Marlin moved his rook forward. "I was trapped in the bus barn. There were seven or eight of them fellas coming after me with their googly eyes and monster groans. I figured I could distract them with a fire, so I filled my Coke can with some gasoline and stuffed a rag in it, but before I could throw the damn thing, this little kindergartener—a girl named Jamie who sometimes rode my bus—snuck up behind me and grabbed my shirt. She was messed up, all snarling with bloody teeth and curled fingers. I batted her away and threw that bomb just a second too late."
He said there were scars up and down his arms too. Cheryl declined his offer to see them.
She could have called
checkmate
early in the game when her queen and rook had his king in peril, but she made a less aggressive move instead and several moves later, let him win the game.
"Two out of three?" he asked, setting up the board again.
"Okay. Winner gets bragging rights then."
Marlin rubbed the stubble on his chin. "How about winner gets a trade instead?"
She leaned back in her chair and put her hands on the table, ready to rise up. "What kind of trade?"
He looked down at the diamond ring on her hand then back up towards her face. "Those earrings you got on—those little silver studs. I'm bunking with a guy whose daughter turns twelve in a couple of days. They'd be a nice gift for her."
Cheryl put one hand up to her ear, feeling the little round ball. Since her hair had grown back down over her ears, she rarely noticed them anymore. "Deal," she said.
"Now, you're probably wondering what I've got that's worth anything to you?" Marlin asked with a smile that made the scars on his cheeks crinkle into deep, hook-shaped grooves. He stood up and fished in the pocket of his jeans. He brought out a pair of bronze-plated dice. "Before I gave up gambling, I used to spend my days at the Craps table in a casino in Scottsdale with a Seven & Seven in one hand and a cigar in the other. These beauties brought me a lot of luck…and a lot of misery. It's time I retired them, so they stop rubbing a hole in the pockets of pants that I can't afford to replace. Maybe they'd be luckier for you."
She eyed the shiny dice, thinking they'd be an interesting birthday gift for Mark. "I'll play for those," she said, scooting closer to the table. "You're on…"
This game turned serious rather quickly. It was apparent that Marlin had only feigned incompetence in the first game. She found herself on the immediate defensive, and he had a counter attack for every one of her forward moves, including fork attacks where he challenged two of her pieces with one of his.
Seeming to sense the heated exchange, a handful of patrons circled around the table. Cheryl did her best to ignore them, but felt a prickle of sweat dribble down the back of her neck.
"I think I've been had," she said a few minutes later, after her king was surrounded and he gave the final battle cry of triumph. "You're a shark."
Marlin chuckled and winked at her. "Sorry, my dear. You can take the snake out of the rat's nest, but a snake's still a snake."
Cheryl glanced at the people around her. "Someone could have warned me!"
A man with surfer-blond hair and a faded orange tank top that looked moth-eaten shrugged and took another sip of his beer. No one else commented, but they hung around as if waiting to see if there'd be any entertainment in the aftermath of the competition.
She ponied up the earrings and set them on the board. "Here…can't say you won them fair and square though."
"Tell you what…" Marlin said, sliding the dice across the table. "…I'll pass these on to you anyway. You're a good sport."
"Are they going to explode in my pocket? Or are they safe?"
"Regular dice, honey. They're just extra pretty. Kind of like you…"
Feeling a flush come over cheeks, she took them and stood up. "Thanks for the games. I've gotta run. I've got early duty in the morning."
Liar. Liar.
"Any time you wanna play again—you can find me here."
"Thanks," she said, knowing that she had no desire to be bested by him again.
As she left, Marlin scanned the bar, looking for another victim.
Back at the room, Mark was nowhere to be found. Having nothing better to do, Cheryl decided to clean her gun. The AK had been given a serious workout earlier and could certainly use it.
She removed the action cover and spring assembly then lifted out the bolt assembly. Once she had the other pieces free, she sprayed them with solvent, laid them down to soak, and started to work on cleaning the barrel with a wet patch and a small brush. By the time she finished and put everything back together an hour later, she was concerned that Mark hadn't returned.
Even though they lived together in the confinement of this fort, the days were gone when they could reach each other with the push of a button on a cell phone. It wouldn't matter if they still had phones anyway, because she hadn't seen a single working cell phone in months. She knew the military used ham radios to communicate with other shelters and walkie-talkies for dispatches inside the fort, but they weren't available to civilians, even those who volunteered for patrol duty.
She tried locating him with telepathy.
Where are you, Mark?
That tentative mind meld that she'd had with him was finicky, so she didn't really expect a response.
Then it came…
Go to sleep.
The whispering voice inside her head was curt, not like the supportive and tender coach that she'd tapped into during her journey to the fort. Mark had changed after their reunion. All of his energy went into his determination to be a hardcore defender of the fort…and his obsession with finding out what had caused the outbreak.
She wasn't tired yet and had no intention of obeying Mark's ethereal command. Still wearing her day clothes, she reclined on the bed, picked up the book on the milk crate nightstand and escaped into the spirited 18th century romantic entanglements in Pride and Prejudice. She read a few pages before falling asleep and jerking awake twice. Then, she surrendered to the pull of The Sandman, set the book aside and turned off the lamp. As he sprinkled his powerful dust over her eyelids, causing them to feel heavier and heavier, she pondered Jane's line, "
We do not suffer by accident
".
Chapter 4
"They're coming!"
Cheryl bolted upright, heart pounding. Complete blackness surrounded her, and for a second, she didn't know where she was. She heard heavy breathing next to her. Recognizing the deep timber of the shout, she reached out her hand.
"Mark?"
She found him next to her with his sweaty hand clenched into a fist.
Every time he had an outburst like that during a nightmare, it scared the crap out of her. She never knew if he was dreaming about bombs and snipers from his tours in Afghanistan, or about Eaters. Whatever the cause, she wondered how long he'd continue to suffer from this stress disorder that was interfering with his sleep…
and hers
. Of course, it was a chronic issue for many people now.
Didn't they all have some form of PTSD these days?
There were no meds, no counseling available for those suffering—there were just too many people in the same mental boat, bailing out what little they could as more holes were fired in their fragile hulls.
"You okay?" she asked, squeezing his hand.
Instead of answering, he threw off the covers and got out of bed, muttering something indiscernible under his breath. A second later, a soft blue light from the computer monitor filled the room. She could see the silhouette of his head and shoulders as he sat in the metal folding chair and hear his fingers begin to click across the keyboard.
There was no chance either of them was going back to sleep now, so she propped her head up on her hand and watched him work. He'd saved up credits for two months to get his hands on that used computer and buy a black market, wireless access code that allowed him get online. A buddy had helped him hack through the filter that prevented the rest of the compound from getting unfettered access to the Internet.
"More research?" she asked, even though she already knew the answer.
"Yeah. Trying anyway."
"Not getting online?"
"I'm online alright, but there are still a lot of servers down. So I keep getting fucking
Page Not Found
on a lot of the sites I click on. And that's not including the sites that are obviously blocked."
"What are you looking for? The mosquito thing again?"
"No. That's DOA. Even though the epidemic started in the summer, it couldn't have begun in Afghanistan and jumped halfway across the world so quickly."
"But with air travel—"
"Not likely. It took five years for West Nile Virus to spread from New York to the rest of North America, and that's including the fact that birds are vectors of transmission, because they are reservoir hosts of the disease."
"But we both got bitten last July on our camping trip before this started here, and you…"
"I'm sure I was already carrying it when I came back to the States."
"If it hadn't been for the second dose of vaccine—"
"You don't have to remind me what a lucky bastard I am. I remember every time I look at my scars…every time I wake up and take a breath in the morning."
And she hadn't forgotten what a miracle it was to find him here at the fort long after she thought he was dead.
"You know it started with the dogs back at the base. I keep going back to that. My buddy, Rick, was a handler. He'd worked with dozens of German Shepherds and Labs over the years, and before the dogs and the villagers started attacking us, he told me the dogs he usually got were trained by a contractor for up to six months before they were sent over. They were obedient, reliable, and almost one hundred percent accurate in detecting underground mines and IED's.
But his last batch was different.
Rick said the shepherds acted a little strange from the very beginning. They were skittish and started rooting around in trash cans instead of eating the dog food."
"Then, they started biting people…"
"Yeah. Especially when we were in a village. They'd really go nuts whenever they saw people without uniforms. I guess that's how the first villagers got the disease. A lot of people were bitten and some were literally torn to pieces before we shot the dogs. "
"It's sad that you had to kill them."
"It was us or them, babe. We couldn't call them off."
"I guess it was even sadder for the people in the village you had to destroy. It wasn't their fault they got infected."
"No, it wasn't. And, we had no choice. Once they turned, they had no fear of guns. They invaded our camp night and day in search of flesh to eat. As horrible and unfair as it was, it was safer to bomb the whole stinking village than risk losing our entire unit. We still had plenty of casualties though."
Cheryl hoped he wasn't going to recount the story about his friend whose shrapnel-laden leg had turned gangrenous and had been eaten in the middle of the night by an infected villager before someone was able to come to his aid. When she'd first heard about this, she thought it was the most disgusting thing she'd ever heard. Now, she'd witnessed worse first hand—
lots worse
.
"It still galls me that somebody knew way back then that this thing that turned people into walking dead cannibals. Somehow, they knew way before it got out of hand. That's why they handed out vaccines to our troops."
"You know I hate to say it, but you should have—"
Mark's knitted eyebrows scrunched together, and he slammed a fist into his other hand. "Look…I'm not going to keep apologizing for my stupidity.
I didn't know what it was!
They start handing these little white tablets to us and just said, 'Here…take this." At the time, I thought it was that malaria vaccine—mefloquine—the one that made some guys psychotic and violent. So…I didn't swallow it."
Cheryl looked down and knotted a wad of sheet in her hands. "I'm sorry," she said, looking up again. His back was to her now, and his rough, scarred hands were poised over the keys again. "What about the dogs? That's where it started…"
"Well…I've managed to do some research on where that batch of shepherds came from. I'm guessing they were donated to the military by a private research lab in Kentucky before they were sent to a base in Texas for training. I found a newspaper article from early last year about XCGen Corp donating fifty-four experimental dogs from their lab after they were retired from experimentation. Since they ranged from a year to three years old, they were still young enough to be eligible for training."
Leaning forward, Cheryl dropped the sheet and pulled her knees up to her chest. "Experimentation? What kind?"
"Aahh…here's where it gets interesting. The dogs were part of a cancer research program. They were trying to breed them to be super-smellers that could detect cancerous tumors, but for some reason they scrapped the program.
"How did they make them 'super-smellers'? I thought dogs already naturally had powerful noses."
"Well, I'd bet a round of cheese if you asked any veteran lab rat, it had something to do with genetic modification. XCGen was one of the pioneering companies that worked with stem cells. They were well-known for their genetic trials, monkeying with stem cells and DNA. It seems there were a lot of Dr. Frankensteins at work there. I accessed their website a couple of days ago before it went down.
They were experimenting with different uses for pig cells.
"
Cheryl's eyes wandered over his shoulder to the computer screen. It was still on the search engine page. On the bottom right, the time said 2:32 a.m. She crawled to the edge of the bed, put her hands on Mark's shoulders and gave them a squeeze. "Pigs?" She sighed. "It's late. Can't we talk about this tomorrow? Come back to bed."
"Not yet. I want to check one more—" After a few more clicks, he went silent then he almost jumped out of his seat. "There! Look at this!" He pointed at the screen.
Cheryl rubbed her eyes and reluctantly hoisted herself up again. It was a picture of a pig in a muddy pen, rooting around in a pile of rubbish that included apple cores, pieces of bread, and chicken bones, discarded fatty trimmings, and other kitchen refuse. "It's a picture of pigs."
"Actually, they're hogs."
"What's the difference?"
"When they get over 120 pounds, they call them 'hogs'."
"Okay…"
"This is that story that was in the news last year about the hog farmer out in eastern Colorado."
Cheryl shuddered. "Uggh. I remember hearing about that. Didn't the guy fall in the pen and get eaten?"
"Yeah! No joke. Hogs, pigs…they'll eat
anything
."
"How does this relate to the dogs in Afghanistan?"
"Don't you see? It all goes back to XCGen. Before the company site went down, I read an article that said they were experimenting with stem cells from pigs from rural France. This type of pig was traditionally used to sniff out black truffles underground near tree roots and was easy to care for because they fed on garbage. A scientist in XCGen's research lab succeeded in combining genetic material from one of these pigs with the embryos of several dozen German Shepherds. The article said that the dogs they produced turned out to be powerful cancer detectors, and the company was set to make millions from them by selling them to cancer research centers, universities, and medical facilities. XCGen's European branch was also thrilled with the results, hoping that the new breed of dog would also add value to the truffle industry, because they could be an alternative to the traditional pigs that were sometimes too eager to eat any truffle stashes they found. Even more interesting…it was suspected that this genetic swine material could be worked into any domestic dog breed, so your Rottweiler or Terrier could be fed scraps of kitchen waste instead of expensive commercial dog food. Could you imagine the market for "
trash compactor dogs"
? Funny thing—despite all this income potential, for some reason the company abandoned the project and donated the dogs to the military."
"Genetically modified dogs…" Cheryl sucked in her breath.
She didn't like it
. She didn't like the sound of that any more than the idea of GMO food she'd read so much about over the years. What was it Mark had said on the first night of their reunion when he was so worked up?
People fuck with nature. It fucks back.
She'd written his ideas off as pie-in-the-sky conspiracy theories back then. Now, months later, it seemed that he'd found a bread crumb trail to prove them.
Mark continued to rant. "XCGen knew something was wrong with those dogs, but they didn’t euthanize them; they didn't pass them on to a shelter or any domestic dog training camp—they sent them to the military, and even when they probably didn't pass all of the training requirements, they sent them on to the Middle East.
Coincidence?
It stinks of something rotten."
"Some sort of new weapon against the Taliban?"
"Maybe. If that was the intention, it wasn't thought through all the way. Maybe, XCGen and the government were in on this together all along. That's why they had a vaccine ready, intending to inoculate the military personnel over there. The frustration level with the war was so high we may have been ready to try anything to finally gain the upper hand."
"Like during World War II. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima…"
"Yes! I think those dogs were a deliberate plant, an attempt to start Armageddon in the Middle East. Not an Arab
spring
, but an apocalyptic Arab
winter
. Turn the Arabs on themselves. A new Ground Zero on their turf."
"And it backfired."
"Boom! Hell yeah, it backfired. Instead of just wiping out the Taliban, they brought death and destruction back home to the good old USA. "
Mark closed his eyes for a moment. She could tell that he was fighting his against his need to sleep, despite being so worked up. "Come on," she said, pulling his hand toward the bed.
To her surprise, he powered down the computer and joined her under the sheets, snuggling against her back side with his chin on her shoulder.
"But…" he said, whispering in her ear. "How did it spread around the rest of the world so quickly? I still haven't figured that out."
"Mmmm…" she said, lacing her fingers in between his. "Let's sleep on it."
Mark wasn't ready to give it up quite yet. "I wish I had a map showing exactly where the outbreak originated and how it spread exponentially from city to city within a few days, but all I know is that it started back in Afghanistan with the dogs, and once I was back here all hell broke loose a few days later. Obviously it's transmitted by saliva, because anyone who is bitten gets it. I just don't understand how else it spreads. There are people here in the fort that have been fine for months and suddenly turn. It doesn't make any sense."
"Then, it must be airborne somehow." That idea would terrify her more if she hadn't had the vaccine. There was a time that she suspected she was coming down with it. She'd never forget one insane moment at a church shelter when she'd grabbed a moldy donut out of woman's hand and stuffed it in her mouth. Now, she just chucked that moment of insanity up to stress.
"This thing hit every major city in the world within just a few days. It was like virus bombs were planted and timed to detonate almost all at once."