The Romero Strain (23 page)

He was dead. He had two bullet wounds, one to his upper chest and one to his throat. Blood soaked his uniform and pooled on the floor under his feet. Like the others we terminated, he had no sidearm. Clearly, he had been murdered. We gathered around the body.

“This is weird,” I told them.

“Why is it weird?” Kermit asked. “Looks like they killed him.”

“The undead don’t shoot people.”

He replied with, “No. Before they became those things.”

“That doesn’t make sense either,” I countered. “What would be the purpose of that? And—”

“He was infected and they killed him,” Julie said, interrupting my sentence to add to the conjecture pool.

“They were all infected,” I said. “But I don’t see obvious bite wounds on him. Besides—”

It was David’s turn to interrupt. “Suicide,” David dryly suggested, half joking.

“Okay, everyone stop interrupting and observe. What don’t you see?”

Marisol asked, “Could a pen have killed him?”

“What? A pen? No, Marisol, those are bullet wounds. Why would you ask?”

“You told us to observe, and I observe a bloody pen on the floor under the computer console,” she said, pointing to the object.

She was nearly correct; the pen was actually a refillable lead pencil.

“A dead soldier with gunshot wounds, none of the personnel that we terminated had side arms, a bloody pencil which clearly isn’t the murder weapon. It’s like a game of Clue.”

“Someone didn’t like him,” Marisol concluded. “They shot him like a sneaky
vato
and ran.”

“Or a sneaky little weasel. Speaking of which… Joe, where’s the doctor?”

“How should I know?” he said with a
couldn’t care less
attitude “He left a few minutes after we came in.”

“And you just let him walk away?”

Joe snubbed my question with, “I’m not his babysitter!”

“Son,” Kermit said, “whose side are you on? I’ll go find him.”

“I’m not taking sides!”

“That’s your problem,” Julie declared.

Kermit turned to leave.

“Kermit, don’t bother,” I said. “He’s probably heading to his room. Can you see if those monitors work?” I asked David if we still had the doctor’s key card.

“Right here,” David confirmed, flipping the plastic rectangle back and forth between his fingers.

“Let me have it back. I have a theory.”

“And what’s that?” David asked, handing me the card.

“It was Professor Plum in the conservatory with a revolver.”

Lies, misleading statements, half-truths, vague recollections and bullshit. What little the doctor told us in the facility had more holes in it than a batting cage net. A non-airborne virus magically escaped through the ventilation system, destroying the world, having been released by a captain who disregarded security protocols. He knew who did it and therefore witnessed the act. But why was he in the command center when the shit hit the fan? Why wasn’t he in his lab overseeing the relocation? I found all of it highly unbelievable. No commander in his right mind would give such an order, and there was no such thing as coincidence. I needed to recheck the doctor’s security clearance. His key card wouldn’t work on the dining hall, so what were the odds he had clearance for the command center? The most disturbing thing about the whole situation was the spatter on his lab-coat. I never had a chance to look at the pattern. It could have been blood.

I let the door close behind me as I exited the control room. I swiped the card through the reader. The indicator light remained red. Once more, just in case. The light did not change color. He had lied again.

I used my master key and returned to where I had left David standing.

“Is your conclusion correct, Colonel Mustard?” David asked.

“I am getting close to an accusation once all the cards are in place.”

I went to the monitor station where MSG. Brown had brought up his position. I looked up at the wall of high definition flat panel screens that displayed the closed circuit feed from the various cameras strategically placed throughout the complex, next to the feeds coming from the outside world. There he was, trying to get into his living quarters.

“Like I said… going to his room.” I picked up a microphone that was hooked to the console. It read,
Facility PA.
I flipped up the accompanying switch and said, “Calling Doctor Howard, Doctor
France
, Doctor Howard. Please report to the command center. Now!” I turned the switch off. “Kermit, you think there’s video playback on these things?”

* * *

One door at a time and one room at a time. We spent the entire night and into early morning checking the complex. We broke into two teams. Team one consisted of Kermit, David, Julie, and France. The second team was Joe, Marisol, Max, and me. There may have been more firepower on team one, but I had the nose, Max, and my eyes and ears. Team two had the tactical advantage.

After securing the command center, each team began their search and destroy mission, heading east toward the laboratories. We checked every room, marking each door with an “X” after it was cleared. We joined together to search the living quarters and only encountered one zombie locked in the general living quarters. My team reached the laboratories sooner than the others. What we discovered was a section that looked like it had been incinerated, charred bodies included. Later I would discover that the damage had been caused by a failed decontamination procedure.

There was one final door to the right as I faced the blown-out doors to the laboratory compound. The sign on the door read,
Utilities.
I slid the card through a partially heat-warped reader and the door lock released. I cautiously opened the door. Before me was a staircase leading down into a dark abyss. There was noise emanating from below. It was the noise of machinery. I radioed Kermit to inquire as to what lie below in the darkness. As he was explaining, I could see movement near the bottom landing.

I stood at the ready, peering into the blackness, watching cautiously. I was not going to go charging down the stairs, gun blazing like some gung-ho commando out of some B-Movie action thriller. I waited for backup.

“I only saw what appeared to be a singular moving target,” I told them. “Didn’t get a long enough look to determine if it was human or other, and Max isn’t sure either.”

“Did you call down?” Kermit asked.

“No,” was my response, “I was erring on the side of caution. I’d be a little out-gunned if a horde decided to ascend on me.”

Our whispered conversation appeared to get the attention of the unknown below; it began to ascend the stairs.

Kermit shouted down, “This is Master Sergeant Brown. Identify yourself or we will open fire!”

“Master Sergeant,” came from the murky depths. “It’s Corporal Drukker!”

“Drukker?! Corporal. Hands in the air and walk slowly to us. Don’t make any sudden moves. Just come up and into the light where we can see you. Do you understand?”

“Affirmative, Master Sergeant.”

He was short and lean, just meeting the minimum height and weight requirement for the U.S. Army, and was dressed in standard issue green fatigue pants and black boots. He was minus his shirt and wore an olive drab tank top, which revealed his muscular, tight structure. His face was thin and slightly pale in complexion with thin lips and brown hair parted left to right.

Kermit greeted him heartedly after seeing he had not been infected.

He had been sealed in the facility basement doing maintenance to the generator when all hell broke loose. He didn’t know what happened, only that there had been gunfire.

Kermit gave him a quick rundown of the situation and gave him a firearm. We went to the laboratories. We let the doctor take the lead.

VII. Welcome to the GCC

The first three days were spent disposing of the bodies and separating them from anything useful, such as clothing or ammunition. We also disinfected, and cleaned up the general disarray caused by the transmutes and the damage the base’s security forces had produced. It took Sam one day to fix the entire security system, and another three for the rest of the repairs. I explored as much of the facility as possible while the others took inventory of our food, weapons, and additional supplies. During that period, I discovered remaining research data on the viruses, the transmutes, and information on the facility.

* * *

The monitoring system of the complex was extensive, most likely due to military paranoia. There were cameras throughout the complex and extensive monitoring of the train platform, the elevator entrance, Grand Central itself, and the surrounding streets of the terminal. Anyone coming in and out could be identified through a facial recognition program.

For a few days we had been able to watch news channels from all over the world from the command center and the facility lounge. The news for New York and its vicinity lasted about twenty-four hours, but the information was bleak and we knew the city was lost, not just because the news stations reported its catastrophic end, but because we had heard it from the military.

Inside the GCC’s communications center we were able to listen to secured radio transmissions being broadcast from the United States Special Operations Command, Forward Operating Base (Headquarters) [USSOCOM FOB (HQ)], which Kermit told us would be located somewhere inside the city.

New York 1 news was the last local station to remain on the air. We watched Pat Kiernan and Roger Clark take turns broadcasting and comforting whoever may still be watching, staying on the air long after reports stopped coming into their newsroom. In mid-sentence the station went dead. There had been no indication that they had become infected or the living dead had overrun the station. It was simply a loss of signal. From the satellite feed in the command center we watched CNN as the disease spread across the east coast toward the west. The government tried to stop the spread the best they could. They quarantined Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. They fire-bombed cities along the Mississippi River that had been overrun by the living dead in hopes of halting the spread of the disease, as well as the hordes of walking plague victims. But it was too late. Their valiant efforts were in vain, for the virus had been carried west by aircraft and could not be contained.

Los Angeles fell first, followed by San Francisco. The carnage and the infection quickly spread throughout the rest of the country into Canada and Mexico. After the fifth day, the rest of the world had begun to succumb. By day nine all television broadcasts had stopped.

I didn’t feel comfortable being around the others. I was feeling stressed and fatigued from the past nine days. I was only sleeping a few hours a night. My mind was cloudy. I was unfocused and had not found time to meditate, causing me to be irritable and frustrated. The greatest concern I had was the fact that I could be a danger to the others. I called the doctor to the commander’s office for some answers.

I was not cordial to the doctor as he entered. I was my usual, hostile self. There were many things about his story on my mind and I wanted to confront him with evidence in hand. There was also the issue of my transformation, an issue that needed to be addressed and assessed to determine if I was a risk.

The office was dark with exception of a small banker’s style lamp, which stood on the large oak desk. I tilted it up slightly toward the chair that sat in front of the desk to partly hinder his vision, but in part because my eyes were once again light sensitive, which I attributed to lack of sleep.

“Overly dramatic,” he said as he sat down. “Am I here for an interrogation?”

“Let’s call it an inquiry.” I lowered the banker’s lamp and turned on a standing floor lamp in the corner of the room. “Let’s start with the fact that everything you told us has been half-truths and misleading statements. This is video of you running out of the command center, to your
backup
lab, and out of the complex.” I slid it across the desk toward him. “I’m very confused. Care to tell me your story again?”

“I would like to hear what you think the surveillance disk reveals.”

“Doctor, I’m not interested in witty repartee or futile banter. It usually gives me a headache. And when I get a headache, something unpredictable happens. So let’s cut to the chase. I have a communication’s specialist who was clearly murdered and an officer who pursued you out of the command center who has a puncture wound in his neck. I have a videotape of the captain following you into a lab, but never coming out, and you high-tailin’ it from the complex through a secret exit. Plus you had blood splatter on your lab-coat, which you got shooting someone at close range. Care to explain?”

“I would never have caused Corporal Schwartz harm. He was my friend.”

“Hell of a way to treat a friend.”

“I told you, I did not shoot Derek!”

“For once, how about you actually tell the truth?”

“Since you are so fond of quotes I’ll give you one. Galileo said, ‘All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them’. I shall help you. The blood could have come from Derek, but I did not shoot him. It was that insane Captain Robbins. But I am getting ahead of myself.”