The Immune: The Complete Series
The Immune
The Living
By David Kazzie
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written consent of the author.
The Immune
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Dave Buckley, Matt Phillips, Wes Walker, Scott Weinstein, Kerry Wortzel, Rima Wiggin and others for their valuable input on early drafts of the manuscript.
To Geoffrey O’Neill and James Pickral for their insight on military matters.
To Hiba Mosrie, M.D., for her assistance with medical matters.
All errors are mine alone.
Part I
Unraveling
In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
-Dante, The Divine Comedy
CHAPTER ONE
Miles Chadwick sat in a corner booth of Keens Steakhouse on West 36th Street in Manhattan, waiting for the apocalypse to begin.
A medium-rare filet mignon, accompanied by a side of fresh asparagus, sat in front of him, prepared to fulfill its destiny as his dinner. Chadwick stared absently at the food as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. He poked at the plump, crisp stalks of asparagus with his fork, their presentation on his plate reminding him of the gruesome black-and-white Holocaust photographs he’d seen as a schoolboy growing up in Carbondale, Illinois, of bodies stacked together like so much cordwood. That this was the memory flickering in his mind was ironic, given the course his life had taken, given the final answer to his own personal game of What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?
As he sat there, considering this great irony, the smokiness of the charred meat began tickling his nose, which made him think of something even more horrific than the photographs, and it made his stomach flip a little. Because when you got right down to it, the thing he was now a party to was no different than the things he’d seen in those photographs. Had he really thought he was somehow better than that because he wasn’t discriminating against this group or that one?
He took a deep breath and looked back at his filet. Maybe looking at it was nauseating him more than eating it would, and besides, he hadn’t eaten anything all day, and so he ate every bite, chewing his meat slowly and thoroughly, just in case it might be his karmic comeuppance to choke to death on the day his plan was set into motion.
After cleaning his plate, even taking the time to wipe up the steak’s juices with a crusty pumpernickel roll, he sipped his Dalwhinnie – four fingers’ worth, because if there had ever been a time for scotch and a lot of it, it was now – and looked out across the wood-paneled dining room, which was packed to the gills tonight.
He first held his gaze on a group of young men in their mid-twenties at a table near the center of the main dining room, laughing like drunken hyenas. There was a wave of energy emanating from the table, a vibe that every one of these men would be getting a lap dance sometime in the next two hours. They were well-dressed and loud, commodities traders or investment bankers, managing the latter-day ritual of simultaneously yelling at one another and checking their smartphones. Empty beer and wine bottles littered the table like fallen soldiers on the pitch of battle, and reinforcements were on the way. If there was one thing Chadwick had learned about fine dining, it was that the amount of money a group spent on food and booze was directly proportional to the amount of noise it was allowed to make at dinner.
At the next table, two elderly couples, dressed for the theater. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he would have bet all the money in his wallet that they were talking about tough times, how things used to be back during the Depression, discussions he hated listening to. Just hearing old people talk made his stomach muscles clench, what with their faux surprise at how fast everything was changing and how they never had anything to eat growing up other than soup rendered from the sweat of their shirts. He wondered what they would have thought about the truly hard times ahead, if any of them were fortunate enough (or unlucky enough, depending on your perspective) to survive. Probably won’t be able to impress the young’uns with tales of the Depression and your black-and-white televisions, you old farts.
A third table, a booth just catty corner to him, was the hardest to look at. A man in his early forties, eating with his twin teenage sons. The man wore no wedding band, maybe Dad’s weekend with the boys while his ex-wife got on with her life as a single mom. On the one hand, he pegged the father for a douchebag, dropping three hundred bucks on dinner when the boys would’ve been happy with a twelve-dollar bucket of chicken; on the other, the boys looked like they were having a ball, each of them chowing on porterhouses almost as big as they were. Difficult as it was, Chadwick made himself watch the boys eat their steaks, to make sure he didn’t forget what they’d spent so many years working for.
Chadwick wondered if any of them would still be alive a month from now. Unlikely. Very unlikely. But he just didn’t know what was going to happen. They had planned and planned and worked and worked, and there was no way to know how things would play out until they just went ahead and did it. There were about a hundred people in the restaurant that night. At least one of them would be naturally immune to the virus. Possibly two, but probably just one. He found himself hoping it would be one of the boys. He watched them dip their steak fries in ranch dressing and drink their cherry Cokes, and he watched their dad let them steal a nip from his tall glass of beer, painfully aware the trio would almost certainly be dead by Labor Day, four weeks from now.
Another wave of nausea washed over him, and he shut his eyes tight, trying to will away the queasiness. He’d known this was coming, and why in God’s name he had just eaten a nine-ounce filet was beyond his powers of comprehension. Probably no one in human history had ever felt as much stress as what Miles Chadwick was feeling at this very moment. He gagged, fearful he had confused stomach-liquefying panic with hunger.
His phone began chirping, which just added fuel to his already overheated heart. One of the elderly foursome threw a nasty look in his direction, clearly unhappy with the technological intrusion. He resisted the nearly overpowering urge to flip her the bird, reminding himself that older folks still had a problem with the wireless phones in public, and besides, she’d be dead by the end of the week, so who cared what she thought?
The phone was a dinosaur, prepaid, purchased with cash at a 7-Eleven, for one use, for this moment only. At the other end of the line was another prepaid wireless phone, also purchased for this one historic telephone call. He struggled to grip the phone, which refused to find purchase in his sweat-slicked hand.
“Yes?” he answered, his voice catching.
Jesus, Chadwick, man up.
He cleared his throat. Then, more forcefully: “Yes?”
He could feel his heart pounding in his ears while he waited for a response.
“It’s done.”
“You’re sure?” Chadwick asked.
“As sure as we’re going to be right now. All canisters were deployed without issue or interference.”
Reflexively, he touched his left bicep, the site of the vaccine administration one year ago. He would’ve bet anything that the caller had just done the same thing. Now they’d see if things unfolded as they predicted. Following exposure, an asymptomatic but contagious incubation period of about eight to twel
ve hours, which would facilitate the spread of the virus, and then another twelve to twenty-four hours for the disease to run its course. The key was the virus’ design, Chadwick’s engineering, its remarkable communicability and lethality.
“And there were no problems?”
“No problems,” the man said. “All operatives reported in on schedule with the appropriate code word. Everything went according to plan. Fucking unbelievable, eh?”
Along with the very special vaccine to the soon-to-be-famous virus, relief coursed through Miles Chadwick’s veins. But it wasn’t just relief; riding shotgun was a sudden horror at what he had wrought. Part of him, and not a small one, wished he could undo what he had done, wished he had never created the PB-815 virus, impressionable and easily manipulated, like an insecure teenage girl, which he had brainwashed into becoming a ruthless serial killer. It was too much, too extreme, too fucking crazy. He felt cold; a shiver rippled through him.
“You still there?” the caller asked.
“Yes. Sorry.”
He was biting his lip so hard that he had drawn blood. The taste of iron filled his mouth like he’d been chewing on a penny. He dabbed his lower lip with a napkin; he looked down at it, noticing that the tiny red spot left behind had taken the shape of a scythe. This he wrote off to his mind playing tricks on him. Still, he didn’t want to keep looking at it, the non-symbolic symbol, so he quickly stuffed the napkin into his coat pocket. Scotch, he thought. The scotch would settle him down. He demolished the rest of his drink in one fell swoop.
“Now we wait, right?” the caller said.
“Now we wait,” Chadwick confirmed. We wait, Chadwick thought, until nothing happens, or people start dying like flies. One or the other. “We’ll meet at the compound in two weeks.”
“Enjoy the rest of your summer,” the caller said before clicking off the line.
That brought the faintest of smiles to Chadwick’s lips, and he immediately felt bad about it because it was disrespectful, making jokes at the expense of the human race.
Chadwick ordered a second scotch and glanced at the boys, each now laying waste to a slice of chocolate pie. Then he turned his attention to the front door, positive that any minute now, a hundred federal agents would swarm in like locusts and arrest him, giving the restaurant’s other patrons the winning story at their next get-together. They would charge him with about fifty different violations of the federal antiterrorism statute, and he’d have an all-expense paid trip to the execution chamber at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Wasn’t that how it always played out in the movies? The bad guy never got away. Didn’t the hero always crack the case at the last minute, saving everyone at the zero hour?
Every shred of doubt about his intellect or ability that he had ever felt in his life drew up into a tsunami of fear and panic and washed through him like a flash flood hitting a barren gulley. How could he have been so stupid, so arrogant, so foolish? Who was he to think that he could alter the course of human history? He thought about all he was trying to undo, thousands of years of human achievement, from the wheel to the computer, from fried Twinkies to bluegrass music, from Harley-Davidson to the moon landing. His plan was too big, too insane, too impossible.
He took another sip of scotch, a long one. Calm down, he whispered to himself. Calm down. He closed his eyes and counted to twenty. Finally, finally, the alcohol started to work its magic, and he felt warmth at his core, spreading out to his extremities, his face, and at long last, his brain. His mind settled, he thought about the plan again, a decade in the making. Its genesis, its infancy, its rocky adolescence, and finally, tonight’s debut. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photograph he’d carried for two decades. Ragged on the edges, folded and unfolded so many times that the creases had split. He stared at the picture, and it reminded him why he was doing this, why he’d made it his life’s work to make PB-815 all that it could be.
A basic tenet of virology was that viruses could be extremely lethal or extremely communicable, but not both. Thus, a quick-killing virus, the type that became fodder for movies and books and scaring the bejeezus out of people, normally faced one of two fates: either it burned itself out and disappeared because it killed its host too rapidly, before it had a chance to jump to the next one, or it mutated into a less virulent form to ensure the hosts stayed alive long enough to perpetuate the virus’ continued survival. See, e.g., the common cold, which ran unchecked around the globe, a big, dumb, happy germ that just wanted everyone to like it. The Labrador retriever of the virus world.
Chadwick believed there was a reason that the Ebolas of the world had stayed put, occasionally rearing their heads to remind humanity that they were still here, but never quite making the big crash into the human race. At their core, these super-hot viruses, like Ebola and Marburg, were programmed to stay hot, and so the price they paid for their deadliness was existence on the fringe. They were viral royalty, not interested in infecting millions or billions at the risk of sacrificing their virulence, satisfied, maybe at some unknowable level, at being the very best with a limited body of work.
But then Chadwick had created PB-815 while working for that private, off-the-books laboratory in southern Nebraska, funded by Leon Gruber, the benefactor who had started the project. Without government oversight to worry about, Chadwick’s work progressed quickly. Within two years, he’d developed his masterpiece – a jacked-up virus with the serial-killer drive of Ebola and spliced with the sociability of the commonest of colds. He was fortunate the virus hadn’t claimed him along the way. But their tedious, careful, painstaking work had been completed, not just on the virus, but on the vaccine as well, because without the vaccine, a true marvel, PB-815 was useless, a monster that couldn’t be controlled, a beast that would turn on its handlers.
And now it was ready. If everything went according to plan, it would spread quickly, so quickly that if the virus indeed did mutate a few weeks from now, it wouldn’t matter. Chadwick had made his peace with the fact that there were certain things beyond his control, that no one truly knew how PB-815 would interact with a complex system like the vast tapestry making up the human population. In fact, a very tiny fraction of the population, perhaps less than two percent, would be naturally immune to the virus thanks to a genetic anomaly he’d discovered. Boy, were those folks in for a big surprise.
They had estimated the first wave of infections at about five thousand, five thousand people who would leave tonight’s Yankees game with a very special souvenir, and each of whom would infect a dozen or so people before becoming symptomatic themselves, about eight to twelve hours after exposure. Before the first wave began dying about a day from now, they would have spread the virus to about another 60,000 people. Then their virus would truly go viral, up to five million before health officials even got wind of an outbreak, and then that, as they said, would be all she wrote. And he wasn’t even counting the supercarriers, the ones who would board airplanes and buses and trains and subways and expose hundreds, if not thousands, of people in one fell swoop, and send the virus to the four points of the compass, aboard the transatlantic flights to London and Paris and Johannesburg, the westbound airliners to Tokyo and Sydney and Beijing, on the morning shuttles to Chicago and Washington and Los Angeles and Houston, cutting any effective quarantine attempts off at the legs.
Miles Chadwick held up his tumbler of scotch and silently toasted the noisy dining room, a eulogy for a world that had ended at Yankee Stadium, during the second of a three-game series between the Bombers and the Red Sox, the teams tied for first place with eight weeks to go in the regular season, the baseball universe in its proper order.
CHAPTER TWO
Adam Fisher held the letter in his hands, the words lying flat against the page. Standing alone, each word was just that – a word, meaningless without context, a dictionary entry. But strung together in this way, on this sheet of paper bearing the letterhead of the Virginia Board of Medicine, the words joined together into
something accusatory, something lethal, something ruinous. He read it again, skimming over the clutter and procedure of the opening paragraph and focusing on the meat, a single sentence near the bottom of the heavy bond paper the Board used in flexing its muscles when summoning its licensees before it.
Specifically, Adam Fisher, M.D., failed to adequately monitor Patient A, who was 39 weeks pregnant, causing the patient’s death and the loss of the full-term fetus.
Twenty-six words. Twenty-six words that had chewed their way into the fabric of his life like moths set loose in a musty closet. Twenty-seven, if you counted the M.D., the two letters that meant so much to so many people, the two letters that earned him a spot in Richmond Magazine’s list of Most Eligible Bachelors every couple of years, the two letters that had placed him under the jurisdiction of the Board of Medicine since he’d become licensed as a physician sixteen years earlier.
He set the letter down on his blotter and leaned back in his chair. He was in his private office at the Tuckahoe Women’s Center, on the campus of the Henrico Doctors’ Hospital, a few miles west of downtown Richmond, Virginia. It was early, a little after seven, and the office was still quiet. The day promised a full slate of expectant mommies, menopausal grandmothers, teenage girls embarrassed by their mothers hell-bent on getting them on birth control. Adam hadn’t slept since the letter from the Board had arrived in yesterday’s mail. Of course, he’d known it was coming since that awful day the previous November. It was like waiting eight months for a punch in the stomach, a punch you knew was going to drop you and take your breath away, but one that you couldn’t do anything about.
His gaze drifted up to the large corkboard pinned to his wall, every square inch covered with photographs, the faces of countless babies staring back at him, children he’d shepherded into the world. He’d never planned to start the Baby Board, as it was known in the office, but early in his career, following a patient’s difficult but successful delivery, the new mom had sent him a photo of her healthy baby. Not knowing what to do with it, Adam pinned it to the new corkboard, an office accoutrement he hadn’t found a use for yet. A week later, another patient saw the picture during her last office visit before delivery, and she too sent a photograph of her newborn. And it grew from there. Not every patient sent in a picture, but many did, and in sixteen years, the board had filled up, getting more and more crowded until it looked like a giant group shot of a baby rave.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 1
