Troop of Shadows Read online

  At least for a while longer.

  Even though every person on the planet possessed the DNA molecule responsible for the widespread deaths, not everyone’s were self-actuating...yet. Those in whom it had, were dead within a day or two.

  When it happened, it was quick and catastrophic. The vascular system became inflamed and blood flow to vital organs grew restricted. Death from suffocation or kidney failure occurred mere hours after the first sign of chills and fatigue. The speed with which the body responded to the directive given by the gene was unprecedented, and any therapies they might develop to battle it would take months or years. Director Frieden knew from his research that at the rate the illness was occurring in the population, they would never beat it in time. Fate had placed him at the helm of the Centers for Disease Control during the most significant event in human history.

  Its demise.

  Chapter 1

  Colleyville, Texas

  October 2017 (Now)

  Damn it, she would ditch the backpack. She could come back tomorrow night for it, but right now staying alive outweighed any future benefit its contents might provide. As her pursuers rounded the corner behind her, she darted across the front lawn of a house and leaped over a cluster of dead juniper shrubs. A year ago, those shrubs had been green, manicured, and providing curb appeal to the upscale neighborhood; they functioned now as a hurdle component in the obstacle course Dani navigated on most nights.

  She angled toward the side of the house and around the corner, only to come to an abrupt stop next to a six-foot barricade. Residents of these sprawling bedroom communities situated between Dallas and Fort Worth clung to their privacy fences as fiercely as their rural counterparts did to their firearms. Why all those day-trading dads and cheerleader moms required such secrecy was beyond Dani; maybe they tortured small animals or had orgies in their swimming pools. She didn’t care. All that mattered was how difficult they made her nightly forages. Only idiots or people with a death wish traveled alone on the streets anymore. The clever ones navigated through backyards and drainage ditches, shadowed easements and alleyways, avoiding open spaces and other humans.

  Especially humans traveling in groups.

  Stealth and caution were second nature to her now, and she was pissed at herself for loading up the backpack with more weight than she could easily carry at a full run.

  Rookie mistake.

  She flung the pack into the undergrowth of a once meticulous garden, making a mental note of the enormous red tip photinia which camouflaged the bundle in a leafy shroud. She hoped to be alive the next day to retrieve it.

  She clambered up the fence, finding a toehold on a warped plank, and squirmed over the top. A silver fingernail of a moon did little to illuminate the backyard. Weak starlight reflected off the inky surface of a half-empty, kidney-shaped swimming pool. Her Nikes gripped the concrete deck as she skirted the murky water and made a beeline for the back of the yard that was, of course, separated from its neighbor by a privacy fence. It was a tall one too — a full ten feet. There were no bushes or trees to use for leverage either. She scanned the area for anything that might serve as a step ladder.

  Of all the yards she could have chosen for her escape, she’d picked one with a goddamn ten-foot fence.

  Her heart raced from the sprint, but not from panic. Gone was the young woman from a year ago — the full-time floundering college dropout and part-time surly Starbucks barista who spent too much time reading books and not enough time looking for a job that would allow her to move out of her parents’ house. She was too smart for her own good, everyone had told her. She should have taken that secretarial position in North Dallas; but she would have lost her sanity in that environment — the tedious filing, the ringing phones, the office politics — all the things which comprised hell on earth for a girl with an IQ over a hundred and fifty.

  Despite the recent horrors, she’d come into her own at last, after twenty-one years of meandering through life unfocused and unchallenged. The extra twenty pounds she’d been carrying courtesy of Freddy’s cheeseburgers and Taco Bell burritos were gone, thanks to her newfound self-discipline and endless hours of Krav Maga training with Sam. Not only had she transformed her body, she’d elevated and strengthened her mind as well. Before the power had gone out, she’d watched countless tutorials on T’ai Chi, Qigong, and Buddhist meditation. During that same window — when people were getting sick, but before most of them had died — she’d combed book stores and libraries within a fifteen-mile radius. When the country went dark and people realized that life-saving information was no longer available with a few keystrokes, Dani had amassed reference material on subjects as diverse as hydroponics and combat first aid, ancient meat drying techniques and bomb making. Between martial arts lessons with Sam, she spent every spare minute absorbing the printed esoteric knowledge like a greedy lizard on a sun-drenched rock.

  Knowledge was survival.

  When the first of the men slithered over the fence into the backyard, she hadn’t found anything to use as a foothold. Another figure followed right behind him. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and released it from her lungs, slow and measured, then took off at a full run toward them. While she ran, fingers slid down to a leather sheath secured to her belt. Two seconds before she reached the first of her would-be assailants, a Ka-Bar — the Cadillac of tactical knives — was in her hand.

  Dani used momentum and every ounce of her one-hundred-twenty pound frame to slam the first man into the second, knocking both assailants off-balance and unprepared for her next move: a vicious stab to the groin of the first. He collapsed to his knees. She followed with a backhand movement, opening up the throat of his companion. A similar gesture to the man with the injured groin silenced his moaning.

  The third pursuer straddled the fence now, his mouth open in surprise at the sight of his accomplices on the ground and a woman in shadows standing beside them. Moonlight glinted off the blade she held in her hand. When he began to scramble back over, frantic and panicked, Dani thrust the Ka-Bar at the dangling denim-covered calf.

  The man screamed as he slid the rest of the way down the other side.

  She scrambled over after him.

  He huddled at her feet, clutching a serrated steak knife in one hand, and his wounded leg in the other.

  “You bitch!”

  Tattered clothes hung on his skinny body like a neglected scarecrow. Most people were skinny and tattered these days.

  “Who started this, asshole?” she replied in a reasonable tone.

  “We’re hungry! I got a little sister at home too. We’re all starving. It looked like you had stuff.”

  “And you thought it would be cool to take my stuff because there were three of you and one of me?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know you. Why should I care?”

  “Because we’re not animals. Well, technically we are in a biological sense, but in terms of cultural anthropology, we’re not. Not yet, at least.” Even in the gloom she could see the man’s quizzical expression.

  She sighed. “Where do you and your sister live?”

  “You think I’m gonna tell you? So you can come kill the rest of us?”

  She knelt beside him, pressing the blood-darkened point of the Ka-Bar against the scrawny neck.

  “I’m not killing anyone else tonight if I don’t have to. Give me your pig sticker, handle first. Don’t make any fast moves or I’ll open up an artery,” she said, with the quiet confidence of someone who has done so before.

  The man obliged, grudging and slow, then lay back on the ground, pulling his injured leg up to his chest.

  “Motherfucker, it hurts!” he hissed through teeth that hadn’t seen a good brushing in months.

  Dani shook her head in silent disapproval. Oral hygiene was more important now than ever before. No longer were there dentists to tend to one’s abscesses and root canals.

  “Here’s how this is going down. I’ll play doctor on your l
eg, you’ll say thank-you to the nice lady, and then you’re going to hightail it back to your little nesty nest. Capisce, amigo?”

  She fetched her backpack from under the shrub, then squatted next to her attacker as she unzipped it. She withdrew a small red case stamped with an iconic white symbol. These days, she never left home without basic first aid supplies.

  He nodded. “Hey, I’m sorry about that bitch thing.”

  “No sweat, bro. I shanked you, and I wasted your buddies. It’s understandable.”

  “Maybe we can help each other out. You seem like you got your act together. Maybe you could join up with us? My sister is kinda worthless, but she’s real pretty and she sings like an angel. It’s nice to listen to her...makes you forget all this shit for a few minutes, know what I mean?”

  Dani ignored him. She tended to the leg wound with the efficiency of an emergency room nurse.

  “I got some skills too, ya know,” he said, petulant now.

  “Really, Einstein? What might they be?”

  “I’m real good at math!” he blurted.

  She laughed. “If I ever need to know the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle, I’ll look you up. I appreciate the offer, sport, but I’ll take a pass. I’ve been doing just fine without the benefit of singers and math wizards.”

  Dani had the wound cleaned and bandaged in less than three minutes.

  “Now count to a hundred, slowly, then you can leave. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t come back to this area at all — I have dibs on this particular piece of real estate. Understand?”

  “Fine.”

  She was already two houses away when she heard, “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand...” She smiled as she sprinted down the darkened street toward home, her footfalls soundless in the night.

  Chapter 2

  Stanford University in California

  Julia sat in the deserted lab. The woman who had called her brother about a rogue DNA molecule was gone. Strands of gray streaked her dark hair — vanity had taken a back seat to the most important research she’d ever done — and her shoulders were perpetually slumped from hundreds of hours bending over her microscope.

  After she lost Stan, she’d moved into her lab. She slept on a small sofa in her office, used the shower in the attached bathroom, and ordered in her meals until the restaurants closed. When the staff and other scientists died or disappeared, she’d returned home, loaded the bulk of her shelf stable food and cases of bottled water into her new Land Rover, and brought it all to her office. She’d purchased the vehicle and supplies soon after her conversation with Steven — the day she’d told him about Lixi. The power had gone out, but the building was equipped with a backup generator. Sufficient diesel fuel remained in the maintenance shed to keep the lights on, the air conditioner cooling, and the electron microscopes, thermal cyclers, and centrifuges functioning for longer than she planned to stay.

  It would soon be time to leave what had become her sanctuary, but also her prison. Until then, she was consumed with unlocking the secrets of the molecule which had annihilated most of the population and which she’d coined Lixi, the Greek word for ‘termination.’

  No longer must she endure the sideways glances from co-workers when she talked to herself. She was all alone now except for the orange tabby that had followed her back from the fuel shed a few days ago. The sound of her own voice kept the mocking silence at bay while she worked. But at night, when she lay in bed, the insidious feelings of solitude and isolation squirmed into her realm of consciousness — dreaded and unwelcome. She missed her husband, she missed people in general, and she missed the weekly, static-filled conversations with her brother. Those had ended two months ago when a hailstorm damaged the campus radio tower. The crushing aloneness sometimes felt unbearable, but she was close to deciphering the genetic code that had led to the fall of humanity. Could there be any more daunting yet meaningful task left in the world?

  The clock was counting down though. She and Steven had agreed on a date. In the meantime, she would continue her research, but when that day arrived, she would leave. Must leave. And it was almost here.

  The thought terrified her.

  The last time she’d been ‘out there’ on her food and water run, she’d witnessed the ugly and violent collapse of society. Starving people behaved no differently than starving animals — probably worse. On the drive from her home in Palo Alto back to Stanford, her Land Rover was attacked twice. Those horrific memories never left her.

  For years she’d complained about the inconvenient location of her lab which was situated in a remote, older section of the campus; but now she realized the inaccessibility had kept her safe. No one had bothered her because no one had found her.

  But there were people out there — she knew that better than anyone. What had happened to that tiny fraction of humanity that hadn’t succumbed to the disease? Were they banding together in civilized groups or had they formed marauding packs willing to commit unspeakable atrocities?

  Soon she would find out firsthand.

  ###

  Logan sat on the pier, gazing out at the choppy gray water. It was chilly, so he zipped up the black windbreaker. Alcatraz loomed in the distance, craggy and formidable. Not for the first time he considered loading up a boat with supplies and making the rocky island his home. Its remoteness made it appealing in some ways, but the isolation also intimidated him. And the place was creepy. The tour he’d taken as a kid with his mom left him feeling unsettled and anxious for days. At the time he’d thought some of those angry men who had lived and died there might still be around, their spirits clinging to the last place they’d lived. He had nightmares about it for a long time afterward. But that was years ago; what he’d experienced these past months put those childhood nightmares to shame.

  When the pretty news lady on Channel 6 reported death tolls in the thousands, he’d emptied out his savings account and spent every dime on firearms and ammunition. He’d ruled out using any of his money on food — he figured he’d be able to scrounge for it — and he prepared for the coming apocalypse, which would be bloody and violent. He quit his job at Dave’s Doughnut Shop and worked on becoming skilled with his new weaponry. By the time the truth came out about the plague — something called the ‘mortality rate’ — he could hit a four-inch target at a hundred yards. A one-inch target at fifty yards. That in itself was nothing to write home about. Heck, with his Sig Sauer tactical rifle and Konus scope, a child could do that. He was especially proud of his accuracy with the subcompact handguns. Considering the truncated barrel and reduced grip area, it was a minor miracle for an amateur to hit an adversary at ten feet. Logan could leave a tight, six-hole grouping on the paper targets at Harvey’s Gun Range from fifty feet away. His new buddies at the range seemed to think this was pretty cool. One of them said he was an ‘idiot savant.’ He didn’t much care for being called an idiot, but later, after he checked his mom’s old Webster’s dictionary, he decided he liked the savant part.

  His stomach growled, which startled him out of one of his Quiet Spells. His mom had named them that. She was dead now, as were most people he’d known in the Before Time. He reckoned he should go scrounging for some food. It had always been difficult for him to focus for very long — except when it came to guns — but over the last few days he’d put some serious thought into leaving the Bay Area and heading south. A gang of thugs had taken over the Fisherman’s Wharf territory, so it wasn’t fun to visit the place that had been a childhood favorite. He’d killed a few of them, but they kept coming. Some of them were even girls, which mystified him since they sure didn’t act like the girls that came into the doughnut shop, or the ones in his Sunday school class. These girls acted as mean as the men, and they wore leather boots and carried knives.

  He supposed that meant it was okay to kill them too, but so far he hadn’t. His mom told him it was important to be nice to females because they were fragile and weren’t
as strong as he was. After the incident with the girl in middle school, they’d moved to a new neighborhood. They had the birds-and-bees talk and spent a lot of time going over ‘acceptable and unacceptable behavior.’ She fretted that there’d never been a positive male influence in his life, since his father skipped out long before he was even born, and none of the guys his mother dated seemed to stick around for long.

  He missed his mom. She always made him feel better when the Bad Thoughts came. Now that he was by himself, he’d begun to listen to them. What did it matter now? She’d said he might go to jail if he let the Bad Thoughts control him, but he was pretty sure there was nobody left to put him in jail...he hadn’t seen a police officer in months. He decided he no longer needed to follow all his mom’s rules from the Before Time. The notion that he could now make up his own rules was...what was that word?

  Thrilling, said the Bad Thoughts.

  Chapter 3

  Twickenham, United Kingdom — 11 miles South of London

  Harold bumped his toe against the ball and claw foot of his antique desk, spilling his tea, and eliciting a rare expletive from the anthropologist. Under different circumstances, the candlelight and gas fireplace would have provided a cozy ambience to his study; now they signified a monumental reversal of technology and modern life. Candles were necessary to light his home after the power had gone out, and the fireplace was the only form of heat available to him now, short of burning furniture and books. He supposed when the gas stopped working, he’d be forced to consider such a solution. But for the moment, the fireplace still heated the study where he slept, and the cooker in the kitchen continued to boil water for his Earl Grey, and to warm the tins of stockpiled soup. The mountain of food he’d acquired before the end was down to a meager mole hill.