The Noise

by James Patterson

“None…outside the bags,” she replied. “When I worked trauma at Johns Hopkins, the hospital maintained a stock of body bags specifically designed to shield radiation. I don’t see the nuclear warning label here, and I remember those as being a little thicker, but otherwise they looked the same. These might be some variation.”

  Martha reached for the zipper on the closest bag and hesitated—the plastic felt warm and wet.

  The dosimeter still read nothing out of the ordinary.

  Martha tugged down the zipper.

  Steam rose up from the opening in a dense cloud, crawled over her mask, and slipped over her exposed skin on the sides of her face, her forehead. Even through the mask, she smelled it, this putrid odor, a mix of seared flesh and sulfur. Rot and sour earth. All at once, she was reminded of red tide, walking along the beach as a child only to find thousands of dead fish along the shoreline baking in the sun.

  Inside the body bag, the light fought to find a face, inched around the splayed plastic down into the shadows over long, greasy hair.

  “My God,” Harbin breathed.

  A woman.

  Age unknown.

  Indeterminable.

  Her eyes were open, but there were no pupils, no irises, nothing resembling an eye at all—the sockets were filled with a thick yellow pus. This mucus had dripped down the sides of her face and dried to a crust. Mixed with blood, similar discharge came from her nose, mouth, and ears—all her orifices. It had begun pooling in the bottom of the bag. Her skin had taken on a translucent appearance, milky, with thick, visible veins. Numerous fractures were apparent, more than Martha could count. The same pus drained from scrapes and cuts in her skin.

  Heat radiated from her body. Martha checked the dosimeter again but found no signs of radiation. This was something else.

  During the autopsies, Fitch had pointed out the bodies found inside the crevasse had somehow been cooking from the inside out. If Martha didn’t know any better, she’d suspect this woman was melting, liquefying from the heat. And somehow, it hadn’t stopped with death. In fact, it appeared to be accelerating.

  From the vents in the wall, cold air bellowed out in white, wispy clouds.

  Harbin opened three other bags and found more of the same. “If this isn’t radiation and it’s not viral, what can cause this?”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Fraser was standing near the tent’s entrance, glaring at her, one hand on the gun at his hip.

  Martha froze over the body bag, trying to think of an excuse to offer up, when a scream tore through the camp.

  Chapter Fifty

  Martha

  Martha rose and stomped toward him. She wasn’t about to be intimidated. “Was that one of the girls?”

  Fraser’s grip tightened on the butt of the gun. His eyes jumped from Martha, to Harbin, to the soldier lying on the exam table, and back again. His face grew red. “Do I really need to babysit you?”

  “You’re withholding information,” Martha pushed. “Where’s Dr. Fitch? Where’s Holt? Why are you keeping us from these bodies?”

  Fraser stepped up to the exam table and looked down at the semiconscious soldier. “You’re allowing one of my men to suffer so you can snoop around. I thought doctors were supposed to have ethics?”

  “I’m waiting for the medications to take hold,” Martha fumed. “Don’t try and twist this into something it’s not.”

  “So snooping is what? Busywork? Sorry, maybe I should have left you with a magazine.”

  “I was specifically brought in to determine the medical ramifications of the anomaly. How can you expect me to provide answers when I’m not privy to all the facts?”

  “I’m following orders.”

  “So am I,” Martha countered.

  Harbin zipped up the open body bags and crossed the tent. “Lieutenant, Dr. Chan and I will set your man’s broken arm. That is not a question. But when we’re done, you need to sideline the bureaucracy and tell us what you’ve been told, what you know.”

  Fraser was growing impatient. “I’m a soldier in the United States Army, Doctor. I’m part of a rigid chain of command. That chain of command exists for a reason. Information is disseminated as needed, and I fully understand that I don’t need to know all the details, I only need to know what is necessary for me to complete my existing orders, my mission. Those below me, including this man lying on the table, understand that as well. This is not a question, this is not an option, this is fact. Anything less is chaos.”

  “We’re already in chaos, Lieutenant. You saw that firsthand this morning in Barton.”

  Fraser didn’t answer.

  Harbin fell silent, too.

  “Who screamed?” Martha asked again. “Was it Tennant?”

  Fraser turned to her, then said, “Most likely, that was our witness. I came to get you when she started to stir. I thought it was important you were there when she woke. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “We should talk to her together,” Harbin said. “Come up with a plan together.”

  “I should lock you both up.”

  “Then this situation grows worse. I think you know that,” Harbin told him.

  Fraser eyed both him and Martha with uncertainty. Finally, he patted the side of the exam table. “Set his arm, then meet me out front.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Martha

  Martha set the broken arm with the help of Harbin and a soldier named Klara Fields, who had training in combat triage. The break in the man’s skin required twelve stitches. Once done, they left Fields to apply a cast and administer an IV.

  Forty-two minutes had passed.

  They found Fraser standing outside Medical. As they stepped out, he only started walking back toward Martha’s tent at a brisk pace.

  Martha and Harbin exchanged a quick look and followed.

  Inside, they found their witness sitting up in her cot, a blanket draped over her shoulders, but still visibly trembling. Reiber was holding her hand. The two of them looked up as they stepped inside.

  She appeared to be in her twenties, but her eyes belonged to a frightened child. Wide and moist with tears, bloodshot and lined with broken vessels.

  “My name is Dr. Martha Chan,” Martha said softly. “I imagine you’ve been through quite an ordeal. How do you feel, physically?” She reached for a thermometer and took her temperature—98.8, normal. “Any injuries? Do you feel sick at all?”

  One of her eyebrows was singed. There was a slight burn on her left cheek, not serious.

  She heard the question, but it took her a moment to process the words. When she spoke, her voice was timid, with a slight rasp. “My throat hurts. It hurts when I breathe, in my chest. My lungs.”

  “No doubt from the smoke.” Martha took out a penlight and told her to open her mouth. “They pulled you out of a fire. You’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Is the studio gone?”

  “The studio?”

  She looked down at her hand, still in Reiber’s. “I was recording an album at Crawlspace Records. I guess the recordings are gone. Oh, man, I’m a shit for even thinking that, aren’t I? Worrying about some recordings after…” Her face shot up. “Oh, Christ, did you find Eddie? He went out for smokes, and he didn’t…oh, man, please tell me you found Eddie!”

  “What’s your name, dear?” Harbin asked.

  “Raina Caddy.”

  Reiber gave the woman’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’ve got some of your songs from iTunes. You’re pretty good.”

  Fraser stepped closer. Although he didn’t say anything, his large frame was intimidating.

  Raina shrunk away, inched deeper onto the cot, her eyes on the gun at his hip. “Why are there soldiers here? Where am I?”

  Martha knelt down in front of her. “Can you tell us what happened, Raina?”

  Her eyes jumped from Fraser and the gun to the other people in the room. The trembling had stopped, but now she looked nervous. “I…I don’t know that I can.”

  “Sometim
es, with a traumatic experience, your brain will block certain memories. If you try to recall the last thing you do remember and work forward, step by step, the rest will come back.”

  “That’s…that’s not why.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Her gaze dropped to the floor. “I may have taken some pills.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Blue ones. Eddie had them. Said they’d help loosen me up.”

  “Blue ones,” Martha repeated flatly.

  Raina nodded. “A yellow one, too. But I only took half of the yellow one. Eddie took the other half. I think they made me see stuff.”

  “They were hallucinogens?”

  “I think the yellow one was. I took a whole pill last night, and we didn’t get anything done. The room kept moving, like the walls were breathing. It freaked me out. My fingers wouldn’t work right, I could barely hold my guitar. That was too much, so Eddie told me to only take half.”

  Fraser loomed in silence.

  Raina looked up at him. “Can he arrest me?”

  “No,” Harbin replied. “He can’t do anything to you.”

  “I don’t have any left, anyway. Eddie had them.”

  “What’s the last thing you do remember?” Martha pushed.

  Raina lowered her gaze again and bit the inside of her cheek as she thought it over. “It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Maybe I should have only taken a quarter.”

  Reiber squeezed the girl’s hand again. “It’s okay, just tell us.”

  The memory must have replayed in Raina’s mind, because her face went white and she started to tremble again. Her back stiffened. “We took the pills, then Eddie realized he was almost out of smokes. He said he wanted to run to the store before they kicked in. I was down in the basement, listening to the track we recorded the day before yesterday. I wasn’t happy with the bridge and wanted to come up with something else. I started to get really thirsty. I mean really thirsty. So I went upstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water. I don’t think the pills hit me yet, because other than the thirst, I felt okay. No moving walls or nothing. So I went upstairs, and I was standing at the sink and I saw it through the window.” She paused for a second, then shook her head. “That had to be when the pills kicked in.”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  She looked up at Martha. “A stampede.”

  “What, like cattle?”

  Raina shook her head. “Not animals…people.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Martha

  Raina shivered again and seemed to shrink. Her eyes darted around the room but looked at nothing in particular as her brain tried to process the thoughts flooding back. When she spoke again, her voice sounded so small. “It…it was like a river, a giant mass, all moving together. Thousands of people, just…just running. Practically on top of one another, they were packed so tight. And fast, oh, man, were they fast.” She paused for a moment. Her eyes grew wide and her head slowly shook back and forth. “They had this haunted look on their faces, like they didn’t know where they were…blank…numb…like sleepwalking, mechanical, emotionless. Some of them looked really tired, but they just kept going, oblivious to the pain, exhaustion. They had to be tired, nobody can…they…oh, God…”

  “What?” Reiber said softly.

  Raina’s eyes filled with tears. “One of them tripped, an older woman. She collapsed and went down right there in front of Eddie’s window, right in front of me. The others didn’t even slow down. They ran over her. She disappeared under them, there were so many. They didn’t slow down for anything—cars, yards, fences, other people moving too slow—if something or someone was in front of them, they went right over the top.”

  Her voice fell off again. Martha could see her growing agitated, her pulse quickening, the early signs of PTSD settling in. When she started speaking again, Raina was no longer talking to them but more to herself, thinking aloud. “I remember looking out the window at them, watching this…unfold. They were completely silent. The window was open, I could hear the sounds of them running, all those feet, and holy shit was that loud, but the people themselves? They didn’t make a sound. Not a single gasp, grunt, or cry, and that was the weirdest part—how quiet they all were. It didn’t seem real.”

  Raina looked up at Martha. “That had to be a hallucination, right? From the pills?”

  Images of the trampled bodies back at the village flooded Martha’s mind. The elderly couple, still holding hands. The baby in a carriage. Not just the bodies but devastated buildings, shacks, and other structures. The stones around the well. The paths through the trees, the brush…could all of that really have been caused by people?

  “Doctor?” Raina interrupted her thoughts. “It wasn’t real, right?”

  Martha looked over at Harbin. She expected him to be watching Raina, but instead his eyes were fixed on Fraser. Fraser caught her glance and subtly shook his head no.

  “Doctor?” Raina said again.

  Martha’s gaze hung on Fraser for another moment, then returned to the girl. “Most likely it was the pills. Do you mind if I take a blood sample? It may help us identify what you took.”

  Raina nodded.

  Martha found a needle in the medical kit and wiped Raina’s forearm with an alcohol swab. Raina turned away and cringed when the needle went in. “If…if it was real, where were they going? What were they running to?”

  A murky silence settled over the room. Nobody had an answer for that.

  “It probably wasn’t real,” Reiber told her, offering a reassuring smile.

  “Probably not,” Fraser finally said before turning to Martha and Harbin. “Doctors? A word with you outside?”

  Martha pressed a cotton ball to Raina’s arm and wrapped it tightly with gauze. “When was the last time you ate?”

  She had to think about this for a minute. “Lunch yesterday, I suppose.”

  “Maybe you can help her find something?”

  Reiber nodded and helped her up from the cot. “Come on. I saw about two thousand boxes of macaroni and cheese in the mess tent.”

  They were halfway out the door when Harbin spoke up. “Raina, one more question?”

  She turned to him. “Sure.”

  “The studio down in the basement, is it soundproof?”

  “Oh, yeah. Eddie’s got one of the best places around. I came in from LA to use it. You can’t hear anything down there.” At the thought of her missing friend, Raina’s face went slack again. She turned and shuffled out the door.

  When she and Reiber were gone, Harbin looked to Fraser. “We’ll need access to satellite imagery. Contact with all the local authorities in the surrounding communities. Blockades. Blockades everywhere. You said the president closed off the mountain and surrounding area? The airspace? We need to expand that. The CDC should be here. I have no idea why they’re not. And—”

  Fraser held up a hand. “Slow down, Doctor. This can’t be people.”

  “It most certainly can.”

  “I’m not going to start issuing directives on the word of some junkie.”

  Martha frowned. “I don’t think she’s a junkie. She’s a musician who—”

  “Who took a hallucinogenic to spark a little creativity, I get it. That’s not enough. Start by analyzing that blood sample, figure out what she was on. Then look for similarities between her blood and the samples from the village. Compare those to the samples we took from Barton.”

  “You need to contain this,” Harbin insisted.

  “That’s precisely what we’re doing.”

  “Then how did it get from the mountain to Barton?”

  A phone rang then, startling all three of them. Martha realized she hadn’t heard a single phone ring since arriving here.

  Fraser pulled a sat phone from his belt, looked at the display, and frowned before answering and walking to the opposite side of the ten
t. Aside from multiple yes, sirs, they couldn’t make out any of the conversation. He spoke for several minutes, then disconnected. When he returned to them, he looked slightly flustered. “How quickly can you get those two girls ready for travel?” he said to Martha.

  “Tennant and her sister?”

  He nodded.

  This took Martha aback. “Well, Tennant isn’t a problem, but Sophie shouldn’t be moved at all, not in her current state. I don’t think—”

  He just started shaking his head. “You wanted answers? This is your chance. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Martha

  Fraser didn’t tell them where they were going. Immediately after takeoff, the helicopter banked north, crossed over the Yakama Indian Reservation, and leveled off at about four thousand feet following the mountain range. She knew they’d crossed over into Washington, but beyond that, she wasn’t sure. That had been nearly two hours ago.

  Tennant sat beside her, strapped into the bench seat. Her hands gripping her safety harness, knuckles white. Her eyes were fixed on her sister, strapped to a gurney secured to the floor and still unconscious. Martha had increased Sophie’s sedatives and checked her vitals about every ten minutes. She’d managed to keep the girl’s temperature in check, hovering around one hundred, but her blood pressure was through the roof and she was breathing in long, hard gasps.

  Harbin sat across from them, next to Fraser.

  Soldiers sat on either side of her, weapons nearby. Both were ordered to ensure Sophie remained secure. Martha was worried someone might overreact and forget they were dealing with a sick little girl.

  Over her headphones, the pilot said, “On approach to McChord. Prepare for landing. East field.”

  “Lewis–McChord Air Force Base?” Harbin said, turning toward one of the windows.

  Martha glanced out too and watched as the pilot maneuvered over one of the runways and began following it toward the opposite end of the airfield and a group of hangars.

  When Tennant let out a soft whimper, Martha took her hand. “It’s okay. We’ll be on the ground soon.”