The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) (35 page)

“Come on, Tyler,” Kara said in a cooing voice. “Just do what the man says.”

“I don't want to! I want Mommy!” Tyler twisted from her grip and started to sprint across the tarmac.

“No!” Kara heard the mechanical click of guns being shouldered and aimed. She could practically feel the soldiers tensing, ready to fire on what they clearly thought must be a young Skull loose in their base. She threw herself in front of the boy, shielding him with her body, and closed her eyes. She waited with bated breath, anticipating the crack of gunfire, the hot pang of bullets tearing through her flesh. But it didn’t come.

Tyler cried into her shoulder.

“Hold your fire!” the leader yelled, his voice booming over the tarmac.

Kara opened her eyes, holding Tyler tight against her chest, and gazed down the gun barrels. She’d done plenty of target shooting, she’d hunted with her dad, and she’d taken down those Skulls—but she’d never been on this end of a gun, much less the couple dozen that bore down on her now. Her limbs shook, and she felt like collapsing. It was all too much.

The head of the frightening welcome squad stepped past his soldiers. “Stand down,” he said.

“He’s not...I’m not...we’re people.” The words flew from her mouth. “We’re not Skulls or crazies or whatever.” Another tear rolled down her cheek. “We’re not, I swear.”

Tyler peeked out from Kara’s embrace. His face was red and wet from bawling. “I’ll be good. I will. I promise.”

Kara thought she saw a crack in the commander’s stolid face, a single moment of pity quickly swallowed up by rote duty.

He turned back to his men. “Round them up and send them to quarantine for processing.”

Boots beat across the ground as the soldiers surrounded Sadie, Frank, and the others. Shivers rippled across Kara’s flesh at his words. They’d escaped the hell outside only to be at the whim of this man. Tyler sniffled as Kara rubbed his back. “It’s okay,” she said, not sure if it would be.

Then the commander bent down to her, kneeling by her side. He locked eyes with Kara. “You’re safe here.” His tone was stern, but his eyes were kind, reassuring. “We just have to make sure you’re not carrying the disease that all those”—he gestured to the outer fences of Detrick, where Skulls clambered over one another—“things are carrying.”

The man held out a gloved hand to Kara. She took it, and he said, “I’m Deputy Commander Shepherd.”

“Kara. This is Tyler.”

“Tyler, Kara. I’m pleased to meet you. Now please follow my men. We just need to be safe, but if all goes well, I promise everything will be okay.”

Kara repeated the words in her head.
Everything will be okay. Just one thing at a time.
She wanted to believe Shepherd, but her mom had told her everything was okay too, and now...Kara shuddered as she stood. She took Tyler’s small, clammy hand. She had to be strong. If not for herself, for Tyler. For Sadie.

She glanced at her sister. Sadie’s face was ashen, and her lower lip trembled as a couple of soldiers escorted her away. Against every fiber of her being telling her she couldn’t, she shouldn’t, Kara smiled. A simple gesture. It was all she could offer.

“Don’t worry, Sadie. Everything’s going to be okay.”

She hated herself for saying it, but what else could she do?

***

L
auren examined the latest results of the Oni Agent antibody study. Scott, Amir, Divya, Ivan, and Glenn all showed levels indicating the agent was all but eliminated from their bodies.

“Final test,” Peter said, “is seeing how they feel. If their anger issues are gone, we’ve hit pay dirt.”

Lauren nodded and entered the isolation chamber, followed by Peter.

“How’s it going, Doc and Doc?” Glenn greeted them.

“The real question is how are you doing?” Peter asked.

“Any pain, headaches, nausea?” Lauren checked his vitals and recorded his temperature.

“Negative, negative, and negative.” Glenn exhibited none of the symptoms associated with the Oni Agent and, as far as Lauren could tell, was perfectly healthy. He gave her a warm grin that Lauren couldn’t help but return one of her own. A wave of giddiness spread through her. She refrained from wrapping her arms around him, an instinct she found hard to resist. She wasn’t completely victorious yet, and Glenn wasn’t her only patient.

She and Peter moved to Divya’s bedside. The invalid doctor forced a smile. Bandages covered her arms and face, yet she too seemed in good humor. “I’m not used to being
in
this bed. I’d rather be up in the lab again. What do you say?”

Lauren rubbed the top of Divya’s hand. “Hey, you deserve a couple days of rest before I send you back to monitoring cell cultures.”

Divya chuckled, her brown eyes glimmering in the overhead lights. “Boy, I can’t wait.”

Giving the doctor one more smile, Lauren moved on to their other patients, who were still medically sedated. She held her breath as she took each of them off their sedatives in turn. The first to come around was Amir. His eyes widened, and he almost jumped from his bed before Peter restrained him. His words came out in jumbled Farsi.

“What’s he saying?” Lauren asked Glenn.

The former Green Beret cocked his head, straining to understand. “I think he’s asking for his whereabouts and who you all are. He’s saying something about danger and monsters.”

Glenn spoke some words in Farsi and tried to calm Amir down. Soon the rescued IBSL mechanic’s breathing regained a normal rhythm, and he peered around cautiously at the lab.

“Maybe I’ll finally continue the conversation he owes me,” Glenn said.

“I hope so,” Lauren replied. “It’d be nice if now that he’s stabilized, he’s a bit more helpful.”

Ivan’s eyelids began to flutter open. Peter and Lauren rushed to his side.

“Ivan,” Lauren started, “how are you feeling?”

His dark pupils met hers. His mouth opened as if to respond. Instead, his head jolted forward, his teeth grinding together. He struggled against his restraints. The entire hospital bed jumped as he thrashed. The only thing to escape his lips was a shrieking howl.

“Ivan Price,” Lauren said, willing her voice to remain calm. “You’re okay. You’re in the medical bay of the
Huntress.
Do you understand me?”

Ivan’s broad nose wrinkled as he growled at them. His chin jutted out, and he struggled to bite at Lauren with all the ferocity of a great white shark churned on by blood. A deep pit formed in Lauren’s stomach. Maybe the Oni Agent antibody levels were a false positive, a red herring in their attempt to discover a way to reverse the biological weapon’s effects.

“Sedate him again?” Peter asked.

Lauren gave him a weak nod.

Seconds later, Scott awoke. His howls filled the isolation ward. Divya clapped her hands over their ears as Lauren rushed to put Scott under once more. She clenched her jaw as Scott slowly succumbed to the sedatives and fell into a deep slumber. What had she gotten wrong? What had she missed?

Peter shook his head. “We tried,” he said. “We tried.”

Then Lauren glanced at Amir, Divya, and Glenn again. She went to Amir first, checking his fingernails. Underneath his bandages, his wounds were no longer laced with the calcified tissue left by the nanobacteria. She repeated the examination on Glenn and Divya. They too were free from the outward signs of the infection.

An idea struck her. She moved to a corner of the room with Peter, out of earshot from the rest their patients. “None of them have any sign of a nanobacteria-induced mineralization.”

“So? It might not have hit them yet.”

“No, that’s not it. It took Scott only a few hours to show outward symptoms of the Oni Agent. Amir has been with us much longer, and even after an almost certain infection from Scott, he’s fine.”

“What are you saying then?” Peter arched an eyebrow.

“The nanobacteria themselves might not be responsible for the neurological changes leading to the violent outbursts. There’s something else at work. Think about it.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe the nanobacteria are producing a molecule, a drug, something that causes the neurological changes we haven’t been able to fix in Ivan and Scott. The nanobacteria act like little factories, doing what they naturally do by reproducing and forming the protective bony mineralized tissues around them. But they’re also making a byproduct, something we didn’t catch before. Something that affects the brain.” She paced around the ward. “If we catch the Oni Agent soon enough, we can eliminate the side effects and prevent the brain from succumbing to the agent’s long-term effects. But if we let it go...” She let her words hang in the air.

“So we need to find out what these little nanofactories are producing when we don’t kill them fast enough, don’t we?” Peter asked.

“Right,” Lauren said. She walked toward the morgue drawer in the isolation ward, where they’d stored Brett’s body. She pulled the heavy drawer open. “We’re going to need to perform an autopsy.”

Once they’d prepped the body, Lauren used the T-shaped skull key to remove Brett’s skullcap. The surgical lights beat down in the lab where she and Peter had set up the makeshift autopsy room. She leaned in, peering through her visor. Before her, Brett’s brain lay exposed. She didn’t need an MRI to confirm what she saw in the grey, wrinkled organ. White plaques, almost glaringly pale, were everywhere. Holes perforated the tissue like an aerated lawn. A large volume of Brett’s brain had been eaten away.

The brain was a plastic organ, capable of adaption. But nothing could adapt to the voids left in this tissue. What she and Peter were looking at was nothing less than irreversible brain damage.

“What the hell are those?” Peter pointed one gloved finger toward the white plaques.

Lauren gulped. “Didn’t Samantha and Chao report something about protein complexes potentially associated with the Amanojaku Project? Wasn’t that in the original project description?”

“I think you’re right.”

“Then I believe what we’re looking at is the result of a prion infection. Spongiform encephalopathy.”

“Prions? Infectious proteins? Like the ones that cause mad cow disease?”

“Right,” Lauren said. “I’m almost one hundred percent positive we can prove that in any number of HPLC, immunohistochemistry, and histology experiments, but I believe we’re looking at what happens when these prions decimate the human brain.”

“Good God,” Peter said. “So if you’re right, someone genetically engineered these infectious nanobacteria to produce the protein complexes—the prions. And those prions are turning people into killing machines.”

“This is one of those rare times when I desperately wish I was wrong,” Lauren said. “But I’m afraid that’s not the case.”

“So there’s no cure at all? Nothing we can do to reverse these changes?”

Lauren shook her head. “There’s only one potential way to stop prions, and that’s something the agricultural industry practices whenever they fear an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease—has set in.”

“What is it?”

Lauren met his eyes. “Mass extermination.”

She felt a surge of helplessness, wondering if she and her medical team stood even a hair of a chance at helping those who’d suffered the Oni Agent for too long, like Ivan and Scott.

As if sensing her despair, Peter spoke up again. “Lauren, we’ll find a way. We’ll find something. In a matter of days, you made an incredible breakthrough. I know I was skeptical, but I’m behind you now. If anyone can scrounge up a better way to combat the Oni Agent, it’s you.”

“Thanks,” Lauren said. She appreciated the doctor’s confidence, but confidence wouldn’t be enough in the coming days. She took a final glance at the damage the Oni Agent had caused on Brett’s emaciated body. Her eyes traced over the jagged bones stabbing out from his joints and the plates wrapping around his ribs, along with the talon-like fingernails, yellowed and sharp. From everything they’d learned about the Amanojaku Project so far, it had taken over half a century for some misguided scientists to develop this terrifying bioweapon.

And she was expected to unravel its mysteries, to delve into its biological intricacies, and develop a way to combat it. Even if they did have all the time in the world, she wondered if her medical team aboard the
Huntress
was up to the challenge. If Dom got Fort Detrick on their side, would that be enough?

It would have to be,
she decided. Dom’s Hunters would fight the Skulls in the streets, and she vowed to fight in the labs every waking hour available to her. For Scott. For Ivan. For Brett. For the millions upon millions of others still suffering the Oni Agent. She held her head high.

They would stop the spread of this bioweapon. Their only other choice was to let humanity wipe itself out. And she couldn’t let that happen.

“I guess it’s back to the lab for us,” Lauren said. “We’ve got some work to do.”

––––––––

T
he Skull slammed against the windshield, shattering the already fractured glass. His body rolled into the aisle, and the beast stood, lashing out with its talons, eyes bulging and bloodshot. Dom kicked it into the doorwell and fired three shots, ending the monster’s life. He wouldn’t let the bastard get to his Hunters or the people they were protecting.

The bus shuddered as Meredith propelled it through the Skulls. The endless, sickening crunch of bodies under the fourteen-ton vehicle accompanied the constant jostling of the bus as if they were off-roading in a Jeep. Bright-red blood trickled out of the cuts in Meredith’s face where the shattered windshield had struck her. She didn’t so much as wipe it out of her eyes as she steered the vehicle through the Skulls.

Several more of the creatures climbed up the hood. Dom picked them off as fast he could, with Miguel and Renee assisting. There wasn’t enough room for anyone else to join in the desperate shooting gallery for survival.

“Holy shit!” Joe yelled out. “They’re hanging off the sides.”

Adding to the chaos, Skulls dug their claws into the rubber seals of the passenger windows. They hung precariously from these positions, smashing their fists and foreheads against the glass. The sea of bodies in front of the bus slowed it despite Meredith’s commitment to keeping the pedal pressed tight to the floor.