The Rising (The End Time Saga Book 3)

by Daniel Greene

  She looked over the roof of the pickup at Steele. “He’s right, Steele. We agreed that people can come and go as they see fit.”

  Steele sidestepped to his left so he had a better angle to see her while keeping an eye on Jack.

  “We never agreed people could rob us. Let me search his car. Anything that’s ours stays and then he can go,” he said.

  People emerged from their shelters like curious lemurs, and a crowd was starting to gather to get a view of the dispute.

  “Jack has been here for a long time. He wouldn’t rob us,” Tess said. Her next words were directed at Jack. “Why are you leaving now?”

  “I think his actions speak for themselves. There’s a group out there that is safer than here. Why wouldn’t we all go?” Jack said.

  “Because they’re crazy. They’re holding Pagan hostage for Christ’s sake.”

  Jack faced her with a side glance at Steele. “In a few weeks, we could have snow on the ground. They got a real roof over their head, food, and power. How crazy can they be? You ever think that maybe we’re the crazy ones out here, slumming it in the shadow of an antique lighthouse?”

  “No one said you had to stay.”

  “Then let me and my family go,” Jack hissed, his lip curling.

  More people were showing up, including some of Steele’s volunteers. Steele leaned, looking into the backseat of the pickup. He closed in on the driver’s side door. One hand on his weapon and the other on the door handle, he yanked the door open. He forced Jack from the car amidst the screams of his children. Pushing Jack’s hands on the back of the truck bed, he searched his pockets.

  “My gun’s wedged between the console and the seat,” Jack said.

  Steele called over to Trent. “Check it.” The hunter dug into the driver’s seat removing a Glock 22 from the car.

  Steele turned back to Jack. “You got anything in your pockets?” he asked. He frisked Jack from his waistband to his pockets and then Jack’s pockets all the way down to his boots.

  Tess circled the vehicle. Black plastic bags sat in the pickup truck bed. She inched one open with the muzzle of her .45 1911. A can clanked to the truck bed and rolled end over end away from her all the way to the tailgate.

  “That’s my food,” Jack said to her. His eyes were angry and dark in the night.

  “All of it?” she asked. He had three large trash bags filled with canned goods.

  “Where did you get all of this?”

  “Tess, it was selfish, but I had to keep some stockpiled in case we had to get out of here. And now that you’ve handed the camp over to Mr. Gestapo, I’m leaving.” Steele had finished searching the man and picked up one of the bags.

  “This is a lot of food. Our camp could use it.”

  Steele’s eyes met Tess’s. She shook her head no. She could read his mind. He would take Jack’s food and leave him hungry to feed the group for another week. Sacrifice the small for the group’s greater good.

  “Steele. You said you would hold to the rules. No one is a hostage here. They’re free to go.”

  He set the bag back in the bed of Jack’s truck. His brow crisscrossed in fury.

  “You’re right. But when we run low on food because this selfish bastard has been thieving, you can be the one to look the kids in the eyes and tell them to stop crying.” His words stung her like barbed arrows. But he had made a promise.

  “We will find a way. We always do.” Her words felt as hollow as an empty theater.

  “Sure you will, sweetheart.” Jack sneered. “You hear me, Little Sable. This place is going to burn. And your two fearless leaders here are to blame. Do yourself a favor and leave as soon as you can,” Jack yelled out to all the people.

  Steele glared at the man. Tess thought he was going to pull the trigger on him. “Get out of here,” he growled.

  Jack hopped into the driver’s seat. “My gun?” Jack asked, holding out an arm.

  Trent stepped up, handing it to Steele. Steele looked at the gun for a moment and then held it at his side, glaring at Jack. He dropped the magazine and racked the slide back, catching the round. He placed the pieces back into Jack’s hand. His eyes flashed into the backseat. “If you didn’t have the kids, you wouldn’t be getting this back.”

  Jack snatched the pieces away and shoved it in the seat.

  Steele waved his arm at the Red Stripes to pull back the pickups blocking the entrance. The trucks rolled back, and Jack gunned it through the opening, spinning his tires in an effort to escape.

  They all stood watching the red taillights of his pickup grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear into the forest.

  “We should have stopped him from leaving,” Steele said.

  “It’s not our right to prevent him from going.”

  “Maybe it should have been. What if he tells them where we are? Now, I don’t have the element of surprise if we are going to rescue Pagan. What if he leads them here? We have a motorcycle gang who is here on charity and a ten-person neighborhood watch who can’t handle a gun without shooting themselves in the foot.”

  “Hey now,” Trent said.

  Steele glanced back at the deer hunter. “No offense.”

  We cannot compromise the integrity of this place. I won’t. “If we don’t adhere to the things that make this place unique, then we are no better than those people out there.”

  Steele took a hand and rubbed his forehead. “I know what I promised.” He looked at the ground. “We’re vulnerable. Our position is weak and we are entirely dependent on the Red Stripes.”

  She glanced over at Half-Barrel and Bedford. They smoked cigarettes, leaning on a pickup blocking the entrance.

  The coolness of the night made her pull her robe tighter around her body.

  “I know,” she whispered. His body shivered a bit, but she could tell he was trying to hide it.

  “Shit, it’s cold,” he said. He wrapped an arm around his torso.

  She gave him a little smile. “Say, you want to come back for a nightcap? Warm up a bit. Pagan’s got a half-gallon of Lord Calvert sitting in the camper.”

  He scratched his head, looking back toward his tent.

  “Isn’t it bad luck to drink another man’s liquor while he’s being held hostage?”

  “Old wives’ tale.” She watched him squirm a bit under her gaze.

  His tone grew strict. “I’m only going to do one. I’ve got another long day of ‘don’t shoot yourself’ tomorrow with the volunteers.”

  They walked back to her camper and she flicked on an electric lantern. She set it on the camper table. A dim glow filled the musty inside.

  “Don’t look,” she commanded over her shoulder.

  “What?” he said.

  She let her thin black robe drop to the ground and removed her gun harness. Her body was bare aside from her thong. It sounded like someone had choked the words from his mouth. She could feel his eyes on her flesh. Grabbing a sweatshirt from a pile in the corner, she threw it on. Turning, she caught his eye. Hairy chested, big bearded, he stood there in his boxer briefs, nearly naked as well. His eyes were large and he looked like he was trying not to stare at her legs.

  “I’m a terrible host. Grab a blanket or something.” She waved a finger to a cupboard on the wall. But I wouldn’t mind if you stayed that way. “Unless you wanted to stay warm the old-fashioned way?” She smirked at him.

  His eyes ran down to her lips and she full-on smiled. “I’ll take a blanket,” he gargled out after a moment. He went into a cupboard, using it to block his view of her. He found one and wrapped it around his shoulders.

  She snatched a blanket off her bed and covered herself with it. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. I covered up.”

  He closed the cupboard slowly.

  Opening up her futon bed, she pulled out the half-gallon bottle of whiskey and snagged a couple of shot glasses from the table. Clanking them upright, she poured the honey-colored booze into the glasses. She held one out and he took
it from her. He eyed the alcohol with a small smile under his beard.

  “Been awhile since I had some of this,” he said with a smile. He hefted the alcohol to his lips.

  “Wait,” she commanded, and his hand stayed hovering near his lips. “You can’t crush the shot without saying cheers to something.”

  “Haha. Forgive me,” he said with a slight turn of his head.

  “To Little Sable Point. May it be a beacon of light for those in need.”

  “To Little Sable Point. May it be strong enough to weather the storm,” he added, throwing his head back and downing his shot. “Woo, that’ll wake you up in the morning.” He shook his head out.

  She smiled at him, her eyes filling with mirth. “How about another?”

  “How about it,” he said with a smile.

  JOSEPH

  Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO

  Joseph rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. His mind was foggy and his body weary. He had spent two days with Rebecca trying to pour over the samples from Patient Zero, countless infected, and his samples from Africa, all having been digitalized for mass research.

  He hadn’t left her side in over twenty-four hours. A ball of tension and tired muscle had formed in the base of his neck from hunching over his laptop. The spot right below where the cranium connects with the spinal column. The spot that one could take out to stop the infected permanently.

  Rebecca drifted in and out of sleep. He felt guilty picking her brain when she was awake, knowing that she needed her strength to fight her losing battle against the pathogen.

  It broke his heart to have a front row seat as she degraded. She struggled to stay awake and help him, and she grew weaker by the hour. Pockmarks had appeared and begun to polka-dot her face like severe acne. They were eraser-sized bumps underneath her skin. Some of her lymph nodes had enlarged to the size of cherries, pushing out from beneath her skin. The swelling was due to the monkeypox virus, the gateway virus for their mystery satellite virus.

  New data popped up on the shared server from Byrnes’s experiments on Patient Zero. Joseph double-clicked the file, a yellow folder that read “Liver Samples.” Joseph skipped through dozens of videos of the virus as it infected live cells.

  Like a doorway, the monkeypox would latch onto the clean cell using tentacle-like receptors to hook in. A hose-like apparatus would punch into the host cell and the transfer of DNA would begin. It was a disgustingly simple process and fast.

  The injection took place and the virus shot its genetic material inside the host cell. The monkeypox virus moved its own genetic material inside. Close behind it, the satellite cell tailed behind like a little brother into the host cell. The monkeypox virus would disengage and float to its next cellular victim. Later, the satellite dealt out its own version of viral reprogramming of the host virus and host cell.

  He scrolled down to another video. There has to be a way to work through this. He covered his mouth over his surgical mask as he yawned.

  Rebecca coughed herself awake. “Hi, Joseph,” she said through her mask. A fleck of blood dotted her surgical mask. The virus is in her lungs, he thought. He inched backward in his chair.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” she said. Her voice sounded raw as if she had been out all night at a concert. “I saw it the other day but couldn’t wrap my mind around it.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, setting down his laptop. She grabbed her tablet from the side table. He moved closer to her and tried to ignore the blood on her mask. She swiped on her tablet, searching for an image.

  “Look here.” She flipped her tablet around his way. Joseph studied the image for a moment. The patient’s name read Weinroth along the top.

  “This is your blood work,” he mumbled. Eventually, she will be just that. A data file. He gulped down his sadness.

  Her lighter brown eyes watched him. “Yes, it is. Now watch.” She clicked a sideways triangle on the screen and the video began.

  A monkeypox viral cell attached to a healthy cell as he had seen before. Satellite virus tagged along and injected itself into the cell.

  “It’s as we’ve seen before. The healthy cell has the satellite DNA inside it along with monkeypox.” She dragged her finger along the bottom, fast-forwarding the video.

  “But what about there?” The cell moved to the bottom of the blood vessel and lay still.

  “The cell is lysogenic, in its dormant phase. That’s the virus taking over,” Joseph said.

  “But is it?”

  Joseph stared at the video. The cell lay dormant as if it hibernated at the bottom of a blood vessel. She dragged her finger along the time bar. The video skipped hours.

  “Here,” she said. “Now watch.” The still cell twitched and began to move. It caught another cell on the way by and the satellite virus injected its DNA into it.

  “Wait. It has a new receptor?” he asked.

  “Yes, but continue watching,” she said.

  The newly infected cell floated away and seemingly went dormant until it too rose up again to propagate itself onward.

  “We all know that a virus needs a live cell to propagate itself. The only possible explanation is that the cell becomes dormant while the virus changes the DNA within the cell.” His head felt like it weighed thirty pounds and his neck could only support a paltry seven.

  “And people are supposed to stay dead when they die,” she finished. He stared at her.

  He blinked, trying to focus on what she was saying. “What are you trying to say?”

  She swiped to another video. “Look at this sample from an infected person who had already expired.”

  Cells danced inside the veins. A pile of cells twitched and quivered. The cells swam inside, latching onto any cell not infected.

  “This subject is dead?” He rubbed his neck now, trying to work out the knot that formed at its base.

  “Yes. It was taken from a man outside Atlanta who had been dead for four days.”

  “Theoretically, this is not possible. It’s not possible that his cells are still operating after four days.” His mind raced as he tried to comprehend the information. He knew the host died after infection. He knew the dead still operated physically after death. He knew the satellite virus was to blame.

  “Yes, Joseph. Four days is a long time, but theoretically, it’s not possible for those cells to behave in that fashion after so long. But. Let me go out on a long limb here. What if the cell had to be dead for the virus to take over?”

  Joseph squeezed his eyes shut. “No, no. Every study known to man states the same thing: a virus needs a live cell to spread.”

  She coughed again and closed her eyes in pain. Her forehead squeezed and lines creased it. She laid there in obvious pain. His heart leapt for her in his chest. There has to be something I can do.

  “Entertain the thought, Joseph. This is a game changer. Something that has turned the world upside down. The dead have risen. It’s unbelievable enough in itself. We have to entertain the idea that this virus operates outside the normal conventions of virology,” she whispered, her voice raspy.

  Joseph stared at the video. He whispered it to himself out loud. “What if the virus required the host cell to be dead? What if it was hiding in the monkeypox infected cells, waiting for the host cells to die to activate itself?” He ran a hand through his hair. “It explains the speed at which the virus has mutated. Going from days for the patient to die, to minutes, to seconds. It initially needed the monkeypox, but now, as more and more people die, it only needs itself to propagate itself.” He glanced up at her over the tablet.

  “It also explains why the dead rise up. The virus is controlling them at a cellular level but needs the infected dead to do so,” she said softly.

  “Dear God,” he whispered. His hand covered his masked mouth.

  She looked like she wanted to cry. “I know.”

  He felt dizzy like he couldn’t get enough oxygen. “This is an extinction event. Dinosaur killer. T
he epoch ends here. We aren’t biologically equipped to fight this off. The body won’t recognize the dead cells as a threat. It allows the virus free reign, unhindered by the body’s defenses.”

  “If we can develop a vaccine, we at least have a fighting chance,” she whispered.

  “How? We are dealing with something that has turned our understanding of science on its head. How do I make a vaccine for something that doesn’t follow the rules?” Joseph said. He put his head in his hands. “We are all going to die.”

  She coughed. It sounded like fluid was building up in her lungs. “You are going to stop this,” she said.

  He shook his head in dismay. “Rebecca, you are dying of a disease I can’t fix. In a few days, you’ll be dead and I will be alone in this fight. I can’t possibly do this by myself.”

  Tears formed at the corners of her eyes. “I know that, Joseph, but who are you if you don’t try?”

  “I’m a nobody who failed the world when it needed him the most.”

  Her hand reached for his and she squeezed it tight. Her hand was cool on his. “You don’t have a choice. Find it in yourself to do this. You have what it takes. Now go do it.”

  He bit his lip. He stretched his neck. The knot was still in place, making the rest of his back hurt down through his shoulder blades.

  “Rebecca, please don’t patronize me.”

  “I believe in you.” Her eyes crinkled as she smiled.

  I wish I did. He gave her a determined gaze.

  “I’ll need your help because you know Byrnes won’t help me.”

  “I know he won’t. He used to be such a different man, difficult but in an ingenious kind of way,” she trailed off thinking about the past, her life now only judged by days and hours.

  “Where do we start?” Joseph said. A clock ticked in the back of his mind.

  “I’ve got an idea.” She held up her tablet. “Take a look here.”

  Joseph couldn’t hold himself back. “Rebecca,” was all he could utter. Her eyes darted from the tablet back to him. His mouth dropped open a little as he grappled with the words to say to her. “I. Never mind.”