by Lukens, Mark
Craig’s laptop only had thirty-eight percent battery life the last time he had checked, and it could be even less by now; he didn’t have a lot of time to waste. He sat down in the office chair and pulled the laptop closer to him, opening it up. After a moment he typed the password into the little rectangle.
It worked.
Ray searched through Craig’s files after using a shortcut on the main screen. There were hundreds of files. Some of the file names seemed pretty straight-forward and easy to figure out: more financial records, family photos, even what looked like a few Word files containing novels and short stories Craig might have been working on. But the file he wanted to check first was called Avalon.
Ray opened the Avalon file and he began to read. He wished he could print everything out, but he didn’t have that luxury. He remembered seeing a small leather-bound notebook that was about the size of a paperback novel in one of the desk drawers. It was brand-new. He found the notebook and a pen—he would use it to jot some notes down. The notebook looked like it might have been a Christmas or birthday present from one of his girls.
The Avalon file was separated into different articles and he scrolled through them. A lot of the articles were similar to the newspaper clippings and internet articles in the folder he’d looked through earlier, but these weren’t news articles. These were scientific reports from the CDC documenting cases of the ripper rage, as it was called in one report. Another report called it the rage virus, and another called it the ripper virus.
He came to what looked like an email from someone in the CDC. The person writing the email stated that there had been cases of the plague in various places around the world, the earliest ones being: one in Argentina, one in New Zealand, one in Australia, one in Singapore, one in South Africa, one in Egypt, one in British Columbia, one in Mexico, two in Brazil, three in the United States, a few in India, and several in various European countries. The author of the email made it clear that statistics from China, Russia, some middle-eastern countries, and some poorer nations weren’t available at that time.
Another thing the author of the email made clear was that there was no patient zero. The CDC had no idea where this plague had started—it seemed to have started in many places at exactly the same time, in developed and undeveloped countries, in cities and rural areas, on continents and on islands, in cold and warm climates.
Ray saw a big difference between the newspaper articles he’d read earlier and these articles stored in Craig’s laptop—these articles were from government agencies like the CDC. This was top secret information kept from the public.
“They knew,” Ray whispered. “They knew about this for weeks.”
More articles and emails confirmed that the government knew about and was covering up murders of entire families, whole villages, random people. They covered up stories of mass murder and cannibalism. They covered up stories of people ripped apart and eaten. The news, for a few weeks, reported what they were told to report, portraying many of these stories as local murders, keeping these things separated from different areas of the country, and outright burying other reports of rippers.
Another report in the file was about corporations and business leaders dumping stocks as the market crashed. There was a report of elites packing up and moving to their bunkers or private islands—billionaire doomsday preppers.
We always knew another pandemic was coming, a scientist was quoted as saying in another report. There have been pandemics throughout history. Hell, even the dinosaurs were probably wiped out by a pandemic. It’s probably happened more times than we can imagine.
Ray scribbled down the words they knew in his notebook.
He opened another article; it was a report about two rippers that scientists had experimented on, along with photos that were a little grainy and blurry of what looked like doctors in an operating room with a body on the table, only these doctors were dressed in hazmat suits and the patient had been strapped down to a table.
The report said that the study had been done in a place called Avalon.
Avalon is a location, Ray wrote down in his notebook.
He read the findings of the experiments, but the strange thing was that the rippers showed no signs of any known disease in their bloodwork or brain dissections. No sign of a viral or a bacterial infection. No sign of a fungal infection. No parasites of any kind. No strange proteins or prions in the brain, even though they could tell from CAT scans that large areas of the brain were definitely affected. One photo showed a side-by-side photo of brain scans, one of normal brain activity, and the other was the activity of a ripper’s brain, where so much of what had been lighted up in the prior brain was dark.
Ray grabbed his notebook and scribbled down a few more notes: Something fundamentally changed in the brain, but it didn’t seem to be caused by any kind of pathogen.
He looked through more articles and reports until he found a photo of Avalon. The building was small, located in the mountains of northern Georgia. The small building was surrounded by chain-link fencing. The building was small because most of the facility was underground.
Ray flipped to a blank page in his notebook and drew a crude map, a route from Washington D.C. to Avalon in Georgia, writing down the major highways leading there. Of course they would have to find a map somewhere so they could plan a route along back roads to get there. He also found some maps in one of the drawers, but he wanted to have his own map drawn in the notebook just in case he lost those maps.
There wasn’t much more information on the computer, just a lot of articles that repeated and confirmed other articles, emails from one scientist or government official to another.
He sat back in the chair, thinking for a moment. There was a plague that started in many different places at the same time, a plague that turned people into animals, a plague that had no known pathogen. The CDC estimated that anywhere from two to four percent of the population was immune to this plague.
Leaning forward again, Ray grabbed his notebook and did a quick calculation. There were roughly 360 million people in the United States, so he multiplied that number by three percent and came up with ten million eight hundred thousand people who might be immune to this ripper plague. Almost eleven million people just in the United States.
Of course not all of those people were going to survive, many had to have been attacked, killed and eaten by the rippers. He also had to consider that some of those eleven million people might be children, or elderly people, or others unable to care for themselves. Many of those people would’ve been sitting ducks for the rippers. A small number of the immune might be in prison, perhaps trapped in their cells at this very moment, or even worse, trapped in a cell with an inmate who had turned into a ripper.
And then Ray wondered how many of the immune might have done what Craig did and took themselves out along with their families, unwilling to go on with the world turning to shit, unwilling to let their families turn into rippers.
Ray remembered the rumors about this plague being some kind of airborne rabies virus. He remembered how he hadn’t noticed the classic rabies signs like foaming at the mouth. He knew rabies victims ended up dying from the disease. But would this ripper plague kill its hosts like other diseases would?
Something’s happening to people. That’s what Craig had told him on the phone. He hadn’t said that people were infected or that a plague was spreading—he’d said that something was happening to people.
A noise somewhere else in the house startled Ray. He jumped to his feet, grabbing his golf club. He went to the office window behind the chair in between two of the bookcases and parted the curtain, peeking out through the blinds. It was still snowing, but it was a light snow that would probably melt in the next day or so when the day warmed up a few degrees. It wasn’t the dead of winter yet, but winter was coming.
He didn’t see anyone outside, no one in the large group of trees in the field that separated the driveway in front of the house from the r
oad they had driven here on. He didn’t see any tracks in the snow.
He hurried to the office door to check the rest of the house—it sounded like the noise might have come from the kitchen.
CHAPTER 40
Ray hurried down the hall past the foyer, and then past the dining room. Everything looked okay so far and he hadn’t heard any other noises. He got to the kitchen, scanning the family room, looking at the archways that led to the other large room. He could see the sliding glass doors from where he was—nobody out there that he could see.
He was about to open the basement door to check on Mike and Emma, but then he stopped. He’d heard the bumping noise again. It was coming from the laundry room.
Gripping his golf club in one hand, he pushed the door open, creeping inside the laundry room. The door leading into the garage was ajar, the cold air from the garage seeping into the laundry room.
He hadn’t shut the garage windows yet, and it had to be freezing in there. He crept to the garage door and hesitated there for just a moment.
A scuffling noise came from inside, like a sneaker scraping across the concrete floor. Someone was inside the garage. Maybe they had gotten in through the windows he had left open, tearing the screen away and crawling inside.
If it was more than one ripper, Ray knew he wouldn’t be able to fight them. He was about to peek around the doorway to see how many there were, ready to bolt back to the basement door if he needed to. Another thought occurred to him. It might not even be rippers in there. It could be other people checking houses for food and shelter; it could be one of the nearly eleven million who were immune to the plague, the survivors, and those people could be just as dangerous as the rippers now. They could have guns.
“Ray, wait.”
Ray whirled around at the sound of the voice behind him, his golf club up and ready to swing. But he knew that voice and he stopped at the last second.
Emma stood in the doorway of the laundry room, her dark glasses on, her cane in one hand.
“Emma? What are you . . .?”
“Mike’s in the garage.”
“Mike? How do you . . .?” He let his words trail off. He was about to ask how she knew, but that would be a dumb question.
“I heard him leave the basement a little while ago,” she said. “I think he wants to see Craig and his family for himself.”
Questions raced through Ray’s mind at light-speed, along with the relief that it was Mike inside the garage and not intruders. He wondered how Emma had gotten up the basement steps by herself, but then he realized that she had been living by herself in her own condo for years. He also wondered how Emma knew Mike was up here, exactly where he had gone. Had Mike told her he was going up here? Had Mike told her that he wanted to see Craig’s dead body, the bodies of his wife and daughters?
Then he thought of the girls and the wife being tied up in the Mercedes. He thought of the oldest girl’s contorted face smeared against the car’s window. He didn’t want Mike to see that.
“Don’t be mad at him,” Emma said in a soft voice that reminded Ray of Kim when she asked him not to lose his temper with Mike. Kim had told him many times that he was always harder on Mike than he was on Vanessa.
Because he’s older, he had told her. But it was more than that. Boys could grow up to be bad so easily, they could take one wrong turn in life and end up in a gang, or in jail, or dead.
Like Ray’s brother had done.
“I won’t be mad at him,” Ray said, finally answering Emma. He turned and entered the garage, walking down the three steps to the concrete floor.
Mike stood in pretty much the same spot between the vehicles where Ray had stood not too long ago. Mike stared at the dead family inside the car; all four of them slumped towards their own windows.
Ray hurried over to shut the two garage windows. The fumes were long gone from the garage now. He closed the first window and stared at the snow-covered ground outside. He saw a line of footprints in the distance along the trees on the other side of the driveway. Someone had been walking around out there recently. He closed the other window, watching the trees for any sign of movement, but he didn’t see any. He closed the blinds on both of the windows. He turned towards Mike who was looking at him now.
“Some of them were turning,” Mike said. “That’s why he did this to them, isn’t it?”
Ray nodded and walked towards his son.
“They even killed their dog,” Mike said. He sounded sad, but not on the verge of crying.
“Maybe Craig didn’t think their dog could survive on her own,” Ray explained. “Maybe he thought he was being kind to her.”
Mike looked down at the dead dog, then he looked back at the Mercedes with Craig and his dead family inside.
“Come on, son. It’s cold in here. Let’s get back in the house.”
For a moment Ray thought Mike was going to argue with him; he was afraid that Mike wanted to stare at Craig and his family a little longer. Maybe this was Mike’s way of dealing with death—the death of his mom and his sister turning into a ripper (and her turning into a ripper was like she was dead, wasn’t it?). But then Mike walked to Ray.
Ray wasn’t the best father in the world when it came to giving hugs and comforting his children. But that wasn’t really true, was it? He’d been great at giving Vanessa hugs, but not Mike. He’d always been afraid of being too soft on Mike, and maybe that’s because that’s how his own father had raised him and his brother. He realized he’d held back hugs and affection from Mike for years now, but his son needed a hug now, and Ray grabbed his son and held him.
“You won’t do that to us, will you?” Mike asked into Ray’s shoulder, his words a little muffled, but Ray understood every stinging word.
Ray pulled away from his son, gripping his upper arms, staring him right in the eyes. “What did you say?” he asked, even though he’d heard exactly what Mike had asked.
“For our own good,” Mike said, staring right back at Ray. He didn’t flinch or look away even once—he was seeking the truth.
“How could you—” Ray started, but then he stopped his words. He thought of what he’d already done to Kim, poisoning her, killing her.
But she asked me to do it. She begged me to do it.
Tears burned in Ray’s eyes. “I . . . I would never do that to you. You hear me? Never. I . . . I love you, Mike. You’re all I’ve got left in this world now.” The tears were flowing now. “All I’ve got. You understand?”
Tears slipped out of Mike’s eyes, but he didn’t seem to really be crying. There was a hardness in his expression that Ray had never seen before.
Ray pulled Mike to him and hugged him again. “We won’t go out like that,” he told Mike. “We won’t give up like that. You hear me? We’re going to keep fighting. Keep surviving.”
Mike pulled away from Ray and wiped at his eyes and nose.
“We need to look for a hammer and some nails,” Ray said, trying to get Mike’s mind on something else. “You want to help me find some?”
“Yeah,” Mike said, nodding.
“We need to get some of these doors and windows nailed shut,” Ray told Mike as he walked over to a row of cabinets. He thought again about the footprints he’d just seen in the snow—they needed to be ready for whoever was out there.
Mike walked over to a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves and started rummaging through the boxes and crates.
Ray looked over at his son. He looked so normal right now, a kid helping his father look for some tools.
We’re going to survive somehow.
Emma stood in the doorway to the garage, but she hadn’t come down the three steps. She had a smile on her face.
“I found a hammer,” Mike shouted, holding up a claw hammer with a big smile.
Ray nodded. “That’s good, son.” He knew he should probably go back to Craig’s office and read the rest of the files before the laptop’s battery died, but the laptop was probably dead by now anyway. No, the
y were going to secure this house as much as they could with the daylight they had left.
And then what?
And then they would have a decision to make. Ray needed to talk to Mike and Emma about something.
CHAPTER 41
As the day grew into late afternoon, Ray, Mike, and Emma ate a meal in the kitchen. Ray had been busy, and Mike had helped a lot. Together they got the rest of the stuff from their SUV, letting a few of the wet cardboard boxes dry on the kitchen floor. They nailed the front doors shut, and then they nailed the French doors shut in the fancy living room with the piano. They moved the couches against the French doors and then piled a recliner up on top of them. They did the same thing in the large family room, pushing as much furniture as they could in front of the line of sliding glass doors that led out to the pool area. They went through the food and drinks in the house, organizing everything they had into boxes—one for water, another for canned goods, another for boxed and bagged foods. Most everything in the two refrigerators was off-limits. Some of the food might have been oaky to eat, but Ray wasn’t going to take a chance on any of them getting sick.
After those tasks were completed, Ray and Mike searched through the bedrooms, trying to find anything that might be useful. Ray was hoping to find some kind of gun or a rifle in Craig’s closet, but he didn’t find anything. Maybe Craig didn’t own a gun, and maybe that explained why he had used the Mercedes in the garage to kill his family. But Ray did find a pair of expensive binoculars.
They also found some camping gear in the garage: a tent, two sleeping bags, a few thermoses, a first-aid kit, a little camping grill with a small propane tank. He kept most of that stuff in a pile in the corner of the garage.
“I found some things on Craig’s laptop,” Ray told them as he ate. “Craig told me to come to his house because there were answers here. He mentioned roses and the word Avalon, but the phone was breaking up so bad I couldn’t hear everything he said. And then the phone went out for good.”
