Jeremiah parked the fork-lift and killed the engine as Freddie scooped up the loose parcels. He tossed them on top of the bundle. Jeremiah joined him, gathering an oily-looking box that had been punctured by a fork. Fog drifted from it, which Freddie recognized as dry ice like they used in rock concerts for a stage effect.
“What’s this shit?” Jeremiah said.
“Who cares? Morton will be here any second.”
“It’s got the hazard label. I got it all over my hands. Probably catch AIDS or something.”
“They can’t ship AIDS.” Freddie checked the label. “Category B. It’s safe.”
He doubted Jeremiah would remember the training videos all employers had to watch. Freddie was pretty sure Category B meant biological samples that weren’t infectious but still had to be triple-packed. They’d pounded it pretty hard to break through all the extra protection. He glanced at the shipping address. Headed for the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
Morton’s footsteps echoed down a row of pallets, headed their way. Jeremiah tried to hand off the busted package to Freddie, but Freddie didn’t want anything to do with it. The liquid was brownish and saturated the corrugated cardboard.
“Get rid of it,” Freddie whispered.
Jeremiah chucked it onto a cluster of bundles thirty feet away, drops of liquid flying out. A pool of it had collected on the floor, flecked with grains of Styrofoam, and Freddie tried to mop it up with the sole of his shoe.
Morton appeared around the corner. “What’s going on here?”
“Getting the Louisville shipment together,” Freddie said before Jeremiah had a chance to say something stupid.
Morton peered at the bundle and the fork-lift parked beside it. He tried to adjust the parcels bulging against the plastic wrap. “Looks like you boys shook it up a little.”
“It’s tighter than a moose cooze,” Jeremiah said. “No problem, Boss.”
Morton looked at Freddie’s feet. “What’s that wet spot?”
“Leaked out of the fork-lift,” Freddie said. “Might need a tune-up.”
Morton stooped and wiped his finger in it, then sniffed. “Doesn’t smell like hydraulic fluid. Smells like…”
Freddie thought it smelled like dookie, but he wasn’t about to volunteer an opinion.
“I don’t know what it smells like.” Morton wiped the mess onto the thigh of his jeans. He sported salt-and-pepper hair and wore a dress jacket over his brown uniform to set him apart from his subordinates. “Quit screwing around. The Louisville outbound is already taxiing. And we’ve got Dallas right on its heels. We’re three minutes behind schedule. You’re lucky they’re rerouting some flights because of tornadoes in Oklahoma.”
“We’ll get it done, Boss,” Jeremiah said in what Freddie thought of as his “plantation massah” voice.
Morton didn’t answer. He was studying the trail of brown drops that led to the cluster of pallets bound for multiple points across the United States.
Freddie could hardly wait for midnight and the end of his shift. He wanted to be well away from work when the graveyard shift discovered the busted packages. With any luck, Denita would be awake and maybe even in the mood. It was about time something went his way.
By sunrise, the contaminated packages were making their way to six different airports on three continents.
CHAPTER THREE
Meg Perriman felt the first stirrings of physical unease just after debarking in Seattle to catch her three a.m. connecting flight to Raleigh.
After reaching the departure gate early, she went to the restroom where she relieved herself. The bowel discomfort had crept up on her in mid-flight, but she didn’t like those cramped airliner toilets. The loose, watery stool was a disturbing shade of black. As she washed her hands, the reflection looking back at her bore flushed cheeks against pallid skin. She didn’t have a fever, but her skin was clammy even after she patted her face with a wet paper towel.
She wadded up the paper towel and tossed it at the trash can on her way out. She didn’t notice that it missed and dropped to the floor. She nearly bumped into the janitor on her way out. She issued a whispered apology that was lost in the noise of the SeaTac P.A. system summoning boarders for flight 391 to Los Angeles.
The janitor, Valeria Melendez, was used to distracted travelers on the red-eyes. She could’ve considered the well-dressed woman rude, but everyone was in a hurry with the holiday approaching. Besides, her job required her to be invisible. Given the current political mood of the United States, she preferred invisibility.
Valeria entered the restroom to give it a quick visual inspection. Despite the common belief that men were pigs, Valeria found that women left far messier public bathrooms. Perhaps they ruled their own homes with an iron fist and a bottle of spray cleanser like in the commercials, but they showed less interest outside their own territory. It was common to find tiny shreds of toilet paper on the floor of the stalls, as if rats had sought to make nests.
She was pleased that the unoccupied stalls were relatively clean. One toilet featured an unfortunate streak of spattered fecal waste, but it would hold until she made a full sweep in an hour. That would necessitate the yellow sign warning travelers of a wet floor, which always drew annoyed glares from people who flew five hundred miles an hour yet couldn’t be inconvenienced for a few seconds on land.
A toilet flushed inside one of the stalls, and Valeria politely turned toward the sink, wiping at water spots on the mirror. A woman emerged, struggling with a comically oversize purse. She was in her forties, younger than Valeria by a decade, yet the exhaustion around her eyes aged her with wrinkles. She washed her hands and pulled eyeliner from the depths of her purse.
“It’s the miles, not the years,” the woman said without looking at Valeria.
Valeria turned to see if the woman had a companion with her, but the restroom’s other occupant silently attended to business.
“You have traveled far?” Valeria asked, practicing the elimination of Spanish accent.
“On my way to Hawaii after three weeks in Ontario,” the woman said without enthusiasm.
“Business or pleasure?” Valeria wasn’t in the habit of chatting, since it made her visible. She absently scooped up the rumpled wet paper towel from the floor. Ordinarily she would’ve donned rubber gloves, but she wasn’t going to do any serious cleaning yet.
“Always business,” the woman said, dabbing at one eye and squinting at the mirror. She issued an exasperated gasp and blinked rapidly. “But you take pleasure where you find it, right?”
Valeria didn’t know much about pleasure. She’d endured the love of a man, and the temporary affection of several others, but those experiences fell far short of the romantic myths in movie and song. These days, pleasure was a weekend free and forty extra dollars after the bills were paid. Surely this woman in the pants suit and styled blond hair fully tasted the myths.
The woman, eyes closed, reached out past Valeria toward the towel dispenser. Valeria peeled one off for her and stuck it in her hand. As their fingers brushed, Valeria noticed a diamond ring on the pinkie finger. She might not be engaged, but since she already had a diamond, perhaps there was no need for it.
“Thanks,” the woman said, wiping the corners of her eye.
“You are welcome.” Valeria moved away so the woman wouldn’t hand her the paper towel. “Have a safe trip.”
The woman gave a weary smile, glancing past Valeria as if not seeing her. Even blocking the doorway, Valeria was still invisible. This was another type of pleasure. She tucked the spray bottle in her apron pouch and left the restroom as a mother and her young daughter entered.
Valeria returned in an hour to conduct a thorough cleaning as scheduled, complete with a rolling mop bucket. Foot traffic had slowed considerably. The restroom was in its typical state: a snow of shredded paper, unsightly splotches of yellow and brown, and a vague scent of elimination, illicit cigarette smoke, sweat, and perfume.
She
stood up her folding sign, turning the Spanish-language side toward the entrance. “Cuidado: Suelo Mojado,” it said, featuring a stick figure that seemed to be dancing with joy rather than slipping on a wet floor. She donned her rubber gloves, conducted her duty, and sprayed a floral-scented aerosol. One traveler used a stall while she worked, and Valeria mopped up the footprints afterward.
When her shift ended at six a.m., she caught the 560 Express to Bellevue, paying exact change as she boarded the bus. She sat next to a long-haired young man with a guitar case and knapsack. He fidgeted with his phone for the entire forty-minute ride. He only spoke to her once, asking if she knew the connecting route to Tacoma, which was in the other direction.
“You wanted 574,” she said. “You’re going the wrong way.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m lost.”
He shoved the phone toward her. “Can you show me which highway to take?”
She shook her head, not wanting to get involved or to risk dropping the expensive technology. “You would do well to ask at the Kennydale stop.”
He insisted, and before she could react, she held his phone, staring at the map on the screen. She swiped wildly at the screen—she used a pay-by-the-minute Tracfone herself, and these fancy devices intimidated her. The image zoomed out until she saw Seattle, and then further, until Tacoma showed at the bottom of Puget Sound.
“We are here, and you want to be here,” she said, pointing.
“I know, but I don’t know how to get there.” The young man wasn’t angry, but he harbored a certain annoyed disposition, as if Valeria was responsible for his circumstances.
“What’s the problem?” asked a deep-voiced fat man sitting behind them.
Valeria was relieved when the young man turned to his new target and began his explanation. The fat man was more than eager to give an opinion. Valeria happily slipped back into invisibility.
By the time she exited at the Bellevue Transit Center to catch another bus to Issaquah and her tiny apartment beside a strip mall, she’d infected three dozen people who even now were fanning across the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Not a bad night’s work, even if she wasn’t compensated for her labor and shared far more generously than she intended.
The Klondike Flu virus, like her, was invisible.
CHAPTER FOUR
Anders Nordegaard was too wired to sleep.
He rose from his bunk in the male quarters at Toolik and slipped into his clothes in the dark. Three other researchers and a technician were sound asleep, a soft chorus of snores filling the insulated metal hut. He donned a parka and collected a flashlight, leaving it switched off until he exited the building.
Light snow drifted sideways through the air, the flakes dancing and swirling in the flashlight’s beam. Anders blinked against the arctic wind, bleary-eyed and unsteady. His head throbbed, a condition he ascribed to his long hours in the lab. A research assistant from the Norwegian Institute of Science and Technology, he was three weeks into a six-week internship. As a Scandinavian, he was used to short days and long nights, but he’d been unable to adjust to the Alaskan climate on the other side of the world.
Or maybe it was the culture shock of working with a number of different nationalities. Although most scientists were apolitical, a certain streak of fatalism ran through much of the work, especially the climatologists. Governments dependent on capitalism were resistant to bad news that might prove expensive. The few who worked with the day-to-day data were tempted to quit and live out the dwindling days of the human race in peace.
As a marine biologist, he’d noted changes in his own corner of the ecosphere. Rising acidity and ocean temperatures had forced many aquatic species to move away from the equator, and Anders was currently tracking haddock, halibut, and snow crab populations in Prudhoe Bay. He would take the data back to Norway and compare it to changes in the North Sea. Early results suggested what most environmental scientists already knew: things were getting weird and fast.
Anders was young, though, so he still had faith in the future, although he had no idea what it would look like. But there was more to life than work, such as the Canadian beer in the dining hall. A couple of Molsons might lull him back to sleep. The crisp air in the compound was having the opposite effect, though. His breath plumed out in front of him in a frozen white fog.
An orange floodlight marked the office and dining hall, which was open around the clock with a radio operator monitoring the weather and power generators. Anders made for it, the only movement in the field station at five in the morning. He switched off his flashlight and let the hazy aura emanating from the office illuminate his path. A faint, shimmering band of green aurora flickered in the northern sky.
He was almost to the office when he saw a silhouette down by the lake. He wouldn’t have noticed except the still water was backlit by the reflection of the aurora. So he wasn’t alone despite the odd hour. He would’ve continued on to the office—minding his own business given the type of independent people who sought out the remote field station—but the figure appeared to be walking away from the shore and into the water.
It was a male, judging by the bulk inside the dark parka. Anders almost shouted, but he was still more curious than alarmed. He veered out of the compound toward the man, who was now knee-deep. The water had to be just above freezing. Slabs of broken ice floated around him. Even someone deliberately drenching themselves wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than a handful of seconds.
But the man didn’t stop. Instead he waded in deeper, water lapping over the furry hemline of the parka. Since the hood was up and the man was facing away, Anders had no way of recognizing him even if the scant light allowed it. Only a few dozen researchers and staff were currently on site, but given their varying schedules and disciplines, Anders had not met some of them despite the communal setting.
Anders broke into a jog, sweating now despite the chill. “Hey!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard but not enough to wake the sleeping people.
The man in the water didn’t answer. He dipped forward as if reaching into the water, green-hued ripples expanding outward around him and breaking the glass-like surface of the lake. Anders was nearly to the shoreline now, debating whether to actually enter the water himself. He called again and was again ignored.
The man reared back from the water, lifting his arms in the air. Silver droplets rained from his parka. He held a glittering, squirming object in his hands that took Anders a moment to recognize, despite his training. It was a fish, a cutthroat trout that was easily fifteen inches long.
How had the man caught such a swift, shy fish with his bare hands?
And why?
Water lapped against the toes of Anders’ boots as he received a partial answer: the man shoved the fish toward his face and the fish wriggled in pained panic. The man yanked the fish away from the parka hood, and its head was gone, blood dribbling into the water from the ruined creature.
“Dude!” Anders called, unsure whether to admire the man’s skill or call for the medical staff.
The man finally turned, his parka soaked. Maroon-colored blood ringed the man’s mouth as his teeth gnawed and snapped at the fish’s skull. Gore trailed down the man’s beard, his eyes wide and bright with a manic gleam.
Anders recognized him now—the German scientist who’d proven to be something of an asshole. Anders had avoided the man, and not just because of what the Germans had done to his home country in World War Two. Werner Lang carried himself as if he owned the field station and everyone else was a servant or bit player. But the haughty, sneering demeanor had given way to this crazed visage of a nightmare.
“You’re going to freeze,” Anders said, unable to articulate the thousand questions racing through his brain.
Lang tossed the fish carcass over his shoulder as if discarding a broken toy. The fish’s nervous system gave a final twitching shudder before it hit the water with a splash.
The German opened his mouth
as if to speak and a bit of red gristle dropped out of it. He waded toward Anders, and that’s when Anders noticed a couple more bizarre biological anomalies. The man wasn’t even shivering despite the frigid water, and his breath wasn’t steaming out as he exhaled.
In fact, the man wasn’t breathing at all.
“What the hell, man?” Anders said, frightened for the first time.
Lang kept coming, now ten feet from shore.
Anders backed up a couple of steps. “Say something!”
Lang emitted a low growl that caused even more fish bits to plop from his mouth. From this distance, Anders could see the man’s eyes—bloodshot and rheumy, glinting with a mad fever that Anders had no intention of catching.
Or being caught by.
He turned and ran even as the German slogged ashore.
CHAPTER FIVE
“You look like hell, honey,” Ian Perriman said to his wife as he glanced over from behind the wheel of his Honda sedan. The morning traffic on I-40 to Raleigh was lighter than usual, probably because of the upcoming holiday.
“Gee, thanks,” Meg said. “I love you, too.”
“I mean it with the greatest affection. Didn’t I kiss you when I picked you up?”
“And twice while we loaded the luggage.” Meg sagged in the passenger seat, wiping her jacket sleeve across her sweaty forehead.
“Did you not get any sleep on the flight?”
“A little. But the guy next to me smelled like bologna and kept adjusting his seat. If I’m coming down with something, it’s only fair that he catches it, too.”
“Now, honey, that’s not very compassionate.”
“I’ve been flying for sixteen hours. I’d be cranky under the best of circumstances.”
Arize (Book 1): Resurrection Page 2
