Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  Emma put down the pen and stood erect. Isabel met her uncomplicated and direct gaze. “You’re talking about forming a militia of the infected?”

  “It would be helpful, now that you mention it, simply to recall the previously uninfected militiamen to their posts. There’s pre-existing organization, equipment, maybe even a modicum of training.”

  “I didn’t mean that!” Isabel said for no particular reason.

  “I just thought,” Emma said uncertainly, “that I would credit you with a good idea.”

  “No! Don’t ‘credit me’ with that.” Isabel was exasperated. “Emma, that’s an army.”

  “A militia.”

  “Men in big trucks with guns!” Emma searched Isabel’s face, presumably in an effort to understand her sister, who after all did have the great idea of founding an army of Infecteds. “What is this militia of yours going to do, exactly?”

  “Help me survive. And you, too, possibly.”

  Isabel filled her lungs and exhaled noisily, which increased Emma’s scrutiny of her. “Jesus, Emmy. What’s gonna happen? To us? To the world?”

  The gears clearly turned in her sister’s damaged head before she extended her thumb to keep count of her points. “The virus is going to overrun the Earth.” Her index finger was next. “If we plan carefully, we may survive.” Her middle finger joined the first two. “The world, as it existed before the outbreak, will be replaced by a new world that’s dramatically changed by massive depopulation, the wars, and the altered nature of Infecteds, who will quickly predominate demographically.”

  She was finished. So was Isabel. Again, she reached out to steady herself on the countertop. “I…I’d better…I’m heading back down now.”

  “Okay,” Emma said. She sounded almost cheerful, except “cheer” was one of those emotions that Infecteds had lost, along with everything else that made them human.

  When Isabel’s hand found the knob at the front door, she heard from behind, “That Nichols boy that I killed…”

  “Yes?” Isabel replied without turning.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have killed him.” Isabel turned to face her sister. Was Emma’s remark evidence of self-doubt? Was it possible that the ever amazing brain had sufficient plasticity to work around the damage it had suffered and reconstruct an identity—a self—from the wreckage? A self against which standards of behavior—morals, ethics—could be measured and guilt applied to enforce societal norms? “Killing the boy seems to have caused trouble.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “And…” Emma fell silent.

  “Yes?” Isabel prodded. Emma’s eyes were darting about empty space. She’s thinking, Isabel realized. Something is happening in there. “And what, Emma?”

  “And could you bring some artificial sweetener on your next trip? The coffee doesn’t taste good just black.” That was it. Isabel felt deflated.

  “Okay. Sure. Sweetener. The zero-calorie kind, for your…figure.” She felt relieved to be outside and to not see the muzzle of a stolen gun aimed at her back. But it took Isabel getting over the first ridge for her to envision a world in which everyone was like Emma, or worse. She stopped, squatted, wrapped her arms around her knees, and rocked herself back and forth. But the only thing that calmed her was to close her eyes and repeat, silently, her mantra. Rick, Rick, Rick.

  Chapter 23

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 54, 1230 GMT (8:30 a.m. Local)

  Isabel’s niece beamed with pride as Natalie put the eggs from Chloe’s hens on the table for the family.

  A phone rang with a previously unheard tone. It wasn’t any of the cell phones, all checked in unison, of anyone in the kitchen or breakfast room. “What’s that?” Chloe asked.

  “The land line!” Noah replied. His chair scraped the floor as he hurried to answer.

  “The what?”

  Isabel and Noah’s curious family crowded around Noah, who pressed the speaker button on the handset’s base.

  “…has activated your county’s disaster response plan. A credible report of an outbreak in your county of Pandoravirus horribilis has been received. You should remain indoors, if possible, and should limit contact with persons not known to you to be uninfected until further notice. You should exercise extreme caution in public, avoid all large crowds, and report any suspicious persons to your local medical or law enforcement authorities. If you see something, say something. To repeat, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management has activated your county’s disaster response plan.” The reverse 9-1-1 call reiterated the previous warnings. Noah hung up.

  “Emma was right,” Isabel said, feeling both begrudging respect for her sister’s prediction and fatalistic resignation at the foretold arrival of the pandemic.

  Everyone turned to Noah. “Okay. Starting now, we all carry a radio and a rifle with us everywhere, and all the time. We’ll patrol different parts of the property, in pairs, every four hours during the daytime, and once at night before we button the place up. Jake, the drones will go up in between foot patrols and check the areas not covered. I’ll make out a schedule. If anyone sees anything—kids—they let everyone know. Immediately.”

  “Do you think it’s Emma?” Natalie asked. “Who triggered that call?”

  Noah shook his head. “I’m guessing it’s someone else. Walcott didn’t seem too convinced by Trey Nichols’s accusation that the murderer was an Infected. But I’ll go check on Emma to make sure she hasn’t done, you know, anything else.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Isabel said. Why, she didn’t know. She needed to abandon this hopeless goal of reconnecting with her brain-damaged sister, which if truth be told was really a continuation of a lifelong, failed effort. They were identical twin sisters. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  * * * *

  When Noah met Isabel on the front porch after distributing the patrol schedule he’d printed out, she said, “Look at us!” She left her helmet, body armor, hydration system, huge backpack, and smaller rucksack behind, but wore her army camouflage, webbing studded with bulging pouches, and combat boots, and carried her assault rifle. Rick would be proud.

  “Look at you,” Noah commented. She grew self-conscious, checking herself in the hallway mirror for something that appeared comically out-of-place. Noah, too, wore camo, but hers looked government-issue, his bought from a sporting goods store. “What’s in all those pouches?” he asked.

  She tucked her chin to her chest to look down, which warped her voice. “These four are ammunition. I don’t know, exactly, about all the rest. I think this one’s first aid. This one I’ve never looked in. That one has a compass. This is where I keep my toiletries.”

  Her brother took a look at her rifle, tilting his head, his attention lingering around the trigger. “It’s full auto.” He sounded impressed, or possibly concerned.

  Isabel looked at the switch, which had three positions: Safe, Semi, and Auto. “Yeah. You’re only supposed to use Safe and Semi.” Because Rick said. Noah perhaps felt somewhat inadequate, in a Freudian sense. “Your rifle is a lot longer than mine,” Isabel said in an attempt to make him feel better.

  “Yeah. And semi-automatic only. Yours is, like, totally illegal. Barrel’s too short, and full auto. Jeeze.”

  Isabel fished a small purse from the cargo pocket on her right thigh. In it was her California driver’s license, UCSB faculty ID and health insurance card, VISA and American Express cards, and the card that she was looking for, which she handed to Noah.

  “Retired Federal Agent?”

  “Former FBI agent, please, to be precise. Remember, I was a snitch? But I can now legally carry guns for the next fifteen years.”

  They headed out through the small gate on the uphill side of the compound, which Noah tapped lightly before opening. Isabel quickly lost the main house’s WiFi, which put a halt to h
er obsessive checking for text messages. She had awoken that morning, looked at her phone, and cursed that it hadn’t chirped to notify her of the middle-of-the-night message. Rick couldn’t say where he was, probably some military secret, but he’d texted that he wasn’t “too far.” That must have meant he was still at the Pentagon, where he’d headed the day before.

  He’d told her, during their escape from Long Island, that there were four sites in Washington that would be defended to the last: central D.C. encompassing the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Supreme Court; the cluster of the NIH and Walter Reed hospitals in Bethesda; Joint Base Andrews; and the Pentagon across the Potomac in Arlington.

  “So,” Noah said when she put her phone away, “this Marine guy…”

  “Rick Townsend.”

  “Are you and he…?”

  “Sleeping with each other? Uhm, duh.”

  “I was gonna say serious, but okay. What about that ex-boyfriend of yours, Brandon what’s-his-name, from the University of Illinois?”

  “Indiana,” she corrected. “And he’s dead.”

  Saying it out loud stabbed Isabel in the chest. She recounted to Noah Brandon’s self-sacrifice at the Manhattan ferry dock and was surprised to end the story in tears.

  Noah stopped and embraced her. “You know, if all Townsend saw was him jumping into the water…”

  “Being pushed,” Isabel amended. “Fully clothed, wearing all the same heavy gear I’ve got on, plus a backpack and body armor. Just ahead of a panicked crowd that shoved a few hundred more people in on top of him in a fifty-degree river. In a city that’s right now lost all control after outbreaks at the DHS headquarters, City Hall, NYPD headquarters, everywhere, and has descended into something like the late stages of a medieval siege.”

  They were silent for a while as they continued on uphill. Then Noah said, “So, you love him? The Marine?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess I do. I think about him all the time. I want to be with him and hate every second we’re apart. I worry about him, scared to death about where they might send him. And…and I worry he won’t, you know, come back. For me.” Her lower lip quivered, and she bit it.

  Isabel looked up at her big brother. Surely he’d picked up on her deepest fears and would reassure her that she was smart, and witty, and pretty, and of course Rick loved her and would move heaven and earth to return to the only person that mattered in his life. But naturally, Noah totally missed the pleading look on her face and said, “Something tells me Marines are gonna be pretty busy the next little while. I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  “Jesus!” she snapped, confusing Noah completely.

  Isabel walked the rest of the way to the cabin in wounded silence. As before, Noah called Emma’s name repeatedly some distance from the front door. There was no answer. They knocked. Nothing. Noah opened the door.

  They stepped into the dark, single room. Before Isabel’s eyes could adjust, Noah exclaimed, “Shit!”

  Sitting still on the sofa and on a chair were the African-American embassy guard Dwayne, whose breathing was fast and shallow, and the young blond ambassador’s daughter, Samantha, who had infected Dwayne during their evacuation from China and who now pinned both hands beneath her legs. In a miniature imitation of Emma, the young girl said softly, to Dwayne, “In through the nose; out through the mouth.” In the kitchen, holding a broom in a white-knuckled death grip, stood a wide-eyed Dorothy, the infected tourist and housewife, also Emma’s NIH roommate.

  “Ho-o-oly, shit,” said Noah. “They’re all here. Fuck me.”

  “Noah,” Isabel admonished, nodding at the twelve-year-old girl. She then said, as cheerily as possible, “Hi,” giving the silent Infecteds a cursory waggle of her fingers.

  “Hi,” replied Sam in her high-pitched voice as she returned the wave. Dwayne just stared at their weapons. Dorothy didn’t know what to say, but she had always been more addled than the others.

  “Hello.” Noah and Isabel both jumped at the greeting from behind them.

  “Christ!” Noah exclaimed. “Emma! You scared the hell outta me!” Their sister was flushed and breathing hard, and her T-shirt was soaked through. “Where have you been?”

  “Jogging. We talked about that.”

  “Right. Nothing else? No…trouble?”

  “Jogging?”

  Noah turned to the three other Infecteds gathered in the cabin. “How about any of you? Did you, by any chance, run into any trouble on the way down here from Maryland?”

  Sam said, “No.” Her voice was so childlike it seemed to put Noah at ease. But Isabel knew better. That cute little girl had used her thumbnails to gouge out the eyes of her Navy SEAL rescuer in Beijing.

  Noah’s ease proved to be short-lived. Isabel nudged him. His gaze followed hers to the coffee table. On it lay neatly arranged personal effects. Wallets. Cell phones. A mace canister. A revolver with five bullets and one empty casing standing upright beside it. A pink, bedazzled plastic bag that looked like it contained a young girl’s makeup kit. All resources presumably collected on their trek south and cataloged on the paper Noah had brought the day before, which lay on the table next to a pen.

  “Did you bring sweetener?” asked Emma as she poured herself a glass of water. Isabel put the blue box with its individual packets on the counter. At Emma’s urging, Dorothy resumed sweeping.

  Emma rejoined her siblings by the front door and said to Noah, “From now on, we’re going to need rations for four. And in return we’ll help you in the defense of the property and share any deer that we kill. That would be an amendment of our contract. Do you agree?”

  “Uhm, it’ll be tighter…” Noah glanced at Isabel, who stared back wide-eyed—can you believe this—and attracted Emma’s close attention, but ultimate confusion. “But instead of the venison,” Noah said, “I’d like you to agree to give us four days’ notice if you ever intend to terminate this contract.”

  Emma’s eyes darted all about. She opened her mouth—not as if to speak to them, but to someone else…who wasn’t there. Eventually, she focused on Noah. “One day.”

  “Two days’ notice.”

  “Agreed,” Emma replied. “And it’s reciprocal.”

  Emma turned and looked at each of her roommates, but no words or gestures were exchanged. “And as for the defense of the property, tell Jake he doesn’t have to patrol the cabin all the time. We’ll take care of everything here.”

  “Emmy, I don’t know what you think, but I didn’t tell him to spy on you.”

  “The drone was here for five minutes during my outdoor shower yesterday. Explain to him that drones are louder than he thinks. Also, I washed and aired out that camouflage jacket. Would you mind smelling it to make sure it’s okay?”

  She handed the jacket to Noah, who seemed dumbfounded and frozen. “Emma, I’m very, very sorry. This is so embarrassing.”

  “What is?” When Noah couldn’t manage a timely reply, Emma said, “Does the jacket still smell?”

  “Did you lose your sense of smell?” he asked.

  “No,” Isabel answered, raising the jacket to her nose. “They can smell, they just aren’t offended by smells. It’s clean, Emma. No problem.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “Did you come up here for any other reason?”

  Noah seemed dazed. “Uhm, yeah, I guess.” Isabel tried to remain motionless and to forego the newfound comfort of resting her finger on her rifle’s trigger and thumb on the selector switch. “We got a reverse 9-1-1 call this morning saying that the virus is now in this county. There’s been an outbreak.”

  “That was them.” Dwayne and Samantha agreed. “Someone stole Samantha’s water bottle in the Red Cross soup line and must’ve ingested pathogens from it.”

  “The Salvation Army,” the normally taciturn Dorothy corrected. Everyone turned her way. “The ones with the kettle and be
ll. They’re the Salvation Army.”

  Isabel’s eye was drawn toward the corner of the room to an ice chest, a canvas tent, and miscellaneous camping supplies. “After they ate, they went off and found a camper with those things in them, then headed back by the soup line and the sheriff had already quarantined it.”

  “The sheriff?” Noah asked.

  “Yes. Sheriff Walcott.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah,” Isabel said. “She’s already met him.”

  “He seems competent,” Emma opined.

  Noah shook his head and took a deep breath. “Emmy, can we talk to you outside?” When the twins followed Noah out, he said, “You can’t kill people for their stuff. That’s…That’s…” He didn’t complete the thought, perhaps realizing all the reasons why Emma couldn’t kill people no longer applied…to her, anyway. It’s immoral? Illegal? Cruel? Why would that persuade an Infected?

  “If you start killing the uninfected,” Isabel tried, “then they’ll start killing you.”

  “They’re already killing Infecteds, if that’s who you mean by you.”

  * * * *

  “What the hell am I gonna tell Natalie?” Noah asked on the trip back down the hill.

  “The truth?” came Isabel’s naïve reply. She’s obviously never been married, Noah thought but didn’t say.

  But then again, what else could Noah tell his wife? His every alternative to the truth seemed worse. “Okay. But how can I spin it as a positive?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Try, ‘Nat, there are some homicidal Infecteds at the cabin, but we have that deal that they won’t slaughter us without first giving two days’ notice’?”

  “You see, that’s what’s wrong with the truth.”

  “Do you think we actually can trust them?” Isabel asked.

  That pissed Noah off. “Aren’t you the world’s leading fucking expert on Infected behavior? Why are you asking me?”

  “Because I’m worried about it, Noah. Jesus. I mean, who the hell could know whether they’ll honor their side of any deal? And it probably varies based on which Infecteds you’re talking about, and what the circumstances are in a situation that’s going through radical changes every couple of hours.”