Resurrection (Book 2): Into the Wasteland

by Michael J. Totten

  He’d injected it into somebody else.

  The doc ran some kind of test, all right, but not under a microscope. He too wanted to know—or more likely, the mayor wanted to know—if Annie’s immunity could be transferred to a person who shared her blood type.

  She already knew the answer, but she only knew that because Parker had been infected on purpose after being injected. How would the doc and the mayor figure it out unless they, too, planned to infect someone on purpose?

  She doubted this frightened little man had the nerve for that kind of thing, though the mayor might.

  “So you ran some tests,” Annie said.

  Doc Nash nodded.

  “And?”

  “Inconclusive.”

  I’ll bet, she thought. Three days passed before Parker turned and came back.

  She wanted to tell him. She wanted to help. She wanted to say they could solve this problem together. It’s the reason she’d left the San Juan Islands, after all. Orcas Island was overrun with the infected, but some of the smaller islands were safe enough. She could have stayed in the Pacific Northwest with her friends and scrounged together a primitive existence in relative safety. She drove a thousand miles to find a hospital.

  And she found one.

  But she wouldn’t tell him about Parker. Not yet. She didn’t know how Doc Nash would react, and she didn’t know if it would make any difference anyway.

  “Can you beat this thing, doc?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said.

  She could suggest that the doc and the mayor and their security people could help her find a larger hospital in a larger city, if not Atlanta then possibly Salt Lake City or Denver, but she’d probably come across as a flight risk.

  “What do you know about this disease?” she said. “Is this thing even a virus?”

  “It’s probably a virus,” he said.

  “You aren’t sure?”

  “Not entirely, no, but it’s probably a virus.”

  “Haven’t you been studying it?”

  “I—” He exhaled and leaned back. “I treat sick and injured people. I didn’t take it upon myself to cure this thing, no.”

  “So what do you know about it?”

  He sighed again, seemed to gather a little internal energy, and leaned forward. “It started out as the worst sickness we’ve ever seen, and now it’s even worse.”

  “How could it possibly get any worse?”

  “It’s a little more virulent now than when it first jumped into the human population.”

  “How is that even possible?”

  “The onset of symptoms is faster, which is the main reason why I think it’s a virus. Viruses mutate constantly, and when they suddenly become more virulent, they can rapidly continue growing even more virulent. Initially, people didn’t become symptomatic until after a couple of hours. You know. You were in Seattle when it started. By the time it reached us...”

  She felt a chill up her spine and on the back of her neck. “What changed, doc?”

  He took a deep breath. “Average onset of symptoms is now about thirty minutes. I’ve seen it happen in as little as ten.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Viruses mutate and evolve, sometimes with incredible speed. You have to understand, when you’re infected with a virus—not just this virus, but any virus—you have hundreds of millions of them in your body. And there are hundreds of millions of people in this country. At least there were. And there are billions of people on earth. The chances of an advantageous mutation are excellent. The regular H1N1 flu virus is always mutating. It never stops. Every year it’s practically a new virus, which is why we all need a new flu shot each year. Our immunity is only temporary.”

  Annie felt her eyes widen. “You mean—”

  “No, no. I don’t mean to suggest you aren’t still immune. The virus hasn’t changed that much. At least I don’t think it has. It is simply more virulent. You remember the Spanish Flu?”

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It killed 100 million people during World War I, more than fifteen times as many as the Nazis killed in the Holocaust. It was the worst pandemic in the history of the world until this one. But it was just a particularly virulent form of the H1N1 virus that goes around every year. It temporarily mutated into a form that infected and killed much faster. It mutated on a dime, so to speak. One day it killed rarely and slowly, then the next day it exploded. And then it got even worse. The virus struck in waves, each more terrifying than the last. It mutated that quickly. This virus is doing the same thing. I think it’s the rabies virus.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but yes, I think so. It started in Russia, if you recall, when a researcher at a remote station was bit by an Arctic fox.”

  “I thought it was a wolf.”

  “It was a fox. Rabies has always been transferable to humans from animals. Theoretically, a human could bite an animal and spread it that way, though I doubt it ever actually happened.”

  “So what does it mean that the virus is more virulent now?”

  “It’s harder to contain than it used to be. The waves come faster now. We could have several waves in a single day now, theoretically. But it’s still containable if it’s stopped quickly enough.”

  “How?”

  “By killing the infected, of course. There isn’t a cure. At least not yet.”

  Doc Nash looked away and rubbed the back of his neck again.

  Hughes and Parker went for a walk first thing in the morning, each in separate directions. They’d need to scope out the hospital and see what kind of security detail the mayor had put on it, but Hughes assumed they were still under some kind of surveillance and had to be careful. They needed to appear as if they were exploring out of pure curiosity, as if it had not even occurred to them that Annie ought to be anywhere else.

  They needed to know how well the hospital was being protected, and they needed to know if Steele had set up checkpoints at any of the major intersections. Were armed men doing random patrols? Had the mayor beefed up the perimeter on the outskirts? Hughes had no idea.

  So Parker would scope out the downtown core and the area around the hospital while Hughes ambled toward the city limits. Hughes wanted to eyeball the hospital himself, but he was black and couldn’t possibly blend into lily-white Wyoming. Parker could pass as a local far more easily. The mayor could have created a ring of steel around the hospital, but the men he’d put there would have no idea what Parker looked like.

  Hughes set out first. He headed east on Main toward the outskirts and away from downtown, his Glock in his parka’s right pocket.

  It was beyond cold outside. Had to be pushing zero degrees Fahrenheit at the most. He pulled his scarf up over his mouth and would have wrapped his entire face including his eyes if he could. He could swear the freezing air even stiffened his pants.

  The guys keeping an eye on the motel the previous night weren’t on observation duty anymore. They were off Hughes’ ass now, at least for the moment. No doubt some of Steele’s men were tracking down whoever had bitten Max, but Hughes figured he’d see more of them on the main drag.

  Hardly any traffic at all moved on the streets. There was hardly any gasoline left. These people would have to go farther and farther afield to find more. Soon enough they’d siphon the gas out of every car for a two-hundred-mile radius and that would be that. They’d have to ride bicycles—or walk.

  Hughes plodded along Main past a closed boot and hat store and a closed guns and ammo store that also sold archery equipment. He glanced inside the gun store and saw empty shelves. No big surprise. Steele’s militia had no doubt raided it for the ammo. According to the sign in the window, it would open in a little more than an hour, at 10:00 a.m. That wasn’t going to happen. That gun store was out of business forever. At least the windows weren’t broken like they were at every other gun store he’d seen since leaving Seattle. Lander was still holding on, but eventually
the entire planet would run out of ammunition if whatever was left of the human race managed to live long enough to use it all up.

  He passed an open barber shop with a red, white and blue striped pole outside. Across the street he saw an outdoor store that advertised a jackalope exhibit and trail rides. He imagined himself waltzing in there all smiles like a dumb tourist and saying, “Hey! I wanna go on a trail ride!”

  A rusted blue Ford pickup approached at maybe half the speed limit on Main. A lot of trucks in Wyoming, Hughes thought. The truck-to-car ratio was far more tilted toward trucks than on the West Coast. Even so, every vehicle Hughes had seen so far in town drove slowly even though there wasn’t much traffic. He doubted these people even realized they were barely crawling along even though they lived in one of the last surviving towns in the world and had no reason to hurry. There was nowhere else to go, really. Some deep part of their collective psyche must have been screaming caution at all times.

  The woman behind the wheel of the pickup stared at Hughes as she drove past. He waved. She didn’t.

  Town wasn’t used to strangers, and it especially wasn’t used to black strangers. Hughes wondered how many black people even lived in Wyoming. He’d look it up if his smartphone still worked and he’d be shocked if there were more than a couple hundred in the entire state. Pretty much everyone was either white or Native American. Maybe some Hispanics. Hardly any black people and maybe no Asians at all. Hardly any black people lived anywhere out West except California. Most of the rest were in the south or the northern industrial cities.

  His hometown of Seattle was mostly white too, but at least nobody gawked at him because he was black. At least not very often.

  Hughes saw little of Steele’s militia on the streets. Just two men on a foot patrol going the other way behind him and a single black SUV heading toward the city limits on Main. That surprised him. Surely the hospital was well protected, at least, now that Annie was in there. That was obvious without even scoping it out. Either way, he’d get a report from Parker later on in the day.

  He headed left onto a residential street to get a feel for the real part of town where people actually lived. The street was surprisingly wide. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a residential street as wide as this. Certainly not in Seattle. But it hardly ever snowed in Seattle. Wyoming must have huge piles of plowed snow on the sides of the streets after big storms. They’d need the streets to be wider.

  There was no snow yet. The ground was bone dry. Dead leaves blew around in swirling eddies.

  Around half the houses looked like they’d been built in the early 1940s, before the end of World War II when housing styles took a nose dive, though some looked much older. A handful must have been built at the very beginning of the 20th century or even late in the 19th. The designs were a real hodgepodge. Craftsman stood next to farmhouses next to Dutch Colonials with the odd single-story ranch home thrown in. Upper-middle and lower-middle class houses were all mixed together.

  Hughes saw no obvious poverty.

  An elderly woman out walking her dog passed him on the sidewalk. “Well, good morning!” she said, clearly surprised to see him.

  “A good morning to you, too, ma’am,” Hughes said.

  He heard someone chopping wood behind one of the Craftsman homes and saw some kids up ahead riding around on bikes despite the frigid temperature. The locals were used to it, he guessed. Kids didn’t seem to feel cold the way adults did anyway, probably because they ran around all the time and kept their body temperatures up.

  All in all, the neighborhood looked and felt shockingly normal and eerily quiet at the same time. He’d have no idea, if he didn’t already know, that the rest of the Western United States was a vast death zone. Very few people were out and about, though. Nobody seemed to be going anywhere. They must have known an infected man was shot and killed on Main Street the night before. Even if no one had told them, they would have heard the gunshots.

  Hughes imagined how difficult it would be to get out of town in the Suburban after grabbing Annie from the hospital and he decided: not very. Driving from the hospital to the city limits would take maybe two minutes. He saw no checkpoints in town itself. He’d only have to worry about the checkpoint on the outskirts.

  Getting into and out of the hospital, though, was another matter. There was no theory under which Steele would leave it unguarded.

  He doubled back, crossed Main and walked into the residential neighborhood on the other side of town. It was a little bit dodgier. It wasn’t poor, exactly, just noticeably less prosperous. Hughes saw more one-story homes and cheaper trucks in the driveways. Some of the yards had chain-link fences out front. The trees weren’t as tall. It all just looked a little less stately.

  Hughes heard a door open behind him and a screen door bang shut. He turned and saw a black man in his mid-forties wearing a light jacket and no hat as if he didn’t expect to be out very long. The guy cracked a smile. He could tell Hughes was surprised to see him, and he was right.

  “Hey, man, what’s up?” the guy said.

  “Morning,” Hughes said.

  Okay, so maybe Wyoming wasn’t quite as all-white as he thought. Because there he was, standing on the street with another black man.

  “New in town, eh?” the guy said.

  “That obvious?” Hughes said.

  The guy laughed. “I don’t know everybody in town. I’ve probably seen most folks at least once. Most the time I couldn’t tell you if they lived here or the next town over. But you, I’d remember.”

  “Because I’m black,” Hughes said.

  “Only one other black man in town besides me,” the guy said. “And you ain’t him.”

  “Name’s Levan Hughes.”

  “Carter,” the guy said and stuck out his hand. “Keith Carter.”

  The shook hands. Carter couldn’t stop grinning. He was obviously thrilled to meet Hughes.

  “You want to come in for a cup of coffee?” Carter said.

  “You have coffee?” Hughes said, amazed.

  “Well,” Carter said and smiled a little bit sheepishly. “I’d brew up some coffee if I had any. Truth is, I have water. But it doesn’t sound right to invite a man into the house just for a glass of water.”

  Hughes considered it. He needed to talk to people and he needed to do it today, but he first wanted to get the lay of the land. He’d have at least a hundred questions if he went into Carter’s house now, but he’d have even more if he could scope things out for himself a bit first.

  “Tell you what, Carter,” Hughes said. “I just got here yesterday and am out for a walk to get my bearings, get myself oriented. Can I take a rain check, stop by later this afternoon?”

  “We really should talk,” Carter said.

  That stopped Hughes cold. Something was up.

  “You know what’s going on in this town?” Carter said.

  It was worse than he knew if a stranger felt the need to warn him about something first thing.

  “Look, man, I trust you,” Carter said.

  “You trust me?” Hughes said. He looked around, up and down the street. Nobody else was outside. “What, is the Klan running this town?”

  “I don’t trust you because we’re both black. I trust you because you’re not from here.”

  Hughes narrowed his eyes at him. Carter was shivering. He hadn’t bundled up properly. He hadn’t expected to stand on the sidewalk shooting the shit all morning. He must have seen Hughes out the window and bolted straight out of the house.

  “I do have a couple of questions,” Hughes said.

  “You’d better come inside,” Carter said.

  11

  Parker left his motel room fifteen minutes after Hughes and headed downtown.

  He’d bundled himself up in his parka and brought along his entire hat-gloves-scarf ensemble, but he started out with his hat in pocket because he wasn’t sure if he’d need it or not.

  He did.

  He’d never been to M
inneapolis or Chicago during the winter, but he had a pretty good idea now what those cities must feel like when the polar vortexes swept down out of Canada. His lungs initially rejected the air. He had to force himself to inhale it. He felt ice crystals inside his nose. His eyes cried out for moisture. Wind chill felt like a lit match against exposed skin. His ears felt like numb leather flaps.

  He put his hat on.

  Even though the low winter sun made him squint, it didn’t warm him any more than an overhead fluorescent tube light in a grocery store.

  The cold was spectacular, a no-fucking-around force of nature like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, and Parker loved it. It was all-consuming. It stripped away everything but itself. It sanded his mind down to the basics, to the elements, to survival. There was no room left for his obsession about biting people and ripping them apart and the waves of anxiety and panic that came with it.

  He passed a boarded-up taco joint, a motorcycle store with a picture window showroom, another motel that looked a bit nicer than his own but was apparently closed, a defunct gas station, a grocery store with three cars in the lot, a credit union, a hardware store, a Laundromat that did appear to be open and an auto parts store that clearly was open. Then downtown began.

  In the days before the infection, Parker would have considered downtown Lander mildly pleasant, but he saw it now as a heartbreakingly lovely dreamlike street in an earthly Elysium.

  Most of the buildings were two-story brick structures with wide windows at street level and dignified vertical windows on the second. The red-tinted sidewalks were lined with trees, wood and iron park benches and old-fashioned Victorian-era lamp posts. More than half the stores appeared to be open. There was a small amount of traffic on Main Street and at least a dozen pedestrians—men, women and even children—looking in the windows as if on a Saturday morning years ago before the infection even existed.

  The scene overwhelmed him. Its very existence staggered him, and he found himself revising his earlier feeling that Lander was a sinister place run by some kind of overlord.