A knock on the office door barely preceded its opening. A grimy Marine festooned with combat gear said, “I’ve got someone who should be on your plane.” He opened the door wider to reveal a short, dark skinned woman holding a tiny bundle in a hospital blanket. The Marine wore a mask. The woman didn’t.
“I’m sorry, but I can only take people with an enumerated list of specialties.”
“Yeah, but you’re gonna want to take her and her baby too.” Noah held his hands out in invitation for him to explain. “We fought our way down to Scripps hospital. Our CO’s wife was there recovering from a car accident. The place was a hodgepodge of barricaded wards. Some had turned, some hadn’t, and everybody was fighting everybody. On our way back out with the colonel’s wife, we got stopped by a doctor and a nurse who told us to take this woman and her baby, and to guard them with our lives.”
“And why is that?” Noah asked, eyeing the silent and impassive woman repeatedly.
“Because, they said, she’s immune. She came out of the maternity ward where she’d been sealed up tight with a coupla dozen other women, newborns, and medical staff for almost a full day. Everybody else, other than her and her baby, had caught the P. and turned or died. She hadn’t. Neither of them had. They tested their blood—twice—and said they were both virus-free. Completely healthy.”
“Had she been vaccinated?” Noah asked.
“No. The doctors were positive. They said the blood tests confirmed it. She’d never gotten the vaccine.”
“So she’s…naturally immune?” The young Marine officer shrugged. “I’ve never heard of that before.”
“That’s why they said you should take real good care of her…and her baby.”
The woman had not said one word. “What’s your name?” Noah asked. She looked back up at the Marine who had escorted her there.
“She doesn’t speak English. Her name is on her hospital bracelet.”
“Where’s she from?” Noah asked.
“Papua, New Guinea, they said.”
Noah nodded and directed the woman and baby to the door on the left.
Chapter 38
NEW ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 106, 2100 GMT (5:00 p.m. Local)
“You never even asked me how my temperament test went,” Samantha said.
“I saw you the next day,” Emma replied. “So I knew you passed.” Samantha didn’t seem satisfied by Emma’s straightforward answer. “Why am I meeting this guy?”
“You’re both professors,” the girl replied. “I thought you’d want to hear him out.”
“Is he Infected or Uninfected?”
“Un-.”
Emma and Sam entered the small office in their headquarters. A stout, graying man in full PPE rose at the far end of a conference table. “How do you do?” Emma said.
“Okay, I guess. I’m Dr. Frank Porter, with the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech.”
“Emma Miller. Professor of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. Have a seat.” The man seemed nervous and fidgeted. If he had been infected, Emma would’ve been concerned. “How are things at Virginia Tech these days?”
The man seemed not to know how to answer. “You mean, after…? Most everyone is dead…or infected.” That confirmed what Dwayne had reported.
He’s looking for sympathy, came the voice in Emma’s head. “I’m sorry,” she said, more a test of the voice’s hypothesis than a desire to put her visitor at ease.
“Thank you.” Emma couldn’t tell whether he sounded sincere, but doubted that he did. “I’ve heard that, despite your…tactics, you’re a reasonable person and not a…a….”
Emma waited, but he failed to complete the thought. “Why are you here?”
“Agriculture.” It was a timely subject. The proposal to rebalance food production and consumption by reduction of the population had lost its champion with Walcott’s death, but was still on the table. “People are hungry,” Dr. Porter said. “This young lady here said you might be willing to work together to improve agricultural output.”
Samantha tried her unartful smile. Porter seemed stuck in the preliminaries—establishing that there wasn’t enough to eat and determining that Emma was willing to partner with Uninfecteds—which she wanted to get past. “I am. So how do we do it?”
“Thirty-four percent of the state’s land is devoted to agriculture,” Porter said. “Virginia produces wheat, barley, peanuts, potatoes, snap beans, cucumbers, sweet corn, soybeans. Hay for livestock. We’ve got poultry, beef, dairy, farm raised fish. We even grow apples and grapes. And we can convert land used for tobacco to growing food crops.”
“That’s one of the reasons we chose Virginia. Why don’t we have enough food?”
“Well, most of the best farmland is south of Richmond—east of here.”
“If we expand in that direction,” Samantha said, “it’ll take us closer to Norfolk.”
When Porter didn’t seem to understand, Emma explained. “We’re trying to avoid open military conflict with the national forces that still remain in and around Norfolk.”
“I understand you’ve got issues.”
“We’ve got issues,” Samantha replied, “if we’re working together.”
“Fair enough. But east is where the farmland is. Campbell, Appomattox, Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax Counties. Those aren’t that close to the coast.”
“There’s dirt everywhere,” Samantha noted. “Why not just farm where we are?”
That elicited a lecture on the gritty sand best for sugar beets and carrots, intermediate silts, and fine clay more suited to wheat, beans, potatoes, and rapeseed. “The best all-around soil is loam, which is fortyish percent sand, 40 percent silt, and 20 percent clay. That loam lies east of here.”
Dr. Porter described the history of the domestication of species like wheat, which had been selectively bred over the millennia to maximize production and nutritional value. “Eighty percent of our food supply, directly or indirectly—via livestock eating grass or grain fodder—comes from cereal crops, which are nothing more than varieties of grass like barley, sorghum, millet, oats, and rye. The majority of our food comes from just three cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—which should be our focus. But without active management with herbicides and pesticides, those tamed species would be driven to extinction by hardier wild plants that seize abandoned farm fields.
“Some crops—rhubarb, potatoes, artichokes—can fend off the encroachment. They’ll do fine unattended for several seasons. But before we lose entire species forever, we need a seed collection program focusing on heirloom crops, not hybrids, whose seed supply is disrupted.” Porter said mankind owes its existence to the earth’s thin layer of topsoil, which is disintegrated rock hosting a microbial ecosystem that processes decaying matter and recycles plant nutrients. “Plants need topsoil with four things—water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—which farming saps from the soil. Ancient Egyptians depended on annual flooding of the Nile, whose silt replenished nutrients, but we use fertilizer. With access to petrochemicals cut off, the land will quickly lose its vitality.”
“What should we be growing,” Emma asked, “to avoid exhausting the land?”
“Without fertilizer, or letting fields lie fallow for multiple growing seasons to revitalize themselves naturally, which is highly inefficient land management, we’ve got to revert to older methods of farming. Crop rotation, simpler farm implements, and manure.” The Norfolk four course rotation, coincidentally named but originating in Britain, would keep the land fertile. “First you grow legumes, peas, beans, lentils, soy, peanuts, clover, or alfalfa. What you don’t harvest for human consumption, you allow livestock to graze on to produce traditional manure, or you plow the crop into the soil for use as green manure. Both methods pump nitrogen back into the soil.
“The next year, you plan
t nitrogen hungry wheat for humans to eat. The following season you plant root crops. That could be potatoes for us to eat, but you could also plant biennials like turnips, rutabagas, or kale, which are flowering plants that take two years to complete their lifecycle. They can be harvested to fatten up livestock over the summer, or kept in the ground until needed for feed during the winter. They’re a lot better than energy poor roughage like hay. And cultivating livestock will provide you not only with fresh meat, but also dairy products rich in vitamin D, which is in short supply in dark winter months when your skin can’t synthesize it from sunlight.
“In the fourth year, the Norfolk rotation dictates growing barley for animal feed before looping back around to legumes. Not only does that rotation maintain the fertility of the soil, but by varying the species you grow, you break any infestations of pests or pathogens that prey on any one type of plant. Using that method ought to support ten people per five acres of farmland.”
For fertilizer they could use the nitrogen from unprocessed animal manure, or human manure cleansed of microorganisms by open, aerated composting, or closed, oxygen starving bioreactors. “Each human produces about a hundred pounds of feces, and ten times as much urine, each year. That’ll yield about 450 pounds of cereals.” Assuming they lost access to mined calcium phosphate, they could spread crushed bone meal from animal skeletons and teeth, which is rich in phosphorus, and potassium from potash, which they could easily extract from wood ashes.
“Okay,” Emma finally said. “You’re now the head of our Community’s agriculture. Prepare a plan—land and farming equipment needed, seed and animal collection, crop rotation, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides needed—and I’ll review it.”
The man hesitated. “Will I be working for you, or for the Stoddards?”
“I can have you report to President Stoddard, if that’s what you want.”
“No. I want to work for you, not…her. Mrs. Stoddard.”
“I understand,” Emma said. “You’ll report to me, then.”
Chapter 39
FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO
Infection Date 108, 1400 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)
“You’re gonna need a mask,” said the deputy sheriff, a Native American from the Navajo tribe, who halted at the police tape barring the door of the high school gymnasium.
“Oh, no,” Isabel replied. “We’ve been vaccinated.”
“It’s not for that. It’s for…the smell.” Isabel and Rick donned the masks he offered without further hesitation, then ducked under the yellow tape.
The interior of the gym was dark. “Wait. Stop,” said their escort, wearing a cowboy hat and khaki uniform. Isabel could make out basketball hoops and stands, and large bundles of abandoned camping or other equipment strewn all about the court. Even through the mask, she could detect the faintly putrid, steely smell that permeated the stagnant air.
The deputy flicked on a heavy-duty flashlight. When its beam lit the abandoned piles of gear, Isabel gasped. Rick’s grip found her elbow as if to catch her.
It wasn’t gear that was scattered everywhere. It was bodies. Body parts, to be more accurate. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people. A headless torso with a single arm. A long string of intestines trailing a blood streaked crawl under the stands. A woman in a fetal curl whose hair hung from shreds of scalp. Stumps where legs should be. Hands slipped from their protective cover of eyes gouged black.
The hardwoods were dark with blood. When Isabel turned to see the revulsion shown in Rick’s squinting eyes, her boots stuck to the floor. The smell resolved into the separate reek of blood, urine, and feces like on Rouses Point Bridge, but enclosed in the stifling gym. The walls were smeared from indistinct slides to the floor and occasionally adorned with bloody handprints like ancient cave drawings or macabre, preschool finger paint. Some had died in huddles—families, friends, schoolmates—others in lone, desperate attempts to escape. A body dangled from the stanchions that held aloft a backboard. Upturned sneakers were all that were visible where a man or woman had tried to wedge their body behind the top row of the stands. Other remnants of people extended outward from gaps in row after row of bench seating running the length of the court on both sides.
Old women. Little children. The sounds of the massacre must have been horrific.
“We found this after the army retook Farmington,” said the deputy. “Nobody who saw what happened survived. Whatever Infecteds did this are somewhere else now, or killed in the army’s reoccupation. After finding this, the soldiers quit taking infected prisoners and went on a killing spree, shooting Infecteds, even the calm ones, on sight.”
“How many…?” Isabel had to swallow bile. “How many died here?”
“Don’t know. This was an evacuation shelter. The last count they called in before whatever happened was 1,065, plus Red Cross, city officials, and Guardsmen.” Isabel’s gaze followed his flashlight’s illumination, but she had seen enough. “You mind,” he said, “if I ask you a question? You’re the expert, right, on Infecteds?” He flicked off the beam. In the darkness, he said, “Why? Why would they do this?”
Jesus, she thought. How the hell do I know? “Can we go outside now?”
Rick and Isabel followed the deputy back to the exit. The only sounds were the noisy soles of their sticking boots. The flood of sunlight caused Isabel to squint, but she swiped the mask from her face, breathed deeply of the dry desert air, and hunched over and grabbed her knees, very close to retching. When she looked up, the deputy awaited her answer.
“Before the virus reached here, we’d observed only three categories of Infected violence. They could kill you coldly, rationally, to take your supplies or eliminate you as a threat.” She swallowed hard, straightened herself up, and tried to provide the analysis, like this, to people, like the deputy, who did the actual work. “The second reason Infecteds kill is when something triggers an adrenal rage, which is typically anything but rational.”
Isabel closed her eyes at the recollection of the sights inside and took deep breaths. Rick’s arm snaked around her shoulder. “And the third reason they kill is when a crowd forms at a blockade or other chokepoint, their density increases, and their members get immersed psychologically into the crowd. That essentially hypnotizes them and turns them into a unified mob capable of unspeakable violence in overcoming whatever obstacle that mob faces. That has seemed like the greatest threat. Individuals or small groups can be dealt with—killed—whether the rational types or the adrenally enraged. But a large enough mob of Infecteds, totally unconcerned by death, can break through almost any barricades and keep up their killing until the crowd disperses and their adrenaline resorbs.”
A helicopter gunship less than a mile away made a strafing run—brrrrrrap—against some unseen target. It disappeared repeatedly through or behind column after column of black and gray smoke before firing a string of whooshing rockets, quickly followed by their boom-boom-boom-boom. It wheeled up into the sky and away from whatever carnage lay splattered beneath it. It was a sight not even worth noting these days.
“But since Pandoravirus got here, we’ve been observing more and more what you might classify as a fourth kind of violence, or some hybrid of the three that I just described. Calculated, intentional mass violence. Crowds forming, or being formed by leaders, into sufficient density to cause full psychological immersion, then directed—consciously or instinctively—to unleash their unthinking rampage on a target of that crowd’s or those leaders’ choosing.”
“Like…they’re forming an army,” the deputy asked, “of the insane?”
“Not exactly. An army implies training, organization, and equipment, and some durability to justify those investments. These crowds we’re seeing form, ad hoc, with or without leadership, for the express purpose of overwhelming Uninfecteds. It’s behavior somewhere between psychology, from which should emerge an instinct of survival, and sociology, which co
uld sacrifice individuals in service of that group’s goals.”
“They mob up,” the deputy summarized, “and rip whoever opposes ’em to pieces.”
From the deputy’s radio came an unintelligible crackle, to which the deputy responded. All Isabel had made out was an address, which was the next stop on their tour of horrors. It was a medical clinic in which four beaten, traumatized women were handcuffed, crying, on cots. Whimpering, begging, they immediately turned their attention to Isabel. “Please! Help us!” “Make them let us go!” “Oh, God, please just kill me!”
Isabel was momentarily stunned into silence. “Wha…what’s going on here?”
A nurse in full PPE dragged her away. “They were raped.” The woman’s low voice was barely audible over the whimpering pleas from the room next door.
“Please! Dear God!” “Kill me, please! I’m begging you!”
“By Infecteds?” Isabel asked. The nurse nodded slowly. “And they’re sick?” Another nod. Isabel’s head fell and eyes closed. “My God.”
“What do we do?” the nurse asked urgently. “They’ve all got fevers. They’re all gonna turn…or die. Should we even try to save them? The army will just gun them down.”
“You’re supposed to help us!” “We came to you!”
Isabel had no idea what to say. Not a single thought popped into her head, and for a moment she imagined that she was an Infected. Blank. Mindless. Mute.
“Treat them just like you would anyone else,” Rick instructed. “Dress their wounds. Flip them over facedown. Hydrate them.”
“And then? If they survive?”
“Hand them over to the army. You’ve done your job. They’ll do theirs.” The nurse shook her head vigorously, not in rejection but as if to rid her mind of the image.
They said nothing in the back of the deputy’s SUV on the way to their next stop. “Our son couldn’t run fast enough,” the father said, choking on his words. “He was the oldest, but he was only six. When they caught him and started to…. He kept calling for us—Mommy! Daddy!—so I…I shot him. I carried our four-year-old. My wife had the baby.” The mother’s haunted gaze never left the floor, and she said nothing. Several times Isabel worried for their swaddled baby, clutched too tightly to its traumatized mother.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 25