Pathosis (A Dark Evolution Book 1)

by Jason LaVelle

  Each man wore a long black turtleneck and a full-face mask, complete with respirator. Kala gazed a little longer at the submachine guns they carried. Perfect for laying out a crowd, but even the most skilled shooter would have trouble hitting a target a hundred yards away, like they were, with an MP5. These guys weren’t snipers, either. To Kala, they looked like National Guardsmen, too cocky to be regular army, but proficient enough to know how to handle themselves. Kala’s stomach was rolling around uncomfortably, so she turned away from the gruesome scene. Then, unexpectedly, a short stream of vomit erupted from her mouth and onto the scrubby grass beneath her.

  “Don’t lay there,” she said quickly, then made her way back down the hill.

  Adrian waited for Kala to wipe her mouth and turn back to them.

  “So, I guess we aren’t going to be able to get in, huh?”

  Abbie put her head down on her arms. Her back began to hitch and they heard sobs starting to emanate from her. Adrian put his hand on her back but she shrugged him off and continued to cry.

  “Abbie, honey, your parents weren’t in that crowd-” Kala began.

  “How can you know?” Abbie shouted at her, looking at her with a beet red and sweaty face.

  “Shh!” Kala cautioned. “They’ll hear you!”

  “I don’t even care,” Abbie moaned.

  “Well I do,” Kala responded gruffly, “and I’m sure your parents do, too.”

  Kala looked up at Adrian, who was standing there but saying nothing. Typical man, she thought.

  “Your parents weren’t in that crowd. Those were people who were trying to get in to the airport. Your parents were already here, back by the terminals where the planes park.”

  “Yeah, they might have even let them fly out of here already,” Adrian offered.

  Kala glared at him. What an idiot. “I’m sure they are keeping them quarantined on board the plane they came in on, or in some other shelter. You know, to keep them away from the infected.”

  Abbie nodded at her slowly, that seemed to make sense.

  What Kala didn’t add was that if these men would mow down hundreds of innocent people out here, they may have decided that they should also take out the plane passengers. Who knew, these guys were obviously psychopaths, and whoever was making the decisions now was clearly in kill or be killed mode.

  “There’s only one thing we can do now,” Kala said calmly.

  Abbie stopped crying and looked at her curiously. There was hurt and dismay on her face.

  “We’re going to go find your parents.”

  Abbie’s face lit up and Adrian stepped back in shock. That was clearly not what either of them had expected her to say.

  “What?” Adrian said. “Past the guys with machine guns? Hello. They just killed a crowd of unarmed people, what do you think they’ll do to us?”

  Kala thought for a moment. It defied all logic and sense of self-preservation to continue, but Kala kept thinking about the boy with the bullet hole in his head. The boy that could have been her brother. She thought about all of the mothers, fathers, and children that were gunned down out there. It filled her with anger. She thirsted for justice, even if it was irrational. She wanted to punish those men who committed that atrocity. Then, she would find Abbie’s parents. She owed her friend that much. Whatever happened after, she could not say. She had to live in the very moment now.

  “Well for one thing, Adrian, we are not unarmed.” Kala looked him dead in the eye and raised the AR-15 she carried.

  Adrian drew several nervous breaths then nodded. Kala had to give him credit for having some cojones. She looked over at Abbie. The lithe, tan-skinned athlete raised her own blacked-out AR and gave her a nod.

  “Let’s do this shit.”

  Chapter 29

  “I may have something, Doctor,” a young, bearded FBI agent said, standing close to Ormiston.

  He looked up, a bit surprised; he had not seen this agent before. “Where did you come from?”

  “I was part of the evidence team that was on the ship - I’ve been in a hazmat suit all day, that’s why you haven’t seen me before now.”

  “So, what do you have?”

  “Well, it’s a bit mad, but I think it might work.”

  “Let’s hear it then, son.” Ormiston set down his pen. He was running the numbers on paper. He had arranged for the CDC to airdrop two pallets of anti-parasitic medication. With the help of a local hospital, they would begin to distribute the medicine to as many people as they could. Each person would get a prepackaged five-day supply of albendazole and prednisone, taken three times a day. It would be brutal on their systems, but the medicine should knock out anything growing inside them. Ormiston knew that hospitals all over the state were starting to implement this same protocol as quickly as they could, to try to stop the epidemic before it expanded outside Southern Florida. There wasn’t much hope left for the people of Miami, he knew, but they would try.

  “My grandfather was a farmer out in the boonies. He’s long since been retired now, but he still lives on the farm. He just leases out the land to other farmers now, instead of working it himself.”

  Ormiston nodded, but his mind was already trying to return to the huge job of managing this logistical nightmare. The treatment protocol: three pills a day, times five days, times three million possible infected, or those with the potential to be infected. The numbers were huge. The nation’s supply of antiparasitic medications would be completely depleted. If they ran out of albendazole, they would have to move on to ivermectin, and on down the ladder of effectiveness from there. The agent was still talking about the farm.

  “We used to play on the farm as children. We were all over the farm and the barns and the tractors. There was only one place we weren’t allowed. The barn had an aluminum sided shed attached in the back. Grandpa kept it padlocked, but we got in one day anyway; we had to find out what he was keeping in there.”

  “And?” Ormiston asked, while thinking that this story was going nowhere.

  “Well it looked like how we thought a toxic waste dump would look. There were giant steel drums stacked up two tall and filling the entire space. There must have been thirty or forty of them. The drums were rusted and black and smelled foul, but it wasn’t as if he could really dispose of them, not after the Stockholm Convention anyway. He just couldn’t use the stuff.”

  Ormiston raised his eyebrows. “Son, you are taking an awfully long time to get to the point here, and I have a ton of work to do. So if you don’t mind getting to the meat of things … ”

  “All in all there’s probably close to two-thousand gallons of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane in his shed, still there to this day.”

  “DDT,” Ormiston intoned. The wheels started up quickly in his head. Of course, he knew all about DDT. They used it in Africa to treat the walls of homes, to keep the mosquitos away. Disturbingly enough, that was the only legal use for DDT, to control vectors in malaria-ridden countries, and that was because they were more concerned about the fast and certain death from the malaria parasite than they were about the long slow death from cancer.

  “So my thinking is that there are probably a lot of old farmers with huge stockpiles of DDT just sitting in the back of a barn, unable to be legally used. There are also many aerial crop dusters in Florida, because of all the citrus groves. If we …”

  “Wait,” Ormiston interrupted him. “Spray DDT? From above? Are you crazy? We lightly sprayed the walls of homes in Africa to serve as a repellant; it was never blanketed down over a population. It’s - it’s DDT for Christ’s sake!”

  The young agent looked uncomfortable for a moment, but did not back down.

  “Yes, Doctor, and malaria still kills a lot of people. There are almost twenty million people in Florida, and three hundred million in America. Yo
u wanted ideas and I think this is a good one. In fact, it may be the only one. Even if you succeed in arming the residents with the medicine they need, the parasite will persist … unless we kill off its means of transportation. We have to kill the bugs, doctor.”

  Ormiston scratched at his face. Thick white stubble covered his cheeks and neck. He was a thin man, but age had begun to soften his face and neck and his jowls had started to become looser. “What’s your background, agent?”

  “Biology and forensic science.” The man grinned beneath his beard. “The FBI lets me carry a gun, though. Doctor, if it gets out of Florida, it’s going to be like the apocalypse, right?”

  “So we bomb Florida with the most deadly and destructive pesticide the world has ever seen?”

  “It’s way better than using VX,” the agent offered, referring to a failed pesticide that ended up becoming one of the nastiest chemical warfare weapons ever conceived.

  Ormiston rolled his eyes and sighed. “Sure, we’ll kill the bugs and everything else. Florida will be destitute - unfit for life. How many human lives in Florida?”

  “About twenty million.”

  “So we have the lives of twenty million humans against all other life on our peninsula. Are we worth more than the earth that sustains us? More than nature?”

  “DDT was used for decades and the world didn’t end.”

  “No - it didn’t. It’s never been used the way you’re suggesting though, to bomb an entire state.”

  “Our priority has to be to preserve our species. We cannot allow this to spread, doctor.”

  “I know that, of course I know that. I’ve already told Agent Grey that any and all measures needed to be taken to ensure the containment of this bug.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Well, what if this is God’s way, or nature’s way, if you will, of trying to get rid of us once and for all?”

  “Sir,” the young agent said, “really, even if I believed that, which I don’t – Mother Nature can go screw herself.”

  Ormiston sighed and rubbed his temples. He felt like crap. His head hurt and he was extremely nauseated. He and everyone at the Coast Guard base had been the first to start taking powerful anti-parasitic medicines. Who better to be guinea pigs? In any case, he and his team needed to be protected in order to try to save more lives. The unfortunate effects of the albendazole ranged from cold sweats to headaches, diarrhea, and terrible nausea. Better than dead. Better than turning into one of those damn zombies. Ormiston pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “If we do this, the public will hang us.”

  “If we don’t, there may no longer be a public.”

  Ormiston held up a hand. “I agree with you. Find every pilot you can. Track down planes and as much viable DDT as possible. Hell, get chlordane too, if you can find it, that shit was nasty. I’ll call the CDC and run this by the higher-ups; they’ll pass it along to the White House.”

  The young agent turned to depart.

  “Wait, where is Marlon Grey?”

  “He’s dealing with a … situation at the airport.”

  Ormiston nodded grimly. The airport was bad news, he was glad Marlon was handling it himself. Whatever it takes, Ormiston reminded himself.

  “Okay then, put a call in to Quantico and put them in the loop. Get any assistance you can from them.”

  The agent paused, then admitted, “I already talked to the assistant director, I called him before I came in to talk to you.”

  Ormiston looked up, shocked.

  “Sorry, doctor,” he said, “I work for the FBI, not the CDC.”

  Ormiston’s mouth was agape and he felt a frustrated heat rise up in him but he disregarded it. What does it matter now anyway? He threw up his hands.

  “Well you better get to it then, agent. The world is ours to destroy.”

  It was easy to sneak up on the guards, because they weren’t looking for someone to be approaching stealthily. The four men, all clad in tactical gear were chatting amongst themselves and occasionally glancing up the airport road, toward where the gate was. That was presumably where everyone had been coming through. All the people they slaughtered, Kala thought angrily.

  Kala, Abbie, and Adrian skirted around to the side of the main terminal building and approached the airport from an oblique angle, making use of the sun’s position to stay out of the guards’ sight lines. They weren’t far from the sentries now, thirty yards or so. They found a steel and glass parking ticket operator booth that was perhaps a five-foot square. From their vantage point crouching behind the tiny building, the three of them could easily observe the guards chatting amiably behind the mass of dead bodies they had created. Kala knelt down against the edge of the booth and leaned out in such a way that she could raise her rifle along the side of the building.

  Kala was nearly invisible where she knelt; her profile was so thin against the ticket booth. She brought the AR-15 up to her face, and taking long slow breaths, pressed her eye into the scope. Immediately, the sentry closest to her snapped into crystal clear focus and filled up the eyepiece. She could pick out every detail of his face and outfit through the fine optics. She brought the top reticle to bear on the man’s chest. Her finger lingered just outside the trigger guard. Her breathing was slow and carefully metered as she watched the man talking to his companions. She thought about the mass of dead people and her grip tightened, which caused the crosshairs to wobble.

  “Kala,” Adrian whispered just behind her. “Kala.”

  “What?” she replied with irritation. She needed to concentrate right now. She moved the crosshairs from the man’s chest to his waist, then down to his knees. That’s where she would hit him. Kala didn’t know if she was ready to kill someone, even if they were murderers themselves. She could permanently incapacitate him, though, and take him out of the fight here for good.

  “Kala, I was thinking … I think that taking these guys out is the right thing, but, then I was thinking that they obviously have cell phones or radios or both. If we open fire on them, they’re going to alert their buddies and we still won’t have an easy way to get in and back to the planes.”

  “Kala?”

  “I’m thinking,” she whispered. She raised the gun slightly, bringing the reticle back to bear on the man’s face. Killer. Murderer of children. But was she a killer too? Could she kill these men? Just to gain access to the airport on the chance that they would locate Abbie’s parents? Kala felt like she had seen more death in the last twenty-four hours than anyone should ever see in a lifetime. Reluctantly, she lowered the big rifle.

  “Okay, what do you think, Adrian? Do you have an idea?”

  Adrian glanced over his shoulder at Abbie. “No, but she does.”

  Kala maintained her position for a few more seconds, unsure of herself. In the end, she turned to her friend. Abbie sat with her bottom on the ground and her legs straight out in front of her, and she leaned back against the booth. She did not look well. Kala sat down next to her.

  “I didn’t really want to kill them anyway. I mean, I did, but I didn’t.”

  “I know you didn’t. I knew you wouldn’t. I think that injuring them would have just brought more misery down on us Kal, I really do.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Well, I don’t think the passengers are actually in the airport at all. I have a feeling that they are keeping them out there on the tarmac while they try to figure out what to do with them.”

  Kala nodded, “Probably, yeah.”

  “So, I want to get to them before whatever crazy person is in charge decides to make them dead like all of these poor people. But we don’t actually need to go in the airport at all, do we? I mean, we’re already through the fence, if we just follow the building around the long way over there, we’ll end up b
ehind it, on the runways.”

  “But...”

  “And I think the only reason we were going into the building was to take down those guards. But Kala, they’ll get theirs, in this life or the afterlife.”

  Kala looked from Abbie to Adrian. He cocked his head to the side and indicated he was on board with the new plan.

  “Kal, I just want to get to my parents. My leg is killing me, and I feel like I’m going to bust out crying every two minutes.”

  “They might make trouble for us later,” Kala reminded her.

  “Then you’ll have to deal with them later,” Abbie said, giving her a meaningful look.

  Kala gave another sigh, which she seemed to be doing a lot of. “Fine, okay. The airport is huge, though, and there could be more sentries out on the tarmac.”

  “I doubt it,” Adrian said. “I think these guys would expect to see anything that was coming.”

  Abbie pulled herself up off the ground. She peered around the edge of the booth, making sure the guard was occupied and looking in the other direction. Then she lightly ran up to the edge of the airport’s main building. Adrian and Kala followed, and they made their way around the long concrete structure.

  Kala didn’t know how far it was around to the back, but by the time they were rounding the last of the edges, they were all dripping sweat. The temperature and humidity was ratcheting its way up as they approached midday. All three of them were breathing heavily, especially Abbie, who was traveling with the added burden of an injured leg. She was a tough athlete, though, and she did not complain.

  They crept slowly around the corner and all at once, the runways and landing gates came into view.

  Chapter 30

  The smell of aircraft fuel was everywhere. It was, if possible, even worse when it was burning. Mixed in with the fuel were an acrid electrical smell and the aroma of cooking meat. Marlon thought that, in a way, it did not smell so bad. The stink reminded him of Gulf War One, being in Bagdad while the city was burning along with the corpses of tanks and planes.