Primus Unleashed

by Amber Wyatt

  “It has been over three years and yet the debate is still raging in the courts as to whether Columbus 754 was legally shot down or not.” Behnke replied. “There are literally hundreds of internet forums debating conspiracy theories, and because it was an illegal, non-scheduled flight, no official crew or passenger manifest exists. Over three thousand lawsuits from both within and outside the zone have been filed for compensation against the government by people claiming that family members were on board at the time. Naturally the vast majority of these claims are untrue. There is no way the largest plane in the world could have carried anywhere near a fraction of the total number of people that these lawsuits claim was on board. The problem of course is that it is quite impossible to prove who was on board or not.”

  “Right,” Wilkins looked down sadly at the last bit of whiskey in his glass and then drained it, savoring the bite on his tongue. “And you are going to the crash site to do what exactly?”

  “A number of things,” Behnke lifted up one hand and began counting off the points on his bruised, but still finely manicured fingers. “Number one, we will be the first expedition ever to visit the crash site, locate the black box, and document in detail exactly what happened to Columbus 754 when it was shot down. Secondly, we will endeavor to identify and produce a list of all passengers and crew who were on board and who went down with the plane. Thirdly we will answer the question definitively, whether or not there were actually zombies on board, and fourthly,” at this point Behnke grinned knowingly at Wilkins, “we believe the long-searched for patient zero was on board the plane.”

  “Patient zero means the first guy infected with the Lyssavirus, the one who brought it to Fort Lauderdale,” said Tristan excitedly.

  “I know what the term means, but…” Wilkins was lost in thought for a moment. His family had always been totally focused on the chest mentioned in his ancestor’s hundred-year-old letters. And thanks to the recent research carried out by his obsessed grandfather, Wilkins had thought he had known where the chest was. It is just a chest though. It could have been moved very quickly, and might well be on board the plane. However, Wilkins was just realizing that he had never really thought about patient zero, the first person to come into contact with the chest. But of course, it stood to reason that there must have been one.

  This first person who had become infected, what these people and probably the rest of the world would term as ‘patient zero’, had then subsequently infected everyone else. And even if the chest were destroyed, patient zero would still pose a threat afterwards until he or she had also been destroyed. After all, the outbreak had been ongoing for nearly two months before the quarantine zone had been imposed. It was quite possible that patient zero had wandered quite freely around Fort Lauderdale spreading the infection for weeks, before the quarantine panicked him or her into trying to escape on an airplane.

  “Why do you think patient zero was onboard Columbus 754?” Wilkins finally said.

  “If you look at the large volume of articles written about the Lyssavirus many of them disagree widely upon its mechanism and there are all manner of speculative theories ranging from black magic, to government conspiracies, to a cornucopia of medical explanations.” Behnke paused to knock back a couple of pills from a small plastic packet in his jacket. That Russian bastard had really destroyed his face during the fight, and the subsequent reconstructive surgery had only added to his pain and misery. He took a sip from his water and massaged the strips of plaster across his tender, swollen nose. “Yet what the majority of them have in common, surprisingly, is a firm belief that patient zero is essentially a non-symptomatic carrier. It is after all, not uncommon in many medical conditions and, for our purposes, it is the most logical explanation for how someone infected with the Lyssavirus managed to board Columbus 754. Let’s be honest, if you are a passenger on board a plane trying to escape a deadly plague, it is impossible to believe that you would allow someone on board whom you suspected of showing even the slightest symptoms of it.”

  “But how do you know there were any zombies on board the plane?” Wilkins asked. “Nobody knows. That wasn’t the reason they were shot down. They were shot down for trying to escape the quarantine.”

  “Phone calls,” said Tristan. He looked at Behnke questioningly, but Behnke merely sipped his water and nodded at Tristan to continue. “We have recordings of cell phone calls made from inside the aircraft, that have been independently verified, that there were zombies on board, attacking other passengers, just before they were shot down.”

  “What? But that’s incredible! I’ve never heard of any evidence of that before.”

  “I’ve got a cousin in one of the circuit courts,” Tristan shrugged. “They’re keeping it under wraps until the final cases are heard, since a pretty major part of the defense will be proof that the downing of the flight was justified to keep the rest of the country safe.”

  “Okay,” Wilkins pursed his lips thoughtfully, “so you have zombies on board. Why does that mean one of them was patient zero?”

  “Two things, Mr. Wilkins,” Behnke gestured to Thomas who handed him a folder, from which he pulled out several papers which he started to hand out around the table. The others looked at them curiously but without any understanding. Wilkins recognized them as photocopies of some of the original letters from his ancestor, the sailor Paul Cope, describing the battle with the undead on board his whaling ship over a hundred years ago. “Firstly, the speed of transmission. The infected passenger must have been asymptomatic upon boarding, and presumably remained so until the plane was in the air, otherwise other passengers would have been panicking and the pilot would have aborted the take-off. And yet less than a minute after take-off we have phone transcripts from passengers on board screaming that they are being attacked by zombies. ‘Zombies’, plural. I have an entire team of analysts going through every article, every zombie sighting, every video clip on the internet, and one of the few conclusions they have come to, is that the closer you are to the original source of the infection, the faster you turn into a zombie once you are bitten.”

  “What is this?” Tristan waved at his copies of the old letters, reading them with an increasingly puzzled look on his face. Behind him, Rob the cameraman, who had maintained an air of sullen boredom as he read through his copy, suddenly breathed in sharply and focused intently as he quickly turned to the next page.

  “Which brings me to the second point. Gentlemen, the papers you are all holding contains information brought to me by Mr. Wilkins. Information that dovetails very neatly with our own theory, Tristan. Which is that patient zero is conscious of his own condition, and may well be keen to escape the quarantine zone. And what better way than by running to the airport the day after quarantine has been declared, looking for a flight out?”

  “It’s a book?” Rob’s face was a mixture of anger and incredulity as he looked up from his papers. “The source of the infection is a book?”

  “A chest,” corrected Wilkins dryly. “A chest in which we believe there is a book with a specific secret that causes the undead phenomenon to manifest in whomever reads it”. He looked down wistfully at his empty whiskey glass. He had had plenty of time to read the sailor’s ancient letters quite thoroughly. Most of his adult life in fact. And in those letters Cope had clearly stated that after the nightmarish battle with the zombies, an old witch had appeared on the blood-soaked sand and had told him that the source of the evil necromancy was an ancient and secret book locked within the black, wooden chest.

  “Calm down, Rob,” Behnke held up his hand to forestall a comment from the cameraman who had just opened his mouth angrily. “Before you start asking the how’s and why’s, the short answer is we don’t know. Does the book contain black magic?” Rob snorted in disgust, but Behnke shushed him, “or does it contain an alchemist’s herbal recipe of some lost Amazonian fungus that turns people into these monsters? Is the book itself physically made of a material that is infectious, or does the
chest in which it is kept also contain spores that carry the infection?” Not only Rob, but everyone around the table looked thoughtful at that last comment. “We don’t know. What we do know is that this is not just another wild conspiracy theory. What we have in our hands is this: original documentation of an eyewitness account with proven provenance, through an unbroken chain of generations of the same family, that describes in detail an identical outbreak of Lyssavirus over a century ago. And it is unique,” Behnke held up one finger to emphasize the point. “The one and only document in the world that actually claims to reveal the actual physical source of the infection.”

  Everyone looked back down at their own copies of the letters and for a moment there was no sound in the room except for the faint rustling of papers. Rob finished reading through his copy of the letters and looked up at Wilkins with a frown on his face. “Okay, I’ve got a question.” He tapped the photocopied pile of papers in front of him. “Even for someone as cynical as me, this stuff is quite compelling. It’s obviously an authentic eyewitness account, and you do have the original letters, right?”

  “Yes, they’re locked in a safe back in England.”

  “So my question is, why haven’t you gone to the authorities with this? I mean have you shown anyone else this stuff at all?”

  “Yes of course we did,” Wilkins answered. “When those news broadcasts came out about the Galleria incident and then the quarantine zone was created, my grandfather wrote to his MP straight away, to the police, in fact he sent letters out to everyone he could think of.”

  “And?” Behnke was alarmed, although he tried to maintain a casual air. He had assumed that the papers were a family secret. If the existence of the book were widely known it would significantly affect the plans he had regarding the exploitation of its secrets after it had been recovered.

  “And what do you think?” Wilkins smiled wryly. “Nobody believed him of course. Way before the Galleria, as soon as the Lyssavirus surfaced in Florida the internet was flooded with thousands of crackpot theories regarding the zombie apocalypse about to engulf the world. Nobody was going to pay any attention to yet another fairy-tale, even if this one was about a magic book. Most people simply ignored his letters. A few sent polite replies thanking him for his interest and saying that the matter was ‘under consideration’.”

  “Yeah, you’d have to be crazy to believe a story like that,” Rob cast a sideways glance at Behnke.

  Behnke ignored him and breathed an inaudible sigh of relief to himself. Widespread public awareness of the chest and the book would definitely be a problem. He made a mental note to himself, to get a team to prepare a few misleading fakes, which could be planted as decoys in case word about the book got out in the future.

  “Well from this moment forward we must refrain from any further mention of the book.” Behnke looked around at the others. “Our expedition has two objectives now. Number one, to document the crash site of Columbus 754 and number two, to recover the chest. The chest is the more important of the two. And we have to recover it secretly. There are already enough difficulties to overcome to enter the zone as it is. The discovery of the source of the Lyssavirus and exploiting its potential is going to be the next big thing. The US government has already spent a billion dollars on Lyssavirus research for the military applications. But apart from that, if the virus’s secrets could be unlocked, it could be the Holy Grail for the future of the health and beauty industries as well.”

  Behnke did not feel the need to inform the group that he himself already had a research facility within the zone, which had been operating for over a year now. For well over a decade, annual global expenditure on cosmetics had exceeded that of the arms industry. The ability to decode and exploit just the anti-aging properties of the virus alone, would be a multi-billion-dollar business.

  “If word were to get out that there is a confirmed patient zero or other source, like a spore sample, it would trigger a tsunami of groups trying to get into the zone, which would result in a massive clampdown from the authorities making it even harder for us to get in. Plus of course, even after successfully infiltrating the zone we would then have to contend with perhaps hundreds of competitors from within the zone itself.” Behnke looked hard at each individual around the table to make sure that they all understood the importance of what he was saying. “Make no mistake about it. The success of this expedition relies on absolute and total secrecy until we have successfully completed our objective and exfiltrated from the quarantine zone.”

  Regardless of the actual legalities of entering and leaving the zone, he and Tristan had agreed that it was almost certain the authorities would arrest them under some vaguely related charge to prevent them from entering. There was already a well-resourced border patrol force in place, whose primary job these days seemed to be to stop idiots going in to hunt zombies for fame and glory on social media. Plus of course there was always the ZLM.

  Zombie Lives Matter was the largest and most vocal pro-zombie organization, whose members advocated that the infected were in fact only sick patients that needed help and medical treatment. They strongly opposed the lethal and violent measures taken by the authorities and inhabitants of the zone to deal with the infected whenever they encountered them. There was a great deal of popular, if silent support around the country for the ZLM who had compared the Lyssavirus to a number of common conditions suffered by many Americans. After all, they claimed, what was the difference between killing victims infected with the Lyssavirus, and going around shooting diabetics? Would people with allergies be next?

  The ZLM movement had been significantly boosted recently by a month long, high-profile awareness campaign fronted by a selection of young and glamorous celebrities, and included posters at bus stops, billboards on highways and one-minute slots on half a dozen cable channels. Typical ZLM videos usually comprised clips of sad, grim-faced parents executing their own, crying children for the crime of suffering from some innocuous medical condition, overlaid with the slogan ‘Does ill mean kill?’. These were interspersed with clips of a succession of photogenic doctors announcing that they had taken an oath ‘to do no harm’. Each ZLM video ended with a black and white closing message from a well-known Miami-based lingerie model seductively clutching a sleeping infant in a ‘I have a cold’ romper asking the camera huskily, “Would you kill my baby?”

  ZLM followers were understandably hostile to any adventure seekers trying to enter the zone whom they assumed, usually correctly, were intending to hunt zombies. However, despite the surprising success of ZLM’s global marketing, Behnke was confident that his post-expedition publicity campaign would be more than enough to counter their clumsy tugging at the heart-strings of an ill-informed and easily-swayed public. That same audience who fell for their sappy video clips were exactly the same demographic who would lap up his adventure-filled and heroic documentary with relish.

  The high body count of dead zombies required to deliver a suitably dramatic edge to the expedition, would initially excite a certain amount of outrage he was sure, but he was a firm believer in the old adage that there was no such thing as bad publicity. And besides which, the fickle and superficial audience would be quick to forgive and forget if he could return from the zone with a miracle cure that could erase their wrinkles, and make them look and feel decades younger.

  Behnke forestalled any further discussion by calling in the maître d’ and getting dinner served as he guided the rest of the conversation to general equipment and logistical considerations. He did not want anyone thinking too much about what they would do with the book if they recovered it. Not if, he corrected himself, when they recovered it. He had his own plans for the secret of the Lyssavirus, and he would share them with the others at the appropriate time.

  In the meantime, there was a great deal of work to be done to tidy up the final details of entering the zone. He had talked to Takumi’s wife several times the day before and she had assured him that everything would be prepared
for their arrival. Still, Behnke could not ignore feeling a slight twinge of annoyance. He generally insisted on using his own staff for all of his requirements, and having to rely on an unproven, external contractor was extremely galling, especially on such an important expedition such as this. However, as his investigator had informed him, she had shown a certain flair and ruthlessness in eliminating her husband, and therefore might well be ideally suited for the upcoming mission.

  As Behnke and his group dined in Las Vegas, it was already past midnight over two thousand miles to the east in Fort Lauderdale, where the subject of Behnke’s thoughts was still hard at work. Hana was on her laptop in the back office of Takumi Taktical, sorting through the orientation briefing she intended to give to Behnke’s group. She had dragooned Hugh into helping her prepare the equipment for the expedition, and with his help the work had gone very quickly. All that was left was to load up the vehicles the next day and drive out to the rendezvous point.

  Much to her surprise Hugh had also volunteered to come along up into zombie territory and babysit the group with her. Although as he had pointed out, he was not going to do it for free. Hugh intended to bill the client handsomely for his time, as he surmised that a man of Behnke’s extreme wealth would not even notice the additional expense. Still, Hana felt that he was not doing it simply for the money. Hugh liked her, she was astonished to realize, remembering the way he had looked at her with an unfamiliar fire in his eyes. He liked her the way a man likes a woman.