You and Me against the World: The Creepers Saga Book 1 (4 page)

“Right behind it.” Her voice was a near-whisper.

“I know this is difficult, but the jet that just bombed our hospital is going to circle back and drop more munitions on this area to contain the virus. We need to get out of here. We can’t go downtown because it will be an inferno very soon.”

Susan nodded, but it was a mechanical response like one of those dashboard bobbleheads. In the backseat, Rosa sobbed softly.

Thorn looked to his right and saw that the remaining group of infected still galloped toward the street. They would reach it in a few moments. He needed to pass the main entrance before they did, the chaos started, and the traffic accidents ensued. He gunned the accelerator and turned onto Daniels without regard for any oncoming traffic. He sped past the first infected as it did its sick gallop into the lane.

Chapter 3

The End of the World

P
art 1

What we don’t know could fill a room

Thorn had been correct in his assumption that the government was ahead of the curve but not enough to make a difference. The earliest case of what officially was named VirusXB724a, or X for short, appeared in early June in the small coastal town of Punta Sol, located in the Florida Panhandle. Influenza was rare in the summer months and one that could thrive in the hot humidity of Florida was extremely rare.

Scientists determined that X was a rogue strand that fit somewhere between the H10N7 group and the H7N7 zoonotic type. If the original incubation was a mammal, tests suggested that the possum had been the most likely carrier. The government scientists who witnessed the mutation first hand understood that without containment, X would mean X-human race. The virus self-progressed from forty-eight-hour incubation to eight hours and to two hours, and then just before Punta Sol’s total eradication, infection occurred within ten minutes of contact through either bite or ingestion of the black bile. The incineration of Punta Sol’s seven hundred residents required little explanation. The DEA reported that in the struggling economy, the residents had turned to meth production and that an unfortunate explosion had dominoed through the home labs. They further stated that the explosions had filled the air with a dangerous combination of poisonous gases and that for reasons of public health and safety, the area would remain quarantined until further notice. The media, busy with politics and celebrity news, covered the story for just five minutes before they moved on to more scandalous and better-selling stories. Relatives who challenged the meth production story found agents on their doorsteps. The agents’ inquiries made it clear that they intended to investigate the complaining relative’s possible involvement in narcotics trafficking. People stopped asking questions.

None of the flu-surge models could have predicted the spread of such an infectious strain. None of their research would have revealed patient zero. The carrier never displayed a single symptom. He was only six months old. The Mimi virus he carried had been a genetic gift passed from father to son for longer than time could record. In most generations, the virus slept; but in some, it encountered another virus strain that allowed it to create something new.

Researchers would have been astonished at patient zero’s lineage. They would have discovered that the child’s great-grandfather had traveled to Africa during World War II. And that while there, his own Mimi virus combined with another. Forty years later, they would call this new virus HIV. They might have found that an even earlier relative had, in 1918, brought the family’s genetic passenger to a Kansas army base and launched the famous Spanish flu. And that yet another had visited the Orient in the late 1300s, where his Mimi virus became history’s most infamous plague. Of course, none of this would have made a difference. The Mimi virus had waited thousands of years and countless evolutions to find its perfect mate and reach its full potential. On that beautiful sunny Memorial Day weekend, proud parents brought their new baby to visit relatives in Punta Sol. The baby’s aunt had been feeling fatigued all week. She assumed she was just tired from her travels. She was unaware that she had picked up the flu on her business trip. She kissed the baby and the Mimi virus found its destiny.

Can’t see the forest from the trees

Five of Punta Sol’s infected were transported to a research facility on a small island near Sanibel Island, Florida. The researchers observed the infected’s behaviors, ran a full complement of tests, and worked furiously to find a cure. When a cure proved impossible, they incinerated the infected specimens. The team strictly followed all decontamination protocols; no one stole samples for black market sales, no one accidentally left the facility with trace amounts of bile on their shoes, and no subversive group enacted a conspiracy to infect the populace.

In the end, it was a matter of right church, wrong pew. The researchers focused exclusively on transmission post-transformation because at that stage, it was both quick and deadly. In their horror over the infected’s murderous behavior and their frustration with their inability to isolate a cure, they forget a key attribute of the virus. It was, after all, a form of influenza, and it still possessed the ability to use the slower but just as assured flu transmission process: aerosol contamination. The researchers ignored their own coldlike symptoms.

Sixteen of the twenty researchers and half the military personnel left the facility with the sniffles. Some took time to enjoy the Florida coast, some went to Disney World, and others returned directly home to California, Georgia, South Carolina, Washington DC, Chicago, and New England. All told, thirty-two people carried the early-stage virus to the public. After that, it was just a matter of time.

Four weeks’ time, to be exact.

When in doubt, do something to make it worse

The second round of cases appeared in early July. There was no question that these were Virus X. Still, the government and the CDC were cautiously optimistic when the initial patients either grew no worse or outright died without violent incident. That optimism did not extend so far as to avert discussions of a “contingency” plan. The plan included an outline of and preparation for “aggressive containment.”

By the last week of July, all calls to the CDC that met Virus X criteria were routed to a special assignment desk of the NSA, code name SAD. The SAD agent noted the level of infection, added the location to the strike list, and put “boots on the ground” within the hour to monitor conditions. The SAD operative called in a Code X alert if the infected patient passed the virus to a second victim.

In Fort Myers, the moment Dr. Benson passed out, a patient in the waiting area walked outside, removed a scrambled SAT phone, and texted “Fort Myers, Code X” to a programmed number. The operative, as instructed, went to his vehicle to leave the area. Upon entering his vehicle, a man in a power company uniform with a large puppy-dog smile approached the operative. That man, also an operative, shot the first in the head and then got in his own car and drove away.

Containment procedures had begun.

The aggressive containment procedure, or ACP, included surgical strikes in three stages. The first was a modified CBU-72 bomb dropped from an A6E Intruder. The gas bomb would carpet the strike point with fire, burning the building and any exiting occupants. The second strike consisted of the deployment of a Mark 84 that would replace the building with a fifty-foot-wide, forty-foot-deep crater. The third strike included additional CBU-72 bombings around the infected area. Loss of human life aside, the military was very excited to play with their modified weapons.

On the day the infection decimated Fort Myers, there were twenty-three air strikes carried out across the country.

Aggressive containment procedures failed.

Have virus, will travel

Three hours before Dr. Benson’s patient ripped out Antonio’s throat, four commercial airliners departed Fort Myers’ RSW International airport.

On board Delta flight 1272 to Atlanta was Rich Demmins, an IRS agent returning home from vacation. The flu had ruined Rich’s vacation. He looked forward to his return home and to a visit to his own doctor. The one at the walk-in clinic in Fort Myers, in his opinion, had been as useless as the antibiotics that he had prescribed. Rich actually felt worse and wondered if he was having an allergic reaction to the Cipro. When he complained to the flight attendant about the cabin’s freezing temperature, she gave him an odd look and told him it was seventy-five degrees. She did give him, however, a second blanket.

Rich passed out before takeoff. What awoke as the flight reached ten thousand feet was not Rich. The Rich thing tore open the throat of its first-class companion and then did the same to the flight attendant. Concerned passengers feared a terrorist attack and tried to subdue the maniac.

A flight attendant in coach notified the pilot, who notified air traffic control. ATC instructed them to reroute to Orlando International Airport for an emergency landing. The pilot, unaware of his copilot’s affair with the first-class attendant, was shocked when his crew member broke protocol and opened the flight deck door. The Rich thing eviscerated the copilot and then the pilot. The 757 with its 192 passengers had just reached fifteen thousand feet when the plane began its uncontrolled descent.

On the University of Central Florida campus, the Reflecting Pond shimmered in the late summer sun. Strictly off-limits to students, except during the annual “rush the pond” event at homecoming, the pond had enjoyed a hundred-thirty-thousand-dollar resurfacing the previous year. The work was a total loss when a hundred tons of 757 crashed into it at just over five hundred miles an hour.

The Lufthansa flight to Germany was less eventful. There were several flu sufferers on board, but they remained in fitful sleep during most of the nine-hour flight. During the last two hours, four of the passengers began to cough and expel a dark, pungent liquid, which fell on their very unhappy companions and flight attendants. At debarkation, over thirty of the passengers carried the virus into the streets of Munich. In the next forty-eight hours, the flu spread to most of Europe.

Similar scenarios occurred on the flights to New York and Minneapolis, with the noted exception that in Minneapolis, a flight attendant had to wake a sleeping passenger for debarkation. The passenger bit through the flight attendant’s carotid artery and then galloped into the terminal, where she killed ten travelers and infected several more before airport police gunned her down.

Overall, it was not a good day to be a Delta flight attendant.

Plan B

Virus X continued to spread. Within two days, the government abandoned the aggressive containment strategy, and they allocated all resources to land-based containment. National Guard and military personnel arrived in the major cities with orders to suppress or destroy the infected. When faced with a mob of running, screaming people, it was difficult to determine who was or wasn’t infected. The guns blazed with extreme prejudice.

While some suffered a longer incubation, the majority turned within ten minutes of contact with the black bile. Bite victims who managed to survive the physical attack held off complete infection for as long as a day. By week two of the full-scale outbreak, the government was incapable of a central coordination of the efforts. Most officials had either become infected, had died in an attack, or no longer felt Washington was their kind of town.

The original Virus X analysis suggested that it was at least in part zoonotic. A zoonotic virus has the ability to jump species. In the second week, domestic cats began to contract the infection. By week four, most had turned. There were an estimated one hundred million cats in the United States. The survivors now faced a smaller, more-difficult-to-spot predator.

As expected, all manner of craziness

In New York, a famous filmmaker named Michael gave a presentation to a radical liberal group called the People’s Liberty Movement. Several of his entourage was sick, and they urged him to cancel the event. The speech would be the featured opening of his next film, so Michael insisted the show must go on. In his opening remarks, he stated with absolute certainty that the epidemic was a hoax created by the corporations and banks responsible for the economic meltdown. The flu hysteria was just a clever distraction. The crowd resoundingly agreed until one of Michael’s production assistants bit him. Two more assistants turned a few seconds later and joined the first in devouring Michael. He was a large meal, and there was plenty for all. Half the crowd of ten thousand died or turned in the next thirty minutes.

A subgroup of the People’s Liberty Movement who were staunch environmentalists believed that nuclear power plant waste had caused the infection. The chaos and impending government collapse provided them an opportunity to take action. Over the prior two years, they had planned a shutdown of nine nuclear plants in the Northeast. Now it seemed was the perfect time to set their plan in motion. None of the twenty-five PLM members were nuclear physicists or engineers, but they had made contact with a man who had intimate knowledge of power plant operations. The man had drawn up detailed instructions for reactor shutdown.