Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  Two others went insane shortly after. The first orderly arrived at the bus door in time to see one of the adults crawling down the stairs, bright red arterial blood spraying from a torn carotid artery. Before the afternoon was over, the boys bit three doctors, two nurses, and nine orderlies. Two boys never made it into the hospital. While security was helping restrain the stricken, they raced off down the sidewalk, into San Francisco.

  * * *

  A San Diego Harbor patrol boat, responding to a call, came up on the 72-foot Caravel charter boat, Killer Catch, drifting just outside the Shelter Island Yacht Basin. The boat rolled gently in the swells, with no signs of life aboard. Following procedure, the 29-foot patrol boat came alongside slowly, lights flashing. The pilot nodded to his partner, who chirped the siren twice before he picked up the mic and called to ask if anyone was aboard.

  For a long moment, there was no response. Then, there was a series of screams. The two men looked at each other. The screams sounded less human and more animal. The Killer Catch had three decks, a lower fantail, a low open mid-deck, and a flying bridge. Someone stood on the flying bridge and looked down at them. The patrolmen gaped in surprise. Blood covered the man’s face, and more ran down his front, staining his once-pristine shirt. One of the officers picked up the mic to ask if the man was all right, when 10 people appeared on the mid-deck, rushing from the interior cabin.

  They didn’t slow as they reached the railing, vaulted over the side, and lunged for the patrol boat. Two fell short, plummeting into the harbor’s cold water. Another hit the gunwale of the patrol boat face first, splattering the two stunned patrolmen with blood. The other seven completed their leaps with varying degrees of success.

  The patrolman at the controls screamed in panic, and slammed the throttles to full forward. The dual 225-horsepower Mercury outboards roared, sending the boat rocketing toward the San Diego Yacht Club, a quarter of a mile away, as the new passengers began tearing the screaming men to pieces.

  * * *

  The Director of the CDC sat in the plush office chair behind his mahogany desk, working on a draft of his acceptance speech for his appointment as Surgeon General. The previous one committed suicide the day before, and they’d appointed him an hour ago. He was trying to find the correct spelling for “magnanimous” when there was an urgent knock on his door. He looked up in surprise. He could hear the loud protestations of his secretary, and the response.

  “There isn’t time for that,” a man said, pushing the door open. He’d recognized the voice of his chief virologist even before the portly man slid through the door. Dr. David Curie, “No relation and scared of radiation,” he’d say when introduced, was in his mid-fifties and sported an ample beer gut. He wore his hair in a classic redneck mullet, though the top of his head was mostly bald. He had a proclivity for wearing long-sleeved dress shirts covered in prints of half-naked fantasy girls. Overall, his image suggested he belonged in an East Texas honky-tonk, not the CDC. But he had an IQ that would make Stephen Hawking whistle, and had written more papers on biochemistry than most third-year grad students had read. “Dr. Gallatin, it’s Strain Delta.”

  Gallatin looked confused. What would cause the normally unflappable David Curie to burst into his office in the middle of the day? “What’s all of this?” he asked. “Delta is contained.”

  “I tried to warn you, Chris,” Curie said, closing the door in the face of the director’s flummoxed secretary.

  “It’s okay, Emily,” the director called out, and she stopped trying to enter. “What are you talking about?”

  “When you issued that memorandum to the Surgeon General, I emailed you my dissenting opinion, and included the data on Delta. Of course, I was far too optimistic as it turns out. Anyway, I sent the data to the SG, myself, yesterday.”

  “You did what!?” the director roared. Unflappable as usual, David continued.

  “It had to be done,” he explained. “You didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of what we have here.”

  “Suppose you explain it to a lowly scientist like myself.” Though Director Gallatin was a well-respected scientist in his own right, it was common knowledge that David Curie had carried him to the top. They’d met at a conference 25 years ago, struck up a friendship centered around old sci-fi movies and beer, and helped each other’s careers ever since. To Gallatin’s advantage, David was not nearly as eager for promotion, allowing Chris to rocket to the top of his field, mostly because of his friend’s genius.

  “We believed it was a common virus that expressed encephalitis-like symptoms; perhaps a blood pathogen. The vector of its spread was confusing, almost defying understanding. That is until we, more or less, isolated the contagion.”

  “How can you ‘more or less’ isolate a contagion?” the director asked.

  “Because it appears to be three contagions!” David said, and handed the director a stack of papers held together with a Curie-signature red clip. David continued his discussion, even as the director began paging through the documents. “We were going crazy trying to isolate an active pathogen. The reports of infection were so damned variable, nothing made sense. Then we got some samples from the infected customs agent from Texas.”

  “The one that took off Dr. Hansen’s pinkie?”

  “The very same,” David said, with a nod. “We gathered additional data, when Dr. Hansen succumbed to the disease. Between the two, we discovered the truth. There are three distinctly different organisms, three different vectors.” He took out a broadcasting remote, something all senior CDC staff carried, and linked it with the display in the director’s office. On the screen was an electron microscope image like nothing Dr. Gallatin had even seen.

  “That isn’t any virus we’ve ever encountered.”

  “No,” agreed Curie, a gleam in his eye. He flicked his remote and a different organism appeared. “Or this one.” Click. “Or this one, either.” The final one was the most alien of them all. It reminded Chris of a pentagon-shaped snowflake, each point possessing what looked like the sensory antenna of a moth, fine and infinitely complex.

  “How are they getting around?”

  “This last one is airborne. And it’s everywhere.” The director looked up, eyes wide. “I got this sample from the executive coffee lounge an hour ago. To be certain, I sent teams around Atlanta, in a 20-mile radius, to be safe. All four brought back this little guy. I’m still waiting on reports from our counterparts in the other G8 countries, but I suspect I already know the results.” Click, all three organisms shared the upper half of the screen.

  “We’ve been unable to extract anything like DNA or RNA. Mass spectrometer data says they’re mostly carbon, with some silicates and other matter we can’t identify. Maybe it’s a prion?”

  “Nothing like this exists on the planet,” the director said, shaking his head.

  “Right again.” The two locked eyes. “It’s got to be extraterrestrial.”

  “Okay, forget that shit now. If this one,” he pointed at the snowflake, “is in the air, why don’t we have a pandemic already?”

  “Because each individual organism is harmless.” Click, and an inset screen opened, showing an organism with a more recognizable structure. It looked a little like a virus, and a little like a biological, cellular organism. “Meet Strain Delta, Director Gallatin.” There was a series of images of each type encountering one of the other types. In each case, they seemed to merge into another form, and in each case, the form looked the same. “I’ve never seen this kind of process before. Any two of the three merging creates the final form you see here.”

  “What’s the vector of the other two?”

  “Animal life, passed by bites or direct contact, we think. We’re working on that. And water. Mix them in water or air, and they don’t combine. But put them in an organism, and bingo. Sometimes a fresh blood sample works, sometimes not. We just don’t know enough, yet. We do know it’s just about everywhere. We’re trying to develop a working test.”

&n
bsp; Next were microscopic digital shots, followed by a film. The organism moved autonomously, like many small organisms found in nature. There was a swirl in the water, and Gallatin saw the introduction of several human white blood cells. The organism instantly moved toward the nearest cell and invaded it. In moments, the cell broke apart, and the organism caught various elements, and moved on to another cell.

  “It has a distinct taste,” Gallatin said. “The bugger prefers white blood cells.”

  “But, the effects are more like encephalitis,” Gallatin complained.

  “It prefers white cells for fuel and components, but it works on brain cells.” Click. On the screen was a slide of brain tissue. The neurons were clearly visible in the web-like connections. Among them, at a fraction of the neurons’ size, were the Delta Strain organisms. They weren’t attacking the neurons themselves, they were attacking the connections.

  “Holy shit,” the director gasped. “Are they destroying the neural connections? That would explain the psychopathic behavior.”

  “Only to some degree,” David said, “but eventually, the damage would render the infected comatose, then dead. No, this isn’t a simple pathological attack.” He considered the image for a while, then took out an old-fashioned notepad and scribbled in it, seemingly forgetting where he was. He gestured at the screen absently. “Delta is doing something.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “We don’t know, yet.” Click. Now they saw the late Dr. Hansen, strapped to a table in a specially-constructed room. He shook, fighting his restraints, eyes wide and animalistic, following people off camera with a disturbing intensity. “But I intend to find out.”

  “How many outbreaks?” the director asked, leafing through the bright red pages at the back of the report.

  “As of 10 minutes ago, over 40.”

  “My God,” the director said and set the report on his desk with a growing sense of dread. David continued flicking through slides, mumbling and shaking his head, a slight smile on his face that meant he was discovering something new and interesting. The director also discovered something—why the Surgeon General had killed himself.

  * * *

  Thirty-five miles south of Kissimmee, a dozen hunters celebrated the end of another successful hog hunt. The feral porcine had caused massive damage to crops and displaced species native to Florida for many years. After the introduction of no-fee hunting and helicopter hunts, they had finally turned the corner. This group used a combination of men in helicopters with semiautomatic Saiga shotguns and a groundside ambush to rack up nearly a hundred hogs in just a few hours.

  Volunteers finished cleaning and butchering the day’s kills and packed them into refrigerated trucks to send to programs that fed the homeless in Tampa, Orlando, and Palm Beach. In hours, there would be tons of pulled pork sandwiches and sausage.

  To repay the hunters and the volunteers, the charity hunt organizer and land owners hosted a huge open-pit barbeque. Everyone lined up to fill their plates with fresh, steaming, well-done slices of tasty hog. Hours later, when none of the attendees returned home, family and friends began to wonder if something was wrong.

  * * *

  On the cruise ship Bahamas Odyssey, sushi night was a great success, thanks to the wide variety of fish brought aboard in Nassau. Officials inspected the fish before the sushi chefs cut them up and made tasty treats for everyone. Most of the passengers tried at least one piece, and the captain shared some of the best with his table.

  After the meal, the wait staff feasted on the leftovers, and some found its way down to the engine room.

  * * *

  A few miles from the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta, the annual zombie walk was underway, sponsored by a famous cable television show. Thousands of hardcore fans, dressed up in costumes and makeup that went from amateurish to unbelievably realistic, paraded down the streets to the delight of onlookers and the horror of the police department. To make it even more exciting, impromptu groups of “zombie hunters” pretended to attack the walkers with Nerf guns and realistic weapons.

  As the participants moved past the restaurant district, a few of the zombies couldn’t resist stopping for a snack, or posing with a Dos Equis. I don’t always eat brains, but when I do it’s in Atlanta! So, when a zombie with a torn shirt and blood all over his face and chest came running out of a popular barbecue joint, a few people used their cellphones to record the event with interest. The zombie howled, looked around in confusion for a moment, then screamed and jumped on the nearest person, a woman holding her young daughter’s hand.

  There were a few shouts of surprise and a smattering of applause. When the zombie tore the woman’s throat out while the little girl screamed, almost everyone decided they were watching an elaborate performance of some kind. The little girl tried to stop the zombie, grabbing him by his hair and pulling back. It turned, mouth full of her mother’s flesh, and backhanded the girl, sending her spinning to the concrete. The crowd fell into an outraged silence as four more zombies staggered out of the barbecue shop, looking for victims.

  * * *

  General Rose looked at his assistant, a young major who’d replaced Cobb Pendleton when he’d retired two years ago. The assistant shook his head, and Rose scowled. The order he looked at was in response to his request to send assistance to distressed citizens.

  “Stand down, do not send any units into the field,” the orders read. “Mobilization orders are forthcoming. A national state of emergency is underway.” The orders, written in code, were signed by the Joint Chiefs, instead of the President; it was another sign of the growing emergency.

  “Son of a bitch,” Rose grumbled and tossed the dispatch onto his desk. He had units out training. He could send one, but it didn’t have the knowledge or equipment to deal with the situation Cobb described. He had no doubt the retired major was on the up-and-up. He’d seen the preliminary reports of losses among the forces sent to Mexico. The situation was turning into the biggest shit sandwich in history. “Are there any other units in the area?”

  The major ran a finger down a report he carried, shook his head, then stopped. “There’s this,” he said, and put the sheet down, pointing at a line.

  “Well jumping Buddha, son, why didn’t you tell me that was available?”

  “It isn’t. They listed that bird as red-lined in Mexico. It went down with the expeditionary forces, but had an engine failure. It’s supposed to be in Monterrey.”

  “Since it’s not a radioactive pile of junk, I’d say that report is wrong,” the General proclaimed. “Get the pilot on the horn before he’s too far out of position.”

  “We tried when it approached the border. There was no reply.”

  “And you were going to report this when, exactly?”

  “Traffic was about to report it to the Pentagon, when I saw the dispatch.”

  “Don’t!” Rose barked. “Get a link, so I can call them.”

  “But, General, they’re not responding to radio calls.”

  “Get me the fucking radio, son.”

  * * *

  Andrew didn’t like the plane very much. It was a slug compared to his nimble fighter, and with one engine down it had terrible flight characteristics. He was having trouble maintaining level flight above 12,000 feet. Whenever he climbed over that altitude, the craft started to bleed power. It was frustrating. Normally, he’d have dealt with it, but there were mountains nearby, and that meant he had to fly a circuitous route northward to maintain a sufficient safety margin. He watched his fuel gauges with a wary eye.

  “Spooky, call sign Spooky, this is Hood, over.”

  Andrew looked up from the controls in surprise. He’d heard calls earlier and figured they were addressing him. He’d ignored them. There was a landing strip only five miles north of the border. He planned to set the bird down there and pick up the pieces afterwards. After what he’d seen in Mexico, he didn’t care what they did to him. There was the road he’d photographed, then the cannibal
crazies in Monterrey. Fuck that! Everything was out of control.

  But this time, it wasn’t a generic call. He looked along the overhead, above the instruments, and found a plaque. Engraved there was the name “Spooky,” the plane’s call sign. Whoever was calling was from Ft. Hood, they knew exactly where he was, and what the plane’s call sign was. Fuck.

  “This is Spooky, Hood, go ahead.”

  Chris, who’d been sitting in the engineer’s seat so he could read some of the instruments or flip switches for Andrew, looked up in surprise. When he realized the pilot was talking on the radio, he got excited. Andrew wished he were as excited. Chris didn’t know that Andrew had been a prisoner the day before.

  “What’s your mission Spooky? You are out of the chain of command.” The voice was deep, authoritative, and way too direct for Andrew’s liking.

  “Just moving this bird back stateside.” Andrew tried the subtle route, playing the stupid transfer pilot. Why not? “Who’s this?”

  “Lieutenant General Rose, III, Corps Operations Command. Now you, son. And don’t try to tell me you’re just some transfer pilot. That bird was red-lined in Monterrey, and we both know what happened there.” Andrew considered turning off the radio. “Go dark on me, and I’ll have an F-22 airborne in ten minutes.”

  Andrews’s plans, half-formed, became a smoking ruin. What could he do? “This is Lieutenant Andrew Tobin, USAF, General.”

  The radio was quiet for a half a minute. Andrew knew someone on the other end of the radio link was punching his name into a database, and they would shortly know his entire story. Would they scramble the F-22 or a surface-to-air missile?