He changed the channel again. A nature show talking about the blue-footed booby, and this seemed soothing in its own way, so he left it on. Then he sat back down in his metal chair because he really didn’t know what he was supposed to do now. He sat there for another ten minutes. Then he went over to the door and cracked it open, just a sliver, not wanting to draw any attention to himself. If he turned his head just right, he could make out the nurses’ station at the center of the floor. Everything was still chaotic, still madness, a giant sewage-like wave of horror washing across the cold tile floors, engulfing all in its path. A tall, skinny man, pacing back and forth in front of the nurses’ station, arguing with two nurses inexplicably still on duty. Few were still working, and Freddie didn’t know if that was because they’d fled the hospital or if they were now patients themselves. He wondered where his agent Richie was.
The man was shirtless, his chest speckled with blood and Lord knew what else. Freddie heard moaning in other rooms, and of course, the wet, ripping sound of that horrible cough that had become the background music to the disintegration of the hospital. On the far side of the nurses’ station, a middle-aged man wearing a perfectly nice Hawaiian shirt was arguing with a doctor about something or the other. He became increasingly animated, and then Freddie watched, stunned, as Hawaiian-Shirt Man plunged a white plastic knife into the doctor’s throat.
As blood began spurting from doctor’s wounded neck, Freddie slammed the door shut and slid down on his bottom. There just wasn’t enough room in his brain to deal with such insanity. He held his huge hands over his ears as the volume ramped up. A shout, then another, and then a gunshot. Freddie heard heavy footsteps race past his door, and that was when he started to wonder why he hadn’t come down with it, why he hadn’t started coughing up blood and burning with the terrible fever that had taken everything he had ever known and loved. Until now, he hadn’t had time to think about it, but now that he did, he felt fine, just fine, and he believed it had been because he had to be there for Susan and Caroline and Heather as they grew sicker and sicker, as they died, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let them die alone.
But now they were gone, and he didn’t care about feeling fine. He didn’t care about feeling anything because feeling meant thinking about them and the fact that they were dead and gone. How could they be dead? Caroline was supposed to start the seventh grade in two weeks, Heather, the third grade. Susan was a kindergarten teacher and she was about to start getting her classroom ready, one of the things she enjoyed the most about a new school year. He found himself thinking about the glitter and glue sticks and pencil boxes and Back to School Night, which would make Susan so nervous she barely slept the night before, and the classroom’s guinea pig, which was now three years old. Or was it four?
Then the most ridiculous thought zoomed through Freddie’s head as he sat there on the cold tile floor, in the company of his dead family.
Who was going to feed the guinea pig?
The guinea pig. The guinea pig. He kept thinking about the guinea pig, skittering around its cage in their family room, where Susan kept him during summer vacation. Freddie hadn’t spent more than thirty seconds of his life thinking about the goddamn guinea pig, and now it was all he could think about. Chewie the guinea pig, with his pink-rimmed eyes and the light brown spot on his back.
Who was going to feed the guinea pig?
He was crying again, big silent tears streaming down his face. The room seemed very small, as if the walls were closing in around him. He became aware of the smell, the sourness of his own body odor, the rich, gassy smell of decay in the room, and he saw the blood and vomit and the other byproducts of death to which he’d somehow remained oblivious for the past few days. But now it was all coming home, the true reality of what had happened, and he needed to get out of this room right now, right away. Part of him, the responsible family man part of him, told himself to stay right where he was because his place was by his family’s side, but its voice was growing weaker and fainter, and he needed to get out of this hospital right now.
He kissed his three girls on their foreheads, and then gently set Susan and Heather’s bodies next to Caroline’s. He wasn’t going to stay here in this house of death, and, he decided, neither was the rest of the Briggs clan. After covering their bodies with a sheet and locking the bedrails, he pushed the bed out of the room, nearly blinded by the tears, almost hoping someone would try and stop him.
No one did, no one even gave him a second look as he wheeled the bed down to the elevators at the far end of the hallway, moving slowly so as not to jostle his precious cargo. The elevator vestibule was dark, empty but for a dead woman and the now-lifeless body of Hawaiian Shirt Man. The floor under his body was shiny with blood.
Freddie wasn’t sure if the elevators were working, but the call button lit up like a solitary Christmas light when he pressed it. He considered his next move as the elevator hummed its way to the fourth floor. Home was his final destination; he was going to get his girls home where they belonged, and if that meant he was going to bury them in their backyard, then so be it. He’d be damned if he was going to let them rot here in this hellhole, in this dead place. If he had to carry them the four miles, then that’s what he would do.
The familiar bing broke him out of his trance, and he prepared to roll the bed into the elevator. As it opened, he changed his mind. Three plague victims were lying on the floor of the elevator, dead or very close to it. One appeared to be a doctor, his white lab coat streaked with blood. He was on his back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and he was moaning softly. He either did not notice Freddie’s presence or simply paid it no mind. And the smell was what Freddie really noticed, an overpowering stench of raw death that sent Freddie’s stomach into revolt. One whiff, and he was doubled over, dry heaving because, since he hadn’t eaten in more than a day, there was nothing to bring up. As Freddie struggled to catch his breath, the heaves stealing his ability to breathe, the dying doctor rolled over on his side and flung his arm out across the threshold of the elevator. When the door tried to slide home, it met the doctor’s arm and then bounced back open again.
The hell with this, Freddie thought, as his stomach began to settle down. He said a little prayer for his family, asked God for strength for what he was about to do, and then slung Susan’s body over his right shoulder, the girls’ bodies over his left. The stairwell was just beyond the elevators, and he carried them down the four flights like sacks of flour, taking special care not to bang their bodies against the rails or the walls. At each landing, he found more of the sick and the dead, bodies sprawled everywhere, and he stepped carefully so as not to trip. He was a little winded by the time he got to the first floor, but his legs were strong. He was thankful for the six months he’d spent running and weightlifting. It hadn’t been to make it back to the NFL, he now understood; it had been so he could be strong enough to take his family home one final time.
More chaos greeted him on the first floor of the hospital as he burst out of the stairwell, possibly even more than he’d left behind on the fourth floor. Bodies lined the corridor, stacked one on top of the other like firewood, double-wide in some places, leaving barely enough room for two people to pass each other in the hallway. Here and there, he’d see someone stumbling around, the look of someone who was lost, eyes open but far away. It was warm down here, the air stale and thick with an oppressive stench Freddie couldn’t identify, that he didn’t particularly want to identify. He spotted one of his neighbors, a pleasant stay-at-home mom named Meg Tinsley, sitting on the floor, weeping. She didn’t appear to have seen him, and so he kept on walking, unsure of what the hell he would even say to her.
No one paid him any mind as he staggered through the white corridors, through the emergency department, past the curtained areas and the gurneys. Any semblance of order in the hospital had crumbled like a cookie in a child’s hand. The unit was drenched with moans and howls, a terrible soundtrack to this constantly evolving
and endless horror show. The main entrance was blocked by an ambulance that had crashed through the doors.
He kept moving, past the ER and into another series of corridors. Panic chewed at his insides like a rat as each of the corridors began to look more and more alike. At a large intersection, where he saw signs directing visitors to cardiology and radiology and physical therapy and other perfectly ordinary hospital destinations, he saw two dead doctors sitting on the floor, backs to the wall; their hands were laced together, dried blood caked on their faces and lab coats. One of the doctors even had a chart set on her lap, God bless her little heart. As he gazed down on these two, he wondered if he would have the courage to stay and treat the sick if he’d found themselves in their shoes. He began to cry because he wouldn’t have stayed if he were one of these doctors. He would have fled, he knew it as deeply and as surely as he’d ever known anything in his life.
As he turned left at a bank of elevators, he finally spotted the reassuring red glow of an Exit sign, and his heart soared. It was bad in here, much worse than he’d ever imagined, and he wanted to get out of here more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Part of him couldn’t believe how widespread this thing was, but he pushed those thoughts out of his head as he continued his funereal procession. There would be time for that later; right now, his focus was on getting his family home. And besides, what difference did it make how far the disease had spread? His own universe had imploded, taking with it all the galaxies and stars of his soul.
He turned a corner and saw the main foyer ahead of him, but it looked nothing like the one he’d seen when they’d checked into three days ago. It was a dead place, crowded with the bodies of plague victims who had died waiting to be seen. The Exit sign glowed ominously, a deep warning shade of red. A makeshift wall of sandbags bisected the foyer, and a pair of unmanned machine gun batteries had been mounted there, the turrets pointed in opposite directions. Freddie puzzled over the scene for a moment, trying to ascertain what had happened here, but his head began to swim with confusion. Nothing he’d seen in the last seventy-two hours had made a lick of sense.
The foyer was silent but for the heavy breathing of a National Guardsman curled up in the corner, where the sandbags met the glass wall. At first, Freddie couldn’t tell if the man was conscious; then the soldier looked up at him, his M4 rifle pointed squarely at Freddie’s chest. He was a young guy, a thin wisp of mustache coloring his upper lip. His name patch identified him as Barousse.
“Not supposed to leave the hospital,” Barousse eked out.
“Please leave me alone,” Freddie said.
“Quarantine,” he said. “The quarantine broke.”
“What the fuck is going on out there?” Freddie asked. “What happened?”
“No one-” A spasm of coughing interrupted, and thin, ropy splatters of blood sprayed the soldier’s pant legs. Private Barousse wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand and examined the residue of his spittle.
“What a Charlie Foxtrot this turned out to be,” Barousse said.
“A what?”
“Cluster fuck.”
“What happened?” Freddie asked again.
“Not really sure,” Barousse said. “Things just fucked up.”
He sighed deeply.
“Hey man, do you have a cigarette? I’m sleepy.”
He leaned his head back against the glass and closed his eyes. Freddie paused for a moment, sorry he didn’t have a cigarette, hoping the soldier didn’t intend to enforce the quarantine that no longer existed, and then swung his legs over the sandbag barrier, one at a time. The hospital’s main doors slid open, and Freddie stepped out into the bright August afternoon, the sun harsh and merciless. His eyes adjusted to the glare, but slowly, as if they didn’t believe what they were seeing, hesitant to report the images back to Freddie’s brain.
Two Georgia National Guard trucks were parked in the semi-circular drive at the main entrance; one of them was barely recognizable, its front end a smoldering husk, thin wisps of smoke still drifting from the engine block. The street fronting the hospital was barricaded at both ends by police cruisers, but Freddie couldn’t tell if anyone was manning the roadblocks. On the south side of the street was the hospital’s main parking lot, where a ring of police cars had set up shop around the perimeter. The parking lot itself was not particularly crowded with cars, as only about half the spots were occupied. The driving lanes, however, were lined with rows of cylindrically shaped objects of varying sizes, shrouded in white. Freddie stared at it for a moment and then froze, his eyes locked on the rows, knowing what he was seeing, but not wanting to accept it. He forced himself to break eye contact and headed north along the street, the image of the shrouds strong and bright in his memory, like marquees on Broadway.
The parking lot had become a mass grave.
INTERLUDE
FROM NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY LISTENING POST 0451029
August 16
0345 Greenwich Mean Time
Bekaa Valley, Lebanon
Unsub: Unknown Subject
AAN: Ahmad Abu-Nidal, Second-in-Command of Dawn of God
Translated from Arabic
TRANSMISSION BEGINS
Unsub: What the hell is going on?
AAN: I do not know. An evil eye is watching down on us. [COUGHING]
Unsub: No way this happened naturally.
AAN: Regardless of how it is happening, it is happening. [WHEEZING, COUGHING]
Unsub: They are going to blame us. You know that, yes?
AAN: Yes, but I do not think it matters.
Unsub: How could it not matter? They will scorch the earth looking for us. Do you know how many have died in America alone?
AAN: Do you know where I am right now? [COUGHING]
Unsub: Don’t you dare!
AAN: I am just north of Ain Hirshey. Have you heard of it?
Unsub: No. My God, they’ll be on you in a day.
AAN: It’s a little village in the mountains. Barely a village, really.
Unsub: And I care about this why?
AAN: Because every single person in this town is dead. The last village, dead. The village before that one. Dead.
Unsub: How does that impact us?
AAN: You fool. This sickness is everywhere. There won’t be anyone left to look for us. I’ve spoken to our comrades in China and Russia and South America, and there it is the same.
Unsub: God is great! The pigs will die.
AAN: [LAUGHTER, FOLLOWED BY COUGHING]
Unsub: What is so funny?
AAN: God might be great, but he is also pissed.
Unsub: God be with you.
AAN: Go to hell.
TRANSMISSION ENDS
FROM THE SUICIDE NOTE OF WILLIAM BRADY
Knoxville, TN
Undated
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought this would be so much different. I used to think an apocalypse would be cool. I liked zombie movies and The Stand and those kinds of books and movies and I thought it would be cool to be a survivor. And here I am. I’m a survivor and I didn’t get sick and I watched my mom and my four sisters die in the last five days and it was the worst fucking thing you could imagine. And I think I might be the last person alive in this shithole city and I’m not exaggerating. I haven’t seen a single living person in I don’t know how long and we just went and fucked ourselves pretty good didn’t we. And it’s so QUIET so GODDAMN QUIET I can hear my fucking heart beating! The smell is getting worse because it’s been hot and humid this summer and it gets worse after it rains, oh, Jesus, it gets so much worse. I don’t know why I’m writing this at all because no one is ever going to read it but I had some things I wanted to say before I did it. I’m so sorry. I’m so afraid & I don’t want to be afraid anymore.
If anyone reads this and wants to know, well, let me just tell you, it was so bad, so bad at the end. Everything just went to hell it was like we were animals worse than animals. Sorry, God. We must’ve really pissed
you off.
fuck you.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was August 24.
That was according to Adam’s watch, which he found himself looking at with increasing frequency. He wore it all the time now, even when he slept, something he’d never done before. He kept the band tight, to the point that it was chafing his skin, but he wanted to feel it close to his body. It was very important to know what time it was, all the time. He would check it and be a little amused to find that time had continued to tick by as it always had, second by second, minute by minute, Medusa victim by Medusa victim. Time was decidedly unconcerned with the affairs of men. Time didn’t care. What, was his watch going to stop ticking because the human race had offed itself?
Then he found himself thinking about the Doomsday Clock, that delicious bit of geopolitical commentary in which a bunch of old farts got together each year and passed judgment on how well the human race had behaved itself, their decision reflected in the minute hand of a giant analog clock set to a few minutes before midnight. The closer humanity got to midnight, the story went, the closer it was to extinction. The last time he’d read about it in Time or the Huffington Post or what-have-you, the clock had been moved forward three minutes, all the way to 11:57 p.m., thanks to a whole shitload of new problems humanity had created for itself. He wondered what time they’d set the Doomsday Clock to now. Probably two-thirty in the morning. They might even make a little note in their little Diary, if there was such a thing, that not only was it way, way past midnight, but that humanity was stumbling around drunk, vomit on its shirt, looking for a late-night slice of greasy pizza.
Adam was on the couch, his television tuned to ESPN, a bottle of Jack Daniels nestled between his legs. The electricity was still on, and that was one of the few pieces of good news, but he wondered when that bit of luck would run out. Currently, the television cameras were broadcasting from the Bristol, Connecticut studio where they taped SportsCenter – used to tape SportsCenter, a little voice squeaked from within – but the place looked abandoned. Someone had left the cameras on and, not surprisingly, no one had been back to turn them off. The camera was still pointed at the unmanned anchor desk. Off camera, from somewhere deep in the studios, Adam could hear someone coughing, nearly retching. Adam couldn’t bear to change the channel. He didn’t want the person in the studio to be alone. Maybe if he kept watching, that poor bastard, dying alone inside the headquarters of the Worldwide Leader, wouldn’t be so alone. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it wasn’t like there was anything else to do anyway.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 12
