Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 2): Fractured Paradise

by Wohlrab, Jeff

A single tear rolled down his face as he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “There weren’t any. Someone already cleaned everything out.”

  He could feel the big man slump as he said, “Well, that’s bad.”

  Jensen knelt by the edge of Daniel’s bed with his hand on his friend’s arm. He could feel the heat through the palm of his hand. “I’ve got a plan. We’re going to head out as soon as we get a little more charge from the panels.”

  Daniel started to chuckle, but broke into a coughing fit. It sounded wet and harsh. “Dude, just plug it in.” He indicated the monitors in the room and the lights. “We have power.”

  That just made too much sense. Jensen had depended on those panels in war zones overseas and the one which had developed in his own country. He hadn’t even thought about taking the juice from the storage cells within the cabin. He patted Daniel’s hand. “You just stay alive. I’ll get what you need.”

  Daniel grabbed his hand. “Where?”

  “We’re going back to the college.”

  Daniel’s grip tightened, “Don’t do that. That place is death.”

  Jensen pulled his hand away. “The CDC was there. It’s our best chance to save you.” He paused, “I’m not going to let you die.”

  Daniel coughed again, a thick, rasping sound. “I don’t plan on dying.”

  Jensen had so much he wanted to say, but he simply patted him on the arm gently, “Don’t. I’ll be back.”

  He left before Daniel could see the second tear fall from his eye.

  Jensen was back in the fresh air. He inhaled the scents of the blossoming trees and the humidity in the air. It was life. He was going to do everything he could to give Daniel, Dylan, and Emmy the chance to experience this feeling. His tub had charged quickly once he hooked it into the electrical system of the cabin. He gave Jessica a warning. “Ten minutes until we’re on the road.” Then he turned and walked off into the woods to relieve himself. He didn’t want to go back into the cabin where his friend was struggling to breathe.

  Jensen had both tubs plugged into the cabin’s power infrastructure and briefly considered having someone accompany them in the second tub. Now that their only known threat, the man who had escaped from the dawn ambush of the Dahlonega group, was dead, he felt more confident about the security of the mountaintop. He was torn, but he ultimately decided to leave it. In his mind, the multicam tub belonged to Daniel, and Daniel wasn’t going anywhere.

  They were on the road in less than ten minutes. Both Jessica and Jensen seemed eager to get moving toward a possible reprieve for their comrades’ death sentence. With almost a full charge, Jensen pushed the speed of the armored vehicle higher than he normally would. He didn’t expect the light weight of the trailer to have much impact on their mileage; the tub weighed over a dozen tons already.

  It was only about thirty-five miles to the college and they drew close after about forty-five minutes of driving and one brief swerve to further crush the redneck’s body in Clayton. Jensen slowed on the edge of the campus. He carefully compared the scene in front of him to the one he remembered from the last time they’d been there. The time when Todd had been killed by an unseen sniper.

  He looked up at the corner of the building where she’d been hiding. It had been destroyed by the high explosive grenade he’d lobbed into the window from his launcher. It had an even greater effect than the one he’d used on the National Guard building in Elberton. This one had blown out part of the first floor as well. Jessica noticed his gaze. “Is that where she was?”

  “She was in the corner window up there.” He pointed toward the library to their left. “We were loading books from the library when she shot Todd. We had no idea anyone was even around until she fired.” He looked back at the ruined building. “Daniel pinned her down with machine-gun fire while I dragged Todd back into the library. Once he was gone, I got in my tub and used an HE grenade on that building. She was probably already dead, but I had to make sure.”

  Up ahead, the CDC trailer was still in the same place. The tents were still in position in front of what was a gym or athletic facility of some sort. The entrance was obscured by a long row of plastic sheeting which appeared to house some sort of decontamination unit. It didn’t look like anyone had been here since their first visit.

  Should they go directly to the athletic facility or try to clear the buildings first? Jensen wasn’t sure. They felt the pressure of time drifting away from them, but he didn’t want to lose another friend to the fire of an unseen sniper. Especially on their first date.

  Aside from the ominous looking tents and the damaged building, the scene looked almost serene. The grass was a deep, dark green and blossoms had started to flower in the trees alongside the road. The land was recovering after the mild winter. In a different world, Jensen could picture himself walking to class down the wide sidewalks.

  He made his decision. There was no way for the two of them to properly clear all of the facing buildings. Even if they managed to clear one, he would have no way of knowing it would stay clear when they moved onto the next one. It would also take a lot of precious time, time they didn’t have. Instead, he drove straight up toward the athletic building.

  Stopping just beside what he suspected was the decontamination area, he spent a couple seconds psyching himself up. He never liked to return to the place of a battle where he’d lost someone. Jessica asked, “What are we doing?” She seemed as eager as he was to get going and get this over with.

  Jensen sized up their options. “Let’s get inside first and see if we can find any equipment. Then we’ll take a look inside these tents and see what we can find.”

  “Fair enough. On three?” She held up her hand and raised one finger, then two. On three she rotated the locking bar down and started to climb out of the cockpit. Jensen opened his own hatch and dropped to the ground.

  Instead of entering at the end of the hallway of plastic sheeting, he moved directly toward the doorway and drew his knife. He punctured the plastic just above his head and drew the knife all the way to the ground. He didn’t want to walk through the semi-transparent decontamination area. It felt like a shooting gallery. Instead, he wanted to reach the safety of the strongly built facility as directly as possible.

  He noted with approval Jessica had dropped to one knee with her back against the wall and her rifle up as she scanned the area behind them. Either she’d had very good training, or she was naturally gifted at combat. Perhaps both. He whispered, “Let’s go,” as he ducked through the plastic and into the dim room before them.

  Jensen immediately had his rifle up and pointing in front of him. He could see the red dot of his sight lined up with his right eye as he scanned the small atrium. To either side were signs for locker rooms and to his immediate front was a reception desk. It was piled with forms and clipboards. He wasn’t sure if those were from the college or the CDC, but he made a mental note to check on the way out.

  Beyond the desk were multiple doors leading to a gym. Through the glass, he could see what appeared to be white sheets hanging down in rows. That was weird. Before they moved forward to check that out, he wanted to clear the locker rooms. “You take the women’s locker room, I’ll take the men’s. Let’s clear those before we move into the gym.”

  Jessica’s movement was her reply. She moved in a crouching run toward the door on the left and swung it open. After a moment, he saw her fumbling with her vest as she pulled a flashlight and pressed on the tail cap. In an exaggerated whisper, she told him, “No windows.” That was good to know. He dropped his AR to hang on the sling and pulled his own flashlight and his Ruger.

  Jensen pointed the light forward in his left hand and rested the barrel of his pistol on the back of his hand. His eyes, the light, and the barrel of the pistol were all pointed in the same direction. As he swept the door back, he twisted back and forth at the waist to keep his weapon and light aligned with his eyes. He had half-expected to see some sort of CDC hazard gear in the locker
room, but it looked empty.

  There were locks on a number of lockers and a few empty ones that stood open. He moved slowly and quietly through the rows of lockers to the showers. He was jealous for a moment: these all had individual stalls, unlike the large open showers he’d had to use at times in the Army. Jensen cleared them one by one before he returned to the atrium. Jessica was already there. He asked, “Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  They moved toward the doors into the gym. Once again, he noted with satisfaction that Jessica kept an eye on their six o’clock. The feeling of something wrong hammered into his brain again. This wasn’t what he’d expected. Before they entered, he’d imagined a long line of cots strung through the gym. Instead, he saw plastic and fabric sheets hung from a taut wire about eight feet high from end to end to create small isolated rooms.

  Long cables snaked across the floor with metal junction boxes at close intervals. Some of the sheets had been swept to the side. From the doorway, Jensen could see real hospital beds with IV stands surrounded by gleaming white machines. He recognized a ventilator from his own stay in the hospital.

  Nothing moved in the light gleaming through the high up windows. It was eerily still. The machines were off. A small prickle of fear crept up his back and along his forearms. Irrationally, he expected zombies to come screeching through the stillness after them. He knew they weren’t real, but he almost took a step back anyway. Something felt … wrong.

  The small rooms created by the hung sheets resembled the tiny areas in an emergency room that could be cordoned off with curtains for privacy. Actually, these rooms looked exactly like those rooms. Each had a hospital bed and monitors surrounding it. Suddenly, he realized why he was so unsettled. The hospital beds had straps hanging off the rails.

  That was probably what had spurred his irrational thoughts of zombies. Why would you need to restrain flu patients you were trying to save? Jensen turned his head slightly so Jessica could hear him more clearly, “I don’t like this at all. Let’s grab four of the ventilators and get them into the trailer.” Sheila only had three patients, but if one wasn’t functioning, Jensen certainly wasn’t going to be the one to decide which two members of his party got to breathe.

  He turned and propped the door open before unplugging the first machine and wheeling it toward he outside. “Jensen” Jessica hissed a few moments later. “There are straps on the hospital beds!”

  In the same tone, he whispered back, “I know. There’s something wrong here, but I don’t know what.”

  There was a fine layer of dust on the machine. Whoever had been working here hadn’t been there in a while. The campus, aside from the lone sniper, and the nearby town of Clarkesville, had both seemed completely deserted. For the moment he felt like they were the only two living people within miles. It wasn’t a good feeling.

  Behind him, he could hear Jessica moving a second ventilator from one of the small isolation rooms. He listened for any other sounds that were out of place, but everything was silent. He couldn’t even hear any birds chirping on the bright spring day. Once at the door, he paused and looked around. The plastic sheets distorted his view of the outside. The colors were blurred and undefined.

  Jensen took a deep breath and pulled his knife again. The slit in the plastic wouldn’t be enough to move the large ventilator through. In fact, the small openings in the plastic hallway in front of him didn’t seem large enough to move equipment through either. They must have either been brought in another way or been in place before this decontamination area was erected.

  He quickly cut through the plastic, aware of Jessica behind him. Her rifle was up and scanning, even though he knew she wouldn’t be able to identify a target through the semi-transparent sheeting either. As the plastic dropped to the ground, he kicked it out of the way and grabbed the first machine. He wheeled it over the smooth lawn toward the back of the trailer, lifting it slightly when the wheels objected to the surface.

  Once he had it in the trailer, he turned to help Jessica with hers, but she was nowhere to be seen. Jensen hurried back to the door and saw her returning with a third ventilator. Jensen was relieved. The gym spooked him, and he was glad he didn’t have to go back in. Instead, he took the second one and repeated the process. By the time he returned for the third, she was already back with the final machine. This time, she followed him across the lawn to the trailer.

  Jensen’s ominous feeling had faded somewhat in the bright sunlight. Everything was still eerily quiet. He couldn’t hear any birds or animals. He couldn’t even hear trees rustling in a breeze. “Did you see any medicine in there? Any sort of antivirals?”

  Jessica shook her head. “I checked one of the cabinets, too. There was nothing.”

  Jensen turned toward the white tents on the other side of the tub. “Then let’s go check those out. We might find something in there.” Jensen took the first tent and motioned for Jessica to go to the second. He ducked inside and moved quickly to his left, rifle raised in case there were any threats. There were folding tables holding laptop computers and monitors. In the back, he could see boxes of what appeared to be bottles and pills.

  He didn’t recognize what was on the bottles, but one of the words seemed familiar. Sheila had told him to get anything that ended in ‘mivir.’ He was sure it was one of the drugs on the list Sheila had given him. Without checking further, he simply grabbed the boxes filled with pills and syringes and moved them into the trailer. They had gotten everything they came for. It was time to leave.

  Jessica was already loading IV bags into the trailer. “There’s a ton of medical supplies in here. Help me out.”

  Jensen followed her to the second tent. It was full of syringes, gauze, tubes, and needles. There were more boxes of the IV solution.

  He piled as much as he could on top and went back to the trailer. “That’s enough” he told her. “Let’s get before someone else shoots at us.” Then he paused, “Wait, let me get something else.”

  He ducked back into the first tent. Jessica dropped to a knee beside the hulking armored vehicle and scanned the area around them. Like Jensen, she had an odd feeling about this place, she just couldn’t figure out why. Although there seemed to be plenty more to acquire, she was just as ready to leave. She watched Jensen exit the tent carrying several laptops. “Maybe Sheila can figure something out from these.”

  He popped the hatch open and laid them onto the floor of the scout seat. The suspension in the tub wasn’t much, but it was far better than having them bouncing around in the trailer. He held out his hand for Jessica’s rifle and held it for her as she climbed back into the cockpit. After handing it back, he climbed back into the commander’s seat and locked down the hatch. He felt a sense of relief to be back behind the titanium armor. He didn’t like this place, either because it was where Todd had been killed or something else, but it made his skin crawl.

  “I really hate this place,” Jessica said.

  Jensen nodded, still imagining some sort of zombie to come screeching out of the building and attack the tub. “You and me both.” He shuddered involuntarily, he still had goosebumps. “This place feels like a morgue.”

  “That’s exactly what it feels like, but with no bodies. Why aren’t there any bodies? It’s like this place was abandoned and the sick just disappeared.”

  He started the tub forward, and they headed for home.

  Chapter 21

  In the cabin, Sheila was doing all she could. Her three patients were making her remember the weeks before Daniel and Jensen had arrived in Appling. She had been working 16-hour days at the urgent care clinic trying to help those afflicted with the superbug. Her success rate had been miserably low. Many of her patients had already been on death’s door by the time they arrived. There was little she could do for them then.

  Some didn’t have insurance or didn’t understand their insurance, so they delayed seeking treatment until it was too late. Others thought because they’d received the vaccination,
they would be able to overcome the virus, not realizing, as few did, that the vaccination had been what started the pandemic.

  The most heartbreaking for Sheila had been the young mother who brought her daughter in for treatment. By the time she saw her, the girl had been struggling just to breathe. She was drowning from all the fluid in her lungs. Her 02 saturation was so low she was virtually suffocating in the open air. The mother had tried herbal remedies and essential oils, believing they would help fight off the sickness. They did nothing. The girl hadn’t lasted the night.

  She was determined to do better with her current patients. This time she might be able to save some if Jensen came through. They were still within the first 48 hours of symptoms, which helped their chances if she had the right equipment. At the urgent care clinic, they had a single mechanical respirator. She put as many patients on oxygen as she could, but it barely had an effect. Most still died. As they weakened from the virus, they simply couldn’t seem to pull enough oxygen into their lungs.

  She had to hope Jensen was able to find the antivirals and machines she’d requested. If not, all she’d really be able to do was monitor her patients’ vital signs as they slowly started to suffocate. Emmy’s 02 saturation had already started to drop. It was down to 94%. That was only slightly below medical guidelines for normal, but she found it worrisome the woman had dropped from 98% earlier in the day.

  Hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation to her cells, wasn’t a concern yet, but it would be. Hypoxia and heart failure were the two biggest killers with this flu virus. The fluid in and around the lungs made it difficult for them to function properly and also put pressure on the heart. The most effective treatments had involved antivirals, diuretics, and oxygen enhancers like erythropoietin, or EPO. It was the drug Lance Armstrong had admitted to using to maximize her performance during part of his cycling career.

  Inhaled steroids and bronchodilator drugs were another tactic they used to try to combat inflammation and keep the airways open. The goal for all of the treatments was to keep the sufferer breathing and to keep getting oxygen into the bloodstream.