Once Bitten, Twice Dead - By Bianca D'Arc Page 0,3
groups from different branches of the armed forces needed to work together.
Matt was still working on the mission this man had tasked him with at their first meeting. Matt’s normal duty station was Quantico, Virginia, but lately he’d been spending most of his time in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’d been at Fort Bragg for the past week, helping some Army Rangers deal with an unexpected problem he’d seen before. Everything had been going reasonably well until this morning when he’d been rousted out of bed at 0-dark-thirty and pushed onto a cargo plane heading south. It had spit him out here at MacDill where an attaché was waiting at the airstrip to escort him directly to the admiral’s office. No waiting in line. No appointment necessary.
This couldn’t be good, he thought again. A feeling of foreboding invaded his mind.
Matt opened the folder and scanned the single sheet of paper it contained. Oddly enough, it was a police report from Suffolk County, New York. A report that sounded all too familiar.
No, not good at all.
“What do you make of it?” The admiral had finished with his paperwork and was looking at Matt expectantly when he finished reading.
“Sir, I think we have another flare-up on our hands.”
The admiral’s expression turned even grimmer. “That’s what I thought, too. You’ll have to send someone to check it out. Who can you spare?”
Nobody, Matt thought. They needed every single soul they had to fight the problem in North Carolina. They were spread too thin as it was. But this couldn’t go uninvestigated. He had to find someone….
“Captain Beauvoir is probably our best bet. He has enough rank and experience to run an op with little supervision, and he’s learned fast since being released from the hospital. I’d say he’s our man to look into this potential problem.”
“All right.” The admiral scrawled Beauvoir’s name into the empty space on the set of orders he’d been signing when Matt arrived. “I want you to keep track of both operations. Beauvoir will report directly to you. He can pick a small team from among those who’ve been briefed but not rated to work in the field. If this really is another outbreak, I want this contained quietly. Impress that upon the captain.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Now, while I have you here, give me a sitrep on the situation at Bragg.”
Matt spent the next half hour talking with an admiral he never would have known, if not for the colossal screwup at Quantico a few months ago. His life had taken a turn for the decidedly strange, and his career was going places he’d never expected because of it.
Being at the wrong place at the right time had given an otherwise normal career a boost. He now had expertise on something so top secret only a few people in the world knew about it. And Matt was rubbing elbows in the stratosphere of not just the navy brass but the marine corps and now the army as well. Not to mention the political aspects. He’d been given his initial orders directly from the president herself.
Nothing had been normal since the first outbreak. Matt had thought it was all over, then he’d gotten the call about Fort Bragg. Now this.
Matt was truly worried. It seemed more and more like this nightmare was only just beginning.
Chapter One
Sarah woke with a pounding headache. Little jackhammers were beating against the inside of her skull, and her eyes didn’t want to open. The fog in her brain lifted all at once and she gasped. Was she safe?
She forced her eyes open and a beeping sound interrupted her panic. She was lying in a hospital bed, and the beeping came from a machine to her right. The pace of the sound had increased as her heart rate began to spike higher and adrenaline hit her system.
She was safe. No need to panic.
A doctor moved hurriedly into the room. “You’re awake,” he said.
Sarah had to wonder why he sounded so surprised.
“Did they get them?” Her voice was a croak of sound that made her headache even worse, but she had to know.
The doctor looked confused. “Did who get who?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. Instead he moved closer and took her hand. “Can you squeeze my fingers?”
Of course she could squeeze his damn fingers. She proved it, making him wince. What she really wanted to know was if they’d gotten the…creatures, or whatever they were, who’d done this to her.