H7N9: The Complete Series [Books 1-3]

by Campbell, Mark

  Lizzy refused and looked up at him with tired eyes. “I can’t… If I throw up again, I’m pretty sure that my guts will come out of my mouth.” She tried to smile, but it came off as a pitiful grimace.

  “How’s she doing?” Teddy asked without turning around.

  “She’s not holding down water,” Ein said.

  “I’ll be fine,” she protested.

  “No, she needs a—” Before Ein uttered the word doctor, the absurdity of the statement made him pause and rephrase. “She needs medicine.”

  “They don’t make medicine for food poisoning,” Teddy stated matter-of-factly. “She’ll have to rest and drink lots of water.”

  “There has to be something we can do.” Ein looked down at her, frowning.

  “I’ll get her some of that pink stuff when we stop at Clarksville. That’s the best we can do.”

  “How much further?” Ein asked.

  “For the hundredth time, I don’t know!” Teddy felt bad for snapping at the kid, but the constant barrage of questioning ever since they left Nashville was starting to wear him out. He sighed and softened his tone. “Look, it’s a big city. We’ll know it when we see it. I’ll get her what she needs—I promise.”

  “All you do is worry,” Lizzy told Ein. She reached for the water and forced herself to take a few sips. Once done, she wiped her mouth and handed the bottle back up to Ein. “Better?”

  “It’s a start.” Ein took the bottle and put it back in the burlap sack. “I’ll feel better when you’re able to sit up and give the old man over here a hard time again.”

  “Kid, we could get there faster if I threw your ass overboard and lightened our load,” Teddy said.

  They laughed, but their happiness was short-lived—Lizzy threw up just five minutes later.

  A few miles downriver, Teddy steered the boat around a bend and nearly crashed into a rusty pick-up that bobbed in the muddy water. Metal scrap and pieces of trash polluted both sides of the river.

  Teddy knew that they were getting close.

  The course became challenging as more and more corroded vehicles floated in the foul water along with bloated, putrid corpses.

  The stench of death returned along with another scent that Teddy hadn’t smelled back in Nashville.

  It was the rich oaky smell of smoke.

  Teddy navigated around another bend and passed underneath an old iron truss bridge clogged with burnt vehicles.

  Past the bridge were the blackened remnants of Clarksville, Tennessee.

  The downtown structures had been gutted by the flames, and the outlining suburban area appeared utterly razed. The fire had spread unchecked until it eventually ran out of fuel and snuffed itself out. Wispy tendrils rose into the air from smoldering mounds that were once homes and businesses.

  The air was thick, smoky, and hazy.

  “No use searching ashes…” Teddy pulled back on the throttle and stared at the complete and utter destruction. “Where’s the nearest town?”

  “There are none.” Lizzy sat up and stared at the burnt buildings with a sickened, horrified expression. “This was it… Everything else has been cleaned out either by our scouts or by the gangs…”

  “We’ll just have to keep moving forward,” Ein said. “Maybe there is a town on the way that you missed.”

  Lizzy gave him a doubtful, sorrowful look and then lay back down.

  Teddy pushed the throttle forward and maneuvered around the burnt husk of a military flatbed truck that drifted in the water. He didn’t want to spend another moment in that city of ash.

  As he passed the edge of Clarksville, he saw a structure that was far enough from the rest of the city to be spared from the flames.

  Teddy’s stomach knotted at the sight of the familiar barbed wire fences and guard towers that surrounded the two-story concrete building.

  An idea occurred to him. He pulled back the throttle and brought the boat to a snail’s pace even though every fiber of his being wanted to keep going forward.

  Ein looked at him with confusion. “What are you doing?”

  Teddy let out a heavy sigh and steered the boat to the shoreline. He anchored to a metal signpost which read: state-owned property—no trespassing and no fishing next 2mi.

  Lizzy sat back up and watched.

  “Teddy, what the hell?!” Ein exclaimed. “We don’t have time for this—we can’t rest here! We have to find the next town!”

  “No, we don’t.” Teddy walked away from the helm and hopped off of the boat onto the shore. He dusted himself and took a deep breath as he stared up at the prison.

  “What are you doing?” Lizzy asked.

  “I’m going to get your medicine,” Teddy said.

  “From where?” she pressed.

  “From the only place left that wasn’t touched by looters.” Teddy turned and patted his pockets down, looking for something. Eventually, he pulled out a Hard Rock Café branded pen from one of his jacket pockets and tossed it to her. “I need you to write down the name of the medication that you need for your grandma.”

  Lizzy picked up the pen and peeled the label off of one of the water bottles. She scribbled the name down and handed it to Ein, who then handed it over to Teddy.

  Ein approached the edge of the boat and held out the paper. He stared up at the prison and finally realized where he was planning on going. “You’re not seriously going in there, are you?”

  Teddy snatched the paper from his hands. “If I’m not back in two hours, then go ahead without me.”

  “You don’t even know what’s in there,” Ein said.

  Teddy thought about the final days in Tucson. He thought of the bodies that were piled in the rec yard’s mass grave and stacked like cordwood in the corridors. He thought about the hundreds more who had been left to rot away locked in their cells. “Trust me, kid, I have some notion.”

  Before Ein could protest, Teddy bundled himself up, stuffed the piece of paper in his pockets, and walked up the embankment towards the prison’s perimeter.

  CHAPTER 9

  Teddy walked along a footpath from the empty parking lot towards the prison and passed a red sign that warned: stop—staff only beyond this point—visitors use east annex road entrance—deadly force is authorized. He stared uneasily up at the guard towers. He pictured alarms going off and a bunch of keystone cops chasing after him waving their nightsticks in the air, tooting their whistles.

  Of course, there were no alarms. There were no keystone cops still dutifully on watch, either—all that was history now.

  What was left were concrete watchtowers that stood like silent sentinels over a building undoubtedly full of corpses.

  At the perimeter fence, the pedestrian gate was wide-open and swung lazily on its rusty hinges as the breeze whistled across the prison’s overgrown grounds.

  Teddy glanced over at the abandoned gatehouse and read the sign that flapped above it: Riverfield State Penitentiary.

  He had never heard of the place, but he imagined the scene was pretty similar no matter which prison it was. The guards were gone, and the inmates were left behind.

  Unnecessarily cruel, but not necessarily surprising.

  Teddy knew that they were part of a forgotten population.

  He walked closer to the building and stared up at the rows of darkened cell windows.

  The thought of thousands of dead eyes peering down at him was harrowing. It was as if they were waiting all this time for a damned fool like him to wander inside.

  As soon they had him where they wanted him, they’d slam the iron door shut, and he’d be trapped in the darkness forever.

  The closer he got, the more he became consumed with irrational fear.

  Teddy abruptly turned around and almost ran back towards the boat, but he stopped himself.

  He had been many things in his time, but never a coward.

  Instead of retreating, Teddy took a hard swallow and pushed at the steel door that led into the main corridor.


  The first thing that struck him was the overwhelming stench of decay.

  The second was the swarm of flies—there were hundreds of them. They buzzed over and around Teddy, making a frenzied escape as soon as the door opened and sunlight poured inside.

  Teddy stumbled back, gagging and retching. He swatted his hands in a futile attempt to get away from them.

  It took full two minutes for the swarm to slow to a trickle, and it took another five before Teddy mustered up the nerve to step inside.

  The sunlight was coming through the doorway and cast long shadows down the otherwise windowless corridor. A series of interlocking sally ports constructed out of iron bars and operated by some distant control room were positioned all along the hall, and all of them were slid open.

  As Teddy started walking down the corridor and passed the first security grille, the image of the grille sliding shut behind him came to mind.

  He pushed the thought away and quickened his pace.

  Malnourished rats parted like the Red Sea at his feet as he went deeper inside in the facility.

  The rats squeaked in protest, but Teddy didn’t look down—he didn’t have the nerve.

  He kept moving forward.

  The infirmary had to be in there somewhere.

  He passed other sally ports labeled with cellblock numbers.

  Teddy slowed down and gave one of the cellblocks a passing glance. Dim sunlight seeped in through the cell’s narrow barred windows and revealed two tiers of cells, with skeletal silhouettes inside cages. Inmates—or what remained of them—were slumped against walls and sprawled on the floor. Decaying arms hung out of the bars in some last, futile attempt at escape. A few had even opted for suicide and dangled side-to-side like rotting pendulums from their ceilings.

  The guard’s podium in the middle of the cellblock was empty. Whoever had once operated the post probably chose to die in the comfort of their own home.

  It was an option that the inmates never had.

  Sickened, Teddy looked away and didn’t glance inside any of the other cellblocks that he passed.

  Eventually, he passed the darkened inmate chow hall and then came across a door emblazoned with the word “MEDICAL.”

  There was a gnawed away ghoul wearing a guard’s uniform lying next to the door.

  Teddy realized it was the only dead guard he had come across since he had stepped foot inside Riverfield State Penitentiary. He wondered why the sick guards had not had the human decency to at least allows the healthy inmates to go. Then again, he hadn’t witnessed much in the way of human decency neither before nor after his incarceration.

  Teddy reached down and pulled the flashlight off of the guard’s duty belt and grimaced as a rat ran across his hand. He flicked the rodent off of himself and tried the light.

  To his surprise, it still worked.

  Teddy opened the door and walked inside the medical wing, scanning the area with the flashlight’s beam.

  The small clinic had three triage gurneys inside, and each had a dead staff member lying atop it—IVs stuck in their leathery forearms. They gazed up at the ceiling through hollow sockets. Their lips had shriveled and receded—revealing skeletal grins.

  Before they left, somebody must have tried saving them.

  Teddy doubted whether the sick inmates had received the same courtesy.

  At the back of the room, behind a locked glass cabinet that had been shattered open, he found the pharmaceuticals.

  The shelf with the pain medication and the insulin refrigerator had been picked clean. There was another row of boxes labeled with something Teddy never heard of called Oseltamivir, but they were empty.

  It didn’t matter—he was looking for something else.

  Teddy pulled out the crumpled paper from his pocket and read aloud what she had written down. “Lisinopril…”

  He found three small bottles of varying milligrams near the bottle shelf and took all three along with some other containers that ended with “cillin” which he prayed were a type of antibiotic.

  Teddy got up and stuffed the goods inside a small trash bag.

  Just as he was about to go, he remembered her stomach medicine.

  There was nothing in the glass cabinet.

  After searching some of the regular drawers, he found some bismuth solution that he figured would do the trick.

  Teddy put the bottle of pink liquid with the other pills and left the room.

  He hurried back out of the corridor and rushed through the grilles, half expecting one of them to slam shut in his face at any moment.

  He knew his fear was irrational—childish even. His feet moved faster, all the same.

  Once he got outside, he let out a deep sigh of relief and left Riverfield Penitentiary behind without daring to look back.

  CHAPTER 10

  As the day waned on, Lizzy’s condition seemed to improve after taking some bismuth medicine.

  She wasn’t entirely back to normal, but she was able to hold down water and sat up on her own.

  Teddy figured that she’d be over her stomach bug by the time morning came around.

  Ein seemed delighted by the new prognosis. He sat cross-legged across from Lizzy and basked in her company just like he had back in the restaurant.

  Lizzy seemed just as content keeping Ein engaged in useless conversation and meaningless trivial tidbits about their lives before.

  Teddy didn’t mind the fact that neither one of them bothered to include him in their yammering.

  He found peaceful solitude in navigating the majestic, muddy Cumberland Rive

  The persistent knock of the engine warned Teddy that if they didn’t get some more fuel soon, then they’d be in trouble.

  An opportunity to gather some more fuel only presented itself once.

  Sometime after they left Clarksville, they passed an industrial town called Cumberland City.

  The factory’s smokestacks weren’t putting up any plumes, and the mill’s turbines didn’t look like they had run in quite some time. Vines were starting to climb up the steel buildings, and the forest’s underbrush had overtaken the town’s edge.

  Teddy pegged the place as abandoned.

  They spotted an empty dock next to what appeared to be a paper mill.

  On the dock, there were four fuel pumps.

  Just as Teddy started to pull back on the throttle, a group of people emerged out of the side-streets.

  After sizing up the boat, a few in the crowd waved exuberantly and smiled as they welcomed the new faces.

  Teddy looked uneasily at the excited crowd and figured that they weren’t militiamen or cops, but they were something just as wrong—they were strangers.

  He didn’t ask for Ein’s opinion because the look in the kid’s eyes told him everything he needed to know.

  For once, they were on the same page.

  Teddy accelerated the boat and continued past Cumberland City.

  They traveled the next few hours through an expansive nature preserve full of waterfowl and grazing horses that had probably escaped from nearby ranches.

  The riverside offered beautiful views, but very little in the way of fuel.

  When the sky finally turned orange, and the sun looked ready to set, the engine sputtered to the point of stalling.

  There was another town up ahead.

  Teddy saw the sunlight glisten off of a silver cross atop the whitewashed chapel’s steeple. The chapel stood prominently in the middle of the town in front of a square. Small one-story shops and prefabricated homes surrounded the chapel.

  “We’re here!” Lizzy stood up, wobbled, and placed a hand on the gunwale to keep from toppling over.

  “Dover?” Teddy kept watching the town for any signs of movement.

  Lizzy nodded excitedly.

  “Looks deserted…” Ein gave her a grave look. “How long since you’ve been here…?”

  “It hasn’t been long.” Lizzy stared at him. “Why are you asking?”

  “Do
you think that maybe…” Ein trailed off.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe something happened while you were away?” Ein managed to ask.

  Lizzy’s brows creased, and she glowered at Ein, but before she could say anything, there was sudden movement from the shoreline on both sides of the boat.

  A group of ten men wearing old army uniforms came out of the tree line carrying carbines. Woolen balaclavas obscured their faces. They got into position and pointed their rifles towards the boat.

  Teddy tried to accelerate, but the engine sputtered and wouldn’t respond. He noticed that none of the men’s uniforms had any FEMA emblems on them. Militiamen, he thought, with growing dread.

  Even Lizzy looked taken aback by the spectacle.

  “Driver—kill the engine and drift to the shore!” one of the soldiers ordered. “Passengers—put your hands above your heads!”

  Ein and Lizzy both complied.

  Teddy guided the boat onto the pebbly shore and put his hands in the air as three of the soldiers approached with their rifles ready.

  One of the soldiers stepped forward and squinted as he stared at Lizzy. He lowered his weapon. “Elizabeth?”

  Lizzy, still looking wan, with most of her face obscured by the towels wrapped her neck, had probably not been easy to identify. She turned towards the familiar voice, surprised. “Hodge? Is that you?”

  The man laughed and took off his balaclava. “I didn’t recognize you with all that stuff on!”

  Lizzy smiled. “Same here…”

  “You know him?” Ein whispered.

  Lizzy nodded. “Everyone knows him… He owns the general store.”

  Hodge glanced around at the other men and motioned for them to put their guns down. “Guys, it’s fine—she’s one of ours. Stand down.”

  The guns lowered and cries of “False alarm!” and “All clear!” echoed throughout the town’s perimeter.

  “What is all of this, Hodge?” Lizzy stared at the unfamiliar men. “Who are these people?”

  “Just some of Jimmie’s ranchmen that got recruited into my little security detail,” Hodge said. “Sorry for the fright. We’ve been having a problem with marauders for the last few days.”