Elixr Plague (Episode 3): Pandemic

by Richardson, Marcus

  A scream rent the air to his right, toward the car park. It was a primal scream, a scream of life and death. It stirred something deep in his soul. He had to go NOW.

  “I’m sorry, Carl…I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,” he whispered to his friend’s body. He swore if he survived this shit show he’d come back and give Carl a proper burial. But for now, he needed to move. He had an axe, so he could defend himself—Daren paused, looking again at Carl’s body. In the opposite corner of the room was the display case with the viking armor replica, now laying on the floor and splattered with blood. He didn’t know if it was Carl’s or the zombie’s, but the armor looked battle-used now.

  A slow smile spread on Darren’s face. The zombie had torn Carl’s throat out easy enough…but could it get through chain mail?

  When Darren left the museum a few minutes later, he was dressed in a full suit of viking dragon scale armor, covered from neck to knees in stiffened, boiled leather that was almost as hard as steel on his chest and back, and a layer of interlocking metal scales that shimmered when he moved, covering his arms and legs. He pulled a coif over his head and settled it around his neck like the hood on his favorite sweatshirt. Hefting his bloody axe, he tested the weight of the armor.

  It weighed about twenty pounds, so he definitely felt it on his shoulders and back, so he hoped it was strong enough to withstand a bite or scratch. He didn’t know if the zombie disease was spread that way—this wasn’t a movie, after all—but he had no desire to find out, either.

  Darren narrowed his eyes and stomped down the steps, looking like a real viking. He had a van to retrieve and woe unto anyone—or anything—that got in his way.

  13

  The Truth

  Private Hangars

  Laguardia International Airport

  New York City, New York

  Edith slowed the Zero FSR and stopped along a chain-link fence near the private hangars at Laguardia. Overhead, the news helicopter she’d spotted heading toward a refueling station, hovered—no doubt filming the dramatic scene of desperate people catching the last flights out of a doomed city. The motorcycle was silent, so the droning chopping of the helo’s rotors sounded incredibly loud.

  She watched as massive passenger jets lumbered into the sky, stacked like cordwood at the other end of the airport. Air traffic control was really forcing the jets out in an attempt to get as many people out of New York before the lockdown took effect.

  She scanned the nearby hangars looking for Martin’s company branded jet, one of several he owned. She’d been on it—or one like it—many times. But it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. A fuel truck sat unattended near the closest hangar, the hose laying stretched out and forgotten, a small puddle of aviation fuel staining the tarmac.

  She grabbed the chain-link fence and shook it. “Hey!” she yelled, her voice drowned out by the roar of the distant jets and the damn helicopter hovering overhead. “Hey!”

  No one answered. Desperate, she looked around, hoping to find someone—anyone—who might know what was going on. She really didn’t want to climb the fence, but according to her watch, she had only minutes left before the army made its move.

  “Damn it!” she said, pounding her hand on the bike. If she’d known the jet would have taken off without her, she would have just headed out of the city on the bike. She probably could have made it, skipping through the lines of cars trapped in tunnels and on bridges, all taking part in the world’s greatest traffic jam.

  This is not happening…

  The helicopter lowered, preparing to land. An idea formed in her head. She gunned the bike and raced down the length of fence until she came to a checkpoint. It was unmanned and the gate arm was down, so she duck-walked the bike around the arm, then left a trail of rubber on the road as she shot toward the landing helicopter.

  As she’d hoped, the cameraman in the open doorway turned and filmed her approaching like a mad woman. Someone hopped out and waved at her to slow down and divert her bike around the helicopter, but she continued in a straight line and came to a stop under the spinning blades.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy with the flight helmet on yelled over the rotors. He held his hands up when he saw the rifle hanging from her shoulder.

  “Relax!” she yelled, reaching for her Martin Enterprises, Inc. ID wallet. She held the badge out to him. “You know who I am?”

  “I do now.”

  “Get me out of this city—right now—and I’ll give you the exclusive of a lifetime.”

  “We can’t take passengers—” he yelled.

  “Get her on board!” a woman in heavy makeup said from inside the helicopter.

  The guy looked at the woman who’d just ordered him to take a complete stranger on his aircraft, then back at Edith and shrugged. “Not my call. Hop on, I’m going to arrange for some—”

  “Do you have enough fuel to get out of the city?” Edith asked, already reaching up to climb aboard.

  “Yeah, but we need to top off—”

  “We need to leave, right now,” she said. “They’re shutting down the airspace over New York in the next couple minutes. Anything not in the air isn’t going to be taking off.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded the woman inside the helicopter as she handed Edith a flight helmet.

  Edith flashed her badge again and put the helmet on.

  “Get us in the air!” the other woman said, slapping the back of the pilot’s seat.

  Edith didn’t have her helmet on yet when she felt her stomach try to fall through her own seat. She leaned back and let the other woman help her strap in.

  “Kathy Alberts,” the woman said. “Channel 10 news.”

  “Edith Traviers,” she said, shaking hands. “Executive assistant to Desmond Martin.”

  “I know who you are,” Alberts said with a grin. “But I don’t know what’s going on—no one does. Care to shed a little light on the situation?”

  Edith wedged her pack and rifle between her knees as the pilot got them up over the airport. “We need to get away from the city, right now. The army is—”

  “We know the army will be blocking the tunnels and bridges into Manhattan and Long Island—that’s why we’re here, to report on the chaos. We were just about to load up—”

  “No,” Edith said, holding up a hand. “You don’t understand.” She pulled out her phone, and opened the message on her ultra-secure email host that Martin had sent her when he’d given her the first warning, almost forty-five minutes ago.

  Edith waited patiently, trying to hold her arm and the phone steady for Alberts as the helicopter banked over the airport. God, had it only been forty-five minutes?

  “This says they’re going to shoot down any aircraft that doesn’t land…is this legit?”

  “Do you see who sent it?”

  “Senator Franklin?”

  Edith nodded. “And I got it from Desmond Martin himself. It’s real. And they’re going to shoot us down if we don’t get outside the city in the next few minutes.”

  “Uh…I’m getting a weird broadcast up here,” the pilot said, breaking into the conversation. “They’re telling all aircraft in the vicinity of New York to land or…this can’t be right…”

  “Get us out of here, right now!” Alberts yelled into her mic.

  “Where?” the pilot asked.

  “South! Get us out of New York airspace—take us over the Sound, I don’t care, just get us outside that boundary!” Edith said.

  “Do it!” Alberts said when the pilot hesitated. “I’ll cover you, just do it.”

  “You got it, Kathy,” the pilot replied. “Hold on to your asses, ladies, we’re gonna kiss the deck.”

  Edith yelped in surprise when the pilot put the helo nose down into a dive and threw the throttle wide open. She closed her eyes and gripped her seat with white knuckles. The engine roared, the wind howled, and the news chopper flew at breakneck speed just a hundred feet off the ground, ra
cing south for freedom.

  “They’re ordering me to land,” the pilot reported when the wild, bucking ride leveled out.

  Edith opened her eyes, watching pavement and roads and cars zip by under the skids. “How fast are we going?”

  “Not fast enough,” the pilot grunted. He angled the nose down a little, and the helicopter picked up speed. “We’re maxed out now, won’t have much fuel after this.”

  “Where can we go?” asked Alberts.

  “Anywhere but here,” Edith replied. “Can you get to Philly?”

  The pilot looked at his gauges. “We can make it, but it’ll be tight. Assuming they’re not going to shoot us down if we exit NYC airspace, I can slow down to cruising speed. We should be good. But we’ll need to refuel ASAP.”

  Alberts looked out the window. “Hang on.” She pulled out her phone and tapped out a message. “I’m contacting our sister station in Philly.”

  Edith looked out her window again, wondering how much information she could give to the reporter as payback for saving her life, yet cause minimal harm to Martin and his company. She knew the details of the Elixr Project and knew—knew—it was a good, worthy goal. Somehow, someone out there had modified Elixr to turn people into monsters, whether accidental or on purpose didn’t matter. Martin and his team, meaning her, had to come up with a way to fix things. They had to. She glanced at the reporter and her cameraman, heads together over cell phones. If Martin Enterprises came under even more investigation and scrutiny…

  Her mouth pressed into a line as her hand rested on the barrel of her rifle. If need be, she’d get out at Philly without giving any exclusive interview. It all depended on how far the reporter wanted to push.

  Alberts looked up at her like she’d been reading her thoughts. She held up her phone and smiled. “Say cheese.”

  “What?” Edith asked. The phone flashed and Alberts looked down at her lap again, her thumbs furiously tapping out a new message.

  “They wanted proof. I had to take a picture of you to send to the boss. I think they’re going to go for it.”

  Edith’s fingers traced the barrel of her rifle. “Go for what?”

  “Getting us clearance to land and refuel in Philly and bringing you with us in exchange for a tell all interview on what the hell is really going on with Elixr.” She looked up from her phone. “Are you cool with that? We’ve seen some seriously crazy shit in the last couple days and no one is willing to say what—if they even know—is going on. I have a feeling though, that you do know.”

  Edith swallowed. The woman had the power to reach millions of viewers. She could sway the opinion of entire cities. Cities that had been infected with the modified Elixr. She thought back to the people—the things—she’d seen on the Queensboro Bridge…those monsters, feeding on a person…they were caused by Elixr. By the virus…

  She closed her eyes. She had a duty to warn people. She knew that, but she had a duty to Martin. He was trying desperately to fix things and he couldn’t do that from behind bars, which is exactly where he’d be if she gave a tell-all interview. She couldn’t do that. It would not only end her career, and the company she loved, but it would doom the nation—maybe humanity. A cure had to be found before it was too late, and Martin was uniquely poised to get it done fastest.

  Edith looked at the Martin Enterprises bag strapped to her BOB. And the key to finding that cure could very well be sitting right there.

  “Whadya say?” asked Alberts with an evening news grin. Her finger hovered over the send button on her phone’s messaging app.

  “I’ll do it,” Edith said. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “Fantastic!” Alberts hit send, then read the reply. She broke into a wide smile. “Get us to Philly!”

  Edith looked out the window. I’ll tell you the truth. She watched burning cars and people running in the streets as the helicopter crossed the coast of Long Island and soared out over the open Atlantic, out of the reach of the army and the air force and their missiles. There were other problems for them to deal with, like the stream of passenger jets.

  How many of them would get shot down? How many hundreds of people would die screaming as they fell to their deaths in balls of fire and fuel?

  I’ll tell you the truth…

  The pilot banked hard to the right, and they angled back toward the Jersey shore and buildings glittering in the sunlight.

  …but I won’t tell you the whole truth…

  14

  Hunger

  Beacon Point Urgent Care

  Beacon Point, Michigan

  Jillian woke up on a bed, with IVs in her arms. A machine beeped somewhere behind her head. Groggy, she stirred and moaned. Her whole body ached. For the first time in what felt like forever, she didn’t feel hot, so she counted that as a win.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living, Ms. Downer,” a kind, warm voice said to her, floating on waves of nausea.

  Jillian groaned again and redoubled her effort to open her eyes and focus. A figure stood over her, shadows covering its. She saw a flash of white and recognized a smile.

  “Where am I?” she croaked.

  “You’re in the Beacon Point Urgent Care center,” the voice said. “I’m Dr. Linda Grenwald, your attending physician. You’re fighting a serious upper respiratory infection, Ms. Downer. ”

  “What?”

  Grenwald sighed. Her image cleared somewhat as Jillian’s eyes came back into focus. She froze when she recognized the biohazard suit Dr. Grenwald wore. A white, bulbous space-suit thing with a large clear visor that remained inflated with air pressure from the backpack she wore. The doctor winked.

  “Don’t you worry though, we’ll have you out of here in no time.”

  Jillian closed her eyes and turned her head away. It was the Elixr virus, just like the woman in CVS had said. The clerk at the gas station in Sault Ste. Marie…he had infected her when he’d sneezed.

  “Oh, God,” she whimpered. She’d heard snippets on the radio while in the car escaping Sault Ste. Marie about people dying in New York and the thousands of cases in Los Angeles.

  A gloved hand gripped Jillian’s shoulder, as gentle as possible through the layers of plastic and latex. “Now, don’t you worry, hon, we’ll take care of you. I don’t—”

  “You can’t help me,” Jillian whined, tears leaking from her eyes. “I’ve got that virus, the one from New York. I can feel it…”

  Grenwald pulled her hand away as if she’d been burned. “How do you know that?” she asked in a whisper.

  Jillian coughed. Something wet shifted in her chest. “Some guy at the gas station I stopped at this morning…he sneezed on me.”

  Grenwald pulled a clipboard from a shelf and made a note. “This morning? Where was this?”

  Jillian coughed. When she pulled her hand from her mouth, there was a fleck of bright red on her thumb. Her fingers trembled at the sight, but she answered anyway. “Sault Ste. Marie. The Citgo on 3rd street.”

  Grenwald made another note. “Sault Ste. Marie? What are you doing here? Did he look sick? When did you start feeling sick?”

  Jillian tried to shrug at the barrage of questions, and the effort elicited a new moan of pain. Every joint in her body felt like it was in a vise and every movement turned up the pressure. “He didn’t…I don’t know…I didn’t ask…he said a friend of his had been at the Elixr release event in Chicago…”

  “Mmphmmm,” Grenwald said, making another note. “And did you get his name?”

  “I wasn’t asking him on a fucking date,” Jillian snarled, “just getting gas and a breakfast sandwich.” Why was she tied to the bed? She pulled on the restraints. Could this day get any worse? Anger welled up inside her.

  Grenwald watched her struggle, a cold expression on her face. “Just settle down, Jillian…we’ve got you restrained for your own good—you were pretty out of it when they brought you in. Now, can you tell me anything else…when did you start feeling sick?”

  “
Like I said, I…I don’t know,” Jillian said, trying to think back through the haze of memories she wasn’t even sure were hers. She remembered driving out of the city and being stuck in traffic…taking 28 West…then things started getting blurry. She closed her eyes. “I remember feeling hot and turning up the A/C in the car….somewhere on 28—after I left the interstate…it was so hot.”

  “Good,” Grenwald said, her pen scratching on paper again. It was painfully loud. “When did you notice anything was wrong…anything at all, even the smallest thing could help us.”

  “Well…” Jillian said. She closed her eyes again and swallowed, her throat felt thick and hurt. “I guess…my hands started hurting when I was home.”

  “You went home? After you got gas?”

  “No…I went to work after I got gas. I went home after my dad called and told me to leave the city.”

  “I see…” Grenwald muttered. “Where do you work?”

  “Uh…a law firm. I’m a…a paralegal. Broskowski and Putnam.” Jillian swallowed again and winced.

  “Here, dear, have some water.”

  Jillian took a sip and grimaced. “Hurts to swallow.”

  “I’ll get something for your sore throat in a minute. I just need to ask a few more questions. Now…who did you talk to at work?”

  Jillian frowned. “I…I don’t remember…” She really couldn’t. She remembered sitting at her desk and eating breakfast, putting on her headphones and dealing with Frank’s latest travesty of a brief. That took most of the morning, then she shipped it off to him to approve, and while she wrapped up another case, he sent it back that afternoon for a final edit. That’s what she’d been working on when her dad called. She tried to explain this to Grenwald, but the doctor seemed convinced she must have spoken to someone at the office.