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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  She walked back to the Oldsmobile and climbed behind the wheel.

  Etta woke, opening her puffy eyes to stare at Susan. “Where are we?”

  Susan started the car and pulled across the gravel driveway toward the barn. “I don’t know. Somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley.” She backed up until the Oldsmobile was parallel to the open sliding door.

  Etta suddenly frowned. “What’s that smell?”

  “Cattle. We’re at a feed lot,” said Susan. “Did you take your diuretic?” She opened the door and stepped out.

  “Not yet,” said Etta. “Where are you going?”

  Susan jerked her head at the backseat. “I’m going to take care of him.” She glanced at the gray-faced man. His breathing came fast between dry open lips, amplified within the confines of the car.

  Susan ducked into the vet’s office and grabbed an armful of towels. She spread them on the barn floor and then went into the vet’s work room again. Finally, after several trips, Susan came to the backseat door, opened it, and leaned in. “I’m going to need your help treating him, Etta.”

  Susan grunted as she dragged the man from the backseat. His eyes fluttered opened as she manhandled him onto the towels. For one moment, she thought he might be conscious enough to recognize her, but his mouth moved in silent twitches, and she decided he wasn’t.

  She hushed him gently, called to Etta to come, and pulled the box of supplies nearer.

  “You’ll need to hold his arm absolutely still,” Susan told the old lady. “Can you kneel?”

  “If you help me up again.”

  Susan looked at her doubtfully. Etta looked so incredibly frail standing there, with her spindly calves and swollen ankles. Susan reminded herself that this woman was just this side of heart failure, just a hair’s breadth from death herself.

  She stood. “Let me help you down, Etta.” She grasped Etta’s arm and eased the old woman to her knees, but Etta couldn’t hold the position. She teetered unsteadily. Susan guided her into a seated position. Etta propped herself up awkwardly.

  Humiliation washed across the old woman’s face. “I’m sorry, Susan.”

  “Don’t be,” Susan said. “Can you hold his hand down?”

  The old lady nodded, but Susan harbored grave doubts. The brutishly large injection apparatus she’d stolen from the vet’s workroom was designed for a steer, not a human. If the man moved his arm during the injection, the large needle would tear through the vein and deposit the antibiotic in the skin, rather than his blood. Her chances of saving him would decrease significantly. But what other choice did she have?

  Susan opened the bottle of saline, mixed the antibiotic in the huge syringe, and placed it on the towel next to him. She then pulled a lace from her running shoe and tied it around his arm.

  His veins were good. Susan lightly ran a finger over the biggest one in the crook of his elbow. She pulled a bottle of alcohol from the box and poured some directly on his skin.

  Susan peered at his face. “Don’t move, do you hear?” By the way he stared into the air with wide, dilated pupils, she doubted he did. She picked up the syringe, uncapped the needle, and stuck it into his arm, pulling on the plunger until she saw the telltale flash of blood.

  “Pull the shoelace off,” she told Etta. She pushed the plunger in, emptying fifty milliliters of antibiotics into his vein.

  He didn’t even flinch. Susan braced the needle against his skin and disconnected the syringe. Blood poured backwards, drenching her fingers before she could attach the next syringe. This one was loaded only with saline. She injected him while holding the needle with a death grip. It couldn’t move.

  The process was a bloody mess. She connected and disconnected the syringe ten times to make a rudimentary IV fluid bolus. It was laborious and sloppy, but the best she could do without IV tubing or a catheter.

  Susan peered down at the man’s face. His features were drawn as though he was in pain, but he made no noise.

  It’s better that he’s unconscious, she thought. Because he wouldn’t like what she was going to do next.

  She unbuttoned his shirt, wishing to god she had a pair of gloves, but there hadn’t been any in the vet’s quarters. Whoever had worked there had taken them, along with all the masks.

  She lifted the soaked bandage and flinched at the stench of infection beneath. The wound ran jaggedly across his chest wall, an uneven flap that lay over decaying flesh—the perfect breeding ground for a life-threatening infection.

  Gently, with a gauze pad, she pulled the wound open. The man gasped in pain. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Susan poured the remainder of the saline bottle on the wound and then took a thick pad of gauze and began to scrape at the inflamed interior of the wound.

  The man screamed. He threw his arms blindly outward, hitting Susan so hard that she fell sideways onto her elbow. A lightning bolt of pain shot up her arm and into her neck, but she held the gauze above her as though it was priceless, because it was. It was sterile gauze, maybe the last left in the world.

  She pushed herself back onto her knees and set at it again, scrubbing roughly at the mushy dead skin. She continued this harsh mechanical debridement, while the man cried wordlessly, tears running down the sides of his face.

  Susan thought she would be sick. A deep revulsion roiled through her, but she didn’t stop until the dead tissue was scraped away and all that was left was the healthy underlying flesh— raw, but alive and bleeding freely. She poured sterile water over the wound to wash away the dead cells and blood, and then she pressed sterile gauze against it to stem the bleeding. The man’s chest jerked unevenly, his eyes open and staring wildly into space.

  Susan couldn’t tear her gaze away from his agonized face. Her world reduced to his suffering, a bubble that contained only the two of them, all other sounds and smells muted. She felt alone with him, this half-conscious man, whose ragged breath cut at her heart like the sharp edge of a sword.

  Susan wondered for a moment if she had killed him, because how could he stare like that, with his eyes open so wide, as though he had been electrocuted, as though his agony had finally transcended his body’s limits?

  He closed his eyes, their twin intensities snuffed out, his face no longer illuminated.

  Susan’s breath caught her in her throat as something horrible jerked through her chest. She stared at her bloodied hands as though they were culpable, the instruments of torture that had caused the man’s dreadful death.

  Then she saw it, the faintest outward and inward movement of his chest, almost imperceptible.

  He was still alive.

  Fifty-Eight

  The air in the living room was so foul that Mack couldn’t take it anymore. He threw open the sliding glass door and stood on the threshold to his backyard, breathing as deeply as the respirator allowed. He yearned to whip off the N95, but he didn’t dare. He knew he was covered with plague bacteria.

  Behind him, Nesbitt moaned loudly. The young CDC officer had descended into delirium and lost control of his bladder and bowels. Now, shit and piss soaked the couch, and the smell was so revolting that Mack’s stomach bucked each time he entered the living room.

  Despair settled over him. Without water or fresh laundry, he couldn’t properly care for Nesbitt. The CDC officer tossed and turned in increasing filth.

  A sharp bang sounded. Something crashed to the floor. Mack turned, flinching despite himself. Nesbitt lay on the floor between the couch and the old coffee table, his shit-stained sheets wrapped around his legs. Blood poured from a wound on his head.

  “Ah, Jesus, Jeremy,” Mack cried. He crossed the room and hauled the sobbing Nesbitt back onto the couch.

  When the CDC officer was settled, Mack walked to the linen closet in the hall. It was empty inside, save a washcloth. He carried it back to the living room.

  The cut was triangular in shape, above Nesbitt’s eyebrow. Mack pressed the cloth against it and was dismayed by the dark cranberry color of the younger
man’s blood. Mack could tell Nesbitt was suffocating. The CDC officer sucked in each breath as though through a straw, the muscles of his neck and abdomen straining to draw air into his failing lungs.

  Mack couldn’t bear it. He stood up and went to his bedroom, where he rifled around in his dresser until he located the ampules he’d stolen from the hospital when he’d gotten his forehead sewn up. He opened them and filled a syringe. He took the syringe to the living room.

  Mack rolled up the younger man’s sleeve. Dark, purplish marks dotted the CDC officer’s hands and forearms. Mack searched for a useable vein but couldn’t find one, so he jammed the needle directly into Nesbitt’s deltoid instead, emptying the syringe into the muscle.

  The CDC officer jerked at the poke, his writhing for one second coordinated into full body rigidity, but then he coughed again, and his body resumed its strangled twitching.

  Mack sat quietly, the stench forgotten, his eyes now locked on his friend’s. How long does it take? he wondered. Nesbitt’s breathing slowed, as his eyes drifted closed. His twitching finally ceased.

  And then, it was over. Mack didn’t move, just stared at Jeremy’s face, the empty morphine syringe held loosely in his hand.

  It took a while for Fisk to die. John Harr couldn’t have said how many hours he sat there. He figured he dozed off at some point, because when he finally walked out of the hospital, the sun had begun its downward descent toward the western horizon.

  He wasn’t sure what day it was. He tried half-heartedly to remember but gave up, realizing it didn’t matter. There was no one minding the clock, no banker’s hours or store hours or holiday hours or anything kind of hours, only time in its most fundamental form, its passing marked by sunlight and darkness and his own distorted perception of the two.

  He felt muddled, as though he were living in a waking dream. The hospital grounds were as quiet as the hospital’s interior had been, not a single live person left. Harr stood in the ambulance bay and looked out across the sea of dead people. They’d all fallen silent between when he had gone to sleep last night and this new day. Not far away, a flag at half-mast flapped in the breeze.

  Harr wondered where the mourning cowboy had gone. The two dump trucks stood parked next to each other in the disposal area, their cargo areas empty, the giant roll of plastic wrap pushed to the side. Harr carefully stepped between dead people as he crossed the parking lot. When he peered at their faces, he recognized far too many.

  Nothing more to do, the doctor had said.

  Harr couldn’t bury them all. Couldn’t ship them all to the burning pits, wherever they were. He sure as hell couldn’t save any of them.

  Harr stood, irresolute, at the periphery. He felt a keen, almost panicky need to find someone alive, to prove to himself that this was not reality but rather a nightmare from which he’d soon awaken. But when he climbed in his pickup and drove through Burns, he realized it was no dream. The streets were as quiet as the hospital, not a car moving, not a face visible. He turned down Broadway, crossed West Monroe Street, and drove past the bank and the Blue Light Tavern. The two businesses should have been open in the middle of the day but were instead closed, their curtains drawn, their interiors dark.

  His breath hitched in his throat. Not one survivor. Not one face. Not anyone.

  He turned the truck down another street, and then another, zig-zagging through town, straining to look through front windows, to find someone or something familiar. But there was nothing familiar. The streets of his childhood had become an alien landscape, as foreign and lifeless as the moon.

  He drove back to the ranch in a state of shock. He couldn’t stay there because he didn’t have power, but he didn’t know where else to go. To go to the west side of the state meant more disease, but to stay in the high desert meant a perpetual search for food and water.

  He peered out the window at the soft undulating hills and the butte-like rock formation to the east that marked the approach to his ranch. It was an austere geography, and it had one of the shortest growing seasons in America. They were entering that growing season now. By fall, it would be bitterly cold again. He contemplated a long, dark high desert winter for a moment.

  And then, he shook his head, wondering why he was thinking about winter when spring was in the air. His mind wandered, bouncing from unpleasant thought to unpleasant thought. He tried to force himself to fixate on something positive, some plan of action, but he couldn’t.

  Harry Kincade stood in front of the isolation room’s bank of monitors, impressed that when the rest of the country was out of power, the federal government kept its lights burning. And what lights they were! The central monitor showed the President and several other respirator-clad government officials meeting via videoconference. The surrounding monitors showed a spectacular display of chaos and death.

  “Put it on mute,” said Harry. The military officer raised an eyebrow but complied. “See if you can raise Colonel Heger over at USAMRIID.”

  “How long do you think we should stay in isolation?” Ann asked beside him. Although it had been her formal recommendation that strict isolation precautions be taken at Mount Weather to limit interaction while the epidemic raged, she was beginning to seem antsy.

  “As long as it takes,” Harry said. He couldn’t take his eyes off the satellite imagery from New York. “That’s just fucking incredible, isn’t it?”

  Ann glanced at the monitor. Whole sections of the subway were under water. “We can’t stay in isolation forever, Harry.” She gestured to the military officer, who was discreetly looking away. She lowered her voice. “What’s he for anyway? To make sure we don’t run away?”

  Harry shrugged. He found the soldier’s presence odd, too. “Security probably.”

  They stood in the small one-room isolation chamber the government had set up for them. To one side stood the bank of monitors and a table with two laptop computers and a telephone. On the other side were two bunk beds and a spartan bathroom, out of view of the videoconference camera. In the cramped quarters, it was hard to avoid bumping into each other.

  Harry’s eyes were glued to one of the side monitors. “Hard to see what’s going on there.”

  The monitor showed nothing but a black cloud, thick and impenetrable. Ann shrugged irritably. “I don’t know why they’re even projecting anything. The satellite can’t penetrate the smog.”

  “That’s all from refinery fires?”

  “Who knows?” Ann paced three steps and then was forced to turn back around. “Nobody knows what’s going on in Los Angeles.”

  Harry looked thoughtful. “That’s where our survivor is.”

  “You don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

  “No,” returned Harry. “But she’s still important, because if she’s immune, that means other people are, too.”

  He knew Ann was tired of this conversation. They had had it many times since Harry had returned from Fort Detrick. It always ended the same: Harry holding onto some strange, intense hope while she argued that a rare mutation wouldn’t save any of them in the short term.

  The officer interrupted. If he had heard any of their argument, it wasn’t evident in his expression. “I’ve got Colonel Heger ready now, sir.”

  The President and his advisors disappeared from the center monitor and were replaced by Jim Heger’s masked face. Kincade was shocked. “Jesus, Jim, you look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit,” Heger said hoarsely. The military scientist looked ashen, his eyes sunken above the respirator. “DRYP has breached Fort Detrick. The scientists are getting sick.”

  “Can you keep working?” Harry asked.

  Heger let out a small breath, his words weighed down with tired patience. “My wife is dead. My children are dead. And now I’m dying, too.” He paused, his eyes seeming to bore into Harry’s. “No, I can’t keep working.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They’re all sick. When you get one sick person inside a closed space and
the disease is as highly transmissible as DRYP is, then one illness is all it takes.”

  Harry felt a chill chase over his body. He knew this was the principle behind the strict isolation at Mount Weather, but it didn’t make him feel safe. If DRYP had breached Fort Detrick, it could also breach the super-secure underground facility at Mount Weather. Even with the air circulators that could filter down to the micron level, it only took one person, one cough, one momentary lapse in vigilance.

  “What about the girl?” Harry blurted out.

  Heger suddenly let loose with a body-shaking cough. His face turned red above the respirator, and then he bent forward so that only the top of his jerking head was visible on the screen.

  After a moment, Heger sat back up. He was so breathless he could barely speak. “I’ve put together a summary of our data. I’m sending it to you. You’ll have to decide what to do with it.”

  He paused to catch his breath. “I’ve included something that I think you’ll find interesting.”

  “What is it?” Harry asked urgently.

  Heger leaned forward, his hand stretching just out of the camera’s range. “Just read it.”

  And then he was gone, the transmission terminated.

  Fifty-Nine

  The view was spectacular. Jim Carson reclined on the deck of the most expensive house he had ever been in and admired the panoramic sight of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and the completely empty bay in between. Not a single ship plied the azure waters. He glanced upward. Not a single aircraft crossed overhead.

  The trees on the hillside below the deck swished in the breeze, but because Carson’s lounge chair sat on the leeward side of a plate glass wall, he only felt the sun’s warmth and the good fortune of someone else’s fortune, for he was pretty sure the hillside house’s owners were rich as hell.