Noah exited the barn on the side facing the house. Chloe and Natalie were lying flat on the porch behind their rifles.
“Clear!” Noah called out.
“Clear!” Chloe replied, as taught, in her high pitch.
“Clear!” Jake shouted from the tower.
“I don’t see anything,” Natalie said. “I mean…clear!”
Noah rounded the corner of the barn at which the would-be chicken thief lay.
“Noah, your mask!” Natalie reminded him.
He jogged back to the house to gear up. “Is he dead?” Chloe asked.
“I dunno. Probably. Stay right there and shoot anyone you see. Or shoot that guy again if he moves a muscle.” He donned a mask and blue latex gloves from the boxes in the foyer, but his hands shook so much the gloves’ fingers were never pulled on fully. When he returned to the porch, he asked in a voice that he heard tremble, “Anything?” as he knelt and surveyed the scene.
Chloe looked ill, but both she and her mother shook their heads in reply.
Noah again crossed the yard. The fallen intruder lay face down. He had sparse gray hair and smelled as if he hadn’t showered in weeks. His dark jacket had a single hole in the middle of his back. Blood spread black around it. Noah kicked the shotgun away, then used the toe of his boot to roll the man over.
The intruder stared straight up at the sky through pupils that were totally black. Dirt stuck to the sweat on his forehead. A small hole in his chest corresponded to the larger one in his back. As taught by the instructors, Noah held his rifle one-handed, pointing down at the man, finger pulling firmly against the trigger, as he thumped the man’s eyeball with a gloved index finger. The infected man didn’t react at all. No involuntary flinch of a living person who was “playing possum.”
“He’s dead!” Noah announced.
Natalie and Chloe arrived a few moments later but kept their distance. His daughter looked mortified, staring out from her mother’s embrace at the man she’d killed. Noah wanted to help relieve her anguish. “Good shot, Chloe. Thank you for…”
Chloe vomited. In between spasms, she repeated, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Jake arrived. “It’s okay, Chloe. You feel bad for a little while but then it goes away.”
Noah realized in that moment that both of their teenage children, whose lives their parents had committed to protecting, had now killed people, but neither he nor Natalie had fired a single shot in their defense. What sense did this new world make?
“Chloe, sweetie,” Natalie said, “you did the right thing. Like Dad said, good shot. I couldn’t have made it. And if you hadn’t done it, Dad would’ve been hurt, or even killed.”
“He was just hungry,” Chloe said. She was doubled over, hands braced on her knees, and spitting the foul taste from her mouth as Natalie rubbed her back.
“He was infected,” Noah replied. “And stealing the food that we need to survive.”
“Everything okay?” Emma shouted from the side gate that led up the hill to the cabin. She, Dwayne, Samantha, and Dorothy all stood outside the fence carrying long guns.
“Yes!” Natalie replied.
“Did we miss one of the Nicholses?”
“No. Some guy was trying to steal our chickens, we think.”
“Okay then. Here’s our notice,” Emma said, waving a single sheet of paper in air, rolling it up, and inserting it into the fencing. “Bye.”
Noah sent Jake back up to the tower as Natalie guided Chloe inside. He went and retrieved the single page Emma had left behind. “We hereby terminate our contract.” Signed “Emma Miller, PhD.” Emma and friends were long gone. Noah felt overwhelmed. His circuits overloaded.
He got a shovel from the barn and began digging a grave near the septic tanks, where there was soil, not rock. It felt good to sweat from hard labor instead of anxiety. It calmed him. When the hole was a few feet deep, he dragged the body into it. He shoveled the topsoil from where the thief had fallen, dark with blood, into a trash bag, which he buried unceremoniously with the Pandoravirus-tainted remains and his blue gloves. Noah made a cross from two pieces of wood and wrote on it the man’s name he got from his wallet, Chet Perkins of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the dates of his birth and death…today. Noah then used wire to repair the hole in the fence.
Over the radio, Natalie asked if they should turn the electric fence on during the daytime. Noah replied, “I don’t know if we’re producing enough power. But we can try it and see if the battery holds up.”
When the fence was fixed and he’d thrown the long red handle to electrify the fence, he took a long, calming shower, holding onto the walls as he allowed himself to admit just how close he’d come to dying, and how great the risk to his family remained. He then joined Natalie, whose tanned arms were wrapped tightly around Chloe as she repeatedly kissed their daughter’s short blond hair. The TV was tuned to a grainy, off-air channel.
“The Rawley Springs station is back on,” Natalie said quietly as if not to disturb her daughter’s fragile calm. Her eyes directed Noah’s gaze to the screen.
The anchorwoman from the station in the valley sat woodenly in front of the camera reading the news. “Brazilian authorities believe the outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, which marks the first known arrival of Pandoravirus in Latin America, traces back to a charter flight evacuating wealthy Portuguese refugees from Lisbon.”
Noah felt Natalie looking his way, and turned to meet her gaze. “Do you see it?”
“See what?” he asked.
Natalie nodded at the TV again.
Noah leaned forward. The picture quality wasn’t great. “The weather today is expected to be fair, with a high of 64 degrees and no precipitation in the forecast. There are no local sports scheduled. The local school district remains closed until further notice. Traffic on the main highways continues to be heavy out of northern Virginia…”
Noah gasped. The anchorwoman’s eyes were jet black. She was infected.
Chapter 36
ABOARD E4-B
Infection Date 61, 1545 GMT (11:45 a.m. Local)
Isabel sat in her blue seat, mask and goggles on, airsick bag at her side, staring at the numbers—“1436/62”—written in black marker on the back of her left hand. The first number was clearly the time of her injection with the vaccine—1436 Greenwich Mean Time, about an hour and ten minutes ago—when her entire cabin had been vaccinated in their seats or bunks. The second number was either her order in the 112 injections being given to the people on board, or the number written on the vaccine’s syringe, or something like that.
She passed the time by occasionally catching the wide, goggled eyes of off-duty crewmen seated around her, who themselves warily monitored neighbors for any signs of illness. Statistically, seven of them should catch Pandoravirus from the injection.
No movement through the aircraft was allowed. Air policemen armed with pistols stood at the opposite ends of their cabin and, Isabel presumed, each of the other cabins on the 747. They periodically took slow strolls down the two aisles searching for any signs of medical distress. A cough. A sneeze. A gag. A hiccup. Squirming. Sweating. Moaning.
A nurse in camouflage arrived to take everyone’s temperature. The frequency of the checks was increasing as the two-hour mark approached. This check and the next one, two spins of the wheel, should inform Isabel and the others of their destinies.
The nurse didn’t smile when she got to Isabel. Nor did the armed air policeman accompanying her. Any bedside manner they might once have exhibited had yielded to tension writ firmly onto their faces. “How do you feel?” the nurse asked from behind her mask and goggles.
“Great!” Isabel said. Her voice quivered.
The nurse pressed the contact thermometer to her forehead. Isabel couldn’t help but close her eyes. Please, God, I’ll be good! There was a beep. The nurse mad
e a notation on her iPad and moved on. Isabel resumed breathing. The airman followed the nurse to the next row. “How do you feel?” she asked the airman in the seat behind Isabel.
Another beep. Another all-clear.
But shortly afterwards, Isabel sensed a break in routine and turned to look down the aisle. A man, around her age—an officer—had approached the nurse and her escort. He was speaking to her in quiet tones. Sweat trickled down his brow. The thermometer went to his head and beeped. The nurse read the instrument, and raised it again to his forehead. Beep. Her brow furrowed.
The officer willingly climbed into a full-body coverall and calmly said his good-byes as he walked forward with one of the cabin’s two posted guards following him. Isabel didn’t know the man, but she got a nod as he passed, which she returned.
Jesus. He was so calm. Could I be that brave? His life was over, or irrevocably changed, but he seemed serene. She was shaking and covered herself in her blanket. That got her noticed. “You doing okay?” the nurse asked as she came back up the aisle.
“Yeah. Sure.” She held her breath again as the thermometer beeped. The nurse and her airman moved forward to the middle cabin.
Minutes passed like months. An officer arrived and called an airman to duty. “That’s two,” said the man across the aisle from Isabel. It took a moment for her to understand. Someone else, up front, had fallen ill. The man from their cabin was his or her replacement.
“What are they doing with them?” she asked the man. “With the people who…?”
“They outfitted the aft lower lobe as an isolation ward. It’ll be tight for a half-dozen people.”
Isabel imagined the scene as, one-by-one, sick people filled the small compartment. Were there tears? Prayers? Vomit? Was there gallows humor, or a camaraderie among the condemned? She shivered and took a deep, ragged breath. Her seatmate paid greater attention to her after that. She didn’t feel sick, exactly, she didn’t think. Hers were symptoms more of terror. She felt cold, but not feverish…probably.
She needed to go to the bathroom. But was that diarrhea? She shivered, but her temperature was normal or else they’d have escorted her down to that nightmarish dungeon. Her stomach made a gurgling noise. She glanced at the airman across the aisle, who returned her gaze suspiciously. Had he heard the noise?
She checked her phone. Only twenty minutes had passed since they’d led the sick man off. Time was stuck in super slo-mo. Another airman was called to duty presumably to replace a crewman who’d fallen ill. Three. Isabel’s nerves began to settle. She felt no worse than before inoculation, which meant cramped, sore, and stir-crazy. But that beat the hell out of the alternative. She resisted the urge to rub and scratch the sore and itchy injection site.
She couldn’t think about Rick. He was ninety-four percent okay. She instead pictured Emma, Noah, and his family tending their gardens in their idyllic and safe mountain hideout. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The nurse arrived at the front no longer wearing her mask and goggles. “This cabin is all clear.” There was an explosion of cheering. Caught by surprise, Isabel didn’t join in but grinned in quiet celebration. Not only did they not die or turn from the dread disease, they were now all going to be immune! “Please stay in your seats until you’re notified that you can resume normal rotations.”
The nurse turned to leave, but stopped when someone called out, “How many?” The woman knew what he meant. “Eight, sir.” That was one more than the 6.6 infections, rounded to seven, that Isabel had calculated based on the average Nielsen had reported.
Her cheer at surviving the inoculation was tempered by two thoughts. There were eight people, somewhere down in the bowels of the jumbo jet, who were facing death or life-altering brain damage. And there was Rick, somewhere amid the horror down on the ground, who may or may not have been one of the lucky ninety-four percent.
Chapter 37
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 62, 1220 GMT (8:20 a.m. Local)
When Emma, Dwayne, Samantha, and Dorothy reached the state highway at the bottom of the Miller property, they looked uphill toward the eruption of gunfire. Dwayne said, “That’s coming from the main house. We only gave them notice yesterday. We’re still under contract.”
The shooting soon turned desultory and disorganized. Probably just a few more starving stragglers. “They can handle it,” Emma said. Dwayne seemed unconvinced and inclined to return. Was that because he wanted to help defend the providers of their food, or because he, too, heard a voice in his head? A voice that was telling him to keep his promise? Emma said, “We can get food in town.” When Dwayne kept glancing back at the sound of fighting, Emma concluded it must be the latter. What remained of the Marine in him was troubled by his broken oath.
They stopped at a distance when they came to the first of the roadside camps—number 1 on Samantha’s map. A half dozen infected refugees slowly gathered on the road’s shoulder. One held a shotgun. None of the others possessed any visible firearms. Emma did all the talking. “We’ve come to organize a community,” she called out from thirty or so yards away. “Offer a chance to join.”
Looks were exchanged, but no words until an older woman said, “What’s in it for the ones who sign on?”
“Food, shelter, clothing, security.” Emma decided not to mention sex, the prohibition of which was as much a stick as its provision was a carrot. “But there’s a contract to be entered into.”
“What kind of contract?”
Emma gave her the outline of the unwritten compact she was slowly developing. “Agree to abide by the rules—no violence unless it’s authorized, everyone works in return for benefits, no forming into crowds, and other things that we’ll inform you of, with any breaches being punishable by penalties up to and including death.”
“What if people don’t join?” asked a man.
“Then they won’t be part of the community, and they’ll have to leave.”
They outnumbered Emma and her small party, but they didn’t outgun them. The few adults and more mature children exchanged views out of Emma’s earshot, then all agreed. Dwayne picked out the adults and older teenagers save one woman who would stay behind with the younger children, and off they went to Infected encampment number 2. There, the promise of necessities, especially food—“Work first, then eat,” Emma explained—quickly sealed the deal, and their numbers grew yet again.
They passed the gate up to the Old Place’s severed and therefore now dangerous ridge road. When they came to the Nicholses’ mailbox, Emma stopped. You should have run off with the boy’s rifle without killing him, said the voice. “What is it?” Dwayne asked.
“Nothing,” Emma lied.
By the time they reached Bishop’s Quickie-Mart and Gas, there were almost thirty fighting-age Infecteds in her group, about half with some sort of weaponry.
The adult proprietors emerged from the store; the woman carrying a rifle and her husband a shotgun. Their blackened pupils confirmed their status. But from around the back of the house, a teenage boy appeared holding his own rifle. His pupils looked normal. Dwayne turned to Emma. “No,” she said, “but keep an eye on him.”
She addressed the couple, who she assumed were the boy’s parents. “I’m here to offer the chance to join a community.”
“Why would somebody do that?” the woman asked.
Emma went through her persuasive litany of benefits. “But it requires agreement to a contract.” So far, all the Infecteds they had met had gladly exchanged their freedoms for the promise of necessities. “Following the rules, which I’ll publish, or being put to death if they’re broken.”
The uninfected boy called out from the side of the store. “Mom! Dad!”
But his parents were uninterested in his objections. Both fell into formation with their weapons for the hike down toward town. Dwayne caught up with Emma at the head of the silent
army. “That boy ran up the highway toward your family’s house. Should I let him go?” She shrugged. Dwayne allowed it to drop.
When they reached the first camp of Uninfecteds—number 5—spread out around an RV, with clothes on lines, a deer carcass lying on a bloody tarp, venison cooking on an open fire, and the men, women, and older children all armed, Emma halted her much more numerous procession of Infecteds. “We mean you no harm. We’re just passing by.”
The Uninfecteds took up threatening positions behind cover. Emma directed her growing band of Infecteds to pass along the opposite shoulder of the highway. Dwayne and a subset of the armed men and women he’d been organizing during the march stood arrayed against the wary Uninfecteds, but their passage proceeded uneventfully.
“Thank you!” Emma called out when they were clear. The bypassed Uninfecteds appeared dumbfounded as they stared at the receding crowd.
Camp 6 had been mixed when they had reconnoitered the highway, but now they were all infected. A woman couldn’t join without abandoning her young daughter and son, but she volunteered nonetheless. “No. You stay and take care of them. What about those two chained to the tree up there?” Emma asked, shielding her eyes from the sun to peer at what looked to be the woman’s husband and mother or mother-in-law.
“Them? They haven’t eaten in days and are too weak. They should die soon. The food was running low, so…” Emma understood. They had to ration. She led the procession off toward town.
The only other cause for conversation was a long-distance appraisal of the final campsite they approached—number 7—along the highway just before they reached the city limits. “I don’t see anybody,” Dwayne said. “But there’s a pot hanging over that campfire.”
The people in number 7 had hurriedly abandoned the food they were cooking. The situation did seem threatening. Emma could feel her anxiety rise. A quick look back at the others in her group revealed signs of similar agitation. “Take care of it,” she told Dwayne.
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