The Dead War Series (Book 1): Good Intentions (9 page)

“Shit!” Vincent cursed, but still, he left a message indicating how important it was that she gathered her husband’s research—as much as she could carry. He ended the call, and then tried his fiancée once again.

This time, she answered.

“Sarah! Oh thank fucking God!” Vincent all but screamed into the telephone.

“Vincent? Oh thank God you're alive!” Sarah replied in a breathless voice.

“Where are you?” Vincent asked.

“I just ran into the building, I'm waiting on an elevator. Whatever the hell those things are, they're coming. I saw them, Vincent. I saw what they were doing. God! Won't the elevator move any fucking faster?!” Sarah fussed as she twitched and fidgeted while waiting for the doors to open. If they didn't open in the next five seconds, she was going to take the stairs. Forty-eight floors, be damned. She's rather die of a heart attack then be eaten alive any day of the week.

“Oh thank goodness! All right, I'm in the condo packing our shit. We're getting out of here,” Vincent told her.

The elevator doors finally opened and more people spilled out, pushing past Sarah with absolutely no regard for her toes, shoulders, or anything else on her body.

“Ow! You asshole!” Sarah shouted at one of the men who smashed her big toe under the heel of his sneaker. The man continued on without even so much as a backward glance.

“What happened?” Vincent asked, concerned.

“I'm all right. Considering the urgency of this situation, I'll forgive peoples’ rudeness. I should be one to talk anyway, I knocked a few people down and out of my way running to get back home after I got your message,” Sarah said. “I'm heading up now.”

“Okay, good. I have to finish packing. I'll see you when you get here. I love you so much,” Vincent said, feeling every word with all his heart.

“I love you, too.” Sarah slipped her cell phone back into her pocket as she watched the level lights turn bright red with each floor she passed. The elevator stopped at several floors and more people climbed on board. They didn't care that it was going up first; they were willing to do that if it meant soon they'd be going back down towards the exit.

***

Vincent went back into his bedroom with Felicia. He pulled a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt from his dresser and dressed quickly. Next he packed a large duffel bag with clothes and items he felt were of the utmost necessity. With one good swipe of his arm, he swept several toiletry items off the shelf in the bathroom into the bag. Toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, deodorant and a box of tampons all went into the bag.

“That will have to do for now,” Vincent muttered to himself.

              “You want to tell me how all of this started?” Felicia asked her tone straightforward and commanding.

Not really. I swear, how many times am I going to have to go over this?
Vincent thought.

Fact of the matter was, he was far too ashamed and no matter how he looked at it, he couldn't shake his feelings of guilt from his involvement.

“I feel like I keep repeating myself. I've already told you everything I know,” Vincent said.

“Well tell it to me again. Every. Single. Detail.” Felicia stood there, arms crossed over her chest. She waited.

Vincent paused and looked up at her. The entire city was in a fucked up situation because of something he was involved in. He could tell by the look in her eyes, despite her professional demeanor; she was holding him at least partly responsible. Part of him couldn't blame her. Still, he put aside his own issues. They needed his help—whatever help he could offer—not his self-pity. He began to talk as he cleaned out his secret money stash hidden in several books on his nightstand bookshelf.

“The ape was dead, I swear it. There weren’t any readings on the monitor. We had just discovered the breakthrough we’d been looking for. It would have revolutionized the world. Heal diseases and strengthen our military force all at the same time. It was going to make history,” Vincent said in his defense.

Felicia snorted. “Yeah, well whatever the hell you did
is
making history. So, at what point did it all go wrong?”

Vincent flinched at her bluntness. Destroying humanity isn’t one of the things he wanted to go down in history for. Curing cancer—most definitely. Curing AIDS—oh hell yeah! Creating healing rations for soldiers on the battlefield—just hand over the Nobel Peace Prize. But this shit, what the fuck!?

Vincent couldn’t really fault her for the harsh dose of truth. He felt he’d earned that and more—maybe a swift kick in the nuts. In all honesty, he couldn’t believe his rhetoric himself. He never did have the confidence in their project the other scientists had. Something about it always rubbed him the wrong way and with good reason considering what was going on around them.

“Hey?” Felicia snapped.

Vincent blinked and looked at her.

“Get back to the story please,” she reminded.

“I’m sorry,” Vincent said, forcing himself to stay on track. “I guess I can always contemplate my hubris later, right?”

“I don't give a damn what you do later as long as we take care of what's happening now,” Felicia shot back. “I don't think you're taking this as seriously as you should.”

Vincent's brows creased and his lip turned up in a sneer. “Don't presume to tell me what I'm feeling or thinking. You weren't there when I saw my friends get ripped to fucking pieces by that damn ape,” he snapped.

“Fair enough. Stay focused then. I need you here,” Felicia said, pointing from his eyes to hers with her first two fingers.

Vincent nodded and continued. “Well, the ape bit my colleague...” His voice trailed off as he thought about Dr. Henrick. “My God.”

“What?” Felicia asked, turning around to see if he was seeing something she didn’t.

“Dr. Henrick, he was the first bitten, the first infected. We rushed him off to Mercy Hospital,” Vincent said.

Felicia’s expression grew solemn. “That would explain why the hospital was the second call on our radar. It was overrun by the time we got there, as was SciTech. My team and I had met up with a team of doctors from the IDPH. The hospital was surrounded by police and some of the officers had already gone inside. As a precaution, Dr. Bloomberg had suggested William stay behind in his truck to monitor transmission. He and his team went inside; I was on my way to follow them when you contacted me. Had I not received your call, I would have ended up like them.”

“What happened?” Vincent asked. He already had an idea, but he wanted to know what she saw so that he could judge just how bad things were.

“They weren’t in there five minutes before Michael... Dr. Bloomberg contacted me over the radio. He said something about there’s too many of them and that they were fast. I told him to get the hell out of there. I was going to let the police lock it down. We had no idea what to expect going in, I thought it was something we could contain from the inside. Quarantine the infected, you know the drill. We didn’t even have time to talk to any of the doctors. No one was left alive inside… well, alive-alive.”

“Did the police lock it down?” Vincent asked.

“Those things came out the front door. There must have been over fifty of them. Some of the police officers who went inside were among them as was Dr. Bloomberg.” Felicia lowered her head more from guilt, than from grief. “I didn’t bother to stick around to see anything more.”

Vincent remembered talking to her on the telephone when that all went down, and he understood. She did the only thing she could do. Hell, he’d run as fast as his feet could take him when the bodies started dropping and then rising at SciTech. He didn’t even know if Steve got away from the female attacker or not. He never bothered to look back.

“The last thing I saw out the rear view mirror was the rest of the cops being overtaken by those… things,” Samantha said.

Both Vincent and Felicia turned when they heard her speak.

“My colleague Dr. Henrick suffered life-threatening wounds when he was attacked. The arteries in his arm were severed and he was bleeding out fast. Fast... everything happened so damn fast! He must have died soon after he got to the hospital for it to be so quickly overtaken,” Vincent speculated. He zipped up one duffel bag and went over to his closet, pulling out another.

“So they rise up within seconds after dying, is that what you're trying to tell me?” Felicia asked.

Vincent nodded as he walked toward the kitchen and into the pantry. “That's exactly what the hell I'm telling you.” He looked at his watch. “Where the fuck is Sarah?”

He tossed the bag on the counter and quickly walked towards the front door. Before he could reach for the handle, Sarah opened the door.

“Oh thank God,” Vincent breathed as he pulled his fiancée into a tight embrace.

She hugged him back as hard as she could, silently praying that they'd never be parted again. He pulled back and looked over her, checking for injuries.

She noticed what he was doing and took her fiancé's face in her hands. “Look at me, I'm all right. I'm all right,” she said, hoping to give him some measure of relief.

“God, I thought something had happened to you. It took you so long,” Vincent said, hugging her again.

“That damn elevator must have stopped on every floor on the way up, then it had the nerve to get stuck. It was so frustrating!”

He nodded. “We need to leave as soon as we can. Can you finish packing some food while I gather my computer and drives?”

Sarah nodded.

“Hey, what's your password?” William asked Vincent.

“What?” Vincent turned, seeing the other doctor at his computer desk.

“I need to get into your system to download your files.”

“I can take it from here, you wouldn't know what to save,” Vincent said.

He walked over to his desk and began packing away Scan Disk portable drives, his two external hard drives and his laptop. William rose from the chair and Vincent took his place, typing in his password. He stuck another drive into the USB port and began copying files. 

“Who are these people?” Sarah called to him from the kitchen as she looked around her condo at the unfamiliar faces.

“Scientists from the CDC, we're trying to get a lid on the situation,” Vincent answered.

“The CDC got here that quickly?” Sarah asked, shocked.

“We were in the city for a national health conference, but that isn't important right now,” Felicia offered her the brief explanation. She walked toward Vincent standing behind his computer chair. “Are you going back to SciTech?”

Vincent shook his head. “Shit, not by myself. I know we need to get into SciTech Labs to gather what information we can get our hands on. But I don't think we should try to do it ourselves.”

“I agree,” said Dr. William Bale. “Before we go in there, we need to at least figure out how to neutralize these things.”

“Don't you mean, 'kill'?” Sarah pointed out. “It's okay to say that word. We all want to know how to do that.”

“Did you see them?” Samantha asked.

“I saw what one of them could do to us. It was horrible,” Sarah said, her voice lowering a few octaves as her mind replayed the vision of a mother and her son being ripped apart by one of the... what was the best word to describe them? Zombies?

Vincent had stopped what he was doing on his computer and was studying her.  He hated that something he did could make her feel such fear, such despair. At that moment, he was so angry with himself, so disappointed. Seeing how the memory was affecting Sarah, Vincent decided to redirect their attention back to him to take the load off of her.

“From what I witnessed, bullets aren’t stopping these things so it’s only a matter of time before the entire city is under siege. We need to get to my co-worker’s home, Dr. Pierce. He was the one who discovered the perfect compound. We need his research and I'm sure a great deal of it, if not everything, is at his home and the lab.”

Felicia nodded. “I'll tell headquarters about Dr. Pierce's research.”

“It's not just his research, we have to gather everything. We pumped so many compounds into that particular test subject; I need to be able to separate the variables that mutated its biology. Like I was saying, it was all but dead and then we injected the compound that gave us the positive result we were looking for in hopes that we could cure it of its illness. It didn't work. I still can't understand why not,” Vincent said.

“What do you mean... what is this compound?” Dr. Bale asked.

“To be perfectly honest, I don't really know. It was given to us by the military and Gen. Bradley Fuller was extremely tight-lipped about its origins. We were to neutralize its unstable elements to turn it into something we could use to help the human race,” Vincent said.

“There's that word again,” Sarah mumbled, referencing the word “neutralize”.

“Come again?” Felicia asked her, one eye-brow raised.

“It's not important,” Sarah begin. “Just a personal gripe I have. I'm not big on politically correct terms that beat around the damn bush and don't mean shit.”

“We can debate the legitimacy of politically correct terms when the city isn't in jeopardy,” Samantha said. “Can we please stay on topic,” she snapped.