The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5]
Page 8
“Susan? Girls?”
No response.
“Susan!”
He turned the corner beyond the sunken living room and stepped into the galley-style kitchen, where his shoe slipped out underneath him. His big frame crashed to the floor, and he felt a sharp pain shoot through his right knee. Oh, no, he thought. Thoughts of all the time he’d spent rehabbing the knee came roaring up inside him, followed by a scorching chaser of guilt. He rolled over on his side and started to push himself up on the fresh, bright-red blood slicking the floor. He scampered to his feet, panic engulfing him like fire consuming a house. Freddie heard a female voice behind him, startling him. He’d almost forgotten the paramedics were there.
“Look,” the woman paramedic – Gibert, according to the ID card clipped to her breast pocket – was saying. Freddie, panic-stupid now, saw her pointing at something, and he followed her index finger to the back of the kitchen, just beyond the Viking refrigerator.
“What’s in there?” Gibert asked, pointing toward a closed door.
“Mudroom,” Freddie said as the pair rushed forward, Freddie close behind. “Leave the stretcher out here. It’s pretty tight in there.”
“Oh shit!” said Rowe, the first one in the door. “In here!”
He slipped into the mudroom behind them, desperate to see her but careful not to interfere with their provision of care. He was a good six inches taller than Rowe, more than a foot clear of Gibert, so he was able to see what was going on. His stomach clenched as he saw the amount of blood splattered on the walls, puddled on the floor. Susan was on her side, curled up into a ball, facing the wall. At first, Freddie thought she was dead, but he saw her shift her right foot, and he felt tears well up in his eyes.
“Aw shit,” Rowe said, mostly to himself. “What the hell is this shit?”
“Shut up,” Gibert hissed. “Roll her over. We need to get her out of here.”
She turned her head to address Freddie. “Sir, is anyone else in the house feeling sick?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
The girls. Where were the girls? He slipped back down the corridor to the staircase and took the steps two at a time. He was sweating badly, and he could smell a strange odor emanating from his body, a whisky-tinted, fear-coated musk. It felt hot in the house, too hot, even though he could hear the soft, reassuring hiss of the air conditioning blowing through the vents. As he approached the closed door of the media room, he heard a sound that severed his connection with reality. His mind was trapped in a netherworld between the three corners of panic, terror, and anger.
It was a terrible sound. A horrible, ripping sound.
His daughter Caroline was coughing.
INTERLUDE
TRANSCRIPT OF YOUTUBE VIDEO UPLOADED AUGUST 10
3.4 Million Hits Before Video was Removed
Shaky video of parking lot. Image blurs and then is obscured by videographer’s hand
“Um, I’m standing about a block north of Turner Field here in Atlanta. That there is the west parking lot of the stadium. There’s been a lot of military activity all morning. I don’t know… wait, people are unloading from the back of the convoy trucks. I don’t know … [COUGHING SPELL] lining them up. [WHEEZY BREATHING] Been hearing rumors of a vaccine. I woke up with it, whatever it is. I feel pretty good overall, maybe I got a mild case or something.”
[SOUND OF MACHINE GUN FIRE]
“Holy fucking shit! The soldiers, they just opened up on those poor people! Oh my God, this can’t be happening. This can’t be happening!”
[WHIMPERS]
“I’m going to try and get a little bit closer.”
Video becomes blurry and shaky
“Jesus. [inaudible]. Oh, Jesus, Jesus.”
[SOUND OF MACHINE GUN FIRE]
“Oh, shit. I gotta upload this shit.”
[SOUND OF COUGHING]
[VIDEO ENDS]
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You know, Kevin,” Kevin Butler said to his empty office, just a stone’s throw from the Oval Office, “you probably should’ve listened to that guy Ponce.”
Then a coughing spell. Hard, ab-shredding coughing.
“No, we should’ve nuked the Bronx!” he said. Then he laughed.
He took off his dress shirt, leaving him in a white t-shirt and Joseph Abboud pants. He didn’t know why he did it. It just seemed like a good idea. When he was done, he sat back down to rest because the simple act of removing his shirt had left him spent. He sat there in his white t-shirt and sweat-soaked Joseph Abboud pants. Or maybe it was piss. He didn’t know anymore.
God, he felt like shit.
He cried for a few minutes. Then he stopped because he forgot what he was crying about. Then he remembered he was crying because he was dying, but he didn’t start crying again because it required a tincture of effort that he did not currently possess.
He looked at the clock on the mantel. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. He didn’t know if his family was alive or dead. He had no idea what day it was, but he didn’t really care. All the days had piled up on top of one another, a big car crash of blocks on a calendar. They were all the same day now.
How had he gotten here?
You walked, a little voice called out.
He laughed the manic laugh of a man whose links to reality were breaking, one at a time.
No, not here here. HERE.
Oh, HERE.
He thought about the path that had led him HERE, about the million tiny decisions he’d made and forgotten, and the million tiny events he’d had no control over, the way those things had braided themselves together into the tapestry that was Kevin Butler’s life. He thought he’d figured it out, where it had all begun nearly thirty years ago, an unseasonably warm January morning during his final year of law school at Harvard. Around dawn, he’d been jolted from sleep by a strange noise and had been stunned to see an intruder in his bedroom (his bedroom!), rifling through the drawers of his bureau, looking for God knew what. And only God had known what that man had been looking for, because upon noticing Butler was awake, the burglar had fled the crappy apartment in the crappy neighborhood, never to be seen again.
Butler looked down at his hands, thinking about his law school burglar for the first time in decades, manic-eyed and mangy, so dirty Butler hadn’t been able to tell if he was black or white. The experience had convinced him to abandon corporate law and sent him down a much different path, starting as an assistant district attorney in Texas, where he took special joy in prosecuting home invaders, through the state Attorney General’s office, to the U.S. Senate, before his old buddy Nathan Crosby, then the governor of Oklahoma, had tapped him to serve as his campaign manager for a presidential run.
The campaign, dismissed in the early days by the pundits as a wild hair, had taken off like wildfire, starting with an unexpectedly strong showing in Iowa, followed by a huge influx of cash to float them through the early primaries. Success begat success, and they’d secured the nomination in Los Angeles that summer, neither of them really believing it was happening until Crosby had taken a concession phone call from the man he’d defeated in the general election, the unpopular Democratic incumbent who’d presided over an economic collapse and had been unable to accomplish just about anything.
When you got right down to it, it had been that anonymous thief who’d shoved Kevin Butler toward his destiny, toward this moment in the White House, struggling (and failing) to deal with the biggest crisis the nation had ever faced. If it hadn’t been for that burglar, if he’d rented a different apartment the previous August, if he’d spent the night at his then-girlfriend’s place, which he hadn’t because they’d had a big fight, if one of a million other things had broken differently, he’d probably have never changed his career track. He’d be a partner at some big firm in D.C. or Chicago or New York, living in some gated community, growing increasingly worried at the widening epidemic.
He didn’t know where the President was.
His phone rang. It was probably someone very important bearing some very important news that would be very bad, and so he didn’t answer it. Ooh, wait, let me guess!
A quarantine broke in Dallas!
No, no, wait! Let me guess! Riots in Des Moines!
Or Army units in Boston are abandoning their posts!
It had all come apart, and he was so, so afraid.
He was burning up now, the sweat pouring off him in rivers.
It had been nearly a week since Medusa had first appeared on their radar. There had been no communication with either the CDC or USAMRIID in at least a day, and he didn’t expect any more. Not that they could offer anything more than what they already knew. It was sort of an academic exercise at this point. Under the microscope, the virus bore close resemblance to a snake, similar in structure to the Ebola and Marburg viruses, blah, blah, blah. But for all its similarities to those two scary pathogens, plenty scary in their own right, Medusa was different, so achingly and astonishingly different.
The thing that had driven the doctors out of their minds, right up until it killed them, was that they didn’t know how it was different. Why was it spreading so rapidly? Why was it airborne? Why was it killing so quickly? Even Ebola Zaire, the deadliest pathogen known to man (until last week, that is), took days to kill its host. They hadn’t even had time to figure out where Medusa had come from. And now they would never know! Atlanta was gone. Fort Detrick was gone. Despite all their precautions, Medusa had wiped out both installations.
What surprised Butler the most was how incompetent he’d felt, how foolish, how stupid, and he was one of the ones that was supposed to figure out how they were going to stop this goddamn thing! It had always been a source of amusement that the world often turned on things he said and did and things he told the President to say and do. He still felt like they were playing grownup, like it was Model U.N. or Student Council, and that certainly, the real grownups would swoop in and take over and fix everything. And the fear. He couldn’t believe how scared he was.
He stepped out into the hallway outside his office. The lights were on, everything running normally, but it was dead quiet. He’d never heard it so quiet in his three years working here. There was a body in the corridor, one of his staffers, Julie or Donna. He couldn’t remember her name. She was single, childless, and had stuck it out here, “managing the crisis,” as they had called it. Many others had fled.
He coughed hard, spraying blood across the wall. He poked his head in the office of one of his deputies, but it was empty. Office after office he visited, staggering from one to the next, using the wall to support himself. This was one was empty, that one contained a body. It became a bit of a game. Empty Office, 2, Dead Body, 1. Ooh, and now it’s tied. Two apiece!
He was getting tired now.
He found a break room and sat at one of the tables. Before him, the vending machines hummed along, the soda ice cold, the snack cakes fresh and moist. And they would stay that way, long after Kevin Butler died. Even if humanity had succeeded in erasing itself from the hard drive, the lights would stay on here. The White House might someday go dark, but it wouldn’t be any time soon. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe a hundred.
“OK,” he said to no one.
He bowed his head and recited the Lord’s Prayer. It felt phony and forced because reciting the Lord’s Prayer was pretty fucking vanilla when you got down to it, like you weren’t even trying, like you were just going through the motions. Kevin had once fervently believed in God, and the Butlers had been a church-going family, because you didn’t become the Chief of Staff to a Republican president without the appropriate set pieces on the stage of your life. Over the years, though, his faith had grown weaker, like a radio station getting farther and farther away with each passing mile, its signal breaking up, heavily laced with static.
“… for thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, Amen.”
Butler opened his eyes and found a young staffer staring at him. Her nose and mouth, caked with blood. Copies of copies of copies. It started to get old after a while. I get it, God, I fucked up! I should’ve agreed to the quarantine or paid a little more attention to that intelligence briefing about that bioterrorist group in Waco or whatever it was that we missed that had brought us to this point.
“Hi,” he thought he said to the young woman, but it actually came out, “Heaaagghhhh!”
The staffer turned and fled down the corridor.
Kevin bought a bag of potato chips and sat back down to eat them. They did not agree with him and he vomited violently on the floor of the break room.
He laid his head down on the table and died at four-thirty that afternoon.
INTERLUDE
From The State Newspaper (Columbia, South Carolina)
EXTRA!
SOUTH CAROLINA SECEDES FROM UNION
WASHINGTON THREATENS NEW REPUBLIC
By SIOBHAN MOON
The State Staff Writer
COLUMBIA (August 13) – Calling the Medusa virus an “unprecedented” threat to its continued existence, the state of South Carolina officially seceded from the United States of America last night for the second time in its history, renaming itself the People’s Republic of Columbia and installing former Governor Alan Moran as its new President.
“The people of this brave new nation have spoken,” said President Moran, speaking from an undisclosed location. “This towering crisis has forced us to make some difficult decisions, and we believe that we alone hold the key to our survival. The government of the United States has proven itself unable to handle this catastrophe, and we will not stand idly by while my fellow citizens suffer.”
The secession became official at 11:18 p.m. last night, when then-Governor Moran placed his signature on the state’s Declaration of Secession, which had been passed unanimously in both houses of the South Carolina legislature earlier that evening.
The House of Representatives voted 44-0 in favor of secession, with 80 House members unable to participate due to illness. The South Carolina Senate quickly followed suit, unanimously passing the resolution 14-0, with 32 senators abstaining due to illness.
Moran added that the borders of his nation were closed indefinitely, and that any unauthorized persons attempting to enter Columbia would be dealt with “harshly and swiftly.”
The White House reacted angrily, quickly issuing a statement denouncing the secession and threatening military action to preserve the Union.
“The United States does not recognize the so-called ‘sovereignty’ of the state of South Carolina,” the statement said. “This White House is confident the state’s action is a legal nullity and has no effect. Furthermore, this Administration considers Governor Moran and his 58 state legislators to be traitors, and they will be held accountable for this ridiculous act. The U.S. does not acknowledge Governor Moran’s so-called borders, and any attempt by the state of South Carolina to enforce those borders will be met with force.”
The current status of the state’s nine military bases was unknown at press time.
According to multiple sources, several other states are considering similar secession resolutions, including Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
CHAPTER NINE
A steady rain fell as Adam crossed the James River just south of the Richmond city limits on that Friday evening, the thirteenth of August. Spires of frozen traffic stretched away in either direction along I-95, and in the distance, he counted three fires burning against the backdrop of downtown. The lights of the cityscape shined dully against the twilight, but at least they were still on, a fact that Adam was deeply grateful for. He checked his watch; it was just past seven-thirty. He was drenched, exhausted, and starving. The one thing he was not, to his pure and utter amazement, was sick. Physically, he felt perfectly fine. The country appeared to be crumbling around him under the weight of this invisible conqueror, which had, so
far, overlooked him.
And somehow, that made it worse.
The waiting.
It had been one week since he’d first encountered what the media were now calling the Medusa virus, and based on the few bits and pieces he’d been able to cobble together, the virus was burning its way across the globe and order was starting to break down. And Medusa’s communicability was like nothing ever seen or studied. After the deaths of the DeSilvas (and he never had found the remaining family members), he’d spent two days on Holden Beach trying to tend to sick vacationers, trying something, anything to keep someone alive. And all he had seen had left him terrified, hopeless, adrift.
He’d tended to the bodies of the DeSilva men the morning after they died. It took an hour, but he finally had gotten them indoors, lying side by side on his kitchen floor, covered with sheets, perhaps a fraction of their dignity preserved. Adam had tackled the senior DeSilva first, a job that had all but wiped him out. Ethan’s father had outweighed Adam by fifty pounds, and so Adam had dragged him up the staircase, his arms locked around the big man’s chest. One step at a time Adam had taken, his arms and back burning with liquid fire. At one point, just two from the top step, Adam had gotten a little off balance, a little high on the rain-slicked stairs, and he’d nearly lost his purchase; he felt both of them teetering downward, a tumble that Adam feared would leave him as dead as the DeSilvas. He managed to find his seat before he fell forward, slamming his tailbone down against the wet edge of the step. After a quick rest, he finished the job, and he brought Robert to what, unbeknownst to Adam, would in fact become his and his son’s final resting place.