Apocalypse: The Savior with System

16 The First Minister

It rarely rained these days in the South and when it did, people would come scrambling out of their shelters to feel the drops of water on their skin. The heat in Texas has always been this way but in recent years, the index of humidity had risen so high, it could potentially choke anyone.

For those infected with the virus, the humidity was another enemy. Under such moist air conditions, the virus seemed to thrive in any substrate, be it in the laboratory or inside the human body. Humidity increased the rate of viral replication and mutation. It accelerated phasic changes. It is for this reason that sufferers need to be housed in. If not, it is uninfected that have to be kept inside to protect them against those that cannot be cured. Hence, he lobbied for the building of safe zones as large as whole towns all over the North American continent. Fortunately, the panic and fear the viral pandemic caused was more than enough for the united governments to allow him to do so. It was imperative, those safe zones, which now numbered in the thousands and scattered all over the world, beginning with Pakistan.

Or so Moira explained to him many years ago when the UCL virus had spread worldwide. Quite lucky, too, that he had married the Sachly Laboratories’ heiress and CEO. Ulysses Pearse twirled his wedding band absentmindedly. It was small and bright yellow gold, a prop he and Moira needed.

Or rather, a prop the world needed.

Something so small and simple but so important and powerful.

He peered out of one of the many floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass windows the Sachly Institute boasted of, his eyes wandering over the grayness of the landscape despite the many trees and assorted foliage surrounding the building. The rain and the mist combined to give the area a desolate and abandoned look.

And abandoned, it is.

The reflection of one of his aides prompted him to turn around.

“Sir, we’ve checked all the rooms, the underground, and the storage. None was left alive, sir,” the young man informed him.

“Have you identified everyone?” he had to ask. Moira specifically wanted to know.

The young man whose ID said was called Justin McAlister shifted. “I’m sorry, sir, but facial recognition could no longer be ascertained in all the bodies recovered.”

“The Phase Fives got to them, then,” Ulysses murmured in his trademark gentle tone. “What of the Hephaestus Files?”

McAllister asked Ulysses to follow him. Bypassing several hazmats and soldiers piling up both dead staff and zombies on wheeled garbage bins, Ulysses followed his aide into a room accessible only with an electromagnetic keycard that needed to be swiped on a slightly tinted glass wall. The wall slid open, allowing both aide and employer access.

It was a small laboratory and office but with several computer terminals near the entryway. Some of them were turned off, the others with screens that lit up with the barest movement inside the room. McAllister led him to one terminal and began typing onto the keyboard to reveal a password prompt. After using his own hacking skills, McAllister managed to open the server connected to this particular terminal.

“This was Doctor Judith Merkel’s terminal,” he told Ulysses, letting him peer into the monitor. On the screen were several open tabs for various research articles on the virus. Nothing remarkable and quite an expected finding in any scientist’s work computer but for a small blinking icon at the bottom of the screen.

“What is that?” he asked his aide. His aide moved the cursor and clicked.

A series of numbers, images, and other scientific mumbo-jumbo interspersed with military information appeared.

Hephaestus, Ulysses thought, recognizing the hammer wreathed in flame logo done in watermark over the documents and images. Moira had been accomplished in visual arts and music in her old life and on a moment of whimsy created the logo.

“This is top secret information on our military, sir,” McAllister remarked, his innocent eyes only understanding the bits about the military while scrolling down to even more damning evidence that Judith Merkel had been poking her nose where it wasn’t supposed to. The woman had been Moira’s favorite graduate student and took the fresh-faced and very idealistic girl under her wing.

Judith Merkel, though, had eyes that saw more than the surface. He could already tell on their first meeting so many years ago—the shrewd gaze coming out from behind wire-rimmed glasses, an impassive expression being the norm for her, and nondescript clothing covering what he assumed to be a nondescript body. But her mind, he knew, was nothing ordinary.

He’d told Moira his reservations about her new pet but his wife, as expected, rebutted him in her own way…a marvelous display of his favorite w***e’s hand on his dinner plate. Pity, that hand had serviced him well.

And when Judith Merkel began asking questions after she came back from Pakistan, he knew Hephaestus was put at risk. Something had to be done about her inconvenient meddlesomeness.

But even in that area, his wife outdid him. She waited for some time but she still pulled through.

“Sometimes, wound debridement is not enough,” she told him yesterday as he prepared to mobilize his own men to clean up what she’d done to the institute. “Diabetic feet have to be amputated to prevent the rot from traveling up. Even if it’s pretty dancing feet. We do not want rot, Ulysses.”

He supposed he was lucky enough to have been raised by a medically-inclined father or else the statement might have been lost on him.

McAllister shut down the computer terminal and was already detaching the hard drives from the housing when he turned his eye on him again. “I think we should take these as evidence and present them to the Primus and Parliament,” McAllister suggested excitedly, the passion in his voice unsubtle. “It seems Doctor Merkel has been carrying out her own experiments and research without yours or Mrs. Pearse’s knowledge. I have already sent out an alert and once we enlist Parliament’s help, we can start a manhunt for her.” McAllister gave a loud relieved huff as the hard drives finally exited the terminal with one last pull.

“That’s all well and good, Justin,” Ulysses said quietly. “All well and good if we want a government-backed manhunt at this point.”

His aide looked up at him in confusion. “Sir?”

The confusion that turned into a look of bewilderment as he fell down, a hole in his forehead leaking out his life force to the floor.

Ulysses stood unperturbed, glancing down momentarily at the pistol in his hand. He bent down, shook his head at his aide’s corpse, and pried the hard drive from his fingers.

“First Minister, sir.”

A black-clad soldier in full battle gear arrived beside him. Ulysses rose to his full height, throwing away the gun.

“We have secured the area, sir, but we are missing a tank from storage.”

Ulysses hummed. A missing tank. He smiled to himself.

“Are we ready to leave, then?” he asked the soldier.

“Anytime you’re ready, sir.”

At that moment, he heard the rat-tat-tat of a helicopter’s blades coming closer and louder.

He nodded to the soldier. “You know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he was several hundred feet above the ground, Ulysses watched his wife’s inherited institute explode and go up in flames.

Knowing Moira, it wouldn’t have mattered.