Backwoods (25 page)

The screamer was fast, impossibly so, and
Andrew stumbled to his feet, snatching the fallen pistol off the
floor. Though Moore cut a frantic, zig-zagging path down the hall,
the creature stayed straight on course, bee-lining for him, and
when Andrew squeezed the trigger, the bullet plowed into the meat
of its shoulder, spinning it wildly, knocking it off its feet.

In a flash, it was upright again, whirling
about and charging back at Andrew, using its deformed hands and
feet to break into a wide, frenzied gallop. Andrew staggered
backward, keeping the gun raised.

“Shoot the heart,” Moore cried out, and when
the screamer leaped at Andrew, hands outstretched, it left its
upper torso a wide-open, vulnerably exposed target. Andrew’s index
finger flexed inward, and again, the pistol bucked against his
palm. This time, when the bullet dropped the creature, it stayed
down.

“Jesus,” Andrew whispered, shuddering as he
stumbled back into the wall for support. He couldn’t bring himself
to lower the gun and stood there, arms outstretched, shaking like a
leaf.

“Daddy!” Alice flew down the hallway into
Moore’s arms.

He scooped her up, letting her legs lock
around his waist, her arms around his neck as he hoisted her to his
chest. Looking past the tangled mess of her hair, he said to
Andrew, “Did you get it this time?”

Limping forward, cautious, Andrew prodded the
fallen screamer with his foot, turning it onto its back. He could
see the bullet’s point of impact left of the sternum, the
putty-colored flesh puckered in and peeled back around the sunken,
bloody crater.

“Yeah.” At last, his arms drooped and he
turned, meeting Moore’s gaze. “I got it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“We need to keep moving,” Moore said grimly.
Obviously not trusting Andrew at his word this time, he’d checked
out the dead screamer personally, satisfying himself that the
nine-millimeter slug had indeed punctured its heart. Standing, he
wiped his hands on his pant legs, then reached for Alice.

“What the hell was that?” Andrew asked. “You
know, don’t you?”

Moore didn’t answer, but when he tried to
brush past Andrew, hauling Alice in tow, Andrew caught him by the
shoulder and shoved him back against the nearest wall. “What was
that thing?” he demanded again. “Was it one of the soldiers like
O’Malley?”

Moore tried unsuccessfully to shrug away.
“It’s part of what’s left of Alpha squadron.”

It took Andrew a moment to remember. “The
ones Prendick sent home? The ones with Rocky Mountain spotted
fever?”

Moore nodded. “They weren’t sent anywhere.
They were the first test subjects.”

At these words,
test subjects
, Andrew
felt his skin crawl uneasily. “For what?”

Moore didn’t respond, his brows narrowing
stubbornly, and Andrew pushed him into the wall again. “Answer me,”
he snapped. “Whatever happened to O’Malley, is that what happened
to those poor sons of bitches, too? What did you do to them?”

“It’s complicated,” Moore said.

Andrew shoved the gun into his face. “Try
me.”

“Do you know anything about
bioengineering?”

“No. Try me anyway.”

Moore sighed. “They were infected with a
retrovirus, a specific, synthesized microorganism that can imprint
its own genetic sequencing into a foreign cell, transforming that
cell into one that’s like the virus. It’s a complete
transformation, erasing whatever genetic code it’s replacing and
proliferating until the entire host organism is overrun.”

“You mean a
germ
did that?” Andrew
asked, pointing with the barrel of the nine-millimeter at the dead
screamer.

Moore awarded him a glance that suggested he
felt like he was trying to teach one of his chimps or Siamangs to
play Candyland. “A highly specialized, man-made germ,” he replied.
“One that affects only a specifically targeted segment of
susceptible hosts.”

Between you and me, this is the strangest
assignment I’ve ever had.

Dani had told Andrew this and her words came
to his mind now.

We’re all a hodge-podge of different units,
different companies, different regiments. I didn’t know any of
these guys up until two months ago when we all got here.

“The soldiers,” he said. “That’s why they all
came from different units, why there are so few of them. You’re
saying they were hand-picked to be here.”

“From their medical records, yes.” Moore
nodded. “They were each identified as a potential host.”

A host.
The term was cold, brittle,
callous.
Expendable,
Andrew thought.
It sounds like
something expendable.

“Why them?” Unspoken but even more desperate,
from inside his mind:
Why Dani?

“Because,” Moore said. “According to their
medical records, none of them have ever been exposed to
human-specific
varicella zoster
virus. Chickenpox.”

Andrew blinked, surprised and bewildered.
“You’re kidding, right? You made some kind of mutant form of
chickenpox?”
This sounded as asinine and preposterous as
Suzette’s assertion O’Malley had been stricken by some kind of side
effect from strep throat.

“No,” Moore said. “But what I made shares
similar enough properties that if introduced into a subject who has
been exposed to varicella or its vaccine, they won’t be infected.
Which, for the record, does not include you.”

Startled, Andrew blinked. “What? How do you
know if I’ve had chickenpox or not?”

Moore smirked. “Because Prendick let you
live. You can’t be naïve enough to believe that he’d have let you
survive even a night at this compound if there wasn’t some reason
for it, something in it for him. There’s a fairly simple blood test
that shows whether or not your body has the
varicella
antigens, a type of immunological memory cell, you could say, that
helps prevent future infections. And if you’d tested positive for
those antigens, Prendick would have shot you himself.”

Suzette had drawn a blood sample from him on
his first night at the facility. He hadn’t understood why at the
time but it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask.

Then he remembered something, a flash of
childhood memory, his mother taking him to a neighbor’s house for a
party.

“Whose birthday is it?” he’d asked his
sister.

“No one’s,” Beth had answered. “It’s a
chickenpox party. Billy Cramer’s got it and they think you’ll catch
it, too. Then you won’t have to worry about it later.”

But although Andrew had spent the afternoon
playing with Billy and the rest of his friends, he hadn’t caught
chickenpox. In fact, he’d made it through at least two such parties
in his youth unscathed and had never been infected.

Which means I could still get it.
Horrified, he looked down at his shirt, splattered with virus-laden
gore.
Chickenpox spreads through contact.

“Don’t worry.” Moore made a chuffing sound,
dismissive and derisive. As if reading Andrew’s mind, or at least,
the stricken expression on his face, he said, “I specifically
engineered the strain to control its communicability. You can only
be infected when it’s directly injected into the cerebrospinal
fluid or cranial sinuses.”

“You were going to do that to me?” Andrew
asked. “Make me one of those things, too?”

“Do you have any idea how rare it is for an
adult in this day and age to have had no exposure to either the
varicella virus or its vaccine?” Moore asked, again with a smug
sort of glance that suggested he thought Andrew wouldn’t have much
of an idea about anything. “You, Mister Braddock, are among a very
select tier of the American population, one of only five percent in
the entire country.”

And of all the backwoods in all the world
where I could’ve run my damn Jeep off the road, I wind up in this
one,
Andrew thought.
Lucky me.

“If I’m so rare, why would the government
want a weapons-grade chickenpox virus?” he asked. “You said if
someone’s had it or been vaccinated, they can’t catch your
bug.”

“Because it’s the
host
that’s the
weapon, not the virus itself.”

Alice uttered a small, birdlike cry. They’d
been walking past a room in which the door had been left standing
ajar, and as Andrew followed her horrified gaze, he recognized the
rows of animal cages lining the walls. Now those cages lay tossed
and scattered, the pale tile floor splattered and stained with
something dark.

“Alice,” Moore exclaimed as the girl darted
away from them and into the room.

“Alice!” Andrew shoved past Moore and hurried
after her, skittering to a halt just past the doorway. It looked
like an F-5 tornado had ripped through the chamber. The door hadn’t
been pushed open as much as plowed
through,
and listed now
on its hinges, the metal crumpled inward with deep pock marks and
craters. Animal crates had been tossed about with haphazard
brutality, the sides dented and battered, the metal grates twisted
and torn loose of their moorings. The monkeys and Siamangs that had
been kept inside were all dead, some little more than bloody
entrails or limbs left scattered across the floor.

Alice, meanwhile, had raced across the room.
When she poked her head into the playroom, she shrank back from the
doorway with another wounded cry, then rushed inside.

Lucy,
Andrew realized.

Alice had found the Siamang lying half-way
beneath the table at which the three of them had played Candyland.
Alice had fallen onto her knees, folding herself over the lifeless
primate.

There were no emergency lights in the
playroom, the only illumination coming from the dim recessed bulbs
in the storage area beyond, and it wasn’t until Andrew drew near
that he saw what was left of Lucy. Mangled almost beyond
recognition, her arms and legs had been torn loose from their
sockets, her gut torn open, her face battered and bloodied.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He went to Alice,
kneeling beside her.

“They killed her,” she said, stunned.
“Lucy…she’s dead.”

Something had attracted the screamers to that
store room. They had either heard the monkeys or smelled them
inside.
Something,
Andrew thought.
They knew they were
here and they bashed their way through the locked door to get
them.

Oh, God, what if they’ve done the same thing
to Dani?

****

“Why does the government want things like the
screamers?” Andrew asked Moore. He’d thought that Alice would weep
with the discovery of Lucy’s remains, but instead, the girl had
simply sat on the floor beside the dead Siamang, her eyes distant
and vacant as her mind had slipped into whatever fugue-like cocoon
her autism sometimes allowed her. “You said your virus made the
hosts the weapons. What did you mean?”

“It’s altered their DNA,” Moore replied.
Unlike Alice, he seemed unmoved by the carnage as he surveyed the
playroom. Moving idly, he’d started picking up fallen books and
game boards, placing them back on bookshelves or countertops.
“You’ve seen it for yourself. They’re faster now, stronger, more
resilient. The virus allows them to produce growth hormones that
facilitate healing more quickly, making them relatively impervious.
The limbic system in their brains have been enhanced, so their
natural aggression levels have been heightened, intensified.
They’re tough as nails and meaner than hell. They are, in essence,
super-soldiers.”

“Not too super,” Andrew remarked. “O’Malley
was blind. Those tumors on his face, they’d grown over his eyes.
That one in the hallway, its head was being covered up, too.”

“A human’s immune system can fight off a
viral infection, but only if it can interrupt the virus’s
reproductive cycle,” Moore said. “If allowed to replicate itself, a
virus can overtake its host. That’s what happened to the men in
Alpha squad. They were given too much of the retrovirus too
quickly. Instead of enhancing their physiology, it overwhelmed
them.”

“It’s made them monsters,” Andrew said.
“You
made them that way.”

“Not me.” Moore glanced at him, seeming
surprised by the accusation, if not somewhat stiffly offended. “It
was Prendick’s call to administer the higher doses. I tried to warn
him of the side effects, the risks involved, but he was impatient.
He didn’t want a gradual transformation. The United States
government is a results-oriented organization, that’s what he told
me. And he wanted to give them results. He wouldn’t listen to
reason, not from me or Lieutenant Carter, not from anyone.”

“Carter?” Andrew said. Dani had told him the
lieutenant had been sent home shortly after Alpha squadron,
suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Except Alpha squad
didn’t really have Rocky Mountain spotted fever,
he thought.
“Did he become one, too?” he asked. “One of the screamers?”

At first, because Moore remained silent,
Andrew thought he wouldn’t respond, but at length, he sighed
heavily. “He threatened to go above Prendick’s head, to report
Prendick trying to speed up the testing timeframe. Prendick turned
the Alpha squad loose on him in the woods. Have you ever seen a
wolf pack cull their prey? They separate the weak or sickly deer
from its herd. Then they keep upwind of it, tracking it by its
scent, before splitting up and chasing it until they exhaust it.
When it’s beyond the point of resistance, they attack together, a
collaborative effort.”

The corpse in the woods,
Andrew
realized, because at the time, he’d seen a rank insignia affixed to
the tattered remnants of its uniform.
A silver bar, a First
Lieutenant’s insignia.

“They killed him,” he said and Moore nodded
grimly. “The screamers, Alpha squadron. They chased him into a
snare trap, then once he was hanging there, helpless, they killed
him.”