The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared

by Abrahams, Tom

  “Here you go,” Maryland said. “I’d wait for you if I could. But as I said earlier, I gotta get back to the scene.”

  “Thanks for what you did,” said Mike. “It was more than enough.”

  Mike searched for the door handle but couldn’t find it. He played with the armrest.

  Maryland glanced over his shoulder at Mike and smirked. “I gotta let you out.”

  Mike’s face flushed. He was sure it was red. “Oh, sorry.”

  Maryland climbed out of his seat and marched around the front of the patrol car until he reached Mike’s door. He opened it and then moved around the back toward Brice’s door.

  “Help me with him,” said Maryland.

  The two of them moved Brice from the car, and Mike helped him toward the clinic’s front door. Mike waved one last thanks to the deputy and then heaved open the heavy glass door.

  He stepped inside, helping balance Brice. He was immediately hit with the strong odors of sweat and sickness. It was like a hospital but lacked the antiseptic fragrance of industrial soap and bacterial cleansers.

  His eyes adjusted to the bright light of the waiting room and then his heart sank.

  There was standing room only. All of the chairs were taken, as was a long bench that ran along one side of the rectangular space. There were children sitting on the floor and people leaning against the walls in the corners. Mike quickly counted twenty-five people.

  “Can I help you?” asked a pleasant but beleaguered voice from behind a stucco and stainless-steel welcome desk.

  Mike led Brice to the desk, and his friend immediately dropped his elbows on the stainless-steel bar-height counter that separated the woman from the rest of the room. He sighed and it sounded more like a groan. Mike put his hand on Brice’s shoulder and squeezed his reassurance.

  “Yes, please,” said Mike. “My friend has a concussion. Well, I think he has a concussion. He was in a fight.”

  The woman narrowed her glossy eyes. “Did he win?”

  Mike thought that was an odd question but didn’t say so. “No. It wasn’t much of a fight. But he hit his head on the ground and I’m worried that—”

  “Does he have insurance?” The woman was squinting as if she expected that he didn’t.

  Mike surprised her with a nod and she smiled sympathetically. It was a practiced smile reserved for people with insurance.

  “Could I see his driver’s license and his insurance card?” she asked, sniffing. Mike noticed her nose was red.

  Brice lazily reached around to his back pocket and pulled out his fancy wallet. He plopped it on the counter with a clang and slid it across the counter. It made a scraping noise that sent a chill up Mike’s spine.

  “It’s in there,” Brice said without looking up. He braced his head in his hands.

  Mike pulled out the ID and found the green and beige insurance card. He handed them to the receptionist. She took them without smiling and placed them on her desk next to her keyboard.

  Fingers dancing on the keyboard, her eyes flitting between the screen and the information on Brice’s cards, she entered the information into whatever system the clinic used. When she finished, she looked up at Brice and then at Mike. She cleared her throat.

  “Says he has a fifty dollar copay,” she said. “We take credit and cash only. No checks.”

  Mike chuckled nervously. “I didn’t know anyone wrote checks anymore or used cash.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said and cleared her throat again. “Credit then, I guess. Card or app?”

  Mike fished a credit card from Brice’s wallet and handed it to her. She glanced at Brice and then ran the card.

  “Hey, how long is the wait?” Mike asked.

  The woman punched a button on the credit card scanner and coughed. She tried suppressing it before she lifted a hand to her mouth.

  The receptionist cleared her throat again. “I’m sorry. Head cold.”

  Mike doubted that.

  She reached across her desk to a bottle of hand sanitizer, pumped a greenish dollop into her palm, and rubbed her hands together. Then she flapped them in the air to dry them.

  “How long?” asked Mike.

  She punched another button on the credit machine then pulled the card free, setting it on the counter in front of Mike.

  “Two hours?” It was a question as much as an answer.

  Brice lifted his head. “Two hours?”

  “Could be less,” said the receptionist. “I don’t know. We’re overloaded here. It’s been this way for a week.”

  She sneezed into her hands.

  “Bless you,” said Mike.

  Brice turned around and noticed the waiting crowd for the first time. He sighed. “I don’t know if I can wait two hours. My head is killing me. Can we get in your car and go?”

  “I don’t have my car, remember?” Mike said. “We rode over here with the deputy.”

  Brice was looking straight ahead, but Mike could tell he was elsewhere. He squinted and put his hand over his eyes, shielding them from the bright overhead light. “I guess I remember. That back seat was uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah, it was,” said Mike. “What do you wanna do?”

  A woman in a dingy white lab coat appeared in a doorway that led from the waiting area and into the heart of the urgent care center. She held an electronic tablet. Her hair was in a messy bun and her eyes drooped with exhaustion. The pale green scrubs she wore under the coat were so wrinkled they looked like a topographical map of the Rocky Mountains. “Johnson,” she said. “Marvin Johnson.”

  Five people stood from their seats, moving toward the woman at the door.

  “All of you are Marvin Johnson?”

  “We’re with him,” said a gaunt woman in a cotton tank top and shorts that looked three sizes too big.

  The woman shrugged and motioned for them to head through the open door. She told them to wait for her and she tapped the tablet. “Flores,” she said. “Leo Flores.” There was even less energy in her voice this time. It was as if she struggled to push the words past her lips.

  Four more people got up, two of them from the floor, and moved to the open door. The woman in the lab coat followed them, and the door swung shut with a hiss and a thud.

  Brice lumbered toward the now empty bench. He dropped onto it and lay down on his side, closing his eyes.

  Mike glanced back at the sniffling receptionist. He took the wallet from the counter and crossed the room to Brice. “You wanna wait?”

  Brice nodded. “Yeah,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I gotta get something strong for my head. You wanna get your car?”

  “You mean leave you?”

  Brice opened one eye. “I’m not a child. I’ll be okay. No point in you waiting here too. Then when I’m done, the car is here and you can take me home.”

  “Okay,” said Mike. “I’ll go get it. Here’s your wallet.”

  He pressed the cool metal into his friend’s hand. Brice took it.

  Mike made his way to the door.

  “Mike?” Brice called.

  “Yeah?” asked Mike, waiting at the exit, his weight against the glass door.

  “Thanks,” Brice said, his voice cracking. “You’re a good man.”

  Mike nodded and pushed his way back outside. He drew in a breath of warm, humid air and started his march back toward the station.

  CHAPTER 7

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  Gwendolyn Sharp stepped through the front doors of the Hotel Dnipro, adjusted the mask on her face, and swung left. She moved through the thin crowd of people on Khreschatyk Street. It was the early part of the traditional travel season, but it didn’t look like it.

  She stuffed her hands into the waist pockets of her cream-colored wool coat and braced herself against the unseasonably cold temperatures. Keeping her head down so as not to make eye contact with anyone, she hustled southwest toward the pharmacy across the stre
et from the musical fountains at the entrance to Independence Square.

  Despite her efforts to keep her focus narrow, her peripheral vision caught the hurried, wary steps of the others around her. Worried men and women moved to avoid others, to do their business as soon as possible and get back to the safe havens from where they came.

  Having been in the capital city for four months, Gwendolyn felt like a local. She’d learned the shortcuts to and from the places she needed to go. She walked without thinking about her steps. It was rote by this point, the trip to and from the pharmacy, to and from the only coffee shop still open for business, to and from the nearby command post, where she worked long arduous hours that bore little fruit.

  The streets were more barren by the day. It was as if some invisible force had plucked people from their daily routines, a game of musical chairs in which the loser was missing the following day. Kiev lacked the panic of many of the Western cities. She’d seen it on the news. There were long lines for gasoline and groceries, and hospitals were at capacity. In Dublin there was looting. In Paris, the Champs-Élysées was a disaster from rioting. The damage there to businesses was worse than the yellow vest riots more than a dozen years earlier.

  Major cities in the United States were at the beginnings of panic. They were preparing for the plague like a coming storm plotted on a satellite map. They “hunkered down” or “bugged out.” She’d read a piece in a newspaper about the large preparedness community and how there were those in the western United States—Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Texas—where large landowners were living off the grid and were ready to provide for and defend themselves. There was also the American Redoubt, the political movement started by author John Wesley Rawles, which had like-minded people ready to descend upon the northwestern United States in the event of an apocalyptic event.

  None of this existed in Ukraine or in and around Syria, the twin epicenters of the plague. Gwendolyn wasn’t certain why this was the case, except that there was little over which to panic. Even before the plague, goods and services were limited. And these were populations of people who’d lived through violent conflicts for the better part of two generations. Why would they riot or panic over sickness when it seemed to them another link in a chain of hopelessness? It was as if those living at the inception point of the world-altering plague were those most resigned to what it would bring. Still, the capital city was different from when she’d stepped off her plane some months ago.

  She thought back to early July, the day she’d arrived in Kiev. She’d somehow managed her way through the crowd of people at the international terminal at Boryspil and found the man holding up a tablet with her name glowing on its display.

  The ride from the airport to the city took her along narrow streets and wide highways that bore witness to the sprawl of towering tenements. She remembered seeing the famed Motherland Monument to her right as the driver switched lanes at a high speed, its metal and concrete standing taller than the Statue of Liberty. The sun gleamed off its sheen, the stoic face of Mother Russia staring defiantly into some distant past. So much of the place, even bathed in sunlight, reminded her of the dark history she’d read about in school: the hammer and sickle, the wall that separated east from west, and the consolidation of a communist empire, the union of peasants and the working class. Ukraine was once part of the Soviet Union. It was held against the bosom of the motherland.

  There were the golden domes and brightly painted orthodox churches that served as art and grounded the plazas on which they stood. People snapped awkwardly angled photographs with their phones, shooting up the noses of their subjects, who smiled or pretended to pinch the domes between their fingers.

  People in Kiev lived in apartments, not houses. They stood uncomfortably close to one another in the streets and on the subways. They bartered loudly at the markets and ate seasoned lard on dense bread. They wore expressions of resignation that all but masked the glimmers of hope that danced in their weary eyes. The older men and women stooped under the layered weight of their heavy, threadbare garments. The businessmen wore clingy suits with thin ties and pointed leather shoes and spoke with importance into the Bluetooth devices plugged into their ears. The young women wore too much makeup on their angular, pretty faces, and too short skirts on their thin miles-long legs. They smoked equally thin and long unfiltered cigarettes and drank straight vodka out of room temperature tumblers.

  Those were her first impressions of the bustling, crowded city. As she walked along the eerily silent streets, the shuffle of feet and flapping of tent pole flags the only sounds, she longed for what had seemed quaint.

  She looked up to cross the wide street where it intersected with Maidan Nezalezhnosti and on the opposite side of the thoroughfare saw a man bend over at his waist. His hands went to his hips and he coughed. It was quiet enough, and the traffic so sparse, the hack carried like thunder in a canyon. The few men and women who passed him took wide berths. They held their hands to their masks, pressing them against their sallow faces. They stole glances at the man but hurried past and into the street without checking for passing buses, cars, or trucks.

  Gwendolyn stopped, one foot already off the crumbling curb, and stepped back onto the sidewalk. She held her position and gaze. The coughing man was having a fit. His back heaved. His lungs expanded and contracted while he struggled to breathe. He didn’t have long. He’d progressed from the dry, spasmodic cough of early presentation to what sounded like the paroxysmal cough of a child battling pertussis.

  The man wheezed and stood up, hands still at his hips, and Gwendolyn saw the dark purple stains on his blue mask. Hemoptysis. The man was a goner. He was coughing up blood. She imagined he’d be bedridden in forty-eight hours and dead within the week.

  The virologist glanced to her right. She could go back to the hotel and stow away in her room until she had to be at work. The pharmacy was a luxury, not a necessity, and Morel had counseled the team not to take unnecessary risks.

  There was a virtual certainty she wasn’t susceptible, but there was still a risk given the superbug’s propensity for adaptation. Everyone on the team had been exposed to the disease over the past four months. There was no avoiding it given its prevalence. Whatever inoculations they’d received or immunities they carried had worked for all but one of them. A woman who worked as part of Kovatliev’s unit contracted the plague and had become a valuable research tool. Even in death she was contributing. It was the sad truth of their work.

  Still, she questioned her decision to venture outside. All of their work, and that of scientists working independently across the globe, suggested they were reaching an inflection point. The disease had infiltrated every civilization on the planet. Data from their forecasting team showed a mortality rate nearing seven in ten. Two-thirds of the Earth’s population was at risk of dying in the coming weeks. The forecasters spoke of the resulting infrastructure collapse, the economic meltdown, the disintegration of government and law enforcement.

  Of course, none of this was public. It was speculation, even if well-founded, and those at the highest levels of the scientific and political communities wanted the projections and theories kept under wraps.

  “People will find out the truth of the matter as it happens to them,” Charles Morel had said. “No need to foster hysteria if it’s ultimately unwarranted.”

  “That’s like playing the violin on the deck on a sinking ship,” Kevin Pierce had argued. “The iceberg has already cut an irreparable hole in the hull. We’re sinking. Just because people can’t see the rupture, they feel the shift. They know it. No amount of denial will stop that.”

  Morel had smiled. “And if those ill-fated people on the Titanic had known? If the band hadn’t played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, those who managed to survive might have sunk with the ship. Instead of twenty-two hundred deaths, there were fifteen hundred. I’d argue the music helped.”

  “Funny,” Gwendolyn had interjected. “Two-thirds of the people died on the Titanic
too, if my math is more or less correct.”

  Now she was staring at one statistic. The man across the street still had his hands on his hips, but he was moving. His slow amble carried him northeast along Khreshchatyk Street. She wouldn’t have to pass him. Gwendolyn exhaled, aware she’d been holding her breath. It wasn’t smart to be doing this. But she’d failed to plan and the trip to the pharmacy was necessary. Plus, she needed to see a happy face. Nobody ever smiled in Kiev. At least, not since she’d arrived. None of her coworkers ever laughed, people on the streets kept to themselves, and even at the hotel, the concierge gave terse information with impassivity.

  At the pharmacy, she always got a smile and genuine conversation. The owner was a kind man with thin hair and high cheekbones. His laugh was as genuine as Ukrainian vodka was smooth.

  Sergei was his name. He was always behind the counter. When she asked for help, he didn’t point her in the right direction, he took her there. This was why she was a frequent customer and bought items there that might have been cheaper elsewhere. Sergei was a nice man. He asked about her day, told her jokes, offered her advice. Gwendolyn found herself going to the pharmacy even when she didn’t need anything other than levity.

  She adjusted the mask on her face, freeing loose strands of hair from the confines of the elastic band behind her ear, touched the bun at the top of her head, and stepped out into the street. A man on a puttering motorbike sped past her, and she paused to give him space.

  It crossed her mind as she walked, now with purpose, toward the pharmacy, that this country had endured more than most. Being an epicenter for the Scourge was only the latest challenge for its strong people.

  Ukraine was home to a long war. It was the war that produced the camps in which the disease had germinated and spread so rapidly. It was the place in which, nearly fifty years earlier, the world’s worst nuclear disaster had altered hundreds of thousands of lives.