“How many doses do you have?” Gilda said.
“Ten thousand.”
“Why don’t we take some over to the clinic in Lilydale? And some more up to Belgrave? We can get it done faster if we spread out.”
“Do you know anyone there who you trust? We can’t let people find out what we’re doing.”
“Yes, I have contacts at both those clinics,” Gilda said.
I wondered for a moment how Gilda was so well connected, but then Annie said, “Let’s get to work.”
“I’m going for Sam,” Gilda said. “I’ll start telling people to come here.”
“Don’t forget. You have to tell them that it’s the same vaccine the rest of the clinics are giving out.”
Gilda looked at her with a flash of fear and then turned around and left, the curtain over the doorway swinging behind her.
Annie and I started preparing the syringes, putting needles on them. Twenty minutes later Gilda returned with Sam. He ran over and hugged us both and I clung on to his thin but lively body, spinning him around for a minute before putting him back down.
Gilda asked Sam to sit down, but just as Annie was about to inject him a tall, heavy set man in torn khakis came through the door, a gun in his hand.
“Get away from the boy,” the man said.
“Boon, it’s okay, they’re friends. This is Michael and Annie.” Gilda stepped between him and us.
“Do you know what these people are trying to do?” Boon said.
“They’re here to help us,” Gilda said.
“Help us my fucking ass.” Boon stepped passed Gilda with his pistol still pointed at Annie. “Now get the fuck away from him before I blow you both away.” He waved the gun between the two of us.
“Boon, calm down.” Gilda put a hand on the arm holding the gun, but it didn’t sway.
“Do you know what this shit is? Do you?” Boon picked up a syringe and turned to her.
“It’s a vaccine. These people are my friends. They’re here to help us.”
“This is a fucking virus,” Boon said, pushing Gilda out of the way and coming towards Annie and I.
“It’s a benign virus designed to modify the immune system,” I said. “It works like a vaccine.”
“Bull shit,” Boon said, dividing the word in two. “We’ve had our people run tests on this shit. We don’t know what the fuck it does, but we’re pretty sure it’s not going to be very nice.”
Annie and I looked at each other. What was he talking about? He obviously thought this was the same vaccine they were handing out at the clinics, but what did he mean by it being a virus? The blanks they were delivering to the clinics shouldn’t have contained a virus, and surely they weren’t handing out the actual vaccines.
And then it clicked. They were using the “vaccines” to spread Rebola.
By now Boon was over next to Annie, holding his gun at her and taking the syringe from her hand.
“Stop,” I said. “Look, you have to believe us. We’re here to help. I’ll show you.” I picked up one of the syringes from the table, took the cap off and injected myself with it.
I watched Boon’s tense body relax and the gun waver, but then suddenly it was pointing at me again.
“You’ve probably vaccinated yourselves,” Boon said. “Of course you wouldn’t be so stupid as to risk your own lives.”
“Is this true?” Gilda looked at Annie and I with anger in her eyes.
“Gilda, of course it’s not true,” Annie said. “Why would we have told you what we did? Why would we even be here if this was the truth?”
Gilda looked at her and then she lowered her guard. “Boon, they’re telling the truth. Sit down. Listen to what they have to say.”
Annie and I repeated to Boon what we’d told Gilda and then I told them all about how the virus worked and how the military was spreading it.
“How do you know all this?” Boon said.
“I work for a company who works for the military,” I said, not wanting to tell him everything.
“How long have we got?”
“A couple of days at most. Once people are injected they’ll be dead within twenty-four hours. And within a few days pretty much everyone within a hundred kilometers of here will have it.”
“Why didn’t you come earlier?”
“They only just came up with the vaccine.”
“We could have gotten away.”
“There’s no escaping this thing,” I said. “It’s airborne, and can last outside of the body for days.”
“Why only ten thousand vaccines?”
“That was all we could get without being noticed. And if too many people survive, the military will just find another way to wipe them out.”
Just then another woman came through the doorway. She looked at Annie and at me suspiciously.
“What is it, Macy?” Gilda said.
“Does anyone know why the gates have been shut?” she said, obviously referring to the gates leading back to the regulated zone.
“Since when have they been shut?” Annie looked at me with panic in her eyes. We had thought we had another few days at least.
“Since about an hour ago. Nobody’s going in or out.”
I tried to check the net, but there was no signal.
“You know this has absolutely nothing to do with the rebel situation, don’t you?” Boon turned to Annie and I.
“What do you mean?” Annie said.
“They know there’s no longer enough food left for everyone and most of the food growing regions are in the de-reg zone,” Boon said. “That is the real reason they want to get rid of us.”
“What do you mean they’re going to get rid of us?” Macy said.
“Macy, go and get your children,” Gilda said. “Bring them over here. There’s a nasty bug going around. We need to vaccinate them against it.”
“What’s vaccinate?”
“It means protect against.”
“And who’s trying to get rid of us?”
“Nobody. It’s just Boon talking crazy again. You know what he’s like?” Gilda went over and put her hands on Macy.
Macy looked doubtful, but then Gilda said, “Go and get your children.” And Macy left.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Boon said to Gilda. “We have to start getting people in here. If this is a real vaccine.” He shot one more questioning glance at me.
“It is.” I nodded.
Boon and Gilda hugged in a way which told me their relationship ran deeper than just acquaintances, and then Boon strode away.
“Who is he?” Annie said.
“He’s Sam’s uncle,” Gilda said. “My late husband’s brother. You probably saw him at the funeral.”
“I don’t remember him. Are you sure you can trust him?”
“I’d trust him with my life.”
“Do you think that’s true? What he said?” Annie said.
“Yes. The rebels are only trying to protect the people here. They’re not trying to take over the regulated zone.”
Annie looked at her and shook her head. “Okay, here’s what we do. You stay here with half the vaccines, try to spread them around as much as you can. Make sure whoever’s doing the vaccinating has vaccinated themselves first. We’ll go down to my old clinic and start vaccinating people from there. It’ll be the quickest way.”
Half an hour later, Boon came back with two other men.
“Let’s go,” Annie said.
“Will we be able to carry the vaccines between us?” Boon asked.
“Yes,” I said.
The five of us went out into the night and headed for our vehicle, moonlight paving our way.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Annie.
“These people are going to need our help,” she said. “The government isn’t going to let people back in for weeks and once the virus goes through there’s going to be so much that needs to be done. Getting rid of the bodies, for one thing. Without a good cleanu
p this place is going to become an infested swamp of disease, and even the ones we do vaccinate are going to die.”
My heart and stomach ached as I thought about the deaths of all these people from a virus that I had helped the military make useful by creating a vaccine for. Even if I hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. They had my research. Others knew how to use it. There was nothing I could have done to stop them. I suddenly understood how those who had been working on the Manhattan project felt when they heard the atom bomb had been detonated over Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
We got back to the car and Gilda and the two men loaded up with vaccines.
“I’ll stay with you two,” Boon said.
“Okay.” I was glad to have a gun on our side.
The car drove us towards the clinic and on the way we stopped at a few people’s houses and told them they needed to come to the clinic immediately. We told them to tell others, and for those others to do the same.
We arrived and started setting up. Instead of using the consulting rooms, which would only slow down the flow of people, we set up small tables in the waiting room, a box of vaccines on each with accompanying needles and syringes. If only we had more. The five thousand we’d kept were not going to last very long.
People started arriving fairly soon after we got there, and Boon directed them to form a line outside while Annie and I called them in one by one. We sat them down, gave them a quick shot, and told them to tell their friends and families to get down here quickly. I looked at each one as they went through: old people, young people, small children, families. People from all over the world — Australia had always been multicultural. It was early in the morning and they seemed surprised to be there, as if they weren’t quite sure what they were doing.
By 8am, there was a line halfway down the block but we hadn’t done more than a couple of hundred people. The nurses who lived in the de-reg zone came in with confused looks on their faces, and we told them what was going on and set up more tables for them. Doctors should have been arriving from the regulated zone by then but with the gates shut there would be no way for them to get through.
There were six of us injecting people but the line outside was still growing. We were running out of time. If they’d started giving out shots containing Rebola at the other clinics, it would only be a matter of hours before people started getting sick.
We worked all that day and into the night, taking shifts and sleeping in short spurts on the beds in the consulting rooms. By the next morning, the line at the door had only gotten longer, and we were down to our last fifteen hundred doses.
I was injecting a young family, three children and their parents, when I heard a screaming at the door.
“Get away. Get the fuck away from us.”
A man had come in, blood running from his nose and mouth. He was having trouble breathing and with each breath more blood came up. People around the man were moving away from him, but instead of getting out of there, like they should have, they just stood there, watching.
The man started coughing, with his hand over his mouth. Blood ran between his fingers and down his arm.
“Help me,” was all he could say before he crouched down on the floor, desperately trying to get enough air into his lungs. He was around thirty-five, with worn but clean clothes, and I imagined him as someone’s husband or father. Annie rushed over to him and lay him on his side to clear his airways but I knew there was nothing we could do for him.
“This way, quick,” I said to the family who I’d been working with. I’d done two of the children but hadn’t yet done the third child, the oldest, or the parents.
There was a back door to the clinic and I showed them out it.
“Here, take these,” I said to the mother, pressing a syringe and three doses into her hands. “Do yourselves. Immediately.” Both her and her husband, who had their youngest in one arm and their daughter by her hand, looked up at me like animals stunned by a car headlight.
“What the hell just happened in there?” the father said.
“You’ll be fine. Just go,” I said.
I went back inside and the infected man was now lying face down on the floor in his own blood, smears of bloody handprints around him. Annie was trying to herd people out, but those who had been near the door had rushed inside and there was a struggle over the remaining vaccines. Three people were trying to inject themselves, while others had taken doses and were heading for the back door. One woman had the remainder of my box.
“You can’t take all of those,” I said. “There are people who have been waiting here all night.”
“I have a family.” the woman looked at me out of dark eyes from between matted hair, and clutched them to her breast.
Just then there was a commotion at the door. Word had obviously spread back through the line about what had happened to the man inside, who Boon was now dragging towards the back door by his arms. Shouting started as a whole crowd of people tried to push into the clinic, unaware it was probably the worst thing they could do. They would have been better off waiting outside for us to inject them there.
Then I heard screaming.
“Everybody get outside,” I called, but nobody was listening to me. I let the woman go and grabbed the box of vaccines from Annie’s table. People were still stuffing them into their pockets along with syringes and needles. With a stampede at the door, the ones inside couldn’t get out, and now Boon was trying to direct everybody towards the back. I wondered where he’d left the body, and wanted to tell him that people shouldn’t go anywhere near it or the trail of blood he’d left behind. We needed to clean up. But then a man and a woman were trying to grab the remaining vaccines from me. I pulled two out and handed them to them.
“Where are the needles?” the man said.
“Over there,” I said, pointing to a table.
They rushed off but then another man came at me and I felt a hand being stuffed in my face and the box being ripped away.
Outside it was complete mayhem. People were fighting one another, tearing at each other’s clothes and pushing their way past one another to be first in the door of the clinic. People were bleeding and I wasn’t sure if it was from fighting or if they were already sick. A couple of young men had pieces of wood and were beating their way through the crowds with them.
Just then a shot went off. I looked around and saw Boon standing there with his pistol in the air. For a moment everyone froze.
“Okay,” he said. “Everybody just stop. You need to get out of here. This place is now contam—”
But that was all he could say. Another shot had rung out, from a man by the door who was pointing a gun at him.
Suddenly Annie was by my side together with the three nurses.
“This way,” she said. “Quick.”
Annie ducked down and pulled me along a corridor and we heard more shots going off and people started screaming and glass started breaking and then Annie opened up a door with a key and pushed us all inside and slammed the door shut behind us. Inside the room, which was lit with a single fluorescent globe, were racks of medicines.
“The drug room,” Annie said. “The door’s solid steel. We’ll be safe in here.”
I only nodded. I was in complete shock. Apart from the fact that my heart was racing I felt strangely detached from everything that had just happened, almost as if I hadn’t actually been there.
We heard people bashing on the door and screaming out for us to let them in.
“Do you think the same thing is happening at Gilda’s?” Annie said.
“Probably.” I slumped down on the floor against the wall.
“We had enough, too,” one of the nurses said. “If only they’d waited, we probably could have gotten to everyone. At least the ones who were waiting.”
For another two hours the screams and yelling continued and then, as quickly as it had started, it quietened. There was no way that everyone had died so quickly, so I could only presume that there wer
e no more vaccines left and that people had abandoned the place.
“What should we do?” one of the nurses said to Annie.
“I think we’d better stay here for a while.”
The next morning, we tried the door. Something was blocking it and it took both one of the nurses and I pushing hard against it to remove whatever it was and create enough space for us all to get through. There were two bodies behind it, dried blood around their mouths. Down the corridor were another three, and in the main room of the clinic there were many more. Some of them looked like they’d died from the virus, but most of them looked like they’d either been shot or beaten to death. I saw fractured skulls and broken fingers. Crude weapons were still in hands but anything valuable, including shoes and even a pair of pants, had been taken. What sickened me most was a young girl, around four, with her eyes still open and blood dripping slowly from her mouth. I felt nauseous but looked around for Boon, but he wasn’t there.
Outside, at least another thirty people lay dead, scattered along the dirt road. All the windows of our vehicle had been smashed in, but when I activated it with a voice command it still started. We had to drag four bodies away from the road to get out and it was then that I vomited. I hadn’t eaten in nearly a day so there wasn’t much to come up, but I dry retched and spat against the side of the car until the dizziness and nausea left me and I could see again.
“Where are you three going?” Annie asked the nurses.
One of them looked at her as if the question meant nothing.
“Home, I suppose,” another one said.
We dropped the three nurses off at their houses and then drove as close as we could to Gilda’s house. Bodies were all over the place and I had to put the car in manual and swerve from one side of the road to the other to avoid them, bumping over arms or legs. Crows, rats, dogs and cats were already feeding on them and ran or flew off as our car approached.
We parked and walked as quickly as we could towards Gilda and Sam’s, afraid of what we might find there. As we got closer, the number of bodies on the street increased. We turned a corner into their street and found people carrying bodies away. Those doing the carrying didn’t look much more alive than those being carried. We went inside the house and found Gilda and about five other people out the back sitting around on the rotting lounges and old camp chairs.
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 16
