With that, Emma casually walked out into the downpour. No umbrella. No raincoat. She was soaked by the time she got to the bottom of the steps.
Isabel followed, but raced to the waiting car with her equipment and ducked inside. The infected driver’s head didn’t even turn as she slammed the door. He drove off without a word, presumably toward the Stoddard’s house. Isabel raised her hand to the window to wave as they passed her thoroughly drenched sister, but Emma didn’t even look.
Isabel retrieved the sat phone from her backpack. It beeped when she turned it on. She still had a few hours, but she decided to send her coded message now just to be safe. But what message? If Emma was telling the truth, and she seemed to be, they would quickly grow to outnumber the teetering, ever shrinking United States. Weapons systems would degrade. Serviceable equipment would become ever shorter in supply. Fuel tanks would dry up. Destroying Emma’s Community of only a million or two would be a smaller moral outrage than nuking half or more of the former country, not to mention it being a more probable success, militarily.
But those weren’t Isabel’s concerns. Emma had proposed a nonaggression treaty, and Isabel’s mandate was to assess whether they might coexist peacefully. And if I wait here, I’ll be reunited with Rick. Isabel grimaced. She knew what Emma was doing. And it was working, which made Emma twice as scary. “Function,” Isabel said as the button beeped. “D,” beep, “1,” beep, “Send,” beep. No duress; ready to negotiate.
She caught the infected driver’s stare at her in the rearview mirror.
The satellite phone rang almost immediately. It was General Browner’s aide, then Browner, President Anderson, and who knew how many others. “Yes, she’s willing to open negotiations on a nonaggression treaty, and on a trade deal to swap their excess food production for things they’re short on. But Emma says we have to stop our attacks, which I didn’t know about by the way.” There was silence. Isabel considered telling them about Rick, but hesitated for reasons that were unclear to her.
The driver pulled up to a brightly lit, columned mansion. An infected footman of some sort held an umbrella over her car door. “I just arrived at former President Stoddard’s house to meet with uninfected members of Emma’s Community.” Isabel headed for the front porch. “I’ll report back afterwards.” For the briefest instant, she returned the fixed gaze of the infected footman, then turned away, carried her pack and weapons to the far end of the covered porch, and began whispering. “As a warning, they know a lot more about what’s happening around the country than you’d think. They must have, I dunno, spies, maybe everywhere. Be careful. Talk to you later tonight.”
She waited, and was relieved when no one instructed her to run for the hills, duck, and cover. But then, they wouldn’t….would they? said a voice in Isabel’s head.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks go out to my agent, Bob Thixton, at Pinder Lane and Garon-Brooke Associates, Ltd., for his tireless efforts in midwifing these labors of love I produce periodically. I also greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with and the editorial guidance given me by Michaela Hamilton, and the support I have received from James Abbate, at Kensington Publishing, with whom I have thoroughly enjoyed working on the Pandora series. And last but certainly not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude toward every reader who gave these books a chance. I understand the time and emotional effort that goes into reading each novel to which you commit and have endeavored to the best of my abilities to not let you down. Please keep reading, and stay on the lookout for my next effort.
About the Author
Eric L. Harry launched his Pandora series of science fiction thrillers with Pandora: Outbreak and continued it with Pandora: Contagion and Pandora: Resistance. Raised in the small town of Laurel, Mississippi, he graduated from the Marine Military Academy in Texas and studied Russian and Economics at Vanderbilt University, where he also earned a JD and MBA. In addition, he studied in Moscow and Leningrad in the USSR, and at the University of Virginia Law School. He began his legal career in private practice in Houston, negotiated complex multinational mergers and acquisitions around the world, and rose to be general counsel of a Fortune 500 company. He left to raise a private equity fund and cofound a successful oil company. His previous thrillers include Arc Light, Society of the Mind, Protect and Defend and Invasion. His books have been published in eight countries. He and his wife have three children and divide their time between Houston and San Diego. Contact him on Facebook or visit him online at www.EricLHarry.com.
Pandora: Outbreak
“Harry’s vision of an apocalyptic plague is as chilling as it is plausible. This masterful thriller will leave you terrified, enthralled, and desperate for the next entry in the series.”
—Kira Peikoff, author of No Time to Die and Die Again Tomorrow, on Pandora: Outbreak
“After a devastating epidemic that changes the very nature of humans, two sisters, an epidemiologist and a neurobiologist, hold the key to humanity’s survival.”
—Library Journal
BEGINNING OF THE END
They call it Pandoravirus. It attacks the brain. Anyone infected may explode in uncontrollable rage. Blind to pain, empty of emotion, the infected hunt and are hunted. They attack without warning and without mercy. Their numbers spread unchecked. There is no known cure.
Emma Miller studies diseases for a living—until she catches the virus. Now she’s the one being studied by the U.S. government and by her twin sister, neuroscientist Isabel Miller. Rival factions debate whether to treat the infected like rabid animals to be put down, or victims deserving compassion. As Isabel fights for her sister’s life, the infected are massing for an epic battle of survival. And it looks like Emma is leading the way…
“Harry has a first-rate speculative mind, well grounded in current science. The ideas he puts forth are extremely engaging.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A good storyteller…harrowing stuff!”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Like Crichton and H.G. Wells, Harry writes stories that entertain roundly while they explore questions of scientific and social import.”
—Publishers Weekly
See where it all began, in the first book of Eric L. Harry’s chilling Pandora series.
PANDORA: OUTBREAK
Keep reading to enjoy a sample excerpt.
Chapter 1
CHUKOTKA AUTONOMOUS OKRUG, SIBERIA
Infection Date 7, 1500 GMT (3:00 a.m. Local)
The sound of the zipper on Emma Miller’s tent woke her with a start. Cold air flooded in. Backlit in dim starlight she saw a man, his breath fogged. Her heart raced as she fumbled for her flashlight…and found her pistol. “Who’s there?” She flicked the light on. It was the blond Russian soldier who had saved her life hours earlier. His pupils were black and unresponsive. “Stop!” He said nothing. She kicked at him. “Stop-stop!” He crawled atop her. She dropped the flashlight while flicking the pistol’s safety off.
Bam! In the flash, his head rocked back with a hole in his brow.
Sgt. Sergei Travkin collapsed heavily onto Emma’s shins. “Oh-my-God!”
A knife stabbed her tent and sliced it open. Men hoisted Emma—whimpering before she thought to hold her breath—into the shockingly cold air. The ever sober young scientist loosed an animal sound. “Nooo! No!” Someone wrenched from her grip the pistol Travkin had given her after being infected. The pistol with which she had killed him.
Emma’s sobs merged with her shivering. Anonymous men clad in personal protective equipment unzipped her blue jeans and yanked. Goosebumps sprang from bare thighs. A bright lantern blinded her. Her jeans snagged at each ankle. “Stoooop!” she screamed. “P-Please!” Buttons popped off her blouse. “Wait!” An ugly knife sliced through the front of her bra. She covered her breasts. Gloved fingers found the elastic of her panties. She clam
ped her knees together and stooped in a futile attempt at modesty. Her teeth clenched against an overpowering chatter. She shook from the cold, from the shock of killing a man and from the incapacitating terror at what may lie ahead.
“Would…somebody …?” Frigid spray stung her midriff. She doubled over with a grunt. Three men in gowns, hoods, boots, and gloves sprayed disinfectant through a wand, pumped a cylinder like an exterminator, and scrubbed her roughly with a brush at the end of a telescoping pole. She willed herself to stand upright, raising quivering arms and turning circles in place, as soldiers rolled Emma’s tent into a single biohazard bundle.
Travkin’s dilated pupils hadn’t contracted even in the brilliance of her flashlight. Did he infect me? Noxious liquid burned her eyes and fouled her mouth. Despite its awful taste, she swished, gargled, and spat. The pool brush scraped at her hair. She grabbed it and used it to scrub her head and face herself. “He wouldn’t stop!” she shouted before coughing and spitting. He never got closer than my knees. Maybe I’m okay?
Soldiers hoisted the impermeable crimson bag, covered in prickly black biohazard symbols, by loops at its corners and carried away her tent, parka, and backpack along with Travkin’s remains. The faint rays of her flashlight shone blood-red through its plastic.
Buckets of cold water cascaded over her head. “Jee-zus!” One after another. “Aaaaw!” Her chest seized so tight she couldn’t even breathe.
A tall French medic extended a blanket at the end of the pole. She wrapped herself in it but could force no words past locked jaws. The medic draped a second blanket over her head and waved away Russian soldiers’ rifles. In the distance—and upwind—the World Health Organization’s Surge Team One, and her own Surge Team Two, which had arrived just that day, watched in grim silence. From the shadows all witnessed their worst fears materialize as the grip of rigid infection control protocols seized a colleague.
“Hang tough, Emma!” “You can do it!” “You can beat it!” Their accents were varied, but their theme was consistent. “Farewell, Emma Miller.” She cried as she stumbled barefoot across hard ground, her feet already numb. The medic kept his distance but illuminated her path with a lantern. Emma heard disturbing noises with each jarring misstep that must have emanated from her.
She asked where they were going. The French medic replied, “Quarantine.” Her destiny was now binary. Either she’d contracted the new disease, whatever the hell it was, or not. Like a prisoner in a Roman colosseum, Emma awaited her thumbs up or thumbs down.
Whirring sounds grew louder—air pumps at quick-erect isolation shelters. Travkin had been hustled into one after fighting off the suicidal attack on their landing zone. Emma had watched from a distance and upwind as he, too, had been stripped and scrubbed. But the shelters had been off-limits when she’d come to thank him. Seven hours later, eyes black, it had been Travkin who visited Emma.
The isolation shelters reminded Emma of the bouncy house her brother rented for her nephew’s twelfth birthday. Emma and her twin sister, tipsy from the wine at the grown-ups’ table, had giggled and jumped like schoolgirls. But those playpens maintained their shape by positive pressure. Isolation shelters were the opposite—held up by poles as their tainted miasma was sucked out through HEPA filters, removing micron-sized particles one hundred air changes an hour. Negative pressure kept germs from escaping the openings.
“What about the other guy?” she asked in vibrato, shivering. “I don’t wanta catch it from him.”
“Corp. Leskov died,” the medic replied.
Oh, God! Please! I’ll be good. Please! Okay. Focus. Concentrate. Science.
“Blown pupils,” she said, “c-c-can be from intracranial pressure.” Her sister Isabel, a neuroscientist, had once told her about that phenomenon. “How’d Travkin get out?”
“He attacked my medical team,” replied a new man, also with a French accent, also in PPE, who arrived to escort them the last few meters to the bouncy houses. “Fractured my doctor’s windpipe.” The open-air site of the mobile isolation ward was brightly lit. “Eye gouging and asphyxiation for one medic.” Emma lay on a gurney, as bidden. “Broken neck for the other.” They peeled away her blankets. Emma reflexively covered her breasts and pubis. Gas heaters bathed her in blessed warmth. “You’re lucky to be alive.” Emma scoffed at any mention of her good fortune, emitting a puff of fogged breath.
A wireless blood pressure cuff squeezed her biceps. A thermometer was clamped to her fingertip. The prick of an IV needle caused her to jump. A drip bag flowed cold into her arm. “Antibiotics,” the doctor said.
“Cipro?” He snorted. Better. Last-ditch. Kept out of use to prevent resistance. A doomsday-stopper. But oh, the things epidemiology professors know. Statistically, the new disease was probably a virus—not a bacterium—as impervious to antibiotics as fungi, protists, prions, protozoans, and worms, other tiny predators that ate their prey from the inside.
When she’d asked others on her team earlier how bad the new illness was, it had strangely been a big secret. But she asked again, and as a professional courtesy, or as required by the Hippocratic oath, the French doctor seemed to reply honestly. “Until we get the pathogen’s taxonomy done and ICD assigns it a name, we’re calling the illness SED: severe encephalopathic disease.”
“Severe?” Emma asked. “So, a high initial-case fatality rate?”
“Fifty percent,” the doctor replied. Christ! An incubation period rivaling cholera. First symptoms around two hours. An even shorter latency period. People are contagious before first symptoms, which are gastroenteritis, chills, nausea, vomiting, respiratory distress, joint pain, high fever peaking at hour four in convulsions and acute intracranial pain. The medic laid a third blanket onto Emma, but it did nothing to stop her trembling. “Direct mortality is between four and six hours of exposure. But survivors then report feeling no discomfort at all.”
“Whatta you mean, direct mortality?” she barely forced out.
“Well,” he explained, “Travkin’s death wasn’t direct.”
“Oh.” Jeeze! “So, if you survive, what th-then? What does it do?”
The doctor glanced at a nearby unit, different from the others in that its vinyl walls were opaque, not clear. Bright light leaked through the zippered seals of its single doorway. “We don’t know a lot yet.” Just outside the unit lay the unzipped empty body bag from which protruded the remains of Emma’s tent. Her flashlight still shone inside.
“You’re doing an autopsy?” Emma said. “Of Travkin?”
“You made a mess of his cranium,” the doctor replied in tacit confirmation.
“What’s the pathogen’s vector?” Emma asked.
“It’s not zoonotic. It didn’t mutate and leap species. The Russians were drilling for oil when a mud logger caught it. Apparently, as an early test for hydrocarbons before the spectrographic analysis is done, old-timers taste the rock cuttings. Our guess is the pathogen was frozen a few dozen meters under the permafrost 30 to 40 thousand years ago. The crew, fifty-one, mostly men, all got sick. The Russians called Geneva. As soon as Surge Team One was assembled here, they declared a sudden-onset emergency and called for your Surge Team Two.”
“Fifty-one people?” The other isolation shelters were empty. “Where are they?”
“The half that survived the acute phase… Well, you ran into a few of them when your helicopter landed. The Russians are rounding up the others in the forest.”
Jesus! Emma thought. “So, Encephalopathic? It causes…b-brain damage?”
In a terrifyingly sympathetic tone, he replied, “To the cerebral cortex,” and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Is the damage reversible?”
He shook his head.
“So, p-permanent brain damage?”
“Structural alterations. In every victim we’ve studied. I’m sorry.”
Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God! Get a grip. G
et a grip! But she couldn’t. Science! “What,” she said, choking on her fears, “what does the damage do?”
“Did you note Travkin’s lack of emotional responsiveness?” He again put his hand on her now-quaking shoulder. “And they can be very, very violent.”
The tall medic plunged a syringe into the injection port on Emma’s IV.
“What’s thaaah—” Emma started to ask just before tumbling into a calm and comfy bliss. She smiled at arriving Russian soldiers, armed and in camouflaged protective gear, so unlike the solid green worn by the très chic French. Change of procedure after Travkin? she wondered, barely clinging to reality against the undertow.
Emma drifted on a river of euphoria. She was Dr. Miller, epidemiology professor, yeah, Johns Hopkins, on assignment, for…for the NIH, that’s it, and the WHO! That took a lot out of her, so she relaxed into the current. She was Emmy of sunny days playing tennis and swimming, and languid evenings gossiping and flirting. A life in a world-within-a-world, her family’s Greenwich country club, in a galaxy far, far away.
In summers, she ventured out of that bubble only for sailing lessons on the Sound, which were the highlights of her poor, poor sister’s week. Emma had sports teammates; clubs masquerading as charities for college applications; and boyfriends one after the other, scandalously overlapping. Her identical twin sister, Isabel, in contrast, had mom and dad. The three would binge-watch television series and movies, together—one of Dad’s John Wayne movies or whatever for each of Izzy’s romantic comedies. They thus ruined Isabel’s scant chance for a social life by providing her refuge from some awkward years.
Both twins, now thirty-two, were five-foot-four, both 110 pounds, both fit, both pretty for God’s sake. Both were groomed, educated, and well-raised in a wealthy, high-achieving family. Both had light brown hair that turned blond in summers. But Emma’s was cut short for convenience on these grown-up scientific adventures. The tips of her hair now felt frozen and her arm cold as she twirled a strand. It had once been long and lustrous like Isabel’s still was. Emma felt envious. A medic placed her arm back under the blanket.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 34
