Five million survivors.
Taken out of context, the number was huge, overwhelming, the size of the Chinese Army, at least until about two weeks ago, but in truth, the number alone meant nothing. These survivors were scattered all over the place, virtually none of them would know each other, and many of those would go through another weeding out in the coming year, people who were in no position to survive the harsh reality without the modern conveniences they’d all come to depend on. As many as twenty-five percent of the survivors were under the age of eighteen. At least a million, possibly two million, wouldn’t make it through the winter. And the North American landmass was enormous. Even before the epidemic, large swaths of the continent were unpopulated. These survivors were just pinpoints scattered across a blank canvas.
The rest of them, though, the ones Professor Darwin would be really impressed with, would become battle-hardened with time. They would adjust, evolve, possibly assemble into a threat, especially if they ever found out the truth about the Citadel. That was their greatest secret, the one that had to be guarded at all costs.
He drained his coffee and looked at his calendar. Chadwick had meetings this morning, meetings all day. There was so much to do, so much to keep track of. First up was Dr. James Rogers, who had been running tests on Citadel women in preparation for the project’s second critical phase. Chadwick checked his watch and sighed. It was ten after six. He was already behind schedule. Rogers was due at six, and he was normally early to their meetings. As he waited, the day breaking clear and hot, he poured another cup of coffee, passing on the Bailey’s this time.
Rogers knocked on the slightly ajar door just as Chadwick finished stirring in his sugar.
“Come!”
Rogers stepped in the room. The physician was pale, bleary-eyed, his clothes rumpled and disheveled. Highly unusual for the fastidious medical director of the Citadel. It was obvious he hadn’t slept. Chadwick went in for a sip of his coffee, his eyes locked on Rogers’ face, and ended up with a hefty gulp of the steaming liquid. He felt it scorch his tongue, and wasn’t that just a hell of a way to kick off the day? All because he thought he’d seen something in Rogers’ face.
“What is it?”
“You’re going to want to sit down,” Rogers said. He was a tall man, lean, his skin pale from years in the lab. He kept his fine blond hair short, close to the scalp. He was a brilliant pathologist and a pill popper who’d had his license to practice medicine indefinitely suspended.
Chadwick noticed that Rogers had not apologized for his tardiness, which just made Miles even more nervous. He felt the ligaments in his knees loosen, and he nonchalantly grabbed the edge of his desk, lest he collapse from nerves in front of one of his closest advisers.
“What? Is it the virus? Is someone sick?”
“No,” Rogers said. “No, it’s not that.”
He was silent for a moment, picking at his lower lip. He didn’t make eye contact with Chadwick, focusing instead on something on Chadwick’s desk. Miles followed his gaze to the commemorative baseball on the corner. It had been signed by each member of the St. Louis Cardinals team that had won the 2006 World Series. Looking at the ball twisted something inside him, and he remembered how much he would miss baseball.
“The test results are back,” Rogers said. “We’ve discovered an anomaly.”
“What anomaly?”
“In the female subjects,” Rogers said.
Annoyance tickled Chadwick like a feather; he hated it when scientists spoke so robotically. Maybe if they’d been a little more approachable, a little more human, maybe none of this would have been necessary. Shortly before the outbreak, Chadwick had read that sixty-one percent of the American population didn’t “believe” in evolution. As though it were something you had to believe in. It was like saying you didn’t believe that two plus two equaled four. He often wondered who was to blame for such a travesty. Had scientists done their jobs right, maybe the world wouldn’t have needed this reboot, this reformatting of its hard drive.
“Jesus, what anomaly? Stop beating around the fucking bush.”
Rogers folded his hands together and tapped the fist against his lips, like he didn’t want to verbalize his next thought, lined up like a reluctant airplane waiting for takeoff.
Now Chadwick was pissed and scared; a ripple of heat shot up his back.
“We ran anti-mullerian hormone testing on all fifty females,” Rogers said. He was still looking at the baseball. “This test checks ovarian reserve.”
“I know what it does,” Chadwick said sharply.
Rogers ignored him.
“The results were disconcerting.”
Chadwick spread out his hands in front of him, as if to say, “And?”
“In each of them, the AMH levels were virtually zero,” Rogers said, finally looking up at his boss. “We ran additional tests, FSH in particular, and the results were the same. Complete ovarian failure.”
Chadwick sat down and scratched an itch on his palm. That had meant something once, that money was headed your way, right? Good fortune? Well, that was a load of shit because Dr. James Rogers had just dropped an atom bomb in the middle of the Citadel. He felt a big, idiotic grin spreading across his face, and he felt his breath coming in ragged gasps.
“Ovarian failure,” Chadwick said softly.
He thought about all the work they had done, the years of sacrifice, the careful, precise planning, and the idea that it had all been for nothing made his stomach flip.
And then, quite unnecessarily, Rogers added: “Miles, all of the women in the Citadel are infertile.”
“How is that possible?” Chadwick asked. The question was partially rhetorical, as he already knew the answer. There were only two options.
Either the virus had sterilized the women.
Or the vaccine had.
#
Fifteen minutes later, Chadwick was in the main conference room with Rogers and his other three top advisers. Rogers and Patrick Riccards, the Citadel’s director of security, were engaged in a heated discussion, on their feet, their faces red, like two baboons getting ready to tussle.
Margaret Baker, the director of operations, was in tears, something Chadwick immediately took note of. He wondered if he should cut her some slack. She was thirty-five and hoping to give birth to one of the first Citadel babies, and he could understand her despair. But could he trust such an emotional hair trigger of a woman? He’d never seen the slightest hint of emotion from her, not even a wisp of regret or empathy as Medusa had incinerated the human race. You just never knew with some people.
If the virus was to blame, and every surviving woman on the planet was now infertile, then none of this mattered. This was all window dressing, a really shitty after-party, and they were just the epilogue. Another few decades, and the sun would set on the human race permanently. The Earth would go back to doing whatever it was doing before Homo sapiens became the dominant life form, and Chadwick didn’t think mother Earth would miss them all that much.
He preferred this scenario because then it meant it wasn’t the other scenario. If it wasn’t the virus (and he really didn’t think it was), that meant it was the vaccine that had done this. Their vaccine. He’d almost been prouder of the vaccine than he’d been of the virus. It had been the ultimate exercise of dominion. In Medusa, he’d created the ultimate weapon, a mechanism to alter all things. But in the vaccine, they’d created something even greater.
If Medusa was the devil, Miles Chadwick had been its God.
And all things served God. Even His fallen angels.
Or so he’d thought.
“Quiet,” he said. “Everyone sit down.”
He waited while they each found their seats. He was pleased and a little relieved that they responded so quickly. They sat like obedient schoolchildren, their faces open and scared and hopeful all at the same time.
“Up until now, everything has gone to plan,” he said. “Better than we imagined. But now
we’ve got our first crisis. Our first real crisis.”
He thought of something else to say, but he wasn’t sure how it would play. His pulse slowed, like a racecar throttling down, and he thought it ironic that it had taken the end of everything to make him feel like he was in control.
“And, quite possibly, our last crisis,” he said casually.
He saw smiles on their faces, even a chuckle from Rogers. The tension seeped out of the room like a deflating balloon. It worked. They wanted leadership, and he was giving it to them. He was in charge.
“We need to find out if the infertility is a side effect of the vaccine,” Chadwick said. “We need to bring in an unvaccinated female survivor. And we need one yesterday.”
He looked at Patrick, who was already nodding his head, taking notes.
“I’ve got a team in mind already,” he said. “We’ll move out in the morning.”
“What if it’s not a side effect of the vaccine?” Margaret Baker asked stupidly.
Chadwick sniffed, and then let out a slow breath. He reminded himself she wasn’t a physician. Rogers, who had been sitting quietly, his head down, focused on his hands, spoke first.
“Then we’re all fucked,” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
For months, Sarah Wells had been promising her father that she would come back to Raleigh for a visit, if she could just find the time. On the twenty-sixth of August, she fulfilled that vow. She parked the motorcycle on Eastwood Drive, there next to the mailbox, and secured the helmet on the handlebars, but she didn’t dismount the chopper. She stared at the little Cape Cod she’d grown up in. All she had to see was the long grass, rippling in the light afternoon breeze, to know that her father was dead. He’d been religious about cutting the grass, twice a week in the summer, Sundays and Wednesdays, once a week during the winter.
It never crossed her mind that he’d fled when things started going south because that wasn’t whom Ernie Wells had been. No, he was in there, no doubt about it, dead now like his wife, like his neighbors, like everyone else she knew. He had stayed and helped and checked on people until he got sick and died. She looked up and down the desolate street, this twisted, nightmarish version of the neighborhood she’d grown up in. Somewhere along the street, a loose shutter clocked against siding, the sound huge in the morning quiet. Next door, over at the Tiricos’ house, a cat slinked along the front porch railing.
Sarah swung her left leg over the seat, slung her M4 over her shoulder and walked up to the front door; it was cracked open, and a terrible mustiness tickled her nose. She poked the door open with the muzzle of her rifle, revealing in full color what she knew to be true. There he lay in his recliner, wearing his dungarees as he called them, a white t-shirt (and she ignored the dried blood spatter) and, of course, those suspenders because he’d been a slight man, thin his whole life from his career as a mailman. A blue blanket was bunched up at his feet. On the end table, cold and flu medicines, a half-empty glass of 7-Up. She knew it was 7-Up and not water because there were few ills that Ernie Wells had believed a glass of cold 7-Up could not fix, and she felt the hot tears, stinging her lips as she thought about him sitting here at the end, alone, thinking that maybe one more glass of 7-Up would fix him up.
A horrible feeling swept over her; relief that he was dead. Relieved that her own father was dead. And not just because he would be spared a life in this terrible new world or possibly reunited with his wife, dead two decades now. But because Sarah wouldn’t have to face her father and tell him what she had done that terrible day on the Third Avenue Bridge. That she had “followed orders” and massacred civilians, that she had hurt the ones she had sworn to protect. And for what? A quarantine that was obsolete the moment it had been ordered.
It hadn’t taken her long to see the folly of the mission. Across the river in a canoe, through the dead streets of Manhattan, block after disease-ravaged block. Everything outside her Q zone had been just as fucked up as it was inside their little cocoon. Her quarantine, and her God-blessed attempt to hold it, had been nothing more than window dressing, something for the bigwigs, for the deciders, to do to make them feel like they were doing something, even as everything spun out of control.
She covered her father with the blanket and went around the house, tidying up. He had been a fastidious man, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do with his body, but she could at least put the house back the way he liked it. Orderly. She cleaned for the rest of the day, until the daylight started to go, until the small of her back ached, and her hands became stiff.
For dinner, she ate some beef stew she found in the pantry, straight from the can. It wasn’t great cold, but she’d had worse on her tours of duty.
When she was done, she sat back down on the couch and dug the bottle of tetrabenazine out of her pack. She rolled the amber-colored cylinder between her hands, turning her head just so, the moonlight glinting off the bottle. There were a dozen pills left, her first go around with the medication that would merely manage the disease that would ultimately kill her.
She was such a coward.
She hadn’t even been able to tell him about the diagnosis; how had she ever thought she would tell him about what had happened in the Bronx? Four years she’d been living with it, four years since she’d sat in that doctor’s office in Olympia, Washington and he’d told her the bad news from behind his desk with his stupid horn-rimmed glasses, that she carried the gene for Huntington’s disease. It had killed her mother, and so there was already a fifty percent chance she would get it, and wouldn’t you know it, things hadn’t broken her way. So here she was, staring death in the face, probably before she turned forty.
Then the plague had come, and she had prayed for death via Medusa, because that killed you quick, and she wouldn’t have to suffer for years on end the way her mother had. Two days of fever and internal bleeding and coughing? That was nothing compared to what Karen Wells had endured in the last three years of her life.
But because the universe was a real bitch, I mean, a real Grade-A megabitch, she’d survived the epidemic and she wouldn’t be getting an early exit after all, and Huntington’s would be waiting for her like it had been all along. She’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan four times; each time, she’d made it home very little physically worse for the wear. The worst injury she’d suffered was a nick in her arm from an IED that had killed six of her fellow soldiers.
Because of course.
And back up in the Bronx, the rest of her platoon had died. She had stayed with them after the thing with the bridge, and she had watched them die, one at a time, punishment for her sins at the bridge. Then she received that bizarre final order from HQ, and when she was done here, she would carry out that order.
Because of course.
She unscrewed the cap and popped the chalky pill into her mouth, where she let it sit for a moment. She could feel it dissolving, the chalky bitterness spreading on her tongue, hitting her gums, and for a moment, she considered spitting it out, and being done with it. No more treatment, no more delaying the inevitable.
But she threw her head back, washing it down with her father’s flat 7-Up. It slid down her throat just as smooth as good wine, and she cried.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It seemed a little strange to Freddie Briggs that he was even bothering with breakfast, given what he had planned for this morning, but there you go. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d skipped his morning meal, and he wasn’t going to start now. His mother wouldn’t have approved, and he figured he’d better do something she’d have been happy with before the day was out.
And so Freddie Briggs sat on the curb in front of the Cave Spring branch of the Rome Public Library in northwest Georgia, chewing robotically on a Pop-Tart as the day warmed and then blistered before him. He grimaced at the sickly sweet taste, wondering why they hadn’t improved their formula in the last two decades. They tasted the same today as they did when he’d first started eating them as a fresh
man linebacker at LSU, back when he couldn’t consume enough calories to keep the weight from falling off.
Well, guess what guys, you’ve lost your chance!
The library bordered a small park to the east. The smell of wet grass tickled Freddie’s nose, and he was back at LSU again, back in the locker room after his very first practice. He closed his eyes as he chewed. Beyond the sweet earthiness of the practice field after a mow, the sour stench of dried sweat hung in his nostrils. The prank the seniors had played on him after that first practice, the heat so immense it felt like you were wrapped in insulation. How gullible he’d been.
“Coach wants a word,” the defensive captain, an onyx-skinned cornerback, had told him.
“Really?” Briggs replied. “Coach Hyatt?”
“No, dumbass. Coach Bush. Grad assistant. Said bring your playbook.”
“Playbook?”
“Did I fucking stutter?”
Freddie’s tongue went numb.
Playbook?
So Freddie had gone looking for Coach Bush, the graduate assistant coach, who, quite frankly, Freddie couldn’t even remember meeting, but that didn’t mean anything to him. College football was so much bigger and faster than high school had been. He was fast and big, sure, but so was everyone. More coaches, more equipment, more plays, more everything.
And he’d met with Coach Bush, whose office was nothing more than a tiny supply closet (gotta start somewhere, Bush had said), and then he told Freddie he’d been cut, that they’d seen everything they needed to see about him in that first sweltering practice, that he might have been a superstar back in Smyrna, but this was Loozy-anna State, goddammit, and his game just wasn’t gonna cut it in the ESS-EEE-CEE. Freddie hadn’t argued with him because he worried that if he had, he’d break down in tears, and he couldn’t have that.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 15
