Pestilence: A Medical Thriller (19 page)

Kansas City, Kansas

Mark Sheffield walked out of his office to get some fresh air. He
’d had a cough and a fever all morning, but his boss, a prick named Ted, had refused to allow him to take a sick day. They had a meeting that afternoon with an investor in their marketing and SEO company, and Mark was the salesman. He went to the meeting and made it through only by stopping to cough about five times. After the last bout, he glanced down and saw that his handkerchief was coated with blood.

O
utside the building, he leaned against a tree planted near the sidewalk. The sound of cars whizzing by annoyed him. Someone was running a trimmer along the grass, and the buzz-saw racket was grinding against Mark’s nerves. He would have yelled at the guy, even thrown something at him, but he didn’t have the strength. He had enough energy to know to go to the hospital, and that was it. He texted his wife to come pick him up and then didn’t move from the spot.

Ted texted several times
, asking Mark where the hell he was and saying that he needed to come to an early dinner to schmooze the clients.
Going home to sleep,
he replied.

When hi
s wife arrived, Mark climbed into the car and put on his seat belt. She stared at him without driving.

“What’s wrong?” he
asked.

“You look like
crap.”

“Thanks. Just t
ake me to a hospital, will ya?”

“Mark, you look terrible. What’s going on?”

“How the fuck do I know?”

On the way to the hospital
, he started vomiting—little globs of blood at first. Then torrents of the stuff came out in long streams and soaked the floor mats. His wife was frantically shouting into her phone at someone, but the pain was so intense that he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything, and soon, he couldn’t see either. And he understood, from the amount of the warm fluid that was coming out of him, that his eyes and ears were bleeding.

Before he bled out, he
heard his wife screaming in his ear that she couldn’t live without him. He wanted to say, “Yes you can.” But no words came.

Miami, Florida

Jennifer Mills finished her beer and then played absently with her nachos while she looked over her balcony at the people below. All the chips were still on the plate. She had put one chip into her mouth and then spit it back out because even the thought of food was so disgusting that she might have to run to the bathroom and hurl. Instead, she drank ice water, which even alone made her queasy.

Masood
, her boyfriend, came out of the bathroom naked, smiling at her. She wanted to protest and tell him that she wasn’t in the mood anymore, but getting it over with seemed easier. They kissed on the balcony, and he took her hand and forced her to play with him as he lifted her and took her to her bed. He pulled down her skirt and then entered her.

She didn’t feel pleasure or pain. She was numb
. Her stomach was bloated even though she hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. Small pimply sacs had appeared on her skin, but Masood either didn’t care or didn’t notice. He was grunting and thrusting inside her as though it were the last time he would ever be with a woman again.

He bent down,
put his mouth over hers and his tongue down her throat, and before she even knew what was happening, she spewed into his mouth. He had sealed his lips so tightly around hers that the vomit shot right over his tongue, and he swallowed a lot of it.

He jumped off and spit
blood over the room as she kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She noticed that his genitals were covered in blood, and when he saw that, he ran into the bathroom, shouting profanity at her about not telling him she was on her period.

She was too weak to respond
that she’d had her period the previous week. So instead, she lay back and listened to the water running in the shower as she dozed off.

Kyoto, Japan

Aiki
Ito screamed as the doctors told her to push. The baby—a boy—was going to be huge, they said. His father had been large when he was born, too. This pregnancy had been a difficult one, and for the past three days Ito had been so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed. She was going to get this baby out of her, no matter what.

The pain was intense and ran up into
her guts, chest, and neck. Even with an epidural, every little needle prick felt like an event that lasted forever. Her skin was extremely sensitive, and she could only keep her eyes open for so long at one time because the pain made her faint. The lights of the hospital room seemed harsh and caused her retinas to ache.

The doctor was yelling at her to push
, and she did. The doctor pulled the baby out, and Ito cried when she saw him. She focused on the baby for so long that she didn’t notice the frantic movements of the doctor and nurses. They were running around, shouting to each other. Something was wrong. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

“We’re
doing everything we can,” the doctor kept telling her, in an effort to calm her down, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop.

And then she felt something so
mind-numbingly painful that she thought it would kill her. Something inside seemed to detach from everything else, as though a piece of her had come off. The pressure made its way down, almost like a lump heading for the drain in a bathtub. As she reached down to touch where the pain was, the lump slipped out of her, and the nurses screamed.

Her
organs were coming out with rivers of blood.

55

General Kirk Lancaster was in Maine when he found out about the detonation. Even during a time of emergency, the one place he didn’t want to be was at the Pentagon. When he was there, he was checking his phone and his e-mail every minute or two and driving himself insane. So instead, he turned off his phone and drove to his family’s cabin in Eastport. He would eventually call up his wife and three boys, but right then, he needed the solitude, more than he had thought he did.

He was sitting in his small fishing boat with the hook in the water, a beer in his hand
, and the sun on his face, when he decided he should probably turn on his phone. He had thirteen unheard messages and even more e-mails—fifty-six. He flipped through some, purely out of curiosity, as his underlings should have been able to cover everything for at least an afternoon.

He saw the subject line
in one e-mail, and his heart dropped. He immediately called Martin.

“Where were you?” Martin
asked.

“I thought you quit?”

“I’m temporarily back. I called all around for you.”

“That’s not important. What the fuck happened?”

“As to the why or how, I don’t have a clue. Clearly an attack within our borders.”

“What do you have?”

“I got witnesses in all four cities. Same thing everywhere. A man and a suitcase and an explosion. Except for LA. The witness there was a nurse working at a hospital. She saw a man lying injured on the ground in their parking lot, and a woman ran away from him. And that’s when the blast occurred.”

“
Did any of them survive?”

“
No. But it looks like this explosion wasn’t the primary function of the device. The explosion’s diameter was only about twenty feet. The primary function appears to be the release of the mists.”

Lancaster stayed silent on the phone
for a long time. “You’re not telling me—”

“I don’t know yet, sir. We’re having
the mist properly tested to see for sure. But preliminary assessments are coming back positive for a type of poxvirus.”

Lancaster put his hand over his forehead and bent down. He felt ill. “Holy shit, Martin. Holy shit…”

“Sir, do we have any ideas as to who could have done this?”

“Four chemical weapons simultaneously detona
ted in the four largest cities? No, Martin. I don’t have a fucking clue who could have done this. I’m guessing it’s not some cave-dwellers in Pakistan. But whoever they are, we better hope they’re not planning something else, ’cause we were just brought to our fucking knees.”

56

Hank
Kraski sat on the bench at the park, watching the pigeons as they flew down. An old man was feeding them stale bread. Hank counted over fifty pigeons and was delighted to watch them flap around and wrestle and peck at each other for dominance.

Before too long, a woman
with curly red hair and a black suit came and sat next to him. They were there early in the morning, and in the light of dawn, she looked stunning. Something had been there between them long ago but was gone now.

“Ian’s dead,” she said.

“I know.”

“You trained
Greyjoy, and he trained Ian. You guys are becoming an extinct species.”

“We were always meant to be.”

“All four detonations went off perfectly. We had three more in Europe and two in Asia last night. We didn’t feel that Australia and Africa were warranted, and unless you wanted to take out penguins, Antarctica should be obvious.”

“I agree.”

She checked her watch. “I don’t know if they briefed you on this, but a certain percentage of the population has a natural immunity to black pox.”

“What percentage?”

“Point oh-oh-oh one. About seven thousand people on the earth will be completely immune to its effects, and it’s genetic, as well. A dominant gene from what we can tell. It should display in their children, which should push that number up but probably to no more than twenty thousand.”

He nodded. “We’re anticipating
ninety-five percent population loss. We can handle another twenty thousand people on top of the survivors.”

She paused.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. Do you realize what we’ve done? What we’ve all done, Hank? We’ve changed the course of human history. It was going one way, and we came along, and it will follow a divergent path now.”

He
watched the pigeons. “How do you know this wasn’t the path it was supposed to follow?”

Turning to look at her,
he felt those old feelings resurface. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t acted on them when he’d had the chance. Work, maybe. But the memory was so dusty with time, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

Her face was perfect—perfect and simple—even without makeup, which he found most people put on too much of anyway. She had been a model in the ’80s, if he remembered correctly. His predecessor had seen her on some runway in Spain and had decided they needed to have her. His predecessor.
How odd to say that.
He figured every generation would soon have predecessors and be looking back, wondering how the hell they had become the ones in charge.

“If this doesn’t work,” she said, “if we’re betrayed
… then we just killed our own species.”

Hank shrugged. “We would eventually die out anyway. Intelligence is counter-evolutionary. The species becomes wise enough to invent more and more efficient methods to kill
itself. We were in a very long process of self-destruction.”

She swallowed. “I didn’t think the morning would look so pretty. I thought it would be overcast or raining, something.”

He grinned. “Death on this scale probably has a tendency to surprise everyone.”

57

Rick Bolton wrapped his tent and rolled
the sleeping bag tightly. Early-morning Yosemite always had a certain vibe to it, especially far away from any cabins and parking lots. Something in the pine-scented air or the way the breeze whistled through the trees brought him a sense of calm that he really needed.

He’d been
there a lot as a kid and remembered the murders that had taken place. A mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter, an exchange student, and another young woman who worked for Yosemite had been killed. The decapitated body of the fourth victim had led police to Cary Stayner, who was later convicted of all four murders.

The number
of visitors to Yosemite had declined when word got out about the Yosemite Killer. When the brutal sexual assault and torture details came out, camping in Yosemite became almost non-existent. Rick still went. His father had said they’d caught the killer, and he had only targeted females, so he and Rick were fine.

Rick was excited
he and his father would have the entire park to themselves one summer when he was ten, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. A darkness, something heavy that seemed to stick to the skin, hung over everything when they were there. Two days into a six-day trip, his father packed up and said it was time to go.

Rick looked over
at the final tent and saw the feet of his son and daughter sticking out. His thirteen-year-old son, Marcus, was snoring so loudly that Rick was amazed his daughter, Trudy, could sleep. He peeked in through the lip in the tent. Sure enough, they were both passed out. Taking out a water bottle, he spilled a few drops on each of their foreheads, and they groaned and stirred.

“What time is it?” Marcus
asked.

“Seven
o’clock,” Rick said, then took a sip of the water before replacing the lid.

The six
-day trip seemed to fly by. His work as a professor of anthropology routinely took him out of the state or country for long research projects and sabbaticals, and he tried to take his children with him whenever he could. Since their mother’s passing two years before, he was all they had.

His boy sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Did you get what we came for?”

“Sure did,” Rick replied, taking a small plastic container from his backpack. Wrapped up in cellophane were several arrowheads. “Anasazi. They weren’t believed to be up this far north. They’re mostly found in New Mexico. This is definitely their handiwork, though. It’ll be an exciting paper.”

Marcus swirled his finger in the air and said, “Y
ay.”

Rick smacked him playfully
, and Marcus tried to tackle him. Rick lifted him off his feet and got him onto his back. He pinned him, then held him there while one of his hands went down to his armpit and tickled.

“Eight years of wrestling, boy. You can’t take your old man yet.”

Marcus was laughing. “Stop, stop! I’m gonna piss myself.”

Rick stopped and got off him. He helped the boy up
, then smacked his bottom and told him to pack up the tent and his gear.

Trudy
got up and went over to the edge of the trees to brush her teeth. When she was done, she got on her phone and mumbled something under her breath when she couldn’t get reception.

“You know, there are other things to look at than a phone screen.”

“I know. I’m waiting for a text from Alexis ’cause Brian asked her to that dance I was telling you about, and I wanna see if she said yes.”

He shook his head. “You’re eleven. You know what I was doing at eleven? I was outside
, digging stuff up to see if I could find anything cool.”

“Good for you
, Dad. But you guys didn’t have iPhones.”

He grinned and helped Marcus finish packing.

When they were done, they headed out of the national park in their RV. Soon, they were on the I-5, going south, back to their home in Westwood in the heart of Los Angeles.

Marcus watched movies on his tablet
, and Trudy played games on her phone. Rick frequently glanced back at them and smiled to himself. But occasionally, a pain would tug at his belly, and he would feel sullen and heavy, as though his thoughts and movements were working their way through water.

Trudy looked like her mother.

The drive wasn’t that bad. But along the way were abandoned jeeps and roadblocks with no one tending to them. An uneasiness came over him, but he didn’t know what else to do other than drive.

When he finally admitted to himself that no other cars were on the freeway, as if it had been abandoned, his uneasiness turned to panic.

“Either of you getting reception yet?”

“Not me,” Marcus said.

“Me neither.”

T
hey were back in Los Angeles in five hours. In fact, he had never made the drive in that amount of time.

He
parked at a truck stop outside the city and stretched his neck. Trudy was dozing on the bed in the back. He kissed her, then headed outside to the bathroom; hoping to find some other people that could tell him what the hell was going on. He wondered if the freeways had been closed because of some terrorist attack or natural disaster and they just hadn’t gotten the message.

As he stepped outside, he noticed two
empty cars in the lot. Rick went to the restroom and pissed at one of the urinals, yawning and stretching his shoulder, which had been injured in a college wrestling bout and never been quite the same.

When he finished and
turned toward the sink, he saw something on the wall. Dark and dry, a smear led down into the stall. Spread over an enormous portion of the wall, it looked like blood.

From where he
was standing, Rick couldn’t see in. He walked over slowly. “Hello? Is someone there?” No reply. He crouched lower for some reason and felt stupid for doing so. So he stood up, went right over, and pushed the stall door open with his boot.

Inside, a man was huddled over a toilet.
He was wearing a suit and fancy Italian leather shoes. His head was hanging over like a wet rag, and the entire stall was caked in dried blood. The walls, the floor, even the ceiling had been spattered.

“Um, hello? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

Rick glanced to the door of the bathroom and then back to the man. He wondered if he should try to call the police or check on him first. But what did it matter if he was alive or dead? He would call the police, just the same.

He swallowed and took a step forward. Approaching the man from behind, he reached down to grab his hips and
flip him over.

The man
let out a gurgled, horrifying scream and spun onto his back. Rick jumped, and the man reached for him as more blood shot out of his mouth. But it barely looked like blood.

The man was covered in
sores or chicken pox. But Rick had seen chicken pox when Trudy had them, and that wasn’t chicken pox. The man’s skin was bumpy, but it appeared to have been burnt. Some of it was falling off.

Rick ran out of the bathroom to get his phone and call the police
. Then he heard his daughter scream.