The Final Outbreak Read online

  Ted had volunteered to drive if TJ would navigate. She was far more adept at that than him, calling out approaching signs and anticipating their next turn. He didn’t need a GPS when he had her. TJ was his GPS.

  With both of their doors opened, they flashed each other smiles over the roof of the car. They had a five hour drive to Malaga, and maybe then they could relax a little.

  That’s when TJ called out, “What the hell is that?”

  Ted’s head snapped to where her finger pointed. “Get in the—” he yelled, cutting off his own command, as he threw himself into the driver’s seat, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  TJ, normally the one to react to a potential threat quicker than Ted, seemed frozen by bewilderment. It was fear. Her hesitation negated her ability to jump in on time. Reflexively she ducked behind the door’s glass window, just as what looked like a dog made impact.

  Both TJ and the dog yelped.

  She remained fixed for a long moment, until Ted hollered, “TJ!”

  Reacting as if being punched, she finally sprang inside, slamming her door behind her.

  They watched in stunned silence as the German shepherd righted itself and shook its head violently, spewing blood and saliva across TJ’s side window. The animal momentarily scrutinized them, its eyes an unnatural and angry red. It seemed rabid with rage—without the foaming of the mouth—and yet befuddled at the same time.

  Then the animal caught sight of something behind them, out of their periphery, and hurriedly limped away in that direction.

  “What was that?” Ted squeezed his wife’s hand to comfort himself, as well as her.

  Time held its breath as they waited for their hearts to slow.

  TJ, unable to find the right amount of air needed to reply, left his question unanswered. She didn’t have an answer, even if she had had enough air.

  Ted gazed at her and considered what must be going through her head right now. It was, after all, a dog attack that almost killed her and left her physically and emotionally scarred. Now just about any animal, big or small, caused his wife to freeze in fear. It had become such a liability to her now, she could no longer operate as a Bureau field agent, spending most of her time behind a desk. Even working out for her had to be done indoors, where there were no alleyways or streets where dogs could be potentially lurking.

  She peered through her glasses at the side mirror, searching for the wild animal that just tried to eat them.

  Finally, she turned to him. “Let’s get out of this nightmare.”

  But their nightmare was only just beginning.

  DAY TWO

  WE WERE LOOKING FORWARD TO A PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL RESPITE: GOD KNOWS WE NEEDED IT. BUT MALAGA WOULD OFFER US NEITHER.

  02

  Malaga, Spain

  This time, she didn’t duck and the rabid-like dog got her. This time, he couldn’t do anything to save her. He was forced to watch from a distance. The crowds of people swelled around him, holding him back, as she lay there alone and dying. When he finally broke free and made it to her, he knew he was too late. Her life-giving blood was everywhere, her eyes welled up in agony, pleading to him to answer why he wasn’t there for her; why he couldn’t have stopped this?

  Then she was gone.

  Ted sat up, swallowing back the bile that filled his mouth. He snapped his head to her side, desperately hoping she was there.

  He couldn’t see her.

  But it was dark and he couldn’t make out anything, really. A weak shaft of light from the coming dawn illuminated an unfamiliar desk on the other side of this foreign room.

  He heard the distant sound of a car horn, which didn’t make sense because they lived in the country.

  Then he heard her.

  She exhaled soft puffs of air, her breaths rhythmic and restful. She was asleep beside him.

  And then it all made sense. She was fine. They were in their hotel room in Malaga, Spain. He didn’t lose her. This time.

  Ted continued to dry-swallow the bitter nastiness lingering in his mouth and the burn in his throat, while trying to keep from hyperventilating. He drew comfort in his wife’s peaceful breathing and started to calm himself.

  Many recent mornings he woke from a similar horror, with only the circumstances changing. Last week it was her drowning in their lake; the week before, she was being run over by a truck—that was the most common one. In each nightmare, a suffocating crowd flooded around him, holding him back with debilitating panic, so that there was no way to save her.

  For over twenty years he’d been having this same damned nightmare, his author-mind only creatively interjecting different causes of death. But in the end, the result was always the same: some outside force caused her to die and he was held back by a swell of people.

  He began to feel his breathing accelerate again, just by thinking about all the people.

  “Same dream?” TJ asked, her voice heavy from sleep.

  “Yeah,” he huffed.

  She slid over to him and wrapped her arms around his trunk, squeezing him tight. “Well, I’m very much alive, I love you, and we are now in the beautiful town of Malaga. Let’s get up and go see the city.”

  “Sounds like a terrific idea.”

  And they did just that.

  After checking out of their hotel, they stowed their bags in the trunk of their parked rental car and meandered through cobbled pedestrian thoroughfares bustling equally with tourists and locals.

  Interspersed were city workers push-brooming away the fine layer of volcanic dust which had settled everywhere. Likewise, the Williamses pushed aside their worries about home, work and their travels, quickly wiring themselves into the vibrant culture and ancient history of Malaga, Spain.

  Hand in hand, they walked quietly, each focused on their own thoughts. They were not unlike any couple who had shared twenty years of respect and love through marriage. Only as a couple, they rarely spent much time together, at least not lately. With TJ’s and Ted’s disparate schedules, they found themselves frequently apart. TJ worked late hours and often had to travel to other Bureau offices, sometimes for a week or more at a time. And Ted’s agent often had him traveling around the US and the UK for book signings at small bookshops and radio and TV interviews. His schedule was especially busy around new book releases. His latest was apt to be his biggest. The cruise was to be their calm before their stormy schedule, already packed full of travel and appearances. And it would be a celebration of their anniversary.

  Threading the needle of their already ballooning calendars, Ted’s agent had recently booked this trip. He would have never chosen a cruise, because of all the people. But TJ insisted that they could spend most of the time in their cabin and it would give them some needed “us time.” He relented, knowing their chances to be together would go away in less than a month.

  At the Teatro de Roman—an ancient Roman theater excavated in the heart of Ciudad de Malaga—they turned right and ascended the centuries-worn ramparts leading up to the stone entrance of the Moorish palace known as Alcazaba de Malaga.

  Originally built in the 11th century and continually expanded upon through the 14th, it was an impressive fortress pridefully peering over its Malagan subjects. The palace’s occupants included Muslim rulers and Spain’s infamous Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

  And though the trek up from the city center was a calf-burning distance, the rewards were breathtaking vistas, flourishing gardens and ornate fountains which gushed sparkling streams, engineered into cascading outdoor water courses running through stairwells and walkways. An Andalusian Garden of Eden.

  Just inside the towering defensive walls, they stopped to admire an impressive column of seagulls, which had corkscrewed up and into the complex, like one giant organism barking its excitement as it swooped overhead.

  They passed tourists, young and old, including an elderly Spanish couple, their withered hands clasped together, their supportive canes on opposing sides, clunking against the polished
stones in perfect synchronicity. Ted glanced at his wife, to see if she had the same thought as he, but she was preoccupied, as she had been the last several days.

  Continuing along, just inside of the fortress’s protective walls, they found themselves gazing up at a long walkway that crowned the top of the wall’s buttresses, spanning the distances just five feet below the wall’s lip. Bisecting the walkway periodically were lookout towers.

  TJ couldn’t help herself and took off like a jackrabbit, ascending a stairwell up to the closest tower’s door. “What do you suppose is inside this tower?” She tugged on the obviously locked rustic door, which looked as ancient as the rest of the structure.

  “Not sure you should even be up there,” Ted stated tepidly, always amazed that someone in her profession so easily played fast and loose with other people’s rules.

  “Don’t see a sign that says ‘Don’t enter.’ Besides, it’s locked.”

  Just as a large mouth might sense a new meal, the tower’s knotty walnut door retracted inward. It was like a dried-up tongue pulled back to reveal a blackened opening surrounded by rotten stone teeth. The weathered appendage disappeared into the darkness, stopping with a clank.

  A bearded man wearing official-looking work clothes of white and yellow stepped from the gaping orifice and jerked to a stop on seeing TJ there.

  She quickly flashed her usual bright smile and added a warm, “Hola.”

  “Hola, Senora,” the man replied, far more reserved than her.

  “Can we, I mean, podemos...”

  “You want to see inside?” the worker asked her, and then beckoned to both with his hand. “It’s okay.”

  “Gracias, Senor,” Ted replied from below, expending pretty much the totality of his limited Spanish vocabulary in one sentence.

  TJ quickly stepped into the dark tower opening while Ted started up the brick steps, stopping just before the small doorway to glare at some point off the horizon, over Malaga.

  “Come on in, Ted, you’ve got to see th—” TJ halted mid-sentence after gathering in her husband’s demeanor.

  She couldn’t see what he saw because he was looking at something outside, past the tower. She bounced a little as she waited for him to tell her what it was, so she could resume her exploration.

  Only a few hundred yards away, the same column of white seagulls continued its aerobatics, swooping around and around above them all, like a giant living corkscrew-shaped light fixture in the sky. But another larger swarm of gulls barrel-rolled from the west into the natural chandelier of birds above Alcazaba’s grounds. The larger group of aggressor gulls broke through their brethren’s columns, attacking each of the scattering birds.

  Ted’s chin started to sag. What he was seeing looked like a WWI dogfight between birds of the same feather, directly above. At first a surreal fascination, it quickly turned gruesome. After biting, ripping, and clawing at their panicked kin, sending their damaged bodies plunging to the ground, the aggressor gulls sought out new targets.

  The people below.

  Like a tsunami, panicked screams started to roll in, first one, then two, then four, as Alcazaba’s visitors scattered to the four winds, each flailing at the terrorizing birds. The elderly couple they had passed hobbled toward an exit but then tumbled to the ground as one gull after another pounced on them,

  That sight tore Ted from his moorings. He sprinted the rest of the way into the dark safety of the tower structure, nearly sending TJ—who was just making her way back out to see what was keeping him—to the polished brick floor.

  “Close the door!” Ted yelled at the worker. “They’re attacking.”

  The confused worker asked in Spanish what the crazy tourist was making such a fuss about.

  “Per favore, close the damned door!” Ted hollered. He crawled along the floor and pushed with a shoulder to close the opening.

  The worker, his foot blocking the door’s closure, craned his head into the outside light, wanting to see with his own eyes why this tourist acted so loco. But then just as quickly, he pulled himself back inside and thrust his palms into the hard wood. Just before it loudly clasped shut, two thumps, like deep tremors, vibrated from the other side, causing both men to jump and exchange knowing glances.

  “What the hell is going on out there?” TJ yelped.

  “The birds; they’re attacking!” Ted answered.

  TJ was about to toss back a sarcastic comment about the Hitchcock classic, but held back after seeing Ted’s face, and then hearing the screams outside. “What birds?” she stuttered.

  “Mira,” the worker said, now pointing to a long slit in an opposite wall, a few feet away from them. TJ studied the place where defenders used to shoot their arrows at attacking invaders centuries earlier. When the tower was open to tourists, this deep cleft afforded limited views out over the Puerto de Malaga and the inviting blue of the Med. Now, through the opening streamed terror-filled screams and shrieks from gulls, some of whom streaked by in flashes of white, gray, and blood-red.

  The three of them tentatively ambled toward the opening to get a better look. TJ reached it first and stuck her face into the top of the six-inch-wide space.

  Before the other two could reach her, she screamed and flopped backward onto the hard floor. A gull crashed into the opening with a thump, stopped short by its extended wings.

  The men gasped at the red-eyed bird as it thrashed to gain traction with its claws and broken wings, but then fell away from the opening, out of sight.

  “Mierda!” the worker panted.

  They remained fixed in their places, for a moment, before TJ jumped back up. She quickly snatched up a pile of coveralls on the floor and shoved them into the opening. Ted and the worker followed her lead, snagging drop-cloths from a pile and completely sealing the opening.

  They listened to the muffled shrieks from the birds and the occasional scream from a human, until there were no more of either. Waiting for what seemed like an hour, but was more likely just a few minutes, they carefully pulled the makeshift stopper from the opening.

  They watched and listened for a longer period before they dared to brave the door.

  Whatever had just happened was over now.

  “Se terminó?” the worker asked them, still breathless.

  “I think so,” replied Ted, the first of them to tentatively descend the stairs, followed by TJ.

  The cobbled walkways were carpeted in bloodied and mostly dead seagulls and a few other birds. Every fifth or sixth carcass flopped or fluttered with weakening brays. Splatters of blood were everywhere.

  As they hurriedly navigated the ancient path out of the castle, Ted and TJ clasped their hands, clutching each other so hard their knuckles turned white. So fixated were they on the sky and getting out of Alcazaba, and then Malaga quickly, they didn’t even notice the old couple they had passed on the way in. The two ancient lovers who had drawn Ted’s admiration were slumped in a dark corner of the entrance, the first human casualties of the attack.

  03

  Puerto de Malaga

  “Leave it,” TJ demanded, her voice all wobbly. “We’ll call the rental company from the ship. We can mail the key in when we get home. It’ll cost, but I don’t want to spend another moment in Spain.”

  Ted was already out of the car, double-parked outside the port entrance, and gathering their bags from the trunk. “How far to the ship?” He asked this partially out of a nervous need to say something, as he could plainly see three cruise ships in the distance. But the port also looked pretty big and he didn’t want them to take a wrong turn. And although it was the first time either of them had been to the Malaga port, he knew she’d studied the map and knew by asking she’d be focused on where they needed to go next so they wouldn’t dawdle out in the open.

  “I know this is the way.”

  He slid a rollered bag into her hand, and they scurried across the street and into the vast Puerto de Malaga.

  They walked in hurried silence down a long,
straight pedestrian street filled with shops on their left, bustling with people. On their right, the boarded walkways of a dock ran parallel. Small but expensive boats were intermittently tethered, each gently swaying to the Med’s incoming tide.

  Their eyes continually darted toward the dark sky, tracking on any bird that fluttered above.

  On their left, a small delivery van stopped in front of a store, making a delivery of supplies or perhaps picking up the few baubles that didn’t sell well.

  Glorious aromas of coffee from the street-side restaurants fought against pungent scents of decaying sea-life pushed in by the cold waterfront breezes.

  It all felt normal.

  Those not milling around the shops seemed to be ambling in the same direction as them, although at a much more leisurely pace: probably passengers on their cruise ship or one of the others.

  As they passed each clog of tourists—all pulling giant bags on rollers—they’d attempt to catch a bit of their conversations. Only a few spoke English, and none of those spoke about anything of importance. All seemed jovial and unconcerned.

  Ted and TJ maintained their constant pace in silence.

  Their ride from Alcazaba had consisted of short bursts of navigational instructions, but no other words. The whole time to the port and even now, both their minds were mentally racing to keep up their anxious desire to get to safety, away from the outside, sure another attack was imminent.

  But no one here was anxious. There was no panic.

  It was human nature to discount an event that went against all measures of normalcy. And both were doing this in their own ways. Perhaps what they experienced only occurred at Alcazaba and nowhere else. It had to have been an anomaly, based on what they were seeing now. It might have been terror-filled, but only incidental. As their minds continued to discount the enormity of what they witnessed, the adrenaline stopped pumping and fatigue quickly caught up to their steady march. The endorphins had long since ebbed, and now they felt tired. Yet they didn’t slow.