The Schrödinger Enigma

by Greg Krojac

  Understandably, Sitara was taken aback at this unexpected interruption to her mealtime.

  “Am I under arrest, agent?”

  “I’m Federal Agent Steve Barber and my colleague is Federal Agent Don Hathaway. No Doctor Khan, you are not under arrest.”

  “So can I say no, Steve?”

  “No Doctor Khan, you may not refuse to come with us.”

  “May I finish my meal?”

  “Sorry Doctor Khan. You need to come with us now. You can eat at the NIH campus.”

  Although the warrant strayed a little from the main intention of the Act, it was actually unnecessary, as Sitara understood completely the ramifications of her apparent immunity. She had already suggested to Acting Administrator Nelson that she should undergo medical scrutiny. She stood up and started to leave the room. Agent Barber walked alongside her.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor Khan.”

  Sitara smiled at him.

  “You only had to ask,”

  She thought that they would be going to, by car but the Agent Barber explained that the roads out of Washington DC, like most cities, had been closed and people were now turning round and driving back to their homes. Instead, the three of then took the elevator to the helipad on the roof of the building, where a helicopter was waiting to take them to the NIH campus.

  Later that night the new President (formally the Vice-President), the speaker of the House, the Senate President, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Treasury all died, leaving the Secretary of Defense in charge of the nation. Ironically, this pandemic was one enemy that he couldn’t defeat by military means, leaving him feeling powerless in probably the most powerful position in the world.

  DAY ELEVEN

  4 May– Infected 26,093,715 Dead 40,915

  The visor of the canary yellow hazmat helmet misted up momentarily as Nolan stood by the bed, looking into the vacant lifeless eyes of the woman, imagining how beautiful she must have been when she was alive. Of course, her beauty hadn’t suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke when she had died three hours earlier, but the vibrancy that would have accompanied it was now missing. He called out to his colleague who was in the living room.

  “Who was she, Triggs?”

  Daniel Trigger, sitting alongside two dead teenage girls, who had spent their dying moments huddled together on the sofa, checked the address on his tablet.

  “The MILF? She’s Nadine Shumacher and these two beauties are fifteen year old Melody Schumacher and thirteen year old Carole-Anne. Says here, the father, Grant Schumacher died four days ago. Same symptoms.”

  Nolan would have preferred to have been working with anyone else but Triggs, but he had no say in the matter. Triggs was way too disrespectful to the dead for his liking.

  Triggs stood up and dragged Melody’s body to the side of the sofa, making space enough for him to sit between the two girls. Once seated comfortably, he took his cell-phone from a pouch on the left leg of his hazmat suit and stretched his arm out in front of him to take a selfie. He stopped for a moment, rearranged the girls’ bodies so that it looked like they were snuggling up to him, and took a photo. He then joined his partner in the main bedroom. Nolan shook his head.

  “She must’ve died first. Otherwise she’d’ve[a1] probably been with the girls. She probably left them watching TV in the living room so they didn’t have to see her die.”

  Triggs moved to the foot of the bed, stepping over Nadine’s soiled jeans that she had removed and tossed onto the floor when they had become too caked with human waste, and pulled her body down the bed towards him, Nolan didn’t like the direction that this was taking.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Triggs? Let’s bag ‘em[a2] up and get them out of here.”

  Triggs ignored his companion and instead threw his phone towards Nolan, who instinctively caught it, much against his wishes. Triggs removed his hazmat helmet and nodded at Nadine’s body.

  “Take a photo for me, Nolan.”

  Nolan couldn’t believe what was happening.

  “No way am I taking a photo. And for fuck’s sake, put your helmet back on. You got a death wish or something?

  Triggs ignored Nolan’s disgust, opened his mouth and let tongue dart in and out between his lips like a snake sucking information from the air around him. Nolan’s face looked like thunder.

  “I’m warning you man –” [a3]

  Triggs hooked his forefingers around the waist of Nadine’s lacy white panties and went to pull them down but was hurled backwards as a fist suddenly came out of nowhere and delivered searing pain just under his nose. Nolan stood before his workmate, who was picking himself up off the bedroom floor.

  “I warned you man. You can’t treat people like that. I don’t know who raised your ass, but it certainly wasn’t a God-fearing woman like my mama. A pack of dogs, maybe, from what I’ve seen. You don’t treat women like that. Dead or alive, you don’t treat ’em like that.”[a4]

  Triggs wiped blood from his split lip.

  “It’s just a bit of fun. She wouldn’t complain. I’ve always wanted to fuck a woman as good lookin’ as she is.”

  Nolan closed his eyes and shook his head.”

  “You’re a sick motherfucker, Triggs. Ain’t no place for that kind of thing.”

  Closing his eyes, even for a moment, was a mistake that Nolan would regret for the rest of his life. Triggs punched him in the stomach with all the force that he could muster. Nolan doubled over, and Triggs’s knee came up and struck him square in the jaw. Nolan was still wearing his helmet, but it was designed to give protection against microbes and germs, not physical attack. As he wavered unsteadily, Triggs ripped off his colleague’s helmet, linked his hands into one conjoined fist and brought it down heavily onto the back of Nolan’s neck. His colleague, now almost unconscious, could do nothing more to protect Nadine’s dignity, but the adrenaline of the fight had replaced Triggs’s lascivious sexual desire with bloodlust. He looked around the room for a weapon and his eyes rested upon a heavy-looking statuette on the dressing-table. He picked it up and felt the weight in his hand. It was perfect. He walked over to Nolan who was trying to get to his feet, although still very groggy. Triggs raised the statuette above his head and brought it down hard onto Nolan’s skull, again and again, always in the same spot, until he heard the splintering of bone and his partner slumped to the floor, all life beaten out of him, lying in an expanding pool of his own blood.

  Triggs pulled his hazmat helmet back over his head and went out to their van that was parked at the front of the house, and returning with four black body-bags. He opened up one of the body bags and clumsily pulled Melody off the sofa by her feet. Her body made a loud thump as she slumped onto the floor, leaving an ugly diarrhoea stain on the seat cushion. Triggs smirked.

  “That stain won’t never [a5]come out.”

  Melody was now laying on the floor in an undignified pose, limbs twisted at strange angles. Nolan rearranged her arms and legs so that she no longer looked like a Barbie doll that had been tortured by a two-year-old.

  “OK Triggs. Let’s zip this one up.”

  He took hold of Melody’s legs and placed them into the body-bag, then he grabbed underneath her armpits, lifting her more gently than one might expect into the body bag. He pulled the zipper closed.

  “One down, three to go, Triggs.”

  He repeated the process with Carole-Anne and placed her beside her sister. Then he searched the house, looking for money and jewellery, before picking up the two remaining unoccupied body-bags and returning to the main bedroom, where the corpses of Nadine and her would-be protector were still where he had left them. Triggs counted his booty.

  “Not a lot here, Triggs. Just some cash. Three hundred and twenty-five bucks and some change. It’ll have to do.”

  He dropped the empty body-bags on the floor, and dragged Nadine off the bed and onto a body-bag. She landed almost perfectly, Triggs only having to tuck her feet and head inside be
fore sliding her engagement ring and wedding ring from her finger and zipping up the bag. He carried the mother and her daughters out to the van and carelessly tossed them into the back. Then he went back into the house to fetch Nolan.

  His partner was a good deal heavier than the women had been and it took Triggs all his strength to hoist his ex-partner’s body-bag onto his shoulder and carry it outside, He opened the rear door of the van, almost dropping Nolan in the process, and then let him fall off his shoulder into the van. A couple of shoves to Nolan’s feet, so that he could close the rear doors, and he was ready. He slammed the doors closed, went round to the front of the vehicle and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  He was supposed to take the bodies to one of the Seattle district’s overworked crematoriums for instant disposal, but instead he and his four dead passengers were going to take the I-90E out of the city. Seattle was the worst hit area at the moment, so he would head east. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got there, but at least he’d be a couple of thousand miles away from the west coast. But first, he had to go home and pick up his family.

  He arrived at his apartment after a short drive, calling out to his family as he turned his key in the door lock.

  “Carol, Shaun, Lynette? Git some bags packed. We’re goin’ on a road trip.”

  He was surprised when nobody answered him, but soon discovered the reason for the silence when he went into the bedroom. His wife, Carol, and his daughter, Lynette, were laid out on the bed just as Nadine had been, covered in their own bodily waste. Triggs turned to the bedroom chair, where his sixteen year old son, Shaun, was sitting upright, his vacant eyes staring straight ahead. Triggs went over to the boy.

  “Shaun. Wake up boy. We gotta go.”

  The boy didn’t move. Triggs slapped his son’s face.

  “Wake up Shaun. I knows you ain’t dead. You ain’t covered in shit like your ma [a6]and sister.”

  Triggs struck the boy again, and this time it pulled him out of his shock-induced trance. He looked at his father, life returning to his eyes.

  “I couldn’t do nothin’, Pa. All I could do was put ‘em on the bed.”

  Triggs showed uncharacteristic compassion for his son, leaning forward and resting his hand on the teenager’s shoulder.

  “You did good, son. You did good.”

  Shaun looked at Triggs and gave a half-smile, grateful for this rare show of affection from his father.

  “What now, pa?”

  Triggs stood up.

  “Now, we go on a road trip. We’re headin’ east, boy.”

  “But what about Ma and Lynette? We can’t just leave ‘em there.”

  “Look Shaun, I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours picking up dead bodies – messed up bodies just like your ma and sister – and I don’t wanna do that no more. We’ll leave them where they are. Won’t bother ‘em none.”

  Shaun wanted to protest but now he needed his father – such as he was – and didn’t want to be left behind, so he quickly gathered up a backpack with what he considered essentials.

  Twenty minutes later they were on the road, at the start of a foreboding two and a half thousand mile drive, although Shaun wasn’t much impressed with the cargo of corpses that slid around the back of the van with every turn. Eventually the constant movement got to his father too, so after a while the van pulled over to the side of the road and father and son unceremoniously dragged the body bags out of the vehicle and dumped them by the side of the road, before continuing their journey four passengers lighter.

  DAY TWELVE

  5 May– Infected 130,468,750 Dead 204,575

  “We can’t stay here for the rest of our lives. We’ll go stir crazy.”

  Jason Green had to concede that what Patrick Dunbar was saying was true, but it would still be difficult to leave the familiarity of the neighbourhood. It had once been a thriving little community, where everybody knew everyone else and – more importantly – looked after each other. They’d managed to find just the right balance of caring for one another while still respecting the privacy of the individual, but their numbers were severely depleted now. What had once been a thriving community of over one hundred families and friends had been reduced by the plague to just Jason and the other eight adults that now sat in Patrick and Sally Dunbar’s front room discussing the future, while the Dunbars’ two-year-old twin daughters slept upstairs, blissfully unaware that their futures were being discussed on the floor below.

  Burt Prentice, who had been born in his small townhouse seventy-one years ago, and had lived there for the last fifty years with his wife, Mary, was reluctant to go anywhere.

  “I’ve lived here all my life and it’s never seemed like a prison to me. I like having my old furniture around me. I like having my familiar things on hand. I’m too old to start gallivanting around the country, and so is Mary.”

  Mary was torn between leaving and staying. She loved her little house, but she could see the logic of leaving the area too. Bottled water was in short supply now after the looting and there wouldn’t be any fresh deliveries to the local stores. Drinking tap water was out of the question as the mains water supply couldn’t be trusted. She knew that it would probably be a good idea to be prepared and make a move before supplies ran out. But Burt had always looked after her well, and she wouldn’t challenge his opinion now, not when he needed affirmation of his role in what was left of society. He’d been the production manager at a small but busy local electrical components manufacturer and had always had an air of authority about him. Both he and Mary knew that that authority had diminished since his retirement, but he still enjoyed the respect of his community. The last thing he needed was a confrontation with his wife. Anyway, Mary sensed the majority of the people at the meeting would agree with Patrick Dunbar and if there was one thing that Burt believed in, that thing was the Democratic Process. He may not want to leave the area but – if the majority decided to do so – then he would do the same. He would have no choice; they both knew that there was no way that either of them could survive long without the rest of the group.

  For his part, Burt’s resistance to leaving the square was but a token gesture. He still played the cranky old man that the local children had considered him to be, but everybody involved knew it was just a game. In reality, he loved children and there was a mutual understanding between the local kids and the grey-haired old fellow with the handlebar moustache; a mutual affection that only masqueraded as fear. But now the only children left in the square were the Dunbar family’s twin girls, Kiera and Sierra, and they were far too young to be indoctrinated into the game. He knew very well that the group would have to leave and that he and Mary would go with them. But he felt he had to keep up appearances.

  Jason wanted to deal with the practicalities of their proposed journey.

  “I agree that we need to move on, but where to? We can’t just wander aimlessly around from pillar to post.”

  Marshall Franks pulled a map of the city from his pristine leather rucksack and lay it on the coffee table. The extreme edges of the map flopped over the edge of the table, but it didn’t stop the group from having a more or less clear view of the layout of the city. A software engineer, the Jamaican would have felt more at home using Google Maps to present his idea, but the internet had stopped working and survivors of the pandemic were restricted to what was already on their laptop computers’ hard drives, and that, in turn, depended on how long the batteries lasted. The paper map was a perfectly good substitute, so Marshall didn’t see the point of wasting valuable battery life unnecessarily. The speed with which the energy and utility infrastructure had deteriorated had caught everybody off guard, and it was difficult to accept that it was just coincidence. It was almost as if it had been sabotaged. He decided to keep his conspiracy theories to himself and pointed to a location on the map.[G7]

  “Jason’s right. That would be pointless. However, I have a suggestion. We should make our way to the Potomac River. There’
s bound to be a boat there that we could commandeer – well, steal, I suppose – and head towards somewhere safer. It could be safer than using the roads. As it is, we’re too vulnerable if we stay here.”

  Jason agreed with Marshall.

  “And more importantly, we don’t know what other survivors are like. They might be decent folk, but they could just as easily be crazy dangerous. This disease doesn’t care who it kills, and who survives seems to be down to chance. On land, we’re pretty vulnerable, never knowing who or what might be around the next corner. At least on the water we can keep a distance between us and anyone else, until we’re sure of their intentions.”

  Xi-Wang Lin, the local pharmacist, still had concerns.

  “Say we do get to the river and manage to borrow a boat…”

  His daughter, Mai, interrupted him.

  “It’ll hardly be borrowing a boat, dad. We’re not exactly going to bring it back. Once we’re out of here, we’re gone.”

  “Please indulge me Mai. I said borrow because it sounds so much nicer than stealing. I don’t like to use the word steal. But I know we won’t be bringing it back. I just feel better thinking the intention is to return it one day – however impossible that may seem now.”

  Marshall turned the map over to show the area surrounding the city.

  “I suggest we head for DC.”

  The rest of the group leaned in to get a better look.

  “It’s the nation’s capital, where all the politicians are. And who always looks after their own asses in an emergency? Senators and Congressmen. Politicians. If anywhere is set up to survive this plague, it’s DC.”

  Burt’s wife Mary nodded her head in agreement.

  “I’ll be sorry to leave my home, but if staying here could put us in danger, I’m ready.”

  Patrick Dunbar stood up and surveyed the small group of survivors.