“Where are you headed?” she asked finally.
“Honestly?” he said. He ran a hand across his scalp. “I don’t know. I just want to keep moving. I need to keep moving. Maybe we can find other survivors. Maybe we can find you a doctor.”
A faint smile crept across her face.
“I wish I had something better for you.”
“I think I’d be more worried if you had a plan,” she said.
“No,” he said, thinking about the garden hose snaking its way from the tailpipe into the cabin. Oh, he’d had a plan all right. And not just any plan, but one that would almost certainly have signed Caroline’s death warrant.
“I’ll go get the car.”
He turned to head back up the drive.
“Don’t forget about me,” she said, her voice quiet. There was a sharp undercurrent of fear just below the surface of her words.
He turned back and looked her squarely in the eyes.
“No,” he said as firmly as he could. “I won’t forget you.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Adam woke up early on the morning of the thirtieth, the day dawning hot and steamy. Last night, exhausted, he had pitched his tent in the middle of the Duke University football field in Durham, North Carolina. He liked its clear lines of sight, which reduced the chance that someone could sneak up on him. Plus, the acoustics made for a lot of echoes, another good early-warning system. The Bermuda grass was starting to go, a little bit shaggier than you’d expect to see on a college football field, but that was true of just about everything these days.
This would be his sixth day on the road; in that time, he had only traveled about two hundred miles, far fewer than he had been hoping to log by now. But this was turning out to be no ordinary road trip, and he’d badly underestimated the impact that the world in its new state would have on him. After that last night on his couch in Richmond, he had started early on the morning of the twenty-fifth, proud of himself for his clarity of thinking. Only a fool would’ve started such a huge undertaking in the dark, in the middle of a storm.
As he’d driven his neighbor Jeanette’s little Honda toward I-195, the local bypass feeding onto the interstate, he’d slalomed around abandoned vehicles and pileups littering the neighborhood roads. At the corner of Belmont and Main, Adam had come across the body of the cyclist he’d seen screaming past his house a few days earlier, lying face-up in the street, his ruined head propped up on the curb, as though he were using it for a pillow. His bicycle was wrapped around a telephone pole, which the cyclist apparently had struck in a last-second attempt to avoid a spilled motorcycle. The curb had cleaved the man’s head open after he’d flown over the handlebars, and that had been that.
At Hamilton Street, Adam turned north and found the charred wreckage of an Army truck blocking the on-ramp to I-195, the best interstate access point for miles. Two soldiers lay dead on the ground near the truck. Adam nervously took one of their machine guns and threw it in the trunk. He had no idea how to use it, and holding it terrified him, but having it in the back of the trunk made him feel better. There was no plug of traffic here, which didn’t make any sense, but he’d long since given up trying to make sense of anything. He gave up on the interstates, figuring he’d have to follow the city streets on his way out of town.
He motored west along Grove Avenue, past quaint Cape Cods and boutique shops and trendy restaurants. The streets, littered with branches and leaves felled by the previous night’s storm, were silent. No bodies here. No nothing. Then he swung north onto Granite Avenue toward a house he knew well, unable to resist the temptation; he knew he shouldn’t check on his med school roommate, Mark Zalewski, and his family, but he was going to anyway. Zalewski, an oncologist, lived in a brick colonial with his wife Ashley and their three kids, two girls and a boy. Adam parked at the curb and left the engine running.
“Mark!” he called out, running up the walk. The houses around him were silent and dark, their blinds pulled tight.
The front door was open, the air rank with the hint of something sour.
“Ashley!”
He was in the foyer now, his breathing shallow and ragged. Nothing moved.
They’re dead, you know they’re dead.
But he went upstairs anyway. The boy, Parker, was at the top of the steps. He was nine years old and he lay dead in his Spider-Man pajamas. He found the girls, Scarlet and Casey, with their mother in the king-sized bed she’d shared with Mark; Ashley’s arms were wrapped around her daughters, as though they’d settled in to watch a movie. Seeing them entwined in death shattered him. Mark was nowhere to be found. Knowing him, he’d gone to help at the hospital and died there. Before leaving, he carried Parker into his parents’ bedroom, laid him next to his family, and covered the four of them with the comforter. Then he went back to his car and cried.
At Libbie and Grove, he saw spires of thick black smoke swirling in the early morning sky to the northwest. It reminded him of those awful images from the morning of the 9/11 terror attacks. The stink of burning char filled his nostrils; in the massive quiet, he could hear flames crackling and snapping. It looked like the fire was burning farther west, over toward the hospital. There were a few gas stations in that direction, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to discover that one had gone up in flames. It was unnerving to think that this fire would burn, and it would burn, and it would burn, and no one would be coming to put it out.
The further he edged away from home, the more real it became. Everything was gone. He felt tiny, nothing more than a speck of dust fluttering through this gigantic nothingness. Nothing could’ve prepared him for the staggering shock of mile after mile of emptiness. Roads that were normally bustling with shoppers and delivery drivers and salespeople and stay-at-home moms were eerily quiet that Wednesday morning, August 25. Even the chaos he’d encountered coming home from Holden Beach, when mankind was still fighting, still scratching, still clawing to stay alive, was better than this.
After crossing the James River, he followed U.S. 60 east for a while, past shopping malls and car dealerships and chain restaurants and self-storage facilities. Images of a life lived here popped in his head like camera flashes. The animal shelter from which he’d adopted a lab mix puppy, dead from cancer five years now. The Korean barbecue restaurant he came to with his buddies every once in a while. Then he looped south on to Route 10 and followed it until he finally found an access point onto Interstate 85. That too, had been a difficult row to hoe, the highway peppered with traffic accidents, lanes blocked by military checkpoints in places that made no sense at all, as though the soldiers had been riding along and decided what the hell, this was as good a place as any for a checkpoint. It made Adam feel bad, that humanity hadn’t been able to answer the bell, that for all its spirit, it hadn’t been enough, and it was left to roll up checkpoints in rural Dinwiddie County. He averaged about forty miles a day, sleeping in his car, living off the rations he’d packed. He took frequent breaks, stopping every afternoon at two o’clock to call Rachel (unsuccessfully so far), and just trying to get his goddamn bearings. The nights were horrible, his sleep fractured by nightmares, photo negatives of all the bad dreams he’d ever had, the terror now grounded not in the fear that the dream was real but that it wasn’t because nothing his dream machine had been able to conjure up had matched the broken world waiting for him each morning.
And that was how it had gone until he made it to Durham on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, when the traffic had become overwhelming, and he’d had to abandon the vehicle at the interchange joining I-85 and U.S. 70. He packed what he could into the backpack, making sure he had Rachel’s picture, and began walking. He made it to the Durham city limits as the sun began to drop, and he capped that night with a can of cold ravioli, too freaked out to even start a campfire.
He stepped out of his tent into the morning glare, needing to pee and hungry. He took care of the former need in the corner of the field, behind the end zone, and was about to address
the latter when the fox struck. It snuck up on him just as he was digging through his bag for a Pop-Tart. It was a red fox, not full grown, little more than a blur that morning. Its razor sharp teeth clamped down on his wrist before he even got a clear look at it. A huge gasp of pain and shock boomed from him, and he instinctively jerked his arm around, flinging the animal loose as he scampered to his feet. It landed on its back a few feet away and then rolled back upright. Its head twitched once, twice, and then a third time. A stagger to the left before launching another attack on Adam. This time, he danced to his right, narrowly avoiding another full bite, but its teeth scraped against his leg.
Another howl of pain.
He pirouetted around to find himself looking at the fox’s backside; the animal was twitching again and staring off toward the stands, as though it had forgotten what it was doing. Adam reared back and delivered a swift kick to the animal’s haunches, and its rear leg snapped like a dry twig. The fox hissed and hobbled toward the sideline on three legs, keeping an eye on Adam. Then it lunged again, stumbling as it did so, its two front paws tangling together before it crashed back down. As it struggled back to its feet, Adam kicked it in the head, cracking its skull. It whimpered and went down hard. He stomped its head a second time, turning the fox’s small head into a bag of broken pottery.
It was over. His legs turned to jelly, and he dropped back onto his butt. He checked his wounds; there were three raised welts on the calf of his leg where the fox’s teeth had scratched him, but the skin was intact. The arm, however, was a different story. Blood seeped from the puncture wounds in his wrist and had smeared his forearm.
But the wounds themselves were the least of his concerns.
The way the fox had attacked. The bizarre twitching of its head. And how it had resumed its assault even after its leg had been broken. He clambered to his feet, dizzy. His mouth watered, but not in a good way, not in a way that suggested he was smelling a couple of ribeyes on the grill. He felt hot, very hot, like he’d spiked a fever. His dinner from the night before, meager as it was, came up all at once, in a rush; he bent over, his hands on his knees, swaying in the morning humidity. The sound of his heaves echoed off the bleachers.
His rational mind made the connection that his primal self already had.
Rabies. Rabies.
He’d just been bitten by a rabid fox.
He needed a vaccine, and he needed one now.
#
He visited hospitals and urgent care clinics and pharmacies for three days but could not find any vaccine at all. Why that was, he did not know. Maybe in the last days of the plague, people had begun injecting themselves with anything they could find in a desperate, futile attempt to fight off Medusa. He didn’t sleep, stumbling here and there looking for the only thing between him and certain awful death. At dark on the third day, he broke into a little bungalow in a quiet neighborhood on the north side of Durham. The bodies of an elderly couple were in the master bedroom, but otherwise, the house was clear, dark but for the shine of his flashlight. He found a bathroom and washed out the wound with soap and a bottle of water from the dead refrigerator.
When he was done, he sat down on the living room couch, amid the photo albums and unfinished crochet and piles of newspapers. The fear inside him was huge, even worse than when he’d been stuck with the HIV-contaminated needle. Statistically speaking, the risk from the needle stick had been extremely low, especially after the prophylactic treatment. But this. This was Medusa fear. What it must have felt like to come down with it, what it must have been to wait for the inevitable, bloody, painful end.
Now that the rabies virus was almost certainly inside him, the disease could present at any time. And once symptoms appeared, that would be it. He would die. His wrist throbbed, and he could almost hear the virus coursing through his veins. The bleeding had stopped and the wound was healing nicely, but without the vaccine, it wouldn’t matter. Without the shots, sometime in the next week or next month or next year, he’d develop a cough, some numbness at the wound site, and then his brain would begin to swell and he’d develop a fear of water and then he would die a horrible, horrible death.
This was what it was like.
This is what it had been like for the rest of the world. As if death had wanted him all along. There was no escaping destiny, after all. That’s what destiny was.
Right on, old chap. Missed you with Medusa. Will be coming back ‘round with something else for you soon.
He was too scared to sleep.
He stayed up all night flipping through the dead couple’s photo albums. He didn’t know why they were out from their slot on the bookshelf; perhaps the couple had been walking down memory lane when Medusa had found this little house. They were pictures of a lifetime together, black and white wedding photographs, color pictures with that weird yellowish hue, then sweeping through the last three decades of weddings and graduations and Christmas parties and dogs and cats and fish and hamsters. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was checking out a dog on an examining table. He looked at more pictures, more and more, until he dozed and dreamed about this family and their life clicking by like a slide show, a frame at a time. As he slept, a realization flared inside his brain, exploding like a mushroom cloud, shooting him out of slumber.
The man had been a veterinarian.
Rabies.
He raced through the house, rummaging through papers and files until he found in an antique desk a business card emblazoned with the logo of the Phillips Veterinary Clinic. Mosrie Drive in Durham. He strapped on his backpack and sprinted through the dead neighborhood, following the streets out to a main artery. As dawn broke over the city, he stopped at a gas station for a map and found Mosrie Drive not a mile away.
The morning air was steamy and hot; on display around him were more scenes from the last days. Adam saw the body of a young soldier, his hands holding his rotted intestines, chewed free of his body by some heavy-caliber weapon. A black crow was perched on the man’s thigh, chewing on his entrails. A turn of his head, this way or that, uncovered more visual horrors. An attractive young woman with a crowbar thrust through her neck. The head and upper torso of a middle-aged man, notably separated from his legs a few yards away. Abandoned police cruisers. A North Carolina National Guard personnel carrier. A Channel 11 news van, its satellite dish still telescoping into the sky like an alien paw. Quiet. Quiet.
The veterinary clinic was housed in a small brick building next to a Hardee’s. Adam stood astride the bike, breathing hard, waiting for his heart to slow down. The terror was moon-sized now, orbiting him, threatening to fracture him. He pulled the gun from his backpack and approached the door slowly. A handwritten note on the door read CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. He double-checked his flashlight and his gun. The clip was full, and he had one in the chamber.
He went inside, and the door swung shut behind him.
Weak sunbeams streamed through the large windows into the reception area, catching dust and other particulate matter floating in the ether. His heart slammed against his ribcage as though it wanted out of not just Adam’s body but out of this dead place entirely. He pictured a cartoon heart scampering down the hallway, using its ventricles like legs. Maybe the rabies was already driving him insane.
He found the medication cabinet in the back, near the kennels, which were full of dead cats and dogs. He checked each kennel, one at a time, hoping that maybe there was one industrious pooch who’d hung on and could join Adam on the road. But there wasn’t; there was just more death. He hoped the animals hadn’t died of Medusa; it was hard to imagine a world without dogs. He rifled through bottles and vials, antibiotics and emetics and pain pills, chicken- flavored this or that, and then he found it on a shelf. A five-dose package of human rabies vaccine. A dose of immune globulin and four doses of the vaccine itself. He grabbed it along with some syringes and hustled back outside, thanking his lucky stars. It had been illegal for a vet to house or administer human rabies vaccine.
Tears fill
ed his eyes as he read the instructions inside the shrink-wrap. He was supposed to have taken the first dose on the day of the bite, but there was nothing that could be done about that now. He injected the globulin and first dose of vaccine and prayed that he’d done it in time. The other three doses would follow in three, seven and fourteen days. All he could do was hope and pray. Pray that he wasn’t left to die of perhaps the one disease even deadlier than Medusa.
The tears burst forth, and he cried, sitting there on the curb outside the Phillips Veterinary Clinic.
“Are you okay?”
The voice startled him so badly he gasped. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard a human voice. He opened his eyes and saw an attractive young black woman wearing an urban camouflage uniform and holding a gun on him.
He stared at her, debating whether she was really there or if he was hallucinating.
“You gonna freak out on me here?” she asked.
He felt his jaw moving, but no words would come out.
“I’m going to count to ten,” she said, “and then I’m going to head on down the road.”
Then more quietly: “Jesus, can I not catch a break?”
“No,” Adam said. “I’m fine.”
“What’s with the needles?” she asked. “No hospitals if you O.D.”
Adam glanced down at the paraphernalia around him and smiled.
“Oh, no. It’s not that. I got bitten by a rabid fox a few days ago,” he said, pointing to the bite marks on his arm. “I finally found some vaccine for it.”
He watched her watch him, staring at him with her fierce green eyes, as though she was trying to decide whether to believe him.
“My name is Adam.”
#
The day brightened around him, the morning cloud cover pushing off to the east. As they stood there in the parking lot, he felt very small, very alone.
“Adam Fisher,” he said again, extending his hand.
Her eyes narrowed as she considered his offer of goodwill. His outstretched hand hung there in the void, suspended, frozen in time.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 17