by Tom Abrahams
Taskar had studied the woman. She’d seemed sincere. Like so many people at that time, she’d been at her wit’s end, and her mania was to be expected. He hadn’t considered whether she was a thief playing him or something more sinister. Still naive in those early days after the Scourge, he’d given in to the guilt.
He’d motioned to the front passenger’s seat. “Okay, hop in.”
The woman had pulled her fingers from the crack and danced up and down with excitement. She’d thanked him repeatedly as she’d skirted her way around the front of the hearse.
She’d flung open the passenger’s side door and rolled into her seat. She’d been barefoot. It was only once she was sitting next to him, struggling with the seatbelt, that Taskar had noticed the woman was in her pajamas.
He pressed the accelerator and started the two-hundred-mile journey south as the woman, still on the edge of hyperventilating, had reached into her pajama top and pulled out a stack of folded bills.
“I’ve got one thousand dollars,” she’d said. “I can pay for whatever gas you need plus five hundred. That okay?”
Taskar had checked the fuel gauge and nodded. “I should have enough gas to get you to Kansas City, even if I stay off the highways. Plus, I don’t know how many places are going to have fuel anyhow.”
The woman had thanked him again, and five hours later, he’d dropped her off at her parents’ home. He hadn’t stuck around to find out if the woman’s mother was still alive. If she was, it likely wouldn’t be for long.
Armed with the five hundred dollars in cash, he’d managed to find a gas station that would sell him half a tank for a hundred dollars. He’d taken the deal, and while the station owner pumped the gas, a young couple had approached Taskar and asked if they could hitch a ride.
He’d asked them where they’d wanted to go and if they could pay him. They’d said Wichita and offered a case of bottled water, ten cans of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, and a weather radio.
He’d taken it. His unplanned career as a post-apocalyptic chauffeur had begun. He traveled back and forth across the wall countless times. He’d been from the Rockies to the Appalachians. He’d never been to Atlanta. Until now.
The sun was still rising in the sky straight ahead of him as he drove east. He flipped down the visor and fumbled for a bent pair of Ray-Bans he kept in the driver’s side door pocket.
Beneath the glare was a city built upon its own ashes. One hundred and eighty years earlier, Atlanta had burned.
November 15, 1864, General William Sherman and his Union troops set fire to the city, one that Sherman believed had done more to help the Confederacy than any other save Richmond. Thirty percent of Atlanta was burned to the ground. Famously, one Georgian was quoted as having said, “Hell has laid her egg and here it hatched.”
Under the glow of the morning sun, it appeared to Taskar as if it were on fire again and he wondered what hell he might be entering. He gripped the wheel with one hand, adjusted his Ray-Bans with the other, and pressed harder on the accelerator. The faster he understood what he’d gotten himself into, the better.
CHAPTER 8
FEBRUARY 7, 2044, 10:03 AM
SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Lomas Ward awoke with a headache in a bright white room he didn’t recognize. He was cold and drenched in sweat. His shirt was stuck to his lower back and underneath his arms. He blinked to try to focus on the ceiling above him but struggled. Each thump of his quickened pulse aggravated the throb that ran across his forehead from one temple to the other.
He tried sitting up, but couldn’t. There was something holding him in place, flat against a cot or table. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he squeezed them shut.
A familiar voice caused him to open them again. “Lomas,” said Dr. Morel, “can you hear me?”
Lomas searched the room despite the muscular ache in his eyes, but didn’t see the doctor. His chest tightened and he coughed. When the doctor spoke again, he could tell the voice was piped in through a speaker.
“Lomas,” said Dr. Morel, “how are you feeling?”
Lomas lay back against the thin, damp pillow underneath his head. He stared at the ceiling. His head pulsed with a sharp, debilitating pain. He swallowed against the sandpaper in his throat and coughed again. An explosion of stinging pain jabbed against his chest. A loud buzz and metallic click drew his attention. A figure in a large blue biohazard suit appeared from beyond a newly opened door and clunked its way into the room. The door buzzed again and the door shut. The figure connected a tube on the suit to a coiled hose along the wall, then moved toward Lomas.
“I’m not certain this is a best protocol,” said Dr. Morel over the speaker. “We could wait to assess the progress until—”
“I’m fine,” said Gwendolyn Sharp. “I’ve done this before without consequence.”
The figure stopped at Lomas’s bedside. Even through the haze of his discomfort, he recognized her face behind the mask.
“We’re designated BSL 3,” said Dr. Morel, referring to the room’s designation as a biosafety level three laboratory.
Sharp awkwardly faced a white spherical camera perched in the corner of the room behind Lomas’s head. “So?” she said. “I’m not breathing his air. There are no sharp objects except for me. It’s fine.”
Morel sighed through the intercom. Sharp smirked and bent over to look at Lomas. She spoke about him as if he wasn’t there. “Please record my observations,” she said. “The time is 10:06 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, 7 February 2044. This is Dr. Gwendolyn Sharp, Senior Research Virologist, CDC, Atlanta, Georgia.”
“What are you doing?” asked Lomas in a wispy voice he didn’t recognize as his own.
She ignored him. “Patient CV-01 is exhibiting symptoms consistent with a viral form of the Yersinia pestsis bacteria to which he was previously immune. Note an obvious inflammation around the eyes and nostrils.”
Lomas struggled against the binds that held him flat against the table. He strained until he used up what little strength he had remaining. His body shuddered.
Sharp slid close to Lomas until her mask was inches from his face. “The patient is perspiring. There is nasal mucus draining from the nostrils and rheum collecting in the corners of his eyes.”
Lomas swallowed past the razor-blade pain in his throat. “What did you do to me?”
Sharp stood up straight and shifted toward the camera. “The patient is requesting information about his condition. Your thoughts, Dr. Morel?”
“Tell him,” said Morel. “There’s nothing he can do about it now.”
Sharp looked back down at Lomas. Her blurry image shimmered in the cloud of his aching eyes and pounding head. He could smell the plastic of her suit, could almost taste its organic compounds on his tongue, the odor was so strong. Still, he couldn’t even be sure this was real. Maybe it was a dream.
“Is this happening?” he asked, expecting to wake up.
Sharp responded flatly, without emotion. “Yes, this is happening. You’re infected with a modified virus. It will kill you. Are you experiencing any abdominal pain?”
Lomas searched Sharp’s face for any hint that she might be joking. He found none. He started to speak but coughed. He clamped his jaw against the swelling pain in his chest.
“Tussis is present,” said Dr. Sharp. “We are at nineteen hours incubation. The onset of these symptoms is accelerated beyond our expectations.”
“Is that a problem? We need enough time for phase two.”
“We should be fine,” said Sharp. “We’ve yet to identify any bloody sputum, and the secondary viral infection has a longer incubation period. We have at least three days, by my estimation, until they are fully present, and another two or three before we reach morbidity.”
Sharp’s blue, angular image danced in front of Lomas’s eyes. He tried blinking past the blurred shimmy of the virologist in her Tychem suit. He wanted to reach up and grab her by the mask and tear at it
with his hands until her face was exposed. Then he would cough on her, spit on her, give her whatever it was they’d injected into his body. He sucked in a shallow, raspy breath. Moving his lips and emitting a sound was taxing.
“Morbidity?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Sharp. “I told you, what you have will kill you. Within a week you’ll have served your purpose and we’ll know whether or not what we’ve given you is as effective as we anticipate it to be.”
Lomas tightened his fists into balls. His chin quivered, his chest heaved, and his pulse quickened, worsening the throb of the headache. He tried suppressing the wave of tears he knew was coming, but couldn’t. He lay there, strapped to an exam bed, sobbing. His chest and hips pressed against the straps that held his body in place.
“Are you experiencing any abdominal pain?” asked Dr. Sharp.
Lomas didn’t respond. He relaxed his fists and laid his sweating palms flat on the table. His body shuddered again against the perceived chill in the room.
Sharp stood motionless for a moment, pivoted away from Lomas, and moved back toward the door. There were a series of hums and clicks; the door opened and closed. She was gone.
Lomas inhaled a shallow breath through his nose. He could taste the thick phlegm building at the back of his throat. He tried cataloging his ailments: headache, coughing, sore throat, fever, tightness in his chest, muscular weakness, burning in his eyes. Soon, he knew he would add stomach pain to the list. He silently prayed for a quick end to the suffering. He didn’t think he could handle another three or four or more days of this, especially if it was going to get worse.
He told himself to stop thinking about it. He willed himself to envision his boys in their new home.
They were smiling. Their eyes were free from the worry he so often saw reflected in them when he tucked them in at night. They were rubbing their bellies from the home-cooked meal made-to-order. Chances were, they’d asked for grilled cheese sandwiches. They loved cheese, but it was a delicacy in the Ward household.
They were clean and smelled like Irish Spring soap. Their hair was washed and brushed. They wore proper-fitting clothes that were absent the stains, tears, and holes common in the wardrobe he’d been able to supply them.
And most of all, he hoped, they didn’t miss him, that they’d already adapted to their new environs and forgotten all about their dad. He couldn’t bear the thought of his boys missing him, of wondering where he’d gone, if he’d abandoned them or given up on them. He’d much rather believe they’d wiped him from their young memories.
The idea that they hadn’t was as painful as the chest-drilling coughs that came with more frequency. Lomas told himself he’d done a good thing by his boys. He knew that if he kept repeating it to himself, he might eventually believe it.
* * *
Gwendolyn Sharp dabbed a cloth towel on her forehead, absorbing the thin sheen of sweat that had formed on her forehead during the trip into the lab. Once she was finished, she tossed the cloth into an aluminum container marked INCINERATOR.
She finished disrobing and tossed the rest of her clothing and undergarments into the same container. Then she stepped into a floor-to-ceiling rectangular box that resembled a twentieth-century phone booth, shut the door behind her, and raised her hands above her head. She stood with her feet a bit more than shoulder width apart.
“Ready,” she said. A blast of cold water sprayed her body from all directions. It was an identical spray to the one she’d undergone minutes earlier while still wearing the single-use biohazard suit.
The water stopped and a voice warned her to close her eyes and mouth. She did as instructed and a wash of antibacterial foam coated her body. The voice counted down from ten; then a secondary spray of icy water cleansed the soap from her skin and hair.
Goose bumps populated her skin as she wrung the excess water from her hair and walked from the shower room, through a code-panel equipped door, and into an adjacent space with towels, a stainless steel bench, and a locker.
She shivered and dried off her slender, toned body. She was a runner who managed ten miles a day on a treadmill in her room at the facility. It was her time to exercise, think, de-stress, and plot.
Once in her clothes, she slinked into the hallway, around a corner, and into an office space replete with a wall of surveillance monitors and high-powered computers connected to the facility’s basement mainframe.
She ground her teeth in a Pavlovian response to the ever-present low-pitched hum in the room that was at once unnerving and soothing to Sharp. She was acutely aware of it every time she stepped into the office. It subconsciously reminded her of the overwhelming project with which her team had been tasked. As she got to work, the hum melted into the white noise of the room and it was comforting. She drifted over to the far corner of the room and Dr. Morel.
He was pounding away at the keyboard at his terminal. The clacking of his keys smacked of desperation. He didn’t notice her as she approached.
She put her hand on his shoulder and he jumped at the surprise of her touch. “What did you think?” she asked.
Morel kept pecking at the keys. “About what? The patient’s symptoms, his lack of understanding, his frustration?”
“We should start referring to them as subjects as opposed to patients,” Sharp said. “Calling them patients makes it sound as though we’re trying to save them.”
Morel stopped typing. Without looking at Sharp, he sighed. “We are trying to save people. That’s the whole point of this, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” she asked coyly. “I think subjects is more proper regardless of the endgame. How are the others?”
Morel rolled his chair backward past his colleague and spun to face a wall of monitors. Sharp faced the wall with him. She folded her arms across her chest and scanned the large color displays.
Morel pointed to a screen in the top row. “CV-02 isn’t showing symptoms yet,” he said. “She’s less restless now though, getting weaker. Temperature is still normal.”
Sharp focused on the woman in the picture. She was older in appearance, her white hair wiry and unkempt. Her eyes were half open. She was flat on her back and not struggling or moving. Sharp stepped closer to the monitor.
“Can I see the vitals on CV-02?” she asked.
Morel rolled back to his desk. He picked up a tablet-sized handheld remote and tapped the screen several times until a multicolored graphic overlay appeared on the monitor with the image of the woman strapped to the exam table.
“Her pulse is very low,” said Sharp. “And her oxygen intake is suboptimal. Did we do a VO2 max test when she arrived so we have a baseline oxygen utilization measurement?”
“No,” Morel replied. “She wasn’t able to generate any intensity in her workout. We couldn’t even complete a standard stress test.”
Sharp sighed. “Not sure she’s a great patien—subject.”
“As long as she’s infected and contagious, it doesn’t matter. She’s not going to be running any marathons.”
Sharp spun from the display and scowled at her colleague. “She needs to survive the infection long enough to be effective. So it does matter, Dr. Morel. It matters a great deal. There is a tremendous amount at stake here. Or aren’t you aware of that?”
Morel shrank in his chair. He frowned and looked blankly at the tablet in his hands. “I’m aware,” he mumbled.
“Show me CV-18 and CV-19,” she said. “What’s their status?”
He tapped his tablet and switched two displays. “They’re infected. They have elevated body temperatures and the most recent CBC indicates spikes in their white blood cell counts.”
“They’re sick?”
Morel hesitated. He looked at the screens, the bodies of the two lying motionless on their respective tables. Both were drenched with sweat. Fluids drained from a bag attached to an IV pole and into their veins.
Sharp snapped her fingers. “Morel?” she said. “They’re sick?”
He
blinked and nodded. “Yes. They’re sick.”
Sharp pointed at the image of a woman lying quietly on her table. “What about this one?”
Morel squinted to focus on the display. “CV-07. That subject is not showing any signs of infection.”
“When was the subject exposed?”
Morel tapped the tablet first, then expanded the detail on the screen with his index finger and thumb. “Four days ago. We subsequently introduced a second dose. Virtually no effect.”
“Virtually means some,” said Sharp. She had her hands on her hips as she stared at the woman who appeared peaceful and asleep.
“Her white blood cell count is elevated.”
“Elaborate.”
Morel swiped the tablet. “Both the T and B lymphocytes are active. There’s a spike in B cell antibodies. We’re also seeing neutrophils present where we should see bacteria.”
“What makes her so special?”
“She’s not necessarily special,” answered Morel. “CV-09 is also relatively asymptomatic.”
“Are they the only ones?”
“So far,” said Morel, “but that gives us an eighty percent infection rate. That’s higher than the sixty-six percent mortality rate of the Scourge by itself.”
“We’ve increased its efficiency by fourteen percent?”
“With this incredibly small sample, yes. It could fluctuate drastically once we see it in the real world.”
“What about the others?” Sharp asked. She motioned toward a screen in the middle of the wall. “CV-04? How about him?”
CV-04 was a waif. If he weren’t shirtless, it might have been difficult determining his sex. His chest and abdomen were heaving. His eyes were squeezed tight with pain. He was drenched in sweat and other fluids. There was dried blood on his philtrum, the narrow indention that ran vertically from his nose to his upper lip, and what appeared to be vomit on his chin and neck. His mouth was moving, as if he were mumbling or talking. His eyes drifted wildly around the room. His wrists and ankles strained against the binds that held him down.