Resurrection Read online

  Altered Genes

  Resurrection

  Mark Kelly

  Barking Dog Productions

  © 2016 by Mark K. Kelly. All rights reserved-V1.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9947405-1-9

  Cover art by: Aero Gallerie

  A huge debt of gratitude is due to my wife, Anna, for supporting my indulgence and allowing me the time and opportunity to write.

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  * * *

  This is the third book in the Altered Genes Trilogy.

  * * *

  Altered Genes : Genesis

  Altered Genes : Revelations

  Altered Genes : Resurrection

  Contents

  1. Prologue

  2. Getting ready

  3. Seeing the general

  4. Are you leaving?

  5. A home on the road

  6. I guess we’re staying

  7. Petit Henri

  8. She needs help

  9. A gift

  10. There’s no one left

  11. A real mish-mash

  12. Down the river

  13. The daughter of light

  14. Don’t bother

  15. A way across

  16. How much for ticket?

  17. Where did you find that?

  18. Condolences

  19. Back across the river

  20. Paid in Full

  21. It Will Never Be Enough

  22. I See Them

  23. You’re Late

  24. Making Spores

  25. Orphans

  26. The Clinic

  27. Do you think I am stupid?

  28. They took her

  29. Back at Base

  30. Lets Trade

  31. There already is a cure

  32. I want to leave

  33. Bad weather

  34. Where’s Saanvi

  35. A close call

  36. I’m so cold

  37. You can do this

  38. No more saline solution

  39. Time to leave

  40. Found a clue

  41. A snowy owl

  42. Are you a local?

  43. A glint of metal

  44. Not very epic

  45. Pile of dirt

  46. Missed opportunity

  47. A bus ride

  48. Moths to a flame

  49. We all die

  50. Merry Christmas

  51. Rise from the ashes

  52. Afterword

  1

  Prologue

  “Brinng…Brinng…”

  John Raine looked over at the dingy brown wooden bookshelf in astonishment. The Iridium Satellite phone sitting on the top shelf was ringing and vibrating in its charging station.

  He craned his neck and stared at it, unsure if his ears were deceiving him. It had to be Baker. Only Baker and the other hunter-killer team leaders had this number, and everyone but Baker had dropped off the face of the earth months ago.

  Raine jumped up from his chair, snatched the phone from its charging station. The LCD displayed:

  Incoming Call

  Private

  He pressed the green answer button and spoke into the phone. “Baker? Where the hell have you been? You better have good news. Is Simmons dead?”

  There was the rustling of wind noise and then the sound of someone beginning to speak.

  Call Disconnected

  “Damn it.”

  Using the keypad, Raine fumbled through the directory until he found Baker’s number. He pressed re-dial and waited.

  Call Failed

  Frustrated, he tried once more, and then again before a knock on the door distracted him. Annoyed by the interruption, Raine placed the sat-phone back in its cradle and made a note to try Baker later.

  “It’s not locked,” Raine grumbled, sitting down behind his desk.

  His office door opened and a head popped through the crack. It was the colonel’s errand boy; a snot-nosed private with a crew-cut that showed every bump on his malformed skull.

  The kid looks like one of the inbreds from the movie Deliverance, Raine thought as he stared transfixed by the odd sight.

  “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but Colonel Pickett says you gotta switch offices. He needs this space. 2nd ID is back.”

  “What do you mean back?” Raine asked in disbelief. The 2nd Infantry Division had been based at Camp Red Cloud in the city of Uijeongbu, South Korea. As far as Raine knew, they had all been killed when the North Koreans went nuclear in retaliation for the American attack on their infrastructure.

  The private grinned like a cheshire cat. “The colonel got approval from the vice-president to send a Herc over to pick up what’s left of them—Seventy-three are coming back,” he added proudly.

  Raine shook his head in disgust. Seventy-three out of ten thousand—what a monumental waste of resources. Only the army with their stupid ‘leave no man behind’ creed would do something as dumb as sending a C-130 Hercules aircraft seven thousand miles around the globe to pick up a bunch of grunts.

  “It was the right thing to do, sir,” the private said unapologetically. “We look after our own.”

  Raine grunted. “Hmmph, why here? Why not Fort Hood or Bragg or even Campbell?”

  “There’s nowhere else to put the men, sir. Hood and Bragg are full, and Fort Campbell was quarantined a few days ago. The bug got inside the fence.”

  The bug—Raine hated the term. That was Alice’s fault. The C. diff bacteria she genetically altered for the false-flag operation against the North Koreans wasn’t supposed to mutate. It was only supposed to infect a single hospital in England and then die off leaving just enough evidence to pin the outbreak on the Koreans. But the bacteria was unstoppable. It spread like wildfire and everything went to shit.

  At first, the president showed restraint, but as the pandemic spread, he authorized non-nuclear cruise missile strikes on all of the known ROK leadership bunkers in retaliation for what he thought they had done. Unfortunately, the missile strikes missed the bunker Dear Leader was cowering in, and the North Koreans retaliated with what was left of their nuclear arsenal.

  In total, twelve thousand American troops and nearly seventy-five thousand civilians died. After that, the president had no choice. He retaliated with a single 1.2 megaton B83 nuke, and Kim Jong-il and most of the residents of Pyongyang were killed instantly.

  None of that mattered to Raine. As long as he and Alice were safe, he couldn’t care less about anyone else; including what was left of the 2nd ID.

  “Tell the colonel, I’m too busy to move,” he said dismissively. He opened a report on his desk and pretended to read it.

  “Does the colonel know about that, sir?”

  Raine glanced up at the private who had a smug grin on his face.

  “About what?”

  “That.”

  The man pointed to the sat-phone’s charging station. Its green LED blinked on and off, indicating it was using valuable electricity to charge the phone’s battery.

  Raine grimaced.

  Unauthorized use of electricity was
a crime under the recently revised Uniform Code of Military justice. The sat-phone didn’t take much juice, but he had never bothered to get approval and even he wasn’t immune to the colonel’s wrath.

  Raine stood up and puffed out his chest as he spoke. “You know who I am, right? That phone is the only way to communicate with the men who are risking their lives to hunt down Simmons.”

  Everyone on base—perhaps everyone in the entire world—knew who Professor Tony Simmons was. Raine had made sure of it by spreading the lie whenever he had the opportunity. Simmons was the man who had started the pandemic. The man responsible for the largest genocide in the history of mankind.

  Conflicted, the private scratched his cheek for a second and then spoke. “I hope you get the bastard, sir. He deserves to die, but you still need to get a certificate of approval for the phone from Colonel Pickett.”

  “I will, private. I’ll head over to his office right now,” Raine lied. He had no intention of groveling to Pickett. The man was a stickler for rules, the type of person Raine took great delight in ignoring.

  “Okay, that’s great, sir, but I’m still supposed to report anything I see.”

  Raine stood and stepped out from behind his desk. “I’ll get a certificate. Let’s just keep this between the two of us for now. No need to get the colonel involved. I’m sure he has bigger things to worry about.”

  Raine held out his arms and ushered the private out of his office. He shut the door and hurried back to his desk. He had to call Alice and tell her the good news. The call on the sat phone must mean Baker’s alive and hopefully Simmons is dead.

  Raine reached for the black rotary phone that sat on the corner of his desk. The phone, a relic from the 1960’s, was connected via a hard-wired land-line to the National Bio and Agro-Defense BSL4 lab, where the USA had relocated its research on the pandemic bacteria when Fort Detrick became too dangerous. Even though the lab was only one hundred and twenty-five miles north of McConnell Air Force Base, Raine didn’t go there very often. Life on the base was safer and more comfortable.

  He picked up the handset and tapped his finger impatiently on the desk while he waited for someone in the lab to answer.

  “Lab here,” a muffled voice said.

  “It’s John Raine, get me Dr. Mayer.”

  “She’s running a PCR right now.”

  “I don’t care if she’s running a marathon, go get her,” Raine snapped.

  A minute later, Alice Mayer came onto the phone. “What is it, John? We’re starting to make progress locating the mutation. Another few months and we might have something to trial. I was in the middle of sequencing a—”

  “Good news, Alice. Baker called.”

  Her voice quivered and trailed off as she spoke. “Did he find Tony? Is he…”

  She can’t even bring herself to say it, Raine thought. “I don’t know if Simmons is dead. I hope so. That would be good news, wouldn’t it?”

  “What if it isn’t good news, John? What if he’s still alive and has told someone what we did?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Alice. Of course, it’s good news. Why else would Baker have called?”

  2

  Getting ready

  Mei stood on the porch watching the soldiers heave the mattress up and into the back of the green five-ton truck. It was the same mattress Baker had carried down the stairs for his partner Taxson to die on a month earlier, but Taxson hadn’t died, and now the mattress, along with all the rest of their household belongings, was going to the lab in Chalk River.

  “Will you miss it?” Simmons asked her.

  “Miss what?”

  “The house.”

  She turned to him and shook her head. “No, it was never really home—more like a place to stay while we figured things out, but I want to make sure we leave it as we found it. It’s the right thing to do.”

  She didn’t mention the farmhouse’s owners, Barb and Don. They were dead, but if she and Lucia hadn’t met the elderly couple in the parking lot outside New York City, they would never have come to Canada and God only knows what would have happened.

  Her eyes left Simmons, and she pulled her sweater closer, buttoning it to ward off the chill in the air. It was mid-October and six months had passed since the pandemic swept the world. But here in the countryside, it was Fall. The leaves on the trees lining the laneway were in the midst of changing. She stared at them, entranced by the patchwork of brilliant colors—scarlet, maroon, pale yellow, all blending together into something beautiful.

  “Hey, Doc, what do you want me to do with these?” a soldier yelled from the side of the house ruining the quiet of the moment. He held out a cardboard box and looked at her.

  Before she could ask what was in the box, Dines, the female soldier in charge of the squad, beat her to it.

  “What d'ya got?”

  “Carrots…from the garden out back.”

  “Jesus, what are you—Bugs fucking Bunny?” Dines muttered. “Put ‘em in the truck with the other stuff.”

  Mei smiled. She remembered chasing Samantha’s daughter, Callie, across the backyard in the dead of the night after she caught the little girl stealing carrots. Maybe those same carrots.

  She turned as the screen door opened and then slammed shut behind her.

  “I don’t understand why I can’t stay here,” Emma whined as she walked across the porch and stood beside Simmons. “Not everyone is moving to the lab.”

  By not everyone, Mei knew Emma meant the McNees—especially Brandon McNee, the handsome nineteen-year-old son of the local mayor. Samantha and Callie were staying with the McNees, and Emma would have given her right arm to stay there too.

  “You know why, Emma,” Simmons said. “We need your help at the lab. As people are inoculated against the pandemic C. diff, some will be allowed into the lab facility. We need to keep the kids busy with something and school is as good as anything.”

  He winked at Mei and added, “You’ll be able to come back and visit with Samantha and Callie in the spring when they re-open the local school.”

  Emma placed her hands on her hips and glared at him. “Geez—it’s not fair. Do you know how long it is until spring?”

  Mei and Simmons broke out into laughter, stopping as a pair of dull-green off-road motorcycles raced up the driveway. As the bikes skidded to a halt, their rear wheels slid sideways, kicking up gravel and a small dust storm. Even with the full face helmets and mirrored visors, Mei recognized Baker and Lucia. Lucia was wearing her standard attire of jeans and a t-shirt with a faded jean jacket. Baker wore a pair of khaki pants and a flannel shirt.

  For the last month, the two of them had been taking longer and longer trips into the surrounding countryside as Baker taught Lucia how to ride the motorcycle; and more importantly, how to survive the difficult conditions they would face on the road.

  Baker pulled off his helmet. He ran his hand through his tousled hair, patting it down.

  “Your hair is fine, pretty boy,” Lucia teased as she removed her own helmet. “And by the way—I won.”

  “It was a tie,” Baker shot back.

  “Not even close.”

  Mei shook her head. With Lucia and Baker, everything was a competition.

  “What are you guys up to?” she asked.

  “Just getting in one last practice run,” Baker said. “She’s a fast learner. For someone who had never been on a bike until a month ago, she’s doing pretty well.”

  “Excuse me…Excuse me…Coming through,” a voice called out from behind Mei.

  She stepped aside as a young soldier walked out of the house, his arms overflowing with boxes of clothing stacked precariously on top of each other.

  “Holy cow, you stink,” Emma said as he passed by her.

  “Emma!”

  “Well, he does,” Emma said defensively. “He smells like my car after I’ve been to a McDonald’s drive-thru.”

  Mei brought a hand up to cover her smile. He did smell like stale french fries an
d fast-food. All the soldiers did.

  “You can thank him for that,” Dines said, reappearing from inside the house and nodding towards Simmons. “Him and fucking Abrams. They’re the ones that sent us out to collect all that used cooking oil and crap.” She pointed to the steel drums pushed up against the back of the truck’s cab and said, “We’ve been all over hell’s half-acre draining oil from every damn restaurant fryer we could find.”

  Simmons frowned and gave Dines an indignant look. “I’ll have you know that cooking oil will fuel your trucks once we convert it into biodiesel.”

  Dines shrugged back at him. “Just means more work, Professor. I liked it better when you stuck to making moonshine. At least, we could drink that.”

  The soldier carrying the boxes stumbled and Dines grabbed his arm, steadying him. “Don’t you fucking drop that or I’ll give you a swift kick in the ass. Go put it in the truck and get the rest of their stuff.”

  “Already on it, Sarge.”

  “Sarge—since when?” Baker asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Dines grinned broadly at him. “Since yesterday. Abrams too.”

  “So, Abrams got his crown after all.”