“No!” I answered, my voice much louder and more forceful than I’d intended. A hush dropped hard on the room, like someone had flipped a switch. Several people stopped what they were doing and stared at us. I lowered my voice. “It’s not like that! We just kissed.”
Huai Li scrawled notes on her clipboard. “What happened to others in the house?”
“Nothing,” Kyle responded. “They made us leave after she was bitten.” He nodded his head in my direction.
I squirmed in my seat. We needed to steer the questioning back toward our current situation. “So, how long will it be before I get my treatment? I’m concerned about how long this is taking.”
“Not to worry,” Huai Li answered. “There is plenty of time. Who else was with you in the house?”
Easy for her to say, I thought as my nausea increased. Huai Li’s pen was poised over the clipboard, waiting to take notes.
“Nobody important,” Kyle answered.
“What you mean? You share house with these people, and ther’es nobody important enough to remember their names?” Huai Li asked, one eyebrow cocked with suspicion.
I forced myself to keep my breathing even as I considered what to say. My mind went blank, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, other than to give Huai Li the fake names we came up with for Verna and Jordan. “What he means is,” I said, interrupting, “nobody else was infected. It was just a woman named Verna Woods and a guy. Matt…Fanes, I think his last name was, but I’m not sure.”
Again, Huai Li scribbled on her sheet of notes. “Why they with you?”
“What do you mean?” Kyle asked, his angry tone showing his frustration with the questions. “Look, Cas—.”
Electric fear shot through my brain, and I lunged forward, faking dry heaves and accidentally triggering a wave of spasms in my stomach. Actual vomit spewed out of my mouth and onto the floor. At least I’d stopped Kyle from saying my name. “I need help here, and you’re asking questions about people who aren’t even here,” I spat. “We didn’t even know them, okay? We took them in for shelter.”
“Why they wandering in the country? How they get there?” Huai Li asked, seemingly unconcerned about my sickness.
“Damn it!” Kyle slammed his fist against the back of his chair, his face red with anger. “That’s it. We’re not answering any more questions until you get us some help. Now!”
A door opened in the hallway, and a man with a prominent, bushy mustache stuck his head in. He looked in our direction and walked toward us. “Smith. My office.” He crooked his finger at the records technician, gesturing for her to follow, before disappearing through a door in the hallway.
“I’ll be back,” she told us. “Wait here.”
***
“What a moron. Like there’s anywhere else for us to go,” Kyle grumbled as Huai Li walked away. “Jesus, what kind of place is this?”
I held a finger to my lips and scowled at Kyle. When the records technician was out of hearing range, I spoke. “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. We’ve already drawn too much attention. Let’s just do what we have to do to get through this and get the hell out. No matter what, let’s try to steer any questions back to our need for medical attention, okay?”
He nodded, his cheeks returning to their typical shade. Squeaking wheels signaled the arrival of a bored-faced custodian, who’d come to clean up the vomit spill. He poured a sack of pink-hued sawdust-like product on the gooey mess and leaned on his broom handle while waiting for it to absorb. He swept the pile into a dustpan, dumped it into a biohazard bag mounted to his cart, and left the area.
As we sat in the makeshift sick ward, my descent into the disease was gradually worsening. My head throbbed in pain, and my body ached with fever. I glanced around at the others in the room. They’d returned their attention to their own interests, and the hum of conversation had resumed. Drainage dripped at the back of my throat, and I coughed. The foul-tasting mucus made me gag. A short line of people standing at a water fountain in the hallway caught my attention. “I’m going to get a drink,” I said, nodding in the direction of the fixture.
“I’m sure that thing’s filthy,” Kyle warned. “I wouldn’t drink from it if I were you.”
“What’s it going to do? Turn me into a zombie?” I wandered over to the fountain, scanning the hallways as I walked. By the time I reached the fountain, the line had grown. I took my place at the end and stood next to a man and woman who introduced themselves as Alice and Wes Barnes. Both, like me, had been infected within the last twenty-four hours. I didn’t say so, but it struck me that both of them were in worse physical shape than I was. At least they had more visible signs of infection than I did, as far as I could tell. Despite offering the pleasantries of an introduction, both of them seemed tense, and Wes put off a strong, angry vibe.
Alice shifted her heavy frame forward a step as the line inched closer to the fountain. She clapped a hand to her face and heaved an impatient sigh. Alice looked to me as if she was in pain as the woman stood there, shifting her weight uneasily from one foot to the other. It appeared that she could only tolerate any standing posture for a short period. The delicate skin beneath her eyes was puffy and dark, and I noticed an angry red patch forming on one temple. Wes’s skin was pale all over. Even his hands were ghostly white, and small dots of sweat beaded his forehead.
“You okay?” I found myself asking the woman, more out of compulsion than anything else. I regretted it as soon as the words escaped my lips. Alice returned a dark sideways glance. “No, damn it. Every joint in my body is killing me.”
“Sorry,” I said. I meant it, but felt stupid for having broached the subject. Of course, Alice wasn’t okay. None of us were.
“Stop being a bitch, Alice,” Wes grumbled. He turned to me. “We’ve been here for several hours, and we’re both drained.”
“Yeah, I get that.” If I hadn’t wanted to wash the foul taste from my mouth so badly, I would have sat back down. The negative energy coming from these two was so stifling I just wanted to get away from it. “Well, at least after you get your injections, you can leave,” I said. It had been an attempt to help them feel better, but Alice let loose a tirade of profanities, unlike anything I’d heard before.
“Woah!” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was trying to—.”
“How long have you been here?” she asked, her fists planted on her hips and her head cocking back and forth in a way that reminded me of a raging hen fighting another one over a worm. “They haven’t told you yet?” she added, without waiting for my response. “They’re not letting us leave here, and worse, those reports they sent out about the vaccines? They weren’t right.”
I felt my face drop, along with my blood pressure. Wes reached out and grabbed my arms before I fell to the floor and steadied me on my feet. My head swam, and my visual field seemed off and tilted to the left.
As my body regained its balance, I stood there, bewildered by what I’d heard, and the fact that I’d apparently almost fainted.
“Yeah, that happens to Alice, too,” Wes said, “but you’re easier to hold up.”
Alice reared back a fleshy arm and swung to slap him, but he raised his hand in time to block it.
“What are you saying?” I asked, ignoring the angry powder keg that threatened to blow up between them. “Why would they tell people they had a vaccine that works when they don’t?”
“Well, they supposedly treated one person who was cured, but they needed more subjects for research. They wanted newly infected people to refine their serum,” Alice explained, holding up her arms and hooking her fingers to make air quotes around the words supposedly, subjects, and refine, the skin above her elbows flapping with emphasis.
“Jesus!” I breathed. “It would be better to commit suicide than be here and be experimented on.” Again, the words had eluded my brain filter before tumbling out of my mouth.
“Shut up!” Wes warned in a harsh whisper. “Don’t ever say an
ything like that in this place. If they hear you, you’ll be put in restraints. We saw that happen to one guy already.” He paused, shifted his stance, and peered down the hallway, before lowering his tone to a barely audible hiss. “The only way you’ll die is by the virus, or if and when they say you’ll die. Got that?”
Good God. What have we done by coming here?
I had to tell Kyle. I’d never felt comfortable with this situation, but the cloak of darkness that fell heavy over my mind was unlike any I’d known. Flashbacks of the safe zone, and that horrible zombie carcass we’d found in the operating room, flickered through my brain. It had been like me once—a person infected with this horrid manufactured virus. They’d chained him or her to a table and operated, experimented. The unthinkable evil was that this person had apparently been conscious to some degree when they’d begun the procedure. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been restrained. The scene had appeared rushed, as if the insane researchers had stopped what they were doing, mid-procedure. I couldn’t help but wonder if the doomed soul had been somewhat conscious, even when they began removing his organs.
Stifling the urge to throw up, I again scanned my surroundings with a new level of scrutiny. There were no visible exterior doors in this wing, and the barred windows that I’d noticed earlier made me wonder if they’d always been that way, or if they’d been modified to keep people from leaving.
I watched the workers moving about and interacting with the patients through jaded eyes and decided I should stay in line to avoid any movement that might appear suspect. I inched closer to the fountain, while taking in details of my surroundings, and realized Wes was probably right. There was too much supervision here for me to attempt suicide, should worse come to worst, and unless they moved us somewhere else, there didn’t seem to be any actual means to accomplish killing myself, not that I’d ever planned it to any degree before now. There were no ledges to jump off. Nothing to hang myself with. I didn’t have enough medical knowledge to know what to take, even if I could access it.
How could we have been so stupid to not have planned for something like this when we were with Verna? An involuntary quiver crawled up my spine at the thought of the fate we almost certainly faced.
A male staffer walked by with a cart full of empty syringes and wheeled it toward a young mother who sat in the corner with a small girl. As they talked, the mother’s face contorted in anguish, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders heaved, and she shifted the toddler in her arms and tightened her grip around the child. The staffer took the girl’s tiny arm in his hand and prepared to draw blood. I couldn’t watch it and turned away. This was horrible. I felt myself stiffen as the child began to wail.
After what felt like hours, I got my drink, swished the infected bile from my throat, and then hurried to Kyle’s side. I leaned in close to his body, threw my arms around his neck and snuggled in close.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said, his hand slipping beneath the ribbing at the waist of my sweatshirt.
“Focus, Kyle. This isn’t a make-out session. It’s serious,” I whispered. “Keep your hands under control and act like you’re just holding me. Squeeze me if anyone comes our way, and don’t react to what I’m about to tell you.”
I felt Kyle freeze mid-breath, as I explained what Alice and Wes had said. The strong shoulder muscles beneath my fingertips hardened with tension as I spoke. The soft warmth of his lips, planting kisses on the top of my head, trailed over my hair and down the side of my head. “We have to get out of here, somehow,” he breathed into my ear.
No shit.
Chapter 8
Huai Li
“You need something, Mr. Rhodes?” Huai Li asked as she entered the CEO’s office, the interior, a stark contrast to the nondescript, sterile functionality of the rest of the building. Rhodes, with an ego as big as his bank account, had hand-picked the furnishings in each of his offices located on military bases and in government buildings across the globe. He sat behind his hand-carved, mahogany replica of the Resolute desk, barely acknowledging Huai Li as she entered.
Huai Li pushed the door closed, and her senses registered the deadened ambiance that engulfed the room as it shut. Per Rhodes’ specifications, the office was sound-proof, fire-proof, and most important to him, bulletproof.
Rhodes sat at his desk and worked behind a computer outfitted with multiple auxiliary monitors. His desktop was littered with printouts of spreadsheets. “Close the door and sit down, Smith,” the man mumbled, his mustache undulating as he spoke. He glared at her from behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with bulky lenses that made his eyes appear bigger than they were. The effect was comical, but Huai Li knew well that no one who knew the man ever equated Marshall Rhodes with humor.
He waved stubby fingers toward a chair. It wasn’t a courtesy.
Huai Li obediently sat down as the CEO continued typing at his computer, making her wait. He’d always been fond of such power games in the years she’d known him, enjoying the control he wielded as the BioGenetics mastermind. The lines of his brow remained crooked in focused annoyance of late, as he’d personally taken the reigns of much of the data analysis after what he grudgingly referred to as the incident at the safe zone. He preferred to leave the daily functions of the country’s financial mainframes to his personally designed algorithms, but the incident had sparked volatile unpredictability in the markets that he couldn’t tolerate.
Huai Li understood that although Rhodes’s attention was on his work, he was enjoying the thought of her sitting here, squirming inside her mind, because she was too scared to move.
The woman used the time to take note, again, of the features in his office. She knew he kept a Sig P226 9mm loaded with 15 rounds. It was likely holstered beneath his jacket, and despite his girth and deceptive frumpiness, he could draw it on her in a heartbeat, if she gave him cause. In this room, he wouldn’t even need the suppressor he kept strapped to the opposite side of his bulbous belly. But he wouldn’t shoot. No, that wasn’t his style. He was a modern version of a 19th-century robber baron, who would capitalize on every aspect of the situation.
Waste not.
He’d use her for his research, as well as entertainment, in the operating room. Like he did to Cohen.
Though it had been only a short time ago, thoughts of Cohen no longer came with the pain most people associated with a spouse’s murder. Grief was an indulgence Huai Li couldn’t afford. Cohen. Her sweet, brilliant research colleague, and love of her life, had stepped across the line just days before the incident.
The woman knew her life was worth nothing to Rhodes, and she had to suck up, grovel, and keep reminding him that he needed her. Her knowledge was her only asset, and she doled it out in bits and pieces to remain alive, like a twisted bastardization of Scheherazade. Unlike that story, Huai Li understood that her own survival was ultimately unlikely. The best she could hope for was death without torture and experimentation.
Behind Rhodes’ desk, beneath the antique Axminster rug, was one of the facility’s four access hatches that led to a vast network of tunnels and underground chambers. It was a veritable underground city of storage units. Many served as subterranean missile silos where guidance and flight systems, engines, and warheads were stored, along with the stockpiles of nerve gas. She’d visited the bunkers a few times in her early days as a BioGenetics intern. If she remembered correctly, most of the sarin had been stored to the north of where she currently sat. The gas had been systematically deactivated and incinerated over the last five decades, per federal and international mandates.
The thought almost gave rise to a snicker. Almost. It had been a stroke of genius that led Rhodes’ grandfather to craft the laws that would rid the world of chemical weapons, but like everything the family and their enlightened colleagues orchestrated, the real motive for the action was far more complicated. Distract the public with an elaborate, plausible cover story while continuing the real work in secret. Over the
decades, the puppet masters and their minions carried out the research that would bring about the current state of affairs, all under the guise of altruistic motives.
Léger de main, Rhodes called it. Sleight of hand. There was a reason that all the allied secret societies studied magic, and it had little to do with rabbits or hats. It was more about furthering their goals in plain sight, harnessing the resources of the working public to fund their enterprises under the pretense of national security.
They were clearing out the laughably inferior chemical weapons stores, while replacing them with something far more productive and profitable. In a best-case scenario, sarin killed. Unfortunately, in Rhodes’s view, sometimes it only maimed, necessitating things like humanitarian aid and reparations. Profit suckers.
The new products provided long-term leverage. They would enable the elite to galvanize their rule over the world and prevent anyone from challenging them in the future. They would accomplish this through strains of designer biochemically engineered viruses, developed explicitly for unique purposes. They were beautiful in their complexity, yet virtually indistinguishable from naturally-occurring infectious agents.
But they weren’t quite ready. The explosion at the depot had been unfortunate, and two variants had been released, revealing in stark detail the work yet needed on the strains. Z180A, intended for general populations, was developed to infect and relegate civilians into servitude. After an initial illness, individuals would recover only a fraction of their former capabilities. Once the fully-developed virus was released, it would create a world of human worker drones that could be trained to perform menial tasks and repetitive jobs necessary to maintain the comfort and convenience of the ruling class. Civilians’ thinking ability would be limited to performing activities needed for their existence, like working, eating, reproducing, and doing what they were told.
The second strain, Z180B, was intended for military use only. The vision for this variant was to develop a force superior in strength and speed, with mental faculties necessary to function on the battlefield, follow orders, and engage in basic communication, but nothing more complex.
The Viral Series (Book 2): Viral Storm Page 12