Caught in the Web Read online

  Sarah was the leading researcher in the United States for what was classified as “Unknown Pathogens”. That meant that whenever there was a new mutation or something that couldn’t be diagnosed, she would often be called in for a consult. Most of the time, things happened over the phone, emails were sent through secure networks, and high definition pictures were often sent for her to make educated hypotheses as to what it was.

  She had given a few briefs on field work, and had written up a few papers about how she felt certain things should be contained and investigated. However, going into the field…well, that typically only happened once, maybe twice a year, typically never in such a hurry, and she was almost always sent overseas.

  This was being rushed. Someone needed her right away. This wasn’t going to be a long flight overseas if there was that much of a rush on it. If that was the case, they would have sent her pictures and had her do the research virtually.

  This was being rushed so that meant, more than likely, whatever was going on wasn’t far away. It was going to be somewhere in the United States. Did that mean there had finally been a biological attack?

  She could feel her heart starting to race as the doors for the elevator opened once again. This time, she hurried in, not allowing them to close.

  * * * *

  The gravel crunched beneath the tires of the large vehicle as it pulled off the road. It had been a half-hour drive from the armory to Hammond’s city limits, but it would have been quicker if it hadn’t been for road construction along the way. He would have to look at the map again to see if he could give the rest of his troops an alternate route to keep them from getting caught in the traffic. If he hadn’t forced the driver of his caravan to go into the ditch and around the line of cars eight miles back, they would still be sitting there, trying to get around the now one-lane road.

  The large troop carrier came to a stop with a jerk, making Sergeant Wade push against the restraint of his neon green seat belt. He gave a dark look to the private that was behind the wheel, but the man missed it, and the sergeant didn’t push it. Instead, he quickly stepped out and took a brief look at the city limits sign just a few feet away from him.

  Hammond, Pop. 9,903.

  Ten thousand people and he had to keep them from leaving town.

  Once they had left the armory, he put all his emotions aside. It would be deadly for him to think about what they were about to do. If he dwelled on it and thought about the action they were taking, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do it. His stomach already burned and felt like it was eating away at him from the inside.

  Dammit, now is not the time to be thinking about family, he thought. He couldn’t let anything personal get in the way of doing his duty. He had a responsibility to his country. He swore an oath to God and country and, while he questioned the God, his country was his family.

  No matter what damn color they put into the White House, he had a duty to his country, but this sure as hell never would have happened on anyone else’s watch up there. Anyone else would never have let a mistake like this happen, allowing a town to be quarantined off. What was it, some kind of biological test gone wrong? What could have led this town, in the middle of nowhere, to get cut off from the rest of the world?

  “Sergeant!” a uniformed soldier called out as he hurried up from the troop truck that had followed behind the one he rode in. The man was holding out a large radio receiver, and he reached for it. As he did, he looked around at the rest of his men, who were scrambling into the street with a series of barricades. He knew that once they set them up, they would move the trucks in front of them as reinforcement before pitching the tents to the side of the road.

  Blocking the roads was going to be the easy part. As he put the large radio to his ear, he grimaced while looking at the large acres of farmland that stretched between the roads. Sure, he could block the roads, but there was a lot of space in between them and watching over it seemed like an impossible task, especially with the corn stalks high enough that a person could easily make their way through unnoticed.

  It was a nightmare situation, a military action on United States soil, and he was at the “nothing he could do” end of it. If he was overseas and somewhere he felt like he could do more, could control his environment without as many legal implications, he would have sent out teams to torch the fields, making it possible for a clear line of sight.

  “Mitch!” yelled a voice through the radio, and he turned his attention back to it.

  “Yes, sir!” Damn, it was the colonel.

  “You in position?” the voice barked at him with an angry, commanding voice.

  “We just arrived at the first post. My men are positioning themselves at the other stations and securing them. We will be continuing on to the next location as soon as the first barricade is set up.”

  “How far out are you from the city limits?”

  “We are at the city limits, sir.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, and he wasn’t sure if the colonel had just disconnected or if he was planning his replacement. He didn’t know what the hell the man wanted. He was told to secure and quarantine the town. He had never been told how far out to set the barricades, and he didn’t think it really mattered. He figured as close to the town as possible would cause less questions and inconvenience.

  “Okay, secure them. I’ll be there within the hour, setting up secondary positions ten miles out. No one in or out, sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Over and out.”

  “Over and out.”

  He knew this time that the colonel had disconnected. He handed the phone back to the soldier who was standing there, then turned back to the rest of his men. They were working quickly, and the camp would be set up within five minutes. Not bad, but that didn’t mean he still couldn’t yell at them. They needed to know he was still biting at their heels or they would get lazy.

  “I want this camp set up and ready in two minutes! Five minutes, I want the line at attention! Last man to be in line will be digging latrines! Understood?!”

  The men seemed to pick up their pace, but that could have been his imagination. He would like to think he got them to bust their ass, though. He would like to think a lot of things. He didn’t want to think about what the hell would get the colonel off base and coming all the way up there to them. And if he would be there within an hour, that meant they mobilized even before he and his men.

  So what in the hell was going on? He sure wished he knew.

  “Pierce!” he called over to the man with the radio who had just started to walk away so he could set up his equipment in one of the tents. “Pierce! Get with the other units. I want everybody’s status before we line up, make sure they are all in position. Then call the armory. I want to know how the remaining troops are coming, if the guard for the area has been called in and notified. Make sure they are also getting ahold of the guard inside the town. I want those soldiers to know the situation and get with the authorities to try and keep all those inside the city limits calm. The local law enforcement must help to keep people from trying to get to our lines. We have orders to shoot, but it must not come to that. Got it!”

  “Yes, sergeant!” The man hurried to where four other men had just set up one of the tents. His equipment had already been brought to it and he quickly went to busting them out of the crates and onto the tables.

  Get the perimeters secure, get the people locked down…lock in all the pigs and get them ready for the slaughter.

  His stomach twisted into a knot as he thought about it. That’s exactly what all this was. There were so many grisly possibilities of locking in all these people. He had friends and family in there. What was he going to do when he had his sister in his sights with an order to shoot? Would he be able to pull the trigger?

  None of this was good, and he was sure this night wasn’t going to end well. Pigs in a pen, and the pen is all fenced in. So many roads leading in and out, so ma
ny gates for the farmers to watch their livestock. If the pigs tried to run and get out, would they really be able to hold them? Oh no, this was not going to end well at all.

  He thought back to the map he had seen. Back at the armory, he had pulled out a large map of the area, detailed with many of the roads. It would never have all the roads as there were always the small farm roads that never made it onto the maps, but it didn’t matter. The map they used had been detailed enough, showing the crisscrossing patchwork. He had looked at it, thought about all those lines as they worked their way across the terrain. Taking out all the fields and the topography, it was all just a bunch of lines. Lines that all came to a centralized point…Hammond.

  He knew what it looked like, the lines getting closer together as they merged to one point. He couldn’t help but think about it. He didn’t know why he had never seen it before, and why he didn’t think it had anything to do on what was going on now. Why should it? He couldn’t help but think with how all the roads came together, it had an eerie similarity to a spider web.

  And now the townspeople, and even himself, were all the flies.

  “Pierce, make sure to get a call in. Make sure they got the choppers in the air, and to keep their eyes on the corn.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Rob couldn’t think of a day he regretted leaving Chicago more than any other day. Sure, the crime was bad there and he had always been forced to be on his toes. A Chicago cop never knew when the next bullet might be shot, or when they would take a figurative knife in the back. In fact, he had seen that, just last year, Chicago had topped New York as the number one murder capital in the United States. Another statistic he didn’t want to contribute to. He had been thankful when he got a job out of the city.

  But at least when he was part of the Chicago PD, he wouldn’t have found himself stuck out in the middle of nowhere. His bills, back when he had a steady full-time job, had always been paid, and he was able to put food on the table. He was able to survive and not have to work the odd jobs he was now having to do around the neighborhood just to earn a little extra income. He would have been making enough money to have had the spare on his car fixed so that when his tire had blown, he would not have been left stranded on the side of the road, stuck on what seemed like some forgotten back highway that no one used anymore. He wouldn’t have been out there when the corn was so high, he had no clear way of seeing where there might be a farmhouse he could walk to, or some kind of help he could find.

  Yeah, so why didn’t he use his cell and call for help? That was why people had the damn things, so that they wouldn’t be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Not that he had the best damn cell reception out there. He already learned that from experience. But to have to worry about reception, he would have had to remember to bring the phone with him, instead of leaving it sitting on his nightstand where he had been using it as his alarm clock that morning.

  Thankfully, someone had finally shown up to help him. A truck driver, a larger man who looked to be in his mid-forties, had pulled off and picked Rob up, bringing him to the closest town. Of course, it didn’t do him any good to get to the county courthouse to testify in the vandalism case he was supposed to be appearing at, but with most of the morning wasted on the side of the road, all he really wanted at this point was to get somewhere cool, sit down for a bit, and maybe get his hands to stop shaking from everything that had happened that damned morning.

  He had never had a tire blow on him going sixty miles an hour. The front of the car had rocked up, coming crashing back down. The whole world around him started shaking as he fought to keep control of the car. It seemed odd that he really only had to fight for control for the first few seconds, when the car had crashed back down from the initial blow out. After that, the car seemed to stabilize itself, and he was able to ease it over to the side of the road. Sure, it seemed easy and, for a long time, he hadn’t really thought about what he had done. The whole time he had been focused on just reacting. It had seemed so easy…until he had time to think about it afterwards and wonder just how he had actually done it.

  Bruce, the truck driver, had picked him up, taken him to a little diner for some lunch, then had taken him to the garage he knew right across from a friend’s bar. Rob appreciated it, and had enjoyed the meal. He hadn’t thought too much about the whole experience and how he was lucky to be alive. Now though, as he watched the large man walking away from him and heading off to the little bar, he had time to think. His hands were shaking as he realized that his morning, his shitty morning from hell, could have been a lot worse. He could easily have lost control of the car, it could have flipped over, the rubber and metal from the tire could have ripped into the engine and done some damage or caught on fire, and he might not have walked away from it.

  All in all, he was definitely lucky to be alive.

  Rob watched and saw the little bar that Bruce was heading towards, making sure to make note that it was the building just across the railroad tracks, caddy-corner to the little garage he was at, and not the bar just across the street from him. They were so far off the main drag of town, he was surprised there were two bars, but he made sure that he would go to the correct one as soon as he was done talking to the mechanic.

  He looked around the little garage. Back in Chicago, he would have thought it was a meth lab…the dirty windows, the clutter in corners, junk piled on top of junk. The place didn’t look like it was open for business and looked like it wanted to stay off people’s radar. Why would anyone choose to go there? It seemed like a place abandoned and forgotten. The cars that were parked in the lot along the side of the building were covered in dust that even the latest rain hadn’t been able to wash clean. He doubted even the newest car was less than ten-years-old, and he questioned who would possibly pay the $700 that was crudely written on its windshield in large, washed-out soap numbers.

  But Bruce had ensured him this guy would be okay. He wondered just how Bruce knew him, but Bruce was from the area, while Rob, living just thirty miles from there in a small town he had moved to just over a year ago, was still a stranger.

  He didn't know if he would ever get over the differences between being a Chicago PD officer to being a small town deputy. It had been a big shock when they had moved down there, and it continued to always amaze him that it could get more unexpected. It wasn't like Mayberry, like the television shows he had seen growing up, but it wasn't much like those modern shows that teens watched, either. The sheriff didn't know everyone, didn't care to know everyone, and the police force wasn't always on duty. At least that’s how it was in the small town in which he was a deputy. He wasn't sure how much different it would be in the town he was currently stranded in. In his town, the local law enforcement was on duty from 4 p.m. until 4 a.m., and anything after that required a call to county. The sheriff worked five days a week. That left only weekends for Rob to work and was the reason why he had to find various odd jobs around the town to make ends meet.

  Why had they left the city and his full-time job again?

  Oh, that’s right. Because, on his last call as a CPD officer, he had been shot, set on fire, pushed down some stairs, and awoke weeks later in a hospital. That, and the fact there had been a rash of school shootings at his son's school, made him and his wife re-think the idea of living in the city. While he hadn't meant to do something as drastic as moving far out in the country, the job that was available and the house they had found made him jump at the chance.

  Yes, he had jumped at the chance to have a house large enough that he could have his own man-cave. Pardon him for wanting to have his own space and have a room to sit back in, with a big screen television to watch the Sunday football games. Of course, when he found out the job wasn't full-time, the big screen television never reached his man-cave.

  He walked over to the front door of the little place, noticing that he could just make out the flip sign through the dirty glass of the door…“through the dirty He pushed on the door, momentarily fight
ing as it was stuck, then cringing a little as it scraped the door frame before releasing and letting him step inside.

  The smell of stale cardboard, old oil, and the heavy musty odor of dirt attacked him, and he was instantly reminded of what his garage had first smelled like when they had moved into his house. It had only been a year ago and it was huge. Coming from Chicago, and buying the house for only a fraction of what they had paid for their condo, they hadn’t been ready for the amount of space they would have. He also hadn’t been ready for the garage attached to the house. He had no idea what the previous owners had been like, although looking at the boring white walls throughout most of the house, he didn’t think they had been too imaginative. The garage must have been the storage area for most of their shit, and the previous owners didn’t believe in disposing of old oil. He had found jugs of the stuff, and the garage reeked of it. The smell seemed like it had infused itself into the cement floor and the wood beams, like it was a part of it.

  It wasn’t filling him with confidence that this mechanic’s garage smelled much the same way. Did he really want to trust his car to this guy? Sure, he only needed to get a tire fixed, but something about that bothered him. He felt like he was forgetting something. He didn’t know what it was, but there was a thought hiding in the corner of his mind. Something here wasn’t going to go how he wanted it to. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he had that uneasiness telling him something was about to go wrong.