Rage by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

THE LAB

IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS

TWENTY-FIVE NAUTICAL MILES FROM NORTH KOREA

SEA OF JAPAN

The barge was big and flat and full of people who looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from that old Ghostbusters movie. White or yellow hazmat suits, each with its own air tanks. Lots of bulky equipment. Lots of people with guns, too. And four tower-mounted flamethrowers aimed at a dedicated quarantine space on one end.

The exfiltration chopper had been a bulky Chinook that lowered a metal box like a shipping container. We could not risk using the RHIB to come out here because it couldn’t be easily sterilized, so once we were all in the container and lifting off, I triggered its self-destruct mechanism. It’s now a lump of unidentifiable slag.

The container they lowered was, in fact, a high-end biohazard unit. We put the zippered corpses into a cold box, and put Sergeant Chung and a very nervous Andrea into isolation cubicles. The drone was isolated in a big plastic box. Havoc Team was strapped into seats with our Hammer Suits on and sealed, while the Chinook flew us to the barge. No one spoke much, though I switched to a secure channel directly to the TOC. Because the hoods of the Hammer Suits are not completely soundproof, I was careful about what I said, and mostly gave them observer’s impressions to enhance the telemetry and video feeds from the drones.

On the other hand, Doc and Church were free to be as chatty as they wanted. For Church, that wasn’t very much. Doc, on the other hand, is a horse of a different color. She asked about a thousand questions. She asked about skin color and lividity for both the dead and the little girl prior to her death. She had me verify that the girl spoke. This seemed to bother her quite a lot, and she asked me to go over the scene moment by moment.

“It was all on the video,” I said. “You can watch the playback.”

“You were on the ground, honey-cheeks,” she said. Doc is like that. She is about a standard light-year away from being politically correct, and yet her comments never felt all that insulting. Not sure why. I’d need to get Rudy to decode it for me. “Tell it to me the way you saw it. Give me all of it, darlin’. Put me in the moment.”

And so I did.

I closed my eyes and was back there on the village street, and I told her everything. She did not interrupt. When I was done, she let out a long, sad sigh.

“I’ll get back to you,” she said, unhelpfully.

I omitted the conversation I’d had with Ho. That would be something to share with Church later on.

The Chinook lowered the biohazard unit onto the barge with only a mild thump, then dropped the cables and flew off. The WHO team, supplemented by hot zone veterans from all four countries, closed around us, blasting the outside of the unit with high-pressure sprays that were designed to kill any living thing, even prions, which are notoriously hard to kill.

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