Pestilence: A Medical Thriller

by Victor Methos

  Lancaster put his hand over his forehead and bent down. He felt ill. “Holy shit, Martin. Holy shit…”

  “Sir, do we have any ideas as to who could have done this?”

  “Four chemical weapons simultaneously detonated in the four largest cities? No, Martin. I don’t have a fucking clue who could have done this. I’m guessing it’s not some cave-dwellers in Pakistan. But whoever they are, we better hope they’re not planning something else, ’cause we were just brought to our fucking knees.”

  56

  Hank Kraski sat on the bench at the park, watching the pigeons as they flew down. An old man was feeding them stale bread. Hank counted over fifty pigeons and was delighted to watch them flap around and wrestle and peck at each other for dominance.

  Before too long, a woman with curly red hair and a black suit came and sat next to him. They were there early in the morning, and in the light of dawn, she looked stunning. Something had been there between them long ago but was gone now.

  “Ian’s dead,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You trained Greyjoy, and he trained Ian. You guys are becoming an extinct species.”

  “We were always meant to be.”

  “All four detonations went off perfectly. We had three more in Europe and two in Asia last night. We didn’t feel that Australia and Africa were warranted, and unless you wanted to take out penguins, Antarctica should be obvious.”

  “I agree.”

  She checked her watch. “I don’t know if they briefed you on this, but a certain percentage of the population has a natural immunity to black pox.”

  “What percentage?”

  “Point oh-oh-oh one. About seven thousand people on the earth will be completely immune to its effects, and it’s genetic, as well. A dominant gene from what we can tell. It should display in their children, which should push that number up but probably to no more than twenty thousand.”

  He nodded. “We’re anticipating ninety-five percent population loss. We can handle another twenty thousand people on top of the survivors.”

  She paused. “I couldn’t sleep last night. Do you realize what we’ve done? What we’ve all done, Hank? We’ve changed the course of human history. It was going one way, and we came along, and it will follow a divergent path now.”

  He watched the pigeons. “How do you know this wasn’t the path it was supposed to follow?”

  Turning to look at her, he felt those old feelings resurface. He couldn’t remember why he hadn’t acted on them when he’d had the chance. Work, maybe. But the memory was so dusty with time, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why they hadn’t spent their lives together.

  Her face was perfect—perfect and simple—even without makeup, which he found most people put on too much of anyway. She had been a model in the ’80s, if he remembered correctly. His predecessor had seen her on some runway in Spain and had decided they needed to have her. His predecessor. How odd to say that. He figured every generation would soon have predecessors and be looking back, wondering how the hell they had become the ones in charge.

  “If this doesn’t work,” she said, “if we’re betrayed… then we just killed our own species.”

  Hank shrugged. “We would eventually die out anyway. Intelligence is counter-evolutionary. The species becomes wise enough to invent more and more efficient methods to kill itself. We were in a very long process of self-destruction.”

  She swallowed. “I didn’t think the morning would look so pretty. I thought it would be overcast or raining, something.”

  He grinned. “Death on this scale probably has a tendency to surprise everyone.”

  57

  Rick Bolton wrapped his tent and rolled the sleeping bag tightly. Early-morning Yosemite always had a certain vibe to it, especially far away from any cabins and parking lots. Something in the pine-scented air or the way the breeze whistled through the trees brought him a sense of calm that he really needed.

  He’d been there a lot as a kid and remembered the murders that had taken place. A mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter, an exchange student, and another young woman who worked for Yosemite had been killed. The decapitated body of the fourth victim had led police to Cary Stayner, who was later convicted of all four murders.

  The number of visitors to Yosemite had declined when word got out about the Yosemite Killer. When the brutal sexual assault and torture details came out, camping in Yosemite became almost non-existent. Rick still went. His father had said they’d caught the killer, and he had only targeted females, so he and Rick were fine.

  Rick was excited he and his father would have the entire park to themselves one summer when he was ten, but he hadn’t enjoyed it much. A darkness, something heavy that seemed to stick to the skin, hung over everything when they were there. Two days into a six-day trip, his father packed up and said it was time to go.

  Rick looked over at the final tent and saw the feet of his son and daughter sticking out. His thirteen-year-old son, Marcus, was snoring so loudly that Rick was amazed his daughter, Trudy, could sleep. He peeked in through the lip in the tent. Sure enough, they were both passed out. Taking out a water bottle, he spilled a few drops on each of their foreheads, and they groaned and stirred.

  “What time is it?” Marcus asked.

  “Seven o’clock,” Rick said, then took a sip of the water before replacing the lid.

  The six-day trip seemed to fly by. His work as a professor of anthropology routinely took him out of the state or country for long research projects and sabbaticals, and he tried to take his children with him whenever he could. Since their mother’s passing two years before, he was all they had.

  His boy sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Did you get what we came for?”

  “Sure did,” Rick replied, taking a small plastic container from his backpack. Wrapped up in cellophane were several arrowheads. “Anasazi. They weren’t believed to be up this far north. They’re mostly found in New Mexico. This is definitely their handiwork, though. It’ll be an exciting paper.”

  Marcus swirled his finger in the air and said, “Yay.”

  Rick smacked him playfully, and Marcus tried to tackle him. Rick lifted him off his feet and got him onto his back. He pinned him, then held him there while one of his hands went down to his armpit and tickled.

  “Eight years of wrestling, boy. You can’t take your old man yet.”

  Marcus was laughing. “Stop, stop! I’m gonna piss myself.”

  Rick stopped and got off him. He helped the boy up, then smacked his bottom and told him to pack up the tent and his gear.

  Trudy got up and went over to the edge of the trees to brush her teeth. When she was done, she got on her phone and mumbled something under her breath when she couldn’t get reception.

  “You know, there are other things to look at than a phone screen.”

  “I know. I’m waiting for a text from Alexis ’cause Brian asked her to that dance I was telling you about, and I wanna see if she said yes.”

  He shook his head. “You’re eleven. You know what I was doing at eleven? I was outside, digging stuff up to see if I could find anything cool.”

  “Good for you, Dad. But you guys didn’t have iPhones.”

  He grinned and helped Marcus finish packing.

  When they were done, they headed out of the national park in their RV. Soon, they were on the I-5, going south, back to their home in Westwood in the heart of Los Angeles.

  Marcus watched movies on his tablet, and Trudy played games on her phone. Rick frequently glanced back at them and smiled to himself. But occasionally, a pain would tug at his belly, and he would feel sullen and heavy, as though his thoughts and movements were working their way through water.

  Trudy looked like her mother.

  The drive wasn’t that bad. But along the way were abandoned jeeps and roadblocks with no one tending to them. An uneasiness came over him, but he didn’t know what else to do other than drive.


  When he finally admitted to himself that no other cars were on the freeway, as if it had been abandoned, his uneasiness turned to panic.

  “Either of you getting reception yet?”

  “Not me,” Marcus said.

  “Me neither.”

  They were back in Los Angeles in five hours. In fact, he had never made the drive in that amount of time.

  He parked at a truck stop outside the city and stretched his neck. Trudy was dozing on the bed in the back. He kissed her, then headed outside to the bathroom; hoping to find some other people that could tell him what the hell was going on. He wondered if the freeways had been closed because of some terrorist attack or natural disaster and they just hadn’t gotten the message.

  As he stepped outside, he noticed two empty cars in the lot. Rick went to the restroom and pissed at one of the urinals, yawning and stretching his shoulder, which had been injured in a college wrestling bout and never been quite the same.

  When he finished and turned toward the sink, he saw something on the wall. Dark and dry, a smear led down into the stall. Spread over an enormous portion of the wall, it looked like blood.

  From where he was standing, Rick couldn’t see in. He walked over slowly. “Hello? Is someone there?” No reply. He crouched lower for some reason and felt stupid for doing so. So he stood up, went right over, and pushed the stall door open with his boot.

  Inside, a man was huddled over a toilet. He was wearing a suit and fancy Italian leather shoes. His head was hanging over like a wet rag, and the entire stall was caked in dried blood. The walls, the floor, even the ceiling had been spattered.

  “Um, hello? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  Rick glanced to the door of the bathroom and then back to the man. He wondered if he should try to call the police or check on him first. But what did it matter if he was alive or dead? He would call the police, just the same.

  He swallowed and took a step forward. Approaching the man from behind, he reached down to grab his hips and flip him over.

  The man let out a gurgled, horrifying scream and spun onto his back. Rick jumped, and the man reached for him as more blood shot out of his mouth. But it barely looked like blood.

  The man was covered in sores or chicken pox. But Rick had seen chicken pox when Trudy had them, and that wasn’t chicken pox. The man’s skin was bumpy, but it appeared to have been burnt. Some of it was falling off.

  Rick ran out of the bathroom to get his phone and call the police. Then he heard his daughter scream.

  58

  Samantha’s plane landed at Dobbins Air Force Base, and she waited until it had come to a complete stop before unbuckling herself. She glanced at Jessica. The young girl was sitting in shock, staring out the window. She had asked where her father was twice, and no one told her.

  As they stepped off the plane, Sam put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and shuttled her over to an awaiting jeep. They rode in silence, but Jessica didn’t remove Samantha’s arm. In fact, she placed her head on Sam’s ribs, and Sam kept her arm over her, as if she could shield her from what they both knew was coming.

  When the jeep stopped in front of Samantha’s home, she debated for an instant. Olsen had given orders for the child to be taken into protective custody. But she knew what that meant—a night at a military base and then into state care. That wasn’t what Sam had promised Harold.

  Without so much as a peep from the driver, Samantha helped the young girl out of the jeep, and they walked inside the house. The house was immaculately clean.

  Sam checked her watch, and it read 9:00 a.m. The nurse usually came at around ten. The maids came twice a week, and a physical therapist was over twice a week to take her mother out for walks and to exercise on the equipment in the basement.

  “There’s a spare room over there,” Samantha said. “You have your own bathroom. We’ll go tomorrow and try and find you some new clothes.”

  “Where’s my dad?” she asked.

  Samantha locked eyes with her. The girl’s light-blue eyes were full of confusion and fury. She already knew where her father was; she had known it the moment she’d woken on the plane to the awful suction of an open door and didn’t see him there. But Sam guessed she needed to hear it.

  “Your father is gone, Jessica. I’m sorry. He passed away to save the rest of us.”

  She nodded, glancing down at the floor. “What about my mom?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no communication in or out of California, so I don’t know what’s happened to your mom. But we’ll look for her today, okay?”

  She turned without saying anything and went into the room Sam had pointed to. Sam waited a few moments and then poked her head in. Jessica was on the futon, curled up in a ball, and staring out the window at the sunlight that was flooding the street. Sam wondered what she could say to make it better, to ease her loss. But she couldn’t come up with anything. Jessica hadn’t just lost her father. Everything she had ever known was gone, and she would never get it back.

  None of them would.

  Samantha collapsed on the couch in the front room, her face in her hands, and cried. When she finished, no tears were left. She thought of Duncan and the sweet way he would text her with funny photos to make her laugh.

  She was grieving, though she didn’t recognize it as such. He would have asked her to marry him soon. Neither one of them had had any doubt about that. It was only a matter of finding the perfect moment. But it had never come. Instead, she was left with memories and a cold, empty feeling that the way her life was supposed to turn out had not materialized. Though she wanted to believe that, to revel in her grief, a part of her told her she would have said no, and it made her feel guilty. At least, she thought, Jane and her family had made it out.

  “Are you okay?” Jessica was standing there.

  Sam wiped the tears away and said, “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think I can sleep.”

  Sam patted the cushion on her couch, and Jessica walked over and sat down as Sam put her shirt to her face and cleaned off the salty tears. She wrapped her arm around Jessica, and they leaned back on the couch. Before they had a chance to say anything to each other, both of them were asleep.

  60

  Rick burst through the bathroom door and saw a man banging on his RV.

  “Hey!” Rick ran over, grabbed him by the shoulders, and flung him away. He went in for a kick as the man was still struggling to get up and stopped.

  The man was pale, and his eyes were rimmed so red that they looked painted. His clothes were stained black and wet, and Rick immediately knew it was blood. He jumped back as the man vomited so violently one of his eyes popped out of the socket. The slick, wet cord allowed it to dangle over the pavement as the vomit continued to flow.

  Rick ran to the RV and tried to open the door, but it was locked. He banged on it and called out to Trudy. Marcus opened the door, and Rick jumped in, then shut the door behind him before locking it again. He ran up to the front to look out the windshield.

  The day was warm and quiet, and with senses newly attuned from fear, he heard everything he had missed before. Or, in this case, he noticed what he hadn’t heard.

  No airplanes in the sky. No cars on the interstate. No voices outside. He turned on the radio and got static on every station. Rick pulled out his phone and dialed 9-1-1, but got a busy tone. He tried Googling the nearest police precinct, but the Internet on his phone wasn’t working.

  “Is your internet working, Trudy?”

  “No, it hasn’t worked for three days. I thought it was the canyons.”

  Rick sat in the driver’s seat for a moment, staring out at the truck stop, thinking about the man with the face that appeared to be falling off. His flesh had been ragged, as though it were weak from being soaked in water and were slipping off his skull.

  Rick started the RV and headed back onto the interstate. Trudy was sitting up in the passenger seat, and Marcus was on the floor behind him.

&
nbsp; “What’s happening, Daddy?” Trudy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  They passed several cars, but none of them were moving. They were all pulled over to the side of the road without occupants. As they rolled into Los Angeles, a heavy, dark, feeling came over Rick, and for some reason, it was familiar. But he couldn’t place it for a long time, until they saw a body in the middle of the road.

  A man, maybe in his mid-twenties, was flat on his back, and some birds were picking at his belly, which was exposed underneath a dirty tank top. His face was bloody and torn up, and all his limbs were a dark black, as though they had been barbequed.

  Rick stopped behind the corpse, recognizing the feeling he’d had before. In Yosemite, when they had entered the place where the Yosemite Killer had spread terror and evil for months, he’d felt the same.

  “Dad?” Marcus said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You gonna go around him?”

  “Yeah,” Rick said, not realizing he had been stopped for a long time. He rolled the RV around and continued down the interstate.

  “Look at that,” Marcus said.

  Corpses were piled on the side of the road. A massive accident had occurred. At least twenty to thirty cars were strewn about like children’s toys, rolled over or thrown onto the surrounding fields.

  Bodies were everywhere. But the bodies didn’t appear to have been flung around by the accident. These bodies had collapsed from something else. And the road was painted a faded red, with droplets thrown around like on a canvas painted by a drunken artist. It was so out of the ordinary that Rick’s mind couldn’t recognize the red paint for what it was: gallons of blood from the body of every person who had died out here.

  “I’m scared, Daddy.”

  “We’re safe in here,” he said, unable to sound convincing. He caught her eyes, trying to appear as upbeat and positive as possible. “We’re safe in here, sweetheart. Go lay down on the bed. We’ll be home soon.”