A quarter hour later, the Mississippi River came up on them, wide and glassy that afternoon, lazily snaking its way through the heart of America. Adam, who’d never seen it in person, tried focusing on the road, but the river pulled on his gaze time and again. Boats, resembling toys from this distance, rocked in the still waters downriver.
“I just had the most random thought,” Adam said.
“What?”
“Is there anyone on the International Space Station? What about a Navy ship or submarine out in the Atlantic? Or an oil rig down in the Gulf?”
“Jesus,” Sarah said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I don’t understand,” Max said.
“There could be people in all those places,” Adam said. “People who weren’t exposed to the virus. They could still be healthy. They might be out there right now, wondering what to do.”
“What would happen to them if they came back?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know. I don’t know if we’re carrying the virus inside our bodies. I don’t know if it’s lurking somewhere or if it burned off. Or if it’s mutated.”
His mind drifted to the world they’d be facing, and it was more than he could process. Traffic on the river itself would be nonexistent in the coming weeks and months, giving the river a chance to repair the environmental damage it had suffered in the last few centuries. Strange thoughts. Strange days.
“Look,” Max said, pointing ahead.
They were approaching an overpass, atop which Adam could make out two figures staring out down across the highway.
“Holy shit!” Max exclaimed. “He’s got a gun!”
Adam cocked his head for a better view and could just make out the glint of gunmetal in the sunshine. A round slammed into the concrete about twenty yards away, the report of the gun echoing off the automobile graveyard surrounding them.
“Jesus H. Christ!”
He yanked the wheel to the right.
“Stay calm,” Sarah barked. “How’s the road ahead look?”
Adam tore his gaze away from the overpass and peered down the highway. The dead traffic had thickened here like trans fats clogging an artery. He decelerated and slalomed his way around the abandoned vehicles. Another few seconds brought them directly under the overpass, just as the shooter prepared to fire.
“It’s getting a little crowded here,” he said, as a second shot shattered the windshield of an abandoned box truck in the eastbound lanes.
“He’s firing blind,” she said, a steely conviction in her voice. “He’s not a good shot. Just take the next exit and drop down into the city.”
Another shot exploded behind them, followed by a loud pop; the car shimmied underneath him and fishtailed.
“We blew a tire, we blew a tire!”
“Shows how much I know,” Sarah muttered.
He eased off the gas and steadied the steering wheel until the car rolled to a stop in the middle of the freeway, not far from the exit ramp.
Then another shotgun blast.
“We’re gonna have to run for it,” Adam said, hoping he was covering the panic he was feeling.
“Max, swing your door open, but stay in the car.”
“I don’t wanna get out of the car.”
He was ramrod still, his eyes shut tight, his hand clenched into little chubby fists.
“Max, it’ll be OK. We’re up against the jersey wall. We’re gonna stay low, and the door will shield us. Max. We can’t stay here. I’ll make sure you’re safe.
“Give me your hand,” Adam said, reaching toward the kid.
Max shook his head violently, like a child refusing his medicine.
“Max,” Adam said, his voice dropping in volume. “We’re going to do this together.”
Slowly, the boy slid his hand into Adam’s; it was cold and clammy.
“Now with your other hand, swing the door open.”
Max swung the door open. The edge caught the jersey wall, making a nails-on-chalkboard screech. Adam retrieved his gun from the console and nodded toward Sarah, who slipped out onto the shoulder with her M4 slung across her back. Max scurried over the center console and followed Sarah out the door. As Adam brought up the rear, a shell shattered the rear windshield. Max screamed.
“Stay low, stay low!” Sarah hissed. She squeezed off a burst at the overpass. The roar of the machine gun fractured the morning, its chatter making everything seem harder and more real. The shooter ducked below the railing, pushed back by the threat of Sarah’s heavy gun. Sarah kept the gun trained on his position, and when he reappeared, she took his head off with a short burst from the M4.
They hugged the wall as they scampered east; Adam crab-walked, keeping an eye on the road behind him, listening for footfalls, the click of more shells being chambered. He didn’t know if there was one potential killer or three or twenty.
He glanced up the road and saw the exit ramp fifty yards off. More gunfire peppered the afternoon air. Sarah waved Adam and Max past her. Then, using a shiny Lexus coupe for cover, she rose up and fired a burst from the M4 at the second shooter. Adam paused, Max’s hand sweaty and tight in his own. Then he shimmied up next to Sarah and drew his gun.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Helping,” he said, although it came out more as a question.
“You ever seen combat?”
“No,” he said.
“Get him the hell out of here,” she said, nodding toward Max. “I’ll meet you at the bottom of the next exit. Go!”
Adam pressed the butt of the gun to his forehead, his teeth clenched. Back toward the overpass, an angry voice bit into the air.
“Go!”
As he turned back toward Max, he spotted a figured closing in from the east, also sliding down along the jersey wall.
“Sarah!”
She swung her attention toward Adam as he gestured wildly to the east. Then she slipped around the front of the Lexus, staying low but leaving herself very exposed.
Adam fumbled with the gun, but it was slippery in his sweaty hands, which were moving in slow motion. The figure drew closer, but Adam still couldn’t make the gun work. He might as well have been trying to defend himself and Max with a jar of peanut butter.
Then a stitch of gunfire slammed the man against the wall, and he slid to the asphalt, quite dead. Blood smeared the wall where his body had impacted it. Sarah emerged from between two cars in that lane, her gun still trained on the man.
She slid his gun away from his body with her foot, and Adam exhaled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They made it unmolested to the bottom of the exit ramp and onto 4th Street, which ran north through the stadium area. Adam’s heart continued to race in the wake of the little skirmish at the overpass, and he was having a hard time concentrating. He’d known such a thing was possible, even likely, as the world drifted away from the shoreline of civilization, but it had been so harsh and vivid and sudden that he’d barely been able to react. Why had it happened? To what end? The more he thought about it, the more he worried he wouldn’t be long for a world like this. How Sarah had done it, he’d never know. She’d say it was her years of training that had kicked in, muscle memory, but it was more than that. It was something he didn’t think he had.
“Look at all the bodies,” Max whispered as they made their way north.
Max was right. There appeared to be an unusually high concentration of victims here.
“Adam,” Sarah said. “Look over to your left.”
Adam turned his head and saw Busch Stadium rising in the shimmering afternoon sun. Not twelve months earlier, this place had hosted the National League Championship Series, which the hometown Cardinals had lost in five games to the Washington Nationals. It was hard not to overlay his memories of baseball on top of the empty shell that lay before them.
They were on the stadium’s east side now, cutting in between the stadium and the Gateway Arch Park to their right. Adam didn�
�t know what they were supposed to be looking for, but it looked a lot like everything else they had seen. They passed a parking lot full of abandoned military vehicles. At the corner of 4th and Clarke, sandbags and a machine-gun battery.
“See anything?” he asked.
Sarah held her M4 tight.
“Let’s find the main entrance,” she said. “Stay close.”
Dread crawled up Adam’s back like a snake.
“There’s no one here,” Adam said. “We should get out of here.”
“I’ve got my orders.”
Adam held his tongue. There’d be no arguing with her. She had her orders.
They proceeded west on Clarke Street, moving slowly, their backs to one another to give them a 360-degree sweep of the area. As they fell into a rhythm, the silence engulfed them like a heavy blanket. They heard nothing and saw no one as they drew closer to the stadium’s main entrance. The stench was horrific, deeper and stronger than Adam had smelled yet. Weeks of immeasurable human decomposition was finally peaking.
Sawhorses lined the front entrance of the stadium, but there was no one guarding them. Bodies of soldiers, some wearing gas masks, littered the concourse. The trio passed under the black metal arches, gleaming in the afternoon sun, up the ramp and into the bowels of the stadium. Shuttered concession stands and a dark souvenir store greeted them as they moved along the outer concourse. There were hundreds of bodies in here. Adam felt Max press his body up against him.
Then they were in the bleachers, staring out across the empty field, this dead cathedral to America. Thousands of bodies were scattered through the stands, their empty, bloated faces staring at them, waiting for a game that would never begin. The outfield grass had grown long and rippled in the afternoon breeze, but the infield was still groomed, the white lines marking the baselines still pristine. Tents bearing the logo of the Federal Emergency Management Administration lined the warning track, but they, too, were abandoned, silent. A few crows and vultures here and there, pecking at the remains.
“I just had to be sure,” Sarah said, as they descended the steps.
“We should check the tents for supplies,” Adam said.
A burst of birdcall above them, and Adam looked up to see the sky darken with hundreds of blackbirds swirling about like a cloud. They flew lazily, in circles, as though the offerings of carrion were so vast, so varied, they didn’t know where to begin. A lifetime of dining on squirrels and field mice had been replaced with the greatest buffet line they’d ever seen.
As he watched the birds, his stomach swirled, the dead stadium a gut punch, more than he cared to admit. It had represented the last best chance that humanity still had a pulse, faint as it might have been, and seeing that it was gone left him dizzy. There was nothing. You expect something bad to happen, but there’s still that tiny sliver of hope, stuck in your mind like a splinter, that it might still go the other way. But then the bad thing happens, and you’re looking at it, and it’s just as bad as you feared and there’s nothing you can do. They stood there for a full ten minutes, long enough to feel the sun’s rays grow uncomfortably warm on their necks and arms.
“Max, you ever been on a major league field before?” Adam asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Follow me.”
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked.
“Just taking a little break,” Adam replied. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“We should probably get a move on,” Sarah said.
“I can’t right now,” Adam said. “I just need a break.”
They found bats and balls and gloves in the Cardinals dugout. Adam threw fat batting practice pitches to Max, who had a nice, natural swing and even put a couple into the outfield. Around them, the empty faces of the dead watched them play baseball. Maybe this wasn’t the wisest use of their time, Adam realized, but he didn’t care. Rachel, if she was even still alive, was two thousand miles away, and what the hell, he might as well throw a little batting practice.
As he reared back to fire another pitch in toward the plate, Adam froze suddenly. Just over Sarah’s shoulder, an enormous man was approaching them, carrying in his arms a wisp of a woman.
“Hey!” he barked. “This the testing center?”
Sarah turned to face the newcomers, her machine gun raised up and ready for business.
“Don’t move!” Sarah called out.
“She needs help,” the man said, dipping his chin toward his human cargo.
Then the man froze and took in the full scope of the scene before him. His head rotated from one side to the other.
Sarah looked over at Adam, who nodded toward her.
“It might be a trap.”
“No!” the woman called out. “I’m pregnant!”
The news galvanized Adam like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. Pregnant. He got a good look at her swollen belly. At least thirty-five weeks along, Adam surmised. Close to full term, close to finding out up close and personal and that pretty goddamn soon whether babies were immune to the Medusa virus.
“It’s OK,” Max called out, holding his hands up high. “He’s a doctor.”
“Oh, my God, are you for real?” she said, bursting into tears.
The man looked down at the woman and whispered something to her; she nodded and squeezed his shoulder. He took her down into the dugout and propped her up on the bench. A makeshift splint framed her right leg.
Images of babies dying of Medusa flooded Adam’s brain, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near this woman. He didn’t want them to know he was a doctor. He didn’t want to be the one who couldn’t do anything for her. What was he going to do, perform a C-section there in the dugout with some plastic cutlery?
They waited.
Finally, Adam followed them down the steps to the dugout and took a knee next to her. The floor was still sticky with tobacco dip and sunflower seed shells.
“You really a doctor?” she asked.
He chewed on his lower lip; he could just lie and say the kid had been making it up, and maybe Sarah would go along with him because she would understand he had some reason for doing so. But in the end, he couldn’t.
“Yes.”
He saw a big smile spread across the woman’s face, and she gently placed her hands on her abdomen.
“Don’t suppose you’re an OB?”
“I am in fact an OB.”
“Jesus. I guess this is my lucky day. Are you a good one?”
“Best in the city.”
She laughed and broke into tears simultaneously.
He was glad they’d shared the joke. Humor was humanity’s great glue, yoking people together for thousands of years. That was something, he thought, as he drew closer, keeping one eye on her massive companion.
“When are you due?” he asked.
A breeze rustled through the shadowy dugout, cooling them.
“September twenty-fifth.”
“How’s the pregnancy been?”
“Pretty uneventful,” she said.
“Baby been active?”
She nodded.
“Rome burned, and he kept right on kicking,” she said.
“It’s a boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the kicking’s good,” Adam said. “Real good.”
He pointed at her belly and held up his hands. “Do you mind if I examine your stomach?”
“Go ahead.”
“You mind lifting up your shirt for me?” he asked, wanting her to be the one to expose her belly. “Just halfway so I can get a look at your stomach.”
He gently palpated her stomach, feeling for the head. A moment later, he felt the baby squirm and roll, twisting away from his manipulations.
“Any allergies?”
“No.”
“I’d feel more comfortable with an ultrasound machine, but things seem right on track. I’d say another couple weeks.”
Her face lit up, and her eyes were wet with tears.
“Thank God,” s
he said. “I haven’t seen a doctor since July.”
“Well, let’s hope your luck holds out.”
“Will you deliver the baby?”
There was no way around it. In this new paradigm, not doing his job would put her life in danger. Too many things could go wrong. People thought that delivering babies was a simple matter, and maybe in the grand scheme of things, across the giant sample size that had been humanity, it had been. Most babies and mothers survived their delivery. Most. But this woman would be playing against a stacked deck. It wasn’t going to be easy for her with that broken leg, even with another two weeks of healing.
“Of course,” he said. “I don’t know how many obstetricians are running around these days. I can’t promise you everything modern medicine could have delivered two months ago, but we’ll do our best.”
She reached out and squeezed his hand.
“Thank you,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard any good news.”
Her eyes narrowed, and her face turned to stone. He knew what was coming, and he began working on an answer before the words were out of her mouth.
“Will the baby catch it?”
“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
She gave him a wan smile.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
He searched for something to say, but anything else would have been superfluous, the wilted lettuce lying alongside the entree.
The thin smile disappeared.
“At least you’re honest.”
“We’re probably past the point of lying to make each other feel better,” Adam said. “Let’s move on. How’s the leg feeling?”
“I guess it’s healing. Itches like hell.”
“That’s the bone stitching back together. Mind if I take a look?”
“Think we’re getting to know each other pretty well, Doctor…. Oh my God, I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Dr. Fisher,” he said. “But you can call me Adam.”
“I think I’ll stick with Dr. Fisher,” she said. “At least until the baby comes.”
“Fair enough.”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 22