Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  “My God!” Isabel wailed, heard by no one. Dirt fell all around. Treetops crashed in great clumps. A finer volcanic rain of bristles, twigs, and ash followed, as did the smoke, and the stench, and the thought—Why am I here? The woods ahead of them settled again into a calm and dark broken only by the crackle and flickering of a hundred small blazes.

  But the pop of rifles and burp of machine guns slowly filled the lull. Someone even closer to the explosions than they were had survived. Somehow many still managed to approach. “What was that?” Isabel asked Rick in horror.

  “F/A-18. A dozen 500-pound bombs. Detail up! Sgt. Vasquez, back to the primary LZ. There are more fast-movers inbound!”

  “More?” Isabel could hear an approaching helicopter. Our helicopter, she prayed. She felt guilty leaving Stockman and his men in the woods, but glad for an escape from the hell into which they had so unexpectedly and shockingly descended. Rick took her rifle and hoisted her aboard their Black Hawk. She, Rick, Brandon, Vasquez, and his five men all clung to the deck as the helicopter lurched skyward. In the calm after the door slid closed, Isabel stared at her palsied, quivering hand.

  Rick and the other soldiers began cleaning their weapons, munching on energy bars, and putting adhesive bandages on small cuts as if what had just happened was somehow within the realm of the normal. “What…?” Isabel began. Rick looked up from his rifle, which lay in pieces large and small on his poncho. “What was that?”

  “That? Technically, I guess you’d call it a meeting engagement.” She looked at him as if he were speaking some strange tongue founded on extreme understatement. He sat back on his heels, still trying to bridge the language barrier. “And we won it.”

  “Won it? It didn’t…It didn’t feel like we won anything. It felt like…like everything went wrong, and…and we were almost…”

  Rick seemed baffled. “That was about as good as firefights go. No friendly casualties. Maneuvers were organized. The line held. The fire mission hit the enemy, not us. Their objective was to block passage through those woods, and by the time they finish their work in there tonight I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be accomplished.”

  Work? People do this for a living? Rick does this for a living? Of course they do. Isabel sighed. “Well, if that’s winning,” she muttered in a quaking

  voice, “I’d hate to see what losing is like.”

  “Yeah.” Rick reassembled his M4 with mechanical snaps and clacks. “You would.”

  Chapter 6

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 41, 1300 GMT (9:00 a.m. Local)

  Noah had to wake Jake, and then Chloe. “It’s too early!” Chloe whined before pulling the pillow over her head to block the light from the hallway.

  “It’s the crack of nine am. Your chickens are hungry.”

  “My chickens? They’re the family’s chickens.”

  “Get your ass outta bed!”

  “All right, all right. Jeez.”

  Back upstairs in the kitchen, Natalie had muted the TV news. Noah picked up the remote control. “That makes Ottawa, Canada, and Montpelier, New Hampshire, the latest North American cities to join Montreal and Burlington in reporting widespread and uncontrolled outbreaks of Pandoravirus.” Noah filled the water bottle he would wear on his belt like a cyclist. “In France, the disease has been reported as far north as Valenciennes, sparking violent clashes at the Belgian border with…”

  The TV fell silent. Natalie held the remote pointed at the flat-screen on the wall, but looked at Noah. He kissed her and said, “We spend way too much time watching TV, and not nearly enough tending to this place.”

  Noah headed to the top of the stairs. “Jacob!” he shouted down toward the kids’ bedrooms. “Chloe! Get up here now! Let’s go!” He heard something muffled from someone downstairs, then trudging, heavy footfalls on the steps. The basement, where the kids slept, was what Noah had planned to be the safest place in the house. His kids arrived scowling and bleary-eyed, technically complying with all the rules—rising on command, gathering at the breakfast table, awake and not asleep—but with deniable looks of protest at the impositions upon their lives.

  “Why don’t you and Mom plant some seeds today?” Noah suggested to Chloe.

  His daughter looked back and forth between her parents, then asked, “What? Is this, like, a girl thing? Are we supposed to darn socks and make festive decorations for the holidays, too?”

  “Come on,” Natalie intervened. “Let’s see if we can make something grow.”

  Noah told Jacob he was going to chop firewood. “Me man!” Chloe said in a caveman voice and beat her chest. Jake spit his multivitamins onto the table in laughter. Natalie nixed the idea as too dangerous and put the waffles and syrup on the table.

  “The United Kingdom eased travel restrictions within the nation, but the Channel tunnel remains closed indefinitely.” Jake had unmuted the TV on reflex.

  Natalie grabbed the remote from him and turned the TV off. Jake protested to Noah. “This is, like, historic and stuff. Or historical? Whichever. Shouldn’t we…?”

  Natalie shot Noah a look before turning back to the kitchen counter. Noah shrugged in reply to Jake. Chloe unsurprisingly found something at which to roll her eyes.

  Noah went to the living room and returned with a book entitled Agriculture for Dummies. “You should try tomatoes first,” he suggested.

  Chloe snorted. “We’re not gonna be able to grow actual food, ya know.”

  “Sure you can!” replied Noah. “Necessity is the mother of invention. We need to grow food, so that’s what you’re gonna do.”

  But before he finished his not overly long exhortation, Chloe was already reading texts on her phone. “Hey! Justin said everything is normal back in McLean, except that almost everybody is gone.” She grinned as she typed rapidly with both thumbs.

  “Justin’s family is still planning on staying put?” Natalie asked.

  “They don’t think it’s gonna be that bad, I guess, but, I mean, the news. Do you think maybe they’re gonna be able to stop it? The P.? Before it gets down here?”

  Noah’s entire family looked at him. He had been forewarned of the pandemic by his scientist sisters so that he could make preparations that would help them survive. That had, for a month, made him an expert on the approaching menace by comparison to a world in which news of it was thoroughly suppressed. But how the hell did he know if they could stop the spread of the disease?

  “We could watch TV and keep track of how it’s going,” Jake floated.

  “Later,” Noah said. “We’ll all watch tonight. After our chores. Now let’s get going. Chloe feeds the chickens and then joins Mom in the grow labs to begin our spring planting.”

  “It’s not spring,” Chloe couldn’t fail to note glumly.

  “Jake, you and I will go check the fence line, then I’ll show you how to oil the gearbox on the windmill.”

  “Don’t let him near any turning gears,” Natalie warned. Another chore that would fall only to Noah.

  A couple of hours later, Noah allowed Jake to take a break from clearing brush that spoiled sightlines and carrying the firewood that Noah had chopped, and went to the only grow lab of the four repurposed shipping containers whose door was ajar. Natalie and Chloe stood inside, staring at a trough filled with the finest potting soil in front of a packet of seeds and Agriculture for Dummies, which lay open on the brightly lit work table.

  Natalie said, “This book says we should have a starting mix. Do we have one?”

  “A what?”

  “A…starting…mix,” she repeated slowly, as if he were an imbecile. Then, she read, “Peat moss, ver-mi-cu-lite, and per-lite. Do we have any of that?”

  “No! Of course not.”

  “Da-a-ad!” Chloe chastised.

  He was exasperated. After all he’d done, all he’d th
ought to do, to have his wife and daughter come to a grinding halt over the first little hiccup. “Look, I’m sure it’s optional. I mean, farmers a thousand years ago didn’t have all that stuff, and they managed.”

  “They were starving, toothless, and died at thirty,” Natalie noted, “but I guess we could just stick the seeds in the dirt and see what happens. But we’re supposed to put them in little cups or containers first. Do we have any of those?”

  Noah said they had paper cups in the pantry. Natalie sent their teenage daughter, perturbed at the unending demands, to go get them.

  “After lunch,” Noah said, “I’m gonna take Jake down to the highway to post some no-trespassing signs. We’ll be back before dinner. I’m carrying my radio in case there’s any trouble.”

  “That’s it?” Natalie said. She picked up the farming book as if she were presenting it as evidence of the impossible complexity of her task. “I’m in charge of growing the food? And if our crops fail and we starve, it’s on me?”

  “How hard can it be, really?” Natalie stared back at him. “I gotta go.”

  Noah and Jacob drove down the long ridgeline road. It was barely passable as it was. A few more rains and maybe he wouldn’t have to blow it. At the bottom, they exited their SUV and Noah relocked the gate behind them, which was discouraging enough to keep away casual visitors. But if people were sufficiently hungry…

  The two-lane state highway was the downhill border of their property. Noah slipped a hammer into its loop on his tool belt and snapped off the price tag that still dangled from it. His pockets were heavy with non-rusting aluminum roofing nails. He shouldered his half-empty backpack, which contained only the essentials: water, radio, and six extra magazines filled with twenty-seven rounds of 5.56mm ammunition. After doing a radio check to make sure Natalie could hear him—“Yes, Noah?” she replied, annoyed—he told Jake, “I’d take about three of those,” pointing to the spray cans of aluminum paint. Jacob shook one with a loud rattle, and put the other two in his own, similarly filled backpack. Both slung ARs over their shoulders.

  “The paint marks need to be vertical. Two inches wide and eight inches long. Three to six feet off the ground.” They headed for the barbed wire fence. “Paint the trees so they’re visible from the highway.”

  “Paint all the trees?”

  The woods were thick. The clinging, scratching undergrowth would dissuade people more than the double-strand barbed wire. “One mark about every ten feet or so.”

  “What does posting those signs and painting trees even do?”

  “Legally, it raises the penalties for trespassing and poaching.” He opened one of the Amazon boxes he carried and pulled out a sign. “POSTED,” it read, and, in smaller letters underneath, “Trespassers Will Be Shot.”

  “Will we really do that? Shoot trespassers?”

  “We may have to, son. But the main point is to scare people away.”

  Noah draped a carpet remnant over the barbed wire, grabbed a rickety fencepost, climbed onto the lower strand, and slung his leg across the carpet without snagging his jeans. Jacob followed suit, also without injury. Noah had read about the carpet trick on a survivalist blog when researching which wire cutters to buy.

  “Are we gonna do this all the way around the whole property?”

  “Yep.”

  “Seriously, Dad?” The walking was difficult through the brush and along the rocky, uneven ground. Not very inviting. Noah dropped his load and nailed a sign onto a tree beside their property’s gate. Jacob stood frozen in front of his first tree six feet from the sign Noah had posted. “For real?”

  Noah headed down the highway. “Yep. Get going.” Noah posted the second sign onto a tree with a single hammer blow about a hundred feet from the first. Thus, it continued, with Jacob shaking his rattling can, painting tree after tree with a whoosh, and quickly falling behind and ultimately out of sight.

  About a half an hour later, Noah nailed the last sign in the box onto a tree at a point where their property turned sharply uphill—unclimbable without ropes. He carefully traversed the barbed-wire fence without the aid of the carpet and headed back toward the SUV along the easier, paved roadway.

  “Dad!” Noah heard Jacob yell from over a rise in the highway ahead.

  Noah dropped the empty sign box, unslung his rifle, and ran. His heart raced. Outlaws holding Jake at gunpoint! Cannibals, maybe, licking their salivating chops. A trudging horde of insensate Infecteds raising dust all the way to the horizon. By the time he crested the rise, he was sweating as much from adrenaline—from mentally preparing to kill—as from exertion. A pickup truck with dark police lights and a star emblazoned on the door was parked next to Jake, whose rifle was propped against a nearby tree on the far side of the barbed wire. A khaki-clad man in a white cowboy hat casually spoke to his son from a distance with one boot on the fence that separated them. He turned to look at Noah clutching his rifle at the ready, and his hand drifted toward his holstered sidearm.

  Noah slung his rifle over his shoulder before heading down. The man’s hand left its perch atop the pistol butt, but his thumb remained hooked onto his leather belt, studded with bullets, only a short distance from his weapon. “What can I do for you?” Noah called out as he neared.

  “You the Millers? Sheriff Walcott. Pleased to meet you. Didn’t think we’d had any of your people up here in decades, but I’d heard somebody was workin’ on the place.”

  “We moved down here from D.C. McLean, actually.” Noah thought they might seem less like carpetbaggers if they had at least come from the same state.

  “Good idea. I hear the army is keepin’ D.C. in order, but there’s a whole shit-pot full of lootin’ out in the ’burbs. We’re gettin’ a lot of folks from up that way with some scary tales. Some of ’em don’t have too much, and people are worried they’ll run outta food and supplies and there’ll be trouble. The churches are takin’ turns feedin’ ’em…fer now.”

  “Well, not to worry about us. We’re pretty self-sufficient up there.”

  “Good, good. And it looks like you can defend your own, too. Good.” He removed his cowboy hat and rubbed his forehead, which was as red as his short hair from where his hat band pressed. “Say, Mr. Miller, we’re takin’ a head count of people we can call on if we run into any trouble down in the Valley. Can we pencil in you and your boy over there, if push comes to shove?”

  Goddammit, Noah thought. That wasn’t part of his survival plans. Jake crept closer to listen.

  “Me and my deputies should keep a lid on things. But you never know. The BCI—the state Bureau of Criminal Investigations—said, basically, shoot any Infecteds on sight. Then the Deputy Superintendent of the State Police, which is over the BCI, said use discretion, but don’t use deadly force unless lives are at risk. Well, lives are at risk if you get infected. And that was the Deputy Superintendent who sent out that e-mail. Why not the Superintendent hisself? So…shit. I dunno. I guess, since the instructions are contradictory, we gotta decide for ourselves.”

  “Have you seen any around here? Anyone infected?”

  “No, no. Not yet, anyways. But it’s only a matter of time, I figure. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to shoot ’em or give ’em milk and cookies. So we’re holdin’ a town meetin’ down at the fire hall to talk about next steps, and I need to know who I can count on as part of an auxiliary force in case we approve it.” He looked at the posted signs along the tree line behind Jacob, who leaned against a teetering fencepost barely held upright by the barbed wire. “You’re invited. Only landowners and permanent residents. Day after tomorrow, eight o’clock in the p.m. We might even have some definitive word outta Richmond by then.”

  “I expect I’ll be there,” Noah lied. He hadn’t planned to have any engagement at all with the local community.

  “And your boy?”

  “Jacob is only thirteen.”

 
“He’s a tall ’un,” said the Sheriff. “And he knows his way around an AR?”

  “You can count on me. But I want my son to stay here at the house.”

  The Sheriff unbuttoned the breast pocket on which he wore a big star. “I’ll put you down as one. Noah,” he said and presumably wrote on the pad he extracted, “Miller.” He tapped the brim of his hat in salute before departing.

  After he was gone, Jacob asked, “Are we in trouble? Because of the signs?”

  “What? No! He’s just looking for volunteers in case, you know, things get bad.”

  “And you unvolunteered me?”

  “Someone has to take care of the house. Of your mom and Chloe.”

  Jake nodded. That made sense to him. “But you joined up? Don’t you think you should run that by Mom?”

  “I can make decisions on my own,” Noah lied again, but Jacob looked skeptical.

  “You’re gonna have to drop all your g’s to fit in,” Jake said. “Puttin’, gettin’, fixin’, spittin’…” He added a rural twang to his condescending tone.

  “You shouldn’t make fun of these people, Jake. We live here now.”

  Noah helped Jacob mark the trees along the highway. In the time it took to finish, several cars passed, filled with lost-looking families and piled high with belongings. Each time, Noah stopped what he was doing, turned, and faced them with his rifle in hand. Jake mimicked his father. Each time, after initially slowing, the city folk accelerated away from the possibly homicidal, possibly inbred mountain folk. Noah winked at Jacob.

  As they worked their way past the alternate gate onto their property, carefully disguised per Noah’s specifications, he showed Jacob where it was. The double strands of barbed wire were attached to a vertical metal bar that was padlocked to a fencepost. From the highway, you would never notice it or the overgrown old road that wound its way a mile up the hill to their house. Noah had walked it once. It was rocky, but passable with the higher clearance of a jeep or SUV.