Forces of Destiny Read online

  FORCES OF DESTINY

  Book 3

  ROBERT MAXWELL

  Copyright 2017 Author All rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  death horizon

  all remaining military get to washington, d.c.

  confirmation of death

  CRITICAL CARGO

  HUMANITY’S EDEN

  A SILENT SECRET

  CONFIRMED DARKNESS

  ECHO MISSION : THE LAST HOPE

  death horizon

  Classified Underground Medical Facility South East of Fort Richardson, Alaska

  Chapter 1

  Tracy in the dim light of the rubbing alcohol and gauze fire looked down at the undead scientist who she had just put a bullet hole between her eyes. The relief of knowing she had survived that horrendous attack of being hunted naked in the dark was so overwhelming that for a few seconds she forgot about how cold she was. Then the pain of her naked body going into hypothermia risk brought her back to another race for survival.

  Tracy with cold numb hands barely fed more gauze and rubbing alcohol onto the fire. The large hot flame over the next minute started to warm her fingers enough to regain some dexterity. She reached down and pried the frozen medical scrubs off the dead male doctor’s body by her feet. She put them on but they were freezing and caked with blood which was going take a while to thaw from her body heat.

  She made a torch out of a sheet, two bottles of rubbing alcohol and an IV pole. She took a precious thirty seconds to warm her fingers over the torch to get some feeling back in them before she lost all her dexterity to function in this freezing cold. If there were more undead in the facility, the gunshots would have them running her way shortly.

  She ran towards a blinking red light down what she could see by torch light was a hallway. She passed four dead scientists with holes in their heads on her left. Five feet down the hallway there were three scientists with their heads cut off. Tracy thought, how the hell did someone do that? Tracy got close enough to see the red light was on a computer display panel that said the base was running on backup power which was at fifteen percent capacity before running out of fuel.

  Tracy turned the corner and walked past six more dead scientists down a fifty foot hallway but there no more weapons visible on any of the bodies. Tracy thought, I must be holding the handgun of the last armed survivor I found in the base entrance. They were probably trying to get out.

  The hallway turned to the left. As Tracy turned the corner she saw a light on in one of the rooms to the right of the hall. Tracy entered the room which was actually warm. The room was a medical lab with several rows of containment cells for infected patients. One of the containment cells was lit up.

  Tracy was cold, barely armed and scared but her training kicked in. She locked the door she just came through, raised up her handgun and walked up slowly to the clear thick security glass of the lit containment cell. She saw a woman in her fifties in white lab scrubs stained with dried blood lying on a bed. She looked dead but Tracy looked at her chest and could see it rise. The woman’s eyes opened and she sat up startling Tracy who almost shot at the glass before her instinct stopped her finger from pulling the trigger.

  The woman in the containment cell looked just as surprised and she also looked extremely weak. She said, “I am Dr. Ebert the only surviving Arc Light member at this facility. Everyone else is dead or infected. Warn your rescue containment team that there are types of undead loose in this facility we have not seen before.”

  Tracy said, “Dr. Ebert, there is no containment team it is just me but I can protect us both. What is your medical status? How can I help you?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “All the team members became infected. None of us understood because we have the best and most classified containment technology in the world. I was the last one left and then I became infected. I realized I had a day or two so I poured everything into creating a test antimicrobial from our best chance for a cure that seventy medical scientists had been researching. I injected myself with the test vaccine which is our last chance to fight this infection with everyone in labs everywhere dead. We have tried everything else and failed.”

  Tracy asked, “What do you mean by labs everywhere?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “This facility not only did classified research towards a cure, we had intelligence teams working with the CIA that had infiltrated into every major medical facility in the world. We also had teams in the secret biological facilities in the world of Russia, Iran, and China. One by one the labs fell. All the scientists in those labs either quit showing up for work or they became infected. All research discoveries about the infection across the world got funneled to this facility.”

  Tracy asked, “How are you feeling with the antimicrobial you took?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “I have been taking blood tests every two hours from a blood analyzer in this cell that gets fed to our central medical diagnosis computer. The test results show I am getting weaker but my white blood cell count is up meaning this may have been a major breakthrough in combating the pathogen’s suppression of the immune system. We tried over a thousand genetic engineered antimicrobials but the pathogen always was able to take over the immune system almost instantly and shut it off.”

  Dr. Ebert said, “Something is terribly wrong. I have never seen this in any of our hundreds of thousands of tests of the pathogen. Look, the infection switched from using a viral form to spread itself to using both viral and bacterial infections in the body.”

  Tracy said, “The intelligence of the pathogen is creating a rapid adaptation. Look at the mutation rate. The blood analysis results show a four minute mutation rate in both bacteria and virus strains.”

  Dr. Ebert said, “With that rate of mutation, even if we matched the new strain with a new antiviral or antibiotic the strain mutates in minutes to protect itself. Nothing we have today in medicine exists to match that level of rapid mutation.”

  Dr. Ebert could feel the weight of devastation on her already weakened state of mind from the infection. Even with all the technology at this Arc Light facility, it would take years to study the source of the mutation to try and reverse engineer a matching genetic technology and then they would have to invent new medical manufacturing from scratch to produce it at a test level let alone synthesize enough doses for the survivors. This pathogen was a darkness on humanity spiraling out of control and growing stronger. She reflected on how she gave everything along with hundreds of the smartest minds in the world and their only counterstrike against the pathogen was to reactivate the immune system it shut off. Yet the pathogen was silently waiting to reveal its next danger almost like an intelligence being waiting in ambush for its attacker. She thought, how many secrets does the zombie pathogen have left in reserve?

  Tracy said, “We found the source of the infection with the Russians using it as a biological weapon. The origin of the infection should have allowed us to reverse engineer a cure?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “My blood analysis shows our premise was wrong that we found patient zero in Chechnya who was infected by the KGB. We had several Arc Light reconnaissance teams try over and over until they found the body of the original infected patient.”

  Tracy asked, “We captured a Spetsnaz colonel that we thought gave us false intelligence that the KGB did not create the infection but they found it in a dormant pathogen and then weaponized it by replicating it. Now it appears he was telling the truth.”

  Dr. Ebert said, “Even if we found the true origin of the pathogen we don’t have the medical technology to reverse engineer a cure against an infection with these many vectors of attack. We looked at the DNA level of the pathogen and was unable to see it had random mutation abilities or the ability to go the r
oute of viral and bacterial. My guess is the pathogen is hiding its ability to use fungal, proteins or other parasites to spread the infection. The Russians were the first to find one form of this infection, they didn’t create it so we wasted our time and all our hope on a false lead.”

  Dr. Ebert sat in silence with a look of hopelessness. After a minute her eyes looked up at Tracy and she said, “I remember one piece of research that might be helpful to warn the military. We found that at the smallest particle level, quantum events were mutating DNA in one of the zombies to make its body function in extreme ways we have only seen evolve in the animal kingdom like the Axolotl salamander who can regrow its head, brain, and adapt other body parts from other Axolotl. Salmon that can sense magnetic fields. Or rare spiders in the Amazon who genetically evolved that made their webs which are stronger than steel, even stronger by modifying the protein structures in their silk. There may be a mutation in one of the undead out there that is the reason behind reports that it is not killed by headshots to the skull.”

  Tracy made a mental note to get this out to the military command the first chance she got. Tracy thought, she is starting to fade emotionally. Get her mind to focus.

  Tracy said, “You pushed the boundaries of medicine with the Arc Light medical program. There was nothing left to give in effort. I saw the medical records of you successfully transplanting DNA. You were able to successfully grow skin on burn patients with stem cells. You solved the key problems with the brain transplant procedure giving three patients a chance to live. Those types of leaps would have never been imagined. You made a difference in history. This infection is just unprecedented in anything we have ever seen.”

  Dr. Ebert was recalling vivid memories of the past weeks.

  She said, “When we had patients that were brain dead but their bodies were uninfected, Dr. Lambert pushed for authorization to attempt a brain transplant of a candidate with an infected body but their brain was clear of infection. At first, everyone was disgusted by doing that to someone without consent. Then many of the doctors realized Dr. Lambert knew how bad the situation was with the pandemic. He was grasping at extreme measures before the rest of us because he saw we were hitting a dead end with reverse engineering a cure. He knew that to save the patient, you would have to scrap the body and only save the brain like the civil war doctors only being able to save lives by cutting off whole limbs.”

  Tracy in disbelief asked, “How did the first brain transplant patient react at the news?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “We never told them. They lived for three days. One other lived longer but we never told them.”

  Tracy could see the regret on Dr. Ebert’s face and wanted to change the topic quickly.

  Tracy asked, “What do you know of the research on the computer here on the pandemic concentrations. The infected were spread out at first but they then started concentrating in major cities like LA and Chicago but their migration routes stayed away from some town or random places?”

  Dr. Ebert said, “Dr. Baram studied the pandemic patterns using low orbit satellite scans where he found traces of some type of radiation. He had a hypothesis that there was a pattern of attraction or repelling to these locations that had to do with radiation signatures. I heard his report briefly at one of the daily research update meetings with all the doctors but I was so busy with my project to find a cure the research teams didn’t have time to cross-link their findings. Especially as the staff started to get infected one by one. When I finally had time to look into his patterns I contacted him but they said he was evacuated by an Arc Light operator but their destination was classified. The facility said this operator, Vince Jackson asked if you were at the facility or if anyone knew if you were still alive.”

  Tracy was in shock as she thought, where the hell did Vince, Tracy’s Partner that had left her for some other mission, go to? Why is Dr. Baram so valuable?

  Tracy asked, “What is Dr. Baram’s specialty?”

  Dr. Ebert was in pain and had trouble catching her breath.

  Dr. Ebert said, “I don’t know. Please listen this is important. I have seen every stage of this infection. It’s terrifying once you really know its lifecycle. I brought a handgun into this cell to end my life if the cure did not work but my hands are numb, I can’t move them.” Her voice started to break into a begging, “I can’t even kill myself. I am trapped in my helpless body. Please, please listen very carefully. There is a containment button that will trigger a burn protocol in this cell. Hit it right now, please!”

  Tracy said, “What about the chance of you entering a coma?”

  Dr. Ebert begging said, “There is no chance at a cure! Hit the button, please for the love of God! I don’t want this infection to kidnap my existence. I’ve seen it decimate thousands of patients we studied.”

  Dr. Ebert had to catch her breath and fight through the pain to speak.

  Dr. Ebert fighting to speak between breaths said, “I promised myself when I was at the edge of losing control that I would use the gift to choose death as the one final solution. Follow the logic as a scientist and give me this. Please press the button!”

  Tracy was in disbelief and thought, the intelligence of the infection beat the best medical research in the world. Humanity got complacent and thought it had won against its environment, believing it could cure anything with money and technology. Now the oldest universal event of using death to cure intolerable pain was the only logical solution Dr. Ebert was begging for. The only tool left for her was to end everything. This is almost like suicide.

  Tracy realized the cruelest form of mercy was through administering death. Tracy could no longer think about the tragedy unfolding in front of her with the news that the infection overtook humanity and the suffering of Dr. Ebert so she got up to press the containment button. Tracy could see Dr. Ebert’s eyes follow her movement and her face showed a relief her horror was going to be over.

  Tracy was overcome by the absolute loss as tears rolled down her face and said, “Dr. Ebert, I honor everything you gave inside yourself to serve humanity, even sacrificing your life for one last chance of a cure,” Tracy’s emotions of pure respect for this level of sacrifice of all the elite Arc Light medical researchers who died overwhelmed her ability to speak as tears were the only communication she could perform. The weight and realization of all the death sweeping over a defenseless humanity fed the waves of raw emotion drowning her ability to speak. She could only feel her body convulse and cry in a consuming existence of emotional loss.

  Tracy regained enough control to speak again to ensure Dr. Ebert knew what her sacrifice meant. Tracy said with a totality of her being, “I promise you….that service to humanity will live on inside me to honor your life.”

  Tracy could see the despair in Dr. Ebert’s eyes from the fear of death but she also wanted the flames to come and rescue her from the horror inside her. Tracy thought with a horror, the pain of Dr. Ebert’s body is suffocating her consciousness. I do not want Dr. Ebert to die with her last thoughts drowning in fear. Not after everything she sacrificed for the world.

  Tracy had a poem inside of her that was forged from years of fighting in combat and facing the raw pain of death first hand. She had never shared with another human being before the words of her poem that were deeply seared into her memory, her very being. She only spoke to God about her poem when the pain of humanity hurting each other overwhelmed her. Tracy with tears running down her eyes said,

  “We are drunk with pain

  As our minds burst with fever like burning rain

  Sorrow asks of us what shall we do?

  The pain within yearns for healing power that feels true

  Why stay in our prisons full of pains?

  When the doors are so open to our soul’s healing domains

  Where we enter and dance in endless love with no bounds

  Grieving only with joy from the support that surrounds

  For in our soul’s deep silence we awaken to sing
>
  With all the truth its power brings

  With all of its loving feelings

  With all of its powerful healings

  With all that has ever been and will ever be freeing

  So together we sing with rejoice

  With transformation of a brilliant divine

  voice”

  Tracy looked at Dr. Ebert’s eyes cry with an overwhelming feeling of inner peace as her mind shed the pain of her infected body and claimed the depth of her soul’s love. Dr. Ebert’s head started to nod in contemplation of the raw power of hope and inner peace radiating forth from Tracy reciting each word of the poem with a meaning only someone speaking from their soul could convey. Dr. Ebert was focusing every fiber of her consciousness in her last few seconds on the deeper meaning of her life beyond all her struggles.

  Dr. Ebert’s lips whispered, “together we sing with rejoice.”

  Dr. Ebert had connected to every word Tracy poured from her heart with purity in these final seconds and in exchange was rewarded with a feeling of being wrapped in the warmth of humanity during the most precious last few seconds of her life.

  Tracy pressed the containment button and watched the flames with a merciful warmth cleanse whatever was left of Dr. Ebert’s pain from her consciousness as Dr. Ebert held her hand out in a final gesture of sharing the connection of the human spirit even during the worst horror of humanity’s existence. Tracy had her hand pressed hard against the containment window, her heart straining to send Dr. Ebert every ounce of love to help her with the end of her physical journey and the beginning of her deeper journey after this life. Inside of Tracy the emotional flames of humanity driven to the brink of extinction consumed every thought and feeling of her being as she realized the enormity of seven billion people fading from existence forever.