The officials were nowhere to be seen. Neither were the police. The gym was filled with just regular, ordinary people.
This particular high school gym wasn’t especially nice. The Albuquerque school system had always had issues with money and it seemed that in recent times, funneling money to gyms wasn’t a priority.
It looked like a gym from the late 1980s. As if nothing had been updated except for the basketball nets.
“Find out anything?” Stacy had said, looking up at Will over her phone.
“Not a lot, except that virus probably works faster than was previously reported.”
“Yeah,” said Stacy, nodding. “I saw that too. Nothing else? Any word from the government?”
Will shook his head.
His eyes had traveled across the room, surveying the many different types of people that were there.
The hours had passed and night had fallen.
That’s when the symptoms had started.
Looking back on it, the only conclusion that Will could come to was that the virus had spread quickly. Very quickly. And that even the revised virus timeline available on the internet was grossly wrong.
Because otherwise how could it have been possible?
In the span of less than twelve hours, nearly everyone that was locked in the gym was infected.
And not just infected but showing symptoms.
And not just showing symptoms but actively dying.
Will didn’t want to think about it.
He didn’t want to think about the blood coming from their eyes, noses and ears. He didn’t want to think about the screams.
He didn’t want to think about Stacy and the look she’d given him when her enlarged veins had first shown up.
He didn’t want to think about Stacy’s death, which had happened at about four in the morning. Well before dawn. Darkness everywhere.
He’d watched in horror as Stacy had bled out on the hardwood gymnasium floor, blood gushing from her face like a horrific fountain. The power had apparently gone out, but the gymnasium was partially lit up with the ghostly bluish glow from hundreds of cell phones.
He’d held her until she died. It hadn’t taken that long.
Clearly the “facts” on the internet were wrong.
Either that or the virus had changed. Mutated maybe.
All around them, the others had died.
They’d tried to escape. They’d rammed the steel doors. To no avail.
They’d bled out all over the floor, which was now slick with blood.
They’d seized on the floor, their limbs flopping sickeningly this way and that.
They’d fought. Even as they’d died, some of them had fought. The men, in particular, had smashed each other’s bloody faces with fists. Who knew why?
Will had waited, expecting to die. He’d kept checking his veins all through the night, never finding them enlarged. He’d eventually given up checking, figuring that through whatever quirk of personal biochemistry, he wasn’t going to show the enlarged veins.
But he’d still fully expected to die. He’d fully expected to start bleeding from the mouth.
He’d even wanted to die. Right next to his wife.
Why would he want to live with her dead?
He hadn’t tried to escape.
He hadn’t tried to save himself in any way.
He’d done nothing. Just waited, as the others screamed in agony around him and died, as the floor became slicker and slicker with their blood.
Somehow, he hadn’t died.
Maybe he was immune.
He checked his watch. It was ten in the morning. Everyone was dead. Everyone except him.
He stood up, leaving his wife lying in her own blood on the hardwood floor. He walked across the room, stepping through the corpses. He quickly gave up trying to step over them, and just walked across them.
His mind felt completely numb. It was a defense mechanism. A way of not even trying to make any sense of the situation. After all, what was there to think? Everyone was dead except him.
He reached the double metal doors to the gymnasium. Stopped. Pushed against the handle.
The doors moved. But only a few inches.
Evidently, the doors were chained together on the other side. Last night, countless people had tried to force their way out through those doors, to no avail.
Well, he was stuck.
The prospect didn’t bother him much. After all, he wished that he’d died along with his wife. Along with everyone else.
Maybe it was survivor’s guilt. He didn’t really care.
Now he’d have to wait until he starved to death. That was fine with him. But he didn’t want to wait it out.
An hour passed and nothing happened. He found himself pacing back and forth across the floor and across the corpses. He didn’t go back to his wife’s body. He didn’t want to see her face like that. He wanted to remember her as she’d been before, rather than covered in that horrible slick blood.
He tried the door again. Just for something to do.
Of course it was locked.
Not that he wanted to get out.
He’d just wait and starve to death. It would take a while. Too long.
Maybe he should kill himself. Just get it all over with.
But how?
With what?
It was something he’d never even considered. Not even for a moment. He believed it was wrong.
But now? The depression was too much to take. It felt like a physical pain existing in his head. In his brain. And in his lungs. Through his entire body. Like a horrible weight that hung against his heart.
It was the worst feeling that he’d ever experienced.
He found himself on the other side of the gymnasium. Bodies were everywhere.
An entire family lay near him. Not just a nuclear family, but an extended one. There were three generations there, all huddled together. Blood all over them. Stone-cold dead.
Will couldn’t deal with it. It was a sight that too horrible for his constitution.
Completely intolerable.
He threw himself against the wall. Hard. Intentionally trying to hurt himself.
He crashed into the hard wall headfirst.
He blacked out.
No dreams. Just comforting blackness. Just comforting nothingness.
But then he woke up. With the worst headache of his entire life.
It was worse than a splitting migraine.
He staggered to his feet, his eyes barely opening.
What had happened?
The memories from just a few hours ago were gone.
He opened his eyes all the way, and once again saw the horror around him. He saw the hundreds of dead and he saw their blood.
He staggered across the bodies, clutching his head, and he found once again his wife’s body. Covered in blood.
He started puking as the memories came back to him.
It was a horrible type of vomit. Like pink slime from deep in his guts.
Maybe he did have the virus after all. Maybe he’d die along with the rest of them.
No such luck.
He waited among the bodies, lying between them, covered in their blood, simply not caring, waiting to die, waiting with his head hurting more than it had ever hurt.
But nothing happened.
The hours passed.
Soon it was around noon. He’d looked at his watch but it was covered in blood. So he couldn’t be sure.
And that’s when he’d heard the crying.
Soft sobbing.
Coming from somewhere.
Coming from among the bodies.
Maybe he was hallucinating. If he was, it’d be a welcome sign. A sign that his body might be on the brink. That he might be dying soon.
But he decided to go with it. Run with the hallucination. Let it take him over.
If it wasn’t real, so what?
“Who’s there?” he found himself calling out.
; The sobbing grew louder. But it was muffled.
Soon he was running toward the sound. He slipped on the blood-slick floors. He stepped on dead faces and dead stomachs. The corpses squashed and moved underneath him.
He tripped and fell onto corpses. He slipped and fell into their blood.
But he kept going. Through the corpses.
Toward the sound.
It was muffled. Buried somewhere. Underneath bodies.
Someone was trapped.
He was digging. Digging through the corpses.
“Where are you?” he called out, his voice frantic.
There was someone alive, other than himself, among all these dead. And he was frantic to get to them.
He was almost there. The crying was louder.
But then he stopped, as a thought hit him like a truck.
What was the point of all this?
He’d find someone else alive. Someone crying.
And then? Then they’d still be locked in this room. They’d still be locked in this basement gymnasium that hadn’t been updated since the 1980s. They’d still have to just wait around to starve to death.
“Whatever,” he muttered, picking up a heavy man’s corpse and tossing it aside, grunting as he did so.
The sobbing was louder.
He’d uncovered the source of the sound.
It wasn’t a person.
It wasn’t another person alive.
It was nothing but a walkie-talkie, issuing forth a sobbing sound from its little speaker.
A walkie-talkie?
Rage filled Will.
He grabbed the walkie-talkie, about to smash it against the bloody floor.
But then, as he picked it up, he accidentally pressed the button that would allow him to send something back.
And it was that simple action, where the volume lowered, the button depressed, and static hissed forth, that he realized that there really was another person on the other end of that walkie-talkie.
There was someone out there.
Someone crying.
Someone in pain.
Someone alive.
“Hello?” he said, the button depressed. His voice was hoarse and strange, but he got the words out.
The sobbing immediately stopped.
“Hello?” he said again. “Are you there?”
3
Joe
Joe had never cared much for society. Or for culture.
Hell, he’d never much cared for other people.
Sure, there were a couple of exceptions. He’d found, here and there, that there was the odd individual that he could tolerate.
Sean was one of them.
Sean had come from the East Coast. A well-to-do college kid. He’d had money in the bank and had been in the process of getting a degree from a good school. Everything had been lined up for him. If he’d wanted to, he could have gotten a good internship, a good job, and by his mid-twenties been well on his way to serious wealth and community respect.
But Sean hadn’t wanted any of that. He’d thrown it all away. Maybe he’d gone crazy. He’d said himself he wasn’t quite sure what had happened. One day he’d been going to his business classes and the next he’d given all his money to charity and hopped on a bus for New Mexico.
Sean had worked odd jobs and that’s how Joe had met him.
Joe had been living on his land for well over a decade, having scraped together enough money from odd jobs to buy up some cheap acreage.
Joe, like anyone else, had had his ups and downs, his lucky breaks and his periods where nothing seemed to be going right.
The property he’d bought had an incredibly old house on it. Completely falling apart. People had warned him not to enter it, saying that he’d get hantavirus.
Joe had scoffed, entered the house and found a collection of old paintings. Next thing he knew, he was selling the paintings for about ten thousand dollars a pop. Turned out they were the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe’s second lover.
So with a little money in his pockets, he started on some projects.
Building an adobe house was the first project. And that’s how he’d met Sean. He’d needed some hired help and he’d found Sean wandering around near a gardening store, apparently having just applied for a job there.
So Sean had come to work for Joe.
In the end, they’d only managed to build about half the adobe house. There’d been all sorts of problems.
The main problem had been money, which Joe had run out of quite quickly.
Most of the money had been spent on digging the well. He was far enough away from town that city water was out of the question.
They’d told him the well would cost him ten thousand dollars, and in the end it had been twice that much.
There’d been nothing he could do. The company he’d hired had threatened to take him to court if he caused any problems.
So he’d had to pay up.
It had left him with land and water. But not a lot of money. And certainly no way to pay Sean.
But they’d become friends anyway, despite the decades that separated them.
Sean went out and worked the odd job here and there, living on Joe’s land and paying him rent.
And as the years passed, Joe had become more and more convinced that something was going to happen, that there was going to be some kind of serious collapse.
So he’d done what he could to be prepared.
It had been hard without money.
Hell, he hadn’t even had a computer.
Sometimes he’d gone to the public library to use one. But that was about it.
So he’d evolved and grown into his own sort of man. Individualistic. Uncompromising. Sometimes very difficult. Sometimes prone to extreme anger. Often wrong and unwilling to admit that he was wrong. But hell if he wasn’t going to do it all his way; the way he saw fit, the way that made sense to him.
“Sean, you in there?” Joe was outside the four-season tent that Sean lived in. “Sean?”
Joe took a stick from the ground and tapped it against one of the tent poles.
“Huh?” came Sean’s sleepy reply.
“Wake up! What are you doing? It’s almost noon.”
“Noon? Go away! I got in late last night. Didn’t get to sleep until six a.m.”
“What the hell were you doing? Visiting that girlfriend of yours? We’re supposed to go into town this morning. I’ve been waiting for you to come by.”
Sean had been spending more and more time over at his girlfriend’s place. She was a graduate student in pottery and ceramics and lived not that far away, near Cerillos, in a cute little adobe house. She was a pretty girl and why she wanted to have anything to do with Sean was beyond Joe. He also didn’t know what the hell it meant to be a graduate student in ceramics. “Just make the pots and get on with it,” he’d say, whenever the topic came up.
The tent flap moved aside. Sean poked his head out. His hair was messy and he was a couple days away from a shave. He was well muscled, due to his habit of swinging a kettlebell around at all hours of the day and night when he wasn’t working.
“We can’t go to town today,” he said simply, working his way out through the tent’s opening. He wore nothing but a pair of cut-off jean shorts, with the threads fraying. “Oh, and you don’t have to worry about me being away from work anymore. She dumped me. Screamed at me that she hated my guts. Never wanted to see me again. And you know what? She meant it. I could tell. I can always tell.”
“Why the hell can’t we go to town??” said Joe, ignoring the whole discussion of Sean’s girlfriend.
“Are you serious? You didn’t notice anything unusual today?”
“Unusual?”
“What have you been doing all morning?”
“Whittling.”
“You didn’t try to turn on the radio?”
“What for? It’s all garbage. You know my opinion on the news.”
“Yeah, but you still listen to it. I guess
you’re in one of your isolationist phases.”
Joe just grunted, not really answering. It was true. Sometimes he’d get in one of his moods and refuse to do anything but whittle or hike or just sit there.
“You seriously haven’t heard about the virus?” said Sean, standing there in nothing but his shorts.
“The virus?”
“Wow. How many days has it been now? At least a couple. Yeah. You really need to get out more, Joe.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Joe. “That’s why I bought this land. So I don’t have to get too involved in other people’s business.”
“That’s not what I mean. So there’s this virus...”
Sean started explaining the virus. He explained how it was incredibly contagious. How Santa Fe and Albuquerque had both been completely shut down. And about how there was now no cell service.
“Hell, we hardly get cell service anyway. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“No, but this time I’m connecting to the tower, but nothing’s happening...the networks are all down. I don’t know how to explain it. You know I don’t know a whole lot about that kind of stuff...”
“So a virus...” said Joe, putting his hand to his chin in a musing sort of way. His thoughts started to go wild, imagining what this would mean for the nearby cities, and for the country at large.
“Looks like we got visitors,” said Sean, pointing off down the dusty path that served as a driveway through much of the land.
A sleek new black SUV was barreling toward them, kicking up dust. Its windows were tinted and the rising sun glinted off the windshield, making it impossible to see who was inside it.
Joe didn’t react for a moment. Just stared at the SUV.
Joe knew that he had to think fast.
Fortunately, he was good at thinking fast.
“You said this virus is highly contagious, right?”
“Yup,” said Sean, not taking his eyes off the SUV. “Highly contagious.”
It wasn’t often that they had visitors drive out to their land. And it was even more rare that someone should be so brazen as to speed along the path like that, as if it were their own land.
“So whoever is in that SUV out there...they could be infected with the virus... merely getting close to them could get us killed, right?”
“That’s what they said on the news before it went down...presumably the virus killed enough of the employees for everything to go offline. Just based on that, I’d say it’s highly contagious. Deadly.”
Last Pandemic (Book 2): Escape The City Page 2