Pestilence: A Medical Thriller (20 page)

58

Samantha
’s plane landed at Dobbins Air Force Base, and she waited until it had come to a complete stop before unbuckling herself. She glanced at Jessica. The young girl was sitting in shock, staring out the window. She had asked where her father was twice, and no one told her.

As they stepped off the plane,
Sam put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and shuttled her over to an awaiting jeep. They rode in silence, but Jessica didn’t remove Samantha’s arm. In fact, she placed her head on Sam’s ribs, and Sam kept her arm over her, as if she could shield her from what they both knew was coming.

When the jeep stopped in front of Samantha’s home,
she debated for an instant. Olsen had given orders for the child to be taken into protective custody. But she knew what that meant—a night at a military base and then into state care. That wasn’t what Sam had promised Harold.

Without so much as a peep from the driver, Samantha helped the young girl out of the jeep
, and they walked inside the house. The house was immaculately clean.

Sam checked her watch
, and it read 9:00 a.m. The nurse usually came at around ten. The maids came twice a week, and a physical therapist was over twice a week to take her mother out for walks and to exercise on the equipment in the basement.

“There’s a spare room over there,” Samantha said. “You have your own bathroom. We’ll go tomorrow and
try and find you some new clothes.”

“Where’s my dad?” she
asked.

Samantha locked eyes with her.
The girl’s light-blue eyes were full of confusion and fury. She already knew where her father was; she had known it the moment she’d woken on the plane to the awful suction of an open door and didn’t see him there. But Sam guessed she needed to hear it.

“Your father is
gone, Jessica. I’m sorry. He passed away to save the rest of us.”

She nodded, glancing down
at the floor. “What about my mom?”

“I don’t know. There’s no communication in or out of California
, so I don’t know what’s happened to your mom. But we’ll look for her today, okay?”

She turned without saying anything and went into the room Sam had pointed to. Sam waited a few moments and then poked her head in. Jessica was on the
futon, curled up in a ball, and staring out the window at the sunlight that was flooding the street. Sam wondered what she could say to make it better, to ease her loss. But she couldn’t come up with anything. Jessica hadn’t just lost her father. Everything she had ever known was gone, and she would never get it back.

None of them would.

Samantha collapsed on the couch in the front room, her face in her hands, and cried. When she finished, no tears were left. She thought of Duncan and the sweet way he would text her with funny photos to make her laugh.

She was grieving
, though she didn’t recognize it as such. He would have asked her to marry him soon. Neither one of them had had any doubt about that. It was only a matter of finding the perfect moment. But it had never come. Instead, she was left with memories and a cold, empty feeling that the way her life was supposed to turn out had not materialized. Though she wanted to believe that, to revel in her grief, a part of her told her she would have said no, and it made her feel guilty. At least, she thought, Jane and her family had made it out.

“Are you okay?”
Jessica was standing there.

Sam wiped the tears away and said, “Yeah.”

“I don’t think I can sleep.”

Sam
patted the cushion on her couch, and Jessica walked over and sat down as Sam put her shirt to her face and cleaned off the salty tears. She wrapped her arm around Jessica, and they leaned back on the couch. Before they had a chance to say anything to each other, both of them were asleep.

60

Rick burst through the bathroom door and saw a man banging on his RV.

“Hey!”
Rick ran over, grabbed him by the shoulders, and flung him away. He went in for a kick as the man was still struggling to get up and stopped.

The man was pale
, and his eyes were rimmed so red that they looked painted. His clothes were stained black and wet, and Rick immediately knew it was blood. He jumped back as the man vomited so violently one of his eyes popped out of the socket. The slick, wet cord allowed it to dangle over the pavement as the vomit continued to flow.

Rick ran to the RV and tried to open the door
, but it was locked. He banged on it and called out to Trudy. Marcus opened the door, and Rick jumped in, then shut the door behind him before locking it again. He ran up to the front to look out the windshield.

The day was warm and quiet
, and with senses newly attuned from fear, he heard everything he had missed before. Or, in this case, he noticed what he hadn’t heard.

No airplanes in the sky. No cars on the interstate. No voices out
side. He turned on the radio and got static on every station. Rick pulled out his phone and dialed 9-1-1, but got a busy tone. He tried Googling the nearest police precinct, but the Internet on his phone wasn’t working.

“Is your
internet working, Trudy?”

“No, it hasn’t worked for three days.
I thought it was the canyons.”

Rick sat in the driver’s seat
for a moment, staring out at the truck stop, thinking about the man with the face that appeared to be falling off. His flesh had been ragged, as though it were weak from being soaked in water and were slipping off his skull.

Rick started the RV and headed back onto the interstate. Trudy was sitting up in the passenger seat
, and Marcus was on the floor behind him.

“What’s happening
, Daddy?” Trudy asked.

“I don’t know.”

They passed several cars, but none of them were moving. They were all pulled over to the side of the road without occupants. As they rolled into Los Angeles, a heavy, dark, feeling came over Rick, and for some reason, it was familiar. But he couldn’t place it for a long time, until they saw a body in the middle of the road.

A
man, maybe in his mid-twenties, was flat on his back, and some birds were picking at his belly, which was exposed underneath a dirty tank top. His face was bloody and torn up, and all his limbs were a dark black, as though they had been barbequed.

Rick stopped behind the corpse
, recognizing the feeling he’d had before. In Yosemite, when they had entered the place where the Yosemite Killer had spread terror and evil for months, he’d felt the same.

“Dad?” Marcus said.

“Yeah.”

“You
gonna go around him?”

“Yeah,” Rick said, not realizing he had
been stopped for a long time. He rolled the RV around and continued down the interstate.

“Look at that,” Marcus said.

Corpses were piled on the side of the road. A massive accident had occurred. At least twenty to thirty cars were strewn about like children’s toys, rolled over or thrown onto the surrounding fields.

Bodies were everywhere. But
the bodies didn’t appear to have been flung around by the accident. These bodies had collapsed from something else. And the road was painted a faded red, with droplets thrown around like on a canvas painted by a drunken artist. It was so out of the ordinary that Rick’s mind couldn’t recognize the red paint for what it was: gallons of blood from the body of every person who had died out here.

“I’m scared,
Daddy.”

“We’re safe in here,” he said, unable to sound convincing. He
caught her eyes, trying to appear as upbeat and positive as possible. “We’re safe in here, sweetheart. Go lay down on the bed. We’ll be home soon.”

He pulled the RV over the median and around the corpses
. Then he continued down the interstate, but what they saw was no different. Corpses rotted in the sun while birds, coyotes, and dogs tore at them. He kept driving, following the speed limit, and then grasping how pointless that seemed, he sped up to seventy-five and barreled toward his home as if that were their safe house and none of this would be real if they could get there.

The inner city was even worse. Bodies lay in the gutter like trash
, and cars had run through convenience stores, wrapped around light poles, and flipped upside down. He didn’t see anyone out.

Rick’s
home was up on a hill overlooking the city. To get there he had to go through Laurel Canyon, and he rolled down his windows so he could smell the eucalyptus leaves. The wind hit his face and made him feel better. He glanced in his rearview, and both his children were sitting attentively on the bed, neither of them speaking. Their eyes were glued to the windows, and he knew they were scanning for more dead bodies.

Pulling into their driveway, he
stopped and put on the parking brake. None of them moved. Rick turned to them, and they exchanged glances.

“Why don’t you guys stay here a minute,” he said. “Just while I check out the house.”

He walked outside and shut the door behind him. The bright sun was hot on his face, and he scanned his home, a five-bedroom built right on a cliff over the canyon, then walked to it.

61

Samantha woke to the sound of ringing. She checked her cell phone, but the batteries were long dead, and she realized her home phone was ringing.

Jessica was still
asleep, her head nestled comfortably underneath Sam’s arm. Samantha calmly lifted her arm and rose from the couch. She didn’t know what time it was, but bright sunshine was coming through all the windows. A note from her mother’s nurse was on the coffee table, letting her know that her mother had been fed and changed and that she hadn’t wanted to wake Sam. It also asked who the girl was and said that she was adorable.

Samantha walked to the phone in the kitchen and answered it.
“This is Samantha.”

“Samantha, I didn’t know if you’d made it back. This is Freddy.”

Her boss—he was the person in the entire world she least wanted to talk to. “What do you need, Freddy?”

“Um, well, I don’t know what to say. I heard about Duncan. Olsen called me and let me know. I’m sorry
. I know you two were friends.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah. Well, um, what I was calling about was that I was wondering when you were going to come in next.”

“Come in to the office?”

“Well, yeah. This is an enormously important time, Sam. We’ve had four detonations, and all have come back as—”

“We had four detonations?” she
asked, shocked. She remembered Olsen mentioning that to her, but in her medicated state, it had passed through without the recognition it deserved.

“Oh, well, yeah. I thought you’d heard.”

“I’ll be right down.”

62

Rick stood at his open front door. He didn’t move until he heard the door creak in the wind that was blowing through the trees and shrubbery. Walking in, his mouth was dry, and his heart was pounding. He was physically weak and thought,
So this is what being really terrified feels like?

His gun was upstairs. He walked through the kitchen and into the living room. As he was heading up the stairs, a breeze
wafted in, and he saw that the balcony doors were open.

Taking one step at a time, careful not to make them creak, he got to the second floor and glanced down both sides of the hallway before turning into the master bedroom. A framed photo of his wife was on the nightstand. He stared at it a moment and then went to the closet. Up on the top shelf was his 12
gauge. He took down that and a box of ammo. Then he loaded the weapon and cocked it before turning around.

Rick walked back down to the living room. He crossed the carpet, stopping for a moment to listen,
and then was about to head out to his kids when he saw something off the balcony—a plume of smoke, several, in fact.

He walked out and slid
open the screen. Standing on the balcony, he saw Los Angeles before him, but it didn’t resemble any city he’d seen. Fires raged across the city. Some were small patches that produced light, gray smoke, and others were sizeable infernos the length of football fields that discharged a black fog. The streets were clogged with motionless cars, and most shocking of all, he didn’t see a single live person. Bodies were everywhere, dotting the landscape like ants over rotting food. Many wore military uniforms.

He heard something in the sky
and looked up to see a chopper heading toward downtown. The machine was veering off course, weaving in the air as though it had a drunk driver, far too close to the ground. It squealed as it neared the city and banked downward into a building. A boom and an explosion accompanied it as it slammed into a tower and shattered.

Though Rick was miles away, he flinched.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw a smoldering heap of stone and steel where the chopper and fragments of the building had hit the sidewalk.

Rick turned and ran to the RV
, grabbing some food and storage water on his way. He ran back to the house twice more, with his kids asking him what was going on, and loaded up as many supplies as he could.

“Dad, what’s going on?” his son
asked.

He jumped into the driver’s seat. “We’re getting the hell out of California.”