“We need water, Maggie,” he said. “Between the heat and the stress, I think I’m bone dry. You thirsty? You want a drink?”
Maggie stood. She inched closer to his face and he put up his hand in time to prevent a lick to the ear. The last thing he needed right now was a cat-poop-laced pasting on the side of his head.
Danny stood, using the ledge for balance, and the blood rushed from his head. He wobbled in place for a moment but steeled himself before moving toward the mouth to the garage ramp.
Maggie followed him, prancing at his heels. Danny had said the word drink and she’d responded. It was a trigger word she easily recognized, like treat, walk, bath, and bite-the-arm-of-the-intruder-trying-to-quarantine-us-through-martial-law.
They descended to the fourth floor of the garage. It was darker now than it had been when they’d emerged onto the roof. Danny’s eyes adjusted to the low light a few steps in, and he could better see his surroundings. Once he’d focused again, he stopped and listened for voices.
Not hearing any, he led Maggie down the ramp toward the second level and his VW. Each time they turned a corner, Danny used a support pillar or adjacent car to hide himself long enough to evaluate whether or not they were alone.
The fronts of his shins started bothering him by the time they reached his car. His toes, having pushed against the fronts of his shoes on the way down, felt bruised. “We should have taken the stairs,” he whispered to Maggie.
He stopped at the rear of the VW and considered the best way to get into his car. If he broke a window, anybody on the first level or standing at the street entrance to the garage would hear it. They’d come running and likely catch him.
Moving to the first floor wasn’t a great option either. He was certain that the office was in sight of the hazmat teams positioned on the street.
He looked at Maggie. She didn’t offer any ideas. Perhaps sensing what Danny wanted to do, she moved closer to the hatchback and jumped onto it with her front paws. She stood there on her hind legs, looking alternately at Danny and the bubble-tinted rear window.
“Hop down,” Danny stressed in a low voice. He stared at her intently, trying to effect some sort of dominance.
She ignored him. Her nails scratched against the worn paint job.
Danny snapped his fingers and pointed at the ground. “Maggie.”
The dog licked her chops, yawned, and hopped down, her nails screeching against the rear of the hatchback.
Danny grumbled his annoyance and checked the paint. Despite there being much bigger issues at hand, he was still compelled to rub his thumb across the scratches. They were surface scratches, but they’d taken off some of the car’s color. He rubbed his fingers over the slight damage and cursed under his breath. Then he pushed on the latch, out of habit, and the hatch’s pneumatic hinges hissed as the rear of the VW opened.
Before Danny could say anything, Maggie had hopped past him and found her spot on the pilled blue blanket that stretched from one side of the space to the other. She did her customary tail chase and lay down. Danny could have sworn she winked at him.
“You’re something else,” he said to her and leaned across her to flatten the rear seats. Both of them popped and the seat backs folded over onto the seats. Maggie didn’t move, even while Danny weaseled his way to unlock the rear passenger door. He opened it and then slid back out to gently close the hatch. He almost slammed it out of habit, but remembered the dangers lurking outside before he managed to close the back of the car with a click.
He walked around to the side of the car, looked around the garage one last time, and climbed into the rear passenger’s side. He closed the door and repositioned himself so he could search the front seats, netting a half bottle of water, an unopened can of Pringles potato chips, a partially melted Kind brand snack bar still in its wrapper, and a package of peppermint Tic Tacs. From the glove box he recovered an expired travel-sized container of Tylenol. It was a bounty.
He downed four of the Tylenol, split the chips and the water with Maggie, saved the bar and the mints, and pulled a corner of Maggie’s blanket over his torso.
“We’ll worry about finding a way out of this mess when we wake up, Maggie.” He suggested she close her eyes, which she did. He kept his head away from hers, given the ripeness of her breath, and both of them were asleep within minutes. Going to sleep in the car would prove to be a bad idea.
CHAPTER 7
DAY 11
San Francisco, California
Three men stood together in a lab on the twenty-ninth floor of the Interllayar Tower. The entire floor was a series of labs, some of them more tightly controlled than others. This one was general purpose and served as a meeting place. The man holding the meeting, Albert Moss, told the others he felt more comfortable in a stark lab than he did in the burled wood and chrome environs of an executive suite. Moss raked his fingers through his neatly trimmed beard, seemingly aware of exactly where the pesky white strays had populated the otherwise brown facial hair. He’d expected both of the others would immediately pepper him with questions, yet neither man had said anything for a long minute, which was stretching into two.
He ran his thumb and forefinger along the spots on his face where his mustache reached his beard. The hair was thinner there. His eyes darted between the two other men, Robert Chang and the boss, Derek Hoover.
Hoover stood with his feet shoulder width apart, his arms folded across his chest. His chiseled jaw was set. Moss couldn’t tell if he was thinking about what he’d learned or if he didn’t understand it. It was impossible to tell.
Chang leaned against the black granite of the laboratory bench and glanced at what Moss determined was a dumbfounded look on the boss’s face, pinched the bridge of his nose, and squeezed his eyes shut with a pained expression.
Moss tried to imagine what was rushing through Chang’s mind. The new information made sense, except that it didn’t.
He considered that Chang might be wondering how his wife had contracted a fatal disease and he hadn’t gotten as much as a cramp or sniffle. He hadn’t taken any precautions until he realized her illness was much like the one debilitating much of the West Coast at historic speed. Those were reasonable concerns. Moss could give him that.
Finally, when the boss didn’t say anything, Chang did.
“That’s what you think it is?” he asked after exhaling a long breath. “You think it’s two bacterial infections that have merged together and created a new type of illness?”
“A new type of illness? Like a new virus?” asked the boss, Derek Hoover.
Moss understood that Hoover was in the lab as a courtesy and as a convenience. Chang had invited him so Moss wouldn’t be burdened with being an emissary, having to re-explain the findings to Derek. Moss would have been fine with a one-on-one. He didn’t like crowds. Three was a crowd. Still, he’d acquiesced to Chang’s insistence. That was saying something. He was not the kind of man to acquiesce to what other people wanted.
Albert Moss was a singular man who plowed forward, searching for truth, without bending to the whims of others around him. He wasn’t unpleasant, he was just so utterly focused on his life’s work that he rarely stopped to consider anything other than the path he’d laid out in front of himself. He was a team player as long as everyone on the team played the way he believed was most effective. Such was the way of brilliant men who knew how brilliant they were. It was hard for others to understand whether it was the brilliance that made them obstinate or the obstinance that made them brilliant. Chicken. Egg.
Moss was a leading epidemiologist or, to some in the profession of infectious diseases, the leading epidemiologist. A native Californian, he’d done his undergraduate work at Berkeley, attended the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health for his master’s, and gotten his PhD at George Washington’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. The Centers for Disease Control recruited him, and he’d worked there for a decade before taking a management position at the World
Health Organization, until the politics of the United Nations became tiresome. So when a tech company called Interllayar offered him a position at four times the money and a chance to return to his native California, he’d taken the job and not looked back.
Now he was nodding at Chang and the man who’d hired him, Derek Hoover. He’d spent twenty minutes explaining exactly what he thought was happening. Chang had reduced it to a single sentence.
“No,” said Moss. “And yes.”
“Which is it?” asked Derek.
“It’s not a virus or multiple viruses,” said Moss. “It’s bacterial. So yes, it’s multiple bacteria combining. I have no doubt. Absolutely no doubt. I see clear evidence of bacterial conjugation.”
“You said that about the conjugation.” Chang’s eyes were open now, but he was squinting.
“What I didn’t say is that, frequently, the process is helpful to the bacteria,” said Moss.
“What do you mean?” asked Derek. “Helpful how?”
Moss glanced at Chang, as if seeking approval he didn’t need, and then back to Hoover. He stopped raking his beard midstroke and pursed his lips. Then he clicked his tongue on the back of his teeth as if considering the best way to answer the question. “Bacterial conjugation. I’m giving you the basic Wikipedia definition here. You’re okay with the basic definition? It will facilitate a much faster explanation.”
Hoover, a brilliant man in his own right, clenched his jaw. He shot Moss a look that told the scientist to keep talking but without the condescending tone he was currently employing. Moss was intuitive enough to understand that.
“Good then.” Moss clasped his fingers together and held them out in front of him to demonstrate. “Bacterial conjugation is essentially a transfer of genetic material between cells. The cells create bridges called piluses between one another; then one uses the bridges to transfer the material to the other.”
“It sounds like sex,” said Derek. He used another demonstrative gesture using his hands that was less appropriate.
Moss frowned. “It is, if you want to think about bacteria having sex.”
Chang chuckled. It was the first time Moss had seen him crack a smile since his wife had died.
“Except it’s not sexual reproduction in a real sense,” explained Moss. “There’s no gam—”
“I get it,” Derek interrupted.
Moss raked his fingers across the scruffy beard on his neck. It wasn’t as well trimmed as the rest of it. “Regardless, one of the benefits for the recipient bacteria is typically an antibiotic resistance. The implications with regard to genetic engineering are remarkable, really. But when it comes to disease transformation, the results can be catastrophic. Under the right circumstances, of course.”
“And we’re under the right circumstances,” said Derek.
“Yes.”
“What bacteria is it?” asked Chang. “I have my suspicions based on what I’ve seen on the news and what I…what I witnessed with Ellen.”
Moss sighed. “I’ve identified three components. The first is the Escherichia coli strain O157:H7.”
“E. coli?” asked Derek. “Like the stomach thing you get from uncooked foods that have crap on them?”
“Yes,” said Moss.
Chang nodded. “Not surprising.”
Moss wondered what he might say that would be surprising to Chang. The man rarely seemed fazed.
“Is that deadly?” asked Derek. “Don’t you just get, I don’t know, diarrhea and puke?”
“It can be deadly,” answered Moss. “There’s a two percent chance that the O157:H7 strain will be fatal. The infection damages red blood cells and harms the kidneys. Typically, young people and the elderly are the most susceptible. But this is not typical.”
“Because of the bacterial conjugation?” asked Derek.
“Yes.”
Derek ran his hands through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck. “What’s the other disease?”
Moss eyed both men. He swallowed. “It is unfortunately the deadliest infection in the world.”
Derek scrunched his face with confusion. “AIDS?”
Moss slid his hands into his lab pockets. “No, HIV is still among the most deadly.”
“Then what is it?” asked Derek.
“Tuberculosis.”
Chang pinched the bridge of his nose again and exhaled.
Derek worked his neck like a pecking bird. His face was squeezed with confusion. Then he waved his hands in front of him like a football referee signaling an incomplete pass. “Wait,” he said with disbelief. “Tuberculosis? There’s a vaccine for that. There are antibiotics. How could it be tuberculosis?”
Moss raised his hands in surrender. “I know,” he said, shaking his head to commiserate with the befuddled Derek, “it sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.”
“He’s right, Derek,” said Chang. “It’s tuberculosis. I could tell when my wife was coughing, when there was blood in the sputum.”
“I thought that was, like, an Old West disease,” said Derek, “and that we’ve had it under control.”
“Actually,” said Moss, “the disease likely stretches back to Egyptian times. But it wasn’t until the early 1900s that we had a vaccine. It was only given to infants at high risk of developing the disease.”
“The first treatments for those who had already contracted it was later, 1943,” Chang explained. “Selman Waksman used streptomycin. It worked. The problem is, antibiotics are overprescribed. So now many diseases have strains that don’t react to the medication. They’re resistant.”
Derek leaned on the lab table. His gaze softened but focused. His thoughts were somewhere else. He blinked back to the conversation and eyed both bearers of bad news. “What else is resistant?”
“Staph is one,” said Chang, “especially the golden staph known as MRSA. The bacteria that causes gonorrhea is another one.”
“What about E. coli?” Derek asked. “Is E. coli one of them?”
Chang and Moss exchanged glances. Moss raked his beard. Chang shifted uncomfortably in his stance. He nodded almost imperceptibly at Chang, as if to give permission to speak. Finally, Moss answered Derek’s question.
“Yes. Third- and fourth-generation cephalosporins are ineffective with many of the strains of E. coli.”
“We have two drug-resistant bacteria that have combined to make this deadly disease,” said Derek. “And it’s spread through the air?”
“Through the air,” said Chang. “Through touch. Either one.”
Derek tugged at his hair. He sighed, the heavy exhale full of exasperation. His eyes narrowed and he motioned to Chang. “You were around your wife. How do we know you’re not sick? How do we know you haven’t contracted…what are we calling this?”
“The CDC hasn’t given it a name yet,” said Moss. “They’ve identified the same conjugation I have, but they’re hesitant to name it. I was on the sat link with them right before this meeting. We agree on our findings. So does Berkeley.”
“Berkeley?” Derek echoed.
“The school of public health,” said Moss. “They’ve got specimens too. UCLA has some. Everybody’s working on this. It’s tentatively XDRO157:H7.”
“What’s the third?” asked Chang, not answering Derek’s previous question about his own health.
“The third what?” asked Moss.
“The third bacteria,” said Chang. “You mentioned you’d identified three distinct components.”
Moss shook his head. “I haven’t identified the third component yet.”
“Why not?” asked Derek.
“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’m here with one lab assistant. The CDC, Berkeley, they have teams tackling this.
Derek took a step back, aiming a finger at Chang. His eyes narrowed again. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said to the recent widower. “How do we know you’re not sick with this…extro…whatever…disease? How do I know you’re not giving it to all of us as we stand he
re speaking?”
Chang shrugged. “Because you do.”
“Do I?” asked Derek.
Chang took a step toward Derek. The filtered air hissed through the lab. “Of course. Every single time we get to this point, I’m fine. You’re fine. Moss, when he’s here, is fine. It doesn’t matter which of the scenarios unfolds, we’re always tasked with living through the horror of it. Whatever it is, we see it through. It’s like some punishment for knowing something we’re not supposed to know.”
Derek frowned. He folded his arms across his chest and looked at the floor, considering what Chang was telling him. He was processing it. He was remembering whatever it was he could remember. He winced.
Moss wondered if his boss was suffering from a headache or the more typical disorientation-laced déjà vu. They’d all been there. They’d all be there again. He was sure of it. This time was like all the others. There wasn’t a nuclear wasteland; fires weren’t burning out of control; a city wasn’t underwater; the temperature hadn’t sunk below zero. And for the love of God, there weren’t zombies. Nonetheless, this was apocalyptic. It was an alternate ending to the same story Moss had either witnessed or been taught by the two men standing in his lab.
CHAPTER 8
DAY 11
West Carson, California
Clint had seen a lot in his life. His drug addiction had put his senses onto things both real and imagined that had changed his perception of the world around him. Time in jail and then in prison had only opened those senses further.
He’d witnessed things he couldn’t unsee. He’d smelled things seared into memory. He’d heard things that still kept him awake at night with their echoes. Through all of that, he’d never witnessed the overwhelming sensory consumption he was experiencing in the homeless camp in West Carson.
There were smells he couldn’t identify that made him retch, so strong they stung his eyes. Still, through the moist sheen in his watery eyes, he could see the blood and the other fluids.
The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction Page 8