Freddie handed him a bottle of water, and Adam drank it down. It was lukewarm, but that was fine by him. Made it go down a little faster, without the threat of brain freeze. His desiccated body absorbed the water like a new sponge. He used a bit of the water to wash out his mouth, and then he wiped his lips clean with the back of his sleeve.
Baby’s sick.
The words were like bullets to the chest.
God dammit, why had he let himself get his hopes up?
After taking a deep breath, he staggered to his feet and followed Freddie toward Caroline’s tent. A light but steady rain was falling from low, gray clouds, which were nestled in the kind of sky that told you you’d be better off just staying in bed and watching movies. The rain rustled the leaves, spattering the shells of their polyester tents, steady, steady, steady. They were a few miles east of Salina, Kansas, where, on September 20, they’d set up their most permanent home to date, waiting for the baby to come. Adam hated to stop their progress, but the travel was starting to wear on Caroline. Plus, his last examination of her suggested the baby had dropped and would be coming any moment.
Caroline had gone into labor early on the morning of September 26. By the early afternoon, her contractions were four minutes apart, and she couldn’t wait any longer. With Sarah and Freddie working as de facto nurses, Adam set about the familiar work of bringing new life to the world, even if it was into a world with which he was decidedly unfamiliar. It had been a smooth delivery, given the circumstances. Caroline had told him her original birth plan had been to deliver without pain medication (and Adam couldn’t help but smile, virtually all of them said that, and then virtually all of them accepted the epidural after one or two good contractions). In this case, however, Caroline had gotten her wish. Oh, she had most certainly gotten her wish.
And six hours after she started pushing, right about the time he’d started thinking about an emergency C-section, out came a healthy, howling baby boy, out the way they had come for the entire history of the human race, his skin as fair as his mother’s, his head topped with a fine layer of red fuzz. He maxed out the 1-minute and 5-minute Apgar scores, pinking up and screaming his little head off. It was the most beautiful thing Adam had ever seen, and in that moment, as he handed the infant to his exhausted mother, all their problems just fell away. She named him Stephen, in honor of his father, who had succumbed in the second week of the epidemic. Their good luck continued several hours after his birth, when he began nursing like a seasoned professional.
They passed the baby around like a good joint, each taking a hit of that baby smell, and even Freddie seemed happy. He made ga-ga faces and changed diapers so Caroline could sleep in between feedings. Thirty-six hours in, Adam had started to relax, enjoying a cigar and a scotch while the others passed around a bottle of champagne Sarah had snagged during a supply run. The baby was feeding well, sleeping in two to three-hour bursts. He’d even found his thumb and was happy and alert.
One scotch became four, and on no sleep since Caroline had gone into labor, the alcohol had hit him hard and fast, precipitating the hangover he was feeling as he hurried into Caroline’s tent. He found her tucked in her sleeping bag, holding the baby close to her body.
Stephen was coughing, those tiny hacks, and immediately, Adam tried to attribute it to anything but what he feared it would be. Allergies. Drool. Milk going down the wrong pipe. He always thought it funny that doctors did the same thing as their patients, their minds working the same way, to explain away the thing that you feared the most.
“When did this start?” Adam said, kneeling by her.
She looked exhausted, and the glow that had been there after Stephen’s arrival had faded badly, like a once shiny penny that had been put through its paces.
“About two hours ago,” she said. “And I think he’s running a fever.”
A soft hand to Stephen’s fragile forehead confirmed Caroline’s diagnosis. The tiny little boy, a wrinkly, squirmy pile of pink, was wearing nothing but a diaper, but he was still warm, very warm. Adam wrapped his hands around the boy’s toothpick legs and found those uncomfortably warm as well.
Adam fought to maintain as straight a face as he could. In normal circumstances, a fever in an infant under twelve weeks of age was deadly serious, warranting immediate medical intervention. Hearing it now made him weak, dizzy, and if he hadn’t had one knee firmly planted in the ground, he might have tumbled over.
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Adam began, “but I’m not going to lie to you. This is not what I was hoping to see.”
Her jaw clenched tight, and he saw the panic bubbling there like a forgotten pot of soup, her eyes bouncing from Adam to Freddie and back again. She stared at him, and he could feel it in her stare.
“Do something!” Freddie barked.
A cough, a deeper one, exploded from Stephen’s little chest, and Caroline continued to rock him as she began to cry.
“Jesus!” Freddie snapped. He pointed at Adam. “You. Outside.”
Adam recoiled as a spike of fear coursed through him.
“Be right back,” Freddie said, but Caroline wasn’t listening. She rocked Stephen gently in her arms as the men ducked through the flaps of the tent.
Outside, the rain had intensified. Sarah and Max were lingering by the tent, anxious to hold the baby, anxious to kiss the baby, anxious to just be in the same goddamn room with the baby. They were like addicts waiting for their dealer to dish out a little more of that sweet, sweet horse.
“God dammit, ain’t there anything you can do?” Freddie asked.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.
“Stephen’s sick.”
“Aw, shit.”
“No, no, no!” Max said, bursting into tears.
“Is there anything you can try?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know what I can do,” Adam said. “Not if he’s got it.”
“What the hell kind of doctor are you?” Freddie snapped. His cheeks flushed, his left eyebrow twitching.
“A realistic one,” Adam said. “I don’t want to get her hopes up.”
“There’s got to be something.”
“You’ve seen what it does,” Adam said.
Max fled back to his tent, leaving the three of them standing there in the rain. Freddie closed his eyes, his breathing shallow and ragged. He placed his massive hand on Adam’s chest.
“Please,” he said, his eyes closed now. “Can you just try?”
“How about we leave the doctor stuff to me? How about that?”
Freddie’s face drained of color, Adam’s emasculation reaching him at his very core. Adam hadn’t set out to embarrass the man, but he had to take control of the situation. If his expertise, the one thing he brought to the table, was going to mean anything, he had to plant his flag now.
Freddie stormed back inside the tent. Just like that, Adam and Sarah were alone again.
“You really think he’s got it?”
Adam looked down at his shoes.
“Maybe it’s just a cold or something,” Sarah said.
”I don’t think so.”
“These aren’t exactly ideal conditions,” she said. “Maybe he picked up something on the road. I just don’t want to assume all is lost.”
They stood in silence, and he watched her watching him, wondering if she now regretted hitching her wagon to his, wondering if he wasn’t the man she had thought he was.
“I can try an antiviral,” he said finally. “I heard some chatter it was distantly related to the influenza virus, but I have no idea if that’s accurate. It’s not usually indicated for infants this young, but there isn’t really any other option. Maybe a combination of the medicine and any antibodies he inherited from her will make a difference.”
“OK. An antiviral. Can we find it in a pharmacy?”
“Yes. Assuming there are any supplies left. Remember, I’m sure everyone and their brother tried it during the outbreak.”
“Yo
u always this glass-is-half-empty?”
“Can you blame me?”
“No, I guess not.”
She turned toward the tent’s opening, and he grabbed her gently by the wrist.
“Seriously,” he said as she turned back to face him. “Please don’t get her hopes up. I’m telling you this as a doctor. This is a Hail Mary pass.”
#
They powered west all morning, hitting half a dozen pharmacies, unable to find antivirals, unable to find virtually any medicine at all. At noon, they reached the outskirts of Salina, smack in the dead center of Kansas. Salina had been at the hub of the state’s wheat industry, once a pleasant city of about fifty thousand souls. In the eastern suburbs, where Adam and Sarah had found a Walgreen’s drug store, cookie cutter development had been in full swing when the plague had hit, giving them a sense of the familiar they’d seen in almost every town and city they’d passed through on their trek west.
The box-shaped building was at the south end of a strip mall, bordering a new residential neighborhood. The moisture barriers for half-completed homes flapped in the rain, the skeletal shells of the unfinished homes beginning to bear the scars of inattention. New saplings dotted the area, but the once-manicured common areas were starting to go to seed. An Applebee’s restaurant anchored the shopping center, the words IMMEDIATE SEATING AVAILABLE still flashing in the window, a gaudy, neon red. This gave Adam the willies almost more than anything they’d seen on the road.
“Power’s on here,” he said, pointing toward the restaurant.
“Strange,” she said.
“Backup generators?”
“I suppose.”
Sarah glassed the area with a pair or binoculars, shaking her head after a moment.
“I don’t know about this one,” Adam said. “Maybe we should keep looking.”
“Didn’t you say time is of the essence?”
“Yes,” he said. “Every minute counts with an antiviral. The longer we wait, the less effective it will be.”
“Then we go in here. You got your piece?”
He nodded.
“You sure you’re ready to use it?”
He nodded firmly, hoping it masked his terror.
He cleared the chamber and made sure the pistol was ready to fire as Sarah swung the doors open.
“Ready?”
He nodded, his face oily with sweat. It was cool out, still drizzling, but his cheeks were hot, and perspiration matted his shirt to his skin.
“Stay behind me,” she said.
Adam’s heart was pounding as they crossed the threshold into the store, which was silent but for the buzz of the overhead lights. Sarah motioned skyward toward a closed-circuit television mounted near the ceiling, still functioning. The picture cycled from one angle of the store to the next, giving clear views of each aisle. The store appeared empty, but Sarah maintained her position, crouched over, her hands gripped tight around her weapon.
“Stay alert,” she whispered, her face taut, her jaw set like stone.
Using the long shelves for cover, they moved from aisle to aisle, poking their heads around ransacked displays of sunscreen, disposable cameras and corn chips. After they finished their sweep, Sarah led him back to the middle of the store, and they moved in tandem down the center aisle, back to back. The place was a mess, the shelves stripped bare, disheveled, toys and tchotchkes littering the linoleum floor. An issue of People lay face up on the floor, a pair of married celebrities adorning the cover. The headline read, More Kids for Hollywood’s Power Couple? It was dated August 6, a harsh reminder of how quickly the world had ended. As they moved deeper into the store, Adam began to lose hope, as the place had been picked over pretty well.
The pharmacy, which was at the back of the store, was dark, the overhead lights shattered. Bits of glass littered the floor, crunching under their feet as Adam checked the shelves. There wasn’t much left. Bulk containers holding pills to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and erectile dysfunction lined the shelves, but the antibiotics and narcotics were gone. He was about to give up hope when two stray bottles on a nearly bare shelf caught his eye.
Please, please, he thought.
He grabbed one of the bottles and studied the label.
Oseltamivir phosphate.
The antiviral.
It was the generic form, with nothing on the label to indicate that it was an antiviral. It was in capsule form, so they’d have to crush the contents into a bottle of formula for him. He still didn’t think it was going to work, but at least they were doing something. And he owed that to Caroline. To let her know he had done all he could.
“I’ve got it,” he called out.
When Sarah didn’t reply, he froze. He leaned back, staying in shadow, and peeked out toward the store proper. From his vantage point, he could just make out Sarah’s profile. Behind her, a slender arm, holding a gun to the back of her head.
He looked around and saw a closed-circuit monitor mounted on the counter. The black-and-white picture flickered through two shots of the store before snapping over to the pharmacy area. In the three seconds the shot remained on screen, Adam picked out two bandits, a skinny man and a heavier-set woman, both young.
“Come out with your hands up,” a gruff voice called out. “Gonna count to three. Then the bitch gets it.”
Bitch.
Well, he thought, at least that told him what kind of folks he was dealing with here.
“You hear me?” the man barked, his voice screeching now.
Adam chewed on his lip, the edges of a plan taking shape in his mind. He pulled the gun from his waistband and considered his options. He stared at the gun like it was an alien artifact, beyond the powers of his puny human comprehension. One versus two. And Sarah was being held hostage. In his untrained hands, the gun would be about as useful as a ball of yarn.
“I’m coming out!” he said, setting the gun and the antiviral down. He scanned the shelves and grabbed two more bottles.
Oh, Adam, what the hell are you doing, buddy?
He eased his way around the counter and out into the aisle fronting the pharmacy, his hands sky high, the pill bottles visible in his partially clenched fist. Sarah was about six feet away, a girl close in behind her, the gun pressed firmly against her temple. The girl’s face was blank, betraying not a single emotion. She was heavier set, her hair cut short. The second gunman, whose wide face and even wider-set eyes reminded Adam of an owl, stood just off their shoulder, brandishing a shotgun. Sarah’s M4 hung from his shoulder. He aimed the shotgun directly at Adam’s face. The twin bores, black and empty, stared at Adam like a dead-eyed monster.
“What’s in your hand?” the owl said, his words marinated with a thick Southern accent.
“Medicine.”
“What for?”
“You promise to let us go if I tell you?” Adam asked.
“How about you give it to me ‘fore I kill you?” Owl snapped.
“If you kill me, you won’t know how to use it.”
“What’s it for?”
The temperature seemed to be climbing with each passing moment. Adam felt rivulets of sweat channeling down his sides, and he tried to steady his breathing.
“It.”
An audible gasp.
“You mean Snake?” the girl said.
Snake. Medusa. So many names. Adam nodded as gravely as he could.
“That shit’s gone,” the girl snapped, her words clipped and desperate. “Everyone left’s ‘mune.”
“Lucy, he’s just bullshitting you,” the owl said.
“Yeah, we thought everyone was immune, too,” Adam said, gently lowering his hands to his head. It was a calculated risk, but he thought if he kept his hands over his head, they wouldn’t notice. Especially given the bomb he was about to drop on them. His arms were starting to burn; it was time to play his hand. He held his final card, holding, holding, as he watched their jaws tighten, their eyes widen with fear.
“Until
she came down with it yesterday,” he said, jutting his chin directly toward Sarah.
Lucy’s deep-seated instinct to survive kicked in, and she shoved Sarah away from her hard, stumbling backwards as she did so. Sarah lost her own footing, crashing into Adam and sending them both to the ground. Owl was on the retreat now too, holding his hand up, as if that might stop the spread of the phantom illness. Lucy was wiping her hands down on her jeans, pulling her shirt collar up over her lips and nose.
“No, no,” Owl said. He raised the gun back up and covered his mouth with his sleeve.
“No, wait!” Adam said. “If you shoot her, you’ll spray blood everywhere. Then you’ll definitely be exposed. There’s still time. She hasn’t coughed or sneezed since we came inside the store!”
“What?” Lucy said.
“I’m a doctor, trust me!” Adam said. “Medusa spreads like the common cold. You have to be exposed to droplets of the virus. You can’t get it otherwise.”
“You’re shitting me!” Owl said.
“No, I was with a CDC team in Kansas City during the outbreak,” Adam lied. “We figured out that the disease spreads easily, but not that easily. But you gotta get out of here now!”
The owl stood there, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Jack, let’s go!” cried Lucy. “I fucking touched her!”
“Go on now,” Adam said as grimly as he could. “Before it’s too late. She’s been coughing and sneezing a lot. I can’t believe she hasn’t yet in the store.”
“What about you?” Jack asked.
Adam shook his head.
Jack’s finger slipped in and out of the trigger guard as he swung from one choice to the other. Murder or flight.
“Please, hurry,” Adam yelled. “Please, I don’t want you all to get sick!”
“What about the medicine?” Owl asked. “It won’t work. If it worked, everyone would still be alive.”
“This medicine works,” Adam said. “They just didn’t have enough of it. I found some hidden in the back. This is the last of it.”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 26