The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) (21 page)

Downtown Frederick looked no safer than around the base. Fires raged in neighborhoods. Roving packs of people took to the streets.

Must be Skulls
, Meredith thought. Yet as far as she could see, most of these people hadn’t suffered the same strange skeletal growths. Maybe it was just a matter of time before the Oni Agent perverted the body after altering their minds.

She shuddered as her mind turned toward Dom’s family. With the city falling apart, she wondered if they would become casualties of the unfolding chaos.

Still, she had a promise to keep. She withdrew her satellite phone and dialed the
Huntress.

Chao Li answered. “What news do you have?”

“I’m in Frederick.”

“All right, I’m sending for Dom. Where exactly are you?”

“About a few miles west of Dom’s family, near Fort Detrick. The Army looks like it’s struggling.”

More helicopters swarmed the base as if to emphasize Meredith’s claim. She pressed the binos to her eyes and saw fresh reinforcements fill the tarmac.

“If I were to guess, they either know something about the science of the Oni Agent,” Meredith said, “or they’re mustering their resources at Detrick to figure something out.”

“Judging by how the Oni Agent is spreading, it doesn’t sound like they have a way to stop this, does it?” Chao Li asked.

Meredith understood what he was implying. “Right. Otherwise they wouldn’t have let it get this far.”

“Any word from my family?” Dom blurted.

“Not yet, but I’m on my way to them.”

“Understood,” Dom said. “What’s the situation at Detrick?”

“I don’t think it’s going to be possible to make contact by ground. Have you had any luck raising them on any frequency?”

“Not so far,” Dom said. “I’d assumed the worst and figured the base was lost. But if what you’re saying is true, maybe outbound communication isn’t a priority for some reason.”

“Hell, maybe the base
was
compromised and they’re only just now getting it back. That’d explain the incoming air support,” Meredith said. “Anyway, they’re shooting civilians, Skulls or not, on sight. What’s the range on your chopper?”

“The AW109 can travel a little less than six hundred miles in the right conditions.” He paused. “I’m not sure I like where this idea’s headed.”

“Neither do I,” Meredith said. “But we don’t have a choice. We need to get in contact with someone in charge. Detrick seems like the right place to do it, but the only way we’re getting into that base is from the air.”

Dom paused. “They’ll shoot us out of the sky.”

“Right now, I think they’re more frightened of being overrun by Skulls. They must have learned Skulls can’t drive a car, much less fly a chopper. We’ve got to try flying there. It’ll at least get their attention, and I don’t know how else to open a line of communication with them.”

“This is crazy,” Dom said. The line was silent for a moment. “But you might be right. I’m going to keep hailing them. I really don’t want to fly in there without them picking up the damn phone.” He sighed. “Regardless of what happens, if we fly out there, I can bring you and my family back to the ship. How’s that sound?”

She prayed he
would
be able to bring his family back safely. “If your ship isn’t on fire or overrun with monsters, it’d be a welcome change for me.”

“I can at least promise you that,” Dom said. “It’ll be good to see you again, Meredith.”

“You, too, Dom.” Meredith meant it. She realized how much she’d missed his friendship since they’d been apart. Hell, maybe it was something more...but she couldn’t worry about that now. “You, too.”

“I’ll get the Hunters together for a rescue party, and we’ll be on our way soon.”

“Great. I’ll be waiting, but I have to warn you, I’ll have a couple of guests.”

“Besides my daughters?”

“Right,” Meredith said.

“The bird can only fit eight.”

“Which makes getting into Fort Detrick all the more important,” she replied. “I’ve got to get these people somewhere safe. I can’t just leave them.”

“Always the bleeding heart, Meredith,” Dom said. “But I’m happy to help however I can. Tell me where to meet you, and we’ll be there.”

“Assuming they’re still there, how about your daughters’ home? It gives us a home base safely outside of Fort Detrick’s range and the densest population of Frederick.”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll prep my team for insertion and extraction. Call back when you find Kara and Sadie. By that time, we should be near enough to the coast to fly in for a pickup. Anything else you need, don’t hesitate to call.”

They said their goodbyes, and Dom wished her luck. She slid the satellite phone back into a pocket. Maybe by the time Dom and his team reached land, the fighting would have subsided and it would be easier for them to make contact with the Army.

She held the binos up to her eyes and surveyed Detrick once more. An explosion tore apart a couple of civilian cars near a southward gate. Bodies flew into the air, and gunfire rang out.

Then again, maybe that hope was too optimistic.

Before Meredith could let her mind wander into a pit of hopelessness, a nearby gunshot echoed below the warehouse. She scrambled to the edge of the roof. As she reached it, Shauna’s scream pierced the night.

––––––––

D
om hung up the handset. A small stream of optimism trickled through him. Soon enough, he could be on the ground again, rendezvous with Meredith and his daughters, and make it to Detrick to change the deadly tide of the Oni Agent’s spread. He turned to address the tech specialists. “Where are you with the data?”

The blue glow of the computer monitors shone on Samantha, Chao, and Adam. Dom, Thomas, and Miguel stood around Chao’s desk.

“I’d love to hear what I’ve been missing out on,” Miguel said, flexing the fingers on his prosthetic. Lauren and Peter had agreed he could end his stay in isolation, given he had been asymptomatic and sustained no injuries. Besides, given Scott’s instability and the mechanic’s burgeoning infection, Dom had agreed with the doctors that Miguel would be much safer outside the confines of the ward. “How’d you nerds do?”

Samantha gave him a menacing look and shot him a one-finger gesture to convey her distaste.

Then again, Dom might’ve been wrong. Miguel might still be safer back in quarantine.

“Us nerds,” Samantha began, “used a natural language processing algorithm—”

“Sorry,” Dom cut her off. “I want to make it back into Medical to see how Glenn is getting on. So cut the computer jargon and help me understand what’s going on. If there’s anything I can ask the mechanic before Lauren induces him into a coma, better spill it fast.”

“Right,” Samantha said, rolling her eyes. Dom knew she took special pride in regaling the crew with her technical wizardry, but with so many cogs in this disaster moving at once, he didn’t have time to entertain her ego. “I think our biggest discovery is that an early iteration of the Oni Agent originated from late-1940s government research.”

Thomas scratched the stubble along his jaw. “World War II-era tech? Was this a result of Operation Paperclip?”

“The name Amanojaku is Japanese,” Dom said. “Paperclip was focused on the Germans, not the Japanese, so I’m betting this isn’t Nazi tech. Still, the US did take their fair share of doctors and scientists from Japan. Most were from Unit 731.”

“That was the chemical and biological warfare research arm of the Japanese military, right?” Thomas asked.

Dom nodded. “For some reason, it never reached the levels of infamy Josef Mengele’s human experiments in Auschwitz did, but Unit 731’s research led to the death of thousands of men, women, and children.” A twinge of disgust and anger rose up in him as he spoke. “These people served as guinea pigs for vivisections, germ-releasing bombs, radiation exposure, and bubonic plague infections, among other grotesque experiments. It wouldn’t be a far cry to assume the Oni Agent came from the same research.”

“We think so,” Samantha said, standing from behind her bank of computer monitors. “And the paper trail we’ve followed through the non-corrupted data starts with the CIA. At one point, this project was moved to another military installation, but we can’t determine where.”

“Sounds like Fort Detrick might be a top candidate.” Dom wondered if that might explain the response Meredith had witnessed at the base. “Is that all you’ve got on the historical context?”

“That’s it,” Adam said, tugging his beard and looking disappointed. Chao and Samantha both nodded. “I’m not sure anything else is salvageable. The connection between the rig and the
Huntress
was too short for us to bust through all their layers of firewalls and encryption.”

“Fair enough,” Dom said, leaning against Chao’s desk. “What about the science side of things?”

“Yeah, tell me what I
didn’t
catch,” Miguel said.

“Not much, I’m afraid. We got random numbers and tables, but we have no idea what these values mean. There aren’t any textual labels.” Samantha shook her head, her long dark braids tossing about her shoulders. “We tried some pattern analysis to see if we could identify any probable correlation between the experimental variables they could’ve been studying, but we’ve found nothing significant.”

“In English?” Thomas asked.

“We’re at a loss,” Samantha said. She lowered her gaze in defeat.

“Anything we can ask our pal from the rig to help you all out?” Dom asked. “I’m not sure how long he’s got before the Oni Agent takes hold.”

“Yeah,” Chao said. “Ask him what the hell it is.”

“Anything besides the obvious?”

“Anything that might help us analyze what little data we’ve recovered.” Adam paused his typing and looked up over his glasses for the first time. “But honestly, at this point, your guess is as good as ours.”

***

G
lenn nodded at Dom through the window of the isolation ward. He and Lauren stood next to the worker from the oil rig. They no longer wore the positive pressure suits since determining that the Oni Agent wasn’t airborne.

Still, Dom had asked Lauren to keep Scott and the mechanic within the isolation ward for added protection. Not from the Oni Agent itself, but as a prison of sorts in case the sedatives and induced coma weren’t enough and Scott or the mechanic lashed out in rage under the poisonous influence of the agent.

“His name is Amir,” Glenn’s voice sound over the intercom. “He was a maintenance worker. Took care of the generator and mechanical equipment. He claims to know nothing about the labs or what they were doing aboard the platform. In fact, he was forbidden from entering that entire deck. Sounds like he was more or less kept prisoner on the generator deck.”

Disappointment welled up in Dom. He had hoped this man would be the key to filling in the cracks between the scientific studies and computer analyses his team had conducted. “Do you believe him?”

Glenn lifted his bulky shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “I think so. My Farsi is a bit rusty, so it’s hard for me to gauge his honesty through spoken word.” He tilted his head at Amir. “And the poor guy isn’t doing too hot, so reading his body language isn’t helpful.”

Pallor had replaced the healthy brown of Amir’s face. Beads of sweat rolled down his forehead. Dom imagined the wounds in his arms were filled with the same bone-like tissue covering Scott’s injuries and Brett’s body.

“We’re losing him fast,” Lauren said. “I’ve kept him on antibiotics to slow the progress of the Oni Agent, but Scott scraped him up good. I think the sheer number of scratches is contributing to the rate at which the agent is forming calcified tissue. Presumably, that’s linked to the spread of whatever is causing the neurological changes that led to Scott’s aggressive outburst.”

It wouldn’t be long before the Oni Agent completely took over Amir’s mind, turning him bloodthirsty like Scott. The Oni Agent would slowly ravage both their bodies until the transformation was complete and they turned into demonic Skulls.

“So in other words, we don’t have much longer to talk to this guy,” Dom said.

“Not unless we find a cure.”

“Glenn, thanks for your efforts,” Dom said. “See if you can’t get anything else useful from him. Maybe he knows something but doesn’t even realize it.”

“Understood,” Glenn said.

Waiting for Amir to magically give them something more helpful and praying his electronics team or the medical team would make a sudden breakthrough wouldn’t be enough.

But his team
had
come away with something interesting. The vague but telling clue regarding a military installation that had taken control of the Amanojaku Project might prove important. Coupled with Meredith’s observations at Detrick, Dom felt more convinced they urgently needed to make contact with the base. It seemed logical, judging by Detrick’s response to the Oni Agent outbreak, that someone there knew something Dom and his team didn’t.

He glanced at Scott’s rigid form. The man’s eyes were closed, and his chest rose and fell in shallow waves.

Never before in the history of the
Huntress
had Dom lost a man or woman, not until they’d boarded the IBSL. He didn’t intend to lose another. If a potential cure lay in the confines of Fort Detrick, Dom would take the chance to find out. By traveling to Frederick, he might save Scott and his girls in one fell swoop.

He and Meredith had agreed to meet at his family’s home, but he still hadn’t heard from his daughters. He prayed Kara and Sadie were bunkered down with Bethany watching over them, waiting for someone to sweep them away to safety. Yet he knew that it wasn’t just his family’s lives at risk as the Oni Agent spread; the entire human species was hanging in the balance.

***

K
ara lowered the shotgun and let it drop in a nearby bush. She crouched on the roof and waited to see if any of the crazies flitting about the neighborhood noticed. Maybe nightfall would help conceal her.

A half dozen had run down the main road, and now only a couple meandered about the cul-de-sac. She believed at least three had invaded the Weavers’ home.