Apocalyptic Fears II: Select Bestsellers: A Multi-Author Box Set

by Greg Dragon

  This is how she threaded her way through the debris, giving the insects rising with their angry buzz a wide berth, leaving the pestilence to resume their molestation of the spoiled flesh.

  But the mud sometimes masked the corpses, encasing them so that you were sometimes unfortunate in where you placed your foot. It was inevitable, knowing too late the distinctly unpleasant sensation of stepping on a body part, feeling the slip of the liquefying muscle and the crunch of the brittle bones beneath your heels.

  She stumbled upon a blackened, deflated corpse, the desiccated skin pulled taut over a barrel ribcage, and she reeled back before recognizing it as a pig. Partially hidden at the base of a pile of torn lumber and ragged plastic, the carcass was long past the bloating stage and had begun the process of collapsing in on itself again, so she guessed that it must have died during the initial event or soon after. It looked just like so many of the human corpses she had seen since disembarking from the boat she’d chartered to bring her here.

  But what troubled her now were the fresher bodies, some newly maggot-ridden and thus only days old. Others harbored full-blown infestations, had become horrifically swollen, like carnival balloons. These were dead a week, which meant that they had survived the initial impact before succumbing to their injuries or the sickness which now must be sweeping across the island. Other corpses, their skin bruised to deep shades of yellow and green and brown. Marbling, she thought with clinical detachment. That’s what it was called in certain forensic circles. Marbling had set in, meaning they had been dead two weeks.

  The scene seemed to confirm her suspicions, that disease was taking the lives of the survivors. She’d seen it before, in Haiti, for example. In Indonesia a couple years ago. One of her first assignments. The events had been uncannily similar to this, the earthquake and tsunami. Cholera — the possibility of it, anyway — was what had prompted her to come here.

  Cholera.

  Seeing the devastation, she still couldn’t believe how clueless the world was about this. How could this have gone unnoticed, unreported for three weeks? The answer, of course, was that it couldn’t, not unless someone wanted to keep it quiet. But who? And why?

  She herself had only become aware of the tragedy from a single isolated tweet on her Twitter feed from an account named @VIBRIO, just a seemingly random string of numbers: 28.130347 125.126928. The coordinates mapped to the East China Sea, to a tiny resort playground island called Huangxia, some three hundred kilometers off the coast of Shanghai. An 8.1 earthquake had struck in the region a couple weeks earlier, spawning a tsunami warning. But as far as she knew, the affected islands were all well along in the recovery process by then.

  Normally she would have dismissed it, but for some reason this cryptic post clung stubbornly in the rafters of her mind and wouldn’t let her rest. Vibrio, the genus name for cholera, an opportunistic pathogen that often took hold in areas devastated by natural or manmade calamities and where recovery efforts were delayed or hampered. But she hadn’t heard of any such problems in the wake of this quake.

  She searched the internet, but found nothing on any of the social media sites, nothing in the usual news feeds. In fact, there was no mention at all about Huangxia Island. It was as if it had dropped off the face of the planet.

  On a whim, she searched the satellite images for the past week. The photos confirmed the destruction, same as a few other islands in the region. But what differed here was that there were no obvious signs of recovery activity.

  Why the hell not? Where was the Chinese government? Why hadn’t they reported this to the international relief agencies?

  It wouldn’t be the first time the PRC had tried to hide something from the world. But those events tended to be politically or militarily embarrassing. Human rights failings or outright abuses. But Huangxia wasn’t some undeveloped, remote place. Or a military asset. Or prison camp. It was a fairly well-established international resort. Hundreds of foreigners came here daily during the summer. Had it not been winter when the earthquake struck, tens of thousands would have died.

  “Are you getting any of this?”

  Attached to her was a United Nations photojournalist, P. Mark DeBryan. He tilted the camera off his shoulder, moving the viewfinder away from his eye, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Where the hell is everyone?” she asked.

  “Good question. No search and recovery activity at all as far as I can see. No clean up. No demolition. No electricity or clean water. It’s screwed up all right.”

  Despite the chill in the air, a bead of sweat trickled down his brow. He wiped it away with a bright red bandana he pulled from inside the front of his parka, then shoved it back in. He didn’t bother zipping the jacket back up again. After shrugging the bulky pack higher up onto his back, he returned the viewfinder to his eye and resumed recording.

  Angel stepped over to a set of concrete stairs and climbed them until she reached the top, unzipping her own jacket as she went and readjusting her own pack. She was an attractive woman, tall and slim, though few would describe her as beautiful. Her face was just a little too angular to be considered that, though it did possess quite pleasing proportions. If she were a man, she might be described as handsome. Her breasts were smallish, and she had the hips of a teenaged boy. Her eyes were her most striking asset. The palest of blues, or gray, depending on the lighting, they contrasted with her dark eyebrows and the Mediterranean skin she had inherited from her mother.

  The small building which had once occupied the foundation where she now stood was gone, shorn clean off of its foundation by the power of the tidal wave. What had it once been? A home? A souvenir shop? Maybe a cafe.

  She could see the stubs of pipes poking up out of the cement pad, the sewer lines, gas and water. A set of loose wires rose from a broken hub in one corner, looking like disemboweled intestines.

  Where were the bulldozers? Why the hell were there still corpses in the street? Even the International Red Cross had no record of any operation here. She had requested, and they agreed to send out, an advance team to rendezvous with them.

  A couple hundred meters away, a modern ten-story hotel rose up out of the rubble, the bottom twenty meters stripped bare of its external walls. It was a wonder that the building still stood, given the shoddy construction. All of the lower windows were shattered and blown out. That’s how high the wave had been. Above it, the exterior sheathing was largely intact.

  “We better get moving,” DeBryan said.

  From her elevated vantage point, Angel made one last assessment of the devastation surrounding them. Anyone remaining on the bottom five or six floors of the luxury hotels and many of the permanent residents in their tiny houses would have been swept away by the force of the water.

  From oceanographic data, she knew that the wave had struck in the middle of the night, when nearly everyone would have been sound asleep. There must have been alarms though, some kind of advance warning. People would have scrambled to the upper floors, survived. Yet she hadn’t found a single eyewitness account.

  She checked her phone for the location of the IRC team’s staging area on the other side of the narrow island, then nodded at the photog. She’d seen enough by now to know which questions to ask. Now she needed answers.

  * * *

  The kilometer trek through the debris field took them the better part of an hour to cover. At times there was simply no road, either because it was coated in mud or had washed away. The two were forced to climb over piles of wreckage, some several meters high, and through erosion dikes deep enough to swallow small houses. The mounds kept shifting, threatening to avalanche and bury them. Armies of rats scurried out of every heap.

  They spoke little, continuing to be shocked at the sights, disbelieving their own eyes that nothing had been done to respond. It wasn’t like this was that difficult a place to bring in the necessary people and equipment. There were two public docking areas sturdy enough to accommodate some very large boats, one on each side
of the isle, plus a good dozen private ones. It was to one of the latter that they’d arrived.

  Angel thought back to her experience at the State Department in New York three days before, easily one of the most frustrating she’d endured in recent memory. When she first told them where she wanted to go and why, they had granted her an emergency travel visa, just like always. But hours before she was to leave, she received a text telling her that it had been rescinded. They couldn’t give her a reason why. Or wouldn’t. When she went to resubmit, the consular general himself came out to meet her. He told her no and recommended, in very strong terms, that she drop the matter.

  They didn’t know how persistent she could be. She contacted the World Health Organization and arranged for a replacement visa through France’s Ministère des Affaires Étrangères instead. Sometimes it helped having dual citizenship. The French system was a lot easier to navigate than the American one, if you knew how and had the right connections. Nevertheless, even that hadn’t been without its hiccups. She knew some backroom wrangling had occurred on her behalf. And some money had exchanged hands. She didn’t really care about that. She could afford it. And her reporter’s nose was really itching by then.

  The visa was granted just the day before — an extension, actually, of one that was still valid — and she’d wasted no time booking the flight to Seoul and chartering the boat. That was where she met the UN photog, who’d overheard her trying to get to the island, and he managed somehow to finagle his own paperwork to accompany her. She tried to discourage him, insisting that she worked better alone, yet he persisted, even suggesting that his UN credentials would gain them greater access should they encounter local resistance. He also promised to allow her to break the story, whatever it might be. It wasn’t about the scoop, she countered. It was just a lot easier if she weren’t dragging around dead weight.

  She had expected him to get angry and launch into some self-righteous tirade about his qualifications, but he hadn’t. He simply shrugged it off.

  Now that they were here, Angel was actually grateful for the company. Something was clearly off about what they were witnessing, and it sent alarm bells jangling inside of her.

  “Ange?”

  But then he had to go and call her that. It was one of those American customs she could never quite get used to, people she barely knew lopping off bits and pieces of people’s names, like they were extraneous things. David had done it, when they’d first met. The familiarity of it had always irked her.

  She frowned in irritation, and considered telling DeBryan that it was either Angelique or Angel. Not Ange. Not Angie. And certainly not Angelica.

  “We got company.” He pointed with his free hand, but kept on recording.

  They were boys, mostly, no older than twenty, twenty-two. About a dozen quickly coming toward them. Angel guessed that they were locals, though their clothes were new, brightly colored, and almost certainly looted from one of the upscale shops. Rather disturbingly, they carried weapons, chains which scraped and rattled along the ground and pipes that they slapped threateningly against their palms.

  “I don’t think that’s a welcoming committee. They don’t look so happy to see us.”

  Angel grunted and dug out her media pass, held it up when they got close enough to see it. The boy in the lead gave it a cursory glance as he passed her. He placed a palm over the lens of DeBryan’s camera and pushed hard while shouting something in Chinese.

  “English?” DeBryan yelled back. “Do you speak English?”

  “What you doing here?”

  “We’re journalists,” Angel said. “We’ve come to report—”

  One of the boys grabbed her arm and jerked her to the side while shouting in Chinese. Overbalanced by the pack on her back, Angel tripped and fell to her knees, scraping them on the muddy gravel. She let out an angry cry and pushed back, and the boy stumbled. He raised his fist, readying to strike her. Biker gloves covered his palms; his knuckles were crusted in blood.

  “Stop!” DeBryan shouted.

  He was struck on the side of the head with a pipe and he fell. The camera clattered to the ground. He scrambled to recover it, but a kick sent it skittering across the road. The boy who did it laughed, then feigned attacking him, hoping for a reaction. DeBryan stood his ground. Blood trickled from his temple. The other boys snickered.

  “We’re trying to help you,” Angel snapped. She struggled back to her feet and out of reach of the boy who’d grabbed her. She could feel herself shaking, could feel the rage building up inside of her, the fear. The helplessness. Where were the police? The Red Cross?

  Where were the UN forces which had been dispatched to the other islands in the region?

  “You not help,” the leader said, speaking in broken English. “You only make worse!”

  “Where are the CAPF?” DeBryan asked, referring to the Chinese People’s Armed Police Force. He had recovered the camera and now cradled it in his arms. His chest rose and fell as he worked to keep himself under control. He didn’t look scared, just angry.

  The lead boy sneered. His lips were crusted white, just like all the others’, and the rancid smell of his breath cut through the stink of the dead. “They gone, dead. Not dead. You leave.”

  Not dead? Angel felt a chill crawl up her spine.

  “You should not come here or you be dead, too.”

  “Look,” she said after a moment, “whatever it is you’re doing here, we don’t care about that. All we’re trying to do is understand why the government hasn’t stepped in to help. I fear there may be an outbreak of disease, cholera. Surely you must be feeling—”

  “There no disease! We not sick!”

  Angel’s gaze flicked from one face to the next. The signs were obvious, the dehydration in their sunken eyes, in the bluish tinge to their skin. The split and bleeding lips. These boys were sick, and she pointed it out to them. “You need medical care, antibiotics. When was the last time you had clean water? Or a proper meal?”

  But the leader just shook his head. Fear flickered across his face. “You go! Now. Before dark.”

  “What happens after nightfall?” DeBryan asked, his eyes narrowing.

  The leader turned to him but didn’t answer.

  Okay,” DeBryan finally said, breaking the gaze first. He gestured at Angel not to argue. “We’ll leave. But it won’t be today. Our boat left and isn’t scheduled to return until tomorrow afternoon.”

  The leader of the gang hesitated a moment. He spoke briefly with the other boys, then turned and pointed to a hotel at the other end of the quad. “You stay inside then, in room until morning. No come out.”

  Chapter Two

  She could sense DeBryan standing close behind her, could feel the heat coming off his body as she stood at the dusty abandoned hotel room window and looked down at the destruction beneath them. She wrapped her arms tighter against her chest and tried not to shiver. It was all she could do not to scream out in frustration.

  The room had a good vantage point, once you got past the horrifying aspects and saw what was interesting about it, which came naturally to her journalistic eye. She’d learned long ago how to compartmentalize her feelings, stowing away her fear and horror. It helped her to be clinically objective. Sometimes, though, it was a struggle. Like now. She’d been trying hard to hold it together since the initial shock of their arrival.

  The boys were just leaving, down below. She could hear them shouting at each other, laughing, though the sound was muffled by the glass. It was still intact but hazy with dirt. There had been fourteen boys in the group, which meant that three remained behind inside the hotel, undoubtedly to ensure they stayed put inside their rooms until morning.

  What happens after nightfall?

  She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she’d seen a flash of fear in them when DeBryan asked his question. They were scared, and the fear told her that they weren’t killers, just kids playing at it.

  A moment later and it was gone from them
all, leaving nothing but resentment toward her and DeBryan because they weren’t locals. Because they were more well-off.

  On the morrow, they would be escorted back to the dock to wait for their boat, and whatever was happening here would remain a mystery. She couldn’t let that happen. Leaving now would only ensure the boys’ deaths, too.

  She turned her head slightly and found DeBryan there, just as she’d expected, not half a meter away. The filtered sunlight illuminated his face, drawing her focus to a vein throbbing in his temple. But he wasn’t looking outside. The dark orbs of his eyes were aimed at her own. He was staring hard, looking worried.

  “I’ve been in tighter situations,” she said, turning away. “We’ll figure it out.”

  The room was trashed. It had clearly been in use when the tsunami struck, but what had happened to the occupants since then was a mystery. If the visitors had fled, they’d taken little with them. A large tan suitcase was upended on the bed, its contents rifled through. Nothing of any value remained. Takeout food containers, traces of uneaten dinner now spoiled and petrified, littered the top of the dresser.

  At least they put us in adjoining rooms.

  “I called the contact at the charter,” he said.

  She whipped back to him. “How? They took our phones.”

  “I always carry two. It’s not the first time this has happened. Or something like it.”

  She felt her face burn, and she looked away. “Well, I’m not leaving.”

  “Nor am I, but my camera’s busted,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “It’s a twelve thousand dollar Alexa. I had a backup camera as well, tucked away inside my pack, but no way can you hide something like that. Those boys took it and my accessories. They really don’t seem to want any record of this.”