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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  “They can walk.”

  Susan peered at the couple. They were wearing the unmistakable orange respirator masks that had been in such short supply at the hospital. The man pointed at the swaddled baby.

  “Etta, have you lost your humanity?” Susan said. “It’s a baby. I’m stopping.”

  The old woman let out a grunt of disapproval. Susan ignored her and pulled the Oldsmobile alongside the hapless couple. She rolled down the window, recoiling from the hot, polluted air. “Do you need help?”

  Rivulets of sweat ran down the man’s temples, revealing ruddy skin beneath a thick layer of dust. Later, Susan could not have said what put her suddenly on edge. Was it his large size? Or the fact that he moved at her so aggressively before checking himself?

  “My radiator’s overheating. You got any water?” His eyes swept the back seat.

  Susan could feel Etta stiffen in the seat next to her. “We only have enough for us to drink. Not enough for a radiator. I’m sorry,” Susan said apologetically. “Did you try any of the houses around here?”

  “Nobody’s got water,” said the man. “I got a baby here, lady. You can’t leave us out here.” He jerked a thumb at the woman behind him, who was standing back, the baby clutched against her chest so tightly that Susan thought she’d smother it. “They’re all dead around here. I don’t want my baby dying like them.”

  “Susan, please,” Etta whispered.

  Susan reached for the gearshift. “We’ll stop at the police department. We’ll get you some help—”

  The man grabbed her scrub top collar and yanked up so violently that Susan’s head banged into the Oldsmobile’s ceiling. Etta let out a terrified scream.

  “Shut up!” The man yelled. “Anna, get your ass over here!”

  Stars exploded in Susan’s head. She clawed at her collar. She couldn’t get enough air.

  The man was shouting. Through a blur of tears, Susan saw the woman throw the bundle of blankets on the pavement and run to Etta’s side of the car.

  This is all going wrong! We’re going to lose the car! Susan thought in agony. And losing the car meant losing Etta, because there was no way the old woman could survive without a car to take her to safety. Susan tried to punch at the man’s torso, but he slammed her head against the ceiling again.

  “I said, get out!” he yelled.

  Susan couldn’t speak. Through the corner of her eye, she saw the glint of metal. Something sharp pierced her skin.

  She had messed it all up! She had been stupid! And now they would die!

  She heard the car door yanked open and felt herself being dragged out.

  She wanted to say, “We’ll take you!”—to do anything to stop this, to maybe spare their lives, but she couldn’t speak. Her vision pin-holed around her. She struggled, but her legs felt like jelly. She grabbed weakly at her throat.

  And then she heard a voice, faraway but unmistakable.

  “Let her go.”

  Fifty-Three

  Alan Wheeler roared up the wide frontage road, trying to keep himself upright on the bike. He figured he was feverish. How else to explain the hallucinations that seemed so real he thought his heart would crack?

  He felt Jason behind him, wrapping his teenaged arms around Alan’s shivering torso, urging him onward. Faster, faster!

  Alan roared past a golf course, the interstate a dull shadow in the distance.

  He saw Joseph in horned rimmed glasses, hovering in the space before the Harley, telling Alan, you owe God your life!

  God? Where was God in all this?

  Tears streamed from Alan’s eyes. He wiped them away.

  Was that really a man trying to strangle someone in a car? Alan bore down on the stopped vehicle, certain he heard screaming. But who was screaming? The woman running toward the passenger side, or someone in the car?

  Alan dragged his watch before his face. Fifteen minutes until five.

  He pulled the throttle, heard the Harley’s engine kick up a notch.

  The person inside the car was a woman wearing a scrub top. Alan watched through watering eyes as the man bashed her head against the ceiling and drew something metal from his waistband.

  You owe God your life.

  In a split-second Alan knew he would stop. It seemed a dream. He pulled the bike to a halt near the car, and as the man turned around to gaze at him in momentary surprise, Alan pulled the gun from his backpack.

  “Let her go,” he said.

  The man loosened his grip on the woman’s shirt. She slumped, gasping, against the car seat, her large dark eyes fixed on Alan’s face.

  “Drop the knife,” Alan ordered.

  The man and the woman spoke at the same time.

  “I wasn’t going to hurt her—” the man said.

  “He said he had a baby,” gasped the woman.

  Alan eyed the red trickle of blood on her neck, the way it dribbled onto the collar of her hospital shirt. “Drop the knife and get away the car.” He aimed the gun at the man’s head.

  “Jesus, Mike,” the woman on the other side of the car screamed. “Just drop the knife, already!”

  The man let the blade clatter to the pavement.

  The driver’s side door flung open. Alan kept his gun trained on the man as the woman in the scrub top stood up on wobbly legs and kicked the knife across the road.

  “Get back in the car,” Alan said to her.

  For the first time, Alan noticed the old woman in the passenger seat. She looked frozen solid.

  Alan waved the gun at the man. “Walk.” He felt woozy, the road and houses beginning to spin.

  The man looked at Alan with hate-filled eyes. “Fuck you!” he shouted, but he started down the long boulevard. The woman on the other side of the car ran after him.

  Alan watched them disappear into the haze. He began to shake. He couldn’t stop it. It felt like his bones were melting.

  Distantly, he heard the woman in the car cry out, but he didn’t know what she’d said. He was only aware that he was falling—and that she’d come out to catch him.

  “What time is it?” he whispered.

  She cradled him against her chest. He felt her hair brush against his face as she turned to look at her watch.

  “It’s five o’clock,” she said.

  “Etta, help!”

  Susan struggled under the man’s weight.

  “We’ve got to get him in the car. They might come back.” She pulled at him frantically, dragging him across the pavement to the Oldsmobile. She let him slowly slump to the ground and then turned to snatch open the backseat door.

  She gasped when she saw her hands.

  “My god, he’s bleeding!” Bright red blood covered her fingers. “Come on, Etta. Don’t just stand there. Grab the backpack! Make sure you have the gun.”

  Susan climbed into the backseat and braced her legs against the doorframe. She heaved the man onto the backseat, collapsing backwards when he landed on top of her.

  She climbed out the other side of the car and pulled on the man’s shirt until his hips cleared the edge of the seat. He moaned incoherently. Violent shudders racked his body.

  “They’re coming back,” Etta said.

  Susan gazed up the expanse of the boulevard to the two silhouettes emerging from the smog. “You have to drive, Etta!” Susan cried, pulling herself into the backseat beside the man. “If I don’t stop his bleeding, he’ll die.”

  The old woman hesitated only a moment. She rounded the hood and plopped herself behind the steering wheel. Susan felt herself flung back as Etta floored it.

  “Are they still behind us?” Etta asked. She clutched the steering wheel with rigid, veiny arms, her eyes never leaving the road, her chin jutting forward over her hands.

  Susan cranked around to peer out the back window. “Yes, but they’ll get the motorcycle. Two can ride on a motorcycle.”

  “Will they chase us?”

  “I doubt it,” Susan said, but she wasn’t sure. She peered at the m
an’s head in her lap. He was so pale, his lips were almost colorless. She reached down and quickly unbuttoned his shirt. The makeshift bandage underneath was soaked through and nearly falling off. Without hesitation, Susan removed it.

  She sucked in her breath. The flesh around the wound was swollen nearly to his armpit. Bloody, yellowish fluid oozed from jagged skin.

  The man shuddered. Susan pulled a sweatshirt from the floor of the car and pressed it against the wound. It wasn’t a sterile dressing, but that hardly mattered now. She placed her free hand on his head. His skin was on fire.

  “Where do I go now?” Etta asked. She slowed the car and peered through the windshield.

  Susan scanned the nondescript housing developments, each separated from the wide boulevard by high cement-block walls and a series of flags. They hung limp in the still brown air.

  “I think we’re in Saugus,” Susan said finally. “We should hit Castaic soon.”

  Fifty-Four

  The USAMRIID lab looked sterile, the cabinets and benches clean and cold-appearing.

  “You’re handling her blood in a low-level lab?” Kincade asked.

  “There’s no plague in her blood. We don’t need to handle it in a biosafety level four lab.” Heger nodded at one of the lab workers, who was busily pipetting small drops of fluid into a series of tubes.

  The lab worker looked up briefly, said “hey,” through his respirator mask, and went back to work.

  Heger gestured for Kincade to follow him around the corner to a monitor on a desk. “I can tell you is it isn’t an antibody.” He punched in a command and waited. “Up to this point, all immunity to plague that we’ve found has been antibody-mediated, but her serum doesn’t have any of those antibodies. Either she was never exposed to plague, or her immunity is genetic.”

  Kincade peered at the screen. He was an epidemiologist by training, not a molecular biologist, but he could still recognize a genomic map. “Is this her DNA?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to a short, magenta-colored series of numbered boxes. “This segment is different. It codes for the receptor that allows Yersinia pestis to enter the host cell.”

  “Her receptor is different?”

  “No, her receptor is absent. She doesn’t have the receptor that makes most humans so spectacularly vulnerable to the plague bacterium.” He tapped on the screen with a pencil. “Plague can’t enter her cells.”

  Kincade whistled softly. “Holy shit. We do have survivors.” He peered at the DNA base pairs, all lit up in coordinating colors. “How many people, do you think?”

  “With this mutation? We don’t know.”

  “But you don’t have it?” Harry knew that researchers sometimes used their own blood for initial case comparisons. “That’s your DNA, isn’t it?”

  Heger gave Kincade a strange look. He answered quietly, “Yes, that’s my DNA. And no, I don’t have the mutation.”

  “Then I guess we better find out who does.”

  Jim Carson glanced at the retreating shoreline of San Francisco and tried to gauge his location. The fog was thick, and he wasn’t an expert sailor, but he was pretty sure he was midway between the city and Tiburon. With any luck, he would punch through the fog belt soon and enter the clearer skies closer to his destination in Marin County.

  He rubbed his temple, trying to relieve the throb that had resumed in his head. He couldn’t shoot up when the wind was so strong—if he let go of the helm for a moment, he was certain the sailboat would either capsize or float out the Golden Gate—but the headache made even the simplest actions impossible.

  Rage exploded in him like a bomb. Goddamn DRYP! Goddamn headache! The two had to be linked, although he didn’t know how.

  He slammed a palm against the helm so hard that he felt blood vessels burst beneath the skin. He kicked the side of the boat. He screamed at the top of his lungs.

  All the while, jackhammers pounded in his brain.

  Finally, the boat pierced the fog and entered calmer waters. He snatched the backpack from the chair and tore open a syringe package with shaking fingers. He tossed his jacket and plunked himself down on the floor of the boat.

  A moment later, when he felt the familiar warmth in his belly that spread to his fingertips, he let out a long, shuddering sigh. The boat drifted off course, but he didn’t care. He listened to the slap of water against the hull and the snap and clink of the riggings.

  He swore he’d never let the headache overtake him again.

  John Harr had meant to help with the living, but he wound up taking care of the dead instead. He and a cowboy named Jess worked steadily in the hospital’s loading bay, both clad in bunny suits, respirators, and two pairs of thick dark-green gloves.

  It was the grimmest work Harr had ever done. They worked like a two-person assembly line, first dropping a body on the polyethylene sheeting, then rolling it like a log until it was covered, and finally cutting and taping the plastic closed. When they had a sufficient pile of corpses, he and Jess heaved them into the back of one of the county’s large dump trucks.

  The dump trucks left every ten minutes.

  Harr didn’t ask where they were going.

  The sun was setting when the hospital’s medical director came out and told them to take a break. “Come eat something,” Doctor Fisk shouted through his spaceman respirator suit.

  “You’ve got food?” Harr peeled off the outer set of gloves and threw them onto the plastic. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day.

  “Not much, but you guys got to eat something.”

  Jess glanced at the unwrapped corpses still lying off to the side. “I’m not hungry.” He turned back to the dead. He hadn’t said much more than a word or two the entire time they had worked together.

  “Come on, John. Leave him,” Fisk said. “I need to talk with you.”

  When they were far enough away, Fisk jerked his head at the cowboy they’d left behind. “His wife and kids were some of the first to die. Come on. There’s some food inside.”

  Fisk led Harr to a break room. The medical director stripped off his bunny suit just outside the door. “Don’t throw yours away. Hang it here.” He pointed at a coat rack along the wall. “We’re saving all the bunny suits. Keep your mask on. Throw your gloves in the garbage.”

  When Harr had finished, Fisk pulled open the door and pointed at a bottle of hand sanitizer. “Wash your hands before you touch anything.”

  There was a pile of individually-wrapped junk food on a table. “We raided the vending machines,” said Fisk, falling into a chair. “There’s warm soda over there. When you got what you want, go over there.” He pointed across the room. “I don’t want you too close to me when you take off your mask.”

  “You mean we’ve got to shout across the room?”

  Fisk sat at one of the distant tables. He had removed his gloves, but he kept his hands carefully folded in his lap. “Plague’s a killer, John. Germs are everywhere.”

  Harr looked at his own bare hand as he reached to pull out a chair. He wondered who had touched the metal and plastic surfaces before him, what invisible plague germs they had left behind. He suddenly lost his appetite.

  Fisk seemed to read his thoughts. “It’s everywhere. Every time someone coughs into their hand and then touches something, they’re spreading it.” He looked down at his hands, motionless in his lap. “But we can’t live without touching things. And no set of gloves will protect you forever. Sooner or later you’re bound to touch something without realizing it. Sooner or later it will get through these defenses—” He broke off.

  Harr thought the doctor was trying to compose himself. In the distance, the generators droned on.

  After a moment, Fisk said, “Anyhow, I wanted to tell you to go home. Your ranch is probably the safest place, although it’s probably not even safe there, given that the rock chuck and the squirrels have the disease, too.”

  Harr set the bag of chips on the table. He thought of Lola, Bess and Joey Markamson, and the many,
many more dying and dead outside. The relatively isolated sphere of his life had begun to crumble, the interconnectedness of things unraveling with alarming speed.

  “I don’t reckon I need to go anywhere,” he said quietly. “There’s plenty to do here.”

  Fisk regarded the younger man silently for a moment, then stood. “Suit yourself. When you’re done eating, you know where to find me.”

  Susan switched places with Etta as soon as they reached the Ridge Route. She drove as fast as she could, but the narrow, winding road was in poor shape. In sections, the pavement was so eroded that the gravel base showed.

  She was pretty sure the man was dying. His breath was labored and shallow, cut only by his frequent moans. The stench of blood and pus filled the car.

  “Are there any developments up here?” Susan asked, peering out the windshield.

  Etta shook her head. “If you mean stores or houses or anything like that, no. The Ridge Route is an old, abandoned highway. No one lives out here.”

  Susan could see why. Dry, chaparral-covered mountains stretched as far as the eye could see, and aside from a few isolated farmsteads, they’d seen no other signs of civilization, save a few orange cones that marked the worst of the damaged road. “How much further until the next town?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t driven the Ridge Route in thirty years. Maybe ten hours?”

  “Ten hours?” Susan accelerated up a straight, narrow section. “He may not live another ten hours!”

  “Does he have plague?”

  “No, it’s not plague. It’s some sort of wound infection, like he’s been shot or something. But Etta, it’s bad—” She braked abruptly as they came upon a sharp turn. “Bad enough to kill him if he doesn’t get treated. My god, this road is terrible!”

  Etta clutched the door handle with a gnarled hand. “The Ridge Route was built a hundred years ago. They didn’t build roads for speed back then.”

  From the back, an incoherent cry arose, and the man pitched on the seat. Susan darted an anxious look at him. “Where is the closest hospital? Is there anything closer than Bakersfield?”