Cobra Z Read online

  8.45PM, 17th April 2014. Hirta Island Research Facility, BSL-4 Containment level access tunnel

  He ran. He ran and he bled. Bathed in the hypnotic orange flashing emergency lights, he propelled himself down the subterranean corridor, the howls of the damned echoing all around him. He didn’t dare look back, didn’t dare risk seeing what he knew was relentlessly pursuing him, the insane eyes and the blood-stained mouths. And he bled, oh how he bled. His once white, pristine lab coat was now soiled, thick with the crimson artwork that seeped from the wound on his torn and lacerated neck. He stumbled and almost fell, a wave of dizziness and nausea crashing over him, and he knew that it wasn’t just from the loss of blood. He could feel it, feel it working away inside his mind. The virus was in him, ravaging and raping his cells. But still he ran, because what else was he to do with the insanity that pursued him?

  He was running with such determination, fuelled by masses of adrenalin, that he couldn’t slow himself down in time, and he hit the door at the end of the corridor with panicked force. He almost didn’t feel the impact. Behind him, the racing footsteps of his tormentors could be heard getting ever closer. On the edge of losing what little sanity was left to him, his blood-slicked hand tried to punch in the door’s access code on the control panel illuminated blue at the side of it.

  “Come on, come on.” The panel flashed red in response, making what on an ordinary day would be an irritating error noise and an annoying wait for technical support. Today, that noise was a death sentence, and a calm, almost reassuring computer voice spoke to him from the access panel

  Security Lockdown

  Access denied

  “Fuck, fuck…” He tried his code again, only to get the same response, his hands now slick with sweat as well as his own blood. And the blood of others. His mind still had difficulty registering the mass of guts and flesh he had fallen into when he had fought off the woman who had attacked him, the one who had bitten him … the one who had infected him. Was that how it spread?

  The door mocked him; there was no way through it. It was designed for one purpose, to stop what was coming from escaping into the outside world, to keep the population safe from the mistakes made down in this once sterile and ordered environment. He should know – he helped design the security protocols, insisting that multiple layers of security be put in place to prevent the unthinkable.

  It was at that moment all hope left him, and he did the only thing left to him. He turned, putting his back to the door he had walked through hundreds of times before. And then he saw his true reality. There were dozens of them, and seconds away from what he knew to be one of the worst fates imaginable, his bladder opened, and his lungs exploded in a scream that mingled with the hungry roar of the damned. Then they were upon him, and his last minutes became a savage torture of teeth, of gouging fingers, of kicks and of punches, and he collapsed to the floor, insanity mercifully stripping what was left of his scientific, logical mind. Their brutality and their viciousness were matched by only one thing: their insatiable hunger for human flesh.

  8.52PM, 17th April 2014. Hirta Island Research Facility, BSL-4 Containment level. Office B7

  Quiet, don’t make a sound. If they can’t hear you, they can’t find you. If they can’t find you, maybe they will just leave you alone. Locked in her office, cowering in the corner on the plush carpet she had demanded be installed just a month earlier, she let fear overwhelm her. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was the thing of movies and TV – this wasn’t real life. How was this even possible? She could hear them now, their howls far off in the facility. They were searching, running … hunting.

  She could feel their anger, their desire, their hunger. Wait, that didn’t make any sense; how could she know these things? Looking at her hand, she saw the teeth marks that bled and throbbed and … no, it couldn’t be that. This was madness, her scientist’s mind told her. But the little girl inside her knew the truth. The child who had escaped a life of emotional abuse into the maze-like wonder of the library, who had devoured any book she could find knew the truth that logic failed to admit.

  Something twitched in her mind. Something pulled her, dulled her, seduced her. Despite her fear, she realised she didn’t want to be alone. She had witnessed what the others had done, had witnessed them attack, rip, bite and scream. Witnessed them kill those who she classed as friends, and yet she felt drawn to them. There was a pain behind her eyes that grew with every passing moment. Was pain the right word? Perhaps not; it was more a feeling of pressure that seemed to block out her thoughts, her reasoning. Then she vomited, and her bowels opened. And the pain hit her anew in ever-increasing waves.

  Something thumped onto the outside of the door to her office, and she jumped in terror, despite the agony that coursed through her system. She could almost picture the crazed maniac on the other side, blood-smeared hands clawing at the wood that was her only barrier. The sight in her left eye blurred, and she gasped as her stomach suddenly churned, threatening to expel its contents all over her once again.

  “Join us.” Who said that? The voice, more a collection of voices, seemed to come from inside her head.

  “Join us, feed with us, kill with us.” No, I won’t, I won’t. But despite her protestations, she found herself standing up. Staggering to her feet, using the wall for balance, she felt a part of her die. The pain in her hand was being replaced by a warmth, a warmth spreading throughout her body, and as the warmth spread, pieces of who she was simply slipped away – it happened that quickly. A spasm rocked through her, nearly sending her back to the floor, and her head twisted to the side as the muscles of her neck contracted violently. The warmth grew, and with it came the hunger. She had never felt anything like it. She knew it would be insatiable; she knew it would be relentless. As the last of her human mind evaporated, as the last of her independence was burned away by the virus, her mouth drooled, and her body shook with the urgency of what she had to do.

  “Join us.”

  “Yes, yes I am yours,” she said. Did she say that out loud? She didn’t know; she didn’t care. All she cared about was the hunger, and she scrambled to the door, unlocking it and sending it wide. Three of them were waiting for her on the other side. They did not attack, but they embraced her, pulling her into the corridor.

  “Feed with us,” the voices in her head demanded.

  “Yes, yes I will feed.” And, those being the last words she would ever utter, she joined them in their hunt for the living.

  8.35PM, 17th April 2014. Hirta Island Research Facility, Security Command Room

  He watched them die. Standing with the three men tasked with monitoring the evening security of one of the country’s most secure and secret biological research facilities, he watched and listened to the dying minutes of the people they knew and worked with. At least the alarm claxon had been shut off.

  It happened so quickly. One minute, he was sat at his desk going over the latest scheduling report, the next he was running from his office as the worst sound in the world bellowed in his ears. Why the hell had he decided to pull another all-nighter? Why hadn’t he just listened to his wife for once and left early instead of deciding to burn the midnight oil? He could have been out there, in the cool night’s breeze, breathing unfiltered air. And without the dread that within hours he might be burned alive.

  “Attention! Biological hazard detected. Containment lockdown initiated.”

  Right now, he was utterly helpless, helpless to help those in the lower level. Powerless to help anyone else in the facility should the lockdown spread. Powerless to help himself. The computer would determine everything. It would collect and collate all the data, the very data it had used to initiate the lockdown, and determine its recommendation for who lived and who died.

  “We’ll be okay. Whatever it is, it hasn’t breached containment. We should be okay.” He said this to nobody in particular, perhaps trying to convince himself more than anything. They were on the ground level, and the lab was no
w completely contained. The computer monitored everything, scanning for deadly microbes in the filtration systems and in the bodies of the people who worked throughout the facility. They called the computer TRQ, which stood for “The Red Queen” after the homicidal computer in the film Resident Evil. He didn’t feel that joke was so funny now.

  “Sir, TRQ reports no sign of contagion outside the BSL-4 containment level,” one of the security officers stated as he typed furiously on his computer. “Filters are clean, biologicals for all personnel outside the lab level green.”

  He didn’t respond. It was a waiting game now. Each self-contained level was isolated from the next. The computer, based on the algorithms programmed into its software, would determine who would be released from the facility. On the large screen, he watched one of the lab technicians being chased down by three of her former colleagues. The video feed, in full colour, showed them ripping her apart, her white blouse turning crimson, arterial spray actually hitting the lens of the camera.

  “Sir, confirmation Whitehall has been informed.” He knew what that meant. Within hours, a helicopter would descend upon this small island, and the man it brought would have a decision to make. Although TRQ could seal off the facility, it had not been given the power of life or death unless there was a breach of the outer doors. As long as the facility remained contained, the fate of those inside would be determined by one man, a man with a chequered past. A merciless man, a man who could make the decisions normal men could not. Until that man arrived, all he could do was wait. He didn’t like it, but he knew the risks when he took this assignment. But how the hell had this happened? There was nothing down in that lab that could cause this. The worst they had down there was bloody Ebola.

  “Turn those monitors off. I don’t want to see any more of this.”

  1.30AM, 18th April 2014, Waterloo Rd, London

  Always the same fucking dream. The relentless heart-rending screaming of his men, the tearing physical pain and the blood and the flames. The complete feeling of failure and helplessness and the smell of the dead and the dying and the burning of flesh. Always the same dream that mutated into night terrors that woke him, drenched in sweat, his heart pounding, his mouth dry and his mind ripped open by fear and the blackness of the souls lost on his watch.

  The psychiatrist told him it wasn’t his fault, and he knew that on a logical level, she was correct. It was a mechanical failure in the helicopter, the brutal irony of that fact not lost on him. Half his men lost, men who had survived nine months unscathed in one of the most hostile military environments known to man. Half his men killed because the bloody helicopter that was transporting them decided to give up the ghost and fall from the sky with them on board. Even though he was an officer, the men he had lost were friends. Sergeant O’Brian, who had saved his life twice in the field, who could drink any man under the table and still be there for the five-mile run in the morning. Corporal Hillier who had the gift of “feeling” when those Taliban scum were skulking in ambush at the side of the road, and had once pulled Croft away just as he had been about to step on a mine. Two short seconds later, and the pair of them would have been scattered in bits across the roadside, balls and legs shredded and useless. Seven heroes dead; seven men he had fought with, lived with, trained with and who he watched die through a haze of semi-unconsciousness, flames and agony. And the worst thing of all? He had lived to remember it all.

  That had been eight years ago. The dreams came less frequently now, less than once a month. “Your mind will heal,” they had told him. “It will adjust as it processes the trauma you went through,” they said. And they were right; he no longer jumped half out of his skin at loud noises. He no longer broke down in tears for no apparent reason, or felt his heart pounding in his chest from some random stimulus. He was functional, effective and useful once again. No longer broken, but far from fixed. But the dreams still came. And invariably they were portents of doom, messengers of danger to come.

  Sitting up, alone in his bed, he breathed slowly and let the terror subside, soaking in the normality of the darkness around him. He ran a scarred and calloused hand over his shaved head and sighed deeply. Alone he sat, the almost hypnotic thrum of London traffic the only noise audible in the bedroom air. No lover by his side, no children sleeping in the next room. Not even a cat to wake him in the morning. Why risk such loss again?

  He didn’t even jump when the telephone at the side of his bed rang. Part of him was almost expecting it. Here it was again, the call in the dead of night. The insistent voice stating that he must be dressed and packed in 10 minutes so as to be ready for the government car to pick him up. The call to duty. No time to shower, the overnight bag already prepared and sat by the side of his front door. His HK P8 pistol loaded and holstered, easily accessible in the gun safe, stripped and cleaned five hours before. Again, thought Croft. Here we go again. This was the sixth time in two years. What were these idiots doing now? What horrors had they unwittingly unleashed this time? Were they so intent on opening Pandora’s Box, on destroying the world? But this is what they paid him to do, and so he went where they sent him. Although he was now a soldier in rank only, he still knew how to follow orders. After all, what else was there for him to do? Besides, somebody had to be there to clean up the mess those incompetent criminals in Whitehall created. It might as well be him.

  Croft picked up the phone and listened. “I’ll be ready,” he said to the faceless voice on the other end of the secure landline. Placing the phone back in the receiver, he stood from his bed and walked into the bathroom, the pain in his right knee a constant reminder of that fateful day in Afghanistan, the day he and his men were being shipped home. They all went home, just some went home in pieces, wrapped in a flag that now really had no meaning, dying for a dream of England that never really existed.

  8.30AM, 18th April 2014, Hirta Island Research Facility

  Yep, another goddamn mess for him to clean up. Another fuck up by genius scientists who lacked the common sense to know they shouldn’t meddle with the forces of nature. Scientists who could calculate the nature of the universe but probably needed help to cross the road and tie a shoelace. There was a reason evolution occurred over millions of years, why nature made changes gradually and methodically. Why couldn’t these idiots understand this? Just because you could do something, didn’t mean that you should. And so here he was again, dragged out of his slumber to go to wherever the government needed him. And it seemed they needed him more and more these days.

  David Croft felt his stomach lurch as the SA 330 Ouma military transport helicopter was buffeted by the winds coming off the merciless Atlantic Ocean. At least this facility wasn’t on the bloody mainland, and at least this time, the incident had been contained quickly. That was what the emergency dossier on his secure tablet told him. Now stored away in his bag, it had briefed him on everything he needed to know to make the decisions those in power paid him to make. His job held no title and was unknown to all but a select few. This was what the Yanks called “Black Work”. Dirty, unpleasant, and sometimes far from legal. But it was necessary, and he was needed so as to give those in power a sense of deniability. His job was to protect the clamouring, selfish and hypocritical masses from the inevitable mistakes his government and their minions made. This wasn’t a job; it was a way of life, and he knew the very people he protected would scream for his incarceration if they learnt of the things he had been forced to do for their protection. They wouldn’t understand, and they would turn on him and those who made him like a rabid dog turns on its owner. Sometimes, he wondered if the masses actually deserved saving, but he knew that this was not a decision for him to make. He was merely the hired help. And yet the price he paid for their safety was the soiling of his very soul.

  Looking out of the window, he saw Hirta Island drawing closer. Another godforsaken rock. The helicopter buffeted again, and rain started to impact on the outside, obscuring the view of his destination, which got ever closer. Croft
hated helicopters – understandable really, considering. It had been two years before he had been able to get near one without suffering chaotic palpitations and anxiety. And now all he seemed to do was fly about in the things.

  “One minute to landing, Major,” the voice of the co-pilot stated over the intercom. Thank Christ. Croft grabbed hold of the door handle and readied himself for touch down. Even a cold, wet, barren rock in the Atlantic was better than this.

  There were people waiting for him at the helipad … but then there were always people waiting for him. That was his life now it seemed. Some carried worried faces, others had defiant eyes. Some even reeked of resentment, as if Croft’s presence was an insult to their existence, to their competence. And in fairness, in a way it was. If he was anywhere on orders of Whitehall, it meant that someone or something had failed. Despite the safeguards, despite the systems, and despite the training, human error always crept in. That was one of the first things they taught him at Sandhurst, a message battered home in his SBS training.

  “All plans fall apart upon engagement with the enemy.”

  And didn’t he know that all too well. Hadn’t he experienced that very thing time and time again? He held his breath as the helicopter touched down, and sighed internally as the motion stopped and the ground became his new home. Another bullet dodged. Another day to carry on living.

  “You are safe to disembark, Major.” Croft didn’t respond; he undid his seat harness and opened the door, mindful of the rotors that were still spinning as they slowed their rotation. There were three people there this time, two struggling with umbrellas as the wind buffeted them, toyed with them. Grabbing his bag, he stepped from the helicopter and made his way over to where they stood anxiously. One of them saluted – the one who stood in the rain without protection, the soldier and the driver of the car that waited to take Croft to his latest massacre. He saw the hint of fear in the man’s eyes, the look that told him the man had seen something no human being should ever see but lived to talk about it. Not that the man would ever speak a word of what he had seen here. That was what the Official Secrets Act was for. Croft saluted back, gave the man a nod that relayed respect. Nobody spoke for there was nothing that needed to be said, and they retreated quickly to the relative warmth of the car. The next 30 minutes would determine whether 47 people got to live or die. All in a day’s work, thought Croft.