“Do you really think the hospitals are any different in the valley?” Etta asked.
“They have to be. It can’t all be like Los Angeles.” Susan took one hand off the wheel long enough to gingerly touch her neck. “He saved our lives, Etta.”
The old woman eyed the dried blood and raw welts neck with something like shame. “I’m sorry I’m not any help,” she said quietly.
Susan glanced at her in surprise. “Of course, you’re of help.”
“How’s that?”
“You know the Ridge Route,” said Susan. “And besides, you’re still alive.”
Fifty-Five
Fisk drew the sheet over the child’s face. “You can take this one.”
Harr bent to lift the little body, cradling it against his white-suited chest. He didn’t look at the child’s face, because he was afraid it might be familiar, and he didn’t think he could bear it. Something terrible was happening in his heart, a tightening in his chest that he knew had nothing to do with the respirator.
He took the child to the loading bay and gently placed her on the plastic, thankful that the generator lights barely reached the disposal staging area. It was less heart-wrenching to wrap up a child’s corpse when you couldn’t see the face. But still, Harr felt something cracking inside, a fissure widening each time he took a body outside and cut the plastic.
At first, Fisk had recorded each passing, meticulously noting names and addresses in a paper ledger, but soon, the number of dying made such careful notation impossible. If the medical director knew the name, he wrote it. If he didn’t, he merely wrote some other identifying features: baby girl, brown hair, blue eyes, age 6 months?
Harr paused, the sting of fatigue causing his eyes to tear, but he didn’t wipe away the water that seeped down his cheeks. His hands were gloved, and Fisk had been stern: there was a shortage of protective gear, so Harr was not to waste anything—certainly not the double-layer gloves, which needed to be worn an entire shift.
Fisk’s white-suited figure detached itself from the crowd in front of the hospital and trudged over to the loading dock. “The numbers are falling off, John. You ought to go take a nap while you can,” the elderly physician said. “I expect things will get worse again when the sun rises.”
Harr peered at the crowd in front of the hospital. He wondered how many he and the cowboy had disposed of. It had to have been at least two hundred, which suggested the small town of Burns was in bad shape. But he kept this thought to himself as he gazed at Fisk. Harr couldn’t make out medical director’s face behind the spacesuit helmet, but there was something troubling about the way the doctor stood, as though his center of balance kept shifting.
“You need some rest, too,” said Harr.
The doctor shrugged. “I haven’t been hauling bodies. I’ll be fine.”
Harr tried to figure where the last truck was. His partner, the grieving cowboy, had taken over driving, switching between two trucks, hauling off one load of bodies while Harr stacked another.
“Don’t worry about your friend,” Fisk went on. “I’ll have him rest, too, when he comes back.”
Harr peered at the doctor’s shielded face but found it impossible to read his expression in the dim light. He didn’t know how the older man could tolerate the workload he’d been shouldering. “You really should try to get some rest, too.”
Fisk shrugged again. “I’ll get my rest soon enough,” he said.
And then, the doctor trudged back to the crowd beneath the generator-powered construction lights, his white spacesuit weaving ever so slightly, an oddly brilliant flash against the thick black night.
The Ridge Route was bathed in darkness, the Oldsmobile’s twin headlamps the only light for miles.
Susan inched along the ancient road’s tight curves, threading the car between overgrown shrubbery on one side and the drop off on the other.
Beside her Etta snored quietly, slumped against the door. Even the man in back had fallen into a fitful sleep, punctuated only now and then by a groan when Susan took a corner too quickly.
Susan didn’t dare stop to nurse him. She knew what he needed was not in the car but elsewhere, just as she knew any delay could take his life.
She was very afraid he might die anyway. His pulse raced like a sprinter’s. It was only a waiting game until she somehow got him antibiotics, or his body finally gave out.
Loneliness pressed in on her. The car’s sweeping headlamps turned and turned, but never found anything except crumbling road and shadowed chaparral.
She had no idea which direction she was going nor how far she had come. The road was unmarked except for one sign that she had seen earlier, an old decaying posting that read:
RIDGE ROUTE MAXIMUM SPEED LIMIT
15 MPH
The emergency management coordinator’s voice crackled over the radio on Mack’s desk. “Sierra Power says nothing for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Mack blinked and shook his head. He’d radioed over to the Incident Command Center because he’d been too tired to cross the parking lot to get an update in person. What he hadn’t expected was to fall asleep while waiting for a response.
He was becoming dangerously fatigued. Mack stood up from his chair and picked up the radio off his desk.
“You ought to shut things down over there and come over here if you plan to keep working tonight,” the coordinator’s voice went on.
Mack understood. They couldn’t spare the diesel to run the generators for both the public health building and the incident command center, and since there were hardly any public health workers left, it made sense to transfer their remaining operations over to the other building.
“Roger. We’ll be right over.” He hooked the radio to his belt.
He wondered where the hell Nesbitt was. The CDC officer had given Mack the latest casualty estimates earlier in the day, but Mack hadn’t seen him since then.
He rubbed a hand through his matted hair and wandered unsteadily from his office to the War Room.
Two-hundred thousand dead. Mack was so tired, he could barely wrap his mind around the figure. It seemed infinite, like the stretch of the universe.
There has to be an end to this, he thought. It can’t go on forever.
The War Room was dim and empty, the dry erase markings on the board days old now, abandoned as the public health workers had one by one fallen sick or disappeared.
Mack looked at the blue and red scrawled figures and was stunned to see “INDEX CASE” at the top of the board. He had forgotten in the ensuing catastrophe that there had ever been an index case, that there had once been a Japanese boy who had been sick with something no one had ever seen before, and that this single index case had led to this cataclysmic disaster.
It seemed a lifetime ago. A different life altogether.
Mack spied a pile of papers next to Nesbitt’s laptop, handwritten reports from National Guard troops listing names, addresses, and dates of death. Without the help of the other EIS officers, Nesbitt had fallen behind. The stack was nearly a foot tall.
Mack figured the CDC officer had finally given up and was trying to get some shut-eye. He walked the dim hallways, opening doors and checking offices, until he came to Pincher’s office. A soft wheezing floated out of the darkness.
“Nesbitt?” Mack flicked on the switch. Fluorescent light flooded the room. A figure on the couch threw up a defensive hand, shielding against the brightness.
Mack’s heart slammed in his chest. Nesbitt lay huddled beneath an army blanket, shivering uncontrollably, his blood-specked mask cast beside him on the floor.
“Ah, fuck!” Mack burst out. “Ah, fuck, Jeremy. Goddamn!”
He took a step forward, but Nesbitt whispered, “No, George. Don’t.”
Mack hardly recognized Nesbitt. His eyes had sunk back into his skull, and his face was etched with pain.
A horrible realization dawned on Mack. Nesbitt had been sick earlier. The dark shadows beneath h
is eyes hadn’t been exhaustion. They had been DRYP, taking root and spreading, the assault on Nesbitt’s body already begun.
“I’m going to die, George,” Nesbitt whispered.
Sudden, overwhelming refusal surged through Mack’s veins. “Not here, you’re not.” He heaved the younger man off the couch and dragged him across the room. Nesbitt was too weak to hold his legs straight. They flopped behind him as Mack manhandled him through the building to the front door.
In the parking lot, Mack let the young man slump to the ground, answering Nesbitt’s whispered protests with a breathless, “Be quiet, Jeremy.” He crossed the dark parking lot to the department’s pickup truck.
Mack stuck the keys in the ignition with shaking hands and thanked God when the engine turned over and caught. He pulled the truck over to the entrance, the headlights pinning Nesbitt’s humped figure with their harsh glare.
“Don’t take me to the hospital,” Nesbitt pleaded.
“I’m not.” Mack shoved the younger man into passenger seat, steeling himself against Nesbitt’s protesting groans.
Mack circled around and climbed into the driver’s seat. He felt as though there were twin bands around his body, one squeezing his chest, the other constricting his throat. He realized that he was crying, that tears were tracking down his beat-up face.
Nesbitt watched him through dull eyes. “Where are you taking me, then?”
“Home.” Mack put the truck in drive.
Fifty-Six
Harr woke to a strange stillness. Faint sunlight filtered through the blinds, washing the small office in pale yellow. He blinked for a second and then sat bolt upright on the hard vinyl couch.
Shit! He’d overslept.
He jumped to his feet and hastily pulled on his bunny suit and the pair of gloves he had worn the night before. He wondered why Fisk hadn’t woken him. Mid-morning shadows stretched across the office floor.
A sense of foreboding gripped him as he ventured out into the administrative wing. Not a soul stirred in the hallways. He veered toward the patient care areas, bypassing vacant nurses’ desks to peer directly into the open doorways of the patient rooms. It was silent everywhere.
For a perplexed moment, Harr wondered if the hospital had been evacuated, but he couldn’t imagine why. The previous evening, there had been at least a hundred people waiting for beds out in the parking lot.
He found Doctor Fisk sitting alone at the ICU clerk’s desk, his spacesuit helmet tossed on the counter beside him.
Fisk greeted him wearily. “Why are you still here? The generators are out of diesel.”
The doctor looked like hell. His skin was the color of ash, and although he’d removed his helmet, he hadn’t bothered to detach the belt pack. A hose hung like a tail from his waist.
“Where is everybody?” Harr asked.
“You can’t run a hospital without power and supplies. Once the last of the inpatients died this morning, we shut the hospital down.”
Harr suddenly noticed the piles of garbage stacked in the ICU’s corners, the sheetless beds, the dismal gray light. “What about the people in the parking lot?”
The medical director shook his head. “We told them to go home and let their family members take care of them. They’ll do better there than here. We don’t even have enough people left to dispose of the bodies.”
Harr struggled to process the news. He wondered what had happened to Jess, if he, too, had either succumbed to the disease or given up in the face of an impossible task.
A coughing fit suddenly seized Fisk. The doctor doubled over, burying his face in the neck-hole of his bunny suit. Instinctively, Harr reached out to steady him.
Fisk flinched and pulled away. “Don’t touch me! I’ve got plague, you idiot. You’ll die if you touch me.”
Fisk’s lips were the same bluish tinge Lola’s had been. Without a word, Harr reached around the smaller man’s torso and heaved him out of the chair. The doctor gasped as Harr hauled him across the floor to one of the beds.
Harr tried to think of something to do for the doctor. He looked for a blanket and couldn’t find one. He wandered from room to room, looking for water or food, but found neither. Finally, in the last room, he found a box of tissues stuffed in the back of a drawer. He took it back and placed it on the bed beside the doctor.
Fisk glanced at it and closed his eyes. “John, there’s nothing more to do here. You should go while you still can.”
“I will,” said Harr quietly, but he didn’t go. Instead, he pulled over the clerk’s chair, sat with his head bowed, and waited for the doctor to die.
Mack opened all the curtains in his house, trying to let sunlight in, but the living room still looked gloomy. Nesbitt lay in the shadows, huddled under a blanket on the couch, a large metal bowl on the floor beside him.
Mack cast an anxious glance at him. Nesbitt had finally stopped vomiting, but the stench of stomach acid and bile lingered in the air.
He cracked the window wider and walked back to the kitchen to check the camping stove. Mack took the kettle off the flame and poured steaming water over a packet of Lipton’s Cup-a-Soup. After letting the mixture cool a few minutes, he carried the bowl to the living room.
The CDC officer looked at the soup and said with deep weariness, “There’s no point.”
“Drink,” said Mack.
Nesbitt sighed, opened his mouth, and accepted a small spoonful, but the movement triggered another bout of hacking. Soup sprayed everywhere.
Mack put the spoon back into bowl and set it on the coffee table next to him.
He was worried about Nesbitt’s breathing. Mack counted twenty-six breaths a minute, much more than a normal person needed, but not enough, apparently, for Nesbitt. The CDC officer’s lips had turned an ugly purplish black.
Mack stood up and crossed to the spare bedroom. He pulled one of the pillows off the guest bed and brought it Nesbitt, before carrying Nesbitt’s soup-and-sputum-covered pillow to the backyard. Mack shucked the soiled case and put it on a pile to be burned later.
Then, he went back and sat down beside Nesbitt. Mack watched the young man sleep, wondering if he had called his mother, and did he have a girlfriend? What about brothers and sisters?
Mack realized that he hadn’t really known Nesbitt at all, at least in terms of personal details. But Mack knew Nesbitt in other ways, in the ways that really mattered: his dedication, his loyalty, his courage, his intellect. These were the things that one saw in action, and he and Nesbitt had shared a lot of action, a lifetime of action, in the past few weeks.
Nesbitt groaned. His eyes fluttered open, saw Mack, and closed. “You should have left me at the office.”
“You’d have made all the other public health workers sick.”
Nesbitt shook his head weakly. “There are no other public health workers. How many dead?”
Mack felt it again, the odd squeezing in his throat. “I don’t know, Jeremy. That was your job, remember?”
“Too many,” said Nesbitt, his voice fading. “I think it will be everyone.”
Mack frowned. “Not everyone. Once they get the vaccine—”
“There is no vaccine. It failed.” Nesbitt’s voice was barely audible. “The CDC doesn’t want people to know.”
Mack stared at his younger colleague, slack-jawed. “They’ve got nothing else?”
Nesbitt shook his head without opening his eyes.
Of course, thought Mack. It all fell together. The Continuity of Operations Plan, the decentralization of power. Mack had thought it had all been rumor, but he’d been wrong.
A silent shudder wracked Mack’s body. He suddenly understood why Nesbitt had toiled so tenaciously at recording deaths and death patterns—recording, in fact, the whole fateful disaster—even when he must have known the cataclysmic scope of the pandemic. He’d persisted, Mack realized, in order to create a road map that survivors could one day use to determine how a disease that had been around for millennia had reared its hea
d again and done what it had never managed before: to alter the fate of homo sapiens, forever.
Fifty-Seven
The glass shattered, but the sound barely registered in Susan’s brain. She only heard the cattle stirring fitfully in their pens, their enormous bodies brushing against the long metal fences.
She shot a glance at the Oldsmobile before knocking out the rest of the window. Both Etta and the man slept, undisturbed by Susan’s attempt at breaking and entering.
She placed her polar fleece jacket onto the windowpane’s remaining sharp edges and climbed through, hesitating for a moment, once inside, to adjust to the gloomy light. A long steel bench lined one of the workroom’s walls. Across from it, several cabinets and a refrigerator lined the other. Susan unlocked the door from the inside and threw it open.
She forced herself to focus. Her thirst was making her dizzy again, but there wasn’t time to look for more water. The man was dying. She was certain of it. He hardly made any noise, anymore.
She pulled open the cabinets one by one until she found antibiotics. She didn’t know all the names, which didn’t surprise her because she knew that veterinarians often used drug analogues, but many of the names she recognized. She selected one, placed it on the bench, and then emptied the other drawers, astounded by the bounty of what would have been only a small stock in earlier times, but which to Susan’s sleep-deprived eyes constituted the greatest collection of medical supplies she had ever seen: bottles of sterile water and saline, syringes, needles, clean towels. So many things she so desperately needed, things she hadn’t seen in what seemed like eons.
Tears stung the corners of her eyes. She shook her head forcefully, unwilling to deviate from her primary goal.
She walked outside and eyed the aluminum-clad barn from the front, then tried the enormous sliding door. Miraculously, it opened with a shriek. There were no animals inside, just an enormous concrete floor, may times larger than a basketball court, on which were parked an assortment of trucks and farming equipment. In the gloom, Susan could barely make out the office that she had just broken into. Bright morning sun spilled a wedge of light onto the concrete.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 39
