Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  Her dad skidded over to her. She turned away. “You’re in huge fucking trouble, Chloe. Eject that magazine and the round you chambered right now.”

  “Dad, I’m not that high. I can handle an AR. It’s not like I’m carrying grenades like somebody we know. I just did a little microdose right before my shower. It was supposed to be Jake’s patrol.”

  “Eject that magazine and that round. I’m not fucking kidding, Chloe.”

  “Are you sure that’s really smart, Dad? On a patrol? Two hundred meters from thirteen potential hostiles?”

  “Hostiles?”

  “They could have patrols out too, ya know, Dad? And while we’re here arguing about this nothing burger, they could be…”

  “It’s not nothing. I want your stash before Jake gets into it.”

  Chloe guffawed. “Me giving weed to Jake? That’s funny. The point is we’re on this patrol, we haven’t even talked about the potential hostiles issue, and you’ve completely lost situational awareness. And I’d never get stoned, okay. I’m responsible. And you’re not getting my ‘sta-a-ash.’ No way. I have rights. If I carry a rifle, I get rights. To vote, and stuff like that, and to the pursuit of happiness. So…”

  “This isn’t over,” her dad said.

  They left the trespassers unmolested and headed back home in silence. The hill seemed twice as steep as she’d remembered it on the way down. To top it off, her dad stopped them, made her get down on the ground, waved and waggled his hand and pointed to his eyes—“What?” she’d pantomimed—like she could possibly know what he meant by all his monkey motion. And all of it was only paranoia. She’d mentioned patrols by potential hostiles completely theoretically. Of course nobody else went on patrols. Normal people didn’t have guys like her dad. Jesus.

  He eased up after no major loss of life and joined Chloe for the last of their climb. “Where’d you get that potential hostiles thing? Did I miss it in class or the reading?”

  “I made it up.” He looked down at her. “I’m creative.” Her dad smiled. Situation handled. “We really could’ve taken ’em, ya know. Those settlers down there.”

  “Now they’re settlers? I think potential hostiles is better. It includes Infecteds, and Uninfecteds who’re starving, or driven to depravity by trauma, or just ordinary felons.”

  “PH is shorter,” Chloe remarked. “But the P stands for potential, Dad. They could just be settlers looking to raise some crops, you know, and support, like, the local arts and crafts. But we coulda taken ’em. I could have hit all mine on the left, and then come and helped you out on the right. My aim is real steady when I microdose.”

  “Wait!” He grabbed her arm. “Chloe, you’ve gone shooting before while high?”

  “You train like you fight. That’s what the big instructor said.”

  “High?”

  “Like I said, it was Jake’s patrol. I’d finished my chores.” She gritted her teeth. “Microdose, Dad. I put an entire magazine, twenty-seven rounds, inside the five ring while microdosing. It looked like a cannon ball had shot straight through the target. That’s when the instructor gave me that thingie, remember, that pin? Expert effing marksman. ‘Markswoman,’ he called me, remember? My hands were, like, totally calm. My heart steady. Breathing slow.”

  She waited to see which way this thing was gonna go. More lectures and criticism, joined in by her mom, God forbid? Or full-on police raid of her panty drawer, where the vape pens Jake had given her were hidden?

  “Uhm, Chloe, could I maybe, you know, have a little? Pot, I mean? Just a little.”

  “What?” Oh, the irony. Un-fucking-believable! After her reflexive roller coaster of an eye roll, she said, “You know what hypocrisy is, don’t you? And yes, okay, you can have one vape pen, but only if you prove you understand the microdosing concept. I’d like to see a good definition on the hallway floor outside my room by eight o’clock tonight, double-spaced, 200 words, handwritten is fine.”

  Her dad laughed. “You woulda been a good lawyer.” He meant it as a compliment.

  “So, what am I gonna be now?” she asked, hoping the pot conversation was over before her mom got to join it.

  “Maybe, I dunno, travel the country doing sharpshooting exhibitions at rodeos, hoe-downs, barn raisings.” He hugged her. “Ew!” She pried herself free from her sweaty father.

  Chapter 33

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

  Infection Date 60, 1000 GMT (6:00 a.m. Local)

  Emma, Dwayne, and Samantha arrived at the first encampment along the state highway leading down to town, which Samantha had numbered “1” on her map. It was occupied by Infecteds of varying capabilities from indolent and inactive, to industrious and energetic. The latter would work; the former could be disposed of. They took photos on Emma’s iPhone for future use in organizing. Camps 2, 3, and 4 were also full of Infecteds, but 5 was Uninfected: blasting loud music on an RV’s stereo system, with boisterous children playing noisily atop an immobilized SUV. Camp 6 was evidently mixed, with Uninfecteds wearing masks and Infecteds chained to a tree. Camp 7 was impossible to categorize from the observable actions of their grimy, barely subsisting occupants. The scientist in Emma noted the convergence of Infected and Uninfected behavior at the very edge of subsistence living. All were wary of the three armed passers-by, but none challenged or confronted them.

  Before reaching town, they climbed the hill above the highway and lay on their bellies behind a rock. Samantha sketched the town’s layout and took note of Dwayne and Emma’s comments. “I estimate about two hundred refugees in that enclosure,” Dwayne said.

  “More,” Emma corrected. Sam added a plus sign after the 200 she had written on her map next to the fenced back lot of an auto-body shop that looked more like a junkyard. Emma noted for Sam the only guard they saw: a shaggy man in jeans and a camouflage blouse with a hunting rifle propped on his hip and a sleepy dog at his feet. “See those young men over there?” Emma pointed at four boys and men seated behind the hulk of an old truck, hidden from view amid piles of rusting metal. “They’re sharpening tools.”

  “Weapons,” suggested Dwayne.

  Sam asked, “Are they Infected, or Uninfected?”

  “Uninfected.” Emma pointed. A boy of ten or so chased a girl somewhat younger through the junkyard playing a game of tag. Samantha put a big “U” in the center of the fenced-off pen she had drawn. “Look,” Emma said. “They’re gonna feed them.” A line of gray-haired ladies carried trays toward the fence from one of the four nearby churches. A sheriff’s deputy with a shotgun escorted them, and the refugees in the camp quickly crowded the fence nearest them. Even the males making weapons and the two playing children raced to join them. The lone guard with the hunting rifle knew enough to be concerned, and retreated several steps as the commotion grew.

  “They’re starving,” Emma said. The Uninfecteds jostled for position, with shoves and elbows thrown, and snarls revealing a more primitive underlying substrate. They’re dangerous, said the voice.

  “Why are they wasting food on them?” Samantha asked.

  Emma ventured, “Maybe the promise of a little food keeps them under control.”

  Dwayne was shaking his head. “Right now, they’re in a fairly secure enclosure. But before too long they’ll work their way through that fence.”

  The fence bowed outward with the pressure of the refugees. The women with the food stopped short. In what appeared to be the routine, they placed the trays on the ground and began tossing sandwiches, wrapped in paper, over the fence. Each descending packet became the center of a fight. Bigger men generally fared better in the scramble for food, but some groups appeared organized with men blocking their competition and women seizing the sandwiches. The noise of it all, including the useless barks of the guard’s dog, rose to a crescendo as the last of the food rained down into the melee. The women, looking behind them in concern bordering on
fear, departed with their empty trays. The deputy shouted unheard commands as men and women wrestled over the last unclaimed bundles.

  “That man doesn’t look very interested in doing his job,” Dwayne said. The civilian guard with the hunting rifle had backed all the way across the street from the fence. His slumping dog looked ancient and decrepit.

  “Could he stop them if they broke out?” Emma asked.

  Dwayne shook his head. “Not with a bolt action rifle against 200 starving people.”

  “Then why are they staying penned up in there?”

  “They’re doing what they’re told. They’re getting at least some food. They’re staying free of the virus. It would take five or six men with magazine-fed semi-automatic rifles—or one with a belt-fed machine gun from that armory—to cut them down to a manageable number.” Samantha neatly wrote “5-6 rifles or 1 MG” underneath dashed lines of bullets ripping through the roughly square enclosure drawn on her map.

  They saw no evidence of a larger armed militia. A second deputy sat in a folding lawn chair at the door to the large brick Army National Guard building, to which Samantha paid particular attention in her drawing. “Could you hit him at this range?” Dwayne began to raise his rifle to his shoulder. Emma rested her hand on his arm. “I mean, hypothetically.”

  “From here? Three hundred yards? Sure.” Samantha drew a dashed line from their vantage point to the stick figure she’d placed by the armory door, wrote “300 yards,” and drew a smiley face.

  Emma had Sam note every door and window into the armory, fire station, and sheriff’s offices, and the doors into the church’s kitchen to which the ladies had returned.

  “This town isn’t big enough,” Emma commented as Sam completed her map.

  “You said you didn’t want a big city,” Dwayne noted. “Too attractive a target.”

  Emma said, “Sam?” The girl was so absorbed in her map that she jumped in surprise. “What was that list of mid-sized Virginia towns that we came up with at the NIH hospital? Between 75,000 and 150,000 pre-outbreak populations?”

  Samantha had recreated most of her notes from their combined recollections in a spiral notebook like those she had presumably used in middle school. Only this one lacked the flowery doodles and hearts and stars, and bore instead, on its bright blue cover, only the word, “Notes.”

  “Uhm, Lynchburg.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Emma said. “But it’s close to D.C.”

  The next three—Suffolk, Portsmouth, and Hampton—were nixed on Dwayne’s advice. They were all adjacent to Norfolk, still a flourishing and heavily defended U.S. naval base. “Plus,” he said, “anywhere near the coast and we’d be exposed to naval artillery and the possibility of an amphibious assault.”

  “And the last town is Roanoke,” Samantha interjected in her high-pitched yet still confident voice. She looked expectantly at Emma. Roanoke was nowhere near the coast. Could she be thinking on her own, not simply reciting the requested list? Could she possibly be hearing voices too, prodding her with advice? Voices that were, somewhere deep in her mind, doing their own analysis of the data?

  “That’s reasonably close to here,” Emma noted.

  Dwayne added, “And in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Remember when I was telling you about raising semi-regular forces without all the complex and heavier systems.”

  Emma looked his way. “Forces that could break down,” she said, “under pressure into semi-irregular units, like guerrillas. In the mountains?” Samantha began drawing large apes on the map next to Roanoke. Emma said, “So, Roanoke it is. But we’ll need numbers. First, this town. Then on to Rawley Springs.”

  Chapter 34

  UPSTATE NEW YORK

  Infection Date 60, 1100 GMT (7:00 a.m. Local)

  The gunner atop Isabel’s Humvee had opened fire repeatedly after they left Pearl River, but they hadn’t exited their vehicles to fight even once. Nevertheless, the trip back—in the dark early morning hours—was several times scarier than the daytime trip down to Pearl River had been.

  Once, the ghostly figure of a woman, almost certainly infected, had stood staring straight through Isabel’s side window from under ten feet away as they edged their way slowly through the narrow channel of stalled cars cleared the day before. The woman had fallen backwards like a bowling pin when their machine gunner had cursed and fired as fast as he could swivel his weapon around. But in her spooky final moments on Earth, she had never taken her eyes off Isabel.

  They returned the way they had come, driving north up the southbound lane. At their plodding pace, it would take hours more to make it back to the president’s plane.

  A flurry of radio traffic changed that calculus. They pulled off the Interstate and into the parking lot of a long-ago looted Walmart. “What’s going on?” Isabel asked Rick.

  “Changing rides,” was all he said, opening his door even before the Humvee stopped. Their convoy was arranged in a tight circle in the huge, empty parking lot, its vehicles backing into place so that their headlights illuminated their surroundings. Old shopping bags and free newspapers swirled in the breeze amid overturned carts and volume discount packaging.

  Isabel opened her door, but Rick leaned back inside. “Stay there!”

  She ignored him and exited inside the circle of vehicles, which reminded her of a wagon train bedding down for the night. The wind was cold. There was thunder in the distance. Men growled orders, moved between vehicles, and unfurled belts of brass ammo to feed the machine guns placed in the gaps between the fenders. “Alvarez,” a sergeant barked, “you got from Garden Supplies on the left to that burned out flatbed. Mazelli, that flatbed is the leftmost edge of your field of fire. You got all the way over to that last lamppost in front of the barbeque grills. You see which one I’m talkin’ about?”

  “Yes, sergeant!”

  “If they take cover behind the flatbed, you both keep ’em pinned and we’ll lob forty mike-mikes down on ’em. Got it?”

  “Yes, sergeant!” both men replied.

  The thunder on the horizon seemed odd. It came in waves, not randomly. Isabel found the gap between the tall MRAP, Rick had called it, and the Humvee with the stubby, automatic grenade launcher and watched the lightning that was associated with the rumbling. They were explosions, not weather. She counted the time between the strings of flashes and the sounds of boom-boom-boom-boom. Seven seconds. Seven miles.

  “I told you to stay in the fucking Humvee!” Rick snarled at her.

  She was more disturbed than offended by him cursing at her, but held it together. “What’s going on?”

  Rick’s eyes followed hers to the flashes that lit the treetops. “They found and fixed that renegade National Guard unit. So, Stewart thinks it’s safe enough now to fly helos, and you’re getting picked up. They’re in a hurry to get you back.”

  “To get that ice chest back, more likely.”

  “I take it this wasn’t a beer run?” he ventured. She simply shook her head. She’d already decided it was best if no one knew what was in the cooler. Someone might go a little nuts if they heard she was carrying a working Pandoravirus vaccine. It may be the single most valuable substance on earth.

  “Movement!” someone called out from the opposite side of the circle.

  “Hold your fire!” came another shout.

  Rick hustled to the source of the warning. Isabel followed. “Five people,” said the sergeant, alternating between night vision goggles mounted atop his helmet and hand-held optical binoculars. “Looks like a family. Mom, dad, three kids.”

  Despite that report, the soldier next to Isabel took aim; nervous, jumpy, ready.

  A lieutenant showed up with a bullhorn and handed it to Rick. “You there!” his voice boomed. “Halt! United States military! You are approaching a restricted zone! We will use deadly force if you come any closer!”

  There
was a shout in reply from the distance. “What did he say?” the lieutenant asked Rick.

  “Fuck if I know.” Rick pointed the horn toward the family and raised the handheld mike connected to it by a long, curly cord. “I say again. Halt! This is a restricted military zone! Do not approach this convoy! We will use deadly force! This is your final warning!”

  There was another shouted reply. The only word Isabel made out was “food.”

  One of the soldiers said, “They’re starving.”

  “Yeah?” the army officer replied to his man. “And I haven’t been paid in a month. We all got problems.”

  “Yeah but…They got little kids.”

  “Helo is ten out,” Rick said to his fellow officer, lowering a radio handset. Isabel thought ten minutes was no time at all. But the two officers exchanged a glance that suggested otherwise.

  The family was now clearly pleading. “They’re just hungry,” the soldier again piped up.

  “You don’t think Infecteds get hungry?” his commanding officer answered.

  “Please!” came the now audible shouts of the approaching family. “They’re everywhere! The woods are full of ’em! We risked coming out because we’re starving! We’ve got kids! Just take them! Please!”

  “That don’t sound like Infecteds, sir!” the rebellious soldier implored.

  This time, it was another soldier who responded, not their officer. “If we let them inside this perimeter, we could all get sick.”

  But the first guy wouldn’t give up. “We’re out in open air. That’s not as dangerous as indoors, right?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” the lieutenant snapped. “We’ve got a mission, and we’re gonna complete it.” He glanced at Isabel—their mission—and she felt guilty.

  The rifle of the hesitant soldier was no longer raised to his shoulder. He muttered, “The mission, the mission,” and avoided looking directly at Isabel. “When we get this woman back, what then, sir? What are our orders? ’Cause it seems like we’re just about at the end of the road. What if there’s nobody out there to give us our next mission?”