Hour 23

by Robert Barnard

“If you insist,” Dr. Merrill said, trying to hide his annoyance, “I will tell you that the name is more poetic than literal. I realized very early on that this virus’s greatest strength was its element of surprise. If you found a loved one exhibiting symptoms of EV1, you may hug them, nurse them, comfort them, and likely end up becoming infected yourself. But, thanks to a rapid dissemination of information, as well as a brisk and carefully calculated military quarantine, that element of surprise was quickly lost. Those who were infected moved slowly and weakly before spreading the virus—that is not the mark of a virus that can cause extinction. If it were up to me, I would rename it something else.”

  “When was the last reported infection?” Vivian asked without pause.

  “Four months ago, approximately.”

  “How does a virus with a shelf life of twenty-three hours continue to affect the north east region for months after its discovery?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Dr. Merrill said, and he leaned back in his chair. “And there are several answers. First is the fact that not everyone evacuated. Many stayed behind in the scope of the disaster zone. Some Amish communities, for example, as well as other groups of folks who refused to leave. Secondly, we’re still not certain of the origin of EV1. We have several leading theories—”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m unable to disclose them at this time, but they’re great theories. And I wish I could delve into them, but until we are absolutely certain, such information could be misguiding and do more harm than good. And in fact, the biggest challenge with EV1 is not that those who contract it die twenty-three hours later. It’s the virus’s incubation period that proves most difficult. Over ninety percent of the time, those who contract EV1 will succumb to the virus within two minutes. Depending on a wide range of variables, however—age, race, weight, gender—some incubation times have been as long as several hours. The pilot of the Oceanic flight, for instance, had been living with the virus for nearly a day before exhibiting symptoms.”

  “So, people could be walking around, carrying the disease right now and not know it?”

  “Well, yes. But to date, that has been a problem exclusively reserved to the State of New York. There has been wide-spread field testing for EV1. We have taken samples in every state in America, and nearly every nation in the global community has helped our efforts, also. Keep in mind that many citizens volunteer to be tested. Regardless, there has not been a single reported case of EV1 outside of the great State of New York.”

  “What are your hopes for immunization?”

  “Another excellent question, Miss Morales,” Dr. Merrill said, unbuttoning his suit jacket. “We hope to have a vaccination ready for distribution within the next month. I know for your viewers that seems like an eternity, but for a vaccination to be prepared like this in under a year is nothing less than extraordinary, and is a testament to the global partnerships that have been forged in the medical community during the aftermath of this pandemic.”

  Dr. Merill paused in his chair. He felt disgusted with himself; for having to adhere to a script, for taking the orders of mysterious agents he knew little of, and for having to push an agenda. He suddenly recalled his time spent in residency, towards the end of medical school, when the AIDS epidemic first began. How many years since then had passed without a vaccination, or a cure? And now, just eight short months since the dawn of EV1, the mysterious agents from D.C. would be hand delivering him a vaccination on a silver platter. The doctor was not a religious man, but he had an urgent and unshakeable feeling that he was doing business with the devil.

  Vivian Morales thanked Dr. Merrill again for joining the show, then turned towards her camera and introduced the next segment. Dr. Merrill let out a deep sigh. For the first time in a long time, he couldn’t wait to be back in New York.

  ***

  The doctor was exhausted from his trip back to New York. It was a lengthy flight from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh. Despite domestic flights resuming several months earlier, New York was still a no-fly zone. And, it wasn’t as if he could take a train or a taxi for the extensive drive from Pittsburgh to Riverside, New York. A military escort waited for him at the airport, shuffled him into the backseat of a camouflaged Humvee, and escorted him back home.

  Miles and miles of destroyed towns and abandoned communities passed outside his window before Dr. Merrill saw the outline of Riverside Mall on the horizon. In the weeks after the epidemic, when the death and destruction had finally been brought to a simmer, the abandoned mall was utilized as a makeshift laboratory for Dr. Merrill, a specialized team of epidemiologists from WHO, and agents of the CDC. One half of the building had been converted into a hospital of sorts, used for experimentation and research, while the other half was transformed into crude living quarters for the staff. Dr. Merrill’s current home address was the south east corner of a former JC Penny.

  Outside of the hospital, Agent Litchfield was smoking a cigarette. When the Humvee came to a stop, he reached for the back door handle of the vehicle and opened it.

  “Hey, Hollywood,” Litchfield said with a cackle as the doctor stepped out.

  Dr. Merrill wasn’t amused. “You know it wasn’t my choice, yes?”

  “I know, but don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it at least a little bit. Hey, how hot was that broad Vivian up close?”

  “She was just lovely,” Dr. Merrill said. “As fine of a journalist as I would expect to find in Los Angeles.”

  “At least the weather must have been nice. Damn, practically summer and I’m shivering. The sun hasn’t even set yet.”

  “Too bad our virus couldn’t have swept through Florida?” Dr. Merrill said, chuckling for the first time since arriving home. “We could be running lab tests with pink flamingos, sipping fruity drinks with tiny umbrellas.” Dr. Merrill groaned. “That’s New York for you. Don’t worry, it will warm up soon enough, and the perpetual chill in the air will be a distant memory.”

  Litchfield finished his cigarette, flicked it on the pavement, and stamped it out with his foot.

  “Come, old friend. Walk me in, tell me what I’ve missed,” Dr. Merrill said, holding what was once the door to the mall food court open for Agent Litchfield.

  “We started testing the vaccination.”

  Dr. Merrill looked surprised. “Human trials?”

  “Some of the guys were lining up to volunteer the moment your girl Stephanie dropped them off.”

  “You should have waited for me.”

  “There was no stopping it, doc. The excitement here was at a fever pitch.”

  “You still should have waited for me.”

  “Forgive me your highness,” Litchfield said. “You missed baby’s first steps, sure. But aren’t you curious as to how he’s walking?”

  “Tell me.”

  “No reported side effects yet. So far, human trials are running at a best case scenario projection. No sickness. No one has turned, either, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “That was never a concern of mine, agent.”

  “We all knew deep down there was a chance of it happening.”

  “How many have been vaccinated?” Dr. Merrill asked, as he took off his jacket and replaced it with a lab coat.

  “Currently, thirty. Mostly nurses. Feds are ready to start churning them out as soon as our reports are finished.”

  A repeating, buzzing alarm suddenly initiated. It echoed through the wings of the mall. Bzzt, Bzzt. Bzzt. It both startled and worried Agent Litchfield and Dr. Merrill.

  “Been a long time since that’s gone off, huh?” Litchfield said, not seeming too worried.

  The two hurried into hazmat suits and rushed to the main entrance at the northern wing of the mall. The alarm indicated that an EV1 victim was being rushed into the mall.

  Litchfield’s teams were still finding the occasional EV1 patient wandering the countryside or stumbling through town. Not that it was any business of Vivian Morales or the viewers of the CNN ne
ws network.

  Though he stated otherwise, the last EV1 positive patients brought in entered Dr. Merrill’s facility just six days before his primetime news interview. They were from a cult operating in West Chester. A group of whack jobs, as Litchfield referred to them, hid out in an abandoned church during the evacuation. Adults, children, old, young—they would take one infected member, and just before their twenty-third hour, intentionally use them to infect the next cult member in line. When Litchfield’s military team found them, they discovered three persons infected, two survivors, and a stack of thirty-two deceased bodies in the front of the church.

  At the north wing of the mall, in a Sears that had been gutted and transformed into a makeshift welcome center for EV1 patients, Dr. Merrill and Agent Litchfield waited with a group of nurses and doctors.

  Two stretchers burst through the wide front doors of the entrance. An ambulance with its lights still flashing parked haphazardly on the curb outside.

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Merrill said, running alongside the ambulance crew.

  “We were ambushed by a group of them while doing recon work on the south end of Riverside,” a young man in military garb said.

  “A…group?” the doctor asked.

  “Yeah, a fucking group. At least five or six.”

  “All infected?”

  “Every single one of them. I lost one of my men out there, these two here were bit. The one on the left—Medina—he’s got your fucking vaccination. It better work. My guy on the right, Olivarez, he’s—”

  Olivarez screamed from the tight bounds of his gurney.

  Dr. Merrill understood, and ordered that they be sent to separate quarantines for observation. The two men were wheeled off in different directions.

  Agent Litchfield walked up beside Dr. Merrill and patted his shoulder. “I guess we’re going to find out how effective those vaccinations are.”

  ***

  Sherri stood in Dr. Merrill’s doorway.

  “Medina’s dead.”

  “What?” Dr. Merrill shouted from behind his desk. The doctor had run back to pick up some files and notebooks to help document the new arrivals.

  “He turned five minutes ago, and he was on the DLL list.”

  The DLL list was a ghoulish, yet necessary list that many of the Riverside staff had democratically enacted. They wanted to work and help in New York, yes; but they also understood the very real possibility of becoming infected themselves. Many opted to be put on the DLL list—“don’t let ‘live’”—in the event that they were exposed to EV1. Should someone on the list become infected, the medical staff would compassionately euthanize them as quickly as possible.

  “And Olivarez?”

  “Turned, sir. They have him strapped down in the east wing.”

  Dr. Merrill stood silent and still before grabbing his desk by the front drawer and flipping it over in one quick blur. The doctor’s computer monitor and table lamp crashed against the floor. Loose papers floated and glided throughout the room.

  “Sir?” Sherri asked meekly.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Dr. Merrill said with an unnerving plainness. “Get out now.”

  “I’ve never seen you drink before,” Litchfield said, holding an empty bottle of bourbon in his hand. He sat at the foot of Dr. Merrill’s bed. “Isn’t this stuff banned on the premises?”

  “Shut up,” Dr. Merrill said.

  “It’s disappointing news,” Litchfield said, trying not to grind his teeth. “But it’s no excuse for you to act like a fucking baby, Paul. I had to come in here to wake you because you scared Sherri half to death. She’s still rattled.”

  Dr. Merrill grunted. “Let me sleep.”

  “This hurts us all, Paul. It will take months before we have another stab at a vaccination pinned down. But we’re all in this together, for Christ’s sake. Get up.”

  Dr. Merrill rolled over, turned his back to Litchfield, and muttered, “Get out of here.”

  The doctor tried to drift to sleep, but all he could think of were the calls to Agents Perry and Ritchie that had gone unreturned. The bitter voicemails he had left them, cursing and screaming. He put his neck on the line and they betrayed him.

  You lied to me, the doctor thought. You lied, you lied, you lied.

  ***

  Dr. Merrill heard a terrible pounding. At first he thought it was coming from inside his head, but slowly he realized it was reverberating from the cheap, plywood door at the end of his room.

  “Out here, now,” Agent Litchfield demanded as he opened the door.

  Dr. Merrill opened his eyes. The room was blurry and stunk. He looked at his watch.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Too long,” Litchfield said.

  Dr. Merrill finally focused his eyes enough to see that Litchfield was in his hazmat suit. “Suit up, now. We need you out here.”

  Dr. Merrill stumbled out of his full sized bed and pulled a hazmat suit on. The solid piece of material went on easily—for a moment he recalled the days of duct taping his wrists and ankles at the hospital.

  The doctor followed Litchfield out of the department store and into the long, western wing of the mall.

  “They should have never killed that Medina kid,” Dr. Merrill said, before letting out a burp that disgusted himself.

  “He was on the list, Paul.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The vaccination failed, we could have studied him—”

  “For fuck’s sake, Paul, shut up. We have bigger problems than that right now.”

  Dr. Merrill squinted. “Yeah?”

  Litchfield gave the doctor a serious glance through his visor. “You’re never going to believe this.”

  After a brisk walk, the two men arrived at the tent that housed Private Olivarez. He was strapped tightly to his gurney. Dr. Merrill looked him up and down at length. His flesh clung firm to his face, his eyes were clear and wide. His teeth gnashed together and clicked as his glance darted from nurse, to doctor, to officer, to nurse….

  “How long was I out?” Dr. Merrill asked again.

  Litchfield groaned. “Nearly a day, Paul. The way you were acting, we thought it was best if we just…let you sleep.”

  “You should have woken me earlier,” Dr. Merrill said, studying Olivarez’s face. There were no bruises on his neck where blood should have begun to pool, no tears in his skin. No welts on his face.

  Olivarez seemed alert and…irate. He pulled viciously at his restraints. He seemed strong.

  “He’s approaching the twenty third hour now, Paul,” Litchfield said, and he pulled a chart from the foot of Olivarez’s bed.

  “Who wrote this?” Dr. Merrill asked, holding the chart above his head.

  The staff members in the room all looked at Dr. Merrill with worried faces.

  “Don’t everyone speak up at once,” Dr. Merrill yelled. “Who fucking wrote this?”

  “I did, sir,” an Army sergeant stated, taking a step forward from the back of the room.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sergeant Burt Arnold, United States Army, sir.”

  “I remember you, you came in with this man—and the other one, Medina, right? You were the one who came in with them last night?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you filled out this chart?” Dr. Merrill asked, pressing a rubbery gloved finger on the clipboard in his hand.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It says here—Private Olivarez, bite wound, right forearm, 7:08 P.M., with yesterday’s date. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dr. Merrill glanced around the room and at the troubled faces looking back at him. “Everyone but Litchfield, out.”

  Those in the room filed out one by one, each muttering something under their breath as they exited. Litchfield and Dr. Merrill took a seat at the foot of Olivarez’s bed. After some time had passed, Dr. Merrill finally broke the silence.

  “What do you think this means?” the doctor asked.

  Litchf
ield swallowed. “I don’t know, Paul.”

  Dr. Merrill looked up at the wide, round analog clock on the wall directly above Olivarez’s twisting, hissing head. 6:22 P.M.

  “What do we do?” the doctor said.

  “We wait, Paul. Let’s just wait.”

  Dr. Merrill thought of all the infected patients he had visited over the past eight months. With minor variations of five or ten minutes, they all died within twenty-three hours. Their skin drooped from their body, they became weak and frail, their extremities turned to jelly. They fell apart.

  6:31 PM. Olivarez looks like he could run a marathon.

  6:42 PM. Dr. Merrill gives Agent Litchfield a solemn, worried look. Each minute that passes feels like an eternity. Angered by their presence, Olivarez directs a frightening roar towards the men at the end of his bed. His screams are agonizing. Barbaric.

  6:58 PM. The only sounds that Dr. Merrill can concentrate on are that of his own heartbeat and the ticking clock above Olivarez. Tick, tock, tick, and thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. Occasionally, the ticking and thumping are punctuated by Olivarez’s hisses, cries, and moans of anguish.

  7:00 PM. Twenty-four hours have passed and Olivarez still shows no sign of relenting. The second hand of the clock pulses ominously, each movement echoing in Agent Litchfield and Dr. Merrill’s ears.

  Tick, tock, tick.

  About the Author

  Robert Barnard lives in Orlando, Florida with his two cats, Conan & Bella, and his dog, Lady. In 2014 he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Legal Studies from the University of Central Florida.

  When he isn’t writing, he enjoys reading, playing guitar, collecting retro video games, attending pop-culture conventions, and at least several other hobbies you would imagine an author of zombie fiction enjoying.