Outbreak (The Outbreak Series Book 1)

by Victor Deckard

  Outbreak

  by Victor Deckard

  Table of contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  Other books

  Chapter One

  After what seemed to be an eternity to me, a haze in my head began to slowly vanish.

  I was lying supine on the sole bed in the room with all white walls, dumbly looking at the ceiling, which had the perfectly matched color. I was struggling to get my brain in gear. Where the hell was I? Who was I? What was I? Why didn’t I have any memories at all? What had happened to me? I had no answers to those questions, a total void in my head.

  My body felt weak, but I still had enough strength to raise myself to my elbows. I then sat up. After a little dizziness disappeared, I looked around. It was a tiny, all white room. The bed I was lying on took up all but the entire space of the room. Behind the head of the bed was a barred window and across from that on the opposite side of the room was a heavy-duty metal door. Both were closed tight.

  It seemed to be some kind of hospital. Or maybe it was a prison hospital? I couldn’t tell for certain.

  My legs felt pretty good. Weak, but good enough to hold my body in an erect position. I shoved my legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. In the same instant, I realized I had overestimated the shape my body was in. The effort of standing-up made my weakened knees buckle under the weight of my frame. I felt dizzy once again and the room began slowly spinning around me. I had to grab at the rail at the head of my bed to keep from crumpling onto the tiled floor.

  After a few moments, I felt a little better and ready for moving on. I let go of the railing of the bed and took my first wary step. My gait was clumsy, hobbling, and unsteady, but at least I was able to hold myself up and not to collapse to the floor. On covering the short distance to the rear end of the room, I looked out the window, holding on to the bars to support myself.

  It might be either the late evening or the wee hours of the night. Anyway, it was pitch-black darkness outside and all I could tell was that I was on the third or so floor of the building.

  I once again commenced racking my brain, trying to extract anything from my memory. As the fog in my head slowly dissipated some things began to clear up.

  I was in this place for a way long time. I recalled uncounted days spent inside this room and a burly man in white clothes, his muscular frame tugging at the fabric of his tight-fitting white uniform. His suit strained against his bulky body. He looked like a thug dressed in a doctor’s outfit. He hardly ever talked to me, but when he did, he spoke with a thick accent I couldn’t place. He wasn’t a native English speaker, for sure.

  I also recollected syringes. Injections. I’d been administered some sort of drug by this beefy jerk. I remembered long, thin needles piercing my weakened body, making me oblivious and groggy.

  Every time my head would clear up the man in close-fitting white clothes would appear and put some strong drug into my body. But today the man didn’t show up. Not yet anyway. Thereby my system was slowly recovering from the toxic effects of the drug the man had been giving me.

  So what had happened? Why the man in all white didn’t come in yet? Was he just tardy? Was he yet to come? Either way, I wasn’t willing to have my body injected once again. Once he would come in, I was going to fight him, punch his freaking lights out.

  At least I would try. Was there any chance that I would succeed? Given the present state of my body, I wouldn’t be able to take the burly man down. He would easily put me down on the bed and give me an injection to make me docile, compliant, and stupefied. But I would give it a try anyway. I would try and put up a fight. To do that would be better than just to sit tight and let him do whatever he wanted.

  Then another thought struck me. What if the beefy man and whoever was in charge of him had changed their plans about me? Could that be the case? No way. I had a gut feeling that something else had happened, something that had nothing to do with the wishes and intentions of people whose bidding was doing the burly guy.

  A sound shattered my reverie, bringing me back to the moment. I snapped out of my pondering and pricked my ears up. The sound was muffled, distant, not loud, but regardless of all that, I recognized it with ease. It was the sound of a gun being fired. A few moments later, the gunshot repeated. It was closer this time. What the hell was going on over there?

  I started for the wall next to the door, grabbing at the bed to support myself, my body swayed on my rubbery legs. Once I covered the short distance to the door, I tuned my ears to the scene around me once more, listening for movement or any other sounds on the other side of the door. After a short while, yet another gunshot shattered the silence on the other side of the door. The sound was followed by someone’s shout full of pain and horror.

  Whoever was wasting the personnel of this would-be hospital was steadily drawing toward the door of my room. Judging by the sound of the footfalls coming from the outside, only one person was approaching. I had a hunch that the triggerman was after me. The weakness of my body and a little dizziness notwithstanding, I was going to fight the killer when he, or she, entered my room.

  The footfalls came to a halt right behind the heavy-duty metal door of my room. I stayed still as the door creaked open. Once some man stepped into the room, holding a pistol in his right hand in front of him, I wasted no time coming at him. Guessed he caught a glimpse of the movement on his right as he suddenly leaped forward. He was swift, dumbfoundingly swift. One second he stood by the doorframe and then in a split second, he was right in front of me pushing me backward with his left hand and pinning me down, my back pressing hard against the wall.

  I thought he was going to take aim at me, but he put his handgun into his drop leg holster instead. And then he did something surprising––he took a quick step forward and gave me a hug. He held me tight for a few moments and then stepped backward looking me intently in the eye.

  “Long time no see, bro,” the man said in a cheerful tone of his husky voice. “You okay?”

  On saying that he gave me a tap on my left shoulder. That light blow made me totter from head to toe like a leaf stirred by a strong wind.

  “Shit, Jack, you don’t look good,” the man said, a worried tone in his voice. “You’re barely standing!”

  “Who are you?”

  I saw a faint glint of surprise in his eye. But he didn’t look completely astonished.

  “What do you mean?” He inquired, a bit more tension in his voice now. “It’s me. Frank. Your brother. You don’t even remember me?”

  “They’ve given me some sort of drugs. Figure that has something to do with my memory loss,” I explained.

  “Yep, I thought as much. Assholes!”

  He went silent for a moment and then said, “Look, we really gotta go. No time to waste. You’ll remember me in no time, for sure. But for the time being, we just gotta hustle our bustle. Just trust me, okay?”

  I regarded him for a few seconds. This man didn’t look familiar to me at all, but there was an unfeignedly concerned expression on his face. He sincerely cared about me, to be sure. Besides, I didn’t have much choice.

  So I just said, “Okay, lead the way, Frank.”

  He nodded. “Can you walk by yourself?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Well, guess I have to carry you then.”

  He dug into a pocket of his jacket, produced a handgun, and held it out for me to take. I recognized the pistol immediately. It was a Px4 Storm.

  “Take i
t. You’re gonna need this,” Frank said. “Hope you didn’t forget how to use it.”

  On taking the gun into my right hand, I realized at once I wasn’t a stranger to weapons. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I served in the Special Forces. I had twenty years with the First Special Forces Operational Detachment popularly known as Delta Force. Still, I wasn’t sure whether it was actually the case or it was just my brain that played tricks on me.

  “Okay, we’re good to go.” Frank’s words brought me back to now.

  He draped my left hand over his shoulders, wrapped his right hand around my body, and helped me go out of the room. My muscles tired, I was tottering forward down a passage. I could barely be walking, so Frank was half-dragging me.

  There were closed doors on either side of the corridor. Light was seeping from under none of them. The only room with the lights on was the one we had just split.

  “What the hell is this place?” I said, my eyes darting around. “Doesn’t look like a hospital.”

  “Because this ain’t no hospital,” Frank replied giving a little chuckle. “This whole damned building was set up solely for the one purpose, which is to confine you to this place. And those thugs in white clothes ain’t no doctors. They’re just goons hired to hold you hostage in here.”

  “Why?”

  Frank began saying something, but then one of the doors, which surprisingly had light leaking out from beneath it, shot open and a man in white clothes showed up right in front of us. Terrified expression appeared on his face when he saw us. He cried out something in a foreign language. Frank raised his pistol and wasted the man with a single discharge at point-blank range. The man collapsed to the floor, blood gushing from the wound like from a faucet.

  “No more talking!” Frank demanded. “We need to hurry!”

  Off to the right, we found a staircase. We took it, Frank rapidly pulling me down.

  On the first floor, we encountered the bulky man who had been injecting me with drugs. He stopped dead when he saw us. The pistol of Frank’s cracked loudly, the round punching the big guy right in the middle of his face.

  Yet another man turned up. He looked scared shitless and knew better than just to stand there staring at us. Frank opened fire, but the man managed to make it away from us alive disappearing behind one of the doors.

  I didn’t want to kill all these people until I wasn’t one hundred percent sure they had it coming, but I was far too tired even to argue the point with my rescuer.

  Up ahead were footfalls and two malicious-looking men dressed in black uniforms turned around the corner. They saw us, stopped, and then lifted their pistols to get a bead on us. One of them shouted in perfect English, “Don’t’ move!”

  Frank didn’t hesitate to shove me aside, away from their line of fire. He then lifted his handgun and began to shoot. When guards started firing back at him, something all too weird and uncanny happened. Frank just disappeared, dissipated instantly as if he had never been there, guards’ rounds whizzing through the empty space where Frank had been a moment ago.

  In half a second, he materialized behind the guards. They appeared to be unaware of that. They quit firing and started looking around astonishingly. In one flow motion, Frank lifted his handgun, lined up his iron sights on his targets, and then squeezed off two shots. He took each man with a single round to the back of the head.

  “What the hell was that?” I muttered under my breath.

  Footsteps came from behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and saw two more guards in black uniforms running down the corridor toward me. On seeing two dead bodies on the floor, the guards stopped dead in their tracks. Then they saw me holding the Px4 Storm in my hand and brought their pistols immediately to bear on me.

  I didn’t feel like smoking them, but I knew better than to ask them to give up. So I swung my handgun up, dropped to a knee, had one of the guards lined up in my iron sights, and put pressure on the trigger. One of the guards and me fired at each other at once. A bullet that leaped from the muzzle of my handgun struck one guard in the left thigh. He dropped flat on his face, unable to continue operating with the wounded leg. In one fluid motion, I swing my pistol to bear on the next man and shot him in the forearm, causing his weapon to drop free. This guard tumbled down onto the floor, blood spraying every which way. Both men screamed in pain.

  It’d been perfect shots on my part and I knew straight away that I had guessed right about myself being a military guy. Only a person with plenty of military experience could perform such accurate shots, much less such cold-blooded killings. Sure enough, I didn’t ice those guards. Instead, I just wounded them slightly. But although their wounds weren’t life-threating, I knew I could easily have killed those guards without giving it a second thought if I’d wanted to.

  It wasn’t long before I realized that my right shoulder was slightly stinging. The bullet of one of the guards’ nicked me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spied Frank materialize behind the two injured guards and shoot each man in the head. After that, he noticed my wounded shoulder and came running toward me.

  “You hurt?” He queried with concern in his voice, eyeing my blood-oozing shoulder.

  “Nah, just a scratch,” I said as I shook my head back and forth once. Then I added, “You didn’t have to whack those guards. They were already out of it.”

  “It’s wrong time to get all maudlin, Jack,” Frank replied disapprovingly. “They’re our enemies, bro. Remember that. They didn’t come here to give you their best wishes.”

  I wasn’t all that fond of finishing the wounded men off, but it stood to reason that I was in serious trouble and that Frank was my only lifeline now, so I didn’t press the point.

  He helped me get up to my feet, half-dragged me toward the entrance door, and led me out of the building, into the late-evening-or-early-night cold air. The darkness notwithstanding, my eyes could make out a crimson-colored pickup truck sitting in a small parking lot not far from the building.

  Frank eased me into the front passenger seat, ran around the front of the car, and hopped inside behind the wheel. Once he slammed the driver’s-side door shut and put the truck’s transmission into gear, the car leaped forward.

  He came off the throttle just a bit in order not to lose control while pulling the car onto the main road and taking the right turn. Then he gunned the truck’s engine and sped off.

  In a few moments, the building behind us receded into the darkness.

  Chapter Two

  It was a deep night. There was no traffic whatsoever on the roads, so Frank floored it cheerfully ignoring all driving laws.

  As I rode shotgun, I looked out the passenger-side window at buildings and streetlights dashing past. It was pretty dark outside due to all the streetlights being out. Most of the houses stood one or two stories high. All of them looked derelict and dilapidated. Many homes had broken windows, jagged glass shards sticking out of the wood frames. Some of the buildings were boarded up.

  There were no lights on, no passers-by, no driving cars, no movement at all. The streets we were driving down were lit only by stars. Other than the roar of our truck, no sound broke the complete silence that shrouded the city. That kinda crept me out. Something sinister had happened in the city, something really nasty had befallen citizens. I could feel it in my bones.

  Frank darted glances at me every now and then. After a couple of minutes passed, he said something. I was lost in my thoughts and didn’t quite make out his words.

  “What?” I looked over at him.

  “Your arm,” he gestured with his right hand toward my wounded shoulder. “How is it?”

  I looked down at my shoulder, and it took me by surprise when I found out that the wound had already healed over not leaving behind so much as a scar. I rubbed at the spot where the guard’s round nicked my shoulder, brushing the clotted, dried blood off. The skin on my shoulder was clean and smooth and the wound was nowhere to
be found as if the bullet had never touched me.

  “What the hell? It’s gone!”

  “Good.” Frank nodded approvingly. “Your body recovers from the drugs’ effects very fast. You’re gonna regain your strength and retrieve all your powers in nothing flat.”

  I wasn’t sure I caught his drift.

  “Retrieve all my powers? What do you mean by that?”

  But Frank just waved me off not looking at me.

  “It would be too long to explain everything to you. There’s too much background to fill you in on. Besides, it would be a helluva story. You wouldn’t buy it. So it’s easier just to wait a little while till your memory returns to you. Ain’t gonna take a long time for that. After you get your memories back, you’ll get answers to all your questions.”

  It was obvious that he wasn’t in a mood to be interrogated. So I decided to change the subject.

  “Okay then. Could you just tell me where we’re now? And what has happened to this place?”

  By way of explanation, Frank said, “It’s Vegas, bro.”

  “The hell I’m doing in Vegas? And why does this place look so abandoned?”

  Frank shot a quick glance at me.

  “So I guess you’ve already recollected some of your memories, haven’t you?”

  It was true. I recollected something from my past life, so to speak. I acknowledged Frank’s question with a nod and said, “I’ve been a military person. Been a Delta troop commander. Was on a secret mission in the ‘Stan. But I cannot grasp how the hell I ended up in Vegas, in a prison of sorts, being given damn drugs.”

  Frank saw me looking him in the eye, waiting for the explanation. He sighed.

  “Guess you ain’t all that keen on having to wait till you remember everything on your own. Well, okay then. Long story short. They found you out. Seized you. I don’t have the slightest idea as to how they were able to actually capture you. Hope you’ll tell me when your memories return. Then you were claimed to be a terrorist. Just like me. You were brought here and confined to that building. They were administering special drugs to you to keep you weak, oblivious, and harmless. It took me a while to found this place to rescue you.”