Pestilence: A Medical Thriller (18 page)

52

Samantha felt broken. Her hip
was twisted, and her knee burned. She tried to lift herself, but the pain in her legs and hip was too much. She managed to roll onto her back. Next to her, the stranger was unconscious.

She rolled to the other side
, and a pain unlike anything she had ever felt before pierced her ribs. It took her breath away, and she groaned as she forced herself up. Limping, she made her way to the hospital entrance.

She went to the
all-night pharmacy and walked behind the counter. A young pharmacist with glasses and acne was the only employee, left to fill prescriptions and work the register. He yelled at her, threatening to call the police.

“Go ahead,” she rasped.

Going through the shelves, she found some Percocet and took two of them without water. The young pharmacist stared at her in disbelief.

Sam
hobbled out and took the elevators to the third floor. She went to Jane’s room, where Duncan was lying on the floor, limp, his eyes open to the ceiling. The guards weren’t there, and she wondered what had happened to them and if the man had killed them, too.

She bent down, weeping softly, and felt for a pulse.
She couldn’t feel one.

She closed his eyes and kissed his
lips, which were already cold. She rose and looked at her sister. Lifting the canopy, she pulled at the bed. Her hips and ribs were in agony, but she didn’t stop—not until she had pushed the hospital bed away from the wall. Then she got behind it and pushed it out of the room.

Slowly
, with pain pulsating at her with every step, she took the elevators to the top floor and wheeled her sister into the room with the old woman at the end of the hall. She closed the door behind her, then hobbled downstairs. Outside, where she had been lying a few minutes ago, the stranger was gone.

Staggering
through the parking lot, she went up the street to wait at an intersection for the light to turn. Her knee felt torn to pieces, and she couldn’t put hardly any weight to it. Crossing the street, she noticed several choppers above her and that few cars filled the street.

Samantha stepped out into the road and waited for the first car to come by.

Howie drove through town, constantly checking his daughter, who was staring absently at the passing city. He thought a long time about what to say to her, about how to describe what that man was trying to do and why. But no explanation he could give would be adequate. When they could get away with it, all men were capable of evil.

“Are you
thirsty?”

“No,” she whispered.

Howie kept his eyes on her for a long time. She resembled her mother more and more, and it made him miss her. It made him regret his arrogance and stupidity for thinking he could ignore her, cheat on her, and still have her stick around.

When he
turned his eyes back to the road, he had to slam on the brakes and swerve. The Humvee’s tires squealed as it skidded to the curb and the front tires ran up onto the sidewalk.

He
turned to peer out the rear window. The woman who had been standing in the road was limping toward them. She was injured, and a cut on her head was bleeding.

“Please,” she said. “I need help.
I’m not infected.”

He hesitated a few seconds and was about to put it in drive
, but Jessica gave him a look. She was watching intently what he was about to do. The fact was, he didn’t know how much longer he was going to be around. What memories of himself he left her with was suddenly very important to him.

Howie
stepped out of the Humvee and helped the woman in before shutting the door and pulling away. As he drove past a hospital, Howie saw a man in a disheveled suit standing in the parking lot, searching for something. They exchanged glances before Howie turned his attention back to the road.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“You have to get me to a medical facility,” she rasped.

“There was a hospital back there.”

“No.” She shook her head gently as her eyes closed and then opened. “There’s a military facility.”

“Lady
, we are not going anywhere near a medical facility. But I’d be happy to drop you off somewhere if you need.”

“I have to get help and come back. My sister needs my help still.”

As he turned to get on the interstate, Howie saw, to his horror, that a roadblock had been set up. He was about to do a U-turn, hoping they didn’t push it, when one of the guardsmen stepped forward and held up his hand, indicating for the Humvee to stop.

Howie
reached for the rifle that he had placed in the backseat.

“No,”
the woman said. “Let me talk.”

The guardsman came to the window and peered in. He was turning away to shout to his fellow soldiers when
the woman spoke up. “My name is Dr. Samantha Bower. I’m here at the request of General Clyde Olsen. I need his assistance. Please call him for me.”

The guardsman was silent and then spoke into a device on his shoulder. “Get Lieutenant General Olsen on the horn, Kelly.”

53

Ian came to and
lifted himself off the grass. Samantha was gone. Disoriented, he stood. His vision was fuzzy, and all the general shapes before him appeared to have an aura. Beginning at his toes, he stretched or flexed every part of his body.

His leg was fractured at the fibula. Several ribs were
cracked, and he likely had a compound fracture at T6 and T7 in his spinal column. His acromion was splintered, probably broken into several pieces, and numerous metacarpals were broken, as well. Acute pain shocked him with every movement of his body, and his left arm and leg were numb, but his left foot was tingling with hot needles.

He walked over the
grass, ignoring the intense pain that was commanding him to lie down and be still.

H
e had forgotten where he had told Katherine to wait for him in the vast parking lot. As he stood thinking about where to go, long strands of drool dropped from his mouth, and he wiped them with the back of his sleeve.

He had let anger take control of him
, and this was the result. He could have calmly taken Samantha Bower into his arms and crushed her throat like melon. Instead, his rage emptied out of him, and he had dashed at her in a full sprint, oblivious to the window behind her. He would do better next time.

Remembering that he had asked Katherine to stay at the front entrance, he shuffled his way there. She was gone.

“Stupid girl.”

He
scanned the area around him and saw a Humvee drive by. The driver wasn’t military, and Ian hoped he would stop, but he didn’t. Someone ducked in the backseat.

The Humvee turned a corner and was gone.

Ian felt lightheaded, and before he could control himself, he blacked out again.

He rose sometime later
; he wasn’t sure how much later. His head pounded from what he guessed was a severe concussion, and he had to lean against a tree in the parking lot until the world stopped spinning. He remembered a Humvee driving by before he blacked out.

As he was about to go into the road to find another car,
he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning toward it, he spotted Katherine standing at the back of the car, staring at something in the trunk. He limped toward her. She had moved his briefcase back there and opened it.

“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” she said.

He was quiet, unable to muster the strength to speak. “It is,” he said softly.

“Even you can’t be this much of a monster.”

Holding her gaze, he pressed something on the device and then reached up and closed the trunk. “I am.”

H
e noticed himself in the reflection of the back window. He was covered in blood, and his arm was bent at an awkward angle. He was leaning to the side as if his back couldn’t support his weight, and he’d gone from a handsome young man to someone who appeared to have risen from an awful grave.

“What happened to you?”

“You need to drive me to the airport.”

“I’ll pull out.”

She got into the car, turned it on, and backed out of the parking spot. She turned the wheel at an angle so that Ian could climb in and then stopped. He hobbled over.

She twisted the wheel hard to the right,
slanting the car toward Ian, and slammed the pedal down. The tires squealed, making smoke, as the car rocketed forward. Making impact with Ian sounded more like something falling on top of her car rather than hitting it at the front.

Ian flew and slammed to
the ground, then rolled at least ten feet. She swallowed, her mouth dry and her mind blank. She hit the accelerator again, and the car jumped up, then fell as if she’d driven over a speed bump.

She sat in the car
, staring at the unmoving body before slowly getting out. Ian was on his back, spitting up blood. Tire marks burned his chest, and his hands were black and lay useless by his side.

Steadily
, she walked up to him. His face should have been filled with terror, but he looked… serene.

He grinned at her. “It’s too late,” he gasped.

She watched him, confused, when she heard something—a ticking, but not quite. It was more of an electronic beep every few seconds. She started to run in the opposite direction.

The explosion was so massive and blinding
that she didn’t even have time to realize she was dying.

54

Samantha wouldn’t have even noticed the explosion if not for Clyde Olsen sitting across from her on the plane.

“What the hell is that?” He pointed out the window.

From the plane, t
he detonation appeared only to the passengers sitting next to the window, who had happened to glance outside at the moment of the flash.

A tube of light, almost
thirty meters tall, was followed by an explosion that could’ve taken out a soccer field. Like a black hole, the explosion sucked in light, and then after another, smaller explosion, a thin mist descended over the city.

She turned her head
. Seated across from her were the man and his young daughter whom she had convinced General Olsen to bring along as they fled the state. They had saved her life, and Samantha was obligated to save theirs.

All of this occurred amidst utter
calm and quiet. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the military had rounded up the citizens of Los Angeles and put them into camps. The ones with pull—relatives of federal employees, for example—were taken to the nicer hotels and allowed to stay there of their own recognizance. Everyone else, rich or poor, was stuck in a cage. But the guards were taking bribes to let people go.

Stretched to the brink across Southern California and then Northern,
the National Guard didn’t have enough men to police itself. And most of the local law enforcement had been rounded up along with the civilians. Only the ones on duty, who were easily recognizable, had been given a place next to their captors.

In some places, Olsen had told her, guards were apparently letting people out for as little as
a thousand dollars cash, jewelry, guns, or cars—anything the guards could get their hands on. The only people truly stuck in the cages were the poor and middle class who couldn’t pay up.

The operation had been a
disaster from the get-go. The military only later recognized the contingencies they hadn’t planned for. They had probably thought it would be a simple operation, and that all they had to do was ensure no one left the state. They hadn’t anticipated the bribery or the failing infrastructure. After one day, water and electricity was dwindling in most of the state, including the military bases.

But the mist
that had settled over the city after the explosion was something else that no one had ever seen or could have planned for.

Olsen’s cell phone buzzed as they flew over the
California-Nevada border.

“Olsen
… yes… yes… What other cities? Okay. Okay. Roger that.”

He hung up and stared out the window at the
gray dawn, twirling the phone in his fingers before it dropped and hit the metal floor with a ding.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha
asked, the pain medication causing her speech to slur and slow.

“T
hree other explosions. Nashville, Manhattan, and DC.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know. But they’re all reporting the same thing. A green mist.”

A single horrifying thought gripped her mind. It sent shivers up her back
, and though she was numb from the medication, she knew that something had happened that would change the course of society. As soon as the thought was articulated with words, she knew it to be true.

The mist was Agent X.

From the way Olsen was acting, Samantha knew that the military hadn’t had any idea that was going to occur. Life was truly unpredictable, a string of random events interspersed with fleeting glimpses of reason and order. But that was illusory. In the end, the events tying a life together were dictated more by circumstance than people believed. So many unknown variables existed, so many forces pulling in each direction, that it seemed funny to her that she had ever thought order endured along with the anarchy. She was almost embarrassed that she had been so naïve.

The young girl was asleep
, but she stirred and cuddled up to her father. He gently pushed her away and then leaned against the window. He was pale and sweating, and he had gone to the bathroom twice on the plane.

He noticed her
watching him. Glancing at his daughter, he stood up and walked past Olsen. When he came close to Samantha, he said, “Can I talk to you, Doctor?”

Samantha rose
, leaning on the seats for support, and followed him. They stood far enough away that General Olsen couldn’t hear.

“You’re
with the Centers for Disease Control, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a virus doctor?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“What is this thing?”

“It’s something
like a variant of the poxvirus called black pox. But it’s mutated a few times, so we called it Agent X. An intern called it that, and it stuck because we didn’t know what else to call it.”

“It should be called Red Pox.
It seems like all it does is make you bleed.”

She nodded. “You know you’re infected, don’t you?”

He glanced at his daughter. “Is there a cure?”

“We don’t even have a cure
for the common cold or flu. There are no cures for a virus. You can slow them down or prevent them, but once you have them, they have to run their course.”

“So there’s nothing?”

“There’s an experimental drug that was being developed by a laboratory in Nigeria that I was working with. It’s a type of drug that can identify infected cells and then destroy those cells, essentially halting replication of a virus. It might work with something like this. But the research was taken over by the government and then buried. There’s nothing else I can think of.”

“Is there any
way”—he paused to cough—“someone like me could get it. Or maybe someone like you?”

“No. We’d have to fly to Nigeria
first and then see how far they got with it. I don’t think it ever got approved for human trials. By the time we got there and it was ready…”

“I’d be dead.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Samantha Bower.”

“Samantha, my name is Harold Burke.
I know we’re strangers, and I never thought I would ask this of anyone, much less someone I don’t know, but my daughter is the only thing in the world I have left. If you could… until you find her mother, I mean… I don’t have anybody left that would…”

He said it so genuinely, filled with so much utter humiliation and so much hope that she would accept, that it tore
out her heart. She thought of her own mother and the nights she’d spent crying when her father had passed away, bargaining with God that she would do anything if her husband could come back to them. She had three children to look after by herself, and her mother worked two jobs to provide for them. She gave up everything in her life so her children could have a chance at a better one. Children were everyone’s weakness.

“I’ll
take care of her.”

He nodded, tears in his eyes. “Thank you.”

After a moment, he coughed again and then made room so she could get by without having to get near him. Samantha was all the way to her seat when the plane’s side door opened. The vacuum instantly sucked out anything that wasn’t screwed or strapped down, and deafening high-pitched squealing of dropping pressure filled the plane. It flung her off balance, and Olsen had to grab her to keep her in place. Her ears popped, and a terrible sucking sound filled the cabin as things bounced off the metal interior.

By the time she
saw what had happened, one of Olsen’s soldiers had grabbed the door and pulled it closed. But Harold Burke wasn’t there. He was already flying through the air to his death.