Eden Plague - Latest Edition (46 page)

“See, there’s policy. Agreed?” I asked.

Everyone did.

“Is there anyone that plans to go back to their life and forget about all this?” I looked in Skull, Spooky and Vinny’s direction. They were the big question marks.

“No way,” says Vinny. “This is the coolest thing since forever. I always wanted to live outside the law and hack into anything I wanted. My family is Uncle Tran’s, so I’m just speaking for myself.”

There were nods and quiet mumbles of approbation. Everyone looked at Spooky, expectantly.

“I cannot bring my own family. Too many friends, brothers, uncles, cousins, my people. Unless they all come. So I go back. I am the man on the outside. Maybe there is a time I will bring my people in. Or send in some of them. Agree?”

He looked around anxiously, an unusual emotion for him to show. Everyone nodded.

Zeke said, “Done. Alan?”

Skull sat impassively, his arms crossed like mine. If I didn’t know better I would think he was enjoying the limelight.

“I have to think about it.”

Stares his direction, some hostile. We couldn’t afford to drive him away, though. I didn’t want to have to take drastic measures. I had to keep peace.

“Just as long as you don’t give up our secrets, I’m okay with that,” I said. The rest of the group followed my lead, accepting. Denham’s expression might have thawed a trifle.

Larry spoke up. “Well, I’m infected, so I ain’t goin’ back to live. But I’d like to go back home for a while, see who might be good candidates. And I got my eye on a honey but it ain’t a done deal yet. I got a sister and she got kids, and then there’s my mom and dad. All right?”

Nods all around.

Zeke clasped his hands together, rubbed them briskly. “That’s settled, then. The first expedition is to get my family. Then we can get anyone else’s. Who’s coming with me?”

The discussion sorted itself into two parts. The A-team composed of Skull, Larry, Spooky, and Zeke would go get his family. Once they were secured and en route to the bunker, Larry and Spooky and maybe Skull would go get Larry’s relatives, and possibly some of Spooky’s. The rest would stay at the bunker, with Vinny doing the shopping trips, and get the place in order.

There was endless work.

Right before the mini-A-team left, I sought out Zeke. I watched him from the doorway for a minute as he suited up, before I disturbed him. “Here. Protein bars. Stick ‘em in your pockets.”

“Thanks.” He took them, stuffing them into various places in his clothing.

“This too.” I handed him a zippered pouch.

“What is it?”

“Open it.”

“Syringes? What’s in it?”

“Eden Plague. From my saliva.”

“But I can just bite anyone I need to.”

“I think this will work faster. Bigger dose. And it might have its uses.”

He opened the pouch, looked at the two preloaded syringes in it, wrapped in padding. “Okay.”

I clasped his hand. “Good luck, Zeke. I’m looking forward to seeing Cassie and Ricky and…”

“Millie.”

“Right.”

***

Zeke and Larry took the Land Rover, Skull and Spooky the Cherokee, a natural division. On the way Zeke and Larry hardly stopped talking , reminiscing about missions and comrades, friends and golf games, women and bars.

The other two drove in relative silence, listening to the radio and making a few comments about the road. They all had their secure radios but kept them in push-to-talk mode.

Eight hours later the pair of SUVs pulled into a truck stop at the outskirts of Fayetteville, North Carolina, just after dark. They sent Spooky in for food.

Zeke opened up a disposable cell phone, activated it, and called a special set of digits. He entered a code and his home number. This process masked the call, routing it through an offshore international service, nearly impossible to trace.

“Hi, Cass, it’s me. How’re the kids?”

“Everything green here, Mister J.”

Zeke’s blood chilled. “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll be gone for
two
more weeks.” He rambled on about family concerns couple of minutes before hanging up. Disposing of the phone, he switched his secure radio to voice-activated mode.

“They’re under surveillance. My wife gave me the code for ‘being watched.’ I told her to expect extraction at two a.m.”

“Damn, Sam, you got that girl well trained,” Larry chucked.

“Actually, she got me trained. I never told you what she did before, did I?”

“Nope.”

“I met her at the US Embassy in Moscow. I was there as a military attach?. She was deputy station chief.”

“She was Agency.”

“Yup. In the ultimate tradecraft training ground. She’ll be fine. We just have to make a plan to get them out and break contact. That means we have to locate the surveillance and shut them down.”

Skull chuckled. “Does that mean I’m weapons free now that DJ Do-Right is out of the picture?”

Zeke sighed, exasperated. “Alan, if we kill their people it will raise the stakes tenfold. Right now Jenkins is trying to keep everything hush-hush. Dead feds, or even contractors, will force him to confess to his superiors and they’ll come after us like a pack of hounds.”

“Joking, boss, joking.”

“I hope so. If you have to shoot, wound them. One of us will bite them if we have to.”

“Why don’t you do that anyway? Won’t that screw them up? Get them fighting the disease instead of us?”

A long, thoughtful pause. “Interesting idea. Maybe when we get back we should start trying to weaponize this thing. Create a delivery system. Darts or something. See if it can be put in a water supply. So we can make good on our threats.”

“Hmmm.”

Spooky returned with the food.

“How do you think they connected you with Markis?”

“Good intel work. Assemble a database of all his associates. Cross match with things like, ‘Did he treat them in the field?’ ‘Are they at home or out of town?’ Stuff like that.”

“I hate intel pukes,” Skull growled.

“Only when they’re on the other side.”

“I hate them all.”

Zeke exchanged silent looks with Larry. He shrugged.

“Let’s focus on our five-meter targets, shall we? We make a sweep of my neighborhood. Locate the surveillance. Make a plan. Ready?”

Affirmative grunts and sounds.

They drove into Fayetteville. Zeke led them to an unused corner of a large, well-lit gas station. “This is our ORP. Make your sweep, maintain commo, meet here.”

The SUVs split up, approaching Zeke’s suburban middle-class home from two different directions. They quartered and searched the blocks, looking for vehicles with the telltale signs of a surveillance team: being parked on the street, not in a driveway; extra antennas; roomy models, like vans or big SUVs; too-black windows; sitting heavy and low on their suspensions; magnetic business logos, the kind that can be slapped on and peeled off easily. There were lots of clues if you knew what to look for.

It didn’t take long. Skull spotted them first. “I got a cable service truck on your street. Old van, new paint, UHF and satellite, antenna, barrier between the driving and cargo compartment. Parked between houses.”

“That’s probably it. No cable technicians working this time of night.”

“Do they ever work?”

“Ha ha. We going in light or heavy?”

“No way to sneak up on them. If you want them deactivated, we have to do it heavy.”

“Understood. Rally now at the ORP.”

They met back at the gas station.

“We need a shock truck. Spooky?”

“If we can find it, I can steal it.”

“Okay, spread out, report when we got one.”

It took them twenty-five minutes to locate a suitable truck, a flatbed two-ton. Spooky had it gone in sixty seconds. Skull drove. They talked over their plan of attack on the way.

Zeke and Larry pulled up at the end of the alley that ran behind his house. “In position.”

“Roger. Commencing shock run.”

Skull put the truck into gear, coming around the corner nose-on the surveillance van. At the same time Spooky drove the Cherokee around the opposite corner, slowly, focusing the watchers’ attention on him as they looked out the back window.

The truck was going forty when its heavy steel bumper smashed into the nose of the van. Impact drove the van several car-lengths down the street, coming to rest on its side.

Spooky pulled up in the Cherokee. He and Skull jumped out of their vehicles, charging the van. Through the shattered back window they could see broken electronics and camera equipment, and two men lying amid the wreckage, moving weakly. The shock had jumbled them like mice in a paint shaker, and the smell of leaking gasoline wafted through the mess.

Spooky stepped through the opening and pistol-whipped each in turn, ensuring unconsciousness. Then he pulled out the syringe Zeke had given him and pumped half of the contents into each. “Get them out, Skull.”

“We should let ‘em burn,” he grumbled, reaching in to drag the men out with Spooky’s help, tossing them roughly onto the closest suburban lawn. He keyed his mike. “Van and their team out of commission and infected. We’re extracting, people are already coming out of their houses.” Skull popped a smoke grenade and tossed it into the van. The flaming smoke mix soon ignited the dripping gasoline and the vehicle caught fire with a whoosh. They drove rapidly away, around the block and back toward the ORP.

Zeke and Larry had already pulled up to his back gate, blasting twice on the horn. Zeke got out, fastening the barrier out of the way, and then bolted inside. A moment later he ran out, carrying a skeletal boy wrapped in a blanket. Larry held the door open. Right behind him followed an athletic woman of about forty and a girl of eight.

“Hi, Cass. Hi Millie,” Larry rumbled.

“Hi Mister Larry!” piped the girl.

Cassandra nodded to Larry, handing him a suitcase.

Headlights appeared and the roaring of an engine sounded at the end of the alley, accelerated toward them. Cass shoved Millie into the Land Rover, while Larry reached for his shotgun from under the seat.

Muzzle flashes sparkled from both sides of the oncoming vehicle, and Larry’s twelve-gauge roared over and over. Zeke hunched over Ricky, covering him with his body, while Cassandra drew a pistol from the small of her back, taking cover behind the door to return a rapid hail of bullets.

The headlights wobbled, then skewed leftward as the oncoming vehicle bucked and rolled down the alley with a grinding crash of metal. Cassandra reloaded while Larry ran at the smoking wreck of a Suburban. He looked inside, seeing two men unconscious. He reached in, taking their guns and tossing them into a nearby garbage can, then knelt down among the wreckage.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said aloud to himself, then bit them each in turn. “Feel like a freakin’ vampire.” He returned to the Land Rover.

Larry was almost there when he heard an anguished sob, choked off, then a high keening. He leaped forward, shotgun searching for a target, but there wasn’t anything to shoot.

Cassandra knelt over Zeke, who lay stretched out on the ground. Millie stood there, wailing, her small hands tangled in her hair, pulling. Larry pushed her gently aside, confident the Eden Plague would make it all right.

Not this time.

Zeke’s eyes stared sightless at the glowing suburban sky. Blood and brains leaked from the hole in his head. Cassandra stroked his face, crooning, “No, no, no…”

Larry cursed, a string of bitter vulgarities. “Come on, Cass, he’s gone. He’s gone. More might be on the way, we have to get going, we have to break contact.”

Cassandra growled with frustration, muttering under her breath, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Help me get him in. We’re not leaving him.” She forced down her grief.

Together they rolled Zeke in a blanket, then manhandled his body into the back of the SUV. Larry drove them away from the scene as rapidly as he could without attracting attention.

“What was that?” asked Spooky over the radio.

“They got Zeke. Lucky head shot. He’s gone,” Larry answered grimly.

Silence. Then, “Shit.”

“Meet at the ORP. We still have to get Zeke’s mom.”

“What?” asked Cassandra. “Why? She’s in a facility.”

“Because we can cure her, we think. But if we cure her we have to take her with us because if they find out we did, they will lock her up, quarantine her.”

Cassandra digested this as they met at the ORP. “All right, I’ll tell you where to go. Do you think they’ll be watching her?”

“We have to hope not. They can’t be everywhere.”

Twenty minutes later they pulled into a complex labeled ‘Green Pastures Managed Care facility.’ It was still early enough for visitors to just walk in without checking in. They took her out the back way in a wheelchair.

The return trip to the bunker went smoothly, but a nightmare clouded their minds. Ten bags of truck stop ice packed Zeke’s body in the back of the Cherokee; still no one could forget what had happened.

Larry drove the Land Rover, silent, bleak. Zeke’s mother Beulah sat buckled into the front seat, humming softly to herself for a while before falling asleep. Cassandra sobbed from time to time, an arm around each of her children in the back seat. Millie slept most of the way, which was a relief; it wasn’t real to her.

About two hours out, Ricky spoke up. “I’m hungry, mama.” He reached up to grasp her arm.

“Ricky!” She took her hand in his, feeling the strength of his grip.

“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”

“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”

“That’s not for kids!”

Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”

“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”

Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.

He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.