The Rising (The End Time Saga Book 3)

by Daniel Greene

  “What does that mean for us?” she said.

  “More running. Either way, we’re in danger. As nice as these people have been, they could turn on us quick.”

  Her eyes flitted up to his. “I mean us.”

  “We keep fighting until we find a place for us.”

  “We should stay,” she offered. She glanced at the vehicles around them. “We could live here. There’s food, water, safety,” she said.

  He eyed the crude ring of vehicles with disgust.

  “We are further from the cities. Maybe it’s far enough away to be safe. A place like this, free and safe, but organized and cohesive in purpose.” Her words sounded like a pipe dream, when in reality, they lived in a nightmare.

  “That sounds amazing, but this place is lucky to exist and wouldn’t stand a chance against a horde.”

  She looked at the ground. “I’m not sure, but we have to reach for something better than survival or we will die tired, beaten and our spirits crushed. I need something. I need to believe in it. Back there in West Virginia, I saw people at their worst. Not like the infected. People like you and me, and it crushed me. It took away my hope. When you rescued us, a glimmer of hope was there, but when you left me again and Lucia died, I knew I was wrong to hope. People are evil. They lack morality and conviction. They don’t even have a sliver of compassion for others. It makes me sick to be like that. I’ve seen the good in people in the past, and I want it back. Even if it’s just a lie I tell myself so I can sleep at night.”

  Steele’s jaw dropped a little, his mouth hanging open a crack. It had been days since she had said more than a few sentences at once to him. “I…I understand. I want all those things too, but I’m not sure where they even exist at this point.”

  Her eyes grew impassioned. “We can run trying to find them, or we can make them. I may not be the same person I was, things might never be the same in our relationship, but we can only reap what we sow. We either build a society we want to live in, or we perish in the flames of someone else’s.”

  Her words burned inside him. “The world will never be the same. I’ve accepted that. But everything I’ve done was to keep you and others safe. I’m no saint, but I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You never would have left me in Pittsburgh if that was true,” she said.

  He shook his head no. I am going to be paying for that decision for awhile. “I thought we were over this.”

  “No. You have to understand why you were wrong.”

  “I had to leave. It was the only way Colonel Jackson would let us go.”

  “We should have left then, escaped.”

  He threw his hands in the air. “With Mauser on crutches. No vehicle. Mountains to climb. Hundreds of thousands of infected between us and here. There was no way. We needed them.”

  “You left me alone.” She looked away, trying to compose herself.

  “You weren’t alone. Mauser was there along with Kevin and Joseph.” Mauser’s name was a bitter mint on his tongue.

  “They aren’t you.”

  “They aren’t, but if I thought there was a better way, I would have done it. Colonel Jackson threatened your life if I didn’t do it, and you and I both know he meant it. We’re lucky to be free of the man.”

  She was silent. “I understand you have your duty, but remember you have a duty to come back to me. You have a duty to include me in your life. You have a duty…,” she stopped, her sentence trailing off.

  “I’ll always come back to you. I’ve always promised I would.”

  She sniffed hard, rubbing her nose. Awkward tension filled the air.

  He reached into the cargo pocket of his pants, removing the yellow, packaged birth control pills.

  “I found these for you. Probably won’t need these, but,” he said, giving her a careful look. He placed the plastic wrapped package in her hand.

  She stared down at the package and back at him. It was as if she held Pandora’s box in her hands, infinitely tempting but only woes were locked deep inside.

  “That’s the right kind, right?” he asked, confused by her response, thinking she would be appreciative or at least want them.

  The disc-shaped object sat atop her open palm. She eyed them poisonously.

  “Are they not right ones?”

  She quickly put them in her pocket and wiped her hands on her camouflage pants.

  She gave him a short smile. He was confused. He expected some sort of thanks.

  “Of course they are. Thank you,” she said quickly.

  “Okay, good. Can’t be too careful. Jesus, can you imagine if you got pregnant now?”

  Her throat jiggled up and down as she swallowed.

  “I can’t.”

  JOSEPH

  Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO

  An air-pressure resistant door closed behind him with a whoosh. It sealed closed and the air was sucked out of the chamber, leveling the air pressure with Patient Zero’s containment room. The low pressure made it difficult for pathogens to escape. A rubber bladder inflated, making the seal tight along the door edges.

  Joseph’s blue HAZMAT suit wrinkled and scrunched as he turned toward Dr. Weinroth. Behind her plastic faceplate, she flashed him a nervous smile.

  Their section of Cheyenne Mountain was a Biosafety Level Four Laboratory (BSL-4), meaning they could handle any and all known diseases that were fatal and had no known vaccine or cure. In this case, their current viral enemy was both, unknown with no known treatment.

  “Are you ready?” he asked Dr. Weinroth. Her eyes were anxious beneath her fogging glasses.

  “Of course,” she said. Her voice shook a bit in his headset earpiece. “My glasses are kind of a pain,” she added softly, pushing on her plastic faceplate.

  “Mine too,” Joseph said into his microphone. They both wore headsets to communicate effectively inside their suits. She stared at the metal door as if it were the gate to Hell. A red biohazard sign covered the middle of the door, reading Authorized Personnel Only over the glass.

  Whether or not she was ready, it was time. He timidly pressed the flat of his palm onto a large, circular red button on the wall. This was his first day without a sling, and his arm was shaky at best. When he let his mind drift at night, he could still feel the blade sticking into his flesh and through the muscle, the cold foreign metal inside his body.

  The button depressed and an orange siren on the ceiling spun. It honked away like a submarine under attack from above. If they were exiting the lab, vertical banks of nozzles would be spraying them with a decontamination shower for over seven minutes.

  The doors rolled open. With a look at one another for courage, the two doctors hesitantly stepped inside the white room. The overhead fluorescent lights shone down with extreme brightness. They were encased in airtight boxes to prevent viruses from collecting along the edges. Epoxy was lathered over any fixture where a pathogen could hide.

  Richard Thompson lay on a single shiny metal table in the middle of the room. His arms were bound at his sides. A white sheet covered his lower body. His head was strapped down with a band across his forehead. Machines lined the head of the bed. They beeped out Richard’s heartbeat and other bodily functions with robotic consistency. A miracle in itself, he was the only infected person still alive.

  The doctors’ blue biohazard suits crunched step-by-step like they were walking across a bubble wrap covered floor for Patient Zero. The room’s ceilings were high, well over twenty-five-feet tall. The room was all white except for the two-way mirror on the wall. The other doctors observed from the opposing side.

  Richard’s eyes, the color of chalky chocolate milk, moved from one doctor to the other. “Who are you? What are you doing to me?” Richard stammered. His chin shook with fright and his breath quivered from his lips.

  “Richard. It’s me, Dr. Jackowski. I found you at your home in Grand Haven.” There were others. Your wife and daughter. Dead. Joseph digested the thought hopin
g the man couldn’t read his thoughts.

  Richard closed his eyes. “My wife? And Helen?”

  “I am so sorry, but they have passed,” Joseph said.

  Richard stayed with his eyes forced closed for a moment. “No. No,” he whispered. When he opened them, they blamed Joseph with angry tears.

  “I wish there was something I could have done for them.”

  “You could have started by having your friends not shoot them,” Richard spat. Richard tried to turn his head away but had to settle with averting his almost white eyes.

  Joseph swallowed hard. No choice, but how could we ever make this man understand? “If you cooperate with us you will be able to save the lives of millions of people.” If that many are left.

  Richard twisted his face. Joseph touched Richard’s shoulder. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  “Who’s the girl?” Richard said. His eyes turned to Dr. Weinroth like a predator.

  “This is Dr. Weinroth. She is an infectious disease specialist with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. We are going to run some very basic tests in an attempt to learn more about the virus.”

  “Hello, Richard. We are here to help,” Dr. Weinroth said with a sad smile.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Richard cried. His arms pulled against his restraints. His normally nonexistent veins became vascular, crisscrossing his forearms. “Why am I strapped down? Let me out of here.” His hands rolled in a circle as he searched for a way to free himself. Dr. Weinroth took a step back. Joseph locked eyes with her, trying to give her strength. Her pretty face was stricken with worry.

  Joseph nodded to her. “It’s okay. He’s harmless in his current state.”

  She shook herself. “I’ve…” She looked at him again. “I haven’t been this close to an infected patient yet.”

  “You haven’t? How?”

  “I’ve been here since the outbreak. I wasn’t with Colonel Byrnes at Detrick. They only sent us samples, but no live specimens.”

  Joseph gave her a comforting smile from behind his suit mask. He glanced over her shoulder at the mirror. He was certain Byrnes scrutinized him on the other side.

  “Let us begin. Richard, I am going to give you a topical anesthetic, and we are going to biopsy some of your poxes.”

  “Okay,” Richard said quietly.

  Joseph picked a syringe up and pressed it into Richard’s shoulder.

  “Ow,” Richard uttered. Joseph ignored him and injected his shoulder. He removed the needle and set it down.

  “Now that’s not so bad is it?” he said to Richard.

  “It stung.” Richard’s eyes kept going from doctor to doctor.

  “Dr. Weinroth. Can you hand me the scalpel?” His eyes briefly grazed her plastic-covered face. She handed Joseph the surgical knife. He tapped Richard’s skin.

  “Do you feel that?” Joseph looked at Richard’s whitish-hued eyes. It was unsettling to see a live person with such a dead stare. Joseph tried to smile.

  “No. Only pressure,” Richard said.

  “Good.”

  Joseph went to work like a sculptor. He carved a centimeter-wide pox off Richard’s shoulder and placed it in a glass tube.

  “I am going to draw his blood,” Dr. Weinroth said. She tied a rubber tube around Richard’s arm and pushed a needle into his skin. Joseph massaged around Richard’s neck with his fingers, locating a golf ball-sized node.

  “I would like to have one of his nodes as well,” Joseph said. He looked up at Rebecca. She filled vials with Richard’s almost black-red blood. Richard tensed underneath their probing hands and needles.

  “I…I…I can feel it,” Richard shouted. Joseph stopped what he was doing.

  Richard let out a groan and his neck stretched. The veins bulged along his throat. Dr. Weinroth looked at Joseph, eyebrows creased upward.

  “I can feel it inside me, bubbling beneath the surface of my skin. It’s crawling in my veins.” He twisted his head toward Joseph. His restraints dug into the skin of his forehead. For a moment, he let out a low moan. “Ooooo.” His lips then curled into a snarl. “It only wants to get out!” he screamed. His shoulders rocketed against the table. His torso thrust upward as if he were trying to bend in half the wrong way.

  Joseph instinctively took a step back, holding the scalpel in the air. Richard writhed on the table in deep affliction.

  “You’re going to be okay. I’m going to give you a sedative. It will make you feel less anxious.”

  Richard’s body banged back down on the metal table. His hands and feet still moved in their restraints. “That. Would. Be nice,” Richard said, his body relaxing a bit.

  “Dr. Weinroth, can you hand me the benzodiazepine dipthopham? Thirty milligrams.”

  She stared at him for a moment, eyes wide. “Joseph. That’s three times the recommended dosage for the average adult.”

  “I understand that, Rebecca, but this is no normal man.”

  She nodded. She picked up a syringe and stuck the tip inside a small vial. She extracted the clear fluid from the bottle and handed the syringe to Joseph. Their hands touched as she handed it off, and her hand lingered for a brief moment. Was that on purpose? She looked back down at her work. My cruel imagination.

  He put the syringe into the drip chamber and pressed the fluid inside. Richard blinked rapidly. Joseph held his breath for a moment, and Richard’s eyes closed.

  “How are you feeling, Richard?” he said down to him.

  “I’m…fine…,” he mumbled.

  “That’s better. I would have liked to have spoken with you more, but we will have more time. Perhaps when you’re less agitated.” Joseph gave Rebecca a smile which she returned, her plain pink lips flipping up on the sides.

  “I agree. I’m thinking that we should take that lymph node biopsy while he’s sedated,” she said.

  “I concur. I’ll prep the large gauge needle for you?”

  Patient Zero’s foot twitched. At first, it was a small jerk. Joseph and Rebecca stopped. It swung wide in a rotation like a windshield wiper.

  Rebecca stopped her preparation. “Did you see that?” she whispered.

  “Uh, yeah. Must be an involuntary muscle spasm.”

  Unsureness crossed her features. “I’ve never seen that before with dipthopham.” She continued at a high whisper. “And never with such a high dose.”

  “Neither have I,” Joseph uttered. He leaned his face close to Patient Zero. The man’s chest rose and fell at a slow rate. One, two, three, up. One, two, three, down. The heart monitor beeped an even, controlled double beep. Joseph stood upright.

  “His breathing is normal—.” Joseph was cut off as Patient Zero started to shake uncontrollably. The metal table rattled beneath him. His body appeared to be in some sort of hypothermic involuntary state. Every single portion of the man vibrated. The heart monitor fired up with a hurricane of mini-heartbeat waves.

  “What’s he doing?” Rebecca shouted. Patient Zero’s body convulsed, and stopped. The heart rate monitor toned down as the man’s heartbeat came under control again. The room became quiet save for the monitors beeping. Joseph found himself holding his breath.

  “I think that did the trick,” he said. He tried to give her a smile with some swagger behind it. “Shall we continue?”

  Rebecca gave him a nervous smile. “Of course.”

  Joseph glanced over at the two-way mirror, knowing the other doctors were critiquing his every move.

  Joseph’s breath steamed up his mask. He pushed on his clear faceplate with his blue plastic-suited hands. It did nothing but knock beads of condensation down his mask. The only sound in his head was the beating of his heart in his chest. He took a step closer.

  “Richard is restrained. We have nothing to fear from him,” he said.

  Rebecca nodded fast, but her suit didn’t move.

  “Let’s continue,” he managed with more bravery than he felt.

  “Okay. Where were we? Ah yes, th
e lymph node biopsy.” Joseph gave the monitor an uneasy look. The blips were coming too slow. The beeping slowed as Patient Zero’s heart rate dropped.

  “Jesus, his heart rate’s crashing,” Joseph said. He reached for Patient Zero’s chest restraints. He undid the straps, throwing them to the sides. “Loosen those restraints. We can’t have anything impeding his blood flow.”

  Joseph’s hands fumbled along the wrist straps. Rebecca did as he asked, loosening Richard’s other arm restraints.

  “Let’s get some oxygen in him.” Rebecca turned and twisted a knob atop an oxygen tank. She quickly handed the mask to Joseph. He placed it timidly around Patient Zero’s face. He folded his hands and placed them on Patient Zero’s chest and began giving him compressions. Within thirty seconds, the heart rate monitor was back to normal. Joseph leaned back, watching the monitor.

  “See. There we go,” he said, breathing hard.

  Joseph picked up the biopsy syringe off the ground. No need for a new one. Sterile facility.

  He inched the twenty-gauge needle point against the lymph nodes in Richard’s neck that sagged to the side through his skin, too heavy to remain in place. Rebecca bent in and, with her finger and thumb, and forced his eyelid open.

  Patient Zero’s eyes glared at her. They darted to Joseph and back to Rebecca in a few blinks.

  “Raahhh,” Patient Zero snarled. His mouth worked open and closed. His hand shot from its confines and grabbed Rebecca by her wrist. He twisted and turned beneath the other restraints. Joseph watched in horror.

  “Joseph!” she screamed. She bent in his grasp, pulling like a dog fighting in a tug-of-war with hard jerks for her arm back. Patient Zero kicked one leg free and then the other.

  “My hand,” she said, frantic.

  Patient Zero stood upright.

  “Joseph,” she cried. She cowered, his hands wrapped tightly around hers. Alarms blared overhead. The other doctors had seen. Help would be coming soon.

  “Let me go,” she cried. Yellow sirens swirled above them. “Joseph,” she mumbled.

  “Richard,” Joseph commanded. Richard turned his head to the side, and his whitish eyes judged him for a moment. “Get back on the table.” Richard ignored him and turned back to Rebecca, driving her forward.