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

by Scheuring, R. A.

  Susan knew she had to stop. The truck’s gas tank was nearly empty.

  But she didn’t know where she’d find fuel. The farmsteads in the northern San Joaquin Valley were few and far between. They consisted mostly of individual barns surrounded by tall chain-link fences that were topped with razor wire. Corporate farming, she thought with dismay. Not a farmhouse for miles.

  “You never told me where we’re going,” Etta said.

  Susan started. In her preoccupation, she’d blocked out Etta’s presence beside her.

  “We’re going to my parents’ place.” Susan slowed at a crossroads, looked for a sign, and found a numerical road marker that wasn’t particularly helpful. Frowning, she put her foot back on the gas pedal. “They have a farm about three or four hours north of here in a place called Liberty Valley.”

  Etta let out a small hmmph. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Most people haven’t. It’s off the beaten track, a couple of mountain ridges northeast from Napa.”

  “Is it safe?”

  The truck rumbled around a gentle curve. Long shadows from the almond trees stretched across the two-lane road. “I don’t think any place is safe, but there aren’t a lot of people there. It’s an agricultural valley.”

  Etta silently peered out the windshield. Susan knew what she was thinking. If the San Joaquin Valley was out of water and power, why would a farm in a remote Northern California valley be any different?

  “My parents’ farm is on a river, Etta. We won’t have water problems.”

  Outside, the dense leafiness of almond orchards gave way to the open, green expanse of alfalfa fields. In the distance, Susan could just make out another farmstead. She squinted anxiously, trying to determine its size. With the last of the daylight, she could see a metal-sided building. Closer in, next to what looked like a copse of eucalyptus trees, was a ranch house.

  “Bingo,” she whispered.

  Etta peered uneasily at the buildings. “Why are you slowing down?”

  “We’re almost out of fuel.” Susan said. “Some of these bigger farmsteads have diesel tanks.”

  She slowed to a crawl and stared into the ranch house’s darkened windows, looking for the twitch of a curtain or a flicker of light. Nothing.

  Etta shifted anxiously in her seat. “Maybe we should find another farm.”

  “Shhh.” A fuel tank stood at the far end of the driveway, next to an unhitched trailer full of white PVC irrigation piping. To Susan’s immense relief, the tank was an old-fashioned gravity-driven system. She drove directly to it.

  “What if someone is in the house?” Etta cast an anxious glance backwards.

  Susan opened the backpack on the seat. “There’s no one there, Etta.” She withdrew the handgun and held it out, handle first, to the old lady.

  “Then why are you giving me that?” Etta asked.

  Susan placed the cool steel in the old woman’s veiny hands. “Just in case I’m wrong.”

  Sixty-One

  Harry Kincade was shit-faced. Although not a regular drinker, he wasn’t averse to drinking the hard stuff when situation dictated, and boy, the situation really dictated. He’d been drinking all day.

  Ann gazed at him with a composed expression. “Harry, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

  Harry took a slug and lifted his Styrofoam cup at the monitors. “I’ve had enough of that. It’s pointless.”

  They’d watched an endless procession of meetings featuring a dizzying array of masked faces. The facilities at Mount Weather have to be enormous to house that many people doing so much futile fucking work, Harry thought blearily. He sank down into a chair and tossed back the last of his scotch. When he reached for a refill, Ann pulled the bottle from his grasp.

  “Bar’s closed, Harry. We need to talk. How long do you think this epidemic will last?”

  He looked up at her through bloodshot eyes. “Is that an indirect way of asking when we can go outside?”

  She stood with her arms crossed, peering down at him with a look halfway between exasperation and utter seriousness. “Well, yes, ultimately, it is. I’m guessing these facilities have enough food, water, and fuel for a month or two, but not longer. Do you think the epidemic will pass before then?”

  He let out a weary sigh. “PULSE predicts the worst will be over in a couple weeks, but that doesn’t mean the disease is going away. There’s an animal reservoir, Ann. DRYP may go dormant in humans for a while, but it’ll erupt again to wipe out whatever survivors there are left.”

  “Except the immune ones.”

  He tossed his cup at the garbage can and missed. He stood up unsteadily and kicked the Styrofoam container under the bed. “If starvation and other diseases don’t get them first.” He gave her a look as he plopped back down. “We’re fucked, Ann.”

  She regarded him in silence for a moment. The soft whirring of the air circulators seemed much louder, the tiny room smaller. Suddenly, something in the back for the room beeped. Their stone-faced military officer, who’d stood silently until now, glanced at his phone and announced, “A request from the Director of National Intelligence to include you in today’s presidential briefing. It’s currently ongoing.”

  Harry gave Ann an oh shit look and tried to straighten his shirt. He felt, rather than saw, Ann sit in the vacant chair next to him. The monitors abruptly switched to show the President and several officials that Harry recognized as heads of the FBI and other intelligence agencies. The audio came on, loud and harsh in the small room.

  The Director of National Intelligence was speaking. “It is our understanding that the group subscribes to a Millenialist philosophy based on the Book of Revelation and that this is part of some sort of End Times action.”

  Harry’s buzz evaporated. He sat straight up in his chair.

  The director went on, “The compound’s lab showed evidence of CRISPR gene-editing capability.” He paused to look down at a sheet of paper and then back at the webcam. “And apparently, in a separate area, a flea cultivation operation. It’s believed that the Lake Tahoe area was seeded with infected fleas as a trial run, with the real target being Los Angeles.”

  Harry couldn’t help himself. His mouth dropped open. Heger had said DRYP’s spread pattern made no sense for bioterrorism, but if what the DNI was saying was true, the spread pattern, through fleas, was deliberately chosen. The implications were enormous.

  The FBI director began to speak. “We’ve located an abandoned compound near Winnemucca, Nevada. The group moved by caravan about ten days ago to a second compound north of Burns, Oregon. They’ve dubbed it New Jerusalem.” He glanced at his notes. “We believe that they’re heavily armed—”

  The DNI interrupted, “I’d like to pose a question to Ann Kincade at the CDC. Dr. Kincade, is it possible that the group used CRISPR technology to create a cure or somehow prevent the disease?”

  If Ann was shocked by the question, Harry couldn’t tell. She answered in a carefully neutral voice, “If you mean, did they engineer immunity, I’d say no. Not with our existing knowledge, as I understand it. But I’m not a geneticist or biochemist.”

  “What about a cure?” he pressed.

  She shook her head. “Doubtful. If you’re asking if a rogue lab out in the middle of nowhere could do what our best research labs couldn’t, I’d say it’s highly unlikely. My best guess is that they used CRISPR to create the plasmid responsible for DRYP’s antibiotic resistance.”

  “Thank you,” he said tersely. He reached a hand off the screen. The transmission abruptly cut off.

  Ann turned to Harry, astonishment clear on her face. “Harry,” she whispered. “They’re desperate. There are no scientists left!”

  Harry knew exactly what she was talking about. If the Director of National Intelligence was consulting an infectious disease specialist in charge of a vast public health bureaucracy about cutting edge gene-editing therapy, it meant the government had no research scientists left to consult. Harvard, Berkeley, t
he NIH—basically every top lab in the US—must now be down.

  Tears pooled in Ann’s eyes. “Bastards!” she burst out. “Why?”

  She turned abruptly, as though suddenly claustrophobic. In the small confines of the room she almost collided with the soldier standing against the wall. His hands reached out to catch her, steadying her. Harry was startled to see the flare of unsuppressed emotion in the officer’s face.

  Their guard wasn’t so detached after all.

  The fuel tank was locked. Susan cursed under her breath.

  Of course, it would be locked! she thought. Her own father locked all his tanks. The fuel inside was worth thousands of dollars.

  She swung around in the fading twilight, searching for something to break the lock, knowing full well no rock could break the reinforced metal. She needed bolt cutters, or better yet, a key.

  She glanced at the house as she crossed the yard to the machine shop. No one had emerged in the minutes she had wrestled with the padlock, and yet, Susan couldn’t shake the feeling that someone, or something, was watching her.

  The farmstead’s stillness bothered her. Unlike the feed lot, no animals stirred restlessly on this property. Only the creak of the shop’s little side door pierced the silence. Susan pulled it open and stepped inside.

  Cool air wrapped around her. In the gloom, she could make out the hulking shadows of tractors and harvesters on a wide concrete floor, but no key box. Only empty metal shelving and faded safety posters lined the wall. A sense of dread settled over her.

  The keys were in the house.

  It made no sense, she knew, to freak out about a house, but she couldn’t help it. Her hands began to shake. Her heart pounded in her ears.

  “Come on, Susan,” she breathed. She swung around and crossed the yard again, hustling against the fading light. In her scrub-top pocket was the lighter taken from the South Pasadena house only days earlier, but she told herself she wouldn’t need it. There was enough twilight left.

  When she opened the ranch house’s front door, she realized she was wrong. The stench of rotting bodies poured out of a darkness thick as the night.

  How many of these death houses are there? she wondered in horror. Across the yard, Susan saw Etta shift anxiously in the passenger seat. With one hand, Susan pulled the neckline of her scrub top up over her mouth. With the other, she flicked the lighter. And then, gagging, she went in.

  Faint, wavering light illuminated the living room. Susan could just make out a shadowy striped couch and a coffee table covered with burnt down candles. Déjà vu assailed her. The same awful smell, the same claustrophobic darkness. Her stomach rebelled, and acid burned her throat.

  Something warm wrapped around her ankle.

  Susan screamed.

  In the mayhem that followed, the lighter went flying. She reared backwards, colliding with something metal. A crash sounded, followed by a terrified meow. Susan could just make out the black shadow of a cat streaking toward the front door.

  “Shit!” She dropped to her knees and scrabbled on the floor for the lighter. She found it by a coffee table and flicked the wheel. Light, or enough of it to see that she knocked over a floor lamp, filled the living room. Her heart pounded in her ears.

  “Goddamnit!” she cried. So much death. So much destruction! Like a fury, she leapt to her feet and charged to where she thought the kitchen was. She spotted a key rack on the wall next to an old-fashioned telephone. She grabbed the set labeled “DIESEL TANK” and stuck it in her pocket.

  A lifetime of work to build this farm, she wanted to scream. A lifetime to build everything! All for nothing!

  She nearly collided with Etta on the way out. The old woman stood in the doorway, a charcoal silhouette against the gathering night outside. She pointed the gun with two unsteady hands.

  “Susan!” she cried. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” said Susan, pushing the gun downwards. “Let’s go.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, George Mack awoke with the odd feeling that he was choking. His body felt as hot as a blast furnace, his mouth dry and foul-tasting.

  He thought that he should get up and get a glass of water, but then he remembered there wasn’t any, so he lay in bed staring up into the darkness.

  No power or water, he thought. A contaminated house. And now, this godawful exhaustion that no amount of sleep seemed to remedy.

  Suddenly he knew. His breath halted. The only sound he could hear was the whoosh of his heartbeat in his ears.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. As a public health officer, he’d known the risk of bringing Jeremy home. It was the same risk that every other person took when they cared for a sick family member. To love meant the possibility of death. In the act of caring, one risked all.

  But still, somehow, he’d thought that he might be different. He let out an ironic breath in the darkness. Goddamn Yersinia pestis, he thought. Killing me too.

  He rolled on his side painfully, marveling at how rapidly the whole catastrophe had unfolded. The ground squirrels, the pneumonic spread, the drug resistance, the lack of masks and the overall breakdown of public order. DRYP was the perfect storm: a highly transmissible, highly lethal, untreatable disease with a permanent animal reservoir. Mother Nature couldn’t have designed a better bullet, if she’d tried.

  Unless she hadn’t. A new thought, too horrible to believe, occurred to him. He let out a long, ragged breath in the darkness.

  Was it such a stretch, with all the gene editing tools available, that someone might have created DRYP? The initial method of spread, via animal vectors, had thrown him. To use fleas seemed hopelessly low tech, but what if that person or organization didn’t have the capability to deliver a bioweapon any other way? There certainly was precedent for using fleas to start an epidemic. The Japanese Army had infamously dropped them on China during World War II. The only difference this time, Mack realized, was the payload. DRYP was dangerous enough that once planted in a human population, it could spread by itself

  A painful coughing spasm overtook him. He realized he would never know what caused DRYP. His time was coming to an end.

  Coldness washed through him. He felt his limbs begin to shake, an uncontrollable shudder overtaking his body. He curled into a ball.

  No morphine left, he thought.

  He closed his eyes, but sleep didn’t come.

  Sixty-Two

  The beep-beep-beep of her watch alarm woke Susan. She opened one crusty eye to find dawn splashing salmon pink across the sky. It took her a full thirty seconds to remember where she was.

  She sat up with a grunt. Across the bench seat, Etta dozed against the truck’s passenger-side door, the striped throw pillow Susan had taken from the farmer’s house propped beneath her head, the backpack on the seat between them. Susan figured they’d been asleep three hours.

  Etta stirred. “Where are we?”

  Susan looked out the windshield at the flat cornfields stretching in all directions. In the distance, a tall earthen levee rose above the rows of green. “I think we’re in the delta.”

  She remembered crossing several rivers and channels during the night, and she was sure it was the labyrinth of waterways known as the Sacramento Delta.

  “Is that close to your parents’ farm?”

  Susan rubbed her eyes. “Yes, two hours, maybe. If I’m right about where we are.”

  She grabbed the thermos off the front seat and climbed out of the cab. Funny, she thought, we’ve all drunk out of the same thermos, but none of us has gotten sick. She found the thought disturbing, that this apparent triumvirate of surviving humanity should be together here in this farm truck when she could find no signs of life around her.

  The man was awake when she climbed in next to him. He regarded her somberly, only his face visible above the throw blanket she had taken from the house and wrapped around his body the night before.

  She opened the box of medical supplies next to him. “I have to give you another dose
of antibiotics,” she said.

  His eyes traveled over her face. “Who are you?”

  Despite the gaunt, pale hollows of his cheeks, she thought he looked sharper this morning. He tried to rise from the truck’s bed.

  “My name is Susan. I’m a doctor.” She gently pushed him down and drew back the blanket to expose him. Dark bruises stained his arms where she had injected the antibiotics. She looked at these with regret but realized that she had no other choice. The large veterinary needles she’d used were practically harpoons, but at least they were needles. She was beginning to feel that maybe she could save the man with them after all.

  He watched her while she pulled the makeshift tourniquet around his arm and sought out a virgin vein. She poured a small amount of alcohol on his skin, swabbed at it with a gauze pad, and then drew up the antibiotic into the oversized syringe, which she tried to hide from him. “This is going to hurt a little. You might want to turn your head.”

  He turned his head and winced slightly as she injected the syringe’s contents. She withdrew the needle, capped it, and placed the syringe back in the box. She pressed the gauze against the hole in his skin. “Can you hold this?”

  He took his other hand and held the gauze while she returned the remaining medical supplies to the box. She knew he was watching her.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Alan Wheeler,” he said.

  It took her only a second to place the name. She stared at him in shock.

  The central monitor had stopped transmitting sometime in the early morning while Ann and Harry were sleeping. When Harry awoke, Ann was on the phone, talking in low tones.