by JT Sawyer
In the larger metropolitan regions throughout the world, the streets were filled with thousands of animalistic creatures who swept with purpose through entire neighborhoods, decimating anyone in their path only to have the infected rise up and strengthen their force. Lau had already lost two battalions of his own soldiers who had been trying to enforce the border outside Beijing, and many of his other field generals were long overdue in reporting back.
Lau clicked on an internal CCDC document, which was updated every thirty minutes and showed a map of the world and the current spread of the virus, with the cities most affected indicated in red. Since the last check he’d done two hours earlier, new clusters had appeared in metropolitan regions in every corner of the globe. He panned to the larger picture and saw that Russia, South Korea, New Zealand, and countless other nations were being devastated by the disease. Mortality rates were now in the seven digits for most countries.
He pressed his fingers into the sides of his temples and gasped. Containment on any level is beyond anyone’s reach. We have to pull back our critical assets to the bunkers and save what we can.
Soon, the premier and his staff would be arriving at their designated bunker outside the city of Nanjang. Lau examined the roster of personnel, stroking his chin with concern as he realized that the bunker there would soon be at capacity.
His computer screen indicated a high-priority message had just arrived, and he pulled his chair closer to the desk, clicking on the encrypted email. It was from one of his submarine commanders, who had just returned from a mission to the South China Sea.
Lau read the report, which detailed how a four-man team had inserted aboard a derelict ship near the Spratly Islands. Lau had dispatched them there after his intelligence officers had reported faint satellite imagery of a possible drone of unknown origin that had made a flight over Fujian Province earlier in the week and then disappeared into the ocean.
Lau had cast a wide net, trying to track down any potential links to the drone, and his staff had identified three vessels operating in remote waters near the Spratly Islands. Two had resumed travels but one ship, the Atropos, had been sedentary for days, and SAT images indicated there was no personnel movement on board.
He viewed the vest-cam footage of the agents obtaining the drone data, followed by them descending into the lower levels of the ship. Lau kept squinting as he saw the numerous streaks of blood washed upon the floor, along with the damage from small-arms fire on the walls. So, the crew was attacked before our arrival—but by who?
He saw two of his men enter what looked like a small laboratory that was unsealed. Lau froze the video and reversed it, then stopped at a stack of wooden crates stamped in Chinese characters above but in English below: Fujian Province. He sat back and ran his fingers over the stubble on his chin. Was this an attack on the tea plantations in China, or something larger?
Lau knew there were only a few nations who could have benefited from wreaking havoc upon the Chinese economy, and he marveled at the audacity of the undertaking. His mind shifted from being a pragmatic soldier to a cunning scientist developing disruptive bioweapons. A small-scale attack upon our tea crops would set back our economic growth for months—and the only culprit would be some mites. Brilliant! He swung around in his seat and then saw the latest death toll estimates being updated to close to two million people. His face went taut and he blinked hard, refocusing his bleary eyes on the numbers only to realize that the figure was from China alone. Two million in only three days.
He shot up onto his feet, balling both his fists. “Retribution will be swift to whomever inflicted this upon us.”
Lau turned around and jotted down a series of coordinates from the submarine commander’s email, then he pressed a button on his desk, which summoned his assistant. A second later, a thin man with a protruding chin entered the room and stood at attention a few feet from the desk.
“Have the intel division pull up all satellite imagery for the area surrounding this vessel and any movement within the past seventy-two hours. I want to know everything that passed through that region, even if it was just a seagull shitting on the deck.”
The man nodded, then did an about face and quickly exited the room.
The Atropos was at the epicenter of tracking down the perpetrators behind this attack on his nation. He didn’t care if the rest of the world burned. If it was the U.S. or one of its allies, then they didn’t appear to have a cure in hand, given the mounting death toll in the West. The Chinese military still had numerous subs and destroyers at sea whose crews were unaffected by the virus. They were now the front lines in his effort to locate the perpetrators and wipe them out of existence. If this cataclysm is not all of our undoing then I will see to it with my last breath that the nation responsible for this is crippled beyond recovery.
***
Thirty minutes later, Lau received satellite images which indicated a Huey-160 had arrived on the Atropos three hours earlier. From there, he tracked the flight of the helicopter after the vessel exploded to Taiwan. Lau looked at the wall to his right, seeming to penetrate the cement as an image in his head of the biofacility to the south of him in Taipei took shape.
His attention was diverted when Lau saw an incoming text from the premier. He grunted, narrowing his eyes as he saw that the man indicated he and the remaining cabinet members would be arriving at the underground bunker near Nanjang within minutes.
The soldiers and researchers at that facility are the only ones worth saving. Lau grimaced and shook his head, thinking of the last time he met the rotund politician, who seemed more interested in showing off a recently completed bronze statue of himself than in the pressing interests of the nation.
He pulled up the personnel list on his computer for the fourteen underground bunkers around the country. Lau viewed the names of the political members with disdain. He knew they would be trying to maintain control of their surroundings through the same cronyism and servitude they had used throughout their long careers of draining the prosperous coffers of his great nation. Science and martial strategy were the only guiding principles that existed in Lau’s thinking, and the nation’s future would be better served if it didn’t have the excess fat of its political underbelly dragging it down.
He stared again at the personnel numbers at Nanjang. These will be the reservoirs of hope for our nation’s future.
He clicked on the exterior camera outside of the Nanjang bunker. It was located on the western slope of a mountain range and had a single road leading up to it, with several helipads outside the arched entrance. Below this were massive steel doors that were sealed shut.
Lau turned on the intercom and listened to the chatter between the guard inside the facility and the helicopter pilot arriving with the premier. The guard was shouting, his frantic voice indicating that thousands of creatures were pouring in from the hillsides and main road. Lau watched the helicopter land and the small security detail rush out from the side doors while the premier waddled out along with eleven of his assistants and family members. The countryside to the south had come alive with movement, and the ravenous horde began flooding towards the small band of humans trotting towards the entrance.
The cumbersome steel doors slowly began to open. Then suddenly they reversed and slammed shut as Lau implemented the override code from his computer. He held his chin up as he stared at the monitor, watching the premier and the others pounding at the defiant doors while screaming into the overhead speakers to let them in. The encroaching horde behind them descended swiftly. Body parts were liberated from the torsos like branches on a tree snapping off during a winter storm. The desperate people were ravaged by a mob of bloodthirsty beasts, who painted the entrance to the unyielding bunker in crimson and filled the cold mountain air with the blaring sound of shrieks.
When it was over, Lau cleared his throat then cast his shoulders back, feeling himself rooted to his surroundings like never before. He clicked off the screen then tapped his finger
on the oak desk. Now there are no further impediments.
Chapter 25
Reisner sat in Tso’s office on sub-level two. He and his team had been outfitted with some new clothing and footwear, but the jeans he wore were meant for someone with a slimmer profile, and he had a hard time sitting still. Their tactical vests, clothes, boots, and biohazard suits had been incinerated, so they were reduced to wearing civilian clothing. Nash and the others were busy field-stripping the Tavors and Glocks in the staff lounge. Santos had been able to remove the disinfected ammo crates from the Huey and they were able to replenish their magazines.
Reisner removed his phone once again to call Runa, but he got the same response. In fact, none of his Agency contacts back at Langley were picking up, and he figured they had probably been evacuated to a strategic location outside of Virginia. He didn’t want to focus on the alternative, given the recent images he’d seen of Washington DC being overrun by hordes of creatures.
The Cheng Hsin facility had enough supplies in place to shelter everyone for at least a month, and the layout of the building was hardened to withstand any assault from the creatures on the street. The only way to access the three sub-floors was through a security access card. In addition to Tso and Munroe, there were sixteen medical personnel along with some of their family members that were sealed inside the facility. Most of them were busy working on examining the data collected earlier from the deceased and trying to make some headway on figuring out patterns in the mortality rate.
Reisner sat back in Tso’s desk chair and turned on his laptop. He inserted the flash drive found in the lab on the Atropos. Reisner entered his security clearance code and accessed the files that belonged to Doctor Hayes.
“Now, let’s see what you were brewing up in your little lab of horrors.” He sifted through the files which had been dictated by Hayes over the past two months. Nothing jumped out at Reisner, mostly because every third word was a term from the fields of biochemistry or genetics. He clicked on a half-dozen other files which were identical, then found one titled, Ithaca 19.
This guy was sure into Greek names. He scrolled through the document, which had a day-by-day breakdown of studies Hayes had been conducting at a remote island location. Reisner sifted through the tedious notes, which spoke about the efficacy of using oribatid mites for viral transmission but indicated that the modern influenza viruses were too weak. Hayes’ next step had been to try a modified strain of the 1918 flu, one of the most lethal viruses ever to sweep the world, causing the deaths of over 50 million people. Let me guess where he got that from—Siegel, that son of a bitch.
The file ended with a poorly copied black-and-white map of an island in the Pacific, with a red arrow pointing to the east towards Hawaii, nearly two thousand miles away. He opened another tab and pulled up a map for that region, studying the geography. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands were the nearest locations.
So he uses this place as his little incubation chamber to perfect his concoction before sailing towards the South China Sea. Wonder if it’s still intact or if it suffered the same fate as the Atropos?
Reisner’s cellphone vibrated and he swiftly reached for it. There was a five-digit sequence he didn’t recognize, followed by a number he knew well. It was Runa.
“Never thought I’d be so glad to hear from you so soon after getting deployed.”
Runa’s voice seemed strained and he spoke in a hushed tone. Reisner was sure he heard the faint sound of gunfire in the distance. “Will, thank God you’re alive. I haven’t been able to get through to anyone since our convoy evacuated Langley this morning.”
“Are you OK, sir? Where are you?”
“About a hundred miles outside of Alexandria. Our surviving personnel were preparing to leave Langley when hundreds of those things breached the security perimeter and cut through our defenses. We couldn’t even make it to the helos, and had to plow our way out on the army trucks. We’re holed up in a house until sunrise, when we plan to push out further into the countryside.”
“Langley was overrun? How’s that possible?”
“The whole country, Will. POTUS and the VP along with most of the Cabinet are gone. Before he died, the president ordered air-strikes on the bridges and interstates in some of the larger cities in the U.S. in an attempt at containment, but it was too late. Most of the metropolitan areas back here are in flames and the people that are still left in the cities are waging a losing war. These creatures almost seem like they’ve fought in battles before.” Runa took a deep breath, then continued. “MacDill Air Force Base in Florida is the new command center for now, and most of our special operations units and remaining members of Congress are mobilizing there.”
Reisner heard the clear sound of a bolt-action rifle delivering some hate downrange. “Dammit, sir, I wish I could be there with you.”
“You’ve got more important things on your plate right now, Will. I contacted Pacific Command. Admiral McKenzie with the Seventh Fleet and what is left of our remaining forces in that region are the nearest sizeable force to your location. I sent you his access number. The password of the day is Round Robin. He knows of your location and is working on getting a SEAL team to get you out of Taiwan, but their resources are stretched thin.”
“Sir, I’ve got intel from Hayes that covers his research and also references another location where he had a stationary lab for creating the virus. Where should I send it?”
There was a long pause, followed by the sound of people shouting for more ammo. “Will—you’re it. Do what you have to do to stay alive, and get Hayes’ research into someone’s hands who can identify a way of stopping this.”
“I’ve got Tso here and a researcher named Munroe.”
“Selene Munroe—damn, that’s the best news I’ve heard all day.” The sound of gunfire was increasing, and the shrill sound of creatures was causing Runa to shout. “Will, Munroe is your number one priority now. The CDC has gone dark. Get her out of there and see to it she has anything she needs for her research, including Hayes’ work. There’s also a secure file from Siegel that I uploaded to the cloud before leaving Langley, assuming you can still access that remotely. It may contain information vital to the origin of the virus. I didn’t have the means of locating the other ghost ships he mentioned, but those are floating bioweapons labs that provide some answers and more staff to combat this thing. You’ll have to figure out a way to remotely access that directly off Siegel’s network at Langley if it’s still intact.”
“I’m on it.”
He could hear Runa scrambling around the room, the grit under his shoes screeching in the earpiece, followed by a high-pitched shriek.
“Will, you were the closest thing I’ve ever had to a son. I should have told you that a long time ago. I hope that—”
The phone went silent. He sat up, pressing it into his ear, wanting to reach out and grasp the arm of his mentor, his friend, and yank him back through the receiver.
“Jonas,” he yelled. “Jonas—God dammit.”
He slumped back in his chair, clutching the phone, then rubbed his finger along the side as if it were a talisman. After a long minute, he slowly placed it in his shirt pocket and stood up. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing another friend, and he drove the image of Runa’s last moments from his tortured psyche. If anyone could survive an onslaught, it’s him. The man had spearheaded operations in Afghanistan and been involved in countless incursions behind enemy lines on three continents. You’re gonna make it through this, Jonas. You have to.
He had to focus on the present, and needed to get Munroe and Tso dialed in on what Hayes had been doing aboard the Atropos. Now he had to gain the trust of a woman who clearly had disdain for him after their earlier conversation. Reisner was no stranger to recruiting and developing assets, but he didn’t have the time for such a lengthy undertaking, nor was that the kind of relationship he wanted to foster with her. Besides, he figured she would see through it anyway. Rei
sner needed to try a new tactic—one of being forthright instead of deceptive and screening each word through the prism of secrecy that was second nature to him. The thought of openly communicating with a woman was like walking through a psychological minefield, and Reisner realized he’d rather be engaged in empty-hand combat.
He swung open the steel door of Tso’s office and saw a flurry of movement down the hallway to the left. Two Asian men clad in black tactical vests and fatigues with slung rifles had just begun walking in his direction from the stairwell. Careful what you wish for.
Chapter 26
Selene was rifling through computer images from her earlier lab work, studying the features of the parasites and comparing them with known members of the Bertiella family. The two were very similar, but the parasites taken from the virus victims showed larger heads that were spear-shaped and seemed to have some type of antennae above the diminutive eyes.
They have to be feeding off the cerebellum or something else like the pituitary gland. The violent behavior seen in the majority of the creatures in the newsfeeds could be attributed to the limbic system, but why were some of them hanging back from the others and not exhibiting that level of aggression?
Selene pulled her focus away from the wall monitor when she heard the door behind her open and saw Tso walk through. He gave her an awkward nod and averted his eyes as he headed to a computer terminal on the opposite side of the room.
