Zero day code, p.38
Zero Day Code, page 38
part #1 of End of Days Series
"I don't know whether we're supposed to stay here or not," James said. "We’re witnesses."
"You're more than a witness," Melissa Baker said. Her English accent sounded like a stage actor’s.
"Fuck this," Michelle said. “Give me a minute, I'm gonna make a few calls."
She disappeared back inside the manager's office.
“Dude, you wanna change?” Boreham asked him quietly. “I found these out the back in the staff room.
He offered James a pair of grey drill pants. They looked like they’d fit. He blushed, but the other man waved off his embarrassment. He leaned over and said in a quiet voice, “I shat myself so often in combat I stopped counting.”
James thanked him, and shuffled away to change in an aisle, where he had at least some privacy, what little the empty shelving could offer. He would have given up all of his cash right then and there for a hot shower – and fresh underwear. Instead, when he was done, he returned and stood with the other two survivors. Or were they something else? What did the legal system call people like them?
"I don't know whether you remember or not, in all of the excitement and stuff," James said. "But my name is James O'Donnell."
He held out his hand. Rick Boreham took it with a firm grip. He introduced himself again, and his girlfriend, Mel Baker.
"Pleased to meet you, James,” she said, as though they had just encountered each other at a tea party.
"And thanks, seriously man," Boreham said. "If you hadn't tackled that guy, I don't know that I’d have got the first shot off. He kinda surprised me coming up where he did."
"I don't know why I did that," James confessed. "Honestly, it was a stupid thing to do."
Rick – he had asked James to call him Rick – grinned.
"Nah, you totally had him bro."
James laughed nervously.
"Yeah," he said. "He was gonna hurt his hand so bad pounding me to a pulp there was no way he could’ve pulled a trigger on you."
Rick laughed too. His sense of humour seemed much fiercer, much more resilient than James’s.
"I like your dog," James said. “I probably owe her a cookie or something. I was leaning over to give her a pat when they started shooting. I'm pretty sure that's why I'm out here talking to you, not in there on the floor. Do you think they’re ever coming to get the rest of those bodies?" He couldn’t bring himself to look at them. "You were a cop, weren't you?" James asked Mel. He seemed to recall something about her being a police officer, but the day felt like a jigsaw puzzle he had dropped at his feet.
"There should be law enforcement and paramedics everywhere,” she said. She seemed unimpressed with the official response and James was irrationally embarrassed by that. She’d come all the way to his country, which really had no excuse for badly managing a mass shooting like this, after all the practice they’d had, and…
“The old Bill should be here doing the witnesses,” she said, abruptly cutting off his meandering line of thought.
And who was this Bill?
“There should be witnesses,” she said. “They've all gone. I don't know what's going on but this is a bloody dog’s breakfast. No offence Nomi.”
Nomi the dog did not seem to take offence.
Michelle had returned from the manager's office by then.
"What's going on is a stage four collapse,” she said. “The police aren't coming. No more paramedics. If Phil the fruit shop manager wants those bodies moved, he’s going to have to do it himself. We should get going, come on."
Mel the London police lady frowned at her.
"We can't just leave the scene of a crime like this. Jesus, it's not even a crime. It's a massacre." She touched Rick on the arm. “Not judging, darlin’. Just saying."
Rick placed his hand over hers and smiled.
James thought they must have been together a very long time.
"Yeah, well it's not the only massacre today," Michelle said. "It's not even a very big one. Look, you guys don't know me because I didn't introduce myself properly before. My name is Michelle Nguyen. I work for the National Security Council.”
She pulled her ID card and showed them. Melissa Baker read it very closely before giving it back.
“James here was also doing some work for us,” Michelle explained. “I’ve just spoken with Admiral David Holloway, my boss at NSC. He’s… not in DC right now. But I briefed him in on what happened here. He’s going to get a message through to local law enforcement. Not that he thinks it’ll be necessary. His advice to us was to clear the area as soon as possible."
Rick and Mel looked confused.
"We were going to get a cabin for the weekend. On a lake," Rick said. “Can we just do that now?”
"You got food?" James asked.
Rick laughed, but not so happily this time.
“Ha. That's why we came here," he said. "We were gonna pick up a couple of days’ worth of groceries. And some dog food for Nomi."
"I got some cheap cuts from the butcher," James said. "If that helps."
"She supposed to be on this diet," Rick said, but Mel put one hand gently on his forearm again.
"I think she can probably skip the diet today," she said.
"Yeah," he admitted. "Probably."
"What are you guys going to do?” Mel asked. "Do you live around here? Things are a bit out of hand, eh?”
Michelle gave her a quizzical look. They were standing in the middle of a fucking slaughterhouse. Things were more than a bit out of hand.
"You guys haven’t been paying attention, haven't you?" Michelle said. "You can see what's going on here, right? What's been going on the last couple of days?"
Rick and Mel exchanged a furtive smile.
"We've been sort of busy," he said. "Kind of wrapped up in each other."
She giggled.
Jesus Christ, James thought, they've only just hooked up.
"Look," he said. "I feel like we should bring you up to speed. You know, after you saved our lives and everything. I’ve got a couple of bags of mystery pasta. I think we still have the olive oil, if it didn't get smashed?"
Michelle held up a shopping bag. "We're good," she said.
James went on, “We’re happy to share our food. We've got a long drive ahead of us and to tell you the truth I don't think either of us should be driving long distances today or tonight. We walked here from DC this morning."
"What? The capital?" Mel said. "That's crazy."
"The traffic was crazy," Michelle said.
Rick Boreham looked around the ruined market. Crazy was relative.
"I have some basil and some tomatoes growing in my yard," he said. "I'd be happy to pick them to make up a sauce for your pasta if you like. And if you're serious about sharing that meat with my dog, she’ll be getting pretty hungry, and she is a good dog."
"She is a very good dog indeed," James said.
Michelle drove the short hop to Rick Boreham’s place, where James had a long, hot shower. He couldn’t believe the luck of this guy. Rick Boreham lived in a really lovely little cabin in the woods, by a river at the edge of a country club. Some people just fell assbackwards into the good life, didn’t they?
There were plenty of days when the market made James wish he could just run away to a cabin in the woods.
On the other hand, there was that look in Rick’s eyes, or rather that complete absence of anything in his eyes, when he was crawling across the floor of the market towards James with a knife in his hand…
So maybe not such a good life.
Rick kept a small herb garden and a vegetable patch from which he pulled a couple of bunches of fresh basil and five or six plump, impossibly red tomatoes. He took a smaller one and tossed it to Nomi who wolfed it down in two bites, wagging her tail in Labrador ecstasy. Rick apologised for having only a jar of minced garlic in his little bar fridge, but as somebody who lived on take-out and UberEATS, James wasn’t judging. Michelle did something to the tomatoes and garlic which reduced them to a thick fragrant sauce in a pot on the stove top and Mel asked if anybody wanted a drink.
“I got me a thirst that could cast a shadow,” Rick said.
“I could straight up murder a glass of wine,” Michelle sighed before the light faded from eyes and she mumbled, “Oh, sorry.”
Rick Boreham tilted his head a little, just like James examining a really interesting spreadsheet. He found the answer he wanted, walked across the small living room of his cabin and folded Michelle Nguyen into his arms.
“We’re good,” he said. “You’re alive. That’s what matters.”
James chanced a look at Mel Baker, but she was smiling as if she’d been hugged too.
When Michelle emerged from Rick’s embrace she was crying, but she thanked him and wiped the tears from her eyes.
“I could really use that wine,” she said quietly.
He made a face.
“I’m not much of a wine guy, but I can get some.”
“Oh please, no,” Michelle said quickly, “Don’t bother.” But Rick had a mission now.
“James, you want to come see my club?” he asked.
It was a second before James understood he wasn’t joking.
“The country club?” he asked.
“Yeah. I got keys. They got wine. I can leave my boss a note. He’s cool.”
James asked Michelle if she, too, was cool with that, and she nodded.
“To be honest,” she said, “for wine, I’d be cool with you sandbagging another motherfucker with a shotgun. Go.”
“She’ll be with me, James,” said Mel. “I’m even tougher than him.” She pointed at Rick, who nodded.
“She is,” he said. “Come on. I want to drive your truck. It looks awesome.”
James gave him the keys. He did not feel like getting behind the wheel.
They talked about the Sierra on the two-minute drive to the Bretton Woods clubhouse. Like they were just a couple of buds out for some brews. The conversation down-shifted when James told the whole story of how he’d come to buy it.
Rick pulled on the handbrake and cut the engine. The club house was quiet. Deserted. It would normally be jumping with hundreds of guests at this time. It had power. There were lights burning inside. But James and Rick were the only souls about.
“You really think it’s that serious?” Rick asked. “You’re breaking camp and pulling back to your family’s farm?”
They sat in the darkened cabin of the big SUV.
“I thought it was pretty serious when we left Washington,” James said. “Michelle too. That’s her job. Threat assessment. But after that… that business at the market today.”
He petered out.
Rick said nothing, waiting.
“Man,” James went on. “I think you and Melissa should get the hell out while you can. There’s a couple of million people in the DC-Baltimore area. They’re going to be hungry for real in two or three days. Starving in a week. Maybe the army keeps a lid on it here, but the military’s got bigger problems.”
“You mean China?”
“No. I mean New York. LA. Chicago. I mean hundreds of millions of people who can’t feed themselves. Can’t buy food. Can’t even get in a car and drive away because the major urban road nets have been sabotaged. Nobody was keeping order at that market today. That’s what I think it’s going to be like everywhere in a week or so.”
Rick stared out into the night. He said nothing.
“We should get that wine,” James said, after a while.
They ate on the front porch. A simple but beautiful meal, with two bottles of very expensive wine, and a six pack of beer. James threw down a couple of pain killers with his food. He insisted on leaving cash in the resort manager’s office to cover the price of the wine. Rick confessed that one of the bottles alone was worth more than his pension for a week.
The heat of the day eased into a mild, balmy evening and Rick burned some sort of incense to keep the mosquitos away.
James was tormented by violent flashbacks, but he said nothing of it. Once he caught Rick looking at him, as though reading him like an open book. The veteran nodded at him and James felt gooseflesh crawl up his arms. But he felt a little better too, knowing that somebody knew.
Nomi ate all of the cheap off-cuts for which James and Michelle had paid so much.
“She’s gonna have quite the tummy ache in the morning,” Rick said.
“And she’s going to fart like a camel tonight,” Mel warned.
They drank all of the wine and Rick finished most of the beer. They did not talk about what had happened in the afternoon. Each of them told stories about their families and friends, their lives, their adventures.
They had all had much more interesting adventures than James.
It was late when Rick and Mel went to bed.
Rick made up a bed roll for James on the floor. A camping mat, a pillow, blanket and a sheet. It was surprisingly comfortable. Michelle took the couch and they turned out the light.
James could not sleep. His mind kept replaying the terrible things he had seen that afternoon. He did not imagine he would ever be able to sleep through the night again, but after ten- or fifteen-minutes Michelle Nguyen quietly climbed off the couch and came and lay with him under the sheet on the makeshift bed on the floor. She wrapped her arms around him, and held him tight, and he soon forgot about things best forgotten.
In the morning, with Rick supervising, they packed the Sierra for a long trip and all four of them, and Nomi, drove away from the cabin by the river.
Epilogue
The desert darkness was hot, even in the deep of night, but not four hundred feet below ground. Down there, in the bio-hazard vaults of Project Blue, the air was held to a constant chill, just above freezing. General Panozzo wore his fur-lined parka. The two Green Beret soldiers with him wore summer weight BDUs but they did not complain. They would not be here that long.
Only Professor Bruce waited for them. The other technicians and scientists had clocked off at the end of their shifts. They had told Panozzo back in Washington that Bruce rarely left the facility. He looked it. His skin was sallow, almost jaundiced under the fluorescent lights and his eyes had sunken back into his skull. He looked… wrong.
Just being in the same room as the man made the skin crawl behind Panozzo’s testicles. He ignored the sensation.
“Gentlemen,” Bruce said. He grinned. Or at least he skinned thin, grey lips back from the yellowed teeth hiding behind them. “A great day. A great and terrible day.”
“If you don’t mind, Professor, we’re on a schedule.”
“Of course, of course,” Bruce said. “Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. I do understand, General. I understand only too well. Come, come along. I have your package ready.”
He led them from the outer lab through a series clean chambers and scrubber locks into the vault.
A medical suitcase, heavy and grey, waited on a stainless-steel table for them. It was already sealed. Biohazard warning stickers stood out in bright red and yellow on the slate grey casing.
“As promised,” Bruce said. “More than enough. More than enough.”
Panozzo felt weak and a little dizzy. As though just being in proximity to the contents of the case was enough to kill him. It wasn’t. He knew what was in there. They were all safe. But his voice, when he spoke, still sounded watery and thin to him.
“I confirm, Professor that we are taking receipt of three hundred doses of the HPAI B1 subtype coded 848-AB. Please sign.”
He handed the virologist an iPad and a stylus.
Bruce signed with a flourish.
“Thank you,” Panozzo said. “Sergeant?”
The sergeant from the Third Special Forces Group stepped forward, took the iPad from Professor Bruce and handed it back to his colleague. He turned back to the Nobel Prize winning scientist and killed him with a spear hand strike to the throat. It took Bruce a little while to die, and Panozzo was pursued from the vault by the desperate choking and scrabbling sounds of a man gasping out his last breath through a shattered windpipe. The soldier who had killed Professor Bruce carried the body out of the lab over his shoulder. He would dump it in the desert an hour later. The other non-com carried the heavy medical transport case.
It was very late.
The only Project personnel on base were guards who had been rostered off for the night, replaced with more of Panozzo’s men. Nobody looked twice as the General and his escorts carried a dead man and a heavy biohazard containment case out of the facility. The Project sat within an army transport depot deep within the High Desert region of California. Panozzo and the soldier with the case drove five minutes west to the airfield that serviced the base.
Three aircraft waited for them there.
Army Medical Corps technicians separated the contents of the case into three smaller carriers, after which agents from the CIA’s Special Activities Division took responsibility for the packages. Two agents escorted each case onto a plane and flew west to catch connecting flights from Edwards AFB.
Within twenty-four hours, dozens of unwitting contractors hired by Special Activities would deliver the tailored variant of the Avian flu virus to more than a hundred locations throughout China. But by then General Panozzo, had returned home, written a letter of resignation which he left on the desk in his study, and retired to his garden where he put a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Afterword
Zero Day Code is finished, but our heroes’ adventures are not.
They continue in Fail State.
If you’d like to hang out with the gang in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world, they are all back in Fail State and later in American Kill Switch.
Well… all of them except for the ones who get killed. Sorry about that.
If you’d like a heads up, and a big discount on the next instalments, you can get both by joining my bookclub/internet dive bar. Just hit up either link below.
