by Sawyer, JT
He nodded, trying to soak in some of her hope, but he was tired on a level he had never know before. It felt like this was a war with no end in sight because of the highly adaptable nature of the enemy, who seemed to respond with new tactics at each fight. The ramifications of all-out war at MacDill and other bases made this upcoming mission seem less daunting all of a sudden. Reisner pulled her in close, smelling the comforting aroma of her blond hair and realizing she was giving him the kind of pep talk he was used to giving her when the chips were down. He was amazed at her resolve after all she had been through since this began—and he knew Selene was right about the bioweapon being the key to tipping the scale in their favor. But will there be enough time for us to gain the upper hand?
Chapter 12
Thirty minutes later, the Blackhawk flew over the subdivisions of west Phoenix, heading past the derelict cities of Goodyear and Buckeye then veering to the north. The pilot planned to arc back to a small mountain range four miles from the nuclear power plant and insert the group to avoid alerting the paras to their presence. After that, they would trek across the desert and lay up within a half-mile from the target while coordinating with the other tactical strike teams around the country to begin their assault at the same time.
“There it is,” said the pilot over the intercom as he motioned with his chin to the left. Ivins could see several manmade lakes, their royal blue color an assault on the eyes as it stood out amidst the ocean of rock and sand. Surrounding these were three generating stations made of domed concrete that reminded Ivins of mosques in the Middle East. There were numerous other buildings and acres of electrical towers, but they were too far away to make out any further detail.
The helo descended, making a beeline for the jagged mountains that resembled the fine teeth on a saw. The pilot circled in and landed, idling the bird while the teams hopped out and grabbed their immense rucksacks filled with canisters of the bioagent, ammo, explosives, and trauma gear. Ivins had tanked up on water and chow before leaving, knowing they would have to hump a lot of gear through some inhospitable desert terrain before arriving at their lookout. He was the first one up and ready with his pack and he took a visual fix on one of the nine venting stacks at the nuclear plant, which were still emitting gray vapor into the humidity-hungry sky. He looked at his watch and set the timer, then turned to face the rest of the group, who were standing with their weapons fanned out around the Blackhawk as it lifted off.
“Alright, we’ve got ninety minutes to cover four miles, so let’s get busy.” He clutched his MK12 rifle and pivoted around, letting his eyes linger on the orange hue of the western horizon, wondering if his wife and daughter were looking at the same sunset. He filed away the thought for now, his mind needing to be free of emotion, then he began briskly walking into the saguaro-studded landscape towards Palo Verde.
Chapter 13
The dilapidated wine cellar smelled like raw sewage and camphor, causing Carl’s eyes to water as he was led into the cavernous chamber made of locally hewn stone. The dim lighting on the ceiling was augmented by a large spotlight mounted from an overhead rafter, and Carl squinted as he neared the center of the room, where two people in their fifties were busy measuring amounts of clear fluid into a glass beaker. The ad-hoc assemblage of medical equipment on the rectangular table looked like it had all been recently unboxed, given the pristine conditions of the test tubes, Bunsen burners, and glass cylinders. Behind the two men was another smaller table arranged with a wealth of pharmaceutical compounding equipment, oral suspension mixes, and large bottles of micronized synthetic hormone powders.
“Jim and Evelyn will fill you in on what your role is,” said Rose. “You will work until we tell you that you are done. Food and water are on the desk next to the first wine urn. The bathroom is wherever you want it to be.” She turned and walked out the entrance, closing the thick oaken door behind her.
“I hope that snotty bitch trips going down the stone steps and breaks her neck,” said the woman with frost-colored hair that was matted down against her head.
“She’s just trying to stay alive like we are,” said the man. “Like everyone is in this crazy world.”
“If you say so. She always acts so smug.” The woman put down a small tray and looked over at Carl. “Name’s Evie, not Evelyn. What’s yours?”
He shuffled forward, casting a glance back at the oak door and then down the aisle between the wine casks. “Carl—Carl Hathaway.”
“So what kind of doctor are you exactly?” said Jim in a barely audible voice. He didn’t bother to look at Carl and continued plodding away at his duties. “I assume that’s why you’re here.”
“I’m…uhm…a vet, actually. Veterinary doctor before this.” Carl moved closer, scrutinizing the liquids and dried pharmaceutical compounds in the mortar and pestle next to Evie.
Jim raised his eyebrows, glancing up at Evie then over at Carl. “This is what it’s come to, eh? No more real physicians left so they’re scrounging around for anyone with medical experience.” Jim scratched the back of his chin with his wrist bone, careful not to get any of the clear fluid from his latex gloves on his bare skin.
Evie nodded for him to come closer. “Regardless, he’ll make things easier for us—and maybe together we can all figure out a way out of this hellhole.” She pointed at the four rows of full bottles on the worktable. “Since we were captured, we have been in here, formulating all of this.” Evie paused and looked down. “For him.”
“Who?”
Jim looked surprised. “I thought Rose would have taken you to him by now.”
Evie held her shirt sleeve up to her mouth and fought back a muffled gasp as her eyes gazed at the ground. “He has both of my sons—said we need to produce two hundred vials today or…or one of my boys will die.”
“Who is doing this? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?” said Carl as he moved closer to Evie.
“He—it—whatever…it’s some kind of advanced alpha beyond anything I’ve heard about on the ham radio broadcasts. This thing is strong and smart.” Evie paused, her lips trembling. “And it can…can talk as well as any of us.”
“How’s that possible?” said Carl.
“I’ve wondered that myself and have had a lot of time down here to mull that over,” said Jim, who had stopped working and rested his hands on the edge of the table. “Maybe the virus mutated his brain structure in a radically different way than the other creatures, which could mean that there might be more like him around the world. Or he never suffered through the reanimation process, so his brain function never dropped off like the other alphas.”
“You say it can talk—about what?” said Carl.
“Only about our roles down here and the consequences to our loved ones if we fail him,” said Evie, her voice barely audible.
The three of them each exchanged looks of despair, then Evie and Jim turned away, returning to their work in silence. Carl felt like the cavernous walls of the damp cellar were squeezing in on him. He carefully grabbed a beaker of solution, steadying his shaky hands as the thought of losing the few friends he had left in the world filled him with an intense desire to fulfill his tedious duties.
Chapter 14
Selene was standing in the large office she shared with Tso and Noveck, surrounded by all of her packed belongings, which largely consisted of several laptops, some scientific equipment she would need on the Lachesis, and some personal items stowed in a duffle bag. A young man named Kurt, who was Tso’s assistant, had just left with another armload of equipment, heading for the helipad on the roof, and Selene now had more legroom to pace around as she tried to sleuth through the mysterious circumstances surrounding the woman found in the tunnels. Selene was staring at the monitor on the wall that showed the BSL-4 lab on sub-level three, where the mystery patient brought in from the tunnels was located. Why on earth were all these women kept immobilized in that chamber? What’s unique about them that they weren’t consumed by the drones
or the alphas?
Victor Tso was next to her, entering the last of his notes on his laptop. She was relieved having her old partner join her again after arriving from Pearl Harbor a few days ago, and his expertise in epidemiology had already lightened her workload and stress level. Selene moved away from the monitor and leaned over Tso’s right shoulder, studying the records of the woman’s vital signs since she arrived along with analyzing the CT scan.
“Her heart rate has been the same all along—just below the normal threshold for survival despite the meds we’re administering,” she said. “She is basically only being kept alive because of all the hardware she is hooked up to and probably doesn’t have too much longer.”
Tso looked over his laptop into the exam room ahead while pushing his rimmed glasses further up his slender nose. “Almost reminds me of someone who is suffering from immersion hypothermia and whose body is barely hanging on.”
“But her brain function is almost non-existent,” she said, tapping her finger on the EEG machine. “There’s an occasional blip on the screen, almost like there’s some kind of outside interference, but nothing I can attribute to her.”
I’ve never seen that kind of contradictory data before—are you sure everything checks out with the equipment?”
“Yes, I already triple-checked the results. Noveck is upstairs checking on the diagnostics on the CT machine but there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary there either.” Tso shook his head. “We’ll have to do further studies on the Lachesis once we get relocated.” He glanced at the digital clock on the wall. “When is the helicopter from Creech arriving?
“In just another thirty minutes,” Selene said in a monotone voice while studying the vitals again. “I just don’t get it—her central nervous system shouldn’t even be able to maintain her physical state since she is essentially brain-dead. It has to be the sheer amount of melatonin flowing through her system that is keeping her in this kind of controlled stasis.”
Tso heard his laptop beep, indicating a new file had just arrived from his lab assistant. He clicked on it, pulling up a grainy black-and-white image. “These are the lab results we just ran an hour ago. I wanted to…” He paused, his mouth agape. “Wait, this can’t be right.”
Tso’s torso was blocking the screen and Selene hopped over to his left side to see. “What is it?” she said.
He enhanced the image. Selene felt her mouth go dry when she saw the photograph. “She’s pregnant—or she was,” Selene said, lowering her voice as she swiveled her head to the right, staring at the supine figure resting on the table in the lab, her own maternal feelings rising up and reaching out an invisible hand that crossed the threshold between them. She wanted to hold the helpless young woman’s hand and turn back time so this person could have a chance at living her life instead of dying on a cold steel table in the basement of the CDC.
“I’d say just over three months,” Tso whispered. “But I don’t know medical pediatrics that well, so I could be off.”
“But how’s that possible? Her bloodwork and other tests didn’t indicate anything along those lines.”
“I’m not sure. There just weren’t any of the usual indicators to reveal she was pregnant.”
Selene’s eyes darted around the room, then she rushed over to her desk and began clicking through the helmet cam images taken by Reisner in the tunnels, staring at the other three women who had been similarly entombed in the immobilizing foam. She clicked on the DOD personnel files sent over by Dorr’s staff a few hours ago. After rapidly scrolling through each of the women’s health histories, Selene slid further back into her chair, her shoulders tensing as her eyes narrowed. “All three of them were pregnant as well. They were all in the first trimester.” She felt like a giant hand was squeezing against her ribcage. She forced herself to breathe, then slowly looked over at Tso. “My God, what was the alpha going to do with these women—or had already done to them?”
Tso’s swallowed hard, his face white. “And their unborn.”
She looked over at the small monitor that displayed the woman’s vital signs. Selene watched the heart rate slowly lowering beyond the handful of beats it had been exhibiting until it flatlined as the other vital signs were reduced to numeric figures whose meaning she was all too familiar with. Selene felt her own breath quickening and her head pounding, knowing another life had just been lost to the horrors of this pandemic. She loosened the grip on her pen, hearing it clank on the desk as she slumped back in her seat and stared at the lifeless figure in the other room. How many more have to perish?
Out of the corner of her eye, Selene caught a brilliant flash of red emanating from the ceiling, followed by the blare of a siren shrieking in the hallway. It was a sound she knew from past emergency evacuation drills at the CDC in Atlanta. She felt her heart racing as adrenaline coursed through her veins. She raced over to the control panel on the wall, where a small closed-circuit television screen had just activated.
“It has to be a biohazard breach in one of the labs,” shouted Tso above the blaring sirens.
“No—it can’t be,” muttered Selene as she stood transfixed, staring at the security camera, which showed the lobby doors outside being assaulted by two alphas accompanied by hundreds of drones.
Chapter 15
Reisner lay on his stomach a few feet from the electrical fence surrounding Palo Verde as he glassed the grounds with his binoculars. Nash and Porter were squatting to his right, disabling the security panel for the perimeter. Ivins and his team were spread along the ground eighty yards to the north, waiting for the green light from Nash to cut through the fence and proceed inside. Reisner scanned right to left, past the two white administration buildings in front of the nine columnar venting stacks emitting a ghostly gray vapor that cloaked the grounds. A hundred yards past the stacks were over eighty acres of electrical towers that transferred the energy generated at the nuclear plant to nearby relay stations.
The plan was for Reisner’s team to enter from the east and proceed towards the entrance to the recirculation pumps housing facility, where the largest concentration of alphas was located. Their unique heat signatures, which hovered a few degrees higher than the drones, indicated that eight of them were nestled inside the building while their legions of drones were clustered around the north entrance gate. Once they received the go-ahead from Dorr, Ivins would deliver his payload of aerosol upon the drones while Reisner’s team targeted the alphas fleeing the building in an effort to protect the drones. All of the operators knew from past experience and from data collected from past battles around the world that the alphas always hovered within a hundred meters of the drones in an effort to defend them and provide guidance. Reisner also had a hunch that there was a geographic limitation to the alphas’ mental ability to communicate with their underlings, though he wasn’t sure what the extent of that was yet.
Reisner pulled back from his binoculars as he saw Nash give the thumbs-up that the electrical fence had been neutralized. He relayed the information to Ivins through his mouthpiece then glanced down at his watch. The second hand on his watch seemed like it was moving at half speed, and he felt his mouth go dry. Ten minutes to the largest orchestrated assault on our country’s facilities ever attempted.
Chapter 16
The tactical ops room on the third floor of the command center was bustling with chatter between the intelligence personnel at their consoles and their respective operators on the ground, spread around the eleven nuclear plants. Dorr stood with his arms folded, dividing his attention between the various monitors on the wall that showed the lay-up positions for each team. Hemmings was beside him, her breathing shallow, like she was a sprinter waiting for the start signal. He realized she had probably never observed a surgical military operation unfold before and now she was about to be privy to one of the largest tactical assaults by special operations units on U.S. soil. It was difficult enough for him to fathom at times, and he wondered what the next few hours would bring. Ei
ther way, he knew there would be a significant retaliation by the alphas once they learned of the massive fatalities amongst the drones and the deaths of the alphas inside the nuclear facilities. They had been fortunate in Phoenix with Reisner’s team containing their small experiment and eliminating the single alpha there before it could relay information. This would take things to an entirely new level and mark their first massive ground assault upon the enemy since the pandemic began.
Dorr observed the shaky helmet-cam footage from the video monitor, which showed eastern Washington. The foul weather was obscuring the clarity of the facility grounds ahead but he could make out a cluster of drones milling about the main entrance. He knew the heavy rain was going to make air dispersal of the bioagent a problem, and the team of operators had to move in closer than planned.
“Three minutes,” whispered Hemmings as her foot tapped on the floor. “After this, there will be no turning back. God help us in our efforts to reclaim this world.”
Dorr nodded, not sure her latter comment would have any bearing on the situation. The virus had wiped out his entire family and dozens of his closest colleagues and brothers-in-arms. His faint hold on religion had evaporated the same week as he tried to hold on to his grip on reality while having the burden of leadership thrust upon him by the remaining survivors spread throughout the nation. Elite warriors, superior firepower, and brutal efficiency in combat tactics were the elements that were his guiding forces, and they were about to dole out a major blow upon the enemy.