Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  Several times, his predictions seemed prescient. “Pull them back right now! Right now! Can’t you see? That crowd has to be sixty-plus per ten square meters! They’re all facing the barricades! Get them outta…!” But the roar of the crowd, and then of the guns, had overtaken his ineffectual efforts. Commands to retreat shouted over the NYPD and National Guard radio nets came from men and women clustered around monitors displaying scenes that Isabel never wanted to see again. Scenes that always ended the same way: unanswered calls over the radio by forlorn dispatchers and army signalmen while shocking horrors played out on muted video.

  After the sixth such dramatic containment failure, each a mass casualty tragedy that left hundreds, thousands of bodies in the parks and streets of Manhattan, Sgt. Vasquez whispered into Rick’s ear. “What?” Isabel asked Rick quietly.

  “Gather your gear.”

  Isabel scanned the room. They were trying to manage the hydra-like crisis on two dozen glowing screens, each with its own incident commander and still intact chain of command. But Rick had already played the game out a few moves, and he was ready to go.

  “Let me tell Brandon,” Isabel said softly.

  Brandon, however, was too busy, too engaged to be pulled aside. “Wait!” he snapped at Isabel, then pointed at a map on a glowing iPad as he spoke to a National Guard major. “If we pulled off the blockade here, at Worth Street, that crowd in Columbus Park can unpack some and maybe cool off.”

  The police captain standing next to the two men, who had been repeating what Brandon said into his cell phone, shook his head. “That won’t work. They’ll just merge with the already dense crowd in Thomas Paine Park, which puts them right on City Hall’s steps. We’re trying to hold City Hall.”

  “Well you’re not going to be able to!” Brandon replied. “And you’re outta time! Look. Look! You’ve seen it before, right? How many times? That’s a charged crowd! That’s what they look like!” The Infecteds were all motionless. They stared silently at the barricades in front of the New York City Marriage Bureau. “That’s sixty-five, maybe seventy per ten square! One little spark—someone steps on someone else’s toe—and…! You’ve seen it before! You know what’s gonna happen! Do something!”

  Both the cop and the soldier were on their respective phones and radios, both pleading with superiors. But before either could get an answer, the roar of the crowd and the rattling crescendo of firearms erupted from the tinny computer speakers. Brandon grabbed his head with both hands as the sawhorses were toppled and the first few waves of infected rioters were mowed down. The next waves poured over the flimsy barriers and attacked the cops, who either dropped their riot shields and ran or died in place en masse.

  Brandon turned to Isabel. He looked deathly pale and, with his hair unkempt, vaguely unstable. “This is pointless! No one is listening to me!”

  Isabel whispered that he should get his stuff and meet them in the elevator lobby. There, they joined with Rick and Vasquez’s team. Everyone maintained a guilty silence as they abandoned the still striving headquarters. But when the elevator doors closed, Rick said, to Isabel and Brandon, “We can’t get the Black Hawk in to pick us up. The airspace is closed.”

  “What do we do?” Isabel asked. Brandon was in a daze and not listening.

  “Catch a boat,” Rick replied. She didn’t ask how, or where. She simply trusted in Rick’s quiet competence, and allowed herself to be carried along on whatever course he set. Head north, or south. Hop aboard a helicopter, or a boat. She had her job analyzing Infecteds’ behavior. He had his keeping her alive. Her mind was most at peace these days when it was blank, and she intentionally turned it off until it was needed again.

  Outside the American Copper Buildings, the giant city felt like a ghost town. Nothing moved. No one was visible. The noisy tumult of the great city’s collapse sounded far away. But on closer inspection, she saw the rounded tops of helmets—some green, some desert tan—just above sandbags. A machine gun protruded through a smashed third-story window. A half dozen soldiers awaited orders at a construction site, whose piles of building materials concealed their turreted armored fighting vehicle.

  In the distance, from all points of the compass, came sirens, car alarms, burglar alarms, the buzz of drones, the chop of helicopter rotors, indistinct warnings shouted through feeble bullhorns, and intermittent explosions near and far. Single shots sometimes rose to brief volleys before dying out and other times kept rising into full-on fusillades that were silenced only by some unheard cease fire command, or more likely by a fatal overrun. There were surely temporary victories here and there. But each loss was essentially permanent as the disease spread through one chink in the armor to the next.

  The apocalyptic feel was rendered complete when their little detail reached FDR Drive. The wind off the East River just beyond it felt stiffer due to the stillness of their environs. Even though not a single car could be seen in either direction along the normally bustling artery, it still felt oddly dangerous simply to walk across the expressway. But not to fear. Straddling the pavement in the north- and southbound lanes to either side were two main battle tanks whose long guns were slewed broadside to enforce the curfew with fearsome overkill.

  Ahead, Isabel could now see, were the crowds. At a distance they seemed largely tranquil. There were vestiges of orderly lines that wrapped through parking lots, along the esplanade, and out onto the ferry pier. But the closer to the boats the civilian mass got, the more chaotic the queues, and the more crushing the press of bodies. In several spots, rival factions in the crowd faced off, shouting at each other and pushing. The lives of the people at the back of the line depended upon order, process, and cooperation. The people at the front, however, were so close to safety that they could almost reach out and seize it.

  Rick raised his mask, and the others all followed suit without need for command. Goggles or face shields came down from helmets. Latex gloves that were awkwardly donned days before were now pulled on with practiced ease. They tightened their nine-person formation, all bulked up by the addition of their giant and painfully heavy backpacks, to wade into the sea of humanity, which was bundled against the brisk wind inside thick wool overcoats, brightly colored ski jackets, and puffy down parkas. Most held driver’s licenses, passports, and other identity documents in gloved hands and pulled rolling carry-ons. They generally seemed affluent, grim, quietly desperate, and searching for clues in the covered eyes of the troops and scientists who pressed through them toward the river.

  “’Scuse me. ’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,” Vasquez repeated.

  Their progress slowed the closer they got to the water. “Get in fucking line!” some guy shouted. Bodies closed in. People pushed back. Isabel had to scramble for footing as a shove rippled through the crowd. “Go back and fight!”, “Cowards!”, and a chorus of “Boo!” rained down as they made it from the wooden deck of the covered terminal out onto the pavers on the dock.

  There, Isabel stared back mutely into angry faces, one hand on the pistol grip of her rifle even though she would never be able to swing it around in such tight quarters. Rick fended off one crush into her side with a stiff-arm and brandished his pistol several times to silence threats at close range.

  When they stopped, Rick squeezed through tiny gaps to talk to the cops guarding a gate under a large sign that read simply, “South.” Several times Rick pointed and both men looked at Isabel. “I work for the State of New York,” someone shouted. “I have priority!” To which rose a cry of, “Bu-u-ullshit! Try and cut line and I’ll kick your pompous ass!”

  Just beside Isabel, a little blond girl in gray leggings and a hat with two bunny ears sat atop the shoulders of her seemingly mild-mannered father, who craned his neck to monitor their patient progress toward the safety that lay a mere ten feet ahead. The little girl smiled at Isabel. Out of nowhere, Isabel began to cry. A look of concern darkened the girl’s small face. At first just a few te
ars soaked Isabel’s mask. But soon, it was a flood. Her jaw quivered. Her lips curled in a fixed grimace. She closed her eyes. There was no place to hide. She felt overwhelmed and lightheaded, but couldn’t have fallen even if she fainted given the crush that pressed in on her from all sides.

  They began to move again. The little girl whom she left behind waved good-bye with a smile presumably meant to cheer Isabel up.

  When the last of their detail squeezed with difficulty through the partially opened metal gate, the thick cop manning it shouted, “That’s it! That’s it!” and was joined by cops and soldiers on the far side, who put their shoulders into the effort of forcing the gate closed. A man whose face was creased by the gate’s bars was panicking, saying he was being crushed and couldn’t breathe. A cop used his baton to jab at the people closest to him in an effort to relieve his distress. Isabel relished the relative openness of the gangplank, and felt guilty for the feeling.

  The transit officers running the ferry terminal’s operations counted out the last nine people in line for the next boat. Isabel expected more curses and complaints as people lost their places to the troops and scientists. But those nine people obviously felt too lucky to be at the head of the line waiting for the next boat to complain about their lot. Examples of a poorer fate pressed against the bowing fences and metal gate and shouted angrily in the direction of everyone on the other side, them included.

  “Good-bye, sweetheart,” said a man, who hugged a woman holding a young girl in her arms. She was sobbing too hard to reply. The count of nine had split their family of four in half. The father, wearing a calf-length black wool overcoat and scarf, kissed the child held by his wife, who would board the ferry with Isabel’s detail. The husband, with his hands on the shoulders of his boy of eight or so, joined the group bumped to the next ferry. The heartbroken woman kept rising onto her tiptoes and craning her neck to peer back at her husband and son.

  As a boat approached the dock, it blasted its horn, which seemed to stir up the crowd outside the gate. Everything happened quickly. The ferry was fastened only tenuously to the dock for quick turnaround by a few loops of a single line. Its engines churned the water to pin it in place. The gangplank was lowered. People streamed aboard. The young mother in front of Isabel began calling out, “Alan! Alan!” and failed to keep up with the rapidly receding line. Isabel couldn’t help but look, and wished she hadn’t. Tears streamed down the woman’s face and her daughter’s small hand that pressed upon it in curiosity and growing alarm. “Alan!”

  Finally at the gangplank, the woman began shaking her head and saying, “I can’t! I can’t!” She ran back toward the waiting group behind them. Her husband was shouting, “No! Go back! Get on the ferry, Claire!”

  Isabel, and everyone in line around her, Brandon most of all, were immersed in the drama. Isabel didn’t think that Claire would be able to force herself to part with her husband and son, but she peppered her son’s face with kisses, hugged her daughter tight, and rejoined the back of their line, sobbing.

  “One forty-seven!” the transit officer called out as Isabel mounted the gangplank. “One forty-eight!” he said, clapping his hand on Rick’s shoulder. “One forty-nine and fifty!” he said as Claire carried her clinging daughter aboard. “That’s it! Prepare to shove off!”

  The pier at the end of the gangplank was filled with rolling luggage that passengers were not allowed to bring with them. Two transit officers were dumping bags into the water with big splashes to make more room. Without warning, a stupendous series of booms echoed through the city and rolled like a crackle across the East River and back. The ferry passengers ducked and gasped. Two jets, flying side-by-side, wheeled in air and climbed from their bombing run with engines shrieking before disappearing into the clouds. Boiling orange flames rose above the skyline and quickly turned black.

  The fences holding back the further agitated crowds began to buckle. “I always loved you,” Brandon said to Isabel. “I never stopped.” Before she knew what was happening, he made his way off the ferryboat and down the gangplank.

  “Brandon?” she called out, and found her confusion reflected in Rick’s face.

  Brandon spoke to the man—Alan—who hugged his son and then pushed the uncertain boy up onto the gangway. The metal gates behind them were groaning as they slowly gave way; the people at the front compressed against it were in obvious peril. The dockworker shoved the boy onto the boat and followed him aboard, as did the two transit workers dumping luggage into the river.

  Brandon waved at Isabel as the ferry pulled away. “Brandon!” A quick blast of the horn signaled they were clear of the dock. “Alan!” Isabel heard shouted from nearby but out of sight in the standing-room-only mass. Warning shots were fired into the air from the dock as the fence began to give way. The nine people they had booted off the ferry, Alan and Brandon included, huddled together, recoiling from the encroaching mob.

  As the ferry turned, Isabel lost sight of the dock. Over the shoulders of the soldiers who enveloped her, her protective charge, she could see only the tops of skyscrapers and the even taller columns of black smoke merging into gray clouds. Another stunning string of explosions caused another stir among the passengers. Another pair of jets standing on blazing, howling exhaust pipes caused Isabel to duck as they rose over the river in unison and punched holes through the overcast sky. Rick’s arm wrapped around her on the slowly rolling deck.

  “Can you see?” Isabel asked the much taller Rick, her voice trembling.

  “The gate and fence gave way,” Rick reported. “I saw Dr. Plante go into the water with everyone else.” Isabel lowered her head to his chest and shut down her brain. Closed her heart. Heard nothing. Saw nothing. Felt nothing. Cold air in through her nostrils, warm air out through her mouth, fogging her face shield. Her resolution, made in bed the night before intertwined in Rick’s arms and legs, that she would enjoy life for the little while she had left, no longer seemed possible. The naiveté of a silly girl who didn’t know, until now, what the end would look like.

  “Daddy!” came the little girl’s pointless cry. Vasquez ushered her older brother through the crowd to be reunited with his mother. Tears poured down Isabel’s cheeks. “Rick,” she said, “Brandon…he thought I thought he was a coward. He…He…” Her face was contorted and she shook in silent sobs.

  “You’re going home,” Rick said. Though it was in a whisper, his commitment seemed firm. Her natural resistance to being told what to do made only a fleeting appearance. She nodded, exhausted, and closed her eyes. He was right. This was all way too much. It was time to go home. She was no use to anyone anymore. She had practically murdered Brandon with her own two hands. She wouldn’t do that to Rick, too. She wouldn’t make him trade his life for hers the way Brandon had for that little boy. Oh God, when will this all be over? The tears dried up. Fatigue took their place. Rick removed his gloves and wiped her face above her mask with his rough thumbs.

  “Okay,” she said, overcoming the last few straggling heaves of her chest and regained control of her breathing. “Okay. I wanna go home.” But if Rick was her salvation, then she had to be his. She needed to keep him alive so that she would have something to live for. Someone to live for. “What are you gonna do?” she asked, now strangely, unnaturally calm. Drained. The ferry bobbed on the slight swell as its engines rumbled through the soles of their boots. The wind whistled by. Claire and her two clinging children sobbed. Booms from the city’s canyons resounded across the water like thuds from a bass drum. But Isabel’s world was tiny. It encompassed Rick, the few inches between their faces, and nothing else.

  “I’ll find you,” he said. “I will come and I will find you.” They were only words. Not a plan, but a promise. An oath. She raised their face shields, pulled down their masks, and kissed him. A kiss that was worth the risk. A kiss that prevented any conditions, qualifiers, or caveats escaping his lips. A kiss that sealed the pact and gave her
just enough hope to go on living for however long she had left.

  Chapter 21

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 53, 1315 GMT (9:15 a.m. Local)

  “Dad!” came Jacob’s shout.

  Noah ran for the door of the humid shipping containers, snatching his rifle from where it was propped against the wall. He saw Jake rapidly descending the hill behind the house. His son was frantically pointing at trucks and SUVs pulling up to the ridge road gate. Noah waved for him to go back. Jake understood, climbed back uphill, and lay behind some rocks with his AR-15 at the ready.

  The three vehicles stirred up a dust storm. A dozen men, including Sheriff Walcott and Noah’s neighbor, Trey Nichols, climbed out. They all had long guns in hand. Noah gripped his assault rifle tightly.

  He had chambered a round before leaving the house that morning. His right thumb felt for the selector switch. He had practiced in the dark. Click. Fire. Click. Safe. Click. Fire. Click. Safe. Noah stepped onto the front porch forty meters from the gate. “Sheriff?”

  “Mr. Miller!” Walcott said with a touch of the brim of his cowboy hat. “We’re checkin’ the area. Can we take a look around your property?”

  “You’ve been on my property since you passed that locked gate and those Posted signs down on the highway!”

  The eyes of the militiamen flitted back and forth between Noah and “the tower.” They hadn’t seen Jacob with his rifle on the hill, but the tower looked like an obvious threat. The front door opened. Natalie appeared holding the shotgun, which she had apparently found beside the umbrella stand.