by Dees, Cindy
“It’s hot,” she complained.
“Believe me. It’s better than the sunburn alternative. And, the white fabric reflects sunlight. You’ll ultimately be cooler.”
“Too bad there’s not a cell phone in the bag,” she commented.
“No matter,” he replied. “The cell towers all over this region went down the second those power lines blew up.”
“I can’t imagine what’s going on in Las Vegas right now,” she said grimly.
His reply was equally grim. “The lights all just went out, and all the air conditioning went off. People are complaining and pulling out their cell phones, and only now realizing they don’t work, either. The stop lights will blink red until their internal batteries go out, and traffic will be a mess. Which will freeze the cars in place until your Dad and his little bomb can knock out all their internal electronics and kill them.”
She asked heavily, “Any idea how long it takes for back-up generators to kick in?” Not long after they did, her father would undoubtedly blow himself and his plane up. No reason for him not to kill himself as efficiently as he’d done everything in this attack of his, so far.
Mike looped his good arm around her shoulders and gave her a hard squeeze that was more an exhortation to be strong than an actual hug. “The casino back-up systems will come up a few seconds after the initial EMP because of all the security systems they use.” A pause, and then he added low, “He won’t feel a thing. It’ll be instantaneous.”
She buried her face against his chest momentarily. Her father was about to blow himself up and there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it. “He wasn’t even a good father,” she mumbled.
“But he was the only one you had. And that makes it hurt. You’re allowed to grieve his loss, Piper.”
“It’s stupid. I’ve spent my whole life rebelling against him. Why would I shed tears for him now? He doesn’t deserve them, dammit!”
Mike replied gently, “Conserve the water if you can, sweetheart, and don’t cry.”
She sighed. “I know. We’d better get going. How far do you think it is?”
“Ten miles. Maybe twenty.” He made that sound like a walk in the park. But she knew better. She already felt like she was overheating dangerously, and they hadn’t started moving, yet. And his shoulder had to be killing him.
Mike shouldered the pack on his good side and took the lead.
To say it was hot wouldn’t capture the true experience. They were in Hell. And exercising strenuously. If she’d thought Khartoum had been hot, it was nothing compared to this blazing inferno.
Mike’s voice floated back to her. “You did great earlier, Piper.”
“Huh?”
“You managed the PHP guys brilliantly. They were prepared to kill us until you diffused the situation.”
“Wait. You’re complimenting me?”
A chuckle came over his shoulder. “I happen to think you’re a fine operative. And now that I’ve seen how fucked up your background is, I’m all the more impressed with who you’ve managed to become.”
“Okay, you have to help me out here. Was that a compliment or not? The background bit could be taken either way.”
He stopped and turned in that deceptively quick way he had of moving, and she all but ran into him. He grabbed her arm to steady her, and said, “I’m trying to tell you I think you’re amazing.”
“Okay, now I know we’re dying. Give it to me straight, Mike. How much time have we got left?”
He laughed and squeezed her nose playfully through her cotton facemask. Commencing walking again, he said thoughtfully, “If we got exposed to the virus two days ago, I’m guessing we’ve got about five days left before we get sick. Any preference how we spend it?”
“Hmm. We’re not far from Lake Tahoe. I hear it’s gorgeous. Maybe we could go up there to spend our final days.”
“It is tempting to chuck all this stuff and just spend our remaining time together, isn’t it?”
She was staggered to hear that out of Mr. Mom-and-Apple-Pie. “Tempting, yes,” she answered carefully. “But I know you. Never in a million years would you walk away from your duty. You’ll die in the harness before you give up pulling.”
“Ox analogy aside—thanks,” he muttered.
“You’re welcome.”
“You can go if you want,” he offered. “When we get back to Overton, I’ll find you a ride away from Las Vegas and the virus. In fact, I’ll feel better if you do go.”
“And I’ll feel better if you come with me,” she replied tartly.
“I’ve got to see this through.”
“As do I,” she responded.
“I’ll focus better on what has to be done if I’m not worrying about you constantly,” he retorted.
“Fine. Then I guess we’ll just have to work together so we always know where the other one is and we don’t worry about each other.”
He half-turned, clearly to argue, but then exhaled hard. “You’re right.”
“Say that again?”
He glared at her humorously. “You heard me the first time.”
“Can’t bring yourself to let those words pass your lips twice in under a minute, huh? Heck, you’re almost fun to be stranded with in the desert, roasting alive. If I ever need to go to Hell, I’ll be sure to bring you along.”
That made him laugh outright. “Deal.”
They started walking, and a strange calm came over her. It was as if out here, all alone, with nothing but dirt and rocks as far as the eye could see, they were in a world apart from reality. Their own private universe. Who’d have thought a vast expanse of dirt and rocks could feel so intimate?
They walked for a while in as companionable silence as she supposed was possible given the horrendous conditions. Under normal circumstances, they would never try to move in this heat. They would find shade, hunker down, and conserve body moisture until the sun went down and temperatures fell. But her father and a mysterious terrorist calling himself El Noor had made that impossible.
So hot she was getting lightheaded and dizzy, she distracted herself by asking, “Who do you suppose EL Noor is?”
“No idea. I’d sure like to find the guy, though. But he’s a problem for another day. Right now, we have to find civilization.”
“And pray your tampering with my father’s bomb disabled it,” she added fervently.
The next four hours were the longest of her life. Each step was more painful than the last as the bottoms of her feet burned inside her shoes. She developed a pounding headache, and she didn’t want to think about how dehydrated she was becoming. She and Mike had covered every inch of skin they could by rolling down their sleeves and pulling up their collars. They even wrapped their hands in the remnants of the white t-shirt. It made her feel a thousand degrees hotter, even though intellectually she knew the coverings ultimately to be helpful in cooling her body.
For his part, Mike didn’t complain even once. He grunted now and then when he jostled his shoulder particularly hard, testament to the extreme pain he had to be in. But he soldiered on, picking out a trail headed generally northwest and skirting around big boulders and occasional cactus. They only had to scale one ridge of any consequence. But when they reached the top, she actually had to ask Mike to stop so she could catch her breath. The heat was taking far more of a toll on her than she’d realized.
If only they could climb into a walk-in freezer and cool their bodies off. She tried to pretend she was shivering with cold, but it didn’t work. She tried to remember the last time she’d been ice cold. It had been in Yusef’s lab in the Sudan until the fire destroyed the unit. An industrial-sized air conditioner had cooled the basement and no doubt scrubbed the air for any errant virus material that might have escaped its petri dish.
She pictured herself floating in that chilly space like a tiny speck of Ebola, cooled until she turned into an ice crystal—
“Mike. I think I just figured out how to stop, or at least slow down, th
e virus in Las Vegas.”
“How’s that?”
“Viruses crystalize when they go into a dormant state. They can stay that way indefinitely. In fact, some virus, once crystallized, never become actively infectious again.”
“So scientists have to find a way to get Yusef’s virus to crystallize. How? By the time they research it, everyone in Vegas will be dead.”
“What if Yusef gives us the answer?”
“He won’t talk. If the guy’s willing to sacrifice his own daughter rather than talk, he’ll definitely take his secrets to the grave.”
“What if he already gave us the answer?”
Mike stared at her intently. “Meaning what?”
“Ebola is highly sensitive to cold. It only survives and stays active for long periods of time outside human bodies in tropical temperatures.”
Mike frowned. “Continue this line of reasoning.”
“There was a huge air conditioner blowing into Yusef’s lab in the basement of that house. What if he was using the cold air to protect himself while he worked? I didn’t see any hazardous materials suits down there, or even any self-contained breathing apparatus. How did he work with the virus so closely for so long and not catch it himself, unless he was protecting himself in some way?”
Mike nodded. “There was an abnormally large air conditioner in the bedroom he and his daughter slept in, too. The room was cold, even with the fire starting to engulf the house.”
She nodded eagerly. “That makes sense. If they could spend most of their time in air too cold for the virus to go live, he and his daughter would be safe against the virus.” She frowned. “Although…he seemed to be devoted to her. I can’t imagine him letting her anywhere near his lab unless he had a cure of some kind…”
“Go on. Where does that logic take you?”
“If I were a scientist designing and handling a weaponized virus, wouldn’t I build in a vulnerability? Or at least a back-door cure of some kind? If not for the public to discover, to protect myself and my beloved child?”
“Like computer designers building in quick, secret ways to get into a program’s software?” Mike asked.
“Exactly. He would have spent months researching the virus. If it has a weakness, he’ll have found it. Did you see anything when you were in the house that looked like preventative treatment of some kind? Syringes? Medication bottles?”
Mike’s expression lit. “There were these little blue bottles in the bathroom. A row of them, mostly empty.”
“What was in them?”
“I don’t know. But they had Arabesque writing. It looked like this.” He cast around for a narrow shard of stone and started drawing from memory in the sand. She sounded out the Farsi script as he wrote it.
“Silver. Colloidal silver,” she announced.
“What the hell is that?”
“Silver ions are antimicrobial in nature. It kills bacteria sufficient concentrations, too. The human body doesn’t react much to it, so it’s not dangerous to ingest.”
“Well, Abahdi and/or his kid were downing it in quantity based on the row of empty bottles of it that I saw. The daughter had them lined up all along her window sill and all over the top of the air conditioner.”
“What if the virus has some sort of vulnerability to ionized silver?” she speculated. “It would be easy enough to dump a bunch of colloidal silver into the water supply of Las Vegas, for example, and to treat everyone all at once.”
“If people washed down surfaces with silver treated water, would that kill the virus, too?”
“Maybe. It would have to be tested.”
“So…what?” Mike asked. “We cram everybody in Las Vegas into a hotel, turn the a/c up full blast, and have them drink gallons of silver-treated water?”
Their stares met as comprehension exploded in their brains at the same instant. She spoke first. “That’s why the PHP had to knock out all the power in the city. To prevent people from hanging out in cold buildings that slow or stop the airborne virus. Take out all the cooling in a desert city in August, and the virus can run wild.”
Mike’s voice was grim. “This El Noor bastard went looking for some patsy who could be convinced to knock out all the power in Las Vegas and came up with you father and his Luddite cronies.”
They stared at each other in grim satisfaction at having solved the mystery. Two separate attacks from two entirely separate sources, originating outside Las Vegas, but crossing paths like a giant X right on top of the city. Combined, the attacks stood to kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
“It’s a nightmare scenario,” she murmured.
“We’ve got to get word out to someone to get power back and try the silver thing,” Mike bit out.
They would find a way. They had to. They had to get word to the authorities to restore cooling to someplace in Las Vegas at all costs and get everybody in the city into the cold air immediately. Everybody’s lives depended on it.
As the sun began to set, they caught its full glare in their eyes, and she eventually resorted to hanging on to Mike’s belt and letting him lead her blind for stretches of up to several minutes in length.
“Hah,” he announced. “This way.”
“Have we reached civilization?” she asked hopefully, screwing her eyes shut against the blinding sun.
“Nope. But I spotted a broad-leafed yucca. I know a trick.” In a few seconds, he had broken two long, flat, leathery leaves about two inches wide and several feet long from the succulent. Using his knife, he made six-inch long slits in each leaf. He tied one of the leaves over her eyes like a blindfold. “Try that.”
The narrow slit let in just enough detail for her to see out, but blocked most of the sunlight.
“Eskimo sunglasses,” he explained. “They use pieces of wood with carved slits to knock down glare off the ice, but the principle is the same.”
“Cool. Thanks,” she replied. She was getting short enough on breath that even speaking a few words was difficult.
“You’re doing great,” he muttered. “Another mile or two, we may spot a ranch or something.” Apparently, he didn’t have spare energy for talking, either.
Another hour saw the sun finally dip below the horizon. The pounding of her headache reduced from jackhammers to mere sledgehammers in her skull as the bright light and killer heat finally broke.
“There’s no food in the pack,” Mike said apologetically. “We can forage for something edible if you need it.”
“How far to town?” she asked, weighing the options.
“Don’t know. Couple miles, maybe.”
That didn’t sound too bad, now that the heat had dropped twenty degrees. Amazing the difference between 120 degrees in the sun and 100 degrees at twilight. She felt almost reborn. “I’m not worried about food. Time is the enemy right now. I say we walk another few hours. If we don’t bump into any buildings or roads, then we can make camp, set up a water collector, and think about food and shelter then.”
Mike nodded. He didn’t look like he wanted to stop any more than she did. Their information was vital. They had to share their guess about how to stop the killer virus.
She feared that the time would come when his superior stamina and strength would leave her in the dust. Then, they would have some hard choices to make. But in the meantime, she planned to do everything in her power to keep up with him and keep going.
When her steps flagged, the idea of being separated from Mike was enough to inject new energy into her exhausted muscles. She was not going to lose him. Not after they’d only just found each other.
Twenty
Under normal circumstances Mike would put this shitty today right up there at the top of his list of days in his life that had purely sucked. Except for one thing. Piper’d said she loved him. And damned if she hadn’t sounded like she’d meant, it, too. The idea had distracted him enough that he’d actually been able to forget the terrible deadline they were working under for a few minutes at a
time. He was even able to forget the throbbing pain in his shoulder from time to time. Which was saying something. The joint hurt like a bitch.
They were in big trouble. With no sign of water anywhere, they would survive maybe one more day in this blistering heat before one or both of them collapsed. And then they were done for. His only hope was to put on an everything’s-fine face, pray for a miracle, and do his best to keep Piper in a positive frame of mind.
Ideally, they would walk all night and rest all day tomorrow. But time and that damned virus were against them. If they stopped before it cooled down too much tonight, they could set up a condensation collector with their tarp and gather a few ounces of water for themselves. And right now, every drop counted.
He marched Piper onward until he estimated it was about midnight. Then, he veered toward a long ridge of red volcanic rock he’d been paralleling for hours. It should be riddled with caves, which would provide a little shelter against the night cold still to come. Piper following, uncomplaining, but stumbling more often than before. Brave girl.
It didn’t take long to find an overhang with some scrub bushes in front of it. And tonight, he wasn’t picky about where they stopped. They just needed a small space in which to trap their body heat. Piper went to work piling rocks and brush up to mostly enclose the crevice while he dug a water pit with his bare hands and a flat rock he used like a spade. They spread their precious plastic tarp over the empty pit after centering an old tin can he’d found earlier underneath the tarp. He poked the center of the tarp down to a point so condensation that formed overnight on the underside of it would run down the plastic and drip into the can. Hopefully by morning they’d have a few swallows of water apiece.
Piper declared their shelter ready, and he crawled into the low space. She had cleared away all the rocks and gravel and laid out a bed of brush and smashed tumbleweed for them. She crawled in after him, and they cuddled on the surprisingly comfortable makeshift bed. Or maybe it just felt that good to lie down and quit moving at long last.
