“Come on,” said Susan. “Take the pills.”
The old woman brought them to her lips, placed the two pills on her tremulous tongue, and then took a sip of the water.
Susan regarded her with anxious regret. To treat Etta properly, she would need a urinary catheter, an IV, X-rays, and blood tests, but she had none of those things. She only had oral medications and a stethoscope. She prayed she had gotten the dosage right.
Susan turned the key in the ignition, listened to the Oldsmobile fire up, and watched with relief as the gas gauge showed near full.
“Come on,” said Susan. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” gasped the old woman.
“To a friend.” Susan pulled the enormous car out of the parking lot and into the smoggy Pasadena air.
The federales caught Ezra easily, the short one tackling him not twenty feet into the vineyard. Ezra went down with a thud, his body shuddering from the collision with the ground.
I must really have pissed them off, he thought distantly, as the taller one’s boot connected with his side. A lightning bolt exploded in Ezra’s chest, every muscle in his torso instantaneously spasming.
The federale kicked him again. Ezra tried to curl into the fetal position and wrap his arms protectively around his belly, but the federales jerked his arms behind him, forcing his face into the dirt.
The taller one muttered something in Spanish. The smaller one grunted as he handcuffed Ezra’s wrists behind his back.
I’m so fucked! thought Ezra.
The federales weren’t talking any more. They panted—the heat of the day, the struggle with Ezra, and the respirators all choked off their breath.
The taller federale pulled Ezra to his feet, yanking so hard that Ezra’s shoulders felt like they would pop from their sockets. In the distance, Ezra could see the nun waiting for them at the adobe building, her habit dusty where she had fallen into the dirt. She gestured toward the open front door.
“No, please,” begged Ezra. “Please.”
They ignored him. “¿A dónde?” said the tall one.
The nun’s voice was dry, cracked with age. “Con los otros.”
The federales pushed him down a long hallway to a door with an ornate cross painted on the wooden panel. Ezra could hear the muffled sound of coughing. Someone moaned.
Cold, electrifying panic shot through him. He had no mask!
He began to struggle wildly, trying to pull his shackled body away from the federale. Distantly, he registered the pain exploding in his shoulders, but he didn’t care, because adrenaline tore through his body, the jet fuel of panic roaring in his ears. He toppled to the ground.
Ezra could see the nun’s heavy black shoes beneath her habit as he tried to scuttle like an overweight crab across the floor. He heard the federales’ shoes scuff against the stone as they dove after him.
And then he felt the pain as they kicked him again and again, breaking his ribs this time, connecting violently with the soft flesh of his abdomen.
Oh god! He thought in agony. Not this!
His body shrank into a black ball of pain, his eyes squeezing shut as the federales shoved him through the darkened doorway and sent him sprawling to the floor.
La estación de cuarentena, thought Ezra. End of the road for Ezra Pilpak.
He thought of the life he had led, of the life he would no longer lead, trapped like an animal with other stinking animals—sick, ridden with plague, the nastiness of human existence finally visited upon him, inescapable. Too late.
He heard the same rattling coughs that he had heard at County.
They were dying here. The cemetery outside flashed through his reeling mind.
He would die here, too. Ezra began to sob.
He just hoped they would mark his grave.
Forty-Five
The water tasted good against Alan’s leathery tongue. As long as he didn’t think about where it had come from, it was perfect.
He sat sideways on the commode and dunked the cup into the toilet’s tank before dragging out more water.
That was the great thing about having eight bathrooms in your house. There had to be at least one toilet that hadn’t been flushed since the water had gone out.
He drank slowly, letting the liquid absorb into his gut, afraid that he might throw up.
He hadn’t been able to find anything else to drink in the house. The kitchen had been plundered, not even a bottle of ketchup left. His wine cellar had been emptied. Alan couldn’t even find a bottle of seltzer in the bar.
So, he drank toilet water. He dunked the cup again and brought it to his lips. He didn’t give a damn.
He was trying to work up the courage to look in the mirror. The throbbing pain of yesterday had waned, only flaring when he bent to one side or the other. But looking down at his body, he realized he looked like something out of a horror movie. His entire right side was dark red and tacky.
He must have lost half his blood.
He shook his head. Not possible, he thought. He would be dead. And he definitely wasn’t dead. He was sitting on one of Brooke’s expensive porcelain toilets, drinking water that was best not thought about too much. He finished off a third cup and peered into the tank. How many more cups in there?
He set the mug down on the vanity and rose to his feet. He thought the water had helped, because he was steadier now, the overwhelming dizziness of earlier lessened enough that he didn’t feel like he would throw up or pitch over if he straightened to standing. He pulled open the door to Brooke’s enormous closet and flicked the light switch. When the dull light of the room didn’t change, he remembered. No water, no power.
Well, he wasn’t applying make-up. He didn’t need to see that well.
He peered at the closet’s full-length mirror and exhaled shakily. He was ghastly, the suntan on his face unable to hide the whiteness underneath. Dark circles shadowed his eyes. Rusty streaks of dried blood extended to his toes.
He looked away. He didn’t need a mirror. To see the blood in full-length was gratuitous and stomach-turning. He moved slowly to the circular couch and sat down.
It was difficult to get the bunny suit off, the movement triggering pain along his chest wall. But he finally left the covering and his shirt in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes as the full impact of his body odor assaulted him.
He grabbed some Kleenex and pressed it against the injured flesh. A chill ran down his body despite the warmth of the day. He threw the blood-soaked wad on the couch and seized another wad of tissue. When he was certain the bleeding had stopped, he rose painfully to his feet.
The wound looked horrible. Alan lifted his arm to examine the jagged chunk of destroyed skin along the right side of his chest.
The bullet didn’t penetrate my chest cavity, he thought. Otherwise, he would have died by now. But the gunshot had penetrated something, because he had bled like crazy. An enormous, dark purple bruise extended along his chest wall.
I can still die, he thought bleakly. Not from blood loss, though. From infection. He needed to clean the wound. He needed to go to a hospital.
And then, Alan felt a moment’s despair. Clean the wound with what water? Go to which hospital? All the hospitals in Los Angeles were overrun with plague victims. And how in god’s name would he ever get to a hospital anyway? Call an ambulance? Drive his gasless cars? Walk the mean streets of LA?
He stood there silently, looking upward, away from his reflection. And then, he turned and walked back to the bathroom.
He rifled through the vanity’s contents until he found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He unscrewed the cap, lifted his arm, and poured half the container on his wound.
Despite himself, he gasped in agony, blackness descending on his vision.
Have to keep the water for drinking, he thought with gritted teeth. Only hydrogen peroxide for the wound.
When he could breathe again, he dabbed the wound’s edges with Kleenex, trying to clear the dried blood
so that he could see the damage beneath. The edges were uneven, a flap of skin hanging over open flesh.
Gingerly, he used his right arm to lift the flap so that he could access the wound underneath. With his left hand, he poured the remaining hydrogen peroxide onto the damaged flesh. An acid-like agony penetrated all the way to his bones.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw his reflection in the mirror, the pale, hollow face, the skin lax with misery. Tears ran down his cheeks. He stared at these in awe.
I’m crying, he thought.
And then, he sank down onto the toilet, his will momentarily extinguished, and began to weep.
John Harr woke with a hangover.
In the darkness of the previous night, once the power had gone out, it had made sense to drink the remaining cold beer in the fridge. But by the light of day, when the full impact of what was happening occurred to him, Harr was only annoyed that he’d made himself feel sick when there was work to be done and the damn water was out.
Harr cursed himself for not buying a generator. He’d always intended on buying a generator because the power was iffy in the high desert, but he hadn’t followed through, because he had been uncertain how big a generator he needed. Running the water pumps would have required a model that cost thousands of dollars.
Which was more money than he’d had available, so he’d bought the new flat screen, instead.
He groaned as he sank onto the couch.
Goddamn, he could use a cup of coffee. But the coffeemaker didn’t work without electricity, nor did the television. And boy, would he have liked to watch TV today. The nonstop emergency news broadcasts of the previous evening had scared him shitless.
The newscasters had said the situation was extremely dangerous.
What exactly did that mean? He felt an unfamiliar sense of anxiety, of impending disaster, which he had no way to control. Never in his life had he felt so helpless, so out of the loop.
He dropped his head into hands. He knew he should check the cattle, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He kept thinking about the plague and all the dying people and what the newscaster had said on TV before the power had gone out.
“The government is refusing to comment, but reports from highly placed sources are saying that the so-called DRYP illness is incurable, and that the death rate is over ninety-nine percent...”
He couldn’t believe it. He rose, head aching, and gazed out the sliding glass window to the alfalfa field beyond. He’d have a helluva time irrigating with no power. He’d lose the crop.
A death rate over ninety-nine percent...
He stared sightlessly out the window, thinking of the people in Burns, whom he had known for years, the sphere of a relatively isolated life. They were dying now in earnest.
He felt a strange tightening in his chest and then straightened abruptly. He made a fist, examining his forearm’s well-muscled contours, looking for something to explain the disturbing question that kept repeating itself in his mind.
Why was he still alive?
George Mack rubbed a weary hand over his eyes. The news was bad. It just kept getting worse.
“How much diesel do we have left?” he asked the emergency management coordinator.
They sat together in the War Room, the heat of the day beginning to seep in through the room’s open windows. Mack could hear the low rumble of the diesel generator, powering the laptops, the communications equipment, and the one light that burned over the conference room table.
“Less than a day’s worth. The pipeline from California is shut down.” The coordinator shook his head grimly. “We can get some truck supply, but the situation there isn’t much better. There’s just not enough trucks and drivers to supply everybody who needs diesel right now.”
“We can’t run emergency management services without power. What about Sierra Pacific Power?”
“They’re still trying to reroute the power from the geothermal electric plants. They say at least another twenty-four hours. They’re having problems with system stability.”
“We don’t have another twenty-four hours.” In his mind, Mack knew that twenty-four hours more meant another day without water, relying on a dwindling diesel supply to power the most basic of emergency services. “We could run out of diesel before we have any other sources of power. What about the feds?”
“The feds are having their own problems. This isn’t a regional problem, George. It’s a national one.”
“But what about the national emergency stockpile? That’s supposed to have a sixty-day supply of petroleum.”
“Yes, but that’s crude oil. You can’t run the generators on crude. The California refineries are knocked out.”
“Why can’t they refine it some place besides California? What about Utah? Don’t they have refineries there?”
“Yes, but they’re like everyone else, working on skeleton crews, not enough to run things safely. There’ve been explosions—”
Mack rubbed his temples, his fingers pushing against the bruised skin that was now turning yellow. The movement hurt, but he used the hurt to focus. He was so exhausted and hungry, he could barely think. “And yet, we still have people stuck in their houses.”
“They’re scared to come out.”
“Good,” said Mack shortly. “It’s the only thing keeping people alive.”
“How long will they stay there, though? How long can they stand it without food and water and power?”
Mack looked at the emergency worker, whose face was haggard as Mack’s own. Mack had his own question, one that he knew he shouldn’t ask, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“How long can we stand this?” he said, thinking of the endless hours of work, the attempts to catalog the dying, the staggering effort to keep people in their houses, to communicate to them what to do with their dead, to dispose of the ever-increasing number of corpses stacked in the street, to get the power running, to get water, to somehow find and distribute food, to try to keep people alive as long as possible, uninfected, so that they might hold out for Kincade’s vaccine. It was impossible. A monumental, hopeless task.
The emergency management coordinator had no answer.
Later, after the emergency management coordinator left, Mack sat with Nesbitt in the dull light of his office. Exhaustion washed over the public health officer, a bone weary dullness clouding his mind.
“Tell me the numbers again,” he said, trying to marshal his intellectual resources to assimilate the facts his younger colleague was trying to tell him.
“One hundred thousand dead.”
Mack’s mouth dropped open. “In Reno?”
“Yes. It’s an estimate, but I’d stand by it. The National Guardsmen are marking the houses.”
“That’s twenty-five percent of the population.” said Mack.
“The National Guardsmen are getting sick,” Nesbitt continued, his face carefully expressionless. “The respirators and personal protective equipment aren’t protecting them.”
“It’s like the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic,” said Mack softly. “Their protective equipment didn’t work then, either.”
“Yes, but only five hundred thousand died, then. In the entire country. We’ve got a hundred thousand dead in Reno alone.”
There was a long silence as Mack struggled to grasp the enormity of the catastrophe. He wondered how, in the last mind-numbing days, he’d failed to see the numbers as they truly were. He’d known the epidemic’s growth had been exponential, but somehow, in the struggle to get power and water and to ensure isolation and quarantine, he’d let absolute numbers escape him. He’d been taken up in the details, he realized, without ever seeing the overarching picture.
“We’re having body disposal problems,” Nesbitt continued. “We need to allocate more of the Guardsmen to collecting bodies—”
Mack interrupted him. “Do you have any family, Nesbitt?”
The CDC officer looked momentarily surprised. “Just my mother. Why?”
“Baltimore.”
Mack nodded silently, his eyes on the desk between them. “You better call her.”
“George, look at that.” Nesbitt motioned to a stack of paper by his laptop. “Those are reports from the field that I haven’t entered yet. My mother can wait.”
“Call her now.”
Nesbitt opened his mouth to protest. He closed it when Mack met his eyes. Quiet realization registered in his face. “George, you don’t think the power’s coming back on.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Mack silenced him with a look. He pushed the satellite phone across the desk toward the younger man. “Just call your mother, Jeremy.”
The CDC officer took the phone and left the room.
Forty-Six
Susan glanced uneasily at Etta. The old woman slumped against the passenger door, her breath coming too rapidly, her face shut down in mute exhaustion.
Come on, diuretics, thought Susan. Kick in!
She contemplated giving Etta more of the water pills, but she had already given her a whopping dose, more than she had ever given someone. She prayed it would work.
She also prayed it wouldn’t destroy Etta’s kidneys. The water pills could knock out frail kidneys, and without knowing any of Etta’s medical history, Susan thought it was entirely possible the high dose of diuretics might send the old woman into organ failure. Etta could die from that, too.
They drove past the Langham Huntington Hotel, the sprawling Pasadena luxury property that Susan had admired from the street, but never visited because it was stratospherically out of her price range.
Susan stared in shock. The hotel’s browning lawn was covered with sick people. They spilled outwards from a series of tents with red crosses on the roofs. Susan scanned the crowd, dismayed to see no movement except the isolated lifting and falling of the tent flaps in the breeze.
An overpowering stench seeped in through the car’s ventilation system. Susan stomped on the gas pedal, accelerating past the hotel and up the gently sloping hill to the surrounding neighborhood. Etta groaned.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 33