“Save your bullets,” Maria said.
Maria hunched low as the thing drew near. She held the fork out in front of her, hoping to spear it. But stopping just shy of the prongs, it grinned at her, before ripping the fork out of her hands and turning it on Maria.
Jeff rattled off half a dozen rounds, taking the thing to the floor instantly. Maria picked the fork back up, and they all headed down into town.
“It grinned at me,” Maria said. “It bloody grinned at me, for God’s sake, Jeff. How? It knew what it was doing. It knew what I was doing, too!””
“I’m scared,” Amy said.
“Come here,” Maria said, and held the girl’s hand. “You’re not the only one.”
“We have to assume now that they can survive in the daylight, and that they are definitely starting to think like humans again,” Jeff said.
“Maybe only a handful of them can do this at the moment?” Maria said.
“If that’s right, then we should be okay for the time being.”
“I hope so.”
They got to the jeep and Maria jumped in behind the wheel, knowing Jeff would have difficulties operating the pedals. Nothing had come at them between the hill and the jeep, and the town appeared nothing more than a ruin.
Jeff got in the passenger’s side, as Amy climbed into the back. Jeff threw the holdall onto the back seat next to Amy. Once they were all in, Maria engaged the locks. She bent down and fumbled with the wires under the steering column. Ollie had to undo them yesterday to prevent the jeep from running.
“Shit,” she muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked
“The light in here is poor. I can’t see what the hell I’m doing.”
Amy screamed as a dustbin ricocheted off the windshield of the Toyota, causing a thin split to develop in the glass. The thing that threw it was a fat, bald man with glasses; his body naked; his flesh covered in boils and erupting blisters, which pissed yellow fluid. He bent down to pick up the rubbish bin again, but the jeep kicked to life and Maria pushed the pedal to the floor. The back wheels spun, throwing up grey smoke. Maria ploughed straight through the tubby guy, who landed on the bonnet. His face smashed into the thick glass, and his skull disintegrated; chunks of brain and gobs of blood splashed onto the roof. When Maria took the corner out of the street they were parked in, the body slid off, tumbling into a parked car.
“Get the map out of the holdall, please, Amy, and give it to Jeff, there’s a good girl,” Maria said.
She heard the girl rustling around in the bag, looking for the map which was buried under the stove, radio and ammunition.
“I have it,” she said, and handed it to Jeff.
“Great,” Jeff said.
“See if you can find the first aid box in one of the bags behind you, Amy,” Maria asked her.
Amy turned in her seat, and got to her knees. She looked over the back seat and saw another holdall there. She unclipped the hood on the bag, and pulled at the cords. Inside she found clothes, food, knives, a hatchet, and the first aid kit. She snatched it out, and climbed back over the seat, giving the small green box to Jeff.
“Got it,” she said.
Jeff opened it and took out a small bottle of pills marked Paracetamol. He uncapped the lid, and plucked out two small pills – he swallowed them dry. He then picked out some dressing, a bottle of antiseptic, gauze, a swab and scissors.
Maria slowed the Toyota so that Jeff could work on his leg. He undid the soaked cloth on his thigh, and cut the leg of his trousers open. The wound itself wasn’t really that deep, but Dylan had ripped the knife downwards, causing a nasty gash in Jeff’s flesh. He swabbed the area first, then soaked the wound in antiseptic; gritting his teeth as the alcohol-based substance absorbed into his skin. Jeff gripped the dashboard and dug his fingers into the plastic, trying his best to fight the urge to scream.
Once the burning sensation had gone, he applied the gauze to the area followed by an abundance of dressing.
“This will have to do for now,” Jeff said. “First chance I get, I’ll sew it.”
They drove through Twsc slowly, hoping a survivor would see them, and come running to them for help. But nobody did. The Asda Jeff and Roxie had gone to yesterday was nothing more than a burnt-out shell now. They are definitely getting smart, Jeff thought; and definitely evolving.
They took all the B-roads on the map, which were nice and quiet, as they headed to the hangar. Jeff had worried that some of them would be blocked up with abandoned cars – but there was very little in the narrow, lane-like roads.
The fields were empty on either sides of the road; no cows, sheep or wildlife existed. No birds in the sky, only the sun. Jeff lowered his head. Life would never be the same again. Then he thought about Ollie and Roxie. He shook his head.
“What’s the matter,” Maria asked?
“I was just thinking about the other two.”
“Ollie and Roxie?”
“Yes.”
“I know. I miss them already.”
“Me too,” Jeff said.
“What happened last night, Jeff?”
“I don’t really know; Dylan beat me pretty bad. I was unconscious.”
“But before he beat you?” Maria pushed.
“He managed to work himself free from the pipe he was cuffed to – pulled it off the wall.”
“Where were you at the time?”
“Out in the kitchen. And as I entered the living room to go back by the window, he jumped me. That’s pretty much all I remember.”
“I’m surprised Ollie didn’t wake,” Maria said.
“He was upstairs with Roxie.”
“Upstairs? Both of them? But why?”
Jeff looked over at her, but said nothing.
“Oh, I see,” Maria said. “I suppose, in a way, it was nice that they got to be with each other one final time.”
“When I woke up, I was tied to Roxie,” Amy said. “I saw him drag Ollie down the stairs.”
“Is that all you saw?” Jeff asked.
“No, I saw Dylan hurt Ollie. He was hitting him, telling him about the lab.”
Nobody spoke much after that as they got off the B-road and took another. This one was the same: dead. No sign of life from man or beast. There were, however, a few abandoned cars dotted here and there. Maria didn’t stop at any of them, just in case there were infected in the area. Her thinking was that if anyone was alive, they would flag Maria and Jeff to a stop.
“Where are all the animals, Jeff?” Maria said.
“I have no idea. But I’m guessing wherever they are they must be sick – just like the dogs that came at Ollie and me last night.”
Maria didn’t have to manoeuvre around the deserted cars much, as most of them were off to the side, tight to the hedges. Then a two car pileup came into view around the next bend. The driver of the one vehicle was stretched out through the windshield, arms extended, touching the grill; the face was plastered to the crumpled bonnet with blood, its skull sliced wide open. The passenger was also dead; throat slit, eyes missing. As Maria drove closer, she could see that that person had been scalped. Nobody appeared to be in the other car, which smoked and hissed.
“Looks like this happened recently,” Jeff said – darting his eyes around the scene as Maria crept the Toyota past the carnage. “I don’t think we should take our time. Put your foot dow—”
Something heavy hit the roof of the jeep, causing them all to scream. The back window blew in, and Amy wailed as she was pulled back by her hair. Jeff turned in his seat, and tried to get in the back, but he was held in his seat by his belt. He fumbled for the release button.
“Shit, shit, I can’t bloody mo…Hang on Amy…”
The child cried as she was pulled closer to the broken glass. The thing that had her was half in the car, and half out. It was almost free of sores on the face and arms. Only slight signs gave it away as being infected. A small island of yellow, orange spots had formed at the side of
the thing’s left nostril; its hair patchy – as though it had alopecia; the eyes pearl-white. It snapped its teeth like a ravenous alligator.
Amy wound her foot around one of the belts and anchored herself. Maria brought the 4x4 to a complete halt as Jeff finally managed to work his way out of his belt. He grabbed the pitchfork Maria had brought, and punched the rust-decayed prongs through the thing’s face, snapping the handle of the garden tool with the driving force. One tine punctured its left eye, which popped and blew blood onto a side back window. The other three points dug into its mushy flesh, penetrating a cheek, the nose and the mouth. The thing squealed and fell away, taking the fork with it.
“Go,” Jeff yelled. “For Christ’s sake, go, Maria!”
Chapter 11
Somewhere inside the research facility at Twsc Army and Scientific Barracks…
“It’s not SIV – or ‘swine flu’ as the media has dubbed it – I’d just like to make that clear from the off. What we are dealing with here is a new strain, a strain created by a team of highly trained researchers and scientists, put together by myself.” He put the Dictaphone on pause and put it down by his side. The floor he sat on was a bloody mess, with broken glass strewn about the place like confetti. He picked up the bottle of Grouse from his side and took a couple of deep swigs before replacing the bottle back by his side. He wiped his lips dry of the fiery liquid. Picking the Dictaphone back up, he proceeded to tape once again, “Before I go on to talk about this new strain, and what I have unleashed on the world, I would like to give my full name, rank and number. Plus I want to explain a few things.” He cleared his drying throat before speaking again. “My name is Jaime Hill, my rank is Colonel and Science Lab Technician of this research facility at Twsc, South Wales; my number is 722665.
“Seven days ago the influenza that we created – known as “defector virus”, with the aid of six top researchers from around the country – got free. I am not totally sure how, but I think that Sarah Llewelyn, a member of my team who I did not manage to kill, may have contracted the strain from one of our many ‘volunteers’, and walked it out of here? That is the only explanation I can think of because Sarah left in a rush last Thursday, the 8th of June. Come the following Monday there was panic everywhere on our streets – the 12th of June, 2009. Hell, this whole facility came away at the seams; funny how the world can fall apart so quickly.
“Anyway, how it may or may not have got free isn’t the real issue. What does matter is the fact that it’s loose and causing carnage. I’m not sure the world can survive this threat, but if it does, I hope that this tape will be found, and that it will clear up a lot of unanswered questions.
“Defector virus, or virus-d as it is known by the team and myself, is an influenza made up of other deadly strains, created to do two things – to immobilize enemy troops, then have them turn on one another before finally succumbing to the flu-like disease forty-eight hours afterward. That was our intention, but the bug got smart. It was able to mutate beyond our imagination, and it got free before we could tame it, before we could bring it back under our control. I hate to think what it is totally capable of once it starts to infect people.”
Jamie took another pause, and again downed a few more swallows of whisky before returning to the tape recorder.
“The main elements for virus-d were/are – swine influenza virus, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and FMD – commonly known as foot and mouth disease. We did test other viruses and diseases such as zoonosis, rift valley fever, human immunodeficiency virus, various cancers, leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis and meningitis. But we found that swine influenza, bovine spongiform encephalopathy and FMD worked really well together – better than we’d thought possible. Although zoonosis did offer us some good qualities; like swine influenza, it is an infectious animal disease that can be transmitted to humans. Some of the 150 or so diseases are: anthrax, brucellosis, bovine tuberculosis and of course, rift valley fever. This is interesting for the record, because other researchers and scientists (hell, even the government) in this country were led to believe that RVT was only found in Saharan Africa, which caused a widespread outbreak in Egypt in the late 70’s killing thousands. ‘They’ think it only causes a great threat to the people of the Middle East these days, but believe me – we had it in this very lab to use at our disposal, that and many others alike.”
His gaze fell upon Andrew O’Hara. He’d been the first to die, shot in the face three times by Jaime. One of the bullets must have exited the man’s cranium, because most of the skull was missing. Jaime could see the damage the slug had caused the brain; it was like looking into an egg with its top cut off. Blood and brain had oozed onto the carpet; the dead man stared up at the ceiling with vacant eyes, his tongue lolling to one side of his open mouth. “He used to have such a great smile,” Jamie said aloud. “I executed my team when I found out that virus-d had escaped. I was in fear that maybe one of the others would go to the press with what we were doing here, and blow the lid off everything. The backers to this project would have been most upset with me. I won’t disclose who my financiers are just yet, because I want to finish telling about the virus-d.”
“As I said, the strain created by my team and myself was meant to immobilize and defect enemy troops. The virus would have been put into bombs with the intention of dropping them down on enemy camps. On impact, a gas would release from the explosion – infecting enemy troops within a couple of miles radius, which would eventually peter out. When contaminated with the germ, the host will show signs of swine flu such as fever, coughing, sore throat, body aches, headaches, chills, fatigue, diarrhoea and vomiting. This intertwined well with the FMD virus which causes fever and vomiting, but can also cause malaise, red ulcerative lesions of the oral tissue, and sometimes blisters on the skin.
“When these were combined with bovine spongiform encephalopathy and injected straight into a ‘volunteer subject’, tests showed at first they developed signs of weakness, exhaustion and incapability of eating. Hours after the first signs of a flu taking effect on our subjects, the vomiting and diarrhoea came on fast, bringing with it chills and headaches. By the time the blistering of the skin had come along, the host was mildly volatile towards my team and me. On destroying a female partaker, and giving her an autopsy, we could see that the BSE had totally shut the brain down with the aid of the other two viruses, causing explosive hallucinations. This had a knock on effect, causing the patient to strike out with hot-blooded aggression.
“We thought we’d cracked it after four years of trying, and all that was left to do was tweak what we had. But we were wrong. Our subjects become more and more aggressive. They developed the power to be able to heave acid liquid that disintegrated human skin. Their acidic vomit could even melt through the chains that harnessed them, making it harder for us to be able to keep them alive while we did tests on them. This was not necessarily a bad thing, until I lost a team member – Captain Howard Ford, my second in command. A male patient managed to get free, and on cornering Howard, unleashed that God awful sick onto his face, which melted its way down to the bones.
“Not long after this, we learned that virus-d had escaped our lab. At first the news coverage was casting it off as ‘swine flu’, but I knew different, so did my team. That’s when I decided to take action – by firstly killing all our remaining test subjects, then locking my team and myself in one of our test labs. I executed them one by one.”
He stopped talking and let his eyes drift around the room, from Andrew O’Hara to Tina Jones, who was slumped down dead in a swivel chair – half of her face missing. The once white lab coat she wore had absorbed most of the blood.
“You were such a pretty thing.” Jaime let his stare linger on Tina for a moment, before finally moving on to Joe Hargreaves, who was sprawled on top of a table, his arms hanging over either side and his feet barely touching the ground; he had two craters in his chest. Samantha Kidd was lying on the floor by Joe’s left arm. Bloody bullet holes grac
ed her back. “Guess you won’t be fucking each other anymore, kids.” A wry smile spread across his lips. “I know I’m losing it, that’s what being locked in a room for five days, with nothing but dead bodies to keep you company does to one’s mind. After I’ve finished recording all I have to say, I’ll be taking my own life. A small price to pay for the work I played a hand in.”
He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes, and knocked the tape recorder off for the time being. Jaime guzzled some more whisky and tried to compose himself. He looked up at the ceiling, “When did the bombing stop?”
He was sure that he’d heard fighter planes overhead only hours ago; they had been almost constant from the outset of the virus attack.
“The army must have lost the war against the infected. That does not surprise me. If others had witnessed what we had seen the virus do in this very lab, then they would not have bothered trying to fight it, just run for the hills and tried to wait it out. God only knows what stage of transformation virus-d is currently in.”
He clicked the Dictaphone back on, and began to speak in a trembling tone.
“I’m not entirely sure who our money men were. I know the order came from pretty high up in the army. Hell it may have been handed straight down from someone in the government. All I know is that I was reporting our findings back to a superior officer by the name of Weathers, Major General Weathers. I was picked out for the project because of my long service in the army, plus my immaculate record and knowledge of chemical warfare. I was told to handpick a team of extremely creditable scientist to aid me in creating this weapon, and that expense was no object. I was also told that my team and myself were to keep what we were doing quiet, that we should tell no-one. I thought that would have gone without saying? Having said that, you’ll be wondering why I’m telling all now? The answer to that question is simple – guilt.
“Somewhere on this tape I said that virus-d got smart. When we first put defector virus together, it was weak under our control, so to speak. We knew it had weaknesses. But the more and more we tried this on one of the subjects that had been infected with the virus for well over three to four weeks, we found they became adapted to the light. This was not the only change in the host we noticed. The longer this virus festers away in someone’s body and mind, the more and more it will evolve. It will turn the old and very young into vigorous killing machines. The weak of mind will also be infected in the same way. People who already have warped minds will become even more disturbed. We also observed their intelligence, and found that they could work together through basic language, such as grunts and snarls. Not only that, but some test subjects became intelligent quickly, evolved in a matter of hours after becoming injected. Virus-d is totally unstable – it’s capable of anything once inside someone. My God, what have I helped release on the world.”
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