Thank you very much! This was one of those “I’m writing at 3 in the morning” deals, so there was a lot more I could have done with it if I had been more awake haha. And it was just kind of a blurb stuck in my head, so I decided to write it down. If I do more work on it, I’ll be starting from an earlier point and using a lot more detail.
Novel Treatments / Containment [Working Title]
Containment One
The Devil and the Dragon
There was a battle in heaven, son...
And the Devil won.
It was very nearly too much for him. Gazing out over the broken asphalt and strewn chips of concrete-turned-shrapnel, he wanted to be sick, but that wouldn't do. Getting sick in his haz-mat suit was only going to cause more problems for him. Still, what lay spread out before him caused his stomach to knot and flop weirdly. Luckily, the screen on his hood was reflective, so his colleagues could only see the scene again where his face should have been, instead of the wide-eyed terror.
There were bodies everywhere. They were tossed about like bits of flotsam and jetsam after a nasty coastal storm. Many were civilians, but a vast majority of the corpses wore uniforms. There had been a battle here, but no one knew who the enemy was. He could see the black and blue uniforms of the United League of Nations soldiers, but among them were other uniforms in a strange and sickly green and a garish blood red he'd never seen printed on cloth before.
What disturbed him most was the states of the bodies.
“Lieutenant.”
He didn't move at first, riveted as he was to the sight stretched out over the ruined interstate.
“Lieutenant Billens? Hey. Ed, Jesus. What's wrong with you?”
Edward Billens, Lieutenant of the ULN, bio-hazards division. He'd been on call for chemical genocide, gas chambers that utilized fast-bred pathogens; designer bio-weapons. Somehow this was different than all that.
“Yeah?”
“Now I know something's wrong. You never say 'Yeah'. This isn't getting to you, is it?”
Billens shook his head.
“No. It's just...”
“Just what?”
“I think I'm confused.”
“You think?”
Taking a step forward, Billens knelt down to the nearest untouched corpse. It was sprawled out on it's back, eyes closed. The man, a ULN soldier, was left with no signs of anything gone wrong other than a thick, pus-filled foam oozing from between swiftly bluing lips.
“Look at him.”
“Other than the goo, what?”
Billens gestured around him.
“The street's been torn to shreds, the concrete dividers blasted to bits. Man, something big went off here, but all the bodies; there's no sign of trauma. No mangled limbs, no broken bones, no bruising, no nothing. It looks like these guys just laid down, went to sleep, and drowned in whatever this yellow shit is.”
There was a long pause before Billens's colleague shrugged. Aleksey Nikitin was a highly educated polkovnik, colonel, from the Russian branch of the ULN. He had the square chin and high cheekbones of a classic Russian man, the kind one could have read about in propaganda from wars long ago. His thick brown hair and heavy eyebrows made him look younger than he really was, nearing his late forties, and he spoke just like an American except when cursing was involved. He favored the language of the mother country for that.
“Alek, don't you just shrug at me.”
“Otebis'. What the hell am I supposed to do when I don't know?”
“Be brilliant.”
“I'm not always brilliant.”
“That's a damn dirty lie.”
Billens and Nikitin had worked together for a little over a decade and gone to hell and back during that time. Their back and forth bickering was meant to soothe nerves, to help move beyond the horrors they saw in their day to day lives.
“Alright, fine. Looks like a bomb went off, but no bodily damage. Weird bodily effects, however. I'm thinking bio-weapon.”
Billens rolled his eyes.
“Thanks, genius. We wouldn't have been called out here if it hadn't been.”
Nikitin only smiled and shrugged again.
“Must've walked into it, eh?”
“Can't see death with the human eye these days.”
He wanted to pinch the bridge of his nose, rub his temples to smooth some of the stress away, but his hood was in the way and he didn't dare take it off. These bio-terrorist attacks were getting disturbingly more and more frequent.
“They're getting better at this,” Nikitin murmured, getting to his feet and looking out over the field of death. “We don't even know if we're containing it or not.”
“We don't?”
Nikitin shook his head.
“We're going to have to bring these bodies back for autopsy before we know. Like you said, it doesn't look like there's anything wrong with these guys, other than the goo. Do they just drop dead and start oozing? By the time we figure that out...”
Billens didn't want to finish for his friend, but his brain did it for him. By the time they found out what the telltale signs of contraction were, half the city would be sick with it. That always seemed to be the case, people died in the hundreds before a planned epidemic was cleaned up. Every time the ULN took a hit in the popularity polls. The League was getting abysmally weak. If the terrorists hadn't been too much before, with the failing power of the ULN, they had rogue nations to worry about now, too. The voters were doing more harm to themselves than they knew, Billens thought.
“I wonder who these guys are?”
Nikitin's question broke into Billens's thoughts. The Russian had moved away and was nudging one of the green-and-red clad men with his boot.
“I don't know. I've never seen the uniforms.”
“Cultists?”
Billens's eyebrows knitted together and he gave his friend a look.
“What makes you think that?”
“Sub-par equipment, no easily discernible insignias or dog tags, and these colors? Looks like an infected wound; puss green and blood.”
It made him want to gag a little, but Billens took a deep breath instead, taming the reflex.
“It'll be a sad day when even the nutcases have bio-weapons.”
“Who's to say they didn't all along?”
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Rhonda9080 reviewed Version 1 -
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I’m not going to get my usual long-winded here. As usual, writing is flawless, compelling and I would read this book. Ezekiel 38, 39 (well, from ch 35 on). Describes this secenario exactly—except has a coalition led by Russia (ancient Ural mountains Magog) and featuring the good ol’ Syrians, Iran, Libya, etc.
Very clean writing, and vivid. Gave me a chill. Good characerization too for such a short piece of the story. Damn girl! You make me jealous! But you must finish Raven first! (At least the first book). No one could write Raven but you.
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cindergirl6 reviewed Version 1 -
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Megan, I am so impressed. While it is not my usual genre, obviously, I am really intrigued. My best suggestion is give us more. More of what the Lt. see’s at the beginning. Paint the sickening picture as you would a landscape. Use this as part of the hook. Make us feel what he feels. Other than that, your characters are well-established and have great potential. You have talent my friend, and I would love to read more.
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