Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation

by Hodge, Alister

  Pain exploded in his lower back, caused by a steel capped boot into his kidney. Mac leaned over him, ‘That got your attention, boy?’ Drool hung in a line from one corner of his mouth, the left side of his face hanging like a wax mask. His left limbs were also now affected, the arm hanging limp, while the leg dragged like a dead piece of wood over the dirt. The man’s stroke was extending, but all too slowly for his two captors.

  ‘I bet your daddy’s watching through that drone’s camera. Time to put on a show,’ he slurred.

  Mac looked up at the drone hovering twenty metres above and extended his middle finger up at the camera. He then looked back down at Heath and grinned lopsidedly as he drew a revolver and pointed it straight at his face. Heath looked into the black eye, seeing the pistol barrel from end on. He saw Mac’s finger tighten on the trigger, unable to believe what was happening to him. The gun kicked as it fired, the noise overwhelming at less than a metre distance. Everything went black.

  The Sergeant at Arms looked at his President aghast. ‘What the fuck are you doing, Mac? If they think the hostages are dead, what’s to stop them killing us all?’

  Mac barely seemed to hear his words and just grinned down at his handy work, saliva hanging in a long thread from his chin. He’d passed the point of reason, leading them to disaster only to retreat into the damaged recesses of his own mind.

  The Sergeant at Arms swore bitterly, realising the command was his. He aimed his rifle up at the drone and fired. Sparks flew from one of the rotors, destroyed by the bullet’s passage. The machine veered wildly to the right, starting an irretrievable dive. Removing the watching eye from above gave him scant comfort. They’d already seen everything he had at his disposal, and knew the layout and locations of the men under his command.

  He took a deep breath, his face hardening as he accepted the situation. He’d always expected to die a violent death at some point; under the guns of the police or a rival club before the world fell apart, or from the teeth of the Infected in the present day. If it was to be at the hands of a soldier instead, he wouldn’t complain. He’d just take as many with him to hell as possible.

  He turned back to the walls, his face grim. ‘They’ll attack soon!’ he shouted up to the men on the scaffolding. ‘It’s time for you farm-boys to finally earn your keep. Get your fucking heads above that wall so you can see them come and start shooting!’

  ‘NO!’ shouted Joel. ‘Not my boy!’ Tears welled in the farmer’s eyes as he watched his son get shot on the drone’s relay.

  Mark was shocked at how fast the situation had escalated. Before the screen went black, he still hadn’t seen his girlfriend move, for all he knew, it was already too late for both hostages.

  ‘Get in the trucks!’ he shouted to his soldiers. ‘We’re ramming the main gate!’

  Mark and Vinh sprinted for the first armoured vehicle. Vinh took the wheel and revved the engine to life. Within moments, the back of each truck filled with troops from the side of the road. Wheels spun in the dirt as Vinh accelerated along the narrow dirt road.

  Mark ordered his Sergeant to halt once the walls of the compound were in view. He picked up the radio control and flicked on the outside speaker to address the compound.

  ‘I am an officer of the ADF. You will surrender immediately, or be killed on sight. You have ten seconds to comply!’ said Mark, his voice booming from the speaker mounted to the top of his truck. A rattle of rifle fire sounded to his right.

  Mark turned to Vinh. ‘Fuck ‘em. They had their chance, ram the gate, Sergeant.’

  Vinh gritted his teeth and stamped his foot on the accelerator.

  Brent Kilpatrick sat on the scaffolding, his back against the brick wall, knowing that his death was probably no more than a few moments away. He watched the contorted face of the Sergeant at Arms screaming at him and the other young men on the wall to stand up and fight. Two of his mates complied, men he’d known most of his life, gone to school with, chased girls with even as they grew up in and around Cob Hill. They didn’t last a heartbeat, hit by snipers in the bush surrounding as the Army officer announced his conditions. Their bodies collapsed to the decking, blood pooling from bullet-punctured skulls.

  He gripped his rifle, anger overcoming his fear. He hadn’t joined the Spartans by choice. When given the ultimatum to join or see his sister get made the club whore instead, he’d seen no option. Brent turned to the men nearest, speaking up loudly.

  ‘If I’m going to die today, it won’t be fighting for those pricks down there,’ he shouted, lining his sights on the nearest Spartan in the courtyard. ‘Let’s take back our town from these bastards!’

  The Sergeant at Arms glared up at the recruits on the wall. ‘Don’t you fucking do it, Brent. I’m warning you!’ he roared.

  Brent ignored him and fired, drilling a bullet through the chest of the Spartan. The other recruits took his lead, turning their rifles on the original club members below. The Sergeant at Arms looked at his dying comrade, swore bitterly before lifting his rifle and returning the favour. His other mates weren’t so willing to die, dropping their rifles and lifting hands in submission.

  To his right, the gate smashed free of its hinges, an ear rending scream of tearing metal as an armoured truck crashed through into the compound, collecting two Spartans like nine-pins. Up on the scaffold, Brent curled into a foetal position, gut shot and dying while his mates shouted victory.

  Vinh skidded to a halt. Soldiers poured from the back of the truck with weapons raised and shoulders hunched, emerging to a battle won. The surviving Spartans on the ground stood with arms already raised in surrender, while the men on the scaffold quickly dumped their rifles.

  With the Spartans under guard of his soldiers’ weapons, Mark ignored them and ran toward the hostages. Mac sat some distance away with vacant eyes, his good leg bleeding profusely from a bullet wound. The Sergeant at Arms was next to him, staring balefully at the soldiers as he nursed a through–and–through wound to his right shoulder.

  Mark knelt beside Steph and cut the ties between her wrists. She was still breathing, although the pulse at her wrist was thready beneath Mark’s fingers and her skin burning to the touch. He searched her for a wound serious enough to account for her condition. Sweat soaked her shirt and ran in rivulets from her face.

  ‘She busted her wrist and feet at the farm,’ said a quiet voice. Mark looked at Heath in surprise and found the boy’s eyes open. He raised a hand, touching where Mac’s bullet had grazed the side of his skull, furrowing a laceration down to the bone. He’d been knocked unconscious by the passage of the bullet, but had survived. Heath sat up groggily and vomited.

  ‘What did they do to her?’ asked Mark, his voice urgent.

  ‘Carrier,’ said Heath between retches.

  ‘Fuck,’ muttered Mark, as he started searching desperately for a bite wound. ‘Where did it get her?’

  ‘No not a bite, he forced her to eat part of its brain.’

  Mark was floored. He’d taken for granted that she’d been bitten at the farm. He looked at Heath, his mind failing to process the information. ‘What?’

  ‘She saved my life, Mark. They had a Carrier’s head in a box and were going to make it bite me. She managed to smash the skull before they could, and as punishment, Mac forced part of its brain down her throat.’

  As he finally understood what had happened, rage flared in Mark’s mind, blocking out all other thoughts than a need for retribution. He stood and drew his pistol, raised it and lined up the nearest Spartan, shooting the man at point blank.

  ‘Line ‘em all up, Sergeant. I want them dead!’ shouted Mark, his voice thick with rage. ‘Every. Single. One!’

  Vinh looked rattled. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘That’s an order I can’t follow. They’ve already surrendered, if we kill the men that were forcibly recruited from the farms – we’ll lose support of the town and the real mission will fail.’

  ‘Like I give a fuck! Look what they did to her, are you fucki
ng blind, Vinh?’ shouted Mark.

  His Sergeant stood firm, unwilling to cave. ‘You’ll regret it, Boss. You’re not that type of man.’

  Mark turned away from him, searching the yard for the Spartan president, determined to have some part of his need sated. Spotting the degenerate, he had a target again. ‘You’re bloody mine,’ he said, raising his gun at Mac.

  ‘Stop.’

  Mark paused, stunned to hear a voice he’d thought lost. He looked down, saw Steph propped on one elbow. Fever glazed her eyes, but she was conscious. She pushed herself upright.

  ‘Not you,’ she said, each word a visible effort. ‘I need to do this.’

  Mark passed his gun to her without a word. Mac stared straight at Steph, unrepentant as she lined him up, and fired.

  Mark paced nervously, unable to keep still. The other soldiers of the platoon sat in clumps along the walls of the town hall, watching their commanding officer in respectful silence. After gaining her revenge on the Spartan president, Steph had collapsed once again. The platoon medic had worked on her, gaining intravenous access and pumping a bag of saline in to bump up her failing blood pressure. Her vitals had rallied somewhat, enough to transport her back to the temporary base in Cob Hill.

  And now Mark waited for her to die, like every other person exposed to the virus. He glanced at an old clock high on the wall, seeing it was now four hours since he’d broken into the bikie compound. The thought of losing her paralysed his thoughts, rendering him unable to think of anything else. A door by the hall’s stage squeaked on opening. Mark walked over to intercept the medic, impatient for news of her progress. The medic put up his hand, cutting off his Lieutenant before he had a chance to speak.

  ‘She’s still hanging in there, Boss. I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s not progressing like a usual plague bite.’

  Mark tried to ignore a stubborn flicker of hope at the medic’s words. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s sick – no doubt, but her blood pressure’s stabilised, and heart rate fallen. I don’t think there’s anything else I can do for her. She needs proper medical staff, a hospital. We just haven’t got enough supplies here to waste... I mean, to use up on only one soldier.’

  Mark excused the slip up in words, but the medic was right. He couldn’t use up all medical supplies on what might still be a hopeless case, when he had the remainder of his platoon to think of.

  ‘Would she survive a transfer to Geelong?’ asked Mark, thinking if he could get her there, that maybe Harry could help in some way.

  The medic shrugged uncertainly. ‘Maybe, I don’t think there’s any other option but to try though, Boss.’

  Mark nodded, decision made. ‘Get her ready to move, Sergeant Vinh will use one of the trucks to transport you both to Geelong Base Hospital.’ The medic went to return to Steph to begin preparations when Mark pulled him up one last time. ‘One last thing, no matter what happens, thanks for what you’ve done for her. She... means a lot to me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Boss. We know how it is between you two,’ he said, meeting his officer’s eyes for the first time. ‘And not one of us has a problem with it. She’s one hell of a soldier, she means a lot to all of us.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Harry cupped his hands around his mouth, warming them with his breath in the cold of the evening. Leaning back on the tarnished steel of the gaol’s main gate, he looked up at the multitude of stars that filled the night sky in the absence of light pollution. Under such an open sky, he felt some of the tension in his chest subside. Inside the lab, where the old prison cells reared high above his head to either side, he’d begun to feel claustrophobic. Each door seemed a vacant eye, feeding off the death that his research bred with each failure, exuding a coldness that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room. Unable to shake the feeling that he was not alone in the lab, but rather being watched and judged, he had escaped to the cool of night to wait his friend’s arrival. Now that he stood outside with a light breeze ruffling his shirt, his earlier feelings within the lab seemed ridiculous. Still, he had no desire to re-enter the building for the moment. As much as the rational side of his mind laughed at the concept of supernatural phenomena, his gut told him another story.

  Harry looked down the street, searching for headlights to tell of Vinh’s approach. He’d felt merely numb on hearing the news that his cousin was to be delivered into his care, and requested that she be transported to the gaol research facility rather than the hospital where she might end up placing other patients and staff at risk. After presiding over so much death of late, watching the young and old die, helpless to change the ultimate outcome; Veronica had been the last straw. Sometimes he pictured his sanity as a boat, weighed down in the water by each successive death, until water lapped at the gunwales threatening to sink his mind into abject despair. He was tired, but not yet completely broken. Harry continued to fight, focusing on one thing at a time, using the strict procedures of his research to push out negative thoughts until his metaphorical boat rose above the water line again.

  During his autopsy of Veronica, he had stumbled upon a key finding. As in the autopsy of the child, the “Mito1” medication had succeeded in keeping the virus out of Veronica’s mitochondria. Both the kid and his colleague had shared a similarity of dying from a seizure, prompting Harry to further investigate neural tissue. It was here that he discovered the brain along with other nerve cells through the body still teemed with the virus, while other cell structures seemed relatively ignored.

  Harry heard the vehicle long before it appeared. A low growl of changing gears gradually built in volume until headlights swung around a corner two blocks distant, bringing the armoured truck into view. Harry unchained the gate and heaved it to the side, ready for Vinh to enter the walled area surrounding the gaol. The truck barely slowed, tyres squealing as it swung off the tarmac and through the gap, skidding to a halt at the entrance to the lab. Harry slammed the gate shut again, securing the compound before running to join the crew emerging from the truck.

  A sensor light cast the vehicle in harsh detail against the surrounding gloom. Smears of blood darkened the vehicle’s camouflage paint job, bits of human flesh still stuck amongst the gore where the truck had smashed Carriers from its path. Vinh ignored the approaching doctor, dropping to the ground and shining a small torch under the truck up at the axel.

  ‘I fucking knew it,’ he muttered. Vinh turned his head to one of his soldiers. ‘Get me the dog pole, it’s still bloody moving.’

  While his Private extracted a long dog-catcher’s pole with a noose at the end from the truck’s cabin, Vinh acknowledged Harry for the first time. ‘Sorry mate, I hit a Carrier on the way into town and didn’t see the body emerge in the rear-view mirror. What’s left of it’s jammed up above the rear axle.’

  Vinh stuck the pole under the truck out of sight from Harry. Suddenly the pole came alive in his hands, jerking hard as he managed to secure the loop around the Carrier’s neck. A garbled snarl sounded from the shadows beneath the truck, like a Rottweiler with a throat full of blood. Vinh drew himself to his feet and leant his weight backwards.

  ‘Come on guys,’ he grunted. ‘This’ll need a few of us, the bastard’s jammed hard.’

  Harry took a grip alongside the Sergeant on the dog pole.

  ‘On three, heave!’ said Vinh.

  The two men dug their heels in, every muscle taught as they jerked backwards. On the third wrench, something gave, and they stumbled away, the dog pole suddenly light in hand. Vinh stared at the decapitated head stuck in the noose, face still contorted with rage. ‘Ah, for fucks sake,’ he muttered.

  The Private that had got the pole from the car, rammed his rifle butt into the side of the skull, crushing the bone inwards to finish the job. ‘You want to get the rest of it out now, Sarg?’ he asked, unfazed by the procedure that was common place after driving in plague infected areas.

  ‘Nah, it can wait. I just didn’t want it grab
bing at legs while we unloaded Steph,’ said Vinh.

  Hearing that his exit was clear, the medic swung open the door at the rear of the truck and jumped down. Harry joined him, keen to see the condition of his cousin. Steph lay on a low stretcher, body covered in a blanket with only head and right arm exposed. Harry grimaced as he studied her face, hoping that it was only the yellow light of the truck cabin responsible for her jaundiced complexion. The medic that readied her IV lines and monitoring equipment for transfer looked almost as ill as his patient, exhaustion smudging dark marks under bloodshot eyes. He glanced up briefly at Harry as he worked.

  ‘You the doc I’m handing over to?’

  Harry nodded. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘You mean after getting brains from a fucking Carrier jammed down her throat?’ Anger at the mistreatment of his Corporal leant the medic’s voice a harsh quality. ‘Not well, but that’s still a damn sight better than I could have hoped for. She’s still alive and fighting, but for how much longer – your guess is as good as mine.’

  The medic grabbed the handles at one end of the stretcher ready to move. ‘Can I finish off the story inside? I’d be happier with her on a real bed and out of this metal box.’

  ***

  Harry read through the notes he’d taken, quietly stunned at the undeniable information on the page as he looked back up at his cousin. Steph was sleeping – not unconscious, and that was a stark improvement on how she had arrived on his lab’s doorstep. The medic had done amazingly well with his resources at hand, however, in some cases of severe sepsis, there was only so much difference a fluid challenge could achieve. What Steph had required was inotropes. Harry had started an infusion of Noradrenaline, a drug that constricted the arteries, and gave the heart something to beat against. Steph’s blood pressure had responded in kind, improving enough to perfuse her brain. It would be a matter of time to see if the extended time with low blood pressure had resulted in any hypoxic brain damage, but for the moment, Harry was content to let her sleep.