Viral Misery | Book 3 | Revelations Read online

  VIRAL

  MISERY

  Book Three

  REVELATIONS

  . . .

  THOMAS A. WATSON

  TINA D. WATSON

  Copyright © August 26, 2020

  THOMAS A. WATSON

  TINA D. WATSON

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Credits

  EDITED BY SABRINA JEAN

  www.fasttrackediting.com

  COVER ART BY CHRISTIAN BENTULAN

  This book is a work of Fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the written consent of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Thank you for acknowledging the hard work of this author. If you didn’t purchase this book or it wasn’t purchased for you, please go purchase your own copy now.

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  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to each of you for all of

  your help in getting this one ready.

  Anna Shirley

  Arthur Maybee

  Beth Mayo

  Cheryl Deariso

  Claude Franks

  Cora Burke

  Fleur Wilkinson

  Heather Everette

  Jaala Wickman

  James Mayo

  Jan Tice

  Johnny King

  Joseph Ruffolo

  Kathy Roberts

  Leslie Bryant

  Margaret Wankel

  Nicole Revis

  Rebecca Larsen

  Sandra Welch

  Tina Rush

  William Beedie

  Yalonda Butler

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter One

  Double Date

  It was the second week of October in this new world of viral misery. Four miles to the southwest of Snowball, Arkansas, and thirty miles from their ranch, Arthur barely shifted his weight while scanning the collection of buildings across the valley below him. There was a large house, for a lack of a better term, a humongous barn and then what looked like fifteen double wide mobile homes. The mobile homes were set up just like a trailer park, side by side in a perfect row, but they all looked new. No other homes were within three miles of this group. This site was as remote as the ranch, but Arthur actually liked their location better. After all, LL had only found them after catching some of the people who lived there on the trail cameras.

  Thirty miles east of the ranch and in the county of Searcy, by using trail cameras they had narrowed down where to search for this group. LL had taken a group out yesterday with Joseph and gathered up all the trail camera cards. Viewing the cards, LL was finally able to track this group down.

  Of all the groups and people, not that there were that many left, this group piqued everyone’s interest. It was very easy to see who belonged to the group; everyone wore camouflaged chemical suits with NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) gas masks. Just from the pictures, anyone could see the suits and masks were current issue military grade. Another thing anyone could see, not everyone in the group was in the military. Arthur was just trying to figure out where in the hell this group had found masks and suits that fit kids because he had seen the pictures of young teens wearing NBC suits, riding in pickups with adults.

  Even now as he laid there in the early morning dawn, Arthur was looking at four kids in masks. The kids weren’t in the suits when they played in the yard, but there were several adults in suits moving around the small compound. His group was on the west side of the valley atop the ridge and a small river or large creek was below them on this side of the valley floor. He made a mental note to check for the name of the creek when he got home because there wasn’t one on his topo map. There was about a thirty acre field before the small community that sat at the base of the east ridge. Three hundred feet down the slope from Arthur was a footbridge over the water that looked large and sturdy enough to handle ATVs and even the Jeeps they’d seen the group in as they moved about. The group didn’t ever move far, and unless they moved east, Arthur had never found them on any camera more than ten miles away from the hidden community.

  “Why in the hell are they wearing all that shit?” Arthur asked again for the hundredth time. “The virus has run its course and if they survived any mutation that spawns they’ll have immunity, at least that’s what Sutton says.”

  On Arthur’s right side and looking through his own binoculars, Jason shook his head. “I have no idea but paranoid or not, those folks have a nice setup.”

  “That’s why I can’t see them being that paranoid,” Arthur huffed. Spread out in a line in the field in front of the compound were twenty greenhouses. Using his range finder, Arthur knew they were all twenty feet wide and forty feet long. He could see a nice chicken coop that had to have at least a hundred chickens in it. Just past the chicken coop was one of the biggest rabbit farms he’d ever seen.

  Also looking through her binoculars, “There has to be three hundred rabbit cages down there,” Wendy stated on Arthur’s left side. Feeling cold air hit her neck, she adjusted her shemagh. Cold weather wasn’t unheard of in Arkansas this early, but they’d already had two very hard frosts. The first one had been September 29th, the day she’d tried to talk to Sutton about Alicia but just couldn’t. “I’m not thinking about her today,” Wendy mumbled.

  On Jason’s left was his wife Samantha. “Has anyone noticed the front porches? Not just the house but the mobile homes?” she asked. Each had a porch that was wrapped in heavy plastic. There wasn’t a true door in the plastic sheeting, just a hanging curtain on each one. “I swear, they all look like decontamination rooms.”

  Never lowering his binoculars, Arthur couldn’t help but grin. He and Wendy were nurses, Jason was an emergency room doctor, and Samantha was a nurse practitioner. “We definitely have medical staff on this outing,” he mumbled, but it wasn’t loud enough for anyone to hear.

  “Damn, babe,” Jason mused, “now that you say it, they do look like decontamination areas. All the windows are covered with plastic, and here I was thinking it was some redneck form of insulation for winter.”

  “Shit, I should’ve thought of that,” Samantha chided herself.

  Lowering his binoculars to look over at his wife, “Redneck isn’t down there, babe. That’s why I was having a problem figuring it out. Those mobile homes are very nice. That solar array they have has to be at least a thirty-kilowatt setup. There are over a dozen windmills on the east ridge above them and then there’s the ten water wheel stations,” Jason pointed out, but Samantha never lowered her binoculars.

  Shifting his gaze, Arthur looked at the water wheels and even guessing with the best set up, each one could only ge
nerate five hundred watts, but there were ten to make up for low output. That was five thousand watts of continuous power. There was one structure Arthur thought was a battery house because he could see conduit coming up from the ground and going into the building.

  “Yeah, there’s no doubt they have power,” Arthur said, lowering his binoculars. Getting to his knees, Arthur put the binoculars in his pack. “I see two antennas, so they have radio.”

  Dropping his binoculars, Jason popped the scope covers on his AR-10 scope as he got behind the rifle. “Bitch, don’t ruin Date Night by getting shot. This is the first time Samantha and I have ever double dated,” Jason warned him and Samantha gave a snorting chuckle.

  Checking his weapons, the throat mic for his radio, and his fedora, “Donald, Daisy,” Arthur called out and both dogs jumped to their feet. “There isn’t enough ammo they can shoot at me to ruin Date Night,” Arthur huffed, walking away down the slope toward the small bridge followed by the dogs.

  “Adam, Eve, alert,” Jason called out and Wendy glanced back at the two blue German shepherds. Both had belonged to a deacon at their church and were some of the dogs they’d collected from homes of their friends, ‘acquaintances’, Wendy corrected in her mind. Like the Rottweilers, Beauty and Beast, who’d belonged to their pastor, most had been trained by Arthur. Jason and Samantha had taken Adam and Eve. Beauty and Beast had been taken over by Joseph because he’d helped Arthur train them when he was home on leave two years ago.

  Watching Arthur stroll down the slope with the dogs, Wendy couldn’t help but grin as she got on her own AR-10. She hated this virus, but it had presented them with the large family she’d always wanted to give Arthur. But not even she could’ve predicted it would also give Arthur what she’d always hoped he would have, a buddy.

  She knew everything about Arthur’s life and that was one thing he’d never had, not even when he was a kid when you were supposed to have buddies. Partly the reason was that Arthur was always moving between foster homes, but also, Arthur had never met anyone he trusted enough. Wendy knew because she’d asked about some of the kids Arthur had mentioned in his life. That day in July when Jason walked outside with Arthur, she had seen it instantly. Arthur trusted Jason, something she’d never seen Arthur give, other than to her and Joseph. What was so awesome, because Jason and the others had passed out almost immediately after arriving, Arthur didn’t really meet him until Jason had stepped outside. She would never come out and say it because it would piss Arthur off, but in her mind, it was ‘buddy at first sight’ for Arthur and Jason.

  LL was also a buddy, but because he had saved her, Arthur just worshipped him. That was one thing Wendy was thankful for. LL wasn’t the type of person to take advantage of it in any form. There wasn’t a doubt in Wendy’s mind that if LL wanted to sit in a chair and just eat and do nothing else in life, Arthur would allow it and dare anyone to say anything simply because LL had saved his Wendy.

  Arthur at times acted like a twelve-year-old boy with his first buddy and Wendy loved it. More than once during the mornings, Arthur would look up the stairs to see if Jason was coming down so ‘the buddies could talk, you know’. Since Wendy had friends and even buddies growing up, but because Arthur didn’t trust anyone like that, she’d held back. There were a few women since they’d been married that Wendy would’ve liked to have been buddies with, but she wouldn’t go that far in her friendships. She was Arthur’s buddy and she never wanted him to feel jealous, even though she didn’t think he would. There wasn’t a doubt in Wendy’s mind how much Arthur loved her, and she wasn’t going to risk hurting him in any way.

  Besides, the best buddy she’d ever had was on the other side of Jason. She and Samantha didn’t bond as fast as Arthur and Jason, it wasn’t until that first evening Wendy realized how much she liked Samantha. Looking at Samantha one could easily see a princess, but the fact that Samantha lived in a funk, taking care of babies and kids while having running gun battles, was something that held Wendy in awe. Wendy knew she herself was pretty and not because of Arthur always telling her, before the virus she’d seen men looking at her, but Samantha was a damn knockout and built like a brick shithouse.

  Watching Samantha gear up for war was like watching Barbie strap on guns, but Samantha could sling hate and didn’t think twice about doing so.

  Wendy wasn’t stupid. Before Samantha ever told her, Wendy knew Samantha had gotten into guns only because of Jason. Because Jason REALLY loved guns, and he was good with them. She and Arthur had done three-gun competitions like Jason and Samantha and they could shoot very well. They liked guns and owned a lot of them before the virus. But Wendy looked at guns like Arthur did, they were tools they grabbed to accomplish a task. Until Jason came along, they just grabbed a rifle from their gun racks before they went outside.

  Oh, but that changed real fast the first afternoon Arthur and Jason took the kids who were going to be tested to carry weapons to the range. First on the line, Arthur had put the gun timer on his belt. When the gun timer beeped, from twenty-five yards, Arthur had put all ten rounds from his 1911 into the ten ring in five-point-six seconds and was happy with that. Jason had called out ‘that was good’. When Arthur turned around, he’d found Jason gluing ten pennies, a foot apart, to a 2x4 board. Then Jason had taken the board out and set it at twenty-five yards. Grabbing the gun timer Jason got ready at the line, when it beeped he drew and hit each penny once with his 1911, and he’d done it in three-point-four seconds.

  With their jaws hanging open, Arthur and Wendy just gawked. Not really impressed but telling her husband ‘good job’, Samantha informed Jason that he didn’t drop his shoulder on the draw because he was trying to show off. That was when Arthur and Wendy had found out all of Jason’s guns were fine-tuned works of art.

  Immediately, Arthur had asked to see Jason’s pistol and when Jason handed it over even Wendy was impressed. But when Arthur had told her it was a four thousand dollar Wilson Combat tactical custom 1911, she’d nearly fainted. That’s when they’d heard Jason’s mottoes: ‘Buy once, cry once’ and ‘Never trust your life to cheap’. Then they heard Samantha’s motto: ‘Don’t ever tell your wife what you spent because she would make that one cry last forever because you didn’t buy cheaper’. Only when they’d learned the fact Jason had an array of pistols and rifles, each an expensive, fine-tuned work of art, they’d understood Samantha’s motto. Jason didn’t believe in skimping on anything that he was going to entrust his and his wife’s safety with.

  After the gun range test for the kids was finished, Jason had asked Arthur where he could set up a gunsmith bench. It was when Arthur replied, ‘In our workshop, dummy’ that Wendy had fought not to cheer. Arthur’s shop was his pride and joy. The fact he’d declared it ‘our workshop’ that very first day, let Wendy know she had seen correctly. Arthur had a buddy at long last.

  It did take some effort for Wendy to not bust out laughing when Arthur had led Jason away. They were both acting like two little boys. Jason was impressed with Arthur’s gunsmithing area but over the next week, sought out other things to add. Jason was a fair machinist and an excellent gunsmith. Arthur was an excellent machinist and a fair gunsmith. When Jason showed Arthur how to make the tiny springs by hand, Arthur was in awe of his new buddy.

  Jason had grabbed five AR platforms and went to work so his new buddy could also have fine works of art. Setting the ARs up for different scenarios, Jason mated the bolt to a match grade barrel for each one then redid the triggers, and added ambidextrous safeties, magazine releases, and bolt releases on all five. Then Jason had gotten the pistols Arthur carried, from the XD to his 1911s, even Arthur’s pride and joy, his self-made Damascus folded 1911.

  Wendy and Samantha had been in the shop when Jason took the Damascus 1911. When Jason found out Arthur had ‘made’ everything but the springs, Jason was in awe. Grabbing his tools Jason had found the barrel that Arthur made was match grade, so he went to work on the rest. He replaced the cheap springs and Wend
y was so thrilled when Jason chastised Arthur for putting cheap shit in such a work of art. Jason skeletonized the hammer and trigger, then fine-tuned the gun.

  When Arthur finally shot the 1911, even Wendy was in awe seeing the grouping of all ten shots at twenty-five yards. All ten shots were touching in a very tight circle. After testing all the guns Jason had reworked for him, Arthur found the accuracy improved on all of them. Very jealous, Wendy leaned over and whispered to Samantha, wondering if she could get Jason to do that to her guns. Samantha, being Samantha, didn’t ask shit. She went and got Wendy’s guns and handed them to Jason. “Do that for these. You have until tomorrow so the girls can practice at the big people range,” she informed her husband and Jason did. Now Wendy and Arthur loved their guns, but still not at the same level of love, or lust if you listened to Samantha, as Jason had for them.

  Feeling movement, she turned to see Jason getting to his knees. “I’m moving twenty yards to the right so I have a better line of sight on that guard on the slope near the wind turbines,” he told them, shifting his AR-10 and pack. With his AR-15 slung across his back, Jason moved off.

  Turning to see Arthur was halfway down the slope, Wendy leaned back over her scope and then heard Samantha scoot closer. Lifting herself, Wendy saw Samantha getting situated on her rifle. “Are you worried about Arthur? I only ask because I would be about Jason,” Samantha whispered.

  “Nope,” Wendy scoffed. “One thing I can say, Arthur never bites off more than he can chew. And I don’t even feel sorry for any who try him.”

  Pulling the stock into her shoulder, “Oh, I can’t say that about Jason. He can usually chew up what he bites off, but not before nearly choking,” Samantha smirked. “I’m so glad our boys are buddies.”

  “Remember, Arthur grew up alone and learned to make plans because he had nobody to back him up until I came along,” Wendy reminded her because she and Samantha talked a lot. “But I do feel in time, Arthur will overextend more than he ever has before. He had me to watch his back but, don’t tell him I said this ever,” Wendy paused, “I overload my ass thinking I’m just as tough as he is, but I also know Arthur will bail me out. Now that he has a buddy who he trusts, I think Arthur will start to overextend himself, but I could be wrong.”