DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic]

by Scheuring, R. A.

  A strange ebullience rose in Ezra’s breast. He was safe as long as he dodged DRYP. The epidemic had to burn out. They always did. People developed immunity. Or the disease killed all available hosts and stopped transmission that way.

  When it did, he’d return. And then he, Ezra Pilpak, would thrive. Because he knew that a specialist in Infectious Disease, one who had fought the plague and survived, would no longer be a disappointment. He’d be a hero! The kind of child of whom his parents could finally be proud!

  Mack shook his head, disgusted. It made sense to kill the hosts to combat a vector-borne illness, but DRYP was no longer a vector-borne illness. It was a person to person killer. Expending a lot of effort killing rodents seemed like a criminal waste of time. And yet, here he was with Bob Sparks, setting rat traps around Reno.

  Or at least teaching National Guardsmen how to set rat traps. About fifty soldiers stood in the parking lot of the Washoe County Public Health Department, looking anxious as they listened to Sparks explain the murderous devices.

  “This ain’t gonna make a bucket of water’s difference in hell,” muttered Mack. If anyone heard him, no one acknowledged it. The military men stood in white bunny suits with “NATIONAL GUARD” emblazoned across their backs. Each man wore a mask and gloves, but even with so much covered, the men’s nervousness was unmistakable.

  “Don’t handle the rats without protective gear. Assume they’re infected and infectious,” Sparks said, as he pulled out a plastic bag. “Drop each rat into a bag…”

  Mack tuned him out and looked across the parking lot to the eastern horizon. It would be a beautiful day, cold and crisp now, but hot later. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it slowly. Short of breaking into a convenience store, it was the last cigarette he was likely to have for a while. His supply was exhausted. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

  His head throbbed, the headache of his current situation intermingled with residual pain from his destroyed face. Singh had given him a large supply of Norcos, which he felt guilty taking because he knew the hospitals were running out. But he took them anyway, dimly aware that, somehow, he had become the captain of this ship, and even if the ship was going down, he still needed to be on deck.

  The radio on his chest emitted a burst of static. “George?”

  “Yeah, Nesbitt.” They had taken to using military radios because the phones were too unreliable.

  “I’ve run the spread pattern again with the latest data. Do you want to come up and look?”

  Mack looked at the soldiers and Sparks and felt his own crushing exhaustion. “Do I need to?”

  Nesbitt hesitated. “No, I guess not. I can just tell you that the spread is still nearly equal across all sectors, except the warehouse district.”

  “That’s not surprising. No one lives out there.”

  “Yes, but what doesn’t make sense to me is that the spread is following the same trajectory everywhere. People are staying in their houses. We’ve got military patrols out there enforcing that. We’ve got people wearing masks when they do go outside. We’re doing everything in the public health book to stop person to person transmission.” Mack could hear the frustration in his colleague’s voice. “It should be plateauing by now.” Nesbitt paused. “Which makes me wonder if we’re missing a transmission vector.”

  Mack frowned, wincing as his face flared with pain. “Like what? Rats? We’re working on that. But I can tell you, Jeremy, it’s not the rats. Rats don’t transmit pneumonic plague.”

  “What about the water?”

  “Water?” Mack shook his head. “Yersinia pestis is not transmitted by water. It’s never been documented.”

  “Something else, then?”

  Mack watched as Sparks showed the men how to load rat poison into the trap. “It’s person to person, Jeremy. We need to focus on person to person.”

  Mack knew that the younger man wasn’t convinced. In truth, Mack wasn’t either, but he couldn’t figure out another reason for why the plague was winning. It wasn’t as if the disease was new. Plague had been known for centuries, its killing pattern remarkably consistent. Except now. Now it killed better, faster, and more efficiently.

  “I know it looks complicated,” Mack heard Sparks say to the soldiers. Sparks held up a set trap. “But it’s not, once you get the hang of it.”

  Just then, a cat slunk across the crowd to rub against one of the soldier’s legs. The soldier looked down in surprise, and another looked at him and laughed anxiously. “With all due respect, sir,”’ the laughing soldier said, turning to Sparks. “What you need is a whole lot more of these.” He jerked a thumb at the cat as it wove its way through the group of men.

  “A whole lot simpler, too,” chimed in one of the other soldiers.

  Mack stared at the cat, a prickling wave of recognition sweeping over him. The animal made its way through the crowd, rubbing its body lazily against leg after leg.

  “Jeremy, Jeremy,” Mack said into his radio, his voice suddenly urgent. “It’s the cats!”

  The morphine must have destroyed my memory, Harr thought. The doctors had given it to him for the burns, and for a while, he’d drifted between painless stupor and sleep. But now that the opiates had worn off, his hand hurt like a bitch, and he was wide awake, wondering how he had wound up in such a colorless little room.

  He sat up in the bed abruptly. Just as abruptly, he fell back as a lightning bolt of pain blazed through his right arm.

  “Aghhhh.” It came as out a long, drawn-out breath. Tears welled up in his eyes. Through the momentary blurring, he saw that his arms and legs were restrained with soft, blue foam restraints that were tied to the sides of a hospital bed. From his bandaged right hand emanated the most searing, agonizing pain he had even known.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to move the arm, so that the pain would subside. When it did, he opened his eyes again.

  He was in a hospital room. That much was obvious. He could see the intensive care unit through the double-paned glass windows.

  What wasn’t obvious was why he was here in the first place, much less tied down to the bed like a mad man. He did a mental scan. His right arm was bound up in an enormous white gauze bandage. But other than that, there was nothing to indicate why he was in the hospital. Even the IV in his left arm was disconnected, only the hub of the catheter taped to his skin, the rest of the tubing hanging loosely from an empty IV bag near his left shoulder.

  The door opened. Two figures in full body protective gear entered.

  “Ah, he’s awake now,” the one in front said. The second figure, smaller than the first, emerged from behind.

  “John?”

  Harr was astonished. “Lola? What the hell is going on?”

  She stood near the wall, only a few feet from the door. He saw the skin near the corners of her eyes move, as though she was trying to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “Now, John, easy does it,” said the bigger figure. “Lola doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Doctor Fisk. I’m the medical director of the Harney County Community Hospital. We’ve got to put you in quarantine.”

  “Why? I never interacted with the people in the convoy.”

  “No, but you interacted with your dog. The drug sensitivities came back. Your dog had the same plague as down in Los Angeles.”

  A horrible realization took root in Harr’s gut. He stared at the doctor wordlessly.

  “You didn’t tell me, John. How could you not tell me?” Lola sounded anguished.

  “I’m sorry about those,” the doctor went on, gesturing to the restraints. “But we didn’t want you to leave until we explained the situation to you.” The medical director cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, you were a little combative when you first came in. With the morphine…” He shrugged.

  “Untie me now.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

  “Why in god’s name not?”
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  “You’re in the hospital’s only isolation room. Negative pressure. Nothing gets out. Every time we open the door, it just sucks in outside air. The bugs, your bugs, stay in.”

  Harr looked at the room’s sterile contents, realization dawning on him. “I’m not staying here. You can’t keep me tied up here like an animal.”

  “We’d rather not tie you up,” the doctor said. “We want you to stay voluntarily.”

  Harr shook his head. “I’m not sick.”

  “Not yet,” said the doctor. “Quarantine’s a week. Your dog died three days ago.”

  Had it only been three days? “Where’s Bess?”

  The doctor’s eyes clouded over. “Across the hallway. I don’t need to tell you, John. She’s not doing well.”

  Memory flooded back: the fire, the black smoke, Bess’s limp body, the blood that seemed to spill everywhere. “Where’s Ammon?”

  “Organizing townsfolk,” said Lola. “Ammon came to warn us, John. He saved our lives.”

  Harr stared at her, astonished. “How’s that?”

  “He told us they were heavily armed, and that they had outgunned you. He said that he had to make a split-second decision. He already knew Joey was dead, and he thought you and Bess were probably dead, too. He made the decision to come back here.” He could see the hint of a plea in her eyes. “He’s a hero, John. He came back here and warned us, and we didn’t put up a fight. The convoy just rode on through. No one got hurt.”

  Harr turned away. He didn’t want to look at her. He kept thinking of Joey Markamson’s blood-splattered body lying in the middle of the road, the roar of Harr’s truck as Ammon sped away, leaving him and Bess alone to face the relentless shooting and the terrible fire.

  And now Bess wasn’t doing well, and god knew what that meant, but it couldn’t mean anything good, because doctors only used words like that when things were really going bad.

  “I’m not staying here,” Harr said finally.

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid you are.”

  Thirty

  Alan never got hold of Brooke. He’d called and called, and when the circuits weren’t busy and he was finally connected, all he got was a voice message—on both her cell phone and the land line.

  Dread filled him. He’d seen the news reports. He’d seen the chaos on the street. But it had never occurred to him that she might be unsafe on the way to their Beverly Hills home. The police and National Guard were out. Martial law was in place. Surely, things were under control enough that she could travel the highway home unmolested.

  He looked at his watch. Nine am. Earlier, he had told himself that she must have been asleep, too exhausted to answer the phone, but it was daytime now. He’d tried calling his neighbors to get them to check on her, but no one on either side of their gated home had answered the phone. He’d finally called the police, but the dispatcher had snorted when he’d gotten through.

  “Do you think we have enough officers for a well-being check?” she’d asked incredulously.

  He sat alone in Jason’s hospital room, gowned and masked, watching his son’s heart slow to an impossible rate. The doctors had left his body on the ventilator, which whooshed breath in and let it flow out, the flow causing Jason’s chest to rise and fall. But despite the ventilator, despite all the medications that were supposed to keep his heart beating, the doctors said Jason’s numbers were still far too low, and Alan wasn’t sure what numbers they were talking about anymore—only that it meant that his only child was really and truly dying.

  He sat there, a powerless witness, as the single most important person in his world ceased to be, watching the last moments of life as they ebbed from his son’s body, the long flat lines of the boy’s EKG interrupted only infrequently by the squiggle of a heartbeat.

  The invasion of privacy sickened Alan. He didn’t want to record this very private passage, the dying of his son. So he stood up, walked to the heart rate monitor, and shut it off. Then, he pulled his chair closer to Jason, sat down, and grasped his only child’s blackened hand.

  He didn’t know how long he sat there, his gloved hand holding Jason’s, the last connection between a father and son. He tried to remember earlier, happier times, but everything seemed so black, so hopelessly dark. He kept his eyes on Jason’s face and prayed that he hadn’t suffered much, but the hollowed cheeks and cracked lips told him otherwise.

  He held his son’s hand and thought, Son, I won’t leave you. He felt frozen, as though time had finally ceased to pass, and all that was left was this moment, this horrendous parting, that blotted out everything else.

  Later, there was a fight about the body. Because even though it was a dead body, it was still Jason’s body, and Alan didn’t want his only child to be buried in some mass grave outside of city limits. Grif Richardson had said that the death toll was so high that the National Guard was burying people in huge trenches, but Alan hadn’t believed him. But now, when he talked with the doctors, they said, yes, it was true. It was the only way to deal with the thousands of dying. The crematoriums and funeral homes were overwhelmed and the accumulating dead bodies an infection risk.

  “Keep him in the morgue,” Alan pleaded. “Just twelve hours in the morgue. I need time to make arrangements.”

  The doctors shrugged. Not unkindly. But Alan knew what they were thinking: how could they begin to care about the body of one boy when the whole city seemed to be dying?

  They gave him the assurances he wanted, and he called Richardson and put him on the task.

  Richardson was blunt. “You and Brooke need to get out. The airspace is closed. No one is flying in or out, except military. I’m working my contacts, but Alan, if you can get out another way, I’d advise it.”

  “I’ve got to find Brooke,” Alan said. “She went home yesterday. I can’t reach her by cell phone or land line.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence, then Richardson said, “Jesus, Alan.”

  “Grif, the phones are out.”

  “But I thought you said you got the answering machine.”

  “Maybe she can’t get hold of me.” It sounded false, like the delusions of a desperate man, but Alan didn’t want to hear the anxiousness in Richardson’s voice. The anxiety in his own heart was enough. “I need you to make arrangements for Jason’s body. I’ll find Brooke, and then we’ll make plans to get out of here.”

  He hung up, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and hurried out of the hospital. What he saw at the double front doors stopped him in his tracks. Outside, held back by a small battalion of masked security guards, was an endless sea of sick people, covering the circular driveway and flowing over the sidewalks onto the small patches of grass in front of the adjacent medical office buildings.

  Where had they all come from? There hadn’t been any people there yesterday. Or was it the day before? Time had telescoped for Alan, the sleeplessness of the past few days confusing him.

  A security guard turned, only his eyes visible above his mask. Over his protective bunny suit, he wore a shoulder holster. “Don’t go out there,” he said.

  Alan gazed out across the crowd. Distantly, like some slow-motion scene in a horror movie, he recalled Richardson’s words: “Mass graves, Alan. They’re dying by the thousands. My contacts in the governor’s office say it’s only going to get worse.”

  There were thousands dying right here. And this is just one hospital!

  “I need a taxi,” he told the guard.

  The guard looked at him like he was crazy. “You think we got taxi service?” He shook his head. “I’ve got news for you, pal. There aren’t any taxis in Los Angeles these days. It’s martial law out there.”

  “I have to get home,” Alan insisted, trying to keep the rising desperation out of his voice.

  The guard was unmoved. “Then you’ll need a car and a pass for the roads. Otherwise, you’re walking.”

  Alan’s eyes swept the driveway and the endless moaning crowd. Even if he had a car
, he couldn’t get out. The dead and dying blocked the parking structure exit, the driveway, the street beyond.

  The guard’s eyes followed Alan’s. “We can’t let them overwhelm the hospital,” he said, almost to himself.

  Alan gazed at the scores of people still strong enough to push against the security guards, and the sea of those who could only lie there dying. He turned back to the guard.

  “I think they already have,” Alan said.

  “Susan!” Hodis looked as if he had seen a ghost. “You’re alive!”

  She smiled at him from the doorway. “You sound surprised.”

  He sat at his desk in his office, surrounded by papers and empty coffee cups. Susan gently picked up several sheets of paper from a chair and moved them aside. She had the overwhelming desire to hug the old researcher, but she refrained. She felt well, but she could never endanger Hodis, and she still couldn’t quite believe she was alive.

  “I couldn’t stay home any longer,” she said. “I feel well, Tom. And I know they need doctors if what I hear on the radio is accurate.”

  “The doctors are dying too, Susan,” he said.

  She knew it was true, but she also knew that if she was going to die, she would have done it already, or at least, started on the way. Instead, she felt healthy, and she might as well work while she waited for the end.

  “It’s exhibiting passage,” Hodis said.

  “Passage?”

  “Yes, it’s getting more virulent. I’ve taken samples from Jenna and compared them with samples from later victims. DRYP is getting stronger. It reproduces faster and kills quicker.” He tapped the eraser end of a pencil on a piece of paper thoughtfully. She realized it was an electron micrograph of the plague bacillus.

  She felt the tightness begin again in her chest. “Do you know why?”

  “Passage is a well-known property in the lab. Bacteria and viruses mutate in successive generations. Sometimes this makes them weaker, but sometimes, like now, it makes them a whole lot more dangerous.” He stopped tapping for a moment and looked at her. “Which makes me wonder why you’re still with us. Are you certain your needle stick patient had plague?”