Quarantine

by James Phelan

  “We know that most people sheltered, in their apartments or in mass refuges,” he explained. “New Yorkers have had it drummed into them for years, everyone is pretty much prepared, with their duct tape and ration boxes and whatnot. Hell, I just heard that Madison Square Garden alone has been packed with close on fifty thousand, Empire State had another twenty—”

  The thought of so many people out there in these streets was . . . incredible. I’d felt so alone at times in this city that was teeming with people—people just like me, thousands of them who’d probably felt as alone or even more so than me.

  “Have you heard anything about Australia?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve not heard anything about it, but London, Paris, Moscow, Shanghai, Rio—quarantines all around the world are being lifted as we speak, so it’s too soon to tell the full extent of what’s happened.”

  My head spun from the enormity of it, but also at what he’d said: if it were global like that, what chance did little defenseless Australia have?

  “How will you get all these people out?” I asked. They all looked at me. “The survivors—how will they know that it’s okay to come out now?”

  “They’ve got armored convoys going out from tomorrow morning, pushing routes clear so we can start busing people out to the north. They’re giving instructions by megaphone and dumping info flyers, and we’ve just got radio broadcasts back up and running today, with TV following in a few days once the power’s back on. Medevacs are already running, as you can hear.”

  As if on cue, a helicopter buzzed deafeningly overhead.

  “Paul, you said before that there was no choice,” I said. “About these guys who are going out to kill the worst of the Chasers—the infected.”

  He nodded.

  “I have a friend out there.”

  “I know. I’m sorry—”

  “No, you don’t understand,” I said, sitting up in bed, the drip line in my arm pinching as I moved. I looked from him to Rachel and Felicity. “There’s another way, another choice, I know it.”

  “I’m sorry, this is their doctrine.”

  I tried one last time. “Well, what if they do get better?”

  “They don’t—”

  “Or what if there is a cure?”

  “Jesse, this has been analyzed in labs—hell, the USAMRIID team here has worked around the clock.”

  USAMRIID . . . “I met some of those guys!”

  “They came in here to test you?” Paul asked.

  “No,” I said. “They came into Manhattan, days ago.”

  “No,” Paul said. “Those here today are the first responders on the ground.”

  “I saw them too!” Felicity said to her brother, her voice rapid and tinged with excitement. “I was with Jesse; they had their ID on a container in their military truck, and we saw them getting attacked by a UAV.”

  Paul looked taken aback. “When was this?”

  “A few days ago.”

  He looked spaced out, computing all this.

  “Tell me everything.”

  “You don’t think that’s weird, that there was a group of US soldiers here on the streets, transporting an unexploded missile out of Manhattan, attacked by their own aircraft?”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “It was, Paul, it was a US aircraft, you know it,” Felicity said. “Attacked by our own people, like they weren’t meant to be here, doing whatever they were doing.”

  Her brother was clearly struggling to take in the possibility.

  “What do you think they were doing?” I asked him.

  “The USAMRIID?” Paul said.

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking out the tent’s clear side panel.

  “What if they were getting rid of evidence?” It was one of the ideas I’d tossed around with Bob and Daniel.

  “What?”

  “That they were here to get that missile and take it away—to hide it—because the missile or the contagion was US in origin.”

  “Something like that has happened before,” Rachel said. “With the anthrax attacks. Apparently, they were said to be perpetrated by US armed forces—”

  Paul shook his head. “I doubt it. I mean, why not just destroy it?”

  I told him about what happened when the aircraft struck the truck, about Caleb being so close . . .

  “Are you sure it was a missile from this attack that they had in the back of their truck?” Paul asked.

  “Yes, absolutely sure,” I said. “This guy, Starkey, told me that.”

  “Starkey?” Paul said, shocked, as if the name meant something to him. “I’ve met him—he was a colonel in the USAMRIID, a brilliant specialist in infectious diseases. You’re sure that was his name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Describe him.”

  I did. The more detail I provided, the more ill Paul looked. He shook his head. “It can’t be!”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said quietly, trying to show a little bit of respect. “The last time I saw him he was dying.” He’d been bleeding badly, blood pumping from his stomach, but even as he lay there in agony, he’d tried to help by warning me about the danger of the missile.

  Finally, Paul looked freaked. “We were told today that he and his team were killed a few days back, in a lab incident at Fort Detrick.”

  “Who told you that?” Felicity asked.

  “Our CO,” he said. “The general in charge of this quarantine op.”

  “Why would he lie?”

  He shook his head, looked around, as worried as I’d ever seen anyone. “I don’t know.”

  “It was a US aircraft that swooped down and destroyed the trucks and killed them,” I said. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  Paul nodded. “We’re the only ones that have aircraft like those you described.”

  “Killing their own and covering it up,” Rachel said. “In case anyone is wondering, that there’s another example of why I prefer animals over humans.”

  Felicity put a hand around Rachel’s shoulders.

  “This virus,” Paul said, “it only lasts a certain time in the air and on the ground. Call it an hour, max. We wanted to send crews looking for samples but it was deemed that we were far too late—that this contagion is dead, the risk looking under rocks too high.”

  “Their doctrine,” I said.

  Paul nodded.

  “But what?” Felicity asked.

  “If we had a sample of it from ground zero, we could try to work up an antidote.” Paul looked at me. “Jesse?”

  “I can do better than that.”

  The girls looked at me, too.

  “I can show you where an unexploded missile is,” I said, the image of the explosion and subsequent infection of my friend Caleb as fresh in my mind as that missile at St. Pat’s.

  “Where?”

  I shook my head. “No. I’ll show you.”

  The two girls looked worried but I could tell that Paul was wavering. I pulled the IV needle from my arm.

  28

  It was pitch dark when we prepared to leave the quarantine zone.

  “Jesse, this is a situation where darkness will not be our friend,” Paul said.

  The three of us—Paul, Felicity and I—were dressed in black camouflage outfits complete with bulletproof vests and helmets.

  “Do we really need helmets?” Felicity asked.

  Her brother was firm. “If you’re coming, it’s my rules.”

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she said, and the pair of them hugged.

  “Most serious injuries on the battlefield are insults to the head and are easily preventable by these,” he replied, rapping his knuckles on the Kevlar shell atop his head. “Of course, you could stay here.”

  She punched him in the arm, their argument about that long over and won by her.

  Rachel hugged me. She was still dressed in the
quarantine outfit, although she now had a coat on over it. “Be safe, be quick.”

  I nodded, and we slipped out the side gate by the zoo’s arsenal building, itself as defiant a survivor as I’d ever seen. The soldiers in the upstairs windows didn’t wave or seem to take notice, such was their ambivalence to us sneaking out—but their boss, a gruff army major, was a friend of Paul’s, and after a heated conversation he’d arranged our covert leave pass via his security post here. Rachel locked the gate, the major by her side.

  We raced up the stairs to Fifth Avenue. I had to be quick and be safe—Caleb’s life depended on me getting back with a sample. I knew the dangers that lay ahead: the so-called cleanup squads tasked with shooting any threat on sight; the Chasers out for their nightly hunt; getting the sample of the contagion from that missile and taking it back to the quarantine zone. They were only a tad less scary than the other thing working against us: time.

  Silenced weapons of silent killers. We watched from a first-floor window of a Fifth Avenue store. Paul took the night-vision goggles from the clip on his helmet and passed them to me. As I looked through them, the green-hued world around me came alive.

  Below our position, a group of Chasers walked the street, wary. They were headed south, and walking right into an ambush: eight figures were crouched, hidden from the Chasers’ view, some behind cars and others behind the columns of a building opposite. I could see their night-vision goggles, their raised weapons.

  The silenced submachine guns spat jets of bright flaring flames. I passed back the goggles, rubbing my eyes. At least a dozen long tongues of death as the soldiers did their devil’s dance in the street, wiping out the group of Chasers. I’d never felt so ashamed.

  Fifteen minutes later we emerged once more onto the street.

  We were silent, the three of us, Paul with an assault rifle ready and night-vision to guide him. It had become windy.

  “They’re gone,” he said, scanning the street up and down.

  I led the way to the south. We walked in silence, stopping every few yards to be still and listen, never moving until Paul said so.

  In my pocket I carried the only vestige of my former outfit, the tiny little holy medal I’d found in the cathedral. I rubbed it between my thumb and fingers, waited while Paul watched from another window at the front of a store. It smelled of death inside here, and I didn’t have the stomach to search around for the source.

  “They’re close,” he whispered.

  Felicity looked at me, the shine of the moonlight reflected in her eyes. The three of us headed deeper into the store, behind an aisle unit that had tipped over and spilled its contents, the mess a pattern of repeated destruction that I’d seen so often.

  “You know those patterns that repeat themselves?”

  “What?”

  “Like, the pattern is the same no matter what the size, you know . . . I’ve been wondering about it my whole time in New York.”

  Felicity shook her head, looked at me like I was nuts.

  “Fractals,” Paul whispered. “Like the Mandelbrot set.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said, and he went back to keeping lookout, peering through the shelves from where we sat crouched in the dark recess of the store.

  “You should have stayed back there,” I whispered to Felicity. “This isn’t safe.”

  She hugged me, said close into my ear: “I don’t ever want to be left behind again.”

  An hour later we waited. Twice Paul went up to the front of the store to watch and listen, twice he came back, convinced it was too dangerous for us to leave. Paul headed out—waited outside by a smashed taxi in front of the store. No sign of a cleanup squad of killers, nor Chasers. Not a sound here except for the constant drum of military aircraft echoing through the streets. He called us out. The three of us by the cab, watching, waiting, listening.

  “Can we go?” Felicity asked.

  “I think so,” he said. “Jesse?”

  “I’ll lead,” I said.

  He reached for his night-vision goggles and passed them to me but I declined them. “I’m used to the dark,” I said. “And these streets. Come on, it’s not far.”

  “One more block south, at the intersection,” I said.

  “Rockefeller Center?”

  “St. Pat’s.”

  We squatted down behind a burned-out van. A flash of light in the sky illuminated the charred metal panels.

  “What was that?” Felicity asked.

  She was answered by a dull rumble, followed almost instantly later by heavily falling snow.

  “Thunder snow,” Paul said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Another flash. I could make out the lightning this time, then the deep rumble of thunder closely followed. Snow fell in a thick heavy blanket.

  “It happens sometimes,” he said. “A thunderstorm, but it snows instead of raining—it means the weather system is unstable, and it’s gonna be a rough night.”

  A RIP-CRACK right above us, so loud it made the three of us jump and Felicity screamed; the lightning hit at the same moment.

  “How long will this last?”

  “Maybe an hour,” he said. “Reckon the snow’ll keep coming, though.”

  As well as the bolt of lightning there was a low, drawn-out rumble.

  “One more block?” I said.

  The two of them were huddled close to me.

  “I’ll lead this time,” he said, his night-vision remaining on his head, useless amid the flashing light-show above. “We won’t be able to hear much, but they won’t have their night-vision on either—may even force them inside a building for a break.”

  St. Patrick’s Cathedral was a solid slab of dark and cold, intermittently broken by blades of colored light shooting through the stained glass.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Down by the pulpit,” I replied.

  We moved quickly—there was no time to light candles but the interior was made less sinister by the flashlight mounted on the end of Paul’s assault rifle, the piercing beam reaching into the darkest shadows.

  “Wait here,” he said. He took off his backpack and passed us each a clunky black object made of plastic and rubber. “And put these on.”

  The three of us pulled up our gas masks. Paul did up our straps and checked the seals. He gave me a thumbs-up, passed me his assault rifle, and went the last few paces with the light of a glowstick to guide him.

  Another flash, followed several seconds later by thunder—the noise seemed to enter through the hole in the ceiling and reverberate around the cavernous space.

  “Is it blowing over us?” Felicity asked, her voice shrouded in mystery via the gas mask.

  “Yeah.” We watched as Paul reached the spot where the missile was and started to take samples. I saw him hunched over, working by the dull light. Another flash of light, this time it took nearly ten seconds for the thunder to sound.

  “Do you really think that so many people could have sheltered in places like this?” Felicity asked me. “Half a million?”

  “We did,” I said, thinking back to when I’d first seen Felicity: it was on a tiny video screen, the diary-type entry she’d made in her parents’ apartment, and that’s where I’d viewed it, only a day after she’d left; I’d managed to stay at 30 Rock twelve whole days before properly venturing out. “We lasted it out for nearly two weeks.”

  We watched Paul place a small black box into his pack, then head over.

  “True,” she said. “But—but we’ve seen such little evidence of survivors, certainly not on the scale that my brother said they expect to receive in quarantine over the next few days.”

  “Maybe most of them gathered in big spaces,” I said. “Refuge areas.” Hell, I’d thought about that enough times, that possibility. It would drive me crazy to think about it now.

  Paul joined us; he took off his mask and we followed suit. “Got it—let’s move.”

  All his samples were in bagged containers and secured in
his padded backpack. I could feel them moving close behind me as we ran to the first corner north. How could I convince them to leave me out here? I wanted to go and find Caleb, trap him, put him somewhere secure until this antidote was ready. If my home was gone, I needed to do this—I had to right something. I had to do something.

  We stopped at 52nd Street.

  The thunder was fainter but there were still deep flashes of lightning somewhere high above in dark clouds as the heavens continued to fall in sheets of snow.

  From the cover of a building’s corner, Paul surveyed our path north.

  As Felicity and I huddled a few feet behind him, I noticed bumps in the snow: frozen bodies, real life snowmen and -women.

  “Felicity,” I said, close to her ear. She turned. “I can’t—”

  “Now we head back, careful as we can, same drill,” Paul said as he came over to us. “Quiet, wary, no risks.”

  Another big flash of lightning lit the scene around us for a couple of seconds, clear as day.

  To the west on 52nd, a group of Chasers. Beyond them, a cleanup squad.

  In that moment, all hell broke loose.

  29

  Behind us, the screams of Chasers and the thudding of bullets were punctuated by a long, low growl of thunder.

  We ran. Paul was faster than me, and Felicity nearly kept pace.

  Glass shattered around us and bullets zapped.

  Paul skidded to a halt behind the fallen facade of a building across the street and we crashed in behind him. Another stream of bullets tore at us, sending up plumes of concrete dust from our barricade. I pointed across the street and we kept ground-close as we ran to more cover.

  “Can’t you call them off?” Felicity screamed as we raced behind some massive granite columns, hugging the facade of the building as we headed south.