The Rising Horde, Volume One (Sequel to The Gathering Dead )

by Stephen Knight

  McDaniels looked in the direction the Ranger pointed. Lenny shared a tent with Belinda and her family one alley over, so for the moment, his son was likely safe. When McDaniels started to enter the alley, the Ranger put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Hold on for just a sec, sir. The area hasn’t been secured. We have a chalk in there already checking out the site. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

  “Just one stench?” McDaniels asked.

  “That’s what we’ve heard, sir.”

  Someone jostled McDaniels. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the TOC, Colonel?”

  McDaniels turned and found Gartrell standing beside him, his AA-12 in hand, helmet-mounted night vision goggles over his eyes. He was manned up in full armor and wearing his usual weapons load-out. McDaniels was running light, having only his assault rifle and sidearm. His night vision goggles were still locked in the upright position on his helmet.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be there as well, Sergeant Major?”

  Gartrell shrugged. “Well, since the boss wasn’t around, it seemed all right to bypass that specific destination in order to put eyeballs on target.” Gartrell turned his head, panning his PVS-7’s single light intensifier tube over McDaniels. “Sir, you don’t have your radio.”

  Shit. McDaniels reached up and touched his left ear. Sure enough, his radio headset was still back in the tent, along with the lion’s share of his gear. It was an amateur move, hurrying out before he was fully equipped to handle whatever the situation might dictate. I need to get with the program and stay with it. “Everyone has their moments, Sarmajor.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gartrell looked back toward the darkened alley between the rows of tents, then started forward.

  “Site secure, sir,” the Ranger behind him said.

  McDaniels nodded his thanks, embarrassed. If he’d had his own radio, he would have heard the report himself.

  With Gartrell leading the way, McDaniels advanced into the tent city. Ahead, more Rangers stood outside a tent, weapons at port arms. Civilians stuck their heads out of several tents, and the Rangers waved them back inside without answering their questions. As they neared the secured tent, McDaniels heard the sounds of several people, including a crying child and a woman’s raised voice. Gartrell stopped short and let McDaniels pass when they neared the Rangers’ perimeter.

  “What’s the status here?” McDaniels asked.

  The captain in command of the Rangers turned and saluted. “Had a rising in this tent, sir. Looks like a family member died somehow and reanimated during the night. We’re thinking it was sudden, maybe a heart attack or something similar. We were in the zone already, and we heard it go down when the stench went on the attack.”

  “Injuries?”

  “Two. One woman has a bloody nose. One kid has a, uh, bite wound.”

  McDaniels grimaced. “Damn it.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Ranger captain didn’t seem to like the set of circumstances either. “We were on it almost immediately, but…”

  “Not your team’s fault, son. We knew this was going to happen, and a lot of people are at risk until we can manage it. Any injuries related to your team’s activities? I heard three shots.”

  “That’s because three of us shot the zed at the same time, sir. We were on it so quickly we didn’t have enough time to organize our fires, but every round hit the stench. No one missed, and all were head shots.”

  “Medical assistance is on the way?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s a team headed over right now from the main building.” The Ranger officer pointed toward the main building in the office park, where the research facilities were located.

  “Do me a favor. Tell them to reach out to Doctor Regina Safire. She’s a pediatrician, and she’s the one who should look over the kid.”

  “Hooah.” The captain turned away slightly and spoke into his headset’s boom microphone.

  McDaniels motioned for Gartrell to follow him into the tent. Gartrell held back for a moment, then slowly obeyed the nonverbal order.

  The tent was in disarray. Several cots had been knocked over, and bedding lay everywhere. A boy sat curled on a woman’s lap, cradling his wrist, sobbing in fear and pain. The woman spoke softly to the boy, but McDaniels saw tears in her eyes as well. At the other side of the tent, an older woman held a towel to her nose. She was tended by a Ranger, while another Ranger stood over the motionless body on the floor. A blanket had been thrown over the corpse, but McDaniels could smell the blood in the air, mixed with the acrid tang of cordite.

  McDaniels knelt beside the woman with the crying boy. He gently reached out and pulled the boy’s arm toward him. The kid had a bloodstained towel clamped to his wrist.

  The woman looked at McDaniels with wet eyes. “He’s been bitten. It’s a big one.”

  “Medical help is on its way,” McDaniels said.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” Tears streamed down the boy’s face. He looked to be about seven years old. Did he know what a bite would do to him?

  McDaniels thought that the kid probably did. He touched the boy’s head and smiled as confidently as he could. “You’re going to be fine, son. Just fine.”

  ***

  After the medical folks arrived and carted off the two women and the boy, McDaniels instructed the Rangers to stand guard over the tent to ensure no one entered. He wanted it quarantined until it could be decontaminated or taken down and destroyed.

  “I’ve had zombie gore all over me, and I didn’t get the bug,” he told the Ranger captain. “But that’s probably just pure luck on my part. Let’s treat this as a lethal pathogen, and contain it as best as we can. Any biologicals should be destroyed.”

  “We’ll treat it as a HAZMAT site,” the captain agreed.

  McDaniels nodded. “Hooah.”

  “Colonel?” Gartrell stepped toward him. “We need to get to the TOC. Jaworski and the rest of the senior leadership are waiting for us.”

  “Roger that. I’ll need to stop by my tent and grab the rest of my gear. Can’t believe I took off without it. Stupid.”

  “You were thinking of your son, right?” Gartrell asked.

  McDaniels sighed and nodded. “Yeah. I guess I was.”

  “Not a big deal, sir. It’s not like you were going over the wall into stench country with nothing on your back and no munitions on hand. But next time, you should take a second to pull it all together. Being unable to communicate at your level is bad juju.” Gartrell tapped one of his radio’s earphones.

  “I hear you, Sarmajor.” McDaniels paused and looked toward the main office building, where the injured had been taken. “You know, I’ll guarantee you that kid’s going to turn. Someone’s going to have to put him down before that happens. Save him some pain and misery.”

  “Not me, sir.” Gartrell’s voice was small, almost inaudible. “Not me.”

  McDaniels turned to him. “I didn’t mean you, Gartrell. I was just… thinking aloud, I guess.”

  Gartrell nodded. His night vision goggles were in the stowed position, and McDaniels could see his blues eyes in the tepid light of the floods two alleys over. Gartrell was still a hard-charger, but his gaze was distant. Haunted.

  “Come on, let’s get moving.”

  “Hooah,” Gartrell replied.

  ***

  McDaniels made his report to Jaworski and the rest of the senior staff, as he had been the senior officer on station. Both Jaworski and Haley were annoyed that the QRF commander had gone directly to the scene of an active engagement without notifying anyone in his chain of command, and that CSM Gartrell had mysteriously joined him there.

  “That both of you were out of the TOC and in the AO is not a good thing,” Haley said. “We have experienced troops who are entrusted to carry out the internal security mission. You and the Sarmajor running to the scene of an active engagement before the area was officially secured was reckless.”

  McDaniels almost laughed, but he managed to contain himself. Jus
t because the Ranger battalion commander exhibited the usual alpha male pretenses during the operations meetings didn’t mean the man was likely to run off into combat himself. He had been given command of a Ranger battalion for a reason, and approaching things in a levelheaded manner was probably one of those.

  “I hear you,” McDaniels said. “It was close enough that I figured I’d better put eyeballs on target. I brought the Sarmajor with me for some cover,” he added, giving Gartrell an out.

  Haley didn’t respond, but Jaworski didn’t seem to buy it. He looked at Gartrell directly and with no humor in his eye. “Is that so, Sergeant Major Gartrell?”

  “It seemed like a good idea for us to head over there, since we were already close to the engagement to begin with, sir,” Gartrell said. “We knew the Rangers were on-station, but we didn’t know their exact circumstance.”

  “Hey, Colonel?” Switchblade shot Jaworski a winning smile. “Let’s cut this stuff out, all right? We just had a rising in the middle of the complex. That’s what we need to focus on. What the hell are we going to do about that kid who got bit? Will the vaccine the civvies are working on help him?”

  “We were told by Wolf Safire that it didn’t work that way,” McDaniels said. “I haven’t actually asked that question myself recently, but I’ve been operating under the premise that the vaccine is only useful if it’s administered before the patient is bitten.”

  “I was informed that’s still the case.” Jaworski rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Okay. We need to manage that aspect more directly. What happens to the kid now? He’s definitely been bitten, and we know what’s going to happen. What do we do?”

  “Simple,” Haley said. “Lock him up somewhere, wait for him to turn, then put a bullet through its brain.”

  “Looks like the kid’s mother is still alive,” McDaniels said. “It was the father who turned, and he was one of the security guys for the office park. Another woman took a tap to the snot locker, probably while trying to save the kid. Everyone involved was taken over to the medical area in the main building for a full workup, but so far, only the kid’s going to go over the fence. And as heartless as it is to even think about it, unless the scientists across the way can offer up something, the kid has to die.”

  Switch shook his head. “Damn, sir. And here I was thinking you were some sort of bleeding heart liberal.”

  “Well, I did vote for Perot in ’92, does that count?”

  “Who’s going to do it?” Jaworski looked around the table. “Who’s going to shoot that boy in the head?”

  “We wait for him to turn, and then we do it, sir,” Haley said.

  “According to the news, dying from a bite is one of the most painful ways to check out there is,” Jaworski said. “Cordell said the boy’s mother is still alive. Are we going to make her sit and watch her son die in great pain over the next… what, twelve to fifteen hours?”

  “Colonel Jaworski.” Gartrell’s voice was flat and unemotional even though he stared at the tabletop before him. “Do you mean to say that you prefer one of us to walk over there and shoot the kid before he goes into the final stages?”

  “We should discuss it with the mother,” Jaworski said. “We should lay it out for her and let her make the call. That’s her kid. She probably needs to figure out what’s best for him.”

  “I can’t see a lot of utility in letting the kid go through that just so we can shoot him.” McDaniels looked around the table. “This is something we might have to deal with more regularly as time goes on. We’re going to need some sort of action plan. Shooting zeds through the noggin is one thing. Consigning people to die in great pain from the virus is another. I think you’re right, Colonel. We should lay it out for the mother and see what she says. And we should loop in the medical people at InTerGen. They might be able to offer some alternatives.”

  “I’ll do just that,” Jaworski said.

  “Better to let me handle that, sir.” McDaniels rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve already seen the mother. I know what to expect. And there’s no need for all of us to go through this shit until it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “You going to be able to handle that?” Commander Rawlings asked. “That’s a lot for one guy to have to shoulder.”

  “You interested in the job, Rawlings?”

  “No way, sir. Just making a point, is all.”

  “Someone has to do it,” McDaniels said. “You guys are closer to the operational spectrum than I am, and I don’t want something like this clouding your judgment when the chips are down. And this isn’t that big of a deal, when you look at the big picture,” he added, more for Jaworski’s benefit than anyone else’s. “I’ll see to the boy’s disposition. I’ll be as humane about it as possible, but at the end, the kid won’t become a threat to anyone else.”

  The assembled soldiers, airmen, and sailors looked at each other for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  Switch finally broke the silence. “You’re totally hard core, sir.”

  ***

  “There’s nothing that we can do,” Regina quietly confirmed outside the thirty-two bed Combat Support Hospital that had been deployed as part of JTF SPARTA. “Doctor Kerr is working on something that might be appropriate for these kinds of cases, but it’s not ready and won’t be ready for clinical trials for at least another two weeks.” She kept her voice low because the only thing separating her and McDaniels from the infected boy was a small plastic partition. McDaniels looked past the curtain surrounding the boy’s bed.

  The kid lay on his back and stared at the florescent lights. His eyes were red, and his face was puffy from crying.

  McDaniels thought the boy knew what was coming. “How’s the mother?”

  Regina snorted. “Her son has been bitten, Colonel. How do you think she is?”

  McDaniels shuffled his feet and sighed. He grabbed Regina by the arm and moved her away from the small emergency ward. The CSH, or “cash,” was just another assembly of interconnected tents, and the emergency ward was a single medium tent equipped with twelve surgical beds, a hard floor, and its own generator. It was staffed by one physician and four nurses. The doctor stood nearby, watching McDaniels and Regina as they walked away. He had allowed Regina to conduct the detailed medical workup since she was a pediatrician and the boy was only seven years old.

  “Look, if there’s nothing you can do, we can’t have the boy turning,” McDaniels said as they stepped outside. One of the nurses stood nearby, smoking a cigarette. McDaniels’s nostrils twitched at the scent.

  “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” Regina asked.

  “I mean, that boy’s in for a painful death over the next twelve hours or so. You know that, right?”

  Regina nodded slowly. “Yes, I know. His body will begin to break down. Tissues will become necrotic and fuel an advanced sepsis through his abdominal tract, resulting in extremely painful cramps, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea. His temperature will go through the roof, and he’ll start having convulsions in about six hours. It’ll be twelve hours of hell, especially for the mother, who will see her son’s body eject just about everything inside it before he dies.” She listed the symptoms of the boy’s coming death like some sort of a computer, brief and direct, without any kind of human warmth. Not even disgust or fear. McDaniels hoped she’d had a better bedside manner when she’d been a practicing pediatrician.

  “So what can you do to spare him that?”

  “Nothing. Short of putting him into an induced coma, that is.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “With a dosage of specific barbiturates. Usually pentobarbital or thiopental, both of which could be measured to reduce the blood flow to the boy’s brain and cause him to remain unconscious. But he’d still go through the same effects. The virus will still kill him in the same way. It would just be easier for him, I suppose.”

  “What if we were to overdose him?”

  Regina looked at McDaniels oddly. “I don’t und
erstand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  The nurse finished her cigarette and stabbed it out in a nearby ashtray before stepping back into the cash. The nurse had acted as though she hadn’t overheard their conversation, but of course, she’d heard every word. McDaniels didn’t care either way.

  “If we overdose him, he goes from cardiac arrest, but he’d be unconscious and unlikely to feel anything. He’d go the same way Michael Jackson did, basically.” Regina looked up at McDaniels. “I don’t get why you’re even asking. You know he’ll still reanimate, right?”

  “I want the kid controlled, and for his family’s suffering to be over as quickly as possible.”

  Regina hugged herself in the cold, chilly air. Her breath fogged in the lights over the entrance. “So you want us to kill the boy.”

  “I want you to help me convince the mother that it’s in her child’s best interests, and to give her time to say good-bye to her son while he still is her son, before the virus takes him away from her.”

  “And after it’s done? After the boy dies?”

  McDaniels put his hand on the pistol at his hip.

  Regina got the message. She half-turned away and looked back at the cash tent. “It’s going to be very difficult to get her to agree to it.”

  “I know. I know.”

  ***

  The boy’s name was Gregory Goodwin. His mother was Martha, and the older woman with the broken nose was Glenda, the mother of the man who had become a zombie. McDaniels and Regina consulted with the cash doctors, and all three of them were against the plan on ethical grounds, but the senior physician, a major, finally agreed to back up McDaniels.

  “We know where this is headed, and if nothing else, it’ll be better for the boy,” he said. “So even though we all have strong feelings against this… euthanasia, we’re prepared to move forward with it, since there is no treatment forthcoming, and the results of the boy’s death would be… well, difficult to deal with as well.”

  “Then back me up with medical facts. That’s all you need to do,” McDaniels said. “I’ll do the rest.”