Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2

by Elizabeth McLaughlin

  What emergency rations hadn’t already been depleted during the mad rush to feed a thousand people coming out of pods at the same time were evenly divided and distributed to everyone in quarantine. Food production went into overdrive; they claimed most plants that we had farmed for use in rudimentary medicine. The little that was left over would supplement the food. The most caloric plant, a large crop of potatoes that would be ready to harvest within the week, was given its own troupe of guards. They worked in shifts. Absolutely no one was allowed without prior authorization. Tolerating any kind of theft was unconscionable; let one person steal their food and the rest would abandon the fragile order we had established. I gave the guards clearance to use lethal force if necessary. Fiona worked herself to the bone to plant as many new seedlings as the hydroponics would allow. So strong was her concentration that I had to send someone to make sure she slept and ate at least twice a day. We could break into supplements and dried ingredients to keep the rest of the shelter healthy. I couldn’t tell you how many hours I spent at my desk trying to work out the math, but it seemed like the solution would hold. For now.

  Anyone who could tolerate it was asked—or ordered—to ration their meals for the time being. Until we could get things up to speed, there was going to be a dearth of food and water. I was the first one to sign up. Others came forward as well, some less willingly than others, spurred to surrender their food. As the days passed, I took to guzzling water and tea instead of a full meal. No matter how much liquid I drank in, the growling of my stomach was always there. It was affecting others, too. The reactions to the rationing were varied. Some people simply were a little quick to snap at you. Others slid into full blown aggression. Only the threat of the virus kept them from starting any major conflicts. I’m sure there were a lot of holes punched in a lot of walls.

  The infirmary went from nearly empty to overflowing overnight. No one was allowed in or out with the exception of the medical team. I commandeered what had been my room for reading and chess and ripped it apart with Marcus and Eliza’s help. We set up fifteen beds as best we could inside and stocked the place with food and water. The medical team was instructed to work in four hour shifts. Four hours working, eight hours for food, leisure time, and sleep. It was made clear to them that disobeying this rule would not be tolerated. A few protested, but I reminded them that they had a choice. Keep themselves healthy so they could save lives, or risk falling prey to the virus and not being able to help anyone. That certainly made any would be heroes think twice. I admired their spirit but it was imperative to take care of their own physical and mental health as well. Reflecting on how few hours I was sleeping a night these days, I could relate. I vowed to follow the same schedule, telling myself it was for the sake of convenience, but it was really for my sanity.

  Gabriel had retreated from his campaign of harassment for the time being. His loss in the election had no doubt frustrated him into putting together some ridiculous scheme. All the better for me, I had enough to fill my time without looking over my shoulder. Work was being done on how to best isolate individuals and families from exposure. My rudimentary filter idea had caught on and high thread-count cloth was at a premium. Some suggested putting the printers to work making filters but I passed on the idea. Installing proper filters in the air circulation system would take too long and on consulting the doctors, wouldn’t properly protect most people. In addition to protection, research into how to treat the virus accelerated at a rapid pace. It was established that the virus was indeed airborne, but that surface transmission appeared to be very low. Thus, thousands of years old measures were implemented. Masks and hygiene were the best defenses we had to offer.

  There was a limited supply of UV-C robots so they were dedicated to the high contact points in the shelter. Restrooms, the mess hall, and the area around the entrance to the infirmary were subjected to regular baths with the powerful lights. To my inexperienced mind it didn’t make much sense as to how shining a light on something could make it any safer but the logic was sound. If the sun outside could cause a sunburn, it made sense that UV light could kill viruses.

  By and large everyone seemed to be happy to follow instructions, but as time passed I became more aware a degree of unrest. It was getting difficult to ignore the murmurs and glares I was getting anytime I passed Gabriel’s remaining fan club. After the results of the election I expected the opposition to settle down. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was wishful thinking. Every day I heard whispered epithets. Rumors were started about a secret hoard of food and supplies I was supposedly keeping for myself and my family. Questions about my real motivations in freeing everyone from the virtual world turned into accusations. On the rare occasions that I encountered Gabriel in person, he never spoke but only grinned and tapped his left wrist with his index finger.

  Tempis Fugit. Time is fleeting. Didn’t I know it.

  The day came when I could take sitting in my room no longer. It wasn’t possible for me to get a run in like I used to, but I could at the very least go for a walk. I donned the thick mask that had been allotted to me and picked a random direction. With each step I concentrated on my breathing, filling my lungs as much as I could. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Soon I entered a meditative state. The cadence of my steps played in synch with the beating of my heart. My breath added its own tune. I was a one man symphony of concentration.

  “Wish we could go back.” I heard a voice float down the hall. I stopped dead in my tracks and flattened my profile against the wall. The voices sounded like they were coming from the front door of someone’s quarters. Great. More people breaking quarantine. Just what we needed.

  “This is some real horseshit.” The speakers sounded vaguely familiar to me but I couldn't quite place them. Someone I had encountered before but not frequently enough to leave an impression. “I’m still not convinced that idiot Alvaro had any right ending the simulation. It's not like Gabriel couldn't have just killed us without letting him know. Something doesn’t add up.”

  “I don't know about you but I'd rather be dead in there than waiting to choke to death on my own spit out here. Did you see the body they brought out the other day? Thing looked like someone had picked it up and wrung out every drop of blood.”

  “Yeah, I saw it. I never really thought about it too much, but if I’ve gotta go, sign me up for any way but that. Look, that guy George says that if he won the election, he would have put us back.”

  “Damn shame he didn't win. Hell, it’s a shame he didn’t beat Alvaro to a pulp and just take the spot.”

  “Never too late, my friend, never too late.”

  I rolled my eyes. First they had broken the only minutes of peace I had garnered for myself since this ordeal began and now this crap? Anyone who thought that Gabriel could crush me like a flower had another thing coming. Perhaps that was the plan. Wait until I could be found alone in a dark corner and take out his rage with his fists. How unoriginal. Still, I had to be on my guard. Gabriel’s grasp on reality was tenuous at best when he was confined to virtual reality. No doubt the experience of being human hadn’t made that grip any firmer. We had to leave this place before he lost it completely.

  Eliza tracked me down later in my walkabout. She wasn’t happy.

  “We have a problem.”

  I sighed. “Of course we do. What is it now.”

  “Food production. With the increased demand for medical staff and the lack of regular food distribution, we’re having trouble keeping up production. The healthy need to eat and I can’t feed the sick the regular 3D printed stuff. Too much of it ends up in buckets.”

  What a delightful detail. “What do you want me to do? Head into the mess and whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies?”

  “You subsisted on protein enriched snot for how many years? I need your recipe.” She stood in front of me and crossed her arms. “Cut out the moody bullshit, man. I’ve got enough crap to deal with without you being a whiny bitch.”

&n
bsp; I smirked. “You can find the recipe in the database, you know that. And I’m not a whiny bitch. You try dealing with this shit.”

  Eliza stepped forward and squeezed my arm. “Jacob, I need the help. You’ve spent most of your time hidden away with the medical team. You aren’t exactly the favorite person around here. You’ve ordered close to a thousand people into indefinite quarantine without any information on how or when it will end. People aren’t stupid, dear father-in-law. If you don’t make some efforts to reach out, whatever they think is going to become reality. If you want to avoid having the grumbling turn into calls for your removal you need to make a publicity tour.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “You want me to go around and wave at the common people. During an epidemic. Not exactly sure that will ‘inspire’ anything. I’ll look like a crazy man.”

  “I’m trying to help you gain back some good will.”

  “I’m not here to be their friend, Eliza!” She had no idea what it was like to have this kind of responsibility resting on her shoulders.

  “No.” She reached a hand towards me and then thought better of it. “You’re not. But you are here to lead them. How can they possibly follow you if they don’t know you?”

  God damn it. I really hate when she had a point.

  “Fine.”

  Eliza and I sat at a table in the center of the mess and discussed how to create the bare-bones slop I had survived on for so long. She had timed the conversation to coincide with the rotation of families coming in to retrieve their afternoon meal. Through masks and face shields I saw expressions of surprise, happiness, and confusion. Eliza had been correct in her assumptions. Running down the details of converting over the 3D printers to produce the needed nutrients took all of ten minutes. Actually executing the programming took another fifteen, but I stuck around as long as I could, checking in on people. Eliza was right. The people wouldn’t—couldn’t—place their trust in a leader that hid himself away from the world. My reception was varied. Some people stopped by to chat, asking about Fiona and Marcus’s health. A few daring souls bent down to taste the snot coming down the conveyor belt and shared their feedback, most of which was sympathetic. Sharing a moment of my lonely ordeal cracked the ice between us. A little touch of shared sacrifice that we could all relate to.

  Feeling high from my newfound likability, I thought it might be the right thing to do if I contacted families of the deceased and see if spiritual counseling or rites might comfort them. If I couldn’t perform them myself, I would find someone who could. I had been too focused on serving the living when it was just as important to serve the dead. I got the list of those who had passed from Dr. Naylor and scrolled through it. It was long. Too long. I hadn’t realized how many we had lost, nor how quickly. The best way to go about it was to start at the top and go down.

  My showing up at the relatives of the recently departed was met with mixed reception. I had doors slammed in my face plenty of times. One man even threatened to rip my head off if I thought that saying a few words was going to make up for the death of his father. I didn’t take it personally. I would probably say the same thing. On my sixth knock, I came across an older man who had joined the rest of his family in their quarters. To my surprise, they invited me in warmly. The younger man of the house, presumably the man’s son, explained to me that they had just lost his mother less than twelve hours ago.

  “Sir, are you her husband?” I addressed the old man as gently as I could. He nodded, his face unreadable. I understood why. “You were together a long time?” Another nod and he grimaced. “How many years?”

  “Fifty,” the man whispered. He coughed as he tried to regain his composure.

  “That’s a good amount of time. I’m sure you love her very much. What’s your name, sir?” The difference between ‘love’ and ‘loved’ was time and acceptance. One didn’t have to wonder; no one would be ready to accept their spouse’s death so soon after it happened.

  “Abram.”

  “We’re Jewish,” the man’s daughter-in-law piped up. “And we haven’t had the chance to perform any blessings. I don’t know of anyone in the shelter who is a rabbi, either.”

  “I’m afraid that’s probably true. I don’t believe we’ve had an abundance of spiritual leaders for a while now. I’m an atheist myself but I was raised in a Christian household. I don’t know if any of that can help you, but I’d like to offer myself to say a few words or bear witness if it will bring solace.” I placed my hand on the old man’s shoulder, feeling his thin frame underneath the surgical gown. He was either the luckiest man alive to have escaped the virus or the most ill-fated to have survived it. “Abram, if I can’t find a rabbi, is there a way I can be of assistance?”

  “You have to cremate the bodies, right?” the son spoke.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s against our faith!” Abram spat. “She has to be buried.”

  “Dad, we talked about this. There’s nowhere for us to bury her. Even if there was, she passed from a terrible sickness. It would be cruel of us to put others at risk for our traditions, no matter how important they are.”

  Abram’s hands balled into fists but he remained calm. “I understand. It just..I just want what’s best for her.”

  “I’ll do it.” The whole family turned to look at me. “I’ll cremate the remains for you. It’s not a perfect solution, but this way you don’t have to…”

  “We wouldn’t be participating.” Abram’s son finished for me. “I believe that may be helpful for us Jacob.” He turned to his father. “I’m sorry, I never introduced myself. My name is Lucas, and this is my wife Rachel. My mother’s name was Esther.”

  I smiled through my mask. “A fine name for a fine man. Lucas was my father’s name. It’s clear that yours raised a strong man. It’s a pleasure to meet the both of you formally.”

  I took my leave to find out where Esther’s remains were being kept. When I explained the situation to the medical technician tasked with keeping the body quarantined, he wasn’t happy. We argued for a few minutes but I eventually pulled rank on the kid and retrieved the gurney from the freezer we had commandeered. The body was still in the state it had been when she passed. Blood and mucus crusted Esther’s face and more blood was collected around scratches that dotted her arms and legs. Thank god the field hospital was off-limits. If I had to witness this I don’t know that I would have had the strength to continue. I sent the med tech to fetch a cloth and some warm water. Being careful not to expose any of my own skin to the body, I carefully cleaned Esther’s remains before sealing them again.

  The march to the cremation chamber was uneventful. When I returned to Abram’s family quarters I found two small children accompanying the adults. Abram’s grandchildren. The kids smiled up at me but sobered up quickly at the sight of their grandmother’s body. I let Abram lead the impromptu procession. His son and daughter-in-law took the rear position and I motioned the grand-children to stand on either side of me behind their parents. After bidding the matriarch of their family goodbye, I took Esther’s body into the cremation chamber. As I shut her remains into the oven, I knew that this would be far from the last time a family had to say goodbye.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” Dr. Rickman had called me into her office an hour prior but a patient had gone into respiratory failure and so our meeting had been delayed. I appreciated that she was taking the time at all.

  “I’ll take the bad news first.” Things had already gone to hell, how much worse could it get?

  “It’s a droplet spread respiratory virus. The symptoms appear to be more severe than we thought. We weren’t able to observe it in Allison and Tarik because they died so suddenly but...”

  “But what?” An icy feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. I knew what she was about to say and I wished to god and heaven above it was something else.

  “But in...younger patients...” She hesitated before
nodding gently to herself. “In children and young adult patients we have been witnessing…an increased amount of aggression.”

  “What kind of aggression? I can’t blame them for feeling aggressive, I would be too if I got sick with this.”

  “Something more akin to rabies than a bad mood. We’re not sure if it’s from the fever or the virus itself, but it seems that when patients hit that point they start having significant disruptions in their cognitive functioning. They seem to lose all inebriation and revert to base behaviors, such as biting.” I glanced at the change to her personal protective equipment. Her surgical gown had been stuffed into two sets of nitrile gloves. In her left hand she held a face shield.

  Biting? My mind flashed back to one of my favorite old movies, 28 Days Later. It detailed a zombie outbreak in Great Britain. The only catch was that these people were very much alive, instead of stumbling and shambling they morphed into rabid shadows of their former selves. Their only motivation was to bite an uninflected human and they frequently mangled themselves trying to do so. “It’s that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  I took a deep breath, the smell of my mask sour after hours of sweat. “What’s the good news?”

  “It’s a droplet spread respiratory virus.”

  I waved my hand in front of her face. “Earth to Phoebe, you just said that. Are you feeling okay?” The joviality was most certainly inappropriate, but I was feeling spread thin and was starting to not care about propriety.