H7N9: The Complete Series [Books 1-3]

by Campbell, Mark

  Officers manning the perimeter guard towers fired at the erratically moving vehicle as it veered off of the road and tried to disappear into a dead cornfield.

  Searchlights powered to life and focused their beams on the fleeing SUV.

  Men wearing what looked like FEMA uniforms looked out from the shattered rear window and fired at their two pursuers, but with little effect.

  In an instant, and underneath a steady rain of lead, the fleeing SUV lost one of its rear tires. It careened to the left, rolled over three times, and came to a smoldering stop on its back in the middle of the field.

  The pursuing Suburbans skidded to a stop behind it.

  Bloodied, injured officers crawled out of the wrecked SUV and tried to run away but none of them made it very far.

  Deserters, Hammond surmised.

  It didn’t surprise him—the ramifications of announcing emergency rationing would undoubtedly put people on edge. He was quite certain that the back of that overturned SUV was loaded with boxes of MREs and ammunition.

  They couldn’t be the only ones.

  He figured that many of Hock’s men were dipping their hands in the cookie jar to build themselves a nice little stockpile. The fact that needless theft and hoarding would only make the situation worse was probably lost on them.

  Hock’s men weren’t the only ones stealing.

  He noticed that people from his own security team seemed to have vanished during the course of the day.

  Hammond hunched over and shuffled back towards his desk and ignored the sporadic pop of gunfire that persisted from somewhere outside.

  He plopped down in his chair with a heavy sigh.

  His eyes shifted towards the reassignment packet that sat on his desk.

  “Three years…” he muttered aloud.

  How was he supposed to manage a camp for three years when he already knew that it wouldn’t make it past summer?

  His eyes shifted back towards his empty glass.

  He picked it up and held it in front of his face, regarding it. He slowly tilted it side-to-side and watched as the moonlight glittered off of it.

  In the glass’s distorted reflection, he saw his own face—the face of a stranger. He looked like a goddamn ghoul. Then again, after what he did to Laura, wouldn’t that description be accurate?

  Disgusted and haunted by his own appearance, he tossed the glass over his shoulder as the old pains and memories overwhelmed him once again.

  Hammond reached down with a shaky hand, opened his desk drawer, and peered down at the last bottle of whiskey lying inside. Moonlight glistened off of a chrome-colored object next to the bottle.

  His tired eyes lingered on the old revolver with a marbled grip.

  The bottle or the gun—his hand hovered each of them as he considered his options.

  One of the items offered him temporary reprieve while the other offered to silence the ugly memories forever.

  Mark Hammond chose the latter.

  CHAPTER 14

  DECEMBER 17th

  There were one hundred and ten tiles on the ceiling.

  Teddy knew that because he counted each and every tile at least five times every day during his brief periods of lucidity. Time itself seemed to have an abstract quality as the hours morphed into days. As to how many days had passed since he was admitted, he hadn’t a clue.

  After the meeting with Lt. Hock, they had rolled his bed into a different room while he was asleep.

  It was a smaller room.

  The walls were painted the same tepid blue as before but appeared to be made out of some sort of sealed concrete. His bedside monitor had been replaced with an even more advanced version that required more tubes and wires to invade his body. There were no chairs in the room nor any posters on the wall, but there were two security cameras mounted in opposite corners of the ceiling.

  Another drastic change was the door itself.

  Instead of a regular hospital room door, Teddy noticed that his door was made out of a solid piece of steel as if it were a ship’s bulkhead entrance. It seemed to operate remotely by whoever was watching the cameras and made a loud HISSSS each time it opened.

  He also knew that the room was pressurized because every time the door was opened his ears popped.

  Nurses wearing blue protective suits along with hooded respirators came and went infrequently, but they kept him too sedated on pain medication to figure any set pattern in their schedules. The few who did come when he was awake were stiff and unemotional in their duties and performed their work like automatons.

  Bandages changed—check; bedpan emptied—check; vitals taken—check; medication administered—check.

  They never spoke to him and never answered any questions.

  It was maddening, and the truth of the matter was that Teddy was afraid that his fragile grip on reality was slipping away.

  It wouldn’t be too much longer before he figured he’d be no different than a babbling lunatic at an asylum.

  He didn’t know why he was being kept in that room and he didn’t know why the nurses wore those blue-suits whenever they saw him.

  It honestly scared the shit out of him.

  He certainly didn’t feel sick—just doped up.

  He felt like a prisoner in his own flesh.

  Until he regained some strength, he was powerless and at the mercy of their needle.

  His legs tingled and sensation started to slowly return, but all he could do was hope that he would have enough strength to make a move before another blue-suited asshole sedated him again.

  Their timing had been better than his every time so far.

  Teddy stared up at the ceiling and started mentally ticking off tiles as he waited to see if his body would finally be faster than theirs.

  After he counted all 110 tiles twice and was about to start on round three, the door depressurized and opened as someone entered the room.

  “Good evening,” the visitor said.

  Teddy looked towards the voice, disappointed—they had beaten him to it again.

  However, he was surprised to see that his visitor wasn’t a nurse inside of a blue-suit at all.

  His visitor was an elderly man wearing a white lab coat.

  The man appeared to be in his late sixties. His face was tanned, wrinkly and what was left of his silvery hair was slicked back away from his receded hairline. A stethoscope hung around his neck and a FEMA ID card dangled from his coat’s lapel. His breast pocket was crammed with pens and markers.

  “I’m Doctor Gatsby,” the man said in an affable voice. He walked towards Teddy’s bedside and extended a hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mister Sanders.”

  Teddy hesitated a moment, but then forced a hand out to weakly shake the man’s hand—even the simple act of a handshake felt laborious.

  Gatsby peered down into Teddy’s eyes and offered a smile.

  Teddy saw the unmistakable glint of intelligence in the man’s blue eyes, but there was something else that he couldn’t quite place a finger on.

  The doctor withdrew his hand and turned towards the monitor, carefully scrutinizing the readings.

  Teddy had a million questions and it felt like he was going to blurt them all out at the same time in an unintelligible string of words. One question eventually rose above them all. “When can I leave?”

  “You’re lucky that they picked you up when they did,” the doctor replied without answering the question. “The bullet missed your femoral artery, but you almost succumbed to exsanguination.”

  Teddy stared at him blankly.

  The doctor glanced down at him and saw the confusion on his face.

  “Blood loss, Mister Sanders,” Gatsby clarified with a pitying smile. “You nearly bled to death in the middle of the road.”

  Teddy remembered that he wasn’t the only one in bad shape—Parham came to mind. “What about the sergeant?”

  “Dead,” Gatsby coldly replied as he turned his attention back to the monitor. “He expired t
wo weeks ago.”

  Teddy was surprised at just how much time had passed. “How?”

  “Retroperitoneal hemorrhaging caused by a ruptured aortic aneurysm,” the doctor explained. “There was very little we could do, given his injuries.”

  Teddy didn’t know what half of that meant, but he understood what dead meant. He knew that the hard-ass lieutenant wouldn’t take the news well, but he hoped that meant the man would rescind the offer he had made since Hock didn’t seem like the type of man who took refusals very well.

  The doctor continued. “Your initial prognosis wasn’t very good either. I was concerned about possible infection. Fortunately, I think that you’re out of the woods. Everything has healed well and we’ve removed the buckshot pellets that were embedded in your thoracic region.”

  Gatsby lifted Teddy’s gown and peeled back the gauze bandage that wrapped his thigh. He peered down at the healing wound, nodded with approval, and carefully reapplied the bandaging.

  Teddy placed a hand over his eyes. The longer he kept them open the dizzier he became. Whatever drugs they were pumping him with seemed to have lasting effects.

  “Yes, indeed. Looks fine,” Gatsby announced. He pulled a small pad out of his pocket and scribbled down some notes.

  “If everything looks so fucking rosy, then why do they keep forcing medication down my throat?” he asked with his hand still over his eyes.

  “Simply for the pain,” Gatsby explained. He placed a cold hand on Teddy’s shoulder and gave him a reassuring pat. “We don’t want you suffering while we work.”

  Teddy took his hand off of his eyes and gave the doctor a dark look – he knew that the man was lying.

  He knew that the liberal dispensation of heavy sedatives had nothing to do with pain management and had everything to do with behavioral compliance.

  It was a tactic he had seen before in Tucson.

  The prison doctors kept many of the troublemakers in line with their needles. Many times, they housed heavily medicated schizophrenic inmates out in general population and avoided proper medical treatment for their illness. Whenever someone started making too much trouble, a shot of chlorpromazine always seemed to be the answer.

  “Doc, what the fuck is going on?” Teddy asked weakly. “What’s the deal with the spacesuits?”

  Gatsby flashed a slight smile and put his notepad away. “Do you know much about immunology, Mister Sanders?”

  Teddy simply looked at him, annoyed.

  “Well, I gather not,” Gatsby said with a soft chuckle. “If you did, you’d understand my fascination with you.”

  A dark thought crossed Teddy’s mind.

  “Doc… Spare me the bullshit and tell me,” Teddy said dreadfully.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Am I sick…? Do I have the flu again?”

  “Quite the contrary—you’re immune!”

  Teddy grew even more confused. “I can’t be immune… I had the flu.”

  “Exactly,” the doctor replied. “You weren’t immune, but now you are. You had the flu, recovered, and developed an immunity to that particular strain. That’s the way things normally work, right?”

  “So did many others. I don’t understand how that makes me special.”

  “Your body’s immune response is what makes you unique,” the doctor explained. “Most people develop antibodies to a particular strain and then become susceptible as their immune response to the initial infection naturally declines. The blood sample which they took at the quarantine center back in Tucson revealed the presence of H7N9 antibodies, but that’s to be expected in a recovered individual. If I were to compare the numbers from the initial test conducted in Tucson to the numbers taken in this clinic after losing so much blood, I would expect to see a drastic reduction in your immune response to the H7N9 pathogen. Your immune response, however, is still going strong—the presence of abundant antibodies in your blood is testament to that fact.”

  “Then why the spacesuits?”

  “Even more fascinating is the way your system responds to antigenic drift,” the doctor went on as if he didn’t hear the question. “Small genetic changes are common with influenza…” He waved his hands animatedly. “This genetic drifting… to-and-fro… it creates a new variant of the virus. The variants don’t pose a real danger to an immune individual since they’re close together on the phylogenetic tree and share the same antigenic properties. A healthy immune system exposed to a similar virus will usually recognize it and respond accordingly.

  “However, small genetic changes can accumulate over time and result in viruses that are vastly antigenically different from the original virus. When that happens, the body’s immune system cannot recognize it and a second wave of infection occurs.”

  “I still don’t understand why that means anything to me,” Teddy grumbled.

  “Because your body is different!” the doctor went on excitedly. “This strain of avian influenza drifts more than any other strain I’ve studied it at length. Its instability makes it difficult to even create a baseline vaccine—as soon as we manufacture one, the virus changes. What astounds me is the way your body is able to take the antigenic drifts in stride! Not only do you not get sick, but your body produces antibodies for every variant introduced.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, doc.” Teddy shook his head with aggravation. “I haven’t been exposed to any new strains of the flu. The only sick people I’ve been around were back at the stadium.”

  Gatsby cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses.

  “That’s not entirely true,” the doctor corrected. “You see, as soon I recognized your body’s abnormally strong immune response, I had to test a theory. We’ve injected you with several mutated forms of the virus during your stay here.” He chuckled gleefully at his own ingenuity. “One nasty concoction had every variant we discovered and I was positive that even you’d succumb to that one—but you didn’t! You developed antibodies for every single variant that you were introduced to!”

  Teddy gave him a horrified look.

  Suddenly, the reason for those spacesuits became clear.

  “You… infected me?” Teddy asked with disbelief.

  “No, we didn’t infect you,” the doctor said as he took a step back and carefully measured his words. “We exposed you. Your blood will give us the best chance yet to create a viable vaccine. In fact, if we can get your antibodies to replicate in laboratory animals, then we can even begin passive immunization therapy.”

  “You could’ve killed me!” Teddy exclaimed. He floundered weakly on the bed in an attempt to get up, but his body didn’t respond. He stared wild-eyed at the doctor. “You sadistic motherfucker!”

  Gatsby took a step back and stared down at him, visibly shaken by the rage displayed.

  “Please, be rational for a moment,” the doctor said in a somewhat smoothing voice. “While I am positive there are others out there like you, the odds of us discovering someone in this camp is highly unlikely. Your assistance will benefit countless lives.”

  “I’ve lost every life that matters to me!” Teddy snarled. “I couldn’t care less about the rest of the goddamn world—I’m not helping you!”

  Gatsby blinked and then calmly adjusted his glasses with a smile. “You don’t really have a choice in the matter anymore.” He waved a hand at one of the cameras in the ceiling.

  The room’s door opened with a loud HISSSS and three blue-suits entered. One of the blue-suits held an H&K MP5 submachine gun.

  “Take him off of the monitors and wheel him down to phlebotomy,” Gatsby ordered.

  Two of the blue-suits went to work disconnecting the electrodes from Teddy’s body and turned off the monitoring equipment while the blue-suit holding the MP5 stood at the foot of the bed with his weapon pointed towards Teddy.

  “I want out of here!” Teddy demanded as he continued glaring at the man. “No more tests! No more bullshit!”

  “You’ll get your wish as soon as I get my blood,”
Gatsby assured. “I’ll send you off with that madman lieutenant and this will all be nothing more than a bad memory.”

  One of the blue-suits disconnected the IV from his arm.

  “No! No blood!”

  “Don’t be childish,” the doctor chided with another pitying smile. “You’ll be fine. I don’t need much… Then again, if I do need more, I could always have you brought to me.”

  “I don’t give you permission!” Teddy exclaimed, unable to think of anything else to say other than strings of expletives.

  The statement brought chuckles from everyone in the room.

  Teddy lay motionless, his body exhausted from struggling against his chemical restraints. He stared up at the ceiling and drew in rapid, shallow breaths.

  The two blue-suits rolled his hospital bed out of the room and into a brightly-lit hallway.

  Gatsby and the blue-suit with the MP5 followed.

  Teddy looked around, squinting in the light.

  Pipes and ductwork were suspended along the ceiling and interspersed with harsh white light fixtures.

  He noticed that many other rooms along that section of the hall with doors just like his. Each door was spray-painted with a number.

  Teddy wasn’t sure how many rooms had people locked away inside, but he knew that this meant that he wasn’t their only test subject.

  At the end of the hallway they arrived at a junction and passed a glassed-in security booth manned by an officer who had her feet kicked up on the desk and her nose in a book.

  The blue-suits rolled the bed around the corner and took him down an adjacent hall.

  Long observation windows lined both sides of the hall along with two pressurized steel doors. A red sign on the doors read: BSL-4 PPE Required Beyond This Point!

  On the other side of the glass Teddy saw men, women, and children inside a plain dormitory-style room. Each one of the individuals had the back of their left hand tattooed with a square-shaped pattern of dots. Their beds, which consisted of little more than bare-bone cots, were lined in six rows and each had a tiny footlocker. The patients inside wore white hospital gowns and stared at him curiously as he was rolled past them.