H10N1

by M. R. Cornelius

  They would have to take Broadway all the way up to the north end and cross at the George Washington Bridge.

  A few stubborn flames flickered in the burned-out hull of a building. Cars and trucks bulldozed to the sides of the street made it look more like an automobile scrap yard than Manhattan. A chair from a sidewalk café poked out of the windshield of a cab. Part of a riot? Farther down, a delivery truck stuck halfway out of a furniture store’s picture window. Embers glowed inside the massive showroom and Taeya could see that the store was gutted. She thought she saw someone scurry into the shadows.

  Mixed in with the tumble of vehicles in the street was debris from collapsed buildings. At intersections, mounds of concrete and steel had been pushed aside, like snowbanks. How would this ever get cleaned up? Was Manhattan even worth saving?

  Once she was on her own, she’d have to avoid major cities. Between uncontrollable fires, explosions from gas mains, and maniac looters, all urban areas surely looked like this.

  Rick sat hunched over the wheel, pouting.

  “What did you do to the security guard?” she asked.

  His annoyance came as a sigh. “Roger Masterson was on duty tonight. And if you had done your homework, like I did, you would know that ole’ Rog has a jones for Vicodin. I left half a bottle in the bathroom across from the security desk, with a few Halcyon thrown in for good measure. He was zoned out nicely when I saw him at 12:30. I figure he’ll be in la-la-land for at least three hours.”

  She ignored his reference to her last-minute decision to leave. There were more important questions on her mind. Like why Rick was still going to D.C. if he planned to take the van and run?

  “Look at this shit,” he said. “It’s all gone. The Village. Tribeca. The huge loft I couldn’t afford. Moshe’s falafel stand on forty-sixth. The New York City Library. I think that’s when the fire department gave up. So many of their guys died.”

  Why was he suddenly so chatty?

  “And you know what’s really tragic?” he continued. “Most of this was done by good old Americans. Why is it people aren’t content to just steal a TV? They have to set the store on fire, too?”

  “You ought to understand the barbarian mentality,” she quipped. “It isn’t enough to take control. Conquerors rape and pillage. They aren’t satisfied until the whole village is burned to the ground.”

  “You think I’m a barbarian?”

  “I think you’re a looter, just like those people who stole the TVs.” Taeya crossed her legs and leaned on her armrest. “So tell me, did you set the gourmet shop on fire after you took the case of caviar?”

  Oh, yes. She’d taken a peek under his tarpaulin while she loaded her MREs in the back. He had cases of escargot in garlic butter, marinated artichoke hearts, and who knew what else?

  “That’s not my shit,” he said. “I’ve been rounding all that crap up for the last two days. Orders from the top. Half was for here, the other half for D.C. Evidently, there will be big receptions once the new residents get settled in. Too bad you didn’t stick around, Doc. You could have served punch to Councilwoman Sanders, or made crab puffs for J.J. Martin from the Yankees.”

  She refused to let his jabs hit her soft spots again. “Sounds like you’ve already seen the guest list.”

  “Yeah, and you weren’t on it.”

  She tilted her head, squinting in the darkness. “Why are you so angry at me?”

  “Look, Doc. I don’t know what you expect to find out here, but there won’t be any more trips to Cabo or late dinners after the theater. We’re back to ground zero, scraping for food, fighting off renegades. Hell, just living without power is going to do you in.”

  “You seem to have me confused with someone else.”

  “I doubt it. My guess is you were married to some hot-shot doctor. What was he? A neurosurgeon, cardiologist? Did you get your picture in the society section of the newspaper on Sundays for your charity work?”

  “My husband—” That sounded strange coming from Taeya. Randall had never really felt like a husband. More like a mentor. Eighteen years older, Randall had already spent fifteen years with the UK Medical Research Council before joining the World Health Organization.

  He was a brilliant man who could lecture on Prokaryotes and the Methanogenic Archaeon with the same admiration a weapons enthusiast might praise a particular bullet and the damage it could inflict. He was a hunter, no different from men who tracked wild game or chased tornadoes. Taeya didn’t fall in love with Randall, she fell in love with his tenacity.

  During their four years together, she couldn’t remember a time when they had more than a couple dollars in their pockets.

  She cleared her throat and started again. “My husband died in a van similar to this one. Their cargo was food and medical supplies.” She scratched at the anger that prickled her scalp. “World Health had a base set up in Santa Lucia, north of Guadalajara. He shouldn’t have even been in that van, but reports were coming back about a strain of tuberculosis in an outlying village and he wanted to make a first-hand evaluation. When the mobile unit was attacked, the looters didn’t just take the food and meds, they took the hubcaps, the seats, even the wiper blades. I don’t recall them burning the van, but they might as well have.”

  She never cried over Randall’s death. But this past year as she’d waged her losing battle against this pandemic, she missed him terribly.

  Rick didn’t have much to say as he sped through the theater district. When he got to Columbus Circle, he slowed and swung the van around to shine the headlights into the charred remains of Central Park.

  “There’s another prime example why the masses deserve to be extinguished.”

  Rumors about the riot in the park and the subsequent fire spread through the hospital as quickly as the blaze itself, but television coverage was nonexistent by then. There had been no pretty blonde on the scene, no studio commentary on why people do what they do. All anyone could see from the hospital was the billowing smoke.

  Operators at the suicide center said people were still holed up in some of the apartments on Central Park West. They must have really panicked when the riot started, sitting up in their million-dollar flats watching a mob scream at one of the mayor’s aides, demanding protection. From whom? Themselves?

  Estimates varied from a few hundred to thousands of people killed during the protest. The drivers of the incinerator trucks insisted it seemed like millions.

  And how could so many acres of lush greenspace be destroyed in a single day? Had rioters carried lit torches like villagers in some Frankenstein movie? No one really knew for sure, there were so few survivors, and so many conflicting stories. But as Rick drove slowly up Central Park West all Taeya saw was the blackened skeleton of the park.

  “Maybe China’s right,” Rick said. “Let this disease run its course and start over.”

  Let them die. It certainly was the easiest solution. India had adopted the same policy; so had most of the poorer nations, although their decision was based on poverty, not stupidity.

  “Problem is,” Taeya countered, “a virus probably isn’t the best judge of who should live and who should die.”

  All of those survivors waiting to take over the Medical Center had the right connections, but did they have the right motives for getting the country back on its feet?

  Rick remained quiet as he drove through Harlem. Tired of putting his foot in his mouth? Taeya felt a little twinge of guilt, too, over that whole gourmet food misunderstanding. Best that they just keep comments to themselves. They should be in D.C. by dawn and she could scout around for a different vehicle.

  Once in Harlem, Rick slowed at 159th Street. Ahead, Taeya spotted rubble strewn on the pavement. To the right, a building smoldered, flames still flickering in what remained.

  Rick edged the van forward, driving up onto the curbing of a narrow boulevard of trees. Taeya felt the crunch of bricks under the tires as Rick eased the van through the debris.

  To her
left, across the boulevard, Taeya caught a glimpse of movement, someone hobbling out of a building. A looter? How many of the survivors in the area now had guns? Were gangs organizing in the city? She shook off the tension in her shoulders. The van was impervious to assault, certainly by someone on foot.

  Up ahead, the van’s lights caught someone dashing across the grassy median and into the street. It was a woman, wearing a tattered housedress and bedroom slippers. She threw her arms in the air to stop the van. The dusky gray of her face indicated a lack of oxygen. She was drowning from the fluid in her lungs.

  A man stumbled off the curb to help block the lanes. He coughed, spraying blood into the air. The reflex made him teeter to stay on his feet. Was this influenza, or the new virus Johnson had shown her earlier in pathology?

  “They look like zombies,” Rick muttered.

  He rolled forward, hoping they would step aside, but when they didn’t, Rick stopped.

  Two more people stepped out of the shadows. Taeya saw the familiar gaunt faces, the emaciated bodies sagging with death.

  A hand slapped on Rick’s window and Taeya cried out in surprise. Rick recoiled from the man who stood peering into the van. His face was blistered with severe burns. What little hair remained on his head was crinkled from fire.

  “Help us,” he cried.

  The simple statement seemed to take everything out of him. He stumbled backwards, and when his hand left the window, the outer layer of the man’s skin remained on the glass.

  Rick almost came out of his seat. “Jesus!”

  These people must have been living in the building that burned. They’d been driven out into the streets, with nowhere to go. Perhaps they were waiting for a bus to take them to the Center to die. One last meal. Someone to pat their hand, tell them they were sorry, but it was over.

  “Is there a way you can hand something out without opening a window?” she asked.

  “Christ, Doc. What do you want to do? Feed them?”

  Boosting herself out of her seat, Taeya went to the back for her biohazard box.

  “I recall a small tray we could use to hand out passports at the Mexican border. Is this van equipped with that feature?” Taeya tapped Rick’s shoulder with the 6-pack of foil-wrapped pills.

  He stared at the sheet in his hand for a moment, reading the label. Then he banged his head against the seat’s headrest. He tilted his face up at her. Then he laid the pills in the passport tray and rotated it outside.

  The woman in the housedress shuffled over and took the pack.

  “Will this make me better?” the woman asked.

  “No,” Taeya said through the glass, “but it will end your pain.”

  With trembling fingers, the woman snapped the sections apart and handed then out. Rick didn’t wait to see if they took the pills. He gunned the engine and sped away.

  “Bravo, Doc.” He glanced her way. “You must be the pride of the medical profession. ‘Sorry, there are no vaccines, but we’ve got plenty of suicide pills.’”

  She refused to get into a debate on the drug, or the logic behind distributing the Nexinol. But she couldn’t resist educating this cretin.

  “You don’t understand how vaccines work. They’re a preventive measure, not a cure.” When he didn’t immediately attack back, Taeya continued.

  “Every year, vaccines are developed, based on what we think the strain of virus will be. But with this biologically-engineered virus, we had no idea. At least not in time. Once we isolated the strain, identified it, and started manufacturing, it was way too late. You have to get the vaccine before any symptoms appear. It needs to be in your system for at least two weeks to be effective.”

  “You know what I think?” Rick said. “You hotshots got caught with your thumbs up your asses and now you’re eliminating as many witnesses as you can.”

  Taeya choked out a laugh. “Oh, no. I’m stuck in the van with a conspiracy freak.” She leaned on her armrest. “And I suppose you believe that people are getting rich off this catastrophe, too. Who? The company that developed Nexinol? Oh, I know.” She snapped her fingers. “The incinerating companies that are disposing of your witnesses. They must be making really big bucks on that government contact.”

  Rick tried to respond, but she cut him off. “No, wait! It’s a government conspiracy. What better way to wipe out the national debt? I’ll bet the oil companies are in on this, too. And health care providers.”

  “Are you done now?” Rick snipped.

  “I don’t know.” Taeya shook her hair away from her face. “But if I think of any more conspirators, I’ll be sure and let you know.”

  Then she tilted her seat back. Right, like she would be able to go to sleep with this fool at the wheel. What was his problem? Did he think she enjoyed watching people die? With his attitude, Taeya wondered how he’d ever gotten the job with the Center. This pandemic affected nearly every human being on the planet, but Rick was taking it much too personally, like the government, or the CDC, was out to destroy him.

  She wondered if he’d ever taken Risperidone or some other antipsychotic medication.

  * * *

  Taeya woke with a start. One minute, she’d been checking mileage signs to Philadelphia, and the next thing she knew, the sky was dawning and Rick was dodging abandoned cars on the D.C. beltway. She raised her seat back upright, and blinked at the sun glinting on the horizon in the distance.

  Destruction of the nation’s capital looked identical to Manhattan. A gray haze hovered over burned buildings and the streets were clogged with automobiles. She noticed a pattern she hadn’t seen at night. Half of the cars causing the gridlock on the local streets were in long lines at gas stations.

  The van slowed and Rick took an exit for Silver Springs. A gas station up ahead on the right had cars still sitting at some of the pumps, with lines snaking through the parking lot and out onto the street in both directions. A few of the cars Rick passed still had people inside.

  “My God,” she groaned, “they died waiting for gas.”

  Rick swung his head over for a quick look, although she was sure he’d seen plenty. “Another CDC blunder,” he said. “Some asshole goes on national television talking about a quarantine and we have an instant stampede.”

  Her face flushed. That truly had been a monumental disaster, but she wasn’t going to let Rick blame that on the CDC.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she snapped. “We never considered quarantine. That guy was just some flunky who worked as an office clerk. You can blame the media for that debacle. They were the ones shoving their microphones in everyone’s face. They never understood that the people who knew the most, said the least. They always zeroed in on some idiot man-on-the-street. My father had a saying. ‘I don’t know, but let me tell you anyway’.”

  Rick’s jaw flexed, his mouth in its permanent scowl, but he remained silent as he zigzagged the van through the tangle of cars. Taeya noticed several gaps in the long lines. Had people given up waiting for gas, or had the vehicles been stolen?

  “Here you go, Doc. Just your style.” He stopped beside a gold Lexus.

  “Very funny.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Actually, there was nothing funny about her situation. Taeya’s confidence took a nose-dive. She was on her own now. Regardless of why Rick continued his charade of reporting for work, he intended to put her out here. Did any of these cars still have keys? Or gas?

  Unbuckling his seat belt, Rick weaved around their supplies to the back of the van. He popped open a wall cabinet full of weapons — everything from what looked like a rocket launcher to M-16s, handguns, and knives. He jerked an M-16 off its brackets and slipped a Ka-Bar into his belt. Now why did he need the knife?

  The instant he slid open the side door, he swept his M-16 left and right, searching for potential trouble. Taeya stood, but the moment she stepped out from between the seats, he stuck a hand up to stop her.

  “Hang on there, Mary Poppins. First rule of the road. You neve
r leave your vehicle without a gun.”

  She cocked her mouth to the side in a sneer before working her way back to the gun cabinet. She chose a Beretta—lightweight, not much recoil, and continuous firepower if necessary.

  Rick had already jumped down out of the van when she stopped him. “Hang on there, Rambo.”

  She dug a surgical mask and latex gloves from her medical bag. “First rule in a pandemic. Never leave your vehicle—”

  He snatched the mask out of her hand before she could finish.

  While Taeya made her way along the street, peering into windows for keys, Rick kept a lookout. They’d walked two blocks when she began to lose hope. Most of the cars not only were missing their keys, but they were locked up tight. If she broke out a window, did Rick’s talents include hot-wiring a car? Evidently not, or they wouldn’t still be searching.

  The unmistakable odor of carrion grew stronger, and when she glanced down a side street, she spotted an SUV with the driver’s door open. On the pavement — a body.

  She skirted wide to the left and came up on the passenger door. Keys dangled from the ignition.

  The body didn’t bother her as much as it seemed to bother Rick. He stood three cars back, his mouth probably puckered in a grimace behind the mask.

  The driver was male, and from the amount of decay, she’d guess he’d been dead four to six weeks. That was good. Any virus feeding on the dead host had long since perished as well. The man’s left leg was tangled in the strap of his seat belt. He’d climbed out of his car, perhaps too ill to drive, but had gotten twisted up and hadn’t had the strength to free himself.