by Sarra Cannon
“I showed up to volunteer three days ago, just before the hospital was placed under quarantine. No one has been allowed in or out in days and we’re all going completely crazy in here,” she said. She glanced from side-to-side, her face pressed close to the camera. “They took our cell phones after they initiated the quarantine, which we all thought was weird. Like they didn’t want anyone outside to really know what was going on in here.”
Her voice quivered and she cleared her throat.
“My supervisor passed away this morning,” she said. A sob escaped from her, but she cleared her throat again and kept talking. “I stole his keys from his pocket and got my phone out of his office. There isn’t much charge left, so I wanted to try to get this out before the phone dies.”
The camera swung back around as the girl walked down the hall, turned another corner, then walked inside one of the patient rooms. Crash counted at least ten patients crammed into the small room. There were only two beds, and the rest of the patients were laid out on the floor with blankets and pillows.
Angela panned the camera around the room.
“This is the section of the hospital where the doctors have put all of the advanced stage patients, and as you can see, there aren’t nearly enough beds for all of the sick. Every room in this section is packed to the limit, and we have started moving overflow into the hallways. There just isn’t even floor space to lay everyone out. Some of these people don’t even have the strength to stand on their own.”
She moved back into the hallway, her camera passing rows of people sitting in chairs. Some were slumped over on each other, while others just leaned forward into their own hands or leaned up against the wall. Angela moved into a room at the end of the corridor and approached a patient lying in one of the room’s two beds.
“When this virus first presents itself, it looks very much like the average flu. Cough. Fever. Aches and pains. Maybe some nausea. That’s what they told us when they called us in to volunteer,” she said. “They told us it was some kind of flu and that they needed all the help they could get. They told us since we’d been vaccinated against the flu, we’d probably be okay.”
She sniffed and coughed. Crash winced when she turned the camera back to her own face. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth and from the tear duct in the corner of her left eye.
“As you can see, the vaccine didn’t do shit to help me,” she said, a crooked smile crossing her face. She coughed again and blood splattered across the screen. She tried to wipe it away, but it just smeared across the camera.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” she said. “On day 1 of the quarantine, my supervisor, Bill Ross, was healthy and strong. He showed no sign of the virus. Day 2, he presented with a low-grade fever and a cough. This morning, Day 3, I came to wake him for his next shift and found this.” She zoomed in on the face of the man on the bed and Crash’s eyes grew wide.
The man’s eyes were rimmed in black bruises streaked with blood. His cheeks looked hollow, as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His hair had fallen out in chunks. Red sores dotted his face and neck, then continued down his arms. Many of the sores had broken and a yellowy puss ran out of them. Crash put his hand over his mouth and turned away.
“I have never seen a virus or any disease work this quickly,” Angela Burrows said into the camera.
The woman began to cry.
“When they locked us in three days ago, we had just over sixteen hundred patients, nurses and doctors quarantined inside this hospital,” she said. “Today, only six hundred of those are still alive. By the end of the week, almost all of us will be dead. Including me.”
The screen went black and Crash sat in silence, trying to make sense of what he’d just seen.
Noah
Noah stood at the door to the basement.
He’d reached his limit. Enough already. His dad must have come out to get food at some point in the middle of the night because he left his dirty plate in the sink, but Noah had been asleep and missed it.
His father had also left a note on the bar telling Noah not to go outside or leave the house for anything. Not even school.
Noah had gotten similar messages from his dad in the past when a new strain of the flu would show up or there was some kind of other virus or threat, but he usually ignored it. His dad could be really paranoid about this stuff ever since his mom died.
But between the man who collapsed and died on their street and seeing Parrish’s mom the other night, Noah decided he better listen to his dad. He skipped school on Monday. Tuesday, though, school had been canceled. Too many students and teachers were sick, they said. It gave Noah the chills just thinking about it.
How serious was this thing?
He’d obviously already been exposed. He’d carried Madelyn Sorrows down the stairs, his face close to hers when she coughed. If he was going to get sick from it, how long until symptoms started showing up?
He needed answers.
Being the son of someone who worked directly for the CDC should mean easy access to answers. He knew his dad was busy trying to come up with a cure or a new vaccine or whatever it was he did, but the man should have taken at least an hour to come talk to his own son about what this sickness was really all about.
His dad didn’t know he’d gone out to help with Parrish’s mom the other night. He was going to be pissed when he found out.
Noah stared at the door again, then stepped forward and knocked.
He waited, his heart racing. If his dad didn’t answer the door, then what? Should he knock it down and go demand some answers? Or just keep waiting? This whole thing was driving him crazy.
He knocked again. Louder this time.
Finally, after a couple of minutes of waiting, the door opened slowly.
Noah’s father appeared in the crack of an opening, his head down. “I’m busy, Noah,” he said. He glanced up for only a moment. “Are you feeling alright?”
“I’m fine,” Noah said. “I just needed to talk to you. Can you come up for a minute?”
His dad looked away and cleared his throat. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said. “You aren’t sick or anything right? You’re staying home like I asked you to?”
“Yes,” Noah said.
His throat tightened. Something was definitely off here. Why wouldn’t his dad look at him? Why wouldn’t he at least come up into the kitchen for a minute to talk to him?
“I should get back downstairs,” his father said, already beginning to close the door.
Noah stuck his hand between the door and the frame, then pushed it open a little further. “Dad? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t come in here, Noah, I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want you to be exposed to this.”
Noah pushed the door open more. “What’s going on?”
His dad pushed against the door, but Noah wouldn’t give up.
“Dammit, Dad, I’ve already been exposed,” he said.
“What?” his dad asked. There was such sadness in his tone. “When? You didn’t get too close to that man the other night, did you?”
“No,” Noah said. “But I helped Parrish carry her mom to the car in the middle of the night a couple days ago, so you can stop trying to protect me. Whatever this is, I’ve already been exposed to it.”
His father let go of the door and it slammed against the back wall. He turned away, hiding his face. Noah’s stomach twisted and he clenched his jaw.
“Dad?”
He placed his hand on his father’s shoulder, expecting his dad to yell at him or tell him to go back upstairs.
Instead, he began to cry. His father’s shoulders moved up and down as sobs shook his body. He sat down on the steps and laid his head in his hands.
“What’s wrong?” Noah asked again. The last time he saw his father cry was at his mom’s funeral. That was the only time, really. He moved beside his dad and sat down on the steps. “You’ve got to talk to me.”
After a mom
ent, his father finally wiped the tears from his face and sniffed. “I’m sorry, Noah,” he said. “I did everything I could to keep you safe, but it’s becoming more and more clear that none of us are safe. Not ever again.”
His father sat up and slowly, painfully, turned toward him.
Noah’s eyes grew wide, then filled with tears. His father’s eyes were bloodshot, purple bruise-like bags under them. His skin had lost a lot of its color and his lips were dry and white.
“How long have you been sick?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I kept hoping if I worked hard enough, I would find some kind of answer to this whole thing.”
“What is this, Dad? It’s not the flu, is it?”
“Is that what they’re calling it on the news?”
Noah nodded. “They keep saying it’s some kind of super-flu, but I don’t think anyone’s really buying that anymore.”
His father ran his hands through his hair and sniffed again. “No, it’s definitely not the flu. In fact, it’s not like anything we’ve ever seen before,” he said. He stood and motioned for Noah to follow him. “Most illnesses like this are either viral or bacterial. We can usually isolate it inside the blood and study it, but we can’t seem to figure this one out.”
Noah paused at the bottom of the stairs. He’d never seen his father’s lab before. He’d never been allowed down here. The room was bright with stark white walls and metal countertops. There were all types of lab equipment from microscopes to glass vials and everything you would expect to see in a lab. But it was the containment cell along the back wall that caught his attention.
“What’s that for?” he asked, pointing.
His father turned to look, then his shoulders slumped. “It’s a quarantine cell,” he said.
“Okay. So what’s it doing in our house?”
“I had it installed as a precaution,” he said. “In case I accidentally exposed myself to a deadly virus and needed to be quarantined.”
His words hung in the air between them.
“I thought of using it as soon as my symptoms began yesterday,” he said. “But the truth is that we’re way past the point of quarantines helping to contain this disease. It spreads too quickly and by the time any symptoms appear, you’ve already exposed everyone around you.”
“So what is it, then? If you can’t find evidence of it inside the blood, what is it?”
His father looked up at him, his eyes full of fear and frustration. “That’s exactly the problem,” he said. “No one knows. We’ve got everyone looking at this. We’re talking global cooperation here. No one has been able to identify the source of the sickness. We can see its effects on the body, but not the virus or bacteria itself. It’s like a ghost in the system.”
Noah shook his head. How could this be happening? For most of his life, he’d listened to his father’s paranoid talk about a super-flu or virus that might someday wipe out millions—even billions—of people within a matter of months. If everything he was saying now was true, this was the modern-day equivalent of something like the Black Death. Or worse.
“So what exactly do you know?” Noah asked. He sat down, ready to listen.
His dad grabbed his laptop from the workspace and came to sit down beside him. He propped it open and logged in through the backdoor of the CDC’s website. He worked fast, bringing up a series of files labeled ““Unidentified Virus”.
“Everything we know so far is in these files,” he said. “These are classified and I’m not supposed to be showing them to you, but I need for you to understand what’s going on.”
He stopped to cough, leaning far away from Noah. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and Noah noticed a smear of blood as he tucked it back in his lab coat.
Noah felt short of breath. Coughing up blood couldn’t be good. And with no official treatment, what exactly did that mean for his dad? Fear shot through him, but he swallowed it down. He didn’t want to panic. His dad would figure this out.
“The disease is airborne,” his father said. “This is one of the main reasons why it’s simply too late for a quarantine to work. Anyone who has come close to someone who was infected or touched anything they’ve touched is probably already infected.”
Noah wrinkled his forehead. His mind was spinning.
“But with the massive amounts of people they are saying are already sick, that would mean almost everyone on the planet has probably been exposed by now.”
His father met his eyes and slowly nodded. The truth of what was really happening started to sink in and Noah’s jaw dropped slightly. His breath hitched in his throat.
“God, Dad, what’s going on?”
“It’s really bad, Noah. Never in my worst nightmares had I envisioned something this deadly ever finding its way to us,” he said.
“Deadly?” Noah asked. “So a lot of the people who are sick are actually dying from this?”
His father took in a deep breath, then let it out in a ragged sigh. “No, not a lot of them, Noah.” He paused and shook his head. “All of them.”
Karmen
“What do you mean, you can’t get home?” Karmen asked.
Her parents had gone to one of their inspirational retreats in the mountains for a long three-day weekend, but they were supposed to be back by Monday night. It was already Wednesday now and they were still in the mountains.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” her mother said. “Rick asked us to stay an extra day or two to help out after the conference was over, and you know your father. He hated to say no to a friend in need.”
Karmen rolled her eyes and had to press her lips tight to keep from saying something she’d regret.
“We changed our flights to today, but now we’re at the airport and they’re telling us all flights have been completely grounded,” she said.
Karmen wrinkled her nose. “Grounded? For what? Is the weather bad there?”
“No, not at all,” her mom said. “They won’t tell us why. It’s complete chaos.”
She held the phone to her ear and walked into the living room to turn on the TV. Had there been some kind of terrorist attack? Or a plane crash?
“I’ve been trying to get your brother on the phone, but no one’s picking up at his house,” she said. “As soon as I reach him, I’ll have him come pick you up and take you over to his house.”
Karmen groaned. She hated her older brother and his perfect little family. He was eight years older than she was and married to a bitch of a wife. They had twin baby girls who were absolute terrors.
“I’ll be fine, Mom,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
She quickly scanned through the TV channels, searching for news.
“Hang on, I’ll have to call you back, sweetheart,” her mom said. “Love you. And we’ll discuss staying with your brother when I call you back.”
Her mom clicked off and Karmen set the phone down and turned the TV up.
The local news station was showing footage of airports across the country, packed with people whose flights had been canceled. She listened for a minute, but the stupid reporter never said what they’d been canceled for. As usual, the news was completely useless.
Karmen walked over to her laptop and started a Google search for “why have flights been canceled?” A news story popped up near the top explaining that the CDC had issued an order to stop all airline traffic in hopes of slowing the spread of the latest outbreak of the flu. They were urging anyone who was showing signs of the virus to stay where they were and not to travel until they were fully recovered.
Holy crap.
Canceling flights to slow an outbreak of the flu?
School had been canceled for the past two days and now this? People got the flu all the time, so what was the big deal? It sounded like your typical case of people overreacting to the slightest thing. The country had gone completely paranoid these days.
Karmen closed her laptop and picked
up her phone again. Well, if her parents weren’t coming home for another few days and school was closed too, she was going to make the best of it.
She texted her best friend Kate. House 2 myself still! Want 2 come over?
There was no immediate response, so Karmen sent a message to Melody, too.
While she waited to hear back from someone, she went in to the kitchen to make something to eat. Her mom usually bought groceries on the weekend and the people who came over for the party Friday night basically ate everything they had in the house. She sighed and grabbed an apple from the bottom drawer.
Maybe she should order pizza or something, but she’d already eaten a ton of junk food the last few days. With summer right around the corner, she couldn’t afford to gain any weight. She was going to have to find her mom’s credit card and go grocery shopping later.
Her phone buzzed against the top of the counter. Karmen grabbed jar of peanut butter from the pantry and a knife from the drawer, then checked the message as she cut the apple into small slices. She dipped the first piece into the jar, coating it with peanut butter.
My dad and sister are really sick. Can’t leave them. Have u talked 2 Kate?
That was from Melody. Karmen sighed. Too sick for her to leave and come hang out with a friend?
No, why? Everything okay?
The phone buzzed again.
Mark died this morning.
Karmen had to read it three times before the words sunk in. Mark was Kate’s little brother. He was only two years old.
She set her half-eaten apple slice on the counter and slid down onto the cold tile floor. What the hell was happening? She’d spent the last couple of days chilling out on the couch, watching marathons of Vampire Diaries. Had the world completely changed in just two days? Was everyone sick?
She dialed Aaron’s number, her stomach suddenly queasy. He was supposed to come over last night and watch a movie, but had totally bailed on her. Usually he would at least call or something, but she’d never heard from him. She’d been too pissed to call him earlier, but now, her hands were trembling as she placed the phone to her ear and waited for him to pick up.
