by JT Sawyer
He paused for a moment, looking at a sealed laboratory, whose lights were flickering. Reisner removed his cellphone again and pulled up the deactivation codes Siegel had provided for the lab entrances. He typed in the numbers on the keypad, then stood back as the thick door hissed open.
He recalled Siegel saying that only the main laboratory had a security activation system in place, but he still studied the entrance of this one for any laser alarms in the door frame or the floor. When he was sure they were clear, he motioned for Nash to follow him inside, then the two inspected the contents of the lab. There were several mesh trays filled with some kind of dried leaves beside a canister with a biohazard symbol on the side. A stack of wooden crates with Chinese inscriptions were toppled over next to the main computer terminal. He took a quick series of photographs and grabbed several flash drives sitting beside a damaged laptop, then retreated from the room.
Reisner was moving back into the hallway when he heard Byrne’s voice in his earpiece.
“Contact in the hallway, aft.”
Reisner caught a glimpse of someone moving down the partially lit corridor. He could see the shadow of a thin person sauntering as if they were intoxicated. A second later, a woman in a grimy lab coat moved towards them, her piercing black eyes accentuated by her opaque skin. Her jaw appeared broken, the lower mandible bent at an odd angle. She staggered forward, then let out a crackling moan that turned into a high-pitched shriek. A second later, Reisner heard a series of faint shrieks emanating from the darkness behind the woman. It sounded like it was at the far end of the hallway.
Byrne raised his Tavor and yelled at her to stop. She took another step forward and raised a pale arm towards him. Something was rippling beneath the muscles around her neck. She staggered, then let out another high-pitched shriek. Byrne shuffled back, putting one round into her forehead, blowing out the contents onto the floor.
A second later, a cacophony of screeches began emanating from the dark passageway ahead, where the main laboratory was located. Reisner took a few steps forward, his rifle’s flashlight penetrating the inky passage, until he saw movement thirty yards ahead. There were at least ten or more creatures creeping slowly forward, but their movement resembled a mass of limbs, as if they had formed into a single entity. Most of their clothing was shredded or missing altogether, and their faces were caked with dried blood.
“Change of plans,” he said firmly into his mouthpiece. “Fall back to the stairwell and retreat up top. Connelly and I will hold them off here.”
Reisner heard a woman’s voice on the overhead speakers. It was automated and monotone. He felt his chest constrict at what he heard next: “A security breach of critical infrastructure has occurred. Initiating safety protocols. This research facility will self-destruct in T-minus ten minutes.”
Chapter 12
“Are you shitting me?” said Nash. “We haven’t set off any perimeter alarms.”
Reisner thought back to Siegel’s briefing and his mention of the internal security system. Why has the system been tripped now? Unless they’ve been dormant this whole time. Something didn’t add up, but he didn’t have time to slice through the mystery.
He tightened his grip on his Tavor and felt Connelly brush her elbow against his as she moved up alongside him.
Reisner could hear the panting voice of Connelly in his earpiece. “Control your breathing or you’ll fog up your mask.” He turned and looked at her, seeing her eyes nearly filling the circular ports. “You’ve trained for this. Just remember—turn your fear into rage and you will have another weapon besides your rifle.”
Reisner heard a seething noise and saw two people running at him. He blinked hard—these were not human beings but something twisted and unnatural. They moved slowly but their veiny faces and pasty skin seemed to pulse as if animated from below the skin.
He fired a short burst of rounds into the head of the first, then a nearly uninterrupted follow-up into the second creature’s throat and face. Both of them collapsed before the windows of a small laboratory.
The creatures ahead didn’t slow their pace, and came in a wave of three. The hallway echoed from the suppressed fire coming from Connelly and Reisner’s Tavors as they dispatched the approaching cluster. A rivulet of creamy fluid filled with tiny worms oozed out of the shattered skulls.
Shrieks could be heard beyond the bullet-ridden corpses, and Reisner wondered if some of the creatures in the next wave had been struck from over-penetration of the rounds, but his flashlight didn’t reveal any obvious wounds on their bodies as the determined beasts moved towards them.
The three oncoming creatures staggered their movements, almost performing a weaving pattern, unlike the rigid shuffle of the previous batch. As he took aim on the nearest figure, he heard a scream behind him, followed by a short burst of gunfire.
“Shit—they got Dominguez,” came the voice of Byrne through Reisner’s earpiece. “They’re coming out of the ceiling.”
Reisner’s heart felt like it was beginning to punch through his chest as he backed up, firing off two rounds into the head of the closest creature while Connelly killed the second one.
“Check above us,” he yelled as he focused his efforts on the third creature, which had just broken into a sprint and had leapt over the tangle of bodies lining the hallway.
Reisner shot the last creature in the throat and eye socket as it breached the twenty-foot mark. He swept his rifle along the passage ahead but saw that the remaining cluster were gone, then he swung his rifle up and scanned the overhead ducts.
“Let’s keep moving back to the helo,” he yelled, trotting to the door, where he noticed Byrne near the stairs. Reisner caught movement above and saw several creatures scurrying like insects along the overhead pipes. He saw bright red blood dripping off the air ducts and then stepped over a Tavor that belonged to Dominguez.
“Get up top,” yelled Reisner to Byrne.
“I’ve got movement behind me,” said Connelly, who was covering the intersection they had just come from. A short burst of gunfire from her rifle could be heard, followed by something thumping to the floor. “Got it,” she said with vigor.
Reisner stopped and took aim on one of the creatures above, but it leapt from its perch and tackled Byrne around the waist as he was ascending the steps. The hulking man went down, his arms pressed to the side as the gnashing beast tore into his shoulder then bit a chunk out of his neck.
“No,” yelled Reisner as he looked for a shot, then bolted forward and slammed the butt of his rifle into the creature’s head. It fell to the side, then tried to lunge at him, but Reisner let off a burst of rounds into its ear.
Byrne’s gas mask was filling with blood, and he tore it off as Reisner came up alongside him. Reisner leaned over him, pressing his palm into the throbbing carotid. With his other hand, he removed his trauma kit from the man’s vest, fumbling with this gloved hands to open it while the monotone voice overhead indicated the ship would self-destruct in four minutes.
“Hold on, buddy. We’ll get you out of here.”
Byrne clutched Reisner’s arm, then his hand slipped away, the man slumping against the steps, which were slick from the sheer amount of blood that had throbbed out of Byrne’s neck.
“Stay with me,” shouted Reisner as he stared into Byrne’s pale face, knowing he was already gone.
“We have to move,” yelled Connelly as she kept her weapon trained on the hallway. Reisner forced himself up, then unslung his rifle and proceeded up the steps as she followed him. As they crested the landing of the second level, they heard movement from the passage below.
“Go,” he said to Connelly as he shoved her towards the steps leading up.
Reisner paused and punched in the code on the door’s security keypad, his foggy mind hoping the numbers were correct. He saw several translucent limbs crawling over Byrne’s lifeless body in their effort to reach the landing just as the massive door hissed shut, sealing off the third level.
All he could hear was the voice blaring from the overhead speakers as the final countdown from sixty seconds commenced. He climbed on board and motioned for Santos to lift off. The pilot scanned the cabin for the others, then saw that Connelly was shaking her head. Reisner saw four creatures scurrying along the walkway leading up from the lab.
There’s no way they could’ve broken through that door. His mind searched for answers as the helicopter lifted off, but all he could think about was Byrne and Dominguez. Santos banked the Huey hard to the right and ascended quickly, then raced to the east. Twenty seconds later, the Atropos ignited in a mushroom cloud of flame and black smoke, turning the vessel into a sinking coffin.
The burning conflagration matched the blaze of fury and loss that had flared inside of Reisner’s soul. As he watched the Atropos sink below the water, he lowered his head, whispering into his mask, “I’m sorry, my brothers.” Then he thought of Siegel and what he would do to the man when they met again. Reisner knew it would cost him his career, maybe even his freedom, but he didn’t care.
Chapter 13
People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Headquarters, Beijing
General Chen Lau was in the operations center located six floors below ground when the early reports of a massive viral outbreak came across the wall-mounted monitor before him. The first cases had occurred yesterday morning at a large tea plantation in Fujian Province. The initial clusters indicated it was connected with several dozen workers employed at the plantation. Lau’s head epidemiologist had already alerted him to the issue and had set up a mobile clinic outside the quarantined region to cope with the patients.
There was one man who was unaccounted for as his shift had ended early. The worker had ventured to Hong Kong and then taken a boat to Taiwan. Lau didn’t care that the country of Taiwan was now afflicted by the deadly virus, but he did want to know more about the outcome of patient zero.
What Lau found most disconcerting was the thousands of infected who had filled the hospitals in southern China overnight. The spread of the disease and the escalating fatalities made him question whether it was another case of avian flu from a nearby poultry farm adjacent to Fujian Province or if something else was at work, given the unusual feedback from the autopsies his medical examiners had provided.
Before becoming supreme commander of the PLA, Lau had served as assistant director of the bioweapons program on the outskirts of Nanjang, where he oversaw development of some of the most lethal synthetic viruses since the days of the Soviet Union. Now, as he stood examining the clusters of incoming reports from China and the rest of the world, Lau surmised that another foreign government had intentionally released the contagion on his soil and that something had gone astray with the virus, given what he knew of how microbes can mutate.
Lau heard the sealed door hiss behind him and turned to see the minister of national defense, Han Sung, enter along with two of his bodyguards. Sung’s jet black hair was slightly out of place and Lau figured the man had been jarred from his sleep by one of his aides after receiving Lau’s phone call earlier.
Sung approached, motioning for his guards to remain behind. He moved up near Lau but stayed a foot behind the general’s side. “Are those red clusters the outbreak areas you mentioned?”
Lau crossed his arms, without acknowledging the question. He leaned over and tapped a button on the keyboard, which brought up a larger picture of the global map, showing the eastern U.S. and London.
“Even the Americans and Europeans haven’t escaped this. They are reporting fatalities in the thousands already.”
“But still not as high as us—in Fujian Province?”
“My head epidemiologist there believes that is ground zero. I am performing an intel sweep of the past seventy-two hours to see what shows up on our radar and satellite images for that region and the surrounding coastline.”
“And you still think this could be manmade?”
He nodded slightly. “Perhaps, though lethal viral strains like that usually don’t have the presence of parasites. That’s what’s most puzzling to me.” Lau ran a hand over his brush-cut black hair, thinking back to a recent classified transmission from one of his submarine commanders operating in the South China Sea, who had just retrieved data from a drone aboard an unmarked vessel. He didn’t have any further information to go on until the data was decrypted, but he wondered if there was any connection with the deadly virus sweeping through his country. Lau shrugged off his concerns and focused on the images on the monitors around the room.
Sung ran a hand through his hair. “The president is considering implementing border closures around each of the larger cities and grounding air travel.”
“The fool—I sent him my recommendations last night. It is too late to stop this from spreading now.”
Sung moved in closer, lowering his voice. “My sons—they are both at the university in Shanghai. Perhaps I should send my men to retrieve them.”
Lau gave him a hard stare. “I don’t give a shit about your litter. My daughter is in Hong Kong, working in the hospital to stop this, and my son is in the military on the front lines outside of Beijing. Both of them will remain where they are, fulfilling their duties.” He glanced back up at the projections on the monitor. “I am more worried about the eleven-thousand troops of mine who are listed as infected, so focus your skills, however meager, on trying to provide solutions to the big picture before us.”
Chapter 14
By the time Selene arrived at the airport in Taipei, she had over a dozen text messages from colleagues back in the U.S. and UK related to outbreaks in their respective regions. The virus had spread throughout North America at an alarming rate and there were even reports coming in from remote areas in Costa Rica, Norway, and New Guinea.
On the flight over, she had sifted through the patient documentation that Tso had provided and concurred that the symptoms were similar to past avian influenza cases in China, but with some variations on the strain she’d not seen before. Selene surmised it had to be airborne to spread so quickly, but was uncertain of the exact strain. She would need to get a blood sample back to CDC and have them sequence it, and that process alone would take several days.
During the spring, China had been dealing with a highly pathogenic outbreak of H5N2 avian flu found at commercial poultry farms, but there hadn’t been any cases of infections in workers. This strain sounded like something completely new, and the presence of parasitic worms made Selene’s head swirl with questions. The ability for a virus to be transmitted through bacteria wasn’t unusual. Nature had already set the precedent with the example of E. Coli and other diseases. However, there hadn’t been anything pathogenic on this scale in recent memory.
A driver from the Taiwan Ministry of Health drove her from the airport to Cheng Hsin General Hospital, which was adjacent to the Taipei Center for Disease Control (TCDC). The ten-story building was one of the newest medical institutions in Taiwan and served as both a hospital and research center, with a separate building to house the latter. The center was equipped for Biosafety Level 4, but Selene knew that Tso had a much smaller research division and funding compared to the CDC in Atlanta. However, the Cheng Hsin facility was the only medical institute in the region besides those in mainland China equipped to study pathogens, but it wasn’t likely that those countries would exchange information or resources, given the political tensions between the two governments.
The TCDC was separated from the hospital and had its own helipad and quarantine area adjacent to the rear of the building. The biosafety lab was located three floors below and employed the same safety features and security measures as the CDC.
Upon arriving, she was escorted by Tso’s young assistant, Anna Lee, to the autopsy room in the coroner’s chambers on the third sub-level. Tso and the medical exa
miner were clad in yellow biohazard suits as they stood on either side of a deceased thirty-year-old male. Both men were busy discussing the inner anatomy, which was made visible by a long incision that ran from the sternum to the pelvis region. The grave face of the medical examiner looked up, his thick eyebrows scrunching together as he said something to Tso then pointed towards Selene. Upon turning towards the observation window, Tso nodded and then walked across the room. His tense face eased slightly upon seeing her, and he motioned for her to turn on the audio speaker next to the window.
“So good to see you, my friend. Thank you for coming. I wish your visit was under better circumstances.”
She smiled, looking at the heavy bags under Tso’s eyes. “Long coupla days, eh?”
He glanced back over his shoulder at the body. “You are going to want to see this. He, like the other victims, appears to have died from influenza, but there are hundreds of these tiny worms present in the body. I’m not sure how they are connected to the virus yet.”
“Any idea on mode of transmission?”
“From the interviews I conducted with the patients after they were admitted to the hospital, it appears that most of them indicated they were around other people at work or in public who were coughing and had the usual flu symptoms.” His eyes narrowed. “Patient zero is the exception. As I mentioned in my notes, he was working at a tea plantation in Fujian Province. His job was to sort and package the dried leaves for sale to distributors. He indicated no one else there was sick beforehand and that he and several employees became ill midway through their shift. After leaving work, they broke out in rashes and described having intense itching. Hours later, they developed the flu symptoms.”
Selene brushed a lock of blonde hair off her forehead and let out a long exhale. “So, there could be a possible disease vector at the plantation, maybe rats or rodent droppings or even mosquito-borne?”
“I thought of that too, but when the autopsies were done, the presence of the parasitic worms really made me question the validity of a mammalian or mosquito intermediary.”