Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  From the barn, Chloe said, “Dad?”

  “Back in the barn!” he snapped. The militiamen argued inaudibly. A window in the barn opened. The muzzle of Chloe’s rifle appeared in it.

  “We can get a warrant!” Walcott threatened. “Judge Parker is down the hill. But we was hopin’ you’d consent.”

  “Tell the judge he can come on up. I’d like a hearing. You tell him that. A hearing.”

  “We’re searchin’ everybody’s places,” Walcott said, “’cause we had a murder three nights ago at the Nicholses’. Trey’s fourteen-year-old nephew was stabbed to death. Trey said he’s seen a suspicious woman on your property down by the highway.”

  “What does a suspicious woman look like, Sheriff Walcott?” The militiamen were paying close attention. They were civilians, not soldiers; more of a jury than a posse. And with three armed members of the Miller family having shown themselves, they seemed open to persuasion. “What was this suspicious woman doing?”

  “Jogging,” Walcott replied.

  Several militiamen laughed. It was Emma! Noah knew.

  One militiaman waved. “Hey, Mr. Miller. I’m Angus Bishop from down at the Quickie-Mart. My wife Margie said to tell you hey.”

  Noah waved back. This militia wasn’t solid in backing Walcott. Noah addressed Trey Nichols, but played to his neighbor’s comrades. “I’m real sorry, Trey, for your loss. That’s truly awful. And I don’t mean, folks, to be inhospitable. Ordinarily, I’d invite you all in. But if I open those gates, somebody could bring the virus in with ’em. That’s a death sentence for my whole family.” There were looks exchanged and a nod or two of agreement.

  Sheriff Walcott spoke into the radio handset clipped to his khaki uniform blouse. “The judge is on his way up. I guess we’ll just wait here, instead of spendin’ our time searchin’ the valley for Infecteds.”

  Noah joined Natalie in the house. “I don’t want them coming in here!” she said.

  “I’m doing every fucking thing I can.”

  “Don’t you curse at me, Noah Miller!”

  Chloe slipped in sideways through the open front door, and Jacob entered through the back. Natalie’s fierce gaze barely left Noah. “Are you not gonna do anything to stop those people from coming in here, raping us, stealing our supplies, and infecting us all?”

  “Jesus, Nat. None of that’s gonna happen. That militia out there are our neighbors.”

  Jacob, being young, was also stupid. “Will they check the cabin, you think?”

  Noah tried not to deflate on the spot. Maybe Natalie had missed it. “What about the cabin?” she asked instantly. Natalie turned her quizzical gaze onto Noah.

  He took a deep breath. “Emma’s living up there.”

  Natalie looked at him as if the words were puzzling; as if he’d made no sense at all. “Emma? Your…your sister Emma? Your infected sister, Emma? At our secret hideout, where we’re supposed to run off to…to avoid all getting sick?”

  “She’s nowhere near as contagious as before. Now, it’s only like…like AIDS, or Ebola.” Natalie could only stare at him. He’d perhaps chosen the wrong diseases for comparison. “I didn’t invite her to move in up there. She just showed up. And again, technically, this place is one-third hers. Legally.”

  “Noah, don’t take this the wrong way, but Emma is a fucking zombie.”

  “That’s not fair! You shouldn’t use that word.”

  “Uh, hello?” Jake said to his parents from the door. “Can you not hear that?”

  In the silence that followed, Noah heard a distant engine sound. “The judge?” he asked. Sure enough, he saw through the window the arrival of a dust-covered black Lincoln.

  “No,” Chloe said, peering out the door at the sky. “That’s not it.”

  “Judge Parker has your warrant!” Walcott shouted, waving paper in the air. “Now if you’d put down your weapons and open this gate, we won’t waste any more time!”

  Noah stepped outside. “Judge, that warrant is unconstitutional! They have no probable cause!”

  “There!” Chloe said from the porch beside him, shielding her eyes. Jacob, too, searched the sky. “Dad,” Chloe said, “do militias have helicopters?”

  A helicopter! Shit. “Look,” Noah said to Walcott, “let’s talk this thing over calmly.”

  Natalie hustled the kids inside and joined Noah on the porch, still holding the shotgun. The Sheriff began issuing orders. Only a couple of his men, however, did what they were told and fanned out to either side of the gate. The rest argued among themselves. Some also began gazing at the sky. Walcott said, “There’s ten of us, Mr. Miller! And four of you! Yeah, I see your boy up there!”

  A giant green helicopter descended out of the clouds overhead. Noah’s heart sank. It had a huge Gatling-type gun in its door. Behind it stood a man in a large green helmet with a black visor. If Walcott had full-on military shit, it was game over.

  It didn’t orbit overhead, however, but settled into the small, level clearing—Jake’s “droneport,” where Chloe had dragged a lawn chair to work on her tan. When its tires set down, soldiers leapt out. Helmeted men ran off to either side out of sight.

  Other soldiers approached the house as the engines wound down. One was tall; the other looked smaller than the rest, and waved.

  “Izzy?” Noah called out. “Iz!”

  When they met, she threw herself into her big brother’s bear hug. Isabel’s escorts focused their attention on the gate. Hand signals sent serious men off to the left and right of Walcott’s now outgunned and outmaneuvered search party.

  “Is there trouble here?” asked the tall soldier who’d given the troops orders.

  “They wanna search our house!” Natalie said from behind Noah.

  “And you don’t want ’em to?” Natalie shook her head. The soldier headed straight for the gate.

  Natalie watched him depart while giving her sister-in-law a distracted, perfunctory hug. Isabel was filthy. Every square inch of her was overlaid with layers of dusty flak jacket and grimy pouches that appeared full of rifle magazines. “So, who’s that?” Natalie asked.

  “Rick Townsend.” Isabel’s face lit with a smile she seemed incapable of suppressing. “He’s a Marine,” she explained with faux nonchalance. “A captain.”

  “Hmm. Are you…?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Isabel got another hug, this one genuine, from her sister-in-law. “Way to go Isabel!”

  “They may be talking about that warrant,” Noah said. “I’d better…” He took one step.

  Natalie grabbed his arm. “Nope.”

  Noah was instantly frustrated. “Do you think, Isabel, you might explain what the hell is going on here? You flying in on a helicopter gunship and all?”

  “Technically, it’s a medium utility helicopter. A UH-60 Black Hawk.”

  “Not the point!”

  The militiamen loaded up to leave. Trey Nichols shouted, “This ain’t over!” before he was dragged into Walcott’s truck. They departed in another dust storm.

  The tall Marine—Townsend, by his nametag—returned.

  “What just happened there?” Noah asked.

  “They showed me their warrant. I told them to leave or we’d kill them all. They left.” Townsend was called back to the helicopter by the door gunner.

  “Yum,” Natalie actually said—out loud.

  Noah couldn’t recall ever seeing his sister look happier. Chloe arrived. Isabel quickly related how she’d met the Marine on the trip to Siberia to pick up Emma after her infection. “He’s in charge of my ‘personal security.’” Natalie and her clone-of-a-daughter suppressed their amusement at the vaguely ribald job description. Isabel, Noah knew, so unlike Emma, had had only two boyfriends in her entire life to date. This was clearly a big deal to her.

  Townsend called Isabel over. “Uh-oh,
” Natalie said, her spidey sense picking up on some cues Noah missed entirely.

  “Is he dumping her?” Chloe asked.

  What?

  “Looks like it.”

  “How the hell can you tell that?” Noah asked in even greater frustration.

  Townsend had to pull Isabel’s arms from around his neck. As she tried to kiss him, his hand signals reeled in the troops deployed about the property. The engines wound up from a whine to a roar. Isabel held Townsend’s face, speaking words audible only to him.

  The Marine climbed aboard as a stooped Isabel shielded her face from the flying grit. The giant aircraft rose skyward and thundered away, thrashing the treetops with its ferocious rotor wash.

  A crate-like box lay on the ground beside an enormous backpack, which Isabel impressively hoisted onto her shoulders, but with effort. When she returned, slumping under her load and staring at the ground, her tears had turned to mud from the dust and ran in streaks down her face like mascara. “He’ll be back,” Isabel said, presumably to herself. “He always comes back. Rick said Marines never leave anyone behind.” Natalie and Chloe wrapped their arms around Isabel as if she might topple over at any moment. “He’ll be back. He will.”

  Natalie offered Isabel a long, hot bath, tea, then a meal with the last of the semi-fresh food.

  “Rick left that,” Isabel said to Noah, glancing back over her shoulder at the crate in the landing zone.

  “What is it?”

  “Dunno. He said it was a house-warming gift. He’s from very, you know, considerate, Midwestern people. Dairy farmers, from Wisconsin.”

  “And I bet that’s pretty much all you know about him, right?”

  “We’re getting there! Christ. Just try being happy for me, Noah.”

  The three women in his life all glared at him as they left. “Jake, buddy, we need to spend more quality time together, you and me.” Jake followed his father to the crate. On it were stenciled incomprehensible strings of numbers, and the words, “30 Grenade, Hand, Frag Delay, M67, Bursting Charge.”

  “Wo-o-ow!” Jake half-said, half-cackled. For him, this was like the Christmas morning when he’d gotten a hoverboard. For Noah, it felt more like that Christmas night spent in the emergency room. They each took one end of the crate by its rope loop and lugged the heavy box down to the basement. Noah held up a clawed crowbar, triumphantly finding a manly tool for a manly job. The grenades inside were smooth and round, not knobby and pineapple shaped.

  Jake searched the Internet on his phone. “Okay, it says that, for right-handed people, you hold the grenade and the spoon—the safety lever thing—with your right hand, pull the safety clip—the pin—out with your left, throw the grenade like a football,” he pantomimed the motion complete with a whoosh, “then take cover. You should be able to throw it thirty to thirty-five meters. That sounds kinda far. Maybe we could practice with rocks or something that are about the same weight. It says the grenade blows up in four to five seconds, and to make sure you don’t hit a tree limb or something, or throw it up a steep hill so it comes rolling back. If you’re standing near where it goes off, it’s guaranteed to kill you inside of five meters, and wound you within fifteen meters. But—and this is in big black letters—it says the fragments could fly as far as two-hundred and fifty meters out, but they generally go up, like an upside-down cone, so you should get down low.”

  Noah let Jacob hold one grenade to judge its weight before sending him out to find rocks for throwing practice. At the top of the stairs, Jake collided with Chloe, who was head-down typing on her phone. “Justin thought the army helicopter story was really cool.”

  “We’ve got grenades!” Jake informed her.

  “Sweet!” Chloe said. “Lemme see. Justin’s family only has baseball bats.” Noah knew what she really wanted to do was take a selfie with their new arsenal to send to her boyfriend. They thundered downstairs past their father.

  “No playing with the hand grenades!”

  In the kitchen, Natalie was making tea. Isabel said, “So, she’s here? Emma?”

  “Oh. Yeah. She hitchhiked down from Bethesda. She’s been here about three days.”

  Natalie, wearing an oven mitt, removed the whistling kettle from the stove. “That Nichols boy was murdered three nights ago.” Isabel and Noah waited, but Natalie didn’t complete the thought. From the hush that followed, however, they all harbored the same suspicion.

  “How…is she?” Isabel asked. “I mean, any difference?” Noah shook his head. “And that Sheriff was up here looking…for her?”

  “Apparently Emma went jogging and got spotted.” On seeing Isabel’s surprise, Noah said, “She wants to keep her figure so she can find a man of her choosing.”

  Isabel snorted. “That, kinda, makes some sense, I guess. Her plans again? Hubby, kids, picket fence, station wagon?”

  “She might be lonely. She told me to tell her when Pandoravirus hits the valley.”

  Natalie said, “So she can get first pick of the infected widowers, I suppose.”

  Chloe arrived with arms full of clothes from the laundry room. Isabel picked out a pair of blue jeans. “Oh, this top is cute,” Natalie said. Chloe added accessory suggestions.

  “How about this one,” a winded Jake said upon arrival, placing a rock on the breakfast table with a thud.

  Noah tossed it in air a few times. “Feels about right. So, Jake, it’s about time. To go. You know. Do that thing?”

  “What thing?” his idiot son asked.

  Noah sighed. “Um, sweetie? Natalie? You’re gonna hear a loud bang. But don’t worry. That’s us. Let’s go, Jake.”

  Natalie peppered Noah and Jacob with repeated questions all the way to the SUV.

  “They’re gonna go throw hand grenades!” Chloe let slip.

  “Chloe!” Jake snapped. “You narc!”

  “You are not going to start playing with hand grenades, Noah Miller!”

  “No,” Noah said. “We’re not. We’re going to detonate four blocks of C4—seven and a half pounds of plastic explosives—and permanently sever the ridgeline road so we won’t get any more visitors like today.”

  He was prepared for an outburst. So when she said nothing he grew defensive. “I paid a guy at the highway department a hundred K, and he and some other guy, ex-military or something, got the explosives from God knows where, pre-wired everything, and showed me what to do. The C4 is in a bore hole underneath the road. I don’t have to go anywhere near it. We’ll be back in an hour, max.”

  Chloe listened, mouth agape. “You mean we’ve been driving a huge SUV over a bomb?”

  “Noah! She’s right. But, now that it’s done, be careful,” was all Natalie said.

  “What?” Chloe burst out. “Mo-o-m!” Noah hustled Jake into the SUV. “It’s not fair! Just because he’s a boy, it’s Jake who gets to blow shit up?”

  “Language, Chloe.”

  Jake fastened his seatbelt wearing a look of absolute wonder. “I thought we were just gonna blow up a grenade. She’s actually letting us do this?” Noah ignored him and drove down the hill in silence, trying to make sure he hadn’t forgotten any of the steps they’d walked him through. “It’s rained, you know,” Jake added, “since they put the dynamite in that hole.” Noah frowned but declined to respond. “What if it got wet and doesn’t blow? Do we, like, pull it out and see what’s wrong? What if a wire is loose, and we tug on it?”

  “It’s gonna work.” Noah had no other answer to the fairly legitimate concern.

  They turned the SUV around in a tiny level area about a hundred meters from the detonator—three hundred from the charge. They climbed out with their rifles and found the blasting unit where Noah had hidden it under now dried-out, brown brush.

  Father and son lay on their stomachs on the side of the ridge road behind the black plastic box. Noah handed the loose end of a brigh
t orange wire to Jacob. The cable ran just outside the raised lip delineating the road’s cliff-side edge and off into the distance around the bend ahead. Noah extracted the remote blaster from its waterproof enclosure. When he pressed “Power,” the display lit and beeped. He smiled to his son at their success thus far.

  “This goes in here,” Noah said, inserting the plastic connector into the remote blasting unit, which beeped again. The display cycled through a series of checks. “Line continuity—OK. Rounds wired—1. Delay—0 ms. No errors.” A green light lit above a button labeled, “Fire.” The word, “Armed,” flashed on the small LCD screen. But Noah didn’t exult in that final milestone. His anxiety prevented premature celebration.

  Jacob stared at him. “Ready?” Noah asked with a dry mouth. Jake covered his ears.

  Noah couldn’t figure out how to plug his own ears while also setting off the charge. He probably should’ve brought earplugs, or put the blasting unit on a timer, but instead just counted down. “Three, two, one.”

  He pressed and held the “Fire” button. When nothing happened, his heart sank.

  Boooooom!

  Both jumped reflexively at the stupendous detonation. Noah was jarred. His nerves embrittled. Church bells rang in his ears. The explosion had instantaneously pounded his body and rattled his chest. He coughed as jangled echoes reverberated through the hills.

  Jacob was saying something and starting to rise. Noah restrained him until the last debris fell onto the road ahead. Smoke fouled the breeze with a noxious smell. Jacob shook Noah’s arm. “Dad!” he mouthed through the cotton of Noah’s throbbing eardrums. “It worked.”

  “Let’s go check it out!”

  “You’re yelling, Dad.”

  They carried their rifles into the clearing haze. Around the curve, a thirty-foot section of road had completely disappeared. Unstable dirt tumbled into the gap. The ridge walls were now nearly vertical. No one could traverse it or the dominating hill above it.

  “Wow!” Jacob said while taking photos on his cell phone.

  On the short drive back, Noah kept trying to pop his ears like on an airplane.