Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3)

by Victor Methos

“ ‘I really appreciate this, Luther. I know it’s a sacrifice to cut into your research time. I promise I’ll get you out and back as soon as I can.’

  “He chuckled. ‘No need, you know you were always one of my favorites. See ya soon.’ I hung up and put the phone down. Downtown Atlanta wasn’t too far and I could see the skyscrapers. Not that long ago, they looked like glimmering gems in the bright sun, clean and well taken care of. Now, they appeared like abandoned warehouses, dirty and empty.”

  “That night, I opted to stay home. Jessica and I would sleep in the upstairs bedroom and lock the bedroom door. When we were getting ready for bed, she stood in front of the mirror and brushed her hair. I sat on the bed and watched her. I had always wanted children, specifically a daughter. That prospect seemed a million years away now. Even the thought of bringing a child into this existence filled me with dread. I couldn’t do it, so having Jessica there wasn’t just for her benefit. It helped me, too. I don’t think it’s enough to just live, I think we have to have something to look forward to, something to live for. Coming home and spending time with Jessica was that something for me.

  “ ‘I miss my dad sometimes,’ she said out of the blue.

  “The death of her father was not something we had discussed. She understood what happened and why he did what he did, but as far as both of us were concerned, it was one of those topics that was more painful to talk about than if we left it alone. She’d never once brought it up, but I suppose it was natural she’d want to talk about it with someone. ‘I didn’t really know him,’ I said, ‘but I know he was a good man. Sacrificing himself probably saved a lot of people. All he cared about was that you were taken care of.’

  “ ‘I was mean to him,’ she said, pulling the brush through her hair. ‘I was mad because I thought he left me and my mom. So I was mean to him. I don’t know if he knew that I loved him.’

  “I was quiet a moment. The relationship I had with my own father was close, and imagining it otherwise was hard to do. Your father, at least I think for women, shapes who you date, who you want to marry, the men you’re attracted to, and what to expect from them. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been married yet; my standards were set high because of my father. But I could see Jessica felt pain, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  “She set the brush down and came over to the bed. She put her arms around me and lay her head on my shoulder. Outside, we heard tires screech and a crash, the sound of bending metal filling the street. I felt her arms tighten around me. The sound had startled her. I didn’t move for a long time, just held her, made sure she felt at ease before I tucked her in and left the bedroom. I didn’t even look out the window, because I didn’t want her to think it was important, further frightening her. So I left under some excuse, running down to get some food or something, and then I went out on the front porch and looked up the street.

  “Two cars had crashed. The door was wide open on both, and something was happening inside the one, fast, jerky movements.” Samantha paused. “I never made the connection. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what it was. So I just went back inside my home and locked the doors.”

  Mitchell had the urge to move a strand of hair that had fallen over Samantha’s face, but he held himself in check and chastised himself for even thinking it. “What happened when Dr. Daniels came down?”

  “Civilian flights were hard to come by, so it took two days for him to get down to Atlanta. Looking back on it now, I should have known something was happening, but I focused completely on the lesions and didn’t pay attention to what was going on around me. Reports started trickling in from other cities, rumors started spreading among the staff of the CDC, news reports seemed to grow more violent. Something was happening, and no one was quite sure what.

  “I distinctly remember seeing a report of a mob attacking and killing a family with their bare hands. Ripping away limbs and tearing them open with their teeth… the report went into detail about it. Someone had taken a video on a cell phone. A family sat in a minivan at a checkpoint. It wasn’t as common as now, but checkpoints had been set up on all interstates, and if you were going to travel from one state to another, you had to verify the identity of everyone in that vehicle and submit to a search. A line had formed at this checkpoint in… I think it was Kansas City, and this crowd of people stormed the minivan. They came from the fields, their clothes in tatters, some of them nude. The driver’s side window was open, and one of the mob reached in and pulled out the driver, the father. Several of the mob ripped open his belly and eviscerated him while the others tried to get into the van. I remember thinking that the doors were probably unlocked, and why weren’t they just trying to open the doors? But that didn’t even seem to occur to the mob. They just smashed the windows, and several got into the van. You couldn’t see what happened to the family because… because blood coated the windows from the inside.”

  Mitchell knew the scene well. He’d seen a thousand just like it. “And you didn’t investigate an attack like that further? The CDC didn’t look into it at all?”

  “How could we? Smallpox is the deadliest virus in human history, and this particular strain is the most adaptive and unusual we’ve ever seen. We felt—I felt—that our only mission was to develop a vaccine. The world could go to hell around us, we could always rebuild, but someone had to be around to do the rebuilding. And I felt developing a vaccine was the way to do that.”

  Samantha folded her arms and looked down at the table. “When Luther arrived, he excised portions of Eric and Ryan’s brains and ran tests for almost a week. That week was… unusual. I’d go home every night and come to work the next day just like every other day, but something was different, almost like the air had changed. The days got darker… something.

  “The reports kept coming in, mobs of people killing anyone they could find. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Whenever law enforcement breaks down, you can expect most men to satisfy their more wicked urges. Say what you will about Freud, he predicted that, at least. When a society loses the protections of law, like in Iraq after the American invasion when we dismantled the police and military, there’s still an order behind the chaos. In Iraq, people were trying to get as much material gain as they could. If that meant killing people, they did it, but it was never purposeless. Even when it seemed like it was, we found out that the killing occurred because of feuds between tribes that went back centuries. The killing had an explanation, but the killings taking place here, they had no explanations, no reason behind them.”

  She paused, unfolding her arms and putting her hands in her lap. Mitchell glanced down at the digital recorder to ensure it was still on.

  “I was driving to work one morning, and there was a jogger by my house,” she said. “I don’t know what possessed this woman to go out jogging during martial law, but she did. Maybe she thought that little bit of normality would help get her through the rest of the insanity during the day. I don’t know, but she was attacked by two men. I saw it. They chased her down like lions after a gazelle. And this woman was in shape, skinny and fit, and the men were not. One was so overweight his stomach bounced over his belt, but they ran her down. It was like they were possessed and didn’t care if they gave themselves heart attacks.

  “I swung the car over to the curb and opened the passenger door for her to jump in. She was screaming, and I could see the look on her face, her eyes like marbles, completely devoid of the capacity to think. She got to the door before the first man reached her. He hit her like an NFL linebacker and took her down. I think even the impact might have killed her, but they didn’t stop. They… they…”

  Mitchell said, “If you need a second, you don’t have to…”

  “No, I want to.” Sam swallowed. “They pulled her legs off. The strength they must’ve had to do that… now we know that it’s because of the near-toxic levels of adrenaline pumping through them, but at the time, all I could think was that it looked like pulling the legs off a fly. Just sn
ap, a few tears, and they came off. The woman lived only a few moments after that, in shock as she bled to death. The men began… tearing her apart.”

  Mitchell’s throat felt dry. He swallowed. “Do you mean… eating her?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it eating. Anything they swallowed was instantly vomited back up, along with a torrent of blood. I got to see it from up close. They weren’t even paying attention to me. They were just focused on the legs. There was nothing I could do. I wasn’t armed, and no one was around to help, so I drove away. I thought that I would call the military patrols and have them go by when they could. At least she would get a proper burial, and maybe they could even catch the two men that killed her.”

  Mitchell nodded. “That must’ve been traumatic to see. Surely by now you knew something new was going on? Not just a poxvirus, something much more violent?”

  “Yes, I did. That’s why I wanted to speak to Luther as quickly as I could. Those men were infected, but unlike most infected, they were faster and stronger. When infected with Variola, after the incubation period has passed, people are bedridden. They can’t even go to the bathroom by themselves, much less chase down a runner and tear her limbs off. I suspected we either had a new strain of virus, or the old strain was doing something new. The lesions were of course my top concern, and I hoped Luther had something.

  “When I got in to work, I found Luther in the general labs, the unsecured labs we took tour groups through, on the main floor. He was sitting at a terminal looking at DNA matrices. I came up behind him, standing quietly a few moments before saying, ‘That bad, huh?’ I knew that when he got a result, he liked to email me, or whoever he was doing the analysis for, right away. He wanted us to know what he found so that he could get the inevitable questions out of the way. The only time he didn’t email with updates and reports was when the news was going to be something we didn’t want to hear.

  “ ‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘The lesions. They’re not lesions at all.’ He took off his glasses and placed them on the table. His eyes were rimmed red, and I saw the black circles underneath them that hadn’t been there when I picked him up from the airport.

  “ ‘What are they?’ I said, sitting on the desk.

  “He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and said, ‘They’re rotting brain tissue. The brains of that young man and his father were rotting from the inside out.’ ”

  Sam hesitated. “And just like that, everything was different.”

  4

  “It seemed like one of those things,” Samantha continued, “that once you know about it, it starts popping up everywhere. The CDC that day started getting more and more requests for autopsies, blood work-ups, biopsies, everything that could be tested, primarily from the military. They were the de facto police force, and the number of arrests and shootings to maintain order had skyrocketed. They thought something new had been introduced, but they knew even less than we did. Military intelligence thought that a radical terrorist group had infiltrated all facets of society and was attacking in large numbers. That’s silly to even think about now. Why would a terrorist group use their bare hands, when weapons that could kill a hundred times more people were available? That was just one example of the flaw in their logic, but they had even deeper problems. Soldiers were not immune, and the biohazard suits barely seemed to help. They were exposing themselves to the infected and, in turn, becoming infected themselves.

  “In one episode, a soldier had turned on his comrades in the middle of a patrol. Patrols went out in parties of six, and a single soldier had killed all five other men. When they found him, he was riddled with at least ten bullets. They shot him everywhere—the head, heart, kidneys, legs—but he hadn’t given up. All he cared about was killing those soldiers, and he did it before he bled to death. So the military was thinking they would make great weapons. We’re in the middle of the worst epidemic in history, it’s not even close to over, and they’re thinking, ‘Gee, we can turn these monsters into weapons to fight the North Koreans.’ So now the military has an interest in figuring out what’s going on, and that’s when the numbers hit, the numbers of all the people who had attacked others and were required to be killed. The FBI’s Hazardous Material Response Unit had at least four thousand samples taken from around the country. They had known about this effect for five weeks and kept it to themselves. They said they didn’t want panic. But I don’t think that’s the truth.

  “The truth was that only a handful of giant corporations own the media and dominate the markets. When there’s a crash, they’re the hardest hit. They were just trying to prevent another crash, hoping this new behavior induced by the virus just went away on its own.” She shook her head. “They were willing to let people die if they could just prevent losing any more money, as though money meant anything anymore.

  “Anyway, once we determined what it was, a degenerative disorder of some kind brought about by the infection of Variola, where only certain regions of the brain were affected, we could see what was happening, the sheer destruction of it. Even in Atlanta, you’d see people dashing from place to place on the sides of the roads, screaming, blood raining out of them. But they wouldn’t really attack each other. I noticed that almost immediately. Luther decided to stay and help at the CDC. One night we were running samples through the spectrometer and he said, ‘This isn’t found in nature. This is engineered.’ The statement took me by surprise. I’d considered it, of course, but Luther had never intimated that his thinking was going down that path. ‘That’s the problem with man’s arrogance,’ he said. ‘It destroys itself, too.’

  “I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I do now. Whoever engineered the virus didn’t prepare for its devastation. Maybe they had an antidote they thought would save them, or they just didn’t realize how quickly it would spread, I don’t know, but a biological attack is not like a nuclear attack. A nuclear attack is a precision instrument by comparison. A virus, once released, spreads everywhere. The country of origin isn’t immune. I think the engineers just didn’t realize it would come back to haunt them so soon.

  “One thing we couldn’t figure out, though: Why was the violence showing up now? Was it a new strain or a different virus entirely? Once we had completed a full analysis of Ryan and Eric’s blood, we sent the results to Dr. Goldberg in Tel Aviv, Dr. Gam in Paris, and Dr. Arcand at the WHO. None of them could tell me anything. It was Luther who said something that broke it open, casually, as we ate pasta at my house with Jessica gulping chocolate milk, a treat Luther had arranged for her. ‘What if it’s the initial infection, but this trait is dormant for a certain time?’ My mind reeled. How perfect that would be. Distract us with smallpox while infecting us with a virus we wouldn’t be screening for, one that wouldn’t cause symptoms for months or years.

  “I had Jessica get a sleeping bag, and the three of us drove down to the CDC immediately. Darkness had fallen and few city lights were on. The government attempted to conserve resources wherever possible, and streetlights were not considered a necessity. But you could see them. Not swarms of them, not yet, but you could see a few of them just out in the piles of refuse or wandering aimlessly in the darkened streets. One man stepped in front of our car and screamed at us, bloody spittle spattering over the hood of my car, before he jumped onto the hood with both feet.

  “ ‘Go!’ Luther shouted. I hit the gas. The man flipped forward, his face against the windshield, leaving a smear of blood and bits of ragged flesh. Jessica had her eyes closed and was chanting something to herself. I looked at Luther, who appeared as if he wanted to pass out and was gripping the dashboard so tightly his fingernails were cutting into it. Luckily, the CDC wasn’t far. I parked and, feeling as though I had a lead weight in my stomach, got out and hurried inside with the two of them. It was just like that, overnight. One night we didn’t feel entirely unsafe, and the next night we couldn’t drive down the street, but we didn’t realize how much worse it was going to get, n
ot then. My only concern then was to test Luther’s theory that the infection had occurred months or years ago in Eric and Ryan and had lain dormant.

  “Few staff were there at that hour, but I did find an assistant willing to help me. I set Jessica up in my office on the couch and was about to leave when she said, ‘Sam?’ I turned and saw the look of… resignation on her face. Not fear, not confusion, more like the acceptance of a belief she didn’t want to believe. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’

  “I sat down near her feet. ‘No, we’re not going to die. Epidemics have lifespans—that means they only last for so long. Then they stop spreading and begin shrinking.’

  “ ‘They stop spreading because they’ve killed so many people, don’t they?’ I could’ve lied to her, but if I’d learned anything about her, it was that her ability to look at her circumstances without flinching exceeded that of any adult I knew. She would know I was lying.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The virus kills until there aren’t enough people to spread it farther. I think this virus is near the end.’ I leaned down and kissed her forehead. ‘Now get some rest.’

  “Luther, the assistant, and I all went up to the BS4 labs. The analysis would take hours. I got some Diet Cokes for us, which was saying a lot because anything like that was a luxury at this point. When the data had been collected, we all sat out in the waiting room and drank our sodas and waited a good twenty minutes, just decompressing, I guess. We talked about mundane things. The weather, how much Luther missed professional baseball, where we got our shoes from. That was one of the first things that hit you when resources were scarce, but it was something you never thought about before: What if you needed new shoes? The stores were closed, and ordering online was impossible because so few mail carriers existed anymore, it being one of the jobs that interacted with the public so much that the government regulated who could deliver the mail to slow the spread of the virus, so what would you do? That hadn’t been a problem for me, but the assistant said he had to trade a box of candy bars with neighbors for some new sneakers. That seemed to be how most people got the goods they needed, barter. Money was almost worthless now with hyperinflation, even though people were still fighting and killing for it.