by Barry Napier
Paul bit back the retort that sprang to his tongue right away. He also did his best to hide the fact that he was clenching and unclenching his fists in anger. “So what is it, exactly, that you need?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“For the time being, just some information,” Ramsey said. “And while I get it, Dr. Jolly is going to take another blood sample. From your arm this time. Are we going to have a problem?”
Again, he had to bite back words. Something in this man’s eyes made him know without a doubt that a rifle butt to the chest would be like a picnic if this man teed off on him. Paul had a mean streak in him, but he also knew when to back down and bide his time.
“I’d obviously rather not, but it seems I don’t have a choice.”
“Thank you,” Ramsey said. “Have a seat and give Jolly your arm.”
Paul eyed both men with distrust as he did what he was told. Jolly set to work, tapping at Paul’s arm to find the best point of entry.
“The men that you spoke to when you first came in tell me you’re NYPD,” Ramsey said. “Is that true?”
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“Were there many other survivors that you know of? Certainly you saw some on your way out of the city.”
“We saw a few,” Paul said as Dr. Jolly slid a needle into his arm. “Maybe three? But we also heard some people here and there, off in the distance.”
“And what about on the rest of the trip out here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe another two or three. It’s all a blur, really.”
“What time did you go on shift on that last day in New York?” Ramsey asked.
“It was supposed to be seven thirty, but most of us got a call earlier than that, asking us to come in. There had been some emergency—an explosion near the coast from what everyone could tell.”
“How soon after that explosion did people start getting sick?”
“I don’t know an exact time,” Paul said. He was not liking the way this line of questioning was going. He was starting to think the military knew absolutely nothing about what had happened. “I’d say maybe two hours but that’s just a guess.”
“And how long between that explosion and when things just started going to hell?”
Paul thought it over. He thought of the man in the drug store, aiming a gun at the woman behind the counter. He thought of the bodies on the sidewalk, people puking at every turn, the guy on the bike getting nailed by the ambulance.
“Not sure. Somewhere between four and five hours.”
Jolly uttered a curse at this, but Ramsey seemed unfazed by it. “Did you ever get a chance to see it from the very start to the very end?” Ramsey asked. “The virus, that is…”
“Not in New York. But I saw it with my grandfather in Brownstone, West Virginia. That’s where we went first.” In the midst of this statement, Jolly slid the needle out, having gotten the sample he needed.
“How long did it take?” Ramsey asked.
The man’s cold cadence was irritating Paul to no end, but he understood it. He was here to collect information. And to collect the sort of information he was looking for, manners and any semblance of compassion were useless. He just needed the facts.
“Maybe an hour,” Paul said. “Probably less. Coughing one minute, puking the next. High temperature to go along with it. Barely breathing within half an hour. Seemed sort of delirious there at the end.”
“And at no point in your travels have you, Olivia, or Joyce felt ill?”
“No. Just tired and scared out of our minds.”
Ramsey considered all of this and then looked to Jolly, who was bandaging up Paul’s arm. “You good here?” Ramsey asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Ramsey looked back to Paul and gave a curt nod. “See, that was easy. If you can remain helpful, this won’t be so bad for you.”
“You’re all about shooting straight, right?” Paul asked. “You seem like the kind that gets right to the point, no bull, no drama, right?”
“A keen observation,” Ramsey said. “What’s your point.”
“Just tell me the truth. Are Olivia and Joyce safe?”
“Yes. They’re perfectly fine—located in a room exactly like this one in a trailer about fifty yards away.”
“And has anyone attempted to contact the girl’s father?”
“No. Not yet. But we will. I understand the protective vibe, but with all due respect, reuniting a little girl with her father is very low on our priorities list. But if you remain a good sport, I’ll see to it myself that it’s moved up. I may even make the call myself.” He gave a tilt of the head, a sarcastic smile, and added: “Anything else.”
“Yes, actually. This virus…what is it?”
Ramsey looked to Jolly and for the first time, he saw something other than strength and confidence in Commander Ramsey’s eyes. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Ramsey then walked to the door and used his little card to make his exit. With a hiss of hydraulics and a gust of stale air, he and Jolly left the room. Paul didn’t even bother with thoughts of sneaking out behind them. The look he’d seen exchanged between Ramsey and Jolly made him wonder if he wanted to get back out there at all.
Chapter 12
The broadcast out of Montgomery showed a highway on fire, just outside of Louisville, Kentucky. Terrence Crowder watched it with tears in his eyes. He let the tears flow, nervously rubbing at the seashell necklace around his neck.
“I’m sorry,” he said for about the hundredth time since he’d first heard the news about Louisville. “I’m sorry…so sorry.”
He didn’t know who he was talking to, who he was apologizing to. Given that he was rubbing at the little shell around his neck, he assumed he was speaking to Trevor. In a dark sort of way, Trevor and Mary had seemed very close to him over the last week or so. All of the death and destruction seemed to bring them closer.
And now there was even more death to digest—to wrap his mind around.
Kettle had been right. Louisville was gone.
The bomb had gone off exactly six hours after the Richmond explosion. The broadcast seemed to be only visuals, with no audio; whenever one of the reporters tried to say something, they’d get a few words in and then start choking up. One thing was now clear, though. They repeated it over and over again because it was the only thing to hang a hat on, the only thing to fixate on and direct their worry, fear, and anger toward.
“Our country is under attack,” a tear-streaked blonde woman had said into the camera just ten minutes ago. “We are under attack in a way that we have never dared to even think of. Explosions in New York and Fort Worth that seemed to be of a biological warfare nature. And now two nuclear detonations in the span of six hours, one in Richmond, Virginia and the other in Louisville, Kentucky. The timing of the nuclear explosions denote a very clear intent, going off exactly six hours apart from one another. Officials are saying…”
She could make it no farther. She’d stepped away from the camera and the feed showed only the aftermath of Louisville. Highways on fire. Helicopters swirling, careful not to get too close to the fallout.
That had been ten minutes ago and no one had managed more than four words since then. Also, the feed was starting to get weak. He’d added fuel to the generator two hours ago so he knew it wasn’t a power issue. No, things overhead were getting bad enough to affect a feed he was streaming out of Birmingham. It made sense, he supposed. From what he understood, Baltimore was now either a wasteland or very close to being one. And while the nuke that had taken out Richmond would certainly cause disruptions, he didn’t think it would have been close enough to mess with his setup.
But even as he thought through all of this, the broadcast got weaker and weaker until it finally winked out. Terrence was left looking at a blank screen. The generator kept humming behind him, almost like some purring mechanical beast. He tried reloading the screen but found nothi
ng. He tried a few other sites, a few other feeds and streams but there was nothing.
Ah God, he thought. If he had no way of communicating with the outside world, that meant his meager way of staying in touch with George Kettle was now gone. He knew that his little messages to Kettle weren’t nearly as important as he thought they were. Kettle’s responses to what was happening in America (and, by now, probably parts of Canada and Mexico) proved that he was not going to change his mind. It also proved that the man was just as psychotic as he’d been eight years ago.
His last response alone was enough of an indication of this: See the news from Richmond? I now know the order. I now know the route. Louisville. Boom.
So, no…sending little messages back and forth through an unsent email were ultimately going to do no good, anyway.
But for Terrence, it was a way to know that Kettle was at least stationary; it was a way to know that he was alive, likely in one place, and still safe. And if he was alive and well, there was at least the slim chance that his mind could be changed—that he might be able to put a stop to the events still to come.
Terrence looked to the laptop with the email pulled up. He wasn’t sure if it would even work anymore if there was no connection above his head, but he—
On the screen, he saw that Kettle had sent him another message. It had apparently come while Terrence had been watching Louisville burn. It was short, to the point, and it made Terrence very uneasy.
The message read: Relocating. Nice knowing you.
If Kettle was relocating, it likely meant that even if he could figure out a way to send messages to Kettle, it would do no good. Kettle would be out in this mess, seeking shelter in a new place. And why? Maybe because the next place to get hit was too close to where Kettle was currently residing? Maybe because…
“Wait a minute now,” Terrence said to the empty bunker. “Relocating…”
Was Kettle trying to tell him something? Was he trying to send a veiled message, being a little paranoid and making sure it wasn’t obvious? Or was Terrence simply reading too much into it?
“Relocating,” Terrence said again.
He thought back to the very long conversations he’d had with George Kettle eight years ago. He could clearly recall some of the plans Kettle had in place even back then, getting ready for this absolute hell that he had referred to as Chaos Dawn. He had backup plans and even backup plans for those backup plans, all depending on the shape and size that Chaos Dawn might take. And now that Kettle seemed to know the layout of the rest of the project, he was relocating.
Based on those conversations from eight years ago in colorless government interrogation rooms, Terrence thought he might know where Kettle was relocating. It was a location Kettle had revealed almost in passing during one of their lengthier interrogations eight years ago. The question that remained, though, was if Kettle had intended for Terrence to figure this out.
A little stirring of nervous excitement bubbled up inside of him. There was a very basic fear at the core of it, but that was okay. If he planned on making it through the next several weeks, a healthy dose of fear was going to be necessary. He stared at Kettle’s last message and started to rub at his seashell necklace again. Beyond the chaos overhead, there was now one enormous thought orbiting around all others.
George Kettle was relocating, and Terrence had a pretty good idea where he was headed.
As if in a dream, Terrence got out of his seat and walked over to his small bed. He knelt down and reached into the thin space between the bed’s metal frame and the floor. His fingers grabbed the edge of the steel case hiding in that thin space and he slowly pulled it out.
He looked at the case for a while, a scarred metal case that almost looked like a suitcase someone might expect to see on The Jetsons. Two simple clasps held it closed on either end. Terrence ran his thumbs along the latches but could not bring himself to flip them up. Not yet…not now.
While he now had something of a plan in place and that fearful excitement was fueling him, he still had to think logically. He had no idea what was in the air above him. Maybe (and probably) the Blood Fire Virus. Or maybe there were more Homeland Security goons up there looking for him. Surely by now they’d realized the two they’d already sent out looking for him weren’t coming back.
Terrence stared at the case, knowing that when he opened it, he’d be crossing a line that he could never go back to. He’d be stepping closer to the end of all of this even though he had no clear picture of what that end might look like. So for now, he simply ran a hand over it as if brushing dust off of an ancient relic, slightly terrified of what was inside.
Chapter 13
The moment Katherine made it out of the little strip of woodland and saw the industrial park, a series of sudden realizations hit her. Her mother was dead. Her aunt and uncle on her father’s side (her father having passed three years ago from prostate cancer) were dead. Her sister, thank God, had been visiting a college friend in Florida, so she had not been in Richmond when the bomb went off. But everyone else close to her was gone. Her mother and the little cottage-looking house her parents had lived in just seven miles away from Katherine’s apartment was gone. The guy she had been sort of dating for about a year or so now, with his addiction to mountain-biking and his sloppy loft apartment near the college district, gone. Luis, her unofficial bureau partner, gone and likely fully submerged in the James River by now. Section Chief Rollins and every familiar face in the conference room she’d stood in earlier that morning…all gone.
Gone, gone, gone. The weight of it all fell on her as she crossed the parking lot of the industrial park. Her knees gave out with the weight of it as she crossed in front of a small architecture firm and she fell to the pavement. A little spark of pain flared in her knees and shot up her leg but she barely noticed it. Scattered debris covered the parking lot. Not too far away from where she fell, she saw a small flatbed trailer that had been upended and slightly bent at the end.
Katherine let out a wail of grief and looked into the sky. It did not look burned, as she’d first thought. Instead, it now looked like a very heavy storm was on the way. Little streaks of an almost ethereal sort of orange peeked through here and there.
A million questions raced through her mind as she allowed herself that brief moment of weakness. Why had this one been a nuke while the other two she’d heard of had been much smaller? Why had Richmond been different? And why hit Richmond? In the grand scheme of things, it seemed like a pretty insignificant target.
Lurking beneath those questions was another one that seemed to demand more attention. It was a simple question, but it did not have a simple answer. What am I supposed to do now?
The answer came to her in the voice of Section Chief Rollins. While Katherine would never have admitted it to him (or anyone, for that matter) Rollins had been something like a father figure to her in the past few years. When she’d requested bereavement when her father passed away, Rollins had watched her break down and cry, right there in his office. Several months later, when she had been about five minutes too late to save a young, kidnapped girl from being killed by her estranged uncle, he had helped her deal with the anger and disappointment. So she supposed it made sense she could still hear him in her head, giving her orders.
You finish your assignment to the best of your abilities, he said.
Given that a nuclear bomb had just destroyed her hometown and most of the people in her life, it seemed like an insane notion. But at the same time, all of the pieces fit together quite easily and did seem to point toward the completion of her assignment. Most other agents had been in town, hunting for any traces of bombs in response to what had happened in New York and Destiny Ridge, Texas—as well as the discovery of a bomb in Atlanta. Meanwhile, Rollins had tasked her and Luis with trying to find two men called Terrence Crowder and George Kettle. It was an assignment that had saved her life; had she been downtown or on the West End sniffing out bombs, she’d be just as dead as everyon
e else.
I wonder how big that bomb was? she thought. The blast of it was strong enough to blow cars around a bit out here. Which way is the wind blowing? What about radiation poisoning?
She shoved those thoughts to the back of her mind. She’d survived the blast and, so far, was safe from that wretched virus. She was not going to pile one other monumental danger on top of all of the others. There was no upside to it and right now…well, right now she had enough to worry about. So she set her thoughts back to the last assignment she’d been given and the ramifications of what it could all mean.
Rollins had also told them to keep the assignment quiet, and that the directive had come straight out of DC. When she added all of that up, as well as some of the other tidbits Rollins had shared with them, it made her quite certain that Crowder and Kettle might be somehow responsible for what was happening. Or, at the very least, that they might have some idea who was behind it.
If that was the case, then that was what she would do. She would find some way to make it to that second address in Hoop Spring, out by the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sure, there was no one to report to and no one to give her orders and instructions, but that was fine. She had the primary directive, and that was enough: find Terrence Crowder or George Kettle. And because there was no one else to turn them over to, she’d just have to take matters into her own hands. It almost made her feel silly to think such a thing—that she could make these apparently vicious men crack.
But with her hometown and most of her loved ones reduced to ash behind her and the country she loved and had sworn to defend going to hell, there were no limits to the dedication and rage swarming inside of her. With one final gasp of sorrow and loss, Katherine got back to her feet and with steel in her eyes, hurried in the direction of the highway.
***
The parkway her car had been ejected from emptied out into several different parts of Richmond and the outlying neighborhoods. She and Luis had been heading for the Brandermill area, where they’d pick up US 360 and head west. When Katherine stepped back up onto the outer rim of the parkway, she figured she was about two miles away from the exit she and Luis would have taken to get into Brandermill.
