He moved at a brisk pace, well, at least as brisk as a seventy-three-year-old ex-Marine with an artificial leg could manage. Even at his current stride, he still managed to lose sight of his pursuers. He had traveled about two miles along the service road before he reached the entrance to the main thoroughfare through town. An odd feeling came over Marvin as he entered the town proper; the usual noise and hustle and bustle of commuters and tourists flying in from BWI airport were strangely absent. Even the locals who normally traversed the neighborhood were missing. It was as if he strolled into a ghost town.
Marvin looked skyward. The rain had stopped, and from the looks of things, the clouds were starting to disperse. It even appeared that the sun was trying to make an appearance. Marvin gazed up and down the roadway. He scratched his balding gray head and continued walking.
There was a gas station that sat on the corner of the next street over, the type that housed a decent-sized convenience store as well as a garage. As Marvin approached the store, he noticed a red and white sign that hung in the garage window that read mechanic on duty.
“Wonder if he’s good enough to fix an armored car that was hit with a fucking missile,” Marvin said dejectedly with a hint of sarcasm. He made it to the parking lot of the gas station, cautiously approached the glass double doors, and peered inside. The store was in complete disarray. Snacks of all shapes and sizes lay strewn about the floor; Slurpee-type machines set with the valves still open, draining the frozen treat onto the floor. Magazines clung to the tile drenched in the sugary swill, causing the ink to leech and run off in a rainbow of unnatural colors. Marvin shook his head; it looked as if everyone had just picked up and left.
“What in God’s green Earth is going on here?” Marvin questioned himself. Slowly he opened the door; he wanted to find a phone and call home. With everything that was going on today, Homeland Security will be damned. He wanted to know if his wife was okay and, more importantly, if this shit was going on there as well.
Marvin stepped inside; a bell chimed as he entered. He paused and looked around expectantly, waiting to see if a merchant would step out of a backroom somewhere. When none appeared, he called out. “Hello, anyone home?” he said in his normal gruff tone. His gaze flitted around the store. “I need to use your phone.” He stepped farther into the store, cheese puffs crunched underfoot as he approached the counter. Marvin leaned over the countertop to see if their phone was hidden within; he stepped back in shock, almost knocking over a rack of comic books as he saw the disemboweled corpse of an Indian man lying in a puddle of blood on the floor.
“Holy fuck!” Marvin hissed as he grabbed the side of a display rack to keep from falling over. “Shit, shit, shit,” he spit out in rapid succession, his feeble heart raced in his chest; and for a moment, he eyed a bottle of aspirin that lie on the floor, wondering if he should take one now just in case. “It’s just a body,” he said to himself. “Nothing I hadn’t seen before,” he said trying to calm his quaking nerves. He took in a deep breath, walked back toward the counter, and peered over once more.
The man on the floor was in horrific shape. His face looked as if it had been peeled back with a vegetable peeler then nibbled on by carnivorous raccoons, half-moon shapes dotted up and down his caramel-colored flesh in between the torn rags of clothing. Marvin wasn’t even sure if he could identify the sex of the victim. Marvin held his breath and scanned the contents of the shelves that were in his vantage point. A black old-fashioned rotary phone set opposite his position, underneath a lotto machine on the other counter.
“Damn it,” Marvin muttered, knowing that he would have to walk behind the counter and over the mutilated corpse if he wanted to use the ancient device. “Didn’t even know those damn things still existed.”
Marvin walked around to a small swing door attached to the rear of the counter behind a row of coffee machines and carefully pushed it open. The door swung open easily on well-oiled hinges and clanged as it struck the door jamb behind it. Marvin winced involuntarily at the noise that resounded. He quickly glanced around the empty store to make certain nothing was creeping around to attack him. He stepped in through the door frame, carefully avoiding a puddle of sticky congealed blood that matted the gray-and-black-speckled linoleum floor. Marvin skirted the edge of the counter, standing on his tiptoes, trying his best not to step on the dead man’s form that lay in the space’s center. It was at that point Marvin noticed what looked like the pistol grip of a pump action shotgun poking out from underneath a shelving unit, only inches from the bloodied man’s hands, well, what was left of his hands, that is. Marvin noticed three fingers had been torn from their respective moorings, bloodied bits of torn skin, and sinew occupied the space where the fingers should have been. He looked around the area half expecting to find them lying close to the body, but they were nowhere to be found. That gave him pause. The more he looked, the more he noticed other things missing as well. In Vietnam, he had seen his share of eviscerated corpses, and this man seemed to be missing a hell of a lot of his internal organs. Marvin shivered at the thought.
He tore his gaze away from the man and turned it instead to his objective. Marvin reached down and retrieved the phone from its perch on the shelving unit and set it atop the counter. Picking up the receiver, he placed it to his ear. “Well that figures,” Marvin said, realizing that there, of course, was no dial tone. He rapidly depressed the disconnect button several times, trying to get a response from the stupid machine. “Fuck!” Marvin shouted, and then tossed the phone aside in frustration, sending it clattering across the countertop.
Marvin turned around and froze as he noticed the corpse that was on the floor just a moment ago was currently standing directly in front of him. The man’s dead eyes focused seemingly on nothing as it steadily swayed from side to side like a crackhead standing on the corner of Fayette Street, its entrails squirmed out of his body cavity spilling waste and other fluids onto his pants and down to the floor.
Marvin began to reach for his sidearm when the man’s gaze abruptly seemed to polarize on him.
Out of nowhere, he lunged, closing the slight distance between them in an instant. The man clutched onto Marvin’s arms as he brought his snarling face into Marvin’s shoulders and bit deep. Subsequently, Marvin’s body armor saved his life as the man wrenched his head back, chewing on a mouthful of polyester fabric.
Marvin, placing his foot in between the shelving unit’s baseboard and the floor, pushed forward, bringing his left hand up, striking the ruined man in what was left of his chest. The man lost his grip and stumbled backward, tripping over his own intestine, sending him sprawling once again to the floor. Marvin ripped his pistol from its holster and opened fire; the .45 caliber rounds punched neat holes through the man’s snarling skull. The back of his head exploded outward adding to the gore-strewn linoleum.
Marvin breathed heavily, not taking his eyes off the beast that lay at his feet. A loud banging noise from his rear caught Marvin’s attention. He spun around bringing his pistol up in the direction of the noise. To Marvin’s amazement, his two pals from the roadway stood, pounding on the gas stations front door. “What the hell?” Marvin said in astonishment.
Upon closer examination, he could tell these two were in just as good of shape as the man on the floor. Bits of flesh were torn away from sections of their arms and faces. Marvin saw now that one of them was a female, a young woman, and an attractive one at that, at least she had been. The other was a middle-aged man in trucker’s overalls, both left smears of blood on the thick glass of the entryway. Marvin decided it would be a good time to get out of sight, not wanting to wait around until the duo either shattered the glass or figured out how to pull open the door. He had to wonder, how in the hell had they found him; he’d lost sight of them on the roadway about two miles back. He shrugged off the thought; it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they were here now.
Marvin turned back around, glancing down at the body on the floor. He kicked at
the still form with the tip of his boot to make certain the son-of-a-bitch decided to stay dead this time. At this, Marvin remembered the shotgun. He grinned as he pulled it out from the recesses of the shelf. Upon further examination, he also found a small box of birdshot cartridges hidden behind a money order printer.
“Got to love the ol’ U.S. of freaking A,” he said as he pocketed the shells. Marvin slid his sidearm back into his holster and held the shotgun in one hand. He picked the metal case up off the countertop where he had left it and searched the walls until he spotted a door at the far end of the store that he assumed led into the garage area. He hoped there would be a drill or a hammer and chisel, something he could pop this fucker open with. Stealing another glance over his shoulder to see his newly formed entourage was still there, which they were, Marvin began to make his way toward the door.
Chapter 12
Alex Bishop stood observing the explosion from a mile or so away from the target zone, tucked inside the relative safety of a local middle school parking lot. Their white SUVs stood in stark contrast to the school’s bland red brick facade. Rows of dogwood trees swayed with the gentle wind and dripped with resonate moister from the stalled rainfall. Clouds still hung low in the sky casting wan shadows across the dim landscape; grays and whites now illuminated in a red and orange glow above the blast site. Bishop and his men could feel the heat resonate from the eruption even at this distance.
Alex checked his watch. About twenty minutes had passed since he had relayed the information about the armored vehicle and subsequent outbreak of the kuru variant pathogen. Director Hammond, along with other suits in Washington, had ordered him to launch Prometheus protocol. Prometheus was the code name for a small localized fuel air bomb designed to be launched in the event of a biological attack on the United States, to aid in the prevention of the spread of whatever contagion may have been released. It was, of course, an extreme measure; however, the threat of a wildfire disease being released in a major U.S. city or, in this case, an international hub with flights not only traveling to every major U.S. city, but also every country on the planet. The collateral damage would most likely be minimal by comparison to the entire country’s population; however, the casualties would most definitely haunt their lives and dreams for years to come, but what could they do? Orders were orders, and in this case, he believed those orders to be justified. From the initial report that Bishop had read, this shit was beyond nasty. He however, had not expected the disease to infect and spread via cannibalism though, that after all was just crazy, but here it was and if it were allowed to spread even further than it had been, well, he didn’t want to even think of that possibility.
He watched as the small mushroom cloud engulfed the portion of I-95, where they had just been. Cars that weren’t immediately vaporized under the intense heat were blown off the overpass like autumn leaves scattering in the wind. Concrete and asphalt jutted skyward in a plume of dust and debris, reminding him of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. Refrigerator-sized chunks of asphalt rained down for about a quarter mile of the blast site smashing cars and careening into buildings.
Bishop saw more than one structure collapse under the manmade storm. A man from Bishop’s squad came running over to his position. He came to a halt in front of his commanding officer and stood expectantly waiting for Bishop to acknowledge that he was there. Bishop ignored him for a moment, still observing the aftermath of the bridge bombing. He wondered just how the brass was going to spin this one. Terrorists, fuel tanker explosion, solar flare, he laughed at that last thought, knowing how the pinheads in Washington worked, he wouldn’t put it passed them.
“Ahem,” the agent by his side cleared his throat in an obvious attempt to wrangle his attention.
Bishop removed his face from the binoculars that he was peering through and brought his gaze upon the man that stood beside him. “What is it, Corporal?” Bishop asked with a hint of impatience entering into his voice.
“Sir.” The corporal snapped off a salute. “I was given orders to monitor the GPS readings you provided on our target.”
Bishop raised an eyebrow. “And what do you have to report?” Alex had quelled most of his worries about the damn case when the armored car was struck with a stinger missile, and then blown to shit when they enacted Prometheus; unfortunately, they hadn’t had time to search the vehicle before the jet was radioed to be inbound.
The corporal shifted uneasily under his captain’s scrutiny. “Well, sir, it’s moving,” the subordinate replied.
Bishop stepped toward the man, his head cocking to one side in irritation. “Moving? How in the hell is it moving?” The question was rhetorical, and Bishop really didn’t expect an answer from the man. He was just the messenger, and Bishop did, in fact, want to shoot him.
“Damn it,” he spat in frustration, abruptly pacing a few feet in thought fairly certain he already knew the answer to his query. The driver must have escaped. How that was remotely possible with everything they had hit it with he didn’t know, other than he must have drastically underestimated the capabilities of that damn car; more importantly, he must have underestimated the resolve of that car’s crew. He made a mental note to find out who exactly was operating the armored transport. No matter, he thought, they could track that case to the ends of the Earth so long as there was a satellite still in orbit to do so. “Did you get a location?” Bishop said calmly, steeling himself a bit.
“Yes, sir. It appeared to be about two klicks west of our current position.”
Gunshots erupted sporadically to Bishop’s left on the opposite side of the middle school. He keyed his lapel mic, and shouted, “Who in the hell is firing?” Bishop waited for a response and got nothing “Who’s firing?” he called again; the hiss of broken static was his only reply.
“Damn it,” he hissed and grabbed his MP5 and motioned to the corporal along with several other agents that loitered around the area. “On me,” he ordered and began to run toward the opposite end of the parking lot. He stopped dead in his tracks upon seeing several figures burst out from the tree line directly ahead. He could tell by their jerky movements and feral faces that they were infected with K5, the kuru variant strain, which meant Prometheus had failed to contain the outbreak, or perhaps there had been more than one release site. At the moment, it didn’t matter. Bishop opened fire at the advancing men and women.
Under normal circumstances, his men would have questioned their superior officer as to why he had engaged a group of unarmed civilians, not being privy to the information that he was provided with. After what they had just faced on the bridge, they didn’t query, and quickly followed suit.
Bullets tore into the tree line, striking into the advancing figures punching neat holes into chests and torsos, spraying the leaves and trees with pink and red mist. The first volley hit the group mostly center mass and had barely even slowed their pace. One man in a rock and roll T-shirt and blue jeans took a round just above his left eye socket and fell in a heap to the grass-covered ground. Bishop took note of this and quickly adjusted his aim.
“Aim for the head!” he shouted, barely audible above the sounds of gunfire and roars of battle. The tactic seemed to be working as the infected people’s progress seemed to stall.
Then from behind the carnage, there were more, a lot more. Bishop stared wide eyed in horror and amazement at the onslaught of people that began to materialize from out of the shadows of the forest. There were dozens, possibly even hundreds of them; it was hard to tell with the way the trees broke up their sight pattern. Bishop checked his rifle and then checked his spare ammunition. There was no way in hell they were going to be able to hold this position. Making a head shot was difficult enough even when firing at full auto, but to take the time to aim and fire one round at a time, which was the only way they could possibly even stand a chance at thinning this horde, they would be overrun in a matter of minutes. Alex glanced around, gauging his options. They could go for the vehicles, but
then what? They would be on them before they could even get the engines started, and with this many bodies heading their way, there was no way they’d ever be able to push through them. The middle school was their best and really only option at this point. Thankfully, this morning’s excursion was prior to the school’s opening; and with the firefight and the threat level raised, the school was automatically closed, which is why he and his men had chosen it as a rendezvous point. Bishop shouted out, barking the order to his men. “To the school! Everyone get inside!” he admonished, sounding a general retreat.
The men quickly ceased firing at the advancing infected and turned tail. They ran through the rows of dogwoods and on to concrete sidewalks and through the brick columns that formed the entryway to the school. The men reached the door and pulled—locked—as if they expected anything else. One man panicked and kicked at the door violently with no effect.
Before Bishop could stop him, the man pulled up his weapon and fired at the locking mechanism. The bullet struck the heavy metal door, causing its brown paint to chip away and dent. The bullet ricocheted off its surface and struck the agent just above his knee. Flecks of blood sprayed outward and stained the door’s silver handle. He fell to the ground, dropping his weapon, sending it clattering across the concrete sidewalk and coming to rest in the grass that lined the entryway. He clutched his wound and shouted obscenities through gritted teeth as blood seeped through his fingers.
“You dumbass, didn’t you notice this door is made of metal!” Bishop shouted at his subordinate.
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