CHAPTER 11

Kara leaned against the door to the lobby, relishing the feel of the cool glass. Man was she hot. Last night she had slept better than she had in months, and she had woken up full of energy. Unfortunately, the burst hadn't lasted and now the waves of nausea were almost overwhelming. Forcing herself to head back towards the make-shift command center before Alisha sent out a search party to look for her, Kara decided to try to find Rachel on her next break and get something for her stomach. Maybe she'd have Rachel check out the baby as well. She (since, despite what Danny thought, Kara was convinced it was a girl) had been rather quiet this morning, only the occasional tap-dance on Kara's bladder. It would be reassuring to have Rachel tell her that everything was fine.

"Heard from Cobra," Slattery noted as she re-entered the room. "No problems in Norwalk. They are pushing north. Next check in thirty minutes."

"That's good news, sir," Kara replied. She was disappointed to have missed the check-in, the last one before Danny left for Cornwall. Not that they would have discussed anything personal, of course, but she had gotten very good at reading his frame of mind based on a few words over the radio.

Slattery gave her a hard look. "Heard you puking. Third time this morning. You eat anything?"

Kara sighed. The XO was nothing if not direct. "It didn't work out so well." The chocolate chip pancakes that had looked so amazing at the cafeteria this morning had been the first thing to come back up.

"Go see Doctor Scott. Everything here is running like clockwork. Besides, that sound is making me twitchy." Kara exchanged glances with Alisha, fighting back a smile despite how miserable she currently felt. Twitchy? As though sensing the question, the XO shuddered. "My wife threw up for nine months all three times. Makes a man thankful to be out to sea."

Normally Kara would have insisted on toughing it out, not wanting to receive special treatment, but right now she felt too awful to argue. Thirty minutes was plenty of time to get back before Danny called in again. "Thank you, sir."

Heading across the street, Kara hoped that whatever Rachel gave her kicked in quickly. She did not have time right now to be sick.

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"I'm thinking about it."

Danny swallowed hard, fighting back a sob of joy and relief at the sound of her voice. Caro was alive. Somehow, someway she had survived. And he had found her – or she had found him. He had another chance to make things right.

"Still pissed at me, I take it?" Danny called back, reverting to his typical half-flippant manner of dealing with Caro, sidestepping the emotional intensity of the moment.

"If you want to talk, Danny, you can come on over," Caro replied. "But no guns. And tell anyone else with you to head back down the road."

"Absolutely not," Burk responded instantly. "We have no idea what is going on and this whole question and answer thing is weird."

Tex leaned forward. "I'm with Burk. This isn't just scared civilians. There's something wrong here. You sure that's your sister?"

"Oh, that's Caroline all right," Cruz responded without hesitation. "And she's got a bee in her bonnet about something. No talking her out of it, though. She is the most stubborn woman on the planet."

"Let me talk to her," Danny insisted. He knew that he could get through to Caro with a little time. He just needed to figure out the situation, get a bit more information. "They won't shoot me."

But what if they did? Despite himself, he couldn't stop himself from remembering Kara on that morning in New Orleans, her eyes teary as she asked, no implored, him not to leave her alone to raise their child. One of the rare moments when she had set aside the self-confident persona that she projected to the world and allowed him to see her fear, her worries. He could not allow his emotions – either about Caro or about Kara and the baby – to rule his head. He had to trust that Burk was seeing the situation clearly.

"No can do, Caro," Danny called back. Then he added, "Cruz here says that you are the most stubborn woman on the planet."

He looked over at Tex. "That should get a rise out of her."

But surprisingly, there was no response. Danny frowned, confused by the continued silence. Caro was not an indecisive person. Waiting, equivocating, vacillating, that had never been Caro's style. Of course, that was before the virus. Who knew what Caro had been through in the last year? No doubt she had changed, as had he.

"I heard Mr. Will. Anyone else with you? Dad? Tom? The Wards?"

"You think that's going to work on me?" Caro's voice was scornful. "Get me to tell you how many of us there are? Forget it buster. I've been down that road before. The military and all of their help."

Danny slammed his fist into the ground. The Immunes. They must have been through here, spreading their oh-so-effective propaganda. There was no telling what Caro had seen or heard, but something truly terrible must have happened for her to be this suspicious. The most sensible thing to do right now would be to turn around, head to Hartford via another route, avoid a confrontation, wait for word of the cure to spread here naturally. But this was his sister, his family. He couldn't just leave.

"You see anything Wolf?" Burk asked quietly.

"Looks like civilians," Wolf responded over the mic. "Four of them. Older man, two guys in their early twenties, and the woman – Green's sister, I take it. She has a pistol but the rest of them have rifles, probably designed for hunting. They're on a small hill slightly west. I don't see any lookouts. We could take them without any shots being fired. Sneak in, toss in a little smoke, and have them on the ground before they knew what hit them."

"Negative," Slattery's voice over the radio was firm. "President doesn't want any violence and no telling what you'll find up the road even if you take these guys out."

"Sounds like the Immunes have been here," Burk added. "Spreading their usual rhetoric."

"How long to go back south and around, Green?" Slattery asked.

Danny considered the request. "We can probably get back to Route 8 in forty-five minutes, then another hour or two north to Hartford, depending on whether the road is clear."

"Assume three hours. Sundown is around five thirty these days. That gives you an hour to talk your way out of this one, boys. Win the hearts and minds of America, right?" Slattery's dry voice made it clear just how much he agreed with the President's sentiment.

"So what's the plan, Danny-boy? These are your people." Tex looked at him expectantly.

"Wolf, circle around north if you can and check out the situation up the road," Danny ordered. "Cruz, cover him. Burk, go south, check on Miller and make sure we aren't getting blocked in. I don't want to get surprised."

"Looks like we have ourselves a stalemate," Danny spoke loudly this time, making sure that Caro would hear him. "Kind of reminds me of playing Risk when we were kids."

"You've never been good at compromise, Danny," Caro replied.

"Pot meet kettle," Danny retorted with a snort. He actually was very good at compromising. Just not with Caro. He had learned at an early age that any give with her somehow turned into complete capitulation. "Well, since it sounds like we might be here for a while, you going to tell me what you've been up to for the past eighteen months?"

"You first. I can't wait to hear of the heroism of Daniel Joshua Green. Saving the world since 1987." Caro's voice dripped with sarcasm. Ah, there was the old Caro.

Tex's eyebrows popped. "Damn, you are a baby. Not going to tell you what I was up to in 1987."

"We need to keep her talking. Only way to figure out what happened here," Danny responded quietly. Tex nodded. If there was one thing that Tex was good at, it was talking.

"Saving the world can be kind of tricky," Danny called out to Caro. "I got a few things right this year. And a lot of things wrong." He paused. "Reminds me, actually, I ran into Rebecca. She was in New London when we made port." He played with the idea of having Rebecca talk to Caro, but decided it was too risky. He didn't want Rebecca caught in any cross-fire, or doing something stupid like agreeing to talk to Caro face-to-face. "She was worried about you. Said that you two had been on the outs."

"Which is your fault, of course," Caro retorted, but Danny thought he heard a note of something else in her voice, relief perhaps, at learning that Rebecca had survived.

"She has you pegged," Tex tossed in.

"This is my boy Tex. Met him down in Gitmo earlier this year and he's been annoying me ever since. But I'll get to that later. Might as well start at the beginning. I assume the parents told you that I was assigned to the Nathan James." She had known. See you on the flip side. "What they didn't know, because I couldn't tell them, was that we were headed to the arctic to test a new weapons system. Well, the ship was anyway. My job was to babysit two scientists while they dug around in the ice looking for bird droppings. So a year ago I was in the arctic, no incoming communication, spending my days freezing my ass off on the ice and my nights dreaming about a lovely lieutenant named Kara Foster. Gorgeous, smart, funny, good with a gun. Pretty much the perfect woman."

"Do you have a point?" Caro interrupted, her voice exasperated. Danny's lip curled. Long rambling stories like their father used to tell had always annoyed her.

"Oh yeah. Back on point. Babysitting a doctor looking at birds? Most boring assignment of my life, I though. Until the day Russian helicopters appear and start shooting at us, demanding that we give them the cure. Because it turns out that Doctor Rachel Scott is not just some annoying ornithologist, but is actually the world's leading paleomicrobiologist. And our real mission in the arctic is to find the primordial strain of a virus that is currently killing half a million people a day, which the CDC needs to develop a vaccine."

"Did you find it?" Caro's voice wavered slightly. She was a nurse. He had known that she would immediately grasp the significance of their mission.

"She's moving closer to your location," Wolf whispered. "The others are following a bit behind her, keeping their distance. Road north looks clear for now. Cruz and I will circle around behind them."

"We did. Not that I had any idea what a primordial strain was at the time, or what was going on back here. Captain broke radio silence that day and I tried to reach you – you, Mom, Dad, Chris, anyone really. Nothing went through. We left the arctic, heading south, but we needed fuel. We were just off the coast of France, trying to refuel, when a nuclear bomb passed overhead, eviscerating Paris. We were running on fumes when we came across a cruise ship. No response to our hails so we headed over. It was a ship of death. Bodies everywhere, ravaged by the virus. We were on our way out when Frankie tripped. His containment mask came off. He'd been exposed. And I watched as my best friend blew his head off." He paused. Talking about Frankie was like being stabbed over and over again, the wound still raw.

"At least it was quick," Caro's voice was hard. "The Red Flu is an awful way to die. I'd take a bullet any day."

"Not sure that I agree with you, sugar," Tex tossed in. "I've been shot and had the Red Flu. Can you say that? Anyone? Bueller?"

"Nobody survives the Red Flu." It was a man's voice, but not Mr. Will. They were getting through to someone, at least.

"I did," Tex said simply.

"This is Eddie Ward. I survived as well, both me and my boy."

Tex let that sink in for a moment. "Well, as the only person here with any basis for comparison, the Red Flu isn't so bad. Getting shot hurts like a son of a bitch. The virus? The rash doesn't really itch and the hallucinations were kind of enjoyable. The worst part was listening to Green's sniffling over Kara. 'Don't you dare leave me. You are not going to die, okay? You complete me.'" Danny gave Tex a look. Waaay too far. "I might have borrowed that last bit from Jerry McGuire, but you get the idea. Not what I wanted to hear while I was having a nice morphine induced dream about a certain temptress doctor."

"At least I didn't resort to bad James Bond jokes," Danny retorted under his breath, before raising his voice again. "But back to my story. We headed home to find Doctor Scott a laboratory, but nobody was responding. So she worked on the ship while we moved from place to place. Picked Tex up at Gitmo along with a bunch of equipment that Doctor Scott needed. Cruz has a nice scar from a run-in with some inmates there. We lost Bercham and Smith to the Russians. I almost ran the ship into some coral…."

"Skip ahead, Danny." Caro's voice was exasperated, and suspicious. "How did that man survive? Nobody survives the Red Flu. You're either immune or you're dead."

Burk reappeared, staying to the tree line as he made his way towards them. "Well, fast forwards a bit and Doctor Scott has it – a vaccine. We still had to test it, though. Six people volunteered – Tex and Kara included. But the vaccine didn't work. They all got sick. Really, really, really sick. Still, Doctor Scott is one determined lady. She refused to give up. And at the last minute she managed it. Using the primordial she found a formula that not only inoculates the healthy, but also cures the sick. Like Tex here."

"Did … Kara … survive?" Caro spoke hesitantly, her voice catching over the name of a woman that she had heard of only a few minutes ago. It felt surreal, the idea that Caro had no idea who Kara was, how much she meant to him.

"Sure did. Both her and the little Green parasite pulled through." Tex paused when nobody laughed. "Get it? Baby Green? A Green parasite?"

"If you have to explain the joke it isn't funny, Tex." Heaven help Tex if he said that in front of Kara.

"She was pregnant?" Caro sounded dumbfounded. And he couldn't blame her. If she walked out eight months pregnant, he would be completely blind-sided too.

"That was pretty much my reaction," Danny confessed. "Not exactly the news that I was expecting when the Captain walked out onto the flight deck that day. But continuing with my story. Now we have the vaccine but we need to find a lab where we can make and distribute it in large quantities. We were near Baltimore when we got hailed by a woman named Amy Granderson who, by chance, was the mother of one of the lieutenants on the Nathan James. She knew about our mission and had a lab we could use. Sounds perfect, right?"

"I'm going to guess that it wasn't," Caro responded.

"She's almost on the road," Wolf interjected.

"Of course not. I met them on the pier. Checked their identification and sent a bunch of them back to the ship. We all headed downtown to Mrs. Granderson's fortress. By the time we realized what she was up to – killing the sick and burning their bodies to power the city – her people had taken the Nathan James. But they couldn't find the primordial strain. Our doctors had hidden it too well. So Granderson decided to get clever. You know what a great way to re-engineer a vaccine is? Stem cells."

"Oh my God," Caro's voice reflected the horror that Danny could see on Eddie's face as understanding struck. "Did you save them?"

Danny stepped around the SUV, onto the sun-dappled road. Caro stood twenty feet away, her arm in a sling, limping as she took a step towards him. "Me save them? Nope. Kara pulled a hand free and stabbed the doctor to death with a syringe, then got herself out of the building with a little help from our good friend Tex." Another time that Kara had been alone. Another time that she had been forced to save herself. "She's not exactly a shrinking violet, and she doesn't like people messing with her family. So if your friends over there are thinking about shooting me, they may want to think twice, because she might just hunt them down."

"I thought that I would never see you again," Caro admitted, her voice shaking. "Dad's gone. He got sick early on. The Wards and Carltons are gone. There are only a couple hundred of us left. The looters keep picking us off. Nowhere is safe anymore."

His father was gone, then. Hearing Caro's voice had made him hope…. Not that he was surprised, but the news was still a blow. And Rebecca's and Eddie's parents as well. But Caro was here. He still had her. They were close enough now for Danny to see the tears rolling down Caro's face. She was filthy, her clothing covered in stains, blood seeping from the makeshift sling. She looked like she had been through a war – and maybe she had. He closed the last space between them, pulling her into his arms for a hug, gentle so not to jostle her injury. "I'm sorry. For everything."

Caro pulled back, looking up at him through tear-soaked eyes. "Me too. A baby? Really? Anything else you need to tell me about?"

"Later." Danny felt like he had been saying that a lot lately. "What happened to you?"

"Tom's people." Caro explained. "When I heard that Eddie was with you, I thought maybe you'd all crossed over."

"Tom's people?" It was Danny's turn to be feel mystified.

"I haven't heard from Tom in months," Eddie spoke, frowning, as he joined them on the road. "He'd been updating me on my folks and then all of a sudden there was no answer. I figured he was dead. I've been down in New London. I thought about trying to come up – look for my parents – but I couldn't leave my boy."

"A few months back a group came through, passing out supplies, offering to help. They wore uniforms – looked like standard army green. Something about it felt off to me. But Tom knew some of the guys. Said they were legit. We'd gotten close, spent a lot of time together since the quarantines were put in place. He used to say that he was taking care of me because that's what you would have wanted, Danny. That he was like a substitute big brother. I trusted him. But it was a lie. Two days after the men came through, half the town was dead and most of the rest dying. And Tom was gone. He left with them in the middle of the night. They come back every so often for food and supplies. Ran into some of them a couple nights back." Caro held up her bandaged arm.

Danny and Tex exchanged glances. "Immunes. We saw it in the south. They deliberately spread the virus to see who would get sick. But they were all supposed to surrender in exchange for presidential pardons."

"No, these guys aren't immune," Caro corrected. "At least I don't think they are. The water they were passing out was laced with rat poison – arsenic. They were just clearing us out. Apparently there is no room for the weak in the new world order. Tom pulled a few of us aside and offered to let us join them. He didn't take 'no' well."

Danny felt his jaw drop. They poisoned the town? It was horrifying – and unfathomable - that Tom could have participated in such a ghastly act. Waldron had been the ladies' man of their group, Danny the athlete, and Eddie the clown. But Tom, Tom had been the smart one. The guy that never had to study but always aced the test. The one who was always two steps ahead. Danny recalled how disappointed his father had been when Tom returned from college and got a job managing the local hardware store, rather than continuing on to graduate school. But Tom had seemed content. How could his friend have participated in the mass murder of a town, of people that he had grown up with? Disbelief dissolved into anger, as well as a sense of deep disillusionment. The Nathan James' mission was to save the world. But at what point was the world no longer worth saving?

"My parents?" Eddie's voice broke.

"I'm sorry, Eddie," Caro whispered. "I tried to save who I could. But it took me too long to figure out what happened and then we didn't have the right medication…."

At that moment, Mr. Will and two younger men stepped out of the woods. Danny thought that one of them was Ryan Stokes, a boy a bit older than Chris, but he wasn't sure. Wolf followed them a moment later. Caro jumped as he appeared, hand dropping to the pistol she had strapped to her thigh (a sight that Danny had never imagined – his sister carrying a gun). He beat her to it, palming the weapon. "Wolf's with me. No offense Caro, but your people suck at guard duty. Try looking behind you once in a while. How many people are you with? Do you have vehicles?"

One of the men behind Caro spoke. "About two hundred. We've been staying at the old strawberry barns. We have a couple vans and trucks, but not much fuel left. Do you know somewhere safe we can go?"

Eddie answered the question. "We were in Norwalk this morning and there was no fighting and plenty of supplies. That's your best bet if fuel is limited."

Danny nodded. The strawberry barn was about a mile northwest the way the crow flies, but longer by road. Danny mentioned to Wolf. "You and Burk head north, check the road to make sure it's clear. I'll take Tex and Cruz and head to the barn directly. Tex, grab the extra gas from the SUV." Danny tapped his microphone. "Cobra to base."

"Situation Green?" Commander Garnett's voice responded, startling Danny. In order for Garnett to be answered, the Captain, XO and Kara were unavailable – which most likely meant that something had gone wrong with the ground efforts. Danny exchanged glances with Tex.

"We're about twenty minutes north of Norwalk. Found survivors but they are in rough shape and are telling us about looters in the area. Plan to evacuate civilians south and then head towards the primary objective. May require support, ma'am."

"We'll have the bird on standby."

Danny turned back to Caro. "You have a way of contacting people – telling them to get ready to go?"

One of the men – Ryan? – nodded. Hearing movement in the trees, Danny raised his weapon, then lowered it immediately as Cruz appeared. "There you are. We're headed…."

But whatever Danny was about to say was completely lost when Cruz marched up to Caro and, to Danny's utter shock, leaned down to give her a fervent kiss.