Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

awful. But it was hot. “We’re still in September, right?” He grinned. He looked at Deuce, who watched him intently. Chad smiled weakly. “Not bad,” he said, raising his mug. The big Ranger smiled.

“See?” the mountain of a man said to Garza. “He likes it.”

“So you haven’t heard anything about the flu or Atlanta?” asked the captain over the foul-mouthed response from Garza.

“What flu? What about Atlanta?” asked Chad, taking another sip from his steaming cup.

“It’s hitting some big cities. Kinda strange-like. I don’t know, I’m no doc, but my sister is. She’s in Los Angeles and called me Friday night, after Atlanta…People getting sick in numbers she hasn’t seen since…”

“The Pandemic?” asked Chad in a quiet voice. “It’s back?”

No one spoke for a few moments. “I don’t know,” said the captain in a quiet voice. “My sister said she ran some tests and this strain is related, but it’s…different somehow. It looks like people who were infected ten years ago and survived should be okay, but…she can’t be certain. She said it’s mutated, but in ways it shouldn’t be possible to mutate. They’re still trying to figure it out, but people are starting to die much faster than during The Pandemic.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Like I said, I’m no doctor. But the last thing I heard before we came out here, it’s getting real bad and a lot of the brass are getting worried. Like, Def-Con 2 worried.”

“Where?” asked Chad in a flat voice.

“L.A., San Diego,” said Deuce.

“San Fran, Portland,” added Garza.

“Yeah, I guess most of the big cities on the West Coast are like ground zero. Hospitals swamped, that kind of thing. On the East Coast, New York, Boston, Philly, the big ones there are just starting to see cases.” Captain Alston rubbed his eyes but kept talking, “Hardly anything in the midwest, but last I heard, Chicago and a handful of smaller cities in the Rockies are reporting numbers of sick they haven’t seen since…you know.”

Chad closed his eyes and put a hand to his face. “How long?”

“Shit, just in the past week. It’s like it just popped up everywhere in the west at once. Now it’s in the east,” replied the captain. “Freakin’ unreal. And yet here we sit, trying to protect you from a bunch of ninja wannabes.”

Eyes still closed, Chad tried to fight off the memories from his past. Burying Mom and Dad, his sisters, his neighbors. “What kind of casualty count worldwide?” he asked, ignoring for the moment that a bunch of North Koreans were trying to kill him.

“Uh…” said the captain. “You know…I don’t really know. Hadn’t thought about it.” The others grunted agreement and ignorance.

Chad opened his eyes and looked around. The Rangers looked genuinely confused.

“I haven’t heard anything happening outside North America,” said Deuce. “Why?”

“And even then, it’s mostly in the U.S.,” Captain Alston mused, his frown deepening. “There’s a few cases reported from Canada, but…”

“Jesus,” Chad whispered. “They weaponized it.”

Captain Alston sat up. “What did you just say?”

“Some crazy son of a bitch in a lab coat weaponized The Pandemic strain of H5N1! Don’t you get it? That’s the only explanation. You said it yourself, we’re the only country that’s got it in significant numbers. It popped up in major cities, in waves, at the same time—”

“Jesus…someone hit the West Coast, then the next round went east,” said Captain Alston, nodding at Chad’s assessment.

“Why the hell hasn’t CDC gone completely apeshit over this?” Chad demanded.

“Damn,” said Garza, shaking his head sadly. “He doesn’t know.”

“Know what?”

“The CDC is gone, Mr. Huntley,” said the captain. “Someone nuked Atlanta Friday afternoon.”

Chad’s mouth dropped open. He was stunned. “Wait…when you mean nuked, you mean like a terrorist bomb or something…a—what do you call them…a dirty bomb, right?”

“No. I mean some tourists in Florida saw a fucking ICBM shoot up out of the Atlantic Ocean. It damn near wiped Atlanta off the map.”

Chad looked at the captain in utter disbelief but the grim look to the man’s face confirmed his words. He looked at Garza, who merely nodded. Deuce’s face was dark with anger.

“My parents lived in Atlanta,” the big man growled.

“Who?” Chad squeaked in a whisper. “Who did this?” All his friends and co-workers were all at the CDC main campus in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. They were all gone. It was like The Great Pandemic all over again.

“Don’t know,” said the captain. He looked ready to crush the metal coffee mug in his white-knuckled hands. “But when the brass figures that out, you better believe we’re gonna be dropping the hammer on somebody’s ass.”

“Why Atlanta?” asked Chad, eyes closed again. Everyone gone. His home, his neighbors. Again. Wiped out. And now with the Blue Flu apparently visiting the country again…His eyes flew open.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit, holy shit…” Chad got up and started pacing, his mind reeling from the thoughts that were spinning in his head.

It can’t be. It’s too outrageous…but there’s too much coincidence. If I’m right, though…holy shit.

“What?” asked Captain Alston. “What is it?”

“Atlanta. The nuke—it confirms that someone weaponized The Pandemic strain. We…the CDC, my division, I mean…they made a vaccine for it the year after The Pandemic, remember?”

“Yeah, it’s what started calming everything down and stopped the war in Iran from going nuclear,” replied Captain Alston.

Chad pointed at him. “Right! And do you know where the vaccine came from?”

“Well, the CDC I would guess.”

“No way!” said Garza, getting to his feet. He pointed at Chad. “It came from him, man! He said he couldn’t get sick, right?”

“Right,” said Chad with a nod toward the grinning Garza. “They took so much of my blood, I thought they were going to kill me. They needed it to make a vaccine—to kill that fucking super flu dead in its tracks. Then they started stockpiling it.”

“That’s great! Where is it?” said the captain. “They should be able to haul it out and stop this flu so we can focus on getting back at whoever nuked Atlanta.”

“In the vaccine vaults at the CDC main campus. In Atlanta,” said Chad with a shake of his head. “Oh, the CDC sent samples to the other countries in the world to let them make their own, but without my blood, it was just synthetic, and it wasn’t as good as ours. The bits that I overheard from the virologists, whatever they did to make the vaccine was pretty classified. They didn’t want anyone else out there to find out how we made the vaccine so they built into it a limited shelf-life or something. After a few months, all the vaccines we made to kill H5N1 were useless. That kept the entire world dependent on the CDC for the good stuff.”

“How do you know?” asked Captain Alston. “You some sort of doc or something?”

Chad’s anger suddenly bubbled to the surface. “Hey, when you see everyone you care about wither and die because of some goddamn disease, you tend to read up on it.” Chad closed his eyes and tried to calm his breathing. The faces of his co-workers flashed across his mind. All their families, their kids…

“I’m sorry,” Chad said after a moment. “Didn’t mean to jump down your throat like that.”

Captain Alston waved off the apology. “Don’t worry about it. You got a lot to take in at the moment.”

Chad sighed deeply before continuing, “At any rate, those lab geeks loved to tell me how smart they were—they had to make a new round of vaccines—that’s what they froze, that’s what got pulled back to the CDC—”

“That’s what got everyone in Atlanta killed,” muttered Deuce.

Chad looked at the floor and after a moment of silence, said, “Last I heard, somebody in Washington determined that the bio-synthetic vaccine was too valuable to national security or some shit. They wanted it all in the basement at the CDC for safekeeping.”

"Figures," said Deuce. "Some REMF decides to put all the vaccine in one place right before that place gets glassed." He shook his head. "Fuckin' bureaucrats."

Chad leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor in exhaustion. The weight of the world was pressing down on his shoulders. H5N1 was back. He couldn’t even grasp that concept, let alone that some fools had actually released it on purpose, then wiped out the country’s only means of fighting back. He put his head in his hands.

“A lot of people are going to die.”

“A lot of people have already died…” said the captain, sadly. “Atlanta was a big town and they glassed it during rush hour. They’re saying a half-million casualties—minimum.”

“Madre de Dio,” muttered Garza, crossing himself.

“So why the hell are the North Koreans after you?” asked Zuka, pointing a steaming mug at Chad.

“And how the hell did they get in-country in the first place, that’s what I want to know. Someone dropped the damn ball on that, big time,” said the captain, disgust rippling across his face. “Air Force was too busy getting coffee, I guess.”

Chad shook his head. “I have no clue. My God, this is a nightmare.”

Captain Alston’s radio broke squelch. “—net, repeat: Apache Dawn is in effect…communications—” Static erupted again. A moment later