Degeneration Read online

  Degeneration

  Mark D. Campbell

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or governmental agencies or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Editor: Aubrey B. Goldie

  Cover Design and Art: Michelle Olsen

  (http://www.ravynsphotography.com/)

  Published in print by Lulu Publishing.

  © 2012 Mark D. Campbell. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-300-56007-4

  DAY 1

  1

  A man stood inside a biological protection suit. The suits were bulky and were often given the moniker ‘white-suit’. An attached oxygen hose ran from a valve in the back of the white-suit into the ceiling, but the microbiological suits were capable of utilizing small detachable oxygen canisters.

  The man was carrying a tray of sealed glass test-tubes labeled ‘PT-12’ out of the refrigerator. He did not feel like pulling a double-shift, but an urgent message came from Atlanta at the last minute.

  Sighing, he sat the tray on the sterilized silver table that stood in the middle of the immaculate lab. He did not understand the rush to test samples that had been in cold storage for years, but, then again, he did not get paid to question his orders.

  His partner, another veteran researcher inside a white-suit, walked towards the laboratory sallyport doors holding a silver clipboard. He reached behind his back and detached the oxygen hose from his suit and the hose immediately retracted up into the ceiling.

  “Calling it a night, Blanding?” the white-suit standing near the test-tubes asked.

  “Yeah, Ray, I have to be back at four,” Dr. Blanding said. He pressed a button next to the exit and the first set of pressurized doors slid open. “If I’m lucky, I can get about five hours of sleep before I turn around and come right back.”

  “At least you are going home. I have to stay and finish testing samples,” Dr. Raymond said.

  “Oh, which batch?”

  “Something called PT-12. Apparently the specimen sample we sent Atlanta for their yearly audit did not fare well against the antiviral they have in storage. They suspect that it went through a genetic change at some point, and they want us to check our findings against theirs. They put a rush on the order, too.”

  “Really? Sounds rather drastic,” Dr. Blanding said, confused. “Which one is PT-12 again?”

  “Some flu offshoot, I believe. I have not worked with it in ages. It has been sitting in storage ever since the first Bush was in office, just taking up fridge space. It is going to keep me busy all night.”

  “I feel for you,” Dr. Blanding said, laughing. He stepped into the sallyport and froze. He looked down at the metal clipboard in his hand and cursed. “Hey, Ray, do you mind taking this for me and throwing it on my desk when you go in the back? I almost walked out with the daily reports. Not one of my finer senile moments.” He took one step towards Dr. Raymond, holding out the clipboard, standing in the middle of the inner sallyport door’s track.

  Dr. Raymond chuckled and walked towards Dr. Blanding with his oxygen hose still tethered to his white-suit. As he walked, the oxygen hose brushed across the table and sent the tray of PT-12 glass test-tubes shattering against the floor.

  An alarm sounded.

  The sallyport door quickly slid shut with a hydraulic hiss, disregarding Dr. Blanding who was caught standing in the center of its path.

  Dr. Blanding’s bloodcurdling screams drowned out the wail of the alarm.

  Two floors above, on the security floor, the soldier read the words flashing on the computer screen in horror:

  ‘CONTAINMENT BREACH – SUB LEVEL 3’

  2

  It would be a long nighttime train ride between Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richard's legs felt it already. He shifted around in his cramped Amtrak seat anxiously and frowned. He knew that he should try to get some sleep, but all he could think about was his brother. He wrung his hands together in his lap and eagerly stared out the window. His brother sat just one-hundred and fifty miles away in a maximum security federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.

  Unfortunately, Amtrak did not provide a direct route to Butner, so other travel arrangements would have to be made once he reached Raleigh. In Richard’s case, it usually meant renting an overpriced compact car from the rental lot next to the train station and making the hour drive to Butner. It was a stressful ordeal, but well worth it since visiting day only came twice a month. He always respected and admired Andy. After all, after the incident in the kitchen, Andy was the only family he had left. It was imperative that he visited him, even if only briefly.

  Tall and lanky, Richard reached his hands up and ran his fingers through his dark brown hair. His hair was tousled and his cheap dress shirt was wrinkled, but he was not in the business of trying to impress anybody anymore. He lost all desire in the opposite sex not long after the medication stole his libido like a thief in the night. The prison doctors said that the medication’s side effects would be temporary, but, as usual, the doctors lied. The doctors always seemed to lie to him, to secretly work against him.

  He grimaced; one of his headaches was coming and that meant that the whispering was trying to surface. He was diagnosed when he was young, not long after that faithful day in the kitchen. The prison doctors tried to help him, so they said, but his condition had only gotten considerably worse since he was released one year ago. It was the sort of condition that nobody should ever have to get used to, but somehow he managed. He did not have many pleasant days, but, somehow, he willed himself to feel better on visiting days.

  Richard turned his head and distantly stared out the window.

  Even on bad days, those long stretches between the two authorized visiting days, thoughts of his brother eventually rose above the whispers in his head. The whispers never truly went away, though. The medication was the only thing capable of temporarily silencing the whispers, and, even then, sometimes the whispering fought back.

  He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

  He had to see his brother, and he couldn’t let the sickness get in his way again. If worse came to worse… he’d double-dose.

  He placed his hand on the pill bottle in his pocket to assure himself and smiled.

  As he fidgeted in his seat, he bumped against the man sitting next to him.

  Terry was getting annoyed and unable to immerse himself in his novel. The gangly man sitting next to him kept fidgeting around and bumping him with his knee. He kept undershooting the man dirty glances, but the man did not seem to notice. He seemed pretty preoccupied, but so what? Terry had his own problems. He sighed and went back to his novel as he tried to forget about his newly-coined ex-wife.

  Behind Richard and Terry sat the heavyset Howell Wright, a recently dismissed engineer from Atlanta with an agenda. Unlike most people, Howell preferred the trains. On the trains, even after 9/11, baggage security was lacking. He looked past his protruding belly at the duffle between his feet and smiled.

  There were others on that midnight train, of course, asleep in their seats, but very few of them would survive past the accident that would later occur later that morning.

  3

  Nobody said a word aboard the helicopter. It was a cramped stealth number with two black iron benches accommodating a gunmetal cabin interior. Six soldiers wearing biological hazmat suits sat in silence as they flew over the Maryland countryside towards their final destination. They knew whatever awaited them would not be pretty; the 161st Bioterrorism Response Regiment did not get called out often. It was eerily silent inside the helicopter, and it was dark; the moonlight struggled to shine through the helicopter’s narrow windows and reflected off of the soldier’s M16s and their mirrored facemasks.
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br />   There was no small talk, only raspy breaths through six respirators and the constant whirl of the helicopter blades.

  “Any guess where we’re going?” Lloyd Godson, a scrawny New England career solider of eight years, was the first to break the silence since they left Ft. Bragg.

  The others looked up, broken out of their meditation.

  Silence was his answer.

  Lloyd turned his head and looked out the window slit, fidgeting. Below, the trees were thinning; moonlit green fields stretched out for miles. Army vehicles raced across the fields like ants while white-suits erected tents. Lloyd chewed on his lower lip and stared.

  The interior lights brightened and the door separating the cockpit from the cabin slid open. The men’s attention immediately focused on the intruding figure holding the red folder, Sgt. Gregory James.

  Sgt. James looked over the men carefully, clutching the red file tightly. He knew they would have difficulty performing the mission, but he knew that orders had to be followed and he trusted his men to carry out their mission with the precision and tact that the 161st expected.

  “Alright men,” Sgt. James finally said. “Our target is a sublevel BSL-4 laboratory deep inside the Fort Detrick complex. At 0107 hours, a biological compound named ‘PT-12’ contaminated the laboratory. The lab’s emergency system activated, but something obstructed one of the sallyport doors and containment procedures failed.

  “The entire third sublevel floor became contaminated. The floor was immediately quarantined and locked down. The rest of the building has been cleared and evacuated.

  “Your primary objective is to neutralize any and all remaining personnel on the quarantined floor. You will fire two rounds into the head of each staff member you come across, no exceptions.

  “Your secondary objective is to place thermal charges inside the main laboratory in order to neutralize any trace of the contaminant.”

  Sgt. James ducked back inside the cockpit and pulled out a small black duffle. He tossed the duffle over to Lloyd.

  Lloyd caught the bag and held it against his chest, hands trembling.

  “Place one set of charges on the main refrigerator inside the laboratory and place the second set on the laboratory’s data servers in the back of the lab.”

  “Sir, permission to speak,” Corporal Nathan Andrews said.

  “Speak,” Sgt. James quickly responded.

  “Is it necessary to neutralize the staff?” Cpl. Andrews asked, clearly uncomfortable.

  Sgt. James nodded somberly.

  “The staff may be hostile and are all highly infectious.”

  “In what nature, sir?”

  “Classified.”

  Lloyd looked down at the black duffle, frowned, and immediately looked away. He turned his gaze out the window. Whatever ‘PT-12’ was, it scared the shit out of him.

  Below the helicopter, armed white-suits led unarmed soldiers and scientists at gunpoint into large white tents. The base's gatehouse was empty, and the barbwire-topped gate was wide open; a convoy of white vans poured through the open gate towards the main complex. ‘Welcome to Fort Detrick, home to the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command!’ a large sign suspended over the entry gate read.

  The helicopter continued flying over manicured grounds and began its descent towards what looked like a small office building covered with clear plastic sheeting; the sheeting draped over the entire building and large white tents surrounded the building's base. White-suits hauled equipment into the base of the covered building and some of them looked up as the helicopter descended towards the roof.

  The side doors of the helicopter cabin slid open with a hiss.

  “Take the roof-top elevator down to the sublevel third floor. You won’t find any buttons inside the elevator for the floor due to the floor’s clandestine nature, but base security will remotely lower the elevator down once you all step inside. After you place the explosives and the staff has all been neutralized, take the elevator back up the main level for decontamination and extraction. The base will take care of it from there.”

  Sgt. James stepped back into the cockpit and slid the door shut without another word.

  The helicopter hovered twenty feet above the roof of the building, rippling the plastic that shrouded it. The soldiers stood up, secured their weapons, and fast-roped down onto the roof in unison.

  The sergeant sighed and sat down next to the pilot, frowning, staring blankly out the window.

  “Eagle One to Hawk Nest,” Sgt. James said into the secure line, “the team is in position and is about to make first contact.”

  4

  The wail of the alarm was deafening.

  The alarm gave a shrill cry as it cast red strobes into the recesses of empty offices and janitor closets. Offices and other assorted rooms ran along both sides of the long hall. Litter had been strewn about the white tile floor and office furniture lay overturned as the panicked occupants scrambled towards the elevator.

  At one end of the hallway was the sallyport leading into the laboratory. At the opposite end of the long hall, an elevator with badly dented doors.

  People were huddled along both sides of the elevator which served as the only access portal to the sub-level third floor, coughing and sneezing. They were exasperated, hungry, sick, and most of all scared. Four were soldiers and the rest were virologist staff.

  One of the soldiers, Trent, stood in front of the dented elevator doors holding an equally dented fire extinguisher. He breathed heavy raspy breaths and was soaked with sweat. A blue band was wrapped around his right arm; it said ‘MP’ on it in bold white letters.

  “Attention, Attention,” a pleasant artificial female voice announced over the alarm wails. “Laboratory integrity compromised. Critical sallyport failure detected. Quarantine activated. Please proceed to the elevator and wait for evacuation.”

  “Goddamnit!” Trent screamed. He raised the fire extinguisher above his head and slammed it against the elevator doors repeatedly. “What are they going to do?! Let us rot down here?!” He dropped the extinguisher and collapsed onto his hands and knees, coughing violently.

  “You need to relax,” said a female scientist who was obviously not relaxed. “They are not going to just leave us here! They can’t!” She sat cross-legged on the floor and grasped her cell phone with jittery hands; her face was damp with fever-sweat. She stared at the cell phone and attempted to ‘will’ the signal bars into existence.

  Another woman, opposite of the woman gripping the cell phone, rocked back and forth while muttering nonsense.

  Next to her, a man in a sweat-soaked lab coat slipped in and out of consciousness while slouched against the wall with his legs sprawled in front of him.

  “Oh yeah?” Trent snarled. “Why do you think the elevator is off? Why do you think they killed our Internet connections? Why do you think the phones are down?” He stood and picked up the extinguisher.

  “Attention. Attention. Laboratory integrity compromised. Critical sallyport failure detected. Quarantine activated. Please proceed to the elevator and wait for evacuation.”

  “This is bullshit!” Trent threw the extinguisher down the hallway. The valve flew off when it struck the floor and a plume of white powder shot into the air. The extinguisher skittered down the hall towards the laboratory and struck the lab’s outer sealed doors with a hollow CLANG.

  One of the other soldiers, a burly MP nicknamed ‘Gus’, stood and grabbed Trent by the throat and pinned him against the elevator doors, coughing.

  “Knock that shit off!” Gus screamed into Trent’s face. “All you’re doing is getting everyone worked up!”

  Trent flushed from seething red to a terrified pale. He gagged and Gus relaxed his grip.

  “We are all in the same boat. So shut the fuck up and sit down, Trent!” Gus let go and sat back down against the wall with a raspy sigh.

  “Fuck you!” Trent yelled, coughing, and stormed off down the hall. He retreated into a restroom, rubbing
his red throat.

  Behind the dented doors, the elevator motors hummed.

  “It’s moving,” one of the slouched scientists hoarsely announced as he staggered up to his feet.

  The others stood and stared in silent unison with their bloodshot eyes focused on the elevator’s floor indicator lamp as it marked the elevator’s descent. The only person who remained on the floor was a man who was unconscious; he was slumped against the wall with his chin on his chest.

  “Trent!” Gus yelled, still staring at the elevator. “Get your ass over here! Rescue is finally here!” He erupted in a coughing spasm.

  The crowd stepped back as the elevator doors slid open and revealed six armed soldiers in white hazmat suits. The two opposing groups stood in silence, staring at each other.

  The silence was broken by a raspy cough.

  “It’s good to see you guys,” Gus said, eying their M16s cautiously. A dribble of snot ran freely from both of his nostrils.

  Cpl. Andrews, the lead soldier, slowly nodded his head and gave a raspy reply through his suit’s respirator.

  “Get on quickly,” Cpl. Andrews said and motioned for the other white-suited soldiers to form up. The white-suits rushed out of the elevator and took position behind the group of scientists and MPs in the hall, herding them all into the elevator at gunpoint.

  “Someone grab him,” Cpl. Andrews said, pointing at the unconscious scientist.

  Gus and another MP picked up the unconscious scientist by his arms and pulled him into the elevator.

  “We have another guy, Trent, he just went to the restroom,” Gus said, wheezing. “There may be others, too.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cpl. Andrews said, “we’ll find them.”

  Lloyd and Patrick, a newcomer to the 161st from Nebraska, aimed their weapons towards the BSL-4 laboratory doors at the far end of the hallway while the other four white-suited soldiers kept their weapons turned towards the group inside elevator.