Today We Die (The Killing Sands Book 1)

by Daniel Wilde

  The goal of these measures is to seal Anthrax E within its current location to ensure the safety and survival of the human race.

  The current quarantine and isolation will remain in effect indefinitely. Following the HMP application, a no flyover zone will be enforced for 1 mile above the tallest building in the city. This additional measure will be in force indefinitely.

  “Holy crap! I’m glad we’re getting out of here now!” I said.

  “Yeah. We don’t have time to sit in confinement for seven days. Shevchuk needs your samples now.” Anta spoke so matter-of-factly that I was confident she had no doubts about her plan for escape.

  That’s good, because we’re out of here. I wonder if they’ll find any survivors.

  January 21, 2093, 8:30 AM—Shift

  Yesterday at 6:30 PM, near twilight, Anta and I braved the elements and the sick air outside the hotel. Hauling our gear down the stairs to avoid potential dead people on the elevator, we loaded her truck with all of the provisions it could carry. It took us several trips. We had to make sure we had enough food and water to last several days in the desert, just in case our plans for escape failed. We probably loaded two weeks worth—which we hoped was overkill. We wondered if someone would see us, so we used caution at first. But we didn’t see any movement, anywhere.

  We traveled south into the Qattara Depression along the pot-holed Al Betrol Road. The air was still and the moon was bright—not exactly the best cover for our escape, but it meant we could keep the headlights off until we left the city limits and some distance beyond. We didn’t see a single person though, living or dead, after we left the city.

  In fact, even before we left the city, we only saw two bodies, maybe 60 meters away. They were far enough away, at the entrance to an alley near a bakery, that we couldn’t tell what condition the bodies were in. But they were lying on the ground, either dead or very near to it. With a bit of shame, we drove right past. If they were alive, we reasoned, they would be found by the inspectors only a few hours later. We would not have been able to help them anyway.

  Approximately five hours after we passed the city limit on the south, driving through the barren Qattara Depression, we neared the junction of the Al Wahat Al Baharia Road. 15-20 minutes before we would have actually reached the junction, Anta turned off the headlights and slowed our speed. She believed a quarantine checkpoint would probably be located at that junction because there are so few roads out here.

  “This old truck is a noisy bugger,” she complained. “We can’t afford to have anybody at the quarantine border hear us coming.” The land between us and the junction was completely flat. Our headlights wouldn’t have helped us stay hidden for long. She stopped the truck and turned off the engine.

  We exited the truck and searched for any sign of a checkpoint in the distance. The bright moon, our only source of light, reflected off the sand like lamplight at night on fresh snow. The sand was a fascinating shade of turquoise blue. There wasn’t a single sound reaching our ears. Even the insects had gone to bed. It was other-worldly, and peaceful.

  “I don’t see any sign of life,” Anta said.

  A few moments later, though, I saw specks of light in the distance, at two points—one to the left and one to the right.

  “I see the lights,” Anta said quietly before I could point them out to her.

  “Yeah, one in each direction. They look like they’re a couple miles away.”

  “More like five miles. Things look closer in the desert than they really are.”

  “Do you think those are quarantine checkpoints?” I asked.

  “Yes, along the Al Wahat Al Baharia Road, as we had suspected,” Anta replied.

  If she was correct, then those two checkpoints would restrict travel out of the Qattara Depression on any surface road. Of course, we didn’t intend to ever reach that junction. Using satellite-fed pinpoints on my watch, I located an old dirt road heading south just behind us.

  Anta’s old truck seemed reliable, but the whole desert in that area was deep sand—presently glowing a beautiful blue. I was concerned that the dirt road may be impassable. But we didn’t have any other option.

  Turning that noisy truck around, we began to look for the road. Several minutes later, in the dark with no headlights, we finally found a small, raised section of dirt road heading south off the highway. It was lined with rocks making it look, on that otherworldly night, like the backbone of a giant, blue lizard. While the lizard spine running along the west side of the road was likely meant to keep the sand off the dirt road, several sections were covered over with anyway. It made travel slow and difficult, even with the truck’s wheels engaged into “four wheel drive”.

  After driving a few miles down the old sandy road, sometimes on hard-packed dirt and sometime across drifts, we stopped again, this time to cleanse ourselves and our gear. We hadn’t yet left the quarantine zone and prudently, Anta decided that it would be incredibly stupid to travel any closer to civilization without first destroying any Anthrax E spores on our chem suits, vehicle or possessions. Plus, we eventually had to get out of the suits before we met any people.

  The truth is that, even after sterilizing everything in our possession, we still risked personal contamination just by virtue of our location very near the south-eastern edge of the Qattara Depression. The risk, of course, seemed minimal since the winds had not traveled south-east since we discovered Anthrax E. Nor had we heard any reports of illness to the east or south of El-Alamein—and Anta had asked her father that very question before we left El-Alamein. So, we were—well, Anta at least was—fairly confident that, in our present location, the only risk of infection was from our own stuff. So, we sterilized everything inside and out of the truck—our gear, the provisions and our suits. Well, not inside our suits. That would have been stupid.

  Then we drove 20 miles farther down the road and sterilized everything again. Then we traveled another 20 miles and repeated the process. That’s right, three times. Then, with great trepidation, we removed our chem suits and left them in the desert to be swallowed up by the foam application that was to commence shortly.

  Finally, after nearly two hours of steady, but slow and difficult travel on that old dirt road, we came to the Al Wahat Al Baharia Road, but this time nearly 60 miles south of what we believed was the quarantine checkpoint we’d seen earlier. From there, a right turn and a quick 45 minutes later, we arrived in the small town of Bawiti, just before 3:00 AM.

  Anta pulled up to the back of a small motel and turned off the engine.

  “Wait in the car,” she said. “I’ll check in, then come and get you. They shouldn’t ask questions if I’m alone and pay with cash.”

  Since authorities were supposedly going door to door in El-Alamein, we assumed that they would be looking for us, thinking that we might still be alive. If, or when they didn’t find us, dead or alive, they may have become suspicious. We didn’t want them to know where we’d gone.

  “Why do I have to wait in the car?” I asked, with a smile.

  “Oh, you’re much too handsome to be a local,” Anta replied, smiling. “We don’t want to raise suspicion, do we?” Her smile was tired but mischievous.

  A few minutes later, she returned and pointed to a dusty-looking cottage behind the main building. We grabbed our bags and hurried across the hard-packed ground to the small building where we crashed for the remainder of the night.

  After an amazing, hot shower and relieving myself on a real, flushing, porcelain toilet, I laid down on the couch, across the room from Anta and the bed, with no chem suit. Just before I fell asleep, I caught Anta looking at me. Her hair was wet from her shower, and she was wearing a tight t-shirt and gym shorts. She was cute. I smiled. She smiled back. Thankfully, I didn’t have long to ruminate on the issue of her sleepwear as I fell asleep almost immediately, and slept soundly.

  January 21, 2093, 3:45 AM—Anta

  That shower was amazing! It’s been 17 days since we put on the che
m suits. Sponge baths do a pretty crappy job of keeping a girl clean. Plus, you can’t wash your hair without real shampoo and water. Shift’s hair is short, so he didn’t look so bad tonight when we left our suits in the desert; but he had to be disgusted by my appearance. I certainly was. He didn’t say anything though. I wonder what the hotel clerk thought of me when we showed up here a little while ago. I was stinking up the joint.

  Shift just crawled into bed—literally. This isn’t the first time we’ve slept in the same room together—we’ve always been in separate beds—but it’s the first time sleeping in the same room without the chem suits. He’s wearing some long, thin, cotton sleeping pants but no shirt. The dude—to borrow his apparent term of endearment—looks good! His six foot frame is quite muscular, which I wouldn’t have thought given the clothes I’ve seen him in. He’s pretty tan too, with dark blue eyes and very short, light brown hair. He’s no supermodel; he just looks like he cares about himself.

  His tan skin is a little surprising considering he came to Egypt from Colorado, in the winter, where there’s snow, and, we’ve spent the last 17 days covered from head to toe. Maybe it’s just the natural color of his skin. It’s nice, whatever its source.

  When Shift looked at me tonight, just before he closed his eyes, I couldn’t help but notice his kind face. It’s the face I first saw at the airport in Apion. Lately though, it’s been hard to see as we’ve struggled with our reality.

  But despite the turmoil, just being with him has kept my spirits up. When he smiles, however seldom lately, it makes me feel like things are going to work out okay. When he sighs, I feel like I should slow down and enjoy life a little more. When he cries—which I’ve only seen a couple of times—like during our Holo conference with Dr. Ghannam and his daughter Shani, when they took them away for isolation—I feel like my heart will stop beating.

  Phew! I’ve got to stop thinking about Shift this way, and I’ve got to stop looking at him. There’s nothing I can do. He’s my colleague. He’s not married though. I wonder if he has a girlfriend. Why haven’t I asked? Ahhh, stop it Anta! Go to sleep!

  January 21, 2093, 7:35 PM—Shift

  When we left the motel this morning, the small town of Bawiti was buzzing with life—life as I imagined existing a hundred years ago. There were merchants on the streets in little kiosks selling necklaces, dishes and meat with flies circling hungrily. There were camels for rent, although anybody renting one would have to go south away from the Depression—probably not too good for business lately. The buildings were, for the most part, run-down; but they had a mystic charm, like in that old cartoon “Aladdin” with the blue genie from the lamp that sang and danced. We saw a few automobiles, but only one hovercar.

  The breeze was calm but noticeable, and coming from the West! A wind from that direction, blowing across the Depression, would send Anthrax E right into Apion and Cairo. But the palm trees were only gently swaying in that breeze, and, I hoped, El-Alamein and the Depression were already covered in foam.

  Just down the block from our motel, kids were playing at a small park, just like any small-town playground you would find in the United States. Swings were swinging, the sun glittered off a short metal slide, and it looked like a game of “tag” was underway. It was peaceful, and a bit surreal. It was hard to believe that we had just been surrounded by death—and a very gruesome death at that—concerned for our lives, and anxious that we would never be able to leave El-Alamein; and yet, there, in a place so close to all that carnage, life continued to move at a leisurely pace, seemingly unconcerned with anything else going on in the world. There was no sign that the people had any concern for their health, despite the deadly bacteria wreaking havoc less than 300 miles away. The press had been adequately constrained.

  We reluctantly left the peaceful town of Bawiti, headed for the closest international airport not located in Cairo. There are relatively few major roads in Egypt’s deserts. A direct route to Cairo from Bawiti would take us back past the quarantine checkpoints. While we weren’t necessarily concerned that the guards there would know anything about us, we didn’t want to take the chance. So, we had a long drive ahead of us. There’s an international airport in the city of Asyut, 560 miles away. In Anta’s old truck, and on those dilapidated roads, at times covered with sand, it took us over nine hours to get to Asyut, but we were on our way. Our destination—Boston, Massachusetts.

  En route to Asyut, Anta sent an encrypted com to her dad to report our whereabouts and to ask him to arrange passage for us to Boston. Then, just before we arrived in Asyut this evening, Anta received another communication from her dad describing what actually occurred in El-Alamein today.

  “Read it out loud,” she said as I took her datapad and began scanning it.

  “It’s in Arabic, but I’ll try.”

  Anta gave me a look that said, I know you read Arabic, so cut it out!

  “Okay. Your old man says, ‘1,200 inspectors were dispatched to El-Alamein, just as planned, and began their search at precisely 6:00 AM, as scheduled. During the next 10 hours, approximately 70% of the city was searched. In that time, only seven survivors were located, five of which were . . . I think the word is ‘sick’. Of those five, four agreed to humane dispatch, and the other was dispatched without her consent.’”

  “Dispatched?” Anta questioned out loud.

  “Were they just shot in the head?” I asked.

  “Oh, I hope not,” Anta replied.

  I continued. “‘The two other survivors showed no signs or symptoms of any contagion, both tested positive for infection. They were both female—a 37-year-old woman and her 13-year-old daughter. They were discovered in their home. They had not taken any precautions to keep the plague out of their home. They had been breathing normally, eating normally, sleeping normally. The only precaution they had taken as to their own safety was to stay indoors. The two healthy survivors and 1,199 inspectors all checked in by the designated time. One inspector failed to check in and was likely buried in the foam with any other person who may have survived the plague.’

  “That’s all it says,” I concluded.

  “They only searched 70 percent of the city. That means they needed more inspectors or more time. What if there were others?” Anta asked, her voice a little tremulous.

  “I suppose finding only two uninfected people out of that 70 percent of the city means that they likely wouldn’t have found any others in the remaining 30 percent,” I replied.

  “You’re probably right,” Anta said. “They might not have even found us, except that we would have been looking for them too, not hiding out in the hotel.”

  “It’s a good thing we’ll never have to know. I wonder if that mother and daughter are immune or just lucky. They tested positive, but aren’t sick.”

  “I’m sure we’ll find out,” Anta said.

  Through some brief coms with Minister Chalthoum, we learned that there have been no alerts about us; so we didn’t know whether the authorities in charge of the search in El-Alamein realized that we weren’t there, or whether they even cared. Our tickets granted us passage on a flight to Boston and nobody at the airport stopped us or even gave us a second look.

  January 22, 2093—Anta

  We landed in Boston yesterday afternoon, just before dusk. Our flight was without incident. I was pretty worried that our flight would be stopped just before take-off and that somebody would come on the plane, drag us off, and haul us to some containment facility, there to remove our heads and limbs as punishment for our crimes. But that didn’t happen.

  During the flight, I couldn’t stop thinking about how, just a few hours earlier, Shift and I were worried that we may not live to see another day. But when we landed in Boston, there was no indication that anybody even knew about the problems in El-Alamein. A news program playing on the holos at the terminal had no ongoing coverage of the situation, which was contrary to what I’d come to expect in times of crisis. In fact, there wasn’t even a blip about El-A
lamein in the 45 minutes we watched. Instead, the news coverage had stories about a basketball game between the revered Boston Celtics and the Honolulu Waves (Boston got creamed, not that I care), an aviation trade show in South Boston, and a fairly-interesting editorial on the Second Boston Tea Party of 2032, which I didn’t get to finish watching.

  We were met at the airport in Boston by Dr. John Silitzer. He seemed thrilled to see us, with a big smile and warm hug for Shift, and two-handed hand-shake for me. It seemed he was holding back on a hug he wanted to give me too. Perhaps in time.

  “Hey John, can I call my sister,” Shift asked as we headed toward the exits.

  “Better now than when we get to our destination,” John replied. “In fact, try not to mention any details of our plans, just in case your call is monitored.”

  “Are my calls being monitored?” Shift asked, nervously.

  “Not that I know of. But better safe than sorry, as they say.”

  Shift wandered away as he dialed. When he returned a few minutes later, he was in a good mood.

  “Looks like that went well,” John said.

  “Everything’s fine in their world. I told her I would be out of touch again for a while. She’s not happy about it, but she’s glad I’m in the States instead of overseas. And, it was great to talk to my nieces again.”

  After our brief reunion at the airport, we headed off. From the Logan-Bush International Airport in Boston, we traveled east along the Massachusetts Turnpike Air Corridor, flying in a new 2092 Chevrolet Fluxor. Sure, we have hovercraft of various types back home, and nearly every family owns one, but there’s clearly more affluence in the United States. According to my studies, that’s been the case for almost 200 years. This craft was beautiful and the ride was incredibly smooth. After all that time in my truck over the past couple of days, it felt like we were drifting lazily along on a cloud, or, at least, a very nice mattress on wheels.

  We followed the Massachusetts Turnpike Air Corridor for about 70 minutes at a very rapid pace relative to the speed of my truck—through the urban center of Boston and then through its vast suburbs—and then turned northwest. Our route took us through a very dark, heavily-forested countryside unlike anything I’ve seen before. The trees and undergrowth were so thick that my visibility was limited to perhaps 80-100 meters in any given direction, and it was dark.