The Holocaust Engine, page 39
Extinguishing diseases had become his fallback; if he could not explore space, then at least he could cure illness.
McCaffrey did his residency in Orange County, and then worked in Los Angeles County’s infamous C-booth while waiting for an opening at the CDC.
When they dispatched him into the quarantine zone, nothing he saw shocked him. He’d seen all sorts of violent wounds back in L.A., and had seen treatment conditions even more squalid was after being assigned to the Ebola team in Liberia. Even the guns and the anger didn’t shock him, for McCaffrey had once been held hostage for 48 hours by rebels on the Sierra Leone border.
Three days after sealing the bodies of the ‘Level Two’ Bontrager’s patient from the airport—as along with the other that they’d later collected from the beach—in plastic and packing it into ice, Dr. Andrew McCaffrey became the first person to be evacuated from the quarantine zone. According to memorandums, he arrived at the Atlanta office along with the remains of two infected bodies, identified as follows:
Subject: Mr. Gray
Subject: Chains
The Division of Select Agents and Toxins went to work on isolating the virus and identifying its external markers and genetic code. The clean room that housed the viral components was state of the art, and the procedures for all operations left nothing to chance. The so called ‘Type Two’ virus could leave the facility in only one way—if one of the doctors intentionally removed it—and none of them would ever have done that.
Except, however, for Dr. Andrew McCaffrey.
His colleagues had never seen him as anything but a true believer. It had defined him. Or at least, it seemed to.
Dr. McCaffrey had always been involved in social activism. He’d met his wife, Sharon, at a protest against the EPA handling of strip mine in West Virginia. His wife had supported numerous environmental and social causes throughout their marriage. He loved her passion for humanity, and for the world in which those humans lived. Sadly, after the birth of their daughter, it seemed to Andrew that Sharon was far less passionate about him, or even particularly understanding.
Unhappy at home, Dr. McCaffrey poured himself into his work and, by all accounts, was a model employee... before his wife filed for divorce. During the court proceedings, Sharon McCaffrey filed for full, exclusive custody of their daughter and only child, Sasha, on the grounds that her husband was unfit. As evidence, court records logged dozens of site hits for rape-themed pornography. The story never made national news—not on television—but it did find its way onto a widely-viewed feminist site, and as a result, several complaints were made, and Dr. McCaffrey was temporarily suspended from his duties.
Dr. McCaffrey left no message explaining why it was that he broke out of quarantined isolation and killed three other CDC doctors, including his department head. Yet anyone looking closely at the man’s record could not help but notice that his time spent in the world’s most virulent hotspots—the Ebola team in Liberia, Zika in ultraviolent favelas of Rio, and yes, Bontrager’s in the Lower Florida Keys—all took place after his reinstatement.
Did he believe that his employers wished to be rid of him? Did he suspect that they wanted him dead? Did he think of his life as a shamble? It would seem likely, in retrospect, that this was not the sort of envelope that he had ever imagined pushing.
Whatever his reasons, eleven days after returning from the islands, Dr. McCaffrey left the quarantine room and walked straight into the office of his superior, smashed a cherry-oak padded chair into the floor with his bare hands, killed two colleagues with one of the wooden legs, and bashed his supervisor’s head until it was unrecognizable. Security fired on him as he ran from the building, and struck him at least once, but he didn’t stop.
Within the next twenty-four hours, he killed his ex-wife, one of his ex-wife’s closest friends, and his ex-wife’s attorney.
Authorities apprehended him two days later at a roadblock north of Savannah, Georgia. Three state troopers fired handguns, and one a shotgun, point blank. The autopsy revealed that his body had been struck at least 73 separate times.
His daughterhad been seated in the passenger seat during the shooting, but wasn’t harmed by either the gunfire or her silent, purple-lipped father.
They officially termed Dr. McCaffrey’s episode as ‘drug-induced psychosis,” likely incurred while working in the less than sterile conditions inside the quarantine zone. Privately, however, a number of friends and coworkers remembered comments he’d made before, which seemed unimportant at the time, and realized that perhaps he’d become disillusioned with the very idea of human progress. They wondered if he hadn’t exposed himself with the preconceived intention of showing his wife and his boss a very different sort of human development.
When interviewed, Sasha McCaffrey was able to account for the entire interval from the killing of her mother to her father’s death. He’d not had close contact with anyone else during that time. After speaking to neighbors, and checking CDC security footage and card reader entry and exit times, officials found nothing to lead them to believe that Dr. McCaffrey had spread the disease.
Still, they remained on high alert for over a month, for any signs of a Type Two outside the quarantine zone. Eventually, the pressing matters on Key West, and the continued reports of Bontrager’s, drew their attention away, and the matter was all but forgotten—a terrifying scenario that thankfully had not come to pass.
And so they were completely unprepared for what happened next.
Yes... there’s more to come soon. Please keep reading for our Bonus Content—not just one, but two Special Sneak Previews:
FLUID SHOCK (Book 2) by David Rike & Stephen Patrick
and
RED DEATH by Jeff Altabef
A team of investigators and military operators join the survivors in a race to stop the spread of an otherworldly plague.
~~~
~~~
Please enjoy the Special Sneak Preview we offer below.
~~~
Please keep reading for....
Imagine a book.
A young man opens the cover and begins writing. This book is his life and it’s written in the language of his innermost being, but he believes that since he is no one of any consequence, that no one will ever read it. This thought needles him. It whispers discouragement, but it never completely quenches his fire. A certain freedom comes with anonymity and this young man basks in that freedom. For this reason, he writes his book in large, exuberant letters that slant down each and every page—his dreams, his desires, the sum total of a life’s experience.
Even though he is no one of any consequence, he knows that something greater than himself exists and he lives his life for that greatness and for those around him—particularly for the woman he loves. He had known her since elementary school, had pined for her since middle school. The first time he asked her on a date she said no, but she felt sorry for him and said yes when he worked up the courage to ask again. An attractive girl, she could have picked from any number of young men, but even though he was no one of any consequence she came to see in him a simple dignity. They grew closer and closer until finally a life spent together seemed perfectly obvious. They were married and bought a house with the money he’d saved working as an electrician for the city’s power department. For years coworkers came and went around him, moving on to bigger cities and better paying jobs with titles and offices. But not the young man. He could see no future for himself anywhere but this place.
The city he and his wife lived in covered a beautiful island frequented by rushed tourists and clamorous business-people, but in the midst of this, as the years passed, the two of them lived a quiet life, full of children and grandchildren, weddings and retirement parties. After all of this, one day his wife suffered an aneurism and went into a coma. This was the book’s final chapter and he, now a little old man, resolved to write it down just as he written all the rest, in humble devotion to the things he cared for most. He visited her every day at the hospital, surrounding her with flowers and cards. He turned the television to her favorite channels and spoke to her softly of the old times while stroking her hair. If the virus had never come, he would have stayed with her until the very end. He would have kissed her goodbye and seen to the funeral arrangements. Then, his final duty completed, he would have put his own affairs in order and closed his book for the very last time.
But in this final chapter the story changed. The doctors and nurses feared this virus and even with Sinatra playing on the stand next to his wife’s bed, words that had never appeared in the book before began to filter through—encephalitis, Bontrager’s disease, excited delirium, military-enforced quarantine. He wanted none of it. His time had passed and the little old man prayed that the chaos would simply leave him and his beloved alone.
It wouldn’t. He was seated at her bedside the day the hospital lost power. Suddenly, the last trickle of freedom that he’d cherished in his youth vanished. He had no choices left. None at all. He could only stand up with a sigh as he watched the nurses keeping his beloved alive with a hand pump ventilator. With nothing else to be done, he shuffled out of the room, leaving his wife’s side for the final time, and he went to work.
At this point in the story, the letters shrank down and the sentences became terse and sharp. Only the old man knew how to restore power and keep his wife’s ventilator running. Only he could rig up the secondary source. It took all he had. While manning the turbine night and day he heard stories of this disease: the zombie-like cases of early onset dementia, the whole buildings of people gone missing. For him it changed nothing. He had only a single purpose: keep the hospital’s power on.
On the last page of his life’s book, they came for him. Hearing a door open, he walked down the hallway to investigate. In the corner of his eye he saw a shadow. He felt something grab at him from behind. In a snap second of motion and searing pain a hand jerked his chin upward. A razor-sharp knife slit his throat. He fell. Gurgling on the floor he heard two sets of shoes walking away. Clearly they believed him finished. When he struggled back to his feet he slipped on his own blood. He got up again. He pulled the wrench from his belt as he saw them. They looked almost human. Almost. As if some warped, depraved electrician had taken two men off of ventilators just like his wife’s, then plugged a socket into their spines and charged them upright using a voltage of concentrated lust and madness. The one with the Rorschach pattern of writing on his face ripped the wrench out of the old man’s hands and struck him with it, impossibly hard. Again he collapsed. As he lay on the floor, eyes closed, he could hear them torturing Herb Costins. Heard them destroying his turbine. He wiped the streams of blood away from his eyes and got back up. One last time. When he stumbled onto the factory floor, over to the worktable, and clutched the ball peen hammer, they stopped. For a single instant neither of the creatures moved. He saw something in their eyes. A kind of fearful recognition. Something he had that they never could.
The next moment they struck him like a car wreck.
The little old man died on the floor next to his final creation having barely slowed down the spreading darkness that was soon to claim his beloved and so many others. Bleeding from a dozen wounds, his last thought was how little he had accomplished—a man of no consequence—of how little he had changed. He couldn’t even save his own wife, who could have had anyone, but took him, a simple electrician, and in the grand drama playing out all-around he would have been correct, except....
Reagan Castaneda and Captain Perry Nelson had met on several occasions, but they never talked before Nelson’s quarantine. The hospital had too many exposure cases to house them individually and Captain Nelson had been confined to a room with a young girl who had gotten a level Two Bontrager’s blood not just on her, but in her. No one believed that she would survive.
Every night Reagan came to see her. She liked him and even though he couldn’t physically touch her, he talked and winked and smiled and let her feel like they were falling in love before the inevitable took hold and the disease began to change her; before it forced them to end her young life.
Captain Nelson wanted to like him, but Castaneda was brash and gratingly self-assured. On top of this, fear that he himself might be infected had worn the Captain’s patience thin. On the last night before Captain Nelson moved back inside the Republic’s defensive perimeter, Castaneda told the girl the story of his fight against Gene Cauthron, the infected Navy SEAL that had single-handedly murdered every man, woman, and child sheltering in place at the Casa Marina hotel. Castaneda held himself out like a demigod. When he claimed to be the only one who had ever fought Cauthron one on one, Captain Nelson could bear it no longer.
“Other.”
“What?” asked Castaneda.
Captain Nelson adjusted his tongue in his swollen mouth and said, “Other. You’re the only other person to do it. Sorry, cowboy, you have to share that award with a 78-year-old city electrician.”
Castaneda scowled, but the girl wanted to hear the story and so Captain Nelson told them both about the little old man who had jerry-rigged the power grid with an old factory turbine after the government knocked out the transmission lines running down Highway 1. Castaneda listened in silence.
That night, as he lay awake on his mattress surrounded by the sounds of crickets and the snores of people sheltering with him inside of the hospital, Reagan Castaneda mentally opened the book of Donald Tiune’s life. It could have been read a hundred different ways, but Reagan Castaneda was a survivalist and he translated it into his survivalist script. This is what it said:
When faced with death there is one question that determines survival more than any other. It has nothing to do with food stockpiles or ‘bugout’ vehicles, bunkers or water filters. It stands above even the more important questions of natural ability, acquired skills, and flexibility of mind.
The question is this: when the time comes and everything falls apart, do you have a family that is depending on you for their survival?
In the summer of 1941 the German Blitzkrieg was unstoppable. It had overrun western Europe. France had lasted just weeks. Smaller countries, only days. In June of that year Germany invaded the Soviet Union. All along this ‘Eastern Front’, resistance collapsed. Already disillusioned with the failed promises of Stalin’s regime, soldiers found themselves unwilling to die for their nation. Whole divisions fled with barely a shot fired. Over two million surrendered. The German war machine advanced without slowing. Everywhere except for the fortress of Brest.
Because Brest Fortress not only housed soldiers, it also housed their families. The surprise attack trapped those families inside its walls. In Brest, the soldiers did not fight for their nation. They fought for their wives and children. And fight they did. Using nothing more than outdated small arms, they stopped the Germans in their tracks. Artillery, tanks, flamethrowers, the Germans soldiers reported, ‘we hear them screaming, but still they fight’. Day after day it continued. In the end, the mighty German war machine had to retreat, and wait for heavy bombers. For the first time in the war, and not the last, superior equipment would falter when face to face with superior resolve.
Bontrager’s disease had found a world of ‘swipe right’. A shallow, self-serving world. It had begun to chew that world apart. But what if it had to face something else?
The creation of the ‘Hulk’ comic book in the early 60’s was inspired by a phenomenon called ‘hysterical strength’, a condition whereby a person suddenly displays ‘increased’ abilities under extreme stress. Occurrences typically involve a threat to a person’s loved ones and are believed to stem from the body suddenly flooding itself with adrenaline in a last-ditch attempt to save their lives.
How great of an increase? The most weight ever clean/pressed at the Olympics is 576 pounds, lifted by giant of an athlete who trained much of his life. The most weight ever known to have been lifted by someone saving a family member is 3,514 pounds, lifted by a mother whose young son was trapped under a 1964 Chevy Impala.
In the Lower Keys, months after Donald Tiune’s death, Doctor McCaffrey of the CDC evacuated the with the two ‘special infected’ bodies. Initially, the surviving islanders had buoyed with confidence. They received thousands of doses of the first Bontrager’s vaccine along with much-needed supplies.
But left inside of the quarantine zone, apart from government control, the days had turned into weeks and the initial optimism faded. Then came the moment that the dog Maximus and his human handlers had tracked the scent of the infected former Navy SEAL up to the old Truman Annex on the far side of the island. Protest City, as the islanders had dubbed it, had converted into an armed camp, with far too many defenders for the Hospital security crew to force their way inside. Doctor White and the remaining hospital staff had met with former Mayor Pro Tem Elmond Hutchins and the rest of the old municipal leaders, along and representatives from nine of the other confines to resolve the situation. The meeting was a catastrophic failure. None of them were willing to work together. Hutchins, for his part, seemed bent of hindering any sort of confederacy from even taking shape. Everyday more lives were lost.
By this time, Reagan Castaneda had finished the book.
In June of 1967 a multinational force invaded Israel. Using Soviet-made weapons and possessing a huge advantage in manpower, the multinational army attacked the tiny country on all sides. If the Israeli soldiers had lost, their families would have faced extermination.
