The Z Directive (Book 2): Mutation

by Thompson, Chris

  The Z Directive: Mutation

  The Z Directive, Volume 2

  Chris Thompson

  Published by Chris Thompson, 2020.

  Copyright Information

  Text Copyright © Chris Thompson 2020

  Cover created by Chris Thompson and is © Chris Thompson 2020, and is an original image.

  Disclaimer

  The following is a work of fiction; no likenesses to persons, living or dead, or events is intended or inferred. The subject matter is suitable for mature audiences and features scenes of violence, adult language and horror. If you do not enjoy such content, or find it offensive, then do not read any further. Reader discretion is advised.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Disclaimer

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

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  Chapter One

  IT HAD BEEN BARELY forty eight hours since Jack Ramsay led a team to rescue Doctor Emma Reed, a scientist who worked for a company named Bolvinox, which she discovered had manufactured a virus that reanimates the dead and turns them into flesh-eating zombies. The virus itself was deadly to humans, capable of killing and reanimating them within minutes or perhaps hours depending on their immune system. Jack had yet to see someone reanimate, but he had seen the deadly effects of those infected with the virus, and the monsters they turned into. There had been six of them on the mission to rescue Emma, and only five of them had returned. Oliver Cross had been killed during the desperate battle to hold their extraction point. His sacrifice, however, hadn’t been in vain. Emma had been in possession of a flash drive containing encrypted data downloaded straight from a Bolvinox computer server, and though it had only been briefly examined and decrypted, Jack had been told the information could be the tipping point in the battle against the undead.

  Since the mission to rescue the doctor, Jack and the uninjured and members of his team - Tyrone, Rodriguez and Smith - had been in and out of Dewbury a half dozen more times, aiding in the evacuation of a refugee center. After the last group of civilians had been secured, Jack and his team had been given orders to rest, staying entirely at the base of operations for what was being called the Illinois Campaign. Fort Elridge had become their home, one they shared with thousands of refugees who were awaiting processing and extraction to carrier ships out at sea or more heavily secured facilities. There was still a sizable military presence in Fort Elridge, though it was not as large as it had been when Jack arrived. For all the advanced technology they had at their disposal, the huge numbers of infected roaming the streets of Dewbury and the other cities and towns they were operating in were still inflicting heavy losses on the ground forces deployed against them. General Tobias Maxwell, Jack’s superior and one of the commanders of the Coalition - a covert global military organization - expected the order to reduce Dewbury to rubble with airstrikes to come down any day now. Unfortunately, however, there was some concern about the political ramifications of destroying a city on the US mainland, and while the red tape was being cut, the infected continued to gain ground, increase in number and threaten the living.

  After twelve solid hours of rest, however, it seemed something was changing. Emma had been hard at work with analysts from a variety of intelligence agencies, members of the CDC as well a bunch of people Jack couldn’t remember the origin of, sifting through the information on the USB drive packed with the data Emma had acquired from the Bolvinox secret research facility at Bluefield, a small town near Dewbury. Though their efforts to decode and trawl through all the information she’d stolen before escaping from the facility were far from complete, some facts had become clear - facts that supported Maxwell’s own investigation into Bolvinox.

  Firstly, Bolvinox had been created by someone high up in the chain of command of the Coalition. Though the founder of the company had yet to be unveiled, a half dozen or so names had come to light which had been traced back to former operatives of the Coalition. Jared Brown and Carl Sutton, both of whom had been killed by Jack’s group on the mission to rescue Emma Reed, were listed as security assets of Bolvinox. Two other members of the security team they had faced were former Coalition soldiers too, Eric Messer and Karl Davidson, and like Brown and Sutton, had been listed as having died in action only to reappear as employees of Bolvinox. In addition, there was a pair of analysts named Abigail Bree and Thomas Glass also, previously employed by the Coalition, who had apparently been working at Bluefield at the time Emma penetrated its security. The latter two, being analysts, had never been on a mission and consequently hadn’t been listed as killed in action. According to internal records, they had been dismissed and subsequently were no longer registered as working with the Coalition, which was strange, especially as no reason was given and they weren’t being tracked - a definite breach of protocol for former or current employees. Whether the latter two were still alive, no one could know for sure. As far as Emma was aware, almost everyone who worked at the Bluefield facility had been killed, but in the time it took her to download the data, she admitted it was possible more could have fled. Secondly, their investigation into the precise nature of Genetic Material X - the alien bacteria recovered from a satellite which had been in Earth’s orbit before crashing in Italy - was acquired solely by Bolvinox and was the focus of their research. Apparently, according to a confidential memorandum Emma had unearthed, there had been efforts by other corporations to acquire the genetic material, but they had been prevented from doing so. Exactly how Bolvinox had done this wasn’t clear, but given the illegal nature of their research, and the fact that they had later deployed a military team in an effort to kill Emma, Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if there were more than a few bodies hidden amidst the foundations of the Bolvinox Company.

  Jack wasn’t sure how this would help in the long run, as the undead were still advancing and spreading from every infection epicenter, but he hoped that the research would eventually yield some information on a vaccine or some ultimate method to destroy the infected. So far, to Jack’s mind, all they could do was wait for the infected to decay and lose their mobility, but Emma had declared that might take more time than they had. It was during the evening of Jack’s enforced rest period, while in the mess hall with Emma, that he had put forward the opinion that waiting for the zombies to decay might be their only strategy. Emma, however, had cautioned against this.

  “My boss wanted me to insert something into the virus so that they would become docile after receiving a specific prompt, or find some way of inserting a genetic marker that would allow them to be efficiently destroyed when their ‘work’ was done. As I didn’t do that, I’m assuming the infected are going to stick around for a very, very long time.”

  “So what do you think our best bet is?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Hopefully there’s something in the data we can use, otherwise airstrikes against the largest groups of them and deploying ground forces to clear streets and buildings might be all we can do.”

  “That’s a lot of manpower though; a lot of bullets too,” Jack commented. She smiled at him briefly.

  “It’s the end of the world, Jack, there aren’t that many good options left.”

  Jack returned her smile. Since her r
escue, in the limited amount of time they’d been able to spend together on the base, they had grown a little closer. Between his near constant deployments and her round the clock research into the Bolvinox data ,they’d only seen each other over meals in the mess hall - or in the corridors of the command center as they passed by. He had continued to feel more comfortable in her presence however, and it was clear she felt the same way. Were it not for their situation and their workload, he liked to think things might be a little different.

  “Jack—” Emma started, leaning forward a touch as she began, only for her to be interrupted by a loud male voice also saying his name.

  “Jack,” Tyrone declared, announcing his presence. Jack shifted on the bench he was seated on to look at his comrade.

  “What’s up, Ty?” Jack wanted to know.

  “We’ve got a briefing. Maxwell would like you to join us too, Doctor,” he announced. Tyrone seemed a little more dour than usual, which led Jack to wonder what was wrong.

  “Who died?” Jack questioned, guessing this was what led to his dark mood.

  “Walden and his whole team. They were on patrol along Dewbury’s outskirts, runners came out of nowhere and led the shamblers right to them. They caught everything on their helmet cams.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack told him. He’d encountered Frank Walden once or twice since he’d returned to work with the Coalition, and he’d seemed like a good man. He’d been responsible for evacuating a refugee center established at a school in Dewbury during their mission to rescue Emma, and by all accounts, had done exceptional work protecting the civilians while ensuring the safety of his own men. To discover he was dead was sad and disappointing; they would need men like Walden in the coming days.

  “Thanks. Let’s go,” Tyrone told him abruptly, turning away and starting out of the mess hall. Jack looked back at Emma and smiled briefly.

  “Things are still tense between you and he I see,” Emma commented.

  “We’re working it out in our own way,” Jack responded. After learning Tyrone had been the one who, under direct orders from Maxwell, had burned his cover identity on a previous mission, the relationship between Tyrone and Jack had been reduced to a purely professional level, not at all like the friends they had been for the better part of two decades. Regardless, duty came first, so Tyrone followed Jack’s orders and Jack listened to his suggestions when they were on a mission. Perhaps, Jack thought, that was all they needed to be able to do.

  “Fair enough, Jack,” she said, finishing her coffee and standing up. She followed Jack out of the mess hall tent, and together they in turn followed the more distant figure of Tyrone as he led the way to the command center. They entered the two storey, red-brick structure, crossed the large central corridor and rode the elevator down to the first basement level, where the command center was located. Following the corridor down from the elevator and taking a left on the catwalk that ran around the upper area of the large control room, where personnel were busy working at the banks of computers below, Jack, Emma and Tyrone went directly to the glass-walled briefing room. Maxwell was seated at the head of the table as usual; deliberately chosen so he could see not only the entrance door, but through the glass wall to the corridor beyond. He was drawing heavily on a cigarette with a stoic, somewhat weary expression on his face. Elizabeth Hall stood on the opposite side of the table from the entrance, her tablet computer cradled in one arm and a serious expression on her face - also as usual.

  “Jack, Emma, Tyrone,” Maxwell greeted.

  “So, what’s the mission, Maxwell?” Jack wanted to know as he took a seat near the middle of the table, Emma and Tyrone sitting on either side of him.

  “Emma, have you ever heard of the Redshield Facility?” Maxwell probed. Emma shook her head.

  “No, but I’m guessing it’s related to the facility I stole the data from?”

  “Elizabeth,” Maxwell said, glancing at her briefly before taking a long pull on his cigarette. Hall tapped on her tablet and then gestured to the large screen on the wall to Jack’s right. He turned the chair and looked at an aerial satellite picture of a small town.

  “This is Woodhill, Illinois, with a population of about ten thousand give or take,” Hall started. “According to part of the data our security analysts have managed to decode, there’s a facility codenamed Redshield located beneath the town. It was originally accessed via an old silver mine, but Bolvinox installed a second access to the facility through the town hall, leading us to believe they had significant influence over the town.”

  “Was there anything else related to Bolvinox there?” Tyrone questioned.

  “No, not even a post office box. Their presence in Woodhill was completely secret and off the books.”

  “Sounds like the ideal place to conduct illegal biological weapons research then,” Jack commented sardonically.

  “Indeed,” Hall continued, seemingly disinterested in his comment. “We don’t know if the facility is still active, but given that the Bluefield facility was apparently destroyed after Emma escaped, this is an opportunity to recover more intel.”

  “Wait, the Bluefields Facility was destroyed?” Jack asked. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Me too. It was just overrun the last I saw,” Emma added.

  Hall tapped on her tablet and brought up another satellite picture, the name Bluefield written in the top left corner. It showed a large crater which seemed to go down some miles, with scorching all around the ruined patch of earth. There were metallic struts protruding from some parts of the crater, with a large amount of wreckage at the bottom: twisted metal plates, unidentifiable fragments and chunks of masonry that were blackened and ruined. It appeared there was a minimal amount of debris outside of the destroyed facility, the vast majority being contained within the crater.

  “The latest satellite imagery,” she informed them. “It seems there was a highly controlled detonation from within, and our demolition experts suggest that the blast was designed to carry the debris downwards,” Hall explained. “We were monitoring the area with progressive aerial scans to ensure there was no above ground activity before deploying ground forces, but three hours after those scans started, this happened.”

  “Holy shit. That must’ve been one hell of an explosion,” Jack commented.

  “So how do we know the Redshield facility isn’t about to go up like that?” Tyrone wanted to know. “I’d hate to be inside when that happened.”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain. The only thing we can offer you is, when looking back over the time period prior to the explosion, there was a brief increase in radio traffic in the area around the town of Bluefields, so we believe it was a remotely triggered detonation. To counter that, we’ve deployed UAVs that can jam those specific frequencies in the hope that it will prevent another remote detonation. We believe there is a window for a strike team to be deployed to the Redshield Facility, to secure any and all data that may be stored within, and if possible, deactivate the self-destruct system to allow us to retain control of the facility. If that isn’t an option, then use whatever means are necessary to stop Bolvinox from retaining control of it,” Hall summarised.

  “As simple as that,” Jack commented, glancing at the massive crater which was once the Bluefields Facility. “What’s the infected situation like in Woodhill?”

  Hall glanced very briefly at Maxwell before answering, sharing a concerned look that immediately led Jack to believe there was bad news incoming.

  “There’s something we haven’t told you Jack, something that I’ve been looking into as quietly as possible with the assistance of Elizabeth,” Maxwell announced.

  “Why am I not surprised,” Jack responded dryly.

  “It’s not like that, Jack. Elizabeth, give us some privacy,” Maxwell instructed. Elizabeth tapped on her tablet a few times, and when Jack glanced behind him, he saw that the glass had turned a solid black color, preventing him from seeing out - and anyone from see
ing in.

  “The room is secure, sir,” Elizabeth reported.

  “Brown, Sutter, Messer and Davidson: all former members of the Coalition and all listed as dead. What you might not know is that we found some circumstantial evidence that indicated Bolvinox was actually founded by the Coalition, perhaps by a General David Haddenfield - also listed as deceased.”

  “So you’re telling me that we’re responsible for the zombie virus?” Jack questioned incredulously.

  “Us by proxy, not directly, Jack. We’ve been hoping more information would come to light from the data Emma recovered, but unfortunately nothing has presented itself yet. I’m making discreet enquiries, but without knowing how far this conspiracy might go—”

  “You don’t want to tip them off and bring them down on top of us,” Jack interrupted.

  “Precisely.”

  “So you’re also hoping that if we can take control of a Bolvinox facility there might be more information on who’s working with them.”

  “The data is sure to be compartmentalized, but you never know.” Maxwell responded.

  “What about the town itself? Was the town evacuated or was it overrun by the infected?”

  Hall shifted uneasily before she spoke again.

  “The town was completely destroyed. We haven’t detected any sign of a living person, and only minimal signs of the infected,” Hall responded, tapping at her tablet and bringing up a series of aerial night vision pictures of the town. It showed scenes of carnage similar to those Jack had seen both in reports about the battle across the country - and the world - as well as those he had seen firsthand on the streets of Dewbury. Blood, bones, crashed vehicles and carnage indicating there had been vicious fighting in the streets.

  “No survivors at all?” Jack probed.

  “None that are showing on thermal scans.”

  “So where did the majority of the infected go?”