by Paul Seiple
"I know it's not comforting, but that asshole you shot earlier wasn't military. He belonged to a group called ARMA."
Daria stopped and turned. "Who brought you here?"
Q didn't answer.
"Exactly. Whether he was military or not, he murdered the people I was closest to, and the government knew about it. The government executed Chad, Matt, Rick, Eddie, and Amanda. All of them."
"Did they turn?" Q asked.
"Matt and Amanda were the only ones. They shot the rest in the back of the head. Honestly, though, I didn't mind putting a bullet in zombie Matt's skull. Living Matt was sort of an asshole."
"So, you're not sick. Any symptoms?" Q asked.
"What do you mean? I haven't been bitten, and I'm not dead. That's the way these zombie things work, right?"
"I don't think your friends were killed to be silenced. I think those people who came here feared them," Q said.
"Feared? What really happened here?"
"ARMA chose Black Dog as the place to test weapons it had been working on. Two specifically, first people were infected with a manmade virus called Judas. The virus's only purpose was to showcase the effectiveness of the second weapon, a controlled bomb called Judas Kiss. The smart bomb was programmed to seek out those infected with Judas and destroy them with minimal damage to the surroundings."
"That's some trashy science-fiction shit," Daria said.
"There was more to Judas than they realized. The virus has a strong to desire to survive, so it evolved, and spread faster than they imagined."
"And you think I have it?"
"Do you have symptoms?"
"I'm hungry, but the thought eating you doesn't appeal to me," Daria said. "What are the symptoms? No wait, don't tell me. Every time I look at WebMD, I have every disease known to man."
Q took a moment and stared into Daria's emerald eyes. No cloudy film.
"I don't think you're infected," Q said.
"Hey, that's the best thing you can say to a girl in a zombie outbreak. The house is just up this hill."
A small white house came into view. The front was covered in graffiti. The words I am the way out of this dark hell, and this torch is my light were written all over the outside of the house.
"Your work?" Q asked.
Daria laughed. "I'm not that goth. It was here when I found it. I have no idea what it means. The generator is around b…"
The rustling of leaves stole Daria's words. She held the gun at chest level. Q turned his back to hers.
"I thought you said your sister was the only one left."
"I thought she was," Daria said.
The rustling grew louder. A girl staggered through the woods to the side of the house and into the front yard. Her gray skin sagged, her clothes were tattered, and patches of white hair with blonde tips clung to her scalp.
Daria lowered the gun. "That's Amanda. Just ignore her."
Q watched the girl stumble forward before catching her balance. It was a cognizant thought. She was dead, but her brain told her not to fall. Her body responded by leaning back.
"Come on, we need to get back before dark," Daria said.
Q continued to watch the infected girl as she closed in on him.
"I can't shoot her. She will attack you if you let her get close enough. I'm not choosing you over my sister, even if she is dead."
"Does this town have a doctor's office?" Q asked.
"She's dead. You can't save her. Just let her be."
"I need to try to get some samples from her. Maybe I can figure out the genetic makeup of the virus," Q said.
"She wants to eat you. She's not going to let you take blood. And I'm not going to let you kill her."
"She's already dead. The virus is alive, though. I need to keep her in this state."
"And what do you suggest we do? There's a doctor's office a few blocks over."
"We need to find a way to restrain her and take her there," Q said.
"OK, we can kidnap my zombie sister tomorrow. We need to get this generator back to Nick now."
Nick glanced at his watch. Darkness would make its presence felt soon. A ten-minute trip, fifteen tops, had become thirty minutes. He planned to wait for Q to dig into the first hard drive, but the longer Q and Daria were gone, the more negative thoughts crept into Nick's head. He plugged in the first drive and waited for it to boot.
"Did you miss us?" Daria asked.
"Like a hemorrhoid," Nick said.
Q sat the generator on the floor. He grabbed a bottle of water from his backpack and took a few swigs. "Anything?"
"First drive just booted," Nick said, clicking on the drive's icon.
A group of folders populated. All of them were called The Judas Project, followed by a name. Nick clicked the folder named The Judas Project - Tom Hendricks. The folder contained one file. Nick opened it. The type was gibberish.
"It's coded," Nick said.
"We don't have time to decipher these drives," Q said.
"Move over," Daria said. "Does your iPhone have a signal?"
Nick picked up his phone. "Two bars, 4G," he said.
"Tether it," Daria said. "This is an encrypted URL. I've dabbled on the Dark Web. I've seen something like this before."
Nick noticed a flashing icon next to his battery meter.
"James tried to get in touch," Nick said as he tapped the button for the Not So Common Sense game.
"Who's James?"
"My brother," Nick said. He read the message aloud.
Not safe. Moving. Infected are not the enemy. Be careful.
"What does he mean the infected are not enemies? Those bastards try to eat us. I'm not going to play Settlers of Catan with them at Starbucks," Daria said.
"The enemy is on the hard drives," Q said. "Can you crack the code?"
Daria connected the MacBook to Nick's phone's Wi-Fi and waited for a signal. She typed in 7327386.org.
"How the hell do you remember that URL?" Nick asked.
The connection was slow. After about forty-five seconds, the screen turned black. An animated skeleton appeared, dancing to "This is Halloween."
"It's pretty easy. Look at your phone. The numbers spell ‘secreto,’ which in Latin means in secret," Daria said.
The song came to a screech as if a needle dragged across the record. A look of fear crossed the face of the skeleton. Thunder from the beginning of Slayer's "Raining Blood" blared through the MacBook’s speakers. The skeleton exploded, sending bones in different directions when the song kicked in. As the singing began, the bones formed the words Enter Your Credentials.
"That's impressive," Nick said.
Daria typed at least twenty characters that were concealed behind asterisks. The screen turned red. The animated skeleton appeared again with his bones held together with rope. A robotic voice spoke. "What's your immorality?"
Daria typed, I slept with my sister's boyfriend…twice.
"For real?" Nick asked.
"No, he's an asshole. This is kind of like a weird form of untraceable two-factor authentication. I needed something easy to remember that no one would ever figure out," Daria said.
A search engine popped up on the screen. It resembled a dark version of Netscape. The words The Inquisition of Moe were written across the top of the page. Ads for anything from illegal drugs to prostitution ran down the right side of the page.
"Who's Moe?" Nick asked.
"No clue," Daria said.
She typed “decode” in the search bar. A list of sites populated. Daria clicked on the ninth in the search.
"Why not the first?" Nick asked.
"Usually the first few are landmines."
"Landmines?" Nick asked.
"Hey, this isn't exactly Google. There's some shady shit that goes down on Secreto. This may be hard to believe, but there are hackers on here looking to steal your ID, bank account, whatever. Novices get torn to shreds. The mind tells you the first in the search is the best. Not true here. I'm doing y
ou a favor,” Daria said.
"Thanks, I guess," Nick said.
Daria copied and pasted the one line from the Hendricks file onto the screen. The gibberish spelled out judasthree.com. Daria clicked the link.
"Let me take over," Q said.
Daria threw her hands above her head. "Fine. I can't even get a thank you, though?"
"Thanks," Q said.
A white screen appeared to mimic a blank page.
“Did they take the site offline?” Q asked.
“Move over,” Daria said. She ran the mouse cursor slowly over the screen.
“What are you doing?” Q asked.
“She’s looking for the login,” Nick said.
Daria slid the cursor to the top right of the screen. The arrow turned into a hand as it hovered over a tiny black speck. Daria clicked the mouse. A sign-in box appeared in the middle of the screen.
“Any idea on what the password would be? I’m sure all these assholes had their own. I just need one,” Daria said.
“I didn’t see anything in the notebooks,” Q said. “Can’t you crack it on the Dark Web?”
“She would need a user name. This only requires a password, which makes it much harder to crack,” Neil said.
“Yeah, what he said. It’s probably cloud-based storage. You cannot register for it. They set up passwords. Without one, I don’t how we’re going to get in,” Daria said.
“For shits and giggles, try JAMES1234,” Nick said.
Daria typed it in. “Holy shit, that worked.”
A group of about ten folders appeared on the left side of the page.
“Let me get there again.” Q pushed Daria away from the laptop.
“OK, I can chalk one time up to you being excited, but two, without a thank you, that’s just rude,” Daria said.
Q navigated to a folder that read JUDAS. It contained everything about the virus.
"The bastard spliced the RNA from H1N1 with his Frankenstein virus," Q said. He clicked on a video. It was Hendricks talking to Carolyn Swann. She told Hendricks that Judas was successfully airborne after introducing a strain of 2009 H1N1.
"Dammit, Carolyn," Q said.
"I take it you know her," Daria said.
"She's his fiancée," Nick said.
"Ouch. Being the cause of the end of the world is a little worse than cheating," Daria said.
"I can't believe she would do this," Q said.
"We can't harp on that now. Is there anything in there that helps you figure out a cure?" Nick asked.
"Hey, I'm no scientist, but what about the folder called The Cure?" Daria said.
"You may not be a scientist, but you're a pretty good smart ass," Nick said.
"I'm sixteen, what do you expect?"
Q ignored the banter and clicked on the folder. Four videos appeared. Each named Savior with a date after the word. Q opened the first video. It opened with blurry video, which cleared to reveal a concrete room like a bunker. A man dressed in a white lab coat stepped in front of the camera to adjust the angle so that a white board on the wall came into frame. The man walked to the board and faced the camera.
"Good morning, I'm Doctor Franz Reichfield. This video is to document the first attempt at creating a cure for the virus Judas. One with any basic knowledge of viruses is aware that antibiotics aren't a viable treatment. However, in the creation of Judas, a small sample of Staphylococcus Aureus was introduced to the formula to act as binding agent for antibiotics to neutralize the virus. We introduced a small dose of erythromycin to the virus. Something wonderful yet terrifying happened. Judas became stronger. It wasn't a complete surprise since there are strains of antibiotic resistant staph a, but to my knowledge, a weak strain should have been eliminated with erythromycin."
Q paused the video.
"I thought the bomb was the cure?" Nick asked.
"It was for the military, but there's bigger money in pharmaceuticals," Q said, opening the second video.
"Do you have good news for me, Franz?"
"Who's that?" Daria asked.
"Hendricks. The man behind all this shit," Nick said.
Q turned the volume up on the MacBook.
"Depends on what you consider good news," Franz said. "Your virus ate the antibiotic like chocolate and now seems to be stronger. So, from an end-of-the-world scenario, that's bad. I'm fairly confident dicloxacillin will kill it, though. So, from a pharmaceutical standpoint, the cure is going to make you the wealthiest man in the world."
"You'll be right there with me, my friend," Hendricks said, patting Franz on the shoulder."
Q paused the video again.
"Wait, did that asshole make a virus just to create a cure to get rich?" Daria asked.
"Looks that way," Q said, clicking the video again.
A neon green line split the computer screen in half.
"What's going on?" Q asked.
"Probably a glitch in the video," Nick said.
The green line multiplied until the entire screen was dissected into tiny sections. Smoke billowed from beneath the keys on the keyboard.
"Get away from it," Daria said, pulling Q's arm.
Flames sparked from the USB port attached to the hard drive. There a snap and crackle like popping corn. The hard drive caught fire. The computer's screen splintered into a spider web.
"Untether your phone," Daria said.
"What?" Nick asked.
Daria jerked the phone away from Nick and disconnected it from the MacBook.
"We got sniped," Daria said, inspecting the phone for damage.
"What the hell is getting sniped?" Q asked.
"The hard drive was set to self-destruct. I'm guessing there was a script written to recognize if the drive was being used by another computer," Daria said.
"That's possible?" Q asked.
"It's doable," Nick said. "It could be something as simple as the hard drives are NTFS. It's a format native to Windows. Macs can read the files, but that's all. The script could have been written to notice the difference and self-destruct," Nick said.
"Or, we could be dealing with some top-level hacking shit. If that's the case, there could be trackers on the hard drives," Daria said.
"Fuck. That's how they found us at the cabin," Nick said. “We have to destroy the rest of the drives."
"We can't destroy them. The answer to a cure is there," Q said.
"Q, we can't use them. Look at what happened to my computer. And I don't have AppleCare."
"Not the time to be a smart ass. The cure is on one of those drives. I have to find it," Q said.
"As long as we have those drives, they have a direct line to us," Nick said.
A gunshot put an end to the argument.
"My sister," Daria said.
"They found us," Nick said. "We have to hide."
"Come on, there's a storm drain around back that leads to the lake," Daria said.
Q was the last to exit the drain. He followed Nick and Daria around a boat dock to a thick patch of brush that benefited from sprouting weeds.
"Are we safe here?" Nick asked.
"As long as Q didn't bring those hard drives, we should be OK," Daria said. "From this side of the lake, we can see them coming."
"Q?" Nick asked.
"I left them in the diner."
A solid black helicopter broke through the clouds. Daria pushed Nick further behind the bushes. Q used the base of an oak tree to shield himself from the chopper. It circled the lake a few times before moving over town.
"Three of those black helicopters showed up right before my friends were murdered," Daria said.
"It's ARMA," Q said.
"All right, so do we wait around to end up like her friends or do we have a plan?" Nick asked.
"The highway isn't far from here. We could get there in about ten minutes,” Daria said.
"We need to wait it out. You've avoided them. We'll follow your lead," Q said.
"When they were here before, I pretty much sta
yed in the storm drain. It's a sophisticated system for a small town. I think we should stay here and keep an eye on them until it gets too dark. Then we go underground," Daria said.
Sixteen
"No sign of life, sir. One infected. No longer a threat."
The man waited for instructions over the radio. Three men stood behind him dressed in all-black fatigues, armed with Russian AK-9s.
"And the hard drives?" Static cut through the question, making it barely audible.
"We have the hard drives, sir. It looks like one was attached to a computer. It was destroyed, but the rest are intact."
"Sweep the area again. Q Warren is there somewhere. If he could get anything from that drive, he knows too much. Your job is to take him and whoever is helping him out. They cannot leave Black Dog," Ashe said.
"Yes, sir." The man clipped the radio to his belt. "All right, Sanchez and Martin, check the houses surrounding the diner. Thomas, flip that diner over like a fucking tornado hit it. I'm going to walk the lake shore."
Robert Strait joined ARMA after serving ten years in the Marines. Physically, he was a dynamo. Standing six feet six inches and weighing two-forty with four-percent body fat made the college basketball all-star an imposing force. But it was his intelligence that put him on ARMA's radar. His IQ tested 150. Strait had one of the best strategic minds Tom Hendricks ever had the pleasure of picking. The paycheck Hendricks offered him was too good to pass up.
Strait commanded an elite squad of ARMA's henchman. This was his third trip to Black Dog. He knew his way around the town. The only spot he never searched was across the lake. Retrieving the hard drives was only a small part of the mission. Finding Q Warren was his main objective. He radioed Thomas and told him he was going to check the other side of the lake.
"It's getting pretty dark; should we head underground?" Nick asked.
Daria didn't answer. A beam of light bouncing over the water caught her eye.
"Should we…"
She interrupted Nick by grabbing his wrist and whispering, "Someone is coming."
Q saw the light.
"What do we do?" Nick asked.
"Do you only see one light?" Q asked Daria.