Starting the Slowpocalypse (Books 1-3 Omnibus)

by James Litherland

  Before she could decide what she would do, one of the men lurched forward. “We’ll show you something, and it isn’t love.” He hefted the rock he held, then threw it in her general direction.

  Of course she’d seen that coming long before it had left his hand and was already flying through the short distance between her and the man holding the pipe as the stone sailed through the air she knew not where. Probably not anywhere close to where she’d been standing. Then she was nudging their spokesman off balance and swinging him as she plied that pipe from his hand. Sliding her shoulder under his, she turned and propelled the man into the pair behind him and slung the pipe low through the air, to trip the former rock-wielder and send him crashing to the ground.

  Of the three who remained standing, two immediately dropped what they’d been carrying, another pipe and a couple of bricks, and turned to run. That left the torch-bearer alone, standing there and staring at her with his mouth hanging open.

  In the distance, Kat could hear the whine of one of the electric carts and knew help was on the way—so if something was set on fire, they could help fight it. So she slowly walked toward the man, and it was not until she got close that he slashed at her with the broken beer bottle. She slid inside his swing, focusing on the torch moving farther from her in his left hand as she casually clipped his right wrist with her fist. He squawked and dropped the bottle.

  Backing away, he tried to keep her from getting the torch, holding it high behind his head. Sighing, Kat dropped suddenly to the ground and rolled behind him, coming to her feet before he realized precisely where she was. She reached out and grabbed the torch with her left as she smashed her right fist through the side of his jaw as he was turning toward her. He slumped to the ground, and she had to drop with him—he was still holding the torch, forcing her to pry it from his hand.

  As she stood and stepped back, somebody sped in front of her to roll the man over onto his stomach and zip-tie his hands behind him. In the light from the torch she held, Kat saw it was Grace Cameron.

  She was even more surprised to see Sara kneeling over one of the others doing the same. Looking over her shoulder, she noticed Officer Kirkland still sitting in the driver’s seat of the cart they’d arrived in and not looking inclined to move. So she strolled over to stand next to the man and gestured with the torch in her hand.

  “Now, what in the world do you think I ought to do with this thing?”

  Kirkland grinned. “I take it that you don’t want to set the world on fire? Maybe you should toss it in one of the ponds.”

  The former sheriff was large and running to fat, which only enhanced his natural air of jollity. There was steel underneath though. Even in his so-called retirement, he was a man to be reckoned with.

  Kat nodded and smiled back. “I think I’ll take it to show my mom. I’ve warned her about angry citizens wielding pitchforks and torches. Perhaps now she’ll listen, even without the pitchfork to complete the picture. They were headed there, by the way, to the director’s house.” Her parents’ home.

  Kirkland chuckled. “Don’t be so formal. You’re not on duty, so why not call him your dad?” Then he squinted at her. “Just what were you doing out here all on your own anyway?”

  Maintaining her smile to keep this friendly, she shook her head at him. “I’m sure you know perfectly well what I was doing. You can rat on me to Tony or Chief Cameron, but you’re not my boss, so I don’t have to answer to you.” And it didn’t sound as if either chief was in any shape to yell at her.

  “I’m not going to report you, girl, but the details will be in my report. I’m sure Chief Nelson will take a look at it and be able to read between the lines. As for me, I was just curious.”

  Just let Tony try giving her a hard time about it. Even if it ended up becoming a full-fledged fight, at least it would be some kind of communication. “As far as being curious goes, why are you out patrolling with Grace and Sara? Grace hasn’t even completed her orientation, and Salazar had Sara staying at the office. So who’s manning the fort?”

  “That would be Laskey.”

  Kat sighed. “Seriously? Ben’s the only one you have at headquarters?”

  Kirkland just nodded. “He was there in the Resource room, doing something with the FURCSnet, so Sara suggested that we let him handle everything at HQ and give her some more field experience. As for Grace, since Chief Nelson saw fit to reassign my partner to help over at the clinic, I decided to make Grace an Officer Trainee and start her field training by bringing her along as well.”

  “Well, it’s your call, but thank you for satisfying my curiosity. I’d better be going now.” Shaking her head, she strode off with a backward wave.

  She was heading for her parents’ house, looking forward to waving the torch in Caroline’s face. Then she could toss the thing into her mom’s bathtub and stay the night—after all, how might things have ended up if Kat hadn’t happened to be patrolling in this area? And there might be more like those men.

  Kat was too tired to keep patrolling, and Security had too few people out and about. So she’d have to sleep at her parents’ rather than returning to her own quarters—she wouldn’t risk leaving her mother home alone. She only hoped her mom didn’t make her live to regret it.

  Chapter 10

  Unanswered Questions

  10:20 a.m. Thursday, May 22nd

  DAVID scrolled through the last file one more time to make sure he’d gleaned everything he could, then sighed. He had mapped out every known contact of everybody who’d been infected, but it hadn’t helped any. Looking up and across the little table where he sat in Dr. Harker’s office, he saw Michelle still working hard with her head bent down over her own pad. “I hope you’re getting along better than me. I’ve got nothing.”

  She raised her head to blink at him. “You’ve got all the information. From there it’s simply a matter of tracing the transmission vectors.”

  “I’ve got plenty of data, but no answers.”

  Michelle cocked her head at him. “If you’re unable to form a conclusion from the information you have, don’t blame the data. You must be missing an obvious link somewhere.”

  David leaned back in his chair. “I’m sure I am—but I don’t know what it is, so I don’t know where to look for it. What are you doing?”

  “I’ve been correlating the results from the blood tests to create an integrated epi curve.”

  He had no clue what an epi curve was and hesitated to ask for an explanation. “Lt. Miles looked as if she might be a carrier, but she’d only had contact with two of the twenty in the forty-eight hour period before they got sick, and you say she tested negative for the flu anyway.”

  “The sisters found no sign of the influenza virus in the blood sample you took, of any strain. And it’s improbable that there would no longer be any trace of its presence. Surely there were others who’d had contact with some of the original patients.”

  “We’ve already checked the blood of everybody we know of.” Sgt. MacTierney had been clean. And so had the Cameron girls and everybody else who’d seemed like a possibility. “The only person I haven’t tracked down yet is the sister who gave Chief Nelson and me our checkups on Sunday.”

  Michelle shook her head. “If anyone who works here were a carrier, we would have seen a number of clinic personnel infected by now, but so far there is only the nurse we know caught the flu from you.”

  David sighed. “At least Ken’s doing better. And demanding to be released.” Though Fiona had been confirmed as infected, they were still waiting to find out if any of the girls had caught the new strain.

  Amita walked in as he was talking and gave him a wry smile. “Chief Cameron will have to wait to get out of here until I’m sure he’s recovered. And if he’s still contagious, I’m not letting him go back to work. He’ll have to remain isolated in his quarters.”

  The more severe strain of the virus was spreading so fast the clinic would soon be out of beds in the isolation ward. S
o they were evaluating patients for candidates to be quarantined at home—anyone who was healthy enough to not need the special medical care the clinic provided, and who were living somewhere they could effectively self-isolate and not risk spreading the flu to others. Though David doubted Ken would abide any such restrictions, there was no way he was going to tell Dr. Harker that.

  Having set her workpad down on the table, she shrugged off her lab coat and hung it on the hook on the back of the door, then pulled off the band holding her hair back in a ponytail and fluffed it out with her hands. Stretching her arms, she turned to stare at them. If she was hoping they had good news, she would be disappointed.

  David put off reporting with a question. “When can I donate more blood? For Mrs. Cameron.”

  Amita shook her head. “I’m not letting you give plasma again until Saturday at the earliest. By that time she should be producing antibodies on her own and won’t need yours. We’ll see who needs help on Saturday. Until then, concentrate on your work. Do either of you have anything to report?”

  David shook his head. “Nothing but failure. So far I’ve not found a single index patient.”

  Dr. Harker put her hand on his shoulder. “I see you’ve been learning the lingo, at least.” She turned to look expectantly at Michelle. “What about you?”

  Officer Mori nodded. “I already knew the relevant terminology, and as for my report—I reviewed the blood work, separated the cases by strain, classified them by the onset of symptoms, and created an epi curve to show the progress of the outbreak. But I don’t think it will be very helpful.” She shifted her workpad so that David and Dr. Harker could see the graph she’d made. By the notations at the side and bottom, he could see it charted the number of cases over time.

  Michelle continued her explanation. “While we have found a few mild cases of the flu, the results of DNA tests show them to have been from a different strain of the virus and unconnected to those twenty patients brought to the clinic between Sunday night and Monday morning. It’s a familiar strain, only so much noise on the chart. Worse, those twenty cases at one time stand out from the rest to make a complete mess of the curve.”

  Even David could see what she meant. It would look like the beginning of a traditional bell curve, if not for that one tall line. “How about creating separate graphs for each strain?”

  She blinked rapidly, then began hitting buttons on her workpad. “I should’ve thought of that myself since I’d already segregated the data.” Then she was shifting the pad back around again before he started to ask his next question. “There.”

  Dr. Harker peered at the three charts displayed on the screen for a long moment. “As you say, those few cases of the other mild strain are irrelevant, the typical cases of the flu that are always turning up. I hope you don’t mind.” Without waiting for Michelle to respond, Amita leaned over to delete that chart. “Now, you can see the beginning of a traditional bell curve in this graph of cases of the newest strain. It’s steep because of the high rate of retransmission, but it’s what I would expect to see.”

  Now that David and the mutated strain that had started with him were all on their own on one graph, it looked even worse. He was looking at all the people he’d infected, either directly or indirectly. There were dozens already.

  Dr. Harker had moved on to the third chart. “It is those original cases of the new, mild strain which are the problem.”

  Once again, even David could see what she was talking about. Twenty cases all on the same day, but nothing before or after to indicate the people they’d been infected by or infected themselves. “We had to have caught the flu somewhere, didn’t we? At least I was able to confirm all the cases of people getting ill from the severe strain originated from contact with me, or someone who’d been infected by me.”

  Amita patted him on the shoulder. “That’s good work, David, and it should help us track down more cases and get to them quicker and hopefully contain the virus. Or at least slow it down.”

  Michelle pointed at the other graph. “But what about these cases? I know you isolated each of them soon after they were presenting symptoms, but still, I would’ve thought they had time to infect a few other people at least.”

  Shifting her gaze back to the chart with that line standing straight in the air, Dr. Harker pressed her lips together, frowning hard. “You’d think so. But I’m more concerned that we haven’t found the carrier or carriers who infected those twenty. It doesn’t make any sense. We have to be missing something.” She looked at David. “Maybe those patients haven’t been honest with you about their contacts. Try digging deeper to see if you can figure out who might’ve spread the flu to so many without getting sick.”

  David shook his head. “Would anyone lie when they know how serious the situation is? They would have to know they’re putting people at risk.”

  Amita’s smile was sardonic. “And yet, they will still lie. But chasing down those answers isn’t a priority. Our efforts right now need to go into fighting the severe strain. It’s spreading fast, and if we don’t get ahead of it soon, we’ll lose whatever opportunity we might have to contain it. Soon it will surpass our ability to fully treat those who become ill, and we’re still trying to determine the mortality rate with care. We could see deaths mount like a decade ago.”

  Amita sighed as she walked over to her desk and sat down heavily in the chair. Taking off her glasses and biting on one end, she stared off into space and mused. “I’ve been trying to study the mutated virus we took from samples of your blood, David.”

  He massaged the inside of his arm where sisters had been poking him with needles. “I thought I was only able to give so much blood.” That was what she had said when he wanted to donate. They’d continued drawing more of his blood even now, when that virus was no longer present.

  Amita almost smiled again. “The tiny amounts we take don’t count. Are you afraid of needles?”

  “No, of course not.” Not afraid, per se.

  Dr. Harker shrugged. “Anyway, you’re the first case of this severe strain, so the exemplars we have from the original sample we took of your blood will be the best to study. I only hope it helps. This new strain is so different, I’d almost think it wasn’t part of the Orthomyxoviridae family.”

  “What?”

  Michelle took pity on him. “The virus that causes influenza.” She turned back to the doctor. “But it has to be, even if it has mutated.”

  “That’s what I would presume, but I’m no virologist. I’m not sure what I’m seeing in the virus or in the way David’s immune system responded.”

  He didn’t want to hear any more about that. “I guess you’re working on a vaccine?”

  Amita shook her head. “It’s too late for that. We need to try and keep it from having hosts to spread to. That’s why I want you two to keep telling everybody to wash their hands often, and prevent unnecessary personal contact. And isolate everyone who’s been infected.”

  Michelle nodded enthusiastically. “It’s possible it might mutate again and become more dangerous. If it begins killing off its hosts, that would also limit its transmissibility.”

  Dr. Harker frowned at her. “Of course, we’d rather not see an epidemic end because the virus has killed off too many of its carriers. Instead, let’s hope that as more and more people recover and have the antibodies to keep from being reinfected, that alone is enough to slow the spread of the virus. One benefit of being confined in this compound is that there’s a limited supply of hosts, and the virus should burn itself out. Eventually.”

  “Unless it undergoes another antigenic shift, as it did with David. Then the immunity they’d gained wouldn’t help, and they could catch the new strain.”

  He found himself glaring at his partner. “Don’t sound so happy about it. How about we save the optimism for stopping the flu, not cheering it on?”

  With a heavy sigh, Dr. Harker leaned forward in her chair. “I think we’re more likely to see antigenic drift th
an shift, but I’m not very confident with this virus. That’s why we need to do everything possible to contain it before it mutates further.”

  David squared his shoulders. “We’ll do what we can to help. What can we do now?”

  Amita took a deep breath and seemed to revive. “Continue interviewing all the newest cases and get the details of everyone they’ve been in contact with, then track those people down and make sure they’re taking proper precautions and take samples of their blood for analysis.”

  “Well, I ought to have had enough experience at that by now to know what I’m doing.” But when he started thinking that way, he made mistakes.

  Amita just nodded. “Remind those people they might not see symptoms for a day or two after being infected and it’s important that they act as if they’ve been infected, until they know for sure. You can let Michelle take anyone we presume was only exposed in the past twelve hours. But to be safe, you should be the one to approach anyone whose exposure was further back in time.” She shifted her gaze back and forth between the two of them. “Our enemy now is time, so don’t waste any more here with me—but I’ll still want you to be rigorously thorough, so don’t go too fast.”

  David understood the gravity of his responsibility, and he would make every effort to do his best—there were still plenty of unanswered questions that he couldn’t stop thinking about though, such as who had infected him and the director and Chief Nelson and the other original victims.

  Amita seemed confident that this outbreak was not some kind of attack, but it seemed suspicious to him. So while he’d be busy trying to track down the potentially infected carriers, he would also continue to think through everything he knew in the hope he could find some solution to that nagging mystery of how this had all started.

  Chapter 11