Resistance: Pandora, Book 3

by Eric L. Harry

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” her mom said, seeming to reconsider everything.

  “Hi, Mrs. Miller,” said the little dark haired girl from Jake’s class.

  “Oh, aren’t you cute!” Their mom glanced at Jake as if to prod him. “What’s her name?” she asked her son, who shrugged.

  “Amanda. Flowers. But people just call me Mandy.”

  “Cuuute.” Chloe’s mom jabbed her elbow into Jake’s ribs.

  Turner Ash waited in the hallway and said, to Chloe, “I’ll walk you to orientation.”

  Chloe nearly died when her mother gave her a sly thumbs-up. Jake and Amanda aka “Mandy” accompanied Chloe and Turner to the auditorium. Students not only stared as they passed—they were easily distinguished by the blue jeans they all wore except for Mandy, who was in a skirt with a matching navy blue bow in her hair—they steered a wide path, closed lockers, and pressed against walls, even covering their noses and mouths. The newcomers weren’t only social pariahs; they were potentially diseased social pariahs.

  Chapter 31

  TUTTLE, IDAHO

  Infection Date 95, 1400 GMT (8:00 a.m. Local)

  For two days, Isabel, Rick, and Hank Rosenbaum had toured isolated outposts of uninfected humanity. Each faced its own bitter end, hovering between mere desperation and the total loss of all hope. Each had its own tale of near death escapes along a path of decline to the brink of collapse. Each was unique in its details, which Isabel dutifully documented in reports to the NSC, but shared its experience with a world in which defenses always failed and the virus always won.

  The first hint that Hank had lost all hope was when he asked Isabel, “Where do you want to be at the end? Do you want to be on some Pentagon mission in some strange town? Or do you want to be with loved ones in a familiar, comfortable place?”

  But I’ve been vaccinated, she wanted to say but didn’t. Vaccinated people die by violent attack just like anyone else.

  The second clue about Hank had come when he refused his own vaccination. “No, no. There are plenty of others who need it more.”

  The third had been his refusal ever to see any cause for optimism. After Isabel interviewed a perfectly reasonable, black eyed National Guard officer—infected but still wearing his camouflaged uniform and insignia—through the fence of a detention center, she had remarked to Hank that Infecteds and Uninfecteds might someday live together in harmony. “Isabel,” Hank had admonished, “he gave you beauty pageant answers. All he wants is world fucking peace. But you did notice, right, that every time you typed his bullshit answers on your iPad his eyes dropped to inventory your gear and weapons.”

  But she was unprepared for Hank’s final act of surrender to fate.

  All seemed routine as their helicopter approached the landing zone. Isabel now knew what it felt like when people prepared for combat. Nerves were contagious. The soldiers started getting fidgety. Their adrenaline wakes you up. You start squirming. Every itch needs scratching. Rivulets of perspiration become objects of obsessive focus. Doomed are any attempts to relax by forced concentration. You might as well begin your checks and rechecks like everyone else.

  The thirty round magazine in her carbine was full. Isabel had completed the destruction of her fingernails by loading it herself. She slapped it back into her M4, which hung, stock retracted, across her chest at a downward angle. It was safely safed, which she confirmed, reconfirmed, and re-re-reconfirmed. In between, she checked the surprisingly heavy Sig Sauer P320 9mm in its holster. It had seventeen rounds, she made sure, plus one in the chamber, also with the safety on.

  The third time she drew the pistol to check it—better safe than sorry—Rick put his hand on her forearm. She reholstered the weapon and secured it with its quick draw strap. “You’ve done this before,” Rick said at a volume barely exceeding the engine noise. “We can shoot our way outta most situations. Relax. Let your…”

  “Let your training take over? I’ve heard that speech. Only I don’t have any training.”

  “I was gonna say let your instincts take over.”

  “Which is your speech to people with no training?”

  “You have experience. You’ve been through the shit before.”

  All the young soldiers in the back of the helicopter were keyed up. Only Rick seemed calm…and Hank, who stared vacantly out the window without so much as a pistol or a knife or a mask.

  Right before they touched down, Hank held out his hand in the old-fashioned way. Isabel knitted her brow in confusion but shook it. “Good luck,” was all Hank said.

  Both side doors slid open. Isabel exited into the gale with her eyes squinting against the swirling dust. She and Rick were greeted by what had to be half the population of the hamlet. Looming over their town was a wall of smoke from whose direction also came the crackle of sporadic gunfire. “Where’s Hank?” Isabel asked.

  She and Rick looked all around. The replacements who’d arrived with them had found waiting guides to their new units. The helicopter crew went through their post and, she suspected, preflight checklists. Hank was nowhere to be seen.

  “Setting that fire worked at first,” said the mayor of either Tuttle or Wendell, Idaho, Isabel couldn’t remember which. “But now it’s outta control.”

  Isabel said, “Wait. Sorry. What?”

  “That fire worked,” the man said, nodding toward the towering cliff of smoke. “It burned the Infecteds out that way to a crisp and saved our asses. But then the wind shifted.”

  “Are you saying you started that fire on purpose?”

  “It wiped out the Infecteds to our west and northwest. There were tens of thousands of ’em streamin’ down I-84. We diverted ’em in some bloody fighting straight into the inferno. Now, it’s backfired, so to speak. And in the other direction, people are jammed up for miles along I-84, and more keep comin’ from Twin Falls and Salt Lake City. I feel bad for ’em, I really do. But how are we gonna feed two hundred thousand mostly infected people? There’s only 367 of us original residents. We’re pinnin’ our hopes on…stronger measures from President Anderson.”

  Isabel turned to Rick. He means nuke I-84. Rick nodded. “Alright,” Isabel said. “We should see what’s happening over there.”

  Everyone turned toward the fire and the sound of desultory, intermittent gunfire. “I’m not so sure that’s a good, or a safe idea,” the mayor said. “Maybe it’d be best if you just flew on back so you can deliver your report.”

  “Our report,” Isabel said, “is on what your security situation is right now.”

  “Well…we’ll wait for you right here, then.”

  A few soldiers reluctantly escorted them toward the sound of the guns. Isabel kept looking for Hank. This was no potty break. He had simply vanished into thin air. The smells got to Isabel first. The smoke from the approaching fires. The stench of the echoing guns and explosives. But it was the odor of the dead that stood out most. It was often described as sickly sweet, but to Isabel it was more sickly and led inevitably to a cringe.

  “Where the hell did Hank go?” Isabel asked Rick, who shrugged.

  Their military escorts began moving tactically, as Rick called it—crossing open spaces, like intersecting streets, at brisk jogs, then halting in a crouch or a kneel behind buildings’ walls. All talking subsided. Rifles were raised in heightened readiness. Rick and Isabel emulated their guides. For Isabel, that meant gripping her carbine in both hands and ensuring its muzzle didn’t point at anyone friendly. Only belatedly did she will herself to go through, in her head, the steps required to actually fire her weapon.

  “One at a time,” the National Guard lieutenant directed their small band at the next intersection. “On the double.” He sent his own man across the road first. The camo-clad soldier sprinted without incident from the pet store beside which they paused to the insurance agency across the street whose windows were smashed to b
eads lying in a pretty sparkle on the sidewalk. Another soldier went second. Then Rick. Then it was Isabel’s turn.

  She ran, too slowly it felt even under the lighter weight of her combat load, but made it across. The sound of the guns was now close. Isabel’s eyes and throat stung from the smoke and she popped a lozenge in her mouth to stifle any coughs that might reveal their position. When the soldiers bringing up the rear joined them, they proceeded down the next block in a crouch, from doorway to bicycle rack to ash covered car in short dashes that left Isabel’s heart thumping under her body armor.

  They stopped before reaching the far end of the block. A captain fell back toward them for a briefing. “Welcome to the end of the world.” He turned and pointed. “That forest fire has rousted everybody outta hiding. Most are infected.” Every few seconds, the calm was shattered by rifle fire out of sight to the left or the right. In between, shouts and calls could be heard. “At your ten! 150 meters! I count three! One with a long gun!”

  “Eyes on!”

  “I got ’em too!” came another shout. “Man, woman, child! Could be uninfected!”

  “Hold your fire!”

  The exhausted captain paid them no mind. “The hardest thing is sorting ’em out. Twice, we let folks approach we thought were uninfected, only to see their eyes when they got close.” Isabel didn’t have to ask what had happened next. “They lie.” To save their lives, Isabel thought, with a firestorm bearing down on them. “The second group of Infecteds had even buddied up to look like a family, but the quote, unquote dad was a twentysomething white dude, the mom was a middle-aged Asian, and their kid, we saw after we smoked ’em, was a really short but fully grown black guy. They answered all our questions okay from downrange, but it never felt right.”

  “Let us through!” came a distant plea.

  “They’re bad!” one soldier, nearer at hand, immediately declared.

  “Hold your fire!” yelled another, probably their sergeant.

  “They’re right behind us!” came the far away shout of a man seeking passage. “Please!” The rising pitch of his voice sounded appropriately distressed. But if they could learn to deceive by forming fake families, they could learn to imitate the tones of desperation, which could be heard everywhere. “They’re gathering! Hundreds of ’em! On purpose! I think they’re getting ready for something! Please let us through!”

  “Captain Hodges, sir!” It was the much nearer sergeant type up ahead. Their briefer bear crawled away on all fours toward the last building on their block. Their front line overlooked a downhill sloping, empty field and an early stage construction site before more buildings obscured farther view. Isabel slowly rose to a stoop, went to the far edge of the last building, and climbed hand over hand up the wall of a looted deli until she stood almost fully upright.

  A football field away, three cowering people—an intact little nuclear family of Uninfecteds, possibly, or pathogen carrying killers, also possible—huddled behind the shelter of the last wall before the open no-man’s-land, which was strewn with dozens of uncollected bodies. But they hid not from the guns of the National Guardsmen, to which they were fully exposed, but instead from whatever or whoever lay beyond them.

  Rick surveyed the terrain through binoculars. She could discern no pattern from the masses of dead. Were they charging, or fleeing? Running, or kneeling and begging?

  “Captain, sir! We got movement on our left!”

  Rick turned his binoculars that way. “Jesus Christ.”

  “What?”

  He handed Isabel the binoculars. Hank Rosenbaum strolled at a leisurely pace across the killing fields toward the three prone civilians. “What the fuck?” Hank wove his way between the corpses, but wore no protection against infection. “What’s he doing?”

  When she looked up at Rick, his pinched lips said, You know what he’s doing.

  “They’re okay!” Hank shouted back across the empty field as he stood beside the cowering family. “They’re uninfected!” The family urged Hank by word and hand gestures to take cover.

  “Hank!” Isabel shouted.

  But he gave one last wave and disappeared, heading toward the wall of flames.

  “What in God’s name…?” Isabel intoned slowly.

  Rick pulled her back down to one knee. There seemed to be, in that moment, an odd lull. There was no shooting, no shouting, no explosions. Or maybe time had just slowed, or her sense of its passage intensified. “Be ready,” Rick whispered. His eyes darted this way and that. His head swiveled toward threats more anticipated than observed.

  “Rick, what the hell just happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Put it outta your head.” He slowly emphasized each word. “And get…fucking…ready.” He pulled two magazines out of her backpack where the emergency supplies resided and slid them underneath her armor against her chest, causing her to squirm. She had six more mags in pouches hanging from her webbing. “Drop your pack and run,” he whispered, not wanting to start a panic among the nearby Guardsmen.

  She nodded, but got that feeling again. Not exactly guilt. Nothing had happened yet. More a sickening sensation of knowing that, if it came to it—and it felt like it would—they would sacrifice the lives of everyone around them to save her life and Rick’s. Gone would be the baby faced infantryman sneaking looks at them around sandbags. Gone would be the boy’s comrade whose cheeks were flushed either from the chill, or from barely suppressed mortal terror. Gone would be the male and female EMTs across the street, wearing black body armor and black helmets instead of the military’s camo versions over incongruously colorful blue jumpsuits. And gone was Hank, PhD in Neuroscience from Berkeley and patriarch of the doomed Rosenbaum clan.

  “Halt!” shouted one of the soldiers. “Halt-halt-halt!” Even fractions of a second seemed, to Isabel, to be measurable intervals. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. She closed her eyes in preparation for saying a prayer, but Rick grabbed her arm painfully and jerked.

  She was instantly back in the moment. The family of three had made a run toward their lines and been shot dead.

  “Now. Let’s go.”

  “But…Hank!”

  “Now!” Rick dragged her to her feet just as a fusillade of gunfire erupted. She saw hundreds of Infecteds storm into no-man’s-land, and even more frighteningly watched Rick strip himself free of his backpack. She hopped over it as they headed back the way they had come without even thinking to shed her own, which Rick did for her. The EMTs across the street also took flight as the howl from an onrushing mob merged with the rising crescendo of machine guns, rifles, and grenade bursts.

  Isabel shot a look over her shoulder. The captain grabbed at fleeing machine gunners and their assistants, who had abandoned their valuable but heavy weapons and now fled, wild-eyed, toward at least a chance to argue their way out of a firing squad.

  “Iz!” Rick shouted, literally pulling her past him then shoving her toward safety.

  Both ran. The firing behind them never quite stopped, but seemed like haphazard potshots taken before flight was resumed or the fleeing soldier was overtaken. When a window shattered right in front of Isabel, she realized some of the firing was from the Infecteds, and she and Rick were their intended targets.

  A stupendous roar preceded Rick’s painful tackle of Isabel onto the pavement. A machine gun raked once, twice, three times across their street. Bullets zipped by inches overhead as Isabel cringed, trying to anticipate the unimaginable blows just moments away. The Infecteds now had the Guardsmen’s guns and killed infected attackers and their uninfected prey with no regard for either’s lives—the new, infected style of machine gunning.

  “This way!” Rick shouted. Both made it to the relative safety of an alley wall. But the male EMT following them from across the street fell. The female paramedic went back for him. “No!” Rick yelled as she knelt at her partner’s gushing head, hands held outstretched but
motionless—a picture of utter helplessness until a fist sized knot of her torso exploded out of her back. Body armor didn’t stop machine gun bullets.

  Rick issued repeated two-word commands, which Isabel followed in a daze. “Let’s go! Get down! Follow me! Look out!” His claw like hand repeatedly bruised her arms until, finally, with Isabel shaking in complete shock, they found a cop with an ordinary squad car, who almost shot them with his drawn pistol. “Friendly!” Rick called out, removing his hands from his carbine as if in surrender.

  The cop was clearly terrified. At the ten-meter limit, Isabel could see his pistol, clenched tightly in both gloved hands, shaking. The cop’s eyes above his mask were surely twice their normal size. “Why…why aren’t you wearing PPE?”

  “We’re vaccinated,” Rick said. “Calm down. We’re immune.” In contrast to the panicking cop, Rick’s voice was low, like a cowboy slipping a harness over a newly broken horse. “My name is Captain Rick Townsend, United States Marine Corps. This is Dr. Isabel Miller, a neuroscientist from the University of California, Santa Barbara. We’ve been sent here….” Rick was competing with the distracted cop’s increasingly terrified looks toward the shrieking sounds of the approaching mob, the gunfire, and the echoes of explosions coming, seemingly, from all directions. “We’ve been sent here by the National Security Council—”

  “Nobody’s gotten the shots yet!” the officer said, his eyes barely pausing on the two suspects on which he held his gun. He took one hand off his pistol to key the shoulder mounted mic of his radio. “Dispatch! Come in, please! Is there anybody there? Over!”

  “Calm down, buddy,” Rick pled. “I’m begging you. We’re from Houston—”

  “You’re Infecteds!”

  “No. No. We’re not.”

  “Bullshit!” He again tried his radio, holding the pistol one-handed and less steadily.

  Bam!

  The cop fell back onto the hood. One hand rose to the hole in his chest but his gaze never focused enough to make out what had happened before he slid to the ground, leaving a blood trail streaked down his squad car.