No Shelter: Book 3 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 3)

by Justin Bell

  “Clark Bradley,” the man replied. “Retired United States Marine.”

  Harris let his eyes drift down to the bulk of Clark’s waist jutting out over his belt. “Retired? You don’t say.”

  Clark glowered at him, his thick fingers coiling tight around the bars of his holding cell. The mayor broke away and turned toward the other cell where Lisa sat on the cot. The young man, woman, and little girl stood in there with her, making for some very tight quarters. Harris dropped down to a crouch as he approached, holding the bars and leaning toward them to get a good look at the girl.

  “And who might you be, sweetie?” he asked.

  “Melinda,” her small voice replied.

  “Is this your daddy?” he asked, glancing up toward Javier. Melinda shook her head.

  “My dad’s dead. So’s my mom. These people are helping me.”

  “Well isn’t that nice of them,” Harris exclaimed, pulling himself up into a standing posture. He looked at Javier and blinked, waiting for his identification.

  “I’m nobody,” he said softly. “Javier is my name. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You look like you’re in some pain, son,” the mayor remarked.

  Javier shrugged. “It’s been a tough few days.”

  “Indeed,” the mayor replied. “as it has for all of us.”

  “Some more than others,” Lisa whispered.

  The mayor ignored her and focused his attention on the other woman in the cell. “Last, but certainly not least?”

  Priscilla looked around, weighing something in her head, then finally deciding to speak. “Priscilla. Like Javier, I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Is that so?” Mayor Harris asked, nodding. “Okay. Well, welcome to Aldrich.” He smiled wide, showing his teeth.

  “It’s a lovely town,” Clark hissed.

  Mayor Harris turned slowly toward him, looking down the bridge of his nose. “You know… Martial Law has been enacted. All throughout the northeast, ever since Boston went down in flames. I could have shot you all dead on the street and been hailed a hero of the town. Do you realize that?”

  “And here I thought you were the welcoming committee,” Clark replied.

  Mayor Harris lunged, slamming his hand against the prison bars with an echoing, metallic bang. “We don’t take kindly to funny guys in this town, Mr. Bradley. Do you understand me? This is a serious world we live in and we demand a serious response. Don’t test my patience.”

  Clark looked him dead in the eye, his face stern and unwavering. “You sound like my second ex-wife. She wasn’t much fun either.”

  Harris’s knuckles whitened on the prison bars and his cheeks flushed red, and he held that look for a handful of seconds, everyone’s hearts beating once, twice, then a third time. Finally, he unflexed his fingers, his face paled and he drew down slightly, his mouth twisting into a wide grin.

  “Now that,” he snickered, “that was pretty funny.” He turned away from Clark and Broderick, walking back toward the other cell. “You’ll have to excuse the lack of hospitality, but one can’t be too careful these days. Lots of weirdos running around.” He glared at the three females and one male in the other cell, his eyes locking on each person in line. “I think we’ll leave you all in here for a bit. Let you cool down. When you’re ready to tell me what you’re doing in my town, we’ll see about giving you some fresh air.”

  “Oh this is your town?” Broderick asked.

  Harris nodded. “Indeed. This is my town. While you’re here, you live under my care. My laws. My prerogative. It would do you well to remember that.”

  “Hey, we’re just passing through,” Javier said. “We don’t care what goes on here, we just wanted to be on our way.”

  “And where exactly are you heading?” Harris asked.

  “South,” Broderick replied, before Javier could speak and reveal more information than he wanted him to.

  “South is a big place,” Harris replied. “Anywhere in particular?”

  “That doesn’t much matter, does it?” Broderick asked. “Important thing is, we have no intention of staying, and we’re happy to move on. Unfortunately your men shot up our truck, so we’d need some transport, but if you’d be so kind, we’d—”

  “No, no I don’t think I would be so kind,” Harris interrupted. “The time for kindness has long since passed, my friend from the United States Army. We’re past such things.”

  “Some might argue,” Priscilla said quietly, “that a lack of kindness is what got us into this mess.”

  Harris nodded. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Dwelling on what caused it is a fool’s errand. We need to focus on fixing it. And this town is my responsibility.”

  “Fair enough,” Broderick said. “We’re happy to leave you to it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry but that’s not an option. Not anymore.” Harris turned toward Lisa, squinting in her direction. “See, thanks to this young lady over here we’re a couple of men short. So we could use the help. We’re down two, and there are three of you here, so that works out nicely.”

  “C’mon, man,” Broderick started.

  “Mayor. You can call me Mayor Harris or Mr. Mayor, or maybe even sir, but you do not call me ‘man.’”

  Broderick closed his eyes and chewed his lip, forcing his mouth to remain closed. “I apologize, Mayor Harris. But these things that are happening? The sickness that’s hurting people… killing them? I have some important information that I need to get in front of the right people. Information that could save lives. We need to be allowed to get back on the road. For the good of the entire nation.”

  Mayor Harris seemed to think this over for a few moments, cupping his chin in his hand, staring down at the floor and nodding softly. He turned toward Broderick and walked slowly in his direction, considering what he’d said. He extended an index finger and gestured for Broderick to lean in closer as he approached the bars, pressing his cheek toward them, as if to whisper some great state secret to the soldier. Broderick did as he was asked, stepping toward the bars and leaning in close.

  Harris’s hand shot out, his fingers clamping around the collar of Broderick’s uniform. Harris yanked toward himself hard and fast, slamming the soldier’s forehead into the iron bars with a loud bang that sounded like a frying pan dropped from a high distance. Broderick shouted and the Mayor released his collar, letting him stumble backwards, clutching at his head, which had split open, blood flowing fast over the contours of his head and face.

  “What do you take me for?” the mayor hissed. “Sit down and be quiet. If you give me no more hassle, maybe you’ll even get a meal today. Maybe. But until then, keep your lies to yourself and I’ll let you know when I have a use for you.”

  Harris spun on his heels and stormed out of the lobby, the three soldiers falling in behind him, walking down the hallway, footsteps echoing into silence. A handful of seconds later, the large oak door slammed closed, leaving the prisoners in blessed solitude.

  “Clark is he okay?” Priscilla asked, leaning close to the bars. “Is his skull fractured?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Broderick barked back. “He split skin, but that’s it. It’ll be the last time he puts his hands on me, that’s for sure.”

  “Listen to you, Mister Macho,” Clark replied, helping Broderick to his feet. “We gotta find something to stop that bleeding, man. You’re a mess.” He turned and saw a pillow on their cot, wrapped in a simple cotton pillow case. Clark stripped it off, then tore the pillow case into several long strands, moving behind Broderick and tying a makeshift bandage tight around the wound in his forehead.

  “Good call, by the way,” Clark said to Priscilla. “Not telling him you’re a doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  For the first time, Priscilla became aware of the other woman in the cell, the woman sitting on the cot, and she turned toward her, nodding.

  “Yes, I’m a doctor. Family practitioner. That didn’t seem like information I wanted him to know.�
�

  “You’re right,” Lisa replied. “That wouldn’t have gone well for you. He’s all about taking advantage of our skill sets.”

  “So how did you end up in here?” Clark asked from across the room. “He didn’t appreciate your skill set?”

  Lisa smirked. “Yeah, he wasn’t real happy with one of them.”

  “He said something about you taking out two of his men?” Broderick asked.

  Lisa shrugged. “Couldn’t be helped. I’d do it again. They had it coming.”

  Priscilla smiled. “I think I’m going to like you.” She extended her hand and Lisa took it, shaking briefly.

  “I’m Lisa,” she said quietly.

  Across the room, Clark’s mouth dropped open. “Wait,” he said. “Not Lisa Martin?”

  She drew her head back. “Yes. Lisa Martin. Where do you know me from?”

  Clark laughed and shook his head. “You’re not gonna believe this, Lisa… but your boyfriend is gonna save all our asses.”

  ***

  Colonel Reeves felt like he was digging a groove in the command center floor between the communications consoles and the Research and Development lab near the rear of the large room. He’d spent the majority of the morning coasting back and forth between them, information gathering and coordinating outreach through Leeza Burns at comms, and trying to get as much information and data as possible from R & D.

  As he crossed the room, he glanced over at Jorge Rodriguez, who stood stoic by one of the room’s entrances, decked out in his camouflage battle dress uniform, the automatic rifle held on a taut strap over his shoulder. His eyes were narrowed and facing straight forward and he showed none of the signs of exhaustion that others had been demonstrating, especially over the past few hours.

  Reeves redirected his walk and moved over toward Rodriguez. “How are you holding up, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “Doing fine, sir,” Rodriguez replied without hesitation.

  “If you need someone to take over for a bit so you can grab some shuteye, just let me know.”

  “I’m okay, Colonel, thank you.”

  Reeves glanced around the room, still a haven of activity with several uniformed men and women drifting from console to lab, then back again. Several people in white coats still fluttered around complicated looking research equipment along the back wall. There didn’t appear to be any imminent threats.

  “Are you worried about something, son?” Reeves asked.

  “Nothing specific, sir,” Rodriguez replied, “but our nation has been attacked, and I’m taking no chances.”

  “Fair enough, just try and get some rest at some point. You won’t do anyone any good if you’re standing here on your last legs.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Reeves continued his walk toward the counter at the back of the command center, watching the white coats swarming around a strange looking device as if it were the most captivating thing on the planet.

  “What do you have for me?” Reeves asked, drawing close.

  At the center of the group, a tall man in close-cropped black hair turned, then stepped away from the rest of them, intercepting the colonel before he drew any closer.

  “Frank, talk to me, man. I know you guys are strapped, but I need something. Leadership… what’s left of it, anyway, is going to be calling me in an hour. I want to actually have something to tell them.”

  “We’re starting to put some pieces together,” Frank Nebers replied. “It’s slow, Colonel, I know, and I’m sorry, but we’re working at about six percent capacity over here. Doing the best we can.”

  “I get that, doc. Honestly, I do. But I don’t have to tell you what’s at stake.”

  “No, you don’t,” Frank replied. He started back toward the rear counter, the small group of white lab coats slowly separating to give them room. On one of the large flat-panel monitors a complex diagram was forming of various shapes linked together by differently colored lines. Colonel Reeves could tell the computer was still processing a lot of data as the picture slowly began to form in front of him.

  “Sergeant Davis brought back some good data for us,” Nebers said. “Not a lot of it, but enough.”

  “Enough to do what?” Reeves asked.

  He looked at Reeves with solemn eyes. “Enough to tell us what we were suspecting, but didn’t know for sure. What happened in Boston, what’s happening in the world all around us was a targeted, directed genetic attack.”

  Reeves lowered his head, closing his eyes, as if that might somehow make the statement untrue. It was the hypothesis they’d all been working under for sure, but hearing it stated in black and white was a whole different ballgame.

  “What’s the proof?” he asked, looking back up.

  Frank pointed toward the shape that was starting to form on the monitor, trying to keep his words short and simple.

  “It’s the structure, really,” Frank said, tracing his finger around the general outline of the shape. “It’s too regular. Too nicely formed. Organisms that appear in nature are… untamed creatures. They generally appear malformed and mutated, growing out of existing cells. We captured this image that’s still processing from one of the victim’s samples, and as you can sort of see, it’s a very self-contained specimen.”

  Colonel Reeves was having a hard time telling the difference, but he just nodded anyway.

  “It’s obvious this particular virus was engineered in a lab, not in the wild. Also, see these markers here?” Frank pointed to several strange crisscross shapes emerging from the surface of the roughly spherical organism. “The way they’re designed… it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. These microscopic phalanges are developed in a way to nest in recesses of other human cells. But not all human cells.”

  “Explain.”

  “The way this organism was built, it will only attach and attack a certain subset of victims. Now, that subset appears to be very large, but from what we can tell, this truly is an ethnic bio-weapon of a sort, a viral specimen born and bred to attack a certain population to ensure widespread cataclysm without risk to the people developing the virus in the first place.”

  Reeves shook his head slowly. “Can you tell what population this virus was programmed for?”

  Then it was Nebers turn to shake his head. “Not yet. I can tell you, obviously, every victim in that Quincy store was vulnerable. Judging by what’s going on in the world at large, most of civilization is vulnerable. But we need a lot more analysis before we can tell for sure.”

  “So how did this virus get in the victims’ system?”

  “Well, here’s where things get interesting,” Nebers replied.

  “Interesting? Do you find the end of humanity interesting?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Reeves closed his tired eyes yet again, running a hand through almost non-existent hair.

  “Just tell me,” Reeves breathed.

  Nebers smiled and nodded, once again pointing to the screen. The image of the forming shape blinked off, and a similar shape appeared, only it was less fully formed.

  “Team Ten did a great job with data gathering at the site. We were able to cross reference a few different samples and actually put together a time lapse of this organism in its various stages. Based on what data we had, we used some reverse analysis to look back in time, so to speak, and estimate what the organism might have looked like originally.”

  “Okay. So what does this tell us?”

  “What it tells us is that this… thing. This virus was designed to be ingested, then to attach to the cell membrane and lay dormant.” As he spoke, the shape on the screen slowly changed form, its phalanges growing longer and stringier, its bulbous central sphere enlarging and bulging slightly. “Lay dormant for… I’m going to say, a day or two? Then once it’s been there, within the body for a time, it has grown to the point where it actively battles the tissue around it, and effectively ‘detonates.’”

  “So it lays there for a day or two, doing nothing? Then strike
s all at once?”

  Nebers nodded. “Have you ever heard of a zero-day exploit? Or a zero-hour exploit as it might be.”

  “I think so,” Reeves replied.

  “It’s a computer virus. A computer virus that’s programmed to infect someone’s computer, then on a specific day, it executes its payload and attacks the file system. This acts the exact same way.”

  Reeves’s eyes grew wide. “How is that even possible?”

  Nebers shrugged. “Seriously? How is cloning a sheep possible? How is all of the bio-hacking done around the world in this century possible? We are making huge strides in the world of genetic mapping and genetic engineering, stuff like this… I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner.”

  “But when I ask others about this, they tell me it’s next generation stuff. It’s a kind of bio-technology that nobody has yet.”

  “That’s true, too,” Frank replied. “Conceptually it’s not a stretch to come up with something like this, you just have to watch the news to get an idea of how it might work. But actually having the resources and technology to put it together? I don’t know of anyone right now who could do that, the United States included.”

  “So how do you explain it?” Reeves asked.

  Nebers shrugged again. “Apparently someone figured it out.”

  “What’s the likelihood that an enemy of the state figured it out?”

  Nebers looked back at the screen. “China maybe? Definitely too advanced for Iran or Iraq. Probably even out of North Korea’s league. Russia would be a stretch. The fact that any of these countries might get something like this executed before we would seems like a tall order.”

  Reeves nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Actually,” Nebers turned back toward him, “yeah, there was something else. Along with the organism and the normal human genetic tissue within the samples, we found microscopic traces of carbon. Five parts carbon to twelve parts hydrogen, mixed throughout the organism at a microscopic level.”

  The colonel drew back, looking at Nebers. “Am I supposed to understand that?”

  Nebers cocked an eyebrow. “Not necessarily. The combination of those molecules generally makes up the chemical that used to be known as Isopentane. It’s a clear liquid that is compression friendly. Typically found in shaving cream.”