The Spread Read online

  He panicked and ran. He did not know what else to do. He made it to his apartment without being attacked. He considered getting his saw and trying to hack off his arm. He had no signs of the rot yet, and he thought maybe this would work. He put the thought aside as he remembered Jenny stumbling past him as her neck gushed blood, her mind too addled with the rot and blood loss for her to look his way as he said he was sorry.

  He didn’t think he could do it. Even if he could stomach sawing off his own arm, he did not think it would do any good. He washed the love of his life’s blood off the knife and cleaned and bandaged the bite on his arm before sitting in his favorite chair. For the first time since high school he’d considered suicide. Just like every other time in his twenty-three years on the planet, he could not bring himself to do it.

  He examined himself for some sign of the rot. He went to the bathroom mirror and checked his eyes. He had no sores, and while his eyes had looked better, he looked like someone who had been crying instead of someone who had the rot. Bo went back to his chair and waited for the symptoms to begin. The first sign of rot and he would slash his wrists. He figured he might as well live up until that point, even though living for him consisted of sitting down and waiting to die.

  Chapter 3

  The TMRT Research Convoy - Oceanside, CA

  In the middle car of the TMRT convoy, Dr. Talbot stood over the dead body of the man they called Mikey when he got the call from his bosses in the TMRT.

  He ignored the call and stayed looking down at the deceased vampire rotter.

  “They want us to come in, sir,” the driver of the middle transport told him through the intercom.

  “Tell them I will be there in a second,” Dr. Talbot said. They would want a video conference, and he did not want to have them possibly seeing the dead vampire rotter on the floor. Explaining what happened to Mikey would be difficult, and he already had enough difficult things to explain.

  He went back to staring at Mikey while he considered his next move.

  Mikey was not the vampire rotter’s real name, or at least not his pre-infected name. He was not even named Mike. For reasons Dr. Talbot could not remember, someone called the vampire rotter they had captured in Los Angeles “Mikey” and it stuck.

  Mikey was dead by the same hand and same gun as Mr. Chen. Like Mr. Chen, Mikey had it coming. He definitely meant the underdressed teenager some harm. While it was hard to have much affection for something that spent every waking moment wanting to put a bite on him, Dr. Talbot felt he was going to miss Mikey. They had ridden together many a mile.

  Dr. Talbot had thought maybe it was possible, much the same way a man can train a lion not to bite his head off when he sticks his face into the lion’s mouth, to train Mikey. He wondered if they could make him docile enough to be almost like a pet. At no time during Mikey’s time with them did he give any indication he could be domesticated.

  The good thing for Dr. Talbot was that there were plenty of vampire rotters around who could replace Mikey as a living sample for them to study. They were difficult to catch, a bad combination of cunning and aggression. During his time in the Quarantine Zone, which had grown since his mission began, he had seen the vampire rotters roam in packs, working together to either spread the disease or kill those they saw as a threat.

  A howl from a vampire rotter could bring a horde of the mindless amblers to bear on whoever the vampers felt was a threat, giving the seemingly brain-dead a singular purpose. It was a fascinating behavior, one that needed further study. The problem was trying to observe this in action was a good way to end up either dead or infected.

  Dr. Talbot was not in the ever-expanding QZ to study the behavior of vampire rotters and amblers. He was there for the third much more rare victim of a rotter’s bite. There were those who took a bite and never came down with the rot. A select few were immune.

  He had come into the QZ to bring them back. The TMRT was leery of bringing anyone out of the QZ, for good reason. What good is a quarantine if people can come and go? There was also the very real fear the immune were not immune at all. The rot infection spread at vastly different rates depending on the individual. Some people went either full ambler or vampire rotter in a matter of seconds; others would slowly turn over a matter of hours. It was theorized the immune still had either a slow-moving or latent version of the rot, and they could turn anytime.

  Dr. Talbot had the perfect solution. The immune would be processed and brought back as mostly liquid in refrigerated storage units. He felt it would be better to carry out tests on them this way anyway.

  The immune did not like this solution, but no one was asking them. The TMRT figured large segments of the public would not be keen on citizens who had survived the perils of the Quarantine Zone having all their blood drained and then being thrown into a high-powered wood chipper. For this reason, the details of the operation were kept within the organization. Many in the TMRT were not in favor of the idea themselves, so only a small group of need-to-know types within the TMRT knew exactly what Dr. Talbot was doing.

  Which brought him to his current problem. The one more pressing than replacing his living vampire rotter. Two of the last immune samples he came to collect had escaped and were still on the loose.

  To make things even more complicated, one of the loose men with immunity was a TMRT soldier named Eric Vance. It would be a problem if he were to somehow get out of the QZ and get word of Dr. Talbot’s operation to the outside world. Even if his revelations stayed in-house, those in the TMRT not in the know would not be happy.

  Dr. Talbot was sure the key to stopping the rot was in the liquified remains of the immune. He did not want to be in jail for making those remains while someone else used his hard work to find a cure.

  For this reason, he was going to defy an order. He went to the front of the transport, dropping an iron door to divide the long transport into two rooms, and sat in front of the computer screen.

  Major Dr. Barrington’s fat face filled Dr. Talbot’s screen. Barrington was one of the few men in TMRT who had an extensive background in both the military and medical world, thus the Major Doctor title. Dr. Talbot did not like the man much. He felt the man’s status was undeserving; being mediocre in two things didn’t add up to being anything but still mediocre in Talbot’s mind.

  He had an inkling Major Dr. Barrington did not think much of him either.

  “Why are you in Oceanside?” Major Dr. Barrington asked.

  “The situation on the ground called for it.”

  “How so?”

  “One of the immune—actually two of them—fled San Francisco. We followed.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “You’d have to ask them to be sure, but I am reasonably certain they went to try and rescue the family of one of the immune.”

  “I can see that part, but why did you bother to follow? San Francisco was supposed to be your last stop.”

  “I felt it important to collect them.”

  “Given the number of samples you have collected, what was so important about these two? Oceanside is a disaster—the last thing we need is you down there complicating things.”

  “No offense. Major Doctor, but I decide what is important when it comes to collections.”

  “Was one of the immune Major Eric Vance?”

  “It so happened it was.”

  Major Dr. Barrington made a face. “Were you going to process him too?”

  “It is how we decided to bring the possible latent rot victims out of quarantine.”

  “He is one of us.”

  “He was until he was bitten.”

  “No matter. You need to come in. We will figure out how to deal with Vance later. I suspect he will contact us.”

  “No. I will be staying until we acquire him.”

  “I’m giving you an order.”

  “I am strongly suggesting you rescind this order.”

  “Why?”

  “I believe he knows what
I had in store for him. It is better if this knowledge does not leave the QZ unless in liquid form.”

  “I thought you said he went to try and save his family.”

  “He did, but I have reason to believe he learned of what we are doing.”

  “How?”

  Dr. Talbot did not want to say he may have given away this information when they retrieved another TMRT survivor, or his top man defected, so he replied, “I don’t know, but he does—that I do know.”

  Barrington clearly did not like this. “Let me talk with our people in the know on your operation, and I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, do not do anything that would attract attention. Do not make this worse.”

  The screen went blank before Dr. Talbot could reply.

  Chapter 4

  The SWARC Urban Assault Wagon - Oceanside, CA

  “Corrigan? Are you serious? That dude is the very definition of batshit crazy,” Donna said to Eric Vance as Ana drove the SWARC Urban Assault vehicle through a mostly abandoned Oceanside neighborhood near the long-abandoned marine base Camp Pendleton.

  There were eight of them in the Chevy Suburban. The SUV had been customized by the young, mostly deceased members of SWARC to become the armored Quarantine Zone-ready Urban Assault Wagon.

  Vance had worked his way from quarantined San Francisco to newly quarantined Oceanside when he learned his ex-wife, Donna, and fourteen-year-old daughter, Katelin, were trapped in the Quarantine Zone.

  While he was working his way south, Donna and Katelin had hooked up with a drunken sailor who went by the name Barnacle Bill, or Bar for short, and a group of twenty-somethings who called themselves the South West Apocalypse Response Crew. The heavily armed members of SWARC were looking to go into the QZ to the north of Oceanside, in hopes of getting footage of them killing the infected to put on YouTube, when the Quarantine Zone came to them.

  Of the six members of SWARC who came to Oceanside, only two were still living, Ana and Lumpy. Lumpy had not made it unscathed; his left leg was probably broken.

  Also along was the one survivor, a man they knew only as Holiday, who Vance had found on the failed TMRT mission to San Francisco, and Vance’s fellow TMRT soldier Ashley Cope. The last man along was another TMRT soldier, Major Cook. His defection from Dr. Talbot’s rolling convoy of carnage was the main reason any of them were still alive.

  “Given all that has happened, can you really say he was batshit crazy? I would say he may not have been paranoid enough,” Vance told his ex-wife.

  “Are you sure we can’t just make a run for the border?” Ana asked. “We have three members of the TMRT in the car—surely they will let us through. It’s your own people manning the checkpoints.”

  The three TMRT all said no at once.

  “The drones will not recognize us as anything but a threat,” Ashley added.

  “Even if we get past the drones, Dr. Talbot has probably turned our people against us. If he says we are infected, the response will be to shoot first and ask questions later,” Major Cook told everyone.

  “I know this may not apply to the rest of you,” Holiday chimed in, “but from what I’ve heard from the major, there is no guarantee Vance and I won’t be thrown in a blender even if we get out of the QZ.”

  “You don’t think they are doing that outside, do you?” Ana asked.

  “I don’t believe they are,” Major Cook added.

  “If they were, would they tell you about it?” Holiday said.

  “No,” Cook replied.

  “So, what are the options?” Katelin asked. “Do we just stay in the quarantine until it is over?”

  “Not to be a downer,” Lumpy said, “but I don’t think we have enough bullets or food to make it long out here.”

  “We don’t,” Vance said. “That’s why we are going to Corrigan’s.”

  “He have food and bullets?” Lumpy asked.

  “Yeah. More important, he has secure access to the dark web.”

  “You want to order some drugs and hookers, Dad?” Katelin asked.

  “No…”

  “Cocaine and a blow don’t sound good to you right now?”

  While Vance was staring at his kid in disbelief, Bar said, “Sounds good to me.”

  “Don’t say things like that,” Vance said to his daughter.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m your dad.”

  “In name only.”

  “Stop it, Katelin,” Donna said.

  “Go fuck yourself, Mom,” Katelin said before turning to the window to watch some amblers wander through the neighborhood.

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Vance said.

  “Let it go,” Donna told him. “Instead tell us what good Corrigan’s computer will do us.”

  “The major is right. Talbot has too much pull in the TMRT to think we can get out without serious resistance. Talbot doesn’t want us to get out. The shit he pulled with Katelin and Ana would be enough to get him court-martialed even if everyone on the outside is down with his methods, which I suspect they are not.”

  Cook nodded to confirm this. “Part of the agreement for him to do the mission was he keep it on the down-low. It was made clear to us whatever happened in the QZ was to stay there. I wish they had been more clear as to what was going to happen. I would have never come along.”

  “No offense, Major, but I’m glad you did,” Ashley said. “Without you, I don’t think we would have made it this far.”

  “With Corrigan’s setup,” Vance continued, “I can reach out to someone who might be sympathetic to our cause without Talbot or anyone else getting wind of it. If I can get someone on our side to clear the way, then we can get out of this mess. Otherwise, we are likely stuck here.”

  “You sure your friends can get us out?” Ana asked.

  “No.”

  “If his can’t, maybe mine can,” Major Cook said.

  “Either way, we are better off if we can make contact without our conversations being listened to or tracked. Corrigan was big on keeping to himself—he will have the setup to do it,” Vance said.

  “Okay, but won’t this Corrigan guy have been evacuated?” Lumpy asked.

  “No. He has a deep distrust of anything government,” Vance replied.

  “Where do you know this guy from?” Ana asked him.

  “Marines.”

  “So he comes by his skepticism honestly?” Bar said.

  “His skepticism? Sure. His paranoia is at a whole other level,” Vance told him as he pointed out the front window from his spot in the second row of seats. “Turn here, and then take the dirt road on the left.”

  Ana made both turns and started going uphill. Soon they were in an avocado grove with nothing but rows of trees on either side.

  “You sure he is still here?” Donna said. “You haven’t been around this area much lately.”

  “He reaches out from time to time. We’ve kept in touch.”

  “Do you remember his birthday?” Katelin asked. Vance ignored the question. He had apologized for forgetting his daughter’s birthday, but she was not ready to let it go. She wouldn’t like the answer anyway.

  They came to a clearing, and Vance told Ana to stop.

  “You guys wait here. Stay in the car. I need to talk to him first.”

  No one looked too happy to be waiting.

  “We’re up in the hills. In fact, we left Oceanside a while back. I’m pretty sure this is Fallbrook now. Chances are good the infection hasn’t gotten up here. There aren’t a lot of people, and those who are here are spread out,” Vance said as he got out of the vehicle.

  Despite what he said, Vance checked to make sure the magazine on his sidearm was full and went to the back of the Urban Assault Wagon to retrieve his sick-slaying stick. The SSS was issued by the TMRT and worked well when dealing with the slower, less aggressive amblers. One end of the alloy staff was a heavy ball that could be covered with spikes with the press of a button, and the other end had a long, sharp blade, which
could be withdrawn with the push of another button.

  Vance had used some of the precious battery power on his phone to try and contact Corrigan, leaving both a voice mail and sending a text. If Corrigan had received either of them, he had not replied.

  There was a barbed wire fence not far from the road. A pair of signs, one saying “No Trespassing” and another saying “Warning: Intruders enter at their own risk,” was posted. There was no gate by the road. Vance knew from experience there was no gate at all. Visitors had to carefully push the wire down and climb over.

  He moved slow as he approached Corrigan’s bunker, which was set into the hill Vance was walking on. Corrigan likely booby-trapped the path leading to his home tucked in amongst the avocado groves.

  Vance saw the arm first, lying by itself without the rest of the body. It took a while to spot the rest, as the explosive the man had tripped had spread his body all over the small clearing. Someone had already tried to visit Vance’s old pal from the corps and had not known the area was wired to take out intruders.

  He had spotted the first trip wire and was standing still looking for the second when he caught some movement in the trees with his peripheral vision. He turned to see his old friend Corrigan emerge from the trees.

  He was about to say hello when he saw his old friend’s jaw had extended and his eyes were not sitting right in their sockets. His old friend bent down so his elongated arms touched the ground in front of him.

  Vance had seen enough vampire rotters to know this one was about to charge.

  Chapter 5

  The TMRT Eastern Compound - Escondido, CA

  Major Dr. Barrington was not surprised when he received word that General Dr. Thompson was arriving to take over this operation. Things had gone horribly wrong, and even though Barrington had recommended the evacuation take place weeks ago, when the first isolated case of the rot was found, he would take the blame for the massive breakout happening before they could get all but a handful of people out of the area.