A Time to Die (9 page)

“Son of a bitch!” the commander spat as the old man, unfazed by just having his head clubbed by a rifle, chewed the meat and scanned the room with wild eyes. When they fixed on the commander, he almost shit himself. The wounded private fell face first on the table, blood continuing to spray but in ever slower gouts as he lost consciousness. Then the old man started coming over the table.

The commander was a veteran of many engagements dating back to Grenada and on through both Gulf Wars. His instincts responded before his mind completely registered what was happening. He wiped blood from his face with his left hand as his right drew his M9, thumb sweeping down the safety and index finger stroking the trigger. The first round took the man just below the right collarbone and blew out his scapula in a cloud of bone and blood. The old man rocked to the right, snarled and leaped.

The commander stared in stunned amazement as he fired again and again. Arm, chest, neck, all good hits, and all completely ineffective. The old man crashed into him, hands reaching for his neck, pulling his head towards the commander’s flesh. Bloody teeth and lips worked in anticipation of what was to come.

The impact slammed the commander back against the opposite wall hard enough to make stars appear before his eyes. The gun was pinned between them and he had no idea of its orientation. Everything in his training was against firing in this situation, but as those teeth got closer all he could think of was; Fire, fire, shoot you fucking idiot! The gun barked once, the bullet exiting the old man’s back just below and to the side of his neck. The commander knew it was a lethal shot. A switch shot, likely blowing the heart in half. The old man jerked, but didn’t stop. “Fuck!” the commander screamed as the teeth reached him.

The report of the 5.56 round hit the commander’s ears like a baseball bat in the confined quarters. Four shots in rapid fire stitched up the old man’s side, the final one blew out the upper half of his skull and splattered the already gore covered command center in white brains. The teeth were against his skin, but the bite had not come.

“Jesus, Jesus fucking Christ!” the commander said over and over as the body slowly slumped to the floor. The corpsman had recovered enough to check the private who was very much dead. The doors flew open and several of the commander’s aides stuck their heads in, drawn by the sounds of combat. He held up a hand to calm them. The situation was under control.

“Are you wounded sir?” one of them demanded.

He looked down, realizing for the first time he was covered from head to toe in arterial blood spray, bone fragments, and bits of brain. Amazingly, none of it was his.

“I’m fine son,” he said, but their own corpsman came in quickly to check on him anyway. “Get someone out to observe the other five who were brought in.” One of the soldiers rushed out. No sooner was the door closed then the commander heard rifle fire outside. He knew what the report would eventually be.

He’d been sent here to help the Mexican Federales regain control of the region from some crazy viral outbreak that was making people go insane. His briefing had talked about dementia, random attacks, people rushing armed troops, and yes, cannibalism. He hadn’t believed most of it. Two hours ago when they’d rolled up and instantly been attacked by a hundred screaming wild eyed ex-chicken farmers, he had begun to wonder. When they rushed the machineguns and grenade launchers showing no fear and not reacting to near mortal wounds, he stopped wondering. And now after watching that formerly normal appearing old man try to eat one of his countrymen and only be brought down by seven bullets, he was sold.

“Get me an uplink to the Pentagon,” he ordered his commo officer. The man pulled his eyes away from the macabre scene and nodded before beginning to program the uplink.

“Did you get some blood in your eyes, sir?” the corpsman asked.

“Yeah,” he growled and allowed the man to use an antibacterial eye wash, a less-than-fun procedure, on him. Two hours later, his report complete, he went out and had a few bites of chicken with his men. It wasn’t fancy, but it was fresh. He didn’t notice it was a little bloody in places. What did you expect for roasted on a bayonet? A short time later, in conference with his senior staff and the Federales commanders, with report after report going by, he started to feel light headed and dizzy. He thought he was going to throw up so he excused himself from the freshly cleaned command trailer into the head.

He didn’t puke though. He sat on the toilet and shivered, wondering what was happening. He was hearing things in his head and was dizzy. “I think I better call the corpsman,” he slurred a moment before he fell limp on the toilet.

The door to the head opened and everyone looked up. The meeting had spun in neutral while the American commander went to relieve himself. The look on his face as the door opened took everyone by complete surprise.

“Sir?” asked the commander’s aide, one second before the senior American officer snarled and pounced on the aide, tearing his throat out.

* * *

The American commander was in the back of a Humvee, his hands and feet secured with stripper cuffs, his mouth covered with duct tape while the now senior staff consulted with command. They were ordered to retreat north back towards Mexico City and prepare to link up with another unit. Orders in hand, they went about mobilizing the troops. The first of the soldiers turned while the command truck was being configured for road travel, attacking their fellow troops with teeth and nail. In less than twenty minutes, there was frantic fighting all over the bivouac area.

Four hours after the column initially arrived at Pollo Bueno Farms, there was no remaining military force. A few men were hiding in culverts or locked in the rear of vehicles while their former comrades screamed and pounded on the armored glass, trying to get at them. All were out of ammunition. Many had been bitten or clawed in the battle. Unlike the farmers at Pollo Bueno, these men were all wearing body armor and headgear. When they’d turned, only a few had been brought down by their fellow soldiers. One man managed to get to a .50 machinegun and he had accounted for the most enemy casualties. Then the belt ran out and he was overrun trying to reload it by himself.

With no more people to attack, the former Mexican and American soldiers began to wander off in all directions. All except those still trying to get at the ones locked into vehicles and such. They would stay until the prey either emerged, or they succumbed to the desert heat. The chickens continued to mill around looking for food as their former home sent columns of smoke into the Mexican sky.

Chapter 13

Saturday, April 21

Lisha was well past fatigue at this point. It was well over thirty-six hours since her head had last felt a pillow. A strange mixture of horror and amazement kept her going as the computer worked on sample after sample and the data continued to flow into her computer. Only eight of the staff were even aware Grant Porter was still alive, sort of, aboard the HAARP facility. He was one deck down in a triple armor glass cell constructed on the fly just for him. The infection had driven all that remained of the once brilliant scientist out, leaving behind only insatiable hunger and loathing for anything not similarly infected. She needed sleep soon. Instead she took another stimulant and washed it down with a cup of coffee.

“Latest results, Doctor.”

Lisha stifled a yawn and looked up at the young woman. Edith was her name. Lisha hadn’t known that until two days ago. The girl was a new hire and had been working to catalog genome data until Lisha’s longtime assistant had had his throat ripped out by Grant just forty-eight hours ago. Now this girl was a chief research admin and personal assistant to the project manager.

“Thanks,” she said and accepted the clipboard. She glanced at the data, then glanced back again. “Are you sure of this?”

“Yes ma’am, I checked it myself.”

“These samples were taken two days ago, and there is no sign of decay?”

“Not directly. Analysis says that there is no sign of any fat remaining, but gas detected indicates it was consumed.”

“How is that possible?” Lisa wondered.

“The guys in biology think the sample is itself alive now, and scavenging for material to keep itself alive.”

Lisha nodded absently and considered that. It was possible, she supposed, for an organism to rearrange its own makeup. But she’d never heard of such a thing. Only single celled organisms had such a degree of makeup as to allow fundamental changes like that. If an entire complex organism was capable of that sort of thing…

“Tell the team I want a brain sample.”

“He’s still alive, isn’t he?” Edith asked.

“He killed eleven people,” she reminded the young girl. “One was your friend, right?” Edith nodded. “Do you really think Mr. Porter is still in there?”

When she hesitated, Lisa stabbed an icon on her computer, bringing up a webcam, and swiveled it so Edith could see. Grant stood in one corner of the glass cage, staring off into space, drool dripping from one corner of his mouth and breathing very slowly. As if on cue a technician came into the lab on some errand. Grant instantly spotted him, eyes going wide he howled and slammed both hands against the glass wall. The wall was already smeared with his blood all over its surface. One look at his hands and arms would tell anyone why. They were black and blue messes of ravaged and torn skin from hours of beating against the unbreakable prison. It didn’t stop him from renewing his assault though, spittle flying from his lips and he roared in frustration.

“Well, do you think there is an award winning geneticist in there?”

“No ma’am.”

“Right, I thought not. Prep the team.”

Later in the surgery bay, Grant Porter was unconscious and strapped face down to a table, his face protruding through a hole and tubes snaked down his throat. It had taken three tranquilizer darts to subdue him enough to let technicians covered from head to toe in reinforced hazmat suits to haul him in to the surgery. Even then, as they were inserting the IV to administer anesthetic, he began to wake up. The leather belts were added after that so even if he woke up he couldn’t go for any of them.

A nurse had shaved him in preparation and red drapes were hung around his head. Lisha examined the skull of a man she’d worked with and respected until only two days ago, then took a scalpel and started cutting.

She finished a semi-circular incision and then peeled back the entire back of his scalp, revealing bloody white bone. Picking up the bone saw, she tested its function. The high pitched whine of the reciprocating saw make one of the assistants jump. Without further hesitation Lisha began cutting. It only took a minute for her practiced hands to finish. She fished under the edge of the cut with an implement and with a steady hand lifted the entire back of his skull away revealing the brain below. “Holy shit,” one of the technicians said.

“Holy something,” Lisha agreed. The brain didn’t look like it was supposed to. It had somehow been transformed. From the back it should have been a regular conical shape, gently curved around and above the brain stem. Instead it was now bisected roughly into two lobes, elongated and almost loose in the space that was once packed with gray matter.

“Get me an X-ray series,” she ordered and stepped back. An X-ray tech moved the arm of the machine from the side and set up the portable plate that would transmit the image to the computer. He started to go get the lead lined apron for the patient but Lisha waved him off from that. “You really think that is necessary?” she asked. The man shook his head and started taking pictures. After each one he’d move the plate and emitter a few inches. The whole process only took a few minutes.

Lisha leaned back in, lowering her magnifying glasses over her eyes with a slight jerk of her head and examined the ‘brain’. Something else was bothering her about it. “Sample dish,” she said and an assistant rolled in a table with a series of glass sample dishes already open and waiting. Lisha picked up a scalpel and cut off a slice from the tip of one of the lobes. The body did not respond. The brain bled, but only slightly. Much less than she had expected.

She took three more samples from the same lobe, then asked for a probe. She was handed a long, thin metal lance with a handle. Using it she moved the lobes to examine between them, all the while talking into the microphone taped to her cheek. The other doctor leaned in and commented from time to time on the structures. There was no doubt between them that this wasn’t a human brain.

She was done and considering closing when the other doctor suddenly said “Wrinkles.”

“What was that?” she asked.

He pointed at the brain and repeated. “There are no wrinkles.”

She looked back down and realized what he meant. A human brain was covered in hundreds of wrinkles, or folds. It was an evolutionary adaptation that increased the surface area of the brain allowing for more computing power, as it were. This brain was completely smooth. She nodded, took a few pictures, and put the skull cap back in place with bone glue and a couple screws.

“Close him up,” she told the nurses and assistants and retreated back to the lab. Three of the samples went to the chem labs, biology, and life sciences, the last went with her. She had it under a microscope before it could cool off and began examining the structure. On a computer nearby were digital images of a normal human brain cellular structure. After examining and comparing the normal brain images to the samples of Grant for almost an hour, she was forced to admit that she could find no difference in their basic structure.

Lisha made some notes about animal tests, ate a candy bar, and went back to see if any preliminary results from the other labs were available yet. And that was how Edith found her, head cradled in her hands against the table, data scrolling down the computer screen over and over.  Edith almost put a hand on her to wake her up, then though better of it. She left and returned with a blanket that she draped over the woman’s shoulders then quietly left.

* * *

Kathy Clifford admitted to herself more than a day ago that she was a fugitive. And an unemployed one, too. She departed the bureau office, without asking, after uploading a video that had gotten more hits than Gangnam Style in only six hours before being stripped from the original server. Normally uploading that sort of a viral sensation would make your career. If it wasn’t the government that was stopping it from being uploaded. She’d checked a couple times while driving through Waco and saw that every time one version was taken down, two more were uploaded. “Hail Hydra,” she chuckled. Whoever the fucker was that kept uploading it with the song “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons attached was one particularly sick fucker.

She’d loaded up her Civic with as much film equipment as she could lay hands on before leaving. The text message from her former boss was straight and to the point. “You are fired!! Return the gear or we’ll file a police report.” She already knew the government was after her for uploading the video anyway, so she’d emptied her accounts in a frenzy of ATM stops outside of Dallas, $500 at a time. At the seventh ATM, her card was declined even though she knew there were thousands left. So with $3,500 in cash, a couple disposable Visa cards that had $250 each on them (invaluable to a stringer reporter who often found herself in tight situations), she was on the run and unemployed.

Her spirit as a reporter was not diminished, though. She’d been heading south as fast as she could while avoiding speeding. All it would take was to get pulled over and she’d be out of the game for good. She slept in rest stops and abandoned truck weigh-stations. Aside from a lurid proposal from one lonely trucker, she’d been unmolested. Her father’s venerable Smith & Wesson .38 Police Special was tucked into the center console, just in case. She’d decided that the charges likely on the warrant were far in excess of what she’d face for an illegally concealed handgun. Besides, if what she was driving toward was half as bad as she suspected, who would care?

On the open roads of South Texas, she’d questioned her thought process in even going many times. Bad enough the government was out to get her, if she’d stayed put the bureau would have defended her. For what that would have been worth, it might have been better than the situation she now found herself in. But they would have shut her down, and she didn’t let go of a story easily. Especially not the likes of the story she’d stumbled onto in Mexico.

She finally ran into trouble when she hit Austin. The freeway southbound was closed. “Only open to local traffic,” the computerized notice reported. The official story was the risk of landfall by Hurricane Enrico. She knew better. Enrico was indeed a hurricane; currently in the Bahamas, it was spinning and grinning with a one in ten chance of turning north. Probably one in a million of making it into the Gulf of Mexico in April then on to Houston. No, that was just a convenient way to stop southbound traffic. South was into the unthinkable.

She had a limited number of options to get south. Catch a ride with a local? Possible, but not with the gear stuffed into the back of the Civic. Hire someone? Too risky. Run the roadblocks? She supposed she could do that if she could manage that, but once past that roadblock any chance encounter with the law would end her trek instantly. No, she really only had one choice.

It was late in the afternoon when she pulled up to a checkpoint along Texas Rural Route 12A. The cop looked at her 2003 Chevy Silverado that had seen better days. In the back was a substantial pile of hay bales and she wore clothes that not a single farmer in South Texas would have given a second thought to. The whole shebang had cost her almost $2,000, all said and done. Her Civic was at a parking garage at the airport, one mile from where she’d met the farmer complaining that they were only going to give him $1,500 in trade for his truck at the dealer. The extra $500 was enough to make him forget about the strange city girl who wanted a truck full of hay and paid cash. The clothes she’d gotten at a second hand store for less than $50. Her gear was under the hay. That had been a surprisingly hard little piece of work, leaving her sweaty enough to seal the deal on her disguise.

“Run out of hay?” the cop asked.

“Damn goats eat it faster than I can grow it,” she joked. Luckily she’d heard the farmer at the truck stop talking about how he and his neighbors were all raising goats these days.

“Yeah, I hear that.” The cop gave her one more look over and she shot him her best ‘hey cutie’ smile. He chuckled and waved her through. So Kathy stepped on the gas sending the Chevy coughing and wheezing down the road.

She cut back and got on the freeway a few miles later. Less than 100 miles north of Brownsville she picked up her first curious police officer. He’d been following her for at least five miles before she noticed. Kathy took the next exit she came to and pulled down the ramp. It was a dead exit (no services) and the cop followed her.

“Shit,” she cursed as she glanced at the road signs then her smartphone. Nothing out here for miles and miles other than a small town to her left. She signaled and turned right like she’d done it a thousand times. Casually glancing in the rearview mirror, the cop stopped at the sign and watched her go. After a long moment, he went across the road and back onto the freeway without following her. She considered doubling back, then decided she’d tested her luck enough for one day and stuck with the side roads.

The cell signals were getting progressively worse the farther south she drove. The roads themselves weren’t much better. It took her four hours and well into darkness to make it another fifty miles, putting her within ten of the outskirts of Brownsville. There she pulled into a little podunk gas station/grocery/post office whose front bench was crowded with locals gossiping and drinking beer. Kathy glanced at her gas gauge, appalled at just how much she’d used in only seventy miles, and decided to fill it up.

“Don’t think I’ve seen you ‘round here,” one younger man said who was filling up a truck bed full of gas cans.