by Noah Mann
“That had to come down near the coast,” Schiavo said.
“If not in the ocean,” Lorenzen said. “Let’s go confirm the kill.”
Schiavo looked to Quincy.
“Bring the Humvee up,” she said. “Private Westin, get back to com and monitor reports from the checkpoints. Corporal Enderson...”
Schiavo hesitated there, a sudden cough interrupting her orders. The congestion cleared after a few seconds and she continued.
“Tell the fire crew to stand down.”
The town’s small fire department had been put on alert, prepared to respond if a successful shoot down had resulted in a crash and fire amongst the town’s widely scattered structures. As it appeared, though, any impact with the ground was beyond inhabited spaces.
“Fletch, you coming?”
Schiavo’s invitation was not unexpected, and I didn’t hesitate to accept. I climbed in the back seat of the Humvee as it pulled up, Lorenzen next to me and the captain up front with Private Quincy.
“Get us there, private.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
Five minutes later, guided by a glow to the west seeming to emanate near the coast road, we found what we’d come looking for, the wreckage ablaze on the sand, just shy of the lapping waters of the Pacific.
“Private Quincy, keep people back,” Schiavo ordered, noting a half dozen curious residents making their way toward the crash site.
Quincy headed off from where she’d stopped the Humvee on the beach and prevented those approaching from coming any nearer.
“It came apart,” Sergeant Lorenzen reported, his flashlight sweeping the shore and lighting up various pieces of debris. “Midair.”
I looked to the spot of the largest fire, the remnants of the drone’s fuselage crumpled and burning there, maybe ten yards from the water. Nearby were smaller blazes, pieces of wire and electronics smoldering. Amongst all these were chunks of the aircraft, some scorched, but most seeming to have been ripped from the airframe by a final, violent explosion as it neared impact with the ground.
“Wing,” Lorenzen reported, focusing his flashlight beam on the long, slender piece of debris. “Uh, Cap...”
Schiavo hadn’t said a word since dispatching Quincy to handle crowd control. She’d just walked amongst the bits of aircraft parts scattered along the shore, not even bothering to use her own flashlight. But at her sergeant’s call she finally activated its beam and joined him where he stood. I followed her a second later.
“That’s not any Hellfire missile,” Lorenzen said, lighting up what was still affixed to the underside of the wing, although bent and cracked.
“What is that?” Schiavo asked.
I approached the sliver of wing and used my own light to examine the slender cylinder affixed to what had been its underside. Its front end, near the leading edge of the wing, was bulbous, and had been a perfect half sphere before the crash deformed it. At its rear, the shape tapered to almost a teardrop configuration, with a slender tube extending from it, some mechanism wired to it as if it were a...
“A valve,” I said, realizing what I was looking at.
“What?” Schiavo asked, seeking clarification.
I stood and took a step back, away from the wreckage. Lorenzen noted my sudden wariness.
“Fletch, what is it?”
I looked to the sergeant, and then to the captain.
“That’s a nozzle,” I said, centering my light on the valve and its actuator. “This whole thing is a spray tank.”
Schiavo stifled another cough that came without warning, looking to her hand as she brought it away from her mouth.
“They haven’t been watching us,” she said.
I shook my head in agreement.
“They’ve been dosing us from the air,” I said.
Twenty Seven
It started without anyone realizing that it had even begun.
Sniffles were the initial complaint, though most had dismissed them. Then coughing, much as had happened for Schiavo. When the fevers began, mid-grade, hardly anything over 101, Commander Genesee sounded the warning that the biological attack we’d expected, feared, and confirmed by downing the drone two days earlier, had taken hold.
“We have thirty cases now,” Genesee told the assembled defense council. “Including yours truly.”
The man looked like death on two feet, skin pale and brow glistening. Elaine had begun to exhibit symptoms the night before, stuffy nose and an infrequent cough keeping her from a restful sleep. When I’d tried to feel her forehead just before we’d entered the town hall she’d gently blocked my hand, signaling with avoidance that her temperature was on the rise.
“I expect we’ll see double that in a couple days,” Genesee said. “And another doubling a few days beyond that. And so on.”
“Until everyone is sick,” Schiavo said.
Genesee nodded. But it was not the gentle bob of his flushed face that drew my attention. His right hand, resting on the table where he sat, tapped nervously, absently upon the wooden top. Soft little pecks, quick and slow, the cadence familiar.
Too familiar.
And I was not the only one noticing. Seated across from me, on the same side of the table as Genesee, Martin’s gaze was angled hard left, fixed very plainly on the doctor’s softly drumming fingers.
“There haven’t been any overflights since we downed their drone,” I said.
“They don’t need any more flights,” Mayor Allen explained. “They’ve introduced enough virus already. The rest will be spread person to person.”
“How bad is this going to get?” Elaine asked through thick sniffles.
“No way to know,” Genesee said. “Some may have few if any symptoms. Most, I believe, will be flat on their back by a certain point.”
“They’ll be incapable of participating in any defense,” Mayor Allen said.
“Then the Unified Government forces just walk in and take us,” Schiavo said. “Without much of a fight.”
“They have to have some treatment for the virus,” Genesee theorized. “Something to bring people back to health. Otherwise they’d just be taking a town of dead people.”
At the head of the table, Mayor Allen agreed. He’d not yet been affected by the sickness. His decades around sick people, perhaps, had granted him some tiny modicum of resistance, though expecting anything such as that to last, if it existed at all, was foolish.
“We have to find some way to weather this outbreak,” Martin said.
“Palliative care is all we can do,” Genesee said, looking directly to Schiavo next. “Without undertaking more drastic measures.”
Her refusal to allow any removal of the implants still inside Grace, Krista, and Brandon, had been based upon a moral code which, to me, seemed unwavering.
“We keep people hydrated,” Mayor Allen said, laying out a course of treatment. “That and rest. The sickest we’ll monitor either in the clinic, or on home visits.”
Genesee’s fingers stilled atop the table and he regarded both Schiavo and his predecessor with a look of plain disagreement, shaking his head as he stood.
“Just so you know, people are going to die from this,” the Navy doctor said. “They will die. And we could stop that, maybe, if we introduce a diluted vaccine. The effects could be lessened.”
“We’ve already discussed this,” Schiavo reminded him, her reddened eyes fixed on the man as she fought to suppress still another cough.
Genesee looked away, just standing there for a moment, trying to summon some argument, it seemed. But after a few seconds he simply turned and made his way along the conference table’s long edge and through the door past its end, leaving us, the Defense Council, to deal with the issue on our own.
“Would that work?” Elaine asked, repeating the question she’d raised when Genesee first proposed his idea after examining Grace and the children upon their return.
We looked to Mayor Allen, who was clearly stepping
back into his role as Doc Allen during this medical crisis.
“It could work,” the mayor said, his gaze fixing on Schiavo. “But I agree with the captain. Some things just aren’t right.”
I didn’t disagree with her decision, or the mayor’s concurrence. The possibility of a diluted vaccine did, however, leave me wishing that what had been implanted in me was still in place so I could volunteer its removal and use.
“So we treat the symptoms,” Martin said. “Keep people comfortable.”
“Yes,” Mayor Allen confirmed.
“Our fighting ranks are going to suffer,” I said, directing the appraisal at the one person I knew had already come to that conclusion.
“We do the best with what we have,” Schiavo said, stopping when a wet coughing fit prevented any further discussion for the day.
* * *
“Genesee,” I said, cornering Martin outside as the others drifted away from the town hall.
“What about him?”
“You saw the same thing I did,” I reminded the self-appointed spy hunter. “The way he was tapping the table.”
“Maybe it was just tapping.”
“There was a rhythm to it,” I said. “Like he’s used to doing that.”
“Fletch, let me handle this,” Martin chided me mildly. “I told you early on that I was afraid of a witch hunt, so let’s you and me not start our own.”
I understood where the man was coming from, but that didn’t negate the oddities which cast suspicions on the man.
“And let’s not forget,” Martin began, “he’s sick.”
“He’s also a doctor,” I said. “He could have the vaccine stashed somewhere so he can give himself occasional shots. Just enough to not get too sick. He wouldn’t even need to have an implant.”
“He wanted to cut the implant out of Grace and her children,” Martin reminded me. “Why do that to make a vaccine if you’re here to help bring us to our knees?”
“He would control it,” I said. “He could make it ineffective. Look, if things get bad enough, people will be clamoring for a vaccine, even if it’s a longshot. Do you think Allen and Angela will be able to stop a mob from demanding that they take the implants out of Grace? Out of the children? There are other children here. Children whose parents will be desperate. Genesee knows that, and he could negate any helpful effects by controlling any vaccine that would be made.”
Martin nodded, accepting what I was theorizing. Mostly.
“Fletch, even if you’re right, we need proof,” he said. “I need proof. Absolute proof. And you know why that is.”
I did.
“Because Angela will have whoever it is shot,” Martin said.
That sober reality gave me pause for a moment. I had to consider that my personal feelings toward the generally unlikeable Navy doctor might be clouding my assessment of him as a possible traitor. He was most definitely a difficult man to like, or even get close to. That, in itself, didn’t make him a traitor. And his actions, the tapping of his fingers, was that really enough that I could say, with any level of certainty, that his persona fit the profile of one who would turn against his countrymen?
“Maybe I’m overreaching,” I said.
“Maybe. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong.”
“But you think I am.”
To that, Martin nodded.
“I watched him most of yesterday,” Martin said. “He was dealing with sick people for twenty hours. If somewhere in there he was able to slip away, record a Morse message, then get it to a hidden transmitter, then he’s some super being.”
“There was another message?”
“Reporting on the sickness and the progress in shifting our ammunition supply to the new armory,” Martin said.
“He couldn’t have managed sending that?”
Martin shrugged.
“It’s possible.”
We were fighting a mostly unseen enemy, a virus, and a shadow. And we were losing to all three.
“So if it’s not him, then who?”
Martin said nothing to my question. A telling lack of response.
“You have a suspect,” I said.
Still, he said nothing, neither confirming nor denying my assertion.
“Martin, if there’s someone we should be wary of...”
“Proof, Fletch,” he said. “When I have proof.”
Twenty Eight
We had to do something. The illness was spreading. No one was on death’s door yet, but those infected, now nearing half the town, were laid up, most in bed, not a one of them functioning at more than fifty percent ability. Maybe less. In a few days it could be the entire town, minus those who’d been granted some immunity from the virus.
Including me.
“There is an option,” Mayor Allen said.
He’d stepped back into his old vocation, assisting Genesee at the town clinic. Taking five minutes away from his medical duties to talk to Schiavo, Martin, and me outside the front door of the town hall.
“Olin,” the mayor said.
“This isn’t what he told us about,” I said. “He said it wiped out an Iraqi town in days.”
“Do we know that?” Schiavo asked. “Does he?”
“He just described it as deadly,” Mayor Allen said. “But he didn’t specify the mechanism of death.”
“This can’t be Four Twelve,” I said.
“He’s a liar,” Schiavo said. “He’s trained to be.”
“What if death doesn’t come for weeks?” Martin suggested. “Or months? That would still give them time to introduce a vaccine and bring people back from the brink after any surrender.”
I was beginning to get the gist of where they were going with this. My assumption was that the idea began with Mayor Allen, while he was pondering the spreading effects as Doc Allen. He’d likely run the idea by Schiavo next, who’d then sought Martin’s counsel on the likelihood of me going along with what had been conceived.
“You want me to find Olin,” I said.
“He said he’d be close by,” Schiavo reminded me. “We know which way he headed when Sergeant Lorenzen dropped him at the checkpoint.”
There were many factors to consider in what they were asking of me. I would have to head into and, possibly, through enemy controlled territory. I would be looking for something akin to a needle in a haystack. And, was there really a realistic chance that the man, if I was able to locate him, would be able to provide any assistance that would matter—if he was even open to doing so?
But, foremost in my concerns, and paramount in my thoughts, was something else entirely. Someone.
“Elaine is sick,” I told the members of the Defense Council who’d been able to make the hastily called meeting. “Very sick.”
Schiavo was getting worse by the day, but was pushing through. Martin was beginning to exhibit the first symptoms of the bug that had been airdropped upon us, congestion and body aches, but no fever as yet. Mayor Allen was still holding strong, with no symptoms—or none that he would admit to.
But Elaine...
“I can’t leave her,” I said. “I’m already doing patrols while she’s home by herself.”
“I will make sure she’s taken care of,” Mayor Allen said.
“She would tell you to go, Fletch,” Martin predicted, accurately, I was certain.
Schiavo turned away and began coughing, planting her hands on the conference room table for support as the respiratory fit ran its course. After a full minute she looked back to me, Martin’s hand rubbing slow circles upon her back.
“I can’t order you to do this,” Schiavo said. “But I can beg.”
I shook my head at what she’d said.
“No,” I said. “You won’t do that. It’s not in you.”
She knew I was right. Even in desperation, Captain Angela Schiavo would not plead. Would not bow her head to another in submission. Would not fall to her knees.
But for her to suggest that she would in the fa
ce of all I knew about her, to me that spoke of the seriousness with which she saw our situation.
“I need to see Elaine first,” I said, acquiescing to the request.
“Of course,” Mayor Allen said. “Of course.”
* * *
Elaine, my love, lay in bed, curled into a ball, the covers pulled tight as she shivered beneath them. I watched her from the doorway to our bedroom, a memory flashing back. A memory of Colonel Ben Michaels, his body wrecked by starvation and illness, wasting away, unable to take another step. But in that instant he had made a sacrifice unthinkable in the world as it was before the blight. He had given his life so that another might live.
So that Neil, my friend, might live.
Whether that offering now seemed worthy of the man who had squandered it, I did not care. Looking upon my wife as she suffered through the effects of the illness brought to our town, I knew that I would make any sacrifice, bear any burden, suffer any threat, if there was a chance that it would heal her.
“Hey,” I said, entering the room and coming around the bed.
Her eyes opened and angled up to me, a smile building, bare and brief, but a smile nonetheless.
“Hey, yourself,” Elaine said.
I crouched and then sat on the floor so that I was even with her face. The heat from her bled across the small space that separated us. Her fever was spiking, and she wasn’t sweating. There would be no breaking of this sickness.
“Listen...”
I stopped there, trying to think of how to say what I had to say. How to tell her that, in this moment, when she needed me, truly needed me, I could not be there for her. I would not be there for her.
“You have to do it,” she said before I could craft any explanation.
“How do you know? How could you know?”
She coughed and tried to lift her head off the pillow. I put my hand to her cheek and eased it back down.
“I don’t know what, but I know that look.”
“They want me to find Olin. They think he might know more about what’s affecting us than he let on.”