With a shaking hand, Veronica slammed down the screen of her laptop, as if by turning it off, she could prevent any further violence from happening. Veronica and Harry looked at each other, stunned by what they’d witnessed. Neither had any words, both rendered speechless for a few moments.
Harry pushed back his chair as he stood. ‘Those poor bastards. Maybe we’ve got it better over here – at least we know who’s trying to kill us.’
Veronica hooked a small plastic bottle from her jeans pocket and shook free a pair of tablets. Her pale hand had a coarse tremor as she tipped the drug into her mouth. Ignoring Harry’s worried expression on seeing her knock back the Valium, she walked to a sink and cupped a handful of water to wash the tablets down.
Looking up, she finally met her colleague’s eyes and scowled. ‘Oh, fuck off, Harry. As if you haven’t done a little self-medicating every now and then; and with shit like that happening on a live news broadcast, it’s not like I don’t have a good reason.’
She turned away and walked towards one of the desks, not giving him a chance of reply. ‘We should get back to work. Every day we don’t have a cure, is another day that those bastards can ruin what’s left of our country.’
Harry stalled, caught between worry for his friend and horror at the developments in Tasmania. If the Conservatives and Patriots Party had gathered such power, then surely it would only be a matter of time before their isolationist policies cut off the last supply ships crossing Bass Strait. Famine wouldn’t be far behind such an event.
A buzzing on his hip interrupted his line of thought. Harry reached down and extracted the pager, his heart rate surging at the notification. The Rapid Response Team was en route to pick him up. His chance to trial their drug at the scene had come.
***
The ambulance swerved to the side of the road and skidded to a halt, throwing Harry forward against his seatbelt. Although house clearances had been conducted throughout Geelong, they had been imperfect. As survivors reclaimed new houses, occasionally Carriers were found in missed basement spaces, closets, or locked sheds. Today’s case was unforgivable. That the Carrier had been allowed to survive in the garden shed was a clear case of negligence by the clearing squad, and it pissed Harry off no end that a family of survivors had worn the violent consequences. When the father had knocked the shed lock off to access tools within, he’d unwittingly released two Carriers. Caught off guard, he’d gone down under their teeth. His wife had managed to get her kid inside and a call off to the army for support while she mounted a defence on the back foot.
A scream sounded from nearby, agony tearing a hideous sound through vocal cords before being abruptly cut off. Soldiers erupted from the jeep ahead, their rifles up as they scanned the street for movement before homing in on the two-storey brick house to the right. From his seat, Harry could see congealing blood on pavers leading from the street to the front door. A mutilated hand lay on the street path. Severed at the wrist, its one remaining finger pointed at the house in question as if directing the Rapid Response Team. The front door of the property hung slack on its hinges, swaying slightly in free space as Sergeant Larkin led his group of four soldiers toward it at pace. The group paused at the threshold, breathing hard as adrenaline surged. Then with rifles swapped for handguns in the close confines of the house, the men entered and disappeared from sight.
Harry checked his own side arm, ensuring a round was in the chamber before climbing out of the ambulance to prepare for any survivors. A cry of rage emanated from somewhere in the back of the house - the squad had made contact. A smattering of gunshots cracked the air, driving Harry to quicken his movements as he pulled a stretcher from the back of the ambulance with the aid of a paramedic. Harry attempted to block out what was happening in the house, trusting the army squad to take care of the Infected, leaving him to prepare for whatever human life they could salvage. He stabbed an intra-venous giving set into a bag of Normal Saline and primed the line, ready to go for a fluid resuscitation.
Harry felt something warm spray across the back of his neck as the paramedic behind him emitted a shriek. He spun on the spot, drawing his pistol and racking the slide. A Carrier held the paramedic in a vicious embrace from behind, worrying a mouthful of flesh from the young man’s neck like a dog. The ghoul’s skin was the colour of tanned leather, features desiccated and retracted, dirty hair clumped and matted over its face. Harry knew the creature before him must be one of the two original Infected released. With a sound of tearing fabric, the Carrier ripped a wad of skin and muscle, blood spraying in an arc from the paramedic’s wound as the monster gagged down the mouthful of tissue and went back for more. Harry lunged forward, driving the end of his pistol against the Carrier’s skull before pulling the trigger.
The paramedic fell to his knees, one hand gripping his neck wound in futile effort, arterial blood squirting from between his fingers in lessening strength with every heartbeat. The Carrier lay beside him on the asphalt minus half its head. Harry ignored the paramedic for a brief moment, checking his surrounds once more to ensure there was no more danger closing in. Screaming continued inside, but there was nothing more on the street.
Harry grimaced as he holstered his pistol and pulled free one of three syringes of trial medication from his sleeve pocket. There was no point attempting a resuscitation, the paramedic had maybe thirty seconds of life remaining as he pumped his life-blood onto the street. The man was no longer kneeling, had slumped forward onto his face as he gasped for breath. All he could do was to try and prevent him coming back. Harry took the cap from the needle and buried it through the paramedic’s pants, deep into a thigh muscle and depressed the plunger, all the while knowing it was a waste of medication.
Stepping back, Harry wiped the blood on his hands down his pants as he watched the paramedic draw two ragged breaths, and die. Harry swore in frustration, knowing the medication wouldn’t have had time to work, the location of the wound likely taking the virus straight to the man’s brain. He drew his pistol once more, watching for the first signs of reanimation from the paramedic. Sure enough, within thirty seconds, Harry saw the man’s foot twitch and fingers clench into a fist. It was enough to confirm diagnosis. Harry shot two rounds into the paramedic’s skull.
A shout pulled Harry’s attention away from the horror splattered across the ground. Turning, he saw Sergeant Larkin waving him up to the house. Harry took one last look at what was left of the paramedic’s face after his two bullets had entered, took a deep breath and grabbed one of the first aid backpacks from the ambulance. Hoisting it onto one shoulder, he ran to meet the Sergeant, keeping his pistol in hand as he went.
Sergeant Larkin’s eyes took in the carnage at the rear of the ambulance, his jaw clenched. ‘Jamie’s dead?’ was all he asked.
Harry gave a rough nod. ‘One second we were prepping, the next it had him. There wasn’t much I could do.’
The Sergeant just nodded, accepting the situation without further question. He turned away from Harry and back into the house, indicating for him to follow with a flick of his fingers. ‘I’ve got two victims inside. Mother and daughter,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘The old lady put up a brave effort before she went down. Locked her kid in the main bedroom, then took the Carrier on with nothing more than a kitchen knife.’
‘Is she still alive?’
‘She was when I left, but with the amount of blood she’d already lost, I don’t think she had much time left,’ he said, speech emptied of emotion as he relayed the facts.
Harry knew that just because the Sergeant wasn’t all choked up over the woman, it didn’t mean he was unmoved. He’d been in the same situation many a time himself while managing medical emergencies in the ED – when the shit was hitting the fan, if you let emotion cloud your thoughts, all it did was impair your ability to think and act. The soldiers would cope later in the only way they knew, by honouring the fallen with a bottle or ten of home brew back at the mess. It mightn’t be the healthiest sol
ution, but for many, it was the easiest.
Harry turned his thoughts back to the child. ‘What about the kid?’
‘The girl looks about five. Poor thing’s hiding under the bed and won’t come out. She’s holding onto a bloodied wrist, so chances are she’s nursing a bite. I was hoping you might have experience with kids? Didn’t want to freak her out further after she heard her mum get butchered.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Harry, privately thinking no amount of gentle talking would make it right for the child.
Harry trailed the Sergeant up a set of stairs to the second storey. Blood spray trickled down the wallpaper in two spots. Another section had a smear of claret where a bloody torso had been shoved against the wall as the mother and Carrier fought each other. A smell of rot assaulted his nose as he saw the Carrier, sprawled on its back halfway up the second flight. Shot from behind by Larkin’s squad as they mounted the stairs, the bullet had blown a palm sized exit wound through its face, taking eyes, nose and upper teeth.
Harry stepped over the corpse, arriving at the top of the stairs to see one of the soldiers leaning over the mother. With foot braced against her forehead, the Private pulled on the handle of a bayonet. The blade was buried to the hilt above her ear and squeaked softly against the bone as he wrenched it from her skull. The soldier leaned down and gently brushed dirt off her skin, trying to remove the mark he’d made with his boot on her forehead. He looked up as Harry and the Sergeant arrived.
‘Sorry, Doc,’ he said with a frown. ‘She stopped breathing a minute ago, I didn’t want her getting up again to make the situation worse.’
The mother was in awful shape, flesh bitten from arms, face and chest as she’d fought to protect her child. Harry ground his teeth together, feeling the familiar weight in his chest at the senseless loss. Forcing himself to continue, he looked up and noted the bedroom door was ajar.
‘The kid better not have seen you do that,’ he muttered, stepping past to enter the bedroom.
On the far side of the bed, another soldier knelt on the floor. At Harry’s footsteps, he poked his head up. ‘Thanks for coming in, mate. My little friend under the bed is named Ruby, and she’s five years old,’ he said in a gentle voice, talking more to the child than he was to Harry. ‘I told her that an excellent doctor friend of mine was coming up that could help fix her wrist, and all that she had to do was come out from under the bed.’
Harry gave a tight smile of gratitude at the soldier’s kindness, and lay down on the carpet to make eye contact with the girl. Out of arms reach, under the middle of the bed was a wide eyed little girl. She looked at Harry, tears and snot streaking her face, visibly shaking with fear.
‘Hi, Ruby. My name’s Harry, I’m the doctor that’s come to help you,’ he said in a slow calm voice. ‘I’m here to help keep you safe and take away the pain in your wrist. Can you come out from under the bed so I can fix your arm?’
The girl ignored his question, staying put. ‘Is my mummy ok?’ she asked in a tiny voice.
Harry forced his face to remain unchanged, giving an open smile as he began to lie. ‘She sure is, darling. But she got a little bit hurt, so she’s already gone to the hospital. She asked me to help you be brave until you could join her. Ruby, do you think you can be brave just like mummy, and come out from under there?’
The little girl gave a nod, and crawled toward the edge of the bed, stretching out her arms so that Harry could draw her out. He sat her on top of the mattress, where she cradled the left wrist against her chest.
Harry knelt down so that he was at eye level with the child. ‘Can I have a look at that?’ he asked, pointing at the wound. When the girl didn’t refuse, he gently took her hand and drew the limb toward him. Ruby gasped as air hit the wound, a crescent of puncture marks to the inner aspect of her forearm. A minor bite, but fatal nonetheless. Unless... Harry refused to follow that line of thought. Opening up hope would only make it hurt more when he failed yet another of his patients.
His voice reflected none of the darkness of his inner thoughts as he continued to talk gently with the child, trying to build her trust so that she’d feel safe and allow him to administer the medication without fighting.
‘Ruby, I have a special medicine that you need to stop you getting sick from the bite on your arm. It’s really important that you have it now, or it might not work. Can I give it to you?’
‘No! I want my mummy,’ she said, her bottom lip beginning to tremble.
‘If you’re brave and have this medicine, I’ll take you straight to her, ok?’
‘NO!’ screamed Ruby. She began crying again and tried to scoot backwards from Harry over the mattress.
Harry sighed, realising he had no more time to waste and would have to restrain the poor thing. He looked over at the soldier on the other side of the bed. ‘You’re going to have to hold her while I give the needle. She needs to have it ASAP.’
The soldier grimaced, but leant down and scooped the girl off the bed nonetheless, cradling her head into his neck and holding onto her tight. Harry, wanting it over and finished, quickly removed a syringe of the drug from his sleeve pocket and uncapped the needle.
‘Hold her leg tight, ok?’ he instructed, lifting the leg of her shorts to expose her little thigh muscle. Without further delay, he inserted the needle into Ruby’s leg, depressing the plunger as quickly as he dared while the soldier restrained the screaming child. Harry ditched the spent needle, apologizing to his small patient as he stepped away. Ruby buried her face into the soldier as she cried, refusing to look at Harry again.
‘We need to get her to the lab as soon as possible,’ he said, heading for the stairs. ‘I just want to make sure they’ve, ah... cleared the hallway before we take her out.’
***
Harry woke with a start, mouth open in a silent scream, eyes wide after another nightmare. He forced his breathing to slow as he tried to clear the last image of his dream, a Carrier pulling a handful of intestines out of his abdomen. Although there was no injury to his gut, he could still feel pain on the lower right side where the ghoul had driven its fingers through skin and muscle, until its forearm had been buried to the wrist in his nightmare.
Harry sat up, the side of his head aching from where it had rested on the hard desktop. A clock beside one of the cell doors told him it was three o’clock in the morning. He stood abruptly, accidentally knocking his chair back, the clatter of wood on concrete explosive in the silence of the lab. He should have relieved Veronica over an hour earlier from her watch of the corpse. The trial drug had failed to prevent the child dying; however, it had stopped the usual progression of the plague. When he’d fallen asleep, the child had been two hours post death without signs of reanimation. With any luck, it would be the same now.
He dodged between the empty trolleys and desks that made up the lab, down to the end space where Veronica had waited next to the five-year-old, Ruby. After death, the girl had looked so tiny on the expanse of the adult sized trolley, her little legs and arms like pale, fragile twigs. As he got closer, Harry realised the trolley where Ruby had lain held nothing but an empty sheet. He felt his heart drop, if the bed was empty, then the child had likely re-animated earlier. Checking the cells immediately to the side, however, revealed these to be empty as well.
‘I’m over here, Harry,’ said Veronica in a quiet voice.
Harry turned around, eyes skittering about the shadows until he saw her, sitting on a chair with something cradled in her arms. He walked toward her, a little confused at the situation.
‘I’m sorry I slept late, Ronnie, you should have woken me,’ he said.
‘It’s all right. I wouldn’t have slept anyway,’ she said, stroking the object in her arms gently.
With a start, Harry finally realised she was holding the dead child, wrapped in a blanket. ‘Jesus Christ, Veronica! It’s too dangerous, let me help you place her back on the trolley where she can be restrained,’ he said, reaching down to remove the small
bundle from his colleague’s arms.
Veronica withdrew from him. ‘No. It’s been eight hours; there’s no chance of her coming back as a Carrier now.’
Harry stood back, unsure how to proceed. There was something off about his colleague. Veronica pulled back the blanket from around the girl’s head. Ruby’s eyes were closed, the muscles on her face had softened in death, the skin pale as snow in the half light. She stroked the girl’s cheek, silent tears trickling down her own face.
‘She looks just like my little girl, Isabelle,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘She was about the same age when she was killed, but I didn’t get to hold her like this afterwards. There was barely anything left of her by the time...’ she stopped, unable to continue the line of thought. Harry rested his hand on her shoulder in silent support. Nothing he could say would make it any better.
Veronica stood up, carrying the tiny bundle back to the trolley. She arranged the blanket over the girl like she was tucking her in to sleep. ‘We have to try something different, Harry,’ she said, still looking down at the child. ‘What we’ve achieved so far isn’t enough, not when a beautiful little girl like this still dies from such a minor wound. We need to give the drug prior to plague exposure...’
‘We’ve already been down this path,’ interrupted Harry. ‘We can’t do it, the proposal got rejected from the head office at Canberra. It’s too much risk to the test subject.’
‘I won’t be placing anyone else at risk, because I’ll be the one to take the drug. Once injected with the medication, I’ll introduce saliva from a Carrier’s mouth into a wound.’
Plague War (Book 3): Retaliation Page 13