It did cross his mind, as a soldier waved him forward, closer to the front of the line, what had happened to Marcus Battle? Had he survived the Scourge? That smug Battle was indestructible in a comic book sort of way.
CHAPTER 11
MARCH 13, 2033
SCOURGE +163 DAYS
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Colonel Whittenburg rubbed his chin. He’d said nothing in more than a minute. Now he spun in the chair behind his desk and leaned over to pull open a drawer.
With a thunk, he set a large glass bottle on the desk and two shot glasses beside it. He popped open the top to the bottle and poured the soft brown liquid, capped the bottle and slid one of the shot glasses across the desk to Gwendolyn Sharp. The colonel toasted her and tossed back his shot with a flick of his wrist, slammed the glass onto the hard oak and winced.
Gwendolyn picked up her glass and toasted her boss. “No lime or salt? I like to lick it, suck it and then slam it.”
He laughed heartily and undid the button at the collar of his pale green shirt. Uncapping the bottle, he poured another shot for himself. Accidentally or on purpose, he overfilled the glass and the tequila spilled onto the oak, leaching across its glossy surface.
“I haven’t seen a lime in months,” he said. “Salt is at a premium given its preservative qualities for meat. You should be thankful for the anejo. It’s almost as rare as smart people these days.”
“Or people at all,” she said with a wry smile.
She brought the glass to her lips and inhaled the strong aroma. Gwendolyn couldn’t remember the last time she’d had tequila. Vodka? Sure. Whiskey? Frequently. But not tequila. Not even mescal.
It burned her lips and tongue as she took the shot in a single gulp. Her head buzzed.
“Touché,” said Colonel Whittenburg.
He looked down at his desk and noticed the spilled tequila worming its way toward an open file. Quickly, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a paper napkin, another luxury and swiped the desk dry. He crumpled the napkin in his hand and his eyes fell back to the folder. “If what you’re telling me is true,” he said, “we’ve struck gold. This is months, if not years, ahead of schedule.”
Gwendolyn wiggled her glass, set it down and slid it across the desk. “It’s true.”
Colonel Whittenburg obliged, filling her glass, careful not to spill this time. He eyed a photograph on his desk. Other than the bottle, a wireless keyboard, twin flat-panel monitors and a nameplate, the framed photograph was the only thing on the broad oak desk.
The black-and-white photograph featured a younger Major Whittenburg standing with his hands on the shoulders of an attractive, svelte woman who sat ramrod straight in front of him. On her lap was a child, two or three years old. Whittenburg and the woman smiled with their eyes. The child grinned, his eyes looking off camera.
The colonel reached out and positioned the frame so that Gwendolyn could see it more clearly. She didn’t touch the shot glass.
The colonel fiddled with a thick silver band on his left ring finger. “They’re both gone.”
Gwendolyn frowned. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “You didn’t kill them. The boy died in Syria two years ago. Nineteen. Enlisted right out of high school. I wanted him to go to West Point. His mother wanted him to study art history at Sewanee or some other liberal arts enclave. He defied both of us.”
His hands ran across the oak, his palms wiping imaginary dust from the surface. He leaned forward and back in the chair, its joints creaking. “Ambushed near the Turkish border. Bad call by the sergeant. Should have called for air support. Didn’t. Whole squad died. The rest of the platoon tried to help. Half of them came home draped in flags too.”
The air in the room seemed almost too thin to breathe. Gwendolyn stared at the untouched drink, not able to look into the colonel’s glistening eyes.
“My wife died a week into the Scourge. She was an ER nurse. Never had a chance.”
“What was her name?”
“Kay.”
“And your son?”
“Junior.”
He waved a hand at the photograph. He lifted his chin and looked down his nose at her. Then he shifted his gaze toward the other end of the office, staring at a round table with four chairs. The table was empty, the chairs slid underneath.
“I tell you this so you understand a little bit more about me. I’m not doing this to save my family, to create a better world for my grandchildren. I won’t have any grandchildren. I’m doing this because I believe in it. This world is at its tipping point.”
He swung his hips in his chair, swiveling the seat. It creaked. “Hell, the world was already leaning in the wrong direction. Too many people, too little to sustain them. This plague was a course correction. It was God’s way of saying, ‘Whoa. Slow down. Back up.’”
The colonel pulled the frame away from her and sighed. He narrowed his gaze, his brow knitted. “The work we do here, Dr. Sharp, will shape the next generation and the next and the one after. If we can flip the script on this nasty bug and make it work for us, we can short-circuit wars before they start. Before nineteen-year-olds die in an ambush.”
Gwendolyn took the shot and downed it. It burned less than the first.
“Another?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Two’s my limit.”
“Cheap date.”
She snickered and rubbed her lips with her thumb. They tingled and felt foreign against her own touch.
The colonel slapped the table with his hands. “Enough melancholy. Let’s get back to the issue at hand.”
“Let’s.”
The colonel opened the drawer under his desk and dropped the bottle into it. He took the glasses and moved them next to the monitors, leaving the desk open between them. With one hand he reached over and planted his fingers on the file folder. He slid it across the oak and tapped the top page with his finger.
“These results, the work your Dr. Treadgold is doing, suggest we can expect when the disease is about to morph. Which means we know enough about it to facilitate a change in its structure?”
Gwendolyn tilted her head from side to side. “Not yet. That’s the goal. But the results you see there are accurate. We’ve replicated this multiple times. The algorithm is infallible.”
Lips pursed, he nodded. “Good. Good. I want you to work toward a predictive model based on artificially induced evolutions in the disease.”
“Okay.”
“We’re working toward having something deployable in the next five years.”
“Deployable?”
The colonel scratched his nose. “Field ready.”
“Overseas?”
“TBD. Suffice it to say we’d deploy it on non-US soil.”
She considered the semantics. Her eyes widened. “Texas?”
A smile snaked across Whittenburg’s face. He said nothing.
“Is it that bad there?”
The colonel pushed back from his desk and stood. He walked around the table, trailing his fingers on the oak. He moved to within a foot of Gwendolyn and sat on the edge of the desk closest to her. This gave him the advantage of looking down on her as he spoke. The colonel was a big man and enjoyed using his size as a tactical advantage.
“This isn’t public yet,” he said. “It will be in the coming days. Keep it under your hat until then.”
“Of course.” Gwendolyn had the highest security level available to a civilian at the CDC. There was nothing he could tell her she wouldn’t keep secret.
“Texas remains unstable. It’s a drain on our resources. We can’t keep policing the entire border that stretches more than fourteen hundred miles from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Arkansas and Louisiana.” He crossed one leg over the other. “We’re building a wall.”
“A wall?”
“It’s a Homeland Security project. It’ll separate Texas from the United States. Damn republic didn’t want to listen to the president when he ordere
d National Guard deployment, let ’em twist out there in the breeze. Behind a wall.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand the point. Aren’t there bigger things to concern ourselves with? Now that the primary threat of contagion is past, there’s the rebuilding to do in our cities. People need jobs; they need food.”
The colonel lifted a finger and pointed as if she’d made his argument for him. His eyes widened as if he’d had an epiphany. “Exactly. This wall will kill multiple birds with a single stone. Or with walls of stone, as it were. Not only do we physically put a barrier between us and a territory that is rapidly falling under the control of drug runners, thieves and ne’er-do-wells, but we create a jobs program in the process.”
“Jobs program?”
“Yes. It’s like the Works Progress Administration, the old WPA, in the 1930s. Ninety-eight years ago, then-President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034. In the middle of a depression, he put millions back to work through government infrastructure programs. That’s what we’re doing. We’ll hire every able-bodied adult who wants to work. They’ll get paid with rations, housing for their families, free medical.”
Even if it didn’t make sense, it made sense. Gwendolyn remained silent.
“The wall will get built in record time. Once it’s complete, we don’t have to worry about Texas. They can stew in their own broth.”
“What happens to the workers after the wall is finished?”
“That’s a couple of years from now,” said the colonel. “By then the economy might stabilize a little bit. If not, we’ll come up with another program. It’s a win-win.”
“And then we deploy a plague.”
“Inside the wall. Clever, right?”
“Diabolical.”
CHAPTER 12
MARCH 13, 2033
SCOURGE +163 DAYS
ROCKLEDGE, FLORIDA
Trick McQuarry slung the backpack over his shoulders and clicked the harness at his chest. It was already warm and the sun wasn’t yet visible above the rooftops of the houses across the street.
Winter stood next to him, checking the Mossberg Patriot rifle. She slid the bolt action. “I oiled it up good for you,” she said. “It’s like butter.”
She handed him the rifle, its twenty-two-inch barrel pointed at the sky. He thanked her and took it.
“It’s loaded full,” she said. “And you got another box of .308s in your backpack. I checked. You taking the truck?”
McQuarry said, “No. Doing this on foot. It’s not too far. We need to save fuel for when we need it.”
“Good idea,” said Winter. “Be careful. Looks like you’re loaded for bear.”
McQuarry adjusted his belt, sliding a nylon pouch closer to the outside of his hip. Inside the sheath was a Kershaw Brawler. Its blade was shaped for piercing. All black, it was sleek and a good everyday carry. There was a belt clip on the back of its handle. McQuarry liked the pouch better, given the possibility of the clip catching and slowing the Brawler’s deployment.
On his opposite hip, underneath his untucked long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, he wore a Taurus G2s Slim. It was a nine millimeter without the bulk or weight of other weapons that fired the same sized ammunition. It was a cheap, decent gun. Certainly reliable enough in a pinch. It carried seven plus one in the chamber. He had an extra magazine in the back pocket of his jeans.
Cooper James pushed through the front door. His pack was slung over a shoulder like a high schooler. He wore a Glock 19 on one hip and carried a pump-action shotgun in his right hand. The Rusk twins followed him outside. They looked greasier than usual.
Winter stepped close to McQuarry. “Trick, you sure you don’t want me coming with you? I could do good.”
Trick kissed her forehead. “Nah. I appreciate it. I know you’d do good. You need to hold down the fort here.”
Dickie walked around the side of the house and into the front yard. He had a rifle slung over his shoulder and a nylon cinch pack on his back. The pack was a freebie from some radio contest promotion a year earlier. It had the radio station logo printed on the back along with the phone number for an animal rescue. The lettering was peeling.
McQuarry furrowed his brow. “You’re bringing that? You don’t have a bigger pack?”
Cooper James and the Rusk twins pivoted to stare at Dickie, whose face flushed pink. His eyes darted from person to person.
“I do,” he said, “but I don’t want to carry too much. I’m bringing only what I need. I got water, a couple of energy bars, some extra ammo, a flashlight.”
McQuarry shrugged. “Suit yourself. C’mon, let’s head out.”
“What about Neil and the others?” asked Dickie.
Cooper James adjusted the pack on his back. “What about ’em?”
Dickie frowned and looked at his boots. “Nothing. I was just wondering what their plan was.”
“Search the neighborhood,” said McQuarry. “We’ll find out what they know when we get back.”
Dickie pursed his lips and nodded. He looped his thumb under the rifle sling and marched toward the street.
Cooper James kissed both women on the mouth, which both answered McQuarry’s question about his relationship with the women and sparked new ones. There’d be plenty of time for Q and A on their journey toward the island. It was a good hour to the 520 bridge and the first checkpoint.
McQuarry leaned over and kissed his woman. Winter kissed him back.
“See you, Bonnie,” he said.
She winked. “See you, Clyde.”
The march through the neighborhood toward the highway was uneventful. The streets were empty; windows hid behind shutters or curtains; houses appeared abandoned.
They weren’t. People simply stayed to themselves. It was the best way to survive. Born from the fear of contracting the Scourge, isolation became the new normal even after the threat of the disease was virtually gone.
McQuarry wondered if he and Winter might be better off alone. They could hide and wouldn’t have to worry about fending off the land barons bent on building new micro-societies with cultlike followings.
Could be after this scouting expedition it would be what he decided to do. It wasn’t that he was afraid of confrontation or violence—he’d proven that time and again—it was that he was tired of it. Months of scavenging, giving in to his basest instincts, wore on him.
It wasn’t guilt, it was exhaustion. Being a bad guy took more effort than being good.
Cooper James pulled even with him when they reached Highway 1 outside Pine Cove Village. There was a Publix Super Market and a Pizza Hut across the highway from them.
“Should we check the Publix?” asked Cooper. “See if they got anything of value?”
McQuarry shrugged. “Why not? It’s on the way.”
He had no interest in checking the Publix. Without stepping inside, his gut told him the place was empty of everything but wiring and framing studs. Maybe even the wiring was gone.
But there was no harm in placating Cooper. Let him think he had good ideas. Let him believe he was a right hand. That could be helpful.
They crossed the highway, maneuvering in between two abandoned cars stripped of their tires and interior seating. Huffing, Dickie kept pace behind them.
The parking lot was empty of cars. It was an easy walk across the asphalt to the store. Its facade was a mix of orange, yellow and beige. Painted concrete or stucco lifted over a yellow-orange metal awning, which slanted toward the curb that fronted the building. Bright green letters announced the store’s name and underneath the awning was a tangled collection of grocery carts. They were spilled onto each other like spent dominos and chained together.
The ATM to the right of the entrance was smashed. A large hole occupied the spot where the digital display once sat. The glass doors were open. Sheets of plywood covered the windows, which ran the length of the front of the entrance. A mélange of graffiti covered the wood such that none of the individual artwork was distinguishable from
one another.
Without hesitating, they crossed the threshold into the market, a foul odor washing over them as they did. It was ripe and pungent, like rotten fruit or spoiled meat. It was a mix of the two.
All three men drew their weapons. McQuarry and Dickie shouldered their rifles. Cooper held his shotgun belly high.
The store was powerless. The only light came through the opaque skylights that dotted the unfinished ceiling. It gave the store the dim, hazy appearance somewhere above darkness.
They stood at the entrance between the doors and the registers. McQuarry let his eyes adjust and swept the area in front of him with the Mossberg, listening for any movement.
Nothing.
He spoke above a whisper. “All right. We should fan out. Cover more ground faster. It shouldn’t take long to find out if there’s anything worth taking.”
Cooper James nodded and motioned across his body with the shotgun. “I’ll take the left.”
Without waiting for approval, he moved in that direction. McQuarry jutted his chin straight ahead.
“You take the middle,” he said, ordering Dickie toward the central aisles, which ran from the front to the back of the store. “I’ll go right.”
McQuarry pivoted and crouched. He moved heel to toe toward the right side of the store and a reflective sign that read “Customer Service.”
Ears pricked, he took in his surroundings as he moved deliberately toward the counter on the far side of the building. It was dark beyond the counter. McQuarry couldn’t see anything past it. Even as he approached the light was too dim. He stepped across torn plastic bags strewn across the floor, almost slipping on one as it slid on the tile floor underneath his boot heel.
To his left, he passed the last of the register lines. It was a self-service line. The flat-screen display was smashed. A coiled electric cable dangled from a port next to the display, wires tangled at its end. The handheld scanner was missing, as was the credit card machine. Only the stub of a mount stood next to the embedded scanner/scale.
He reached his destination and lifted his rifle as he leaned over the waist-high laminate counter. Narrowing his eyes to try to see better in the dark, he saw papers scattered across the floor. Blank red and white lottery forms fanned out on the counter, crumpled and torn coin wrappers piled on top. The register, whose cash drawer was built into the counter, was open and empty.
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 11
