by Rick Jones
She offered him a pretty smile. “If you wish, Seth. I was just hoping to peel back some of that hard edge of yours so that you could see what I see.”
“And what’s that?”
“A good man.”
Kimball felt a sour lump crop up in his throat while fighting back the sting of tears. He wanted her to see in him what others saw, a goodness that he was blinded to. How could anybody see decency in a man whose hands were always covered with the blood of others?
“I’m sure this man who took you in at the lowest point in your life would do so again,” she added. “Contact him, Seth. Find the courage and reach out to him.”
Here stood a man who had faced the uncertainties between living and dying when engaged in combat, always manning the front lines of battle and looking his enemy in the eyes. But the notion of facing off with an aged man who had grown old and feeble terrified him beyond descriptive words. To see any level of hurt or disappointment in the eyes of Bonasero Vessucci would be nothing less than a living hell. I . . . can’t.
“And do you want to know what else I see besides a good man?” she asked him.
He didn’t respond, taking the question as rhetorical.
“I see a little boy trapped in a big man’s body. And that little boy is crying for help.” She stepped away from him and traced her fingers over the donation box. “This is fine work, Seth. Father Donavan and I thank you very much. I just pray that the vandals will appreciate it as much as we do.”
“Don’t worry about that, Sister. This little boy will make sure that the box will stay just the way it is for now on.”
She turned to him, her smile beautiful. “I hope so,” she said. “I would hate to see something so beautiful become damaged more than what it already has been.”
Kimball wasn’t sure if she was referring to the box or him. He was always sensational at curing the ills of others, a consummate problem solver. What he couldn’t do, however, was salvage himself. But when he answered her, he did so as if she was referring to the donation box. “Don’t worry, Sister Abigail,” he told her. “Anyone who comes into this church to steal from its till again will wish they hadn’t.”
Her eyes batted, but not in a coquettish sense. “There goes the little boy talking like a man,” she said in playful jest. And as she was leaving, she said, “Reach out to him, Seth. We have but one journey on this planet. And it would be a shame ending up living with regrets for the rest of your life when you didn’t have to.”
And then she was gone, as well as her vivaciousness that filled his heart with joy every time she came near.
He then went to the donation box and examined it, letting his fingertips glide over the image of the cross etched into it, and thought about Bonasero. Unlike his true father who bullied his way through life for minimal achievement, Bonasero Vessucci was good and kind and devoted his life to humanity’s causes. And he missed him.
He missed him deeply.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Bensenville, New Mexico
4:17 PM
As soon as the authorities in a distant and neighboring town had been notified by the brothers as to what they discovered in Bensenville, a massive military undertaking was quickly under way. All access roads into the town had been cordoned off. Military vehicles covered with canvas tarps lined the roadways approximately two miles from the town’s center. And fully-armed soldiers wearing hazmat suits manned the entryways.
On a piece of flat terrain west of their position, three helicopters were gearing up as their rotors began to move in blinding revolutions. The wash of the blades kicked up clouds and dust devils the color of desert sand as they lifted off and banked towards the town.
In the lead helicopter sat Jason Melbourne of the NSA, Stephen Kendrick and Pauline Child of the CDC, and Jerald Seymour of the Department of Counter Terrorism. All were wearing hazmat suits. In the two trailing helicopters were sixteen men from elite forces, fully armed.
Seymour was pouring over documents. Without looking up he asked a question which sound muffled behind the Plexiglas of his face shield. “What’s the town’s population?”
Melbourne was leafing through his own sheets of data. “Eighty-four,” he answered.
“Casualties?”
“Unknown at this time,” returned Melbourne.
“And what about the two brothers?”
Melbourne said, “They were miles away on a hunting trip. Nevertheless, they remain in quarantine. But they appear fine.”
“No effects of the strain?”
“None so far.”
Seymour set his papers aside. “All right,” he started. “We work in essence under the same umbrella of the government. So it’s understood that all information of discovery is to be withheld in the interest of national security. What we find here today will be relayed to the National Security Council and the National Security Defense. Am I clear on that?”
Everyone concurred by nodding their heads behind their Plexiglas masks.
Melbourne, however, had another question. “And what about the brothers?”
“Keep them in quarantine until this is over. Then inform them of the hard consequences, should they divulge anything to the public.”
“Understood.”
Seymour then addressed Stephen Kendrick and Pauline Child of the CDC. “What can you tell me of this strain?” he asked them.
Kendrick and Child looked at each other, with Kendrick giving his counterpart the OK to answer.
Pauline Child leaned forward and voiced her knowledge over the noise of the turning blades. “About eighteen months ago,” she began, “the University of Texas backed an exploration in the Antarctic where they discovered core samples dating over two hundred thousand years, which contained a very unique form of bacteria with no related properties to any other known bacterium or viruses. None. But when the sample was taken to the bio-level and thawed, it was then that the strain was rendered active after being inert all this time.”
“And?” coaxed Seymour.
“Well, like any unknown pathogen it’s immediately classified as a B-four level as a precaution, until we know for sure of its capabilities. Any unknown toxin is then sent to Atlanta for further study.”
“Doctor,” ventured Seymour, “this strain taken from a Texas bio-lab just wiped out an entire community. It’s covered with what appears to be ash. So what exactly are we looking at here?”
She shook her head. “It’s not ash,” she told him. “What you’re seeing is what we call remnants.”
He cocked his head. “Remnants?”
“This particular strain, Mr. Seymour, is the perfect killing machine. Not only does it kill anything organic, but it also kills other forms of viruses and bacteria as well. It kills anything that teems in the air that’s too small for the human eye to see. It kills the mites that feed off of the dead tissue of our skin. It kills any and all plant material, such as trees and plants and weeds. And what you see on the ground is the remains of what the human eye cannot see, those living particles that are one-billionth of our size.”
Seymour clearly appeared agitated, wondering if the hazmat suits were capable of repressing the strain from entering.
So Pauline Child intuited, once seeing the sudden concern fall over his face. She raised her hands and patted the air. “It’ll be all right,” she told him. “These suits are just a precaution.”
“How do you know?”
“The brothers,” she said. “They’re fine. They walked right into the lion’s den and walked away without any effects whatsoever.”
“Maybe it takes time.”
“Negative. The Omega Strain is fast acting. It kills within moments of contact and has a mortality rate of one hundred percent.”
“That’s if it is the Omega Strain.”
“I’m sure it is,” stated Kendrick. It was the first time Seymour heard the man speak. “From what the brothers told us, from what they saw, including the bodies, there’s no doubt. Whoever unleashed the Omega Stra
in on this town did so as a trial run. They purposely chose a community that was out of the way and secluded in order to see the results without outside interference. This place was a testing ground and everybody in it was nothing more than test subjects.”
This was something Seymour and the Department of Counter Terrorism expected all along. When the strain was specifically targeted inside a Texas lab, then the concurrence between team members was that it would be tested prior to its becoming the backbone of future threats. The terrorists would most likely point to Bensenville as the example on a miniscule scale, whereas the goals of future threats would fall upon cities like New York and Washington D.C., as primary targets.
“In the hands of terrorists,” he added, “say inside congested areas, what is the Omega Strain capable of?”
Again, it was Kendrick who spoke. “That’s still up for debate,” he said, “since ongoing tests were being conducted at a very precautionary level at the CDC and the Galveston shop, it doesn’t appear to transfer from person to person like some viruses. It appears to attack and kill its host before the individual has a chance to spread the disease. It literally kills that fast. But if you want to talk about congested areas—well, each vial is known to contain about a hundred million microbes. So you do the math.”
Seymour was flustered. The first question he toyed with was what on Earth would ever compel people to create something like this? But it wasn’t created at all. It was one of Nature’s natural defenses that had been lying dormant all these centuries. And if there was one thing that man was incapable of conquering, it was Nature, a force that provided everything you could possibly want and take it away just as fast.
Worse, it was in the hands of terrorist whose insight was incredibly shallow and saw only the immediate consequences rather than the entire outcome, which could be the annihilation of mankind should the toxin spread. They were only looking at towns and cities, not the globe.
Looking out the window, they could see the town quickly approaching. Even from their vantage point they could see that the ground was canvassed with an awful gray, the area dim and bleak looking despite the fact that a white-hot sun was making its westward trajectory.
When the choppers landed in the middle of the square several feet away from the fountain, plumes of gray sand filled the air.
And when the dust finally settled, two words echoed through Seymour’s mind:
My God.
#
In the center of the square lay four dust-caked bodies. They appeared flat within their clothing, almost deflated, with viscous black fluid pooling beneath their bodies from cavity leaks.
As the troops disembarked from the choppers, Seymour immediately broke the teams up into two groups. One to follow the tandem team of Seymour and Child, the other to follow Melbourne and Kendrick. They were to fan out and look for survivors, and, should any be found, placed into quarantine. For those who resisted, then their orders were clear: terminate for fear of further contamination.
As Melbourne and Kendrick ushered their unit to cover the east and north sides of the town, Seymour stayed by the bodies in town central, wondering as he pointed to the dead while addressing Pauline Child, who stood beside him.
“You mind telling me why they look the way they do?” he asked.
The bodies were coated with a fine layer of gray dust, of remnants. “The Omega Strain,” she began, “is vicious in its intent to break down and destroy matter down to its purest form of liquid, which sixty percent of our bodies are made up of.”
He turned to her. “So we’re talking about a form of Ebola—something that can liquefy organs.”
“No,” she answered. “The idea that Ebola can liquefy a person’s organs is a fallacy. The Ebola strain causes severe internal hemorrhaging inside the body, giving off the impression that the organs are liquefying, when they’re not. There is no known pathogen or bacteria that has that capability outside of the Omega Strain. The Omega attacks its host and breaks down bone density until the bones become so brittle that they fracture into chips no larger than the size of your thumbnail. Once the organs have dissolved, then the fluids bleed out from every orifice. So the body, like a balloon, collapses because there’s no internal support—no bone structure, no organs, nothing.”
“So this strain is unique?”
“Very.”
“And something with no known remedy.”
“We at the CDC and the Galveston stations have been coordinating efforts to find a solution to combat the strain. But nothing has worked over the past eighteen months. We’re not even close.”
This was bad news to Seymour’s ears. If the cell decided to flip the lid of a vial and let Nature takes its course in some populated area, it didn’t sound as if the CDC had any answers to ward off a pandemic.
When he turned his head, he had to rotate his entire torso because his hazmat helmet would not move independently, since it was firmly attached to the suit. The first thing he saw was the washed-out sign of Jimmy Ray’s. He pointed. “I guess that’s as good a place as any to start.”
“Are you looking for something in particular?” she asked him.
His upper torso turned back to her. “Survivors. Ground Zero. Anything that can give me answers to questions that the president of the United States is certainly going to ask.”
Seymour then gestured to the troops to take the lead. With combat weapons raised and their heads on a swivel, they entered Jimmy Ray’s.
#
Melbourne and Kendrick followed the lead of their designated troops, as the unit walked down the dusty lanes of Bensenville. Houses on both sides of the street were covered in gray, the true colors underneath barely perceptible.
As the team approached one of the houses, they noticed a couple sitting on the porch who appeared as gelatinous as those lying dead in the central square. Upon further inspection they noticed that the front yard consisted of a large cottonwood that was now dead, its bark having decayed until the trunk looked weakened to a state of falling. An abundance of dead gray leaves surrounded the once sizeable canopy.
Kendrick veered off, soon followed by Melbourne and the rest of the team, and began to climb the stairs to the residence. The bodies were so deflated within their garments that their gender was unrecognizable. The only thing that gave them away was the cloth dress that the corpse was wearing in the chair to Kendrick’s left; overalls and boots for the body on the chair to the right, a male. Both were wearing wedding bands; however, the rings seemed to be sinking into the flesh as if the skin was becoming soft and gummy.
On the floor of the porch’s decking beneath the chairs, fluid the color of grape juice pooled beneath them, the bodies draining of fluids.
“You seeing this?” asked Kendrick.
Melbourne shrugged. Of course I’m seeing this. “Yeah.”
Kendrick pointed to the male, whose position remained to be one of leisure with one leg crossed over the other. “He died like that,” he said. “The strain hit him so hard, so fast, that he didn’t have time to writhe in agony. He was dead the moment it hit. Probably her as well.”
Melbourne panned his head, searching. It was unlikely that they would find survivors. But if the two brothers appeared sterile against the effects of the virus, then perhaps there were others. “All right, people, canvas the area for survivors,” he stated. “Finding people alive is our primary objective here. Fan out to every house, business, toolshed and outhouse--everywhere. People will most likely be scared. And scared people react differently. So be careful out there. And stay in communication with your team captain. I cannot stress the importance of this any more than what I have already expressed earlier.”
The unit was then split into two groups with each unit taking a side of the street, then began to work their way to the end of the road, a long process.
“We have about four hours of daylight left,” said Kendrick. “That won’t be enough time to police the town for survivors.”
What Kendric
k didn’t know was that additional resources, such as high-intensity lamps, were coming in on the backs of cargo trucks from a military base. The intention was to set up shop at the town’s outskirts with a military unit operating the light banks set throughout the area.
This was not going to be a hit-and-run operation, since Bensenville had become an extinct town in record time. Samples would be taken and autopsies conducted with the nation’s leading medical and viral principals pouring over data and results for weeks, if not months.
Bensenville was now a giant petri dish.
Kendrick stepped away from the bodies after scooping some of the grape-colored fluid into a small vial, and placed it into a cooling container that was no larger than a lunchbox.
Melbourne took this in with an appraiser’s eye. “You know more about this virus than I do,” he said to Kendrick. “So tell me what the chances are of finding someone alive.”
“Alive?” Inside his hazmat helmet, which did not move, Melbourne saw Kendrick shake his head. “The normal response would be something like ‘slim to none,’” Kendrick returned. “But not this time. Anyone who was standing within a mile or two from where we are when the cap was opened is dead. No doubt about it.”
Melbourne looked down at the bodies. Eighty-two people, he thought, gone in minutes as the strain expanded outward like ripples in a pond. The two surviving brothers had been blessed that they were miles away when the Omega Strain claimed its stake by taking life and territory.
There was so much more to do, Melbourne thought additionally. And so much more to see as the sun was clearly making its waning trajectory to the west He would see nasty things, terrible things. Things that should never have come to being but did. And all of it commencing by the direction of the blackest side of the human condition.
He turned and viewed the landscape, saw the gray, which was the color of dismal feelings and emotions. And Melbourne could feel no grayer than what he was feeling at the moment. If the cell utilized the Omega Strain, then there would be no stopping the spread of contagion. Everything they would do to counteract this would only end up being an exercise of futility.
