The Z-Strain Trilogy Box Set [Books 1-3]

by Morris, SJ

  “It’ll be okay, Cooper. This lady is going to wash your arm and put a bandage on like Miss Sammy does. Then, you can come back, and we’ll see if there’re any toys to play with.”

  “I guess so,” said Cooper with a sad face. I took him by the hand and walked him over to the kitchen pantry.

  “Do you want to see something really cool? It has to be a secret, though. Just you, Chris, and I know about this, okay?”

  “Sure, I’m good at keeping secrets.”

  “Great! Well, the office that has all the bandages in it is in a secret place just in here. We’ll show you,” I motioned for Chris to pop the secret door in the pantry so we could go downstairs to the infirmary. When he did, Cooper’s eyes went wide with excitement.

  “Wow, that’s so cool. It’s like a secret hiding spot!”

  Just then, the light in his eyes dulled, and he doubled over in pain. I picked him up quickly before any of the other kids heard him and ran down the stairs. Chris closed the door behind us, and once down the stairs, he ran to the door, punched in a code, and motioned for me to follow him down the hall to a door with a red cross on it.

  Chris opened the door, and Cooper started sweating worse than before, complaining that his head hurt badly, and he felt incredibly hot all over.

  The room was more like an emergency room with the beds lined up against the wall, each with its own sink, oxygen tank, and a cart that was full of tools.

  Chris led me to the end of the five beds where there were two sets of steel doors. Chris opened one and led us in.

  I put Cooper on the bed and looked around. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a fully functioning surgical suite. I still couldn’t grasp that I was underground, and this was all underneath the cabin. It was like being transported to another reality.

  Cooper was asking for water in-between moaning in pain. I laid the bed flat for him so he’d be more comfortable and went to the sink for a glass of water. I tried to get him to sip it, but he was in so much pain that it just dribbled down his face, onto his cartoon character t-shirt.

  I saw the character with a big smile on his face giving thumbs-up, and I started to cry. This little boy who had barely begun to live was now going to die because of what was going on.

  I had no control over what was happening with his body, and it made me increasingly frustrated. Chris came running back through the doors with restraints and started tying them up to the bed rails. He went to put the first one on Cooper’s wrist, and I stopped him.

  “Not yet. I think I’ll know when to do this but not now. Please?” I looked up into his face, and we were both just as worried as the other.

  He saw my tears and dropped the cuff to the edge of the bed, “What do you need me to do?”

  “Thank you. I need an IV bag of saline, and where’s the morphine?”

  “All of the meds should be in that cabinet. It’s locked, but the key’s in the door since we haven’t really opened this part of the house yet.”

  “Well, let’s get it opened up.”

  I ran to the cabinet and found the morphine. I went back to Cooper’s bedside, where Chris was hanging the IV bag, and I grabbed one of the nearby carts and found the catheters. I grabbed the smallest one I could find.

  “Chris, can you hold him down, please? I have to start a line, and he’s already in so much pain I don’t think he is going to notice, but I need him to be still.”

  “Sure thing, Doc.”

  As Chris held the tiny little boy down, I started the IV and pumped in a small dose of the morphine.

  Cooper seemed to calm down shortly after that, and I was able to take his vitals. His bite wound was no longer bleeding, but it was open, slowly oozing black puss, and it looked terrible. His temperature was at what I thought it was going to be, 105 degrees. His blood pressure was through the roof, and his pulse was as fast as that of a hummingbird.

  “This is everything I saw before in Georgia. The fever, the wound, the BP and heart rate, everything. Even him asking for water but not being able to take any is the same as the soldiers we tried to treat. I never saw the soldiers fully conscious, so I don’t know how long it took them to go from walking and talking to pain riddled and comatose.”

  “So, what do you think, then? What should we do now?”

  “The only thing we can do, I guess. Just try and keep him comfortable and keep everyone else away from him.”

  “Don’t you think we should restrain him if he is going to be out for a while?”

  “I guess so. It took almost seven days before they made us restrain the soldiers, but that was back then. This seems to be happening much quicker than what I saw eighteen years ago. I sure hope Troy makes it here and quick. Maybe he’ll know what to do.”

  “I sure hope so. Troy knows more than all of us combined. Even so, Abby, I think you did a great job with the little guy here. You handled yourself very well in a chaotic situation. I see why Jack spoke so highly of you and the work you did. He’d be very proud of you for what you did both yesterday and today.”

  I started to cry again, but I managed a ‘thank you’ to Chris for his words, and then, we put the soft restraints on the five-year-old Cooper, whom we had all just met.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up to Tom’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently.

  “Sorry, I must have dozed off there, what’s up, Tom?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Abby, but I think you should get as far away from the little one as possible.”

  “What do you mean? Oh, my!” I looked up and Cooper had apparently died and come back while I napped at his bedside. Tom had already put a belt with a sock around it in his mouth so that he couldn’t bite.

  “When did this happen, Tom?”

  “You were sleeping when I came in about a half an hour ago, and the little one here was breathing slowly. I was going to wake you but then he stopped breathing, so there was no need. I got the belt ready and timed it to see when he’d come back and it was only about forty-five seconds before his eyes started to flutter. Then, his hands started to pull against the restraints, and then, this.”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s about four o’clock.”

  “Oh my goodness, it only took four hours since the symptoms started for a bite wound to kill and reanimate him. That’s much quicker than with the soldiers I saw before. I’d have to guess he was bit sometime early this morning, but I don’t know how long it took them to run here. That would make it seven hours or so between bite and death, to reanimation. This is bad.”

  Tom looked at me questioningly, “Well, the soldiers were also grown men, in top physical condition, right? It would take longer for it to get to them normally, right?”

  “Yes, but the soldiers were under my care for seven or eight days and were traveling for, at least, most of another full day after they were infected. Also, I never saw them die or turn. They took them away before that could happen. So, they could have lasted up to nine or ten days while infected. Cooper here was bitten this morning. Even if we use an altered timescale for his weight and age, he should’ve at least lasted about three, maybe four days, not hours. This virus, or whatever it is, has evolved to take over its host substantially quicker over the last eighteen years or so.”

  “That’s really not good. That means the entire country could be overrun in the next few days.”

  “Yes, a week at the absolute most, I’m guessing. I really hope Troy gets here soon.”

  “What should we do with the little one?” Tom motioned towards Cooper, who was pulling against his restraints with incredible force. The metal gurney was creaking in protest at his endeavors.

  “Well, let’s get out of his sight for the moment. From what I’ve seen before, the infected are pretty docile until they are met with food... ugh, well, us. Let’s see, if we leave the room, maybe he’ll calm down. I’m worried about him pulling out of the restraints. This door does lock, right?” I asked.

  “Yes, it does. You
need a code to get in the first doors and the surgical rooms here can lock if needed.”

  “Well, let’s leave Cooper alone for a while and see what he does. Maybe Troy will have some answers when he gets here. Just be sure to lock the doors.”

  “Already on it, Doc. I’ve got the keys ready to go,” Tom said as he pulled a ring of keys out from his back pocket. The key he selected was red. There was a blue, green, yellow, and, oddly enough, a camouflage key on the ring too.

  “What are all those different colored keys for, and where’s my set?”

  “You have one. It’s in your room, on your dresser.

  Well, the red one here is for the surgical doors. The blue one is for the water and food bunker that’s at the end of the opposite hall. The green one is for a vault in the barn that holds seeds to plant, food for the animals, and most of the other supplies for the farm. It also unlocks the door to the greenhouse. The yellow one is for the gas tank, down by the lake, and the other container that’s hidden behind the barn. That was my idea. That tank looks like an extension of the barn, but it has thousands of gallons of gasoline in it, enough to fill an entire tanker. Last, but certainly not least, is the camo key. That’s the front door key to the main house.”

  “That’s pretty clever, color-coded, so you know which goes to what but in secret. I love your idea about the extra gas tank masked as the barn. Very intuitive.”

  “Jack always used to say, you can never be too careful!” Tom did his best impression of Jack’s voice by going an octave higher than his own, which was funny, but it did kind of sound like Jack.

  We locked Cooper in the surgical suite room A and started down the hallway. I was lost in my thoughts as we made our way back upstairs to the kitchen and didn’t realize I still had Cooper’s blood on my shirt.

  We came out through the pantry and I closed the false panel behind me. I was met with a gasp from Amelia, who was coloring on a piece of paper at the kitchen table, “Is Cooper okay?”

  I had no idea what to say. I looked around the room for help and everyone just stared at me wide-eyed as they looked at the amount of blood on my shirt. Tom finally spoke up and saved me, “Cooper is just resting now, sweetie. He actually has a cold too, so he’s not feeling so good on top of the cut he had on his arm. What are you coloring there, darling? It looks so pretty with all of that purple and pink all over it.”

  For a man who’s intimidating as hell with no kids, Mr. Thomas Buckeneye sure was great with children. I knew the deferral of all eyes on me wouldn’t last, so I slid out of the room as quickly I could. Without drawing more attention to myself, I went back to my room and shut the door.

  I stood there for a good few moments with my eyes shut and my back to my bedroom door, just breathing and trying not to think of all the terrible things I had seen and done in the last two days.

  I opened my eyes and almost screamed when I saw Lance sitting in a chair in the corner of my room. He had his head back, and his eyes closed, napping in the sun that was coming through my window.

  I reached over him to close the shade and realized that there were white metal bars over the windows. I looked higher up in the frame, and sure enough, there were metal hurricane shutters that you could pull down over the windows. They really had thought of everything, it seemed.

  Need reinforcement for the windows but still need the ability to shoot through them, we’ve got metal bars for that. Need to close the window entirely so that nothing or no one gets in or out, we’ve got metal shutters for that.

  Jeez, I hoped this was super overboard for what we needed in the next coming days, weeks, or months. However long this thing lasted. I certainly was very grateful that Jack had started this and that his brave friends seemed to have finished his work in time for this event.

  I was pulled out of my thoughts as Lance woke up, “Hey, Mom. I wanted to catch up with you whenever you got done with that kid and figured here was the best place to get you. How’s he doing?”

  “Well, he’s not doing very well at all. As a matter of fact, he actually died and turned. He’s infected.”

  “Oh my God, really? We were just talking to those kids a few hours ago! What about the others? What are we going to do with them? Are they infected?” Lance stood up and started to get hysterical.

  I grabbed him by his shoulders and set him back in the chair, “Lance, keep your voice down, please. No one else but you, Tom, and I know about Cooper. The other children were not bitten or infected, as far as I can tell.”

  “As far as you can tell! What the hell, Mom? They’re sitting out there with Ally, Tyler, and all of the other people that live here now, and you don’t THINK they’re infected? How about you get back out there and do a full workup on them or whatever you need to do before they start biting people’s faces off!”

  “Lance, you really need to calm down. None of the other kids had wounds of any kind that I saw. I don’t have a test per se to find out if they’re infected, but this virus seems to work a lot quicker than when I saw it before. It now only takes a matter of hours to kill and bring you back, just from a single bite.”

  “So, what are you saying? That we just let them hang out for now since they haven’t started trying to eat us yet? Where’s your head, Mom? I killed one of those things yesterday! You killed three of them! You know what they can do. I will not just let these kids hang out while we wait and see if they are infected.”

  “What are you going to do, Lance? They are only four and five years old! They are kids who have no idea what’s going on. They don’t know where their parents are, and they’re probably terrified. We don’t even know what happened to them today, that led to them stumbling around in the woods outside our gates.”

  “So, let’s go find out. You check them out for bite wounds, check their vitals, or whatever, since you said the infected have a super high fever, and we ask them. We find out right now what went on.” Lance stood to go and stopped at my door, “Are you coming, or what?”

  “I’m coming, but please put on a good face for this. We don’t want to spook anyone, and I don’t want to scare the kids any more than they already are. Let me do the talking and let me change, please,” I replied as I pointed out my bloody shirt.

  With that, Lance stood outside my door as I changed tops, and we went to the kitchen, where everyone seemed to be congregating in or very near, except Dan and Tom. I figured Dan was back to monitoring the security cameras, and Tom was probably keeping an eye on Cooper or whatever he was now. I didn’t feel comfortable not calling him Cooper anymore, even though it seems like Cooper, the little boy was long gone by now.

  The kids were still at the table coloring, and Kristen was milling around the kitchen, making dinner. I stood in the doorway with Lance to my left and watched them for a little. They seemed like regular kids to me, but Lance was right. We had to be sure, or we could all be screwed.

  I sat in the open chair next to Amelia and asked her if she or any of the other kids had gotten scratched or bitten, and they all responded no. This was starting out well at least. They didn’t seem to mind my question about earlier today, so I ventured another, and I asked where they had come from. Amelia looked up and the rest of the children looked down at the pages they were coloring.

  “We came from our school. There were bad people there and Miss. Sammy told us to run as far as we could, and we did.”

  “Do you know if Miss Sammy is okay?”

  “When we left, she was bitten by one of the other mommies from school. She got us all outside to where we play on the slide, opened the gate, and told us to run as fast as we could. She shut the gate, and some more mommies and daddies seemed to be mad that Miss Sammy was telling us to leave. She started screaming, so we ran.”

  “Okay, sweetie, thank you. I just want to take a look at all of you really quick to make sure you have no scratches and get you cleaned up a little. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, can I go first, please? I really need to wash my hands. They’re s
ticky from the cookies Chris gave us,” she said with a smile, holding up her grimy little chocolate and marker covered fingers.

  “Absolutely, we can use my bathroom and get everyone cleaned up one at a time. Maybe Kristen will have dinner ready by the time we’re all done.”

  “Definitely. Lasagna’s already in the oven, and the garlic bread will be toasting soon.” Kristen looked happy to be busy cooking, and that made me smile. I can cook regular meals, but feeding our growing group would be more than I could handle.

  Lance agreed to keep an eye on the other kids as I took Amelia to my bathroom and gave her a quick shower. She had no cuts or bites on her and no fever, so I was sure she was okay. I got her into one of my short sleeve t-shirts. It was big, but it would have to do until we could get their clothes cleaned and dried.

  Gia was next, and she had a few scratches on her upper arm, but it looked like they were from branches, probably from running through the woods. None of them were deep enough to bleed. They were just surface cuts, so I was pretty sure she’d be okay. She had no fever at all, but I made a mental note just to keep an extra close eye on her because of the cuts.

  I found a shirt in the back of my drawer that had horses on it, and that was now her wardrobe for the night.

  Last was Christian. He was very quiet, but he seemed to like the shower. He had no scratches or a fever, so he was okay. He asked me if he could take a bath halfway through and if I had any toys. I plugged the drain and let him play a little in the warm water. I gave him the washcloth and a cup, which he was very happy to play with. I closed the shower door and just sat on top of the toilet, listening to him play. He was pretending the cup was a boat, and the washcloth was a sea monster attacking and sinking it. It brought me back to the days when my boys were young and would do the same thing. They’d be in the tub for hours with their toys. They always came out wrinkly and happy. The pleasant memory made me smile.