Immunity: Apocalypse Weird

by E. E. Giorgi

  “I’m not going anywhere until all the buildings have been evacuated,” David told the Army Captain. “We need to sweep the buildings and help people get out. Most of us have been disoriented by the blindness. Who knows how many are still trapped inside, unsure of what to do.”

  “Bless you, sir,” the captain said. “We’ll need as many volunteers as possible to look out for the infected and rescue the others.”

  Anu tapped on David’s shoulder, the dazed look he’d spotted earlier on her face now replaced by renewed determination. “Let’s start with the dormitories,” she said.

  David nodded. “We need to find Jeff. I haven’t seen him since last night.”

  * TEN *

  The woman whimpers. She hadn’t expected the blow to her face, and now blood oozes out of her split cheek and mixes with tears. Stein feels a strange itch to examine the wound, maybe administer a sedative. But that would defeat the purpose.

  General Naga paces up and down the room. “Joyce, Joyce, Joyce” he says, dripping condescension in his high-pitched, grating voice that makes you think of nails on blackboards.

  Stein crosses his legs and taps his fingers. Quite the lady. Resilient, indeed. There are four cadavers in the room, their blood soaking the blue carpet, and yet she still refuses to cooperate. Who knows how much longer she’ll keep them in there. Time has always been something the General overlooked, as if the ticking of the clock never really mattered to him.

  From the reflection through the window, Stein glimpses the sizzling rage of the fire approaching. Time may not be important, but being roasted alive is not in his plans. He knows that now that the blindness has ended, the military squads will start swarming into the building.

  The few that survive, that is.

  So easy to pop their brains during the blindness. A tad unnerving, he’ll admit, to hear the General kill them one after the other during the blindness, the only one, from what he claims, who could still see perfectly throughout the entire, almost endless night.

  Pop, pop, pop, and they all came down like domino pieces. Of course he couldn’t kill them all in one night. But that was an easy fix. A brilliant one, in fact: spreading H7N7 among eight hundred armed men. All you need is a handful of productive infection to exterminate hundreds. And time it well. That, they had done. Subtly brought the virus on the premises two months earlier. A very low dose, as not to trigger obvious symptoms. Stein’s brilliant idea. A light cold, half a degree of fever—Army men shake that off easily. Nobody would raise the alarm over that. A few days of a mild cold, then the virus is gone and the fun begins.

  And it sure did, right on time for Naga’s arrival.

  Stein gets up, steps over one of the dead officers, and walks to the window. The firefighters look like tiny little ants fighting a giant. There’s nothing they can do with a blaze like that. How come they haven’t started evacuating the other buildings yet? They must be still disoriented from the blindness.

  Wait, there’s more.

  Stein leans against the window and squints.

  Bodies. All over the place. An armored vehicle, the Army Guard, most likely, right behind the fire engines and ambulances. Without orders from the above ranks, and with a virus running havoc among their own men, they’re ready to throw in the towel.

  There’s another blow, the crack of bones under soft tissue.

  Joyce whimpers. That’s all she’s got left. A whimper.

  Stein turns away from the window and watches the handyman, one of those Harley Davidson guys whose Stalin-like mustache compensates for his baldness. He’s already cracked three or four of Joyce’s ribs, plus her wrists. The General told him not to get to the legs just yet. They may have to get her out of here quickly. Intact legs tend to be useful under those circumstances.

  The General looks down on Joyce, a smirk plastered on his gray face.

  The man enjoys pain.

  Heck, the man lives off pain, like a leech feeding off the moans and cries of humanity.

  “What did you just say, Joyce?” General Naga asks.

  Joyce lies on the floor against her desk. The cute salmon pink suit she was wearing so elegantly yesterday is now torn and stained. Her locks, dyed blonde and carefully crafted, are now flat and plastered against her skull. She lies curled like a comma, her head tilted backwards and her hands tied behind her back. Bloodied, bruised, her arms twisted. Finished, you would say, if it weren’t for her eyes.

  Man, those eyes.

  Pretty. Yes, of course, that’s how Stein saw them the first time he met her in person. Stein, who until then was an unknown physician hidden in a cubicle over at occupational medicine, doing new employee physicals and teaching CPR training. Then H7N7 happened and suddenly Joyce remembered she had a whole crew of underpaid meds on campus and made them part of a special biosurveillance committee. Oh yeah, Stein remembers those clear blue skies when she walked over and shook hands with him. Made sure he had all the resources and comforts to do his job. Little did she know, Stein had already sold his soul to the devil.

  Too late, ma deuce.

  General Wick Naga. Stein’s pretty sure Wick is short for Wicked, though the man will never reveal little tidbits of his life like that. Brilliantly devious. At times a little too full of himself, but that’s ok. Nobody’s perfect.

  The General steps on Joyce’s ankle and shifts his full body weight onto her leg. She closes her eyes and howls, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “What did you just say?” he snarls.

  Harry the Handyman crosses his arms, showing off his Popeye biceps and sniggers like an idiot who’s had too much beer and has nothing left to do but giggle like a woman.

  Joyce opens her eyes and spits, “That you’re an asshole!”

  Wow.

  Just wow.

  The woman’s got guts. There she is, lying like a broken doll, and yet she won’t give up.

  Harry the Handyman stops giggling. His wide forehead scrunches down into a question mark. He lifts a fist, the studded black bracelet on his right wrist glistening under the fluorescent light. “Boss. Shall I?” he asks.

  Surprisingly the General shakes his head. “No,” he says. And then turns to the window. “No.”

  He grabs the curtain, pulls it all the way to the side. “See that, Joyce?” he says. And somehow he manages to switch his voice to smooth, smooth and mellow like an old Jazz tune. Really. Anybody who can do that must be the devil himself. He taps on the window and repeats the question. “Look at that, Joyce. The world out there is a mess. Broken. Sick. Polluted. Humanity has turned into an infestation. How many billions, now? Seven?”

  Hi eyes shift to Stein. “Close to eight,” Stein says.

  The General shakes his head. “Close to eight. How can our tiny planet feed so many people? Do you ever wonder about that, Joyce?”

  Joyce closes her eyes and doesn’t reply. Obviously, she has other worries at the moment.

  “Do you ever wish,” the General presses on, “we had a reset button for this sick, wounded world of ours? A magic button you could just press and start over. Fresh beginnings. New humanity. Humans, you failed your trial, erase everything and start over.” The General snorts, the last sentence pronounced in a feminine falsetto. He then turns, suddenly, abruptly, swoops down on Joyce and snarls, “Well the time has come to start over. Erase everything, purge this failure of humanity. It’s over. There’s no going back, now. Countdown has begun. You saw it yesterday, when all light disappeared from the face of the earth. You saw it again, when I was able to pull the trigger on your bodyguards. Killed them in an instant. Killed them just like that, because you see, I, of all people, could still see. Wonder why that is, Joyce? Oh come on, you do wonder. It’s because I have the power and you don’t.”

  He leans into her face, his voice soft again, almost loving if you didn’t know the man isn’t capable of any love. “Admit it, Joyce. You can act up all you want, but the truth is, you’re defeated. The Lab is burning. People are dying. Even t
he renowned scientists you fought so hard to bring over here. Make a team of qualified experts—is that what you said?”

  “Accomplished,” Stein interrupts.

  He glares at him, and suddenly Stein knows what the solitary fly feels when it crawls on a dump at the end of the summer. Disposable.

  “I mean,” he says, trying to sound casual. “That’s the word she used. Accomplished experts.”

  “Shut up, Stein.”

  There. He did it again. It’s Doctor Stein, and he doesn’t even pronounce it right, with the long e, as in spleen, not i as in fine. He lets it run. He always does, because Stein is a nice man, deep inside. And all this blood soaking the carpet is starting to nauseate him. He went into medical school not because of the blood, though normally he wouldn’t mind. But today, today the fire’s giving him an itch. Enough of this crap already. Let’s move on, shall we?

  “Joyce,” the General says, his voice still tuned on mellow. “Did you wonder at all where Elizabeth was during the blindness?” He fiddles in his pocket, produces a shiny object, a necklace with a silver pendant. He raises it and examines it.

  Joyce—defeated Joyce, lying on the floor with a bloody cheek and her hands tied behind her back—squints. Somehow the name Elizabeth has perked her interest.

  The General lets the pendant swing in the air and tilts his head. “To my beloved,” he says, and then smirks. “Wonder where I got this, Joyce?”

  “Liar!” Joyce screeches. “You’re a filthy liar! That’s not Elizabeth’s pendant.”

  He exhales, rolls his eyes, and hands the pendant over to Harry. “Read what it says, Harry.”

  Harry touches the pendant reluctantly as though it might burn him or something. He squints, rotates the pendant and brings it two inches away from his nose, a deep furrow splitting his wide forehead.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Stein says, snatches the pendant out of Harry’s hand and reads: “To my beloved Elizabeth. Love, Mom.”

  The General nods. “Isn’t it true your beloved child always wears that pendant and never takes it off?”

  “I don’t believe you,” Joyce snarls. “You could’ve gotten it anywhere.”

  He inhales, frustration seeping through his face. “Fine,” he says. “Get me my phone, Harry.”

  Harry complies. The man’s got chicken brains but he sure knows how to follow orders. Which is why he gets to tag along. The General punches a number on his phone, then puts it on speaker. One ring. Two. Three.

  “Hello??” Female voice. Young, Distressed.

  Joyce stiffens.

  “Helloooo?? Get me outta here! Please! Please get me outta here.” Sobs. Broken words.

  And it’s there, at last. Terror. Surfacing in Joyce’s blue eyes. Joyce’s steel eyes, so strong, so indestructible. Until now. Tears roll down her face.

  “It’s—it’s a recording,” she whispers. “It’s not her. You’re bluffing.”

  “Elizabeth?” the General says on the phone.

  “Get me outta here!!!” the voice replies, hysterical.

  “Can you say hi to your mom, Elizabeth?”

  Pause. “What?”

  “Your mother, honey. Would you like to say hi to her?”

  Funny how there’s no sweetness to honey when the General says it. No sweetness at all.

  “Say it loud and clear. ‘Hi, Mom.’ Come on, now.”

  Elizabeth breathes heavily on the phone. “Mom? Are you there, Mom?”

  Joyce cries. There, there. Broken like a small doll.

  “Beth,” she sobs. “Beth, I’m here. You’re going to be fine, I promise you.”

  “Mom! Mom, there’s a bomb! It’s ticking! They put it under my chair and they strapped me over it. I can see the countdown.” Elizabeth’s voice rises in pitch. “Please help me, Mom. It’s at—”

  “Twenty-one hours, thirty-five minutes and thirteen seconds, right, Elizabeth?” the General interjects.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth whimpers. “Please, Mom, pl—”

  And right then, the General cuts the call. What an artist of all things evil. He drops the phone in his pocket and paces. “Oh, don’t worry. She’s safe.” He smirks, waves a hand in the air. “You know, aside from the ten pounds of TNT she’s sitting on. That was necessary. But really, you should thank us, Joyce. You know your daughter always had a knack for speeding. How many people driving on the I-5 in downtown L.A. do you think survived when the blindness hit? Rush hour. Right when Elizabeth gets off work and hits the road.”

  Terror spreads across Joyce’s face. Her lower lip trembles, her whole body shivers.

  “You bastard,” she whimpers. “You disgusting bastard.”

  The General flashes a broad smile. He’s enjoying the show. “That’s not very grateful of you, Joyce.”

  Harry giggles and somehow Stein wants to punch him. But he knows better.

  “Elizabeth is safe, whisked away from traffic one second before darkness fell on humanity and the freeways turned into a bloody mess of body limbs squashed in crushed metal.” He lifts a hand to his face and covers his eyes. What an actor. “I don’t want to even think what kind of mess the rescuers had to clean up once the darkness lifted.” And then he sneers. “Assuming there were rescuers who survived.”

  Stein is getting edgy. He rocks on his heels, rubs his hands together. “Sir.”

  “What?” There’s the rusty, grating voice again.

  “I hate to be the party pooper, but the fire’s real close now.”

  The General squints at the window, then flashes a brisk nod to Harry. “Lift her up, Harry. I’m pretty sure our director has finally decided to cooperate.”

  Harry grabs Joyce by the waist and pulls her up. She swallows a screech of pain and then snarls back, “Where are you taking me?”

  “Oh, you know where, sweetie. To the Uranium reservoir. Aren’t you showing us the way, my dear?”

  And that final sneer scrawled on the General’s face…

  Pure. Evil.

  * ELEVEN *

  The sun was an angry, orange disk in the sky. The column of smoke had morphed into a dense, thick fog that enveloped the whole mesa. People in the streets were running. David and Anu glimpsed a couple of scientists loading their cars with boxes of notes and papers and then screeching away in a hurry, the tires leaving black marks on the pavement.

  “Do you have a car?” David asked as they jogged down to the dormitories.

  “An old Subaru. Thank goodness my tank is full, gas trucks haven’t been coming up here much since the nuclear explosion.”

  “That’s good,” David mumbled. “About your tank, I mean. I left my Jeep with a guy camped at the bottom of the canyon. Who knows if I’ll ever find it again.”

  He thought of Nawat, briefly, and his sick wife, and wondered if they were still ok. If the blindness had affected them, too.

  An MRAP vehicle rolled by on the street. Anu and David froze for a minute, the same thought crossing their minds. Before they could run, a speaker from the turret started blaring, “Mandatory evacuation orders in effect for the entire laboratory premises. Repeat: all people on the premises are required to leave effective immediately.” The vehicle kept wobbling up the street, toward the fire, the barking of the speaker trailing behind.

  David swallowed hard and squeezed Anu’s arm. “One of those in the wrong hands and we’re all done for good.”

  Anu nodded, watching silently as the MRAP disappeared behind a curve. Her eyes strayed to the top of the multilevel garage structure. The Koala helicopter that had arrived two days earlier was still there. She wondered what was happening over at the Tawana building, where Joyce was.

  The relentless fear that anyone could turn into a murderer lingered in their thoughts like a bad aftertaste. Trust no one, the captain had said. Not even your loved ones. Kill, if necessary. This is what it has come down to.

  The complete lack of communications and the spread of the viral madness among the military had generated a chaotic “run for your lif
e” reaction among the people. Yet random acts of kindness and heroism still survived, like the firefighters still battling the fire. Ambulance sirens were still heard from time to time, rushing up and down the streets. An improvised emergency station had been set up by the management building, the few volunteers running it struggling with the last medical supplies, blood for the injured, antibiotics.

  Flames lapped the side of a new building, sending a new wave of ashes and burnt debris floating in the air.

  “Come on, Anu,” David said. “We need to move faster.”

  She nodded. They had so little time, now. And what David had told her about his simulation kept nagging her. The virus can’t be just a few years old, he’d said.

  Yes it can. It can if it’s manmade.

  Manmade. Like the virus her mother had claimed was theoretically possible.

  They’d said she’d died because she had failed. They’d said she’d killed herself because she was a liar and she didn’t have the guts to face the shame.

  What if my mother… died to protect the world from a deadly secret?

  People were storming out of the dormitories carrying boxes, laptops, belongings. A bald man with round glasses and a wide forehead pearled with sweat stopped them. “What’s going on? What the hell happened yesterday, why couldn’t anyone see?”

  David shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Just get to safety and be aware of shooters. They’re not always—friendly.”

  The man bulged his eyes. “The virus? So it’s true, the virus is here now?”

  Anu said, “The virus has always been here. And now it’s manifesting itself.”

  The man blinked, his round cheeks and jowls trembling with fear. “I’m out of here!” he yelled, running to the curbside where a Volvo station wagon already packed with people and suitcases was waiting for him.

  David turned to Anu. “I’m not leaving until I find Jeff.”

  She nodded. “His suite is in the west wing of the Oppenheimer building, sixth floor. Mine’s on the fourth floor, on the opposite side. I need to get my notes and laptop. Let’s split, and if Jeff’s not in his suite we’ll keep looking.”