I’m not taking responsibility for her in the field.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ muttered Harry under his breath, but his relief was short lived.
‘She didn’t take the news too well, Harry. Tried to tear me a new one over the phone, then said some shit about finding a Carrier on her own if I wouldn’t help out. I’d have to say, she worried me a bit, I was actually about to give you a call to see if she was all right, but you beat me to it.’
Harry thanked the Sergeant for his time and hung up, more concerned than ever. Even if Veronica had decided to do something as crazy as let a Carrier bite her, surely she’d wait a few days for the medication to properly take hold before seeking out the plague? But she wasn’t thinking rationally and was very likely suicidal. Harry wracked his brains, thinking of where she might have gone before it hit him.
The fence line at Eastern Beach.
It was at Eastern Beach that she’d first told him about her idea for the new drug, and also where he’d killed a Carrier that had emerged from the water right in front of her eyes. There was no other place in walking distance that provided as high a chance of plague exposure.
Harry kicked back from the table, his heart hammering against his ribs. Taking off down the hallway at a run, he slammed the front door aside and took the steps onto the street at a leap. He lengthened his stride and ignored the fire of a stitch in his side, praying to whatever uncaring God was above that he had it all wrong.
Chapter Twenty
Steph tucked a wayward strand of blond hair behind her ear. Within moments, it pulled free again, whipped out by a stiff breeze cold enough to make her bones ache. Even if the day had been warm, she knew her joints and back would be hurting after the past week’s labour. Every soldier in the platoon had worked from dawn to dusk, replicating the Carrier trap in each field of Joel Tipper’s farm. They all knew the constructions would be useless against a swarm, however, for the usual handful of roaming Infected, they should be effective enough to let the farmers start tilling their land again.
Today they moved to the next part of the plan. Steph led a detachment of ten to begin harvesting the paddock of wheat at the front of Joel’s property, but first they needed to cull the Infected. She took a double handed grip on her Austeyr rifle and stabbed forward, driving the point of her bayonet deep into the screaming mouth of a Carrier. Brain stem severed, it dropped like a sack of dirt. Steph braced her foot against the side of the fenced pen and extracted her weapon. The recording of screaming rabbits had only attracted two Carriers after playing for twenty minutes. With any luck, the harvester’s noise would pull little more attention their way. Steph depressed a button on her radio and notified the rest of the squad that the front paddocks were cleared and ready.
Behind Steph, a rumble grew in volume as Heath approached, driving a combine harvester down the gravel road from the storage sheds. Joel’s son had taken an active role in all components of the project to date, and reminded Steph of Jai to such an extent that she had nearly used the dead teenager’s name when talking to him. Leaving the culling pen behind, she waved the rest of the detachment forward to the edge of the driveway that exited the main road, dividing the grain paddock in two and leading to the main house and sheds. Morning dew on the long grain soaked her camouflage uniform as she walked, sticking the heavy cotton to her thighs. She cradled her rifle across her chest, eyes scanning the field for movement despite the clearance measures already taken. The recording would only gather in those Carriers still capable of movement, and last thing she wanted was to trip over an incapacitated ghoul with a working mouth.
On reaching the edge of the paddock, Steph opened the double set of gates ready for Heath to drive through. The combine harvester was a massive piece of machinery, able to complete the whole job of reaping, threshing and winnowing to isolate the only edible part of the plant – the grain. Steph moved to the side of the opening, giving a respectful distance as Heath drove off the dirt road and into the paddock. It didn’t take much imagination to picture what it would do to a body caught in the wrong place. A spinning pick-up reel at the front of the machine was responsible for pushing the grain down onto cutters at the base, hundreds of teeth-like blades opening and closing at dizzying speed. With a shudder, she forced the thought aside and locked the paddock gate again.
Heath brought the huge machine to a stop, letting it idle while he swung the cabin door open. The glass of the windscreen and doors had been removed and replaced with a steel lattice. The holes in the lattice were large enough to poke a barrel through, but too small to admit anything wider than a Carrier’s finger. Heath had his 0.22 rifle propped in the rear corner of the cabin, ready for use if the situation changed.
‘You guys all ready?’ he asked, cheeks pink with excitement at the morning’s work.
Steph climbed up to the cabin so she could talk without yelling over the engine. ‘All good from our side. We’ve cleared everything that could walk or crawl from the paddock. If there’s a stumpy one out that’s missing legs or arms, it might still cause some issues if it gets jammed in the machinery.’
‘We’ll deal with that when and if we have to,’ said the kid with a shrug, apparently unconcerned at the prospect of extracting a rotting corpse from the harvester’s complex workings. ‘Worst case, we’d have to ditch the grain in the catcher – I don’t think anyone’s going to eat grain seasoned with mulched Carrier.’
Heath gave the dash an almost affectionate rub as he dismissed the problem of the Infected out of hand. ‘I’ve been hanging out for this since Dad said we were getting the farm up and running again. I haven’t had a chance to drive this old beauty for months.’
Steph couldn’t help but grin at the young man. Only a sixteen-year-old had such a belief in their own immortality that they could ignore the dangers of a situation to focus on the fun side. ‘All right then,’ she said, jumping back down onto the ground. ‘We’ll be following on foot, about twenty paces behind. If you see any Carriers, just bring it to a halt and we’ll clear them from the field.’
Heath gave a thumbs up and slammed the cabin door shut, his focus already turned to the business of running the harvester. The engine roared as the kid revved the accelerator in neutral and set the reel to spinning. With a jerk, the machine started into the field, mowing a four-metre swathe. Where a sea of wheat had impeded passage until moments before, all that was left after the harvester passed was ankle length yellow stalks to scuff at their boot heels.
Steph led
her detachment forward in a staggered line, keeping an eye also to their rear and flanks for any other sign of danger. Her concern didn’t lie with an attack by the Infected; with the small numbers in the local area, they could be dealt with easily enough. No, it was the Spartans that had her a little uneasy today. They’d been unexpectedly quiet since the confrontation at the town hall. An attack would most likely come, it was just unclear when. The platoon knew they were being watched, and just this morning one of her detachment had seen a club member on the main road. Her trigger finger had itched to take the spy out, but Mark had given clear orders not to initiate armed confrontation. He was hoping that Mac’s men would desert their leader. Steph couldn’t help but think he was wasting time in that regard, handing the initiative back to the Spartans while leaving his own soldiers on the back foot.
She buried her thoughts, forcing her focus back onto her surrounds. It was too easy to fall into autopilot while distracted, and find you’d walked fifty metres with no clear recollection of the intervening space. That sort of poor discipline was what got soldiers killed, and she’d be damned if it would happen while she was running the show.
The kid had cleared a third of the paddock, and was nearing the bottom end close to the road when a noise of an approaching engine caused Steph to pause. She looked to her left, her heart rate jumping as she saw a small goods carrying truck coming their way at speed. It was closely followed by a pair of twin-cab utes, each holding a few men in the tray. Even from this distance, Steph could see the morning light reflect off rifles in their hands.
The waiting had finished.
Steph grabbed her radio from where it was clipped to her webbing. ‘Contact with Spartans made. Request immediate back-up. Over,’ she said, voice tight as adrenaline surged.
The truck veered off the road toward the fence, engine screaming as it accelerated further. Wire snapped like rifle shots on impact, the truck flattening two fence posts as it burst through the meagre barrier. Its front tyres dug into the softer dirt of the paddock, slewing the vehicle to the right and threatening to flip it as it braked with the rear of the truck now facing toward Steph’s detachment. The utes followed, parking behind the truck and using it as cover. A man jumped down from the truck’s cabin, running bent over to the rear, he unlocked the back doors and swung them wide. Steph swore hard as she saw the truck’s contents exposed.
Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation Page 14
