The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared

by Abrahams, Tom

  “And the Taser?” asked Kandy. “Why did that happen?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Carrie. “I saw it happen on your air. Well, I mean, I saw on my iPad. I watched your first report and was shutting things down. Then my phone goes crazy over your second live hit. I hit your app on my iPad and watched it like everyone else.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kandy. “I’ll call you later for an update.”

  “That’s fine. But truthfully, it’ll probably have to come from OPD. It’s their deal even though the officer is working for us.”

  “What about the sick baby?”

  “What about it?”

  “Any info on whether or not it has the disease?”

  Carrie Perry laughed. It was a nervous laugh. “I have no clue, Kandy. Even if I did, you know I can’t release that information. Federal privacy law prevents that.”

  “I know,” said Kandy. She did.

  “Do me a favor, though,” Carrie asked. “I don’t care if you leave your car where it is, but if you do another hit, could you please be on the sidewalk? My bosses will be less likely to tear me a new one if you’re not on the property.”

  Kandy sighed. She considered whether it was worth the fight. It wasn’t. “Sure. I’ll do that.”

  They hung up and Kandy redialed IFB. She picked up the tripod, camera still attached, lifted it onto her shoulder, and carried the rig to the sidewalk about fifty feet away.

  The phone rang and then clicked as it connected. After a short burst of static, she could hear the sports anchor talking about the Orlando Magic basketball team. Although the NBA club was a couple of weeks away from starting its season, the league was in talks to delay opening day because of the disease. There was a sound bite with the team’s general manager talking about his respect for the commissioner and his willingness to do whatever was in the best interest of the league and its fans.

  “Kandy,” said the producer, “that you? You have new info?”

  “Yep. I’m ready when you are.”

  “We’ll hit you as soon as sports is over. Then you’ll have about forty-five seconds. I’m killing the kicker to get another update from you.”

  The kicker was the last story of the newscast. It was typically something lighthearted or funny. The intent was to give the viewer twenty-one minutes of the worst of humanity and then put a cherry on it at the end, as if that might somehow cleanse the palate. Kickers got dropped if there was breaking news that “needed” updating or if the producer failed to properly time the newscast and ran out of time.

  “Got it,” said Kandy.

  She stepped to the camera and flipped out the side monitor so she could see herself. After hitting the autofocus function on her camera, she made sure she was centered on screen. She was ready.

  Unlike a lot of reporters, Kandy didn’t use notes on her phone during the live reports, she worked from memory. She thought it made the live shots look better, gave her an air of authority, and made her appear as though she was telling a story instead of reciting a script.

  She went over her mental notes, reminding herself of the salient points. She was ready for the final hit. Then her long day was over. It would be up to the assignment desk to follow up with OPD about the altercation. After that, she could head back to her place and have a drink with Phil.

  “Sports is wrapping. Stand by. We’ve got video from earlier. We’ll roll it over your hit while you’re talking. You can call for it.”

  The breaking news music played again, and the news anchor introduced her again, saying she had important new developments in the unfolding story at ORMC.

  “That’s right,” she said earnestly. “This is an evolving story here, and we have video to show you. It’s exclusive to Action News. I’ve learned a couple seeking treatment got tired of waiting in the ER. As we’ve reported, the hospital is incredibly busy. They’re handling their usual load plus all of the people who are concerned about the Scourge. So this couple was among the overflow crowd and is concerned about their child’s health. The man, likely the one you saw in handcuffs, started yelling at staff. An off-duty Orlando police officer tried to calm the man but was unsuccessful. They took it outside. A crowd spilled into the parking lot right outside the emergency room entrance, and the situation escalated to the point that a woman, whom we believe was with the couple, was tased.”

  “Wrap,” the producer said into Kandy’s ear.

  “Of course,” Kandy said, “we’ll have more on our website and on our news app. Reporting live from ORMC, Kandy Belman, Central Florida’s Action News.”

  The anchor thanked her and Kandy held her spot. She stared into the lens and waited.

  “You’re clear,” said the producer. “Nice work, Kandy. Thanks. You’re clear from the show too. The desk will follow up. Be careful coming home.”

  Kandy gave the lens a thumbs-up and a half-hearted smile. She disconnected the phone and unclipped the microphone. Then she moved to the camera and pushed a button on the device connected to its rear. That device, which held a half dozen cell phone cards, was what transmitted her signal back to the station.

  As she deconstructed her equipment and took it back to her station vehicle, Kandy watched the ER entrance. She wondered if this was as serious as it appeared to be. People always panicked. It was their nature to overreact. The idea that people would flock to emergency rooms en masse wasn’t a big surprise. But was this different? Did people have a right to be worried?

  Kandy had been doing this a long time. She had a sense for the overblown and the truly newsworthy. Something in her gut, something unsettling and gnawing, told her this was bad and it would only get worse. Much worse.

  CHAPTER 12

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  ORLANDO, FLORIDA

  Mike sat with his elbows on his knees. Eyes closed, he was awake but in that weird space between sleep and consciousness. The door to the exam room opened and closed. A deep voice drove him from that distant, calm place where his mind rested and landed him back in the clinic.

  Brice was on a hospital bed, sitting up with paper-covered pillows behind his lower back. Bandages covered the cuts on his face and arms.

  “I’m Dr. Auman,” said the newcomer. “I’m sorry it took so long to see you.”

  The doctor stood at the sink opposite the hospital bed. He pumped liquid soap onto his hands and lathered them up to the wrists and ran them under the faucet, lathering the soap before cleaning it off. Plucking a couple of paper towels from a white metal dispenser above the sink, he dried his hands, then pulled a pair of latex gloves from an open cardboard box and slid them onto his hands.

  “I’ve already looked at your chart,” said Auman, tapping his foot onto the lever of a trash can. The lid flipped up and he dumped the paper towels into the bin. “You have a concussion. No doubt about that.”

  Auman’s voice was so deep it sounded like a musical instrument. His breaths were deep and audible. He was a tall man who hunched at his shoulders. His hair was combed to one side but was unkempt. Heavy, black-framed glasses sat on the bridge of his nose and made his dark eyes appear larger than they were. He offered his gloved hand to Brice and shook it, then glanced over his shoulder at Mike. “Are you related? Brother? Partner? Husband?”

  “Just a friend.”

  Auman nodded and shifted his attention to Brice. “You’re okay with your friend being here? I don’t want to violate your privacy. Anything we discuss is—”

  Brice waved him off. “It’s fine. Mike’s cool. He got me here, so I’m good with him hearing whatever you say. No problem.”

  Auman eyed Mike again and reached for a wheeled stool. He planted his fingers on it and moved it across the floor toward him. He straddled it and sat down, flicking the tails of his lab coat over the rear. “You want the good news or the bad news? I’m happy to start with either. I’ll do a little workup here as I talk.”

  The doctor paused. A smile spread across his face.


  “I’m kidding,” he said. “I always start with that. Loosens things up.”

  Brice furrowed his brow and frowned, glancing over at Mike.

  “I don’t mean to scare you,” said Auman, apparently sensing Brice’s discomfort. “The good is good. The bad has nothing to do with your injuries. Not directly.”

  Brice shrugged. “Good news, I guess?”

  Auman nodded. “The good news is you’re the only person I’ve seen today who doesn’t think he’s infected with the Scourge. And from the blood tests we’ve run, you don’t have any infections.”

  The doctor flashed a penlight in one of Brice’s eyes and then the other. He slid the penlight back into his lab coat pocket and then rolled to the wall to grab a mounted otoscope. He attached a black cone to the end of it and took Brice’s chin in one hand, turning his ear to the scope.

  “I didn’t think there was a test for the Scourge,” said Brice.

  Auman peered into Brice’s ear canal. “There isn’t per se. No vaccines, no curative drugs. It doesn’t respond to antibiotics. But that’s not what I mean. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Brice narrowed his eyes, squinting with confusion. “Three,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’re not showing an elevated WBC count, which is indicative of an infection,” said the doctor. “When your body is fighting an infection, it produces white blood cells, what we call leukocytes. Your count isn’t elevated, at least not beyond a normal range.”

  “What’s normal?” asked Brice. He turned his head to the other side.

  “Anywhere from four thousand to ten thousand,” said Dr. Auman. “You’re at eight thousand and change. It’s fine. We’ll need to break it down further to know anything more than that. But at first blush you’re fine.”

  Auman took a reflex hammer from a drawer behind him and motioned for Brice to swing his legs over the edge of the table. He tapped the patella tendon on both knees. Both legs kicked in response.

  “So that’s good,” said Mike.

  The doctor nodded but qualified it with a shrug. “To a point. We ran a CBC, a complete blood count. Some results we get in minutes. Others can take hours. Initial indications are good. Stand for me.”

  Brice dropped from the bed table and stood on his bare feet, keeping his focus on the doctor. “What else?”

  The doctor stood for a moment and pressed down on Brice’s shoulders. He asked Brice to lift one foot and then the other. “How’s your balance?”

  “Okay,” said Brice. “I still have a headache, but the ringing is gone and my vision isn’t blurry. I feel pretty normal right now.”

  Auman nodded but showed no expression. He sat down on the stool and motioned for Brice to hop back onto the bed. Brice swung his legs up and propped the pillows behind his back again.

  “Your concussion is what we’d call severe,” Auman said. “Concussions have three grades, from mild to moderate to severe. You’re between moderate and severe. A grade one has no loss of consciousness. You reported that you were knocked out and have loss of memory surrounding the time of injury. Plus you report some lingering dizziness, ringing in your ears, confusion. That rules out grades one and two.”

  Brice frowned. “That’s part of the good news?”

  “Yes, actually,” said Auman. “There’s no skull fracture. That’s positive. And you haven’t vomited. Also good. CT scan is negative. MRI would be helpful, but that’s not possible today. What I can say is that you’ll have headaches and sensitivity to light for a few days. There’s a protocol for severe concussions, though I’m not sure I can prescribe it.”

  The doctor’s cryptic admission hung in the air. Only his heavy breathing filled the space. A moment later he explained, “I wouldn’t suggest you sit in a dark room doing nothing while you recover,” said Auman. “It’s not safe.”

  “What’s not safe?” asked Mike.

  The doctor spun on his stool. The wheels rolled on the solid flooring, and the ball bearings in the rotating stool scraped. He pushed the heavy frames up the bridge of his nose and blinked behind the thick lenses. “This disease…the Scourge, or pneumonic plague, or black plague, or whatever they want to call it, is a bad thing. It’s going to get worse. I’m telling every one of my patients who aren’t sick yet to get out.”

  “Get out of what?” asked Brice.

  The doctor rolled his feet onto his heels and pushed. The stool moved back away from the exam table, making it easier for him to address both members of his audience at once.

  Auman looked toward the door as if he expected someone to be listening on the other side of it. He lowered his voice despite having moved away from Mike and Brice. “This is my last day here,” he said. “I’m not taking a chance. My job is to help sick people. I can’t help them, not the ones with the plague. For more than a week I’ve been seeing the numbers of people with the symptoms escalate. Mind you, I’ve been inoculated against everything. None of that is any good against the Scourge. If I don’t already have it, now’s a good time to get out. If I do, it’s a good time to spend my remaining days with my family.”

  Mike sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He crossed one leg over the other and tilted his head to one side. “Why are you telling us this? Seems kinda weird. We don’t know you. You don’t know us.”

  Brice’s eyes danced between Mike and Auman like he was watching a tennis match.

  The doctor sat up and scratched the underside of his chin. Then he looked at his watch. “That’s fair. I guess it is weird. But it’s the end of my shift and I’m leaving. Leaving for good. So I guess I felt like I had to tell somebody. I guess I’d regret it if I didn’t make the same suggestion to someone who appeared healthy. You know, part of my oath is to remember that I’m part of society. I have an obligation to my fellow human beings, those with sound mind and body as well as the infirm.”

  Mike considered this. Yeah, it was strange that Auman would confide in them. It made sense that a doctor about to abandon his responsibilities to the sick would try to balance that with doing a good deed for the healthy.

  The men were quiet for a moment.

  “Either of you prepared?” Auman asked.

  “What do you mean?” asked Mike. “Prepared for what? The Scourge?”

  Auman nodded. “Exactly. I don’t talk about this much, and my wife thinks I’m nuts, but I’ve been planning for years. I’ve got BOBs at home for her, me, our three kids. They’re ready to go.”

  “BOBs?” Brice repeated.

  Mike knew what the doctor meant. He didn’t answer though, content to let Auman do the talking.

  “Bug-out bags,” said Auman, counting on his fingers. “Backpacks with fire-starters, water filtration, compasses, knives, multi-tools, first aid kits, tents, sleeping bags, fire blankets—”

  Brice adjusted a pillow underneath his lower back. “Fire blankets?”

  Auman waved his hand like he was shooing away a fly. He chuckled. “They’re all-purpose. Any kind of disaster or TEOTWAWKI event.”

  “TEOTWAWKI?” Mike echoed. He thought he’d heard the word before but couldn’t place it. “What’s that?”

  The doctor’s eyes widened with excitement. It was like he’d dropped the lure and they’d bitten, and he was setting the hook. “It’s an acronym for The End Of The World As We Know It.”

  An old rock song from the late 1980s popped into Mike’s head. He remembered it because his mother had liked the song. His father had not and made it clear during a cross-country trip from Pendleton to Lejeune when he was seven years old. It was from a band called R.E.M.

  His father called it trash. Mike never thought it was trash. He’d sought out the song at a vinyl record store when in high school. He’d found an old recording of the song and listened to it over and over. He never played the B-side, and he’d never understood the depth of the lyrics until now. Sitting here in Dr. Auman’s office, he didn’t feel fine.

  “You’re a preppe
r,” said Mike. “One of those people who thinks the world is ending and get ready for it. I’ve read about people in Texas who have bunkers, live off the grid, and have stockpiles of food and weapons.”

  The doctor chuckled. “We don’t call ourselves preppers. That’s what others call us. It’s pejorative. We’re just people who prepare. We’re self-reliant and believe the government isn’t going to be there to help us. In some cases, we even think they might be working against us.”

  “You have a bunker?” asked Brice.

  “No,” said Auman. “I’ve got land though. It’s off the beaten path. I’m headed there tonight. I’m getting out of Dodge, so to speak. I suggest you two do the same. Find somewhere to go that’s far away from people. Avoid population centers.”

  Mike and Brice exchanged looks. Mike imagined that Brice had to wonder if he was still hallucinating. It was like the scene in a movie where some random character, not critical to the plot, shows up with valuable information to propel the story forward, and then disappears.

  The doctor slapped his large hands on his thighs and pushed himself to his feet. Leaving the stool in its place, he moved to the door. “I’d write you a prescription for headache medicine,” he said, “but you’d never get it filled. The pharmacies are crazy. Any over-the-counter drug is good. You could use Tylenol, Advil, whichever you like. Try not to use plain aspirin, and don’t use a migraine medicine with aspirin in it. Avoid television and computers if you can. No video games if you’re into that. Truly, the best thing is rest. Like I said, though, you should get out of here. Find somewhere in the middle of nowhere, at least until the bulk of this thing dies off.”

  “How long could that be?” asked Mike.

  The doctor shrugged. “Who knows? I’m not leaving my land until the food runs out, and that’s at least two years from now.”