The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) (14 page)

“Went to their first meeting, but they weren’t going to teach me anything dad didn’t already. There’s only like ten people in the firearms club, too, and they just weren’t my type. Didn’t know as much about shooting and guns as I would’ve thought—or at least, not as much as dad knows.” She started counting off different organizations with her fingers. “Same thing with the self-defense classes, the camping groups, the one hunting organization at Maryland, and even the swing dance club. Dad taught me all that stuff.”

Bethany laughed, although it sounded forced to Kara. She was never sure whether her mother really liked talking about Dom since the divorce.

“Your father is good at excitement, huh? Student orgs can’t even compete.”

“Nope, they can’t.” Kara imagined what she’d be doing if her Dad was coming back to town, too. It had been months since she’d seen him last. Maybe he’d take her bow hunting. That’d be more interesting than sitting around the house in Frederick, but she’d never dare tell her mother.

“Still liking your bio courses?” Bethany asked, interrupting the drawn-out silence.

“Yeah, they’re good. But I wish I didn’t have to take Biology I. I feel like I know all that stuff already. I’m ready for Bio II and organic chemistry and—” The car stopped suddenly. Kara jolted forward, and her seatbelt dug into her sternum. “What the hell?”

“Sorry.” Bethany glanced in the rearview mirror, catching Kara’s eyes. “People don’t know how to drive. A little rain and everyone loses their minds.”

Red brake lights flared before them. Cars and semi-trucks snaked across the interstate. Horns blared. Another thing Kara didn’t miss when she struck off in the wilderness: traffic.

Kara saw a white-tailed deer emerging from between the trees. It stared westward along the interstate toward the origin of the highway congestion. Its tail flicked up in alarm. The deer dashed back into the forest.

“You think—” Bethany paused and leaned forward over the steering wheel. “What’s going on?”

Kara turned away from the trees to see what had caught her mother’s attention. She scooted off the seat, pressing against the seatbelt, and squinted. A man was running between the vehicles. His face was painted crimson. As he came closer, she realized
blood
was trickling from his scalp. He said nothing as he passed.

Kara spoke again, her voice low. “There must have been an accident.”

Bethany pressed a button on her dash. A female voice came over the speakers: “Please say your command.”

“Call 9-1-1,” Bethany said, her words stern and slow.

The dial tone from her Bluetooth-connected phone rang out. Then it stopped. “This number is disconnected.”

“Come on!” Bethany said. “Call 9-1-1.”

Again the dial tone rang for a moment before repeating the error message.

“Mom, we need to go,” Kara said. The back of her neck tingled, and she wanted nothing more than to get out of the car and escape into the safety of the woods.

A woman tugging a child rushed past. The little girl wailed, and tears streamed down her face. Another man followed. One arm hung limp by his side, and his suit jacket fluttered behind him, torn and ragged. His jaw was clenched, and his brow was deeply furrowed as if in pain. The trickle of people turned into a human stampede as more and more sprinted past. A semi-truck’s engine roared to life as it turned onto the interstate’s shoulder. It careened ahead until another car attempted to bypass the stalled traffic with the same maneuver. The truck smashed into the car, crushing the smaller vehicle.

“Mom, we need to go!” Kara yelled. Her knuckles turned white as they gripped the edge of her seat. She wasn’t sure what had happened on the road ahead, but she knew in the pit of her stomach that they needed to get away from it—and fast.

“I know! Hold on!” Bethany reversed the car and then threw it into forward and did a U-turn. She pulled the car onto the shoulder and peeled out over the gravel. Bethany dodged other SUVs and cars sticking their noses onto the shoulder. A truck pulled too far out. Bethany swerved, but it was too late. Her front bumper crumpled against the passenger side of the Ford F150. A cloud of broken plastic sprayed up, but she continued, ignoring the damage.

“You okay?” Bethany asked, turning to catch Kara’s eyes.

Kara nodded.

Bethany pressed the gas pedal to the floor, her eyes flicking back to the windshield.

Kara’s heart pounded as she turned and watched the chaos they left behind. A throng of people sprinted between cars and trucks. Several of them ran over the hoods and roofs of the vehicles, desperate to break away from the burgeoning tidal wave of panic. The Volvo’s progress became slower as more cars turned onto the shoulder.

One of the runners caught up and jumped onto the trunk of their Volvo. Kara let out a scream, more in surprise than fear. The man pounded over the roof; his footsteps resonated in the cabin. He stumbled over the hood and fell. When he stood, he tore off his suit jacket and ran off the highway toward the trees. Another woman followed. A black bra showed beneath her white T-shirt, which hung off her in tatters. Blood covered her arms.

The man turned back and saw the woman. He appeared to pick up speed, but the woman was faster. She pounced on him, and they fell together in a tumble of limbs, rolling away into the tall grass and weeds beside the road. For a moment, they disappeared under the sea of green and brown. Then the woman emerged alone from the underbrush. Her head swiveled, and her eyes focused on the highway again. Scarlet stains covered her face as fresh blood dripped down the front of her shirt and over her arms. She wiped her face clean and locked eyes with Kara.

Then the woman charged at their car.

“Go, Mom, go!”

Bethany yanked hard on the wheel and steered the car off the shoulder. Gravity pulled it down the short slope of mud, slick with rain, until they were on the flat stretch of grassland between the highway and the forest. The car bumped and jostled as it shot forward. A grinding sound emerged from under the vehicle as the suspension bottomed out and the undercarriage scraped against the ground. The woman with the black bra still followed. More screams joined the cacophony outside the car. People ran and pounced on one another. Some appeared to be the hunters, others the prey.

Without higher clearance and a four-wheel drive transmission, the Volvo struggled over the uneven ground. A line of trees blocked their exit to the right, and the stalled cars along the highway prevented them from using the road again. Going forward was their only option. The crazy woman chasing them howled and threw herself at the Volvo. Her head smacked against the rear window, and cracks splintered across it like a spider web. Bethany yelped. “Kara! Are you okay?”

“Just keep going!”

Bethany slammed on the gas, and the car shot forward. The woman’s body rolled back from the trunk. She fell to the grass but quickly shot back up as the Volvo continued to put distance between them. Seemingly bored of chasing difficult prey, the woman veered onto the highway. She leapt onto a man in a leather jacket and sunk her teeth into his neck. More people poured from their vehicles. Others streamed into the woods. The mass of humanity muddled Kara’s ability to tell predator from prey.

Kara wrapped her arms across her chest. “What’s wrong with those people?”

Her mother leaned forward over the wheel. Kara could see sweat trickle down her brow. An SUV surged past them, its wheels kicking up clods of dirt and grass. The SUV barreled forward until it hit a hidden rut. The vehicle’s front tires caught, and the SUV flipped. A cloud of dirt and dust whooshed up as its roof crumpled against the ground. Bethany steered their car around it. They reached a ramp leading to another road not yet clogged by stalled vehicles and hordes of crazed people. The Volvo bounced onto the asphalt. Bethany jerked the wheel to the left and dodged a minivan unknowingly headed into the hell they’d escaped. They honked at her, and she honked back, flailing her arms in a desperate effort to turn them around. A child pressed his chubby face to the window, sticking his tongue out.

A wave of terror coursed through Kara. “They have no idea. We have to warn them.”

Another car shot past them onto the ramp. Bethany shook her head and directed the Volvo onto a two-lane country road. “There are too many.”

Kara wasn’t sure whether her mother meant there were too many people chasing them, too many people being chased, or too many people who needed to be warned. Either way, a crushing feeling of uselessness overwhelmed her.

“We have to go home,” Bethany said and pressed the button on her steering wheel to make a call again.

This time the car’s voice system reported, “No available cellular service.”

“We’ve got to get home,” Bethany repeated. “We have to find your sister.”

***

M
eredith Webb adjusted the dial on the hand-cranked radio. She heard muddled voices in the midst of static and crackling music but couldn’t make them out. She sat back against the trunk of a pine. A bed of dried brown needles rustled as she stretched her legs. She tried her burner cellphone again, reasoning that her earlier calls on the disposable phone might’ve been lost to bad cell reception on the Appalachian Trail. But still the phone reported no service.

A seed of worry had rooted within her when she’d heard the radio show covering the strange, bony bodies washing ashore on beaches along the Atlantic seafront. That initial concern had grown into a twisting snarl of thorns preventing her from focusing on anything but the possibility of an epidemic-level spread of the biological agent from the IBSL oil platform.

As Meredith twisted the radio’s knob, a woman’s voice came over the air. “All along I-270, we’ve got abandoned cars. People running.”

A man’s voice came on. “Running from what?”

“Other people. Hold on a second, we’re at the front of the traffic jam.”

“That’s WADC’s eye in the sky, reporting live from western Maryland. We’re putting a hold on our normal scheduling to cover a series of incidents caused by individuals who can best be described as enraged and malevolent.”

Meredith’s heart fluttered as she stood. She swiveled, peering into the forest and down the trail, but she saw only trees and heard nothing more than wind through their branches.

“Craig? Craig?” the reporter asked. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, Julia, tell us what you see.”

“The traffic accident appears to have started with an overturned bus. There are bodies along the road. Some in the grass beside the interstate. I can’t even begin to estimate the number.”

The radio crackled, and Meredith scrounged through her hiking pack. She pulled out the satellite phone to call Dom. She’d hoped to put more distance between herself and the agency in case they were still tracking her, but there was no use in waiting to contact him now. If the biological agents the CIA had been hiding already made it into the US population, she wanted to know what they were dealing with—she needed to know what Dom had uncovered. Maybe he’d found something to clue her in on what was going on with the rest of the world.

Craig’s voice came over the radio again, surprisingly calm. “Our staff informs us similar incidents are occurring in New York and Miami. Georgia has already declared a state of emergency. The cause of these events is so far unknown, but there is speculation that this is some kind of coordinated terrorist attack.”

Meredith laughed aloud. She knew she seemed crazy, but...
terrorists
pulling this one off? Hell, maybe they were right. Maybe this
was
a terrorist attack. But based on what she knew of the IBSL facility, the terrorist group unwittingly responsible for this disaster might be the United States government.

––––––––

D
om paced in front of the metal tables bolted to the deck. The Hunters, engineers, electronic gurus, and other crew members filled the seats. All forty-odd shipmates stared at him with grim expressions.

“Brett Fielding is gone,” Dom began. “He gave his life for this mission. A Ranger in his past life, a fellow Hunter in this one, he died honorably, and we will not soon forget him.” Mixed whispers of condolences and remembrances rustled among the audience. In his mind’s eye, Dom watched Brett tumble off the platform with the Skull ripping into him. Guilt surged in him again. He shook the thoughts from his mind and continued. “What we saw aboard the IBSL is unlike anything we’ve encountered before. I want to share with you what I discussed with the Hunters and select medical and tech staff before the mission. It’s vital that we’re all on the same page.”

He detailed Meredith’s cryptic message and the video she had sent. He explained the behaviors of the Skulls and the samples they’d found in the laboratory. He’d also had Chao set up a projector to replay the gruesome footage of the Skulls aboard the rig. Dom signaled for Chao to fill in where he had left off.

“We don’t know much yet,” Chao reported, “but we do believe these things originated from a classified bioweapons research program called the Amanojaku Project.”

“Thank you, Chao,” Dom said. “The communications team will be working overtime to get to the bottom of this, as will our medical team. We’ll be relaying any and all information we find on a regular basis.” He paused and then said, “I have other news to share: besides Brett Fielding, we experienced two other casualties. Miguel Ruiz was attacked but came away with no serious bodily harm. Still, he is being quarantined for a compromised biohazard suit. Scott Ashworth is also quarantined. He faced daunting injuries, but Lauren Winters and her medical team have treated him. He’s now in stable condition. In fact, he’s already regained consciousness and appears to be in good spirits.”

The low rumble of voices erupted into applause.
One life lost, one life saved,
Dom thought. It didn’t seem like an even trade.
Let them focus on those we saved.

“Renee’s squad recovered a worker who had barricaded himself aboard the rig. When Lauren assures us he is in stable condition, we’ll have a first-hand witness to explain what the hell was going on at the IBSL.”