Pandemic (The Extinction Files Book 1)

by A. G. Riddle

  Separate wasn’t what she wanted—in banking or otherwise. She had recently asked him to move in with her. He was hesitant, still afraid he would hurt her. But saying no would hurt her too. They bought a small cottage-style home in Palo Alto Hills. For him, it was the easiest move ever. He simply hooked up the Airstream, backed it into the driveway, and carried his few belongings inside.

  Despite their windfall, Peyton didn’t change one bit. She kept going to med school, studied her heart out, and decorated the house in her free time. She painted every room. Put wallpaper in the half bath. There was always a home improvement project for the weekend. Desmond was pretty good at them, but he figured half of her motivation was to give him something to focus on. In the months after he quit SciNet, he mostly lay on the couch and read. Or surfed the web. The last six months while SciNet was public had been grueling. He’d worked long hours on endless deadlines. The year before hadn’t been much better. Taken together, he felt like he’d crammed twenty years of work into eighteen months. He was burned out. But that wasn’t the full extent of his problems.

  He had believed that financial freedom would be a breakthrough for him. That he would feel differently. He’d thought that on the other side of that train tunnel he’d finally relax and open himself fully to life—and in particular, to love. Love without fear, love with Peyton. But the wall was still there. He felt like a greyhound that had run the racetrack his entire life, chasing a stuffed rabbit, and had finally caught it—only to discover that the thing he had been chasing was of no use to him, that it had all been a fool’s errand. He now knew the truth: his true issue was far deeper, at a more fundamental level.

  He read texts on psychology and researched it on the internet. Peyton became increasingly worried, and presented a myriad of solutions.

  “You need to exercise more, Des. You’ve been physically active your whole life.”

  He got a gym membership and began running with her every morning. They swam every Saturday. It didn’t help. Neither did getting outside.

  “Maybe you need to actually interact with people,” she said. “I mean, being here all day alone would be tough on anyone.”

  He joined a book club. Began taking classes at Stanford on subjects that interested him: astrophysics and psychology. He went to lunch at least twice a week with old colleagues. But he felt no different.

  Peyton begged him to see a doctor.

  “I feel like I’m watching you slip away, Des. Please. Do it for me.”

  At the family physician’s office, he filled out a questionnaire. Inside the exam room, the doctor sat across from him and said, “First, know that what you’re experiencing is very common. Depression affects people of all ages, all races, and at every socio-economic level. Sometimes it’s temporary, sometimes it’s a chronic medical condition that must be managed throughout a person’s life. And it is that: a medical condition. I’m going to prescribe a medication: a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. Many patients improve on SSRIs. In your case, with the severity of your symptoms, I would also strongly encourage you to see a psychotherapist who can identify other underlying issues that could be at play and help you identify triggers in your life that you can manage. I’ve seen many patients improve on medicine alone, but many more benefit from a combination of medicine and therapy.”

  The psychotherapist the doctor recommended was named Thomas Janson. He was in his sixties, with short gray hair and a kind smile. He listened as Desmond recounted his childhood and every major event up until he had walked in Dr. Janson’s door. The man took copious notes, and when Desmond had finished, Dr. Janson told him that he believed he could help him. He just needed a few days to consider what he’d said.

  When Desmond returned, the man sat in a club chair, a notebook in his lap, and spoke slowly, his voice even.

  “I believe you have a disorder we call post-traumatic stress disorder. Or PTSD.”

  That surprised Desmond.

  “I suspect you developed the condition after the bushfire that killed your family and very nearly you as well. I believe you never recovered from that event. You never came to grips with that severe trauma. In fact, you were placed in a new environment with its own dangers and hostility: your uncle’s care. Those first years were spent in near-constant fear of starvation or verbal abuse from your uncle. In your work on the rigs, you were in physical danger; your injuries attest to how real that threat was. And in the days after, when you and your uncle were,” he glanced at the notebook, “blowing off steam, that is, drinking and fighting, the danger and fear never went away.

  “You also never got to mourn your uncle’s death—or frankly to unpack your feelings about him at all. You were in danger the instant he passed, even having to fight for your life, to kill a man, which is in itself an incredibly traumatic event. The fact that you processed it with little emotion at all is evidence of the vast amount of pre-existing emotional scar tissue.

  “Our brains are like a muscle, Desmond: they become conditioned to the strain they must endure. We are an exceptionally adaptive species. We change to survive in the environment in which we exist. For you, that environment has been one of near-constant danger. From the moment that fire took your parents, you have been in physical or emotional danger your entire life. Even after you came to California, you feared someone from Oklahoma would find you, arrest you. You feared you’d lose the money your uncle left you.

  “But I believe perhaps the greatest issue affecting you is the people you’ve lost in your life. Your family. The librarian,” he peeked at the notebook again, “Agnes. Your uncle. Everyone you’ve become emotionally invested in has been taken from you. Not just taken, but taken at a moment when you least expected it. Your mind, subconsciously, is now trying to protect you. It has seen this pattern before: you want to love, to care. But the moment you do, the object of your affection is ripped away. It won’t let you. You are at war with your own mind.”

  Desmond sat for a moment, considering everything Dr. Janson had said. “Okay. Let’s assume I agree with your diagnosis. How do I fix it?”

  “Well, that’s a tougher question. You didn’t get this way overnight, Desmond. Nor will your condition resolve quickly. It will take time. And some faith on your part. Hope is also a powerful thing.”

  He encouraged Desmond to continue taking the medication and to establish a regular schedule of two visits per week.

  The gloom Desmond felt was a sharp contrast to the euphoria around Silicon Valley. A new company seemed to go public every week, minting millionaires by the hundreds. Desmond was skeptical. Warren Buffett’s adage, “When others are fearful, be greedy; when others are greedy, be fearful,” seemed like good advice in the current environment. He invested his and Peyton’s money in bonds. With a small portion of his funds, he placed bets against companies he thought were poised for a fall. Having been inside a dot-com startup, he could evaluate their technology and read through the BS in the earnings reports and press releases. He spent his days listening to quarterly investor conference calls and researching companies.

  Desmond’s bets failed at first. In the fall of 1999 and early 2000, he lost nearly half a million dollars. It seemed to him like the whole world had gone crazy. In 1999, there were 457 IPOs; most were high-tech companies. Of those, 117 saw their stock prices double on the first day of trading. And the euphoria wasn’t limited to new companies. On November 25, 1998, Books-A-Million announced an update to their website. Their stock increased over one thousand percent that week.

  Some companies were using their stock to snap up every hot startup they could. Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.9 billion in stock and GeoCities for $3.57 billion in stock. A Spanish telecom company acquired Lycos for $12.5 billion (a few years later, they would unload it for less than $96 million—a loss of over 99% of their investment). In January of 2000, AOL bought TimeWarner in the second-largest merger in history. During the Super Bowl that month, sixteen dot-com companies ran ads. They cost two millio
n dollars each.

  The stock market soared. And crashed, in March of 2000, with stocks falling as hard as they had risen. Over the next two and half years, stocks shed over five trillion dollars in value. People flocked to bonds, and Desmond’s bearish wagers paid off. Their nine-million-dollar fortune was nineteen at the end of 2000, fifteen after taxes. He played it safe after that, diversifying and buying only a few high-quality stocks.

  Every week Desmond heard about another one of his friends who had lost their job or seen their company collapse. He felt for them. The memory of xTV’s sudden collapse and his days of pork and beans in the months after were still fresh in his mind. He did the only thing he could: he took folks out to lunch, always picked up the tab, and tried to connect people with jobs when he heard about them. Their stories were horrifying.

  The layoffs were nerve-wracking affairs. Large groups would be led into conference rooms and told they were being let go; consultants handed out packets with details. In some cases, the consultants even surprised the HR people conducting the layoffs by handing them a folder with their walking papers too, right after the dismissals of everyone else.

  The coffee shops that had teemed with bright-eyed entrepreneurs with the next big idea, written out on a napkin, were now packed with people working on their resumes, which they tweaked and proofread and scrutinized before printing them on thick paper stock so they would stand out. Startup execs who had been worth millions on paper found themselves broke, moving back in with their parents or in-laws. Many employees whose companies had gone public never made it past the lockup period to sell any of their shares before their companies folded.

  Desmond watched it all in disbelief; it seemed the world had only two extremes: charging up the hill wide open, or free falling over a cliff.

  He was in his own kind of free fall. Every month he grew less optimistic about his prognosis. The medication helped. So did the sessions with Dr. Jansen. But Desmond had plateaued. He wasn’t making any real progress.

  Peyton was. He watched as she changed, little by little. She took pride in her schoolwork, was near the top of her class. She was blossoming, becoming an incredible woman. She was ready for something more. That worried him. He wondered if he could ever be the man she deserved.

  Christmas 2000 came and went; they had a little tree in the home in Palo Alto Hills and kept up their tradition of ten dollars or less in gifts. Peyton cheated though: hers was a box with a model airplane inside.

  “It’s great.”

  “The airplane’s not the gift, Des.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go on a trip—back to Australia, to where you were born. Visit the remains of the home. Go to Oklahoma, where you grew up.”

  He knew what she wanted: for him to visit the places that had caused him so much pain and somehow come to grips with what had happened and move on.

  He agreed. He was desperate enough to try anything.

  In Australia, he walked across the paddocks where he’d once played. He visited the thicket where he’d built the fort that day, even straightened the overturned rocks he’d set down eighteen years ago. The house was still there, or at least its burned remains. He stood in the yard, inside the fence, where he’d rushed into the fire. There was no breakthrough. He didn’t cry. He felt only sadness.

  They stayed in a hotel in Adelaide for a week while he tried to find Charlotte. But since Desmond didn’t know her last name, it was impossible to find her. Over a hundred thousand people had been part of the relief efforts in the wake of the 1983 bushfires. And it had been almost eighteen years; she might have left the area, or left Australia altogether.

  In Oklahoma City, they rented a car and drove south, through Norman, then Noble, and finally onto Slaughterville Road.

  He pulled off at the home where he’d grown up. Orville’s home. It had been part of a farm once, but the farmland had been sold, maybe by Orville himself or someone who’d owned it before him.

  The new owners had painted the home and put on a new roof. The asphalt shingles sparkled in the clear April day. A Chevy truck and a Ford sedan sat under a newly erected metal carport. A red Huffy bike sat on the front porch. It was about the size of the one Desmond had bought at the pawnshop—the bike Orville had threatened to take away.

  The shed stood open. The old Studebaker was gone. Desmond’s eyes lingered on the patch of ground where Dale Epply had bled to death while he held the lawnmower blade.

  Peyton put an arm around him.

  “You want to go in?”

  “No. I’ve seen enough.”

  They drove past the grocery store that had sustained him, up Highway 77 into Noble. The small town hadn’t changed much. They ate at a small cafe on Third Street and walked the three blocks to the library.

  A girl a few years younger than Desmond sat behind the counter, a mechanical pencil in her hand, a large book open in front of her. Another University of Oklahoma student, if he had to guess.

  “Help you?” she asked.

  “Nah. Just looking.”

  He walked down the fiction aisle, Peyton close behind him. He spotted a few of the paperbacks he’d read as a kid: Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Hyperion. He could even remember where he was when he read them.

  The place had barely changed. The only addition was a wooden study carrel in one corner. It held a Gateway computer with a seventeen-inch monitor. A plaque on the top of the carrel read, Pioneer Library System Technology Center Provided in Loving Memory of Agnes T. Andrews.

  It was the best thing he’d ever read in that library.

  He took Peyton’s hand.

  “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 74

  In the plane’s cockpit, Avery stared in disbelief. Spain was dark except for a few glimmering lights in what she thought was Barcelona. They’d launched no fighters to pursue the Red Cross plane. Air traffic control hadn’t even engaged her. She wondered what was going on down there and how many people were left.

  On the navigation screen their destination loomed: the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland. She’d never heard of the place. She wondered what they’d find there, at the GPS coordinates Desmond had provided. On the satellite map, there was only a forest. Was it a trap? Avery feared that it was. But she had no choice.

  She engaged the autopilot, stood, stretched her legs, and walked back into the passenger compartment. Desmond and Peyton lay in sleeping bags, both facing forward, Peyton tucked into Desmond like a little spoon.

  Avery leaned against the door frame and stared. She’d have to make a decision soon. A hard one.

  On September the eleventh, 2001, Desmond sat in the light-filled living room in Palo Alto, Peyton at his side, both staring in disbelief. The news channel showed a live view of Manhattan. The people in the buildings were burning alive, just as Desmond’s family had on that day in 1983. This tragedy, however, wasn’t a natural disaster. It was an act of humankind—the worst kind of evil. The sickening, cruel slaughter of innocents.

  “Something is very wrong with this world,” Desmond said.

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  The US stock market stayed closed until September seventeenth—the longest closing since 1933, during the Great Depression. When it reopened, stocks tanked. The market fell 684 points—the largest single-day decline in history. By the end of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over fourteen percent. The S&P lost almost twelve percent. Nearly 1.4 trillion dollars in market value was lost in that week alone.

  While others were dumping American stocks, Desmond was buying. He returned to his criteria for identifying a successful company: a founder who instinctively knew what his customers wanted, and a tightly managed operation. He loaded up on stock in Amazon and Apple.

  On the news every night, he watched sabers rattle and the world go to war. He was mad as hell too. He even considered applying at the NSA or CIA. But he barely had the energy to get out of bed. He seemed to get worse every month.

  P
eyton saw it—was worried about it.

  “What if you start your own company?”

  “Doing what? Why? There’s no point. I have no ideas. No drive to do it.”

  “You could start a nonprofit. Child welfare. Find something you care about and go for it.”

  He thought about it for a few weeks, researched it, and began volunteering at a group home in San Jose.

  That helped him pass the time, but it wasn’t enough. Deep down, he knew the truth: he was never going to change. He would never be able to love Peyton the way she loved him—with reckless abandon. It wasn’t fair to her. She deserved more.

  In the summer of 2002, he sat in Dr. Janson’s office.

  “This isn’t working.”

  “It takes time, Desmond.”

  “I’ve given it time. I’ve been coming here for over two years now. I’ve tried medication, exercise, volunteering. Hell, we even retraced the tragic events of my childhood. I’m not getting better. I don’t feel any better than I did the day I walked in here.”

  “Please realize that every person has emotional limits. Your… range may simply be very confined. It’s also possible that two years isn’t enough time.”

  “You want to know what I actually do feel?”

  Janson raised his eyebrows.

  “Guilt.”

  The man looked confused.

  “I feel guilty because I know she’ll never leave me. And I’ll never make her as happy as she deserves to be.”

  That afternoon, Desmond packed his things. The gifts from Peyton he placed very carefully in a large trunk. He scanned all their pictures, printed copies of them, and returned them to their frames. He waited in the living room, and when she got home, they sat on the couch, feet from each other, her nervous, clearly aware something was very wrong. He said the lines he’d rehearsed a dozen times.

  “I have this vision of you in a few years. It’s summer. You’re sitting on your back porch, drinking a glass of wine while the kids play in the yard. Your husband is manning the grill. And he’s playing in the back yard with the kids, and he knows exactly what to do, because he played in his back yard as a kid with his dad, who loved him. You all eat together, and he knows exactly how to treat you because he grew up with an actual mom and dad and they treated each other right. He reads a story to the kids before he puts them to bed, because his parents did that for him. When they act up, he knows what to do by instinct, not because he read it in a book, but because it’s how he was raised, in a normal home. And he loves you. And them. Because he’s able to love, because he hasn’t drifted from one tragedy to the next in the years before he met you. Your life isn’t perfect, but it has a real chance to be, because one of you isn’t broken beyond repair.”