Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  “ ‘Stay here,’ I said.

  Jessica immediately grabbed my arm. ‘No! Don’t go. Stay with me. Stay here, please!’ I bent down and looked into her eyes again, attempting to calm her. But the panic in her eyes had settled in, and she wouldn’t hear anything I said. ‘Jessica, I will be right back. I just need to make sure Beth and Eric are okay. You can watch me from the window.’

  “She flung her arms around me. ‘Please don’t go.’ But I had to get over there and verify what I had seen. I knew a logical explanation existed, something that would explain it in a way that would remove the ball of anxiety in my gut, so I left and locked the door behind me. I saw Jessica’s face glued to the window before I crossed the street.

  “The neighborhood was quiet and still. I wondered if anyone even cared that a police cruiser sat in one of our driveways, the lights spinning and illuminating the street red then blue, red then blue. I wondered why the officer didn’t just turn the lights off. Probably to alert any burglars of his presence so they could run off and the officer could avoid interacting with a member of the public. I glanced into the cruiser as I passed. A shotgun lay across the backseat, and crumpled on the floor, a yellow biohazard suit that looked like someone tried to shove it under one of the seats. When I got to the porch, I stood there and listened. I couldn’t hear anything from inside. In fact, I intended to wait on the porch when two loud pops went off. Bang, bang! With each bang, a flash of light through the windows. I still held my own gun but suddenly realized the officer might think I was a prowler and shoot me. So I put it away and stepped off the porch. I stood by the cruiser and waited.

  “Nothing happened. Glancing back to my home, I saw Jessica’s terrified face in the window. My first thought went to her. What would she do if something happened to me? She had no family left, none that she knew of, anyway, and no friends. Government programs like foster care and welfare had all but shut down for fear of spreading the virus. The military saw them as ‘negative externalities’, programs that diverted resources from the real objective of maintaining order and containing the epidemic. Jessica would have nothing and no one. I couldn’t risk that. As much as I wanted to know what had happened, I couldn’t risk harm for her sake. I backed away from the house, never taking my eyes off it. Halfway into the street, I nearly jumped when the door flew open and the officer tumbled out.

  “He gripped his upper arm, panic written on his face as he ran to his cruiser. I could see blood pouring from a wound on his neck and out over the fingers he had around his arm. He placed a call on the two-way radio and then jumped out and ran to the trunk. Flipping it open, he then rummaged through everything back there until he found a first aid kit. His eyes fixed on me—large, wild eyes. ‘I need help,’ he shouted as he rushed toward me. My first instinct was to reach for my gun, but I forced myself to remain calm.

  “ ‘I’m a physician. Sit down on the curb. Let me have a look at your injuries.’

  “He didn’t comply at first, instead he shouted, ‘I need help,’ again. Shock was setting in, and his face was as pale as the moonlight. I grabbed the first aid kit from him and sat him down on the back of the cruiser. I lifted his collar for a better look at the wound and saw the indentations, teeth marks. He’d been bitten, and a chunk of his neck the size of a silver dollar was torn away. ‘What happened?’ I said.

  “ ‘Fucker ran at me. Just jumped out. I popped him twice, but I don’t know if he’s dead. Fucker just ran at me!’ The officer’s eyes told me he was going to lose it. The injuries, though pouring blood, weren’t life threatening: one wound in the neck and another smaller one on the upper bicep. I glanced at the home. I pushed Eric out of my mind to tend to the officer. The first aid kit had plenty of gauze, and I pulled some out to stop the bleeding until emergency services could get there. Ambulances were even scarcer than police. When they were called, most of the time it was because someone was dying from the poxvirus. They would drive past, not even bothering to tell the victims why they wouldn’t stop and help. I had once seen an ambulance allow a man to die in front of his hysterical wife because the driver confused vomiting from flu with vomiting from the pox. The man’s blood was later tested as part of a lawsuit and found clear of infection. That’s almost funny now, someone suing the government for letting a loved one die, considering everything that’s happened.

  “I slowed the blood as much as I could with what I had. Glaring at the house, I knew I had to go inside. I had to check on the children, who I hadn’t seen when I’d gone in. ‘I’ll be right back,’ I said, but the officer didn’t hear me. His eyes had glazed over, and he stared at the ground. I hurried up the porch and inside the home. In the middle of the living room floor, Eric lay flat on his back, two bleeding holes in his chest. I approached him slowly. The stench of decay filled the home. A dead body has a unique smell. Nothing else in nature smells like a dead human body, and I smelled one just then. But it wasn’t coming from Eric.

  “Stepping over Eric’s corpse, I saw something poking out of his collar. The only light on in the home was the one light I’d turned on in the kitchen, so it was difficult to make out. Track lighting on the ceiling provided a flood of bright light once I turned it on, and I bent over Eric’s body. His eyes… His eyes were black with red circles in the middle, smallpox eyes. And what I saw sticking out of his neck were pustules. Eric had the poxvirus.

  “I quickly jumped away and covered my mouth. Variola is transmittable through the air and the entire event played through my mind. Did Eric ever get a chance to breathe on me? Did he sneeze or cough? Did he spit? I looked out the front door to the officer who still sat on the back of the cruiser, his eyes not leaving the ground. The officer, without a doubt, was infected. A possibility existed that he didn’t inhale droplets of saliva or mucus or blood, but the fact that he was bitten means the proximity between them was close enough that he in all likelihood did.

  “My only thought was to run out as quickly as I could. The virus lived on surfaces, too. A house that had been inhabited by an infected person would have to be torn apart to get rid of the virus. The linens and furniture, carpet, rugs, hair products, toothbrushes, food, dishes and cups, anything that came into direct contact with someone infected would have to be burned.

  “I headed for the front door when I heard another thump upstairs. It stopped me cold. Beth couldn’t have survived her injuries. Someone else was up there. I turned around and headed up the stairs, pulling out my gun again. I hadn’t grown up around guns. My father was a pacifist and wouldn’t keep them in the house. It wasn’t until I was attacked that I purchased one and made shooting at the range a regular habit, so I wasn’t uncomfortable holding it, and I knew if I had to, I could shoot someone with relatively decent accuracy.

  “At the top of the stairs, I stopped and listened. The thump came from the right, from the children’s rooms, which I’d already checked. Cautiously, and with as little noise as I could, I went over to the first room, the boy’s room. I flipped on the light and scanned from wall to wall, but I didn’t see anyone. Another thud sounded from the wall. I looked over, instinctively bringing the gun up in front of me, and noticed the closet with the sliding doors. Breathing hard, my heart beating furiously, I went over to the closet and slowly slid open the door. Inside, Eric and Beth’s oldest child, whose name I couldn’t remember, lay on his back convulsing. Foam dripped from his mouth and blood soaked the closet floor, spilling from every orifice as though an invisible vise squeezed it out of him like water from a sponge. His arms were shaking violently, and his eyes rolled back into his head. I saw then for the first time that the whites of his eyes had hemorrhaged and turned black, the pupils red.

  “In a flash, the boy was on his feet, still seizing, his muscles slamming him into the closet doors and walls. His eyes fixed on me, and I could see there wasn’t any reason there anymore, no recognition that I was another human being. I backed away and closed the door, leaving the boy growling in the room. Soon, I heard the pounding against
the door as he smashed his body against it. I thought if I could get him to a hospital, we could stop the convulsing and figure out the behavior later. Maybe it was some sort of psychosis brought about by dehydration. Most of the blood had left his body, as well as Eric’s, and severe dehydration could alter a person’s mind to such an extent that they could kill. Several case studies existed on survivors of shipwrecks or mountain disasters where they would turn on their fellow survivors after only days without adequate water.”

  Mitchell didn’t move, and when Sam stopped speaking, he didn’t ask her to continue. Instead, he put his hand under his chin, as though to support his head, and waited patiently a while. When Sam didn’t continue, he said, “When did you find out about the lesions?”

  Sam sipped the contents of her drink, lemonade that she had made herself from lemons that grew in a garden near the hospital. Grocery stores didn’t exist anymore, and if someone wanted to eat, they had to grow it themselves or be given food in a handout by the government. “The next day. I went to the CDC and brought Jessica with me. It was the most secure place in the state, and I didn’t want to leave her home until I figured out what was going on. She sat in my office and listened to music. Without radio and only a few places receiving Internet service, music was a rare treat. I had a collection of old CDs and a player with batteries, and she seemed perfectly content sitting in my office. I asked my boss, an assistant chief at the CDC, Dr. Fredrick Jared, to keep an eye on her while I went up to the BS4 labs and examined the bodies of Eric and his son, whose name I learned was Ryan.” She paused. “I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.”

  3

  Mitchell waited until Sam appeared ready to speak. She was beautiful, and his mind kept going to her looks. It embarrassed him that after all his experiences and all the honors he’d received, he was still governed by man’s baser instincts, though he liked to feel he could control them.

  As Samantha sipped her lemonade, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses, he thought of his own wife and the last few moments he’d had with her. He’d spent that time with her in a hospital while she vomited the last of her body’s precious blood over her bed sheets. The treating physician had sedated her so she could die in peace. Both thoughts—that in this environment, in this time, he still thought about sex more than anything else, and that he had watched his wife die and still couldn’t help but think of other women—filled him with guilt and shame.

  He cleared his throat. “Tell me what you found, Dr. Bower.”

  Samantha leaned back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. “Dr. Yashima, Ngo, and I performed the autopsies. Their body cavities had filled with blood, but not to the degree we’d seen before. Their organs weren’t drowning in it. They could function. But the brains were much different than those of any other patients we’d seen. The lesions were eating away at the brain matter, primarily the frontal cortex, almost like a severe brain injury.

  “ ‘What would this do to someone?’ Ngo asked. He was what we called a Mud-Fud, which meant he had both a medical doctorate and a PhD. His specialty was research. I think, ultimately, he didn’t enjoy working with patients, and despite his brilliance, he seemed to know little about how the human body actually worked.

  “ ‘The prefrontal cortex is the seat of reason,’ I said. ‘When it comes to behavior, most of our higher functioning takes place there. So with damage like this, a person would…’

  “Dr. Yashima interjected, ‘They would become an animal.’ ”

  Mitchell didn’t speak for a moment before he said. “Did you have any inkling what was coming?”

  Sam shook her head. “I thought it was a new mutation that just killed us off faster. I didn’t know what the virus was doing. Most people think viruses attempt to kill us as quickly as possible, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Ebola Zaire, the most deadly of the four genera of Ebola, kills us within days. In total, it has taken the lives of roughly seven thousand people throughout modern history. You compare that with a virus like HIV and AIDS. The AIDS virus has learned. It’s adapted. People think that because of modern drugs, those living with HIV and AIDS are able to extend their lives now, sometimes by as much as thirty years after a diagnosis. But the drugs have nothing to do with it. It’s the virus itself. It’s learned, if that’s the right word, to slow down the process of death so that the host can spread the virus as far and wide as possible before dying. That’s why Ebola has killed seven thousand people, and AIDS has killed fifty million.

  “That day, I decided to call a neurologist by the name of Luther Daniels. Luther was the head of neurology at Johns Hopkins, and I knew if anyone could give us an explanation for the lesions, it was him. I let Jessica hang out in the cafeteria. Some of the other employees had brought their children as well and I let her be with them. Interaction for kids was so rare… you should’ve seen her face. It lit up just at the sight of other kids her age.

  “But anyway, I sat in my office and called Luther.

  “ ‘Hello?’ I could still hear the grogginess in his voice though it was well past noon.

  “ ‘Luther, it’s Samantha Bower at the CDC.’

  “He chuckled. We’d always had a good relationship since medical school, and just at the sound of my voice, his mood seemed to lighten. I got the distinct impression that Luther was as lonely as Jessica.

  “ ‘What’dya know, what’dya say?’ he said in his New Jersey accent, something he’d gone as far as taking lessons to get rid of. ‘I haven’t spoken to you since Hawaii.’

  “Luther had been one of the physicians I called for advice during the initial outbreak. Though he’s not a virologist, I felt he had a deep understanding of how the human brain and mind interacted and the consequences of certain infections on the psyche. That’s also part of any infection by a virus, the psychological effect. The research points to the fact that the attitude of a patient, particularly one suffering from a serious illness, plays a major role in their recovery… or their death. ‘It’s been hard to think about old friends lately,’ I said.

  “I heard him exhale as though saddened. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘Lord, don’t I know. Have you read the Book of Revelation at all, Dr. Bower?’ He knew I wasn’t religious. What he was really saying was that I should read the Book of Revelation.

  “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not recently, anyway. My mother was deeply religious, and I’m sure she made me read it at one point. Why?’

  “ ‘Because it contains everything you need to know about what’s going on. Every generation since John the Divine has believed their generation is the one, the one generation John was referring to when he spoke of the seas of blood and the rain of fire. Every generation thinks itself special, set apart from previous generations. The difference for us is, we’re it. This is Armageddon.”

  Samantha paused a moment. “You have to remember, this is before the world epidemic, before we labeled the four detonations the T-zero event, the moment when civilization was wiped out and started over. At that point when I was speaking with him, we had an epidemic on our hands, a bad one, but just an epidemic. I felt that we’d beaten smallpox before and could do it again, so all his mystical references didn’t resonate with me. I thought he was just being a Christian, which he was. ‘I need more than the scribbles of wandering tribes from thousands of years ago, Luther. Do you have access to a BS4 anymore?’

  “ ‘No,’ he said. ‘USAMRIID revoked my top-secret clearance when I retired.’ I hesitated before asking him. Luther had been a brilliant physician and, though he didn’t receive credit, was on a team that had secured the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work using snake venom to combat brain tumors. But he had a wild side that, like his accent, he could never kick. I once heard he hired a stripper for one of his histology professors and had her perform a lap dance for him during the final exam. Medicine isn’t the kind of place where creativity and spontaneity are valued. It’s more like the military. He’d actually started work in the last place I could see him, the
United States Army Medical Research Division, and as I could’ve predicted, he was forced to ‘retire’ within a year. It didn’t seem to faze him, and he just moved to Johns Hopkins. ‘I need you to come to Atlanta, then,’ I said. ‘You’ll have full access to the BS4. I’ll get you clearance. I need something analyzed.’

  “ ‘What?’ he said, the curiosity in his voice practically jumping out of the phone.

  “ ‘Lesions,’ I told him. ‘Lesions on the prefrontal cortex of patients affected by Variola, by Agent X, kinda dark, almost black lesions. They look like burn marks and appear to have damaged the brain tissue. I was attacked last night by two of my neighbors who had become infected. The father was shot and killed by police, and the son jumped out of his bedroom window, breaking his skull open and bleeding to death. We have them here for the autopsies, and their prefrontal lobes and a few other areas are covered in these lesions.’

  “ ‘Hm. Sounds mildly interesting. I don’t deal much with the infected. Do they all have the lesions?’ I shook my head even though I was on the phone and then felt silly. Putting my feet up on the desk, I tried to strike a posture of relaxation. Our posture affects our mood, so I always forced myself into more relaxing poses in the hopes that it would calm me. ‘No, not that I’ve seen. This is a new phenomenon.’

  “He made a few noises, as though he were lost in thought and mulling it over intensely in his mind, before he said, ‘Okay, gimme a day and I’ll get out.’ I knew he couldn’t decline, but I played along anyway.