The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction

by Abrahams, Tom

  “If that happens, what?” Victor prompted.

  “It can’t happen,” said the voice. “That’s all we need to discuss about that. Tell me how you’re faring.”

  “In this iteration?”

  “Yes.”

  Victor glanced at Doc and then at Gilda before he answered. Even in the dim light of the hub, the concern etched into his face was apparent. Gilda knew Victor was processing the new information, as was she.

  This was no drill. It was no short-term deployment. This one was the real deal, and it looked like her long-term future was underground, safe from the TBE disease that threatened to wipe humanity off the face of the planet.

  She should have been happy. She was alive. She was safe at a time when so many weren’t. Yet she was far from rejoicing. Her gut ached. She was queasy. Her headache was more acute.

  “We’re doing as well as can be expected,” said Victor. “Our food supply is good. The hydroelectric plant is generating sufficient power and cooling. Our population is healthy and docile.”

  “That’s good. Ultimately, our end game involves survivors who can model the entirety of the scenario and add to research as a whole.”

  “How are you? Up top, I mean?” Victor asked. “Aren’t you in danger of being exposed?”

  “No. We’re sequestered here. There’s ample security. Nobody’s getting in or out.”

  “I guess that’s good,” said Victor.

  “It’s not as if we have a choice. The military has taken over San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Every city is blocked into quarantined zones. There’s no travel between zones. There are internment camps.”

  “Wait,” said Victor, “what do you mean, internment camps?”

  The voice on the other end of the line huffed with evident exasperation. He drew in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “I mean internment camps. People who are sick are essentially being sent to die in controlled environments. Their bodies are incinerated once they die or are close to it. I mean, nobody’s checking pulses, you know? And the ones who aren’t sick are going to camps where they’re held until…”

  “Until when?”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’m calling them internment camps. There’s no end date. People are forcibly removed from their homes and separated. So we couldn’t leave here if we wanted to.”

  “They’re not coming for you? What about your wife?”

  “We’ve got special dispensation from the governor on this. It’s not a problem as long as we stay put, don’t let anyone inside, and stick to our work.”

  “And your wife?”

  “She’s at home. We’re far enough out of the city that it’ll be weeks before they reach her. By then, I’m hoping the need for internment or quarantine or whatever is over.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Victor.

  “Look,” said the voice, ignoring the sentiment, “I wish I could take a deeper dive into how you’re faring, the day-to-day of things, but I can’t. I’ve got a meeting with Dr. Chang in a minute. He’s got some news for me, I’m told. I need a second to decompress before he gets here.”

  “Got it,” said Victor. “Hang in there, Derek. We’ll talk in forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight hours,” said Derek Hoover. “Talk then.”

  The line went dead. Victor slid his headphones around his neck. Doc and Gilda removed their headsets. They sat there for a couple of minutes. The whir of the fans cooling the equipment was the only sound in the space.

  Gilda broke the silence. “It’s worse than they thought?”

  “It appears so,” said Victor. “It’s spreading faster than the sure model anticipated.”

  “SIR model,” Doc corrected.

  “Sorry,” said Victor. “SIR. What exactly is that anyhow?”

  Doc sighed and folded his arms across his chest. He looked at both of his friends over the top of his glasses. “As best I understand it, it’s a compartmental model that divides the population into groups. It assumes that everybody within a particular group has similar characteristics. It’s really a simple formula…mathematically speaking.”

  “That says what?” asked Gilda. “What does SIR even mean?”

  “Well, it’s an acronym for susceptible, infectious, recovered. Those are your three compartments, essentially. But you have to account for time. That’s the variable. At any given time, or as time elapses, what happens to each of those compartments? How does time affect them…and how does one of the compartments…over time…affect the others?”

  “Doesn’t sound so simple,” said Gilda.

  “It’s simple mathematically, if math is your thing. It’s not simple…in the truest sense of the word. After all, the dynamics of an epidemic vary.”

  “Some diseases might spread faster than others,” said Gilda. “I mean, diseases that don’t have vaccines.”

  “Sure,” said Doc. “Dengue is faster spreading than West Nile…or malaria. Now those are viruses and not bacteria. You get the point though.”

  Gilda rubbed the back of her neck. It eased the throb in her head.

  “Let’s look at historic diseases and how quickly they…dented the population,” said Doc. “The plague, first traced to China in the sixth century, had a transmission rate of one point three. So every person who got sick infects a third of a person…statistically. One hundred million people have died from the plague.”

  “One hundred million,” said Victor.

  “In the course of history,” clarified Doc. “Yes. That’s nothing compared to the flu.”

  “Seriously?” Gilda said.

  “Yes,” said Doc. “The transmission rate, depending on the strain, can be anywhere from one to three. As many as a half million die every year. And this started in the sixteenth century.”

  “I had no idea,” said Victor.

  “That’s nothing compared to SARS,” said Doc. “That respiratory disease is new. It probably started in China in a bat reservoir in 2003. It’s viral, linked to the common cold, and has a transmission rate of three.”

  “Everyone who gets sick,” said Gilda, “gets three more people sick.”

  “Exactly,” said Doc. “There’s no vaccine and it has a fatality rate of one in ten. Only a thousand people have died from the virus. Mainly because it has such a long incubation period.”

  “Whatever this is,” said Victor, “this TBE, it’s historically bad.”

  “Yes,” said Doc. “From what I’ve been able to gather on the research which, mind you, isn’t a lot, there are multiple components to this bacterial cocktail that are antibiotic resistant. So anyone who is surviving it has some innate immunity…that’s not replicable yet.”

  “In the meantime we’re stuck,” said Gilda. “Down here. In the hole.”

  “It’s an OASIS.” Victor’s lips twitched, threatening to smile.

  Gilda rolled her eyes. “We need to tell everyone we’re down here for the duration.”

  “Agreed,” said Victor. “There’s no rush though.”

  “True,” said Doc. “We have all the time in the world.”

  CHAPTER 11

  DAY 14

  Infected Zone A4

  The knocking startled Danny from his uncomfortable sleep. He opened his eyes, not remembering where he was, and tried to focus. Maggie was even slower to react. When she did, at the second round of measured raps, she snarled and started barking. Her sharp reports filled the small space and Danny recognized his surroundings.

  He was in his car, in the parking garage where he’d been for the better part of four days. He’d tried escaping from Infected Zone A4 multiple times. Each failed attempt had resulted in Danny and Maggie returning to his VW and sleeping for as long as they could. They’d scavenged water and bits of food from other parked cars and trash cans. They’d also, by happenstance, found other supplies that might be useful when the time came. They were stuffed into the door pockets and hidden in the glove box. Most of it was junk, but Danny kept it anyway. Just i
n case.

  Nonetheless, the last four days had been miserable. Misery had ensured, however, that they’d remained undetected and free of a trip to wherever it was the endless parade of transport vehicles were taking people. Until now.

  Danny hushed Maggie to a low, grumbling growl and found the source of the knocking. A trio of Tyvek-suited soldiers stood outside his car, one of them aiming a rifle at the window.

  Maggie’s growl erupted into a cascading bark. Danny calmed her but didn’t sit up from his awkward sleeping position in the cramped back seat of the VW.

  “You need to get out of the vehicle,” said one of the suited soldiers.

  Danny didn’t respond but pushed himself up onto his elbows. When he did, he saw there were three more soldiers behind him on the other side of the car, and one was standing at the back of the hatchback. He was essentially surrounded.

  There was no escaping this.

  “Can you hear me?” asked the soldier in the now familiar muffled command voice. All of the soldiers sounded the same behind the protection of their hooded masks.

  Danny stretched his neck, tilting his chin to one side and then the other. For some inexplicable reason—fear, resignation, or a combination of the two perhaps—he said, “I don’t think I’m coming out.”

  The Tyvek soldiers stiffly eyed one another from behind their tinted visors. It reminded Danny of confused storm troopers at Mos Eisley Spaceport.

  One of them tapped the window again. “I don’t think you understand that we’re not asking you to come out of the car. We’re telling you. This area is under martial—”

  “I know,” he cut in, “martial law. Blah, blah, blah. You have the right to take me and my dog and do whatever you want. I do understand. But I’m not leaving my car.”

  He was surprised by how emboldened he felt. It was as if he’d awoken a different person, someone confident and defiant. Maybe it was the four days in hiding, or his anger that in a time of crisis during which he’d done nothing wrong, he was a fugitive who couldn’t return home.

  He and Maggie were reduced to scavenging for food and water. They stunk. They were exhausted. The last thing Danny wanted to do was follow orders from people in yellow suits.

  “We will shoot you if it comes to that,” the soldier said flatly. “We don’t want to do that, but we will.”

  Another soldier, behind Danny’s head on the passenger’s side of the car, said, “We could shoot the dog first if that will lubricate your compliance.”

  Danny eyed Maggie. She bared her teeth, her tail stiff. Her snarl was like an angry purr. The hair on her neck and back stood on end. She swiped her nose against the glass, following the taunting soldier on the other side, leaving wet smudges in wide arcs. She pawed at the glass. She was agitated now, as if she understood English and understood what the soldiers were suggesting.

  “No need for that,” said Danny. He was stalling. He needed time to figure a way out of this even if he believed there was no way out. “I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

  A soldier tugged on the door handle and found it locked. He tugged at it again, rattling it. Danny silently thanked himself for having had the foresight to keep the GTI locked while he slept. He’d done it out of fear that other fugitives might try to hurt him or steal something. He wasn’t thinking the Tyvek brigade would find him.

  “There’s no negotiation here,” said the first soldier. “We’re going to give you ten seconds to exit the vehicle. If you don’t, we will use force to restrain you. We will kill your dog.”

  Danny sat up straight, keeping his eyes on the soldier with the rifle. He motioned with his hands toward Maggie. “If I come out—”

  “Ten,” said the lead soldier.

  “If I come out,” Danny said more loudly, “what do you want—”

  “Nine.”

  “—me to do with my dog?”

  “Eight.”

  “Seriously,” Danny pressed. “What assurance do I have that—”

  “Seven.”

  “—when I open the door to come out, you won’t—”

  “Six.”

  “—shoot her on sight anyhow?”

  “Five.”

  Holding one hand up to feign complicity, Danny reached for the door with the other.

  “Four.”

  Maggie snarled and barked. She pawed at the glass on the passenger side and then hopped into the front seat, maneuvering from side to side across the center console and gear shift.

  “Three.”

  Danny inched closer to the door, keeping his eyes on the soldiers, with one hand up and the other extended for the handle.

  “Back away so I can get out,” he said.

  The lead soldier motioned for his team to step back.

  “Two.”

  Quickly, Danny glanced down at the door pocket beneath the handle and in a swift movement pulled from it an oblong egg-shaped device. He’d found it in a dumpster behind an Army surplus store along with spent shell casings and a box of glow sticks. He pulled the pin and held it up to the window before the soldiers could react.

  The soldiers took giant steps back and looked at the lead for guidance.

  “One?” Danny asked defiantly.

  The soldiers didn’t respond. No doubt they were assessing the threat: a man trapped in a car with his dog and a live hand grenade.

  Danny waggled the grenade; then he pressed it against the window. The soldiers instinctively flinched at the sound of the grenade slapping the glass. “You going to shoot me and blow yourselves up?”

  Danny was trapped. The doors were locked and he was surrounded by soldiers. None of that had changed. But now he had the upper hand. He had the threat of violence they couldn’t match.

  “No need for that,” said the soldier. “We are not interested in harming you.”

  “Or my dog?” asked Danny. “Her name’s Maggie, by the way.”

  At the mention of her name, Maggie’s ears pricked, and she hopped between the front seats to the back. She licked Danny’s ear and sniffed it.

  “Please return the pin to the grenade,” said the lead soldier. His voice was still muffled, but now he was breathing more heavily. The sound of respiration almost overpowered his projection.

  The soldier took a step forward. His eyes and expression hidden by the reflective mask, he held out his hands, palms up. “Don’t let go of the spoon and you can replace the pin. No harm, no foul.”

  Danny reached across his body, pulled on the handle, and shoved open the door. “Maggie, stay.” All but the lead soldier backed another step away from the car.

  The lead held his ground, his gloved hands above his head. “Don’t be foolish. We’re under a quarantine. There are units everywhere. There are barricades. You won’t get far.”

  Danny stepped from the car and stood with the grenade at his side. He whistled and Maggie hopped out beside him and sat. “Take off your suit.”

  The lead soldier didn’t move.

  “Let me rephrase that,” said Danny. “Tell the rifleman here to lower the weapon. Tell him to put it on the ground and back away. Then take off your suit.”

  The soldier held his hands out in front of himself pleadingly. “I don’t—”

  “I’m going to count to ten,” said Danny. “Then I’ll kill all of us. Does the thought of that lubricate your compliance?”

  The adrenaline was coursing through Danny’s body. His pulse thumped, his breath was quickened, but he was holding it together. He was invigorated. There was something intoxicating about this, empowering.

  The lead soldier pivoted, his suit crinkling, and ordered the armed soldier to put his weapon on the garage floor and step away. The armed soldier hesitated.

  “Ten,” said Danny.

  “Do it,” snapped the lead soldier. The subordinate complied.

  “Who else is armed?” asked Danny.

  He couldn’t see all of the soldiers from his vantage point. He needed them all in front of him.

&n
bsp; “Scratch that,” he said. “Get everyone over here on this side of the car. Anyone armed puts their weapon next to the rifle on the ground.”

  Nobody moved.

  “Nine,” said Danny. Without pausing for a breath, he continued. “Eight. Seven.”

  “Everyone move,” said the lead soldier. “Relieve yourself of your arms.”

  The other soldiers moved toward the group on the driver’s side. Two of them laid weapons onto the ground.

  “That it?” asked Danny.

  “Yes,” said the lead.

  “Six,” said Danny. “Take off your suit.”

  “This is an infected zone,” the lead protested. “I’ll be exposed.”

  “I’m exposed,” said Danny. “I’m fine. Five.”

  “This is an infected zone. TBE is in the air. I’ll get exposed. I’ll—”

  “Four.”

  “I don’t think you get it,” said the lead. “People are dying. The transmission rate is five, and I—”

  “Three.”

  “We’re not all bad here,” said the lead. “We’re not even all military. I’m a doctor. Most of us are doctors.”

  That explained why not all of them were armed. Only the soldiers had weapons. It didn’t matter. Doctors, soldiers, candlestick makers—they were all trying to take him into custody and separate him from his best friend.

  “Two,” said Danny. “You don’t want me getting to one.”

  “Okay,” said the lead, his voice full of fear and exasperation. “Okay.”

  He waved over a subordinate, who helped him begin removing the suit. The hood came off first and revealed the sweaty, overwhelmed government researcher who’d tried to take Danny into custody against his will. His dark hair was matted with sweat. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. He didn’t look much older than thirty-five, save the specks of white in his spotty beard. He looked ashamed as he stepped out of the suit, standing there in only undergarments like the kind professional athletes might wear. Form-fitting and perspiration-wicking, the black outfit clung to his body.

  “What now?” he asked.