by Brian Parker
Ian dug into his armpits with his washcloth. He might as well move the entire operation to Fort Bragg if they were forced to leave DC. Fayetteville, North Carolina was a shithole, but his shrinking bank account could fund the company for several years beyond what he was currently projecting by staying in the capitol.
During his stint in the Army, Ian McCollister had saved every penny that he could by living in the barracks, eating almost exclusively in the dining facility, and driving the same car that he’d bought when he turned sixteen. When he got out, he founded Precision Stryke and modeled his company after the private security corporations that he’d worked with downrange. He’d hired both former military with connections and men and women who’d never served, but had the right skillsets for that line of work. For more than a decade, they’d rode high on the hog on government contracts all over the world, but that’d changed a few years ago and the contracting landscape began to become less profitable.
“Fucking politics,” he muttered, raising his arms above his head to wash away the suds. The last changeover in administrations had screwed the smaller private security companies like Precision Stryke, while the bigger, multi-billion dollar companies continued to land larger and more lucrative government contracts.
His cell phone on the counter began ringing and he considered stepping out to grab the blasted thing, but thought better of it. He wouldn’t authorize the purchase of a new cell phone when one of his sub-contractors did something negligent and ruined their phone, so why would he risk damaging his own? I’m nobody special, he told himself as he scrubbed at his rear end with the washcloth. It was almost midnight, the phone call would have to wait.
Ian wrung out the cloth and hung it up underneath the shower head. He’d throw it in the laundry basket tomorrow when it was dry. He took his time, allowing the water to cascade over him. The idea of moving again, or even letting some of his employees go was stressful and not how he’d envisioned everything would end up when he started this gig.
Eventually, the water temperature began to chill as the small water heater in his apartment refilled with water. “Ah, fuck it,” he grumbled and turned off the shower.
After he’d dried off, he tapped his phone’s screen to see who’d been calling. It was a number with an area code that he didn’t recognize. “808?” he grumbled as he toweled his hair. “Where’s that?”
A quick internet search told him that the call had originated from Hawaii, which could explain why they’d called so late with the time difference of six hours. It was only just after the normal work day there.
Ian pulled on his sleep pants and a t-shirt, then went to the kitchen to pour a glass of whiskey. He poured two fingers, then shook the nearly empty bottle before tipping it into his glass. He’d need to get more before the weekend. He sat at his table, pulling a pad of paper and an ink pen in front of him before he hit the redial button to call back to Hawaii.
A woman with a slight accent that he assumed was Asian answered on the second ring. “R8 Systems. How may I direct your call?”
“Uh…” The person who’d called did not leave a message. “Uh, I missed a call from this number a few minutes ago.”
“This is a central line, sir,” the receptionist answered. “If you don’t know who called you, then it may be an accidental call.”
“Okay,” he replied, pushing the paper away. “Hey, I’m Ian McCollister, the owner of Precision Stryke Solutions. We’re a private security firm based in Washington, DC. Does that ring a bell?”
“I’m sorry, sir. You’ll have to be more accessible to R8 if you expect a contract with us.” With that, she hung up.
Ian looked at the phone. “What the hell?” Had he heard her correctly? Did she say that he needed to be accessible to get a contract or was his sleep-deprived and stressed mind clutching at straws, trying to make up jobs for his company that didn’t exist?
He considered calling her back, but decided against it. He’d wait until 9 a.m. tomorrow, Hawaii Time to call again. Maybe a different person would answer the phone who knew why he’d been called.
In the meantime, he sipped his whiskey and tried to research the company. R8 Systems didn’t return any hits, which wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary in this line of work, but it didn’t help his case at all either. Had he imagined the woman’s statement?
The phone’s buzzing on his nightstand woke him up. He glanced at the alarm clock, glowing angrily in the darkness. It was 3:36 a.m.
He lifted the phone, angling it toward his view. It was the 808 area code. Ian swiped the answer icon before the call ended. “Hello?”
“What took you so long to answer, Mr. McCollister?”
“Uh… I was asleep.”
“Unacceptable.” The voice sounded familiar. Was it the woman from before? “If I am to hire your company, I need to know that you will always answer when I need to speak to you.”
“Now wait a damn minute, that’s—” The phone clicked dead once more. “Asshole,” he muttered, dropping his phone to the nightstand before punching his pillow. His people needed the contract—whatever it was. If he had to deal with an eccentric egomaniac until something better came along, then so be it.
He sighed and dialed the number.
“Alright, settle down, everyone,” Ian ordered, raising his hands to his sides and patting the air down. He waited until his group of employees, for the most part his friends, heeded his directive and sat around the common room. A quick head count told him that all ten of his full-time employees were present.
“What’s up, boss?” Toby asked, cracking a beer, even though it was 9:30 in the morning. Ian couldn’t blame the guy. They were out of work and out of options.
“We are officially no longer out of work and we’ve got plenty of options,” he announced.
There were murmurs amongst the group for a moment, then Kinsey shouted, “What’s the job?”
Ian clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “The contract is multi-year. Nine million over three years—guaranteed. With an additional annual renewal option at three million a year for up to ten years.”
Several whistles accompanied high fives and even a few tears. “Holy shit,” Toby blurted out. “What is that, like seven hundred and fifty K each?”
Ian crossed his arms. Toby was an extremely smart fellow, even if he was a hard-headed screw up from time to time. “Not quite, Tobes. After the cut for Precision Stryke overhead—we’re gonna need to hire two receptionists on twelve hour shifts during the week and pass off the duty phone on weekends—ah… Hell, what was I saying?”
“You were gonna tell us what we can expect in our paychecks,” Trish, the former Marine who’s muscles were still just as jacked and as lean as the day she’d left active duty said. “I’ve got two kids and no child support helping me out.”
Ian pointed at her. “Yeah, that’s right. Sorry.” He turned and picked up a dry erase marker. On the white board, he wrote out his figures while he talked. “Okay, so three mil a year. I’m going to offer the two new Ops Center employees—” Several groans cut him off. “Alright, maybe we won’t call it an OPCEN, maybe it’ll be—”
“How ’bout you just call it desk services at the corporate headquarters?”
“Okay, sure. Thanks, Jean.” He continued writing. “So I’m prepared to offer each of you your normal fee, plus ten percent annually, guaranteed for three years, with a shot at up to another ten percent bonus for performance and meeting time requirements, standard non-disclosure and non-compete agreements apply. Plus, we potentially have ten more years in the contract if we can keep the execs at our benefactor happy with us.”
“What’s the job?” Toby repeated Kinsey’s earlier question. “You’re trying awful hard to sell us on the profits, but you haven’t said what we’re gonna be doing.”
“Yeah, he’s right, boss,” Kinsey agreed. “I don’t want to be doing anything illegal that’s gonna get us sent to jail.”
Ian glared at her. “R
eally? Do you really think I value my company so little as to conduct myself in such a way?”
Kinsey shook her head. “Nah. Sorry, Ian.”
“Alright,” Ian said, still staring at the truck driver. “It’s with a corporation based out of Hawaii named R8 Systems.”
“Never heard of it,” James Brahler declared.
“Neither had I when they contacted me two days ago. I did some digging—a lot of digging actually. They’re pretty well buried, but if you know which stone to turn over, then you can find some information.” He paused for dramatic effect.
“And?” Kinsey prodded.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure that they are a subsidiary of a shoot off of a bastard child of Homeland—DOJ or FEMA specifically,” he added. “It’s pretty fuzzy where their funding comes from.”
“Hey, they got the cash, then I don’t care if they’re Russians!” Toby stated to a chorus of boos. Anytime the Russians were involved with anything, there was guaranteed to be a different opinion from everyone in the room, so it was a standing rule that nobody mentioned them. Of course Toby was never good at following the rules.
“So, like Toby’s asked a few times, the job is simple. We help select a few sites across remote parts of the United States to prepare storage facilities for humanitarian aid and such. Pretty vanilla tasks, low threat, with a high payout. Who’s on board?”
All the hands shot up except for Jose, a grizzled Army vet with double the time in than Ian had. “So, are we responsible for contracting out construction crews and whatnot?” he asked.
“No. They will just tell us what part of the country that they’re looking at, we’ll coordinate with real estate agents to procure the land. I’ll transfer it to R8 and they contract the construction. We provide site security during construction and while it’s being stocked to ensure no local with delusions of being the next Sherlock Holmes interferes or snoops around too much. Once the site is finished, we move on to the next.”
“What kind of equipment are they storing?” Jose pressed.
“I don’t have a complete list, but vehicles, communications equipment, fuel tankers, that sort of stuff.”
“I don’t know. That’s an awful lot of money for not a lot of work.”
“R8 expects significant environmental pushback since they’re looking to develop these sites pretty far off the beaten path. We may be dealing with a bunch of eco-terrorists for all we know.”
Ian smiled at the hook he’d just planted. Getting the opportunity to mix it up with a bunch of hippie nerds is exactly what his crew wanted and he knew they wouldn’t be able to resist. That’s why he’d worked it out with Jose to ask the loaded questions. Plus, the money that R8 was offering to cover a few simple jobs was a major incentive to everyone in the room when they’d been facing the unemployment line a few days earlier.
To quote one of his favorite television characters of all time, he said, “I love it when a plan came together.”
FOUR
* * *
TAEDONG, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA
TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE OUTBREAK
“This is remarkable,” Kasra Amol stated, looking through the ballistic glass into the cell where three men stood, nude except for the waistband from a pair of underwear on one and the bloodstained, tattered remnants of a t-shirt on another. They swayed slightly as they stared intently at the floor, the wall, the back of one of their brethren. It really didn’t seem to matter to them what they looked at for the moment.
The infection had started as only one man, but he’d transferred his sickness to a nurse and one of the guards.
“They look like they should be in shock. I mean, look at all that blood.”
Dr. Sanjay glanced at the monitor that displayed the live feed from the infrared camera. The men were nearly pink they were so hot. The sensors were inaccurate, he knew, but his best guess was their internal body temperatures were running around 104 degrees when they were on the move and a low-grade 100 degrees when they stood still.
“The pain blocking chain is the key,” Sanjay said. “Tell Doctor—” He paused and coughed. “I guess I never learned the man’s name.”
“It isn’t important,” Kasra mumbled noncommittally as she watched the infected men. She reached out to tap on the glass.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Sanjay warned.
Her head whipped around, eyes narrowed. “You dare tell me what to do?”
Sanjay took an involuntary step backward. “No. I, ah… I meant no offense, Ms. Amol. The infected become extremely agitated when there is external stimuli.”
“I am aware, Doctor. That is what I want to see.”
She turned back and slapped her open palm onto the glass. As one, the men’s heads jerked up and they dropped into a hunter’s crouch. The two-way mirrored walls offered them no indication which way the sound had come from.
Kasra glanced at Sanjay and smiled. He thought that her pointed canines seemingly extended beyond her lower lip, giving her an absolute feral look. She slapped her hand on the glass three times in rapid succession.
The nurse ran, screaming toward the wall of glass. She banged her hand into the surface and collapsed, temporarily dazed. The other two bellowed incoherently in chorus with their fellow, but stayed put, searching for the source of the offending noise. Within seconds, the nurse’s head impacted against the glass again, bouncing wetly off the ballistic material.
“Please, Ms. Amol,” Sanjay pleaded. “These things are dangerous.”
She tapped a manicured fingernail on the glass, which sent the nurse into a frenzy. He banged his forehead against the mirrored wall repeatedly in an attempt to break the glass. Dark, bloody smears appeared where his head impacted against the unyielding surface.
“This is US military ballistic glass, Doctor Sanjay. The same stuff they use on vehicles to protect against IEDs. A man, no matter how determined his diseased mind may be, will never breach it with his bare hands—or his head, as this one is trying.”
The sounds of the man—no, he was no longer fit to be called that, Sanjay decided. The sounds of the creature trying to break through had stopped. The doctor looked past Kasra Amol’s dark hair to where the thing had fallen into a heap. Its frontal lobe was cracked and bloody, parts of gray brain matter oozed through the largest of the jagged fissures in its skull. From its ears, a clear fluid leaked freely to pool in the depressions created by his clavicles.
“Fascinating,” Sanjay remarked, losing himself to the clinical side of his work, momentarily forgetting about the human aspect of what he’d done. “The creature’s single-minded instinct to attack the sound has overridden its sense of self preservation. It literally beat itself to death trying to get at you.”
Kasra Amol smiled. “They will do. How long from initial transmission until they turned into…that?”
“The guard took seventeen hours to succumb to the vomited fluids and change. It was only nine hours for the nurse, who’d been bitten and weighed approximately forty kilos less than the guard.”
She nodded. “That gives a person enough time to escape to safety after being bitten. They could go through a quarantine zone, hiding their symptoms…”
“Theoretically, yes,” Sanjay agreed.
“Good.” She turned quickly. “This site is to be shut down immediately and everything moved to Site 53. Kim Pujon Hi will administrate the facility’s new batch of scientists.”
“Excuse me?”
“You will return to the United States,” she continued, ignoring his confused question. “I will contact you with your next task once you’ve cleared customs without raising alarm.”
He opened his mouth and closed it. “What of my family?” Sanjay blurted out. “I came all this way to see them, to be near them. I want to see them in person.”
“Oh. They’re here. In this very facility.”
Sanjay’s mouth dropped open. “I’ve been here for two months. Why haven’t I seen them?”
&nb
sp; “You’ve talked to them on video chat,” she said, sliding around him. “I’ve watched you. Did you know that?”
“I figured as much. I want to see my family. Now.”
“Of course.” She tapped a quick series of knocks on the observation room door and one of her big guards opened it. “Be a dear, Hyuk, and bring the good doctor’s wife to the observation room.”
Sanjay spun on his heel. “That’s not what I—”
The door slammed shut and Kasra stalked toward him. “You see, I don’t take kindly to people who try to order me around in my own facility, Dr. Sanjay.”
“What are you going to do to them?”
“You said you wanted to see them in person,” she replied, pushing her lower lip out. She did not look anything like the pouty-lipped sex goddess that she attempted to appear. Instead, Sanjay imagined she was a snake, poised to strike.
The red warning light set into the ceiling turned on and began to spin. “No!” he shouted, turning back to the room where the two remaining infected men waited for their next stimuli.
The door into the outer chamber was open and the massive guard pushed two smaller women through the door in front of him. Both of them collapsed to the floor, near the transparent glass door into the observation room. Hyuk retreated through the solid metal door back into the hallway.
A hand snaked around Sanjay’s chest from behind as he watched the guard and his original test subject followed Hyuk’s movement. He’d been there and gone before they even had a chance to respond. The hand slipped inside his lab coat to his bare skin beneath.
“All it takes is for me to hit the release button,” Kasra cooed into his ear, “and those diseased freaks that you’ve created will be through the ballistic doorway to where your wife and daughter are. One little tap, Dr. Sanjay.” Her hand tightened into a fist, tugging at the hair on his chest. “Give me a reason to do it.”