Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  He saw soiled tennis shoes protruding from the brush—unnatural in pose and unmoving. He raised his mask with a gloved hand and, with his rifle to his shoulder, crept closer. It was a middle-aged woman. Her hands clutched loosely at the sucking wound on her chest, which made a gurgling rattle. He couldn’t tell if she was infected, but there was blood everywhere. She wasn’t long for this world.

  Noah backed off a few yards, raised the radio, and whispered, “See anything? Over.”

  “Nope,” Natalie replied. “It’s all still. I don’t think I hit anyone. And you’ve gotten all of Jake’s. Looks like that’s the last.” After a moment, she said, “Oh. Sorry. Over.”

  “What’s that?” Chloe said from behind Noah on hearing the sounds emanating from the dying woman’s last labored breaths.

  “I gotta take one shot,” Noah radioed while looking at his daughter. “To finish it.”

  He waited, but didn’t know for what. “Okay,” was all Natalie said. It was less than the full moral absolution for which he longed. Noah caught Chloe’s eye and raised his rifle in a pantomime of what he was about to do. His daughter shrugged before turning away. She seemed drained, or distant, or closed off from what was happening. Whichever, it came off as uncaring, like an Infected. Like her Aunt Emma.

  Noah aimed at the nearly lifeless form, first at the underside of the woman’s chin. But what a mess that would leave. He shifted positions to the side so he had a shot straight at her heart. He was surprised how hard it was to pull the trigger. Harder than when they were shooting back. Enough time to think about it. He fired a single shot into the mortally wounded attacker, who jerked once before falling still.

  He grabbed the woman’s tennis shoe and dragged her across the sloping forest floor back toward Chloe. “Where’d I hit her?” his bored sounding daughter asked in an incongruously high-pitched, girlish voice. He too had endured the violence of the past few days, but Chloe’s callousness still disconcerted Noah. He surveyed the carcass, whose arms were raised directly over her head from his dragging as if in surrender to death.

  “Chest. It was fatal, but it was taking too long.”

  Another shrug from his daughter. Another casual dismissal of a life lost. Chloe had donned gloves and mask to retrieve the woman’s small-bore, bolt-action rifle. “She stood up,” Chloe said. “I don’t know why. Maybe it was that ant pile behind the rotting tree. But she just stood straight up right in my cross-hairs.” Noah could think of nothing to say. It was just chatter—small talk—he decided. “Was she infected?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied.

  “Just curious.” With the toe of her boot Chloe lifted the woman’s eyelid. “Infected.” She began rummaging through the dead woman’s pockets and extracting a handful of.22 long shells and a folding pocket knife.

  “Make sure you wash that stuff, and your boots, before going back inside.”

  Noah dragged their latest victim to the new pit. They’d used the little Bobcat to dig a third trench for the dead a short distance from the other two and the lone individual grave of their first kill. Noah slid the body down onto the growing pile of corpses of all ages and genders and in all manner of clothing at the bottom of the long and narrow mass grave, then removed his blue Latex gloves and tossed them in after her. Flies were beginning to gather. He wondered if they might spread the disease.

  “That makes twenty-three,” Chloe said dully. “Fourteen Infecteds, and nine Uninfecteds, not counting the Nicholses and those camps down on the highway where Emma and Dwayne got their weapons.”

  “Let’s leave this hole open a little while longer,” Noah said.

  “It’s starting to smell.”

  Noah gazed up at the sun through the canopy of trees. “Yeah, but it’s in the shade, and it’s still early.”

  The walk back up to the side gate was circuitous. The cyclone fencing was still intact—no one had made it inside since the first day—but it was growing frayed by bullets fired through it in both directions. Both the barn and the house were randomly pocked with an alarming number of pits and holes like a World War II urban battle photo. Two chickens—Kourtney and Khloé—had died in the crossfire. Chloe and Noah kept their distance from the growing number of contaminated black patches in the dirt where Infecteds had fallen.

  It was just a matter of time, Noah reasoned—time, and statistics—before one of the bullets meant for a member of their family struck home. Noah had imagined it dozens of times as he had tried to grab an hour or two of sleep. Each time, some small detail had jolted him awake. The fleeting image of his frantic, inexpert, and ultimately failed first aid attempt. Calls not returned on the radio. Another search, like the one for Jake, only with a different outcome and a different family member each time. Natalie. Chloe. Jake.

  He hadn’t slept in four days.

  Each of them had suffered close calls that had troubled them more and more in the quiet hours that followed the fights. Noah and Natalie were emotionally exposed to each and every near miss—of them, and of their children. The cumulative toll taken on their nerves was starting to tell. There was no more laughter. Their conversations were brief. Gone was the warmth and love shown just days earlier. Chloe hadn’t even cried at the loss of her beloved chickens.

  Noah’s daughter said, “How long can we keep doing this? I mean, eventually we’re not gonna hear ’em until it’s too late and a whole bunch of ’em are inside the fence.” She was right. He had known it for a day or so now. The attacks on their compound would continue until one finally succeeded. “Whatta we do, Dad?”

  With his back to his daughter, Noah allowed himself a wince. If only she hadn’t said, “Dad.” That word encompassed both her trust and faith in him, and his duty to protect her. Everything depended on him and the decisions he made. On no sleep. Hands now constantly trembling, spoiling his aim. How much longer could he keep his family safe there? He silently cursed himself for ever thinking that he could just by renovating a house and stocking it with things. Millions in worthless gold in the basement.

  “Dad?”

  Noah’s original Plan B had been to evacuate to the cabin, which apparently had been abandoned by Emma and company. But after the attacks they’d barely managed to repel on the relatively well protected main house, the cabin seemed like a death trap. His new Plan C—or was it B now?—was to abandon both houses and live in the hills around their property. Noah, together with either Jake or Chloe, in alternating patrol schedules, had begun stashing bags of food, water, supplies, and ammo in various caches scattered at a distance. Once they abandoned the compound, the house would surely be picked clean. Those cached supplies would buy them a few weeks, maybe a little more with replenishment of water snuck from the main house’s or cabin’s wells.

  “On the news,” he finally replied to his daughter without looking her way, “they’re talking about some last stand in Texas. Defending big pharma plants there that’re manufacturing the vaccine. I’m thinking maybe…we could head that way.”

  “To Texas?” Noah shrugged as they entered the side gate and locked it behind them. “Will they even let us in if we make it there? I mean, they might think we’re Infecteds.”

  “They’ll have some procedure,” Noah made up. “A test or something.” Chloe’s concern, while valid, lay at the end of a thousand other life-threatening obstacles between Virginia and Texas, which in the aggregate made staying and defending the house or hiding in the hills look more attractive by comparison. They hosed off their boots, and Chloe washed the .22 rifle, bullets, and pocket knife with soap and water in the buckets kept for that purpose beside the front porch. Both then scrubbed hands that were raw from previous scouring.

  At the front door, which had at least a dozen bullet holes in it, Natalie had left lunches for them made of stale, rock-hard bread and peanut butter. Noah and Chloe ravenously consumed the food in joyless silence and washed it down with cool
well water. They were almost out of bread, whose increasingly mold-covered edges Natalie excised like a surgeon, reducing the slices’ sizes to miniature versions of sandwiches.

  Natalie or Jake fired a single shot from a rifle in the tower above them. “I see four!” Jake called out before firing several more shots. Natalie added, “It looks like two men, a woman, and a boy or girl! Down the hill just past where we burn the trash!”

  Noah stuffed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, wiped the crumbs from his lips with the back of his hand, and took cover behind the column opposite where Chloe lay with her rifle. His shouting was made difficult by the peanut butter. “Are they running…or…are they staying?”

  “They went to ground!” Jake replied. Pop. Pop. His wife and son kept up steady fire meant to keep them heads-down. “I counted two long guns!” Pop.

  Chloe was already donning a fresh pair of gloves, which Noah did as well. “We’ll swing around the back,” he said, “past the grow labs, and out the side gate again.”

  “We should climb up the rocks to the left of the path up to Emma’s cabin,” Chloe suggested. “That’ll give us a clearer shot.”

  That was just what Noah had been thinking. He explained their plan over the radio to Natalie and Jake, and led his teenage daughter on the flanking maneuver. Ten minutes later, Noah dragged the first of the dead family of Uninfecteds toward the pit. “Twenty-seven, Dad,” Chloe said as she kept watch with her rifle.

  Texas was looking—and probably smelling—a fair bit better.

  * * * *

  As night fell, Natalie brought dinner—the first of their twenty-five-year shelf-life freeze-dried packages—up to Noah in the tower, keeping her head below the level of the walls. “Pasta alfredo!” she announced with her smiling, newly adopted forced optimism. Noah turned off the battery-powered thermal imager. He’d wait to use it until it was fully dark. “The first of 192 pasta alfredos to come, so I hope you like it.” Noah took a bite and tried not to grimace. The boiled dinner tasted bland with overtones of plastic. “I noticed that some of the buckets of bulk food were gone. Is that what you’ve been hiding out there on your hikes?”

  “Patrols,” Noah corrected. “And yeah.”

  “That’s the new backup plan? If things get worse here? Live off the land?”

  “Nat, we need to talk. I don’t know how much longer we can stay in this house.” She was sitting on her heels and blinking. “I mean, if people keep coming—and I don’t know why they’d stop, especially after the food in town runs out—then we’re constantly going to be attacked, and sooner or later…” He couldn’t bring himself to speak his worst fear aloud.

  “So that’s it?” she asked, her eyes flitting about the bare concrete of the tower, which was pocked with bullet holes. “All these preparations—the grow labs, the supplies—and we’re just gonna abandon everything? Sleep in tents? Live like homeless people?”

  “Everyone seems to know where we are, and that we’ve got a lot of supplies. We’re too big of a target. One of these times our luck is gonna run out. I mean, what’s Chloe’s count? Twenty-seven we’ve killed? How many rounds did they fire back our way that missed? Two hundred? Four hundred? Have you seen the front of the house? The hurricane shutters look like Swiss cheese. The windows between the inner and outer shutters are all shattered, and some of those bullets went clear through into the living room and kitchen. The breakfast room TV got smashed. It just takes one bullet.”

  “I know how many fucking bullets it takes, Noah!” Natalie replied. “What about the cabin? Emma and her crew are all down in town now. We could air the cabin out for a day or two and scrub it down.”

  “Nat, as soon as they pick over the main house, they’ll come find us up there. And that cabin is completely undefendable.” He shook his head. “Nothing is working.”

  “What about going into town? Joining Emma?”

  “We can’t agree to Emma’s contract, whatever the hell that’s gonna be. She’s serious, you know, about killing undesirable people and rule breakers. That would include us if we stepped out of line. Forget sentimental family ties. I’d rather take my chances in the woods. Or on the road, like the rest of America.”

  “Noah! You’ve seen on the news how bad it is out there. And it’s worst on the refugees! The army is trying to stop them. The towns treat them like invading barbarians. People assume you’re infected, just like you do them. They prey on each other for food and water. And they’ve got to contend with the real Infecteds. Without any electrified fence, stone walls, or towers. It’s horrible.”

  “Pick your poison.” The expression seemed agonizingly apt. “I sure would like not being such a juicy target. Or at least being a more mobile one.”

  Natalie absorbed the comment before sighing. “I see you brought a sleeping bag and a pillow up here. Are you spending the night in the tower again?”

  “Yeah.” He expected her to lecture him about how tired he looked; how important sleep was; how not to overtax himself. But she didn’t. He finished his dinner—410 calories that were supposed to be sufficient but left him feeling almost as empty as before—then flicked on the huge thermal imager and raised it into one of the crenels in the low wall. The imager was meant to sit atop a rifle like an enormous telephoto lens. Through the eyepiece he quickly confirmed that the woods were dark. Nothing glowed hot. Anything 98.6 degrees would shine brightly against the duller, cooler black-and-white background.

  “So what do we do?” Noah’s wife asked. This time, his eyes found hers boring into him, waiting for the next plan that would save them from the brutal end they had witnessed—and caused—twenty-seven times now.

  “We head to Texas.”

  “What?”

  “It’s where the government is reforming after D.C. fell. You saw the news. They’re moving all their troops down there to defend the pharmaceutical factories and refineries. Everywhere around here—it’s gonna be all-out war.”

  “And we’re gonna drive straight thorough the middle of that war zone, Noah. They’re going to be blasting the holy crap out of anybody who tries to flee down there, and, oh by the way, everywhere between here and there that turns. And where do you think you’re gonna find gasoline for that guzzler you parked down by the highway?”

  “We can’t take the SUV.” She screwed up her face in confusion. “We’ll have to hike it.” Her jaw dropped in utter disbelief. “It’ll be safer ultimately. In a car, you’ll drive right into an ambush and never see it coming. On foot, you’ll have a sense of what’s around you. ‘Situational awareness,’ the shooting instructors called it.”

  “Noah, that’s…Walking? To Texas? Through towns and cities that are all—every one of them—in the middle of their very own Armageddon? Assuming that’s even possible—that we can actually hike that far, and nobody will shoot us or bomb us or strafe us or whatever—how can we possibly carry enough food and water for what will take months, I presume?”

  “About fifty-two days, taking a more or less straight line and making eight hours a day.”

  “So…months, like I said. Do you realize how heavy those buckets of food are down in the basement? It took all my strength just to bring one upstairs today.”

  “Four ounces per packet, three packets per day, figure sixty days, that’s forty-five pounds per person.”

  “On a thousand-mile trek, Noah!”

  “It’s 1,260 miles. But the load will get lighter and lighter as we consume stuff.”

  “Water is even heavier than food. We can’t carry that much, plus all the other stuff we’d have to bring—sleeping bags, flashlights, first aid kits…and guns, I’m sure, and lots and lots of ammunition.”

  Noah said, “I figure we’ll take about half that much food, plus some water, and we’ll forage the rest along the way.”

  “You mean steal it. Take it from some poor people who aren’t armed as well as w
e will be. Right?”

  “Nat, bullets and purification tablets are lighter than food and water.”

  “Jesus Christ. That’s what it’s come to? This is who we are now? We’re no different than those twenty-seven starving people we’ve killed.”

  “You’re wrong there,” Noah replied. “We are different.” Natalie cocked her head. “We’re better armed.” He took another check through the thermal imager.

  A half dozen glowing figures approached in the darkness. “Go get Chloe and Jake. We’ve got more coming.”

  Chapter 40

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

  Infection Date 64, 1530 GMT (11:30 a.m. Local)

  Isabel and Rick wore their goggles in the breezy open doorway of the Black Hawk as it slowly circled the Old Place. “My God!” Isabel gasped seeing the bodies strewn all about. “Oh-my-God-oh-my-God!” Rick’s arm wrapped around her as she began to shake while searching the dead for her brother and his family.

  The door gunner was on high alert behind his multi-barrel weapon as they settled into the tight clearing, which looked too small for the large aircraft. The tree limbs flailed this way and that only feet beyond the spinning rotors. Dust shot up just before the tires connected solidly with the ground.

  There was no Vasquez or Army detail anymore, just Isabel, Rick, and the three-man crew, who remained in the cockpit or behind the door gun as their two passengers climbed out into the dying gale.

  Rick took the lead, rifle raised. This time, Isabel held her finger on her trigger, and her thumb on her selector switch. She felt sick, needing to vomit but unable to. Somewhere in that dark house, she felt sure, they would find her brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew—dead. Slaughtered. Raped. Tortured. Butchered. She was petrified to discover her worst fears come true, and tried several times to pray for it not to be before abandoning the dangerous distraction and focusing on killing whoever did this.