The briefing. The MP captain who had briefed them the afternoon of their arrival, in that sweltering, fly-infested hut. He had used those words – emergency protocols – and handed an envelope to his CO…who handed it to the XO. The briefer said he was to carry it with him at all times in case the ‘balloon went up.’
Siren or no siren, that’s exactly what happened, Donny thought. The brutal attack in the forest, the dying screams of his men, the crunch of a combat knife punching into skulls…anxious, three-star generals didn’t just drop out of the sky to wave pistols and bark nonsensical orders.
We’re at war.
Or at least something approximating it. The emergency protocol would be orders for an in-the-event-of situation. The XO had those orders, and he was right there in the trees where Donny had left him. Ignoring his men’s shouted questions, he grabbed his combat knife and sprinted back up the hill, stopping at the edge of the pines.
It was dark in there, and getting darker as the sun fled the sky. A breeze whispered through the trees, and it was followed by a distant giggling from deep within the shadows. The giggle was repeated off to the right, then echoed several time to the left. Donny peered into the darkness but saw nothing moving.
Are they watching me?
He gritted his teeth and ran the few yards to his executive officer’s body, rolling it onto its back and tearing open the body armor’s Velcro seal. He reached in, feeling around blindly because he wasn’t about to take his eyes off the trees.
Another giggle, a throaty sound that seemed to hang in the pines.
Movement in the shadows, more than one figure.
His fingertips grazed something rigid that gave him a paper cut, and he grabbed, pulling out the folded manila envelope. RED PROTOCOL – FEATHER MOUNTAIN was stamped on it in red ink, and was the only marking. He tore it open, finding several laminated pages and a red plastic key card on a chain.
The giggling came again, and this time there was no mistaking the silhouette of a man slipping from behind one tree and disappearing behind another, moving closer. Donny slipped the chain and card around his neck, shoving the big envelope into a cargo pocket. He hurried back to his men.
“What are your orders, sir?” his PFC repeated.
Donny pointed up the hill. “That way, back to the base.” He looked at the sky. The sun was below the trees now, setting early in late October and even earlier in the mountains. Gathering clouds that promised rain drained the light even further. He didn’t want to think about how bad things would get once night fell.
“Aren’t we supposed to hold the airfield, sir?” asked Jones.
“Do you want to try to do that with a knife, Private?” When the man shook his head, Donny said, “Then follow me.” The four soldiers ran up the dirt road in the direction the Humvees had gone, while night stole into the mountains.
-19-
LABCOAT
Atlanta, Georgia – October 28
CDC Atlanta was in protective lockdown, its doors sealed against the outside world. It didn’t make a difference. The infected were already inside, searching the halls and offices and labs, searching for prey.
That’s what we are to them, Dr. Moira Rusk thought. A food source.
The research – the live research, conducted simply by witnessing what they did – supported the idea.
“Are we secure?” Moira asked, emerging from a small office where she’d just had a hurried phone conversation with a Deputy Joint Chief of Staff, a two-star Air Force general at the Pentagon. He was the highest ranking official she could reach, since no one at Homeland Security – the agency that would make the official call – was answering. Neither were a lot of people. What Moira had said to the two-star had been good enough for him, and he’d immediately made the call to initiate Bank Vault, not knowing that the late Bob Chase of Homeland Security had already given that order to the Secret Service.
“We’re locked up tight,” answered Dr. Karen Fisher, standing in the aisle that ran down the center of a cluster of work cubicles, the offices at this end of a lengthy suite of labs and test subject wards. The woman looked haggard, as if she might drop at any moment, dark smudges completely encircling her eyes and her face drawn with deep lines. She was holding a cup of coffee in a hand that trembled slightly, and there was a dried blood splatter across the front of her white lab coat.
Moira touched her friend’s arm as she went past, moving to a door with a thick glass window that looked out at and opened onto a common hallway here on the third floor. The glass was streaked with a red smear that ended in a bloody palm print, but the thing that had made it was nowhere in sight. Moira looked as far left and right as the window would allow, just to make sure.
She turned back to face her fellow physician. “Karen, did you check every door? Personally?”
Dr. Fisher nodded. “No one is getting in here.”
No one? Moira thought. No thing was more like it. And it wasn’t really true anyway. They were already in here, just a few doors away.
“And we have a complete headcount?”
Fisher rubbed her eyes. “Nine lab staff, you and me, one duty nurse. Ten subjects. Every interior door from end-to-end is punch code secured. The exterior doors from the office (she nodded at the one where Moira was standing) and the ward are now key card only, and only from the inside. You and I have the only cards. We’ve followed the lockdown protocol.”
Moira took Karen’s arm. “I’m sorry. I know you know what you’re doing. I’m just-”
“I get it,” said Fisher. “No worries.”
“Plenty of worries.
The younger woman just nodded, then sat down in a swivel chair in the nearest cubicle. “What did Washington say?”
Moira found a chair of her own. She spoke in a soft voice so that none of the other staff would hear, although it wasn’t necessary; there was a pressurized, steel and reinforced glass door between them and the doctors’ conversation. “It was a brief call. I did a lot of the talking, trying to convince a general to initiate part three of the NRP and get Bank Vault rolling. He didn’t need much convincing.”
“A little late for the NRP,” Fisher said without a tone of recrimination. She knew how hard Moira had tried to convince the White House to put it in place.
“From a preventative perspective maybe,” said Moira, “but I won’t give up hope on the medical aspect, and both the military and economic features just make sense.” She sighed. She was exhausted too, and the adrenalin that had so recently hit her during the incident had quickly depleted, leaving her feeling worn and weary. “They’ve lost the President,” Moira said. “Somewhere in Cleveland. The rest of the First Family, too. Bob Chase from Homeland Security is missing, along with most of the Cabinet members, the Supreme Court justices, the Joint Chiefs and lots of senators and congressmen. The general I spoke with said he thought the Vice President and the Speaker were secure, but he couldn’t confirm.”
Dr. Fisher could only stare and shake her head.
“Even more are missing, or at least they can’t be located or reached. Everything is falling apart.”
“The military?”
“All he said was that they were ‘responding to the crisis as best they could.’”
“That sounds like a bullshit answer,” said Karen.
“Agreed, but there was no point pushing it.”
“We’ve been monitoring the internet and watching the news,” said Fisher. “There’s a TV in one of the cubicles. It’s chaos out there. What we saw in here multiplied by hundreds of thousands. Millions, even.”
Moira took a long look at the tired doctor. “What day are you, Karen?”
The response was immediate. “I-Plus-Nine, but closer to ten than nine.”
The older woman paled.
“You’re I-Plus-Seven,” Karen said. “You’ve got a few more days to figure this out.”
The I-Plus language Fisher was using was simply a measurement. It stood for how long a person had been in
fected with Trident in terms of days, determined by research into the infection’s growth rate through the body, which had thus far been consistent in every study worldwide. How much the infection had spread through the body was now giving an extremely accurate (to within hours, at least) picture of when a person had contracted Trident, and thus how long they’d had it. And now they all knew what happened around I-Plus-Ten.
A monster was born.
Fisher saw her friend’s look and gave her a thin smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll excuse myself before I turn into a threat.”
Moira flashed anger. “You’re not going anywhere! And I’m not worried. I don’t want to talk about it.” It wasn’t the response of a professional researcher and virologist, someone who searched tirelessly for knowledge and solutions. They were the words of someone terrified of losing a beloved friend.
She moved back to the subject of the call. It was safer. “The Pentagon said that they have a federal judge with them, and they’re initiating executive succession procedures, trying to assemble everyone who is in line for command. They’re sending some people to come get me and take me back to Washington, just in case.”
“Damn,” said Fisher. “The Secretary of Health and Human Services is what, twelfth down the list?”
“Something like that. I’ve never done the math. It was always a ridiculous idea to think that things would ever be bad enough for me to be sworn in as President.”
“Until now. But instead of sending people to collect you, why aren’t they putting everything into finding the real President?”
“I asked the general that very question,” said Moira. “He said they were using every available resource to find him, then something about those resources rapidly dwindling, and finished with a policy quote about maintaining a working government.” The older woman shook her head. “Anyway, I have my doubts about any rescue team.” She tried to smile but it failed. “If they’re unable to locate and evacuate the most protected man in the world, do you really think they’re going to be able to make it to Atlanta and get me back there?”
“Sure,” said Karen. “They know exactly where you are.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Moira said. “I’m not leaving you here to deal with this alone.”
“Now that is a bullshit answer,” Fisher said. “I’m not much of a flag-waver, you know that, but Jesus…we’re talking about the country here. And you knew the score when you accepted the Cabinet appointment. If they make it here, you’re going.” She gave the older woman her sternest doctor’s glare, then tilted her head toward the pressurized inner door. “What are you going to tell them? About what the Pentagon said and everything else?”
“As little as I have to,” said Moira. “Nothing about the President or succession or all the deaths.”
“Moira, they’re seeing it for themselves on the TV and the internet.”
“Well, it’s not going to come from me. We’re in lockdown, the research is our only priority, and I want everyone working. Turn off the TV and online news. Keep them busy. That will keep them calm.”
Fisher nodded her agreement.
“The body is autopsy, right?” She knew it was – she and Karen Fisher had wheeled it in there on a gurney themselves, a long lump covered in a bloody sheet. As they had moved through the lab, a middle-aged woman named Annabelle had burst into tears and looked away from the sight.
Moira stood. “Let’s go take a look at it.”
The autopsy room could be accessed through a door from the main lab on one side, and another door on the opposite side that led to the patient ward. The room was cool, with white walls, steel and hard lights making it colder still. Dr. Rusk pulled the sheet off the body on the table in the center, revealing a young man in his late twenties wearing Dockers, a button-down shirt and a white lab coat. His complexion was the ashy, paper color of the recently dead, and his lab coat was soaked red. A fragment of glass jutted out of his neck, right where his carotid artery was.
Terry Butters, one of Fisher’s research techs, had been dead now for a little over twenty minutes. Moira used surgical scissors to cut away his clothing, pitching it into a damp pile in the corner of the room. Mr. Butters had been I-Plus-Ten.
Both doctors snapped on Latex gloves and switched on a bank of high-intensity lights directly over the table. Moira wasn’t ready to conduct an autopsy just yet, but that would come soon enough. For now, she wanted to make some initial observations.
“How long was he symptomatic before it happened?” Moira asked. She’d been in the patient ward at the time, and had missed the event.
“I’d say less than an hour,” Fisher replied, lifting the young man’s eyelids one at a time, turning the head from side to side and inspecting the pale gray lines that marked the skin, crawling upward from his neck to curl around his jaw. Marbling, it was called. “He complained of a headache, was perspiring and had visible tremors, complained of chills. He sat down for a while, and gave him a quick examination. When I spoke with him he appeared mildly disoriented. That increased right before the attack. His blood pressure and respiration was slightly elevated, but no indication of fever.”
Chills and sweating, but no fever, Moira thought. “Anxiety or signs of aggression?”
“He was passive,” Fisher said, opening the man’s mouth and peering inside with a pen light. “Some reflexive motor activity, repeated clenching and unclenching of the hands. He didn’t seem to be aware of it. I thought it might be anxiety-based.”
“Lungs?”
“Sounded clear.”
“What about the eyes?” Moira asked. They looked at the corpse. Terry Butters was staring unseeing up at the ceiling, his blue eyes clouded over as if by cataracts and containing a silvery sheen. Far from normal for this type of death as well as the short length of time since he’d expired.
“They’d become glassy just before it happened,” Dr. Fisher said, “but nothing like this.”
Rusk chewed her lower lip. “Did you notice any external triggers?”
“Nothing I could see.” Fisher explained that she had just stepped away from him, and a few seconds later Terry Butters had snapped. He’d come off his chair with an animal growl, snapping his teeth and lunging for one of his fellow researchers, the woman named Annabelle, grabbing her by the shoulders and lunging in to bite. The woman had been saved by a freak chance and her own reflexes. She’d been running blood work at the centrifuge and happened to be holding a long, glass vial of O-negative from one of the patients in the ward. As Terry Butters came at her, she’d reacted instinctively and lashed out with the hand holding the vial. Whether because of her terrified grip or simply the way it struck him, the vial had splintered, driving a three-inch shard of glass right into his neck, completely severing his carotid artery.
Terry Butters fought on despite the mortal wound, even as she tried to push him away and other researchers attempted to pull him off the screaming woman, but the damage made him bleed out fast and he’d quickly weakened, then collapsed. No one had moved to apply pressure to the wound, which might have saved him. After what he’d just done, no one wanted to save him. Covered in both the tech’s and a patient’s blood, having just killed her co-worker, Annabelle became hysterical and Fisher was forced to inject her with a sedative to get her to stop shrieking.
At almost the same moment, CDC went into lockdown as incidents like this were repeated throughout the building.
Moira began to mentally organize the stages.
Phase-One: Asymptomatic infection for approximately nine to ten days.
Phase-Two: Chills, perspiring, headache, disorientation. Duration approximately one hour, perhaps less.
Phase-Three: Violent, physical aggression, loss of reasoning and comprehension. Predatory, stalking behavior. Cannibalism.
Much of this last evaluation came not from what had happened with Terry Butters, but from what they’d seen on TV and the internet, as well as the violence that had – and still was – taken place right here at
the CDC. Like the “flick of a switch” Karen Fisher had described, Phase-Two victims presenting symptoms moved to savage Phase-Threes without warning, and it had been demonstrated again and again that once they did, they immediately began to pursue, kill and consume human prey.
Viral cannibalism?
Moira shook her head. Inexplicable.
Phase-Three duration…unknown.
Would there be a Phase-Four? She couldn’t imagine what that might look like, but considering the bizarre things she’d seen and encountered thus far, she knew that she had to keep an open mind. At this point another evolution was more than possible, even likely.
“Something turns them on,” Moira Rusk said. “We have to find out what it is, and find a way to turn it off.”
Dr. Fisher nodded, but she wore a resigned expression. Any such cure would come too late for her. She was I-Plus-Nine, and if their calculations were correct, less than twenty-four hours away from devolving into what the young man on the table had become.
Moira switched off the overhead lights, throwing the sheet-covered body back into shadow. “Get them back to work,” she said, then told her colleague what she wanted done. “I’ll be in the ward,” she finished.
“We’ll have to decide what to do with Annabelle,” Fisher said quietly.
“That will be on me. It won’t be your burden.”
Dr. Fisher gave her a thin smile. “Right.”
There was nothing more to say, and they went their separate ways.
Karen Fisher moved slowly through the lab with a single sheet of computer print-out, a pad of yellow Post-its and a Sharpie marker, carrying out the assignment Dr. Rusk had given her. Everyone at CDC had been tested, of course, and Fisher’s print-out reported the most updated information on Trident’s progression through every staff member here.
One by one she approached a lab worker, referred to the print-out and wrote on a Post-it. Then she peeled it off and stuck it to each person’s laminated CDC ID clipped to their white coats.
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