by Sean Deville
“I wasn’t bitten,” he implored.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Hudson stated. “Move over to the radiator at the far side of the room.” Gavin did as he was ordered, the three men parting to allow him entry, the room big enough so they could stay well away from him. Three paces from the radiator, Gavin noticed the set of handcuffs dangling from the metal pipe work. With all the soldiers now behind him, he turned.
“No, please, I haven’t done anything.”
“Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” one of the other soldiers said. He also held a taser. “But it’s either the cuffs or several thousand volts through your fucking testicles.” The man waved the weapon in front of him. “Your choice, but make it quick.”
“Come on, cuff yourself to the bloody radiator already.” Hudson watched as the man he had met the other day on the farm did as he was ordered, resigning himself to his new imprisonment. Gavin sat down on the floor, his back to the radiator, which had mercifully been turned off. He looked across at the death squad that had been assembled for his benefit.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Gavin began to cry. “I didn’t know.” He watched as Hudson removed the gas mask, now safely on the other side of the room, the face bringing recollection.
“Know what?” Hudson demanded.
“Fuck you,” Gavin suddenly exploded, tears streaming from his eyes. “If I’m infected, then it’s your doing, you cunt.” The four soldiers exchanged glances.
“You’ll have to explain that one to me,” Hudson said calmly.
“You brought them to my farm,” Gavin blustered. “You left me there to be…to be eaten by them?”
“Still need a little more detail there, son. And if I remember correctly, we offered you a ride out of there, which you very rudely declined. So what was it that tried to eat you?” Hudson asked the final question calmly, although he already suspected what was going to come next.
“The dogs, you bastard, you left me to the dogs.”
15.41PM, 17th September, Newquay Airport, Newquay, UK
“That is an unfortunate development, Captain,” General Mansfield said over the satellite radio. The room around the general was silent, everyone desperate to know if the infection had been contained.
“Yes sir,” the captain said.
“Do you think the situation is contained?”
“Seems to be, sir. We are outside the quarantine window. Fortunately, Doctor Holden didn’t have any interaction with anyone after treating the infected individual. It looks like we dodged a bullet.” The captain’s words sent a wave of relief through the room, and Mansfield heard someone say “thank fuck” under their breath.
“Good work, Captain,” Mansfield said. “Of course, you know what I need from you now, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Hudson responded calmly.
“And can I trust you to get that done?” There was a brief pause, but then the words that Mansfield needed to hear came across the radio.
“Yes, sir. I’ll attend to that now, sir.” The radio connection was silenced. Mansfield stood, looking around the room, his eyes finally settling on someone.
“Corporal, contact the defence teams. Shut it down. Nobody else gets past the wire. I don’t care if the Queen herself is waiting in line to get in. Tell them they are authorised to use lethal force if necessary. And patch me through to NATO command. I need to talk to General Marston.”
Hudson looked at the radio in his hand, and passed it to the gas-masked man to his side. Stood out in the corridor, he felt the acid burn into his stomach.
“Shit.” They had no test for the virus, no means to see who was and wasn’t infected before the infection took hold. So the hospital would stay in lockdown until someone said otherwise. Nobody in, nobody out, including Hudson and his men. And to think he had volunteered for this shit.
Gavin was a new development, one that hadn’t been expected. Clearly, Gavin hadn’t turned, and if he was infected, it represented a great opportunity. Within him might be the answer to defeating the virus. But he also represented a threat. If one person was immune, there would be others who might be free to spread the virus, to act as reservoirs of infection. And there was always the chance that Gavin wasn’t the source, that it was merely coincidence, that he was indeed free of the virus. But Hudson didn’t think so, not with what the farmer had told them about the dogs.
There was a commotion at the end of the corridor, and three men in hazmat suits walked through the set of double doors. Hudson, standing next to two police officers he didn’t know, beckoned them over to him. His mask was still off. He knew what would come next. The new arrivals and others like them would turn the hospital into a laboratory. They now had a possible test subject, and hopefully a working example of the virus. With that and the equipment that was undoubtedly being shipped to this location, these men and women would soon create a test for the viral strain, and with luck, maybe even a vaccine. But they still had to deal with the immediate threat, and that meant keeping people calm. And he would do that by intimidation and force if he had to.
15.43PM, 17th September 2015, MI6 Building, London, UK
Bullets don’t always kill, and sometimes even brain shots point-blank have been known to be non-fatal. Rasheed, however, was not that fortunate, the bullet entering his temple, and the shock wave and the projectile itself trashing both hemispheres of the brain. The electronic impulses and neural connections that made Rasheed who he was were irreparably damaged, and blackness came to the man who was already close to suffering a devastating stroke. Owen had effectively killed a man who was already dead.
But the bullet did not destroy the brainstem, the virus there changing, mutating as the tissues in the brain began to break down and decompose. Lying alone, a hand twitched, the fingers stretching, clawing. Most of the infected who had died had done so from wounds to the torso or from loss of blood. Very few died from such severe head injuries, so with Rasheed, the resurrection was slower, but it still happened. Deep in the bowels of the MI6 Building, a low moan rolled through the deserted corridors, unheard by human ears. A few infected were still there to hear the sound, and they shivered in apprehension, for deep down they knew the power in that sound.
Another mind heard the sound. Not with her ears, but telepathically. Still deep within the underground system, Rachel cocked her head and sniffed. She smelt nothing but the undead around her, but she felt Rasheed within her, felt him changing, felt him becoming. And despite her human brain now being a dead husk, she understood, she knew what this new presence meant. Fabrice had wept at the death of Rasheed, not understanding that his death was inevitable. No human was meant to possess that kind of power, the physiology of the body just too weak to contain it. But now the virus was in control, shaping what nature had taken billions of years to create into a being of unfathomable power.
Rasheed pushed himself up off the floor. Coordination totally shot, it took several attempts for the corpse to become one of the walking variety. Uneasy on his feet, he circled several times, confusion rampant in the remnant of his neural matter. Only the reptilian part of the brain now thrived, the rest cast aside as useless matter. But still Rasheed understood the words that came to him, knew the source and stumbled off in search of the voice’s owner.
“Come to me, come to me,” said the voice. Not Fabrice this time. No, this time, the voice belonged to Rachel.
12.09PM, 12th June 2004, British Embassy, Moscow, Russia
Snow sat in the smoke-filled room, the no-smoking rule that applied to most UK government buildings seemingly forgotten here. Snow wasn’t the one smoking—that was reserved for the man sat across the metal table from him. The official name for this was a debriefing, but Snow was well aware that it would be more of an interrogation. Because the operation had gone wrong, badly wrong. The bandaged arm from where the bullet had passed through was part testament to that. If there was an American present, the word clusterfuck would undoubtedly have been used.
“
Why don’t you tell me again how the operation went to shit,” the smoking man said impassively. The room was small, lit by a single bulb, and the interrogator took a long drag on his cancer stick. Being in Russia, they had to make do with the infrastructure the Russian Government gave them, and as much as they could freshen up the decor, there was a limit to what they could do to the historic building the British Embassy presently occupied. Of course, the first thing they had done was strip out all the listening devices that were embedded in the walls and almost every electrical appliance. You could never trust a Russian, that was Snow’s motto.
It was almost ironic that the operation may well have even been one that the Russians would have approved of. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Mob had flourished and had begun to flood the Black Market with Russian military armaments. Either sold by base commandants whose pay had become non-existent, or simply stolen from warehouses no longer guarded, it represented a dangerous destabilising influence on the world stage. Less readily admitted, it also cut into the profits of the Western military industrial complex, who made billions selling tools of death to regimes and warlords across the globe who really shouldn’t have been allowed to handle anything more dangerous than a sharp stick.
The big threat, of course, was nuclear weapons. If they weren’t poorly guarded, they were being left to rot. Through the Echelon global surveillance network, MI6 had uncovered a plan to steal and sell three suitcase nukes to Iran, and that just couldn’t be allowed. Small and compact, the nukes could be easily transported and smuggled into any city in the world with devastating consequences. No Western power could allow a regime as rabid as Iran to get their hands on that kind of military might, and as he had spent thirteen months infiltrating the Russian gang in question, Snow was the obvious choice to find out when and where the weapons were being exchanged. It had been a last minute change to his undercover operation, and Snow had protested that there were too many unknowns. Turns out, he was right.
And now seven Russians, three Iranians, and one British operative were dead. Fortunately, Snow and his back-up team had managed to extricate themselves from that situation before Russian authorities had turned up, and there was even a slim chance his cover was still intact. What was more annoying than the operation being blown, however, was that the dead body on ice down in the embassy basement had not been killed by a Russian. The plan had been to witness and oversee the loading of the weapons cargo onto a ship, only for the ship to be intercepted by British warships at a later date. The freighter would be monitored by satellite, and Snow was there merely to confirm that the suspected cargo did actually exist. There were still some who had trouble believing that the technology actually existed to put nuclear weapons in a suitcase. Having seen the three metal cases lifted out of the back of an armoured limo, Snow had no doubts whatsoever. That was when the bullets started to fly.
“We didn’t know Mossad also had an operation running. Apparently, they had been following the Iranians for over a year based on their own intel,” Snow told the smoking man. “With everyone together to make the changeover, the Mossad assault team hit hard and it hit fast. The Mob guys didn’t stand a chance.”
“And you didn’t suspect that this would happen?” smoking man said accusingly.
“Hey, don’t try and pin this shit on me,” Snow replied angrily. “I didn’t set this operation up. I was just an asset on the ground that your department decided to acquire. My job was to confirm the package, not worry about other agencies fucking things up for us.” And for the British, it had been a fuck up. For the Israelis, it was a huge success, the nukes undoubtedly now in their possession. Even mere hours after the firefight at the docks, the Mossad team were likely already halfway out of the country, the Russian borders made porous by low pay and the corrupting power of the US dollar.
“I note you saved two Mob guys from Israeli fire. Why was that?”
“They were my contacts inside the organisation. I was hoping to at least salvage something from this.”
“You don’t honestly expect to be allowed to continue with your op, do you?” The smoking man seemed genuinely surprised that this was even a consideration.
“I’ve spent nearly two years worming my way into the lives of these people. I’m close to getting the trust I need to get the information I went in there to get. Saving a few Russian lives seemed a good way of getting that trust. If anything, I should be the one outraged here.” He had indeed saved two of the Russians, pushing them to the ground as the bullets started flying, which was where he had received his now patched-up injury. One of the Russians he saved was a man called Alexei.
15.47PM, 17th September 2015, Defensive position 5, Cornwall, UK
“I repeat, all borders are to be closed. Over.” Grainger looked at the radio that had spewed out the words he hadn’t wanted to hear.
“I still have a lot of civilians heading towards us, sir,” Captain Grainger said into the radio handset. “It’s going to get ugly if we have to turn them away. Over.” He was in the command tent at the rear of his position. Five minutes ago, he had been up one of the observation towers and had seen the roads funnelling thousands of refugees to his position.
“I understand that, Captain,” said the voice on the other end. “However, General Mansfield’s orders are explicit. You will carry them out or you will be relieved of your command. Over.” Grainger sighed heavily. The defensive perimeter he was now in charge of extended for several miles north and south of his position, and was more than adequate to keep out unarmed people. It was still being fortified, however, because the infected would wash over it in minutes.
“I understand the order and will follow it out. I want it on record that I think it is a mistake. The people we leave out there will only add to the army I’m going to have to face when the infected come. Over.”
“Then you are free to take whatever measures you feel appropriate to eradicate that risk. Over.” Grainger’s blood turned to ice. He knew exactly what that meant. No, he would not fire on bloody unarmed civilians, not unless they resorted to violence. How could he order that?
“Yes, sir. Grainger out.” The captain put down the radio hand piece and looked around the tent. Vorne stood next to him, his face as expressionless as ever, and their eyes met.
“You know what to do, Sergeant.”
“Sir.” Vorne knew this man, knew that he would never order the murder of innocents. But maybe the general was right. As abhorrent as it was, culling the herd was now the best way to limit the numbers they would eventually face. That’s what the fly-boys had been doing all across the country after all, raining down explosive death on cities across the nation. But it was different when you were looking down the end of a rifle and shooting something you could see. Vorne knew his captain, and he knew his men, and there weren’t many that could easily pull the trigger in those circumstances. But there were some, and he knew who they were, that he had always made a point of keeping an eye on them because they were usually trouble. But in this world, right now, they were everything that was needed and more. Grainger’s strength of character was now a weakness, and Vorne was certain that the captain realised this. So if the unspeakable had to be done, Vorne would ensure the people who could do the unspeakable were where they needed to be. As he made his way to the main gate, he picked the radio off his belt and started the process of gathering those with an iron will and unhealthy mind.
15.51PM, 17th September 2015, Vauxhall Underground Station, London, UK
Rasheed almost fell down the escalator steps, instinct causing him to grip to the railings. The engineered steps still moved, and he swayed in place until they brought him to the bottom where the sound of the undead floated on an invisible mist. He still couldn’t see them, but he could feel them, and he moaned softly to himself.
“Come to me.”
Yes, I come. Unlike Rachel who had died and slowly started to regain cognitive abilities, Rasheed still possessed much of his. He had lost
the bulk of his identity, but he understood the basics of language and had a vague understanding of what had happened to him. All that he was though—his memories of past events, his beliefs, and his devotion to his religion—was gone, stripped from him by the assassin’s bullet that was still lodged within his skull.
He still had awareness though. And he also knew that he still possessed his power, and he revelled to use it. Something inside him told him he no longer had to fear, because his mind was now freed from human constraints, the virus allowing its true potential to be unleashed.
“Not yet, no not yet,” the voice said. But it was so hard. Whilst he craved flesh, he craved the use of his power even more, and felt it building inside him.
“Not safe use here. Wait.”
Yes, he would wait, but he didn’t know for how long he could do that. It was so hard, the urge and the desire so strong. And why were they down here anyway? He followed the feeling and stepped onto the underground platform. Still, none of the undead were visible, and he stumbled off the track, falling onto the rails on the track below. As he landed, his foot hit the live rail, and 630 volts coursed through him, causing his body to twitch and buck. The motion caused his foot to dislodge and the electricity stopped. If he hadn’t been dead already, the voltage would have been a problem. Rasheed merely pulled himself up and, still smoking in parts, wandered off down the railway line into the blackness of the tunnel.
He didn’t really need his eyes anymore; he just kind of sensed his way around, and it wasn’t long before he came upon the first of his kind. But, of course, that wasn’t quite right, because they were inferior to him. Rasheed could obliterate them all in a blink, could bring the whole tunnel crashing down upon them all. Was there ever any limit to what he could do? He didn’t know, and for some reason didn’t quite understand what the word limit meant.