Strain: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller (The Agora Virus Book 3), page 1
STRAIN
The Agora Virus Book 3
Jack Hunt
Direct Response Publishing
Copyright © 2017 by Jack Hunt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
STRAIN: The Agora Virus Book 3 is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For my Family
Contents
Also by Jack Hunt
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
A Plea
Newsletter
About the Author
Also by Jack Hunt
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The Cyber Apocalypse series
As Our World Ends
As Our World Falls
As Our World Burns
The Agora Virus series
Phobia
Anxiety
Strain
The War Buds series
War Buds 1
War Buds 2
War Buds 3
Camp Zero series
State of Panic
State of Shock
State of Decay
Renegades series
The Renegades
The Renegades Book 2: Aftermath
The Renegades Book 3: Fortress
The Renegades Book 4: Colony
The Renegades Book 5: United
The Wild Ones Duology
The Wild Ones Book 1
The Wild Ones Book 2
The EMP Survival series
Days of Panic
Days of Chaos
Days of Danger
Days of Terror
The Against All Odds Duology
As We Fall
As We Break
The Amygdala Syndrome series
Unstable
Unhinged
Survival Rules series
Rules of Survival
Rules of Conflict
Rules of Darkness
Rules of Engagement
Lone Survivor series
All That Remains
All That Survives
All That Escapes
All That Rises
Mavericks series
Mavericks: Hunters Moon
Time Agents series
Killing Time
Single Novels
Blackout
Defiant
Darkest Hour
Final Impact
The Year Without Summer
The Last Storm
The Last Magician
The Lookout
Prologue
When the power grid shut off, Kate Talbot found herself trapped in an elevator. It was just the beginning of a hellish nightmare. At first, she had expected the power to come back on. It always came back on. It had done this several times over the course of the past two days. Lights would flicker. Monitors would go black and then everything would kick back in.
But not this time.
Shrouded by darkness, contained inside a seven by six foot metal coffin, she could hear the sound of her own blood rushing in her ears as panic crept up in her chest. She leaned forward and felt around for the buttons. Her fingers swept over the circles, pushing them all in a state of desperation.
No response.
“Hello?” she yelled. “Can anyone hear me?”
Her voice echoed in the steel chamber.
She took a few deep breaths. “Don’t panic. It will come back on.” She hated the dark. Her fingers ran over the concave buttons and she tried again, this time taking her time and slowly going one by one.
Once again, nothing happened.
“Shit!”
Kate slumped down against the side. It shifted ever so slightly and she prayed to God that the wires held. The thought of it dropping made her sweat.
Only thirty minutes earlier she had been working away at the CDC with the grand hope of finding a cure to the Agora Virus, a disease that had already killed thousands around the globe, bringing society to its knees.
Hours of work.
Days of toiling over different samples.
And they still hadn’t come close to finding a solution.
Eventually, she knew there was no hope when her coworkers stopped returning to their workstations. At first, it was just one or two who abandoned their post. Then slowly but surely the group thinned out until there was only her and two others. The expressions on their faces as they gazed around the empty lab spoke volumes. They didn’t even need to say anything. One by one they removed their white overalls and walked away.
No one stopped them. No one was left to stop them.
The CDC was as quiet as a library. Her heels clacked along the ground as she made her way down to the internal parking. The lot inside was empty barring one other car. Not once in all the years she’d worked there had she seen it like this. It was always packed. Shifts occurred around the clock. Not now.
Kate had returned to her apartment with the goal of packing what little she had, collecting Tom’s gun, and then heading north to the island. She didn’t want to be alone and yet that’s exactly how she felt. Her apartment was a studio that she had been sharing with Tom prior to his death. The very thought of him brought tears to her eyes.
The CDC, along with a large section of the city, had been barricaded. It was one thing to see it on the news, another to see it in person. She hadn’t left the CDC since the virus had spiraled out of control.
On the journey to her apartment block, she took in the sight of the fires that raged out of control. Since the barricades had been breached, all sense of order had fallen by the wayside. Order and decency were a thing of the past. Now, it was every man, woman and child for themselves.
The black Infinity swerved and weaved it’s way through the chaotic streets. She had to take a different route home, one that was longer because of the riots, looters and desperate who were taking matters into their own hands.
She navigated down back roads and tried to keep her mind occupied by telling herself that it was going to be okay. Once she made it to Clayton she would be safe. She thought about Frank. Though her life with him had been tough, she had got through it by repeating positive words. He said it didn’t have any merit, but she swore by it.
Now, as she dealt with the situation before her, she once again reverted back to affirmations. You can do this. You are strong. You will overcome.
What should have taken fifteen minutes to get home took closer to forty. At one point, she had to do a U-turn in the road because a group of locals had taken up control of a section of the city. They had blocked off the streets with multiple cars, covered the tops in barbed wire that had once been used by the government to keep everyone quarantined.
It was a disaster just waiting to happen.
When she arrived at the luxurious high-rise that Tom said they could afford on both of their salaries, she was pleased to find that it was still in one piece. Many of the buildings nearby were ablaze. How? Why? Who knew what might have caused it. She could still hear in the distance sirens wailing. The last wave of police, firemen and ambulances. Those wouldn’t last long. If the CDC had given up, eventually, so would emergency services.
Upon entering the lobby, the electrical grid was still working.
Heck, even Jake Roberts, the security guard on duty, was still manning his post.
But that was then, this was now.
Kate was losing her patience.
After ten minutes inside that darkened elevator, her eyes had adjusted. Kate slammed her fist against the side and screamed for someone to hear her, but no one could. At first, she just assumed it was the elevator. A glitch. Nothing more. They would eventually hear her, pull her out and she would breathe a sigh of relief.
I should have taken the stairs. Why didn’t you take the stairs? She thought.
She had never taken the stairs in the two years she had been living there. The apartment block was twenty-one stories high. Out of the entire selection of floors they could have been on, Tom had picked one on the highest.
Before the power went out, she was somewhere between floor seventeen and eighteen. At least that’s what she recalled.
“Come on!”
Her anger was getting the better of her. Out of all the places to get stuck.
Another five minutes passed before she remembered her phone. She patted her jacket down, pulled it out, and slid her thumb across the glossy surface. The screen glowed a bright white, providing her with some badly needed light. It was only partially charged. It wouldn’t last. She tried to phone but was getting no signal. Rising to her feet, she moved around in the tight confines holding the cellphone up, thinking that eventually she would get a bar.
“C’mon.”
No luck.
She gritted her teeth. “You’ve got to be joking!”
With no Internet connection and no signal, she was shit out of luck. The first thing she attempted was to pry the doors open. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t shift it. She gazed up at the ceiling above. It was metallic and paneled with small pot lights. She shone the light along the edges looking for some sort of release mechanism. There was nothing. Weren’t these things meant to have an emergency hatch? Some kind of handle that could be used in the event someone got stuck inside? Nope. Not this. They were all about appearances. Still, she was determined to find it. It had to be there.
However, the first challenge was to try and figure out how to get up high enough that she could attempt to pry one of the panels loose. She didn’t have Frank’s height. She was only five-foot three. She stretched out and rose up on her toes and was just able to touch the ceiling. There was a handrail on either side. She attempted to climb up using it but it was impossible. So she did the next best thing. She took a few steps back, placed one foot on it and used it to push herself upward. It wasn’t perfect, and she fell on her ass several times but each time she launched upward, she managed to hit the elevator-ceiling panel above her. After the fourth attempt it dropped, ever so slightly. From there, she was able to stand up on her toes and start using some leverage to pry it loose. Fortunately she didn’t have to, as it slid to one side. It seemed as if it worked using a mechanism that required it to be pressed then slid to one side. She shifted it over and now found herself staring up into a dark void.
Using her phone, she shone the light upward and could see all manner of steel cables soaring upwards.
“Well, here goes nothing.” After multiple failed attempts, she finally did it. Exhausted, sweating and more than pissed off, Kate sat with her feet dangling down into where she had once been confined.
She gazed up into the darkness.
“Hello!” she yelled and her voice echoed off the walls of the shaft.
There was no response.
Navigating her way over to the wall, she noticed there wasn’t exactly any ladder that went up, just a whole lot of steel overlapping and cables. “Why me,” she grumbled as she began the ascent up to the next floor. She wasn’t that far from the eighteenth floor. She stuck her phone in her mouth and made sure to have the light pointing upward as she clambered up, praying to God that she didn’t slip. One wrong footing and she would plummet to an early death, or at least break her back.
She pushed the horrific thought from her mind.
If getting out of the elevator was hard, it didn’t look as though it was going to be any easier prying the doors open on the eighteenth floor.
When she finally made it up, her hands and clothes were covered in grease. Perched on a ledge no wider than half her shoe, she held on to a cable with one hand and began pulling and pushing at the doors. When that didn’t work, she started kicking it as hard as she could, hoping she would raise enough noise that someone would hear and come to her aid. She kicked that bastard door for at least five minutes before giving up. Sweating profusely, she cursed under her breath. There was no way in hell she was going to get through there. Between balancing on the edge, holding on, and trying to get her fingers between the doors, it wasn’t working.
She had almost resigned to the fact that she would be trapped in there for hours and likely starve to death when she heard a male voice on the other side.
“Mam.”
Kate stuck her phone in her back pocket.
“Oh, thank god.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “Jake?”
“Mrs. Talbot. I’ll get you out. Give me a couple of minutes.”
She exhaled hard and waited for what felt like ten before she heard a clunking sound and the doors were pulled wide. Immediately, she noticed the hallway was dark.
“Here, give me your hand.”
He helped her in and she thanked him.
“For a moment I thought everyone had left.”
“Oh, most folks have. I’m the only idiot who has stuck around.”
“Well I appreciate it. Doesn’t this place have a backup generator or something?”
“No, they spent all the money on making it look pretty,” he said before chuckling. He had a flashlight in his hand and shone it down the hall. “Will you be okay from here? I need to go level by level and make sure there aren’t any other issues. We had looters trying to get in earlier this evening.”
She had her hands on her knees and was trying to catch a breath when she nodded. “Oh yeah, don’t worry about me.”
He turned to leave.
“Jake.”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you still here?”
“I needed the money. I just assumed they would figure out this virus issue and open up the barricades. My apartment is beyond.”
“You know it’s been breached, right?”
“Yeah, I saw that.”
“And you still didn’t leave?”
He shrugged. “Dumb move, right?”
“I don’t know. I only just knocked off forty minutes ago.”
He leaned against the wall near the stairwell. “Where’s Dr. Jenkins?”
Her eyes dropped and she didn’t need to say anymore.
“I’m sorry. That’s rough.”
“Yeah. I was just going to grab a few things and head out.”
“And go where?”
“North, to be with my daughter, and my ex. We have an island near Clayton.”
“Room for one more?” He muttered, then acted as though he didn’t mean it. Yet she could tell it was a serious question.
She frowned and looked at him closely. “Where’s your family?”
“Pennsylvania. Though my grandparents are from here. I moved out here with my girlfriend a year ago. That all went to shit and well, I’ve been stuck here ever since. I’ve been thinking of moving back, you know, to be close to family and all, but you know how it goes. You get into a routine and…”
“It takes over.”
He nodded and grinned. “Exactly.” He paused for a second. “Anyway, I should make sure no one else has gotten stuck in the other elevator, or worse.”
“Worse?”
He shook his head and disappeared into the stairwell. Kate rested for a few seconds, staring down the long corridor. She took out her phone and used it to light the way ahead before making her way over to the stairwell and heading up to the twenty-first floor. As she entered the stairwell, she heard voices down below and figured that other residents were coming out to find out what was going on.
Why? It seemed pretty obvious.
Since the virus had spread, the World Health Organization had alerted everyone to stay inside until further notice. While some would heed that warning, others wouldn’t. Now with the power down, the streets and buildings in the cities would become a haven for the depraved and desperate.
Her thighs screamed in protest as she ascended three flights of steps. As soon as she approached her apartment, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. Her brow knit together. She had seen the same thing on several of the other apartments throughout the hallway. Was Jake checking the rooms? Had someone broken in? He had mentioned looters. On an ordinary day, security was tight and people had to be buzzed in, but without any power, none of the cameras would have been working and there were multiple ways into the building: through the underground parking, on the south and east sides, and the main entrance. Any one of the residents could have left a door ajar on their way out.
