Scorched Earth: Book 2 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 2), Page 3

  Havestock nodded.

  “We have to consider Boston as a level one containment zone as well. Under no circumstances should any attempts be made to rescue individuals on the ground. The containment cases are the primary objective, do you understand me?”

  “Understood, sir,” Havestock replied. Reeves nodded and released his shoulder, allowing the man to continue his trek toward the communications console to organize the retrieval team. Reeves turned back toward the hustle and bustle of the command center, his eyes locking on two people who had just entered from the rear.

  They were two men, dressed in neatly pressed black suits, narrow ties tucked into starched collars. Both of them were clean cut, with neatly trimmed hair, clean shaven faces, looking inordinately calm and collected among a broiling throng of barely contained chaos.

  Reeves kicked off, striding long and swift across the floor, his eyes narrowing toward the two gentlemen.

  “Gentlemen?” he asked, approaching them. “I’m going to have to ask you to take your suited butts out of my command center. Right now.”

  “Colonel Reeves,” one of the men replied. “I’m Agent Craig.” He extended a hand, which Reeves made no gesture to accept.

  “I don’t care what your name is,” he spat back. “I don’t care what agency you’re from. This isn’t the place for you. I’ve got a crisis to deal with here.”

  Agent Craig’s brown eyes glared over the colonel’s shoulders toward the comm stations where a few screens were showing smoke and fire cascading from the Boston skyline.

  “And a fine job you’re doing, Colonel.”

  Reeves looked over his shoulder at the screens they were looking at, then turned back. “Go to hell, Craig.”

  “We’re not here to start any trouble,” Agent Craig said in a softer tone, trying to defuse the situation. “I’m just following orders like you.”

  “You can follow your orders elsewhere.”

  “Listen, Colonel,” the agent continued, “without our agency your team here wouldn’t have two nickels to rub together, so think about that before you toss us out of here like we’re drunk college students.”

  Reeves glared at him, clenching his hands into fists.

  “You’ve got yourself a regular soup sandwich in Boston, okay, and it’s only getting worse. Hartford is circling the drain, and we’re getting more reported cases by the minute across New England and the northeast. All hands are on deck for this one, Colonel. I’m sorry, this is no longer your game and your game alone.”

  Reeves chewed his lip as he looked at the two well-dressed men. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but they made a certain amount of sense, and the entire core of Team Ten and the USAMRIID had been built on a culture of collaboration. Still, something about these two men felt off and he didn’t want them polluting his workspace. His arm rigid, he extended a finger toward the door on the east wall of the command center.

  “Private conference rooms are that way,” he said. “You’re welcome to use our facilities. But time is of the essence here, gentlemen, and no one in the United States Armed Forces is better equipped to deal with this crisis than the team that’s in here right now. So please don’t begin to think you know what’s best.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Agent Craig replied, nodding amicably. He swiveled on his heel and walked toward the conference room door, the second man in a suit and tie following close behind. Reeves tracked their movements with his narrowed eyes, a nagging feeling tugging at his guts, telling him that something here was about to go very wrong.

  Or it already had.

  ***

  Agent Craig swung into the conference room and eased the door closed behind him, just letting the second agent squeeze past.

  “Have a seat, Agent Kuster,” Craig said, nodding toward the small table. Kuster approached the table, slowing his pace slightly when he saw that two other men were already seated there. He turned toward Craig as if to ask where they’d come from, but the look on Craig’s face convinced him to hold his tongue.

  “Agent Craig,” said one of the men. “We’ve been waiting.”

  “Apologies, Agent Wakefield,” Craig said, nodding toward one of the men already seated. He wore a royal blue suit with a tightly cut mane of silver hair. Next to him was a second man, similarly dressed, only in gray, his hair a deep, dark charcoal.

  “Agent Bryce,” Craig said, nodding toward the man with the charcoal hair. “This is Agent Kuster.” He gestured toward Kuster as he made his way around the table and swept out a chair to sit in.

  “Now that we’ve all been introduced,” Agent Wakefield said, calmly, both palms pressed to the table’s surface, “maybe someone can tell me precisely what the devil is going on out there.”

  Kuster and Craig’s eyes darted toward each other, but Craig corrected his vision quickly, moving back over to meet eyes with Wakefield. He didn’t want to show any signs of weakness.

  “We’re still digging through the details,” he said. “Obviously there were complications.”

  “Complications, you say?” asked Bryce. “The city of Boston is burning to the ground.” His voice was low and sharp, a guttural growl with a jagged edge.

  “Agent Bryce, let’s try to keep the finger pointing to a minimum,” Craig replied.

  “Says the guy who is getting all the fingers pointed at him,” hissed Wakefield. “Craig, I mean seriously. Do you have any idea what Pandora’s Box you’ve opened here? This was supposed to be a single, isolated test case scenario.”

  “We are still investigating what went wrong,” Craig replied.

  “Meanwhile, millions of lives are at risk!” Wakefield said.

  “Don’t pretend for a second you give a crap about lives at risk,” Craig interjected. “You just want to make sure it’s all swept under the rug, and you’re worried the more people die, the harder that will be. Don’t forget, it was your agency who came up with this whole thing. I was just the one who had the guts enough to actually develop the execution plan.”

  “And you certainly executed it well,” said Bryce, sarcasm punctuating every word he spoke.

  Craig pressed his hands into the table and pushed himself up into a standing posture. “If all we’re doing here is blaming each other, I’m just going to go. We’re coming together to formulate a solution. At least that’s what I thought we were doing.”

  “Calm down, calm down,” said Wakefield, opening his palms toward his fellow intelligence operative. “You’re right. We need to fix this. That’s the top priority.”

  Craig remained standing for a moment for emphasis, staring down at Wakefield and Bryce. After a few calculated moments, he let himself settle back down into the chair and folded his hands together.

  “So what do we know?” Wakefield asked.

  Craig took a deep breath. “What we know is that we had an asset on the ground in Boston coordinating an isolated field test of a genetically engineered anti-bioweapon. This anti-bioweapon was devised as a quick dispersal device, designed to counteract genetically engineered viruses that we believe are currently being developed in several state-run projects internationally.”

  “Carry on,” said Bryce.

  “We delivered this device to a small-town market in Quincy, Massachusetts in an attempt to perform a localized field test. The target was a willing participant to a government sponsored research initiative, and was paid well for his participation. He was scheduled to see one of our physicians the following Monday who would have taken tissue samples to examine the results of this dispersal device.”

  “That all sounds very above board,” Wakefield replied. “So remind me where things went sideways.”

  Craig and Kuster glanced at each other. “Unknown to us, on Saint Patrick’s Day, the target runs a special celebration of sorts, and opens on Sunday, a day he is typically closed. There was a crowd of numerous customers at the time that the dispersal device detonated, instead of just the target. From what we can gather, the prototype genetically engine
ered anti-bioweapon did not work as designed and tested in a laboratory environment.”

  “Apparently not.”

  Ignoring the snide comment, Craig continued. “These new bioweapons we’re hearing about are genetically engineered to target a specific set of genomes that can match an individual’s ethnicity, country of origin, or even a specific genetic trait carried in an individual’s family. They are exceptionally powerful. Imagine dropping a chemical weapon in a crowd of hundreds, a weapon that would be completely innocuous to everyone but a single target? The virus hits this single target and activates, creating systemic failure within the target’s organs. He or she is dead within minutes. Meanwhile, everyone else in the crowd of people hears the noise, breathes the biological material, but it has absolutely no effect.”

  “Still sounds like science fiction just as much as it did a year ago,” replied Wakefield.

  “It may sound like science fiction, but it is science fact,” Craig replied. “I’ve seen it work.”

  “In the field or in a lab?”

  Craig gritted his teeth, but maintained his calm. “In a lab.”

  Wakefield nodded his curt “that’s what I thought” nod, but managed not to say the actual words. “Obviously it didn’t quite work as planned out in the real world.”

  Craig didn’t reply, he just remained seated, glaring at the two other men across the table.

  “Tell us about this girl,” Bryce said quietly. “There were reports that a young girl survived this catastrophe.”

  “We believe that’s true, yes,” Craig replied. “Our man in the field identified her parents, and we sent two agents to her apartment to see if we could get some further details. Neither agent has reported back and we’ve lost contact with our initial agent as well.”

  Wakefield pulled back from the desk, leaning in his chair, hands folded in front of him. “It sounds like you’ve got yourself one Grade A SNAFU here, don’t you?”

  “We’re still sorting out precisely what happened.”

  Wakefield looked at him. “Let me tell you what happened. Someone screwed up is what happened. This genius anti-bioweapon killed people is what happened.”

  “We targeted a tiny, isolated market south of Boston. Explain to me how that dropped planes out of the sky, set fires all over the city, and started a catastrophic spread of some kind of mysterious pandemic!”

  Wakefield and Bryce glanced at each other, then Wakefield returned his glare toward Agent Craig.

  “My friend, that’s exactly what we expect you to do.”

  Chapter 2

  It was a narrow, tightly packed dirt road, winding deep through the thickening trees, looking at once isolated and welcoming. Their first day of foot travel had occurred mainly throughout the forest, so getting their feet on relatively solid, cleared ground felt good to everyone, even though running into other people was not high on their list of accomplishments. Every person they’d run into since the incidents began had mostly wanted to kill them, after all.

  Jackson walked ahead of the group, with Clark at his right shoulder. The younger man held his shotgun in a clamped left hand, the sheathed sword jutting out of his tightly packed backpack. To his right, Clark strode empty-handed, though his pistol remained stuffed into the holster at his left hip, freshly loaded with nine-millimeter rounds cannibalized from the weapons retrieved by Team Ten after their ambush in downtown Boston. Drifting a few steps behind them was Broderick, still wearing his yellow containment suit, the hood pulled down and mask removed, with the M4 Carbine held firmly in two hands, the canvas bag of weapons strapped to his shoulder and running across his chest. The low clatter of metal on metal sounded from within the bag as he walked, the surrounding silence only serving to amplify the noise.

  Javier and Melinda brought up the rear. He had her pink backpack strapped to his shoulder, riding high and tight on his upper back, looking ridiculous on his larger frame. She walked in short strides, the now familiar stuffed hippopotamus hanging from her fist, its arm crunched tight between her closed fingers.

  “So talk to me about this place in Connecticut,” Clark said, turning slightly toward Jackson.

  “Aldrich?” Jackson asked. “Small town. Real small. Little downtown area, a few shops and a movie theater. Mostly farm lands, though. Spread out pretty far, though the downtown is where most of the action is.”

  “You said you’ve got family there?”

  “My fiancée. Her family.”

  “What about yours?”

  Jackson looked out into the trees as he walked, chewing some words around in between his clenched teeth.

  “Sore subject?” Clark asked after a few moments of silence.

  “Nah,” Jackson replied. “I mean, I guess not. My dad owned a crop dusting business, believe it or not. I mean, landscaping, mostly, but he owned a plane for the bigger jobs, too.”

  “Pretty cool.”

  Jackson shrugged. “I guess. I mean, I should be thankful. Without my experience flying that Piper Cub, I probably would have died in a fiery plane crash over Hanscom a couple of days back rather than landing the Cessna alive and well. Suppose I should be thankful for that, though my teenage self would have been rolling his eyes so hard they fell out of his head.”

  “No interest in crop dusting as a high schooler? I’m shocked,” Clark said, rolling his own eyes.

  “That’s what Dad wanted me to do. He had this picture in his head of me taking over the family business fresh out of high school, continuing the family name. Settling down with the small-town girl, living my life as a third generation Aldrich citizen.”

  “Sounds like a good life,” Clark said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Not the life you wanted?”

  Jackson shook his head. “As hard as he tried, I just couldn’t get into it. Call me a millennial or whatever, but landscaping was not my bag. I was into Eastern medicine, actually. Holistic healing, relationships, meditation. Martial arts. And yes, Crossfit.”

  Clark laughed. “Man, working in landscaping would burn you more calories than Crossfit any day, junior.”

  Jackson shook his head again.

  “So I assume Dad was a bit cranky that you decided to move to Boston?”

  Another few moments of silence passed between the two men, and once again Clark sensed a sore subject.

  “He died before I finished college,” Jackson said. “Heart attack. He was out clearing the back forty on our farm, working harder than he should have been at sixty years old.”

  “Sorry to hear that, man.”

  “It’s all good. I mean, it’s not good, really. He didn’t want me to go to college, he saw it as a direct rebellion against his way of life. My mom would never have said it, but I think part of her blamed me for his death. If I’d stayed home and taken over the family business, maybe he wouldn’t have been out there trying to clear that brush all by himself, while I was off at my fancy school.”

  “Come on, man,” Clark said. “That’s not fair to your mom. I mean, I don’t know your parents at all, and, well… I’m not a parent, at least not that I know of, but I can’t see that being true.”

  Jackson shrugged.

  “Have you talked to your mom about it?”

  “Can’t,” Jackson said. “She died like two months after my dad. She was having some heart problems anyway, then after he died, she just kind of stopped eating, stopped caring. Stopped doing a lot of things. Dad was dead, I was a hundred miles away at school, and she just kind of withered away and died in that little, run down house.”

  “Man,” Clark said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re not worried about Mom blaming you. You’re blaming yourself enough for everyone, right?”

  Jackson shrugged again, his new default response.

  “You need to cut that out, man. There’s no law that says the kid has to do what the parents did or what the parents wish of them. They would have been proud of you, man. Moving to the big city. Getting a corporate
job. Living the high life.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jackson spat back. “I can barely pay rent, man. I’m just… I mean, I was just working out the last six months of my lease and getting ready to move back. I couldn’t hack it.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my sensei told me, too.”

  Clark chuckled. “Get out. You had a ‘sensei’? What are you, one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”

  “If I was, I’m totally Leonardo,” Jackson said, reaching back to touch the hilt of the sword in his backpack.

  “I would have pegged you more for Donatello,” Clark replied. “You’re a total nerd.”

  “You don’t even know me, jarhead!”

  “After forty-eight hours walking through the stinking woods with nobody else to talk to? I think I know you better than I knew my brother!”

  “You two are having way too much fun up here,” Broderick said, picking up the pace to match strides with Jackson and Clark. “What are you guys laughing about up here?”

  “Oh, you know,” Clark replied, “walking in the woods, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, parents dying early, the usual.”

  Broderick drew back. “Yeesh.”

  “So you said you’re looking to get back to Fort Detrick?” Jackson asked. “What’s there?”

  “Well, home, for one thing. I live in Maryland, just a few miles from the office.”

  “And the office is Detrick?” Clark asked.

  Broderick nodded. “Technically I’m part of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.”

  “Try saying that ten times fast,” said Clark.

  “Even the abbreviation sucks.”

  “So, how did you end up in Boston?” Jackson asked.

  Broderick’s eyes darted instinctively to the right, then to the left, as if checking to see if anyone was listening. As if anyone was walking alongside them in these trees, eavesdropping.