He took another nip of the amber-colored whisky. The liquor burned his throat like drain cleaner as it sloshed its way to his stomach. He considered the last week of his life, which in many ways had been the final week of his life, his old life, before he had been birthed through the blood and viscera of a dying mother into this new world on the other side of history.
He got up from the couch and wandered over to the big bay windows looking south onto Floyd Avenue. It was evening, still light out, but long purple shadows had just begun to creep across the street and up the sidewalks, the beginnings of a blanket of twilight on the city. Night filled him with dread now, as it had when he was a boy. A random memory from his childhood began playing in his head, like a song from his iPod set to shuffle. He’d been seven or eight years old, unable to sleep thanks to the shadows cast by a pair of saplings outside his bedroom window, shadows that shimmied in the wind like the bony arms of the undead, plotting and just waiting for little Adam to fall asleep so they could sneak in his window and cut his throat. Adam crawled down the hall, seeking comfort from his father, who had called him a pussy, smacked him across the side of the head and sent him back to bed.
For the first few days he’d been back in Richmond, he was certain he had to be dreaming. There was simply no way that what was happening was actually happening. Even when he’d reported to the hospital for a marathon three-day shift beginning on the fourteenth, during which he’d made two hundred and fifty-six pronouncements of death, and would have made hundreds more if they’d continued keeping track of them, it had to be a dream. When he told them he was on suspension, and the acting chief of medicine had said he wouldn’t have cared if Adam had been a rabid raccoon, it had to be a dream. He watched his patients die, then he watched the nurses and doctors die, and by the time he left on the afternoon of the seventeenth, he was one of only a handful of people still alive.
But he had to be dreaming. Soon he would see goats wearing reading glasses or transparent hot-air balloons filled with marshmallow crème and that would be it for this nightmare. Goodbye, crazy-ass subconscious, hello six a.m. and the morning news on the NBC affiliate, Channel 12, with the pretty anchor talking about another homicide down in Gilpin Court or a dog attack on a petite widow out for a stroll with her Bichon frise puppy. The smell of coffee brewing in his coffeemaker. The hiss of the machine followed by the reassuring trickle into the carafe, the pungent aroma of coffee spreading through the house.
But the dream hadn’t ended, it had kept right on keeping on, and he sat there, cocooned by the silence, its big brawny embrace squeezing him until he could barely breathe. Then he tried to force the dream’s hand, thinking maybe he could declare a jihad against it. At noon on the twenty-first, he wandered out onto his porch wearing nothing but black dress socks and running shoes. Everything about it seemed wrong, and that was what he wanted, standing there with his wang and balls hanging free, he wanted it all to feel wrong because that was what usually pierced the heart of a dream. But there he was, in the big empty summer day, naked as the day he was born. When that didn’t work, he jogged down the steps and headed east on Floyd Avenue. As he ran, he heard nothing but the sounds of his ragged, shallow breathing, the thrum of blood whooshing in his ears. On he ran, sweat slicking his body, and he began to cry, his sobs echoing off the houses of his dead neighbors. He ran faster and cried harder, and when he finished the loop around the block, he’d sat on his porch and cried like a baby. He went inside and hadn’t been back out since.
Since then, he’d spent much of his time on the couch with his laptop, drinking, eating peanut butter, watching Internet access grow spottier and spottier, the news channels go off the air one by one. One of the last news reports he’d seen was of a nuclear power station in Michigan melting down when the staff had failed to execute the plant’s emergency shutdown procedures properly. It was like watching your favorite team get its ass kicked on national television. Except this time, the team was mankind.
Now he had a burning desire to be outside while there was still light. He cracked the front door, just a sliver, and when he was convinced it was safe, he stepped out onto the small concrete porch, his hand gripping the neck of the whisky bottle like a weapon. The air was thick and heavy, the feeling of wearing a sweatshirt on an unexpectedly warm fall day. He lit a cigarette right away, mainly because it made him feel tougher, because it made him feel like he had a grasp on things. You walk down a street and see a guy on his porch smoking a cigarette and drinking Jack from the bottle in the middle of the mother-fucking apocalypse, that is a guy you do not want to mess with, right?
The sounds of summer were huge and everywhere, the cicadas buzzing, the birds chirping. In the distance, he could hear a dog barking. The hum of the overhead power lines in there somewhere. But underneath that was a huge void of silence.
A flicker of movement to his left caught his eye, and he looked over to see a cloud of flies buzzing around a body in his neighbor’s yard. It was Jeannette, the poet, lying dead on her perfectly manicured lawn, the grass still a bright, resplendent green. Adam stared at her blankly, the way he might have looked at a painting he didn’t quite understand. She was dressed in pajama pants but nothing else; her hair was a tangled mess, and her face was bloated, caked with blood and mucus. He wondered how she’d ended up in her yard, how long she had been out here. Had she crawled outside, sensing the end was near, unwilling to lie for all eternity in a hundred-year-old brownstone?
The scope of what happened crashed down on Adam like a rogue wave and stole his breath away. It was always there, lapping at the shores of his mind, but it was these big waves eroding his sanity like an unprotected sand dune. Had he not lived through it himself, he wouldn’t have believed such a catastrophe was even possible, and he was a doctor, a full-fledged, card-carrying man of science. The speed at which the virus overwhelmed everything had been dizzying; it was as if the battle to contain the outbreak had been lost before it had even begun. It was a thousand, no, a million times worse than anything he’d ever imagined. And here he was, standing at the end of history.
A breeze rustled the trees, full and thick with summer foliage, the leaves whispering amid the dying light of the day. Thunder rumbled in the distance, a low guttural drum. Adam looked west and saw a line of black clouds moving in, flashes of lightning laced into them like strobe lighting. It had been dry in Richmond for days; he’d heard faraway thunder each of the past few nights, but the storms had swept around the city, doing their duty elsewhere. The approaching tempest riveted him for a bit, like the passage of time had, because a summer storm right now was exquisite and ordinary all at the same time.
A series of electronic chimes from behind him broke him from his trance, and at first, he thought he’d imagined it. Broken out of a daydream by another daydream. A sure sign of insanity. But a few moments later, he heard the chimes again; it was his iPhone, the sound drifting through the screen door. His goddamn iPhone was chirping inside the house. An e-mail. A text message. Someone had tried to contact him. Rachel. He flung the screen door open, his eyes desperately scanning the house as the door clacked shut behind him.
Where was it? Where was it? He closed his eyes and, a moment later, he remembered he’d dropped it in the basket on the little end table by the front door after one of his many efforts to reach her. He had tried calling, emailing, texting, he had sent her messages through Facebook and Twitter, but he didn’t know if anything was getting out.
He brought up the home screen (noticing with some alarm that he had less than a twenty percent charge) and saw the numeral 1 stamped over the telephone icon. After plugging the phone in to charge, he tapped the icon to enter the voicemail module, where he found a single message waiting for him.
Rachel’s Cell
August 22
9:42 p.m.
August 22? That had been two days ago. But the message had just landed in his inbox, leading him to the conclusion that it had been hung up in the ether somewhere, and had
just managed to make it through the once-impossibly clogged communications lines. Maybe they weren’t clogged anymore because there wasn’t anyone left to use them.
He tapped the screen again, activating the playback function. Outside, the wind freshened as the storm drew closer. A burst of static, and then:
“Dad?”
Her voice was an atomic blast of light in his darkening world.
“I got your messages,” she continued. “All of them showed up on my phone at the same time. I’ve tried calling you like fifty times.”
Adam felt his heart break, an almost palpable sensation of his chest caving in. His daughter needed him, and he hadn’t been there. Every decision he’d made in his life since the day Rachel had been born had been just flat out wrong, because they’d added up to put him here, clear across the country from his daughter, where he couldn’t do shit for her in her darkest hour of need.
Father of the Year!
“Jesus, I hope you get this,” she said. “Mom’s dead. Everyone’s dead.”
Her voice cracked and then she sobbed for a moment. Then she took two deep breaths before continuing. Adam didn’t dare move a muscle, didn’t even take a breath, lest he somehow fuck up and delete her message.
“It’s the 22nd,” she continued. “I think. I’m headed up to my stepdad’s condo at Tahoe while I try to figure out what to do,” she continued. “I’m not sick. I don’t think I’m going to catch it. I don’t know how. I was hoping it was hereditary. No, that doesn’t make sense. Because Mom died. But maybe the immunity passed through you. I still feel fine. Is it bad there? I haven’t seen any news in a couple days. But it’s so bad here. So fucking bad. Sorry for the F bomb. Everyone is dead.”
She was rambling now, and Adam could hear the panic in her voice. She broke down again, but it was softer this time, more measured, more controlled.
“God,” she said, her voice trailing away. “I don’t even know if you’re alive. Please, if you get this, please, please call,” she begged. “The power is out here, but I guess the cell towers are still running somehow because I’m still getting a strong signal. I’ll leave the phone on as much as I can, charge it with a car adapter. I’ll do that until the cell towers go down.”
Adam heard the tinkling of glass breaking in the background of the call, and he froze. He waited for her to come back on the line.
But she didn’t.
“End of messages,” a mechanical female voice said.
Adam played the message again, tears streaming down his face as he listened to her voice a second time. He checked his watch, his trusty Casio, faithfully marking the passing time. If she was still symptom-free two days ago, that meant she’d almost certainly survived multiple exposures to the virus. As best as he could tell, the disease was winding down by then, certainly in any decent-sized population centers. He called her back immediately, but the line wouldn’t connect.
Did she share his resistance to the disease? Was it hereditary somehow? Some recessive gene buried deep in the Fisher DNA that had protected them? He told himself to calm down, to look at it clinically, to not get his hopes up. Anything could’ve happened in the last two days. This set off a huge debate in his subconscious, one that he decided to ignore for the time being. Up front, he set himself to gathering more information, more data, more evidence as to what might have become of her.
He played the message a third time, scouring it for any clues that Rachel might have left about her experience. The power was out in California, not surprising given the energy problems the state had had even before all this. She sounded alone, a single flickering light in a dark and dying world. Heading for Tahoe wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Safer than staying in a metro area, but the idea of her by herself out there made his throat tighten with panic.
He had to get to her. Nothing else mattered.
A boom of thunder shook the house, sending Adam’s balls into his chest. He slammed the door behind him, locking it, and moved deeper into the house, away from the windows. He ran upstairs as the skies opened up and unleashed a monstrous deluge of rain on the city. The rain was deafening, louder than any storm he’d ever heard before, its sounds amplified, as if Mother Nature was sporting a bullhorn, making sure whomever was left was listening very carefully.
#
As the storm raged outside, he spread a large map of the continental United States out on his bed and plotted his course. Richmond was a bit of a gateway town, the nexus of three major interstates – I-95, I-64 and I-85. Whereas I-95 hugged the coastline from Maine to the tip of Florida, and I-85 plunged south into Dixie, I-64 meandered away from the ocean, toward the plains. Interstate 85 was his best bet. Away from the mountains, but digging deep into the heartland before an eventual westward turn on I-40.
He packed slowly, taking his time, carefully going through each room in the house. He filled an emergency kit with medicine, bottled water, canned goods, matches, a rain poncho. Then he packed clothes, toiletries, flashlights, even the photograph of Rachel he kept by his nightstand. From the closet in his bedroom, he retrieved a handgun, a nine-millimeter Glock he’d owned for years, since medical school, when he’d lived in the slums near downtown. It was wrapped in a white hand towel. He thought back to his close call up the street with the man who’d tried to shoot him. The very thought of shooting a gun again made his heart throb, as if his chest were too small to contain it. He’d taken the Glock to the range a few times, but it had been a while. He made a note to fire off a few practice rounds when he was out on the road.
The basement he saved for last, where he got to work dusting off old, rarely used camping gear. The place was dim and dank, and he was glad he’d tucked a flashlight into his pocket. The bulb sizzled and popped when he flicked the switch, and so he worked by the light of the hall corridor upstairs, using the flashlight for pinpoint work. As he picked through the detritus littering his basement, he thought about the origin of his gear, a byproduct of the thing with Stephanie, the outdoorsy one.
She was a third-grade teacher at St. Catherine’s School, a friend of a friend. She was nice enough, and they had some good times, but they’d never really clicked, not in the way that said forever. They’d hiked along the Appalachian Trail a few times, and she knew what she was doing, whereas he did not. He ended up buying a thousand bucks worth of camping gear and then decided he needed to break it off. She hadn’t seemed all that upset about it. There hadn’t been any tears or long talks or anything like that. He saw her out with another guy a few weeks later, and he briefly debated approaching the guy and offering to sell him the tent and the backpack and the GPS tracking device because when was he going to use any of that shit?
And then it hit him that Stephanie was probably dead, and this felt tremendously unfair to Adam, that he was standing here, preparing for the camping trip of a lifetime, and it was only because of Stephanie that he was properly equipped to take it on.
He lugged the tent and the backpack up to the main floor, trying and failing to envision the days and weeks ahead of him. There was no frame of reference for this. For as much as he knew about the world in its new form, he might as well have been dropped on the surface of Mars. But what choice did he have? He had to get to California, to Rachel, because finding her meant he was doing something. Because finding her meant he had some purpose left.
He thought about Patient A, for the first time in days, and it occurred to him that his case before the Board of Medicine had been continued, postponed indefinitely, postponed forever. Patient A was still dead, but, he supposed, so were the nine members of the Board of Medicine. He would never get to tell the story about what happened, clear his name, and then he felt guilty because how could he think about Something Like That in the face of All This.
The thoughts just kept whizzing by as he inventoried his supplies, and he couldn’t stop them, like he was watching train after runaway train race by from a deserted subway platform. Patient A and Natalie, the office receptionist who, inex
plicably, had hated Adam from the day he’d joined the practice and basketball practice and his high school basketball coach who had skipped town in the middle of his junior year of high school and losing his virginity to Dena Chamberlain while his dad was passed out on the sofa and his dad, Jack Fisher, his giant prick of a dad who’d gotten off easy, preceding the rest of the world in death by several years, lost in a sailing accident at sea. Little League and the free soda they got at the end of each game. The way they’d fill the cup with a little of each kind of soda, a suicide they’d called it. Going to birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s and the feel of warm video game tokens in his hand.
The tears sluiced down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and he tasted salt. He wiped his eyes and his face, ran his hands through his hair, and then laughed at himself a little because just who the hell was he cleaning himself up for? He hadn’t seen a living soul in days, and he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t hallucinated that little incident. He was looking out his window on the morning of the twenty-second when a man in full cycling gear had ridden by on Floyd, up out of the saddle, hunched over the handlebars like he was leading the peloton at the Tour de France. He raced by, never looking up at Adam, never slowing down as he zoomed west.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 13