A Time to Die

by Mark Wandrey

  “It’s like the video,” Vance whispered as he press-checked his FN FAL, doing a quick pat of his tactical vest to verify how many magazines he had. Seven extra full mags. On his right thigh was a Springfield XD .45 ACP and he had six extra mags for that weapon as well. Additional weapons were stashed throughout the house in various fallback locations. “They’re going to eat us alive.”

  “Contact!” Harry yelled from the south side of the house. He’d rushed in that direction, knowing the enemy would be coming from that way and taking it. Tim and Vance hadn’t tried to stop him.

  Vance heard running feet coming up and the women emerged on the balcony, dogs in hot pursuit. Ann and Nicole were both in their combat gear now, though they carrier M-4 carbines. Belinda Rose was behind them, a bit slower because she carried a pair of M-4 rifles from the house armory and an extra tac vest. She looked at Vance who’d gestured with his head toward where the ex-Marine was guarding. She took the corner and ran.

  “Space out evenly,” Vance ordered. “How many you got, Harry?”

  “Dozens,” he yelled back. The man had his weapon up and was scoping the advancing line of figures. “They’re the… things.”

  “What are they?” Ann asked, somewhat out of breath.

  “Monsters,” Vance answered in a whisper, “like the ones in the video.”

  “God,” she whispered back.

  “They’re closing on the house,” Harry said as his wife left him a tac vest and carbine. For the moment he’d stuck with the SSG3000. Its abilities easily exceeded those of the M-4. “They must see us.”

  “Maybe they’ll just leave us alone?” Tim asked.

  At fifty yards, the closest stopped to consider the house. The first of the dogs spotted them and growled.

  “Jesus, get them inside!” Vance hissed. All three dogs were low, their hackles standing up on their backs like ripe wheat. Ann reached for the nearest dog and they all began barking like crazy.

  The effect on the infected was immediate. Dozens of heads jerked up at the sound, eyes locking on the people standing on the balcony. There was a ripple of wild snarl and growls and the group began a headlong charge towards the house.

  “Open fire!” Vance barked and trotted towards that end of the balcony as Harry fired his first round.

  This time they’d been able to set their hearing protection in place so the booming of the .308 round was not as profound. Harry had the bipod open and braced on the balcony. He fired out the rifle in a matter of seconds, dropping someone with each shot. And just like before, it didn’t slow the others by a step.

  Vance and Tim arrived at the same time on either side of the ex-Marine as he carefully sat the Sig Sauer rifle down on its bipod and scooped up the M-4. With reflexes honed from long service he did a lightning fast press check, shouldered the weapon, and began firing.

  The balcony roared as all three men began firing, two with their .308 FN FAL rifles and Harry with the .223 M-4. In the predawn light sprinting people began to fall. A lot were men, some were women and others were quite a bit younger.

  Magazines began dropping almost in unison as the men finished firing out the first ones. Full mags found their mag-wells and were slammed home as the women all came around to join them. “Are they really people?” Belinda asked.

  “Not anymore,” her husband assured her.

  More than twenty were down on the ground below. Some were still moving, a few crawling toward the house as six guns came on target. Dozens more raced towards the house.

  “Fire!” Vance said and the morning erupted in a fusillade of fire. Four battle rifles in .308 and two in .223 unleashed a total of a hundred rounds in just a few seconds. All the shooters were experienced, with proficiency ranging from marksman to expert, and Harry at the top of the order. As bolts again locked back again, no more figures were walking below.

  “We did it!” Mike yelled, but not really in celebration. At least fifty people lay dead or dying below. What had been human beings a short time ago. Vance had a moment to examine them for the first time. Most were in various stages of undress, many complete naked. Most had various bites on their bodies, face smeared in dried blood. Their hands were caked in dirt and grime.

  “Reload,” Harry hissed.

  “Why?” Vance started to ask, then saw. Out of the distance, hundreds more were coming. Thousands.

  “We’re going to get overrun,” Harry said simply. The first of them reached the first of the ones Harry had shot. A couple dropped down and started to feed on the dead. Vance felt the bile rise in his throat. The women all gasped, Mike just puked over the side of the balcony. The dogs had never stopped barking the whole time. They were going absolutely insane. Vance began to worry they were going to jump over the side. He decided:

  “Everyone inside, we’re going into the bunker.”

  * * *

  That had been four hours ago.

  Now they’d been watching as more and more of the zombie-like people appeared. Hundreds became thousands, became tens of thousands. They swarmed around and slowly past the house. Some stopped long enough to beat on the house’s doors, walls, and even windows. Others fed on the dead until there was nothing left but bloody bones and scattered entrails. Always they milled around.

  “Watch how they act,” Belinda said, pointing at a group. They were fighting for a short time, biting and clawing at each other. After just a few seconds it broke up. None of them were dead this time. In other brawls sometimes there was a loser. When that happened the winners fed. “What has happened to these people?”

  “It’s the Strain Delta,” Vance said, “someone said it’s rewritten their brains.”

  “What kind of a virus could do that?” Ann asked.

  Belinda started to say something, then her mouth closed. She made a face but finally just shrugged. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nothing I’ve ever heard of.”

  “What’s our power/water situation look like?” Vance asked his wife.

  “Power is holding,” Ann said, “down a few percent from those things wandering around the solar farm. Water is good. With zero rain, we have two months for all of us down here. Food, about the same, but as long as the house holds above we can access the long term stores we’re good for as long as the water lasts.” She glanced at her smart phone’s calendar. “We’re due for an inch or two of rain this month. We’ll refill the reservoir, even with current usages. Really, we should be good for a year or two.”

  Ann reached down and touched her stomach. She wasn’t showing yet, and wouldn’t for months to come, but Vance knew she was thinking about their unborn baby being born in the bunker. Sure, they had birthing kits in storage. He thought there were twenty of them, bought in bulk over a year ago from a supplier in the Ukraine.

  “We’re going to lose the country,” Harry said as an endless stream of people shambled past the camera.

  * * *

  Dr. Breda stared at the datasets through sleep-deprived eyes and feelings of despair. She’d read emails from counterparts all over the world. The virus in its various parts, dubbed Strain Delta by the USA CDC, was worldwide in all its forms. The list of countries not reporting outbreaks was smaller than the ones that did report them. Worse, a handful of advanced countries were no longer responding at all.

  Four hours ago she’d been talking with a counterpart at another genome project in Osaka, Japan when he’d broken off the conversation. She could hear screams and gunshots over the link.

  “I’m afraid I cannot assist any further,” he’d told her as the camera was snatched from a table and the view became one of frenzied movement.

  “What is happening, Dr. Okudo!” she’d yelled.

  “The end here,” he said, though she could no longer see him. A minute later the camera was carried out into daylight and Lisha realized it was the roof of the Japanese building where Dr. Okudo’s project was. The sound over the small wireless camera’s microphone was like something straight from hell. Millions screamed, moan
ed, or roared in rage.

  The camera came into focus looking out over a typical broad Japanese avenue, at least six lanes wide. Hundreds of thousands choked the roadway, moving in a surging sea of humanity. In the foreground down on the road a line of armored personnel carriers were visible. Here and there a solitary figure stood on top, gun in hand, bravely standing to the last as an unstoppable tide of unspeakable horror engulfed them one at a time.

  The wave of infected was so immense and powerful they were moving the multi-ton military vehicles, skidding them sideways along the concrete. Small cars could occasionally be seen. Some being crushed into the concrete by scores of passing infected, other were pushed like shopping carts. Dante couldn’t have imagined worse.

  “Is that all of Japan?”

  “Most cities, yes,” Okudo admitted. “Our leadership was struggling to contain it, but it seems the warnings of fresh food contaminants were not heeded, and now we are lost. I had images from Tokyo. It is a scene of unspeakable loss. It would seem we are to be an island nation of the infected. Wherever this is seen in the future, try to remember what we were.”

  There was more sounds of shooting, nearby, and yells in Japanese. Over that were snarls and cries of fear and panic. The camera was held up and she could see the look on the researcher’s face. It was one of stark raving terror. Behind him she could see a security detail trying to hold the doorway to the roof. They were panic firing downward into the stairwell. Burning through ammo at a furious pace.

  “I cannot face a fate of being one of them,” Okudo said simply.

  “I’m sure they can get you off in a helicopter,” Alisha pleaded.

  “There is nowhere to go,” he said simply. “Remember us?! Please?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. Then he jumped.

  “Okudo!” she screamed. The researcher did a half turn as he fell, still showing his face, eyes closed and expression neutral. As he turned she saw the windows rushing by, then the crowd far below. The roof was twenty-two stories above the street, about three hundred feet. The unthinkable mass of the infected approached faster and faster until she could make out their faces looking up, hands reaching to receive him.

  She wanted to closer her eyes, but didn’t. The camera was a good model, it only dissolved into static for a fraction of a second upon the bone jarring impact. The sound was like a pumpkin hitting a wall, with cracking boards mixed in. It continued to send her images as the infected began to tear bloody dripping bits from his body.

  Lisha hadn’t slept since that scene from hell. And there was no more contact with anyone in Japan. A few websites were still up, broadcasting preprogrammed responses of other traffic. It was her assistant, Edith, who found her the worst. A webcam from Shibuya, Tokyo. The street crossing was famous as an example of the non-stop vibrant life of living in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world. Tens of thousands could be seen crossing the street on webcam nearly twenty-four hours a day. The webcam was still up, and the street was still crowded. But now it was a sea of infected, moving about aimlessly, and sometimes preying on each other.

  Everyone in the project was numb with shock at the events. Even the self-appointed zombie squad was in stunned disbelief. Despite everyone who had knowledge of the virus and how it was spreading worldwide, few believed it would come to this. Japan, one of the most advanced nations of the world, a hundred and twenty-five million people. Gone.

  They’d finished isolating the virus in several forms. Strain Delta had four distinct vectors that she had isolated. The omnipresent version was, as far as she could tell, in every living thing on the planet. After more than five hundred tests of everything from flies to a cat done around the world by other researchers at her behest, it was found in them all. It appeared to be airborne, and inert until it entered a living host at which point it quietly set up production. It was invisible to all forms of terrestrial immune systems, and appeared to do no harm. Until it met one of the two basic forms.

  One of the other forms appeared in living animals. Usually complicated lifeforms, sometimes simpler ones, and rarely insects. Never plants. She was trying to understand this version. It appeared similar to the widely found version in everyone. But this one was somehow established differently, and she didn’t understand how. There was no vector for its spread. It was just there.

  The other form was in the planet’s water supply. It was in all the oceans, and some of the fresh waters of the planet. Though not all, and that was confusing.

  Mixing of either of those two with the one in people resulted in the final version, though a sort of controlled mutation. The result was Strain Delta. The truly confusing part was it didn’t happen in all animals. Only some. She didn’t have a substantial stock of test animals. In fact, she had damned few. Mostly rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits. She tried it on all of them, and only the guinea pigs resulted in a transformation to Strain Delta. The animals didn’t become insane like humans. They became weird. The watched their human handlers intently, almost like they were thinking. When she’d reached in for one, it did its level best to try and bite her. The leather gloves proved more than resistant to small rodent bites. Even energetic ones.

  They’d vivisected the pig and examined it carefully. There wasn’t much brain to work with, but the microscope revealed exactly what she’d expected. Similar restructuring to human victims of the virus. She sampled the other animals and found no sign of the final mutation of Strain Delta. Absolutely nothing.

  So she moved on trying to create the mutation in lab conditions, and failed. Under no circumstances could she get it to replicate.

  She knew things were going from bad to worse on the mainland. Fewer and fewer phone calls were returned. And more of the web was inaccessible every hour. It was getting where fewer emails went through than got bounced back.

  Her analysis of the virus in its various stages had gone as far as possible. She’d hoped to use the CDC’s facilities to further her research. Those numbers and emails were among the others who would never again be answered. One of the mechanics, now on the Zombie Response Team (despite her efforts, that name was widely used) had gotten a failing webcam to work in Atlanta that showed millions of zombies roaming the streets. Lisha had turned her efforts towards defeating the virus. She quickly wished she had never tried.

  Thanks to her involuntary volunteers she now had very detailed records of how the virus progressed in a human host, and somewhat less so in the guinea pigs. You could kill the virus with heat. There was some variation, but the minimum was 300°F. The first time she boiled a pot of water full of the virus, collected the steam, condensed it and found living virus in that water she’d gasped.

  That test had been carried out a dozen times, always with the same results. A few organisms on earth could survive being boiled, so she probably shouldn’t have been that surprised. But Strain Delta didn’t appear to be hardened. It was some of those unidentifiable proteins in its sequence. Proteins the damned beasties manufactured as they reproduced using human biological material. “It’s like a doomsday machine,” she remarked. One of her assistant doctors was of the opinion it might not even really be alive, in the sense of how humans understood that condition. They might be some kind of alien machine. Since Lisha had no way of testing that hypothesis, it just stayed where it was, unsolved and unverifiable.

  A day ago they’d cobbled together a pressure cooker with a steam takeoff. The steam reached temperature of almost 400°F, and it destroyed all the virus.

  “So all we have to do is boil all the victims at 400 degrees,” Edith joked in dark humor. Lisha didn’t laugh, but she admitted the woman was right.

  The facility’s water had depended on salt water condensers, which she’d ordered shut down as soon as the fact that the boilers likely weren’t purging the virus, were almost empty. The boilers were modified and temperate increased to 350°F, as high as they could safely be operated. After emptying the tanks and cleaning them with acid (which thankfully killed th
e bug), they were now filling again with verified safe water. Lisha had a tech testing the tanks every two hours, just to be sure.

  She couldn’t do anything about the virus floating in the air. The facility had some watertight doors, but wasn’t a submarine. It couldn’t be isolated from the air. It had no such facilities. Thankfully just breathing infected air wasn’t enough to cause the mutation. She didn’t think drinking water would either, but wasn’t ready to take that risk. Since she could provide virus-free water, she did so. Regardless, she’d verified that a standard HEPA filters could remove all the virus. The bug was over half a micron in size.

  So she’d set about finding anything that killed the bug, or at least stopped it from replicating and mutating. Like much of the rest of her endeavors, she felt like she’d wasted most of her time. The virus was happy to exist in any environment that humans could, and more than a few that man could not live in. It practically loved several types of antiseptic fluids.

  She’d just stopped to go get some breakfast. Food supplies were dwindling, of course. Unable to fish to stretch their supplies, and forced to dump case after case of fresh foods over the side, they were subsisting on canned and frozen foods more than thirty days old. Her supply chief estimated they had eight weeks’ worth, so Lisha had ordered a reduction of 25% to all rations, pushing their survival out to ten weeks.

  In the cafeteria there was a selection of oatmeal, poptarts, and scrambled eggs. The supply chief was sure the eggs were well over a month old. She’d still tested a few, just to be sure. She got a bowl of oatmeal, sweetened it with some honey, and added some eggs. Everyone was eating eggs while they held out. Aside from some ground round, it was the only fresh protein left in the cooler.

  Her breakfast done, she was about to return to her lab when someone came running up. Even with the facilities reduced staff she didn’t recognize the young man.

  “Dr. Breda!”