Song of Ariel: A Blue Light Thriller (Book 2) (Blue Light Series)

by Mark Edward Hall

  This is the plague Grampy Joe wrote about in the letter he left for me. He wasn’t a delusional old fool. He was telling the truth. This is absolutely real. Which means the rest of it is real. Oh, hell!

  Danielle slammed the gearshift down into drive and stomped on the gas pedal. The car leapt forward. Two men (things) stepped in front of her. She maneuvered around them. They both had swollen red eyes.

  A tall, thin black man with silver hair came out of the motel’s office holding a long gun. As she passed him by he lifted the gun and fired at the two approaching men. They both flinched but otherwise acted like nothing had happened. They continued to move inexorably toward him in that mechanical, jerky way that reminded Danielle of creatures she’d seen in zombie movies.

  “Damn it!” Danielle said. She pulled back around and saw that the two men (or whatever the hell they were now) were within ten feet of the old man who again lifted the gun and fired. The two things (not human. No way were they human) jerked (not with pain but with the sheer force of impact) as pieces of flesh flew off them. They were now close enough to grab the old man. Danielle saw him pull the trigger again and again, the gun jerking spasmodically, but they were not dissuaded. Soon he was out of ammo, so he lowered the gun and stood there waiting for them to grab him.

  Danielle aimed her car at the two things and hit the accelerator slamming into them at thirty miles an hour. She heard bones crunch. One came over the hood and crashed into the windshield but miraculously did not break it. The other bumped beneath the car’s undercarriage. She slewed the car around and came back toward the skinny old man who was still standing there as if in shock. Danielle hit the brake and came to a screeching halt beside him. She rolled down her passenger side window and said, “Get in!”

  “How do I know you ain’t one of them?”

  “You see any of them driving cars?” A dozen feet away, one of the men she had run over was animating, sitting up, getting ready to stand.

  The skinny old man hesitated for only a brief moment longer, glancing first at the chaos around him then back at the motel office before opening the car door and sliding onto the front seat. He rested the gun between his legs and heaved a deep sigh. Danielle hit the gas and the BMW leapt forward.

  “My wife turned into one of those . . . things,” the man said in a Cajun inflected voice that was hoarse with emotion. “When I woke up this mornin she was at my throat.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “Why didn’t I . . .?” The old man was shaking his head in disbelief.

  Danielle glanced over at him. “What? You mean turn into one of them? I don’t know. I don’t know what’s causing it to happen. If it’s some sort of virus then it would be my guess that some people are immune. Viruses are funny like that. They don’t infect everyone. No one knows why. There are a number of reasons. Some have better immune systems than others.” Danielle shrugged.

  “What if it’s not a virus?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Danielle said.

  “I turned on the TV after my wife . . .” the man stopped as if he was searching for just the right words to describe what had happened to his wife. He gave up and said, “The government had hijacked all the stations. They were tellin everyone to stay inside and lock the doors and windows. And just like that all the broadcasts stopped and the TV went snowy. Everything was off the air. Tried the phones too. Got a recording.”

  By now Danielle was maneuvering toward the highway on-ramp. Bands of people (things) wandered aimlessly. She avoided a group of them and accelerated up the ramp toward the highway.

  “How do we know that’s not going to happen to us?” the man said.

  “We don’t,” Danielle replied. “What’s your name?”

  The man looked over at Danielle as if he hadn’t understood the question. Or perhaps he was still pondering the answer to his own question.

  “My name’s Danielle,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “It’s Slim Pickard. Some folks like to call me Slim Pickins, cause I’m so thin and all.”

  “Nice to meet you, Slim.” Danielle figured Slim was probably close to seventy but he seemed fit, and like his nickname suggested, he was definitely slim. All bones and sharp edges.

  “Good to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”

  Danielle looked over at Slim and smiled. “Please, Slim, call me Danielle. I’m not ready to be a ma’am yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Slim smiled sheepishly and settled back into his seat like a bag of bones.

  Danielle picked her phone off the dash and pressed a button. She put it to her ear and listened for a minute and then put it back down. Up ahead the highway was in chaos. Vehicles were off the road everywhere. Some had crashed together, others were on fire. Everywhere people had banded together in groups. Some looked normal but others didn’t. Danielle was not about to pull any more rescues. Who knew what was real and what wasn’t? People lay dead everywhere. Some looked as though they’d been beaten and ravaged, others had no heads. There were a few emergency vehicles moving here and there, but the chaos seemed too extensive for them to take care of everyone in need. Civilization—at least civilization here—had completely broken down. Danielle knew she was on her own. She was quite certain that whatever emergency crews were out and capable of doing their jobs, were probably spread thin. Their efforts were perhaps even futile. The shit had hit the fan big time, and it would be a miracle if she herself didn’t catch whatever was going around.

  She had gassed up in Alabama when she’d stopped to eat last night so she had nearly three quarters of a tank left. She didn’t know how far they were from the Louisiana state line and she was in no mood to stop and buy more gas until they were far away from here. She kept her speedometer at about fifty and weaved the small beamer in and around mostly stopped traffic. Luckily it was early morning on I-10, it was a national holiday, and the traffic hadn’t been all that heavy when the shit hit the fan. So far she had not encountered any total blockages of the highway. She did see a few other moving vehicles, including a number of police cars, reassuring her that not everyone was infected. Not yet anyway.

  “Were you staying at the motel?” she asked Slim conversationally.

  “Well, yeah, but I always stay there. I’m the owner, see. The inn is a franchise. Worked thirty years to save enough money to buy it. My wife and I have an apartment in the back. Now this.” Slim stopped talking even though his mouth still worked, as if he was searching for something more to say about their situation.

  “Tell me about your wife.”

  “She was the love of my life,” Slim said. “What you might call a soul mate. Now she’s gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Slim.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “What happened this morning?” Danielle asked. “I mean, how did she react? You said she was at your throat.”

  “We went to bed just like normal around ten o’clock. Night clerk works the desk. I heard Millie get out of bed sometime before daylight. Said there was a commotion out in the hallway. I must’ve went back to sleep. When I woke up again it was daylight outside and Millie was on top of me. At first I thought she was gettin frisky, but that wasn’t it. She was trying to bite me. Millie’s not a strong woman but she was strong then. And her eyes were all swelled up and red. She was growling, just like some kinda animal. I fought her off and got out from under her before she could do any harm. I was trying to reason with her, but could see that it was too late. There wasn’t any reason left in her.” Slim stopped talking. Danielle looked over and saw that his cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Then what happened, Slim?”

  “Her head exploded. Just like that. No warnin or nothin. But there was nothin in it but these dry things that come out and floated around the room. There shoulda been brains and wet stuff, but there wasn’t none of that, just all these . . . floaty things. Millions of them.”

  “Did you breathe any of them, Slim?”

  “Yes,
ma’am. You think that means I’m gonna end up like her?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “You can let me out right now if you think . . .”

  I’m not going to do that, Slim. I don’t know how long it takes for the contagion to do its thing. Seems like it’s happening faster than it should. That might be a good thing for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never seen a retro virus act this way. I’ve never seen it work so quickly. Usually, as with cold and flu viruses, there’s an incubation period of six to nine days. From what I’ve seen, this virus, if that’s what it is, has an incubation period of somewhere between almost immediate to as much as a few hours.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s not. At least not in my experience. This is something totally new.”

  “How do you know these things?” asked Slim.

  “I’m a doctor. I work with retro viruses. The kinds that cause things like leukemia, cancer and AIDS. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “I think it’s the end of the world,” Slim said.

  “It just might be,” Danielle said, and as she maneuvered the BMW down the highway she thought of the letter, the object, the file of papers and the stern warning her grandfather had left her. If mankind continued on its present course it would be besieged by a terror, a plague so heinous that few if any would survive.

  Some inspiration that was beyond her ability to explain caused Danielle to put her hand in her pocket and cup the object. The face of a beautiful, angelic child entered her mind. Something about the child’s expression made her want to weep with joy. “We need to go north,” she said suddenly.

  “Why?” asked Slim.

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling, and in the past twenty four hours I’ve learned to trust my feelings.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Slim said. “Coming up you can take Route 55 toward Jackson. That good enough?”

  “I think that should do just fine,” Danielle said. And as she drove Danielle thought about all that had happened and wondered how everything would play out over the next several days. Again she thought of her grandfather’s stern warning. What better way to invade Earth then to infect humans with a retrovirus that almost instantly destroys their brains. What she could not fathom, however, was how they could continue to motivate like that. How could a human being with a head full of dry spores move as if they were still alive? Well, maybe not alive in exactly the way she thought of life, but at least able to move and do damage. Everything in her training had taught her that every body function started with the brain and depended on the brain. She did not understand how it could work without the brain. Raw reflexes, the sort that caused chickens with their heads chopped off to run around aimlessly were short lived. This was something different, something new, something deeply mysterious.

  How many would survive the plague? Really survive as intact human beings. Some. This was incontestable. It was the nature of life. No matter how advanced or deadly a contagion was, there would be some who were immune. This was the reality. Danielle knew she needed a sample of the spores and a lab in which to test them and soon. Perhaps others were thinking along these same lines. Hopefully in Atlanta the CDC was testing them at this very moment trying to come up with an antidote. Was there still time to halt it before it was too late?

  Once again she cupped the object in her hand and saw the face of the beautiful child.

  Trust the object, it will show you the way.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ice Caves. Somewhere in the Northern Maine Wilderness,

  July 5th. Two days after the arrival.

  Doug McArthur moved in and around thickets of obstacles to reach the cave’s entrance and met Annie head on. He took her in his arms, hugging her fiercely. “So damn glad to see you.”

  “Me too,” Annie said kissing his eyes, his cheeks, his lips. “So afraid of losing you.”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “We’re okay.”

  She led Doug to the oak plank door beyond all the concealment.

  “God, what the hell happened down there?”

  Doug told her, starting with what he’d found in the cutoff, the empty vehicles and the headless man. The drone attack and the ensuing firefight he’d waged with the drone.

  “The cabin is gone, Doug. What are we going to do?”

  “We’re alive. And we have the caves. We’re safe here. At least for now. Where’s Ariel?”

  “I put her down for a nap. She was exhausted.”

  “How is she holding up?”

  “Okay. She took the cabin’s destruction rather well considering. But she had a little spell on the way up here.” They were inside the cave now with the oak door bolted behind them. Doug was soaked with sweat and he was still breathing harshly, his lungs burning with exertion. It was cool inside, however and Doug was grateful. He unslung his rifle and stuck it up on a rack attached to the cavern wall, well out of Ariel’s reach.

  “You mean like a panic attack?”

  “I don’t think so. You know how she is, so damned intuitive, so damn smart. She said there were bad people after you.”

  “She was right,” Doug said.

  Annie’s face fell. “I was hoping she was wrong, or maybe just paranoid. I don’t know how she knows these things, Doug. It scares the crap out of me.”

  “Me too.”

  “Who are they? Who’s after you?”

  “I don’t know. Just before I entered the woods to start up here I saw armed men wearing hazmat suits looking over the ruins of the cabin. I didn’t wait around to see what they wanted. When they don’t find any bodies my guess is they’ll spread out and search the entire area. We don’t have to guess anymore, Annie. They definitely know we’re here. They’ve probably known from the beginning.”

  “So why did they wait until now?”

  “I think something’s terribly wrong in the world. I can feel it. There’s no radio, no phones, take that and put it together with what I saw in the clearing. And now we have men wearing hazmat suits in the wilderness. Why? What’s out here that they’re afraid of?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m really creeped out about it. Do you think they’ll find us? Do you think they already know about the caves?”

  Doug stared long and hard at Annie. “I think it’s fifty/fifty,” he said. “We’ve been very careful about covering our tracks up here. But the government has spy satellites that can zoom in and watch activities on the ground in high resolution. They knew about the cabin.” Doug shrugged his shoulders. “I think it’s time to set the defenses.”

  Doug rushed deeper into the cave past the living area to a small walled-off room in back that contained a locked door. He took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. Just inside the door and to the left sat a five thousand watt gasoline powered generator mounted on a solid oak platform. The generator’s exhaust was vented up through the ceiling of the cave, concealed inconspicuously in amongst piles of rocks and boulders on the side of the mountain. Just behind and to the right of the generator lay a bank of 250 lithium powered batteries of the type used to power laptop computers. And mounted on the wall to the left lay a bank of small flat-screen video monitors, two rows of ten each, twenty in all. Over the past three years Rick Jennings had flown the generator parts, the batteries, video cameras and monitors, as well as other essentials a few hundred pounds at a time into Parker Pond with his float plane until they’d had enough to assemble what they had needed. The supplies had been packed on their backs up to the caves over a period of months.

  Doug switched on the battery power and a wall panel lit up with a slight hum. He did not need to start the generator. For readiness the batteries were charged once a week and it had been only three days since their last charging. The panel gauge showed the batteries at ninety-two percent. One at a time Doug activated two separate perimeters at one hundred yard intervals that completely surrounded the small mountaintop in which the caves were forme
d. These quadrants were wired to blow in sections, a dozen each, but not automatically. There were fail safes that prevented accidental detonations. Tree-mounted cameras provided a nearly uninterrupted view of both quadrants in real time, and whether a single section, an entire quadrant, or something larger would be blown was up to the discretion of the person watching the monitors.

  Doug carefully scanned all twenty monitors. He saw a few animals; a deer, (probably the one he had spooked earlier) several rabbits and a raccoon, but no men wearing hazmat suits. Not yet anyway. He figured that if they did venture all the way up here in this high summer heat the suits would be an encumbrance, making their progress much slower than his or Annie’s had been.

  Annie appeared in the doorway behind him. “Are we okay?”

  “So far so good. Listen, while I was waiting for you to answer the door I thought I heard the drone of an aircraft engine.”

  Annie exhaled a sigh of relief. “You think it was Rick?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like his plane. In a way I hope it wasn’t.”

  Annie frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “He might be flying into a trap. I wish there was a way to warn him.

  Doug settled himself in a desk chair so that he could more comfortably watch the monitors. They didn’t need to be watched twenty-four-seven because each checkpoint was equipped with a motion detection sensor which sounded a small alarm if a large human-size object came within range. It happened frequently with moose, deer, even bear. They’d gotten used to the alarms, and, for the most part ignored them. Now things had changed and Doug needed to be ready for whatever came their way.

  “Are you hungry?” Annie said. “I could make you something to eat.”

  Doug shook his head as he continued to watch the monitors. “Just water. No food.”

  Ariel cried out. Doug jumped from his chair and together he and Annie rushed to her small room, opened the door a crack and peered in. She was asleep and dreaming, sweating and tossing on the sheets.