He smiled at Sophie. “I know they mean well, but sometimes they worry too much. However, I think I will shut my eyes for a moment — stay with me. I’ll only be a moment. Please feel free to freshen up, the bathroom is through there.” He pointed, then leaned back on his pillows and within a moment was fast asleep.
Sophie opened the door to the en suite bathroom and gasped at the opulence in the President’s private bathroom suite, a cross between Louis XIV’s boudoir and a Hollywood starlet’s dressing room. She washed her face, and brushed her dark, wavy hair wondering what her mother, God rest her soul, would have thought of her only daughter using the facilities at the President’s house.
She had to pinch herself to believe it was true. The vast bathroom had double french-doors out onto a patio area where she could see a bar-b-que pit and wooden garden furniture. She heard the murmurings of male voices and presumed the doctors’ had returned.
President James Burgess jack-knifed in bed and clutched his heart as his bedroom door burst open and General Malloy marched in purposefully, accompanied by armed troops.
“What is the meaning of this?” hissed the President. “You burst into my bedroom like some jack-booted Nazi!” The monitors strapped to his body beeped in protest to his rising anger. Sophie heard the commotion and peeped through a crack in the bathroom doorway, and recognized General Malloy. “How dare you!” continued the President in anger. “Marching in here and barking at me like some jumped up scrap-yard dog! I’m the Goddamned President!”
The General whipped out his pistol. “Correction—” he calmly shot the President between the eyes, “- were.”
Sophie gasped in shock, and General Malloy swiveled towards the bathroom door, and flicked his head for one of his lackeys to look.
The Soldier took a cursory glance around the bathroom, could not see anything untoward, looked out at the patio, no one could have gotten far and shut the french-doors.
He re-joined the General, “Nothing, General,” he told him.
“Let’s check the security monitors just to make sure, we don’t want any loose ends.”
02:00 AM
The canvas-covered military truck carrying Luke halted with a squeal of air brakes. He tentatively glanced through the gap in the flaps. He’d stopped watching from the back some time earlier, sick of seeing the death squads dispatching the plague-carriers.
They arrived at the Marlins Park, built on the site of the infamous Orange Bowl. The Stadium was a hive of activity, with helicopters circling overhead shining searchlights down into the arena. A continuous parade of military trucks pulled up and unloaded its human cargo. Hazmat wearing Soldiers with loudhailers ordered Luke and the others down from the truck. They were frog-marched single-file down a hastily made wire enclosure, towards the stadium under the watchful eyes of armed guards. A skinny youth made a run for it, the sergeant major snapped up his rifle and shot down the kid mid-stride.
Luke entered the stadium under an armed escort where the harsh floodlights burned his eyes. He quickly scanned the arena for an escape, but found it well guarded, he estimated one guard per hundred refugees. They were up makeshift towers, in the stanchions of the flood light towers and evenly placed along the roofline.
“Duuude,” Jake drawled. “Don’t even think about it.” A crack of a rifle shot rang out and a man fell with blood spewing from his forehead and was dead before he hit the ground. Luke wondered what minor crime the man had committed. A sharpshooter on the stadium roof taking credit for the head shot.
Luke was quickly marched passed the body, and allocated a space on the grass, allotted by a towel to indicate his personal space. He was approximately on the centerline and found it ironic to be on the hallowed turf where the Orange Bowl used to be, where his favorite Miami Dolphins once played. A life-long fan, and in his youth he would daydream of playing for the Dolphins at the ‘Bowl’ one day, where a live dolphin would celebrate a touchdown by doing back-flips from its water-tank one end of the arena.
Well, he was here now, he thought somberly and wished the hell he wasn’t. He listened to the tannoy announcements telling them to wait patiently, that food and water would be brought around shortly, that there would be escorted comfort breaks, and that medical staff would pass amongst them in the near future, the announcer thanked them for their co-operation during this difficult time.
Luke listened in disbelief as the internees applauded and whistled as if they were at a rock concert. “Can you believe ‘em?” Luke said. “Didn’t they see the shootings?”
“Dude, people see what they want to see. They’re not going to cry over a couple of spicks being shot.” He slumped, realizing their situation was bleak.
Winnie snorted, “I’ve witnessed this sort of bullying my entire life, the so called liberal-minded citizens looking the other way. It ain’t gonna change now. I also know we’s gotta get out of the stadium, ‘cause in here we’re sitting targets.”
“How?” asked Luke.
“You’re the smart one, slick — figure it out,” she said in a voice that broached no argument.
02:00 AM
General Malloy sat in the communications room at the President’s summer residence, scanning the multi-monitors as they played back the CCTV footage of the previous hour. His eyes flicked from side-to-side, surveying the various flat screens, each one showing a different part of the compound at high speed.
“Permission to speak, sir?” a corporal asked.
“Granted,” General Malloy replied without taking his eyes off the high-speed footage.
“We need to get moving if we’re to stick to our itinerary.”
“No one was in the bathroom, general.”
“I heard something, soldier, I sensed it. I’m like Spiderman, I have this sixth sense, you may scoff but it’s saved my life more than once.”
“But, sir—” He stopped when he heard a commotion from the corridor. The sergeant left at the security gates to find the missing guard detail burst through the door.
“They’re dead, general, all dead!”
“Shot?”
“Not shot, General. It looks like the Black Death.” The words resonated around the communications room. Eventually the sergeant spoke again. “General, shouldn’t we be wearing the hazmat suits to protect ourselves?”
“Negative, son. It’s not the plague we are a good seventy miles north of the danger zone.”
“They were black, sir, and covered in boils.” He trembled, remembering the sight of the bodies.
“It’ll be something else. Trust me, this has all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack, a real subtle attack, misdirecting us into thinking it’s an ancient disease. But we’re too clever for that,” he paused. “Boys, we’ll go down in history for the courageous way we’ve acted.”
“They had the swellings under the arms, the black blood—” the sergeant persisted.
The general rocked on his heels and evaluated this new information. “Then it’s worse than I thought,” he told them. “There must’ve been an advanced hit squad, making it look like the Bubonic Plague has killed everyone at the compound, including the President—”
“The President’s dead!?” the sergeant gasped in amazement.
General Malloy realized that he had slipped up. “Affirmative, son,” he admitted, the soldiers murmured in utter shock at the news. “He was assassinated by terrorists. This is top secret for obvious reasons. That is why it’s imperative we watch these security tapes, we need to discover who committed this atrocity.”