Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) (13 page)

15

Mit
chell checked the battery life on the digital recorder. The sun still hung in the sky, though it was evening now and the temperature had cooled. He felt both hungry and thirsty, but neither of those sensations mattered much to him. He would have preferred to finish this business today than eat and finish tomorrow.

“I had heard about Dr. Daniels’ death,” he said. “I just assumed he’d perished in the initial outbreak. That’s when most of the population died, those first two days. I hadn’t realized he lived for so long.” Samantha didn’t respond so he continued. “What happened when you fled the town?”

“We were in the desert, flat and hot, just like you’d imagine a desert to be. Every once in a while we’d see a caravan. There’s no other word that really describes it: long lines of people trudging through the desert with all their belongings in tow, usually pulled by a horse cart or something similar. We stopped a couple of times and spoke with them, where they were headed, what the latest news was… I couldn’t really pay attention. I kept seeing Luther’s death. When I would sleep, which wasn’t often, but when I could actually drift away, I saw torn, bloody faces coming at me, biting into Jessica, pulling Luther out of the truck. I saw my mother as one of them, a risen corpse with no soul, coming after me. I would wake up with a start, panicked, and Jessica would calm me. She never really said much, just put her hand over mine or lay next to me.

“One night, when Jason was asleep, I stared at this gun he
had next to him. I thought it’d be so easy, just pick it up, put it in my mouth, and finish it. What did I have to look forward to, anyway? Another year, maybe two, of starvation and hiding before the ips finally won, or maybe the dormant virus in my veins would suddenly trigger and I’d actually become one of them, neither one of which was something I wanted to see.

“I think my hand actually came up to get the gun, and then I felt something. Jessica had wrapped her arms around me. She was asleep
, but my motion had caused her to stir. I gazed at her face a long time. Even in all this muck and blood, it still had that childhood innocence… and I knew no one else would take care of her. Jason thought only of the greater good, and if that included leaving a little girl behind who couldn’t contribute much, I wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t do it. I was all Jessica had. So I lowered my hand and placed my head against hers.

“Every fifty miles or so we’d come across a gas station. Not a government
-owned one, but an actual gas station. They were all abandoned, of course, but we’d find scraps of food or some gas left in their storage tanks. It kept us going.

“Sometimes at night you could hear the ips out in the darkness.
Howls and shrieks would echo through the valleys, but we could never see them. They were just shadows out in the blackness of night.

“Eventually, down to our last quarter tank of gas, we reached the Warren airbase. It didn’t look like any airbase I’d ever seen, and since the initial outbreak
, I’d seen a few. The airbase held maybe ten planes, and most of them didn’t appear to be functional. A skeleton crew remained on the base, and almost all of them were armed. The only one who wasn’t was a captain who came out to greet us.

“ ‘Who are you?’ he said. He had a stern face and didn’t want any chitchat. I thought he
looked like a man who had been making hard decisions for a long time. He clearly thought this was going to be one of those decisions.

“ ‘Can we talk in private, Captain?’ Jason said, jumping out of the truck. The two men walked off, leaving us in the bed of the truck. Shui came out. He smiled, a warm smile that spread across his plump face.

“ ‘I have something for you,’ he said to Jessica. He pulled a package of cupcakes out of his pocket and handed it to her. She hadn’t eaten much that day and tore into them.

“Jason came back a few minutes later. ‘
They’ll take us as far as Florida,’ he said. “They got a transport heading out that way to pick up some grunts. We can hitch a ride to the Congo from there.’”

Mitchell leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs. His lower back ached a bit
, but he ignored it. “That seems rather odd, Dr. Bower. That you would just follow this man you barely knew into the most violent jungle on the planet.”

“What other choice did I have? Atlanta was overrun. At the airbase
, they had a real-time digital map of the war. That’s what the military was calling it at this point, a war, not a pandemic. The map showed the green zones, which were the safe zones, and the red zones, those overrun with infected and considered lost. The coasts of the United States were almost entirely red, with splotches of red spattered over the country itself. A few wide spaces of green existed, like in the Mountain West, but even they were dotted with red. The rest of the world was even worse.

“I know there’s been a lot of theories as to why the United States could hold off the swarms the longest. The NRA said it was because we were the most well
-armed nation, and our citizens could fight the ips with guns. The liberals said it was because we had a lot of government programs that were already in place, like welfare, that could distribute goods quickly. Conservatives said it was because each state was an independent entity and so decisions on the local level were made quicker and more efficiently… but I don’t think that’s it at all. Have you ever walked into a room full of people from different countries? I can spot the American right away. They’re usually the most outgoing, the most gregarious. It’s a confidence we have, I think. We’re not shy about making friends or making fools of ourselves if we have to. Someone told me once—I think they were from Russia—that we’re the only people on the planet that expect to be happy. No one else expects that. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but whatever it was that allowed us to survive that initial two weeks, I think it was internal, not due to anything outside of ourselves.

“So when I watched the map at Warren and heard the conversations around me about the state of other nations, I wasn’t surprised. The communist nations
seemed to be doing the worst now. Their governments denied the pandemic for so long that the infected were at everyone’s door by the time the government warned people. Once they warned people, they told them everything was under control, that the great leaders would take care of everything. This wasn’t true, of course. What they wanted was for panic to be delayed long enough for the leaders to get themselves and their families out of the country as quickly as possible. You saw it everywhere—Cuba, China, North Korea. All the leaders in government and the military fled, leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. Democracies had gotten their acts together and were faring better, but large portions of the globe had gone black, no communication in or out.

“ ‘Amazing,’ Jason said to me as I stood inside the war
room watching the map. ‘One second we’re the dominant species on the planet, the next we’re shrinking dots on a map.’

“ ‘I need to know I’m not wasting my time, Jason
, what little I have left of it. I need to know that you believe there’s an answer in the Congo.’

“He nodded. ‘There’s definitely an answer. I’m just not sure it’s the one you want to hear.’
”

BOOK TWO:

Africa

16

NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, wasn’t uniquely American
, as most people thought. Pete Brass remembered when he’d first come from the Air Force and joined NORAD, he’d been amazed to see half the staff in his office were Canadians. It was a joint agreement between the two countries that they needed each other to defend their air space.

The command center in Peterson Air Force Base just outside Colorado Springs was
the nicest military installation Pete had ever hoped to work at, all chrome and shine. NORAD, truth be told, didn’t really do much, so there weren’t many opportunities to have crowds of people mucking up the building. Everything was in prime condition and pristine, just how he liked it. Given how the rest of society looked, coming to work was a welcome relief for Pete.

One of the senior airmen, a man named Bryce, walked past him as he stood in the back of the room.

“Bryce, what are you doing here? I thought it was your son’s birthday.”

“It is, sir. I couldn’t get anyone to cover my shift.”

“No,” Pete said, “go home and be with your family. I’ll take up the slack.”

“Are sure, sir?”

“Yeah, go home. Have some cake for me.”

He smiled widely. “Thank you, sir.”

Pete took a sip of coffee as he headed over to Bryce’s station to cover his shift. He sat down, brought up the monitor, made sure no emergencies were occurring, and then began reading on his iPad, something he knew most of the rest of the world was unable to do anymore.

He read for another hour before he heard, “Sir
.”

“Yeah?” he said, without looking up.

“You better have a look at this.”

Pete sighed and put the iPad down. He was in the command center
, at a station in the back. Before him were about fifteen other desks, each staffed by men in green uniforms with a NORAD insignia on their shoulders. On each desk, five computers sat monitoring everything from satellite surveillance to air currents. On the wall at the front of the room were five of the biggest monitors the US government could provide. On the wall next to them were two more monitors, where cable news never turned off: CNN and Fox. After the outbreak, both had gone off the air and only recently returned, the crew broadcasting from an undisclosed secure location.

Pete rose and strolled over to the airman’s desk. The airman stared at a black screen that had a map of the
US superimposed in neon green.

“What am I looking at?” Pete said.

“Right here, sir.”

Pete looked where the airman’s finger pointed. On the screen were seve
ral blips, one not far from NORAD, a few on the East Coast, some on the West.

“That a glitch?”

“No, sir. I’ve run diagnostics.”

“Well
, run them again,” he said, straightening up to head back to his station.

“Sir, I ran them three times. I also checked the satellite.”

“And?”

The airman swallowed and then pressed a button on the keyboard. One of the monitors switched to a
magnified satellite view of the United States. The blips were clearly visible now and completely in US airspace. They seemed to hover motionless over multiple cities.

Pete thought of those Looney
Tunes cartoons where a black cloud followed people around just above their heads.

He leaned forward, staring at the satellite feed. “What is that?” he said quietly.

The airman shook his head. “Whatever they are, there’s a lot of them. And they weren’t there a second ago.”

It’d been two and a half
hours since the objects, which was all they were calling them for now, had been spotted. Pete paced from one end of the command center to the other. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Suddenly, it seemed hot in there. No windows were allowed, so every few minutes he would stop at his desk and use the little paper fan his mother had gotten him as a birthday present. The gift was from another time. Even with all his credentials and clearances, Pete didn’t know if she had survived the outbreak. Communication had been all but cut off to most of the states on the coasts.

The doors suddenly opened, and in walked the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Daniel Clover
, a brooding, middle-aged man in a military uniform with a brow the equal of any Neanderthal. At least, that’s how he’d always appeared to Pete.

“Master Sergeant,”
Clover said by way of greeting, “please tell me what my meeting with the chief of staff was interrupted for.”

Pete cleared his throat and hoped he wasn’t turning red. “Um, sir, we have
unidentified objects in our air space. They appeared about two and a half hours ago.”

“You realize,”
Clover said, his voice rising, “that I have more important things to do than fly halfway across the country to come look at a damn blip on your radar.”

“You don’t need to look at the satellite feed, sir.” He paused. “You can look outside now.”

The assistant secretary’s brow furrowed, and he spun on his heel and headed out the door. He’d probably been driven in without even bothering to look up at the sky. Pete followed him out. It took a few minutes, as they had to pass several security checkpoints.

Once out
side, the sun shone down and the sky was blue. Off in the east, a black mass floated in the sky, almost like a plane that wasn’t moving.

Clover placed his hand
above his eyes to shield them from the sun. He then lowered his hand and put on his glasses, then took the glasses off and stared at it with the naked eye again.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“Unidentified, sir.”

“A meteor?”

“No, sir. It reduced its velocity and is now… hovering.” Pete swallowed. “I think it might be a vessel of some kind, sir. We’re seeing them spread over major cities across the country.”

Clover looked
at him, and the two men held each other’s gaze. “Get the secretary of defense on the line as quickly as you can, Master Sergeant.”

Pete looked up at the motionless black mass, a trickle of fear going up his back. “Right away, sir.”