“Please don't,” said an emotional male voice.
“Identify yourself,” John replied. Part of him laughed at the thought there were a dozen armed men inside, just waiting for him to come through the door. His ruse got him this far, but wouldn't work a second longer.
“I...I just work here. I can't risk the equipment.”
“That doesn't tell me who you are.”
“I'm Bill Dredsel. I keep the Elma Jean running. Who the hell are you?”
John made a decision. If there were twelve men with guns, he'd have no chance. He decided to be bold. He pushed through the door, gun in hand.
A skinny old-timer in dirty overalls skittered backward into the bridge compartment.
John almost dropped his gun when he saw the place. After weeks of primitive living, blood 'n guts fighting hand-to-hand, and the rickety town of Cairo—he felt like he'd walked onto the space shuttle. The wrap-around windows showed the barge sitting in front of them, but it was filled with computer data, as if it were also a giant computer screen.
The area where he'd planned to smash the glass had a running string of data falling like snow from top to bottom. It became clear why the man didn't want him to break the window. It was more than mere glass.
Bill had his hands up, though he kept stepping backward. John was happy to see the proper amount of fear on the man's face.
“All right, mister,” he said in his best cowboy-movie voice, “I want to know everything that's going on. And we'll start right here.” He pointed to one corner of the carnival display of information—it showed four people standing in an area that looked like the ward of a hospital.
They were surrounded by several armed figures dressed in black.
Chapter 21: Threat Level 5
Liam had seen the helicopter hovering when they came into the hold of the barge, so he wasn't too surprised to see drones or more people come down the steps. After settling the two old women—the one endlessly called out for a nurse—he stood talking to the three younger women as the intruders dropped in.
He held Victoria by the waist. He wanted to keep her close until he could think of a way to get out of what was turning out to be a multi-layered prison.
Debbie with her shotgun.
The drones.
Whoever was in charge of the creepy hospital.
The helicopter.
And, should he make it outside again, the town was surely overrun with zombies.
Debbie seemed to anger at the sight of him holding Victoria. Even as the new men approached, she raised her shotgun toward him.
“Liam. I thought we had something. I, like, saved all these—” she started to laugh. “Oh, my. This has been fun, but I can't keep up this silly charade. Who talks like that?”
She stepped back toward the approaching dark-clad figures.
“I'm done talking like that. My mom is here—finally,” she shouted back to the new arrivals.
One of the men walked up to Debbie with a DNA sniffer.
“This is her.”
Debbie smiled wickedly while she pointed her shotgun at Liam, but her face cringed when the newcomer reached to her and injected something in her neck. A second later, she dropped to the floor like she had been turned off.
The shotgun fell to the metal hull and clanged loudly. Though it was impossible, he waited for the gun to fire itself.
Dad would scold me for thinking such nonsense.
There were three men, each dressed in black tactical gear and wearing face masks.
“Drop your weapons!”
Victoria set her rifle down, as did Jane.
Two of the men grabbed Debbie and pulled her toward the steps.
“Wait,” Jane cried out. “What do you want with her?”
“Elsa Cantwell is wanted for conspiracy to commit genocide. That's all you need to know.”
“You want a teenager for genocide?” Liam blurted out.
That seemed to take the man by surprise. Even from behind his mask, Liam saw the indecision. The man turned around, crouched next to Debbie, and whisked away her hair. It had covered her face as she went down.
“Oh shit. He's right. Check this. Fast,” he said to an assistant.
The machine was pointed to Debbie again. It only took a few seconds.
“Sir, this says it is Ms. Cantwell. The DNA checks out.”
“We've been played.” The man ripped off his face mask. He was middle aged, about the same as his dad, but he wore cropped hair and had the chiseled features of a movie superstar. He looked around the room, settling on Liam and his friends since they were the only ones on their feet.
“Sir, the drones?” Victoria asked as he approached.
“Ours. Well, they became ours. Look, I don't have much time. What's going on here? Who are you people? Why the beds?”
“You mean you don't know?” Liam asked with disbelief.
The man laughed.
His partner came up beside him, using the machine on the three of them. He only needed to get close before the thing bleeped.
“Holy shit! These three are Priority Level 5 targets.”
The weapons of the men came up in unison.
Liam tightened his grip on Victoria's soft midsection.
“We're innocent,” Liam said weakly.
“This kid is wanted in connection with bio-terrorism,” the man with the equipment said while pointing to Liam. “This girl is listed as infected, deceased. And this woman—”
The seriousness of the charges affected the men. They stepped back several big steps.
“Damn. This woman is supposed to have offed the President.”
“That figures,” retorted Jane.
“Sir, we are cleared to terminate these three on sight. In fact, someone wrote in some notes. It states several penal codes that will apply if we don't shoot them on sight.”
Victoria moved closer to him, though they were already about as tight as they could be. She looked up. “Thanks for coming for me. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
He didn't care how it would look. He swept Victoria in his arms and kissed her.
There are worse ways to go out.
The kiss was a record-breaker. It was his first since their rendezvous in her dorm room, and it was something he'd been thinking about every minute since. It was everything he'd dreamed, and it made him completely forget the cruel world infected everything except what he had in those final seconds…
The kiss went on longer than he could have hoped. It truly was a good trade, if they had to die.
“Wait just a damned minute,” said the leader at last. “Just a damned minute.”
Liam heard the words and sensed the change. He really wanted to keep on kissing her, but they read each others' minds and pulled apart, together. Her smile and moist eyes encouraged him to look back to the intruders.
“If that's not Elsa, how in the world do we know these people are the threats we see here? Do they look like the world's most dangerous terrorists? This one is just a kid.” They pointed at him.
“We need more information.” Looking at Liam, he said, “I don't suppose you'd tell us whether this information is true? Are you the most dangerous boy in America?”
Well, it depends on who you are.
Out of his mouth, he professed a much more mundane explanation.
“This Debbie girl asked my girlfriend and me to help her bring elderly people to this boat. We wanted to help. They were being left behind for the zombies to get them.”
“And her?” He pointed to Jane.
“I'm his mother,” she said matter-of-factly. “We live in Cairo, of course, and I chased these two when I thought they had come out on these barges to have sex. You know, being the end of the world and all.”
Liam felt his face flare up in embarrassment. But he couldn't exactly counter her argument without destroying his fabricated story. “Yeah, my mom saved us from doing something stupid,” he said without emotion.
“Sir, ther
e's no way we're going to find four Level 5's in this toilet of a town in nowhere, USA. This has to be a mistake. Our data has been hacked.”
The leader looked around, evidently thinking it over.
Liam rubbed Victoria's back. It was all he could to keep his hands busy because the other one was shaking at his side.
2
“We bag 'em all. Take them back to base. Let HQ sort out the truth.”
Liam let out an audible sigh of relief.
“Sir, we're looking for Marty Peters, my great-grandma. Does your computer have a location for her?”
The computer man looked at the leader, who replied with a curt, “Do it.”
In a few moments, the man quite forcefully smacked his own head. “She's in the system. We now have five of them! We've struck gold.” He pointed to the machine. “It says Ms. Martinette Peters is wanted for involvement in the trafficking of bio-toxins across state lines. We are ordered, and I quote, to terminate her at extreme distance and ensure body and biological remnants are purged thoroughly in a hyper-temperature smelter.” He laughed. “Who the hell writes this stuff?”
“But where is she? Is it in there?”
“Yeah, sure kid. It shows her not far away, in the town.”
He figured she was on the run. She wasn't at the house he'd checked.
The questions were there, but he wanted to know something else. A dark force he suspected was behind all this, no matter what Victoria thought.
“I um, have one more name. My dad. If it's not too much trouble could you look him up? Then I won't bother you again.”
“That won't be necessary, son. He's waiting for us right where we left him.” Jane looked right at him.
“His name is Douglas Hayes. Just tell me where he is, so I know he's OK.”
The computer operator seemed hesitant, but the leader nodded. “One more. That's all I can handle.”
In moments, the man had his answer. His face revealed his surprise before he voiced it.
“Well, thank the lard for good taste. We've cooked a half-dozen doozies. This guy is the worst one of all. A Homeland Security special adjunct in charge of studying the spread of the ZF one dash one zero strain of influenza. It says he infected the lab and escaped with several virulent samples of the virus.” He paused, his eyes continuing to read what must have been a lengthy blotter.
“Good God! Intel says he was part of the division that secretly helped the Patriot Snowball rebels infect D.C. Then he did some work overseas. Finally...oh come on! This can't be true. It says his role in the insurrection was to sanitize the city of St. Louis of all life.”
Secretly, Liam knew at least some of that was true. What about the rest? If they knew what was really happening would they kill them instantly? How did he let himself get dealt into the game, so these men thought his own father was a mass murdering lunatic? What did that make him?
Afraid to know the truth, he had to ask. “And his location?”
“It says he's right here, of course. Cairo. What is this place? A criminal convention?”
Liam felt Victoria turn toward Jane, but no words were passed.
The leader walked up to him. “You three better give me some answers. I'm authorized to terminate you on sight. Do you know what kind of power that gives me?”
“Sir, are you with the Polar Bears?” Liam had to eliminate that possibility.
“I ask the questions. I'll give you five seconds to start talking.”
“Or what?” asked Jane. “How dare you threaten me and my son.”
“Or I drag your ass onto my helicopter, and I drop you in Supermax prison. That might be a fate worse than death, right now. By some miracle, most inmates survived this crisis. Isolated living, I guess.”
“We have rights,” Victoria added.
The man looked at her with the first hint of sadness. “Ma'am I used to work for a special branch of the United States government. I swore an oath to a Constitution which no longer exists. My country no longer exists. It's been taken over by an insider coup. Your rights were stripped by those people. My job now is to take it back. Your rights extend up to and including me shooting you three in the face if I believe for a second you are as dangerous as this computer says you are.”
He got as close as he dared. “Someone had better say something.”
“I'm a Snowballer,” Liam said while thinking of Mom. “My goal is the same as yours—to restore this nation to what it was before. Three weeks ago I didn't know how good I had it. I did nothing but play video games, and I didn't even know about the Patriot Snowball group back then. But I ran into some of them. They told me what the government agents did to them. They told me about all the experiments.” He pointed to the nearby beds. “This place is one of those experimental sites. I'm sure of it. We're here to stop the people responsible for this. Though I admit, we aren't doing a very good job.”
“And the others?”
“We're all patriots.” He was careful not to lie about Jane. He didn't know what she was, other than the wife of the man who shot his girlfriend. Her loyalties remained suspect, even though she was with Victoria. “Victoria and I helped my great-grandma Marty Peters escape from the Riverside Hotel and Casino in downtown St. Louis. They were doing experiments there with elderly citizens, and they had captured many different specimens suffering from the zombie plague.”
He took a deep breath, adamant he could keep this momentum going.
“And we witnessed the death of an Agent Duchesne, who was part of a government agency called the NIS—National Internal Security. They're the ones who released the plague on the Patriot Snowball. Not the other way around. They knew about the plague long before it came to America. After we escaped, we found more evidence of the creation of the plague down in the Koch Hospital Mine. They did their experiments on bodies of soldiers they stole from the National Cemetery.”
Victoria jumped in. “And I was, uh, working with Liam's dad at Washington University when the NIS destroyed his lab. He'd discovered that some people are infected with the plague and don't even know it. The NIS wanted the plague spread far and wide. They even claimed they used a hidden signal in the tornado sirens to get the zombies to move faster during the first few hours. They're the bad guys, sir.”
The leader stepped closer and looked at Jane with a cold stare.
“My name's Ben, ma'am. Not at all pleased to meet you, but I'll protect you, if I can. I have to ask: do you have any control over your kids? It sounds like they're getting into a lot of trouble,” he said with no irony.
“They've caused me more sleepless nights than you can imagine,” she said with a forced smile.
Ben turned around and waved them all toward the steps.
“I don't believe any of it, of course. But HQ will get to the truth. I'm not coming out of this empty handed.” Then, quieter, “Not again.”
3
While they'd talked, the drones had come to rest on the metal of the hull. The propellers were rapidly slowing.
Near the steps, the leader noticed them and spun around. “If any of you tries anything, I will kill you. Are we clear?”
“Crystal, sir,” said Liam, knowing the answer.
“We've apparently lost control of these drones. I didn't order them to stand down. Jay, check for threats. I'll radio up top. We're getting clear.” He pulled out a radio and called for his flight.
His man went up the steps, then promptly tumbled back down. Dead. A bullet had struck him in the back of the head.
A gun was in Liam's face before he had taken one deep breath after seeing the body.
“Who's with you? Tell me or you're dead!”
He couldn't speak. His stomach was ready to unload, though.
“There's no one,” Jane piped up. “I swear. We came alone. Don't kill him, please,” she pleaded with passing sincerity.
The barrel of the gun wavered.
“Dammit!”
The gun pointed to the floor.
He put
up a finger to quiet everyone, then got back on his radio.
“Jolly Roger, this is Crusader One. Abort, abort, abort.”
There was no reply.
“Jolly Roger—”
The whine of the helicopter increased, then an explosion above sent shards of shrapnel through the metal roof of the barge an instant later. A blast of heat poured down the stairwell, into the compartment. Everyone ran deeper into the hold. One big section of the roof buckled inward, as if something heavy had landed on it. The scraping of metal and the repetitive clangs on the outer hull strongly suggested the helicopter had been destroyed.
“It's a damned trap!” Ben yelled. “Get to the other end.” They all ran down the length of the hull. The younger people helped the older set get along to relative safety.
Most of the debris landed about mid-way down the length of the line of beds. A big piece of steaming hot metal struck one of the sleeping bodies. It collapsed part of the bed, and as Liam ran by he was horrified to see it had taken off one of the man's legs. The scary part, he realized, was that the man didn't wake up.
He kept eyes forward. There were others in the area, and he didn't want to know if any of those had been struck. There was nothing to be done for any of them. Right now his priority was Victoria. They ran hand-in-hand.
When they reached the other end of the boat, he was disappointed. There was no exit. He assumed this was because the space was normally used to store coal, or rock, or grain. Not people. The designers never anticipated a second exit would be necessary.
“Ben, are you guys military?” Jane asked.
“We're Secret Service,” he said as he searched the walls and ceiling.
“Secret Service,” Jane repeated. “Is the president around?”
“I couldn't tell you if he was, but we do more than protect the man. We protect the office. Whether you know it or not, you said the magic words. If you know about the NIS and aren't killing us for hearing it, we can more or less assume you aren't NIS.”
Liam thought of Jane. She was, at one time, NIS. How deep did that loyalty run? Was she honest about working against them? She'd outright killed NIS agents with her sniper rifle, but he'd learned to doubt everything with Hayes, and, by extension, his wife.
Since The Sirens Box Set | Books 1-7 Page 170