The Zombie Virus (Book 1) (2 page)

“Hello?” I answered in a sleep deadened
voice, looking over at the lit numerals of the bedside clock. I was
beginning to feel the first stabs of anger rise up within my chest
that someone was calling this early in the morning, two hours
before the alarm was scheduled to sound and start me on my way to
work.

“Steven, it’s Jennifer, how are you
feeling?”

Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Hanson, who held
PhDs in both epidemiology and medicine, was the director of the lab
complex where I worked. A stern, handsome woman, she ran the labs
with a smooth efficiency that reflected her years of service in the
Army’s medical service. When I heard the urgency in her voice I sat
up straighter in bed, instantly alert. “Feeling? I’m fucking tired.
It’s two-thirty in the morning. How am I supposed to be feeling?” I
snapped, wary but still annoyed at being woken so early.

“Good. You need to get in here now. The shit
is hitting the fan.” Again the only emotion carrying through the
line was a sense of urgency.

“What?! Why? What’s going on?” I asked,
looking again at the clock. Fear tickled my stomach like a
fluttering butterfly. As the reasoning centers of my mind started
to process the situation I realized that the Colonel would never
call any of her scientific staff at this hour at home unless
something very serious was afoot. My next immediate thought was
that the labs had been compromised and that something we didn’t
ever want to get out had escaped.

“Turn on the news, Steve. Something happened
last night. A pandemic out of nowhere. I got the call from the CDC
twenty minutes ago and I’m on my way to the lab right now. I’m
calling in all available staff, although I’m not having much
luck.”

I could hear the exasperation in her voice,
but no fear, which calmed me, just a bit.

“Pandemic?” I tasted the word in my mouth. It
was the most terrifying word a microbiologist could utter, but the
calm way she had stated it belayed my alarm.

“You mean an epidemic?” I asked, crawling
across the prone form of my wife, who muttered an unflattering
expletive and pulled the pillow over her head.

“No, Steve. A full blown pandemic is what I’m
hearing. Worldwide by all accounts.” This time I heard a hint of
fear in Jennifer’s voice and felt the butterfly again. I raced
naked across the bedroom to the master bath, flicked on the lights,
and sat down heavily on the edge of the tub to absorb her
words.

“I don’t understand it either,” she
continued. “We just need everyone who is able to get in here so we
can unravel this.”

“Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. “I can be
there in about forty-five minutes.”

“Good. I’m having everyone meet in the Level
1 conference room.” She abruptly hung up the phone.

I sat and listened to the dial tone for a few
seconds before turning off the phone.

Pandemic? That had to be a mistake. A
pandemic did not happen overnight. That was impossible unless… then
a horrible thought occurred to me: bioterrorism. Something we had
been planning for but prayed we would never to have to experience.
Still, a worldwide pandemic happening overnight is something
outside the ability of most nations, maybe even the United
States.

I relieved my bladder and threw on
yesterday’s boxers that were laying on top of the hamper. Running
out into the living room I grabbed up the remote and plopped down
onto the couch, thumbed on the power to the television and switched
to a national news channel.

It was the only story being aired. During the
night, after the celestial fireworks show had finished, people
started falling ill. It was first reported in the countries on the
day side of the planet, while here in the U.S. we slept away
obliviously while a portion of our population sickened. People in
massive numbers were experiencing flu-like symptoms and flooding
hospitals and clinics.

Speculation was running rampant. Most were
blaming Hosteller’s Comet, claiming that some virus was released by
the meteor storms that showered the planet last night. I knew this
was farfetched. The temperatures involved from friction of the
particles hitting our atmosphere would destroy any virus or
bacterium that wasn’t imbedded deeply in a large chunk of space
rock. Even if some foreign organism was in the rock, it was
improbable that it could be released in quantities that could cause
a pandemic, especially as quick as this one seemed to be
hitting.

I spent a few minutes garnering as much
information from the news as I could get before going back into the
bedroom and checking on Holly. I knelt next to the bed and gently
shook her awake. She pushed the pillow off of her face and stared
at me with an icy glare.

“This had better be good,” she cooed coolly,
obviously as agitated as I had been at being woken up so early.
Holly was a pediatrician at the county hospital and was just coming
off of a three day shift. This would have been her first full night
of sleep.

“How do you feel?” I asked, aware that it was
the same question that I had woken to just a short while
earlier.

“Steven, I’m very tired. Go whack off in the
bathroom or wait till this evening. You’re not getting any from me
this early in the morning!” she snarled pulling the covers up over
her head.

I grabbed the sheet and pulled it back down.
“No, Holly. It’s not that! I have to go in to work. Something bad
is happening.” I put my hand to her forehead, relieved at the feel
of her cool skin. She swatted my hand away and sat up, her auburn
hair falling down like a waterfall across her pale breasts.

“How do you feel?” I asked again. “I feel
fine. Why? What’s going on?” her green eyes were now wide with
concern.

“Get dressed,” I told her, “I need to check
on Jeremy.”

“Steve, you’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
She swung her long legs out of the bed while never taking her eyes
off of mine.

“Just get dressed and meet me down in the
living room.”

I trotted out of the bedroom still in my
boxers and went to my son’s room. I quietly opened the door and
slipped inside the dark room. I could hear his steady breathing
coming from his bed. I knelt down beside his shadowed form and felt
his forehead for fever and breathed a sigh of relief when I didn’t
detect any. I silently slipped back out of the room and closed the
door. I rushed back to our bedroom and gathered my clothes together
for the day.

Holly came out of the bathroom in a silk
robe. “Do you want to tell me what’s going on yet?” she opened a
dresser door and pulled out a pair of cotton panties.

“People are falling ill. Hanson is calling us
all into the Facility.”

“What people? What kind of illness?”

“I don’t know, Holly. There are reports of
people all over the globe falling sick with flu-like symptoms.”

A look of realization spread across her face.
“The comet!” she exclaimed.

“I don’t think so. I can’t envision any
disease spreading through a vector like that,” I stated calmly,
sitting down on the edge of the bed to pull on my shoes.

“Some type of toxin maybe?” she asked,
getting dressed at a pace as fast as me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought
of that, but I guess it is a possibility. That’s why they want us
at the Facility.” I stood, went to her, and hugged her close to me.
She hugged me back and I took comfort for a few moments in the
warmth of her body, then held her at arm’s length.

“Jeremy seems to be okay, but keep close tabs
on him.” I bent forward and kissed her, relishing the soft fullness
of her lips. “Stay inside today and don’t go out for anything until
we know what’s going on. I’ll keep you updated from the lab.” I
tried a lame attempt at a smile, “It’ll probably end up being
nothing,” I said, hoping that it was true, but fearful it wasn’t.
She nodded knowingly, not hiding the fear that caused tears to well
up in her eyes.

“Will you be home tonight?” she asked,
already knowing my answer.

“I don’t know, Holly, as soon as I know
anything I’ll call you, okay?”

She nodded again and looked away. “Be
careful, Steven,” she whispered.

“I always am. It will probably turn out to be
nothing.” I tried to be reassuring, even though the butterflies
were swarming in my stomach.

My name is Steven McQuinn. I live with my
wife, Holly, and our ten year old son, Jeremy, on the western shore
of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It’s a beautiful area to raise a
family, with gleaming waterways teeming with aquatic life and
surrounded by abundant farmland and forests. The area we live in is
about an hour south of Washington, D.C. and hosts a mostly
professional suburban population spread out over a myriad of
peninsulas and bays.

I had left the Army as a Major a little over
a year before, chasing the almighty dollar and the better research
opportunities available to a scientist like myself in the civilian
marketplace. Ironically, however, I didn’t escape too far from my
former colleagues. I was offered a position to head my own lab at
an Army facility that conducted Bio-Safety Level 4 (BSL-4) research
and development at a site secreted away in the heart of a naval
base in the southern part of Maryland, sandwiched between the
Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay.

My lab was part of a multiplex of
laboratories which were a satellite arm of Ft. Dietrich’s U.S.
Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases
(USAMRIID) and employed a mix of civilian and Army personnel. I had
been stationed at Ft. Dietrich up until my commission ended and it
was a natural progression for me to slip into the civilian research
world while still having the familiar funding and resources of the
military at my disposal.

This collection of labs which we all referred
to as “The Facility,” was a buried complex of state-of-the-art
infectious disease laboratories. They were rated from Bio-Safety
Level 2, which dealt with bacteria and viruses that pose a moderate
potential hazard to humans – like the viruses that cause dengue
fever or influenza A – through Level 4 where the really nasty stuff
is studied. At any one point in time there are about ninety souls
who work in and around the Facility.

I’m a virologist with a Ph.D. in microbiology
working under AMRIIDs’ Special Pathogens Branch where I specialize
in filoviruses. These are one of those wicked groups of viruses
that cause Viral Hemorrhagic Fever, such as Ebola and Marburg.
These are nasty single strand ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses which
devastate the human body by destroying the vascular system and the
body’s ability to repair itself. They are highly infectious. We
were trying to find ways to combat this family of viruses. So far
without much success.

The work could be tedious and hazardous, but
also exhilarating and exciting. It mostly involved endless hours in
the lab, although occasionally my team and I had to travel to
exotic locales when outbreaks occurred. Okay, I’m lying – they were
mostly shitholes in the armpits of the world.

On that morning as I drove in to work with my
hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles
showed white, I didn’t know it yet, but this was the day the world
as I knew it was ending.

Let me digress a bit…

It had been a hot and muggy July so far and
the news had been dominated by the upcoming passage of Hosteller’s
Comet. The comet had become visible in our night sky weeks ago as a
faint star-like object that seemed to stay just out of focus. As
the weeks passed, it grew in size and prominence in our
light-polluted heaven and now was even shining through the azure
blue of our daytime sky like a long, diffuse cloud.

The economy, the unrest in the world, all
else took a back seat to this spectacular event that we were
witnessing. It wasn’t a huge comet as comets are measured, however,
it was going to pass close, really close. Of course, all the
doomers were out predicting the end of the world. I reckon many of
them were Larry Niven fans.

I never bought into any of the doomsday
scenarios that seemed to pop up at least once a decade, even after
the discovery of this icy ball that was hurtling toward us at close
to a million kilometers per hour.

We were what some people called preppers,
although for other reasons. After an ice storm knocked out power
for a week I was determined to not have my family go through all
the hassle again of empty grocery store shelves, long gas lines,
and waiting for water and food handouts at the local fire
department. We started amassing three weeks’ worth of food and
supplies. That soon turned into about six months’ worth as my
policy of first in-first out and double replacement began netting
results. My wife always thought I was on the edge of insanity with
my disaster preparations, however, she tolerated it like a loving
wife will for most of a husband’s quirks.

Holly really started buying into the
preparedness genre after the comet dominated the news and our sky,
you know, just in case.

We were also a family of gun enthusiasts. For
a long time we had collected weapons and become proficient in their
use and maintenance. We attended several defensive and tactical
courses for both handguns and carbines and shot in the monthly
pistol and rifle matches at our range over the years before
Hosteller’s Comet made its appearance. Our gun enthusiasm could be
interpreted by some from the anti-gun camp as fanaticism and our
collections as arsenals, then again their unfounded fears of
inanimate objects seemed to border more on the edge of a mental
illness to me than me and my family punching holes in paper once a
week – not that any of that would matter if that conglomeration of
ice and rock were to hit us.

Unlike the Niven novel, Lucifer’s Hammer,
NASA knew exactly what the orbit of this new comet was and exactly
where it would pass in relationship to the Earth. They had
determined that the orbital period of this long-period comet was
about 92,000 years. They weren’t sure if this was its first pass,
having relatively recently been ejected from the Oort cloud at the
outer reaches of our solar system, or if it had been in orbit for
millennia, having made possibly multiple passes since the birth of
this planet.