Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  “Look,” Carol said. “They’re two teenage girls. They were showing no symptoms; they are not incapacitated in any way.”

  She waved her arm, a broad gesture that covered the entire grounds of the stadium. Outside the illumination that dappled the canvas treatment tents, an unyielding blackness reigned. Only a thin slice of the stadium’s perimeter fencing could be seen.

  “Those are chain-link fences. There’s not even much of a moon tonight. Where are the guards? The only ones I’ve seen here are stationed around your incoming operations. The people here are too sick towant to escape.”

  Carol forced herself to remain calm.

  “Correct me if I am wrong, Dr. Porter. My guess is that you did not choose a high school football field with the intention of preventing someone from going over the wall—certainly not two kids who think they’re healthy and feel like leaving.”

  Porter looked hard at Carol. “You’re certain they’re not still here, somewhere?”

  “I’m certain I can’t find them,” Carol retorted, “and I looked. If I were you, I’d start looking too. And you should ask someone to look in the parking lot of the clinic. That’s where I parked my pickup.”

  “You’re worried about your truck?”

  “No, Dr. Porter. I’m worried about the spread of this virus. You see, my keys are missing too.”

  Chapter 34

  Helena Memorial Hospital

  Helena, Montana

  July 23

  The two of them looked a mess.

  The back and right sides of April’s head were heavily bandaged; bruises, abrasions and deep scratches on her face, arms and hands were scabbing souvenirs of her crawl through the brush and rocks. Beck’s head was bandaged too: an X of adhesive tape held the gauze pad over the shaved patch where the doctors had taken six stitches. He sat in the visitor’s chair, his heel resting on the foot of April’s hospital bed. His pant leg at the thigh was tight over its thick cocoon of bandages. Gauze and tape also covered his wrists, where the weight of his body had forced the handcuffs to bite deep into the flesh.

  Frank Ellis would have felt even more responsible than he already did—should have known pairing O’Connor with this damn CIA spook was asking for trouble,he berated himself—except both of his charges were in such high spirits that at first he wondered if they had been given an excess of painkillers. Then the realization hit the FBI supervisor: April and Beck were simply glad to be alive. Not many hours before, neither had expected to be.

  “She snores,” Beck bitched happily. “And not a dainty little whistle, either. The damn windows rattle.”

  “Nobody forced you to sit there,” April countered. “You could have hung around the cafeteria, tried hitting on the nurses. Play on their sympathy, maybe.”

  It had been like this in the room since Ellis entered almost a half hour before. He understood the two were performing—partly for him, but mostly for each other. It was the same kind of postgame bravado that surfaces in any contest where the underdog pulls out a close, come-from-behind victory. There was no mention of the dark man they had both survived, and Ellis understood that too.

  The only break had been right after his arrival. April had introduced the two men, and Beck had immediately asked for the status of the search for his daughter. Ellis had looked perplexed—no request for status and location of the missing girl had been relayed by Andi Wheelwright—then covered with professional ease, citing a litany of treatment centers and CDC field facilities where the name of Katie Casey had not shown up on any lists.

  “That’sgood news, Dr. Casey,” Ellis had insisted, remembering from his training classes at Quantico not to put too much obvious sincerity into his tone. “It improves the chances of her being outside the contagion ring. Your daughter may even have made it out of the state before the quarantine was ordered.”

  Beck had eyed Ellis without expression, though the FBI man imagined he could see the wheels spinning behind Casey’s impassive demeanor. In his peripheral vision, he noted the way April O’Connor captured it all, her eyes flickering between the other two.

  Finally Beck spoke. “You’ll keep looking?”

  “Every agency involved will keep looking,” Ellis had replied, and realized that he meant it. Mentally, he made a note to alert every FBI facility to press hard to locate this man’s daughter; he made a second note to find out why Andi Wheelwright had not already done so.

  At that moment, the telephone on the table between the beds rang, and the shrill sound shattered the somber mood that had descended.

  Beck won the almost-adolescent race. He snatched the phone from under April’s reaching fingers, and grinned in giddy triumph.

  “O’Connor’s Seafood Shack,” he said into the instrument. “You got the time, we’ve got the crabs.” He ignored April’s mock-enraged hiss and listened to the voice at the other end. “Hey, Larry.” He winked at April, careful to hold the phone out of her reach. “Nah—we’re fine. Be out of here in no time.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, they’re both here.”

  A pause, and then Beck broke into a broad grin. “Sure, I’ll tell her. Hold on.”

  He cupped a hand over the receiver, then turned to April. “Dr. Krewell says some county cop named McGuire’s been calling in every half hour, trying to find you,” Beck said, and watched as the FBI agent’s ears turned pink. “Aha. April’s got a boyfriend,” he crooned in a mischievous singsong, then raised his hands in mock-terror as she groped for something to throw.

  “Sure, I’ll tell her,” Beck said, sounding stronger than Krewell had expected. “Hold on.” As he waited on the line, Krewell half-heard the buzz of conversation in the background. Then there was a loud clatter, almost like a lamp falling to the floor, and the unmistakable sounds of laughter.

  “You behave, dammit,” Beck’s voice came over the line, sounding stern, “or I’ll have them tie you to your bed.” Then he also laughed. It had been days since Krewell had last heard genuine humor in Beck’s voice. He regretted being the one to crush it.

  “Yeah, Larry,” Beck said. “I’m back.”

  “When things are bad, they just get worse. We have a report from New York City. They caught a guy in a boat on the Hudson, figured he was trying to hightail it out of town. He tried to make a run for it, and a police sharpshooter in a helicopter had to put a round in him.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah,” Krewell said. “They searched the boat and found a bunch of pretty vicious pamphlets in a bag on board. Seems the guy was a member of one of those militia outfits—something called the Legionnaires of the Empire State. The guy’s name was Dickie Trippett.”

  “I don’t suppose that’s a coincidence.”

  “He’s Orin’s cousin.”

  “Uh-huh. So?”

  “They found something else too. Three pressurized cans, one of ’em open. Looks like the virus has made it to New York. And I’d bet that Orin is carrying the same package his cousin had. CDC’s field lab in New York is testing the contents now.”

  “Why bother?” Beck asked, and there was bitterness in his voice.

  In the silence that followed, he sensed that Krewell wanted to confide in him. He waited for what seemed like a long time.

  “We may have a chance—maybe,” he said. “One of the voodoo priests out at Fort Detrick has come up with an idea. It sounds dicey, but it’s the only one we have left.”

  After Ellis left, April and Beck returned to something closer to their normal personalities. The banter slowed, and finally ground to a halt as the two retreated into their own thoughts. April surprised herself: she found herself thinking about Beck’s antics, and didn’t know whether to be touched, amused or alarmed. There was nothing sexual about the way he treated her—nothing overtly so, that is. In her experience, few people—none of them male—could make the jump to intergender friendship without at least a brief sexual speculation.

  Still, it would be good to have a friend.

  “You asleep?” Beck
’s voice startled her.

  “Just thinking,” she said, and was silent for a minute. “Leg hurt much?”

  Beck grunted, his mind obviously elsewhere. “The guy, the Russian—obviously, he was waiting for Trippett.”

  “Yeah. Probably. So?”

  “So the guy wanted to know who I was, who sent me—why I was with an FBI agent. He had a lot of questions, but he didn’t ask the obvious one.”

  “Which is?”

  “He didn’t find Trippett at the trailer. So why didn’t he ask if I had an idea where to look next?”

  Beck frowned, as if wrestling with a stubborn mathematical equation.

  “He already knew,” he finally said aloud. “Or he thinks he knows where Trippett is now.” He rubbed his eyes in frustration. “I’m not getting it. My head’s still fogged from these pills they gave me.”

  “I’m kind of blurred over, too,” April admitted. “You’re trying too hard, Beck. Relax, and it’ll come to you. Drift for a while.”

  “Uh-huh,” Beck said, doubtfully. He did not want to relax; he did not want his mind to drift. He did not like the thoughts it drifted toward.

  When Beck had been in the hands of the RussianMafiya, what had sustained him longer than he had thought possible was a single belief: that within the vast apparatus of the organization for which he worked, wheels were turning. A rescue was—hadto be—both inevitable and imminent.

  What had finally broken him had been neither the psychoactive drug injections nor even the often-hideous pain his captors had inflicted. It had been the realization that there could be, would be no rescue. The revelation that, in the end, nobody was out there to come for him.

  Before his capture, he had believed that he had two families. One was his wife and child, the other the CIA.

  By the second week in the hands of theMafiya, he no longer believed he would ever see Deborah and Katie again. In his guilt and shame, he told himself that was even for the best: he had long been too careless with their love, he knew, drawing on it like a spendthrift draws on a shared account until it is bankrupt.

  Finally, when the interrogation had been at its most violent, he had pushed Deborah and Katie outside the torture chamber, locking the door behind them and shattering the key. It was an act of simple self-preservation: their very existence made Beck excruciatingly vulnerable to both hope and despair.

  As for the CIA, which had asked for his loyalty and trust, which had demanded so much from him—he had waited, with the inculcated faith of the professional. In the end, the Company had coldly given back . . . nothing. At that moment, under the renewed attentions of theMafiya technician, he realized that he had lost both of his families.

  Since then, he had been empty, unwilling or unable to regain either of them.

  Yes, and that’s why you would have cracked like an eggshell this time—a lot faster, too,Beck told himself acidly.Admit it—you were ready to tell him anything to keep it from happening. And would have, if she hadn’t come stumbling out of the dark with that beautiful gun in her hands.

  Beck glanced at April, and saw her staring fixedly at the ceiling above her head.

  He wondered if, in her mind’s eye, she too saw a thin Moorish moon in a black sky. And whether she too heard, mingled with the slapping of water against rock, a merciless voice offering the urgent, yearned-for relief of a quick death.

  He hoped not; he would not wish that on anyone else.

  Then the bedside telephone rang again. This time, April answered. She spoke—at first, with a wary expression. Gradually, her features relaxed, then brightened. And after a few moments more—during which she laughed three times, by Beck’s count—April pushed the receiver in Beck’s direction.

  “It’s for you, double-oh-seven,” she said. “Remember my ‘boyfriend,’ Deputy McGuire? Said if we still want to find Trippett, maybe he can help. Wants to know if we’re still interested.”

  As Beck snatched at the receiver, she plucked it back out of reach.

  “I said we were,” April told Beck. “Please note the pronoun. We’re going out of here together, even if I have to commandeer a wheelchair.”

  Chapter 35

  Denver, Colorado

  July 23

  Orin Trippett knew better than to call any of his contacts directly, even from a pay telephone. He, like all members of his militia, was well briefed on the dangers associated with any form of electronic communication.

  “NSA’s been intercepting every phone call in the continental United States for more than fifteen damn years,” he had told his people, reciting the information he and the other platoon officers had culled from various newsletters and militia-oriented Web sites. “Same with fax—and now, e-mail. It all goes through computers looking for key words they’ve got flagged.”

  He had cocked his head quizzically at the group.

  “You want to have the ATF, the FBI, maybe even the goddamn Boy Scouts show up at your door?” he asked. “Well, then—all you gotta do is use the words ‘president’ and ‘assassinate’ in the same phone call. I guarantee y’all have companyreal quick.”

  The line never failed to bring down the house. Everybody always seemed honestly amused, if in an outraged sort of way. Widespread illegal surveillance, electronic or not, was just more proof that “the G” was capable of any abuse.

  Hell, it might even be true,he thought to himself.But this sure ain’t no time to find out.

  Now, still tired from the circuitous drive along backcountry roads that had avoided any police roadblocks, Orin wedged the car between two similarly battered-looking vehicles. The sun was a half hour away from rising, and he walked down a still-darkened street on Denver’s gritty southwest side.

  It was a neighborhood of dirt driveways and rusted pickup trucks, with the occasional chrome-laden Harley secured by a chain to the porch. These were working-class houses, their windows darkened hours before by residents who were usually awake to greet the dawn from jobs on the early shift. Occasionally, a dog barked at the echoes of Orin’s footsteps on concrete chipped and cracked.

  Midway down the block, he climbed the steps to an asphalt-shingled bungalow fronted with a weather-grayed porch. He knocked—softly at first, then with a louder impatience. Finally, a light deep inside the structure snapped on and Orin saw movement behind the door’s curtained glass.

  “Orin? That you, boy?”

  “Let me in, Cappie.”

  The door opened, wide enough for him to slip into the house.

  Inside, a heavyset man in a soiled green T-shirt and boxers broke into a wide grin. He shifted the pistol he held, a blue steel Colt Python, to his left hand and extended his right.

  “Damn, boy—we’ve been wondering if you got out.” Cappie dropped his unshaken hand, awkward under Trippett’s unblinking eyes. “I guess you heard. They kilt Bobby. Gil, too.”

  “I was there, Cappie.”

  “Sure. Sure, I know you was. Hey, you want a beer? Some coffee?”

  “What I want, Cappie—what I dearly want, more than anything else in thefuckin ’ world—is to find out how the goddamn feds knew to come lookin’ in the warehouse.”

  “How’m I supposed to—”

  “Bitch had a fuckin’ warrant, Cappie.” Orin’s voice was still low, but carried the intensity of a laser. “She and that spic waved it right in my face. Somebody’s talking. They knew where to look for the ’16s.”

  “Bullshit,” Cappie said, and now his voice was angry too. “If somebody talked, why would the feds come looking now? Damn, boy—we moved them guns outta there three days ago!”

  Orin was in no mood for his subordinate’s logic. “And then we lose the Jap nerve gas, too,” he said. “Fuck did you go off to? Gil and Bobby go down, so you just take the hell off?”

  “I was shooting too,” Cappie protested. “I had my Russian AK. I burned up two full clips, all I had, out the side window. Damn, same time’s I was trying to drive the truck, boy! Then you was gone, and I seen Bobby and Gil tak
e it. All the shooting, you knowed the cops had to be on the way. What’d you want me to do? Wait around and surrender to ’em?”

  “Seems that’s what you wanted me to do.”

  Cappie threw up his hands, the gun still gripped in his left. “Jesus Lord! Okay, I’m sorry you got left. I’m sorry I ain’t got X-ray eyes so I coulda seen the Spanish guy hadn’t shot you dead.”

  There was a noise from the back of the house, and Trippett’s head swiveled so quickly the tendons popped loudly. His eyes, narrowed to mere slits, darted to Cappie’s face.

  “Fuck you got back there?”

  “Jesus, Orin—it’s just Lubella. Lubella Tompkins. Bobby Touchette’s cousin, okay?” He raised his voice. “Honey? C’mon out here and say hi to Orin.”

  A woman of perhaps thirty, her features sharp and feral, stepped from the bedroom darkness into the long living room. She wore a man’s pocket T-shirt that fell just below the junction of her thin legs; as she moved, the small cones of her breasts bounced against the fabric. She stared at Orin for a long moment, her expression cold; then she moved to the dining table and picked up a pack of cigarettes.

  “What you say, Orin? You want Lubella to fix up something to eat? She don’t mind—right, baby doll?”

  The match flared, and the pool of light it cast around her face caught her in an eyes-tight grimace as she brought her cigarette to the flame. Lubella drew the smoke in deeply, and exhaled it with a sibilance that was sharp and disapproving.

  “Cook your own damn food,” she said. “Lincoln freed the slaves, or ain’t ya heard?”

  Cappie colored. “Damn it, Lubella, I said to—”

  “Up yours,” Lubella overrode him. “I’m going back to bed. You make a mess, I ain’t cleaning it up tomorrow.” She took several steps, then turned at the door. “Whatever you two got in them pea-brains of yours, leave me the hell out of it,” she said evenly.

  “You don’t know nuthin’ ’bout it,” Cappie said.

  “I know I ain’t gonna get killed like poor Bobby,” she said. “You take your machine guns and your poison shit somewheres else.”