Title

A team of investigators and military operators join the survivors in a race to stop the spread of an otherworldly plague.

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 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.

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.

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.

The engagement is called The Six Day War because it only took six calendar days for the desperate defenders to utterly annihilate the combined forces of the invaders.

Castaneda took the words of Donald Tiune’s book to heart. He moved out of the hospital. He went to the confine living inside of what had once been the Doubletree Resort and its security team that had once been called ‘Wharf Rats’ along with its large number of residents (many of whom were young and single) who had yet to truly involve themselves in the horror and bloodshed around them. He had thought that the manager, Sri Patel would be hard to convince, but that was only because he did not know at the time that Sri had a wife and five young children that lived in the hotel with him. A social experiment began.

They started slowly. The lady's hall on the east side of the second floor suddenly had three rooms occupied by single men. Reagan and Sri dreamt up ‘mixers’ to encourage interaction. The hotel’s occupants began to leave their confine in groups. Missions were doled out, some of which were necessary, some that were pure invention. Orphans were assigned to “mothers”. Women sent outside were assigned strangely compatible “guards”. Sri gradually allowed more and more outside information to reach his patron’s ears. Fear began to drive them together. By New Year’s, the little island in the swimming pool had hosted its fourteenth wedding. By late January they had a plan.

It could not be called an optimistic plan. So much so that Reagan and Sri agreed that few could know of its existence. If it worked, many would die and a group of volunteers could not leave with the others and would have no hope at all. But it answered another question; how do you stop the unstoppable? And how can anyone survive a threat that seems to have crawled out of hell itself?

To that it gave this answer: by remembering what our world has forgotten, what a man of no consequence taught, that humanity has one final resort when faced with extinction. Devotion to those you love. An ultimatum between those people that rely on you, and the forces that wants to murder those people. A contract with no escape clause—that you will put the ones you care for at your back, no matter the cost, and that you will turn and face the thing that wants to destroy them. Then, and only then, you will learn just what exactly you can survive.

And so, as January turned to February, the year after the quarantine began, Reagan, Hunter Grant, and the twins went to the Grotto and its plaque that promised that as long as it stood Key West would never again experience the full brunt of a hurricane, and they destroyed it completely.

The image in front of them flickered, grainy black and white footage of four natives, seated in front of a thatched wall, chins down, jaws slack, unfocused eyes staring off at nothing.

“The mythology surrounding it is believed to have its origins in the rituals and practices of the local shamanistic religion which—on this side of the Atlantic—is known as Voodoo.

On the screen, white arms reached out and then pressed a needle into the palm of an unresponsive hand.

“Legend held that anyone in this state could be dominated by the power of the shaman.”

Just then, one of the comatose natives stood up, naked except for a loin covering. Two men sauntered into the screen on either side of this one, dressed in the sort of loose-fitting pants and British pith helmets that Admiral Tisdale would have dated to the early 1900’s. The image stuttered while a dark shape passed directly in front of the camera lens. The footage ran without sound, but the standing native cocked his head as if in response to a spoken command uttered from off camera. His face. That expressionless face. His body dipped and his arms reached out to embrace the men on either side. Then he rose, straight up, the explorers cradled on his raised arms like toddlers.

The image on the screen changed. Modern day. A single figure, male, young, strapped to a hospital bed. These images had sound. While the man’s eyes flitted at something above his bed, a soothing horn section played Dancing in the Dark, a background of the kind of big band music that would have made a fitting accompaniment to the black and white footage they had just seen.

Suddenly the music stopped. A piercingly sharp note replaced it that made half of the dignitaries in the briefing room aboard the USS Haggler press their hands against their ears. The face on the screen went wild. It bucked against the straps. Then, muscles contracted visibly all over its face and in a single concerted movement it began to rise. The strap over its forehead strained, then frayed.

Admiral Tisdale took the opportunity. “Hold on a minute, Doctor.” Then looking over the darkened room of top members of the CIA, CDC, Homeland Security, FEMA, Military Intelligence, and his own staff, he found Major Murphy. “Major, give them the update.”

The Army intelligence officer nodded. Without notes or any reference screens he started, “We now have over 20,000 confirmed cases worldwide. ‘Possible cases’ are edging toward 40,000. Over 50,000 direct-result deaths and counting. Hong Kong is at forty-seven. Tokyo had their first confirmed case last Monday. Contained without casualty.

Murphy nodded to the FEMA contingent. “Came off an unregistered whaler. The manifest said it ranged all the way over to the Aleutians. Nearly all major population centers in the western world are now fully involved. Rate of transmission is picking up in the east, even while it drops here in the west. Like Dr. Elkins said earlier,” he nodded in the direction of the seated CDC personnel, “the next batch of vaccinations should be ready in a few weeks, but I can tell you that the White House is talking about keeping some as foreign aid bargaining chips, and domestically no one at the Pentagon wants to see another Arizona disaster. I don’t think any more vials hit the public until they feel like they’ve got distribution worked out. That could be months.”

Then two of the CDC doctors started in on Murphy. Stephanie Banks from the State Department yelled back. Admiral Tisdale sighed. Every briefing was the same. The doctors wanted isolation, close the airports and shipping hubs. Be like Japan. The State people gnashed their teeth. Close them and they’ll never reopen. Close the country and you start a ticking clock attached to an economic warhead. Food prices in Japan were up 300% in the last six months. And the question remained—how do you stop a disease that moves like an STD, that kills more by fear, than by direct exposure; of those dead, many of those weren’t from Bontrager’s in the excited delirium state, many were murdered because they acted loopy and someone thought that just maybe they had the disease.

Just then Deputy CDC Director Tricia Wang cut in, “is any of this going to explain the so-called Operation Clean Sweep? Or why none of us were notified of this rather dramatic change in policy concerning the Lower Keys Containment Area?”

The room, shaped like section of a 747 passenger compartment, turned deathly quiet.

“Totality of circumstance,” said the Admiral softly, almost dreamily. “Murphy, why don’t you go ahead and set up Dr. Williams.”

The Major continued, “For the last six months we have been... committed... to a particular profile of the Level Two strain of infection. That profile, drawn up largely by your office,” he made eye contact with Director Wang, “assessed Level Two as a kind of slow burning variant of Level One. Higher order thinking is retained, but other than that, you are basically just dealing with a smarter Level One.”

“So far,” Wang said, “the Lower Keys seem to be the only place where this strain can be found. Since we can’t even isolate it at as a separate strain, that makes sense, don’t you think?”

Admiral Tisdale looked behind him. Seated against the wall, dressed in a slate grey business suit was a man they addressed as Mr. Fincher to his face, but all called "The Smoking Man" behind his back. He was nominally the liaison to Secretary Dennis, but it was obvious that was only a fraction of the truth. He was deep state. And he was there to keep tabs on all the doctors and soldiers and administrators. He was a part of the power behind the power, and as much as Admiral Tisdale had distrusted him at first, their relationship had now changed.

Because these two men understood each other. Subtle looks. Changes in tone. They were alike. They both wanted the same things. The Admiral wore a uniform and Fincher wore a suit, but Tisdale guessed they had something of a similar background: public service, military or paramilitary, decisions of life and death for the greater good. Tisdale imagined that when this was all over he could invite this man out to his ranch house on the Platte River and they could sit on the balcony and stare at the water and tell war stories while they laughed over their brandies. Beady-eyed Dennis and his fear of bond market reactions. Right now, the look they exchanged said that Fincher already knew what was coming next.

“Of course,” said Murphy, “the people inside the containment area had a very different profile which we discounted entirely as hysteria.”

“Doctor McCaffrey spent eleven years with the CDC before his infection and subsequent killing spree.” Doctor Williams’s voice broke, white hair and red power tie, standing behind a podium, he clicked at the screen until it showed a shadowy figure frozen, mid-charge, in front a car’s headlights. “Confronted at a traffic check point, sheriff’s deputies fired a total of 178 rounds of ammunition, striking him at least seventy-three times at close range.” The image rolled with the maddened figure running, bullets tearing through its clothes. Then it stopped. The doctor pointed at the screen. “We thought this was the kill shot. Severed spinal cord. He drops. They keep shooting. On and on. They....” The Doctor took a moment to compose himself. Then he continued, “All of Dr. McCaffrey actions prior to this point—the attack on CDC personnel and ex-wife—seemed to be tied to his former life, which fit nicely for the profile we developed for the infected Lt. Cauthron and the other suspected Level Two cases inside of the containment zone. For the last several months we have been continuing to study the tissue samples given us, as well as tissue from Dr. McCaffrey, while observing the events unfolding inside of that zone.”

And spreading disinformation, thought Tisdale—that McCaffrey was stoned on Heroin cut with meat tenderizer—to keep the existence of the Twos merely the stuff of wild conspiracy theorists.

Deputy Director Wang’s eyes bounced over the others, looking for understanding. “What changed?”

The Doctor clicked to a magnetic image of two brains, then on to a body of a handsome dusty blonde-haired man in his twenties, eyes closed, with a line of red around his throat, his pale cheeks almost angelically peaceful.

“Type Ones are disjointed and uncoordinated in their actions. Type Twos seem exactly the opposite. They take on a kind of persona. This one covered his face with masks and was known to tie up and abuse young women. He did this intentionally and consistently. The question is why?”

“Because that’s what happens when the brain fails,” called out a man from the CDC contingent. “Schizophrenics don’t hear soothing voices telling them to give to the poor. If they hear voices, the voices tell them to hurt people, or hurt themselves.”

“But that doesn’t answer the question,” responded an aged doctor on the front row. “Why do they only hear malevolent voices? Is it because that’s the default setting for a human brain incapable of higher order thinking? Or is it because we humans actually are surrounded by a world of malevolent voices, and that we can hear those voices most clearly when our thinking becomes muddled?”

A few in the room made scoffing sounds. Finally, Doctor Williams continued. “The first part of the equation has to do with the samples themselves. Of the specimens we were originally presented, the one called Mr. Grey was the most complete. Like with McCaffrey, we assumed that death was the result of a severed spinal cord, although it was hard to be certain since the subject had nearly its entire blood volume removed through the injury to its throat along with several precise incisions made at other points on its body, and on top of this suffered a brain injury from an object inserted up one of his nostrils.

The doctor cleared his throat, “we would have liked to have attributed death in all of the Level Two subjects that we were given to the loss of brain-body functioning, but there were... problems.”

Williams nodded at the Deputy Director. “The curare-based nerve agent, so effective in stopping the already overstressed hearts of the Level One Bontragers cases in their excited delirium state, had little to no effect when your man used it on the Twos. The other unnerving piece of evidence was the body of the one they called Colossus, confirmed to have full tissue burns on every visible inch of its body. Wounds not survivable by a One,” for a moment his voice cracked, “or anything else that we are aware of. Doctors Gupta and Henshaw had the idea for a kind of test.” He wiped something from his brow and turned back to the view screen.

“By the time we were able to coordinate with the survivors inside the Containment Area back in September, the body of the one they called Jones had absconded.” The image on the screen showed a cadaver with only the bottom half of its skull remaining. “However, the one called Chains was still accessible where it had fallen on the beach and... I’m not sure how to say this.”

“There’s no reason to dance around it,” Murphy cut in, “The real dividing line between our synopsis of the Level Two capabilities and the model they’ve got on the island is a question of physical versus metaphysical.”

“Which is why we discarded theirs,” said Assistant Director of FEMA operation Craig Danvers with some pique, staring at the seated doctor who had spoken of ‘malevolent voices’. “Official government operations don’t do black magic.”

Once again the room fell silent. For a long moment the only sound inside of the narrow chamber was the ever-present thrum of the aircraft carrier’s engines.

“We were looking for signs of life,” Williams started sheepishly, “uh, physical movement where the basic machinery of a human body was compromised to the extent that movement should have been impossible.”

Deputy Director Wang spoke over the murmurs. Her voice had turned to iron. “We almost bombed a civilian population, our own citizens, because we couldn’t account for a time of death?”

“We better get our story straight on this one, Doctor,” said Deputy Director Wang, “Because right now this is sounding less like a debriefing and more like the prelude to a war crimes tribunal. If the press gets a hold of this....”

“Please,” said Tisdale, “hear him out. Reserve judgement. I promise you. We did not come to this point quickly, or lightly.” He nodded to the podium, all the while thinking of the president gazing down at the situation room map and muttering over and over, we’ve got to take some of these pieces off of the board, Jack. We’ve just got to take some of these pieces off of the board.

The screen flashed to an aircraft-mounted image of a large truck in the center of pair of crosshairs. An explosion detonated in front of the cab. The video froze.

“The body of the driver was completely destroyed by the missile’s detonation,” said Doctor Williams. “The body of the passenger on the back of the vehicle was not. And this, this presented us with a conundrum.”

The video rolled. As did the truck. What was left of it. Until it came to a rest off the road and onto the sand of Smathers beach. Then the impossible happened. A figure jumped from the rear of the wreckage and charged, chains swinging from its arms.

“The question we needed to answer concerned the condition of this subject’s body at the moment it emerged from the sanitation truck. You see, even though the vehicle shielded this body from the shrapnel and much of the heat, that explosion still should have killed it. The air to ground missile that struck directly in front of that vehicle generated enough air pressure to shatter cement masonry well beyond the impact site. Even at the vehicle’s rear a human body would have been within the blast’s kill radius.”

The doctor’s entire body began to shake as he railed at the frozen figure on the screen. “Even with the other injuries that it suffered and if you will forgive me Admiral I’m not going to play this any further. I’ve seen it a score of times and I... I would prefer not to do so again.

"We examined it. There’s no question. None. Even with the early stages of decomposition and the multiple gunshot wounds there is simply no doubt. That body, that thing, suffered the exact tissue damage that we would expect from the pressure wave. Ear drums bursts. Lungs nearly liquefied. And more than that, water displacement inside the cells causing the cell walls to burst. There is simply no way—no possible way—that it can even be standing, let alone running. Almost half of the soft tissue cells examined had undergone fluid shock. Almost half!”

FEMA Director Lauren Younger threw up her hands. “Then the disease gets the most out of the other half!”

“No, Director, you don’t understand. If the brain is dead, then the body stops. We’ve assumed that any interruption in the physical signaling stops the infected body, just like with the body of Dr. McCaffrey. No, don’t interrupt me. Somewhat like the classic zombie mythos. What I’m telling you is that the level of damage that this... this thing had to its nerve tissue would have made any connection between brain and body impossible. Imagine losing forty percent of the towers and still transmitting power from one city to the next. Eventually you hit an impasse on every line. His head may as well have been totally severed.” His finger stabbed out. “At this moment it is dead! It has to be!”

One of the CIA deputies muttered, “And cause and effect just left the building and now we all get to watch voodoo on the big screen.”

Then, from the back of the room, Mr. Fincher spoke. “Which gives us at least a part of why Operation Clean Sweep was assembled and why we didn’t go through channels.”

“I don’t get that at all,” said Deputy Director Wang. “All I’m getting is that we’ve left a significant number of our own people trapped inside with those things for almost a year now with barely any assistance and I’m still waiting for an explanation why.”

“Madam Director,” said Mr. Fincher, coldly. “The real theatre in this operation is still Cuba, which has yet to get its house in order and has a pretty neat slice of our entire naval fleet making sure nothing comes in or out. We were about to have a heart to heart with the Calzado administration and give them an ultimatum. That ultimatum would have looked a whole lot more menacing after we just bombed 13,000 of our own citizens or however many of them are still alive in there. A bombing that would have ensured that no one ever found out about the second strain.” Then he looked back to the Admiral. “The only real question now, Jack, is what on earth could have made you scrub the mission. And whether we should all get a really strong sedative before you lay it on us.”

Tisdale nodded to Murphy, who reached down between his legs into an attaché case.

The Admiral cleared his throat. “What you are about to be handed is a heavily redacted English translation of a memorandum sent from an asset in the currently contested Chechnyan zone. It should go without saying that nothing you are about to see leaves this room. Any leak will be aggressively investigated."

As the copies circulated, the seated dignitaries came alive with reactions: gasps and groans; Deputy Director Wang began to cry. “You did this,” she said softly, looking down at the paper. “This is your fault.” And Tisdale knew that she was probably referring to him. They grew louder. Several in the room stood. In a moment he would lose them. The Admiral called out for attention and cleared his throat.

“We were still monitoring movements inside of the containment area and debating a change in policy when we started getting rumblings that they’d somehow made contact with the outside world. The Joint Chiefs decided not to take any chances and put together Clean Sweep on the fly. Then we got this.” Tisdale took a deep breath. “In short it says that parties unnamed are offering eight Level Two bodies. The implication is that those bodies are currently not “active”, but the highest bidder could make them that way, or do whatever else it wanted with them. And that these bodies are already outside of our cordon.” His voice boomed as he tried to talk over the grumbling filling the room. “We’ve been able to trace the source.” He waited for them to settle down in order to hear the rest. “Key West. Specifically, from a satellite phone we gave to Police Captain Perry Nelson some months ago.”

Tisdale gave a pained nod to the assistant FEMA director, “yes, Craig, that would be a good place to start.” He looked for a moment at Deputy Director Wang. She had just regained her composure. He sighed. “For those of you who do not know, Captain Nelson succumbed to what we believe was Level Two infection shortly after the massacre on Smathers Beach. His current whereabouts are not known, but spotters are active.”

The Admiral met the CDC Deputy Director’s livid gaze. “The Captain had an abscess as the result of his combat injuries,” he said. “After he... turned he apparently took treatment matters into his own hands.”

“He’s only been seen once by spotters since his escape,” said Murphy. “The islanders have given him the name Cheshire.

To keep up with the further developments of this series, as each subsequent book is released, please stay tuned to the series page at our website: