Pandora - Contagion
Page 1
MADNESS HAS GONE VIRAL
The world is not the same since the Pandoravirus outbreak changed the essence of human nature. Those affected by the disease are consumed by adrenal rage. They erupt in violence with the slightest provocation. And now, infected scientist Emma Miller is forging them into an army of merciless killers marching across America.
Emma’s twin sister, neuroscientist Isabel Miller, is desperate to avert the chaos that threatens to engulf civilization. But her team has its hands full staying one step ahead of the civil unrest that’s ravaging the country. Noah Miller, the twins’ brother, thought he had created a safe haven for his family in the mountains of Virginia—until the arrival of Emma and her infected followers proved the folly of his plans.
The Millers’ conflict is just one of many sweeping the nation. A nation divided into factions. A nation on the precipice of all-out civil war . . .
Visit us at www.kensingtonbooks.com
Also by Eric L. Harry
PANDORA: OUTBREAK
ARC LIGHT
SOCIETY OF THE MIND
PROTECT AND DEFEND
INVASION
Pandora: Contagion
Eric L. Harry
REBEL BASE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
Contents
Also by Eric L. Harry
Pandora: Contagion
Contents
Copyright
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Pandora: Resistance
Chapter 1
Meet the Author
Pandora: Outbreak
Copyright
Rebel Base Books are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Eric L. Harry
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fundraising, and educational or institutional use.
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Special Sales Manager:
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Attn. Special Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.
REBEL BASE Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
The RB logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.
First Electronic Edition: January 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-63573-015-9
ISBN-10: 1-63573-015-5
First Print Edition: January 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-63573-018-0
ISBN-10: 1-63573-018-X
Printed in the United States of America
Author’s Note
Mankind’s complex systems are both highly efficient and dangerously brittle. An average aluminum can is bought from a store shelf, taken home, consumed, dropped into a recycling bin, collected, melted down, refashioned into a new can, refilled, returned to the store shelf, and purchased again…all in 60 days. Humanity’s enormous gains in productivity, logistics, and technology have ushered in an era of plenty, of ease, and of wealth. But removing any of the essential underpinnings of modern human organization causes a cascading sequence of failures that ripple through the economy with ever compounding results. Remove all of those underpinnings, all at once, and you have mass starvation, social disorder, and population collapse. Some novels and films deal with ominous pre-apocalyptic build-ups; many more depict post-apocalyptic hellscapes. This book series attempts to describe, realistically, the time in between: the apocalypse itself.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
– W.B. Yeats
The Second Coming
Chapter 1
NORTHERN VIRGINIA
Infection Date 39, 1700 GMT (1:00 p.m. Local)
The sound of the zipper was Emma Miller’s cue. She leaned over the trucker’s lap and reached into her boot for the rusty screwdriver she had found on the side of the highway. “That’s a good girl,” said the man—fat, ugly, and missing a front tooth—who had given Emma a ride in exchange for a promise. She looked up and attempted a smile. He sensed something was amiss. She drove the rusty screwdriver through his neck up to its handle. It sank into the voids of his mouth and sinuses with surprising ease.
She extracted her crude weapon before his hands found the spurting wound. He gurgled more than screamed, bug-eyed in shock. She dried the screwdriver and her hand on his tattered cloth upholstery. The driver made animal sounds and thrashed from side to side. His gaze never left Emma, but his hands remained clutched on his neck.
Emma’s stomach rumbled. It was time for lunch. When the trucker finally slumped onto the steering wheel inert, she searched the filthy cab. The only thing of value was the man’s wallet. “Bert Walker,” his driver’s license read. Age forty-seven. From the lone photo, with its shopping-mall quality backdrop of lazy palm trees and thatched huts, she gleaned he was married to a similarly unattractive woman and had two overweight children. She took only the roughly one hundred dollars he had in cash.
Emma considered trying to drive his truck, but grinding through gears would raise too many questions. She was a petite, five-foot-four epidemiologist trying not to attract attention, spark calls to 9-1-1, or trigger a manhunt. She climbed down and headed back to the state highway from the secluded parking spot. Bert had made a mistake, she noted and committed to memory. He shouldn’t have performed his side of the bargain before her turn came. Contracts are tricky, Emma thought. She needed to discuss them with her brother Noah, who was a lawyer.
After leaving the NIH lab hours earlier, Emma had abandoned her blue mask and gloves in the woods, but she still carried her hospital-provided white plastic bag and its toiletries by the loops of its
drawstring. She knew she would have trouble passing for uninfected. Several times, the trucker had cast sidelong glances her way after replies that he found odd. And Emma also wasn’t sure just how contagious she remained. If she left a trail of infected people along the way, someone might plot her route and zero in on her location. Plus, she would have at most two hours until first symptoms appeared in her wake. She had to stay ahead of any outbreak she caused and the violence that inevitably ensued.
On reaching the highway, she walked down its shoulder but didn’t hold out her thumb. The traffic was heavy, but not bumper-to-bumper like on the Interstate out of D.C. Cars and trucks flew by without stopping. Did Emma appear strange and out-of-place? It wouldn’t take much of an incongruity for someone to phone the police. Everyone would be paranoid now that the disease had broken out in Vermont.
A large, older car, windows rolled down, passed slowly. A woman and her three kids scrutinized Emma before pulling off onto the roadside ahead. When Emma reached them, the African-American woman asked, “Did your car break down, hon?” Emma dared only a nod, not a verbal reply. “Well, hop in, then,” the woman said.
The kids were young. She needed to worry mainly about killing their mother.
Emma climbed into the front passenger seat, displacing a long-legged girl of about ten who could probably run fast. “Where you headed?” the girl’s mother asked as they drove off.
“South,” Emma dared to reply.
“I understand. Tryin’ to get…away?” She glanced at her children through the rearview mirror, then at Emma, who thought better of trying to smile and nodded again.
Wind rushed through the open windows. They probably wouldn’t catch the virus, diluted as the air was in the sedan. Maybe Emma could avoid the hassles and slight risk of killing them all. Four was a large number to do all at the same time. It highlighted her need for a better weapon to make these things go more smoothly.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Dorothy,” Emma lied in case she spared their lives. The assumed name had popped into her head out of nowhere, along with the image of a yellow brick road leading south. The origin of these mysterious thoughts, which hinted at some deeper mental processes pondering questions not yet even posed, was increasingly curious. Where did they come from, and to whom did they occur? Were they, as proposed at the NIH lab by her neuroscientist twin sister Isabel, the product of unconscious reasoning? And if so, to whom were those solutions given if not some mystical, conscious self?
“I’m Francine. And that’s Wanda, Marcus, and Brandon.”
The woman glanced over as if it were Emma’s turn to say something. “My sister’s ex-boyfriend is named Brandon,” came the thought out of nowhere. To Emma’s ear, it sounded like suitable small talk. A semblance of a conversation.
“Hear that, Brandon? I tol’ you it was a good name.”
“It’s not Marcus,” said the youngest of the three children, glaring for reasons that eluded Emma at his older brother of that name, who sat next to him, arms crossed, smirking.
“Where ya from?” Francine asked.
“Connecticut,” Emma said, not lying where she didn’t have to. That would help minimize later slipups and give her greater flexibility in choosing the time and place of their end.
“That’s close,” Francine replied. “To Vermont, I mean. How long do you guess it’ll take for the P. to get down to Connecticut?”
“Six days,” Emma replied. When Francine shot her a look, Emma appended, “More or less. I would guess.” At least she hadn’t said, per my calculations.
“Whatta you do up there in Connecticut?”
“I’m…in between jobs,” Emma replied, which was true. But something seemed off about the conversation. Emma would have to get Francine to pull over before aiming one jab at Francine’s face, then taking down the girl, then grabbing whichever boy was closest. She would probably have to chase the last one, hopefully into the woods and not down the public roadway. Or maybe she should attempt to salvage the conversation by asking a question, but what? Emma wasn’t interested in anything Francine had to say. “What, uhm… Where are you headed?” Emma asked. That sounded good, came the silent pat on the back from the enigmatic hidden voice.
Francine shot Emma another look. Something in what Emma had said, or how she had said it, sounded off. “To Atlanta,” Francine replied. “I got a cousin there with a big house. Takin’ us all in.”
“You shouldn’t go to a city,” Emma commented, but shouldn’t have. When Francine asked why not, Emma said, “When SED arrives, cities will turn quickly.” Again, not a lie.
“He’s all stocked up and everything,” Francine said, but her brow was now furrowed and she gripped and re-gripped the steering wheel. Emma’s hand edged closer to her boot. “It’s gettin’ kinda chilly,” Francine said. “Let’s close these windows up.”
“No,” Isabel said, too sharply. Too abruptly. “I mean, can we keep them cracked?”
“Sure.” They all adjusted their respective windows, alternately raising them above a howl from rushing airflow and lowering them below a squeal until the noise was tolerable. Isabel was now somewhat less certain whether the pathogen she exhaled with every breath would build in the car to levels dangerous for the susceptible family. If they got sick, the authorities would do contact tracing, inquiring about anyone they had met in the last few hours. The strange white girl, Dorothy, would sit at the top of their suspect list. But the relevant quotation—dead men tell no tales—arose from somewhere deep in her mind.
“What’s in that plastic bag?” Francine asked Emma.
They’re toiletries I was given upon my release from the National Institutes of Health after being studied for a month in their Bethesda laboratory. That was a bad answer. “It’s my toothbrush and stuff,” Emma said instead. There. That was better. Francine seemed calmer and smiled at her.
But the woman kept stealing looks at Emma. “I’m sorry, but you just look so familiar.” Francine must have seen the Homeland Security video explaining the effects of Pandoravirus horribilis by reference to its first American victim.
“I’m fairly common looking,” Emma replied, trying to avoid having to begin the killing right here and right now.
“Oh, no. You’re very pretty! Don’t ever sell yourself short, Dorothy. A girl has to have confidence, I always say. And don’t worry about losing your job. Ever’body’s gettin’ laid off these days.”
Emma surveyed Francine, then looked over her shoulder at the children. No one seemed particularly suspicious of her. “Are any of you sick?” Emma asked Francine.
“We ain’t been anywhere near Vermont!”
“No, I mean regular sick,” Emma explained.
“Oh. No. We all got good health.”
That militated in favor of not killing them. Their immune systems might successfully fight off a low-level exposure to Pandoravirus. Their odds of survival rose even higher when Marcus passed gas, Wanda berated and punched him, Brandon and Marcus shared a laugh, and Francine had everyone lower their windows before apologizing to Emma. The now doubly tainted miasma was quickly swept out by the gale.
When they reached the junction with the Interstate, which looked like a parking lot, Francine pulled over. “We gotta head west from here,” she told Emma.
It was now or never. If they were infected, how far away could Emma get before the dots connected back to her and every cop and sheriff for a hundred miles was given her description? She would have to try to do Francine with one jab, probably in through the eye socket. But if Francine flinched, it may take multiple stabs during which the kids would probably throw open their doors and scatter. There was a crowded gas station and convenience store a hundred yards away. Killing them here was not a good plan. Emma would just have to hope they hadn’t contracted the virus.
“Thank you,” Emma said, climbing out.
“Good luck!” said Francine.
“Good luck to all of you,” replied Emma.
“You see,” Emma heard Francine say to her kids as she headed off, “she was nice.”
Emma was thirsty and hungry, so she went to the convenience store, which was busy despite its nearly empty shelves. Emma got in line with a large bottle of sports drink—the only consumable liquid she could find—and a package of miniature donuts dusted with confectionary sugar. On the small TV beside the cash register, a news helicopter filmed a large, angry crowd at a Vermont blockade formed by army Humvees. The people were loud, their gestures animated. They were clearly uninfected, presumably protesting their quarantine.
“Those poor people,” said the woman in line ahead of Emma, who nodded in reply. The woman kept eyeing her warily. Could she, too, possibly have recognized Emma from the DHS video? On impulse, Emma took a knit cap from a rack and put it on. She needed to avoid interacting with people she couldn’t kill.
When the woman in front of Emma finished paying, she turned to Emma, made a face, reached up to Emma’s hat, and broke the plastic tie that attached to it a dangling price tag.
Emma left the store and resumed her march down the highway, eating her donuts and passing car after car waiting to ascend the ramp onto the Interstate. The shelter of the overpass was occupied not by the old and weathered homeless, but by the new homeless: clean-cut families and couples whose cars had died, or run out of gas, or money to buy gas. One tall man about her age, skinny, unwashed, and unkempt, fell in alongside her and said he liked her cap.
“Thank you.”
He then asked if she had any money.
“Yes,” Emma replied.
“Can I have enough to put some gas in my van?”
“No,” she answered.
He grabbed her arm to slow her up and exclaimed, “Hey!” When she looked down at his grasp, he released her. “Why so unfriendly?” he said. “A perty girl like you, I woulda thought you’d be lookin’ for somebody to hook up with. Maybe we help each other out.”