DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic]

by Scheuring, R. A.

  “How many people are out there?”

  “I don’t know. A thousand? This is some bad fucking shit, Susan. They’re all fucking dying!”

  “Thanks, Ezra.”

  Ezra had the grace to shut up for a moment. Finally, he said, “That doesn’t mean you’re dying, Susan—”

  “Like I said, I’m feeling fine.”

  Whether he believed her wasn’t evident. It didn’t matter anyway, because whatever Susan felt about her health ceased to matter when she finally arrived on her doorstop.

  “Oh, Ezra!” she wailed.

  “What?”

  Her front door was ajar, broken from its frame. Beyond, she could make out the smashed television and scattered books, their spines cracked.

  But it wasn’t the broken TV or the damaged books that filled her with dismay. It was the kitchen. The cupboard doors were flung open, the contents, or lack thereof, painfully visible. Even the refrigerator door had been left unlatched, the interior light dully illuminating its empty shelves.

  “Susan, what’s going on?” Ezra’s tone was sharp.

  Susan stood at the threshold to the kitchen, staring at the mess that was her home. “Oh, Ezra. They’ve stolen my food!”

  Twenty-Three

  “I can get a helicopter. We’re working on clearance for takeoff.”

  “Good.” Alan Wheeler stood outside the hospital, off to the side of the passenger drop-off circle. He tried to keep his voice low as he spoke into his cell phone. “They can take a patient on a ventilator?”

  “Yes,” said Grif Richardson. “It won’t be cheap. Is he off blood pressure medication? The med transport company doesn’t like to transport patients with unstable blood pressure.”

  “He’s off blood pressure medication.”

  “Good.” Like his boss’s, Grif Richardson’s voice was clipped. He’d spent the better part of the morning trying to find a medical transport company that would violate the quarantine and transport Alan Wheeler’s critically ill son out of Los Angeles. It hadn’t been easy. Nearly all non-military aircraft had ceased flying in the Los Angeles airspace. Fortunately, Richardson had found one outfit that had been willing to transport Wheeler’s son for the sum of fifty thousand dollars, cash. Richardson wasn’t sure about the quality of the transport, but there wasn’t much choice.

  The next question was more delicate. “Alan, do they know what his infection is?” Richardson cleared his throat. “The transport company is concerned about plague, of course.”

  “Jason doesn’t have plague.”

  “I know that,” Richardson said, although he didn’t sound sure. “But the transport company doesn’t. Didn’t the doctors run blood tests or something?”

  Alan’s eyes drifted up to the fifth floor of the hospital, where Jason lay clinging to life in the ICU. “They’ve run a hundred tests. They just don’t have any conclusive results yet.”

  “I see.”

  Alan felt a desperate anger overwhelm him. “Are you saying they won’t transport without a definite diagnosis?”

  Richardson paused, carefully selecting his words. “I think you can understand. If it’s plague, no one wants to transport.”

  Alan closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “Grif, Jason doesn’t have plague. I can guarantee you that. It’s something else.” He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. “But he may get plague if he stays here. The boy doesn’t have an immune system.”

  The CEO’s voice was gentle. “I know, I know, Alan. I still need to get clearance to take off. We’ll have to pull some strings in Washington, but I’m not worried about that.” He paused. “It’d help things a lot if you could get a firm diagnosis.”

  Alan’s gaze shifted up to the fifth floor again. He thought about the overworked doctors and nurses and the no-shows. He wondered if he’d even see Jason’s doctor again today. “Just get me clearance, Grif,” he said firmly. “I’ll get you a diagnosis. I’ve donated so much money to this hospital, they’ll do what I say.”

  “I know,” Richardson said. “We’ll get you and Brooke and Jason out of there sooner than you know.”

  John Harr sat in the Ponderosa Diner. The daily crowd of ranchers had gathered to eat lunch and harass each other, which in other times, Harr might have joined in on. But not today. The room was dead silent, each man’s eyes riveted to the TV screen above the lunch counter.

  “It’s just unbelievable,” Lola said, as she leaned to pour another cup of the restaurant’s trademark watery coffee into Harr’s cup. “All those poor Californians.”

  “Poor Californians, my ass,” said a rancher next to Harr. Harr recognized him as one of the rougher cattlemen from southern Harney County, a man whose family had eked out a subsistence existence from the high desert for generations. “It’s God’s vengeance for all the crazy shit they do down there.”

  Harr didn’t respond. He wasn’t a religious man, but he knew many of the high desert people were, and he had learned to respect their beliefs.

  “Ammon, I’d appreciate it if you watched your language,” Lola said primly. She poured the man another cup of coffee. Harr wasn’t sure, but he thought Lola flushed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the rancher slowly, touching the brim of his cowboy hat. Harr wondered if he was making a move on Lola. Probably. Ammon Custer was a prick.

  “They ought to shut down the whole California border,” said another man. “Keep all that plague down there.”

  “Won’t happen with all their liberal kindred living up in Portland,” said Ammon. “They’ll open up the border, invite the plague here. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Lola leaned a hip against the lunch counter, the coffee pot still in her hand. She looked at the chilling video of the robed figures in Los Angeles beating themselves and shook her head. “I try not to agree with you too much, Ammon,” she said sweetly. “But you might be right this time. Maybe we should shut down the border.” She gestured at the TV with the coffee pot. “That’s just crazy.”

  “I don’t give a good goddamn if they all beat themselves to a pulp,” said another rancher. “So long as that plague stays down there and doesn’t come up here.”

  The group muttered several things at once. Lola turned to Harr. “Well, you’ve been pretty quiet, John. What do you think about this?” In her eyes, Harr registered a challenge, only he didn’t have any idea what it was.

  “Harr’s always quiet,” said one of the ranchers. “He’s the strong, silent type, Lola. Ain’t you figured that out yet?” The other cowboys laughed.

  They all turned to look at Harr expectantly. He chose his words carefully. “I think it’s only a matter of time before it comes here.” Inside he thought, hell, it already is here. His dog had died of it, and if the antibiotics they had started Harr on didn’t work, then he’d be checking out as well.

  “Well, we can do something about that,” said Ammon, his voice rising. “We can close our own borders.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Lola asked.

  “Honey, there aren’t too many roads coming into Burns, and there sure aren’t too many going out. Not too many for a roadblock or two.”

  The other ranchers shouted agreement. All except Harr. He glanced at the video on the restaurant’s TV. A plaza outside a hospital overflowed with people, some standing, some lying down, all with masks on their faces. Medical workers in white bunny suits and face protection moved carefully amidst the sea of patients, putting marks on foreheads, covering some with sheets, carrying some away.

  No one noticed Harr’s silence. The cattlemen were talking loudly about where to put the roadblocks and who would man them. Harr could hear their confidence.

  But a deep worry had settled in Harr’s gut, because he knew, even if the other ranchers didn’t, that Gage’s plague might be the same as the California plague. And if that was the case, their roadblocks wouldn’t do a thing.

  Because he knew, with dreadful certainty, that squirrels and other rodents didn’
t follow roads. He had seen countless numbers of them dead across his range land, their rotting bodies testament to their disease and its spread. If it was the same disease as what the TV people were calling DRYP, then it had already penetrated the desolate, empty miles of high desert that the cowboys—however misguidedly—believed was a last defendable bastion of safety.

  The fight came later, after the ranchers had left and Harr found himself alone with Lola. He knew immediately something was amiss. She’d smiled brightly and flirted with Ammon as he’d departed, had expressed shock and admiration for the ranchers’ plans, but the minute she and Harr were alone, she dropped the prom-queen act and asked cooly, “Did you have plans tonight, John?”

  When he didn’t immediately answer, she turned away, the short skirt of her waitress uniform lifting to show her knees. Harr thought he saw tears in her eyes.

  “Lola, what’s the matter?”

  She didn’t respond immediately. She seemed to be composing herself. Finally, she turned red eyes to his. “It’s my birthday, John,” she said. “You forgot.”

  “Shit,” he said, because she was right. Of course, he’d forgotten. He’d forgotten everything the minute he’d gotten the phone call, the minute the vet had told him Gage had plague.

  “I’m sorry, Lola,” he said. “I got some bad news—”

  “I’m going out with Ammon tonight.”

  Harr stared at her. So that explained it. “I see.”

  “I’ve tried, John. You know I’ve tried. But it doesn’t seem to work, does it? You don’t love me. I know you don’t love me.” Her face crumbled.

  “Lola…”

  “Oh, stop it!” she cried. “I’ve loved you for eighteen years! Waited for you for eighteen years. And you can’t even remember my birthday!”

  He didn’t know what to say, which only seemed to make her angrier. Her face contorted with rage, and she pointed wildly at the door. “Get out of my life, John Harr! I’m sick of you! Sick of you, do you hear me?”

  Harr wanted to say something, anything, but words failed him. Finally, he picked up his hat and placed it on his head. She was still yelling at him as he crossed to the door.

  Twenty-Four

  Nesbitt gasped when Mack walked into the War Room. “Jesus, George, what happened to your face?”

  Mack sat down gingerly in one of the chairs next to the CDC officer. “Face met the wrong end of a nine-millimeter.” He grimaced. It was still hard to talk.

  Nesbitt looked appalled. “Why?”

  Mack explained using as few words as possible. “Maybe if we had more than four-hundred, eighty-thousand masks in a town of five-hundred thousand, they wouldn’t be such a hot commodity.” He pointed at the PiSS computer screen. “Your fancy program showing anything?”

  The younger man looked troubled. “No. We’re struggling to keep up with the data entry.” He glanced quickly across the room before continuing in a lower voice, “George, they keep coming in faster. Our estimates are a thousand, probably more. That’s dead people, George. I’m not talking sick people. I’m talking dead people.”

  Mack leaned toward the screen. “What’s the program saying?”

  “It’s not following a predictable course.” Nesbitt hit several command keys. The screen lit up in a multi-colored map of Reno. He pointed at the screen. “This makes no sense for person to person spread. With the quarantine and the masks dispensing, we shouldn’t be seeing such a continued exponential growth in cases. It should be plateauing. But it’s not. We’re doubling our confirmed dead every twelve hours.”

  “It has a two to four day incubation period, Jeremy. These could be infected people from before the quarantine.”

  Nesbitt shook his head. “Not this many. And not this spread pattern. Look at this.” He pointed at the map. “There are cases in every single sector of town. That doesn’t make sense. You’d expect there to be clusters, but not an even spread across town. It’s like someone is methodically spreading the disease throughout the city.”

  “You mean like a Typhoid Mary?” Mack shook his head. “Not possible. The duration of illness is too short. Once infected, or at least, showing signs of infection, your Typhoid Mary would be dead within forty-eight hours. Certainly incapacitated within twenty-four. She’d be hard-pressed to infect half of Reno in that time.”

  Bob Sparks, Mack’s deputy director of Public Health, walked up. “George, your face!” Sparks searched his boss’s mangled visage with a look of unmistakable pity. Mack, despite his bad temper and acid tongue, had been a friend for years.

  “Well, don’t just stand there gaping. What is it?” Mack growled.

  “We’ve opened two more PODs. At Hug High School and the convention center. They’re processing two hundred an hour, but it’s not enough.”

  “Two hundred an hour is not enough?”

  “I’m telling you,” said Nesbitt. “This is not spreading like any predictable person to person disease.”

  Sparks nodded in agreement. “We’ve got so many sick, now, that it’s impacting public services.”

  “What public services?”

  And then, as if by divine explanation, the power suddenly went out.

  The room plunged into darkness, every light and computer screen going out at the same time. After a moment, Mack’s eyes adjusted enough to see the light through the window casting a gray pall across the room.

  “Shit,” said Nesbitt. “The programs!”

  “Where are the back-up generators?” Mack asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Sparks.

  “You don’t know?” Mack was incredulous. “We’re an emergency management center. We’re supposed to have back-up generators.”

  “We have them. I just don’t know why they’re not working.”

  “Is City Hall out?”

  “I’ll find out.” Nesbitt crossed to one of the telephones. He pulled a card out of his pocket, looked at a phone number on it, and then dialed.

  “What’s that?” Mack asked.

  Nesbitt held up the card. “It’s a priority access code. You’ve got one, too. It’ll get you through when all circuits are busy.”

  “It’s good to know we have some priority around here. Even if we don’t have any goddamn power.”

  Nesbitt threw a brief smile over his shoulder before turning his back. Mack could hear him speaking in low tones into the phone.

  “George?”

  Mack turned to the hesitant face of the deputy public health officer.

  “I don’t mean to make things worse,” Sparks said. “But we’ve got another urgent problem.”

  “I’d like to know when we have a non-urgent problem.”

  “People are getting hungry,” Sparks went on. “We’ve had forty-eight hours of quarantine. Stores are closed. People are stuck in their houses...”

  Mack understood. “And you’re worried they’ll come crawling out of their homes like cockroaches when they run out of food.”

  Sparks nodded. “It’ll torpedo our shelter-in-place order.”

  Mack rubbed the uninjured side of his face wearily. He looked up as Nesbitt returned from the phone.

  “City Hall’s on backup power, too,” Nesbitt announced. “Fire’s knocked out one of the downtown transformers. They think it shouldn’t take long to get power back up and running.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. We need someone to get on our generator problem, because I have a feeling we’re in for a long ride here.”

  “Which brings us back to the food problem,” said Sparks.

  “You’d think people would have more than two days’ worth of food in their houses,” said Nesbitt.

  “In America?” Mack asked. “When there’s a twenty-four-hour grocery store open around the corner and a McDonald’s at every freeway interchange?”

  “Can we get more military rations?” asked Sparks.

  Nesbitt’s shoulders rose a fraction. “Sure, but we still have the same distribution problem. The postal service is crappin
g out. Despite what Postmaster Patton said on TV, the mail carriers have families, and some of them are getting sick. They’re having a hard time keeping people on the job.”

  “Have the masks been distributed?”

  “Just the one hundred thousand, as far as I can tell.”

  “In a city with a population of five hundred thousand.” Mack shook his head painfully. “That’s not good, Jeremy. We need to get more masks out.”

  “That’s obvious, but how?” Nesbitt tapped a finger against lips, thinking. “What about calling in the US military?”

  Mack shook his head. “That would take a request from the governor. Besides, it would take at least twenty-four hours to mobilize them.”

  “I don’t see a better solution, do you? I’ll call Atlanta. They can call Washington. We’ll see if we can speed things up.”

  Mack watched expressionlessly as the CDC officer crossed to the telephone. It hurt too much to move his face, but more than that, the dread that had visited him over the past week, which had now seemed to have taken permanent root in his gut, made a smile seem an inappropriate expression, a complete denial of the reality that was unfolding before him. His eyes drifted around the room to the people working tirelessly, utterly focused, their faces bent over clipboards now that their computers had gone down.

  All these people, Mack thought. All these good people.

  And then the lights came back on.

  When Harry Kincade got back to his hotel room, Ann was waiting for him.

  “How’d you get in here?” he asked.

  “I’m still your wife.”

  “Ex-wife,” he corrected.

  “Not officially.” It was true. They had been separated for years, but Harry had never signed the divorce papers, and for some reason, she hadn’t fought him on it. He’d given up trying to figure out why.