The Source: A Wildfire Prequel

by Marcus Richardson

  I’m with Mom. That gets a big eye-roll…

  Chad laughed out loud, picturing Jess doing just that. He turned the page and kept reading a few paragraphs down the page.

  …and then, she was like, “Ohmigod, my dad went postal today!”

  I was thinking her dad—he’s a truck driver—had like road rage or something. But no. Her dad shot someone! I can’t believe it! I didn’t tell my parents—I didn’t want Mom to call the cops (she would, being a lawyer and all). Does that make me an accessory or something?

  Anyway, turns out this guy showed up at their house this morning before the sun came up and was trying to break into her dad’s rig. He yelled at the guy and told him to leave, but she said the guy pulled a knife and charged, screaming about medicine he thinks Chrissy’s dad had hidden away.

  That's not possible, because he drives a truck for—

  Chad squinted at the page. Some liquid had dribbled down the middle and blurred the ink. He couldn’t read the rest of the sentence, so he skipped ahead.

  —pulled his gun out and shot him! I thought Chrissy was going to throw up on the phone…she sounded so scared. I can’t even imagine my father doing something like that. I don’t think he’s ever even been in a fistfight! He always says he had it easy because no one ever wants to hit the guy with glasses.

  The guy was crazy though—he pulled a knife on her dad. Even my grandma carried a .45 in her purse till the day she died. This is Texas…

  The door opened with a hiss of pressurized air and Chad looked up from the diary. Dr. Boatner stepped into the room with his ever-present clipboard and smiled. He was followed by two nurses and a soldier in camouflage who wore a pistol on his belt, but kept his hands clasped behind his back.

  Wow. I get a guard. Is he here to keep me from leaving or keep people out?

  “Hello, Chad. How are you feeling?”

  “Clean,” Chad said as he closed the diary. “Thanks.”

  “Good! It’s amazing what a hot shower and a good meal can do for the spirit, isn’t it?” Boatner smiled. He motioned the two nurses to set their gear down on either side of Chad’s bed.

  “What are you reading?”

  Chad put Jess’ diary back in the satchel but kept it in his lap. “Nothing, just something I picked up—”

  “Is that the girl’s diary?”

  “Uh…”

  “Jess was her name, right? It’s okay,” Boatner said as he adjusted his glasses. He picked up his clipboard. “I have a report here that says when they interrogated her—that was genius about the smoke signal, by the way—she mentioned she gave you her 'flu journal’.”

  “Oh…uh, yeah…”

  “I’d love to take a look at it sometime,” Boatner said, eyes on the bag. He looked up at Chad and smiled. “If you’re okay with that.”

  Chad blinked. He hadn’t thought Boatner would give him the option. “You’re not going to just take it? I mean, I’m a prisoner or something, right?”

  “Good grief, no…" The scientist looked hurt. “You’re not a prisoner. Well, you’re not exactly free to leave,” he said, glancing at the soldier, “but you’re not under arrest.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  Boatner looked around. “They didn’t even leave a chair?” He stuffed his hands in his white lab coat and exhaled. “I swear, sometimes I wonder how the military functions at all." He glared at the soldier. When the man didn't so much as blink, Boatner sighed loudly.

  "I need a chair, please,” Boatner prompted.

  “Sir, I’m not supposed to leave my post—”

  “Do you want me to tell General Vilnum that I was delayed in my work because you wouldn’t open the door, reach into the hallway, and bring that chair we both know is sitting right there—”

  “Okay, okay!” grumbled the soldier.

  Boatner winked at Chad while the man in uniform muttered to himself and fetched the plastic chair from just outside the door.

  “Happy?” he asked as he slid it across the room.

  “Delighted. Thank you.” Boatner sat with dignity and adjusted his glasses. “Now then.” He stared at Chad. “Mr. Huntley, you’re here because you are a very…unique…young man."

  Chad looked down and ran his fingers over the purple strap on Jess’ bag. “Yeah. So I've heard.”

  “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you why you’re special. The thing is, I think—no, check that—I know I can help people fight off and survive this terrible disease with your help—”

  Chad looked up. "Is the whole world sick?”

  Boatner paused, his mouth open mid-sentence. He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Unfortunately yes. This event is projected to be worse than the Spanish Flu. In 1918, there were a couple billion people on the planet. Five hundred million people were infected. Of those, 100 million died."

  Boatner sighed. "Now we have roughly 8 billion people on the planet and this thing has been making the rounds for over two months in places from China to Europe to America. We’re looking at an estimated global infection rate of 75 percent. Do you know how many people that is?”

  “A lot.”

  Boatner took off his glasses and examined the wire frame spectacles against the light above Chad’s exam bed. “There’s somewhere on the order of 6 billion sick people out there right now. Europe lost over 100 million lives as of this morning—that we know of. And it will get worse—this is just round one. The Spanish Flu had three waves.”

  “Wow.” Chad blinked. He had no idea things were that bad. “That’s…I knew it was bad, but I had no idea…”

  "It's Biblical,” Boatner said. “The president is treating this like a large asteroid strike—an extinction level event. They put pressure on the media to keep the real numbers quiet but the details are getting out and panic is setting in.”

  “Wow,” Chad said again. His mind felt numb.

  “That’s where you come in,” Boatner continued, his voice more optimistic than his face. “There’s a chance—if I can figure out what makes your immune system impervious to the flu—that we can fight back.” He put his glasses back on and picked up the clipboard. “But only if you agree.”

  “So let me get this straight. The human race is facing extinction because of this over-grown flu virus and you’re telling me there's a chance I can help save us—all of us—but I get to decide if I want to help or not?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Boatner replied. “For the record, I’m hoping you’ll agree…”

  Chad looked down at Jess’ bag. “So this is like fighting back, right? We’re going to try to kill this bug, right?”

  “Right and right. I want to make influenza extinct, like polio and small pox. I think we have a real chance to do this—with your help.”

  Chad thought of his family. The virus took everything from him, everyone he’d ever cared about was dead and gone. It didn't have any mercy, it just killed.

  Chad swallowed. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Protector

  FOR THE NEXT TWO weeks, Chad's daily routine seemed set in stone. He'd wake precisely at 7am when a nurse arrived with a soldier shadow and knocked twice on his door. He had fifteen minutes to make use of the bathroom connected to his private quarters and dress himself.

  At 7:15am every day except Sunday the nurse and her escort entered, delivered a breakfast of sizzling steak, re-hydrated eggs, and chilled canned fruit with unending glasses of water and milk. Then there was the daily course of vitamins, both pills and liquids. He hated the liquids—they tasted like drinking muddy water—but Dr. Boatner insisted the extra nutrients were essential to help his body create new blood.

  As a reward for his blood-bank services, Chad could eat all the red meat and iron-rich foods he wanted. This earned him sour expressions and baleful glares from several soldiers who, for the duration of the crisis, were stuck with standard combat rations. All of them except Cpl. Reeves that is, who rotated in on guard duty a couple
times a week. Reeves always had a smile for Chad and a wink for the nurses.

  Chad offered to share his meals a few times, but Reeves always declined. He said it was more important for Chad to get the rations he needed, so the doctors could find a cure and help everyone. Eventually, Chad stopped asking.

  After breakfast, he'd walk under guard to the medical exam room deep in the heart of the extensive research facility at Fort Sam Houston. Once ensconced in his room, Chad could be expected to wait anywhere between ten and thirty minutes before Dr. Boatner and a bevy of nurses showed up to draw blood. Chad would lay back on the table and let them attach monitors and clip sensors all over his body before putting needles in both his arms.

  Dr. Boatner usually passed the time talking about the daily happenings out in the real world. He could talk for hours about his research, but Chad didn't understand most of it. Boatner was always excited to discuss gene sequencing and CRISPR techniques—whatever that was—and the potential of benefits Chad's blood could offer mankind.

  "The properties of your T-cells are so far removed from everyone else's…" Boatner had said one day. "It's something no one has ever seen before. Your counts are stable, despite your extensive exposure to the virus—I mean, you hid in a pile of bodies just crawling with viral spore. And yet you emerged unscathed."

  Chad stared at the ceiling and listened to the machines whir and click around him. Every beat of his heart pumped more blood out of his body and into collection tubes. Every twitch caused the tubes to tug and pull at his skin. He felt like a fly trapped in a spider's web.

  "It doesn't feel so miraculous," Chad had responded.

  It was always the same after they'd taken his blood. Chad ate cookies and juice to get his blood sugar back up, then they would escort him to a recreation area where he could relax and watch a movie or play video games until lunch. After a hearty meal of steak, shrimp, or oatmeal—with bread slathered in butter, and usually a spinach salad—he'd head back to his room for a two-hour nap.

  The afternoon was little different from his regimented mornings. Nurses arrived at 2pm to wake him for his second daily physical—the doctors really loved taking measurements. Chad wouldn't have been surprised to find out that they entered his room in the middle of the night to check his temperature and blood pressure while he slept.

  Following the afternoon physical, he’d head to a briefing room with long tables and lots of chairs. There, stern-faced officers would pace back and forth while grilling him about the events of the last few weeks. They wanted specific information on the firefight he'd survived. They wanted to know everything about Meigs and his men—they even brought in a police sketch artist to get an idea of what Meigs looked like. When they ran out of questions about the soldiers in black uniforms, they peeled back another layer in time and peppered him about his escape from DFW.

  Usually by the time Chad was ready to scream—no one ever answered his questions—Dr. Boatner would show up and the two of them would have dinner in Boatner's office. It was the only time during the day that anyone would talk with him like he was a person. He could ask Boatner anything.

  Chad learned how some countries—like China, Indonesia, and Australia—had "gone dark" and no one could communicate with them, officially or otherwise. They talked about Boatner's work, though Chad didn't understand very much. As the days turned into weeks however, he gradually got a feel for scope of the Singulari Program.

  "It truly is my generation's Manhattan Project," Boatner had said, his voice full of pride on more than one occasion. "But what I'm really excited about is the prospect of finding more people out there like you."

  "You mean people immune to everything?" Chad asked around a mouthful of tuna salad.

  "Well," said Boatner, so excited he almost forgot to swallow. "What I mean is people with unique properties like you—maybe not exactly immune to everything…but if there's one person who is," he said, nodding at Chad, "why couldn't there be more? I'm in negotiations now to get funding to start an international search. I mean, the possibilities could be…" Boatner stared at Chad and his expression sagged. He waved his fork in a dismissive gesture.

  "Well, let's just say it's exciting."

  As the weeks melted into months, Chad grew numb to his daily activities. It didn't matter if he struggled or went along meek as a mouse—the result was always the same: they always got their blood, his questions went ignored, and no one ever talked to him—except Dr. Boatner.

  He wasn't sure if that was by design or chance. Either way, Chad was left with two people in his life: Dr. Boatner, and through her diary, Jess.

  In his downtime, Chad devoured her little composition notebook. Whenever he had a private moment, usually after his dinners with Boatner, he’d be turned loose in the base library. The catch: after leaving the library, he could not exit his room until breakfast.

  So Chad read—a lot. He spent the waning days of winter reading Jess' diary over and over. By the time the sun thawed the frozen ground and brought life to the world around him for a new year, he felt he knew Jess on a level he’d never experienced with anyone except his own family.

  Through her writings, Chad shared in the fear and anger of someone who'd lived through the outbreak. Like him, she'd looked death in the face and lived to tell the tale. At least, Chad assumed so—Boatner could only tell him she'd survived, the last he'd heard, but she wasn't genetically unique like Chad so Boatner didn't know anything else about her.

  Jess became Chad's private life raft in a sea of confusion and conformity. He had a taste of her sarcastic, snarky wit through her writings and knew how she'd react to any situation: she'd give the soldiers so much shit they'd either kill her out of frustration or talk to her out of respect.

  Chad let loose a few Jess-like comments of his own on more than one occasion at the stone-faced sentries who followed him around and ruled his life when he wasn't in the immediate presence of doctors and nurses. But that wasn't him. If left to his own devices, Chad was nearly as quiet as they were.

  So he tried a different tactic. He just started talking to the silent guards as he ate and replied to answers he made up for them.

  "So what's it like to shoot one of those rifles you guy carry?" he'd asked one day. Predictably, the guards said nothing but stared straight ahead. Chad nodded.

  "Really? That's pretty cool. You ever kill anyone?" Chad looked at the guards as he chewed. He nodded. "Yeah, me neither."

  It wasn't real conversation, but he could get creative and he was bored anyway. After two weeks of some very enlightening "talks", he finally got one of the guards to crack a smile.

  "Okay," he'd said around a mouthful of eggs and home fries one morning when Reeves and Garcia were on duty. "I've had it." He put his fork down and pointed at them. "You two seriously need to shut up! I can't freaking hear myself think around here with all your babbling."

  The guards looked at each other but didn't say anything.

  "Good grief! There you go again!" Chad pushed back from the table and stood. "I mean, if you're going to talk, at least talk about girls or guns or something. Do they send me guards who want to talk about the Cowboys? God, I'd even talk about the freaking Eagles at this point—but oh no, I have to be stuck with the guys who sit around arguing about tennis of all things." He walked over to stand in front of them, then leaned toward Reeves conspiratorially.

  "You two gonna shut up or am I going to have kick your ass?" he demanded of Garcia. Chad laughed at the imaginary joke. "Oh, you talkin' to me?" He looked around.

  "I know you're not talking smack to me." Chad jerked a thumb at Reeves. "He's so scared he won't even look at me. See? Just stares straight ahead." He looked up at Garcia, who towered over him. "Yeah, you better watch it Private Garcia or I'll cut your head off at the knees and bring you down to size."

  Reeves snorted in an attempt to quash a burst of laughter. Chad looked back at Garcia and received a smile in return. Chad moved back to his food and sat down in a huff. He gla
nced up and Reeves cracked a smile but Chad finished his meal in silence nonetheless.

  Later that day, after the second bloodletting, Reeves and Garcia escorted Chad to his room. As Chad walked by Reeves, the soldier muttered under his breath: "Look under the toilet's tank lid in your bathroom."

  Chad wasn't sure what to do about that—they were the first words anyone besides Boatner had spoken to him that didn't involve how he felt, his health, or questions about his past. He blinked. Reeves left him in his room and departed in silence.

  Chad waited a few minutes, then went to the bathroom and closed the door. He felt silly snooping around his own bathroom but carefully lifted the tank lid on the toilet just the same. Taped to the underside of the porcelain was a plastic baggy containing a scrap of paper.

  Chad looked around and unfolded the note.

  Sorry we can't say anything out loud, but there's cameras everywhere in here—except your bathroom. If we need to pass info to you, we'll signal you at mealtime—don't worry, you'll get it—then you need to check under the lid. When you're done reading the note, flush it. If you need to leave a note for us, put one in the same place under the lid—one of us will check it when we do the ELINT sweep at cleaning time (when you’re in the exam room).

  We know what you're doing must be hard—it really sucks that we can't talk. Hang in there. A lot of us have family and kids on the outside that might just have a chance if the rumors we've heard about your blood and finding a cure are true.

  Reeves.

  Chad folded the note and sat on the counter. He looked around at the cinder block walls, painted in thick white paint, the white tile floor, and the white, sound-absorbing ceiling. The walls felt a little less claustrophobic, a little less prison-like. He smiled.