“Nuh-uhhhh! I didn’t say any of that. I just asked about that redneck boy down the hill!”
“Margus?” her dad contributed. “What about Margus?”
“He’s your daughter’s meal ticket, apparently.”
“Nuh-uh! Jesus, Mo-o-om!”
“You know, Chloe,” she replied, “Neanderthals might just be the way to go these days. Not too witty around the campfire, but they can probably defend the cave and bring home the protein.”
“Stop it,” her dad said. It wasn’t loud, but it surprised both Chloe and, apparently, her Mom, who went back to work preparing dinner, only with more vigor than before.
Chloe and her dad exchanged looks of warning, and neither moved a muscle or said anything.
“I think you need to go down to town and mend fences,” her mom told her dad, although Chloe hadn’t seen any broken fences when they drove through. “Isabel’s boyfriend threatened to kill the sheriff and his men, then you blow up the ridge road, and they already suspect us of harboring an Infected but don’t realize that we’ve got a whole prison block full of them up the hill who’re doing God knows what at night…”
“We can’t assume, Natalie…”
“You’ve heard that gunfire. Every night for the last two nights there’s been shooting. And I’m not even mentioning the gunshots we hear during the daytime. I’m willing to assume they’re just hunters. But at night? Nobody hunts at night.”
“I think, maybe, they do, for things like boar, and…”
“Noah, do boar shoot back? Does it take twenty or thirty shots by different guns in some big boar shootout?”
Chloe drew the ire of both parents when she snorted. “What? It was funny.”
“So you want me to go down there?” her dad asked. “Where that shooting is? Where the virus is? Then come back here and possibly infect the whole family? Why? What could possibly be worth that risk?”
Chloe’s eyes followed the ball back across the net to her Mom, who paused her furious cooking to face her dad. “Find out what’s going on. Not on TV in Buffalo or Philadelphia, but where it matters most. Down in that valley. Where the people are. If they think we’re protecting your sister, and that she murdered that boy at the Nicholses…”
“Which she did,” Chloe said, the weight of her chin on her palm mushing the words.
“Thank you for that,” her mom replied before turning back to her dad. “They could hike up here, with their guns, and there could be trouble. You’re a very persuasive lawyer. You could go down there and convince them to leave us alone.”
Her dad seemed reluctant. But when he didn’t refuse, her mom rewarded him with a kiss, then a second, then allowed him a hug. When his hand brushed over her yoga pants bottom, Chloe said, “Ughhh!” and got out of there. Yeah, Mom, she thought in bitter triumph. You send Dad off maybe to get killed with one feel of your ass, and I’m the one who gets her way with her looks!
Chapter 26
JOINT BASE ANDREWS
Infection Date 56, 0510 GMT (1:10 a.m. Local)
“Attention on base. Attention on base,” the loudspeaker in the crew lounge blared. “Nightwatch crew, report to stations. I say again. Nightwatch, to your stations.”
Isabel bolted upright in her reclining chair. She had six minutes. She blinked until she could read her glowing cell phone. It was one-ten a.m. Her pals, the crew of the C-17, were nowhere to be seen. A few other people wearing flight suits were curled up here and there, but none of them stirred. Isabel ran to the bathroom, rinsed her mouth with the conveniently supplied wash, and pinned her hair up so that it looked slightly less of a mess.
“You need to board the E-4B, ma’am!” said an agitated young airman as she entered the bathroom behind Isabel, wearing a sidearm and full camouflage.
“Yep. I just need to…”
“You need to go now, ma’am.”
Isabel followed the woman back into the lounge, aggravated her when she stopped for her backpack and rifle, and jogged heavily with her load down the hallway toward the hangar. Several times they had to make way for airmen racing past at even higher speeds. “Is the president here?” Isabel asked.
“I don’t know, ma’am.” She replied in similar fashion to questions about whether they were taking off now, what was happening, and whether containment in D.C. had failed. She was led directly to the aft stairs of the giant aircraft, which was now sitting outside the hangar on the dark tarmac with engines running.
There was a short line at the bottom of the stairs filled with a mixed lot of civilians in suits towing black carry-ons, and soldiers and airmen in camouflage and flight suits lugging backpacks or duffels. Air policemen wearing blue berets and blue ascots tucked into their camo blouses and holding rifles stood all around the jet interspersed with Secret Service agents wearing suits and carrying small, ugly, black machine pistols out in the open.
In line up ahead, the Director of the CIA, Phillip Struthers, acknowledged Isabel over his shoulder, then showed his ID to the Secret Service agent just like everyone else. The agent handed the ID to an Air Force officer, who checked the Director’s name off a list. Isabel scrambled to find the ID she had been given. Was it in her wallet? Purse? The outer pockets of her pack? Her fatigues pockets?
“Ma’am?” the Secret Service agent at the front of the line had to shout over the engines.
“Just a…” Isabel remembered and pulled the ID, on its strap, out of her blouse.
“Miller,” the agent said to the Air Force officer, “Isabel.” The stern-looking military man looked back and forth from her ID to her face, then checked her name off the list.
Isabel ascended the long staircase. At the top waited several airmen wearing sidearms. One pointed Isabel to her pre-assigned seat. She put her backpack, rucksack, and body armor in a storage closet, and rifle and helmet in the overhead bin, then streamed forward amid the line of boarding passengers in hopes of finding some purpose for her being there. Near the front, she stopped beside an open door into a small conference room. “Dr. Miller?” the CIA Director said on seeing her. FBI Director Pearson greeted her with a silent bob of his head.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Isabel said, sounding ditsy when she really was on edge. She was the only one even to crack a smile. “What’s up?” she asked, expecting to be invited in.
“Apparently my blood pressure,” the CIA Director replied. Both men glanced out the lone, small window. The headlights of a motorcade lit the tarmac. “Behold…POTUS,” Struthers mumbled. That sounded odd to Isabel, who caught a glimpse of the First Lady, with one hand on the shoulder of each of her two children, directing them at a fast clip toward the stairs. Isabel was expecting some announcement over the PA system, but within seconds the aircraft was moving. She grabbed the doorway as the sound of the engines rose steadily through a high-speed turn to full power. The giant aircraft picked up momentum down the runway until its nose rotated skyward.
Director Pearson said to Isabel, in a voice raised over the noise, “There are reports out of France that the gendarmerie is going house-to-house, rousting out Uninfecteds, and forcing them to go sit in crowded halls with recently turned townsfolk.”
His CIA counterpart said, “Like one of those old chickenpox parties before they developed a vaccine.” He shook his head.
Both directors half rose to their feet. Isabel turned to see the president. “No, keep your seats.” He edged into the room, forcing Isabel inside first. Pres. Stoddard shut the door and squeezed into a seat beside the CIA Director. “Did you hear about Kansas City?” When no one replied, Pres. Stoddard said, “There’s been an outbreak there. Nobody knows where it came from.”
The silence was doleful and oppressive.
The president said, “MIT now projects that the virus will be in all forty-nine continental states within two weeks. Two. Hawaii may hold out a bit longer, or not.
They say we’ll hit eighty percent infected in about three months. Among the twenty percent who’re left—sixty million or so people—should be large swaths of the mid- and southwest, our military bases, and random pockets of population behind Infected lines here and there probably not exceeding a few tens of thousands in any one location.”
“What about…?” the CIA Director asked cryptically.
“I don’t wanna hear the words ‘impulsive eradication’ again. Do you have any idea what ordering troops to kill Infecteds would do to their morale? As it is, there were 137 summary court-martials and twenty-nine executions by firing squad as of my last update. We had over a dozen fragging incidents—officers killed by their own troops. We need a Plan B.”
“There is no Plan B,” CIA Director Struthers said, barely masking his anger.
“What about a vaccine?” Isabel asked.
The president frowned. “Pearl River is keeping fingers crossed about their human trials. And there’s some progress down in Atlanta in mitigating the virulence of Pandoravirus with antivirals. The subjects don’t get as sick. Their survival rates are better—over sixty percent. But they still turn, every last subject.”
“Prisoner,” Pearson corrected. “They’re testing it on prisoners condemned to death or life without parole.”
“It’s all being done by court order,” Struthers said to Isabel. She tried harder to suppress the revulsion that must be shown on her face.
“Soon,” Pearson added, “we’ll be testing vaccines on jaywalkers and litter bugs.”
“What is it that you don’t get?” the CIA Director suddenly snarled in a raised voice. Struthers directed his ire at his fellow agency head. But Isabel couldn’t help but think the president was its target. “This is it! Our backs are against the wall. We’ve got to fight while we’ve still got an army and a navy and an air force to fight with. You heard the projections. In three months, our forces will be greatly reduced, and our enemy will be far stronger than we are.”
“Maybe they’re not our enemy,” Isabel said.
“Oh!” the CIA man replied. “There it is. ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ Kumbaya and all that bullshit.”
“Maybe we could try to look at it from their perspective,” Isabel said.
“I thought you were the one,” Struthers accused, “who said that they don’t have a perspective. That they’re empty husks who used to be human.”
They all waited for Isabel’s reply. “They may not have a consciousness. Okay,” she amended, seeing her accuser’s scoff, “they aren’t conscious. That part of their brain—of their human experience—is gone. Forever. But my sister was tortured by…”
“Oh, please!” interrupted the CIA Director.
“They shocked her with electrodes!” Isabel protested. “Burned her. Intentionally inflicted pain.”
“Which you said yourself she couldn’t feel,” Struthers responded. “And which those experiments, by the way, proved. Just like others done in more suspect corners of the globe like Russia without all the assurances that the tests would be conducted safely.”
“But her ill treatment did have an effect,” Isabel rebutted. “She may not have any sense of self or emotional reaction to pain, but she knows who it was that locked her up and harmed her. And she remembers from her upbringing in the pre-plague world that good, honest, trustworthy people don’t torture, even in the name of science. She knows why there were always guns pointed at her, ready to shoot her dead if she made any untoward move. She ran away at the first opportunity. She so distrusted us—the Uninfecteds—that she jumped out of her brother and sister’s car after they sprang her and ran off into the freaking woods. She thought that she had to do that to survive based on how we were treating her.”
“So if we start a war with them,” the president said, “and they fight back, how long do you think we’ll survive? Wouldn’t we be better off avoiding war with them for as long as possible to give our scientists more time to find a vaccine?”
Director Struthers frowned. “I guess I’d rather go out on my feet than on my knees.”
“But what if there’s another way?” Isabel asked. “I bet the models didn’t assume that a negotiated peace was possible. A separation—a partition—of the Infected and the Uninfected. If the mathematicians added that to their calculations, I bet the models might show an equilibrium develop between the two populations. Maybe even ultimately a recovery of the uninfected population.”
“Sure,” replied the CIA Director derisively. “You can make models show anything you want. The key is to vet the assumptions you use for their reasonableness. Do you think it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll agree to peacefully segregate the world into a ‘Theirs’ and an ‘Ours’? Which are their farm fields? Their oilfields? Their factories? Their mines? Their tanks and planes? And also, keep in mind that infection is a one-way street. We can turn into them, but they can’t turn back into us.”
With that, the president rose. Although these arguments were fresh to Isabel, they obviously weren’t to Stoddard. He exited without a word into a flurry of demands for his immediate attention.
Isabel headed back to her cabin, passing cabinet secretaries who didn’t know her from Adam and military officers whose faces were knit deep in concentration at glowing screens. When she sank into her seat, she looked out the window. In the dim moonlight she could see, off the starboard wingtip, two small fighter jets whose lights were extinguished.
She didn’t feel like sleeping. She had nothing to do and no reason, really, even to be there. A female crew member walked past. “Excuse me,” Isabel asked, “do you happen to know where and when we’ll be landing?”
“Where, no ma’am. But we’ll land sometime in the next week.”
“Week?”
“Yes, ma’am. We’ll refuel midair a couple of times a day. We’re provisioned with consumables for over a week in flight. It’s just the fluids and lubricants that limit our flying time.” She smiled cheerily and headed off.
A week, Isabel thought, staring down at her phone in airplane mode and then out at the two little military jets. Their pilots were doing their small part in the grand saga but seemed to be rendered insignificant by the vastness of what was happening…just like Isabel.
Chapter 27
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 56, 1230 GMT (8:30 a.m. Local)
After breakfast, Noah stuffed ammunition, meal rations, and an extra canteen into his backpack for his trip down to town. “The Internet is out,” Chloe said, entering the kitchen staring at her phone rather than getting after her chores in the barn. “First the cell connection, now this.”
Noah looked at his own phone. “I’ve got WiFi.”
“Yeah, but no Internet.”
He tried a random Google search, but instead of results he got an error message. He reset the router. Nothing. Chloe stared at him with a look of deep concern. “You don’t think,” she said in terrible trepidation, “like, the whole Internet went down. That couldn’t happen, could it?” Noah checked the land line. The phone was dead.
“I’ll follow the cable downhill and make sure some branch didn’t take the wires out or something.”
“What’ll you do if it did?”
“I don’t know. Fix it, maybe?”
“Yeah, right,” his daughter scoffed.
“Be careful,” Natalie said, kissing him good-bye. “And wear your mask thing when you get around people.”
“Here!” Chloe said. “Take my phone. It’s useless without the Internet, but maybe I’ll get my texts and messages if you get cell coverage down in the valley. Don’t turn it off, and don’t look at anything!”
Noah slid the phone into his backpack and headed off. “See ya, squirt!” he shouted across the compound to Jake, who waved as he knelt over the drone he prepared to launch. Noah found the first tel
ephone pole, and began following the black line to the pole’s nearest neighbor. Conveniently, the line mostly followed the old way down the hill.
Everything looked fine until the last pole before the highway. A single black cable drooped to the ground and disappeared into the brush. Noah found its frayed end. He couldn’t tell for sure, but from a few slices in the insulation he guessed that it had been cut by vandals.
He decided to ask in town if anyone could repair the line professionally. Luckily, the break was right beside the highway and easily accessed.
The hike along the smooth roadway went much faster. He felt uncomfortable as he passed the Nicholses’ mailbox. When he reached Bishop’s Mini Mart, Margie came out and waved. Angus followed right behind her. Their store was actually open, though all the nozzles on the empty gas pumps were covered in yellow plastic bags. Noah felt compelled to head over to greet the friendly couple.
“Hullo, Mr. Miller!” called out Angus. Noah halted the prescribed ten steps away. “Hey, listen. I feel like I need to apologize for comin’ on your property uninvited. I can see how you mighta felt like we were, I dunno, threatenin’ you or somethin’. With the sheriff and the judge there, it all seemed official. But some of us—most of us, actually—didn’t sign on to harass our neighbors like that.”
“No hard feelings, Angus,” Noah said as the bell on the store’s entrance jingled and their eighteen-year-old son Margus emerged. He didn’t look particularly friendly, wearing a glum expression, but he wasn’t armed that Noah could tell, nor were his parents. “So… ‘Margus’ is, like, Lithuanian, or something like that?”
The boy looked at his parents, who glanced at each other before Angus replied, “If you say so. We thought we’d made it up. Half Margie; half Angus.”
Noah nodded agreeably. “Oh. Cool. So, Margus, you’re in the military, right? Are you on leave or something?”
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