Red Death: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (2 page)

Chapter 2

Tara woke to the noise of vacuums coming from somewhere. Now that the house beside them was empty, she felt fairly isolated. The home on the opposite side stood beside a church and served as the parsonage. It was empty too. The preacher had moved on to a new church eight months before, and his position hadn’t yet been filled. So both neighbor’s houses were vacant now.
For some reason, Tara kept having a recurring thought—
no one on either side to run to.

Lee had left for work early, so she was there alone all day as usual. Since Tara stayed up until the early a.m. writing, Lee didn’t usually wake her up before he left. Today, she had no pressing errands to run, so she hoped to catch up on her new book. As she washed her face and prepared for the day, the noise that woke her droned on.

Curious now, she made her way downstairs to look out the kitchen window toward Marla’s house. She saw a flash of white go past on the patio. A figure in a hazmat-suit came into view.
Oh, my God, they’re decontaminating the house!
A stab of fear went straight to her heart.

It had been over a week since she’d seen Marla sick on her back porch. She’d given up on the hospital. They simply would not give Tara any info when she called. The local news had not mentioned it again either. She grabbed her cell in a panic, texting Lee at work, but he usually only answered on his lunch hour. She looked at her watch. It was only 11:45. He wasn’t on break yet. The noise continued unabated.

Tara walked to the front door to get the mail, trying not to panic. It was September 1
st
and still nice out, although the evenings were cooler now. She had hoped to surprise Lee tonight with a fire out back in the chiminea and maybe a cookout, taking full advantage of the last of Indian summer. But now, she began to think in terms of exposure to whatever germ was over at the neighbor’s house.
Too late, I worked out there in the garden all week.
All of a sudden, Tara felt as though she couldn’t breathe.

Distracted by her thoughts, she reached into the mailbox. She noticed the woman who lived across their busy street gathering her mail as well. Tara knew her as Mary, a widow with a small notary business in her home, the income supplementing her social security. She and Lee had used her once when they sold their old car, but Tara didn’t even know her last name. The street they lived on wasn’t real conducive to making friends, since it was heavily trafficked.

Although she and Lee usually kept to themselves, today was an exception. Frightened by the hazmat suits next door, she needed some reassurance, maybe even some human companionship.

“Hey, Mary!” Tara called to her.

The older woman heard, gave a wave and walked down her front steps to the curb. Tara did the same as traffic flew by on the street between them.

“Have you heard anything about Marla and Frank?” Tara yelled again, motioning back toward their house. A semi rolled past and Mary cupped one hand around her ear, not understanding. She looked both ways, waiting for the traffic to thin and then jogged across as soon as it did, her short white hair blowing. She was tall for a woman, taller than Tara, wiry almost, but she had an open, friendly face. Tara met her on the grassy curb strip.

“My God, there are people in hazmat suits next door!” Tara cried, pointing at the big dark house next to hers. “Have you heard anything about them? The hospital won’t give me any info.” She suddenly realized she was running her words together in panic, and poor Mary couldn’t even get a peep out. But she couldn’t help herself. When she got nervous, she talked a blue streak. “Marla’s eyes were bloody last time I saw her. I didn’t even put it all together until the next day at the grocery store when I heard something on the local news!” Tara forced herself to shut up and wait for Mary’s reply.

“My daughter Julie is a nurse over at the hospital. She followed in my footsteps,” Mary joked. Tara had forgotten Mary was a retired nurse. She had only talked to her once or twice before. Mary lowered her voice, even though the sound of traffic drowned out any possibility of being overheard.

“The hospital staff were all exposed. No one there knew any better, and there was no warning. But they transferred your neighbors out, up north somewhere. Their tests came back positive for Ebola.” At Tara’s sharp intake of breath, Mary paused. “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but Marla died two days ago, and Frank died today.”

“Oh, dear God.” Tara backed up a little, her long hair blowing across her face. She was partially in shock, and partly afraid of standing too close. Mary noticed.

“It’s okay. I haven’t seen my daughter, only talked to her on the phone. She doesn’t want to come anywhere near me. She’s afraid of exposing me.”

“Oh, Mary, how awful,” Tara replied.

Mary nodded and sighed. “I told her I didn’t care, but she insisted she was staying away for 21 days. All the nurses on that shift are on leave.” Mary paused for a moment as Tara stared at her, speechless. The older woman looked around at Marla and Frank’s house. “I’m really glad they’re decontaminating the place though, for your sake.”

Tara’s vision swam for a moment and she thought she might pass out. Mary saw her struggling and came closer to hug her, then stopped. “I guess we’d better not get too touchy-feely. If I were you, I’d turn off my AC, especially if it’s on that side of your house. You don’t want to bring in any outside air from around their home.”

“Oh, my God, I didn’t even think of that, Mary!” Her breath came in shallow little gulps. Fear seized her and an icy cold certainty that they were all going to die horribly took hold. Her thoughts raced.
My AC unit is on the other side. Still.
She felt the color draining from her face as Mary watched her.

“It’s okay, Tara, supposedly it’s hard to catch. Let’s hope it doesn’t go airborne as most viruses do when they mutate. Just use precautions. And my advice is—get ready. My daughter says there are an awful lot of confidentiality forms being forced on them. For whatever reason, the powers that be do not want us to know what’s going on. Maybe so we don’t panic. To
me
that means get ready. They know something we don’t.”

“Thank you,” breathed Tara, dazed and overwhelmed. “I’m going to prepare. Stay in touch, Mary, okay? Your daughter is in the loop way more than we are, and I’m grateful for any info you can pass on.”

Mary nodded and said goodbye, crossing back over and disappearing inside her small white bungalow on the corner. As Tara stood there in shock, still digesting the ramifications of all this, Mary reappeared at her door. She strode outside and grabbed the small
Notary Public
sign from her front yard, taking it with her as she disappeared back inside. This scared Tara even worse.
She needs that money
. But if Mary was worried enough to limit her exposure to strangers…

Tara walked back to her front door fast, not even glancing over at the hazmat operation. She really didn’t want to know. Back inside, she frantically dialed Lee and he answered on the third ring, chewing.

“What? I’m eating,” he laughed. Tara told him what had happened in a hushed voice, detailing all Mary said. Lee was quiet for a moment.

“Well, two guys who work side by side here on the production line are home sick today,” Lee told her. He paused for a moment, “and both their wives are nurses. They work together at the hospital. Let’s hope this isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

Tara’s mind was on high alert now, running options through her head at a speed hitherto unknown to her.
Could Lee leave work? Can we make it on what money we have for a while? Wait, he’s got a month’s paid vacation!

“Lee, please, please, put in for your vacation! Take it now! That gives us four weeks to see what happens. We weren’t planning on going anywhere on vacation anyway. I mean, so far you’re isolated in the R & D lab there, but if it spreads, I don’t want you around all those people! Four weeks of us here together, staying away from everyone— by that time, we should know if anything bad is going to develop.”

Lee pooh-poohed her fears, but she begged him, explaining her bad feeling. Before he got off the phone, he promised Tara he would call the office and schedule it. Not for Ebola, he laughed, but because he was tired and ready for a vacation. Since it was Friday, he’d be off for four weeks starting later today. Tara didn’t care how much he made fun of her, he was coming home and together they could handle anything that developed.

Before he hung up, she made him promise to go wash his hands and stay away from everyone. Lee’s boss was the only one who worked in the lab with him, and she was a younger woman living alone, not much of a high-risk exposure there.

Tara looked at her watch, feeling slightly better.
Only four more hours
.  She knew if she didn’t get out of there, she’d spend the rest of her afternoon staring through the slats at the kitchen window, trying to see what the hazmat suits were doing. There was still time to get food and supplies, maybe take some money from the bank too.
Time to prepare a little. I’d rather be ready than not.

Uneasily, Tara opened the checkbook and glanced at her balance. She knew she had two thousand dollars in savings.
I’m going to buy some extra stuff, just to be on the safe side. I’m not even gonna tell Lee.
At least, she wouldn’t tell him yet.
If this really is the beginning of an outbreak, money will be useless. Food and water will be all that matters. Lee might want to throttle me for it, but I’m buying it. 

~

Tara ran
through the bank and withdrew $1,500. She wanted a thousand to stash at home, and five hundred to get supplies. She ticked off a list in her head of what worst-case scenario items they might need. A major revelation struck her as she drove to the dollar store for cheap canned food.
We’re going to need ammunition for our gun.
A gun was sometimes the only thing that stood between safety and danger.

She had owned a little purse-size Beretta .25 semi-automatic pistol for years. It lay beside the bed on the nightstand with a Kleenex draped over it.
Probably clogged with dust by now. We sure haven’t fired it for years.

Tara turned the car around and went first to the small firearms shop in their town. She told the man there what kind of gun she had and he went in the back to get what she needed. She bought fifty bucks worth of ammo, and drove back to the dollar store.

Normally fairly frugal, she decided she would only buy cans of food they usually used. No sense in going berserk and buying out the store. Plus if a pandemic never materialized, she’d feel pretty dumb with enough red beans and rice to feed Louisiana and no money in the bank as a safety net.

At the dollar store, she pushed the cart slowly through the aisles, trying to imagine what they might need in a worst-case situation. She bought lots of pasta in bags, long dated at least two years, and bottled spaghetti sauce to go with it. Round cans of chicken soon nestled among trapezoidal tins of corned beef. Tuna, Chili, soups of all kinds, as long dated as she could find, began to stack up. Rice, lots of flour, dried beans, salt, bags of sugar, even cookie mix and cans of Crisco were added to the stash.

She still had some of her mom’s old supplies, inherited after her folks passed away, and Tara remembered they’d had a couple of personal water filters they’d bought after 9/11. They were guaranteed to purify even water from a mud puddle, so Tara felt a little more secure about a water supply with those. But since they’d lain untouched all these years on her shelf, they’d need checking.
I better go down and see if they’re still good.

Passing a sale on bleach, she hesitated, and then grabbed six jugs, just in case.
That should do it
. She’d read somewhere that you could use a few drops of bleach to purify water too, as well as disinfect any surface. A sudden vision of her and Lee lying dead with their half empty glasses of “purified” water in front of them flashed in her head, and she laughed out loud. An old woman pushing a cart past gave her a funny look.

Tara nodded and smiled, embarrassed, but her morbid sense of humor, coupled with her lack of even basic prepper knowledge, pushed her fear away and tickled her funny bone. Sure, maybe the internet could get her up to speed on a few things, but she truly hoped she would never have to know exactly how to purify water. As it was, Lee razzed her enough about her other germaphobic habits. But Tara knew what Lee nicknamed her “Howard Hughes” phobias kept her healthy, so they might just help with whatever came their way now. And that was that.

Tara didn’t want to appear any stranger than she had to, so she decided to buy this batch of stuff, then hit up another area store for paper products and whatever else they had that was different from what she’d already bought. Tara fielded a few questions from the clerk by saying she was restocking the pantry for the winter, since they didn’t like to drive in the snow. The total came to almost two hundred dollars. She paid in cash, and then loaded it into her SUV.

Next, she drove to the other store in town and bought two carts full of paper towels and toilet paper, along with jugs of water and quite a few more cans.

Tara drove past Marla’s house on the corner on the way into her rear driveway. There were no vehicles or people in suits anywhere. A wave of sadness at Frank and Marla’s deaths and a sense of unreality washed over her.
This feels like a bad dream
. She looked at her watch and it saw was almost time for Lee.
Thank God.