They drove to a nursing home. The staff had fled on foot. Old folks lay near overturned wheelchairs and toppled walkers. Canes were feeble weapons. Why had they attacked them? They were as helpless as babies, an unfortunately prescient thought.
At a smoking hospital, Isabel asked, “Why are we here?”, breaking the silence.
“They wanted me to show you the maternity and neonatal wards.”
“No.” Isabel shook her head continuously. “No. No. No. No.”
“Who’s they?” Rick asked. “Who wants us to see whatever’s up there?”
“The army. The commander of the local task force who retook the town.”
“The guy,” Rick said, “who gave the shoot on sight orders?” The deputy nodded. “You can report back that his point was made.”
They drove off. The most affecting anecdote of all—the proverbial final straw—wasn’t even planned. While awaiting their flight back to Denver, the ponytailed deputy said, “Some guy wants to talk to you.” Isabel was too exhausted to resist. But she barely paid the guy much attention—at first—other than to note the Hispanic man’s weathered skin, trembling hands, and tics of his eyes, which he tried to mask by blinking.
“We left Salt Lake City,” he said softly, “in our camper van. M-m-my wife and th-th-three children.” He looked everywhere but at Isabel. “My wife was t-t-taken when we stopped on a b-b-bathroom break. We searched for her. My oldest, fourteen, f-f-found her…raped and, and…. She had fought so hard. She was dead. Almost. M-m-my two oldest, they convinced me to-to honor her wishes. ‘Kill me, kill me, kill me.’ So…. Our youngest, who was seven, never spoke to me again. We lost our middle one…I was only thirty yards away. Over a little hill. Filling water jugs. She shouted. Only once. They knifed her to shut her up, I suppose, and took everything she had—pink backpack with some Skittles she was saving, her favorite book, a ratty stuffed animal, her water bottle. My youngest disappeared in the middle of the night two days later. I think he went off to pee, but… We looked for days. Nothing…thank God. And my oldest,” his eyes welled up, but not enough for tears to flow, “was brave. He ran off to…to help another family. We were out of bullets so I went to get our baseball bat, but by that time…. They killed everybody. I saw it. When they spotted me, I jumped in the camper but didn’t know what to do. They were clawing the doors and scratching the windows, so I drove and drove and drove. By myself. Alone.”
The man’s deep breath was his story’s punctuation. There. Done. As his story had progressed, she noticed, his stammering had stopped—released, therapeutically, by its telling. Isabel muttered, “I’m so sorry,” a few times. But she had heard so many of these stories that her attempts fell flat. She barely had any empathy left.
“You should kill them all,” the man said, suddenly focusing, intently, on Isabel. Boring holes with his gaze. “Nuke them. Gas them. Line them up against a wall and shoot them. There would be more mercy in putting them down like rabid dogs than they’re capable of. They’re not human. They’re some kind of animal that kills and rapes. You’ve either got to kill them, all, or eventually they’re gonna kill all of you.”
Isabel should have noticed his pronoun choice—you instead of us—but felt numb and dazed. “Thanks,” she said, but felt the opposite sentiment. She resented having to carry yet an additional burden—that man’s story—as she shook his proffered hand. She should also have noticed that he was heedless of the infection risk such intimate contact entailed.
He left for the outer lobby in the private aviation terminal, which was crowded with cops and soldiers awaiting evacuation. Isabel took a deep breath, conveyed to Rick in an expression her complaint about how hard her life was in having to listen to yet another such tale of woe, and, after brief shouts of disturbance, jumped when a single shot rang out.
They exited the office with their carbines raised, but it was all over except for the excuses. “He just fuckin’ grabbed it!” said the cop with an empty pistol holster. The Hispanic man’s head lay in a spreading pool of dark blood.
Isabel returned to the office, anesthetized by the cold that settled over her, when her smartphone vibrated, followed seconds later by Rick’s. It wasn’t an email or text. Those apps were long dead. It was from Browner via the more robust Department of Defense servers. Both read their devices in silence. “Cease all surveys and return to Houston immediately. Transportation is inbound. Acknowledge by prompt reply.”
From the face Rick made and his typing, she surmised he’d gotten the same order.
Isabel banged out her reply—“I acknowledge and will comply”—but then added, “I’m ready to start work on the Emma task force. One favor? Please get my brother Noah safely back to Houston also.” She didn’t have the guts to demand an acknowledgment.
Her research was over anyway. She had no further need for reflection on the issues of the day. The logic of all she had seen was compelling. Dispositive, in fact. Anyone capable of the violence she and Rick had seen was evil. All Infecteds were capable of that kind of violence. Therefore, all Infecteds were evil. Period.
Isabel extracted her cell phone and dashed out a quick report to the NSC. It would be her most pessimistic ever. She concluded it as forcefully as she had ever done before. “I see no possibility to coexist with Infecteds in the west, and we should proceed with their eradication by all military means at our disposal.”
Before she could rethink it, she hit Send. Bing. Green check mark.
Chapter 40
NELLIS AFB, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
Infection Date 109, 1100 GMT (6:00 a.m. Local)
Noah had waited, and waited, and waited. When the pilot finally arrived, Noah was about to ask, in a passive-aggressive display of annoyance, why military people always wanted to do things so early. But the pilot, looking more natural in his flight suit than Noah, boomed, “I don’t know who you are, or why you rate, but this is your lucky fucking day.”
Lt. Col. Carpenter attempted to crush Noah’s hand before he understood the game.
“You got lucky first ’cause I just watched the last of my squadron depart. And second, ’cause my weapons officer apparently had volunteered to fly in here with me just to get to his family, who lives out in the ’burbs, and he has opted to jump the fence, stay here in Vegas, and suffer with said family a fate worse than its predecessor Sodom. That means I’ve got an empty seat and pretty clear orders to get you the fuck to Texas.”
Noah nodded, waited, and shrugged. He had no idea why either. Isabel, probably.
“Awright. We’re heading straight in to Ellington. Flying time is none-of-your-fucking-business. There will be no refreshments or inflight entertainment. This is an F-15E Strike Eagle.” He swept his arm around toward the surprisingly huge but still sleek fighter-bomber, bathed in light from the open hangar door. “Do you know anything about operating the weapons systems of a dual role fighter?” Noah cocked his head. “So, in lieu of weapons, and my weapons systems officer, I’ll have sitting in my back seat you, a…?”
“Lawyer.”
A big nod. “Of course. A lawyer.” He took the last swig of his coffee and tossed the cup to the ground. Somehow blatant littering didn’t live up to the promise of the pilot’s swaggering, tough guy persona. “You have four jobs on this flight. Uno. Do not ask me to go to the bathroom. Dos. Do not ask me anything. Tres. Do not touch anything. And cuatro. Tuck your elbows in and brace if I punch us out of the airplane. Awright?”
Carpenter and Noah donned their bulky helmets and climbed up ladders to and strapped into the ultimate bucket seats with the help of ground crew. When the engines started with the canopy still open, Noah feared they would damage his hearing. Carpenter taxied all the way out before closing the canopy with a squeak, which plugged Noah’s ears. He turned onto the runway without slowing and pinned Noah to the back of his seat by the amazingly smooth but powerful acceleration and climb out.
&nb
sp; After gawking at the lights of Las Vegas and fires surrounding it, there was nothing much to see but dark mountains and dusky wilderness. In fulfillment of his duties on that mission, Noah’s head bobbed repeatedly before he nodded off to sleep.
“Visor down,” woke him with a start. It was still dark outside.
“What?”
“Reach up to your helmet and lower your fucking visor,” Carpenter instructed as the aircraft banked into a steep turn to the right. Noah fumbled for a few seconds before he felt something slide. The heavily tinted lens came down into place. Whereas previously he could at least make out the horizon separating ground from sky, it was now totally dark except for glowing screens and buttons around his knees.
A light in the cockpit changed all that. Every knob, switch, and dial came clearly into view except those that lay in the stark but slowly shifting shadows. Carpenter pivoted to look back past Noah over his left shoulder. It was in the reflection of the pilot’s tinted visor that Noah first saw the large glowing blob.
He too turned to look behind them. The burning ball had risen through the clouds in the distance and stood atop a thinning stalk. The sky was black. The mountains were gray. But the snowcapped peaks shone brightly. The thin layer of haze beneath them separated to allow passage of the fireball, which kept rising fast until it was far above their altitude.
The F-15 shuddered and shook. Carpenter banked back to the left, returning to their original course as the glow slowly dimmed. “Was that what I think it was?” Noah asked.
“Yep, in case you were wondering whether things could get any worse. And you now have one more job—cinco. You saw nothing. Nada. It was a boring, uneventful flight. I’m dead eyed serious about this, Miller. You wanta get your ass locked up, start blabbin’.”
Chapter 41
HOUSTON, TEXAS
Infection Date 110, 1330 GMT (8:30 a.m. Local)
The day on which Chloe would save her family’s lives five times, but who’s counting, began with a start. “Get up! Jake! Up!” It was Chloe’s mother in her brother’s room next door. Chloe reached for the kitchen knife under her pillow. But through one eye, she saw that the sun was bright outside. “We all overslept. Someone’s alarm didn’t go off!” That was directed at Chloe, and that was the first time she saved their lives that day.
Chloe pried open her squinting eyes. Her phone was dead. It was plugged in, she confirmed on checking the wall, but it was totally dead. Her mother burst into her room.
“I plugged it in,” Chloe immediately whined.
“Power went out last night. Get up! We’re all late.” Off her mom ran to dress.
In the back seat of her family’s clunker, Chloe sipped on a juice box through its tiny straw and, with great difficulty and intermittent success, tossed peanut butter crackers into her gaping mouth from a crumpled plastic baggy. Her mother criticized her with a glance in the rearview mirror. “Whah?” Chloe replied with a full mouth. “I’m tryin’ ta maintain hann hygie, li’ they say to!”
Her mother was speeding. So they were late? Who fucking cares? They barely learned anything from the substitute teachers in their overcrowded classes. And her mom was treating her crappy job like it was important or something. But, Chloe wondered for the first time in her life, where they would get money or ration cards for food if her mother was fired and her father never came home?
That’s when she caught sight of Turner Ash, across the divided lanes of the boulevard leading to the gate of their high school, running down a grassy embankment from their school’s sports fields and football stadium.
“Stop,” she said to her mother.
Three soldiers ran to the edge of the embankment with rifles at port arms and wearing gas masks and rubber onesies before chasing Turner down the artificial hill.
“Stop! Turn right. Here! Turn-turn-tuuurn!” Her mother slammed on the brakes and turned. That was the second time Chloe saved their lives.
Her mom clearly had no idea why they detoured—“Okay”—until they saw, all around the school’s gate and the streets leading to it, flashing blue cop car lights and twirling red ambulance lights. The number of emergency vehicles was dwarfed by the multitude of green army trucks. But all concern about them was erased by the far more terrifying glimpse of dozens of white buses, whose windows were spray painted and totally opaque.
Chloe’s mom pulled over to the curb of the side street. “Christ,” she said, slumping over the wheel that she death gripped like the pilot of a stricken plane.
“Did they quarantine the school?” Jake asked from the front passenger seat.
“What-the-fuck, Jake?” Chloe snapped. “Yes! Didn’t you see Turner?”
“Was that him bein’ chased down that hill?”
“Yes!”
Their mother threw the car into drive. “They could expand the quarantine,” was all she said in explanation as the pitiful engine chugged and they accelerated away, sort of.
Chloe’s mom headed what she thought was straight home. But they didn’t know the typically gridlike city map well and they meandered through a woodsy neighborhood whose irregular streets followed the undulations of a bayou. Two turns later, they were lost. GPS no longer worked, even if the car had one or if any of their phones held a charge. Gas was precious, but they kept driving. Finally, they saw and followed a sign for I-10.
But before they could reach the manmade landmark and pick the direction toward parts of the city that they knew, they pulled to a stop at the back of a traffic jam. “What’s this? What’s this?” Chloe’s mom was antsy. She pulled herself up by the steering wheel to the car’s fraying headliner to try in vain to peer around the huge Suburban ahead.
She tried tapping buttons on the car’s dashboard while repeating, “Radio. Radio.”
“Mom?” Jake said. He grabbed and held her hand gently. It was the first time he’d ever done anything vaguely competent in the human relations sphere. “Calm down, okay?”
“We would’ve been there,” she said with eyes darting across the dash. “And…and we wouldn’t have gone back to those nice, clean trailers at the airbase. They’re all headed to main quarantine. Outdoors, you know? And everyone in there—”
“We know, Mom,” Jake tried interrupting, unsuccessfully.
“And everyone in there is sick, or gets sick eventually. It’s like…it’s like a concentration camp, and nobody…nobody ever gets out.”
No one, Chloe couldn’t help but think. It’s what her mom would’ve said…before.
A car raced by them in the direction opposite the one in which they were heading. “…all residents of Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery Counties,” the radio announced after Jake pressed the correct buttons, “to remain indoors. Avoid interaction with persons not known to you to have maintained effective isolation. HISD has canceled all classes for the remainder of the week.”
Another car raced past them. “Mom,” Chloe said calmly. “Turn around.”
“But the interstate is right ahead. This is just rush hour.”
“Turn around. Now. Just do it.”
It could have been Chloe’s tone again, or her now proven spidey sense, or the radio news, but her mother began maneuvering the car, forward and back and forward and back, until she could U-turn it. During the time that took, three more cars raced past.
When they pulled into the opposite lane, they saw the entire tableau of quarantine unfolding ahead. Everyone was beginning to turn around. Police cars with lights flashing skidded to stops on side streets, and PPE clad cops exited with shotguns or rifles. Long files of armed soldiers jogged toward them in full chemical warfare gear, confronting drivers or chasing runners who abandoned their rides and sprinted across grassy lawns.
Crack. Crack-crack-crack. Two soldiers, one kneeling, felled a fleeing girl.
They drove away. That was the third time.
No
one said a word. Her mom looked terrified. There were omens of worse to come. Cars sped and ignored stop signs. At every traffic slowdown, her mother turned rather than stop. No one spoke, but all presumably pondered the same question. Is this it?
The breaking news on the radio was reminiscent of a storm report. “The Department of Homeland Security has issued an outbreak warning for the following counties.” But it ended, mid-sentence, with a long, loud—.
Beeeeeeeeep. That was followed by repeated shrill and grating tones. “Attention. Attention,” came the recorded voice over the car’s tinny speakers. “This is the Emergency Broadcast System. Take shelter immediately. Take shelter immediately. This is not a drill. Repeat. This is not a drill. Multiple reported outbreaks of Pandoravirus have been confirmed in the Houston metropolitan area. Take shelter and stay tuned to this frequency for further instructions.” There was a long scratch of static, then silence. Not like the station was off the air; like it remained on-air but broadcasting nothing.
“Chloe,” her mother said with an eerily incongruous calm as she accelerated through an empty intersection despite its red light, “you go to the kitchen and pack all the food you can fit into the bags that we collected and put under the silverware drawer. Jake, you start loading those big jugs of water. Be careful because they’re heavy.”
“We shouldn’t go back home,” Chloe found herself saying on impulse.
“We’ve gotta get food, Chloe. And the hatchet, knives, and axe handle.”
“Dad said head straight to the go bags.” So maybe this one was partially Chloe’s dad’s save. But she was the one who reminded them. And Dad hadn’t even been there when they’d stashed the bags, filled with scrounged survival gear, amid brownish brush beneath a dilapidated billboard. “We’ve got knives in there, too, and tarps for lean-tos and ground cover, and that expired crap in cans. Plus, it’s away from the city.”
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 26
