A Flock of Ill Omens (7 page)

1.8. Matt Jacobs:

Tallahassee, Florida

Dead Men Can Multiply

The headquarters of the Kraken made the headquarters of Eagle Corp look like the fucking Pentagon. There was a biker bar in Tallahassee, and if you went past the bathroom to a broom closet, there was a flight of stairs at the back that led to a locked door. If you knew the fuse box next to it was actually an access pad and intercom, you didn't need a key—provided somebody inside knew who you were and believed you had any business being there.

Matt had done a handful of jobs with men from Kraken in the last few years. Enough that one of his two remaining friends, Brian Craig, worked for them, along with a dozen friendly acquaintances.

He drank a beer at the bar for the sake of appearances, and then headed toward the bathroom. When he was sure nobody was watching, he ducked down the passage and into the closet with the staircase. Inside the fuse box he pushed the red button that should have been the intercom. Nobody answered.

He and Craig had gotten drunk together once while they waited to be picked up from an assassination attempt in Pakistan. The target hadn't been there, and since he and Craig weren't in direct danger, they'd been low priority for retrieval. They'd both sworn about being low-priority soldiers, but Matt figured Craig was as content to have the down-time as he was.

While they waited, they'd joked about things they thought would never matter, including their commanders' quirks, which for Craig included a passcode tendency based on the board game Monopoly. The man had memory issues, but figured if they rounded the board, a new property every month, along with the price to get a number into the formula, people with bad memories or who had been away for a while could figure it out.

Two years ago, plus or minus a month, they'd been at St. Charles Place. Matt pulled out his phone to look the damn thing up, because he'd never remember all the properties. Two years ago was twenty-four months, and there were twenty-eight properties. That left him at Reading Railroad at two-hundred dollars if it was exactly two years, which it probably wasn't. He tried Reading200 first, with and without capitalization, but had no luck, so he jumped back to Baltic60.

It caused the door to buzz and he edged it open, taking out his weapon as he did.

There was no noise, so he pushed in further, flipping on the lights. The place looked like a haz-mat lab. Somebody here must have managed to get word to someone official that everyone was sick and dying and they'd called in the pros to come test what it was and clean up the place. Everything that had been here the last time
he
had was gone, replaced by a sterile table with lab equipment and a notebook.

Matt scanned the room continuously, but when he reached the table, he thumbed the book to see what it could tell him. It listed the various hazards that might have made the crew so sick. All negative. He wasn't sure whether to be relieved that nobody had poisoned them, or more concerned that they hadn't figured out what the hell this was. It had wiped out two full teams of mercenaries without a trace. There was nothing more he could learn here, since they'd been so thorough in cleaning the place out, so he decided to try to find his friend. There was always a chance he'd survived.

Brian Craig was nowhere to be found, but at least he didn't seem to be dead in his apartment. Matt broke in to make sure—no sign of him. He could hold out a little hope. Not a lot, though. It seemed the life expectancy in his field was running low.

Having given up on Brian, Matt tried to call his brother next, first by landline, then cell, and finally with the satellite phone he'd left with him. He cursed Paxton's lack of cable while he waited. He had no way of knowing if any of this was even going on in Atlanta where Teddy was. In all likelihood, Teddy was passed out somewhere and would get back to him. If not, he'd gather the supplies he needed and drive up there himself. But first he wanted to check out Camp Blanding. It was the only way to know if this was about mercenary targets, or fighting men more broadly.

He was getting tired of driving this same stretch of 10W, and driving to Camp Blanding gave Matt flashbacks. When he'd been discharged from the Army he'd been sort of lost for a while, not sure what to do with his life. He'd debated joining the National Guard, something he could do at the same camp where he'd done his initial Army training. He wanted to just keep his hands in the action. Then he discovered he could make good money as a mercenary. He was too shell-shocked and damaged to have a wife and family—he was no Dwayne Paxton. So why not keep doing the work, but for more money?

He was an adventure junkie, a thrill-seeker, and a one-night stand. It wasn't that he didn't want a woman in his life, but nobody deserved to be strapped to his baggage, least of all somebody he actually cared about.

Matt pulled off of 10 toward Camp Blanding and stopped for a sandwich. If the last few days were any indication, he was probably going to lose his appetite shortly, and it was better to have been fortified beforehand.

The base was quiet on approach. Too quiet, considering what could be seen from the road was a museum normally open to the public. It was closed. He parked in front of it anyway, walking around to give the base a closer look. He would have expected drills or companies or vehicles—something moving around out there, but there was nothing. Nobody on the lake. Nobody in the sky. Nobody to stop him from poking around, though he shouted to make himself known as he went—better not to surprise anybody who might be armed.

Finally a man came out of the back of a garage with a wrench in his hand. “Can I help you?”

“Life!” Matt joked. The man didn't seem amused so Matt explained himself. “I served six years. A tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. I currently work with a United States contractor and have discovered that two units, mine and one of a buddy of mine, have been decimated. I'm just trying to see what's going on.”

The man wiped a bandanna across his forehead and stuck the wrench in his back pocket. “I'm currently a civilian, but I work here—my wife is deployed, thank God. Flu spread through here like wildfire.”

“Flu? You sure?”

“That's what the doctors say. Said. Most of them are gone, too. Is there a reason I should think otherwise?”

“It's hitting the military harder than civilians. I just...” Matt checked either way, not sure who he was worried might be eavesdropping. “I was thinking terrorists.”

The man's eyes popped. “Overseas units have all been healthy. Shouldn't they have been hit even harder—easier to get to?”

Matt shrugged. It was a good point. “You didn't get it.”

“Just got back from a family thing. I must have missed the germs.”

“So who's in charge here?”

“Nobody around. A couple officers were called to some meeting to figure out what to do, but nearly all the enlisted and about half the civilians who work here are gone. Dead or left.”

“Does that strike you as odd, that the civilians weren't hit as hard?”

“Weren't staying in the barracks, I guess.”

Matt thought it was more complicated than that. Or less complicated, depending how you looked at it. But this man still seemed to have hive-think, so questioning him wasn't going to do any good. Whatever the case, Matt had learned what he came to learn. The military was dying like they'd been targeted. Something was up and his baby brother was the best person he could think of to solve a question like that.

1.
9. Nathan Drake:

Boulder, Colorado

What Do Zombies and Nurses Have in Common?

The Zombie Apocalypse response team was scheduled to start Saturday morning, which meant the Zombie Apocalypse really had to get underway Friday night. By morning there had to be enough saturation of danger that there was a crisis to solve.

This was the fun part.

A team of Zombie-makers hit a few frat parties, a few dorm parties, and the student union. They gave out enough make-up to each 'infected undergrad' to infect three friends. They also got a red washable marker for them to mark people 'whose brains they'd eaten' (and so were, for all practical purposes, dead and not reanimated). Students were asked to limit this feeding frenzy to one person per hour. They could also add the food coloring to food and water to 'contaminate those sources.'

To balance the infection, and to approximate real life citizens with knowledge or resources, they distributed black markers to put an X on the head of any zombie that had been neutralized with any toy gun, or full beheading by sword. All people were on the honor system, but it seemed like the people enlisted thought it was fun and were willing to play.

Once critical infection had been achieved, the PhD cohort met at Catacombs, a campus bar, to celebrate. Nathan had to admit it was a hoot to watch in action, especially when a pair of zombies came in and started infecting patrons.

He overheard, “Oh, just kill us. We need to wait for some people,” from the table behind them and two of his classmates put squirt guns on the table to show that they were
armed, so the zombies moved back near the pool tables to seek prey.

By the next morning, campus did indeed look like the Zombie Apocalypse was in motion and the MPH students were sent out to assess and troubleshoot. Had they been paying attention, MPH teams were also supposed to have stored supplies and worked out evacuation routes and safe spaces, so some of the teams jumped in ready to start saving people, but most floundered, learning the price paid for failing to be prepared.

The PhD students took it in turns to advise and evaluate how they were doing. By noon prospects seemed pretty hopeless, though once formal containment efforts began around one, the tide started to turn.

Nathan liked being at command central. It gave him the chance to take the pulse of all of it, to mentor students in what to do, and to watch the effects of various preparations and reactions. It was tiring, though, even in this farce of a scenario. He gave Shana the swing shift so he could sleep for a few hours and come back to do the Saturday overnight shift.

When he returned at midnight, Shana was frowning at a campus map.

“There's something at the hospital,” she said as Nathan came in.

“Hospital? We aren't supposed to interrupt them.”

“It's in the rules, but what portion of kids do you think read everything? And Nathan? That's life, remember? You can put all the protocols in place, but how many epidemics follow human-made rules? Too bad there wasn't money for better prizes,” she said. “Then they'd follow the rules.”

Infected students were supposed to register online—that was how they qualified for prizes—and registering included agreeing to the rules. Nathan ran his hand through his hair.

“Those rule-breakers will make this thing spread faster, too,” Shana said, grinning.

“Also like life?” he asked, and she nodded. Registering also made for an enforced 'incubation period'. They'd always known only a certain portion of participants would go through all the steps. That was part of the lesson that would be taught after the fact—collecting the information from various sources to triangulate and try to measure what really happened.

“Science follows all the rules until you throw people into the mix,” Shana said.

“Can we put somebody at the hospital to make sure we don't disrupt them?” he asked.

“Can you go? I can cover here for another hour or two, but I'm on my bike.”

“Done.” Nathan hated to babysit, but they were trying to run lean overnight, so the people working already had jobs to do. And he knew his way around the hospital, so he was probably the most efficient person to go.

He drove to Boulder Community Hospital and didn't see anything to do with zombies. He walked around the outside, even peeking into the ER waiting room. It was swamped, but he couldn't see any zombie nonsense.

He called Shana because it didn't make any sense.

“I don't know. Ariel Hutchins called and said she had a kid with a sprained ankle caused by running from the zombies and at the hospital they couldn't get in because so many nurses were dead.”

When Nathan pressed ‘end’ on his phone he decided that deserved a few answers from the information desk. It was past visiting hours, so the man at the desk had time to talk to him. Nathan explained who he was and why he was there.

“Uh, no. I haven't heard anything about a Zombie Apocalypse.” The young man leaned forward to whisper. “Sadly, I do know something about dead nurses. We're dangerously low on critical staff. We've put in requests to Denver and Colorado Springs, but they're having similar problems—sick staff and increased demand.”

“So this is the flu?

“I'm afraid so.”

Nathan made an executive decision at that point. The Zombie Apocalypse had to be called off. Doing anything that increased social interaction at this point was a bad idea.

He went back to the lab and broke the news to Shana.

1.10. Sidney Knight:

Portland, Oregon

When We Lose

Sidney spent the afternoon and evening researching the spread of the flu in more detail. She wanted to figure out where the flu was ordinary flu and where it was the bird flu—a more dangerous mutation of the original. But nobody seemed to be tracking that. The CDC website had stopped updating information, best she could tell, so she turned to the Dartmouth Atlas, one of the more reliable sources for stats. Death reports had quadrupled in only a few days and they'd made a set of projections that took her breath away. Most major US cities would lose between ten and twenty percent of their population, but the ones that had been hit hardest initially, without a huge intervention, were projected to lose up to two-thirds.

As she read, she stumbled upon another strange trend. A hospital in Maryland had had to shut down already for lack of providers—doctors, nurses—it seemed everyone had gone out ill and a number had died. The explanation in the Washington Post was a particularly virulent patient who'd had his stomach opened for surgery and some noxious gas had been released, infecting a number of people before they even knew it was there.

Sid wasn't sure she believed it. It sounded like classic spin. Especially when she ran across a similar pattern in Madison, Wisconsin and Ann Arbor, Michigan, within spitting distance of her parents' house in Toledo. There was no attribution there except the epidemic. It seemed to be spreading out of control in some very specific places. Some of the places she didn't know well, but when she saw Boulder a conspiracy theory began to nag at her and she wondered who'd want to destroy college towns.

“Is this terrorism?” Sidney muttered out loud.

“Is what terrorism?” Sarah asked behind her.

Sidney'd thought she was alone.

“The medical staff at all these university hospitals—epidemics. You know your fear? About nurses and being forced to get the shot? Looks like a legitimate concern, at least at a bunch of teaching hospitals.”

Sarah was a lot less shocked than Sid expected. “Makes sense,” she said. “Military. Hospitals. Talk about the best way to make us vulnerable.”

Sid's chest tightened. “I'm not a good enough reporter for this. It's too big. I'm too green.” Every bit of it overwhelmed her, but she didn't know who to turn to.

“You want to report it?” Sarah's panicked expression was almost comical.

“I have reported it. I sent an article to the Oregonian about the strange lack of real investigation about how this got so out of hand and the evidence the vaccine was making it worse. That's what I do. If anybody took me seriously, I might have saved lives by reporting it. Though come to think of it, they paid me, but I never saw the proofs on that. I wonder if it actually printed.”

Sarah shook her head, uninterested in the logistics of publishing news articles. “If it's terrorists, it's dangerous. I mean, I get what you're saying, but why you? Can't CNN do this? I want you to be safe.”

“What if nobody else is looking?”

“This is huge—somebody's looking. They have to be.”

Somehow, Sid doubted it. It wasn't on the news. Nobody seemed to be linking the pieces together, even the little ones
she'd
put together. Either nobody was looking, or somebody was suppressing the media. That idea chilled her, largely because it was no longer a world of a few radio or TV stations and newspapers. Suppressing the internet had to be done on a huge scale—that was a
lot
of power.

“I have to go to Atlanta tomorrow.” Sidney worried Sarah would be upset at being abandoned, especially with Grant sick now, too, but Sarah gave Sid her own shock.

“David and I are pretending we have a death in the family. We're going to Missoula for at least a week. It will delay my need for a shot without getting me fired.”

Sid felt a weight slide off of her. David's family was in Missoula. “Good thinking—nice save, even.”

“They're mad at work—we're short-staffed—people out sick. But it's not like they can ask you to stay when your mother is dying—or mother-in-law, as the case may be. This trend hasn't hit Missoula, has it? It
is
a college town.”

Sid checked the few places that had seemed to have reliable information as Sarah stood waiting. “Not that I can tell. If this is terrorism, it might have been too small a target to make their list. The ones I've seen are really major universities.”

“I'll open a bottle of wine to pack with,” Sarah said.

“That's the best idea I've heard in a while.”

Sid got online to book her ticket, then joined Sarah and David in the kitchen to coordinate laundry schedules. That would be the trickiest piece of all three of them packing at once. The three of them drinking wine in the kitchen made Grant's absence feel like dense fog hovering over them. He was always the most outgoing of them.

“We'll check on him tomorrow before we go,” Sarah said.

Sid nodded, fighting back tears. It was a bad time to be leaving her friends.

When they arrived at Ricky's apartment the next morning, Sid had a hard time choking off the panic. The soup had never been retrieved from the landing.

“Mask!” she ordered, and Sarah handed her one, then put on her own. There were already tears in Sarah's eyes and Sid felt herself getting choked up, too, feeding off of Sarah's dread.

She pushed open the door. The place stunk of sweat and possibly urine. Grant was on the sofa, apparently passed out—unresponsive to their shouts. Sarah handed Sid surgical gloves and she put them on to check his pulse, but couldn't find one. Sarah moved her aside and managed.

“Shallow and racing, but there,” she said. She had a lot more experience finding pulses than Sidney did.

“Go find Ricky,” Sarah said as she headed to the kitchen, probably for a cloth to cool Grant down. Sid had been able to tell he was hot. She should have known that meant alive, but it was hard to think straight when she was this scared.

Ricky was sprawled on the bed, eyes wide open. He looked like he'd been gasping for breath at the end and when she felt for a pulse, he was cold. She doubted he could have gotten that cold unless he'd died the night before.

“He's dead,” Sid called to Sarah.

“Shit. Call 9-1-1, I guess. Grant needs a hospital and Ricky needs a morgue. They can't stay
here
, at any rate,” she said.

Sidney took off the gloves and pulled out her phone to call, for all the good it did. The dispatcher said there weren't any available units and she doubted the hospital had any room.

When Sid relayed that, Sarah swore, but then told Sid to wait. Sid guessed that meant she knew something to do to help, even if a hospital was more ideal. She shut Ricky's bedroom door and got a towel to shove under the crack. It probably didn't matter, but death germs were something she'd rather avoid. She then put on a new pair of gloves and sat next to Grant to hold his hand. She couldn't hold in her tears thinking the love of his life was lying dead in the next room. So many dreams were gone.

If this was the damn vaccine she had to find out who was responsible. She owed that to Grant.

Sarah returned half an hour later with three bags of what was probably saline. She had a pump to control the speed and the tools to put in an IV.

“Find me something to hang these from,” she ordered.

Sid had to go in Ricky's room for it, but found a coat rack, cleared it of coats, and dragged it back out. It would do.

As she watched Sarah be so efficient it was hard to even remember the party animal she'd been at nineteen–the student who had nearly flunked out of the University of Oregon because it was just too overwhelming, so had transferred first to Lane Community College, then to Oregon Health and Sciences. She'd finished a year behind Sid, but Sid could see the skills she'd learned topped her own in a crisis any day.

Sarah put the IV in Grant's arm and started the drip, then ground some aspirin and soaked it in water that she put in his mouth with a dropper. She had Sid keep freshening the towel with cool water for his head.

“We aren't leaving today, are we?” Sid asked.

“I'm not. Grant and I were friends in grade school. He's my longest surviving friendship.”

Sid knew that. She'd met Grant through Sarah, but while Sarah went off to become a nurse, she and Grant had hung out in Eugene for three more years, building a friendship of their own. Nothing like life's oldest friend, though. Grant had had a rough childhood—a homophobic dad with a misconception he could make his son straight with enough discipline. She thought that was why he and Sarah never talked about the childhood years.

“I'm not going, either,” Sid said.

“You have to. You're flying.”

“I can delay it a day.”

“Well, I'd call and check on that.”

She knew it was true and she didn't really want to drive four thousand miles, so she called the airlines.

“Miss, there are a lot of cancellations. I can get you on later. But I need to warn you, they are talking about stopping air service. I don't know that I'd wait for tomorrow.”

“What is your latest flight out tonight?”

“Eleven twenty.”

“And you're sure it's going?”

“Yes, ma'am. Staff are already checked in at Minneapolis. They fly to Atlanta, here, then back the way they came.”

“Okay, book me on that.”

Sid would have liked another day, but she was as worried about Jeff as she was about Grant. Well, that wasn't completely true. She could see Grant was really sick, and Jeff might have been fine, but until she knew for sure, her imagination would wreak havoc. And with her renewed commitment to find out what all this was about, she felt the headquarters of the CDC might be just the place to find some answers. After all, Jeff had warned her about the shots a week ago.
Somebody
had to know something. And she certainly wasn't able to get access to them from here.

Sarah's measures weren't enough. Sid didn't think anything would have been enough, but Sarah took it hard, all the professionalism collapsing when Grant's heart stopped pumping. Sid had to call David to come down when it was over. Sarah blamed herself for not knowing more, while Sid blamed the hospital and ambulance system for not coming to get him. David reminded them there was more nefarious blame to go around.

“It's the vaccine. Somebody is killing people on purpose.”

Sid desperately wanted that not to be true, because you couldn't fight an enemy you couldn't see and she felt it placed the burden of figuring it out on her own shoulders, but at the same time, she could see it let Sarah breathe easier. They called again for the bodies to be picked up, but doubted anyone would come.

Were there really dead people stuck in apartments all over the city? It was starting to look like that had to be the case.

Sarah called Grant's mother, but sadly, had to leave a message.

Sid called Ricky's sister, who was devastated, but she said Ricky had been HIV positive for more than a decade. It confirmed Sid’s guess, though it had never been her business, so she hadn’t probed. It sounded like the sister had steeled herself to the idea of Ricky's death years ago, before the cocktail had changed HIV from a death sentence to a chronic condition.

At the house they tried to eat a pizza because it was easy, and Sarah and Sid drank a bottle of wine, toasting Grant and Ricky and crying a lot. Then David drove Sid to the airport. She made her flight after all.