That would be his go-to place when things started to get out of hand, as they most certainly would—at least for a while. Centrally located, they already had a new satellite transmitting station in place and ready to go. The final tests had been conducted. With the FCC now a thing of the past, he would be free to begin broadcasting his shows from there whenever he wanted.
Well, his entire network programming schedule, as well as two more channel feeds they wanted to start utilizing. He was currently in negotiations to buy out two shopping networks that were close to bankruptcy since most the general population could barely afford computers anymore, much less shopping online or buying from their TV.
It was time to find the truly faithful now, draw them in and prepare them for when a vaccine was found. Then he could make sure his flock was safe and he’d be ready to step in and take control of the country.
Because he would do everything in his power to make sure that, other than a few key people, only his faithful made it through the other side of this crucible.
To repopulate the world. The way it should be.
With the beliefs they should have.
His smile creased his face. And he would make sure he seeded his legacy far and wide.
Figuratively and literally.
History would speak his name, his genes living on across the globe through his faithful flock.
Yes, he had faith a vaccine would be found in plenty of time. And when it was, that meant the beginning of a whole new world.
His world.
Chapter Four
Doc looked up when he heard the knock on the small window in the main room of their barracks. Niner offered him a smile and an okay sign through the glass, but Doc still spotted the stress in the man’s face.
He got up and walked over to the window. Raising his voice enough to be heard, he asked, “Well?”
“The others already hit the showers. I wasn’t directly exposed. I wanted to stop by here first and let you know we were back.”
“No blue?”
“Still clear.”
Doc rubbed a hand across his chin. “Good. Keep us posted.”
They had a pre-staged holding area not far from the showers where the men could stay for the rest of their waiting period. Ideally, ten hours was best. If everyone exposed didn’t contract it during that time, there was practically no chance of them catching it from that incident. The virus had proven very fragile outside the host, making indirect transmission difficult, if not impossible.
When someone tested blue, they could have hours or days before the first symptoms developed. They were still contagious, though, through blood and saliva. One case Doc had read about, the victim went nearly two weeks from suspected infection until they succumbed. Once active symptoms presented, it was usually less than a week until end-stage hit.
Doc turned, nearly stumbling over Alpha. “You want to move?”
“You think they’ll be okay?” Alpha asked.
Doc pushed past the man. “I think you’ll be in the infirmary if you don’t get out of my way.” He didn’t bother knocking on the door of the rack room. He left the door open for light to see by and picked his way around occupied cots to the rack in the far corner where their CO lay on his side, back to the door.
“They’re back,” Doc said, knowing the man wasn’t asleep.
Eight other men sat up or rolled over at the sound of Doc’s words. He ignored everyone’s questions and comments except Papa’s “No blue?”
“Not yet. They’re showering and then going to wait it out in the holding pen.”
Papa rolled onto his back and looked up at Doc. “You think they’re good?”
He shrugged. “So far.”
“Okay. I’m going back to sleep then. Wake me if anything changes.”
“Roger roger.”
He left the rack room, pulling the door shut behind him. Predictably, it opened again seconds later, several of the men spilling out as they pulled on clothes in their race to the window.
He couldn’t blame them.
Sometimes, you just wanted to put eyes on someone for yourself to make sure they were okay.
As okay as any of them could be in this terrifying new world.
* * * *
Doc didn’t relax until the four men walked through the door in the flesh nearly three hours later, their gear in their hands. Roscoe, Niner, Foxtrot, and Kilo looked exhausted despite their jovial smiles and nonchalance in the presence of their brothers.
He expected no less of them. Of any of them. They all knew the risks.
“You guys hungry?” Doc asked them.
Roscoe grinned and in his New York accent said, “I could eat a horse.”
“Dude, that’s cannibalism,” Niner wearily shot back, smiling despite how exhausted Doc knew he had to be.
“Shut the fuck up,” Roscoe said, giving him a shove. The two of them were buddies, as were Foxtrot and Kilo. Doc’s buddy, Tango, was currently asleep in a rack now that he knew their brothers were home safely.
In this way, he and Tango were different. Tango, when faced with possibilities that had yet to manifest, chose optimism.
Doc, for his part, was a rabid realist.
Especially in the face of Kite.
Papa emerged from the rack room and walked over to them. “Well?”
Roscoe, also known as Sergeant Enrique Velasquez, as well as the highest-ranking man on the mission, took over the telling of the story.
“He wasn’t there. And we got overrun by a bunch of Kiters from the next village over before we could clear out.”
“Any idea where he is?”
“We only found two people who’d talk to us, and they both said he’d left before we got there. Maybe a few days ago, they didn’t know exactly, only that they hadn’t seen him in a while. They didn’t know where he went, and he was traveling alone. Their best guess was he headed south.”
“How’d you get exposed?”
“Trying to get our asses out of there. At least fifty Kiters, some in the final stages and completely raging.”
The fourth and final stage of the engineered virus usually saw the victim, if they weren’t physically incapacitated or restrained, violently attacking anyone at random. At least victims not quite as far along could be talked to, sometimes reasoned with.
Sometimes.
“We didn’t want to shoot,” Roscoe said, “but the Kiters in the front wouldn’t turn back, even after we fired warning shots in the air. They fucking came at us. Some of them were faster than others. We didn’t want them chasing us all the way back to base.”
Doc knew they would have done their best to not randomly mow people down. Firing on Kiters at the front of a crowd meant risking hitting people behind them who might not be as far along, or not infected at all.
None of them wanted to do that.
“A couple got through,” Kilo said. “Got ugly quick.”
“All right,” Papa said. “Get some chow and rack time.”
They had a rudimentary kitchen area, an old propane stove and a fridge they’d scrounged from off-base. If they weren’t grabbing meals at the base’s small KP hall, they were eating MREs or cooking up fast and easy food. Right now, they had a huge pot of leftover spaghetti in the fridge, and it was this that Doc heated up for the men.
Papa walked over to where Doc was stirring the pot on the stove. “It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?” Papa quietly asked him.
Doc nodded. He didn’t need clarification. His thoughts usually mirrored Papa’s on this topic. “Unless they find a vaccine for it.”
* * * *
Doc and Papa were sitting in the main room and discussing Kite precautions when the sat-phone went off again a couple of hours later.
The men both frowned. This particular tone meant one of the higher brass was trying to reach them. Papa walked over and answered it as Doc watched. When the man hung up a moment later, he looked troubled.
“Change of orders,” Pa
pa said. “Need the football.”
That was his nickname for the secure sat-linked laptop he used to receive orders and communicate with the higher-ups in the food chain. He retrieved it from its waterproof case in his bag and fired it up, activating its sat-link so he could retrieve his messages.
A moment later, he stared at the screen.
“What is it?” Doc asked. “They mad we didn’t find that guy?”
“No. Change of orders. We’re heading to Australia.”
“What? Why?” Not that he was complaining. The small continent was a hell of a lot safer than where they currently were.
“Hard leads on one Dr. Phe Quong, who’s possibly in the Melbourne area. We’re to grab him and get him out of there.”
“What about Dr. Kim?”
“Back burner.” Papa tapped on his keyboard. “Looks like a journalist might be sniffing on his trail, too. I mean Quong, not Kim,” he clarified.
“Terrific. Just what we need. A freaking reporter.”
“Not going to complain about getting the hell out of here.”
“Didn’t say I was.” Doc stood and stretched.
“Where are you going?”
“Rack time. If we’re bugging out, I want some damn sleep.”
Chapter Five
Celia Jorgens stepped off the plane in Melbourne and shouldered her bag after adjusting the surgical face mask covering her nose and mouth.
Dammit.
Late March, and Australia was heading into winter. With the weather drizzling and a little on the chilly side, she hurried across the wet tarmac and followed other passengers to where they were queuing under a large tent to await their luggage. She was glad she’d opted to bring her waterproof jacket with her.
Half the terminal was still under reconstruction from a militant terrorist attack right before Christmas. Inbound domestic flights didn’t get to use the other half that remained standing and functional. That was reserved for outbound flights and incoming international flights that had to go through customs.
What the hell am I doing here, anyway? What was I thinking?
At first, proposing the story idea to the editors at the network had seemed like a damn good idea. Her older sister, Carole, had freaked out in a bad way when Celia told her she was traveling out of the country for the very first time to Australia, of all places.
“Are you out of your fracking mind?” her sister had yelled when Celia had come home from work and told her Chicago Metro Media had agreed to fund her trip.
Celia had stuck to her guns. Radiation levels in Australia were low. Hell, parts of the western coastal US had received higher doses right after China’s hissy fit than Australia had. And they didn’t have any mass Kite infections, either.
Yet.
Now, she was here.
Along with her fellow passengers, she waited for her bags. The assignment editor had given her two weeks to either come up with hard proof that Dr. Phe Quong was still alive and hiding out here in Australia, or she’d have to return home and shut the hell up about wanting to advance from the research department to on-air reporter status.
This is what I wanted, right?
Her buddy, Mike, was a computer geek and head of the research department at Chicago Metro Media. He was also her boss and the one who’d hired her. He’d worked at the network for over twenty-five years. Ever since she’d gone to work for him, she’d done everything she could to advance from researcher, and having an occasional byline as a production assistant, to on-air reporter. She was a good writer, even if the anchors and on-air reporters usually ended up taking her copy and rewriting it so they could put their bylines on it and not give her any credit.
Mike was the one who’d put her on the scent of this major story in the first place. It was a process of elimination by the scientific and medical communities which had created “The List” that the United Nations was currently circulating. Fifteen people with a lot of letters after their names who were now unaccounted for, and who had traveled to North Korea for extended stays in the five years preceding the emergence of Kite…and China’s subsequent radioactive reaction to it.
While many people assumed the people on The List had probably been vaporized, along with millions of North Koreans, there were some who thought maybe a few of them escaped.
Or, maybe all of them did.
And if any of them had anything to do with Kite’s creation, finding them alive and bringing them in might mean being able to quickly render a vaccine that would halt the rapid global progress of the virus in its tracks.
Dr. Quong was a North Korean national who’d gone to medical school at Harvard. But Mike had dug up an interesting fact for Celia—Dr. Quong’s two brothers, his two daughters, his mother, and his wife had all appeared on the same passenger flight manifest, with South Korean passports, ticketed to Melbourne two days before the Chinese attack on North Korea.
And there was no record of them having left Australia, via airplane or by other means.
So many people had fled that region in the days and weeks following China’s attack that it was impossible to track them all. Especially since many of them had left via private aircraft or ships, or were evacuated by the multinational UN-led rescue effort.
The US military and Homeland Security were so busy trying to keep Kite—the drug and the disease—from gaining a foothold in the United States that their resources were stretched far too thin to do this kind of in-depth research. Other countries fared even worse.
Mike, with her help, had spent hundreds of hours scouring airline databases he’d managed to hack into, until they hit pay dirt.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that the names associated with Dr. Quong had all traveled out of South Korea, en masse and on the same flight, just before the attack.
It was as if he’d sent them away knowing something really bad was about to happen.
It also couldn’t be a coincidence that Quong’s user ID had recently been active on a Harvard University medical discussion forum. As in only two weeks earlier.
No surprise, he hadn’t commented on any articles, but the IP trail Mike found when he hacked into Quong’s user account there showed the doctor had viewed and bookmarked several discussion threads about Kite the virus and Kite the drug.
And they led back to an ISP in Melbourne, despite the man’s efforts to mask his trail.
Mike was that good. And he was still working to see if he could gain any additional information about where the Quongs might be staying in Australia, or if there were any patterns of a group of the same size, genders, and ages of people with the same last names leaving Australia on different passports.
Her suspicion was the doctor likely obtained South Korean paperwork for his family, but probably couldn’t get them paperwork for other countries in the aftermath of China’s attack. If he could, he likely would have gotten those and sent them farther away.
In the immediate aftermath, countries had granted instant refugee status to South Koreans, Japanese, and citizens of other countries in the region which were affected by radiation. It wasn’t until news of Kite the virus started getting around that other countries closed their borders until they could figure out how to quarantine anyone who might have been exposed. Those were in the early days before the stick tests had been developed and widely distributed.
But Dr. Quong’s family would have been safe, already inside Australia.
Everywhere Celia looked, posted inside the tent and inside the airports she’d flown through on her route from Chicago, were large warning placards about the symptoms of Kite, how to protect yourself from infection, and how to report people who had suspected symptoms.
She rubbed the pad of her left thumb over her left index, middle, and ring fingers, where they were still sore from the all the stick tests she’d had since departing Chicago. Now required, anyone boarding an airplane—passengers and crew—had to get multiple stick tests for the Kite antibodies. The only significant breakthrough so far, th
e fact that scientists had discovered antibodies appeared in the bloodstream within two hours of exposure and they had developed a simple and accurate test strip as a result.
Which meant arriving at the airport at least four hours before a flight to get stuck before going into a quarantine area, an hour later moving to another area after another clear stick test, and so on.
One person in the group testing positive meant the whole group got pulled back to start over. The general public was no longer allowed inside an airport terminal. Cars and public transportation weren’t even allowed to drive up to the outside of terminals anymore. Incoming passengers were dropped off in parking lots at trams, where they underwent their first stick tests before being allowed onto the tram.
Most passenger airports now had residential “sterile” holding areas for crew, which meant they didn’t have to mix with passengers or most airport employees between flights, and greatly reduced their potential for exposure. Some savvy travelers now went to the airport the night before their flight, preferring to sleep in chairs or on the floor in the sterile gate areas rather than risk missing their flight and having to endure the whole experience a second time. People transferring between flights were ushered through sterile terminal corridors and randomly tested by sharp-eyed TSA officials.
It had turned the previous nightmare of air travel into a horror-worthy experience for those who could still even afford the astronomical price of a plane ticket.
The worry was no longer someone hijacking an airliner. The worry was someone infected with Kite slipping onto a plane and spreading the virus to everyone on board.
Celia was lucky that, in her case, after landing in Sydney she’d been able to pass through a sterile customs transfer post and go straight to her next gate area to wait with only one more stick test before boarding to Melbourne.