She protested and said the work needed to be done, but the coughing wore her down. They both noticed that her last tissue had a small blot of blood on it. That was enough to convince her. She conceded and went to her car.
Cal watched as she pulled her car to the edge of the main road to wait for traffic. He noticed Susan appeared to have a coughing fit at the stop sign and she appeared to be leaning over the seat as if she was trying to grab something just out of reach. Perhaps her box of tissues, he thought.
It appeared that she had unintentionally slow-rolled out from the office lot onto the six lane divided road. Cal looked down the road and saw the truck before Susan did. She rolled right in front of a 9,000 gallon fuel tanker. The massive truck T-boned her older Buick at the driver’s door and pushed her down the road a couple hundred feet.
Cal saw the crash and ran to her car but she was unconscious, with green- and red-tinted mucus draining from her nose and an obvious head injury. Not wanting to move her, Cal grabbed his phone to dial 911 but someone yelled for him to get back. He turned to look and saw fuel was spewing from the truck’s saddle tank and a fire was beginning to spread to the driver’s cab. Cal jogged off the road as the cab and the Buick became engulfed together. He felt deep guilt for not giving her a ride home as he stood there, helplessly watching the vehicles burn.
Enough was enough for the distraught Cal. After he finished the crash reporting with the State Troopers, he went back into his office and called the other managers. He told them to send everyone home, with pay, for the time being. He also called Charlotte to let her know what just happened and that he was as ok as he could be.
While he was making calls, he attempted to reach Mark at the hospital but there was no answer.
22
Chapter 22
Wednesday, January 10th - late evening
West Palm Beach, Florida
Duane was ready for round two. The previous night’s hospital adventure confirmed to him that he was on the right track. The problem for him was that everyone already knew there was a deadly flu. That did not necessarily mean something more nefarious was happening. In fact, a lot of people felt that it was only a matter of time before a virus got loose–nature had a way of correcting things on its own.
He needed to prove that Pharmastat had something to do with it. That is why he and the film crew were in the unmarked van at the mall across the street from the hospital. Two of the dump trucks were still behind the hospital, parked near the loading bay, along with the big yellow tractor.
He wanted to know where the bodies were being taken, so he had parked the van for a stakeout at the mall, but the mall traffic was nearly non-existent today. There was not much casual shopping in the last few days. Of course, there were the high society types who did not seem to have a care in the world. That is why the high-end stores seemed to be busy, but they were the exception.
“What is with these people?” he muttered aloud, referring to the well-heeled shoppers in their Range Rovers.
“The world is dying and they are still shopping. Are they immune or something?”
A light went off in his mind. Could they actually be immune? He made some notes and took some “B” roll of the high-end shoppers. He would try to edit in a connection about how perhaps the rich were being inoculated for the coming collapse and that is why they seemed to be thumbing their noses in the face of certain infectious death.
As the night settled in, Duane realized that the van was going to stand out in the empty mall parking lot. He decided to find a place where people parked at all hours of the day without suspicion. What better than a hospital parking lot. He fired up the non-distinct white van with tinted windows and navigated across the divided State Road. Pulling into the lot marked Emergency Room with a big arrow on the sign, he wheeled around looking for a good vantage point, keenly aware that an unmarked van cruising endlessly around the lot was sure to eventually draw suspicion from a golf cart mounted rent-a-cop. He was feeling the pressure to not play musical parking spaces, so he just chose a darker spot, backed in, and killed the engine.
“Alright, noise and light discipline gentlemen,” he reminded.
As the clock passed 9 pm, they were getting discouraged that anything would happen that night.
“Last night the action didn’t start until midnight,” Jeff said.
“Are you trying to be encouraging or saying we wasted a whole afternoon here?” Dave shot back.
Duane ignored the bickering and noticed someone raising one of the bay doors. Another man jumped off the dock and climbed into the tractor. Two teams of two moved to block traffic that might find its way past the loading dock.
“This is interesting,” Duane said, as he shushed the bickering in the back. The bright lights that flooded the loading area went out.
“Dammit, they cut the lights.”
The machine rumbled to life in time to receive the laundry carts of bodies, just the same as the night before. The crew worked to film through the windshield of the van, but the distance and darkness that covered the alley was too much. They were not getting any usable footage.
After filling the dump truck, the tractor parked and the operator climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck. The truck rumbled to life as the bay door closed. The driver pressed the button that pulled the screen over the dump bed and chugged off toward the road.
“Well crap, now what? We didn’t get it,” Dave the cameraman complained.
“No, you didn’t get it. This is a gold mine opportunity. We are going to follow the dump truck,” Duane proclaimed.
The truck unknowingly drove right past the van and Duane waited to start up and pull out after it. The truck merged into the light traffic and onto State Road 7, made a U-turn at the next crossover, and headed north. Duane had to work hard to keep his distance from the slow-moving dump truck.
“What the hell, man? All day long big trucks are racing down the roadway and we get stuck with Driving Miss Daisy over here,” Duane muttered.
The ride to the Port of Palm beach normally took about thirty-five minutes but the dump truck was setting a slow speed record. Forty-five minutes later, the truck chugged up to the Port’s South gate. A gate guard checked the driver’s ID and made the stink wave and did not keep the truck a second longer than necessary.
“Great, how are we going to get past the guard,” Dave asked no one in particular.
Duane was thinking the same thing. He saw the new power plant next door was under construction and security seemed less obvious over there since the plant was only in the beginning stages.
The crew wheeled back around and parked at a coin laundry on the other side of US 1. Since they were always trying to sneak in somewhere, the crew had a selection of disguises in the van.
“Let’s be construction workers tonight,” Duane decided. The three men pulled on reflective vests and hard hats from a box in the back of the van.
The ruse sounded comical but somehow worked well enough for them to get on the construction site and cross a fence onto Port property. The Port of Palm beach was not massive like the other international shipping ports one might imagine. Most of the shipping traffic was back and forth to the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and South America.
It did not take long for the crew to locate a John Deere Gator multipurpose vehicle to borrow. This was essentially a six-wheeled work-style golf cart with a tilt bed to carry hand tools and small equipment. The thinking was that if they were conspicuous in a noisy tractor, no one would ask questions. The plan seemed to work and they waved at everyone they happened upon while driving around.
After about 15 minutes of wandering aimlessly looking for the dump truck, they saw it pull out of a big insulated building–the kind that was refrigerated for produce and other perishables being off-loaded from foreign ships.
“There,” Duane said, as he slowly rumbled the rickety maintenance cart past the now-closing bay door. The Gator kept going and pulled to a stop near a deserted wo
rkshop.
“OK, now what?” Jeff asked.
“I did not see any outside security. Let’s ditch the cart and walk over for a closer look,” Duane replied.
The team grabbed their tool bags with the camera gear and strolled over to the refrigerated building. They made an effort to walk in the shadows just in case. Arriving at the rear of an adjacent building, they stopped to observe. A man came out of the cold building in a cloud of fog. He was dressed in a heavy coat and stopped for a smoke break. A minute later, another man called him back in. He grumbled and tossed the butt on the ground as he went back in.
Without hesitating, Duane double-timed to catch the slowly closing door. He waited a few seconds for the men to get further into the building and peeked inside. What he saw made him retch. There were three men inside and they were all wearing military-style full-face chemical respirators.
An operator was moving a nearly identical full-size front end loader back and forth, scraping the bucket on the shiny concrete floor as if it was tidying up a pile of dirt–but this was not dirt, it was a small mountain of bodies.
“Dave, bring the camera. Quick!” Dave panned the camera inside the cavernous building.
At that moment, one of the men pressed a button on a control pad and the large door raised up. Three more dump trucks were lined up outside. The first one entered in a practiced pattern and raised its dump bed. A full load of bodies slid out. Just like when dirt is dumped, the truck had to chatter the bed up and down to dislodge the last of the load. The first truck left and the next two followed suit. This was not a one-off, but a well-rehearsed operation.
“Those other trucks were not from the hospital. Where did they come from?” Duane asked.
“This must be a body dump,” Jeff added.
“But why?” Dave replied. Duane shushed them again. “Zoom in on the tractor, it has Port of Palm Beach stenciled on the engine shroud. We need to be able to prove without a doubt where we are.”
The crew got about twenty minutes of footage and left. On the way out, they shot some “B” roll footage of the building’s address and the surrounding port.
As they were walking away, the crew noticed two men exit the building and walk across the narrow street to a slip that had a cargo ship with a Panamanian flag moored to large steel cleats.
The big ship had a large drive-on ramp that was lowered to accept shipping containers mounted on trailer frames, along with various other wheeled vehicles. The two men seemed to be very familiar with the ship.
“Get some footage of the ship’s name and registration number,” Duane ordered.
Just as they finished up and put the camera away, a white SUV with a blue slash and the Seal of The Department Of Homeland Security rolled past them. Big letters on the side said Border Operations.
“That was close, let’s get out of here. This will blow the lid off,” Duane said, not elaborating on what lid he was referring to.
Duane’s team worked through the night to put together a well-edited report on what they had seen and had it uploaded well before the morning news cycle.
The crew had been going non-stop for three days and everyone was exhausted. Dave found himself passed out on the couch as he had done countless times before when they worked late into the night. The 10 AM sun was shining right on him through the window and squashed any hopes of real sleep, so he rolled off the couch in a grumble. On his way to the bathroom he saw something on the bank of TVs that stopped him in his tracks. He ran and rousted the others.
“Get up! Hurry! Look at the TV.”
One of the TVs was tuned to the local CBS affiliate and they had a reporter standing in front of the Port of Palm Beach. The reporter was split-screened with Duane’s video from last night. As the report continued, they also showed still grabs from the hospital loading dock video that the crew had taken the night previous.
“We have recently uncovered a disturbing video of what appears to be bodies being transported from St. Agatha’s Hospital in Wellington to the Port of Palm Beach in dump trucks and handled with heavy machinery. We caution that the images you are about to see are very graphic and not for the faint of heart. Viewer discretion is advised.
“Our Channel 12 investigative team is working to get more information but so far our inquiries to the hospital and the Port have gone unanswered. The videos appear to have originated from a known conspiracy website famous for leaking damning videos in support of what they call social justice.
“The latest video was released early this morning and it has already gone viral, registering over 2 million views in the last 5 hours. Yesterday we ran a report on how disasters and crises breed conspiracy.
“The hospital video that you are now seeing was included in the story. Channel 12 decided to investigate the claims when the videos depicted locations within our viewing area. With respect to claims that Pharmastat is involved, we cannot say for certain, because as of yet they have not responded to our requests for comment.
“An interesting note on the ship you see in the video,” the video froze on the ship’s name. “A records search has revealed that it is of Panamanian registry and ownership is with a shell company that traces back to none other than Pharmastat, the biotech company based in Wellington. This is Lynn Flores reporting from the Port of Palm Beach. Back to you in the studio.”
The weary guys all high fived. Duane checked his email and found it loaded with requests for interviews from news outlets around the globe. By mid-afternoon the national news outlets had picked it up. Similar stories from other places around the country appeared and every talking head had a line of subject matter experts ready to speculate on what they were seeing.
Their videos had created a turn in the road. People were beginning to get caught up in the hysteria. By Thursday evening, panic and pandemonium were developing in numerous regions around the country.
By the weekend, looting and vandalism would become rampant, but mob riots would not develop as people were afraid of close human contact out of fear of the contagion.
People were turning on each other, neighbor against neighbor. Crime was increasing as law enforcement became stretched to the limits and cops began to stay home with their families. It wasn’t the wild west yet, but getting close in some places.
Numerous cases of arson were suspected around the country as masked raiders burned the homes of the dead and in some unfortunate cases, homes with people still alive, but sick inside. One of the raiders was caught after setting fire to a home. He claimed it was justified, as an attempt to prevent further contagion.
Some neighborhoods began to provide their own security patrols. It was becoming commonplace to see hastily painted “You loot, we shoot” signs, reminiscent of images after Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina. There were even effigies hanging from trees as a visual reminder of what might happen to criminals.
There was something about their raw video that screamed cover-up. One national polling agency stated that trust in government was at an all-time low and since the videos had surfaced, 72% of people surveyed felt the government was covering up or purposely misreporting the truth on the worsening pandemic.
Would anyone survive this breakdown?
23
Chapter 23
Thursday, January 11th
Loxahatchee, Florida
Thursday mornings used to be Charlotte’s workout time, but today there were other things taking priority. On this morning Charlotte had been working with the girls to organize the food storage she had been collecting over the last week. She had Costco boxes scattered from the garage to the kitchen. Cal had built her a nice-sized pantry but she was in stocking mode and needed all the room she could get.
Amber and Mandy were sorting boxes and cans and using a Sharpie to scribble the “Best By” dates on the front labels and on the top of each item so they could be top-read if stacked in a box. Baby Tempest was sort of helping–but really just running off with the marker and drawing on herself.
The phone rang; it was Glendora.
“Howdy Charlotte, how you?” she said, in her typical Georgia southern drawl.
“Oh you know, just preparing for the apocalypse,” she chuckled back.
“Ain’t it the truth though?” Glendora replied. “Y’all still want to meet me at the store this morning?” she asked.
“Absolutely, we are good to go.” Charlotte replied.
“Is 11ish still good?” Glendora added, confirming the plan they made yesterday.
Looking at the clock on the microwave from across the room, Charlotte answered.
“Yep, I’ll see you in about an hour.”
“Alrighty, I’ll see you then.”
They hung up and Charlotte switched gears to the plan.
Given the way things had gotten so much worse in the last couple of days, the group had made arrangements with Glendora to load up as much food and supplies from the store as they could and move them to Cal’s house. Cal and Charlotte had several refrigerators and Tim was also bringing one over this morning, along with another large deep freezer to put in the garage.
“Let’s put all the can food together over there.” Charlotte pointed to the corner of the keeping room just off the kitchen.
“Try to organize the cans by food type so we can keep a good idea of where we stand on a particular thing,” Charlotte added.
The girls, being teenagers, thought the whole exercise was somewhat pedestrian.
“Isn’t 48 cans of corn just so extra?” Mandy said to Amber. “I mean who needs 48 cans of carn?”
The girls laughed at Mandy’s attempt to sound country.
“My Gramma always says carn and she is definitely not country,” Amber chuckled.
“OK girls, I need to head over to Miss Glendora’s store and pick up a load of food. Can you please keep an eye on the baby?”
The Unraveling: Book 1 of the Bound to Survive Series Page 20