His thoughts drifted back to a time when he had first enlisted into the Marines before the training that would essentially determine his war career in demolitions. He was young, the age of seventeen, having lied to gain entry into the military. It was a way for him to get away from his bastard of a father who took capital punishment to a whole new level. He was young, stupid, and barely even a man.
He recalled one night in the jungles of Vietnam working sentry duty on the edge of his platoon’s encampment. He had been exhausted after a full day’s forced march through the thick, inhospitable and unbelievably humid jungle, and being the newest member of the platoon, he drew the short straw for guard duty. He took up his post and kept watch a Lucky Strike lit and dangling from his lips. The next thing he knew, he was being struck in the face by a large meaty fist. His eyes shot open as he landed in a heap on the moist jungle floor, and he reached for his sidearm. A large jungle boot landed square on his throat, nearly choking the life out of him. He tried to gasp and immediately brought his hands up to try and wrestle away the boot and clear his airway. As spots began to form in his vision, the pressure behind the boot relaxed slightly, and a man stood above him, pointing a finger in his direction. He recognized the man but couldn’t remember his name, but from the insignia on his uniform, Marvin knew he was a major.
“If you ever, ever, fall asleep on this post again, soldier, I will personally put a bullet in your ass! Now get the fuck up!” the major screamed, reached down, and plucked him up by the collar. The major leaned in closely to Marvin’s ear. “If Charlie would have attacked while you were taking your little fucking snooze and one of my men had died, they wouldn’t have needed to court-martial your worthless ass, because I would have seen you strung up here in the jungle. Do you get me, soldier?” the major spat angrily in Marvin’s face in a harsh whisper.
Marvin nodded his dazed head frantically in acquiescence.
The major brushed out Marvin’s uniform and handed him a cigarette. “Now take yourself over to the mess and get a cup of coffee. Hell, make it two. I’ll hold your post until you get back.” The major didn’t have to add the words and see this never happens again, because that had become abundantly clear to Marvin. Ever since that day, even with the onset of old age, Marvin had conditioned himself to function even with total lack of sleep, albeit it had gotten progressively harder with age.
Marvin glanced down at the backpack resting on his legs, remembering the manila folder he had taken from the briefcase only moments ago; it felt like a lifetime, however. Yet another effect of adrenaline, he mused. He reached into the backpack and withdrew the classified document. There was a small red string wrapped around a round tab that held the folder closed. Marvin slowly unwound it, almost afraid to see what the folder contained. He placed his thumb inside the folder, pinning down any documents to prevent them from blowing away in the slight breeze that made its way to the top of the tower as he opened the folder.
Interlude 3
Director Hammond still sat at his desk rubbing his temples as reports had started to flood in from his agents in the field. The airstrike on the only known infection point had failed. Prometheus had failed, their only defense against this type of crisis. Somehow the contagion had still managed to spread, and as reports came in from around the country, it had appeared that Maryland had not been the only target affected. In the matter of only a few hours, every major airport, train station, hell, it seemed even bus depots around the United States had been silently attacked. K5 was being deployed on American soil.
“K5, “Hammond hissed, running his hand nervously over his balding head.
He pulled up the media player on his computer and located a file marked Kuru Variant Nanoid. A prompt displayed on the screen requesting a user ID and password; Hammond entered his credentials and pushed play.
The file that played was badly distorted being that it originally had been on an old reel-to-reel thirty-five-millimeter tape that had been digitized once the technology had become available. On the bottom of the screen read “Бутырской тюрьмы августа 1975” (Butyrka Prison August 1975). A man dressed in plain tattered prison garb sat strapped to a metal chair in the center of a small brightly lit room. He struggled with his bonds in a futile attempt to recoil from a man or woman dressed in what appeared to be an old version of a hazmat suit. The figure held what looked like a petri dish in one gloved hand and a scalpel in the other. The hazmat-clad figure then ran the blade along the surface of the dish just barely scraping the culture within.
He or she then walked over to the prisoner, turned and held the knife up in view of the camera, and said something in Russian that Hammond could not understand. He decided he would read the translations later, although he wasn’t quite sure what that would do other than fuel his acid reflux, if anything. The doctor then turned toward the sobbing prisoner, tears streaked down his grizzled face as the doctor gripped his chin hard with a gloved hand, jerking his tear swollen face toward the camera, making it clearly visible to the camera that the young man looked to be in good health. Without hesitation, the doctor ran the scalpel across the surface of the prisoner’s cheek; a small thin line of blood appeared from the minute scratch. The doctor backed slowly away from the prisoner, scalpel still raised in the figure’s hand, never taking his or her eyes off the subject.
After a tense moment, the prisoner’s eyes rolled back into their sockets, exposing nothing but the whites of his eyes. His head listed off to one side and hung still and limp, a small trickle of blood and saliva oozing from his mouth. There was silence for what seemed like an eternity.
The doctor stepped over to the man and placed two gloved fingers against his carotid artery. The figures remained still for a few seconds more, and then without warning, the prisoner began to violently convulse; the doctor quickly jumped back, losing his or her grip on the scalpel. The small metal object clattered to the floor and skittered out of site. The man in the chair convulsed so violently the leather straps that confined him to the piece of metal furniture tore free from the bolts that held them, as if someone had flipped a switch; the prisoner’s gaze snapped in the direction of the doctor. The infected prisoner lunged, grabbing the doctor and immediately tore into her suit. Hammond could tell it was a woman now that the suit lay splayed open, exposing a naked breast underneath.
The female doctor screamed in agony as the prisoner sank his teeth into the soft, tender flesh of her breast. He jerked his head back, removing her once pink and supple nipple and swallowed it, ingesting flesh and blood. He lunged again, missing her, as this time she ran off frame, presumably pounding on the door as she pleaded for her life.
The infected prisoner regained its bearings and charged after the woman. Another scream erupted, and then the entire screen flooded white as the observing scientists purged the room with fire, effectively destroying anything living within the smallish space. Director Hammond leaned back in his chair, removed his bifocals, and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. If this was the disease that had been released, then plausible deniability was the least of their worries; and if the reports from his field agents were valid, and he had no reason to doubt that they weren’t, containment was really their only viable option. Problem was, how exactly does one combat a foe you can’t see? The President, however, disagreed per his words:
“This virus will be contained. Neither I nor my administration will be held accountable for your incompetence, Hammond. Your people need to fix this, or I will see you hanged in the middle of the Whitehouse lawn before you bring me down.”
The President had practically screamed at him through the phone. Hammond, as well schooled in the art of self-preservation that he was, knew that what the President had said was, in all seriousness, the truth. He would do his job. His men would track down and retrieve the cases that tied them to this whole ugly business, and as far as containment—well, as far as he was concerned—medical containment was the job of the eggheads at the RID. Homel
and could set blockades and lock down Townes all in the name of national security, but beyond that, they were helpless.
All things considered, in reality, they knew very little about this disease. It had been brought to the attention of the United States sometime during the 1980s at the height of the Cold War, when a scientist by the name of Ivan Morozov defected after his conscious finally caught up to him, seeing firsthand at some of the biological cocktails that his government was having them cook up on a daily basis. Weaponized anthrax, Ebola containing strands of RNA that would normally only be found within rhinovirus, otherwise known as the common cold, allowing the disease to be spread via sneezing or coughing rather than the crash-and-bleed response the virus normally triggered. That in itself was scary beyond belief, but K5 took the cake.
Doctor Morozov explained that with the increasing tensions between Western-led NATO and the Eastern Warsaw Pact, Russia had toyed with an idea of a first strike offense that did not involve a nuclear response. The biological cocktail itself was designed to infect a nation’s population and alter their brain chemistry, causing extreme violence and social unrest, and ultimately have them destroy themselves from the inside out. The pathogen K5 was the Russian attempt at mind alteration, similar to the United States’ own MK-Ultra experiments from the early 1960s. The U.S. had used drugs such as LSD or some other designer, more potent substances that had never made it onto the streets. The soviets took a different approach, using a designer virus merged with a prion disease that would normally take years to affect the brain of the host organism. The viral component that was still yet unknown broke down the body’s defenses, allowing the prion disease to multiply and infect the brain at a much, much faster rate. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they had never succeeded to develop a working vaccine to inoculate their own population, so the project was scraped.
It would be thirty years later before even a hint of the pathogen would surface. After the fall of the once-great Soviet Union and its subsequent demilitarization, a vast black market surplus of weapons and equipment opened up to the rest of the underdeveloped world. With dual wars being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tensions toward the United States and its allies surging to its inevitable critical mass, it was Homeland’s firm belief that one of the many terrorist organizations of the region had procured this nasty bug, and from Internet and cell phone chatter Homeland and the NSA had intercepted, they planned on using it to purge the infidels from the planet.
Hammond rubbed his sweat-coated temples and reached for his lukewarm cup of whiskey-spiked coffee. He took a long pull and slammed the cup on the desk just as the video respooled and began playing again. He snatched up the mouse and clicked the stop button, leaving an image of the bound prisoner staring toward the camera’s eye, his face contorted and full of fear. Hammond stared at the screen for a brief moment; the whiskey that he had been pounding all morning was beginning to catch up to him. He wasn’t sure if it was panic or the booze, but his head began to swim. There was a pounding outside his door, not on the door itself, but somewhere off down the hallway from the sounds of it.
Hammond swooned and steadied himself on his desk as he reached for the phone. He picked up the receiver, expecting his perky intern to answer. After four or five rings, he hung the phone up, figuring perhaps she had gone to use the facilities. Strange, as far as he could tell, the woman never seemed to even leave her desk throughout the day. Well, not unless she was popping outside to grab a smoke, which she actually only did on a rare occasion; and even when she did, she’d always informed him that she was doing so. He waited a few moments, picked up the phone, and tried again; still he got no response. He arose from his desk, wobbling as he did so, and stumbled slightly over to the door, pressing his ear against its cool wooden surface, listening for any sounds of movement.
Hammond jumped a bit as another bang resounded on the other side of the door, closer this time. It was then Hammond noticed the smoke lingering outside of his window. Curiously, he left the door and approached the large bay window that overlooked the street from eight floors up. His vision blurred slightly as he peered out into the gray-cast sky; vertigo started to set in as he looked down into the direction of the street. At first appearances, everything seemed to be normal, everything except for the car that was smoking from underneath its hood. It had more than likely just overheated, he thought.
“Sucks to be you,” he said with a slightly drunken laugh. People walked back and forth along the street, or so it seemed. The more he gazed down at the figures on the sidewalks and streets, the more he noticed something was off about them. Everyone was walking, but no one seemed to be going anywhere. They just kind of lumbered around as if they all had a touch of the spirits this morning. Hammond blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to clear away the fog of the booze so that he could interpret the situation.
A figure came tearing ass out of a building across the street, a woman, as far as he could tell. Several others pursued her arms outstretched as if trying to snatch her right off her feet. Hammond leaned close as the others that had only moments ago been milling around, seemingly without purpose, galvanized and joined the chase.
“What the fuck?” Hammond said as the group of people chased down the screaming lady. He watched as she tripped on a curb and landed face down on the sidewalk, trying desperately to get to her feet as the others piled in on top of her. Hammond’s face drained, the effects of the liquor all but vanishing.
“I-it’s here,” he whispered to himself and began to back away from the window, not wanting to watch any longer, not wanting any of this shit to be happening. A heavy weight slammed into the door, causing Hammond to nearly jump out of his pallid skin. He spun around, facing the door as it jolted again, this time sending wood splintering from its frame. Don ran quickly to his desk and flung open the bottom drawer; the door cracked again as it took another hit, this time the hinge at the top of the door buckled and rattled in its place. Hiding underneath a pile of discarded paperwork was Don’s old .45. It set among the detritus in the desk unused for, Christ, years, he thought. He found the magazine still loaded and squeezed into the edge of the drawer propped up alongside a small basket of colored paperclips. The door shuddered again as Don frantically tried to place the magazine into its socket. As he thrust the magazine upward, it caught on something and fell to the floor, skittering underneath the desk. Don held up the weapon and inspected it. A fucking Post-it note had lodged itself within the cavity of the gun, crumpled up in a little ball. Don drove his index finger into the slot, trying desperately to dislodge the foreign object, having difficulty maneuvering his digit with its fatty exterior. All of a sudden, the door gave way.
Chapter 15
Fear and shock passed across Karen’s features as she sped down the roadway toward her in-laws’ homestead. Figures ran freely along the streets and sidewalks, some screaming, fleeing in panic, scattering to and fro like seagulls amassed on the roadway, some giving chase. She had to swerve on many occasions to avoid colliding with any of them. One pregnant woman stood outside of a doughnut shop, waving her arms frantically in the air, screaming for help.
Karen was about the pull the van over to her position and pick up the frightened woman, taking her out of the chaos erupting all around them, just as a man ran straight at the lady from inside of the doughnut shop, crashing through the large plate glass windows that encompassed the front of the store, seeming unaffected by the shards of glass that penetrated his neck and face.
He grabbed the pregnant lady and sank his teeth into her exposed neck, causing her to fall to the sidewalk in front of the store. Several others seemed to take notice of the fallen woman as she screamed in pain and horror. They came running over, falling on her as well. Several of them fought with one another like rabid dogs fighting over a piece of meat.
The last thing Karen had seen of the young woman was her bloodied, outstretched hand protruding from underneath the teeming mass of the infected. She shuddered at the scene and sped
off. Karen passed through sections of derelict cars, cars that had seemed to be abandoned on the sides of roads, and sometimes directly in the center. She could tell that most, if not all, were still running, by the exhaust that fumed out of their tailpipes.
Karen exited off Route 40 and took side roads until she reached the outskirts of a town called Colora. It was a small spit of a town, the kind of town that you could spit from one border to the next. If you were driving and you blinked, you would quite literally pass straight through it without even knowing it was there. Her in-laws lived near the town’s eastern edge, away from the town proper, and somewhat off the beaten path. Things were still and quiet as she maneuvered the van through winding forested-lined roads. Normally, whenever she and her husband had taken this drive, there were signs of life everywhere you looked—a deer running across the roadway, carrion birds feasting on the carcass of a not-so-fresh piece of roadkill. As of yet, however, there seemed to be nothing but silence. As much as she wanted to avoid the more populated town center, she had no choice but to travel through it in order to reach her destination. She had to wonder if this affliction, or whatever the hell it was, had made it this far into the countryside. After leaving the main road, most of the chaotic activity had seemed to drop off all but completely. The fact that she hadn’t seen so much as another car along the roadway gave her pause.
As Karen pulled to a stop at an intersection several hundred yards away from the town proper, she let her hand rest on the shotgun that rested on the passenger seat. She eyed the seemingly quite streets and buildings with dismay; she had hoped to see the usual bustle of activity that the summer months seemed to turn out, but none had presented itself thus far. The sun started to show through the gray expanse of cloud cover, casting brilliant reflections off pools of water that flowed toward the town’s storm drains.
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