by JT Sawyer
“And all of those things on the street attacking people—they’re infected with the virus you’re talking about,” said Nash.
Tso nodded his head, the bags under his eyes seeming to sag further. “Yes. Not long ago, the hospitals and morgues around my country were filled with the bodies of those who died from the virus. Now those same people somehow reanimated and began assaulting others, thus spreading the virus with a new mode of transmission.” He rubbed his fingers against his temple. “I just don’t know how any of this can be happening.”
“The same thing has been reported in North America and elsewhere,” said Selene. “Millions of formerly deceased victims of the virus are now ambulatory and killing others.”
Reisner glanced down at his phone. He had tried to call Runa but his boss’s phone went straight to voicemail. He thrust it in his pocket then stepped closer to Tso.
“Look, we don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to get straight to the point. We have some critical intel that we need to get back to the States that might help get a jump start on figuring out what we’re up against with this virus. Runa says you’re one of our guys, so that’s good enough for me. If you can just—”
“Wait a second,” said Selene, taking a step forward. “You know something about all of this? How’s that possible? I’ve been on the front lines of this from early on, and Doctor Tso before that—and we hardly even understand what’s happening.”
The face of the woman with the kind demeanor from the tent had disappeared and had been replaced by someone with fire in her gaze.
“Just dial it back a notch, Doc. We’re here to help.”
“And you’re with the State Department—just flew in from a decontaminated site, did you, for a visit with an old buddy.” She took a step back from Tso, eyeing him with suspicion, then fixed her attention again on Reisner.
“Look, I realize you don’t know me and our arrival here was under less than favorable conditions, but we’re on the same side. If I can contact my boss we can figure out how to get all of us out of here.”
She folded her arms, giving him a piercing gaze. “I’ve been studying viral pathogens for most of my career and have never come across something like this—this is beyond nature’s construct. If you have some information that can be used to combat this pandemic, then please speak up.”
“Perhaps in good time, Doc. I just lost two members of my team a few hours ago, so I’m as interested in understanding what’s happening as you are.”
She walked underneath the television screen, thrusting her index finger at the grisly images. “What you may not know, Mr. Reisner, is that not only did all of the deceased become animated but they did so simultaneously around the world, including in the basement of this very building, where my assistant and I barely escaped.” She paused, taking a deep breath as she rubbed the back of her neck. “That can only mean that there is some kind of unseen connection between those who are infected. So, if I don’t fucking dial it back a notch, you’ll have to forgive me.”
Connelly stood up from her chair, whispering to him from behind. “Remember the three we shot on deck outside the command center.” Reisner was aware that she was breaking protocol in discussing their mission in the presence of civilians, but he didn’t care. What Selene had just mentioned sent a chill up his spine.
“Yeah, the two guards who moved slower almost acted like they were being instructed by the other one at the rear—the one that moved like a leopard.”
Reisner looked at the monitor, then down at Selene. “What time did this happen—how long ago did the dead start to come back to life or whatever you want to call it?”
“Just over two hours ago.” I noticed it first in the lab with a partially autopsied corpse. A few minutes after that, all of the deceased in the morgue began awakening.”
Nash stood up and moved alongside Reisner. “The detonation of the ship corresponds with Doctor Munroe’s timeline. Did that explosion and the death of all those creatures somehow trigger the rest of these bastards out of their slumber?”
“We’re talking about people, gentlemen, not creatures,” said Tso.
“You didn’t see what we did,” said Reisner. “These things moved like predators—some were fast and others acted like scouts, moving slower and sacrificing themselves.”
Amidst everything happening on the ship and his oxygen-starved body on the flight, he hadn’t had time to think about it before, but now he understood. “It’s almost like they were seeing how we’d respond so they could adjust their tactics.”
Porter patted his fist on the wall. “And I swear that the one below deck—the slow mover—kept letting out those high-pitched shrieks like it was relaying a message back to the others.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” said Selene, whose eyes had widened. “Where were you?” Her expression had softened and she moved away from the television. “Please, tell me so I can help.”
He knew they had only flown to Taiwan because his original plan of heading to Manila hadn’t been an option. He also realized he was breaking dozens of Agency protocols in revealing that they had classified information in their possession. He glanced at the television monitor again, watching as a mob of crazed attackers toppled a school bus and burst through the windows while police moved in with tear gas. Reisner wanted to shuck off his disciplined exterior and tell her that the director of the CIA was most likely responsible for releasing a bioweapon of catastrophic proportions upon the world and that the Chinese military would be fluttering their finger over their nuclear launch buttons if any of this got traced back to the U.S.
Instead he ran his hand through his wet hair and glanced around at the rest of his team. He wasn’t about to let the sacrifices of Byrne and Dominguez be buried in some Agency memo on Siegel’s desk, if Siegel was even alive anymore. He didn’t know if he’d be able to get through to Runa or how they were going to get out of Taiwan and back to the U.S., but for right now, this facility was the safest location in the region until he could figure out an exfil plan.
He needed to see for himself what was contained on the flash drives and learn what they could extract from the captain’s laptop. Then he would decide if he would break protocol and share that information with Selene Munroe. Whoever she was, it sounded like she would be able to navigate through the data better than he could, and right now, she and Tso might be the best hope of understanding how to fight this deadly enemy.
Chapter 22
CDC, Atlanta, Georgia
After he had finished examining the video exam that Selene had performed in Taipei, Geoffrey Weaver slumped back in his seat. The past seventy-nine hours had been grueling, and he just wanted to crawl into a corner and forget the horrors of what he had witnessed unfolding with his teams around the country.
He dragged his hands across his neck, trying to drive out a knot of muscle tension. He looked at his computer screen, examining numerous police and medical reports from around the U.S. Weaver just couldn’t understand the pathology of this virus and why the parasites would still be alive long after the host had died. He concurred with Selene that the Bertiella parasites most likely originated from the oribatid mites. He was familiar with that transmission mode and had heard of outbreaks on islands in the Indian Ocean, where children became infected after consuming guava fruits covered with the tiny mites.
Though most of the early patients with this deadly virus admitted to hospitals exhibited rashes caused by the mites, their presence hadn’t been indicated in any further cases since last night. Weaver believed that the virus had initially spread from the eighteen-hundred passengers who had disembarked from a cruise ship out of Asia. The main mode of transmission during the past twenty-four hours had changed from the mites to the parasites, which then spread the virus from maulings inflicted by the recently reanimated.
He dictated his notes into an email to colleagues of his around the world:
The Bertiella parasites seem to have mutated after
finding a suitable host inside the human body. The autopsy from Dr. Munroe would seem to indicate that the parasites are largely centered around the cerebellum, which may be how the deceased victims are able to move. The parasites could be obtaining nourishment from the pituitary gland, given its proximity to the cerebellum, but further research is required to explore this possibility and its ramifications.
He removed his headset and sent off the email along with an attached file which contained other findings from CDC centers and WHO field offices around the globe.
Thinking over the timeline of patient zero’s arrival at the hospital in Taipei and the corresponding report of outbreaks in China, Weaver didn’t understand how hundreds of thousands of corpses could suddenly come back to life at the same time around the world. If this began in China then why didn’t they become reanimated there first, followed by a sequential pattern occurring in other nations that were affected later by the virus?
Standing up, he donned a new lab coat, latex gloves, and a protective mask, then swiftly exited his office. Weaving through his frenzied staff, he made his way to the elevator and descended to the infirmary observation room outside of BSL-4 laboratory. Walking down the narrow hallway, he took a right turn and strode into the ten-by-twelve room before the morgue. The gurneys inside the chilled room on the other side of the glass were empty, and a metallic tray was lying on the blood-stained floor amidst an array of used surgical instruments.
Weaver pressed the button on the intercom, seeing some rustling behind a dark green curtain to the left. His chief medical examiner, Liam Hagan, was supposed to be finishing an autopsy. “Doctor Hagan, can you spare a minute to talk? I have a few more questions about the last victim.”
Weaver saw a partially clothed figure emerge from behind the curtain, its blood-stained lips parting and a piece of jagged flesh falling to the floor. Several worms protruded from the corners of its mouth. Hagan’s face was nearly translucent, the white of his cheekbones showing through parchment-like skin. The thing that was once Hagan moved with a stilted walk and hissed as it moved towards Weaver, its gaze unflinching. It reached a hand up then walked into the glass, angrily screaming in defiance of the barrier separating them.
Weaver felt a knot in his stomach as he backpedaled into a steel table. He reached for the alarm on the wall but instead pressed his hand into something rubbery and slick, like the skin of a fish. He turned and saw the crazed face of a nurse, who lunged forward and bit off two of his fingers then leapt onto him. Weaver shrieked and toppled back onto the tiled floor as she gnawed on the yielding flesh of his neck while worms flitted out of her mouth with each greedy thrust of her head.
Chapter 23
For the first time, Jonas Runa noticed the rain had stopped hitting the window—no, it had been drowned out by something else. He stood, looking out to his right, staring at the streets below the three-story house which he and eleven other agents had taken refuge in, and saw a river of movement—crazed humans swarming upon hundreds of people fleeing in every direction. The attackers only resembled a human in the crudest sense. Their skin was opaque, a stark contrast to their jet black eyes. These were shocking caricatures of their former selves—something animalistic and predatory.
Two blocks away, he could see a throng of a dozen maniacal creatures diving through the glass of a van, mauling the passengers inside, while another group near a gas station tackled two police officers whose weapons had just run dry. The ghastly screaming and howls from below penetrated the thick window pane until it seemed to fill Runa’s head.
They had stopped to help others once before during their exodus from Langley and had suffered the loss of five agents when they were overwhelmed by nearly forty creatures that swarmed in from a side street near a park. The route back to their vehicles had been cut off and they fled on foot to their present location, holing up in a recently abandoned three-story house in a cul-de-sac near Alexandria.
Now, with their guns nearly depleted, the remaining men with him knew they had to evade the creatures and escape from the city to the countryside, where there were fewer infected. He smirked at the irony—evading through my own country while surrounded by hostiles in every direction. All thanks to fucking Siegel. I wish he had been on that street with us last night.
Though it was only four days ago that he had sat with Reisner and his team at the briefing about the Atropos, it seemed like months had passed. Millions of people infected and turned into monsters—how our mighty world has crumbled in no time at all.
He wasn’t even sure who was left to govern the country. The remaining special operations units at MacDill AFB in Florida were confirmed as being intact, as was NORAD and a half-dozen other smaller bases around the U.S. where the outbreak had been prevented. Any other members of the Senate or Congress would have been flown to one of a dozen secure locations, but the last he had heard, their numbers were few and POTUS and anyone else up that food chain was dead.
“Sir, we’ve got multiple tangos moving in from the south of the house,” whispered Lipscomb, a blond-haired agent to his right who was squatting beside a window.
“We need to get to another vehicle and get out of here, but I don’t see how that’s possible just yet, given how many are out there.”
“Where to this time?”
“I’ve got a place in mind that’s off the grid and with very few people around. Should be about eighteen miles southwest of here—belongs to one of my agents.”
Lipscomb squatted lower, lessening his profile in the window while holding up his Sig P320 pistol. “Looks like a few more goons just got invited to the party. I count fifteen now.”
Runa peered through the veil-like curtains at the macabre scene below. The creatures were walking in a parallel formation, with two rows of six followed by one of them at the rear, who was emitting a shrill sound. What the hell are they doing?
It reminded him of the old movies showing the British military formations during the Colonial Era. Once the group reached the front lawn of the house next door, the first row broke off and ran forward, crashing through the windows of the house and front door. The others remained in a loose formation, standing clad in torn pants or shorts, their translucent bare chests glistening under the streetlight. Runa could see their muscles wriggling as if there was a current of hundreds of miniscule threads pulsing through the flesh. Their bulbous lips were parted and revealed a steady flow of cream-colored saliva combined with blood.
What kind of abomination is this?
A minute later, Runa heard screams inside the house, followed by silence. Then he saw the group of six creatures file out, their faces shiny with fresh blood. The last one was dragging a semi-conscious man in his late fifties. The portly figure was groaning but looked untouched. Runa scrunched his eyebrows together and wondered why the man had been spared.
He paused in mid-thought as he saw the creature at the rear move around to the porch steps, where the man was lying on his back. The gangly beast leaned forward, opening its jaws and letting a few parasites wriggle free and drop onto the man’s face.
The stout man thrashed, arching his back in the air and screaming as the worms slithered up to his right ear canal then disappeared. The man’s chest stopped moving and the mist from his exhalations ceased.
Runa wasn’t sure if it was Lipscomb or himself that had just gasped. My God—what happened? Runa had seen a lot of bizarre things in his lifetime, but this caused his stomach to sour and he felt nauseous. He narrowed his eyes and forced himself to continue studying the scene before him in hopes of learning something about the enemy at their doorstep.
Runa saw the man roll to his side then sit up, taking a knee and then standing. His face was featureless, but his mouth hung open and he emitted the same shrill sound as the others. He moved alongside the other creature and both of them proceeded to lead the others that had fallen back into formation before moving to the house next to Runa’s location.
Runa slowly turned and looked at Lip
scomb, who had the same terrified expression he was sure was on his own face.
Chapter 24
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Headquarters, Beijing
General Lau’s office on the sixth sub-floor of the Tactical Operations Center had been bustling non-stop for the past eighty-six hours since the viral outbreak began, and he told his assistant outside to make sure no one disturbed him for the next fifteen minutes. He had hardly slept during the past few days between the endless video conferences with the party general secretary, the premier, and the president along with hourly briefings from the Chinese minister of health, who oversaw all twenty-three of the country’s provinces. Now, the PGS and president were both dead, which left Lau and the premier as the two governing figures of the Chinese government.
In all of his years spent working in military bioweapons programs, Lau had never seen a pathogen move this quickly. Analyzing the data from the physicians who had emailed their findings along with other medical reports from around the world reinforced his gut feeling that this was a novel virus not found in nature. However, no terrorist group had come forth acknowledging their handiwork and he wondered if it was a manmade creation that had been formulated during the old Soviet bioweapons program or something entirely new. He had no doubt that the epicenter of the outbreak was in Fujian Province, where the earliest victims were documented along with the highest mortality rates.
During the first thirty-six hours following the outbreak around the world, the WHO had implemented the Global Public Health Information Network to collect data from local and national medical centers and then disseminate information, but it did little more than tell people what the internet and media outlets were advising: avoid close contact with others, employ frequent hand-washing, and stay out of crowded settings. In past outbreaks this had served to reduce infection considerably, but this virus hadn’t slowed in its tracks in the slightest. China, like the rest of the world, was being ravaged by an invisible enemy that turned its victims into some kind of monster bent on killing others.
