Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  “Get him off that man!” the commander ordered. One of the Federales, the only one not gawking in stunned disbelief, raised his M16 and butt-stroked the old man in the side of the head. He came away, but didn’t release his jaws. A fountain of bright red arterial blood sprayed across the command center, and the old man fell back with a mouthful of neck tissue and a dripping artery.

  “Son of a bitch!” the commander spat as the old man, unfazed at having his head clubbed by a rifle, chewed the meat and scanned the room with wild eyes. When they fixed on the commander, he almost shit himself. The wounded private fell face first on the table, blood continuing to spray in ever slower gouts as he lost consciousness. Then the old man started climbing over the table.

  The commander was a veteran of many engagements, from Grenada to both Gulf Wars. His instincts responded before his mind completely registered what was happening. He wiped blood from his face with his left hand as his right drew his M9. His thumb released the safety and his index finger stroked the trigger. The first round took the old man just below the right collarbone and blew out his scapula in a cloud of bone and blood. The old man rocked to the right, snarled, and leaped.

  The commander stared in amazement as he fired again and again. He had good hits on the arm, chest, and neck, but they were all completely ineffective. The old man crashed into him, hands reaching for his neck, pulling himself toward the commander’s flesh. Bloody teeth and lips worked in anticipation of what was to come.

  The impact slammed the commander against the opposite wall hard enough to make him see stars. The gun was between them and he had no idea of its orientation. Everything he learned in training suggested he not fire in this situation, but as the teeth got closer, all he could think of was fire, fire, shoot you fucking idiot! The gun barked once; the bullet exited the old man’s back just below and to the side of his neck. The commander knew it was a lethal shot, a switch shot that likely blew the heart in half. The old man jerked, but didn’t stop. “Fuck!” the commander screamed as the teeth reached him.

  The report of the 5.56 round hit the commander’s ears like a bat hitting a baseball in confined quarters. Four shots in rapid fire stitched up the old man’s side, and the final one blew out the upper half of his skull and splattered the already gore-covered command center with white brains. The teeth were against the commander’s skin, but there was no bite.

  “Jesus, Jesus fucking Christ!” the commander said over and over as the body slowly slumped to the floor. The corpsman had recovered enough to check the private who was very much dead. The doors flew open, and several of the commander’s aides stuck their heads in, drawn by the sounds of combat. He held up a hand to calm them. The situation was under control.

  “Are you wounded, sir?” one of them demanded.

  He looked down, realizing arterial blood spray, bone fragments, and bits of brain covered him from head to toe. Amazingly, none of it was his.

  “I’m fine, son,” he said, but the corpsman came in quickly to check on him anyway. “Get someone out there to observe the other five who were brought in.” One of the soldiers rushed out. No sooner was the door closed than the commander heard rifle fire outside. He knew what the report would eventually be.

  They’d sent him to help the Mexican Federales regain control of the region as panic spread about some crazy viral outbreak making people go insane. His briefing talked about dementia, random attacks, people rushing armed troops, and cannibalism. He hadn’t believed most of it. Two hours ago, when they’d rolled up and a hundred screaming, wild-eyed ex-chicken farmers attacked them, he began to wonder. When they rushed the machine guns and grenade launchers, showing no fear and indifference to near-mortal wounds, he stopped wondering. And now, after watching an old man who was suddenly impervious to bullets try to eat one of his countrymen, he had no doubts.

  “Get me an uplink to the Pentagon,” he ordered his communications officer. The man pulled his eyes away from the macabre scene and nodded, before beginning to program the uplink. He stopped and rubbed his eyes.

  “Did you get blood in your eyes, sir?” the corpsman asked.

  “Yeah,” he growled and allowed the corpsman to flush his eyes with antibacterial eye wash, a less-than-fun procedure. Two hours later, his report complete, he went out and had a few bites of chicken with his men. It wasn’t fancy, but it was fresh. He didn’t care that it was a little bloody in places. What could you expect from chicken roasted on a bayonet? A short time later, in conference with his senior staff and the Federales commanders, listening to report after report, he started to feel light-headed and dizzy. He thought he was going to throw up so he excused himself from the freshly-cleaned command trailer to go to the bathroom.

  He didn’t puke, though. He sat on the toilet and shivered, wondering what was happening. He was hearing things in his head and was dizzy. “I think I better call the corpsman,” he slurred a moment before he fell off the toilet.

  The door to the bathroom opened and everyone looked up. The meeting had spun in neutral while the American commander went to relieve himself. The look on the commander’s face when the door opened took everyone by surprise.

  “Sir?” asked the commander’s aide, one second before the senior American officer snarled and pounced on him, tearing out his throat.

  * * *

  The American commander was in the back of a Humvee, his hands and feet secured with stripper cuffs, his mouth covered with duct tape, while the senior staff officer consulted with command. They’d received orders to retreat north toward Mexico City and prepare to link up with another unit. Orders in hand, they went about mobilizing the troops. The first of the soldiers turned while they configured the command truck for road travel, attacking his fellow troops tooth and nail. In less than twenty minutes, there was frantic fighting all over the bivouac area.

  Four hours after the column arrived at Pollo Bueno Farms, there was no remaining military force. A few men hid in culverts or locked themselves in the rear of vehicles, while their former comrades screamed and pounded on the armored glass, trying to get at them. They were out of ammunition. Many had bites or claw marks from the battle. Unlike the farmers at Pollo Bueno, these men wore body armor and headgear. When they’d turned, their fellow soldiers had only been able to bring down a few. One man managed to get to a .50 caliber machine gun, and he racked up most of the kills. Then the ammo belt ran out, and they overran him while he tried to reload the gun by himself.

  With no one left to attack, the former Mexican and American soldiers began to wander off in all directions. Those still trying to get at the people locked in the vehicles stayed, and they would continue to stay until their prey either emerged or succumbed to the desert heat. The chickens continued to mill around, looking for food as their coops burned, sending columns of smoke into the Mexican sky.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 13

  Saturday, April 21

  Lisha was beyond fatigued. It had been well over 36 hours since her head last felt a pillow. A strange mixture of horror and amazement kept her going as the computer worked on sample after sample, and the data continued to flow into her computer. Only eight of the staff were aware Grant Porter was still alive, sort of, aboard the HAARP facility. He was one deck down in an armored glass cell constructed on the fly for him. The infection had driven all that remained of the once brilliant scientist out, leaving behind only an insatiable hunger and a desire to attack anything not similarly infected. She needed sleep soon. Instead, she took another stimulant and washed it down with a cup of coffee.

  “Latest results, Doctor.”

  Lisha stifled a yawn and looked up at the young woman. Until two days ago, Lisha hadn’t known her name. It was Edith. The girl was a new hire and had been working on cataloging genome data, until Lisha’s longtime assistant had his throat ripped out by Grant. Now, Edith was the chief research administrator and personal assistant to the project manager.

  “Thanks,” she said, accepting the clipboar
d. She glanced at the data, then back at Edith. “Are you sure of this?”

  “Yes ma’am, I checked it myself.”

  “We took these samples two days ago, and there is no sign of decay?”

  “Not directly. Analysis says there is no sign of fat; the gas we detected indicates it was consumed.”

  “How is that possible?” Lisa wondered.

  “The guys in biology think the sample is alive, and it is scavenging for material to keep itself alive.”

  Lisha nodded absently and considered that. It was possible, she supposed, for an organism to rearrange its own makeup, but she’d never heard of such a thing. Only single-celled organisms had a structure that would allow fundamental changes like that. If an entire complex organism was capable of that sort of thing…

  “Tell the team I want a brain sample.”

  “He’s still alive, isn’t he?” Edith asked.

  “He killed eleven people,” she reminded the young girl. “One was your friend, right?” Edith nodded. “Do you really think Mr. Porter is still in there?”

  When she hesitated, Lisha stabbed an icon on her computer, bringing up a webcam, and swiveled it so Edith could see. Grant, breathing very slowly, stood in one corner of the glass cage, staring into space, drool dripping from one corner of his mouth. As if on cue a technician went into the lab. Grant spotted him. His eyes grew wide, and he howled and slammed both hands against the glass wall. Smears of blood already coated the wall, and one look at his hands and arms showed why. They were black and blue messes of ravaged and torn skin from hours of beating against the unbreakable prison. It didn’t stop him from renewing his assault though, and spittle flew from his lips as he roared in frustration.

  “Do you think there is an award-winning geneticist in there?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Right. I thought not. Prep the team.”

  Later in the surgery bay, Grant Porter was unconscious and strapped face down to a table, his face protruding through a hole, and tubes snaking down his throat. It had taken three tranquilizer darts to subdue him enough to let technicians, covered from head to toe in reinforced hazmat suits, haul him into the surgery. Even then as they were inserting an IV to administer anesthetic, he began to wake up. They added the leather straps so that, even if he woke up, he would be unable to move significantly.

  A nurse shaved him in preparation, and someone hung surgical drapes around his head. Lisha examined the skull of the man she’d worked with until only two days before, then took a scalpel and started cutting.

  She finished a semi-circular incision and peeled back the entire back of his scalp, revealing bloody white bone. Picking up the bone saw, she tested it. The high-pitched whine made one of the assistants jump. Without further hesitation, Lisha began cutting. It only took a minute for her practiced hands to finish. She fished under the edge of the cut with an implement, and with a steady hand lifted the entire back of Grant’s skull away, revealing the brain below.

  “Holy shit,” one of the technicians said.

  “Holy something,” Lisha agreed. The brain didn’t look like it was supposed to; somehow, it had transformed. From the back, it should have had a conical shape, gently curved around and above the brain stem. Instead it now appeared roughly bisected into two lobes, elongated and loose in the space that was once full of gray matter.

  “Get me an X-ray series,” she ordered and stepped back. An X-ray tech moved the arm of the machine from the side and set up the portable plate that would transmit the image to the computer. He started to get the lead-lined apron for the patient, but Lisha waved him off. “You really think that’s necessary?” she asked. The man shook his head and began taking pictures. After each one, he’d move the plate and emitter a few inches. The whole process only took a few minutes.

  Lisha leaned back in, lowering her magnifying glasses over her eyes with a slight jerk of her head, and examined the brain, or what was left of it. Something else was bothering her. “Sample dish,” she said, and an assistant rolled in a cart holding a series of glass sample dishes already open and waiting. Lisha picked up a scalpel and cut a slice from the tip of one of the lobes. The body did not respond. The brain bled, but only slightly, much less than she expected.

  She took three more samples from the same lobe, then asked for a probe. Using it, she moved the lobes around to examine between them, all the while talking into the microphone taped to her cheek. Her assistant leaned in and commented from time to time on the structures. Neither had any doubt; this wasn’t a human brain.

  She finished and considered closing when her assistant suddenly said, “Wrinkles.”

  “What was that?” she asked.

  He pointed at the brain and repeated. “There are no wrinkles.”

  She looked back down and realized what he meant. Hundreds of ridges and folds, called gyri and sulci, cover the normal brain. It was an evolutionary adaptation that increased the surface area of the brain, allowing for more computing power. Grant’s brain was completely smooth. She nodded, took a few pictures, and put the skull cap back in place with bone glue and a couple of screws.

  “Close him up,” she told the nurses and assistants and retreated to the lab. The first three samples went to the chemistry, biology, and life sciences labs; the last went with her. She had it under a microscope before it could cool, and she began examining the structure. On a computer nearby were digital images of normal human brain cellular structures. After examining and comparing the normal brain images to the samples taken from Grant for almost an hour, she had to admit that she could find no differences in their basic structures.

  Lisha made some notes about animal tests, ate a candy bar, and looked to see if preliminary results from the other labs were available yet. And that was how Edith found her, head cradled in her hands, data scrolling down the computer screen over and over. Edith almost put a hand on her to wake her up, then thought better of it. She left and returned with a blanket she draped over the woman’s shoulders, then she quietly closed Lisha’s office door.

  * * *

  Kathy Clifford admitted to herself she was a fugitive, and an unemployed one at that. She had uploaded a video that had gotten more hits than “Gangnam Style” in only six hours, before they stripped it from the server. Normally, uploading that sort of viral sensation would make your career…if the government wasn’t trying to prevent the upload. She’d checked a couple of times while driving through Waco. Every time they took one version down, two more appeared. “Hail, Hydra,” she chuckled. Whoever kept uploading her video with the Imagine Dragons song “Radioactive” attached was one particularly sick fucker.

  She’d loaded her Civic with as much film equipment as she could lay her hands on before leaving. The text message from her former boss was straight and to the point. “You are fired!! Return the gear, or we’ll file a police report.” She already knew the government was after her for uploading the video, so she emptied her bank accounts in a frenzy of ATM stops outside of Dallas, $500 at a time. At the eighth ATM, the bank declined her card, even though she knew there were thousands left. So, with $3,500 in cash and a couple of disposable $250 Visa cards (invaluable to a stringer reporter who often found herself in tight situations), she was on the run and unemployed.

  Her spirit as a reporter didn’t diminish, though. She’d been heading south as fast as she could while avoiding speeding. If the cops had pulled her over for a minor speeding violation, she would have been out of the game for good. She slept in rest stops and abandoned truck weigh-stations. Aside from a lurid proposal from one lonely trucker, she’d been unmolested. She had her father’s venerable Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special tucked into the center console, just in case. She’d decided that the charges on the warrant most likely exceeded those she’d face for the handgun. Besides, if what she was driving toward was half as bad as she suspected, who would care?

  On the open roads of South Texas, she’d questioned her decision to go many times. The government was
out to get her; if she’d stayed put, the bureau would have defended her. That might have been better than the situation she now found herself in, but they also would have shut her down, and she didn’t let go of a story easily, especially a story like the one she’d stumbled onto in Mexico.

  She got all the way to Austin before she ran into trouble. Officials had closed the southbound freeway. “Only open to local traffic,” the computerized notice reported. The official story was the risk of landfall by Hurricane Enrico. She knew better. Enrico was indeed a hurricane, but it was in the Bahamas and had a miniscule chance of making it into the Gulf of Mexico then on to Houston. The danger from Enrico was a convenient way to stop southbound traffic.

  She had a limited number of options if she wanted to continue. Catch a ride with a local? Possibly, but not with the gear stuffed into the back of her Civic. Hire someone? Too risky. Run the roadblock? There was a slim chance she could manage it, but once past the roadblock, any chance encounter with the law would end her trek instantly. No, she only had one choice.

  It was late in the afternoon when she pulled up to the checkpoint along Texas Rural Route 12A. The cop looked at her 2003 Chevy Silverado, which had seen better days. In the back was a substantial pile of hay, and she wore the clothes of a South Texas farmer. The whole shebang had cost her almost $2,000.

  Her Civic was at a parking garage at the airport, one mile from where she’d met the farmer who complained they were only going to give him $1,500 in trade for his truck at the dealer. The extra $500 was enough to make him forget the strange city girl who paid cash for a truck full of hay. She’d gotten the clothes at a second-hand store for less than $50. Her gear was under the hay. Loading the gear was surprisingly hard, and had left her sweaty enough to look and smell like a farmer.

  “Run out of hay?” the cop asked.

  “Damn goats eat it faster than I can grow it,” she joked. Luckily, she’d heard the farmer at the truck stop talking about how he and his neighbors were all raising goats these days.