Plague (22 page)

“
Papale
Garrett, how ya doin’
?
Sorry you had to run into
trouble out there. Hui
s is gettin’ worse by the day. Huis
is just what we call them lawless folks that’s out on the streets.”

“Are you the police?”

“Well, I guess so. Now. We found them uniforms at the police
station an’
we help out when we can,” he said, looking to one of the
men
that had helped Samantha. “Well anyway,
if you got someone to come get you
,
you should call them now. Afternoon and night is the worst time to be out
,
so you should get all your business done in the morning.”

Sam looked around the space. There were clothes, food rations, jugs of water
,
and gasoline along with dishes piled next to a sink.

“Do you live here?”

“Good a place as any,”
Papale
said. “Got water, electricity when we need, we got each other. There’s the food court downstairs with enough stock to keep us fed for a year or two. Seemed as good a choice as my
own
house.”

“Food is being given away at aid stations, along with water and anything else you could need.”

He chuckled. “Young lady, the day the government does
somethin’
right is the day I take
up ballroom dancin’. There
ain’t enough food to feed a preschool
at them aid stations. The lines go on for blocks and by the time you get there
,
they outta everythin’ but flour and sugar. Soon they’ll be outta those too.”

“They get resupplied every other day.”

“If that’s true, I ain’t seen it. Once they
run
outta food, they close and they leave.”

“That has to be some kind of mistake.”

“Mistake or not, that’s what they’re doin’. Now if you’ll ex
cuse me
,
I got some work to do
thawing some chickens for tonight’s dinner. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like or you can have someone pick you up.”

“Thanks.” Samantha pulled out her cell phone. All the men in the office were staring at her and it became apparent that there were no women in the mall with them. She smiled a friendly smile to them and then walked out the doors to the corridor.

“Where have you been?” Wilson’s voice
said
on the other end.

“I was attacked, Ralph. A group of men chased me down the street
when
I was walking to the hospital.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I ran into the mall and there were other people here.”

“Whole damn city’s gone to hell. Did you know our vaccine shipments were attacked? They burned the crates. Two guards were injured.”

“
Maybe they thought it was something valuable.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“
Ralph, how are the aid stations doing?”

“Fine. Why?”

“I heard that they’ve been closing and that there’s not enough food for everyone.”

Wilson was silent a while. “You better get to the hospital. I’m sending down a military escort for you. We need to talk.”

CHAPTER 28

Ralph Wilson sat in an administrative office at the Queen’s Medical Center and stared out the window at the abandoned streets below. He pictured kids out here, people jogging, teenagers heading down to the bus stop to get to the beach for the day’s surfing. But there wasn’t any of that. There was fluttering garbage and stray dogs and every once in a while, a group of men out prowling the streets.

It reminded him of Kosovo when he was there supervising, unofficially, a NATO team
providing medical assistance to civilians
.
He was a young man then and too stupid to know that he was expendable.

The Army Rangers had dropped him off without anything but the name of a contact and the clothes on his back, and that was the way he liked it. Or so he thought, until it started raining so hard it was as if the sky had opened a wound and was pouring its lifeblood out onto the crumbling city. He contracted pneumonia and survived only because a family in town took him in and nursed him back to health with soup and tea. Otherwise, he would’ve died alone underneath a bridge that he was using as shelter.

The family
had been
Muslim, and he remembered when the soldiers with the harsh Czech accents had come into the home by kicking in the door. They
wanted to take
the wife and the young daughter. The man of the house had not yet heard of the rape houses where they would be forced into sex acts with dozens, even hundreds of men a day. They would be forced to have sex with other women, including relatives. Mothers and daughters were especially prized.

The Serbs and Croats were no longer human. Ralph had seen their devastation in the mass graves in soccer fields and parks.
As the two men were dragging away the wife and daughter,
Ralph, still weak from his illness, rose from his bed, pulled out
a
.45 caliber from its holster, and shot three rounds, two entering one man’s head and the other finding its mark in the other man’s throat.

The family was grateful but shocked. They would certainly be marked for death now. Ralph helped them gather their belongings and they snuck in the dead of night to a NATO encampment almost a hundred miles away. The route was treacherous. The streets revealed nothing but decaying buildings with decaying souls looking out of them, their eyes blank. The war had taken what was human in them and crushed it.

Now, twenty years later, at night
he would occasionally wake up and see the buildings before him. Monsters in the darkness that were slowly collapsing, consuming whatever was around them.

Looking out onto the streets of Honolulu, he saw that same evil here. Whatever
it was, it was here. Not fully
but a spark. It was beginning to take over and he knew that eventually, there would be nothing left.

“Ralph?”

Ralph looked up from the window and saw Duncan Adams standing by the door. “Yeah, Duncan. What can I do for you?”

“I was calling your name for a good ten seconds. You doin’ okay?”

“Yes, yes, I was, um, somewhere else. Have a seat.” Duncan sat down across from him and crossed his legs. “So where’s your sidekick?”
Ralph said.

“Samantha?” Duncan said. “Why would you think she’s my sidekick?”

“You guys are always together and when you’re not
,
you’re calling each other.”

“I wouldn’t describe Sam as anybody’s sidekick. If anything, I’m hers.”

Ralph laughed softly. “She once punched one of her professors when he made a pass at her after class. She tell you that?”

“No.”

“Philosophy professor
,
I think. They’re all wackos anyway and this one was an aggressive wacko. I guess she belted him and nearly laid him out. She was almost kicked out of school but her father filed a lawsuit against the university and they backed down.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. And to answer you
r
question, I’m not sure where she is. I know she’s been setting up the aid stations the past couple of days.”

“I spoke to her about an hour ago but I thought she would’ve been here by now. I have some news, Duncan, and eventually you’d hear it anyway so I thought I should share it with you.” He pulled out his iPad and passed it Duncan. “That’s Pushkin’s report on the infectiousness of Agent X.”

Duncan read for a moment. “This can’t be right.”

“It is.”

“That’s impossible,” he said quietly.

“It’s not. We’re gearing up for—”

The door opened and Ralph’s assistant Betty poked her head in. “Sorry, Dr. Wilson, there’s someone here to meet with you and I thought you might be interested in meeting with them.”

“Who is it?”

“Benjamin Cornell from the anti-vaccination people.”

“That son of a bitch. Gimmie a minute, Betty, and then let him back.”

“Not happy with him
,
I take it?”

“He’s the one that’s been attacking our vaccine shipments. I’ve dealt with him before. He
targeted
a meeting at the World Health Organization in Sweden a few years back and he started spraying animal blood on anybody walking in.”

The door opened and Betty led Benjamin inside. Ben smiled and nodded hello to both men before sitting down.

“Beautiful day, boys. We should be out enjoying nature
,
not stuck in an office.”

“Nature’s trying to kill us right now,” Duncan said.

“Cut the shit, Ben,
”
Ralph interjected
.
“I know you’re the one attacking my vaccine shipments.”

“They’re not your shipments, Ralph. And where’s your proof that I was even twenty miles near those shipments
?
Besides, that’s not my style.”

“You don’t have a style. You’re a terrorist.”

“I’m a patriot. What I do is no different than what the Founding Fathers did. I stand up to tyranny and arbitrary rules thrown at us from the government. You’re too deep in it now to see it
,
Ralph, but I protect people like you too.”

“Protect me from medicine? I don’t need your protection. And neither do these people. As far as proof goes, if I had any you’d be sitting in jail right now instead of in my office.”

“I don’t think
there
’s
enough people manning the jails as it is,” he said with a grin. “Ralph, we’re getting off on the wrong foot. We’re really on the same side, you and I. You want to see people healthy and disease free and I want to see them healthy and disease free. Does it really matter that much that our methods of how to achieve those goals are different?”

Ralph stuck a finger near Benjamin’s face. “Keep the fuck away from my vaccines or you’re gonna be sorry. We’re now under martial law. I won’t be so inclined to follow procedure if another one of my shipments is attacked. I’ll just send some MPs down to arrest you and hold you in a brig until we get back to the mainland.”

“Don’t you mean if we get back to the mainland?”

Ralph was silent a while. “Who the hell told you?”

“Just an educated guess.”

Duncan looked from one man to the other. “What’re you two talking about?”

“You haven’t told him?” Benjamin said. He chuckled. “I think you should maybe tell the people who’ve risked their lives coming out here what you plan to do.”

“I don’t give a damn about what
you
think.
And the only reason
I
asked
you here
is
to give you one more chance. I have another shipment of vaccines tonight
,
which I’m sure you know about. They get touched, and you’re done.”

Benjamin smiled to himself and rose. “Pleasure as always, Ralph. Dr. Adams, nice seeing you as well.”

Duncan nodded and waited until he had left before speaking. “What was he talking about, Ralph?”

Ralph exhaled loudly and leaned back in his chair. Exhaustion permeated every
muscle
,
bone
,
and
sinew in his body. Even his skin felt numb and tired. He hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours and looked forward to the time when he could be back at his own home and
in
his own bed.

“Ralph, what was he talking about?”

“What I’m about to tell you doesn’t leave this room. Not yet. Understood?”

“Sure.”

“You better shut the door then and sit down.”

CHAPTER 29

Samantha arrived at the hospital a few hours later. It had taken the MPs nearly two and a half hours to arrive and verify her identity before they allowed her into the
Jeep
and drove her back to the hospital in silence.

She walked down the main corridor and saw Jerry Amoy sitting in the waiting area. There was an empty plate on the seat next to him and he was sipping a
Diet Coke
as he watched a DVD
of
Friends
on the television that was hooked to the wall. Samantha came and sat down next to him.

“I haven’t seen you in a few days,” Amoy said.

“I’ve been setting up the aid stations.”

Amoy nodded. “I’ve heard they’ve been running out of food.”

“I just heard that myself. I d
on’t know how that’s possible. T
hey’re supposed to be resupplied every night and we have shipments scheduled to come in every week.”