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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  Please God, don’t let Etta die.

  Susan peered out the windshield, trying to remember where Hodis’s home was. Each house looked similar and yet unfamiliar, unified by one terrifyingly ubiquitous characteristic: a red cross on the door.

  The rapidity of the die-off stunned Susan. She’d known that pneumonic plague had the capability for exponential growth, but what she was seeing suggested people were dying within a day of getting infected. How else to explain the stillness of the Langham crowd and the silence of the streets?

  A quote sprang, unbidden, from the back of her mind.

  How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

  Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  Oh my god, thought Susan. The Black Death.

  She spotted Hodis’s stately Georgian house where the street curved. Susan pulled the car into the driveway and cut the engine. “I’m going to get help.”

  Etta didn’t even look up.

  Susan climbed out and backtracked on the wide, circular driveway to the enormous front door. Her heart slammed in her chest when she saw the huge, spray-painted cross.

  Not Hodis, she thought. Please not Hodis, too.

  She pounded the door’s brass knocker, but no one answered.

  She shot a glance back at the car, the shadow of Etta’s slumped form barely visible in the front seat. She pounded the knocker again. “Tom, open up! It’s me, Susan!”

  There was no sound at all. She raised her hand to knock once more, but then she heard a faint whisper of movement. The door swung open slowly.

  Hodis swayed in the entryway. Susan watched in horror as he sank to the floor.

  She half-carried, half-dragged him to the living room. When she at last got him onto the sofa, he said gently, “I wish you hadn’t come, Susan.”

  She knelt beside him, holding his hand, her throat so tight she couldn’t speak.

  “Sarah died yesterday.” He said it matter-of-factly, but Susan knew him well enough to know the pain behind his words. “I buried her in the backyard under the bougainvillea.” He tried to catch his breath. “It’s where I want to be buried, Susan.”

  His words choked her. She nodded wordlessly and tried not to cry. She didn’t want to fall apart before him.

  He squeezed her fingers. “I know you’re afraid, Susan, but you must be strong. There will be other survivors besides you. The computer model predicts—” A coughing paroxysm swallowed his words.

  When the coughing finally subsided, he gathered his strength to speak again. “The CCR5-delta 32 mutation,” he said. “It confers immunity to HIV.”

  Susan wondered if he was delirious. She was familiar with the delta 32 mutation. It was a mutation of the gene that coded for a receptor on the surface of the disease-fighting cells of the immune system. The receptor was the entry portal for HIV. For people with the delta 32 mutation, the receptor was missing, which meant HIV couldn’t enter their cells.

  She didn’t know what this had to do with DRYP.

  “It’s hypothesized that the delta 32 mutation might have protected Europeans from the Black Death.” His voice was not much more than a whisper. “The survivors had the mutation, and it protected them.”

  “Are you saying I have the mutation?”

  He closed his eyes again. “Or something like it. It’s the only explanation for your immunity.”

  She was afraid to ask the next question. “How many people?”

  “Have the same mutation?” His voice was very faint. “I don’t know. Maybe one in a million? Two?”

  She was speechless. In a city the size of Los Angeles, that would mean only eighteen or so survivors. “That’s assuming a hundred-percent attack rate, Tom. What if—”

  But Hodis had drifted off.

  “Tom, wake up.” Susan shook his hand gently, trying to rouse him, but the researcher remained still, his breath slowing, the movement of his chest barely visible beneath his shirt.

  She reached a hand to his wrist. His pulse was racing. She had seen that often enough, enough that she didn’t need an EKG to diagnose the failure of his heart, but it didn’t stop her own heart from cracking. She clutched his hand to her face, her tears running onto his darkened skin.

  She didn’t want him to die. She didn’t want him to leave her.

  But it was too late. It had already happened. His face had become foreign, the body left behind no longer recognizable.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there. For minutes, for hours? Had the day cycled, the sun crossing the sky and rising again to position itself above, only to cast the same dull shadows?

  Maybe I will die like him, Susan thought. I’m halfway there.

  She looked up from the couch, through the living room to the backyard garden. Brilliant flowers, not yet wilted, beautiful in the smoggy, glowing light.

  Sarah’s bougainvillea.

  One last promise to honor. I will bury you, Tom.

  But she didn’t move.

  You said I wouldn’t be alone, Tom. But you left me. Everyone’s left me.

  She heard her own ragged breath in her chest, felt it catch in her throat.

  Time echoed in the house, scraping in slow cadence across the polished wood floor.

  “Young lady.”

  Susan nearly jumped in fright.

  Etta stood in the living room, somehow more upright, her breath not so labored, her eyes remarkably clear. “I have to pee,” she said.

  Forty-Seven

  Alan Wheeler threw the soap into the swimming pool.

  It floats, he thought without humor, and then he fished it out and rubbed the washcloth. He cleaned his naked body the best he could, scrubbing away the dried blood, carefully washing his armpits, trying to avoid the enormous wound on his side.

  He wasn’t sure how hygienic the pool water was. No one had serviced it since before the plague had hit, and now, it was filled with leaves and a fine dust that swirled on the water’s surface.

  But it was still water, soothing against his overheated skin. He dunked the washcloth, ran it carefully down his arms, and then splashed water on his face. He didn’t touch his hair. He was too frightened to submerge his body—frightened that he might infect his wound, frightened that in his weakened state, he might never emerge from the water again.

  So he stayed in the shallow end, finished his minimal ablutions, and climbed out slowly.

  By the time he reached the towel he had thrown on Brooke’s glass-topped table, his skin was nearly dry. He rubbed his body anyway, trying to remove the leaves and dust that still clung to him. When he was done, he wrapped the towel around his hips and reached for the satellite phone.

  The phone was necessary equipment, Grif Richardson had said, for the security of Wheeler Corporation’s chairman. Access anywhere in the world. No cell drop-out. No coverage issues. Taken from the chromium steel safe in Alan’s bedroom, the sat phone had not been touched by looters.

  Alan turned the device on and dialed. He was counting on Richardson. The CEO was his only connection with the world beyond the quarantined borders of the Los Angeles Basin.

  “Alan?” Richardson cried. “Thank god, you’re alive!”

  “Yes, for the moment.” Alan sank onto one of the patio chairs, fatigue suddenly overwhelming him. “I’ve been shot. Brooke and Jason are dead.”

  “Oh shit, Alan. I’m so sorry.” The horror in Richardson’s voice was unmistakable.

  Despite himself, Alan’s eyes stung. He squeezed his eyelids shut and tried to control his voice. “Can you get me a helicopter?” It was better to keep his eyes closed. If he couldn’t see, he could focus on Richardson’s voice. The rest of the stuff—the house, his dead wife inside, his son’s dead body somewhere across town—all those things could be momentarily blotted out.

  There was a half a beat of silence, and then Richardson’s voice, thinking fast, “To pick you up in LA? The FAA won’t let a helicopter int
o the airspace, but maybe I could get a helicopter to land somewhere near the quarantine borders, somewhere in the surrounding mountains.”

  “Which mountains?” Alan opened his eyes to scan the smoke-obscured outlines of the nearby Hollywood Hills.

  “Let me talk with our security guys. It’s going to take some arranging. Are you all right to hang tight an hour or two?”

  Alan looked up to Jason’s bedroom window. “Yes.”

  There was another second of silence, and then Richardson said, “It’s spreading all over now. Half our work force is out. We’ve lost California operations entirely. Our Houston operations are maxed. And the government is breathing down our necks—” Richardson broke off. When he spoke again, his tone was apologetic. “I don’t need to tell you about this now. I’ll brief you when we get you out of there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Alan?” Richardson said, sounding uncharacteristically hesitant. “This thing, this DRYP—is it as bad as they’re reporting in LA?”

  Alan looked up into the silent Southern California sky. The sun seemed far away, obscured by the thick, noxious smog, but it was hot, and Alan felt a gritty layer of dust already beginning to settle on his shoulders. Cradling the phone, he tried to think of something reassuring to say to his friend, but he couldn’t find it in himself.

  “It’s worse,” he said.

  The sexy nurse was dying.

  Jim Carson looked down at her with distaste. She lay in ICU Room 2, her eyes sunken, her skin waxy. Only her fake breasts were still pert. They stood straight up on her chest while the rest of her body shrank away.

  She looked at Carson with pleading eyes. “Your plasma,” she gasped.

  He glanced at the battery-powered monitor, at the oxygen saturation of her blood. It wasn’t good.

  “It takes a while,” he lied.

  Small tears dripped from the corners of her eyes down the sides of her face.

  He looked down at the IV tubing pumping fluids into her failing body.

  This proves it, he thought. It’s not transferable immunity. No antibody passing on protection. It had to be genetic. Immunity was in his genes.

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Somehow, he walked through this nightmare of dying people like a real life Omega Man. He turned away from the bed.

  The nurse called out plaintively, “Dr. Carson—”

  He ignored her. She was a failed experiment, her utility extinguished.

  The question was: how many people were immune? He’d bet his medical training that there were other survivors. But how would he find them?

  His gaze drifted through the ICU. The lights were on auxiliary power, and the few windows cast gray shadows across the floor.

  The hospital normally had forty-eight hours’ worth of diesel, and they had been without electricity for close to thirty-six hours. So that left, what? Twelve more hours until they were out of power?

  He glanced at his watch. San Francisco was not exactly where he wanted to be when the lights went out.

  But where could he go? Both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge were blocked by the military. He’d seen the humvees and the camouflaged National Guardsmen on TV before the television stations had gone off the air. Fleeing southward to San Jose was not really an option, either. The military had established a cordon sanitaire around the entire southern end of the bay.

  He rubbed his temples, trying to soften his headache. When it peaked, like it was peaking now, the strange, rushing ebullience inside lessened. Instead, he felt only the desire to lie down, to curl into a ball and rest.

  Which he absolutely couldn’t afford to do. His eyes fell on the automated medication dispenser by the stockroom.

  He looked around. The front desk was deserted, no bunny-suited health care providers anywhere. He walked to the machine, entered his user ID, and put his thumb on the fingerprint scanner. The machine, powered by the hospital’s back-up generator, greeted him with a glowing display.

  He pressed “Remove Items” and waited, wondering what was left in the machine. The nurses had been rationing drugs, so there couldn’t be much. He scanned the list. The antibiotics were gone. No surprise there. But … there was fentanyl left.

  He selected it. The machine prompted him to declare how many vials he wanted. He pushed “Select One” and listened to the mechanical whirring as one of the machine’s doors popped open, revealing fourteen glass vials of fentanyl, still in their wrappers.

  He quickly pocketed all the vials. The machine cued him to report how many vials he had taken and how many remained in the drawer, which made him shake his head. The machine’s internal computer recorded who accessed the drugs and how much they took out. There’d be hell to pay if the pharmacy department thought he took fourteen vials of fentanyl. They’d report him to the medical board. He could lose his license.

  He looked around the emptied ICU once more and punched in his options—one taken, thirteen remaining. He stood there momentarily indecisive.

  Who knew what was out there? The fog of his headache made it increasingly difficult to think clearly. He wondered if the headache was somehow related to DRYP. He decided it probably was, but there was no knowing why or how. Not with the way research had ground to a halt.

  He glanced briefly at Room 2, at the half-silhouette of the nurse inside. She gazed glassily at the ceiling, alone during her final moments on earth, no witness to record her passing.

  He had to get out of San Francisco.

  He looked down at the pharmacy screen. It had logged him out automatically because he had been standing there so long. He quickly punched in his code again and pressed his thumb to the fingerprint scanner.

  He needed to think clearly. Which meant he had to control the headache.

  He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one had come along, then quickly selected morphine, and when he emptied the drug machine of all its morphine, he punched in dilaudid, and after this he punched in Demerol, until his pockets were full of narcotics and the pharmacy machine was empty.

  Forty-Eight

  “Are you all right?” Susan stood at the bathroom door, wondering if the old woman had fallen. Etta had been on the pot this time for more than five minutes.

  “I’m fine,” snapped Etta.

  Susan shook her head bemusedly. The diuretic had kicked in, and Etta wouldn’t stop peeing. She had been in the bathroom, on and off, for most of the last thirty minutes.

  Well, that’s fine, thought Susan. At least the old lady was alive.

  “Don’t flush,” Susan said through the door. “There’s no water pressure.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” came Etta’s reply. “Are you going to stand there the whole time?”

  “No.” Susan took a step away from the door. She felt a little silly doing bathroom guard duty, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of the frail old lady falling.

  But she could also sense that the old lady would take her head off if she hung outside the bathroom door any longer, so she wandered toward the kitchen, throwing an anxious glance over her shoulder at the bathroom behind her.

  The kitchen was a massive, modern room with gleaming marble counter tops and an enormous central island. Hodis had not been particularly wealthy, but his wife Sarah had come from an affluent Southern California family. Susan tried to remember where the money had come from: Scotch tape? Kleenex? Post-its?

  Susan couldn’t remember. What she could remember was that Hodis had lived like an old-time doctor, in a large, comfortable house with a beautiful garden and a wife who hadn’t done much more than keep it that way. Even before the plague, Hodis’s life had seemed like a throwback to an earlier age, when doctors’ salaries were generous, and life seemed so much simpler.

  She gently ran her fingers over the central island. How many times had she come into this kitchen to chat with Sarah? To enjoy a glass of wine? To talk about research?

  Although Sarah hadn’t worked herself, she had been intimately knowledgeable about
Hodis’s lab work, not to mention a hell of a hostess. It was no wonder that Hodis had loved her. She had given his life continuity and made his existence seamless, such that one felt as comfortable in his home as in his lab.

  Susan pulled herself away from the memory. She had to bury Hodis, and it was hot outside. She felt remnants of the headache, her brain cells still starved for water. She searched the cupboards, but all that remained were jars of roasted peppers and bottled spices.

  Nothing to drink. She scanned the well-ordered pantry shelves for soft drinks, for anything, and felt a flooding relief when she found three juice boxes stuck in an old igloo cooler. Overlooked booty, she thought. Leftovers from a picnic long ago.

  Susan took the boxes to the central island, sat down at one of the leather-covered bar stools, and punched a hole in the box with a straw. She emptied the box in ten seconds and set herself at the next one.

  “What are you drinking?” Etta asked.

  Susan looked up, surprised. Etta had brushed her hair, and although her face was still pale, she had made a remarkable transformation. The veins of her neck were no longer engorged, and some of the swelling in her legs had abated.

  “Juice. Want one?” Susan held up the third box.

  “No, thank you.” Etta looked at the stool next to Susan but remained standing, her body slightly hunched. Susan realized with a start that the old lady couldn’t climb up onto a stool. The spindly legs beneath the house coat were too thin, the muscles too wasted.

  Susan leapt off the stool and stood awkwardly in front of the old lady, the juice box still in her hand. “I have to bury my friend,” she said.

  “Then you should do it,” said Etta. “And then we should leave.”

  “Where?”

  Etta shrugged. “Out of Los Angeles. We can’t stay here.”

  “We can’t get out. The military is blocking all the roads.”