“Liam Peters?” A distant metallic female voice called to him.
“Umm.”
One of the small drones hovered in through the broken windows. The force of the air from the fans filled the tub with turbulence. When it was over him, he saw both the black orb and a speaker in the plastic casing around it.
“Mr. Peters?”
“Yes. You got me.” There was no possible way they didn’t know it was him. He had twenty-two tags embedded in him which said as much.
“You’ve been a hard gentleman to find—”
Someone interrupted the woman in the speaker.
“Are you f’ing kidding me? She got out?” the voice said quietly in response. After a pause, she continued.
“I said, you are a hard person to find. I had to move drones all over the city to get to you.”
“Why?”
“Why, huh? Do you remember Agent Duchesne? I’m sure you do. You left him to die on that shipwreck.”
“Yes.”
“Let’s just say this is for him.”
“But he tried to kill me. I didn’t want him to die.”
He didn’t think the truth would help. He was happy to see the man die because he was responsible for infecting Grandma. Then he tried to kill them all in the river. That he died was a bonus, by his reckoning.
“The reasons are unimportant. We all do bad things in the service of our country. He was a big piece of my own future. So, thanks for that, you little shit.” The words were vicious, but the tinny speaker didn’t do them justice. He considered telling her, but his life was on the line. Humor usually backfired on him when the stakes were high.
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me who you are? My money’s on this being that dirtbag’s mom. You sound like an angry mom.”
Dammit, Liam. You said no humor.
“Mom? Are you really that stupid? No, I don’t guess you are. You’ve survived trips back and forth to Cairo, and I’m guessing you’re responsible for walking off with two of our tanks. Not the activities of an innocent child. Who are you with? Tell me that, and I might let you go, for now.”
He took a chance.
“Elsa? Is this Elsa? I have a note for you.”
Silence for a long pause.
“OK, it doesn’t matter. Who has a message for me?”
He didn’t know the who. Only the what. “It said, Dear Elsa. You lose. Then a bomb exploded and blew up the home of Hans Grubmeyer.”
The woman began to cuss but keyed off her microphone before she completed her first word.
She came back with serenity. “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Peters. It gives me great pleasure to tell you your Grandma Marty is now dying with the miserable town of Cairo, Illinois. You left her here, and I finished her off. Her life isn’t worth a tenth of Michael’s, but it's a start. I have a list here with several more of your family members. It will provide a fun diversion from my more pressing duties, like rebuilding the world.”
Liam was crestfallen. He knew about the list but wanted to believe Hayes had been telling the truth when he said that list had been stopped.
His options were to grovel to this tinny-voiced drone or remain defiant until the end.
A violent series of explosions erupted inside the tiny bathroom. He figured the drone was self-destructing or something. It would be a sure way to eliminate him. For twenty seconds the room was a smoky echo chamber of ear-splitting bangs and the sound of bullets impacting heavy metal.
He closed his eyes, not because he was scared, but because he imagined debris dropping in his eyes from all the shrapnel raining on him. The drone bumped into the tub several times but soon stopped altogether. If the voice was still speaking, he couldn’t hear it.
A deep hum and vibration came from outside the house, rattling the glass on the floor. Then a hand touched him.
“Come on, sleeping beauty. Time to run.” It was Brandyweis.
He jumped out and followed. Three other Marines hovered outside the bathroom door, aiming their weapons up and down the hallway.
“Go! Go! Go! We’ll be out in thirty seconds.”
The other end of the hallway was a mangled mess. Where the grenade had gone off, it stripped the paint off the wall and punched holes through them in several places. The glass window at the end was blown out.
The stairwell was once the model of moneyed beauty. The fancy carpet and ornate wooden banister had been ruined as the drone bumped and climbed its way to the upper floor.
All of them were on the ground floor in moments. Brandyweis continued out the front door without stopping. Liam followed.
When he exited the remains of the front door—
Hey, this reminds me of my house!
—he was rewarded with a sight that thrilled him.
The V-22 Osprey landed on the wide avenue between the row of mansions and the large municipal park beyond. It was bouncing lightly as if it had only just landed and wanted to get back off the ground.
“Run!” Someone shouted.
He wasn’t going to wait for an invitation. He crossed the lawn, easily pacing the larger, gear-clad Marines. As he approached, a woman in a small window near the front gave a thumbs up sign and then adjusted a huge gun on her door. The gun barrel began to spin and soon rounds tore into the mansion behind them as she traded fire with multiple drones pushing rounds the opposite way.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
A Gatling gun. The similarity to the destruction of his parents' house was uncanny.
While the gun screamed up front, they ran up the ramp on the rear. It was already going up as he reached the central cargo space. He also noticed people from the park had begun to run toward the plane...but he tried to keep that in perspective. If he successfully found a cure, all those people would be saved. More than could ever make it on one flight out.
Once they realized someone was shooting guns in their direction—the overshots of the drones—the whole procession stopped and dropped.
He was just able to reach a tie-down strap to hold on as the plane cleared the trees.
My God, that was close.
7
When he could take a breath, he appreciated how close he'd come to getting crossed off the list. His luck held, though as the big bird morphed from a helicopter into an airplane, he cussed into the rotor noise: he'd forgotten the handgun back in the tub.
He needed a list to keep track of all the expensive weapons he'd misplaced recently.
The Marines plugged him into the comm system so he could communicate with the Lt. Colonel without shouting. They discussed the assault, Elsa’s role, and what it could mean for their next mission. Liam remained focused on the one thing he could understand from all the new problems of the day.
“I need to find Victoria. We can't leave her.” He wondered if they were flying high above her, or if she was far away, or...dead.
He had to know.
On a whim, he said the first thing that came into his mind. “Hey, sir, do you think that machine will tell me where Victoria is? Is she in the tracking system?”
“I sincerely doubt it. It might know her name and information, but not her locale. She would have had to have been tagged, like you were. And if she was in Forest Park before you, the drones hadn’t made it that far west.”
“But they did make it. You just saw them.”
He thought it was so obvious it didn’t need saying, but he was determined to get them to use the computer to answer for certain.
In minutes, the Marine named Thomas—his name plate said Zinsky—brought the laptop-thing. He punched in a few keys, then took a minute to look at the screen. Liam couldn’t see what he was looking at.
After too long, Brandyweis asked him for a report.
“Well, sir. The kid said she was in Forest Park, but this is showing her several screens away. It shows her near Cairo, Illinois.”
“That’s not possible!”
She promised she wouldn’t leave me.
“Sir, I’ve ch
ecked the data. She's definitely there. But it also has her account flagged. You better see this.” He motioned for his superior to come to him.
Brandyweis got up from his seat and bent over to read the computer.
“You're sure about this?”
Liam could hear the colonel talk on the comm system.
Thomas nodded.
Brandyweis turned to him. “Son, this is saying your girlfriend was tagged before the disaster. The notes say she was admitted to a routine exam when she started working at Barnes Hospital. While she was there, this tag was inserted underneath her skin.
His mind spun. Duchesne said they tracked her by her phone. That was an easy lie for him to make. If he knew the tracking was more insidious, it didn’t cost him anything to blame it on the phone. But that would also mean he knew people were being tracked before the sirens got things started.
Would Victoria have any idea?
They can find us both, at any time.
Staying with Marines suddenly seemed the reasonable course of action. “Sir, I’ll follow you to the end of time if you can get me to Victoria in Cairo. If she left this park without telling me, I think she's in a lot of danger. The cure has to wait for this one thing.”
The plane rattled as the colonel stood nearby, studying him. He felt the harsh stare of the man now dictating the next phase of his life, but he met his eyes. There was no weakness when Victoria’s safety was on the line.
He needed the colonel. Desperately.
Chapter 6: Trust Issues
While Liam was asleep in the basement nearby.
Victoria was in the video control room of the Whitaker building on the Washington University campus of St. Louis. She’d just seen herself on a video recording set in her dorm room—someone had been spying on her.
“Vicky,” said a man’s voice behind her.
She was startled, but not afraid. She knew who it was and settled herself so as not to give him power over her.
“Hayes,” she said without emotion as she turned on her heels.
“Oh, I thought I’d surprise you. You look like you expected to find me here.”
“When I saw the elderly on the monitors, I thought of you. I had a feeling we’d see you again. I’m sorry it happened so soon.” Left unsaid was that Hayes had her shot in a previous meeting, though their most recent meeting was complicated—he’d helped her and Liam escape from the Riverside Hotel.
“Believe me; I wish this meet up didn’t need to happen, either. But the situation outside is dire, and it turns out I need your help.”
She turned her hip toward him. “You want to shoot me again? Here you go. I'm still healing, so it will really hurt.”
Hayes shook his head emphatically. “No, no, we have to get past that. I’ve said I was sorry, and I am.”
His contrition seemed genuine, as it did the last time, but she could never fully trust a man who had shot a gun at her, no matter the stakes.
“You need Grandma Marty. That’s why you're here.”
A long stare. “I don’t fault you for doubting me—”
“You need her. Just say it.”
He was a middle-aged man, now dressed in khaki pants and a light blue crisscrossed button-down shirt. He often seemed jovial in their prior encounters. Like he somehow enjoyed the chaos.
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I need her.”
“A ha! Knew it.”
“I need her, but so do you. We all do.”
“Yes, great. Not surprising. But before we get to that, why were you spying on my room? Are you a sick pervert, in addition to being an attempted murder—oh, I’m sorry, we’ve moved beyond that incident,” she said with mock conviction.
Now he started to look like he was off balance. “No, it isn’t like that. I swear.” He pointed to the video screen now frozen on a still image of her old dorm room. “I don't have access to my old, um, tracking tools. That room is the only link I had to find you again. If you hadn’t come back, I might never have figured out where you’d taken Marty.”
“And nothing I did there was of any interest to you, other than finding me?”
“Why? What happened there?” he said with too-obvious curiosity.
She couldn’t tell if he knew, but he’d watched part of the tape because he’d used the name “Vicky” which she yelled out when she thought she was totally alone in the room. That was bad enough. But her real fear was that he’d watched the entire tape.
Earlier in the day she and Liam had gotten involved romantically in her room, after several weeks together out in the wild. They both assumed they had the place to themselves and made good on that time alone. It was nobody’s business what they did, but standing in front of this video screen made something innocent seem tawdry and dirty. After her prior relationship disaster—summed up in that single word "Vicky," the intrusion hurt deeply.
“Just tell me how I can erase this tape. I’ll help you if I decide I agree with what you’re doing.”
“No questions asked?”
“Oh, nuh-uh. It doesn’t work like that. I’m going to ask lots of questions. I happen to know exactly where Grandma Marty is, but I’m going to guard her like my own Nana, for now. If you want to know where she is, the first step you’re going to need to take is to erase this tape.” It was her turn to point to the video screen of her room.
“Deal,” he said with his old charm. He went to fidgeting with the controls while she stood on and watched.
Maybe it was coincidence, and he intended to use the tape just to find her. But here he was in the control room at just the time she arrived, and he’d gotten her to agree to his terms. All he had to do was erase a tape he should never have had in the first place.
She sighed.
Was I just played?
Hayes stepped back. “Here, this button will erase that entire log. It’s been on a continuous feed, so you’ll erase the whole thing. Then I’ll turn it off.”
Studying the image, she tried to guess where the camera had been hidden. Her best guess was that it was in the closet at the back of the room. The view was through one of the slats on the metallic door.
“I’ll be destroying that camera when I get back there.”
He seemed hurt. “No, don’t do that.”
She held her hands on her hips, indignantly.
“I’m serious. Remove it, but don’t ruin it. The factory that made that camera is probably burning somewhere in China. They’ve been hit with this virus, same as us. If you destroy that piece of technology, there will never be another one like it. At least not for a very long time.”
“I thought you said you were working on a cure?”
He laughed quietly. “The last time we met, I believed we were on track to find a cure and save the remaining population. That’s true enough. But today, weeks later, I’m a little less enthusiastic about our ability to save human civilization.”
“Is that your job? Save civilization? Wasn’t it to spread a virus?”
He finally looked serious. “I deserve your scorn. I made the virus that was dropped on those marchers and hell was unleashed, rather than just giving some politician a victory. But I told you before; I’m a changed man now. I’m trying to end this disaster before it wipes mankind and his civilization off the Earth, forever. After everything I’ve seen, the race now is to save the former. The latter is already gone.”
“And so you tracked me down to help with that.”
“Honest. Let me show you what I’ve been doing here.”
He led her out of the control room, and down the steps.
2
“Don’t,” she said quietly.
Hayes had walked up to the double doors of the room where she’d earlier witnessed the zombies walking among the test subjects.
He turned to her while at the door. “Don’t worry; this is a controlled experiment.” She could just make out the smile in the low light. But when he turned back around, a zombie was at the window. Hayes jumped.
&n
bsp; “Oh shit!”
He stumbled back a few steps before regaining control.
“They’re never at the door.”
“I might have riled them up,” she offered. They had scared her in much the same way before she left to go upstairs.
“Yeah, well, it’s all good. We’ll just have to look around that one.”
He moved back to the door, and she stayed close, but behind him. She didn’t trust him not to open the door and toss her in. That would make a fun “experiment,” she was sure.
The blood-soaked zombie hovered, but as she got a better look at him—he was dressed in hospital scrubs—she noticed he wore the equivalent of a bridle. A strap wrapped around his head, and a thick piece of leather or another material was wedged tightly into its mouth, so it was prevented from closing its jaw. It couldn’t bite a banana, much less skin.
“When I was here, I saw these zombies walking through those people in the beds. People I knew during the day, today. I watched over one of them, only to find out they were being abused at night by this sick prank.”
He turned back to her. “Prank? This isn’t a prank. Far from it. We’re witnessing the first zombies not to attack humans when they have the chance. Those people in there are alive.”
With a nod to the window, he continued. “Look inside. Those people are fine. It’s the zombies who are different.”
As instructed, she checked it out. The closest zombie was an unwelcome distraction, but its behavior was a far cry from the violence and attacks always associated with them. Still, it was pawing at the door.
But, sure enough, there were other zombies walking the room, and while they seemed to make circuits around the beds of patients, they did not attack them.
“It’s a sick experiment. How are you allowed to do this?”
“I still have my resources. I had the University stand down from guarding this place, so I could be assured I could conduct these tests in private. They give me people suspected of being infected, and I send them back people I know are clean. Everyone wins.”
She peered into the room, wondering if the people lying in the beds would agree with him. Unaccountable testing was a nightmare scenario for an ethical nurse or doctor. Her impulse was to go in there and kill the zombies and release the victims.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 152