by S. Ganley
Something new caught her attention, floating down from the sky towards the parking lot she saw a sparkling rain of ash that had just filtered into view from the edge of her building. It looked like black confetti but with glowing and shimmering edges. The puff of grey smoke that followed behind the confetti suddenly told the story, there was a fire somewhere along the far end of her building. The smoke and ash she was seeing was raining down from a point too high to have come from a grill or something burning near ground level. A slight wind had picked up outside and was now pushing the smoke back down the row of apartments and towards her window, she was starting to pick up the thick scent of melted paint and scorched wood. Unlike the pleasing and calming smell of wood burning in a crackling camp fire, this had the unpleasant tinge of burnt plastics, scorched carpet and a heavier metallic smell mixed in with it. She realized that the smell was not just coming to her from the window in her living room. She was sure that she was also detecting the smells from a point further into her own apartment, it was coming in through the ventilation system as well as seeping in from the cracks around her front door. She felt a renewed sense of panic start to take hold of her as she realized that at least one or more of the units in her building were on fire. In a building like hers it would take no time at all for an out of control fire to spread from one end to the other, right on cue she started hearing the telltale buzzing of a fire alarm in one of the adjoining apartments. It sounded like it might be coming from the apartment just on the other side of the wall from her and if that was the case then there was a good chance she didn't have more than a few minutes to escape before it jumped to her own home.
She looked back to the people in the parking lot, from their vantage point they should be able to easily see the blaze in her building, the smoke was much thicker and darker between her window and the outside now and burning ash and pieces of debris were raining down on a regular basis. Some of the debris was falling in the path of the people walking around in the lot and from what Miranda could see they seemed almost oblivious to it. None of them was showing any more than a passing interest in the burning building. They didn't seem to be paying attention to anything at all in particular they just continued to follow meaningless patterns around the parked cars and through the open lot. From Miranda's point of view they just looked dazed and confused but completely uninterested in the burning apartment building on a few feet away from them.
A distressed scream for help came from a point just out of her view and up closer to the far end of her building, she moved the curtains a little further to the side and stretched her neck as far as she could to see if she could spot the source of the cries. She was not the only one attracted to the sounds, everyone in the parking lot had now directed their attention back up towards the building. She saw two new figures emerging from the smoke, a middle aged woman was struggling towards the parking lot while half dragging along a man who was covered in black soot as if she had just dragged him out of a burning apartment. The man appeared to be conscious but in serious pain, his right leg was flopping uselessly along beside him and looked as though it had suffered severe burns. The woman was yelling out for help and Miranda could hear her as she cried that others were still trapped inside burning apartments. She thought that the sudden appearance of this woman dragging a burn victim had finally pushed the people in the parking lot into action. As a single unit they all turned towards the woman and started rushing up the sidewalk and onto the grass in her direction. Miranda could not see their faces as they were sprinting towards the woman, presumably to help her with the injured man she has half carrying, but something about the expression on that woman's face suddenly told her that she didn’t perceive them as coming to her aid. Instead of looking relieved that help was coming, her face turned into a mask of terror. She started to scream again and this time Miranda was sure that it was a scream of fear as she yelled at her rescuers to stop and leave her alone. Even her injured charge was now holding out one blackened and burnt arm as he tried to wave off their would-be saviors. The group was now just reaching the patch of grass at the end of the sidewalk, and were only a couple yards short of reaching the woman and man when she suddenly shoved the injured man free of her shoulder and let him fall roughly to the ground at her feet. Still screaming for help, she turned back towards the burning building and started running, but she only made it three or four steps. In a flash, they were on her, but instead of trying to help, they brutally knocked her to the ground like football players mobbing a quarterback. Through the swirling smoke and growing haze of heated air, Miranda watched as not only did most of the group pounce on the woman as soon as she hit the ground, but two of their numbers broke off from the pack and slammed themselves down on top of the injured man as he was desperately trying to crawl away from the them while throwing his blackened arms in the air in a frantic effort to ward them off.
Miranda could only sit opened mouth and in utter shock as she watched the people she had only moments early thought for sure had been guardian angels suddenly turn on the pair of innocent victims. The smoke was growing thicker between her and the ongoing attack but she could see just enough to know that the mob didn't stop at merely knocking the woman down and jumping all over her, she could see rapid movements and shadows that told her they were working her over with everything they had. She had a better view of the two people who had jumped on the injured man and at that moment she wished that the smoke had been thicker to prevent her from seeing it. One man had him in a bear hug around his lower back and was pressing his face into his belly while his teeth were gnashing and struggling to tear away the tattered remnants of the guy’s burnt shirt. In one single motion he smacked his face hard against the soft midsection and tore free a strip of fleshy fat leaving behind a clearly visible pink tract of raw and bloodied meat across the exposed belly. There was no mistaking the intent of this attack, the man holding onto his belly was fully vested in eating into his abdomen. It was like watching a cannibalistic scene in a low budget horror film, but this was live and in person and actually happening only several dozen yards away from her living room window. As if the belly attack wasn't bad enough, the second man had him pinned down by laying across his chest from left to right, this attacker prevented Miranda from seeing the face of his victim and Miranda was guiltily grateful for that. From the piercing cries of pain she could hear from the poor soul, she did not think she could stomach seeing the agony he must be experiencing etched across his face. Even without seeing his face what she could see was more than enough to send shivers of fear running down her spine, the man lying across his chest had a firm hold on his right forearm and was holding it tight to the ground. The attack had only started maybe ten seconds earlier but already this man was pressing his face back towards the injured mans trapped hand and as she watched he proceeded to bite off a third finger, the other two missing digits having already been swallowed in a few hasty bites. The screams of pain coming from the man as he was being devoured by his attackers were overshadowed only by the higher pitched cries of agony coming from a little further away as the woman who had rescued him was dealing with a similar fate. The worst part of the entire scene was when her screams reached a new pitch of terror and then suddenly just stopped all together. As ferocious as the attack on the man was, she was pretty sure she understood what the sudden silence from the woman signified.
She had seen enough of the gruesome encounter and slunk down into the couch pulling her knees up to her chest into as tight a ball as she could as the suffering cries of the man with only seven fingers continued to echo inside her head. Miranda knew she couldn't let the fear consume her as it had when she had heard gun shots earlier, the smell and building smoke of the spreading flames told her that she didn't have much time, she had to get out of her apartment in the next few minutes before she was trapped. A loud splintering crash punctuated that thought as a portion of the building further down from her apartment must have collapsed. Smoke billowed even thicker into her li
ving room immediately following that and she could now hear the crackling of flames nearby. The temperature inside the apartment was quickly rising along with the accumulating smoke and when Miranda looked at the wall that separated her unit from the next, she saw that the paint was noticeably peeling from the building heat she knew that she was out of time, it was now or never.
The air inside her apartment was already growing thick and harder to breathe, when she stood from the couch she noticed that it was also much more difficult to see as well. Miranda dropped to her knees and crawled across the carpet to the small foyer by the front door. She felt the door knob for a moment and was relieved that it was still cool to the touch, at least the fire had not yet reached that side of her apartment yet. She almost laughed out loud as that thought crossed her mind, her apartment, she hadn't been inside the door more than twenty four hours and still had not had a single utility turned on in her own name and she was already leaving it behind to be consumed by a raging fire. After what she had witnessed going on just outside of her building she felt guilty as she found herself being thankful that it was still the weekend and Mrs. Carpenter would not have been able to deposit her down payments on the place yet.
She paused before opening the front door as she realized she had not made a decision on where she would go when she left her apartment. Turning to the right was out of the question. That would take her down the short covered pathway right out in front of her building and in clear sight of those people still ravaging her neighbors. That meant that she would have to turn and run to the left and come out along the backside of her building. From the back of the building she would be able to make a run down a short incline and into the other parking lot that would lead her to the Carpenter's residence. As she thought of her landlord and her husband, that seemed to be the most likely place for her to run and seek help, at the very least if they didn't know already they should be made aware that one of their buildings was not only on fire but was also under siege by a blood thirsty pack of cannibals. Maybe her landlord would have better luck reaching the police using the landline in her home. Her confidence started coming back as the plan formed in her head, having a goal to reach and somewhere to go once she left her apartment made her feel much better than she had only a moment earlier. She eased the door open and peeked outside making certain that no one had circled around to her side of the building in the last minute or two. Seeing that she was safely alone, she crept out into the covered alcove and closed the door softly behind her. Moving quickly, she kept close to the wall of the building to minimize her profile until she reached the back corner of the building. Taking a cautious look around the corner she could now fully appreciate the scope of the blaze, her little section of the building was the only remaining portion not already fully involved in a towering inferno that was spitting flames and ash high into the sky. The conflagration must have been visible for miles and she once again thought about why the hell the police and fire department were not already on the scene fighting the blaze and arresting the murdering band of sickos on the opposite side of the building. She decided it was something she was going to stress to Mrs. Carpenter that she needed to file a formal complaint with the city for the lack of emergency service response. Once she was certain that the path was clear and she could make it down the small hill without being observed, she took off at a fast trot while holding her arm over her eyes to help shield herself from the falling ash.
#
Dr. Woods had issued the orders for both the crisis center and the surviving members of the CDC labs to begin breaking down their most critical mobile equipment and to prepare both facilities for immediate evacuation. Contact with the White House situation room had been completely lost two hours earlier, but in his final act of command, General Page had pulled off what Dr. Woods considered to be the impossible. The commander of the naval station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba had quarantined the entire base after the first reported outbreaks occurred in overseas locations stemming from flights originating in the Continental United States. In accordance with a department of defense protocol that designated Guantanamo as an autonomous command authority in the event of a breakdown of command, the base was able to isolate itself from the outside world without any further command authority. Due to a recent trade and travel embargo imposed on the nation of Cuba itself as a result of the latest blustering from its contemptuous regime, the country had already been effectively isolated from the outside world for the last three weeks. By imposing those restrictions, the United Nations had unwittingly turned the small island nation into the last bastion of infection free society known throughout the world. Naval and air force assets stationed at Guantanamo reinforced with a small contingent of forces out of Naval Station Key West at the southern edge of the Florida Keys had already been on station working to enforce the travel restrictions on the country. When word came from the commander of the base at Guantanamo that he was enforcing a total lockdown as a result of the world wide epidemic, those attached forces were immediately transferred to his command and their orders were that any water or airborne attempt to reach within fifty miles of any point of the island of Cuba without direct authority from his office was to be met with deadly force without hesitation or reservation. All forces under his command were also restricted from approaching within fifty miles of the shores of North America or any neighboring Caribbean islands. His quick thinking and foresight likely saved the lives of everyone on the island and as a result, the commander of Cuban forces had approached the Americans and offered to temporarily place all of their armed forces under American command for the duration of the crisis. A move never before heard of or even anticipated, it was learned that while those overtures were taking place a contingent of Cuban special forces had seized control of the capital in Havana and launched a military coupe ensuring that no civilian leadership would interfere in their efforts to keep the country secure and infection free.
General Page had spent the last several hours of his command coordinating with the commander at Guantanamo to work out a method for evacuating select key personnel from the United States to the military base on Cuba. Only personnel cleared by military medical authorities as free of even a runny nose would be allowed to board dedicated military flights bound for Cuba. Upon arrival, the aircraft and all aboard were to be quarantined at a point on the far end of the runway where detailed blood testing would be conducted on each individual before they were permitted to interact with any base personnel. It was an imperfect system that the base commander had at first raised a host of arguments against, but when it was explained that without the scientific and medical personnel planned to be evacuated, any chance of finding a method of beating this outbreak would more than likely be lost once they were themselves inevitably exposed to the virus. With the help of Cuban workers, an impressive facility was being constructed on a remote part of the American base that was destined to become the new scientific and medical research and response center dedicated to the outbreak. All uninfected personnel at the CDC along with several truck loads of sensitive equipment were to be escorted by armed convoy to the regional airport where they would be airlifted by a pair of US Air Force C5 Galaxy transports nonstop to Guantanamo. A hangar at the airport in Atlanta had been secured and turned into a hasty medical screening zone where everyone authorized to board the transports would be examined by army doctors adorned in the highest rated chemical warfare protective suits available to the military. An entire infantry company had been assigned to pull security around the hangar and air craft, reports had already been filtering back of zombies and mobs of civilians trying to gain access to the airfield and the whole area was becoming littered with bodies, making it necessary to hasten the efforts at evacuating the CDC staff.
The Vice President and the remaining federal leadership had elected to remain in place at the secure bunker underneath the Greenbrier hotel, the logic being that leadership of the nation would never be transferred to foreign soil. They would remain in place
and stay in the loop with the efforts underway in Cuba to reorganize and find a way to fight the epidemic.
Dr. Woods and select members of his own staff were to board a waiting C130 cargo plane at Andrews Air Force base, a similar set up had been arranged at that location to evacuate the crisis center personnel as well as several critical medical staff from Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland who were being ferried to Andrews via helicopter airlift. There was a certain amount of discontent at running out during the darkest hours they had ever faced, from his own team, only himself and seven other analysts would be making the flight from Andrews. Dr. Martin and the remaining members of the team he had spent so much time working with to help coordinate efforts for many other crisis faced by the nation would not be making the trip. Their fate was sealed when preliminary testing of their blood showed signs of the infection. Most of them were already displaying visible signs of the illness. As stoically as possible, Dr. Martin had tried to explain how it was for the greater good in the long run, they would continue to keep the center in DC running for as long as possible. The would continue coordinating with the remaining emergency services they were still in contact with across the country, while feeding raw data to the new operation in Cuba once it was up and running. Their final goodbye was bittersweet given that those who had still tested infection free had been segregated from those with signs of infection and it was only via the in house conferencing system that they were able to talk to each. Dr. Woods assured his good friend that they would be in touch again in less than a few hours when he arrived in Cuba and could get their communications up and running. He had no way of knowing that less than an hour after their plane departed Andrews, the crisis center would be burnt to the ground during an attempt by civilians on the outside to break in after a rumor of a possible cure that was only being provided to select persons in the government began to make its rounds through the surrounding communities.