Adam made shorter work of Ethan’s remains. The boy had been tall but rail-thin, a body that would never fill out. As Adam hoisted him over his shoulder, he felt the boy’s smooth cheek rub against his own; it was a face that hadn’t seen the edge of a razor yet. Adam was reminded of Ethan’s youth, of all the promise that would go unfulfilled, and an immense sadness swept through him. He thought about all the things Ethan DeSilva would never do, never see, and he felt his eyes water like a heavy cloud. Maybe he was being a bit maudlin, because for all Adam knew, Ethan might have grown up to be an embezzler or a drug dealer or child molester, but he didn’t want to think about that right now. Whatever possible future may have lain ahead, Ethan DeSilva deserved a better fate than he had gotten.
Standing in his kitchen among dead men, Adam’s muscles ached and his legs quivered with exhaustion. He searched for something to say to the DeSilvas, some eloquent benediction to bid them farewell from this world, but he could think of nothing. He clicked his teeth together for a few moments.
“I’m sorry,” Adam had finally said, his voice catching.
Sharp swords of guilt and regret buried themselves into Adam’s soul, up to the hilt. He wished he could give them a proper funeral, but storing them inside was the best Adam could do. He wasn’t planning to stay long anyway – he could simply crank up the air conditioning to help slow the rate of decomposition. For all Adam knew to the contrary, he might be joining these men in death in a day or two anyway. A sudden burst of terror then, like a kick in the stomach, and he found himself trying to imagine the DeSilvas’ final moments. How afraid had they been? Did they know the end was near? Could they feel life slipping away, like the taste of something delicious dissolving into nothingness? Was it stinking, bowel-loosening terror? He thought these things, and he couldn’t stop himself.
That afternoon, as he’d peered out over the ocean from the Holden Beach pier, he’d met an older Asian woman, on holiday with her family, who, like him, had remained healthy. She spoke very little English, but at some primal level, she grasped that Adam wasn’t sick either. She dragged him by the collar of his shirt, all one hundred pounds of her, to her family’s beach cottage. Her entire family had come down with it. The first three to fall ill, two adults and a ten-year-old girl, had already died, and the others were deteriorating rapidly. She was hysterical.
And so he waited with the elderly woman, whose name he finally learned was Sang-mi, as her beloved relatives expired, one by one, as her family disintegrated, a great machine failing unexpectedly when only hours before it had been humming along in perfect synergy and harmony.
At the goddamn beach.
He held her hand and cried with her.
Sang-mi had been inconsolable. When Adam went to pull a sheet over the body of her son, who’d been the last one to die, she bolted out the back door and onto the back deck, screaming hysterically. He raced out after her, reaching out to pull her down before she could jump, even grabbing a swatch of fabric from her peach-colored housecoat, but she was fiercely determined to join her departed relatives, and that was precisely what she had done. Sang-mi flung herself from the railing; Adam closed his eyes as she plunged down, a second later, he heard her body hit the roof of their Dodge Durango some fifty feet below, the sharp crunch of the metal skin of the roof crumpling under Sang-mi’s weight.
And much like he couldn’t leave the DeSilva men alone in the carport, he couldn’t leave Sang-mi there, like a fragile bird that had fallen from flight, and so he carried her broken little body back upstairs and laid her to rest with the rest of her family.
He sat there with the dead family and watched the news, and that was when it had hit home for Adam, that this monster was roaming the countryside, all the countrysides, it was everywhere and nowhere, ghostly and very real. Regular programming had been interrupted for round-the-clock news coverage of the epidemic. Outbreaks had been reported in twenty-five states and across the globe. The more he watched, the sicker he felt, hope sluicing away, like tiny grains of sand trickling through an hourglass.
Driving off the island was no longer an option; the traffic jam he’d encountered with Ethan had metastasized into a bizarre still frame of a demolition derby, cars turned every which way, smashed up against one another. So he’d ridden his bike, an old beach cruiser he kept under the house, across the causeway on the morning of the eleventh. He rode all day, stopping only to relieve himself. He made it to Wilmington at dusk, but there was no respite there, just more chaos. Large crowds drifted through the streets, loud and panicky. Automatic gunfire chattered in the twilight. It was too dark to keep riding, so he spent a restless night in an alleyway.
He had to get home.
West of Wilmington, the congestion had eased up some, enough to warrant commandeering a Ford Taurus he found by the side of the road, its driver dead of Medusa. After laying the body on the shoulder, he loaded his bike in the back seat and shoved off, sticking to the back roads cutting through central North Carolina and into Virginia. Even in these rural areas, he saw nothing but chaos. Fires burning, car wrecks, throngs of people migrating on foot, carrying what they could. He listened to the radio for news, but it was confusing and contradictory, and so he had shut it off.
By the following morning, August 13, he was about a hundred miles from home, and he decided to make the rest of the trip on the bike. Dead traffic choked I-95, so he had used the cars as refueling stations, raiding them for snacks and water. Most of the vehicles were abandoned, but many contained the bodies of Medusa victims, their desperate flight from the plague now over.
He called Rachel half a dozen times, but on the few occasions the call went through, he got only her voice mail. Thinking about what was going on around him was too much to contemplate, and so he had simply focused on the road ahead. Terror powered his legs; his mind had shut down, perhaps as an act of self-preservation. He rode past the towns of Emporia and Jarratt and Carson and found things just as fucked up in Virginia as they’d been in North Carolina.
That had brought him here, just north of the bridge spanning the James. Adam curled onto the Broad Street exit, desperate to get home, numb, exhausted. His ass hurt from so many miles on the bike. As he merged onto Broad Street and cycled past the Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital, three gunshots cracked the night air in quick succession, one after the other – POW! POW! POW! A chilling scream followed, a howl so primal that Adam slammed down the bicycle’s brakes, almost reflexively. The wheels locked up, but on the wet surface, they continued to slide underneath him; a second later, his weight disrupted the balance of the bike, tipping it over and dumping him onto the blacktop. His body rolled into the curb like a discarded beer bottle.
He lay still for a moment, anxious for reports from his various body parts. Pain buzzed through his body, but he took solace in the fact that he could feel pain everywhere. Carefully, he wiggled all the wiggly parts, starting with his feet and moving upward to his head. It was going to hurt like hell the next day, assuming he lived that long.
There were more people here, pockets of them, wandering the streets, the air buzzing with panicked voices. The tinkle of breaking glass. They were right, the novelists and screenwriters with their depictions of the apocalypse. They’d been so goddamned right. The crowd consisted mostly of young people, some of them engaged in a kind of protest march.
TRUTH NOW! one sign read.
Another: NO MORE LIES!
A third: MEDUSA IS OUR DOOM
He heard a low growl approaching from the east; a moment later, a pair of olive-green military transports pulled up and blocked the intersection at 10th and Broad Street, just a few blocks from the state capitol building.
“Clear the streets and return to your homes,” a soldier announced via megaphone. “You are in violation of a military curfew.”
Adam’s stomach flipped. How was this happening, how was this happening, how was this happening? His feet felt locked in concrete as he watched the protestors ignore the sol
diers’ mandate. He could hear coughing and sneezing and if they had it, Adam thought, they really didn’t have anything to lose by ignoring the soldiers. That made for a very bad combination.
He needed to get out of here.
He was half a block shy of the hospital’s emergency room entrance. In the falling darkness, the familiar red lights of an ambulance strobed across the neighboring buildings. Almost instinctively, his feet began shuffling toward the door, the hospital’s gravity pulling him in, his life so inextricably tied to medicine and the healing arts that there was no separating him from it, especially in the face of this immense disaster. Hell, maybe he could help out!
The closer he got, the faster he moved. He had to see for himself. One last light of hope flickered deep in his soul, perhaps nothing more than a pilot light, but, with the right spark, could reignite his faith that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, that this outbreak had burned hot and fast but like a falling star scraping the roof of the world, was flaming out, that his colleagues, his brothers and sisters in arms, were bringing their best game in their most desperate hour.
These were the thoughts pinballing around his head as he drew closer to the double doors, and these were the ones that died the most brutal deaths when he saw the words GOODNIGHT MOON grotesquely scribbled on the glass doors in … Jesus God, was that blood? The sliding doors were malfunctioning, opening and closing like a metronome. To his left was the ambulance whose lights he’d seen flashing earlier; one of the bay doors was open, swaying in the rain-freshened breeze. Half a dozen bodies were piled up inside the ambulance bay.
As he drew close enough to see inside the hospital, to see the stretchers scattered about the unit like a child’s abandoned toys, the smell hit him like a runaway truck. It was rich and deep, a pungent, gassy smell that all but wrapped its invisible hands around Adam’s throat. He recoiled, losing his balance and finding his seat on the wet asphalt behind him. He sat in the puddle, feeling the cold rainwater seeping through his clothes, thinking about Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.
Behind him, back on the street, the protestors were growing louder. At first, he couldn’t quite make out their words, a tri-syllabic chant, but as he primed his ears, the words came through loud and clear.
“Fuck you, pigs! FUCK YOU PIGS!”
Over and over they screamed it, louder and louder until the desperate chatter of gunfire exploded and cut the mantra short. Then their screams of protest were replaced by howls of pain and agony. He heard footsteps, and terror stabbed at his core.
“FUCK YOU, PIGS!”
Hide, you moron, hide!
The dark cave of the ambulance bay beckoned him; he didn’t want to get in, but he had to. He grabbed the edge of the door and hoisted himself up onto the bumper. Even with the doors open, it was rank and hot, like an ancient evil expelling its hot breath on him. The sound of automatic gunfire erupted again, this time closer, much closer, almost like it was in his head, and he forced himself deeper into the ambulance, toward the back, using the dozen bodies for cover.
It was dark, but not pitch black, and that was horrible in its own way. Silhouettes moving about, soldiers pursuing and cutting down fleeing protestors, the tongues of flame erupting from the muzzles of their heavy guns.
Finally, silence, as the soldiers finished their sweep, leaving Adam alone in the back of that dead ambulance.
Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.
Then the bad thoughts started rushing in, pouring in as if a water main had ruptured. Fear that she wouldn’t answer if he called. Fear that she was already gone. Fear that he would never see her again, and he would never get a chance to make right what had gone so terribly wrong.
He had tried to make a go of it with Nina Kershaw, Rachel’s mother, when they’d discovered she was pregnant. They’d been on a few dates together, so it wasn’t quite a one-night stand that had led to the pregnancy. A couple weeks after the pregnancy test came back positive, they’d ridden down I-64 to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, about an hour southeast of Richmond, just to get their minds off the very sudden and unexpected detonation of a reality bomb in their lives.
It had been a beautiful September day, the day clear and fresh with just a hint of fall in the air. They ate funnel cakes and chili dogs, and Adam had ridden the Loch Ness Monster; Nina had opted for the less exciting rides in her delicate condition. Toward the end of the day, he’d won her a gigantic stuffed bear at one of the carnival games, a stuffed animal that had stood guard over Rachel’s room to this day.
On the drive back to Richmond, they’d held hands. That night, she stayed with him at his apartment, where they made love. They slept until noon, and Adam felt like everything was going to be all right. Maybe things weren’t as clean or neat as he once imagined they’d be, but if there was one thing he’d learned in medical school, it was that life wasn’t particularly interested in neat and clean. It was dirty and messy and sloppy, and you had to be able to adjust to it, to read the defenses, call the audibles.
And so when she had ended things three months later, there in the parking lot of St. Mary’s Hospital, after the twenty-week ultrasound that had told them it was a girl, he felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He’d missed the signs, the ground shifting underneath him, the chill in the air, the distance growing between them, two tectonic plates drifting apart.
He pulled out his phone, the glow from the screen illuminating the corpses around him. In the top left corner of the bright screen, two bars reflecting signal strength flickered at him. This worried him; he normally got great reception downtown. It was too creepy, too symbolic. Pushing the thought out of his head, he dialed her number, his heart pounding, the blood rushing in his ears.
The phone rang and rang and rang, its buzz as lonely a sound as he had ever heard in his life.
No one answered, and the call rolled into voice mail.
“Rachel, it’s Dad,” he said, trying to hold his panic down like a runaway steer. “Call me. I’m not sick, but I don’t know what’s going on. Today is, uh…”
He had no idea what day it was. Urgent requests for information skittered along his neurons, tapping his brain for the information, but the answer was not forthcoming.
“Shit, I don’t even know what day it is. Please, chicken wing, call me.”
He ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket.
Chicken wing. That had been his nickname for her when she was a kid, a skinny mess of arms and legs. It had been years since he’d called her that.
As he retrieved his bike, two camouflaged Army trucks rolled by, headed east on Broad Street.
He had never felt so alone.
#
The storm grew stronger as Adam drew closer to his house, there just near the end of Floyd Avenue. Old oaks and maples dating back to the Civil War swayed in the stiffening wind like angry sentinels. Sheets of rain washed across the blacktop, the throaty ripple of thousands of gallons of water rushing into the city’s ancient storm drains audible above the downpour. Lights were still shining in many houses, the rooms bright in the falling gloom; he paused at one bay window and peered inside, cupping his hands around his eyes to sluice away the rain. He hoped, no, he prayed to see signs of life, someone watching television, lingering in front of a bookcase, making dinner. But instead, he saw a middle-aged woman on a couch, curled up under a blanket, the blue light of a television screen flickering against her face. Her eyes were closed. He moved on.
At the last intersection, he saw two people arguing, their arms wild and animated in their accusatory slashes. In the intersection, a Jeep’s front quarter panel was smashed to hell, and its assailant, a large Buick sedan, now sported a crumpled front grill. Steam curled from cracked radiators.
Then the larger of the men, a heavyset, balding fellow wearing a black windbreaker, shoved the other man in the chest. The skinnier fellow stumbled backwards, and Adam’s face tightened as he sensed, deep in his soul, something extraordinarily bad was about to happen. He slowed
to a stop, keeping one foot perched upon the pedal, the high one, just like he’d learned as a kid. He debated making a U-turn, approaching his house via one of the other streets that-
BLAMM!
The sound of the gunshot exploded through the rain, the impact of the bullet spinning the heavyset man’s body around before he crashed to the wet pavement in a heap. Adam’s medical training kicked in, and he got off the bike, ready to rush to the man’s side to treat the wound. Part of him wanted to be there for him, maybe give him a chance to help someone this week, after the catastrophic few days he’d spent at Holden Beach. But then that, too, was stolen from him, when the shooter stepped forward and fired two more bullets into his victim’s face.
“No!” Adam called out.
The shooter looked up in Adam’s direction. Their eyes locked, and in that moment, Adam saw the panic and the fear and total disintegration of everything this man might have been yesterday, hell, five minutes ago. He aimed the gun at Adam, who froze. His mind went blank; it didn’t seem real, what was happening, as though he might have been watching this scene unfold on television.
Everything became exquisitely clear, down to the fat drops of rainwater forming on the barrel of the gun and then splashing down onto the blacktop to join the thin rivulets flowing across the blacktop. As Adam sat there, straddling his bicycle, the shooter held up a free hand, a defensive posture, as if he were the one facing the barrel of the gun. Then he fired.
The bullet missed by a country mile, but it sent Adam tumbling to the asphalt, pulling the bike down on top of him. His foot became tangled in the spokes of the rear tire and as he attempted to wrestle it free, he noticed the man approaching, his gun up again.
The spike of terror was so sharp Adam gagged; he kept one eye on the armed man and worked to free himself. Why hadn’t he just pedaled away? He would’ve been three blocks away by now.
“Are you sick?” the man was yelling. “Are you sick?”
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 9
