The Doomsday Infection (9 page)

He reeled back on
his heels, and looked at Sophie pleadingly. “Help me . . . please.”

“Get in the jeep. We must get to the compound,” the sergeant told him.

“There’s nothing you can do for me. We were told that in orientation.” He wiped the black-colored blood from his nostrils. Sophie noticed his skin getting darker. She calculated that he would not make it as far as the compound.

The sergeant turned to the soldier. “Get in the jeep, soldier. Do not disobey me again.”

“Fuck you, Serge. I’m staying here.”

“Negative, soldier. You’ll infect anyone you come into contact with.”

The solider stood and stared out his superior challengingly. “So what? I don’t give a flying fuck about them.” He glared, then turned on his heels and walked in the opposite direction.

“I can’t let you do it, soldier, do not disobey me.  Come back, halt or I
will
shoot.”

Sophie stared in disbelief as the sergeant raised his rifle and she yelled. “What a
re you doing?” She moved into his line-of-sight stopping him in his tracks.

“I’m following my orders, doctor. Stand aside.” He re-aimed, and shot.

Sophie starred open-mouthed as the bullet hit between the soldier’s shoulder blades; and exited his rib cage in a plume of blackish blood. She watched in horror, as the driver dropped to his knees, turned and caught her eye, blood bubbled from his mouth, his eyed registered total surprise. He tried to stand, wobbled, then flopped face first into the dirt.

CHAPTER 9

Sh
e steeled herself and tried to match the sergeant’s defiant glare. “I’ll report you for murder, when we reach the compound,” she declared, feeling her

self tremble with rage as she spoke.

“I followed orders, ma’am, nothing more, nothing less,” he said matter-of-factly.

“What orders?” she asked.

“For your information southern Florida is under martial law, and I have the authority to shoot on sight if I deem it necessary.”

“Oh yeah, sure, since when?” she scoffed.

He checked his wristwatch. “Since about thirty minutes ago.” He smiled mockingly, watching her face drop, taking in the information. “Now,” he said, indicating the vehicle, “Get back in the fucking jeep . . . ma’am.”

15.30 PM

General Malloy prowled the war room deep in the heart of the Pentagon. At last, finally the moment he’d been waiting his entire life
for - martial law. Now, he’d be able to get the American people under control. To make the country great again, like it had been when he was a boy.

He remembered growing up in Alabama, and how his chest used to burst with pride when his parents acquired some new toy, be it a brand new Cadillac, boat, or camper van, flaunting their wealth and living the American dream. He and his elder brother, who he utterly adore
d, wanted for nothing. They regularly had new clothes, no hand-me-downs for Jack or his brother. They were always turned out smartly, kept their hair short and tidy, and had the latest must-have toys. Same with the other kids in the neighborhood, they had played in little league baseball and any sport they could discover.

Then
desegregation was pushed through by the numb-nuts in Washington, where the lily-livered liberals forced their Northern standards upon them, what did they know? The South had gotten along for several centuries doing things their own way. They had stood up to them, until they sent in the National Guard to safeguard passage for the black kids to attend
his
school. He could remember even as an infant in the 1960s as the first black faces entered the school. Then as predicted, not so long after that they moved into the neighborhood and then the rot set in, first the graffiti, then stolen cars, and then burglaries.

Fifty plus years later and he still felt the slow toxic drip of the mixing o
f the races, which he thought patently obvious, would not work. It would weaken American blood and the American race. He’d noticed over the years that each new in-take of raw recruits were inferior to the last, as the American gene pool mixed and diluted.

Since then, there had been feminism and worse, far worse, as part of some mad, touchy-feely population experiment, they had even had a black
President. Jesus H. Christ. A black President! Truly, the pinnacle of everything that was wrong with the once great country.

His pappy had never been the same since his elder brother died in Vietnam, one of the last, while they were evacuating from the American embassy. His father had collapsed and never fully recovered, falling into a gradual and irreversible
decline. Young Jack had been mortified to hear of his brother’s death in Vietnam, the very day he was due back home. To die was bad enough, but for his brother to die on the last day of the conflict, was too cruel for them to suffer as a family.

Jack had signed up to join the same regiment as soon as
he was able and had taken to the military life like a duck to water. He loved the discipline, the smartness, the order of life. He needed the rules and regulations to live by and rocketed up through the ranks to his current position, a four star general. He used every ounce of his forceful nature to make the Joint Chiefs of Staff quake in their boots and as he prowled around the enormous mahogany conference table in the war room, he had the floor and he had their attention.

Most were riveted, listening to his innovative plans and applauded his no nonsense approach to the impending disaster, his declaring of martial law and more importantly passing a law that plague carriers and objectors disobeying the military’s commands would be shot. No argument, no discussions, they would be shot dead
and that’s the end of it. The Vice President had given him complete freedom to solve the Florida problem.

General Malloy couldn’t bring himself to utter the words, the Black Death, or Bubonic Plague. It was too archaic
, to have the power to bring Florida to its knees. It had to be a hi-tech virus, man-made in a laboratory, just as he knew there would be an enemy foreign power behind the attack, and he was going to make them pay for that. He smiled to himself; he had recently received information that they had a lead in that direction.

“Finally,” he said to the expectant crowd of military men and women. “We have information about the suspected terrorists. They were seen escaping the island on a Jet Ski. These terrorists obviously have an antidote as they walked freely amongst the dying. It also appears they harpooned a man in their escape to freedom.” He waited for the information to sink in. He had their attention and he loved it. “A naval vessel tracked them, however the fugitives gave them the slip, but they are still in the exclusion zone and rest
assured that we will track them down like the animals they clearly are. As of now they are public enemy number one.”

“Do we know who they are, General Malloy?”

“There is a woman of foreign appearance, possibly middle-eastern and she’s accompanied by a Caucasian man. We’ve managed to pull off some images from the hospital CCTV which seems to be the epicenter of the chemical attack.”

“Can we see them?”

“We’ve had the images beefed up and if you watch those screens these are the faces that are being beamed live to our troops in Florida to assist in there capture.” Slowly from the top of the screen, a series of lines whizzed across the screen until there were two grainy photographic images of Sophie, and Luke.

CHAPTER 10

21:15 PM

Luke sat in the left hand seat, the pilot’s seat, in the cockpit of the Boeing 777, flight 416 returning to Miami. The aircraft flew on automatic pilot on a heading back to Miami International. The enormous craft’s computers in theory could land the airplane. Luke doubted that the American public were ready for that innovation yet, they like he, needed the reassuring announcements of a calm, authoritative captain, and they would happily put they lives in his hands and not think about it again for a few hours until they were safely back on
terra firma
. He could not imagine many folk brave enough to fly on a pilotless airplane flown by computers, although the military had used pilotless spy-planes and drones for years, on a lesser scale but the same principle. No, Luke knew his major problem would be on the final approach and he would need to start preparing shortly.

Sheila Stone the chief flight attendant sat in the co-pilot’s seat, and murmured encouragement, altho
ugh Luke could tell that she was rapidly succumbing to the virus. The Asian man sat strapped into the rumble seat behind him.

“You can do this, Luke,” she said. “I have faith in you,” Sheila encouraged.

“Yeah I’ll give it a go,” he shrugged nonchalantly. “How hard can it be?”

Sheila chuckled, which caused her to spit up a mouthful of blood.

“We’ll land in Moscow within the hour.”

“Moscow!” the Asian man said in alarm.

“He’s teasing,” said Sheila. “A little cockpit humor.”

“I do not care for this sort of joke,” said the Asian man.

“I mean,” continued Luke. “It’s like a car with an up and down stick.” He smirked.

The Asian man eyed him worryingly. “I thought you were telling me earlier that you flew?”

“I do fly - hang-gliders.” He noticed the Asian man’s face drop. “It’s the same principle, left, right, up and down, finding thermals. Oh, and I did have one flying lesson in a Piper Cherokee.”

“
One lesson! We are going to die. We are in the hands of a lunatic,” the Asian muttered. “One lesson?” he then mumbled a silent prayer.

The radi
o crackled into life. “This is Air Traffic Control. Flight 416 please respond?”

Luke smiled inwardly at his early efforts to get air traffic control to believe that a civilian was flying the airplane and that the
pilot and crew were dead.

Sheila took charge of the radio. “Flight 416 responding, go ahead.”

“We’re going to need you to adjust some controls, and get used to the feel of the airplane.” Luke followed the instructions and the aircraft started to slow, and consequently lowered in the sky.

“Stand by, 41
6 . . . we need to get the sick to hospital. Can you estimate the number of the dead and dying?”

Sheila answered.
“Approximately three hundred.”

“Could you repeat that flight 416?” asked the air traffic controller.

“That’s three, zero, zero, passengers and crew dead. That’s three hundred,” she said. “Maybe more.”

“OK, you have priority. Runway 27 has been cleared for you. However we do have a problem, they is another flight right in front of you. You’re both on the same heading, you have priority, but we have lost radio contact with them. We have them on radar and you are practically on top of each other.”

Luke glanced from the cockpit, scanning the dark outside but could not detect the nearby hazardous airplane. “Negative - nothing in sight.”

“We’ll keep you informed. What is your speed and altitude?”

Luke scanned the relevant dials. “Altitude three hundred feet. Airspeed two hundred knots.”

“You’re flight instructions will follow shortly. The autopilot will bring you in. You’re doing just fine, flight 416. These planes genuinely do fly themselves, you know. Sit tight and we’ll be talking again shortly.”

Sheila pointed to the lights of the Miami skyline in the distance giving him comfort, he was tantalizingly close to home, and smiled, finally having a glimmer of hope, when he saw a massive ball of flames as the preceding airline crashed into the sea several miles short of the city.

Sheila cried
out in alarm, and Luke patted the back of her hand, then as the ATC read out instructions, he made the corresponding procedures and acknowledged the action with them. He stared dumbfounded at the burning wreck, unable to speak.

The Asian man cleared his throat, and tapped a monitor, “I’ve noticed that since they
have changed our altitude that we are veering off the pre-arranged flight path to the airport.” Luke glanced at the monitor and saw that the diagram of the aircraft was now far lower than the predetermined course that would safely land them at the airport. The Asian man nervously asked, “You don’t think . . . ?” He pointed at the burning wreck ahead, unable to vocalize his thoughts fully.

Sheila finished the question. “. . . That they would deliberately ditch us into the ocean, rather than have us crash into any of the tower blocks of downtown Miami?” She arched an eyebrow. “Hmm, let me see, an airplane with three survivors, or the likelihood that we take out a large section of downtown Miami?” she said sardonically.
“What do you think, Luke?”

H
e answered by pushing forward on the thrusters and the engines responded smoothly, the nose of the craft lifted as they gained height.

The
ATC were on it in a flash. “Flight 416 we’ve noted a difference in your altitude. Please respond?”

Sheila went to acknowledge, when Luke cut her off. “I don’t think so, do you?”

22:00 PM

The heat sapped Sophie’s energy. She could only imagine how the sergeant was coping in his hazmat suit.

“What else?” asked the sergeant as the jeep zipped along the freeway unhindered as they had the entire northbound freeway to themselves.

“Well,” she started, thinking best to keep the murdering armed thug busy. “With the Black Death, the symptoms include high fever, aching limbs, darkening of the skin, like we saw with your colleague, swelling of the lymph nodes, swelling of the glands in the neck, under the armpits and around the groin. Buboes develop and burst, you get ring like marks on the skin, then the blood coagulates, and of course towards the end even urine can thicken and even turn black.”

“Sweet Jesus . . .” he muttered under his breath.

As Sophie watched the convoy of military vehicles heading in the opposite direction, she thought back to how the original plague had wiped out entire villages overnight. How incredible, she thought, that a village population would retire for the night relatively healthy, maybe the odd sniffle or sneeze, come morning they would all be dead. The law at the time being if there was a known infection in the household the citizens were to self-quarantine and mark their door with a red cross to warn neighbors of their plight and potentially avoid the same fate. However, the contagion was too strong, and the ever-present black rat spread the disease from house to house, as the bacterium
Yesinia Pestis
was present in the fleas upon their backs and in turn infected the human occupants. London of the mid 1600s suffered especially badly; the timber framed Tudor houses were made of wattle, a mixture of straw and manure, easy for rats or fleas to pass through into the jammed together houses.

Sanitation in London city was a trough carrying effluence running down the center of the street, where
residents would throw their slops; chamber pots full of urine and excrement, from the upper story overhang, often splashing the pedestrians below. The Tudor architecture did not help, with the overhang, often only at arms’ reach from their opposite neighbor. The inhabitants would keep their livestock inside their homes with them; the horses, donkeys, and sometimes pigs, were stabled below on the ground floor, their straw a perfect breeding ground for the numerous rats.

The city of London employed folk to collect the diseased corpses on handcart
s, they would ring a bell and holler the notorious chant. “Bring out your dead!” Where the residents, should they be fortunate enough to have survived the night, would pay six-pence to the collector, gladly, to distance themselves from the virus-ridden corpse.

Nevertheless, whatever measures the elders took the death toll kept rising. The municipal cemeteries could no longer cope and with the bodies mounting the elders commissioned the digging of mass graves outside the city wall
s, where the carcasses were buried
en masse
, with no time for the sensitivities of a proper burial for the recently bereaved to attend.

However, even these mass pits could not cope, as thousands upon thousands died each night. Eventually the plague pits could not cope and they would dump the corpses in a heap outside the city walls. The piles grew so high that highwaymen could hide behind them before leaping out on the few travelers brave enough to venture from the city only to be robbed, by a villain with a cry of; “Stand and deliver!”

“Ma’am,” said the sergeant bringing Sophie back to the present, “Why is it spreading so fast?”

“It’s interesting, actually, because I think we are also dealing with a new strain made up partly from a
septicemic plague which attacks the blood and pneumonic, which attacks the lungs, which is particularly worrying as pneumonic makes the virus airborne.”

“These buboes, you mentioned, the swellings, what happens to them?” he asked her timidly.

“They burst and then death follows swiftly . . . why?” However, his violent sneeze answered the question, and she regarded him with wide-eyed terror.

“Aw, fuck, one has just burst under my arm. I’ve got it!” He yanked on the brake and rested his head on the steering wheel. “Why me?”

“Did you remove your helmet?” she asked, horrified to be so close to a victim, yet still feeling sorry for him.

“Briefly, at the rest-stop. These suits are so damned hot and what with the freak weather we’ve been having, I was boiling.” His shoulders shook as he cried in self-pity.

“Let’s get you to the compound they’ll surely help,” Sophie suggested.

He removed his helmet and looked at his reflection in the side-view mirror. “
Dammit, look!” he screamed. “I’m turning black!”

She regarded him sadly, not knowing how to comfort the dying man.  She patted his hand but it felt like a useless gesture.

“Level with me, doc, how long have I got?”

“It’s impossible to say,” she answered weakly.

“Days, hours, minutes? Please, the truth.”

“Each person is different, but I would say a few hours. I’m sorry . . . .”

He pulled himself together. “Ma’am you must continue to the President’s summer residence. It’s imperative to the nation. You can drive. The GPS will take you right to the door.” He handed her the papers. “Show these documents to the guards, you’ll have no trouble.” He flicked a brisk salute.

“Are you not coming?” she asked worried for her safety.

“I feel I might be a hindrance on this mission, ma’am.” He handed her his sidearm, “I’ll keep the rifle. You take the pistol. Do you know how to use it?” She shook her head. “Well, it’s easy enough, I’ve taken off the safety, anyone gives you any trouble, aim at the center of their body mass.” He placed his hand on his chest. “Here, and pull the trigger.”

She started the engine without any further argument. “Good luck.”

“Doctor, is it going to hurt . . . I mean, more than it already does, because, you know.” He indicated his rifle. “If it’s going to be agony, then. . .” He mimed shooting himself in the mouth.

She weighed up telling him the truth or not and thought there had been enough lying. “I won’t lie to you, the pain will be unbearable.”

“Thank you for being so candid. Is there -” He sneezed violently and black blood gushed from both nostrils. “Goddamn it. Is there anything else I should look out for?”

Again, she wrestled with her conscience. “Does your skin feel tight anywhere?”

“It does, now that you mention it, my cheeks feel tight. Why?”

“It can rip open . . . while you’re still alive.”

As she spoke, he rubbed his hand against his cheek causing the fragile skin to tear. He screamed in agony as the torn skin exposed the muscle and bone below. He doubled over in pain and vomited a puddle of black-colored vomit.

She watched in open-mouthed horror as his other cheek slowly tore open. He screeched and scrambled with his rifle, but no matter what he tried, the barrel was too long to enter his mouth. “Shoot me!” he yelled at her.

She turned the trembling pistol towards the soldier who lay prone on the street. “Do it,” he begged, then convulsed, sneezing black blood.

She pointed the gun at him, but could not pull the trigger. “I, I . . . can’t.” she trembled.

He rose up on his knees, and pointed at his heart. “Aim here. You must.” He howled in tortured pain. “
Please
.”

She pointed the gun at him in a two-handed grip, but once more she turned away unable to take a human life no matter how much pain they were in. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.”