Point Of Transmission: A Post-Apocalyptic Epidemic Survival (The Morgan Strain Series Book 1)

by Max Lockwood

  Natalia looked down at her lap, hiding a smug smile. Elaina wasn’t sure why she was asking a stranger such personal questions. Maybe she was just so traumatized by everything that had occurred in the past twenty-four hours that she turned to inappropriate questions.

  “Well, girls,” Alec said, looking in his rearview window at the two, “should we go to the station downtown? We’ve got plenty of supplies there, so you can stay until someone can come pick you up.”

  “No,” Elaina said quickly, a cold sweat forming under her arms. “We can’t go to the police station.”

  “Why not?” Alec asked, genuinely confused. “No one can kidnap you there—it’s filled with uniformed officers. There’s no safer place in the city.”

  “I disagree,” she replied. “I don’t really have anyone to pick me up. Neither does Natalia. If we stay at the station for a few days, where will we sleep?”

  Alec thought for a moment. “We have cots in our holding cells. You can crash there until you figure something out.”

  “We’re going to be sleeping in a jail cell?” Natalia asked.

  “No,” Alec said. “It’s not like that. You know you’re not under arrest. We wouldn’t put you in the same cell as the real criminals. Maybe I can talk to the captain and we can make the drunk tank into a safe place for displaced citizens.”

  “Let me out of the car,” Elaina said firmly.

  “What?” Alec asked.

  “Here’s the thing—we’re going to be mixed in with infected people. There’s no doubt about that. If I’m stuck in a cage and someone goes into a rage, I’m going to get infected. Then I’m dead. I’m not going to a police station. If that’s where you’re going, you can let me go here.”

  “Lainey,” he protested.

  “It’s just not safe. Thank you for all of your help. I really appreciate it. I just can’t be locked into a death cell.”

  He thought for a moment, considering what Elaina had to say. He, too, had felt concerned about working in an environment where many of the people in holding cells were likely infected. It would be wrong to force them into a place that was supposed to be safe, only to see them fall victim to the virus.

  “I just don’t know where else I can take you that would be any safer,” he said.

  Elaina clenched her fists. Her heart was racing. She slid her hand to the door handle just in case he started to drive and she needed to make a quick escape.

  “If we’re going to get infected at the police station, I don’t want to go there,” Natalia said.

  “Please, let’s think of a better solution,” Elaina pleaded.

  “You’re right,” Alec said, to which Elaina breathed a small sigh of relief. If Alec didn’t recognize her, someone else at his place of employment certainly would. “Do you have any ideas?”

  The car was silent as the three tried to think of one place in the city that would be even remotely safe. Elaina needed a place with a lab and few interruptions. Natalia just wanted protection from creeps.

  “How about a school?” Alec suggested.

  “No,” the girls said in unison.

  “We came from a school, remember?” Natalia said. “I’m in no hurry to go back. They’re filled with infected.

  They thought quietly again, Natalia’s head bobbing as she started to doze off.

  “How about a hospital?” Elaina offered. “There should be enough rooms that Natalia and I can stay safe.”

  “I wouldn’t do that unless you were well rested and on top of your game,” Alec replied. “When people get sick, where’s the first place they go?”

  Elaina frowned. Save for a professional laboratory, any medical setting would be the next best bet. Even a veterinary clinic would suffice. But she couldn’t let on to Alec why she wanted lab equipment without drawing suspicion.

  After a few more minutes of silence, Elaina broke.

  “I can hardly think anymore,” she cried, throwing her hands in the air. Natalia woke up at the noise, startled into sitting up straight.

  “Let’s not worry about a permanent safe space then,” Alec said firmly. “Let’s find somewhere safe to rest for a little bit, and then we’ll figure out where to go. I could use a little rest myself. It’s not safe to be out there when we’re tired like this. Is that fine with the two of you?”

  Natalia nodded enthusiastically. Elaina bit her lip.

  “Fine,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “But once we feel rested, I’m out of here. I realize that it’s probably best if we stick together so we can sleep in shifts. Besides, you’ve got a gun and you know how to use it. That’s more than we have right now.”

  Alec cracked a small smile. He was finally getting somewhere.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “The shipping district is full of warehouses. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find an empty one. Plus, they’re filled with supplies. We just have to find the right one and set up a little shelter there.”

  “Don’t homeless people sleep in those?” Natalia protested.

  “Do you have a home to go to?” Alec retorted.

  She fell silent. “As long as you promise to protect me, I don’t care where we go.”

  “Lainey?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Once our basic needs are met, we can look for a better place. After some rest, we’ll be able to think much more clearly. Let’s go before Natalia falls asleep again.”

  Natalia reached across the backseat and squeezed Elaina’s hand. She gave her a squeeze back. She felt as though they had wordlessly created an alliance. Now, sticking with Natalia was almost equally important to working on a cure. As much as she liked to be independent, Elaina knew she couldn’t do it alone. She needed all the help she could get.

  When she got the chance, she would explain more of her situation to Natalia. Bretton’s daughter wouldn’t be her first choice for confidant under normal circumstances, but the world that they lived in was pure chaos. Elaina couldn’t afford to let a single resource go to waste.

  “Thank goodness.” Alec smiled. “I know it’s strange for me to say this since I just met you, but you have no idea how glad I am that I’m actually able to help.”

  “I’m glad that we could be your damsels in distress,” Elaina said sarcastically, flashing him a smile.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dr. Bretton Vincent took a deep breath and walked past the commanding officer’s office, hoping he wouldn’t be seen. It wasn’t that he was scared of the man, it was just hard to look him in the eyes and tell him that he wasn’t making any progress. Coleridge, as he knew him by, was a tall, muscular man, like an older version of GI Joe. Coleridge was the first man he was formally introduced to at the military base. No one else really spoke to him, except for a few lower-ranked individuals. His job was to take orders from Coleridge and report any findings to him first.

  “Here are the samples our team collected, Doctor Vincent,” an eager lab assistant named Smith said to Bretton, handing a bunch of test tubes to him. “We’ve collected five different samples from five different corpses. The deceased were all shot by police officers and military personnel due to displaying violent tendencies, so we can assume they reached the rage period fairly recently.”

  Bretton nodded and placed the tubes in the rack, clearly labeling them with the date. So far, he had managed to collect a wide variety of virus samples in hopes that one would lead him toward some type of solution. Instead, it confirmed what he already knew to be true—people were dying from his mutation of Elaina Morgan’s virus.

  No one could know this, though. In fact, when the military brought him in for questioning and briefing, he made sure to emphasize that he’d had little to no involvement in Elaina’s work. He figured he probably knew about it better than most virologists, but he was not at fault for its release.

  Because Elaina Morgan was still missing, he was the next best scientist to work on the cure. Besides, if she was wanted for possible bioterrorism, she was hardly trusted to
create a vaccine or cure.

  Because he was tasked with a top-secret operation, he only had lab assistants that the military provided for him. They were well-trained and qualified to be assistants on complicated work, but they only followed orders. This meant that their leader needed to know exactly what he was doing in order for them to be useful. Unfortunately, Bretton was stuck.

  He stared under microscopes and studied the little squiggling virus, but no inspiration came to him. It made him furious that Elaina could see these viruses and come up with ideas that would never even occur to him. He was a gifted and knowledgeable scientist, but she was doing things in the lab that no one else could do. It was unfair that he was tasked with working on something that would be a struggle for even her.

  He didn’t really have a choice, though. The military had offered him something that no one else could—complete protection. Left out on the streets to fend for himself, Bretton probably wouldn’t last more than a few weeks. He couldn’t even protect an eighteen-year-old girl—how was he supposed to protect himself?

  When the armored car turned up on the road that day, it was like a gift from heaven. He was so scared and lost, and the military scooped him off the road and gave him a job. A job which, if he completed successfully, would provide him with the wealth and power he desired. In fact, if he pulled this one off, he could even contract with the government to work on other big projects. The thought of working on top-secret projects was much sexier than co-authoring a paper that no one would even read.

  Bretton was getting ahead of himself. If he didn’t deliver, then there would be no future as a military contractor. In fact, if he didn’t come up with the results they needed, there might not be a future for him at all.

  When he was briefed, it was made clear that the military wasn’t doing him a favor by giving him a safe place to work. If Bretton couldn’t come up with results in a reasonable amount of time, then he would be released and he would have to go out on his own. Since the number of infected grew at an exponential rate, he knew the odds of staying healthy weren’t spectacular.

  What was reasonable for creating a vaccine or cure, he didn’t know. From the way Coleridge spoke, it seemed like a shorter amount of time than Bretton would have liked. It had been just a couple of days, but he didn’t even know where to start. He’d tried working on a vaccine, but every time he checked back on the virus, it had changed enough that his vaccine was useless. He couldn’t stop or predict how it was going to mutate next. It just all happened too quickly. He felt the pressure from the officers who oversaw the progress. They didn’t work in virology. They didn’t know how slow progress could be.

  The military had bigger problems on their hands than sheltering a mediocre virologist. They needed to stop the spread of the disease. This went beyond quarantines and education methods—they had to physically stop the infected from willingly infecting others. No one liked to speak of it, but the government was killing their own sick citizens by the hundreds every day.

  The government was having a hard time keeping the virus contained. What began in Seattle had spread to the suburbs and now had roots in other states. Before long, there was an international travel ban put in place. No one was entering or exiting the country. Traveling in and out of the state was first left to the discretion of the individual, but once it started spreading out of control, the National Guard was deployed to guard each state border. This helped some, but it wasn’t enough.

  It was a tricky situation for the country’s different government departments who all had plans for this sort of thing but never dreamed of having to put them in action. The idea of a massive epidemic wiping out the population was so absurd to some that putting the plans into practice was much harder in real life than in the yearly drills that elicited eye rolling and half-hearted participation.

  Plans that had been created years ago were left to sit and become outdated. Administrations changed hands, and no one thought to brief incoming staff on how to handle these things. Some of the literature on epidemics was so outdated that it was laughable. Many didn’t account for new forms of transportation and new technologies. A lot of it just wasn’t around during the days of the Polio or Ebola outbreaks. Those outbreaks happened so long ago that history books had to be pulled from libraries to see how they were dealt with.

  No one was prepared, but they were doing everything they could to stop the spread of disease. Unfortunately, these measures became dramatic once the panic set in. No one was immune to the virus, just as no one was immune to the panic that came along with it. Even the most cool and collected officials had fears that kept them up at night—Will I be next?

  The only known creator of the virus, Elaina Morgan, was missing. This didn’t make her look innocent in the eyes of the law. The longer she hid, the more she was suspected of being a malevolent scientist, hell-bent on watching the world burn.

  Bretton Vincent, on the other hand, was becoming a shining light in a dark world. Out of all the other virologists in their research lab, he was the only one who’d agreed to help. The ones who could be found were sure that they knew nothing about Elaina’s virus and weren’t remotely capable of understanding it. But Bretton, with false confidence and the desire to succeed, had agreed to do the impossible.

  Setting his wire glasses on the lab table, he rubbed the sweat from his forehead. He needed to focus if he wanted to beat the clock.

  A chicken’s egg in hand, he carefully injected a tiny sample of his virus inside, then placed it back in its incubator. He repeated the process over and over again until the incubator was full. Next, he formulated a standard catalyst and added it to his vaccine. He didn’t want to rush things, but he hoped it would speed the process up enough that he could begin trials.

  Bretton knew that he could create a vaccine for just about any run-of-the-mill virus out there. What he was struggling with was one that frequently changed. If he could get his vaccine released quickly enough, it might work. But it wouldn’t work forever. It was like making a key that opened one door when what he really needed was to make a master key that could open hundreds of locks. He might get lucky in a few isolated cases, but by and large, it wouldn’t suffice.

  “I’ve never seen that technology being used in that way before,” Smith said. “I thought people stopped using eggs for vaccines years ago. I’ve also never seen a catalyst that works that quickly.”

  “You’re young,” Bretton said. “Besides, in emergencies, you have to be resourceful. Do you have any subjects for testing?”

  Smith looked uncomfortable. He was an excellent scientist and soldier, but he had yet to be hardened by the horrors of the world.

  “What?” Bretton asked. “Don’t tell me that you haven’t found any subjects yet. I should have cages full of rats ready to go. What’s the holdup?”

  Smith looked at the floor. “I have orders, sir.”

  “What kind of orders?” Bretton groaned.

  “Have you ever worked with primates before?”

  Bretton put his glasses back on. “It’s usually not considered ethical to test on animals larger than a rat. Even with rodents, there are still rules. I’m going to need a large sample size. At this stage, ten rats are more valuable to me than one orangutan.”

  “Sir, this is the military. You can get whatever you need in any quantity you want. This is a desperate situation. Our commanding officer wants to move things as quickly as possible.”

  This made Bretton nervous—not because he had any problems testing on animals of various sizes and intellects, but because he knew that these guys were not messing around. If they could wipe out infected people without batting an eye, bring in all sorts of animals for testing, and do so without the public knowing, then what could they do to him if things didn’t go well?

  “It’s fine,” he said, “but I feel more comfortable working with rats. Besides, their DNA is similar enough to humans’ that it doesn’t sacrifice quality. Please ask your supervising officer if we can sta
rt with rats first.”

  “Yes, sir,” Smith responded, turning on his heel. He strode out of the room, just as he was conditioned to do in basic training.

  Bretton sat back on his lab stool, a sick feeling in his stomach. He was working with a very powerful, very dangerous employer. He needed to do whatever he could to get on their good side.

  Later that night when he walked back to his barracks, he wondered if his daughter were still alive. Natalia was a sheltered child. If she were still out there somewhere, he hoped that someone was taking good care of her. She was stubborn and tried to be as independent as possible, but she had never experienced a hard day in her life, as far as he could recall.

  But he knew that if he were being honest with himself, she was gone. If not from the attackers themselves, then the virus would have taken its toll on her delicate frame. She was just a wisp of a girl. Her body would have been ravished in days. Bretton tried to convince himself that she was still alive, but at the very least, she’d passed peacefully instead of being overcome with the rage.

  A tear slid down his face that he quickly brushed away. Bretton stood still for a moment and closed his eyes, breathing in the fresh air. He imagined himself standing on a stage, accepting an award for his advances in virology. The Natalia Vaccine, he’d call it, and then his daughter’s name would be on the lips of everyone around the world. He may have let her go, but he would make sure that her memory would last forever.

  Bretton brushed his teeth in front of the tiny mirror and swallowed a tiny blue pill that the medic told him would help him sleep. Then, he lifted the tightly tucked sheets and slid onto the mattress, finally free from the watchful eyes of his superiors.

  Tomorrow would be a fresh start for the scientist. Sleep would renew his focus and he’d suddenly become inspired once he stopped stressing out about it so much.

  At least that was what he had been telling himself every night since the virus was released from the lab. He couldn’t lose hope yet. There was too much on the line—fame, money, and protection from the very thing he adapted and released into the world.