Gnash (19 page)

Curtis took it and shook it.  He had a grip like a vice.  “Well, you should avoid the cities young man.  The National Guard and the police don’t have this thing under control yet, but they’ve mobilized over in Cleveland, so won’t be long now ‘fore they get here to help us out.  We’ve put together a small group to try to keep people like that gang there out of our neighborhood and we’ve had to run more than a few off.  We…”

He broke off his sentence as the banging on the back door grew to a feverish level.  The trapped men were literally throwing themselves against the door in an effort to escape.  Curtis looked to a few of his men, “Justin, you’ve got the only gun in the group today, go guard that back door and shoot anybody that comes out.  The rest of you, you know what to do if they make it out either door.  Let’s just hope they don’t.”

The group split into two with half running up to the front door and the other half moving back to the rear of the building.  “Like I was saying, we’ve ran quite a few of those damn gang kids out of our community, but this group moved in a few days ago and we haven’t been able to scare them off.  The word on the street is that they killed the cops that used to come by here at first, but who knows.  Only thing we know is that they’ve been attacking our citizens and we had to stop them.”

Grayson said, “What about the man out front that I was trying to get gas from?  I think he’s dead.”

“Yeah, he’s dead. D.J. was always tryin’ to make a few bucks.  We told him to stop selling, but he had a saying, used to say that if the ‘70’s didn’t drive him out of business nobody in Washington would.  I guess since this whole thing started in Washington, somehow he blamed them.  Now he’s gone, guess this time he didn’t make it through.”

“Can I help you guys bury him or anything?” Grayson asked.  “I feel really bad that he died helping me.”

“Yeah, we’ve got a wheelbarrow stashed a few blocks away.  I’ll send one of the boys after it and we can bury him in the First Pentecostal Church’s yard a few blocks over,” Curtis said.  “The nearest cemetery is probably four miles away or so and I ain’t havin’ my men wheel his body that far with all the crazies about.  Besides, it’s getting dark.  Can I offer you a place to stay for the evening?”

“I’d appreciate that very much.  Thank you,” Grayson said.  He’d noticed that the sounds from inside had ceased but he decided not to say anything more on the subject.

ELEVEN

04 May, 0438 hrs local

Military Decontamination and Infection Control Site #3

Near Culpepper, Virginia

“Emory!  Emory, wake up!  Wake up, we need your help!” her new friend said as he shook her awake.

She pushed his hand off her shoulder and sat up.  “What’s going on, Josh?” she asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

“We need all the help we can get over at the hospital.  There was some kind of attack involving a large Army group in the city.  The helicopters will be here in a few minutes.  Please, get up, we need everybody to help out.  I’m going to go wake the other volunteers.”

Great.  I didn’t realize when I volunteered to help out at the hospital that I’d be woken up in the middle of the night so often.
  She put on the scrubs they’d given her and raked her fingers through her hair.  This was the third time in as many nights since she’d volunteered at the hospital that there was an emergency.  All of the other times it was a new batch of refugees being brought in, this was the first time that a
military
unit had been attacked here at ground zero that she knew of.  Sure, all over the country there were reports of small-scale civil war that was slowly being suppressed, but the local region around the blast site had been relatively calm as people tried to deal with the repercussions of a nuclear detonation sixty miles away.  Was the violence and madness beginning to take hold here too?

She shuffled her feet along the wooden pallet walkway to the hospital.  The designers of the camp had wisely installed the pallets as a pathway between each of the tents as protection against the mud that was sure to build up when it finally rained.  That would be a treat, poison rain collecting in puddles where the survivors were taking refuge.  When she reached the hospital fence she waved to the guard who opened the gate for her.  “Good morning Miss Perry,” the young Marine said.

“Good morning.  There’ll probably be a lot more of the volunteers coming in before too long.”

“Thank you for the update ma’am,” he said smiling.  She’d learned after the first night in camp that the guards were just as clueless as the refugees were.  They were kept in the dark about what was going on, so presumably, they could focus on securing the facility instead of worrying about what else was happening. 

She heard the helicopters coming from the east and hurried into the triage tent where her station was.  Within minutes the flight medics and some of the orderlies were running into the room with litters.  Doctors ran from patient to patient conducting quick assessments and marking the injured men as appropriate.  In all, there were seven patients brought in.  These men had obviously been in some type of building collapse or explosion.  Most of them were missing limbs and had open cuts across their bodies as if they’d been hit by flying debris, but there weren’t any burn marks or scorched clothing that Emory thought would have been associated with a gas line explosion or fire of some type.  Thankfully, up until the blast, they’d had a very wet April in the Northern Virginia area, so most of the fires had already burned out without dry tender.  Those that hadn’t yet were mostly confined to the city where nobody was really willing to go yet.  

She looked over the group of men once more.  One of the men was missing his right hand and his legs were mangled.  One of the muscles in his leg was ripped open and part of it flopped out to the side.  His face was obscured by splattered blood and gore.  He had either been given morphine or had passed out from the pain.  She wondered whether the man had a family or if he’d sacrificed it all for the military like so many soldiers did.  He didn’t appear to have a ring on his hand, but who could tell underneath the crusted blood. 

“Emory, snap out of it!  This one needs you,” the doctor said to her.  She blinked and shook her head to clear her mind.  She realized she’d been standing there in a daze as all the chaos happened around her.  The doctor gestured to a man near the side of the tent with a large X on his forehead in red grease pencil. 

She walked over to him and gave him a quick once over.  He was a black male, probably in his late thirties or early forties wearing an Army sergeant’s uniform.  He had one leg torn off nearly all the way up to his hip and he held his intestines on his stomach with trembling hands.  She yelled for a nurse to bring morphine, but the man said, “No.  No drugs.  I’m ready to go to my Lord, and I’m not going be high the first time I meet him.  Just talk with me until I go.”

“Uh, alright…My, my name’s Emory.  What’s yours?”

“Cecil,” he said through clenched teeth.

“What happened out there Cecil?” she asked looking him in the eyes.

“They made it through the wire after we ran out of ammo.  Animals.  I don’t want to end up like them.  Promise me please.  Promise me when I go that you’ll burn my body after I go so I don’t become one of them.”

“One of who, Cecil?” she asked in as soothing a tone as she could manage.  The first day on the job she’d learned that it helped patients when you said their names a lot.  It kind of helped them identify with who they are and so far they hadn’t lost any of the patients that she’d helped with, but that was probably going to change tonight.

“One of those things.  The zombies.  Everyone is in danger…” he grimaced in pain.  “Everyone they brought in must be burned.  Do it, Miss.  Tell the doctors.  Get Doctor Collins on the radio.  If you don’t destroy our bodies, we’ll turn into zombies and start killing you too.”

Emory glanced over her shoulder at the doctors working feverishly to stabilize the remaining men before they took them into surgery. 
What the hell was he talking about, he was crazy,
she thought.  She jerked her head around when a bloody hand grasped her wrist, “Please, say the Lord’s Prayer with me, it won’t be long now.”

She reached down and grasped his hand strongly in hers.  This was something she knew how to do.  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day…” the prayer was interrupted as Cecil coughed up a globule of blood.  “Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen.”

“Thank you,” he said. 

“You’re welcome, Cecil.  I’ve always felt that the Our Father was very soothing,” Emory said as she ran her hand gently over his crew cut.

He continued on with the part of the 23
Psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”  He didn’t close his eyes as he died, he just continued to stare at the fabric of the roof and passed into the afterlife. 
Hell of a way to go
, Emory thought.  To her it seemed that this man had been extremely brave.  She’d read accounts of men in battle who cried out for their mothers as they died. She checked his identification tags hanging over the table from a chain, his name was Cecil T. Owens and he was a Baptist.  He obviously trusted that his soul would be in heaven after he died.  It was almost comforting to her that he died in such a calm and brave way, it made her feel that maybe we would all pull through this and establish control again.

But that was in the future.  For now, she needed to at least try to respect his final wishes to be cremated.  She walked over to the shift leader for the volunteers to tell him about Cecil’s request.  It would be better to have him with her for validity when she tried to talk to the doctors about cremating the bodies.  She didn’t believe the dying man’s rants about monsters of course, but she thought maybe they had been attacked by a group of men who seemed to be like zombies because of severe radiation sickness or something like that and he was worried about getting others sick by being in contact with him.  When she thought about that, she was impressed again at how brave the man had been.  Even in death, he was worried about others.

She decided that was how she would broach the subject of cremation, that Cecil’s body must be destroyed, not only because he wished it, but also to avoid contamination in the camp.  She came up behind her shift leader and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.  He turned around, “Yes, Miss Perry?  What can I help you…”  He never finished his statement as a group of heavily armed men burst into the surgical tent.  They took up positions beside each of the patients and two more guarded the doorway.  A man in his mid-thirties wearing a lab coat came through the door.

“Alright everyone, remain calm.  My name is Doctor Jeremy Collins.  I’m the chief medical officer for the Army’s Special Operations Biological Infections Containment Center at Fort Dietrich, well, what was Fort Dietrich before a radiation cloud forced the evacuation.  Anyways, I’m the doctor in command of diagnosing, containing and curing the disease these men on your operation tables were exposed to.”

“Doctor, what the hell are you talking about?  These men were in a firefight,” the chief surgeon, Colonel Jefferson, stated. 

“Yes sir, they were, but they’ve also been in close contact with a very communicable disease that has developed since the detonation.  We need to secure and isolate them, and then treat them.”

“What?  Why is this the first we’ve heard of this?  We’ve been operating on patients all week.  If there’s something else that we should be aware of, we need to know immediately.”

So the camp doctors don’t know what’s going on either, interesting
, Emory thought as she watched the two doctors square off.

“Sir, up until now, no one outside of the president, his immediate staff and the US Special Operations Command personnel knew that the French missile was an attempt to destroy a biological weapon that was released in the Pentagon and turned the infected into extremely violent creatures.  That attack was a failure.  We’ve been fighting against the infected men and women for a few days now.  They appear to retain the original virus and as far as we can tell, they’re not affected by the radiation that is still heavy in the downtown areas.”

“What the hell?” the surgeon exclaimed, echoing the sentiment of several other people in the medical tent.  He visibly composed himself and looked back at the scientist.  “Alright doctor, if we’re going to be treating these patients we need a rundown of their symptoms and what we know about treating them.”

“Yes, I’ve been working on a few of the infected that we’ve captured and so far, nothing has worked to revert their condition…”

“Doctor Collins!  This one’s already starting to turn!” one of the security team members shouted.  Emory’s heart sank as she realized the man who yelled was behind her near the table where Cecil had died.

“Well, Colonel, you will now see firsthand what we’re dealing with,” Collins said calmly.  To his men he said, “Restrain them all to their tables.  Remember, they can function with everything missing except their head and torso, so strap down the chest separately from everything else.  And use multiple straps for their arms and legs, their strength is incredible.”

“Now wait a goddamned minute here.  We have patients to treat,” the chief surgeon said as he took a step forward.  One of the men near the door raised his weapon and advanced in between the colonel and Doctor Collins.

Collins raised his hand in a gesture meant to pacify the situation.  “That won’t be necessary Sergeant,” he said to the man who slowly lowered his weapon.  “Sir, you’ll be able to operate on them after we restrain them.”  He pointed towards the twitching body of Cecil Owens, “I knew that man.  I know all of these men, but we have to get this situation under control before every man, woman and child in this camp is dead.”