The Zombie Virus (Book 2): The Children of the Damned (10 page)

“Over here!” he called out over his shoulder.
The man then spoke briefly into a small microphone that wrapped
around from his right ear.

The man had a tangle of curly dark hair
starting to show some gray at the temples and a strong, muscular
face that was black as coal. A dark beard hid the lower half of his
face and gave him a menacing look, yet his bright brown eyes held a
friendly glint in them. He was dressed entirely in Army camouflage
complete with a reverse U.S. flag patch and Virginia Army National
Guard patch on his shoulder; a nametape that read ‘Shavers’ was on
his right breast. His shoulder chevron’s proclaimed him to be a
First Sergeant, while his partner’s indicated a Sergeant. The other
man came over beside him. He was a head shorter with a receding
hairline of thin blond strands. Although he was shorter than the
tall man he seemed to be as wide as Jeremy was tall. His crooked
nose and patchy, sparse red-blond beard covering a wide, protruding
square chin made him look even more intimidating than his partner.
His nametape read ‘Heinlich’.

“You okay?” the first man asked Jeremy.

“Uh-huh,” he answered timidly. “Are you here
to save me?”

“I’m not sure you needed saving,” the shorter
man said in a gravelly voice as he admired the large pile of dead.
“Looks like it was the crazies that needed savin’ from you.”

“Boy, you stay there quietly while we clear
the rest of this floor. We’ll be right back,” the black man said
while pointing his finger at Jeremy.

Within a minute both men were back and
looking slightly more relaxed.

“How many are with you boy?” the black man
asked.

“It’s just me and my dog, Jumper.”

“You did this all yourself?” the shorter man
inquired.

Jeremy nodded. “Yeah, but I was almost out of
ammo. You guys showed up in the nick of time.”

“How old are you, boy?” asked the tall man in
a deep friendly voice.

“I’m ten. My name’s Jeremy.”

“Amazing,” the shorter man remarked. “Well,
First Sergeant, let’s get Jeremy out of there.” He wrapped a gloved
hand around the ankle of the dead Loony boy and pulled him off the
pile. Within minutes the two men had the stairway clear enough that
Jeremy could walk over the remaining dead bodies. He ran up to the
short, wide man who was standing closest to him and hugged him
fiercely. The man reluctantly hugged him back with an amused smile
playing across his face.

“Enough touchy-feely. We need to get you into
the Stryker and get the hell out of here before the bigger mobs
show up.” The tall man motioned toward the door.

Out front the Stryker sat idling noisily. The
bodies of Loonies lay everywhere, twisted, crushed, or shot to
pieces. Many were piled in heaps two or three thick. The man with
the SAW had climbed on to the top deck while Shavers was boots on
the ground and he gave the First Sergeant a nod when he exited the
house with the boy, then continued scanning the area around them
with the gun’s heavy barrel. The blonde girl stood at the rear
corner of the vehicle’s lowered troop door with her weapon up
guarding the entrance. She briefly flashed a smile at Jeremy as
they approached. The short wide man deftly climbed up the side of
the Stryker and assumed a position on the top deck next to the SAW
gunner while Shavers directed the boy and the dog around to the
back of the large machine. They walked up the ramp into the
vehicle’s inner sanctum where Shavers had to bend down nearly
double once inside. The ceiling was low enough that even Jeremy had
to crouch down a little.

“First Sergeant?” another ACU clad man
standing on the ramp inquired of the tall man. His face was covered
with a fiery red beard and he wore a headset that was connected to
the interior of the vehicle with a long coil of wire.

“Let’s get her buttoned up and get back to
base. We’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest and all hell will be
coming down on this sector. We’ll have to re-plan this operation
for another day.” He put a large hand on Jeremy’s shoulder
directing him to sit on one of the side benches. Jeremy shrugged
out of his pack, although kept his empty AR pistol slung tight
against his chest. The dog jumped up on the bench and lay down next
to him. “This here young man’s name is Jeremy and that’s his dog
Jumper. He was holding his own in that house,” Shavers said with a
hint of admiration.

He knelt down so his commanding eyes were
level with Jeremy’s. “You sit tight and we’ll get you somewhere
safe. Anything you need you just ask one of my men.” He stood up to
his stooped position again. “As for introductions, we’ll go through
that back at base. We need to get rolling ASAP.” He left Jeremy and
shuffled bent-over to the front of the Stryker where he said
something through the hatch to the men on the top deck. One of the
men’s legs dropped through the hatch where he planted his feet on
the bench beneath him, his upper body hidden from view out the
hatch. First Sergeant Shavers glided into the commander’s seat on
the starboard side of the vehicle, slid a pair of lightweight
headphones over his ears, and spoke into the attached microphone
while his hands danced over the controls and switches, reactivating
the remote controlled M2 on the deck above him.

The red-headed soldier ushered in the young
girl and then re-entered the vehicle, hit a switch, and the ramp
closed. Jeremy heard the man speak into his head mounted comms
unit: “You heard the First Sergeant. We’re buttoned up back here.
Let’s pop smoke and RTB.”

The short, wide man’s legs dropped through
one of the rear open hatches onto the bench next to Jeremy as the
blonde woman in the blue jeans and plaid shirt stood up through
another open hatch on the starboard side of the Stryker with her M4
shouldered and searching.

Within moments the pitch of the engine
increased and the Stryker sped off from the house.

As the Stryker rumbled down some unseen road,
Jeremy took in his surroundings. The white interior of the vehicle
was equipped with two long padded benches along each wall with a
separate thinly padded backrest. Cables and wiring harnesses ran
along the walls of both sides, interspersed with steel piping. A
long, narrow crawlspace along the port side of the vehicle led to
the driver’s perch, where Jeremy could only see the back of a
woman’s head sporting dark short-cropped hair as she navigated via
her driver’s hatch. On the starboard side, surrounding Shavers in
the commander’s seat, was an array of monitors, equipment, and
controls. The armor of the vehicle appeared to be pretty thick to
his limited experience and for once he realized that he was
actually safe.

The red-headed man smiled kindly at Jeremy
from across the aisle, and then slid down so he was sitting
directly across from him.

“Can I get you anything? Water or
something?”

Jeremy nodded. “Water would be good,” then he
paused and said, “What I really need is some ammo. Two-two-three
for my Sig and nine millimeter for my handgun.”

The red-headed soldier laughed heartily as he
handed Jeremy a bottle of water from under the seat. “I believe you
are a firecracker! I should know. I’m one too. Gotta be our red
hair, don’t ya think?” The man winked at him playfully.

Jeremy remained quiet, and took the water
eagerly.

“Hell kid, when we get back to base we’ll get
you a full load out.” He laughed again.

“I’m not a kid no more,” Jeremy said
firmly.

The man stopped laughing and stared at the
boy with his green eyes narrowed to slits. “No, I reckon you’re
not.”

Chapter Five

The four survivors sat around the campfire; one man
and three women barely more than girls, each with their own
personal demons garnered in their long, perilous journey to this
point in their harried existence. Each one wondering if there could
ever be any absolution for the sins they had committed to survive.
Then there was the fifth of their party, who lay muttering to
herself in a grungy sleeping bag nearby; for better or worse, all
but lost to this world.

Their bellies somewhat satiated by the food
they had found and consumed, they sat around contemplating each
other, this ragtag remnant of humanity.

After dragging the three bodies deep into the
woods they had restrung the noise making perimeter wire, still
keeping an eye and an ear on the deepening gloom as evening set in.
They all had their firearms close at hand.

“Do any of you know what happened out there?”
asked Katherine without looking up from picking dirt from beneath
her ragged fingernails. She had pulled her long blonde hair into a
tight ponytail that hung limply down her back. “I mean, I know that
there was some type of plague because a lot of people got sick, but
does anyone know how it happened?”

“It wasn’t a plague,” Steven grunted,
pressing more rounds of .223 into a magazine. “A plague is caused
by a bacterium. This was a virus.”

“Virus, bacteria, what difference does it
make?” Dontela snarled. “Damn thing turned most people into M-80s,
and those that didn’t turn mostly got killed by the M-80s or the
human shit-stains that were left!”

“It matters to me,” muttered Katherine. She
looked at Steven. “People said it was that meteor shower the night
before that did it to us. Do you know what happened?”

Steven nodded to her then glanced at Kera,
who sat leaning against him staring absently at the fire. He
stuffed the full magazine in a pocket along with the remaining
loose rounds.

“Yeah, I have more than a passing knowledge
of what happened.” He put his arm around Kera’s shoulder and
brushed her long, silky hair back from her face and bent down to
kiss her on the forehead. “As I said, it wasn’t the plague. It was
a viral infection. I’m not even sure that is the right terminology,
since this was so unprecedented in that the virus wasn’t
transmitted from another host or through an external vector. There
was no patient zero in this pandemic because we didn’t have a point
source of infection.” He paused and took a swig of water from the
bottle beside him. “I was a microbiologist for the Army’s
infectious disease lab in Maryland.”

“Don’t tell me you people did this to us,”
Dontela cut in.

Steven frowned at her and shook his head.
“No, it wasn’t us, it wasn’t anybody. Maybe it was God. Maybe this
is the biblical Armageddon. From a scientific point it was a lot
simpler than that, and also a lot more complicated.” He took
another swig of water and wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand. The two new girls were quiet and watching him intently.

“We were the virus’ reservoir. This sickness
came from our own DNA. From a piece of it that long ago was an
active virus and had lain dormant for who knows how many millennia.
Ever since DNA sequencing was made possible, we have known about
these fragments that we called fossil viruses. As far as I know
they have never caused a problem before. Usually the longer they
are encoded in our DNA the more likely a mutation has changed them.
I’m talking about over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of
years. The chances of a fossil virus reactivating during
transcription would be about the same chance of someone winning the
lottery every time they played it. It simply wasn’t realistic. At
least, so we thought.”

He looked sharply at Katherine. “The people
who said that the meteor shower from the comet caused this are
probably correct to an extent. The organic molecules that rained
down on us that night from the comet coated the planet,” he paused
briefly and looked them both in the eyes, “and us. I believe that
the organic molecules were absorbed into all of our bodies,
probably through respiration. They ended up causing a specific
change in our DNA that repaired the damaged section of this
specific fossil virus code, allowing it to be reactivated. A virus
is more or less genetic material, in this case a
single-negative-stranded RNA surrounded by a protein coat. They are
intracellular parasites that can only replicate within a cell. I
called this virus The Zombie Virus from the way it came back to
life. We would have developed a more official designation for it as
we identified its characteristics, yet no one was left to complain
and really, the name was fitting for this virus.

“The reason all of us here didn’t get sick
was because somewhere in our past we had incorporated enough
mutations down our genetic lineage that the virus couldn’t
reactivate. However, the majority of the population, across the
globe, became instantly infected. At the facility that I worked in
we had protocols and procedures for outbreaks, even major ones,
dealing with how to try and contain them. Immunizations— if they
are available for certain viral outbreaks— are a major line of
defense, especially for horizontal spread. Quarantine of infected
areas and individuals is the other major line of defense. However,
as I said, this was unprecedented. We had no protocol to follow
when ninety percent or more of our staff was already infected. No
procedure to guide us when the majority of the world’s population
was sick with a viral infection. This was an unforeseen and
unwinnable war against a very insidious disease. Those of us left
could only be reactive and not proactive.”

Steven took a deep breath and shook his head
as the images of those days flashed through his mind. “Everything
was collapsing around us, still, we stayed on to try and tackle
this the only way we knew how; by getting to work and solving the
mystery of this crisis. It cost me so much, but I was able to stay
and study the virus, to unravel it. In the end I was the last one
left alive.

“I was able to isolate and take pictures of
the virus. When I viewed the electron micrographs I recognized the
bullet-shaped virion immediately as a derivative of the rabies
virus, a type of lyssavirus. Only, I think this virus is much more
ancient. Its protein markers were different enough that it didn’t
react to any of the known rabies vaccines that I tried.