This Dying World (Book 2): Abandon All Hope Read online

  “What the hell, Murph?” Jason gasped, his hand inching toward his Beretta. “Call him off!”

  Murphy said nothing. He spun the tin in his hands, staring at it with a mix of sadness and hatred on his face.

  “Murphy?!” Jason snapped, his eyes locked on the dog closing within lethal striking distance. Titan’s growl grew louder, emanating from deep within his chest. His black nose crinkled as large fangs were revealed, glistening white in the dim light.

  “Titan,” Murphy said with little emotion. “Make yourself small.”

  Instantly, the dog lay on the floor, inches from where Jason sat. The deep rumbling growl had ceased, teeth hidden once more. It was then that Jason noticed that Titan’s attention had not been directed at him. Instead, his large black eyes were trained on Murphy. More accurately, he stared with trepidation at the tin in Murphy’s hand.

  “Care to explain what’s going on here?” Jason demanded, his eyes shooting between man and dog.

  Without another word, Murphy opened the container with a small pop. He pulled out a wallet sized photograph, his eyes misting over as they fell on the image. With a deep breath, he tucked the image into his MCCUU blouse pocket.

  He fished a small tube from the tin and held it up to the dim light from the hallway. He held it up for Jason to see, the translucent orange fluid sloshed around as Murphy gave it a quick shake. Though Titan remained perfectly still, his agitation was clear. His paws clenched, nails scratching against the wooden floor.

  “What is that?” Jason asked.

  “This,” Murphy started, holding the bottle in front of his own face.

  “This is how the world ends.”

  Chapter 25

  “I was done,” Murphy started, setting the vial back in the tin. “I was retiring. No more re-ups, no more sand in my ass crack. I was done.”

  Murphy popped open another beer, letting the bottle cap fall to the floor. It bounced away with tiny metallic taps until it came to a rest by one of Titan’s massive paws. He eyed the bottle as white foam lifted from the lip of the glass before settling back down. He sighed, taking a long drink before continuing.

  “They came to me for one more run,” Murphy began again. “One more mission. They said it would be the most important one I’ve ever done. God and country, that kind of bullshit.”

  “So you signed up,” Jason said, drinking the last of his beer. He hadn’t set the bottle down before he heard another bottle cap bounce on the wooden floor. He looked up to see Murphy handing him another container of liquid gold.

  “Shit no,” Murphy said with a near laugh. “Every mission was important. Every one of them meant saving the free world from terrorism or communism or environmentalism or fuck-it-all-ism. Like I said, I wanted out. I just wanted to spend my days safe and secure with my family.”

  “What changed your mind?” Jason asked.

  “When you and a few dozen other operators get conferenced in with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, and the man himself in the Oval Office, no is not a word anyone wants to hear.”

  “I don’t know much about what you guys do,” Jason said. “But as an outsider that doesn’t sound like standard operating procedure.”

  “It never happens,” Murphy replied. “Our pre-mission briefs are just like yours. We just get better maps and intel from people with very high pay grades.”

  “I feel like I could be shot just listening to this,” Jason attempted a smile, but in reality he was as uncomfortable as he could ever remember. Half of his beer disappeared in two gulps.

  “Like you said,” Murphy smiled. “Who are you going to tell?”

  “I’m guessing your mission had something to do with what’s happening out there,” Jason thumbed toward the outside.

  “It was played off as a simple in and out. Relieve a few couriers of their burdens. We were told this mission was optional. No one had to agree to take it on.”

  “Why did you?”

  “What they said next made my mind up for me.” Murphy took a deep breath, his eyes locked on his beer bottle. He lifted it to his lips, but appeared to change his mind. He let his hands drop back to his lap. “Agree, and we’ll make sure your family is safe. Turn us down, and we can’t make any promises as to their safety.”

  “They threatened your family?!” Jason gasped.

  “That’s what I thought,” Murphy replied, this time drinking deep from his bottle again. “I agreed. What else could I do?”

  “Not much of a choice,” Jason said, shaking his head.

  “But it turns out they weren’t making threats. They were honestly promising to keep my family safe from what was coming. I got picked up from Great Lakes Naval–”

  “I used to live nearby,” Jason interrupted.

  “Yeah, well your winters suck.”

  “Not really, we’re just tougher than you southerners.”

  “Anyway,” Murphy rolled his eyes. “After some serious cloak and dagger bullshit helo rides across the states, I ended up in a building somewhere in the Rockies.”

  “Tax dollars at work,” Jason said, trying to lighten the building tension. “Travel across the continent just to have the same sit down conversation they could have had right there at Great Lakes.”

  “There’s that,” Murphy nodded in agreement. “But it all felt wrong. I’ve never seen people wear their fear on their sleeves like those intel guys were. Then I read the reports.”

  Jason stared at Murphy as he waited for him to continue. The man’s eyes were locked to the floor, his face betraying the torture in his soul. He pulled the picture from his shirt pocket, a visible tear escaping the corner of his eye as he whispered something to himself.

  “I didn’t think it was real at first,” he continued after several long minutes. “I mean, how do you read over a file summary with the words zombie and undead written all over it and not think it was some kind of joke?” Murphy visibly shuddered as the memories flooded his mind.

  “The video though,” he sighed, his voice trembling slightly. “I watched a man shot dead in some kind of white room. It looked like one of those padded cells they put psyche jobs in, you know? He was just some asshole who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They shot him, double tap to the chest, no hesitation.”

  Murphy drew a breath through clenched teeth, balling his fists and nearly crushing the photo in his hands. He tucked it back into his pocket. “But then he got back up. He fucking got up!” He gasped, grabbing his beer and finishing it off in one long pull.

  “The things they did to that man,” he continued. He lifted his eyes and stared off into space as the haunting memories played out in his mind. “He wouldn’t die. Shooting, stabbing, burning…he should have died. He shouldn’t have even been walking, but we was! But when they shot him in the head, he went down and stayed down.”

  “I have seen more head trauma than I care to remember,” he said, lifting his eyes to Jason again. “I have seen enough brains outside of where God intended them to be to give me nightmares to my dying day. But I have never seen brains do that before. It was like the tissue was on a frying pan. It just sizzled on the floor until it turned into chunky pea soup.”

  “I don’t know if I would have believed it,” Jason said.

  “I’m sure some of us didn’t at first. I mean, a bio engineered fungal agent designed to kill the living and raise the dead? It was like a late night horror movie. But the people in that room weren’t the kind of people that would go through that kind of trouble for a joke. This briefing was piped all over the world. This was a global special operation.”

  “To stop the spread before it got a foothold?” Jason surmised.

  “Not quite,” Murphy replied. “The delivery system had already been in place for some time. We were tasked–”

  “E-cigarettes!” Jason gasped as he finally recognized the tube Murphy had shown him. “They used e-cigs to spread this thing?”

  “Close. E-cig cartridges are to
o heavily regulated to tamper with. Vape juice though, that’s like the Wild West. The internet is full of startup companies that make their own flavored juices.”

  “Are you saying this was some conspiracy cooked up by vape juice makers?” Jason asked sarcastically.

  “No,” Murphy sighed. “They didn’t even know they were a part of this. They just ordered their supplies like always, but didn’t know some of their nicotine bottles were tampered with.”

  “Wait,” Jason interrupted again. “I thought nicotine was a controlled substance. How would that get tainted without anyone knowing it?”

  “I asked the same thing,” Murphy said. “It looks like the flavoring and additives are highly regulated and almost impossible to taint. But nicotine is shipped out from the manufacturers to distributors, who then ship the bottles to customers. The seals are easy to breach if you know what you’re doing.”

  “That seems…backwards,” Jason said.

  “Like you said, tax dollars at work.”

  “Why vape juice though? If it’s in the nicotine, why not just lace tobacco?” Jason asked.

  “Cigarettes and cigars burn too hot, the spores would have been destroyed. Besides, you seen the price of those cancer sticks these days? Everyone is turning to vapes or e-cigs.”

  Jason simply nodded, mulling over all he’d heard so far. He took another swallow of beer, his head feeling lighter as the alcohol started to take effect.

  “There’s enough spores in each one of those refill bottles to infect a city block. Every puff infects the smoker and leaves plenty of spores left over to float away in a cloud of water vapor. The infected come down with something that looks like the flu. Coughing, sneezing, blowing their noses…spreading the disease. Those that got better went on with their lives, continuing to spread the infection.”

  “How was something like that not caught?” Jason asked. “I mean, once people started getting sick wouldn’t someone have put two and two together and traced it back?”

  “The tampering was selective, only a few bottles here and there went to vape juice makers. But those makers shipped flavored bottles all over the world. One batch of flavored juice could go to as many as four hundred customers all over the world. Multiply that by all the different makers throughout the country, and you have a global delivery system.”

  Jason simply stared at Murphy, his mind working feverishly to come to grips with the enormity of what he was being told.

  “But that was just the start,” Murphy continued. “This was a two stage delivery. The first one spreads it, the second one kills.”

  “Was that the trigger spore?” Jason asked.

  “That was it,” Murphy answered solemnly. “It took a carrier, someone willing to ingest it and spread it. The second wave needed a host to incubate it until it was ready. Release those spores and suddenly your dead gramma is chewing on your insides.”

  The room grew quiet as the two finished off their beers and one more after those. Jason’s thoughts moved a mile a minute, counting off how many of his family members vaped. His blood went cold as the numbers steadily climbed in his head. He popped the top off yet another beer, swallowing it down and welcoming the mind numbing effect.

  “Twenty-four hours later, I hugged my kids and kissed my wife goodbye.” Murphy suddenly broke the silence, his eyes clouding over as the corners of his mouth curled down. “I never saw my family again. Three weeks after I left, this thing hit. They wouldn’t even let me talk to her. I called and called, but they wouldn’t let a civilian on our secure lines. I held a man at gunpoint and took his cell phone just to try and talk to them one more time. But there was no answer. I couldn’t reach anyone.”

  “Then I got the call,” Murphy said after a few heavy breaths. “Some of the flight crew were infected and turned mid-flight. The chopper went down, no survivors…is the package secured? That’s how I heard it. Sorry for your dead kids, you got my stuff?”

  Murphy stood and paced back and forth on unsteady drunken feet. He swooped down, picking up his beer and tried to take a drink. His hands shook, breaths coming so fast he couldn’t drink if he tried. He ran his free hand across his stubbled head, his body racked with sobs that he could no longer subdue.

  “They were supposed to protect them!” Murphy screamed, hurling the bottle against the wall. The brown glass exploded on impact, sending a shower of glass and beer across the store. “They promised they would be safe!” he screamed again, kicking over a stand of beef jerky.

  Jason sat in silence as his companion raged. His thoughts again turning to his own family, anger bubbling up from the pit of his stomach until he could no longer hold in his own burning question.

  “How long did we know?” Jason growled.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Murphy slurred, falling back into his chair.

  “It matters to me!” Jason snapped. “You’re sitting here telling me that we knew this shit was coming, and I want to know how long we knew!”

  “Three months.”

  “Three. Fucking. Months?” Jason asked slowly, his voice smoldering with rage. “We knew this shit was happening for three months and do jack shit to stop it?! Explain that to me!”

  “Because it’s been spreading for over a year.”

  “What…how?” Jason’s anger instantly deflated into surprised confusion.

  “You don’t get it,” Murphy said, shaking his head. “We weren’t acting, we were reacting. We found this out by accident. Some data diver was experimenting with a new way to pick through metadata at the NSA and they got a hit. It took them almost two weeks to discover this shit show, and almost another two weeks to convince the upper echelon that this was for real. Every intelligence agency across the world, friendly or otherwise, was mobilized to try and track this down and contain it. But by then it was already too late.”

  “How did we miss this?” Jason exhaled. “How could it spread so long and us not see it?”

  “I don’t know,” Murphy exhaled.

  “But how–” Jason started.

  “I don’t have all the answers!” Murphy roared.

  “I’m just trying to understand this!” Jason snapped back. “Who would do this? And why?! What did they hope to gain?!”

  “Exactly what you see” Murphy laughed maniacally. “They wanted to cleanse the Earth of human life and let nature start over.”

  “You’re telling me that a bunch of tree hugging hippies started the apocalypse?”

  “That’s all we were told,” Murphy answered in clear frustration. “We were given a mission and I carried it out!”

  “Which was?”

  “Like I said, intercept a courier and relieve him of his burdens. All his burdens.” Murphy suddenly slumped into his chair, the anger and frustration melting away from his features, leaving only sorrow in its wake. “That’s where we really fucked up.”

  Jason grabbed another beer, downing the bottle in a few gulps before tossing it aside. Murphy sat with his hands clasped in front of him, his head lowered. His breaths slowed, shaking as he exhaled.

  “Each of us were given a list. On that list were people we needed to find and remove from the playing field. It needed to be done quickly and quietly. We didn’t set up teams because we were hunting individual civilians. Oh, we found them alright, and we killed every last one of ‘em. Then they got up, and we killed ‘em again, just like in the video...the video that we found out too late had been leaked on purpose.”

  “Wait,” Jason chimed in. “What do you mean ‘leaked on purpose?’”

  “Whoever these people were, they were smart. Smart enough to let information out and make it look like they were trying to hide it. Every person on that list was a carrier of the trigger spore. They knew we would do everything in our power to stop them. Operators all over the world picked them off within a matter of days.”

  “Murphy,” Jason started, a cold rage building in him as he started to piece together a puzzle that he did not want to finish.

 
“I killed one in Paris, one in Madrid, and one in DC and Seattle. Each one I took out led me to the next. I thought it was just because they were basically dumb civilians, but they set us up. We were supposed to find them. They wanted us to kill them.” Murphy turned his head, locking his tear filled eyes with Jason’s. “I took a vial from each one I took out, the last one in San Diego.”

  Jason stood slowly, his hands balled up and shaking. He watched Titan get to his feet, emitting a low rumbling growl that he knew was meant for him. He didn’t care, his mind was fully consumed with rage.

  “Titan,” Murphy said weakly. “Lay down.” The canine complied, his narrowed eyes locked on Jason as if daring him to move.

  “Say it,” Jason snarled. He drew his M9 from its holster and gripped it until his knuckles whitened.

  “I shot them in the head. I exposed their brains to the air. I let the spores loose.”

  “Say it!” Jason demanded, leveling his pistol at Murphy’s head.

  “I helped start this.”

  Jason fired.

  Chapter 26

  “What the hell were you thinking?!” Chris shouted, pacing back and forth across the kitchen.

  “Dude, I was going to go with him!” Matt snapped.

  “Oh yeah, that would have been better! Instead of one dumbass lost out there, we’d have to worry about two!”

  “Calm down, buddy,” Joe said, trying to diffuse the situation. “We’ll find him!”

  “How?!” Chris shouted again. “He’s got my truck and that bus is going nowhere!” Chris spun his attention back to Matt. “Why would you leave him alone after he outright told you what he was planning?!”

  “Why the hell wouldn’t you tell me there was a spare key attached to the damn truck?!” Matt shouted back.

  “Hey!” Anna snapped as she stormed into the kitchen. “You’ve got Katie bawling her eyes out over her dad, and the rest of the kids are freaking out! Can you tone it down?”

  Chris stood, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. Taking a deep breath he let his boiling rage cool to a low simmer.