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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  Alan felt something cavernous and howling open in his chest, far worse than the wound, far worse than anything he’d ever known.

  The doorknob to Jason’s bedroom was bloody. Alan pushed the door open, but he couldn’t see clearly. All he could see was water, an ocean of tears welling in his eyes.

  “Ah, Brooke.” He dropped to his knees.

  Her eyes were closed, as though she’d known death was coming—which she must have, given the location of the bullet hole.

  She clutched a picture, her bloody fingers wrapped around the frame. Alan recognized it as Jason’s sixth-grade basketball portrait, his dead son’s face soft and vulnerable, a basketball tucked loosely under his arm.

  Alan wasn’t sure how long he stared at her lifeless body. Even in death, she clung to the blood-smeared memory of a beloved son. A new sensation rose in his chest, the dreadful blackness of his own unbearable grief.

  They were all dead.

  And now it was his time too. Alan lay down painfully beside his wife, the pounding of his heart beginning to slow. He stretched his hand out for hers and wrapped his warm fingers around her cold ones, feeling fleetingly for something he knew was no longer there.

  He closed his eyes.

  Susan crossed Zonal Avenue to the Stauffer Medical Research Building as the sun disappeared behind the hospital. She took one last look at the massive concrete structure, backlit by the orange sky, a surreal, Armageddon-like tension in the late afternoon air.

  She had the crazy urge to rip off the respirator mask, to suck in the smog-laden air, but she didn’t. She paused for only a minute, trying to burn the memory of the hospital into her mind, to remember a lifetime that she knew was gone. Brian. Sanders. Jenna. Andy. Faces flashed through her consciousness, a collective memory of lives lost to DRYP.

  The curved driveway leading to the hospital’s entrance was quieter now, less turbulent, the bodies stirring listlessly as life slipped away from them.

  Susan’s heart raced. She had to get to Hodis. Surely, he would know the true state of the epidemic. Hodis’s network extended everywhere; his lifetime of scientific work had forged international bonds.

  She pulled at the double glass doors of the Stauffer Building and realized with dismay that they were locked. She walked around the building to the courtyard entrance and pulled again, gasping with relief when the doors swung open. The lobby was deserted.

  And yet, she felt terrified as she entered the stairwell. She jumped when the door closed behind her, plunging her into darkness.

  Hodis was gone. She stood at the threshold of his office, looking at the mess inside. He hadn’t bothered to lock the door, which meant that he had expected her. Despite herself, she felt a painful sense of abandonment. How could he have left her behind?

  And then she saw the note, a clean white sheet of paper on top of the stacks of journal articles on his desk. She picked it up and squinted in the half-gloom at Hodis’s messy scrawl.

  Susan—My wife is sick. Lab down. No more work to be done. My advice to you: GET OUT.

  He hadn’t bothered to sign it.

  Thirty-Nine

  Jim Carson felt it build inside, a tight clenching in his lower abdomen, a roaring tension in his head, and finally, exquisite release as his cock emptied itself, his semen spewing forth into a willing receptacle, a velvet-gloved vise that he thought was perhaps the best thing he had ever felt in his life.

  God, it felt great not to use a condom.

  He let his body collapse on hers, felt the buoyant pressure of her breasts pressing back against his bare chest.

  They’re fake, he thought fleetingly, from the distant shores of post-orgasm. No real breasts felt that firm.

  She stirred beneath him. He forced himself to look at her. What was her name?

  She tried to wriggle out from beneath him, and he finally rolled over, falling onto his back on the bed next to her. He let out a deep, contented sigh.

  “How long does it take?” She rubbed the skin on the front of her arm where he had stuck the needle just ten minutes before. They were squished together on the single bed in the ICU call room—a little too close for Carson, but he was feeling magnanimous right now, because he had just fucked the hot little ICU nurse, whatever her name was. He reached an arm around her.

  She didn’t appear interested in post-coital cuddling. Her anxious eyes focused on the bruise that was beginning to blossom on her inner arm.

  “It’s immediate.” He stretched his other hand out to squeeze one of those gigantic breasts. The bruise on his own arm was well-established now, but he didn’t pay attention. “Of course, you may need another injection. For additional immunity.”

  He moved his hand down her abdomen to her pussy and slipped his finger inside, feeling the wetness of his ejaculation there. He hadn’t worn a condom, but what in a different time might have filled him with anxiety only pleased him now. So what if she got pregnant?

  He pushed his finger in deeper, feeling the slick, velvety folds and wondered if she’d be up for another round.

  “I don’t know how you can be so horny at a time like this,” she complained, her voice petulant.

  He didn’t, either, but the feeling was still there, that overwhelming sense of wellness, of power, a crazy ebullience that roared around his body and inside his head.

  He put his mouth against her neck and whispered, “What better time? We’re going to survive this.” He thought he should say her name. It would be a nice touch at a moment like this: share some plasma, share some other body fluids. But he couldn’t remember it.

  “You think we’ll survive this?” she said hopefully.

  I will, he thought. He pulled his head away from her neck and looked meaningfully into her eyes. “Of course,” he said, as though he couldn’t be more certain of anything in the world. “You’ve got my plasma.”

  He put his face back to her neck and licked.

  Susan broke into a jog once she hit the quad, crossing the darkening courtyard to the medical school parking structure where she had left her car.

  She wasn’t sure where she was going, because there seemed no point in going home. The place was trashed, the door broken, not a scrap of food left in the house. And she couldn’t go to her parents’ because the quarantine was still in effect.

  Or was it? She had no idea what was going on. Only that the night was coming, and she had no shelter, no place where she would feel safe.

  She picked up her pace as she entered the structure, the unnatural quietness of the place frightening her. Where had they all gone? The Department of Health had ordered people to shelter in place until the epidemic passed, but there had still been healthcare workers moving about, serving the various hospitals and clinics surrounding the medical school.

  But now, there was no one. Not one single person. For Susan, who had seen the chaos in the hospital, this was the most ominous development of all. Surely they weren’t all dead. Surely Sanders had exaggerated.

  She threw the stairwell door open and shot up the stairs on a wave of adrenaline. She found the floor she had left her car on but stopped abruptly as she emerged from the stairwell.

  Susan stared at the remaining cars in dismay. All of them had had their windows broken in. Glass littered the concrete floor, glinting dully in the half-light.

  She guessed that whoever had broken her window had wanted to reach the gas flap release inside. The gas cap dangled by its tether.

  Susan swept broken glass from her car seat, put her key in the ignition, and turned it, a silent prayer on her lips.

  The car coughed and spluttered, but it came to life.

  The empty gas tank light glowed red in the gloom. She forced herself to think. How much gas did she have left? Enough to make it to South Pasadena? Enough to get farther away?

  She looked around the deserted structure. The sky glowed like hot embers, turning everything a deep orange. She only had an hour or so until it was pitch black. Ten miles to South Pasadena, she th
ought. That’s all I’ve got to go.

  She put the car into reverse and heard the crunch of glass beneath her tires, the car engine ridiculously loud in the empty parking structure. She rounded down and down, passing floor after floor of abandoned cars whose owners were nowhere to be found. I have to get going, her mind repeated over and over.

  Night was coming.

  The air in the Situation Room was so tense, Harry Kincade felt it vibrate in his bones. He sat silently while the nation’s emergency management team tried to rein in a situation spiraling rapidly out of control.

  “State is trying to coordinate with the British for a counter-response to the situation—”

  The words fluttered in and out of his consciousness. It was too much. Too many problems that transcended mere disease.

  “Destabilizing force in the Middle East…Troop plague casualties more than twenty-five percent.”

  His eyes sought Ann’s. She was looking straight at him.

  “Armed forces Not Ready Status. Pandemic Countermeasures Program instituted to limit troop impact.”

  My god, she was beautiful still. Her thick dark hair and full lips, too pretty to be a doctor. Too pretty to have once been his wife.

  “Internet paralyzed. Cyber-attacks out of North Korea.”

  Category Six, her eyes said. He turned away.

  “Only three days of food available in major cities, not enough for effective shelter-in-place measures.”

  He looked at his fingers, which were clasped in his lap.

  “Doctor Kincade!”

  He realized with a start that they were addressing him. He looked up, forcing his face into the expressionless mask that they expected.

  “The status of the vaccine program?”

  He could hear his words coming as though from another body. “Our initial vaccine has not proven effective. We are in the process of testing several other vaccines, but we do not anticipate an effective vaccine in the immediate future.”

  That silenced the room. All eyes were trained on him.

  They were looking for hope, he could see that. They were all hardened bureaucrats, public servants used to dealing with catastrophe. But none of them had lived through a lethal pandemic, and the magnitude of the event, the sheer international penetration, had shocked them, their fear incompletely hidden behind a façade of composure.

  “How severe is the pandemic? What are the projections?”

  Ah, thought Kincade, the crux of the matter.

  “We do not have reliable data to determine a true attack rate—that is, the number of exposed people who actually come down with the disease. The situation is too fluid. But if I had to guess, I would estimate an attack rate of greater than eighty percent, if not higher.”

  The room was deathly still.

  “And that’s not counting the case fatality rate—the percentage of people with the disease who actually die.”

  “What is the case fatality rate?”

  His face burned, the eyes of the room boring into his own. “Greater than ninety-nine percent,” he said.

  It was as if a bomb had detonated in the room. All faces were stunned, the room’s occupants momentarily speechless.

  At last, the Secretary of Defense blurted, “That’s worse than the Black Death!”

  Harry nodded. He looked for Ann again.

  Category Six, her eyes said.

  Yes, thought Harry. Category Six.

  Forty

  Harr went to see Lola as soon as he was released from the hospital, Doctor Fisk’s orders to self-quarantine be damned. He wanted to thank her for delivering his bullet-riddled but still functional pickup to the hospital, and, more importantly, to tell her she was nuts for thinking Ammon was a hero.

  An ambulance arrived as Harr pulled out of the parking lot. In his rearview mirror, Harr saw two health care workers in full PPE rush out of the hospital’s emergency department.

  Harr wondered if the ambulance carried a plague patient. He hadn’t seen an especially large number of them at the hospital, but now, as he drove Burns’s empty streets, he realized the town was taking the outbreak seriously. Hand-printed signs hung in shuttered stores: Closed for Quarantine, God Bless! The nearby elementary school’s sign proclaimed an ominous, “School Closed Until Further Notice. May God Watch Over You.”

  Every single person seemed to have withdrawn into their homes and closed the curtains. A few of the doors even sported red crosses. Harr wondered if the scarlet marks signified plague.

  Harr’s jaw dropped when he reached Lola’s house. A brand new Ford F-150 pickup stood in the driveway.

  Ammon. Bile rose in Harr’s throat. He pulled his truck to the curb and climbed out, crossing the front lawn in three pissed-off strides.

  Ammon met him on the porch. Harr stared down the barrel of Ammon’s rifle, incredulous.

  “John, you’re not wanted around here,” Ammon said, a red bandana wrapped around his face like a western outlaw.

  “Jesus, Ammon. What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

  Ammon’s eyes were cold. “If I have to.”

  “You’re violating the quarantine, John,” Lola said. She peeked her head around Ammon’s shoulder, her eyes anxious, her mouth covered by a cheap cloth mask.

  Harr looked at her like she was crazy. “I’m not sick.”

  “But you been exposed,” said Ammon.

  Harr ignored him. He looked directly at Lola’s strained face. “I’m not sick, Lola. What the hell is going on around here?”

  “They called the quarantine this morning, said if we didn’t abide by it, we’d wind up just like the western side of the state.”

  Harr didn’t have any idea what was happening on the western side of the state. He kept thinking about the nurses rushing around with IV poles and paramedics pushing the gurneys into the hospital.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to step back, John,” Ammon said, making a jerking movement with the rifle’s muzzle.

  Harr ignored him. “Are there sick people here?” he asked Lola.

  Lola nodded. “Mrs. Benson is sick, and so is her sister. The Cardenas are sick, the whole family. I think some of them have died, John!”

  She’d rattled off the names of the neighbors in the houses that had red crosses on the doors.

  “What’s happening in the western part of the state?” asked Harr.

  “They got a pandemic over there,” she replied, her tongue moving around “pandemic” as though it were an exotic word. “They say people are dying by the thousands. You ought to go back home. It’s probably safest.” She flashed a look at Ammon again. “We—I mean, I—will probably head out of town as well, you know, to wait it out.”

  “You heard the lady,” Ammon said, jerking the rifle again. To Harr’s amazement, Ammon pointed it directly at him. “Get going.”

  “I’m not going to make you sick,” Harr snapped, but he could see that Ammon had made up his mind, and he would be damned if he was going to get shot trying to make Lola see reason. He shook his head in disgust. “Lola,” he said. “Don’t go with him. He won’t protect you. Look what happened with Bess Markamson.”

  “Fuck you,” Ammon said.

  Harr resisted the urge to punch him. He stared for a long minute at Lola’s uncertain face, his eyes boring into hers. He could see her tremble, see the indecision in her eyes, but she didn’t move, her body still tucked halfway behind Ammon’s.

  “C’mon, Lola,” Harr said softly, but she only shook her head.

  Harr turned and walked back across the lawn to his truck.

  She called after him as he climbed into the cab. “John?” He turned the key, felt the big truck rumble to life.

  “John, I’m sorry.” Her plaintive voice was barely audible over the truck’s diesel roar.

  Harr allowed himself a brief, angry glance. She’d stepped out from behind Ammon and stood next to him on the little porch, her upper arm caught in Ammon’s grip.

  Harr shook his head briefly bef
ore taking off down the deserted street.

  Freeway or surface streets?

  Susan brought the car to a halt. She flipped through the radio channels, trying to find someone still broadcasting. She finally settled on a news channel, the only station still on air.

  “The following message is brought to you by the State Emergency Management Office: The quarantine remains in force in Los Angeles County. All citizens are advised to shelter-in-place while critical services are reestablished…”

  Susan frowned at the tinny, mechanical voice. She wondered why, in such a catastrophe, they didn’t use a reassuring human voice—until she realized that the recording was a loop. It played the same message over and over again.

  “Citizens are advised to avoid the freeways as multiple traffic accidents have shut down traffic…”

  That settled it. She turned the car toward San Pablo Avenue. The sky glowed a deep, charcoal red behind her. Twilight was fading quickly.

  Susan tore down San Pablo at fifty miles an hour. She’d driven through the industrial district next to the medical campus a thousand times, but never before had she been so acutely aware of the warehouses and scrap metal yards, the train tracks and barbed wire fences. She felt hyperaware, every brain cell alert.

  She spotted two figures emerging from a warehouse, carrying boxes to a parked car. One of the men dropped his box and pointed at her.

  Her stomach sank. The man held a gun. She floored the gas pedal and cursed the Corolla’s underpowered motor. The car picked up speed slowly, the needle on the speedometer climbing to sixty and then seventy, the wind roaring through the broken window.

  The men on the curb stared at her as she blazed past, the gun following the Toyota, but not firing.

  In a flash of insight, Susan realized why. The men were too sick. She saw their hollowed-out eyes and gaunt bodies, the telltale appearance of plague.

  She slowed back down to fifty once she had passed them, because the Corolla had begun to fishtail, and if she crashed, if she lost the Corolla…