No Shelter: Book 3 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 3)

by Justin Bell

  “What kind of monster do you think I am?” he asked in a low voice.

  Nobody answered, because they knew precisely what kind of monster he was. They’d seen it in his eyes. And now, he was taking Melinda out of their sight and away from their care, and that petrified every one of them.

  ***

  Jackson hesitated on the porch, looking at the front door of the farmhouse, once again feeling that knot in the pit of his stomach, a clenched fist of dread preventing him from wanting to open the door. The animal tracks and footprints by the barn had appeared recent, recent enough to have likely been made within the past day or two, a fact that told him all was not lost.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to believe it, not one hundred percent, and as his hand flexed, reaching for the door knob, it hovered there, not wanting to get too close. Not daring. Something bad could be behind the door, something he didn’t care to see, something he wasn’t sure he could live with seeing. Lowering his hand again, he lets his eyes follow its trek down toward his thigh, dangling like a wet towel. What was he going to do, just stand here on the porch? He had to go in, he had to face whatever was inside, meet it head on and figure out what he would do afterwards. There was no other choice.

  Drawing one last deep breath, Jackson stepped forward and twisted the doorknob, his chest tightening somewhat as it spun free. Part of him had hoped it was locked, it might mean the inhabitants had left of their own free will, but with the front door unlocked, it only settled deeper that something was dreadfully wrong here. Even way out in the boondocks, Lisa’s father had always locked the front door. Jackson had given his fiancée grief about it more than once.

  “Your nearest neighbor is six miles away,” he’d joked. “Is your dad afraid one of the horses will break in?”

  She hadn’t laughed. His relationship with her father had been icy, especially since he’d landed the plane in their backyard, and every comment that was meant as a harmless joke was seen as a dig, even if that’s not how it was meant. Now that Jackson thought about it, the majority of his recent conversations with Lisa had revolved around his dwindling relationship with her parents, their reluctance to her moving to Boston with him, and a general frustration with the direction of their life together.

  Had he been fooling himself? Was his rush back here to Aldrich some kind of fool’s errand to win her back without him even realizing it? In retrospect, it had been easy to blame her haste to move back to Connecticut as being directly related to her mother’s illness, but the more Jackson stood on this silent front porch thinking about it, the more he wondered if that was the truth, or just a convenient, if unfortunate, reason?

  At the end of the day, what did it matter? Was Lisa somewhere in this house, and if so, was she even alive? Why bother sullying his memory of her by dredging up the unpleasant events of the past six months?

  Jackson pushed the door open, taking a confident, if hesitant stride into the front hallway. The house was lit, though not lit well, a single lamp on a table in the front hallway emanating a soft, pale glow. He felt a chill in the front hall as he walked through it, an environment he was intimately familiar with, yet felt so completely foreign. His shoes tapped softly on the smooth, wooden floor, the short hallway leading to a central living room beyond. Jackson crossed the threshold into the living room, more wooden floors covered by a large area rug with a sofa perched right in the center of the large, rectangular room. A doorway to the left led to a kitchen, something Jackson knew well from the several holiday dinners he’d had at this house throughout the years. It occurred to him then that it was mostly holidays that he’d eaten at Lisa’s house. Typically she’d come over to his parents’ place, or his place after his parents had passed away, a fact that seemed alarming in retrospect. Red flags had been waving all along, it would seem.

  Glancing into the kitchen, Jackson saw nothing unusual, and looked into the study that was off the rear of the food serving area. That small, dimly lit room was also empty.

  Moving back toward the living room, he eyed the stairs that led up from this central gathering place, knowing that the only thing upstairs were two bedrooms. There was a dining room also on the first floor, and at first he was going to bypass it, but a thought dug at his brain.

  The only two bedrooms had been upstairs, but Lisa’s mother was far too ill to travel up and down the long, narrow, wooden stairwell. He remembered conversations she’d had with her father, how they were going to refit one of the downstairs rooms to be her bedroom.

  His eyes locked on the closed door on the opposite side of the living room from the kitchen. It had been a separate dining room that they’d rarely used, because it made little sense to traverse through the living room into yet another room to eat, so they either sat at the small table that was in the kitchen, or for family gatherings, set up the larger table right in the living room. Today, the table was not in the living room, and the door to this secondary dining area was firmly and ominously closed.

  Jackson froze in the quiet living room, not wanting to move forward, once again feeling the stiff resistance that he’d felt out on the porch. Something was keeping him from further investigation, an innate fear of what he might discover. He’d only been in that dining room a handful of times over the years, and he hadn’t remembered it being very large, certainly not large enough for three people to be inside. Was that the proof he needed that Lisa and her family had escaped after all? That they’d loaded up a car and taken off as quickly as they could? The old Chevy pickup truck had not been in the driveway, a fact that just occurred to him as he stood in the silent, gray living room, trying to find excuses not to open this one last door.

  He had to open it. He knew this, he felt it deep within the core of him, and he took another step forward, reaching out toward the door knob, fingers trembling slightly as it approached the bronze colored globe. His fingers touched the cool metal and held there, feeling the smooth contour of the door knob just at the tips. He pressed his palm into the knob, wrapping his hand around it, then twisted, the door coming open out into the living room.

  Jackson gasped and took a clumsy step backwards, his breath choking in the tight strain of his lungs.

  There was a body on the floor, slumped, leaning on its left side, facing away from the entrance so that he couldn’t see its face. Broad shouldered and wearing an unbuttoned flannel shirt, he could tell it wasn’t Lisa, the frame was too large, and he recognized the shirt that her father often wore. The body didn’t move as he stared at it, it simply lay still and prone, no apparent breathing to make the shoulders heave, just an unmoving lump of flesh, muscle and bone.

  “No,” he whispered to himself, shaking his head slightly. He had no love for Lisa’s father, but he was still family of a sort, and Lisa had always been very close to him. Did she know he was lying dead in his wife’s makeshift bedroom right now?

  Just beyond the corpse, he could see the metal poles of an IV rack with bags of fluid dangling from it, bags that appeared concave and drained of anything. The soft whir and hum of medical equipment was audible inside the room and Jackson took a step forward again to peer inside and see what other horrors might be unearthed within. As he moved closer, he could see the spray of red wood in front of the body of Lisa’s father, an outward cone of coughed, dried blood.

  A hospital bed was just next to his fallen body, his legs actually extending underneath the tall piece of hardware and Jackson leaned into the room to get a better view.

  He saw Lisa’s mother almost immediately, her gaunt, strained face glaring up at the ceiling from underneath thick covers, curled and gnarled fingers clutching at the edge of blankets that were pulled up high on her chest. Her eyes were open, wide open, and her lips were cracked into what seemed to be an eternal plea for mercy. Like her husband’s shoulders, the blanket did not heave and there was no sign of life within the woman, just a still, carved statue of what used to be, completely devoid of any sign of humanity. Jackson also noticed that there was no p
ooled or caked blood around her lips, no evidence that she’d been sick, but as his eyes moved toward the empty IV bags hanging from the rack next to her, he thought he realized what might have happened.

  Lisa’s father had died of the illness, coughed himself to death right here next to his beloved wife, and with nobody available to refill the IV bags or care for the dying woman, she had slowly starved to death over the past three days.

  Jackson’s stomach lurched, the muscles in his shoulders tightening, and he felt a sudden charge as if he was kicked in the chest by a horse. Choking, he back pedaled from the room and turned, half stumbling and half scrambling out into the living room where he wouldn’t have to look at Lisa’s mother’s face ever, ever again. Dropping to his knees, he propped himself up with one hand, using the other to clutch at his stomach, but besides some racking coughs and gags, he quickly brought himself under control. Lisa’s parents were dead. Both of them.

  But she wasn’t with them.

  In spite of the winter weather, the temperature in the house felt suddenly stifling, a moist and oppressively hot sauna. Adjusting his backpack on his shoulder, Jackson clamored to his feet, using the sofa for leverage, then desperately shambled from the house, pounding closed the front door behind him. He stood out on the porch, gasping for air, breathing short, haggard breaths, trying to get himself steady and under control. All around him the farm was empty and eerily silent, a landscape painting where the artist forgot to put in all the animals, something that looked artificial, not real. Every time he’d ever been here in his life, there’d been an undercurrent of activity, chickens clucking, horses neighing, cows mooing, some sort of machinery clattering nearby. This morning there was nothing and nobody, and Jackson felt like he’d somehow been transported into an alternate dimension.

  But Lisa wasn’t here.

  The thought both comforted and terrified him. If Lisa wasn’t here, that meant she hadn’t died with her parents, that she might have gone to get help. Or it could just mean that she was lying dead somewhere else on the vast farmlands, either on the grass or in the trees, somewhere Jackson couldn’t see her.

  Almost without thinking, Jackson walked down the steps from the porch and ventured out onto the grass, walking toward the dirt road. Lisa’s parents had been dead for a while, Jackson guessed her father had died around the same time most other folks did, maybe just a little bit later, since he’d spoken to her on the phone that evening and she’d seemed fine. But if her parents were dead and she was gone, how did that explain the recent footprints by the barn, or all of the animals disappearing? Something still wasn’t right.

  Stopping by the side of the road, Jackson knelt down, looking at the dirt. He could clearly see several tire tracks, which had crushed the grass and mud at the corner of the front yard, and even some of the gravel of the driveway. There were tire tracks everywhere, and not your normal run-of-the-mill truck tires, some of the tracks looked thick and heavily treaded. Dozens of footprints were scattered about as well, littering the road, driveway and grass, many of them made by thick-soled boots.

  Combat boots?

  Pulling himself back upright, Jackson placed his hands on his hips and looked down at the mess that the road was currently in, then followed some of the wider tire tracks as they made a gradual U-turn through the farm’s yard, back out onto the road, and then off toward downtown.

  Someone else besides the Martins had been out here recently it seemed, and whoever they were, they’d headed back into town.

  Jackson stood out by the road for a few moments, looking back toward the tree line that he’d exited from way behind the Martin farm, then looking back out down the winding dirt road, which veered off into some other trees looming over the passage. Lisa wasn’t here, of that Jackson was suddenly certain, but the real question was, if not here, then where?

  Only one way to find out, he decided, and he cinched his backpack up on his shoulder and started walking the dirt road, heading into downtown.

  Chapter 6

  “Tell me what I’m looking at here,” Colonel Reeves said over crossed arms as he stared ahead at the flat screen computer terminal.

  “This is a network architecture map,” Agent Craig said, pointing to the collection of shapes and arrows on the computer screen. “It’s the backbone of much of the core internet connectivity east of the Mississippi.”

  “And why am I looking at this?” Reeves asked.

  “During the previous meeting we’d all agreed that information is power, correct?” Agent Wakefield asked.

  Reeves nodded.

  “So, we wanted to collect some more surveillance footage of the events of Black Friday, see if we could find some correlation between that and whatever this biological weapon seems to be, use that to try to either figure out who was behind it, or how we can stop it.”

  “I’m following you,” Reeves replied.

  “So this architecture map has isolated two of the major department store chains throughout the eastern half of the United States.” As they watched, several of the curved lines and arrows faded away, revealing only a few, all of them intersecting through a tight cluster of closely knit shapes.

  “Is this real time?” Reeves asked.

  “Oh no,” Craig replied. “Internet connectivity is all but lost. Several scattered disturbances throughout the country coupled with a sudden lack of workers to repair and maintain equipment has resulted in a nearly complete systemic failure. It’s only a matter of time before the power grids fail completely as well.”

  “So more stuff to look forward to,” mumbled Lieutenant Burns from her chair just next to the colonel.

  “However, as of the disasters in Boston and Hartford, this map was accurate, and you can see this cluster here where the networks intersect.”

  Reeves nodded.

  “It’s presented as a series of separate shapes, but those shapes in fact represent a single data center in Pennsylvania. This data center belongs to a national colocation corporation which hosts many different customers throughout the world, and in fact both of these department store chains used them for remote backup and disaster recovery.”

  “Tell me what I need to know, Agent Craig. Plain language please.”

  Craig nodded stiffly. “Footage from the network security cameras was synchronized… copied to this data center as part of a routine nightly backup. If we can get into this data center and get access to the remote disk backups, we could get our hands on some serious footage.”

  “And footage from more than one source?”

  “Oh, yes,” Agent Craig replied.

  Wakefield leaned back in his chair, his hands on his lap. “Agent Craig, I know you’ve got your fingers in the NSA, but this all strikes me as… legally dubious.”

  “Nothing dubious about it,” Craig replied. “What I’m suggesting is in direct violation of dozens of data privacy laws. But I think extreme situations require extreme measures, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Reeves sat in his chair, his fingers interlocked and cupping his chin, deep in thought.

  “And, I mean… last I heard, at least seven members of the Supreme Court are dead. And those are only the ones we know about.” Craig said it with a hint of humor, but Reeves shot him a look, telling him he didn’t find it the least bit funny.

  Sergeant Davis coughed lightly in the corner, standing several feet away, trying to stay out of the immediate vicinity of their conversation. Reeves turned toward him.

  “Question, Davis?”

  Davis shook his head. “Nope. Just thought I’d point out… as part of our joint operations with USARMIID, there’s a detachment of Marines at Fort Detrick. I’ve been in communication with one of them. There aren’t many survivors, maybe ten, but they’ve got a prototype CH-53K transport helicopter and the last time I spoke with Gunny, he was itching to do something. Anything, really. I’ve had them sitting this out, so far, figuring we might need their help if something… drastic were to happen.”

  “So
we’ve got a transport, and we’ve got ten Marines, and that should be enough to break into this data center and get what we need?” Reeves asked.

  Craig cleared his throat. “Not entirely. You’ll need my help. Or someone with some rudimentary knowledge of technical systems and the floor plan for the data center.”

  “Are you volunteering?” Reeves asked happily.

  “I suppose I am,” Agent Craig replied. “Not willingly, mind you, but unless anyone here has a better idea.”

  “We are all humbled and amazed by your endless sacrifice,” Wakefield said sarcastically.

  “Next steps?” Reeves barked, keeping the conversation on track.

  “Let me get on the horn with Gunnery Sergeant Haskell, and we’ll start putting the team together. I suggest we move on this immediately,” Davis said.

  “Concur,” Reeves said. “Let’s do it.”

  All in unison, the group stood from their chairs and shuffled from the quiet room, dispersing throughout Fort Detrick, finally starting to put a plan into action that might actually make a difference.

  It was about time.

  ***

  Over a hundred miles to the east, planes were hurtling toward downtown Boston, but Mayor Bruce Harris’s day was going like any other. The good thing about being the mayor of a tiny rural Connecticut town was that the days were, more or less, predictable, and Mayor Harris had a very specific day time routine. With Thanksgiving less than a week ago, the holiday season was in full effect, keeping activity at the Town Hall to a minimum. Most of his staff were using up their generous supplies of vacation time, and he spent a chunk of his days during the holidays working from home, unless some specific town work required his presence in the office.

  He lived simply—a pale yellow two-floor house just outside of downtown Aldrich, it was not extravagant or extraneous, and it provided him and his family with just what they needed. Three bedrooms, one for each of his children and one for him and his wife, a basement office, a swing set in the backyard, a two-car garage and all of the basic amenities. It was early morning and the kids were off from school, sleeping in their beds while his wife was doing some early morning grocery shopping, preparing for the weeks ahead. Leftovers were just running out, the fact that they’d lasted almost a week as a testament to how picky his children were at eating these days, and Mrs. Harris was venturing to the next town over to hit the big box grocery store for their once a month resupply. Most of their weekly food was purchased at the small grocers downtown, Mayor Harris preferred to keep things local if possible, but once a month they ventured farther away to stock up.