by D. J. Molles
Lee watched the two bodies jolt from impacts about a half-second before the rifle reports washed over him. Gray hoodie crumpled where he stood. Red plaid staggered forward, tried to bring up his rifle, then lost his legs and collapsed, dead.
Across from the gate, Lee watched the assault team coalesce out of the woods, Logan up front with bolt cutters. They breached the gate. Filed through at a purposeful but unrushed pace.
“Assault team is in,” Lee said. “Overwatch, hold on doors and windows, Building One.”
Two buildings. The main and largest one designated as Building One. The smaller one, not much more than a shed, designated as Building Two. With Carl and Abe covering Building One, Lee shifted to observe Building Two.
Mitch’s voice: “Assault team’s at Building One. Breaching now.”
Lee opened both eyes. Through the unmagnified sight of his left eye, he saw Rudy put his foot through the door of Building One. The explosive sound of the slam reached Lee a second later. The assault team filed in, Julia and Mitch holding cover on the exterior of the building.
Lee refocused on Building Two. No movement.
After about a minute, Rudy, Morrow, Logan and Blake exited Building One, and started moving for Building Two.
Mitch and Julia still held their positions.
“No movement from Building Two,” Lee advised.
They stacked up again and Rudy breached again.
Only Logan and Blake went into the smaller Building Two. They exited about twenty seconds after they’d entered.
“It’s clear,” Mitch said, louder and more confidently. “Grounds are clear.”
“Roger,” Lee responded. “Moving to you.”
The entire operation had lasted less than five minutes, from first shot to all-clear.
In the time it took Lee and Carl and Abe to make it out of the woods, Rudy and Morrow had retrieved their two pickup trucks and parked them around back of Building One where they couldn’t be seen from the road.
They secured the gates, posted Logan and Blake as sentries, and met inside the main building.
It was dark inside and they lit their way around using their weaponlights. They went to the office, which had a desk and some chairs. That was all they needed. Julia posted their trusty solar lamp, illuminating the room.
Mitch sprawled their map of southern Alabama across the desk while Lee pulled out the satphone that he’d borrowed from Ed. He quick-dialed Fort Bragg, put it to his ear and waited.
It rang.
He waited.
Ringing.
Waited some more.
He disconnected the call, wondering if the damned satellites had degraded so much that the satphone was rendered useless. But then, it wouldn’t be ringing, would it?
He tried the call again.
And again, no one answered.
The occupants of the office had become very still, watching Lee. And watching the phone.
He tried to connect a third time.
He let it ring for longer this time. Almost a full minute.
A full minute, in which time his mind went to a lot of different places.
He put the phone down. “Something’s wrong.”
“Is it ringing?” Julia asked.
Lee stared at the phone like it was actively trying to stymie him. “Yeah, it’s ringing. It’s just no one is answering.”
“That’s not a good sign,” Carl observed.
Julia nodded to Lee. “Keep trying.”
***
Angela’s office was thrown into chaos.
Thirty seconds prior to that, Angela had been on the verge of just duking it out with Kurt and seeing if she could make a break for the door. He’d lost contact with Sergeant Hauer, who was sent to retrieve Abby and Marie, and kept repeating “He’ll answer up, he’s just busy,” but Angela wasn’t having it.
Right about the point in time when Angela was considering how effective a surprise right hook would be on Kurt, they heard a commotion in the hall. Kurt raised his rifle to the door as it burst open, and luckily had the trigger discipline not to shoot Marie in the face.
She tumbled in with Sam on her heels, looking harried and scared, but Angela’s gaze skimmed off her like a flat pebble over water and went straight to her daughter who was limping into the room, bawling hysterically with both arms over Sam’s shoulders.
There was a lot of yelling. A lot of screaming. A lot of questions being shot out and not getting any answers. The truth began to coalesce out of the storm of words.
The primals had attacked them.
Sergeant Hauer was dead.
Abby had been bitten.
Had Angela been the same woman she’d been two years ago, she would’ve stood in shock, clutching her daughter to her and trying ineffectively to think of what to do next.
But times change. And people change with them.
Angela ran to her desk and with a single sweep of her arm sent everything on it clattering and fluttering to the floor. “Put her on the desk!” she shouted over everyone else.
Sam had already anticipated what she wanted and was there with Abby, sitting her down, then swinging her legs up so she was laying on the desktop, propped up on her elbows.
“Where’d she get bit?” Angela demanded.
Sam pointed to Abby’s right thigh.
On the short ride over, Marie had done the only thing she could think of to help Abby. She’d used her own belt to tourniquet the leg. Despite the fact that everyone knew tourniquets were not an effective barrier against infection.
Angela grabbed Abby’s hand and squeezed it. She brushed hair from her daughter’s face and mumbled, “It’s going to be okay now, Sweetie, it’s going to be okay. We have you now.”
“I’m gonna die!” Abby shrilled. “I’m gonna turn infected!”
Angela couldn’t help her own tears, didn’t even think about them as they blurred her vision. “You’re not going to die!” she told her daughter. “You’re going to be okay.” Then she bent over the leg and looked at it.
She knew that she’d seen worse, and as hard as it was to be objective, that’s what she chose to fixate on: I’ve seen worse.
The bite had broken through the fabric of Abby’s jeans, and there was blood coming out, but it didn’t look like the monster that had done it had ripped a chunk out. The bleeding was manageable, and she knew that bleeding was the first priority.
God, I wish Julia was here…
She turned to Kurt and snapped her fingers. “Knife. I need a knife.”
Kurt ripped his folding knife from his vest and handed it to her. “You can’t amputate with that,” he told her as the knife left his fingers.
Angela flipped the knife open. “I’m not amputating my daughter’s leg!”
“You’re gonna amputate my leg?” Abby gasped.
“No, Sweetie, no one’s going to amputate your leg.”
In the back of Angela’s mind, the memory of her first night in Camp Ryder scuttled through her brain on insect legs. There’d been a girl that had been bitten. They’d amputated to try to prevent infection. She’d died of blood loss.
But how are you going to stop the infection?
Angela grabbed the cuff of Abby’s jeans and used the knife to cut upwards, creating a long slit all the way up to the tourniquet, exposing the wound.
The teeth marks were evident. A full bite. Top and bottom teeth. Blood oozed, but didn’t gush.
That’s good, she told herself, even as the sight of it made her feel faint. Not the blood by itself, but the fact that it was her daughter’s blood.
Kurt had negotiated himself to the opposite side of the desk, the side where Angela usually sat. He had already taken a small pouch from his vest and ripped it open. What the guys called a “blowout kit.” He pulled a little green pack from inside of it and handed this to Angela.
“It’s gauze. Put it on the wound and hold pressure.” Then he grabbed a Combat Application Tourniquet, pulled it loose, and applied it expertly, directl
y below Marie’s makeshift tourniquet. He started cranking the windlass and Abby cried out in pain.
“That hurts!”
Angela had to reign herself back from her immediate instinct to smack Kurt’s hands away.
Kurt looked at her daughter with a shade of tenderness that Angela had never seen in him before. “I know, honey. But it’s gonna help you, okay?”
Abby squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face into Sam’s arms. He cradled her head, staring down at the wound, and then up at Angela, his eyes a question about how they were going to proceed. Angela noticed that his hand snuck around and gently covered Abby’s exposed ear.
She looked up at Kurt. He had finished with the windlass and was now securing it in place. He looked up at her and the warmth was gone from him. There was only clinical urgency now. “You have to,” he said, his voice low.
“I’m not,” Angela shook her head fiercely.
Kurt held out his hand. “I’ll do it then.”
Angela pulled his knife away. “No one is going to do it!”
“Angela, it’s the only fucking way, and you know it.”
Angela jabbed a finger at him, getting furious and scared all over again. “No, I don’t know that! No one knows that! This is the first time someone’s been bitten by a primal and survived!”
“You think it’s gonna be any fucking different?” Kurt hissed, getting angry right back at her.
Angela grabbed hair that was getting in her eyes and yanked it back from her face. She spoke very deliberately, like the words were an incantation: “There is anecdotal evidence that the primals’ bites are not infectious anymore.”
Kurt’s eyes crinkled up at the edges and he tossed his hands up. “Oh, anecdotal evidence! Bullshit. You talking about some guy who says he knows a guy that knows a guy that got drunk and claimed to survive a bite? Bullshit, Angela. It’s fucking bullshit and your daughter’s life is on the line!”
“Hey!” Marie butted in, then lowered her voice below the ascending level of the argument. “You guys mind taking this over to the corner of the room?” Her insistent eyes jagged pointedly to Abby.
The three of them shuffled over into the corner of the office. By the time they got there, Kurt’s expression had melted into a hard-swallowing regret.
“Ma’am, I spoke out of turn,” he said, stiffly. “I apologize. It’s just…”
Angela was still pissed. “We’re not cutting my daughter’s leg off with a pocket knife!”
Kurt squeezed the rest out: “I had a daughter. I couldn’t do it either. And she died.”
Angela stared at him, shocked by that revelation. Kurt seemed so young, she’d never thought he could have been a father.
Marie touched Kurt’s shoulder. “No one’s taking away from that horrible situation you went through,” she said. “But this is not that. Three years ago, anecdotal evidence was the reason we started amputating after a bite, and it saved some lives. Now we have anecdotal evidence that says something different, and I’m inclined to believe it. But besides that fact, Angela is right. We don’t have the equipment to keep Abby alive through an amputation. If we start trying to do it with what we’ve got lying around she will die. If we wait, there’s a chance that she won’t.”
Kurt looked pained, but didn’t respond.
Angela’s anger had gone. She was back to fear. Back to thinking through dozens of different possibilities, none of them good. “Can we get her to the hospital?”
Marie made an unsure face. “Even if we could, it’s eight o’clock at night. Doc Trent’s not going to be there.”
“We could go find him,” Angela spurted out. “We could find him and bring him to the hospital.”
“It’s not safe out there yet,” Kurt said. “You gotta give the response crews time to clear the streets. Look what happened to Sergeant Hauer, just trying to retrieve Abby!”
“How long until they clear the streets?” Angela demanded.
“I don’t know,” Kurt responded, then indicated his radio earpiece. “They’re out there now. But we gotta give them time. If we run out there, we’re just going to create a worse situation. You try to get Abby to the hospital, there’s no telling what might happen between here and there. Is that something you really want to risk?”
“I don’t know!” Angela suddenly shouted, then grabbed her face with one hand like she was trying to stifle any more outbursts.
Marie spoke calmly. “Listen. Angela. I know you don’t want to hear the bad stuff right now, but I’m going to shoot straight with you, okay?”
Angela nodded, feeling her eyes burn, her vision swimming again.
“The tourniquets aren’t affective against infection. They never have been.”
Angela squeezed her eyes shut. Felt tears drip over her cheeks. “Jesus, Marie…”
“Listen,” Marie repeated. “If the primals’ bites are infectious, then even if we go and get Doc Trent and we somehow get Abby to the hospital, it’s going to be thirty minutes, maybe even an hour before he operates. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Angela opened her eyes. Took unsteady breathes.
She’s saying if the primals’ bites are infectious, then Abby is already infected, or will be by the time we can do anything about it.
She nodded, suddenly feeling odd and out of place, stuck in a nightmare. Everything surreal and obtuse.
Marie took Angela’s hands and squeezed them in her own. “I don’t think they are, Angela. I believe what people have told us. I think Abby’s going to be okay.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No one knows. But we’re gonna hope and pray, because that’s our best option right now.” Marie untangled her hands from Angela’s, and used those same hands to cup Angela’s face, forcing eye contact. “I love you like my own family. I love Abby too. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was true.”
“Jesus, I don’t think I can do this,” Angela whispered.
“You can. And you will. Because you have to.”
There was a sharp knock at the office door, and then it opened.
Lieutenant Derrick stepped in, looking around the carnage of the room with surprise. He held a satphone in his hand. His eyes finally found Angela, and he held the phone up. “Ma’am, it’s Captain Harden.”
Angela stared at Lieutenant Derrick, thinking, I can’t do this. I’m not cut out for this shit. I can’t strategize with Lee while my daughter’s life is on the line. I’m in over my head…
Marie cut off her thoughts. “Angela, let me coordinate with Lee, okay? You focus on Abby.”
***
“What the hell is going on out there?” Claire sidled up next to the window and pulled the shades apart, looking out onto the street where a Humvee roared by, a soldier in the turret blaring his voice through a loudspeaker: Stay in your houses. There are primals inside the wire. Lock your doors. Stay in your houses…
“Come away from the window,” a woman’s voice said behind her.
Claire turned away from the window, letting the curtains fall closed again.
Elsie Foster stood across the kitchen from her, one arm hugged across her chest, the other propped up with the fingers thoughtfully at the side of her mouth. “You’re pretty sure about the information? About the Marine detachment?”
Claire shrugged. “Charlie says she’s sure. I suppose I trust her.”
“Okay,” Elsie nodded. “You should send that information as soon as possible.”
“I’ll figure out a way to get it out. Tonight.”
“That might be tough.” Elsie frowned at Claire, her eyes knowing. “Do you know how the primals got inside?”
Claire inhaled sharply. Exhaled. “The drain gate.”
Elsie nodded, concurring. “You can’t use that again.”
“The meetings weren’t good for recruitment anyways. Everyone was just showing up to have a good time. Just a bunch of drunk kids. Their eyes glazed over at the slightest mention of dissidence.”
“Well.” A grim smile crossed Elsie’s lips. “It did get us Ben Sullivan.”
“If that ever even becomes useful.”
Elsie was very still. Considering something. Watching Claire carefully.
Claire fidgeted under the gaze. “What?”
Elsie took a step toward Claire. They were close together now. Elsie put her hand on Claire’s shoulder. “It’s very dangerous, Claire. I don’t expect you to go.”
“I’m going.”
Elsie’s lips pressed together in concentration. “Primals in the wire. A tragedy for others. An opportunity for us.” She looked earnestly at Claire. “I need you to find out what’s happening in Angela’s office. But only go if you think you can make it there safely.”
Claire looked towards the window again, a little sliver of nighttime beyond visible between the two curtains.
Out in the darkness, a string of gunfire rattled.
“Yeah, I can make it there. I’ve been through worse.”
Elsie squeezed her shoulder. “You’re so incredibly brave, Claire. I hope that someday people know about what you’ve done for this country.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
─▬▬▬─
SLIM TO NONE
In the small, dark office of Building One, Lee and his team sat in the muted refraction of a few flashlights, all of them staring at the satphone, which was placed in the center of the desk, on top of the map.
They heard Lieutenant Derrick knock on a door and then they heard some commotion in the background.
Julia shook her head, eyes still affixed on the satphone. “That doesn’t sound good.”
The phone rustled and Marie’s voice came over the line. “Lee? Are you there?”
“Yeah, we’re here, Marie,” Lee answered. “What the fuck’s going on? We’ve been trying to make contact for the last twenty minutes.”
“Primals got in the wire somehow,” Marie said. “We don’t know how yet. The whole place is in lockdown. And Lee…” Marie hesitated and lowered her voice. “Abby got bit.”
Lee drew a hand over his mouth. “Okay. I copy that. Is Angela with her?”
“Angela’s right here. We’re in her office with Abby. I’m gonna handle this phone call for her. Is that okay with you?”