The Chronos Plague (Book 1): No Time Left Page 15

  Steve waved his hand. “I hope it’s not what I think it is.”

  I stood up and started to leave, then stopped by the door.

  “Your family in a safe place?” I asked.

  Steve nodded. “Sent them there an hour after I got your report.”

  “See you, then. Thanks for the update,” I said as I left.

  “Mac!” Steve called.

  “What?”

  “Bring one back, will you?”

  “Jesus.”

  I followed Conner out of the lab and back through the parking garage. In the main building, we were greeted by an analyst who brought us back to the director’s office. I was seriously starting to hate this place, but then maybe it was who occupied it.

  “MacCullen, Elliott. Looks like there might be something to your story after all. We need you to fly out to Utah. Some hikers are talking about a guy in the mountains that might fit your description.” He handed over a file folder. “Location, witness information, all we know right now.”

  “Thanks. How are we getting there?” I asked. “Commercial’s too slow.”

  “Head over to the Air Force base. They’ve a transport waiting for you,” the director said, sitting down, effectively dismissing us.

  I didn’t bother to say anything as I left his office. I didn’t feel like I owed him anything.

  Conner and I hitched a ride with transportation services over to the Air Force base. We were driven right out to the tarmac where two F15E Strike Eagles were waiting for us.

  “Well, I guess that’s fast enough,” Conner said.

  “What’s the speed on these?” I asked, walking over to the places.

  “About eighteen hundred miles per hour,” Conner said.

  “Damn.”

  The pilots joined us in a minute and after explaining our situation, they were more than happy to get us to Utah. Gee, they had to fly fast?

  We got into the air and when we reached altitude, the pilots let things loose. We were in the air for about an hour, and then we were in approach for landing. It was weird to land before we actually left.

  A car was waiting for us, a simple government sedan. I actually liked it, but Conner wrinkled his nose, the spoiled brat. We piled in and headed out, following the route from the file. The location was pretty remote, but it was accessible by car, so at least there was that.

  We headed out of town looking for the small hamlet of Croydon, and from there we headed north on Long Creek Road. The road led us deep into the mountains, and Conner pointed out that we had just a few more miles to go.

  We stopped at a house to ask for directions, and it was there we learned that there used to be a lot of activity for a while, and then there was none. It seemed like there was some kind of building going on, but then nothing.

  “What do you make of that?” Conner asked.

  “Not sure, but I think this is what we were looking for,” I said, pulling into a small trading post on the side of the road. There was a squad car, and it looked like the deputy was talking to a couple of people. They looked like your typical hiking folk: backpacks, hydration packs, likely had granola in at least two of their pockets.

  The police officer was taking notes as we came up, and we waited for him to finish his discussion with the pair. I flagged him over and showed him my credentials, which were actually little more than investigator badges from the federal government. I had no arrest powers, although I could kill you if needed. Go figure.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  The officer shrugged. “Not much to say. They were hiking up the way and came across this person who looked like they were in trouble. They tried to render aid and were attacked and chased for a while before losing them in the woods. They’re pretty shaken up. I was going to transport them back to their car and then get to looking for whoever went after them.”

  “Where did they see the person, exactly?” Conner asked, pulling out his phone and pulling up the area.

  The officer waved the man over and he looked at the phone for a minute, trying to come up with an excuse as to why he couldn’t find it. I waved the woman over and she found the area in a couple of seconds. It looked like we could get close with the car, which I liked, since I wasn’t a fan of walking too far.

  We hit the road and drove deeper into the mountains, following the path given to us. The roads were remarkably well-maintained, giving us easy access close to where we needed to be.

  ‘I wonder where the… Holy Shit!” Conner yelled as he swerved the car over to the side of the road. He almost missed the man that popped out of the bushes in front of the car, but we still clipped him with the rear of the car. The man stumbled and rolled into the other side of the road, landing in a small patch of grass.

  “Damnit! Where the hell did he come from?” I said, getting out of the car. I moved around toward the other side but the man was already up and coming at me. He was dressed in hiking clothes, but the resemblance ended there. His throat was ripped open and his shirt was a mass of blood from his neck to his belt. The blow from the car barely slowed him down.

  “Ah, shit! Got a dead one here!” I called out to Conner to keep him in the car, since he was on that side of it anyway. I pulled my gun and as the man got closer, I put a large bullet in his head. The sound echoed off the nearby cliffs and hills as the man fell to the ground, fully dead.

  Conner got out of the car, drawing his weapon. “You think that’s the only one?”

  “Nope, that was a local. This is spreading. We have to get to the source, fast. How good are your tracking skills?” I asked.

  “Not that great. They moved away from that at the academy.”

  “Christ, things are going to hell over there. All right, follow me, cover my back,” I said, heading over to where we first ran into the man. Back when I was a young recruit, we had an old cowboy teach us how to track both man and animal. Nothing fancy, just looking for patterns and how things were different when a man passed a certain way and when an animal did. Lucky for me, a dead guy walking didn’t do much to hide his trail.

  The grass was matted down and the blood trail was easy enough to follow. I actually figured Conner could do this, it was that easy. We moved down through the channel between two small hills, and then over another one. At the bottom of the next hill over, there was a large spot of blood on the ground and a lot of matted grass. “Looks like a struggle here, probably where the guy bought it,” I said. “There’s another set of tracks that look like they are approaching this one, and they seem to go off that way.” I pointed to the grass that was crushed that led toward a forest.

  “Fair enough. But if we follow the other trail, won’t we be getting to the source?” Conner asked.

  I exhaled long and loudly. “True, and I hate to split up, but we really have no choice. You think you can handle the guy or whatever that did this?” I asked.

  “Hell, my gun holds fifteen bullets. Get with the times, old man,” Conner said.

  “I’m old for a very good reason,” I said defensively.

  “And what reason might that be?”

  “No one fucks with a 1911. Get lost, junior.”

  Conner headed out along the trail, and I focused on what I was doing. The trail I was following was erratic and went around trees, up the sides of hills, down the banks of creeks, under tree falls, and in general wandering around. After a mile and a half of this, I was so ready to shoot something that I was wishing that I had followed the other trail.

  The path wound its way into a small forest, and I found it actually easier to find it since the ground was mostly pine needles, but the branches were broken in a singular direction. I followed the trail and it took me through the trees to a small clearing. I stopped just before the edge and took a look around, more out of habit than anything else.

  There was a small building in the clearing, single story, no entrance I could see and no windows. It was painted in a neutral color, and as I shifted, the color shifted a little, too.<
br />
  “Huh. Camo paint. Didn’t think that would work as well as it does,” I said to myself. The paint was experimental several years ago; guess they made advances since then.

  “Huh. There’s a few dead people over there.” That part I didn’t say out loud as I wasn’t completely stupid. Anytime there were bodies about, my old mentor had a few words about it. “If you don’t want to join them, watch, wait, or get the hell out.”

  I waited for a moment to see if there was any movement, but there didn’t seem to be any. The bodies were remarkably similar, being that they were all dressed in black and armed. But as I looked closer, I could see that they weren’t professionals of any sort. Their guns were not the same, and their clothing was only similar in that it was colored black.

  There was a lot of blood around, and if they weren’t dead from wounds, they certainly were dead from blood loss.

  I was about to step out when I heard gunshots. One, then two, then several. I waited for a moment then didn’t hear any more. I didn’t like what that meant, and I certainly hoped Conner had hit whatever he was aiming at.

  The gunshots had an effect on the dead though. One of them stirred and started to move, although it struggled and it seemed like it was still trying to remember how to move. I wondered briefly about the process, if it was like relearning how to do things after a long time in a coma or something.

  I interfered with the changing by sending a bullet into its head. The movement stopped and I was grateful that something still respected the 1911. I went up to the building, but I wasn’t overly interested in heading in there by myself. I searched the bodies and came away with a small pile of weapons and other goods. The three dead people had nothing else in common, and I started to wonder why the hell they were here. It didn’t make any sense, but then nothing about this mess did.

  Then I remembered I was in Utah. I made a quick call and checked with a contact at the FBI. Turns out there was a militia group nearby, and these three dopes probably stumbled onto this building not knowing it was here, and the building spat out its hell to meet them. I gave them a quick accident report and they promised to look in on the militia and see how they took the news.

  I heard a noise in the woods, and I stepped around to the side of the building to get some cover. It took a heartbeat to get myself calmed, and my head raced with images of what I had seen in Canada.

  But everything went fine when Conner came stumbling out of the woods. He looked a little haggard, and I raised a hand.

  “Did you get him?” I asked.

  “Her, yes. Hard to get a bullet in her when she was falling down a hill,” Conner said.

  “Huh. Why didn’t you wait for her to stop falling and kill her then?” I wondered.

  “She was falling on me.”

  “Ah. Good hunting, then.”

  “What’s in the building?” Conner asked

  “No idea. I was about to go in.”

  “Who the hell are these guys?” Conner pointed to the boys in black.

  “Local militia. Looks like they stumbled on this place and wound up waking something they weren’t prepared for,” I said.

  “What color are these walls?”

  “Jesus, you done asking questions? Shut the hell up and find a way in,” I said.

  It took no time at all, really, we just followed the matted grass backward until we found the door. It was hidden from most views, with the latch being found on the inside of a corner, but it swung open easily. I held my gun at the ready while Conner opened the door. Unlike the three dead outside, we knew what we were facing.

  We went through the building, and being different than the other one, this one was actually a single-story building. There was a small lab, a single table, and a single empty cell. We didn’t find anything that might have been useful, but we checked and double-checked.

  “What is all this stuff?” Conner asked.

  “Genetic research stuff,” I said. “Smaller scale than the last one. Want to bet that this might have been a startup facility, then they moved on to the larger one up in Canada.”

  “You think they had only the one?”

  “Probably. This place was likely feeding of discoveries in the north,” I said. “Let’s give it another once over and then get gone.”

  We searched and didn’t find anything, so we spent the next hour dragging the bodies of the dead to another clearing. We arranged pickup of the one corpse to be sent back to the lab at Langley, and then we got ourselves back to the airport.

  The flight back was uneventful. The entire time I was mostly thinking to myself that local law enforcement could have handled it just fine; all we had to do was tell them there was a bio risk and let them do their thing. Yeah, I could see that ending well with a thousand videos online of victims and the like.

  We rolled back to Langley and it was then that we noticed that we may have a problem.

  Conner was walking ahead of me when he reeled slightly and had to grasp a handrail at the top of a flight of stairs to steady himself.

  “Whoa, man. You okay?” I asked, grabbing his arm.

  Conner shook his head. “Not sure what happened. Just got real dizzy there for a second.

  I stepped in front of him and looked him over. He was pale, like he caught the flu, and slightly sweaty. On his collar was a small dark spot. It was that spot that suddenly sent warning alarms going off in my head.

  “Conner, how close were you when you capped that zombie?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, four, five feet?” he said.

  “Come with me,” I said. I led him back through the garage and to the door to Steve Castle’s lab.

  “Why are we here?” Conner asked.

  “Trying to save your life,” I said.

  We went through the door and the activity was worse than before. There were people that were actually rolling on the floor, arguing about some sort of sequence as they tried to gouge each other’s eyes out. One woman was banging her head against the wall, and another was standing in Steve’s doorway sobbing nearly uncontrollably.

  “Hey!” I shouted.

  No response.

  I shouted louder. “Hey! Sick man here! Anyone a real medic?”

  Still no response.

  “Fuck this.” I took my pistol out and fired a shot over the heads of the lunatic asylum. The bullet went through the glass of Steve’s office window and lodged itself in the wall behind him.

  Dead silence was actually almost scarier. Steve came out of his office and stared with an intensity that probably would have set me on fire had he not shifted his gaze to Conner.

  “Sweet mother of God,” Steve whispered. Then he shouted. “Biosuits! Doctor Hu! You are in charge!”

  I was pushed away and Conner was left standing alone. He fell to a knee, and I felt sorry for him. He knew what was coming and he was pretty calm about it. He gave me a single look before he was surrounded by doctors and taken to another room. I nodded and he closed his eyes.

  “You, Mac! Decon now!” Steve’s voice interrupted my thoughts and I was moved into a small room where I stripped and was showered, covered in a “bio-cleanse” which I suspected was bleach, washed again, and then fried with an ultraviolet light for five minutes. If there was an active bacteria left on me, it was in a place I didn’t want to know about.

  I came back out and my clothes had been replaced with an ill-fitting shirt and jeans. I took my guns off a man who clearly had no idea how to handle a weapon, and put them back where they belonged.

  In the time I had been “cleansed,” the lab had been transformed into a medical unit. People moved about in biohazard suits, and in the corner was a room that was lit up with medical equipment. Conner was lying on his back with a mask on his face, his eyes glassy and unfocused. I watched him for a minute then went over to Steve.

  “What’s the verdict?” I said.

  Steve looked up from his iPad. “It’s not good. He caught whatever it is they were cooking in those labs. It’s
a virus of some sort, and it’s more aggressive than anything I’ve ever seen. He must have gotten contact through a droplet in his eyes or mouth or someplace.”

  “So he’s going to become a zombie,” I asked.

  “At this rate, the only people who know more about this virus…” Steve trailed off.

  “Are dead,” I finished for him. “Son of a bitch. They killed the only people who might have been able to reverse this, or at least knew enough about it to help.”

  The implication hit Steve like a ton of bricks. “Holy mother of God.” He looked at Conner for a long moment then he turned to me. “Where there any more names on that list?” he asked quietly.

  “Just one left. Conner and I have been chasing lab sites, not people. I haven’t even had a chance to look,” I said. “After this much time, their survival is probably nil.”

  “Still, if there’s a chance…” Steve said.

  “I’m on it. Do me a favor?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “If I wind up on a table like Conner, kill me.”

  Steve smiled. “My pleasure.”

  “You’re a twisted man, Castle.”

  I ran back to my computer and scanned the list. We’d crossed off all of the names of the people we had found, save one. Dr. Julia Rodriguez. I did a fast search on the computer and got a hit on an address in Arizona. I called the local PD to do a wellness check, and spent fifteen minutes waiting for a callback. The news was both hot and cold. She was there a week ago, but her neighbors hadn’t seen her since. She did have family in Ecuador that she visited regularly, so it was possible she was there. I thanked them for their time and then called the agent in charge in Cali, Columbia.

  While I was talking to him, several things were happening around me. High-level suits were converging in offices, and by the time I finished, I was staring back at the director of Clandestine Services, and the assistant director herself.

  “Mac, what do you have?” the DCS asked.

  It seemed like the entire office held its breath while I collected my thoughts. The agent in Cali told me that he would send a couple of agents to the address I gave him. I had filled him in on the critical need to get her to safety, and we needed her back here as soon as possible.