Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) (20 page)

35

With the top of the jeep off,
Debra enjoyed watching the sky. As a little girl, she’d lain with her sister in the backyard and counted the stars. Then the next night, they would do it again, wondering whether the same number of stars would appear. And if they didn’t appear, they would wonder where they went. No Google existed then, so they couldn’t look up why some nights only a few stars would appear and others the sky seemed coated in shining diamonds. They imagined that the stars would hide some nights, and others, when they felt brave, they’d come out.

Pete stepped out of the hotel. He was limping and holding his side, his face bloodied.

“Peter!”

She jumped out of the jeep. He recoiled and shouted, “Don’t get close!”

Debra stopped. They stood far apart. He straightened and said, “You need to get the cities evacuated. They’re planning something big.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Go to Jacob’s house. Tell him about the drones. Tell him he has to get the cities evacuated. He’ll listen.”

Debra took a step forward. “I’m
not leaving you.”

“You have to.”

“No,” she said, emotion tightening her throat, “no, not like this. It can’t end like this.”

Pete grinned. “You wanna know
something? I was going to ask you out the first day I met you. I got right up there, behind your table when you were eating lunch in the mess hall, and then I chickened out. I said to myself, ‘there’s plenty of time…’ There’s never plenty time.”

“Pete, don’t do this. You can fight.”

“I’m a danger to everyone I’m around,” Pete said, his mouth overflowing with liquid. He spit a glob of blood onto the pavement. “Go to Jacob’s house and tell him everything. He’ll believe you.”

She nodded and turned away, wiping the tears from her eyes as she climbed into the jeep. She started it
, and Pete took a few steps back. He didn’t say anything as she pulled away, She tried to watch him in her rearview mirror, but all she could see was darkness.

Pete watched until the taillights of the jeep faded into black. A piece of garbage fluttered in the street. Other than that, there was no motion
, no sound, not even the wind blowing through the abandoned buildings.

Pain had an off switch
: apathy. All Pete had to do was not care anymore. If he turned off that part of himself, he wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, but he wanted to feel it, to know that he was still alive.
Not dead yet
, he kept saying to himself.
Not dead yet
…

He leaned against the wall of the hotel and slid down. Closing his eyes, he felt sleep washing over him
, but he knew it wasn’t sleep. He was losing consciousness from the blows he had taken to his head. He had to stay awake because he wasn’t sure he would wake up if he closed his eyes. But then again… there were worse ways to go than in your sleep.

Pete wasn’t certain how long he sat there, but something roused him.
Screaming.

He jolted awake. The screams echoed over the empty streets, like waves
rolling over them. And they were getting closer. Pete forced himself to his feet. Around the corner up the road, a single person appeared. It was too dark to make him out clearly, but Pete could see the blood soaking his shirt. The man screamed and sprinted at Pete.

Pete turned, the pain so acute it made his knees wobble. He leaned heavily against the hotel’s exterior, trying desperately
to claw his way to the entrance. The man kept screaming, each scream painfully closer than the last. Pete slammed through the revolving doors. There was a lock on top of the doors, and he pushed the pin inside the lock, preventing the doors from turning.

The man
crashed into the doors, nearly breaking the glass. Covered in blood, shrieking, his face pale, his eyes black, he looked like a devil.

Pete
stumbled into the building, one hand pressed against the wall for support. People were gathered around a television. One woman had her hand covering her mouth while tears streamed down her face. One of the men’s jaws dropped so far he looked like it was stuck that way.

Pete made his way over,
shouting, “I need a gun,” and no one even moved. He stood behind them, away from them so he wouldn’t get blood anywhere, and his eyes locked onto the television. A video was running, taken on what looked like a cell phone. A plane clipped one of the drones. The drone dropped from the sky and exploded onto a busy Manhattan street, releasing a light-green mist. No one was reporting any illness or injury, but everyone knew what it was. At least two hundred people had been in the radius of the mist. With an R-naught of twenty, that meant those two hundred would infect about four thousand people, and those four thousand would infect eighty thousand, and so on. There were at least thirty other drones over population centers. Isolation could only go so far. Eventually, everyone would be infected.

Pete felt pain and exhaustion
pour over him. He didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. He limped away and sat on one of the hotel lobby couches and then lay down and closed his eyes. Before he even knew what he was doing, sleep overtook him, shutting out the rest of the world.

36

The dinner laid out before them was unlike anything Samantha had ever had. All the food was fresh, the meat untouched by antibiotics, growth hormones, or corn, which practically no animals were meant to eat in the quantities they were force-fed in modern industrial societies. It gave the meat a flavor she’d never tasted.

Jason
spoke with Tristan, who was seated at the head of the table. The rest of the village, the adults anyway, sat around them or on smaller tables set up in a separate dining room inside the largest hut. Sam had initially thought the feast was for their benefit, but she could see this was a nightly ritual, one that was important to them. Though the townspeople behaved stoically during the day, now, with a little bit of beer, they let their hair down and relaxed.

A hierarchy definitely existed.
Based on the way some of the men responded to some of the women, Sam guessed that this was a matriarchal society, with Tristan at the head.

“You’ve hardly touched your drink,” Tristan said to her.

“I’m not much of a drinker.”

“I think you’ll find this particular drink pleasant. It’s a mixture of beer and a special juice from a local berry. It’s quite flavorful. You must try a little.”

Sam, to be polite, picked up the cup and took a drink. “It’s good, thank you.”

Tristan smiled and bowed her head.

As the night wore on, Jason turned to her and said, “You okay?”

“Yeah, why?”

“You seem sad.”

“
It’s hard not to be.”

He shrugged. “You gotta make the most of the little moments, you know?”

She nodded, though she felt nothing of the sort. The devastation and chaos were too recent. She still remembered the way things used to be. When she awoke in the morning, it was the world of two years ago that she expected to step into, and every day she would have to look out her window to see that her nightmare was actually real.

Within a few minutes, Sam noticed an odd sensation
, her vision blurring at the edges. At first she thought it was a trick of the light, there being only candle and an oil lamp, light she wasn’t used to. Soon she saw it wasn’t the light. The blurriness coincided with general vertigo, a buoyancy to her body that made her feel as though she could float away.

“I don’t feel well,” she said.

Jason looked her way, and his eyes rolled back into his head. He fought it, but eventually his head just collapsed onto the table.

Everyone stopped talking. They had their eyes fixed on her. Her limbs felt as though they had to move th
rough sand, and heaviness descended over her, making even the slightest movement difficult. She pushed herself away from the table and nearly fell over as she got to her feet.

“What’d you… do to me?”

“It’s best not to fight it, dear,” Tristan said. “You could harm yourself. Just lie down and let it take over. It’s not entirely unpleasant.”

Sam tried to
get away, but the room spun. She hit the wall, bouncing her head off it, and collapsed onto her back.

The last thing she saw was Tristan’s smiling face over her.

37

A commotion woke Pete. He sat up and saw a man arguing with one of the clerks. The
suited man had puffy blond hair and was wearing an overcoat, even though it was summer. The man was growing frustrated, as evidenced by the constant tapping of his fingers against the counter. Finally, he shouted, “Tell me where Daniel Clover is or I will kill both of you!”

Pete ducked low as soon as he
heard it. The clerk stammered, “Six sixteen. He’s in six sixteen.”

The man stomped over to the elevators and took the next one up. Pete pushed himself up. Every bit of him hurt and his head was spinning. He had to take a moment to adjust.

When he’d regained his equilibrium, he looked to the revolving door. No one stood outside of it anymore. Pete staggered over to the clerk. “Do you have a gun?” The clerk, terrified, nodded. “You need to give it to me. That man is not here for a party.”

“I don’t…”

Pete went around the counter. A small safe sat before the woman. “Open it,” he said. Slowly, she took a key from her pocket and opened the safe. A .38 lay there, and Pete grabbed it. He took the elevator up to the sixth floor again.

When the
doors opened, he stepped off. He couldn’t hear anything. He slowly made his way over to Clover’s door, which was wide open. Pete stuck his head in. He could see feet sticking out against a wall, but the rest of the body was concealed until Pete got closer.

Rummaging through the pockets of Daniel Clover was the blond he had seen downstairs. C
lover was dead. One gunshot wound to the side of the head. The blond was frantic, tearing through his pockets until he stopped at the waist. Behind the belt was what looked like a small pocket, something that would’ve had to be customized on Clover’s pants. The blond man pulled out a set of two keys. He eyed them a while then closed a fist around them. Pete raised the gun.

“I assume those must be valuable to kill an assistant secretary of defense.”

The blond looked up but didn’t turn around. “Very valuable,” he said.

“What are they to?”

“A warehouse.”

“Warehouse of what?”

“Of something very important.”

Pete took a step back and leaned against the wall, his legs feeling wobb
ly. “And what is that?”

“Death.”

The blond spun and rushed him. Pete got off one round, blowing away a bit of the man’s shoulder. The man struck him with a fist and then an elbow in quick succession. He kicked out at Pete’s throat, and Pete moved. The foot kicked through the wall, raining a cloud of drywall over the man’s leg. Pete stumbled backward and fell. The gun the man had used to kill Clover was on the floor next to the body. The man rolled over it, picking it up along the way, and was in a crouching stance before Pete could blink.

Pete fired twice, as did the blond. One of Pete’s shots hit the man in the throat. Bits of flesh and blood exploded over the
walls behind him, and he choked. His hands went up to his throat in the universal sign that he was unable to breathe.

Pete had been shot, too. One round
had missed his head, but the other had connected with his arm. The pain was excruciating, like being stabbed with a blade that was on fire. When he tried to move his arm, agony blasted through his body. He dropped the gun, trying to stop the flow of blood.

The blond
man choked to death, a pool of dark blood soaking the carpets around him. Pete was breathing heavily, and the sweat wouldn’t stop. His body felt hot, like he’d been in a furnace, and the injury made his arm nearly useless. The keys were on the floor in front of him. He stared at them a long time before picking them up. On one of the keys it said, “Harboro Storage.”

He forced himself to his feet.
There had to be a first aid kit downstairs somewhere. Stumbling forward, he made his way to the elevator and then down to the first floor, leaving a trail of blood behind him. The front desk clerk, her eyes wide, said nothing as he struggled up to her and said, “I need the first aid kit, please.”

Pete sat on the couch in the lobby. He bandaged the wound as
well as he could, at least enough to slow the blood until he could get to a hospital. Then again, going to the hospital seemed a little like plugging a hole in a sinking ship.

Besides, h
e had to go somewhere else first. He had a feeling Harboro Storage had something to do with the drones, and killing Clover was just a measure of cleaning up.

“I need a car,” he said to the clerk. Though he didn’t point his weapon, the sight of him holding
a gun, covered in blood, must’ve been terrifying, and he didn’t do anything to change that impression.

“We have a van,” she
stammered.

The van
was used for transporting equipment and various items to and from the hotel. It was filled with linen when Pete climbed inside. He started it, flipped on the headlights, and pulled away. No one tried to stop him. But when the patrols came by again, he was certain the clerk would be outside waving them down. He had to hurry.

Though he couldn’t connect to the military server, the general server for the
US government was still up. He had access to the Internet through his phone, and he looked up the address for Harboro Storage, a facility about fifteen minutes outside of town.

Pete drove the van like he was ninety years old. Pain radiated
from his arm, distracting him. He couldn’t concentrate on the road or anything else. He stopped once and checked the bandages and layers of gauze that he’d soaked in Betadine. The bleeding hadn’t stopped, only slowed.

The warehouse sat in
a field of long grass surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence topped with razor wire. Only one gate led in, and a guard booth sat in the middle with retractable steel arms on either side. Pete pulled up to the guard gate. The guard was a soldier, a pistol strapped to his hip. He stepped out of the booth and came to the window, glancing inside the van.

“Identification
, please.”

Pete pulled out his
NORAD identification from his wallet and handed it to him. The soldier went back into the booth for a minute and then came back out. He handed the ID back and said, “Head on through, sir.”

The arm pulled up and Pete drove through.

Gravel surrounded the warehouse and crunched underneath the tires. No other vehicles were around. The warehouse looked rusted and old, something he could’ve driven by dozens of times and never noticed. He stopped the van in front of the door, which bore several chains and two padlocks. He got out of the van and looked back to the guard booth. The guard was staring at him through the windows of the booth. Pete turned to the locks and took out the two keys.

The two keys opened the two locks
. He paused a moment before doing anything else. A cool breeze was blowing, and in the sky, the moon was starting a slow retreat as the sun began its ascent.

He felt weary and hot. A general malaise had fallen over him
, and the itch in his throat had turned to pain that rose to his ears. The pox was building momentum. In a couple of days, he wouldn’t be able to do anything but lie in bed. After that, he would be one of
them
. As he stared at the doors, he wondered why he even cared what was in there. It made no difference, ultimately, to him.

But he knew he couldn’t just walk away. He had to know why this was happening.

Pete opened the doors and stepped inside.

The warehouse was large, far larger than the exterior let on.
As he moved, the droplets of blood that dripped from his arm, down his hand, and off his fingertips onto the pavement were not lost on him. He was a walking virus, and everyone around him was at risk. Maybe a better approach would’ve been just going somewhere isolated and dying alone… but the thought was so horrific that he couldn’t fathom it—to die alone and in pain, no one even knowing he was gone.

Pete trudged through the warehouse. Lining the walls were shelves of e
quipment. He didn’t recognize them, but they were clearly for manufacturing something, vehicles or machines, something that required large engine parts. Eventually he reached shelves that were cleared. There wasn’t enough light to see them in detail, so Pete had to get close. As he did, he noticed something else on the far side of the factory: large containers.

He went to them. They were vats of thick plastic. White. He’d seen these vats before…

“Sir,” someone said behind him.

Pete turned to see
a soldier in the Weaver stance, the pistol aimed at his head.

“Do you know what this is?” Pete said.

“You’re going to have to come with me, sir.”

Pete looked
at the vats. “It’s poxvirus, tons and tons of it, enough to wipe out every human being on the planet. And it’s sitting in a warehouse with two locks.” He looked back at the soldier. “Has the entire world gone crazy?”

“Sir, I’m going to need you to come with me.”

Pete shook his head. “This was the plan, wasn’t it? To wipe everyone out and start over? Why would someone do this?”

“Sir, I’m not going to ask you again. I have been given authority to take you into custody by any means necessary.”

“You should run, soldier. I’m infected, and just by breathing the same air as me, you might become infected, too. Run. Run now!”

The soldier appeared shaken, his eyes wide. He didn’t lower the gun right away
, but Pete could see the terror in his eyes—terror no doubt brought on by watching the final moments of someone dying from the strain of smallpox that had come to be known as black pox, Agent X: sheets of skin falling off the body, blood, nearly all the blood in the body, draining from every orifice, the vomiting, the organs that liquefied and came out of the anus, and then the victim turning into a demented predator. It was Hell itself.

The soldier backed away a few steps and then ran out of the warehouse. He might be back, he might
bring others, but that would take some time.

Pete
searched the shelves. Many of the containers had chemicals in them, but they were unmarked. He had no idea if they were flammable or not. He’d have to guess.

He went outside and got into the van. He drove it through the double doors, knocking the doors off their hinges, sc
raping the body of the van against the walls in a shower of sparks and groaning metal.

The van stopped just inside the doors. Pete felt his stomach on fire. Before he could stop it, he vomited
a spattering of dark blood. The incubation period had accelerated even more than the doctor who’d tested him knew. The blood clung to the steering wheel and the windshield. It dripped down over his thighs. He looked in the rearview and saw only a dark outline of his face.

He drove the van
over to the vats. When he got out, he had to lean on the van and place his head against it. Only the sweat dripping into his eyes and the sting that accompanied it woke him from his stupor. He didn’t have long before he’d be useless.

Pete gathered as many of the chemicals as he could, dumping the contents out over the vats, over the van, and over the warehouse floors and walls. He took off
his uniform jacket and tore the sleeves off, creating a long piece of cloth. The warehouse stank strongly of chemicals, like an overwhelming amount of paint thinner. He opened the gas cap to the van and began running the cloth inside the gas tank, as far in as he could get. He pulled it back out, saw that the end was soaked in gasoline, and then shoved it back inside the other way.

Now, all he needed was a lighter.

He searched the van but didn’t find one. The guard may have had one in the booth, and Pete headed out that way. The breeze that whirled around him cooled his skin. The pain in his stomach had faded, but the one in his arm had increased. With every movement, it felt like he was tearing the wound open again.

The guard booth was abandoned. Inside, a paperback
novel sat on the counter, along with a package of cigarettes and a drink in a plastic bottle. Thirst rang inside of him more powerfully than he had ever felt. He drained the bottle, juice of some kind.

He searched the
drawers underneath the controls. In one of the drawers was a book of matches with a few left. Pete held them in his hand, running his fingers along the edge. He turned back to the warehouse.

In the distance, not too far on the only road leading to the warehouse, he heard vehicles
, the rumble of engines, military vehicles. As he limped back inside, he saw their headlights on the road.

The warehouse was lighting up as the sky lightened outside. He wished he could see the sun rise one more time.

Pete knelt down near the cloth sticking out of the gas tank and struck the match. He held it in his fingertips a long time, long enough that it burned him. He pressed it to the cloth. The material ignited instantly, creating a large flame that began to consume the cloth. As it burned, it ran up the length of the material, into the gas tank.