“Can we coexist with them? Or do we take them out before they grow too big?”
Isabel curled up, fully dressed, under her blanket. Maybe nuclear annihilation was long overdue. Maybe the North Koreans simply hadn’t possessed enough nukes to do the job. She tried to imagine it; Emma working at a modest desk in a small room until a bright light flared around curtains that smoked; all the contents of the room being blasted through the far walls, and the unsupported upper floors collapsing.
Nope. Not shocked anymore. Maybe she was just tired. Her head sank deep into the pillow, and her eyelids closed of their own weight. Or maybe something else had changed. Maybe she had grown to accept what Infecteds were, came the last coherent thought before Isabel began repeating her bedtime mantra—Rick, Rick, Rick—and calmed enough to descend into nightmares.
Chapter 43
NEW ROANOKE, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 112, 1330 GMT (9:30 a.m. Local)
“Should we announce it?” Samantha asked.
“Announce what?” Emma replied.
“What I just said. That Pandoravirus has reached the southern tip of South America.” She referred to her notes. “How do you pronounce T-O-L-H-U-I-N, Argentina?”
“I don’t know. But why does it matter?”
Samantha was growing increasingly assertive. And Emma no longer controlled what she did with her days, although Dwayne’s spy reported her spending time in Uninfecteds’ neighborhoods. “It means the infection has spread to every corner of every continent except Australia. That seems like news everyone would want to know.”
Emma dismissed the request. “Most Infecteds only care what work they’re assigned, what rations they’ll receive, and maybe what the weather is. And most Uninfecteds will just redouble their demands for vaccination, which isn’t going to happen.”
“You said you would vaccinate them,” Sam said for some unknown reason.
“I lied. To placate them. Surely you knew that.”
Samantha grew agitated and began to pace. Agitation always interested Emma. She surreptitiously slid open the desk drawer until she could see the butt of Sheriff Walcott’s pistol.
“Why not vaccinate them?” Samantha’s little fists were balled tight. “You agreed they provide ‘creativity and initiative.’ I wrote your words down. Was that a lie, too?”
“How is the history project coming?” Emma asked.
“I’d prefer it if you answered my question.”
“I am. How is it going compiling our history of the pandemic?”
“We’re doing 300 interviews a day and summarizing the experiences we record.”
“And from all those anecdotes by survivors, if you had to draw one conclusion—just one—about the prospects for Infecteds and Uninfecteds living in peace and harmony together in the future, what would that conclusion be?”
“That we need them because they’re smart, and creative, and industrious.”
The voice cautioned Emma. She likes Uninfecteds. Emma remained silent.
“Are you going to infect them all?” Samantha asked in her girlish voice. “Sheriff Walcott had that plan to taint their food.”
Emma rocked back in her chair. “Do you have feelings for the Uninfecteds?”
“Feelings? Feelings like, maybe, I wanta marry a boy someday? Maybe an uninfected boy, who makes jokes and acts silly and reads books and stays in shape and cares about looking hot? Or do you mean feelings, like, emotions?”
“I’m not sure what I meant, but I think you’ve answered the question.”
“Are you gonna execute me?” Sam asked, her fists balled tight.
“Should I?”
“I think I’m a good worker,” the twelve-year-old replied. Or was she thirteen now?
“I do too. But can I trust you?”
“Yes.”
“And if I decide the Uninfecteds are a threat to be eliminated?”
Sam hesitated. “That would be a mistake. Machinery would fail. We’d starve.”
“And there would be no more cute, silly boys?”
“You like uninfected boys too,” Samantha replied.
“I never said I didn’t. But I’ve got to know I can trust you, no matter what happens.”
There followed the briefest hesitation. “Sure. Always.” Blood was visible on Sam’s palms as she left Emma’s office abruptly. She’s lying, said the silent voice in Emma’s head.
Chapter 44
ELLINGTON FIELD, HOUSTON, TX
Infection Date 114, 1215 GMT (8:15 a.m. Local)
The vaccination protocols were inviolable. No amount of arguing and begging, respectively, by Noah and Natalie Miller convinced the airbase’s medics to allow them to wait out the postinoculation quarantine together, as a family. “You’re lucky to be getting this at all,” the airman said. “But they ordered Ellington to go 100 percent vaccinated.”
Noah hugged and kissed Natalie, Chloe, and Jake. They spoke of their love for each other, the parents’ pride in their children, the promise of a better future once risk of infection was behind them—essentially everything but, “Goodbye.” Each rolled up a sleeve, took the shot, stared at the red mark but declined to touch it as if, to do so, would worsen their infection risk, then went outside where they kept the people who waited.
The scene there was surreal. Noah could see his wife, who returned his wave, and his two children, who did not, in their respective plastic chairs ten yards from their closest neighbor. A bottle of water sat beside each—the only accommodation they were afforded.
The hundred odd chairs filled over time. The sun lay behind a veil of haze and the weather was mild. Noah wondered what they did when it rained as bewildered airmen and civilians joined them. Who the latter were, Noah had no idea. Families of airmen, maybe? Or the relatives of the high and mighty? Or simply people who’d been lucky—or unlucky—enough, like the Millers, to be on base when the vaccines arrived?
Noah’s eyes returned repeatedly to his family. He knew the math. Four people, each with a 6 percent chance of infection, meaning each had a 94 percent chance they wouldn’t contract Pandoravirus. That’s 0.94 times 0.94 times 0.94 times 0.94. Jake’s iPhone calculation was rerun by both his parents. They all came to the same conclusion. There was a 78 percent chance that none of them would get sick, but that meant there was a 22 percent chance that someone would. Which one? There was no such thing as acceptable losses, but there was a 22 fucking percent chance someone would get sick. Half would die. There was over a one in ten chance that one of Natalie, Chloe, Jake, or Noah would die within hours from that single, one-second injection. Noah tried to think about anything other than that.
Jake kept scratching the site of his shot. Chloe’s head darted from side to side in a constant sweep of the basketball courts, presumably looking for anyone showing signs of illness but also, possibly, reflecting anxiety over emerging symptoms. Natalie stared at the ground, minute after minute, without moving. Either she couldn’t stand looking at her husband and children for fear that she saw them clutching their stomach or head, or she felt pain herself and was trying her mightiest to hide it for as long as possible.
Noah tried to distract himself by counting the number of people sitting in the chairs. He gave up at eighty-six and estimated that there were easily twenty or thirty more. That meant six to seven ought to get sick. There were two elevated platforms keeping watch over them—one, a proper guard tower with opaque tinted windows, bristling with security cameras and antennas. The other was an ordinary cherry picker housing a single, helmeted man behind a machine gun pointed at the courts.
A hand went up. A stout airman rose. Not a sound was uttered, but every head turned his way. A medic in full camo but wearing goggles, mask, gloves, and an apron approached, but not too closely. Two men in chemical warfare gear and carrying assault rifles backed him up. The machine gunner in the cherry
picker swiveled his weapon.
The conversation was brief and quiet. The medic produced a white coverall. The airman, maybe in his forties, climbed into it and the mask, hood, gloves, and goggles that followed. He looked all around, apparently knew no one, but waved and received hesitant nods in return from several nearby soldiers and civilians. Then he was gone.
Noah found Natalie staring at him. He raised his fingers to make the okay sign. She did not. What does that mean? Jake was now hugging himself. Chloe was fidgeting, shifting in her seat, sitting on one foot, swinging the other.
A woman leaned over to one side and vomited. People in chairs nearby rose, but a loudspeaker boomed, “Stay in your places! I repeat. Stay in your places.” The medic helped the sobbing woman into her coveralls and escorted her toward a low concrete building in the distance near the earthen mounds Noah assumed were ammo bunkers. Was that where they killed them? He had heard no gunshots after the first man departed.
Armed airmen turned the woman’s chair upside down and put orange traffic cones around it, and they covered the vomitus with what looked to be finely ground sawdust and, from a large plastic jug, some kind of white powder. Everyone around sat sidesaddle to face—and breathe—in any direction but toward the condemned and contaminated site.
Every time the wind blew from that direction, Noah held his breath. He knew he was supposed to be safe. Every seat was widely spaced—at least the minimum ten meters that would keep you from inhaling the virus in quantities sufficient to overwhelm your body’s defenses—but why take chances? One way or another, in a few hours he would never have to worry about infection by Pandoravirus again.
Natalie raised her hand. “Natalie?” he called out involuntarily.
“Mom?” Chloe added.
The medic approached. Noah rose to his feet. “Sir,” came the loudspeaker. “Take your seat immediately!” The medic departed, leaving Natalie where she sat.
“Mom?” Jake called out.
She shook her head and waved both hands in air as if to deflect his concern. But she sat forward, rocking slightly, and pinned her hands beneath her thighs just like Noah’s infected sister Emma had done to restrain herself from unspeakable acts of violence.
For the next hour, Noah scanned not the basketball court generally, but his son, his daughter, and especially his wife. Natalie raised her head only to check her kids and to catch Noah’s eye, but she made no attempt to communicate her condition despite Noah’s repeated, pantomimed attempts to elicit a report.
Natalie’s head shot around to another retching civilian—a little boy—before he was taken away despite the cries of parents barely restrained by increasingly threatening loudspeaker calls. Natalie’s chair scraped the pavement when she jumped on hearing the wail of an airman, who pounded her thighs with both fists and ignored as long as possible the white coverall extended to her. Minutes later, Natalie could barely look at a teenager, who kept shouting, “Mom! Dad!” as she was led off, and the demands of her parents—“Where the hell are you taking her? What are you going to do?” Another unlucky man—a camo-clad airman—just stood, raised both hands over his head as if in surrender, and met the medic several paces from his chair. The voice over the loudspeaker said, “Good luck, Master Sergeant.”
There was a slender airman, who stamped his feet on the ground and clung to his plastic chair with both hands. Two armed airmen in gas masks tried reasoning with him, then summoned help. Six men finally pried the chair from his grip, held him down, and forcibly gave him an injection. His thrashing and flailing settled into an animal sounding whine. Noah could see, as he lay on his side, that the seat of the man’s pants was stained by diarrhea. His masked comrades managed to guide the now more compliant man into his coveralls and onto a stretcher, on which they finally took him to the concrete building.
Natalie was staring at Noah. People all around were crying. Not just the relatives of the sick children, who were doubled over or chanting, “Why? Why? Why?” But people around them, who were sobbing in sympathy, or crushed by the overwhelming sadness of it all.
“Attention. Attention,” came from the loudspeaker. “Immunity bracelets are available at the southeast gate. Please place one on the arm in which you received your injection. You are free to return to duty or to your trailers. Quarantine is terminated.”
A cheer went up. Not lustily, not unrestrained, and not universal, but a muted hurrah at having made it through. Not so, however, one family, which gathered around the matriarch, who collapsed to the ground in the arms of her surviving children and husband.
Another family rushed the airmen at the base of the guard tower. Parents pointed toward the concrete building where their young son had been taken and demanded to see him. One, and only one, airman raised his mask and spoke to the parents sympathetically, but they were having none of it. Finally, the mother took off toward the concrete building, and the airman chased her down, restrained her despite the arguing of her husband and feeble punches of young children. The woman was put in plastic ties and led away shouting, “William! Williaaaaam! Mommy loves you! Mommy will always love you!”
Jake and a teary-eyed Chloe joined Noah for a hug from which they watched the commotion—yet another tragic fate the Miller family had escaped—but Natalie studiously avoided the scenes of tragedy as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “Let’s go.”
“What was that about when you called the medic over?” Noah asked.
“It was nothing,” Natalie said, not making eye contact.
“Nothing? You scared the shit outta me.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Chloe added. “That wasn’t cool.”
Natalie ignored them. They got in line at the gate. After last temperature checks, they gave their names and the injection numbers written on their arms, and received green rubber wristbands. They were now in some database. It was official. They were immune.
Noah, however, didn’t yet feel like celebrating. Chloe punched Jake’s arm on his injection site—“Ow! Jesus, that hurt!”—but they were grinning and joking.
“You kids walk ahead,” Noah told them. Chloe looked suspiciously at her inscrutable mother before dragging her confused brother out of earshot. In low tones, Noah said, “Natalie, why did you call that medic over?”
She stared at the concrete sliding by beneath their boots. “I had a question.”
“You scared the crap outta us because you had a fucking question? What question?”
She took her time answering. Chloe kept glancing back at them. “Remember when they asked if anyone was pregnant?” They had also asked about immunity compromising diseases like HIV and diabetes. “I was asking about birth defects.”
It slowly dawned on Noah what she was implying. “But you’re on the pill.”
“Shhhh.” Both kids turned toward them. “I didn’t like the way they made me feel.”
“You never complained before,” Noah said in an artificially restrained voice.
“I never had to take the midnight to four watch, Noah.”
“So…?”
“It was in Tennessee. In that utility closet, when Rick took the others out on patrol.”
“Jesus, Natalie, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking we were gonna die, Noah! That…that we were never gonna get out of there! We should be dead by now. All of us. I thought that was the last time we’d ever make love. The last time I’d feel…like a woman, I guess. I was sure we only had one, maybe two days left. Max. I never imagined I’d get pregnant.”
Noah’s arm went around Natalie’s shoulder, and her head instantly fell to his chest. Chloe nudged Jake, who turned to take in this latest hint at what was happening.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“My periods are like the fucking atomic clock. Lucky me, didn’t miss a beat even when we got chased outta the Old Place. First night I spent sleeping outdoors. Ever.
First time I’d shot a gun at a person. Ever. First time I’d ever fought fucking zombies. Ever. First time I’d killed a half dozen people in a day. Ever. And the first time I’d watched my kids and husband almost get killed a dozen fucking times. Ever. Most women’s cycles would be totally thrown off. Not mine.”
“So, you’ve missed a period?”
Natalie’s mouth opened wide. “Oh. You’re so smart. You figured that out?”
He ignored that. “What did the medic say?”
“She said, and I quote, ‘I dunno.’ Then she asked me if I was preggers, and I lied and said no.”
“Why didn’t you tell them? About being pregnant? Before getting the shot?”
Natalie stopped. “Because, Noah, they wouldn’t have given me the fucking shot.” She took off after the kids. Noah caught up with her and slowed her down.
“Do you wanta…?”
“Keep it? It could come out horribly deformed. It could, I don’t know, maybe catch the virus and turn, in utero, and gouge my eyes out during breastfeeding. Or it could be a perfect, beautiful, healthy baby.” She seemed to gauge Noah’s view on the subject by studying his face. What did she see there? What did he feel? “How can we terminate this pregnancy, Noah? Billions of people are dying all over the globe. The world needs life.”
But if we can’t outrun a mob, Noah thought, or keep a crying baby quiet…. He kept those worries to himself and kissed Natalie long enough for his wife’s arms to wrap around his neck and for his kids to return to embrace them both.
“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?” Chloe said. Her mother nodded, smiling through tears. “See?” Chloe backhanded Jake’s injection site. “You owe me five billion bucks.”
Jake pulled free and asked, “When the hell did you…?”
“Nope,” Natalie interrupted, marching off toward the trailer arm in arm with Noah.
Chapter 45
HOUSTON, TX
Infection Date 116, 1500 GMT (10:00 a.m. Local)
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 28
