The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (11 page)

With three quarters of her blood now more coffee than plasma
, she was awake, jittery and just in an overall pissed off mood. Not one of the patients who had approached her desk in the last several hours had exhibited anything more than signs of a common cold. She almost wished for a stabbing victim to wander in so she would have something worthwhile to do. To pass the time and also to help drown on the sniffling, whining and complaining of a waiting room full of the dredges of society, she had turned the television intended for the visitor room to face her desk and moved one of the external speakers from its mount on the wall to a shelf just under her desk. Now she could at least keep up with her shows and successfully overlook the dozens of pitiful souls that had already turned the waiting area into standing room only. If her supervisor cast a glance at his security monitor to check up on her it would look as if her attention was being completely devoted to the waiting area, he would have no way to tell from his quiet and segregated office that she was actually focused completely on the TV.

Every now and then she would be interrupted by a brave newcomer willing to fight their way through the unyielding crowd between the desk and doorway. Nurse Raven had dispensed with the normal clipboard full of information that was required for each new patient to complete, instead she would jot their name down on the bottom of a three page list. If they had remained near the emergency room by the time their name was finally called, then she would have them complete the required paperwork. It had been her experience that in cases like this at least half of the people who had only imagined symptoms would give up after their first couple of hours crowded into the waiting room and elect to ride out their imagined illness in the comforts of their own homes. The ones that really got on her nerves were the patients who would brazenly approach her desk just about every hour and demand to know why they had not yet been called, didn't she realize just how desperate their situation was? Those were the ones that tested her patience to their limits. Each one that made the mistake of doing just that received a little tic mark next to their name on her list. All those with tic marks were deliberately skipped over to be seen until she felt they had paid enough penance for pissing her off to allow them their place back in line. She was scanning the room now for the man who had argued with her earlier about others being seen before him. She had given him his deserved tic mark and he had behaved ever since, she had decreed that he had paid his
dues and was now willing to call him forth as the next fortunate soul to pass her station. Scanning the packed waiting room she thought she spotted the young man sitting on the floor at the far end of the room wedged between a section of seats and the wall. She called out his name loudly enough to be heard over the ever present din of dozens of separate conversations, the television, several crying babies and the occasional unintelligible hospital paging system. Keeping her eyes on where the man was sleeping when she called out for him, she didn't detect the slightest hint of movement from the still form. She waited ten seconds and tried again, this time louder. Again there was no response from the young man. She was now positive that this was in fact the same man, a break in the crowd had allowed her a brief glance at an identification badge hanging around his neck. She remembered that the guy had been wearing some type of laminated name tag declaring him to be part of some low level government agency that she really cared little about. Her personal policy in cases like this were that she would clearly call out a name twice, even if they were sleeping on the floor directly in front of her desk she would make no further effort to get their attention. This was not a motel and if a patient contributed to the mess she was faced with today and did not have the decency to stay awake to hear their name, well, that was just too damn bad. She scratched his name off her list all together and moved on to the next winner.

It was almost an hour after she had removed the young man's name from the list when the first signs of complete disord
er gripped the waiting room. Looking up from a dramatic scene at the climax of her current soap opera, Nurse Raven found that the entire room had suddenly erupted into a full on panic with men, women and children rushing towards the exits, tortuous screams of pain and desperate cries for help all emanating from a cluster of bodies that seemed to be tussling around on the floor. Whatever was happening she was sure that the young man with the ID badge around his neck was in the center of it. She could see only the back of the man as he gyrated and wiggled around towards the bottom of a pile of several people along the foot of the row of chairs he had been sleeping against. The scene took on a new sense of urgency for her when she spied a rapidly growing puddle of fresh blood oozing its way in a widening circle around this cluster of people wrestling with one another on the floor. It was then that her attention was drawn to a flabby middle aged man complete with wife beater t-shirt showing off a multitude of crude and tasteless tattoos and blue jean pants that probably had not seen the inside of a washing machine since they went out of style two years earlier. This man was hunched over the back of the chairs and cradling his arm like he was holding a baby, his head was turned upward toward the ceiling and he was letting out a chilling scream of utter agony that she heard many times before from mangled car crash victims racked with absolute tortuous waves of pain from mangled limbs and crushed torsos. The fountaining spray of blood shooting skyward from his cradled arm was enough to clue her in that there was a real situation here. The first thing that came to her mind was that the young man with the ID badged had possibly stabbed this man and the other patients now mixing it up on the floor with him had witnessed the assault and come to his aid. In any event, a stabbing or otherwise, she had two calls to make, the first was a general call of alarm for security to respond in force and immediately to the emergency room waiting area. The second call was to the ICU ward just through the entry controlled double doors behind her. She reported an ongoing assault situation in the waiting room and that there were possible multiple victims with lacerations and stab wounds, a crash cart and medical team was needed immediately.

Arriving at almost the same time the medical team swarmed into the waiting room pushing a crash cart full of supplies and equipment while four burly security guards rushed th
rough a personnel entrance leading from the main wing of the hospital. Both groups stopped short at the scene they were confronted with. At least twenty people were still pushing, shoving and yelling in a bid to get out the exit doors leading to the parking lot. One of the double doors had shorted out from being pushed open violently by the initial rush of people trying to leave. With only a single exit for so many people to try and push through, it was inevitable that several people had been knocked to the ground and were still struggling to gain their feet as the oncoming rush of people behind them kept trying to move forward and prevented them from standing. It was already evident they would be dealing with several injuries from that mess at the exit, but the real action was still unfolding in the center of the waiting room. The floor, chairs and windows were all slathered in dark thick blood stains and the group of five or six men wrestling around in the middle on the floor between islands of chairs and tables were already soaked in smeared blood making it difficult to tell from a distance who was actually injured and who was just painted in cast off body fluids. The first man to be attacked was sitting on the floor with a row of chairs between him and the ongoing struggle. Still cradling his injured arm, it was evident that he had lost a great deal of blood already and his skin had the pasty look of someone who was close to bleeding out if he didn't get medical attention in the next few moments. The crash team rushed to his side and began rendering immediate attention and prepared to move him back to the ICU while the security crew assessed the group of men rolling on the floor.

It didn't take the security guards long to figure out which person in the midst of the blood
y mess was the instigator. When Carl's snarling face turned towards them, two of the guards had to turn away and vomit in nearby planters when they realized that the long flap of gore covered meat hanging from the side of this mouth had just been bitten clean from the naked stomach of another man now curling up in agony at the bottom of the pile. The sight of the crazed assailant hungrily chewing away on that strip of human flesh was not a scenario the guards had expected or were trained to deal with. Those guards still able to function in the face of this depravity put away any notion of joining the fray and pulling the assailant free of the others, Tasers were drawn and two guards fired at the same time while the man's upper body was still visible within the squirming pile. With such a short distance to cover, both guards hit dead center of their target and simultaneously squeezed their triggers to send crippling levels of shock through the thin wires connecting to double sets of barbed metal darts protruding from the man’s chest. The man visibly shook and undulated as the electrical charges rippled through his body, but instead of falling off to the side of the pile stunned and much more compliant, he simply gulped down the stringy chunk of meat hanging from the side of his mouth. He then turned back towards one of his wrestling opponents who was just breaking free from the pile and trying to make a break for it, and grabbed him by his calf. Using the man’s leg for leverage he was able to wiggle his own body partially free from the bottom of the pile and latch onto the thick calf of his next victim. With the triggers for their Tasers still pulled back, the security guards could only watch in stunned silence as the wide open mouth closed down tightly on the fatty calf muscle along the back of the man's leg. The horrific screams of pain that erupted from the man as the teeth punctured through his skin and dug deep into the fat and muscle below, would continue to echo inside the heads of the guards and everyone else within ear shot for the short remainder of their lives.

"Shoot him!" yelled a short squat muscular man who had just pulled himself free from the opposite side of the pile. Pressing his hand firmly against one side of his chest in an attempt to staunch the bleeding from a nasty bite wound that left a flap of skin hanging free along with his hairy nipple dangling just under his hand.

With a double dose of extended Taser blasts having no effect on the man the guards were now only left with their sidearms to control this situation. Their two comrades who had lost their lunch after the disturbing scene they had walking in on had now regained their composure and were already drawing their own pistols and leveling the barrels at the out of control patient who was even now ripping open a wound all the way to the bone along the leg of the man he had snared in his grasp. The supervisor for the security guards hesitated to give the order for only a moment, but seeing that their Tasers had no affect and the amount of damage this man had already done against five people struggling to restrain him, he realized that his twelve dollar and hour paycheck was not worth coming in contact with those snarling teeth.

"Fire!" the supervisor yelled. Before the word was fully clear of his lips four guns were sounding off in a rapid fire explosion of bullets tearing through the waiting room.

"Cease Fire!" he yelled again after each of them had unloaded several rounds into their target.

The results of the impromptu firing squad were immediately apparent, their intended target was riddled with no less than eight bullet wounds to his upper body, including two shots to the side of his head. Two other civilians mixed in with the tangled mess of bodies were also hit, one of them seriously.

The guards holstered their weapons and motioned for the crash team to move in and start rendering aid to the group of men now sprawled out across the floor, each of them cradling various injuries mostly consisting of bite wounds.

The decision to open fire into a group of people like that and with the end result being their subject dead, one additional casualty who would also die in the next few minutes and one other innocent wounded, would normally
mean the loss of each of their jobs but possible criminal charges as well. As it was that would never come to pass. The speed at which the bureaucracy of a hospital of this size moved was slow enough that everyone involved in this incident and all those responsible for passing judgment would not be alive long enough to see any form of adjudication to even start to get under way.

The hangover that greeted Garrett that early Saturday morning as the first tendrils of sun poked through the shades covering his bedroom window was nothing short of four alarm. The day before he had extended a few celebratory job landing beers over lunch into an afternoon and evening long event. He had stretched it from the original restaurant to one of his good friends house and then back out to at least three local bars. His intention hadn't been to get himself hammered by any means, but when he popped by the townhouse owned by his old army friend former First Sergeant, now retired, Calvin Wiser, and presented him with the news about his new job, any option he had of not continuing drinking was off the table.

They had been friends for going on eight years now, first meeting while stationed with neighboring units in Germany they had somehow ended up on a s
imilar duty assignment rotation. With the exception of a single year that Garrett was stationed in Korea, they almost always ended up at the same post within a few short months of each other. Even when their units were both deployed on combat tours in the Middle East they found themselves inside the wire at the same compound. They had common interests in fishing and hunting as well as some skirt chasing and beer guzzling. In the last several years those last two interests had calmed down quite a bit as the demands of their ranks and positions forced them to refrain from activities that could potentially put them in an unfavorable light with their higher commands. But, once Calvin finally retired and settled down only a short distance from Garrett, he had turned the volume back up and was always looking for a good excuse, or even a bad one, to tie one on and see what kind of trouble they could get into. Throughout their friendship Garrett had helped Calvin work through some troubling times including two failed marriages, the sudden death of his younger brother as a result of a tragic car accident and the loss of a number of soldiers under his command in combat. Calvin had been there for Garrett after he was wounded, taking a week of leave time he had flown to Germany on his own dime and been one of the first faces Garrett was greeted with when he finally came too. During his physical therapy when he felt like just giving up, Calvin always seemed to show up at just the right time to pick him back up and get him motivated to continue on. Garrett later thought that it wasn't anything in particular that Calvin would say or do that got him back in the saddle, it was his own unwillingness to let Calvin see him fail at anything that pushed him on.

Shielding his face from the rays of sunlight that were driving nails through the base of his skull, Garrett tried to rundown each and every step they had taken
the night before. He was trying to figure out if he should expect a knock on his door from the local police department or if he needed to not act surprised when some blond, brunette or redhead suddenly stepped into his bedroom fresh out of the shower. One of the last things he remembered was stopping at a bar inside the Holiday Inn hotel after they had read the marque advertising a high school reunion. Calvin had managed to secure name badges for both of them and they had then spent several hours convincing people they had never met that they were in fact old high school buddies from years past. As the night wore on they had found themselves in a table booth with several attractive middle aged women, two of whom Calvin had convinced that he had dated at one time or another during their high school years. The man just had a way with women that Garrett could never understand, at least in the early stages, his last two wives had learned that he was not willing to change his gallivanting ways once married and that had been the biggest contributing factor to the two divorces he now had under his belt. After persuading the girls that they had dated and 'reminding' them of some of the sexual escapades they had shared, he had been on the verge of settling the details on a bet with both of them of whether or not their blow job skills had improved over the years. That was the last clear memory that Garrett had of the evening, just like a hot and steamy dream ending at the best part his memory drifted into darkness before he could recall the outcome of that bet.

Carefully sliding to the edge of the bed he eased himself up and into a sitting position, realizing at that point that with the exception of his shoes, he was still fully dressed from the night before. Not hearing the shower running or the soft padding of naked feet down the hall from a towel wrapped a
nd dripping wet one night stand. He rationalized that whatever happened in the late evening hours after his memory failed him did not include the kind of happy ending most single guys in his position would have enjoyed. It was probably for the best anyways. Just starting off a new job it would be better for him in the short run to keep any possibly complications out of his life until he was more established and comfortable with what free time would be available to him that he could devote to a relationship.

A buzzing sound from the top of his dresser caught his attention. Keeping one hand on the headboard for balance he tested his ability to stand up right and cringed as the throbbing headache once again reminded him that he was well past the age when he could drink like a college student and still be able to function as a normal human being the following morning. Easing over to his dresser he looked at the display on his buzzing cell phone and saw that he had three text messages, two missed calls and two messages, all from Calvin. No doubt checking on him while
also eager to brag about how his night had probably ended on a much higher note than Garrett's. The odds were pretty good that when Calvin got out of his own bed this morning there was a towel wrapped cutie waiting nearby for some morning action. Garrett didn’t bother to read the texts or listen to the messages just yet, he would wait until he got his headache and sloshing stomach a little more under control before he was dragged back into his good friend's world full of wine, women and song. For now he just wanted to drink something cold, wet and nonalcoholic to help remove the pasty dry taste in his mouth and throat. There was still several bottles of Gatorade and bottled water in his fridge, and one of the sports drinks sounded like just the right medicine at the moment.

Settling down on his living room couch with an already
half-finished Gatorade he flipped on the television to see if the world had all of a sudden come to a fiery end during the blackness of the last hours of his night out. The news stories at the top of the hour continued to revolve around the continued quarantine zone set up in the south central region of New Jersey. The anchorman was just now explaining how they were getting few updates from military or CDC sources about casualties or conditions inside the zone. The story went on to show examples of emails, tweets, Facebook posts and phone messages by the hundred that had flooded in from families and friends concerned with loved ones caught inside the quarantine zone. Reports seemed to indicate that no communication with anyone inside the zone had been possible for at least sixteen hours at this point despite no indications that phone service, radio or Internet service had been interrupted. One caller compared the entire area to a giant black hole in the middle of the state. Government sources had continued to insist that there has been no intentional blocking of communication into or out of the zone but some areas have experienced temporary outages due to ash and sand accumulation on power lines from the ash cloud rising from the mine at the center of the incident. Repair crew efforts to reach downed lines had been hampered by the dangers of methane levels in certain areas.

The story then shifted to even more news from New Jersey, a reported shooting incident at a major metropolitan hospital in downtown Camden involving hospital security officers and an out of control patient had left two individuals dead and a number injured. The report continued to state that several of the injuries were being reported as bite type wounds suffered from the patient who had started a commotion in the emergency waiting room. Four other patients were being treated for injuries suffered during a mass stampede of people attempting to flee the emergency room area after an altercation broke out involving a number of patients.

Garrett found the news of the continued quarantine to be a little unsettling. He reminded himself to bring it up the next time he spoke with Calvin, he still had some pretty high level contacts in the military and might be able to pick up some chatter about what the news was not reporting. For the time being he switched channels to the history channel and dialed the volume down just enough that it was only background noise. He was going to finish one more bottle of Gatorade along with a handful of aspirin and then crawl into a warm shower. The weekend had already started and all he had accomplished so far was getting out of bed. He needed to finish his shopping lists, get to the mall and fight the crowds for a couple of hours and then get home before dark to spend some time refurbishing his camping gear so he could get that stored and out of the back of his truck. His plan had been to get all of this done on Saturday so that he would have some free time on Sunday to work out, clean his house, and visit the grocery store to stock up on food for the week.

His cell phone started ringing once again with another call from Calvin, Garrett ignored it for now and made his way back to the bathroom to crawl into the shower and hope that by the time he was done the combination of hydration, aspirin and warm shower w
ould have finally done its job and have him feeling somewhat close to normal once again.

#

The Reaper unmanned air vehicle, UAV, was primarily designated for use by the United States Air Force and had the capability to serve in a combat or reconnaissance mode. In light of the seriousness of the evolving situation in central New Jersey, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had arranged for two of the high endurance drones along with support personnel and equipment to be temporarily placed under the authority of the command element of the National Guard forces responsible for enforcing the quarantine zone around the area. Designed to be launched and recovered from existing runways the lack of vehicle traffic along the highways leading out of the zone provided ground crews with more than enough open road close to their target to launch the first of the craft just after sun up on Saturday morning. Equipped with the latest in surveillance gear this reaper had also been retrofitted with a suite of measuring equipment designed to collect, analyze and report on any anomalies in the air over the target zone. The use of manned aircraft, even those with protective gear against exposure to chemical or biological agents was deemed an unnecessary risk until they had a better understanding of the particular virus they were dealing with.

"Six minutes until the drone is in position," Dr. Woods announced to no one in particular. His staff were all gathered around banks of monitors preparing to begin digesting the data coming from the drone as soon as it began transmitting over the target. They were now racing against the clock to find out what they were dealing with and discover a cure.

After word reached the crisis center about the incident at the hospital in Camden it didn't take them long to discover that the intern from the Geological Survey team who had reported from close to the mine, had managed to squeak past a check point and reach a major city before succumbing to the virus. Reports from that hospital and others in that immediate area of Camden indicated increasing numbers of patients with symptoms resembling exposure to the H2N2 virus. Dr. Woods had arranged for the hospital to send blood tests results immediately to the field center and CDC laboratories, if those tests confirm that this new outbreak in Camden matched the signature of the virus they were dealing with in the quarantine zone, then they would be facing a confirmed breach of the quarantine. The reports of Carl's activities at the hospital noted that he had spent hours in a crowded waiting room while as many as one hundred people had come and gone during his visit. Even though they still needed to wait for confirmation from lab results, Dr. Woods already knew that they were on the verge of an out of control epidemic. In the hours that Carl had visited that hospital waiting room, he had likely infected everyone who had come and gone from there. Those same people would have continued spreading the virus and by the time the sun rose on a new day, it was already so far out of control that their only hope of containment rested on discovering a cure. Pulling up a map of the area surrounding Camden, Dr. Woods shivered as he counted at least ten airports within easy drive of the hospital, including an international airport in Philadelphia. The proximity to other major metropolitan areas alone was enough to make him feel faint.

The radio mounted on the desk next to his computer monitor crackled to
life, “Crisis center, this is flight control, do you read?"

"Yes, this is crisis center and we read you loud and clear," Dr. Woods replied.

"Ummm, Dr. Woods, this is the flight director here, Captain Cochran, and I need to see what you make of some unusual activity we are seeing."

Dr. Woods looked at the mission readouts, the drone was still at least five minutes out from its primary target zone, "Ok, Captain, but according to our readings here the drone should still be quite a ways short of the target area."

"That’s correct doctor, I am sending a direct feed to your station. This is real time video and thermal imaging from a few miles down route 70 from our launch point."

Dr. Woods watched his screen as a video window appeared and started to resolve. The view was taken from an aerial platform and the readings in the corner of the screen showed the altitude to be 500 feet with an a
ir speed of 180mph. As the image came into focus it took Dr. Woods a moment to understand what he was seeing. The highway and surrounding countryside were visible whipping by underneath the drone with the angle being shot out to the front and down from the camera mounted under the nose of the plane shaped UAV. As the view sped along the open and bare highway he started catching a glance here and there along the road of human shaped figures moving in the opposite direction of the camera. At first there were a few scattered figures then a larger clumping and finally a crowd of what must have numbered in the hundreds. At the speed the UAV was moving he only had seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. The video window that the Captain was directing to his screen had typical controls for computerized video along the bottom, including rewind, pause and frame by frame. Dr. Woods backed the video up until the first tendrils of movement were visible and then started the view forward again in a slower frame by frame view. This time through the video there was little doubt about what he was seeing, there were people, at first a handful, and then a couple dozen and then hundreds, moving down the highway and through the surrounding countryside as if in the middle of a poorly organized parade.