A Wilderness Within

by Emma Castle

  But they would never be truly safe, never again.

  5

  @CDC: We have received thousands of messages asking us to explain how viruses like Hydra-1 mutate. When humans reproduce, we share genetic material vertically from parents to children. Microbes share genetic material horizontally. They exchanged genes laterally when they bump against other viruses. These exchanges or mutations happen in microbe-rich, fecally contaminated environments. The Hydra-1 virus developed in a wet market in China where horseshoe bats and civet cats defecated in the shared space. Their fecal matter merged, and the microbes of different viruses were able to mutate using each other’s genetic material. The WHO has cleared the area and quarantined all individuals connected in any way to the market.

  —Centers for Disease Control Twitter Feed

  November 24, 2019

  * * *

  January 2020

  Lincoln and his team strode down the boarding ramp of the military transport plane in a private airfield just outside of Washington, DC. Adam Caine was waiting for him. Despite his role as vice president, he never hid from his duties. Once Delta Force, always Delta Force, he would say. Whenever he said that, the Secret Service team hovering behind him would roll their eyes before returning to their duty of scanning for danger.

  “How was your flight?” Adam asked as they embraced in a brief hug and a back slap.

  “Dull. Horowitz spent the whole flight telling everyone about his new kid. Man has a phone full of pictures.”

  Horowitz, one of Lincoln’s men, shot Lincoln a dirty look. “Fuck you, Atwood. My kid’s amazing.”

  “I’m sure he is,” Adam said, grinning as he waved the team forward. “Come on, let’s get you inside.” Adam gestured to three black SUVs. Lincoln nodded at his men, and they divided up between the vehicles. Adam and Lincoln rode together in the middle SUV.

  “Dare I ask how Turkey was?” Adam asked once they were in the car and the driver was pulling out of the airfield.

  “Bloody. Everyone wanted a piece of us. The Russians, the Syrians, you name it.”

  “He who controls Turkey controls the gates to the Western world,” Adam muttered as he looked out the window. “I miss it. I wish I was back in field.”

  Lincoln smiled. “You are where you need to be. Whitaker needed someone like you. No bullshit, no politics, just someone get who gets shit done. That’s what the country needs right now.”

  “I hope so. No one believes in us anymore. It’s easy to criticize the system when you’re seeing only one side of it. But if people looked at the big picture, they would see…” He sighed, as if collecting his thoughts. “We fight for what’s right, for the betterment of everyone. At least, we try. But everyone’s got an agenda, including us. Like this damned virus in China and India. We’ve been trying to work with a network of foreign governments and health organizations. China thinks we planted the virus, and they won’t let our teams into the infected areas without putting up a hell of a fight. Russia’s using it as a bargaining chip, hinting they’ll make things difficult if we don’t make some concessions on nuclear disarmament in Syria. Our second team of CDC specialists was stuck in an immigration hellhole for over a week before we twisted China’s arm to get them released. By that point, the virus was already devasting several of the villages outside where we think it originated.”

  Lincoln had heard the rumblings of discord while he and his team had waited for their transport plane to arrive.

  “Adam, what is this thing, really?” He hadn’t forgotten the 2014 Ebola scare, the way the world had overreacted. Ebola, as far as anyone knew, could only be transmitted by exchanging bodily fluids with a victim or somehow consuming infected vomit. Bottom line, it didn’t transmit easily. Yet individuals were forced into quarantine just for having been in the same city as a victim being treated for Ebola.

  “Hydra-1, as the CDC is officially calling the virus in their memos, dehydrates the victims. All soft tissue eventually dries out, and the cell walls break down. The usual process of decay doesn’t seem to occur, and the normal preservation you’d expect to find on a desiccated corpse doesn’t either. The cells are so devastated by the virus that they literally turn into dust. It’s the scariest thing. Eventually, you have nothing but a damn skeleton where a body once was.”

  “Jesus,” Lincoln said. “No wonder people are talking about it being a bioweapon. It sure as fuck sounds like one.”

  Adam nodded. “It’s part of the reason China is so paranoid. But that’s not the worst part. It’s airborne. The strands, as far as we can tell, can be turned into an aerosol when someone coughs. If you’re too close to a victim or you’re in a place where airflow is strong, you can catch it. We haven’t had a new airborne pathogen with a mortality rate like this in a long time.” Adam met Lincoln’s gaze. “If we can’t control it, the r-naught rate is high. Too high.”

  “The r-naught rate?” Lincoln had heard the term, but he didn’t really know what it meant.

  “If you have the virus and you infect, say, two people, the r-naught rate is two. Ebola has a typical r-naught rate of two, but something like measles is much higher, however, less fatal.”

  “What’s the Hydra-1 r-naught rate?”

  Adam swallowed hard, fear showing in his blue eyes, and Lincoln felt his skin ripple with his pulse.

  “Hydra-1 has an r-naught of six. Six victims for every single infected person. Combine that with the projected mortality rate, and the CDC says it has the potential to wipe out the world. The virus is a ‘race killer.’ Unless we can find a cure or create a lasting vaccine…”

  Adam didn’t have to finish. Lincoln knew what he wasn’t saying. The end would come. Humanity would die out.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan for now is containment. But…”

  “But?”

  “If that fails…Omaha.”

  Omaha. The word sent a bolt of dread through him. Omaha was where the secret bunker for the president and other key staff would be housed in the event of a disaster or a massive attack.

  “So we hide, like cowards?”

  Adam frowned at him, the reprimand clear in his gaze. “You think I want that? I don’t. But what the hell are we supposed to do? You can’t shoot viruses. The country will need to have someone leading it while everything goes to hell. It’s our only chance. So if we have to sit in a concrete cell twenty goddamn feet belowground, we’ll do it.”

  “What about placing cities under quarantine?” Lincoln suggested after a moment’s thought.

  Adam shook his head. “It’s part of the overall strategy, but it won’t work. Quarantines cause riots, fires, death, and large-scale destruction. People always find a way through the walls. Nothing can ever be truly bottled up. The CDC is still trying to figure out the incubation period and infection rate. Some victims are hanging on for up to a week before the last stages set in and they die. If we have a thousands of infected victims loose, it’s only going to spread faster. I just don’t know how we can effectively trap it or even bottleneck it in any of the major cities.”

  Adam didn’t have to say it, but Lincoln could hear it in his words. Nothing can ever be truly contained. Which meant there was no stopping Hydra-1.

  “There’s really nothing we can do?” Lincoln whispered as he stared out at the city as they drove through it. He could see groups of tourists like colorful birds as they flocked toward the entrances of museums and national monuments. For every one infected person, six more would catch the disease—and pass it on to six more each before they died. Whole cities would perish, states would empty out, and the world would go dark in a way it hadn’t since the middle ages.

  He’d read about the Black Death when he’d been a kid, and the idea of a plague wiping out entire populations had been fascinating back then. The tiny bacteria had spread on the backs of fleas clinging to the fur of rats as they traveled in the bellies of ships and crouched in the corners of medieval hovels. That epidemic killed 25 million
people and wiped out entire cities.

  He’d even been interested in the Ebola virus. Scared shitless, but still fascinated. The virus had emerged from the remotest corners of Africa, pooled in the cold-water ponds inside Kitum Cave, where elephants scraped at the walls with their tusks looking for salt deposits and panthers trod underneath bats and monkeys. It was an ancient weapon that mankind was struggling to defend against.

  And now, from somewhere in the Far East, this new virus had emerged, one that made Ebola look like the common cold. And it had its microbial sights set on humankind.

  “You should call your family,” Adam said quietly.

  “Will you tell the others?” Lincoln looked away as he imagined making the call to his mother. She’d try to get him to talk to his father, and that was the last thing he wanted. Even the end of the world didn’t make that necessary. When a man repeatedly knocked his kid around, the kid didn’t ever want to see him again.

  “I’ll tell the rest of the team soon, once I know more.” Adam pulled back the sleeve of his suit and checked his watch. “POTUS is having a briefing at the White House in fifteen minutes.”

  By the time they arrived, reporters were gathering around the gates, which usually wasn’t allowed for security purposes. But no one was paying attention. The world was facing a bigger threat than any terrorist group. Even those dirtbags were hiding in their holes, shaking with fear. A virus could get them anywhere, and they knew it.

  Lincoln followed Adam and his security detail through the White House corridors before they entered a briefing room. Adam motioned for Lincoln and his team to stand at the back. The large conference table was full of generals, economic advisors, diplomats, and several people who wore WHO and CDC badges.

  Adam took a seat beside President Whitaker. The man was in his late fifties, but he was toned and fit. His expression was solemn as he surveyed the room, even meeting the eyes of Lincoln and his team before he spoke. He was good leader and a man to be respected. Adam would haven’t have agreed to run as his VP otherwise, which meant Lincoln trusted Whitaker too.

  “We’re facing a crisis. What is spoken of in this room today must not leave this room. We can’t have the country falling into chaos, not before we can present a solution.”

  Lincoln banished the memories from his mind as he stared into the darkness of the backyard. Those men and women were gone, ghosts who lived only in his memories.

  Death was a funny thing. It robbed the dead of their blood, their breath, their very existence, yet within the mind of another person, they still somehow went on, even if they were faded copies, muted and limited. Flashes of Adam’s face, his sunken eyes pleading for the end, would never stop haunting him.

  I did my duty. I did what was required of me.

  But he could still feel the blood on his hands, invisible, yet there, burning into his palms like fire. He rubbed at his right hand, massaging the muscles, and tried to focus on Caroline. She needed him now. The past was the past, and he couldn’t undo any of it.

  He wearily climbed the stairs and headed for the master bedroom. When he opened the door, Caroline was passed out, her lantern still on. She had either forgotten to turn it off or she had needed the comfort of a night-light. Eitherway, he could hardly blame her.

  During those first few nights in the bunker, he’d listened to the sounds of the other men settling in the next room, making tense jokes and hearing the creak of metal cot frames as they all tried to get to sleep. He’d never been afraid of the dark until that first night. With twenty feet of earth and concrete between him and the sky, he’d felt like he couldn’t breathe. He was buried alive. They all were. His vision had blurred, and he’d struggled to get air into his lungs. He’d fallen off his cot, clutching his chest as panic got a death grip on his throat.

  Then his door had opened, and Adam stood there, a camping lantern hanging from one hand. He’d set the lantern on the bedside table, touched Lincoln’s shoulder where he knelt by the bed, and then left the room without a word.

  Seeing the light, knowing he wasn’t in a tomb, had given him back his ability to breathe. After a moment, he’d gotten back into bed, rolled onto his side, and closed his eyes, the light of the lantern illuminating the backs of his eyelids. In time, he managed to sleep.

  Now Lincoln stared down at Caroline, hoping she didn’t suffer the same nightmares he had. They were free, aboveground, with the moon and the wind outside. Perhaps it was the emptiness of the darkness that scared her rather than the suffocation of it. He reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. Her lips curved suddenly, just the slightest bit, as though she was dreaming of something nice. Thank God she still had good dreams. God knew he sure didn’t.

  What the hell are we supposed to do, honey?

  The virus hadn’t taken either of them. What was next? He sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his boots and reached for one of the extra blankets. When Lincoln started to reach over Caroline to turn off the lantern, he stopped. The thought of darkness swallowing them up tonight didn’t seem right. From the moment he left the bunker, he’d had nothing to lose. But now? He had Caroline. And he wanted to fall asleep looking at her.

  When he started to slide down in the bed beside her, he heard a distant pop-pop-pop and then silence, followed by another pop-pop-pop. He reached for the lantern and slammed his fingers down on the button. The light vanished. He’d crushed Caroline in his effort to kill the light, and she woke with the start of a scream. He covered her mouth with his hand, and she tried to scream even harder.

  “Shut up!” he hissed. “Listen! Someone’s shooting nearby.” He held still, keeping her pinned beneath him. She froze, and he wished he could see her face. He could only feel her, her mouth against his hand, her body warm beneath his. More pops, farther away this time, which made Lincoln relax. He let go of Caroline’s mouth and rolled away from her. Then he slid off the bed and crawled over to the window, pulling the curtain back a few inches.

  The silence in the bedroom seemed to thicken until finally she whispered, “Do you see anything?”

  “No, but there’s barely a sliver of moon. I’m not sure I could see anything out there if there was something to see.”

  He continued to stare into the blackness beyond, searching for any hint of danger. But when he heard nothing more after several minutes, and saw nothing, he finally crawled back to bed.

  “I’m sleeping here tonight,” he said, then pulled back the blankets beside her and settled in. He expected her to try to leave or possibly to punch him, but she didn’t. Maybe she was actually starting to trust him.

  “You have a gun here, don’t you?” she asked, her warm breath so close that he felt it. Something about that made his chest ache. The feel of another person so close while darkness and danger ruled the night… It gave him a sense of comfort he wasn’t sure he deserved.

  Lincoln shifted, sliding one hand under his pillow and curling his fingers around his Glock.

  “Yes.” With that single word, he was making a promise that he would protect her.

  “Good.” She turned on her side to face him. She was a dark outline between the pillows and blankets, yet he could feel her gaze upon him.

  “Good night, Caroline,” he whispered, hoping she would fall back asleep. It unnerved him to think of her watching him back. He preferred to see and be left unseen. While she was in his care, she would see more of him than anyone else had, maybe even more than the men from his unit, even Adam. He dreaded to think of what would happen when she saw too much and ran away from him.

  “Good night, Lincoln.”

  Dawn arrived, and Lincoln watched the sky, still black with fires. But this time he couldn’t hide them from her.

  “The other survivors are setting fires?” She joined him at the windows. She barely limped and no longer needed him to carry her about. She needed to be mobile, just in case things went south and they had to run.

  “Men like to watch things burn,” he said an
d sipped his coffee. He’d gotten used to making his own coffee ages ago.

  “But why? There’s so little left. We should be rebuilding, working together to save one other.” Caroline’s hazel eyes were more of a soft green rather than brown in the pale gray today. For a moment he was lost in the fracturing splinters of the colors blending in that worried gaze.

  “You still haven’t lost faith in humanity, even after everything you’ve seen?” He couldn’t believe it. Was she that naïve?

  “No, I haven’t.” She met his astonished stare and half smiled. “I’m not stupid—I know people are running scared, that they’re doing terrible things. But someone has to find a way to reach them, to remind them what we used to be. The world wasn’t perfect before Hydra struck, but humanity isn’t without hope. As long as there are people who believe in goodness, there’s always hope.”

  Lincoln wanted to believe her, to trust that burning certainty in her eyes. She wasn’t naïve—he could see that now. She was a crusader, a person who would never stop fighting for what she knew in her heart to be right. It was a damned brave thing in this brave new world. But he had to make her face the fact that the world she wanted to save might be unsavable.

  “Mankind has always felt the need to control its environment. When we lose control, our fear overpowers us. Fear makes us do anything we can to feel like we’re in control again.” He knew what he was telling her might frighten her, but these were truths she needed to know. The civilized world was gone. People as she understood them had changed. Law-abiding citizens, governments, rules, police, all those protections put in place over the past hundreds of years were gone. Animal instincts were all that was left.