Chapter 2
2
GAGE WOLFE
I checked my phone for the third time in the last ten minutes, but there weren’t any new notifications. As much hell as I’d given Julien over the years, there was no way the kid wouldn’t show up for the birth of his first child.
However, Julien’s plane should have landed at DCA at least three hours ago. While traffic could get bad in the D.C. area, it was nothing like the West Coast congestion I experienced that couldn’t be cleared with the strongest dose of Sudafed.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Ari.
She looked at me from the hospital bed with glazed-over eyes, her brown skin ashen. Then she sent me a nod of reassurance—as if I couldn’t see what she looked like. As if we haven’t known each other since childhood, so I’d know from a glance when she was in a great deal of pain.
I stood, the fabric of my jeans brushing the side of the thin mattress. “I’m going to find someone. No one’s been in here in over a half hour.”
While I knew labor pain, in itself, didn’t usually lead to anything fatal in modern times, I couldn’t stand seeing her like this. Plus, depending on the severity of the pain, there could be complications, which we would have known if someone came to the room more than once every blue moon.
“Don’t shoot anybody,” she said.
I smiled and gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “No promises.”
Initially, I was supposed to be in Atlanta. My corporation was bidding on a government contract to build new offices on the southern edge of the CDC campus. All the finalists had been invited on a private tour of where the structures would be located, but the meeting was canceled at the last minute, and no tentative date was set for a rescheduled showing. Then, two days ago, the application closed without warning.
Julien was called out of town for an emergency. As he often liaised as an analyst with the federal government, they’d plugged their ears when he told them he had a baby due any day now.
So, I flew to the DMV area to be with Ari.
The very same week, she went into labor.
I stepped out into the hallway, quietly shutting the door behind me. Images of babies in large frames decorated the yellow walls, and it never made sense to me why so many hospitals shied away from grays and blues. The mustard-colored paint gave me sensory overload, so I could only imagine its effect on someone in active labor.
Another door opened, and a man stepped out. At first, he looked down the hall, but then he swung his gaze in my direction. It was too late for me to turn around, so when he called out to me, I had little choice but to respond.
“Have you seen the doctor?” he asked. “Or even a nurse? My wife’s in pain, and they promised someone was coming right away, but that was a half hour ago.”
More doors opened, and it dawned on me how eerily empty the corridor had been before the first guy stepped out. Hospital traffic could wax and wane, yet it was almost as if nobody was there but the patients and their guests.
“I’m on my way to see what’s going on,” I said.
He pointed at me. “Coming with you, buddy.”
I started to tell him that no one had invited him to tag along, but I gave him some leeway because of the uniqueness of the situation.
We headed for the nurse’s station only to find that empty as well. The man, who’d introduced himself as Greg, tossed up his hands.
“Well, this is just rich.”
A faint voice sounded from far off.
“What kind of hospital?—”
“Mate.” I shot him a glare. “Quiet.”
I followed the voice to a room on the other side of the hallway, where it seemed like all the floor staff had gathered. Some cried and held each other, while others stared at their phones. The rest were huddled around the TV.
Behind me, Greg huffed. “Hey, what’s going on here? My salary pays the taxes that help run this hospital, so you guys need to be?—”
“Mate, put a fucking sock in it,” I hissed.
If he’d let what I was sure were too-tight briefs out of his ass for a moment, he’d be able to assess the room first to avoid asking questions whose answers were right in front of him.
I went closer to the TV, pulling out my phone at the same time to check on Ari, but I stopped in the middle of pressing her name in my contacts list when I noticed the headline:
IS THIS THE END AS WE KNOW IT?
Two newscasters looked into the camera as if they’d stared death in the face somewhere in the studio seconds before. One had tears and snot dripping from her chin. Another’s hand trembled so aggressively, he had to set down his sheet of paper. Generally, anchors remained emotionally neutral when delivering news for the benefit of the public. Unfortunately, these two looked like they couldn’t even if they tried.
“As of right now, we don’t know what it is,” the male anchor said. “No official statement has been released yet from the CDC or The White House, but we’ve received reports of it sweeping through a hospital ward in Florida.”
I snorted.
Of course.
Fucking Florida.
“In addition, viewers have been submitting videos we’ve just received permission to share. Please be advised that the content you’re about to view is extremely graphic.”
The screen cut to a video shot by a phone camera lens. The angle suggested that the person was hiding, more than likely underneath a desk, and the feed was shakier than a Cloverfield movie. However, that stopped being of any concern to me the moment I saw one human, growling and foaming at the mouth, take a bite out of another human.
Blood squirted.
People screamed, slipping as the fluid covered the floor.
Some were in obvious terror, while others looked, for lack of a better word, rabid. Their eyes had lost all sentience, their skin had taken on a blue-gray hue, and they appeared as if they now had only one purpose in life—to consume.
“It’s here.”
We turned.
A man wearing glitter-covered pink scrubs and unicorn ears appeared in the doorway.
“It’s on the pediatrics floor,” he said, breathing hard. “Another nurse told us about an hour ago that it was in the psychiatry wing, but we thought it was a patient with psychosis. It’s not. It’s here.”
The lights went out, blanketing the floor in darkness. The backup generators immediately kicked in, illuminating the hallways with dim emergency lighting.
I pushed through the bodies slowly collecting in panic, and I tried Julien again as I headed back to Ari. All I got was dead air, the networks undoubtedly overwhelmed by frantic calls.
I burst into the room.
Ari looked up at me from her phone screen and then turned it toward me. It was another video, much like the one I’d seen earlier. Only, this person managed to be live-streaming.
“Gage, have you seen this?”
“I just did,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s going on.”
It was a half-truth.
Back when I worked as an elite covert operative, my unit encountered something similar. We received a briefing about what had been deemed an “Ebola-level” threat identified in the Northern Hemisphere. At the time, there had been only one report of an infection, as the individual was immediately quarantined. However, we had already started prepping for a doomsday protocol.
“I know this is probably a stupid question,” Ari began, “but are we safe here?”
“It’s not a stupid question,” I reassured her. “And I don’t know. A pediatric nurse said that whatever this is, it might be here.”
“Here in D.C. or here in the hospital?”
I didn’t want to tell her, but she’d accused me multiple times of treating her like a little sister while I treated her twin as an equal. However, Mo and Ari were vastly different. Ari technically was the less dominant twin. When we were kids, I told Mo any bad news I had to share first as sort of a funnel or filter because she was better at communicating with Ari than I was.
“In the hospital,” I said.
Ari bowed her head, grimacing as she gripped the bed rail. I wished I could do something to take some of the pain of each contraction—anything to make this experience a little less difficult for her. Depending on how today went, she might wind up bringing a life into the world at the exact moment there was no longer a world to offer her baby.
When the contraction ended, sweat dripped down her face, and the curly hair on her head started to frizz. Before she could catch her breath, another one came, so powerful that she tried to grit her teeth and bear it, but she screamed out in pain. Two that close back to back meant the baby was coming.
Someone knocked on the door.
I ripped it open to find the nurse from before, in the pink scrubs, standing on the other side. Although he hadn’t mentioned working in obstetrics, I was sure he would be able to help deliver a baby. My military medical training hadn’t covered that particular subject.
“Mate, am I glad to see you,” I said. “We could really use your…”
Slowly, I picked up on the ashen look to his skin, the veins in his neck more visible than they should have been. I noticed the lifeless eyes and a dark substance smeared his face, concentrated around his lips.
Then he snarled.
And charged.
Behind me, Ari screamed.