"No, John, I am saying cancer affects few, whereas unemployment affects us all.” She said this with a chuckle, genuinely believing that it was the newsman and not herself who had made such an unbelievable statement. Finally, the man known as VOICE interrupted.
“That’s the government at work right there people!” He burst out laughing uncontrollably. He was not used to being looked at as the sane one in the conversation.
******
'Hilary' became the talking point across the world - in bars, in living rooms and in the workplace.
In Bluebell, Pennsylvania, Miss Ella, an African-American lady in her late sixties who should have long since retired but who chose to work out of boredom, sat in the lunch room of National Call Center East. She looked over the news on her tablet before looking up.
“Now, Mr. Thomas will you be getting this Y1 'Hilary' vaccine?” She was addressing her boss, who was just sitting down with a bowl of soup at a table on the opposite side of the room.
“Are you kidding me?” he said with a smile. “I work in a call center! Every Fall I end up with some kind of cold that someone brings in here. Sign me up!” It was an open and shut case for him, he had no doubt. He paid it no more thought and continued to butter his roll and started in on his soup.
“Not me.” said a pretty young receptionist, pulling her dark hair away from her face and glasses. She was a quiet girl, but at the same time possessed an intelligence that her personality kept hidden.
“Now why is that Jilly?” asked Miss Ella.
“Needles!” she said, as if the single word would be enough explanation. Besides, she was already reading her book again.
Always with her head in a book that girl, thought Miss Ella. Perhaps she should lift that pretty face up occasionally and let a good man like Ted see it. Miss Ella liked Ted a lot - a quiet man in his early thirties who was diligent in his custodial duties. He was a pleasant character that always seemed to have an air of sadness about him. Miss Ella thought that Jilly and Ted must be the two smartest, yet loneliest people in the world, or at least the loneliest in this office. She did however catch Jilly looking at him over the top of her glasses and book. She accidentally caught Miss Ella’s smile of approval before quickly looking back down to continue some silly bestselling novel that was sure to be a movie in the near future.
“You should have Ted go with you to hold your hand,” said Miss Ella, the eternal match-maker.
“I’ll be waiting on the VA, ma’am, and probably will have had everything it cures by the time I get to take the vaccine.” He gave a hint of a smile and continued to fill the paper towel dispenser. He approved of Ella’s attempts, but always assumed that Jilly would never be interested.
Eventually, Mr. Thomas and Miss Ella went to get the vaccine, while Ted and Jilly each waited on the other about it, but neither ever did.
The conversation about the 'Hilary' vaccine was less cordial in other places, such as the trailer of three brothers who sat around a table filled with bags of white powder and a mirror covered in samples of the same.
“Dude, no fucking way!” said Al Tadler, the oldest of the three, as he rolled up a twenty dollar bill. The Tadlers did not carry one hundred dollar bills since they found out from VOICE that they contained a tracker in the ink, to ensure that they knew who was holding large amounts of money. “That shit has something in it! If it’s free, it fucks you!”
“That’s the truth, bro!” said the youngest of the three, Ty. “I swear there was a sign in the gun store about it! Says it’s gonna be free. Some billionaire IT guy is forming a charity to pay for it all. IT and injections: means only one thing, man!”
“Tracking devices, DNA profiling and all kinds of other NSA, CIA, FBI shit!” JD, the middle brother said, raising his .45 and shooting a picture of a cop on the wall. “They all wanna fuck us over. Not while I can carry a gun legally, dudes. No fucking way.” He took the twenty from his elder brother and drew a line from the mirror. “No fucking way,” he said and laughed.
Others, such as the undocumented population, also had their own suspicions about the drug, and simply did not register, for fear of deportation. In Brooklyn, NY, several members of the Russian mob, led by a particularly violent character known only as “Vlad”, had decided the chance of linking them to multiple crime scenes would be too great a risk, so they elected against it. Besides, their presence in the United States was not exactly legal.
The same was true of Mrs. Marisol Rodriguez, of Ecuadorian birth, who had moved to the USA in 1984. She had left home as a teenager, smuggled in the false compartment of a truck, as she had crossed into Texas. Her nightmare had truly begun at that point. The men that had brought her across the border had demanded more money of all of those who had come through. Once they took everything they had, they drove them onto a farm about three hours north of the border.
As they were taken from the vehicle, the women were led into the barn and handcuffed to the cattle rings on the cowshed walls. The men were taken elsewhere, the location of which she did not know. She had heard the distant gun shots and recognized the smell of whiskey on the men when they returned. They also held a look in their eyes that she knew was not good. It was the look of the devil.
When they took what they wanted from the women, it was brutal, violent and painful. Scream as she may, it did not stop. For three days they kept them there, chained up and used. Then, on the last day, they walked in and shot the first woman. Her English was not good, but she understood that the leader was angry at the shooter for wasting ammunition.
“The heat will get them” the leader had said, and then they were gone.
The next three nights were cold, and the days so hot she felt as if she were suffocating. But three days was how long it took her to shake the screws loose on the wood. Her only water was from the moisture she gathered licking the stone floor. Hardly enough, but it kept her alive. Her will was stronger than the other two survivors, and while they succumbed to the beatings that they had endured, Marisol grew stronger in her determination. As that last screw came loose, she slipped to the floor and wept. She cried in pain, she cried in dry sobs, too dehydrated to produce even a single tear.
Marisol rose to her feet - she felt the bruising in her ribs, her thighs and her ankles where she had been held open and helpless by the devil’s men. She climbed to her feet, still bound at the wrists. The skin was rubbed raw. She knew by instinct that she needed water quickly, or she would not last, but thankfully, and ironically, a cool pool of water sat only a few yards from the cowshed that had been her prison.
As she came back to reality from the horrific flashback, her son entered the room. He was a product of those days in the cowshed - a secret she had shared with no one except the woman who had found her wandering the roads helplessly. She paid for a ticket to New York, where Marisol had family. She was unaware of the life growing inside her that day when she stepped out of the New York Port Authority bus terminal, and headed to the address she had memorized a hundred times over; The very same address that she sat in today, twenty-seven years later.
“Mama, come on, we need to register for the 'Hilary'," her son had said in Spanish.
“No,” she replied with a smile. “I think it best if not, son,” she added, and confessed everything in that moment. Her son, Enrique Raul Rodriquez listened and understood his mother’s fears. She told him he was not to be angry, he was not to blame anyone. She had forgiven as God had taught her, and been blessed with a beautiful son. Enrique “Hubcap” Rodriguez did as she asked, and they spoke of it never again. He, like his mother, never took the 'Hilary' vaccine.
Yet most people did take the Vaccine, upwards of 90% of the population of North America had been vaccinated by the time John Woodwind came back on the news thirteen months later on a late winter's evening, and announced that in the last Flu season, reported cases were down by almost 99%, along with sales of cold medicine, allergy medicine and a host of other drugs that had been sold almost as
a staple of the American diet for the preceding seventy years.
But what was most important, what everyone wanted to hear that night was that there were no new cases of cancer reported in the USA for the past month.
“It would seem,” said Woodwind to the camera,” that this reporter has the honor of saying the suffering of cancer is behind us, and we can move forward with a greater hope than before. 'Hilary', it would seem, is the miracle that the whole world had prayed for.”
Except that it wasn’t.
It was the nightmare no one would have expected.
Landfall
Number 1 did not like sirens, the screaming filled his ears to the point it made him howl in pain. A part of him was glad that the door was open to his Master’s rooms. He bolted away quickly as the siren screamed. The noise was louder in the halls, screaming in concert with the flashing red lights in the dark and a voice screaming the same words repeatedly. The words were not words that he understood. Not words like “sit” or fetch”, they simply made a noise to him.
Had Number 1 understood, he would have heard them as “Containment breech in lab 42.”, but he did not understand, so he simply ran, seeking out a silence to stop the pains in his ears. He ran harder and faster, panting more heavily, desperate to drink, but not so much that he would stop.
As he bolted into a room with a large open metal door that rolled up rather than swung, he headed towards the dark. His legs felt unsteady as the thirst and cold air burned inside of him. Dashing between the cars away from the loud voices giving chase, Number 1 made a path towards the clean-smelling air. It was a new smell of salt and water, and something else. It was a sweet smell. As he ran out into the night air he heard new sounds among the sirens, a loud noise followed by a whistle that flew past him. He also heard another word. It was a word he was very familiar with. “No!”
As Number 1 heard the word “No!”, there was a symphony of noises and feelings he was unfamiliar with; A whistle, a soft thudding noise, and a sharp pain in his hind leg that screamed in agony when he tried to put his rear leg to the ground. A yelp escaped his mouth as the pain tore through him - and then the explosion and rumbling thud as the air grew yellow and orange behind him. The siren continued.
As he moved slower, driven by the smell of water, Number 1 limped onto the rocks and found a small pool of water. He lapped at it, but the taste was salty and unpleasant. He continued up the rocks, and although the siren was quieter in the distance, there was a soft, more welcoming sound. Number 1 did not really notice this noise, but found the lapping of the water against the rocks comforting.
He moved towards the soft sound, and as he reached the higher rocks, he saw the vast sea of water before him. There were lights in the distance, on the other side of the water. Number 1 - being a dog - would not have understood that this was the community west of Orient Point County Park, the traffic on New York Route 25, and the lights of the Cross Sound Ferry Docks.
He was mesmerized by the water and the lights, yet the whistle that shot past his ears snapped him back to the moment. Seeing the water, he had nowhere to go, so he turned, and barked and growled at the men approaching him. They had pointed sticks and there were more loud bangs and whistles, followed by another sharp pain. Number 1 struggled for balance, but found none.
Slipping from the rocks and hitting the cold water, he swatted with his paws. He was facing the lights and headed towards them. He wanted to be away from the noises and the pain, and the soft beat of the sea sounded so much more peaceful as he paddled on.
There were more whistles, bangs and new splashing sounds, but no more pain came. He continued on, and as the lights seemed to get closer, Number 1 closed his eyes and drifted into a sleep. The waves carried him away from the lights. As he slipped into a state that was dream-like, neither dead nor alive, he drifted out further. Out to the sound and away from the noise, the pain and Plumb Island.
*****
Number 1 was found in fishing nets at six o’clock the next morning by the fishing trawler Newport Maiden. She was a small fishing boat that made a modest living through the winter, but her main trade was the fishing trips that the summer crowds brought in the late spring though the early fall. As it was only a few days until Easter, the boat was making some practice trips, cleaning up the gear and running the boat and crew through their paces. It was when they were just north of Fisher Island off the coast of Connecticut that they pulled in the nets, ready to head back up the coast to Newport, RI. The greenhorn they just called Primo, was in charge of hauling in the nets, and spotted the black Labrador in them.
“Hey, skip,” he called up to the man on the bridge, which was little more than a raised platform with a wheel and a tarp attached.
“What is it, Primo?” he called back, a half-burned cigarette hanging lazily from the corner of his mouth, exaggerating his New England drawl.” We got a dead dog in the nets here, does that usually happen?” the young man asked, not too sure why he was asking.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the skipper muttered to himself, “Not with the bait we are using. Cut it out and throw it back,” he yelled down before turning around to his snoozing deckhand. “Bob, go help the greenhorn cut that dog out, we don’t want him puking anymore on this trip.”
“Sure, skip,” he replied, dropping whatever it was he had in front of him and heading down to the net booms. “Ah, you caught ya first Labrador I think, kid!” he called to Primo, laughing to himself as the greenhorn was gingerly pulling in the net. "C’mon kid, you gotta pull it in hard, or it’ll get away from ya,” added Bob, grabbing at the net and pulling at it.
All at once the dog growled and snapped at his hand, sinking his teeth into Bob’s flesh and shaking its head roughly. Bob let out a blood-curdling scream as the dog’s teeth sank down to the bone, gnawing away at Bob’s hand, refusing to let go. Primo grabbed the axe from the deck and swung it at the dog, smashing into fur, skin, and bone, but the dog still did not let go.
“Get the fucking thing off me!” screamed Bob in agony, ducking as the axe swung down again, almost decapitating the dog. But still it would not let go. A third swing, catching the dog and the net, Primo heard the ropes and the dog's spine snap as one, and the now dead canine fell back to the water floating lifeless, in a crimson aura of blood. Bob’s hand, except for the thumb, floated on the surface, near the dog for a moment, and then sank below the already diluting bloody water.
******
“So…” the old man asked, dropping the binoculars down to his chest and looking north at the smoke and burning buildings on Plumb Island. His vantage point was near the ocean as well, but on the northern tip of Gridlines Island, approximately five miles from the point where Number 1 had fallen from the rocks, and twenty-three miles southwest of where a deckhand named Bob was clutching a blood-soaked towel to his mangled left hand, awaiting a helicopter from the United States Coast Guard to fly him to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. “So,” he repeated, “what the fuck happened?” The expletive was asked in the muttered tones of a sigh, not as a reprimand where it was used to emphasize his annoyance at the situation. He was annoyed, but now was not the time to show it. Now was the time for answers.
“Sir,” said a younger man, wearing a suit and rubber boots which, combined with his glasses and 'CDC' cap, made him a ridiculous sight in the eyes of the older man. “The facility was conducting experiments using jewel wasp venom on cases of livestock infected with hoof and mouth. Lab 42 was looking for ways to stem the effects of ALS, Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s in humans. Since Hilary showed up, everyone is looking for these miracle cures. It seems some corners were cut to speed up the process and…”
“Corners cut!” the older man snapped in interruption of CDC Cap, “It’s a goddamn fucking mess! You see that smoke? How the hell do we explain that to all those rich pricks in the Hamptons? Sorry, we cut a corner? Are you aware of what the conspiracy nuts think of that damn island?”
“Yes sir, I am, but I did not cut
corners in this report, the people on that island did, sir.” CDC Cap replied with a confidence that surprised the older man.
“I am sorry, please continue,” He said, turning to face the younger man, a hint of respect entering into his voice.
“Well, it seems like one of the scientists took his pet dog onto the island and it stole a dissected brain from a cow that had been given the experimental drug. He bolted off, and the security guards fired on the animal. In the process, they accidentally shot a propane tank.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered to himself, “and what about the dog?”
“Missing, presumed infected,” said the younger man, looking down at the ground apologetically. “And the livestock have shown unusual cannibalistic and aggressive side effects, sir. Several people were also bitten in the melee that followed.”
“Infection?” he asked, puzzlement as much as curiosity in his voice.
“One of them is showing signs of a fever. The other was crushed in the stampede, back broken, and pronounced dead at the scene, the only symptoms showing are the blisters around the bite mark. They are awaiting an authority to perform the autopsy on-site, but most people are barricaded in the buildings. The animals are attacking wildly, and small arms are having limited effect. Tranquilizers seem to work, as well as cattle prods, but only as a temporary solution."
“Containment measures?” the older man asked, his tone revealing that he somehow knew the answer, but did not want to say it himself.
“Sir, I hate to be the one to say it, but I think this is a 'Tinderbox' situation”. CDC Cap did not want to look the older man in the eye as he said it, knowing only too well what such a measure would lead to. “They are reporting that the strain is 100% effective among livestock, and the blisters around the sites of the two human bites, plus the fever, it looks like the chances of anything reaching the mainland would be too bitter to contemplate. This is not like we are repeating the Lyme’s Disease cover-up, sir.”
Zombie Outbreak Z1O5 (Book 2): Zed Dawn Page 2