The Apocalypse Crusade 2 (13 page)

Her hand was on the door handle when movement caught her eye. The one soldier still alive was on his knees and reaching for his own weapon. “Eng!” she screamed, grabbing his arm. The soldier’s gun was coming up in what felt like slow motion, its bore looking like a black eye searching for her.

Eng was more than willing to let the soldier kill Anna, however he didn’t like his own chances against a man armed with an assault rifle while he only had the .38. He stomped the gas and the Nissan leapt forward. It was a nimble and quick car, but it could not outrun a bullet. The back windshield blew inwards and then there was thudding sound, as though someone was smacking the car with a hammer. Next, there was a “bang” and the car started shuddering as it drove.

Anna crawled down into the footwell and hugged herself until they were out of sight and the awful thunder of the gun had ceased. She sat up and stared out the back. The Nissan was in a poor state: the upholstery was shredded, there were holes big enough for her to put her thumb through all over its hide, and there wasn’t a single window left intact. The back tire on the passenger side had been struck and now they were shedding vulcanized rubber at a rate that couldn’t be maintained. Soon it became a lurch and then there came the squeal of metal grinding on pavement. Only then did Eng stop.

He brought out the .38. For the moment it hung at the end of his arm, pointing at the ground. “Let’s see how good you are with a jack.”

“Me? That soldier is just down the road. He could be here in a few minutes.”

“Then you better hurry,” Eng said, icily.

She didn’t like the sudden quiet of the nearby forest. It made her feel very much alone with a psychopath. “You still need me.”

“Yes, I need you to change the tire. Now let’s go!”

She wasn’t weak or ineffectual in any way; she had changed tires before but the tire would remain forever unchanged. Going to the rear of the vehicle, the biting odor of gasoline struck her nostrils. “Aw, shit,” she said in a whisper. The tank had caught a bullet as well and beneath the car was a growing puddle.

“You still need me,” she reminded Eng. He had grown uncomfortably still and quiet, much like the forest around them. He glanced back the way they had come and then brought up the pistol, pointing it her way.

Ryan Deckard sighed for the thirtieth time and when he did, he made sure that it was loud enough not just to be overheard but to piss some people off as well.

“Do you have something to say,” Special Agent Meeks asked. He wore a smarmy smile but with the blue biohazard suit and the mask, it wasn’t seen. Deckard didn’t need to see it, he felt the arrogance of it come right through the plastic.

“I sure do,” Deckard said. He’d been leaning against one of the tent supports, but now he stepped close so that Meeks had to tilt his head up to see the taller man. “Why don’t you stop being a dick? This isn’t an interrogation. This is you preening for the camera.” A bagged camera had been brought into the tent to record Thuy as she explained at length what had happened at Walton. She was constantly being interrupted by the sanctimonious Meeks.

Thuy had stood firm during it all and really didn’t need a protector, especially when the bullying was scientific in nature, however Deckard could only take so much.

“I will get to you and your so-called ‘security arrangements’ soon enough,” Special Agent Meeks sneered.

Deckard snorted both figuratively and literally. “Here’s all you’ll get out of me.” He hocked up a ball of snot and shot it in a gob to splash against Meeks’s face shield. The agent did a herky-jerky dance and, backing away from Deckard, he tripped over Chuck Singleton’s long legs. The Okie had done nothing to keep it from happening.

John Burke grinned, showing the gaps in his grill. “That was a bit of alright for a city-boy. Now, iffin, y’all wanna see how we spit out in the sticks, I’ll show you a thing or two. I can shoot a line of skoal twenty feet and smack a bull-finch right ‘tween the eyes.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Burke,” Thuy said, gently. She turned to the visibly angry, FBI agent. “Though I don’t agree with Mr. Deckard’s method of handling this situation, I concur that we have strayed beyond anything resembling a debriefing. You are clearly trying to trip me up in some fashion, perhaps in order to assist in some future criminal proceeding. Sorry, but I will not ‘play’ along. Despite what you’ve hinted at, I have rights.”

“Are you saying you are no longer cooperating?” Meeks asked, quietly.

“I won’t be cooperating with a kangaroo court, whose sole purpose is to find a scapegoat. I will cooperate scientifically. I will answer your questions honestly and to the best of my ability, however if you insist on asking the same questions over and over again, then I’m sorry, I will not answer. If you’ve forgotten a previous answer you should refer to the recording.” She indicated the camcorder held by one of the soldiers in the room. The other two held guns.

“She’s answered all of my preliminary questions,” the army Bio-weapons expert, Colonel Haskins stated. He hadn’t liked the answers to his questions, especially the probable incubation period. He had felt his stomach drop when Thuy had said:
A person exposed to the Com-cells will, depending on body weight and metabolism, become infectious within approximately two hours
. The idea was sickening. They started with forty patients and half a day later, Poughkeepsie with its fifty thousand people was a ghost town. Reconnaissance flights had shown only the undead left roaming the streets.

Haskins knew that the official jargon was “Infected Person” but the Air Force recon planes had amazing photo capability. All it took were a few close-up stills of the zombies eating people for him to forever throw the words “Infected Person” out the window. These weren’t people anymore. These were things that had to be exterminated.

Dr. Tanis of the CDC was also quiet. He had no need for scapegoats, and he was sure he wasn’t going to have time for them either. He had been privy to the official projections of different outbreaks since he had come to the CDC fourteen years earlier. For three straight years, he had been in charge of writing MMRs: Morbidity and Mortality Reports. It had been a wearing three years churning out documents entitled:
Estimating the Future Number of Cases in the Ebola Epidemic—Liberia and Sierra Leone, 2014-2015
.

With its thirty-one charts, and ninety-eight pages that one had been a best seller. Thankfully, the projection had been off. CDC projections frequently discount the idea of changing human reactions to a deadly pathogen in their midst and they have a long history of instilling that prejudice within their reports. Ebola was a fine example. What caused the outbreak to flourish was the way the bodies were ritualistically cleaned before burial. Relatives handled the corpses at a point when they were carrying their highest pathogen load, covered in blood and feces. It wasn’t until this was pointed out, repeatedly, that the death tolls began to level off.

Tanis didn’t think they would be so lucky this time. There wasn’t a behavioral component to the spread of the Com-cells, there was just a mindless, insatiable hunger driving the infected. The virus was definitely blood-borne and yet, because of the elements of the fungi within it they had to take precautions against it being airborne as well. He went to rub his weary eyes forgetting the plastic hood and just ended up smearing his face screen. “I will need more specific information on the Com-cells,” he said.

“The original?” Thuy asked. “I have more information about that, based on memory, granted. Let’s see they’re approximately 143,000 nucleotides in length. It encodes seven structural proteins including nucleoprotein, polymerase cofactor, VP35, and VP40. There’s also, GP, transcription activator, VP30, VP24, and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.” She saw his eyes begin to glaze and realized that he’d been too long compiling data on other people’s work rather doing anything original. In her experience, it tended to dull the mind. “Unfortunately the specifics, the uh written specifics were kept under pretty tight lock and key at Walton. They were undoubtedly destroyed in the fire.”

“Well, whatever you can remember might well be helpful,” Tanis replied.

Special Agent Meeks, still with his face shield smeared with spittle, said, “She’s going to be more than helpful. She’s going to jump through every hoop I can think of or I’ll have her on obstruction of justice and this isn’t a normal obstruction charge. It’ll be a life sentence for you young lady. I’ll fucking see to it.”

“She’s answered your questions,” Deckard growled, stepping between them.

“Back off!” Meeks snapped. “You’re on the same hook as she is. That goes for all of you.”

“We didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” Burke said. “Me and Chuck and Stephanie didn’t do nothin’. No offence, Doctor Lee, but you could say we was the victims here.”

Thuy was surprised how much that hurt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Sorry?” Meeks demanded. “You’ve killed 50,000 people and sorry is all you have to say? And you three,” he said pointing at Chuck, Burke, and Stephanie. “We are talking about the destruction of America! You may not love this country but I do and I will do anything to keep her safe. You will comply or else.”

Stephanie laughed suddenly. She really laughed. It was all belly and it was loud. It didn’t go with their surroundings and the others worried for her, but she didn’t need their worry. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my country, but do you really think you can threaten me or Chuck? Ha-ha! We’re dying of cancer you stupid douchebag. You don’t scare me in the least…and those guys with the guns? Nope, not afraid of them either. So why don’t you take your threats and shove them up your ass?”

Both Burke and Chuck started grinning but in seconds, they were rolling on the ground laughing, tears springing from their eyes. Even Deckard joined in, though his laughter was mostly out of spite. There were still many punishments that the FBI could mete out to him and Thuy. Wilson was in the same boat as Deckard, and he was actively worried about his practice being taken from him. He smiled but it was without strength.

“So you have nothing more to say?” Meeks asked Thuy. She shook her head. He then turned to the others. “And you think you have nothing to fear? I think we’ll put that to the test. People have been slipping out of the quarantine zone and we have to put them somewhere. Be sure to make them comfortable when they arrive.”

That quieted the tent. They all feared becoming zombies, all except for Burke who thought he was immune. “Don’t be a dick,” Burke rumbled. “No one here did anythin’ wrong.”

“I have my orders,” Meeks replied. “All escapees are to be housed in a quarantine tent. This is the only tent available.” By the crinkling around his eyes, they could tell he was smiling malevolently. “Now do you have anything more to say, Dr. Lee?”

In truth, she didn’t. She hadn’t held back in the least. “I have told you everything, honestly.”

“Then I have even less regret,” Meeks said. He gestured for the others to leave with him. The two doctors left with downcast eyes and soon the six were alone again.

John flipped him the bird as he zipped up the tent. He then got up, scowling as the others remained seated looking shocked. “It’ll be ok,” he told them. “Y’all can jes sit over at the far end of the tent and if there does happen to be sumptin wrong with anyone they bring in here, I’ll do him up good.”

“The spores maybe airborne,” Thuy said. “Do you understand what that means, Mr. Burke?”

“It means they goes in the air I reckon.”

“But we don’t know that for sure,” Deckard said. “I think John’s plan is the best we have.”

Thuy hated the idea and wouldn’t be a part of it and yet she was in no position to stop it either. She was dreadfully afraid of coming to come face-to-face with whoever they brought in. Would they realize she had been at the heart of everything? Would they blame her? Of course they would. There was no question of that.

It was such a horrible idea that when the zipper started to come down a few minutes later she hid her face in her hands and only peeked through her fingers. A teenage boy: small and thin with a bush of brown hair on his head, and a nose and feet that he was still growing into, was hustled through the opening and stood looking as if he was going to vomit on his tennis shoes. Like a gang of highway robbers, first Stephanie and then the others, lifted the front collars of their shirts to cover their faces.

“Sit right there,” Burke growled, pointing at a corner near the door. The boy looked too shell-shocked to even think about disobeying. Burke looked him up and down. “Y’all get bit or scratched?”

“No I didn’t I was…”

“Jes nod yo head, boy!” Burke snapped. “There ain’t no need to be runnin’ y’all’s gums.”

“Mr. Burke!” Thuy hissed. “Have some compassion. I’m sure this young man has done nothing wrong. We should treat him with respect, and it would be appropriate to explain to him what is going on around here. The reason we’re here is because there was an accident and some, for want of a better word, germs were released.”

“I know, they make people into zombies,” the boy said, his teeth worrying at his lip.

Thuy swallowed hard at that. She held up a finger, wanting to argue the point because, after all, what he had said wasn’t scientifically accurate. Deckard nudged her in the ribs and shook his head slightly. She bit back a proper explanation. “Yes, in a sense the victims become
zombies
.” She put special emphasis on the word since she had to choke it out. “And once they have metamorphosed they become contagious. We’re worried that you might have been exposed to one of the, uh, zombies.”

“No…no I ran,” the boy said. “I…I, put my little brother in my tuba c-case and I-I ran.”

“Tuba case?” Thuy said, feeling pain score her heart. How desperate does a person have to be to put a child in a tuba case? “How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know. Like around sunrise.”

The words made her head go light. If Thuy hadn’t been seated, she would’ve fallen over. Parts of her were completely without feeling and in other parts all she felt was a deep pain. “Sunrise?” she asked breathlessly. “That was hours ago. We…we should try to get help for your brother. Where do you live? Where did this happen?”

“Thuy,” Deckard said, gently.

“No!” she cried and pushed his hands away. “I did this! We…I have an obligation to help him and his brother.” She tried to get up but Deckard held her down. His hands were like iron and his arms, steel. She fought him, but he was too strong and too big. “I d-did this!” she wailed. She cried in great retching sobs and the tent was quiet but for her. The boy cried as well. In silence, tears dripped from his eyes. His brother was dead, he was sure of it…he only hoped he died of asphyxiation in the tuba case and not from the zombies.

“Ever-one hush,” John Burke said, holding out his hands and cocking his head. “I hear them comin’ back.”

Thuy began shaking her head, afraid to see more children being herded into the tent. She didn’t think she’d be able to handle any more children. Tears streamed down her face and her breath began to hitch, sounding like a bad case of hiccups, but when she saw the people who came in, her body slipped back into her control, mostly. She couldn’t stop herself from flying at the pair, her hand out stretched to rake their eyes out.

Deckard stopped her, barely. “No, they may be infected.”

“All the more reason they should die!” Thuy screamed.

Anna Holloway had been expecting to denounce Eng the second they entered the tent, now she hid behind him as Thuy fought like a beast to get at her. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I was a spy, but that was all. I didn’t sabotage anything. It was Eng who did it. Ask him. He speaks English better than you and me.”