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

by Victor Methos

  “Jason leaned the shotgun against the wall and said, ‘Hope your mercy doesn’t come back to haunt us.’ He turned and walked inside without looking back. I put my arm around Jessica, and we watched the weeds tumble.”

  11

  “That first night at the store, I couldn’t sleep. The wind howled nonstop. On the second story of the building, an apartment had been carved out with two bedrooms, and we set up there. Occasionally, the wind would throw a piece of debris—garbage or more likely a twig or pebble—against the windowpanes. Jessica would wake up crying, and I’d wrap my arms around her until she went back to sleep. Eventually, we just slept in each other’s arms.

  “In the morning, I saw Jason go out with the shotgun, probably to explore the town for supplies. As I watched him out the window, Luther came in and said, ‘You’re not gonna believe this. They have running water.’

  “Before I could reply, Shui came out of the building across the street, wearing a T-shirt and the same pants from yesterday, and stretched on the porch. He noticed me looking down at him from the window and waved. Despite how silly it seemed, I waved back.

  “ ‘That guy again, huh?’ Luther said, watching over my shoulder.

  “ ‘He seems harmless enough.’ I turned to Jessica and said, ‘Why don’t you take a shower while we still can.’ She got up and left the room, and I heard the door to the bathroom close. When the water was running, I said, ‘What are we doing, Luther? Traveling to Africa to find some tribe that allegedly isn’t infected? Even if we found them, what facilities would I have in the Congo to analyze their antibodies? The only place I could do what I needed to do would be back at the CDC in Atlanta. So we have to go into the most dangerous jungle on the planet, find the tribe, and convince them to give us their blood, and then come back out again and go to a place infested with ips.’

  “ ‘Ips?’ he said with a look of surprise. ‘You’re really buying into Jason’s tall tales, aren’t you?’

  “ ‘You think he’s lying?’

  “ ‘I don’t know what to think, other than we shouldn’t trust anyone, including him. Maybe especially him.’”

  Mitchell pulled a package of gum out of his pocket and offered a piece to Samantha. She took it, gently unwrapped it, and placed it on her tongue. Gum wasn’t something easily found anymore. “Shui…” he mumbled. “Is that Dr. Zhang Shui?”

  Samantha nodded. “Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “He’s one of China’s greatest mathematicians. He just happened to end up in the same small town in Wyoming you were hiding out in?”

  “Shui had come to the United States hoping to find answers. That day, that first day, we decided to stay in the town a bit longer. Jason thought that he could get one of the abandoned trucks running again, so we could get to the airport. He kept saying that if we could get to Francis Warren airbase near Cheyenne, he could secure transport out of the country. It seemed like a decent plan at the time, though more and more that day, I thought we should stay in town and forget the Congo. There was enough food to last us months. ‘We can’t,’ Jason said when I talked to him about it. ‘This isn’t going to stop. We can hide out for a hundred years, and when we get out, we’ll still be seeing ips. You wanna stop this thing, Shangri-La’s the key.’

  “He seemed so… confident in what he was saying. Like he just knew that this was the path we had to take. At the time, I was a ball of confusion and stress. I didn’t know anything, much less how to save the world. But he was convinced we had to go to the Congo. The key was there. ‘Why are you so confident?’ I asked him out on the porch when we were alone.

  “ ‘Because of the Soviet Union.’

  “ ‘What about them?’

  “He glanced at me, like he wasn’t certain he could reveal such a great secret, and then hesitantly said, ‘In the eighties, they ran experiments on the use of smallpox against civilian populations. Smallpox and plague, bubonic plague. They did experiments in the Congolese jungles, where the US couldn’t find them.’

  “I already knew about the Soviet experiments. They produced massive quantities of biological weapons, and after the fall of the USSR, the storehouses all but emptied, and no one knew where they went. We knew for a fact that the Soviet Union produced about forty tons of dry anthrax, but no one has been able to locate it. Some, no doubt, has been funneled to North Korea and Cuba, maybe Iran, but not forty tons. That’s enough to wipe out a country, if you dropped it from small planes over the large cities. When I’d first been hired by the CDC, they briefed me on all this, and I volunteered for six months on the WHO’s SWRP, Soviet Weapons Recovery Program. It was just an initiative to try to find all the lost biological weapons from the Soviet Union. Health Department officials from various Western countries would take turns interning at the WHO and assisting in the program. They told me it was going to be a needle in a haystack, but it was more like a needle on a sandy beach. Officials, even after the fall, were still loyal to the Soviet regime and refused to cooperate or would stall when we flew out for inspections. Some of them outright lied, and a few even ran. But I had never heard of experiments with smallpox in the Congolese jungle. ‘I know a lot about the history of biological warfare, Jason, but I’ve never heard that,’ I said as diplomatically as possible.

  “ ‘Well, I know it happened. I knew someone who was there. A man named Hank Kraski. He was in charge of the Soviet biological warfare program, hardline KGB, no remorse, no pity… more like a machine than anything. He defected to the United States, and they adopted him into the intelligence community. Fucking KGB operative working with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Eventually, they gave him his own show. He was in charge of monitoring the Russian biological and chemical weapon programs and tracking down lost stores of hot agents, like smallpox. He grew really powerful in the intelligence community and became a power broker, selling state secrets to the highest bidder. When the DIA found out, they tried to arrest him, and he disappeared.’

  “ ‘What does he have to do with the Congo?’

  “Jason hesitated. ‘He said they would vaccinate villagers and then experiment with different strains. They wanted a strain that was resistant to vaccines. I think he found it, and he also happened to find a way to protect an organism from the virus. That’s what Shangri-La is. It’s the one part of the world he left alone. I think he’s there, and if he is, he knows how to stop this.’

  “We sat quietly for a while, the sun up in the sky and Shui across the street from us, hanging his newly washed clothes on a clothesline. He didn’t seem to mind that he was nude in front of strangers. That type of modesty didn’t seem to exist in a world where anyone could die at any second. ‘How do you know all this?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Because… I used to work for him. Robert Greyjoy worked for him too… and Ian. He sent them to kill you… and I was supposed to finish what they couldn’t.’ ”

  Mitchell froze. He blinked a few times and then put his hands on the table. “You telling me, Dr. Bower, that Jason Shafi was an assassin?”

  Samantha nodded, stretching her legs out and then recrossing them. “Yes. When he told me that, that he had originally been sent to kill me, I didn’t know what to do. I thought he was confessing before getting the job done. I rose and began to back away and he said, ‘No, I’m not going to hurt you.’

  “ ‘How do I know that?’

  “ ‘Because I’ve had a million chances to do it if that’s what I wanted.’

  “He was right about that. He could’ve killed me at any time since we’d met, but he hadn’t. So I didn’t run just then because I didn’t want Luther coming out. With the tension already between them, I didn’t want to spark an altercation. Luther was no fighter, and Jason could clearly kill him if he was so inclined.

  “ ‘Hank sent me to find and kill you,’ Jason said, ‘because he thinks you’re the best shot at stopping this. But when I saw what the virus did… I couldn’t believe it. When I told him about my girl… he said that sacrifices h
ad to be made. Sacrifices. As if my daughter was a sheep whose throat we slit to the gods.’

  “Realization came to me just then when he said that about his daughter. I had always wondered who would release something like this on humanity. What kind of person would kill off not only their enemies but themselves as well? ‘It was a mistake, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘He didn’t think it would get this bad.’

  “Jason nodded, staring down at the ground. ‘He told me he thought it would spread among the population of the Western countries and South America, decimate them, and then a new world would be built from the ashes. A world like glass, that’s what he always said, but I don’t know what he meant. Maybe a world that was free of conflict or something. He thought he had immunized the allied countries—North Korea, Russia, Cuba, China, and Iran—but that didn’t happen. The virus mutated after it’d been released, and it kept mutating. It spread to every country on the planet, and he had to go into hiding, so when that happened, he just decided to run with it, to find someplace to hide out until it was over.’

  “ ‘Why kill me, then?’

  “He shook his head. ‘For that, we’ll have to ask him.’

  “For the next few days, Jason spent the bulk of his time in the garage next door working on the old truck. Luther, for the most part, kept to himself, reading what books he could find, which were just some paperback novels in what used to be the town’s only gas station. Jessica and I would spend our days walking around the town, exploring. There’s something kind of mischievous in walking into other people’s homes and being able to go through their things, seeing how they lived, what they did for fun. One overwhelming trait I saw in the town was the lack of televisions. A few people had them but just old color TVs with the bunny ears, nothing modern. I figured in a town like that, they’d spend as much as they could on TV, but apparently they had other things to do.

  “ ‘One night, I saw Shui sitting on the porch of the building across the street. We’d been in the town already four or five days, and we hadn’t exchanged any words since that first encounter. I felt sorry for him, for the fact that he was alone, so I went over and sat down a few spaces away from him. ‘I noticed you reading earlier,’ I said. ‘What were you reading?’

  “ ‘Reports from the Ministry of Health in Shanghai.’

  “ ‘And what do the reports say?’

  “He shook his head, turning his eyes away from me. ‘Nothing good.’

  “ ‘Your English is excellent. Did you study here?’

  “He nodded. ‘I receive medical degree from UCLA before returning to China.’

  “The word China sent a spark of emotion through his face. We sat silently a few moments before I asked him, ‘Shui, what happened in China? How did you get over here?’

  “ ‘When outbreak first occur, the president said we were safe and that nothing would happen to us, the People’s Army would take care of menace and round up infected. Of course, the outbreak was blamed on Western powers, Great Britain and United States. We were told you had released the virus, but people who were infected were easy to identify, easy to see who was infected and who not. Government say they would be rounded up, army would come to a village and take the sick, but they did not understand incubation period. They did not care. It was their arrogance. They had been told for so long that they were the greatest army that had ever existed, in the most powerful nation in the world, we had no rivals. They developed what you call a God complex and did not think harm could come to them. Do you know I saw some of the soldiers dealing with the infected without proper protection or containment? They just held them by their arms and carried them to trucks.

  “ ‘I was a professor at Jiao Tong University, and they came one day for the students who were infected. We had heard horrible things about what they did with those who had the virus, so people began hiding from them. They would run away. Several of my students left the classroom and hid in the bathrooms. To gather and imprison them was a poor plan and one that anyone could see was going to fail, but the National People’s Congress thought if you could eliminate the threat by force, nothing else was necessary. That was their failing in diplomacy as well. They wanted to get rid of their rivals by force and didn’t understand that the use of force doesn’t work, that it hurts the person using it in the long term just as much as the victim it is used against. They were hurting their own people worse. It would have been better had they not done anything. That way, the sick would have gathered at hospitals rather than hide, but that is what they did—they hid.

  “ ‘In two weeks, the State Council went on all the television stations and said that the threat had been contained, that all those who were sick were now in resettlement camps away from the population, but it was too late. Those who remained hidden spread it to others, and those to others. We were in pandemic, and president was on television declaring victory. Again, it was arrogance, arrogance in his own superior abilities and a misunderstanding of how far people go to fight off an invader. Because that’s what the army had become in every city, an invader ready to gather the sick and put them in cages. That’s when I knew our nation was lost, when the government told me it was saved.

  “ ‘The attacks began small at first. You heard things at the university of people killed by thieves for their possessions, women raped in the streets, a crime wave. That was the way they explained it to themselves, but I saw the crime wave very close. Several police officers went into a home where it was reported that a man had walked inside and killed an entire family. It was close to the university, and I stood across the street and watched. I had heard the screams earlier and called the police myself. I heard gunshots and more screams, and one of the policemen ran out of the house, covered with blood from his head to his feet. Another man, one I had not seen, jumped out of the house and chased him, like a fox chasing a rabbit. He leapt at him and bit his neck, through the neck so the policeman’s head rolled down the street, and the man, if he was a man, lapped at the blood like a dog. His eyes raised when he saw me, and I ran. I have not stopped running since.’

  “ ‘But why here?’ I said. ‘Why the United States?’

  “ ‘It was rumored that because you started the plague, the United States was safe. I had to see for myself if there was such a place. It seemed to me the entire world was ending. When I cast off at the harbor, men were killing each other for space on the boats, but it didn’t help. The jiangshi—that’s what we called them—were more agile than most men. They filled the boats, and I saw people leaping into the water to get away from them, but they were in the water, too. I would see someone swimming for the shore and then they would disappear under the water and not come up again. I got onto a small boat that took me to Japan and then the Hawaiian Islands, but it was no better there. We are being pushed to extinction, and I don’t even know why.’

  “ ‘How did you end up in this town?’

  “ ‘I was traveling with a group here. Everyone is coming here. They know it is the least populated state in America. Soon, it will no longer be so.’

  “I didn’t understand then the implications of what he was telling me. I thought we, the American people, were organized and by and large in the same general state as before the outbreak, as if it were some sort of bad year that we would recover from. People don’t relocate entire cities because of a bad year. I still held that naïve belief that everything would be taken care of, but by that time, we were already scattered and planning a general retreat. The droves of infected that wandered the streets didn’t really need to eat or resupply. They didn’t care about water, food, or casualties. They just attacked. And a lot of the people they attacked, if they lived, would then turn to them within days. It was an army that grew in numbers the longer a war went on, unstoppable. That’s the first time, right around when I had met Shui, that the military presented thermonuclear warheads as a viable option. They wanted to somehow drop a bomb that would wipe out entire populations and thereby save the rest. That was then, and is now,
the stupidest idea I could’ve conceived. This strain of the virus had infected the entire planet. You could wipe out whole countries and it wouldn’t matter. The infection would just continue to spread.

  “The people had seen the writing on the wall, and they were fleeing the coasts in a mass exodus. Wyoming, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Utah, and Montana were the states they were traveling to. Tens of millions of people fled for them, everyone from Hollywood socialites and celebrities to retirees living on the beaches of Florida. The nation was terrified and sought refuge in the open plains.

  “Shui was just the first. Within a week, three more people had shown up in town. I continued to share our water and food with them. Finally, when the fourth and fifth people came, a couple from Oregon, Jason put a stop to it.

  “ ‘You can’t give them anything else,’ he told me one day when I went out to see him while he was still working on the truck. ‘They’re draining our resources, and we’re going to need more still to get to the airbase.

  “ ‘I can’t turn them away.’

  “He stopped his work and sat on the hood of the truck, wiping his hands on a dirty blue rag. ‘Do you know who the best leaders are when there’s an emergency? It’s not the most compassionate. It’s the one who’s willing to kill ten people to save a hundred. That’s why Rome, a republic that hated tyranny, granted dictatorial powers to a single individual in times of crisis. You have the potential to develop a vaccine. These people don’t. You have to survive. They don’t. It’s as simple as that.’

  “ ‘I’m sick of hearing about a vaccine,’ I said. ‘You’re putting too much faith in me.’