A Heartbeat Away

CHAPTER 45

Ellis checked that Gladstone’s BlackBerry was powered on and set to capture video. She was keyed up and tense in all the best sense of the words. Jim Allaire had kept her in the dark long enough. It was time she documented what was really going on, and just how much they all had to fear from this virus.

Beside her, O’Neil looked as if his legs were about to betray him. His complexion mirrored the white of the marble floor.

Inches away, the clamor and the scraping sound on the other side of the door continued.

The Secret Service agent uncoiled the length of chain securing the Senate Chamber doors. The steel links slid through his hands and clattered into a heap at his feet. Ellis cupped her ear and listened against the door.

“Nothing,” she said. “I have no idea what that sound could have been, but it’s gone now.”

“I think you’re crazy to go in there.”

“We, dearest. We are going in there. And we’re going to be quick about it, too. In and out with a little video in between. That will be all I need. Judging from Dr. Townsend’s containment suit over there, these people are infected with something pretty horrible.”

“Whatever it is, we’ve been exposed, too.”

“But I’m betting that whatever it is, these poor souls got a mega dose. It’s time to see just how much your boss has been holding out on us all. Don’t you want to know? I mean, it is your life, too.”

“I … don’t know.”

“O’Neil, I promise you. If we stay only a minute, just enough time to let me gather the video I need, we’ll both be fine—especially if we hold our breath. Now, let’s go.”

O’Neil sighed, and pulled the door open.

The first thing Ellis noticed as she stepped forward into the main aisle of the Senate Chamber was the smell. It was a foul stench of blood, bodily waste, and vomit, unlike anything she had experienced before. Her throat immediately tightened as her gag reflex kicked in. She wondered if the standing fans installed throughout the room were somehow keeping the powerful odor from escaping through the door cracks. The room lights were on full, and what Ellis saw as she fumbled for her camera made her cry out in fright.

The golden damask above the marbled wainscot was stained with blood and fecal matter. White marble busts of past Senate presidents, normally set in bowl niches in the gallery level, were either smashed, missing, or lying on the floor. But even more disturbing was that the one hundred mahogany senators’ desks had been ripped from their footings and thrown aside, replaced by a number of cots—at least twenty or twenty-five of them, mostly occupied, and many by people she knew, now barely recognizable to her.

Some of those in the chamber wore the comfortable clothing that had been delivered to the Capitol. But there were a few others—the most debilitated—who were still wearing what remained of their tuxedoes and designer gowns. They were lying listlessly, or vomiting congealing blood into blue plastic buckets wired to the bedframes. Some were writhing in pain. Others were propped on one elbow, moaning piteously.

For half a minute, Ellis stood transfixed, the purpose of her mission forgotten.

She heard a terrible shriek and turned in that direction. The senior senator from Missouri, a genteel, dignified man in his seventies, was pressing his hands on either side of his head, groaning for the pain to stop. Blood, from a nosebleed or perhaps his stomach, stained the sheet beneath him. He screamed again, and slapped at his expansive abdomen, as though trying to put out a fire burning inside. Then, suddenly, he turned his head and vomited into the bucket—black blood, thick as oil.

Ellis managed to raise her camera and pan the scene. This was not the flu. Nor was it any other virus she could imagine.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said, her voice barely able to form the words.

O’Neil was rooted. Many of these dignitaries were also people he knew well. Finally, he managed a few baby steps back toward the door. Ellis stayed close to him. Then they turned to run, but Admiral Archibald Jakes had materialized in the center of the aisle and was blocking their only way out. He was a grotesquerie. His stained dress whites were ripped in many places. The rows of service ribbons over his left breast had gaps resembling a hockey player’s teeth. The sclerae of his eyes were bloodred. His cheeks were sunken and his lower jaw was in constant motion—a gnawing skull.

The admiral lifted his hands to prevent O’Neil and her from passing, and Ellis gasped.

His palms were a swirl of crimson, concentric circles, giving the appearance of having had the design branded on. On the surface of the swirls were hundreds of tiny, raised blisters, many of them broken and oozing.

“Home … please take me home…,” Jakes moaned.

His voice was a coarse whisper, and his breath was foul.

“Admiral, what’s going on in here?” O’Neil managed to ask. “What’s happening to you? Who’s helping you all?”

“Dying … we’re all dying.” Each word the admiral spoke emerged like a hiss of steam. “Why did you do this to me?”

“No, it wasn’t us,” O’Neil said. “It was Genesis. It’s some sort of virus.”

“You lie! You lie!”

Ellis sensed movement behind her and turned to see that others in the room were now gathering behind her like zombies, blocking their only retreat from Jakes. Some of them had been friends and colleagues of hers for many years. All of them were ill—terribly, terribly ill. It was also impossible not to see the bright red patterns on their palms.

“Admiral Jakes, please,” O’Neil pleaded, “let us by. We’ll get you help. I promise.”

The navy man’s eyes were wild.

“No help. You lie! You lie!”

Jakes drove forward with surprising quickness and wrapped his fingers around O’Neil’s throat. The Secret Service agent batted Jakes’s hands aside, but in an instant the admiral lunged again, clawing at his face, drawing blood.

“Stop!” O’Neil shouted.

“Die! Die like me!”

Jakes continued flailing at the much younger man. Blood from the angry gouges ran down O’Neil’s cheek, soaking his shirt collar.

Ellis screamed as the small crowd began folding in around them.

At that instant, the scene was frozen by a gunshot. Smoke rose from the pistol at O’Neil’s waist. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff dropped to his knees, then toppled in slow motion onto his back, staring sightlessly at the high, ornate ceiling. A scarlet stain instantly began expanding from the bullet hole in his jacket. The advancing crowd pulled back as the pistol in O’Neil’s hand smoked. The stench of gunpowder merged with the other odors in the room.

“Let’s go! Now!” he barked at Ellis.

Clutching her BlackBerry, the speaker grasped O’Neil’s coat sleeve and allowed herself to be dragged outside the Senate Chamber. The dying men and women were again moving in when O’Neil pushed the doors closed. Ellis looped the chain tightly through the handles and leaned against the doors with all her strength as O’Neil snapped the lock.

Then, gasping for air, exhausted, and rattled, the two of them slumped against the wall. The din and scratching from within had resumed, but with a difference. Somewhere amidst the mob on the other side of the door lay the body of the chief of the United States Navy.

Ellis checked her phone.

She had recorded everything.