Sarah felt every muscle in her body tighten up like she’d been hit with an electrical current. Around her, the small arms fire was intensifying, almost like a Fourth of July fireworks show reaching its final crescendo. Most of the gunfire was of the M4 variety, the sound as familiar to her as her own voice, but there were still others woven into the fabric of the gunbattle, .38 specials and SIG Sauers from dusty shoeboxes on closet shelves, possibly a MAC-10 in there. Street guns, no match for the military hardware Echo Three was packing.
Any means necessary.
Jesus. So this was for real. Really real. Her mind went blank and she let herself be the soldier she’d trained for more than a decade to become. Not for the first time in her life, she was thankful for her Army training. She was trained to follow orders, and it let her detach from the current reality. Many times, it was the job that had drawn her through the darkest times in her life. She had to believe this terrible order she’d been given, one that would surely haunt her for the rest of her days, however many of them remained, was being issued for the greater good. That thoughtful, careful, deliberate men had examined the situation here and the situation elsewhere and determined that this was the only way.
“Acknowledge, Echo Three.”
“By any means necessary,” Wells repeated. “Copy that.”
“God bless you, Echo Three,” came the reply, the voice softer this time, followed by a quick burst of static. Then silence.
This made Sarah’s blood run cold, and a hard shiver rippled through her body. Using the helmet-com, she switched the channel over to the platoon’s dedicated frequency.
“Echo Three, fall back!” she barked.
After clicking off her communicator, she did a quick recon of their situation. Multiple casualties, multiple itchy trigger fingers and their scared shitless captain. Immediately to her left, four soldiers – Preston Beaumont, Johnny Weekes, Clint Vranian and Faisal Qureshi. Quite a quartet, she thought. All barely out of basic training. The others were scattered around the perimeter of the truck. Just ahead was a side street, an alley more than anything, which cut behind a bodega; she took note of it as a possible escape route in case they needed to get out quickly. That’s what it had come to. Planning a possible bugout.
“Our orders are to maintain the quarantine by any means necessary,” she said after they had congregated behind the truck.
“Fuck that!” came the deep, bellowing voice of PFC Vinnie Matthews. He’d been sick since midnight. “What the fuck is the point of all this? We’re all fucking dead anyway! I fucking quit.”
Without thinking about it, Sarah drove the butt of her rifle into Matthews’ midsection; when he doubled over, grunting, coughing up blood, she brought up her right knee squarely into his chin. She laid him down gently on the ground and knelt down close to him, his panic-stricken face just inches from her own.
“Don’t ever question my orders again,” she said softly.
Matthews nodded, his eyes shiny with tears. She eyed him for a moment longer, debating whether she should try and give him a comforting word. She decided against it. They were all in the same sinking boat.
“Anyone else want to fucking quit?” she asked, surveying the faces of her terrified troops.
“We have a fucking job to do,” she said when no one replied. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, or how long we’re going to be here, but we have to believe our orders are part of some bigger plan to get us out of this shit. Are we clear?”
A gaggle of “Ma’ams” and “Yes ma’ams” followed. She didn’t know if they believed what she was saying; she wasn’t sure she believed it. But if she didn’t act like she believed it, she’d lose whatever thread of control she maintained over her platoon.
“All right, let’s get back to work.”
In the distance, she heard shouts, some English, some Spanish, still others in languages she didn’t recognize. Gunshots peppered the air, the smell of smoke and metal intensifying. She peered around the front edge of the truck, back toward the quarantine zone and saw another crowd forming, this one louder and angrier than the first. Pockets of people swarmed the area, people hiding behind parked vehicles, in alleys, behind the buildings. She saw many were armed this time, the mob evolving like a strain of deadly bacteria. Movement along the tops of the buildings near the perimeter caught her eye, and she realized with horror these people were getting ready to launch some kind of offensive against her unit.
“Weekes!” she barked into her communicator. “Looks like we’ve got movement on the rooftops.”
As if on cue, a hail of gunfire rained down on them from above. Sarah and Weekes turned and directed their fire on the rooftop snipers. She fired one burst, and then another, and then another, her M4 growing hot in her hands. Weekes edged around the far side of the truck and came up firing, but the shooter retreated from the edge. Then she turned her attention toward the clusters, crying as she cut down citizen after citizen.
A loud, revving groan caught her attention, and she swung her gaze toward the source of the noise. A large vehicle was accelerating toward the roadblock, coming from the north, possibly a moving van or delivery truck. As it breached the last roadblock-free intersection, hell erupted around Sarah. The street exploded with heavy gunfire. She rotated back around the front of the truck and opened up with her M4, tears streaming down her cheeks, partially from fear, but mostly from sadness, terrible, crushing sadness that her life was probably going to end here, in New York City, everything fucked six ways to Sunday.
“I’ll man the gun!” she shouted. Her heavy footsteps twanged against the metal bed of the truck, and within seconds, the air was filled with the terrifying whisper of the .50-caliber gun as its rounds found purchase in the front grill of the truck. The machine gun edged upwards slightly, just a hair, and within a second, a splatter of red splashed against the windshield. But it was too late. The truck’s trajectory shifted slightly, as it continued without human control, but it didn’t decelerate at all.
“Fall back!” she screamed.
Realizing there was no chance to divert the truck from its homicidal trajectory, Sarah leapt off the machine gun battery; a second later, the truck’s grill crashed into the side of Sarah’s armored personnel carrier and it careened up Lincoln Avenue toward the bridge. She hit the ground hard and rolled, her body a rag doll against the rain-slickened asphalt. The truck pitched and yawed as it hit the bridge, scraping up against the left guardrail. It overcorrected, sweeping across the other travel lanes before punching through the guardrail on the north side of the bridge. It plunged sixty feet into the dark waters of the Harlem River, piercing the surface with a terrific slap.
The crowd poured into the gap created by the collision like water from a ruptured main, flowing, flowing, flowing. Sarah scampered out of the way, taking cover under the remains of an old Toyota Celica; she lay prone and watched hundreds, thousands of feet slapping the pavement. She activated her shoulder mike.
“Echo Base, Echo Three.”
The open line hissed with static.
“Repeat, Echo Base, Echo Three. Third Avenue Bridge quarantine breached. Repeat. Third Avenue Quarantine breached.”
More static. No answer.
Sarah watched them stream through, sick, dying, carrying the virus with them into Harlem. When the flow had tapered to a trickle, she crawled out of her hiding spot, her M4 at the ready. But it wasn’t needed. The crowd cascaded across the bridge now, people staggering and stumbling over one another like a haunted funhouse version of a picturesque marathon start.
She had failed.
A buzz drew her attention, and she turned her head south, where she saw two low-flying helicopters following the cut of the river, closing fast. Apaches, loaded for bear. Multiple starbursts winked in the low morning gloom as each chopper unleashed four Hellfire missiles upriver. The rockets screamed north and slammed into the Third Avenue bridge superstructure; it disappeared into a cloud of smoke, debris and body parts. As fif
teen hundred men, women and children plunged to their deaths alongside the twisted, burning wreckage of the bridge, the screams were so loud, so piercing it made Sarah’s head throb.
When it was over, the Apaches dipped their noses low, as if sighing, and continued upriver. A strange silence enveloped everything around her, and Sarah stood there watching the burning rubble and bodies floating in the Harlem River.
INTERLUDE
FROM SELECTED TWITTER ACCOUNTS
Hashtags #Medusa #plague #flu
August 15
9:16 a.m. to 9:17 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
@NewYorkCity: Quarantines will remain in effect until further notice #Medusa
@LynnSwanson: The hospitals are full here in Topeka. Please spread the word #Medusa #flu
@Andre2K: Bodies stacked up on outskirts of town. Long ditch being dug. #Bozeman #Medusa #cobra
@JavierWriter: I just saw a policeman shoot and kill two looters! #cleveland #medusa #plague
@CarlosDiaz: Todo el mundo en mi edificio está muerto! Tengo una fiebre. #medusa #ayudar
@USHomelandSecurity: A #Medusa vaccine is nearly ready for widespread distribution
@NBCNews: RT @USHomelandSecurity: A #Medusa vaccine is nearly ready for widespread distribution
@TadMcGuire: Sounds of heavy gunfire all night long. So scared. #trustinjesus #medusa
@ErinCollins: here’s a pic of the fire at Murfreesboro water tower. No firetrucks!!! #medusa #tennessee
@DesMoinesEmergencyOps: Please mark an X on your front door for body removal #medusa
@VanceBaker22: It is time to make your peace with YOUR LORD! The TIME OF THE RAPTURE IS AT HAND! #medusa
@WorldNews: #Medusa outbreaks reported in London, New Delhi, Tokyo. Mortality exceeding 90 percent in some areas. North Korea reporting no infections.
@PastorJohn: #Medusa is God’s judgment on our wicked world! The fag marriages and the homos are to blame!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When the end came for his seven-year-old Heather, the last surviving member of his family, Freddie Briggs was holding her hand, sitting on a cold metal chair next to her bed. As she slipped away, he made no attempt to hale a nurse or flag down a doctor or otherwise ignite the engine of modern medicine. Instead, he squeezed her hand and whispered in her ear, knowing from the countless explosions of grief that had rocked the intensive care unit throughout the day that no one was going to do anything, that no one could do anything. Everyone in the hospital was stumbling drunk through a surrealistic minefield, the landscape getting smokier with panic and misery with each passing hour.
In her last terrible moments, Heather seized briefly and then her body simply shut down. It was the quickest and least traumatic of the deaths of the three people Freddie loved more than anything in the world. She didn’t seem to be in any pain, but wasn’t that what they all said? How the hell did anyone know that anyway? She was lying perfectly still, her eyes closed, as they had been for the last six hours. Freddie folded her hands over her heart, brushed her hair, which had been matted down around her face with sweat, out of her eyes, and then sat back in his metal folding chair.
He became very aware of an itch on his neck and scratched it. The relief was huge, the sound of the fingernail scraping the dry patch of skin more soothing than seemed normal. He looked at his watch; it was six-fifteen. A perfectly ordinary time of day, with its own rituals and routines. Dinnertime. The early SportsCenter. Happy hour.
Freddie looked around the room that had become the Briggs family crypt and wondered what the hell good this private hospital room had done for his Susan and Caroline and Heather. Not a goddamn thing. As he thought about the last few days, he felt tears sliding down his cheek, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand.
By the time the ambulance had pulled away from the Briggs house, Susan and Caroline were both symptomatic. Susan had been the sicker of the two, worsening by the minute. Her chest was rising and falling quickly as her body struggled to draw in oxygen. Pale on her healthiest days, Susan’s skin had taken on an ashy tone and was stretched taut against her already thin frame, as though it had shrunk and no longer fit. One of the paramedics, the teacher, kept attaching and reattaching a blood-pressure cuff, seemingly unhappy with the results he was getting. As the ambulance rounded a corner, he felt Susan’s body heave, and she began coughing, an interminable spasm that didn’t subside until they’d made it to the hospital.
Freddie was thrilled they’d been assigned the last available room, and he tried not to think about the fact they’d been afforded that luxury because for the first time in his life, Freddie had used the “Don’t you know who I am?” card. As it turned out, the staffer in charge of room assignment had known who he was; she and her husband were huge Falcons fans, hopeful they could afford to get season tickets this year, but it would probably be next year. She had prattled on and on about football while working to check them in, apparently oblivious to the fact that things were going straight to hell, and Briggs had indulged her only because he had hoped it meant they’d get seen faster.
They probably had gotten seen faster, but in the end it hadn’t mattered. Susan died within an hour of checking into the room, despite an exhausted-looking doctor doing his best to keep her airway open. Freddie had begged him to tell him what was going on, how could so many have gotten so sick so fast, what the plan was to treat his family. The man hadn’t replied, and after he’d given up his resuscitation efforts, he simply said he was sorry and disappeared from the room. Caroline died two days after they checked in; Heather, the littlest one, fought the hardest, her body standing its ground for days, much longer than virtually anyone else in the unit, but eventually, she too, began to lose her battle.
As Heather deteriorated, Freddie began to realize the din, the frantic shouts of physicians’ orders and medications and codes, was nothing more than busy work, a desperate attempt to make it look like there was still order and structure in the hospital, because admitting that there was no order or structure would be like a boxer quitting on his stool in between rounds, throwing the blood- and snot-soaked towel into the middle of the ring. Brief sorties out of the room to get ice or juice or towels or just to see what the hell was going on had told him all he needed to know. So he just sat there with his beloved daughter, feeling oddly empty inside, as if the parts that had made Freddie Briggs Freddie Briggs had been scooped out with a shovel, and he was just the shell left behind.
Freddie sat back down in his chair and let out a long sigh. The machines in the room, a heart monitor and an IV cart, were silent. He hadn’t seen a nurse or doctor in about ten hours, not since Caroline had died in his arms earlier that morning, crying and coughing blood and writhing until she’d simply gone limp, a puppet with its strings cut. The doctor, ill himself with Medusa, had stood there, hugging them both, crying and apologizing. After it was over, the doctor had fled the room like it was on fire, shouting garbled nonsense. No one had made a pronouncement of death, no one had signed a death certificate, and no one had come to remove the body.
Her small body was wrapped with a bedsheet, tucked in the corner of their room because Freddie Briggs hadn’t had the first fucking clue what, precisely, he was supposed to do with the dead body of one daughter while watching the life drain out of the other.
The dead had been cast wherever there was open space, in some places two on a gurney. And they were the lucky ones. Many had been lined up on the bright, cold tile floors, under sheets and blankets, and they had simply died there, having never received a single second of treatment. The other rooms had been crammed full of patients, haphazardly triaged by the stage of infection. Adherence to universal precautions had long been abandoned; the intensive care unit was covered in blood and all manner of bodily fluids, but no one had bothered to clean it up.
He watched a fly (and there seemed to be a lot of flies buzzing around this evening) land on his daughter’s nose, and that was when it finally hit him. His sweet, gentle, serious Heather wa
s gone, like her sister and their mother, leaving him all alone in a world disintegrating around him. Heather had loved her hamster and their two family cats, and since she’d been old enough to understand the concept of veterinary medicine, that’s what she’d wanted to do with her life. Never once had she wavered, never once had she talked about becoming a princess or a nurse or a professional soccer player. She bought books about animals by the armful and loved going to the zoo, even though she’d been torn on the whole concept of zoos and whether it was thoughtful conservation or just plain cruel to the animals, and just like that she was dead.
His family was dead.
“My wife is dead,” he said to the empty room. “My daughters are dead.”
The room remained silent.
He said it again.
“My family is dead.”
He turned on the television with the remote control.
Why had he done that?
He didn’t know.
The television was tuned to the NBC affiliate, but it was drawing the MSNBC feed for some reason. Onscreen, the words On the Phone: Lenox Bowman, Byron, MN, were superimposed over a graphic of a rotary telephone.
“…we’re just praying real hard, Megan,” a voice was saying, but Freddie tuned the voice out because he didn’t want to hear what Lenox Bowman from Byron, Minnesota had to say about anything, thank you very much.
At the top of the screen were the words NATION IN CRISIS. At the bottom was the ubiquitous crawl, the ticker relaying undoubtedly important information about wearing facemasks or eating chicken soup and staying in bed or whatever. And that wasn’t all. Somehow, the genius producer had managed to slap the number for the Centers for Disease Control on there as well, and it all swirled together in a miasma of nonsense until he changed the channel.
Modern Family was on.
Much better than Lenox Bowman from Byron, Minnesota!
He watched two episodes. One of them he’d seen before, but the second was new to him. Weird that he’d missed an episode of Modern Family! Susan used to DVR it for him, and they’d watch it together before bed. Susan.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 11