And then Alan saw the gun again. The tattooed man lifted it and pointed it at him.
Not like this! Alan grabbed at the gearshift and pulled frantically. The van’s tires squealed, a crazy, rubber-burning sound. The Econoline lurched forward.
But it was too late. The gun went off, the deafening blast shattering the passenger side window. Alan’s chest exploded in a fireball of pain.
Sanders found Susan on the hospital’s roof, eighteen stories up.
Susan heard the fire escape door open and close, but she didn’t turn. She sat instead on one of the folding chairs the residents had put up on the roof in happier times, her arms pressed in against her sides. She leaned forward slightly, her eyes fixed on the horizon.
The air was so smoky that her throat burned, but it turned the sky into a glowing, fiery-red inferno, which somehow seemed entirely appropriate.
“I thought I might find you here,” Sanders said.
He’d shed his bunny suit and now stood in just his hospital scrubs, his pale white skin pinkened by the odd light. He pulled a chair up next to her.
“They’ve taken Brian’s body downstairs,” he said quietly, puffing into his respirator.
She nodded. “I tried to call his mother, but the phones don’t work.”
He didn’t answer, just sat beside her, his eyes focused parallel with hers on ghostly outlines of the downtown skyscrapers.
“This can’t go on forever,” she said finally.
“It won’t.”
She looked at him. “Do you think this will really end?”
“Yes, they’ll all die.”
Something snapped in her. She wheeled on him. “I don’t believe that. The government will help us. They’ll send in more supplies—”
“The government has abandoned us,” Sanders said, his voice maddeningly certain. “They’re not sending any more military because the soldiers they’ve sent are getting sick. The ER is filled with them downstairs.”
“There’s a quarantine, Sanders. The military can’t ship out sick soldiers.”
“Maybe so, but explain to me why the government is refusing to send in more troops.”
She stared at him. “There’s plague in other cities. Maybe they don’t have enough troops to send more.”
Sanders shook his head. “No, it’s because they’ve given up on Los Angeles. All you have to do is look around you.” He gestured over the roof’s edge to the vast, smoky wasteland below. “No one needs more help than LA. We’re dying here by the hundreds of thousands. They don’t tell you that on the radio, do they?”
She refused to answer. It was true that case numbers were never mentioned in radio reports, but she assumed that omission was due to the dynamic nature of the epidemic. The government simply didn’t know how many had died.
Sanders scooted his chair so that he faced her. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I’ve talked with the Guardsmen, Susan. They’ve been told to reinforce the perimeters, to keep the disease in, which means they have to abandon the city’s core. That’s why martial law is breaking down. That’s why we keep losing power. Why we don’t have any water.”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t believe our government would purposely allow a city of eighteen million to die without trying to help.”
Sanders laughed. “Oh, Susan, you are so incredibly, unbelievably naïve. This disease is incurable. It killed one third of Europe in the Middle Ages. Without antibiotics, we’re no different now than they were then.”
She couldn’t stand the grim confidence in Sanders’s voice. But the images that filled her mind were just as disturbing: Brian’s face in death, his blue lips motionless, unparted by breath; the little trampled girl, her hair tangled, her arms stained with the unmistakable black splotches of death; Jenna Niven and Andy the med student, some of the first to die, lucky, perhaps, because they didn’t have to see this awful hell that never seemed to get better, that only seemed to get unimaginably worse.
She turned back to Sanders. “If you really believe that, if you really believe we’ll all die, then why do you stay?” she asked, her voice charged with emotion she could no longer control.
A little flare of something—humanity? heartbreak? Susan wasn’t sure—flashed in his eyes before going out. The ghost-like bleakness returned. He shrugged.
“Maybe I’m more of a doctor than I thought.”
George Mack stood in the parking lot, a frozen man. The satellite phone hung loosely in his hand.
He had tried futilely to call Kincade back, to persuade him that Reno deserved vaccine, but Kincade hadn’t answered.
Which only confirmed what Mack had feared.
The US Government had given up on Reno.
I should go in, he thought, and tell Nesbitt. Maybe Nesbitt could pull some strings in Atlanta, but Mack doubted it. He now understood why he had been sent a junior CDC officer. Nesbitt was expendable.
A junior CDC officer and an overweight, over-the-hill county public health director. Nobody that the government would want to save.
Neither did they want to save Reno, with its 500,000 stricken people. The city wasn’t big enough to register on the political radar back east.
Mack stood quietly, listening to the wheezing breath as it left his chest.
He had smoked since he was fourteen years old, a pack a day on light days, but often two packs on others. Far too many cigarettes for any respectable public health officer. But then again, was he a respectable public health officer?
He tried to breathe evenly, to exhale without shaking.
He looked out across the city and thought about his life, his childhood in the small hunting town just east of Reno, the combat tours in the Middle East, the years traveling from one diseased hot spot to another with the World Health Organization—and then, his ultimate banishment to Reno for reasons that didn’t matter anymore, where he had slowly rotted away for the last seventeen years, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his life slipping dully—but not, he realized—horribly by. Reno had been kind to him.
He thought of Sparks and Pincher and Carol, the people of his office, the people who had been the closest thing to a family that a lonely man like George Mack could have.
He thought of Ajay Singh and Tyrone Hayden and the mayor and all the people who were working with him to try to stop the plague. He owed them something for believing in him, for trusting him.
There may not be vaccine, he thought, but I’ll be damned if I give up.
I’ve been compromised, Alan thought.
The realization flashed in his brain, a sudden detached insight that the infrastructure of his body had been badly disrupted, that the structural damage was severe.
He clutched the steering wheel, leaning forward painfully. The Econoline zig-zagged down the street in a crazy, veering course.
He understood he might die, because, Jesus, he was bleeding like crazy. He could feel the warm trickle running down his chest, soaking the inside of his bunny suit.
He didn’t know where he was. He thought he was nearing Wilshire Boulevard, but he was no longer certain. Strange, ghost-like figures gathered on the sidewalks, their faces wrapped with rags, standing around bonfires. Every so often, a pair of ghost people would throw a large, floppy log into the flames.
Alan saw them through the windshield, felt grayness and then blackness threatening his vision. The ghost people looked up as he swerved by. They stopped momentarily from their work, holding their massive logs in mid-throw—strange, crumpled objects that didn’t really look like logs at all, but which also didn’t look like anything Alan recognized, either.
The van decelerated, gasped, and then surged forward again. Darkness drew down over Alan’s sight like a curtain.
Those aren’t logs, he thought.
The van made a strangled sound, slowed, then died entirely.
No more gas. The thought was faint and far away. The Econoline glided to a stop.
He felt certain he had left this earth, that h
e had gone somewhere else entirely, and he was terribly sad, because he had tried to be a good man.
But maybe he hadn’t really been a good man, because this wasn’t heaven, of that he was quite sure.
No, it had to be hell. He had seen the burning bodies to prove it.
The power had been out for more than an hour when Tom Hodis gave up working and called his wife. He hadn’t called her earlier because the phones were unreliable, and because he’d been busy, but now with the lab in a state of suspended animation, he suddenly found himself with nothing to do. And so he dialed. And dialed. And when he was just about to give up, he finally got through.
“Have you had any luck?” she asked.
“Not much,” he said. “The power keeps going out.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” he said, because he never lied to her.
She paused then, which should have told him something. “Are there any survivors?”
“Once they have the disease, no. None that I’ve encountered. But there are some who are immune, I think.”
“Do you know how?”
He looked at the dead computer screen in front of him. “No. I’ve run a few tests, but the power keeps going out. It’s out more than it’s on.”
“We’ve been out for twenty-four hours now. Everyone’s hoarding water and food.” He heard her clear her throat, a disquieting little sound. She sounded out of breath. “I’ve been listening to the old portable radio, and they’re telling everyone to stay indoors, that we’ll be out of power for at least three days. Do you think it will be that long?”
“I think it could be longer.”
She was silent for a moment. “How many people do you think will be immune?”
It was his turn to pause. He had run calculations before the last power outage. They were crude and infinitely preliminary, but the results had been staggering. He weighed not telling her, but there was no point in hiding the truth.
“One in a million,” he said.
“One in a million?” he heard the strained incredulity in her voice, and he felt an inexplicable dread begin to rise in his throat.
“It’s just a guess, Sarah.”
Her ragged breath came over the cell phone. “It doesn’t sound very good, does it?”
“They’re working on a vaccine in Washington.”
“But it won’t be ready soon enough for us.”
“Probably not.”
She began to cough then, helplessly, and he thought he could hear her crying.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she said.
He felt a deep and overwhelming grief begin to rise in him. “I’m coming home.”
“Please don’t. You’re not sick.”
He ignored her. “I may not be able to call. Even the cell phones are going down. But I’m coming, Sarah. I’m coming.”
He hung up on her before she could protest.
He stood, took one last look around the laboratory that had been a second home for him for more than twenty-five years, giving himself one minute to remember a lifetime, and then he quickly scribbled a note and left it on top of the pile of papers on his desk.
He opened the door to the lab, walked through, and let it close softly, finally behind him.
Thirty-Five
Susan looked at the cell phone and whispered, “Shit.”
Only ten percent of the battery life left. She punched the redial button again and held it to her ear, praying that it would ring this time instead of the mechanical cannot-complete-your-call recording she had heard for the last half an hour.
Please, please, please, she thought. She felt like weeping when she heard the recording again.
She stared out across the city. Sanders had left her, and now she stood on the roof of the old hospital alone, which was just as well, because she didn’t want anyone to see her like this, half out of her mind with worry.
She hit redial again, closed her eyes, and waited for the recording again. She’d heard it thirty times.
Only this time, there was an odd, blank moment of silence, a soft click, and the unmistakable sounding of ringing.
Miraculously, she heard her mother’s voice. “Susan! At last! Are you all right?”
Relief left Susan momentarily light-headed. “Yes, yes, I’m fine. It’s horrible down here, but I’m fine.”
“We saw the reports. They’re just awful. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. What about Steven?”
“He’s still in Sacramento. Amanda’s sick.”
Susan’s stomach dropped. “Oh, god. I told you to get him out.” She stared sightlessly into space. There was no way that her brother and his wife could get out now. They’d never let a sick woman outside the quarantined area. “What about the children?”
“Amanda doesn’t want the family separated.”
Susan couldn’t believe it. “Mom, this isn’t a joke. People are dying here by the hundreds of thousands.” She used Sanders’s figures as though they were true, because she knew in her heart that they probably were. “And Sacramento will be no different. Their only hope is to get the kids out.”
“Steven’s taken Amanda to the hospital.”
Susan pressed a hand against her forehead. “That’s the worst place to go! The hospitals are running out of supplies, and we don’t have a cure. All we have is sick people and more sick people.”
“But there’s no place else to go. He can’t let her die at home.”
So she knows, thought Susan. Her mother was no fool, but like many of her generation—a generation that was born right after the advent of antibiotics—she viewed medicine as capable of heroically saving people from infectious diseases that had wiped out thousands only a generation earlier. The hospital was the only logical place for a sick person to go.
“Besides,” her mother continued. “They couldn’t get out if they wanted to. The quarantine is being strictly enforced.”
Susan was silent. She hardly knew what was going on in Sacramento. With the power outages and the endless sickness, she felt cut off from the world.
“Can you get out?” her mother asked. “It sounds much worse down there.”
Susan looked into the smoky air around the hospital. Even at this height, the visibility was incredibly poor. She felt enveloped in a noxious, throat-burning cloud.
“I’ll try, Mom. It’s bad here. But I’ll try.” She heard a little beep. She held the cell phone out in front of her. The battery light was flashing. She only had moments longer.
“Mom, Mom, listen,” Susan rushed. “My phone is about to die, and we don’t have power down here. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to talk to you again. Don’t leave the farm. I’ll come to you as fast as I can. But whatever you do, don’t leave the farm. Stay away from people. Just stay where you are.”
Her mother sounded confused. “But Susan—”
“Just do as I say. Stay where you are. Please promise me you’ll stay where you are,” Susan begged.
But her mother didn’t answer. The cell phone was dead.
Just west of San Diego, about a mile out from shore, Ezra Pilpak encountered a flotilla of boats. He had seen relatively few sea craft on the journey down from Los Angeles and had begun to believe that the Bayliner cabin cruiser would make unimpeded progress to the border.
But this wasn’t unimpeded. This was an obstacle course!
Hundreds of boats bobbed out on the blue Pacific. Ezra turned the wheel and tried to take the Bayliner farther out to sea, to skirt around the flotilla, but the little boats seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see.
Their courses made no sense. Some just floated out there, as though their occupants had found a good fishing spot and had dropped lines, but there weren’t any poles. In fact, Ezra couldn’t see any people. The boats seemed to drift aimlessly.
He reached into the glovebox above the passenger seat and pulled out a pair of binoculars. The view through the lenses wobbled with the rise a
nd fall of the ocean, but what he saw made his heart stop. Two men lay dead in the back of the nearest boat, their bodies rotting in the harsh Pacific sun.
“Holy shit!” Ezra hissed.
He trained the binoculars on another boat, a small yacht not unlike the one he was piloting. They were harder to spot, but he found a man and a woman sprawled on the deck, their bodies blackened with disease.
They’re all plague ships! Ezra wove the Bayliner between the boats, recoiling despite himself each time he saw another dead person. Half-digested sardines rose in the back of his throat.
He must be going mad. The disease was in Los Angeles, not San Diego—but these were San Diego boats. He could see the harbor of origin painted on the hulls. Which meant that DRYP had spread farther than he’d realized.
He felt the crazy urge to urinate, to shit, as though every sphincter in his body was threatening to blow. Twin tears streaked down the sides of his face as he pulled the Bayliner’s throttle.
A small boat floated into his path. There was a woman inside, half-kneeling and clutching a small child with one arm, the other arm waving frantically at Ezra. An outboard motor lay on its side behind her.
Ezra stared at her. What had she been thinking, taking a boat that small so far from shore? She’d never get in again by herself if the motor was dead. They had to be at least a mile from shore, and the ocean was choppy. There was no way she could swim for it, not with a little kid.
She shouted at him, but he couldn’t hear her over the Bayliner’s roar. Ezra peered through the windshield at her, felt the wind whipping through his hair.
She looked desperate. She had a child. He felt something tug in his gut.
They were very close, now. Ezra put his hand on the accelerator, looked at the little boat.
He felt God watching him, felt his hand begin to tremble.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 27