The guardsman stared at him, and Alan suppressed the urge to stare back. He knew a van driver would never engage in a stare-down with a soldier. Sweat trickled down his sides under the bunny suit.
“Stay on the freeway. Avoid the surface streets as much as you can.” The soldier gestured at the empty freeway over his shoulder. “We control most of the freeways, but the surface streets are another matter.” He looked at Alan and into the back of the empty van. “Do you need an escort? Cesar Chavez Avenue isn’t secure.”
Alan shook his head. White Memorial Hospital was right in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. It didn’t surprise him that the avenue wasn’t secure, but he had no plans to go anywhere near it. “I’ve radioed over to their dispatch. They say that it’s clear right now.”
The soldier shrugged. “Clear isn’t the word I’d have used.” He looked toward downtown. The air was laden with smoke so thick, the city’s skyscrapers stood out only as shadows. “I wouldn’t want to be going in there alone, if I were you.”
“Why is it so smoky?”
“One of the oil refineries is burning. There’s no water to fight the fire because the pumping stations are down.”
“That looks like more than one refinery fire.”
“That’s because it is. There’s tons of fires down there.” The soldier gestured at the great lowland sink that was central Los Angeles. “City services are out. People are burning their garbage. They’re catching their houses on fire. It’s crazy as hell.” He looked at Alan meaningfully. “Are you sure you don’t want an escort?”
Alan shook his head again. “Dispatch says there’s no need.”
The soldier didn’t believe it. Alan could see it in his eyes, but Alan could also see that the soldier had no desire to venture onto the surface streets of downtown Los Angeles. He waved Alan through.
The Santa Monica Freeway was eerily empty. No cars except a few public service vehicles speeding by with military escort. Alan floored the gas pedal, even though the smoke was thicker here. He was afraid the Guard would pull him over and turn him back.
He didn’t see the wreck until he almost crashed into it. Two overturned vehicles and a smattering of rescue trucks blocked all four lanes.
Alan’s reaction was instantaneous. He jammed on the brakes. The van shuddered and moaned, miraculously coming to a halt not ten feet from the nearest fire truck. Several rescue workers looked up in horror.
Just beyond the fire truck, a police cruiser and an enormous black Escalade lay upside down. Alan could make out several emergency workers using some type of hydraulic spreader on the crumpled cop car. No one attended to the Escalade. White smoke rose from both vehicles.
Alan didn’t know what to do. The crash and the rescue vehicles blocked the freeway. There was no way he could get around.
A police officer detached himself from the rescue effort and marched over to the van. “What the fuck are you driving like that for? You could have killed us!” The officer looked at the side of the van and then at Alan. His eyes were cold. “Where are you going?”
Alan thought quickly. He was now far from White Memorial, but he wasn’t certain what other hospitals lay in this direction. “Cedars-Sinai,” he guessed. “Need to pick up some docs.”
“They must not like you much.”
Alan stared at him, confused.
“Because it’s fucking dangerous out here, man,” the cop went on. “You should have an escort.”
“I was told the route to Cedars was secure.”
“There’s nothing secure around here. I’d advise you get your ass back to County and arrange for some security. Otherwise, you’ll be as dead as those fuckers in the Escalade.”
Alan felt sick. He looked over at the overturned Escalade. Two motionless figures hung suspended inside. “How long will the road be closed?”
The officer looked at him like he was crazy. “Hours. But you’re not sitting around here on the freeway waiting. We’ve got too much to take care of to worry about you.”
“I’ve got to get to Cedars.”
There was a sudden shout from the wreckage site, and then a snapping, metallic sound. The police officer whipped his head around as the upended police car collapsed in on itself. He turned briefly to Alan, his voice harsh. “You’re not going to Cedars. You’re going back to County. Whoever sent you should know better than to send an unarmed man out here.” He turned and ran back to the wreck.
Alan watched as the firefighters struggled to free the cruiser’s occupant. Something had gone wrong in the rescue attempt, and the firefighters had lost control of the vehicle. Now, the driver compartment lay crumpled beyond any possibility of human survival.
Alan’s stomach turned. He couldn’t wait. The gas gauge’s empty light glowed bright red in the van’s display.
He threw the van into reverse and swung it around. He didn’t have enough gas to take the long way home on other freeways that might still be open. He only had enough gas to take the shortest route.
Which meant Wilshire Boulevard. The long arterial ran parallel to the 10 and would take him directly to Beverley Hills. He peered out the windshield at the darkness on either side of the freeway, trying to pinpoint where he was. He took the first exit he came to.
There was no sign of police or the military, just an empty on-ramp, closed off at its base by a series of wooden roadblocks. Alan pressed the gas pedal, felt the van vibrate as it gathered speed, and then rammed the barrier, bracing himself as the roadblocks exploded into a million pieces.
He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. The industrial district was deserted, a smoky ghost land of graffiti-covered buildings and rundown strip malls. With a sinking feeling, Alan noticed the shattered window fronts and burnt out buildings. The air reeked of scorched wood.
He thought, there are 18 million people in this city, but I don’t see a soul. Where did they all go?
He pulled the van onto a side street and drove slowly down the middle, looking for a sign that would tell him exactly where he was. The smoke was so thick that even the air inside the van burned his eyes and throat.
He understood why. Whole blocks smoldered. A wave of agony washed through him. He had sent Brooke out into this yesterday.
He pulled the cell phone out of his pocket and checked the display for signal.
Later, he would blame this momentary distraction for not seeing the Monte Carlo until it pulled alongside him. The driver honked the horn, and Alan found himself staring at the passenger side door and something worse: a young man with no mask—and the biggest handgun Alan had ever seen.
Thirty-Three
Jim Carson gave up on wearing his respirator. The N95’s dense weave made him feel claustrophobic, and now, after not wearing it for a full twenty-four hours and not getting sick, he decided he would never wear it again.
Because he was immune. He knew it with certainty. The others were all dead, but he was alive.
A strange tingle rushed through his blood as he scanned the ICU, counting the plague patients. The dying rolled in like a tsunami, more and more, each with the same dreadful outcome.
And yet, he lived.
He walked over to the nurse, the young, sexy one at the desk. It was hard to tell with that white bunny suit on, but she had a great set of tits. Before the plague, he’d admired them from afar, certain that they were fake. But now, with every health care worker dressed the same, she looked no different than any other person. It’s a crying shame, he thought, to cover up all that glory.
He must have been staring, because she said, “Dr. Carson, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He wanted to say her name, but he couldn’t remember it, so instead, he leaned on the counter to show that he knew her, that she was more than just a nameless nursing face. He smiled at her.
She backed away from him uneasily. “You should wear a mask,” she said.
“Why? I haven’t caught anything yet.”
“But you could.”
“Sure,
I could,” he said easily. “But I won’t. Not everyone’s going to catch this disease.”
She eyed him skeptically, but he could see the curiosity on her face. “You think you’re immune?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I’d like to have some of what’s circulating in your blood, because so far as I can tell, everyone who gets this thing ends up the same way.” Her eyes flitted to the taped-up garbage bags in Room 1, waiting in a pile for orderlies to come haul them away.
Carson looked at her in surprise. His blood! He had been so busy reveling in his good fortune that he hadn’t thought that maybe something about his blood explained his immunity. His mouth stretched into a grin that was so unfamiliar, his face began to ache.
Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Immunity had to be in his blood somewhere, some antibody he had that these other people didn’t, something amazing that set him apart.
He felt a sudden, intense desire to get to the lab, to call the microbiologists, if they were still alive, and do some investigating. If there was an antibody there, he’d find it. And once he did—well, the implications were enormous. He could win a Nobel Prize!
But first things first. He turned the full wattage of his smile on the nurse. “So, you want some of my blood, do you?”
“Well, yes, whatever’s in it that’s keeping you healthy.”
He made a show of considering this, and then he leaned toward her. “Well, today may be your lucky day.”
“It’s the cats, Harry!” Mack shouted into the phone. He stood in the parking lot of the Washoe County Department of Public Health, trying to project his voice over the roar of departing military trucks.
Kincade sounded annoyed. “Where the hell are you?”
“In the parking lot. I’m on a sat phone. The other lines are too unreliable.” Mack cupped his hand around the satellite telephone’s receiver. “It’s the fucking cats, Harry.”
“What’s the fucking cats?”
“Your vector. The cats are spreading it.” Mack felt a wave of excitement sweep through him. This was the first possible break, the first possible good news in days of ever-escalating bad news. “Cats have been documented to spread pneumonic plague. That’s why we’re seeing the nonstop rise in the numbers of infected. The goddamn cats are violating our quarantines.”
Kincade sounded unimpressed. “Great. Kill the cats.”
Mack looked at the departing trucks, inside of which were a hundred National Guardsmen whose missions had abruptly changed over the last hour. A kernel of unease formed in his gut, “We’re already doing that.”
“Great. Was there anything else?”
Mack’s unease blossomed into full-blown anxiety. He found himself saying, almost pleadingly, “This is big news, Harry. I think that if we kill the vectors and enforce our quarantine, we’ll see a plateau in the numbers of infected. I think the cats might be the key to this thing.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone, weighty and unpleasant. “George, I don’t think that cats are the key to this thing. I think a goddamn vaccine is the key to this thing.”
“But we don’t have a vaccine.”
“Yes, we do.”
“We have a vaccine?” Mack was incredulous. “And you didn’t fucking tell me?”
“It’s effective in mice. We haven’t tested it in humans.”
“But you’re going to test in humans.”
“Yes, we’ve got two thousand experimental doses from the Vaccine Pilot Plant.”
Mack did a rapid mental calculation. “Great. Send me five hundred doses. We’ll vaccinate our health care workers and our key public employees.”
There was another pause, longer this time. Mack could hear the crackling static of the satellite connection.
“I’m afraid those doses are already allocated. We anticipate another ten-thousand doses available in the next week or so. We’ll try to get you some of those.”
Mack’s voice rose in disbelief. “People are dying here by the thousands, Harry. By the thousands.”
“The vaccine takes several weeks to take effect. It’ll be useless in the midst of a fast-moving epidemic. We need to allocate appropriately, to vaccinate people who might actually benefit from the vaccine.”
“You’re vaccinating the East Coast, aren’t you?”
“Vaccine wouldn’t help you now, George.”
“It’d help the survivors of the first wave of disease, and you know it. If we can enforce the quarantines, control the cat population, then we have a fighting chance of containing this thing. And then, with a vaccinated population—people would survive this thing!”
“George, you’re letting your emotions override your public health training.”
Mack stopped cold. He looked out over the city, to the darkened horizon near downtown that had never entirely cleared after the fires. He looked over at the public health building behind him. He looked at the now empty parking lot, all military vehicles cleared, off on a task that Mack knew had now been reduced to near irrelevance.
The federal government had a vaccine. And they weren’t giving him any.
Helpless anger swept through him. “Goddamn you, Harry—” he began, but his words echoed emptily in the receiver.
Kincade had already disconnected.
The young man had the letters “LA” tattooed beneath his earlobe, and Alan wondered fleetingly why anyone would want the Dodgers logo permanently inked on his neck when a baseball hat would advertise his fan status just as well. But then again, the man had a lot of tattoos, large ornate letters on his arms, and the number “187” tattooed on both ring fingers.
He tapped on the van’s driver’s side window with his gun, miming a roll-down motion. When Alan complied, the young man asked, “You lost, man?”
The van idled against the curb where the Monte Carlo had pinned it. Three other men stood at varying distances behind the tattooed man, eyeing Alan watchfully.
Alan knew there was no point in answering, but he gave one anyway, his voice flat. “The freeway’s closed.”
The tattooed man nodded sympathetically. “Had to drive through the hood.”
Alan’s mind spun. He had nothing that the men would want except his iPhone, which he refused to give up. And he’d be damned if he offered them his wallet. He said, “I don’t have any money.”
The tattooed man looked surprised, then laughed bitterly. “I don’t want your money, man,” he said. “You people always think we want money.” He shook his head, disgusted. “Need something else, something you people don’t seem to want to share.”
Alan looked at him, baffled. He realized the other men had gathered round the van and were peering in the windows. They turned to their leader and shook their heads.
The tattooed man muttered something under his breath, which seemed to trigger something in his chest. He began to cough, his hand in front of his mouth, the tattooed “187” visible on his finger. Behind him, Alan saw one of the other men flinch.
The tattooed man recovered himself, but the mocking smile was gone. When he spoke, his words sounded muffled, as though his vocal cords were momentarily muted by phlegm.
He pointed his gun at Alan’s face. “Give me the fucking mask.”
Realization dawned on Alan. None of the men wore masks. Of course not. None of the men had masks. Alan wondered if anyone in the neighborhood had masks.
“Give me the fucking mask, man,” said the tattooed man. He looked weaker somehow, but he held the gun steady, aiming it at Alan’s head.
Two ways to die, thought Alan. Which one was faster?
He pulled the N95 from his face and threw it out the window.
The tattooed man grabbed at it in mid-air, missed, and then scrambled to collect it off the cement. When he stood up, he grinned at Alan, but Alan could see that the effort had cost him. He clutched the mask and pointed the gun again at Alan as though he would pull the trigger.
“Don’t kill me,” Alan said.
The tattooed man tilted his head sideways, regarding Alan with bloodshot eyes. Suddenly, he stepped forward, put his nose directly in front of Alan’s, and let loose, a huge hacking cough, murderous spittle flying all over Alan’s naked face.
The tattooed man smiled, the momentary satisfaction of years of rage and revenge flashing in his eyes.
“Too late, man. I just did.”
Thirty-Four
The tattooed man shoved the gun in his waistband and pulled the N95 over his face.
Alan wondered what possible utility the mask could have for the man now, but he said nothing. Instead, he sat motionlessly, the man’s spittle warm and damp against his skin.
The tattooed man pulled the gun back out of his waistband and pointed it at Alan. “You want me to put you out of your misery?” He leaned forward, the strain obvious in his voice.
He moved the barrel of the gun until it was only inches from Alan’s face, but there was no pleasure in his eyes now, only a grim sort of hatred. The man coughed, a great, body-shaking attack that doubled him over and left him incapacitated. The other men looked at each other, wincing.
The tattooed man seemed to sense this. He waved the gun at them unsteadily, his voice choked. “Get in the car, you motherfuckers.”
They looked at him, at the gun, and then again at each other.
“I’ll shoot you motherfuckers,” he threatened. The other men reluctantly climbed in the Monte Carlo, but they left the windows open, their faces turned to the outside air. The tattooed man leaned heavily on the hood of the car as he rounded to the passenger side. He sank down into the seat, the exertion of his efforts draining him. He stared straight ahead, his chest heaving.
The Monte Carlo pulled backwards out of the van’s path, and Alan wondered fleetingly if that was it, they’d just leave him to die in his own certain hell.
But his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the Monte Carlo’s engine idling. The car backed up parallel to his, the tattooed man leaning forward in the passenger seat, his reddened eyes fixed with frank hatred on Alan’s face. For a vanishing second, Alan watched as the man’s chest rose and fell.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 26
