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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  She shook her head violently, trying to still her panicked thoughts.

  She focused instead on the darkening road ahead and wondered why the men were stealing when they had so little time left. Maybe they weren’t stealing for themselves. Maybe they were like hunters of prehistoric times, leaving the safety of the hearth to scavenge for their families at home, families with no food and no water, families that were starving, but not yet sick. Venturing out, even as they were dying themselves…

  She didn’t know.

  The dark was near complete now. No street lights. No moonlight through the heavy air. Reluctantly, she switched on the headlights, the narrow beams slicing the smoke like underpowered search lights.

  The air smelled like a mix of a thousand toxic chemicals. She sped by the small, darkened stores lining the Huntington Expressway, the transition from industrial to commercial and then to residential unfurling before her. She tried to remember the name of the neighborhood, but all the little towns of Los Angeles absorbed into each other, and she had trouble remembering when one town ended and another began.

  Her lungs began to burn. She glanced at the dull-red warning light on the dashboard. Only a few more miles, please, just a few more miles.

  The Toyota’s engine’s hiccupped and spluttered. Susan pushed the gas pedal to the floor and looked around anxiously. The car gasped.

  She flipped the slowing car into neutral, trying to capture the remaining momentum to glide off the expressway onto a side street. The Toyota hit a curb and halted. Where was she?

  For a moment, she just sat there, staring into the darkness. The silence felt overwhelming, the darkened houses on either side of the street barely illuminated by her headlights.

  She bent over, reached beneath the passenger seat, and pulled out a flashlight. The Maglite’s beam cut through the night.

  Hurry! she thought.

  She moved to the trunk. She looked inside for her black doctor’s bag, grabbed it and slung it over her shoulder. She ran the flashlight’s beam quickly over the rest of the contents. Anything else to take?

  The textbooks and journals? Useless, now. The tarp? No. The USC polar fleece pullover? Too hot for a pullover, she thought, but the night is young. She wrapped it around her waist.

  She looked down the street, trying to orient herself. She thought she was in South Pasadena, but she wasn’t sure.

  I have to go north, she thought. She ran the beam over the front of a wide-porched bungalow. The windows sullenly reflected back at her.

  She saw a red cross half a block from the car. She turned the beam to the next house.

  Another cross. She broke into an uneasy jog and flashed the beam at all the doors. The red crosses were everywhere.

  She cut down a side street, looking for Fair Oaks Boulevard, the main thoroughfare through town. But all she could see were more dark streets, more abandoned houses, and the enormous magnolia trees arching upward with sickly, twisted arms.

  Her head throbbed from the motion. She realized she hadn’t had anything to drink in more than sixteen hours. She also hadn’t peed in sixteen hours.

  But where to get water? She flashed the Mag, first at one house, and then the next. Did it matter which? None of them could be good inside.

  Five miles, she thought. Or was it six? Could she walk that distance when she was so dehydrated?

  Wheezing, she stopped on the sidewalk, her brain struggling to make a logical decision.

  No food, no water, no sleep.

  She flashed the beam at the house closest to her. There was no cross, but no light either. She prayed there was something left inside to drink.

  Forty-One

  The lights flickered on for a minute, and everyone in the room froze.

  “Hey,” said Nesbitt, looking up. “They’ve done it.”

  Mack squinted, blinded, in the bright fluorescent light. His eyes had adjusted to the dull glow of the kerosene lamps they had been forced to use for the last 48 hours.

  “I never thought light would look so good,” Harold Pincher said.

  They stood around the War Room’s window, peering out at the streetlights in front of the building and at the illuminated windows in the surrounding county structures, bright spots in an otherwise moonless night.

  “I wonder how much of the city is up,” Nesbitt said.

  “Not much,” Mack said. He could see the sharp demarcation between light and dark one block away, where the streetlights abruptly faded into a long, impenetrable blackness.

  “Enough for the hospitals? And water?”

  “We can hope.” He turned away from the window and moved back to the center of the room. “Can you get on the horn with the power guys and find out?”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when the lights flickered out again, the momentary respite from darkness extinguished, the room again cast into the dull half-light of the kerosene lamps.

  Mack looked into Nesbitt’s shadowed face.

  It was too much to hope that anything would work, that somehow, they might beat this impossible thing.

  The men stood in heavy silence, waiting. When the electricity didn’t return, Mack heard himself say with bleak resignation, “Restart the generators. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Later, Bob Sparks came up to Mack. “Can I talk with you a moment, George?”

  Mack looked into the dark eyes of his old colleague. “What is it?”

  “My wife’s sick.” Mack suddenly saw the tension in the other man’s face, the suppressed worry furrowed between his eyebrows. “I wasn’t sure this morning. She said she had a headache.” Sparks ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But it’s worse now. I gave her a radio. And she called—”

  Mack thought that the other man was about to cry. He had never seen Sparks cry. He watched Spark’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as the man tried to speak.

  “Don’t,” Mack said, cutting him off. “Go home. Take care of her.”

  “I never thought it would get me—I mean us. I always thought it would get other people—”

  Mack cleared his throat. Sparks was no fool—he’d been in public health for twenty-five years, and he had probably seen enough in this War Room to know what the future held for him and his wife.

  “At least Dawn is in Las Vegas,” Sparks said, his voice beginning to crack. Mack knew that Sparks’s daughter attended the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, that they had told her to stay there when the epidemic broke out. “At least she’s not here.”

  “Go home, Bob.”

  The public health officer’s mouth opened and closed, half-movements that produced no words. He stood helplessly before Mack—an old friend, a loyal friend, whose life was now beginning to spin apart.

  Mack said gently, “Elizabeth needs you, Bob. Go home.”

  “Thank god Dawn is still in Las Vegas,” Sparks repeated, as though he were a drowning man.

  “Yes, thank god,” Mack said, but he didn’t look at Sparks when he said this.

  Ezra Pilpak finished the black beans, and after wiping his finger around the inside of the can and licking the semi-sweet residue, threw the empty container overboard. It slapped quietly on the water below.

  No moon tonight. He stood at the railing, the boat’s lamps behind him the only light in the thick night.

  He chewed his finger nervously and glanced at the anchor line, which descended from the bow into the darkly reflecting waters.

  The ocean was mercifully peaceful. Ezra feared choppy waters, because he knew the beans would come up, which would be a waste of the little remaining food on the boat. He’d already eaten the stale crackers, the sardines, the dried apricots, and all three of the aged chocolate bars.

  Anxiety surged through him. Why hadn’t his parents restocked the boat?

  Ezra peered into the darkness, trying to make out the coast.

  He was pretty sure he was somewhere off of Baja California, but he didn’t know how to use the Bayliner’s location equipment to
confirm. Instead, he relied on binoculars, which were useless when the night was as dark as a tomb.

  He needed diesel. The boat’s tank was almost empty, and he didn’t want to overshoot the refueling station in Ensenada, so he had dropped anchor once the sun had set, deciding to wait out the night.

  Only now, he was so lonely that he felt he was half going out of his mind, and he couldn’t stop eating, even though the food tasted horrible. Those chocolate bars must have been twenty years old, but he’d eat anything, because he was starving!

  Ezra farted miserably. Now that he was off the Mexican coast, he began to question the wisdom of fleeing south. He didn’t speak Spanish, not really, just the pidgin sentences that they all spoke at County. Tiene fiebre? Tiene tos?

  How was he supposed to speak with anyone?

  Ezra shook his head wretchedly. No, Australia would’ve been better. Australia had no plague. It was the only continent in the world that didn’t have plague.

  But he couldn’t go to Australia, because all borders were closed. They’d announced it on the shortwave that morning. The whole world was fucking shutting down!

  He began to make a low humming noise: half sob, half lullaby. He should have stayed in Los Angeles, or at least somewhere in America. No one would have known he’d killed the guard. Half of Los Angeles was dying. Who would care about a dead guard?

  He decided to go back. He’d fill up the fuel tank in Ensenada and head back to sea. So what if half of San Diego was dying? He’d go north to some little marina between San Diego and Los Angeles, shack up in a hotel with his masks and gloves until the whole thing blew over. Ten thousand would cover that, wouldn’t it?

  He realized he was rapidly rocking back and forth. He tried to stop himself, to tell himself that he was Ezra Pilpak, Infectious Disease Specialist, that he would survive, but the reports on the shortwave terrified the shit out of him. Thousands, probably millions dead, the worst pandemic in history, reaching all corners of the earth.

  And here he was, running away to Mexico! God, what was he thinking?

  He clutched himself and tried to stifle an urge to howl. Running had seemed the right thing to do at the time, but not to Mexico!

  He looked back out to sea, into the inky night, and tried to calm himself.

  I just need the diesel, he told himself. Just one tank of diesel. Enough to get back across the border. He’d walk the rest of the way if he had to.

  He looked over to where he thought the shore was. Hard to imagine that there was death over there, so close to where he was, and yet somehow so far away. It seemed he should be safe in the cocoon of his boat, separated from death by a mile of sea air, too far for DRYP to travel, no rodents to carry the disease, no people to spew their deathly spittle at him.

  If only he could stay on the boat forever.

  But he had no food and not much water. He couldn’t stay on the boat. He’d die. Resentment shuddered through him.

  Goddamn his parents! Why hadn’t they restocked the boat?

  Susan didn’t expect the front door to be unlocked, but when she turned the handle, the heavy oak door swung open easily. She instantly recoiled.

  Oh, god! she thought. There could be only one thing that smelled so horribly bad.

  She fought the impulse to try another house. She doubted it would be different. The neighborhood was dead. She could see it in the dark silence of the houses, in the absence of any signs of life.

  She tried to breathe through her mouth, but the effort made no difference. The stench still penetrated the N95.

  One drink, she told herself. Just enough to lessen the headache, enough to keep her kidneys from shutting down.

  The flashlight’s beam grazed a couch, two upholstered chairs, an area rug on an oak floor, and an old-fashioned rocking horse. She swung the beam to the adjacent room. Next to an open bible, someone had left a lighter on the dinner table, as though they’d been reading by flame. Susan recognized the passage.

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil—”

  Psalm 23, Susan thought. They’d known the end was near.

  She pocketed the Bic, then flashed the beam through the doorway to the kitchen. Dirty pots and dishes littered the counter. Wadded up sheets filled the sink. The odor of sour milk floated in the air.

  It was as though a whole life had been lived here without the person ever cleaning up, just piles of dirty plates and cups stacked like sedimentary layers, laid down in sped-up geologic time.

  She ran the beam over the cupboards and fought the desire to weep. Nothing! How could there be nothing?

  She tried the refrigerator, pulling the door open and scanning its darkened contents. Nothing there, either.

  She wondered how it had come to this. A house devoid of food, nothing stockpiled, nothing replenished. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them, forcing herself to focus in the gloom.

  She needed to get to the backyard. All the South Pasadena bungalows had detached garages, which many had converted to mother-in-law cottages. There was a fighting chance she might find food or drink someone had not yet scavenged.

  She walked down the central hallway of the house. The walls were covered with family pictures she chose not to look at, instead following the beam of her flashlight along the carpeted floor. There were two doors at the end, both closed. Two paneled doors like a terrible Price is Right game: which one to the backyard?

  She chose the one on the right and immediately regretted it. Her body rebelled in utter revulsion.

  Later, when she tried to reconstruct what exactly she saw, she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t sure if her failed memory was due to dehydration or simply a vision too terrible to process, which she blanked out instead.

  She could think of no better explanation for the fuzzy recollection of that moment. She knew she had seen something when the beam of her flashlight swept the room, stopping on the bed and the lumped figures on it. She remembered a stench so overpowering that her senses simply shut down, overwhelmed. But only one image remained in her brain, flickering and indistinct: the flash of rotten bodies, big and small, and a cat feeding, startled for a moment, its eyes turned to hers, reflecting the beam of the flashlight like twin illuminated beacons above the baby’s face, almost unrecognizable, not recognizable.

  She wasn’t sure if she had seen it at all.

  Forty-Two

  Jim Carson stood at the main ICU desk, watching an orderly wheel yet another intubated patient into one of the isolation rooms.

  What’s the point? Carson wondered. All the ventilation and oxygen in the world wouldn’t save that poor sod. The guy was a goner, as sure as all the others had been goners, all dead soldiers in the war on mankind called DRYP.

  Carson snapped his gum, enjoying the zesty, peppermint flavor. The nurse had given the little white square to him right after he’d fucked her. He wasn’t sure what that meant, because if he’d really had bad breath, why not give it to him before?

  He wondered where she was now. He looked around the ICU for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Just sick patients everywhere, and nurses who looked scared out of their wits.

  He snapped his gum again. Well, they had reason to be terrified. San Francisco was really, truly into the epidemic. He wondered fleetingly how many had died. Someone earlier in the day had said ten thousand, but he thought it had to be more than that. It was hard to know for sure, because the power had been out for twenty-four hours, and communications were now by radio, each medical center operating on some predefined disaster plan.

  And what a disaster it was. He wondered if the National Guard was dumping the dead bodies into the bay, then decided, probably not. Burial at sea required a coordinated disposal plan, plus the fuel to run the ships, and with the disaster sweeping through the country, Carson was pretty sure there was neither coordination nor fuel.

  A nurse in a bunny suit rushed by, throwing him a dirty look because of his bare face. He didn’t mind
. Her bunny suit and mask wouldn’t save her. He was certain immunity was a genetic thing.

  Something warm and deeply thrilling tingled in his blood, marred only by the headache that seemed to have taken permanent root behind his eyes. The pain waxed and waned, but grew more intense each day, as though his blood rushed at maximum velocity through his brain.

  He shook his head and watched the nurses. Hard to tell what they looked like under the bunny suits: which ones were which, which ones were young.

  In a way, DRYP was separating the genetic wheat from the chaff, right before his eyes. The genetically weaker would die off. The genetically stronger would survive. For the first time, he wondered if DRYP would topple humankind. Would this be one of those events that altered the course of the earth, like the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs?

  He didn’t think so. He could envision a massive population decline, but he didn’t think the species would die out. They’d just have to work a little harder to keep the species going, to propagate, so to speak. Basically, it would require a lot of carefully organized fucking.

  At the ICU desk, surrounded by death, Jim Carson laughed.

  There was a young woman on Etta Simon’s lawn.

  The sun had not fully risen, and the day was still cool, so Etta allowed herself to rise from the sofa and peer out the front window. She spotted the girl curled up under the magnolia tree, her dark hair spread out around her, a black doctor’s bag cast off to the side.

  Etta was pretty sure the young woman wasn’t dead. Her chest looked like it was moving beneath her green scrub top, and her bare arms were unmarred by plague markings.

  But that didn’t mean Etta planned to go out and confirm it. Even the short venture to the window had left her winded. She put her hand to the pane and gasped.

  She wondered what had happened to Mercedes. The home care nurse had stopped coming two days earlier. As a result, Etta hadn’t eaten and had run out of her diuretics. Now, water collected in her lungs, choking her.