Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  Chloe started sobbing. “Mo-o-om!” Emma began to calm after getting out of there and heading up to review Dwayne’s plan for seizing control of the town.

  Chapter 31

  ABOARD E-4B

  Infection Date 59, 1700 GMT (1:00 p.m. Local)

  Isabel knew something was happening when the ever present, level whine of the engines fell an octave and her ears popped. Air policemen began donning full combat gear and, upon completion, pounded their comrades’ body armor like football players in shoulder pads. A Secret Service agent in a dark suit appeared at Isabel’s seat. “Please come with me.” She wasted no time with futile questions and followed him up to the small, crowded, standing-room only conference room in the front, which was usually off-limits.

  First Lady Angela Stoddard stood in the doorway on the far side, which presumably led to the presidential quarters, hugging little Ginnie and Bill Junior tight. The First Son kept stealing looks at Isabel, and Ginnie waved vigorously—her face lighting up as if on sighting an old friend. Isabel had attended a private dinner and question and answer session about SED with the First Family at the White House residence.

  The normally polite greeting from the president was missing as the harried man listened to Marine Gen. Browner, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose image was displayed on the room’s screen. “This is a game-changer, sir, if it’s true. Real hope. Maybe our last chance.” She’d never heard him lay it on that thick. “But we’ve got to take full advantage of it. We’ve got to think strategically.”

  “Like ordering all our forces back to Texas and the Rockies?” Bill Stoddard said.

  “You gave us discretion on redeployments, sir. And our forces weren’t exactly proving useful in their previous positions.”

  “But now, General, you want to take the gloves off, I’m guessing.”

  Vice Pres. Anderson appeared on a split screen with Browner. He was at the head of his own conference table in some windowless bunker. “Bill, we’re down to the lick log here. Skip is proposing marshalling our forces inside a defensible perimeter around self-sustaining resources and pharma plants that can crank out what we all hope is a working vaccine. Given where the virus came across the border, that’s the corridor from Houston up through Denver. We can set up a reverse quarantine there. Now, that’s going to require some draconian policies. Expulsion of Infecteds, lethal force at the border, etc., but…”

  “There’s that word again,” Stoddard interrupted. “Border. Right down the middle of our country. We’re going to be massacring fellow citizens, Infecteds and Uninfecteds, who’re fleeing for their lives. And what about all those desperate calls for help you say, Gen. Browner, that we’re getting in the rest of the country? You heard the DHS estimates. Thirty percent of the population in rural Vermont, where it first broke out, are still uninfected. What do we tell them? Certainly not, ‘Get yourselves to Texas,’ as impossible as it would be to cross, what did you call it, ‘Injun Country.’”

  “Sir,” Browner continued in an exasperated tone that must have represented his hundredth attempt at persuasion on the point, “this is about playing the hand we’re dealt.” Around the E-4B’s conference table, the directors of the CIA and FBI and the Attorney General stared at the president, as did the vice president and secretary of defense from their bunkers. “It’s not something any of us would’ve chosen as the plan for our future. Hell, none of us could possibly even have imagined these circumstances even two months ago. But it’s reality, and we all have to deal with it.”

  The president covered his face with his hands. Browner’s gaze scanned the room as if pleading not to the president, but to his National Security Council. No, not pleading. Polling. Counting. Possibly canvassing.

  “No,” Pres. Stoddard replied. “We’re not abandoning the rest of the country for some last stand in the Midwest.” He asked the Secret Service agent behind Isabel to close the door. “Dr. Miller, your colleague Dr. Nielsen at the Pfizer lab in Pearl River, New York, has reported successfully completing human trials on a vaccine that will inoculate Uninfecteds against Pandoravirus.”

  Isabel almost burst out laughing. “That’s…wonderful!”

  But the other faces around the room remained grim. “Yeah, well, let’s hope so. We’ve had our hopes raised before. And Nielsen was pretty cagey on the call. We’re putting down in upstate New York. We can’t safely get you any closer to Pearl River because one of our guard units, which is equipped with state-of-the-art surface-to-air missiles, has turned and is taking pot shots at aircraft flying over the Hudson River Valley. I need you to go meet with Nielsen, see what she’s come up with, and call back with your dead-eyed-serious appraisal of the vaccine’s efficacy. I’ll redirect every resource this government can bring to bear on producing mass quantities of her vaccine, but I need to know if it works. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Isabel said, then added, “Sir.”

  They descended through the clouds to the dreary day beneath them. Browner said, “You’re putting down at Stewart International Airport and its co-located Air National Guard Base. They’ve had a rough go of it and are barely able to defend the strip. I’ve called in your personal security team, but I’ve got to inform you that this mission entails substantial risk.”

  “It’s okay,” Isabel said a bit too quickly. “I mean, I’m good with it, general.”

  * * * *

  The aisles filled as soon as the E-4B touched down. An aide motioned to Isabel, who retrieved her backpacks, body armor, helmet, and rifle. He gave Isabel a bulky satellite phone with the president’s number stored in it and a bag with charging cables just in case. At the top of the stairs, the commander-in-chief and his family wished her luck.

  The lines on the president’s face were worn deep. His hair, even his skin, seemed grayer. “You know Nielsen from Bethesda. I’m hoping you can tell whether this is the breakthrough we’ve been praying for, or she’s just angling for more support like everyone else.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. President.”

  “We’ll be here, on the ground waiting for another aircraft or until we get a green light on a sketchy engine. Call me when you know something, and be careful.”

  Isabel deplaned in a line of staffers, mostly military, who milled about on the tarmac stretching stiff backs, lifting faces to the cloudy sky, and drawing deep breaths of air that was fresh, but also hinted at an encroaching foulness from nearby. Airmen wearing oven mitts at the top of a ladder shone a flashlight into an engine cowling on the 747.

  “Dr. Miller?” Rick called out from the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. She broke into a toothy, broad grin before restoring something approximating adult behavior. He wore full combat gear like the men in the Humvee behind him. A soldier in goggles protruded through the roof behind a machine gun. “You ready for this?” Rick seemed chilly, distant, and on edge. It should have been a warning.

  Rick removed Isabel’s body armor and draped a new vest over her shoulders. “This seems heavier than the old one,” she said as several vehicles pulled up in front of and behind their Humvee.

  “Extra plates,” was Rick’s only, dispirited explanation. Something’s wrong with him, she realized. She studied his face for clues. Rick studiously ignored her.

  Isabel’s nerves frayed as Rick checked her equipment in silence and their convoy formed. There were two tracked armored hulks: one low-slung with a bulldozer blade; the other like a boxy tank with a long, slender gun in a small turret. Then a vehicle with a V-shaped bottom like a boat high above knobby tires. A fourth, also wheeled, had antenna masts and a satellite dish atop a boxy cabin. The fifth was a regular, canvas-topped truck filled with soldiers. The sixth was a green tanker truck. Bringing up the rear was a second Humvee on which was mounted a short and stubby, wide-barreled gun with a giant ammo box.

  “Where’s Sgt. Vasquez?” Isabel asked. Rick gave her a single shake of his head. “Oh
.” She said a short prayer for him. “And his men?” Another no. “All five of them?” She added another prayer. She was growing more religious as the world neared its end.

  A soldier returned Isabel’s rifle after a quick confirmation that it was operable, loaded, and clean. “Are we expecting trouble?” she asked.

  Rick snorted. “It’s forty-seven miles down I-87. Toward the City. So…yeah.” He sounded like a different person, though it had only been five days since they’d parted. That was, however, an eternity during times like these.

  Two small jets roared down the runway side-by-side. As the screech of their engines receded, their exhausts’ black smudges dropped low over the treetops instead of climbing, as if weighed down by their full loads of underwing bombs. A dozen helicopters were parked nearby, but the only ones being readied for flight were small, wasp-like aircraft that bristled with rockets and missiles.

  After a radio check, they drove off, slowed by the lumbering tracked vehicles. The smell of diesel was noxious. Through the grimy, presumably bullet-proof windows she watched them pass two rings of trenches and sandbagged machine gun nests. “Stewart Air National Guard Base,” read the sign at the gate. Burned out cars and trucks lined the road. There was the source of the stench that wafted across the airstrip.

  Forty-seven miles, she thought. Oughta be there in an hour or two.

  Her ETA was proven wrong as soon as they reached the ramp onto I-87. The tracked bulldozer—an “M9 Armored Combat Earthmover,” Rick explained tersely following her attempt to start a conversation—plowed cars and trucks out of their way with grinding noise and sparks.

  They then proceeded down the interstate highway in slow motion, stopping to clear more obstacles every few miles. Rick stared out the window and talked over his radio, but never acknowledged Isabel’s presence despite her near constant focus on him.

  “Where are all the people?” she asked. “From all these cars and buses?”

  Rick just shrugged. He was starting to both frighten her, and piss her off.

  At their fourth stop, one of their machine guns opened fire, followed by a much louder, slower rattle from what Rick called, “The Bradley,” in answer to her question. Its armored rear door lowered to the pavement. Out poured six soldiers, who spread out among the abandoned cars and were joined by a half dozen more from the truck. All fired at unseen targets. When the machine gun atop their own Humvee opened fire, Isabel plugged her ears. Rick exited the vehicle, took cover behind a dusty Lexus, and began firing his rifle. Isabel joined Rick, who tackled her to the pavement. “Ow!”

  Glass exploded on an abandoned yellow cab nearby. Someone was shooting back.

  Isabel raised her helmeted head above the hood. A hundred people streamed toward them across a field. Cows galloped to and fro, but the humans all ran straight at them. Some carried pistols or rifles whose muzzles flashed. Attackers fell with every passing second.

  Rick pulled her back down. “Goddammit! These men are risking their fucking lives for you!” She asked who was attacking. “Who the fuck do you think? Them!” Rick fired over the hood. The whole time, the armored bulldozer plowed the path ahead.

  “Why?” Isabel shouted. “That isn’t a densely packed crowd! And they aren’t agitated individual Infecteds, they’re a group! Why are they doing this?”

  Rick said, in between aimed shots, “They’re a third category!” Bam. “You think this highway is blocked by accident?” Bam. “They want our food, water, weapons!” Bam. “Most of these cars are already shot up!” Bam. “They’ve been at this a while!” Bam.

  A third category of Infecteds’ violence, Isabel thought. Organized and armed resistance.

  The troops suddenly sprinted back to their vehicles at some unheard radio command. One fell, shot in the hip, and was hoisted—grimacing—into a sitting position atop his rifle, which was held on either end by laboring buddies. He was deposited into the arms of a waiting female medic inside the Bradley’s troop compartment.

  Isabel and Rick made a stooped dash back to their Humvee. Its mounted weapon kept up its fire even as they drove off. Star-shaped pockmarks appeared in the side windows in time with loud thumps.

  Rick resumed his watch out his window. The drive continued much the same as before. They stopped to engage largely ineffectual ambushers every half hour or so, always winning with overwhelming firepower. Always leaving fields strewn with the dead. Unlike, presumably, the civilian cars that had strayed into these ambushes before them. Rick declined Isabel’s every attempt to engage him in conversation until, randomly, she asked, “Have things been, you know, tough? Since Andrews?”

  He looked at her with disbelief, or contempt. She didn’t have time to amend the evidently stupid question. “So I led a patrol into Silver Spring,” he said. “The police chief had sent two patrol cars into a neighborhood, and neither came back. We went in quietly, at night, dismounted. Edged our way through back yards. Got spotted by a man taking out the trash in his bathrobe. They’re picking up garbage now like…like normal.”

  “He was infected?”

  Rick wasn’t listening. “Sometimes they run away. Sometimes they charge. You lay your sights on ’em and let God decide. This guy ran at us in his slippers. I dropped him. My mixed bag of reservists, Guardsmen, Marines, and Vasquez’s two remaining men then shot the guy’s wife, three kids, and two other men, whoever the hell they were, who poured out of his house like some jail break. In seconds, every door on that street swung open. Some were Uninfecteds calling for help. Some of them got dragged to the ground by their neighbors. It was a fucking 360-degree shitstorm.”

  Rick chose just then to put on his wraparound sunglasses. To hide behind them as he gathered himself. “Every other house lit us up. There were rounds flyin’ everywhere. I started that patrol with eleven men. When the sixth got hit, we couldn’t carry the wounded anymore. They fuckin’ cursed at us. I almost shot one when he raised his rifle, but he did the job for me and shot himself. I can still see the faces of those wounded men, clear as day under a streetlamp. Eyes wide. Sweat pouring out on a freezing cold night. Knowing this was the end of the road. Remember when I told you that Marines never leave men behind? Well, I left them behind. Just left ’em there. They cursed us till we were outta earshot, then we heard shooting. Wild, crazy fire, then, bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. Five shots. Maybe they were executed. Maybe they shot themselves. That’s where I last saw Vasquez and his two men.”

  All she could come up with was, “Rick, I’m so sorry.”

  “And I can’t get in touch with my parents in Wisconsin,” he said. He faced away from her. The faint reflection of his face in the window was indecipherable.

  “Oh, God, Rick. I had no…”

  “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve asked about them.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about it! I’ve got a job to do. People are counting on me. Still.” He resumed his watch out the side window and radio checks with the other vehicles. Several times, Isabel raised an unseen hand to his shoulder and almost touched him. Each time she decided it might make things worse.

  After four hours and seven firefights, they exited the Interstate at Pearl River. Uncollected bodies in a shopping center parking lot lay strewn around barricades of cars, furniture, and shopping carts at the site of someone’s unsuccessful last stand. On the next block over, looters—Infected or Uninfected, who could tell—loaded minivans and warily watched the convoy pass.

  When they eventually slowed, a curious, sickly sweet smell entered through the open gunner’s hatch. Bodies lay in piles or singly, splayed or in fetal positions, some intact, some just limbs and a head around brown, contaminated stains. The convoy wound its way slowly through a slalom course of immobilized concrete mixers and dump trucks parked in a road pitted with craters large and small. Their Humvee bounced over bodies it couldn’t avoid. The tracked Bradley in fro
nt simply flattened them. Some of the dead Infecteds had guns. Others lay next to sharpened wooden fence posts, clutched iron bars, or held a chunk of concrete in an outstretched hand.

  Infecteds’ bodies were stacked by the dozens near the sandbags at the gate. “Pfizer Pearl River Life Sciences Campus,” read its bullet-riddled sign. Men, women, and children had attacked the two tanks on either side of the road. And there had to be a hundred helmeted heads protruding from trenches running off in both directions in front of parallel, chain-link fences topped by barbed wire.

  As soon as they entered, the gates closed behind them, but no one approached when they got out. Troops in gas masks and gloves encircled them, keeping their distance, weapons in hand.

  “Which one of you is Isabel Miller?” came a shout from behind a mask. Isabel raised her hand like a schoolgirl. “Come forward. Only you!” She walked toward the voice. The ring of troops parted. She followed instructions and stood atop a blue tarp. “Please remove your equipment and clothing, ma’am.” Isabel looked around. There had to be a hundred men on the lawn. “Sorry,” the soldier said, sounding drained, not apologetic. “Protocol.”

  Isabel lay her rifle, webbing and body armor on the ground, unlaced her boots, and pulled her blouse off and trousers down. Her bare skin erupted in goosebumps. “Everything off, ma’am.” She looked back at her convoy. Rick was checking on the wounded man. She unclasped her bra and stepped out of her panties. She had never felt more naked.

  Men in PPE hosed and brushed her down. The icy disinfectant stung. She fought the brushes twice, when they were too rough. Finally, freezing water from a garden hose rinsed her off. Soldiers’ gazes were averted when they handed her a towel and blanket. She was led, shivering, to a guardhouse. A female nurse and armed soldier in full PPE joined her in the small but, thankfully, heated shack.