The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (17 page)

Her attention had remained focused on the continued attack against the day shift supervisor and
she had not noticed that her movements had caught the attention of two men who had taken down one of the day shift crew. Both men lost interest in the remains of the carcass they had been greedily tearing into and started making their way around the far side of the rooms towards her. Just a few feet short of reaching her, one of the men knocked a clipboard off a table as he rushed past, the sudden clattering caught Amy's attention and she spotted the men baring down on her. Almost without thinking, she took a lunging step backwards and into the open doorway as both men shot through the space she had just been occupying. As soon as she cleared the door she reached out with her left hand and stabbed the button to cycle the airlock and close the door. Her hand was just retreating from the button when she was grabbed along the forearm by one of the men who had just missed her a second earlier. With the airlock door already sliding shut the man could only reach partway into the corridor, but it was enough for him to lock his grip on her arm while yanking her hand towards his snapping teeth. Amy tried to fall backwards to the floor to break the man's grip, but he had her beat in body weight by at least a hundred pounds and his strength was much more than Amy had expected, he kept her on her feet but now off balance. Caught halfway into her fall, Amy was easily pulled forward against the closing door and her hand was pulled up into the rapidly shrinking space between the door and wall. With a crunching bite that severed tissue and bone, Amy's attacker bit down hard on her index finger. She felt the bone crush and break under the powerful force of his jaw and a blinding pain shot up her arm. At that same instant the closing door slammed hard into the wrist of the man's hand still holding firmly onto Amy's forearm. With an audible crunch of breaking bone, the door pinned the wrist tight against the wall where it wedged the door open several inches short of sealing tight. With his wrist shattered his hand was no longer able to continue holding onto Amy and she dropped to the floor free of his grasp where she cradled her injured hand tight against her stomach as she convulsed and vomited from the excruciating pain.

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When Amy Benson triggered the alarm at the mobile field center, several things happened automatically and at the same time. All of the doors leading out of the facility were bolted shut as thick magnetic tungsten rods were driven into each door from the adjoining wall, this ensured that no one could open the center and possibly release contaminated air into the surrounding atmosphere. Those locks could only be overridden from the Atlanta offices, this precaution was put in place in the event that staff within the mobile center panicked and tried to open an outer door. At the same time the doors were sealed, a signal was sent to the large boxy incinerator units mounted on the backs of the four tractor trailers used to transport the field center. Requirements for setting up the lab called for each trailer to be positioned in a star pattern surrounding the field center to put the incinerators on all four compass points and oriented
inward towards the lab. The incinerators were fueled by tanks of compressed hydrogen peroxide which when triggered would be released through a trio of rigid hoses into focused chambers inside each unit, an igniter would then spark the gas which would be propelled from the back of the boxy unit into a jet of flame reaching out to a hundred and fifty feet. Burning at over 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, the four incinerator units were capable of reducing the entire field center as well as any contaminated substances to a pile of ash in less than twelve seconds. The process to fire off the incinerators could be started either at any of the four trailers holding the equipment or remotely from the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. The final thing that occurred when Amy pushed that alarm button was that indicators on the computer screens both in Atlanta and at the crisis center in DC would flash on the screen with a notification that an alarm had been activated within the center.

The current on duty supervisor at the CDC office in Atlanta was an asshole, his subordinates knew it and his superiors knew it. Appointed to the position because his father was a
well-known and respected superior court justice, Brian Cansler had spent six years working towards his bachelor’s degree in management from a state university just outside of Atlanta. When he finally graduated, his father made some calls and pulled some strings to get him placed in the CDC offices working on the personnel side of the house. Over time he had threatened, bullied and coerced his way up the ladder until he finally landed a supervisory position overseeing the nonscientific staff that kept the center running. It was not the most glamorous of jobs, but it paid well and gave Brian the satisfaction of showing his old man that he was putting his degree to good use.

Normally Brian would never have anything to do with the operations side of the house within the CDC, his position was designed to oversee personnel such as grounds keepers, electricians, computer techs, janitors and mail room workers. The standard operations guide for CDC functions was very specific in terms of how things were to be run in the event of emergencies like the one they were now facing with a rare and dangerous viral outbreak rapidly spreading throughout the nation and now across the globe. During a crisis such as this
, regulations specified that the monitoring and control centers be manned by a ranking supervisor at all times. Under typical day to day conditions, only a single supervisor was required during normal working hours, generally from 9-5 and the skeleton crews covering the center overnight could make due with a much more junior ranking supervisor. Due to federal budget cuts in the past two years the CDC had been another agency forced to tighten its belt and make due with less. One of those cuts dealt with personnel, after an independent personnel audit identified thirty six positions that were described as redundant, the US Department of Health and Human Services followed the recommendations from the audit and started working out early retirement plans to several senior staff and offered generous severance packages to others who did not meet the criteria for early retirement. The result of these cuts was that the CDC was left at the most minimal staffing levels authorized under their charter. Once the alert level was raised in response to the outbreak in New Jersey, the CDC's protocols concerning support personnel supervisory responsibilities came into effect. These protocols called for someone of department level supervision or higher to be on the on duty authority within the monitoring and control center for each shift. That loophole in their own standard operations manual ended up leaving Brian in a position to be the senior authority for the night shift when the field center alarm came through.

Every
oncoming shift was required to carefully review the logs of the shift they were relieving to bring themselves up to speed on the latest events. Brian considered that too much of a mundane task and instead he spent the time he should have been reviewing those logs updating his personal Facebook page and catching up on some posts from college friends. All he knew about the current emergency was that one of their field units had been deployed in response to a possible flu outbreak and that the crisis center in DC was their superior authority and calling the shots. As such, he was unaware that the virus had already reached beyond designated quarantine zones and that their own people had shifted their efforts from containment to development of a vaccine. With this knowledge in hand a more experienced and reasonable supervisor would have taken a measure of discretion when applying the carefully scripted response steps that had been drawn up in the event of a manual or automated alarm activation at any of the mobile field centers. Brian was neither experienced in any aspect of managing the monitoring and control nerve center of the CDC nor was he anyone would ever consider a reasonable person. When he was made aware of the alarm a mild degree of panic set in, while he relished the opportunity to be put in charge of such an important piece of the CDC's apparatus, he had never really considered that there would come a time where he would be required to make any actual operational type decisions. He had envisioned the entire crisis blowing over in a day or two and then he would be able to brag to his father about what an important role he had played during the crisis and possibly have him make some calls to see about a raise or a nicer office. He thought it might also make a good story over a couple beers in his favorite downtown dive bar, it might even get him a little action with the ladies.

Now that he was actually facing a true to life situation
, he could feel his armpits soaking with sweat, a migraine starting to build in his temple and he suddenly felt as if his tie was tightening around his neck. His saving grace came in the form of the communications operator when the man handed him a binder open to the correct section detailing the step by step procedures to be performed in this type of situation. He had to hand it to the government, for any possible eventuality one could dream up you were bound to find a laminated procedure guide that laid out exactly what actions needed to be taken, when they were to be taken and by whom. Reading through the guide he started to feel a little easier, the steps actually seemed reasonably simple, as long as he followed the guide and there were no surprises, he thought he just might be able to pull it off. As his confidence returned he considered how his actions in this emergency could add to his contributions and further impress his father with his coolness under pressure. Step one called for the communications center to attempt to establish contact with the facility.

Brian instructed the communications operator to get in touch with a supervisor at the field site either by phone, radio or instant messenger. What they would never know was that while more than half of the field center's staff were alive and well in a secure section of the facility out of immediate danger from any contagions in the central lab area, their communications systems were not accessible to them. Since the alarm had locked down the field center at the evening shift change, all the surviving personnel were either in their sleeping quarters, in the rest room or the chow hall, and those w
here the three areas that no one had considered including phones or radios. The operational procedures of the field center always called for more than half of the staff to be on duty in the labs or examination areas at any time, all of their communications gear were in those areas.

When the zombie that attacked Amy Benson wedged the airlock door leading out of the central lab open with his arm, the airlock cycle was unable to run its course. With the activation of the alarm system, all corridors connecting each individual section automatically went into an airlock cycle, the doors on either side of those corridors were sealed tight until the system registered that the cycle was complete and released the locking systems for all of the doors. What had never been taken into consideration in this design was exactly what had happened in this case, a single door being wedged open and not allowing the cycle for that corridor to
complete would prevent any other corridor door from being opened anywhere in the facility. With the outside doors locked automatically in response to the alarms, the remaining personnel were trapped in those three sections by doors that would not open due to a faulty design in the programing for the air locks.

The communications operator continued trying to reach the field center without success on any system. Brian referred back to his step by step guide and noted a highlighted disclaimer under that first step that told him that if communications were not established they were to immediately move on to step six which included instructions for logging directly into the closed circuit camera system of the lab. Using those controls they could also access atmospheric readouts and determine if a contaminant was present, what type it was and at what levels. Brian read the instructions to the equipment operator and waited patiently while he fed commands into his computer terminal to access the security cameras and monitoring systems throughout the field center. What
they didn’t know was that when security guard Tristan Gant had overrode the security systems in the examination room so he could shirk his duties and watch a couple movies, the entire security system went offline from the network. When the operator in the CDC communications section attempt to log in to that system he received a network notification that the system had been taken offline. Referring to the code provided by the network notification he could see that a security guards access code had been used to take the system down. The reference code for such an activity indicated that security personnel on duty at the field center were required to disconnect all network communications when the field center was at risk for being compromised by a contagion. The logic behind such a procedure came from an incident during a training run near Miami, Florida two years earlier. A civilian hacker had penetrated their systems firewalls and gained access to the camera and monitoring systems of a field unit. Since it was an exercise the monitoring systems had been programmed to report that a lethal biological agent had been released in one of the labs. The hacker had taken it upon himself to pass this news on to an Internet newsgroup and it spread like wildfire that the entire Miami area was in danger from a biological agent. The backlash from the local government over the impact this incident had on their tourism levels that spring and summer had prompted the CDC to take action to ensure it never occurred again. Brian once again referred to his laminated instructions which indicated that if step six determined that a contaminant was present, and it gave a list of levels of contaminations and other codes that were not pertinent in this scenario, or if the system was determined to be offline, they were to skip down to step nine. He had to take a couple deep breaths as he read what they were supposed to do next. Step nine was the start of the remote incineration process for the entire field center. It did make him feel a little better when he read that once the process was remotely started, audible and visual alarms would sound throughout the center allowing ample warning to anyone capable of responding to establish contact with CDC. He rationalized that if no one made contact with them, then there was more than likely no one left alive to do so and the destruction of the facility was justified after all.