Page 5 of Chaos Destiny
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 thepsychiatry 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 anybad 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.
3
GAGE
Several Months Later
