Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  “Burlington PD,” came the monotone reply. “I’m hanging up now.” The phone line went dead.

  Noah looked from face to face. The kids were pale and stunned. Natalie returned his gaze, sick with worry. Noah muted the television and said, “Enough TV. Anybody wanna play cards?”

  “What?” Chloe asked, incredulous at the ridiculous suggestion.

  But Natalie agreed. She went to find the new deck Jacob had bought on a whim—the last item remaining in the checkout lane rack at a CVS in Reston, Virginia. Noah joined her in the kitchen. Natalie threw her arms around his neck. “Noah, is that going to happen here? Are we fooling ourselves? Thinking we can just watch Armageddon pass by on TV? Come out when the dust settles with our guns and our seeds and start our new lives as farmers?”

  He kissed her forehead. “One day at a time, Nat. Be strong.”

  When she was composed, they returned to the kids. Chloe, holding her phone, said, “Gracie is in Idaho with her whole family: aunts, uncles, cousins, a whole bunch of them. Why don’t we have cousins?”

  Jake answered. “Because Mom’s an only child, and our aunts are both spinsters.”

  Noah objected. “Aunt Emma and Aunt Isabel are only thirty-two! Where’d you even learn that word?”

  “Well Aunt Emma is infected,” Jake continued, “so she isn’t getting married any time soon.”

  “I dunno,” Chloe said without raising her eyes from her apps. “After everybody turns it’s Aunt Isabel who’s gonna have a hard time finding a guy.”

  “Not that she was much good in that department before,” Natalie commented.

  “Oh!” Chloe exclaimed, reading her phone. “Trey and his folks are on an island somewhere. He won’t say where. Why didn’t we go to an island? That makes more sense, doesn’t it?”

  That annoyed Noah, and Natalie quickly intervened. “Your father worked his butt off to keep us all safe, so let’s not second-guess his choices.”

  Chloe, oblivious to her parents, said, “Huh! Lucy Fong and her family are in Roanoke. That’s in Virginia, right? I seem to be locked in some weird social orbit with her.” She froze mid-sentence. Her jaw hung open. Her humor was gone.

  “What?” Natalie asked. “What is it?”

  Chloe lowered her phone, then threw it onto the sofa cushion beside her as it were an object of disgust instead of the center of her universe. “There’s a picture of Janie and Justin! At Justin’s church, handing out blankets and shit!” Natalie sat beside her daughter and put her arm around her. “I told you he’d leave me if I cut my hair!”

  “Honey, they probably go to the same church.”

  “Janie’s Jewish,” came her daughter’s sullen reply.

  “Chloe, it could be nothing. But even if they got back together…”

  “He said he’d come find me!” Chloe exclaimed, lips quivering. “Now who am I gonna have to settle for? That retarded boy down at the convenience store on the highway?”

  “Chloe!” Noah snapped. “You can’t call someone retarded.”

  “Yes, she can,” Natalie replied, “because he’s not. He’s a perfectly good-looking boy. An athlete, just like Justin.”

  “He’s a hunter!” Chloe corrected.

  “Okay, an outdoorsman. You could do a lot worse in times like this.”

  “What the hell, Natalie?” Noah objected. “Are we marrying off our fifteen-year-old daughter now?”

  “I’m just saying life goes on.”

  “No!” Chloe said. “It doesn’t.” She sat upright, freeing herself of her mother’s embrace. “Not if you get infected. Or if some horde of crazies tears all the skin off your bones, life doesn’t go on. It stops right then.”

  “No horde’s tearing anything off my bones,” Jacob said in what Noah mistakenly thought was bravado. “My last shot goes right here.” He pointed his index finger at the roof of his mouth.

  “Jake!” his mother cried out.

  “But he’s right, isn’t he?” Chloe asked.

  Natalie appealed to Noah for help with a look. Noah could only turn away. They all knew it was true. You saved your last bullet to avoid an agonizing end.

  Natalie plopped the deck of cards noisily on the coffee table. “Chloe, you shuffle.”

  “What?”

  “Shuffle. We’re playing cards.”

  Noah mumbled that he needed to check the fence. He grabbed his rifle and went out into the cold. Should we have gone to an island? he thought, tormenting himself. Or the desert? Or the Rockies? What have I overlooked, or forgotten, or failed to imagine? When his eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he heard nothing but the wind in the trees, he walked the short distance to the barn. The battery levels weren’t appreciably lower than before sundown even with the fence electrified. He could hear the windmill whirring on the hilltop. The ridge road beyond the gate was dark and empty. There was an eruption of clucking from the hens’ cages as he moved about. He exited the far side of the barn and stood a few feet from the electric fence. He thought it would hum or make some other noise, and he considered a quick tap of it to ensure that it was electrified, but decided against it. All was still in the downhill sloping woodlands and quiet from the state highway a mile beyond.

  “Noah!” Natalie called from the porch. He composed himself in the darkness, trying to erase all traces of the fear and doubt from his face, and only then returned for the family games of hearts and then spades.

  Chapter 4

  NORTHERN VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 40, 1200 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)

  The old VW microbus sputtered to a stop on the two-lane blacktop in the Virginia woods. The gas tank was bone dry. The day before, Emma and the van’s owner had made it only a dozen or so miles before night fell and the lanky guy had said he was tired. He built a fire along the roadside and heated soup from a can. “You don’t say much,” had been one of his few attempts to engage Emma in conversation. The rest of the time, he had talked about himself. Apparently, he considered his pointless roaming about the country and semi-homelessness before SED’s arrival to be achievements worthy of boasting. Lots of talk about living off the grid and not selling out to corporate, but it all sounded to Emma like an attempt to turn failure into an ideology.

  “What do you do?” he’d asked in a rare break from self-involvement.

  “I’m a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University.”

  The guy cocked his head, then laughed and launched into a retelling of his life’s story in which he was really the CEO of Fortune 500 company on an incognito tour of the hinterlands. His snickering hinted that he was pleased with his self-amusement.

  “I’m going to sleep,” Emma announced, rising and brushing the dust from the back of her jeans.

  “I’ll join you.”

  She gave him one last chance by saying, “No.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re not gonna hold out on me. Not now, when we don’t know how much longer we’ve got.” In his case, it was about three minutes. Maybe five, if you counted until brain death.

  Emma got out of the van and began stashing in a backpack the few useful items the loser had managed to accumulate—some canned food and a can opener, bottled water, matches, a fleece, a poncho, a wool blanket—plus Emma’s own toiletry bag from the NIH hospital and rusty screw driver from the roadside now caked with the dried blood of two lecherous men.

  Outside, a pickup truck pulled to a stop, and a man and woman got out. There was a shotgun in a rack at the rear window of the truck’s cab, from which peered a young girl and boy. Emma exited the van and closed the door.

  “Hello!” the woman called out to her and waved. The man walked up to the van’s driver’s side window and looked inside. “You have car trouble or something?” asked the overweight woman, in her late twenties, with a smile on her smooth, puffy face. She wore a silver cross on a silver chain.
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  “Out of gas,” Emma said. The man was searching the dark van through its grimy side windows. Emma felt her level of agitation rise, and dug her fingernails into her palms inside clenched fists.

  “You need a ride?” the woman asked. “We’re not goin’ far, but you’re welcome to come along.”

  Emma hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder.

  “What about him?” the man asked, his thumb pointing over his shoulder at the microbus. “Is he asleep?”

  “I’m done with him.”

  The woman tilted her head and made some kind of pinch-lipped face that Emma couldn’t decipher. But she locked her arm in Emma’s and towed her toward their mud-covered pickup.

  The man held his hand out, inviting Emma to get into the back of the vehicle, not the cab. Emma threw her backpack into the flatbed, climbed up the large knobby tire, and settled onto the cold, corrugated metal bed. She waved at the two little faces in the cab’s rear window, and the kids waved back.

  It quickly grew cold on the drive, and Emma donned the fleece and settled lower into the bed to get out of the breeze. Eventually, she lay her head on the backpack and dozed off watching the canopy of trees slide by overhead and the cab’s rear window fog from the kids’ breath.

  She woke when the pickup’s brakes squealed, and she sat up. Alert. Agitated. They had stopped in a small rural town. There was a civil war cannon in the square. A couple of dozen men, young and old, fat and slender, black and white, stood in formation with all manner of shotguns and rifles on one or the other of their shoulders.

  “This is where we’ll have to say good-bye,” the cheery young woman announced as she appeared beside Emma. Her husband eyed Emma warily from a distance. She climbed down, thanked the woman, and exchanged a last wave with the kids.

  They could connect her to the body in the microbus. Rather than continue south at the town square, Emma turned east. She would walk in that direction until out of their sight.

  “Left shoulder…arms!” The ragtag collection of would-be citizen soldiers reshouldered their non-military weapons in a half dozen different, inexpert ways. “Port…arms!” Most didn’t know what to do and belatedly copied their neighbors.

  A small crowd had gathered to watch the martial display. They were clearly a mix of mostly elderly locals, and mostly younger refugees. She looked down. Her jeans, dusty boots, lightweight gray wool sweater, and backpack fit in well with the latter. But none seemed to be unaccompanied females. All the women were in couples, or families, or some other groupings; never alone.

  She caught the eye of a boy and looked away, but tracked his approach in her peripheral vision. Before he had the chance to speak, Emma said, “Not interested,” and kept walking without so much as a glance in his direction.

  “You’re that scientist.” Emma stopped. “On TV.” Emma turned. They were alone, but still visible from the square. He was a teenager, with a mop of dark hair, bangs near his eyes, facial stubble, and a gleaming white grin. She tried turning up the corners of her lips, but his smile disappeared and she quickly aborted. It didn’t feel right anyway. “That’s you, right? On CNN? You’re, like, some brain doctor who’s been studying the Infecteds?”

  He thinks I’m Isabel, came the mysterious voice in her head. Let him. Emma nodded, both to the boy and…to whom? To her self?

  “Charles. Charles Rankin. But people call me Chaz.”

  “Dr. Isabel Miller. Just…Dr. Miller.”

  “Right! I knew it.” He seemed to celebrate his subpar powers of recognition. In fact, both Miller twins had been on nationwide TV—Isabel on CNN to discuss Infecteds’ brain damage; Emma on a Homeland Security video as an example of Pandoravirus’s effects. Isabel was the before to Emma’s after. Emma was lucky for the boy’s mistake. The boy was lucky too.

  “Me and this guy were supposed to ride together all the way to St. Louis, but he ran outta gas and didn’t wanna leave his car. I’m trying to get home to Boulder. I’m a Freshman at George Mason, or was, I guess.” He paused as if it was Emma’s turn to say something.

  “What’s your major?”

  “What? Oh, uhm, undeclared. Prob’ly business admin.” He was acting strange…or she was. “So, you’re on foot? Me too,” he said. “So-o-o…?” Emma waited, but Chaz never completed his sentence. “I wouldn’t think you’d just be out here like a regular person. I woulda thought you’d be in some bunker or secret base or something.”

  Chaz stopped talking, so Emma filled the void. “Nope.” The less said, the fewer clues she might give him. Though he did seem pretty dense.

  “You wanna hook up?” he asked. “I mean…! I don’t mean…” Emma had no idea what he meant other than he wanted to have sex with her. “I mean do you wanna be traveling companions? Throw in together for however long? Road trip!”

  “I’m heading south.” Isabel turned to leave in that direction. You should have said east, the voice said. Now he knows the truth.

  “Me too.”

  After several steps, Emma turned back to him. He looked half her age of thirty-two, but he was handsome and had a nice physique, unlike the flabby truck driver and the lanky, yellow-toothed van guy. “Come on,” she said. He fell in alongside her, grinning.

  There, the voice said. A normal looking couple.

  Chapter 5

  CLINTON COUNTY, NEW YORK

  Infection Date 41, 0200 GMT (10:00 p.m. Local)

  Rick pulled Isabel up onto the bed of a big army truck. Six hundred murmuring soldiers fell quiet. They were the first regular army to arrive, Rick had informed her, the full significance of which she didn’t comprehend. But unlike the National Guardsmen at the bridge, these men’s heads were shaved to their skulls and faces were streaked black and green.

  A lieutenant colonel, fitter than the senior National Guard officer on the bridge, bellowed, “Listen up!” No one uttered a word. “Dr. Miller here is an expert on Infecteds. She’s gonna tell us exactly how we’re gonna kick their asses!” There was a booming chorus of something that sounded like “Hoo-ah!” What does that even mean? The masculine ritual, joined in lustily by the women, was viscerally stirring, but also vaguely primal and more than a little disturbing.

  Isabel said they usually just took questions. Their commander barked, “Questions?”—more an order than an invitation. Isabel was shown how to use a bullhorn. The first boy to stand was barely audible. “Shout it out, soldier!” interrupted the colonel.

  The boy gathered himself and drew a deep breath. “Ma’am, can-you-get-sick-from-having-sex-with-an-Infected—ma’am?”

  The obviously close-knit and keyed-up battalion howled in laughter. The questioner was pushed off balance, dragged to the ground, and put into a head lock. The smiling colonel’s heavily armed, overgrown children were primed. Isabel was entertained because she liked men, and was amused by boys being boys. Their female comrades-in-arms, with low buns that fit under helmets, displayed timeworn smiles more of bemusement.

  When they quieted down, Isabel said, in a greatly amplified voice, “Yes, you almost certainly would.” There were more hoots and hilarity as their tremendous pent-up nervous energy found an outlet.

  But when the next man—a lieutenant—rose to his feet, sergeants quieted their men with kicks, punches, and profanity. “I hear that when Infecteds attack, ma’am, suppressing fire won’t work. They won’t go to ground, or take cover, or chicken out. They’ll keep coming, even if it’s suicide.” The battalion was entirely still now. “I hear they’ll rip you to shreds with their bare hands. No mercy. No limits. No exceptions.”

  There was not a snicker or a cough to be heard. Rouses Point Bridge hadn’t come up once in the briefings they’d given since the massacre. Not by pre-agreement, but because the memory of it was clearly too raw and disconcerting. Isabel, however, could still smell and taste her memories from that day. Not rotting bodies. That would come later. No attemp
t would be made to clear the thousands of corpses leaking the world’s most dangerous pathogen. What Isabel recalled instead was the odor of urine, feces, blood, and vomit, and the acrid stench of gunfire.

  She raised the bullhorn. “Yes, that’s all true.” Six hundred frozen faces stared back. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about Rouses Point Bridge at the New York-Vermont border.” Rick had written a detailed report to the Pentagon, which had instantly been classified Top Secret. “Once the crowd attacked, there was no stopping it. They only calm down when they’ve dispersed to a lower crowd density. Until then, every single Infected in a packed, charged crowd gets roused to unspeakable violence. Once triggered, possibly by some insignificant incident, that mob has only one goal: to kill you and only you, with their hands, with sticks and stones, or with knives and guns. They will focus on killing you with a single-mindedness never seen before. The only way to put a definitive end to a mob attack is to…to kill, basically, every last Infected in that mob.”

  No mercy. No limits. No exceptions.

  Isabel caught sight of a fist bump here and an exchange of hard stares there. These weren’t pre-game rituals designed to psyche up teammates. They were solemn vows: you do your job; I’ll do mine.

  She cleared the lump in her throat with a perfunctory cough. “Infecteds alone or in small groups are obviously also potentially violent. A fair number will be so brain damaged they’re wildly unpredictable and highly volatile, but they’ll only last a few hours or days before they succumb to the elements or are killed. The rest—the higher functioning—will attack you if you threaten them, or have something they want, or stop them from doing what they want to do or going where they want to go, or corner them. They’ll become agitated, get a huge rush of adrenaline, and react in extreme ways—homicidal, suicidal, insanely irrational. But not as horrifically as when they’re in a trancelike state in a crowd. Plus, if they don’t have any of those reasons to kill you, they’ll possibly leave you alone. In fact, they may cooperate with or obey you, so long as that course is rational. But you can never trust them. You don’t know what they’re planning or when the scales will tip and they’ll turn on you without any remorse or guilt or conscience.”