"Thanks, Anthony.
“Do you remember me? From before?” Anthony asked Maya.
“Remember you?”
“I worked for your mom.”
“Really? You knew my mom?”
“She was my boss at Transfer Medical Lab,” Anthony said.
“I didn't know what my mom did. She was at work when she died. I never knew what she did there. I was at school.”
“She was my boss. The lab boss. Sorry to hear she died."
“Lots of people died.”
“True. Lots of people died,” Anthony replied.
"How far to home?" Maya asked.
"From where we are now? Far."
"I was supposed to give Pryce his transfusion yesterday. Savane too."
"I know."
Maya lowered her head back to her knees.
"Come on. Let's get out of here."
"How far is far?" Maya asked.
"Around 80, 90 miles."
"Is that very far?"
"It's going to take a couple days to get home. Sorry, Maya."
Still with her head resting on her knees, Maya started weeping silently. "Why are they doing this?"
"People are people. When they take power, this is what they do," he said as he stood up. "Stay here. I have an idea."
Anthony walked on the wide sidewalk along the front of the building, then angled right to cross the street. Once there, he followed the muddy path to the old auto maintenance garage. Before he entered, he could smell the horses.
"Hello! Hello! Anybody in here?" he called out as he walked through the wide entrance.
"Who are you?" a medium-sized man, with thinning hair and the unmistakable sickly look of a dependent in need of a transfusion, said from near the right wall.
"Gabriel Sparrow wants a horse saddled and ready A.S.A.P.," Anthony said.
"Not his horse. It's recovering, not going anywhere," the dependent said.
"Okay, not his horse. He didn't say his horse. He said A horse. A.S.A.P."
"I wish he would have told me about this last night. I don't really have a horse. Not that can go out today I don't think.”
“You don't think?” Anthony asked.
“Not really sure. I just moved here from the car shop but the last of those quit working. So I'm the new guy here. Hold on a minute. Let me ask him which he had in mind," the dependent said. He put down the snow shovel he was using to push dirty straw and walked toward the entrance.
In alarm, Anthony said, “No, you don't have to...” but the dependent kept walking toward the federal building.
“I'll just be a minute, if I can find him. Wait there,” the dependent said.
“You don't have to check. Just forget it,” Anthony said to him but he kept walking until a voice emerged from a stable on the left side. "Take mine," it said. The dependent stopped and turned back.
"Didn't she just get in last night? Is that a good idea?" the dependent asked.
Serge stepped out of the stable. He held a black plastic bucket in his left hand and a bristle brush in his right.
"Don't you just need her for a light ride around here? Nothing too strenuous?" Serge asked. His voice was voice unnaturally loud and he made eye contact with Anthony. Go along with me, Serge said with his eyes.
"That's right," Anthony said, after some hesitation.
"Give me ten minutes," Serge said and turned back into the stable. Shortly afterward, he emerged. The bucket was gone and the bristle brush was replaced with a horse's reins. "I put extra oats in these bags, and an extra blanket. I think Gabe wants you to practice for a longer ride?"
"That's right. A long ride. Longer ride. Thanks for remembering."
"Good luck, then," Serge said. He handed the reins to Anthony and quickly turned back into the stable.
Confused and slightly suspicious, Anthony nodded his thanks to Serge, but Serge didn't see.
Without another word, Anthony led the horse outside and across the street to where Maya sat. "Hurry up, Maya. Let's get out of here," he said. He put his left foot into the stirrup and awkwardly lifted his right leg over the horse. He then held his right hand as low as he could. Maya reached up with her right hand and grabbed it. He pulled her up and she sat behind him.
Anthony didn't know much about riding horses but he knew they better leave. He managed to spur the horse to a trot and steer it down the street, the same street he had taken on his previous journey back to the coast from IRCC.
An hour later, Maya fell asleep leaning against Anthony's back. Several hours after that, sleep began to leave her. She opened her eyes slightly and glanced around. Overgrown farm fields lined both sides of the road. The field on the right was covered in yellowing, waist high weeds accented with corn growing wild. Maya watched with dull interest as one stretch of the field shimmered in waves. It reminded her of the occasional school of fish swimming just under the ocean surface, visible to her from her bedroom window just before the sun rises. A cuttle fish's skin! That's what it reminded her of, she thought sleepily, and she smiled faintly. As they rode, Maya's cheek bounced against Anthony's back and soon the shimmering wave in the field was behind them.
She closed her eyes again, drifted off to sleep and dreamed of Pryce. In her dream, Pryce was lying on the lab floor holding a hypodermic needle and watching the timer tick down the final minutes of the 54-hour incubation period. When it reached zero, he mustered his remaining strength, pulled himself to the incubator, opened it, retrieved a serum, filled the hypodermic needle, and injected himself.
~ - ~
As the sun dipped below the horizon and darkness swallowed the road in front of them, Anthony finally stopped. They broke a window to a game arcade on the edge of the town they had just passed through, entered, and then broke into the office near the ice hockey tables. Anthony left Maya there and went outside to take care of the horse and retrieve the extra blanket.
About 45 minutes later, he returned to the office and found Maya asleep on a big upholstered chair. Anthony quietly draped the blanket on the floor, settled on it, and quickly fell asleep himself.
~ - ~
There were no windows in the office and the sun did not wake them. Maya woke before Anthony, about two hours after sunrise. She shook Anthony with her foot and the two were back on the road about 20 minutes later.
The run rose to its highest point, and had started its slow descent to the west when they reached the lab outside Wayton. Anthony lowered Maya to the ground, then dismounted.
"We better go inside. Do you want to wait here? We've been gone for almost two days. If Pryce and Savane stayed here it might not be pretty."
"I'll go with you."
Anthony and Maya carefully stepped through the building entrance way, listened for movement, walked down the central hallway, and entered the lab reception area. It was just as they had left it, except the couch was gone. Anthony continued into the lab, where he found the incubator uncovered but closed. Inside, one of the four serums was gone. He was hoping to find two missing, one taken by Pryce and one by Savane. As he looked at the three serums unmoved from their position three days ago, he felt a lump in his throat.
He closed the incubator and returned to the reception area. "I'm checking the back," he said.
"I'll go with," Maya said.
The two exited the back door and found Pryce sitting on the couch, which was placed in the tall grass just off the pavement.
“Your serum works,” Pryce said simply.
“You took it?”
“Look at me. It works. I feel healthy and I haven't had a transfusion since before you left.”
“Savane?”
“No.”
“What about the serum for her?” Maya asked him angrily.
“She was gone before it was ready,” Pryce said.
“What'd you do with her?” Maya cried.
Pryce glanced to the other side of the couch, to
a pile of rocks, about three feet wide and 6 feet long.
“Savane?” Maya asked, tears rolling down her face.
“Savane,” Pryce said. "I'm sorry. I did what you said. Waited for the incubation but she was gone before then.”
“I know it's not your fault,” Maya said.
“Can you make more of it?" Pryce asked.
"Yes, I can make more of it. With your help, I can make lots more."
Maya raised her head off her knees, looked at Anthony, and smiled. "Then you have just changed the world," she said.
Chapter 27
Several years later, the thick plastic sheeting covering the doorway of the cinder block building outside Fallujah was long gone. So was most of the flesh of the three men who created the Fallujah Strain, still inside their medical protective suits but consumed by mindless bacteria that didn't care if the source of their next meal was evil or good.
The body of the lone man who was walking near the side of the road when Fallujah Strain first escaped, its first innocent victim, was long gone, eaten by animals and scattered in the sand.
The bodies of cousins Orel and Graves still lay on an embankment along the west side of the highway near the salmon river, greeting each sunrise. Although bacteria had feasted on their bodies and had had their fill, and their jaws dropped open in the scream of the long-dead, they were otherwise undisturbed.
Around the globe, hundreds of millions of bodies, billions of bodies, were similarly ignored. There was no one left to care.
Savane was the rare exception. While Pryce collected grasshoppers, Anthony and Maya moved her from her initial resting place behind the lab to a spot next to Gwen where she, too, could watch the sunrise each morning.
Chapter 28
June 21 was Maya's twenty-first birthday. She celebrated by netting swarming grasshoppers for Anthony, who was struggling to keep up with the demand for his serum. Using the net she made herself, she swept up thousands of grasshoppers from an open field near her home. She carefully transferred each net-full of the insects into a five gallon lidded bucket.
~ - ~
Those many years ago, after she, Pryce, and Anthony successfully wheeled the incubator and natural gas tank to a new house about eight miles from Wayton, word of the serum spread among dependents.
Pryce spent his time collecting grasshoppers and helping Anthony in the lab. Never again did Maya tell him to collect computers for her. She never again told him to stop his work to collect salmon. She never again ate her favorite food, and she never once regretted it.
At first, those many years ago when the serum was first developed, one or two runaway dependents would arrive at the door of their new house. After some weeks, they arrived in small groups. As the months progressed, and word spread, the groups grew larger. They all searched for the same thing. Life, release from the fear of missing their next transfusion, independence, a restoration of their freedom, that was lost to those who abused the power of their immune blood.
One day, those many years ago, a scout arrived at their new house to collect pints of immune blood and to investigate rumors that had reached IRCC of a serum that freed dependents from the chains that bound them to their immune keepers. Pryce captured him. The next group of dependents who arrived at the beach house agreed to hold the scout until Anthony, Maya, and Pryce relocated. And so their nomadic life began, moving from house to house to stay one step ahead of IRCC and the power-hungry immunes who ran it. Always one step ahead.
~ - ~
When the bucket was full, Maya placed it on the ground, leaned over and scratched the scar on her left ankle, caused when the tracking ankle ring was heated and then cooled until it shattered. It reminded Maya, as it usually did, of the day she received her first ankle ring. On that day, while she selfishly lay on the beach sunning herself, Pryce and Savane buried Gwen. Now, as she stood in the open field collecting grasshoppers, Maya was glad that it was she who helped buried Savane next to Gwen.
And although Savane was lost, Maya was glad that she is helping prevent the needless death of others.
Maya glanced upward to the sky, which was streaked in cheerful yellows and greens. She picked up the bucket, put her ear to the lid, listened momentarily to the grasshopper percussion, and turned to walk home.
~ - ~
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Christina Adams. Without her motivation, this book would not have been conceived or written.
Thanks also to Mount Zion United Methodist Church, Bel Air Maryland for the generous use of their facility.
By the Same Author
Look for The Power to Live, available from all major online booksellers. Two innocent sisters from Sinaloa, forced into the sex slave trade in California, are separated when one is sold to a new master in Colorado. During each sister's desperate search for the other, they learn their bond is stronger than the evil men who control their lives. One learns that many possess the power to kill but there exists an even greater, more elusive power. The power to live..
The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse Page 11