The Devil’s Noose

by Michael Angel

  The Devil’s Noose

  A Pandemic Medical Thriller

  Michael Angel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.

  Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for any purpose.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The Plague Walker

  Other Books by Michael Angel

  About Michael Angel

  PART ONE: THE SURFACE

  Chapter One

  Former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan

  Breakaway Region of Ozrabek

  Central Asia

  Seven-year old Aliya Nizova darted through the trees, her little horsehair-trimmed boots slipping on the carpet of wet pine needles.

  Her breath rasped in her throat as she ran, desperately seeking someplace to hide. She came to a stop at the edge of a clearing and looked around. To the right, a granite boulder jutted from the earth, a rime of dirty snow clinging to its base. To the left, the ground sloped down to a cluster of tangled berry bushes.

  A not-so-distant shout filtered through the dark forest. She made her decision and moved to the left. Cold mud squelched under her boots as she knelt behind one of the bushes.

  She waited, ears keen to pick up any sign of her pursuer.

  Aliya heard a thump.

  Unlike the shouts, the strange noise had come from nearby.

  It had sounded a little like a heavy pinecone hitting the ground, she thought. She craned her neck to look around at the nearby trees. But none of them had cones dangling from their branches.

  A second thump.

  The sound was followed by a strange scuffling noise.

  Then silence.

  Jumping to her feet, she stepped out from the bushes and back into the clearing. At first, she saw nothing but tea-colored earth and gray-green sedge grass. The breeze picked up, cutting and cold.

  Aliya skipped back a step as more thumps sounded next to her, one-two-three, like rifle bullets burying themselves in the earth. The clouds parted, allowing a thin shaft of sunlight to bathe the clearing in golden light.

  They were all around her: small, broken black shapes.

  The ground was littered with the bodies of carrion crows. Their heavy beaks and ebony plumage glistened as they lay sprawled on the ground, necks broken and wings shattered. They’d fallen from the sky as if expiring in mid-flight.

  Even at seven years old, Aliya knew enough about the world to think: Something’s wrong here.

  She’d never frightened easily. But a chill skittered down her spine.

  One of the dark shapes moved. The bird’s wings fluttered, beating against the ground with a scuffling sound before going still. She knelt next to it, grabbing a twig in one hand. She gave it a poke in its side.

  No reaction. She poked it again.

  The crow’s head whipped around as it struck with a convulsive snap.

  Its beak, made razor sharp to dig into rotting flesh, closed about the twig less than an inch from her index finger. The wood splintered in Aliya’s hand, causing her to hop back in surprise.

  The bird let out a guttural caw. Then it arched its neck back, further and further as if pulled by a powerful, unseen force. Wings thrashed, legs pistoned, and four-toed feet flexed, clawing at the air. Caws like shrieks erupted from its beak as it yawned unnaturally wide.

  Finally, its death agonies over, the bird fell silent. One eye stared dully up into the sky, as still and inert as a damp black pebble.

  A crashing sound came from the bushes at the edge of the clearing. Aliya’s twelve-year-old brother Serik emerged to join her. His breath puffed steam into the air.

  “Mama’s called us back,” he announced. “But I still found you, I win.”

  “I wasn’t hiding anymore,” Aliya said. “Look over here. Dead crows.”

  Serik’s eyebrows rose as he took in the sight. “A whole flock of crows! What happened to them?”

  “This one here just died. I thought I saw something in its mouth.”

  Aliya grabbed a sliver of her shattered twig and leaned in close again. She poked at the lower portion of the bird’s beak. She steadied her feet as she bent the neck back towards her, until she spotted what she’d glimpsed before.

  A smear of color pooled in the bird’s mouth. The substance shimmered and ran like sludgy oil. An oil that shifted from a pale, sickly blue to slime green.

  Her brother let out a gasp of surprise and alarm.

  “That’s what Taras coughed up, right before he died!”

  Taras had been their neighbor. Like many of the men from the village, he got up at dawn and then vanished in a haze of bus fumes every morning to commute to work at the mine.

  She didn’t know who’d been the first to cough himself to death. But now more and more of her friend’s fathers were falling ill. Her mother had taken to smudging the house with smoke from bundles of mountain sage.

  A runnel of the liquid edged towards the pink flesh of her finger. Aliya blinked, not understanding. She held her makeshift twig in such a way that it couldn’t drip down on her.

  Had the stuff run up the wood, climbing it like a snake?

  “Come on, leave it!” Serik said, knocking the sliver from her hand and pulling her to her feet. “Mama’s worried, she says that she saw a bunch of people driving this way up the old mountain road.”

  She fell into step beside him as they started back, the clearing with the dea
d crows vanishing behind them. The last hint of autumn sun faded away.

  “Soldiers?”

  “Looks like. They’re in the green trucks.”

  They felt a rumble through the soles of their boots. Then the grumble of diesel engines began to filter through the trees. Picking up their pace, they soon emerged from the forest next to their family’s home.

  The Ozrabek village was a simple cluster of rough, timber-framed homes. The village’s roundabout and the road leading down the mountain were choked with military trucks. The children watched as armed soldiers jumped down off the vehicles and began forming up into squads.

  Aliya’s parents, who wore their traditional upturned Kazakh headgear and fox-trimmed coats with solemn dignity, were being berated by one of the officers. She couldn’t make out any of the words at this distance, but the exchange of words quickly grew more heated.

  The officer let out a curse as he grabbed a rifle from one of his subordinates. Her mother screamed as the man raised the rifle’s butt and brought it down upon her husband’s forehead.

  Serik cried out something unintelligible and ran towards them. Aliya hesitated for a moment, then watched in horror as something completely alien stepped out of the back of the nearest truck.

  It looked like a man, but with a bulbous, baggy silver outline. It had soulless black disks for eyes and a flared pair of nostrils on either side of its snout. It wheezed like a demon as it moved.

  Aliya ran for the house, making it through the door just as the pok! pok! of pistol shots filled the air. Screams, followed by the rattle of automatic weapons firing. Blood drained from her face as what little courage she had left drained away. Whimpering, she ran for her favorite hiding place.

  She’d been smaller when she had first hidden under her parent’s bed. Now she had to push with her feet in order to make it into the comforting darkness.

  She jammed her knuckle into her mouth, biting down to keep from whimpering, and waited.

  The noises outside went on for a what felt like forever. Dim cries of pain, barely-there shouted orders, the rumble of trucks. She closed her eyes, praying for this nightmare to pass.

  A single footfall inside the house sounded like a thundercrack in her ears.

  She heard the raspy wheeze of the silvery demon’s breath. The steps drew closer. She saw a pair of tinfoil-colored boots at the door. Her prayers that the thing would go on down the hall went unanswered. Instead, the boots moved around the bed and behind her, out of sight.

  Her heart leapt into her throat as the bed frame above her sagged with a sudden creak. The springs flexed as the demon sat above her. Flecks of rust dribbled across her cheek. She desperately covered her nose to hold back an explosive sneeze.

  More steps. More wheezing sounds. A second pair of silver boots entered the room. At least these stopped where Aliya could see them.

  To her amazement, she heard a woman’s voice! It had a strange accent, and it sounded muffled, as if wrapped in layers of cloth. Still, she could make out the words.

  “The village has been secured, Commander.”

  A second voice, a man’s this time. Aliya frowned, suddenly understanding. The two silver-skinned demons were people, then.

  “What about Captain Baurzhan?”

  “He’s not exactly happy about being pistol-whipped.”

  A snort of contempt. “He shouldn’t have struck the village elder with his soldier’s rifle. This place would have given up without a fight.”

  “What does it matter? These people are dead anyway.”

  Aliya bit into her knuckle so hard that blood flowed, so hot that it surely steamed.

  “They’re still my people. It’s not their fault that they needed to be sacrificed.”

  The woman sounded surprised. “You, sentimental? I wouldn’t have thought that possible.”

  The man ignored her comment.

  “We are in the elder’s house. The richest family in the village. It’s why he has a Western-style box spring bed. And why each of the two rooms in the back have a single, smaller bed. The children didn’t have to share.”

  “I don’t see why–”

  “Husband, wife, and son make three. Yet there are four in this family.” A pause, followed by another creak as the man shifted his weight. “I grew up in a place like this. Learned to hunt in the forest. You learn to see the signs. You learn to track even the smallest of animals.”

  “Good luck picking up tracks on a bare wooden floor.”

  “It’s not the floor I’m concerned with. Look at the wall over here.”

  Aliya’s head pounded with fright. She froze, not even daring to breathe.

  “Scrapings of mud?”

  “Oh, yes,” the man’s voice said. “Mud off someone’s boots. Small boots. A child’s, I would bet.”

  Suddenly, a heavy hand clamped around Aliya’s ankle. She kicked out, but it was useless. In this confined space, she had no leverage.

  She let out a last despairing shriek as she was pulled out into the light.

  Chapter Two

  Whitespire Laboratories

  Reston, Virginia

  Biosafety Level 3 Lab Area

  On an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning, Leigh Austen was forced to decide how she was going to amputate her boss’ left hand.

  Ironically, that wouldn’t be the most surprising thing to happen to her that day.

  An hour earlier, she stood barefoot in the chill confines of a locker room the size of a walk-in closet. Her pale pink skin pricked up in goose pimples, but that wasn’t what concerned her. She held up one hand. Freshly scrubbed fingernails gleamed in the light.

  A barely-visible shiver ran down her wrist, making her fingers twitch. She closed her eyes and the antiseptic smells of the room vanished. Her nose filled with the wet rot of the rain forest, the sickly-sweet odor of diseased flesh.

  Austen felt her heartbeat picking up, like a runaway freight train.

  She slowed that train with a sequence of deep breaths and her personal anxiety-busting mantra.

  God grant me the courage to change the things I can. And to not push my luck on the things that I can’t do crap about.

  The shivers vanished, as they always did. Donning a spearmint-green surgical scrub suit she then focused on getting her hair under the cloth surgical cap. If pressed, Austen would admit that her hair was one of the few luxuries she allowed herself in her choice of career. At home or in the office, she let her auburn locks hang loose below the shoulder. In the lab, she kept them tightly braided into submission.

  One set of footwear later, she went through a set of self-closing doors which operated like the airlocks on a spaceship. The shower area in between bathed her in a cool blue UV light that served to obliterate stray viral particles.

  As the doors closed, she felt the gentle tug of air at the shoulders of her gown. Biosafety laboratories were constantly kept at a slight negative pressure. This ensured that the air currents always flowed into the lab, trapping anything airborne inside. Usually.

  Finally, after a dash of baby powder and the snap of nitrile surgical gloves, she donned a two-part PAPR, or powered air-purifying respirator. A chunky piece of headgear with a clear face mask made up the first part. This was connected via an air hose that ran from behind the head down to a gold brick that hung from a clipped waist belt. The brick contained a battery, filter unit, and fan motor to deliver pathogen-free air to the user’s face and mouth.

  Austen continued through a second pair of self-closing doors and walked past the chemical decontamination showers. Her movements were smooth and languid, in part from a year-and-a-half spent practicing tai chi. Graceful, purposeful movements were a good thing in a biosafety lab.

  Clumsiness in a Level 3 environment could mean a horrific death.

  She entered the lab, where another green-gowned figure took note of her arrival with a mock checking of a non-existent watch. Joseph Widerman’s amused expression was easy to make out, even behind a face ma
sk and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

  “And…right on the dot once again,” he said, with a gleam in his eye. “I can set my watch by you, Leigh.”

  She looked at him, not quite understanding his comment. “How do you mean?”

  He jerked a gloved thumb towards the observation windows along one wall. She’d only been working at Whitespire Labs for a couple of weeks, and she’d already forgotten about the things. They allowed potential investors to sit outside and watch the lab in operation, a feature that Widerman had smartly exploited to the fullest.

  “You can just make out the door leading to the gowning area,” he explained. “When I see you walk through, I start a slow count from two hundred on down. So far, you’ve never failed to enter the lab right as I get to zero. That’s consistency.”

  Austen let out a rueful chuckle. True, she took a certain pride in her gowning discipline. Widerman didn’t know that every time she entered Level Three, she had to beat back a case of rattletrap nerves. And as the new hire, she wasn’t about to let her boss in on the secret.

  “That’s what I get for following procedure to a ‘T’,” she said. “So, let’s look at those samples of Crucero, if they’re ready.”

  “After an overnight incubation, they better be. You want Station Two again?”

  Austen raised an eyebrow. “Do I have a choice? Or am I going to have to fight you for the spot by the centrifuge?”

  “I’m closer to the dissection tools, you wouldn’t stand a chance.” Widerman shrugged. “Besides, if I’m the one paying a quarter-million dollars for a piece of equipment, I want to be the one who gets to use it for a while.”

  Together, they took their places at the connected biosafety cabinets. Each cabinet was its own self-contained, gas-tight compartment under negative pressure. Austen and Widerman could only work with the contents through pairs of gloves attached to arm-length rubber sleeves. The sleeves in turn were secured to openings cut into the cabinet’s clear acrylic sides.

  Austen tapped a sequence of buttons on her keypad, and a set of reddish vials slid in front of her. The vials had been filled with samples of equine blood and exposed to Crucero, a newly emergent member of the poxviridae family. A member that would fry nerve tissue and leave victims to die writhing in agony.