by Perrin Briar
“Good luck, guys,” Phil said.
He shook the driver’s hand through the open window. Susan pretended not to see the small bag he surreptitiously handed over.
Susan felt like she was giving her patients to terrorists. But she knew it was for the best, and waved as the van pulled onto the road that ran in front of the hospital, weaving through the traffic. The road was already beginning to get congested.
“What about the comatose patients?” Richard said. “They’re still up on the fourth floor.”
“Which is where they’ll stay,” Susan said. “They won’t last long outside the facility without power.”
“But we have power,” Richard said.
“We do right now,” Steve said. “But there’s no telling how long that will last.”
Susan turned to those assembled. Three scientists and three injured soldiers with no weapons. This was what the last hope of the human race looked like.
God help us all.
Z-MINUS: 6 hours 16 minutes
The soldiers acted fast. They began by barricading themselves inside, first by locking all the doors, and then nailing boards up over the windows. They pushed furniture against the main entrance, flipping them over onto their sides so the tabletops were pressed flush against the walls.
Richard picked up a heavy chair and placed it atop a stack.
“Is Amy safe?” he said.
Susan gave him a look. She knew he didn’t really care.
“Where is she?” Richard said.
“What do you care?” Susan said, pushing past him.
“She’s my daughter,” Richard said.
“Is she?” Susan said. “You weren’t so sure of that two years ago.”
Richard’s eyes scrubbed Susan’s face for something he evidently couldn’t find. He nodded and continued to pile furniture.
Bringing up taboos were no longer a big deal, not when you had a problem of this magnitude on your hands.
After half an hour they were exhausted. The first floor of the facility was empty, messy with scattered papers. They smashed the vending machines in the canteen and piled the food on the second floor in case they needed to relocate quickly.
The soldiers, even with their replacement arms and legs fastened in place, didn’t shirk their share of the work. They gathered around Steve in the front lobby.
Steve wiped an arm across his forehead, leaving his hair plastered to his skin.
“That’s the doors and windows blocked,” he said. “With any luck they’ll wander straight past and won’t bother us.”
“What about the lifts?” Phil said. “What if they figure out a way to ride them?”
“Good thinking,” Steve said. “We’ll need to disable them. Taylor?”
Taylor was short, but tough, the way the marines bred them. She took off, limping under the weight of her replacement leg.
“Does anyone else have any suggestions?” Steve said.
“What about ammo?” Oaks said. “These groovy robot arm weapons of ours are pretty cool, but they’re not going to be much more use against the infected than a butter knife.”
“We need real weapons,” Phil said. “Something that can do real harm.”
“I’ve got a friend,” Steve said. “We served together in Afghanistan. You remember him, Oaks?”
Oaks shook his head. It was a discouraging sign.
“Old Starky,” he said.
“Starky?” Susan said. “Why do you call him that?”
“You’ll find out when you meet him,” Steve said.
“A gun nut,” Oaks said.
“But a competent one,” Steve said. “Not much of a team player, I admit, but he lives near here and he’ll have a ton of guns in his home.”
“His ranch, probably,” Oaks said under his breath.
“I could call him and get him to bring as many of his weapons down here as he can,” Steve said.
“Would he do that?” Oaks said.
“He might,” Steve said. “If I told him it was a secret mission. He’s crazy enough.”
“Is he safe?” Susan said.
“Is anybody?” Steve said. “In a world like the one we’ve got now he’s exactly the kind of person we need.”
Susan nodded.
“Call him,” she said, fishing her cell out of her pocket and handing it to Steve.
Dooooo-ooooo. Dooooo-ooooo.
A siren wailed from a high to low tone, like something from the Second World War in Europe. It covered the city in terror.
“Heads up, lads,” Steve said. “They’re coming.”
“Who?” Oaks said.
“Them,” Steve said.
Z-MINUS: 5 hours 54 minutes
Boom.
An explosion, somewhere in the distance.
Boom. Boom.
A syncopated rhythm, offbeat and deadly. The ground shook beneath their feet. There was a hiss, a roar, and then a smack of an explosion. And then another, and another.
“What is that?” Susan said.
“The military,” Steve said. “With Fort Bragg not far away, they’ll be trying to clear the infected in their vicinity before heading farther out.”
Bright bulbous explosions rose like newborn suns on the other side of town.
“They’re just killing them?” Susan said.
She couldn’t control her shock.
“No doubt they think it’s the only thing they can do,” Steve said.
“I thought they were trying to hold them back?” Susan said. “By barricading the cities?”
“It must have failed,” Steve said. “When you’re injured you cut the dead flesh so the infection doesn’t spread. Let’s just hope they have the sense not to bomb us.”
“Can’t you call them?” Susan said. “Let them know we’re here? Tell them what we’re doing?”
“They won’t listen to me,” Steve said. “They’ve got other things to worry about now.”
“But we’re working on a cure,” Susan said. “They could come here, help defend us.”
Steve shook his head.
“They’re concentrating on wide sweeps,” he said. “They won’t be interested in defending a single location. The best thing we can do is keep our heads down and wait till this cure of yours is complete. Then we can go to them with what we have. Until then, we’re the same as everyone else out there. Worse, we’re already injured. They won’t want to rescue us.”
Susan couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Steve and the others were ex-military. They had been willing to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the country, had sacrificed their bodies to prove it, and the military wouldn’t come help them?
“Richard was talking to someone…” Susan said. “A Major… What was it, now? Major Edwards? He was interested in what we were doing here. He would listen to us.”
“He might,” Steve said. “And if he did know about you, why isn’t he here already? He would be, if the fate of the world rested on your robot and his cure. Believe me, I wish they were on their way, wish they would defend us with everything they’ve got, but there’s no use hoping on pipe dreams.”
Susan shook her head. She couldn’t believe her life’s work wouldn’t have been taken seriously by the army, the military, by anyone.
“Did I ever tell you how I came to lose my arm?” Steve said.
Susan had read Steve’s file. She’d read every patient’s, but there were often pages missing, stamped ‘confidential’ with blood red ink across them. She never knew the full story, the true context of what had happened. She shook her head.
“I was stationed in Afghanistan with my team,” Steve said. “We were waiting for an important package to arrive. It was a fairly standard mission. Get in, get out. Nothing complicated. Nothing should have gone wrong. And that was the problem. We weren’t as alert as we should have been.”
His eyes turned distant with the memory of it, imagining himself there at that very moment. With the background noise of the explosio
ns in the city, it felt even more real to Susan.
“We were hit with mortar shells,” Steve said. “We didn’t know where they’d come from. We couldn’t see their position. We picked up our injured and pulled back as far as we could, but then, freaky bad luck, they struck us again. I can remember the whistle and roar of the grenades now, and then the deafening dull boom of the explosions, the white flash as they blind you. Your ears ring and your body gets thrown a dozen yards. I remember thinking I was going to die, that this was the end. It probably should have been.
“The next thing I remember, I was in hospital. My body was bandaged, half my arm missing. It turned out it had been our own side that fired on us. It wasn’t their fault. I don’t blame them. But I do blame those in charge. A simple miscommunication had resulted in the death of three of my team and four others with lost limbs. They were meant to be on our side. They were meant to protect us. We were meant to be brothers in arms. Instead, they had been our enemies.
“I heard the lads on the other team were pretty beat up about what happened. I went to see them, explained I didn’t blame them, that none of my team did, and none of them ever would. If the situation had been different, if it had been us firing on them, the exact same thing would have happened. I learnt an important lesson that day. It wasn’t new, but more of a confirmation of what we all already knew. We joked about it sometimes, but there was always an element of ugly truth underneath it: that we can’t trust those in charge.
“They might be honorable, might be great men and women, but they aren’t on the ground with us, can’t know whether the information given to them is right or wrong, and until they see everything for themselves with their own eyes instead of from the protection of their bunkers, they never can. And when push comes to shove, and they have the opportunity to kill a hundred targets and sacrifice one of us, their own, what do you think they’d choose? If not a hundred, then how about a thousand? Ten thousand? Every soldier’s life has a price tag. It’s usually not even that high.
“That’s why we’re better off waiting here, hoping they’ll forget about us because you never know when a miscommunication might happen, and then we’re up shit creek without a paddle. That’s why we have to hold out as long as we can while we’re here. It’s our best play.”
The words coming out of Steve’s mouth were hard-fought, difficult to process, and even harder to admit out loud.
“Oaks and Taylor,” Steve said. “They were affected by the same kind of accident I was. We talk, sometimes, because we’re not meant to talk about these things with civilians. We understand each other, the neglect and betrayal we suffered. There’s a level of loyalty that we give to command that we never get in return.”
The pops and explosions continued, like a backing track, on the other side of the city. Occasionally one happened close to them. The glass in the window frames shook. None of the soldiers took any notice, their training already taking over. They were in war mode. It was not something Susan had had much experience with, despite hanging out with soldiers for the past ten years. She felt closed-off, like this was something they all had in common, part of an exclusive club, and she wasn’t a member. Her job was to oversee the science, that was all.
The glass in the window panes rattled as a helicopter passed overhead, the flashing light on its underside joining a dozen others in a rough circle. They hovered there, pausing for a second before unleashing their missiles.
They scorched toward an unseen target somewhere on the ground. Whatever it was, it wasn’t firing back. The roars and explosions drummed the earth, loud and deafening.
“Can you believe this shit?” Phil said.
Susan shook her head. It didn’t feel real. A war was taking place on the same streets she cycled down, the same streets she went shopping in.
“It’s like a movie set,” Phil said.
The city turned silent, walls of dirty grey smoke rising like a giant wall. The helicopters banked and peeled away.
“Did we win?” Phil said. “Did we get them all? Is it over?”
No one answered him. No one dared raise their hopes.
Z-MINUS: 5 hours 37 minutes
The soldiers ran whetstones over their blades’ edges, shaving off the protective film. They were arming up. Things were going to get ugly.
“They should call their friends and family,” Susan said to Richard. “It’s the least we can give them. Some hope their loved ones are okay.”
“They shouldn’t be calling anyone,” Richard said. “If the secret gets out that we had the virus before everyone else even knew about it…”
“The secret’s already out,” Susan said, “and it’s tearing through New York, Boston, and now it’s here and about to tear through all of us.”
“Yes,” Richard said, “but no one knows we knew about it before it got here.”
“People are a little too distracted at the moment to start pointing fingers, don’t you think?” Susan said.
“Right now they are,” Richard said. “But they won’t be after all this gets cleared up. They’ll want to blame someone. Who do you think they’re going to go after?”
“You’re assuming this whole thing is going to blow over,” Susan said. “It might not.”
Richard frowned.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean, what if this is the start of something?” Susan said. “What if this is the new era of human development? What if this is what the future is?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Richard said. “They’re animals. They could never defeat us. They’re dumb.”
“A rock is dumb,” Susan said. “But it wiped out the dinosaurs. My point is, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Nothing might happen, and then we’ll be lucky to have to deal with the problem you’re talking about. The army is throwing everything they’ve got at them and who knows the effect they’re having.”
Richard frowned, taking all this in. The thought they wouldn’t ultimately triumph hadn’t occurred to him before.
“I doubt anyone will much care about what happened,” Susan said. “Only what we did to try and stop it. They won’t blame us. It’s not our fault. We didn’t design it, and we didn’t let it out. But we’re as sure as hell trying to stop it. We’re going to need these guys to help us do that. They’ll feel a lot better about their situation if they can call their friends and family and tell them what’s going on, to take away a little of their fear.”
Richard nodded, but he still didn’t like it.
“Yes,” he said. “All right.”
Susan took her and Richard’s cellphones and offered them to Oaks.
“Call your friends and family,” she said. “You must all be worried sick.”
Oaks looked at the phones, but didn’t take them.
“Have you ever served in the military?” he said.
“No,” Susan said.
She took a seat beside Oaks, getting comfortable. Oaks continued to shave slivers off the edge of his knife, blowing on it to clear them.
“There are times when you’re sitting there,” Steve said, “maybe you’re being shelled or you’re told of an insurgency heading your way, and you wait and wait, and all the time you can only think about one thing. Home. It’s where you wish you were, because it’s where your heart belongs. You wonder what you’re doing halfway around the world in a country that doesn’t want you there. But more than that, you want to know your friends and family are all right. But you don’t call them often. Do you know why?”
Susan shook her head.
“You don’t call them because you need to keep your mind on what you’re doing,” Oaks said. “And if they don’t answer, you don’t need to be worried about something that might have happened. They could have been involved in a car accident, could have fallen down the stairs, a million and one things that could happen to anyone, anywhere. Could have gone to the doctor and discovered a lump or abnormality. And they might even tell you all this, depending on
the person you’re talking to. Because they don’t understand what you’re going through.
“So, I thank you for the offer, but we’d all prefer to ride this out, get to the end, and then call them. Plus, our partners knew what they signed up for. It’s not like they wouldn’t have learnt a thing or two from us. They know how to look after themselves.”
Susan nodded. She didn’t really understand. She wanted nothing more than to speak to Amy, to hear her voice. But then, she couldn’t understand their situation anyway. Amy wore a kind of armor nothing could penetrate. Susan tucked the cellphones back in her pocket.
“How’s your little girl?” Oaks said.
“She’s fine,” Susan said. “She’s probably really scared right now.”
“She won’t be the only one,” Oaks said. “A lot of people will be running scared, running to whoever they think will help them, not knowing it should be themselves they should be relying on. Everyone’s so used to having someone else take care of their problems that they’re helpless, worse than any kid, because at least they can adapt. We’ve been ripe for a disaster like this for a long time.”
An ambulance screamed, its siren crying.
Susan peered through the slats over the windows. The ambulance pulled up outside Charlotte General Hospital, dropped injured people off, and then took off again. It had to swerve around cars that had been dumped and left on the pavement. People carried loved ones in their arms screaming, crying and wailing.
One man carried a small body in his arms. He looked from the hospital’s main entrance to the research center tucked behind it. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the crowds and chaos, or he was confused, not knowing whether the research center was a hospital or not. Perhaps he was just too desperate to care. He followed the path to the center.
“Oh no,” Steve said, peering through the windows.
“Shouldn’t we open the door?” Susan said. “We have medicine, food. We could help him.”
“And what do you think will happen if we did let him in?” Steve said.
Susan frowned.
“We could save his kid?” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”