The Orphans (Book 2): Surviving the Turned (31 page)

Epilogue - Six Months from Day 1

Washington, D.C., Center for Disease Research Center

Thirty minutes after outbreak at research facility

6:00 PM

Doctors McBelle and Jacobs hid beneath a gurney. The lights in the room were flickering, making the scenery around them even worse to try to take in. They watched as the Turned walked through the room slowly. They could barely hear the sniffing over the screams of tortured souls. McBelle locked eyes with Jacobs. She mouthed, “We need to move; we need to get up top and report the results.”

Jacobs was sweating profusely, sweat dripping off his head. “We just stay here and wait it out; it’s okay. You have the guard’s gun. We can, you know, hide from them.”

McBelle looked sternly, shaking her head. Her long brunette hair was a mess over her face. She was insistent. “We need to leave. All of those people on the floor will be coming back; you know this. What don’t you understand about that? They are going to—”

Drool fell in front of her face. The two doctors looked up slowly. McBelle still had the gun clenched in her hands. The zombie screamed at them and spittle flew everywhere, making them wince. They kept their eyes shut until it was done screaming. McBelle aimed the barrel square center at the thing’s forehead and squeezed the trigger once. The bullet entered its head with force, snapping its head back and making it fly off of the back of the gurney bed. It hit the floor hard. Its legs twitched and then was still. McBelle pushed up to her feet, running for the laboratory’s door. She saw the Turned rising slowly from their meals; one was still eating the intestines of a doctor who just an hour before had been performing an autopsy on one of the Turned—the autopsy that would change the world forever.

              McBelle punched the emergency exit door to lock down the facility. Jacobs screamed, “No! No! What are you doing? You just sealed us in with those things; we are all dead.”

              She looked back, shrugging. “We were all dead the moment this place became compromised. This place is wired to the hilt, as you might know. They won’t let anything walk out of here, if they have their say in it. The military didn’t work so hard to keep what was left of the East Coast to let it fall to them.”

              Jacobs stared around the room, realizing this would be his eternal resting place, or where he would spend forever as one of the damned, always searching for a meal, which he would never find. “We need to get this information to the CDC then. Otherwise, they will just start again; they won’t know what happened here today.”

              McBelle closed the door, locking it with her badge. “They will break through this in no time, but we should be able to transmit the footage and the data from today. Get moving on it; I’m going to put as much in front of the door as I can to try to slow those things down.”

              Jacobs pounded the computer keys, uploading the footage from the daily testing experiments. He hit send on the computer, transmitting the answers to everyone's questions who
 
thought there was still hope.

5:00 PM

              The two doctors, McBelle and Jacobs, walked down the halls of the Center for Disease and Control. The checklist had become a mundane task but a process that still needed to be done on a daily basis. McBelle brushed her long brunette hair from her face. “Do you think they will ever cure the disease, Jacobs?”

              Jacobs walked to the edge of the foot-thick glass containment cell; there was a row of fifty of them. Jacobs tapped on the divider. The Turned, who had been swaying in place waiting for a meal, twisted its neck in an impossible way and stared at young Doctor Jacobs with dead eyes, ready to decimate the man. It launched itself at the divider, alternating between its face and fists, smashing at it with everything that it had. The government had gone overkill on the cells. The video footage they had gathered over the previous months was more than enough to verify the fact that these monsters were more than sick individuals; they were hell’s fire running through the street.

              The Turned was relentless in its pursuit to get the flesh it could smell through the glass. Jacobs pushed his glasses up on his nose, writing notes. “God, those things creep me out. They need to either cure them or kill them. I think they’re getting worse, actually.”

              “How could those things get worse, Jacobs? Five months ago when they started turning the death row convicts, they wanted to rip your face off. Now five months later, they still want to rip you limb from limb.”

              Jacobs, the ever smartass doctor, smiled and walked up next to the glass, tapping on it. The rage that the Turned had was never ending; its hot breath fogged up its side of the divider. It licked at the window with a blackened tongue. Jacobs pointed. “Their tongues, they are completely disgusting. But they haven’t eaten in months and look at him; they are still full of rage.”

              McBelle stared down the row. The one before them had infuriated the rest of the patients. The pounding was consistent, and they could feel the vibrations from the group’s fight to free themselves and eat them. McBelle shuddered and said, “Let’s get back to the top level. This place creeps me out; there is no escape if they get loose.”

              “If they get loose, I think Washington is screwed, not just the facility. We need to go upstairs anyway and check in with Erickson. He said something about trying a new vaccine. There was a general who was very impatient about the fact that there were little to no results. You know how the military is; they want it all, and they want it now. It’s now our fault that they can’t keep the Turned from breaking through their barriers. I mean, Christ, they have goddamn machine guns.”

              “Do you really blame the general for being in a hurry? There is little they can do against those things. There is little chance of stopping them with bullets. They just keep coming and their soldiers aren’t trained well enough to be able to stay calm with those things charging at them. The only thing that seems to help is having armed citizens. They all have guns and they are keeping the Turned at bay, but they’re quickly losing. The countries who have firearm bans are much worse off than America.”

              “Canada isn’t helping us at all. They’ve got very few people left; there aren’t any reports coming back at this point. They are more of a liability at this point. Mexico’s army is doing okay, but only because they put up the fence on the border.”

              “How ironic is that? Really, now they are trying to keep us out.”

              Jacobs said, “Yeah, but they are doing a hell of a lot better job about it than we did for them for years.”

              “Yeah, but when someone actually cares and their lives depend on it, there is a damn good chance that they are going to put a little more effort into it than just a bunch of politicians complaining about such a thing.”

              Jacobs looked at his watch. “Shit, we need to get to the testing lab or we are going to get reamed beyond belief.”

              The two hurried to the elevators, swiping their badges. The two men guarding the doors with machine guns nodded to them. “Done with the freak show, doctors?”

              Jacobs smiled, “No… just heading to the lab; we will be around these things all day long. Never a moment’s rest when you are busy saving the world.”

              The guards laughed and one of them said, “Yeah, no rush. They’re just eating America with every minute that passes. You two take your time… maybe stop and get some coffee on the way.”

              McBelle ignored them, trying to remain professional. “Don’t you know that we have twenty scientists working day and night, twenty-four hours around the clock, trying to cure these things? There is nothing that we aren’t doing and that we aren’t trying with chemicals to cure them. We are doing everything we can! Sorry you have to sit on your asses, holding guns. I’m sure that is about the most stressful thing in the world for you.”

              The two men opened their mouths with smartass comments on their tongues and waited a moment, thinking it over. One held up the rifle saying, “Well, I think I have about thirty cures right here in this gun.”

              Neither doctor responded, it was pointless. They were still hopeful that they could be cured. They thought science would cure the Turned, and they thought that they were just days away from a breakthrough. They waited until the doors shut and McBelle extend a firm middle finger toward the guards. “God, I hate those guys; they just want to kill everyone of them. It’d be so much easier if we just had the cure. We could gas all of them and make them change back into human form again.”

              “You know how it is, McBelle, you either believe or you don’t. There is very little room left in the middle nowadays.” The doors parted and Jacobs threw her a wink, “Come on, let’s go change history.”

              They walked out, nodding to a long line of armed guards going into the main medical lab. Inside the back of the lab were four patients who had been exposed to the gas and were currently past the point of being referred to as humans. They were fighting the restraints with everything they had but were unable to free themselves. They had been trying every type of injection that mankind had to give them, waiting but rewarded with no results.

A four-star general, General Nulty, was there presiding over the testing and research. He was pacing back and forth in the room, screaming in his normal rant but seemed to be worse than usual today. He, like the others who didn’t have a background in the field of science, could not comprehend the fact that it took time to develop drugs. The urgency of the matter made no difference to the amount of time it took to create. It was not a simple process, and they weren’t wasting time; they were trying to make sure a second outbreak did not happen, especially on the East or West Coasts. He stopped screaming at the director in charge of the team of scientists, Dr. Beyleu, and took in the two doctors who had just entered. He looked at his watch, his eyes saying,
You are late, damn it
. He yelled, “How’s the freak show, doctors?”

              McBelle said, “Still freaky, general. Still in their cages and all accounted for. They aren’t any weaker though. It doesn’t seem to matter how long they go without food, they just stay insane with rage and hunger.”

              The general nodded; he was fully in charge and had the means to do whatever he wanted to. He said, “Goddamn, it’s a shame we couldn’t get something like this for the boys on the ground. It seems there is something that none of you have done yet; that might be the best thing you could do at this point. You know, since we aren’t getting anywhere yet with what we have been trying to do. It isn’t as if there’s a lack of these freaks down there, right? It’s about time we get our hands a little dirty and maybe you can find something new.”

              Dr. Beyleu shook his head, unsure what he was talking about. He hated to ask the man for answers when he was pretty sure there weren’t any. But if it was something that could put them on the right path, something they hadn’t been able to figure out, then he was damned if he was going to pass up on the opportunity to say he didn’t take every chance he could in curing the worst thing to hit the planet.

              He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, taking his glasses off for a moment and said, “I’ll bite; what can we do that we haven’t already tried? We have so many separate groups working, it’s only a matter of time until we…”

              General Nulty walked to the edge of the room where the Turned patients were confined, being watched carefully by surveillance cameras. Every step towards progress they were attempting to make was being recorded and sent directly to the head of the CDC.

Nulty pulled his sidearm as he walked with purpose across the room to one of the four Turned who had been strapped down to the gurney. It was bound by its arms, waist, and legs with the thickest of leather straps. The general pulled his sidearm, aiming it at one and fired a round, followed by a second into the patient next to it. The other two Turned were screaming; the rage they were sending out was at levels that they had not yet seen. Jacobs pointed it out to Beyleu. “Sir, look at them; they are mad.”

“When aren’t they mad, Jacobs?”

McBelle said, “Yeah, but not like that. They don’t like seeing one of their own harmed. They understand, sir. You know what that means, right?”

“Enlighten me, Dr. McBelle.”

“They think, sir. They don’t just hunt in packs like those we saw on the video footage. They really look like they are thinking. That is bad.”

The doctor nodded, walking past her, looking at the two patients who the general had just taken out. The general stared at him, and when it didn’t come to him instantly, he slammed his hands down on the table next to them, making the instruments that were laid out bounce.

“For being the smartest man in the room, you sure aren’t too goddamn bright when the answers are looking you right in the face, are you? Pick up a scalpel, split this fucker in half, and see what is inside there. Maybe you can find something that we don’t already know about them. We haven’t had an autopsy on one yet, and it’s about time we do.”

Beyleu walked over, keeping his distance from the two still on the Gurneys and motioned for Jacobs and McBelle to join him. They all put on the rubber gloves and started a y-incision down its chest. They split it open; the stench that came up made them gag, coming close to losing what they’d recently eaten. They stared down seeing, that its lungs and intestines had blackened and that the heart was no longer pumping. McBelle gasped, “Oh my god! Do you know what this means?”