by Barry Napier
“Sick!” the woman screamed! “He’s sick, he’s sick! It’s here…”
The woman continued to scream, but the uproar of everyone else all around her drowned her out. People started surging and Ray felt like he was adrift in a sea of screams as things in the Philadelphia International Airport went to hell.
***
To Ray, it made sense to stay in the same spot. Everyone was wanting to either rush towards the fight to take part or to rush away from it because of the dire warning the woman had voiced: someone was sick; apparently, the virus had somehow made its way into the airport. While Ray remained in place, standing at the edge of a row of seats within the gate he’d started to call home, he saw more than enough to feel that his choice to stay put was quite smart indeed.
As roughly thirty or forty people started running away from the voice of the screaming woman and the fight, a few people tripped and fell. In the terror of the moment, no one bothered to stop to help them. Ray watched as a middle-aged man in a Patriots tee shirt was trampled. A teenager tripped over this man’s fallen body and was also trampled. Ray actually saw the moment a sneaker came down on his jaw. Another man was knocked hard to the side, directly into a row of seats three gates away from Ray. He went pinwheeling end over end, striking his head on the floor and no one noticed.
Back near the original disruption, the fight seemed to have gotten worse. Ray could just barely see a few of the soldiers in the panicked and milling crowd but the ones he did see had their guns at the ready. Over the commotion, he could hear two different deep, booming voices ordering people to stand down.
But no one was standing down. Everyone was running, screaming, pushing and shoving to get away from what Ray assumed was a sick person somewhere in that frantic crowd about thirty yards ahead of him. And as the crowd surged forward, he also started to realize that he might not be able to stay in the same place after all. In an attempt to get as far away from the sick person as they could, some people were veering away from the central concourse and coming into the gates. Ray watched as a shrieking woman dove under a row of chairs not too far away from him. He couldn’t help but wonder if her frightened mind actually thought she’d find cover there or if she’d just decided to give up, to cover her head with her hands and wait for the end.
The soldiers continued to shout their orders, but no one was listening. More were making their way through the crowd, trying to get to the central area where the fighting had started. Ray saw one soldier swing his rifle around, bringing it across a man’s face when he would not get out of the way. The response from those around the soldier was horrifying; four men fell on the soldier, taking him down in a flurry of punches and kicks.
And that’s when the first gunshot sounded out. And that one acted almost as an invitation. Several seconds after it sounded out, another came, and then another. Most were now coming back from the area of the fight and by the time Ray counted six shots fired, the gate he’d been sitting in during most of his stay at the airport was crowded with people seeking safety from the soldiers and the virus.
Maybe you’ll move now, he told himself. If someone down there is indeed sick…well, you’ve seen on TV how fast this thing moves, right?
Gathering up as much courage as he could, Ray tossed his backpack onto his shoulders and inched his way out into the surging crowd. He had no real idea where he was going to go—as far away from the potentially sick person and the shooting as he could get, he supposed.
Once he was in the midst of the surging crowd and he found the pace, he found that it was almost comforting. As terrible as it seemed, he figured the chances of getting shot were significantly lessened if there were bodies around you to block the shots. Also, he supposed not attacking soldiers was a very good way not to get shot, too.
Just as Ray got used to the speed and urgency of the crowd, everyone in front of him came to a stop. Multiple bodies slammed into one another, a few falling to the ground. A few feet ahead of Ray, someone let out a very loud curse. This was followed by another gunshot and a woman’s piercing scream. Morbid curiosity got the better of him and though he knew he should probably not see what had happened, the writer in him had to know.
As the crowd started moving again, this time slightly to the right, back towards the ticket counters, Ray got a pretty good picture of what had happened. Another soldier had been taken down, this time assaulted by at least four men. One of the men had managed to take the rifle away from the soldier and, without any hesitation, had fired a round off directly into his chest. The soldier was gasping, eyes wide and taking in his last few moments as the now-armed gunman gripped the rifle tightly and started looking around the crowd with crazed eyes.
“Put it down sir,” yelled another armed man. This was not a soldier, but a very frightened airport security member. For his bravery, he received two shots. One hit him high in the chest. The other went slightly off course and took another man in the back. The man—doing his best to get away from the danger—spun around in a half circle before collapsing to the ground. The reaction from the crowd was a seemingly perfect mix of horror and encouragement. One particularly concerned man came rushing for the shooter, trying to tackle him. The shooter caught him just in time and when he pulled the trigger, there was less than a foot between the barrel and the man’s forehead.
The gruesome result was more than enough for Ray to get moving. He ran quickly and when he ran into an older woman and knocked her down, he almost stopped to help her but his knees seemed to already be committed to retreat. Somewhere behind him, further behind the shooting he’d witnessed, more gunfire sounded out. It seemed to be coming from two guns at the same time, then three, then more than Ray could discern.
Ray ran, paying no real attention to where he was headed. He watched people ducking into restrooms and rushing into stores in the hope of finding shelter. When he saw a man slip into a small nook for relaxing and charging phones and devices, ducking down behind the charging stations, Ray thought it wasn’t a bad idea. He kept his eyes open for the next place to hunker down and when he saw it, he veered away from the crowd—which was growing more panicked with each shot fired.
He ran for the little pub and burger place he’d seen dozens of times since he’d become trapped in the airport. The lights were out and there was a sign stuck to one of the entry posts that said service was closed (which had been put up shortly after the cancellation of all flights) but there were no gates or barriers up. Ray dashed into the little pub, made a direct line for the area behind the main counter and bar area, and went to the floor.
He winced at each gunshot, at each scream. The shots still came, and they came faster. It sounded like a miniature warzone out there right now. Then there were the screams, the wailing, and the crying. It made him think of those really horrifying Hieronymus Bosch paintings of Hell; it wasn’t too much of a stretch to assume this might be what the scenes in those paintings sounded like.
Almost right away, he found himself wanting to pull his journal or phone out of his pack. He should be writing this down so he could have some sort of account of what happened. That is…if he made it out alive. If there was really someone that had been sick in the airport, he figured they’d all be dead pretty swiftly. That virus was supposed to be extremely contagious and it could kill in under an hour. He’d seen the footage out of New York before the networks had stopped showing it.
My God, if that’s about to happen in this airport… he thought. But he didn’t dare let himself finish the thought. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like, but the continued gunfire and screaming painted a pretty good picture for him. Ray curled himself into a semi-fetal position and waited for the carnage to stop.
After a while, things did quiet down slightly. That was when he started hearing the sounds of people throwing up one after another, after another. And deep down, Ray realized he much preferred the sounds of gunfire.
Chapter 16
By the time Katherine reached Brandermill, dus
k had started to fall. At least, she thought it was dusk. It was hard to tell with the remnants of the mushroom cloud in the sky and all of the debris and dust it had kicked up. On occasion she’d feel a strange little breeze as if stirred up from nowhere, and feel dirt and grime in it. The frantic part of her mind wondered if that grime was the pulverized bits of a house, of a tree, of a human being. In those moments, she wanted to collapse to the ground and rub it all away.
But she knew that to do that would open the door to other acts of impulse. She was already feeling some sort of mental unhinging taking place. Katherine felt herself standing on the razor thin line of what she thought might very well be sanity and insanity. She did not see it as a ledge or a cliff, but she viewed it as aluminum siding on her mind. It was loose and flapping in the breeze; the question was whether or not the siding would be blown away or if it would remain resolute, attached to the rest of the structure.
Having been born and raised in Richmond, she was very familiar with the Brandermill area. The place looked different now, though. It looked eerie in the fallout from the bomb, and eerier still in the wake of the virus. It was far enough away from the blast that there was no damage to the buildings or cars, though there was evidence that some of the wind from the blast had made it out this far—nothing big, just some trash cans pushed over and scattered tree limbs here and there.
The four lane highways were quite packed. She assumed it was a combination of people trying to escape the fallout of the blast and then getting sick during their escape attempts. Her mind again went to the very basic understanding of nuclear bombs that she had read about during her twenty-nine years of life. A nuclear blast was supposed to destroy everything at the point of detonation. Common sense told her that this included viruses.
But here she was, walking away from a city that had been devastated by a nuclear bomb less than six hours ago and seeing the effects of a virus that was slowly taking over the entire country.
Well, maybe it happened before the nuke, she thought. Maybe there were blasts here beforehand, too. Bombs like the ones Rollins was trying to tell me about before my car got pitched off the parkway and into the river seventy-five feet below. Could those smaller blasts have been like the one in Texas? And could the blast from the nuke have helped to push the virus out, spreading it faster?
She supposed it was a good theory but she did not have the knowledge base to know for sure. Honestly, it felt a little far-fetched and paranoid. She kept her mind working at it, though, making sure that flapping piece of aluminum siding stayed in place. If she kept her mind busy with problem-solving, it made it harder to latch on to other sights she was seeing; the three dead men sprawled out in front of the Taco Bell; the minivan with its side door opened, a mother dead just outside of it and the small leg of a child visible through the opened door; a middle-aged man that had been run down by a car, the driver of the car dead behind the wheel; the policewoman with a gun in her hand, dead in a pool of her own sick.
And that was all visible from standing in one spot, just half a mile off of the parkway. Katherine stared ahead at the slight rise in the road. The traffic wasn’t quite bumper to bumper, but it was thick. She could see smoke rising up from somewhere ahead and she could hear several car alarms blaring.
“There’s no way I can be the only one,” she said. The other thought she had but did not dare speak out loud was: I wonder when I’m going to get sick. Any second now, right? Any second now. If not from that damned virus, then certainly from the radiation. Right?
It again brought up her uncertainty on the issue. She was quite certain any wind that might have been blowing before the blast would not have been strong enough to push the effects of radiation out this way. For the time being, she was relying on the mostly untouched condition of Brandermill as assurance she wasn’t going to have to worry about immediate radiation threats or sickness.
Other than a mind that seemed to want to break and an overwhelming anxiety that felt like a slab of marble on her chest, Katherine felt fine. She tried to keep her mind in one lane—on problem solving and finding answers. On how to get out of this madness and to find the Hoop Spring residence where a man named George Kettle was thought to live. To do those things, she had to be an effective agent, not a woman on the brink of losing her mind. So she pressed on, walking alongside the southbound lanes and trying to get a better picture of what had happened.
The first thing she tried to learn—and probably only one of the questions she could answer with any sort of accuracy—was how long ago the virus had come through Brandermill. She knew it had not been here this morning, when she and Luis had set out to check out the home that had been abandoned by Terrence Crowder. She figured it had been around eleven or so when the nuke had gone off, which meant five or ten minutes before that had been when the smaller blasts Rollins reported had occurred. If one of those blasts had indeed gone off in Brandermill, she supposed the six or seven hours that had passed between now and then would have been plenty of time for the virus to lay waste to Brandermill. It had, after all, knocked out all of New York City in just over a single day. Brandermill was an anthill in comparison.
She supposed that even if an explosion had not occurred here, the ones in Richmond could have potentially been carrying the virus. And if they had been detonated several moments before the nuke and far enough away from the core of the explosion, it could have actually been pushed out and spread in all directions by the force of the blast.
This was all just speculation of course, and questions that felt far too big. So, she turned back to questions she thought she could answer. She went back to the when of it all.
As disgusting as it made her feel, she knew how to answer it rather easily. The dead policewoman, the minivan, and the men in front of Taco Bell were about a mile behind her now, so she had to find new clues. They were all around her, and easy to find.
She stepped away from the side of the road and headed for the large gas station to her right. The parking lot was fairly packed, which made little sense to her. Though, she supposed if the world was ending, it might be a good time to gas up the car. Most of the cars were empty, but she did find a few that contained dead bodies. Several were still running. She passed by one car that had the windows rolled down, a dead man’s head partially hanging out of the passenger side window, with radio static blaring out.
She entered the store, rather surprised that the automatic doors were still working. The moment she stepped inside, she had to step over the dead body of an overweight man with a bottle of Theraflu in his hand. She saw that a crumpled receipt was also in his hand, wrinkled and cupped around the medicine. She reached down and plucked it out, scanning the top. The purchase had been made a little over four hours ago.
Four hours, she thought. She looked back out to the parking lot, then all around the inside of the gas station. Everyone was dead. There were at least six others inside the gas station. One person had keeled over in front of the sports drink selection. He was face up, a wide-eyed expression on his face. He had gotten violently sick leaving evidence of it in the floor, on his face, and along the bottom of the Powerade display.
She wasn’t sure why she found it so challenging to look away from it. She kept telling herself four hours, four hours, over and over again in her head. These people were all alive about four hours ago. Then the virus apparently came through and killed them all. She then tried to tie that to the family she’d run away from back on the parkway. She knew the timing didn’t quite add up and that there might be some sort of clue there if she looked hard enough.
In a strange sort of daze, Katherine finally backed away from the corpse by the sports drinks. She slapped absently at the door to the drink box that held a variety of bottled waters. She got the door open, selected a bottle at random, and unscrewed the top. She was in the middle of slowly drinking it when she heard the rapid back-and-forth of several gunshots.
She dropped the water to the floor and instantly went for her
Glock. By the time she had it out and had assumed a defensive shooter’s stance, she realized the sound had come from a pretty good distance away. She started to feel that strange pull, the flapping aluminum siding letting in the breezes of insanity.
I could do it, too, she thought. I could just stay in this gas station and wait for the world to end itself. There’s plenty of food, plenty of water. I’d be safe here and—
She shook the thought away, sneering at herself. She knew that the part of her that was suggesting such a thing was the same part of her that had taken off running from the family on the parkway the moment she realized she could not help them. She was many things, but she was not a coward, and she was not one to give up easily.
Then prove it, she told herself. Get outside. Walk until the road opens up and then find a way to get out to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Get to Hoop Spring and see if you can find this George Kettle character. And if he has anything to do with the bomb or what has happened here, maybe rough him up a bit before you take him in.
“Take him where?” she asked herself quietly.
Of course, she had no answer. She had no office, headquarters, precinct or even a supervisor to take him to. And honestly, based on everything she was currently seeing all around her, she supposed the chances of Kettle even being alive at all were slim to none. But that didn’t matter. For now, that had to be her purpose. Because if she did not have a purpose to orient herself towards, that piece of aluminum siding was going to pop off and the remainder of the shaky structure was going to collapse right along with it.
Katherine thought that might be even worse than dying. With that realization, her mind tried to bring images of her mother to mind—a mother that had started hearing voices at the age of forty-nine and had spent her remaining seven years of life in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother had gotten progressively worse and, for reasons the doctors had not quite pinned down, she had heard voices, seen people that were not there, and had almost hallucinogenic-like experiences that no number of meds had ever tempered.
