Wildfire- Destruction of the Dead

by Shaun Harbinger

  Instead of pushing her away, he staggered back a few steps.

  And I saw something in those yellow eyes that I had never thought was possible. I saw fear.

  He seemed to be weakening. The arm that held me aloft dropped. My feet touched the floor and I tried to push myself away from him. He lost his grip on me and I fell back onto the boxes.

  Vess managed to push Lucy away but he looked feeble. Lucy looked like she was readying herself for another attack but stopped when she saw what was happening to Vess.

  He leaned against the wall and clutched his arm as if he were having a heart attack. The dark veins that stood out so prominently all over his body seemed to recede. If it wasn’t for the blood that covered his naked body, he would look like a normal human being.

  I stared in shock. I hadn’t expected the vaccine to have such an effect on him.

  He looked over at me and the yellowness in his eyes was gone. His eyes were a normal brown color. He looked confused and scared.

  “What’s happening to me?” he groaned.

  Then the eyes widened and his mouth went slack. It was then that I noticed the four bullet holes in his body. They began bleeding, Vess’s own blood adding to the blood of those he had killed earlier.

  He dropped to the floor as if he had just been shot.

  There was no mistaking the way he had fallen and the slackness of his body.

  He was dead.

  31

  I didn’t know if the vaccine had killed him or if the cause of death was the group of bullets that were obviously lodged in his body. Maybe the virus had protected him from the damage somehow and now it couldn’t because it had been overwhelmed by the vaccine. Johnny Drake had fired at Vess at Site Alpha Two. At the time, we had thought that Vess had dodged the bullet. But maybe Johnny’s bullet was the one that had killed Vess a moment ago.

  I liked the thought of that.

  Jax hadn’t moved. She stood looking at Vess’s dead body. Then she looked at me and took a step forward. I took another syringe out of my pocket. She hesitated.

  Behind her, at the door, Sam and Tanya appeared, brandishing M16s.

  “Get down!” Tanya shouted. Lucy and I flatted ourselves to the floor so she and Sam could open fire on Jax.

  But Jax leaped through the frosted glass window to the compound outside. Sam and Tanya adjusted their positions and began shooting.

  A few seconds later, they ceased fire.

  “She got away,” Sam said. “Fuck, she’s fast.”

  They saw Vess’s dead body lying on the floor.

  Sam’s eyes went wide. “What the hell?”

  “I gave Vess a shot of vaccine,” I said. “He turned human. I think the virus had been protecting his body from all the bullets he’s taken. When the virus died, the bullet wounds killed him.” I rubbed my throat. It hurt to speak. If Vess had applied any more pressure on my windpipe, or if it had lasted any longer, I’d be dead now as well, lying there next to him.

  Sam kneeled down to take a closer look at the blood-covered body. “That’s some fucked-up shit, man.”

  “Yeah,” Lucy said.

  Tanya went over to the broken window and looked out through the shattered glass. “What do you think Jax will do now?”

  She’ll either come back and try to destroy the vaccine again,” Lucy said, “or she’ll run.” She thought for a moment and then added, “I think she’ll run. This vaccine can destroy the virus within her. Since her ultimate goal is to spread the virus, she won’t risk meeting the same fate as Vess. She’ll find a place where she can infect as many people as possible before the vaccine is widely distributed.”

  “Yeah, that sounds most likely,” Tanya said. “At least when we catch up with her, we’ll know how to kill her.” Her voice was tinged with sadness.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “At least she didn’t end up as one of the military’s experiments.”

  She nodded.

  “Speaking of military experiments,” Sam said, “we shouldn’t leave Vess’s body here for those fuckers to dissect.”

  He was right. After what the brigadier had said about the government wanting to experiment on a Type 1, it would be dangerous to leave the body here. Vess looked totally human in death but who knew what the military scientists might discover if they examined the body at a cellular level?

  I checked the situation outside. There was no one around; the soldiers were still busy with the hybrids. Gunshots and shouts drifted down to this end of the camp on the breeze.

  “Let’s get it in the bus,” I said.

  Sam lifted Vess’s head and shoulders off the floor. I took the feet and we made our way out of the hut. Tanya and Lucy stayed behind with the M16s just in case Jax came back, and Tanya reloaded my Walther with a fresh magazine in case Sam and I met her on our way to the bus.

  I kept an eye out as we moved across the compound, but I was sure Jax had fled.

  Vess’s flesh was slick with blood, making his corpse more difficult to carry. We managed to get it into the bus and lay it beneath the back seats, out of sight. Then we went into the washrooms and cleaned our hands before heading back to the girls.

  By the time all four of us were heading back to the bus, some of the soldiers were returning from the northern quadrant. They looked upset and downcast. I wondered how many of their number had been lost in the hybrid attack.

  Captain Price came over to us. His face was set into a hard mask of determination but there were tears in his eyes. “Some of the hybrids were the men that went missing from this camp,” he said. “It’s one thing to fight an unknown enemy but when you have to kill someone you used to know, it’s a damned terrible business.”

  I nodded. We all knew the heart-wrenching consequences of having our friends become enemies.

  The brigadier came marching up to us angrily. “What the bloody hell has happened here?”

  “I told you what was going to happen,” I said. “I warned you. You wouldn’t listen.”

  He came up to me, putting his face close to mine and pointing at me. “If you let her go, I’ll have you court-martialed!”

  “Of course we didn’t let her go,” I said. “She did that all by herself. Your men are lying dead back there because of your arrogance.”

  “You’re all going to jail,” he said. “What you did amounts to treason.”

  I’d heard enough of his bullshit. I hit him. He stumbled backward and fell to the ground, holding his nose as it began to pour blood.

  The soldiers around us looked shocked. They didn’t know what to do. Two of them helped the brigadier to his feet.

  “Arrest them,” he shouted, pointing at us. “Take them into custody.”

  The soldiers moved forward. Tanya and Lucy leveled the M16s at them. The soldiers halted.

  “You won’t be taking us anywhere,” I said.

  We moved backward to the bus, the girls keeping their guns trained on the soldiers.

  As soon as we climbed aboard, Sam started the engine and reversed through the main gate, knocking it down. He kept the bus in reverse all the way to the motorway, where he maneuvered us into position to drive back along it to get to the roads that would take us to the coast.

  “Are they following us?” I asked nervously as we drove along the center lane. If the convoy of armed Jeeps came after us, we stood no chance in a bus.

  “No,” Sam said, checking the mirror.

  “I don’t think the brigadier’s hatred of us has spread to the other soldiers,” Tanya said.

  “Wait a minute,” Sam said. “There’s a Jeep following us.”

  I looked through the rear window. A single Jeep was on our tail, with a driver, a passenger, and a soldier manning the mounted gun.

  “It’s only one Jeep,” Tanya said.

  I sighed. “That’s all they need to blow this bus to hell.”

  The Jeep came up behind us fast. Tanya and Lucy prepared the M16s but I had a feeling they weren’t going to get a chance to use them. W
e’d seen how efficiently the mounted guns had dealt with the bandits.

  The Jeep raced up alongside us. It was Captain Price in the passenger seat. He motioned to Sam to stop.

  “What do I do?” Sam asked.

  “You might as well stop,” I said.

  He brought us to a complete stop. The Jeep stayed next to us. Price jumped out and knocked on the bus door. Sam opened it. The door opened with a hydraulic hiss.

  Price came on board. He stood at the front of the aisle between the seats as if he were a tour guide about to point out the local landmarks. “The brigadier has sent me to bring you back to the camp.”

  “I’ll tell you now, that isn’t going to happen,” Tanya said. She and Lucy had their guns pointed at Price.

  “No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “There’s no need for the weapons. I’m not taking you anywhere. You’ll have to excuse the brigadier; he’s a military man through and through. Doesn’t believe civilians have much value, even though it’s them he’s supposed to be fighting for.

  “You people don’t belong in jail. You’re doing just as much good out here as we are, maybe even more. We’re bound by rules and regulations. Sometimes they get in the way.

  “So, as I said, I came after you as per the brigadier’s orders but you were already gone when I got to the motorway.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said, “but why did you have to stop us just to tell us that? I mean, it’s nice that you want to say goodbye and everything, but we’d have gotten over our heartbreak if you’d just let us leave without saying a word. We wouldn’t have looked back, man.”

  “I came to tell you that you may have underestimated the brigadier. He knows you killed something in Lab 3. We found the bloodstain on the floor and a trail leading to where this bus was parked. He thinks you killed your friend Jax and removed the body so the scientists can’t examine it.”

  We said nothing. Price studied our faces, then nodded and gave a signal to the gunner in the Jeep. The gunner jumped down onto the road, took something from the vehicle and brought it around to the open bus door. He handed it to Price.

  It was a shovel.

  Price tossed it down into the aisle. The shovel clattered on the floor of the bus.

  “Make sure you bury it deep,” he said.

  With that, he exited the bus and went back to his Jeep. He gave us a slight nod before the Jeep turned and headed back to Camp Prometheus.

  “Wow,” Sam said.

  I picked up the shovel and placed it on the back seat. Even though he worked for the military, Price must have the same trepidation as us when it came to letting them study the body of a Type 1 for weaponization purposes.

  “We’ll bury the body on the cliffs,” Tanya said. “Let’s go, Sam.”

  He nodded and got us moving.

  I hoped the short drive to the coast was going to be uneventful. We had a body to bury and I finally had a location for Joe and my parents.

  I took the slip of paper out of my pocket and read it over and over, feeling as if I might be in a dream.

  Tomorrow, I was going to see my family.

  32

  We parked the bus by the cafe and climbed out into the afternoon sun. The Easy and the Escape waited on a gently rolling sea. I wanted to get the burial over as soon as possible and return to the comfort of the boat.

  Across the road, a small stone wall marked the edge of a field. It looked as good a place as any to dispose of Vess’s body A lone elm tree stood in the field. With shovel in hand, Sam vaulted over the wall and began digging in the shade beneath the tree.

  When he had a grave deep enough, he came back and said, “All ready.” We struggled to get the body over the wall but finally managed to carry it across the field and into the grave. Price had said to bury the body deep, and Sam had dug a hole that would suffice. We rolled Vess in.

  “Tell me something,” Sam said. “Are we burying the body out of respect or just to hide it?”

  “Just to hide it,” I said.

  We filled in the hole quickly. As we climbed over the wall and back onto the road, I looked back. No one would ever suspect that patient zero was buried beneath that tree.

  Tanya grabbed the magpie from the bus and we descended the steps to the beach. The Zodiac was exactly where we had left it among the rocks.

  We had driven here without incident, buried the body without being seen, and found the Zodiac with no trouble. Maybe our luck was changing for the better.

  As we launched the small craft, I heard the low buzz of a drone overhead. The magpie sat by Tanya’s feet. We were safe.

  * * *

  We sailed out from the coast and turned the boats south. Our destination was Camp Achilles in Wales. We would go ashore tomorrow. For now, we wanted to get the boats near enough to Swansea Marina to assess the situation there. The last time we had been there, it had been crawling with soldiers and military vehicles. That shouldn’t be a problem now that we had the ID badges that said we worked for the MoD but we didn’t want to blunder into an area where the army had a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy.

  If we saw a large military presence, we would find another place to go ashore.

  When we arrived at the marina, our luck seemed to be holding out; the place was deserted. Tanya’s voice came over the radio. “Alex, where are the soldiers we saw last time?”

  “I guess they don’t need them here now that the drones are patrolling,” I suggested. It made sense to me that if they had drones flying along the coastline, any soldiers on the ground would be redundant and better utilized elsewhere.

  “We’ll land there tomorrow, then,” Tanya said. “Got anything good for dinner?”

  I smiled. It felt good to deal with something as mundane as what was on tonight’s dinner menu. “We’ve got some burgers.”

  “Sounds good. We’ll be over soon.”

  The rest of the evening passed pleasantly and quickly. We all felt a sense of accomplishment. Despite numerous setbacks, we had delivered the first batch of vaccine. Marilyn MacDonald was going to have to find someone else to deliver the subsequent batches because, even if we wanted to help with that, we weren’t welcome at Camp Prometheus anymore. As far as Operation Wildfire was concerned, we were done.

  That night, I dreamed of my family living on board the Easy with us, safe from the horrors on the mainland. With Joe on board, I could relax a little and spend time with Lucy while my brother piloted the boat. Joe always made me feel safe, no matter what.

  I woke up in the night but this time it wasn’t because I’d had a nightmare; I just needed the bathroom. When that was done, I sat up in bed listening to the sea and Lucy’s deep, relaxed breathing.

  Through the porthole, I could see the calm night. The moon cast a silver shimmer over the water.

  If everything went well, my family would be on the boat tomorrow. I could hardly wait to show them around the Easy.

  Everything was going to be perfect.

  33

  The next morning, Sam and I took the Zodiac to Swansea Marina and found a Ford Focus parked near the marine goods store. Sam broke into the car and hot-wired it. We put the magpie on the back seat and drove inland.

  Lucy and Tanya stayed on the boats because we had to make sure we had enough room in whatever vehicle we took to drive my parents and Joe back to the marina.

  Despite the calm and clear night, the morning had brought storm clouds and rain. As we drove along the main road that led to the mountains, Sam turned on the wipers and headlights. “Today’s the day, dude,” he said, seeming genuinely pleased for me. “You get to introduce us to your parents.”

  I grinned. I felt full of nervous energy. How much would Joe and my parents have changed? How much would they think I’d changed?

  Camp Achilles wasn’t far from the coast. We couldn’t miss it because there were red signs everywhere pointing to its location. It was nestled between two mountains, surrounded by the same wire fence and guard towers we had seen at the other cam
ps.

  At the gate, we presented our ID badges and told them who we were here to see. The guards waved us through and told us to wait in our car at the parking area.

  We did, and the rain streamed over the windows, obscuring our view of the camp.

  “It’s a good thing we have these badges,” Sam said. “They wouldn’t let just anybody come into a camp and take people out of it.”

  “I know,” I said. The army’s objective was to get as many people into the camps as possible, not let them leave. My badge meant I could take my family out of Achilles and no one would bat an eyelid. My luck was still holding out.

  A soldier dressed in a green rain slicker knocked on the window and beckoned us to follow him. Sam stayed in the car while the soldier led me to a hut that was simply called Hut 4. Very imaginative.

  He opened the door and held it open while I entered. The room was bare. I guessed that Hut 4 had many different uses and was furnished for whatever need it was being used for at the time. A man visiting his family didn’t require any furnishing at all.

  A second door opened and my heart leaped as my dad stepped through it and into the room. He saw me and rushed forward to hug me. That hug felt so good. I couldn’t remember the last time I had hugged my dad.

  “Alex,” he said, holding me tight. “My boy is alive. We thought you were dead.”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  He held me at arm’s length. “You’re more than fine. Look at you. You’ve lost weight. And you look stronger. Much stronger.”

  His face fell a little and he said, “I wish your mother could see you now.”

  I felt a slight panic rush through me. “You mean she can’t? Where is she?” I looked at the door he had entered through. “Isn’t she here?”

  “Joe is here,” he said. “He’ll be along shortly. Your mother…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head.

  “What? Dad, how? What happened?” I felt numb. My mother couldn’t be dead, she just couldn’t.