The Tide: Salvage

by Melchiorri, Anthony J

  The Tide:

  Salvage

  (The Tide Series Volume 3)

  Anthony J Melchiorri

  March, 2016

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  The Tide: Breakwater

  Copyright © 2016 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: March 2016

  http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

  Cover Design: Eloise Knapp Design

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

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  -9-

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  MALIGNANT (Black Market DNA)

  Also by Anthony J Melchiorri

  About the Author

  -1-

  Roof of the Massachusetts General Hospital

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Abby was dead. Her once sky-blue eyes were bloodshot. Hair lay splayed around her head like the rays of a setting sun. But it no longer gleamed brilliant blond. A sickly gray had replaced the color—and it had spread through her skin. The woman Navid Ghasemi loved had been taken from him by a twisted biological agent. A single scratch from one of the infected had doomed her.

  He was used to cutting-edge biomedical science. He’d been devoted to his work in the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. In fact, he’d almost finished his PhD, studying new ways to deliver drugs to the brain. He had once believed science was the fountain of innovation, inspiration, and hope. Now he wondered if he’d been a fool.

  Navid stood, alone, on the roof of Boston’s Mass General Hospital, where once the brightest doctors and researchers had saved countless lives. But all the life-saving advancements made since the discovery of penicillin to the latest in nanoparticles and stem cells hadn’t stopped this biological agent from transforming people into abominable, nightmarish creatures.

  And even in her death, that agent continued Abby’s demonic metamorphosis. Crooked horns like those of a goat curled from her forehead. Her shriveled, dried skin had given way to mottled, yellow scales—a mutated organic armor had grown from Abby’s bones and worked its way through her flesh. Her fingers, once boasting perfectly manicured nails that were usually painted purple, now ended in serrated hooks.

  He gazed at her left hand, focusing on the twisted, scarred ring finger that would now forever remain bare. Almost three weeks ago, Navid had declined Abby’s offer of running away for the weekend to the Vermont woods. Instead, he’d spent most of the weekend working in the laboratory and writing a research paper for a science journal. It had been almost three years to the day since they’d taken a vacation together, so Navid had compromised with an afternoon of meandering through Boston Commons. Abby had stopped to look at the engagement rings in a jewelry store window, and he was ashamed to remember the anxiety he’d felt as she admired the diamonds. They’d talked about a future together, of course. Abby had meticulously planned it, from the house in nearby Newton to their two kids, a boy and a girl, and their adopted puppy. She had planned for everything—everything except this. Navid grabbed a bottle of water from the backpack next to him and took a sip. He wished, more than anything, that he’d bought her a ring and whisked her away to Vermont.

  But wishes and dreams wouldn’t change the nightmare he lived in now. The nightmare he lived in alone. Without Abby. Without anyone.

  He glanced at the broad white letters he’d painted on the roof: SOS. In the days he’d spent up here, no one had responded. There’d been no flyovers from government or civilian craft. The only voices he’d heard were those of the crazies below. Their monstrous bellows and howls carried up around him night and day. He’d slept in fits, always wondering when those things might catch his scent on the hot, muggy breeze. When would they climb up here and end his misery?

  He closed the plastic bottle and slid it into his backpack. It clunked in next to the two bottles he had left. His stomach grumbled, but he had nothing to offer it. Despite the water, his tongue still felt dry and bloated. But he didn’t dare drink more. He needed to ration the water while he waited for someone to come rescue him.

  He forced a laugh. It sounded sinister, even to his own ears. He knew no one was coming, yet he clung to the hope of deliverance.

  Abby continued to stare at him with those dead, red eyes. They weren’t hers anymore, not really. Abby’s eyes had sparkled with life and intelligence, with love and good humor. He couldn’t take it anymore, and he turned away to look out over the lip of the roof. He wrapped his fingers around the gray stone, warmed by the relentless sun, and peered over the edge. Crazies milled about in the street. They lumbered in clumsy paths like drunks stumbling home after last call. Navid wondered if they were as hungry and exhausted as him.

  One short jump would end it all. Mere seconds and this new hell he’d found himself in would be over. Abby would no longer stare up at him as if to ask why he hadn’t loved her enough to run from the city, why he’d let her succumb to this biological atrocity. Why he’d let her become this horror that lay before him.

  A tear rolled down his cheek, and he slumped back to sit against the lip of the roof. I’m sorry, Abby, he thought. God, I’m so sorry. He wiped the tear away with the back of his hand, but more came until he sobbed into his palms like a child. He didn’t care. He’d lost Abby. He’d lost the goddamned world.

  What did it matter now if he lost his life?

  An unseasonably warm wind curled past his face, tickling his skin. He steeled himself to jump, but then he pulled back from the edge.

  Goddammit, what am I doing?

  He walked toward Abby and picked up the bloodied ax that lay next to her. James, the selfish coward who’d put his own safety above everything else, had tried to kill Abby with this ax. In the end, both James and Abby had died, and Navid’s right hand had become a bloodied, swollen mass of flesh. Navid was afraid he’d broken at least a couple of fingers when the old professor attacked.

  Bastard.

  With his good hand, he hefted the ax. The blade glistened in the sunlight, and Navid trudged to the edge of the roof. He rotated the ax handle in his grip for a while then set it down next to him. With only two and a half bottles of water left, he decided tonight would be his last night on the roof. He couldn’t keep denying what he’d known all along: no one was going to save him. He’d die of thirst and hunger up here if he didn’t do something.

  But trying to
make his move in the middle of the day, when the sun was at its highest in the autumnal sky and those things could easily spot him from a mile away, wouldn’t be wise. He tucked his knees close to his chest, wrapped his arms around his legs, and glanced at Abby once more before he dragged his meager belongings along the edge of the roof to a new position where her judgmental, dead eyes could no longer condemn him. He settled against the low brick wall, and exhaustion soon pulled him into a fitful sleep.

  Vivid dreams played across Navid’s mind. There he was with Abby, walking hand in hand along the Charles River. Then he was sitting across from her at the dimly lit Kelsey’s Irish Bar & Grill, then they were in Toronto with his parents and sister, all smiling as they sipped hot cocoa and watched a Maple Leafs game on TV. A puck zoomed across the ice, bursting from the television. Navid dodged it, pulling Abby into his arms, protecting her. An ice skate the size of a refrigerator came next, cutting across the living room, scraping the walls. Abby screamed.

  The scraping grew louder, and Navid’s eyes jolted open. His dreams disappeared into the fog of his unconscious. Adrenaline surged through him. Instinctively, he grabbed the ax. Sweat trickled across his brow as he slowly stood. He held his breath and listened. There! He heard it again. The scrape of something against concrete. A rattle like rusted wind chimes clanking together. His blood ran cold.

  He crept along the roof until he came to the square structure. Behind it was where he’d left Abby. It also seemed to be the source of the noise. Had Abby—or rather the thing that Abby had become—risen? Navid had no idea how the biological agent worked. Anything seemed possible.

  He inhaled sharply then pushed past his fear. With the ax cocked back, ready in his clammy grip, he swiveled around the corner of the stairwell entrance. Abby was still sprawled, unmoving, across the ground. But Navid’s stomach lurched when he heard the scraping and rattling again. He focused on the sounds and realized they were coming from the roof just past her corpse. He darted forward and peered over the edge.

  A monster was scaling the wall about a dozen yards below. Its bone-plated arm stretched up, and its claws found the grooves in the brickwork. Bright yellow-and-purple sportswear clung to its body, the fabric shredded by the spikes jutting from its skin. Evidently a cyclist in its previous life, the creature had taken up a new sport. It scrambled toward Navid like some macabre rock climber. Its mottled crimson eyes locked with his, and a low growl escaped its cracked lips.

  “Shit,” Navid muttered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  The thing had seen him. He knew the monster wouldn’t leave him alone now. On the roof, he had nowhere to hide. When he’d first fled from the creatures in the hospital, he’d engaged the internal locks on the stairwell doors. It had been a last-ditch effort to escape the crazies chasing him, but now it trapped him on the roof. Panic swelled as he tried to conjure an escape plan.

  The monster hooked one set of claws over the squat brick wall along the roof’s edge. It pushed itself up and lifted a leg over. Navid rushed the creature and struck with the ax. The blade bit into the side of the monster’s head, cracking bone and spraying blood. The beast snapped and swung its claws wildly. Navid planted a foot into the monster’s chest and yanked on the ax with all the strength he could muster. The ax whipped free, and the beast stumbled. It toppled into open space, its limbs flailing and a loud, earsplitting shriek escaping its lips.

  Navid watched the thing fall. It slammed into the roof of an ambulance with a splatter. The noise drew the attention of the nearby creatures. They lurched from their stupors, and cries and yells echoed up around the dozens of mutated humans below. Their heads whipped around, searching for prey. One looked up, and Navid ducked back.

  He held his breath, praying the creatures hadn’t noticed him. The scrape and rattle of the monsters’ strange skeletal armor sounded out, along with a long, drawn-out wail. Navid risked another glance. Shivers tore through his flesh, and adrenaline coursed through him anew. He’d fended off the lone crazy, but now twenty more scaled the hospital. He saw one with horns protruding from its forehead like Abby’s; another had shoulder blades sticking out of its back like strange shark fins. The remnants of suits hung around the mutated limbs of two others, and a few crazies wore scrubs stained with blood. The long, shredded black-and-yellow coat of a firefighter draped from another.

  Navid tightened his grip around his ax. Ever since he’d painted the SOS on the roof, he’d been hoping someone would see him alive and awaiting rescue. Now, someone had. It just wasn’t who he’d had in mind.

  -2-

  Captain Dominic Holland stood in the bridge of the Huntress. The sleek gray bow of the ship cut through the choppy water of the Massachusetts Bay. His grizzled first mate, Thomas Hampton, leaned over a map of the city that Dom had spread out. Officer of the Watch Cliff Slaton brushed a hand through his sandy-blond hair. His weathered, tanned skin told of a lifetime at sea. Even his blue-green eyes seemed to hold a piece of the Atlantic in them. These were the men Dom trusted most to take care of the Huntress and keep the ship and crew in working order during the mission ahead.

  Dom glanced at the map Thomas was studying and then pointed to a spot on the chart. “Bring her in here.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Cliff said. “I can take her in closer if need be. The waters run deep through this part of the bay.”

  “Good to know,” Dom said. “But I want to keep a healthy distance from the city. Best not to announce our presence to the Skulls.”

  “Understood, Captain.”

  Dom walked along the fore of the bridge. He peered out over the crashing whitecaps toward Boston. Smoke drifted up between sheer glass skyscrapers. The cables that had once held the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge steady were snapped and dangling. Pieces of the highway dipped into the Charles River.

  Thomas looked up from the chart and stared at the bridge. “Must’ve been another casualty of General Kinsey’s quarantine attempts.”

  “Most likely,” Dom agreed. He wondered how scarred other cities must look. General Kinsey’s efforts to quell the Oni Agent outbreak by ordering strategic airstrikes had been a mistake. Gutting the interstates and highways to prevent people from escaping quarantined zones in the early days of the epidemic had done little to curb the Agent from tearing its way across the United States. From the last reports sent by Fort Detrick, it sounded as though every major US city had been ravaged. And smaller towns had fared no better. Skulls outnumbered healthy Americans, prowling the streets from New York to Seattle and everywhere in between.

  “Applying astern propulsion now, Captain,” Cliff said.

  The ship’s engines were surrounded by an acoustic damping chamber to improve the Huntress’s covert capabilities. As Cliff pulled back on the main control handle, the noise escaping the engine room was no more than a loud humming. Such a sound might’ve been too subtle for the untrained ear, but Dom appreciated the immense power behind the muffled roar of the engines. The ship slowed in its final approach. Dom waited for the hum of the engines to cease, and the Huntress came to a drift.

  “Drop anchor,” he ordered.

  The portside anchor splashed into the ocean from near the stern of the ship. The thick chains, clinking and rattling, followed into the water after it. Dom didn’t wait for Cliff to finish anchoring the Huntress. After years of service aboard the ship, he knew the man could handle it. He climbed down the ladders to the lower deck with Thomas and then followed a passageway to the cargo bay.

  Hunters milled about the expansive chamber, cleaning their weapons, loading magazines, and stocking a Zodiac with supplies. They had made a separate pile of supplies next to the port hatch, ready to be loaded in the helicopter. He nodded a brief greeting at Andris Jansons, who was packing a sniper rifle. Next he saw Miguel Ruiz helping Terrence Connor dole out smoke grenades and C4. Dom had long since learned the Skulls could be unpredictable, and he wanted to be prepared for any and all types of engagements on this mission. Lauren Winters directed her medical t
eam as they loaded up the Zodiac with emergency medical provisions and prepared small boxes for biological sample collections.

  This was the first time they’d had more than a few hours to plan and prepare for one of their self-directed missions to combat the Oni Agent. They’d spent the entire day traveling up from Baltimore to prepare for tonight. Still, Dom wondered if it was enough.

  “Hunters, fall in!” His voice echoed in the hold.

  The men and women of the elite group of covert operatives rushed to line up in front of Dom. They stood before him clad in their black fatigues and boots, their expressions stern. But Dom knew them well enough to see the exhaustion seeping through them, the fear the Skulls had instilled within them, and the pain from the memories of those they’d already lost in the battle against the Oni Agent.

  Dom tapped on the six-foot-tall LCD monitor, and a map of Boston lit up. He pointed toward a complex of buildings. “This is the Massachusetts General Hospital. We’ve been unable to establish any kind of communications. No medical or research personnel have responded to our radio broadcasts. All telephone services are down.”

  The image zoomed in on one building’s roof, where a large white SOS had been painted. “Here’s why we’re going in. This building houses the Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases. We identified one potential survivor.” A red circle surrounded a man sitting on the roof.

  “Is that...is that a Skull next to him?” Renee Boland asked.

  “It is,” Dom said. “We believe it’s dead, judging by our time-lapse surveillance. As far as we can tell, he’s the only living thing on the roof, human or Skull. Point is, we need access to the labs in that building, and we want to minimize the risk of running into Skulls. If we’re lucky, this guy can tell us exactly where we want to go.”

  “And if we’re not lucky, Chief?” Miguel asked, clenching and unclenching the fingers on his prosthetic arm.

  Dom didn’t want to think about risking his Hunters’ lives in another extended engagement with the hostile monsters. He couldn’t stand to lose another crew member. But getting to the research labs within Mass Gen could help them find a candidate drug or pharmaceutical molecule to destroy the prion component of the Oni Agent. If they prevented the prions from damaging the brain, then they effectively prevented the Oni Agent from turning people into cannibalistic monsters. Regardless of the risk to himself and his crew, they needed to do this. “Lauren says Mass Gen might hold the key to developing a vaccine or cure for the Agent. We’re going to find it. So if we’re unlucky, if we’re forced to scour the entire facility, we’ll do it.” He tapped the HK45C in his side holster. “And we’ll deal with the Skulls like we always have.”