The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (13 page)

"Where you go lady?" the driver asked after they had reached what he felt was a safe enough distance from the
airport’s main building that he finally slowed to a moderate pace.

"Excuse me?" Miranda questioned when she finally realized the man had spoken to her.

"Go, where you go?" He asked again.

"Oh, yes, I'm sorry." She fumbled in her purse and produced a rumpled computer
printout with the addresses of the apartment complexes she had planned on visiting first. She picked the first address she could find and read it off to the driver as he swerved to hit an off ramp and take them in a new direction that she hoped was just a short cut to their destination.

"What happen in airport?" The driver asked as he stumbled for the right words. Miranda imagined that his English vocabulary had been primarily developed to
determining a passenger’s destination with little room for small talk.

She made eye contact with him in the rear view mirror and simply shrugged her shoulders in reply to indicate that she didn't know. For the remainder of the ride she kept her gaze fixed steadily out the window and tried to take in her surroundings. Whatever had happened back in the airport was something that she considered herself very lucky to have not been involved with, she would try and listen to the news later in the evening and see if they ran a story about it. For the time being she was starting to calm back down and needed to focus herself back on the task at hand, finding a place to live and getting on with her new life.

#

Dr. Woods request to the White House for amended orders for the National Guard checkpoints in dealing with refuges suspected of being infected had not been received with the same seriousness he had hoped. General Page had intercepted his call and refused his request to confer with the President on this issue. He had the impression that at this point the President was likely starting to move into a position where he was distancing himself from this situation. The political ramifications of an out of control epidemic on his watch was a political nightmare. If action taken on his direct orders resulted in civilian casualties whether necessary or not, it was something his administration would not be able to recover from. The clear message was that Dr. Woods, Dr. Martin and their CDC teams were running the show on their own. They would be the ones hung out to dry with any blow back that came as a result of this outbreak. The immediate problem he faced was that without support from the White House and Joint Chiefs, the soldiers manning those check points were also being left on their own. The Captain in charge had already made it clear to him that he was not willing to go outside of his orders in dealing with the people closing in on his position.

"What options does this leave us?" Dr. Martin asked.

Dr. Woods shook his head and turned to look at the computerized map showing confirmed reports of outbreaks beyond the quarantine zone. Right now a single red dot was positioned over a hospital in downtown Camden, New Jersey marking at least one or more confirmed cases and two other hospitals in that same area had yellow ones to mark likely cases.

Dr. Woods was now imagining what this same map would look like in the next twenty four hours. At the rate the virus was known to spread, it wouldn't be long before it reached epidemic proportions.

"Not many I'm afraid. We need our field unit to press ahead with blood and tissue tests on the known survivor and compare the results against what we already have for the virus. The cure has got to be somewhere in that data, we just have to find it."

#

Tristan Gant was had grown weary of just sitting there and watching the two corpses, it was morbid and boring and not exactly what he had signed on for. Three years earlier he had completed a criminal justice degree at a local community college which he had started with aspirations of joining the FBI or at least a police department. After six months of applying for openings and either receiving rejections or just no reply at all
, a friend of his wife had directed him to a Government web site for jobs where there were several openings for security specialists. This particular job had been advertised as being a security contractor responsible for site security in fixed and mobile locations. It called for someone with a degree in the same field he had just received his in and it paid at the high end of what he had seen for other security positions. The job came with education, medical and retirement benefits and bonuses for extended assignments in the field. He applied on-line and within two days had undergone a phone interview and was invited in for a personal one on one follow up interview. He had a job offer within two weeks and with his wife's blessing had accepted the terms and started back to work at a full time job for the first time in five years. For the most part the work was not that exciting, but it was a guaranteed pay check and in another year he would be qualified to sit for the supervisor's exam and possible advancement. This was his first actual deployment with the field unit, they had told all of them to prepare for an extended stay in the field but that the duty would be routine security and bonuses would apply for being away from home and possible hazardous duty.

Sitting in this surgical room dressed from head to toe in a biological protective suit and babysitting a pair of mangled corpses was not at all what he considered routine duty. The team of doctors who had been working in here all day had shifted their focus to the girl in the other wing
and an autopsy they needed to perform, but they needed someone to maintain a vigil with these two. All they had really told him was that he was to observe and report anything unusual with either body. For the life of him he could not imagine what they expected for him to possibly see and he had spent the last hour and a half imagining scenarios that now had him jumping at shadows. There were only a handful of them for the security detail at this mobile site so all of them were working twelve hour shifts at a minimum. That left Tristan with ten and a half hours of just sitting here alone with two dead bodies. Normally when he was manning a boring post he could at least get on his cell phone and play a game, text home or read one of the many books he had loaded onto the phone. While wrapped from head to toe in this oversized condom there was no way he could reach the phone attached to his belt. This room was equipped with a computer system that he could get on and at least goof around on the Internet or try and beat his best time on the hardest level of minesweeper. But he knew that the computers in here were directly linked to the command centers in DC and back in Atlanta and he didn't think the big bosses would take kindly to seeing him playing games on their expensive computers. He looked through the window on the pressure sealed door at the technician’s station in the short corridor between this wing and the next. There was a desk with a computer and phone sitting there beckoning to him, he also knew that this particular station, while it was on the network, it was not directly monitored in ether DC or Atlanta. This room was supposed to remain pressurized which would prevent the doors between the two sections from opening and an alarm would sound when the pressure was equalized. The purpose of the pressurization was to segregate the air in each section from contaminating any other sections of the mobile center. In this case Tristan thought it was a pretty useless precaution since there were only dead bodies in here and no samples from any virus victims in the contaminated zone. The bodies he was guarding had been members of the team here and had never entered the zone so he was pretty confident there was no danger in contamination from them. One of the first things most security guards learn on the job from the older hands is how to disable alarms and other forms of security within their area of concern. In this case, Tristan knew just how to turn off the alarms that would sound when the room was depressurized. He toyed with the idea for a few minutes as he continued looking back and forth at the tempting sight of that unmanned computer station just on the other side of the door. He convinced himself that as long as he was sitting at the desk out there he was still fully capable of doing his job, from the desk he could still keep an eye on this room which was all they needed him to do anyways.

The temptation proved
too much for Tristan and he proceeded to bypass the alarm systems, although he didn't realize that this would also take down the air sensors in the room as and the adjoining corridor as well as the cameras dedicated to monitoring both areas. Once the alarms were dealt with, Tristan dialed in the correct code to release the pressure in the room and waited until he saw the lights on the door panel switch to all green indicating that the door locks could now be released. In another five minutes he was comfortably seated at the technicians station and entering his network password to turn on the computer system. When the computer booted up he was pleasantly surprised to see that inside the network folder available to him and the other security teams a new folder had recently been added. The properties for the folder showed him that his first line supervisor back in Atlanta had added this folder the night before along with a text file note that said '
I know it can be boring work out there, so here is something to keep you entertained in your down time'.
Tristan opened the folder and saw it full of first run movies pirated and downloaded from one of those Russian file sharing programs he knew his supervisor liked to visit. One of the movies in the folder just happened to be a recent release of a comedy he had been looking forward to watching. For the first fifteen minutes of the movie he did a good job of looking back and forth from the computer into the room next door at the two still forms he had been charged with keeping his eyes on. The movie rolled on into a particularly funny scene and Tristan soon lost himself in the film and gave up any pretense of looking back and forth at the bodies in the next room.

"Sir?" The ranking sergeant manning the checkpoint exclaimed as he gestured towards a crowd of close to fifty civilians rapidly approaching their position from inside the quarantine zone.

Cpt. Cochran had just stepped out of from the back of the command Humvee set up with a small office crammed full of communication gear and the computer equipment necessary to control and monitor their drone mission. He had finished feeding the drone the instructions to continue with the rest of its mission in autopilot mode, it would now approach Browns Mills
, begin taking air samples at different altitudes and then stream the results of its analysis back to the computers here and those at the CDC and crisis center. After the sample taking portion of its mission was complete it would then lock into an orbit of two hundred feet and commence to fly a series of geometric patterns over the town while streaming live video out to all monitoring stations. If the drone did not receive new orders after being on station for three hours it had been instructed to retrace its flight path back to its take off point and land automatically. Cpt. Cochran had programmed those last set of orders after he learned from the crisis center that no new orders from his command authority concerning use of force against the refuges would be forthcoming. His own attempts to contact his battalion commander for clarification of his orders had met with a terse response that his unit had been attached to the crisis center for this mission. Any orders related to use of force or otherwise concerning how to carry out their mission would come directly from the pentagon. They were being left on their own and it seemed that no one in his chain of command was willing to stick their neck out to give any orders that could result in injuries to civilians. This left it completely up to him on how to handle this situation. Dr. Woods’ warning of how dangerous these refuges may end up being echoed ominously in his head, he had even used the term zombies in describing their demeanor and methods. While Cpt. Cochran was not quite ready to subscribe to the notion that they were actually about to face a horde of brain eating zombies like the monsters he had seen in the movies, he also didn't want to totally discount Dr. Woods’ warning. He had seen for himself the overhead images of these people and how the thermal scans did not pick up any more than a small trace of body heat from them. He was also well aware of the fact that they were facing an unusual and as yet unidentified viral threat, the long term effects of which had still not been scientifically discovered. He was reluctant to order his men to just open fire on these people, even if command had issued orders to allow deadly force he was sure the caveat to that would be that some form of equal threat to his own men had to exist in order to justify that level of force. His decision would be that they would keep all of their options open, the civilians would be allowed to approach the checkpoint and once they were within verbal range he would have his men issue orders for them to stop and turn back. If they continued on despite these orders and did not attempt to harm his people he would have little choice but to allow them to pass and just notify Dr. Woods and his own higher command of the situation. The drone could always be recalled and ordered to track them until someone finally made a decision on how to handle it. On the other hand, if they did turn violent against his men, he was not going to let them just stand there and take it, he had given orders that in that situation they were to defend themselves but only with force equal to what the civilians were using. This meant that a punch or slap to one of his soldiers did not justify his Bradley's opening fire on the crowd.

Standing at the checkpoint and watching this crowd of people approaching through a pair of high powered binoculars, Cpt. Cochran was now starting to have second thoughts about his decision to have his men hold their fire. He picked out one of the civilians in particular and studied the man closely.
He appeared to be in his forties and in fair physical shape, he was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a pullover collared shirt, his clothing was disheveled and dirty looking with a dark stain down the front of the shirt that he thought may have been dried blood or possibly vomit. He could see a smudge leading from the man's bottom lips down his chin and along the side of his neck where some type of fluid may have leaked from his mouth. It was unnerving that the man made no effort to at least wipe away the remnants of whatever had left those marks down his chin. The face had a hollow look as if he was confused or medicated in some fashion, while he could not see the eyes very clearly at this distance he could tell that they looked wrong, as if there was something very different about them. A quick scan across the crowd and he realized that all of the others shared this same faraway and odd look about their eyes. The skin pallor on the man was something else that made him a little queasy inside, even allowing for a Caucasian with a naturally light skin color, this man's color was much different just from that of someone who did not spend a lot of time in the sun. The color had a yellowish hue to it that made the man resemble a wax figurine much more than a living person. It was the same pallor that he had seen before in a dead body before the mortician had his chance to apply makeup and bring back the more natural skin tone for the deceased to be displayed in an open coffin prior to a viewing at a wake. Cpt. Cochran thought that these people certainly at least looked like they were sick, he could even go so far as to agreeing with Dr. Woods in principle that it was not a far stretch to say that they even looked very much like a group of walking dead bodies.

"I see them Sergeant, just stay calm and stand your ground as we discussed, it is important that the men see us remaining unflustered right now." Cpt. Cochran replied. He thought to himself as he watched the approaching crowd that remaining unflustered sounded good in theory but in the next few moments when they were face to face with these people he hoped that he wouldn't fold and run.

All of his men were out on the checkpoint now, they had been taking shifts to give half of their numbers time to relax in the shade for a couple hours at a time. No one was off relaxing in the shade at the moment, with the exception of two crew members per Bradley and a single air force technician manning the controls inside the command Humvee, everyone was in full uniform, including helmet and rifle and standing tall just behind the row of flimsy wooden stands and tangled concertina wire. Everyone was carrying live ammunition and their weapons were all loaded but on safe and slung over shoulders to avoid the appearance of open hostility.

The first group of refuges that would reach the checkpoint was now less than a hundred yards away. They could hear them now, a collective and rhythmic moaning sound rising from the group as if they were incapable of speech and all they could do to communicate with each other was to release this primitive and guttural noise. The sound grew in intensity as they closed the gap on the waiting soldiers, it started to sound like it was taking on an excited tenor as if the proximity of the men sta
nding watch just a little ways in front of them was stimulating them. Up until this point the group had been moving forward at a steady and quick shuffle, now that the men along the checkpoint were within sight of them they picked up their speed to something closer to a medium paced jog and the moaning increased in tempo. With every dozen or so steps that they drew closer they sped up a little more.

"SIR?" the questioning and concerned cry came from one of his lower ranking men and Cpt. Cochran sensed several troops starting to slide back away from the barrier a little bit as if on the verge of making the decision to turn and run for the hills.

"Hold your ground men, do not show fear and do not back away from the barriers." He hissed in reply.

Cpt. Cochran turned towards his senior sergeant and gestured for him to begin issuing verbal commands to the crowd. The man had a natural booming voice that commanded the attention of anyone within earshot and under normal conditions should be more than enough to sway any civilian confront
ed with it that they meant business.

Bellowing the command for the refuges to halt and not approach the checkpoint any closer
, the sergeant clearly and methodically gave his instructions. The verbal commands were loud and concise but they may as well have been given to a brick wall for as much good as they did. The only impact Cpt. Cochran could see from his sergeants orders was that a few of the refuges in the front rank shifted their direction slightly and lined up directly on the sergeant as if the sound of his voice was a beacon designed to focus their attention on him.

They were running now, their feet slapping loudly against the pavement, the distance now down to sixty yards and closing fast. Seeing them up close and their
lack of any reaction to verbal commands now made Cpt. Cochran reconsider his misgivings about using force to stop their advance. He could also see their faces much more clearly now, each of them had a milky haze filling their eyes as if they were wearing dull white filters over each eye. Some of them had visible wounds and injuries to their exposed skin with splashes of blood and other body fluids covering skin and clothing. They all also shared another unique feature that he hadn't noticed until they were this close, their mouths were all turned upward in a vicious snarl like an attack dog baring its teeth as it lunged forward to strike its intended target. Those snarls lent even more credibility to Dr. Woods’s warnings that these people were dangerous and would stop at nothing to get their hands and mouths on him and his men.

Armed with only a pistol
, Cpt. Cochran now drew the automatic from the holster at his side and worked the slide to chamber a round. It was a spur of the moment decision made only after he saw face to face the actual threat that they were really dealing with. Dr. Woods had been correct all along and he had been a fool to put his career over his own personal safety and that of his men. He pointed the pistol at the ground a few feet in front of the closest refuge and fired twice into the asphalt. Several men down the line from him jumped and backed up several feet in response to the sudden and unexpected report of gunfire, their attention had been so steadfastly focused on the approaching mob they had not noticed their commander making ready to open fire. The mass of sickly looking snarled mouthed people rushing headlong towards them did not respond in the least to the gun fire, if anything, Cpt. Cochran thought they had actually sped up. He was suddenly awestruck by their speed, looking as sickly and ragged as they did and considering the several miles they had already covered on foot he would not have thought them capable of suddenly breaking into a dead on sprint like they were, and before he knew it they had cut the distance to barely twenty five feet and the entire front rank had spread itself open as individuals started focusing their attention directly on specific soldiers on his side of the barricade. He adjusted his aim to center mass of the man closest to him and without further hesitation fired off a double tap into the man’s chest. He had no doubt his aim would be true, the distance was too close to miss and his marksmanship with a pistol was unmatched in any unit he had ever served in. A pair of ragged holes materialized in the chest of the man providing him evidence of his accuracy, but that was the only thing that happened in response. The man did not waiver, did not slow nor did he show any outward indication of having just absorbed two steel jacketed 9mm rounds through his heart and possibly a lung. There was also a noticeably absence of blood coming from either wound. Those hits should have bled profusely and also sent the man tumbling face first onto the ground at his next step where he would have been dead a good two or three seconds before his body struck the pavement. He could feel a sudden panic building up inside of him, even though he had told himself that he would not allow them to resort to the use of firearms to quell this disturbance the fact that they had that as a last ditch alternative always gave him a sense security. Now that he was seeing the impossible reality that even firearms were not having an effect on these people that deep down sense of security was crashing into a sea of utter fear and oncoming panic. Gripping the pistol tightly with both hands and concentrating to keep his hands from shaking any worse than they already were, he loosed another salvo of four rounds directly into the chest of the same man now down to fifteen feet away from him and closing fast. Even with six holes stitched across his chest, his advance didn't slow for a second, he didn't even flinch as the rounds ripped through him.

Cpt. Cochran started back pedaling as he moved to distance himself from thi
s admonition racing towards him. There was no rational explanation how that man could have absorbed six rounds directly to his chest, including vital organs, and still be on his feet. They had reached the flimsy wooden barriers and concertina wire now and were pushing the obstacles aside as they rushed onward towards the ranks of soldiers just beyond.

"FIRE, OPEN FIRE!" Cpt. Cochran yelled to his men in a last act of defiance that would hopefully spark a more effective re
sponse than his own attempts. He turned to yell the order to fire to the two armored Bradley fighting vehicles parked just off the roadway nearby by but the order did not have a chance to escape his lips before he was knocked to the ground by two of the first refuges to make their way past the barricades. Their strength caught him off guard and even though he was in prime physical condition he was completely outmatched by his two opponents. The best he could do was to keep throwing his arm around in front of his face to prevent the man he had already pumped six rounds into from clamping his snarling teeth down on his face or throat. It was like he was fending off an attack from a rabid dog intent on biting down for a kill shot, but in this case he had the horrifying notion that they were more interested in the taste of his flesh and muscle, they wanted to eat and not necessary kill. Any hope he had for assistance from any of his men was shattered as he listened to shouts of fear, pain and sheer terror as the rest of his men were overrun and brutally attacked as the bulk of this first group of deranged and sick people pounced on them. A few scattered gunshots rang out but not enough to make much difference and the sounds of gunfire lasted only a moment before more of his men could be heard crying out as they fell. Realizing that help would not be coming, the panic returned and gave him an extra boost of adrenaline, mustering all his available strength he pushed his attacker with six bullet holes drilled through his chest off to the side. With his attention focused on this single attacker he lost track of the second man who had tackled him, a mistake he realized when a shot of white hot pain rocketed threw his thigh. Launching a solid punch that caught the second attacker hard in his temple, Cpt. Cochran was sickened when his punch brought the man’s face into view as it pulled free of the inside of his thigh. The man had managed to use his teeth to rip a hole through the saggy layer of pants in that area of his body and expose the bare skin underneath, hanging from the side of his mouth was a long, wide flap of thick hair covered meat glistening with a sheen of warm and wet blood. Making the scene even more morbid was that the entire flap was still attached to the underside of his crotch. Recovering from the punch, the man started whipping his head from side to side in an attempt to rip the morsel free. Cpt. Cochran was overcome with agony as each turn of the man’s head caused the wound to tear open further into his crotch. His reflexes snapped into autopilot and the arm he had raised against a resumed attack from the bullet riddled man dropped to his ruined thigh and pressed hard against the growing wound in an attempt to keep the man from ripping free any more of the tender meat between his legs. With his attention now focused on the attack on the lower part of his body he missed the open mouth of his fist attacker as it shot forward and latched hard onto the side of his neck. In a fraction of a second a quarter of his neck was ripped free, releasing a river of blood and sent him spiraling into a hazy fog of unconsciousness at the sudden catastrophic loss of blood to his brain. His strength bled from his body as fast as his blood and he collapsed backward onto the ground while his two attackers pressed forward with their brutalization of his now defenseless body. His last conscious vision was a view of one the younger soldiers in his unit laying on the ground several feet away, his head was cocked to the side and his eyes wide open, just before the blackness consumed him Cpt. Cochran realized that the head of this soldier had been separated from the rest of his body which was a foot or two behind the head with three people angled over top of it with their heads pressed deep into the open torso and feasting on the rich bloody internal organs.