Chapter 3
The helicopter hovered unsteadily in the air and lowered to the ground. Before it was even flat on the landing pad, the door slid open and Damascus Kelly stepped confidently out. The powerful blast of air from the rotors spinning above his head barely seemed to even ruffle his clothing as he walked away from the chopper, directly toward a makeshift medical tent set up at the edge of the landing pad. All around him, he could see the scenic beauty of the Arklay Mountains, but he was not there to sight see.
Damascus Kelly was not your average business manager. Towering over people at six feet and five inches, he sported wide, muscular shoulders and powerful hands that gave away his background playing college football. He had a strong, square chin and penetrating blue eyes that were almost always narrowed to intimidating slits.
He could smell the destruction all around him. A faint odor of smoke and chemicals, even out here in the open air, thanks to the complete lack of wind. He could also see the charred remains of a small building, and the battered shell of another nearby.
“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded in a booming voice.
Several men emerged from the tent, all of them dressed in white hazard suits with large plastic helmets built into the hoods. Kelly caught a peek of examination tables lined up within the tent, but his attention was on the man coming forward. The others wisely avoided him and headed toward a small concrete booth that Kelly guessed was the entrance to the lab.
The man in the hazard suit pulled his hood back to reveal his face and stuck out his hand in greeting. “You must be Doctor Kelly.”
Kelly declined the handshake and instead stared the man down. “Yes, and who are you? You’re in charge here? I want to know what’s going on.”
The man frowned and sheepishly pulled his hand back. “I’m Daniel Fisher, from the New York facility. I’m the senior officer right now, but I was told that someone from Arizona would be here soon to take over.”
Kelly gestured impatiently at the scene before them. “So what’s going on? I want an update. What have you discovered?”
Fisher paused and adjusted the glasses on his nose. “Well, we’re still in the preliminary stages of the investigation, but I can tell you that it’s very bad. The entire lab complex directly beneath us is completely destroyed. Thankfully, the fire was trapped underground, and it quickly burned itself out.”
“How much damage?”
“Impossible to say. We’re still digging through the wreckage. But I’m guessing at least three full lab complexes are gone, not to mention all their secondary equipment. I’m not an accountant, but I have to guess the damage is above a billion dollars. Probably more than that.”
Kelly waved the comment away. Although monetary damage was a concern, it was not the primary reason he was there. “And biological contamination? How bad?”
Fisher looked up at Kelly and then averted his eyes. He cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses again. “Well, I’d say it’s pretty bad. What did they tell you on the way here?”
“Not much, just that they lost contact with this entire complex about three days ago, and found evidence of a fire and an outbreak. Are you telling me it’s worse than that?”
Fisher nodded, and when he spoke, it was almost too quiet for Kelly to hear. “This was a Level One,” Fisher said.
Kelly opened his mouth to respond, then thought better of it and stayed silent for a moment, glancing at the medical tent. “A Level One,” he repeated after a moment. “You can’t just toss around terms like that, so you better know what you’re talking about.”
Fisher motioned for Kelly to follow him, and they walked over to the tent. Kelly ducked through the zippered door flap and looked at the tables arranged inside, all of them covered by thick white sheets. Fisher said nothing, but merely walked over to one of the tables and pulled back the sheet.
Kelly grimaced at the sight of a pair of huge legs attached to a severed torso . It wasn’t just the sight of the mutilated body that bothered him, but the fact that the corpse’s skin was white, and the legs were clearly too long to have belonged to a normal human.
“It’s a Tyrant,” Fisher said clinically.
“I can see that,” Kelly snapped. “So what? They had Tyrants at this facility. What happened to this one?”
“I have no idea, but it looks like it swallowed a hand grenade,” Fisher said without humor. “We cleaned up what was left of it. Its arms and head were relatively intact, if burned pretty badly. But the real problem is where we found it.”
“And where was that?”
Fisher pulled the sheet back over the remains. “About twenty feet away. It was sitting right out there in the middle of the patio.”
“What? You mean it was outside?”
“Yes, it was right outside. Like I said, this is a Level One.”
Kelly already had his cell phone in his hand. He flipped it open and was about to dial when Fisher interrupted him. “That’s not all. I have another team at the mansion entrance, and they’ve found some ... disturbing things. You should probably go right to the mansion so you can see it for yourself. “
Kelly nodded and left without a word. He went back to the helicopter, which was still running, its blades rotating at half speed. He climbed inside and leaned over the pilot’s seat to yell, “Get me to the mansion!”
The helicopter rose into the air, and a few short minutes later arrived at the mansion, landing in the rear courtyard. Again, Kelly hopped out before the chopper had even stopped moving. He was met halfway to the building by another scientist wearing a hazard suit, although this one did not pull the hood down.
“You should probably put a suit on, sir.”
“Forget it,” Kelly snapped. “Just show me what you have to show me.”
The scientist led him to a door at the left rear side of the building that led to a small gardener’s supply shed. As soon as he opened the door, Kelly immediately pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and covered his mouth and nose. The shed had no ventilation, and the stink inside was almost unbearable, the faint whiff of compost and fertilizer mixed with the nauseating odor of a rotting body.
Right in the middle of the floor was a corpse wearing a white lab coat. Kelly was no stranger to dead bodies, but this one had been dead for a couple days at least. And the circumstances made Kelly a bit more careful that he would have been otherwise. He wondered if maybe a hazard suit would be a good idea after all.
The scientist knelt by the body and looked up at Kelly. “Second-stage host,” he said. “It was infected with one of the variant strains, I think. Probably the T-strain, since that was what most of the work at this lab was based on.”
“If it’s second-stage, then what happened to it?”
The scientist reached over the body and picked something up off the floor. He held it daintily between his thumb and forefinger, lifting it up so Kelly could see.
It was a pistol. The scientist placed it back on the floor and stepped around to the other side of the corpse. He pointed, and Kelly took a step closer to see what he was pointing at. The back of the corpse’s skull was blown out.
“What in the hell happened here?” Kelly whispered. “Someone shot it?”
The scientist nodded. “And there’s something else. This was clearly a Level One outbreak, but it was also a Level One security breach.”
“What are you talking about?”
The scientist led Kelly through the next door into the mansion, and down the hallway. They turned right through a doorway, and at the end of the next hallway beside a staircase was another corpse. This one, however, was not wearing a lab coat.
Kelly got a closer look at the body. It wore black boots and black cargo pants, with a brown vest over a white shirt. It took Kelly a moment to realize what was wrong. “Wait a minute, this one doesn’t look infected,” he said.
“It’s not. This man died from some other
cause, probably something to do with that wound on his leg. But take a look at that.”
Kelly’s eyes followed where the scientist pointed, and saw a piece of metal stuck to the front of the corpse’s vest, half-hidden under its arm. Kelly reached forward and pulled the piece of metal up.
“Oh my God ...” he whispered, letting it slip from his fingers. It was a police badge. The corpse on the ground in front of him was a police officer.
“Yeah,” the scientist said. “He’s a cop. Why he’s here, I have no idea. But what bothers me more is why this whole place isn’t surrounded by police by now.”
“I have to go,” Kelly said abruptly, standing up. “I don’t have the authority to deal with this situation. I have to make some phone calls.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“Just continue your investigation for now. Keep reporting to Fisher until his replacement gets here.”
“And what about that?” the scientist asked, pointing at the dead police officer.
“Leave it here for now. You’ll get further instructions soon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kelly left the mansion gratefully and walked back toward the helicopter, taking out his phone. Actually, he did have the authority to deal with the situation, or else he would not have been sent there in the first place. But he wanted to get out of that mansion without appearing scared. He had not expected a Level One outbreak.
Or a Tyrant outside the lab. Or a dead police officer.
He dialed and put the phone to his ear. “This is Kelly. The Arklay facility is a total loss. We have a Level One biological contamination and a Level One breach. Casualties may be total, and the local police may be involved as well. I want the highest priority on this. We need more teams down here, as fast as possible. Standard investigation teams, plus hazard crews and clean-up. We don’t have much time.”
An outbreak could be dealt with if it was limited to lab itself. But if a Tyrant had made it outside the lab, then the virus was loose in the wild. In fact, a Level One outbreak would have guaranteed it. Who knows what else might have escaped the lab? For all Kelly knew, there were second-stage hosts wandering throughout the Arklay Mountains, spreading the virus everywhere they went.
And if that was the case, then there was nothing they could really do. Kelly knew that he was just delaying the inevitable, but he had no choice.
“I want a full unit of UBCF troops by the end of the day,” he said into the phone. “And I want a commander here in six hours. And start the media controls right now, we can’t let this get away from us. And don’t let the Feds get involved in this just yet.”
Just as he was about to get into the helicopter, he heard shouting behind him. He turned to see a scientist running towards him. “Doctor Kelly! Doctor Kelly!”
“Hold on,” he said into the phone. “What is it?” he asked the scientist, already knowing it was more bad news.
“We just got word from the team at the disposal plant. They said the main entrance building has burned down, and most of the first underground level is completely destroyed.”
“Another underground fire?”
“Looks that way.”
“How many other buildings to we have in this area?” Kelly asked. “Isn’t there an old training facility a few miles from here?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Send some men there as well. Send someone to every single location we have here. I’m already calling for more people.”
“Okay.”
Kelly climbed aboard the helicopter and closed the door. The sound of the rotors was still extremely loud, and Kelly had to yell into the cell phone just to be heard. “Change of plans. I want a unit of UBCF troops here in six hours, and commander here in three. Mobilize at least a dozen more units, because we’re going to need them. This Level One could potentially reach the local urban areas, and we have to be prepared to deal with that.”
He looked out the helicopter’s window idly as he talked, and suddenly jumped in his seat at what he saw below them. “Circle around!” he screamed at the pilot. “Didn’t you see that?”
The helicopter swung around and Kelly looked down at the ground far below them. At first he didn’t recognize the wreckage, but after a moment he realized he was looking at the remains of a passenger train, scattered across a wide area. He could see the train tracks nearby, and where the train must have jumped them.
It seemed an incredible coincidence that a train would crash so close to one of their labs at the same time they had an outbreak. It did not occur to Kelly that the two events could possibly have been related.
He told the pilot to get lower so he could get a closer view of the damage. He saw a couple of train cars, one of which seemed to have been smashed right in half. Trees were sheared off at their trunks when the train jumped the tracks. And when he looked back toward the train tracks, he was shocked to discover someone walking toward them.
“There’s a survivor!” Kelly shouted. “Land this thing!”
The helicopter lowered to about twenty feet off the ground, but there was nowhere for the pilot to land. The survivor, as Kelly believed the person was, walked toward the helicopter and raised his arms into the air as if reaching for it.
Kelly looked down at the figure again, and the look on his face changed from surprise to sudden fear. The survivor was smeared with blood from his head to his waist, and even from twenty feet in the air, Kelly could see that half of the man’s face was gone, ripped away to expose part of the skull underneath.
From underneath a section of train, another figure crawled out and got wobbly to its feet. It was a woman, or used to be. She stumbled toward the helicopter, staring into the sky with all white eyes. Kelly suddenly saw two more figures emerge from the trees, all of them like the first two. They weren’t survivors at all.
“Get us out of here!” he shouted, and the pilot wasted no time in complying with the order. The helicopter lifted back up and continued on its way. As they flew off, Kelly saw what he probably would have seen in the first place if he had looked out the window on the other side of the chopper.
It was another mansion like the one they had just left, only smaller and with an astronomy tower in the back. Kelly knew right away that it was the old training facility. And right next to it was a derailed train full of resurrected hosts.
He put the cell phone back to his ear. “I’m still here,” he said. “Contact the Board of Directors. I’ve just verified civilian casualties. I don’t think we’ll be able to contain this at all. The UBCF probably won’t be enough.”
He looked out the window and sighed. “We may have to consider final decontamination measures.”