Death's Awakening

Chapter Twenty-Six: Crash

Crash woke with a start. His body jerked from the shock of his dream and he nearly fell out of his chair. He'd fallen asleep in front of his monitors again. Lately, he'd been glued to them like his life depended on it.

And didn't it?

He closed his eyes and rubbed them with the back of his hand. Holy crap, what was that all about? Maybe he needed to lay off the energy drinks for a while.

He'd been dreaming of someone hiding in a dark place. A closet, maybe.

He could feel their fear as if it was his own.

Outside, noises of a fight made them shiver and whimper. He wanted to help them. He couldn't see them because the inside of the closet was so dark, but he knew them all the same. The fifth.

It wasn't the first time he had dreamed of the fifth, but in his dreams, he could never quite see them.

He sat up straighter and tried to shrug off the feeling of fear and loneliness.

On the six main monitors, he had set up a grid of information. YouTube on one screen, email on a second, prepper forums loaded in tabs on the third listening for any recent news on the virus, a hacking program he'd written running on the fourth monitor constantly trying to break into a CDC database, local news playing on monitor five, and finally, on the sixth and center monitor, he had a map up of the affected zones.

The prediction software he'd created had come back with a very scary outlook for the future. According to the information he'd been able to pull from various news organizations and websites, he estimated there were over two billion people worldwide who had already died from this virus. Another billion were currently sick and most of those would probably be dead within a week. That was nearly half the world's population.

Gone in a matter of weeks.

A quick search through YouTube showed nothing new since he'd fallen asleep three hours ago, but a beeping sound drew his attention to the fourth monitor with a snap.

"You've got to be kidding me." He shook his head, then ran his palm up and down over his face, making sure he was really awake and not dreaming this.

Then he started laughing.

He was in. Screw those guys who'd said it was impossible to hack the CDC. He couldn't believe it. He was really in. And he honestly had no idea how he'd done it. The idea for how to create the program just sort of came to him.

He dragged the CDC database to the main monitor and started typing. Searching. He needed to find their main files on the so-called super-flu before someone realized he was poking around and shut him down. Hell, he'd be lucky if a SWAT team didn't come crashing through his door in the next ten minutes.

His heart raced and he sat up on the very edge of his chair. His fingers flew over the keyboard faster than he'd ever dreamed he could type. Damn, the adrenaline pumping through his veins was better than any drug he'd ever tried. This was pure energy right here.

He searched their main files for any possible mention of the virus, but it wasn't there. Impossible. They had to have files on this. But where? As far as he could tell, no one had even named this virus yet. So what exactly was he looking for?

He paused, fingers hovering above the keys as he worked through it.

In the news, everyone was calling this virus the super-flu, but there wasn't a single reference to it that he could see. If there was a technical name for this virus, he hadn't seen it referenced anywhere.

So what were they calling it?

He tried reorganizing the files according to when they were last modified, but nothing on the virus came up and he didn't have time to search through all of these files. There had to be thousands stored here in the main database.