Rectify: A Novella

by Druga, Jacqueline

  June didn’t have the answers, but she did have that fax. Before she went home for the night, just in case it ended up being something the authorities wanted to bury, June grabbed the fax, folded it and placed it in her pocket.

  4 – FREAK

  In her mind, she envisioned chaos and panic. Throes of infected rampaging the streets, after all, if they had a case in of it at Mon Valley Hospital, she couldn’t imagine how bad or how far out it had already spread.

  The warning from the CDC. It wasn’t fast enough.

  June convinced herself they were nonchalant about it all because it was over. Life as she knew it was over.

  She kept thinking of all the movies she saw, how the outbreak consumed the world. That was what June expected. An overnight catastrophic turn of events.

  There was nothing, absolutely nothing other than Mr. Jenner to warrant such fears on a massive level.

  Doctor Ung told her she was being ridiculous, he saw nothing like that when he drove in. June reminded him that he was called in at two in the morning and only lived three miles away. He probably was still on a slight buzz from a hefty glass of scotch before bedtime routine. He reeked of it and he was irritated, which told her he didn’t pay much attention on the drive. What would he see anyhow?

  “Go home, June,” he told her. “You had a traumatic experience tonight. Go home.”

  She was paralyzed with fear to leave the hospital and she stood at the automatic doors staring out. It was semi-dark and the street lights shone slightly orange giving the mist in the parking lot an eerie effect.

  “You need me to walk you out?” Wally the security guard asked.

  June jolted, not expecting him to approach from behind. She looked at him. A man older than her. He carried extra weight and never moved very fast. “No ... but thank you. Can you just ... just watch?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thank you.” She looked out again.

  “You have to step forward for the doors to open.”

  Irritated, she snapped. “I know.” Exhaling, she stepped forward. Her car wasn’t that far and she feared hitting the clicker. What if the sound drew in infected like Mr. Jenner?

  She walked at a fast pace across the small parking lot to her car three rows back. The entire way she looked over her shoulder and all around, and at the last minute she hit the clicker and grabbed the door handle.

  It didn’t unlock.

  She pressed it frantically and flung open her door, hurrying inside and locking it. Her hands gripped the steering wheel as she caught her breath.

  ‘This was it, this was what it felt to be totally terrified,’ she thought.

  She began her journey home, eight miles away. Her phone had died and she reached for the charger in the car. It wasn’t there.

  What if she broke down? What if she ran into a large group of infected? She pulled onto the main road and a car nearly cut her off. The first thing she thought of was the driver was fleeing from something. An ambulance raced by her and she panicked. What if it was headed to her house?

  She kept seeing Mr. Jenner, the look on his face, the maddening determined glare and blood that poured from his mouth. His eyes were beyond blood-shot with red tears.

  It was like nothing she had ever seen before.

  Mind racing, thoughts she didn’t want to have arrived one after another. Her heart raced out of control and it drove June to the point that she screamed loudly in the car.

  “Stop it, June.” She yelled at herself while driving irradicably. “Stop it now.”

  The radio, raced through her mind and she turned it on. Surely if there were a massive event it would be on the radio. A turn of the knob only brought music, and that made her feel slightly better, but not enough.

  She thought of her family, her three daughters, especially her Henny. God forbid someone like Mr. Jenner approached. Henny wouldn’t hear him coming.

  Even if her fears of the worst case scenario were unfounded, they were only unfounded for the time being. They were dealing with a level four virus. It was highly contagious, if it made it to the United States, it could slip under radar easily. Ten people at a concert meant a thousand in the city.

  June began to calm the farther she drove, she saw traffic moving normally, people going about their lives, stopping at fast food restaurants and pumping gas.

  She may not have been able to control what was happening with the CODY virus, but she could control what happened with her family. With those thoughts in mind, she stopped at the grocery store and did a mad dash down the nonperishable aisles, tossing things in the cart at an incredible speed.

  The store was empty. That would change once news of the virus broke. It would have to, there was no keeping it a secret. She remembered how people panicked over Ebola in the US, and already the number of cases of CODY that June knew about exceeded that.

  What would they do over something like this?

  After her mad dash shopping spree, June headed home. A huge part of her knew she was wildly overreacting, but she couldn’t help it.

  No sooner did she pull into the driveway, her front door opened and Stan flew out.

  Placing the gear in park, June jumped out of the car. “What happened? What happened?” June asked panicked. “Are the girls okay? What ...”

  “Stop.” Stan placed his hands on her shoulders.

  “You ran out.”

  “I ran out to see if you were okay,” Stan said. “Doctor Ung called, said you had a horrible experience tonight and he was worried you were having a meltdown.”

  “I am. Oh, God, Stan, this …” her trembling hands reached into her pocket and she pulled out the fax showing him.

  “Is this what your text tried to tell me?” he asked.

  June nodded. “I saw this first hand. It scared me.”

  “I’m sorry.” Stan took her into his arms. “I am so sorry you had a bad night.”

  “It was more than a bad night.”

  “June.”

  “Stan, this could be bad. It could be really bad.”

  Stan pulled back. “Listen to me. Yeah, it could be bad, but good people are working on this. You need to get it together. If things would get that bad and you’re like this now … what will you be like then? This is not you.”

  June returned to his arms. She heard his words. She remembered what Doctor Ung had said, that she saw something horrendous.

  Her behavior was not only out of norm for her, it was beyond reasonable for the situation.

  Her entire psychotic episode was based on a small outbreak. Fear for her family caused it.

  She had to get it together, and June would.

  As a doctor she was going to be on the front lines. She would be that first line of defense. June decided she would allow herself this moment, the freak out, then she would soldier up, be realistic and be rational.

  Rational and smart were truly the only way to protect her family.

  5 – KNOWLEDGE

  If there was one thing June did, it was tackling her obstacles. Whenever she didn’t understand something or needed to learn it, she studied it, became an arm chair expert via the internet. That was what she did with the CO-D4 virus. Learned it. The problem was, there wasn’t much on the internet, nor did the CDC have information ready, they were still learning it themselves.

  The doctors in the field, those treating the patients were the investigators, they were told to report anything and everything. A special website and phone number were set up.

  Even though June had her freak out moment, or rather hour, she vowed it wouldn’t happen again. She would keep a level head, she was going to be smart.

  It didn’t matter that the virus wasn’t airborne, she knew how quickly Ebola had spread just in closed quarters, surface to surface. Because of that, when the news broke that day to the public, June notified the school that the girls would not be returning until the crisis was over.

  The school had no idea what crisis she spoke of.

 
Stan insisted it was a bit much.

  It was April 28th when the world found out about the virus, to the best of June’s research there were approximately four hundred known cases worldwide.

  It wasn’t big enough and the news went over people’s head and garnered about as much attention as a forecast for rain in the spring.

  Nobody cared.

  Nothing really changed for the first few days, people went about their day to day lives. June didn’t see any more patients with it at the hospital.

  Then at one week everything changed.

  The amount of infected went from the initial four hundred, to three thousand at day three, and at one week one estimated fifty thousand were infected in the United States alone.

  The quiet rural hospital of Monongahela, Pennsylvania was continuously packed. June saw as many patients with it as she could, the ones thinking they had it.

  There was no test.

  It was fast.

  That was how they knew.

  The onset of symptoms were mild. General malaise, aches and pains, low grade fever and mild conjunctivitis. Within hours the fever would spike, the patient would become agitated, their eyes would bleed, if they were lucky, death would follow rapidly.

  Then they revived.

  It wasn’t as if they were one hundred percent dead, the heart beat at a few beats a minute and the brain functioned partially. They moved, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, they were instinctual and they were hungry.

  That … was what sent people into a panic. The revival, the creation of what people called Codies, and the fact the virus stuck fast, hit hard and killed. A person would feel fine in the morning and possibly be dead by dinner.

  The entire situation took the world by storm. Chaos ensued before the ten day mark, businesses were closed, people ran for the hills and they fought for food.

  City streets were dangerous, not just because of the infected, but because of the people who wanted to take it upon themselves to rid the world of them.

  It made for a dangerous situation. Lawlessness abounded.

  June saw it coming, she made sure the house was stocked with food and water.

  For three days she never left the house. Everything shut down. Hospitals, stores, electricity went off, essential services were all down. No police, no law or order.

  It took only two weeks and a million infected to reach that point. In June’s mind and in her heart, she believed that it was the end of the world.

  Then someone in authority had the brilliant thought, ‘We won’t go down without a fight’, and the end of the world was put on hold.

  At least for the moment.

  6 – A NEW ORDER

  The long blast of the air raid siren caused June to cringe.

  She was still on the road, still five miles from the hospital.

  It wasn’t her intention not to be at the hospital when curfew arrived, but she got held up at home. Stan was working on editing a Public Service Announcement for the news station and was holed up in his office. June didn’t want to leave for her night shift without making sure the house was locked tight.

  She secured the doors, closed the safe shutters, took the dog out and made sure the girls had a snack waiting for them in the kitchen.

  It was unfair to close them off to daylight before the sun went down, but it was the only way to ensure it was done. Stan often got lost in his work and closed the shutters too late.

  The girls were good about it for the most part. Henny understood, of course, she was thirteen. At the age of eight, Melinda teetered between understanding and irritation over it, but Aggie was confused. She was four years old and just didn’t get why they couldn’t go out and play all the time, or why she stopped going for rides in the car.

  Things had changed in the first month. It went from chaos early on to controlled, controlled wasn’t a bad thing.

  The stats were frightening and sad.

  Seven billion people on the planet and it was estimated, one month post outbreak that twenty percent of the population had, or did have, the CO-D4 virus, it wasn’t showing signs of stopping.

  It didn’t mean it was twenty percent across the board. It was the average.

  High population areas saw infection rates as high as forty percent, whereas rural areas would be as low as five percent.

  Whatever the case, it was a different world. Rules were established to save lives and protect them.

  It was a hardcore military and government controlled state, but it was needed.

  Before it happened, people were starving. They were desperate for water, food and medicine, there was nowhere to get it.

  The so called, Cody Vigilantes on the streets with dreams of being mighty zombie hunters were killing as many healthy people as they were infected. They made going out more frightening than the revived.

  When the government took over full force, they promised safety, but America had to get back to some semblance of normalcy. “Get back to work,” they said, then the soldiers started knocking on doors to make sure people got out.

  The farmers were farming, but no one was moving the product to the factories to be processed, or the stores to sell. There was no electricity to run the factories, no gas to get the workers there.

  The restoration phase was swift and it started at ground level. The Army Corp of Engineers got the utilities up and running. Workers were needed to keep it running, the gas stations were operable, and gas went first to the trucks to get more gas and get the food.

  With each phase of the restoration more and more people were returned to circulation to keep things running.

  Just after the six week post outbreak mark there was a new normal established with harsh rules.

  When to go out and when not to. Limits on where people could go. Advisories were constantly being updated and changed.

  June knew if the rules weren’t in place she and her family would be, either hiding in the house as masses of infected pounded at their door, or dead. And the one point five billion infected people would be much higher.

  Still, how does one explain that to a four year old? How would a small child understand the reasons for not being able to go to the store, or why it was the law to install thick, wooden or metal storm shudders on all first floor windows?

  Despite the advisory not to, parents took their children out to the stores. June didn’t. It was a chance she didn’t want to take. The kids slowed her down, anything could happen in a parking lot.

  And when Aggie asked why they could never go out when the sun went down, June told her in the best way she could understand. “The monsters come out at night.”

  The monster came out in the daytime as well, they were just as massive, but were easier to avoid and less hungry.

  Sundowning was a term June knew well, it was applied to people who suffered dementia, because it seemed when evening set in they were worse, more confused and more agitated. The same applied to the Codies. They were worse at night. Which made sense to June, seeing as it was a cognitive virus.

  There was a reason for every rule, which included the air raid sirens.

  The air raid sirens blasted each night for three minutes. They were the signal for everyone to be inside and to lock down. Absolutely no one was allowed on the roads or streets, if they were, they stood a good chance of being shot.

  If medical help was needed a person had to call for an ambulance or the police.

  The sirens also served another purpose … they called out the Codies.

  The noise was like a dinner bell, and that made them easier to kill. When the sirens stopped and the silence of the night set in it was quickly broken by the sounds of gunfire. The shots echoed across the valley letting everyone know the hunting squads were out.

  June was out there in the middle of it. She drove faster to get to the hospital. The last time she was out when the sirens stopped a bullet hit the back of her car.

  She was halted and flagged down about a mile from Mon Valley. It was dangero
us to stop, for her and the soldier that approached the car on the road.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him before he could even speak. “I had to get my daughter locked down before I left for my shift.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I’m a doctor at Mon Valley.”

  “Do you have your medical pass?”

  “I do.” June reached for her purse, fumbled for the ID and handed it to the young soldier.

  “Okay, doctor,” he handed it back. “No fine this time. But go straight there.”

  “I intend to.”

  “And be safe.”

  “I intended to do that, too.” After thanking him, June hurriedly drove away.

  Just because the sirens blared and no one was on the streets didn’t mean she wouldn’t get patients. Police, fire and ambulances would bring in the infected.

  They’d come at a steady pace. No slowing, no down time. Not anymore.

  June was ready for a busy night. It was always busy now.

  They were in a new phase of living, unfortunately that meant a lot of death.

  7 – ROUNDS

  “I thought you were dead,” Doctor Ung greeted June when she stepped into the nurses station. “Or at the very least your car was shot again.”

  He wasn’t a young man, but his age was hard to tell. June pegged him as possibly late forties or early fifties. He electively wore his head shaven, wasn’t tall and he took pride in his physique, talking often about going to the gym. For as long as June knew him … years, she still had a hard time reading him. He spoke slightly faster than most people, he left out a lot of inflection and dashed the way he spoke with arrogance.

  “I’m sorry I worried you,” she said.

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried. I was mad. I kept thinking that you were going to go and get yourself killed by the cleanup squads and leave me alone with the midnight rush.”