Battle

by Tom Abrahams

  “I need some help,” he said. “I’m going to unlock these back wheels and you’re going to help me pull the gurney from the hearse.”

  “Why?”

  Taskar clicked the first lock, freeing the wheel. “We have to do something. If nothing else, we can’t let him die before we get to Abilene.”

  Blankenship shrugged. “I guess.”

  Taskar unlocked the second wheel and stood behind Lomas. Blankenship moved around him on the other side.

  “You’re going to have to put down that rifle for a second,” said Taskar. “I can’t do this alone and you can’t manage with one hand.”

  Blankenship wrapped his hands more tightly around the grip. “I can’t do that.”

  Taskar huffed and glared at Blankenship through the dark spatter on his visor. “What am I going to do? Where am I going to go?”

  Blankenship held the rifle out to the side and hesitated. He eyed the dying man in front of him and Taskar to his side. He laid the rifle up against the tailgate, setting its butt into a wide, weed-laced crack in the road.

  “Okay,” said Taskar. “These legs expand once we pull him out. So be ready for that when I press a latch underneath the bed.”

  Blankenship nodded his understanding from behind his visor. He gripped the front edge of the gurney with both gloved hands and awaited Taskar’s command. Taskar counted down.

  “Three…two…one…”

  Both men pulled the gurney outward, its wheels rolling easily along the thin carpet inside the back of the hearse. It was halfway out of the vehicle. Lomas wasn’t retching anymore. He wasn’t coughing or spitting out the thick infectious fluid that filled his lungs. He was twitching. His mouth was open, his tongue hanging from the side like a tired, overheated puppy. His breaths were weak, shallow, and rapid.

  Instead of hitting the latch to extend the legs, Taskar released his grip on the gurney and let it drop. It tilted awkwardly, Lomas’s weight shifting against the restraints, and Blankenship stumbled backward away from the light. His eyes ballooned with confusion and Taskar grabbed the rifle. Blankenship let go of the gurney to regain his balance and the wheeled bed clattered diagonally from the back of the hearse to the ground.

  Without hesitating, Taskar slipped his gloved finger onto the rifle’s trigger, flipped off the safety with his thumb, aimed it at Blankenship, and applied pressure to the trigger twice in quick succession. A pair of rounds exploded from the rifle and burrowed into Blankenship’s chest, ripping two perfect holes into the front of his hazmat suit above the oxygenator. A third shot drilled the air-supplying box with a thick thud that fried the display.

  Blankenship grabbed at his chest in the dim cast from the hearse’s interior lights, rolling on the ground like a turtle stuck on its back. His face guard fogged with his final breaths. His body spasmed and he went limp.

  Taskar walked to the guard and stood over him. He pulled the rifle tight to his shoulder, aimed for the opaque face mask and pulled on the trigger a fourth time. The force of the shot jerked the dead man’s body. Standing a few feet from the gurney, which had managed to stay awkwardly upright on the road, Taskar held the rifle with one hand, its barrel pointed at the ground.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said to Lomas through his mask, keenly aware the dying man strapped to a mattress soaked in blood, sweat, and urine couldn’t hear him. “But I can’t let you suffer anymore, and I can’t let you reach Abilene.”

  Taskar glanced over at Blankenship’s shadowy corpse as he readied his aim for Lomas. Through his mask he eyed his target and rested his finger on the trigger. He took two steps closer to Lomas and adjusted the rifle against the fabric at his shoulder, nestling the butt into a comfortable position. He wanted to make sure a single shot did the trick. He drew the rifle down, putting the sights at the infected man’s temple. As he began to apply pressure, Lomas’s eyes opened, teared, and fluttered. He mouthed, “Thank you.” By the time he finished forming the words, a true shot to his forehead ended his misery.

  Taskar dropped to his knees and let go of the weapon. He planted his gloved hands on the road and sucked in a deep, ragged breath. As he exhaled, a knot in his throat swelled and an overwhelming sadness shook his body. He sobbed, one shallow breath chasing the next as he tried to suppress the emotional ambush.

  When he finally calmed himself and sniffed back the snot that dripped from his nose, he pushed himself to his feet. He couldn’t leave the body here as roadkill, an offering to the swooping carrion feeders sure to come. As he wandered the gory scene, mindlessly searching for his next move, he was preoccupied with the vision of a bird ripping into the dead man’s flesh, devouring it, falling from the sky, and becoming the meal of an unwitting, famished family. The disease would spread and he’d still be responsible for it.

  Weak-kneed, he managed to drag the lopsided gurney to the side of the road, dropping it on its side in a dry culvert meant for water runoff. He trudged back to Blankenship and dragged his body across the road, raking the suit against the rough asphalt as he moved in short bursts.

  “I couldn’t leave you alive,” he muttered to the dead man. “You’d make sure we reached Abilene. Dead patient or not, you would’ve insisted, or you’d have killed me. I know that. This was self-defense.”

  He kicked Blankenship’s body the final couple of feet until it flopped into the grassless, weed-free ditch next to the gurney and stood at the edge of the road, bent over at his waist. His head ached at his temples; his body quivered with exhaustion. His vision blurred. He was dehydrated.

  Fighting the urge to collapse, he found his way back to the hearse and heaved out one of the gas cans. He carried it with both hands, the thick plastic banging against his knees, and dropped it at the highway shoulder next to the ditch. He fumbled with the spout until he managed to unlock the various safety mechanisms and tipped the can toward the edge of the road.

  The can glugged, and post-Scourge, Texas-refined gasoline, as valuable as gold or a loaded AR-15, spilled into the culvert. When he thought he’d poured enough, he tilted back the can, picked it up, and heaved a splash on top of the bodies. He closed the spout and lugged the half-empty can back to the hearse.

  From the glove box on the passenger’s side, he withdrew a box of waterproof matches and gripped it tightly with his gloved hand. He used his other to brace himself against the open door frame. The suit felt tight again, tighter than it should. His nose itched, his neck and shoulders ached. A subtle vibrating current, somewhat less than a tremble, coursed through his extremities. The darkness, verging on daybreak, was closing in on him.

  He sucked in the plastic-tasting air, his tongue coated in a thick, dry spit-paste, and put one booted foot in front of the other on his way back to the ditch. His shaking hands managed to slide open the slick plastic container and withdraw a long matchstick.

  Taskar adjusted his grip on the box and struck the stick across its side, igniting the match head. It sparked and sizzled and he held it there for a moment, watching it burn shades of blue and orange. Wisps of smoke wafted from the burning wood and dissipated into tendrils that spiraled into the air above him. He walked a half-dozen steps toward the fuel-laden ditch and flicked it toward the target.

  It found its fuel and the flames grew tall, cracking and popping as they spread across the ditch, lapping up the gasoline and engulfing the clothing, the suit, and the soiled mattress. The pyre was hot and strobed against the purple-hued black of the early morning west Texas sky.

  Taskar had seen so much horror in the years since he’d been orphaned and sheltered in the funeral home. He’d experienced the oppression of the Cartel, the slippery, ineffective governance of the Dwellers, and the anarchy that held sway over the territory south of the wall now.

  As a man with the rare duty of travelling both sides of the wall, of ferrying the good and the bad back and forth, he’d inhaled the intoxicating aroma of hope. He’d seen those living north of the wall rise from the ashes, become self-reliant, form a new gove
rnment, and do their best to recreate some semblance of civilization. It was night and day, or so he thought.

  Yet as he listened to his own breath inside the hot plastic cocoon surrounding his head and got lost in the angry flames that began to spread beyond the dead before dying in the dirt, he understood that both sides of the wall were the same. Both were replete with people looking out for themselves, self-serving survivalists whose primal instincts had overtaken more than two million years of cultural evolution.

  At least in Texas it was in your face. It was kill or be killed and you knew it from the moment you crossed the wall. Up there, in the north, they masqueraded their intentions with a veil of civility.

  Taskar backed away from the fire, appreciating the relative cool that came with distance, and with his hands on the hearse, worked his way around the back to close the tailgate. He eased his way back into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  He drove southwest, not sure exactly where he was going. Maybe Abilene, where he could warn the people of what was coming one way or another. Maybe somewhere closer if he couldn’t make it that far. He glanced to the passenger’s side rearview mirror at the thickening smoke billow above the orange flames.

  CHAPTER 15

  FEBRUARY 9, 2044, 7:39 AM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  “Do we know why she died?” asked Dr. Sharp of the broad-faced man standing in front of her. She was standing in the hallway outside a room called “No Man’s Land” in which a team of suited pathologists worked while tethered to filtered air tubes.

  No Man’s Land was rated BSL 3 on a scale of one to four. Access was restricted. The room was separated from the rest of the facility by sealed double doors and a series of anterior rooms. The air handling was separate, filtered, and non-recirculated, unlike most BSL 3 labs. There were four bodies now, the most recent having been plopped onto a stainless steel table only minutes earlier. The broad-faced man, whose name was Bolnoy, snorted.

  “She was infected,” he said with an accent that gave away his Russian origins. “But you knew this, no?”

  Bolnoy was a supervising pathologist who’d been observing and recording the findings of his team inside No Man’s Land. They’d hypothesized that, like Ebola, the patient’s death wasn’t enough to end the threat of infection. This new mongrel virus, with bacterial components, was as lethal after killing its host as it was while that host fought to live.

  Sharp poked at Bolnoy’s chest with a finger and locked his eyes with hers. “I’m not in the mood,” she sneered. “Don’t play with me.”

  Bolnoy snorted again as if to suggest to his superior he wasn’t intimidated. He likely wasn’t. He’d seen the Scourge kill thousands in his native St. Petersburg and paid a hefty sum of money to secretly climb aboard a cruise ship docked in the Gulf of Finland at the eastern edge of his city. He’d stowed away on the ship until it reached its destination in Dover, England. By then, half the crew and most of the passengers were dead or dying from the disease.

  It took him six months, and a lot of false starts, to find passage to the United States. He’d lucked into the job with the CDC through a friend of a friend. They needed people who could cut open bodies and knew anatomy.

  He’d graduated with a medical degree from St. Petersburg Pavlov Medical State University. He’d joked all they’d need to do was show him a dead body and he’d start drooling. Nobody had laughed. But they’d hired him. He’d proven valuable and skilled, as well as irreverent and moody.

  Now, as he stood in front of Sharp, he was an obstacle to the truth. She poked him again.

  “Give me answers, Bolnoy,” she demanded. “We can’t send corpses out into the wild, even if they do retain their infectious properties.”

  “Dr. Sharp, you know this virus is viable for several days after the host dies,” said Bolnoy, drawing out his words for effect. “I’m not telling you something you don’t know. And it’s entirely possible it lasts longer than that.”

  “I’m aware,” said Dr. Sharp. “The influenza genome RNA segment gives the Scourge an added kick postmortem, which increases the infection rate by a factor of—”

  “You don’t know the answer to that,” said Bolnoy. “What you’re saying is theoretical. It’s hypothesis.”

  Sharp bristled. “Which is exactly why we are testing the subjects in the wild. It’s also why I need to know what about these dead subjects killed them faster than the others. It will inform our rollout and distribution to maximize the testing and the ultimate deployment.”

  Bolnoy looked through the double-layered glass that offered him a view of the autopsies in progress. He’d been in the room for the first of the procedures, a woman known as CV-02. It was grotesque. And there was something he knew Sharp wasn’t telling him. There was something else in the deadly cocktail that caused the hemoptysis, the coughing up of blood. Maybe it was the unprecedented combination of a pneumonic plague and a deadly flu. Maybe there was some bacterial components of the polymerase causing a necrotizing pneumonia, otherwise called lung gangrene.

  “I can speak to CV-02. The woman,” said Bolnoy.

  “The subject,” corrected Sharp. “What about it?”

  “CV-02’s lungs were distended. We observed segmental atelectasis with a blackened pleura.”

  Bolnoy reached into his lab pocket and pulled from it a tin. He thumbed it open and removed a mint leaf. He crushed it between his thumb and index finger and laid it on his tongue. He worked it around in his mouth and chewed. He offered a piece to Sharp. “I grow these hydroponically,” he said. “Very sweet.”

  Sharp ignored the offer. “What else? What is your point here, Bolnoy?”

  Bolnoy flipped shut the tin and slid it into his coat pocket. He rolled the mint around on his tongue. “There were elevated, pale spots,” he said. “They remind me of organisms growing in culture dishes. They were clustered on the parietal pleural surfaces and on the blackened visceral. Both of the pleural cavities contained 100cc of serous fluid.”

  “The serous fluid is normal,” said Sharp. “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  Bolnoy tongued the mint between his front teeth and nibbled. “I’m trying to answer your question. Unlike a bureaucrat, I like details. I like knowledge at the microscopic level.”

  Sharp dragged her fingers under her eyes and outward along her cheeks. She pursed her lips.

  The Russian’s thick eyebrows arched like caterpillars above his eyes. “You have, how do you say? Screwed the pooch. You have created something here for which there is no predator. You have no control of it now. This is a mean thing you have made.”

  “And?”

  “And it does not matter how quickly these subjects die. If you sprinkle enough of them, some will sprout. They will spread like weeds. Those weeds will strangle everything.”

  Sharp’s nose wrinkled as if the Russian suddenly smelled bad. “We are preserving the species,” she said. “Plain and simple. We need the riches south of the wall. The oil, the natural gas, the farmland, the water. Without it, our society won’t be able to function much longer.”

  Bolnoy chewed on the mint. His silence judged her.

  “I don’t need your approval,” she said. “You, a Russian of all people, should understand the sacrifice of the individual for the betterment of the state.”

  Bolnoy stuffed his hands into his pockets.

  “I’m doing my job,” she said. “All of us are doing our jobs.”

  “CV-02 and the other four had weaker immune systems,” said Bolnoy. “This is obvious. Their bodies could not fight the dual infection. It is possible also that the viral pneumonia causes a bacterial infection in lungs. Add a secondary viral influenza, and the body cannot fight both. The same mechanisms that fight viruses make fighting bacter—”

  “I know the science,” Sharp snapped. “I know how it works.”

  Bolnoy shrugged. “Then you should have no more questions for me. You already have answ
ers.”

  The Russian brushed past Sharp, disappearing down a long corridor that led back to the anterior rooms of the BSL 3 autopsy lab. Sharp fought the instinct to watch him walk away from her and marched in the opposite direction.

  She wound her way to an elevator that descended two levels to her private office and living quarters. She completed the triple authentication with her card, fingerprint, and facial recognition, and entered the cool, dark space in which she spent very little of her time.

  Sleep was a stranger. Personal connections were alien. From the minute her Army husband had left her side to help build the wall separating Texas from everyone else, she’d retreated into a hardened shell. When he’d died during its construction, that shell thickened into something impenetrable.

  Sharp waited for the door to slide shut behind her, for the motion-sensitive overhead lights to awaken, and she slinked to her desk. She tapped a large tablet tilted vertically on the white laminate surface and rolled her chair close.

  With her elbows on the desk, she tapped a series of commands into the tablet. She bounced slightly against the ergonomically designed mesh back of the chair, swinging the seat from side to side with her heels. A pleasant-sounding, asexual voice purred from an overhead speaker connected wirelessly to the tablet.

  “Good evening, Dr. Sharp,” said the artificial intelligence programmed to assist her in using the complex’s vast computing power. “How might I assist you?”

  “I’m looking for all deployed non-security tracking implants not located at coordinates 33.7993 degrees north, 84.3280 degrees west. Please advise with display.”

  “Searching for all deployed non-security tracking implants not located at your current location, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “While I calculate the data for you, I’d like to inform you there are fourteen deployed tracking implants at your current location, 33.7993 degrees north, 84.3280 degrees west,” said the AI. “There are an additional thirty-five non-deployed tracking implants that, as of the gathering of this information, are nonfunctional. There are four additional tracking implants that are deployed but nonfunctional because the host shows no life functions.”