Slow Burn: Zero Day, Book 1

by Bobby Adair

  The link between the European flu and the insanity everywhere crystallized in my mind. Was I immune? Really? Or was it just a matter of time before I went nuts like Dan did, or like the men in the jail? I shuddered to think about it. Could there be a worse fate than losing one’s mind?

  I flexed my left hand. My forearm felt stiff. I looked at the crusty scabs and surrounding puffy red flesh. I pressed a finger into the puffiness near one of the big scabs. I felt no pain but disgusting yellow puss oozed out. I felt sure I was it was only a matter of time before I lost my arm to infection.

  I shook my head. My situation was dire. I was powerless to alter it. Despair washed over me, but my eyes stayed dry. If there was one thing that Dan and the dead harpy did for me, it was teaching me how to shunt away troublesome emotions before they caused me more problems.

  I took a deep breath to clear my head. I needed to think. Steph said I needed to avoid the ward, and that’s what I intended to do. I needed to focus on escape.

  The truck slowed. It bounced over another curb and maneuvered through some turns. It came to a stop and went into reverse, then stopped again.

  The clink of metal on metal announced the opening of the doors.

  Outside were more soldiers in protective gear, with guns either at the ready or pointing into the truck.

  “Let’s go,” one of them ordered.

  My quarantined companions who able, had made their way to the rear of the truck.

  I kneeled down to wake Murphy. His skin was hot to the touch—really hot.

  “We’ll get him,” a soldier told me.

  I looked at him, but ignored the order. “Murphy, c’mon. Get up.”

  “Out of the truck, sir!” The soldier pointed his weapon at me. Another stepped up to the open door and did the same.

  I nodded and slowly stood. “You’re the boss.” I refrained from adding a vulgar aspersion.

  Outside the transport truck, soldiers formed a corridor that led into a building. There would be no escape at that point.

  I walked through the doors and into an old, familiar-looking building. I quickly realized that we were on the university campus, which neighbored the hospital campus. They walked us through the entrance to a very old basketball arena. The soldiers herded us toward a pair of double doors that I knew to be one of many entrances to the main gym floor. They put us up in a tight line right at the center of the pair of doors.

  One soldier spoke loudly to us. “Because of the infection, I’m going to open this door, and I need to close it as soon as possible. So, as soon as it opens, all five of you need to hurry through the door. Medical personnel in the quarantine area will take you from there and give you the medical attention that you require.”

  Before anyone could ask a question or protest, the soldier ordered the door opened.

  I was last in line and was roughly pushed forward by several strong hands on my back. I fell into the guy in front of me and we went down like walking dominoes. I bumped the edge of the door as they pushed me past and I tripped on a pile of bodies and fell. The door slammed shut behind me, locking us in.

  Wicked, angry thoughts blossomed with my anger and spilled out of my mouth in a long string of curses at the soldiers. I pushed myself up off of the guys below me and was silenced by what I saw in the gym.

  Chapter 12

  The gymnasium was eighty years old but had been renovated nicely. The gleaming wooden floor had space for three full basketball courts. With the collapsible wooden bleachers pulled out and upper level seating, the gym had room for a few thousand fans. With the doors locked and with platoons of soldiers ringing the building, it was a makeshift asylum for several thousand infected inside. More infected were being shoved through the door at discouragingly regular intervals.

  Most of those in the gym were frenetic and aimless. They were noisy. They sniffed one another as though looking for a meal. They scuffled. They screamed. Most couldn’t remain still, though a good number sat catatonically or lay like corpses on the floor and benches. A few rattled on in nonsensical streams of words like crazed meth heads. More than a dozen ran around the gym, attacking and fighting with whomever they bumped.

  It was a madhouse.

  At one time, I guessed, hundreds of portable beds had been lined up in rows on the floor. By the time I arrived, they were in disarray. Random pieces of hospital equipment were scattered about. More than a few of those locked in the gym wore scrubs or hospital lab coats.

  Very disturbing were frightening smears of blood and bits of meat in perhaps a dozen spots on the floor. More disturbing than that were the infected, who appeared to licking at those spots or chewing on things I preferred not to look at too closely. It reminded me of Dan’s meticulous attention to the harpy’s carcass.

  Many around the floor had a bloody injury, torn clothes, and quite often, bite marks. Many were unscathed, but all had dilated, crazy eyes. The same dilated, crazy eyes as me.

  I sat on the floor next to Murphy, who lay passed out on a cot next to a wall, far from the door. He groaned and stirred. I reached out and felt his forehead. No change. He was still burning up with fever. The same fever I’d had that first night, I guessed.

  Some guy with shaggy hair, a beard, and hippie sandals very suddenly came sprinting at me out of the crowd. I stood just as I noticed him, immediately on the defensive.

  He made no effort to slow as he neared me, a fact I didn’t realize until it was too late. He hit me at full speed and slammed me into the wall, his face stopping at kissing distance.

  “They’re gonna kill us all!” he screamed.

  I put my hands to his chest and started pushing. “Get off me!”

  He grabbed my shirt to pull himself closer.

  I got the full stench of his hot, slobbery breath. His spit splattered my face.

  “Get off me, motherfucker!” I pushed harder.

  “Slaughter! Slaughter! Kill all the zombies!”

  I knocked his hands free and pushed hard. The crazy guy fell on his back and but bounced right up and ran off to accost someone else.

  “Christ!” I looked around and saw a guy walking toward me in a bloodied lab coat. He seemed calm, normal even. I took a defensive stance and got ready to punch him in his glasses.

  His palms went up in front of him and he said, “It’s okay.”

  I relaxed a tad, but prepared myself for another kind of crazy.

  “It’s okay,” he said again. “I’m like you.”

  “What? What do mean, like me?” I asked.

  “Slow burn,” he responded.

  “Back off, crazy man,” I told him.

  “No, it’s okay. I’m not like them.”

  “Just keep your distance,” I warned.

  He stopped about five feet in front of me and put his arms down. “I’m Jerome, Jerome Barnett. I work for the CDC.”

  I was taken aback. “The Center for Disease Control?”

  Jerome nodded.

  “The one in Atlanta?” I asked.

  “The very same.”

  “Okay.” I lowered my arms, then pointed out across the room, indicating the madness around us. “What the fuck?”

  Jerome looked around, “Yeah. Kind of overwhelming isn’t it?”

  “Overwhelming? Not my first choice of words,” I said.

  Jerome said, “I guess your first choice was ‘fuck,’ wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “You gotta admit, Jerome, this is pretty fucked up. Do you know what the hell is going on?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’ve got nothing but time, unless you believe that crazy dude that was just here.”

  Jerome said, “I’ll talk quickly.”

  That concerned me.

  Jerome grabbed an upturned cot and pulled it over by Murphy’s cot. He sat down in front of me. I found a bit of room on the corner of Murphy’s cot that wasn’t covered by Murphy and sat down to face him.

  “This is a disease caused by a virus.”

&n
bsp; “A virus?”

  “Yes,” Jerome answered.

  “Okay,” I prompted.

  “There was an outbreak about two months ago in Africa at a refugee camp in Kenya, just across the border from Somalia.”

  I nodded, “What kind of outbreak. This?” I gestured around.

  “Yes. You probably saw something in the news about it.”

  I shrugged, “Bits and pieces I guess. I don’t really pay much attention to the news anymore.”

  “I hear you,” Jerome agreed. “So, I work for the CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Services Officer.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m an epidemiologist.”

  I was impressed. Jerome didn’t look much older than me. He was clearly not the slacker I was.

  Jerome continued, “I work in the field for the CDC. When there’s an outbreak of some disease somewhere, especially if they’re having trouble identifying it, they send me.”

  “You’re the guy who identifies it?” I asked.

  “No, there are doctors who specialize in that. I’m more of a response coordinator. When we don’t have a defined protocol, because we’re not sure what we’re dealing with, I usually get the call. Most times, it’s something run-of-the-mill, H1N1, Hantavirus, things like that, that aren’t getting identified correctly in the field. We rarely come across anything new, widespread, and deadly. I mean, we come across new strains and variants all the time, but nothing that meets all those criteria.”

  “Widespread?” I asked. “Deadly?”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  I frowned.

  Jerome continued, “So we started getting reports of something weird out of Kenya six or so weeks ago. It doesn’t take much to raise the CDC’s interest. A few cases of unusual symptoms is usually enough to get on our radar. So when this popped up, it was a few cases the first day, then a few dozen, mostly in refugees coming across the border. We realized immediately that something was happening in Somalia. But that place is pretty lawless, and we don’t go in there. Before you know it, I’m on a plane to Kenya and thirty hours later, I’m at the refugee camp. By the time I arrive, the cases are numbering in the hundreds, and it’s not just Somalian refugees fresh across the border anymore. Refugees in the camp are infected.

  “Well, the first thing I try to do when I get there is try to quarantine the camp, but I’ve already missed that boat because it’s spread to neighboring villages. While I’m still figuring that out, it pops up in Sudan and Ethiopia.

  “People from the WHO and CDC come pouring in, but at this point, there’s nothing in the media about it, because it’s just Africa and nobody really gives a crap about dead Africans, but everybody in the community…”

  “The community?” I ask.

  “CDC, WHO, all of us guys who watch this stuff. Well, we know it’s bad because it’s literally exploding out of control and we aren’t even close to knowing anything about it.”

  “So that’s where we are? We don’t even know what it is?” I asked.

  “You’re jumping ahead of me, ah…ah…”

  “Zed. The name is Zed.”

  “Well, Zed, things get pretty out of hand pretty quickly. People in charge start freaking out. The Kenyan army comes in and things start getting ugly. All of the expats, the aid workers, the volunteers…they start bugging out. The Chinese, the Europeans, the Americans, they all go. Everybody sees what’s going down and nobody wants to stay around for it.”

  “What do you mean, ugly?” I asked.

  “Look around, Zed. This is only the beginning. I don’t just mean the beginning of the infection, I mean the beginning of what the infected will start doing once their biological urges get the best of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hunger, sex, the basic urges, but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Okay, well, hurry up, because I’m waiting for the what-fuck-is-wrong-with-me part.”

  “Okay, let me talk about the disease for a minute.”

  I nodded, dramatically, prompting him to move it along.

  “The virus—we’re pretty sure that’s what it is—is transferred through bodily fluids.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, in your case, I guess looking at your arm, you were bitten. Saliva gets in the wound, you get the virus.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Intercourse, of course.”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “Kissing would do it. Heck, if somebody sneezed or coughed and the droplets got in your eyes or you inhaled them, that would do it. This thing is contagious as hell.”

  “Wow.”

  “So I’m infected because I got bitten.”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure? I’m not acting all whacked out like the rest of these…” I wanted to say zombies, but couldn’t bring myself to use the word.

  “You’re infected, Zed. Everybody who gets bitten gets infected.”

  “Everybody?”

  “Everybody.”

  “But you said you didn’t know that much about it.”

  “Yeah, I did, but we’re almost certain that biting is a 100% effective transmission pathway.”

  “Crap,” I muttered. “Did you get bitten? Is that why you’re in here?”

  “Actually, I think mine was a sneeze or a cough when I was in a ward. I caught it that way.”

  “That sucks.”

  “More than you know…well actually, I guess you do know. But Zed, it doesn’t suck as much as it could have, and that’s why we’re having this conversation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the infection doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Like the flu. Some people get it bad, some don’t. Some die, most don’t.”

  “So…” I prompted.

  “Zed, when did you get bitten?”

  “Sunday.”

  “And this is early Thursday morning.”

  I nodded.

  “And what symptoms did you have?”

  “I felt feverish within fifteen or twenty minutes, and then within a half hour or so, I passed out and stayed out for two days.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, I woke up, disoriented, dehydrated, hungry as hell. I felt like crap.”

  “And your eyes, they were dilated, like they are now?”

  “Yeah, I guess, I mean I didn’t know until I got to the hospital. I just knew the sun and bright lights were bothersome.”

  Jerome said, “Yeah, that’s because your eyes are permanently dilated now.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It could be worse.” Jerome looked around.

  “Are you saying that I’m not going to wind up like them?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but right now you and I are what they’re calling slow burners.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “When somebody catches this infection,” Jerome told me, “they develop a fever, usually pretty quickly, but sometimes it might take days to develop, depending on how they catch it. If the initial infection is small, it might take more time to develop enough of the virus in the body for symptoms to show.”

  “I’m guessing that happens in the case of sneezing and coughing transmission?” I asked.

  “We’re not certain yet, but maybe.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, the symptoms almost always include a fever, headache, nausea, and sometimes diarrhea.”

  “Like the flu?” I ask.

  Jerome answered, “Yes, but there’s more. The fever gets high, like in the 104 to 106 range, in a hurry.”

  “I know that’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not. In most cases, brain damage occurs. Nerve damage occurs.”

  “What kind of brain damage?”

  “In most cases the frontal lobes are severely damaged. Pretty much everything that makes us human, such as complex thought, emotion, and empathy are debilitated or destroyed.”

  “Fuck,” slippe
d out of my mouth again before I could catch it.

  “The basic functions mostly survive, though in a ten to fifteen percent of the cases, the host just dies. The ones that don’t die, end up like these guys.” Jerome pointed to the aimless, chaotic mass in the room.

  “We’ve figured out that the body temperature after the initial fever correlates very strongly with brain function loss.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Did anyone take your temperature, Zed?”

  I shook my head. “Not until I got here.”

  “You seem pretty normal, like you’ve got your wits about you. I’m guessing you’re between ninety-nine and a hundred.”

  “Where are you?” I asked Jerome.

  “I got lucky, Zed. I come in at ninety-nine point three. Just over a half-degree above normal.”

  “You seem normal.”

  “I am. I’m a little klutzy. I’m little hyperactive, like I’m on a perpetual caffeine buzz, but I’m lucky.”

  “And you think that’s where I’ll be?”

  “I think so, Zed.”

  “And you CDC guys call it a slow burn because the final temperature is above normal, but lower than these other guys?”

  “Mostly right. For slow burners, the initial fever doesn’t go up to 106, and doesn’t stabilize too far above normal. The crazy guy that you were wrestling with when I walked up, he was probably running at about 102 to 103. The really whacked out ones in here, they’re above 104. With the high temperature, the metabolic rate shoots through the roof. They need calories like you wouldn’t believe. They probably need twice the calories that a normal person needs.”

  “Wow.” I said.

  “Like I said, their metabolisms are running amok. They need to feed.”

  “So, are you sure I’m a slow burner?” I asked.

  “Once the fever starts, the temperature can spike very fast, and they turn from normal to brain-damaged whack jobs pretty quickly, but for slow burners the whole thing usually runs its course in about two days. When you come out of it, based on what we know so far, you pretty much are what you are…mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Some continue to deteriorate.”

  “You mean their temperature goes back up?”

  “Yes, slowly.”

  “And how many end up like us? How many are immune altogether?”