“We did.” He looked around her. “Speaking of which. Where are they?”
She pointed to a rectangular brick building. “Thunder has them all corralled in the school gymnasium over there.”
“Plenty of guards and we keep ’em locked in,” Thunder said.
“Isn’t that a fire hazard?” Steele joked.
Thunder gave him an evil grin.
“That’s a risk we’re willing to take,” Tess said.
“How many of them are in there?”
Thunder gestured at the gym with a hand holding a beer. “Eh. I’d say about two hundred and twenty or thirty. We left over a hundred at Little Sable Point for the dead. I’m not sure how many escaped.”
“They’re probably regrouping as we speak at the Temple Energy Plant.” Steele’s mind raced at the potential for another fight.
“You thinking about taking care of them?” Thunder asked. Steele shook his head no.
“That’s mostly women and children now. Any remnants of the Chosen will be on the defensive from either us or the dead. Let’s think about it for a few days.”
“You know what they say about seizing the initiative.”
“I do, but I’m not sure acquiring another five hundred prisoners will be great for our food situation.”
“Their wounded?” Steele asked.
“They insisted on tending their own,” Tess said.
“Make sure they have adequate supplies. We aren’t monsters.”
Tess’s face grew dark, but she nodded.
Thunder scratched at his bandana. “They may have some supplies that we can use back at the power plant.”
“I’ll think on it,” Steele said, feeling the exhaustion of his injuries and decisions alike.
Thunder gave him a grave nod. “You do that. When you’re feeling a bit better, I will introduce you to some of the clubs.”
Pressing his lips flat, Steele let Thunder know he appreciated him not overwhelming him with a bunch of new faces in his injured state. The other man nodded.
“I look forward to meeting some of the members of Rolling Thunder.”
“Ha. That’s got a nice ring to it,” Thunder said with a laugh. “Boys got some chicken cooking over there. You want some?”
Steele’s stomach grumbled in response. Not having eaten in days was catching up with him. “That’d be nice. Gwen, you think you could go with Thunder and find us some food?” he asked as sweetly as his pain would allow. Her face strained, and she eyed Tess untrustingly.
“Yeah, sure,” she said like a viper, giving him eyes that said if he wasn’t injured already, she would be doing it for him. She walked off with a backward glance at him like a warning shot across his bow. Without her support he sat, mostly fell, down into a nearby lawn chair. Tess dragged a lawn chair and took a seat next to him with a smirk. She shoved her hand into a cardboard box.
“Beer?” she said, holding up a can.
“No, thanks. It’ll put me back to sleep. No craft brews?”
She cracked open the top of the can and slurped a sip. “At this point, it doesn’t matter. Beer is beer.”
Steele breathed a laugh.
Tess took another swig, watching Gwen and Thunder. “You can tell her not to worry. Our near-death experience won’t change our working relationship. I’m not going to steal you out from underneath her,” she said, acting as if he had no say in the matter.
“Well, I’m sure she appreciates that.”
“Crossed my mind, though,” she said with a smirk.
Steele shook his head with a laugh. “I bet it has.” But I have bigger fish to fry, he finished in his mind.
Her playful look sobered. “I’m still glad we found each other. I’m not sure Little Sable would have weathered the storm without you.”
“Little Sable never would have made it this far without someone like you at the helm,” he said.
She flashed him a smile. “Don’t make me blush.”
“I hate to say it, but despite what we did, Little Sable Point is gone,” he said. He shifted in his seat, painfully adjusting his weight.
“I know, stupid. But the idea behind it, ya know? I think it gives people some hope that things might get back to normal,” she said.
Steele looked out over abandoned buildings of Pentwater. The gathering of bikers laughed uproariously. Trash littered the street. Broken glass lay scattered near buildings. Doors lay smashed open. A club of bikers in black-wolf patched vests and with guns drawn, charged into a building across the street. After a dozen gunshots and a few minutes, they walked back out with hands full of boxes and supplies.
“It gives me hope too,” he said, staring out at the desolation before him.
JOSEPH
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, CO
The lights were off inside his room. With no windows, the room was black. The only light crept in underneath the bottom of the door.
Joseph’s back was against the wall, and his hands were wrapped around his knees, holding them together. He had heard a man screaming as he dragged himself down the hallway.
“Be quiet,” Joseph whispered into the darkness. The man never heard him.
The man’s screams were horrible. His skin screeched on the floor as he crawled. Screee. Screee. The gradual scrape of clothes and flesh on the hard floor came to a stop. More footsteps came down the hallway, but Joseph knew better than to hope. It wasn’t the first time the infected had come. The steps were followed by low moans.
“No. Please,” the man sobbed outside his door. The voice pled for them to stop. Splashes of something hit the floor. The man’s screams became cries and the cries became gurgles. Bones popped. Tendons snapped. Followed by the chomping of flesh and the clicking of jaws. Then there were only the distant gunshots. An hour passed and the infected finished their dastardly deed and left Joseph alone.
The gunshots had come in intervals as if different groups of men were clearing the areas already cleared, or maybe the first group through hadn’t survived the clearing.
Booms thundered on his door as if the person were trying to punch their way inside.
“U.S. Army. Anyone alive in there?”
“Yes.” Was all he could muster.
Joseph reached up and clicked the bolt open. The door cracked open and armed men pushed their way inside. Flashlights pointed every which way. The lights illuminated Joseph, revealing drying gore splattered all over his clothes.
“Let me see your hands,” the soldier screamed through his mask. Joseph timidly put them upward.
“I’m not infected,” Joseph growled. “I’m Dr. Jackowski.”
The soldier looked him up and down. “We’ve been looking for you. Get in the back. We’ll take you to the collection point.”
The soldiers were armed with miscellaneous weapons. Two men were heavily armed in black tactical gear like Hudson’s squad that had been ripped apart in the elevator. Masks, gloves, and helmets covered them. They held short carbines in front of their bodies. One of the men wore civilian clothes but had a tactical vest over his torso with an MP5 strapped to his chest. The other two men wore combat uniforms but only had pistols in their hands.
Joseph was pushed to the back of the squad of pieced together soldiers. He joined a couple of people huddling near the back. A woman with glasses cried. The man wrapped his arms around the woman. “Shhh. It’s okay, Megan. These men will keep us safe,” he said.
Her head shook side to side in a tepid no. “They grabbed Stephen from my arms and ate him,” she mumbled. “They said we would be safe inside the mountain,” she whispered. Her words were guilt-ridden, barbed arrows into Joseph’s soul. I caused this.
They avoided a puddle of crimson liquid and bits of a uniform as they followed the soldiers like elementary students following their teachers on a field trip. The soldiers checked room to room for survivors. Quick knocks. Quick questions to determine if they were alive. The group’s progress was painfully slow down the hall.
Jose
ph recognized the double door at the end of the hall. Bloody footprints stained the floor, leaving long streaks across it.
One of the heavily armed soldiers leaned back. “Wait here,” he said in a gruff voice. He eyed them over his shoulder. “We’re going to clear the main room. Yell if somebody comes up behind us.”
The soldiers filed up on either side of the door. The squad leader held up his hand. Three. Two. One. He displayed with his fingers and the squad of mixed personnel disappeared into the office.
A man growled and someone fired their gun in a short staccato of bullet notes. Joseph crept down the hallway after the soldiers.
“What are you doing?” the man behind him hissed.
“I’ve got to see something,” Joseph said.
“They said to stay here.” The man’s voice came out in a whine. Megan continued to cry on his shoulder.
“I know.” Joseph ignored the man’s pleas for him to stop and walked inside.
Cubicle walls were knocked over onto desks. Blood covered the floor where people had been consumed or turned into infected. The squad had cleared corners and made its way cautiously forward to the bloodbath around the elevator. The soldiers twisted back-and-forth, guns searching for threats. Joseph followed behind them thirty feet behind them.
“Help,” echoed out from the elevator.
Shouts sounded out. “Drop the gun,” screamed the soldiers. Metal clanked on the ground.
A man emerged from the elevator where he had been hiding. Dead soldiers were strewn around him. His body was covered in dried brown blood as if he had been swimming in a cesspool of death. Only his eyes were gore-free. His shirt and briefs were stuck to his skin. Bites decorated his skin. His arms and shoulders were covered with open wounds in the form of bite marks. Blood seeped from the indentations in his skin.
“He’s been bit,” shouted a soldier. He pointed his pistol at the man. Guns lifted to shoulders and they sidestepped away from one another in an effort to not get stuck in the crossfire.
Gauze had been stuffed into a hole in his calf and bandages had been hastily wrapped around both his arms.
“I…I…Please don’t shoot. I’m okay,” the young soldier stuttered. Joseph jogged closer to the group. It can’t be him, he thought.
The soldiers exchanged looks. The squad leader, the most heavily armed soldier, turned back to the young man. “I’m sorry, buddy. It’s been a rough day for all of us. You know a bite means. It’s only a matter of time. Our orders are clear.”
The young, shaved-head soldier shook his head, looking from gun to gun. “No. Come on, guys. Same team.”
Joseph eyed the squad leader. The squad leader’s finger tapped the receiver of his carbine three distinct times, and a man in only a tactical vest and civilian clothes moved to the side.
“Make your peace, brother. We won’t let you turn,” the squad leader said. The other soldier crept up from the side, gun pointed at the young soldier’s head.
“Wait,” Joseph screamed. Guns whipped his way, and for a second, he knew they were going to shoot him.
“Get back in the hallway,” shouted the squad leader, pointing a gloved-finger at him, his other hand still on his carbine.
“No.” Joseph gulped.
The soldier’s eyes went wide and he marched for him. An iron grip crushed into Joseph’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see it isn’t safe?”
“Don’t shoot that man,” Joseph shouted. The squad leader shoved him backward. Joseph stumbled back.
“Get back,” the squad leader shouted. He pointed a black-gloved finger at Joseph. “He’s infected. We’ve let him live too long as is,” he hissed through his mask.
Joseph gave him as fierce a look as he could muster. “That man is living proof that we have found a vaccine for the virus.”
The squad leader looked back at the bleeding, bandaged man in his briefs. He released Joseph and pointed back. “Him?”
“Yes. Subject C is the only one who hasn’t turned when bitten.” Joseph eyed the young soldier standing there practically naked. His skin was pale beneath the blood. Joseph added hurriedly, “We must get him medical treatment and pray he doesn’t turn.”
***
Forty-eight hours later, Subject C, Private First Class Rodgers was confined and under constant monitoring in the quarantine wing of the BSL-4 lab. Joseph watched him sleeping on the other side of a camera.
“No sign of infection,” Joseph said to Byrnes. The gaunt military man rubbed his chin and nodded his head.
“I can’t remember the last time we had any good news. We will continue monitoring him for any changes.”
“I’m thinking another week and we will be almost positive that the recipients of the vaccine will not turn infected. Its replication cycle is so fast that every hour he doesn’t turn, I am more sure it worked. Two to three weeks, and I will be comfortable for expansive distribution among the soldiers.”
“What if there are long-term effects?”
“Nothing is more long-term than death, but we will use it on a few squads to begin with. Men involved with some front-line work. I can live with some irritable bowel syndrome, or something like that if it can keep these guys fighting long enough to win.”
Joseph didn’t like it but had to agree. This vaccine would provide soldiers and civilians with an opportunity to live through potential infection. The infected could still murder them, but vaccinated victims would not contract the disease by fluid transmission or bite.
Byrnes nodded thoughtfully. “The outbreak was terrible, but we did it, Dr. Jackowski.” Byrnes wrapped his arm around Joseph, cupping his shoulder. The tall colonel smiled down at him. Still a sad man, but happy in this brief moment in time.
“We did,” Joseph said. Joseph gently released himself from the colonel’s grip. “I’m going down to speak with Richard.”
Byrnes watched him for a moment before he spoke as if he tried to understand him. “What is your loyalty to that guy? He’s the cause of all of this.”
Joseph looked down. Patient Zero had caused him nothing but pain and suffering. Men had died to help Joseph find him. Men had died controlling him. Rebecca, a woman whom he had fallen for even as she slowly succumbed to Primus Necrovirus, had died because of him. This had all been because of one person who had unknowingly spread the virus to an unsuspecting planet. Yet, in the end, the virus was to blame, not the man that contracted it. Richard Thompson, Patient Zero, would get the blame if someone ever wrote about the virus in a history book, but he would also be the man who saved mankind from it.
“I dunno. But I want to tell him that we did it. That we couldn’t have done it without him.”
Byrnes nodded his acceptance and Joseph left. He walked quietly down the hallway, to his room. He donned his HAZMAT suit, undergoing all protocols.
Gasses released as the pressurized doors opened up to Patient Zero’s white sterile room. His heart monitor beeped. Beep-beep, beep. Beep-beep, beep. Patient Zero’s chest rose and fell. Joseph hesitantly approached the bed, remembering the time he had been in the room with Rebecca and Patient Zero had infected her.
His blue-suit-booted feet crunched like plastic beneath him until he was alongside Patient Zero.
“Richard,” he whispered. Richard’s fingers were limp and lifeless. He took the man’s hand and squeezed. Patient Zero’s hand felt almost artificial through his biohazard suit. It was like squeezing the hand of a mannequin.
Bandages covered the countless incisions where the other doctors had sliced him open for observation. One bandage covered his forehead where they had taken a portion of his frontal lobe. It had greatly diminished his communication abilities. His eyes fluttered and cracked open.
“It’s me, Joseph. Do you remember me?” He gave Richard a faint smile.
Richard’s pale white eyes blinked acknowledgment, a faint milk-chocolate brown hidden beneath their whiteness.
“I came here to tell you something.”
Richard blinked his almost white eyes again. Drool dribbled down his chin from the corner of his mouth.
“We’ve come up with a vaccine. It’s more of a miracle than real science, but it worked.”
Richard’s eyes blinked rapidly. Joseph squeezed his hand.
“We couldn’t have done this without you. It was your cells that allowed us to find a way.” And Rebecca. “I just wanted you to know that. You have saved a lot of lives. And you took Rebecca’s.” A flash of anger bubbled in Joseph’s gut. “You took hers. You took the woman who was to be my partner in this. You took her and made me watch her die.” He found himself crushing Richard’s hand in his. Richard’s eyes blinked fast. Joseph let go of his hand, staring at his own.
“Why am I even bothering? You can’t even speak on your own behalf.” Joseph shook his head in frustration. He stared at the white walls. Pure and snow-white and sterile, but also, devoid of feeling and emotion.
“No, it’s not your fault. It is the virus’s.” His eyes dropped back down on Richard’s incision-covered body. Look at his man. More scars than Frankenstein. The man stared back, a primal form of relief in his eyes.
Willing or not, you both gave your lives for this.
From the corner of Richard’s eye, a tear trickled down his face.
“Goodbye, Richard. Your part is done, but this war is not over.”
Richard would continue to be observed in his diminished state until his heart gave out. After his body was put down and incinerated in the flames of a cremation furnace, the war for the living would continue. Richard, Patient Zero of the worst outbreak in recorded human history, would be a footnote. The outbreak war would continue until the living became the dead or as long as the infected roamed the earth.
STEELE
Shores of Lake Michigan
White caps on gray water crashed onto the beach below, filling the air with a dull roar. The sky was a lighter version of gray. Dark clouds hung low, racing across the horizon of the giant lake promising rain sometime in the near future. They stood near the edge of the lakeside sloping cliff that dropped almost one hundred feet to the beach. The grass was uncut and overgrown, standing all the way to Steele’s knees.
The End Time Saga Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 114